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+And even though I finished my degree, I realized I could not settle into a career in law. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) "" It can't be done "" was shown to be wrong. 
+She asked the monk, "Why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold?" 
+(Applause) Trevor Neilson: And also, Tan's mother is here today, in the fourth or fifth row. (Applause) 
+
+Throughout my career, I've been fortunate enough to work with many of the great international architects, documenting their work and observing how their designs have the capacity to influence the cities in which they sit. 
+I think of new cities like Dubai or ancient cities like Rome with Zaha Hadid's incredible MAXXI museum, or like right here in New York with the High Line, a city which has been so much influenced by the development of this. 
+But what I find really fascinating is what happens when architects and planners leave and these places become appropriated by people, like here in Chandigarh, India, the city which has been completely designed by the architect Le Corbusier. 
+Now 60 years later, the city has been taken over by people in very different ways from whatever perhaps intended for, like here, where you have the people sitting in the windows of the assembly hall. 
+But over the course of several years, I've been documenting Rem Koolhaas's CCTV building in Beijing and the olympic stadium in the same city by the architects Herzog and de Meuron. 
+At these large-scale construction sites in China, you see a sort of makeshift camp where workers live during the entire building process. 
+As the length of the construction takes years, workers end up forming a rather rough-and-ready informal city, making for quite a juxtaposition against the sophisticated structures that they're building. 
+Over the past seven years, I've been following my fascination with the built environment, and for those of you who know me, you would say that this obsession has led me to live out of a suitcase 365 days a year. 
+Being constantly on the move means that sometimes I am able to catch life's most unpredictable moments, like here in New York the day after the Sandy storm hit the city. 
+Just over three years ago, I was for the first time in Caracas, Venezuela, and while flying over the city, I was just amazed by the extent to which the slums reach into every corner of the city, a place where nearly 70 percent of the population lives in slums, draped literally all over the mountains. 
+During a conversation with local architects Urban-Think Tank, I learned about the Torre David, a 45-story office building which sits right in the center of Caracas. 
+The building was under construction until the collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the death of the developer in the early '90s. 
+About eight years ago, people started moving into the abandoned tower and began to build their homes right in between every column of this unfinished tower. 
+There's only one little entrance to the entire building, and the 3,000 residents come in and out through that single door. 
+Together, the inhabitants created public spaces and designed them to feel more like a home and less like an unfinished tower. 
+In the lobby, they painted the walls and planted trees. 
+They also made a basketball court. 
+But when you look up closely, you see massive holes where elevators and services would have run through. 
+Within the tower, people have come up with all sorts of solutions in response to the various needs which arise from living in an unfinished tower. 
+With no elevators, the tower is like a 45-story walkup. 
+Designed in very specific ways by this group of people who haven't had any education in architecture or design. 
+And with each inhabitant finding their own unique way of coming by, this tower becomes like a living city, a place which is alive with micro-economies and small businesses. 
+The inventive inhabitants, for instance, find opportunities in the most unexpected cases, like the adjacent parking garage, which has been reclaimed as a taxi route to shuttle the inhabitants up through the ramps in order to shorten the hike up to the apartments. 
+A walk through the tower reveals how residents have figured out how to create walls, how to make an air flow, how to create transparency, circulation throughout the tower, essentially creating a home that's completely adapted to the conditions of the site. 
+When a new inhabitant moves into the tower, they already have a roof over their head, so they just typically mark their space with a few curtains or sheets. 
+Slowly, from found materials, walls rise, and people create a space out of any found objects or materials. 
+It's remarkable to see the design decisions that they're making, like when everything is made out of red bricks, some residents will cover that red brick with another layer of red brick-patterned wallpaper just to make it a kind of clean finish. 
+The inhabitants literally built up these homes with their own hands, and this labor of love instills a great sense of pride in many families living in this tower. 
+They typically make the best out of their conditions, and try to make their spaces look nice and homey, or at least up until as far as they can reach. 
+Throughout the tower, you come across all kinds of services, like the barber, small factories, and every floor has a little grocery store or shop. 
+And you even find a church. 
+And on the 30th floor, there is a gym where all the weights and barbells are made out of the leftover pulleys from the elevators which were never installed. 
+From the outside, behind this always-changing facade, you see how the fixed concrete beams provide a framework for the inhabitants to create their homes in an organic, intuitive way that responds directly to their needs. 
+Let's go now to Africa, to Nigeria, to a community called Makoko, a slum where 150,000 people live just meters above the Lagos Lagoon. 
+While it may appear to be a completely chaotic place, when you see it from above, there seems to be a whole grid of waterways and canals connecting each and every home. 
+From the main dock, people board long wooden canoes which carry them out to their various homes and shops located in the expansive area. 
+When out on the water, it's clear that life has been completely adapted to this very specific way of living. 
+Even the canoes become variety stores where ladies paddle from house to house, selling anything from toothpaste to fresh fruits. 
+Behind every window and door frame, you'll see a small child peering back at you, and while Makoko seems to be packed with people, what's more shocking is actually the amount of children pouring out of every building. 
+The population growth in Nigeria, and especially in these areas like Makoko, are painful reminders of how out of control things really are. 
+In Makoko, very few systems and infrastructures exist. 
+Electricity is rigged and freshest water comes from self-built wells throughout the area. 
+This entire economic model is designed to meet a specific way of living on the water, so fishing and boat-making are common professions. 
+You'll have a set of entrepreneurs who have set up businesses throughout the area, like barbershops, CD and DVD stores, movie theaters, tailors, everything is there. 
+There is even a photo studio where you see the sort of aspiration to live in a real house or to be associated with a faraway place, like that hotel in Sweden. 
+On this particular evening, I came across this live band dressed to the T in their coordinating outfits. 
+They were floating through the canals in a large canoe with a fitted-out generator for all of the community to enjoy. 
+By nightfall, the area becomes almost pitch black, save for a small lightbulb or a fire. 
+What originally brought me to Makoko was this project from a friend of mine, Kunlé Adeyemi, who recently finished building this three-story floating school for the kids in Makoko. 
+With this entire village existing on the water, public space is very limited, so now that the school is finished, the ground floor is a playground for the kids, but when classes are out, the platform is just like a town square, where the fishermen mend their nets and floating shopkeepers dock their boats. 
+Another place I'd like to share with you is the Zabbaleen in Cairo. 
+They're descendants of farmers who began migrating from the upper Egypt in the '40s, and today they make their living by collecting and recycling waste from homes from all over Cairo. 
+For years, the Zabbaleen would live in makeshift villages where they would move around trying to avoid the local authorities, but in the early 1980s, they settled on the Mokattam rocks just at the eastern edge of the city. 
+Today, they live in this area, approximately 50,000 to 70,000 people, who live in this community of self-built multi-story houses where up to three generations live in one structure. 
+While these apartments that they built for themselves appear to lack any planning or formal grid, each family specializing in a certain form of recycling means that the ground floor of each apartment is reserved for garbage-related activities and the upper floor is dedicated to living space. 
+I find it incredible to see how these piles and piles of garbage are invisible to the people who live there, like this very distinguished man who is posing while all this garbage is sort of streaming out behind him, or like these two young men who are sitting and chatting amongst these tons of garbage. 
+While to most of us, living amongst these piles and piles of garbage may seem totally uninhabitable, to those in the Zabbaleen, this is just a different type of normal. 
+In all these places I've talked about today, what I do find fascinating is that there's really no such thing as normal, and it proves that people are able to adapt to any kind of situation. 
+Throughout the day, it's quite common to come across a small party taking place in the streets, just like this engagement party. 
+In this tradition, the bride-to-be displays all of their belongings, which they soon bring to their new husband. 
+A gathering like this one offers such a juxtaposition where all the new stuff is displayed and all the garbage is used as props to display all their new home accessories. 
+Like Makoko and the Torre David, throughout the Zabbaleen you'll find all the same facilities as in any typical neighborhood. 
+There are the retail shops, the cafes and the restaurants, and the community is this community of Coptic Christians, so you'll also find a church, along with the scores of religious iconographies throughout the area, and also all the everyday services like the electronic repair shops, the barbers, everything. 
+Visiting the homes of the Zabbaleen is also full of surprises. 
+While from the outside, these homes look like any other informal structure in the city, when you step inside, you are met with all manner of design decisions and interior decoration. 
+Despite having limited access to space and money, the homes in the area are designed with care and detail. 
+Every apartment is unique, and this individuality tells a story about each family's circumstances and values. 
+Many of these people take their homes and interior spaces very seriously, putting a lot of work and care into the details. 
+The shared spaces are also treated in the same manner, where walls are decorated in faux marble patterns. 
+But despite this elaborate decor, sometimes these apartments are used in very unexpected ways, like this home which caught my attention while all the mud and the grass was literally seeping out under the front door. 
+When I was let in, it appeared that this fifth-floor apartment was being transformed into a complete animal farm, where six or seven cows stood grazing in what otherwise would be the living room. 
+But then in the apartment across the hall from this cow shed lives a newly married couple in what locals describe as one of the nicest apartments in the area. 
+The attention to this detail astonished me, and as the owner of the home so proudly led me around this apartment, from floor to ceiling, every part was decorated. 
+But if it weren't for the strangely familiar stomach-churning odor that constantly passes through the apartment, it would be easy to forget that you are standing next to a cow shed and on top of a landfill. 
+What moved me the most was that despite these seemingly inhospitable conditions, I was welcomed with open arms into a home that was made with love, care, and unreserved passion. 
+Let's move across the map to China, to an area called Shanxi, Henan and Gansu. 
+In a region famous for the soft, porous Loess Plateau soil, there lived until recently an estimated 40 million people in these houses underground. 
+These dwellings are called the yaodongs. 
+Through this architecture by subtraction, these yaodongs are built literally inside of the soil. 
+In these villages, you see an entirely altered landscape, and hidden behind these mounds of dirt are these square, rectangular houses which sit seven meters below the ground. 
+When I asked people why they were digging their houses from the ground, they simply replied that they are poor wheat and apple farmers who didn't have the money to buy materials, and this digging out was their most logical form of living. 
+From Makoko to Zabbaleen, these communities have approached the tasks of planning, design and management of their communities and neighborhoods in ways that respond specifically to their environment and circumstances. 
+Created by these very people who live, work and play in these particular spaces, these neighborhoods are intuitively designed to make the most of their circumstances. 
+In most of these places, the government is completely absent, leaving inhabitants with no choice but to reappropriate found materials, and while these communities are highly disadvantaged, they do present examples of brilliant forms of ingenuity, and prove that indeed we have the ability to adapt to all manner of circumstances. 
+What makes places like the Torre David particularly remarkable is this sort of skeleton framework where people can have a foundation where they can tap into. 
+Now imagine what these already ingenious communities could create themselves, and how highly particular their solutions would be, if they were given the basic infrastructures that they could tap into. 
+Today, you see these large residential development projects which offer cookie-cutter housing solutions to massive amounts of people. 
+From China to Brazil, these projects attempt to provide as many houses as possible, but they're completely generic and simply do not work as an answer to the individual needs of the people. 
+I would like to end with a quote from a friend of mine and a source of inspiration, Zita Cobb, the founder of the wonderful Shorefast Foundation, based out of Fogo Island, Newfoundland. 
+She says that "" there's this plague of sameness which is killing the human joy, "" and I couldn't agree with her more. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+One of my favorite parts of my job at the Gates Foundation is that I get to travel to the developing world, and I do that quite regularly. 
+And when I meet the mothers in so many of these remote places, I'm really struck by the things that we have in common. 
+They want what we want for our children and that is for their children to grow up successful, to be healthy, and to have a successful life. 
+But I also see lots of poverty, and it's quite jarring, both in the scale and the scope of it. 
+My first trip in India, I was in a person's home where they had dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, and that's really what I see all over the world. 
+So in short, I'm startled by all the things that they don't have. 
+But I am surprised by one thing that they do have: Coca-Cola. 
+Coke is everywhere. 
+In fact, when I travel to the developing world, Coke feels ubiquitous. 
+And so when I come back from these trips, and I'm thinking about development, and I'm flying home and I'm thinking, "We're trying to deliver condoms to people or vaccinations," you know, Coke's success kind of stops and makes you wonder: how is it that they can get Coke to these far-flung places? 
+If they can do that, why can't governments and NGOs do the same thing? 
+And I'm not the first person to ask this question. 
+But I think, as a community, we still have a lot to learn. 
+It's staggering, if you think about Coca-Cola. 
+They sell 1.5 billion servings every single day. 
+That's like every man, woman and child on the planet having a serving of Coke every week. 
+So why does this matter? 
+Well, if we're going to speed up the progress and go even faster on the set of Millennium Development Goals that we're set as a world, we need to learn from the innovators, and those innovators come from every single sector. 
+I feel that, if we can understand what makes something like Coca-Cola ubiquitous, we can apply those lessons then for the public good. 
+Coke's success is relevant, because if we can analyze it, learn from it, then we can save lives. 
+So that's why I took a bit of time to study Coke. 
+And I think there are really three things we can take away from Coca-Cola. 
+They take real-time data and immediately feed it back into the product. 
+They tap into local entrepreneurial talent, and they do incredible marketing. 
+So let's start with the data. 
+Now Coke has a very clear bottom line — they report to a set of shareholders, they have to turn a profit. 
+So they take the data, and they use it to measure progress. 
+They have this very continuous feedback loop. 
+They learn something, they put it back into the product, they put it back into the market. 
+They have a whole team called "" Knowledge and Insight. "" It's a lot like other consumer companies. 
+So if you're running Namibia for Coca-Cola, and you have a 107 constituencies, you know where every can versus bottle of Sprite, Fanta or Coke was sold, whether it was a corner store, a supermarket or a pushcart. 
+So if sales start to drop, then the person can identify the problem and address the issue. 
+Let's contrast that for a minute to development. 
+In development, the evaluation comes at the very end of the project. 
+I've sat in a lot of those meetings, and by then, it is way too late to use the data. 
+I had somebody from an NGO once describe it to me as bowling in the dark. 
+They said, "" You roll the ball, you hear some pins go down. 
+It's dark, you can't see which one goes down until the lights come on, and then you an see your impact. "" Real-time data turns on the lights. 
+So what's the second thing that Coke's good at? 
+They're good at tapping into that local entrepreneurial talent. 
+Coke's been in Africa since 1928, but most of the time they couldn't reach the distant markets, because they had a system that was a lot like in the developed world, which was a large truck rolling down the street. 
+And in Africa, the remote places, it's hard to find a good road. 
+But Coke noticed something — they noticed that local people were taking the product, buying it in bulk and then reselling it in these hard-to-reach places. 
+And so they took a bit of time to learn about that. 
+And they decided in 1990 that they wanted to start training the local entrepreneurs, giving them small loans. 
+They set them up as what they called micro-distribution centers, and those local entrepreneurs then hire sales people, who go out with bicycles and pushcarts and wheelbarrows to sell the product. 
+There are now some 3,000 of these centers employing about 15,000 people in Africa. 
+In Tanzania and Uganda, they represent 90 percent of Coke's sales. 
+Let's look at the development side. 
+What is it that governments and NGOs can learn from Coke? 
+Governments and NGOs need to tap into that local entrepreneurial talent as well, because the locals know how to reach the very hard-to-serve places, their neighbors, and they know what motivates them to make change. 
+I think a great example of this is Ethiopia's new health extension program. 
+The government noticed in Ethiopia that many of the people were so far away from a health clinic, they were over a day's travel away from a health clinic. 
+So if you're in an emergency situation — or if you're a mom about to deliver a baby — forget it, to get to the health care center. 
+They decided that wasn't good enough, so they went to India and studied the Indian state of Kerala that also had a system like this, and they adapted it for Ethiopia. 
+And in 2003, the government of Ethiopia started this new system in their own country. 
+They trained 35,000 health extension workers to deliver care directly to the people. 
+In just five years, their ratio went from one worker for every 30,000 people to one worker for every 2,500 people. 
+Now, think about how this can change people's lives. 
+Health extension workers can help with so many things, whether it's family planning, prenatal care, immunizations for the children, or advising the woman to get to the facility on time for an on-time delivery. 
+That is having real impact in a country like Ethiopia, and it's why you see their child mortality numbers coming down 25 percent from 2000 to 2008. 
+In Ethiopia, there are hundreds of thousands of children living because of this health extension worker program. 
+So what's the next step for Ethiopia? 
+Well, they're already starting talk about this. 
+They're starting to talk about, "" How do you have the health community workers generate their own ideas? 
+How do you incent them based on the impact that they're getting out in those remote villages? "" That's how you tap into local entrepreneurial talent and you unlock people's potential. 
+The third component of Coke's success is marketing. 
+Ultimately, Coke's success depends on one crucial fact and that is that people want a Coca-Cola. 
+Now the reason these micro-entrepreneurs can sell or make a profit is they have to sell every single bottle in their pushcart or their wheelbarrow. 
+So, they rely on Coca-Cola in terms of its marketing, and what's the secret to their marketing? 
+Well, it's aspirational. 
+It is associated that product with a kind of life that people want to live. 
+So even though it's a global company, they take a very local approach. 
+Coke's global campaign slogan is "" Open Happiness. "" But they localize it. 
+And they don't just guess what makes people happy; they go to places like Latin America and they realize that happiness there is associated with family life. 
+And in South Africa, they associate happiness with seriti or community respect. 
+Now, that played itself out in the World Cup campaign. 
+Let's listen to this song that Coke created for it, "" Wavin 'Flag "" by a Somali hip hop artist. 
+(Video) K'Naan: ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh o-oh ♫ ♫ Give you freedom, give you fire ♫ ♫ Give you reason, take you higher ♫ ♫ See the champions take the field now ♫ ♫ You define us, make us feel proud ♫ ♫ In the streets our heads are lifted ♫ ♫ As we lose our inhibition ♫ ♫ Celebration, it's around us ♫ ♫ Every nation, all around us ♫ 
+Melinda French Gates: It feels pretty good, right? 
+Well, they didn't stop there — they localized it into 18 different languages. 
+And it went number one on the pop chart in 17 countries. 
+It reminds me of a song that I remember from my childhood, "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," that also went number one on the pop charts. 
+Both songs have something in common: that same appeal of celebration and unity. 
+So how does health and development market? 
+Well, it's based on avoidance, not aspirations. 
+I'm sure you've heard some of these messages. 
+"Use a condom, don't get AIDS." 
+"Wash you hands, you might not get diarrhea." 
+It doesn't sound anything like "" Wavin 'Flag "" to me. 
+And I think we make a fundamental mistake — we make an assumption, that we think that, if people need something, we don't have to make them want that. 
+And I think that's a mistake. 
+And there's some indications around the world that this is starting to change. 
+One example is sanitation. 
+We know that a million and a half children die a year from diarrhea and a lot of it is because of open defecation. 
+But there's a solution: you build a toilet. 
+But what we're finding around the world, over and over again, is, if you build a toilet and you leave it there, it doesn't get used. 
+People reuse it for a slab for their home. 
+They sometimes store grain in it. 
+I've even seen it used for a chicken coop. 
+(Laughter) But what does marketing really entail that would make a sanitation solution get a result in diarrhea? 
+Well, you work with the community. 
+You start to talk to them about why open defecation is something that shouldn't be done in the village, and they agree to that. 
+But then you take the toilet and you position it as a modern, trendy convenience. 
+One state in Northern India has gone so far as to link toilets to courtship. 
+And it works — look at these headlines. 
+(Laughter) I'm not kidding. 
+Women are refusing to marry men without toilets. 
+No loo, no "" I do. "" (Laughter) Now, it's not just a funny headline — it's innovative. It's an innovative marketing campaign. 
+But more importantly, it saves lives. 
+Take a look at this — this is a room full of young men and my husband, Bill. 
+And can you guess what the young men are waiting for? 
+They're waiting to be circumcised. 
+Can you you believe that? 
+We know that circumcision reduces HIV infection by 60 percent in men. 
+And when we first heard this result inside the Foundation, I have to admit, Bill and I were scratching our heads a little bit and we were saying, "" But who's going to volunteer for this procedure? "" But it turns out the men do, because they're hearing from their girlfriends that they prefer it, and the men also believe it improves their sex life. 
+So if we can start to understand what people really want in health and development, we can change communities and we can change whole nations. 
+Well, why is all of this so important? 
+So let's talk about what happens when this all comes together, when you tie the three things together. 
+And polio, I think, is one of the most powerful examples. 
+We've seen a 99 percent reduction in polio in 20 years. 
+So if you look back to 1988, there are about 350,000 cases of polio on the planet that year. 
+In 2009, we're down to 1,600 cases. 
+Well how did that happen? 
+Let's look at a country like India. 
+They have over a billion people in this country, but they have 35,000 local doctors who report paralysis, and clinicians, a huge reporting system in chemists. 
+They have two and a half million vaccinators. 
+But let me make the story a little bit more concrete for you. 
+Let me tell you the story of Shriram, an 18 month boy in Bihar, a northern state in India. 
+This year on August 8th, he felt paralysis and on the 13th, his parents took him to the doctor. 
+On August 14th and 15th, they took a stool sample, and by the 25th of August, it was confirmed he had Type 1 polio. 
+By August 30th, a genetic test was done, and we knew what strain of polio Shriram had. 
+Now it could have come from one of two places. 
+It could have come from Nepal, just to the north, across the border, or from Jharkhand, a state just to the south. 
+Luckily, the genetic testing proved that, in fact, this strand came north, because, had it come from the south, it would have had a much wider impact in terms of transmission. 
+So many more people would have been affected. 
+So what's the endgame? 
+Well on September 4th, there was a huge mop-up campaign, which is what you do in polio. 
+They went out and where Shriram lives, they vaccinated two million people. 
+So in less than a month, we went from one case of paralysis to a targeted vaccination program. 
+And I'm happy to say only one other person in that area got polio. 
+That's how you keep a huge outbreak from spreading, and it shows what can happen when local people have the data in their hands; they can save lives. 
+Now one of the challenges in polio, still, is marketing, but it might not be what you think. 
+It's not the marketing on the ground. 
+It's not telling the parents, "" If you see paralysis, take your child to the doctor or get your child vaccinated. "" We have a problem with marketing in the donor community. 
+The G8 nations have been incredibly generous on polio over the last 20 years, but we're starting to have something called polio fatigue and that is that the donor nations aren't willing to fund polio any longer. 
+So by next summer, we're sighted to run out of money on polio. 
+So we are 99 percent of the way there on this goal and we're about to run short of money. 
+And I think that if the marketing were more aspirational, if we could focus as a community on how far we've come and how amazing it would be to eradicate this disease, we could put polio fatigue and polio behind us. 
+And if we could do that, we could stop vaccinating everybody, worldwide, in all of our countries for polio. 
+And it would only be the second disease ever wiped off the face of the planet. 
+And we are so close. 
+And this victory is so possible. 
+So if Coke's marketers came to me and asked me to define happiness, I'd say my vision of happiness is a mother holding healthy baby in her arms. 
+To me, that is deep happiness. 
+And so if we can learn lessons from the innovators in every sector, then in the future we make together, that happiness can be just as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Mechanical noises) (Music) (Applause) 
+
+So, about three years ago I was in London, and somebody called Howard Burton came to me and said, I represent a group of people, and we want to start an institute in theoretical physics. 
+We have about 120 million dollars, and we want to do it well. 
+We want to be in the forefront fields, and we want to do it differently. 
+We want to get out of this thing where the young people have all the ideas, and the old people have all the power and decide what science gets done. 
+It took me about 25 seconds to decide that that was a good idea. 
+Three years later, we have the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. It ’ s the most exciting job I ’ ve ever had. 
+And it ’ s the first time I ’ ve had a job where I ’ m afraid to go away because of everything that ’ s going to happen in this week when I ’ m here. 
+(Laughter) But in any case, what I ’ m going to do in my little bit of time is take you on a quick tour of some of the things that we talk about and we think about. 
+So, we think a lot about what really makes science work? 
+The first thing that anybody who knows science, and has been around science, is that the stuff you learn in school as a scientific method is wrong. There is no method. 
+On the other hand, somehow we manage to reason together as a community, from incomplete evidence to conclusions that we all agree about. 
+And this is, by the way, something that a democratic society also has to do. 
+So how does it work? 
+Well, my belief is that it works because scientists are a community bound together by an ethics. 
+And here are some of the ethical principles. 
+I ’ m not going to read them all to you because I ’ m not in teacher mode. 
+I ’ m in entertain, amaze mode. 
+(Laughter) But one of the principles is that everybody who is part of the community gets to fight and argue as hard as they can for what they believe. 
+But we ’ re all disciplined by the understanding that the only people who are going to decide, you know, whether I ’ m right or somebody else is right, are the people in our community in the next generation, in 30 and 50 years. 
+So it ’ s this combination of respect for the tradition and community we ’ re in, and rebellion that the community requires to get anywhere, that makes science work. 
+And being in this process of being in a community that reasons from shared evidence to conclusions, I believe, teaches us about democracy. 
+Not only is there a relationship between the ethics of science and the ethics of being a citizen in democracy, but there has been, historically, a relationship between how people think about space and time, and what the cosmos is, and how people think about the society that they live in. 
+And I want to talk about three stages in that evolution. 
+The first science of cosmology that was anything like science was Aristotelian science, and that was hierarchical. 
+The earth is in the center, then there are these crystal spheres, the sun, the moon, the planets and finally the celestial sphere, where the stars are. And everything in this universe has a place. 
+And Aristotle ’ s law of motion was that everything goes to its natural place, which was of course, the rule of the society that Aristotle lived in, and more importantly, the medieval society that, through Christianity, embraced Aristotle and blessed it. 
+And the idea is that everything is defined. 
+Where something is, is defined with respect to this last sphere, the celestial sphere, outside of which is this eternal, perfect realm, where lives God, who is the ultimate judge of everything. 
+So that is both Aristotelian cosmology, and in a certain sense, medieval society. 
+Now, in the 17th century there was a revolution in thinking about space and time and motion and so forth of Newton. 
+And at the same time there was a revolution in social thought of John Locke and his collaborators. 
+And they were very closely associated. 
+In fact, Newton and Locke were friends. 
+Their way of thinking about space and time and motion on the one hand, and a society on the other hand, were closely related. 
+And let me show you. 
+In a Newtonian universe, there ’ s no center — thank you. 
+There are particles and they move around with respect to a fixed, absolute framework of space and time. 
+It ’ s meaningful to say absolutely where something is in space, because that ’ s defined, not with respect to say, where other things are, but with respect to this absolute notion of space, which for Newton was God. 
+Now, similarly, in Locke ’ s society there are individuals who have certain rights, properties in a formal sense, and those are defined with respect to some absolute, abstract notions of rights and justice, and so forth, which are independent of what else has happened in the society. 
+Of who else there is, of the history and so forth. 
+There is also an omniscient observer who knows everything, who is God, who is in a certain sense outside the universe, because he has no role in anything that happens, but is in a certain sense everywhere, because space is just the way that God knows where everything is, according to Newton, OK? 
+So this is the foundations of what ’ s called, traditionally, liberal political theory and Newtonian physics. 
+Now, in the 20th century we had a revolution that was initiated at the beginning of the 20th century, and which is still going on. 
+It was begun with the invention of relativity theory and quantum theory. 
+And merging them together to make the final quantum theory of space and time and gravity, is the culmination of that, something that ’ s going on right now. 
+And in this universe there ’ s nothing fixed and absolute. Zilch, OK. 
+This universe is described by being a network of relationships. 
+Space is just one aspect, so there ’ s no meaning to say absolutely where something is. 
+There ’ s only where it is relative to everything else that is. 
+And this network of relations is ever-evolving. 
+So we call it a relational universe. 
+All properties of things are about these kinds of relationships. 
+And also, if you ’ re embedded in such a network of relationships, your view of the world has to do with what information comes to you through the network of relations. 
+And there ’ s no place for an omniscient observer or an outside intelligence knowing everything and making everything. 
+So this is general relativity, this is quantum theory. 
+This is also, if you talk to legal scholars, the foundations of new ideas in legal thought. 
+They ’ re thinking about the same things. 
+And not only that, they make the analogy to relativity theory and cosmology often. 
+So there ’ s an interesting discussion going on there. 
+This last view of cosmology is called the relational view. 
+So the main slogan here is that there ’ s nothing outside the universe, which means that there ’ s no place to put an explanation for something outside. 
+So in such a relational universe, if you come upon something that ’ s ordered and structured, like this device here, or that device there, or something beautiful, like all the living things, all of you guys in the room — "" guys "" in physics, by the way, is a generic term: men and women. 
+(Laughter) Then you want to know, you ’ re a person, you want to know how is it made. 
+And in a relational universe the only possible explanation was, somehow it made itself. 
+There must be mechanisms of self-organization inside the universe that make things. 
+Because there ’ s no place to put a maker outside, as there was in the Aristotelian and the Newtonian universe. 
+So in a relational universe we must have processes of self-organization. 
+Now, Darwin taught us that there are processes of self-organization that suffice to explain all of us and everything we see. 
+So it works. But not only that, if you think about how natural selection works, then it turns out that natural selection would only make sense in such a relational universe. 
+That is, natural selection works on properties, like fitness, which are about relationships of some species to some other species. 
+Darwin wouldn ’ t make sense in an Aristotelian universe, and wouldn ’ t really make sense in a Newtonian universe. 
+So a theory of biology based on natural selection requires a relational notion of what are the properties of biological systems. 
+And if you push that all the way down, really, it makes the best sense in a relational universe where all properties are relational. 
+Now, not only that, but Einstein taught us that gravity is the result of the world being relational. 
+If it wasn ’ t for gravity, there wouldn ’ t be life, because gravity causes stars to form and live for a very long time, keeping pieces of the world, like the surface of the Earth, out of thermal equilibrium for billions of years so life can evolve. 
+In the 20th century, we saw the independent development of two big themes in science. 
+In the biological sciences, they explored the implications of the notion that order and complexity and structure arise in a self-organized way. 
+That was the triumph of Neo-Darwinism and so forth. 
+And slowly, that idea is leaking out to the cognitive sciences, the human sciences, economics, et cetera. 
+At the same time, we physicists have been busy trying to make sense of and build on and integrate the discoveries of quantum theory and relativity. 
+And what we ’ ve been working out is the implications, really, of the idea that the universe is made up of relations. 
+21st-century science is going to be driven by the integration of these two ideas: the triumph of relational ways of thinking about the world, on the one hand, and self-organization or Darwinian ways of thinking about the world, on the other hand. 
+And also, is that in the 21st century our thinking about space and time and cosmology, and our thinking about society are both going to continue to evolve. 
+And what they ’ re evolving towards is the union of these two big ideas, Darwinism and relationalism. 
+Now, if you think about democracy from this perspective, a new pluralistic notion of democracy would be one that recognizes that there are many different interests, many different agendas, many different individuals, many different points of view. 
+Each one is incomplete, because you ’ re embedded in a network of relationships. 
+Any actor in a democracy is embedded in a network of relationships. 
+And you understand some things better than other things, and because of that there ’ s a continual jostling and give and take, which is politics. 
+And politics is, in the ideal sense, the way in which we continually address our network of relations in order to achieve a better life and a better society. 
+And I also think that science will never go away and — I ’ m finishing on this line. 
+(Laughter) In fact, I ’ m finished. Science will never go away. 
+
+The work of a transportation commissioner isn't just about stop signs and traffic signals. 
+It involves the design of cities and the design of city streets. 
+Streets are some of the most valuable resources that a city has, and yet it's an asset that's largely hidden in plain sight. 
+And the lesson from New York over the past six years is that you can update this asset. 
+You can remake your streets quickly, inexpensively, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. 
+You just need to look at them a little differently. 
+This is important because we live in an urban age. 
+For the first time in history, most people live in cities, and the U.N. estimates that over the next 40 years, the population is going to double on the planet. 
+So the design of cities is a key issue for our future. 
+Mayor Bloomberg recognized this when he launched PlaNYC in 2007. 
+The plan recognized that cities are in a global marketplace, and that if we're going to continue to grow and thrive and to attract the million more people that are expected to move here, we need to focus on the quality of life and the efficiency of our infrastructure. 
+For many cities, our streets have been in a kind of suspended animation for generations. 
+This is a picture of Times Square in the '50s, and despite all of the technological innovation, cultural changes, political changes, this is Times Square in 2008. 
+Not much has changed in those 50 years. 
+So we worked hard to refocus our agenda, to maximize efficient mobility, providing more room for buses, more room for bikes, more room for people to enjoy the city, and to make our streets as safe as they can be for everybody that uses them. 
+We set out a clear action plan with goals and benchmarks. 
+Having goals is important, because if you want to change and steer the ship of a big city in a new direction, you need to know where you're going and why. 
+The design of a street can tell you everything about what's expected on it. 
+In this case, it's expected that you shelter in place. 
+The design of this street is really to maximize the movement of cars moving as quickly as possible from point A to point B, and it misses all the other ways that a street is used. 
+When we started out, we did some early surveys about how our streets were used, and we found that New York City was largely a city without seats. 
+Pictures like this, people perched on a fire hydrant, not the mark of a world-class city. 
+(Laughter) It's not great for parents with kids. 
+It's not great for seniors. It's not great for retailers. 
+It's probably not good for the fire hydrants. 
+Certainly not good for the police department. 
+So we worked hard to change that balance, and probably the best example of our new approach is in Times Square. 
+Three hundred and fifty thousand people a day walk through Times Square, and people had tried for years to make changes. 
+They changed signals, they changed lanes, everything they could do to make Times Square work better. 
+It was dangerous, hard to cross the street. 
+It was chaotic. 
+And so, none of those approaches worked, so we took a different approach, a bigger approach, looked at our street differently. 
+And so we did a six-month pilot. 
+We closed Broadway from 42nd Street to 47th Street and created two and a half acres of new pedestrian space. 
+And the temporary materials are an important part of the program, because we were able to show how it worked. 
+And I work for a data-driven mayor, as you probably know. 
+So it was all about the data. 
+So if it worked better for traffic, if it was better for mobility, if it was safer, better for business, we would keep it, and if it didn't work, no harm, no foul, we could put it back the way that it was, because these were temporary materials. 
+And that was a very big part of the buy-in, much less anxiety when you think that something can be put back. 
+But the results were overwhelming. 
+Traffic moved better. It was much safer. 
+Five new flagship stores opened. 
+It's been a total home run. 
+Times Square is now one of the top 10 retail locations on the planet. 
+And this is an important lesson, because it doesn't need to be a zero-sum game between moving traffic and creating public space. 
+Every project has its surprises, and one of the big surprises with Times Square was how quickly people flocked to the space. 
+We put out the orange barrels, and people just materialized immediately into the street. 
+It was like a Star Trek episode, you know? 
+They weren't there before, and then zzzzzt! 
+All the people arrived. 
+Where they'd been, I don't know, but they were there. 
+And this actually posed an immediate challenge for us, because the street furniture had not yet arrived. 
+So we went to a hardware store and bought hundreds of lawn chairs, and we put those lawn chairs out on the street. 
+And the lawn chairs became the talk of the town. 
+It wasn't about that we'd closed Broadway to cars. 
+It was about those lawn chairs. 
+"What did you think about the lawn chairs?" 
+"Do you like the color of the lawn chairs?" 
+So if you've got a big, controversial project, think about lawn chairs. 
+(Laughter) This is the final design for Times Square, and it will create a level surface, sidewalk to sidewalk, beautiful pavers that have studs in them to reflect the light from the billboards, creating a great new energy on the street, and we think it's going to really create a great place, a new crossroads of the world that is worthy of its name. 
+And we will be cutting the ribbon on this, the first phase, this December. 
+With all of our projects, our public space projects, we work closely with local businesses and local merchant groups who maintain the spaces, move the furniture, take care of the plants. 
+This is in front of Macy's, and they were a big supporter of this new approach, because they understood that more people on foot is better for business. 
+And we've done these projects all across the city in all kinds of neighborhoods. 
+This is in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and you can see the short leg that was there, used for cars, that's not really needed. 
+So what we did is we painted over the street, put down epoxy gravel, and connected the triangle to the storefronts on Grand Avenue, created a great new public space, and it's been great for businesses along Grand Avenue. 
+We did the same thing in DUMBO, in Brooklyn, and this is one of our first projects that we did, and we took an underutilized, pretty dingy-looking parking lot and used some paint and planters to transform it over a weekend. 
+And in the three years since we've implemented the project, retail sales have increased 172 percent. 
+And that's twice that of adjacent areas in the same neighborhood. 
+We've moved very, very quickly with paint and temporary materials. 
+Instead of waiting through years of planning studies and computer models to get something done, we've done it with paint and temporary materials. 
+And the proof is not in a computer model. 
+It is in the real-world performance of the street. 
+You can have fun with paint. 
+All told, we've created over 50 pedestrian plazas in all five boroughs across the city. 
+We've repurposed 26 acres of active car lanes and turned them into new pedestrian space. 
+I think one of the successes is in its emulation. 
+You're seeing this kind of approach, since we've painted Times Square, you've seen this approach in Boston, in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, you name it. 
+This is actually in Los Angeles, and they actually copied even the green dots that we had on the streets. 
+But I can't underscore enough how much more quickly this enables you to move over traditional construction methods. 
+We also brought this quick-acting approach to our cycling program, and in six years turned cycling into a real transportation option in New York. 
+I think it's fair to say — (Applause) — it used to be a fairly scary place to ride a bike, and now New York has become one of the cycling capitals in the United States. 
+And we moved quickly to create an interconnected network of lanes. 
+You can see the map in 2007. 
+This is how it looked in 2013 after we built out 350 miles of on-street bike lanes. 
+I love this because it looks so easy. 
+You just click it, and they're there. 
+We also brought new designs to the street. 
+We created the first parking-protected bike lane in the United States. 
+(Applause) We protected bikers by floating parking lanes, and it's been great. 
+Bike volumes have spiked. 
+Injuries to all users, pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, are all down 50 percent. 
+And we've built 30 miles of these protected bike lanes, and now you're seeing them pop up all over the country. 
+And you can see here that this strategy has worked. 
+The blue line is the number of cyclists, soaring. 
+The green line is the number of bike lanes. 
+And the yellow line is the number of injuries, which has remained essentially flat. 
+After this big expansion, you've seen no net increase in injuries, and so there is something to that axiom that there is safety in numbers. 
+Not everybody liked the new bike lanes, and there was a lawsuit and somewhat of a media frenzy a couple years ago. 
+One Brooklyn paper called this bike lane that we have on Prospect Park West "" the most contested piece of land outside of the Gaza Strip. "" (Laughter) And this is what we had done. 
+So if you dig below the headlines, though, you'll see that the people were far ahead of the press, far ahead of the politicians. 
+In fact, I think most politicians would be happy to have those kind of poll numbers. 
+Sixty-four percent of New Yorkers support these bike lanes. 
+This summer, we launched Citi Bike, the largest bike share program in the United States, with 6,000 bikes and 330 stations located next to one another. 
+Since we've launched the program, three million trips have been taken. 
+People have ridden seven million miles. 
+That's 280 times around the globe. 
+And so with this little blue key, you can unlock the keys to the city and this brand new transportation option. 
+And daily usage just continues to soar. 
+What has happened is the average daily ridership on the streets of New York is 36,000 people. 
+The high that we've had so far is 44,000 in August. 
+Yesterday, 40,000 people used Citi Bike in New York City. 
+The bikes are being used six times a day. 
+And I think you also see it in the kinds of riders that are on the streets. 
+In the past, it looked like the guy on the left, ninja-clad bike messenger. 
+And today, cyclists look like New York City looks. 
+It's diverse — young, old, black, white, women, kids, all getting on a bike. 
+It's an affordable, safe, convenient way to get around. 
+Quite radical. 
+We've also brought this approach to our buses, and New York City has the largest bus fleet in North America, the slowest bus speeds. 
+As everybody knows, you can walk across town faster than you can take the bus. 
+And so we focused on the most congested areas of New York City, built out six bus rapid transit lines, 57 miles of new speedy bus lanes. 
+You pay at a kiosk before you get on the bus. 
+We've got dedicated lanes that keep cars out because they get ticketed by a camera if they use that lane, and it's been a huge success. 
+I think one of my very favorite moments as transportation commissioner was the day that we launched Citi Bike, and I was riding Citi Bike up First Avenue in my protected bike lane, and I looked over and I saw pedestrians standing safely on the pedestrian islands, and the traffic was flowing, birds were singing — (Laughter) — the buses were speeding up their dedicated lanes. 
+It was just fantastic. 
+And this is how it looked six years ago. 
+And so, I think that the lesson that we have from New York is that it's possible to change your streets quickly, it's not expensive, it can provide immediate benefits, and it can be quite popular. 
+You just need to reimagine your streets. 
+They're hidden in plain sight. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Some of the greatest innovations and developments in the world often happen at the intersection of two fields. 
+So tonight I'd like to tell you about the intersection that I'm most excited about at this very moment, which is entertainment and robotics. 
+So if we're trying to make robots that can be more expressive and that can connect better with us in society, maybe we should look to some of the human professionals of artificial emotion and personality that occur in the dramatic arts. 
+I'm also interested in creating new technologies for the arts and to attract people to science and technology. 
+Some people in the last decade or two have started creating artwork with technology. 
+With my new venture, Marilyn Monrobot, I would like to use art to create tech. 
+(Laughter) So we're based in New York City. 
+And if you're a performer that wants to collaborate with an adorable robot, or if you have a robot that needs entertainment representation, please contact me, the Bot-Agent. 
+The bot, our rising celebrity, also has his own Twitter account: @ robotinthewild. 
+I'd like to introduce you to one of our first robots, Data. 
+He's named after the Star Trek character. 
+I think he's going to be super popular. 
+We've got the robot — in his head is a database of a lot of jokes. 
+Now each of these jokes is labeled with certain attributes. 
+So it knows something about the subject; it knows about the length. 
+It knows how much it's moving. 
+And so it's going to try to watch your response. 
+I actually have no idea what my robot is going to do today. 
+(Laughter) It can also learn from you about the quality of its jokes and cater things, sort of like Netflix-style, over longer-term to different communities or audiences, children versus adults, different cultures. 
+You can learn something from the robot about the community that you're in. 
+And also I can use each one of you as the acting coach to our future robot companions. 
+Some of you in this middle section — you have red / green paddles. 
+If you like what's going on, show the green. 
+If you don't like the subject or the performance, you can hold the red. 
+Now don't be shy. 
+It's just a robot. 
+It doesn't have feelings... yet. 
+(Laughter) And the rest of you, you still count, you still matter. 
+There's also a microphone that's listening to the aggregate laughter and applause and booing — I hope not — to help make some of its next decisions. 
+Right, so, let the robot stand-up comedy begin. 
+Data: Hello TEDWomen. 
+It's an honor to be here. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) You guys are looking good out there. 
+Ready for some jokes? 
+Audience: Yeah. 
+Data: Here's the first one. 
+Right, so, a doctor says to his patient, "" I have bad news and worse news. 
+The bad news is that you only have 24 hours to live. "" "" That's terrible, "" said the patient. 
+"How can the news possibly be worse?" 
+"I've been trying to contact you since yesterday." 
+(Laughter) (Applause) The Swiss have an interesting army. Five hundred years without a war. 
+Heather Knight: He's talking about the Swiss. 
+Data: Pretty lucky for them. 
+Ever see that little Swiss Army knife they have to fight with? 
+"" Come on buddy, I have the toe clippers right here. 
+You get past me, the guy behind me has a spoon. "" (Laughter) HK: He's a French robot. 
+Data: A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods. 
+One of them falls to the ground. 
+He does not seem to be breathing. 
+The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls 911. 
+He gasps to the operator, "" My friend is dead. 
+What can I do? "" The operator says, "" Just take it easy. 
+I can help. 
+First, let's make sure he's dead. "" There is a silence, and the operator hears a shot. 
+The guy's voice comes back on the line, "Okay, now what?" 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Question: Why is television called a medium? 
+Anyone? 
+Because it's neither rare nor well done. 
+But to be completely honest with you, I kind of love television. 
+Any of you like television? Audience: Yes. 
+Data: I find it incredibly educational. 
+Actually, as soon as someone turns it on, I go into the other room and read. 
+(Laughter) That's all for now. 
+Was that okay for my first time? 
+(Applause) You've been a great audience. 
+Thank you. 
+HK: Yay. 
+(Applause) So this is actually the first time we've ever done live audience feedback to a performance. 
+So thank you all for being a part of it. 
+There's a lot more to come. 
+And we hope to learn a lot about robot expression. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is about a place in London called Kiteflyer's Hill where I used to go and spend hours going "" When is he coming back? When is he coming back? "" So this is another one dedicated to that guy... 
+who I've got over. 
+But this is "" Kiteflyer's Hill. "" It's a beautiful song written by a guy called Martin Evan, actually, for me. 
+Boo Hewerdine, Thomas Dolby, thank you very much for inviting me. It's been a blessing singing for you. 
+Thank you very much. 
+♫ Do you remember when we used to go ♫ ♫ up to Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫ ♫ Those summer nights, so still ♫ ♫ with all of the city beneath us ♫ ♫ and all of our lives ahead ♫ ♫ before cruel and foolish words ♫ ♫ were cruelly and foolishly said ♫ ♫ Some nights I think of you ♫ ♫ and then I go up ♫ ♫ on Kiteflyer's Hill ♫ ♫ wrapped up against the winter chill ♫ ♫ And somewhere in the city beneath me ♫ ♫ you lie asleep in your bed ♫ ♫ and I wonder if ever just briefly ♫ 
+♫ do I creep in your dreams now and then ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Have the years been kind? ♫ ♫ And do you think of me sometimes ♫ ♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? ♫ ♫ Oh, I pray you one day will ♫ ♫ We won't say a word ♫ ♫ We won't need them ♫ ♫ Sometimes silence is best ♫ ♫ We'll just stand in the still of the evening ♫ ♫ and whisper farewell to loneliness ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ 
+♫ Do you think of me sometimes? ♫ ♫ And do you ever make that climb? ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ My wild summer love ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Have the years been kind? ♫ ♫ And do you ever make that climb ♫ ♫ up on Kiteflyer's Hill? Kiteflyer's... ♫ ♫ [French] ♫ ♫ Where are you? Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Where are you now? ♫ ♫ Kiteflyer's... ♫ (Applause) Gracias. Thank you very much. 
+
+What is so special about the human brain? 
+Why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us? 
+What does a human brain have or do that no other brain does? 
+When I became interested in these questions about 10 years ago, scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of. 
+Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain. 
+This means that two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 400 grams, should have similar numbers of neurons. 
+Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities. 
+And yet, one is a chimp, and the other is a cow. 
+Now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it, but we eat them. 
+I think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex, elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are. 
+So this is a first indication that the "" all brains are made the same way "" scenario is not quite right. 
+But let's play along. 
+If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain, the more cognitively able its owner should be. 
+So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able. 
+And here comes the bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around. 
+It seems quite vexing. 
+Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos, but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos, which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities. 
+It must be really extraordinary, an exception to the rule. 
+Theirs may be bigger, but ours is better, and it could be better, for example, in that it seems larger than it should be, with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies. 
+So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body. 
+That's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body. 
+So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes. 
+Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are, so their brains should also be larger than ours, but instead it's the other way around. 
+Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain. 
+The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses. 
+Although it weighs only two percent of the body, it alone uses 25 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day. 
+That's 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories, just to keep your brain working. 
+So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy than it should, so it's special. 
+And this is where the story started to bother me. 
+In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us? 
+Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way. 
+Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons. 
+Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain. 
+Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex. 
+So this to me became the important question to answer: how many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals? 
+Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons, so 10 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from. 
+But nobody did. 
+I've been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number, and I could never find it. 
+It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter. 
+So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup. 
+It works like this: You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent, which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a clear soup. 
+This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain. 
+Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and therefore tell how many cells that brain had. 
+It's simple, it's straightforward, and it's really fast. 
+So we've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way. 
+Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons. 
+But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain. 
+The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be. 
+Well, what about our brain then? 
+We found that we have, on average, 86 billion neurons, 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. 
+But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean. 
+Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain. 
+So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36 kilos. 
+That's not possible. 
+A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons. 
+I don't think it looks like us. 
+So this brings us to a very important conclusion already, which is that we are not rodents. 
+The human brain is not a large rat brain. 
+Compared to a rat, we might seem special, yes, but that's not a fair comparison to make, given that we know that we are not rodents. 
+We are primates, so the correct comparison is to other primates. 
+And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 66 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate. 
+And all of you are primates. 
+And so was Darwin. 
+I love to think that Darwin would have really appreciated this. 
+His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other primate brains. 
+So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons. 
+It is just a large primate brain. 
+I think that's a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature. 
+Why does it cost so much energy, then? 
+Well, other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs, and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we could do the math. 
+And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same, an average of six calories per billion neurons per day. 
+So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect. 
+So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we're primates, not because we're special. 
+Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons? 
+When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I figured, maybe there's a simple reason. 
+They just can't afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons. 
+So we did the math. 
+We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day. 
+And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons. 
+So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons, but then its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos. 
+To weigh any more than that, it has to give up neurons. 
+So it's either a large body or a large number of neurons. 
+When you eat like a primate, you can't afford both. 
+One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating, but that gets dangerous, and past a certain point, it's just not possible. 
+Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating, and that seems to be about as much as they can do. 
+Nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate. 
+What about us? 
+With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding, which is just not feasible. 
+If we ate like a primate, we should not be here. 
+How did we get here, then? 
+Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can't spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods. 
+And remarkably, that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago, when they invented cooking. 
+To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods outside of your body. 
+Cooked foods are softer, so they're easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them yield much more energy in much less time. 
+So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long. 
+So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. 
+So I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. 
+With this large brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators, all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. 
+So what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we look for the solution in raw food. 
+So what is the human advantage? 
+What is it that we have that no other animal has? 
+My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. 
+And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? 
+In two words, we cook. 
+No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. 
+And I think that's how we got to become human. 
+Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food. 
+I now look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that, by far, most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light. 
+We can stand on the Earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes. 
+The Sun burns our peripheral vision. 
+We see light reflected off the Moon. 
+And in the time since Galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies, the known universe has come to us through light, across vast eras in cosmic history. 
+And with all of our modern telescopes, we've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe — these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the Big Bang. 
+And yet, the universe is not a silent movie because the universe isn't silent. 
+I'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself, because space can wobble like a drum. 
+It can ring out a kind of recording throughout the universe of some of the most dramatic events as they unfold. 
+Now we'd like to be able to add to a kind of glorious visual composition that we have of the universe — a sonic composition. 
+And while we've never heard the sounds from space, we really should, in the next few years, start to turn up the volume on what's going on out there. 
+So in this ambition to capture songs from the universe, we turn our focus to black holes and the promise they have, because black holes can bang on space-time like mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song, which I'd like to play for you — some of our predictions for what that song will be like. 
+Now black holes are dark against a dark sky. 
+We can't see them directly. 
+They're not brought to us with light, at least not directly. 
+We can see them indirectly, because black holes wreak havoc on their environment. 
+They destroy stars around them. 
+They churn up debris in their surroundings. 
+But they won't come to us directly through light. 
+We might one day see a shadow a black hole can cast on a very bright background, but we haven't yet. 
+And yet black holes may be heard even if they're not seen, and that's because they bang on space-time like a drum. 
+Now we owe the idea that space can ring like a drum to Albert Einstein — to whom we owe so much. 
+Einstein realized that if space were empty, if the universe were empty, it would be like this picture, except for maybe without the helpful grid drawn on it. 
+But if we were freely falling through the space, even without this helpful grid, we might be able to paint it ourselves, because we would notice that we traveled along straight lines, undeflected straight paths through the universe. 
+Einstein also realized — and this is the real meat of the matter — that if you put energy or mass in the universe, it would curve space, and a freely falling object would pass by, let's say, the Sun and it would be deflected along the natural curves in the space. 
+It was Einstein's great general theory of relativity. 
+Now even light will be bent by those paths. 
+And you can be bent so much that you're caught in orbit around the Sun, as the Earth is, or the Moon around the Earth. 
+These are the natural curves in space. 
+What Einstein did not realize was that, if you took our Sun and you crushed it down to six kilometers — so you took a million times the mass of the Earth and you crushed it to six kilometers across, you would make a black hole, an object so dense that if light veered too close, it would never escape — a dark shadow against the universe. 
+It wasn't Einstein who realized this, it was Karl Schwarzschild who was a German Jew in World War I — joined the German army already an accomplished scientist, working on the Russian front. 
+I like to imagine Schwarzschild in the war in the trenches calculating ballistic trajectories for cannon fire, and then, in between, calculating Einstein's equations — as you do in the trenches. 
+And he was reading Einstein's recently published general theory of relativity, and he was thrilled by this theory. 
+And he quickly surmised an exact mathematical solution that described something very extraordinary: curves so strong that space would rain down into them, space itself would curve like a waterfall flowing down the throat of a hole. 
+And even light could not escape this current. 
+Light would be dragged down the hole as everything else would be, and all that would be left would be a shadow. 
+Now he wrote to Einstein, and he said, "" As you will see, the war has been kind to me enough. 
+Despite the heavy gunfire, I've been able to get away from it all and walk through the land of your ideas. "" And Einstein was very impressed with his exact solution, and I should hope also the dedication of the scientist. 
+This is the hardworking scientist under harsh conditions. 
+And he took Schwarzschild's idea to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the next week. 
+But Einstein always thought black holes were a mathematical oddity. 
+He did not believe they existed in nature. 
+He thought nature would protect us from their formation. 
+It was decades before the term "" black hole "" was coined and people realized that black holes are real astrophysical objects — in fact they're the death state of very massive stars that collapse catastrophically at the end of their lifetime. 
+Now our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. 
+It's actually not massive enough. 
+But if we did a little thought experiment — as Einstein was very fond of doing — we could imagine putting the Sun crushed down to six kilometers, and putting a tiny little Earth around it in orbit, maybe 30 kilometers outside of the black-hole sun. 
+And it would be self-illuminated, because now the Sun's gone, we have no other source of light — so let's make our little Earth self-illuminated. 
+And you would realize you could put the Earth in a happy orbit even 30 km outside of this crushed black hole. 
+This crushed black hole actually would fit inside Manhattan, more or less. 
+It might spill off into the Hudson a little bit before it destroyed the Earth. 
+But basically that's what we're talking about. 
+We're talking about an object that you could crush down to half the square area of Manhattan. 
+So we move this Earth very close — 30 kilometers outside — and we notice it's perfectly fine orbiting around the black hole. 
+There's a sort of myth that black holes devour everything in the universe, but you actually have to get very close to fall in. 
+But what's very impressive is that, from our vantage point, we can always see the Earth. 
+It cannot hide behind the black hole. 
+The light from the Earth, some of it falls in, but some of it gets lensed around and brought back to us. 
+So you can't hide anything behind a black hole. 
+If this were Battlestar Galactica and you're fighting the Cylons, don't hide behind the black hole. 
+They can see you. 
+Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole — it's not massive enough — but there are tens of thousands of black holes in our galaxy. 
+And if one were to eclipse the Milky Way, this is what it would look like. 
+We would see a shadow of that black hole against the hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and its luminous dust lanes. 
+And if we were to fall towards this black hole, we would see all of that light lensed around it, and we could even start to cross into that shadow and really not notice that anything dramatic had happened. 
+It would be bad if we tried to fire our rockets and get out of there because we couldn't, anymore than light can escape. 
+But even though the black hole is dark from the outside, it's not dark on the inside, because all of the light from the galaxy can fall in behind us. 
+And even though, due to a relativistic effect known as time dilation, our clocks would seem to slow down relative to galactic time, it would look as though the evolution of the galaxy had been sped up and shot at us, right before we were crushed to death by the black hole. 
+It would be like a near-death experience where you see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a total death experience. 
+(Laughter) And there's no way of telling anybody about the light at the end of the tunnel. 
+Now we've never seen a shadow like this of a black hole, but black holes can be heard, even if they're not seen. 
+Imagine now taking an astrophysically realistic situation — imagine two black holes that have lived a long life together. 
+Maybe they started as stars and collapsed to two black holes — each one 10 times the mass of the Sun. 
+So now we're going to crush them down to 60 kilometers across. 
+They can be spinning hundreds of times a second. 
+At the end of their lives, they're going around each other very near the speed of light. 
+So they're crossing thousands of kilometers in a fraction of a second, and as they do so, they not only curve space, but they leave behind in their wake a ringing of space, an actual wave on space-time. 
+Space squeezes and stretches as it emanates out from these black holes banging on the universe. 
+And they travel out into the cosmos at the speed of light. 
+This computer simulation is due to a relativity group at NASA Goddard. 
+It took almost 30 years for anyone in the world to crack this problem. 
+This was one of the groups. 
+It shows two black holes in orbit around each other, again, with these helpfully painted curves. 
+And if you can see — it's kind of faint — but if you can see the red waves emanating out, those are the gravitational waves. 
+They're literally the sounds of space ringing, and they will travel out from these black holes at the speed of light as they ring down and coalesce to one spinning, quiet black hole at the end of the day. 
+If you were standing near enough, your ear would resonate with the squeezing and stretching of space. 
+You would literally hear the sound. 
+Now of course, your head would be squeezed and stretched unhelpfully, so you might have trouble understanding what's going on. 
+But I'd like to play for you the sound that we predict. 
+This is from my group — a slightly less glamorous computer modeling. 
+Imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole. 
+The sound you're hearing is the light black hole banging on space each time it gets close. 
+If it gets far away, it's a little too quiet. 
+But it comes in like a mallet, and it literally cracks space, wobbling it like a drum. 
+And we can predict what the sound will be. 
+We know that, as it falls in, it gets faster and it gets louder. 
+And eventually, we're going to hear the little guy just fall into the bigger guy. 
+(Thumping) Then it's gone. 
+Now I've never heard it that loud — it's actually more dramatic. 
+At home it sounds kind of anticlimactic. 
+It's sort of like ding, ding, ding. 
+This is another sound from my group. 
+No, I'm not showing you any images, because black holes don't leave behind helpful trails of ink, and space is not painted, showing you the curves. 
+But if you were to float by in space on a space holiday and you heard this, you want to get moving. 
+(Laughter) Want to get away from the sound. 
+Both black holes are moving. 
+Both black holes are getting closer together. 
+In this case, they're both wobbling quite a lot. 
+And then they're going to merge. 
+(Thumping) Now it's gone. 
+Now that chirp is very characteristic of black holes merging — that it chirps up at the end. 
+Now that's our prediction for what we'll see. 
+Luckily we're at this safe distance in Long Beach, California. 
+And surely, somewhere in the universe two black holes have merged. 
+And surely, the space around us is ringing after traveling maybe a million light years, or a million years, at the speed of light to get to us. 
+But the sound is too quiet for any of us to ever hear. 
+There are very industrious experiments being built on Earth — one called LIGO — which will detect deviations in the squeezing and stretching of space at less than the fraction of a nucleus of an atom over four kilometers. 
+It's a remarkably ambitious experiment, and it's going to be at advanced sensitivity within the next few years — to pick this up. 
+There's also a mission proposed for space, which hopefully will launch in the next ten years, called LISA. 
+And LISA will be able to see super-massive black holes — black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. 
+In this Hubble image, we see two galaxies. 
+They look like they're frozen in some embrace. 
+And each one probably harbors a super-massive black hole at its core. 
+But they're not frozen; they're actually merging. 
+These two black holes are colliding, and they will merge over a billion-year time scale. 
+It's beyond our human perception to pick up a song of that duration. 
+But LISA could see the final stages of two super-massive black holes earlier in the universe's history, the last 15 minutes before they fall together. 
+And it's not just black holes, but it's also any big disturbance in the universe — and the biggest of them all is the Big Bang. 
+When that expression was coined, it was derisive — like, "" Oh, who would believe in a Big Bang? "" But now it actually might be more technically accurate because it might bang. 
+It might make a sound. 
+This animation from my friends at Proton Studios shows looking at the Big Bang from the outside. 
+We don't ever want to do that actually. We want to be inside the universe because there's no such thing as standing outside the universe. 
+So imagine you're inside the Big Bang. 
+It's everywhere, it's all around you, and the space is wobbling chaotically. 
+Fourteen billion years pass and this song is still ringing all around us. 
+Galaxies form, and generations of stars form in those galaxies, and around one star, at least one star, is a habitable planet. 
+And here we are frantically building these experiments, doing these calculations, writing these computer codes. 
+Imagine a billion years ago, two black holes collided. 
+That song has been ringing through space for all that time. 
+We weren't even here. 
+It gets closer and closer — 40,000 years ago, we're still doing cave paintings. 
+It's like hurry, build your instruments. 
+It's getting closer and closer, and in 20... 
+whatever year it will be when our detectors are finally at advanced sensitivity — we'll build them, we'll turn on the machines and, bang, we'll catch it — the first song from space. 
+If it was the Big Bang we were going to pick up, it would sound like this. 
+(Static) It's a terrible sound. 
+It's literally the definition of noise. 
+It's white noise; it's such a chaotic ringing. 
+But it's around us everywhere, presumably, if it hasn't been wiped out by some other process in the universe. 
+And if we pick it up, it will be music to our ears because it will be the quiet echo of that moment of our creation, of our observable universe. 
+So within the next few years, we'll be able to turn up the soundtrack a little bit, render the universe in audio. 
+But if we detect those earliest moments, it'll bring us that much closer to an understanding of the Big Bang, which brings us that much closer to asking some of the hardest, most elusive, questions. 
+If we run the movie of our universe backwards, we know that there was a Big Bang in our past, and we might even hear the cacophonous sound of it, but was our Big Bang the only Big Bang? 
+I mean we have to ask, has it happened before? 
+Will it happen again? 
+I mean, in the spirit of rising to TED's challenge to reignite wonder, we can ask questions, at least for this last minute, that honestly might evade us forever. 
+But we have to ask: Is it possible that our universe is just a plume off of some greater history? 
+Or, is it possible that we're just a branch off of a multiverse — each branch with its own Big Bang in its past — maybe some of them with black holes playing drums, maybe some without — maybe some with sentient life, and maybe some without — not in our past, not in our future, but somehow fundamentally connected to us? 
+So we have to wonder, if there is a multiverse, in some other patch of that multiverse, are there creatures? 
+Here's my multiverse creatures. 
+Are there other creatures in the multiverse, wondering about us and wondering about their own origins? 
+And if they are, I can imagine them as we are, calculating, writing computer code, building instruments, trying to detect that faintest sound of their origins and wondering who else is out there. 
+Thank you. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm actually here to make a challenge to people. 
+I know there have been many challenges made to people. 
+The one I'm going to make is that it is time for us to reclaim what peace really means. 
+Peace is not "" Kumbaya, my Lord. "" Peace is not the dove and the rainbow — as lovely as they are. 
+When I see the symbols of the rainbow and the dove, I think of personal serenity. 
+I think of meditation. 
+I do not think about what I consider to be peace, which is sustainable peace with justice and equality. 
+It is a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives, where these people have enough access to education and health care, so that they can live in freedom from want and freedom from fear. 
+This is called human security. 
+And I am not a complete pacifist like some of my really, really heavy-duty, non-violent friends, like Mairead McGuire. 
+I understand that humans are so "" messed up "" — to use a nice word, because I promised my mom I'd stop using the F-bomb in public. 
+And I'm trying harder and harder. 
+Mom, I'm really trying. 
+We need a little bit of police; we need a little bit of military, but for defense. 
+We need to redefine what makes us secure in this world. 
+It is not arming our country to the teeth. 
+It is not getting other countries to arm themselves to the teeth with the weapons that we produce and we sell them. 
+It is using that money more rationally to make the countries of the world secure, to make the people of the world secure. 
+I was thinking about the recent ongoings in Congress, where the president is offering 8.4 billion dollars to try to get the START vote. 
+I certainly support the START vote. 
+But he's offering 84 billion dollars for the modernizing of nuclear weapons. 
+Do you know the figure that the U.N. talks about for fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals is 80 billion dollars? 
+Just that little bit of money, which to me, I wish it was in my bank account — it's not, but... 
+In global terms, it's a little bit of money. 
+But it's going to modernize weapons we do not need and will not be gotten rid of in our lifetime, unless we get up off our... 
+and take action to make it happen, unless we begin to believe that all of the things that we've been hearing about in these last two days are elements of what come together to make human security. 
+It is saving the tigers. 
+It is stopping the tar sands. 
+It is having access to medical equipment that can actually tell who does have cancer. 
+It is all of those things. 
+It is using our money for all of those things. 
+It is about action. 
+I was in Hiroshima a couple of weeks ago, and His Holiness — we're sitting there in front of thousands of people in the city, and there were about eight of us Nobel laureates. 
+And he's a bad guy. He's like a bad kid in church. 
+We're staring at everybody, waiting our turn to speak, and he leans over to me, and he says, "Jody, I'm a Buddhist monk." 
+I said, "" Yes, Your Holiness. 
+Your robe gives it away. "" (Laughter) He said, "" You know that I kind of like meditation, and I pray. "" I said, "" That's good. That's good. 
+We need that in the world. 
+I don't follow that, but that's cool. "" And he says, "" But I have become skeptical. 
+I do not believe that meditation and prayer will change this world. 
+I think what we need is action. "" His Holiness, in his robes, is my new action hero. 
+I spoke with Aung Sun Suu Kyi a couple of days ago. 
+As most of you know, she's a hero for democracy in her country, Burma. 
+You probably also know that she has spent 15 of the last 20 years imprisoned for her efforts to bring about democracy. 
+She was just released a couple of weeks ago, and we're very concerned to see how long she will be free, because she is already out in the streets in Rangoon, agitating for change. 
+She is already out in the streets, working with the party to try to rebuild it. 
+But I talked to her for a range of issues. 
+But one thing that I want to say, because it's similar to what His Holiness said. 
+She said, "" You know, we have a long road to go to finally get democracy in my country. 
+But I don't believe in hope without endeavor. 
+I don't believe in the hope of change, unless we take action to make it so. "" Here's another woman hero of mine. 
+She's my friend, Dr. Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. 
+She has been in exile for the last year and a half. 
+You ask her where she lives — where does she live in exile? 
+She says the airports of the world. 
+She is traveling because she was out of the country at the time of the elections. 
+And instead of going home, she conferred with all the other women that she works with, who said to her, "" Stay out. We need you out. 
+We need to be able to talk to you out there, so that you can give the message of what's happening here. "" A year and a half — she's out speaking on behalf of the other women in her country. 
+Wangari Maathai — 2004 Peace laureate. 
+They call her the "" Tree Lady, "" but she's more than the Tree Lady. 
+Working for peace is very creative. 
+It's hard work every day. 
+When she was planting those trees, I don't think most people understand that, at the same time, she was using the action of getting people together to plant those trees to talk about how to overcome the authoritarian government in her country. 
+People could not gather without getting busted and taken to jail. 
+But if they were together planting trees for the environment, it was okay — creativity. 
+But it's not just iconic women like Shirin, like Aung Sun Suu Kyi, like Wangari Maathai — it is other women in the world who are also struggling together to change this world. 
+The Women's League of Burma, 11 individual organizations of Burmese women came together because there's strength in numbers. 
+Working together is what changes our world. 
+The Million Signatures Campaign of women inside Burma working together to change human rights, to bring democracy to that country. 
+When one is arrested and taken to prison, another one comes out and joins the movement, recognizing that if they work together, they will ultimately bring change in their own country. 
+Mairead McGuire in the middle, Betty Williams on the right-hand side — bringing peace to Northern Ireland. 
+I'll tell you the quick story. 
+An IRA driver was shot, and his car plowed into people on the side of the street. 
+There was a mother and three children. 
+The children were killed on the spot. 
+It was Mairead's sister. 
+Instead of giving in to grief, depression, defeat in the face of that violence, Mairead hooked up with Betty — a staunch Protestant and a staunch Catholic — and they took to the streets to say, "" No more violence. "" And they were able to get tens of thousands of, primarily, women, some men, in the streets to bring about change. 
+And they have been part of what brought peace to Northern Ireland, and they're still working on it, because there's still a lot more to do. 
+This is Rigoberta Menchu Tum. 
+She also received the Peace Prize. 
+She is now running for president. 
+She is educating the indigenous people of her country about what it means to be a democracy, about how you bring democracy to the country, about educating, about how to vote — but that democracy is not just about voting; it's about being an active citizen. 
+That's what I got stuck doing — the landmine campaign. 
+One of the things that made this campaign work is because we grew from two NGOs to thousands in 90 countries around the world, working together in common cause to ban landmines. 
+Some of the people who worked in our campaign could only work maybe an hour a month. 
+They could maybe volunteer that much. 
+There were others, like myself, who were full-time. 
+But it was the actions, together, of all of us that brought about that change. 
+In my view, what we need today is people getting up and taking action to reclaim the meaning of peace. 
+It's not a dirty word. 
+It's hard work every single day. 
+And if each of us who cares about the different things we care about got up off our butts and volunteered as much time as we could, we would change this world, we would save this world. 
+And we can't wait for the other guy. We have to do it ourselves. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I think it'll be a relief to some people and a disappointment to others that I'm not going to talk about vaginas today. 
+I began "" The Vagina Monologues "" because I was worried about vaginas. 
+I'm very worried today about this notion, this world, this prevailing kind of force of security. 
+I see this word, hear this word, feel this word everywhere. 
+Real security, security checks, security watch, security clearance. 
+Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much more insecure? 
+What does anyone mean when they talk about real security? 
+And why have we, as Americans particularly, become a nation that strives for security above all else? 
+In fact, I think that security is elusive. It's impossible. 
+We all die. We all get old. We all get sick. People leave us. 
+People change us. Nothing is secure. 
+And that's actually the good news. 
+This is, of course, unless your whole life is about being secure. 
+I think that when that is the focus of your life, these are the things that happen. 
+You can't travel very far or venture too far outside a certain circle. 
+You can't allow too many conflicting ideas into your mind at one time, as they might confuse you or challenge you. 
+You can't open yourself to new experiences, new people, new ways of doing things — they might take you off course. 
+You can't not know who you are, so you cling to hard-matter identity. 
+You become a Christian, Muslim, Jew. 
+You're an Indian, Egyptian, Italian, American. 
+You're a heterosexual or a homosexual, or you never have sex. 
+Or at least, that's what you say when you identify yourself. 
+You become part of an "" us. "" In order to be secure, you defend against "" them. "" You cling to your land because it is your secure place. 
+You must fight anyone who encroaches upon it. 
+You become your nation. You become your religion. 
+You become whatever it is that will freeze you, numb you and protect you from doubt or change. 
+But all this does, actually, is shut down your mind. 
+In reality, it does not really make you safer. 
+I was in Sri Lanka, for example, three days after the tsunami, and I was standing on the beaches and it was absolutely clear that, in a matter of five minutes, a 30-foot wave could rise up and desecrate a people, a population and lives. 
+All this striving for security, in fact, has made you much more insecure because now you have to watch out all the time. 
+There are people not like you — people who you now call enemies. 
+You have places you cannot go, thoughts you cannot think, worlds that you can no longer inhabit. 
+And so you spend your days fighting things off, defending your territory and becoming more entrenched in your fundamental thinking. 
+Your days become devoted to protecting yourself. 
+This becomes your mission. That is all you do. 
+Ideas get shorter. They become sound bytes. 
+There are evildoers and saints, criminals and victims. 
+There are those who, if they're not with us, are against us. 
+It gets easier to hurt people because you do not feel what's inside them. 
+It gets easier to lock them up, force them to be naked, humiliate them, occupy them, invade them and kill them, because they are only obstacles now to your security. 
+In six years, I've had the extraordinary privilege through V-Day, a global movement against [violence against] women, to travel probably to 60 countries, and spend a great deal of time in different portions. 
+I've met women and men all over this planet, who through various circumstances — war, poverty, racism, multiple forms of violence — have never known security, or have had their illusion of security forever devastated. 
+I've spent time with women in Afghanistan under the Taliban, who were essentially brutalized and censored. 
+I've been in Bosnian refugee camps. 
+I was with women in Pakistan who have had their faces melted off with acid. 
+I've been with girls all across America who were date-raped, or raped by their best friends when they were drugged one night. 
+One of the amazing things that I've discovered in my travels is that there is this emerging species. 
+I loved when he was talking about this other world that's right next to this world. 
+I've discovered these people, who, in V-Day world, we call Vagina Warriors. 
+These particular people, rather than getting AK-47s, or weapons of mass destruction, or machetes, in the spirit of the warrior, have gone into the center, the heart of pain, of loss. 
+They have grieved it, they have died into it, and allowed and encouraged poison to turn into medicine. 
+They have used the fuel of their pain to begin to redirect that energy towards another mission and another trajectory. 
+These warriors now devote themselves and their lives to making sure what happened to them doesn't happen to anyone else. 
+There are thousands if not millions of them on the planet. 
+I venture there are many in this room. 
+They have a fierceness and a freedom that I believe is the bedrock of a new paradigm. 
+They have broken out of the existing frame of victim and perpetrator. 
+Their own personal security is not their end goal, and because of that, because, rather than worrying about security, because the transformation of suffering is their end goal, I actually believe they are creating real safety and a whole new idea of security. 
+I want to talk about a few of these people that I've met. 
+Tomorrow, I am going to Cairo, and I'm so moved that I will be with women in Cairo who are V-Day women, who are opening the first safe house for battered women in the Middle East. 
+That will happen because women in Cairo made a decision to stand up and put themselves on the line, and talk about the degree of violence that is happening in Egypt, and were willing to be attacked and criticized. 
+And through their work over the last years, this is not only happening that this house is opening, but it's being supported by many factions of the society who never would have supported it. 
+Women in Uganda this year, who put on "" The Vagina Monologues "" during V-Day, actually evoked the wrath of the government. 
+And, I love this story so much. 
+There was a cabinet meeting and a meeting of the presidents to talk about whether "" Vaginas "" could come to Uganda. 
+And in this meeting — it went on for weeks in the press, two weeks where there was huge discussion. 
+The government finally made a decision that "" The Vagina Monologues "" could not be performed in Uganda. 
+But the amazing news was that because they had stood up, these women, and because they had been willing to risk their security, it began a discussion that not only happened in Uganda, but all of Africa. 
+As a result, this production, which had already sold out, every single person in that 800-seat audience, except for 10 people, made a decision to keep the money. 
+They raised 10,000 dollars on a production that never occurred. 
+There's a young woman named Carrie Rethlefsen in Minnesota. 
+She's a high school student. 
+She had seen "" The Vagina Monologues "" and she was really moved. And as a result, she wore an "" I heart my vagina "" button to her high school in Minnesota. 
+(Laughter) She was basically threatened to be expelled from school. 
+They told her she couldn't love her vagina in high school, that it was not a legal thing, that it was not a moral thing, that it was not a good thing. 
+So she really struggled with this, what to do, because she was a senior and she was doing well in her school and she was threatened expulsion. So what she did is she got all her friends together — I believe it was 100, 150 students all wore "" I love my vagina "" T-shirts, and the boys wore "" I love her vagina "" T-shirts to school. 
+(Laughter) Now this seems like a fairly, you know, frivolous, but what happened as a result of that, is that that school now is forming a sex education class. It's beginning to talk about sex, it's beginning to look at why it would be wrong for a young high school girl to talk about her vagina publicly or to say that she loved her vagina publicly. 
+I know I've talked about Agnes here before, but I want to give you an update on Agnes. 
+I met Agnes three years ago in the Rift Valley. 
+When she was a young girl, she had been mutilated against her will. 
+That mutilation of her clitoris had actually obviously impacted her life and changed it in a way that was devastating. 
+She made a decision not to go and get a razor or a glass shard, but to devote her life to stopping that happening to other girls. 
+For eight years, she walked through the Rift Valley. 
+She had this amazing box that she carried and it had a torso of a woman's body in it, a half a torso, and she would teach people, everywhere she went, what a healthy vagina looked like and what a mutilated vagina looked like. 
+In the years that she walked, she educated parents, mothers, fathers. 
+She saved 1,500 girls from being cut. 
+When V-Day met her, we asked her how we could support her and she said, "" Well, if you got me a Jeep, I could get around a lot faster. "" So, we bought her a Jeep. 
+In the year she had the Jeep, she saved 4,500 girls from being cut. 
+So, we said, what else could we do? 
+She said, "" If you help me get money, I could open a house. "" Three years ago, Agnes opened a safe house in Africa to stop mutilation. 
+When she began her mission eight years ago, she was reviled, she was detested, she was completely slandered in her community. 
+I am proud to tell you that six months ago, she was elected the deputy mayor of Narok. 
+(Applause) I think what I'm trying to say here is that if your end goal is security, and if that's all you're focusing on, what ends up happening is that you create not only more insecurity in other people, but you make yourself far more insecure. 
+Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn't exist. 
+Not running from loss, but entering grief, surrendering to sorrow. 
+Real security is not knowing something, when you don't know it. 
+Real security is hungering for connection rather than power. 
+It cannot be bought or arranged or made with bombs. 
+It is deeper, it is a process, it is acute awareness that we are all utterly inter-bended, and one action by one being in one tiny town has consequences everywhere. 
+Real security is not only being able to tolerate mystery, complexity, ambiguity, but hungering for them and only trusting a situation when they are present. 
+Something happened when I began traveling in V-Day, eight years ago. I got lost. 
+I remember being on a plane going from Kenya to South Africa, and I had no idea where I was. 
+I didn't know where I was going, where I'd come from, and I panicked. I had a total anxiety attack. 
+And then I suddenly realized that it absolutely didn't matter where I was going, or where I had come from because we are all essentially permanently displaced people. 
+All of us are refugees. 
+We come from somewhere and we are hopefully traveling all the time, moving towards a new place. 
+Freedom means I may not be identified as any one group, but that I can visit and find myself in every group. 
+It does not mean that I don't have values or beliefs, but it does mean I am not hardened around them. 
+I do not use them as weapons. 
+In the shared future, it will be just that, shared. 
+The end goal will [be] becoming vulnerable, realizing the place of our connection to one another, rather than becoming secure, in control and alone. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: And how are you doing? Are you exhausted? 
+On a typical day, do you wake up with hope or gloom? 
+Eve Ensler: You know, I think Carl Jung once said that in order to survive the twentieth century, we have to live with two existing thoughts, opposite thoughts, at the same time. 
+And I think part of what I'm learning in this process is that one must allow oneself to feel grief. 
+And I think as long as I keep grieving, and weeping, and then moving on, I'm fine. 
+When I start to pretend that what I'm seeing isn't impacting me, and isn't changing my heart, then I get in trouble. 
+Because when you spend a lot of time going from place to place, country to country, and city to city, the degree to which women, for example, are violated, and the epidemic of it, and the kind of ordinariness of it, is so devastating to one's soul that you have to take the time, or I have to take the time now, to process that. 
+CA: There are a lot of causes out there in the world that have been talked about, you know, poverty, sickness and so on. You spent eight years on this one. 
+Why this one? 
+EE: I think that if you think about women, women are the primary resource of the planet. They give birth, we come from them, they are mothers, they are visionaries, they are the future. If you think that the U.N. now says that one out of three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in their lifetime, we're talking about the desecration of the primary resource of the planet, we're talking about the place where we come from, we're talking about parenting. 
+Imagine that you've been raped and you're bringing up a boy child. 
+How does it impact your ability to work, or envision a future, or thrive, as opposed to just survive? What I believe is if we could figure out how to make women safe and honor women, it would be parallel or equal to honoring life itself. 
+
+Twenty-five-and-a-quarter years ago I read a newspaper article which said that one day syringes would be one of the major causes of the spread of AIDS, the transmission of AIDS. 
+I thought this was unacceptable. So I decided to do something about it. 
+Sadly, it's come true. Malaria, as we all know, kills approximately one million people a year. 
+The reuse of syringes now exceeds that and kills 1.3 million people a year. 
+This young girl and her friend that I met in an orphanage in Delhi were HIV positive from a syringe. 
+And what was so sad about this particular story was that once their parents had found out — and don't forget, their parents took them to the doctor — the parents threw them out on the street. 
+And hence they ended up in an orphanage. 
+And it comes from situations like this where you have either skilled or unskilled practitioners, blindly giving an injection to someone. 
+And the injection is so valuable, that the people basically trust the doctor, being second to God, which I've heard many times, to do the right thing. But in fact they're not. 
+And you can understand, obviously, the transmission problem between people in high-virus areas. 
+This video we took undercover, which shows you, over a half an hour period, a tray of medicines of 42 vials, which are being delivered with only 2 syringes in a public hospital in India. 
+And over the course of half an hour, not one syringe was filmed being unwrapped. 
+They started with two and they ended with two. 
+And you'll see, just now, a nurse coming back to the tray, which is their sort of modular station, and dropping the syringe she's just used back in the tray for it to be picked up and used again. 
+So you can imagine the scale of this problem. 
+And in fact in India alone, 62 percent of all injections given are unsafe. 
+These kids in Pakistan don't go to school. 
+They are lucky. They already have a job. 
+And that job is that they go around and pick up syringes from the back of hospitals, wash them, and in the course of this, obviously picking them up they injure themselves. 
+And then they repackage them and sell them out on markets for literally more money than a sterile syringe in the first place, which is quite bizarre. 
+In an interesting photo, their father, while we were talking to him, picked up a syringe and pricked his finger — I don't know whether you can see the drop of blood on the end — and immediately whipped out a box of matches, lit one, and burned the blood off the end of his finger, giving me full assurance that that was the way that you stopped the transmission of HIV. 
+In China, recycling is a major issue. 
+And they are collected en mass — you can see the scale of it here — and sorted out, by hand, back into the right sizes, and then put back out on the street. 
+So recycling and reuse are the major issues here. 
+But there was one interesting anecdote that I found in Indonesia. 
+In all schools in Indonesia, there is usually a toy seller in the playground. 
+The toy seller, in this case, had syringes, which they usually do, next door to the diggers, which is obviously what you would expect. 
+And they use them, in the breaks, for water pistols. 
+They squirt them at each other, which is lovely and innocent. 
+And they are having great fun. 
+But they also drink from them while they're in their breaks, because it's hot. 
+And they squirt the water into their mouths. 
+And these are used with traces of blood visible. 
+So we need a better product. And we need better information. 
+And I think, if I can just borrow this camera, I was going to show you my invention, which I came up with. 
+So, it's a normal-looking syringe. 
+You load it up in the normal way. This is made on existing equipment in 14 factories that we license. 
+You give the injection and then put it down. 
+If someone then tries to reuse it, it locks and breaks afterwards. 
+It's very, very simple. Thank you. 
+(Applause) And it costs the same as a normal syringe. 
+And in comparison, a Coca-Cola is 10 times the price. 
+And that will stop reusing a syringe 20 or 30 times. 
+And I have an information charity which has done huge scale amount of work in India. 
+And we're very proud of giving information to people, so that little kids like this don't do stupid things. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And rather than go into statistics and trends, and tell you about all the orchestras that are closing, and the record companies that are folding, I thought we should do an experiment tonight. 
+Now, before we start — (Laughter) Before we start, I need to do two things. 
+(Music) (Music ends) He practices for another year and takes lessons — he's nine. (Music) (Music ends) 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Now, if you'd waited for one more year, you would have heard this. 
+(Music) (Music ends) Now, what happened was not maybe what you thought, which is, he suddenly became passionate, engaged, involved, got a new teacher, he hit puberty, or whatever it is. 
+(Music) The 10-year-old, on every eight notes. (Music) 
+And the 11-year-old, one impulse on the whole phrase. (Music) 
+I went back and I transformed my entire company into a one-buttock company. "" (Laughter) Now, the other thing I wanted to do is to tell you about you. 
+My estimation is that probably 45 of you are absolutely passionate about classical music. 
+You have CDs in your car, and you go to the symphony, your children are playing instruments. 
+You might hear it like second-hand smoke at the airport... 
+(Laughter) — and maybe a little bit of a march from "" Aida "" when you come into the hall. 
+It's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he's leading to realize whatever he's dreaming. 
+Of course, I'm not sure they'll be up to it. "" (Laughter) All right. So I'm going to take a piece of Chopin. 
+And it does, doesn't it? 
+(Music) But basically, it's just a B, with four sads. 
+(Laughter) Now, it goes down to A. 
+And if we have B, A, G, F, what do we expect next? 
+Now, he gets to F-sharp, and finally he goes down to E, but it's the wrong chord — because the chord he's looking for is this one, and instead he does... 
+(Laughter) Because for me, to join the B to the E, I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way, and start thinking about the long, long line from B to E. 
+No, he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings. 
+(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Now, you may be wondering — (Applause) (Applause ends) You may be wondering why I'm clapping. 
+I was clapping. They were clapping. 
+Finally, I said, "" Why am I clapping? "" And one of them said, "" Because we were listening. "" (Laughter) Think of it. 1,600 people, busy people, involved in all sorts of different things, listening, understanding and being moved by a piece by Chopin. 
+Now, how would you walk — my profession, the music profession doesn't see it that way. 
+Thank you, thank you. 
+
+What was the most difficult job you ever did? 
+Was it working in the sun? 
+Was it working to provide food for a family or a community? 
+Was it working days and nights trying to protect lives and property? 
+Was it working alone or working on a project that wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but that might improve human health or save a life? 
+Was it work for which you were never sure you were fully understood or appreciated? 
+The people in our communities who do these jobs deserve our attention, our love and our deepest support. 
+But people aren't the only ones in our communities who do these difficult jobs. 
+These jobs are also done by the plants, the animals and the ecosystems on our planet, including the ecosystems I study: the tropical coral reefs. 
+Coral reefs are farmers. 
+They provide food, income and food security for hundreds of millions of people around the world. 
+Coral reefs are security guards. 
+The structures that they build protect our shorelines from storm surge and waves, and the biological systems that they house filter the water and make it safer for us to work and play. 
+Coral reefs are chemists. 
+The molecules that we're discovering on coral reefs are increasingly important in the search for new antibiotics and new cancer drugs. 
+And coral reefs are artists. 
+The structures that they build are some of the most beautiful things on planet Earth. 
+And this beauty is the foundation of the tourism industry in many countries with few or little other natural resources. 
+So for all of these reasons, all of these ecosystem services, economists estimate the value of the world's coral reefs in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. 
+And yet despite all that hard work being done for us and all that wealth that we gain, we have done almost everything we possibly could to destroy that. 
+We have taken the fish out of the oceans and we have added in fertilizer, sewage, diseases, oil, pollution, sediments. 
+We have trampled the reefs physically with our boats, our fins, our bulldozers, and we have changed the chemistry of the entire sea, warmed the waters and made storms worse. 
+And these would all be bad on their own, but these threats magnify each other and compound one another and make each other worse. 
+I'll give you an example. 
+Where I live and work, in Curaçao, a tropical storm went by a few years ago. 
+And on the eastern end of the island, where the reefs are intact and thriving, you could barely tell a tropical storm had passed. 
+But in town, where corals had died from overfishing, from pollution, the tropical storm picked up the dead corals and used them as bludgeons to kill the corals that were left. 
+And after this storm took off half of its tissue, it became infested with algae, the algae overgrew the tissue and that coral died. 
+This magnification of threats, this compounding of factors is what Jeremy Jackson describes as the "" slippery slope to slime. "" It's hardly even a metaphor because many of our reefs now are literally bacteria and algae and slime. 
+Now, this is the part of the talk where you may expect me to launch into my plea for us to all save the coral reefs. 
+But I have a confession to make: that phrase drives me nuts. 
+Whether I see it in a tweet, in a news headline or the glossy pages of a conservation brochure, that phrase bothers me, because we as conservationists have been sounding the alarms about the death of coral reefs for decades. 
+And yet, almost everyone I meet, no matter how educated, is not sure what a coral is or where they come from. 
+If they don't understand what a coral is or where it comes from, or how funny or interesting or beautiful it is, why would we expect them to care about saving them? 
+So let's change that. 
+What is a coral and where does it come from? 
+Corals are born in a number of different ways, but most often by mass spawning: all of the individuals of a single species on one night a year, releasing all the eggs they've made that year into the water column, packaged into bundles with sperm cells. 
+And those bundles go to the surface of the ocean and break apart. 
+And hopefully — hopefully — at the surface of the ocean, they meet the eggs and sperm from other corals. 
+And that is why you need lots of corals on a coral reef — so that all of their eggs can meet their match at the surface. 
+When they're fertilized, they do what any other animal egg does: divides in half again and again and again. 
+Taking these photos under the microscope every year is one of my favorite and most magical moments of the year. 
+At the end of all this cell division, they turn into a swimming larva — a little tiny blob of fat the size of a poppy seed, but with all of the sensory systems that we have. 
+They can sense color and light, textures, chemicals, pH. 
+They can even feel pressure waves; they can hear sound. 
+And they use those talents to search the bottom of the reef for a place to attach and live the rest of their lives. 
+So imagine finding a place where you would live the rest of your life when you were just two days old. 
+They attach in the place they find most suitable, they build a skeleton underneath themselves, they build a mouth and tentacles, and then they begin the difficult work of building the world's coral reefs. 
+One coral polyp will divide itself again and again and again, leaving a limestone skeleton underneath itself and growing up toward the sun. 
+Given hundreds of years and many species, what you get is a massive limestone structure that can be seen from space in many cases, covered by a thin skin of these hardworking animals. 
+Now, there are only a few hundred species of corals on the planet, maybe 1,000. 
+But these systems house millions and millions of other species, and that diversity is what stabilizes the systems, and it's where we're finding our new medicines. 
+I'm lucky enough to work on the island of Curaçao, where we still have reefs that look like this. 
+But, indeed, much of the Caribbean and much of our world is much more like this. 
+Scientists have studied in increasing detail the loss of the world's coral reefs, and they have documented with increasing certainty the causes. 
+But in my research, I'm not interested in looking backward. 
+My colleagues and I in Curaçao are interested in looking forward at what might be. 
+And we have the tiniest reason to be optimistic. 
+Because even in some of these reefs that we probably could have written off long ago, we sometimes see baby corals arrive and survive anyway. 
+And we're starting to think that baby corals may have the ability to adjust to some of the conditions that the adults couldn't. 
+They may be able to adjust ever so slightly more readily to this human planet. 
+So in the research I do with my colleagues in Curaçao, we try to figure out what a baby coral needs in that critical early stage, what it's looking for and how we can try to help it through that process. 
+I'm going to show you three examples of the work we've done to try to answer those questions. 
+A few years ago we took a 3D printer and we made coral choice surveys — different colors and different textures, and we simply asked the coral where they preferred to settle. 
+And we found that corals, even without the biology involved, still prefer white and pink, the colors of a healthy reef. 
+And they prefer crevices and grooves and holes, where they will be safe from being trampled or eaten by a predator. 
+So we can use this knowledge, we can go back and say we need to restore those factors — that pink, that white, those crevices, those hard surfaces — in our conservation projects. 
+We can also use that knowledge if we're going to put something underwater, like a sea wall or a pier. 
+We can choose to use the materials and colors and textures that might bias the system back toward those corals. 
+Now in addition to the surfaces, we also study the chemical and microbial signals that attract corals to reefs. 
+Starting about six years ago, I began culturing bacteria from surfaces where corals had settled. 
+And I tried those one by one by one, looking for the bacteria that would convince corals to settle and attach. 
+And we now have many bacterial strains in our freezer that will reliably cause corals to go through that settlement and attachment process. 
+So as we speak, my colleagues in Curaçao are testing those bacteria to see if they'll help us raise more coral settlers in the lab, and to see if those coral settlers will survive better when we put them back underwater. 
+Now in addition to these tools, we also try to uncover the mysteries of species that are under-studied. 
+This is one of my favorite corals, and always has been: dendrogyra cylindrus, the pillar coral. 
+I love it because it makes this ridiculous shape, because its tentacles are fat and look fuzzy and because it's rare. 
+Finding one of these on a reef is a treat. 
+In fact, it's so rare, that last year it was listed as a threatened species on the endangered species list. 
+And this was in part because in over 30 years of research surveys, scientists had never found a baby pillar coral. 
+We weren't even sure if they could still reproduce, or if they were still reproducing. 
+So four years ago, we started following these at night and watching to see if we could figure out when they spawn in Curaçao. 
+We got some good tips from our colleagues in Florida, who had seen one in 2007, one in 2008, and eventually we figured out when they spawn in Curaçao and we caught it. 
+Here's a female on the left with some eggs in her tissue, about to release them into the seawater. 
+And here's a male on the right, releasing sperm. 
+We collected this, we got it back to the lab, we got it to fertilize and we got baby pillar corals swimming in our lab. 
+Thanks to the work of our scientific aunts and uncles, and thanks to the 10 years of practice we've had in Curaçao at raising other coral species, we got some of those larvae to go through the rest of the process and settle and attach, and turn into metamorphosed corals. 
+So this is the first pillar coral baby that anyone ever saw. 
+(Applause) And I have to say — if you think baby pandas are cute, this is cuter. 
+(Laughter) So we're starting to figure out the secrets to this process, the secrets of coral reproduction and how we might help them. 
+And this is true all around the world; scientists are figuring out new ways to handle their embryos, to get them to settle, maybe even figuring out the methods to preserve them at low temperatures, so that we can preserve their genetic diversity and work with them more often. 
+But this is still so low-tech. 
+We are limited by the space on our bench, the number of hands in the lab and the number of coffees we can drink in any given hour. 
+Now, compare that to our other crises and our other areas of concern as a society. 
+We have advanced medical technology, we have defense technology, we have scientific technology, we even have advanced technology for art. 
+But our technology for conservation is behind. 
+Think back to the most difficult job you ever did. 
+Many of you would say it was being a parent. 
+My mother described being a parent as something that makes your life far more amazing and far more difficult than you could've ever possibly imagined. 
+I've been trying to help corals become parents for over 10 years now. 
+And watching the wonder of life has certainly filled me with amazement to the core of my soul. 
+But I've also seen how difficult it is for them to become parents. 
+The pillar corals spawned again two weeks ago, and we collected their eggs and brought them back to the lab. 
+And here you see one embryo dividing, alongside 14 eggs that didn't fertilize and will blow up. 
+They'll be infected with bacteria, they will explode and those bacteria will threaten the life of this one embryo that has a chance. 
+We don't know if it was our handling methods that went wrong and we don't know if it was just this coral on this reef, always suffering from low fertility. 
+Whatever the cause, we have much more work to do before we can use baby corals to grow or fix or, yes, maybe save coral reefs. 
+So never mind that they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars. 
+Coral reefs are hardworking animals and plants and microbes and fungi. 
+They're providing us with art and food and medicine. 
+And we almost took out an entire generation of corals. 
+But a few made it anyway, despite our best efforts, and now it's time for us to thank them for the work they did and give them every chance they have to raise the coral reefs of the future, their coral babies. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Growing up, I didn't always understand why my parents made me follow the rules that they did. 
+Like, why did I really have to mow the lawn? 
+Why was homework really that important? 
+Why couldn't I put jelly beans in my oatmeal? 
+My childhood was abound with questions like this. 
+Normal things about being a kid and realizing that sometimes, it was best to listen to my parents even when I didn't exactly understand why. 
+And it's not that they didn't want me to think critically. 
+Their parenting always sought to reconcile the tension between having my siblings and I understand the realities of the world, while ensuring that we never accepted the status quo as inevitable. 
+I came to realize that this, in and of itself, was a very purposeful form of education. 
+One of my favorite educators, Brazilian author and scholar Paulo Freire, speaks quite explicitly about the need for education to be used as a tool for critical awakening and shared humanity. 
+In his most famous book, "" Pedagogy of the Oppressed, "" he states, "" No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from being so. "" I've been thinking a lot about this lately, this idea of humanity, and specifically, who in this world is afforded the privilege of being perceived as fully human. 
+Over the course of the past several months, the world has watched as unarmed black men, and women, have had their lives taken at the hands of police and vigilante. 
+These events and all that has transpired after them have brought me back to my own childhood and the decisions that my parents made about raising a black boy in America that growing up, I didn't always understand in the way that I do now. 
+I think of how hard it must have been, how profoundly unfair it must have felt for them to feel like they had to strip away parts of my childhood just so that I could come home at night. 
+For example, I think of how one night, when I was around 12 years old, on an overnight field trip to another city, my friends and I bought Super Soakers and turned the hotel parking lot into our own water-filled battle zone. 
+We hid behind cars, running through the darkness that lay between the streetlights, boundless laughter ubiquitous across the pavement. 
+But within 10 minutes, my father came outside, grabbed me by my forearm and led me into our room with an unfamiliar grip. 
+Before I could say anything, tell him how foolish he had made me look in front of my friends, he derided me for being so naive. 
+Looked me in the eye, fear consuming his face, and said, "" Son, I'm sorry, but you can't act the same as your white friends. 
+You can't pretend to shoot guns. 
+You can't run around in the dark. 
+You can't hide behind anything other than your own teeth. "" I know now how scared he must have been, how easily I could have fallen into the empty of the night, that some man would mistake this water for a good reason to wash all of this away. 
+These are the sorts of messages I've been inundated with my entire life: Always keep your hands where they can see them, don't move too quickly, take off your hood when the sun goes down. 
+My parents raised me and my siblings in an armor of advice, an ocean of alarm bells so someone wouldn't steal the breath from our lungs, so that they wouldn't make a memory of this skin. 
+So that we could be kids, not casket or concrete. 
+And it's not because they thought it would make us better than anyone else it's simply because they wanted to keep us alive. 
+All of my black friends were raised with the same message, the talk, given to us when we became old enough to be mistaken for a nail ready to be hammered to the ground, when people made our melanin synonymous with something to be feared. 
+But what does it do to a child to grow up knowing that you cannot simply be a child? 
+That the whims of adolescence are too dangerous for your breath, that you cannot simply be curious, that you are not afforded the luxury of making a mistake, that someone's implicit bias might be the reason you don't wake up in the morning. 
+But this cannot be what defines us. 
+Because we have parents who raised us to understand that our bodies weren't meant for the backside of a bullet, but for flying kites and jumping rope, and laughing until our stomachs burst. 
+We had teachers who taught us how to raise our hands in class, and not just to signal surrender, and that the only thing we should give up is the idea that we aren't worthy of this world. 
+So when we say that black lives matter, it's not because others don't, it's simply because we must affirm that we are worthy of existing without fear, when so many things tell us we are not. 
+I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken for anything other than a toy. 
+And I refuse to accept that we can't build this world into something new, some place where a child's name doesn't have to be written on a t-shirt, or a tombstone, where the value of someone's life isn't determined by anything other than the fact that they had lungs, a place where every single one of us can breathe. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Welcome to Thailand. 
+Now, when I was a young man — 40 years ago, the country was very, very poor with lots and lots and lots of people living in poverty. 
+We decided to do something about it, but we didn't begin with a welfare program or a poverty reduction program. 
+But we began with a family-planning program, following a very successful maternal child health activity, sets of activities. 
+So basically, no one would accept family planning if their children didn't survive. 
+So the first step: get to the children, get to the mothers, and then follow up with family planning. 
+Not just child mortality alone, you need also family planning. 
+Now let me take you back as to why we needed to do it. 
+In my country, that was the case in 1974. 
+Seven children per family — tremendous growth at 3.3 percent. 
+There was just no future. 
+We needed to reduce the population growth rate. 
+So we said, "" Let's do it. "" The women said, "" We agree. We'll use pills, but we need a doctor to prescribe the pills, "" and we had very, very few doctors. 
+We didn't take no as an answer; we took no as a question. 
+We went to the nurses and the midwives, who were also women, and did a fantastic job at explaining how to use the pill. 
+That was wonderful, but it covered only 20 percent of the country. 
+What do we do for the other 80 percent — leave them alone and say, "" Well, they're not medical personnel. "" No, we decided to do a bit more. 
+So we went to the ordinary people that you saw. 
+Actually, below that yellow sign — I wish they hadn't wiped that, because there was "" Coca-Cola "" there. 
+We were so much bigger than Coca-Cola in those days. 
+And no difference, the people they chose were the people we chose. 
+They were well-known in the community, they knew that customers were always right, and they were terrific, and they practiced their family planning themselves. 
+So they could supply pills and condoms throughout the country, in every village of the country. 
+So there we are. We went to the people who were seen as the cause of the problem to be the solution. 
+Wherever there were people — and you can see boats with the women, selling things — here's the floating market selling bananas and crabs and also contraceptives — wherever you find people, you'll find contraceptives in Thailand. 
+And then we decided, why not get to religion because in the Philippines, the Catholic Church was pretty strong, and Thai people were Buddhist. 
+We went to them and they said, "" Look, could you help us? "" I'm there — the one in blue, not the yellow — holding a bowl of holy water for the monk to sprinkle holy water on pills and condoms for the sanctity of the family. 
+And this picture was sent throughout the country. 
+So some of the monks in the villages were doing the same thing themselves. 
+And the women were saying, "" No wonder we have no side-effects. 
+It's been blessed. "" That was their perception. 
+And then we went to teachers. 
+You need everybody to be involved in trying to provide whatever it is that make humanity a better place. 
+So we went to the teachers. 
+Over a quarter of a million were taught about family planning with a new alphabet — A, B for birth, C for condom, I for IUD, V for vasectomy. 
+And then we had a snakes and ladders game, where you throw dice. 
+If you land on anything pro-family planning, you move ahead. 
+Like, "" Mother takes the pill every night. 
+Very good, mother. Move ahead. 
+Uncle buys a condom. Very good, uncle. Move ahead. 
+Uncle gets drunk, doesn't use condom. Come back, start again. "" (Laughter) Again, education, class entertainment. 
+And the kids were doing it in school too. 
+We had relay races with condoms, we had children's condom-blowing championship. 
+And before long, the condom was know as the girl's best friend. 
+In Thailand, for poor people, diamonds don't make it — so the condom is the girl's best friend. 
+We introduced our first microcredit program in 1975, and the women who organized it said, "" We only want to lend to women who practice family planning. 
+If you're pregnant, take care of your pregnancy. 
+If you're not pregnant, you can take a loan out from us. "" And that was run by them. 
+And after 35 / 36 years, it's still going on. 
+It's a part of the Village Development Bank; it's not a real bank, but it's a fund — microcredit. 
+And we didn't need a big organization to run it — it was run by the villagers themselves. 
+And you probably hardly see a Thai man there, it's always women, women, women, women. 
+And then we thought we'd help America, because America's been helping everyone, whether they want help or not. 
+(Laughter) And this is on the Fourth of July. 
+We decided to provide vasectomy to all men, but in particular, American men to the front of the queue, right up to the Ambassador's residence during his [unclear]. 
+And the hotel gave us the ballroom for it — very appropriate room. 
+(Laughter) And since it was near lunch time, they said, "" All right, we'll give you some lunch. 
+Of course, it must be American cola. 
+You get two brands, Coke and Pepsi. 
+And then the food is either hamburger or hotdog. "" And I thought a hotdog will be more symbolic. 
+(Laughter) And here is this, then, young man called Willy Bohm who worked for the USAID. 
+Obviously, he's had his vasectomy because his hotdog is half eaten, and he was very happy. 
+It made a lot of news in America, and it angered some people also. 
+I said, "" Don't worry. Come over and I'll do the whole lot of you. "" (Laughter) And what happened? 
+In all this thing, from seven children to 1.5 children, population growth rate of 3.3 to 0.5. 
+You could call it the Coca-Cola approach if you like — it was exactly the same thing. 
+I'm not sure whether Coca-Cola followed us, or we followed Coca-Cola, but we're good friends. 
+And so that's the case of everyone joining in. 
+We didn't have a strong government. We didn't have lots of doctors. 
+But it's everybody's job who can change attitude and behavior. 
+Then AIDS came along and hit Thailand, and we had to stop doing a lot of good things to fight AIDS. 
+But unfortunately, the government was in denial, denial, denial. 
+So our work wasn't affected. 
+So I thought, "" Well, if you can't go to the government, go to the military. "" So I went to the military and asked to borrow 300 radio stations. 
+They have more than the government, and they've got more guns than the government. 
+So I asked them, could they help us in our fight against HIV. 
+And after I gave them statistics, they said, "" Yes. Okay. You can use all the radio stations, television stations. "" And that's when we went onto the airwaves. 
+And then we got a new prime minister soon after that. 
+And he said, "" Mechai, could you come and join? "" He asked me in because he liked my wife a lot. 
+So I said, "" Okay. "" He became the chairman of the National AIDS Committee and increased the budget fifty-fold. 
+Every ministry, even judges, had to be involved in AIDS education — everyone — and we said the public, institutions, religious institutions, schools — everyone was involved. 
+And here, every media person had to be trained for HIV. 
+And we gave every station half a minute extra for advertising to earn more money. 
+So they were happy with that. 
+And then AIDS education in all schools, starting from university. 
+And these are high school kids teaching high school kids. 
+And the best teachers were the girls, not the boys, and they were terrific. 
+And these girls who go around teaching about safe sex and HIV were known as Mother Theresa. 
+And then we went down one more step. 
+These are primary school kids — third, fourth grade — going to every household in the village, every household in the whole of Thailand, giving AIDS information and a condom to every household, given by these young kids. 
+And no parents objected, because we were trying to save lives, and this was a lifesaver. 
+And we said, "" Everyone needs to be involved. "" So you have the companies also realizing that sick staff don't work, and dead customers don't buy. 
+So they all trained. 
+And then we have this Captain Condom, with his Harvard MBA, going to schools and night spots. 
+And they loved him. You need a symbol of something. 
+In every country, every program, you need a symbol, and this is probably the best thing he's ever done with his MBA. 
+(Laughter) And then we gave condoms out everywhere on the streets — everywhere, everywhere. 
+In taxis, you get condoms. 
+And also, in traffic, the policemen give you condoms — our "" cops and rubbers "" programs. 
+(Laughter) So, can you imagine New York policemen giving out condoms? 
+Of course I can. And they'd enjoy it immensely; I see them standing around right now, everywhere. 
+Imagine if they had condoms, giving out to all sorts of people. 
+And then, new change, we had hair bands, clothing and the condom for your mobile phone during the rainy season. 
+(Laughter) And these were the condoms that we introduced. 
+One says, "" Weapon of mass protection. "" We found — you know — somebody here was searching for the weapon of mass destruction, but we have found the weapon of mass protection: the condom. 
+And then it says here, with the American flag, "Don't leave home without it." 
+But I have some to give out afterward. 
+But let me warn you, these are Thai-sized, so be very careful. 
+(Laughter) And so you can see that condoms can do so many things. 
+Look at this — I gave this to Al Gore and to Bill Senior also. 
+Stop global warming; use condoms. 
+And then this is the picture I mentioned to you — the weapon of mass protection. 
+And let the next Olympics save some lives. 
+Why just run around? 
+(Laughter) And then finally, in Thailand we're Buddhist, we don't have a God, so instead, we say, "" In rubber we trust. "" (Laughter) So you can see that we added everything to our endeavor to make life better for the people. 
+We had condoms in all the refrigerators in the hotels and the schools, because alcohol impairs judgment. 
+And then what happened? 
+After all this time, everybody joined in. 
+According to the U.N., new cases of HIV declined by 90 percent, and according to the World Bank, 7.7 million lives were saved. 
+Otherwise there wouldn't be many Thais walking around today. 
+So it just showed you, you could do something about it. 
+90 percent of the funding came from Thailand. 
+There was political commitment, some financial commitment, and everybody joined in the fight. 
+So just don't leave it to the specialists and doctors and nurses. 
+We all need to help. 
+And then we decided to help people out of poverty, now that we got AIDS somewhat out of the way — this time, not with government alone, but in cooperation with the business community. 
+Because poor people are business people who lack business skills and access to credit. 
+Those are the things to be provided by the business community. 
+We're trying to turn them into barefoot entrepreneurs, little business people. 
+The only way out of poverty is through business enterprise. 
+So, that was done. 
+The money goes from the company into the village via tree-planting. 
+It's not a free gift. 
+They plant the trees, and the money goes into their microcredit fund, which we call the Village Development Bank. 
+Everybody joins in, and they feel they own the bank, because they have brought the money in. 
+And before you can borrow the money, you need to be trained. 
+And we believe if you want to help the poor, those who are living in poverty, access to credit must be a human right. 
+Access to credit must be a human right. 
+Otherwise they'll never get out of poverty. 
+And then before getting a loan, you must be trained. 
+Here's what we call a "" barefoot MBA, "" teaching people how to do business so that, when they borrow money, they'll succeed with the business. 
+These are some of the businesses: mushrooms, crabs, vegetables, trees, fruits, and this is very interesting — Nike ice cream and Nike biscuits; this is a village sponsored by Nike. 
+They said, "" They should stop making shoes and clothes. 
+Make these better, because we can afford them. "" And then we have silk, Thai silk. 
+Now we're making Scottish tartans, as you can see on the left, to sell to all people of Scottish ancestors. 
+So anyone sitting in and watching TV, get in touch with me. 
+And then this is our answer to Starbucks in Thailand — "Coffee and Condoms." 
+See, Starbucks you awake, we keep you awake and alive. 
+That's the difference. 
+Can you imagine, at every Starbucks that you can also get condoms? 
+You can order your condoms with your with your cappuccino. 
+And then now, finally in education, we want to change the school as being underutilized into a place where it's a lifelong learning center for everyone. 
+We call this our School-Based Integrated Rural Development. 
+And it's a center, a focal point for economic and social development. 
+Re-do the school, make it serve the community needs. 
+And here is a bamboo building — all of them are bamboo. 
+This is a geodesic dome made of bamboo. 
+And I'm sure Buckminster Fuller would be very, very proud to see a bamboo geodesic dome. 
+And we use vegetables around the school ground, so they raise their own vegetables. 
+And then, finally, I firmly believe, if we want the MDGs to work — the Millennium Development Goals — we need to add family planning to it. 
+Of course, child mortality first and then family planning — everyone needs family planning service — it's underutilized. 
+So we have now found the weapon of mass protection. 
+And we also ask the next Olympics to be involved in saving lives. 
+And then, finally, that is our network. 
+And these are our Thai tulips. 
+(Laughter) Thank you very much indeed. 
+(Applause) 
+
+As a scientist, and also as a human being, I've been trying to make myself susceptible to wonder. 
+I think Jason Webley last night called it "conspiring to be part of the magic." 
+So it's fortunate that my career as a biologist lets me dive deeply into the lives of some truly wondrous creatures that share our planet: fireflies. 
+Now, for many of you, I know that fireflies might conjure up some really great memories: childhood, summertime, even other TED Talks. 
+Maybe something like this. 
+My seduction into the world of fireflies began when I was back in graduate school. 
+One evening, I was sitting out in my backyard in North Carolina, and suddenly, these silent sparks rose up all around me, and I began to wonder: How do these creatures make light, and what's with all this flashing? 
+And what happens after the lights go out? 
+Now if you've ever seen or even heard about fireflies, then you'll know how magically they can transform our everyday landscape into something ethereal and otherworldly, and this happens around the globe, like this hillside in the Smoky Mountains that I saw transformed into a living cascade of light by the eerie glows of these blue ghost fireflies, or a roadside river that I visited in Japan as it was giving birth to the slow, floating flashes of these Genji fireflies, or in Malaysia, the mangrove trees that I watched blossom nightly not with flowers but with the lights of a thousand — (Bleep! Bleep!) — fireflies, 
+all blinking together in stunning synchrony. 
+These luminous landscapes still fill me with wonder, and they keep me connected to the magic of the natural world. 
+And I find it amazing that they're created by these tiny insects. 
+In person, fireflies are charming. 
+They're charismatic. 
+They've been celebrated in art and in poetry for centuries. 
+As I've traveled around the world, I've met many thoughtful people who have told me that God put fireflies on Earth for humans to enjoy. 
+Other creatures can enjoy them too. 
+I think these graceful insects are truly miraculous because they so beautifully illuminate the creative improvisation of evolution. 
+They've been shaped by two powerful evolutionary forces: natural selection, the struggle for survival, and sexual selection, the struggle for reproductive opportunity. 
+Together with my students at Tufts University and other colleagues, we've made lots of new discoveries about fireflies: their courtship and sex lives, their treachery and murder. 
+So today I'd like to share with you just a couple of tales that we've brought back from our collective adventures into this hidden world. 
+Fireflies belong to a very beautiful and diverse group of insects, the beetles. 
+Worldwide, there are more than 2,000 firefly species, and these have evolved remarkably diverse courtship signals, that is, different ways to find and attract mates. 
+Around 150 million years ago, the very first fireflies probably looked like this. 
+They flew during the daytime and they didn't light up. 
+Instead, males used their fantastic antennae to sniff out perfumes given off by their females. 
+In other fireflies, it's only the females who light up. 
+They are attractively plump and wingless, so every night, they climb up onto perches and they glow brightly for hours to attract their flying but unlit males. 
+Here in North America, we have more than 100 different kinds of firefly that have the remarkable ability to shine energy out from their bodies in the form of light. 
+How do they do that? 
+It seems totally magical, but these bioluminescent signals arise from carefully orchestrated chemical reactions that happen inside the firefly lantern. 
+The main star is an enzyme called luciferase, which in the course of evolution has figured out a way to wrap its tiny arms around an even smaller molecule called luciferin, in the process getting it so excited that it actually gives off light. 
+Incredible. 
+But how could these bright lights have benefited some proto-firefly? 
+To answer this question, we need to flip back in the family album to some baby pictures. 
+Fireflies completely reinvent their bodies as they grow. 
+They spend the vast majority of their lifetime, up to two years, in this larval form. 
+And firefly light first originated in these juveniles. 
+Every single firefly larva can light up, even when their adults can't. 
+But what's the point to being so conspicuous? 
+Well, we know that these juveniles make nasty-tasting chemicals that help them survive their extended childhood, so we think these lights first evolved as a warning, a neon sign that says, "" Toxic! Stay away! "" to any would-be predators. 
+It took many millions of years before these bright lights evolved into a smart communication tool that could be used not just to ward off potential predators but to bring in potential mates. 
+Driven now by sexual selection, some adult fireflies like this proud male evolved a shiny new glow-in-the-dark lantern that would let them take courtship to a whole new level. 
+These adults only live a few weeks, and now they're single-mindedly focused on sex, that is, on propelling their genes into the next firefly generation. 
+So we can follow this male out into the field as he joins hundreds of other males who are all showing off their new courtship signals. 
+It's amazing to think that the luminous displays we admire here and in fact everywhere around the world are actually the silent love songs of male fireflies. 
+They're flying and flashing their hearts out. 
+I still find it very romantic. 
+But meanwhile, where are all the females? 
+Well, they're lounging down below surveying their options. 
+They have plenty of males to choose from, and these females turn out to be very picky. 
+When a female sees a flash from an especially attractive male, she'll aim her lantern in his direction, and give him a flash back. 
+It's her "" come hither "" sign. 
+So he flies closer and he flashes again. 
+These creatures speak their love in the language of light. 
+So what exactly do these females consider sexy? 
+We decided to conduct some firefly opinion polls to find out. 
+When we tested females using blinking LED lights, we discovered they prefer males who give longer-lasting flashes. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I know you're wondering, what gives these males their sex appeal? 
+Now we get to see what happens when the lights go out. 
+The first thing we discovered is that once a male and female hook up like this, they stay together all night long, and when we looked inside to see what might be happening, we discovered a surprising new twist to firefly sex. 
+While they're mating, the male is busy giving the female not just his sperm but also a nutrient-filled package called a nuptial gift. 
+We can zoom in to look more closely inside this mating pair. 
+We can actually see the gift — it's shown here in red — as it's being passed from the male to the female. 
+What makes this gift so valuable is that it's packed with protein that the female will use to provision her eggs. 
+So females are keeping their eyes on this prize as they size up potential mates. 
+We discovered that females use male flash signals to try to predict which males have the biggest gifts to offer, because this bling helps the female lay more eggs and ultimately launch more of her own offspring into the next generation. 
+So it's not all sweetness and light. 
+Firefly romance is risky. 
+For the most part, these adult fireflies don't get eaten because like their juveniles they can manufacture toxins that are repellent to birds and other insectivores, but somewhere along the line, one particular group of fireflies somehow lost the metabolic machinery needed to make their own protective toxins. 
+This evolutionary flaw, which was discovered by my colleague Tom Eisner, has driven these fireflies to take their bright lights out into the night with treacherous intent. 
+Dubbed "" femme fatales "" by Jim Lloyd, another colleague, these females have figured out how to target the males of other firefly species. 
+So the hunt begins with the predator — she's shown here in the lower left — where she's sitting quietly and eavesdropping on the courtship conversation of her intended prey, and here's how it might go. 
+First the prey male flashes, "" Do you love me? "" His own female responds, "" Maybe. "" So then he flashes again. 
+But this time, the predator sneaks in a reply that cleverly mimics exactly what the other female just said. 
+She's not looking for love: she's looking for toxins. 
+If she's good, she can lure this male close enough to reach out and grab him, and he's not just a light snack. 
+Over the next hour, she slowly exsanguinates this male leaving behind just some gory remains. 
+Unable to make their own toxins, these females resort to drinking the blood of other fireflies to get these protective chemicals. 
+So a firefly vampire, brought to you by natural selection. 
+We still have a lot to learn about fireflies, but it looks like many stories will remain untold, because around the world, firefly populations are blinking out. 
+The main culprit: habitat loss. 
+Pretty much everywhere, the fields and forests, the mangroves and meadows that fireflies need to survive, are giving way to development and to sprawl. 
+Here's another problem: we've conquered darkness, but in the process, we spill so much extra light out into the night that it disrupts the lives of other creatures, and fireflies are especially sensitive to light pollution because it obscures the signals that they use to find their mates. 
+After all, they're just one tiny bit of Earth's biodiversity. 
+Yet every time a species is lost, it's like extinguishing a room full of candles one by one. 
+You might not notice when the first few flames flicker out, but in the end, you're left sitting in darkness. 
+As we work together to craft a planetary future, I hope we can find a way to keep these bright lights shining. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want to share with you some ideas about the secret power of time, in a very short time. 
+Video: All right, start the clock please. 30 seconds studio. 
+Keep it quiet please. Settle down. 
+It's about time. End sequence. Take one. 
+15 seconds studio. 
+10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two... 
+Philip Zimbardo: Let's tune into the conversation of the principals in Adam's temptation. 
+"Come on Adam, don't be so wishy-washy. Take a bite." "I did." 
+"One bite, Adam. Don't abandon Eve." 
+"" I don't know, guys. 
+I don't want to get in trouble. "" "Okay. One bite. What the hell?" 
+(Laughter) Life is temptation. It's all about yielding, resisting, yes, no, now, later, impulsive, reflective, present focus and future focus. 
+Promised virtues fall prey to the passions of the moment. 
+Of teenage girls who pledged sexual abstinence and virginity until marriage — thank you George Bush — the majority, 60 percent, yielded to sexual temptations within one year. 
+And most of them did so without using birth control. 
+So much for promises. 
+Now lets tempt four-year-olds, giving them a treat. 
+They can have one marshmallow now. But if they wait until the experimenter comes back, they can have two. 
+Of course it pays, if you like marshmallows, to wait. 
+What happens is two-thirds of the kids give in to temptation. 
+They cannot wait. The others, of course, wait. 
+They resist the temptation. They delay the now for later. 
+Walter Mischel, my colleague at Stanford, went back 14 years later, to try to discover what was different about those kids. 
+There were enormous differences between kids who resisted and kids who yielded, in many ways. 
+The kids who resisted scored 250 points higher on the SAT. 
+That's enormous. That's like a whole set of different IQ points. 
+They didn't get in as much trouble. They were better students. 
+They were self-confident and determined. And the key for me today, the key for you, is, they were future-focused rather than present-focused. 
+So what is time perspective? That's what I'm going to talk about today. 
+Time perspective is the study of how individuals, all of us, divide the flow of your human experience into time zones or time categories. 
+And you do it automatically and non-consciously. 
+They vary between cultures, between nations, between individuals, between social classes, between education levels. 
+And the problem is that they can become biased, because you learn to over-use some of them and under-use the others. 
+What determines any decision you make? 
+You make a decision on which you're going to base an action. 
+For some people it's only about what is in the immediate situation, what other people are doing and what you're feeling. 
+And those people, when they make their decisions in that format — we're going to call them "" present-oriented, "" because their focus is what is now. 
+For others, the present is irrelevant. 
+It's always about "" What is this situation like that I've experienced in the past? "" So that their decisions are based on past memories. 
+And we're going to call those people "" past-oriented, "" because they focus on what was. 
+For others it's not the past, it's not the present, it's only about the future. 
+Their focus is always about anticipated consequences. 
+Cost-benefit analysis. 
+We're going to call them "" future-oriented. "" Their focus is on what will be. 
+So, time paradox, I want to argue, the paradox of time perspective, is something that influences every decision you make, you're totally unaware of. 
+Namely, the extent to which you have one of these biased time perspectives. 
+Well there is actually six of them. There are two ways to be present-oriented. 
+There is two ways to be past-oriented, two ways to be future. 
+You can focus on past-positive, or past-negative. 
+You can be present-hedonistic, namely you focus on the joys of life, or present-fatalist — it doesn't matter, your life is controlled. 
+You can be future-oriented, setting goals. 
+Or you can be transcendental future: namely, life begins after death. 
+Developing the mental flexibility to shift time perspectives fluidly depending on the demands of the situation, that's what you've got to learn to do. 
+So, very quickly, what is the optimal time profile? 
+High on past-positive. Moderately high on future. 
+And moderate on present-hedonism. 
+And always low on past-negative and present-fatalism. 
+So the optimal temporal mix is what you get from the past — past-positive gives you roots. You connect your family, identity and your self. 
+What you get from the future is wings to soar to new destinations, new challenges. 
+What you get from the present hedonism is the energy, the energy to explore yourself, places, people, sensuality. 
+Any time perspective in excess has more negatives than positives. 
+What do futures sacrifice for success? 
+They sacrifice family time. They sacrifice friend time. 
+They sacrifice fun time. They sacrifice personal indulgence. 
+They sacrifice hobbies. And they sacrifice sleep. So it affects their health. 
+And they live for work, achievement and control. 
+I'm sure that resonates with some of the TEDsters. 
+(Laughter) And it resonated for me. I grew up as a poor kid in the South Bronx ghetto, a Sicilian family — everyone lived in the past and present. 
+I'm here as a future-oriented person who went over the top, who did all these sacrifices because teachers intervened, and made me future oriented. 
+Told me don't eat that marshmallow, because if you wait you're going to get two of them, until I learned to balance out. 
+I've added present-hedonism, I've added a focus on the past-positive, so, at 76 years old, I am more energetic than ever, more productive, and I'm happier than I have ever been. 
+I just want to say that we are applying this to many world problems: changing the drop-out rates of school kids, combating addictions, enhancing teen health, curing vets' PTSD with time metaphors — getting miracle cures — promoting sustainability and conservation, reducing physical rehabilitation where there is a 50-percent drop out rate, altering appeals to suicidal terrorists, and modifying family conflicts as time-zone clashes. 
+So I want to end by saying: many of life's puzzles can be solved by understanding your time perspective and that of others. 
+And the idea is so simple, so obvious, but I think the consequences are really profound. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, I'd like to spend a few minutes with you folks today imagining what our planet might look like in a thousand years. 
+But before I do that, I need to talk to you about synthetic materials like plastics, which require huge amounts of energy to create and, because of their disposal issues, are slowly poisoning our planet. 
+I also want to tell you and share with you how my team and I have been using mushrooms over the last three years. 
+Not like that. (Laughter) We're using mushrooms to create an entirely new class of materials, which perform a lot like plastics during their use, but are made from crop waste and are totally compostable at the end of their lives. 
+(Cheering) But first, I need to talk to you about what I consider one of the most egregious offenders in the disposable plastics category. 
+This is a material you all know is Styrofoam, but I like to think of it as toxic white stuff. 
+In a single cubic foot of this material — about what would come around your computer or large television — you have the same energy content of about a liter and a half of petrol. 
+Yet, after just a few weeks of use, you'll throw this material in the trash. 
+And this isn't just found in packaging. 
+20 billion dollars of this material is produced every year, in everything from building materials to surfboards to coffee cups to table tops. 
+And that's not the only place it's found. 
+The EPA estimates, in the United States, by volume, this material occupies 25 percent of our landfills. 
+Even worse is when it finds its way into our natural environment — on the side of the road or next to a river. 
+If it's not picked up by a human, like me and you, it'll stay there for thousands and thousands of years. 
+Perhaps even worse is when it finds its way into our oceans, like in the great plastic gyre, where these materials are being mechanically broken into smaller and smaller bits, but they're not really going away. 
+They're not biologically compatible. 
+They're basically fouling up Earth's respiratory and circulatory systems. 
+And because these materials are so prolific, because they're found in so many places, there's one other place you'll find this material, styrene, which is made from benzene, a known carcinogen. 
+You'll find it inside of you. 
+So, for all these reasons, I think we need better materials, and there are three key principles we can use to guide these materials. 
+The first is feedstocks. 
+Today, we use a single feedstock, petroleum, to heat our homes, power our cars and make most of the materials you see around you. 
+We recognize this is a finite resource, and it's simply crazy to do this, to put a liter and a half of petrol in the trash every time you get a package. 
+Second of all, we should really strive to use far less energy in creating these materials. 
+I say far less, because 10 percent isn't going to cut it. 
+We should be talking about half, a quarter, one-tenth the energy content. 
+And lastly, and I think perhaps most importantly, we should be creating materials that fit into what I call nature's recycling system. 
+This recycling system has been in place for the last billion years. 
+I fit into it, you fit into it, and a hundred years tops, my body can return to the Earth with no preprocessing. 
+Yet that packaging I got in the mail yesterday is going to last for thousands of years. 
+This is crazy. 
+But nature provides us with a really good model here. 
+When a tree's done using its leaves — its solar collectors, these amazing molecular photon capturing devices — at the end of a season, it doesn't pack them up, take them to the leaf reprocessing center and have them melted down to form new leaves. 
+It just drops them, the shortest distance possible, to the forest floor, where they're actually upcycled into next year's topsoil. 
+And this gets us back to the mushrooms. 
+Because in nature, mushrooms are the recycling system. 
+And what we've discovered is, by using a part of the mushroom you've probably never seen — analogous to its root structure; it's called mycelium — we can actually grow materials with many of the same properties of conventional synthetics. 
+Now, mycelium is an amazing material, because it's a self-assembling material. 
+It actually takes things we would consider waste — things like seed husks or woody biomass — and can transform them into a chitinous polymer, which you can form into almost any shape. 
+In our process, we basically use it as a glue. 
+And by using mycelium as a glue, you can mold things just like you do in the plastic industry, and you can create materials with many different properties, materials that are insulating, fire-resistant, moisture-resistant, vapor-resistant — materials that can absorb impacts, that can absorb acoustical impacts. 
+But these materials are grown from agricultural byproducts, not petroleum. 
+And because they're made of natural materials, they are 100 percent compostable in you own backyard. 
+So I'd like to share with you the four basic steps required to make these materials. 
+The first is selecting a feedstock, preferably something that's regional, that's in your area, right — local manufacturing. 
+The next is actually taking this feedstock and putting in a tool, physically filling an enclosure, a mold, in whatever shape you want to get. 
+Then you actually grow the mycelium through these particles, and that's where the magic happens, because the organism is doing the work in this process, not the equipment. 
+The final step is, of course, the product, whether it's a packaging material, a table top, or building block. 
+Our vision is local manufacturing, like the local food movement, for production. 
+So we've created formulations for all around the world using regional byproducts. 
+If you're in China, you might use a rice husk or a cottonseed hull. 
+If you're in Northern Europe or North America, you can use things like buckwheat husks or oat hulls. 
+We then process these husks with some basic equipment. 
+And I want to share with you a quick video from our facility that gives you a sense of how this looks at scale. 
+So what you're seeing here is actually cotton hulls from Texas, in this case. 
+It's a waste product. 
+And what they're doing in our equipment is going through a continuous system, which cleans, cooks, cools and pasteurizes these materials, while also continuously inoculating them with our mycelium. 
+This gives us a continuous stream of material that we can put into almost any shape, though today we're making corner blocks. 
+And it's when this lid goes on the part, that the magic really starts. 
+Because the manufacturing process is our organism. 
+It'll actually begin to digest these wastes and, over the next five days, assemble them into biocomposites. 
+Our entire facility is comprised of thousands and thousands and thousands of these tools sitting indoors in the dark, quietly self-assembling materials — and everything from building materials to, in this case, a packaging corner block. 
+So I've said a number of times that we grow materials. 
+And it's kind of hard to picture how that happens. 
+So my team has taken five days-worth of growth, a typical growth cycle for us, and condensed it into a 15-second time lapse. 
+And I want you to really watch closely these little white dots on the screen, because, over the five-day period, what they do is extend out and through this material, using the energy that's contained in these seed husks to build this chitinous polymer matrix. 
+This matrix self-assembles, growing through and around the particles, making millions and millions of tiny fibers. 
+And what parts of the seed husk we don't digest, actually become part of the final, physical composite. 
+So in front of your eyes, this part just self-assembled. 
+It actually takes a little longer. It takes five days. 
+But it's much faster than conventional farming. 
+The last step, of course, is application. 
+In this case, we've grown a corner block. 
+A major Fortune 500 furniture maker uses these corner blocks to protect their tables in shipment. 
+They used to use a plastic packaging buffer, but we were able to give them the exact same physical performance with our grown material. 
+Best of all, when it gets to the customer, it's not trash. 
+They can actually put this in their natural ecosystem without any processing, and it's going to improve the local soil. 
+So, why mycelium? 
+The first reason is local open feedstocks. 
+You want to be able to do this anywhere in the world and not worry about peak rice hull or peak cottonseed hulls, because you have multiple choices. 
+The next is self-assembly, because the organism is actually doing most of the work in this process. 
+You don't need a lot of equipment to set up a production facility. 
+So you can have lots of small facilities spread all across the world. 
+Biological yield is really important. 
+And because 100 percent of what we put in the tool become the final product, even the parts that aren't digested become part of the structure, we're getting incredible yield rates. 
+Natural polymers, well... I think that's what's most important, because these polymers have been tried and tested in our ecosystem for the last billion years, in everything from mushrooms to crustaceans. 
+They're not going to clog up Earth's ecosystems. They work great. 
+And while, today, we can practically guarantee that yesterday's packaging is going to be here in 10,000 years, what I want to guarantee is that in 10,000 years, our descendants, our children's children, will be living happily and in harmony with a healthy Earth. 
+And I think that can be some really good news. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids, ages six to eight, at a children's museum, and I brought with me a bag full of legs, similar to the kinds of things you see up here, and had them laid out on a table for the kids. 
+And, from my experience, you know, kids are naturally curious about what they don't know, or don't understand, or is foreign to them. 
+They only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way, and maybe censors that natural curiosity, or you know, reins in the question-asking in the hopes of them being polite little kids. 
+So I just pictured a first grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids, saying, "" Now, whatever you do, don't stare at her legs. "" But, of course, that's the point. 
+That's why I was there, I wanted to invite them to look and explore. 
+So I made a deal with the adults that the kids could come in without any adults for two minutes on their own. 
+The doors open, the kids descend on this table of legs, and they are poking and prodding, and they're wiggling toes, and they're trying to put their full weight on the sprinting leg to see what happens with that. 
+And I said, "" Kids, really quickly — I woke up this morning, I decided I wanted to be able to jump over a house — nothing too big, two or three stories — but, if you could think of any animal, any superhero, any cartoon character, anything you can dream up right now, what kind of legs would you build me? "" And immediately a voice shouted, "" Kangaroo! "" "No, no, no! Should be a frog!" 
+"No. It should be Go Go Gadget!" 
+"No, no, no! It should be the Incredibles." 
+And other things that I don't — aren't familiar with. 
+And then, one eight-year-old said, "Hey, why wouldn't you want to fly too?" 
+And the whole room, including me, was like, "" Yeah. "" (Laughter) And just like that, I went from being a woman that these kids would have been trained to see as "" disabled "" to somebody that had potential that their bodies didn't have yet. 
+Somebody that might even be super-abled. 
+Interesting. 
+So some of you actually saw me at TED, 11 years ago. 
+And there's been a lot of talk about how life-changing this conference is for both speakers and attendees, and I am no exception. 
+TED literally was the launch pad to the next decade of my life's exploration. 
+At the time, the legs I presented were groundbreaking in prosthetics. 
+I had woven carbon fiber sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, which you may have seen on stage yesterday. 
+And also these very life-like, intrinsically painted silicone legs. 
+So at the time, it was my opportunity to put a call out to innovators outside the traditional medical prosthetic community to come bring their talent to the science and to the art of building legs. 
+So that we can stop compartmentalizing form, function and aesthetic, and assigning them different values. 
+Well, lucky for me, a lot of people answered that call. 
+And the journey started, funny enough, with a TED conference attendee — Chee Pearlman, who hopefully is in the audience somewhere today. 
+She was the editor then of a magazine called ID, and she gave me a cover story. 
+This started an incredible journey. 
+Curious encounters were happening to me at the time; I'd been accepting numerous invitations to speak on the design of the cheetah legs around the world. 
+And people would come up to me after the conference, after my talk, men and women. 
+And the conversation would go something like this, "" You know Aimee, you're very attractive. 
+You don't look disabled. "" (Laughter) I thought, "" Well, that's amazing, because I don't feel disabled. "" And it really opened my eyes to this conversation that could be explored, about beauty. 
+What does a beautiful woman have to look like? 
+What is a sexy body? 
+And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability? 
+I mean, people — Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than I do. 
+Nobody calls her disabled. 
+(Laughter) So this magazine, through the hands of graphic designer Peter Saville, went to fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and photographer Nick Knight, who were also interested in exploring that conversation. 
+So, three months after TED I found myself on a plane to London, doing my first fashion shoot, which resulted in this cover — "" Fashion-able ""? 
+Three months after that, I did my first runway show for Alexander McQueen on a pair of hand-carved wooden legs made from solid ash. 
+Nobody knew — everyone thought they were wooden boots. 
+Actually, I have them on stage with me: grapevines, magnolias — truly stunning. 
+Poetry matters. 
+Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art. 
+It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that invites them to look, and look a little longer, and maybe even understand. 
+I learned this firsthand with my next adventure. 
+The artist Matthew Barney, in his film opus called the "" The Cremaster Cycle. "" This is where it really hit home for me — that my legs could be wearable sculpture. 
+And even at this point, I started to move away from the need to replicate human-ness as the only aesthetic ideal. 
+So we made what people lovingly referred to as glass legs even though they're actually optically clear polyurethane, a.k.a. bowling ball material. 
+Heavy! 
+Then we made these legs that are cast in soil with a potato root system growing in them, and beetroots out the top, and a very lovely brass toe. 
+That's a good close-up of that one. 
+Then another character was a half-woman, half-cheetah — a little homage to my life as an athlete. 
+14 hours of prosthetic make-up to get into a creature that had articulated paws, claws and a tail that whipped around, like a gecko. 
+(Laughter) And then another pair of legs we collaborated on were these — look like jellyfish legs, also polyurethane. 
+And the only purpose that these legs can serve, outside the context of the film, is to provoke the senses and ignite the imagination. 
+So whimsy matters. 
+Today, I have over a dozen pair of prosthetic legs that various people have made for me, and with them I have different negotiations of the terrain under my feet, and I can change my height — I have a variable of five different heights. 
+(Laughter) Today, I'm 6 '1 "". 
+And I had these legs made a little over a year ago at Dorset Orthopedic in England and when I brought them home to Manhattan, my first night out on the town, I went to a very fancy party. 
+And a girl was there who has known me for years at my normal 5 '8 "". 
+Her mouth dropped open when she saw me, and she went, "" But you're so tall! "" And I said, "" I know. Isn't it fun? "" I mean, it's a little bit like wearing stilts on stilts, but I have an entirely new relationship to door jams that I never expected I would ever have. 
+And I was having fun with it. 
+And she looked at me, and she said, "" But, Aimee, that's not fair. "" (Laughter) (Applause) And the incredible thing was she really meant it. 
+It's not fair that you can change your height, as you want it. 
+And that's when I knew — that's when I knew that the conversation with society has changed profoundly in this last decade. 
+It is no longer a conversation about overcoming deficiency. 
+It's a conversation about augmentation. 
+It's a conversation about potential. 
+A prosthetic limb doesn't represent the need to replace loss anymore. 
+It can stand as a symbol that the wearer has the power to create whatever it is that they want to create in that space. 
+So people that society once considered to be disabled can now become the architects of their own identities and indeed continue to change those identities by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment. 
+And what is exciting to me so much right now is that by combining cutting-edge technology — robotics, bionics — with the age-old poetry, we are moving closer to understanding our collective humanity. 
+I think that if we want to discover the full potential in our humanity, we need to celebrate those heartbreaking strengths and those glorious disabilities that we all have. 
+I think of Shakespeare's Shylock: "" If you prick us, do we not bleed, and if you tickle us, do we not laugh? "" It is our humanity, and all the potential within it, that makes us beautiful. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) This is the human test, a test to see if you are a human. 
+Please raise your hand if something applies to you. 
+Then let's begin. 
+Have you ever eaten a booger long past your childhood? 
+(Laughter) It's okay, it's safe here. 
+Have you ever made a small, weird sound when you remembered something embarrassing? 
+Have you ever purposely lowercased the first letter of a text in order to come across as sad or disappointed? 
+(Laughter) Okay. 
+Have you ever ended a text with a period as a sign of aggression? Okay. Period. 
+Yes. 
+Have you ever seemed to lose your airplane ticket a thousand times as you walked from the check-in to the gate? 
+Yes. 
+Have you ever put on a pair of pants and then much later realized that there was a loose sock smushed up against your thigh? 
+Have you ever tried to guess someone else's password so many times that it locked their account? 
+Mmm. 
+Have you ever had a nagging feeling that one day you will be discovered as a fraud? 
+Yes, it's safe here. 
+Mmm. 
+Have you ever broken something in real life, and then found yourself looking for an "" undo "" button in real life? 
+Have you ever misplaced your TED badge and then immediately started imagining what a three-day Vancouver vacation might look like? 
+Have you ever marveled at how someone you thought was so ordinary could suddenly become so beautiful? 
+Have you ever stared at your phone smiling like an idiot while texting with someone? 
+Have you ever subsequently texted that person the phrase "" I'm staring at the phone smiling like an idiot ""? 
+Have you ever been tempted to, and then gave in to the temptation, of looking through someone else's phone? 
+Have you ever had a conversation with yourself and then suddenly realized you're a real asshole to yourself? 
+(Laughter) Has your phone ever run out of battery in the middle of an argument, and it sort of felt like the phone was breaking up with both of you? 
+Have you ever woken up blissfully and suddenly been flooded by the awful remembrance that someone had left you? 
+Have you ever lost the ability to imagine a future without a person that no longer was in your life? 
+Have you ever looked back on that event with the sad smile of autumn and the realization that futures will happen regardless? 
+Congratulations. 
+You have now completed the test. 
+You are all human. 
+
+We grew up interacting with the physical objects around us. 
+There are an enormous number of them that we use every day. 
+Unlike most of our computing devices, these objects are much more fun to use. 
+When you talk about objects, one other thing automatically comes attached to that thing, and that is gestures: how we manipulate these objects, how we use these objects in everyday life. 
+We use gestures not only to interact with these objects, but we also use them to interact with each other. 
+A gesture of "" Namaste! "", maybe, to respect someone, or maybe, in India I don't need to teach a kid that this means "" four runs "" in cricket. 
+It comes as a part of our everyday learning. 
+So, I am very interested, from the beginning, how our knowledge about everyday objects and gestures, and how we use these objects, can be leveraged to our interactions with the digital world. 
+Rather than using a keyboard and mouse, why can I not use my computer in the same way that I interact in the physical world? 
+So, I started this exploration around eight years back, and it literally started with a mouse on my desk. 
+Rather than using it for my computer, I actually opened it. 
+Most of you might be aware that, in those days, the mouse used to come with a ball inside, and there were two rollers that actually guide the computer where the ball is moving, and, accordingly, where the mouse is moving. 
+So, I was interested in these two rollers, and I actually wanted more, so I borrowed another mouse from a friend — never returned to him — and I now had four rollers. 
+Interestingly, what I did with these rollers is, basically, I took them off of these mouses and then put them in one line. 
+It had some strings and pulleys and some springs. 
+What I got is basically a gesture-interface device that actually acts as a motion-sensing device made for two dollars. 
+So, here, whatever movement I do in my physical world is actually replicated inside the digital world just using this small device that I made, around eight years back, in 2000. 
+Because I was interested in integrating these two worlds, I thought of sticky notes. 
+I thought, "" Why can I not connect the normal interface of a physical sticky note to the digital world? "" A message written on a sticky note to my mom, on paper, can come to an SMS, or maybe a meeting reminder automatically syncs with my digital calendar — a to-do list that automatically syncs with you. 
+But you can also search in the digital world, or maybe you can write a query, saying, "What is Dr. Smith's address?" 
+and this small system actually prints it out — so it actually acts like a paper input-output system, just made out of paper. 
+In another exploration, I thought of making a pen that can draw in three dimensions. 
+So, I implemented this pen that can help designers and architects not only think in three dimensions, but they can actually draw, so that it's more intuitive to use that way. 
+Then I thought, "" Why not make a Google Map, but in the physical world? "" Rather than typing a keyword to find something, I put my objects on top of it. 
+If I put a boarding pass, it will show me where the flight gate is. 
+A coffee cup will show where you can find more coffee, or where you can trash the cup. 
+So, these were some of the earlier explorations I did because the goal was to connect these two worlds seamlessly. 
+Among all these experiments, there was one thing in common: I was trying to bring a part of the physical world to the digital world. 
+I was taking some part of the objects, or any of the intuitiveness of real life, and bringing them to the digital world, because the goal was to make our computing interfaces more intuitive. 
+What we are interested in is information. 
+We want to know about things. 
+We want to know about dynamic things going around. 
+So I thought, around last year — in the beginning of the last year — I started thinking, "" Why can I not take this approach in the reverse way? "" Maybe, "" How about I take my digital world and paint the physical world with that digital information? "" Because pixels are actually, right now, confined in these rectangular devices that fit in our pockets. 
+Why can I not remove this confine and take that to my everyday objects, everyday life so that I don't need to learn the new language for interacting with those pixels? 
+So, in order to realize this dream, I actually thought of putting a big-size projector on my head. 
+I think that's why this is called a head-mounted projector, isn't it? 
+I took it very literally, and took my bike helmet, put a little cut over there so that the projector actually fits nicely. 
+So now, what I can do — I can augment the world around me with this digital information. 
+Later, we moved to a much better, consumer-oriented pendant version of that, that many of you now know as the SixthSense device. 
+But the most interesting thing about this particular technology is that you can carry your digital world with you wherever you go. 
+You can start using any surface, any wall around you, as an interface. 
+The camera is actually tracking all your gestures. 
+Whatever you're doing with your hands, it's understanding that gesture. 
+And, actually, if you see, there are some color markers that in the beginning version we are using with it. 
+You stop by a wall, and start painting on that wall. 
+But we are not only tracking one finger, here. 
+We are giving you the freedom of using all of both of your hands, so you can actually use both of your hands to zoom into or zoom out of a map just by pinching all present. 
+The camera is actually doing — just, getting all the images — is doing the edge recognition and also the color recognition and so many other small algorithms are going on inside. 
+So, technically, it's a little bit complex, but it gives you an output which is more intuitive to use, in some sense. 
+Rather than getting your camera out of your pocket, you can just do the gesture of taking a photo, and it takes a photo for you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+And later I can find a wall, anywhere, and start browsing those photos or maybe, "" OK, I want to modify this photo a little bit and send it as an email to a friend. "" So, we are looking for an era where computing will actually merge with the physical world. 
+And, of course, if you don't have any surface, you can start using your palm for simple operations. 
+Here, I'm dialing a phone number just using my hand. 
+The camera is actually not only understanding your hand movements, but, interestingly, is also able to understand what objects you are holding in your hand. 
+For example, in this case, the book cover is matched with so many thousands, or maybe millions of books online, and checking out which book it is. 
+Once it has that information, it finds out more reviews about that, or maybe New York Times has a sound overview on that, so you can actually hear, on a physical book, a review as sound. 
+(Video) Famous talk at Harvard University — This was Obama's visit last week to MIT. 
+(Video) And particularly I want to thank two outstanding MIT — Pranav Mistry: So, I was seeing the live [video] of his talk, outside, on just a newspaper. 
+Your newspaper will show you live weather information rather than having it updated. 
+(Applause) When I'm going back, I can just use my boarding pass to check how much my flight has been delayed, because at that particular time, I'm not feeling like opening my iPhone, and checking out a particular icon. 
+And I think this technology will not only change the way — (Laughter) Yes. 
+The fun part is, I'm going to the Boston metro, and playing a pong game inside the train on the ground, right? 
+(Laughter) And I think the imagination is the only limit of what you can think of when this kind of technology merges with real life. 
+And many of you are excited about the next-generation tablet computers to come out in the market. 
+So, rather than waiting for that, I actually made my own, just using a piece of paper. 
+So, what I did here is remove the camera — All the webcam cameras have a microphone inside the camera. 
+I removed the microphone from that, and then just pinched that — like I just made a clip out of the microphone — and clipped that to a piece of paper, any paper that you found around. 
+So now the sound of the touch is getting me when exactly I'm touching the paper. 
+But the camera is actually tracking where my fingers are moving. 
+You can of course watch movies. 
+(Video) Good afternoon. My name is Russell, and I am a Wilderness Explorer in Tribe 54. "" PM: And you can of course play games. 
+(Car engine) Here, the camera is actually understanding how you're holding the paper and playing a car-racing game. 
+(Applause) Many of you already must have thought, OK, you can browse. 
+So, more interestingly, I'm interested in how we can take that in a more dynamic way. 
+When I come back to my desk, I can just pinch that information back to my desktop so I can use my full-size computer. 
+(Applause) And why only computers? We can just play with papers. 
+Paper world is interesting to play with. 
+Here, I'm taking a part of a document, and putting over here a second part from a second place, and I'm actually modifying the information that I have over there. 
+Yeah. And I say, "" OK, this looks nice, let me print it out, that thing. "" So I now have a print-out of that thing. 
+So the workflow is more intuitive, the way we used to do it maybe 20 years back, rather than now switching between these two worlds. 
+So, as a last thought, I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but will also help us, in some way, to stay human, to be more connected to our physical world. 
+And it will actually help us not end up being machines sitting in front of other machines. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+Chris Anderson: So, Pranav, first of all, you're a genius. 
+This is incredible, really. 
+What are you doing with this? Is there a company being planned? 
+Pranav Mistry: So, there are lots of companies, sponsor companies of Media Lab interested in taking this ahead in one or another way. 
+PM: I'm trying to make this more available to people so that anyone can develop their own SixthSense device, because the hardware is actually not that hard to manufacture or hard to make your own. 
+We will provide all the open source software for them, maybe starting next month. 
+CA: Open source? Wow. 
+(Applause) CA: Are you going to come back to India with some of this, at some point? 
+CA: What are your plans? MIT? India? 
+How are you going to split your time going forward? 
+All of this work that you have seen is all about my learning in India. 
+And now, if you see, it's more about the cost-effectiveness: this system costs you $300 compared to the $20,000 surface tables, or anything like that. 
+Or maybe even the $2 mouse gesture system at that time was costing around $5,000? 
+I showed that, at a conference, to President Abdul Kalam, at that time, and then he said, "" OK, we should use this in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre for some use of that. "" So I'm excited about how I can bring the technology to the masses rather than just keeping that technology in the lab environment. 
+(Applause) CA: Based on the people we've seen at TED, I would say you're truly one of the two or three best inventors in the world right now. 
+Thank you so much. 
+That's fantastic. 
+
+Good evening. 
+We are in this wonderful open-air amphitheater and we are enjoying ourselves in that mild evening temperature tonight, but when Qatar will host the football World Cup 10 years from now, 2022, we already heard it will be in the hot, very hot and sunny summer months of June and July. 
+And when Qatar has been assigned to the World Cup all, many people around the world have been wondering, how would it be possible that football players show spectacular football, run around in this desert climate? How would it be possible that spectators sit, enjoy themselves in open-air stadia in this hot environment? 
+Together with the architects of Albert Speer & Partner, our engineers from Transsolar have been supporting, have been developing open-air stadia based on 100 percent solar power, on 100 percent solar cooling. 
+Let me tell you about that, but let me start with comfort. 
+Let me start with the aspect of comfort, because many people are confusing ambient temperature with thermal comfort. 
+We are used to looking at charts like that, and you see this red line showing the air temperature in June and July, and yes, that's right, it's picking up to 45 degrees C. 
+It's actually very hot. 
+But air temperature is not the full set of climatic parameters which define comfort. 
+Let me show you analysis a colleague of mine did looking on different football, World Cups, Olympic Games around the world, looking on the comfort and analyzing the comfort people have perceived at these different sport activities, and let me start with Mexico. 
+Mexico temperature has been, air temperature has been something between 15, up to 30 degrees C, and people enjoyed themselves. 
+It was a very comfortable game in Mexico City. Have a look. 
+Orlando, same kind of stadium, open-air stadium. People have been sitting in the strong sun, in the very high humidity in the afternoon, and they did not enjoy. It was not comfortable. 
+The air temperature was not too high, but it was not comfortable during these games. 
+What about Seoul? Seoul, because of broadcast rights, all the games have been in the late afternoon. Sun has already been set, so the games have been perceived as comfortable. 
+What about Athens? Mediterranean climate, but in the sun it was not comfortable. They didn't perceive comfort. 
+And we know that from Spain, we know that "" sol y sombra. "" If you have a ticket, and you get a ticket for the shade, you pay more, because you're in a more comfortable environment. 
+What about Beijing? 
+It's again, sun in the day and high humidity, and it was not comfortable. 
+So if I overlay, and if you overlay all these comfort envelopes, what we see is, in all these places, air temperature has been ranging something from 25 to 35, and if you go on the line, 30, of 30 degrees C ambient temperatures. If you go along that line you see there has been all kind of comfort, all kinds of perceived outdoor comfort, ranging from very comfortable to very uncomfortable. 
+So why is that? 
+This is because there are more parameters influencing our thermal comfort, which is the sun, the direct sun, the diffuse sun, which is wind, strong wind, mild wind, which is air humidity, which is the radiant temperature of the surroundings where we are in. 
+And this is air temperature. 
+All these parameters go into the comfort feeling of our human body, and scientists have developed a parameter, which is the perceived temperature, where all these parameters go in and help designers to understand which is the driving parameter that I feel comfort or that I don't feel comfort. 
+Which is the driving parameter which gives me a perceived temperature? And these parameters, these climatic parameters are related to the human metabolism. 
+Because of our metabolism, we as human beings, we produce heat. 
+I'm excited, I'm talking to you, I'm probably producing 150 watts at the moment. You are sitting, you are relaxed, you're looking at me. It's probably 100 watts each person is producing, and we need to get rid of that energy. I need, with my body, to get rid of the energy, and the harder it is for myself, for my body, to get rid of the energy, the less comfort I feel. 
+That's it. And if I don't get rid of the energy, I will die. 
+If we overlay what happens during the football World Cup, what will happen in June, July, we will see, yes, air temperature will be much higher, but because the games and the plays will be in the afternoon, it's probably the same comfort rating we've found in other places which has perceived as non-comfortable. 
+So we sat together with a team which prepared the Bid Book, or goal, that we said, let's aim for perceived temperature, for outdoor comfort in this range, which is perceived with a temperature of 32 degrees Celsius perceived temperature, which is extremely comfortable. 
+People would feel really fine in an open outdoor environment. 
+But what does it mean? 
+If we just look on what happens, we see, temperature's too high. 
+If we apply the best architectural design, climate engineering design, we won't get much better. 
+So we need to do something active. 
+We need, for instance, to bring in radiant cooling technology, and we need to combine this with so-called soft conditioning. 
+And how does it look like in a stadium? 
+So the stadium has a few elements which create that outdoor comfort. First of all, it's shading. It needs to protect where the people are sitting against strong and warm wind. 
+But that's not all what we need to do. We need to use active systems. 
+Instead of blowing a hurricane of chilled air through the stadium, we can use radiant cooling technologies, like a floor heating system where water pipes are embedded in the floor. 
+And just by using cold water going through the water pipes, you can release the heat which is absorbed during the day in the stadium, so you can create that comfort, and then by adding dry air instead of down-chilled air, the spectators and the football players can adjust to their individual comfort needs, to their individual energy balance. 
+They can adjust and find their comfort they need to find. 
+There are 12 stadia probably to come, but there are 32 training pitches where all the individual countries are going to train. 
+We applied the same concept: shading of the training pitch, using a shelter against wind, then using the grass. 
+Natural-watered lawn is a very good cooling source stabilizing temperature, and using dehumidified air to create comfort. 
+But even the best passive design wouldn't help. 
+We need active system. 
+And how do we do that? 
+Our idea for the bid was 100 percent solar cooling, based on the idea that we use the roof of the stadia, we cover the roofs of the stadia with PV systems. 
+We don't borrow any energy from history. 
+We are not using fossil energies. 
+We are not borrowing energy from our neighbors. 
+We're using energy we can harvest on our roofs, and also on the training pitches, which will be covered with large, flexible membranes, and we will see in the next years an industry coming up with flexible photovoltaics, giving the possibilities of shading against strong sun and producing electric energy in the same time. 
+And this energy now is harvested throughout the year, sent into the grid, is replacing fossils in the grid, and when I need it for the cooling, I take it back from the grid and I use the solar energy which I have brought to the grid back when I need it for the solar cooling. 
+And I can do that in the first year and I can balance that in the next 10, and the next 20 years, this energy, which is necessary to condition a World Cup in Qatar, the next 20 years, this energy goes into the grid of Qatar. 
+So this — (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) This is not only useful for stadia. We can use that also in open-air places and streets, and we've been working on the City of the Future in Masdar, which is in the United Emirates, Abu Dhabi. 
+And I had the pleasure to work on the central plaza. 
+And the same idea to use there, to create outdoor conditions which are perceived as comfortable. People enjoy going there instead of going into a shopping mall, which is chilled down and which is cooled. We wanted to create an outdoor space which is so comfortable that people can go there in the early afternoon, even in these sunny and hot summer months, and they can enjoy and meet there with their families. (Applause) And the same concept: shade against the sun, shade against the wind, and use, use and take advantage of the sun you can harvest on your footprint. 
+And these beautiful umbrellas. 
+So I'd like to encourage you to pay attention to your thermal comfort, to your thermal environment, tonight and tomorrow, and if you'd like to learn more about that, I invite you to go to our website. 
+We uploaded a very simple perceived temperature calculator where you can check out about your outdoor comfort. 
+And I also hope that you share the idea that if engineers and designers can use all these different climatic parameters, it will be possible to create really good and comfortable outdoor conditions, to change our thermal perception that we feel comfortable in an outdoor environment, and we can do that with the best passive design, but also using the energy source of the site in Qatar which is the sun. 
+(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) Shukran. (Applause) 
+
+Five hundred seventy-one million two hundred thirty thousand pounds of paper towels are used by Americans every year. 
+If we could — correction, wrong figure — 13 billion used every year. 
+If we could reduce the usage of paper towels, one paper towel per person per day, 571,230,000 pounds of paper not used. 
+We can do that. 
+Now there are all kinds of paper towel dispensers. 
+There's the tri-fold. People typically take two or three. 
+There's the one that cuts it, that you have to tear off. 
+People go one, two, three, four, tear. 
+This much, right? 
+There's the one that cuts itself. 
+People go, one, two, three, four. 
+Or there's the same thing, but recycled paper, you have to get five of those because they're not as absorbant, of course. 
+The fact is, you can do it all with one towel. 
+The key, two words: This half of the room, your word is "" shake. "" Let's hear it. Shake. Louder. 
+Audience: Shake. 
+Joe Smith: Your word is "" fold. "" Audience: Fold. 
+JS: Again. 
+Audience: Fold. JS: Really loud. 
+Audience: Shake. Fold. 
+JS: Okay. Wet hands. 
+Shake — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. 
+Why 12? Twelve apostles, twelve tribes, twelve zodiac signs, twelve months. The one I like the best: It's the biggest number with one syllable. 
+(Laughter) Tri-fold. Fold... 
+Dry. 
+(Applause) Audience: Shake. 
+Fold. 
+JS: Cuts itself. Fold. The fold is important because it allows interstitial suspension. 
+You don't have to remember that part, but trust me. 
+(Laughter) Audience: Shake. Fold. 
+JS: Cuts itself. 
+You know the funny thing is, I get my hands drier than people do with three or four, because they can't get in between the cracks. 
+If you think this isn't as good... 
+Audience: Shake. Fold. 
+JS: Now, there's now a real fancy invention, it's the one where you wave your hand and it kicks it out. 
+It's way too big a towel. 
+Let me tell you a secret. 
+If you're really quick, if you're really quick — and I can prove this — this is half a towel from the dispenser in this building. 
+How? As soon as it starts, you just tear it off. 
+It's smart enough to stop. 
+And you get half a towel. 
+Audience: Shake. Fold. 
+JS: Now, let's all say it together. Shake. Fold. 
+You will for the rest of your life remember those words every time you pick up a paper towel. 
+And remember, one towel per person for one year — 571,230,000 pounds of paper. No small thing. 
+And next year, toilet paper. 
+(Laughter) 
+
+So if I told you that this was the face of pure joy, would you call me crazy? 
+I wouldn't blame you, because every time I look at this Arctic selfie, I shiver just a little bit. 
+I want to tell you a little bit about this photograph. 
+I was swimming around in the Lofoten Islands in Norway, just inside the Arctic Circle, and the water was hovering right at freezing. 
+The air? A brisk -10 with windchill, and I could literally feel the blood trying to leave my hands, feet and face, and rush to protect my vital organs. 
+It was the coldest I've ever been. 
+But even with swollen lips, sunken eyes, and cheeks flushed red, I have found that this place right here is somewhere I can find great joy. 
+Now, when it comes to pain, psychologist Brock Bastian probably said it best when he wrote, "" Pain is a kind of shortcut to mindfulness. 
+It makes us suddenly aware of everything in the environment. 
+It brutally draws us in to a virtual sensory awareness of the world much like meditation. "" If shivering is a form of meditation, then I would consider myself a monk. 
+(Laughter) Now, before we get into the why would anyone ever want to surf in freezing cold water? 
+I would love to give you a little perspective on what a day in my life can look like. 
+(Music) (Video) Man: I mean, I know we were hoping for good waves, but I don't think anybody thought that was going to happen. 
+I can't stop shaking. 
+I am so cold. 
+(Music) (Applause) Chris Burkard: So, surf photographer, right? 
+My parents definitely didn't think so when I told them at 19 I was quitting my job to pursue this dream career: blue skies, warm tropical beaches, and a tan that lasts all year long. 
+I mean, to me, this was it. Life could not get any better. 
+Sweating it out, shooting surfers in these exotic tourist destinations. 
+But there was just this one problem. 
+You see, the more time I spent traveling to these exotic locations, the less gratifying it seemed to be. 
+I set out seeking adventure, and what I was finding was only routine. 
+It was things like wi-fi, TV, fine dining, and a constant cellular connection that to me were all the trappings of places heavily touristed in and out of the water, and it didn't take long for me to start feeling suffocated. 
+I began craving wild, open spaces, and so I set out to find the places others had written off as too cold, too remote, and too dangerous to surf, and that challenge intrigued me. 
+I began this sort of personal crusade against the mundane, because if there's one thing I've realized, it's that any career, even one as seemingly glamorous as surf photography, has the danger of becoming monotonous. 
+So in my search to break up this monotony, I realized something: There's only about a third of the Earth's oceans that are warm, and it's really just that thin band around the equator. 
+So if I was going to find perfect waves, it was probably going to happen somewhere cold, where the seas are notoriously rough, and that's exactly where I began to look. 
+And it was my first trip to Iceland that I felt like I found exactly what I was looking for. 
+I was blown away by the natural beauty of the landscape, but most importantly, I couldn't believe we were finding perfect waves in such a remote and rugged part of the world. 
+At one point, we got to the beach only to find massive chunks of ice had piled on the shoreline. 
+They created this barrier between us and the surf, and we had to weave through this thing like a maze just to get out into the lineup. 
+and once we got there, we were pushing aside these ice chunks trying to get into waves. 
+It was an incredible experience, one I'll never forget, because amidst those harsh conditions, I felt like I stumbled onto one of the last quiet places, somewhere that I found a clarity and a connection with the world I knew I would never find on a crowded beach. 
+I was hooked. I was hooked. (Laughter) Cold water was constantly on my mind, and from that point on, my career focused on these types of harsh and unforgiving environments, and it took me to places like Russia, Norway, Alaska, Iceland, Chile, the Faroe Islands, and a lot of places in between. 
+And one of my favorite things about these places was simply the challenge and the creativity it took just to get there: hours, days, weeks spent on Google Earth trying to pinpoint any remote stretch of beach or reef we could actually get to. 
+And once we got there, the vehicles were just as creative: snowmobiles, six-wheel Soviet troop carriers, and a couple of super-sketchy helicopter flights. 
+(Laughter) Helicopters really scare me, by the way. 
+There was this one particularly bumpy boat ride up the coast of Vancouver Island to this kind of remote surf spot, where we ended up watching helplessly from the water as bears ravaged our camp site. 
+They walked off with our food and bits of our tent, clearly letting us know that we were at the bottom of the food chain and that this was their spot, not ours. 
+But to me, that trip was a testament to the wildness I traded for those touristy beaches. 
+Now, it wasn't until I traveled to Norway — (Laughter) — that I really learned to appreciate the cold. 
+So this is the place where some of the largest, the most violent storms in the world send huge waves smashing into the coastline. 
+We were in this tiny, remote fjord, just inside the Arctic Circle. 
+It had a greater population of sheep than people, so help if we needed it was nowhere to be found. 
+I was in the water taking pictures of surfers, and it started to snow. 
+And then the temperature began to drop. 
+And I told myself, there's not a chance you're getting out of the water. 
+You traveled all this way, and this is exactly what you've been waiting for: freezing cold conditions with perfect waves. 
+And although I couldn't even feel my finger to push the trigger, I knew I wasn't getting out. 
+So I just did whatever I could. I shook it off, whatever. 
+But that was the point that I felt this wind gush through the valley and hit me, and what started as this light snowfall quickly became a full-on blizzard, and I started to lose perception of where I was. 
+I didn't know if I was drifting out to sea or towards shore, and all I could really make out was the faint sound of seagulls and crashing waves. 
+Now, I knew this place had a reputation for sinking ships and grounding planes, and while I was out there floating, I started to get a little bit nervous. 
+Actually, I was totally freaking out — (Laughter) — and I was borderline hypothermic, and my friends eventually had to help me out of the water. 
+And I don't know if it was delirium setting in or what, but they told me later I had a smile on my face the entire time. 
+Now, it was this trip and probably that exact experience where I really began to feel like every photograph was precious, because all of a sudden in that moment, it was something I was forced to earn. 
+And I realized, all this shivering had actually taught me something: In life, there are no shortcuts to joy. 
+Anything that is worth pursuing is going to require us to suffer just a little bit, and that tiny bit of suffering that I did for my photography, it added a value to my work that was so much more meaningful to me than just trying to fill the pages of magazines. 
+See, I gave a piece of myself in these places, and what I walked away with was a sense of fulfillment I had always been searching for. 
+So I look back at this photograph. 
+It's easy to see frozen fingers and cold wetsuits and even the struggle that it took just to get there, but most of all, what I see is just joy. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Miranda Wang: We're here to talk about accidents. 
+How do you feel about accidents? 
+When we think about accidents, we usually consider them to be harmful, unfortunate or even dangerous, and they certainly can be. 
+But are they always that bad? 
+The discovery that had led to penicillin, for example, is one of the most fortunate accidents of all time. 
+Without biologist Alexander Fleming's moldy accident, caused by a neglected workstation, we wouldn't be able to fight off so many bacterial infections. 
+Jeanny Yao: Miranda and I are here today because we'd like to share how our accidents have led to discoveries. 
+In 2011, we visited the Vancouver Waste Transfer Station and saw an enormous pit of plastic waste. 
+We realized that when plastics get to the dump, it's difficult to sort them because they have similar densities, and when they're mixed with organic matter and construction debris, it's truly impossible to pick them out and environmentally eliminate them. 
+MW: However, plastics are useful because they're durable, flexible, and can be easily molded into so many useful shapes. 
+The downside of this convenience is that there's a high cost to this. 
+Plastics cause serious problems, such as the destruction of ecosystems, the pollution of natural resources, and the reduction of available land space. 
+This picture you see here is the Great Pacific Gyre. 
+When you think about plastic pollution and the marine environment, we think about the Great Pacific Gyre, which is supposed to be a floating island of plastic waste. 
+But that's no longer an accurate depiction of plastic pollution in the marine environment. 
+Right now, the ocean is actually a soup of plastic debris, and there's nowhere you can go in the ocean where you wouldn't be able to find plastic particles. 
+JY: In a plastic-dependent society, cutting down production is a good goal, but it's not enough. 
+And what about the waste that's already been produced? 
+Plastics take hundreds to thousands of years to biodegrade. 
+So we thought, you know what? 
+Instead of waiting for that garbage to sit there and pile up, let's find a way to break them down with bacteria. 
+Sounds cool, right? 
+Audience: Yeah. JY: Thank you. 
+But we had a problem. 
+You see, plastics have very complex structures and are difficult to biodegrade. 
+Anyhow, we were curious and hopeful and still wanted to give it a go. 
+MW: With this idea in mind, Jeanny and I read through some hundreds of scientific articles on the Internet, and we drafted a research proposal in the beginning of our grade 12 year. 
+We aimed to find bacteria from our local Fraser River that can degrade a harmful plasticizer called phthalates. 
+Phthalates are additives used in everyday plastic products to increase their flexibility, durability and transparency. 
+Although they're part of the plastic, they're not covalently bonded to the plastic backbone. 
+As a result, they easily escape into our environment. 
+Not only do phthalates pollute our environment, but they also pollute our bodies. 
+To make the matter worse, phthalates are found in products to which we have a high exposure, such as babies' toys, beverage containers, cosmetics, and even food wraps. 
+Phthalates are horrible because they're so easily taken into our bodies. 
+They can be absorbed by skin contact, ingested, and inhaled. 
+JY: Every year, at least 470 million pounds of phthalates contaminate our air, water and soil. 
+The Environmental Protection Agency even classified this group as a top-priority pollutant because it's been shown to cause cancer and birth defects by acting as a hormone disruptor. 
+We read that each year, the Vancouver municipal government monitors phthalate concentration levels in rivers to assess their safety. 
+So we figured, if there are places along our Fraser River that are contaminated with phthalates, and if there are bacteria that are able to live in these areas, then perhaps, perhaps these bacteria could have evolved to break down phthalates. 
+MW: So we presented this good idea to Dr. Lindsay Eltis at the University of British Columbia, and surprisingly, he actually took us into his lab and asked his graduate students Adam and James to help us. 
+Little did we know at that time that a trip to the dump and some research on the Internet and plucking up the courage to act upon inspiration would take us on a life-changing journey of accidents and discoveries. 
+JY: The first step in our project was to collect soil samples from three different sites along the Fraser River. 
+Out of thousands of bacteria, we wanted to find ones that could break down phthalates, so we enriched our cultures with phthalates as the only carbon source. 
+This implied that, if anything grew in our cultures, then they must be able to live off of phthalates. 
+Everything went well from there, and we became amazing scientists. (Laughter) MW: Um... uh, Jeanny. JY: I'm just joking. 
+MW: Okay. Well, it was partially my fault. 
+You see, I accidentally cracked the flask that had contained our third enrichment culture, and as a result, we had to wipe down the incubator room with bleach and ethanol twice. 
+And this is only one of the examples of the many accidents that happened during our experimentation. 
+But this mistake turned out to be rather serendipitous. 
+We noticed that the unharmed cultures came from places of opposite contamination levels, so this mistake actually led us to think that perhaps we can compare the different degradative potentials of bacteria from sites of opposite contamination levels. 
+JY: Now that we grew the bacteria, we wanted to isolate strains by streaking onto mediate plates, because we thought that would be less accident-prone, but we were wrong again. 
+We poked holes in our agar while streaking and contaminated some samples and funghi. 
+As a result, we had to streak and restreak several times. 
+Then we monitored phthalate utilization and bacterial growth, and found that they shared an inverse correlation, so as bacterial populations increased, phthalate concentrations decreased. 
+This means that our bacteria were actually living off of phthalates. 
+MW: So now that we found bacteria that could break down phthalates, we wondered what these bacteria were. 
+So Jeanny and I took three of our most efficient strains and then performed gene amplification sequencing on them and matched our data with an online comprehensive database. 
+We were happy to see that, although our three strains had been previously identified bacteria, two of them were not previously associated with phthalate degradation, so this was actually a novel discovery. 
+JY: To better understand how this biodegradation works, we wanted to verify the catabolic pathways of our three strains. 
+To do this, we extracted enzymes from our bacteria and reacted with an intermediate of phthalic acid. 
+MW: We monitored this experiment with spectrophotometry and obtained this beautiful graph. 
+This graph shows that our bacteria really do have a genetic pathway to biodegrade phthalates. 
+Our bacteria can transform phthalates, which is a harmful toxin, into end products such as carbon dioxide, water and alcohol. 
+I know some of you in the crowd are thinking, well, carbon dioxide is horrible, it's a greenhouse gas. 
+But if our bacteria did not evolve to break down phthalates, they would have used some other kind of carbon source, and aerobic respiration would have led it to have end products such as carbon dioxide anyway. 
+We were also interested to see that, although we've obtained greater diversity of bacteria biodegraders from the bird habitat site, we obtained the most efficient degraders from the landfill site. 
+So this fully shows that nature evolves through natural selection. 
+JY: So Miranda and I shared this research at the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge competition and were recognized with the greatest commercialization potential. 
+Although we're not the first ones to find bacteria that can break down phthalates, we were the first ones to look into our local river and find a possible solution to a local problem. 
+We have not only shown that bacteria can be the solution to plastic pollution, but also that being open to uncertain outcomes and taking risks create opportunities for unexpected discoveries. 
+Throughout this journey, we have also discovered our passion for science, and are currently continuing research on other fossil fuel chemicals in university. 
+We hope that in the near future, we'll be able to create model organisms that can break down not only phthalates but a wide variety of different contaminants. 
+We can apply this to wastewater treatment plants to clean up our rivers and other natural resources. 
+And perhaps one day we'll be able to tackle the problem of solid plastic waste. 
+MW: I think our journey has truly transformed our view of microorganisms, and Jeanny and I have shown that even mistakes can lead to discoveries. 
+Einstein once said, "" You can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking you used when you created them. "" If we're making plastic synthetically, then we think the solution would be to break them down biochemically. 
+Thank you. JY: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Music is not the only kind of sound, however, which affects your emotions. 
+There's a reason: over hundreds of thousands of years we've learned that when the birds are singing, things are safe. 
+And whatever number you're thinking of, it probably isn't as bad as this. 
+I'll give you two examples. 
+First, make it congruent, pointing in the same direction as your visual communication. 
+If your sound is pointing the opposite direction, incongruent, you reduce impact by 86 percent. 
+That's an order of magnitude, up or down. 
+Thirdly, make it valuable. 
+
+So magic is a very introverted field. 
+While scientists regularly publish their latest research, we magicians do not like to share our methods and secrets. 
+That's true even amongst peers. 
+But if you look at creative practice as a form of research, or art as a form of R & D for humanity, then how could a cyber illusionist like myself share his research? 
+Now my own speciality is combining digital technology and magic. 
+And about three years ago, I started an exercise in openness and inclusiveness by reaching out into the open-source software community to create new digital tools for magic — tools that could eventually be shared with other artists to start them off further on in the process and to get them to the poetry faster. 
+Today, I'd like to show you something which came out of these collaborations. 
+It's an augmented reality projection tracking and mapping system, or a digital storytelling tool. 
+Could we bring down the lights please? Thank you. 
+So let's give this a try. 
+And I'm going to use it to give you my take on the stuff of life. 
+(Applause) (Music) Terribly sorry. I forgot the floor. 
+Wake up. 
+Hey. 
+Come on. 
+(Music) Please. (Music) 
+Come on. 
+Ah, sorry about that. 
+Forgot this. 
+(Music) Give it another try. 
+Okay. 
+He figured out the system. 
+(Music) (Laughter) (Applause) (Music) Uh oh. (Music) 
+All right. Let's try this. 
+Come on. 
+(Music) (Laughter) (Music) Hey. (Music) 
+You heard her, go ahead. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Bye-bye. (Applause) 
+
+This is poo, and what I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you, which might be quite difficult, but I think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo. 
+So this animal here has got a brain about the size of a grain of rice, and yet it can do things that you and I couldn't possibly entertain the idea of doing. 
+And basically it's all evolved to handle its food source, which is dung. 
+So the question is, where do we start this story? 
+And it seems appropriate to start at the end, because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals, but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living, and so dung beetles eat dung, and their larvae are also dung-feeders. 
+They are grown completely in a ball of dung. 
+Within South Africa, we've got about 800 species of dung beetles, in Africa we've got 2,000 species of dung beetles, and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles. 
+So, according to dung beetles, dung is pretty good. 
+Unless you're prepared to get dung under your fingernails and root through the dung itself, you'll never see 90 percent of the dung beetle species, because they go directly into the dung, straight down below it, and then they shuttle back and forth between the dung at the soil surface and a nest they make underground. 
+So the question is, how do they deal with this material? 
+And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort. 
+Ten percent of the species actually make a ball, and this ball they roll away from the dung source, usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source, and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls. 
+So this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball. 
+You can see it's a male because he's got a little hair on the back of his legs there, and he's clearly very pleased about what he's sitting on there. 
+And then he's about to become a victim of a vicious smash-and-grab. (Laughter) And this is a clear indication that this is a valuable resource. 
+And so valuable resources have to be looked after and guarded in a particular way, and we think the reason they roll the balls away is because of this, because of the competition that is involved in getting hold of that dung. 
+So this dung pat was actually — well, it was a dung pat 15 minutes before this photograph was taken, and we think it's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well-adapted to rolling balls of dung. 
+So what you've got to imagine here is this animal here moving across the African veld. 
+Its head is down. It's walking backwards. 
+It's the most bizarre way to actually transport your food in any particular direction, and at the same time it's got to deal with the heat. 
+This is Africa. It's hot. 
+So what I want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems. 
+So watch this beetle, and there's two things that I would like you to be aware of. 
+The first is how it deals with this obstacle that we've put in its way. See, look, it does a little dance, and then it carries on in exactly the same direction that it took in the first place. 
+A little dance, and then heads off in a particular direction. 
+So clearly this animal knows where it's going and it knows where it wants to go, and that's a very, very important thing, because if you think about it, you're at the dung pile, you've got this great big pie that you want to get away from everybody else, and the quickest way to do it is in a straight line. 
+So we gave them some more tasks to deal with, and what we did here is we turned the world under their feet. And watch its response. 
+So this animal has actually had the whole world turned under its feet. It's turned by 90 degrees. 
+But it doesn't flinch. It knows exactly where it wants to go, and it heads off in that particular direction. 
+So our next question then was, how are they doing this? 
+What are they doing? And there was a cue that was available to us. 
+It was that every now and then they'd climb on top of the ball and they'd take a look at the world around them. 
+And what do you think they could be looking at as they climb on top of the ball? 
+What are the obvious cues that this animal could use to direct its movement? And the most obvious one is to look at the sky, and so we thought, now what could they be looking at in the sky? 
+And the obvious thing to look at is the sun. 
+So a classic experiment here, in that what we did was we moved the sun. 
+What we're going to do now is shade the sun with a board and then move the sun with a mirror to a completely different position. 
+And look at what the beetle does. 
+It does a little double dance, and then it heads back in exactly the same direction it went in the first place. 
+What happens now? So clearly they're looking at the sun. 
+The sun is a very important cue in the sky for them. 
+The thing is the sun is not always available to you, because at sunset it disappears below the horizon. 
+What is happening in the sky here is that there's a great big pattern of polarized light in the sky that you and I can't see. It's the way our eyes are built. 
+But the sun is at the horizon over here and we know that when the sun is at the horizon, say it's over on this side, there is a north-south, a huge pathway across the sky of polarized light that we can't see that the beetles can see. 
+So how do we test that? Well, that's easy. 
+What we do is we get a great big polarization filter, pop the beetle underneath it, and the filter is at right angles to the polarization pattern of the sky. 
+The beetle comes out from underneath the filter and it does a right-hand turn, because it comes back under the sky that it was originally orientated to and then reorientates itself back to the direction it was originally going in. 
+So obviously beetles can see polarized light. 
+Okay, so what we've got so far is, what are beetles doing? They're rolling balls. 
+How are they doing it? Well, they're rolling them in a straight line. 
+How are they maintaining it in a particular straight line? 
+Well, they're looking at celestial cues in the sky, some of which you and I can't see. 
+But how do they pick up those celestial cues? 
+That was what was of interest to us next. 
+And it was this particular little behavior, the dance, that we thought was important, because look, it takes a pause every now and then, and then heads off in the direction that it wants to go in. 
+So what are they doing when they do this dance? 
+How far can we push them before they will reorientate themselves? 
+And in this experiment here, what we did was we forced them into a channel, and you can see he wasn't particularly forced into this particular channel, and we gradually displaced the beetle by 180 degrees until this individual ends up going in exactly the opposite direction that it wanted to go in, in the first place. 
+And let's see what his reaction is as he's headed through 90 degrees here, and now he's going to — when he ends up down here, he's going to be 180 degrees in the wrong direction. 
+And see what his response is. 
+He does a little dance, he turns around, and heads back in this. He knows exactly where he's going. 
+He knows exactly what the problem is, and he knows exactly how to deal with it, and the dance is this transition behavior that allows them to reorientate themselves. 
+So that's the dance, but after spending many years sitting in the African bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days, we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior. 
+Every now and then, when they climb on top of the ball, they wipe their face. 
+And you see him do it again. 
+Now we thought, now what could be going on here? 
+Clearly the ground is very hot, and when the ground is hot, they dance more often, and when they do this particular dance, they wipe the bottom of their face. 
+And we thought that it could be a thermoregulatory behavior. 
+We thought that maybe what they're doing is trying to get off the hot soil and also spitting onto their face to cool their head down. 
+So what we did was design a couple of arenas. 
+one was hot, one was cold. 
+We shaded this one. We left that one hot. 
+And then what we did was we filmed them with a thermal camera. 
+So what you're looking at here is a heat image of the system, and what you can see here emerging from the poo is a cool dung ball. 
+So the truth is, if you look at the temperature over here, dung is cool. (Laughter) So all we're interested in here is comparing the temperature of the beetle against the background. 
+So the background here is around about 50 degrees centigrade. 
+The beetle itself and the ball are probably around about 30 to 35 degrees centigrade, so this is a great big ball of ice cream that this beetle is now transporting across the hot veld. 
+It isn't climbing. It isn't dancing, because its body temperature is actually relatively low. 
+It's about the same as yours and mine. 
+And what's of interest here is that little brain is quite cool. 
+But if we contrast now what happens in a hot environment, look at the temperature of the soil. 
+It's up around 55 to 60 degrees centigrade. 
+Watch how often the beetle dances. 
+And look at its front legs. They're roaringly hot. 
+So the ball leaves a little thermal shadow, and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face, and all the time it's trying to cool itself down, we think, and avoid the hot sand that it's walking across. 
+And what we did then was put little boots on these legs, because this was a way to test if the legs were involved in sensing the temperature of the soil. 
+And if you look over here, with boots they climb onto the ball far less often when they had no boots on. 
+So we described these as cool boots. 
+It was a dental compound that we used to make these boots. 
+And we also cooled down the dung ball, so we were able to put the ball in the fridge, gave them a nice cool dung ball, and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball. 
+So this is called stilting. It's a thermal behavior that you and I do if we cross the beach, we jump onto a towel, somebody has this towel — "" Sorry, I've jumped onto your towel. "" — and then you scuttle across onto somebody else's towel, and that way you don't burn your feet. 
+And that's exactly what the beetles are doing here. 
+However, there's one more story I'd like to share with you, and that's this particular species. 
+It's from a genus called Pachysoma. 
+There are 13 species in the genus, and they have a particular behavior that I think you will find interesting. 
+This is a dung beetle. Watch what he's doing. 
+Can you spot the difference? 
+They don't normally go this slowly. It's in slow motion. 
+but it's walking forwards, and it's actually taking a pellet of dry dung with it. 
+This is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior. 
+There's one more interesting aspect of this dung beetle's behavior that we found quite fascinating, and that's that it forages and provisions a nest. 
+So watch this individual here, and what he's trying to do is set up a nest. 
+And he doesn't like this first position, but he comes up with a second position, and about 50 minutes later, that nest is finished, and he heads off to forage and provision at a pile of dry dung pellets. 
+And what I want you to notice is the outward path compared to the homeward path, and compare the two. 
+And by and large, you'll see that the homeward path is far more direct than the outward path. 
+On the outward path, he's always on the lookout for a new blob of dung. 
+On the way home, he knows where home is, and he wants to go straight to it. 
+The important thing here is that this is not a one-way trip, as in most dung beetles. The trip here is repeated back and forth between a provisioning site and a nest site. 
+And watch, you're going to see another South African crime taking place right now. (Laughter) And his neighbor steals one of his dung pellets. 
+So what we're looking at here is a behavior called path integration. 
+And what's taking place is that the beetle has got a home spot, it goes out on a convoluted path looking for food, and then when it finds food, it heads straight home. It knows exactly where its home is. 
+Now there's two ways it could be doing that, and we can test that by displacing the beetle to a new position when it's at the foraging site. 
+If it's using landmarks, it will find its home. 
+If it is using something called path integration, it will not find its home. It will arrive at the wrong spot, and what it's doing here if it's using path integration is it's counting its steps or measuring the distance out in this direction. 
+It knows the bearing home, and it knows it should be in that direction. 
+If you displace it, it ends up in the wrong place. 
+So let's see what happens when we put this beetle to the test with a similar experiment. 
+So here's our cunning experimenter. 
+He displaces the beetle, and now we have to see what is going to take place. 
+What we've got is a burrow. That's where the forage was. 
+The forage has been displaced to a new position. 
+If he's using landmark orientation, he should be able to find the burrow, because he'll be able to recognize the landmarks around it. 
+If he's using path integration, then it should end up in the wrong spot over here. 
+So let's watch what happens when we put the beetle through the whole test. 
+So there he is there. 
+He's about to head home, and look what happens. 
+Shame. 
+It hasn't a clue. 
+It starts to search for its house in the right distance away from the food, but it is clearly completely lost. 
+So we know now that this animal uses path integration to find its way around, and the callous experimenter leads it top left and leaves it. (Laughter) So what we're looking at here are a group of animals that use a compass, and they use the sun as a compass to find their way around, and they have some sort of system for measuring that distance, and we know that these species here actually count the steps. That's what they use as an odometer, a step-counting system, to find their way back home. 
+We don't know yet what dung beetles use. 
+So what have we learned from these animals with a brain that's the size of a grain of rice? 
+Well, we know that they can roll balls in a straight line using celestial cues. 
+We know that the dance behavior is an orientation behavior and it's also a thermoregulation behavior, and we also know that they use a path integration system for finding their way home. 
+So for a small animal dealing with a fairly revolting substance we can actually learn an awful lot from these things doing behaviors that you and I couldn't possibly do. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I would like to share with you a new model of higher education, a model that, once expanded, can enhance the collective intelligence of millions of creative and motivated individuals that otherwise would be left behind. 
+Look at the world. 
+Pick up a place and focus on it. 
+Patrick was born in Liberia to a family of 20 children. 
+During the civil war, he and his family were forced to flee to Nigeria. 
+There, in spite of his situation, he graduated high school with nearly perfect grades. 
+He wanted to continue to higher education, but due to his family living on the poverty line, he was soon sent to South Africa to work and send back money to feed his family. 
+Patrick never gave up his dream of higher education. 
+Late at night, after work, he surfed the Net looking for ways to study. 
+Debbie is from Florida. 
+Her parents didn't go to college, and neither did any of her siblings. 
+Debbie has worked all her life, pays taxes, supports herself month to month, proud of the American dream, a dream that just won't be complete without higher education. 
+But Debbie doesn't have the savings for higher education. 
+She can't pay the tuition. 
+Neither could she leave work. 
+Meet Wael. 
+Wael is from Syria. 
+He's firsthand experiencing the misery, fear and failure imposed on his country. 
+He's a big believer in education. 
+The higher education system failed Patrick, Debbie and Wael, exactly as it is failing millions of potential students, millions that graduate high school, millions that are qualified for higher education, millions that want to study yet cannot access for various reasons. 
+Universities are expensive. We all know it. 
+In large parts of the world, higher education is unattainable for an average citizen. 
+This is probably the biggest problem facing our society. 
+Higher education stopped being a right for all and became a privilege for the few. 
+Students who are qualified for higher education, can afford, want to study, cannot because it is not decent, it is not a place for a woman. 
+This is the story of countless women in Africa, for example, prevented from higher education because of cultural barriers. 
+And here comes the third reason: UNESCO stated that in 2025, 100 million students will be deprived from higher education simply because there will not be enough seats to accommodate them, to meet the demand. 
+They will take a placement test, they will pass it, but they still won't have access because there are no places available. 
+These are the reasons I founded University of the People, a nonprofit, tuition-free, degree-granting university to give an alternative, to create an alternative to those who have no other, an alternative that will be affordable and scalable, an alternative that will disrupt the current education system, open the gates to higher education for every qualified student regardless of what they earn, where they live, or what society says about them. 
+Patrick, Debbie and Wael are only three examples out of the 1,700 accepted students from 143 countries. 
+We — (Applause) — Thank you. 
+We didn't need to reinvent the wheel. 
+We just looked at what wasn't working and used the amazing power of the Internet to get around it. 
+We set out to build a model that will cut down almost entirely the cost of higher education, and that's how we did it. 
+First, bricks and mortar cost money. 
+Universities have expenses that virtual universities don't. 
+They don't exist. 
+We also don't need to worry about capacity. 
+There are no limits of seats in virtual university. 
+Actually, nobody needs to stand at the back of the lecture hall. 
+Textbooks is also something our students don't need to buy. 
+By using open educational resources and the generosity of professors who are putting their material free and accessible, we don't need to send our students to buy textbooks. 
+All of our materials come free. 
+Even professors, the most expensive line in any university balance sheet, come free to our students, over 3,000 of them, including presidents, vice chancellors, professors and academic advisors from top universities such as NYU, Yale, Berkeley and Oxford, came on board to help our students. 
+Finally, it's our belief in peer-to-peer learning. 
+We use this sound pedagogical model to encourage our students from all over the world to interact and study together and also to reduce the time our professors need to labor over class assignments. 
+We only offer two programs: business administration and computer science, the two programs that are most in demand worldwide, the two programs that are likeliest to help our students find a job. 
+When our students are accepted, they are placed in a small classroom of 20 to 30 students to ensure that those who need personalized attention get it. 
+Moreover, for every nine weeks' course, they meet a new peer, a whole new set of students from all over the world. 
+Every week, when they go into the classroom, they find the lecture notes of the week, the reading assignment, the homework assignment, and the discussion question, which is the core of our studies. 
+Every week, every student must contribute to the class discussion and also must comment on the contribution of others. 
+This way, we open our students' minds, we develop a positive shift in attitude toward different cultures. 
+By the end of each week, the students take a quiz, hand in their homework, which are assessed by their peers under the supervision of the instructors, get a grade, move to the next week. 
+We opened the gates for higher education for every qualified student. 
+Every student with a high school diploma, sufficient English and Internet connection can study with us. 
+We don't use audio. We don't use video. 
+Broadband is not necessary. 
+Any student from any part of the world with any Internet connection can study with us. 
+We are tuition-free. 
+All we ask our students to cover is the cost of their exams, 100 dollars per exam. 
+A full-time bachelor degree student taking 40 courses, will pay 1,000 dollars a year, 4,000 dollars for the entire degree, and for those who cannot afford even this, we offer them a variety of scholarships. 
+It is our mission that nobody will be left behind for financial reasons. 
+Five years ago, it was a vision. 
+Today, it is a reality. 
+Last month, we got the ultimate academic endorsement to our model. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+With this accreditation, it's our time now to scale up. 
+We have demonstrated that our model works. 
+I invite universities and, even more important, developing countries' governments, to replicate this model to ensure that the gates of higher education will open widely. 
+A new era is coming, an era that will witness the disruption of the higher education model as we know it today, from being a privilege for the few to becoming a basic right, affordable and accessible for all. 
+
+Mark Twain summed up what I take to be one of the fundamental problems of cognitive science with a single witticism. 
+He said, "" There's something fascinating about science. 
+One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact. "" (Laughter) Twain meant it as a joke, of course, but he's right: There's something fascinating about science. 
+From a few bones, we infer the existence of dinosuars. 
+From spectral lines, the composition of nebulae. 
+From fruit flies, the mechanisms of heredity, and from reconstructed images of blood flowing through the brain, or in my case, from the behavior of very young children, we try to say something about the fundamental mechanisms of human cognition. 
+In particular, in my lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, I have spent the past decade trying to understand the mystery of how children learn so much from so little so quickly. 
+Because, it turns out that the fascinating thing about science is also a fascinating thing about children, which, to put a gentler spin on Mark Twain, is precisely their ability to draw rich, abstract inferences rapidly and accurately from sparse, noisy data. 
+I'm going to give you just two examples today. 
+One is about a problem of generalization, and the other is about a problem of causal reasoning. 
+And although I'm going to talk about work in my lab, this work is inspired by and indebted to a field. 
+I'm grateful to mentors, colleagues, and collaborators around the world. 
+Let me start with the problem of generalization. 
+Generalizing from small samples of data is the bread and butter of science. 
+We poll a tiny fraction of the electorate and we predict the outcome of national elections. 
+We see how a handful of patients responds to treatment in a clinical trial, and we bring drugs to a national market. 
+But this only works if our sample is randomly drawn from the population. 
+If our sample is cherry-picked in some way — say, we poll only urban voters, or say, in our clinical trials for treatments for heart disease, we include only men — the results may not generalize to the broader population. 
+So scientists care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, but what does that have to do with babies? 
+Well, babies have to generalize from small samples of data all the time. 
+And they develop expectations about ducks and balls that they're going to extend to rubber ducks and balls for the rest of their lives. 
+And the kinds of generalizations babies have to make about ducks and balls they have to make about almost everything: shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. 
+So do babies care whether the tiny bit of evidence they see is plausibly representative of a larger population? 
+Let's find out. 
+I'm going to show you two movies, one from each of two conditions of an experiment, and because you're going to see just two movies, you're going to see just two babies, and any two babies differ from each other in innumerable ways. 
+But these babies, of course, here stand in for groups of babies, and the differences you're going to see represent average group differences in babies' behavior across conditions. 
+In each movie, you're going to see a baby doing maybe just exactly what you might expect a baby to do, and we can hardly make babies more magical than they already are. 
+But to my mind the magical thing, and what I want you to pay attention to, is the contrast between these two conditions, because the only thing that differs between these two movies is the statistical evidence the babies are going to observe. 
+We're going to show babies a box of blue and yellow balls, and my then-graduate student, now colleague at Stanford, Hyowon Gweon, is going to pull three blue balls in a row out of this box, and when she pulls those balls out, she's going to squeeze them, and the balls are going to squeak. 
+And if you're a baby, that's like a TED Talk. 
+It doesn't get better than that. 
+(Laughter) But the important point is it's really easy to pull three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly blue balls. 
+You could do that with your eyes closed. 
+So maybe babies should expect those yellow balls to squeak as well. 
+Now, those yellow balls have funny sticks on the end, so babies could do other things with them if they wanted to. 
+(Video) Hyowon Gweon: See this? (Ball squeaks) Did you see that? (Ball squeaks) Cool. 
+See this one? 
+(Ball squeaks) Wow. 
+Laura Schulz: Told you. (Laughs) (Video) HG: See this one? (Ball squeaks) Hey Clara, this one's for you. You can go ahead and play. 
+(Laughter) LS: I don't even have to talk, right? 
+All right, it's nice that babies will generalize properties of blue balls to yellow balls, and it's impressive that babies can learn from imitating us, but we've known those things about babies for a very long time. 
+The really interesting question is what happens when we show babies exactly the same thing, and we can ensure it's exactly the same because we have a secret compartment and we actually pull the balls from there, but this time, all we change is the apparent population from which that evidence was drawn. 
+This time, we're going to show babies three blue balls pulled out of a box of mostly yellow balls, and guess what? 
+That is not plausibly randomly sampled evidence. 
+That evidence suggests that maybe Hyowon was deliberately sampling the blue balls. 
+Maybe there's something special about the blue balls. 
+Maybe only the blue balls squeak. 
+(Video) HG: See this? (Ball squeaks) See this toy? (Ball squeaks) Oh, that was cool. See? (Ball squeaks) Now this one's for you to play. You can go ahead and play. 
+(Fussing) (Laughter) LS: So you just saw two 15-month-old babies do entirely different things based only on the probability of the sample they observed. 
+Let me show you the experimental results. 
+On the vertical axis, you'll see the percentage of babies who squeezed the ball in each condition, and as you'll see, babies are much more likely to generalize the evidence when it's plausibly representative of the population than when the evidence is clearly cherry-picked. 
+And this leads to a fun prediction: Suppose you pulled just one blue ball out of the mostly yellow box. 
+That's not an improbable sample. 
+And if you could reach into a box at random and pull out something that squeaks, maybe everything in the box squeaks. 
+So even though babies are going to see much less evidence for squeaking, and have many fewer actions to imitate in this one ball condition than in the condition you just saw, we predicted that babies themselves would squeeze more, and that's exactly what we found. 
+So 15-month-old babies, in this respect, like scientists, care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, and they use this to develop expectations about the world: what squeaks and what doesn't, what to explore and what to ignore. 
+Let me show you another example now, this time about a problem of causal reasoning. 
+And it starts with a problem of confounded evidence that all of us have, which is that we are part of the world. 
+Take this baby, for instance. 
+Things are going wrong for him. 
+And there's two possibilities, broadly: Maybe he's doing something wrong, or maybe there's something wrong with the toy. 
+So in this next experiment, we're going to give babies just a tiny bit of statistical data supporting one hypothesis over the other, and we're going to see if babies can use that to make different decisions about what to do. 
+Here's the setup. 
+Hyowon is going to try to make the toy go and succeed. 
+I am then going to try twice and fail both times, and then Hyowon is going to try again and succeed, and this roughly sums up my relationship to my graduate students in technology across the board. 
+But the important point here is it provides a little bit of evidence that the problem isn't with the toy, it's with the person. 
+Some people can make this toy go, and some can't. 
+Now, when the baby gets the toy, he's going to have a choice. 
+His mom is right there, so he can go ahead and hand off the toy and change the person, but there's also going to be another toy at the end of that cloth, and he can pull the cloth towards him and change the toy. 
+So let's see what the baby does. 
+(Video) HG: Two, three. Go! (Music) LS: One, two, three, go! 
+Arthur, I'm going to try again. One, two, three, go! 
+YG: Arthur, let me try again, okay? 
+One, two, three, go! (Music) Look at that. Remember these toys? 
+See these toys? Yeah, I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. 
+You can go ahead and play. 
+LS: Okay, Laura, but of course, babies love their mommies. 
+Of course babies give toys to their mommies when they can't make them work. 
+This time, babies are going to see the toy work and fail in exactly the same order, but we're changing the distribution of evidence. 
+This time, Hyowon is going to succeed once and fail once, and so am I. 
+And this suggests it doesn't matter who tries this toy, the toy is broken. 
+It doesn't work all the time. 
+Again, the baby's going to have a choice. 
+Her mom is right next to her, so she can change the person, and there's going to be another toy at the end of the cloth. 
+(Video) HG: Two, three, go! (Music) Let me try one more time. One, two, three, go! 
+Hmm. 
+LS: Let me try, Clara. 
+One, two, three, go! 
+Hmm, let me try again. 
+One, two, three, go! (Music) HG: I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. 
+You can go ahead and play. 
+(Applause) LS: Let me show you the experimental results. 
+On the vertical axis, you'll see the distribution of children's choices in each condition, and you'll see that the distribution of the choices children make depends on the evidence they observe. 
+So in the second year of life, babies can use a tiny bit of statistical data to decide between two fundamentally different strategies for acting in the world: asking for help and exploring. 
+I've just shown you two laboratory experiments out of literally hundreds in the field that make similar points, because the really critical point is that children's ability to make rich inferences from sparse data underlies all the species-specific cultural learning that we do. 
+Children learn about new tools from just a few examples. 
+They learn new causal relationships from just a few examples. 
+They even learn new words, in this case in American Sign Language. 
+I want to close with just two points. 
+If you've been following my world, the field of brain and cognitive sciences, for the past few years, three big ideas will have come to your attention. 
+The first is that this is the era of the brain. 
+And indeed, there have been staggering discoveries in neuroscience: localizing functionally specialized regions of cortex, turning mouse brains transparent, activating neurons with light. 
+A second big idea is that this is the era of big data and machine learning, and machine learning promises to revolutionize our understanding of everything from social networks to epidemiology. 
+And maybe, as it tackles problems of scene understanding and natural language processing, to tell us something about human cognition. 
+And the final big idea you'll have heard is that maybe it's a good idea we're going to know so much about brains and have so much access to big data, because left to our own devices, humans are fallible, we take shortcuts, we err, we make mistakes, we're biased, and in innumerable ways, we get the world wrong. 
+I think these are all important stories, and they have a lot to tell us about what it means to be human, but I want you to note that today I told you a very different story. 
+It's a story about minds and not brains, and in particular, it's a story about the kinds of computations that uniquely human minds can perform, which involve rich, structured knowledge and the ability to learn from small amounts of data, the evidence of just a few examples. 
+And fundamentally, it's a story about how starting as very small children and continuing out all the way to the greatest accomplishments of our culture, we get the world right. 
+Folks, human minds do not only learn from small amounts of data. 
+Human minds generate research and discovery, and human minds generate art and literature and poetry and theater, and human minds take care of other humans: our old, our young, our sick. 
+We even heal them. 
+In the years to come, we're going to see technological innovations beyond anything I can even envision, but we are very unlikely to see anything even approximating the computational power of a human child in my lifetime or in yours. 
+If we invest in these most powerful learners and their development, in babies and children and mothers and fathers and caregivers and teachers the ways we invest in our other most powerful and elegant forms of technology, engineering and design, we will not just be dreaming of a better future, we will be planning for one. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Laura, thank you. I do actually have a question for you. 
+First of all, the research is insane. 
+I mean, who would design an experiment like that? (Laughter) I've seen that a couple of times, and I still don't honestly believe that that can truly be happening, but other people have done similar experiments; it checks out. 
+LS: You know, they look really impressive in our experiments, but think about what they look like in real life, right? 
+It starts out as a baby. 
+Eighteen months later, it's talking to you, and babies' first words aren't just things like balls and ducks, they're things like "" all gone, "" which refer to disappearance, or "" uh-oh, "" which refer to unintentional actions. 
+(Applause) CA: And if I understand you right, the other key point you're making is, we've been through these years where there's all this talk of how quirky and buggy our minds are, that behavioral economics and the whole theories behind that that we're not rational agents. 
+You're really saying that the bigger story is how extraordinary, and there really is genius there that is underappreciated. 
+There are orders of magnitude more decisions you make every day that get the world right. 
+CA: I suspect there are people in the audience who have this view of accelerating technological power who might dispute your statement that never in our lifetimes will a computer do what a three-year-old child can do, but what's clear is that in any scenario, our machines have so much to learn from our toddlers. 
+I mean, you should never bet against babies or chimpanzees or technology as a matter of practice, but it's not just a difference in quantity, it's a difference in kind. 
+We have incredibly powerful computers, and they do do amazingly sophisticated things, often with very big amounts of data. 
+
+So, these are the Dark Ages. 
+And the Dark Ages are the time between when you put away the Lego for the last time as a kid, and you decide as an adult that it is okay to play with a kid's toy. 
+Started out with my then four-year-old: "" Oh, should buy the kid some Lego. 
+That stuff's cool. "" Walked into the Lego store. 
+Bought him this. 
+It's totally appropriate for a four-year-old. 
+(Laughter) I think the box says — let's see here — "" 8 to 12 "" on it. 
+I turn to my wife and said, "" Who are we buying this for? "" She's like, "" Oh, us. "" I'm like, "" Okay. All right. That's cool. "" Pretty soon it got a little bit out of control. 
+The dining room looked like this. 
+You walk there, and it hurts. 
+So we took a room downstairs in the basement that had been used as sort of an Abu Ghraib annex. 
+(Laughter) Torture, very funny. 
+Wow, you guys are great. 
+And we put down those little floor tiles, and then I went onto eBay and bought 150 pounds of Lego — (Laughter) which is insane. 
+My daughter — the day we got it, I was tucking her in — and I said, "Honey, you're my treasure." 
+And she said, "" No, the Lego is the treasure. "" (Laughter) And then she said, "" Dad, we're Lego rich. "" I was like, "" Yeah. 
+I suppose we are. "" So then once you do that you're like, "" Oh, crap. Where am I going to put all this? "" So you go to The Container Store and spend an enormous amount of money, and then you start this crazy sorting process that never — it's just nuts. 
+Whatever. 
+So then you realize there are these conventions. 
+And you go to one of these conventions, and some dude built the Titanic. 
+And you're like, "" Holy shit! 
+He had to come in like a truck, a semi, with this thing. "" And then someone built this — this is the Smith Tower in Seattle. 
+Just beautiful. 
+And there's a dude selling these aftermarket weapons for Lego, because Lego — the Danish — no, they're not into guns. 
+But the Americans? Oh, we'll make some guns for Lego, no problem. 
+And at a certain point, you look around, you're like, "" Whoa, this is a really nerdy crowd. "" And I mean like this is a nerdy crowd, but that's like a couple of levels above furries. 
+(Laughter) The nerds here, they get laid — except for the lady with the condoms in her pocket — and you say to yourself at some point, "Am I part of this group? Like, am I into this?" 
+And I was just like, "" Yeah, I guess I am. 
+I'm coming out. 
+I'm kind of into this stuff, and I'm going to stop being embarrassed. "" So then you really get into it, and you're like, "" Well, the Lego people in Denmark, they've got all this software to let you build your own virtually. "" And so this is like this CAD program where you build it. 
+And then whatever you design virtually, you click the button and it shows up at your doorstep a week later. 
+And then some of the designs that people do they actually sell in the store. 
+The Lego guys don't give you any royalties, strangely, but some user made this and then it sold. 
+And it's pretty amazing actually. 
+Then you notice that if that Lego-provided CAD program isn't enough, there's an entire open-source, third-party, independent Lego CAD program that lets you do 3D modeling and 3D rendering and make, in fact, movies out of Lego, 3D films of which there are thousands on YouTube, and some of them sort of mimicking famous films and some totally original content — just beautiful — and people recreating all sorts of things. 
+I have to take a moment. 
+I love the guy who's like running away with his clasps, his hooks. 
+Okay. Anyway. 
+(Laughter) There's a whole programming language and robotics tool, so if you want to teach someone how to program, kid, adult, whatever it is. 
+And the guy that made this, he made a slot machine out of Lego. 
+And I don't mean he made Lego that looked like a slot machine; I mean he made a slot machine out of Lego. 
+The insides were Lego. 
+There's people getting drunk building Lego, and you've got to finish the thing before you puke. 
+There's a whole gray market for Lego, thousands of home-based businesses. 
+And some people will fund their entire Lego habit by selling the little guy, but then you have no guys in your ships. 
+And then, just some examples. This stuff really is sculpture. 
+This is amazing what you can do. 
+And don't kid yourself: some architectural details, incredible organic shapes and just, even, nature out of, again, little blocks. 
+This is my house. 
+And this is my house. 
+I was afraid a car was going to come smash it as I was taking a picture for you guys. 
+Anyway, I'm out of time. 
+But just very quickly — we'll just see if I can do this quick. 
+Because there aren't enough TED logos around here. 
+(Laughter) Let's see here. 
+Okay. 
+Ta-da. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So when I do my job, people hate me. 
+In fact, the better I do my job, the more people hate me. 
+And no, I'm not a meter maid, and I'm not an undertaker. 
+I am a progressive lesbian talking head on Fox News. (Applause) So y'all heard that, right? Just to make sure, right? 
+I am a gay talking head on Fox News. 
+I am going to tell you how I do it and the most important thing I've learned. 
+So I go on television. 
+I debate people who literally want to obliterate everything I believe in, in some cases, who don't want me and people like me to even exist. 
+It's sort of like Thanksgiving with your conservative uncle on steroids, with a live television audience of millions. 
+It's totally almost just like that. 
+And that's just on air. 
+The hate mail I get is unbelievable. 
+Last week alone, I got 238 pieces of nasty email and more hate tweets than I can even count. 
+I was called an idiot, a traitor, a scourge, a cunt, and an ugly man, and that was just in one email. 
+(Laughter) So what have I realized, being on the receiving end of all this ugliness? 
+Well, my biggest takeaway is that for decades, we've been focused on political correctness, but what matters more is emotional correctness. 
+Let me give you a small example. 
+I don't care if you call me a dyke. I really don't. 
+I care about two things. 
+One, I care that you spell it right. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Just quick refresher, it's D-Y-K-E. 
+You'd totally be surprised. 
+And second, I don't care about the word, I care about how you use it. 
+Are you being friendly? Are you just being naive? 
+Or do you really want to hurt me personally? 
+Emotional correctness is the tone, the feeling, how we say what we say, the respect and compassion we show one another. 
+And what I've realized is that political persuasion doesn't begin with ideas or facts or data. 
+Political persuasion begins with being emotionally correct. 
+So when I first went to go work at Fox News, true confession, I expected there to be marks in the carpet from all the knuckle-dragging. 
+That, by the way, in case you're paying attention, is not emotionally correct. 
+But liberals on my side, we can be self-righteous, we can be condescending, we can be dismissive of anyone who doesn't agree with us. 
+In other words, we can be politically right but emotionally wrong. 
+And incidentally, that means that people don't like us. Right? 
+Now here's the kicker. 
+Conservatives are really nice. 
+I mean, not all of them, and not the ones who send me hate mail, but you would be surprised. 
+Sean Hannity is one of the sweetest guys I've ever met. 
+He spends his free time trying to fix up his staff on blind dates, and I know that if I ever had a problem, he would do anything he could to help. 
+Now, I think Sean Hannity is 99 percent politically wrong, but his emotional correctness is strikingly impressive, and that's why people listen to him. 
+Because you can't get anyone to agree with you if they don't even listen to you first. 
+We spend so much time talking past each other and not enough time talking through our disagreements, and if we can start to find compassion for one another, then we have a shot at building common ground. 
+It actually sounds really hokey to say it standing up here, but when you try to put it in practice, it's really powerful. 
+So someone who says they hate immigrants, I try to imagine how scared they must be that their community is changing from what they've always known. 
+Or someone who says they don't like teachers' unions, I bet they're really devastated to see their kid's school going into the gutter, and they're just looking for someone to blame. 
+Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us. 
+That is emotional correctness. 
+I'm not saying it's easy. 
+An average of, like, 5.6 times per day I have to stop myself from responding to all of my hate mail with a flurry of vile profanities. 
+This whole finding compassion and common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like a political-spiritual practice for me, and I ain't the Dalai Lama. 
+I'm not perfect, but what I am is optimistic, because I don't just get hate mail. 
+I get a lot of really nice letters, lots of them. 
+And one of my all-time favorites begins, "" I am not a big fan of your political leanings or your sometimes tortured logic, but I'm a big fan of you as a person. "" Now this guy doesn't agree with me, yet. 
+(Laughter) But he's listening, not because of what I said, but because of how I said it, and somehow, even though we've never met, we've managed to form a connection. 
+That's emotional correctness, and that's how we start the conversations that really lead to change. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. 
+Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language. 
+But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. 
+Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so. 
+I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. 
+Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. 
+I learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. 
+Since we only have five minutes, it's better that we have a fast and simpler way. 
+A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. 
+You only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy. 
+The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature — enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers. 
+Today I'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works. 
+You are ready? 
+Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. 
+You get a mouth. 
+This is a person going for a walk. 
+Person. 
+If the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling frantically, "" Help! I'm on fire! "" — This symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame, but I like to think that way. Whichever works for you. 
+This is a tree. 
+Tree. 
+This is a mountain. 
+The sun. 
+The moon. 
+The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west. 
+I call these eight characters radicals. 
+They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. 
+A person. 
+If someone walks behind, that is "" to follow. "" As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd. 
+If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, "" It was this big. "" The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. 
+He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale. 
+One tree is a tree. Two trees together, we have the woods. 
+Three trees together, we create the forest. 
+Put a plank underneath the tree, we have the foundation. 
+Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's "" idiot. "" (Laughter) Easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic. 
+Remember fire? 
+Two fires together, I get really hot. 
+Three fires together, that's a lot of flames. 
+Set the fire underneath the two trees, it's burning. 
+For us, the sun is the source of prosperity. 
+Two suns together, prosperous. 
+Three together, that's sparkles. 
+Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness. 
+It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. 
+The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise. 
+A door. Put a plank inside the door, it's a door bolt. 
+Put a mouth inside the door, asking questions. 
+Knock knock. Is anyone home? 
+This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading. 
+On the left, we have a woman. 
+Two women together, they have an argument. 
+(Laughter) Three women together, be careful, it's adultery. 
+So we have gone through almost 30 characters. 
+By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32. 
+The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. 
+So with very little effort, you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight-year-old. 
+So after we know the characters, we start building phrases. 
+For example, the mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano. 
+We know Japan is the land of the rising sun. 
+This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China. 
+So a sun, origin together, we build Japan. 
+A person behind Japan, what do we get? 
+A Japanese person. 
+The character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other. 
+In ancient China, that means in exile, because Chinese emperors, they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains. 
+Nowadays, exile has turned into getting out. 
+A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit. 
+This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off of the stage. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. 
+We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. 
+So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. 
+(Laughter) How can we lend and borrow more things, without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? 
+How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? 
+Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. 
+I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade. 
+In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. 
+And her death was sudden and unexpected. 
+I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you. 
+So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard, and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to..." 
+I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. 
+"Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy." 
+"Before I die, I want to hold her one more time." 
+So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. 
+It's about knowing you're not alone; it's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways; it's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change. 
+I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community. 
+So, my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina, and beyond. 
+Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice, and share more with one another. 
+Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us, as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+As a singer-songwriter, people often ask me about my influences or, as I like to call them, my sonic lineages. 
+And I could easily tell you that I was shaped by the jazz and hip hop that I grew up with, by the Ethiopian heritage of my ancestors, or by the 1980s pop on my childhood radio stations. 
+But beyond genre, there is another question: how do the sounds we hear every day influence the music that we make? 
+I believe that everyday soundscape can be the most unexpected inspiration for songwriting, and to look at this idea a little bit more closely, I'm going to talk today about three things: nature, language and silence — or rather, the impossibility of true silence. 
+And through this I hope to give you a sense of a world already alive with musical expression, with each of us serving as active participants, whether we know it or not. 
+I'm going to start today with nature, but before we do that, let's quickly listen to this snippet of an opera singer warming up. 
+Here it is. 
+(Singing) (Singing ends) It's beautiful, isn't it? 
+Gotcha! 
+That is actually not the sound of an opera singer warming up. 
+That is the sound of a bird slowed down to a pace that the human ear mistakenly recognizes as its own. 
+It was released as part of Peter Szöke's 1987 Hungarian recording "The Unknown Music of Birds," where he records many birds and slows down their pitches to reveal what's underneath. 
+Let's listen to the full-speed recording. 
+(Bird singing) Now, let's hear the two of them together so your brain can juxtapose them. 
+(Bird singing at slow then full speed) (Singing ends) It's incredible. 
+Perhaps the techniques of opera singing were inspired by birdsong. 
+As humans, we intuitively understand birds to be our musical teachers. 
+In Ethiopia, birds are considered an integral part of the origin of music itself. 
+The story goes like this: 1,500 years ago, a young man was born in the Empire of Aksum, a major trading center of the ancient world. 
+His name was Yared. 
+When Yared was seven years old his father died, and his mother sent him to go live with an uncle, who was a priest of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition, one of the oldest churches in the world. 
+Now, this tradition has an enormous amount of scholarship and learning, and Yared had to study and study and study and study, and one day he was studying under a tree, when three birds came to him. 
+One by one, these birds became his teachers. 
+They taught him music — scales, in fact. 
+And Yared, eventually recognized as Saint Yared, used these scales to compose five volumes of chants and hymns for worship and celebration. 
+And he used these scales to compose and to create an indigenous musical notation system. 
+And these scales evolved into what is known as kiñit, the unique, pentatonic, five-note, modal system that is very much alive and thriving and still evolving in Ethiopia today. 
+Now, I love this story because it's true at multiple levels. 
+Saint Yared was a real, historical figure, and the natural world can be our musical teacher. 
+And we have so many examples of this: the Pygmies of the Congo tune their instruments to the pitches of the birds in the forest around them. 
+Musician and natural soundscape expert Bernie Krause describes how a healthy environment has animals and insects taking up low, medium and high-frequency bands, in exactly the same way as a symphony does. 
+And countless works of music were inspired by bird and forest song. 
+Yes, the natural world can be our cultural teacher. 
+So let's go now to the uniquely human world of language. 
+Every language communicates with pitch to varying degrees, whether it's Mandarin Chinese, where a shift in melodic inflection gives the same phonetic syllable an entirely different meaning, to a language like English, where a raised pitch at the end of a sentence... 
+(Going up in pitch) implies a question? 
+(Laughter) As an Ethiopian-American woman, I grew up around the language of Amharic, Amhariña. 
+It was my first language, the language of my parents, one of the main languages of Ethiopia. 
+And there are a million reasons to fall in love with this language: its depth of poetics, its double entendres, its wax and gold, its humor, its proverbs that illuminate the wisdom and follies of life. 
+But there's also this melodicism, a musicality built right in. 
+And I find this distilled most clearly in what I like to call emphatic language — language that's meant to highlight or underline or that springs from surprise. 
+Take, for example, the word: "" indey. "" Now, if there are Ethiopians in the audience, they're probably chuckling to themselves, because the word means something like "" No! "" or "" How could he? "" or "" No, he didn't. "" It kind of depends on the situation. 
+But when I was a kid, this was my very favorite word, and I think it's because it has a pitch. 
+It has a melody. 
+You can almost see the shape as it springs from someone's mouth. 
+"" Indey "" — it dips, and then raises again. 
+And as a musician and composer, when I hear that word, something like this is floating through my mind. 
+(Music and singing "" Indey "") (Music ends) Or take, for example, the phrase for "" It is right "" or "" It is correct "" — "Lickih nehu... Lickih nehu." 
+It's an affirmation, an agreement. 
+"Lickih nehu." 
+When I hear that phrase, something like this starts rolling through my mind. 
+(Music and singing "" Lickih nehu "") (Music ends) And in both of those cases, what I did was I took the melody and the phrasing of those words and phrases and I turned them into musical parts to use in these short compositions. 
+And I like to write bass lines, so they both ended up kind of as bass lines. 
+Now, this is based on the work of Jason Moran and others who work intimately with music and language, but it's also something I've had in my head since I was a kid, how musical my parents sounded when they were speaking to each other and to us. 
+It was from them and from Amhariña that I learned that we are awash in musical expression with every word, every sentence that we speak, every word, every sentence that we receive. 
+Perhaps you can hear it in the words I'm speaking even now. 
+Finally, we go to the 1950s United States and the most seminal work of 20th century avant-garde composition: John Cage's "" 4: 33, "" written for any instrument or combination of instruments. 
+The musician or musicians are invited to walk onto the stage with a stopwatch and open the score, which was actually purchased by the Museum of Modern Art — the score, that is. 
+And this score has not a single note written and there is not a single note played for four minutes and 33 seconds. 
+And, at once enraging and enrapturing, Cage shows us that even when there are no strings being plucked by fingers or hands hammering piano keys, still there is music, still there is music, still there is music. 
+And what is this music? 
+It was that sneeze in the back. 
+(Laughter) It is the everyday soundscape that arises from the audience themselves: their coughs, their sighs, their rustles, their whispers, their sneezes, the room, the wood of the floors and the walls expanding and contracting, creaking and groaning with the heat and the cold, the pipes clanking and contributing. 
+And controversial though it was, and even controversial though it remains, Cage's point is that there is no such thing as true silence. 
+Even in the most silent environments, we still hear and feel the sound of our own heartbeats. 
+The world is alive with musical expression. 
+We are already immersed. 
+Now, I had my own moment of, let's say, remixing John Cage a couple of months ago when I was standing in front of the stove cooking lentils. 
+And it was late one night and it was time to stir, so I lifted the lid off the cooking pot, and I placed it onto the kitchen counter next to me, and it started to roll back and forth making this sound. 
+(Sound of metal lid clanking against a counter) (Clanking ends) And it stopped me cold. 
+I thought, "" What a weird, cool swing that cooking pan lid has. "" So when the lentils were ready and eaten, I hightailed it to my backyard studio, and I made this. 
+(Music, including the sound of the lid, and singing) (Music ends) Now, John Cage wasn't instructing musicians to mine the soundscape for sonic textures to turn into music. 
+He was saying that on its own, the environment is musically generative, that it is generous, that it is fertile, that we are already immersed. 
+Musician, music researcher, surgeon and human hearing expert Charles Limb is a professor at Johns Hopkins University and he studies music and the brain. 
+And he has a theory that it is possible — it is possible — that the human auditory system actually evolved to hear music, because it is so much more complex than it needs to be for language alone. 
+And if that's true, it means that we're hard-wired for music, that we can find it anywhere, that there is no such thing as a musical desert, that we are permanently hanging out at the oasis, and that is marvelous. 
+We can add to the soundtrack, but it's already playing. 
+And it doesn't mean don't study music. 
+Study music, trace your sonic lineages and enjoy that exploration. 
+But there is a kind of sonic lineage to which we all belong. 
+So the next time you are seeking percussion inspiration, look no further than your tires, as they roll over the unusual grooves of the freeway, or the top-right burner of your stove and that strange way that it clicks as it is preparing to light. 
+When seeking melodic inspiration, look no further than dawn and dusk avian orchestras or to the natural lilt of emphatic language. 
+We are the audience and we are the composers and we take from these pieces we are given. 
+We make, we make, we make, we make, knowing that when it comes to nature or language or soundscape, there is no end to the inspiration — if we are listening. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In 2011, during the final six months of Kim Jong-Il's life, I lived undercover in North Korea. 
+I was born and raised in South Korea, their enemy. 
+I live in America, their other enemy. 
+Since 2002, I had visited North Korea a few times. 
+And I had come to realize that to write about it with any meaning, or to understand the place beyond the regime's propaganda, the only option was total immersion. 
+So I posed as a teacher and a missionary at an all-male university in Pyongyang. 
+The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology was founded by Evangelical Christians who cooperate with the regime to educate the sons of the North Korean elite, without proselytizing, which is a capital crime there. 
+The students were 270 young men, expected to be the future leaders of the most isolated and brutal dictatorship in existence. 
+When I arrived, they became my students. 
+2011 was a special year, marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of North Korea's original Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung. 
+To celebrate the occasion, the regime shut down all universities, and sent students off to the fields to build the DPRK's much-heralded ideal as the world's most powerful and prosperous nation. 
+North Korea is a gulag posing as a nation. 
+Everything there is about the Great Leader. 
+Every book, every newspaper article, every song, every TV program — there is just one subject. 
+The flowers are named after him, the mountains are carved with his slogans. 
+Every citizen wears the badge of the Great Leader at all times. 
+Even their calendar system begins with the birth of Kim Il-Sung. 
+The school was a heavily guarded prison, posing as a campus. 
+Teachers could only leave on group outings accompanied by an official minder. 
+Even then, our trips were limited to sanctioned national monuments celebrating the Great Leader. 
+The students were not allowed to leave the campus, or communicate with their parents. 
+Their days were meticulously mapped out, and any free time they had was devoted to honoring their Great Leader. 
+Lesson plans had to meet the approval of North Korean staff, every class was recorded and reported on, every room was bugged, and every conversation, overheard. 
+Every blank space was covered with the portraits of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, like everywhere else in North Korea. 
+We were never allowed to discuss the outside world. 
+As students of science and technology, many of them were computer majors but they did not know the existence of the Internet. 
+They had never heard of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. 
+Facebook, Twitter — none of those things would have meant a thing. 
+And I could not tell them. 
+I went there looking for truth. 
+But where do you even start when an entire nation's ideology, my students' day-to-day realities, and even my own position at the universities, were all built on lies? 
+We played "" Truth and Lie. "" A volunteer would write a sentence on the chalkboard, and the other students had to guess whether it was a truth or a lie. 
+Once a student wrote, "" I visited China last year on vacation, "" and everyone shouted, "" Lie! "" They all knew this wasn't possible. 
+Virtually no North Korean is allowed to leave the country. 
+Even traveling within their own country requires a travel pass. 
+I had hoped that this game would reveal some truth about my students, because they lie so often and so easily, whether about the mythical accomplishments of their Great Leader, or the strange claim that they cloned a rabbit as fifth graders. 
+The difference between truth and lies seemed at times hazy to them. 
+It took me a while to understand the different types of lies; they lie to shield their system from the world, or they were taught lies, and were just regurgitating them. 
+Or, at moments, they lied out of habit. 
+But if all they have ever known were lies, how could we expect them to be otherwise? 
+Next, I tried to teach them essay writing. 
+Essays are about coming up with one's own thesis, and making an evidence-based argument to prove it. 
+These students, however, were simply told what to think, and they obeyed. 
+In their world, critical thinking was not allowed. 
+I also gave them the weekly assignment of writing a personal letter, to anybody. 
+It took a long time, but eventually some of them began to write to their mothers, their friends, their girlfriends. 
+Although those were just homework, and would never reach their intended recipients, my students slowly began to reveal their true feelings in them. 
+They wrote that they were fed up with the sameness of everything. 
+They were worried about their future. 
+In those letters, they rarely ever mentioned their Great Leader. 
+I was spending all of my time with these young men. 
+We all ate meals together, played basketball together. 
+I often called them gentlemen, which made them giggle. 
+They blushed at the mention of girls. 
+And I came to adore them. 
+And watching them open up even in the tiniest of ways, was deeply moving. 
+But something also felt wrong. 
+During those months of living in their world, I often wondered if the truth would, in fact, improve their lives. 
+I wanted so much to tell them the truth, of their country and of the outside world, where Arab youth were turning their rotten regime inside out, using the power of social media, where everyone except them was connected through the world wide web, which wasn't worldwide after all. 
+But for them, the truth was dangerous. 
+By encouraging them to run after it, I was putting them at risk — of persecution, of heartbreak. 
+In one of their personal letters to me, a student wrote that he understood why I always called them gentlemen. 
+It was because I was wishing them to be gentle in life, he said. 
+On my last day in December of 2011, the day Kim Jong-Il's death was announced, their world shattered. 
+I had to leave without a proper goodbye. 
+Once, toward the end of my stay, a student said to me, "" Professor, we never think of you as being different from us. 
+Our circumstances are different, but you're the same as us. 
+We want you to know that we truly think of you as being the same. "" Today, if I could respond to my students with a letter of my own, which is of course impossible, I would tell them this: "" My dear gentlemen, It's been a bit over three years since I last saw you. 
+At our final class, I asked you if there was anything you wanted. 
+Just once. 
+I was there to teach you English; you knew it wasn't allowed. 
+But I understood then, you wanted to share that bond of our mother tongue. 
+I called you my gentlemen, but I don't know if being gentle in Kim Jong-Un's merciless North Korea is a good thing. 
+I don't want you to lead a revolution — let some other young person do it. 
+If my attempts to reach you have inspired something new in you, I would rather you forget me. 
+Become soldiers of your Great Leader, and live long, safe lives. 
+You once asked me if I thought your city of Pyongyang was beautiful, and I could not answer truthfully then. 
+I know that it was important for you to hear that I, your teacher, the one who has seen the world that you are forbidden from, declare your city as the most beautiful. 
+I know hearing that would make your lives there a bit more bearable, but no, I don't find your capital beautiful. 
+Not because it's monotone and concrete, but because of what it symbolizes: a monster that feeds off the rest of the country, where citizens are soldiers and slaves. 
+But it's your home, so I cannot hate it. 
+And I hope instead that you, my lovely young gentlemen, will one day help make it beautiful. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+War has been a part of my life since I can remember. 
+I was born in Afghanistan, just six months after the Soviets invaded, and even though I was too young to understand what was happening, I had a deep sense of the suffering and the fear around me. 
+Those early experiences had a major impact on how I now think about war and conflict. 
+For these types conflicts — when people's rights are violated, when their countries are occupied, when they're oppressed and humiliated — they need a powerful way to resist and to fight back. 
+Which means that no matter how destructive and terrible violence is, if people see it as their only choice, they will use it. 
+Most of us are concerned with the level of violence in the world. 
+But we're not going to end war by telling people that violence is morally wrong. 
+This is the work I do. 
+For the past 13 years, I've been teaching people in some of the most difficult situations around the world how they can use nonviolent struggle to conduct conflict. 
+Most people associate this type of action with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. 
+But people have been using nonviolent action for thousands of years. 
+In fact, most of the rights that we have today in this country — as women, as minorities, as workers, as people of different sexual orientations and citizens concerned with the environment — these rights weren't handed to us. 
+I met recently with a group of Ethiopian activists, and they told me something that I hear a lot. 
+They said they'd already tried nonviolent action, and it hadn't worked. 
+Years ago they held a protest. 
+The government arrested everyone, and that was the end of that. 
+The idea that nonviolent struggle is equivalent to street protests is a real problem. 
+Because although protests can be a great way to show that people want change, on their own, they don't actually create change — at least change that is fundamental. 
+(Laughter) Powerful opponents are not going to give people what they want just because they asked nicely... 
+or even not so nicely. 
+(Laughter) Nonviolent struggle works by destroying an opponent, not physically, but by identifying the institutions that an opponent needs to survive, and then denying them those sources of power. 
+Nonviolent activists can neutralize the military by causing soldiers to defect. 
+They can disrupt the economy through strikes and boycotts. 
+And they can challenge government propaganda by creating alternative media. 
+There are a variety of methods that can be used to do this. 
+My colleague and mentor, Gene Sharp, has identified 198 methods of nonviolent action. 
+And protest is only one. 
+Let me give you a recent example. 
+Until a few months ago, Guatemala was ruled by corrupt former military officials with ties to organized crime. 
+People were generally aware of this, but most of them felt powerless to do anything about it — until one group of citizens, just 12 regular people, put out a call on Facebook to their friends to meet in the central plaza, holding signs with a message: "" Renuncia YA "" — resign already. 
+To their surprise, 30,000 people showed up. 
+They stayed there for months as protests spread throughout the country. 
+At one point, the organizers delivered hundreds of eggs to various government buildings with a message: "" If you don't have the huevos "" — the balls — "" to stop corrupt candidates from running for office, you can borrow ours. "" (Laughter) (Applause) President Molina responded by vowing that he would never step down. 
+And the activists realized that they couldn't just keep protesting and ask the president to resign. 
+In Guatemala City alone, over 400 businesses and schools shut their doors. 
+Meanwhile, farmers throughout the country blocked major roads. 
+Within five days, the president, along with dozens of other government officials, resigned already. 
+(Applause) I've been greatly inspired by the creativity and bravery of people using nonviolent action in nearly every country in the world. 
+For example, recently a group of activists in Uganda released a crate of pigs in the streets. 
+You can see here that the police are confused about what to do with them. 
+(Laughter) The pigs were painted the color of the ruling party. 
+One pig was even wearing a hat, a hat that people recognized. 
+(Laughter) Activists around the world are getting better at grabbing headlines, but these isolated actions do very little if they're not part of a larger strategy. 
+Its participants must be well-trained and have clear objectives, and its leaders must have a strategy of how to achieve those objectives. 
+The technique of war has been developed over thousands of years with massive resources and some of our best minds dedicated to understanding and improving how it works. 
+Meanwhile, nonviolent struggle is rarely systematically studied, and even though the number is growing, there are still only a few dozen people in the world who are teaching it. 
+This is dangerous, because we now know that our old approaches of dealing with conflict are not adequate for the new challenges that we're facing. 
+The US government recently admitted that it's in a stalemate in its war against ISIS. 
+But what most people don't know is that people have stood up to ISIS using nonviolent action. 
+When ISIS captured Mosul in June 2014, they announced that they were putting in place a new public school curriculum, based on their own extremist ideology. 
+But on the first day of school, not a single child showed up. 
+Parents simply refused to send them. 
+But what if it was coordinated with the dozens of other acts of nonviolent resistance that have taken place against ISIS? 
+What if the parents' boycott was part of a larger strategy to identify and cut off the resources that ISIS needs to function; the skilled labor needed to produce food; the engineers needed to extract and refine oil; the media infrastructure and communications networks and transportation systems, and the local businesses that ISIS relies on? 
+It may be difficult to imagine defeating ISIS with action that is nonviolent. 
+But it's time we challenge the way we think about conflict and the choices we have in facing it. 
+Here's an idea worth spreading: let's learn more about where nonviolent action has worked and how we can make it more powerful, just like we do with other systems and technologies that are constantly being refined to better meet human needs. 
+It may be that we can improve nonviolent action to a point where it is increasingly used in place of war. 
+Violence as a tool of conflict could then be abandoned in the same way that bows and arrows were, because we have replaced them with weapons that are more effective. 
+With human innovation, we can make nonviolent struggle more powerful than the newest and latest technologies of war. 
+The greatest hope for humanity lies not in condemning violence but in making violence obsolete. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This might be the most important sneaker in history. 
+First released in 1988, this is the shoe that started Nike marketing as we know it. 
+This is the shoe that propelled the entire Air Jordan lineage, and perhaps saved Nike. 
+It's been re-released four times. 
+Every celebrity's been seen wearing it. 
+And right about now, most of you are probably thinking, "" Sneakers? "" (Laughter) Yes. 
+Some extraordinary things about sneakers and data and Nike and how they're all related, possibly, to the future of all online commerce. 
+In 2011, the last time the Jordan 3 Black Cement was released, at a retail of 160 dollars, it sold out globally in minutes. 
+In fact, there's over 1,000 pairs on eBay right now, four years later. 
+But here's the thing: this happens every single Saturday. 
+This is Nike building the marketplace for sneakerheads — people who collect sneakers — and my daughter. 
+(Laughter) Yeah, 8,000 dollars. 
+And while that's obviously the anomaly, the resell sneaker market is definitely not. 
+Thirty years in the making, what started as an underground culture of a few people who like sneakers just a bit too much — (Laughter) Now we have sneaker addictions. 
+In the pantheon of great collections, mine doesn't even register. 
+I have about 250 pairs, but trust me, I am small-time. 
+I'm a very typical 37-year-old sneakerhead. 
+After starting three companies, I took a job as a strategy consultant, when I very quickly realized that I didn't know the first thing about data. 
+But I learned, because I had to, and I liked it. 
+The goal was to develop a price guide, a real data-driven view of the market. 
+And four years later, we're analyzing over 25 million transactions, providing real-time analytics on thousands of sneakers. 
+Now sneakerheads check prices while camping out for releases. 
+Others have used the data to validate insurance claims. 
+And the top investment banks in the world now use resell data to analyze the retail footwear industry. 
+(Laughter) Sneakerheads can track the value of their collection over time, compare it to others, and have access to the same analytics you might for your online brokerage account. 
+I have one of those. 
+(Laughter) So an unregulated 1.2 billion dollar industry that thrives as much on the street as it does online, and has spawned fundamental financial services for sneakers? 
+(Laughter) In fact, one guy emailed to say he thought his 15-year-old son was selling drugs and later found out he was selling sneakers. (Laughter) 
+And now they use the data to do it together. 
+And that's because sneakers are an investment opportunity where none other exists. 
+I sold chewing gum in sixth grade, Blow Pops in ninth grade and collected baseball cards through high school. 
+For a lot of people, sneakers are a legal and accessible investment opportunity — a democratized stock market, but also unregulated. 
+And while that definitely happens and is tragic, it's not nearly the epidemic some media would have you believe. 
+In the case of sneakers, that someone is Nike. 
+Let me walk you through some numbers. 
+Let's jump to retail for a second. 
+That means that Nike's customers make almost twice as much profit as their closest competitor. 
+That — (Laughter) How is that even possible? 
+It's a false construct created by Nike — ingeniously created by Nike, in the most positive sense — to sell more shoes. 
+And in the process, it provided tens of thousands of people with life-long passions, myself included. 
+That's because unlike Apple, who will sell an iPhone to anyone who wants one, Nike doesn't make their money by just selling $200 sneakers. 
+They sell millions of shoes to millions of people for 60 dollars. 
+It's marketing. 
+You know those crazy iPhone lines you see on the news every other year? 
+So Nike sets the rules. 
+But once a pair leaves the retail channel, it's the Wild West. 
+There are very few — if any — legal, unregulated markets of this size. 
+So Nike is definitely not the stock exchange. 
+Some are eBay clones, some are mobile markets, and then you have consignment shops and brick-and-mortar stores, and sneaker conventions, and reseller sites, and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter — literally, anywhere sneakerheads come into contact with each other, shoes will be bought and sold. 
+But that means no efficiencies, no transparency, sometimes not even authenticity. 
+Can you imagine if that's how stocks were bought? 
+What if the way to buy a share of Apple stock was to search over 100 places online and off, including every time you walk down the street just hoping to pass someone wearing some Apple stock? 
+A stock market of things. 
+And not only could you buy in a much more educated and efficient manner, but you could engage in all the sophisticated financial transactions you can with the stock market. 
+Because if you had invested in a pair of Air Jordan 3 Black Cement in 2011, you could either be wearing them onstage, (Laughter) or have earned 162 percent on your money — double the S & P and 20 percent more than Apple. (Laughter) 
+And that's why we're talking about sneakers. 
+Thank you. 
+
+Do you worry about what is going to kill you? 
+Heart disease, cancer, a car accident? 
+Most of us worry about things we can't control, like war, terrorism, the tragic earthquake that just occurred in Haiti. 
+But what really threatens humanity? 
+A few years ago, Professor Vaclav Smil tried to calculate the probability of sudden disasters large enough to change history. 
+He called these, "massively fatal discontinuities," meaning that they could kill up to 100 million people in the next 50 years. 
+He looked at the odds of another world war, of a massive volcanic eruption, even of an asteroid hitting the Earth. 
+But he placed the likelihood of one such event above all others at close to 100 percent, and that is a severe flu pandemic. 
+Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. 
+Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. 
+In the developing world, the data is much sketchier but the death toll is almost certainly higher. 
+You know, the problem is if this virus occasionally mutates so dramatically, it essentially is a new virus and then we get a pandemic. 
+In 1918, a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people. 
+It spread like wildfire and some died within hours of developing symptoms. 
+Are we safer today? 
+Well, we seem to have dodged the deadly pandemic this year that most of us feared, but this threat could reappear at any time. 
+The good news is that we're at a moment in time when science, technology, globalization is converging to create an unprecedented possibility: the possibility to make history by preventing infectious diseases that still account for one-fifth of all deaths and countless misery on Earth. 
+We can do this. 
+We're already preventing millions of deaths with existing vaccines, and if we get these to more people, we can certainly save more lives. 
+But with new or better vaccines for malaria, TB, HIV, pneumonia, diarrhea, flu, we could end suffering that has been on the Earth since the beginning of time. 
+So, I'm here to trumpet vaccines for you. 
+But first, I have to explain why they're important because vaccines, the power of them, is really like a whisper. 
+When they work, they can make history, but after a while you can barely hear them. 
+Now, some of us are old enough to have a small, circular scar on our arms from an inoculation we received as children. 
+But when was the last time you worried about smallpox, a disease that killed half a billion people last century and no longer is with us? 
+Or polio? How many of you remember the iron lung? 
+We don't see scenes like this anymore because of vaccines. 
+Now, it's interesting because there are 30-odd diseases that can be treated with vaccines now, but we're still threatened by things like HIV and flu. 
+Why is that? 
+Well, here's the dirty little secret. 
+Until recently, we haven't had to know exactly how a vaccine worked. 
+We knew they worked through old-fashioned trial and error. 
+You took a pathogen, you modified it, you injected it into a person or an animal and you saw what happened. 
+This worked well for most pathogens, somewhat well for crafty bugs like flu, but not at all for HIV, for which humans have no natural immunity. 
+So let's explore how vaccines work. 
+They basically create a cache of weapons for your immune system which you can deploy when needed. 
+Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. 
+When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. 
+So that's really how vaccines work. 
+Now, let's take a look at a video that we're debuting at TED, for the first time, on how an effective HIV vaccine might work. 
+(Music) Narrator: A vaccine trains the body in advance how to recognize and neutralize a specific invader. 
+After HIV penetrates the body's mucosal barriers, it infects immune cells to replicate. 
+The invader draws the attention of the immune system's front-line troops. 
+Dendritic cells, or macrophages, capture the virus and display pieces of it. 
+Memory cells generated by the HIV vaccine are activated when they learn HIV is present from the front-line troops. 
+These memory cells immediately deploy the exact weapons needed. 
+Memory B cells turn into plasma cells, which produce wave after wave of the specific antibodies that latch onto HIV to prevent it from infecting cells, while squadrons of killer T cells seek out and destroy cells that are already HIV infected. 
+The virus is defeated. 
+Without a vaccine, these responses would have taken more than a week. 
+By that time, the battle against HIV would already have been lost. 
+Seth Berkley: Really cool video, isn't it? 
+The antibodies you just saw in this video, in action, are the ones that make most vaccines work. 
+So the real question then is: How do we ensure that your body makes the exact ones that we need to protect against flu and HIV? 
+The principal challenge for both of these viruses is that they're always changing. 
+So let's take a look at the flu virus. 
+In this rendering of the flu virus, these different colored spikes are what it uses to infect you. 
+And also, what the antibodies use is a handle to essentially grab and neutralize the virus. 
+When these mutate, they change their shape, and the antibodies don't know what they're looking at anymore. 
+So that's why every year you can catch a slightly different strain of flu. 
+It's also why in the spring, we have to make a best guess at which three strains are going to prevail the next year, put those into a single vaccine and rush those into production for the fall. 
+Even worse, the most common influenza — influenza A — also infects animals that live in close proximity to humans, and they can recombine in those particular animals. 
+In addition, wild aquatic birds carry all known strains of influenza. 
+So, you've got this situation: In 2003, we had an H5N1 virus that jumped from birds into humans in a few isolated cases with an apparent mortality rate of 70 percent. 
+Now luckily, that particular virus, although very scary at the time, did not transmit from person to person very easily. 
+This year's H1N1 threat was actually a human, avian, swine mixture that arose in Mexico. 
+It was easily transmitted, but, luckily, was pretty mild. 
+And so, in a sense, our luck is holding out, but you know, another wild bird could fly over at anytime. 
+Now let's take a look at HIV. 
+As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. 
+The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. 
+It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it and it quickly hides itself in your genome. 
+Here's a slide looking at the genetic variation of flu and comparing that to HIV, a much wilder target. 
+In the video a moment ago, you saw fleets of new viruses launching from infected cells. 
+Now realize that in a recently infected person, there are millions of these ships; each one is just slightly different. 
+Finding a weapon that recognizes and sinks all of them makes the job that much harder. 
+Now, in the 27 years since HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, we've developed more drugs to treat HIV than all other viruses put together. 
+These drugs aren't cures, but they represent a huge triumph of science because they take away the automatic death sentence from a diagnosis of HIV, at least for those who can access them. 
+The vaccine effort though is really quite different. 
+Large companies moved away from it because they thought the science was so difficult and vaccines were seen as poor business. 
+Many thought that it was just impossible to make an AIDS vaccine, but today, evidence tells us otherwise. 
+In September, we had surprising but exciting findings from a clinical trial that took place in Thailand. 
+For the first time, we saw an AIDS vaccine work in humans — albeit, quite modestly — and that particular vaccine was made almost a decade ago. 
+Newer concepts and early testing now show even greater promise in the best of our animal models. 
+But in the past few months, researchers have also isolated several new broadly neutralizing antibodies from the blood of an HIV infected individual. 
+Now, what does this mean? 
+We saw earlier that HIV is highly variable, that a broad neutralizing antibody latches on and disables multiple variations of the virus. 
+If you take these and you put them in the best of our monkey models, they provide full protection from infection. 
+In addition, these researchers found a new site on HIV where the antibodies can grab onto, and what's so special about this spot is that it changes very little as the virus mutates. 
+It's like, as many times as the virus changes its clothes, it's still wearing the same socks, and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks. 
+So what we've got is a situation. 
+The Thai results tell us we can make an AIDS vaccine, and the antibody findings tell us how we might do that. 
+This strategy, working backwards from an antibody to create a vaccine candidate, has never been done before in vaccine research. 
+It's called retro-vaccinology, and its implications extend way beyond that of just HIV. 
+So think of it this way. 
+We've got these new antibodies we've identified, and we know that they latch onto many, many variations of the virus. 
+We know that they have to latch onto a specific part, so if we can figure out the precise structure of that part, present that through a vaccine, what we hope is we can prompt your immune system to make these matching antibodies. 
+And that would create a universal HIV vaccine. 
+Now, it sounds easier than it is because the structure actually looks more like this blue antibody diagram attached to its yellow binding site, and as you can imagine, these three-dimensional structures are much harder to work on. 
+And if you guys have ideas to help us solve this, we'd love to hear about it. 
+But, you know, the research that has occurred from HIV now has really helped with innovation with other diseases. 
+So for instance, a biotechnology company has now found broadly neutralizing antibodies to influenza, as well as a new antibody target on the flu virus. 
+They're currently making a cocktail — an antibody cocktail — that can be used to treat severe, overwhelming cases of flu. 
+In the longer term, what they can do is use these tools of retro-vaccinology to make a preventive flu vaccine. 
+Now, retro-vaccinology is just one technique within the ambit of so-called rational vaccine design. 
+Let me give you another example. 
+We talked about before the H and N spikes on the surface of the flu virus. 
+Notice these other, smaller protuberances. 
+These are largely hidden from the immune system. 
+Now it turns out that these spots also don't change much when the virus mutates. 
+If you can cripple these with specific antibodies, you could cripple all versions of the flu. 
+So far, animal tests indicate that such a vaccine could prevent severe disease, although you might get a mild case. 
+So if this works in humans, what we're talking about is a universal flu vaccine, one that doesn't need to change every year and would remove the threat of death. 
+We really could think of flu, then, as just a bad cold. 
+Of course, the best vaccine imaginable is only valuable to the extent we get it to everyone who needs it. 
+So to do that, we have to combine smart vaccine design with smart production methods and, of course, smart delivery methods. 
+So I want you to think back a few months ago. 
+In June, the World Health Organization declared the first global flu pandemic in 41 years. 
+The U.S. government promised 150 million doses of vaccine by October 15th for the flu peak. 
+Vaccines were promised to developing countries. 
+Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and flowed to accelerating vaccine manufacturing. 
+So what happened? 
+Well, we first figured out how to make flu vaccines, how to produce them, in the early 1940s. 
+It was a slow, cumbersome process that depended on chicken eggs, millions of living chicken eggs. 
+Viruses only grow in living things, and so it turned out that, for flu, chicken eggs worked really well. 
+For most strains, you could get one to two doses of vaccine per egg. 
+Luckily for us, we live in an era of breathtaking biomedical advances. 
+So today, we get our flu vaccines from... 
+chicken eggs, (Laughter) hundreds of millions of chicken eggs. 
+Almost nothing has changed. 
+The system is reliable but the problem is you never know how well a strain is going to grow. 
+This year's swine flu strain grew very poorly in early production: basically .6 doses per egg. 
+So, here's an alarming thought. 
+What if that wild bird flies by again? 
+You could see an avian strain that would infect the poultry flocks, and then we would have no eggs for our vaccines. 
+So, Dan [Barber], if you want billions of chicken pellets for your fish farm, I know where to get them. 
+So right now, the world can produce about 350 million doses of flu vaccine for the three strains, and we can up that to about 1.2 billion doses if we want to target a single variant like swine flu. 
+But this assumes that our factories are humming because, in 2004, the U.S. supply was cut in half by contamination at one single plant. 
+And the process still takes more than half a year. 
+So are we better prepared than we were in 1918? 
+Well, with the new technologies emerging now, I hope we can say definitively, "" Yes. "" Imagine we could produce enough flu vaccine for everyone in the entire world for less than half of what we're currently spending now in the United States. 
+With a range of new technologies, we could. 
+Here's an example: A company I'm engaged with has found a specific piece of the H spike of flu that sparks the immune system. 
+If you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium, which creates a vigorous immune response, they've created a very powerful flu fighter. 
+This vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria, E. coli. 
+Now, as you know, bacteria reproduce quickly — it's like making yogurt — and so we could produce enough swine origin flu for the entire world in a few factories, in a few weeks, with no eggs, for a fraction of the cost of current methods. 
+(Applause) So here's a comparison of several of these new vaccine technologies. 
+And, aside from the radically increased production and huge cost savings — for example, the E. coli method I just talked about — look at the time saved: this would be lives saved. 
+The developing world, mostly left out of the current response, sees the potential of these alternate technologies and they're leapfrogging the West. 
+India, Mexico and others are already making experimental flu vaccines, and they may be the first place we see these vaccines in use. 
+Because these technologies are so efficient and relatively cheap, billions of people can have access to lifesaving vaccines if we can figure out how to deliver them. 
+Now think of where this leads us. 
+New infectious diseases appear or reappear every few years. 
+Some day, perhaps soon, we'll have a virus that is going to threaten all of us. 
+Will we be quick enough to react before millions die? 
+Luckily, this year's flu was relatively mild. 
+I say, "" luckily "" in part because virtually no one in the developing world was vaccinated. 
+So if we have the political and financial foresight to sustain our investments, we will master these and new tools of vaccinology, and with these tools we can produce enough vaccine for everyone at low cost and ensure healthy productive lives. 
+No longer must flu have to kill half a million people a year. 
+No longer does AIDS need to kill two million a year. 
+No longer do the poor and vulnerable need to be threatened by infectious diseases, or indeed, anybody. 
+Instead of having Vaclav Smil's "" massively fatal discontinuity "" of life, we can ensure the continuity of life. 
+What the world needs now are these new vaccines, and we can make it happen. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. 
+So, the science is changing. In your mind, Seth — I mean, you must dream about this — 
+what is the kind of time scale on, let's start with HIV, for a game-changing vaccine that's actually out there and usable? 
+SB: The game change can come at any time, because the problem we have now is we've shown we can get a vaccine to work in humans; we just need a better one. 
+And with these types of antibodies, we know humans can make them. 
+So, if we can figure out how to do that, then we have the vaccine, and what's interesting is there already is some evidence that we're beginning to crack that problem. 
+So, the challenge is full speed ahead. 
+CA: In your gut, do you think it's probably going to be at least another five years? 
+SB: You know, everybody says it's 10 years, but it's been 10 years every 10 years. 
+So I hate to put a timeline on scientific innovation, but the investments that have occurred are now paying dividends. 
+CA: And that's the same with universal flu vaccine, the same kind of thing? 
+SB: I think flu is different. I think what happened with flu is we've got a bunch — I just showed some of this — a bunch of really cool and useful technologies that are ready to go now. 
+They look good. The problem has been that, what we did is we invested in traditional technologies because that's what we were comfortable with. 
+You also can use adjuvants, which are chemicals you mix. 
+That's what Europe is doing, so we could have diluted out our supply of flu and made more available, but, going back to what Michael Specter said, the anti-vaccine crowd didn't really want that to happen. 
+CA: And malaria's even further behind? 
+SB: No, malaria, there is a candidate that actually showed efficacy in an earlier trial and is currently in phase three trials now. 
+It probably isn't the perfect vaccine, but it's moving along. 
+CA: Seth, most of us do work where every month, we produce something; we get that kind of gratification. 
+You've been slaving away at this for more than a decade, and I salute you and your colleagues for what you do. 
+The world needs people like you. Thank you. 
+SB: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Well, Arthur C. Clarke, a famous science fiction writer from the 1950s, said that, "" We overestimate technology in the short term, and we underestimate it in the long term. "" And I think that's some of the fear that we see about jobs disappearing from artificial intelligence and robots. 
+That we're overestimating the technology in the short term. 
+Because the demographics are really going to leave us with lots of jobs that need doing and that we, our society, is going to have to be built on the shoulders of steel of robots in the future. 
+So I'm scared we won't have enough robots. 
+But fear of losing jobs to technology has been around for a long time. 
+Back in 1957, there was a Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn movie. 
+So you know how it ended up, Spencer Tracy brought a computer, a mainframe computer of 1957, in to help the librarians. 
+The librarians in the company would do things like answer for the executives, "What are the names of Santa's reindeer?" 
+And they would look that up. 
+The librarians were afraid their jobs were going to disappear. 
+But that's not what happened in fact. 
+It wasn't until the Internet came into play, the web came into play and search engines came into play that the need for librarians went down. 
+And I think everyone from 1957 totally underestimated the level of technology we would all carry around in our hands and in our pockets today. 
+And we can just ask: "" What are the names of Santa's reindeer? "" and be told instantly — or anything else we want to ask. 
+By the way, the wages for librarians went up faster than the wages for other jobs in the U.S. over that same time period, because librarians became partners of computers. 
+Computers became tools, and they got more tools that they could use and become more effective during that time. 
+Same thing happened in offices. 
+Back in the old days, people used spreadsheets. 
+Spreadsheets were spread sheets of paper, and they calculated by hand. 
+But here was an interesting thing that came along. 
+With the revolution around 1980 of P.C. 's, the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers, not to replace office workers, but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers. 
+So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets. 
+It increased their capabilities. 
+They no longer had to do the mundane computations, but they could do something much more. 
+Now today, we're starting to see robots in our lives. 
+On the left there is the PackBot from iRobot. 
+When soldiers came across roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of putting on a bomb suit and going out and poking with a stick, as they used to do up until about 2002, they now send the robot out. 
+So the robot takes over the dangerous jobs. 
+On the right are some TUGs from a company called Aethon in Pittsburgh. 
+These are in hundreds of hospitals across the U.S. 
+They take the dirty dishes back to the kitchen. 
+They bring the medicines up from the pharmacy. 
+And it frees up the nurses and the nurse's aides from doing that mundane work of just mechanically pushing stuff around to spend more time with patients. 
+In fact, robots have become sort of ubiquitous in our lives in many ways. 
+But I think when it comes to factory robots, people are sort of afraid, because factory robots are dangerous to be around. 
+In order to program them, you have to understand six-dimensional vectors and quaternions. 
+And ordinary people can't interact with them. 
+And I think it's the sort of technology that's gone wrong. 
+And I think we really have to look at technologies that ordinary workers can interact with. 
+And so I want to tell you today about Baxter, which we've been talking about. 
+And Baxter, I see, as a way — a first wave of robot that ordinary people can interact with in an industrial setting. 
+So Baxter is up here. 
+This is Chris Harbert from Rethink Robotics. 
+We've got a conveyor there. 
+And if the lighting isn't too extreme — Ah, ah! There it is. It's picked up the object off the conveyor. 
+It's going to come bring it over here and put it down. 
+The interesting thing is Baxter has some basic common sense. 
+By the way, what's going on with the eyes? 
+The eyes are on the screen there. 
+So a person that's interacting with the robot understands where it's going to reach and isn't surprised by its motions. 
+Here Chris took the object out of its hand, and Baxter didn't go and try to put it down; it went back and realized it had to get another one. 
+It's got a little bit of basic common sense, goes and picks the objects. 
+And Baxter's safe to interact with. 
+You wouldn't want to do this with a current industrial robot. 
+It feels the force, understands that Chris is there and doesn't push through him and hurt him. 
+But I think the most interesting thing about Baxter is the user interface. 
+And when he grabs an arm, it goes into zero-force gravity-compensated mode and graphics come up on the screen. 
+You can see some icons on the left of the screen there for what was about its right arm. 
+He's going to put something in its hand, he's going to bring it over here, press a button and let go of that thing in the hand. 
+And the robot figures out, ah, he must mean I want to put stuff down. 
+It puts a little icon there. 
+He comes over here, and he gets the fingers to grasp together, and the robot infers, ah, you want an object for me to pick up. 
+That puts the green icon there. 
+He's going to map out an area of where the robot should pick up the object from. 
+It just moves it around, and the robot figures out that was an area search. 
+He didn't have to select that from a menu. 
+So as we continue here, I want to tell you about what this is like in factories. 
+These robots we're shipping every day. 
+They go to factories around the country. 
+Mildred's a factory worker in Connecticut. 
+One hour after she saw her first industrial robot, she had programmed it to do some tasks in the factory. 
+She decided she really liked robots. 
+And it was doing the simple repetitive tasks that she had had to do beforehand. 
+Now she's got the robot doing it. 
+When we first went out to talk to people in factories about how we could get robots to interact with them better, one of the questions we asked them was, "Do you want your children to work in a factory?" 
+The universal answer was "" No, I want a better job than that for my children. "" And as a result of that, Mildred is very typical of today's factory workers in the U.S. 
+They're older, and they're getting older and older. 
+And as their tasks become more onerous on them, we need to give them tools that they can collaborate with, so that they can be part of the solution, so that they can continue to work and we can continue to produce in the U.S. 
+And so our vision is that Mildred who's the line worker becomes Mildred the robot trainer. 
+She lifts her game, like the office workers of the 1980s lifted their game of what they could do. 
+We're not giving them tools that they have to go and study for years and years in order to use. 
+That's climate change and demographics. 
+Demographics is really going to change our world. 
+This is the percentage of adults who are working age. 
+And it's gone down slightly over the last 40 years. 
+And turned up the other way, the people who are retirement age goes up very, very fast, as the baby boomers get to retirement age. 
+That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services. 
+But more than that, as we get older we get more frail and we can't do all the tasks we used to do. 
+If we look at the statistics on the ages of caregivers, before our eyes those caregivers are getting older and older. 
+That's happening statistically right now. 
+And as the number of people who are older, above retirement age and getting older, as they increase, there will be less people to take care of them. 
+I mean robots doing the things that we normally do for ourselves but get harder as we get older. 
+Getting the groceries in from the car, up the stairs, into the kitchen. 
+Or even, as we get very much older, driving our cars to go visit people. 
+And I think robotics gives people a chance to have dignity as they get older by having control of the robotic solution. 
+So they don't have to rely on people that are getting scarcer to help them. 
+And so I really think that we're going to be spending more time with robots like Baxter and working with robots like Baxter in our daily lives. And that we will — Here, Baxter, it's good. 
+And that we will all come to rely on robots over the next 40 years as part of our everyday lives. 
+Thanks very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) These bees are in my backyard in Berkeley, California. 
+Until last year, I'd never kept bees before, but National Geographic asked me to photograph a story about them, and I decided, to be able to take compelling images, I should start keeping bees myself. 
+And as you may know, bees pollinate one third of our food crops, and lately they've been having a really hard time. 
+So as a photographer, I wanted to explore what this problem really looks like. 
+So I'm going to show you what I found over the last year. 
+This furry little creature is a fresh young bee halfway emerged from its brood cell, and bees right now are dealing with several different problems, including pesticides, diseases, and habitat loss, but the single greatest threat is a parasitic mite from Asia, Varroa destructor. 
+And this pinhead-sized mite crawls onto young bees and sucks their blood. 
+This eventually destroys a hive because it weakens the immune system of the bees, and it makes them more vulnerable to stress and disease. 
+Now, bees are the most sensitive when they're developing inside their brood cells, and I wanted to know what that process really looks like, so I teamed up with a bee lab at U.C. Davis and figured out how to raise bees in front of a camera. 
+I'm going to show you the first 21 days of a bee's life condensed into 60 seconds. 
+This is a bee egg as it hatches into a larva, and those newly hatched larvae swim around their cells feeding on this white goo that nurse bees secrete for them. 
+Then, their head and their legs slowly differentiate as they transform into pupae. 
+Here's that same pupation process, and you can actually see the mites running around in the cells. 
+Then the tissue in their body reorganizes and the pigment slowly develops in their eyes. 
+The last step of the process is their skin shrivels up and they sprout hair. 
+(Music) So — (Applause) As you can see halfway through that video, the mites were running around on the baby bees, and the way that beekeepers typically manage these mites is they treat their hives with chemicals. 
+In the long run, that's bad news, so researchers are working on finding alternatives to control these mites. 
+It's an experimental breeding program at the USDA Bee Lab in Baton Rouge, and this queen and her attendant bees are part of that program. 
+Now, the researchers figured out that some of the bees have a natural ability to fight mites, so they set out to breed a line of mite-resistant bees. 
+The virgin queen is sedated and then artificially inseminated using this precision instrument. 
+Now, this procedure allows the researchers to control exactly which bees are being crossed, but there's a tradeoff in having this much control. 
+They succeeded in breeding mite-resistant bees, but in that process, those bees started to lose traits like their gentleness and their ability to store honey, so to overcome that problem, these researchers are now collaborating with commercial beekeepers. 
+This is Bret Adee opening one of his 72,000 beehives. 
+He and his brother run the largest beekeeping operation in the world, and the USDA is integrating their mite-resistant bees into his operation with the hope that over time, they'll be able to select the bees that are not only mite-resistant but also retain all of these qualities that make them useful to us. 
+And to say it like that makes it sound like we're manipulating and exploiting bees, and the truth is, we've been doing that for thousands of years. 
+We took this wild creature and put it inside of a box, practically domesticating it, and originally that was so that we could harvest their honey, but over time we started losing our native pollinators, our wild pollinators, and there are many places now where those wild pollinators can no longer meet the pollination demands of our agriculture, so these managed bees have become an integral part of our food system. 
+So when people talk about saving bees, my interpretation of that is we need to save our relationship to bees, and in order to design new solutions, we have to understand the basic biology of bees and understand the effects of stressors that we sometimes cannot see. 
+In other words, we have to understand bees up close. 
+Thank you. 
+
+Have you ever wondered what is inside your dental plaque? 
+Probably not, but people like me do. 
+I'm an archeological geneticist at the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, and I study the origins and evolution of human health and disease by conducting genetic research on the skeletal and mummified remains of ancient humans. 
+And through this work, I hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerabilities of our bodies, so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future. 
+There are different ways to approach evolutionary medicine, and one way is to extract human DNA from ancient bones. 
+And from these extracts, we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that might be related to adaptations, risk factors and inherited diseases. 
+But this is only one half of the story. 
+The most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites and our immune response. 
+All of these diseases have a strong evolutionary component that directly relates to the fact that we live today in a very different environment than the ones in which our bodies evolved. 
+And in order to understand these diseases, we need to move past studies of the human genome alone and towards a more holistic approach to human health in the past. 
+But there are a lot of challenges for this. 
+And first of all, what do we even study? 
+Skeletons are ubiquitous; they're found all over the place. 
+But of course, all of the soft tissue has decomposed, and the skeleton itself has limited health information. 
+Mummies are a great source of information, except that they're really geographically limited and limited in time as well. 
+Coprolites are fossilized human feces, and they're actually extremely interesting. 
+You can learn a lot about ancient diet and intestinal disease, but they are very rare. 
+(Laughter) So to address this problem, I put together a team of international researchers in Switzerland, Denmark and the U.K. 
+to study a very poorly studied, little known material that's found on people everywhere. 
+It's a type of fossilized dental plaque that is called officially dental calculus. 
+Many of you may know it by the term tartar. 
+It's what the dentist cleans off your teeth every time that you go in for a visit. 
+And in a typical dentistry visit, you may have about 15 to 30 milligrams removed. 
+But in ancient times before tooth brushing, up to 600 milligrams might have built up on the teeth over a lifetime. 
+And what's really important about dental calculus is that it fossilizes just like the rest of the skeleton, it's abundant in quantity before the present day and it's ubiquitous worldwide. 
+We find it in every population around the world at all time periods going back tens of thousands of years. 
+And we even find it in neanderthals and animals. 
+And so previous studies had only focused on microscopy. 
+They'd looked at dental calculus under a microscope, and what they had found was things like pollen and plant starches, and they'd found muscle cells from animal meats and bacteria. 
+And so what my team of researchers, what we wanted to do, is say, can we apply genetic and proteomic technology to go after DNA and proteins, and from this can we get better taxonomic resolution to really understand what's going on? 
+And what we found is that we can find many commensal and pathogenic bacteria that inhabited the nasal passages and mouth. 
+We also have found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and proteins and DNA related to diet. 
+But what was surprising to us, and also quite exciting, is we also found bacteria that normally inhabit upper respiratory systems. 
+So it gives us virtual access to the lungs, which is where many important diseases reside. 
+And we also found bacteria that normally inhabit the gut. 
+And so we can also now virtually gain access to this even more distant organ system that, from the skeleton alone, has long decomposed. 
+And so by applying ancient DNA sequencing and protein mass spectrometry technologies to ancient dental calculus, we can generate immense quantities of data that then we can use to begin to reconstruct a detailed picture of the dynamic interplay between diet, infection and immunity thousands of years ago. 
+So what started out as an idea, is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease, right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens. 
+And from this information we can learn about how pathogens evolve and also why they continue to make us sick. 
+And I hope I have convinced you of the value of dental calculus. 
+And as a final parting thought, on behalf of future archeologists, I would like to ask you to please think twice before you go home and brush your teeth. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Across Europe and Central Asia, approximately one million children live in large residential institutions, usually known as orphanages. 
+Most people imagine orphanages as a benign environment that care for children. 
+Others know more about the living conditions there, but still think they're a necessary evil. 
+After all, where else would we put all of those children who don't have any parents? 
+But 60 years of research has demonstrated that separating children from their families and placing them in large institutions seriously harms their health and development, and this is particularly true for young babies. 
+As we know, babies are born without their full muscle development, and that includes the brain. 
+During the first three years of life, the brain grows to its full size, with most of that growth taking place in the first six months. The brain develops in response to experience and to stimulation. 
+Every time a young baby learns something new — to focus its eyes, to mimic a movement or a facial expression, to pick something up, to form a word or to sit up — new synaptic connections are being built in the brain. 
+New parents are astonished by the rapidity of this learning. 
+They are quite rightly amazed and delighted by their children's cleverness. 
+They communicate their delight to their children, who respond with smiles, and a desire to achieve more and to learn more. 
+This forming of the powerful attachment between child and parent provides the building blocks for physical, social, language, cognitive and psychomotor development. 
+It is the model for all future relationships with friends, with partners and with their own children. 
+It happens so naturally in most families that we don't even notice it. Most of us are unaware of its importance to human development and, by extension, to the development of a healthy society. 
+And it's only when it goes wrong that we start to realize the importance of families to children. 
+In August, 1993, I had my first opportunity to witness on a massive scale the impact on children of institutionalization and the absence of parenting. 
+Those of us who remember the newspaper reports that came out of Romania after the 1989 revolution will recall the horrors of the conditions in some of those institutions. 
+I was asked to help the director of a large institution to help prevent the separation of children from their families. 
+Housing 550 babies, this was Ceausescu's show orphanage, and so I'd been told the conditions were much better. 
+Having worked with lots of young children, I expected the institution to be a riot of noise, but it was as silent as a convent. 
+It was hard to believe there were any children there at all, yet the director showed me into room after room, each containing row upon row of cots, in each of which lay a child staring into space. 
+In a room of 40 newborns, not one of them was crying. 
+Yet I could see soiled nappies, and I could see that some of the children were distressed, but the only noise was a low, continuous moan. 
+The head nurse told me proudly, "You see, our children are very well-behaved." 
+Over the next few days, I began to realize that this quietness was not exceptional. 
+The newly admitted babies would cry for the first few hours, but their demands were not met, and so eventually they learned not to bother. Within a few days, they were listless, lethargic, and staring into space like all the others. 
+Over the years, many people and news reports have blamed the personnel in the institutions for the harm caused to the children, but often, one member of staff is caring for 10, 20, and even 40 children. 
+Hence they have no option but to implement a regimented program. 
+The children must be woken at 7 and fed at 7: 30. 
+At 8, their nappies must be changed, so a staff member may have only 30 minutes to feed 10 or 20 children. 
+If a child soils its nappy at 8: 30, he will have to wait several hours before it can be changed again. 
+The child's daily contact with another human being is reduced to a few hurried minutes of feeding and changing, and otherwise their only stimulation is the ceiling, the walls or the bars of their cots. 
+Since my first visit to Ceausescu's institution, I've seen hundreds of such places across 18 countries, from the Czech Republic to Sudan. 
+Across all of these diverse lands and cultures, the institutions, and the child's journey through them, is depressingly similar. 
+Lack of stimulation often leads to self-stimulating behaviors like hand-flapping, rocking back and forth, or aggression, and in some institutions, psychiatric drugs are used to control the behavior of these children, whilst in others, children are tied up to prevent them from harming themselves or others. 
+These children are quickly labeled as having disabilities and transferred to another institution for children with disabilities. 
+Most of these children will never leave the institution again. 
+For those without disabilities, at age three, they're transferred to another institution, and at age seven, to yet another. Segregated according to age and gender, they are arbitrarily separated from their siblings, often without even a chance to say goodbye. 
+There's rarely enough to eat. They are often hungry. 
+The older children bully the little ones. They learn to survive. They learn to defend themselves, or they go under. 
+When they leave the institution, they find it really difficult to cope and to integrate into society. 
+In Moldova, young women raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to be trafficked than their peers, and a Russian study found that two years after leaving institutions, young adults, 20 percent of them had a criminal record, 14 percent were involved in prostitution, and 10 percent had taken their own lives. 
+But why are there so many orphans in Europe when there hasn't been a great deal of war or disaster in recent years? 
+In fact, more than 95 percent of these children have living parents, and societies tend to blame these parents for abandoning these children, but research shows that most parents want their children, and that the primary drivers behind institutionalization are poverty, disability and ethnicity. 
+Many countries have not developed inclusive schools, and so even children with a very mild disability are sent away to a residential special school, at age six or seven. 
+The institution may be hundreds of miles away from the family home. 
+If the family's poor, they find it difficult to visit, and gradually the relationship breaks down. 
+Behind each of the million children in institutions, there is usually a story of parents who are desperate and feel they've run out of options, like Natalia in Moldova, who only had enough money to feed her baby, and so had to send her older son to the institution; or Desi, in Bulgaria, who looked after her four children at home until her husband died, but then she had to go out to work full time, and with no support, felt she had no option but to place a child with disabilities in an institution; or the countless young girls too terrified to tell their parents 
+they're pregnant, who leave their babies in a hospital; or the new parents, the young couple who have just found out that their firstborn child has a disability, and instead of being provided with positive messages about their child's potential, are told by the doctors, "" Forget her, leave her in the institution, go home and make a healthy one. "" This state of affairs is neither necessary nor is it inevitable. 
+Every child has the right to a family, deserves and needs a family, and children are amazingly resilient. 
+We find that if we get them out of institutions and into loving families early on, they recover their developmental delays, and go on to lead normal, happy lives. 
+It's also much cheaper to provide support to families than it is to provide institutions. 
+One study suggests that a family support service costs 10 percent of an institutional placement, whilst good quality foster care costs usually about 30 percent. 
+If we spend less on these children but on the right services, we can take the savings and reinvest them in high quality residential care for those few children with extremely complex needs. 
+Across Europe, a movement is growing to shift the focus and transfer the resources from large institutions that provide poor quality care to community-based services that protect children from harm and allow them to develop to their full potential. When I first started to work in Romania nearly 20 years ago, there were 200,000 children living in institutions, and more entering every day. 
+Now, there are less than 10,000, and family support services are provided across the country. 
+In Moldova, despite extreme poverty and the terrible effects of the global financial crisis, the numbers of children in institutions has reduced by more than 50 percent in the last five years, and the resources are being redistributed to family support services and inclusive schools. 
+Many countries have developed national action plans for change. 
+The European Commission and other major donors are finding ways to divert money from institutions towards family support, empowering communities to look after their own children. 
+But there is still much to be done to end the systematic institutionalization of children. 
+Awareness-raising is required at every level of society. 
+People need to know the harm that institutions cause to children, and the better alternatives that exist. 
+If we know people who are planning to support orphanages, we should convince them to support family services instead. 
+Together, this is the one form of child abuse that we could eradicate in our lifetime. 
+Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+So this is James Risen. 
+You may know him as the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. 
+Long before anybody knew Edward Snowden's name, Risen wrote a book in which he famously exposed that the NSA was illegally wiretapping the phone calls of Americans. 
+But it's another chapter in that book that may have an even more lasting impact. 
+In it, he describes a catastrophic US intelligence operation in which the CIA quite literally handed over blueprints of a nuclear bomb to Iran. 
+If that sounds crazy, go read it. 
+For nearly a decade afterwards, Risen was the subject of a US government investigation in which prosecutors demanded that he testify against one of his alleged sources. 
+And along the way, he became the face for the US government's recent pattern of prosecuting whistleblowers and spying on journalists. 
+You see, under the First Amendment, the press has the right to publish secret information in the public interest. 
+But it's impossible to exercise that right if the media can't also gather that news and protect the identities of the brave men and women who get it to them. 
+So when the government came knocking, Risen did what many brave reporters have done before him: he refused and said he'd rather go to jail. 
+So from 2007 to 2015, Risen lived under the specter of going to federal prison. 
+That is, until just days before the trial, when a curious thing happened. 
+Suddenly, after years of claiming it was vital to their case, the government dropped their demands to Risen altogether. 
+It turns out, in the age of electronic surveillance, there are very few places reporters and sources can hide. 
+And instead of trying and failing to have Risen testify, they could have his digital trail testify against him instead. 
+So completely in secret and without his consent, prosecutors got Risen's phone records. 
+They got his email records, his financial and banking information, his credit reports, even travel records with a list of flights he had taken. 
+And it was among this information that they used to convict Jeffrey Sterling, Risen's alleged source and CIA whistleblower. 
+Sadly, this is only one case of many. 
+President Obama ran on a promise to protect whistleblowers, and instead, his Justice Department has prosecuted more than all other administrations combined. 
+Now, you can see how this could be a problem, especially because the government considers so much of what it does secret. 
+Since 9 / 11, virtually every important story about national security has been the result of a whistleblower coming to a journalist. 
+So we risk seeing the press unable to do their job that the First Amendment is supposed to protect because of the government's expanded ability to spy on everyone. 
+But just as technology has allowed the government to circumvent reporters' rights, the press can also use technology to protect their sources even better than before. 
+And they can start from the moment they begin speaking with them, rather than on the witness stand after the fact. 
+Communications software now exists that wasn't available when Risen was writing his book, and is much more surveillance-resistant than regular emails or phone calls. 
+For example, one such tool is SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that was originally created by the late Internet luminary Aaron Swartz, and is now developed at the non-profit where I work, Freedom of the Press Foundation. 
+Instead of sending an email, you go to a news organization's website, like this one here on The Washington Post. 
+From there, you can upload a document or send information much like you would on any other contact form. 
+It'll then be encrypted and stored on a server that only the news organization has access to. 
+So the government can no longer secretly demand the information, and much of the information they would demand wouldn't be available in the first place. 
+SecureDrop, though, is really only a small part of the puzzle for protecting press freedom in the 21st century. 
+Unfortunately, governments all over the world are constantly developing new spying techniques that put us all at risk. 
+And it's up to us going forward to make sure that it's not just the tech-savvy whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, who have an avenue for exposing wrongdoing. 
+It's just as vital that we protect the next veteran's health care whistleblower alerting us to overcrowded hospitals, or the next environmental worker sounding the alarm about Flint's dirty water, or a Wall Street insider warning us of the next financial crisis. 
+After all, these tools weren't just built to help the brave men and women who expose crimes, but are meant to protect all of our rights under the Constitution. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We are drowning in news. 
+Reuters alone puts out three and a half million news stories a year. 
+That's just one source. 
+My question is: How many of those stories are actually going to matter in the long run? 
+That's the idea behind The Long News. 
+It's a project by The Long Now Foundation, which was founded by TEDsters including Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand. 
+And what we're looking for is news stories that might still matter 50 or 100 or 10,000 years from now. 
+And when you look at the news through that filter, a lot falls by the wayside. 
+To take the top stories from the A.P. this last year, is this going to matter in a decade? 
+Or this? Or this? 
+Really? Is this going to matter in 50 or 100 years? Okay, that was kind of cool. (Laughter) 
+But the top story of this past year was the economy, and I'm just betting that, sooner or later, this particular recession is going to be old news. 
+So, what kind of stories might make a difference for the future? 
+Well, let's take science. 
+Someday, little robots will go through our bloodstreams fixing things. 
+That someday is already here if you're a mouse. 
+Some recent stories: nanobees zap tumors with real bee venom; they're sending genes into the brain; a robot they built that can crawl through the human body. 
+What about resources? How are we going to feed nine billion people? 
+We're having trouble feeding six billion today. 
+As we heard yesterday, there's over a billion people hungry. 
+Britain will starve without genetically modified crops. 
+Bill Gates, fortunately, has bet a billion on [agricultural] research. 
+What about global politics? 
+The world's going to be very different when and if China sets the agenda, and they may. 
+They've overtaken the U.S. as the world's biggest car market, they've overtaken Germany as the largest exporter, and they've started doing DNA tests on kids to choose their careers. 
+We're finding all kinds of ways to push back the limits of what we know. 
+Some recent discoveries: There's an ant colony from Argentina that has now spread to every continent but Antarctica; there's a self-directed robot scientist that's made a discovery — soon, science may no longer need us, and life may no longer need us either; a microbe wakes up after 120,000 years. 
+It seems that with or without us, life will go on. 
+But my pick for the top Long News story of this past year was this one: water found on the moon. 
+Makes it a lot easier to put a colony up there. 
+And if NASA doesn't do it, China might, or somebody in this room might write a big check. 
+My point is this: In the long run, some news stories are more important than others. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to give you four specific examples, I'm going to cover at the end about how a company called Silk tripled their sales; how an artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of money and having a lot of impact; to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant to be an architect. 
+
+If you ask the Internet, this is what you'll be told. 
+Never mind that this is what you'll actually produce if you attempt to work at a computer with a baby on your lap. 
+(Laughter) But no, this isn't a working mother. 
+That theme is amazing natural lighting, which, as we all know, is the hallmark of every American workplace. 
+There are thousands of images like these. 
+Just put the term "" working mother "" into any Google image search engine, stock photo site. 
+They're all over the Internet, they're topping blog posts and news pieces, and I've become kind of obsessed with them and the lie that they tell us and the comfort that they give us, that when it comes to new working motherhood in America, everything's fine. 
+But it's not fine. 
+As a country, we are sending millions of women back to work every year, incredibly and kind of horrifically soon after they give birth. 
+That's a moral problem but today I'm also going to tell you why it's an economic problem. 
+I got so annoyed and obsessed with the unreality of these images, which look nothing like my life, that I recently decided to shoot and star in a parody series of stock photos that I hoped the world would start to use just showing the really awkward reality of going back to work when your baby's food source is attached to your body. 
+I'm just going to show you two of them. 
+(Laughter) Nothing says "" Give that girl a promotion "" like leaking breast milk through your dress during a presentation. 
+You'll notice that there's no baby in this photo, because that's not how this works, not for most working mothers. 
+Did you know, and this will ruin your day, that every time a toilet is flushed, its contents are aerosolized and they'll stay airborne for hours? 
+And yet, for many new working mothers, this is the only place during the day that they can find to make food for their newborn babies. 
+I put these things, a whole dozen of them, into the world. 
+I didn't know what I was also doing was opening a door, because now, total strangers from all walks of life write to me all the time just to tell me what it's like for them to go back to work within days or weeks of having a baby. 
+They are totally real, some of them are very raw, and not one of them looks anything like this. 
+Here's the first. 
+"" I was an active duty service member at a federal prison. 
+I returned to work after the maximum allowed eight weeks for my C-section. 
+A male coworker was annoyed that I had been out on 'vacation,' so he intentionally opened the door on me while I was pumping breast milk and stood in the doorway with inmates in the hallway. "" Most of the stories that these women, total strangers, send to me now, are not actually even about breastfeeding. 
+A woman wrote to me to say, "" I gave birth to twins and went back to work after seven unpaid weeks. 
+Emotionally, I was a wreck. 
+Physically, I had a severe hemorrhage during labor, and major tearing, so I could barely get up, sit or walk. 
+My employer told me I wasn't allowed to use my available vacation days because it was budget season. "" I've come to believe that we can't look situations like these in the eye because then we'd be horrified, and if we get horrified then we have to do something about it. 
+So we choose to look at, and believe, this image. 
+I don't really know what's going on in this picture, because I find it weird and slightly creepy. 
+(Laughter) Like, what is she doing? 
+But I know what it tells us. 
+It tells us that everything's fine. 
+This working mother, all working mothers and all of their babies, are fine. 
+There's nothing to see here. 
+And anyway, women have made a choice, so none of it's even our problem. 
+I want to break this choice thing down into two parts. 
+The first choice says that women have chosen to work. 
+So, that's not true. 
+Today in America, women make up 47 percent of the workforce, and in 40 percent of American households a woman is the sole or primary breadwinner. 
+Our paid work is a part, a huge part, of the engine of this economy, and it is essential for the engines of our families. 
+On a national level, our paid work is not optional. 
+You know, that's one of those things that when you hear it in passing, can sound correct. 
+But that stance ignores a fundamental truth, which is that our procreation on a national scale is not optional. 
+The babies that women, many of them working women, are having today, will one day fill our workforce, protect our shores, make up our tax base. 
+Our procreation on a national scale is not optional. 
+These aren't choices. 
+We need women to work. We need working women to have babies. 
+So we should make doing those things at the same time at least palatable, right? 
+OK, this is pop quiz time: what percentage of working women in America do you think have no access to paid maternity leave? 
+88 percent. 
+88 percent of working mothers will not get one minute of paid leave after they have a baby. 
+So now you're thinking about unpaid leave. 
+It exists in America. It's called FMLA. It does not work. 
+Because of the way it's structured, all kinds of exceptions, half of new mothers are ineligible for it. 
+Here's what that looks like. 
+"" We adopted our son. 
+When I got the call, the day he was born, I had to take off work. 
+I had not been there long enough to qualify for FMLA, so I wasn't eligible for unpaid leave. 
+When I took time off to meet my newborn son, I lost my job. "" These corporate stock photos hide another reality, another layer. 
+Of those who do have access to just that unpaid leave, most women can't afford to take much of it at all. 
+A nurse told me, "" I didn't qualify for short-term disability because my pregnancy was considered a preexisting condition. 
+We used up all of our tax returns and half of our savings during my six unpaid weeks. 
+We just couldn't manage any longer. 
+Physically it was hard, but emotionally it was worse. 
+I struggled for months being away from my son. "" So this decision to go back to work so early, it's a rational economic decision driven by family finances, but it's often physically horrific because putting a human into the world is messy. 
+A waitress told me, "" With my first baby, I was back at work five weeks postpartum. 
+With my second, I had to have major surgery after giving birth, so I waited until six weeks to go back. 
+I had third degree tears. "" 23 percent of new working mothers in America will be back on the job within two weeks of giving birth. 
+"" I worked as a bartender and cook, average of 75 hours a week while pregnant. 
+I had to return to work before my baby was a month old, working 60 hours a week. 
+One of my coworkers was only able to afford 10 days off with her baby. "" Of course, this isn't just a scenario with economic and physical implications. 
+Childbirth is, and always will be, an enormous psychological event. 
+A teacher told me, "" I returned to work eight weeks after my son was born. 
+I already suffer from anxiety, but the panic attacks I had prior to returning to work were unbearable. "" Statistically speaking, the shorter a woman's leave after having a baby, the more likely she will be to suffer from postpartum mood disorders like depression and anxiety, and among many potential consequences of those disorders, suicide is the second most common cause of death in a woman's first year postpartum. 
+Heads up that this next story — I've never met this woman, but I find it hard to get through. 
+"" I feel tremendous grief and rage that I lost an essential, irreplaceable and formative time with my son. 
+Labor and delivery left me feeling absolutely broken. 
+For months, all I remember is the screaming: colic, they said. 
+On the inside, I was drowning. 
+Every morning, I asked myself how much longer I could do it. 
+I was allowed to bring my baby to work. 
+I closed my office door while I rocked and shushed and begged him to stop screaming so I wouldn't get in trouble. 
+I hid behind that office door every damn day and cried while he screamed. 
+I cried in the bathroom while I washed out the pump equipment. 
+I promised my boss that the work I didn't get done during the day, I'd make up at night from home. 
+I thought, there's just something wrong with me that I can't swing this. "" So those are the mothers. 
+What of the babies? 
+As a country, do we care about the millions of babies born every year to working mothers? 
+One of the reasons I know this is that babies whose mothers have 12 or more weeks at home with them are more likely to get their vaccinations and their well checks in their first year, so those babies are more protected from deadly and disabling diseases. 
+Without me, my daughter had failure to thrive. 
+Thankfully, my manager was very understanding. 
+He let my mom bring my baby, who was on oxygen and a monitor, four times a shift so I could nurse her. "" There's a little club of countries in the world that offer no national paid leave to new mothers. 
+Care to guess who they are? 
+The first eight make up eight million in total population. 
+They are Papua New Guinea, Suriname and the tiny island nations of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tonga. 
+Number nine is the United States of America, with 320 million people. 
+Oh, that's it. 
+That's the end of the list. 
+Every other economy on the planet has found a way to make some level of national paid leave work for the people doing the work of the future of those countries, but we say, "" We couldn't possibly do that. "" We say that the market will solve this problem, and then we cheer when corporations offer even more paid leave to the women who are already the highest-educated and highest-paid among us. 
+Remember that 88 percent? 
+Those middle- and low-income women are not going to participate in that. 
+We know that there are staggering economic, financial, physical and emotional costs to this approach. 
+We have decided — decided, not an accident, to pass these costs directly on to working mothers and their babies. 
+We know the price tag is higher for low-income women, therefore disproportionately for women of color. 
+We pass them on anyway. 
+All of this is to America's shame. 
+But it's also to America's risk. 
+Because what would happen if all of these individual so-called choices to have babies started to turn into individual choices not to have babies. 
+One woman told me, "" New motherhood is hard. It shouldn't be traumatic. 
+When we talk about expanding our family now, we focus on how much time I would have to care for myself and a new baby. 
+If we were to have to do it again the same way as with our first, we might stick with one kid. "" The birthrate needed in America to keep the population stable is 2.1 live births per woman. 
+In America today, we are at 1.86. 
+We need women to have babies, and we are actively disincentivizing working women from doing that. 
+What would happen to work force, to innovation, to GDP, if one by one, the working mothers of this country were to decide that they can't bear to do this thing more than once? 
+I'm here today with only one idea worth spreading, and you've guessed what it is. 
+It is long since time for the most powerful country on Earth to offer national paid leave to the people doing the work of the future of this country and to the babies who represent that future. 
+Childbirth is a public good. 
+This leave should be state-subsidized. 
+It should have no exceptions for small businesses, length of employment or entrepreneurs. 
+It should be able to be shared between partners. 
+I've talked today a lot about mothers, but co-parents matter on so many levels. 
+Not one more woman should have to go back to work while she is hobbling and bleeding. 
+Not one more family should have to drain their savings account to buy a few days of rest and recovery and bonding. 
+Not one more fragile infant should have to go directly from the incubator to day care because his parents have used up all of their meager time sitting in the NICU. 
+Not one more working family should be told that the collision of their work, their needed work and their needed parenthood, is their problem alone. 
+The catch is that when this is happening to a new family, it is consuming, and a family with a new baby is more financially vulnerable than they've ever been before, so that new mother cannot afford to speak up on her own behalf. 
+But all of us have voices. 
+I am done, done having babies, and you might be pre-baby, you might be post-baby, you might be no baby. 
+We have to stop framing this as a mother's issue, or even a women's issue. 
+This is an American issue. 
+We need to stop buying the lie that these images tell us. 
+We need to stop being comforted by them. 
+We need to question why we're told that this can't work when we see it work everywhere all over the world. 
+We need to recognize that this American reality is to our dishonor and to our peril. 
+Because this is not, this is not, and this is not what a working mother looks like. 
+
+I essentially drag sledges for a living, so it doesn't take an awful lot to flummox me intellectually, but I'm going to read this question from an interview earlier this year: "" Philosophically, does the constant supply of information steal our ability to imagine or replace our dreams of achieving? 
+After all, if it is being done somewhere by someone, and we can participate virtually, then why bother leaving the house? "" I'm usually introduced as a polar explorer. 
+I'm not sure that's the most progressive or 21st-century of job titles, but I've spent more than two percent now of my entire life living in a tent inside the Arctic Circle, so I get out of the house a fair bit. 
+And in my nature, I guess, I am a doer of things more than I am a spectator or a contemplator of things, and it's that dichotomy, the gulf between ideas and action that I'm going to try and explore briefly. 
+The pithiest answer to the question "" why? "" that's been dogging me for the last 12 years was credited certainly to this chap, the rakish-looking gentleman standing at the back, second from the left, George Lee Mallory. Many of you will know his name. 
+In 1924 he was last seen disappearing into the clouds near the summit of Mt. Everest. 
+He may or may not have been the first person to climb Everest, more than 30 years before Edmund Hillary. 
+No one knows if he got to the top. It's still a mystery. 
+But he was credited with coining the phrase, "" Because it's there. "" Now I'm not actually sure that he did say that. 
+There's very little evidence to suggest it, but what he did say is actually far nicer, and again, I've printed this. I'm going to read it out. 
+"" The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this: What is the use of climbing Mt. Everest? 
+And my answer must at once be, it is no use. 
+There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. 
+Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation, but otherwise nothing will come of it. 
+We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, and not a gem, nor any coal or iron. 
+We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. So it is no use. 
+If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. 
+What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy, and joy, after all, is the end of life. 
+We don't live to eat and make money. 
+We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. 
+That is what life means, and that is what life is for. "" Mallory's argument that leaving the house, embarking on these grand adventures is joyful and fun, however, doesn't tally that neatly with my own experience. 
+The furthest I've ever got away from my front door was in the spring of 2004. I still don't know exactly what came over me, but my plan was to make a solo and unsupported crossing of the Arctic Ocean. 
+I planned essentially to walk from the north coast of Russia to the North Pole, and then to carry on to the north coast of Canada. 
+No one had ever done this. I was 26 at the time. 
+A lot of experts were saying it was impossible, and my mum certainly wasn't very keen on the idea. 
+(Laughter) The journey from a small weather station on the north coast of Siberia up to my final starting point, the edge of the pack ice, the coast of the Arctic Ocean, took about five hours, and if anyone watched fearless Felix Baumgartner going up, rather than just coming down, you'll appreciate the sense of apprehension, as I sat in a helicopter thundering north, and the sense, I think if anything, of impending doom. 
+I sat there wondering what on Earth I had gotten myself into. 
+There was a bit of fun, a bit of joy. 
+I was 26. I remember sitting there looking down at my sledge. I had my skis ready to go, I had a satellite phone, a pump-action shotgun in case I was attacked by a polar bear. 
+I remember looking out of the window and seeing the second helicopter. 
+We were both thundering through this incredible Siberian dawn, and part of me felt a bit like a cross between Jason Bourne and Wilfred Thesiger. Part of me felt quite proud of myself, but mostly I was just utterly terrified. 
+And that journey lasted 10 weeks, 72 days. 
+I didn't see anyone else. We took this photo next to the helicopter. 
+Beyond that, I didn't see anyone for 10 weeks. 
+The North Pole is slap bang in the middle of the sea, so I'm traveling over the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean. 
+NASA described conditions that year as the worst since records began. 
+I was dragging 180 kilos of food and fuel and supplies, about 400 pounds. The average temperature for the 10 weeks was minus 35. Minus 50 was the coldest. 
+So again, there wasn't an awful lot of joy or fun to be had. 
+One of the magical things about this journey, however, is that because I'm walking over the sea, over this floating, drifting, shifting crust of ice that's floating on top of the Arctic Ocean is it's an environment that's in a constant state of flux. 
+The ice is always moving, breaking up, drifting around, refreezing, so the scenery that I saw for nearly 3 months was unique to me. No one else will ever, could ever, possibly see the views, the vistas, that I saw for 10 weeks. 
+And that, I guess, is probably the finest argument for leaving the house. 
+I can try to tell you what it was like, but you'll never know what it was like, and the more I try to explain that I felt lonely, I was the only human being in 5.4 million square-miles, it was cold, nearly minus 75 with windchill on a bad day, the more words fall short, and I'm unable to do it justice. 
+And it seems to me, therefore, that the doing, you know, to try to experience, to engage, to endeavor, rather than to watch and to wonder, that's where the real meat of life is to be found, the juice that we can suck out of our hours and days. 
+And I would add a cautionary note here, however. 
+In my experience, there is something addictive about tasting life at the very edge of what's humanly possible. 
+Now I don't just mean in the field of daft macho Edwardian style derring-do, but also in the fields of pancreatic cancer, there is something addictive about this, and in my case, I think polar expeditions are perhaps not that far removed from having a crack habit. 
+I can't explain quite how good it is until you've tried it, but it has the capacity to burn up all the money I can get my hands on, to ruin every relationship I've ever had, so be careful what you wish for. 
+Mallory postulated that there is something in man that responds to the challenge of the mountain, and I wonder if that's the case whether there's something in the challenge itself, in the endeavor, and particularly in the big, unfinished, chunky challenges that face humanity that call out to us, and in my experience that's certainly the case. 
+There is one unfinished challenge that's been calling out to me for most of my adult life. 
+Many of you will know the story. 
+This is a photo of Captain Scott and his team. 
+Scott set out just over a hundred years ago to try to become the first person to reach the South Pole. 
+No one knew what was there. It was utterly unmapped at the time. We knew more about the surface of the moon than we did about the heart of Antarctica. 
+Scott, as many of you will know, was beaten to it by Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian team, who used dogs and dogsleds. Scott's team were on foot, all five of them wearing harnesses and dragging around sledges, and they arrived at the pole to find the Norwegian flag already there, I'd imagine pretty bitter and demoralized. 
+All five of them turned and started walking back to the coast and all five died on that return journey. 
+There is a sort of misconception nowadays that it's all been done in the fields of exploration and adventure. 
+When I talk about Antarctica, people often say, "" Hasn't, you know, that's interesting, hasn't that Blue Peter presenter just done it on a bike? "" Or, "" That's nice. You know, my grandmother's going on a cruise to Antarctica next year. You know. 
+Is there a chance you'll see her there? "" (Laughter) But Scott's journey remains unfinished. 
+No one has ever walked from the very coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. 
+It is, arguably, the most audacious endeavor of that Edwardian golden age of exploration, and it seemed to me high time, given everything we have figured out in the century since from scurvy to solar panels, that it was high time someone had a go at finishing the job. 
+So that's precisely what I'm setting out to do. 
+This time next year, in October, I'm leading a team of three. 
+It will take us about four months to make this return journey. 
+That's the scale. The red line is obviously halfway to the pole. 
+We have to turn around and come back again. 
+I'm well aware of the irony of telling you that we will be blogging and tweeting. You'll be able to live vicariously and virtually through this journey in a way that no one has ever before. 
+And it'll also be a four-month chance for me to finally come up with a pithy answer to the question, "" Why? "" And our lives today are safer and more comfortable than they have ever been. There certainly isn't much call for explorers nowadays. My career advisor at school never mentioned it as an option. 
+If I wanted to know, for example, how many stars were in the Milky Way, how old those giant heads on Easter Island were, most of you could find that out right now without even standing up. 
+And yet, if I've learned anything in nearly 12 years now of dragging heavy things around cold places, it is that true, real inspiration and growth only comes from adversity and from challenge, from stepping away from what's comfortable and familiar and stepping out into the unknown. 
+In life, we all have tempests to ride and poles to walk to, and I think metaphorically speaking, at least, we could all benefit from getting outside the house a little more often, if only we could summon up the courage. 
+I certainly would implore you to open the door just a little bit and take a look at what's outside. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I learned about the Haiti earthquake by Skype. 
+My wife sent me a message, "Whoa, earthquake," and then disappeared for 25 minutes. 
+It was 25 minutes of absolute terror that thousands of people across the U.S. felt. 
+I was afraid of a tsunami; what I didn't realize was there was a greater terror in Haiti, and that was building collapse. 
+We've all seen the photos of the collapsed buildings in Haiti. 
+These are shots my wife took a couple days after the quake, while I was making my way through the D.R. into the country. 
+This is the national palace — the equivalent of the White House. 
+This is the largest supermarket in the Caribbean at peak shopping time. 
+This is a nurses' college — there are 300 nurses studying. 
+The general hospital right next door emerged largely unscathed. 
+This is the Ministry of Economics and Finance. 
+We have all heard about the tremendous human loss in the earthquake in Haiti, but we haven't heard enough about why all those lives were lost. 
+We haven't heard about why the buildings failed. 
+After all, it was the buildings, not the earthquake, that killed 220,000 people, that injured 330,000, that displaced 1.3 million people, that cut off food and water and supplies for an entire nation. 
+This is the largest metropolitan-area disaster in decades, and it was not a natural disaster — it was a disaster of engineering. 
+AIDG has worked in Haiti since 2007, providing engineering and business support to small businesses. 
+And after the quake, we started bringing in earthquake engineers to figure out why the buildings collapsed, to examine what was safe and what wasn't. 
+Working with MINUSTAH, which is the U.N. mission in Haiti, with the Ministry of Public Works, with different NGOs, we inspected over 1,500 buildings. 
+We inspected schools and private residencies. 
+We inspected medical centers and food warehouses. 
+We inspected government buildings. 
+This is the Ministry of Justice. 
+Behind that door is the National Judicial Archives. 
+The fellow in the door, Andre Filitrault — who's the director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Earthquake Engineering Research at the University of Buffalo — was examining it to see if it was safe to recover the archives. 
+Andre told me, after seeing these buildings fail again and again in the same way, that there is no new research here. 
+There is nothing here that we don't know. 
+The failure points were the same: walls and slabs not tied properly into columns — that's a roof slab hanging off the building — cantilevered structures, or structures that were asymmetric, that shook violently and came down, poor building materials, not enough concrete, not enough compression in the blocks, rebar that was smooth, rebar that was exposed to the weather and had rusted away. 
+Now there's a solution to all these problems. 
+And we know how to build properly. 
+The proof of this came in Chile, almost a month later, when 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit Chile. 
+That is 500 times the power of the 7.0 that hit Port-au-Prince — 500 times the power, yet only under a thousand casualties. 
+Adjusted for population density, that is less than one percent of the impact of the Haitian quake. 
+What was the difference between Chile and Haiti? 
+Seismic standards and confined masonry, where the building acts as a whole — walls and columns and roofs and slabs tied together to support each other — instead of breaking off into separate members and failing. 
+If you look at this building in Chile, it's ripped in half, but it's not a pile of rubble. 
+Chileans have been building with confined masonry for decades. 
+Right now, AIDG is working with KPFF Consulting Engineers, Architecture for Humanity, to bring more confined masonry training into Haiti. 
+This is Xantus Daniel; he's a mason, just a general construction worker, not a foreman, who took one of our trainings. 
+On his last job he was working with his boss, and they started pouring the columns wrong. 
+He took his boss aside, and he showed him the materials on confined masonry. 
+He showed him, "" You know, we don't have to do this wrong. 
+It won't cost us any more to do it the right way. "" And they redid that building. 
+They tied the rebar right, they poured the columns right, and that building will be safe. 
+And every building that they build going forward will be safe. 
+To make sure these buildings are safe, it's not going to take policy — it's going to take reaching out to the masons on the ground and helping them learn the proper techniques. 
+Now there are many groups doing this. 
+And the fellow in the vest there, Craig Toten, he has pushed forward to get documentation out to all the groups that are doing this. 
+Through Haiti Rewired, through Build Change, Architecture for Humanity, AIDG, there is the possibility to reach out to 30,000 — 40,000 masons across the country and create a movement of proper building. 
+If you reach out to the people on the ground in this collaborative way it's extremely affordable. 
+For the billions spent on reconstruction, you can train masons for dollars on every house that they end up building over their lifetime. 
+Ultimately, there are two ways that you can rebuild Haiti; the way at the top is the way that Haiti's been building for decades. 
+The way at the top is a poorly constructed building that will fail. 
+The way at the bottom is a confined masonry building, where the walls are tied together, the building is symmetric, and it will stand up to an earthquake. 
+For all the disaster, there is an opportunity here to build better houses for the next generation, so that when the next earthquake hits, it is a disaster — but not a tragedy. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The Hindus say, "" Nada brahma, "" one translation of which is, "" The world is sound. "" And in a way, that's true, because everything is vibrating. 
+In fact, all of you as you sit here right now are vibrating. 
+Every part of your body is vibrating at different frequencies. 
+So you are, in fact, a chord — each of you an individual chord. 
+One definition of health may be that that chord is in complete harmony. 
+Your ears can't hear that chord; they can actually hear amazing things. Your ears can hear 10 octaves. 
+Incidentally, we see just one octave. 
+Your ears are always on — you have no ear lids. 
+They work even when you sleep. 
+The smallest sound you can perceive moves your eardrum just four atomic diameters. 
+The loudest sound you can hear is a trillion times more powerful than that. 
+Ears are made not for hearing, but for listening. 
+Listening is an active skill, whereas hearing is passive, listening is something that we have to work at — it's a relationship with sound. 
+And yet it's a skill that none of us are taught. 
+For example, have you ever considered that there are listening positions, places you can listen from? 
+Here are two of them. 
+Reductive listening is listening "" for. "" It reduces everything down to what's relevant and it discards everything that's not relevant. 
+Men typically listen reductively. 
+So he's saying, "" I've got this problem. "" He's saying, "" Here's your solution. Thanks very much. Next. "" That's the way we talk, right guys? 
+Expansive listening, on the other hand, is listening "" with, "" not listening "" for. "" It's got no destination in mind — it's just enjoying the journey. 
+Women typically listen expansively. 
+If you look at these two, eye contact, facing each other, possibly both talking at the same time. 
+(Laughter) Men, if you get nothing else out of this talk, practice expansive listening, and you can transform your relationships. 
+The trouble with listening is that so much of what we hear is noise, surrounding us all the time. 
+Noise like this, according to the European Union, is reducing the health and the quality of life of 25 percent of the population of Europe. 
+Two percent of the population of Europe — that's 16 million people — are having their sleep devastated by noise like that. 
+Noise kills 200,000 people a year in Europe. 
+It's a really big problem. 
+Now, when you were little, if you had noise and you didn't want to hear it, you'd stick your fingers in your ears and hum. 
+These days, you can do a similar thing, it just looks a bit cooler. 
+It looks a bit like this. 
+The trouble with widespread headphone use is it brings three really big health issues. 
+The first really big health issue is a word that Murray Schafer coined: "schizophonia." 
+It's a dislocation between what you see and what you hear. 
+So, we're inviting into our lives the voices of people who are not present with us. 
+I think there's something deeply unhealthy about living all the time in schizophonia. 
+The second problem that comes with headphone abuse is compression. 
+We squash music to fit it into our pocket and there is a cost attached to this. 
+Listen to this — this is an uncompressed piece of music. 
+(Music) And now the same piece of music with 98 percent of the data removed. (Music) 
+I do hope that some of you at least can hear the difference between those two. 
+There is a cost of compression. 
+It makes you tired and irritable to have to make up all of that data. 
+You're having to imagine it. 
+It's not good for you in the long run. 
+The third problem with headphones is this: deafness — noise-induced hearing disorder. 
+Ten million Americans already have this for one reason or another, but really worryingly, 16 percent — roughly one in six — of American teenagers suffer from noise-induced hearing disorder as a result of headphone abuse. 
+One study at an American university found that 61 percent of college freshmen had damaged hearing as a result of headphone abuse. 
+We may be raising an entire generation of deaf people. 
+Now that's a really serious problem. 
+I'll give you three quick tips to protect your ears and pass these on to your children, please. 
+Professional hearing protectors are great; I use some all the time. 
+If you're going to use headphones, buy the best ones you can afford because quality means you don't have to have it so loud. 
+If you can't hear somebody talking to you in a loud voice, it's too loud. 
+And thirdly, if you're in bad sound, it's fine to put your fingers in your ears or just move away from it. 
+Protect your ears in that way. 
+Let's move away from bad sound and look at some friends that I urge you to seek out. 
+WWB: Wind, water, birds — stochastic natural sounds composed of lots of individual random events, all of it very healthy, all of it sound that we evolved to over the years. 
+Seek those sounds out; they're good for you and so it this. 
+Silence is beautiful. 
+The Elizabethans described language as decorated silence. 
+I urge you to move away from silence with intention and to design soundscapes just like works of art. 
+Have a foreground, a background, all in beautiful proportion. 
+It's fun to get into designing with sound. 
+If you can't do it yourself, get a professional to do it for you. 
+Sound design is the future, and I think it's the way we're going to change the way the world sounds. 
+I'm going to just run quickly through eight modalities, eight ways sound can improve health. 
+First, ultrasound: we're very familiar with it from physical therapy; it's also now being used to treat cancer. 
+Lithotripsy — saving thousands of people a year from the scalpel by pulverizing stones with high-intensity sound. 
+Sound healing is a wonderful modality. 
+It's been around for thousands of years. 
+I do urge you to explore this. 
+There are great things being done there, treating now autism, dementia and other conditions. 
+And music, of course. Just listening to music is good for you, if it's music that's made with good intention, made with love, generally. 
+Devotional music, good — Mozart, good. 
+There are all sorts of types of music that are very healthy. 
+And four modalities where you need to take some action and get involved. 
+First of all, listen consciously. 
+I hope that that after this talk you'll be doing that. 
+It's a whole new dimension to your life and it's wonderful to have that dimension. 
+Secondly, get in touch with making some sound — create sound. 
+The voice is the instrument we all play, and yet how many of us are trained in using our voice? Get trained; learn to sing, learn to play an instrument. 
+Musicians have bigger brains — it's true. 
+You can do this in groups as well. 
+It's a fantastic antidote to schizophonia; to make music and sound in a group of people, whichever style you enjoy particularly. 
+And let's take a stewarding role for the sound around us. 
+Protect your ears? Yes, absolutely. 
+Design soundscapes to be beautiful around you at home and at work. 
+And let's start to speak up when people are assailing us with the noise that I played you early on. 
+So I'm going to leave you with seven things you can do right now to improve your health with sound. 
+My vision is of a world that sounds beautiful and if we all start doing these things, we will take a very big step in that direction. 
+So I urge you to take that path. 
+I'm leaving you with a little more birdsong, which is very good for you. 
+I wish you sound health. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) (Applause) Thank you. 
+Hi, everybody. 
+Ban-gap-seum-ni-da. 
+I'd like to share with you a little bit of me playing my life. 
+I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair. 
+The violin, which meant everything to me, became a grave burden on me. 
+Although many people tried to comfort and encourage me, their words sounded like meaningless noise. 
+When I was just about to give everything up after years of suffering, I started to rediscover the true power of music. 
+(Music) In the midst of hardship, it was the music that gave me — that restored my soul. 
+The comfort the music gave me was just indescribable, and it was a real eye-opening experience for me too, and it totally changed my perspective on life and set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist. 
+Do you feel like you are all alone? 
+I hope that this piece will touch and heal your heart, as it did for me. 
+(Music) (Applause) Thank you. 
+Now, I use my music to reach people's hearts and have found there are no boundaries. 
+My audience is anyone who is here to listen, even those who are not familiar with classical music. 
+I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few. 
+Now, with my last piece, I'd like to show you that classical music can be so much fun, exciting, and that it can rock you. 
+Let me introduce you to my brand new project, "Baroque in Rock," which became a golden disc most recently. 
+It's such an honor for me. 
+I think, while I'm enjoying my life as a happy musician, I'm earning a lot more recognition than I've ever imagined. 
+But it's now your turn. 
+Changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world. 
+Just play your life with all you have, and share it with the world. 
+I really look forward to witnessing a transforming world by you, TEDsters. 
+Play your life, and stay tuned. 
+(Music) (Applause) 
+
+I was raised by lesbians in the mountains, and I sort of came like a forest gnome to New York City a while back. 
+(Laughter) Really messed with my head, but I'll get into that later. 
+I'll start with when I was eight years old. 
+I took a wood box, and I buried a dollar bill, a pen and a fork inside this box in Colorado. 
+And I thought some strange humanoids or aliens in 500 years would find this box and learn about the way our species exchanged ideas, maybe how we ate our spaghetti. 
+I really didn't know. 
+Anyway, this is kind of funny, because here I am, 30 years later, and I'm still making boxes. 
+Now, at some point I was in Hawaii — I like to hike and surf and do all that weird stuff, and I was making a collage for my ma. 
+And I took a dictionary and I ripped it up, and I made it into a sort of Agnes Martin grid, and I poured resin all over it and a bee got stuck. 
+Instead, the opposite happened: It sort of created a magnification, like a magnifying glass, on the dictionary text. 
+So what did I do? I built more boxes. 
+This time, I started putting electronics, frogs, strange bottles I'd find in the street — anything I could find — because I was always finding things my whole life, and trying to make relationships and tell stories between these objects. 
+So I started drawing around the objects, and I realized: Holy moly, I can draw in space! 
+I can make free-floating lines, like the way you would draw around a dead body at a crime scene. 
+So I took the objects out, and I created my own taxonomy of invented specimens. 
+First, botanical — which you can kind of get a sense of. 
+Then I made some weird insects and creatures. 
+It was really fun; I was just drawing on the layers of resin. 
+And it was cool, because I was actually starting to have shows and stuff, I was making some money, I could take my girlfriend for dinner, and like, go to Sizzler. 
+It was some good shit, man. 
+(Laughter) At some point, I got up to the human form, life-size resin sculptures with drawings of humans inside the layers. 
+This was great, except for one thing: I was going to die. 
+I didn't know what to do, because the resin was going to kill me. 
+And I went to bed every night thinking about it. 
+So I tried using glass. 
+I started drawing on the layers of glass, almost like if you drew on a window, then you put another window, and another window, and you had all these windows together that made a three-dimensional composition. 
+And this really worked, because I could stop using the resin. 
+So I did this for years, which culminated in a very large work, which I call "" The Triptych. "" "" The Triptych "" was largely inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's "" [The] Garden of Earthly Delights, "" which is a painting in the [Museo del] Prado in Spain. 
+Do you guys know this painting? 
+Good, it's a cool painting. 
+It's kind of ahead of its time, they say. 
+So, "" The Triptych. "" I'll walk you through this piece. 
+It weighs 24,000 pounds. 
+It's 18 feet long. 
+It's double-sided, so it's 36 feet of composition. 
+It's kind of weird. 
+Well, that's the blood fountain. 
+(Laughter) To the left, you have Jesus and the locusts. 
+There's a cave where all these animal-headed creatures travel between two worlds. 
+They go from the representational world, to this analog-mesh underworld, where they're hiding. 
+This is where the animal-headed creatures are by the lighthouse, and they're all about to commit mass suicide into the ocean. 
+The ocean is made up of thousands of elements. 
+This is a bird god tied up to a battleship. 
+(Laughter) Billy Graham is in the ocean; the Horizon from the oil spill; Waldo; Osama Bin Laden's shelter — there's all kinds of weird stuff that you can find if you look really hard, in the ocean. 
+Anyway, this is a lady creature. 
+She's coming out of the ocean, and she's spitting oil into one hand and she has clouds coming out of her other hand. 
+Her hands are like scales, and she has the mythological reference of the Earth and cosmos in balance. 
+So that's one side of "" The Triptych. "" It's a little narrative thing. 
+That's her hand that she's spitting into. 
+And then, when you go to the other side, she has like a trunk, like a bird's beak, and she's spitting clouds out of her trunk. 
+Then she has an 18-foot-long serpent's tail that connects "" The Triptych. "" Anyway, her tail catches on fire from the back of the volcano. 
+(Laughter) I don't know why that happened. (Laughter) 
+That happens, you know. 
+Her tail terminates in a cycloptic eyeball, made out of 1986 terrorist cards. 
+Have you guys seen those? 
+(Laughter) That will bring you to my latest project. 
+I'm in the middle of two projects: One's called "" Psychogeographies. "" It's about a six-year project to make 100 of these humans. 
+Each one is an archive of our culture, through our ripped-up media and matter, whether it's encyclopedias or dictionaries or magazines. 
+But each one acts as a sort of an archive in the shape of a human, and they travel in groups of 20, 4, or 12 at a time. 
+They're like cells — they come together, they divide. 
+And you kind of walk through them. It's taking me years. 
+Each one is basically a 3,000-pound microscope slide with a human stuck inside. 
+This one has a little cave in his chest. 
+That's his head; there's the chest, you can kind of see the beginning. 
+I'm going to go down the body for you: There's a waterfall coming out of his chest, covering his penis — or not-penis, or whatever it is, a kind of androgynous thing. 
+I'll take you quickly through these works, because I can't explain them for too long. 
+There are the layers, you can kind of see it. 
+That's a body getting split in half. 
+You can see the pills coming out, going into one head from this weird statue. 
+Can you see that? 
+Anyway, this talk's all about these boxes, like the boxes we're in. 
+This box we're in, the solar system is a box. 
+This brings you to my latest box. 
+It's a brick box. It's called Pioneer Works. 
+(Cheers) Inside of this box is a physicist, a neuroscientist, a painter, a musician, a writer, a radio station, a museum, a school, a publishing arm to disseminate all the content we make there into the world; a garden. 
+We shake this box up, and all these people kind of start hitting each other like particles. 
+And you come together to realize that we're all in this together, that this delusion of difference — this idea of countries, of borders, of religion — doesn't work. 
+We're all really made up of the same stuff, in the same box. 
+And if we don't start exchanging that stuff sweetly and nicely, we're all going to die real soon. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I am a surgeon who studies creativity, and I have never had a patient tell me, "I really want you to be creative during surgery," and so I guess there's a little bit of irony to it. 
+I've done most of this work at Johns Hopkins University, and at the National Institute of Health where I was previously. 
+(Music) (Music ends) It's really a remarkable thing that happens there. 
+And so I set out with this concept, scientifically, that artistic creativity, it's magical, but it's not magic, meaning that it's a product of the brain. 
+With this notion that artistic creativity is in fact a neurologic product, I took this thesis that we could study it just like we study any other complex neurologic process, and there are subquestions that I put there. 
+Maybe we're not the right people to do it. 
+(Laughter) Well it may be, but I will say that, from a scientific perspective, we talked a lot about innovation today, the science of innovation, how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate is in its infancy, and truly, we know very little about how we are able to be creative. 
+I think that we're going to see, over the next 10, 20, 30 years, a real science of creativity that's burgeoning and is going to flourish, Because we now have new methods that can enable us to take this process like complex jazz improvisation, and study it rigorously. 
+(Video) Charles Limb: This is a plastic MIDI piano keyboard that we use for the jazz experiments. 
+And so through this piano keyboard, we have the means to take a musical process and study it. 
+The next question was: What happens when musicians are trading back and forth, something called "" trading fours, "" which is something they do normally in a jazz experiment. 
+(Video) CL: Mike, come on in. 
+(Music ends) (Video) Mike Pope: This is a pretty good representation of what it's like. 
+So the hardest thing for me was the kinesthetic thing, looking at my hands through two mirrors, laying on my back, and not able to move at all except for my hand. 
+I've always been fascinated by freestyle. 
+This is what you do: You have a freestyle artist come and memorize a rap that you write for them, that they've never heard before, and then you have them freestyle. 
+CL: Thump of the beat in a known repeat Rhythm and rhyme, they make me complete The climb is sublime when I'm on the mic Spittin 'rhymes that hit you like a lightning strike Computer: Search. 
+CL: I search for the truth in this eternal quest My passion's not fashion, you can see how I'm dressed Psychopathic words in my head appear Whisper these lyrics only I can hear Computer: Art. 
+CL: The art of discovering and that which is hovering Inside the mind of those unconfined All of these words keep pouring out like rain I need a mad scientist to check my brain Computer: Stop. 
+Not really though, 'cause I've got to keep it simple instrumental Detrimental playing Super Mario boxes [unclear] hip hop Computer: Stop. 
+[Control Condition Memorized Verses] Emmanuel: Top of the beat with no repeat Rhythm and rhyme make me complete Climb is sublime when I'm on the mic Spittin 'rhymes that'll hit you like a lightning strike Computer: Search. 
+And we do see language areas lighting up, but then, eyes closed — when you are freestyling vs. memorizing, you've got major visual areas lighting up. 
+And I think, hopefully in the next 10, 20 years, you'll see real, meaningful studies that say science has to catch up to art, and maybe we're starting now to get there. 
+
+Over the past six months, I've spent my time traveling. I think I've done 60,000 miles, but without leaving my desk. 
+And the reason I can do that is because I'm actually two people. 
+I look like one person but I'm two people. I'm Eddie who is here, and at the same time, my alter ego is a big green boxy avatar nicknamed Cyber Frank. 
+So that's what I spend my time doing. I'd like to start, if it's possible, with a test, because I do business stuff, so it's important that we focus on outcomes. 
+And then I struggled, because I was thinking to myself, "" What should I talk? What should I do? It's a TED audience. 
+It's got to be stretching. How am I going to make —? "" So I just hope I've got the level of difficulty right. 
+So let's just walk our way through this. 
+Please could you work this through with me? You can shout out the answer if you like. 
+The question is, which of these horizontal lines is longer? 
+The answer is? 
+Audience: The same.Eddie Obeng: The same. 
+No, they're not the same. (Laughter) They're not the same. The top one is 10 percent longer than the bottom one. 
+So why did you tell me they were the same? Do you remember when we were kids at school, about that big, they played the same trick on us? 
+It was to teach us parallax. Do you remember? 
+And you got, you said, "" It's the same! "" And you got it wrong. 
+You remember? And you learned the answer, and you've carried this answer in your head for 10, 20, 30, 40 years: The answer is the same. The answer is the same. So when you're asked what the lengths are, you say they're the same, but they're not the same, because I've changed it. 
+And this is what I'm trying to explain has happened to us in the 21st century. 
+Somebody or something has changed the rules about how our world works. 
+When I'm joking, I try and explain it happened at midnight, you see, while we were asleep, but it was midnight 15 years ago. Okay? 
+You didn't notice it? But basically, what they do is, they switched all the rules round, so that the way to successfully run a business, an organization, or even a country, has been deleted, flipped, and it's a completely new — you think I'm joking, don't you — there's a completely new set of rules in operation. (Laughter) Did you notice that? I mean, you missed this one. 
+You probably — No, you didn't. Okay. (Laughter) My simple idea is that what's happened is, the real 21st century around us isn't so obvious to us, so instead we spend our time responding rationally to a world which we understand and recognize, but which no longer exists. 
+You don't believe me, do you? Okay. (Applause) So let me take you on a little journey of many of the things I don't understand. 
+If you search Amazon for the word "" creativity, "" you'll discover something like 90,000 books. 
+If you go on Google and you look for "" innovation + creativity, "" you get 30 million hits. If you add the word "" consultants, "" it doubles to 60 million. (Laughter) Are you with me? And yet, statistically, what you discover is that about one in 100,000 ideas is found making money or delivering benefits two years after its inception. 
+It makes no sense. Companies make their expensive executives spend ages carefully preparing forecasts and budgets which are obsolete or need changing before they can be published. 
+How is that possible? If you look at the visions we have, the visions of how we're going to change the world, the key thing is implementation. We have the vision. 
+We've got to make it happen. 
+We've spent decades professionalizing implementation. 
+People are supposed to be good at making stuff happen. 
+However, if I use as an example a family of five going on holiday, if you can imagine this, all the way from London all the way across to Hong Kong, what I want you to think about is their budget is only 3,000 pounds of expenses. 
+What actually happens is, if I compare this to the average real project, average real successful project, the family actually end up in Makassar, South Sulawesi, at a cost of 4,000 pounds, whilst leaving two of the children behind. (Laughter) What I'm trying to explain to you is, there are things which don't make sense to us. 
+It gets even worse than that. Let me just walk you through this one. 
+This is a quote, and I'll just pick words out of it. 
+It says — I'll put on the voice — "" In summary, your Majesty, the failure to foresee the timing, extent and severity of the crisis was due to the lack of creativity and the number of bright minds, "" or something like that. 
+This was a group of eminent economists apologizing to the Queen of England when she asked the question, "" Why did no one tell us that the crisis was coming? "" (Laughter) I'll never get my knighthood. I'll never get my knighthood. (Laughter) That's not the important point. The thing you have to remember is, these are eminent economists, some of the smartest people on the planet. Do you see the challenge? (Laughter) It's scary. My friend and mentor, Tim Brown of IDEO, he explains that design must get big, and he's right. 
+He wisely explains this to us. He says design thinking must tackle big systems for the challenges we have. 
+He's absolutely right. 
+And then I ask myself, "" Why was it ever small? "" Isn't it weird? You know, if collaboration is so cool, is cross-functional working is so amazing, why did we build these huge hierarchies? What's going on? 
+You see, I think what's happened, perhaps, is that we've not noticed that change I described earlier. 
+What we do know is that the world has accelerated. 
+Cyberspace moves everything at the speed of light. 
+Technology accelerates things exponentially. 
+So if this is now, and that's the past, and we start thinking about change, you know, all governments are seeking change, you're here seeking change, everybody's after change, it's really cool. (Laughter) So what happens is, we get this wonderful whooshing acceleration and change. 
+The speed is accelerating. That's not the only thing. 
+At the same time, as we've done that, we've done something really weird. 
+We've doubled the population in 40 years, put half of them in cities, then connected them all up so they can interact. 
+The density of the interaction of human beings is amazing. 
+There are charts which show all these movements of information. That density of information is amazing. 
+And then we've done a third thing. 
+you know, for those of you who have as an office a little desk underneath the stairs, and you say, well this is my little desk under the stairs, no! You are sitting at the headquarters of a global corporation if you're connected to the Internet. 
+What's happened is, we've changed the scale. 
+Size and scale are no longer the same. 
+And then add to that, every time you tweet, over a third of your followers follow from a country which is not your own. 
+Global is the new scale. We know that. 
+And so people say things like, "" The world is now a turbulent place. "" Have you heard them saying things like that? 
+And they use it as a metaphor. Have you come across this? 
+And they think it's a metaphor, but this is not a metaphor. 
+It's reality. As a young engineering student, I remember going to a demonstration where they basically, the demonstrator did something quite intriguing. 
+What he did was, he got a transparent pipe — have you seen this demonstration before? — he attached it to a tap. So effectively what you had was, you had a situation where — I'll try and draw the tap and the pipe, actually I'll skip the tap. The taps are hard. 
+Okay? So I'll write the word "" tap. "" Is that okay? It's a tap. (Laughter) Okay, so he attaches it to a transparent pipe, and he turns the water on. 
+And he says, do you notice anything? And the water is whooshing down this pipe. 
+I mean, this is not exciting stuff. Are you with me? 
+So the water goes up. He turns it back down. Great. 
+And he says, "" Anything you notice? "" No. Then he sticks a needle into the pipe, and he connects this to a container, and he fills the container up with green ink. You with me? 
+So guess what happens? A thin green line comes out as it flows down the pipe. It's not that interesting. 
+And then he turns the water up a bit, so it starts coming back in. And nothing changes. 
+So he's changing the flow of the water, but it's just a boring green line. 
+He adds some more. He adds some more. And then something weird happens. 
+There's this little flicker, and then as he turns it ever so slightly more, the whole of that green line disappears, and instead there are these little sort of inky dust devils close to the needle. 
+They're called eddies. Not me. And they're violently dispersing the ink so that it actually gets diluted out, and the color's gone. 
+What's happened in this world of pipe is somebody has flipped it. They've changed the rules from laminar to turbulent. 
+All the rules are gone. In that environment, instantly, all the possibilities which turbulence brings are available, and it's not the same as laminar. 
+And if we didn't have that green ink, you'd never notice. 
+And I think this is our challenge, because somebody has actually increased — and it's probably you guys with all your tech and stuff — the speed, the scale and the density of interaction. 
+Now how do we cope and deal with that? 
+Well, we could just call it turbulence, or we could try and learn. 
+Yes, learn, but I know you guys grew up in the days when there were actually these things called correct answers, because of the answer you gave me to the horizontal line puzzle, and you believe it will last forever. 
+So I'll put a little line up here which represents learning, and that's how we used to do it. We could see things, understand them, take the time to put them into practice. 
+Out here is the world. Now, what's happened to our pace of learning as the world has accelerated? Well, if you work for a corporation, you'll discover it's quite difficult to work on stuff which your boss doesn't approve of, isn't in the strategy, and anyway, you've got to go through your monthly meetings. 
+If you work in an institution, one day you will get them to make that decision. 
+And if you work in a market where people believe in cycles, it's even funnier, because you have to wait all the way for the cycle to fail before you go, "" There's something wrong. "" You with me? 
+So it's likely that the line, in terms of learning, is pretty flat. 
+You with me? This point over here, the point at which the lines cross over, the pace of change overtakes the pace of learning, and for me, that is what I was describing when I was telling you about midnight. 
+So what does it do to us? Well, it completely transforms what we have to do, many mistakes we make. We solve last year's problems without thinking about the future. If you try and think about it, the things you're solving now, what problems are they going to bring in the future? 
+If you haven't understood the world you're living in, it's almost impossible to be absolutely certain that what you're going to deliver fits. 
+I'll give you an example, a quick one. Creativity and ideas, I mentioned that earlier. All the CEOs around me, my clients, they want innovation, so they seek innovation. They say to people, "" Take risks and be creative! "" But unfortunately the words get transformed as they travel through the air. 
+Entering their ears, what they hear is, "" Do crazy things and then I'll fire you. "" Why? (Laughter) Because — Why? Because in the old world, okay, in the old world, over here, getting stuff wrong was unacceptable. 
+If you got something wrong, you'd failed. How should you be treated? 
+Well, harshly, because you could have asked somebody who had experience. 
+So we learned the answer and we carried this in our heads for 20, 30 years, are you with me? 
+The answer is, don't do things which are different. 
+And then suddenly we tell them to and it doesn't work. 
+You see, in reality, there are two ways you can fail in our new world. 
+One, you're doing something that you should follow a procedure to, and it's a very difficult thing, you're sloppy, you get it wrong. How should you be treated? You should probably be fired. 
+On the other hand, you're doing something new, no one's ever done before, you get it completely wrong. How should you be treated? 
+Well, free pizzas! You should be treated better than the people who succeed. 
+It's called smart failure. Why? Because you can't put it on your C.V. 
+So what I want to leave you, then, is with the explanation of why I actually traveled 60,000 miles from my desk. 
+When I realized the power of this new world, I quit my safe teaching job, and set up a virtual business school, the first in the world, in order to teach people how to make this happen, and I used some of my learnings about some of the rules which I'd learned on myself. 
+If you're interested, worldaftermidnight.com, you'll find out more, but I've applied them to myself for over a decade, and I'm still here, and I still have my house, and the most important thing is, I hope I've done enough to inject a little green ink into your lives, so that when you go away and you're making your next absolutely sensible and rational decision, you'll take some time to think, "" Hmm, I wonder whether this also makes sense in our new world after midnight. "" Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you, thank you. (Applause) 
+
+We always hear that texting is a scourge. 
+The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. 
+The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true, and it's easy to think that it is true, but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now, we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is, in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all. 
+What do I mean by that? 
+Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked. 
+That's what we're probably genetically specified for. 
+That's how we use language most. 
+Writing is something that came along much later, and as we saw in the last talk, there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then writing only came along at about 11: 07 p.m. 
+That's how much of a latterly thing writing is. 
+So first there's speech, and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice. 
+Now don't get me wrong, writing has certain advantages. 
+When you write, because it's a conscious process, because you can look backwards, you can do things with language that are much less likely if you're just talking. 
+For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:" "" The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours, till the graduate retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself. "" That's beautiful, but let's face it, nobody talks that way. 
+Or at least, they shouldn't if they're interested in reproducing. That — (Laughter) is not the way any human being speaks casually. 
+Casual speech is something quite different. 
+Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. 
+You'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. 
+That's what speech is like. 
+Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic. 
+It's much less reflective — very different from writing. 
+So we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that that's what language is, but actually what language is, is speech. They are two things. 
+Now of course, as history has gone by, it's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed between speech and writing. 
+So, for example, in a distant era now, it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. 
+So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat, and they go, "" Ahem, ladies and gentlemen, "" and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech. 
+It's formal. It uses long sentences like this Gibbon one. 
+It's basically talking like you write, and so, for example, we're thinking so much these days about Lincoln because of the movie. 
+The Gettysburg Address was not the main meal of that event. 
+For two hours before that, Edward Everett spoke on a topic that, frankly, cannot engage us today and barely did then. 
+The point of it was to listen to him speaking like writing. 
+Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours. 
+It was perfectly natural. 
+That's what people did then, speaking like writing. 
+Well, if you can speak like writing, then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write like you speak. 
+The problem was just that in the material, mechanical sense, that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials don't lend themselves to it. 
+It's almost impossible to do that with your hand except in shorthand, and then communication is limited. 
+On a manual typewriter it was very difficult, and even when we had electric typewriters, or then computer keyboards, the fact is that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech, more or less, you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly. 
+Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak. 
+And that's where texting comes in. 
+And so, texting is very loose in its structure. 
+No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk? 
+No, and so therefore why would you when you were texting? 
+What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That's what texting is. 
+Now we can write the way we talk. 
+And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline. 
+We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard, and so we think that something has gone wrong. 
+It's a very natural sense. 
+But the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity. 
+That's what we're seeing in this fingered speech. 
+And in order to understand it, what we want to see is the way, in this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up. 
+And so, for example, there is in texting a convention, which is LOL. 
+Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning "" laughing out loud. "" And of course, theoretically, it does, and if you look at older texts, then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud. 
+But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore. 
+It's evolved into something that is much subtler. 
+This is an actual text that was done by a non-male person of about 20 years old not too long ago. 
+"I love the font you're using, btw." 
+Julie: "" lol thanks gmail is being slow right now "" Now if you think about it, that's not funny. 
+No one's laughing. (Laughter) And yet, there it is, so you assume there's been some kind of hiccup. 
+Then Susan says "" lol, I know, "" again more guffawing than we're used to when you're talking about these inconveniences. 
+So Julie says, "" I just sent you an email. "" Susan: "" lol, I see it. "" Very funny people, if that's what LOL means. 
+This Julie says, "" So what's up? "" Susan: "" lol, I have to write a 10 page paper. "" She's not amused. Let's think about it. 
+LOL is being used in a very particular way. 
+It's a marker of empathy. It's a marker of accommodation. 
+We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles. 
+Any spoken language that's used by real people has them. 
+If you happen to speak Japanese, think about that little word "" ne "" that you use at the end of a lot of sentences. 
+If you listen to the way black youth today speak, think about the use of the word "" yo. "" Whole dissertations could be written about it, and probably are being written about it. 
+A pragmatic particle, that's what LOL has gradually become. 
+It's a way of using the language between actual people. 
+Another example is "" slash. "" Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to, along the lines of, "" We're going to have a party-slash-networking session. "" That's kind of like what we're at. 
+Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today. 
+It's used to change the scene. 
+So for example, this Sally person says, "So I need to find people to chill with" and Jake says, "" Haha "" — you could write a dissertation about "" Haha "" too, but we don't have time for that — "Haha so you're going by yourself? Why?" 
+Sally: "" For this summer program at NYU. "" Jake: "" Haha. Slash I'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye. "" The slash is interesting. 
+I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. 
+Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. 
+You don't just zip right into it. 
+You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "" Hmm, makes you think — "" when it really didn't, but what you're really — (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is change the topic. 
+You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. 
+All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker — or two, or three. 
+Texting has developed one from this slash. 
+So we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing, and yet it's easy to think, well, something is still wrong. 
+There's a lack of structure of some sort. 
+It's not as sophisticated as the language of The Wall Street Journal. 
+Well, the fact of the matter is, look at this person in 1956, and this is when texting doesn't exist, "" I Love Lucy "" is still on the air. 
+"" Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table, cannot write grammatically — "" We've heard that sort of thing before, not just in 1956. 1917, Connecticut schoolteacher. 
+1917. This is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on "" Downton Abbey "" are articulate, or something like that. 
+So, "" From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.' "" And so on. You can go even further back than this. 
+It's the President of Harvard. It's 1871. 
+There's no electricity. People have three names. 
+"" Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing. "" And he's talking about people who are otherwise well prepared for college studies. 
+You can go even further back. 
+1841, some long-lost superintendent of schools is upset because of what he has for a long time "" noted with regret the almost entire neglect of the original "" blah blah blah blah blah. 
+Or you can go all the way back to 63 A.D. — (Laughter) — and there's this poor man who doesn't like the way people are speaking Latin. 
+As it happens, he was writing about what had become French. 
+And so, there are always — (Laughter) (Applause) — there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning. 
+And so, the way I'm thinking of texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills, and that means that they're able to do two things. 
+Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. 
+That's also true of being bidialectal. 
+That's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing. 
+And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire. 
+It's very simple. 
+If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993, the slang would have changed a little bit since the era of "" Love Story, "" but they would understand what was on that message board. 
+Take that person from 1993 — not that long ago, this is "" Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure "" — those people. 
+Take those people and they read a very typical text written by a 20-year-old today. 
+Often they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as what it looks like to us when they're batting around on their little devices. 
+So in closing, if I could go into the future, if I could go into 2033, the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to "" The Wire. "" I would want to know. 
+And — I really would ask that — and then I'd want to know actually what was going on on "" Downton Abbey. "" That'd be the second thing. 
+And then the third thing would be, please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls, because I would want to know where this language had developed since our times, and ideally I would then send them back to you and me now so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Last year, three of my family members were gruesomely murdered in a hate crime. 
+It goes without saying that it's really difficult for me to be here today, but my brother Deah, his wife Yusor, and her sister Razan don't give me much of a choice. 
+I'm hopeful that by the end of this talk you will make a choice, and join me in standing up against hate. 
+It's December 27, 2014: the morning of my brother's wedding day. 
+He asks me to come over and comb his hair in preparation for his wedding photo shoot. 
+The man who murdered my brother turned himself in to the police shortly after the murders, saying he killed three kids, execution-style, over a parking dispute. 
+The police issued a premature public statement that morning, echoing his claims without bothering to question it or further investigate. 
+But the damage was already done. 
+I sit on my brother's bed and remember his words, the words he gave me so freely and with so much love, "I am who I am because of you." 
+That's what it takes for me to climb through my crippling grief and speak out. 
+Some of the rage I felt at the time was that if roles were reversed, and an Arab, Muslim or Muslim-appearing person had killed three white American college students execution-style, in their home, what would we have called it? 
+A terrorist attack. 
+When white men commit acts of violence in the US, they're lone wolves, mentally ill or driven by a parking dispute. 
+I know that I have to give my family voice, and I do the only thing I know how: I send a Facebook message to everyone I know in media. 
+A couple of hours later, in the midst of a chaotic house overflowing with friends and family, our neighbor Neal comes over, sits down next to my parents and asks, "" What can I do? "" Neal had over two decades of experience in journalism, but he makes it clear that he's not there in his capacity as journalist, but as a neighbor who wants to help. 
+He offers to set up a press conference at a local community center. 
+Even now I don't have the words to thank him. 
+"" Just tell me when, and I'll have all the news channels present, "" he said. 
+I delivered the press statement, still wearing scrubs from the previous night. 
+And in under 24 hours from the murders, I'm on CNN being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. 
+The following day, major newspapers — including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune — published stories about Deah, Yusor and Razan, allowing us to reclaim the narrative and call attention the mainstreaming of anti-Muslim hatred. 
+These days, it feels like Islamophobia is a socially acceptable form of bigotry. 
+We just have to put up with it and smile. 
+The nasty stares, the palpable fear when boarding a plane, the random pat downs at airports that happen 99 percent of the time. 
+It doesn't stop there. 
+We have politicians reaping political and financial gains off our backs. 
+Here in the US, we have presidential candidates like Donald Trump, casually calling to register American Muslims, and ban Muslim immigrants and refugees from entering this country. 
+It is no coincidence that hate crimes rise in parallel with election cycles. 
+Just a couple months ago, Khalid Jabara, a Lebanese-American Christian, was murdered in Oklahoma by his neighbor — a man who called him a "" filthy Arab. "" This man was previously jailed for a mere 8 months, after attempting run over Khalid's mother with his car. 
+Chances are you haven't heard Khalid's story, because it didn't make it to national news. 
+The least we can do is call it what it is: a hate crime. 
+The least we can do is talk about it, because violence and hatred doesn't just happen in a vacuum. 
+Not long after coming back to work, I'm the senior on rounds in the hospital, when one of my patients looks over at my colleague, gestures around her face and says, "" San Bernardino, "" referencing a recent terrorist attack. 
+I was disheartened. 
+Days later rounding on the same patient, she looks at me and says, "Your people are killing people in Los Angeles." 
+I look around expectantly. 
+Again: silence. 
+I realize that yet again, I have to speak up for myself. 
+Have I done anything but give you compassionate care? "" She looks down and realizes what she said was wrong, and in front of the entire team, she apologizes and says, "" I should know better. I'm Mexican-American. 
+I receive this kind of treatment all the time. "" Many of us experience microaggressions on a daily basis. 
+Odds are you may have experienced it, whether for your race, gender, sexuality or religious beliefs. 
+We've all been in situations where we've witnessed something wrong and didn't speak up. 
+Maybe we weren't equipped with the tools to respond in the moment. 
+Maybe we weren't even aware of our own implicit biases. 
+But stepping right into that discomfort means you are also stepping into the ally zone. 
+There may be over three million Muslims in America. 
+That's still just one percent of the total population. 
+Martin Luther King once said, "" In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. "" So what made my neighbor Neal's allyship so profound? 
+A couple of things. 
+He was there as a neighbor who cared, but he was also bringing in his professional expertise and resources when the moment called for it. 
+Others have done the same. 
+Within a month, she joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, where she now works on pluralism, race, faith and culture. 
+Reddit cofounder, Alexis Ohanian, demonstrated that not all active allyship needs to be so serious. 
+He stepped up to support a 15-year-old Muslim girl's mission to introduce a hijab emoji. 
+(Laughter) It's a simple gesture, but it has a significant subconscious impact on normalizing and humanizing Muslims, including the community as a part of an "" us "" instead of an "" other. "" The editor in chief of Women's Running magazine just put the first hijabi to ever be on the cover of a US fitness magazine. 
+These are all very different examples of people who drew upon their platforms and resources in academia, tech and media, to actively express their allyship. 
+What resources and expertise do you bring to the table? 
+Will you be Neal? 
+Many neighbors appeared in this story. 
+And you, in your respective communities, all have a Muslim neighbor, colleague or friend your child plays with at school. 
+Reach out to them. 
+Let them know you stand with them in solidarity. 
+It may feel really small, but I promise you it makes a difference. 
+Nothing will ever bring back Deah, Yusor and Razan. 
+But when we raise our collective voices, that is when we stop the hate. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I got a visit almost exactly a year ago, a little over a year ago, from a very senior person at the Department of Defense. 
+Came to see me and said, "" 1,600 of the kids that we've sent out have come back missing at least one full arm. 
+Whole arm. Shoulder disarticulation. 
+And we're doing the same thing we did for — more or less, that we've done since the Civil War, a stick and a hook. 
+And they deserve more than that. "" And literally, this guy sat in my office in New Hampshire and said, "" I want you to give me something that we can put on these kids that'll pick up a raisin or a grape off a table, they'll be able to put it in their mouth without destroying either one, and they'll be able to know the difference without looking at it. "" You know, had efferent, afferent, and haptic response. 
+He finishes explaining that, and I'm waiting for the big 300 pound paper proposal, and he said, "" That's what I want from you. "" I said, "" Look, you're nuts. That technology's just not available right now. 
+And it can't be done. 
+Not in an envelope of a human arm, with 21 degrees of freedom, from your shoulder to your fingertips. "" He said, "" About two dozen of these 1,600 kids have come back bilateral. 
+You think it's bad to lose one arm? 
+That's an inconvenience compared to having both of them gone. "" I got a day job, and my nights and weekends are already filled up with things like, let's supply water to the world, and power to the world, and educate all the kids, which, Chris, I will not talk about. I don't need another mission. 
+I keep thinking about these kids with no arms. 
+He says to me, "" We've done some work around the country. 
+We've got some pretty amazing neurology and other people. "" I said, "" I'll take a field trip, I'll go see what you got. "" Over the next month I visited lots of places, some out here, around the country, found the best of the best. 
+I went down to Washington. I saw these guys, and said, "" I did what you asked me. I looked at what's out there. 
+I still think you're nuts. But not as nuts as I thought. "" I put a team together, a little over 13 months ago, got up to 20 some-odd people. 
+We said, we're going to build a device that does what he wants. 
+We have 14 out of the 21 degrees of freedom; you don't need the ones in the last two fingers. 
+We put this thing together. 
+A couple of weeks ago we took it down to Walter Reed, which is unfortunately more in the news these days. 
+We showed it to a bunch of guys. 
+One guy who described himself as being lucky, because he lost his left arm, and he's a righty. 
+He sat at a table with seven or eight of these other guys. 
+Said he was lucky, because he had his good arm, and then he pushed himself back from the table. He had no legs. 
+These kids have attitudes that you just can't believe. 
+So I'm going to show you now, without the skin on it, a 30-second piece, and then I'm done. 
+But understand what you're looking at we made small enough to fit on a 50th percentile female, so that we could put it in any of these people. 
+It's going to go inside something that we use in CAT scans and MRIs of whatever is their good arm, to make silicon rubber, then coat it, and paint it in 3D — exact mirror image of their other limb. 
+So, you won't see all the really cool stuff that's in this series elastic set of 14 actuators, each one which has its own capability to sense temperature and pressure. 
+It also has a pneumatic cuff that holds it on, so the more they put themselves under load, the more it attaches. 
+They take the load off, and it becomes, again, compliant. 
+I'm going to show you a guy doing a couple of simple things with this that we demonstrated in Washington. Can we look at this thing? 
+Watch the fingers grab. The thumb comes up. Wrist. 
+This weighs 6.9 pounds. 
+Going to scratch his nose. 
+It's got 14 active degrees of freedom. 
+Now he's going to pick up a pen with his opposed thumb and index finger. 
+Now he's going to put that down, pick up a piece of paper, rotate all the degrees of freedom in his hand and wrist, and read it. 
+(Applause) 
+
+There's a certain — (Laughter) That's true in everything risky, except technology. 
+For some reason, there's no standard syllabus, there's no basic course. 
+The space bar scrolls down one page. 
+Also on the web, when you're filling in one of these forms like your addresses, I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box. 
+Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus, plus, plus. 
+You make the text larger with each tap. 
+Go space, space. 
+Also when it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you've dialed before, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it. 
+Something that drives me crazy: When I call you and leave a message on your voice mail, I hear you saying, "" Leave a message, "" and then I get these 15 seconds of freaking instructions, like we haven't had answering machines for 45 years! 
+(Laughter) I'm not bitter. (Laughter) 
+So it turns out there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this. 
+(Beep) David Pogue: Unfortunately, the carriers didn't adopt the same keystroke, so it's different by carrier, so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you're calling. 
+While we're talking about text — When you want to highlight — this is just an example — (Laughter) When you want to highlight a word, please don't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie. 
+Double click the word. 
+Also, don't delete what you've highlighted. 
+You can just type over it. 
+Also, you can go double-click, drag, to highlight in one-word increments as you drag. 
+(Camera click) (Laughter) So, that's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down — no shutter lag! 
+And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason, the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you! 
+(Laughter) So when that happens — this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program — all you do is hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide, make everybody look at you, and then when you're ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you're really on a roll, you can hit the W key for "" whiteout, "" and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to un-blank it. 
+So I know I went super fast. 
+
+I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. 
+Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating — no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger — and definitely no fear; that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior; women are inferior; that men are strong; women are weak; that women are of less value, property of men, and objects, particularly sexual objects. 
+I've later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the "" man box. "" See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. 
+Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. 
+But at the same time, there's some stuff that's just straight up twisted, and we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood. 
+This is my two at home, Kendall and Jay. 
+They're 11 and 12. 
+Kendall's 15 months older than Jay. 
+There was a period of time when my wife — her name is Tammie — and I, we just got real busy and whip, bam, boom: Kendall and Jay. 
+(Laughter) And when they were about five and six, four and five, Jay could come to me, come to me crying. 
+It didn't matter what she was crying about, she could get on my knee, she could snot my sleeve up, just cry, cry it out. 
+Daddy's got you. That's all that's important. 
+Now Kendall on the other hand — and like I said, he's only 15 months older than her — he'd come to me crying, it's like as soon as I would hear him cry, a clock would go off. 
+I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds, which means, by the time he got to me, I was already saying things like, "" Why are you crying? 
+Hold your head up. Look at me. 
+Explain to me what's wrong. 
+Tell me what's wrong. I can't understand you. 
+Why are you crying? "" And out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box, I would find myself saying things like, "" Just go in your room. 
+Just go on, go on in your room. 
+Sit down, get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a — "" what? 
+(Audience: Man.) Like a man. 
+And he's five years old. 
+And as I grow in life, I would say to myself, "" My God, what's wrong with me? 
+What am I doing? Why would I do this? "" And I think back. 
+I think back to my father. 
+There was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family. 
+My brother, Henry, he died tragically when we were teenagers. 
+We lived in New York City, as I said. 
+We lived in the Bronx at the time, and the burial was in a place called Long Island, it was about two hours outside of the city. 
+And as we were preparing to come back from the burial, the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city. 
+And the limousine empties out. 
+My mother, my sister, my auntie, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine, and no sooner than the women got out, he burst out crying. 
+He didn't want cry in front of me, but he knew he wasn't going to make it back to the city, and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women. 
+And this is a man who, 10 minutes ago, had just put his teenage son in the ground — something I just can't even imagine. 
+The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me, and at the same time, he was also giving me props, lifting me up, for not crying. 
+I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. 
+I can remember speaking to a 12-year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, "" How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl? "" Now I expected him to say something like, I'd be sad; I'd be mad; I'd be angry, or something like that. 
+No, the boy said to me — the boy said to me, "It would destroy me." 
+And I said to myself, "" God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls? "" (Applause) It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. 
+I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner city. 
+At this time we're living in the Bronx, and in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. 
+He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old — younger guys. 
+And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. 
+And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. 
+He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, "What is this 16-year-old boy doing with these 12-year-old boys?" 
+And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. 
+He was a troubled kid. 
+His mother had died from a heroin overdose. 
+He was being raised by his grandmother. 
+His father wasn't on the set. 
+His grandmother had two jobs. 
+He was home alone a lot. 
+But I've got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude, man. 
+He was cool. He was fine. 
+That's what the sisters said, "" He was fine. "" He was having sex. 
+We all looked up to him. 
+So one day, I'm out in front of the house doing something — just playing around, doing something — I don't know what. 
+He looks out his window; he calls me upstairs; he said, "" Hey Anthony. "" They called me Anthony growing up as a kid. 
+"Hey Anthony, come on upstairs." 
+Johnny call, you go. 
+So I run right upstairs. 
+As he opens the door, he says to me, "" Do you want some? "" Now I immediately knew what he meant. 
+Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, "" Do you want some? "" meant one of two things: sex or drugs — and we weren't doing drugs. 
+Now my box, my card, my man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. 
+Two things: One, I never had sex. 
+We don't talk about that as men. 
+You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. 
+For everybody else, we go around like we've been having sex since we were two. 
+There ain't no first time. 
+(Laughter) The other thing I couldn't tell him is that I didn't want any. 
+That's even worse. We're supposed to always be on the prowl. 
+Women are objects, especially sexual objects. 
+Anyway, so I couldn't tell him any of that. 
+So, like my mother would say, make a long story short, I just simply said to Johnny, "" Yes. "" He told me to go in his room. 
+I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. 
+She's 16 years old. 
+She's nude. 
+She's what I know today to be mentally ill, higher-functioning at times than others. 
+We had a whole choice of inappropriate names for her. 
+Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. 
+Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. 
+Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes. 
+So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. 
+So when I go in the room, I close the door. 
+Folks, I'm petrified. 
+I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can't bust in the room and see that I'm not doing anything, and I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. 
+So now I'm no longer trying to figure out what I'm going to do; I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to get out of this room. 
+So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room, and lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. 
+So now there's a living room full of guys. 
+It was like the waiting room in the doctor's office. 
+And they asked me how was it, and I say to them, "" It was good, "" and I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door. 
+Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn't get caught. 
+But I knew I felt bad about what was happening. 
+This fear, getting outside the man box, totally enveloped me. 
+It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her. 
+See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. 
+We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. 
+We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. 
+We kind of see ourselves separate, but we're very much a part of it. 
+You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can't happen without it. 
+So we're very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. 
+The center for disease control says that men's violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad. 
+So quickly, I'd like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. 
+The world I envision for her — how do I want men to be acting and behaving? 
+I need you on board. I need you with me. 
+I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men — that it's okay to not be dominating, that it's okay to have feelings and emotions, that it's okay to promote equality, that it's okay to have women who are just friends and that's it, that it's okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman. (Applause) I remember asking a nine-year-old boy, I asked a nine-year-old boy, "" What would life be like for you, if you didn't have to adhere to this man box? "" 
+He said to me, "" I would be free. "" Thank you folks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I am a Hazara, and the homeland of my people is Afghanistan. 
+My parents also fled to Pakistan, and settled in Quetta, where I was born. 
+After the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers, I got a chance to go to Afghanistan for the first time, with foreign journalists. 
+After four years, I felt it was safe enough to move to Afghanistan permanently, and I was working there as a documentary photographer, and I worked on many stories. 
+One of the most important stories that I did was the dancing boys of Afghanistan. 
+These boys are often abducted or bought from their poor parents, and they are put to work as sex slaves. 
+He was taken to another province, where he was forced to work as a sex slave for the warlord and his friends. 
+When this story was published in the Washington Post, I started receiving death threats, and I was forced to leave Afghanistan, as my parents were. 
+Along with my family, I returned back to Quetta. 
+Once a peaceful haven for the Hazaras, it had now turned into the most dangerous city in Pakistan. 
+Hazaras are confined into two small areas, and they are marginalized socially, educationally, and financially. 
+This is Nadir. 
+I had known him since my childhood. 
+The attacks on the Hazara community would only get worse, so it was not surprising that many wanted to flee. 
+After Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Australia is home to the fourth largest population of Hazaras in the world. 
+We all knew about the risks, and how terrifying the journey is, and I met many people who lost loved ones at sea. 
+If I had been able to simply fly to Australia, it would have taken me less than 24 hours. 
+My journey was much longer, much more complicated, and certainly more dangerous, traveling to Thailand by air, and then by road and boat to Malaysia and into Indonesia, paying people and smugglers all the way and spending a lot of time hiding and a lot of time in fear of being caught. 
+We all shared a bedroom in a town outside of Jakarta called Bogor. 
+After spending a week in Bogor, three of my roommates left for the perilous journey, and we got the news two days later that a distressed boat sank in the sea en route to Christmas Island. 
+We found out that our three roommates — Nawroz, Jaffar and Shabbir — were also among those. 
+Shabbir and Nawroz were never seen again. 
+It made me think, am I doing the right thing? 
+Taken in the night towards the main vessel on a motorboat, we boarded an old fishing boat that was already overloaded. 
+There were 93 of us, and we were all below deck. 
+We all paid 6,000 dollars each for this part of the trip. 
+The first night and day went smoothly, but by the second night, the weather turned. 
+They were screaming. 
+It was a terrible moment. 
+It was like a scene from doomsday, or maybe like one of those scenes from those Hollywood movies that shows that everything is breaking apart and the world is just ending. 
+It was happening to us for real. 
+Our boat was floating like a matchbox on the water without any control. 
+We thought, this is the end. 
+The captain told us that we are not going to make it, we have to turn back the boat. 
+We went on the deck and turned our torches on and off to attract the attention of any passing boat. 
+Our boat crashing onto the rocks, I slipped into the water and destroyed my camera, whatever I had documented. 
+It was a thick forest. 
+We all split up into many groups as we argued over what to do next. 
+Then, after spending the night on the beach, we found a jetty and coconuts. 
+At Serang Detention Center, an immigration officer came and furtively strip-searched us. 
+He took our mobile, my $300 cash, our shoes that we should not be able to escape, but we kept watching the guards, checking their movements, and around 4 a.m. when they sat around a fire, we removed two glass layers from an outside facing window and slipped through. 
+We climbed a tree next to an outer wall that was topped with the shards of glass. 
+We put the pillow on that and wrapped our forearms with bedsheets and climbed the wall, and we ran away with bare feet. 
+I was free, with an uncertain future, no money. 
+When my documentary was aired on SBS Dateline, many of my friends came to know about my situation, and they tried to help me. 
+They did not allow me to take any other boat to risk my life. 
+I also decided to stay in Indonesia and process my case through UNHCR, but I was really afraid that I would end up in Indonesia for many years doing nothing and unable to work, like every other asylum seeker. 
+But it had happened to be a little bit different with me. 
+I was lucky. 
+My contacts worked to expedite my case through UNHCR, and I got resettled in Australia in May 2013. 
+It is really difficult to live a life with an uncertain fate, in limbo. 
+The issue of asylum seekers in Australia has been so extremely politicized that it has lost its human face. 
+I hope my story and the story of other Hazaras could shed some light to show the people how these people are suffering in their countries of origin, and how they suffer, why they risk their lives to seek asylum. 
+
+For more than 100 years, the telephone companies have provided wiretapping assistance to governments. 
+For much of this time, this assistance was manual. 
+Surveillance took place manually and wires were connected by hand. 
+Calls were recorded to tape. 
+But as in so many other industries, computing has changed everything. 
+The telephone companies built surveillance features into the very core of their networks. 
+I want that to sink in for a second: Our telephones and the networks that carry our calls were wired for surveillance first. 
+First and foremost. 
+So what that means is that when you're talking to your spouse, your children, a colleague or your doctor on the telephone, someone could be listening. 
+Now, that someone might be your own government; it could also be another government, a foreign intelligence service, or a hacker, or a criminal, or a stalker or any other party that breaks into the surveillance system, that hacks into the surveillance system of the telephone companies. 
+But while the telephone companies have built surveillance as a priority, Silicon Valley companies have not. 
+And increasingly, over the last couple years, Silicon Valley companies have built strong encryption technology into their communications products that makes surveillance extremely difficult. 
+For example, many of you might have an iPhone, and if you use an iPhone to send a text message to other people who have an iPhone, those text messages cannot easily be wiretapped. 
+And in fact, according to Apple, they're not able to even see the text messages themselves. 
+Likewise, if you use FaceTime to make an audio call or a video call with one of your friends or loved ones, that, too, cannot be easily wiretapped. 
+And it's not just Apple. 
+WhatsApp, which is now owned by Facebook and used by hundreds of millions of people around the world, also has built strong encryption technology into its product, which means that people in the Global South can easily communicate without their governments, often authoritarian, wiretapping their text messages. 
+So, after 100 years of being able to listen to any telephone call — anytime, anywhere — you might imagine that government officials are not very happy. 
+And they're not mad because these encryption tools are now available. 
+What upsets them the most is that the tech companies have built encryption features into their products and turned them on by default. 
+And so, government officials like British Prime Minister David Cameron, they believe that all communications — emails, texts, voice calls — all of these should be available to governments, and encryption is making that difficult. 
+Now, look — I'm extremely sympathetic to their point of view. 
+We live in a dangerous time in a dangerous world, and there really are bad people out there. 
+There are terrorists and other serious national security threats that I suspect we all want the FBI and the NSA to monitor. 
+But those surveillance features come at a cost. 
+The reason for that is that there is no such thing as a terrorist laptop, or a drug dealer's cell phone. 
+We all use the same communications devices. 
+What that means is that if the drug dealers' telephone calls or the terrorists' telephone calls can be intercepted, then so can the rest of ours, too. 
+And I think we really need to ask: Should a billion people around the world be using devices that are wiretap friendly? 
+So the scenario of hacking of surveillance systems that I've described — this is not imaginary. 
+In 2009, the surveillance systems that Google and Microsoft built into their networks — the systems that they use to respond to lawful surveillance requests from the police — those systems were compromised by the Chinese government, because the Chinese government wanted to figure out which of their own agents the US government was monitoring. 
+By the same token, in 2004, the surveillance system built into the network of Vodafone Greece — Greece's largest telephone company — was compromised by an unknown entity, and that feature, the surveillance feature, was used to wiretap the Greek Prime Minister and members of the Greek cabinet. 
+The foreign government or hackers who did that were never caught. 
+And really, this gets to the very problem with these surveillance features, or backdoors. 
+When you build a backdoor into a communications network or piece of technology, you have no way of controlling who's going to go through it. 
+You have no way of controlling whether it'll be used by your side or the other side, by good guys, or by bad guys. 
+And so for that reason, I think that it's better to build networks to be as secure as possible. 
+Yes, this means that in the future, encryption is going to make wiretapping more difficult. 
+It means that the police are going to have a tougher time catching bad guys. 
+But the alternative would mean to live in a world where anyone's calls or anyone's text messages could be surveilled by criminals, by stalkers and by foreign intelligence agencies. 
+And I don't want to live in that kind of world. 
+And so right now, you probably have the tools to thwart many kinds of government surveillance already on your phones and already in your pockets, you just might not realize how strong and how secure those tools are, or how weak the other ways you've used to communicate really are. 
+And so, my message to you is this: We need to use these tools. 
+We need to secure our telephone calls. 
+We need to secure our text messages. 
+I want you to use these tools. 
+I want you to tell your loved ones, I want you to tell your colleagues: Use these encrypted communications tools. 
+Don't just use them because they're cheap and easy, but use them because they're secure. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to talk to you today about the human brain, which is what we do research on at the University of California. 
+Just think about this problem for a second. 
+Here is a lump of flesh, about three pounds, which you can hold in the palm of your hand. 
+But it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. 
+It can contemplate the meaning of infinity, ask questions about the meaning of its own existence, about the nature of God. 
+And this is truly the most amazing thing in the world. 
+It's the greatest mystery confronting human beings: How does this all come about? 
+Well, the brain, as you know, is made up of neurons. 
+We're looking at neurons here. 
+There are 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. 
+And each neuron makes something like 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other neurons in the brain. 
+And based on this, people have calculated that the number of permutations and combinations of brain activity exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. 
+So, how do you go about studying the brain? 
+One approach is to look at patients who had lesions in different part of the brain, and study changes in their behavior. 
+This is what I spoke about in the last TED. 
+Today I'll talk about a different approach, which is to put electrodes in different parts of the brain, and actually record the activity of individual nerve cells in the brain. 
+Sort of eavesdrop on the activity of nerve cells in the brain. 
+Now, one recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy, in Parma, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues, is a group of neurons called mirror neurons, which are on the front of the brain in the frontal lobes. 
+Now, it turns out there are neurons which are called ordinary motor command neurons in the front of the brain, which have been known for over 50 years. 
+These neurons will fire when a person performs a specific action. 
+For example, if I do that, and reach and grab an apple, a motor command neuron in the front of my brain will fire. 
+If I reach out and pull an object, another neuron will fire, commanding me to pull that object. 
+These are called motor command neurons that have been known for a long time. 
+But what Rizzolatti found was a subset of these neurons, maybe about 20 percent of them, will also fire when I'm looking at somebody else performing the same action. 
+So, here is a neuron that fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. 
+And this is truly astonishing. 
+Because it's as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view. 
+It's almost as though it's performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person's action. 
+Now, what is the significance of these mirror neurons? 
+For one thing they must be involved in things like imitation and emulation. 
+Because to imitate a complex act requires my brain to adopt the other person's point of view. 
+So, this is important for imitation and emulation. 
+Well, why is that important? 
+Well, let's take a look at the next slide. 
+So, how do you do imitation? Why is imitation important? 
+Mirror neurons and imitation, emulation. 
+Now, let's look at culture, the phenomenon of human culture. 
+If you go back in time about [75,000] to 100,000 years ago, let's look at human evolution, it turns out that something very important happened around 75,000 years ago. 
+And that is, there is a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use, the use of fire, the use of shelters, and, of course, language, and the ability to read somebody else's mind and interpret that person's behavior. 
+All of that happened relatively quickly. 
+Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100,000 years ago all of this happened very, very quickly. 
+And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people's actions. 
+So that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group, say the use of fire, or a particular type of tool, instead of dying out, this spread rapidly, horizontally across the population, or was transmitted vertically, down the generations. 
+So, this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian, instead of Darwinian. 
+Darwinian evolution is slow; it takes hundreds of thousands of years. 
+A polar bear, to evolve a coat, will take thousands of generations, maybe 100,000 years. 
+A human being, a child, can just watch its parent kill another polar bear, and skin it and put the skin on its body, fur on the body, and learn it in one step. What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn, it can learn in five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. 
+And then once it's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population. 
+This is the basis. The imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization. 
+Now there is another kind of mirror neuron, which is involved in something quite different. 
+And that is, there are mirror neurons, just as there are mirror neurons for action, there are mirror neurons for touch. 
+In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires. 
+But the same neuron, in some cases, will fire when I simply watch another person being touched. 
+So, it's empathizing the other person being touched. 
+So, most of them will fire when I'm touched in different locations. Different neurons for different locations. 
+But a subset of them will fire even when I watch somebody else being touched in the same location. 
+So, here again you have neurons which are enrolled in empathy. 
+Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? 
+I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. 
+Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying "" Don't worry, you're not being touched. 
+So, empathize, by all means, with the other person, but do not actually experience the touch, otherwise you'll get confused and muddled. "" Okay, so there is a feedback signal that vetoes the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch. 
+But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. 
+In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. 
+So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons. 
+(Laughter) And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense. 
+All that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. 
+Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. 
+You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. 
+And this, of course, is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, and that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. 
+You are, in fact, connected not just via Facebook and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. 
+And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. 
+And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness. 
+And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. 
+It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience. 
+So, you have a patient with a phantom limb. If the arm has been removed and you have a phantom, and you watch somebody else being touched, you feel it in your phantom. 
+Now the astonishing thing is, if you have pain in your phantom limb, you squeeze the other person's hand, massage the other person's hand, that relieves the pain in your phantom hand, almost as though the neuron were obtaining relief from merely watching somebody else being massaged. 
+So, here you have my last slide. 
+For the longest time people have regarded science and humanities as being distinct. 
+C.P. Snow spoke of the two cultures: science on the one hand, humanities on the other; never the twain shall meet. 
+So, I'm saying the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings, and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It is said that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and I believe this is true, especially when I hear President Obama often talk about the Korean education system as a benchmark of success. 
+Well, I can tell you that, in the rigid structure and highly competitive nature of the Korean school system, also known as pressure cooker, not everyone can do well in that environment. 
+While many people responded in different ways about our education system, my response to the high-pressure environment was making bows with pieces of wood found near my apartment building. 
+Why bows? 
+I'm not quite sure. 
+Perhaps, in the face of constant pressure, my caveman instinct of survival has connected with the bows. 
+If you think about it, the bow has really helped drive human survival since prehistoric times. 
+The area within three kilometers of my home used to be a mulberry forest during the Joseon dynasty, where silkworms were fed with mulberry leaves. 
+In order to raise the historical awareness of this fact, the government has planted mulberry trees. 
+The seeds from these trees also have spread by birds here and there nearby the soundproof walls of the city expressway that has been built around the 1988 Olympics. 
+The area near these walls, which nobody bothers to pay attention to, had been left free from major intervention, and this is where I first found my treasures. 
+As I fell deeper into bow making, I began to search far and beyond my neighborhood. 
+When I went on school field trips, family vacations, or simply on my way home from extracurricular classes, I wandered around wooded areas and gathered tree branches with the tools that I sneaked inside my school bag. 
+And they would be somethings like saws, knives, sickles and axes that I covered up with a piece of towel. 
+I would bring the branches home, riding buses and subways, barely holding them in my hands. 
+And I did not bring the tools here to Long Beach. 
+Airport security. 
+(Laughter) In the privacy of my room, covered in sawdust, I would saw, trim and polish wood all night long until a bow took shape. 
+One day, I was changing the shape of a bamboo piece and ended up setting the place on fire. 
+Where? The rooftop of my apartment building, a place where 96 families call home. 
+A customer from a department store across from my building called 911, and I ran downstairs to tell my mom with half of my hair burned. 
+I want to take this opportunity to tell my mom, in the audience today: Mom, I was really sorry, and I will be more careful with open fire from now on. 
+My mother had to do a lot of explaining, telling people that her son did not commit a premeditated arson. 
+I also researched extensively on bows around the world. 
+In that process, I tried to combine the different bows from across time and places to create the most effective bow. 
+I also worked with many different types of wood, such as maple, yew and mulberry, and did many shooting experiments in the wooded area near the urban expressway that I mentioned before. 
+The most effective bow for me would be like this. 
+One: Curved tips can maximize the springiness when you draw and shoot the arrow. 
+Two: Belly is drawn inward for higher draw weight, which means more power. 
+Three: Sinew used in the outer layer of the limb for maximum tension storage. 
+And four: Horn used to store energy in compression. 
+After fixing, breaking, redesigning, mending, bending and amending, my ideal bow began to take shape, and when it was finally done, it looked like this. 
+I was so proud of myself for inventing a perfect bow on my own. 
+This is a picture of Korean traditional bows taken from a museum, and see how my bow resembles them. 
+Thanks to my ancestors for robbing me of my invention. (Laughter) Through bowmaking, I came in contact with part of my heritage. 
+Learning the information that has accumulated over time and reading the message left by my ancestors were better than any consolation therapy or piece of advice any living adults could give me. 
+You see, I searched far and wide, but never bothered to look close and near. 
+From this realization, I began to take interest in Korean history, which had never inspired me before. 
+In the end, the grass is often greener on my side of the fence, although we don't realize it. 
+Now, I am going to show you how my bow works. 
+And let's see how this one works. 
+This is a bamboo bow, with 45-pound draw weights. 
+(Noise of shooting arrow) (Applause) A bow may function in a simple mechanism, but in order to make a good bow, a great amount of sensitivity is required. 
+You need to console and communicate with the wood material. 
+Each fiber in the wood has its own reason and function for being, and only through cooperation and harmony among them comes a great bow. 
+I may be an [odd] student with unconventional interests, but I hope I am making a contribution by sharing my story with all of you. 
+My ideal world is a place where no one is left behind, where everyone is needed exactly where they are, like the fibers and the tendons in a bow, a place where the strong is flexible and the vulnerable is resilient. 
+The bow resembles me, and I resemble the bow. 
+Now, I am shooting a part of myself to you. 
+No, better yet, a part of my mind has just been shot over to your mind. 
+Did it strike you? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a journalist, so I like to look for the untold stories, the lives that quietly play out under the scream of headlines. 
+I've also been going about the business of putting down roots, choosing a partner, making babies. 
+So for the last few years, I've been trying to understand what constitutes the 21st-century good life, both because I'm fascinated by the moral and philosophical implications, but also because I'm in desperate need of answers myself. 
+We live in tenuous times. 
+In fact, for the first time in American history, the majority of parents do not think that their kids will be better off than they were. 
+Now, some of you might hear this and feel sad. 
+But when I read this historic poll for the first time, it didn't actually make me feel sad. 
+It felt like a provocation. 
+"" Better off "" — based on whose standards? 
+Those are nearly extinct. 
+OK, so is better off just a number? 
+By that singular measurement, we are failing. 
+All right, so is better off getting a big house with a white picket fence? 
+Nearly five million people lost their homes in the Great Recession, and even more of us sobered up about the lengths we were willing to go — or be tricked into going, in many predatory cases — to hold that deed. 
+Home-ownership rates are at their lowest since 1995. 
+All right, so we're not finding steady employment, we're not earning as much money, and we're not living in big fancy houses. 
+Toll the funeral bells for everything that made America great. 
+But, are those the best measurements of a country's greatness, of a life well lived? 
+What I think makes America great is its spirit of reinvention. 
+In the wake of the Great Recession, more and more Americans are redefining what "" better off "" really means. 
+Turns out, it has more to do with community and creativity than dollars and cents. 
+Now, let me be very clear: the 14.8 percent of Americans living in poverty need money, plain and simple. 
+But, too often we let the conversation stop there. 
+We talk about poverty as if it were a monolithic experience; about the poor as if they were solely victims. 
+Part of what I've learned in my research and reporting is that the art of living well is often practiced most masterfully by the most vulnerable. 
+Now, if necessity is the mother of invention, I've come to believe that recession can be the father of consciousness. 
+All of us, whether we realize it or not, seek answers to these questions, with our ancestors kind of whispering in our ears. 
+My great-grandfather was a drunk in Detroit, who sometimes managed to hold down a factory job. 
+He had, as unbelievable as it might sound, 21 children, with one woman, my great-grandmother, who died at 47 years old of ovarian cancer. 
+Now, I'm pregnant with my second child, and I cannot even fathom what she must have gone through. 
+So my grandfather, their son, became a traveling salesman, and he lived boom and bust. 
+He actually took his braces off himself with pliers in the garage, when his father admitted he didn't have money to go back to the orthodontist. 
+So my dad, unsurprisingly, became a bankruptcy lawyer. 
+He was obsessed with providing a secure foundation for my brother and I. 
+So I ask these questions by way of a few generations of struggle. 
+My parents made sure that I grew up on a kind of steady ground that allows one to question and risk and leap. 
+And ironically, and probably sometimes to their frustration, it is their steadfast commitment to security that allows me to question its value, or at least its value as we've historically defined it in the 21st century. 
+So let's dig into this first question: How should we work? 
+We should work like our mothers. 
+That's right — we've spent decades trying to fit women into a work world built for company men. 
+My mom called it "" just making it work. "" Today I hear life coaches call it "" a portfolio career. "" Whatever you call it, more and more men are craving these whole, if not harried, lives. 
+They're waking up to their desire and duty to be present fathers and sons. 
+Now, artist Ann Hamilton has said, "Labor is a way of knowing." Labor is a way of knowing. 
+If this is true, and I think it is, then women who have disproportionately cared for the little ones and the sick ones and the aging ones, have disproportionately benefited from the most profound kind of knowing there is: knowing the human condition. 
+By prioritizing care, men are, in a sense, staking their claim to the full range of human existence. 
+Punch clocks are becoming obsolete, as are career ladders. 
+Whole industries are being born and dying every day. 
+So we need to stop asking kids, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
+and start asking them, "" How do you want to be when you grow up? "" Their work will constantly change. 
+The promise of a work world that is structured to actually fit our 21st century values, not some archaic idea about bringing home the bacon, is long overdue — just ask your mother. 
+We should live like our immigrant ancestors. 
+When they came to America, they often shared apartments, survival tactics, child care — always knew how to fill one more belly, no matter how small the food available. 
+But they were told that success meant leaving the village behind and pursuing that iconic symbol of the American Dream, the white picket fence. 
+Many Americans are rejecting the white picket fence and the kind of highly privatized life that happened within it, and reclaiming village life, reclaiming interdependence instead. 
+Some people are choosing to share homes not with family, but with other people who understand the health and economic benefits of daily community. 
+And people over 65 are especially prone to be looking for these alternative living arrangements. 
+They understand that their quality of life depends on a mix of solitude and solidarity. 
+But all the research proves otherwise. 
+It shows that the healthiest, happiest and even safest — in terms of both climate change disaster, in terms of crime, all of that — are Americans who live lives intertwined with their neighbors. 
+Now, I've experienced this firsthand. 
+For the last few years, I've been living in a cohousing community. 
+The nine units are all built to be different, different sizes, different shapes, but they're meant to be as green as possible. 
+The 25 of us who live there are all different ages and political persuasions and professions, and we live in homes that have everything a typical home would have. 
+Either they say, "" Why doesn't everyone live like this? "" Or they say, "" That sounds totally horrifying. 
+I would never want to do that. "" So let me reassure you: there is a sacred respect for privacy among us, but also a commitment to what we call "" radical hospitality "" — not the kind advertised by the Four Seasons, but the kind that says that every single person is worthy of kindness, full stop, end of sentence. 
+The biggest surprise for me of living in a community like this? 
+Rather than depending only on the idealized family unit to get all of your emotional needs met, you have two dozen other people that you can go to to talk about a hard day at work or troubleshoot how to handle an abusive teacher. 
+Teenagers in our community will often go to an adult that is not their parent to ask for advice. 
+It's what bell hooks called "" revolutionary parenting, "" this humble acknowledgment that kids are healthier when they have a wider range of adults to emulate and count on. 
+Turns out, adults are healthier, too. 
+It's a lot of pressure, trying to be that perfect family behind that white picket fence. 
+The "" new better off, "" as I've come to call it, is less about investing in the perfect family and more about investing in the imperfect village, whether that's relatives living under one roof, a cohousing community like mine, or just a bunch of neighbors who pledge to really know and look out for one another. 
+It's good common sense, right? 
+And yet, money has often made us dumb about reaching out. 
+The most reliable wealth is found in relationship. 
+The new better off is not an individual prospect at all. 
+Maybe you're a mediocre earner but a masterful father. 
+If you're a textbook success, the implications of what I'm saying could be more grim for you. 
+You might be a failure by standards you hold dear but that the world doesn't reward. 
+Only you can know. 
+I know that I am not a tribute to my great-grandmother, who lived such a short and brutish life, if I earn enough money to afford every creature comfort. 
+In the midst of such widespread uncertainty, we may, in fact, be insecure. 
+But we can let that insecurity make us brittle or supple. 
+We can turn inward, lose faith in the power of institutions to change — even lose faith in ourselves. 
+Or we can turn outward, cultivate faith in our ability to reach out, to connect, to create. 
+Turns out, the biggest danger is not failing to achieve the American Dream. 
+The biggest danger is achieving a dream that you don't actually believe in. 
+So don't do that. 
+Do the harder, more interesting thing, which is to compose a life where what you do every single day, the people you give your best love and ingenuity and energy to, aligns as closely as possible with what you believe. 
+That, not something as mundane as making money, is a tribute to your ancestors. 
+Thank you. 
+
+It's a great honor today to share with you The Digital Universe, which was created for humanity to really see where we are in the universe. 
+And so I think we can roll the video that we have. 
+[The Himalayas.] (Music) The flat horizon that we've evolved with has been a metaphor for the infinite: unbounded resources and unlimited capacity for disposal of waste. 
+It wasn't until we really left Earth, got above the atmosphere and had seen the horizon bend back on itself, that we could understand our planet as a limited condition. 
+The Digital Universe Atlas has been built at the American Museum of Natural History over the past 12 years. 
+We maintain that, put that together as a project to really chart the universe across all scales. 
+What we see here are satellites around the Earth and the Earth in proper registration against the universe, as we see. 
+NASA supported this work 12 years ago as part of the rebuilding of the Hayden Planetarium so that we would share this with the world. 
+The Digital Universe is the basis of our space show productions that we do — our main space shows in the dome. 
+But what you see here is the result of, actually, internships that we hosted with Linkoping University in Sweden. 
+I've had 12 students work on this for their graduate work, and the result has been this software called Uniview and a company called SCISS in Sweden. 
+This software allows interactive use, so this actual flight path and movie that we see here was actually flown live. 
+I captured this live from my laptop in a cafe called Earth Matters on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where I live, and it was done as a collaborative project with the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art for an exhibit on comparative cosmology. 
+And so as we move out, we see continuously from our planet all the way out into the realm of galaxies, as we see here, light-travel time, giving you a sense of how far away we are. 
+As we move out, the light from these distant galaxies have taken so long, we're essentially backing up into the past. 
+We back so far up we're finally seeing a containment around us — the afterglow of the Big Bang. 
+This is the WMAP microwave background that we see. 
+We'll fly outside it here, just to see this sort of containment. 
+If we were outside this, it would almost be meaningless, in the sense as before time. 
+But this our containment of the visible universe. 
+We know the universe is bigger than that which we can see. 
+Coming back quickly, we see here the radio sphere that we jumped out of in the beginning, but these are positions, the latest positions of exoplanets that we've mapped, and our sun here, obviously, with our own solar system. 
+What you're going to see — we're going to have to jump in here pretty quickly between several orders of magnitude to get down to where we see the solar system — these are the paths of Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 11 and Pioneer 10, the first four spacecraft to have left the solar system. 
+Coming in closer, picking up Earth, orbit of the Moon, and we see the Earth. 
+This map can be updated, and we can add in new data. 
+I know Dr. Carolyn Porco is the camera P.I. 
+for the Cassini mission. 
+But here we see the complex trajectory of the Cassini mission color coded for different mission phases, ingeniously developed so that 45 encounters with the largest moon, Titan, which is larger that the planet Mercury, diverts the orbit into different parts of mission phase. 
+This software allows us to come close and look at parts of this. 
+This software can also be networked between domes. 
+We have a growing user base of this, and we network domes. 
+And we can network between domes and classrooms. 
+We're actually sharing tours of the universe with the first sub-Saharan planetarium in Ghana as well as new libraries that have been built in the ghettos in Columbia and a high school in Cambodia. 
+And the Cambodians have actually controlled the Hayden Planetarium from their high school. 
+This is an image from Saturday, photographed by the Aqua satellite, but through the Uniview software. 
+So you're seeing the edge of the Earth. 
+This is Nepal. 
+This is, in fact, right here is the valley of Lhasa, right here in Tibet. 
+But we can see the haze from fires and so forth in the Ganges valley down below in India. 
+This is Nepal and Tibet. 
+And just in closing, I'd just like to say this beautiful world that we live on — here we see a bit of the snow that some of you may have had to brave in coming out — so I'd like to just say that what the world needs now is a sense of being able to look at ourselves in this much larger condition now and a much larger sense of what home is. 
+Because our home is the universe, and we are the universe, essentially. 
+We carry that in us. 
+And to be able to see our context in this larger sense at all scales helps us all, I think, in understanding where we are and who we are in the universe. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Mia Birdsong: Why is Black Lives Matter important for the US right now and in the world? 
+Patrisse Cullors: Black Lives Matter is our call to action. 
+It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. 
+It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us. 
+I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. 
+I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. 
+I remember my home being raided. 
+And one of my questions as a child was, why? 
+Why us? 
+Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why. 
+It offers a new vision for young black girls around the world that we deserve to be fought for, that we deserve to call on local governments to show up for us. 
+Opal Tometi: And antiblack racism — (Applause) And antiblack racism is not only happening in the United States. 
+It's actually happening all across the globe. 
+And what we need now more than ever is a human rights movement that challenges systemic racism in every single context. 
+(Applause) We need this because the global reality is that black people are subject to all sorts of disparities in most of our most challenging issues of our day. 
+I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa. 
+People are reeling from all sorts of unnatural disasters, displacing them from their ancestral homes and leaving them without a chance at making a decent living. 
+We also see disasters like Hurricane Matthew, which recently wreaked havoc in many different nations, but caused the most damage to Haiti. 
+Haiti is the poorest country in this hemisphere, and its inhabitants are black people. 
+And what we're seeing in Haiti is that they were actually facing a number of challenges that even preceded this hurricane. 
+They were reeling from the earthquake, they were reeling from cholera that was brought in by UN peacekeepers and still hasn't been eradicated. 
+This is unconscionable. 
+And this would not happen if this nation didn't have a population that was black, and we have to be real about that. 
+But what's most heartening right now is that despite these challenges, what we're seeing is that there's a network of Africans all across the continent who are rising up and fighting back and demanding climate justice. 
+(Applause) MB: So Alicia, you've said that when black people are free, everyone is free. 
+Can you talk about what that means? 
+Alicia Garza: Sure. 
+So I think race and racism is probably the most studied social, economic and political phenomenon in this country, but it's also the least understood. 
+The reality is that race in the United States operates on a spectrum from black to white. 
+Doesn't mean that people who are in between don't experience racism, but it means that the closer you are to white on that spectrum, the better off you are. 
+When we think about how we address problems in this country, we often start from a place of trickle-down justice. 
+But actually it doesn't work that way. 
+We have to address problems at the root, and when you deal with what's happening in black communities, it creates an effervescence, right? 
+So a bubble up rather than a trickle down. 
+Let me give an example. 
+When we talk about the wage gap, we often say women make 78 cents to every dollar that a man makes. 
+You all have heard that before. 
+But those are the statistics for white women and white men. 
+The reality is that black women make something like 64 cents to every 78 cents that white women make. 
+When we talk about latinas, it goes down to about 58 cents. 
+If we were to talk about indigenous women, if we were to talk about trans women, it would even go further down. 
+So again, if you deal with those who are the most impacted, everybody has an opportunity to benefit from that, rather than dealing with the folks who are not as impacted, and expecting it to trickle down. 
+MB: So I love the effervescence, bubbling up. 
+(Laughter) MB: Who doesn't love a glass of champagne, right? 
+Champagne and freedom, right? 
+(Laughter) What more could we want, y'all? 
+So you all have been doing this for a minute, and the last few years have been — well, I can't even imagine, but I'm sure very transformative. 
+And I know that you all have learned a lot about leadership. 
+What do you want to share with these people about what you've learned about leadership? 
+PC: Yeah, we have to invest in black leadership. 
+(Applause) What we've seen is thousands of black people showing up for our lives with very little infrastructure and very little support. 
+I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. 
+How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody? 
+And I also think leadership looks like everybody in this audience showing up for black lives. 
+It's not just about coming and watching people on a stage, right? 
+It's about how do you become that leader — whether it's in your workplace, whether it's in your home — and believe that the movement for black lives isn't just for us, but it's for everybody. 
+(Applause) MB: What about you, Opal? 
+OT: So I've been learning a great deal about interdependence. 
+I've been learning about how to trust your team. 
+I've come up with this new mantra after coming back from a three-month sabbatical, which is rare for black women to take who are in leadership, but I felt it was really important for my leadership and for my team to also practice stepping back as well as also sometimes stepping in. 
+And what I learned in this process was that we need to acknowledge that different people contribute different strengths, and that in order for our entire team to flourish, we have to allow them to share and allow them to shine. 
+And so during my sabbatical with the organization that I also work with, I saw our team rise up in my absence. 
+They were able to launch new programs, fundraise. 
+And when I came back, I had to give them a lot of gratitude and praise because they showed me that they truly had my back and that they truly had their own backs. 
+You know, in this process of my sabbatical, I was really reminded of this Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu. 
+I am because you are; you are because I am. 
+And I realized that my own leadership, and the contributions that I'm able to make, is in large part due to the contributions that they make, right? 
+And I have to acknowledge that, and I have to see that, and so my new mantra is, "" Keep calm and trust the team. "" And also, "Keep calm and thank the team." 
+MB: You know, one of the things I feel like I've heard in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement more than anywhere else is about being a leaderful movement, and that's such a beautiful concept, and I think that something that women often bring to the conversation about leadership is really the collective piece. 
+AG: Yeah... 
+How many of you heard that saying that leadership is lonely? 
+I think that there is an element where leadership is lonely, but I also believe that it doesn't have to be like that. 
+And in order for us to get to that point, I think there's a few things that we need to be doing. 
+So one is we have to stop treating leaders like superheroes. 
+We are ordinary people attempting to do extraordinary things, and so we need to be supported in that way. 
+The other thing that I've learned about leadership is that there's a difference between leadership and celebrities, right? 
+And there's a way in which we've been kind of transformed into celebrities rather than people who are trying to solve a problem. 
+We like them one day, we don't like what they're wearing the next day, and all of a sudden we have issues, right? 
+So we need to stop deifying leaders so that more people will step into leadership. 
+Lots of people are terrified to step into leadership because of how much scrutiny they receive and how brutal we are with leaders. 
+And then the last thing that I've learned about leadership is that it's really easy to be a leader when everybody likes you. 
+But it's hard to be a leader when you have to make hard choices and when you have to do what's right, even though people are not going to like you for it. 
+And so in that way, I think another way that we can support leaders is to struggle with us, but struggle with us politically, not personally. 
+We can have disagreements without being disagreeable, but it's important for us to sharpen each other, so that we all can rise. 
+MB: That's beautiful, thank you. 
+(Applause) So you all are doing work that forces you to face some brutal, painful realities on a daily basis. 
+What gives you hope and inspires you in that context? 
+PC: I am hopeful for black futures. 
+And I say that because we live in a society that's so obsessed with black death. 
+We have images of our death on the TV screen, on our Twitter timelines, on our Facebook timelines, but what if instead we imagine black life? 
+We imagine black people living and thriving. 
+And that — that inspires me. 
+OT: What inspires me these days are immigrants. 
+Immigrants all over the world who are doing the best that they can to make a living, to survive and also to thrive. 
+Right now there are over 244 million people who aren't living in their country of origin. 
+This is a 40 percent increase since the year 2000. 
+So what this tells me is that the disparities across the globe are only getting worse. 
+Yet there are people who are finding the strength and wherewithal to travel, to move, to eke out a better living for themselves and to provide for their families and their loved ones. 
+And some of these people who are immigrants are also undocumented. 
+They're unauthorized. 
+And they inspire me even more because although our society is telling them, you're not wanted, you're not needed here, and they're highly vulnerable and subject to abuse, to wage theft, to exploitation and xenophobic attacks, many of them are also beginning to organize in their communities. 
+And what I'm seeing is that there's also an emerging network of black, undocumented people who are resisting the framework, and resisting the criminalization of their existence. 
+And that to me is incredibly powerful and inspires me every singe day. 
+MB: Thank you. 
+Alicia? 
+AG: So we know that young people are the present and the future, but what inspires me are older people who are becoming transformed in the service of this movement. 
+We all know that as you get older, you get a little more entrenched in your ways. 
+But I'm so inspired when I see people who have a way that they do things, have a way that they think about the world, and they're courageous enough to be open to listening to what the experiences are of so many of us who want to live in world that's just and want to live in a world that's equitable. 
+And I'm also inspired by the actions that I'm seeing older people taking in service of this movement. 
+I'm inspired by seeing older people step into their own power and leadership and say, "" I'm not passing a torch, I'm helping you light the fire. "" (Applause) MB: I love that — yes. 
+So in terms of action, I think that it is awesome to sit here and be able to listen to you all, and to have our minds open and shift, but that's not going to get black people free. 
+So if you had one thing you would like this audience and the folks who are watching around the world to actually do, what would that be? 
+AG: OK, two quick ones. 
+One, call the White House. 
+The water protectors are being forcibly removed from the camp that they have set up to defend what keeps us alive. 
+And that is intricately related to black lives. 
+So definitely call the White House and demand that they stop doing that. 
+There are tanks and police officers arresting every single person there as we speak. 
+(Applause) The second thing that you can do is to join something. 
+Be a part of something. 
+There are groups, collectives — doesn't have to be a non-profit, you know what I mean? 
+But there are groups that are doing work in our communities right now to make sure that black lives matter so all lives matter. 
+Get involved; don't sit on your couch and tell people what you think they should be doing. 
+Go do it with us. 
+MB: Do you guys want to add anything? 
+That's good? All right. So — And I think that the joining something, like if you feel like there's not something where you are, start it. 
+AG: Start it. 
+MB: These conversations that we're having, have those conversations with somebody else. 
+And then instead of just letting it be a talk that you had, actually decide to start something. 
+OT: That's right. 
+MB: I mean, that's what you all did. 
+You started something, and look what's happened. 
+Thank you all so much for being here with us today. 
+OT: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+One day, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez was walking along the streets of downtown Los Angeles when he heard beautiful music. 
+And the source was a man, an African-American man, charming, rugged, homeless, playing a violin that only had two strings. 
+And I'm telling a story that many of you know, because Steve's columns became the basis for a book, which was turned into a movie, with Robert Downey Jr. acting as Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the Juilliard-trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia. 
+Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, he suffered a complete breakdown, and 30 years later he was living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. 
+I encourage all of you to read Steve's book or to watch the movie to understand not only the beautiful bond that formed between these two men, but how music helped shape that bond, and ultimately was instrumental — if you'll pardon the pun — in helping Nathaniel get off the streets. 
+I met Mr. Ayers in 2008, two years ago, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. 
+He had just heard a performance of Beethoven's First and Fourth symphonies, and came backstage and introduced himself. 
+He was speaking in a very jovial and gregarious way about Yo-Yo Ma and Hillary Clinton and how the Dodgers were never going to make the World Series, all because of the treacherous first violin passage work in the last movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. 
+And we got talking about music, and I got an email from Steve a few days later saying that Nathaniel was interested in a violin lesson with me. 
+Now, I should mention that Nathaniel refuses treatment because when he was treated it was with shock therapy and Thorazine and handcuffs, and that scar has stayed with him for his entire life. 
+But as a result now, he is prone to these schizophrenic episodes, the worst of which can manifest themselves as him exploding and then disappearing for days, wandering the streets of Skid Row, exposed to its horrors, with the torment of his own mind unleashed upon him. 
+And Nathaniel was in such a state of agitation when we started our first lesson at Walt Disney Concert Hall — he had a kind of manic glint in his eyes, he was lost. 
+And he was talking about invisible demons and smoke, and how someone was poisoning him in his sleep. 
+And I was afraid, not for myself, but I was afraid that I was going to lose him, that he was going to sink into one of his states, and that I would ruin his relationship with the violin if I started talking about scales and arpeggios and other exciting forms of didactic violin pedagogy. 
+(Laughter) So, I just started playing. 
+And I played the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. 
+And as I played, I understood that there was a profound change occurring in Nathaniel's eyes. 
+It was as if he was in the grip of some invisible pharmaceutical, a chemical reaction, for which my playing the music was its catalyst. 
+And Nathaniel's manic rage was transformed into understanding, a quiet curiosity and grace. 
+And in a miracle, he lifted his own violin and he started playing, by ear, certain snippets of violin concertos which he then asked me to complete — Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. 
+And we started talking about music, from Bach to Beethoven and Brahms, Bruckner, all the B's, from Bartók, all the way up to Esa-Pekka Salonen. 
+And I understood that he not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, but he related to this music at a personal level. 
+He spoke about it with the kind of passion and understanding that I share with my colleagues in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. 
+And through playing music and talking about music, this man had transformed from the paranoid, disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles to the charming, erudite, brilliant, Juilliard-trained musician. 
+Music is medicine. Music changes us. 
+And for Nathaniel, music is sanity. 
+Because music allows him to take his thoughts and delusions and shape them through his imagination and his creativity, into reality. 
+And that is an escape from his tormented state. 
+And I understood that this was the very essence of art. 
+This was the very reason why we made music, that we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core, our emotions, and through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we're able to shape those emotions into reality. 
+And the reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us, inspires and unites us. 
+And for Nathaniel, music brought him back into a fold of friends. 
+The redemptive power of music brought him back into a family of musicians that understood him, that recognized his talents and respected him. 
+And I will always make music with Nathaniel, whether we're at Walt Disney Concert Hall or on Skid Row, because he reminds me why I became a musician. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thanks. 
+Robert Gupta. 
+(Applause) Robert Gupta: I'm going to play something that I shamelessly stole from cellists. 
+So, please forgive me. 
+(Laughter) (Music) (Applause) 
+
+I had a fire nine days ago. 
+My archive: 175 films, my 16-millimeter negative, all my books, my dad's books, my photographs. 
+I'd collected — I was a collector, major, big-time. 
+It's gone. 
+I just looked at it, and I didn't know what to do. 
+I mean, this was — was I my things? 
+I always live in the present — I love the present. 
+I cherish the future. 
+And I was taught some strange thing as a kid, like, you've got to make something good out of something bad. 
+You've got to make something good out of something bad. 
+This was bad! Man, I was — I cough. I was sick. 
+That's my camera lens. The first one — the one I shot my Bob Dylan film with 35 years ago. 
+That's my feature film. "" King, Murray "" won Cannes Film Festival 1970 — the only print I had. 
+That's my papers. 
+That was in minutes — 20 minutes. 
+Epiphany hit me. Something hit me. 
+"You've got to make something good out of something bad," I started to say to my friends, neighbors, my sister. 
+By the way, that's "" Sputnik. "" I ran it last year. 
+"" Sputnik "" was downtown, the negative. It wasn't touched. 
+These are some pieces of things I used in my Sputnik feature film, which opens in New York in two weeks downtown. 
+I called my sister. I called my neighbors. I said, "" Come dig. "" That's me at my desk. 
+That was a desk took 40-some years to build. 
+You know — all the stuff. 
+That's my daughter, Jean. 
+She came. She's a nurse in San Francisco. 
+"" Dig it up, "" I said. "" Pieces. 
+I want pieces. Bits and pieces. "" I came up with this idea: a life of bits and pieces, which I'm just starting to work on — my next project. 
+That's my sister. She took care of pictures, because I was a big collector of snapshot photography that I believed said a lot. 
+And those are some of the pictures that — something was good about the burnt pictures. 
+I didn't know. I looked at that — I said, "" Wow, is that better than the — "" That's my proposal on Jimmy Doolittle. I made that movie for television. 
+It's the only copy I had. Pieces of it. 
+Idea about women. 
+So I started to say, "" Hey, man, you are too much! 
+You could cry about this. "" I really didn't. 
+I just instead said, "I'm going to make something out of it, and maybe next year..." And I appreciate this moment to come up on this stage with so many people who've already given me so much solace, and just say to TEDsters: I'm proud of me. That I take something bad, I turn it, and I'm going to make something good out of this, all these pieces. 
+That's Arthur Leipzig's original photograph I loved. 
+I was a big record collector — the records didn't make it. Boy, I tell you, film burns. Film burns. 
+I mean, this was 16-millimeter safety film. 
+The negatives are gone. 
+That's my father's letter to me, telling me to marry the woman I first married when I was 20. 
+That's my daughter and me. 
+She's still there. She's there this morning, actually. 
+That's my house. 
+My family's living in the Hilton Hotel in Scotts Valley. 
+That's my wife, Heidi, who didn't take it as well as I did. 
+My children, Davey and Henry. 
+My son, Davey, in the hotel two nights ago. 
+So, my message to you folks, from my three minutes, is that I appreciate the chance to share this with you. I will be back. I love being at TED. 
+I came to live it, and I am living it. 
+That's my view from my window outside of Santa Cruz, in Bonny Doon, just 35 miles from here. 
+Thank you everybody. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Now, extinction is a different kind of death. 
+It's bigger. 
+We didn't really realize that until 1914, when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati zoo. 
+This had been the most abundant bird in the world that'd been in North America for six million years. 
+Suddenly it wasn't here at all. 
+Flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long used to darken the sun. 
+Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm, a feathered tempest. 
+And indeed it was a keystone species that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, from Canada down to the Gulf. 
+But it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades. 
+What happened? 
+Well, commercial hunting happened. 
+These birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton, and it was easy to do because when those big flocks came down to the ground, they were so dense that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up and slaughter them by the tens of thousands. 
+It was the cheapest source of protein in America. 
+By the end of the century, there was nothing left but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers. 
+There's an upside to the story. 
+This made people realize that the same thing was about to happen to the American bison, and so these birds saved the buffalos. 
+But a lot of other animals weren't saved. 
+The Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere. 
+It was hunted to death for its feathers. 
+There was a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the heath hen. 
+It was loved. They tried to protect it. It died anyway. 
+A local newspaper spelled out, "" There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again. "" There's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things, and it happened to lots of birds that people loved. 
+It happened to lots of mammals. 
+Another keystone species is a famous animal called the European aurochs. 
+There was sort of a movie made about it recently. 
+And the aurochs was like the bison. 
+This was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent, from Spain to Korea. 
+The documentation of this animal goes back to the Lascaux cave paintings. 
+The extinctions still go on. 
+There's an ibex in Spain called the bucardo. 
+It went extinct in 2000. 
+There was a marvelous animal, a marsupial wolf called the thylacine in Tasmania, south of Australia, called the Tasmanian tiger. 
+It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos. 
+A little bit of film was shot. 
+Sorrow, anger, mourning. 
+Don't mourn. Organize. 
+What if you could find out that, using the DNA in museum specimens, fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back, what would you do? Where would you start? 
+Well, you'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there. 
+I started with my wife, Ryan Phelan, who ran a biotech business called DNA Direct, and through her, one of her colleagues, George Church, one of the leading genetic engineers who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons and a lot of confidence that methodologies he was working on might actually do the deed. 
+So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons, conservation ornithologists, bioethicists, and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro. 
+All she needed from those specimens at the Smithsonian was a little bit of toe pad tissue, because down in there is what is called ancient DNA. 
+It's DNA which is pretty badly fragmented, but with good techniques now, you can basically reassemble the whole genome. 
+Then the question is, can you reassemble, with that genome, the whole bird? 
+George Church thinks you can. 
+So in his book, "" Regenesis, "" which I recommend, he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species, and he has a machine called the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine. 
+It's kind of like an evolution machine. 
+You try combinations of genes that you write at the cell level and then in organs on a chip, and the ones that win, that you can then put into a living organism. It'll work. 
+The precision of this, one of George's famous unreadable slides, nevertheless points out that there's a level of precision here right down to the individual base pair. 
+The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome. 
+So what you're getting is the capability now of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene. 
+It's called an allele. 
+Well that's what happens in normal hybridization anyway. 
+So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative. 
+Now along the way, George points out that his technology, the technology of synthetic biology, is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. 
+It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue. 
+Okay, the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon. They're abundant. There's some around here. 
+Genetically, the band-tailed pigeon already is mostly living passenger pigeon. 
+There's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon. 
+If you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits, you've got the extinct bird back, cooing at you. 
+Now, there's work to do. 
+You have to figure out exactly what genes matter. 
+So there's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon, genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon, and so on with the red eye, peach-colored breast, flocking, and so on. 
+Add them all up and the result won't be perfect. 
+But it should be be perfect enough, because nature doesn't do perfect either. 
+So this meeting in Boston led to three things. 
+First off, Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit called Revive and Restore that would push de-extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way, and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon. 
+Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak, who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA, himself sequenced the passenger pigeon, using money from his family and friends. 
+We hired him full-time. 
+Now, this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian, he's looking down at Martha, the last passenger pigeon alive. 
+So if he's successful, she won't be the last. 
+The third result of the Boston meeting was the realization that there are scientists all over the world working on various forms of de-extinction, but they'd never met each other. 
+And National Geographic got interested because National Geographic has the theory that the last century, discovery was basically finding things, and in this century, discovery is basically making things. 
+De-extinction falls in that category. 
+So they hosted and funded this meeting. And 35 scientists, they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists, basically meeting to see if they had work to do together. 
+Some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical. 
+There's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species, they're recreating extinct ecosystems in northern Siberia, in the Netherlands, and in Hawaii. 
+Henri, from the Netherlands, with a Dutch last name I won't try to pronounce, is working on the aurochs. 
+The aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle, and so basically its genome is alive, it's just unevenly distributed. 
+So what they're doing is working with seven breeds of primitive, hardy-looking cattle like that Maremmana primitivo on the top there to rebuild, over time, with selective back-breeding, the aurochs. 
+Now, re-wilding is moving faster in Korea than it is in America, and so the plan is, with these re-wilded areas all over Europe, they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job, its old ecological role, of clearing the somewhat barren, closed-canopy forest so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it. 
+Another amazing story came from Alberto Fernández-Arias. 
+Alberto worked with the bucardo in Spain. 
+The last bucardo was a female named Celia who was still alive, but then they captured her, they got a little bit of tissue from her ear, they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen, released her back into the wild, but a few months later, she was found dead under a fallen tree. 
+They took the DNA from that ear, they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat, the pregnancy came to term, and a live baby bucardo was born. 
+It was the first de-extinction in history. 
+(Applause) It was short-lived. 
+Sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems. 
+This one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes, but Alberto was confident that cloning has moved along well since then, and this will move ahead, and eventually there will be a population of bucardos back in the mountains in northern Spain. 
+Cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is Oliver Ryder. 
+At the San Diego zoo, his frozen zoo has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species over the last 35 years. 
+Now, when it's frozen that deep, minus 196 degrees Celsius, the cells are intact and the DNA is intact. 
+They're basically viable cells, so someone like Bob Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology took some of that tissue from an endangered animal called the Javan banteng, put it in a cow, the cow went to term, and what was born was a live, healthy baby Javan banteng, who thrived and is still alive. 
+The most exciting thing for Bob Lanza is the ability now to take any kind of cell with induced pluripotent stem cells and turn it into germ cells, like sperm and eggs. 
+So now we go to Mike McGrew who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland, and Mike's doing miracles with birds. 
+So he'll take, say, falcon skin cells, fibroblast, turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells. 
+Since it's so pluripotent, it can become germ plasm. 
+He then has a way to put the germ plasm into the embryo of a chicken egg so that that chicken will have, basically, the gonads of a falcon. 
+You get a male and a female each of those, and out of them comes falcons. 
+(Laughter) Real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens. 
+Ben Novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting. 
+He showed how all of this can be put together. 
+The sequence of events: he'll put together the genomes of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon, he'll take the techniques of George Church and get passenger pigeon DNA, the techniques of Robert Lanza and Michael McGrew, get that DNA into chicken gonads, and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs, squabs, and now you're getting a population of passenger pigeons. 
+It does raise the question of, they're not going to have passenger pigeon parents to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon. 
+So what do you do about that? 
+Well birds are pretty hard-wired, as it happens, so most of that is already in their DNA, but to supplement it, part of Ben's idea is to use homing pigeons to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock and how to find their way to their old nesting grounds and feeding grounds. 
+There were some conservationists, really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple, who is one of the founders of conservation biology, and Kate Jones from the IUCN, which does the Red List. 
+They're excited about all this, but they're also concerned that it might be competitive with the extremely important efforts to protect endangered species that are still alive, that haven't gone extinct yet. 
+You see, you want to work on protecting the animals out there. 
+You want to work on getting the market for ivory in Asia down so you're not using 25,000 elephants a year. 
+But at the same time, conservation biologists are realizing that bad news bums people out. 
+And so the Red List is really important, keep track of what's endangered and critically endangered, and so on. 
+But they're about to create what they call a Green List, and the Green List will have species that are doing fine, thank you, species that were endangered, like the bald eagle, but they're much better off now, thanks to everybody's good work, and protected areas around the world that are very, very well managed. 
+So basically, they're learning how to build on good news. 
+And they see reviving extinct species as the kind of good news you might be able to build on. 
+Here's a couple related examples. 
+Captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species. 
+The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987. 
+Everybody thought is was finished. 
+Thanks to captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo, there's 405 of them now, 226 are out in the wild. 
+That technology will be used on de-extincted animals. 
+Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa. 
+In 1981, Dian Fossey was sure they were going extinct. 
+There were just 254 left. 
+Now there are 880. They're increasing in population by three percent a year. 
+The secret is, they have an eco-tourism program, which is absolutely brilliant. 
+So this photograph was taken last month by Ryan with an iPhone. 
+That's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors. 
+Another interesting project, though it's going to need some help, is the northern white rhinoceros. 
+There's no breeding pairs left. 
+But this is the kind of thing that a wide variety of DNA for this animal is available in the frozen zoo. 
+A bit of cloning, you can get them back. 
+So where do we go from here? 
+These have been private meetings so far. 
+I think it's time for the subject to go public. 
+What do people think about it? 
+You know, do you want extinct species back? 
+Do you want extinct species back? 
+(Applause) Tinker Bell is going to come fluttering down. 
+It is a Tinker Bell moment, because what are people excited about with this? 
+What are they concerned about? 
+We're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon. 
+So Ben Novak, even as we speak, is joining the group that Beth Shapiro has at UC Santa Cruz. 
+They're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon. 
+As that data matures, they'll send it to George Church, who will work his magic, get passenger pigeon DNA out of that. 
+We'll get help from Bob Lanza and Mike McGrew to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens that can produce passenger pigeon squabs that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents, and then from then on, it's passenger pigeons all the way, maybe for the next six million years. 
+You can do the same thing, as the costs come down, for the Carolina parakeet, for the great auk, for the heath hen, for the ivory-billed woodpecker, for the Eskimo curlew, for the Caribbean monk seal, for the woolly mammoth. 
+Because the fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. 
+We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage. 
+Most of that we'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands, by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species. 
+But some species that we killed off totally we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. 
+I've got a question. 
+So, this is an emotional topic. Some people stand. 
+I suspect there are some people out there sitting, kind of asking tormented questions, almost, about, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, there's something wrong with mankind interfering in nature in this way. 
+There's going to be unintended consequences. 
+You're going to uncork some sort of Pandora's box of who-knows-what. Do they have a point? 
+Stewart Brand: Well, the earlier point is we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct, and many of them were keystone species, and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in by letting them go. 
+Now, there's the shifting baseline problem, which is, so when these things come back, they might replace some birds that are there that people really know and love. 
+I think that's, you know, part of how it'll work. 
+This is a long, slow process — One of the things I like about it, it's multi-generation. 
+We will get woolly mammoths back. 
+CA: Well it feels like both the conversation and the potential here are pretty thrilling. 
+Thank you so much for presenting. SB: Thank you. 
+CA: Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of heavy explosion. 
+It was deep at night. 
+I do not remember what time it was. 
+I just remember the sound was so heavy and so very shocking. 
+Everything in my room was shaking — my heart, my windows, my bed, everything. 
+I looked out the windows and I saw a full half-circle of explosion. 
+I thought it was just like the movies, but the movies had not conveyed them in the powerful image that I was seeing full of bright red and orange and gray, and a full circle of explosion. 
+And I kept on staring at it until it disappeared. 
+I went back to my bed, and I prayed, and I secretly thanked God that that missile did not land on my family's home, that it did not kill my family that night. 
+Thirty years have passed, and I still feel guilty about that prayer, for the next day, I learned that that missile landed on my brother's friend's home and killed him and his father, but did not kill his mother or his sister. 
+His mother showed up the next week at my brother's classroom and begged seven-year-old kids to share with her any picture they may have of her son, for she had lost everything. 
+This is not a story of a nameless survivor of war, and nameless refugees, whose stereotypical images we see in our newspapers and our TV with tattered clothes, dirty face, scared eyes. 
+This is not a story of a nameless someone who lived in some war, who we do not know their hopes, their dreams, their accomplishments, their families, their beliefs, their values. 
+This is my story. 
+I was that girl. 
+I am another image and vision of another survivor of war. 
+I am that refugee, and I am that girl. 
+You see, I grew up in war-torn Iraq, and I believe that there are two sides of wars and we've only seen one side of it. 
+We only talk about one side of it. 
+But there's another side that I have witnessed as someone who lived in it and someone who ended up working in it. 
+I grew up with the colors of war — the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it. I grew up 
+with the sounds of war — the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens. 
+These are the sounds you would expect, but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night, the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous, unbearable silence. 
+"" War, "" a friend of mine said, "" is not about sound at all. 
+It is actually about silence, the silence of humanity. "" I have since left Iraq and founded a group called Women for Women International that ends up working with women survivors of wars. 
+In my travels and in my work, from Congo to Afghanistan, from Sudan to Rwanda, I have learned not only that the colors and the sounds of war are the same, but the fears of war are the same. 
+You know, there is a fear of dying, and do not believe any movie character where the hero is not afraid. 
+It is very scary to go through that feeling of "" I am about to die "" or "" I could die in this explosion. "" But there's also the fear of losing loved ones, and I think that's even worse. 
+It's too painful. You don't want to think about it. 
+But I think the worst kind of fear is the fear — as Samia, a Bosnian woman, once told me, who survived the four-years besiege of Sarajevo; she said, "" The fear of losing the 'I' in me, the fear of losing the 'I' in me. "" That's what my mother in Iraq used to tell me. 
+It's like dying from inside-out. 
+A Palestinian woman once told me, "It is not about the fear of one death," she said, "" sometimes I feel I die 10 times in one day, "" as she was describing the marches of soldiers and the sounds of their bullets. 
+She said, "" But it's not fair, because there is only one life, and there should only be one death. "" We have been only seeing one side of war. 
+We have only been discussing and consumed with high-level preoccupations over troop levels, drawdown timelines, surges and sting operations, when we should be examining the details of where the social fabric has been most torn, where the community has improvised and survived and shown acts of resilience and amazing courage just to keep life going. 
+We have been so consumed with seemingly objective discussions of politics, tactics, weapons, dollars and casualties. 
+This is the language of sterility. 
+How casually we treat casualties in the context of this topic. 
+This is where we conceive of rape and casualties as inevitabilities. 
+Eighty percent of refugees around the world are women and children. Oh. 
+Ninety percent of modern war casualties are civilians. 
+Seventy-five percent of them are women and children. 
+How interesting. 
+Oh, half a million women in Rwanda get raped in 100 days. 
+Or, as we speak now, hundreds of thousands of Congolese women are getting raped and mutilated. 
+How interesting. 
+These just become numbers that we refer to. 
+The front of wars is increasingly non-human eyes peering down on our perceived enemies from space, guiding missiles toward unseen targets, while the human conduct of the orchestra of media relations in the event that this particular drone attack hits a villager instead of an extremist. 
+It is a chess game. 
+You learn to play an international relations school on your way out and up to national and international leadership. 
+Checkmate. 
+We are missing a completely other side of wars. 
+We are missing my mother's story, who made sure with every siren, with every raid, with every cut off-of electricity, she played puppet shows for my brothers and I, so we would not be scared of the sounds of explosions. 
+We are missing the story of Fareeda, a music teacher, a piano teacher, in Sarajevo, who made sure that she kept the music school open every single day in the four years of besiege in Sarajevo and walked to that school, despite the snipers shooting at that school and at her, and kept the piano, the violin, the cello playing the whole duration of the war, with students wearing their gloves and hats and coats. 
+That was her fight. 
+That was her resistance. 
+We are missing the story of Nehia, a Palestinian woman in Gaza who, the minute there was a cease-fire in the last year's war, she left out of home, collected all the flour and baked as much bread for every neighbor to have, in case there is no cease-fire the day after. We are missing 
+the stories of Violet, who, despite surviving genocide in the church massacre, she kept on going on, burying bodies, cleaning homes, cleaning the streets. 
+We are missing stories of women who are literally keeping life going in the midst of wars. 
+Do you know — do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life going? 
+And the ones who are keeping that life are women. 
+There are two sides of war. 
+There is a side that fights, and there is a side that keeps the schools and the factories and the hospitals open. 
+There is a side that is focused on winning battles, and there is a side that is focused on winning life. 
+There is a side that leads the front-line discussion, and there is a side that leads the back-line discussion. 
+There is a side that thinks that peace is the end of fighting, and there is a side that thinks that peace is the arrival of schools and jobs. There is a side 
+that is led by men, and there is a side that is led by women. 
+And in order for us to understand how do we build lasting peace, we must understand war and peace from both sides. 
+We must have a full picture of what that means. 
+In order for us to understand what actually peace means, we need to understand, as one Sudanese woman once told me, "" Peace is the fact that my toenails are growing back again. "" She grew up in Sudan, in Southern Sudan, for 20 years of war, where it killed one million people and displaced five million refugees. 
+Many women were taken as slaves by rebels and soldiers, as sexual slaves who were forced also to carry the ammunition and the water and the food for the soldiers. 
+So that woman walked for 20 years, so she would not be kidnapped again. 
+And only when there was some sort of peace, her toenails grew back again. 
+We need to understand peace from a toenail's perspective. We need to understand 
+that we cannot actually have negotiations of ending of wars or peace without fully including women at the negotiating table. 
+I find it amazing that the only group of people who are not fighting and not killing and not pillaging and not burning and not raping, and the group of people who are mostly — though not exclusively — who are keeping life going in the midst of war, are not included in the negotiating table. 
+And I do argue that women lead the back-line discussion, but there are also men who are excluded from that discussion. 
+The doctors who are not fighting, the artists, the students, the men who refuse to pick up the guns, they are, too, excluded from the negotiating tables. 
+There is no way we can talk about a lasting peace, building of democracy, sustainable economies, any kind of stabilities, if we do not fully include women at the negotiating table. 
+Not one, but 50 percent. 
+There is no way we can talk about the building of stability if we don't start investing in women and girls. 
+Did you know that one year of the world's military spending equals 700 years of the U.N. budget and equals 2,928 years of the U.N. budget allocated for women? 
+If we just reverse that distribution of funds, perhaps we could have a better lasting peace in this world. 
+And last, but not least, we need to invest in peace and women, not only because it is the right thing to do, not only because it is the right thing to do, for all of us to build sustainable and lasting peace today, but it is for the future. 
+A Congolese woman, who was telling me about how her children saw their father killed in front of them and saw her raped in front of them and mutilated in front of them, and her children saw their nine-year-old sibling killed in front of them, how they're doing okay right now. 
+She got into Women for Women International's program. 
+She got a support network. 
+She learned about her rights. 
+We taught her vocational and business skills. We helped her get a job. 
+She was earning 450 dollars. She was doing okay. 
+She was sending them to school. Have a new home. 
+She said, "" But what I worry about the most is not any of that. 
+I worry that my children have hate in their hearts, and when they want to grow up, they want to fight again the killers of their father and their brother. "" We need to invest in women, because that's our only chance to ensure that there is no more war in the future. 
+That mother has a better chance to heal her children than any peace agreement can do. 
+Are there good news? Of course, there are good news. There are lots of good news. 
+To start with, these women that I told you about are dancing and singing every single day, and if they can, who are we not to dance? 
+That girl that I told you about ended up starting Women for Women International Group that impacted one million people, sent 80 million dollars, and I started this from zero, nothing, nada, [unclear]. 
+(Laughter) They are women who are standing on their feet in spite of their circumstances, not because of it. 
+Think of how the world can be a much better place if, for a change, we have a better equality, we have equality, we have a representation and we understand war, both from the front-line and the back-line discussion. 
+Rumi, a 13th-century Sufi poet, says, "" Out beyond the worlds of right-doings and wrong-doings, there is a field. 
+I will meet you there. 
+When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. 
+Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' no longer makes any sense. "" I humbly add — humbly add — that out beyond the worlds of war and peace, there is a field, and there are many women and men [who] are meeting there. 
+Let us make this field a much bigger place. 
+Let us all meet in that field. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Marco Tempest: What I'd like to show you today is something in the way of an experiment. 
+Today's its debut. 
+It's a demonstration of augmented reality. 
+And the visuals you're about to see are not prerecorded. 
+They are live and reacting to me in real time. 
+I like to think of it as a kind of technological magic. 
+So fingers crossed. 
+And keep your eyes on the big screen. 
+Augmented reality is the melding of the real world with computer-generated imagery. 
+It seems the perfect medium to investigate magic and ask, why, in a technological age, we continue to have this magical sense of wonder. 
+Magic is deception, but it is a deception we enjoy. 
+To enjoy being deceived, an audience must first suspend its disbelief. 
+It was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who first suggested this receptive state of mind. 
+Samuel Taylor Coleridge: I try to convey a semblance of truth in my writing to produce for these shadows of the imagination a willing suspension of disbelief that, for a moment, constitutes poetic faith. 
+MT: This faith in the fictional is essential for any kind of theatrical experience. 
+Without it, a script is just words. 
+Augmented reality is just the latest technology. 
+And sleight of hand is just an artful demonstration of dexterity. 
+We are all very good at suspending our disbelief. 
+We do it every day, while reading novels, watching television or going to the movies. 
+We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had. 
+Without this ability there is no magic. 
+It was Jean Robert-Houdin, France's greatest illusionist, who first recognized the role of the magician as a storyteller. 
+He said something that I've posted on the wall of my studio. 
+Jean Robert-Houdin: A conjurer is not a juggler. 
+He is an actor playing the part of a magician. 
+MT: Which means magic is theater and every trick is a story. 
+The tricks of magic follow the archetypes of narrative fiction. 
+There are tales of creation and loss, death and resurrection, and obstacles that must be overcome. 
+Now many of them are intensely dramatic. 
+Magicians play with fire and steel, defy the fury of the buzzsaw, dare to catch a bullet or attempt a deadly escape. 
+But audiences don't come to see the magician die, they come to see him live. 
+Because the best stories always have a happy ending. 
+The tricks of magic have one special element. 
+They are stories with a twist. 
+Now Edward de Bono argued that our brains are pattern matching machines. 
+He said that magicians deliberately exploit the way their audiences think. 
+Edward de Bono: Stage magic relies almost wholly on the momentum error. 
+The audience is led to make assumptions or elaborations that are perfectly reasonable, but do not, in fact, match what is being done in front of them. 
+MT: In that respect, magic tricks are like jokes. 
+Jokes lead us down a path to an expected destination. 
+But when the scenario we have imagined suddenly flips into something entirely unexpected, we laugh. 
+The same thing happens when people watch magic tricks. 
+The finale defies logic, gives new insight into the problem, and audiences express their amazement with laughter. 
+It's fun to be fooled. 
+One of the key qualities of all stories is that they're made to be shared. 
+We feel compelled to tell them. 
+When I do a trick at a party — (Laughter) that person will immediately pull their friend over and ask me to do it again. 
+They want to share the experience. 
+That makes my job more difficult, because, if I want to surprise them, I need to tell a story that starts the same, but ends differently — a trick with a twist on a twist. 
+It keeps me busy. 
+Now experts believe that stories go beyond our capacity for keeping us entertained. 
+We think in narrative structures. 
+We connect events and emotions and instinctively transform them into a sequence that can be easily understood. 
+It's a uniquely human achievement. 
+We all want to share our stories, whether it is the trick we saw at the party, the bad day at the office or the beautiful sunset we saw on vacation. 
+Today, thanks to technology, we can share those stories as never before, by email, Facebook, blogs, tweets, on TED.com. 
+The tools of social networking, these are the digital campfires around which the audience gathers to hear our story. 
+We turn facts into similes and metaphors, and even fantasies. 
+We polish the rough edges of our lives so that they feel whole. 
+Our stories make us the people we are and, sometimes, the people we want to be. 
+They give us our identity and a sense of community. 
+And if the story is a good one, it might even make us smile. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Delighted to be here and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart, which is beauty. 
+I do the philosophy of art, aesthetics, actually, for a living. 
+I try to figure out intellectually, philosophically, psychologically, what the experience of beauty is, what sensibly can be said about it and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it. 
+Now this is an extremely complicated subject, in part because the things that we call beautiful are so different. 
+I mean just think of the sheer variety — a baby's face, Berlioz's "" Harold in Italy, "" movies like "" The Wizard of Oz "" or the plays of Chekhov, a central California landscape, a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji, "Der Rosenkavalier," a stunning match-winning goal in a World Cup soccer match, Van Gogh's "" Starry Night, "" a Jane Austen novel, Fred Astaire dancing across the screen. 
+This brief list includes human beings, natural landforms, works of art and skilled human actions. 
+An account that explains the presence of beauty in everything on this list is not going to be easy. 
+I can, however, give you at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have. 
+And we get it not from a philosopher of art, not from a postmodern art theorist or a bigwig art critic. 
+No, this theory comes from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding, and you know who I mean: Charles Darwin. 
+Of course, a lot of people think they already know the proper answer to the question, "What is beauty?" 
+It's in the eye of the beholder. 
+It's whatever moves you personally. 
+Or, as some people, especially academics prefer, beauty is in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder. 
+People agree that paintings or movies or music are beautiful because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste. 
+Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts travel across cultures with great ease. 
+Beethoven is adored in Japan. 
+Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints. 
+Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures in British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the Earth. 
+Or just think about American jazz or American movies — they go everywhere. 
+There are many differences among the arts, but there are also universal, cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures and values. 
+How can we explain this universality? 
+The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct a Darwinian evolutionary history of our artistic and aesthetic tastes. 
+We need to reverse-engineer our present artistic tastes and preferences and explain how they came to be engraved in our minds by the actions of both our prehistoric, largely pleistocene environments, where we became fully human, but also by the social situations in which we evolved. 
+This reverse engineering can also enlist help from the human record preserved in prehistory. 
+I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth. 
+And it should take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gatherer bands that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries. 
+Now, I personally have no doubt whatsoever that the experience of beauty, with its emotional intensity and pleasure, belongs to our evolved human psychology. 
+The experience of beauty is one component in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations. 
+Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment. 
+As many of you will know, evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms. 
+The first of these is natural selection — that's random mutation and selective retention — along with our basic anatomy and physiology — the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails. 
+Natural selection also explains many basic revulsions, such as the horrid smell of rotting meat, or fears, such as the fear of snakes or standing close to the edge of a cliff. 
+Natural selection also explains pleasures — sexual pleasure, our liking for sweet, fat and proteins, which in turn explains a lot of popular foods, from ripe fruits through chocolate malts and barbecued ribs. 
+The other great principle of evolution is sexual selection, and it operates very differently. 
+The peacock's magnificent tail is the most famous example of this. 
+It did not evolve for natural survival. 
+In fact, it goes against natural survival. 
+No, the peacock's tail results from the mating choices made by peahens. 
+It's quite a familiar story. 
+It's women who actually push history forward. 
+Darwin himself, by the way, had no doubts that the peacock's tail was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen. 
+He actually used that word. 
+Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind, we can say that the experience of beauty is one of the ways that evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest or fascination, even obsession, in order to encourage us toward making the most adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction. 
+Beauty is nature's way of acting at a distance, so to speak. 
+I mean, you can't expect to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape. 
+It would hardly do to eat your baby or your lover. 
+So evolution's trick is to make them beautiful, to have them exert a kind of magnetism to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them. 
+Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure, the magnetic pull of beautiful landscapes. 
+People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved. 
+This landscape shows up today on calendars, on postcards, in the design of golf courses and public parks and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from New York to New Zealand. 
+It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees. 
+The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix. 
+The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indications of animal or bird life as well as diverse greenery and finally — get this — a path or a road, perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it. 
+This landscape type is regarded as beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it. 
+The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience. 
+But, someone might argue, that's natural beauty. 
+How about artistic beauty? 
+Isn't that exhaustively cultural? 
+No, I don't think it is. 
+And once again, I'd like to look back to prehistory to say something about it. 
+It is widely assumed that the earliest human artworks are the stupendously skillful cave paintings that we all know from Lascaux and Chauvet. 
+Chauvet caves are about 32,000 years old, along with a few small, realistic sculptures of women and animals from the same period. 
+But artistic and decorative skills are actually much older than that. 
+Beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you'd see at an arts and crafts fair, as well as ochre body paint, have been found from around 100,000 years ago. 
+But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this. 
+I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes. 
+The oldest stone tools are choppers from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. 
+They go back about two-and-a-half-million years. 
+These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until around 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what are to our eyes an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop form. 
+These Acheulian hand axes — they're named after St. Acheul in France, where finds were made in 19th century — have been unearthed in their thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa, almost everywhere Homo erectus and Homo ergaster roamed. 
+Now, the sheer numbers of these hand axes shows that they can't have been made for butchering animals. 
+And the plot really thickens when you realize that, unlike other pleistocene tools, the hand axes often exhibit no evidence of wear on their delicate blade edges. 
+And some, in any event, are too big to use for butchery. 
+Their symmetry, their attractive materials and, above all, their meticulous workmanship are simply quite beautiful to our eyes, even today. 
+So what were these ancient — I mean, they're ancient, they're foreign, but they're at the same time somehow familiar. 
+What were these artifacts for? 
+The best available answer is that they were literally the earliest known works of art, practical tools transformed into captivating aesthetic objects, contemplated both for their elegant shape and their virtuoso craftsmanship. 
+Hand axes mark an evolutionary advance in human history — tools fashioned to function as what Darwinians call "" fitness signals "" — that is to say, displays that are performances like the peacock's tail, except that, unlike hair and feathers, the hand axes are consciously cleverly crafted. 
+Competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities — intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability, conscientiousness and sometimes access to rare materials. 
+Over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased the status of those who displayed them and gained a reproductive advantage over the less capable. 
+You know, it's an old line, but it has been shown to work — "Why don't you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes?" 
+(Laughter) Except, of course, what's interesting about this is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed, because the Homo erectus that made these objects did not have language. 
+It's hard to grasp, but it's an incredible fact. 
+This object was made by a hominid ancestor, Homo erectus or Homo ergaster, between 50,000 and 100,000 years before language. 
+Stretching over a million years, the hand axe tradition is the longest artistic tradition in human and proto-human history. 
+By the end of the hand axe epic, Homo sapiens — as they were then called, finally — were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other by, who knows, telling jokes, storytelling, dancing, or hairstyling. 
+Yes, hairstyling — I insist on that. 
+For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, to express intense emotions with music, painting and dance. 
+But still, one fundamental trait of the ancestral personality persists in our aesthetic cravings: the beauty we find in skilled performances. 
+From Lascaux to the Louvre to Carnegie Hall, human beings have a permanent innate taste for virtuoso displays in the arts. 
+We find beauty in something done well. 
+So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut teardrop-shaped stone, don't be so sure it's just your culture telling you that that sparkling jewel is beautiful. 
+Your distant ancestors loved that shape and found beauty in the skill needed to make it, even before they could put their love into words. 
+Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? 
+No, it's deep in our minds. 
+It's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. 
+Our powerful reaction to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to the night sky, will be with us and our descendants for as long as the human race exists. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Well, I was born with a rare visual condition called achromatopsia, which is total color blindness, so I've never seen color, and I don't know what color looks like, because I come from a grayscale world. 
+To me, the sky is always gray, flowers are always gray, and television is still in black and white. 
+But, since the age of 21, instead of seeing color, I can hear color. 
+In 2003, I started a project with computer scientist Adam Montandon, and the result, with further collaborations with Peter Kese from Slovenia and Matias Lizana from Barcelona, is this electronic eye. 
+It's a color sensor that detects the color frequency in front of me — (Frequency sounds) — and sends this frequency to a chip installed at the back of my head, and I hear the color in front of me through the bone, through bone conduction. 
+(Frequency sounds) So, for example, if I have, like — This is the sound of purple. (Frequency sounds) For example, this is the sound of grass. (Frequency sounds) This is red, like TED. (Frequency sounds) This is the sound of a dirty sock. (Laughter) Which is like yellow, this one. 
+So I've been hearing color all the time for eight years, since 2004, so I find it completely normal now to hear color all the time. 
+At the start, though, I had to memorize the names you give for each color, so I had to memorize the notes, but after some time, all this information became a perception. 
+I didn't have to think about the notes. 
+And after some time, this perception became a feeling. 
+I started to have favorite colors, and I started to dream in colors. 
+So, when I started to dream in color is when I felt that the software and my brain had united, because in my dreams, it was my brain creating electronic sounds. It wasn't the software, so that's when I started to feel like a cyborg. 
+It's when I started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device. 
+It had become a part of my body, an extension of my senses, and after some time, it even became a part of my official image. 
+This is my passport from 2004. 
+You're not allowed to appear on U.K. passports with electronic equipment, but I insisted to the passport office that what they were seeing was actually a new part of my body, an extension of my brain, and they finally accepted me to appear with the passport photo. 
+So, life has changed dramatically since I hear color, because color is almost everywhere, so the biggest change for example is going to an art gallery, I can listen to a Picasso, for example. So it's like I'm going to a concert hall, because I can listen to the paintings. 
+And supermarkets, I find this is very shocking, it's very, very attractive to walk along a supermarket. 
+It's like going to a nightclub. 
+It's full of different melodies. (Laughter) Yeah. 
+Especially the aisle with cleaning products. 
+It's just fabulous. (Laughter) Also, the way I dress has changed. 
+Before, I used to dress in a way that it looked good. 
+Now I dress in a way that it sounds good. (Laughter) (Applause) So today I'm dressed in C major, so it's quite a happy chord. (Laughter) If I had to go to a funeral, though, I would dress in B minor, which would be turquoise, purple and orange. (Laughter) Also, food, the way I look at food has changed, because now I can display the food on a plate, so I can eat my favorite song. (Laughter) So depending on how I display it, I can hear and I can compose music with food. 
+So imagine a restaurant where we can have, like, Lady Gaga salads as starters. (Laughter) I mean, this would get teenagers to eat their vegetables, probably. 
+And also, some Rachmaninov piano concertos as main dishes, and some Bjork or Madonna desserts, that would be a very exciting restaurant where you can actually eat songs. 
+Also, the way I perceive beauty has changed, because when I look at someone, I hear their face, so someone might look very beautiful but sound terrible. 
+(Laughter) And it might happen the opposite, the other way around. So I really enjoy creating, like, sound portraits of people. 
+Instead of drawing someone's face, like drawing the shape, I point at them with the eye and I write down the different notes I hear, and then I create sound portraits. 
+Here's some faces. 
+(Musical chords) Yeah, Nicole Kidman sounds good. (Laughter) Some people, I would never relate, but they sound similar. 
+Prince Charles has some similarities with Nicole Kidman. 
+They have similar sound of eyes. 
+So you relate people that you wouldn't relate, and you can actually also create concerts by looking at the audience faces. 
+So I connect the eye, and then I play the audience's faces. 
+The good thing about this is, if the concert doesn't sound good, it's their fault. 
+It's not my fault, because — (Laughter) And so another thing that happens is that I started having this secondary effect that normal sounds started to become color. 
+I heard a telephone tone, and it felt green because it sounded just like the color green. 
+The BBC beeps, they sound turquoise, and listening to Mozart became a yellow experience, so I started to paint music and paint people's voices, because people's voices have frequencies that I relate to color. 
+And here's some music translated into color. 
+For example, Mozart, "" Queen of the Night, "" looks like this. 
+(Music) Very yellow and very colorful, because there's many different frequencies. (Music) 
+And this is a completely different song. 
+(Music) It's Justin Bieber's "" Baby. "" (Laughter) (Music) It is very pink and very yellow. 
+So, also voices, I can transform speeches into color, for example, these are two very well-known speeches. 
+One of them is Martin Luther King's "" I Have A Dream, "" and the other one is Hitler. 
+And I like to exhibit these paintings in the exhibition halls without labels, and then I ask people, "Which one do you prefer?" 
+And most people change their preference when I tell them that the one on the left is Hitler and the one on the right is Martin Luther King. 
+So I got to a point when I was able to perceive 360 colors, just like human vision. 
+I was able to differentiate all the degrees of the color wheel. 
+But then, I just thought that this human vision wasn't good enough. 
+There's many, many more colors around us that we cannot perceive, but that electronic eyes can perceive. 
+So I decided to continue extending my color senses, and I added infrared and I added ultraviolet to the color-to-sound scale, so now I can hear colors that the human eye cannot perceive. 
+For example, perceiving infrared is good because you can actually detect if there's movement detectors in a room. 
+I can hear if someone points at me with a remote control. 
+And the good thing about perceiving ultraviolet is that you can hear if it's a good day or a bad day to sunbathe, because ultraviolet is a dangerous color, a color that can actually kill us, so I think we should all have this wish to perceive things that we cannot perceive. 
+That's why, two years ago, I created the Cyborg Foundation, which is a foundation that tries to help people become a cyborg, tries to encourage people to extend their senses by using technology as part of the body. 
+We should all think that knowledge comes from our senses, so if we extend our senses, we will consequently extend our knowledge. 
+I think life will be much more exciting when we stop creating applications for mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body. 
+I think this will be a big, big change that we will see during this century. 
+So I do encourage you all to think about which senses you'd like to extend. 
+I would encourage you to become a cyborg. 
+You won't be alone. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+Well, there's lots to talk about, but I think I'm just going to play to start off. 
+(Music) ♫ When I wake up ♫ ♫ in the morning ♫ ♫ I pour the coffee ♫ ♫ I read the paper ♫ ♫ And then I slowly ♫ ♫ and so softly ♫ ♫ do the dishes ♫ ♫ So feed the fishes ♫ ♫ You sing me happy birthday ♫ ♫ Like it's gonna be ♫ ♫ your last day ♫ ♫ here on Earth ♫ (Applause) All right. 
+So, I wanted to do something special today. 
+I want to debut a new song that I've been working on in the last five or six months. 
+And there's few things more thrilling than playing a song for the first time in front of an audience, especially when it's half-finished. 
+(Laughter) I'm kind of hoping some conversations here might help me finish it. 
+Because it gets into all sorts of crazy realms. 
+And so this is basically a song about loops, but not the kind of loops that I make up here. 
+They're feedback loops. 
+And in the audio world that's when the microphone gets too close to its sound source, and then it gets in this self-destructive loop that creates a very unpleasant sound. 
+And I'm going to demonstrate for you. 
+(Laughter) I'm not going to hurt you. Don't worry. 
+♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a loop, feedback loop ♫ ♫ This is a — (Feedback) All right. I don't know if that was necessary to demonstrate — (Laughter) — but my point is it's the sound of self-destruction. 
+And I've been thinking about how that applies across a whole spectrum of realms, from, say, the ecological, okay. 
+There seems to be a rule in nature that if you get too close to where you came from, it gets ugly. 
+So like, you can't feed cows their own brains or you get mad cow disease, and inbreeding and incest and, let's see, what's the other one? 
+Biological — there's autoimmune diseases, where the body attacks itself a little too overzealously and destroys the host, or the person. 
+And then — okay, this is where we get to the song — kind of bridges the gap to the emotional. 
+Because although I've used scientific terms in songs, it's very difficult sometimes to make them lyrical. 
+And there's some things you just don't need to have in songs. 
+So I'm trying to bridge this gap between this idea and this melody. 
+And so, I don't know if you've ever had this, but when I close my eyes sometimes and try to sleep, I can't stop thinking about my own eyes. 
+And it's like your eyes start straining to see themselves. 
+That's what it feels like to me. 
+It's not pleasant. 
+I'm sorry if I put that idea in your head. 
+(Laughter) It's impossible, of course, for your eyes to see themselves, but they seem to be trying. 
+So that's getting a little more closer to a personal experience. 
+Or ears being able to hear themselves — it's just impossible. 
+That's the thing. 
+So, I've been working on this song that mentions these things and then also imagines a person who's been so successful at defending themselves from heartbreak that they're left to do the deed themselves, if that's possible. 
+And that's what the song is asking. 
+All right. 
+It doesn't have a name yet. 
+(Music) ♫ Go ahead and congratulate yourself ♫ ♫ Give yourself a hand, the hand is your hand ♫ ♫ And the eye that eyes itself is your eye ♫ ♫ And the ear that hears itself is near ♫ ♫ 'Cause it's your ear, oh oh ♫ ♫ You've done the impossible now ♫ ♫ Took yourself apart ♫ ♫ You made yourself invulnerable ♫ ♫ No one can break your heart ♫ ♫ So you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you wring it out ♫ ♫ And you wear it out ♫ ♫ And you break it yourself ♫ 
+♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own, break it yourself ♫ ♫ Breaking your own ♫ (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) 
+All right. 
+It's kind of cool. Songwriters can sort of get away with murder. 
+You can throw out crazy theories and not have to back it up with data or graphs or research. 
+But, you know, I think reckless curiosity would be what the world needs now, just a little bit. 
+(Applause) I'm going to finish up with a song of mine called "" Weather Systems. "" (Music) ♫ Quiet ♫ ♫ Quiet down, she said ♫ ♫ Speak into the back of his head ♫ ♫ On the edge of the bed, I can see your blood flow ♫ ♫ I can see your ♫ ♫ cells grow ♫ ♫ Hold still awhile ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ 
+♫ Some things you say ♫ ♫ are not for sale ♫ ♫ I would hold it where ♫ ♫ our free agents of some substance are ♫ ♫ scared ♫ ♫ Hold still a while ♫ ♫ Don't spill the wine ♫ ♫ I can see it all from here ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ oh, I ♫ ♫ I can see ♫ ♫ weather systems of the world ♫ ♫ Weather systems ♫ ♫ of the world ♫ Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I wanted to just start by asking everyone a question: How many of you are completely comfortable with calling yourselves a leader? 
+
+I want you now to imagine a wearable robot that gives you superhuman abilities, or another one that takes wheelchair users up standing and walking again. 
+We at Berkeley Bionics call these robots exoskeletons. 
+These are nothing else than something that you put on in the morning, and it will give you extra strength, and it will further enhance your speed, and it will help you, for instance, to manage your balance. 
+It is actually the true integration of the man and the machine. 
+But not only that — it will integrate and network you to the universe and other devices out there. 
+This is just not some blue sky thinking. 
+To show you now what we are working on by starting out talking about the American soldier, that on average does carry about 100 lbs. on their backs, and they are being asked to carry more equipment. 
+Obviously, this is resulting in some major complications — back injuries, 30 percent of them — chronic back injuries. 
+So we thought we would look at this challenge and create an exoskeleton that would help deal with this issue. 
+So let me now introduce to you HULC — or the Human Universal Load Carrier. 
+Soldier: With the HULC exoskeleton, I can carry 200 lbs. over varied terrain for many hours. 
+Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and high-agility movements. 
+It senses what I want to do, where I want to go, and then augments my strength and endurance. 
+Eythor Bender: We are ready with our industry partner to introduce this device, this new exoskeleton this year. 
+So this is for real. 
+Now let's turn our heads towards the wheelchair users, something that I'm particularly passionate about. 
+There are 68 million people estimated to be in wheelchairs worldwide. 
+This is about one percent of the total population. 
+And that's actually a conservative estimate. 
+We are talking here about, oftentimes, very young individuals with spinal cord injuries, that in the prime of their life — 20s, 30s, 40s — hit a wall and the wheelchair's the only option. 
+But it is also the aging population that is multiplying in numbers. 
+And the only option, pretty much — when it's stroke or other complications — is the wheelchair. 
+And that is actually for the last 500 years, since its very successful introduction, I must say. 
+So we thought we would start writing a brand new chapter of mobility. 
+Let me now introduce you to eLEGS that is worn by Amanda Boxtel that 19 years ago was spinal cord injured, and as a result of that she has not been able to walk for 19 years until now. 
+(Applause) Amanda Boxtel: Thank you. (Applause) 
+EB: Amanda is wearing our eLEGS set. 
+It has sensors. 
+It's completely non-invasive, sensors in the crutches that send signals back to our onboard computer that is sitting here at her back. 
+There are battery packs here as well that power motors that are sitting at her hips, as well as her knee joints, that move her forward in this kind of smooth and very natural gait. 
+AB: I was 24 years old and at the top of my game when a freak summersault while downhill skiing paralyzed me. 
+In a split second, I lost all sensation and movement below my pelvis. 
+Not long afterwards, a doctor strode into my hospital room, and he said, "" Amanda, you'll never walk again. "" And that was 19 yeas ago. 
+He robbed every ounce of hope from my being. 
+Adaptive technology has since enabled me to learn how to downhill ski again, to rock climb and even handcycle. 
+But nothing has been invented that enables me to walk, until now. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+EB: As you can see, we have the technology, we have the platforms to sit down and have discussions with you. 
+It's in our hands, and we have all the potential here to change the lives of future generations — not only for the soldiers, or for Amanda here and all the wheelchair users, but for everyone. 
+AB: Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In the last 50 years, we've been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. 
+And I'm going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia. 
+So whether it's redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially retail, sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. 
+And in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges. 
+So why is this important? 
+I think there are any number of reasons, and I'm just going to not get into detail but mention a few. 
+Just from the perspective of climate change, the average urban dweller in the U.S. 
+has about one-third the carbon footprint of the average suburban dweller, mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more, and living in detached buildings, you have that much more exterior surface to leak energy out of. 
+So strictly from a climate change perspective, the cities are already relatively green. 
+The big opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is actually in urbanizing the suburbs. 
+All that driving that we've been doing out in the suburbs, we have doubled the amount of miles we drive. 
+It's increased our dependence on foreign oil despite the gains in fuel efficiency. 
+We're just driving so much more; we haven't been able to keep up technologically. 
+Public health is another reason to consider retrofitting. 
+Researchers at the CDC and other places have increasingly been linking suburban development patterns with sedentary lifestyles. 
+And those have been linked then with the rather alarming, growing rates of obesity, shown in these maps here, and that obesity has also been triggering great increases in heart disease and diabetes to the point where a child born today has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. 
+And that rate has been escalating at the same rate as children not walking to school anymore, again, because of our development patterns. 
+And then there's finally — there's the affordability question. 
+I mean, how affordable is it to continue to live in suburbia with rising gas prices? 
+Suburban expansion to cheap land, for the last 50 years — you know the cheap land out on the edge — has helped generations of families enjoy the American dream. 
+But increasingly, the savings promised by drive-till-you-qualify affordability — which is basically our model — those savings are wiped out when you consider the transportation costs. 
+For instance, here in Atlanta, about half of households make between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, and they are spending 29 percent of their income on housing and 32 percent on transportation. 
+I mean, that's 2005 figures. 
+That's before we got up to the four bucks a gallon. 
+You know, none of us really tend to do the math on our transportation costs, and they're not going down any time soon. 
+Whether you love suburbia's leafy privacy or you hate its soulless commercial strips, there are reasons why it's important to retrofit. 
+But is it practical? 
+I think it is. 
+June Williamson and I have been researching this topic for over a decade, and we've found over 80 varied projects. 
+But that they're really all market driven, and what's driving the market in particular — number one — is major demographic shifts. 
+We all tend to think of suburbia as this very family-focused place, but that's really not the case anymore. 
+Since 2000, already two-thirds of households in suburbia did not have kids in them. 
+We just haven't caught up with the actual realities of this. 
+The reasons for this have a lot to with the dominance of the two big demographic groups right now: the Baby Boomers retiring — and then there's a gap, Generation X, which is a small generation. 
+They're still having kids — but Generation Y hasn't even started hitting child-rearing age. 
+They're the other big generation. 
+So as a result of that, demographers predict that through 2025, 75 to 85 percent of new households will not have kids in them. 
+And the market research, consumer research, asking the Boomers and Gen Y what it is they would like, what they would like to live in, tells us there is going to be a huge demand — and we're already seeing it — for more urban lifestyles within suburbia. 
+That basically, the Boomers want to be able to age in place, and Gen Y would like to live an urban lifestyle, but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia. 
+The other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt. 
+Now I keep thinking this would be a great name for an indie rock band, but developers generally use it to refer to underused parking lots — and suburbia is full of them. 
+When the postwar suburbs were first built out on the cheap land away from downtown, it made sense to just build surface parking lots. 
+But those sites have now been leapfrogged and leapfrogged again, as we've just continued to sprawl, and they now have a relatively central location. 
+It no longer just makes sense. 
+That land is more valuable than just surface parking lots. 
+It now makes sense to go back in, build a deck and build up on those sites. 
+So what do you do with a dead mall, dead office park? 
+It turns out, all sorts of things. 
+In a slow economy like ours, re-inhabitation is one of the more popular strategies. 
+So this happens to be a dead mall in St. Louis that's been re-inhabited as art-space. 
+It's now home to artist studios, theater groups, dance troupes. 
+It's not pulling in as much tax revenue as it once was, but it's serving its community. 
+It's keeping the lights on. 
+It's becoming, I think, a really great institution. 
+Other malls have been re-inhabited as nursing homes, as universities, and as all variety of office space. 
+We also found a lot of examples of dead big-box stores that have been converted into all sorts of community-serving uses as well — lots of schools, lots of churches and lots of libraries like this one. 
+This was a little grocery store, a Food Lion grocery store, that is now a public library. 
+In addition to, I think, doing a beautiful adaptive reuse, they tore up some of the parking spaces, put in bioswales to collect and clean the runoff, put in a lot more sidewalks to connect to the neighborhoods. 
+And they've made this, what was just a store along a commercial strip, into a community gathering space. 
+This one is a little L-shaped strip shopping center in Phoenix, Arizona. 
+Really all they did was they gave it a fresh coat of bright paint, a gourmet grocery, and they put up a restaurant in the old post office. 
+Never underestimate the power of food to turn a place around and make it a destination. 
+It's been so successful, they've now taken over the strip across the street. 
+The real estate ads in the neighborhood all very proudly proclaim, "Walking distance to Le Grande Orange," because it provided its neighborhood with what sociologists like to call "a third place." 
+If home is the first place and work is the second place, the third place is where you go to hang out and build community. 
+And especially as suburbia is becoming less centered on the family, the family households, there's a real hunger for more third places. 
+So the most dramatic retrofits are really those in the next category, the next strategy: redevelopment. 
+Now, during the boom, there were several really dramatic redevelopment projects where the original building was scraped to the ground and then the whole site was rebuilt at significantly greater density, a sort of compact, walkable urban neighborhoods. 
+But some of them have been much more incremental. 
+This is Mashpee Commons, the oldest retrofit that we've found. 
+And it's just incrementally, over the last 20 years, built urbanism on top of its parking lots. 
+So the black and white photo shows the simple 60's strip shopping center. 
+And then the maps above that show its gradual transformation into a compact, mixed-use New England village, and it has plans now that have been approved for it to connect to new residential neighborhoods across the arterials and over to the other side. 
+So, you know, sometimes it's incremental. 
+Sometimes, it's all at once. 
+This is another infill project on the parking lots, this one of an office park outside of Washington D.C. 
+When Metrorail expanded transit into the suburbs and opened a station nearby to this site, the owners decided to build a new parking deck and then insert on top of their surface lots a new Main Street, several apartments and condo buildings, while keeping the existing office buildings. 
+Here is the site in 1940: It was just a little farm in the village of Hyattsville. 
+By 1980, it had been subdivided into a big mall on one side and the office park on the other and then some buffer sites for a library and a church to the far right. 
+Today, the transit, the Main Street and the new housing have all been built. 
+Eventually, I expect that the streets will probably extend through a redevelopment of the mall. 
+Plans have already been announced for a lot of those garden apartments above the mall to be redeveloped. 
+Transit is a big driver of retrofits. 
+So here's what it looks like. 
+You can sort of see the funky new condo buildings in between the office buildings and the public space and the new Main Street. 
+This one is one of my favorites, Belmar. 
+I think they really built an attractive place here and have just employed all-green construction. 
+There's massive P.V. arrays on the roofs as well as wind turbines. 
+This was a very large mall on a hundred-acre superblock. 
+It's now 22 walkable urban blocks with public streets, two public parks, eight bus lines and a range of housing types, and so it's really given Lakewood, Colorado the downtown that this particular suburb never had. 
+Here was the mall in its heyday. 
+They had their prom in the mall. They loved their mall. 
+So here's the site in 1975 with the mall. 
+By 1995, the mall has died. 
+The department store has been kept — and we found this was true in many cases. 
+The department stores are multistory; they're better built. 
+They're easy to be re-adapted. 
+But the one story stuff... 
+that's really history. 
+So here it is at projected build-out. 
+This project, I think, has great connectivity to the existing neighborhoods. 
+It's providing 1,500 households with the option of a more urban lifestyle. 
+It's about two-thirds built out right now. 
+Here's what the new Main Street looks like. 
+It's very successful, and it's helped to prompt — eight of the 13 regional malls in Denver have now, or have announced plans to be, retrofitted. 
+But it's important to note that all of this retrofitting is not occurring — just bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city. 
+No, it's pockets of walkability on the sites of under-performing properties. 
+And so it's giving people more choices, but it's not taking away choices. 
+But it's also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability. 
+You want to also try to get more systemic transformation. 
+We need to also retrofit the corridors themselves. 
+So this is one that has been retrofitted in California. 
+They took the commercial strip shown on the black-and-white images below, and they built a boulevard that has become the Main Street for their town. 
+And it's transformed from being an ugly, unsafe, undesirable address, to becoming a beautiful, attractive, dignified sort of good address. 
+I mean now we're hoping we start to see it; they've already built City Hall, attracted two hotels. 
+I could imagine beautiful housing going up along there without tearing down another tree. 
+So there's a lot of great things, but I'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitting. 
+But densification is not going to work everywhere. 
+Sometimes re-greening is really the better answer. 
+There's a lot to learn from successful landbanking programs in cities like Flint, Michigan. 
+There's also a burgeoning suburban farming movement — sort of victory gardens meets the Internet. 
+But perhaps one of the most important re-greening aspects is the opportunity to restore the local ecology, as in this example outside of Minneapolis. 
+When the shopping center died, the city restored the site's original wetlands, creating lakefront property, which then attracted private investment, the first private investment to this very low-income neighborhood in over 40 years. 
+So they've managed to both restore the local ecology and the local economy at the same time. 
+This is another re-greening example. 
+It also makes sense in very strong markets. 
+This one in Seattle is on the site of a mall parking lot adjacent to a new transit stop. 
+And the wavy line is a path alongside a creek that has now been daylit. 
+The creek had been culverted under the parking lot. 
+But daylighting our creeks really improves their water quality and contributions to habitat. 
+So I've shown you some of the first generation of retrofits. 
+What's next? 
+I think we have three challenges for the future. 
+The first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale. 
+We need to be able to target which areas really should be re-greened. 
+Where should we be redeveloping? 
+And where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation? 
+These slides just show two images from a larger project that looked at trying to do that for Atlanta. 
+I led a team that was asked to imagine Atlanta 100 years from now. 
+And we chose to try to reverse sprawl through three simple moves — expensive, but simple. 
+One, in a hundred years, transit on all major rail and road corridors. 
+Two, in a hundred years, thousand foot buffers on all stream corridors. 
+It's a little extreme, but we've got a little water problem. 
+In a hundred years, subdivisions that simply end up too close to water or too far from transit won't be viable. 
+And so we've created the eco-acre transfer-to-transfer development rights to the transit corridors and allow the re-greening of those former subdivisions for food and energy production. 
+So the second challenge is to improve the architectural design quality of the retrofits. 
+And I close with this image of democracy in action: This is a protest that's happening on a retrofit in Silver Spring, Maryland on an Astroturf town green. 
+Now, retrofits are often accused of being examples of faux downtowns and instant urbanism, and not without reason; you don't get much more phony than an Astroturf town green. 
+I have to say, these are very hybrid places. 
+They are new but trying to look old. 
+They have urban streetscapes, but suburban parking ratios. 
+Their populations are more diverse than typical suburbia, but they're less diverse than cities. 
+And they are public places, but that are managed by private companies. 
+And just the surface appearance are often — like the Astroturf here — they make me wince. 
+So, you know, I mean I'm glad that the urbanism is doing its job. 
+The fact that a protest is happening really does mean that the layout of the blocks, the streets and blocks, the putting in of public space, compromised as it may be, is still a really great thing. 
+But we've got to get the architecture better. 
+The final challenge is for all of you. 
+I want you to join the protest and start demanding more sustainable suburban places — more sustainable places, period. 
+But culturally, we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that. 
+But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to. 
+It's time to let them grow up, so I want you to all support the zoning changes, the road diets, the infrastructure improvements and the retrofits that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you. 
+Thank you. 
+
+The editor of Discover told us 10 of them; I'm going to give you the eleventh. 
+Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did, they'd move away from me, because, quite rightly, they were saying psychology is about finding what's wrong with you. 
+What was good about psychology — about the $30 billion investment NIMH made, about working in the disease model, about what you mean by psychology — is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable; it was entirely smoke and mirrors. 
+We could look across time at the same people — people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia — and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are, and we could isolate third variables by doing experiments on the mental illnesses. 
+And then we were able to test them rigorously, in random-assignment, placebo-controlled designs, throw out the things that didn't work, keep the things that actively did. 
+The conclusion of that is, psychology and psychiatry of the last 60 years can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable. 
+We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier, more fulfilled, more productive. 
+And the third problem about the disease model is, in our rush to do something about people in trouble, in our rush to do something about repairing damage, it never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier — positive interventions. 
+It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage. 
+So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future, we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology, a science of what makes life worth living. 
+You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning, for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people? 
+We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities: a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio, how they're defined, how to diagnose them, what builds them and what gets in their way. 
+We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states, the relationship between left hemispheric activity and right hemispheric activity, as a cause of happiness. 
+How do they differ from the rest of us? 
+But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have, in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill, and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable, is, can psychology actually make people happier? 
+This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can, and the skills to amplify it. 
+I want to say a little bit about each of those lives and what we know about them. 
+But the pleasant life has three drawbacks, and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology, and why it doesn't end here. 
+The first drawback is, it turns out the pleasant life, your experience of positive emotion, is about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable. 
+So the different tricks that Matthieu and I and others know about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it. 
+In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30, Len was enormously successful. 
+By the time he was 20, he was an options trader. 
+Second, in play, he's a national champion bridge player. 
+And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish. 
+(Laughter) Len is an introvert. 
+American women said to Len, when he dated them, "You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost." 
+And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him. 
+Re-crafting your work, your love, your play, your friendship, your parenting. 
+But what she did was to take her highest strengths, and re-craft work to use them as much as possible. 
+What you get out of that is not smiley-ness. 
+So, that's the second path. 
+This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally. 
+And meaning, in this view, consists of — very parallel to eudaemonia — it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are. 
+Just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect: when we teach people about the pleasant life, how to have more pleasure in your life, one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills, the savoring skills, and you're assigned to design a beautiful day. 
+I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important that changed your life in a good direction, and who you never properly thanked. 
+Now, OK, you can open your eyes. 
+And what you find is when you do something fun, it has a square wave walk set. 
+So the next to last thing I want to say is: we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have. 
+And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives, how much life satisfaction do you get? 
+The pursuit of meaning is the strongest. 
+Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning, then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry. 
+But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel to the problems of technology, entertainment and design in the following way: we all know that technology, entertainment and design have been and can be used for destructive purposes. 
+And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery and building happiness is extremely important. 
+I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago, that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed, not anxious, not angry, that I'd make them happy. 
+But once you fractionate happiness the way I do — not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough — there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life. 
+As Laura Lee told us, design and, I believe, entertainment and technology, can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well. 
+
+As an Arab female photographer, I have always found ample inspiration for my projects in personal experiences. 
+The passion I developed for knowledge, which allowed me to break barriers towards a better life was the motivation for my project I Read I Write. 
+Pushed by my own experience, as I was not allowed initially to pursue my higher education, I decided to explore and document stories of other women who changed their lives through education, while exposing and questioning the barriers they face. 
+I covered a range of topics that concern women's education, keeping in mind the differences among Arab countries due to economic and social factors. 
+These issues include female illiteracy, which is quite high in the region; educational reforms; programs for dropout students; and political activism among university students. 
+As I started this work, it was not always easy to convince the women to participate. 
+Only after explaining to them how their stories might influence other women's lives, how they would become role models for their own community, did some agree. 
+Seeking a collaborative and reflexive approach, I asked them to write their own words and ideas on prints of their own images. 
+Those images were then shared in some of the classrooms, and worked to inspire and motivate other women going through similar educations and situations. 
+Aisha, a teacher from Yemen, wrote, "" I sought education in order to be independent and to not count on men with everything. "" One of my first subjects was Umm El-Saad from Egypt. 
+When we first met, she was barely able to write her name. 
+She was attending a nine-month literacy program run by a local NGO in the Cairo suburbs. 
+Months later, she was joking that her husband had threatened to pull her out of the classes, as he found out that his now literate wife was going through his phone text messages. 
+(Laughter) Naughty Umm El-Saad. 
+Of course, that's not why Umm El-Saad joined the program. 
+I saw how she was longing to gain control over her simple daily routines, small details that we take for granted, from counting money at the market to helping her kids in homework. 
+Despite her poverty and her community's mindset, which belittles women's education, Umm El-Saad, along with her Egyptian classmates, was eager to learn how to read and write. 
+In Tunisia, I met Asma, one of the four activist women I interviewed. 
+The secular bioengineering student is quite active on social media. 
+Regarding her country, which treasured what has been called the Arab Spring, she said, "" I've always dreamt of discovering a new bacteria. 
+Now, after the revolution, we have a new one every single day. "" Asma was referring to the rise of religious fundamentalism in the region, which is another obstacle to women in particular. 
+Out of all the women I met, Fayza from Yemen affected me the most. 
+Fayza was forced to drop out of school at the age of eight when she was married. 
+That marriage lasted for a year. 
+At 14, she became the third wife of a 60-year-old man, and by the time she was 18, she was a divorced mother of three. 
+Despite her poverty, despite her social status as a divorcée in an ultra-conservative society, and despite the opposition of her parents to her going back to school, Fayza knew that her only way to control her life was through education. 
+She is now 26. 
+She received a grant from a local NGO to fund her business studies at the university. 
+Her goal is to find a job, rent a place to live in, and bring her kids back with her. 
+The Arab states are going through tremendous change, and the struggles women face are overwhelming. 
+Just like the women I photographed, I had to overcome many barriers to becoming the photographer I am today, many people along the way telling me what I can and cannot do. 
+Umm El-Saad, Asma and Fayza, and many women across the Arab world, show that it is possible to overcome barriers to education, which they know is the best means to a better future. 
+And here I would like to end with a quote by Yasmine, one of the four activist women I interviewed in Tunisia. 
+Yasmine wrote, "" Question your convictions. 
+Be who you to want to be, not who they want you to be. 
+Don't accept their enslavement, for your mother birthed you free. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Allison Hunt: My three minutes hasn't started yet, has it? 
+Chris Anderson: No, you can't start the three minutes. 
+Reset the three minutes, that's just not fair. 
+AH: Oh my God, it's harsh up here. 
+I mean I'm nervous enough as it is. 
+But I am not as nervous as I was five weeks ago. 
+Five weeks ago I had total hip replacement surgery. 
+Do you know that surgery? 
+Electric saw, power drill, totally disgusting unless you're David Bolinsky, in which case it's all truth and beauty. 
+Sure David, if it's not your hip, it's truth and beauty. 
+Anyway, I did have a really big epiphany around the situation, so Chris invited me to tell you about it. 
+But first you need to know two things about me. 
+Just two things. 
+I'm Canadian, and I'm the youngest of seven kids. 
+Now, in Canada, we have that great healthcare system. 
+That means we get our new hips for free. 
+And being the youngest of seven, I have never been at the front of the line for anything. OK? 
+So my hip had been hurting me for years. 
+I finally went to the doctor, which was free. 
+And she referred me to an orthopedic surgeon, also free. 
+Finally got to see him after 10 months of waiting — almost a year. 
+That is what free gets you. 
+I met the surgeon, and he took some free X-rays, and I got a good look at them. And you know, even I could tell my hip was bad, and I actually work in marketing. 
+So he said, "" Allison, we've got to get you on the table. 
+I'm going to replace your hip — it's about an 18-month wait. "" 18 more months. 
+I'd already waited 10 months, and I had to wait 18 more months. 
+You know, it's such a long wait that I actually started to even think about it in terms of TEDs. 
+I wouldn't have my new hip for this TED. 
+I wouldn't have my new hip for TEDGlobal in Africa. 
+I would not have my new hip for TED2008. 
+I would still be on my bad hip. That was so disappointing. 
+So, I left his office and I was walking through the hospital, and that's when I had my epiphany. 
+This youngest of seven had to get herself to the front of the line. 
+Oh yeah. 
+Can I tell you how un-Canadian that is? 
+We do not think that way. 
+We don't talk about it. It's not even a consideration. 
+In fact, when we're traveling abroad, it's how we identify fellow Canadians. 
+"After you." "Oh, no, no. After you." 
+Hey, are you from Canada? "" Oh, me too! Hi! "" "Great! Excellent!" 
+So no, suddenly I wasn't averse to butting any geezer off the list. 
+Some 70-year-old who wanted his new hip so he could be back golfing, or gardening. 
+No, no. Front of the line. 
+So by now I was walking the lobby, and of course, that hurt, because of my hip, and I kind of needed a sign. 
+And I saw a sign. 
+In the window of the hospital's tiny gift shop there was a sign that said, "" Volunteers Needed. "" Hmm. 
+Well, they signed me up immediately. 
+No reference checks. None of the usual background stuff, no. 
+They were desperate for volunteers because the average age of the volunteer at the hospital gift shop was 75. 
+Yeah. They needed some young blood. 
+So, next thing you know, I had my bright blue volunteer vest, I had my photo ID, and I was fully trained by my 89-year-old boss. 
+I worked alone. 
+Every Friday morning I was at the gift shop. 
+While ringing in hospital staff's Tic Tacs, I'd casually ask, "" What do you do? "" Then I'd tell them, "" Well, I'm getting my hip replaced — in 18 months. 
+It's gonna be so great when the pain stops. Ow! "" All the staff got to know the plucky, young volunteer. 
+My next surgeon's appointment was, coincidentally, right after a shift at the gift shop. 
+So, naturally, I had my vest and my identification. 
+I draped them casually over the chair in the doctor's office. 
+And you know, when he walked in, I could just tell that he saw them. 
+Moments later, I had a surgery date just weeks away, and a big fat prescription for Percocet. 
+Now, word on the street was that it was actually my volunteering that got me to the front of the line. 
+And, you know, I'm not even ashamed of that. 
+Two reasons. 
+First of all, I am going to take such good care of this new hip. 
+But also I intend to stick with the volunteering, which actually leads me to the biggest epiphany of them all. 
+Even when a Canadian cheats the system, they do it in a way that benefits society. 
+
+This is a vending machine in Los Angeles. 
+This is the Art-o-mat, an art vending machine that sells small artistic creations by different artists, usually on small wood blocks or matchboxes, in limited edition. 
+This is Oliver Medvedik. He's not a vending machine, but he is one of the founders of Genspace, a community biolab in Brooklyn, New York, where anybody can go and take classes and learn how to do things like grow E. coli that glows in the dark or learn how to take strawberry DNA. 
+In fact, I saw Oliver do one of these strawberry DNA extractions about a year ago, and this is what led me onto this bizarre path that I'm going to talk to you right now. 
+Because strawberry DNA is really fascinating, because it's so beautiful. 
+I'd never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before, before I saw it in this form. 
+And a lot of people, especially in the art community, don't necessarily engage in science in this way. 
+I instantly joined Genspace after this, and I asked Oliver, "" Well, if we can do this strawberries, can we do this with people as well? "" And about 10 minutes later, we were both spinning it in vials together and coming up with a protocol for human DNA extraction. 
+And I started doing this on my own, and this is what my DNA actually looks like. 
+And I was at a dinner party with some friends, some artist friends, and I was telling them about this project, and they couldn't believe that you could actually see DNA. 
+So I said, all right, let's get out some supplies right now. 
+And I started having these bizarre dinner parties at my house on Friday nights where people would come over and we would do DNA extractions, and I would actually capture them on video, because it created this kind of funny portrait as well. 
+(Laughter) These are people who don't necessarily regularly engage with science whatsoever. 
+You can kind of tell from their reactions. 
+But they became fascinated by it, and it was really exciting for me to see them get excited about science. 
+And so I started doing this regularly. 
+It's kind of an odd thing to do with your Friday nights, but this is what I started doing, and I started collecting a whole group of my friends' DNA in small vials and categorizing them. 
+This is what that looked like. 
+And it started to make me think about a couple of things. 
+First of all, this looked a lot like my Facebook wall. 
+So in a way, I've created sort of a genetic network, a genetic social network, really. 
+And the second thing was, one time a friend came over and looked at this on my table and was like, "" Oh. 
+Why are they numbered? Is this person more rare than the other one? "" And I hadn't even thought about that. 
+They were just numbered because that was the order that I extracted the DNA in. 
+But that made me think about collecting toys, and this thing that's going on right now in the toy world with blind box toys, and being able to collect these rare toys. 
+You buy these boxes. You're not sure what's going to be inside of them. 
+But then, when you open them up, you have different rarities of the toys. 
+And so I thought that was interesting. 
+I started thinking about this and the caviar vending machine and the Art-o-mat all together, and some reason, I was one night drawing a vending machine, thinking about doing paintings of a vending machine, and the little vial of my DNA was sitting there, and I saw this kind of beautiful collaboration between the strands of DNA and the coils of a vending machine. 
+And so, of course, I decided to create an art installation called the DNA Vending Machine. 
+Here it is. 
+(Music) ["" DNA Vending Machine is an art installation about our increasing access to biotechnology. ""] ["" For a reasonable cost, you can purchase a sample of human DNA from a traditional vending machine. ""] ["" Each sample comes packaged with a collectible limited edition portrait of the human specimen. ""] ["" DNA Vending Machine treats DNA as a collectible material and brings to light legal issues over the ownership of DNA. ""] Gabriel Garcia-Colombo: So the DNA Vending Machine is currently in a couple galleries in New York, and it's selling out pretty well, actually. 
+We're in the first edition of 100 pieces, hoping to do another edition pretty soon. 
+I'd actually like to get it into more of a metro hub, like Grand Central or Penn Station, right next to some of the other, actual vending machines in that location. 
+But really with this project and a lot of my art projects I want to ask the audience a question, and that is, when biotechnology and DNA sequencing becomes as cheap as, say, laser cutting or 3D printing or buying caviar from a vending machine, will you still submit your sample of DNA to be part of the vending machine? 
+And how much will these samples be worth? 
+And will you buy someone else's sample? 
+And what will you be able to do with that sample? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a neuroscientist, a professor at the University of California. 
+And over the past 35 years, I've studied behavior on the basis of everything from genes through neurotransmitters, dopamine, things like that, all the way through circuit analysis. 
+So that's what I normally do. 
+But then, for some reason, I got into something else, just recently. 
+And it all grew out of one of my colleagues asking me to analyze a bunch of brains of psychopathic killers. 
+And so this would be the typical talk I would give. 
+And the question is, "" How do you end up with a psychopathic killer? "" What I mean by psychopathic killer are these people, these types of people. 
+And so some of the brains that I've studied are people you know about. 
+When I get the brains I don't know what I'm looking at. 
+It's blind experiments. They also gave me normal people and everything. 
+So I've looked at about 70 of these. 
+And what came up was a number of pieces of data. 
+So we look at these sorts of things theoretically, on the basis of genetics, and brain damage, and interaction with environment, and exactly how that machine works. 
+So we're interested in exactly where in the brain, and what's the most important part of the brain. 
+So we've been looking at this: the interaction of genes, what's called epigenetic effects, brain damage, and environment, and how these are tied together. 
+And how you end up with a psychopath, and a killer, depends on exactly when the damage occurs. 
+It's really a very precisely timed thing. 
+You get different kinds of psychopaths. 
+So we're going along with this. And here's, just to give you the pattern. 
+The pattern is that those people, every one of them I looked at, who was a murderer, and was a serial killer, had damage to their orbital cortex, which is right above the eyes, the orbits, and also the interior part of the temporal lobe. 
+So there is the pattern that every one of them had, but they all were a little different too. 
+They had other sorts of brain damage. 
+A key thing is that the major violence genes, it's called the MAO-A gene. 
+And there is a variant of this gene that is in the normal population. 
+Some of you have this. And it's sex-linked. 
+It's on the X chromosome. And so in this way you can only get it from your mother. 
+And in fact this is probably why mostly men, boys, are psychopathic killers, or are very aggressive. 
+Because a daughter can get one X from the father, one X from the mother, it's kind of diluted out. 
+But for a son, he can only get the X chromosome from his mother. 
+So this is how it's passed from mother to son. 
+And it has to do with too much brain serotonin during development, which is kind of interesting because serotonin is supposed to make you calm and relaxed. 
+But if you have this gene, in utero your brain is bathed in this, so your whole brain becomes insensitive to serotonin, so it doesn't work later on in life. 
+And I'd given this one talk in Israel, just this past year. 
+And it does have some consequences. 
+Theoretically what this means is that in order to express this gene, in a violent way, very early on, before puberty, you have to be involved in something that is really traumatic — not a little stress, not being spanked or something, but really seeing violence, or being involved in it, in 3D. 
+Right? That's how the mirror neuron system works. 
+And so, if you have that gene, and you see a lot of violence in a certain situation, this is the recipe for disaster, absolute disaster. 
+And what I think might happen in these areas of the world, where we have constant violence, you end up having generations of kids that are seeing all this violence. 
+And if I was a young girl, somewhere in a violent area, you know, a 14 year old, and I want to find a mate, I'd find some tough guy, right, to protect me. 
+Well what the problem is this tends to concentrate these genes. 
+And now the boys and the girls get them. 
+So I think after several generations, and here is the idea, we really have a tinderbox. 
+So that was the idea. 
+But then my mother said to me, "" I hear you've been going around talking about psychopathic killers. 
+And you're talking as if you come from a normal family. "" I said, "" What the hell are you talking about? "" She then told me about our own family tree. 
+Now she blamed this on my father's side, of course. 
+This was one of these cases, because she has no violence in her background, but my father did. 
+Well she said, "" There is good news and bad news. 
+One of your cousins is Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell university. 
+But the bad news is that your cousin is also Lizzie Borden. 
+Now I said, "" Okay, so what? We have Lizzie. "" She goes, "" No it gets worse, read this book. "" And here is this "" Killed Strangely, "" and it's this historical book. 
+And the first murder of a mother by a son was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. 
+Okay, so that's the first case of matricide. 
+And that book is very interesting. Because it's about witch trials, and how people thought back then. 
+But it doesn't stop there. 
+There were seven more men, on my father's side, starting then, Cornells, that were all murderers. 
+Okay, now this gives one a little pause. 
+(Laughter) Because my father himself, and my three uncles, in World War II, were all conscientious objectors, all pussycats. 
+But every once in a while, like Lizzie Borden, like three times a century, and we're kind of due. 
+(Laughter) So the moral of the story is: people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. 
+But more likely is this. 
+(Laughter) And we had to take action. Now our kids found out about it. 
+And they all seemed to be OK. 
+But our grandkids are going to be kind of concerned here. 
+So what we've done is I've started to do PET scans of everybody in the family. 
+(Laughter) We started to do PET scans, EEGs and genetic analysis to see where the bad news is. 
+Now the only person — it turns out one son and one daughter, siblings, didn't get along and their patterns are exactly the same. 
+They have the same brain, and the same EEG. 
+And now they are close as can be. 
+But there's gonna be bad news somewhere. 
+And we don't know where it's going to pop up. 
+So that's my talk. 
+(Laughter) 
+
+Thank you. 
+I'm thrilled to be here. 
+I'm going to talk about a new, old material that still continues to amaze us, and that might impact the way we think about material science, high technology — and maybe, along the way, also do some stuff for medicine and for global health and help reforestation. 
+So that's kind of a bold statement. 
+I'll tell you a little bit more. 
+This material actually has some traits that make it seem almost too good to be true. 
+It's sustainable; it's a sustainable material that is processed all in water and at room temperature — and is biodegradable with a clock, so you can watch it dissolve instantaneously in a glass of water or have it stable for years. 
+It's edible; it's implantable in the human body without causing any immune response. 
+It actually gets reintegrated in the body. 
+And it's technological, so it can do things like microelectronics, and maybe photonics do. 
+And the material looks something like this. 
+In fact, this material you see is clear and transparent. 
+The components of this material are just water and protein. 
+So this material is silk. 
+So it's kind of different from what we're used to thinking about silk. 
+So the question is, how do you reinvent something that has been around for five millennia? 
+The process of discovery, generally, is inspired by nature. 
+And so we marvel at silk worms — the silk worm you see here spinning its fiber. 
+The silk worm does a remarkable thing: it uses these two ingredients, protein and water, that are in its gland, to make a material that is exceptionally tough for protection — so comparable to technical fibers like Kevlar. 
+And so in the reverse engineering process that we know about, and that we're familiar with, for the textile industry, the textile industry goes and unwinds the cocoon and then weaves glamorous things. 
+We want to know how you go from water and protein to this liquid Kevlar, to this natural Kevlar. 
+So the insight is how do you actually reverse engineer this and go from cocoon to gland and get water and protein that is your starting material. 
+And this is an insight that came, about two decades ago, from a person that I'm very fortunate to work with, David Kaplan. 
+And so we get this starting material. 
+And so this starting material is back to the basic building block. 
+And then we use this to do a variety of things — like, for example, this film. 
+And we take advantage of something that is very simple. 
+The recipe to make those films is to take advantage of the fact that proteins are extremely smart at what they do. 
+They find their way to self-assemble. 
+So the recipe is simple: you take the silk solution, you pour it, and you wait for the protein to self-assemble. 
+And then you detach the protein and you get this film, as the proteins find each other as the water evaporates. 
+But I mentioned that the film is also technological. 
+And so what does that mean? 
+It means that you can interface it with some of the things that are typical of technology, like microelectronics and nanoscale technology. 
+And the image of the DVD here is just to illustrate a point that silk follows very subtle topographies of the surface, which means that it can replicate features on the nanoscale. 
+So it would be able to replicate the information that is on the DVD. 
+And we can store information that's film with water and protein. 
+So we tried something out, and we wrote a message in a piece of silk, which is right here, and the message is over there. 
+And much like in the DVD, you can read it out optically. 
+And this requires a stable hand, so this is why I decided to do it onstage in front of a thousand people. 
+So let me see. 
+So as you see the film go in transparently through there, and then... 
+(Applause) And the most remarkable feat is that my hand actually stayed still long enough to do that. 
+So once you have these attributes of this material, then you can do a lot of things. 
+It's actually not limited to films. 
+And so the material can assume a lot of formats. 
+And then you go a little crazy, and so you do various optical components or you do microprism arrays, like the reflective tape that you have on your running shoes. 
+Or you can do beautiful things that, if the camera can capture, you can make. 
+You can add a third dimensionality to the film. 
+And if the angle is right, you can actually see a hologram appear in this film of silk. 
+But you can do other things. 
+You can imagine that then maybe you can use a pure protein to guide light, and so we've made optical fibers. 
+But silk is versatile and it goes beyond optics. 
+And you can think of different formats. 
+So for instance, if you're afraid of going to the doctor and getting stuck with a needle, we do microneedle arrays. 
+What you see there on the screen is a human hair superimposed on the needle that's made of silk — just to give you a sense of size. 
+You can do bigger things. 
+You can do gears and nuts and bolts — that you can buy at Whole Foods. 
+And the gears work in water as well. 
+So you think of alternative mechanical parts. 
+And maybe you can use that liquid Kevlar if you need something strong to replace peripheral veins, for example, or maybe an entire bone. 
+And so you have here a little example of a small skull — what we call mini Yorick. 
+(Laughter) But you can do things like cups, for example, and so, if you add a little bit of gold, if you add a little bit of semiconductors you could do sensors that stick on the surfaces of foods. 
+You can do electronic pieces that fold and wrap. 
+Or if you're fashion forward, some silk LED tattoos. 
+So there's versatility, as you see, in the material formats, that you can do with silk. 
+But there are still some unique traits. 
+I mean, why would you want to do all these things for real? 
+I mentioned it briefly at the beginning; the protein is biodegradable and biocompatible. 
+And you see here a picture of a tissue section. 
+And so what does that mean, that it's biodegradable and biocompatible? 
+You can implant it in the body without needing to retrieve what is implanted. 
+Which means that all the devices that you've seen before and all the formats, in principle, can be implanted and disappear. 
+And what you see there in that tissue section, in fact, is you see that reflector tape. 
+So, much like you're seen at night by a car, then the idea is that you can see, if you illuminate tissue, you can see deeper parts of tissue because there is that reflective tape there that is made out of silk. 
+And you see there, it gets reintegrated in tissue. 
+And reintegration in the human body is not the only thing, but reintegration in the environment is important. 
+So you have a clock, you have protein, and now a silk cup like this can be thrown away without guilt — (Applause) unlike the polystyrene cups that unfortunately fill our landfills everyday. 
+It's edible, so you can do smart packaging around food that you can cook with the food. 
+It doesn't taste good, so I'm going to need some help with that. 
+But probably the most remarkable thing is that it comes full circle. 
+Silk, during its self-assembly process, acts like a cocoon for biological matter. 
+And so if you change the recipe, and you add things when you pour — so you add things to your liquid silk solution — where these things are enzymes or antibodies or vaccines, the self-assembly process preserves the biological function of these dopants. 
+So it makes the materials environmentally active and interactive. 
+So that screw that you thought about beforehand can actually be used to screw a bone together — a fractured bone together — and deliver drugs at the same, while your bone is healing, for example. 
+Or you could put drugs in your wallet and not in your fridge. 
+So we've made a silk card with penicillin in it. 
+And we stored penicillin at 60 degrees C, so 140 degrees Fahrenheit, for two months without loss of efficacy of the penicillin. 
+And so that could be — - (Applause) that could be potentially a good alternative to solar powered refrigerated camels. (Laughter) And of course, there's no use in storage if you can't use [it]. 
+And so there is this other unique material trait that these materials have, that they're programmably degradable. 
+And so what you see there is the difference. 
+In the top, you have a film that has been programmed not to degrade, and in the bottom, a film that has been programmed to degrade in water. 
+And what you see is that the film on the bottom releases what is inside it. 
+So it allows for the recovery of what we've stored before. 
+And so this allows for a controlled delivery of drugs and for reintegration in the environment in all of these formats that you've seen. 
+So the thread of discovery that we have really is a thread. 
+We're impassioned with this idea that whatever you want to do, whether you want to replace a vein or a bone, or maybe be more sustainable in microelectronics, perhaps drink a coffee in a cup and throw it away without guilt, maybe carry your drugs in your pocket, deliver them inside your body or deliver them across the desert, the answer may be in a thread of silk. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Five years ago, I experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be Alice in Wonderland. 
+A few things to consider are having examples, stories and analogies. Those are ways to engage and excite us about your content. 
+Have you ever wondered why they're called bullet points? (Laughter) What do bullets do? Bullets kill, and they will kill your presentation. 
+And the trick here is to use a single, readable sentence that the audience can key into if they get a bit lost, and then provide visuals which appeal to our other senses and create a deeper sense of understanding of what's being described. 
+
+So I'm going to tell you a little bit about reimagining food. 
+I've been interested in food for a long time. 
+I taught myself to cook with a bunch of big books like this. 
+I went to chef school in France. 
+And there is a way the world both envisions food, the way the world writes about food and learns about food. 
+And it's largely what you would find in these books. 
+And it's a wonderful thing. 
+But there's some things that have been going on since this idea of food was established. 
+In the last 20 years, people have realized that science has a tremendous amount to do with food. 
+In fact, understanding why cooking works requires knowing the science of cooking — some of the chemistry, some of the physics and so forth. 
+But that's not in any of those books. 
+There's also a tremendous number of techniques that chefs have developed, some about new aesthetics, new approaches to food. 
+There's a chef in Spain named Ferran Adria. 
+He's developed a very avant-garde cuisine. 
+A guy in England called Heston Blumenthal, he's developed his avant-garde cuisine. 
+None of the techniques that these people have developed over the course of the last 20 years is in any of those books. 
+None of them are taught in cooking schools. 
+In order to learn them, you have to go work in those restaurants. 
+And finally, there's the old way of viewing food is the old way. 
+And so a few years ago — fours years ago, actually — I set out to say, is there a way we can communicate science and technique and wonder? 
+Is there a way we can show people food in a way they have not seen it before? 
+So we tried, and I'll show you what we came up with. 
+This is a picture called a cutaway. 
+This is actually the first picture I took in the book. 
+The idea here is to explain what happens when you steam broccoli. 
+And this magic view allows you to see all of what's happening while the broccoli steams. 
+Then each of the different little pieces around it explain some fact. 
+And the hope was two-fold. 
+One is you can actually explain what happens when you steam broccoli. 
+But the other thing is that maybe we could seduce people into stuff that was a little more technical, maybe a little bit more scientific, maybe a little bit more chef-y than they otherwise would have. 
+Because with that beautiful photo, maybe I can also package this little box here that talks about how steaming and boiling actually take different amounts of time. 
+Steaming ought to be faster. 
+It turns out it isn't because of something called film condensation, and this explains that. 
+Well, that first cutaway picture worked, so we said, "" Okay, let's do some more. "" So here's another one. 
+We discovered why woks are the shape they are. 
+This shaped wok doesn't work very well; this caught fire three times. 
+But we had a philosophy, which is it only has to look good for a thousandth of a second. 
+(Laughter) And one of our canning cutaways. 
+Once you start cutting things in half, you kind of get carried away, so you see we cut the jars in half as well as the pan. 
+And each of these text blocks explains a key thing that's going on. 
+In this case, boiling water canning is for canning things that are already pretty acidic. 
+You don't have to heat them up as hot as you would something you do pressure canning because bacterial spores can't grow in the acid. 
+So this is great for pickled vegetables, which is what we're canning here. 
+Here's our hamburger cutaway. 
+One of our philosophies in the book is that no dish is really intrinsically any better than any other dish. 
+So you can lavish all the same care, all the same technique, on a hamburger as you would on some much more fancy dish. 
+And if you do lavish as much technique as possible, and you try to make the highest quality hamburger, it gets to be a little bit involved. 
+The New York Times ran a piece after my book was delayed and it was called "" The Wait for the 30-Hour Hamburger Just Got Longer. "" Because our hamburger recipe, our ultimate hamburger recipe, if you make the buns and you marinate the meat and you do all this stuff, it does take about 30 hours. 
+Of course, you're not actually working the whole time. 
+Most of the time is kind of sitting there. 
+The point of this cutaway is to show people a view of hamburgers they haven't seen before and to explain the physics of hamburgers and the chemistry of hamburgers, because, believe it or not, there is something to the physics and chemistry — in particular, those flames underneath the burger. 
+Most of the characteristic char-grilled taste doesn't come from the wood or the charcoal. 
+Buying mesquite charcoal will not actually make that much difference. 
+Mostly it comes from fat pyrolyzing, or burning. 
+So it's the fat that drips down and flares up that causes the characteristic taste. 
+Now you might wonder, how do we make these cutaways? 
+Most people assume we use Photoshop. 
+And the answer is: no, not really; we use a machine shop. 
+And it turns out, the best way to cut things in half is to actually cut them in half. 
+So we have two halves of one of the best kitchens in the world. 
+(Laughter) We cut a $5,000 restaurant oven in half. 
+The manufacturer said, "What would it take for you to cut one in half?" 
+I said, "" It would have to show up free. "" And so it showed up, we used it a little while, we cut it in half. 
+Now you can also see a little bit how we did some of these shots. 
+We would glue a piece of Pyrex or heat-resistant glass in front. 
+We used a red, very high-temperature silicon to do that. 
+The great thing is, when you cut something in half, you have another half. 
+So you photograph that in exactly the same position, and then you can substitute in — and that part does use Photoshop — just the edges. 
+So it's very much like in a Hollywood movie where a guy flies through the air, supported by wires, and then they take the wires away digitally so you're flying through the air. 
+In most cases, though, there was no glass. 
+Like for the hamburger, we just cut the damn barbecue. 
+And so those coals that kept falling off the edge, we kept having to put them back up. 
+But again, it only has to work for a thousandth of a second. 
+The wok shot caught fire three times. 
+What happens when you have your wok cut in half is the oil goes down into the fire and whoosh! 
+One of our cooks lost his eyebrows that way. 
+But hey, they grow back. 
+In addition to cutaways, we also explain physics. 
+This is Fourier's law of heat conduction. 
+It's a partial differential equation. 
+We have the only cookbook in the world that has partial differential equations in it. 
+But to make them palatable, we cut it out of a steel plate and put it in front of a fire and photographed it like this. 
+We've got lots of little tidbits in the book. 
+Everybody knows that your various appliances have wattage, right? 
+But you probably don't know that much about James Watt. 
+But now you will; we put a biography of James Watt in. 
+It's a little couple paragraphs to explain why we call that unit of heat the watt, and where he got his inspiration. 
+It turned out he was hired by a Scottish distillery to understand why they were burning so damn much peat to distill the whiskey. 
+We also did a lot of calculation. 
+I personally wrote thousands of lines of code to write this cookbook. 
+Here's a calculation that shows how the intensity of a barbecue, or other radiant heat source, goes as you move away from it. 
+So as you move vertically away from this surface, the heat falls off. 
+As you move side to side, it moves off. 
+That horn-shaped region is what we call the sweet spot. 
+That's the place where the heat is even to within 10 percent. 
+So that's the place where you really want to cook. 
+And it's got this funny horn-shaped thing, which as far as I know, again, the first cookbook to ever do this. 
+Now it may also be the last cookbook that ever does it. 
+You know, there's two ways you can make a product. 
+You can do lots of market research and do focus groups and figure out what people really want, or you can just kind of go for it and make the book you want and hope other people like it. 
+Here's a step-by-step that shows grinding hamburger. 
+If you really want great hamburger, it turns out it makes a difference if you align the grain. 
+And it's really simple, as you can see here. 
+As it comes out of the grinder, you just have a little tray, and you just take it off in little passes, build it up, slice it vertically. 
+Here's the final hamburger. 
+This is the 30-hour hamburger. 
+We make every aspect of this burger. 
+The lettuce has got liquid smoke infused into it. 
+We also have things about how to make the bun. 
+There's a mushroom, ketchup — it goes on and on. 
+Now watch closely. This is popcorn. I'll explain it here. 
+The popcorn is illustrating a key thing in physics. 
+Isn't that beautiful? 
+We have a very high-speed camera, which we had lots of fun with on the book. 
+The key physics principle here is when water boils to steam it expands by a factor of 1,600. 
+That's what's happening to the water inside that popcorn. 
+So it's a great illustration of that. 
+Now I'm going to close with a video that is kind of unusual. 
+We have a chapter on gels. 
+And because people watch Mythbusters and CSI, I thought, well, let's put in a recipe for a ballistics gelatin. 
+Well, if you have a high-speed camera, and you have a block of ballistics gelatin lying around, pretty soon somebody does this. 
+(Gasps) Now the amazing thing here is that a ballistics gelatin is supposed to mimic what happens to human flesh when you get shot — that's why you shouldn't get shot. 
+The other amazing thing is, when this ballistics gelatin comes down, it falls back down as a nice block. 
+Anyway, here's the book. 
+Here it is. 
+2,438 pages. 
+And they're nice big pages too. 
+(Applause) A friend of mine complained that this was too big and too pretty to go in the kitchen, so there's a sixth volume that has washable, waterproof paper. (Applause) 
+
+There's a group of people in Kenya. 
+People cross oceans to go see them. 
+These people are tall. 
+They jump high. They wear red. 
+And they kill lions. 
+You might be wondering, who are these people? 
+These are the Maasais. 
+And you know what's cool? I'm actually one of them. 
+The Maasais, the boys are brought up to be warriors. 
+The girls are brought up to be mothers. 
+When I was five years old, I found out that I was engaged to be married as soon as I reached puberty. 
+My mother, my grandmother, my aunties, they constantly reminded me that your husband just passed by. 
+(Laughter) Cool, yeah? 
+And everything I had to do from that moment was to prepare me to be a perfect woman at age 12. 
+My day started at 5 in the morning, milking the cows, sweeping the house, cooking for my siblings, collecting water, firewood. 
+I did everything that I needed to do to become a perfect wife. 
+I went to school not because the Maasais' women or girls were going to school. 
+It's because my mother was denied an education, and she constantly reminded me and my siblings that she never wanted us to live the life she was living. 
+Why did she say that? 
+My father worked as a policeman in the city. 
+He came home once a year. 
+We didn't see him for sometimes even two years. 
+And whenever he came home, it was a different case. 
+My mother worked hard in the farm to grow crops so that we can eat. 
+She reared the cows and the goats so that she can care for us. 
+But when my father came, he would sell the cows, he would sell the products we had, and he went and drank with his friends in the bars. 
+Because my mother was a woman, she was not allowed to own any property, and by default, everything in my family anyway belongs to my father, so he had the right. 
+And if my mother ever questioned him, he beat her, abused her, and really it was difficult. 
+When I went to school, I had a dream. 
+I wanted to become a teacher. 
+Teachers looked nice. 
+They wear nice dresses, high-heeled shoes. 
+I found out later that they are uncomfortable, but I admired it. 
+(Laughter) But most of all, the teacher was just writing on the board — not hard work, that's what I thought, compared to what I was doing in the farm. 
+So I wanted to become a teacher. 
+I worked hard in school, but when I was in eighth grade, it was a determining factor. 
+In our tradition, there is a ceremony that girls have to undergo to become women, and it's a rite of passage to womanhood. 
+And then I was just finishing my eighth grade, and that was a transition for me to go to high school. 
+This was the crossroad. 
+Once I go through this tradition, I was going to become a wife. 
+Well, my dream of becoming a teacher will not come to pass. 
+So I talked — I had to come up with a plan to figure these things out. 
+I talked to my father. I did something that most girls have never done. 
+I told my father, "" I will only go through this ceremony if you let me go back to school. "" The reason why, if I ran away, my father will have a stigma, people will be calling him the father of that girl who didn't go through the ceremony. 
+It was a shameful thing for him to carry the rest of his life. 
+So he figured out. "" Well, "" he said, "" okay, you'll go to school after the ceremony. "" I did. The ceremony happened. 
+It's a whole week long of excitement. 
+It's a ceremony. People are enjoying it. 
+And the day before the actual ceremony happens, we were dancing, having excitement, and through all the night we did not sleep. 
+The actual day came, and we walked out of the house that we were dancing in. Yes, we danced and danced. 
+We walked out to the courtyard, and there were a bunch of people waiting. 
+They were all in a circle. 
+And as we danced and danced, and we approached this circle of women, men, women, children, everybody was there. 
+There was a woman sitting in the middle of it, and this woman was waiting to hold us. 
+I was the first. There were my sisters and a couple of other girls, and as I approached her, she looked at me, and I sat down. 
+And I sat down, and I opened my legs. 
+As I opened my leg, another woman came, and this woman was carrying a knife. 
+And as she carried the knife, she walked toward me and she held the clitoris, and she cut it off. 
+As you can imagine, I bled. I bled. 
+After bleeding for a while, I fainted thereafter. 
+It's something that so many girls — I'm lucky, I never died — but many die. 
+It's practiced, it's no anesthesia, it's a rusty old knife, and it was difficult. 
+I was lucky because one, also, my mom did something that most women don't do. 
+Three days later, after everybody has left the home, my mom went and brought a nurse. 
+We were taken care of. 
+Three weeks later, I was healed, and I was back in high school. 
+I was so determined to be a teacher now so that I could make a difference in my family. 
+Well, while I was in high school, something happened. 
+I met a young gentleman from our village who had been to the University of Oregon. 
+This man was wearing a white t-shirt, jeans, camera, white sneakers — and I'm talking about white sneakers. 
+There is something about clothes, I think, and shoes. 
+They were sneakers, and this is in a village that doesn't even have paved roads. It was quite attractive. 
+I told him, "" Well, I want to go to where you are, "" because this man looked very happy, and I admired that. 
+And he told me, "" Well, what do you mean, you want to go? 
+Don't you have a husband waiting for you? "" And I told him, "" Don't worry about that part. 
+Just tell me how to get there. "" This gentleman, he helped me. 
+While I was in high school also, my dad was sick. 
+He got a stroke, and he was really, really sick, so he really couldn't tell me what to do next. 
+But the problem is, my father is not the only father I have. 
+Everybody who is my dad's age, male in the community, is my father by default — my uncles, all of them — and they dictate what my future is. 
+So the news came, I applied to school and I was accepted to Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and I couldn't come without the support of the village, because I needed to raise money to buy the air ticket. 
+I got a scholarship but I needed to get myself here. 
+But I needed the support of the village, and here again, when the men heard, and the people heard that a woman had gotten an opportunity to go to school, they said, "" What a lost opportunity. 
+This should have been given to a boy. We can't do this. "" So I went back and I had to go back to the tradition. 
+There's a belief among our people that morning brings good news. 
+So I had to come up with something to do with the morning, because there's good news in the morning. 
+And in the village also, there is one chief, an elder, who if he says yes, everybody will follow him. 
+So I went to him very early in the morning, as the sun rose. 
+The first thing he sees when he opens his door is, it's me. 
+"My child, what are you doing here?" 
+"Well, Dad, I need help. Can you support me to go to America?" 
+I promised him that I would be the best girl, I will come back, anything they wanted after that, I will do it for them. 
+He said, "" Well, but I can't do it alone. "" He gave me a list of another 15 men that I went — 16 more men — every single morning I went and visited them. 
+They all came together. 
+The village, the women, the men, everybody came together to support me to come to get an education. 
+I arrived in America. As you can imagine, what did I find? 
+I found snow! 
+I found Wal-Marts, vacuum cleaners, and lots of food in the cafeteria. 
+I was in a land of plenty. 
+I enjoyed myself, but during that moment while I was here, I discovered a lot of things. 
+I learned that that ceremony that I went through when I was 13 years old, it was called female genital mutilation. 
+I learned that it was against the law in Kenya. 
+I learned that I did not have to trade part of my body to get an education. I had a right. 
+And as we speak right now, three million girls in Africa are at risk of going through this mutilation. 
+I learned that my mom had a right to own property. 
+I learned that she did not have to be abused because she is a woman. 
+Those things made me angry. 
+I wanted to do something. 
+As I went back, every time I went, I found that my neighbors' girls were getting married. 
+They were getting mutilated, and here, after I graduated from here, I worked at the U.N., I went back to school to get my graduate work, the constant cry of these girls was in my face. 
+I had to do something. 
+As I went back, I started talking to the men, to the village, and mothers, and I said, "" I want to give back the way I had promised you that I would come back and help you. What do you need? "" As I spoke to the women, they told me, "You know what we need? We really need a school for girls." 
+Because there had not been any school for girls. 
+And the reason they wanted the school for girls is because when a girl is raped when she's walking to school, the mother is blamed for that. 
+If she got pregnant before she got married, the mother is blamed for that, and she's punished. 
+She's beaten. 
+They said, "" We wanted to put our girls in a safe place. "" As we moved, and I went to talk to the fathers, the fathers, of course, you can imagine what they said: "We want a school for boys." 
+And I said, "" Well, there are a couple of men from my village who have been out and they have gotten an education. 
+Why can't they build a school for boys, and I'll build a school for girls? "" That made sense. And they agreed. 
+And I told them, I wanted them to show me a sign of commitment. 
+And they did. They donated land where we built the girls' school. 
+We have. 
+I want you to meet one of the girls in that school. 
+Angeline came to apply for the school, and she did not meet any criteria that we had. 
+She's an orphan. Yes, we could have taken her for that. 
+But she was older. She was 12 years old, and we were taking girls who were in fourth grade. 
+Angeline had been moving from one place — because she's an orphan, she has no mother, she has no father — moving from one grandmother's house to another one, from aunties to aunties. She had no stability in her life. 
+And I looked at her, I remember that day, and I saw something beyond what I was seeing in Angeline. 
+And yes, she was older to be in fourth grade. 
+We gave her the opportunity to come to the class. 
+Five months later, that is Angeline. 
+A transformation had begun in her life. 
+Angeline wants to be a pilot so she can fly around the world and make a difference. 
+She was not the top student when we took her. 
+Now she's the best student, not just in our school, but in the entire division that we are in. 
+That's Sharon. That's five years later. 
+That's Evelyn. Five months later, that is the difference that we are making. 
+As a new dawn is happening in my school, a new beginning is happening. 
+As we speak right now, 125 girls will never be mutilated. 
+One hundred twenty-five girls will not be married when they're 12 years old. 
+One hundred twenty-five girls are creating and achieving their dreams. 
+This is the thing that we are doing, giving them opportunities where they can rise. 
+As we speak right now, women are not being beaten because of the revolutions we've started in our community. 
+(Applause) I want to challenge you today. 
+You are listening to me because you are here, very optimistic. 
+You are somebody who is so passionate. 
+You are somebody who wants to see a better world. 
+You are somebody who wants to see that war ends, no poverty. 
+You are somebody who wants to make a difference. 
+You are somebody who wants to make our tomorrow better. 
+I want to challenge you today that to be the first, because people will follow you. 
+Be the first. People will follow you. 
+Be bold. Stand up. Be fearless. Be confident. 
+Move out, because as you change your world, as you change your community, as we believe that we are impacting one girl, one family, one village, one country at a time. 
+We are making a difference, so if you change your world, you are going to change your community, you are going to change your country, and think about that. If you do that, and I do that, aren't we going to create a better future for our children, for your children, for our grandchildren? 
+And we will live in a very peaceful world. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see. 
+And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible, because what that does, it expands our horizons, it transforms our perception, it opens our minds and it touches our heart. 
+We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. 
+And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. 
+Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane, and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery, we can see something that's above us constantly but invisible: the vast network of air travel over the United States. 
+We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion. 
+And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere, pulsing with lightning, crowned by the aurora Borealis. 
+At the other extreme, there are things that move too fast for our eyes, but we have technology that can look into that world as well. 
+When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. 
+And by tracking markers on an insect's wings, we can visualize the air flow that they produce. 
+And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places. 
+The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times. 
+And there are unseen creatures living all over your body, including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes, crawling over your skin at night. 
+Can you guess what this is? 
+A caterpillar's mouth. 
+An eggshell. 
+A spider also has great secrets, because spiders' silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic. 
+This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world. 
+The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair. 
+On there is bacteria, and near that bacteria, 10 times smaller, a virus. 
+Inside of that, 10 times smaller, three strands of DNA. 
+With the tip of a powerful microscope, we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices. 
+Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way. 
+Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day, perhaps, repair DNA. 
+We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances, born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life. 
+So under an endless rain of cosmic dust, the air is full of pollen, micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets and supernova explosions. 
+Knowing that there's so much around us we can't see forever changes our understanding of the world, and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards. 
+
+Hawa Abdi: Many people — 20 years for Somalia — [were] fighting. 
+So there was no job, no food. 
+Children, most of them, became very malnourished, like this. 
+Deqo Mohamed: So as you know, always in a civil war, the ones affected most [are] the women and children. 
+So our patients are women and children. 
+And they are in our backyard. 
+It's our home. We welcome them. 
+That's the camp that we have in now 90,000 people, where 75 percent of them are women and children. 
+Pat Mitchell: And this is your hospital. This is the inside. 
+HA: We are doing C-sections and different operations because people need some help. 
+There is no government to protect them. 
+DM: Every morning we have about 400 patients, maybe more or less. 
+But sometimes we are only five doctors and 16 nurses, and we are physically getting exhausted to see all of them. 
+But we take the severe ones, and we reschedule the other ones the next day. 
+It is very tough. 
+And as you can see, it's the women who are carrying the children; it's the women who come into the hospitals; it's the women [are] building the houses. 
+That's their house. 
+And we have a school. This is our bright — we opened [in the] last two years [an] elementary school where we have 850 children, and the majority are women and girls. 
+(Applause) PM: And the doctors have some very big rules about who can get treated at the clinic. 
+Would you explain the rules for admission? 
+HA: The people who are coming to us, we are welcoming. 
+We are sharing with them whatever we have. 
+But there are only two rules. 
+First rule: there is no clan distinguished and political division in Somali society. 
+[Whomever] makes those things we throw out. 
+The second: no man can beat his wife. 
+If he beat, we will put [him] in jail, and we will call the eldest people. 
+Until they identify this case, we'll never release him. 
+That's our two rules. 
+(Applause) The other thing that I have realized, that the woman is the most strong person all over the world. 
+Because the last 20 years, the Somali woman has stood up. 
+They were the leaders, and we are the leaders of our community and the hope of our future generations. 
+We are not just the helpless and the victims of the civil war. 
+We can reconcile. 
+We can do everything. 
+(Applause) DM: As my mother said, we are the future hope, and the men are only killing in Somalia. 
+So we came up with these two rules. 
+In a camp with 90,000 people, you have to come up with some rules or there is going to be some fights. 
+So there is no clan division, and no man can beat his wife. 
+And we have a little storage room where we converted a jail. 
+So if you beat your wife, you're going to be there. 
+(Applause) So empowering the women and giving the opportunity — we are there for them. They are not alone for this. 
+PM: You're running a medical clinic. 
+It brought much, much needed medical care to people who wouldn't get it. 
+You're also running a civil society. 
+You've created your own rules, in which women and children are getting a different sense of security. 
+Talk to me about your decision, Dr. Abdi, and your decision, Dr. Mohamed, to work together — for you to become a doctor and to work with your mother in these circumstances. 
+HA: My age — because I was born in 1947 — we were having, at that time, government, law and order. 
+But one day, I went to the hospital — my mother was sick — and I saw the hospital, how they [were] treating the doctors, how they [are] committed to help the sick people. 
+I admired them, and I decided to become a doctor. 
+My mother died, unfortunately, when I was 12 years [old]. 
+Then my father allowed me to proceed [with] my hope. 
+My mother died in [a] gynecology complication, so I decided to become a gynecology specialist. 
+That's why I became a doctor. 
+So Dr. Deqo has to explain. 
+DM: For me, my mother was preparing [me] when I was a child to become a doctor, but I really didn't want to. 
+Maybe I should become an historian, or maybe a reporter. 
+I loved it, but it didn't work. 
+When the war broke out — civil war — I saw how my mother was helping and how she really needed the help, and how the care is essential to the woman to be a woman doctor in Somalia and help the women and children. 
+And I thought, maybe I can be a reporter and doctor gynecologist. 
+(Laughter) So I went to Russia, and my mother also, [during the] time of [the] Soviet Union. 
+So some of our character, maybe we will come with a strong Soviet background of training. 
+So that's how I decided [to do] the same. 
+My sister was different. 
+She's here. She's also a doctor. 
+She graduated in Russia also. 
+(Applause) And to go back and to work with our mother is just what we saw in the civil war — when I was 16, and my sister was 11, when the civil war broke out. 
+So it was the need and the people we saw in the early '90s — that's what made us go back and work for them. 
+PM: So what is the biggest challenge working, mother and daughter, in such dangerous and sometimes scary situations? 
+HA: Yes, I was working in a tough situation, very dangerous. 
+And when I saw the people who needed me, I was staying with them to help, because I [could] do something for them. 
+Most people fled abroad. 
+But I remained with those people, and I was trying to do something — [any] little thing I [could] do. 
+I succeeded in my place. 
+Now my place is 90,000 people who are respecting each other, who are not fighting. 
+But we try to stand on our feet, to do something, little things, we can for our people. 
+And I'm thankful for my daughters. 
+When they come to me, they help me to treat the people, to help. 
+They do everything for them. 
+They have done what I desire to do for them. 
+PM: What's the best part of working with your mother, and the most challenging part for you? 
+DM: She's very tough; it's most challenging. 
+She always expects us to do more. 
+And really when you think [you] cannot do it, she will push you, and I can do it. 
+That's the best part. 
+She shows us, trains us how to do and how to be better [people] and how to do long hours in surgery — 300 patients per day, 10, 20 surgeries, and still you have to manage the camp — that's how she trains us. 
+It is not like beautiful offices here, 20 patients, you're tired. 
+You see 300 patients, 20 surgeries and 90,000 people to manage. 
+PM: But you do it for good reasons. 
+(Applause) Wait. Wait. 
+HA: Thank you. 
+DM: Thank you. 
+(Applause) HA: Thank you very much. DM: Thank you very much. 
+
+I would like to talk today about what I think is one of the greatest adventures human beings have embarked upon, which is the quest to understand the universe and our place in it. 
+My own interest in this subject, and my passion for it, began rather accidentally. 
+I had bought a copy of this book, "" The Universe and Dr. Einstein "" — a used paperback from a secondhand bookstore in Seattle. 
+A few years after that, in Bangalore, I was finding it hard to fall asleep one night, and I picked up this book, thinking it would put me to sleep in 10 minutes. 
+And as it happened, I read it from midnight to five in the morning in one shot. 
+And I was left with this intense feeling of awe and exhilaration at the universe and our own ability to understand as much as we do. 
+And that feeling hasn't left me yet. 
+That feeling was the trigger for me to actually change my career — from being a software engineer to become a science writer — so that I could partake in the joy of science, and also the joy of communicating it to others. 
+And that feeling also led me to a pilgrimage of sorts, to go literally to the ends of the earth to see telescopes, detectors, instruments that people are building, or have built, in order to probe the cosmos in greater and greater detail. 
+So it took me from places like Chile — the Atacama Desert in Chile — to Siberia, to underground mines in the Japanese Alps, in Northern America, all the way to Antarctica and even to the South Pole. 
+And today I would like to share with you some images, some stories of these trips. 
+I have been basically spending the last few years documenting the efforts of some extremely intrepid men and women who are putting, literally at times, their lives at stake working in some very remote and very hostile places so that they may gather the faintest signals from the cosmos in order for us to understand this universe. 
+And I first begin with a pie chart — and I promise this is the only pie chart in the whole presentation — but it sets up the state of our knowledge of the cosmos. 
+All the theories in physics that we have today properly explain what is called normal matter — the stuff that we're all made of — and that's four percent of the universe. 
+Astronomers and cosmologists and physicists think that there is something called dark matter in the universe, which makes up 23 percent of the universe, and something called dark energy, which permeates the fabric of space-time, that makes up another 73 percent. 
+So if you look at this pie chart, 96 percent of the universe, at this point in our exploration of it, is unknown or not well understood. 
+And most of the experiments, telescopes that I went to see are in some way addressing this question, these two twin mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. 
+I will take you first to an underground mine in Northern Minnesota where people are looking for something called dark matter. 
+And the idea here is that they are looking for a sign of a dark matter particle hitting one of their detectors. 
+And the reason why they have to go underground is that, if you did this experiment on the surface of the Earth, the same experiment would be swamped by signals that could be created by things like cosmic rays, ambient radio activity, even our own bodies. You might not believe it, but even our own bodies are radioactive enough to disturb this experiment. 
+So they go deep inside mines to find a kind of environmental silence that will allow them to hear the ping of a dark matter particle hitting their detector. 
+And I went to see one of these experiments, and this is actually — you can barely see it, and the reason for that is it's entirely dark in there — this is a cavern that was left behind by the miners who left this mine in 1960. 
+And physicists came and started using it sometime in the 1980s. 
+And the miners in the early part of the last century worked, literally, in candlelight. 
+And today, you would see this inside the mine, half a mile underground. 
+This is one of the largest underground labs in the world. 
+And, among other things, they're looking for dark matter. 
+There is another way to search for dark matter, which is indirectly. 
+If dark matter exists in our universe, in our galaxy, then these particles should be smashing together and producing other particles that we know about — one of them being neutrinos. 
+And neutrinos you can detect by the signature they leave when they hit water molecules. 
+When a neutrino hits a water molecule it emits a kind of blue light, a flash of blue light, and by looking for this blue light, you can essentially understand something about the neutrino and then, indirectly, something about the dark matter that might have created this neutrino. 
+But you need very, very large volumes of water in order to do this. 
+You need something like tens of megatons of water — almost a gigaton of water — in order to have any chance of catching this neutrino. 
+And where in the world would you find such water? 
+Well the Russians have a tank in their own backyard. 
+This is Lake Baikal. 
+It is the largest lake in the world. It's 800 km long. 
+It's about 40 to 50 km wide in most places, and one to two kilometers deep. 
+And what the Russians are doing is they're building these detectors and immersing them about a kilometer beneath the surface of the lake so that they can watch for these flashes of blue light. 
+And this is the scene that greeted me when I landed there. 
+This is Lake Baikal in the peak of the Siberian winter. 
+The lake is entirely frozen. 
+And the line of black dots that you see in the background, that's the ice camp where the physicists are working. 
+The reason why they have to work in winter is because they don't have the money to work in summer and spring, which, if they did that, they would need ships and submersibles to do their work. 
+So they wait until winter — the lake is completely frozen over — and they use this meter-thick ice as a platform on which to establish their ice camp and do their work. 
+So this is the Russians working on the ice in the peak of the Siberian winter. 
+They have to drill holes in the ice, dive down into the water — cold, cold water — to get hold of the instrument, bring it up, do any repairs and maintenance that they need to do, put it back and get out before the ice melts. 
+Because that phase of solid ice lasts for two months and it's full of cracks. 
+And you have to imagine, there's an entire sea-like lake underneath, moving. 
+I still don't understand this one Russian man working in his bare chest, but that tells you how hard he was working. 
+And these people, a handful of people, have been working for 20 years, looking for particles that may or may not exist. 
+And they have dedicated their lives to it. 
+And just to give you an idea, they have spent 20 million over 20 years. 
+It's very harsh conditions. 
+They work on a shoestring budget. 
+The toilets there are literally holes in the ground covered with a wooden shack. 
+And it's that basic, but they do this every year. 
+From Siberia to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to see something called The Very Large Telescope. The Very Large Telescope 
+is one of these things that astronomers do — they name their telescopes rather unimaginatively. 
+I can tell you for a fact, that the next one that they're planning is called The Extremely Large Telescope. 
+(Laughter) And you wouldn't believe it, but the one after that is going to be called The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope. 
+But nonetheless, it's an extraordinary piece of engineering. 
+These are four 8.2 meter telescopes. 
+And these telescopes, among other things, they're being used to study how the expansion of the universe is changing with time. 
+And the more you understand that, the better you would understand what this dark energy that the universe is made of is all about. 
+And one piece of engineering that I want to leave you with as regards this telescope is the mirror. 
+Each mirror, there are four of them, is made of a single piece of glass, a monolithic piece of high-tech ceramic, that has been ground down and polished to such accuracy that the only way to understand what that is is [to] imagine a city like Paris, with all its buildings and the Eiffel Tower, if you grind down Paris to that kind of accuracy, you would be left with bumps that are one millimeter high. 
+And that's the kind of polishing that these mirrors have endured. 
+An extraordinary set of telescopes. 
+Here's another view of the same. 
+The reason why you have to build these telescopes in places like the Atacama Desert is because of the high altitude desert. 
+The dry air is really good for telescopes, and also, the cloud cover is below the summit of these mountains so that the telescopes have about 300 days of clear skies. 
+Finally, I want to take you to Antarctica. 
+I want to spend most of my time on this part of the world. 
+This is cosmology's final frontier. 
+Some of the most amazing experiments, some of the most extreme experiments, are being done in Antarctica. 
+I was there to view something called a long-duration balloon flight, which basically takes telescopes and instruments all the way to the upper atmosphere, the upper stratosphere, 40 km up. 
+And that's where they do their experiments, and then the balloon, the payload, is brought down. 
+So this is us landing on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. 
+That's an American C-17 cargo plane that flew us from New Zealand to McMurdo in Antarctica. 
+And here we are about to board our bus. 
+And I don't know if you can read the lettering, but it says, "" Ivan the Terribus. "" And that's taking us to McMurdo. 
+And this is the scene that greets you in McMurdo. 
+And you barely might be able to make out this hut here. 
+This hut was built by Robert Falcon Scott and his men when they first came to Antarctica on their first expedition to go to the South Pole. 
+Because it's so cold, the entire contents of that hut is still as they left it, with the remnants of the last meal they cooked still there. 
+It's an extraordinary place. 
+This is McMurdo itself. About a thousand people work here in summer, and about 200 in winter when it's completely dark for six months. 
+I was here to see the launch of this particular type of instrument. 
+This is a cosmic ray experiment that has been launched all the way to the upper-stratosphere to an altitude of 40 km. 
+What I want you to imagine is this is two tons in weight. 
+So you're using a balloon to carry something that is two tons all the way to an altitude of 40 km. 
+And the engineers, the technicians, the physicists have all got to assemble on the Ross Ice Shelf, because Antarctica — I won't go into the reasons why — but it's one of the most favorable places for doing these balloon launches, except for the weather. 
+The weather, as you can imagine, this is summer, and you're standing on 200 ft of ice. 
+And there's a volcano behind, which has glaciers at the very top. 
+And what they have to do is they have to assemble the entire balloon — the fabric, parachute and everything — on the ice and then fill it up with helium. 
+And that process takes about two hours. 
+And the weather can change as they're putting together this whole assembly. 
+For instance, here they are laying down the balloon fabric behind, which is eventually going to be filled up with helium. 
+Those two trucks you see at the very end carry 12 tanks each of compressed helium. 
+Now, in case the weather changes before the launch, they have to actually pack everything back up into their boxes and take it out back to McMurdo Station. 
+And this particular balloon, because it has to launch two tons of weight, is an extremely huge balloon. 
+The fabric alone weighs two tons. 
+In order to minimize the weight, it's very thin, it's as thin as a sandwich wrapper. 
+And if they have to pack it back, they have to put it into boxes and stamp on it so that it fits into the box again — except, when they did it first, it would have been done in Texas. 
+Here, they can't do it with the kind shoes they're wearing, so they have to take their shoes off, get barefoot into the boxes, in this cold, and do that kind of work. 
+That's the kind of dedication these people have. 
+Here's the balloon being filled up with helium, and you can see it's a gorgeous sight. 
+Here's a scene that shows you the balloon and the payload end-to-end. 
+So the balloon is being filled up with helium on the left-hand side, and the fabric actually runs all the way to the middle where there's a piece of electronics and explosives being connected to a parachute, and then the parachute is then connected to the payload. 
+And remember, all this wiring is being done by people in extreme cold, in sub-zero temperatures. 
+They're wearing about 15 kg of clothing and stuff, but they have to take their gloves off in order to do that. 
+And I would like to share with you a launch. 
+(Video) Radio: Okay, release the balloon, release the balloon, release the balloon. 
+Anil Ananthaswamy: And I'll finally like to leave you with two images. 
+This is an observatory in the Himalayas, in Ladakh in India. 
+And the thing I want you to look at here is the telescope on the right-hand side. 
+And on the far left there is a 400 year-old Buddhist monastery. 
+This is a close-up of the Buddhist monastery. 
+And I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two enormous disciplines that humanity has. 
+One is exploring the cosmos on the outside, and the other one is exploring our interior being. 
+And both require silence of some sort. 
+And what struck me was every place that I went to to see these telescopes, the astronomers and cosmologists are in search of a certain kind of silence, whether it's silence from radio pollution or light pollution or whatever. 
+And it was very obvious that, if we destroy these silent places on Earth, we will be stuck on a planet without the ability to look outwards, because we will not be able to understand the signals that come from outer space. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+If you remember that first decade of the web, it was really a static place. 
+You could go online, you could look at pages, and they were put up either by organizations who had teams to do it or by individuals who were really tech-savvy for the time. 
+And with the rise of social media and social networks in the early 2000s, the web was completely changed to a place where now the vast majority of content we interact with is put up by average users, either in YouTube videos or blog posts or product reviews or social media postings. 
+And it's also become a much more interactive place, where people are interacting with others, they're commenting, they're sharing, they're not just reading. 
+So Facebook is not the only place you can do this, but it's the biggest, and it serves to illustrate the numbers. 
+Facebook has 1.2 billion users per month. 
+So half the Earth's Internet population is using Facebook. 
+They are a site, along with others, that has allowed people to create an online persona with very little technical skill, and people responded by putting huge amounts of personal data online. 
+So the result is that we have behavioral, preference, demographic data for hundreds of millions of people, which is unprecedented in history. 
+And as a computer scientist, what this means is that I've been able to build models that can predict all sorts of hidden attributes for all of you that you don't even know you're sharing information about. 
+As scientists, we use that to help the way people interact online, but there's less altruistic applications, and there's a problem in that users don't really understand these techniques and how they work, and even if they did, they don't have a lot of control over it. 
+So what I want to talk to you about today is some of these things that we're able to do, and then give us some ideas of how we might go forward to move some control back into the hands of users. 
+So this is Target, the company. 
+I didn't just put that logo on this poor, pregnant woman's belly. 
+You may have seen this anecdote that was printed in Forbes magazine where Target sent a flyer to this 15-year-old girl with advertisements and coupons for baby bottles and diapers and cribs two weeks before she told her parents that she was pregnant. 
+Yeah, the dad was really upset. 
+He said, "" How did Target figure out that this high school girl was pregnant before she told her parents? "" It turns out that they have the purchase history for hundreds of thousands of customers and they compute what they call a pregnancy score, which is not just whether or not a woman's pregnant, but what her due date is. 
+And they compute that not by looking at the obvious things, like, she's buying a crib or baby clothes, but things like, she bought more vitamins than she normally had, or she bought a handbag that's big enough to hold diapers. 
+And by themselves, those purchases don't seem like they might reveal a lot, but it's a pattern of behavior that, when you take it in the context of thousands of other people, starts to actually reveal some insights. 
+So that's the kind of thing that we do when we're predicting stuff about you on social media. 
+We're looking for little patterns of behavior that, when you detect them among millions of people, lets us find out all kinds of things. 
+So in my lab and with colleagues, we've developed mechanisms where we can quite accurately predict things like your political preference, your personality score, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, intelligence, along with things like how much you trust the people you know and how strong those relationships are. 
+We can do all of this really well. 
+And again, it doesn't come from what you might think of as obvious information. 
+So my favorite example is from this study that was published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies. 
+And they looked at just people's Facebook likes, so just the things you like on Facebook, and used that to predict all these attributes, along with some other ones. 
+And in their paper they listed the five likes that were most indicative of high intelligence. 
+And among those was liking a page for curly fries. (Laughter) Curly fries are delicious, but liking them does not necessarily mean that you're smarter than the average person. 
+So how is it that one of the strongest indicators of your intelligence is liking this page when the content is totally irrelevant to the attribute that's being predicted? 
+And it turns out that we have to look at a whole bunch of underlying theories to see why we're able to do this. 
+One of them is a sociological theory called homophily, which basically says people are friends with people like them. 
+So if you're smart, you tend to be friends with smart people, and if you're young, you tend to be friends with young people, and this is well established for hundreds of years. 
+We also know a lot about how information spreads through networks. 
+It turns out things like viral videos or Facebook likes or other information spreads in exactly the same way that diseases spread through social networks. 
+So this is something we've studied for a long time. 
+We have good models of it. 
+And so you can put those things together and start seeing why things like this happen. 
+So if I were to give you a hypothesis, it would be that a smart guy started this page, or maybe one of the first people who liked it would have scored high on that test. 
+And they liked it, and their friends saw it, and by homophily, we know that he probably had smart friends, and so it spread to them, and some of them liked it, and they had smart friends, and so it spread to them, and so it propagated through the network to a host of smart people, so that by the end, the action of liking the curly fries page is indicative of high intelligence, not because of the content, but because the actual action of liking reflects back the common attributes of other people who have done it. 
+So this is pretty complicated stuff, right? 
+It's a hard thing to sit down and explain to an average user, and even if you do, what can the average user do about it? 
+How do you know that you've liked something that indicates a trait for you that's totally irrelevant to the content of what you've liked? 
+There's a lot of power that users don't have to control how this data is used. 
+And I see that as a real problem going forward. 
+So I think there's a couple paths that we want to look at if we want to give users some control over how this data is used, because it's not always going to be used for their benefit. 
+An example I often give is that, if I ever get bored being a professor, I'm going to go start a company that predicts all of these attributes and things like how well you work in teams and if you're a drug user, if you're an alcoholic. 
+And I'm going to sell reports to H.R. companies and big businesses that want to hire you. 
+I could start that business tomorrow, and you would have absolutely no control over me using your data like that. 
+That seems to me to be a problem. 
+So one of the paths we can go down is the policy and law path. 
+And in some respects, I think that that would be most effective, but the problem is we'd actually have to do it. 
+Observing our political process in action makes me think it's highly unlikely that we're going to get a bunch of representatives to sit down, learn about this, and then enact sweeping changes to intellectual property law in the U.S. 
+so users control their data. 
+We could go the policy route, where social media companies say, you know what? You own your data. 
+You have total control over how it's used. 
+The problem is that the revenue models for most social media companies rely on sharing or exploiting users' data in some way. 
+It's sometimes said of Facebook that the users aren't the customer, they're the product. 
+And so how do you get a company to cede control of their main asset back to the users? 
+It's possible, but I don't think it's something that we're going to see change quickly. 
+So I think the other path that we can go down that's going to be more effective is one of more science. 
+It's doing science that allowed us to develop all these mechanisms for computing this personal data in the first place. 
+And it's actually very similar research that we'd have to do if we want to develop mechanisms that can say to a user, "Here's the risk of that action you just took." 
+By liking that Facebook page, or by sharing this piece of personal information, you've now improved my ability to predict whether or not you're using drugs or whether or not you get along well in the workplace. 
+And that, I think, can affect whether or not people want to share something, keep it private, or just keep it offline altogether. 
+We can also look at things like allowing people to encrypt data that they upload, so it's kind of invisible and worthless to sites like Facebook or third party services that access it, but that select users who the person who posted it want to see it have access to see it. 
+This is all super exciting research from an intellectual perspective, and so scientists are going to be willing to do it. 
+So that gives us an advantage over the law side. 
+One of the problems that people bring up when I talk about this is, they say, you know, if people start keeping all this data private, all those methods that you've been developing to predict their traits are going to fail. 
+And I say, absolutely, and for me, that's success, because as a scientist, my goal is not to infer information about users, it's to improve the way people interact online. 
+And sometimes that involves inferring things about them, but if users don't want me to use that data, I think they should have the right to do that. 
+I want users to be informed and consenting users of the tools that we develop. 
+And so I think encouraging this kind of science and supporting researchers who want to cede some of that control back to users and away from the social media companies means that going forward, as these tools evolve and advance, means that we're going to have an educated and empowered user base, and I think all of us can agree that that's a pretty ideal way to go forward. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to talk today about the pleasures of everyday life. 
+But I want to begin with a story of an unusual and terrible man. 
+This is Hermann Goering. 
+Goering was Hitler's second in command in World War II, his designated successor. 
+And like Hitler, Goering fancied himself a collector of art. 
+He went through Europe, through World War II, stealing, extorting and occasionally buying various paintings for his collection. 
+And what he really wanted was something by Vermeer. 
+Hitler had two of them, and he didn't have any. 
+So he finally found an art dealer, a Dutch art dealer named Han van Meegeren, who sold him a wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars. 
+And it was his favorite artwork ever. 
+World War II came to an end, and Goering was captured, tried at Nuremberg and ultimately sentenced to death. 
+Then the Allied forces went through his collections and found the paintings and went after the people who sold it to him. 
+And at some point the Dutch police came into Amsterdam and arrested Van Meegeren. 
+Van Meegeren was charged with the crime of treason, which is itself punishable by death. 
+Six weeks into his prison sentence, van Meegeren confessed. 
+But he didn't confess to treason. 
+He said, "" I did not sell a great masterpiece to that Nazi. 
+I painted it myself; I'm a forger. "" Now nobody believed him. 
+And he said, "" I'll prove it. 
+Bring me a canvas and some paint, and I will paint a Vermeer much better than I sold that disgusting Nazi. 
+I also need alcohol and morphine, because it's the only way I can work. "" (Laughter) So they brought him in. 
+He painted a beautiful Vermeer. 
+And then the charges of treason were dropped. 
+He had a lesser charge of forgery, got a year sentence and died a hero to the Dutch people. 
+There's a lot more to be said about van Meegeren, but I want to turn now to Goering, who's pictured here being interrogated at Nuremberg. 
+Now Goering was, by all accounts, a terrible man. 
+Even for a Nazi, he was a terrible man. 
+His American interrogators described him as an amicable psychopath. 
+But you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery. 
+According to his biographer, "" He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world. "" (Laughter) And he killed himself soon afterwards. 
+He had discovered after all that the painting he thought was this was actually that. 
+It looked the same, but it had a different origin, it was a different artwork. 
+It wasn't just him who was in for a shock. 
+Once van Meegeren was on trial, he couldn't stop talking. 
+And he boasted about all the great masterpieces that he himself had painted that were attributed to other artists. 
+In particular, "" The Supper at Emmaus "" which was viewed as Vermeer's finest masterpiece, his best work — people would come [from] all over the world to see it — was actually a forgery. 
+It was not that painting, but that painting. 
+And when that was discovered, it lost all its value and was taken away from the museum. 
+Why does this matter? 
+I'm a psychologists — why do origins matter so much? 
+Why do we respond so much to our knowledge of where something comes from? 
+Well there's an answer that many people would give. 
+Many sociologists like Veblen and Wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we're snobs, because we're focused on status. 
+Among other things, if you want to show off how rich you are, how powerful you are, it's always better to own an original than a forgery because there's always going to be fewer originals than forgeries. 
+I don't doubt that that plays some role, but what I want to convince you of today is that there's something else going on. I want to convince you 
+that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. 
+What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them. 
+Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is. 
+I want to suggest that this is true, not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things. 
+So I want to suggest that pleasure is deep — and that this isn't true just for higher level pleasures like art, but even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about hidden essences. 
+So take food. 
+Would you eat this? 
+Well, a good answer is, "" It depends. What is it? "" Some of you would eat it if it's pork, but not beef. 
+Some of you would eat it if it's beef, but not pork. 
+Few of you would eat it if it's a rat or a human. 
+Some of you would eat it only if it's a strangely colored piece of tofu. 
+That's not so surprising. 
+But what's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically on what you think you're eating. 
+So one demonstration of this was done with young children. 
+How do you make children not just be more likely to eat carrots and drink milk, but to get more pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk — to think they taste better? 
+It's simple, you tell them they're from McDonald's. 
+They believe McDonald's food is tastier, and it leads them to experience it as tastier. 
+How do you get adults to really enjoy wine? 
+It's very simple: pour it from an expensive bottle. 
+There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds of studies showing that if you believe you're drinking the expensive stuff, it tastes better to you. 
+This was recently done with a neuroscientific twist. 
+They get people into a fMRI scanner, and while they're lying there, through a tube, they get to sip wine. 
+In front of them on a screen is information about the wine. 
+Everybody, of course, drinks exactly the same wine. 
+But if you believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree. 
+It's not just that you say it's more pleasurable, you say you like it more, you really experience it in a different way. 
+Or take sex. 
+These are stimuli I've used in some of my studies. 
+And if you simply show people these pictures, they'll say these are fairly attractive people. 
+But how attractive you find them, how sexually or romantically moved you are by them, rests critically on who you think you're looking at. 
+You probably think the picture on the left is male, the one on the right is female. 
+If that belief turns out to be mistaken, it will make a difference. 
+(Laughter) It will make a difference if they turn out to be much younger or much older than you think they are. 
+It will make a difference if you were to discover that the person you're looking at with lust is actually a disguised version of your son or daughter, your mother or father. 
+Knowing somebody's your kin typically kills the libido. 
+Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. 
+If you like somebody, they look better to you. 
+This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do. 
+(Laughter) A particularly dramatic example of this comes from a neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome. 
+So Capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a specific delusion. 
+Sufferers of Capgras syndrome believe that the people they love most in the world have been replaced by perfect duplicates. 
+Now often, a result of Capgras syndrome is tragic. 
+People have murdered those that they loved, believing that they were murdering an imposter. 
+But there's at least one case where Capgras syndrome had a happy ending. 
+This was recorded in 1931. 
+"" Research described a woman with Capgras syndrome who complained about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate lover. "" But that was before she got Capgras syndrome. 
+After she got it, "" She was happy to report that she has discovered that he possessed a double who was rich, virile, handsome and aristocratic. "" Of course, it was the same man, but she was seeing him in different ways. 
+As a third example, consider consumer products. 
+So one reason why you might like something is its utility. 
+You can put shoes on your feet; you can play golf with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum doesn't do anything at all for you. 
+But each of these three objects has value above and beyond what it can do for you based on its history. 
+The golf clubs were owned by John F. Kennedy and sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at auction. 
+The bubble gum was chewed up by pop star Britney Spears and sold for several hundreds of dollars. 
+And in fact, there's a thriving market in the partially eaten food of beloved people. 
+(Laughter) The shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all. 
+According to an unconfirmed report, a Saudi millionaire offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes. 
+They were the ones thrown at George Bush at an Iraqi press conference several years ago. 
+(Applause) Now this attraction to objects doesn't just work for celebrity objects. 
+Each one of us, most people, have something in our life that's literally irreplaceable, in that it has value because of its history — maybe your wedding ring, maybe your child's baby shoes — so that if it was lost, you couldn't get it back. 
+You could get something that looked like it or felt like it, but you couldn't get the same object back. 
+With my colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck, we've looked to see what sort of factors, what sort of history, matters for the objects that people like. 
+So in one of our experiments, we asked people to name a famous person who they adored, a living person they adored. 
+So one answer was George Clooney. 
+Then we asked them, "How much would you pay for George Clooney's sweater?" 
+And the answer is a fair amount — more than you would pay for a brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody who you didn't adore. 
+Then we asked other groups of subjects — we gave them different restrictions and different conditions. 
+So for instance, we told some people, "" Look, you can buy the sweater, but you can't tell anybody you own it, and you can't resell it. "" That drops the value of it, suggesting that that's one reason why we like it. 
+But what really causes an effect is you tell people, "" Look, you could resell it, you could boast about it, but before it gets to you, it's thoroughly washed. "" That causes a huge drop in the value. 
+As my wife put it, "" You've washed away the Clooney cooties. "" (Laughter) So let's go back to art. 
+I would love a Chagall. I love the work of Chagall. 
+If people want to get me something at the end of the conference, you could buy me a Chagall. 
+But I don't want a duplicate, even if I can't tell the difference. 
+That's not because, or it's not simply because, I'm a snob and want to boast about having an original. 
+Rather, it's because I want something that has a specific history. 
+In the case of artwork, the history is special indeed. 
+The philosopher Denis Dutton in his wonderful book "" The Art Instinct "" makes the case that, "" The value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation. "" And that could explain the difference between an original and a forgery. 
+They may look alike, but they have a different history. 
+The original is typically the product of a creative act, the forgery isn't. 
+I think this approach can explain differences in people's taste in art. 
+This is a work by Jackson Pollock. 
+Who here likes the work of Jackson Pollock? 
+Okay. Who here, it does nothing for them? 
+They just don't like it. 
+I'm not going to make a claim about who's right, but I will make an empirical claim about people's intuitions, which is that, if you like the work of Jackson Pollock, you'll tend more so than the people who don't like it to believe that these works are difficult to create, that they require a lot of time and energy and creative energy. 
+I use Jackson Pollock on purpose as an example because there's a young American artist who paints very much in the style of Jackson Pollock, and her work was worth many tens of thousands of dollars — in large part because she's a very young artist. 
+This is Marla Olmstead who did most of her work when she was three years old. 
+The interesting thing about Marla Olmstead is her family made the mistake of inviting the television program 60 Minutes II into their house to film her painting. 
+And they then reported that her father was coaching her. 
+When this came out on television, the value of her art dropped to nothing. 
+It was the same art, physically, but the history had changed. 
+I've been focusing now on the visual arts, but I want to give two examples from music. 
+This is Joshua Bell, a very famous violinist. 
+And the Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment. 
+The question is: How much would people like Joshua Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, if they didn't know they were listening to Joshua Bell? 
+So he got Joshua Bell to take his million dollar violin down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make. 
+And here's a brief clip of this. 
+(Violin music) After being there for three-quarters of an hour, he made 32 dollars. 
+Not bad. It's also not good. 
+Apparently to really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell. 
+He actually made 20 dollars more than that, but he didn't count it. 
+Because this woman comes up — you see at the end of the video — she comes up. 
+She had heard him at the Library of Congress a few weeks before at this extravagant black-tie affair. 
+So she's stunned that he's standing in a subway station. 
+So she's struck with pity. 
+She reaches into her purse and hands him a 20. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) The second example from music is from John Cage's modernist composition, "4 '33". " 
+As many of you know, this is the composition where the pianist sits at a bench, opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds — that period of silence. 
+And people have different views on this. 
+But what I want to point out is you can buy this from iTunes. 
+(Laughter) For a dollar 99, you can listen to that silence, which is different than other forms of silence. (Laughter) 
+Now I've been talking so far about pleasure, but what I want to suggest is that everything I've said applies as well to pain. 
+And how you think about what you're experiencing, your beliefs about the essence of it, affect how it hurts. 
+One lovely experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan Wegner. 
+What they did was they hooked up Harvard undergraduates to an electric shock machine. 
+And they gave them a series of painful electric shocks. 
+So it was a series of five painful shocks. 
+Half of them are told that they're being given the shocks by somebody in another room, but the person in the other room doesn't know they're giving them shocks. 
+There's no malevolence, they're just pressing a button. 
+The first shock is recorded as very painful. 
+The second shock feels less painful, because you get a bit used to it. 
+The third drops, the fourth, the fifth. 
+The pain gets less. 
+In the other condition, they're told that the person in the next room is shocking them on purpose — knows they're shocking them. 
+The first shock hurts like hell. 
+The second shock hurts just as much, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. 
+It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose. 
+The most extreme example of this is that in some cases, pain under the right circumstances can transform into pleasure. 
+Humans have this extraordinarily interesting property that will often seek out low-level doses of pain in controlled circumstances and take pleasure from it — as in the eating of hot chili peppers and roller coaster rides. 
+The point was nicely summarized by the poet John Milton who wrote, "" The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. "" And I'll end with that. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This man is wearing what we call a bee beard. (Laughter) A beard full of bees. 
+Now, this is what many of you might picture when you think about honeybees, maybe insects, or maybe anything that has more legs than two. 
+And let me start by telling you, I gotcha. 
+I understand that. But, there are many things to know, and I want you to open your minds here, keep them open, and change your perspective about honeybees. 
+Notice that this man is not getting stung. 
+He probably has a queen bee tied to his chin, and the other bees are attracted to it. 
+So this really demonstrates our relationship with honeybees, and that goes deep back for thousands of years. 
+We're very co-evolved, because we depend on bees for pollination and, even more recently, as an economic commodity. 
+Many of you may have heard that honeybees are disappearing, not just dying, but they're gone. 
+We don't even find dead bodies. 
+This is called colony collapse disorder, and it's bizarre. Researchers around the globe still do not know what's causing it, but what we do know is that, with the declining numbers of bees, the costs of over 130 fruit and vegetable crops that we rely on for food is going up in price. 
+So honeybees are important for their role in the economy as well as in agriculture. 
+Here you can see some pictures of what are called green roofs, or urban agriculture. 
+We're familiar with the image on the left that shows a local neighborhood garden in the South End. 
+That's where I call home. I have a beehive in the backyard. 
+And perhaps a green roof in the future, when we're further utilizing urban areas, where there are stacks of garden spaces. 
+Check out this image above the orange line in Boston. 
+Try to spot the beehive. It's there. 
+It's on the rooftop, right on the corner there, and it's been there for a couple of years now. 
+The way that urban beekeeping currently operates is that the beehives are quite hidden, and it's not because they need to be. 
+It's just because people are uncomfortable with the idea, and that's why I want you today to try to think about this, think about the benefits of bees in cities and why they really are a terrific thing. 
+Let me give you a brief rundown on how pollination works. 
+So we know flowers, we know fruits and vegetables, even some alfalfa in hay that the livestock for the meats that we eat, rely on pollinators, but you've got male and female parts to a plant here, and basically pollinators are attracted to plants for their nectar, and in the process, a bee will visit some flowers and pick up some pollen, or that male kind of sperm counterpart, along the way, and then travel to different flowers, and eventually an apple, in this case, will be produced. 
+You can see the orientation. The stem is down. 
+The blossom end has fallen off by the time we eat it, but that's a basic overview of how pollination works. 
+And let's think about urban living, not today, and not in the past, but what about in a hundred years? 
+What's it gonna look like? We have huge grand challenges these days of habitat loss. We have more and more people, billions of people, in 100 years, God knows how many people, and how little space there will be to fit all of them, so we need to change the way that we see cities, and looking at this picture on the left of New York City today, you can see how gray and brown it is. 
+We have tar paper on the rooftops that bounces heat back into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change, no doubt. 
+What about in 100 years, if we have green rooftops everywhere, and gardening, and we create our own crops right in the cities? We save on the costs of transportation, we save on a healthier diet, and we also educate and create new jobs locally. 
+We need bees for the future of our cities and urban living. 
+Here's some data that we collected through our company with Best Bees, where we deliver, install and manage honeybee hives for anybody who wants them, in the city, in the countryside, and we introduce honeybees, and the idea of beekeeping in your own backyard or rooftop or fire escape, for even that matter, and seeing how simple it is and how possible it is. 
+There's a counterintuitive trend that we noticed in these numbers. So let's look at the first metric here, overwintering survival. 
+Now this has been a huge problem for many years, basically since the late 1980s, when the varroa mite came and brought many different viruses, bacteria and fungal diseases with it. 
+Overwintering success is hard, and that's when most of the colonies are lost, and we found that in the cities, bees are surviving better than they are in the country. 
+A bit counterintuitive, right? 
+We think, oh, bees, countryside, agriculture, but that's not what the bees are showing. 
+The bees like it in the city. (Laughter) Furthermore, they also produce more honey. 
+The urban honey is delicious. 
+The bees in Boston on the rooftop of the Seaport Hotel, where we have hundreds of thousands of bees flying overheard right now that I'm sure none of you noticed when we walked by, are going to all of the local community gardens and making delicious, healthy honey that just tastes like the flowers in our city. 
+So the yield for urban hives, in terms of honey production, is higher as well as the overwintering survival, compared to rural areas. 
+Again, a bit counterintuitive. 
+And looking back historically at the timeline of honeybee health, we can go back to the year 950 and see that there was also a great mortality of bees in Ireland. 
+So the problems of bees today isn't necessarily something new. It has been happening since over a thousand years ago, but what we don't really notice are these problems in cities. 
+So one thing I want to encourage you to think about is the idea of what an urban island is. 
+You think in the city maybe the temperature's warmer. 
+Why are bees doing better in the city? 
+This is a big question now to help us understand why they should be in the city. 
+Perhaps there's more pollen in the city. 
+With the trains coming in to urban hubs, they can carry pollen with them, very light pollen, and it's just a big supermarket in the city. 
+A lot of linden trees live along the railroad tracks. 
+Perhaps there are fewer pesticides in the cities than there are in [rural] areas. 
+Perhaps there are other things that we're just not thinking about yet, but that's one idea to think about, urban islands. 
+And colony collapse disorder is not the only thing affecting honeybees. Honeybees are dying, and it's a huge, huge grand challenge of our time. 
+What you can see up here is a map of the world, and we're tracking the spread of this varroa mite. 
+Now, the varroa mite is what changed the game in beekeeping, and you can see, at the top right, the years are changing, we're coming up to modern times, and you can see the spread of the varroa mite from the early 1900s through now. 
+It's 1968, and we're pretty much covering Asia. 
+1971, we saw it spread to Europe and South America, and then, when we get to the 1980s, and specifically to 1987, the varroa mite finally came to North America and to the United States, and that is when the game changed for honeybees in the United States. 
+Many of us will remember our childhood growing up, maybe you got stung by a bee, you saw bees on flowers. 
+Think of the kids today. Their childhood's a bit different. 
+They don't experience this. 
+The bees just aren't around anymore. 
+So we need bees and they're disappearing and it's a big problem. 
+What can we do here? 
+So, what I do is honeybee research. 
+I got my Ph.D. studying honeybee health. 
+I started in 2005 studying honeybees. 
+In 2006, honeybees started disappearing, so suddenly, like, this little nerd kid going to school working with bugs — (Laughter) — became very relevant in the world. 
+And it worked out that way. 
+So my research focuses on ways to make bees healthier. 
+I don't research what's killing the bees, per se. 
+I'm not one of the many researchers around the world who's looking at the effects of pesticides or diseases or habitat loss and poor nutrition on bees. 
+We're looking at ways to make bees healthier through vaccines, through yogurt, like probiotics, and other types of therapies in ways that can be fed orally to bees, and this process is so easy, even a 7-year-old can do it. 
+You just mix up some pollen, sugar and water, and whatever active ingredient you want to put in, and you just give it right to the bees. No chemicals involved, just immune boosters. 
+Humans think about our own health in a prospective way. 
+We exercise, we eat healthy, we take vitamins. 
+Why don't we think about honeybees in that same type of way? 
+Bring them to areas where they're thriving and try to make them healthier before they get sick. 
+I spent many years in grad school trying to poke bees and do vaccines with needles. (Laughter) Like, years, years at the bench, "" Oh my gosh, it's 3 a.m. 
+and I'm still pricking bees. "" (Laughter) And then one day I said, "" Why don't we just do an oral vaccine? "" It's like, "" Ugh, "" so that's what we do. (Laughter) I'd love to share with you some images of urban beehives, because they can be anything. 
+I mean, really open your mind with this. 
+You can paint a hive to match your home. 
+You can hide a hive inside your home. 
+These are three hives on the rooftop of the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, and they're beautiful here. I mean, we matched the new color of the inside of their rooms to do some type of a stained wood with blue for their sheets, and these bees are terrific, and they also will use herbs that are growing in the garden. 
+That's what the chefs go to to use for their cooking, and the honey — they do live events — they'll use that honey at their bars. 
+Honey is a great nutritional substitute for regular sugar because there are different types of sugars in there. 
+We also have a classroom hives project, where — this is a nonprofit venture — we're spreading the word around the world for how honeybee hives can be taken into the classroom or into the museum setting, behind glass, and used as an educational tool. 
+This hive that you see here has been in Fenway High School for many years now. 
+The bees fly right into the outfield of Fenway Park. 
+Nobody notices it. If you're not a flower, these bees do not care about you. (Laughter) They don't. They don't. They'll say, "" S'cuse me, flying around. "" (Laughter) Some other images here in telling a part of the story that really made urban beekeeping terrific is in New York City, beekeeping was illegal until 2010. 
+That's a big problem, because what's going to pollinate all of the gardens and the produce locally? Hands? 
+I mean, locally in Boston, there is a terrific company called Green City Growers, and they are going and pollinating their squash crops by hand with Q-Tips, and if they miss that three day window, there's no fruit. 
+Their clients aren't happy, and people go hungry. 
+So this is important. 
+We have also some images of honey from Brooklyn. 
+Now, this was a mystery in the New York Times where the honey was very red, and the New York State forensics department came in and they actually did some science to match the red dye with that found in a maraschino cherry factory down the street. (Laughter) So you can tailor your honey to taste however you want by planting bee-friendly flowers. 
+Paris has been a terrific model for urban beekeeping. 
+They've had hives on the rooftop of their opera house for many years now, and that's what really got people started, thinking, "Wow, we can do this, and we should do this." 
+Also in London, and in Europe across the board, they're very advanced in their use of green rooftops and integrating beehives, and I'll show you an ending note here. 
+I would like to encourage you to open your mind. 
+What can you do to save the bees or to help them or to think of sustainable cities in the future? 
+Well, really, just change your perspective. 
+Try to understand that bees are very important. 
+A bee isn't going to sting you if you see it. 
+The bee dies. Honeybees die when they sting, so they don't want to do it either. (Laughter) It's nothing to panic about. They're all over the city. 
+You could even get your own hive if you want. 
+There are great resources available, and there are even companies that will help get you set up and mentor you and it's important for our educational system in the world for students to learn about agriculture worldwide such as this little girl, who, again, is not even getting stung. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+What do you do when you have a headache? 
+You swallow an aspirin. 
+But for this pill to get to your head, where the pain is, it goes through your stomach, intestines and various other organs first. 
+Swallowing pills is the most effective and painless way of delivering any medication in the body. 
+The downside, though, is that swallowing any medication leads to its dilution. 
+And this is a big problem, particularly in HIV patients. 
+When they take their anti-HIV drugs, these drugs are good for lowering the virus in the blood, and increasing the CD4 cell counts. 
+But they are also notorious for their adverse side effects, but mostly bad, because they get diluted by the time they get to the blood, and worse, by the time they get to the sites where it matters most: within the HIV viral reservoirs. 
+These areas in the body — such as the lymph nodes, the nervous system, as well as the lungs — where the virus is sleeping, and will not readily get delivered in the blood of patients that are under consistent anti-HIV drugs therapy. 
+However, upon discontinuation of therapy, the virus can awake and infect new cells in the blood. 
+Now, all this is a big problem in treating HIV with the current drug treatment, which is a life-long treatment that must be swallowed by patients. 
+One day, I sat and thought, "" Can we deliver anti-HIV directly within its reservoir sites, without the risk of drug dilution? "" As a laser scientist, the answer was just before my eyes: Lasers, of course. 
+If they can be used for dentistry, for diabetic wound-healing and surgery, they can be used for anything imaginable, including transporting drugs into cells. 
+As a matter of fact, we are currently using laser pulses to poke or drill extremely tiny holes, which open and close almost immediately in HIV-infected cells, in order to deliver drugs within them. 
+"" How is that possible? "" you may ask. 
+Well, we shine a very powerful but super-tiny laser beam onto the membrane of HIV-infected cells while these cells are immersed in liquid containing the drug. 
+The laser pierces the cell, while the cell swallows the drug in a matter of microseconds. 
+Before you even know it, the induced hole becomes immediately repaired. 
+Now, we are currently testing this technology in test tubes or in Petri dishes, but the goal is to get this technology in the human body, apply it in the human body. 
+"" How is that possible? "" you may ask. 
+Well, the answer is: through a three-headed device. 
+Using the first head, which is our laser, we will make an incision in the site of infection. 
+Using the second head, which is a camera, we meander to the site of infection. 
+Finally, using a third head, which is a drug-spreading sprinkler, we deliver the drugs directly at the site of infection, while the laser is again used to poke those cells open. 
+Well, this might not seem like much right now. 
+But one day, if successful, this technology can lead to complete eradication of HIV in the body. 
+Yes. A cure for HIV. 
+This is every HIV researcher's dream — in our case, a cure lead by lasers. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi there. 
+I'm going to be talking a little bit about music, machines and life. 
+Or, more specifically, what we learned from the creation of a very large and complicated machine for a music video. 
+Some of you may recognize this image. 
+This is the opening frame of the video that we created. 
+We'll be showing the video at the end, but before we do, I want to talk a little bit about what it is that they wanted. 
+Now, when we first started talking to OK Go — the name of the song is "" This Too Shall Pass "" — we were really excited because they expressed interest in building a machine that they could dance with. 
+And we were very excited about this because, of course, they have a history of dancing with machines. 
+They're responsible for this video, "" Here It Goes Again. "" 50-million-plus views on YouTube. 
+Four guys dancing on treadmills, no cuts, just a static camera. 
+A fantastically viral and wonderful video. 
+So we were really excited about working with them. 
+And we sort of started talking about what it is that they wanted. 
+And they explained that they wanted kind of a Rube Goldberg machine. 
+Now, for those of you who don't know, a Rube Goldberg machine is a complicated contraption, an incredibly over-engineered piece of machinery that accomplishes a relatively simple task. 
+So we were excited by this idea, and we started talking about exactly what it would look like. 
+And we came up with some parameters, because, you know, building a Rube Goldberg machine has limitations, but it also is pretty wide open. 
+And we wanted to make sure that we did something that would work for a music video. 
+So we came up with a list of requirements, the "" 10 commandments, "" and they were, in order of ascending difficulty: The first is "" No magic. "" Everything that happened on screen had to be very easily understood by a typical viewer. 
+The rule of thumb was that, if my mother couldn't understand it, then we couldn't use it in the video. 
+They wanted band integration, that is, the machine acting upon the band members, specifically not the other way around. 
+They wanted the machine action to follow the song feeling. 
+So as the song picks up emotion, so should the machine get grander in its process. 
+They wanted us to make use of the space. 
+So we have this 10,000-square-foot warehouse we were using, divided between two floors. 
+It included an exterior loading dock. 
+We used all of that, including a giant hole in the floor that we actually descended the camera and cameraman through. 
+They wanted it messy, and we were happy to oblige. 
+The machine itself would start the music. 
+So the machine would get started, it would travel some distance, reacting along the way, hit play on an iPod or a tape deck or something that would start playback. 
+And the machine would maintain synchronization throughout. 
+And speaking of synchronization, they wanted it to sync to the rhythm and to hit specific beats along the way. 
+Okay. (Laughter) They wanted it to end precisely on time. 
+Okay, so now the start to finish timing has to be perfect. 
+And they wanted the music to drop out at a certain point in the video and actual live audio from the machine to play part of the song. 
+And as if that wasn't enough, all of these incredibly complicating things, right, they wanted it in one shot. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Okay. 
+So, just some statistics about what we went through in the process. 
+The machine itself has 89 distinct interactions. 
+It took us 85 takes to get it on film to our satisfaction. 
+Of those 85 takes, only three actually successfully completed their run. 
+We destroyed two pianos and 10 televisions in the process. 
+We went to Home Depot well over a hundred times. 
+(Laughter) And we lost one high-heeled shoe when one of our engineers, Heather Knight, left her high-heeled shoe — after a nice dinner, and returned back to the build — and left it in a pile of stuff. 
+And another engineer thought, "" Well, that would be a really good thing to use "" and ended up using it as a really nice trigger. 
+And it's actually in the machine. 
+So what did we learn from all of this? 
+Well, having completed this, we have the opportunity to step back and reflect on some of the things. 
+And we learned that small stuff stinks. 
+Little balls in wooden tracks are really susceptible to humidity and temperature and a little bit of dust, and they fall out of the tracks, the exact angles makes it hard to get right. 
+And yet, a bowling ball will always follow the same path. 
+It doesn't matter what temperature it is, doesn't matter what's in its way; it will pretty much get where it needs to go. 
+But as much as the small stuff stinks, we needed somewhere to start, so that we would have somewhere to go. 
+And so you have to start with it. You have to focus on it. 
+Small stuff stinks, but, of course, it's essential, right? 
+What else? Planning is incredibly important. 
+(Laughter) You know, we spent a lot of time ideating and even building some of these things. 
+It's been said that, "" No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. "" I think our enemy was physics — (Laughter) and she's a cruel mistress. 
+Often, we had to pull things out as a result because of timing or aesthetics or whatever. 
+And so while planning is important, so is flexibility. 
+These are all things that ended up not making it into the final machine. 
+So also, put reliable stuff last, the stuff that's going to run every time. 
+Again, small to large is relevant here. 
+The little Lego car in the beginning of the video references the big, real car near the end of the video. 
+The big, real car works every time; there's no problem about it. 
+The little one had a tendency to try to run off the track and that's a problem. 
+But you don't want to have to reset the whole machine because the Lego car at the end doesn't work, right. 
+So you put that up front so that, if it fails, at least you know you don't have to reset the whole thing. 
+Life can be messy. 
+There were incredibly difficult moments in the building of this thing. 
+Months were spent in this tiny, cold warehouse. 
+And the wonderful elation that we had when we finally completed it. 
+So it's important to remember that whether it's good or it's bad, "This Too Shall Pass." 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) And now to introduce their music video, we have OK Go. 
+OK Go: An introduction. Hello TEDxUSC. 
+We are OK Go. 
+What are we doing? Oh, just hanging out with our Grammy. What what! 
+It think we can do better than this. Hello TEDxUSC. 
+We are OK Go. Have you read the "" Natural Curiosity Cabinet? "" I mean, "" Curiosity "" — excuse me. 
+Let me start again. 
+We need some more ridiculous things besides "" The Cabinet of Natural Curiosities. "" Tim's sundial hat. 
+Have you seen the new work they've done to the Waltz Towers? 
+Sorry, start again. 
+(Barking) Dogs. 
+Hello, TEDxUSC. We are OK Go, and this our new video, "" This Too Shall Pass. "" [unclear] Kay, we can still do one better I think, yeah. 
+That one's pretty good. It's getting better. 
+(Music) ♫ You know you can't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ And you can't keep dragging that dead weight around ♫ ♫ If there ain't all that much to lug around ♫ ♫ Better run like hell when you hit the ground ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ You can't stop these kids from dancing ♫ ♫ Why would you want to? ♫ ♫ Especially when you're already getting yours ♫ ♫ Cuz if your mind don't move and your knees don't bend ♫ ♫ Well don't go blaming the kids again ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ 
+♫ Let it go ♫ ♫ This too shall pass ♫ ♫ Let it go ♫ ♫ This too shall pass ♫ ♫ You know you can't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ No, you can't keep letting it get you down ♫ ♫ Let it go ♫ ♫ This too shall pass ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ ♫ When the morning comes ♫ 
+(Cheering) 
+
+(Applause) (Music) (Applause) Angella Ahn: Thank you. (Applause) 
+Thank you so much. 
+We are so honored to be here at TEDWomen, sharing our music with you. 
+What an exciting and inspiring event. 
+What you just heard is "" Skylife "" by David Balakrishnan. 
+We want to play you one more selection. 
+It's by Astor Piazzolla, an Argentine composer. 
+And we talk about different ideas — he had this idea that he thought music should be from the heart. 
+This was in the middle of the 20th century when music from the heart, beautiful music, wasn't the most popular thing in the classical music world. 
+It was more atonal and twelve-tone. 
+And he insisted on beautiful music. 
+So this is "" Oblivion "" by Astor Piazzolla. 
+Thank you. 
+(Music) (Applause) 
+
+When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. 
+I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. 
+I gave out homework assignments. 
+What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. 
+After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. 
+But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? 
+I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? 
+We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? 
+Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. 
+I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. 
+Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. 
+It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. 
+To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. 
+Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "" How do I build grit in kids? 
+How do I keep them motivated for the long run? "" The honest answer is, I don't know. 
+So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "" growth mindset. "" This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. 
+Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. 
+But we need more. 
+We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. 
+
+(Rainforest noises) In the summer of 2011, as a tourist, I visited the rainforests of Borneo for the very first time, and as you might imagine, it was the overwhelming sounds of the forest that struck me the most. 
+There's this constant cacophony of noise. 
+Some things actually do stick out. 
+For example, this here is a big bird, a rhinoceros hornbill. 
+This buzzing is a cicada. 
+This is a family of gibbons. 
+The place where this was recorded was in fact a gibbon reserve, which is why you can hear so many of them, but in fact the most important noise that was coming out of the forest that time was one that I didn't notice, and in fact nobody there had actually noticed it. 
+So, as I said, this was a gibbon reserve. 
+They spend most of their time rehabilitating gibbons, but they also have to spend a lot of their time protecting their area from illegal logging that takes place on the side. 
+And so if we take the sound of the forest and we actually turn down the gibbons, the insects, and the rest, in the background, the entire time, in recordings you heard, was the sound of a chainsaw at great distance. 
+They had three full-time guards who were posted around this sanctuary whose job was in fact to guard against illegal logging, and one day, we went walking, again as tourists, out into the forest, and within five minutes' walk, we stumbled upon somebody who was just sawing a tree down, five minutes' walk, a few hundred meters from the ranger station. 
+They hadn't been able to hear the chainsaws, because as you heard, the forest is very, very loud. 
+It struck me as quite unacceptable that in this modern time, just a few hundred meters away from a ranger station in a sanctuary, that in fact nobody could hear it when someone who has a chainsaw gets fired up. 
+It sounds impossible, but in fact, it was quite true. 
+So how do we stop illegal logging? 
+It's really tempting, as an engineer, always to come up with a high-tech, super-crazy high-tech solution, but in fact, you're in the rainforest. 
+It has to be simple, it has to be scalable, and so what we also noticed while were there was that everything we needed was already there. 
+We could build a system that would allow us to stop this using what's already there. 
+Who was there? What was already in the forest? 
+Well, we had people. 
+We had this group there that was dedicated, three full-time guards, that was dedicated to go and stop it, but they just needed to know what was happening out in the forest. 
+The real surprise, this is the big one, was that there was connectivity out in the forest. 
+There was cell phone service way out in the middle of nowhere. 
+We're talking hundreds of kilometers from the nearest road, there's certainly no electricity, but they had very good cell phone service, these people in the towns were on Facebook all the time, they're surfing the web on their phones, and this sort of got me thinking that in fact it would be possible to use the sounds of the forest, pick up the sounds of chainsaws programmatically, because people can't hear them, and send an alert. 
+But you have to have a device to go up in the trees. 
+So if we can use some device to listen to the sounds of the forest, connect to the cell phone network that's there, and send an alert to people on the ground, perhaps we could have a solution to this issue for them. 
+But let's take a moment to talk about saving the rainforest, because it's something that we've definitely all heard about forever. 
+People in my generation have heard about saving the rainforest since we were kids, and it seems that the message has never changed: We've got to save the rainforest, it's super urgent, this many football fields have been destroyed yesterday. 
+and yet here we are today, about half of the rainforest remains, and we have potentially more urgent problems like climate change. 
+But in fact, this is the little-known fact that I didn't realize at the time: Deforestation accounts for more greenhouse gas than all of the world's planes, trains, cars, trucks and ships combined. 
+It's the second highest contributor to climate change. 
+Also, according to Interpol, as much as 90 percent of the logging that takes place in the rainforest is illegal logging, like the illegal logging that we saw. 
+So if we can help people in the forest enforce the rules that are there, then in fact we could eat heavily into this 17 percent and potentially have a major impact in the short term. 
+It might just be the cheapest, fastest way to fight climate change. 
+And so here's the system that we imagine. 
+It looks super high tech. 
+The moment a sound of a chainsaw is heard in the forest, the device picks up the sound of the chainsaw, it sends an alert through the standard GSM network that's already there to a ranger in the field who can in fact show up in real time and stop the logging. 
+It's not about seeing a tree from a satellite in an area that's been clear cut, it's about real-time intervention. 
+So I said it was the cheapest and fastest way to do it, but in fact, actually, as you saw, they weren't able to do it, so it may not be so cheap and fast. 
+But if the devices in the trees were actually cell phones, it could be pretty cheap. 
+Cell phones are thrown away by the hundreds of millions every year, hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone, not counting the rest of the world, which of course we should do, but in fact, cell phones are great. 
+They're full of sensors. 
+They can listen to the sounds of the forest. 
+We do have to protect them. 
+We have to put them in this box that you see here, and we do have to power them. 
+Powering them is one of the greater engineering challenges that we had to deal with, because powering a cell phone under a tree canopy, any sort of solar power under a tree canopy, was an as-yet-unsolved problem, and that's this unique solar panel design that you see here, which in fact is built also from recycled byproducts of an industrial process. 
+These are strips that are cut down. 
+So this is me putting it all together in my parents' garage, actually. 
+Thanks very much to them for allowing me to do that. 
+As you can see, this is a device up in a tree. 
+What you can see from here, perhaps, is that they are pretty well obscured up in the tree canopy at a distance. 
+That's important, because although they are able to hear chainsaw noises up to a kilometer in the distance, allowing them to cover about three square kilometers, if someone were to take them, it would make the area unprotected. 
+So does it actually work? 
+Well, to test it, we took it back to Indonesia, not the same place, but another place, to another gibbon reserve that was threatened daily by illegal logging. 
+On the very second day, it picked up illegal chainsaw noises. 
+We were able to get a real-time alert. 
+I got an email on my phone. 
+All these guys are smoking cigarettes, and then I get an email, and they all quiet down, and in fact you can hear the chainsaw really, really faint in the background, but no one had noticed it until that moment. 
+And so then we took off to actually stop these loggers. 
+I was pretty nervous. 
+This is the moment where we've actually arrived close to where the loggers are. 
+This is the moment where you can see where I'm actually regretting perhaps the entire endeavor. 
+But he went, so I had to go, walking up, and in fact, he made it over the hill, and interrupted the loggers in the act. 
+So — Thank you. (Applause) Word of this spread, possibly because we told a lot of people, and in fact, then some really amazing stuff started to happen. 
+People from around the world started to send us emails, phone calls. 
+What we saw was that people throughout Asia, people throughout Africa, people throughout South America, they told us that they could use it too, and what's most important, what we'd found that we thought might be exceptional, in the forest there was pretty good cell phone service. 
+That was not exceptional, we were told, and that particularly is on the periphery of the forests that are most under threat. 
+And then something really amazing happened, which was that people started sending us their own old cell phones. 
+So in fact what we have now is a system where we can use people on the ground, people who are already there, who can both improve and use the existing connectivity, and we're using old cell phones that are being sent to us by people from around the world that want their phones to be doing something else in their afterlife, so to speak. 
+And if the rest of the device can be completely recycled, then we believe it's an entirely upcycled device. 
+So again, this didn't come because of any sort of high-tech solution. 
+It just came from using what's already there, and I'm thoroughly convinced that if it's not phones, that there's always going to be enough there that you can build similar solutions that can be very effective in new contexts. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+As an artist, connection is very important to me. 
+Through my work I'm trying to articulate that humans are not separate from nature and that everything is interconnected. 
+I first went to Antarctica almost 10 years ago, where I saw my first icebergs. 
+I was in awe. 
+My heart beat fast, my head was dizzy, trying to comprehend what it was that stood in front of me. 
+The icebergs around me were almost 200 feet out of the water, and I could only help but wonder that this was one snowflake on top of another snowflake, year after year. 
+Icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves. 
+Each iceberg has its own individual personality. 
+They have a distinct way of interacting with their environment and their experiences. 
+Some refuse to give up and hold on to the bitter end, while others can't take it anymore and crumble in a fit of dramatic passion. 
+It's easy to think, when you look at an iceberg, that they're isolated, that they're separate and alone, much like we as humans sometimes view ourselves. 
+But the reality is far from it. 
+As an iceberg melts, I am breathing in its ancient atmosphere. 
+As the iceberg melts, it is releasing mineral-rich fresh water that nourishes many forms of life. 
+I approach photographing these icebergs as if I'm making portraits of my ancestors, knowing that in these individual moments they exist in that way and will never exist that way again. 
+It is not a death when they melt; it is not an end, but a continuation of their path through the cycle of life. 
+Some of the ice in the icebergs that I photograph is very young — a couple thousand years old. 
+And some of the ice is over 100,000 years old. 
+The last pictures I'd like to show you are of an iceberg that I photographed in Qeqetarsuaq, Greenland. 
+It's a very rare occasion that you get to actually witness an iceberg rolling. 
+So here it is. 
+You can see on the left side a small boat. 
+That's about a 15-foot boat. 
+And I'd like you to pay attention to the shape of the iceberg and where it is at the waterline. 
+You can see here, it begins to roll, and the boat has moved to the other side, and the man is standing there. 
+This is an average-size Greenlandic iceberg. 
+It's about 120 feet above the water, or 40 meters. 
+And this video is real time. 
+(Music) And just like that, the iceberg shows you a different side of its personality. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Late in January 1975, a 17-year-old German girl called Vera Brandes walked out onto the stage of the Cologne Opera House. 
+The auditorium was empty. 
+It was lit only by the dim, green glow of the emergency exit sign. 
+This was the most exciting day of Vera's life. 
+1,400 people were coming. 
+But right now, Vera was introducing Keith to the piano in question, and it wasn't going well. 
+Jarrett looked to the instrument a little warily, played a few notes, walked around it, played a few more notes, muttered something to his producer. 
+"If you don't get a new piano, Keith can't play." 
+There'd been a mistake. 
+The black notes were sticking, the white notes were out of tune, the pedals didn't work and the piano itself was just too small. 
+So Keith Jarrett left. 
+He went and sat outside in his car, leaving Vera Brandes to get on the phone to try to find a replacement piano. 
+And so she went outside and she stood there in the rain, talking to Keith Jarrett, begging him not to cancel the concert. 
+And he looked out of his car at this bedraggled, rain-drenched German teenager, took pity on her, and said, "Never forget... only for you." 
+And so a few hours later, Jarrett did indeed step out onto the stage of the opera house, he sat down at the unplayable piano and began. 
+(Music) Within moments it became clear that something magical was happening. 
+And the audience loved it. 
+Audiences continue to love it because the recording of the Köln Concert is the best-selling piano album in history and the best-selling solo jazz album in history. 
+Keith Jarrett had been handed a mess. 
+He had embraced that mess, and it soared. 
+But let's think for a moment about Jarrett's initial instinct. 
+But Jarrett's instinct was wrong, and thank goodness he changed his mind. 
+And I think our instinct is also wrong. 
+I think we need to gain a bit more appreciation for the unexpected advantages of having to cope with a little mess. 
+So let me give you some examples from cognitive psychology, from complexity science, from social psychology, and of course, rock 'n' roll. 
+So cognitive psychology first. 
+So the regular handout would be formatted in something straightforward, such as Helvetica or Times New Roman. 
+But half these classes were getting handouts that were formatted in something sort of intense, like Haettenschweiler, or something with a zesty bounce, like Comic Sans italicized. 
+Another example. 
+The psychologist Shelley Carson has been testing Harvard undergraduates for the quality of their attentional filters. 
+but no. 
+These distractions were actually grists to their creative mill. 
+Well, one thing you can do is try to solve it step-by-step. 
+Now, this idea of marginal gains will eventually get you a good jet engine. 
+That's a good way to solve a complicated problem. 
+But you know what would make it a better way? 
+A dash of mess. 
+You add randomness, early on in the process, you make crazy moves, you try stupid things that shouldn't work, and that will tend to make the problem-solving work better. 
+So the psychologist Katherine Phillips, with some colleagues, recently gave murder mystery problems to some students, and these students were collected in groups of four and they were given dossiers with information about a crime — alibis and evidence, witness statements and three suspects. 
+And the groups of four students were asked to figure out who did it, who committed the crime. 
+And there were two treatments in this experiment. 
+In some cases these were four friends, they all knew each other well. 
+In other cases, three friends and a stranger. 
+Actually, they solved the problem quite a lot more effectively. 
+But I think what's really interesting is not just that the three friends and the stranger did a better job, but how they felt about it. 
+So when Katherine Phillips interviewed the groups of four friends, they had a nice time, they also thought they'd done a good job. 
+They were complacent. 
+and they were full of doubt. 
+They didn't think they'd done a good job even though they had. 
+Because, yeah — the ugly font, the awkward stranger, the random move... 
+these disruptions help us solve problems, they help us become more creative. 
+and so we resist. 
+And that's why the last example is really important. 
+So I want to talk about somebody from the background of the world of rock 'n' roll. 
+He's also a kind of catalyst behind some of the great rock 'n' roll albums of the last 40 years. 
+And what does he do to make these great rock bands better? 
+Well, he makes a mess. 
+He disrupts their creative processes. 
+And when they're stuck in the studio, Brian Eno will reach for one of the cards. 
+"Change instrument roles." 
+"Make a sudden, destructive, unpredictable action. Incorporate." 
+These cards are disruptive. 
+Now, they've proved their worth in album after album. 
+The musicians hate them. 
+Carlos Alomar, great rock guitarist, working with Eno on David Bowie's "" Lodger "" album, and at one point he turns to Brian and says, "Brian, this experiment is stupid." 
+But the thing is it was a pretty good album, but also, Carlos Alomar, 35 years later, now uses The Oblique Strategies. 
+Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't helping you. 
+The strategies actually weren't a deck of cards originally, they were just a list — list on the recording studio wall. 
+The list didn't work. 
+Know why? 
+Not messy enough. 
+Your eye would go down the list and it would settle on whatever was the least disruptive, the least troublesome, which of course misses the point entirely. 
+And what Brian Eno came to realize was, yes, we need to run the stupid experiments, we need to deal with the awkward strangers, we need to try to read the ugly fonts. 
+But also... 
+we really need some persuasion if we're going to accept this. 
+whether it's sheer willpower, whether it's the flip of a card or whether it's a guilt trip from a German teenager, all of us, from time to time, need to sit down and try and play the unplayable piano. 
+Thank you. 
+
+I'm going to talk about the simple truth in leadership in the 21st century. 
+In the 21st century, we need to actually look at — and what I'm actually going to encourage you to consider today — is to go back to our school days when we learned how to count. 
+But I think it's time for us to think about what we count. 
+Because what we actually count truly counts. 
+Let me start by telling you a little story. 
+This is Van Quach. 
+She came to this country in 1986 from Vietnam. 
+She changed her name to Vivian because she wanted to fit in here in America. 
+Her first job was at an inner-city motel in San Francisco as a maid. 
+I happened to buy that motel about three months after Vivian started working there. 
+So Vivian and I have been working together for 23 years. 
+With the youthful idealism of a 26-year-old, in 1987, I started my company and I called it Joie de Vivre, a very impractical name, because I actually was looking to create joy of life. 
+And this first hotel that I bought, motel, was a pay-by-the-hour, no-tell motel in the inner-city of San Francisco. 
+As I spent time with Vivian, I saw that she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work. 
+It made me question and curious: How could someone actually find joy in cleaning toilets for a living? 
+So I spent time with Vivian, and I saw that she didn't find joy in cleaning toilets. 
+Her job, her goal and her calling was not to become the world's greatest toilet scrubber. 
+What counts for Vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and our guests. 
+And what gave her inspiration and meaning was the fact that she was taking care of people who were far away from home. 
+Because Vivian knew what it was like to be far away from home. 
+That very human lesson, more than 20 years ago, served me well during the last economic downturn we had. 
+In the wake of the dotcom crash and 9 / 11, San Francisco Bay Area hotels went through the largest percentage revenue drop in the history of American hotels. 
+We were the largest operator of hotels in the Bay Area, so we were particularly vulnerable. 
+But also back then, remember we stopped eating French fries in this country. 
+Well, not exactly, of course not. 
+We started eating "" freedom fries, "" and we started boycotting anything that was French. 
+Well, my name of my company, Joie de Vivre — so I started getting these letters from places like Alabama and Orange County saying to me that they were going to boycott my company because they thought we were a French company. 
+And I'd write them back, and I'd say, "" What a minute. We're not French. 
+We're an American company. We're based in San Francisco. "" And I'd get a terse response: "" Oh, that's worse. "" (Laughter) So one particular day when I was feeling a little depressed and not a lot of joie de vivre, I ended up in the local bookstore around the corner from our offices. 
+And I initially ended up in the business section of the bookstore looking for a business solution. 
+But given my befuddled state of mind, I ended up in the self-help section very quickly. 
+That's where I got reacquainted with Abraham Maslow's "" hierarchy of needs. "" I took one psychology class in college, and I learned about this guy, Abraham Maslow, as many of us are familiar with his hierarchy of needs. 
+But as I sat there for four hours, the full afternoon, reading Maslow, I recognized something that is true of most leaders. 
+One of the simplest facts in business is something that we often neglect, and that is that we're all human. 
+Each of us, no matter what our role is in business, has some hierarchy of needs in the workplace. 
+So as I started reading more Maslow, what I started to realize is that Maslow, later in his life, wanted to take this hierarchy for the individual and apply it to the collective, to organizations and specifically to business. 
+But unfortunately, he died prematurely in 1970, and so he wasn't really able to live that dream completely. 
+So I realized in that dotcom crash that my role in life was to channel Abe Maslow. 
+And that's what I did a few years ago when I took that five-level hierarchy of needs pyramid and turned it into what I call the transformation pyramid, which is survival, success and transformation. 
+It's not just fundamental in business, it's fundamental in life. 
+And we started asking ourselves the questions about how we were actually addressing the higher needs, these transformational needs for our key employees in the company. 
+These three levels of the hierarchy needs relate to the five levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. 
+But as we started asking ourselves about how we were addressing the higher needs of our employees and our customers, I realized we had no metrics. 
+We had nothing that actually could tell us whether we were actually getting it right. 
+So we started asking ourselves: What kind of less obvious metrics could we use to actually evaluate our employees' sense of meaning, or our customers' sense of emotional connection with us? 
+For example, we actually started asking our employees, do they understand the mission of our company, and do they feel like they believe in it, can they actually influence it, and do they feel that their work actually has an impact on it? 
+We started asking our customers, did they feel an emotional connection with us, in one of seven different kinds of ways. 
+Miraculously, as we asked these questions and started giving attention higher up the pyramid, what we found is we created more loyalty. 
+Our customer loyalty skyrocketed. 
+Our employee turnover dropped to one-third of the industry average, and during that five year dotcom bust, we tripled in size. 
+As I went out and started spending time with other leaders out there and asking them how they were getting through that time, what they told me over and over again was that they just manage what they can measure. 
+What we can measure is that tangible stuff at the bottom of the pyramid. 
+They didn't even see the intangible stuff higher up the pyramid. 
+So I started asking myself the question: How can we get leaders to start valuing the intangible? 
+If we're taught as leaders to just manage what we can measure, and all we can measure is the tangible in life, we're missing a whole lot of things at the top of the pyramid. 
+So I went out and studied a bunch of things, and I found a survey that showed that 94 percent of business leaders worldwide believe that the intangibles are important in their business, things like intellectual property, their corporate culture, their brand loyalty, and yet, only five percent of those same leaders actually had a means of measuring the intangibles in their business. 
+So as leaders, we understand that intangibles are important, but we don't have a clue how to measure them. 
+So here's another Einstein quote: "" Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. "" I hate to argue with Einstein, but if that which is most valuable in our life and our business actually can't be counted or valued, aren't we going to spend our lives just mired in measuring the mundane? 
+It was that sort of heady question about what counts that led me to take my CEO hat off for a week and fly off to the Himalayan peaks. 
+I flew off to a place that's been shrouded in mystery for centuries, a place some folks call Shangri-La. 
+It's actually moved from the survival base of the pyramid to becoming a transformational role model for the world. 
+I went to Bhutan. 
+The teenage king of Bhutan was also a curious man, but this was back in 1972, when he ascended to the throne two days after his father passed away. 
+At age 17, he started asking the kinds of questions that you'd expect of someone with a beginner's mind. 
+On a trip through India, early in his reign as king, he was asked by an Indian journalist about the Bhutanese GDP, the size of the Bhutanese GDP. 
+The king responded in a fashion that actually has transformed us four decades later. 
+He said the following, he said: "" Why are we so obsessed and focused with gross domestic product? 
+Why don't we care more about gross national happiness? "" Now, in essence, the king was asking us to consider an alternative definition of success, what has come to be known as GNH, or gross national happiness. 
+Most world leaders didn't take notice, and those that did thought this was just "" Buddhist economics. "" But the king was serious. 
+This was a notable moment, because this was the first time a world leader in almost 200 years had suggested that intangible of happiness — that leader 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson with the Declaration of Independence — 200 years later, this king was suggesting that intangible of happiness is something that we should measure, and it's something we should actually value as government officials. 
+For the next three dozen years as king, this king actually started measuring and managing around happiness in Bhutan — including, just recently, taking his country from being an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy with no bloodshed, no coup. 
+Bhutan, for those of you who don't know it, is the newest democracy in the world, just two years ago. 
+So as I spent time with leaders in the GNH movement, I got to really understand what they're doing. 
+And I got to spend some time with the prime minister. 
+Over dinner, I asked him an impertinent question. 
+I asked him, "" How can you create and measure something which evaporates — in other words, happiness? "" And he's a very wise man, and he said, "" Listen, Bhutan's goal is not to create happiness. 
+We create the conditions for happiness to occur. 
+In other words, we create a habitat of happiness. "" Wow, that's interesting. 
+He said that they have a science behind that art, and they've actually created four essential pillars, nine key indicators and 72 different metrics that help them to measure their GNH. 
+One of those key indicators is: How do the Bhutanese feel about how they spend their time each day? 
+It's a good question. How do you feel about how you spend your time each day? 
+Time is one of the scarcest resources in the modern world. 
+And yet, of course, that little intangible piece of data doesn't factor into our GDP calculations. 
+As I spent my week up in the Himalayas, I started to imagine what I call an emotional equation. 
+And it focuses on something I read long ago from a guy named Rabbi Hyman Schachtel. 
+How many know him? Anybody? 
+1954, he wrote a book called "" The Real Enjoyment of Living, "" and he suggested that happiness is not about having what you want; instead, it's about wanting what you have. 
+Or in other words, I think the Bhutanese believe happiness equals wanting what you have — imagine gratitude — divided by having what you want — gratification. 
+The Bhutanese aren't on some aspirational treadmill, constantly focused on what they don't have. 
+Their religion, their isolation, their deep respect for their culture and now the principles of their GNH movement all have fostered a sense of gratitude about what they do have. 
+How many of us here, as TEDsters in the audience, spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation, in the denominator? 
+We are a bottom-heavy culture in more ways than one. 
+(Laughter) The reality is, in Western countries, quite often we do focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out — an object that we're supposed to get, or maybe many objects. 
+Actually, in fact, if you look in the dictionary, many dictionaries define pursuit as to "" chase with hostility. "" Do we pursue happiness with hostility? 
+Good question. But back to Bhutan. 
+Bhutan's bordered on its north and south by 38 percent of the world's population. 
+Could this little country, like a startup in a mature industry, be the spark plug that influences a 21st century of middle-class in China and India? 
+Bhutan's created the ultimate export, a new global currency of well-being, and there are 40 countries around the world today that are studying their own GNH. 
+You may have heard, this last fall Nicolas Sarkozy in France announcing the results of an 18-month study by two Nobel economists, focusing on happiness and wellness in France. 
+Sarkozy suggested that world leaders should stop myopically focusing on GDP and consider a new index, what some French are calling a "" joie de vivre index. "" I like it. 
+Co-branding opportunities. 
+Just three days ago, three days ago here at TED, we had a simulcast of David Cameron, potentially the next prime minister of the UK, quoting one of my favorite speeches of all-time, Robert Kennedy's poetic speech from 1968 when he suggested that we're myopically focused on the wrong thing and that GDP is a misplaced metric. 
+So it suggests that the momentum is shifting. 
+I've taken that Robert Kennedy quote, and I've turned it into a new balance sheet for just a moment here. 
+This is a collection of things that Robert Kennedy said in that quote. 
+GDP counts everything from air pollution to the destruction of our redwoods. 
+But it doesn't count the health of our children or the integrity of our public officials. 
+As you look at these two columns here, doesn't it make you feel like it's time for us to start figuring out a new way to count, a new way to imagine what's important to us in life? 
+(Applause) Certainly Robert Kennedy suggested at the end of the speech exactly that. 
+He said GDP "" measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. "" Wow. 
+So how do we do that? 
+Let me say one thing we can just start doing ten years from now, at least in this country. 
+Why in the heck in America are we doing a census in 2010? 
+We're spending 10 billion dollars on the census. 
+We're asking 10 simple questions — it is simplicity. 
+But all of those questions are tangible. 
+They're about demographics. 
+They're about where you live, how many people you live with, and whether you own your home or not. 
+That's about it. 
+We're not asking meaningful metrics. 
+We're not asking important questions. 
+We're not asking anything that's intangible. 
+Abe Maslow said long ago something you've heard before, but you didn't realize it was him. 
+He said, "" If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. "" We've been fooled by our tool. 
+Excuse that expression. 
+(Laughter) We've been fooled by our tool. 
+GDP has been our hammer. 
+And our nail has been a 19th- and 20th-century industrial-era model of success. 
+And yet, 64 percent of the world's GDP today is in that intangible industry we call service, the service industry, the industry I'm in. 
+And only 36 percent is in the tangible industries of manufacturing and agriculture. 
+So maybe it's time that we get a bigger toolbox, right? 
+Maybe it's time we get a toolbox that doesn't just count what's easily counted, the tangible in life, but actually counts what we most value, the things that are intangible. 
+I guess I'm sort of a curious CEO. 
+I was also a curious economics major as an undergrad. 
+I learned that economists measure everything in tangible units of production and consumption as if each of those tangible units is exactly the same. 
+They aren't the same. 
+In fact, as leaders, what we need to learn is that we can influence the quality of that unit of production by creating the conditions for our employees to live their calling. 
+In Vivian's case, her unit of production isn't the tangible hours she works, it's the intangible difference she makes during that one hour of work. 
+This is Dave Arringdale who's actually been a longtime guest at Vivian's motel. 
+He stayed there a hundred times in the last 20 years, and he's loyal to the property because of the relationship that Vivian and her fellow employees have created with him. 
+They've created a habitat of happiness for Dave. 
+He tells me that he can always count on Vivian and the staff there to make him feel at home. 
+Why is it that business leaders and investors quite often don't see the connection between creating the intangible of employee happiness with creating the tangible of financial profits in their business? 
+We don't have to choose between inspired employees and sizable profits, we can have both. 
+In fact, inspired employees quite often help make sizable profits, right? 
+So what the world needs now, in my opinion, is business leaders and political leaders who know what to count. 
+We count numbers. 
+We count on people. 
+What really counts is when we actually use our numbers to truly take into account our people. 
+I learned that from a maid in a motel and a king of a country. 
+What can you start counting today? 
+What one thing can you start counting today that actually would be meaningful in your life, whether it's your work life or your business life? 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Humans in the developed world spend more than 90 percent of their lives indoors, where they breathe in and come into contact with trillions of life forms invisible to the naked eye: microorganisms. 
+Buildings are complex ecosystems that are an important source of microbes that are good for us, and some that are bad for us. 
+What determines the types and distributions of microbes indoors? 
+Buildings are colonized by airborne microbes that enter through windows and through mechanical ventilation systems. 
+And they are brought inside by humans and other creatures. 
+The fate of microbes indoors depends on complex interactions with humans, and with the human-built environment. 
+And today, architects and biologists are working together to explore smart building design that will create healthy buildings for us. 
+We spend an extraordinary amount of time in buildings that are extremely controlled environments, like this building here — environments that have mechanical ventilation systems that include filtering, heating and air conditioning. 
+Given the amount of time that we spend indoors, it's important to understand how this affects our health. 
+At the Biology and the Built Environment Center, we carried out a study in a hospital where we sampled air and pulled the DNA out of microbes in the air. 
+And we looked at three different types of rooms. 
+We looked at rooms that were mechanically ventilated, which are the data points in the blue. 
+We looked at rooms that were naturally ventilated, where the hospital let us turn off the mechanical ventilation in a wing of the building and pry open the windows that were no longer operable, but they made them operable for our study. 
+And we also sampled the outdoor air. 
+If you look at the x-axis of this graph, you'll see that what we commonly want to do — which is keeping the outdoors out — we accomplished that with mechanical ventilation. 
+So if you look at the green data points, which is air that's outside, you'll see that there's a large amount of microbial diversity, or variety of microbial types. 
+But if you look at the blue data points, which is mechanically ventilated air, it's not as diverse. 
+But being less diverse is not necessarily good for our health. 
+If you look at the y-axis of this graph, you'll see that, in the mechanically ventilated air, you have a higher probability of encountering a potential pathogen, or germ, than if you're outdoors. 
+So to understand why this was the case, we took our data and put it into an ordination diagram, which is a statistical map that tells you something about how related the microbial communities are in the different samples. 
+The data points that are closer together have microbial communities that are more similar than data points that are far apart. 
+And the first things that you can see from this graph is, if you look at the blue data points, which are the mechanically ventilated air, they're not simply a subset of the green data points, which are the outdoor air. 
+What we've found is that mechanically ventilated air looks like humans. 
+It has microbes on it that are commonly associated with our skin and with our mouth, our spit. 
+And this is because we're all constantly shedding microbes. 
+So all of you right now are sharing your microbes with one another. 
+And when you're outdoors, that type of air has microbes that are commonly associated with plant leaves and with dirt. 
+Why does this matter? 
+It matters because the health care industry is the second most energy intensive industry in the United States. 
+Hospitals use two and a half times the amount of energy as office buildings. 
+And the model that we're working with in hospitals, and also with many, many different buildings, is to keep the outdoors out. 
+And this model may not necessarily be the best for our health. 
+And given the extraordinary amount of nosocomial infections, or hospital-acquired infections, this is a clue that it's a good time to reconsider our current practices. 
+So just as we manage national parks, where we promote the growth of some species and we inhibit the growth of others, we're working towards thinking about buildings using an ecosystem framework where we can promote the kinds of microbes that we want to have indoors. 
+I've heard somebody say that you're as healthy as your gut. 
+And for this reason, many people eat probiotic yogurt so they can promote a healthy gut flora. 
+And what we ultimately want to do is to be able to use this concept to promote a healthy group of microorganisms inside. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to start with a short story. 
+It's about a little boy whose father was a history buff and who used to take him by the hand to visit the ruins of an ancient metropolis on the outskirts of their camp. 
+They would always stop by to visit these huge winged bulls that used to guard the gates of that ancient metropolis, and the boy used to be scared of these winged bulls, but at the same time they excited him. 
+And the dad used to use those bulls to tell the boy stories about that civilization and their work. 
+Let's fast-forward to the San Francisco Bay Area many decades later, where I started a technology company that brought the world its first 3D laser scanning system. 
+Let me show you how it works. 
+Female Voice: Long range laser scanning by sending out a pulse that's a laser beam of light. 
+The system measures the beam's time of flight, recording the time it takes for the light to hit a surface and make its return. 
+With two mirrors, the scanner calculates the beam's horizontal and vertical angles, giving accurate x, y, and z coordinates. 
+The point is then recorded into a 3D visualization program. 
+All of this happens in seconds. 
+Ben Kacyra: You can see here, these systems are extremely fast. 
+They collect millions of points at a time with very high accuracy and very high resolution. 
+A surveyor with traditional survey tools would be hard-pressed to produce maybe 500 points in a whole day. 
+These babies would be producing something like ten thousand points a second. 
+So, as you can imagine, this was a paradigm shift in the survey and construction as well as in reality capture industry. 
+Approximately ten years ago, my wife and I started a foundation to do good, and right about that time, the magnificent Bamiyan Buddhas, hundred and eighty foot tall in Afghanistan, were blown up by the Taliban. 
+They were gone in an instant. 
+And unfortunately, there was no detailed documentation of these Buddhas. 
+This clearly devastated me, and I couldn't help but wonder about the fate of my old friends, the winged bulls, and the fate of the many, many heritage sites all over the world. 
+Both my wife and I were so touched by this that we decided to expand the mission of our foundation to include digital heritage preservation of world sites. 
+We called the project CyArk, which stands for Cyber Archive. 
+To date, with the help of a global network of partners, we've completed close to fifty projects. 
+Let me show you some of them: Chichen Itza, Rapa Nui — and what you're seeing here are the cloud of points — Babylon, Rosslyn Chapel, Pompeii, and our latest project, Mt. Rushmore, which happened to be one of our most challenging projects. 
+As you see here, we had to develop a special rig to bring the scanner up close and personal. 
+The results of our work in the field are used to produce media and deliverables to be used by conservators and researchers. 
+We also produce media for dissemination to the public — free through the CyArk website. 
+These would be used for education, cultural tourism, etc. 
+What you're looking at in here is a 3D viewer that we developed that would allow the display and manipulation of [the] cloud of points in real time, cutting sections through them and extracting dimensions. 
+This happens to be the cloud of points for Tikal. 
+In here you see a traditional 2D architectural engineering drawing that's used for preservation, and of course we tell the stories through fly-throughs. 
+And here, this is a fly-through the cloud of points of Tikal, and here you see it rendered and photo-textured with the photography that we take of the site. 
+And so this is not a video. 
+This is actual 3D points with two to three millimeter accuracy. 
+And of course the data can be used to develop 3D models that are very accurate and very detailed. 
+And here you're looking at a model that's extracted from the cloud of points for Stirling Castle. 
+It's used for studies, for visualization, as well as for education. 
+And finally, we produce mobile apps that include narrated virtual tools. 
+The more I got involved in the heritage field, the more it became clear to me that we are losing the sites and the stories faster than we can physically preserve them. 
+Of course, earthquakes and all the natural phenomena — floods, tornadoes, etc. — take their toll. 
+However, what occurred to me was human-caused destruction, which was not only causing a significant portion of the destruction, but actually it was accelerating. 
+This includes arson, urban sprawl, acid rain, not to mention terrorism and wars. 
+It was getting more and more apparent that we're fighting a losing battle. 
+We're losing our sites and the stories, and basically we're losing a piece — and a significant piece — of our collective memory. 
+Imagine us as a human race not knowing where we came from. 
+Luckily, in the last two or three decades, digital technologies have been developing that have helped us to develop tools that we've brought to bear in the digital preservation, in our digital preservation war. 
+This includes, for example, the 3D laser scanning systems, ever more powerful personal computers, 3D graphics, high-definition digital photography, not to mention the Internet. 
+Because of this accelerated pace of destruction, it became clear to us that we needed to challenge ourselves and our partners to accelerate our work. 
+And we created a project we call the CyArk 500 Challenge — and that is to digitally preserve 500 World Heritage Sites in five years. 
+We do have the technology that's scaleable, and our network of global partners has been expanding and can be expanded at a rapid rate, so we're comfortable that this task can be accomplished. 
+However, to me, the 500 is really just the first 500. 
+In order to sustain our work into the future, we use technology centers where we partner with local universities and colleges to take the technology to them, whereby they then can help us with digital preservation of their heritage sites, and at the same time, it gives them the technology to benefit from in the future. 
+Let me close with another short story. 
+Two years ago, we were approached by a partner of ours to digitally preserve an important heritage site, a UNESCO heritage site in Uganda, the Royal Kasubi Tombs. 
+The work was done successfully in the field, and the data was archived and publicly disseminated through the CyArk website. 
+Last March, we received very sad news. 
+The Royal Tombs had been destroyed by suspected arson. 
+A few days later, we received a call: "" Is the data available and can it be used for reconstruction? "" Our answer, of course, was yes. 
+Let me leave you with a final thought. 
+Our heritage is much more than our collective memory — it's our collective treasure. 
+We owe it to our children, our grandchildren and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and to pass it along. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
+Well, I'm staying here because we wanted to demonstrate to you 
+the power of this technology and so, while I've been speaking, you have been scanned. 
+(Laughter) The two wizards that I have that are behind the curtain will help me bring the results on the screen. 
+(Applause) This is all in 3D and of course you can fly through the cloud of points. 
+You can look at it from on top, from the ceiling. 
+You can look from different vantage points, but I'm going to ask Doug to zoom in on an individual in the crowd, just to show the amount of detail that we can create. 
+So you have been digitally preserved in about four minutes. 
+(Laughter) I'd like to thank the wizards here. 
+We were very lucky to have two of our partners participate in this: the Historic Scotland, and the Glasgow School of Art. 
+I'd like to also thank personally the efforts of David Mitchell, who is the Director of Conservation at Historic Scotland. 
+David. 
+(Applause) And Doug Pritchard, who's the Head of Visualization at the Glasgow School of Art. 
+Let's give them a hand. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+
+To most of you, this is a device to buy, sell, play games, watch videos. 
+I think it might be a lifeline. 
+I think actually it might be able to save more lives than penicillin. 
+Texting: I know I say texting and a lot of you think sexting, a lot of you think about the lewd photos that you see — hopefully not your kids sending to somebody else — or trying to translate the abbreviations LOL, LMAO, HMU. 
+I can help you with those later. 
+But the parents in the room know that texting is actually the best way to communicate with your kids. 
+It might be the only way to communicate with your kids. 
+(Laughter) The average teenager sends 3,339 text messages a month, unless she's a girl, then it's closer to 4,000. 
+And the secret is she opens every single one. 
+Texting has a 100 percent open rate. 
+Now the parents are really alarmed. 
+It's a 100 percent open rate even if she doesn't respond to you when you ask her when she's coming home for dinner. 
+I promise she read that text. 
+And this isn't some suburban iPhone-using teen phenomenon. 
+Texting actually overindexes for minority and urban youth. 
+I know this because at DoSomething.org, which is the largest organization for teenagers and social change in America, about six months ago we pivoted and started focusing on text messaging. 
+We're now texting out to about 200,000 kids a week about doing our campaigns to make their schools more green or to work on homeless issues and things like that. 
+We're finding it 11 times more powerful than email. 
+We've also found an unintended consequence. 
+We've been getting text messages back like these. 
+"" I don't want to go to school today. 
+The boys call me faggot. "" "" I was cutting, my parents found out, and so I stopped. 
+But I just started again an hour ago. "" Or, "" He won't stop raping me. 
+He told me not to tell anyone. 
+It's my dad. Are you there? "" That last one's an actual text message that we received. 
+And yeah, we're there. 
+I will not forget the day we got that text message. 
+And so it was that day that we decided we needed to build a crisis text hotline. 
+Because this isn't what we do. 
+We do social change. 
+Kids are just sending us these text messages because texting is so familiar and comfortable to them and there's nowhere else to turn that they're sending them to us. 
+So think about it, a text hotline; it's pretty powerful. 
+It's fast, it's pretty private. 
+No one hears you in a stall, you're just texting quietly. 
+It's real time. 
+We can help millions of teens with counseling and referrals. 
+That's great. 
+But the thing that really makes this awesome is the data. 
+Because I'm not really comfortable just helping that girl with counseling and referrals. 
+I want to prevent this shit from happening. 
+So think about a cop. 
+There's something in New York City. 
+The police did it. It used to be just guess work, police work. 
+And then they started crime mapping. 
+And so they started following and watching petty thefts, summonses, all kinds of things — charting the future essentially. 
+And they found things like, when you see crystal meth on the street, if you add police presence, you can curb the otherwise inevitable spate of assaults and robberies that would happen. 
+In fact, the year after the NYPD put CompStat in place, the murder rate fell 60 percent. 
+So think about the data from a crisis text line. 
+There is no census on bullying and dating abuse and eating disorders and cutting and rape — no census. 
+Maybe there's some studies, some longitudinal studies, that cost lots of money and took lots of time. 
+Or maybe there's some anecdotal evidence. 
+Imagine having real time data on every one of those issues. 
+You could inform legislation. 
+You could inform school policy. 
+You could say to a principal, "" You're having a problem every Thursday at three o'clock. 
+What's going on in your school? "" You could see the immediate impact of legislation or a hateful speech that somebody gives in a school assembly and see what happens as a result. 
+This is really, to me, the power of texting and the power of data. 
+Because while people are talking about data, making it possible for Facebook to mine my friend from the third grade, or Target to know when it's time for me to buy more diapers, or some dude to build a better baseball team, I'm actually really excited about the power of data and the power of texting to help that kid go to school, to help that girl stop cutting in the bathroom and absolutely to help that girl whose father's raping her. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm here to show you how something you can't see can be so much fun to look at. 
+You're about to experience a new, available and exciting technology that's going to make us rethink how we waterproof our lives. 
+What I have here is a cinder block that we've coated half with a nanotechnology spray that can be applied to almost any material. 
+It's called Ultra-Ever Dry, and when you apply it to any material, it turns into a superhydrophobic shield. 
+So this is a cinder block, uncoated, and you can see that it's porous, it absorbs water. 
+Not anymore. 
+Porous, nonporous. 
+So what's superhydrophobic? 
+Superhydrophobic is how we measure a drop of water on a surface. 
+The rounder it is, the more hydrophobic it is, and if it's really round, it's superhydrophobic. 
+A freshly waxed car, the water molecules slump to about 90 degrees. 
+A windshield coating is going to give you about 110 degrees. 
+But what you're seeing here is 160 to 175 degrees, and anything over 150 is superhydrophobic. 
+So as part of the demonstration, what I have is a pair of gloves, and we've coated one of the gloves with the nanotechnology coating, and let's see if you can tell which one, and I'll give you a hint. 
+Did you guess the one that was dry? 
+When you have nanotechnology and nanoscience, what's occurred is that we're able to now look at atoms and molecules and actually control them for great benefits. 
+And we're talking really small here. 
+The way you measure nanotechnology is in nanometers, and one nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and to put some scale to that, if you had a nanoparticle that was one nanometer thick, and you put it side by side, and you had 50,000 of them, you'd be the width of a human hair. 
+So very small, but very useful. 
+And it's not just water that this works with. 
+It's a lot of water-based materials like concrete, water-based paint, mud, and also some refined oils as well. 
+You can see the difference. 
+Moving onto the next demonstration, we've taken a pane of glass and we've coated the outside of it, we've framed it with the nanotechnology coating, and we're going to pour this green-tinted water inside the middle, and you're going to see, it's going to spread out on glass like you'd normally think it would, except when it hits the coating, it stops, and I can't even coax it to leave. 
+It's that afraid of the water. 
+(Applause) So what's going on here? What's happening? 
+Well, the surface of the spray coating is actually filled with nanoparticles that form a very rough and craggly surface. 
+You'd think it'd be smooth, but it's actually not. 
+And it has billions of interstitial spaces, and those spaces, along with the nanoparticles, reach up and grab the air molecules, and cover the surface with air. 
+It's an umbrella of air all across it, and that layer of air is what the water hits, the mud hits, the concrete hits, and it glides right off. 
+So if I put this inside this water here, you can see a silver reflective coating around it, and that silver reflective coating is the layer of air that's protecting the water from touching the paddle, and it's dry. 
+So what are the applications? 
+I mean, many of you right now are probably going through your head. 
+Everyone that sees this gets excited, and says, "Oh, I could use it for this and this and this." 
+The applications in a general sense could be anything that's anti-wetting. 
+We've certainly seen that today. 
+It could be anything that's anti-icing, because if you don't have water, you don't have ice. 
+It could be anti-corrosion. 
+No water, no corrosion. 
+It could be anti-bacterial. 
+Without water, the bacteria won't survive. 
+And it could be things that need to be self-cleaning as well. 
+So imagine how something like this could help revolutionize your field of work. 
+And I'm going to leave you with one last demonstration, but before I do that, I would like to say thank you, and think small. 
+(Applause) It's going to happen. Wait for it. Wait for it. 
+Chris Anderson: You guys didn't hear about us cutting out the Design from TED? (Laughter) [Two minutes later...] He ran into all sorts of problems in terms of managing the medical research part. 
+It's happening! 
+(Applause) 
+
+You are a high-ranking military service member deployed to Afghanistan. 
+You are responsible for the lives of hundreds of men and women, and your base is under attack. 
+Incoming mortar rounds are exploding all around you. 
+Struggling to see through the dust and the smoke, you do your best to assist the wounded and then crawl to a nearby bunker. 
+Conscious but dazed by the blasts, you lay on your side and attempt to process what has just happened. 
+As you regain your vision, you see a bloody face staring back at you. 
+The image is terrifying, but you quickly come to understand it's not real. 
+This vision continues to visit you multiple times a day and in your sleep. 
+You choose not to tell anyone for fear of losing your job or being seen as weak. 
+You give the vision a name, Bloody Face in Bunker, and call it BFIB for short. 
+You keep BFIB locked away in your mind, secretly haunting you, for the next seven years. 
+Now close your eyes. 
+Can you see BFIB? 
+If you can, you're beginning to see the face of the invisible wounds of war, commonly known as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. 
+While I can't say I have post-traumatic stress disorder, I've never been a stranger to it. 
+When I was a little girl, I would visit my grandparents every summer. 
+It was my grandfather who introduced me to the effects of combat on the psyche. 
+While my grandfather was serving as a Marine in the Korean War, a bullet pierced his neck and rendered him unable to cry out. 
+He watched as a corpsman passed him over, declaring him a goner, and then leaving him to die. 
+Years later, after his physical wounds had healed and he'd returned home, he rarely spoke of his experiences in waking life. 
+But at night I would hear him shouting obscenities from his room down the hall. 
+And during the day I would announce myself as I entered the room, careful not to startle or agitate him. 
+He lived out the remainder of his days isolated and tight-lipped, never finding a way to express himself, and I didn't yet have the tools to guide him. 
+I wouldn't have a name for my grandfather's condition until I was in my 20s. 
+Seeking a graduate degree in art therapy, I naturally gravitated towards the study of trauma. 
+And while sitting in class learning about post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD for short, my mission to help service members who suffered like my grandfather began to take form. 
+We've had various names for post-traumatic stress throughout the history of war: homesickness, soldier's heart, shell shock, thousand-yard stare, for instance. 
+And while I was pursuing my degree, a new war was raging, and thanks to modern body armor and military vehicles, service members were surviving blast injuries they wouldn't have before. 
+But the invisible wounds were reaching new levels, and this pushed military doctors and researchers to try and truly understand the effects that traumatic brain injury, or TBI, and PTSD have on the brain. 
+Due to advances in technology and neuroimaging, we now know there's an actual shutdown in the Broca's, or the speech-language area of the brain, after an individual experiences trauma. 
+This physiological change, or speechless terror as it's often called, coupled with mental health stigma, the fear of being judged or misunderstood, possibly even removed from their current duties, has led to the invisible struggles of our servicemen and women. 
+Generation after generation of veterans have chosen not to talk about their experiences, and suffer in solitude. 
+I had my work cut out for me when I got my first job as an art therapist at the nation's largest military medical center, Walter Reed. 
+After working for a few years on a locked-in patient psychiatric unit, I eventually transferred to the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, NICoE, which leads TBI care for active duty service members. 
+Now, I believed in art therapy, but I was going to have to convince service members, big, tough, strong, manly military men, and some women too, to give art-making as a psychotherapeutic intervention a try. 
+The results have been nothing short of spectacular. 
+Vivid, symbolic artwork is being created by our servicemen and women, and every work of art tells a story. 
+We've observed that the process of art therapy bypasses the speech-language issue with the brain. 
+Art-making accesses the same sensory areas of the brain that encode trauma. 
+Service members can use the art-making to work through their experiences in a nonthreatening way. 
+They can then apply words to their physical creations, reintegrating the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. 
+Now, we've seen this can work with all forms of art — drawing, painting, collage — but what seems to have the most impact is mask-making. 
+Finally, these invisible wounds don't just have a name, they have a face. 
+And when service members create these masks, it allows them to come to grips, literally, with their trauma. 
+And it's amazing how often that enables them to break through the trauma and start to heal. 
+Remember BFIB? 
+That was a real experience for one of my patients, and when he created his mask, he was able to let go of that haunting image. 
+Initially, it was a daunting process for the service member, but eventually he began to think of BFIB as the mask, not his internal wound, and he would go to leave each session, he would hand me the mask, and say, "" Melissa, take care of him. "" Eventually, we placed BFIB in a box to further contain him, and when the service member went to leave the NICoE, he chose to leave BFIB behind. 
+A year later, he had only seen BFIB twice, and both times BFIB was smiling and the service member didn't feel anxious. 
+Now, whenever that service member is haunted by some traumatic memory, he continues to paint. 
+Every time he paints these disturbing images, he sees them less or not at all. 
+Philosophers have told us for thousands of years that the power to create is very closely linked to the power to destroy. 
+Now science is showing us that the part of the brain that registers a traumatic wound can be the part of the brain where healing happens too. 
+And art therapy is showing us how to make that connection. 
+We asked one of our service members to describe how mask-making impacted his treatment, and this is what he had to say. 
+(Video) Service Member: You sort of just zone out into the mask. 
+You zone out into the drawing, and for me, it just released the block, so I was able to do it. 
+And then when I looked at it after two days, I was like, "Holy crap, here's the picture, here's the key, here's the puzzle," and then from there it just soared. 
+I mean, from there my treatment just when out of sight, because they were like, Kurt, explain this, explain this. 
+And for the first time in 23 years, I could actually talk about stuff openly to, like, anybody. 
+I could talk to you about it right now if I wanted to, because it unlocked it. 
+It's just amazing. 
+And it allowed me to put 23 years of PTSD and TBI stuff together in one place that has never happened before. 
+Sorry. 
+Melissa Walker: Over the past five years, we've had over 1,000 masks made. 
+It's pretty amazing, isn't it? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) I wish I could have shared this process with my grandfather, but I know that he would be thrilled that we are finding ways to help today's and tomorrow's service members heal, and finding the resources within them that they can call upon to heal themselves. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want to talk about 4.6 billion years of history in 18 minutes. 
+That's 300 million years per minute. 
+Let's start with the first photograph NASA obtained of planet Mars. 
+This is fly-by, Mariner IV. 
+It was taken in 1965. 
+When this picture appeared, that well-known scientific journal, The New York Times, wrote in its editorial, "" Mars is uninteresting. 
+It's a dead world. NASA should not spend any time or effort studying Mars anymore. "" Fortunately, our leaders in Washington at NASA headquarters knew better and we began a very extensive study of the red planet. 
+One of the key questions in all of science, "Is there life outside of Earth?" 
+I believe that Mars is the most likely target for life outside the Earth. 
+I'm going to show you in a few minutes some amazing measurements that suggest there may be life on Mars. 
+But let me start with a Viking photograph. 
+This is a composite taken by Viking in 1976. 
+Viking was developed and managed at the NASA Langley Research Center. 
+We sent two orbiters and two landers in the summer of 1976. 
+We had four spacecraft, two around Mars, two on the surface — an amazing accomplishment. 
+This is the first photograph taken from the surface of any planet. 
+This is a Viking Lander photograph of the surface of Mars. 
+And yes, the red planet is red. 
+Mars is half the size of the Earth, but because two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water, the land area on Mars is comparable to the land area on Earth. 
+So, Mars is a pretty big place even though it's half the size. 
+We have obtained topographic measurements of the surface of Mars. We understand the elevation differences. 
+We know a lot about Mars. 
+Mars has the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons. 
+Mars has the Grand Canyon of the solar system, Valles Marineris. 
+Very, very interesting planet. 
+Mars has the largest impact crater in the solar system, Hellas Basin. 
+This is 2,000 miles across. 
+If you happened to be on Mars when this impactor hit, it was a really bad day on Mars. 
+(Laughter) This is Olympus Mons. 
+This is bigger than the state of Arizona. 
+Volcanoes are important, because volcanoes produce atmospheres and they produce oceans. 
+We're looking at Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, superimposed on a map of the United States, 3,000 miles across. 
+One of the most intriguing features about Mars, the National Academy of Science says one of the 10 major mysteries of the space age, is why certain areas of Mars are so highly magnetized. 
+We call this crustal magnetism. 
+There are regions on Mars, where, for some reason — we don't understand why at this point — the surface is very, very highly magnetized. 
+Is there water on Mars? 
+The answer is no, there is no liquid water on the surface of Mars today. 
+But there is intriguing evidence that suggests that the early history of Mars there may have been rivers and fast flowing water. 
+Today Mars is very very dry. 
+We believe there's some water in the polar caps, there are polar caps of North Pole and South Pole. 
+Here are some recent images. 
+This is from Spirit and Opportunity. 
+These images that show at one time, there was very fast flowing water on the surface of Mars. 
+Why is water important? Water is important because if you want life you have to have water. 
+Water is the key ingredient in the evolution, the origin of life on a planet. 
+Here is some picture of Antarctica and a picture of Olympus Mons, very similar features, glaciers. 
+So, this is frozen water. 
+This is ice water on Mars. 
+This is my favorite picture. This was just taken a few weeks ago. 
+It has not been seen publicly. 
+This is European space agency Mars Express, image of a crater on Mars and in the middle of the crater we have liquid water, we have ice. 
+Very intriguing photograph. 
+We now believe that in the early history of Mars, which is 4.6 billion years ago, 4.6 billion years ago, Mars was very Earth-like. 
+Mars had rivers, Mars had lakes, but more important Mars had planetary-scale oceans. 
+We believe that the oceans were in the northern hemisphere, and this area in blue, which shows a depression of about four miles, was the ancient ocean area on the surface of Mars. 
+Where did the ocean's worth of water on Mars go? 
+Well, we have an idea. 
+This is a measurement we obtained a few years ago from a Mars-orbiting satellite called Odyssey. 
+Sub-surface water on Mars, frozen in the form of ice. 
+And this shows the percent. If it's a blueish color, it means 16 percent by weight. 
+Sixteen percent, by weight, of the interior contains frozen water, or ice. 
+So, there is a lot of water below the surface. 
+The most intriguing and puzzling measurement, in my opinion, we've obtained of Mars, was released earlier this year in the magazine Science. 
+And what we're looking at is the presence of the gas methane, CH4, in the atmosphere of Mars. 
+And you can see there are three distinct regions of methane. 
+Why is methane important? 
+Because on Earth, almost all — 99.9 percent — of the methane is produced by living systems, not little green men, but microscopic life below the surface or at the surface. 
+We now have evidence that methane is in the atmosphere of Mars, a gas that, on Earth, is biogenic in origin, produced by living systems. 
+These are the three plumes: A, B1, B2. 
+And this is the terrain it appears over, and we know from geological studies that these regions are the oldest regions on Mars. 
+In fact, the Earth and Mars are both 4.6 billion years old. 
+The oldest rock on Earth is only 3.6 billion. 
+The reason there is a billion-year gap in our geological understanding is because of plate tectonics, The crust of the Earth has been recycled. 
+We have no geological record prior for the first billion years. 
+That record exists on Mars. 
+And this terrain that we're looking at dates back to 4.6 billion years when Earth and Mars were formed. 
+It was a Tuesday. 
+(Laughter) This is a map that shows where we've put our spacecraft on the surface of Mars. 
+Here is Viking I, Viking II. 
+This is Opportunity. This is Spirit. 
+This is Mars Pathfinder. This is Phoenix, we just put two years ago. 
+Notice all of our rovers and all of our landers have gone to the northern hemisphere. 
+That's because the northern hemisphere is the region of the ancient ocean basin. 
+There aren't many craters. 
+And that's because the water protected the basin from being impacted by asteroids and meteorites. 
+But look in the southern hemisphere. 
+In the southern hemisphere there are impact craters, there are volcanic craters. 
+Here's Hellas Basin, a very very different place, geologically. 
+Look where the methane is, the methane is in a very rough terrain area. 
+What is the best way to unravel the mysteries on Mars that exist? 
+We asked this question 10 years ago. 
+We invited 10 of the top Mars scientists to the Langley Research Center for two days. 
+We addressed on the board the major questions that have not been answered. 
+And we spent two days deciding how to best answer this question. 
+And the result of our meeting was a robotic rocket-powered airplane we call ARES. 
+It's an Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Surveyor. 
+There's a model of ARES here. 
+This is a 20-percent scale model. 
+This airplane was designed at the Langley Research Center. 
+If any place in the world can build an airplane to fly on Mars, it's the Langley Research Center, for almost 100 years a leading center of aeronautics in the world. 
+We fly about a mile above the surface. 
+We cover hundreds of miles, and we fly about 450 miles an hour. 
+We can do things that rovers can't do and landers can't do: We can fly above mountains, volcanoes, impact craters; we fly over valleys; we can fly over surface magnetism, the polar caps, subsurface water; and we can search for life on Mars. 
+But, of equal importance, as we fly through the atmosphere of Mars, we transmit that journey, the first flight of an airplane outside of the Earth, we transmit those images back to Earth. 
+And our goal is to inspire the American public who is paying for this mission through tax dollars. 
+But more important we will inspire the next generation of scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians. 
+And that's a critical area of national security and economic vitality, to make sure we produce the next generation of scientists, engineers, mathematicians and technologists. 
+This is what ARES looks like as it flies over Mars. 
+We preprogram it. 
+We will fly where the methane is. 
+We will have instruments aboard the plane that will sample, every three minutes, the atmosphere of Mars. 
+We will look for methane as well as other gasses produced by living systems. 
+We will pinpoint where these gases emanate from, because we can measure the gradient where it comes from, and there, we can direct the next mission to land right in that area. 
+How do we transport an airplane to Mars? 
+In two words, very carefully. 
+The problem is we don't fly it to Mars, we put it in a spacecraft and we send it to Mars. 
+The problem is the spacecraft's largest diameter is nine feet; ARES is 21-foot wingspan, 17 feet long. 
+How do we get it to Mars? 
+We fold it, and we transport it in a spacecraft. 
+And we have it in something called an aeroshell. 
+This is how we do it. 
+And we have a little video that describes the sequence. 
+Video: Seven, six. Green board. Five, four, three, two, one. 
+Main engine start, and liftoff. 
+Joel Levine: This is a launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 
+This is the spacecraft taking nine months to get to Mars. 
+It enters the atmosphere of Mars. 
+A lot of heating, frictional heating. It's going 18 thousand miles an hour. 
+A parachute opens up to slow it down. 
+The thermal tiles fall off. 
+The airplane is exposed to the atmosphere for the first time. 
+It unfolds. 
+The rocket engine begins. 
+We believe that in a one-hour flight we can rewrite the textbook on Mars by making high-resolution measurements of the atmosphere, looking for gases of biogenic origin, looking for gases of volcanic origin, studying the surface, studying the magnetism on the surface, which we don't understand, as well as about a dozen other areas. 
+Practice makes perfect. 
+How do we know we can do it? 
+Because we have tested ARES model, several models in a half a dozen wind tunnels at the NASA Langley Research Center for eight years, under Mars conditions. 
+And, of equal importance is, we test ARES in the Earth's atmosphere, at 100,000 feet, which is comparable to the density and pressure of the atmosphere on Mars where we'll fly. 
+Now, 100,000 feet, if you fly cross-country to Los Angeles, you fly 37,000 feet. 
+We do our tests at 100,000 feet. 
+And I want to show you one of our tests. 
+This is a half-scale model. 
+This is a high-altitude helium balloon. 
+This is over Tilamook, Oregon. 
+We put the folded airplane on the balloon — it took about three hours to get up there — and then we released it on command at 103,000 feet, and we deploy the airplane and everything works perfectly. 
+And we've done high-altitude and low-altitude tests, just to perfect this technique. 
+We're ready to go. 
+I have a scale model here. 
+But we have a full-scale model in storage at the NASA Langley Research Center. 
+We're ready to go. All we need is a check from NASA headquarters (Laughter) to cover the costs. 
+I'm prepared to donate my honorarium for today's talk for this mission. 
+There's actually no honorarium for anyone for this thing. 
+This is the ARES team; we have about 150 scientists, engineers; where we're working with Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, Ames Research Center and half a dozen major universities and corporations in developing this. 
+It's a large effort. It's all at NASA Langley Research Center. 
+And let me conclude by saying not too far from here, right down the road in Kittyhawk, North Carolina, a little more than 100 years ago history was made when we had the first powered flight of an airplane on Earth. 
+We are on the verge right now to make the first flight of an airplane outside the Earth's atmosphere. 
+We are prepared to fly this on Mars, rewrite the textbook about Mars. 
+If you're interested in more information, we have a website that describes this exciting and intriguing mission, and why we want to do it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Good morning. I think, as a grumpy Eastern European, I was brought in to play the pessimist this morning. So bear with me. 
+Well, I come from the former Soviet Republic of Belarus, which, as some of you may know, is not exactly an oasis of liberal democracy. 
+So that's why I've always been fascinated with how technology could actually reshape and open up authoritarian societies like ours. 
+So, I'm graduating college and, feeling very idealistic, I decided to join the NGO which actually was using new media to promote democracy and media reform in much of the former Soviet Union. 
+However, to my surprise, I discovered that dictatorships do not crumble so easily. 
+In fact, some of them actually survived the Internet challenge, and some got even more repressive. 
+So this is when I ran out of my idealism and decided to quit my NGO job and actually study how the Internet could impede democratization. 
+Now, I must tell you that this was never a very popular argument, and it's probably not very popular yet with some of you sitting in this audience. 
+It was never popular with many political leaders, especially those in the United States who somehow thought that new media would be able to do what missiles couldn't. 
+That is, promote democracy in difficult places where everything else has already been tried and failed. 
+And I think by 2009, this news has finally reached Britain, so I should probably add Gordon Brown to this list as well. 
+However, there is an underlying argument about logistics, which has driven so much of this debate. Right? 
+So if you look at it close enough, you'll actually see that much of this is about economics. 
+The cybertopians say, much like fax machines and Xerox machines did in the '80s, blogs and social networks have radically transformed the economics of protest, so people would inevitably rebel. 
+To put it very simply, the assumption so far has been that if you give people enough connectivity, if you give them enough devices, democracy will inevitably follow. 
+And to tell you the truth, I never really bought into this argument, in part because I never saw three American presidents agree on anything else in the past. 
+(Laughter) But, you know, even beyond that, if you think about the logic underlying it, is something I call iPod liberalism, where we assume that every single Iranian or Chinese who happens to have and love his iPod will also love liberal democracy. 
+And again, I think this is kind of false. 
+But I think a much bigger problem with this is that this logic — that we should be dropping iPods not bombs — I mean, it would make a fascinating title for Thomas Friedman's new book. 
+(Laughter) But this is rarely a good sign. Right? 
+So, the bigger problem with this logic is that it confuses the intended versus the actual uses of technology. 
+For those of you who think that new media of the Internet could somehow help us avert genocide, should look no further than Rwanda, where in the '90s it was actually two radio stations which were responsible for fueling much of the ethnic hatred in the first place. 
+But even beyond that, coming back to the Internet, what you can actually see is that certain governments have mastered the use of cyberspace for propaganda purposes. Right? 
+And they are building what I call the Spinternet. 
+The combination of spin, on the one hand, and the Internet on the other. 
+So governments from Russia to China to Iran are actually hiring, training and paying bloggers in order to leave ideological comments and create a lot of ideological blog posts to comment on sensitive political issues. Right? 
+So you may wonder, why on Earth are they doing it? 
+Why are they engaging with cyberspace? 
+Well my theory is that it's happening because censorship actually is less effective than you think it is in many of those places. 
+The moment you put something critical in a blog, even if you manage to ban it immediately, it will still spread around thousands and thousands of other blogs. 
+So the more you block it, the more it emboldens people to actually avoid the censorship and thus win in this cat-and-mouse game. 
+So the only way to control this message is actually to try to spin it and accuse anyone who has written something critical of being, for example, a CIA agent. 
+And, again, this is happening quite often. 
+Just to give you an example of how it works in China, for example. 
+There was a big case in February 2009 called "" Elude the Cat. "" And for those of you who didn't know, I'll just give a little summary. 
+So what happened is that a 24-year-old man, a Chinese man, died in prison custody. 
+And police said that it happened because he was playing hide and seek, which is "" elude the cat "" in Chinese slang, with other inmates and hit his head against the wall, which was not an explanation which sat well with many Chinese bloggers. 
+So they immediately began posting a lot of critical comments. 
+In fact, QQ.com, which is a popular Chinese website, had 35,000 comments on this issue within hours. 
+But then authorities did something very smart. 
+Instead of trying to purge these comments, they instead went and reached out to the bloggers. 
+And they basically said, "" Look guys. We'd like you to become netizen investigators. "" So 500 people applied, and four were selected to actually go and tour the facility in question, and thus inspect it and then blog about it. 
+Within days the entire incident was forgotten, which would have never happened if they simply tried to block the content. 
+People would keep talking about it for weeks. 
+And this actually fits with another interesting theory about what's happening in authoritarian states and in their cyberspace. 
+This is what political scientists call authoritarian deliberation, and it happens when governments are actually reaching out to their critics and letting them engage with each other online. 
+We tend to think that somehow this is going to harm these dictatorships, but in many cases it only strengthens them. 
+And you may wonder why. 
+I'll just give you a very short list of reasons why authoritarian deliberation may actually help the dictators. 
+And first it's quite simple. 
+Most of them operate in a complete information vacuum. 
+They don't really have the data they need in order to identify emerging threats facing the regime. 
+So encouraging people to actually go online and share information and data on blogs and wikis is great because otherwise, low level apparatchiks and bureaucrats will continue concealing what's actually happening in the country, right? 
+So from this perspective, having blogs and wikis produce knowledge has been great. 
+Secondly, involving public in any decision making is also great because it helps you to share the blame for the policies which eventually fail. 
+Because they say, "" Well look, we asked you, we consulted you, you voted on it. 
+You put it on the front page of your blog. 
+Well, great. You are the one who is to blame. "" And finally, the purpose of any authoritarian deliberation efforts is usually to increase the legitimacy of the regimes, both at home and abroad. 
+So inviting people to all sorts of public forums, having them participate in decision making, it's actually great. 
+Because what happens is that then you can actually point to this initiative and say, "Well, we are having a democracy. We are having a forum." 
+Just to give you an example, one of the Russian regions, for example, now involves its citizens in planning its strategy up until year 2020. 
+Right? So they can go online and contribute ideas on what that region would look like by the year 2020. 
+I mean, anyone who has been to Russia would know that there was no planning in Russia for the next month. 
+So having people involved in planning for 2020 is not necessarily going to change anything, because the dictators are still the ones who control the agenda. 
+Just to give you an example from Iran, we all heard about the Twitter revolution that happened there, but if you look close enough, you'll actually see that many of the networks and blogs and Twitter and Facebook were actually operational. 
+They may have become slower, but the activists could still access it and actually argue that having access to them is actually great for many authoritarian states. 
+And it's great simply because they can gather open source intelligence. 
+In the past it would take you weeks, if not months, to identify how Iranian activists connect to each other. 
+Now you actually know how they connect to each other by looking at their Facebook page. 
+I mean KGB, and not just KGB, used to torture in order to actually get this data. 
+Now it's all available online. 
+(Laughter) But I think the biggest conceptual pitfall that cybertopians made is when it comes to digital natives, people who have grown up online. 
+We often hear about cyber activism, how people are getting more active because of the Internet. 
+Rarely hear about cyber hedonism, for example, how people are becoming passive. 
+Why? Because they somehow assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets, while in fact it may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography. 
+That's not an option being considered too strongly. 
+So for every digital renegade that is revolting in the streets of Tehran, there may as well be two digital captives who are actually rebelling only in the World of Warcraft. 
+And this is realistic. And there is nothing wrong about it because the Internet has greatly empowered many of these young people and it plays a completely different social role for them. 
+If you look at some of the surveys on how the young people actually benefit from the Internet, you'll see that the number of teenagers in China, for example, for whom the Internet actually broadens their sex life, is three times more than in the United States. 
+So it does play a social role, however it may not necessarily lead to political engagement. 
+So the way I tend to think of it is like a hierarchy of cyber-needs in space, a total rip-off from Abraham Maslow. 
+But the point here is that when we get the remote Russian village online, what will get people to the Internet is not going to be the reports from Human Rights Watch. 
+It's going to be pornography, "" Sex and the City, "" or maybe watching funny videos of cats. 
+So this is something you have to recognize. 
+So what should we do about it? 
+Well I say we have to stop thinking about the number of iPods per capita and start thinking about ways in which we can empower intellectuals, dissidents, NGOs and then the members of civil society. 
+Because even what has been happening up 'til now with the Spinternet and authoritarian deliberation, there is a great chance that those voices will not be heard. 
+So I think we should shatter some of our utopian assumptions and actually start doing something about it. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+A couple of years ago, Harvard Business School chose the best business model of that year. 
+It chose Somali piracy. 
+Pretty much around the same time, I discovered that there were 544 seafarers being held hostage on ships, often anchored just off the Somali coast in plain sight. 
+And I learned these two facts, and I thought, what's going on in shipping? 
+And I thought, would that happen in any other industry? 
+Would we see 544 airline pilots held captive in their jumbo jets on a runway for months, or a year? 
+Would we see 544 Greyhound bus drivers? 
+It wouldn't happen. 
+So I started to get intrigued. 
+And I discovered another fact, which to me was more astonishing almost for the fact that I hadn't known it before at the age of 42, 43. 
+That is how fundamentally we still depend on shipping. 
+Because perhaps the general public thinks of shipping as an old-fashioned industry, something brought by sailboat with Moby Dicks and Jack Sparrows. 
+But shipping isn't that. 
+Shipping is as crucial to us as it has ever been. 
+Shipping brings us 90 percent of world trade. 
+Shipping has quadrupled in size since 1970. 
+We are more dependent on it now than ever. 
+And yet, for such an enormous industry — there are a 100,000 working vessels on the sea — it's become pretty much invisible. 
+Now that sounds absurd in Singapore to say that, because here shipping is so present that you stuck a ship on top of a hotel. 
+(Laughter) But elsewhere in the world, if you ask the general public what they know about shipping and how much trade is carried by sea, you will get essentially a blank face. 
+You will ask someone on the street if they've heard of Microsoft. 
+I should think they'll say yes, because they'll know that they make software that goes on computers, and occasionally works. 
+But if you ask them if they've heard of Maersk, I doubt you'd get the same response, even though Maersk, which is just one shipping company amongst many, has revenues pretty much on a par with Microsoft. 
+[$60.2 billion] Now why is this? 
+A few years ago, the first sea lord of the British admiralty — he is called the first sea lord, although the chief of the army is not called a land lord — he said that we, and he meant in the industrialized nations in the West, that we suffer from sea blindness. 
+We are blind to the sea as a place of industry or of work. 
+It's just something we fly over, a patch of blue on an airline map. 
+Nothing to see, move along. 
+So I wanted to open my own eyes to my own sea blindness, so I ran away to sea. 
+A couple of years ago, I took a passage on the Maersk Kendal, a mid-sized container ship carrying nearly 7,000 boxes, and I departed from Felixstowe, on the south coast of England, and I ended up right here in Singapore five weeks later, considerably less jet-lagged than I am right now. 
+And it was a revelation. 
+We traveled through five seas, two oceans, nine ports, and I learned a lot about shipping. 
+And one of the first things that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was, where are all the people? 
+I have friends in the Navy who tell me they sail with 1,000 sailors at a time, but on Kendal there were only 21 crew. 
+Now that's because shipping is very efficient. 
+Containerization has made it very efficient. 
+Ships have automation now. 
+They can operate with small crews. 
+But it also means that, in the words of a port chaplain I once met, the average seafarer you're going to find on a container ship is either tired or exhausted, because the pace of modern shipping is quite punishing for what the shipping calls its human element, a strange phrase which they don't seem to realize sounds a little bit inhuman. 
+So most seafarers now working on container ships often have less than two hours in port at a time. 
+They don't have time to relax. 
+They're at sea for months at a time, and even when they're on board, they don't have access to what a five-year-old would take for granted, the Internet. 
+And another thing that surprised me when I got on board Kendal was who I was sitting next to — Not the queen; I can't imagine why they put me underneath her portrait — But around that dining table in the officer's saloon, I was sitting next to a Burmese guy, I was opposite a Romanian, a Moldavian, an Indian. 
+On the next table was a Chinese guy, and in the crew room, it was entirely Filipinos. 
+So that was a normal working ship. 
+Now how is that possible? 
+Because the biggest dramatic change in shipping over the last 60 years, when most of the general public stopped noticing it, was something called an open registry, or a flag of convenience. 
+Ships can now fly the flag of any nation that provides a flag registry. 
+You can get a flag from the landlocked nation of Bolivia, or Mongolia, or North Korea, though that's not very popular. 
+(Laughter) So we have these very multinational, global, mobile crews on ships. 
+And that was a surprise to me. 
+And when we got to pirate waters, down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait and into the Indian Ocean, the ship changed. 
+And that was also shocking, because suddenly, I realized, as the captain said to me, that I had been crazy to choose to go through pirate waters on a container ship. 
+We were no longer allowed on deck. 
+There were double pirate watches. 
+And at that time, there were those 544 seafarers being held hostage, and some of them were held hostage for years because of the nature of shipping and the flag of convenience. 
+Not all of them, but some of them were, because for the minority of unscrupulous ship owners, it can be easy to hide behind the anonymity offered by some flags of convenience. 
+What else does our sea blindness mask? 
+Well, if you go out to sea on a ship or on a cruise ship, and look up to the funnel, you'll see very black smoke. 
+And that's because shipping has very tight margins, and they want cheap fuel, so they use something called bunker fuel, which was described to me by someone in the tanker industry as the dregs of the refinery, or just one step up from asphalt. 
+And shipping is the greenest method of transport. 
+In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. 
+But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. 
+So shipping emissions are about three to four percent, almost the same as aviation's. 
+And if you put shipping emissions on a list of the countries' carbon emissions, it would come in about sixth, somewhere near Germany. 
+It was calculated in 2009 that the 15 largest ships pollute in terms of particles and soot and noxious gases as much as all the cars in the world. 
+And the good news is that people are now talking about sustainable shipping. 
+There are interesting initiatives going on. 
+But why has it taken so long? 
+When are we going to start talking and thinking about shipping miles as well as air miles? 
+I also traveled to Cape Cod to look at the plight of the North Atlantic right whale, because this to me was one of the most surprising things about my time at sea, and what it made me think about. 
+We know about man's impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing, but we don't really know much about what's happening underneath the water. 
+And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures. 
+Light doesn't penetrate beneath the surface of the water, so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 800 species of fish communicate by sound. 
+And a North Atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles. 
+A humpback can transmit a sound across a whole ocean. 
+But a supertanker can also be heard coming across a whole ocean, and because the noise that propellers make underwater is sometimes at the same frequency that whales use, then it can damage their acoustic habitat, and they need this for breeding, for finding feeding grounds, for finding mates. 
+And the acoustic habitat of the North Atlantic right whale has been reduced by up to 90 percent. 
+But there are no laws governing acoustic pollution yet. 
+And when I arrived in Singapore, and I apologize for this, but I didn't want to get off my ship. 
+I'd really loved being on board Kendal. 
+I'd been well treated by the crew, I'd had a garrulous and entertaining captain, and I would happily have signed up for another five weeks, something that the captain also said I was crazy to think about. 
+But I wasn't there for nine months at a time like the Filipino seafarers, who, when I asked them to describe their job to me, called it "" dollar for homesickness. "" They had good salaries, but theirs is still an isolating and difficult life in a dangerous and often difficult element. 
+But when I get to this part, I'm in two minds, because I want to salute those seafarers who bring us 90 percent of everything and get very little thanks or recognition for it. 
+I want to salute the 100,000 ships that are at sea that are doing that work, coming in and out every day, bringing us what we need. 
+But I also want to see shipping, and us, the general public, who know so little about it, to have a bit more scrutiny, to be a bit more transparent, to have 90 percent transparency. 
+Because I think we could all benefit from doing something very simple, which is learning to see the sea. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to apologize, first of all, to all of you because I have no form of PowerPoint presentation. 
+So what I'm going to do is, every now and again, I will make this gesture, and in a moment of PowerPoint democracy, you can imagine what you'd like to see. 
+I do a radio show. 
+The radio show is called "" The Infinite Monkey Cage. "" It's about science, it's about rationalism. 
+So therefore, we get a lot of complaints every single week — complaints including one we get very often, which is to say the very title, "" Infinite Monkey Cage, "" celebrates the idea of vivisection. 
+We have made it quite clear to these people that an infinite monkey cage is roomy. 
+(Laughter) We also had someone else who said, "" 'The Infinite Monkey Cage' idea is ridiculous. 
+An infinite number of monkeys could never write the works of Shakespeare. 
+We know this because they did an experiment. "" Yes, they gave 12 monkeys a typewriter for a week, and after a week, they only used it as a bathroom. 
+(Laughter) So the main element though, the main complaint we get — and one that I find most worrying — is that people say, "" Oh, why do you insist on ruining the magic? 
+You bring in science, and it ruins the magic. "" Now I'm an arts graduate; I love myth and magic and existentialism and self-loathing. 
+That's what I do. 
+But I also don't understand how it does ruin the magic. 
+All of the magic, I think, that may well be taken away by science is then replaced by something as wonderful. 
+Astrology, for instance: like many rationalists, I'm a Pisces. 
+(Laughter) Now astrology — we remove the banal idea that your life could be predicted; that you'll, perhaps today, meet a lucky man who's wearing a hat. 
+That is gone. 
+But if we want to look at the sky and see predictions, we still can. 
+We can see predictions of galaxies forming, of galaxies colliding into each other, of new solar systems. 
+This is a wonderful thing. 
+If the Sun could one day — and indeed the Earth, in fact — if the Earth could read its own astrological, astronomical chart, one day it would say, "" Not a good day for making plans. 
+You'll been engulfed by a red giant. "" And that to me as well, that if you think I'm worried about losing worlds, well Many Worlds theory — one of the most beautiful, fascinating, sometimes terrifying ideas from the quantum interpretation — is a wonderful thing. 
+That every person here, every decision that you've made today, every decision you've made in your life, you've not really made that decision, but in fact, every single permutation of those decisions is made, each one going off into a new universe. 
+That is a wonderful idea. 
+If you ever think that your life is rubbish, always remember there's another you that's made much worse decisions than that. 
+(Laughter) If you ever think, "" Ah, I want to end it all, "" don't end it all. 
+Remember that in the majority of universes, you don't even exist in the first place. 
+This to me, in its own strange way, is very, very comforting. 
+Now reincarnation, that's another thing gone — the afterlife. 
+But it's not gone. 
+Science actually says we will live forever. 
+Well, there is one proviso. 
+We won't actually live forever. You won't live forever. 
+Your consciousness, the you-ness of you, the me-ness of me — that gets this one go. 
+But every single thing that makes us, every atom in us, has already created a myriad of different things and will go on to create a myriad of new things. 
+We have been mountains and apples and pulsars and other people's knees. 
+Who knows, maybe one of your atoms was once Napoleon's knee. 
+That is a good thing. 
+Unlike the occupants of the universe, the universe itself is not wasteful. 
+We are all totally recyclable. 
+And when we die, we don't even have to be placed in different refuse sacs. 
+This is a wonderful thing. 
+Understanding, to me, does not remove the wonder and the joy. 
+For instance, my wife could turn to me and she may say, "Why do you love me?" 
+And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, "" Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors. "" (Laughter) Though I'll probably also say something about her hair and personality as well. 
+And that is a wonderful thing there. 
+Love does not die because of that thing. 
+Pain doesn't go away either. 
+This is a terrible thing, even though I understand pain. 
+If someone punches me — and because of my personality, this is recently a regular occurrence — I understand where the pain comes from. 
+It is basically momentum to energy where the four-vector is constant — that's what it is. 
+But at no point can I react and go, "Ha! Is that the best momentum-to-energy fourth vector constant you've got?" 
+No, I just spit out a tooth. 
+(Laughter) And that is all of these different things �� the love for my child. 
+I have a son. His name is Archie. 
+I'm very lucky, because he's better than all the other children. 
+Now I know you don't think that. 
+You may well have your own children and think, "" Oh no, my child's best. "" That's the wonderful thing about evolution — the predilection to believe that our child is best. 
+Now in many ways, that's just a survival thing. 
+The fact we see here is the vehicle for our genes, and therefore we love it. 
+But we don't notice that bit; we just unconditionally love. 
+That is a wonderful thing. 
+Though I should say that my son is best and is better than your children. 
+I've done some tests. 
+And all of these things to me give such joy and excitement and wonder. 
+Even quantum mechanics can give you an excuse for bad housework, for instance. 
+Perhaps you've been at home for a week on your own. 
+You house is in a terrible state. 
+Your partner is about to return. 
+You think, what should I do? 
+Do nothing. 
+All you have to do is, when she walks in, using a quantum interpretation, say, "" I'm so sorry. 
+I stopped observing the house for a moment, and when I started observing again, everything had happened. "" (Laughter) That's the strong anthropic principle of vacuuming. 
+For me, it's a very, very important thing. 
+Even on my journey up here — the joy that I have on my journey up here every single time. 
+If you actually think, you remove the myth and there is still something wonderful. 
+I'm sitting on a train. 
+Every time I breathe in, I'm breathing in a million-billion-billion atoms of oxygen. 
+I'm sitting on a chair. 
+Even though I know the chair is made of atoms and therefore actually in many ways empty space, I find it comfortable. 
+I look out the window, and I realize that every single time we stop and I look out that window, framed in that window, wherever we are, I am observing more life than there is in the rest of the known universe beyond the planet Earth. 
+If you go to the safari parks on Saturn or Jupiter, you will be disappointed. 
+And I realize I'm observing this with the brain, the human brain, the most complex thing in the known universe. 
+That, to me, is an incredible thing. 
+And do you know what, that might be enough. 
+Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate, once said, "" The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. "" Now for some people, that seems to lead to an idea of nihilism. 
+But for me, it doesn't. That is a wonderful thing. 
+I'm glad the universe is pointless. 
+It means if I get to the end of my life, the universe can't turn to me and go, "" What have you been doing, you idiot? 
+That's not the point. "" I can make my own purpose. 
+You can make your own purpose. 
+We have the individual power to go, "" This is what I want to do. "" And in a pointless universe, that, to me, is a wonderful thing. 
+I have chosen to make silly jokes about quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen interpretation. 
+You, I imagine, can do much better things with your time. 
+Thank you very much. Goodbye. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar. 
+(Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar. 
+Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. 
+We're all liars. 
+What I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building. 
+Now, speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, "" Liespotting, "" no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no. 
+They say, "" It's okay, we'll email you. "" (Laughter) I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. 
+My husband's like, "" Honey, deception? 
+Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking? "" So before I get started, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. 
+Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, "" Gotcha! Gotcha! 
+I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying. "" No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. 
+They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. 
+And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. 
+Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie. 
+So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to. 
+Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. 
+Now not all lies are harmful. 
+Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. 
+We say, "" Nice song. "" "Honey, you don't look fat in that, no." 
+Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, "" You know, I just fished that email out of my Spam folder. 
+So sorry. "" But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. 
+Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. 
+Deception can cost billions. 
+Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. 
+Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us. 
+Deception is actually serious business. 
+This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man, British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. 
+He said, "" Look, I've got one rule. "" And this was Henry's rule, he said, "" Look, everyone is willing to give you something. 
+We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer — the list goes on. 
+Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like. 
+And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies. 
+On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. 
+Now granted, many of those are white lies. 
+But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. 
+(Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. 
+We can't believe how prevalent lying is. 
+We're essentially against lying. 
+But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. 
+We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. 
+Extroverts lie more than introverts. 
+Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. 
+Women lie more to protect other people. 
+If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. 
+Now, you may think that's bad. 
+If you're unmarried, that number drops to three. 
+It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. 
+We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives. 
+We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. 
+It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. 
+(Laughter) Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. 
+Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive. 
+Now you might remember Koko. 
+Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language? 
+Here's Koko with her kitten. 
+It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten. 
+Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall. 
+(Laughter) We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack. 
+How early? 
+Well babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who's coming and then go right back to crying. 
+One-year-olds learn concealment. 
+(Laughter) Two-year-olds bluff. 
+Five-year-olds lie outright. 
+They manipulate via flattery. 
+Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover-up. 
+By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions. 
+By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with Spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic — in short, what one author calls a post-truth society. 
+Well, there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass. 
+Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. 
+The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate. 
+Why is it so easy to learn? 
+There are good liars and bad liars. 
+I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. 
+And these allegations are false. 
+And I need to go back to work for the American people. 
+(Applause) Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs? 
+Well first we heard what's known as a non-contracted denial. 
+Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language. 
+We also heard distancing language: "" that woman. "" We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool. 
+Now if Bill Clinton had said, "" Well, to tell you the truth... "" or Richard Nixon's favorite, "" In all candor... "" he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter that knows that qualifying language, as it's called, qualifying language like that, further discredits the subject. 
+Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail — and we're all really glad he didn't do that — he would have further discredited himself. 
+Freud said, look, there's much more to it than speech: "" No mortal can keep a secret. 
+If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. "" And we all do it no matter how powerful you are. 
+We all chatter with our fingertips. 
+I'm going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who's chattering with his fingertips. 
+(Laughter) Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language. 
+With body language, here's what you've got to do. 
+You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. 
+Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. 
+Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. 
+Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. 
+But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. 
+Can you all spot the fake smile here? 
+You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. 
+But the real smile's in the eyes, the crow's feet of the eyes. 
+They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox. 
+Don't overdo the Botox; nobody will think you're honest. 
+Now we're going to look at the hot spots. 
+Can you tell what's happening in a conversation? 
+Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions? 
+Now, I know it seems really obvious, but when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators. 
+They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. 
+They're going to say, "Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks." 
+Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. 
+That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. 
+Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places. 
+And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order. 
+And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells. 
+We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. 
+We say "" yes, "" we shake our heads "" no. "" We tell very convincing stories, we slightly shrug our shoulders. 
+We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. 
+Now, that smile is known in the trade as "" duping delight. "" And we're going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we're going to start — for those of you who don't know him, this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock. 
+We're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test. 
+See now if you can spot him saying, "" yes "" while shaking his head "" no, "" slightly shrugging his shoulders. 
+(Video) John Edwards: I'd be happy to participate in one. 
+Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen. 
+Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody — JE: Well, I'm only one side. I'm only one side of the test. 
+But I'm happy to participate in one. 
+Murderers are known to leak sadness. 
+Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger. 
+And we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous and it's easy to learn, and that's the expression of contempt. 
+It's associated with moral superiority. 
+And for that reason, it's very, very hard to recover from. 
+Here's what it looks like. 
+It's marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. 
+It's the only asymmetrical expression. 
+And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows — and it doesn't always follow — look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, "" No thank you. I'm not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you. "" Science has surfaced many, many more indicators. 
+We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit. 
+They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them. 
+They'll alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower. 
+Now here's the deal. 
+These behaviors are just behaviors. 
+They're not proof of deception. 
+They're red flags. 
+We're human beings. 
+We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long. 
+Look, listen, probe, ask some hard questions, get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing, walk into curiosity mode, ask more questions, have a little dignity, treat the person you're talking to with rapport. 
+And as I promised, we're now going to look at what the truth looks like. 
+And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. 
+This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. 
+And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother. 
+What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. 
+And if you look closely, you'll see duping delight throughout this video. 
+That bothers me the most. 
+PM: Now I'm going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in court. 
+Here you're going to see no false emotion, just the authentic expression of a mother's agony. 
+(Video) Erin Runnion: I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby, and you hurt her, and you crushed her, you terrified her until her heart stopped. 
+And she fought, and I know she fought you. 
+But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her. 
+And I don't understand it, and I never will. 
+Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it. 
+We know, for example, that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive. 
+And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day. 
+But you've got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door? 
+They know, as someone once said, "Character's who you are in the dark." 
+And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness. 
+Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. 
+It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. 
+So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. 
+Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency — character integrity — that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter. 
+So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code. 
+When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. 
+You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, "" Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one. 
+My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized. "" And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit. 
+And that's the truth. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+There's a medical revolution happening all around us, and it's one that's going to help us conquer some of society's most dreaded conditions, including cancer. 
+And what that means is that as adults, blood vessels don't normally grow. 
+In women, blood vessels grow every month, to build the lining of the uterus. 
+And this is actually what it looks like, hundreds of blood vessels, all growing toward the center of the wound. 
+It does this through an elaborate and elegant system of checks and balances, stimulators and inhibitors of angiogenesis, such that, when we need a brief burst of blood vessels, the body can do this by releasing stimulators, proteins called angiogenic factors, that act as natural fertilizer, and stimulate new blood vessels to sprout. 
+There are other situations where we start beneath the baseline, and we need to grow more blood vessels, just to get back to normal levels — for example, after an injury — and the body can do that too, but only to that normal level, that set point. 
+But what we now know, is that for a number of diseases, there are defects in the system, where the body can't prune back extra blood vessels, or can't grow enough new ones in the right place at the right time. 
+For example, insufficient angiogenesis — not enough blood vessels — leads to wounds that don't heal, heart attacks, legs without circulation, death from stroke, nerve damage. 
+Yet, without a blood supply, most of these cancers will never become dangerous. 
+Dr. Judah Folkman, who was my mentor and who was the pioneer of the angiogenesis field, once called this "" cancer without disease. "" So the body's ability to balance angiogenesis, when it's working properly, prevents blood vessels from feeding cancers. 
+And this turns out to be one of our most important defense mechanisms against cancer. 
+Cancer cells mutate, and they gain the ability to release lots of those angiogenic factors, natural fertilizer, that tip the balance in favor of blood vessels invading the cancer. 
+And once those vessels invade the cancer, it can expand, it can invade local tissues, and the same vessels that are feeding tumors allow cancer cells to exit into the circulation as metastases. 
+So, if angiogenesis is a tipping point between a harmless cancer and a harmful one, then one major part of the angiogenesis revolution is a new approach to treating cancer by cutting off the blood supply. 
+In effect, when we give cancer patients antiangiogenic therapy — here, an experimental drug for a glioma, which is a type of brain tumor — you can see that there are dramatic changes that occur when the tumor is being starved. 
+Well, I've just shown you two very different types of cancer that both responded to antiangiogenic therapy. 
+So a few years ago, I asked myself, "" Can we take this one step further and treat other cancers, even in other species? "" So here is a nine year-old boxer named Milo, who had a very aggressive tumor called a malignant neurofibroma growing on his shoulder. 
+So we created a cocktail of antiangiogenic drugs that could be mixed into his dog food, as well as an antiangiogenic cream, that could be applied on the surface of the tumor. 
+We have about a 60 percent response rate, and improved survival for these pets that were about to be euthanized. 
+(Applause) Now obviously, antiangiogenic therapy could be used for a wide range of cancers. 
+But the real question is: How well do these work in practice? 
+So I started asking myself, "Why haven't we been able to do better?" 
+So to look for a way to prevent angiogenesis in cancer, I went back to look at cancer's causes. 
+And what really intrigued me, was when I saw that diet accounts for 30 to 35 percent of environmentally-caused cancers. 
+And our search for this has taken us to the market, the farm and to the spice cabinet, because what we've discovered is that Mother Nature has laced a large number of foods and beverages and herbs with naturally-occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis. 
+The active ingredient is resveratrol, it's also found in red wine. 
+This inhibits abnormal angiogenesis, by 60 percent. 
+And we want to measure this because, well, while you're eating a strawberry or drinking tea, why not select the one that's most potent for preventing cancer? 
+So here are four different teas that we've tested. 
+They're all common ones: Chinese jasmine, Japanese sencha, Earl Grey and a special blend that we prepared, and you can see clearly that the teas vary in their potency, from less potent to more potent. 
+And here are some common drugs that have been associated with reducing the risk of cancer in people. 
+Statins, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and a few others — they inhibit angiogenesis, too. 
+And here are the dietary factors going head-to-head against these drugs. 
+You can see they clearly hold their own, and in some cases, they're more potent than the actual drugs. 
+Well, the best example I know is a study of 79,000 men followed over 20 years, in which it was found that men who consumed cooked tomatoes two to three times a week, had up to a 50 percent reduction in their risk of developing prostate cancer. 
+So this human study is a prime example of how antiangiogenic substances present in food and consumed at practical levels, can have an impact on cancer. 
+And we're now studying the role of a healthy diet — with Dean Ornish at UCSF and Tufts University — the role of this healthy diet on markers of angiogenesis that we can find in the bloodstream. 
+Because if we're right, it could impact consumer education, food services, public health and even the insurance industry. 
+Now, finally, I've talked to you about food, and I've talked to you about cancer, so there's just one more disease that I have to tell you about, and that's obesity. 
+Because it turns out that adipose tissue — fat — is highly angiogenesis-dependent. 
+The truly interesting thing about this is that we can't take these obese mice and make them lose more weight than what the normal mouse's weight is supposed to be. 
+Albert Szent-Györgi once said, "" Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one has thought. "" I hope I've convinced you that for diseases like cancer, obesity and other conditions, there may be a great power in attacking their common denominator: angiogenesis. 
+Do you recommend pursuing these treatments now, for most cancer patients? 
+The Angiogenesis Foundation is following almost 300 companies, and there are about 100 more drugs in that pipeline. 
+So, consider the approved ones, look for clinical trials, but then between what the doctor can do for you, we need to start asking what can we do for ourselves. 
+And if Mother Nature has given us some clues, we think there might be a new future in the value of how we eat, and what we eat is really our chemotherapy three times a day. 
+JC: Right. And along those lines, for people who might have risk factors for cancer, would you recommend pursuing any treatments prophylactically, or simply pursuing the right diet, with lots of tomato sauce? 
+
+Now I'm going to give you a story. 
+It's an Indian story about an Indian woman and her journey. 
+Let me begin with my parents. 
+I'm a product of this visionary mother and father. 
+Many years ago, when I was born in the '50s —' 50s and '60s didn't belong to girls in India. 
+They belonged to boys. 
+They belonged to boys who would join business and inherit business from parents, and girls would be dolled up to get married. 
+My family, in my city, and almost in the country, was unique. 
+We were four of us, not one, and fortunately no boys. 
+We were four girls and no boys. 
+And my parents were part of a landed property family. 
+My father defied his own grandfather, almost to the point of disinheritance, because he decided to educate all four of us. 
+He sent us to one of the best schools in the city and gave us the best education. 
+As I've said, when we're born, we don't choose our parents, and when we go to school, we don't choose our school. 
+Children don't choose a school. 
+They just get the school which parents choose for them. 
+So this is the foundation time which I got. 
+I grew up like this, and so did my other three sisters. 
+And my father used to say at that time, "I'm going to spread all my four daughters in four corners of the world." 
+I don't know if he really meant [that], but it happened. 
+I'm the only one who's left in India. 
+One is a British, another is an American and the third is a Canadian. 
+So we are four of us in four corners of the world. 
+And since I said they're my role models, I followed two things which my father and mother gave me. 
+One, they said, "" Life is on an incline. 
+You either go up, or you come down. "" And the second thing, which has stayed with me, which became my philosophy of life, which made all the difference, is: 100 things happen in your life, good or bad. 
+Out of 100, 90 are your creation. 
+They're good. They're your creation. Enjoy it. 
+If they're bad, they're your creation. Learn from it. 
+Ten are nature-sent over which you can't do a thing. 
+It's like a death of a relative, or a cyclone, or a hurricane, or an earthquake. 
+You can't do a thing about it. 
+You've got to just respond to the situation. 
+But that response comes out of those 90 points. 
+Since I'm a product of this philosophy, of 90 / 10, and secondly, "" life on an incline, "" that's the way I grew up to be valuing what I got. 
+I'm a product of opportunities, rare opportunities in the '50s and the' 60s, which girls didn't get, and I was conscious of the fact that what my parents were giving me was something unique. 
+Because all of my best school friends were getting dolled up to get married with a lot of dowry, and here I was with a tennis racket and going to school and doing all kinds of extracurricular activities. 
+I thought I must tell you this. 
+Why I said this, is the background. 
+This is what comes next. 
+I joined the Indian Police Service as a tough woman, a woman with indefatigable stamina, because I used to run for my tennis titles, etc. 
+But I joined the Indian Police Service, and then it was a new pattern of policing. 
+For me the policing stood for power to correct, power to prevent and power to detect. 
+This is something like a new definition ever given in policing in India — the power to prevent. 
+Because normally it was always said, power to detect, and that's it, or power to punish. 
+But I decided no, it's a power to prevent, because that's what I learned when I was growing up. 
+How do I prevent the 10 and never make it more than 10? 
+So this was how it came into my service, and it was different from the men. 
+I didn't want to make it different from the men, but it was different, because this was the way I was different. 
+And I redefined policing concepts in India. 
+I'm going to take you on two journeys, my policing journey and my prison journey. 
+What you see, if you see the title called "" PM's car held. "" This was the first time a prime minister of India was given a parking ticket. 
+(Laughter) That's the first time in India, and I can tell you, that's the last time you're hearing about it. 
+It'll never happen again in India, because now it was once and forever. 
+And the rule was, because I was sensitive, I was compassionate, I was very sensitive to injustice, and I was very pro-justice. 
+That's the reason, as a woman, I joined the Indian Police Service. 
+I had other options, but I didn't choose them. 
+So I'm going to move on. 
+This is about tough policing, equal policing. 
+Now I was known as "" here's a woman that's not going to listen. "" So I was sent to all indiscriminate postings, postings which others would say no. 
+I now went to a prison assignment as a police officer. 
+Normally police officers don't want to do prison. 
+They sent me to prison to lock me up, thinking, "" Now there will be no cars and no VIPs to be given tickets to. 
+Let's lock her up. "" Here I got a prison assignment. 
+This was a prison assignment which was one big den of criminals. 
+Obviously, it was. 
+But 10,000 men, of which only 400 were women — 10,000 — 9,000 plus about 600 were men. 
+Terrorists, rapists, burglars, gangsters — some of them I'd sent to jail as a police officer outside. 
+And then how did I deal with them? 
+The first day when I went in, I didn't know how to look at them. 
+And I said, "" Do you pray? "" When I looked at the group, I said, "" Do you pray? "" They saw me as a young, short woman wearing a pathan suit. I said, "" Do you pray? "" 
+And they didn't say anything. 
+I said, "" Do you pray? Do you want to pray? "" They said, "" Yes. "" I said, "" All right, let's pray. "" I prayed for them, and things started to change. 
+This is a visual of education inside the prison. 
+Friends, this has never happened, where everybody in the prison studies. 
+I started this with community support. 
+Government had no budget. 
+It was one of the finest, largest volunteerism in any prison in the world. 
+This was initiated in Delhi prison. 
+You see one sample of a prisoner teaching a class. 
+These are hundreds of classes. 
+Nine to eleven, every prisoner went into the education program — the same den in which they thought they would put me behind the bar and things would be forgotten. 
+We converted this into an ashram — from a prison to an ashram through education. 
+I think that's the bigger change. 
+It was the beginning of a change. 
+Teachers were prisoners. Teachers were volunteers. 
+Books came from donated schoolbooks. 
+Stationery was donated. 
+Everything was donated, because there was no budget of education for the prison. 
+Now if I'd not done that, it would have been a hellhole. 
+That's the second landmark. 
+I want to show you some moments of history in my journey, which probably you would never ever get to see anywhere in the world. 
+One, the numbers you'll never get to see. 
+Secondly, this concept. 
+This was a meditation program inside the prison of over 1,000 prisoners. 
+One thousand prisoners who sat in meditation. 
+This was one of the most courageous steps I took as a prison governor. 
+And this is what transformed. 
+You want to know more about this, go and see this film, "" Doing Time, Doing Vipassana. "" You will hear about it, and you will love it. 
+And write to me on KiranBedi.com, and I'll respond to you. 
+Let me show you the next slide. 
+I took the same concept of mindfulness, because, why did I bring meditation into the Indian prison? 
+Because crime is a product of a distorted mind. 
+It was distortion of mind which needed to be addressed to control. 
+Not by preaching, not by telling, not by reading, but by addressing your mind. 
+I took the same thing to the police, because police, equally, were prisoners of their minds, and they felt as if it was "" we "" and "" they, "" and that the people don't cooperate. 
+This worked. 
+This is a feedback box called a petition box. 
+This is a concept which I introduced to listen to complaints, listen to grievances. 
+This was a magic box. 
+This was a sensitive box. 
+This is how a prisoner drew how they felt about the prison. 
+If you see somebody in the blue — yeah, this guy — he was a prisoner, and he was a teacher. 
+And you see, everybody's busy. There was no time to waste. 
+Let me wrap it up. 
+I'm currently into movements, movements of education of the under-served children, which is thousands — India is all about thousands. 
+Secondly is about the anti-corruption movement in India. 
+That's a big way we, as a small group of activists, have drafted an ombudsman bill for the government of India. 
+Friends, you will hear a lot about it. 
+That's the movement at the moment I'm driving, and that's the movement and ambition of my life. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. 
+Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
+
+In the spring of 2016, a legal battle between Apple and the Federal Bureau of Investigation captured the world's attention. 
+Apple has built security features into its mobile products which protect data on its devices from everyone but the owner. 
+That means that criminals, hackers and yes, even governments are all locked out. 
+For Apple's customers, this is a great thing. 
+You see, Apple has made a conscious decision to get out of the surveillance business. 
+Apple has tried to make surveillance as difficult as possible for governments and any other actors. 
+There are really two smartphone operating systems in the global smartphone market: iOS and Android. 
+iOS is made by Apple. Android is made by Google. 
+Apple has spent a lot of time and money to make sure that its products are as secure as possible. 
+Apple encrypts all data stored on iPhones by default, and text messages sent from one Apple customer to another Apple customer are encrypted by default without the user having to take any actions. 
+What this means is that, if the police seize an iPhone and it has a password, they'll have a difficult time getting any data off of it, if they can do it at all. 
+In contrast, the security of Android just really isn't as good. 
+Android phones, or at least most of the Android phones that have been sold to consumers, do not encrypt data stored on the device by default, and the built-in text messaging app in Android does not use encryption. 
+So if the police seize an Android phone, chances are, they'll be able to get all the data they want off of that device. 
+Two smartphones from two of the biggest companies in the world; one that protects data by default, and one that doesn't. 
+Apple is a seller of luxury goods. 
+It dominates the high end of the market. 
+And we would expect a manufacturer of luxury goods to have products that include more features. 
+But not everyone can afford an iPhone. 
+That's where Android really, really dominates: at the middle and low end of the market, smartphones for the billion and a half people who cannot or will not spend 600 dollars on a phone. 
+But the dominance of Android has led to what I call the "" digital security divide. "" That is, there is now increasingly a gap between the privacy and security of the rich, who can afford devices that secure their data by default, and of the poor, whose devices do very little to protect them by default. 
+So, think of the average Apple customer: a banker, a lawyer, a doctor, a politician. 
+These individuals now increasingly have smartphones in their pockets that encrypt their calls, their text messages, all the data on the device, without them doing really anything to secure their information. 
+In contrast, the poor and the most vulnerable in our societies are using devices that leave them completely vulnerable to surveillance. 
+In the United States, where I live, African-Americans are more likely to be seen as suspicious or more likely to be profiled, and are more likely to be targeted by the state with surveillance. 
+But African-Americans are also disproportionately likely to use Android devices that do nothing at all to protect them from that surveillance. 
+This is a problem. 
+We must remember that surveillance is a tool. 
+It's a tool used by those in power against those who have no power. 
+And while I think it's absolutely great that companies like Apple are making it easy for people to encrypt, if the only people who can protect themselves from the gaze of the government are the rich and powerful, that's a problem. 
+And it's not just a privacy or a cybersecurity problem. 
+It's a civil rights problem. 
+So the lack of default security in Android is not just a problem for the poor and vulnerable users who are depending on these devices. 
+This is actually a problem for our democracy. 
+I'll explain what I mean. 
+Modern social movements rely on technology — from Black Lives Matter to the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. 
+The organizers of these movements and the members of these movements increasingly communicate and coordinate with smartphones. 
+And so, naturally governments that feel threatened by these movements will also target the organizers and their smartphones. 
+Now, it's quite possible that a future Martin Luther King or a Mandela or a Gandhi will have an iPhone and be protected from government surveillance. 
+But chances are, they'll probably have a cheap, $20 Android phone in their pocket. 
+And so if we do nothing to address the digital security divide, if we do nothing to ensure that everyone in our society gets the same benefits of encryption and is equally able to protect themselves from surveillance by the state, not only will the poor and vulnerable be exposed to surveillance, but future civil rights movements may be crushed before they ever reach their full potential. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Helen Walters: Chris, thank you so much. 
+We saw recently in the press that Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook covers over his camera and does something with his headphone mic jack. 
+So I wanted to ask you a personal question, which is: Do you do that? 
+It's really terrifying. 
+And there's obviously a sexual violence component to this, which is that this kind of surveillance can be used most effectively against women and other people who can be shamed in our society. 
+Even if you think you have nothing to hide, at the very least, if you have children, teenagers in your lives, make sure you put a sticker on their camera and protect them. 
+
+Mobility in developing world cities is a very peculiar challenge, because different from health or education or housing, it tends to get worse as societies become richer. 
+Clearly, a unsustainable model. 
+Mobility, as most other developing country problems, more than a matter of money or technology, is a matter of equality, equity. 
+The great inequality in developing countries makes it difficult to see, for example, that in terms of transport, an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport. 
+Or bicycles: For example, in Amsterdam, more than 30 percent of the population uses bicycles, despite the fact that the Netherlands has a higher income per capita than the United States. 
+There is a conflict in developing world cities for money, for government investment. 
+If more money is invested in highways, of course there is less money for housing, for schools, for hospitals, and also there is a conflict for space. 
+There is a conflict for space between those with cars and those without them. 
+Most of us accept today that private property and a market economy is the best way to manage most of society's resources. 
+However, there is a problem with that, that market economy needs inequality of income in order to work. 
+Some people must make more money, some others less. 
+Some companies succeed. Others fail. 
+Then what kind of equality can we hope for today with a market economy? 
+I would propose two kinds which both have much to do with cities. 
+The first one is equality of quality of life, especially for children, that all children should have, beyond the obvious health and education, access to green spaces, to sports facilities, to swimming pools, to music lessons. 
+And the second kind of equality is one which we could call "" democratic equality. "" The first article in every constitution states that all citizens are equal before the law. 
+That is not just poetry. 
+It's a very powerful principle. 
+For example, if that is true, a bus with 80 passengers has a right to 80 times more road space than a car with one. 
+We have been so used to inequality, sometimes, that it's before our noses and we do not see it. 
+Less than 100 years ago, women could not vote, and it seemed normal, in the same way that it seems normal today to see a bus in traffic. 
+In fact, when I became mayor, applying that democratic principle that public good prevails over private interest, that a bus with 100 people has a right to 100 times more road space than a car, we implemented a mass transit system based on buses in exclusive lanes. 
+We called it TransMilenio, in order to make buses sexier. 
+And one thing is that it is also a very beautiful democratic symbol, because as buses zoom by, expensive cars stuck in traffic, it clearly is almost a picture of democracy at work. 
+In fact, it's not just a matter of equity. 
+It doesn't take Ph.D. 's. 
+A committee of 12-year-old children would find out in 20 minutes that the most efficient way to use scarce road space is with exclusive lanes for buses. 
+In fact, buses are not sexy, but they are the only possible means to bring mass transit to all areas of fast growing developing cities. 
+They also have great capacity. 
+For example, this system in Guangzhou is moving more passengers our direction than all subway lines in China, except for one line in Beijing, at a fraction of the cost. 
+We fought not just for space for buses, but we fought for space for people, and that was even more difficult. 
+Cities are human habitats, and we humans are pedestrians. 
+Just as fish need to swim or birds need to fly or deer need to run, we need to walk. 
+There is a really enormous conflict, when we are talking about developing country cities, between pedestrians and cars. 
+Here, what you see is a picture that shows insufficient democracy. 
+What this shows is that people who walk are third-class citizens while those who go in cars are first-class citizens. 
+In terms of transport infrastructure, what really makes a difference between advanced and backward cities is not highways or subways but quality sidewalks. 
+Here they made a flyover, probably very useless, and they forgot to make a sidewalk. 
+This is prevailing all over the world. 
+Not even schoolchildren are more important than cars. 
+In my city of Bogotá, we fought a very difficult battle in order to take space from cars, which had been parking on sidewalks for decades, in order to make space for people that should reflect dignity of human beings, and to make space for protected bikeways. 
+First of all, I had black hair before that. 
+(Laughter) And I was almost impeached in the process. 
+It is a very difficult battle. 
+However, it was possible, finally, after very difficult battles, to make a city that would reflect some respect for human dignity, that would show that those who walk are equally important to those who have cars. 
+Indeed, a very important ideological and political issue anywhere is how to distribute that most valuable resource of a city, which is road space. 
+A city could find oil or diamonds underground and it would not be so valuable as road space. 
+How to distribute it between pedestrians, bicycles, public transport and cars? 
+This is not a technological issue, and we should remember that in no constitution parking is a constitutional right when we make that distribution. 
+We also built, and this was 15 years ago, before there were bikeways in New York or in Paris or in London, it was a very difficult battle as well, more than 350 kilometers of protected bicycle ways. 
+I don't think protected bicycle ways are a cute architectural feature. 
+They are a right, just as sidewalks are, unless we believe that only those with access to a motor vehicle have a right to safe mobility, without the risk of getting killed. 
+And just as busways are, protected bikeways also are a powerful symbol of democracy, because they show that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to one in a $30,000 car. 
+And we are living in a unique moment in history. 
+In the next 50 years, more than half of those cities which will exist in the year 2060 will be built. 
+In many developing country cities, more than 80 and 90 percent of the city which will exist in 2060 will be built over the next four or five decades. 
+But this is not just a matter for developing country cities. 
+In the United States, for example, more than 70 million new homes must be built over the next 40 or 50 years. 
+That's more than all the homes that today exist in Britain, France and Canada put together. 
+And I believe that our cities today have severe flaws, and that different, better ones could be built. 
+What is wrong with our cities today? 
+Well, for example, if we tell any three-year-old child who is barely learning to speak in any city in the world today, "Watch out, a car," the child will jump in fright, and with a very good reason, because there are more than 10,000 children who are killed by cars every year in the world. 
+We have had cities for 8,000 years, and children could walk out of home and play. 
+In fact, only very recently, towards 1900, there were no cars. 
+Cars have been here for really less than 100 years. 
+They completely changed cities. 
+In 1900, for example, nobody was killed by cars in the United States. 
+Only 20 years later, between 1920 and 1930, almost 200,000 people were killed by cars in the United States. 
+Only in 1925, almost 7,000 children were killed by cars in the United States. 
+So we could make different cities, cities that will give more priority to human beings than to cars, that will give more public space to human beings than to cars, cities which show great respect for those most vulnerable citizens, such as children or the elderly. 
+I will propose to you a couple of ingredients which I think would make cities much better, and it would be very simple to implement them in the new cities which are only being created. 
+Hundreds of kilometers of greenways criss-crossing cities in all directions. 
+Children will walk out of homes into safe spaces. 
+They could go for dozens of kilometers safely without any risk in wonderful greenways, sort of bicycle highways, and I would invite you to imagine the following: a city in which every other street would be a street only for pedestrians and bicycles. 
+In new cities which are going to be built, this would not be particularly difficult. 
+When I was mayor of Bogotá, in only three years, we were able to create 70 kilometers, in one of the most dense cities in the world, of these bicycle highways. 
+And this changes the way people live, move, enjoy the city. 
+In this picture, you see in one of the very poor neighborhoods, we have a luxury pedestrian bicycle street, and the cars still in the mud. 
+Of course, I would love to pave this street for cars. 
+But what do we do first? 
+Ninety-nine percent of the people in those neighborhoods don't have cars. 
+But you see, when a city is only being created, it's very easy to incorporate this kind of infrastructure. 
+Then the city grows around it. 
+And of course this is just a glimpse of something which could be much better if we just create it, and it changes the way of life. 
+And the second ingredient, which would solve mobility, that very difficult challenge in developing countries, in a very low-cost and simple way, would be to have hundreds of kilometers of streets only for buses, buses and bicycles and pedestrians. 
+This would be, again, a very low-cost solution if implemented from the start, low cost, pleasant transit with natural sunlight. 
+But unfortunately, reality is not as good as my dreams. 
+Because of private property of land and high land prices, all developing country cities have a large problem of slums. 
+In my country of Colombia, almost half the homes in cities initially were illegal developments. 
+And of course it's very difficult to have mass transit or to use bicycles in such environments. 
+But even legal developments have also been located in the wrong places, very far from the city centers where it's impossible to provide low-cost, high-frequency public transport. 
+As a Latin American, and Latin America was the most recently organized region in the world, I would recommend, respectfully, passionately, to those countries which are yet to urbanize — Latin America went from 40 percent urban in 1950 to 80 percent urban in 2010 — I would recommend Asian and African countries which are yet to urbanize, such as India which is only 33 percent urban now, that governments should acquire all land around cities. 
+In this way, their cities could grow in the right places with the right spaces, with the parks, with the greenways, with the busways. 
+The cities we are going to build over the next 50 years will determine quality of life and even happiness for billions of people towards the future. 
+What a fantastic opportunity for leaders and many young leaders to come, especially in the developing countries. 
+They can create a much happier life for billions towards the future. 
+I am sure, I am optimistic, that they will make cities better than our most ambitious dreams. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, well, I do applied math, and this is a peculiar problem for anyone who does applied math, is that we are like management consultants. 
+No one knows what the hell we do. 
+So I am going to give you some — attempt today to try and explain to you what I do. 
+So, dancing is one of the most human of activities. 
+We delight at ballet virtuosos and tap dancers you will see later on. 
+Now, ballet requires an extraordinary level of expertise and a high level of skill, and probably a level of initial suitability that may well have a genetic component to it. 
+Now, sadly, neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease gradually destroy this extraordinary ability, as it is doing to my friend Jan Stripling, who was a virtuoso ballet dancer in his time. 
+So great progress and treatment has been made over the years. 
+However, there are 6.3 million people worldwide who have the disease, and they have to live with incurable weakness, tremor, rigidity and the other symptoms that go along with the disease, so what we need are objective tools to detect the disease before it's too late. 
+We need to be able to measure progression objectively, and ultimately, the only way we're going to know when we actually have a cure is when we have an objective measure that can answer that for sure. 
+But frustratingly, with Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, there are no biomarkers, so there's no simple blood test that you can do, and the best that we have is like this 20-minute neurologist test. 
+You have to go to the clinic to do it. It's very, very costly, and that means that, outside the clinical trials, it's just never done. It's never done. 
+But what if patients could do this test at home? 
+Now, that would actually save on a difficult trip to the clinic, and what if patients could do that test themselves, right? 
+No expensive staff time required. 
+Takes about $300, by the way, in the neurologist's clinic to do it. 
+So what I want to propose to you as an unconventional way in which we can try to achieve this, because, you see, in one sense, at least, we are all virtuosos like my friend Jan Stripling. 
+So here we have a video of the vibrating vocal folds. 
+Now, this is healthy and this is somebody making speech sounds, and we can think of ourselves as vocal ballet dancers, because we have to coordinate all of these vocal organs when we make sounds, and we all actually have the genes for it. FoxP2, for example. 
+And like ballet, it takes an extraordinary level of training. 
+I mean, just think how long it takes a child to learn to speak. 
+From the sound, we can actually track the vocal fold position as it vibrates, and just as the limbs are affected in Parkinson's, so too are the vocal organs. 
+So on the bottom trace, you can see an example of irregular vocal fold tremor. 
+We see all the same symptoms. 
+We see vocal tremor, weakness and rigidity. 
+The speech actually becomes quieter and more breathy after a while, and that's one of the example symptoms of it. 
+So these vocal effects can actually be quite subtle, in some cases, but with any digital microphone, and using precision voice analysis software in combination with the latest in machine learning, which is very advanced by now, we can now quantify exactly where somebody lies on a continuum between health and disease using voice signals alone. 
+So these voice-based tests, how do they stack up against expert clinical tests? We'll, they're both non-invasive. 
+The neurologist's test is non-invasive. They both use existing infrastructure. 
+You don't have to design a whole new set of hospitals to do it. 
+And they're both accurate. Okay, but in addition, voice-based tests are non-expert. 
+That means they can be self-administered. 
+They're high-speed, take about 30 seconds at most. 
+They're ultra-low cost, and we all know what happens. 
+When something becomes ultra-low cost, it becomes massively scalable. 
+So here are some amazing goals that I think we can deal with now. 
+We can reduce logistical difficulties with patients. 
+No need to go to the clinic for a routine checkup. 
+We can do high-frequency monitoring to get objective data. 
+We can perform low-cost mass recruitment for clinical trials, and we can make population-scale screening feasible for the first time. 
+We have the opportunity to start to search for the early biomarkers of the disease before it's too late. 
+So, taking the first steps towards this today, we're launching the Parkinson's Voice Initiative. 
+With Aculab and PatientsLikeMe, we're aiming to record a very large number of voices worldwide to collect enough data to start to tackle these four goals. 
+We have local numbers accessible to three quarters of a billion people on the planet. 
+Anyone healthy or with Parkinson's can call in, cheaply, and leave recordings, a few cents each, and I'm really happy to announce that we've already hit six percent of our target just in eight hours. 
+Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Tom Rielly: So Max, by taking all these samples of, let's say, 10,000 people, you'll be able to tell who's healthy and who's not? 
+What are you going to get out of those samples? 
+Max Little: Yeah. Yeah. So what will happen is that, during the call you have to indicate whether or not you have the disease or not, you see. TR: Right. 
+ML: You see, some people may not do it. They may not get through it. 
+But we'll get a very large sample of data that is collected from all different circumstances, and it's getting it in different circumstances that matter because then we are looking at ironing out the confounding factors, and looking for the actual markers of the disease. 
+TR: So you're 86 percent accurate right now? 
+ML: It's much better than that. 
+Actually, my student Thanasis, I have to plug him, because he's done some fantastic work, and now he has proved that it works over the mobile telephone network as well, which enables this project, and we're getting 99 percent accuracy. 
+TR: Ninety-nine. Well, that's an improvement. 
+So what that means is that people will be able to — ML: (Laughs) TR: People will be able to call in from their mobile phones and do this test, and people with Parkinson's could call in, record their voice, and then their doctor can check up on their progress, see where they're doing in this course of the disease. 
+ML: Absolutely. 
+TR: Thanks so much. Max Little, everybody. 
+ML: Thanks, Tom. (Applause) 
+
+(Music) ♫ They stood together ♫ ♫ under a tree in tall grass ♫ ♫ on TV ♫ ♫ telling the world ♫ ♫ their story ♫ ♫ We will be left to wander ♫ ♫ and fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and took our husbands ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ We will live on ♫ ♫ then fade away ♫ ♫ Soldiers came and killed our children ♫ ♫ at the break of day ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I believe ♫ 
+♫ I believe the almighty knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ You've got something this little life ♫ ♫ can never take away ♫ ♫ Running through the darkness of night ♫ ♫ with a child by her side ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Oh Lord, won't you give them ♫ ♫ a shining armor of light ♫ ♫ Daybreak brings a sign of new life ♫ 
+♫ with the power to stand ♫ ♫ Crossing the border ♫ ♫ she said, "" You will grow free on this land "" ♫ ♫ Women of hope ♫ ♫ Women of change ♫ ♫ Women of war and pain ♫ ♫ I can feel your power ♫ ♫ in these words she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ ♫ to keep on living ♫ ♫ Nobody really knows ♫ ♫ how far they will go ♫ 
+♫ to keep on giving ♫ ♫ and forgiving ♫ ♫ Aung San Suu Kyi ♫ ♫ living under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ under house arrest ♫ ♫ for her peaceful protest ♫ ♫ When her people asked her for a message ♫ ♫ she said ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ Now we know the words, let's sing. ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ ♫ If you're feeling helpless ♫ ♫ help someone ♫ 
+♫ People of hope ♫ ♫ People of change ♫ ♫ People of love, joy, no shame ♫ ♫ I believe the almighty ♫ ♫ knows each and every one of you ♫ ♫ by your name ♫ Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Last year here at TED I asked you to give me your data, to put your data on the web, on the basis that if people put data onto the web — government data, scientific data, community data, whatever it is — it will be used by other people to do wonderful things, in ways that they never could have imagined. 
+So, today I'm back just to show you a few things, to show you, in fact, there is an open data movement afoot, now, around the world. 
+The cry of "" Raw data now! "" which I made people make in the auditorium, was heard around the world. 
+So, let's roll the video. 
+A classic story, the first one which lots of people picked up, was when in March — on March 10th in fact, soon after TED — Paul Clarke, in the U.K. government, blogged, "" Oh, I've just got some raw data. Here it is, it's about bicycle accidents. "" Two days it took the Times Online to make a map, a mashable map — we call these things mash-ups — a mashed-up user interface that allows you to go in there and have a look and find out whether your bicycle route to work was affected. 
+Here's more data, traffic survey data, again, put out by the U.K. government, and because they put it up using the Linked Data standards, then a user could just make a map, just by clicking. 
+Does this data affect things? Well, let's get back to 2008. 
+Look at Zanesville, Ohio. 
+Here's a map a lawyer made. He put on it the water plant, and which houses are there, which houses have been connected to the water. 
+And he got, from other data sources, information to show which houses are occupied by white people. 
+Well, there was too much of a correlation, he felt, between which houses were occupied by white people and which houses had water, and the judge was not impressed either. 
+The judge was not impressed to the tune of 10.9 million dollars. 
+That's the power of taking one piece of data, another piece of data, putting it together, and showing the result. 
+Let's look at some data from the U.K. now. 
+This is U.K. government data, a completely independent site, Where Does My Money Go. 
+It allows anybody to go there and burrow down. 
+You can burrow down by a particular type of spending, or you can go through all the different regions and compare them. 
+So, that's happening in the U.K. with U.K. government data. 
+Yes, certainly you can do it over here. 
+Here's a site which allows you to look at recovery spending in California. 
+Take an arbitrary example, Long Beach, California, you can go and have a look at what recovery money they've been spending on different things such as energy. 
+In fact, this is the graph of the number of data sets in the repositories of data.gov, and data.gov.uk. 
+And I'm delighted to see a great competition between the U.K. in blue, and the U.S. in red. 
+How can you use this stuff? 
+Well, for example, if you have lots of data about places you can take, from a postcode — which is like a zip plus four — for a specific group of houses, you can make paper, print off a paper which has got very, very specific things about the bus stops, the things specifically near you. 
+On a larger scale, this is a mash-up of the data which was released about the Afghan elections. 
+It allows you to set your own criteria for what sort of things you want to look at. 
+The red circles are polling stations, selected by your criteria. 
+And then you can select also other things on the map to see what other factors, like the threat level. 
+So, that was government data. 
+I also talked about community-generated data — in fact I edited some. 
+This is the wiki map, this is the Open Street Map. 
+"" Terrace Theater "" I actually put on the map because it wasn't on the map before TED last year. 
+I was not the only person editing the open street map. 
+Each flash on this visualization — put together by ITO World — shows an edit in 2009 made to the Open Street Map. 
+Let's now spin the world during the same year. 
+Every flash is an edit. Somebody somewhere looking at the Open Street Map, and realizing it could be better. 
+You can see Europe is ablaze with updates. 
+Some places, perhaps not as much as they should be. 
+Here focusing in on Haiti. 
+The map of Port au-Prince at the end of 2009 was not all it could be, not as good as the map of California. 
+Fortunately, just after the earthquake, GeoEye, a commercial company, released satellite imagery with a license, which allowed the open-source community to use it. 
+This is January, in time lapse, of people editing... that's the earthquake. 
+After the earthquake, immediately, people all over the world, mappers who wanted to help, and could, looked at that imagery, built the map, quickly building it up. 
+We're focusing now on Port-au-Prince. 
+The light blue is refugee camps these volunteers had spotted from the [satellite images]. 
+So, now we have, immediately, a real-time map showing where there are refugee camps — rapidly became the best map to use if you're doing relief work in Port-au-Prince. 
+Witness the fact that it's here on this Garmin device being used by rescue team in Haiti. 
+There's the map showing, on the left-hand side, that hospital — actually that's a hospital ship. 
+This is a real-time map that shows blocked roads, damaged buildings, refugee camps — it shows things that are needed [for rescue and relief work]. 
+So, if you've been involved in that at all, I just wanted to say: Whatever you've been doing, whether you've just been chanting, "" Raw data now! "" or you've been putting government or scientific data online, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say: Thank you very much, and we have only just started! 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm an ecologist, mostly a coral reef ecologist. 
+I started out in Chesapeake Bay and went diving in the winter and became a tropical ecologist overnight. 
+And it was really a lot of fun for about 10 years. 
+I mean, somebody pays you to go around and travel and look at some of the most beautiful places on the planet. 
+And that was what I did. 
+And I ended up in Jamaica, in the West Indies, where the coral reefs were really among the most extraordinary, structurally, that I ever saw in my life. 
+And this picture here, it's really interesting, it shows two things: First of all, it's in black and white because the water was so clear and you could see so far, and film was so slow in the 1960s and early 70s, you took pictures in black and white. 
+The other thing it shows you is that, although there's this beautiful forest of coral, there are no fish in that picture. 
+Those reefs at Discovery Bay, Jamaica were the most studied coral reefs in the world for 20 years. 
+We were the best and the brightest. 
+People came to study our reefs from Australia, which is sort of funny because now we go to theirs. 
+And the view of scientists about how coral reefs work, how they ought to be, was based on these reefs without any fish. 
+Then, in 1980, there was a hurricane, Hurricane Allen. 
+I put half the lab up in my house. 
+The wind blew very strong. 
+The waves were 25 to 50 feet high. 
+And the reefs disappeared, and new islands formed, and we thought, "" Well, we're real smart. 
+We know that hurricanes have always happened in the past. "" And we published a paper in Science, the first time that anybody ever described the destruction on a coral reef by a major hurricane. 
+And we predicted what would happen, and we got it all wrong. 
+And the reason was because of overfishing, and the fact that a last common grazer, a sea urchin, died. 
+And within a few months after that sea urchin dying, the seaweed started to grow. 
+And that is the same reef; that's the same reef 15 years ago; that's the same reef today. 
+The coral reefs of the north coast of Jamaica have a few percent live coral cover and a lot of seaweed and slime. 
+And that's more or less the story of the coral reefs of the Caribbean, and increasingly, tragically, the coral reefs worldwide. 
+Now, that's my little, depressing story. 
+All of us in our 60s and 70s have comparable depressing stories. 
+There are tens of thousands of those stories out there, and it's really hard to conjure up much of a sense of well-being, because it just keeps getting worse. 
+And the reason it keeps getting worse is that after a natural catastrophe, like a hurricane, it used to be that there was some kind of successional sequence of recovery, but what's going on now is that overfishing and pollution and climate change are all interacting in a way that prevents that. 
+And so I'm going to sort of go through and talk about those three kinds of things. 
+We hear a lot about the collapse of cod. 
+It's difficult to imagine that two, or some historians would say three world wars were fought during the colonial era for the control of cod. 
+Cod fed most of the people of Western Europe. 
+It fed the slaves brought to the Antilles, the song "" Jamaica Farewell "" — "" Ackee rice salt fish are nice "" — is an emblem of the importance of salt cod from northeastern Canada. 
+It all collapsed in the 80s and the 90s: 35,000 people lost their jobs. 
+And that was the beginning of a kind of serial depletion from bigger and tastier species to smaller and not-so-tasty species, from species that were near to home to species that were all around the world, and what have you. 
+It's a little hard to understand that, because you can go to a Costco in the United States and buy cheap fish. 
+You ought to read the label to find out where it came from, but it's still cheap, and everybody thinks it's okay. 
+It's hard to communicate this, and one way that I think is really interesting is to talk about sport fish, because people like to go out and catch fish. 
+It's one of those things. 
+This picture here shows the trophy fish, the biggest fish caught by people who pay a lot of money to get on a boat, go to a place off of Key West in Florida, drink a lot of beer, throw a lot of hooks and lines into the water, come back with the biggest and the best fish, and the champion trophy fish are put on this board, where people take a picture, and this guy is obviously really excited about that fish. 
+Well, that's what it's like now, but this is what it was like in the 1950s from the same boat in the same place on the same board on the same dock. 
+The trophy fish were so big that you couldn't put any of those small fish up on it. 
+And the average size trophy fish weighed 250 to 300 pounds, goliath grouper, and if you wanted to go out and kill something, you could pretty much count on being able to catch one of those fish. 
+And they tasted really good. 
+And people paid less in 1950 dollars to catch that than what people pay now to catch those little, tiny fish. 
+And that's everywhere. 
+It's not just the fish, though, that are disappearing. 
+Industrial fishing uses big stuff, big machinery. 
+We use nets that are 20 miles long. 
+We use longlines that have one million or two million hooks. 
+And we trawl, which means to take something the size of a tractor trailer truck that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds, put it on a big chain, and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish. 
+Think of it as being kind of the bulldozing of a city or of a forest, because it clears it away. 
+And the habitat destruction is unbelievable. 
+This is a photograph, a typical photograph, of what the continental shelves of the world look like. 
+You can see the rows in the bottom, the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been plowed to plant corn. 
+What that was, was a forest of sponges and coral, which is a critical habitat for the development of fish. 
+What it is now is mud, and the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud, to parking lot, is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down on all of the earth in the history of humanity. 
+We've managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years. 
+We tend to think of oil spills and mercury and we hear a lot about plastic these days. 
+And all of that stuff is really disgusting, but what's really insidious is the biological pollution that happens because of the magnitude of the shifts that it causes to entire ecosystems. 
+And I'm going to just talk very briefly about two kinds of biological pollution: one is introduced species and the other is what comes from nutrients. 
+So this is the infamous Caulerpa taxifolia, the so-called killer algae. 
+A book was written about it. 
+It's a bit of an embarrassment. 
+It was accidentally released from the aquarium in Monaco, it was bred to be cold tolerant to have in peoples aquaria. 
+It's very pretty, and it has rapidly started to overgrow the once very rich biodiversity of the northwestern Mediterranean. 
+I don't know how many of you remember the movie "The Little Shop of Horrors," but this is the plant of "" The Little Shop of Horrors. "" But, instead of devouring the people in the shop, what it's doing is overgrowing and smothering virtually all of the bottom-dwelling life of the entire northwestern Mediterranean Sea. 
+We don't know anything that eats it, we're trying to do all sorts of genetics and figure out something that could be done, but, as it stands, it's the monster from hell, about which nobody knows what to do. 
+Now another form of pollution that's biological pollution is what happens from excess nutrients. 
+The green revolution, all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we use too much of it. 
+It's subsidized, which is one of the reasons we used too much of it. 
+It runs down the rivers, and it feeds the plankton, the little microscopic plant cells in the coastal water. 
+But since we ate all the oysters and we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton, there's nothing to eat the plankton and there's more and more of it, so it dies of old age, which is unheard of for plankton. 
+And when it dies, it falls to the bottom and then it rots, which means that bacteria break it down. 
+And in the process they use up all the oxygen, and in using up all the oxygen they make the environment utterly lethal for anything that can't swim away. 
+So, what we end up with is a microbial zoo dominated by bacteria and jellyfish, as you see on the left in front of you. 
+And the only fishery left — and it is a commercial fishery — is the jellyfish fishery you see on the right, where there used to be prawns. 
+Even in Newfoundland where we used to catch cod, we now have a jellyfish fishery. 
+And another version of this sort of thing is what is often called red tides or toxic blooms. 
+That picture on the left is just staggering to me. 
+I have talked about it a million times, but it's unbelievable. 
+In the upper right of that picture on the left is almost the Mississippi Delta, and the lower left of that picture is the Texas-Mexico border. 
+You're looking at the entire northwestern Gulf of Mexico; you're looking at one toxic dinoflagellate bloom that can kill fish, made by that beautiful little creature on the lower right. 
+And in the upper right you see this black sort of cloud moving ashore. 
+That's the same species. 
+And as it comes to shore and the wind blows, and little droplets of the water get into the air, the emergency rooms of all the hospitals fill up with people with acute respiratory distress. 
+And that's retirement homes on the west coast of Florida. 
+A friend and I did this thing in Hollywood we called Hollywood ocean night, and I was trying to figure out how to explain to actors what's going on. 
+And I said, "" So, imagine you're in a movie called 'Escape from Malibu' because all the beautiful people have moved to North Dakota, where it's clean and safe. 
+And the only people who are left there are the people who can't afford to move away from the coast, because the coast, instead of being paradise, is harmful to your health. "" And then this is amazing. 
+It was when I was on holiday last early autumn in France. 
+This is from the coast of Brittany, which is being enveloped in this green, algal slime. 
+The reason that it attracted so much attention, besides the fact that it's disgusting, is that sea birds flying over it are asphyxiated by the smell and die, and a farmer died of it, and you can imagine the scandal that happened. 
+And so there's this war between the farmers and the fishermen about it all, and the net result is that the beaches of Brittany have to be bulldozed of this stuff on a regular basis. 
+And then, of course, there's climate change, and we all know about climate change. 
+I guess the iconic figure of it is the melting of the ice in the Arctic Sea. 
+Think about the thousands and thousands of people who died trying to find the Northwest Passage. 
+Well, the Northwest Passage is already there. 
+I think it's sort of funny; it's on the Siberian coast, maybe the Russians will charge tolls. 
+The governments of the world are taking this really seriously. 
+The military of the Arctic nations is taking it really seriously. 
+For all the denial of climate change by government leaders, the CIA and the navies of Norway and the U.S. and Canada, whatever are busily thinking about how they will secure their territory in this inevitability from their point of view. 
+And, of course, Arctic communities are toast. 
+The other kinds of effects of climate change — this is coral bleaching. It's a beautiful picture, right? 
+All that white coral. 
+Except it's supposed to be brown. 
+What happens is that the corals are a symbiosis, and they have these little algal cells that live inside them. 
+And the algae give the corals sugar, and the corals give the algae nutrients and protection. 
+But when it gets too hot, the algae can't make the sugar. 
+The corals say, "" You cheated. You didn't pay your rent. "" They kick them out, and then they die. 
+Not all of them die; some of them survive, some more are surviving, but it's really bad news. 
+To try and give you a sense of this, imagine you go camping in July somewhere in Europe or in North America, and you wake up the next morning, and you look around you, and you see that 80 percent of the trees, as far as you can see, have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked. 
+And you come home, and you discover that 80 percent of all the trees in North America and in Europe have dropped their leaves. 
+And then you read in the paper a few weeks later, "Oh, by the way, a quarter of those died." 
+Well, that's what happened in the Indian Ocean during the 1998 El Nino, an area vastly greater than the size of North America and Europe, when 80 percent of all the corals bleached and a quarter of them died. 
+And then the really scary thing about all of this — the overfishing, the pollution and the climate change — is that each thing doesn't happen in a vacuum. 
+But there are these, what we call, positive feedbacks, the synergies among them that make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts. 
+And the great scientific challenge for people like me in thinking about all this, is do we know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? 
+I mean, because we, at this point, we can protect it. 
+But what does that mean? 
+We really don't know. 
+So what are the oceans going to be like in 20 or 50 years? 
+Well, there won't be any fish except for minnows, and the water will be pretty dirty, and all those kinds of things and full of mercury, etc., etc. 
+And dead zones will get bigger and bigger and they'll start to merge, and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global, coastal ocean. 
+Then you sure won't want to eat fish that were raised in it, because it would be a kind of gastronomic Russian roulette. 
+Sometimes you have a toxic bloom; sometimes you don't. 
+That doesn't sell. 
+The really scary things though are the physical, chemical, oceanographic things that are happening. 
+As the surface of the ocean gets warmer, the water is lighter when it's warmer, it becomes harder and harder to turn the ocean over. 
+We say it becomes more strongly stratified. 
+The consequence of that is that all those nutrients that fuel the great anchoveta fisheries, of the sardines of California or in Peru or whatever, those slow down and those fisheries collapse. 
+And, at the same time, water from the surface, which is rich in oxygen, doesn't make it down and the ocean turns into a desert. 
+So the question is: How are we all going to respond to this? 
+And we can do all sorts of things to fix it, but in the final analysis, the thing we really need to fix is ourselves. 
+It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. 
+It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today. 
+So the question is: Will we respond to this or not? 
+I would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+These dragons from deep time are incredible creatures. 
+They're bizzarre, they're beautiful, and there's very little we know about them. 
+These thoughts were going through my head when I looked at the pages of my first dinosaur book. 
+I was about five years old at the time, and I decided there and then that I would become a paleontologist. 
+I've worked in the Sahara because I've been on a quest to uncover new remains of a bizarre, giant predatory dinosaur called Spinosaurus. 
+A few bones of this animal have been found in the deserts of Egypt and were described about 100 years ago by a German paleontologist. 
+Unfortunately, all his Spinosaurus bones were destroyed in World War II. 
+So all we're left with are just a few drawings and notes. 
+From these drawings, we know that this creature, which lived about 100 million years ago, was very big, it had tall spines on its back, forming a magnificent sail, and it had long, slender jaws, a bit like a crocodile, with conical teeth, that may have been used to catch slippery prey, like fish. 
+But that was pretty much all we knew about this animal for the next 100 years. 
+My fieldwork took me to the border region between Morocco and Algeria, a place called the Kem Kem. 
+It's a difficult place to work in. 
+You have to deal with sandstorms and snakes and scorpions, and it's very difficult to find good fossils there. 
+But our hard work paid off. 
+We found remains of giant predatory dinosaurs, medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, and seven or eight different kinds of crocodile-like hunters. 
+These fossils were deposited in a river system. 
+The river system was also home to a giant, car-sized coelacanth, a monster sawfish, and the skies over the river system were filled with pterosaurs, flying reptiles. 
+It was a pretty dangerous place, not the kind of place where you'd want to travel to if you had a time machine. 
+So we're finding all these incredible fossils of animals that lived alongside Spinosaurus, but Spinosaurus itself proved to be very elusive. 
+We were just finding bits and pieces and I was hoping that we'd find a partial skeleton at some point. 
+Finally, very recently, we were able to track down a dig site where a local fossil hunter found several bones of Spinosaurus. 
+We returned to the site, we collected more bones. 
+And so after 100 years we finally had another partial skeleton of this bizarre creature. 
+We now know that Spinosaurus had a head a little bit like a crocodile, very different from other predatory dinosaurs, very different from the T. rex. 
+But the really interesting information came from the rest of the skeleton. 
+We had long spines, the spines forming the big sail. 
+We had leg bones, we had skull bones, we had paddle-shaped feet, wide feet — again, very unusual, no other dinosaur has feet like this — and we think they may have been used to walk on soft sediment, or maybe for paddling in the water. 
+We also looked at the fine microstructure of the bone, the inside structure of Spinosaurus bones, and it turns out that they're very dense and compact. 
+Again, this is something we see in animals that spend a lot of time in the water, it's useful for buoyancy control in the water. 
+We C.T.-scanned all of our bones and built a digital Spinosaurus skeleton. 
+And when we looked at the digital skeleton, we realized that yes, this was a dinosaur unlike any other. 
+It's bigger than a T. rex, and yes, the head has "" fish-eating "" written all over it, but really the entire skeleton has "" water-loving "" written all over it — dense bone, paddle-like feet, and the hind limbs are reduced in size, and again, this is something we see in animals that spend a substantial amount of time in the water. 
+So, as we fleshed out our Spinosaurus — I'm looking at muscle attachments and wrapping our dinosaur in skin — we realize that we're dealing with a river monster, a predatory dinosaur, bigger than T. rex, the ruler of this ancient river of giants, feeding on the many aquatic animals I showed you earlier on. 
+So that's really what makes this an incredible discovery. 
+It's a dinosaur like no other. 
+And some people told me, "" Wow, this is a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. 
+There are not many things left to discover in the world. "" Well, I think nothing could be further from the truth. 
+I think the Sahara's still full of treasures, and when people tell me there are no places left to explore, I like to quote a famous dinosaur hunter, Roy Chapman Andrews, and he said, "" Always, there has been an adventure just around the corner — and the world is still full of corners. "" That was true many decades ago when Roy Chapman Andrews wrote these lines. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Kurt Andersen: Like many architects, David is a hog for the limelight but is sufficiently reticent — or at least pretends to be — that he asked me to question him rather than speaking. 
+In fact what we're going to talk about, I think, is in fact a subject that is probably better served by a conversation than an address. 
+And I guess we have a bit of news clip to precede. 
+Dan Rather: Since the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, many people have flocked to downtown New York to see and pay respects at what amounts to the 16-acre burial ground. 
+Now, as CBS's Jim Axelrod reports, they're putting the finishing touches on a new way for people to visit and view the scene. 
+Jim Axelrod: Forget the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. 
+There's a new place in New York where the crowds are thickest — Ground Zero. 
+Tourist: I've taken my step-daughter here from Indianapolis. 
+This was — out of all the tourist sites in New York City — this was her number-one pick. 
+JA: Thousands now line up on lower Broadway. 
+Tourist: I've been wanting to come down here since this happened. 
+JA: Even on the coldest winter days. 
+To honor and remember. 
+Tourist: It's reality, it's us. It happened here. 
+This is ours. 
+JA: So many, in fact, that seeing has become a bit of a problem. 
+Tourist: I think that people are very frustrated that they're not able to get closer to see what's going on. 
+JA: But that is about to change. 
+In record time, a team of architects and construction workers designed and built a viewing platform to ease the frustration and bring people closer. 
+Man: They'll get an incredible panorama and understand, I think more completely, the sheer totality of the destruction of the place. 
+JA: If you think about it, Ground Zero is unlike most any other tourist site in America. 
+Unlike the Grand Canyon or the Washington Monument, people come here to see what's no longer there. 
+David Rockwell: The first experience people will have here when they see this is not as a construction site but as this incredibly moving burial ground. 
+JA: The walls are bare by design, so people can fill them with their own memorials the way they already have along the current perimeter. 
+Tourist: From our hearts, it affected us just as much. 
+JA: The ramps are made of simple material — the kind of plywood you see at construction sites — which is really the whole point. 
+In the face of America's worst destruction people are building again. 
+Jim Axelrod, CBS News, New York. 
+KA: This is not an obvious subject to be in the sensuality segment, but certainly David you are known as — I know, a phrase you hate — an entertainment architect. 
+Your work is highly sensual, even hedonistic. 
+DR: I like that word. 
+KA: It's about pleasure — casinos and hotels and restaurants. 
+How did the shock that all of us — and especially all of us in New York — felt on the 11th of September transmute into your desire to do this thing? 
+DR: Well the truth of the matter is, post-September 11th, I felt myself in the role originally — first of all as someone who lives in Tribeca and whose neighborhood was devastated, and as someone who works less than a mile from there — that I was in the role of forcing 100 people who work with me in my firm, to continue to have the same level of enthusiasm about creating the places we had been creating. 
+In fact we're finishing a book which is called "" Pleasure, "" which is about sensual pleasure in spaces. 
+But I've got to tell you — it became impossible to do that. 
+We were really paralyzed. 
+And I found myself the Friday after September 11th — two days afterwards — literally unable to motivate anyone to do anything. 
+We gave the office a few days off. 
+And in discussing this with other architects, we had seen people saying in the press that they should rebuild the towers as they were — they should rebuild them 50 stories taller. 
+And I thought it was astonishing to speculate, as if this were a competition, on something that was such a fresh wound. 
+And I had a series of discussions — first with Rick Scofidio and Liz Diller, who collaborated with us on this, and several other people — and really felt like we had to find relevance in doing something. 
+And that as people who create places, the ultimate way to help wasn't to pontificate or to make up scenarios, but to help right now. 
+So we tried to come up with a way, as a group, to have a kind of design SWAT team. 
+And that was the mission that we came up with. 
+KA: Were you conscious of suddenly — as a designer whose work is all about fulfilling wants — suddenly fulfilling needs? 
+DR: Well what I was aware of was, there was this overwhelming need to act now. 
+And we were asked to participate in a few projects before this. 
+There was a school, PS 234, that had been evacuated down at Ground Zero. 
+They moved to an abandoned school. 
+We took about 20 or 30 architects and designers and artists, and over four days — it was like this urban barn-raising — to renovate it, and everyone wanted to help. 
+It was just extraordinary. 
+Tom Otterness contributed, Maira Kalman contributed and it became this cathartic experience for us. 
+KA: And that was done, effectively, by October 8 or something? 
+DR: Yeah. 
+KA: Obviously, what you faced in trying to do something as substantial as this project — and this is only one of four that you've designed to surround the site — you must have run up against the incredibly byzantine, entrenched bureaucracy and powers that be in New York real estate and New York politics. 
+DR: Well, it's a funny thing. 
+We finished PS 234, and had dinner with a small group. 
+I was actually asked to be a committee chair on an AIA committee to rebuild. 
+And I sat in on several meetings. 
+And there were the most circuitous grand plans that had to do with long-term infrastructure and rebuilding the entire city. 
+And the fact is that there were immediate wounds and needs that needed to be filled, and there was talk about inclusion and wanting it to be an inclusive process. 
+And it wasn't an inclusive group. 
+So we said, what is — KA: It was not an inclusive group? 
+DR: It was not an inclusive group. 
+It was predominantly a white, rich, corporate group that was not representative of the city. 
+KA: Shocking. 
+DR: Yeah, surprising. 
+So Rick and Liz and Kevin and I came up with the idea. 
+The city actually approached us. 
+We first approached the city about Pier 94. 
+We saw how PS 234 worked. 
+The families — the victims of the families — were going to this pier that was incredibly dehumanizing. 
+KA: On the Hudson River? 
+DR: Yeah. And the city actually — through Tim Zagat initially, and then through Christyne Nicholas, then we got to Giuliani — said, "" You know we don't want to do anything with Pier 94 right now, but we have an observation platform for the families down at Ground Zero that we'd like to be a more dignified experience for the families, and a way to protect it from the weather. "" So I went down there with Rick and Liz and Kevin, and I've got to say, it was the most moving experience of my life. 
+It was devastating to see the simple plywood platform with a rail around it, where the families of the victims had left notes to them. 
+And there was no mediation between us and the experience. 
+There was no filter. 
+And I remembered on September 11th, on 14th Street, the roof of our building — we can see the World Trade Towers prominently — and I saw the first building collapse from a conference room on the eighth floor on a TV that we had set up. 
+And then everyone was up on the roof, so I ran up there. 
+And it was amazing how much harder it was to believe in real life than it was on TV. 
+There was something about the comfort of the filter and how much information was between us and the experience. 
+So seeing this in a very simple, dignified way was a very powerful experience. 
+So we went back to the city and said we're not particularly interested in the upgrade of this as a VIP platform, but we've spent some time down there. 
+At the same time the city had this need. 
+They were looking for a solution to deal with 30 or 40 thousand people a day who were going down there, that had nowhere to go. 
+And there was no way to deal with the traffic around the site. 
+So dealing with it is just an immediate master plan. 
+There was a way — there had to be a way — to get people to move around the site. 
+KA: But then you've got to figure out a way — we will skip over the insanely tedious process of getting permits and getting everybody on board — but simply funding this thing. 
+It looks like a fairly simple thing, but this was a half a million dollar project? 
+DR: Well, we knew that if it wasn't privately funded, it wasn't going to happen. 
+And we also, frankly, knew that if it didn't happen by the end of the Giuliani administration, then everyone who we were dealing with at the DOT and the Police Department and all of the — we were meeting with 20 or 30 people with the city at a time, and it was set up by the Office of Emergency Management. 
+This incredible act on their part, because they really wanted this, and they sensed that this needed to happen. 
+KA: And there was therefore this ticking clock, because Giuliani was obviously out three months after that. 
+DR: Yeah. So the first thing we had to do was find a way to get this — we had to work with the families of the victims, through the city, to make sure that they knew this was happening. 
+Because this didn't want to be a surprise. 
+And we also had to be as under the radar screen as we could be in New York, because the key was not raising a lot of objection and sort of working as quietly as possible. 
+We came up with the idea of setting up a foundation, mainly because when we found a contractor who would build this, he would not agree to do this, even if we would pay him the money. 
+There needed to be a foundation in place. 
+So we came up with a foundation, and actually what happened was one major developer in New York — KA: Who shall remain nameless, I guess? 
+DR: Yeah. His initials are JS, and he owns Rockefeller Center, if that helps anyone — volunteered to help. 
+And we met with him. 
+The prices from the contractors were between five to 700,000 dollars. 
+And Atlantic-Heydt, who's the largest scaffolding contractor in the country, volunteered to do it at cost. 
+So this developer said, "" You know what, we'll underwrite the entire expense. "" And we said, "" That's incredible! "" And I think this was the 21st, and we knew this had to be built and up by the 28th. 
+And we had to start construction the next day. 
+We had a meeting that evening with his contractor of choice, and the contractor showed up with the drawings of the platform about half the size that we had drawn it. 
+KA: Sort of like the Spinal Tap scene where you get the tiny little Stonehenge, I guess? 
+(Laughter) DR: In fact, it was as if this was going to be window-washing scaffolding. 
+There was no sense of the fact that this is next to Saint Paul — that this is really a place that needs to be kind of dignified, and a place to reflect and remember. 
+And I've got to say that we spent a lot of time in putting this together, watching the crowds that gathered at Saint Paul — which is just to the right — and moving around the site. 
+And I live down there, so we spent a lot of time looking at the need. 
+And I think people were amazed at two things — I think they were amazed at the destruction, but I think there was a sense of disbelief about the heroics of New Yorkers that I found very moving. 
+Just the sort of everyday heroics of New Yorkers. 
+So we were in this meeting and the contractor literally said, "" I'm going to lock the door, because this developer will not agree to have you leave till you've signed off on this. "" And we said, "" Well, this is half the size, it doesn't have any of the design features that have been agreed upon by everyone — everyone in the city. 
+We'd have to go back to the beginning to do this. "" And I convinced him that we should leave the room with the agreement to build it as designed. 
+The next day I got an email from the developer saying that he was withdrawing all funding. 
+So we didn't know what to do, but we decided to cast a very wide net. 
+We emailed out letters to as many people as we could — several people in the audience here — who were very helpful. 
+KA: There was no thought of abandoning ship at that point? 
+DR: No. In fact I told the contractor to go ahead. 
+He had already ordered materials based on my go-ahead. 
+We knew that one way or another this was going to happen. 
+And we just felt it had to happen. 
+KA: You were funding it yourself and with contributions and this foundation. 
+Richard, I think very correctly, made the point at the beginning — before all the chair designers came out — about the history of chair designers imposing aesthetic solutions on this kind of universal, banal, common problem of sitting. 
+It seems to me with this, that it was the opposite of that. 
+This was an unprecedented, singular design problem. 
+DR: Well here's the issue: we knew that this was not in the sense of — we think about the site, and think about the need for a memorial. 
+It was important that this not be categorized as a memorial. 
+That this was a place for people to reflect, to remember — a kind of quiet place. 
+So it led us to using design solutions that created as few filters between the viewer — as we said about the families' platform — and the experience as possible. 
+It's all incredibly humble material. 
+It's scaffolding and plywood. 
+And it allows — by sort of the procession of the movement, up by Saint Paul's and down the other side — it gives you about 300 feet to go up 13 feet from the ground to where you get the 360 degree view. 
+But the design was driven by a need to be quick, cheap, safe, respectful, flexible. 
+One of the other things is this is designed to be moveable. 
+Because when we looked at the four platforms around the site, one of which is an upgrade of the families' platform, we knew that these had to be moveable to respond to changing conditions, and the changing definition of what Ground Zero is. 
+KA: Your work — I mean, we've talked about this before — a lot of your work, I think, is informed by your belief in, or your focus on the temporariness of all things and the evanescence of things, and a kind of "" Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die, "" sort of sense of existence. 
+This is clearly not a work for the ages. 
+You know, a couple of years this thing isn't going to be here. 
+Did that require, as an architect, a new way of thinking about what you were doing? 
+To think of it as this purely temporary installation? 
+DR: No, I don't think so. 
+I think this is, obviously, substantially different from anything we'd ever thought about doing before, just by the nature of it. 
+Where it overlaps with thoughts about our work in general is, number one — the notion of collaboration as a sort of way to get things done. 
+And Kevin Kennon, Rick Scofidio, Liz Diller and all the people within the city — Norman Lear, who I spoke to four hours before our deadline for funding, offered to give us a bridge loan to help us get through it. 
+So the notion of collaboration — I think this reinforces how important that is. 
+And in terms of the temporary nature of it, our goal was not to create something that would be there longer than it needed to be. 
+I think what we were most interested in was promoting a kind of dialogue that we felt may not have been happening enough in this city, about what's really happening there. 
+And a day or two before it opened was Giuliani's farewell address, where he proposed the idea of all of Ground Zero being a memorial. 
+Which was very controversial, but it resonated with a lot of people. 
+And I think regardless of what the position is about how this sacred piece of land is to be used, having it come out of actually seeing it in a real encounter, I think makes it a more powerful dialogue. 
+And that's what we were interested in. 
+So that, very much, is in the realm of things I've been interested in before. 
+KA: It seems to me, among other things, a lovely piece of civic infrastructure. 
+It enables that conversation to get serious. 
+And six months after the fact — and only a few months away from the site being cleaned — we are very quickly, now, getting to the point where those conversations about what should go there are getting serious. 
+Do you have — having been as physically involved in the site as you have been doing this project — have any ideas about what should or shouldn't be done? 
+DR: Well, I think one thing that shouldn't be done is evaluate — I think right now the discussion is a very closed discussion on the master plan. 
+The Protetch Gallery recently had a show on ideas for buildings, which had some sort of inventive ideas of buildings. 
+KA: But it had some really terrible ideas. 
+DR: And it also felt a little bit like a kind of competition of ideas, where I think the focus of ideas should be on master planning and uses. 
+And I think there should be a broader — which there's starting to be — the dialogue is really opening up to, what does this site really want to be? 
+And I truly believe until the issue of memorial is sorted out, that it's going to be very hard to have an intelligent discussion. 
+There's a few discussions right now that I think are very positive, about depressing the West Side Highway and connecting this over, so that there's one uninterrupted piece of land. 
+KA: Well, I think that's interesting. 
+And it gets to another issue that was probably inappropriate to discuss six months ago, but perhaps isn't now, which is, not many of us love the World Trade Center as a piece of architecture, as what it had done to this city and that huge plaza. 
+Is this an opportunity, is the silver lining — a silver lining, here — to rebuild some more traditional city grid, or not? 
+DR: I think there's a real opportunity to engage in a discussion of why we live in cities. 
+And why do we live in places where such dissimilar people collide up against us each day? 
+I don't think it has much to do with 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 thousand new office spaces, regardless of what the number is. 
+So yeah, I think there is a chance to re-look at how we think about cities. 
+And in fact, there's a proposal on the table now for building number seven. 
+KA: Which was the building just north of the Towers? 
+DR: Right, which the towers fell into. 
+And the reason that's been held up is essentially by community outrage that they're not re-opening the street to connect that back to the rest of the city. 
+I think a public dialogue — I think, you know, I'd like to see an international competition, and a call for ideas for uses. 
+KA: Whether it's arts, whether it's housing, whether it's what amount of shopping? 
+DR: Right. And we're looking for other things. 
+This small foundation we put together is looking for other ways to help. 
+Including taking a small piece adjacent to the site and inviting 10 architects who currently don't have a voice in New York to do artist housing. 
+And find other ways to encourage the discussion to be against sort of monolithic, single solutions, and more about a multiplicity of things. 
+KA: Before we end, I know you have a piece of digital video of the experience of being on this platform? 
+DR: John Kamen — who's here, actually — put together a two and a half minute piece that shows the platform in use. 
+So I thought that would be good to end with. 
+DR: We're looking from Fulton Street, west. 
+One of the tricky issues we had with the Giuliani administration was I had forgotten how anti-graffiti he was. 
+And essentially our structure was designed to be written on. 
+KA: As you say, it's not a memorial. 
+But were you conscious of memorials? The Vietnam Memorial? 
+Those kinds of forms? 
+DR: We certainly did as much research as we could, and we were conscious of other memorials. 
+And also the complexity and length of time they really take to do. 
+It's 350 people on the committee for Oklahoma City, which is why we thought of this as a sort of ad-hoc, spontaneous solution that expanded on Union Square and the places that were ad-hoc memorials in the city already. 
+The scaffolding you can see built up over the street is de-mountable. 
+What's interesting now is the nature of the site has totally changed, so that what you're aware of is not just the destruction of the buildings in Ground Zero, but all of the buildings around it — and the scars on the building around it, which are enormous. 
+This shows Saint Paul's on the left. 
+KA: I just want to thank you on behalf of New Yorkers for making this happen and getting this done. 
+But the kind of virtually instantaneous nature of its erection, and its being there, almost before you could believe that a response of this magnitude could be accomplished, is part of its extraordinary — I don't know if beauty is the word — but presence. 
+DR: It was an honor to do. 
+And we were thrilled to be able to show it here. 
+
+Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi. 
+Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes. 
+As we design these things, we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds, and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems. 
+Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are. 
+The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods. 
+The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system. 
+The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath, or not, and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch. 
+So, for example, when you touch a pencil, microbial exchange happens. 
+If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways. 
+I get asked all of the time from people, "Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?" 
+And I believe the answer is yes. 
+I think we're doing it right now, but we're doing it unconsciously. 
+I'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how, through both conscious and unconscious design, we're impacting these invisible worlds. 
+This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon, and I worked with a team of architects and biologists to sample over 300 rooms in this building. 
+We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building, and to do this, we sampled dust. 
+From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences. 
+This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project. 
+This is a picture of Tim, who, right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, he said, "" Jessica, the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, and things have changed dramatically for me. "" So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices, and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk. 
+The way that you look at this data is, first, look around the outside of the circle. 
+You'll see broad bacterial groups, and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group. 
+So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare. 
+Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building. 
+If you look inside the restrooms, they all have really similar ecosystems, and if you were to look inside the classrooms, those also have similar ecosystems. 
+But if you look across these space types, you can see that they're fundamentally different from one another. 
+I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest. 
+I told Tim, "" If you could just see the microbes, it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of. "" And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland. 
+This perspective is a really powerful one for designers, because you can bring on principles of ecology, and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal, the way organisms move around. 
+We know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air. 
+So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system. 
+Mechanical engineers design air handling units to make sure that people are comfortable, that the air flow and temperature is just right. 
+They do this using principles of physics and chemistry, but they could also be using biology. 
+If you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building, you'll see that they're all very similar to one another. 
+And if you compare this to the microbes in a different air handling unit, you'll see that they're fundamentally different. 
+The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago, and what that means is that mechanical engineers are like eco-engineers, and they have the ability to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to. 
+Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people, or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices. 
+Given that microbes travel around with people, you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes. 
+And that is exactly what we found. 
+If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another, they have very similar ecosystems, but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away, the ecosystem is fundamentally different. 
+And when I see the power that dispersal has on these biogeographic patterns, it makes me think that it's possible to tackle really challenging problems, like hospital-acquired infections. 
+I believe this has got to be, in part, a building ecology problem. 
+All right, I'm going to tell you one more story about this building. 
+I am collaborating with Charlie Brown. 
+He's an architect, and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change. 
+He's dedicated his life to sustainable design. 
+When he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building, he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did. 
+He went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health. 
+He helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated. 
+So what I'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building. 
+What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time. 
+Next I'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms. 
+We blocked them off at night so that they got no ventilation. 
+A lot of buildings are operated this way, probably where you work, and companies do this to save money on their energy bill. 
+What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again. 
+When you walked into those rooms, they smelled really bad, and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before. 
+Contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers. 
+In these rooms, the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well, and when Charlie saw this, he got really excited. 
+He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape. 
+The examples that I just gave you are about architecture, but they're relevant to the design of anything. 
+Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone. 
+There's a new microbe, I just discovered it. 
+It's called BLIS, and it's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath. 
+Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones? 
+A conscious approach to design, I'm calling it bioinformed design, and I think it's possible. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In the next 18 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey. 
+And it's a journey that you and I have been on for many years now, and it began some 50 years ago, when humans first stepped off our planet. 
+And in those 50 years, not only did we literally, physically set foot on the moon, but we have dispatched robotic spacecraft to all the planets — all eight of them — and we have landed on asteroids, we have rendezvoused with comets, and, at this point in time, we have a spacecraft on its way to Pluto, the body formerly known as a planet. 
+And all of these robotic missions are part of a bigger human journey: a voyage to understand something, to get a sense of our cosmic place, to understand something of our origins, and how Earth, our planet, and we, living on it, came to be. 
+And of all the places in the solar system that we might go to and search for answers to questions like this, there's Saturn. And we have been to Saturn before — we visited Saturn in the early 1980s — but our investigations of Saturn have become far more in-depth in detail since the Cassini spacecraft, traveling across interplanetary space for seven years, glided into orbit around Saturn in the summer of 2004, and became at that point the farthest robotic outpost that humanity had ever established around the Sun. 
+Now, the Saturn system is a rich planetary system. 
+It offers mystery, scientific insight and obviously splendor beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach. 
+In fact, just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies. 
+And here's a beautiful picture of the Andromeda Nebula, which is our closest, largest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. 
+And then, here's a beautiful composite of the Whirlpool Galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 
+So the journey back to Saturn is really part of and is also a metaphor for a much larger human voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us, and also how humans fit into that picture. 
+And it pains me that I can't tell you all that we have learned with Cassini. 
+I can't show you all the beautiful pictures that we've taken in the last two and a half years, because I simply don't have the time. 
+So I'm going to concentrate on two of the most exciting stories that have emerged out of this major exploratory expedition that we are conducting around Saturn, and have been for the past two and a half years. 
+Saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons. 
+They range in size from a few kilometers across to as big across as the U.S. 
+Most of the beautiful pictures we've taken of Saturn, in fact, show Saturn in accompaniment with some of its moons. Here's Saturn with Dione, and then, here's Saturn showing the rings edge-on, showing you just how vertically thin they are, with the moon Enceladus. 
+Now, two of the 47 moons that Saturn has are standouts. 
+And those are Titan and Enceladus. Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived there, was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system. 
+And it is a body that has long intrigued people who've watched the planets. 
+It has a very large, thick atmosphere, and in fact, its surface environment was believed to be more like the environment we have here on the Earth, or at least had in the past, than any other body in the solar system. 
+Its atmosphere is largely molecular nitrogen, like you are breathing here in this room, except that its atmosphere is suffused with simple organic materials like methane and propane and ethane. 
+And these molecules high up in the atmosphere of Titan get broken down, and their products join together to make haze particles. 
+This haze is ubiquitous. It's completely global and enveloping Titan. 
+And that's why you cannot see down to the surface with our eyes in the visible region of the spectrum. 
+But these haze particles, it was surmised, before we got there with Cassini, over billions and billions of years, gently drifted down to the surface and coated the surface in a thick organic sludge. 
+So like the equivalent, the Titan equivalent, of tar, or oil, or what — we didn't know what. 
+But this is what we suspected. And these molecules, especially methane and ethane, can be liquids at the surface temperatures of Titan. 
+And so it turns out that methane is to Titan what water is to the Earth. 
+It's a condensable in the atmosphere, and so recognizing this circumstance brought to the fore a whole world of bizarre possibilities. You can have methane clouds, OK, and above those clouds, you have this hundreds of kilometers of haze, which prevent any sunlight from getting to the surface. 
+The temperature at the surface is some 350 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. 
+But despite that cold, you could have rain falling down on the surface of Titan. 
+And doing on Titan what rain does on the Earth: it carves gullies; it forms rivers and cataracts; it can create canyons; it can pool in large basins and craters. 
+It can wash the sludge off high mountain peaks and hills, down into the lowlands. So stop and think for a minute. 
+Try to imagine what the surface of Titan might look like. 
+It's dark. High noon on Titan is as dark as deep earth twilight on the Earth. 
+It's cold, it's eerie, it's misty, it might be raining, and you might be standing on the shores of Lake Michigan brimming with paint thinner. (Laughter) That is the view that we had of the surface of Titan before we got there with Cassini, and I can tell you that what we have found on Titan, though it is not the same in detail, is every bit as fascinating as that story is. 
+And for us, it has been like — the Cassini people — it has been like a Jules Verne adventure come true. 
+As I said, it has a thick, extensive atmosphere. 
+This is a picture of Titan, backlit by the Sun, with the rings as a beautiful backdrop. 
+And yet another moon there — I don't even know which one it is. It's a very extensive atmosphere. 
+We have instruments on Cassini which can see down to the surface through this atmosphere, and my camera system is one of them. 
+And we have taken pictures like this. 
+And what you see is bright and dark regions, and that's about as far as it got for us. 
+It was so mystifying: we couldn't make out what we were seeing on Titan. 
+When you look closer at this region, you start to see things like sinuous channels — we didn't know. You see a few round things. 
+This, we later found out, is, in fact, a crater, but there are very few craters on the surface of Titan, meaning it's a very young surface. 
+And there are features that look tectonic. 
+They look like they've been pulled apart. 
+Whenever you see anything linear on a planet, it means there's been a fracture, like a fault. 
+And so it's been tectonically altered. 
+But we couldn't make sense of our images, until, six months after we got into orbit, an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of Cassini's investigation of Titan. 
+And that was the deployment of the Huygens probe, the European-built Huygens probe that Cassini had carried for seven years across the solar system. We deployed it to the atmosphere of Titan, it took two and a half hours to descend, and it landed on the surface. 
+And I just want to emphasize how significant an event this is. 
+This is a device of human making, and it landed in the outer solar system for the first time in human history. 
+It is so significant that, in my mind, this was an event that should have been celebrated with ticker tape parades in every city across the U.S. and Europe, and sadly, that wasn't the case. 
+(Laughter). 
+It was significant for another reason. This is an international mission, and this event was celebrated in Europe, in Germany, and the celebratory presentations were given in English accents, and American accents, and German accents, and French and Italian and Dutch accents. 
+It was a moving demonstration of what the words "" united nations "" are supposed to mean: a true union of nations joined together in a colossal effort for good. 
+And, in this case, it was a massive undertaking to explore a planet, and to come to understand a planetary system that, for all of human history, had been unreachable, and now humans had actually touched it. 
+So it was — I mean, I'm getting goose bumps just talking about it. 
+It was a tremendously emotional event, and it's something that I will personally never forget, and you shouldn't either. 
+(Applause). 
+But anyway, the probe took measurements of the atmosphere on the way down, and it also took panoramic pictures. 
+And I can't tell you what it was like to see the first pictures of Titan's surface from the probe. And this is what we saw. 
+And it was a shocker, because it was everything we wanted those other pictures taken from orbit to be. 
+It was an unambiguous pattern, a geological pattern. 
+It's a dendritic drainage pattern that can be formed only by the flow of liquids. 
+And you can follow these channels and you can see how they all converge. 
+And they converge into this channel here, which drains into this region. 
+You are looking at a shoreline. 
+Was this a shoreline of fluids? We didn't know. 
+But this is somewhat of a shoreline. 
+This picture is taken at 16 kilometers. 
+This is the picture taken at eight kilometers, OK? Again, the shoreline. 
+Okay, now, 16 kilometers, eight kilometers — this is roughly an airline altitude. 
+If you were going to take an airplane trip across the U.S., you would be flying at these altitudes. 
+So, this is the picture you would have at the window of Titanian Airlines as you fly across the surface of Titan. (Laughter) And then finally, the probe came to rest on the surface, and I'm going to show you, ladies and gentlemen, the first picture ever taken from the surface of a moon in the outer solar system. 
+And here is the horizon, OK? 
+These are probably water ice pebbles, yes? 
+(Applause). 
+And obviously, it landed in one of these flat, dark regions and it didn't sink out of sight. So it wasn't fluid that we landed in. 
+What the probe came down in was basically the Titan equivalent of a mud flat. 
+This is an unconsolidated ground that is suffused with liquid methane. 
+And it's probably the case that this material has washed off the highlands of Titan through these channels that we saw, and has drained over billions of years to fill in low-lying basins. 
+And that is what the Huygens probe landed in. 
+But still, there was no sign in our images, or even in the Huygens' images, of any large, open bodies of fluids. 
+Where were they? It got even more puzzling when we found dunes. 
+OK, so this is our movie of the equatorial region of Titan, showing these dunes. These are dunes that are 100 meters tall, separated by a few kilometers, and they go on for miles and miles and miles. 
+There's hundreds, up to a 1,000 or 1,200 miles of dunes. 
+This is the Saharan desert of Titan. 
+It's obviously a place which is very dry, or you wouldn't get dunes. 
+So again, it got puzzling that there were no bodies of fluid, until finally, we saw lakes in the polar regions. 
+And there is a lake scene in the south polar region of Titan. 
+It's about the size of Lake Ontario. 
+And then, only a week and a half ago, we flew over the north pole of Titan and found, again, we found a feature here the size of the Caspian Sea. 
+So it seems that the liquids, for some reason we don't understand, or during at least this season, are apparently at the poles of Titan. 
+And I think you would agree that we have found Titan is a remarkable, mystical place. It's exotic, it's alien, but yet strangely Earth-like, and having Earth-like geological formations and a tremendous geographical diversity, and is a fascinating world whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the Earth itself. 
+And so now we go onto Enceladus. Enceladus is a small moon, it's about a tenth the size of Titan. And you can see it here next to England, just to show you the size. This is not meant to be a threat. 
+(Laughter). 
+And Enceladus is very white, it's very bright, and its surface is obviously wrecked with fractures. 
+It is a very geologically active body. 
+But the mother lode of discoveries on Enceladus was found at the south pole — and we're looking at the south pole here — where we found this system of fractures. 
+And they're a different color because they're a different composition. 
+They are coated. These fractures are coated with organic materials. 
+Moreover, this whole, entire region, the south polar region, has elevated temperatures. It's the hottest place on the planet, on the body. 
+That's as bizarre as finding that the Antarctic on the Earth is hotter than the tropics. 
+And then, when we took additional pictures, we discovered that from these fractures are issuing jets of fine, icy particles extending hundreds of miles into space. 
+And when we color-code this image, to bring out the faint light levels, we see that these jets feed a plume that, in fact, we see, in other images, goes thousands of miles into the space above Enceladus. 
+My team and I have examined images like this, and like this one, and have thought about the other results from Cassini. 
+And we have arrived at the conclusion that these jets may be erupting from pockets of liquid water under the surface of Enceladus. 
+So we have, possibly, liquid water, organic materials and excess heat. 
+In other words, we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern day planetary exploration, or in other words, an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms. 
+And I don't think I need to tell you that the discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system, whether it be on Enceladus or elsewhere, would have enormous cultural and scientific implications. 
+Because if we could demonstrate that genesis had occurred not once, but twice, independently, in our solar system, then that means, by inference, it has occurred a staggering number of times throughout the universe and its 13.7 billion year history. 
+Right now, Earth is the only planet still that we know is teeming with life. 
+It is precious, it is unique, it is still, so far, the only home we've ever known. 
+And if any of you were alert and coherent during the 1960s — and we'd forgive you, if you weren't, OK — you would remember this very famous picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. 
+It was the first time that Earth was imaged from space, and it had an enormous impact on our sense of place in the universe, and our sense of responsibility for the protection of our own planet. 
+Well, we on Cassini have taken an equivalent first, a picture that no human eye has ever seen before. 
+It is a total eclipse of the Sun, seen from the other side of Saturn. 
+And in this impossibly beautiful picture, you see the main rings backlit by the Sun, you see the refracted image of the Sun and you see this ring created, in fact, by the exhalations of Enceladus. 
+But as if that weren't brilliant enough, we can spot, in this beautiful image, sight of our own planet, cradled in the arms of Saturn's rings. 
+Now, there is something deeply moving about seeing ourselves from afar, and capturing the sight of our little, blue-ocean planet in the skies of other worlds. 
+And that, and the perspective of ourselves that we gain from that, may be, in the end, the finest reward that we earn from this journey of discovery that started half a century ago. 
+And thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Chris Anderson: We're having a debate. 
+The debate is over the proposition: "" What the world needs now is nuclear energy. "" True or false? 
+And before we have the debate, I'd like to actually take a show of hands — on balance, right now, are you for or against this? 
+So those who are "" yes, "" raise your hand. "" For. "" Okay, hands down. 
+Those who are against, raise your hands. 
+Okay, I'm reading that at about 75 to 25 in favor at the start. 
+Which means we're going to take a vote at the end and see how that shifts, if at all. 
+So here's the format: They're going to have six minutes each, and then after one little, quick exchange between them, I want two people on each side of this debate in the audience to have 30 seconds to make one short, crisp, pungent, powerful point. 
+So, in favor of the proposition, possibly shockingly, is one of, truly, the founders of the environmental movement, a long-standing TEDster, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, someone we all know and love, Stewart Brand. 
+Stewart Brand: Whoa. 
+(Applause) The saying is that with climate, those who know the most are the most worried. 
+With nuclear, those who know the most are the least worried. 
+A classic example is James Hansen, a NASA climatologist pushing for 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 
+He came out with a wonderful book recently called "" Storms of My Grandchildren. "" And Hansen is hard over for nuclear power, as are most climatologists who are engaging this issue seriously. 
+This is the design situation: a planet that is facing climate change and is now half urban. 
+Look at the client base for this. 
+Five out of six of us live in the developing world. 
+We are moving to cities. We are moving up in the world. 
+And we are educating our kids, having fewer kids, basically good news all around. 
+But we move to cities, toward the bright lights, and one of the things that is there that we want, besides jobs, is electricity. 
+And if it isn't easily gotten, we'll go ahead and steal it. 
+This is one of the most desired things by poor people all over the world, in the cities and in the countryside. 
+Electricity for cities, at its best, is what's called baseload electricity. 
+That's where it is on all the time. 
+And so far there are only three major sources of that — coal and gas, hydro-electric, which in most places is maxed-out — and nuclear. 
+I would love to have something in the fourth place here, but in terms of constant, clean, scalable energy, [solar] and wind and the other renewables aren't there yet because they're inconstant. 
+Nuclear is and has been for 40 years. 
+Now, from an environmental standpoint, the main thing you want to look at is what happens to the waste from nuclear and from coal, the two major sources of electricity. 
+If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear, the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can — a pretty heavy Coke can, about two pounds. 
+But one day of coal adds up to one hell of a lot of carbon dioxide in a normal one-gigawatt coal-fired plant. 
+Then what happens to the waste? 
+The nuclear waste typically goes into a dry cask storage out back of the parking lot at the reactor site because most places don't have underground storage yet. 
+It's just as well, because it can stay where it is. 
+While the carbon dioxide, vast quantities of it, gigatons, goes into the atmosphere where we can't get it back — yet — and where it is causing the problems that we're most concerned about. 
+So when you add up the greenhouse gases in the lifetime of these various energy sources, nuclear is down there with wind and hydro, below solar and way below, obviously, all the fossil fuels. 
+Wind is wonderful; I love wind. 
+I love being around these big wind generators. 
+But one of the things we're discovering is that wind, like solar, is an actually relatively dilute source of energy. 
+And so it takes a very large footprint on the land, a very large footprint in terms of materials, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm. 
+In places like Denmark and Germany, they've maxed out on wind already. 
+They've run out of good sites. 
+The power lines are getting overloaded. 
+And you peak out. 
+Likewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 square miles of southern California desert. 
+Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen. 
+It's okay on frapped-out agricultural land. 
+Solar's wonderful on rooftops. 
+But out in the landscape, one gigawatt is on the order of 50 square miles of bulldozed desert. 
+When you add all these things up — Saul Griffith did the numbers and figured out what would it take to get 13 clean terawatts of energy from wind, solar and biofuels, and that area would be roughly the size of the United States, an area he refers to as "" Renewistan. "" A guy who's added it up all this very well is David Mackay, a physicist in England, and in his wonderful book, "" Sustainable Energy, "" among other things, he says, "" I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic. "" (Laughter) In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. 
+We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 
+Ten percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads. 
+We haven't even started the American stockpile. 
+I think of most interest to a TED audience would be the new generation of reactors that are very small, down around 10 to 125 megawatts. 
+This is one from Toshiba. 
+Here's one the Russians are already building that floats on a barge. 
+And that would be very interesting in the developing world. 
+Typically, these things are put in the ground. 
+They're referred to as nuclear batteries. 
+They're incredibly safe, weapons proliferation-proof and all the rest of it. 
+Here is a commercial version from New Mexico called the Hyperion, and another one from Oregon called NuScale. 
+Babcock & Wilcox that make nuclear reactors, here's an integral fast reactor. 
+Thorium reactor that Nathan Myhrvold's involved in. 
+The governments of the world are going to have to decide that coals need to be made expensive, and these will go ahead. 
+And here's the future. 
+(Applause) CA: Okay. Okay. (Applause) 
+So arguing against, a man who's been at the nitty, gritty heart of the energy debate and the climate change debate for years. 
+In 2000, he discovered that soot was probably the second leading cause of global warming, after CO2. 
+His team have been making detailed calculations of the relative impacts of different energy sources. 
+His first time at TED, possibly a disadvantage — we shall see — from Stanford, Professor Mark Jacobson. Good luck. 
+Mark Jacobson: Thank you. 
+(Applause) So my premise here is that nuclear energy puts out more carbon dioxide, puts out more air pollutants, enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up than real renewable energy systems, namely wind, solar, geothermal power, hydro-tidal wave power. 
+And it also enhances nuclear weapons proliferation. 
+So let's start just by looking at the CO2 emissions from the life cycle. 
+CO2e emissions are equivalent emissions of all the greenhouse gases and particles that cause warming and converted to CO2. 
+And if you look, wind and concentrated solar have the lowest CO2 emissions, if you look at the graph. 
+Nuclear — there are two bars here. 
+One is a low estimate, and one is a high estimate. 
+The low estimate is the nuclear energy industry estimate of nuclear. 
+The high is the average of 103 scientific, peer-reviewed studies. 
+And this is just the CO2 from the life cycle. 
+If we look at the delays, it takes between 10 and 19 years to put up a nuclear power plant from planning to operation. 
+This includes about three and a half to six years for a site permit. 
+and another two and a half to four years for a construction permit and issue, and then four to nine years for actual construction. 
+And in China, right now, they're putting up five gigawatts of nuclear. 
+And the average, just for the construction time of these, is 7.1 years on top of any planning times. 
+While you're waiting around for your nuclear, you have to run the regular electric power grid, which is mostly coal in the United States and around the world. 
+And the chart here shows the difference between the emissions from the regular grid, resulting if you use nuclear, or anything else, versus wind, CSP or photovoltaics. 
+Wind takes about two to five years on average, same as concentrated solar and photovoltaics. 
+So the difference is the opportunity cost of using nuclear versus wind, or something else. 
+So if you add these two together, alone, you can see a separation that nuclear puts out at least nine to 17 times more CO2 equivalent emissions than wind energy. 
+And this doesn't even account for the footprint on the ground. 
+If you look at the air pollution health effects, this is the number of deaths per year in 2020 just from vehicle exhaust. 
+Let's say we converted all the vehicles in the United States to battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or flex fuel vehicles run on E85. 
+Well, right now in the United States, 50 to 100,000 people die per year from air pollution, and vehicles are about 25,000 of those. 
+In 2020, the number will go down to 15,000 due to improvements. 
+And so, on the right, you see gasoline emissions, the death rates of 2020. 
+If you go to corn or cellulosic ethanol, you'd actually increase the death rate slightly. 
+If you go to nuclear, you do get a big reduction, but it's not as much as with wind and concentrated solar. 
+Now if you consider the fact that nuclear weapons proliferation is associated with nuclear energy proliferation, because we know for example, India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons secretly by enriching uranium in nuclear energy facilities. 
+North Korea did that to some extent. 
+Iran is doing that right now. 
+And Venezuela would be doing it if they started with their nuclear energy facilities. 
+If you do a large scale expansion of nuclear energy across the world, and as a result there was just one nuclear bomb created that was used to destroy a city such as Mumbai or some other big city, megacity, the additional death rates due to this averaged over 30 years and then scaled to the population of the U.S. 
+would be this. 
+So, do we need this? 
+The next thing is: What about the footprint? Stewart mentioned the footprint. 
+Actually, the footprint on the ground for wind is by far the smallest of any energy source in the world. 
+That, because the footprint, as you can see, is just the pole touching the ground. 
+And you can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet with 73,000 to 145,000 five-megawatt wind turbines. 
+That would take between one and three square kilometers of footprint on the ground, entirely. 
+The spacing is something else. 
+That's the footprint that is always being confused. 
+People confuse footprint with spacing. 
+As you can see from these pictures, the spacing between can be used for multiple purposes including agricultural land, range land or open space. 
+Over the ocean, it's not even land. 
+Now if we look at nuclear — (Laughter) With nuclear, what do we have? 
+We have facilities around there. You also have a buffer zone that's 17 square kilometers. 
+And you have the uranium mining that you have to deal with. 
+Now if we go to the area, lots is worse than nuclear or wind. 
+For example, cellulosic ethanol, to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet, this is how much land you would need. 
+That's cellulosic, second generation biofuels from prairie grass. 
+Here's corn ethanol. It's smaller. 
+This is based on ranges from data, but if you look at nuclear, it would be the size of Rhode Island to power the U.S. vehicle fleet. 
+For wind, there's a larger area, but much smaller footprint. 
+And of course, with wind, you could put it all over the East Coast, offshore theoretically, or you can split it up. 
+And now, if you go back to looking at geothermal, it's even smaller than both, and solar is slightly larger than the nuclear spacing, but it's still pretty small. 
+And this is to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet. 
+To power the entire world with 50 percent wind, you would need about one percent of world land. 
+Matching the reliability, base load is actually irrelevant. 
+We want to match the hour-by-hour power supply. 
+You can do that by combining renewables. 
+This is from real data in California, looking at wind data and solar data. 
+And it considers just using existing hydro to match the hour-by-hour power demand. 
+Here are the world wind resources. 
+There's five to 10 times more wind available worldwide than we need for all the world. 
+So then here's the final ranking. 
+And one last slide I just want to show. This is the choice: You can either have wind or nuclear. 
+If you use wind, you guarantee ice will last. 
+Nuclear, the time lag alone will allow the Arctic to melt and other places to melt more. 
+And we can guarantee a clean, blue sky or an uncertain future with nuclear power. 
+(Applause) CA: All right. 
+So while they're having their comebacks on each other — and yours is slightly short because you slightly overran — I need two people from either side. 
+So if you're for this, if you're for nuclear power, put up two hands. 
+If you're against, put up one. 
+And I want two of each for the mics. 
+Now then, you guys have — you have a minute comeback on him to pick up a point he said, challenge it, whatever. 
+SB: I think a point of difference we're having, Mark, has to do with weapons and energy. 
+These diagrams that show that nuclear is somehow putting out a lot of greenhouse gases — a lot of those studies include, "" Well of course war will be inevitable and therefore we'll have cities burning and stuff like that, "" which is kind of finessing it a little bit, I think. 
+The reality is that there's, what, 21 nations that have nuclear power? 
+Of those, seven have nuclear weapons. 
+In every case, they got the weapons before they got the nuclear power. 
+There are two nations, North Korea and Israel, that have nuclear weapons and don't have nuclear power at all. 
+The places that we would most like to have really clean energy occur are China, India, Europe, North America, all of which have sorted out their situation in relation to nuclear weapons. 
+So that leaves a couple of places like Iran, maybe Venezuela, that you would like to have very close surveillance of anything that goes on with fissile stuff. 
+Pushing ahead with nuclear power will mean we really know where all of the fissile material is, and we can move toward zero weapons left, once we know all that. 
+CA: Mark, 30 seconds, either on that or on anything Stewart said. 
+MJ: Well we know India and Pakistan had nuclear energy first, and then they developed nuclear weapons secretly in the factories. 
+So the other thing is, we don't need nuclear energy. 
+There's plenty of solar and wind. 
+You can make it reliable, as I showed with that diagram. 
+That's from real data. 
+And this is an ongoing research. This is not rocket science. 
+Solving the world's problems can be done, if you really put your mind to it and use clean, renewable energy. 
+There's absolutely no need for nuclear power. 
+(Applause) CA: We need someone for. 
+Rod Beckstrom: Thank you Chris. I'm Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN. 
+I've been involved in global warming policy since 1994, when I joined the board of Environmental Defense Fund that was one of the crafters of the Kyoto Protocol. 
+And I want to support Stewart Brand's position. 
+I've come around in the last 10 years. 
+I used to be against nuclear power. 
+I'm now supporting Stewart's position, softly, from a risk-management standpoint, agreeing that the risks of overheating the planet outweigh the risk of nuclear incident, which certainly is possible and is a very real problem. 
+However, I think there may be a win-win solution here where both parties can win this debate, and that is, we face a situation where it's carbon caps on this planet or die. 
+And in the United States Senate, we need bipartisan support — only one or two votes are needed — to move global warming through the Senate, and this room can help. 
+So if we get that through, then Mark will solve these problems. Thanks Chris. 
+CA: Thank you Rod Beckstrom. Against. 
+David Fanton: Hi, I'm David Fanton. I just want to say a couple quick things. 
+The first is: be aware of the propaganda. 
+The propaganda from the industry has been very, very strong. 
+And we have not had the other side of the argument fully aired so that people can draw their own conclusions. 
+Be very aware of the propaganda. 
+Secondly, think about this. 
+If we build all these nuclear power plants, all that waste is going to be on hundreds, if not thousands, of trucks and trains, moving through this country every day. 
+Tell me they're not going to have accidents. 
+Tell me that those accidents aren't going to put material into the environment that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years. 
+And then tell me that each and every one of those trucks and trains isn't a potential terrorist target. 
+CA: Thank you. 
+For. 
+Anyone else for? Go. 
+Alex: Hi, I'm Alex. I just wanted to say, I'm, first of all, renewable energy's biggest fan. 
+I've got solar PV on my roof. 
+I've got a hydro conversion at a watermill that I own. 
+And I'm, you know, very much "" pro "" that kind of stuff. 
+However, there's a basic arithmetic problem here. 
+The capability of the sun shining, the wind blowing and the rain falling, simply isn't enough to add up. 
+So if we want to keep the lights on, we actually need a solution which is going to keep generating all of the time. 
+I campaigned against nuclear weapons in the '80s, and I continue to do so now. 
+But we've got an opportunity to recycle them into something more useful that enables us to get energy all of the time. 
+And, ultimately, the arithmetic problem isn't going to go away. 
+We're not going to get enough energy from renewables alone. 
+We need a solution that generates all of the time. 
+If we're going to keep the lights on, nuclear is that solution. 
+CA: Thank you. 
+Anyone else against? 
+Man: The last person who was in favor made the premise that we don't have enough alternative renewable resources. 
+And our "" against "" proponent up here made it very clear that we actually do. 
+And so the fallacy that we need this resource and we can actually make it in a time frame that is meaningful is not possible. 
+I will also add one other thing. 
+Ray Kurzweil and all the other talks — we know that the stick is going up exponentially. 
+So you can't look at state-of-the-art technologies in renewables and say, "" That's all we have. "" Because five years from now, it will blow you away what we'll actually have as alternatives to this horrible, disastrous nuclear power. 
+CA: Point well made. Thank you. 
+(Applause) So each of you has really just a couple sentences — 30 seconds each to sum up. 
+Your final pitch, Stewart. 
+SB: I loved your "" It all balances out "" chart that you had there. 
+It was a sunny day and a windy night. 
+And just now in England they had a cold spell. 
+All of the wind in the entire country shut down for a week. 
+None of those things were stirring. 
+And as usual, they had to buy nuclear power from France. 
+Two gigawatts comes through the Chunnel. 
+This keeps happening. 
+I used to worry about the 10,000 year factor. 
+And the fact is, we're going to use the nuclear waste we have for fuel in the fourth generation of reactors that are coming along. 
+And especially the small reactors need to go forward. 
+I heard from Nathan Myhrvold — and I think here's the action point — it'll take an act of Congress to make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission start moving quickly on these small reactors, which we need very much, here and in the world. 
+(Applause) MJ: So we've analyzed the hour-by-hour power demand and supply, looking at solar, wind, using data for California. 
+And you can match that demand, hour-by-hour, for the whole year almost. 
+Now, with regard to the resources, we've developed the first wind map of the world, from data alone, at 80 meters. 
+We know what the wind resources are. You can cover 15 percent. 
+Fifteen percent of the entire U.S. 
+has wind at fast enough speeds to be cost-competitive. 
+And there's much more solar than there is wind. 
+There's plenty of resource. You can make it reliable. 
+CA: Okay. So, thank you, Mark. 
+(Applause) So if you were in Palm Springs... 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Shameless. Shameless. Shameless. (Applause) 
+So, people of the TED community, I put it to you that what the world needs now is nuclear energy. 
+All those in favor, raise your hands. 
+(Shouts) And all those against. 
+Ooooh. 
+Now that is — my take on that... 
+Just put up... Hands up, people who changed their minds during the debate, who voted differently. 
+Those of you who changed your mind in favor of "" for "" put your hands up. 
+Okay. So here's the read on it. 
+Both people won supporters, but on my count, the mood of the TED community shifted from about 75 to 25 to about 65 to 35 in favor, in favor. 
+You both won. I congratulate both of you. 
+Thank you for that. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. 
+I was two years older than my sister at the time — I mean, I'm two years older than her now — but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. 
+So we were up on top of our bunk beds. 
+There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story — (Laughter) which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side. 
+I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground. 
+And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before — (Laughter) (Laughter ends) heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet, (Laughter) for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could — she didn't even see it coming — I was trying hard to be on my best behavior. 
+Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn. "" (Laughter) Now, that was cheating, because there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. 
+Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn — (Laughter) with one broken leg. 
+This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. 
+What we found is — (Laughter) If I got this data studying you, I would be thrilled, because there's a trend there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. 
+There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room — I know who you are, I saw you earlier — that's no problem. 
+That's no problem, as most of you know, because I can just delete that dot. 
+I can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. 
+But if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we're creating the cult of the average with science. 
+If I asked a question like, "How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?" 
+We're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have ten, so you keep coming back. 
+Bobo called me on the phone — (Laughter) from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, "" Shawn, I have leprosy. "" (Laughter) Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. 
+But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause. 
+(Laughter) We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. 
+(Laughter) I was an officer to counsel students through the difficult four years. 
+What does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about? "" Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. 
+What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat. 
+And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness. "" (Laughter) I said, "" That's most people's Friday nights. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. 
+And into the silence, I said, "" I'd be happy to speak at your school, but that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. 
+We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. 
+
+The story I wanted to share with you today is my challenge as an Iranian artist, as an Iranian woman artist, as an Iranian woman artist living in exile. 
+Well, it has its pluses and minuses. 
+On the dark side, politics doesn't seem to escape people like me. 
+Every Iranian artist, in one form or another, is political. 
+Politics have defined our lives. 
+If you're living in Iran, you're facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture — at times, execution. 
+If you're living outside like me, you're faced with life in exile — the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family. 
+Therefore, we don't find the moral, emotional, psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility. 
+Oddly enough, an artist such as myself finds herself also in the position of being the voice, the speaker of my people, even if I have, indeed, no access to my own country. 
+Also, people like myself, we're fighting two battles on different grounds. 
+We're being critical of the West, the perception of the West about our identity — about the image that is constructed about us, about our women, about our politics, about our religion. 
+We are there to take pride and insist on respect. 
+And at the same time, we're fighting another battle. 
+That is our regime, our government — our atrocious government, [that] has done every crime in order to stay in power. 
+Our artists are at risk. 
+We are in a position of danger. 
+We pose a threat to the order of the government. 
+But ironically, this situation has empowered all of us, because we are considered, as artists, central to the cultural, political, social discourse in Iran. 
+We are there to inspire, to provoke, to mobilize, to bring hope to our people. 
+We are the reporters of our people, and are communicators to the outside world. 
+Art is our weapon. 
+Culture is a form of resistance. 
+I envy sometimes the artists of the West for their freedom of expression. 
+For the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics. 
+From the fact that they are only serving one audience, mainly the Western culture. 
+But also, I worry about the West, because often in this country, in this Western world that we have, culture risks being a form of entertainment. 
+Our people depend on our artists, and culture is beyond communication. 
+My journey as an artist started from a very, very personal place. 
+I did not start to make social commentary about my country. 
+The first one that you see in front of you is actually when I first returned to Iran after being separated for a good 12 years. 
+It was after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. 
+While I was absent from Iran, the Islamic Revolution had descended on Iran and had entirely transformed the country from Persian to the Islamic culture. 
+I came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that I found my place in the society. 
+But instead, I found a country that was totally ideological and that I didn't recognize anymore. 
+More so, I became very interested, as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions, I became immersed in the study of the Islamic Revolution — how, indeed, it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women. 
+I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting, in the way the women of Iran, historically, seemed to embody the political transformation. 
+So in a way, by studying a woman, you can read the structure and the ideology of the country. 
+So I made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life, and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse — the subject of martyrdom, the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of God, faith, but violence and crime and cruelty. 
+For me, this became incredibly important. 
+And yet, I had an unusual position toward this. 
+I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place, but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic Revolution. 
+This changed slowly as I found my voice and I discovered things that I didn't know I would discover. 
+So my art became slightly more critical. 
+My knife became a little sharper. 
+And I fell into a life in exile. 
+I am a nomadic artist. 
+I work in Morocco, in Turkey, in Mexico. 
+I go everywhere to make believe it's Iran. 
+Now I am making films. 
+Last year, I finished a film called "" Women Without Men. "" "" Women Without Men "" returns to history, but another part of our Iranian history. 
+It goes to 1953 when American CIA exercised a coup and removed a democratically elected leader, Dr. Mossadegh. 
+The book is written by an Iranian woman, Shahrnush Parsipur. 
+It's a magical realist novel. 
+This book is banned, and she spent five years in prison. 
+My obsession with this book, and the reason I made this into a film, is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female — traditionally, historically in Iran — and the question of four women who are all looking for an idea of change, freedom and democracy — while the country of Iran, equally, as if another character, also struggled for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign interventions. 
+I made this film because I felt it's important for it to speak to the Westerners about our history as a country. 
+That all of you seem to remember Iran after the Islamic Revolution. 
+That Iran was once a secular society, and we had democracy, and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government, by the British government. 
+This film also speaks to the Iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so Islamicized — in the way we looked, in the way we played music, in the way we had intellectual life. 
+And most of all, in the way that we fought for democracy. 
+These are some of the shots actually from my film. 
+These are some of the images of the coup. 
+And we made this film in Casablanca, recreating all the shots. 
+This film tried to find a balance between telling a political story, but also a feminine story. 
+Being a visual artist, indeed, I am foremost interested to make art — to make art that transcends politics, religion, the question of feminism, and become an important, timeless, universal work of art. 
+The challenge I have is how to do that. 
+How to tell a political story but an allegorical story. 
+How to move you with your emotions, but also make your mind work. 
+These are some of the images and the characters of the film. 
+Now comes the green movement — the summer of 2009, as my film is released — the uprising begins in the streets of Tehran. 
+What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film, the cry for democracy and social justice, repeats itself now again in Tehran. 
+The green movement significantly inspired the world. 
+It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy. 
+What was most significant for me was, once again, the presence of the women. 
+They're absolutely inspirational for me. 
+If in the Islamic Revolution, the images of the woman portrayed were submissive and didn't have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Tehran — women who were educated, forward thinking, non-traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist. 
+These women and those young men united Iranians across the world, inside and outside. 
+I then discovered why I take so much inspiration from Iranian women. 
+That, under all circumstances, they have pushed the boundary. 
+They have confronted the authority. 
+They have broken every rule in the smallest and the biggest way. 
+And once again, they proved themselves. 
+I stand here to say that Iranian women have found a new voice, and their voice is giving me my voice. 
+And it's a great honor to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist, even if I have to operate in the West only for now. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My job at Twitter is to ensure user trust, protect user rights and keep users safe, both from each other and, at times, from themselves. 
+Let's talk about what scale looks like at Twitter. 
+Back in January 2009, we saw more than two million new tweets each day on the platform. 
+We were seeing two million tweets in less than six minutes. 
+That's a 24,900-percent increase. 
+Now, the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. 
+My job is to root out and prevent activity that might. 
+Sounds straightforward, right? 
+You might even think it'd be easy, given that I just said the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. 
+Why spend so much time searching for potential calamities in innocuous activities? 
+Given the scale that Twitter is at, a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day. 
+It's the same for other companies dealing at this sort of scale. 
+For us, edge cases, those rare situations that are unlikely to occur, are more like norms. 
+Say 99.999 percent of tweets pose no risk to anyone. 
+Maybe people are documenting travel landmarks like Australia's Heart Reef, or tweeting about a concert they're attending, or sharing pictures of cute baby animals. 
+After you take out that 99.999 percent, that tiny percentage of tweets remaining works out to roughly 150,000 per month. 
+The sheer scale of what we're dealing with makes for a challenge. 
+You know what else makes my role particularly challenging? 
+People do weird things. 
+(Laughter) And I have to figure out what they're doing, why, and whether or not there's risk involved, often without much in terms of context or background. 
+I'm going to show you some examples that I've run into during my time at Twitter — these are all real examples — of situations that at first seemed cut and dried, but the truth of the matter was something altogether different. 
+The details have been changed to protect the innocent and sometimes the guilty. 
+We'll start off easy. 
+["" Yo bitch ""] If you saw a Tweet that only said this, you might think to yourself, "That looks like abuse." 
+After all, why would you want to receive the message, "Yo, bitch." 
+Now, I try to stay relatively hip to the latest trends and memes, so I knew that "" yo, bitch "" was also often a common greeting between friends, as well as being a popular "" Breaking Bad "" reference. 
+I will admit that I did not expect to encounter a fourth use case. 
+It turns out it is also used on Twitter when people are role-playing as dogs. 
+(Laughter) And in fact, in that case, it's not only not abusive, it's technically just an accurate greeting. (Laughter) 
+So okay, determining whether or not something is abusive without context, definitely hard. 
+Let's look at spam. 
+Here's an example of an account engaged in classic spammer behavior, sending the exact same message to thousands of people. 
+While this is a mockup I put together using my account, we see accounts doing this all the time. 
+Seems pretty straightforward. 
+We should just automatically suspend accounts engaging in this kind of behavior. 
+Turns out there's some exceptions to that rule. 
+Turns out that that message could also be a notification you signed up for that the International Space Station is passing overhead because you wanted to go outside and see if you could see it. 
+Okay. Let's make the stakes higher. 
+Back to my account, again exhibiting classic behavior. 
+This is often indicative of something called phishing, somebody trying to steal another person's account information by directing them to another website. 
+That's pretty clearly not a good thing. 
+We want to, and do, suspend accounts engaging in that kind of behavior. 
+So why are the stakes higher for this? 
+Well, this could also be a bystander at a rally who managed to record a video of a police officer beating a non-violent protester who's trying to let the world know what's happening. 
+We don't want to gamble on potentially silencing that crucial speech by classifying it as spam and suspending it. 
+That means we evaluate hundreds of parameters when looking at account behaviors, and even then, we can still get it wrong and have to reevaluate. 
+Now, given the sorts of challenges I'm up against, it's crucial that I not only predict but also design protections for the unexpected. 
+And that's not just an issue for me, or for Twitter, it's an issue for you. 
+It's an issue for anybody who's building or creating something that you think is going to be amazing and will let people do awesome things. 
+So what do I do? 
+I pause and I think, how could all of this go horribly wrong? 
+I visualize catastrophe. 
+And that's hard. There's a sort of inherent cognitive dissonance in doing that, like when you're writing your wedding vows at the same time as your prenuptial agreement. 
+(Laughter) But you still have to do it, particularly if you're marrying 500 million tweets per day. 
+What do I mean by "" visualize catastrophe? "" I try to think of how something as benign and innocuous as a picture of a cat could lead to death, and what to do to prevent that. 
+Which happens to be my next example. 
+This is my cat, Eli. 
+We wanted to give users the ability to add photos to their tweets. 
+You add a photo to your tweet, look at how much more content you've got now. 
+There's all sorts of great things you can do by adding a photo to a tweet. 
+It's to think of what could go wrong. 
+How could this picture lead to my death? 
+Well, here's one possibility. 
+There's more in that picture than just a cat. 
+There's geodata. 
+When you take a picture with your smartphone or digital camera, there's a lot of additional information saved along in that image. 
+In fact, this image also contains the equivalent of this, more specifically, this. 
+Sure, it's not likely that someone's going to try to track me down and do me harm based upon image data associated with a picture I took of my cat, but I start by assuming the worst will happen. 
+(Applause) If I start by assuming the worst and work backwards, I can make sure that the protections we build work for both expected and unexpected use cases. 
+Given that I spend my days and nights imagining the worst that could happen, it wouldn't be surprising if my worldview was gloomy. 
+(Laughter) It's not. 
+The vast majority of interactions I see — and I see a lot, believe me — are positive, people reaching out to help or to connect or share information with each other. 
+It's just that for those of us dealing with scale, for those of us tasked with keeping people safe, we have to assume the worst will happen, because for us, a one-in-a-million chance is pretty good odds. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+You know, what I do is write for children, and I'm probably America's most widely read children's author, in fact. 
+And I always tell people that I don't want to show up looking like a scientist. 
+You can have me as a farmer, or in leathers, and no one has ever chose farmer. 
+I'm here today to talk to you about circles and epiphanies. 
+And you know, an epiphany is usually something you find that you dropped someplace. 
+You've just got to go around the block to see it as an epiphany. 
+That's a painting of a circle. 
+A friend of mine did that — Richard Bollingbroke. 
+It's the kind of complicated circle that I'm going to tell you about. 
+My circle began back in the '60s in high school in Stow, Ohio where I was the class queer. 
+I was the guy beaten up bloody every week in the boys' room, until one teacher saved my life. 
+She saved my life by letting me go to the bathroom in the teachers' lounge. 
+She did it in secret. 
+She did it for three years. 
+And I had to get out of town. 
+I had a thumb, I had 85 dollars, and I ended up in San Francisco, California — met a lover — and back in the '80s, found it necessary to begin work on AIDS organizations. 
+About three or four years ago, I got a phone call in the middle of the night from that teacher, Mrs. Posten, who said, "" I need to see you. 
+I'm disappointed that we never got to know each other as adults. 
+Could you please come to Ohio, and please bring that man that I know you have found by now. 
+And I should mention that I have pancreatic cancer, and I'd like you to please be quick about this. "" Well, the next day we were in Cleveland. 
+We took a look at her, we laughed, we cried, and we knew that she needed to be in a hospice. 
+We found her one, we got her there, and we took care of her and watched over her family, because it was necessary. 
+It's something we knew how to do. 
+And just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me, she turned into a box of ashes and was placed in my hands. 
+And what had happened was the circle had closed, it had become a circle — and that epiphany I talked about presented itself. 
+The epiphany is that death is a part of life. 
+She saved my life; I and my partner saved hers. 
+And you know, that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does. 
+It needs truth and beauty, and I'm so happy it's been mentioned so much here today. 
+It also needs — it needs dignity, love and pleasure, and it's our job to hand those things out. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+For me, this story begins about 15 years ago, when I was a hospice doctor at the University of Chicago. 
+And I was taking care of people who were dying and their families in the South Side of Chicago. 
+And I was observing what happened to people and their families over the course of their terminal illness. 
+And in my lab, I was studying the widower effect, which is a very old idea in the social sciences, going back 150 years, known as "" dying of a broken heart. "" So, when I die, my wife's risk of death can double, for instance, in the first year. 
+And I had gone to take care of one particular patient, a woman who was dying of dementia. 
+And in this case, unlike this couple, she was being cared for by her daughter. 
+And the daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother. 
+And the daughter's husband, he also was sick from his wife's exhaustion. 
+And I was driving home one day, and I get a phone call from the husband's friend, calling me because he was depressed about what was happening to his friend. 
+So here I get this call from this random guy that's having an experience that's being influenced by people at some social distance. 
+And so I suddenly realized two very simple things: First, the widowhood effect was not restricted to husbands and wives. 
+And second, it was not restricted to pairs of people. 
+And I started to see the world in a whole new way, like pairs of people connected to each other. 
+And then I realized that these individuals would be connected into foursomes with other pairs of people nearby. 
+And then, in fact, these people were embedded in other sorts of relationships: marriage and spousal and friendship and other sorts of ties. 
+And that, in fact, these connections were vast and that we were all embedded in this broad set of connections with each other. 
+So I started to see the world in a completely new way and I became obsessed with this. 
+I became obsessed with how it might be that we're embedded in these social networks, and how they affect our lives. 
+So, social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous, in fact, that one has to ask what purpose they serve. 
+Why are we embedded in social networks? 
+I mean, how do they form? How do they operate? 
+And how do they effect us? 
+So my first topic with respect to this, was not death, but obesity. 
+It had become trendy to speak about the "" obesity epidemic. "" And, along with my collaborator, James Fowler, we began to wonder whether obesity really was epidemic and could it spread from person to person like the four people I discussed earlier. 
+So this is a slide of some of our initial results. 
+It's 2,200 people in the year 2000. 
+Every dot is a person. We make the dot size proportional to people's body size; so bigger dots are bigger people. 
+In addition, if your body size, if your BMI, your body mass index, is above 30 — if you're clinically obese — we also colored the dots yellow. 
+So, if you look at this image, right away you might be able to see that there are clusters of obese and non-obese people in the image. 
+But the visual complexity is still very high. 
+It's not obvious exactly what's going on. 
+In addition, some questions are immediately raised: How much clustering is there? 
+Is there more clustering than would be due to chance alone? 
+How big are the clusters? How far do they reach? 
+And, most importantly, what causes the clusters? 
+So we did some mathematics to study the size of these clusters. 
+This here shows, on the Y-axis, the increase in the probability that a person is obese given that a social contact of theirs is obese and, on the X-axis, the degrees of separation between the two people. 
+On the far left, you see the purple line. 
+It says that, if your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher. 
+And the next bar over, the [red] line, says if your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher. 
+And then the next line over says if your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. 
+And it's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends that there's no longer a relationship between that person's body size and your own body size. 
+Well, what might be causing this clustering? 
+There are at least three possibilities: One possibility is that, as I gain weight, it causes you to gain weight. 
+A kind of induction, a kind of spread from person to person. 
+Another possibility, very obvious, is homophily, or, birds of a feather flock together; here, I form my tie to you because you and I share a similar body size. 
+And the last possibility is what is known as confounding, because it confounds our ability to figure out what's going on. 
+And here, the idea is not that my weight gain is causing your weight gain, nor that I preferentially form a tie with you because you and I share the same body size, but rather that we share a common exposure to something, like a health club that makes us both lose weight at the same time. 
+When we studied these data, we found evidence for all of these things, including for induction. 
+And we found that if your friend becomes obese, it increases your risk of obesity by about 57 percent in the same given time period. 
+There can be many mechanisms for this effect: One possibility is that your friends say to you something like — you know, they adopt a behavior that spreads to you — like, they say, "" Let's go have muffins and beer, "" which is a terrible combination. (Laughter) But you adopt that combination, and then you start gaining weight like them. 
+Another more subtle possibility is that they start gaining weight, and it changes your ideas of what an acceptable body size is. 
+Here, what's spreading from person to person is not a behavior, but rather a norm: An idea is spreading. 
+Now, headline writers had a field day with our studies. 
+I think the headline in The New York Times was, "" Are you packing it on? 
+Blame your fat friends. "" (Laughter) What was interesting to us is that the European headline writers had a different take: They said, "Are your friends gaining weight? Perhaps you are to blame." (Laughter) 
+And we thought this was a very interesting comment on America, and a kind of self-serving, "" not my responsibility "" kind of phenomenon. 
+Now, I want to be very clear: We do not think our work should or could justify prejudice against people of one or another body size at all. 
+Our next questions was: Could we actually visualize this spread? 
+Was weight gain in one person actually spreading to weight gain in another person? 
+And this was complicated because we needed to take into account the fact that the network structure, the architecture of the ties, was changing across time. 
+In addition, because obesity is not a unicentric epidemic, there's not a Patient Zero of the obesity epidemic — if we find that guy, there was a spread of obesity out from him — it's a multicentric epidemic. 
+Lots of people are doing things at the same time. 
+And I'm about to show you a 30 second video animation that took me and James five years of our lives to do. 
+So, again, every dot is a person. 
+Every tie between them is a relationship. 
+We're going to put this into motion now, taking daily cuts through the network for about 30 years. 
+The dot sizes are going to grow, you're going to see a sea of yellow take over. 
+You're going to see people be born and die — dots will appear and disappear — ties will form and break, marriages and divorces, friendings and defriendings. 
+A lot of complexity, a lot is happening just in this 30-year period that includes the obesity epidemic. 
+And, by the end, you're going to see clusters of obese and non-obese individuals within the network. 
+Now, when looked at this, it changed the way I see things, because this thing, this network that's changing across time, it has a memory, it moves, things flow within it, it has a kind of consistency — people can die, but it doesn't die; it still persists — and it has a kind of resilience that allows it to persist across time. 
+And so, I came to see these kinds of social networks as living things, as living things that we could put under a kind of microscope to study and analyze and understand. 
+And we used a variety of techniques to do this. 
+And we started exploring all kinds of other phenomena. 
+We looked at smoking and drinking behavior, and voting behavior, and divorce — which can spread — and altruism. 
+And, eventually, we became interested in emotions. 
+Now, when we have emotions, we show them. 
+Why do we show our emotions? 
+I mean, there would be an advantage to experiencing our emotions inside, you know, anger or happiness. 
+But we don't just experience them, we show them. 
+And not only do we show them, but others can read them. 
+And, not only can they read them, but they copy them. 
+There's emotional contagion that takes place in human populations. 
+And so this function of emotions suggests that, in addition to any other purpose they serve, they're a kind of primitive form of communication. 
+And that, in fact, if we really want to understand human emotions, we need to think about them in this way. 
+Now, we're accustomed to thinking about emotions in this way, in simple, sort of, brief periods of time. 
+So, for example, I was giving this talk recently in New York City, and I said, "" You know when you're on the subway and the other person across the subway car smiles at you, and you just instinctively smile back? "" And they looked at me and said, "" We don't do that in New York City. "" (Laughter) And I said, "" Everywhere else in the world, that's normal human behavior. "" And so there's a very instinctive way in which we briefly transmit emotions to each other. 
+And, in fact, emotional contagion can be broader still. 
+Like we could have punctuated expressions of anger, as in riots. 
+The question that we wanted to ask was: Could emotion spread, in a more sustained way than riots, across time and involve large numbers of people, not just this pair of individuals smiling at each other in the subway car? 
+Maybe there's a kind of below the surface, quiet riot that animates us all the time. 
+Maybe there are emotional stampedes that ripple through social networks. 
+Maybe, in fact, emotions have a collective existence, not just an individual existence. 
+And this is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon. 
+Again, a social network, but now we color the people yellow if they're happy and blue if they're sad and green in between. 
+And if you look at this image, you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people, again, spreading to three degrees of separation. 
+And you might form the intuition that the unhappy people occupy a different structural location within the network. 
+There's a middle and an edge to this network, and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges. 
+So to invoke another metaphor, if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity — I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance — this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned American quilt, and it has patches on it: happy and unhappy patches. 
+And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch. 
+(Laughter) So, this work with emotions, which are so fundamental, then got us to thinking about: Maybe the fundamental causes of human social networks are somehow encoded in our genes. 
+Because human social networks, whenever they are mapped, always kind of look like this: the picture of the network. 
+But they never look like this. 
+Why do they not look like this? 
+Why don't we form human social networks that look like a regular lattice? 
+Well, the striking patterns of human social networks, their ubiquity and their apparent purpose beg questions about whether we evolved to have human social networks in the first place, and whether we evolved to form networks with a particular structure. 
+And notice first of all — so, to understand this, though, we need to dissect network structure a little bit first — and notice that every person in this network has exactly the same structural location as every other person. 
+But that's not the case with real networks. 
+So, for example, here is a real network of college students at an elite northeastern university. 
+And now I'm highlighting a few dots. 
+If you look here at the dots, compare node B in the upper left to node D in the far right; B has four friends coming out from him and D has six friends coming out from him. 
+And so, those two individuals have different numbers of friends. 
+That's very obvious, we all know that. 
+But certain other aspects of social network structure are not so obvious. 
+Compare node B in the upper left to node A in the lower left. 
+Now, those people both have four friends, but A's friends all know each other, and B's friends do not. 
+So the friend of a friend of A's is, back again, a friend of A's, whereas the friend of a friend of B's is not a friend of B's, but is farther away in the network. 
+This is known as transitivity in networks. 
+And, finally, compare nodes C and D: C and D both have six friends. 
+If you talk to them, and you said, "" What is your social life like? "" they would say, "" I've got six friends. 
+That's my social experience. "" But now we, with a bird's eye view looking at this network, can see that they occupy very different social worlds. 
+And I can cultivate that intuition in you by just asking you: Who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network? 
+Would you rather be C or D? 
+You'd rather be D, on the edge of the network. 
+And now who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip — not about you — was spreading through the network? (Laughter) Now, you would rather be C. 
+So different structural locations have different implications for your life. 
+And, in fact, when we did some experiments looking at this, what we found is that 46 percent of the variation in how many friends you have is explained by your genes. 
+And this is not surprising. We know that some people are born shy and some are born gregarious. That's obvious. 
+But we also found some non-obvious things. 
+For instance, 47 percent in the variation in whether your friends know each other is attributable to your genes. 
+Whether your friends know each other has not just to do with their genes, but with yours. 
+And we think the reason for this is that some people like to introduce their friends to each other — you know who you are — and others of you keep them apart and don't introduce your friends to each other. 
+And so some people knit together the networks around them, creating a kind of dense web of ties in which they're comfortably embedded. 
+And finally, we even found that 30 percent of the variation in whether or not people are in the middle or on the edge of the network can also be attributed to their genes. 
+So whether you find yourself in the middle or on the edge is also partially heritable. 
+Now, what is the point of this? 
+How does this help us understand? How does this help us 
+figure out some of the problems that are affecting us these days? 
+Well, the argument I'd like to make is that networks have value. 
+They are a kind of social capital. 
+New properties emerge because of our embeddedness in social networks, and these properties inhere in the structure of the networks, not just in the individuals within them. 
+So think about these two common objects. 
+They're both made of carbon, and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way — on the left — and you get graphite, which is soft and dark. 
+But if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way, you get diamond, which is clear and hard. 
+And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms, or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms. 
+So, similarly, the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties. 
+It is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. 
+And so it is not just what's happening to these people — whether they're losing weight or gaining weight, or becoming rich or becoming poor, or becoming happy or not becoming happy — that affects us; it's also the actual architecture of the ties around us. 
+Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we're residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network. 
+Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism. 
+Now, a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and that must be understood by reference to, and by studying, the collective. 
+Like, for example, a hive of bees that's finding a new nesting site, or a flock of birds that's evading a predator, or a flock of birds that's able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific, or a pack of wolves that's able to bring down larger prey. 
+Superorganisms have properties that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals. 
+I think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena — like crime, and warfare, and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption. 
+Now, look at this. 
+I think we form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. 
+If I was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. 
+So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. 
+Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. 
+I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we'd spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. 
+And what I think the world needs now is more connections. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+But anyway, this is about the evils of science, so I think it ’ s perfect. 
+♫ My oh my, walking by, who ’ s the apple of my eye? ♫ ♫ Why, it's my very own Clonie. ♫ ♫ Oh, if I should stroll the hood, who knew I could look so good ♫ ♫ just talking on the phone to Clonie. ♫ ♫ We are pals, it's cool, 'cause we're not lonely, ♫ ♫ shallow gene pool is nothing to my only Clonie. ♫ ♫ Me and you, hustling through, holding on through thick and thin, ♫ ♫ just day by day, our DNA, so the Olson twins got nothing on us. ♫ ♫ We'll survive, side by side. Mother Nature, don ’ t you call her phony, she ’ s my Clonie. ♫ 
+♫ Was wealthy, but not healthy, had no one to dwell with me, ♫ ♫ so look who I got born — Clonie. ♫ ♫ Far from broke, bored, rich folk, we don't need no natural yolk — ♫ ♫ our babies come full-formed, Clonie. ♫ ♫ We'll be huggable, get a publicist ♫ ♫ and show them, be the most lovable thing since fucking Eminem. ♫ ♫ Oh my friend, multiply, we ’ re a franchise, like Walt Disney or Hannibal Lecter. ♫ ♫ We can tell our cancer cells are more benign than old Phil Spector. ♫ ♫ We ’ ll survive side by side, should have signed with Verve instead of Sony. ♫ 
+♫ You ’ re my Clonie. ♫ "" Oh Clonie, how I love you. "" "Ha, I'm the only person I ever loved." 
+♫ Gee, that's swell. I guess you're just my fatal attraction-ie. You ’ re my Clonie. ♫ Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+There are 39 million people in the world who are blind. 
+Eighty percent of them are living in low-income countries such as Kenya, and the absolute majority do not need to be blind. 
+They are blind from diseases that are either completely curable or preventable. 
+Knowing this, with my young family, we moved to Kenya. 
+We secured equipment, funds, vehicles, we trained a team, we set up a hundred clinics throughout the Great Rift Valley to try and understand a single question: why are people going blind, and what can we do? 
+The challenges were great. 
+When we got to where we were going, we set up our high-tech equipment. 
+Power was rarely available. 
+We'd have to run our equipment from petrol power generators. 
+And then something occurred to me: There has to be an easier way, because it's the patients who are the most in need of access to eye care who are the least likely to get it. 
+More people in Kenya, and in sub-Saharan Africa, have access to a mobile phone than they do clean running water. 
+So we said, could we harness the power of mobile technology to deliver eye care in a new way? 
+And so we developed Peek, a smartphone [system] that enables community healthcare workers and empowers them to deliver eye care everywhere. 
+We set about replacing traditional hospital equipment, which is bulky, expensive and fragile, with smartphone apps and hardware that make it possible to test anyone in any language and of any age. 
+Here we have a demonstration of a three-month-old having their vision accurately tested using an app and an eye tracker. 
+We've got many trials going on in the community and in schools, and through the lessons that we've learned in the field, we've realized it's extremely important to share the data in non-medical jargon so that people understand what we're examining and what that means to them. 
+So here, for example, we use our sight sim application, once your vision has been measured, to show carers and teachers what the visual world is like for that person, so they can empathize with them and help them. 
+Once we've discovered somebody has low vision, the next big challenge is to work out why, and to be able to do that, we need to have access to the inside of the eye. 
+Traditionally, this requires expensive equipment to examine an area called the retina. 
+The retina is the single part of the eye that has huge amounts of information about the body and its health. 
+We've developed 3D-printed, low-cost hardware that comes in at less than five dollars to produce, which can then be clipped onto a smartphone and makes it possible to get views of the back of the eye of a very high quality. 
+And the beauty is, anybody can do it. 
+In our trials on over two and half thousand people, the smartphone with the add-on clip is comparable to a camera that is hugely more expensive and hugely more difficult to transport. 
+When we first moved to Kenya, we went with 150,000 dollars of equipment, a team of 15 people, and that was what was needed to deliver health care. 
+Now, all that's needed is a single person on a bike with a smartphone. 
+And it costs just 500 dollars. 
+The issue of power supply is overcome by harnessing the power of solar. 
+Our healthcare workers travel with a solar-powered rucksack which keeps the phone charged and backed up. 
+Now we go to the patient rather than waiting for the patient never to come. 
+We go to them in their homes and we give them the most comprehensive, high-tech, accurate examination, which can be delivered by anyone with minimal training. 
+We can link global experts with people in the most rural, difficult-to-reach places that are beyond the end of the road, effectively putting those experts in their homes, allowing us to make diagnoses and make plans for treatment. 
+Project managers, hospital directors, are able to search on our interface by any parameter they may be interested in. 
+Here in Nakuru, where I've been living, we can search for people by whatever condition. 
+Here are people who are blind from a curable condition cataract. 
+Each red pin depicts somebody who is blind from a disease that is curable and treatable, and they're locatable. 
+We can use bulk text messaging services to explain that we're coming to arrange a treatment. 
+What's more, we've learned that this is something that we haven't built just for the community but with the community. 
+Those blue pins that drop represent elders, or local leaders, that are connected to those people who can ensure that we can find them and arrange treatment. 
+So for patients like Mama Wangari, who have been blind for over 10 years and never seen her grandchildren, for less than 40 dollars, we can restore her eyesight. 
+This is something that has to happen. 
+It's only in statistics that people go blind by the millions. 
+The reality is everyone goes blind on their own. 
+But now, they might just be a text message away from help. 
+(Applause) And now because live demos are always a bad idea, we're going to try a live demo. 
+(Laughter) So here we have the Peek Vision app. 
+Okay, and what we're looking at here, this is Sam's optic nerve, which is a direct extension of her brain, so I'm actually looking at her brain as we look there. 
+We can see all parts of the retina. 
+It makes it possible to pick up diseases of the eye and of the body that would not be possible without access to the eye, and that clip-on device can be manufactured for just a few dollars, and people can be cured of blindness, and I think it says a lot about us as a human race if we've developed cures and we don't deliver them. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Is E.T. out there? 
+Well, I work at the SETI Institute. 
+That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. 
+In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face. 
+I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate. 
+Now, a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic, ridiculous, maybe even hopeless, but I just want to talk to you a little bit about why I think that the job I have is actually a privilege, okay, and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into this line of work, if that's what you call it. 
+This thing — whoops, can we go back? 
+Hello, come in, Earth. 
+There we go. All right. 
+This is the Owens Valley Radio Observatory behind the Sierra Nevadas, and in 1968, I was working there collecting data for my thesis. 
+Now, it's kinda lonely, it's kinda tedious, just collecting data, so I would amuse myself by taking photos at night of the telescopes or even of myself, because, you know, at night, I would be the only hominid within about 30 miles. 
+So here are pictures of myself. 
+The observatory had just acquired a new book, written by a Russian cosmologist by the name of Joseph Shklovsky, and then expanded and translated and edited by a little-known Cornell astronomer by the name of Carl Sagan. 
+And I remember reading that book, and at 3 in the morning I was reading this book and it was explaining how the antennas I was using to measure the spins of galaxies could also be used to communicate, to send bits of information from one star system to another. 
+Now, at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're all alone, haven't had much sleep, that was a very romantic idea, but it was that idea — the fact that you could in fact prove that there's somebody out there just using this same technology — that appealed to me so much that 20 years later I took a job at the SETI Institute. Now, I have to say that my memory is notoriously porous, and I've often wondered whether there was any truth in this story, or I was just, you know, misremembering something, but I recently just blew up this old negative of mine, 
+and sure enough, there you can see the Shklovsky and Sagan book underneath that analog calculating device. 
+So it was true. 
+All right. Now, the idea for doing this, it wasn't very old at the time that I made that photo. 
+The idea dates from 1960, when a young astronomer by the name of Frank Drake used this antenna in West Virginia, pointed it at a couple of nearby stars in the hopes of eavesdropping on E.T. 
+Now, Frank didn't hear anything. 
+Actually he did, but it turned out to be the U.S. Air Force, which doesn't count as extraterrestrial intelligence. 
+But Drake's idea here became very popular because it was very appealing — and I'll get back to that — and on the basis of this experiment, which didn't succeed, we have been doing SETI ever since, not continuously, but ever since. 
+We still haven't heard anything. We still haven't heard anything. 
+In fact, we don't know about any life beyond Earth, 
+but I'm going to suggest to you that that's going to change rather soon, and part of the reason, in fact, the majority of the reason why I think that's going to change is that the equipment's getting better. 
+This is the Allen Telescope Array, about 350 miles from whatever seat you're in right now. 
+This is something that we're using today to search for E.T., and the electronics have gotten very much better too. 
+This is Frank Drake's electronics in 1960. 
+This is the Allen Telescope Array electronics today. 
+Some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately 100 trillion times better than they were in 1960, 100 trillion times better. 
+That's a degree of an improvement that would look good on your report card, okay? 
+But something that's not appreciated by the public is, in fact, that the experiment continues to get better, and, consequently, tends to get faster. 
+This is a little plot, and every time you show a plot, you lose 10 percent of the audience. 
+I have 12 of these. (Laughter) But what I plotted here is just some metric that shows how fast we're searching. 
+In other words, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. 
+We know how big the haystack is. It's the galaxy. 
+But we're going through the haystack no longer with a teaspoon but with a skip loader, because of this increase in speed. 
+In fact, those of you who are still conscious and mathematically competent, will note that this is a semi-log plot. 
+In other words, the rate of increase is exponential. 
+It's exponentially improving. Now, exponential is an overworked word. You hear it on the media all the time. 
+They don't really know what exponential means, but this is exponential. 
+In fact, it's doubling every 18 months, and, of course, every card-carrying member of the digerati knows that that's Moore's Law. 
+So this means that over the course of the next two dozen years, we'll be able to look at a million star systems, a million star systems, looking for signals that would prove somebody's out there. 
+Well, a million star systems, is that interesting? 
+I mean, how many of those star systems have planets? 
+And the facts are, we didn't know the answer to that even as recently as 15 years ago, and in fact, we really didn't know it even as recently as six months ago. 
+But now we do. Recent results suggest that virtually every star has planets, and more than one. 
+They're like, you know, kittens. You get a litter. 
+You don't get one kitten. You get a bunch. 
+So in fact, this is a pretty accurate estimate of the number of planets in our galaxy, just in our galaxy, by the way, and I remind the non-astronomy majors among you that our galaxy is only one of 100 billion that we can see with our telescopes. 
+That's a lot of real estate, but of course, most of these planets are going to be kind of worthless, like, you know, Mercury, or Neptune. 
+Neptune's probably not very big in your life. 
+So the question is, what fraction of these planets are actually suitable for life? 
+We don't know the answer to that either, but we will learn that answer this year, thanks to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, and in fact, the smart money, which is to say the people who work on this project, the smart money is suggesting that the fraction of planets that might be suitable for life is maybe one in a thousand, one in a hundred, something like that. 
+Well, even taking the pessimistic estimate, that it's one in a thousand, that means that there are at least a billion cousins of the Earth just in our own galaxy. 
+Okay, now I've given you a lot of numbers here, but they're mostly big numbers, okay, so, you know, keep that in mind. There's plenty of real estate, plenty of real estate in the universe, and if we're the only bit of real estate in which there's some interesting occupants, that makes you a miracle, and I know you like to think you're a miracle, but if you do science, you learn rather quickly that every time you think you're a miracle, you're wrong, so probably not the case. 
+All right, so the bottom line is this: Because of the increase in speed, and because of the vast amount of habitable real estate in the cosmos, I figure we're going to pick up a signal within two dozen years. 
+And I feel strongly enough about that to make a bet with you: Either we're going to find E.T. in the next two dozen years, or I'll buy you a cup of coffee. 
+So that's not so bad. I mean, even with two dozen years, you open up your browser and there's news of a signal, or you get a cup of coffee. 
+Now, let me tell you about some aspect of this that people don't think about, and that is, what happens? Suppose that what I say is true. 
+I mean, who knows, but suppose it happens. 
+Suppose some time in the next two dozen years we pick up a faint line that tells us we have some cosmic company. 
+What is the effect? What's the consequence? 
+Now, I might be at ground zero for this. 
+I happen to know what the consequence for me would be, because we've had false alarms. This is 1997, and this is a photo I made at about 3 o'clock in the morning in Mountain View here, when we were watching the computer monitors because we had picked up a signal that we thought, "" This is the real deal. "" All right? 
+And I kept waiting for the Men in Black to show up. Right? 
+I kept waiting for — I kept waiting for my mom to call, somebody to call, the government to call. Nobody called. 
+Nobody called. I was so nervous that I couldn't sit down. I just wandered around taking photos like this one, just for something to do. 
+Well, at 9: 30 in the morning, with my head down on my desk because I obviously hadn't slept all night, the phone rings and it's The New York Times. 
+And I think there's a lesson in that, and that lesson is that if we pick up a signal, the media, the media will be on it faster than a weasel on ball bearings. It's going to be fast. 
+You can be sure of that. No secrecy. 
+That's what happens to me. It kind of ruins my whole week, because whatever I've got planned that week is kind of out the window. 
+But what about you? What's it going to do to you? 
+And the answer is that we don't know the answer. 
+We don't know what that's going to do to you, not in the long term, and not even very much in the short term. 
+I mean, that would be a bit like asking Chris Columbus in 1491, "" Hey Chris, you know, what happens if it turns out that there's a continent between here and Japan, where you're sailing to, what will be the consequences for humanity if that turns out to be the case? "" And I think Chris would probably offer you some answer that you might not have understood, but it probably wouldn't have been right, and I think that to predict what finding E.T. 's going to mean, we can't predict that either. 
+But here are a couple things I can say. 
+To begin with, it's going to be a society that's way in advance of our own. 
+You're not going to hear from alien Neanderthals. 
+They're not building transmitters. 
+They're going to be ahead of us, maybe by a few thousand years, maybe by a few millions years, but substantially ahead of us, and that means, if you can understand anything that they're going to say, then you might be able to short-circuit history by getting information from a society that's way beyond our own. 
+Now, you might find that a bit hyperbolic, and maybe it is, but nonetheless, it's conceivable that this will happen, and, you know, you could consider this like, I don't know, giving Julius Caesar English lessons and the key to the library of Congress. 
+It would change his day, all right? 
+That's one thing. Another thing that's for sure going to happen is that it will calibrate us. 
+We will know that we're not that miracle, right, that we're just another duck in a row, we're not the only kids on the block, and I think that that's philosophically a very profound thing to learn. 
+We're not a miracle, okay? 
+The third thing that it might tell you is somewhat vague, but I think interesting and important, and that is, if you find a signal coming from a more advanced society, because they will be, that will tell you something about our own possibilities, that we're not inevitably doomed to self-destruction. 
+Because they survived their technology, we could do it too. 
+Normally when you look out into the universe, you're looking back in time. All right? 
+That's interesting to cosmologists. 
+But in this sense, you actually can look into the future, hazily, but you can look into the future. 
+So those are all the sorts of things that would come from a detection. 
+Now, let me talk a little bit about something that happens even in the meantime, and that is, SETI, I think, is important, because it's exploration, and it's not only exploration, it's comprehensible exploration. 
+Now, I gotta tell you, I'm always reading books about explorers. I find exploration very interesting, Arctic exploration, you know, people like Magellan, Amundsen, Shackleton, you see Franklin down there, Scott, all these guys. It's really nifty, exploration. 
+And they're just doing it because they want to explore, and you might say, "" Oh, that's kind of a frivolous opportunity, "" but that's not frivolous. That's not a frivolous activity, because, I mean, think of ants. 
+You know, most ants are programmed to follow one another along in a long line, but there are a couple of ants, maybe one percent of those ants, that are what they call pioneer ants, and they're the ones that wander off. 
+They're the ones you find on the kitchen countertop. 
+You gotta get them with your thumb before they find the sugar or something. 
+But those ants, even though most of them get wiped out, those ants are the ones that are essential to the survival of the hive. So exploration is important. 
+I also think that exploration is important in terms of being able to address what I think is a critical lack in our society, and that is the lack of science literacy, the lack of the ability to even understand science. 
+Now, look, a lot has been written about the deplorable state of science literacy in this country. 
+You've heard about it. 
+Well, here's one example, in fact. 
+Polls taken, this poll was taken 10 years ago. 
+It shows like roughly one third of the public thinks that aliens are not only out there, we're looking for them out there, but they're here, right? 
+Sailing the skies in their saucers and occasionally abducting people for experiments their parents wouldn't approve of. 
+Well, that would be interesting if it was true, and job security for me, but I don't think the evidence is very good. That's more, you know, sad than significant. 
+But there are other things that people believe that are significant, like the efficacy of homeopathy, or that evolution is just, you know, sort of a crazy idea by scientists without any legs, or, you know, evolution, all that sort of thing, or global warming. 
+These sorts of ideas don't really have any validity, that you can't trust the scientists. 
+Now, we've got to solve that problem, because that's a critically important problem, and you might say, "Well, okay, how are we gonna solve that problem with SETI?" 
+Well, let me suggest to you that SETI obviously can't solve the problem, but it can address the problem. 
+It can address the problem by getting young people interested in science. Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400 years of science, right? 
+I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right? 
+In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up. 
+Now, that's not true anymore. 
+Today, you've got to spend years in grad school and post-doc positions just to figure out what the important questions are. 
+It's hard. There's no doubt about it. 
+And in fact, here's an example: the Higgs boson, finding the Higgs boson. 
+Ask the next 10 people you see on the streets, "" Hey, do you think it's worthwhile to spend billions of Swiss francs looking for the Higgs boson? "" And I bet the answer you're going to get, is, "" Well, I don't know what the Higgs boson is, and I don't know if it's important. "" And probably most of the people wouldn't even know the value of a Swiss franc, okay? 
+And yet we're spending billions of Swiss francs on this problem. 
+Okay? So that doesn't get people interested in science because they can't comprehend what it's about. 
+SETI, on the other hand, is really simple. 
+We're going to use these big antennas and we're going to try to eavesdrop on signals. Everybody can understand that. 
+Yes, technologically, it's very sophisticated, but everybody gets the idea. 
+So that's one thing. The other thing is, it's exciting science. 
+It's exciting because we're naturally interested in other intelligent beings, and I think that's part of our hardwiring. 
+I mean, we're hardwired to be interested in beings that might be, if you will, competitors, or if you're the romantic sort, possibly even mates. Okay? 
+I mean, this is analogous to our interest in things that have big teeth. Right? 
+We're interested in things that have big teeth, and you can see the evolutionary value of that, and you can also see the practical consequences by watching Animal Planet. 
+You notice they make very few programs about gerbils. 
+It's mostly about things that have big teeth. 
+Okay, so we're interested in these sorts of things. 
+And not just us. It's also kids. 
+This allows you to pay it forward by using this subject as a hook to science, because SETI involves all kinds of science, obviously biology, obviously astronomy, but also geology, also chemistry, various scientific disciplines all can be presented in the guise of, "We're looking for E.T." 
+So to me this is interesting and important, and in fact, it's my policy, even though I give a lot of talks to adults, you give talks to adults, and two days later they're back where they were. 
+But if you give talks to kids, you know, one in 50 of them, some light bulb goes off, and they think, "" Gee, I'd never thought of that, "" and then they go, you know, read a book or a magazine or whatever. 
+They get interested in something. 
+Now it's my theory, supported only by anecdotal, personal anecdotal evidence, but nonetheless, that kids get interested in something between the ages of eight and 11. You've got to get them there. 
+So, all right, I give talks to adults, that's fine, but I try and make 10 percent of the talks that I give, I try and make those for kids. 
+I remember when a guy came to our high school, actually, it was actually my junior high school. I was in sixth grade. 
+And he gave some talk. All I remember from it was one word: electronics. 
+It was like Dustin Hoffman in "" The Graduate, "" right, when he said "" plastics, "" whatever that means, plastics. 
+All right, so the guy said electronics. I don't remember anything else. In fact, I don't remember anything that my sixth grade teacher said all year, but I remember electronics. 
+And so I got interested in electronics, and you know, I studied to get my ham license. I was wiring up stuff. 
+Here I am at about 15 or something, doing that sort of stuff. 
+Okay? That had a big effect on me. 
+So that's my point, that you can have a big effect on these kids. 
+In fact, this reminds me, I don't know, a couple years ago I gave a talk at a school in Palo Alto where there were about a dozen 11-year-olds that had come to this talk. 
+I had been brought in to talk to these kids for an hour. 
+Eleven-year-olds, they're all sitting in a little semi-circle looking up at me with big eyes, and I started, there was a white board behind me, and I started off by writing a one with 22 zeroes after it, and I said, "" All right, now look, this is the number of stars in the visible universe, and this number is so big there's not even a name for it. "" And one of these kids shot up his hand, and he said, "" Well, actually there is a name for it. 
+It's a sextra-quadra-hexa-something or other. "" Right? 
+Now, that kid was wrong by four orders of magnitude, but there was no doubt about it, these kids were smart. 
+Okay? So I stopped giving the lecture. 
+All they wanted to do was ask questions. 
+In fact, my last comments to these kids, at the end I said, "" You know, you kids are smarter than the people I work with. "" Now — (Laughter) They didn't even care about that. 
+What they wanted was my email address so they could ask me more questions. (Laughter) Let me just say, look, my job is a privilege because we're in a special time. 
+Previous generations couldn't do this experiment at all. 
+In another generation down the line, I think we will have succeeded. 
+So to me, it is a privilege, and when I look in the mirror, the facts are that I really don't see myself. 
+What I see is the generation behind me. 
+These are some kids from the Huff School, fourth graders. 
+I talked there, what, two weeks ago, something like that. 
+I think that if you can instill some interest in science and how it works, well, that's a payoff beyond easy measure. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I grew up in Europe, and World War II caught me when I was between seven and 10 years old. 
+And I realized how few of the grown-ups that I knew were able to withstand the tragedies that the war visited on them — how few of them could even resemble a normal, contented, satisfied, happy life once their job, their home, their security was destroyed by the war. 
+So I became interested in understanding what contributed to a life that was worth living. 
+And I tried, as a child, as a teenager, to read philosophy and to get involved in art and religion and many other ways that I could see as a possible answer to that question. 
+And finally I ended up encountering psychology by chance. 
+I was at a ski resort in Switzerland without any money to actually enjoy myself, because the snow had melted and I didn't have money to go to a movie. But I found that on the — I read in the newspapers that there was to be a presentation by someone in a place that I'd seen in the center of Zurich, and it was about flying saucers [that] he was going to talk. 
+And I thought, well, since I can't go to the movies, at least I will go for free to listen to flying saucers. 
+And the man who talked at that evening lecture was very interesting. 
+Instead of talking about little green men, he talked about how the psyche of the Europeans had been traumatized by the war, and now they're projecting flying saucers into the sky. 
+He talked about how the mandalas of ancient Hindu religion were kind of projected into the sky as an attempt to regain some sense of order after the chaos of war. 
+And this seemed very interesting to me. 
+And I started reading his books after that lecture. 
+And that was Carl Jung, whose name or work I had no idea about. 
+Then I came to this country to study psychology and I started trying to understand the roots of happiness. 
+This is a typical result that many people have presented, and there are many variations on it. 
+But this, for instance, shows that about 30 percent of the people surveyed in the United States since 1956 say that their life is very happy. 
+And that hasn't changed at all. 
+Whereas the personal income, on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation, has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period. 
+But you find essentially the same results, namely, that after a certain basic point — which corresponds more or less to just a few 1,000 dollars above the minimum poverty level — increases in material well-being don't seem to affect how happy people are. 
+In fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources does not increase happiness. 
+So my research has been focused more on — after finding out these things that actually corresponded to my own experience, I tried to understand: where — in everyday life, in our normal experience — do we feel really happy? 
+And to start those studies about 40 years ago, I began to look at creative people — first artists and scientists, and so forth — trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them didn't expect either fame or fortune, but which made their life meaningful and worth doing. 
+This was one of the leading composers of American music back in the '70s. 
+And the interview was 40 pages long. 
+But this little excerpt is a very good summary of what he was saying during the interview. 
+And it describes how he feels when composing is going well. 
+And he says by describing it as an ecstatic state. 
+Now, "" ecstasy "" in Greek meant simply to stand to the side of something. 
+And then it became essentially an analogy for a mental state where you feel that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routines. 
+So ecstasy is essentially a stepping into an alternative reality. 
+And it's interesting, if you think about it, how, when we think about the civilizations that we look up to as having been pinnacles of human achievement — whether it's China, Greece, the Hindu civilization, or the Mayas, or Egyptians — what we know about them is really about their ecstasies, not about their everyday life. 
+We know the temples they built, where people could come to experience a different reality. 
+We know about the circuses, the arenas, the theaters. 
+These are the remains of civilizations and they are the places that people went to experience life in a more concentrated, more ordered form. 
+Now, this man doesn't need to go to a place like this, which is also — this place, this arena, which is built like a Greek amphitheatre, is a place for ecstasy also. 
+We are participating in a reality that is different from that of the everyday life that we're used to. 
+But this man doesn't need to go there. 
+He needs just a piece of paper where he can put down little marks, and as he does that, he can imagine sounds that had not existed before in that particular combination. 
+So once he gets to that point of beginning to create, like Jennifer did in her improvisation, a new reality — that is, a moment of ecstasy — he enters that different reality. 
+Now he says also that this is so intense an experience that it feels almost as if he didn't exist. 
+And that sounds like a kind of a romantic exaggeration. 
+But actually, our nervous system is incapable of processing more than about 110 bits of information per second. 
+And in order to hear me and understand what I'm saying, you need to process about 60 bits per second. 
+That's why you can't hear more than two people. 
+You can't understand more than two people talking to you. 
+Well, when you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, as this man is, he doesn't have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels, or his problems at home. 
+He can't feel even that he's hungry or tired. 
+His body disappears, his identity disappears from his consciousness, because he doesn't have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that he exists. 
+So existence is temporarily suspended. 
+And he says that his hand seems to be moving by itself. 
+Now, I could look at my hand for two weeks, and I wouldn't feel any awe or wonder, because I can't compose. (Laughter) So what it's telling you here is that obviously this automatic, spontaneous process that he's describing can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. 
+And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field. 
+Whether it's mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it's better than what was there before. 
+Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out. 
+And because all of these people I started interviewing — this was an interview which is over 30 years old — so many of the people described this as a spontaneous flow that I called this type of experience the "" flow experience. "" And it happens in different realms. 
+For instance, a poet describes it in this form. 
+This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. 
+And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous feeling that you get when you enter into this ecstatic state. 
+This poet describes it as opening a door that floats in the sky — a very similar description to what Albert Einstein gave as to how he imagined the forces of relativity, when he was struggling with trying to understand how it worked. 
+But it happens in other activities. 
+For instance, this is another student of mine, Susan Jackson from Australia, who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world. 
+And you see here in this description of an Olympic skater, the same essential description of the phenomenology of the inner state of the person. 
+You don't think; it goes automatically, if you merge yourself with the music, and so forth. 
+It happens also, actually, in the most recent book I wrote, called "" Good Business, "" where I interviewed some of the CEOs who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical, very socially responsible. 
+You see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it. 
+And like all of these successful and responsible CEOs say, you can't have just one of these things be successful if you want a meaningful and successful job. 
+Anita Roddick is another one of these CEOs we interviewed. 
+She is the founder of Body Shop, the natural cosmetics king. 
+It's kind of a passion that comes from doing the best and having flow while you're working. 
+This is an interesting little quote from Masaru Ibuka, who was at that time starting out Sony without any money, without a product — they didn't have a product, they didn't have anything, but they had an idea. 
+And the idea he had was to establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society and work to their heart's content. 
+I couldn't improve on this as a good example of how flow enters the workplace. 
+Now, when we do studies — we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people — from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds — who enjoy their work. 
+And regardless of the culture, regardless of education or whatever, there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. 
+There's this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. 
+You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. 
+And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake. 
+In our studies, we represent the everyday life of people in this simple scheme. 
+And we can measure this very precisely, actually, because we give people electronic pagers that go off 10 times a day, and whenever they go off you say what you're doing, how you feel, where you are, what you're thinking about. 
+And two things that we measure is the amount of challenge people experience at that moment and the amount of skill that they feel they have at that moment. 
+So for each person we can establish an average, which is the center of the diagram. 
+That would be your mean level of challenge and skill, which will be different from that of anybody else. 
+But you have a kind of a set point there, which would be in the middle. 
+If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average. 
+And you may be doing things very differently from other people, but for everyone that flow channel, that area there, will be when you are doing what you really like to do — play the piano, be with your best friend, perhaps work, if work is what provides flow for you. 
+And then the other areas become less and less positive. 
+Arousal is still good because you are over-challenged there. 
+Your skills are not quite as high as they should be, but you can move into flow fairly easily by just developing a little more skill. 
+So, arousal is the area where most people learn from, because that's where they're pushed beyond their comfort zone and to enter that — going back to flow — then they develop higher skills. 
+Control is also a good place to be, because there you feel comfortable, but not very excited. 
+It's not very challenging any more. 
+And if you want to enter flow from control, you have to increase the challenges. 
+So those two are ideal and complementary areas from which flow is easy to go into. 
+The other combinations of challenge and skill become progressively less optimal. 
+Relaxation is fine — you still feel OK. 
+Boredom begins to be very aversive and apathy becomes very negative: you don't feel that you're doing anything, you don't use your skills, there's no challenge. 
+Unfortunately, a lot of people's experience is in apathy. 
+The largest single contributor to that experience is watching television; the next one is being in the bathroom, sitting. 
+Even though sometimes watching television about seven to eight percent of the time is in flow, but that's when you choose a program you really want to watch and you get feedback from it. 
+So the question we are trying to address — and I'm way over time — is how to put more and more of everyday life in that flow channel. 
+And that is the kind of challenge that we're trying to understand. 
+And some of you obviously know how to do that spontaneously without any advice, but unfortunately a lot of people don't. 
+And that's what our mandate is, in a way, to do. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In December of 2010, the city of Apatzingán in the coastal state of Michoacán, in Mexico, awoke to gunfire. 
+For two straight days, the city became an open battlefield between the federal forces and a well-organized group, presumably from the local criminal organization, La Familia Michoacana, or the Michoacán family. 
+The citizens didn't only experience incessant gunfire but also explosions and burning trucks used as barricades across the city, so truly like a battlefield. 
+After these two days, and during a particularly intense encounter, it was presumed that the leader of La Familia Michoacana, Nazario Moreno, was killed. 
+In response to this terrifying violence, the mayor of Apatzingán decided to call the citizens to a march for peace. 
+The idea was to ask for a softer approach to criminal activity in the state. 
+And so, the day of the scheduled procession, thousands of people showed up. 
+As the mayor was preparing to deliver the speech starting the march, his team noticed that, while half of the participants were appropriately dressed in white, and bearing banners asking for peace, the other half was actually marching in support of the criminal organization and its now-presumed-defunct leader. 
+Shocked, the mayor decided to step aside rather than participate or lead a procession that was ostensibly in support of organized crime. 
+And so his team stepped aside. 
+The two marches joined together, and they continued their path towards the state capital. 
+This story of horrific violence followed by a fumbled approach by federal and local authorities as they tried to engage civil society, who has been very well engaged by a criminal organization, is a perfect metaphor for what's happening in Mexico today, where we see that our current understanding of drug violence and what leads to it is probably at the very least incomplete. 
+If you decided to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out what's going on with drug violence in Mexico by, say, just researching online, the first thing you would find out is that while the laws state that all Mexican citizens are equal, there are some that are more and there are some that are much less equal than others, because you will quickly find out that in the past six years anywhere between 60 and 100,000 people have lost their lives in drug-related violence. 
+To put these numbers in perspective, this is eight times larger than the number of casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined. 
+It's also shockingly close to the number of people who have died in the Syrian civil war, which is an active civil war. 
+This is happening just south of the border. 
+Now as you're reading, however, you will be maybe surprised that you will quickly become numb to the numbers of deaths, because you will see that these are sort of abstract numbers of faceless, nameless dead people. 
+Implicitly or explicitly, there is a narrative that all the people who are dying were somehow involved in the drug trade, and we infer this because they were either tortured or executed in a professional manner, or, most likely, both. 
+And so clearly they were criminals because of the way they died. 
+And so the narrative is that somehow these people got what they were deserved. 
+They were part of the bad guys. 
+And that creates some form of comfort for a lot of people. 
+However, while it's easier to think of us, the citizens, the police, the army, as the good guys, and them, the narcos, the carteles, as the bad guys, if you think about it, the latter are only providing a service to the former. 
+Whether we like it or not, the U.S. is the largest market for illegal substances in the world, accounting for more than half of global demand. 
+It shares thousands of miles of border with Mexico that is its only route of access from the South, and so, as the former dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, used to say, "" Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States. "" The U.N. estimates that there are 55 million users of illegal drugs in the United States. 
+Using very, very conservative assumptions, this yields a yearly drug market on the retail side of anywhere between 30 and 150 billion dollars. 
+If we assume that the narcos only have access to the wholesale part, which we know is false, that still leaves you with yearly revenues of anywhere between 15 billion and 60 billion dollars. 
+To put these numbers in perspective, Microsoft has yearly revenues of 60 billion dollars. 
+And it so happens that this is a product that, because of its nature, a business model to address this market requires you to guarantee to your producers that their product will be reliably placed in the markets where it is consumed. 
+And the only way to do this, because it's illegal, is to have absolute control of the geographic corridors that are used to transport drugs. 
+Hence the violence. 
+If you look at a map of cartel influence and violence, you will see that it almost perfectly aligns with the most efficient routes of transportation from the south to the north. 
+The only thing that the cartels are doing is that they're trying to protect their business. 
+It's not only a multi-billion dollar market, but it's also a complex one. 
+For example, the coca plant is a fragile plant that can only grow in certain latitudes, and so it means that a business model to address this market requires you to have decentralized, international production, that by the way needs to have good quality control, because people need a good high that is not going to kill them and that is going to be delivered to them when they need it. 
+And so that means they need to secure production and quality control in the south, and you need to ensure that you have efficient and effective distribution channels in the markets where these drugs are consumed. 
+I urge you, but only a little bit, because I don't want to get you in trouble, to just ask around and see how difficult it would be to get whatever drug you want, wherever you want it, whenever you want it, anywhere in the U.S., and some of you may be surprised to know that there are many dealers that offer a service where if you send them a text message, they guarantee delivery of the drug in 30 minutes or less. 
+Think about this for a second. 
+Think about the complexity of the distribution network that I just described. 
+It's very difficult to reconcile this with the image of faceless, ignorant goons that are just shooting each other, very difficult to reconcile. 
+Now, as a business professor, and as any business professor would tell you, an effective organization requires an integrated strategy that includes a good organizational structure, good incentives, a solid identity and good brand management. 
+This leads me to the second thing that you would learn in your 30-minute exploration of drug violence in Mexico. 
+Because you would quickly realize, and maybe be confused by the fact, that there are three organizations that are constantly named in the articles. 
+You will hear about Los Zetas, the Knights Templar, which is the new brand for the Familia Michoacana that I spoke about at the beginning, and the Sinaloa Federation. 
+You will read that Los Zetas is this assortment of sociopaths that terrify the cities that they enter and they silence the press, and this is somewhat true, or mostly true. 
+But this is the result of a very careful branding and business strategy. 
+You see, Los Zetas is not just this random assortment of individuals, but was actually created by another criminal organization, the Gulf Cartel, that used to control the eastern corridor of Mexico. 
+When that corridor became contested, they decided that they wanted to recruit a professional enforcement arm. 
+So they recruited Los Zetas: an entire unit of elite paratroopers from the Mexican Army. 
+They were incredibly effective as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, so much so that at some point, they decided to just take over the operations, which is why I ask you to never keep tigers as pets, because they grow up. 
+Because the Zetas organization was founded in treason, they lost some of the linkages to the production and distribution in the most profitable markets like cocaine, but what they did have, and this is again based on their military origin, was a perfectly structured chain of command with a very clear hierarchy and a very clear promotion path that allowed them to supervise and operate across many, many markets very effectively, which is the essence of what a chain of command seeks to do. 
+And so because they didn't have access to the more profitable drug markets, this pushed them and gave them the opportunity to diversify into other forms of crime. 
+That includes kidnapping, prostitution, local drug dealing and human trafficking, including of migrants that go from the south to the U.S. 
+So what they currently run is truly and quite literally a franchise business. 
+They focus most of their recruiting on the army, and they very openly advertise for better salaries, better benefits, better promotion paths, not to mention much better food, than what the army can deliver. 
+The way they operate is that when they arrive in a locality, they let people know that they are there, and they go to the most powerful local gang and they say, "" I offer you to be the local representative of the Zeta brand. "" If they agree — and you don't want to know what happens if they don't — they train them and they supervise them on how to run the most efficient criminal operation for that town, in exchange for royalties. 
+This kind of business model obviously depends entirely on having a very effective brand of fear, and so Los Zetas carefully stage acts of violence that are spectacular in nature, especially when they arrive first in a city, but again, that's just a brand strategy. 
+I'm not saying they're not violent, but what I am saying is that even though you will read that they are the most violent of all, when you count, when you do the body count, they're actually all the same. 
+In contrast to them, the Knights Templar that arose in Michoacán emerged in reaction to the incursion of the Zetas into the state of Michoacán. 
+Michoacán is a geographically strategic state because it has one of the largest ports in Mexico, and it has very direct routes to the center of Mexico, which then gives you direct access to the U.S. 
+The Knights Templar realized very quickly that they couldn't face the Zetas on violence alone, and so they developed a strategy as a social enterprise. 
+They brand themselves as representative of and protecting of the citizens of Michoacán against organized crime. 
+Their brand of social enterprise means that they require a lot of civic engagement, so they invest heavily in providing local services, like dealing with home violence, going after petty criminals, treating addicts, and keeping drugs out of the local markets where they are, and, of course, protecting people from other criminal organizations. 
+Now, they kill a lot of people too, but when they kill them, they provide very careful narratives and descriptions for why they did them, through newspaper insertions, YouTube videos, and billboards that explain that the people who were killed were killed because they represented a threat not to us, as an organization, of course, but to you, as citizens. 
+And so we're actually here to protect you. 
+They, as social enterprises do, have created a moral and ethical code that they advertise around, and they have very strict recruiting practices. 
+And here you have the types of explanations that they provide for some of their actions. 
+They have actually retained access to the profitable drug trade, but the way they do it is, because they control all of Michoacán, and they control the Port of Lázaro Cárdenas, they leverage that to, for example, trade copper from Michoacán that is legally created and legally extracted with illegal ephedrine from China which is a critical precursor for methamphetamines that they produce, and then they have partnerships with larger organizations like the Sinaloa Federation that place their products in the U.S. 
+Finally, the Sinaloa Federation. 
+When you read about them, you will often read about them with an undertone of reverence and admiration, because they are the most integrated and the largest of all the Mexican organizations, and, many people argue, the world. 
+They started as just sort of a transport organization that specialized in smuggling between the U.S. 
+and the Mexican borders, but now they have grown into a truly integrated multinational that has partnerships in production in the south and partnerships in global distribution across the planet. 
+They have cultivated a brand of professionalism, business acumen and innovation. 
+They have designed new drug products and new drug processes. 
+They have designed narco-tunnels that go across the border, and you can see that these are not "" The Shawshank Redemption "" types. 
+They have invented narco-submarines and boats that are not detected by radar. 
+They have invented drones to transport drugs, catapults, you name it. 
+One of the leaders of the Sinaloa Federation actually made it to the Forbes list. 
+[# 701 Joaquin Guzman Loera] Like any multinational would, they have specialized and focused only in the most profitable part of the business, which is high-margin drugs like cocaine, heroine, methamphetamines. 
+Like any traditional Latin American multinational would, the way they control their operations is through family ties. 
+When they're entering a new market, they send a family member to supervise it, or, if they're partnering with a new organization, they create a family tie, either through marriages or other types of ties. 
+Like any other multinational would, they protect their brand by outsourcing the more questionable parts of the business model, like for example, when they have to engage in violence against other criminal organizations, they recruit gangs and other smaller players to do the dirty work for them, and they try to separate their operations and their violence and be very discrete about this. 
+To further strengthen their brand, they actually have professional P.R. firms that shape how the press talks about them. 
+They have professional videographers on staff. 
+They have incredibly productive ties with the security organizations on both sides of the border. 
+And so, differences aside, what these three organizations share is on the one hand, a very clear understanding that institutions cannot be imposed from the top, but rather they are built from the bottom up one interaction at a time. 
+They have created extremely coherent structures that they use to show the inconsistencies in government policies. 
+And so what I want you to remember from this talk are three things. 
+The first one is that drug violence is actually the result of a huge market demand and an institutional setup that forces the servicing of this market to necessitate violence to guarantee delivery routes. 
+The second thing I want you to remember is that these are sophisticated, coherent organizations that are business organizations, and analyzing them and treating them as such is probably a much more useful approach. 
+The third thing I want you to remember is that even though we're more comfortable with this idea of "" them, "" a set of bad guys separated from us, we are actually accomplices to them, either through our direct consumption or through our acceptance of the inconsistency between our policies of prohibition and our actual behavior of tolerance or even encouragement of consumption. 
+These organizations service, recruit from, and operate within our communities, so necessarily, they are much more integrated within them than we are comfortable acknowledging. 
+And so to me the question is not whether these dynamics will continue the way they have. 
+We see that the nature of this phenomenon guarantees that they will. 
+The question is whether we are willing to continue our support of a failed strategy based on our stubborn, blissful, voluntary ignorance at the cost of the deaths of thousands of our young. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+On March 14, this year, I posted this poster on Facebook. 
+This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag. 
+I will try to explain to you about the context of why and when I posted. 
+A few days ago, I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store, and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other, and the owner was explaining to the client that we're going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel. 
+And the client was saying, no, it's 10,000 a day. 
+(Laughter) ("" 10,000 missiles "") This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel. 
+We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now, and we have people, you know, afraid. 
+It's like every year it's the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran. 
+It's like, if we don't act now, it's too late forever, for 10 years now. 
+So at some point it became, you know, to me, I'm a graphic designer, so I made posters about it and I posted the one I just showed you before. 
+Most of the time, I make posters, I post them on Facebook, my friends like it, don't like it, most of the time don't like it, don't share it, don't nothing, and it's another day. 
+So I went to sleep, and that was it for me. 
+And later on in the night, I woke up because I'm always waking up in the night, and I went by the computer and I see all these red dots, you know, on Facebook, which I've never seen before. 
+(Laughter) And I was like, "" What's going on? "" So I come to the computer and I start looking on, and suddenly I see many people talking to me, most of them I don't know, and a few of them from Iran, which is — What? 
+Because you have to understand, in Israel we don't talk with people from Iran. 
+We don't know people from Iran. 
+It's like, on Facebook, you have friends only from — it's like your neighbors are your friends on Facebook. 
+And now people from Iran are talking to me. 
+So I start answering this girl, and she's telling me she saw the poster and she asked her family to come, because they don't have a computer, she asked her family to come to see the poster, and they're all sitting in the living room crying. 
+So I'm like, whoa. 
+People are crying, and she came, she read the text, and she started to cry. 
+And everybody's crying now. (Laughter) So I don't know what to do, so my first reflex, as a graphic designer, is, you know, to show everybody what I'd just seen, and people started to see them and to share them, and that's how it started. 
+The day after, when really it became a lot of talking, I said to myself, and my wife said to me, I also want a poster, so this is her. (Laughter) Because it's working, put me in a poster now. 
+But more seriously, I was like, okay, these ones work, but it's not just about me, it's about people from Israel who want to say something. 
+So I'm going to shoot all the people I know, if they want, and I'm going to put them in a poster and I'm going to share them. 
+So I went to my neighbors and friends and students and I just asked them, give me a picture, I will make you a poster. 
+And that's how it started. And that's how, really, it's unleashed, because suddenly people from Facebook, friends and others, just understand that they can be part of it. 
+It's not just one dude making one poster, it's — we can be part of it, so they start sending me pictures and ask me, "" Make me a poster. Post it. 
+Tell the Iranians we from Israel love you too. "" It became, you know, at some point it was really, really intense. 
+I mean, so many pictures, so I asked friends to come, graphic designers most of them, to make posters with me, because I didn't have the time. 
+It was a huge amount of pictures. 
+So for a few days, that's how my living room was. 
+And we received Israeli posters, Israeli images, but also lots of comments, lots of messages from Iran. 
+And we took these messages and we made posters out of it, because I know people: They don't read, they see images. 
+If it's an image, they may read it. 
+So here are a few of them. 
+("" You are my first Israelian friend. I wish we both get rid of our idiot politicians, anyway nice to see you! "") ("" I love that blue. I love that star. I love that flag. "") This one is really moving for me because it's the story of a girl who has been raised in Iran to walk on an Israeli flag to enter her school every morning, and now that she sees the posters that we're sending, she starts — she said that she changed her mind, and now she loves that blue, she loves that star, and she loves that flag, talking about the Israeli flag, 
+and she wished that we'd meet and come to visit one another, and just a few days after I posted the first poster. 
+The day after, Iranians started to respond with their own posters. 
+They have graphic designers. What? (Laughter) Crazy, crazy. 
+So you can see they are still shy, they don't want to show their faces, but they want to spread the message. 
+They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. 
+So. And now it's communication. 
+It's a two-way story. It's Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other. 
+("" My Israeli Friends. I don't hate you. I don't want War. "") This never happened before, and this is two people supposed to be enemies, we're on the verge of a war, and suddenly people on Facebook are starting to say, "I like this guy. I love those guys." 
+And it became really big at some point. 
+And then it became news. 
+Because when you're seeing the Middle East, you see only the bad news. 
+And suddenly, there is something that was happening that was good news. So the guys on the news, they say, "" Okay, let's talk about this. "" And they just came, and it was so much, I remember one day, Michal, she was talking with the journalist, and she was asking him, "Who's gonna see the show?" And he said, "Everybody." 
+So she said, "" Everybody in Palestine, in where? Israel? 
+Who is everybody? "" "" Everybody. "" They said, "" Syria? "" "" Syria. "" "Lebanon?" "Lebanon." 
+At some point, he just said, "" 40 million people are going to see you today. 
+It's everybody. "" The Chinese. 
+And we were just at the beginning of the story. 
+Something crazy also happened. 
+Every time a country started talking about it, like Germany, America, wherever, a page on Facebook popped up with the same logo with the same stories, so at the beginning we had "" Iran-Loves-Israel, "" which is an Iranian sitting in Tehran, saying, "" Okay, Israel loves Iran? 
+I give you Iran-Loves-Israel. "" You have Palestine-Loves-Israel. 
+You have Lebanon that just — a few days ago. 
+And this whole list of pages on Facebook dedicated to the same message, to people sending their love, one to each other. 
+The moment I really understood that something was happening, a friend of mine told me, "Google the word 'Israel.'" And those were the first images on those days that popped up from Google when you were typing, "" Israel "" or "" Iran. "" We really changed how people see the Middle East. 
+Because you're not in the Middle East. 
+You're somewhere over there, and then you want to see the Middle East, so you go on Google and you say, "" Israel, "" and they give you the bad stuff. 
+Today the Israel-Loves-Iran page is this number, 80,831, and two million people last week went on the page and shared, liked, I don't know, commented on one of the photos. 
+So for five months now, that's what we are doing, me, Michal, a few of my friends, are just making images. 
+We're showing a new reality by just making images because that's how the world perceives us. 
+They see images of us, and they see bad images. 
+So we're working on making good images. End of story. 
+Look at this one. This is the Iran-Loves-Israel page. 
+This is not the Israel-Loves-Iran. This is not my page. 
+This is a guy in Tehran on the day of remembrance of the Israeli fallen soldier putting an image of an Israeli soldier on his page. 
+This is the enemy. 
+What? 
+It's like, we are showing respect, one to each other. 
+And we're understanding. And you show compassion. 
+And you become friends. 
+And at some point, you become friends on Facebook, and you become friends in life. 
+You can go and travel and meet people. 
+And I was in Munich a few weeks ago. 
+I went there to open an exposition about Iran and I met there with people from the page that told me, "" Okay, you're going to be in Europe, I'm coming. I'm coming from France, from Holland, from Germany, "" of course, and from Israel people came, and we just met there for the first time in real life. 
+I met with people that are supposed to be my enemies for the first time. And we just shake hands, and have a coffee and a nice discussion, and we talk about food and basketball. 
+And that was the end of it. 
+Remember that image from the beginning? 
+At some point we met in real life, and we became friends. 
+And it goes the other way around. 
+Some girl that we met on Facebook never been in Israel, born and raised in Iran, lives in Germany, afraid of Israelis because of what she knows about us, decides after a few months of talking on the Internet with some Israelis to come to Israel, and she gets on the plane and arrives at Ben Gurion and says, "" Okay, not that big a deal. "" So a few weeks ago, the stress is getting higher, so we start this new campaign called "" Not ready to die in your war. "" I mean, it's plus / minus the same message, but we wanted really to add some aggressivity to it. 
+And again, something amazing happened, something that we didn't have on the first wave of the campaign. 
+Now people from Iran, the same ones who were shy at the first campaign and just sent, you know, their foot and half their faces, now they're sending their faces, and they're saying, "Okay, no problem, we're into it. We are with you." 
+Just read where those guys are from. 
+And for every guy from Israel, you've got someone from Iran. 
+Just people sending their pictures. 
+Crazy, yes? 
+So — (Applause) So you may ask yourself, who is this dude? 
+My name is Ronny Edry, and I'm 41, I'm an Israeli, I'm a father of two, I'm a husband, and I'm a graphic designer. I'm teaching graphic design. 
+And I'm not that naive, because a lot of the time I've been asked, many times I've been asked, "" Yeah, but, this is really naive, sending flowers over, I mean — "" I was in the army. I was in the paratroopers for three years, and I know how it looks from the ground. 
+I know how it can look really bad. 
+So to me, this is the courageous thing to do, to try to reach the other side before it's too late, because when it's going to be too late, it's going to be too late. 
+And sometimes war is inevitable, sometimes, but maybe [with] effort, we can avoid it. 
+Maybe as people, because especially in Israel, we're in a democracy. We have the freedom of speech, and maybe that little thing can change something. 
+And really, we can be our own ambassadors. 
+We can just send a message and hope for the best. 
+So I want to ask Michal, my wife, to come with me on the stage just to make with you one image, because it's all about images. 
+And maybe that image will help us change something. 
+Just raise that. Exactly. 
+And I'm just going to take a picture of it, and I'm just going to post it on Facebook with kind of "" Israelis for peace "" or something. 
+Oh my God. 
+Don't cry. 
+Thank you guys. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In June of 1998, Tori Murden McClure left Nags Head, North Carolina for France. 
+That's her boat, the American Pearl. 
+It's 23 feet long and just six feet across at its widest point. 
+The deck was the size of a cargo bed of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. 
+Tori and her friends built it by hand, and it weighed about 1,800 pounds. 
+Her plan was to row it alone across the Atlantic Ocean — no motor, no sail — something no woman and no American had ever done before. 
+This would be her route: over 3,600 miles across the open North Atlantic Ocean. 
+Professionally, Tori worked as a project administrator for the city of Louisville, Kentucky, her hometown, but her real passion was exploring. 
+This was not her first big expedition. 
+Several years earlier, she'd become the first woman to ski to the South Pole. 
+She was an accomplished rower in college, even competed for a spot on the 1992 U.S. Olympic team, but this, this was different. 
+(Video) (Music) Tori Murden McClure: Hi. It's Sunday, July 5. 
+Sector time 9 a.m. 
+So that's Kentucky time now. 
+At this point, she'd covered over 1,000 miles, had had no radio contact in more than two weeks following a storm that disabled all her long-range communications systems just five days in. 
+Most days looked like this. 
+At this point, she'd rowed over 200,000 strokes, fighting the current and the wind. 
+Some days, she traveled as little as 15 feet. 
+Yeah. 
+And as frustrating as those days were, other days were like this. 
+(Video) TMM: And I want to show you my little friends. 
+DL: She saw fish, dolphins, whales, sharks, and even some sea turtles. 
+After two weeks with no human contact, Tori was able to contact a local cargo ship via VHF radio. 
+Man: Heading up to a low ahead of you but it's heading, and you're obviously going northeast and there's a high behind us. 
+That'd be coming east-northeast also. 
+TMM: Good. 
+DL: She's pretty happy to talk to another human at this point. 
+DL: What the weather report didn't tell her was that she was rowing right into the path of Hurricane Danielle in the worst hurricane season on record in the North Atlantic. 
+(Video) TMM: Just sprained my ankle. 
+There's a very strong wind from the east now. 
+It's blowing about. 
+It's blowing! 
+After 12 days of storm I get to row for four hours without a flagging wind. 
+I'm not very happy right now. 
+As happy as I was this morning, I am unhappy now, so... 
+DL: After nearly three months at sea, she'd covered over 3,000 miles. 
+Her boat kept capsizing. 
+Some of them were pitchpole capsizes, flipping her end over end, and rowing became impossible. 
+(Video) TMM: It's 6: 30 a.m. 
+I'm in something big, bad and ugly. 
+Two capsizes. 
+Last capsize, I took the rib off the top of my ceiling with my back. 
+I've had about six capsizes now. 
+The last one was a pitchpole. 
+I have the Argus beacon with me. 
+It's about 10 a.m. 
+I've lost track of the number of capsizes. 
+I seem to capsize about every 15 minutes. 
+The waves are tearing the boat to shreds. 
+I keep praying because I'm not sure I'm going to make it through this. 
+DL: Tori set off her distress beacon and was rescued by a passing container ship. 
+They found her abandoned boat two months later adrift near France. 
+I read about it in the newspaper. 
+In 1998, I was a high school student living in Louisville, Kentucky. 
+And her bravery stuck with me, and I'm adapting her story into a musical called "" Row. "" When Tori returned home, she was feeling disheartened, she was broke. 
+She was having a hard time making the transition back into civilization. 
+In this scene, she sits at home. 
+The phone is ringing, her friends are calling, but she doesn't know how to talk to them. 
+She sings this song. It's called "" Dear Heart. "" (Guitar) When I was dreaming, I took my body to beautiful places I'd never been. 
+I saw Gibraltar, and stars of Kentucky burned in the moonlight, making me smile. 
+And when I awoke here, the sky was so cloudy. 
+I walked to a party where people I know try hard to know me and ask where I've been, but I can't explain what I've seen to them. 
+Ah, listen, dear heart. 
+Just pay attention, go right from the start. 
+Ah, listen, dear heart. 
+You can fall off the map, but don't fall apart. 
+Ooh ooh ooh, ah ah ah ah ah. 
+Ah ah, ah ah ah. 
+When I was out there, the ocean would hold me, rock me and throw me, light as a child. 
+But now I'm so heavy, nothing consoles me. 
+My mind floats like driftwood, wayward and wild. 
+Ah, listen, dear heart. 
+Just pay attention, go right from the start. 
+Ah, listen, dear heart. 
+You can fall off the map, but don't fall apart. 
+Ooh. 
+Eventually, Tori starts to get her feet under her. 
+She starts hanging out with her friends again. 
+She meets a guy and falls in love for the first time. 
+She gets a new job working for another Louisville native, Muhammad Ali. 
+One day, at lunch with her new boss, Tori shares the news that two other women are setting out to row across the mid-Atlantic, to do something that she almost died trying to do. 
+His response was classic Ali: "" You don't want to go through life as the woman who almost rowed across the ocean. "" He was right. 
+Tori rebuilt the American Pearl, and in December of 1999, she did it. 
+(Applause) (Guitar) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+So it was about four years ago, five years ago, I was sitting on a stage in Philadelphia, I think it was, with a bag similar to this. 
+And I was pulling a molecule out of this bag. 
+And I was saying, you don't know this molecule really well, but your body knows it extremely well. 
+And I was thinking that your body hated it, at the time, because we are very immune to this. This is called alpha-gal epitope. 
+And the fact that pig heart valves have lots of these on them is the reason that you can't transplant a pig heart valve into a person easily. 
+Actually our body doesn't hate these. 
+Our body loves these. It eats them. 
+I mean, the cells in our immune system are always hungry. 
+And if an antibody is stuck to one of these things on the cell, it means "" that's food. "" Now, I was thinking about that and I said, you know, we've got this immune response to this ridiculous molecule that we don't make, and we see it a lot in other animals and stuff. 
+But I said we can't get rid of it, because all the people who tried to transplant heart valves found out you can't get rid of that immunity. 
+And I said, why don't you use that? 
+What if I could stick this molecule, slap it onto a bacteria that was pathogenic to me, that had just invaded my lungs? 
+I mean I could immediately tap into an immune response that was already there, where it was not going to take five or six days to develop it — it was going to immediately attack whatever this thing was on. 
+It was kind of like the same thing that happens when you, like when you're getting stopped for a traffic ticket in L.A., and the cop drops a bag of marijuana in the back of your car, and then charges you for possession of marijuana. 
+It's like this very fast, very efficient way to get people off the street. 
+(Laughter) So you can take a bacteria that really doesn't make these things at all, and if you could clamp these on it really well you have it taken off the street. 
+And for certain bacteria we don't have really efficient ways to do that anymore. 
+Our antibiotics are running out. 
+And, I mean, the world apparently is running out too. 
+So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now — streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant — because we won't be here. But if we are — (Laughter) we're going to need something to do with the bacteria. 
+So I started working with this thing, with a bunch of collaborators. 
+And trying to attach this to things that were themselves attached to certain specific target zones, bacteria that we don't like. 
+And I feel now like George Bush. 
+It's like "" mission accomplished. "" So I might be doing something dumb, just like he was doing at the time. 
+But basically what I was talking about there we've now gotten to work. 
+And it's killing bacteria. It's eating them. 
+This thing can be stuck, like that little green triangle up there, sort of symbolizing this right now. 
+You can stick this to something called a DNA aptamer. 
+And that DNA aptamer will attach specifically to a target that you have selected for it. 
+So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don't like, like Staphylococcus — I don't like it in particular, because it killed a professor friend of mine last year. 
+It doesn't respond to antibiotics. So I don't like it. 
+And I'm making an aptamer that will have this attached to it. 
+That will know how to find Staph when it's in your body, and will alert your immune system to go after it. 
+Here's what happened. See that line on the very top with the little dots? 
+That's a bunch of mice that had been poisoned by our scientist friends down in Texas, at Brooks Air Base, with anthrax. 
+And they had also been treated with a drug that we made that would attack anthrax in particular, and direct your immune system to it. 
+You'll notice they all lived, the ones on the top line — that's a 100 percent survival rate. 
+And they actually lived another 14 days, or 28 when we finally killed them, and took them apart and figured out what went wrong. 
+Why did they not die? 
+And they didn't die because they didn't have anthrax anymore. 
+So we did it. Okay? 
+(Applause) Mission accomplished! (Applause) 
+
+And both in the production of plastic, the use of plastic and the disposal of plastic, the people who have the bull's-eye on their foreheads are poor people. 
+(Laughter) And so we kind of have this moral feel-good moment. 
+(Laughter) "You've served so well." (Laughter) 
+And they say, "" What would you like to do next? "" The little bottle says, "" I just don't know... "" (Laughter) But that's not actually what happens. 
+You see, if you understand the link between what we're doing to poison and pollute the planet and what we're doing to poor people, you arrive at a very troubling but also very helpful insight: In order to trash the planet, you have to trash people. 
+
+So that's Johnny Depp, of course. 
+And that's Johnny Depp's shoulder. 
+And that's Johnny Depp's famous shoulder tattoo. 
+Some of you might know that, in 1990, Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder, and he had tattooed on his right shoulder "Winona forever." 
+And then three years later — which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards — they broke up, and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done. 
+And now his shoulder says, "" Wino forever. "" (Laughter) So like Johnny Depp, and like 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 50, I have a tattoo. 
+I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s, but I deliberately waited a really long time. 
+Because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30. 
+That didn't happen to me. 
+I got my tattoo when I was 29, and I regretted it instantly. 
+And by "" regretted it, "" I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place — this is just a couple miles from here down on the Lower East Side — and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street. 
+(Laughter) Which is a great place to do it because nobody cares. (Laughter) 
+And then I went home that night, and I had an even larger emotional meltdown, which I'll say more about in a minute. 
+And this was all actually quite shocking to me, because prior to this moment, I had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets. 
+I made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions, of course. 
+I do that hourly. 
+But I had always felt like, look, you know, I made the best choice I could make given who I was then, given the information I had on hand. 
+I learned a lesson from it. 
+It somehow got me to where I am in life right now. 
+And okay, I wouldn't change it. 
+In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets. 
+This idea is nicely captured by this quote: "" Things without all remedy should be without regard; what's done is done. "" And it seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first — something we might all agree to sign onto... 
+until I tell you who said it. 
+Right, so this is Lady MacBeth basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people. 
+And as it happens, Shakespeare was onto something here, as he generally was. 
+Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths. 
+It's also, by the way, a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage. 
+So people who have damage to their orbital frontal cortex seem to be unable to feel regret in the face of even obviously very poor decisions. 
+So if, in fact, you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. 
+It's called a lobotomy. 
+But if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live, not without regret, but with it. 
+So let's start off by defining some terms. 
+What is regret? 
+Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past. 
+So in other words, regret requires two things. 
+It requires, first of all, agency — we had to make a decision in the first place. 
+And second of all, it requires imagination. 
+We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice, and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present. 
+And in fact, the more we have of either of these things — the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret, the more acute that regret will be. 
+So let's say for instance that you're on your way to your best friend's wedding and you're trying to get to the airport and you're stuck in terrible traffic, and you finally arrive at your gate and you've missed your flight. 
+You're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20. 
+Why? 
+Well because, if you miss your flight by three minutes, it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome. 
+"" I should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel. 
+I should have gone through that yellow light. "" These are the classic conditions that create regret. 
+We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly, but almost came out well. 
+Now within that framework, we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things. 
+This session today is about behavioral economics. 
+And most of what we know about regret comes to us out of that domain. 
+We have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them — buyer's remorse, basically. 
+But then finally, it occurred to some researchers to step back and say, well okay, but overall, what do we regret most in life? 
+Here's what the answers turn out to look like. 
+So top six regrets — the things we regret most in life: Number one by far, education. 
+33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education. 
+We wish we'd gotten more of it. 
+We wish we'd taken better advantage of the education that we did have. 
+We wish we'd chosen to study a different topic. 
+Others very high on our list of regrets include career, romance, parenting, various decisions and choices about our sense of self and how we spend our leisure time — or actually more specifically, how we fail to spend our leisure time. 
+The remaining regrets pertain to these things: finance, family issues unrelated to romance or parenting, health, friends, spirituality and community. 
+So in other words, we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance. 
+But it turns out, when you look overall at what people regret in life, you know what, our financial decisions don't even rank. 
+They account for less than three percent of our total regrets. 
+So if you're sitting there stressing about large cap versus small cap, or company A versus company B, or should you buy the Subaru or the Prius, you know what, let it go. 
+Odds are, you're not going to care in five years. 
+But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around, what does that experience feel like? 
+We all know the short answer. 
+It feels terrible. Regret feels awful. 
+But it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways. 
+So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial. 
+When I went home that night after getting my tattoo, I basically stayed up all night. 
+And for the first several hours, there was exactly one thought in my head. 
+And the thought was, "Make it go away!" 
+This is an unbelievably primitive emotional response. 
+I mean, it's right up there with, "" I want my mommy! "" We're not trying to solve the problem. 
+We're not trying to understand how the problem came about. 
+We just want it to vanish. 
+The second characteristic component of regret is a sense of bewilderment. 
+So the other thing I thought about there in my bedroom that night was, "" How could I have done that? 
+What was I thinking? "" This real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret. 
+We can't identify with that part. 
+We don't understand that part. 
+And we certainly don't have any empathy for that part — which explains the third consistent component of regret, which is an intense desire to punish ourselves. 
+That's why, in the face of our regret, the thing we consistently say is, "" I could have kicked myself. "" The fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative. 
+To perseverate means to focus obsessively and repeatedly on the exact same thing. 
+Now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop. 
+So it's not that I sat there in my bedroom that night, thinking, "" Make it go away. "" It's that I sat there and I thought, "" Make it go away. Make it go away. 
+Make it go away. Make it go away. "" So if you look at the psychological literature, these are the four consistent defining components of regret. 
+But I want to suggest that there's also a fifth one. 
+And I think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call. 
+That night in my apartment, after I got done kicking myself and so forth, I lay in bed for a long time, and I thought about skin grafts. 
+And then I thought about how, much as travel insurance doesn't cover acts of God, probably my health insurance did not cover acts of idiocy. 
+In point of fact, no insurance covers acts of idiocy. 
+The whole point of acts of idiocy is that they leave you totally uninsured; they leave you exposed to the world and exposed to your own vulnerability and fallibility in face of, frankly, a fairly indifferent universe. 
+This is obviously an incredibly painful experience. 
+And I think it's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Control-Z culture — Control-Z like the computer command, undo. 
+We're incredibly used to not having to face life's hard realities, in a certain sense. 
+We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem — we can undo and unfriend and unfollow. 
+And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot. 
+Sometimes instead of Control-Z, we actually have zero control. 
+And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists — and I know where of I speak — this is really hard, because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right. 
+Now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos, and I'm going to return to that point in a few minutes. 
+But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we're feeling regretful about. 
+So for instance, here's one of my favorite automatic generators of regret in modern life. 
+(Laughter) Text: Relpy to all. 
+And the amazing thing about this really insidious technological innovation is that even just with this one thing, we can experience a huge range of regret. 
+You can accidentally hit "" reply all "" to an email and torpedo a relationship. 
+Or you can just have an incredibly embarrassing day at work. 
+Or you can have your last day at work. 
+And this doesn't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life. 
+Because of course, sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences, either for our own or for other people's health and happiness and livelihoods, and in the very worst case scenario, even their lives. 
+Now obviously, those kinds of regrets are incredibly piercing and enduring. 
+I mean, even the stupid "" reply all "" regrets can leave us in a fit of excruciating agony for days. 
+So how are we supposed to live with this? 
+I want to suggest that there's three things that help us to make our peace with regret. 
+And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality. 
+If you Google regret and tattoo, you will get 11.5 million hits. 
+(Laughter) The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17 percent of us regret getting them. 
+That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends. 
+And that's just regret about tattoos. 
+We are all in this together. 
+The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves. 
+Now in my case, this really wasn't a problem, because it's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don't like your new tattoo. 
+But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets. 
+I don't think that's the case though. 
+All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive. 
+It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us. 
+The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds — except for tattoos, which are permanent. 
+So it's been several years since I got my own tattoo. 
+And do you guys just want to see it? 
+All right. 
+Actually, you know what, I should warn you, you're going to be disappointed. 
+Because it's actually not that hideous. 
+I didn't tattoo Marilyn Manson's face on some indiscreet part of myself or something. 
+When other people see my tattoo, for the most part they like how it looks. 
+It's just that I don't like how it looks. 
+And as I said earlier, I'm a perfectionist. 
+But I'll let you see it anyway. 
+This is my tattoo. 
+I can guess what some of you are thinking. 
+So let me reassure you about something. 
+Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are. 
+I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling. 
+And when I came and settled in New York afterward, I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time. 
+Specifically the two things I learned about myself that I most didn't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring and, simultaneously, how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north. 
+And what I loved about this image of the compass was that I felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image. 
+And I thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device. 
+Well it did. 
+But it turns out, it doesn't remind me of the thing I thought it would; it reminds me constantly of something else instead. 
+It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us, which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us. 
+And ironically, I think it's probably the single most important thing I possibly could have tattooed onto my body — partly as a writer, but also just as a human being. 
+Here's the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. 
+The point isn't to live without any regrets. 
+The point is to not hate ourselves for having them. 
+The lesson that I ultimately learned from my tattoo and that I want to leave you with today is this: We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. 
+Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. 
+It reminds us that we know we can do better. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a writer and a journalist, and I'm also an insanely curious person, so in 22 years as a journalist, I've learned how to do a lot of new things. 
+And three years ago, one of the things I learned how to do was to become invisible. 
+I became one of the working homeless. 
+I quit my job as a newspaper editor after my father died in February of that same year, and decided to travel. 
+His death hit me pretty hard. 
+And there were a lot of things that I wanted to feel and deal with while I was doing that. 
+I've camped my whole life. And I decided that living in a van for a year to do this would be like one long camping trip. 
+So I packed my cat, my Rottweiler and my camping gear into a 1975 Chevy van, and drove off into the sunset, having fully failed to realize three critical things. 
+One: that society equates living in a permanent structure, even a shack, with having value as a person. 
+Two: I failed to realize how quickly the negative perceptions of other people can impact our reality, if we let it. 
+Three: I failed to realize that homelessness is an attitude, not a lifestyle. 
+At first, living in the van was great. 
+I showered in campgrounds. I ate out regularly. 
+And I had time to relax and to grieve. 
+But then the anger and the depression about my father's death set in. 
+My freelance job ended. And I had to get a full-time job to pay the bills. 
+What had been a really mild spring turned into a miserably hot summer. 
+And it became impossible to park anywhere — (Laughs) — without being very obvious that I had a cat and a dog with me, and it was really hot. 
+The cat came and went through an open window in the van. 
+The doggy went into doggy day care. 
+And I sweated. 
+Whenever I could, I used employee showers in office buildings and truck stops. 
+Or I washed up in public rest rooms. 
+Nighttime temperatures in the van rarely dropped below 80 degrees Fahrenheit, making it difficult or impossible to sleep. 
+Food rotted in the heat. 
+Ice in my ice chest melted within hours, and it was pretty miserable. 
+I couldn't afford to find an apartment, or couldn't afford an apartment that would allow me to have the Rottweiler and the cat. 
+And I refused to give them up, so I stayed in the van. 
+And when the heat made me too sick to walk the 50 feet to the public restroom outside my van at night, I used a bucket and a trash bag as a toilet. 
+When winter weather set in, the temperatures dropped below freezing. And they stayed there. 
+And I faced a whole new set of challenges. 
+I parked a different place every night so I would avoid being noticed and hassled by the police. 
+I didn't always succeed. 
+But I felt out of control of my life. 
+And I don't know when or how it happened, but the speed at which I went from being a talented writer and journalist to being a homeless woman, living in a van, took my breath away. 
+I hadn't changed. My I.Q. hadn't dropped. 
+My talent, my integrity, my values, everything about me remained the same. 
+But I had changed somehow. 
+I spiraled deeper and deeper into a depression. 
+And eventually someone referred me to a homeless health clinic. 
+And I went. I hadn't bathed in three days. 
+I was as smelly and as depressed as anyone in line. 
+I just wasn't drunk or high. 
+And when several of the homeless men realized that, including a former university professor, they said, "" You aren't homeless. Why are you really here? "" Other homeless people didn't see me as homeless, but I did. 
+Then the professor listened to my story and he said, "" You have a job. You have hope. 
+The real homeless don't have hope. "" A reaction to the medication the clinic gave me for my depression left me suicidal. And I remember thinking, "If I killed myself, no one would notice." 
+A friend told me, shortly after that, that she had heard that Tim Russert, a nationally renowned journalist, had been talking about me on national T.V. 
+An essay I'd written about my father, the year before he died, was in Tim's new book. 
+And he was doing the talk show circuit. And he was talking about my writing. 
+And when I realized that Tim Russert, former moderator of "" Meet the Press, "" was talking about my writing, while I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, I started laughing. 
+You should too. 
+(Laughter) I started laughing because it got to the point where, was I a writer, or was I a homeless woman? 
+So I went in the bookstore. And I found Tim's book. 
+And I stood there. And I reread my essay. 
+And I cried. 
+Because I was a writer. I was a writer. 
+Shortly after that I moved back to Tennessee. I alternated between living in a van and couch surfing with friends. And I started writing again. By the summer of the following year I was a working journalist. I was winning awards. I was living in my own apartment. I was no longer homeless. And I was no longer invisible. Thousands of people work full and part-time jobs, 
+and live in their cars. 
+But society continues to stigmatize and criminalize living in your vehicle or on the streets. 
+So the homeless, the working homeless, primarily remain invisible. 
+But if you ever meet one, engage them, encourage them, and offer them hope. 
+The human spirit can overcome anything if it has hope. 
+And I'm not here to be the poster girl for the homeless. 
+I'm not here to encourage you to give money to the next panhandler you meet. 
+But I am here to tell you that, based on my experience, people are not where they live, where they sleep, or what their life situation is at any given time. 
+Three years ago I was living in a van in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and today I'm speaking at TED. 
+Hope always, always finds a way. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So the Awesome story: It begins about 40 years ago, when my mom and my dad came to Canada. 
+My mom left Nairobi, Kenya. 
+My dad left a small village outside of Amritsar, India. 
+And they got here in the late 1960s. 
+They settled in a shady suburb about an hour east of Toronto, and they settled into a new life. 
+They saw their first dentist, they ate their first hamburger, and they had their first kids. 
+My sister and I grew up here, and we had quiet, happy childhoods. 
+We had close family, good friends, a quiet street. 
+We grew up taking for granted a lot of the things that my parents couldn't take for granted when they grew up — things like power always on in our houses, things like schools across the street and hospitals down the road and popsicles in the backyard. 
+We grew up, and we grew older. 
+I went to high school. 
+I graduated. 
+I moved out of the house, I got a job, I found a girl, I settled down — and I realize it sounds like a bad sitcom or a Cat Stevens' song — (Laughter) but life was pretty good. 
+Life was pretty good. 
+2006 was a great year. 
+Under clear blue skies in July in the wine region of Ontario, I got married, surrounded by 150 family and friends. 
+2007 was a great year. 
+I graduated from school, and I went on a road trip with two of my closest friends. 
+Here's a picture of me and my friend, Chris, on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. 
+We actually saw seals out of our car window, and we pulled over to take a quick picture of them and then blocked them with our giant heads. 
+(Laughter) So you can't actually see them, but it was breathtaking, believe me. (Laughter) 
+2008 and 2009 were a little tougher. 
+I know that they were tougher for a lot of people, not just me. 
+First of all, the news was so heavy. 
+It's still heavy now, and it was heavy before that, but when you flipped open a newspaper, when you turned on the TV, it was about ice caps melting, wars going on around the world, earthquakes, hurricanes and an economy that was wobbling on the brink of collapse, and then eventually did collapse, and so many of us losing our homes, or our jobs, or our retirements, or our livelihoods. 
+2008, 2009 were heavy years for me for another reason, too. 
+I was going through a lot of personal problems at the time. 
+My marriage wasn't going well, and we just were growing further and further apart. 
+One day my wife came home from work and summoned the courage, through a lot of tears, to have a very honest conversation. 
+And she said, "" I don't love you anymore, "" and it was one of the most painful things I'd ever heard and certainly the most heartbreaking thing I'd ever heard, until only a month later, when I heard something even more heartbreaking. 
+My friend Chris, who I just showed you a picture of, had been battling mental illness for some time. 
+And for those of you whose lives have been touched by mental illness, you know how challenging it can be. 
+I spoke to him on the phone at 10: 30 p.m. 
+on a Sunday night. 
+We talked about the TV show we watched that evening. 
+And Monday morning, I found out that he disappeared. 
+Very sadly, he took his own life. 
+And it was a really heavy time. 
+And as these dark clouds were circling me, and I was finding it really, really difficult to think of anything good, I said to myself that I really needed a way to focus on the positive somehow. 
+So I came home from work one night, and I logged onto the computer, and I started up a tiny website called 1000awesomethings.com. 
+I was trying to remind myself of the simple, universal, little pleasures that we all love, but we just don't talk about enough — things like waiters and waitresses who bring you free refills without asking, being the first table to get called up to the dinner buffet at a wedding, wearing warm underwear from just out of the dryer, or when cashiers open up a new check-out lane at the grocery store and you get to be first in line — even if you were last at the other line, swoop right in there. 
+(Laughter) And slowly over time, I started putting myself in a better mood. 
+I mean, 50,000 blogs are started a day, and so my blog was just one of those 50,000. 
+And nobody read it except for my mom. 
+Although I should say that my traffic did skyrocket and go up by 100 percent when she forwarded it to my dad. 
+(Laughter) And then I got excited when it started getting tens of hits, and then I started getting excited when it started getting dozens and then hundreds and then thousands and then millions. 
+It started getting bigger and bigger and bigger. 
+And then I got a phone call, and the voice at the other end of the line said, "You've just won the Best Blog In the World award." 
+I was like, that sounds totally fake. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Which African country do you want me to wire all my money to? (Laughter) 
+But it turns out, I jumped on a plane, and I ended up walking a red carpet between Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Fallon and Martha Stewart. 
+And I went onstage to accept a Webby award for Best Blog. 
+And the surprise and just the amazement of that was only overshadowed by my return to Toronto, when, in my inbox, 10 literary agents were waiting for me to talk about putting this into a book. 
+Flash-forward to the next year and "" The Book of Awesome "" has now been number one on the bestseller list for 20 straight weeks. 
+(Applause) But look, I said I wanted to do three things with you today. 
+I said I wanted to tell you the Awesome story, I wanted to share with you the three As of Awesome, and I wanted to leave you with a closing thought. 
+So let's talk about those three As. 
+Over the last few years, I haven't had that much time to really think. 
+But lately I have had the opportunity to take a step back and ask myself: "" What is it over the last few years that helped me grow my website, but also grow myself? "" And I've summarized those things, for me personally, as three As. 
+They are Attitude, Awareness and Authenticity. 
+I'd love to just talk about each one briefly. 
+So Attitude: Look, we're all going to get lumps, and we're all going to get bumps. 
+None of us can predict the future, but we do know one thing about it and that's that it ain't gonna go according to plan. 
+We will all have high highs and big days and proud moments of smiles on graduation stages, father-daughter dances at weddings and healthy babies screeching in the delivery room, but between those high highs, we may also have some lumps and some bumps too. 
+It's sad, and it's not pleasant to talk about, but your husband might leave you, your girlfriend could cheat, your headaches might be more serious than you thought, or your dog could get hit by a car on the street. 
+It's not a happy thought, but your kids could get mixed up in gangs or bad scenes. 
+Your mom could get cancer, your dad could get mean. 
+And there are times in life when you will be tossed in the well, too, with twists in your stomach and with holes in your heart, and when that bad news washes over you, and when that pain sponges and soaks in, I just really hope you feel like you've always got two choices. 
+One, you can swirl and twirl and gloom and doom forever, or two, you can grieve and then face the future with newly sober eyes. 
+Having a great attitude is about choosing option number two, and choosing, no matter how difficult it is, no matter what pain hits you, choosing to move forward and move on and take baby steps into the future. 
+The second "" A "" is Awareness. 
+I love hanging out with three year-olds. 
+I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. 
+I love the way that they can stare at a bug crossing the sidewalk. 
+I love the way that they'll stare slack-jawed at their first baseball game with wide eyes and a mitt on their hand, soaking in the crack of the bat and the crunch of the peanuts and the smell of the hotdogs. 
+I love the way that they'll spend hours picking dandelions in the backyard and putting them into a nice centerpiece for Thanksgiving dinner. 
+I love the way that they see the world, because they're seeing the world for the first time. 
+Having a sense of awareness is just about embracing your inner three year-old. 
+Because you all used to be three years old. 
+That three-year-old boy is still part of you. 
+That three-year-old girl is still part of you. 
+They're in there. 
+And being aware is just about remembering that you saw everything you've seen for the first time once, too. 
+So there was a time when it was your first time ever hitting a string of green lights on the way home from work. 
+There was the first time you walked by the open door of a bakery and smelt the bakery air, or the first time you pulled a 20-dollar bill out of your old jacket pocket and said, "" Found money. "" The last "" A "" is Authenticity. 
+And for this one, I want to tell you a quick story. 
+Let's go all the way back to 1932 when, on a peanut farm in Georgia, a little baby boy named Roosevelt Grier was born. 
+Roosevelt Grier, or Rosey Grier, as people used to call him, grew up and grew into a 300-pound, six-foot-five linebacker in the NFL. 
+He's number 76 in the picture. 
+Here he is pictured with the "" fearsome foursome. "" These were four guys on the L.A. Rams in the 1960s you did not want to go up against. 
+They were tough football players doing what they love, which was crushing skulls and separating shoulders on the football field. 
+But Rosey Grier also had another passion. 
+In his deeply authentic self, he also loved needlepoint. (Laughter) He loved knitting. 
+He said that it calmed him down, it relaxed him, it took away his fear of flying and helped him meet chicks. 
+That's what he said. 
+I mean, he loved it so much that, after he retired from the NFL, he started joining clubs. 
+And he even put out a book called "" Rosey Grier's Needlepoint for Men. "" (Laughter) (Applause) It's a great cover. 
+If you notice, he's actually needlepointing his own face. 
+(Laughter) And so what I love about this story is that Rosey Grier is just such an authentic person, and that's what authenticity is all about. 
+It's just about being you and being cool with that. 
+And I think when you're authentic, you end up following your heart, and you put yourself in places and situations and in conversations that you love and that you enjoy. 
+You meet people that you like talking to. 
+You go places you've dreamt about. 
+And you end you end up following your heart and feeling very fulfilled. 
+So those are the three A's. 
+For the closing thought, I want to take you all the way back to my parents coming to Canada. 
+I don't know what it would feel like coming to a new country when you're in your mid-20s. 
+I don't know, because I never did it, but I would imagine that it would take a great attitude. 
+I would imagine that you'd have to be pretty aware of your surroundings and appreciating the small wonders that you're starting to see in your new world. 
+And I think you'd have to be really authentic, you'd have to be really true to yourself in order to get through what you're being exposed to. 
+I'd like to pause my TEDTalk for about 10 seconds right now, because you don't get many opportunities in life to do something like this, and my parents are sitting in the front row. 
+So I wanted to ask them to, if they don't mind, stand up. 
+And I just wanted to say thank you to you guys. 
+(Applause) When I was growing up, my dad used to love telling the story of his first day in Canada. 
+And it's a great story, because what happened was he got off the plane at the Toronto airport, and he was welcomed by a non-profit group, which I'm sure someone in this room runs. 
+(Laughter) And this non-profit group had a big welcoming lunch for all the new immigrants to Canada. 
+And my dad says he got off the plane and he went to this lunch and there was this huge spread. 
+There was bread, there was those little, mini dill pickles, there was olives, those little white onions. 
+There was rolled up turkey cold cuts, rolled up ham cold cuts, rolled up roast beef cold cuts and little cubes of cheese. 
+There was tuna salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and salmon salad sandwiches. 
+There was lasagna, there was casseroles, there was brownies, there was butter tarts, and there was pies, lots and lots of pies. 
+And when my dad tells the story, he says, "" The craziest thing was, I'd never seen any of that before, except bread. 
+(Laughter) I didn't know what was meat, what was vegetarian. 
+I was eating olives with pie. 
+(Laughter) I just couldn't believe how many things you can get here. "" (Laughter) When I was five years old, my dad used to take me grocery shopping, and he would stare in wonder at the little stickers that are on the fruits and vegetables. 
+He would say, "" Look, can you believe they have a mango here from Mexico? 
+They've got an apple here from South Africa. 
+Can you believe they've got a date from Morocco? "" He's like, "" Do you know where Morocco even is? "" And I'd say, "" I'm five. I don't even know where I am. 
+Is this A & P? "" And he'd say, "" I don't know where Morocco is either, but let's find out. "" And so we'd buy the date, and we'd go home. 
+And we'd actually take an atlas off the shelf, and we'd flip through until we found this mysterious country. 
+And when we did, my dad would say, "" Can you believe someone climbed a tree over there, picked this thing off it, put it in a truck, drove it all the way to the docks and then sailed it all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and then put it in another truck and drove that all the way to a tiny grocery store just outside our house, so they could sell it to us for 25 cents? "" And I'd say, "" I don't believe that. "" And he's like, "" I don't believe it either. 
+Things are amazing. There's just so many things to be happy about. "" When I stop to think about it, he's absolutely right. 
+There are so many things to be happy about. 
+We are the only species on the only life-giving rock in the entire universe that we've ever seen, capable of experiencing so many of these things. 
+I mean, we're the only ones with architecture and agriculture. 
+We're the only ones with jewelry and democracy. 
+We've got airplanes, highway lanes, interior design and horoscope signs. 
+We've got fashion magazines, house party scenes. 
+You can watch a horror movie with monsters. 
+You can go to a concert and hear guitars jamming. 
+We've got books, buffets and radio waves, wedding brides and rollercoaster rides. 
+You can sleep in clean sheets. 
+You can go to the movies and get good seats. 
+You can smell bakery air, walk around with rain hair, pop bubble wrap or take an illegal nap. 
+We've got all that, but we've only got 100 years to enjoy it. 
+And that's the sad part. 
+The cashiers at your grocery store, the foreman at your plant, the guy tailgating you home on the highway, the telemarketer calling you during dinner, every teacher you've ever had, everyone that's ever woken up beside you, every politician in every country, every actor in every movie, every single person in your family, everyone you love, everyone in this room and you will be dead in a hundred years. 
+Life is so great that we only get such a short time to experience and enjoy all those tiny little moments that make it so sweet. 
+And that moment is right now, and those moments are counting down, and those moments are always, always, always fleeting. 
+You will never be as young as you are right now. 
+And that's why I believe that if you live your life with a great attitude, choosing to move forward and move on whenever life deals you a blow, living with a sense of awareness of the world around you, embracing your inner three year-old and seeing the tiny joys that make life so sweet and being authentic to yourself, being you and being cool with that, letting your heart lead you and putting yourself in experiences that satisfy you, then I think you'll live a life that is rich and is satisfying, and I think you'll live a life that is truly awesome. 
+Thank you. 
+
+I would like to demonstrate for the first time in public that it is possible to transmit a video from a standard off-the-shelf LED lamp to a solar cell with a laptop acting as a receiver. 
+There is no Wi-Fi involved, it's just light. 
+And the point is this: There will be a massive extension of the Internet to close the digital divide, and also to allow for what we call "" The Internet of Things "" — tens of billions of devices connected to the Internet. 
+This means we need to use existing infrastructure as much as possible. 
+And this is where the solar cell and the LED come in. 
+I demonstrated for the first time, at TED in 2011, Li-Fi, or Light Fidelity. 
+Data is transported by the light, encoded in subtle changes of the brightness. 
+If we look around, we have many LEDs around us, so there's a rich infrastructure of Li-Fi transmitters around us. 
+But so far, we have been using special devices — small photo detectors, to receive the information encoded in the data. 
+I wanted to find a way to also use existing infrastructure to receive data from our Li-Fi lights. 
+And this is why I have been looking into solar cells and solar panels. 
+A solar cell absorbs light and converts it into electrical energy. 
+This is why we can use a solar cell to charge our mobile phone. 
+This means we have a principal mechanism in place to receive information from the light and by the solar cell, because the fluctuations of the energy harvested correspond to the data transmitted. 
+Of course the question is: can we receive very fast and subtle changes of the brightness, such as the ones transmitted by our LED lights? 
+And the answer to that is yes, we can. 
+We have shown in the lab that we can receive up to 50 megabytes per second from a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell. 
+And this is faster than most broadband connections these days. 
+Now let me show you in practice. 
+In this box is a standard, off-the-shelf LED lamp. 
+This is a standard, off-the-shelf solar cell; it is connected to the laptop. 
+And also we have an instrument here to visualize the energy we harvest from the solar cell. 
+If I turn it off, we see it drops. 
+But next I would like to activate the streaming of the video. 
+And I've done this by pressing this button. 
+But in order to prove the point, I can block the light of the solar cell. 
+So first you notice the energy harvesting drops and the video stops as well. 
+(Applause) And I can repeat that. 
+But now imagine that this LED lamp is a street light, and there's fog. 
+And so I want to simulate fog, and that's why I brought a handkerchief with me. 
+First you notice the energy harvested drops, as expected, but now the video still continues. 
+This means, despite the blockage, there's sufficient light coming through the handkerchief to the solar cell, so that the solar cell is able to decode and stream that information, in this case, a high-definition video. 
+What's really important here is that a solar cell has become a receiver for high-speed wireless signals encoded in light, while it maintains its primary function as an energy-harvesting device. 
+That's why it is possible to use existing solar cells on the roof of a hut to act as a broadband receiver from a laser station on a close by hill, or indeed, lamp post. 
+And It really doesn't matter where the beam hits the solar cell. 
+As I said to you, this is the first time I've shown this in public. 
+But my team and I are confident that we can take this to market within the next two to three years. 
+And we hope we will be able to contribute to closing the digital divide, and also contribute to connecting all these billions of devices to the Internet. 
+
+It's a simple idea about nature. 
+I want to say a word for nature because we haven't talked that much about it the last couple days. 
+I want to say a word for the soil and the bees and the plants and the animals, and tell you about a tool, a very simple tool that I have found. 
+Although it's really nothing more than a literary conceit; it's not a technology. 
+It's very powerful for, I think, changing our relationship to the natural world and to the other species on whom we depend. 
+And that tool is very simply, as Chris suggested, looking at us and the world from the plants' or the animals' point of view. 
+It's not my idea, other people have hit on it, but I've tried to take it to some new places. 
+Let me tell you where I got it. 
+Like a lot of my ideas, like a lot of the tools I use, I found it in the garden; I'm a very devoted gardener. 
+And there was a day about seven years ago: I was planting potatoes, it was the first week of May — this is New England, when the apple trees are just vibrating with bloom; they're just white clouds above. 
+I was here, planting my chunks, cutting up potatoes and planting it, and the bees were working on this tree; bumblebees, just making this thing vibrate. 
+And one of the things I really like about gardening is that it doesn't take all your concentration, you really can't get hurt — it's not like woodworking — and you have plenty of kind of mental space for speculation. 
+And the question I asked myself that afternoon in the garden, working alongside that bumblebee, was: what did I and that bumblebee have in common? 
+How was our role in this garden similar and different? 
+And I realized we actually had quite a bit in common: both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another, and both of us — probably, if I can imagine the bee's point of view — thought we were calling the shots. 
+I had decided what kind of potato I wanted to plant — I had picked my Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn, or whatever it was — and I had summoned those genes from a seed catalog across the country, brought it, and I was planting it. 
+And that bee, no doubt, assumed that it had decided, "" I'm going for that apple tree, I'm going for that blossom, I'm going to get the nectar and I'm going to leave. "" We have a grammar that suggests that's who we are; that we are sovereign subjects in nature, the bee as well as me. 
+I plant the potatoes, I weed the garden, I domesticate the species. 
+But that day, it occurred to me: what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit? 
+Because, of course, the bee thinks he's in charge or she's in charge, but we know better. 
+We know that what's going on between the bee and that flower is that bee has been cleverly manipulated by that flower. 
+And when I say manipulated, I'm talking about in a Darwinian sense, right? 
+I mean it has evolved a very specific set of traits — color, scent, flavor, pattern — that has lured that bee in. 
+And the bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar, and also picking up some powder on its leg, and going off to the next blossom. 
+The bee is not calling the shots. 
+And I realized then, I wasn't either. 
+I had been seduced by that potato and not another into planting its — into spreading its genes, giving it a little bit more habitat. 
+And that's when I got the idea, which was, "" Well, what would happen if we kind of looked at us from this point of view of these other species who are working on us? "" And agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention, not as a human technology, but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species, mostly edible grasses, had exploited us, figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world. 
+The competition of grasses, right? 
+And suddenly everything looked different. 
+And suddenly mowing the lawn that day was a completely different experience. 
+I had thought always — and in fact, had written this in my first book; this was a book about gardening — that lawns were nature under culture's boot, that they were totalitarian landscapes, and that when we mowed them we were cruelly suppressing the species and never letting it set seed or die or have sex. 
+And that's what the lawn was. 
+But then I realized, "" No, this is exactly what the grasses want us to do. 
+I'm a dupe. I'm a dupe of the lawns, whose goal in life is to outcompete the trees, who they compete with for sunlight. "" And so by getting us to mow the lawn, we keep the trees from coming back, which in New England happens very, very quickly. 
+So I started looking at things this way and wrote a whole book about it called "" The Botany of Desire. "" And I realized that in the same way you can look at a flower and deduce all sorts of interesting things about the taste and the desires of bees — that they like sweetness, that they like this color and not that color, that they like symmetry — what could we find out about ourselves by doing the same thing? 
+That a certain kind of potato, a certain kind of drug, a sativa-indica Cannabis cross has something to say about us. 
+And that, wouldn't this be kind of an interesting way to look at the world? 
+Now, the test of any idea — I said it was a literary conceit — is what does it get us? 
+And when you're talking about nature, which is really my subject as a writer, how does it meet the Aldo Leopold test? 
+Which is, does it make us better citizens of the biotic community? 
+Get us to do things that leads to the support and perpetuation of the biota, rather than its destruction? 
+And I would submit that this idea does this. 
+So, let me go through what you gain when you look at the world this way, besides some entertaining insights about human desire. 
+As an intellectual matter, looking at the world from other species' points of view helps us deal with this weird anomaly, which is — and this is in the realm of intellectual history — which is that we have this Darwinian revolution 150 years ago... 
+Ugh. Mini-Me. (Laughter) We have this intellectual, this Darwinian revolution in which, thanks to Darwin, we figured out we are just one species among many; evolution is working on us the same way it's working on all the others; we are acted upon as well as acting; we are really in the fiber, the fabric of life. 
+But the weird thing is, we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later; none of us really believes this. 
+We are still Cartesians — the children of Descartes — who believe that subjectivity, consciousness, sets us apart; that the world is divided into subjects and objects; that there is nature on one side, culture on another. 
+As soon as you start seeing things from the plant's point of view or the animal's point of view, you realize that the real literary conceit is that — is the idea that nature is opposed to culture, the idea that consciousness is everything — and that's another very important thing it does. 
+Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. 
+You suddenly realize that consciousness — which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness — is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world. 
+And it's kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool. 
+But, you know, there's a comedian who said, "" Well, who's telling me that consciousness is so good and so important? 
+Well, consciousness. "" So when you look at the plants, you realize that there are other tools and they're just as interesting. 
+I'll give you two examples, also from the garden: lima beans. You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? 
+It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. 
+So what plants have — while we have consciousness, tool making, language, they have biochemistry. 
+And they have perfected that to a degree far beyond what we can imagine. 
+Their complexity, their sophistication, is something to really marvel at, and I think it's really the scandal of the Human Genome Project. 
+You know, we went into it thinking, 40,000 or 50,000 human genes and we came out with only 23,000. 
+Just to give you grounds for comparison, rice: 35,000 genes. 
+So who's the more sophisticated species? 
+Well, we're all equally sophisticated. 
+We've been evolving just as long, just along different paths. 
+So, cure for self-importance, way to sort of make us feel the Darwinian idea. 
+And that's really what I do as a writer, as a storyteller, is try to make people feel what we know and tell stories that actually help us think ecologically. 
+Now, the other use of this is practical. 
+And I'm going to take you to a farm right now, because I used this idea to develop my understanding of the food system and what I learned, in fact, is that we are all, now, being manipulated by corn. 
+And the talk you heard about ethanol earlier today, to me, is the final triumph of corn over good sense. (Laughter) (Applause) It is part of corn's scheme for world domination. (Laughter) 
+And you will see, the amount of corn planted this year will be up dramatically from last year and there will be that much more habitat because we've decided ethanol is going to help us. 
+So it helped me understand industrial agriculture, which of course is a Cartesian system. 
+It's based on this idea that we bend other species to our will and that we are in charge, and that we create these factories and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want. 
+Let me take you to a very different kind of farm. 
+This is a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. 
+I went looking for a farm where these ideas about looking at things from the species' point of view are actually implemented, and I found it in a man. The farmer's name is Joel Salatin. 
+And I spent a week as an apprentice on his farm, and I took away from this some of the most hopeful news about our relationship to nature that I've ever come across in 25 years of writing about nature. 
+And that is this: the farm is called Polyface, which means... 
+the idea is he's got six different species of animals, as well as some plants, growing in this very elaborate symbiotic arrangement. 
+It's permaculture, those of you who know a little bit about this, such that the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the turkeys and the... 
+what else does he have? 
+All the six different species — rabbits, actually — are all performing ecological services for one another, such that the manure of one is the lunch for the other and they take care of pests for one another. 
+It's a very elaborate and beautiful dance, but I'm going to just give you a close-up on one piece of it, and that is the relationship between his cattle and his chickens, his laying hens. 
+And I'll show you, if you take this approach, what you get, OK? 
+And this is a lot more than growing food, as you'll see; this is a different way to think about nature and a way to get away from the zero-sum notion, the Cartesian idea that either nature's winning or we're winning, and that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished. 
+So, one day, cattle in a pen. 
+The only technology involved here is this cheap electric fencing: relatively new, hooked to a car battery; even I could carry a quarter-acre paddock, set it up in 15 minutes. 
+Cows graze one day. They move, OK? 
+They graze everything down, intensive grazing. 
+He waits three days, and then we towed in something called the Eggmobile. 
+The Eggmobile is a very rickety contraption — it looks like a prairie schooner made out of boards — but it houses 350 chickens. 
+He tows this into the paddock three days later and opens the gangplank, turns them down, and 350 hens come streaming down the gangplank — clucking, gossiping as chickens will — and they make a beeline for the cow patties. 
+And what they're doing is very interesting: they're digging through the cow patties for the maggots, the grubs, the larvae of flies. 
+And the reason he's waited three days is because he knows that on the fourth day or the fifth day, those larvae will hatch and he'll have a huge fly problem. 
+But he waits that long to grow them as big and juicy and tasty as he can because they are the chickens' favorite form of protein. 
+So the chickens do their kind of little breakdance and they're pushing around the manure to get at the grubs, and in the process they're spreading the manure out. 
+Very useful second ecosystem service. 
+And third, while they're in this paddock they are, of course, defecating madly and their very nitrogenous manure is fertilizing this field. 
+They then move out to the next one, and in the course of just a few weeks, the grass just enters this blaze of growth. 
+And within four or five weeks, he can do it again. 
+He can graze again, he can cut, he can bring in another species, like the lambs, or he can make hay for the winter. 
+Now, I want you to just look really close up onto what's happened there. 
+So, it's a very productive system. 
+And what I need to tell you is that on 100 acres he gets 40,000 pounds of beef; 30,000 pounds of pork; 25,000 dozen eggs; 20,000 broilers; 1,000 turkeys; 1,000 rabbits — an immense amount of food. 
+You know, you hear, "" Can organic feed the world? "" Well, look how much food you can produce on 100 acres if you do this kind of... 
+again, give each species what it wants, let it realize its desires, its physiological distinctiveness. 
+Put that in play. 
+But look at it from the point of view of the grass, now. 
+What happens to the grass when you do this? 
+When a ruminant grazes grass, the grass is cut from this height to this height, and it immediately does something very interesting. 
+Any one of you who gardens knows that there is something called the root-shoot ratio, and plants need to keep the root mass in some rough balance with the leaf mass to be happy. 
+So when they lose a lot of leaf mass, they shed roots; they kind of cauterize them and the roots die. 
+And the species in the soil go to work basically chewing through those roots, decomposing them — the earthworms, the fungi, the bacteria — and the result is new soil. 
+This is how soil is created. 
+It's created from the bottom up. 
+This is how the prairies were built, the relationship between bison and grasses. 
+And what I realized when I understood this — and if you ask Joel Salatin what he is, he'll tell you he's not a chicken farmer, he's not a sheep farmer, he's not a cattle rancher; he's a grass farmer, because grass is really the keystone species of such a system — is that, if you think about it, this completely contradicts the tragic idea of nature we hold in our heads, which is that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished. 
+More for us, less for nature. 
+Here, all this food comes off this farm, and at the end of the season there is actually more soil, more fertility and more biodiversity. 
+It's a remarkably hopeful thing to do. 
+There are a lot of farmers doing this today. 
+This is well beyond organic agriculture, which is still a Cartesian system, more or less. 
+And what it tells you is that if you begin to take account of other species, take account of the soil, that even with nothing more than this perspectival idea — because there is no technology involved here except for those fences, which are so cheap they could be all over Africa in no time — that we can take the food we need from the Earth and actually heal the Earth in the process. 
+This is a way to reanimate the world, and that's what's so exciting about this perspective. 
+When we really begin to feel Darwin's insights in our bones, the things we can do with nothing more than these ideas are something to be very hopeful about. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+So I want to take you on a trip to an alien world. 
+And it's not a trip that requires light-years of travel, but it's to a place where it's defined by light. 
+So it's a little-appreciated fact that most of the animals in our ocean make light. 
+I've spent most of my career studying this phenomenon called bioluminescence. 
+I study it because I think understanding it is critical to understanding life in the ocean where most bioluminescence occurs. 
+I also use it as a tool for visualizing and tracking pollution. 
+But mostly I'm entranced by it. 
+Since my my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. 
+But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. 
+I needed some way to share the experience directly. 
+And the first time I figured out that way was in this little single-person submersible called Deep Rover. 
+This next video clip, you're going to see how we stimulated the bioluminescence. 
+And the first thing you're going to see is a transect screen that is about a meter across. 
+(Video) Narrator: In front of the sub, a mess screen will come into contact with the soft-bodied creatures of the deep sea. 
+With the sub's lights switched off, it is possible to see their bioluminescence — the light produced when they collide with the mesh. 
+This is the first time it has ever been recorded. 
+Edith Widder: So I recorded that with an intensified video camera that has about the sensitivity of the fully dark-adapted human eye. 
+Which means that really is what you would see if you took a dive in a submersible. 
+But just to try to prove that fact to you, I've brought along some bioluminescent plankton in what is undoubtedly a foolhardy attempt at a live demonstration. 
+(Laughter) So, if we could have the lights down and have it as dark in here as possible, I have a flask that has bioluminescent plankton in it. 
+And you'll note there's no light coming from them right now, either because they're dead — (Laughter) or because I need to stir them up in some way for you to see what bioluminescence really looks like. 
+(Gasps) Oops. Sorry. 
+(Laughter) I spend most of my time working in the dark; I'm used to that. 
+Okay. 
+So that light was made by a bioluminescent dinoflagellate, a single-celled alga. 
+So why would a single-celled alga need to be able to produce light? 
+Well, it uses it to defend itself from its predators. 
+The flash is like a scream for help. 
+It's what's known as a bioluminescent burglar alarm, and just like the alarm on your car or your house, it's meant to cast unwanted attention onto the intruder, thereby either leading to his capture or scaring him away. 
+There's a lot of animals that use this trick, for example this black dragonfish. 
+It's got a light organ under its eye. 
+It's got a chin barbel. 
+It's got a lot of other light organs you can't see, but you'll see in here in a minute. 
+So we had to chase this in the submersible for quite sometime, because the top speed of this fish is one knot, which was the top speed of the submersible. 
+But it was worth it, because we caught it in a special capture device, brought it up into the lab on the ship, and then everything on this fish lights up. 
+It's unbelievable. 
+The light organs under the eyes are flashing. 
+That chin barbel is flashing. 
+It's got light organs on its belly that are flashing, fin lights. 
+It's a scream for help; it's meant to attract attention. 
+It's phenomenal. 
+And you normally don't get to see this because we've exhausted the luminescence when we bring them up in nets. 
+There's other ways you can defend yourself with light. 
+For example, this shrimp releases its bioluminescent chemicals into the water just the way a squid or an octopus would release an ink cloud. 
+This blinds or distracts the predator. 
+This little squid is called the fire shooter because of its ability to do this. 
+Now it may look like a tasty morsel, or a pig's head with wings — (Laughter) but if it's attacked, it puts out a barrage of light — in fact, a barrage of photon torpedoes. 
+I just barely got the lights out in time for you to be able to see those gobs of light hitting the transect screen and then just glowing. 
+It's phenomenal. 
+So there's a lot of animals in the open ocean — most of them that make light. 
+And we have a pretty good idea, for most of them, why. 
+They use it for finding food, for attracting mates, for defending against predators. 
+But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean, that's where things get really strange. 
+And some of these animals are probably inspiration for the things you saw in "" Avatar, "" but you don't have to travel to Pandora to see them. 
+They're things like this. 
+This is a golden coral, a bush. 
+It grows very slowly. 
+In fact, it's thought that some of these are as much as 3,000 years old, which is one reason that bottom trawling should not be allowed. 
+The other reason is this amazing bush glows. 
+So if you brush up against it, any place you brushed against it, you get this twinkling blue-green light that's just breathtaking. 
+And you see things like this. 
+This looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book — just all manner of creatures all over this thing. 
+And these are flytrap anemones. 
+Now if you poke it, it pulls in its tentacles. 
+But if you keep poking it, it starts to produce light. 
+And it actually ends up looking like a galaxy. 
+It produces these strings of light, presumably as some form of defense. 
+There are starfish that can make light. 
+And there are brittle stars that produce bands of light that dance along their arms. 
+This looks like a plant, but it's actually an animal. 
+And it anchors itself in the sand by blowing up a balloon on the end of its stock. 
+So it can actually hold itself in very strong currents, as you see here. 
+But if we collect it very gently, and we bring it up into the lab and just squeeze it at the base of the stock, it produces this light that propagates from stem to the plume, changing color as it goes, from green to blue. 
+Colorization and sound effects added for you viewing pleasure. 
+(Laughter) But we have no idea why it does that. 
+Here's another one. This is also a sea pen. 
+It's got a brittle star hitching a ride. 
+It's a green saber of light. 
+And like the one you just saw, it can produce these as bands of light. 
+So if I squeeze the base, the bands go from base to tip. 
+If I squeeze the tip, they go from tip to base. 
+So what do you think happens if you squeeze it in the middle? 
+(Gasps) I'd be very interested in your theories about what that's about. 
+(Laughter) So there's a language of light in the deep ocean, and we're just beginning to understand it, and one way we're going about that is we're imitating a lot of these displays. 
+This is an optical lure that I've used. 
+We call it the electronic jellyfish. 
+It's just 16 blue LEDs that we can program to do different types of displays. 
+And we view it with a camera system I developed called Eye-in-the-Sea that uses far red light that's invisible to most animals, so it's unobtrusive. 
+So I just want to show you some of the responses we've elicited from animals in the deep sea. 
+So the camera's black and white. 
+It's not high-resolution. 
+And what you're seeing here is a bait box with a bunch of — like the cockroaches of the ocean — there are isopods all over it. 
+And right in the front is the electronic jellyfish. 
+And when it starts flashing, it's just going to be one of the LEDs that's flashing very fast. 
+But as soon as it starts to flash — and it's going to look big, because it blooms on the camera — I want you to look right here. 
+There's something small there that responds. 
+We're talking to something. 
+It looks like a little of string pearls basically — in fact, three strings of pearls. 
+And this was very consistent. 
+This was in the Bahamas at about 2,000 feet. 
+We basically have a chat room going on here, because once it gets started, everybody's talking. 
+And I think this is actually a shrimp that's releasing its bioluminescent chemicals into the water. 
+But the cool thing is, we're talking to it. 
+We don't know what we're saying. 
+Personally, I think it's something sexy. 
+(Laughter) And then finally, I want to show you some responses that we recorded with the world's first deep-sea webcam, which we had installed in Monterey Canyon last year. 
+We've only just begun to analyze all of this data. 
+This is going to be a glowing source first, which is like bioluminescent bacteria. 
+And it is an optical cue that there's carrion on the bottom of the ocean. 
+So this scavenger comes in, which is a giant sixgill shark. 
+And I can't claim for sure that the optical source brought it in, because there's bait right there. 
+But if it had been following the odor plume, it would have come in from the other direction. 
+And it does actually seem to be trying to eat the electronic jellyfish. 
+That's a 12-foot-long giant sixgill shark. 
+Okay, so this next one is from the webcam, and it's going to be this pinwheel display. 
+And this is a burglar alarm. 
+And that was a Humboldt squid, a juvenile Humboldt squid, about three feet long. 
+This is at 3,000 feet in Monterey Canyon. 
+But if it's a burglar alarm, you wouldn't expect it to attack the jellyfish directly. 
+It's supposed to be attacking what's attacking the jellyfish. 
+But we did see a bunch of responses like this. 
+This guy is a little more contemplative. 
+"" Hey, wait a minute. 
+There's supposed to be something else there. "" He's thinking about it. 
+But he's persistent. 
+He keeps coming back. 
+And then he goes away for a few seconds to think about it some more, and thinks, "Maybe if I come in from a different angle." 
+(Laughter) Nope. 
+So we are starting to get a handle on this, but only just the beginnings. 
+We need more eyes on the process. 
+So if any of you ever get a chance to take a dive in a submersible, by all means, climb in and take the plunge. 
+This is something that should be on everybody's bucket list, because we live on an ocean planet. 
+More than 90 percent, 99 percent, of the living space on our planet is ocean. 
+It's a magical place filled with breathtaking light shows and bizarre and wondrous creatures, alien life forms that you don't have to travel to another planet to see. 
+But if you do take the plunge, please remember to turn out the lights. 
+But I warn you, it's addictive. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So when I decided to create an art piece in Manshiyat Naser, the neighborhood of the Cairo garbage collectors in Egypt, I never thought this project would be the most amazing human experience that I would ever live. 
+As an artist, I had this humanist intention of beautifying a poor and neglected neighborhood by bringing art to it and hopefully shining light on this isolated community. 
+The first time I heard about this Christian Coptic community was in 2009 when the Egyptian authorities under the regime of Hosni Mubarak decided to slaughter 300,000 pigs using the pretext of H1N1 virus. 
+Originally, they are pig breeders. 
+Their pigs and other animals are fed with the organic waste that they collect on a daily basis. 
+This event killed their livelihood. 
+The first time I entered Manshiyat Naser, it felt like a maze. 
+I was looking for the St. Simon Monastery on the top of the Muqattam Mountain. 
+So you go right, then straight, then right again, then left to reach all the way to the top. 
+But to reach there, you must dodge between the trucks overpacked with garbage and slalom between the tuk-tuks, the fastest vehicle to move around in the neighborhood. 
+The smell of the garbage unloaded from those trucks was intense, and the noise of the traffic was loud and overbearing. 
+Add to it the din created by the crushers in those warehouses along the way. 
+From outside it looks chaotic, but everything is perfectly organized. 
+The Zaraeeb, that ’ s how they call themselves, which means the pig breeders, have been collecting the garbage of Cairo and sorting it in their own neighborhood for decades. 
+They have developed one of the most efficient and highly profitable systems on a global level. 
+Still, the place is perceived as dirty, marginalized and segregated because of their association with the trash. 
+So my initial idea was to create an anamorphic piece, a piece that you can only see from one vantage point. 
+I wanted to challenge myself artistically by painting over several buildings and having it only fully visible from one point on the Muqattam Mountain. 
+The Muqattam Mountain is the pride of the community. 
+This is where they built the St. Simon Monastery, a 10,000-seat cave church that they carved into the mountain itself. 
+So, the first time I stood on top of the mountain and I looked at the neighborhood, I asked myself, how on earth will I convince all those owners to let me paint on their buildings? 
+He told me the only person I needed to convince was Father Samaan, who is the leader of the community. 
+But to convince Father Samaan, I needed to convince Mario, who is a Polish artist who moved to Cairo 20 years ago and who created all the artwork of the Cave Church. 
+He managed to get me a meeting with Father Samaan, and surprisingly, he loved the idea. 
+In every work that I create, I write messages with my style of Arabic calligraphy. 
+I make sure those messages are relevant to the place where I am painting but have this universal dimension, so anybody around the world can relate to it. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I think I never drink as much tea as I did in Egypt. (Laughter) 
+From the streets of the neighborhood, the painting appears in fragments, isolated from one another, standing alone. 
+
+I design engineering projects for middle school and high school students, often using materials that are pretty unexpected. 
+My inspiration comes from problems in my daily life. 
+For example, one time I needed a costume to go to a comic convention, but I didn't want to spend too much money, so I made my own... 
+with a light-up crown and skirt. 
+(Laughter) Another time, I was devastated because my favorite mobile game, Flappy Bird, was being taken off the app store. (Laughter) 
+So I was faced with the dilemma to either never update my phone or never play Flappy Bird again. (Laughter) 
+Unhappy with both options, I did the only thing that made sense to me. 
+I made a physical version of Flappy Bird that could never be taken off the app store. 
+(Laughter) (Music) (Beeping) (Music) (Laughter) So a few of my friends were also pretty addicted to the game, and I invited them to play as well. 
+(Video) Friend: Ah! 
+(Laughter) (Video) Friend: What the heck? (Laughter) 
+And they told me that it was just as infuriating as the original game. (Laughter) 
+So I uploaded a demo of this project online, and to my surprise it went viral. 
+It had over two million views in just a few days. 
+(Laughter) And what's more interesting are people's comments. 
+A lot of people wanted to make it their own, or asked me how it was made. 
+With the money made from the viral video, we were able to let students in our classroom all make their own game in a box. 
+Although it was pretty challenging, they learned a lot of new concepts in engineering and programming. 
+(Laughter) So before Flappy Bird Box, I had the idea of using creative engineering projects to teach students. 
+When I was teaching at a middle school, we asked our students to build a robot from a standard technology kit. 
+And I noticed that a lot of them seemed bored. 
+Then a few of them started taking pieces of paper and decorating their robots. 
+And then more of them got into it, and they became more interested in the project. 
+So I started looking for more creative ways to introduce technology to students. 
+What I found was that most technology kits available in school look a little intimidating. 
+On top of that, they're all very expensive, costing hundreds of dollars per kit. 
+So that's certainly not very affordable for most classroom budgets. 
+After all, we all played with those since we were kids, and they are also pretty cheap and can be found anywhere around the house. 
+And I prototyped a project where students can create a light-up creature using fabric and googly eyes. 
+They were all helping each other in classrooms, and were laughing and discussing the project. 
+And most importantly, they were able to insert their own creativity into the project. 
+So because of the success of this project, I continued to create more engineering projects to challenge my students. 
+And I also started to take these workshops outside of school and into the community. 
+And something really interesting happened. 
+And specifically, there were a lot more women and minorities than I expected, and that you wouldn't usually see at a traditional engineering workshop. 
+Now take a look at this employee report at a major technology company in 2016. 
+Women make up only 19 percent of the technology workforce. 
+And underrepresented minorities make up only four percent. 
+This statistic might look familiar if you walked into a high school robotics club, or a college engineering class. 
+Now, there's a wide variety of problems that contribute to the lack of diversity in the technology force. 
+Perhaps one solution could be to introduce technology to students through creative projects. 
+I'm not saying that this could solve everything, but it could introduce technology to people who originally wouldn't be interested in it because of how it has been portrayed and taught in school. 
+So how do we start to change the perception of technology? 
+Most students think that it's boring or unwelcoming, so I have always designed projects following three principles. 
+First is having a low floor, and that means this project is easy to get started. 
+So take a look at this tutorial. 
+The first project we asked students to learn is to make a circuit on paper. 
+And having a low floor also means that we're removing the financial barrier that prevents people from completing a project. 
+So with paper, copper tape, lightbulb and a battery, people can complete this project for under a dollar. 
+So second principle is having a high ceiling. 
+This means that there's a lot of room to grow, and students are constantly being challenged. 
+At first it might just be a light-up creature, but then you can add sensors and microcontrollers, and start to program the creature to interact with its environment. 
+(Laughter) And finally, the third principle is customization. 
+This means that we can make this project relevant to anyone. 
+That's the beauty of using everyday materials; it's very easy to customize using paper and fabric. 
+So even if you don't like Flappy Bird, you can still make your own game. 
+(Video) Student: So our game is about Justin Bieber, because he's been speeding, and the object is to prevent him from getting caught by the LAPD — (Laughter) (Video) Student: Yeah, but he's changing so — we're a part of his posse. (Laughter) 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Bruno Giussani: Commissioner, thank you for coming to TED. 
+During 2015, almost one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe from many different countries, of course, from Syria and Iraq, but also from Afghanistan and Bangladesh and Eritrea and elsewhere. 
+And the first question is very simple: Why has the movement of refugees spiked so fast in the last six months? 
+AG: Well, I think, basically, what triggered this huge increase was the Syrian refugee group. 
+I mean, they look at their own country and they don't see much hope to go back home, because there is no political solution, so there is no light at the end of the tunnel. 
+Second, the living conditions of the Syrians in the neighboring countries have been deteriorating. 
+We just had research with the World Bank, and 87 percent of the Syrians in Jordan and 93 percent of the Syrians in Lebanon live below the national poverty lines. 
+All of a sudden, there was a rush, and people started to move in large numbers and, to be absolutely honest, if I had been in the same situation and I would have been brave enough to do it, I think I would have done the same. 
+AG: Well, unprepared because divided, and when you are divided, you don't want to recognize the reality. 
+It looks enormous, but the population of the European Union is 550 million people, which means we are talking about one per every [550] Europeans. 
+Now, in Lebanon, we have one refugee per three Lebanese. 
+And Lebanon? Struggling, of course, but it's managing. 
+So, the question is: is this something that could have been managed if — not mentioning the most important thing, which would have been addressing the root causes, but forgetting about root causes for now, looking at the phenomenon as it is — if Europe were able to come together in solidarity to create an adequate reception capacity of entry points? 
+But for that, the countries at entry points need to be massively supported, and then screening the people with security checks and all the other mechanisms, distributing those that are coming into all European countries, according to the possibilities of each country. 
+I mean, if you look at the relocation program that was approved by the Commission, always too little too late, or by the Council, too little too late — BG: It's already breaking down. 
+And there is such a thing as international law, so there is no way you can say, "" I take 10,000 and that's finished. "" I remind you of one thing: in Turkey, at the beginning of the crisis, I remember one minister saying, "Turkey will be able to receive up to 100,000 people." 
+Turkey has now two million three-hundred thousand or something of the sort, if you count all refugees. 
+What it is fair to say is: how we can we organize ourselves to assume our international responsibilities? 
+And Europe has not been able to do so, because basically, Europe is divided because there is no solidarity in the European project. 
+And it's not only about refugees; there are many other areas. 
+But as the public less and less believes in European institutions, it is also each time more difficult to convince the public that we need more Europe to solve these problems. 
+BG: We seem to be at the point where the numbers turn into political shifts, particularly domestically. 
+The Prime Minister of — AG: But, if I may, on these: I mean, what does a European see at home in a village where there are no migrants? 
+What a European sees is, on television, every single day, a few months ago, opening the news every single day, a crowd coming, uncontrolled, moving from border to border, and the images on television were of hundreds or thousands of people moving. 
+And so their idea was, "" They are coming to my village. "" So there was this completely false idea that Europe was being invaded and our way of life is going to change, and everything will — And the problem is that if this had been properly managed, if people had been properly received, welcomed, sheltered at point of entry, screened at point of entry, and the moved by plane to different European countries, this would not have scared people. 
+But, unfortunately, we have a lot of people scared, just because Europe was not able to do the job properly. 
+BG: But there are villages in Germany with 300 inhabitants and 1,000 refugees. 
+So, what's your position? 
+It is because things are not properly managed that in the end we have situations that are totally impossible to live with, and of course if you have a village — in Lebanon, there are many villages that have more Syrians than Lebanese; Lebanon has been living with that. 
+What I am asking is for Europe to do the job properly, and to be able to organize itself to receive people as other countries in the world were forced to do in the past. 
+BG: So, if you look at the global situation not only at Europe — (Applause) BG: Yes! (Applause) 
+BG: If you look at the global situation, so, not only at Europe, I know you can make a long list of countries that are not really stepping up, but I'm more interested in the other part — is there somebody who's doing the right thing? 
+And they have, as a policy, they call the "" people to people "" policy that every refugee should be received. 
+They have all the neighbors. 
+And, in general, African countries are extremely welcoming of refugees coming, and I would say that in the Middle East and in Asia, we have seen a tendency for borders to be open. 
+Now we see some problems with the Syrian situation, as the Syrian situation evolved into also a major security crisis, but the truth is that for a large period, all borders in the Middle East were open. 
+The truth is that for Afghans, the borders of Pakistan and Iran were open for, at the time, six million Afghans that came. 
+So I would say that even today, the trend in the developing world has been for borders to be open. 
+The trend in the developed world is for these questions to become more and more complex, especially when there is, in the public opinion, a mixture of discussions between refugee protections on one side and security questions — in my opinion, misinterpreted — on the other side. 
+Now that the world seems to have woken up, are you getting more funding and more support, or it's still the same? 
+AG: We are getting more support. 
+But that is clearly insufficient to address the needs of the people and address the needs of the countries that are supporting the people. 
+And here we have a basic review of the criteria, the objectives, the priorities of development cooperation that is required. 
+Because they are middle-income countries, they cannot receive soft loans or grants from the World Bank. 
+Now, today this doesn't make any sense, because they are providing a global public good. 
+They have millions of refugees there, and to be honest, they are pillars of stability in the region, with all the difficulties they face, and the first line of defense of our collective security. 
+And not only do the refugees live in very dramatic circumstances inside those countries, but the local communities themselves are suffering, because salaries went down, because there are more unemployed, because prices and rents went up. 
+And, of course, if you look at today's situation of the indicators in these countries, it is clear that, especially their poor groups of the population, are living worse and worse because of the crisis they are facing. 
+BG: Who should be providing this support? 
+Who should be coming up with this support? 
+AG: We need to join all efforts. 
+It's clear that bilateral cooperation is essential. 
+It's clear that international financial institutions should have flexibility in order to be able to invest more massively in support to these countries. 
+We need to combine all the instruments and to understand that today, in protracted situations, at a certain moment, that it doesn't make sense anymore to make a distinction between humanitarian aid and development aid or development processes. 
+Because you are talking about children in school, you are talking about health, you are talking about infrastructure that is overcrowded. 
+You are talking about things that require a long-term perspective, a development perspective and not only an emergency humanitarian aid perspective. 
+BG: I would like your comment on something that was in newspapers this morning. 
+It is a statement made by the current front-runner for the Republican nomination for US President, Donald Trump. 
+I quote: "" I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US, until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on. "" How do you react to that? 
+We have seen several people around the world with political responsibility saying, for instance, that Muslims refugees should not be received. 
+I am very keen on the need for governments to protect the security of their countries and their people. 
+But if you say, like that, in the US or in any European country, "We are going to close our doors to Muslim refugees," what you are saying is the best possible help for the propaganda of terrorist organizations. 
+Because what you are saying — (Applause) What you are saying will be heard by all the Muslims in your own country, and it will pave the way for the recruitment and the mechanisms that, through technology, Daesh and al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and all those other groups are today penetrating in our societies. 
+And it's just telling them, "" You are right, we are against you. "" So obviously, this is creating in societies that are all multiethnic, multi-religious, multicultural, this is creating a situation in which, really, it is much easier for the propaganda of these terrorist organizations to be effective in recruiting people for terror acts within the countries where these kinds of sentences are expressed. 
+BG: Have the recent attacks in Paris and the reactions to them made your job more difficult? 
+BG: In what sense? 
+AG: In the sense that, I mean, for many people the first reaction in relation to these kinds of terrorist attacks is: close all borders — not understanding that the terrorist problem in Europe is largely homegrown. 
+We have thousands and thousands of European fighters in Syria and in Iraq, so this is not something that you solve by just not allowing Syrians to come in. 
+And I must say, I am convinced that the passport that appeared, I believe, was put by the person who has blown — BG: — himself up, yeah. 
+And I think that is part of Daesh's strategy to make Europe react, closing its doors to Muslim refugees and having an hostility towards Muslims inside Europe, exactly to facilitate Daesh's work. 
+And my deep belief is that it was not the refugee movement that triggered terrorism. 
+I think, as I said, essentially terrorism in Europe is today a homegrown movement in relation to the global situation that we are facing, and what we need is exactly to prove these groups wrong, by welcoming and integrating effectively those that are coming from that part of the world. 
+And another thing that I believe is that to a large extent, what we are today paying for in Europe is the failures of integration models that didn't work in the '60s, in the' 70s, in the '80s, in relation to big migration flows that took place at that time and generated what is today in many of the people, for instance, of the second generation of communities, a situation of feeling marginalized, having no jobs, having improper education, living in some of the neighborhoods that are not adequately provided by public infrastructure. 
+And this kind of uneasiness, sometimes even anger, that exists in this second generation is largely due to the failure of integration policies, to the failure of what should have been a much stronger investment in creating the conditions for people to live together and respect each other. 
+(Applause) For me it is clear that all societies will be multiethnic, multicultural, multi-religious in the future. 
+To try to avoid it is, in my opinion, impossible. 
+And for me it's a good thing that they will be like that, but I also recognize that, for that to work properly, you need a huge investment in the social cohesion of your own societies. 
+And Europe, to a large extent, failed in that investment in the past few decades. 
+BG: Question: You are stepping down from your job at the end of the year, after 10 years. 
+If you look back at 2005, when you entered that office for the first time, what do you see? 
+AG: Well, look: In 2005, we were helping one million people go back home in safety and dignity, because conflicts had ended. 
+Last year, we helped 124,000. 
+In 2005, we had about 38 million people displaced by conflict in the world. 
+Today, we have more than 60 million. 
+At that time, we had had, recently, some conflicts that were solved. 
+Now, we see a multiplication of new conflicts and the old conflicts never died: Afghanistan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo. 
+It is clear that the world today is much more dangerous than it was. 
+It is clear that the capacity of the international community to prevent conflicts and to timely solve them, is, unfortunately, much worse than what it was 10 years ago. 
+There are no clear power relations in the world, no global governance mechanisms that work, which means that we live in a situation where impunity and unpredictability tend to prevail, and that means that more and more people suffer, namely those that are displaced by conflicts. 
+BG: It's a tradition in American politics that when a President leaves the Oval Office for the last time, he leaves a handwritten note on the desk for his successor that walks in a couple of hours later. 
+If you had to write such a note to your successor, Filippo Grandi, what would you write? 
+You know, one of the terrible things when one leaves an office is to try to become the backseat driver, always telling the new one what to do. 
+So that, I will not do. 
+If I had to say something to him, it would be, "" Be yourself, and do your best. "" BG: Commissioner, thank you for the job you do. 
+
+You know, my favorite part of being a dad is the movies I get to watch. 
+I love sharing my favorite movies with my kids, and when my daughter was four, we got to watch "" The Wizard of Oz "" together. 
+It totally dominated her imagination for months. 
+Her favorite character was Glinda, of course. 
+It gave her a great excuse to wear a sparkly dress and carry a wand. 
+But you watch that movie enough times, and you start to realize how unusual it is. 
+Now we live today, and are raising our children, in a kind of children's-fantasy-spectacular-industrial complex. 
+But "" The Wizard of Oz "" stood alone. 
+It did not start that trend. 
+Forty years later was when the trend really caught on, with, interestingly, another movie that featured a metal guy and a furry guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy's guards. 
+Do you know what I'm talking about? (Laughter) Yeah. 
+Now, there's a big difference between these two movies, a couple of really big differences between "" The Wizard of Oz "" and all the movies we watch today. 
+One is there's very little violence in "" The Wizard of Oz. "" The monkeys are rather aggressive, as are the apple trees. 
+But I think if "" The Wizard of Oz "" were made today, the wizard would say, "" Dorothy, you are the savior of Oz that the prophecy foretold. 
+Use your magic slippers to defeat the computer-generated armies of the Wicked Witch. "" But that's not how it happens. 
+Another thing that's really unique about "" The Wizard of Oz "" to me is that all of the most heroic and wise and even villainous characters are female. 
+Now I started to notice this when I actually showed "" Star Wars "" to my daughter, which was years later, and the situation was different. 
+At that point I also had a son. 
+He was only three at the time. 
+He was not invited to the screening. He was too young for that. 
+But he was the second child, and the level of supervision had plummeted. (Laughter) So he wandered in, and it imprinted on him like a mommy duck does to its duckling, and I don't think he understands what's going on, but he is sure soaking in it. 
+And I wonder what he's soaking in. 
+Is he picking up on the themes of courage and perseverance and loyalty? 
+Is he picking up on the fact that Luke joins an army to overthrow the government? Is he picking up on the fact that 
+there are only boys in the universe except for Aunt Beru, and of course this princess, who's really cool, but who kind of waits around through most of the movie so that she can award the hero with a medal and a wink to thank him for saving the universe, which he does by the magic that he was born with? 
+Compare this to 1939 with "" The Wizard of Oz. "" How does Dorothy win her movie? 
+By making friends with everybody and being a leader. 
+That's kind of the world I'd rather raise my kids in — Oz, right? — and not the world of dudes fighting, which is where we kind of have to be. 
+Why is there so much Force — capital F, Force — in the movies we have for our kids, and so little yellow brick road? 
+There is a lot of great writing about the impact that the boy-violent movie has on girls, and you should do that reading. It's very good. 
+I haven't read as much on how boys are picking up on this vibe. 
+I know from my own experience that Princess Leia did not provide the adequate context that I could have used in navigating the adult world that is co-ed. (Laughter) I think there was a first-kiss moment when I really expected the credits to start rolling because that's the end of the movie, right? 
+I finished my quest, I got the girl. 
+Why are you still standing there? 
+I don't know what I'm supposed to do. 
+The movies are very, very focused on defeating the villain and getting your reward, and there's not a lot of room for other relationships and other journeys. 
+It's almost as though if you're a boy, you are a dopey animal, and if you are a girl, you should bring your warrior costume. 
+There are plenty of exceptions, and I will defend the Disney princesses in front of any you. 
+But they do send a message to boys, that they are not, the boys are not really the target audience. 
+They are doing a phenomenal job of teaching girls how to defend against the patriarchy, but they are not necessarily showing boys how they're supposed to defend against the patriarchy. 
+There's no models for them. 
+And we also have some terrific women who are writing new stories for our kids, and as three-dimensional and delightful as Hermione and Katniss are, these are still war movies. 
+And, of course, the most successful studio of all time continues to crank out classic after classic, every single one of them about the journey of a boy, or a man, or two men who are friends, or a man and his son, or two men who are raising a little girl. 
+Until, as many of you are thinking, this year, when they finally came out with "" Brave. "" I recommend it to all of you. It's on demand now. 
+Do you remember what the critics said when "" Brave "" came out? 
+"Aw, I can't believe Pixar made a princess movie." 
+It's very good. Don't let that stop you. 
+Now, almost none of these movies pass the Bechdel Test. 
+I don't know if you've heard of this. 
+It has not yet caught on and caught fire, but maybe today we will start a movement. 
+Alison Bechdel is a comic book artist, and back in the mid- '80s, she recorded this conversation she'd had with a friend about assessing the movies that they saw. 
+And it's very simple. There's just three questions you should ask: Is there more than one character in the movie that is female who has lines? 
+So try to meet that bar. 
+And do these women talk to each other at any point in the movie? 
+And is their conversation about something other than the guy that they both like? (Laughter) Right? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. 
+Two women who exist and talk to each other about stuff. 
+It does happen. I've seen it, and yet I very rarely see it in the movies that we know and love. 
+In fact, this week I went to see a very high-quality movie, "" Argo. "" Right? Oscar buzz, doing great at the box office, a consensus idea of what a quality Hollywood film is. 
+It pretty much flunks the Bechdel test. 
+And I don't think it should, because a lot of the movie, I don't know if you've seen it, but a lot of the movie takes place in this embassy where men and women are hiding out during the hostage crisis. 
+We've got quite a few scenes of the men having deep, angst-ridden conversations in this hideout, and the great moment for one of the actresses is to peek through the door and say, "" Are you coming to bed, honey? "" That's Hollywood for you. 
+So let's look at the numbers. 
+2011, of the 100 most popular movies, how many of them do you think actually have female protagonists? 
+Eleven. It's not bad. 
+It's not as many percent as the number of women we've just elected to Congress, so that's good. 
+But there is a number that is greater than this that's going to bring this room down. 
+Last year, The New York Times published a study that the government had done. 
+Here's what it said. 
+One out of five women in America say that they have been sexually assaulted some time in their life. 
+Now, I don't think that's the fault of popular entertainment. 
+I don't think kids' movies have anything to do with that. 
+I don't even think that music videos or pornography are really directly related to that, but something is going wrong, and when I hear that statistic, one of the things I think of is that's a lot of sexual assailants. 
+Who are these guys? What are they learning? 
+What are they failing to learn? 
+Are they absorbing the story that a male hero's job is to defeat the villain with violence and then collect the reward, which is a woman who has no friends and doesn't speak? 
+Are we soaking up that story? 
+You know, as a parent with the privilege of raising a daughter like all of you who are doing the same thing, we find this world and this statistic very alarming and we want to prepare them. 
+We have tools at our disposal like "" girl power, "" and we hope that that will help, but I gotta wonder, is girl power going to protect them if, at the same time, actively or passively, we are training our sons to maintain their boy power? 
+I mean, I think the Netflix queue is one way that we can do something very important, and I'm talking mainly to the dads here. 
+I think we have got to show our sons a new definition of manhood. 
+The definition of manhood is already turning upside down. 
+You've read about how the new economy is changing the roles of caregiver and wage earner. 
+They're throwing it up in the air. 
+So our sons are going to have to find some way of adapting to this, some new relationship with each other, and I think we really have to show them, and model for them, how a real man is someone who trusts his sisters and respects them, and wants to be on their team, and stands up against the real bad guys, who are the men who want to abuse the women. 
+And I think our job in the Netflix queue is to look out for those movies that pass the Bechdel Test, if we can find them, and to seek out the heroines who are there, who show real courage, who bring people together, and to nudge our sons to identify with those heroines and to say, "" I want to be on their team, "" because they're going to be on their team. 
+When I asked my daughter who her favorite character was in "" Star Wars, "" do you know what she said? 
+Obi-Wan. 
+Obi-Wan Kenobi and Glinda. 
+What do these two have in common? 
+Maybe it's not just the sparkly dress. 
+I think these people are experts. 
+I think these are the two people in the movie who know more than anybody else, and they love sharing their knowledge with other people to help them reach their potential. 
+Now, they are leaders. 
+I like that kind of quest for my daughter, and I like that kind of quest for my son. 
+I want more quests like that. 
+I want fewer quests where my son is told, "Go out and fight it alone," and more quests where he sees that it's his job to join a team, maybe a team led by women, to help other people become better and be better people, like the Wizard of Oz. 
+Thank you. 
+
+I've spent the last decade subjecting myself to pain and humiliation, hopefully for a good cause, which is self-improvement. 
+And I've done this in three parts. 
+So first I started with the mind. 
+And I decided to try to get smarter by reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z — or, more precisely, from "" a-ak "" to "" Zywiec. "" And here's a little image of that. 
+And this was an amazing year. 
+It was really a fascinating journey. 
+It was painful at times, especially for those around me. 
+My wife started to fine me one dollar for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation. 
+So it had its downsides. 
+But after that, I decided to work on the spirit. 
+As I mentioned last year, I grew up with no religion at all. 
+I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. 
+(Laughter) Not really. 
+But I decided to learn about the Bible and my heritage by actually diving in and trying to live it and immerse myself in it. 
+So I decided to follow all the rules of the Bible. 
+And from the Ten Commandments to growing my beard — because Leviticus says you cannot shave. 
+So this is what I looked like by the end. 
+Thank you for that reaction. 
+(Laughter) I look a little like Moses, or Ted Kaczynski. 
+I got both of them. 
+So there was the topiary there. 
+And there's the sheep. 
+Now the final part of the trilogy was I wanted to focus on the body and try to be the healthiest person I could be, the healthiest person alive. 
+So that's what I've been doing the last couple of years. 
+And I just finished a couple of months ago. 
+And I have to say, thank God. 
+Because living so healthily was killing me. 
+(Laughter) It was so overwhelming, because the amount of things you have to do, it's just mind-boggling. 
+I was listening to all the experts and talking to sort of a board of medical advisers. 
+And they were telling me all the things I had to do. 
+I had to eat right, exercise, meditate, pet dogs, because that lowers the blood pressure. 
+I wrote the book on a treadmill, and it took me about a thousand miles to write the book. 
+I had to put on sunscreen. 
+This was no small feat, because if you listen to dermatologists, they say that you should have a shot glass full of sunscreen. 
+And you have to reapply it every two to four hours. 
+So I think half of my book advance went into sunscreen. 
+I was like a glazed doughnut for most of the year. 
+There was the washing of hands. 
+I had to do that properly. 
+And my immunologist told me that I should also wipe down all of the remote controls and iPhones in my house, because those are just orgies of germs. 
+So that took a lot of time. 
+I also tried to be the safest person I could be, because that's a part of health. 
+I was inspired by the Danish Safety Council. 
+They started a public campaign that says, "" A walking helmet is a good helmet. "" So they believe you should not just wear helmets for biking, but also for walking around. 
+And you can see there they're shopping with their helmets. 
+(Laughter) Well yeah, I tried that. 
+Now it's a little extreme, I admit. 
+But if you think about this, this is actually — the "" Freakonomics "" authors wrote about this — that more people die on a per mile basis from drunk walking than from drunk driving. 
+So something to think about tonight if you've had a couple. 
+So I finished, and it was a success in a sense. 
+All of the markers went in the right direction. 
+My cholesterol went down, I lost weight, my wife stopped telling me that I looked pregnant. 
+So that was nice. 
+And it was successful overall. 
+But I also learned that I was too healthy, and that was unhealthy. 
+I was so focused on doing all these things that I was neglecting my friends and family. 
+And as Dan Buettner can tell you, having a strong social network is so crucial to our health. 
+So I finished. 
+And I kind of went overboard on the week after the project was over. 
+I went to the dark side, and I just indulged myself. 
+It was like something out of Caligula. 
+(Laughter) Without the sex part. 
+Because I have three young kids, so that wasn't happening. 
+But the over-eating and over-drinking, definitely. 
+And I finally have stabilized. 
+So now I'm back to adopting many — not all; I don't wear a helmet anymore — but dozens of healthy behaviors that I adopted during my year. 
+It was really a life-changing project. 
+And I, of course, don't have time to go into all of them. 
+Let me just tell you two really quickly. 
+The first is — and this was surprising to me; I didn't expect this to come out — but I live a much quieter life now. 
+Because we live in such a noisy world. 
+There's trains and planes and cars and Bill O'Reilly, he's very noisy. 
+(Laughter) And this is a real underestimated, under-appreciated health hazard — not just because it harms our hearing, which it obviously does, but it actually initiates the fight-or-flight response. 
+A loud noise will get your fight-or-flight response going. 
+And this, over the years, can cause real damage, cardiovascular damage. 
+The World Health Organization just did a big study that they published this year. 
+And it was done in Europe. 
+And they estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution. 
+So they think it's actually very deadly. 
+And by the way, it's also terrible for your brain. 
+It really impairs cognition. 
+And our Founding Fathers knew about this. 
+When they wrote the Constitution, they put dirt all over the cobblestones outside the hall so that they could concentrate. 
+So without noise reduction technology, our country would not exist. 
+So as a patriot, I felt it was important to — I wear all the earplugs and the earphones, and it's really improved my life in a surprising and unexpected way. 
+And the second point I want to make, the final point, is that — and it's actually been a theme of TEDMED — that joy is so important to your health, that very few of these behaviors will stick with me unless there's some sense of pleasure and joy in them. 
+And just to give you one instance of this: food. 
+The junk food industry is really great at pressing our pleasure buttons and figuring out what's the most pleasurable. 
+But I think we can use their techniques and apply them to healthy food. 
+To give just one example, we love crunchiness, mouthfeel. 
+So I basically have tried to incorporate crunchiness into a lot of my recipes — throw in some sunflower seeds. 
+And you can almost trick yourself into thinking you're eating Doritos. 
+(Laughter) And it has made me a healthier person. 
+So that is it. 
+The book about it comes out in April. 
+It's called "" Drop Dead Healthy. "" And I hope that I don't get sick during the book tour. 
+That's my greatest hope. 
+So thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O. box at the end of the day, and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general. 
+And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents, I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone, which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital, but I was just looking for some sort of scribble, some unkempt cursive from my mother. 
+And so when I moved to New York City after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I could think of at the time. 
+I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them. I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere. 
+I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked. 
+Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak — a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order, to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox. 
+Well, today I fuel a global organization that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox, fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them most, but most of all, fueled by crates of mail like this one, my trusty mail crate, filled with the scriptings of ordinary people, strangers writing letters to other strangers not because they're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee, but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing. 
+But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper. 
+They could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters. 
+They're the ones from my generation, the ones of us that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen. 
+We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less. 
+But what if it's not about efficiency this time? 
+I was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate, which is a conversation starter, let me tell you. 
+If you ever need one, just carry one of these. (Laughter) And a man just stared at me, and he was like, "Well, why don't you use the Internet?" 
+And I thought, "" Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I specialist. I am merely a storyteller. "" And so I could tell you about a woman whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan, and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation, and so she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say, "" Come back to me. 
+Find me when you can. "" Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches. 
+Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life, uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family. 
+Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers who were there for him when. 
+These are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency, because she is an art form now, all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing, the doodles in the margins. 
+The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through, with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once, that is an art form that does not fall down to the Goliath of "" get faster, "" no matter how many social networks we might join. 
+We still clutch close these letters to our chest, to the words that speak louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words that we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long. 
+Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+Good morning. How are you? 
+I have an interest in education. 
+But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "" What do you do? "" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. 
+And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. 
+And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. 
+So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. 
+We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "" James Robinson IS Joseph! "" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? 
+What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original — if you're not prepared to be wrong. 
+(Laughter) Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. 
+Shakespeare being seven? 
+I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16. 
+He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. 
+(Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. 
+If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "" What's it for, public education? "" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. 
+They're just a form of life, another form of life. 
+(Laughter) Waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it. (Laughter) 
+And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. 
+And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. 
+If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. 
+The brain isn't divided into compartments. 
+In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. 
+By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. 
+Because you are, aren't you? 
+(Laughter) No, she's good at some things, but if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here. 
+If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed. 
+I say, "" Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here. "" (Laughter) "Give me a break." (Laughter) 
+I saw a great t-shirt recently, which said, "" If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong? "" (Laughter) And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. 
+And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." 
+(Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that. (Laughter) 
+And when they got out, he said to her mother, "" Just stand and watch her. "" And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. 
+And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "" Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. 
+Take her to a dance school. "" I said, "" What happened? "" She said, "" She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. 
+We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. 
+People who had to move to think. "" Who had to move to think. 
+(Applause) What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. 
+I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. 
+Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. 
+We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. 
+And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. 
+By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. 
+
+So there are a few things that bring us humans together in the way that an election does. 
+We stand in elections; we vote in elections; we observe elections. 
+Our democracies rely on elections. 
+We all understand why we have elections, and we all leave the house on the same day to go and vote. 
+We cherish the opportunity to have our say, to help decide the future of the country. 
+The fundamental idea is that politicians are given mandate to speak for us, to make decisions on our behalf that affect us all. 
+Without that mandate, they would be corrupt. 
+Well unfortunately, power corrupts, and so people will do lots of things to get power and to stay in power, including doing bad things to elections. 
+You see, even if the idea of the election is perfect, running a countrywide election is a big project, and big projects are messy. 
+Whenever there is an election, it seems like something always goes wrong, someone tries to cheat, or something goes accidentally awry — a ballot box goes missing here, chads are left hanging over here. 
+To make sure as few things as possible go wrong, we have all these procedures around the election. 
+So for example, you come to the polling station, and a poll station worker asks for your ID before giving you a ballot form and asking you to go into a voting booth to fill out your vote. 
+When you come back out, you get to drop your vote into the ballot box where it mixes with all the other votes, so that no one knows how you voted. 
+Well, what I want us to think about for a moment is what happens after that, after you drop your vote into the ballot box. 
+And most people would go home and feel sure that their vote has been counted, because they trust that the election system works. 
+They trust that election workers and election observers do their jobs and do their jobs correctly. 
+The ballot boxes go to counting places. 
+They're unsealed and the votes are poured out and laboriously counted. 
+Most of us have to trust that that happens correctly for our own vote, and we all have to trust that that happens correctly for all the votes in the election. 
+So we have to trust a lot of people. 
+We have to trust a lot of procedures. 
+And sometimes we even have to trust computers. 
+So imagine hundreds of millions of voters casting hundreds of millions of votes, all to be counted correctly and all the things that can possibly go wrong causing all these bad headlines, and you cannot help but feel exhausted at the idea of trying to make elections better. 
+Well in the face of all these bad headlines, researchers have taken a step back and thought about how we can do elections differently. 
+They've zoomed out and looked at the big picture. 
+And the big picture is this: elections should be verifiable. 
+Voters should be able to check that their votes are counted correctly, without breaking election secrecy, which is so very important. 
+And that's the tough part. 
+How do we make an election system completely verifiable while keeping the votes absolutely secret? 
+Well, the way we've come up with uses computers but doesn't depend on them. 
+And the secret is the ballot form. 
+And if you look closely at these ballot forms, you'll notice that the candidate list is in a different order on each one. 
+And that means, if you mark your choices on one of them and then remove the candidate list, I won't be able to tell from the bit remaining what your vote is for. 
+And on each ballot form there is this encrypted value in the form of this 2D barcode on the right. 
+And there's some complicated cryptography going on in there, but what's not complicated is voting with one of these forms. 
+So we can let computers do all the complicated cryptography for us, and then we'll use the paper for verification. 
+So this is how you vote. 
+You get one of these ballot forms at random, and then you go into the voting booth, and you mark your choices, and you tear along a perforation. 
+And you shred the candidate list. 
+And the bit that remains, the one with your marks — this is your encrypted vote. 
+So you let a poll station worker scan your encrypted vote. 
+And because it's encrypted, it can be submitted, stored and counted centrally and displayed on a website for anyone to see, including you. 
+So you take this encrypted vote home as your receipt. 
+And after the close of the election, you can check that your vote was counted by comparing your receipt to the vote on the website. 
+And remember, the vote is encrypted from the moment you leave the voting booth, so if an election official wants to find out how you voted, they will not be able to. 
+If the government wants to find out how you voted, they won't be able to. 
+No hacker can break in and find out how you voted. 
+No hacker can break in and change your vote, because then it won't match your receipt. 
+Votes can't go missing because then you won't find yours when you look for it. 
+But the election magic doesn't stop there. 
+Instead, we want to make the whole process so transparent that news media and international observers and anyone who wants to can download all the election data and do the count themselves. 
+They can check that all the votes were counted correctly. They can check 
+that the announced result of the election is the correct one. 
+And these are elections by the people, for the people. 
+So the next step for our democracies are transparent and verifiable elections. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) (Music) (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+Chris Anderson: The rights of citizens, the future of the Internet. 
+So I would like to welcome to the TED stage the man behind those revelations, Ed Snowden. 
+(Applause) Ed is in a remote location somewhere in Russia controlling this bot from his laptop, so he can see what the bot can see. 
+Ed, welcome to the TED stage. 
+What can you see, as a matter of fact? 
+Edward Snowden: Ha, I can see everyone. 
+(Laughter) CA: Ed, some questions for you. 
+You've been called a whistleblower, a traitor, a hero. 
+What words would you describe yourself with? 
+ES: You know, everybody who is involved with this debate has been struggling over me and my personality and how to describe me. 
+But when I think about it, this isn't the question that we should be struggling with. 
+Who I am really doesn't matter at all. 
+If I'm the worst person in the world, you can hate me and move on. 
+What really matters here are the issues. 
+What really matters here is the kind of government we want, the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship between people and societies. 
+And that's what I'm hoping the debate will move towards, and we've seen that increasing over time. 
+If I had to describe myself, I wouldn't use words like "" hero. "" I wouldn't use "" patriot, "" and I wouldn't use "" traitor. "" I'd say I'm an American and I'm a citizen, just like everyone else. 
+CA: So just to give some context for those who don't know the whole story — (Applause) — this time a year ago, you were stationed in Hawaii working as a consultant to the NSA. 
+As a sysadmin, you had access to their systems, and you began revealing certain classified documents to some handpicked journalists leading the way to June's revelations. 
+ES: You know, when I was sitting in Hawaii, and the years before, when I was working in the intelligence community, I saw a lot of things that had disturbed me. 
+We do a lot of good things in the intelligence community, things that need to be done, and things that help everyone. 
+But there are also things that go too far. 
+There are things that shouldn't be done, and decisions that were being made in secret without the public's awareness, without the public's consent, and without even our representatives in government having knowledge of these programs. 
+When I really came to struggle with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do this in the most responsible way, that maximizes the public benefit while minimizing the risks? 
+And out of all the solutions that I could come up with, out of going to Congress, when there were no laws, there were no legal protections for a private employee, a contractor in intelligence like myself, there was a risk that I would be buried along with the information and the public would never find out. 
+But the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees us a free press for a reason, and that's to enable an adversarial press, to challenge the government, but also to work together with the government, to have a dialogue and debate about how we can inform the public about matters of vital importance without putting our national security at risk. 
+And by working with journalists, by giving all of my information back to the American people, rather than trusting myself to make the decisions about publication, we've had a robust debate with a deep investment by the government that I think has resulted in a benefit for everyone. 
+And the risks that have been threatened, the risks that have been played up by the government have never materialized. 
+We've never seen any evidence of even a single instance of specific harm, and because of that, I'm comfortable with the decisions that I made. 
+CA: So let me show the audience a couple of examples of what you revealed. 
+If we could have a slide up, and Ed, I don't know whether you can see, the slides are here. 
+This is a slide of the PRISM program, and maybe you could tell the audience what that was that was revealed. 
+ES: The best way to understand PRISM, because there's been a little bit of controversy, is to first talk about what PRISM isn't. 
+Much of the debate in the U.S. has been about metadata. 
+They've said it's just metadata, it's just metadata, and they're talking about a specific legal authority called Section 215 of the Patriot Act. 
+That allows sort of a warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country's phone records, things like that — who you're talking to, when you're talking to them, where you traveled. 
+These are all metadata events. 
+PRISM is about content. 
+It's a program through which the government could compel corporate America, it could deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA. 
+And something that we've seen, something about the PRISM program that's very concerning to me is, there's been a talking point in the U.S. government where they've said 15 federal judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they don't tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court based on secret interpretations of law that's considered 34,000 warrant requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11 government requests. 
+These aren't the people that we want deciding what the role of corporate America in a free and open Internet should be. 
+CA: Now, this slide that we're showing here shows the dates in which different technology companies, Internet companies, are alleged to have joined the program, and where data collection began from them. 
+Now, they have denied collaborating with the NSA. 
+How was that data collected by the NSA? 
+ES: Right. So the NSA's own slides refer to it as direct access. 
+What that means to an actual NSA analyst, someone like me who was working as an intelligence analyst targeting, Chinese cyber-hackers, things like that, in Hawaii, is the provenance of that data is directly from their servers. 
+It doesn't mean that there's a group of company representatives sitting in a smoky room with the NSA palling around and making back-room deals about how they're going to give this stuff away. 
+Now each company handles it different ways. 
+Some are responsible. 
+But the bottom line is, when we talk about how this information is given, it's coming from the companies themselves. 
+It's not stolen from the lines. 
+But there's an important thing to remember here: even though companies pushed back, even though companies demanded, hey, let's do this through a warrant process, let's do this where we actually have some sort of legal review, some sort of basis for handing over these users' data, we saw stories in the Washington Post last year that weren't as well reported as the PRISM story that said the NSA broke in to the data center communications between Google to itself and Yahoo to itself. 
+So even these companies that are cooperating in at least a compelled but hopefully lawful manner with the NSA, the NSA isn't satisfied with that, and because of that, we need our companies to work very hard to guarantee that they're going to represent the interests of the user, and also advocate for the rights of the users. 
+ES: The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting with lawyers, to protect the rights of users worldwide, is to enable SSL web encryption on every page you visit. 
+The reason this matters is today, if you go to look at a copy of "" 1984 "" on Amazon.com, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russian intelligence service can see a record of that, the Chinese service can see a record of that, the French service, the German service, the services of Andorra. 
+They can all see it because it's unencrypted. 
+The world's library is Amazon.com, but not only do they not support encryption by default, you cannot choose to use encryption when browsing through books. 
+This is something that we need to change, not just for Amazon, I don't mean to single them out, but they're a great example. 
+All companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by default for all users who haven't taken any action or picked any special methods on their own. 
+That'll increase the privacy and the rights that people enjoy worldwide. 
+CA: Ed, come with me to this part of the stage. 
+I want to show you the next slide here. (Applause) This is a program called Boundless Informant. 
+What is that? 
+ES: So, I've got to give credit to the NSA for using appropriate names on this. 
+Boundless Informant is a program that the NSA hid from Congress. 
+The NSA was previously asked by Congress, was there any ability that they had to even give a rough ballpark estimate of the amount of American communications that were being intercepted. 
+They said no. They said, we don't track those stats, and we can't track those stats. 
+We can't tell you how many communications we're intercepting around the world, because to tell you that would be to invade your privacy. 
+It's already in place. 
+The NSA has its own internal data format that tracks both ends of a communication, and if it says, this communication came from America, they can tell Congress how many of those communications they have today, right now. 
+And what Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are being intercepted in America about Americans than there are in Russia about Russians. 
+I'm not sure that's what an intelligence agency should be aiming for. 
+CA: Ed, there was a story broken in the Washington Post, again from your data. 
+The headline says, "" NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year. "" Tell us about that. 
+ES: We also heard in Congressional testimony last year, it was an amazing thing for someone like me who came from the NSA and who's seen the actual internal documents, knows what's in them, to see officials testifying under oath that there had been no abuses, that there had been no violations of the NSA's rules, when we knew this story was coming. 
+But what's especially interesting about this, about the fact that the NSA has violated their own rules, their own laws thousands of times in a single year, including one event by itself, one event out of those 2,776, that affected more than 3,000 people. 
+In another event, they intercepted all the calls in Washington, D.C., by accident. 
+What's amazing about this, this report, that didn't get that much attention, is the fact that not only were there 2,776 abuses, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not seen this report until the Washington Post contacted her asking for comment on the report. 
+And she then requested a copy from the NSA and received it, but had never seen this before that. 
+What does that say about the state of oversight in American intelligence when the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has no idea that the rules are being broken thousands of times every year? 
+CA: Ed, one response to this whole debate is this: Why should we care about all this surveillance, honestly? 
+I mean, look, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. 
+What's wrong with that point of view? 
+ES: Well, so the first thing is, you're giving up your rights. 
+You're saying hey, you know, I don't think I'm going to need them, so I'm just going to trust that, you know, let's get rid of them, it doesn't really matter, these guys are going to do the right thing. 
+Your rights matter because you never know when you're going to need them. 
+Beyond that, it's a part of our cultural identity, not just in America, but in Western societies and in democratic societies around the world. 
+People should be able to pick up the phone and to call their family, people should be able to send a text message to their loved ones, people should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering about how these events are going to look to an agent of the government, possibly not even your government years in the future, how they're going to be misinterpreted and what they're going to think your intentions were. 
+We require warrants to be based on probable cause or some kind of individualized suspicion because we recognize that trusting anybody, any government authority, with the entirety of human communications in secret and without oversight is simply too great a temptation to be ignored. 
+CA: Some people are furious at what you've done. 
+I heard a quote recently from Dick Cheney who said that Julian Assange was a flea bite, Edward Snowden is the lion that bit the head off the dog. 
+He thinks you've committed one of the worst acts of betrayal in American history. 
+What would you say to people who think that? 
+ES: Dick Cheney's really something else. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Laughter) I think it's amazing, because at the time Julian Assange was doing some of his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he was going to end governments worldwide, the skies were going to ignite and the seas were going to boil off, and now he's saying it's a flea bite. 
+So we should be suspicious about the same sort of overblown claims of damage to national security from these kind of officials. 
+But let's assume that these people really believe this. 
+I would argue that they have kind of a narrow conception of national security. 
+The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney do not keep the nation safe. 
+The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. 
+Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the Internet. 
+The Internet is not the enemy. 
+Our economy is not the enemy. 
+American businesses, Chinese businesses, and any other company out there is a part of our society. 
+It's a part of our interconnected world. 
+There are ties of fraternity that bond us together, and if we destroy these bonds by undermining the standards, the security, the manner of behavior, that nations and citizens all around the world expect us to abide by. 
+CA: But it's alleged that you've stolen 1.7 million documents. 
+It seems only a few hundred of them have been shared with journalists so far. 
+Are there more revelations to come? 
+ES: There are absolutely more revelations to come. 
+I don't think there's any question that some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come. 
+CA: Come here, because I want to ask you about this particular revelation. 
+Come and take a look at this. 
+I mean, this is a story which I think for a lot of the techies in this room is the single most shocking thing that they have heard in the last few months. 
+It's about a program called "" Bullrun. "" Can you explain what that is? 
+ES: So Bullrun, and this is again where we've got to thank the NSA for their candor, this is a program named after a Civil War battle. 
+They're programs through which the NSA intentionally misleads corporate partners. 
+They say hey, we need to work with you to secure your systems, but in reality, they're giving bad advice to these companies that makes them degrade the security of their services. 
+They're building in backdoors that not only the NSA can exploit, but anyone else who has time and money to research and find it can then use to let themselves in to the world's communications. 
+And this is really dangerous, because if we lose a single standard, if we lose the trust of something like SSL, which was specifically targeted by the Bullrun program, we will live a less safe world overall. 
+We won't be able to access our banks and we won't be able to access commerce without worrying about people monitoring those communications or subverting them for their own ends. 
+CA: And do those same decisions also potentially open America up to cyberattacks from other sources? 
+ES: Absolutely. 
+One of the problems, one of the dangerous legacies that we've seen in the post-9 / 11 era, is that the NSA has traditionally worn two hats. 
+They've been in charge of offensive operations, that is hacking, but they've also been in charge of defensive operations, and traditionally they've always prioritized defense over offense based on the principle that American secrets are simply worth more. 
+If we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can't get access to our secrets. 
+So by reducing the security of our communications, they're not only putting the world at risk, they're putting America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we're going to be paying for it for years. 
+CA: But they've made a calculation that it was worth doing this as part of America's defense against terrorism. 
+Surely that makes it a price worth paying. 
+ES: Well, when you look at the results of these programs in stopping terrorism, you will see that that's unfounded, and you don't have to take my word for it, because we've had the first open court, the first federal court that's reviewed this, outside the secrecy arrangement, called these programs Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. 
+Congress, who has access to be briefed on these things, and now has the desire to be, has produced bills to reform it, and two independent White House panels who reviewed all of the classified evidence said these programs have never stopped a single terrorist attack that was imminent in the United States. 
+So is it really terrorism that we're stopping? 
+Do these programs have any value at all? 
+I say no, and all three branches of the American government say no as well. 
+CA: I mean, do you think there's a deeper motivation for them than the war against terrorism? 
+ES: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you, say again? 
+ES: Yeah. The bottom line is that terrorism has always been what we in the intelligence world would call a cover for action. 
+Terrorism is something that provokes an emotional response that allows people to rationalize authorizing powers and programs that they wouldn't give otherwise. 
+The Bullrun and Edgehill-type programs, the NSA asked for these authorities back in the 1990s. 
+They asked the FBI to go to Congress and make the case. 
+The FBI went to Congress and did make the case. 
+But Congress and the American people said no. 
+But what we saw is, in the post-9 / 11 era, they used secrecy and they used the justification of terrorism to start these programs in secret without asking Congress, without asking the American people, and it's that kind of government behind closed doors that we need to guard ourselves against, because it makes us less safe, and it offers no value. 
+Speaking of terror, most people would find the situation you're in right now in Russia pretty terrifying. 
+You obviously heard what happened, what the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is, and there was a story in Buzzfeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead. 
+How are you coping with this? 
+How are you coping with the fear? 
+ES: It's no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me dead. 
+I've made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning thinking about what I can do for the American people. 
+I don't want to harm my government. 
+I want to help my government, but the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society, and say hey, this is not appropriate. 
+And whatever part I can do to see that end, I'm happy to do despite the risks. 
+CA: So I'd actually like to get some feedback from the audience here, because I know there's widely differing reactions to Edward Snowden. 
+You could view what he did as fundamentally a reckless act that has endangered America or you could view it as fundamentally a heroic act that will work towards America and the world's long-term good? 
+Those are the two choices I'll give you. 
+I'm curious to see who's willing to vote with the first of those, that this was a reckless act? 
+There are some hands going up. 
+It's hard to put your hand up when the man is standing right here, but I see them. 
+ES: I can see you. (Laughter) CA: And who goes with the second choice, the fundamentally heroic act? 
+(Applause) (Cheers) And I think it's true to say that there are a lot of people who didn't show a hand and I think are still thinking this through, because it seems to me that the debate around you doesn't split along traditional political lines. 
+It's not left or right, it's not really about pro-government, libertarian, or not just that. 
+Part of it is almost a generational issue. 
+You're part of a generation that grew up with the Internet, and it seems as if you become offended at almost a visceral level when you see something done that you think will harm the Internet. 
+Is there some truth to that? 
+ES: It is. I think it's very true. 
+This is not a left or right issue. 
+Our basic freedoms, and when I say our, I don't just mean Americans, I mean people around the world, it's not a partisan issue. 
+These are things that all people believe, and it's up to all of us to protect them, and to people who have seen and enjoyed a free and open Internet, it's up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy, and if we don't change things, if we don't stand up to make the changes we need to do to keep the Internet safe, not just for us but for everyone, we're going to lose that, and that would be a tremendous loss, not just for us, but for the world. 
+CA: Well, I have heard similar language recently from the founder of the world wide web, who I actually think is with us, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. 
+Tim, actually, would you like to come up and say, do we have a microphone for Tim? 
+(Applause) Tim, good to see you. Come up there. 
+Which camp are you in, by the way, traitor, hero? I have a theory on this, but — Tim Berners-Lee: I've given much longer answers to that question, but hero, if I have to make the choice between the two. 
+CA: And Ed, I think you've read the proposal that Sir Tim has talked about about a new Magna Carta to take back the Internet. 
+ES: Absolutely. I mean, my generation, I grew up not just thinking about the Internet, but I grew up in the Internet, and although I never expected to have the chance to defend it in such a direct and practical manner and to embody it in this unusual, almost avatar manner, I think there's something poetic about the fact that one of the sons of the Internet has actually become close to the Internet as a result of their political expression. 
+And I believe that a Magna Carta for the Internet is exactly what we need. 
+We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the structure of the Internet, and it's something that I hope, I invite everyone in the audience, not just here in Vancouver but around the world, to join and participate in. 
+CA: Do you have a question for Ed? 
+TBL: Well, two questions, a general question — CA: Ed, can you still hear us? 
+TBL: The wiretap on your line got a little interfered with for a moment. 
+(Laughter) ES: It's a little bit of an NSA problem. 
+TBL: So, from the 25 years, stepping back and thinking, what would you think would be the best that we could achieve from all the discussions that we have about the web we want? 
+ES: When we think about in terms of how far we can go, I think that's a question that's really only limited by what we're willing to put into it. 
+I think the Internet that we've enjoyed in the past has been exactly what we as not just a nation but as a people around the world need, and by cooperating, by engaging not just the technical parts of society, but as you said, the users, the people around the world who contribute through the Internet, through social media, who just check the weather, who rely on it every day as a part of their life, to champion that. 
+We'll get not just the Internet we've had, but a better Internet, a better now, something that we can use to build a future that'll be better not just than what we hoped for but anything that we could have imagined. 
+CA: It's 30 years ago that TED was founded, 1984. 
+A lot of the conversation since then has been along the lines that actually George Orwell got it wrong. 
+It's not Big Brother watching us. 
+We, through the power of the web, and transparency, are now watching Big Brother. 
+Your revelations kind of drove a stake through the heart of that rather optimistic view, but you still believe there's a way of doing something about that. 
+And you do too. 
+ES: Right, so there is an argument to be made that the powers of Big Brother have increased enormously. 
+There was a recent legal article at Yale that established something called the Bankston-Soltani Principle, which is that our expectation of privacy is violated when the capabilities of government surveillance have become cheaper by an order of magnitude, and each time that occurs, we need to revisit and rebalance our privacy rights. 
+Now, that hasn't happened since the government's surveillance powers have increased by several orders of magnitude, and that's why we're in the problem that we're in today, but there is still hope, because the power of individuals have also been increased by technology. 
+I am living proof that an individual can go head to head against the most powerful adversaries and the most powerful intelligence agencies around the world and win, and I think that's something that we need to take hope from, and we need to build on to make it accessible not just to technical experts but to ordinary citizens around the world. 
+Journalism is not a crime, communication is not a crime, and we should not be monitored in our everyday activities. 
+ES: Nice to meet you, and I hope my beam looks as nice as my view of you guys does. 
+(Applause) I mean, The New York Times recently called for an amnesty for you. 
+Would you welcome the chance to come back to America? 
+ES: Absolutely. There's really no question, the principles that have been the foundation of this project have been the public interest and the principles that underly the journalistic establishment in the United States and around the world, and I think if the press is now saying, we support this, this is something that needed to happen, that's a powerful argument, but it's not the final argument, and I think that's something that public should decide. 
+But at the same time, the government has hinted that they want some kind of deal, that they want me to compromise the journalists with which I've been working, to come back, and I want to make it very clear that I did not do this to be safe. 
+I did this to do what was right, and I'm not going to stop my work in the public interest just to benefit myself. 
+(Applause) CA: In the meantime, courtesy of the Internet and this technology, you're here, back in North America, not quite the U.S., Canada, in this form. 
+I'm curious, how does that feel? 
+ES: Canada is different than what I expected. 
+It's a lot warmer. 
+(Laughter) CA: At TED, the mission is "" ideas worth spreading. "" If you could encapsulate it in a single idea, what is your idea worth spreading right now at this moment? 
+ES: I would say the last year has been a reminder that democracy may die behind closed doors, but we as individuals are born behind those same closed doors, and we don't have to give up our privacy to have good government. 
+We don't have to give up our liberty to have security. 
+And I think by working together we can have both open government and private lives, and I look forward to working with everyone around the world to see that happen. 
+(Applause) 
+
+By 2010, Detroit had become the poster child for an American city in crisis. 
+There was a housing collapse, an auto industry collapse, and the population had plummeted by 25 percent between 2000 and 2010, and many people were beginning to write it off, as it had topped the list of American shrinking cities. 
+By 2010, I had also been asked by the Kresge Foundation and the city of Detroit to join them in leading a citywide planning process for the city to create a shared vision for its future. 
+I come to this work as an architect and an urban planner, and I've spent my career working in other contested cities, like Chicago, my hometown; Harlem, which is my current home; Washington, D.C.; and Newark, New Jersey. 
+All of these cities, to me, still had a number of unresolved issues related to urban justice, issues of equity, inclusion and access. 
+Now by 2010, as well, popular design magazines were also beginning to take a closer look at cities like Detroit, and devoting whole issues to "" fixing the city. "" I was asked by a good friend, Fred Bernstein, to do an interview for the October issue of Architect magazine, and he and I kind of had a good chuckle when we saw the magazine released with the title, "Can This Planner Save Detroit?" 
+So I'm smiling with a little bit of embarrassment right now, because obviously, it's completely absurd that a single person, let alone a planner, could save a city. 
+But I'm also smiling because I thought it represented a sense of hopefulness that our profession could play a role in helping the city to think about how it would recover from its severe crisis. 
+So I'd like to spend a little bit of time this afternoon and tell you a little bit about our process for fixing the city, a little bit about Detroit, and I want to do that through the voices of Detroiters. 
+So we began our process in September of 2010. 
+It's just after a special mayoral election, and word has gotten out that there is going to be this citywide planning process, which brings a lot of anxiety and fears among Detroiters. 
+We had planned to hold a number of community meetings in rooms like this to introduce the planning process, and people came out from all over the city, including areas that were stable neighborhoods, as well as areas that were beginning to see a lot of vacancy. 
+And most of our audience was representative of the 82 percent African-American population in the city at that time. 
+So obviously, we have a Q & A portion of our program, and people line up to mics to ask questions. 
+Many of them step very firmly to the mic, put their hands across their chest, and go, "I know you people are trying to move me out of my house, right?" 
+So that question is really powerful, and it was certainly powerful to us in the moment, when you connect it to the stories that some Detroiters had, and actually a lot of African-Americans' families have had that are living in Midwestern cities like Detroit. 
+Many of them told us the stories about how they came to own their home through their grandparents or great-grandparents, who were one of 1.6 million people who migrated from the rural South to the industrial North, as depicted in this painting by Jacob Lawrence, "The Great Migration." 
+They came to Detroit for a better way of life. 
+Many found work in the automobile industry, the Ford Motor Company, as depicted in this mural by Diego Rivera in the Detroit Institute of Art. 
+The fruits of their labors would afford them a home, for many the first piece of property that they would ever know, and a community with other first-time African-American home buyers. 
+The first couple of decades of their life in the North is quite well, up until about 1950, which coincides with the city's peak population at 1.8 million people. 
+Now it's at this time that Detroit begins to see a second kind of migration, a migration to the suburbs. 
+Between 1950 and 2000, the region grows by 30 percent. 
+But this time, the migration leaves African-Americans in place, as families and businesses flee the city, leaving the city pretty desolate of people as well as jobs. 
+During that same period, between 1950 and 2000, 2010, the city loses 60 percent of its population, and today it hovers at above 700,000. 
+The audience members who come and talk to us that night tell us the stories of what it's like to live in a city with such depleted population. 
+Many tell us that they're one of only a few homes on their block that are occupied, and that they can see several abandoned homes from where they sit on their porches. 
+Citywide, there are 80,000 vacant homes. 
+They can also see vacant property. 
+They're beginning to see illegal activities on these properties, like illegal dumping, and they know that because the city has lost so much population, their costs for water, electricity, gas are rising, because there are not enough people to pay property taxes to help support the services that they need. 
+Citywide, there are about 100,000 vacant parcels. 
+Now, to quickly give you all a sense of a scale, because I know that sounds like a big number, but I don't think you quite understand until you look at the city map. 
+So the city is 139 square miles. 
+You can fit Boston, San Francisco, and the island of Manhattan within its footprint. 
+So if we take all of that vacant and abandoned property and we smush it together, it looks like about 20 square miles, and that's roughly equivalent to the size of the island we're sitting on today, Manhattan, at 22 square miles. 
+So it's a lot of vacancy. 
+Now some of our audience members also tell us about some of the positive things that are happening in their communities, and many of them are banding together to take control of some of the vacant lots, and they're starting community gardens, which are creating a great sense of community stewardship, but they're very, very clear to tell us that this is not enough, that they want to see their neighborhoods return to the way that their grandparents had found them. 
+Now there's been a lot of speculation since 2010 about what to do with the vacant property, and a lot of that speculation has been around community gardening, or what we call urban agriculture. 
+So many people would say to us, "" What if you just take all that vacant land and you could make it farmland? 
+It can provide fresh foods, and it can put Detroiters back to work too. "" When I hear that story, I always imagine the folks from the Great Migration rolling over in their graves, because you can imagine that they didn't sacrifice moving from the South to the North to create a better life for their families, only to see their great-grandchildren return to an agrarian lifestyle, especially in a city where they came with little less than a high school education or even a grammar school education and were able to afford the basic elements of the American dream: steady work and a home that they owned. 
+Now, there's a third wave of migration happening in Detroit: a new ascendant of cultural entrepreneurs. 
+These folks see that same vacant land and those same abandoned homes as opportunity for new, entrepreneurial ideas and profit, so much so that former models can move to Detroit, buy property, start successful businesses and restaurants, and become successful community activists in their neighborhood, bringing about very positive change. 
+Similarly, we have small manufacturing companies making conscious decisions to relocate to the city. 
+This company, Shinola, which is a luxury watch and bicycle company, deliberately chose to relocate to Detroit, and they quote themselves by saying they were drawn to the global brand of Detroit's innovation. 
+And they also knew that they can tap into a workforce that was still very skilled in how to make things. 
+Now we have community stewardship happening in neighborhoods, we have cultural entrepreneurs making decisions to move to the city and create enterprises, and we have businesses relocating, and this is all in the context of what is no secret to us all, a city that's under the control of an emergency manager, and just this July filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. 
+So 2010, we started this process, and by 2013, we released Detroit Future City, which was our strategic plan to guide the city into a better and more prosperous and more sustainable existence — not what it was, but what it could be, looking at new ways of economic growth, new forms of land use, more sustainable and denser neighborhoods, a reconfigured infrastructure and city service system, and a heightened capacity for civic leaders to take action and implement change. 
+Three key imperatives were really important to our work. 
+One was that the city itself wasn't necessarily too large, but the economy was too small. 
+There are only 27 jobs per 100 people in Detroit, very different from a Denver or an Atlanta or a Philadelphia that are anywhere between 35 to 70 jobs per 100 people. 
+Secondly, there had to be an acceptance that we were not going to be able to use all of this vacant land in the way that we had before and maybe for some time to come. 
+It wasn't going to be our traditional residential neighborhoods as we had before, and urban agriculture, while a very productive and successful intervention happening in Detroit, was not the only answer, that what we had to do is look at these areas where we had significant vacancy but still had a significant number of population of what could be new, productive, innovative, and entrepreneurial uses that could stabilize those communities, where still nearly 300,000 residents lived. 
+So we came up with one neighborhood typology — there are several — called a live-make neighborhood, where folks could reappropriate abandoned structures and turn them into entrepreneurial enterprises, with a specific emphasis on looking at the, again, majority 82 percent African-American population. 
+So they, too, could take businesses that they maybe were doing out of their home and grow them to more prosperous industries and actually acquire property so they were actually property owners as well as business owners in the communities with which they resided. 
+Then we also wanted to look at other ways of using land in addition to growing food and transforming landscape into much more productive uses, so that it could be used for storm water management, for example, by using surface lakes and retention ponds, that created neighborhood amenities, places of recreation, and actually helped to elevate adjacent property levels. 
+Or we could use it as research plots, where we can use it to remediate contaminated soils, or we could use it to generate energy. 
+So the descendants of the Great Migration could either become precision watchmakers at Shinola, like Willie H., who was featured in one of their ads last year, or they can actually grow a business that would service companies like Shinola. 
+The good news is, there is a future for the next generation of Detroiters, both those there now and those that want to come. 
+So no thank you, Mayor Menino, who recently was quoted as saying, "I'd blow up the place and start over." 
+There are very important people, business and land assets in Detroit, and there are real opportunities there. 
+So while Detroit might not be what it was, Detroit will not die. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In 1962, Buckminster Fuller presented the particularly audacious proposal for the Geoscope. 
+It was a 200-foot diameter geodesic sphere to be suspended over the East River in New York City, in full view of the United Nations. 
+It was a big idea, for sure, and it was one that he felt could truly inform and deeply affect the decision making of this body through animations of global data, trends and other information regarding the globe, on this sphere. 
+And today, 45 years later, we clearly have no less need for this kind of clarity and perspective, but what we do have is improved technology. 
+Today we don't need one million light bulbs to create a spherical display. 
+We can use LEDs. 
+LEDs are smaller, they're cheaper, they're longer lasting, they're more efficient. 
+Most importantly for this, they're faster. 
+And this speed, combined with today's high-performance micro-controllers, allows us to actually simulate, in this piece, over 17,000 LEDs — using just 64. 
+And the way this happens is through the phenomenon of persistence of vision. 
+But as this ring rotates at about 1,700 rpm — that's 28 times per second. 
+The equator's speed is actually about 60 miles per hour. 
+There are four on-board micro-controllers that, each time this ring rotates it, as it passes the rear of the display, it picks up a position signal. 
+And from that, the on-board micro-controllers can extrapolate the position of the ring at all points around the revolution and display arbitrary bitmap images and animations. 
+But this is really just the beginning. 
+In addition to higher resolution versions of this display, my father and I are working on a new patent-pending design for a fully volumetric display using the same phenomenon. 
+It achieves this by rotating LEDs about two axes. 
+So as you can see here, this is a, eleven-inch diameter circuit board. 
+These blocks represent LEDs. 
+And so you could see that as this disc rotates about this axis, it will create a disc of light that we can control. 
+That's nothing new: that's a propeller clock; that's the rims that you can buy for your car. 
+But what is new is that, when we rotate this disc about this axis, this disc of light actually becomes a sphere of light. 
+And so we can control that with micro-controllers and create a fully volumetric, three-dimensional display with just 256 LEDs. 
+Now this piece is currently in process — due out in May — but what we've done is we've put together a small demo, just to show the geometric translation of points into a sphere. 
+I've got a little video to show you, but keep in mind that this is with no electronic control, and this is also with only four LEDs. 
+This is actually only about 1.5 percent of what the final display will be in May. 
+So, take a look. 
+And here you can see it's rotating about the vertical axis only, creating circles. 
+And then, as the other axis kicks in, those actually blur into a volume. 
+And the shutter speed of the camera actually makes it slightly less effective in this case. 
+But this piece is due out in May. 
+It'll be on display at the Interactive Telecommunications Spring Show in Greenwich Village in New York City — that's open to the public, definitely invite you all to come and attend — it's a fantastic show. 
+There are hundreds of student innovators with fantastic projects. 
+This piece, actually, will be on display down in the Sierra Simulcast Lounge in the breaks between now and the end of the show. 
+So I'd love to talk to you all, and invite you to come down and take a closer look. 
+It's an honor to be here. Thanks very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Alec Soth: So about 10 years ago, I got a call from a woman in Texas, Stacey Baker, and she'd seen some of my photographs in an art exhibition and was wondering if she could commission me to take a portrait of her parents. 
+Now, at the time I hadn't met Stacey, and I thought this was some sort of wealthy oil tycoon and I'd struck it rich, but it was only later that I found out she'd actually taken out a loan to make this happen. 
+At the time I made this picture, Stacey was working as an attorney for the State of Texas. 
+Not long after, she left her job to study photography in Maine, and while she was there, she ended up meeting the director of photography at the New York Times Magazine and was actually offered a job. 
+Stacey Baker: In the years since, Alec and I have done a number of magazine projects together, and we've become friends. 
+A few months ago, I started talking to Alec about a fascination of mine. 
+I've always been obsessed with how couples meet. 
+I asked Alec how he and his wife Rachel met, and he told me the story of a high school football game where she was 16 and he was 15, and he asked her out. 
+He liked her purple hair. 
+She said yes, and that was it. 
+I then asked Alec if he'd be interested in doing a photography project exploring this question. 
+AS: And I was interested in the question, but I was actually much more interested in Stacey's motivation for asking it, particularly since I'd never known Stacey to have a boyfriend. 
+So as part of this project, I thought it'd be interesting if she tried to meet someone. 
+So my idea was to have Stacey here go speed dating in Las Vegas on Valentine's Day. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) (Music) SB: We ended up at what was advertised as the world's largest speed dating event. 
+I had 19 dates and each date lasted three minutes. 
+Participants were given a list of ice- breaker questions to get the ball rolling, things like, "" If you could be any kind of animal, what would you be? "" That sort of thing. 
+My first date was Colin. 
+He's from England, and he once married a woman he met after placing an ad for a Capricorn. 
+Alec and I saw him at the end of the evening, and he said he'd kissed a woman in line at one of the concession stands. 
+Zack and Chris came to the date-a-thon together. 
+This is Carl. 
+I asked Carl, "" What's the first thing you notice about a woman? "" He said, "" Tits. "" (Laughter) Matthew is attracted to women with muscular calves. 
+We talked about running. He does triathlons, I run half-marathons. 
+Alec actually liked his eyes and asked if I was attracted to him, but I wasn't, and I don't think he was attracted to me either. 
+Austin and Mike came together. 
+Mike asked me a hypothetical question. 
+He said, "" You're in an elevator running late for a meeting. 
+Someone makes a dash for the elevator. 
+Do you hold it open for them? "" And I said I would not. 
+(Laughter) Cliff said the first thing he notices about a woman is her teeth, and we complimented each other's teeth. 
+Because he's an open mouth sleeper, he says he has to floss more to help prevent gum disease, and so I asked him how often he flosses, and he said, "" Every other day. "" (Laughter) Now, as someone who flosses twice a day, I wasn't really sure that that was flossing more but I don't think I said that out loud. 
+Bill is an auditor, and we talked the entire three minutes about auditing. (Laughter) The first thing Spencer notices about a woman is her complexion. 
+Craig told me he didn't think I was willing to be vulnerable. 
+He thought I was lying, but I wasn't. 
+William was really difficult to talk to. 
+I think he was drunk. 
+(Laughter) Actor Chris McKenna was the MC of the event. 
+He used to be on "" The Young and the Restless. "" I didn't actually go on a date with him. 
+Alec said he saw several women give their phone numbers to him. 
+Needless to say, I didn't fall in love. 
+I didn't feel a particular connection with any of the men that I went on dates with, and I didn't feel like they felt a particular connection with me either. 
+AS: Now, the most beautiful thing to me — (Laughter) — as a photographer is the quality of vulnerability. 
+The physical exterior reveals a crack in which you can get a glimpse at a more fragile interior. 
+At this date-a-thon event, I saw so many examples of that, but as I watched Stacey's dates and talked to her about them, I realized how different photographic love is from real love. 
+What is real love? How does it work? 
+In order to work on this question and to figure out how someone goes from meeting on a date to having a life together, Stacey and I went to Sun City Summerlin, which is the largest retirement community in Las Vegas. 
+Our contact there was George, who runs the community's photography club. 
+He arranged for us to meet other couples in their makeshift photo studio. 
+SB: After 45 years of marriage, Anastasia's husband died two years ago, so we asked if she had an old wedding picture. 
+He was 30. 
+She'd lied about her age. 
+He was the first person she'd dated. 
+Dean had been named photographer of the year in Las Vegas two years in a row, and this caught Alec's attention, as did the fact that he met his wife, Judy, at the same age when Alec met Rachel. 
+Dean admitted that he likes to look at beautiful women, but he's never questioned his decision to marry Judy. 
+Like a lot of the couples we met, they weren't especially philosophical about their early choices. 
+He said, "" When you get that feeling, you just go with it. "" Bob and Trudy met on a blind date when she was still in high school. 
+They said they weren't particularly attracted to each other when the first met. 
+Nevertheless, they were married soon after. 
+SB: The story that stayed with me the most was that of George, the photography club president, and his wife, Mary. 
+This was George and Mary's second marriage. 
+They met at a country-western club in Louisville, Kentucky called the Sahara. 
+He was there alone drinking and she was with friends. 
+When they started dating, he owed the IRS 9,000 dollars in taxes, and she offered to help him get out of debt, so for the next year, he turned his paychecks over to Mary, and she got him out of debt. 
+George was actually an alcoholic when they married, and Mary knew it. 
+At some point in their marriage, he says he consumed 54 beers in one day. 
+Another time, when he was drunk, he threatened to kill Mary and her two kids, but they escaped and a SWAT team was called to the house. 
+Amazingly, Mary took him back, and eventually things got better. 
+George has been involved in Alcoholics Anonymous and hasn't had a drink in 36 years. 
+(Music) At the end of the day, after we left Sun City, I told Alec that I didn't actually think that the stories of how these couples met were all that interesting. 
+What was more interesting was how they managed to stay together. 
+AS: They all had this beautiful quality of endurance, but that was true of the singles, too. 
+The world is hard, and the singles were out there trying to connect with other people, and the couples were holding onto each other after all these decades. 
+My favorite pictures on this trip were of Joe and Roseanne. 
+Now, by the time we met Joe and Roseanne, we'd gotten in the habit of asking couples if they had an old wedding photograph. 
+In their case, they simultaneously pulled out of their wallets the exact same photograph. 
+What's more beautiful, I thought to myself, this image of a young couple who has just fallen in love or the idea of these two people holding onto this image for decades? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. 
+It's the only one that can start a war or say "" I love you. "" And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them. 
+And why is that? 
+How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world? 
+I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we can all fall into. 
+First, gossip. 
+Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. 
+Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us. 
+Second, judging. 
+We know people who are like this in conversation, and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time. 
+Third, negativity. 
+I remember one day, I said to her, "" It's October 1 today, "" and she said, "" I know, isn't it dreadful? "" (Laughter) It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative. (Laughter) 
+Excuses. 
+They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions, and again, hard to listen to somebody who is being like that. 
+It demeans our language, actually, sometimes. 
+For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it? 
+(Laughter) And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us. 
+When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. 
+So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. 
+These are things I think we need to avoid. 
+But is there a positive way to think about this? 
+Yes, there is. 
+I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. 
+The word is "" hail, "" and it has a great definition as well. 
+See if you can guess. 
+The H, honesty, of course, being true in what you say, being straight and clear. 
+The A is authenticity, just being yourself. 
+A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. 
+The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. 
+I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons. 
+First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. 
+Perhaps that's not necessary. 
+But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. 
+So hail. 
+Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. 
+This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. 
+I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking. 
+Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. 
+I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. 
+But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. 
+You hear the difference? 
+We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. 
+That's register. 
+Then we have timbre. 
+It's the way your voice feels. 
+Well if that's not you, that's not the end of the world, because you can train. 
+Go and get a voice coach. 
+And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice. 
+Then prosody. I love prosody. 
+This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. 
+It's root one for meaning in conversation. 
+People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. 
+That's where the word "" monotonic "" comes from, or monotonous, monotone. 
+Also, we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement? 
+(Laughter) And if you repeat that one, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame, so let's try and break that habit. 
+I can get very excited by saying something really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence. 
+There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? 
+We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. 
+(Higher pitch) Where did you leave my keys? 
+And finally, volume. 
+(Loud) I can get really excited by using volume. 
+Sorry about that, if I startled anybody. 
+Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. 
+That's called sodcasting, (Laughter) Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. 
+It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. 
+Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. 
+Warm up your voice. 
+I'm going to show you the six vocal warm-up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. 
+First, arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out, ahhhhh, like that. 
+One more time. 
+Ahhhh, very good. 
+Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba. Very good. 
+And now, brrrrrrrrrr, just like when you were a kid. 
+We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. 
+That's like champagne for the tongue. 
+Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. 
+It's really good. It starts with "" we "" and goes to "" aw. "" The "" we "" is high, the "" aw "" is low. 
+Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. 
+(Applause) Next time you speak, do those in advance. 
+Now let me just put this in context to close. 
+This is a serious point here. 
+This is where we are now, right? 
+We speak not very well to people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. 
+What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? 
+Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? 
+That would be a world that does sound beautiful, and one where understanding would be the norm, and that is an idea worth spreading. 
+Thank you. 
+
+In October 2010, the Justice League of America will be teaming up with The 99. 
+Icons like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and their colleagues will be teaming up with icons Jabbar, Noora, Jami and their colleagues. 
+It's a story of intercultural intersections, and what better group to have this conversation than those that grew out of fighting fascism in their respective histories and geographies? 
+As fascism took over Europe in the 1930s, an unlikely reaction came out of North America. 
+As Christian iconography got changed, and swastikas were created out of crucifixes, Batman and Superman were created by Jewish young men in the United States and Canada, also going back to the Bible. 
+Consider this: like the prophets, all the superheroes are missing parents. 
+Superman's parents die on Krypton before the age of one. 
+Bruce Wayne, who becomes Batman, loses his parents at the age of six in Gotham City. 
+Spiderman is raised by his aunt and uncle. 
+And all of them, just like the prophets who get their message from God through Gabriel, get their message from above. 
+Peter Parker is in a library in Manhattan when the spider descends from above and gives him his message through a bite. 
+Bruce Wayne is in his bedroom when a big bat flies over his head, and he sees it as an omen to become Batman. 
+Superman is not only sent to Earth from the heavens, or Krypton, but he's sent in a pod, much like Moses was on the Nile. 
+(Laughter) And you hear the voice of his father, Jor-El, saying to Earth, "" I have sent to you my only son. "" (Laughter) (Applause) These are clearly biblical archetypes, and the thinking behind that was to create positive, globally-resonating storylines that could be tied to the same things that other people were pulling mean messages out of because then the person that's using religion for the wrong purpose just becomes a bad man with a bad message. 
+And it's only by linking positive things that the negative can be delinked. 
+This is the kind of thinking that went into creating The 99. 
+The 99 references the 99 attributes of Allah in the Koran, things like generosity and mercy and foresight and wisdom and dozens of others that no two people in the world would disagree about. 
+It doesn't matter what your religion is; even if you're an atheist, you don't raise your kid telling him, you know, "Make sure you lie three times a day." 
+Those are basic human values. 
+And so the backstory of The 99 takes place in 1258, which history tells us the Mongols invaded Baghdad and destroyed it. 
+All the books from Bait al-Hikma library, the most famous library in its day, were thrown in the Tigris River, and the Tigris changes color with ink. 
+It's a story passed on generation after generation. 
+I rewrote that story, and in my version, the librarians find out that this is going to happen — and here's a side note: if you want a comic book to do well, make the librarians the hero. It always works well. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) So the librarians find out and they get together a special solution, a chemical solution called King's Water, that when mixed with 99 stones would be able to save all that culture and history in the books. 
+But the Mongols get there first. 
+The books and the solution get thrown in the Tigris River. 
+Some librarians escape, and over the course of days and weeks, they dip the stones into the Tigris and suck up that collective wisdom that we all think is lost to civilization. 
+Those stones have been smuggled as three prayer beads of 33 stones each through Arabia into Andalusia in Spain, where they're safe for 200 years. 
+But in 1492, two important things happen. 
+The first is the fall of Granada, the last Muslim enclave in Europe. 
+The second is Columbus finally gets funded to go to India, but he gets lost. 
+(Laughter) So 33 of the stones are smuggled onto the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria and are spread in the New World. 
+Thirty-three go on the Silk Road to China, South Asia and Southeast Asia. 
+And 33 are spread between Europe, the Middle East and Africa. 
+And now it's 2010, and there are 99 heroes from 99 different countries. 
+Now it's very easy to assume that those books, because they were from a library called Bait al-Hikma, were Muslim books, but that's not the case because the caliph that built that library, his name was al-Ma'mun — he was Harun al-Rashid's son. 
+He had told his advisers, "" Get me all the scholars to translate any book they can get their hands onto into Arabic, and I will pay them its weight in gold. "" After a while, his advisers complained. 
+They said, "" Your Highness, the scholars are cheating. 
+They're writing in big handwriting to take more gold. "" To which he said, "" Let them be, because what they're giving us is worth a lot more than what we're paying them. "" So the idea of an open architecture, an open knowledge, is not new to my neck of the desert. 
+The concept centers on something called the Noor stones. 
+Noor is Arabic for light. 
+So these 99 stones, a few kind of rules in the game: Number one, you don't choose the stone; the stone chooses you. 
+There's a King Arthur element to the storyline, okay. 
+Number two, all of The 99, when they first get their stone, or their power, abuse it; they use it for self-interest. 
+And there's a very strong message in there that when you start abusing your stone, you get taken advantage of by people who will exploit your powers, okay. 
+Number three, the 99 stones all have within them a mechanism that self-updates. 
+Now there are two groups that exist within the Muslim world. 
+Everybody believes the Koran is for all time and all place. 
+Some believe that means that the original interpretation from a couple thousand years ago is what's relevant today. 
+I don't belong there. 
+Then there's a group that believes the Koran is a living, breathing document, and I captured that idea within these stones that self-update. 
+Now the main bad guy, Rughal, does not want these stones to update, so he's trying to get them to stop updating. 
+He can't use the stones, but he can stop them. 
+And by stopping them, he has more of a fascist agenda, where he gets some of The 99 to work for him — they're all wearing cookie-cutter, same color uniforms They're not allowed to individually express who they are and what they are. 
+And he controls them from the top down — whereas when they work for the other side, eventually, when they find out this is the wrong person, they've been manipulated, they actually, each one has a different, colorful kind of dress. 
+And the last point about the 99 Noor stones is this. 
+So The 99 work in teams of three. 
+Why three? A couple of reasons. 
+Number one, we have a thing within Islam that you don't leave a boy and a girl alone together, because the third person is temptation or the devil, right? 
+I think that's there in all cultures, right? 
+But this is not about religion, it's not about proselytizing. 
+There's this very strong social message that needs to get to kind of the deepest crevices of intolerance, and the only way to get there is to kind of play the game. 
+And so this is the way I dealt with it. 
+They work in teams of three: two boys and a girl, two girls and a boy, three boys, three girls, no problem. 
+And the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, also spoke about the importance of the number three in all cultures, so I figure I'm covered. 
+Well... 
+I got accused in a few blogs that I was actually sent by the Pope to preach the Trinity and Catholicism in the Middle East, so you — (Laughter) you believe who you want. I gave you my version of the story. 
+So here's some of the characters that we have. 
+Mujiba, from Malaysia: her main power is she's able to answer any question. 
+She's the Trivial Pursuit queen, if you want, but when she first gets her power, she starts going on game shows and making money. 
+We have Jabbar from Saudi who starts breaking things when he has the power. 
+Now, Mumita was a fun one to name. Mumita is the destroyer. 
+So the 99 attributes of Allah have the yin and the yang; there's the powerful, the hegemonous, the strong, and there's also the kind, the generous. 
+I'm like, are all the girls going to be kind and merciful and the guys all strong? 
+I'm like, you know what, I've met a few girls who were destroyers in my lifetime, so... 
+(Laughter) We have Jami from Hungary, who first starts making weapons: He's the technology wiz. 
+Musawwira from Ghana, Hadya from Pakistan, Jaleel from Iran who uses fire. 
+And this is one of my favorites, Al-Batina from Yemen. 
+Al-Batina is the hidden. 
+So Al-Batina is hidden, but she's a superhero. 
+I came home to my wife and I said, "" I created a character after you. "" My wife is a Saudi from Yemeni roots. 
+And she said, "" Show me. "" So I showed this. 
+She said, "" That's not me. "" I said, "" Look at the eyes. They're your eyes. "" (Laughter) So I promised my investors this would not be another made-in-fifth-world-country production. 
+This was going to be Superman, or it wasn't worth my time or their money. 
+So from day one, the people involved in the project, bottom left is Fabian Nicieza, writer for X-Men and Power Rangers. 
+Next to him is Dan Panosian, one of the character creators for the modern-day X-Men. 
+Top right is Stuart Moore, a writer for Iron Man. 
+Next to him is John McCrea, who was an inker for Spiderman. 
+And we entered Western consciousness with a tagline: "" Next Ramadan, the world will have new heroes, "" back in 2005. 
+Now I went to Dubai, to an Arab Thought Foundation Conference, and I was waiting by the coffee for the right journalist. 
+Didn't have a product, but had energy. 
+And I found somebody from The New York Times, and I cornered him, and I pitched him. 
+And I think I scared him — (Laughter) because he basically promised me — we had no product — but he said, "" We'll give you a paragraph in the arts section if you'll just go away. "" (Laughter) So I said, "" Great. "" So I called him up a few weeks afterward. 
+I said, "" Hi, Hesa. "" And he said, "" Hi. "" I said, "" Happy New Year. "" He said, "" Thank you. We had a baby. "" I said, "" Congratulations. "" Like I care, right? 
+"So when's the article coming out?" 
+He said, "" Naif, Islam and cartoon? 
+That's not timely. 
+You know, maybe next week, next month, next year, but, you know, it'll come out. "" So a few days after that, what happens? 
+What happens is the world erupts in the Danish cartoon controversy. 
+I became timely. 
+(Laughter) So flurry of phone calls and emails from The New York Times. 
+Next thing you knew, there's a full page covering us positively, January 22nd, 2006, which changed our lives forever, because anybody Googling Islam and cartoon or Islam and comic, guess what they got; they got me. 
+And The 99 were like superheroes kind of flying out of what was happening around the world. 
+And that led to all kinds of things, from being in curricula in universities and schools to — one of my favorite pictures I have from South Asia, it was a couple of men with long beards and a lot of girls wearing the hijab — it looked like a school. 
+The good news is they're all holding copies of The 99, smiling, and they found me to sign the picture. 
+The bad news is they were all photocopies, so we didn't make a dime in revenue. 
+(Laughter) We've been able to license The 99 comic books into eight languages so far — Chinese, Indonesian, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish. 
+Opened a theme park through a license in Kuwait a year and a half ago called The 99 Village Theme Park — 300,000 square feet, 20 rides, all with our characters: a couple back-to-school licenses in Spain and Turkey. 
+But the biggest thing we've done to date, which is just amazing, is that we've done a 26-episode animated series, which is done for global audiences: in fact, we're already going to be in the U.S. and Turkey, we know. 
+It's 3D CGI, which is going to be very high-quality, written in Hollywood by the writers behind Ben 10 and Spiderman and Star Wars: Clone Wars. 
+In this clip I'm about to show you, which has never been seen in the public before, there is a struggle. 
+Two of the characters, Jabbar, the one with the muscles, and Noora, the one that can use light, are actually wearing the cookie-cutter fascist gray uniform because they're being manipulated. 
+They don't know, OK, and they're trying to get another member of The 99 to join them. 
+So there's a struggle within the team. 
+So if we can get the lights... 
+["" The 99 ""] Jabbar: Dana, I can't see where to grab hold. 
+I need more light. 
+What's happening? 
+Dana: There's too much darkness. 
+Rughal: There must be something we can do. 
+Man: I won't send any more commandos in until I know it's safe. 
+Dr. Razem: It's time to go, Miklos. 
+Miklos: Must download file contents. 
+I can't forget auntie. 
+Jabbar: Dana, I can't do this without you. 
+Dana: But I can't help. 
+Jabbar: You can, even if you don't believe in yourself right now. 
+I believe in you. 
+You are Noora the Light. 
+Dana: No. 
+I don't deserve it. I don't deserve anything. 
+Jabbar: Then what about the rest of us? 
+Don't we deserve to be saved? Don't I? 
+Now, tell me which way to go. 
+Dana: That way. 
+Alarm: Threat imminent. 
+Jabbar: Aaaahhh! 
+Miklos: Stay away from me. 
+Jabbar: We're here to help you. 
+Dr. Razem: Don't listen to them. 
+Dana: Miklos, that man is not your friend. 
+Miklos: No. He gave me access, and you want to reboot the [unclear]. No more [unclear]. 
+["" The 99 ""] Thank you. 
+(Applause) So "" The 99 "" is technology; it's entertainment; it's design. 
+But that's only half the story. 
+As the father of five sons, I worry about who they're going to be using as role models. 
+I worry because all around me, even within my extended family, I see religion being manipulated. 
+As a psychologist, I worry for the world in general, but worry about the perception of how people see themselves in my part of the world. 
+Now, I'm a clinical psychologist. I'm licensed in New York State. 
+I trained at Bellevue Hospital Survivors of Political Torture Program, and I heard one too many stories of people growing up to idolize their leadership, only to end up being tortured by their heroes. 
+And torture's a terrible enough thing as it is, but when it's done by your hero, that just breaks you in so many ways. 
+I left Bellevue, went to business school and started this. 
+Now, one of the things that I refer to when I — about the importance of this message — is that I gave a lecture at the medical school at Kuwait University, where I lecture on the biological basis of behavior, and I gave the students two articles, one from The New York Times and one from New York magazine. 
+And I took away the name of the writer, the name of the [unclear] — everything was gone except the facts. 
+And the first one was about a group called The Party of God, who wanted to ban Valentine's Day. Red was made illegal. 
+Any boys and girls caught flirting would get married off immediately, okay. 
+The second one was about a woman complaining because three minivans with six bearded men pulled up and started interrogating her on the spot for talking to a man who wasn't related to her. 
+And I asked the students in Kuwait where they thought these incidents took place. 
+The first one, they said Saudi Arabia. There was no debate. 
+The second one, they were actually split between Saudi and Afghanistan. 
+What blew their mind was the first one took place in India, it was the party of a Hindu God. 
+The second one took place in upstate New York. 
+It was an Orthodox Jewish community. 
+But what breaks my heart and what's alarming is that in those two interviews, the people around, who were interviewed as well, refer to that behavior as Talibanization. 
+In other words, good Hindus and good Jews don't act this way. 
+This is Islam's influence on Hinduism and Judaism. 
+But what do the students in Kuwait say? They said it's us — and this is dangerous. 
+It's dangerous when a group self-identifies itself as extreme. 
+This is one of my sons, Rayan, who's a Scooby Doo addict. 
+You can tell by the glasses there. 
+He actually called me a meddling kid the other day. 
+(Laughter) But I borrow a lesson that I learned from him. 
+Last summer when we were in our home in New York, he was out in the yard playing in his playhouse. And I was in my office working, and he came in, "" Baba, I want you to come with me. I want my toy. "" "" Yes, Rayan, just go away. "" He left his Scooby Doo in his house. 
+I said, "" Go away. I'm working. I'm busy. "" And what Rayan did then is he sat there, he tapped his foot on the floor, at three and a half, and he looked at me and he said, "" Baba, I want you to come with me to my office in my house. 
+I have work to do. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Rayan reframed the situation and brought himself down to my level. (Laughter) 
+And with The 99, that is what we aim to do. 
+You know, I think that there's a big parallel between bending the crucifix out of shape and creating swastikas. 
+And when I see pictures like this, of parents or uncles who think it's cute to have a little child holding a Koran and having a suicide bomber belt around them to protest something, the hope is by linking enough positive things to the Koran, that one day we can move this child from being proud in the way they're proud there, to that. 
+And I think — I think The 99 can and will achieve its mission. 
+As an undergrad at Tufts University, we were giving away free falafel one day and, you know, it was Middle East Day or something. 
+And people came up and picked up the culturally resonant image of the falafel, ate it and, you know, talked and left. 
+And no two people could disagree about what the word free was and what the word falafel was, behind us, "" free falafel. "" You know. 
+(Laughter) Or so we thought, until a woman came rushing across the campus and dropped her bag on the floor, pointed up to the sign and said, "Who's falafel?" (Laughter) 
+True story. (Laughter) 
+She was actually coming out of an Amnesty International meeting. (Laughter) 
+Just today, D.C. Comics announced the cover of our upcoming crossover. 
+On that cover you see Batman, Superman and a fully-clothed Wonder Woman with our Saudi member of The 99, our Emirati member and our Libyan member. 
+On April 26, 2010, President Barack Obama said that of all the initiatives since his now famous Cairo speech — in which he reached out to the Muslim world — the most innovative was that The 99 reach back out to the Justice League of America. 
+We live in a world in which the most culturally innocuous symbols, like the falafel, can be misunderstood because of baggage, and where religion can be twisted and purposefully made where it's not supposed to be by others. 
+In a world like that, they'll always be a job for Superman and The 99. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Non English) (French) Mais Des fois on peut voir parce Que Les gens ici faire Des choses on peut manger. 
+(British English) And that's one of the things that I enjoy most about this convention. 
+(Laughter) But it is within our self-interest to understand the topography of our lives unto ourselves. (Laughter) 
+The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living. (Laughter) 
+Common knowledge, but important nonetheless. (Laughter) 
+As we face fear in these times, and fear is all around us, we also have anti-fear. 
+(American accent) But we feel as though there are times when a lot of us — you know what I'm saying? 
+But — you know what I'm saying? 
+Like so I wrote a song, and I hope you guys dig it. 
+It's a song about people and sasquatches — (Laughter) And other French science stuff. 
+(Singing) I've been trying inside I know that I'm in trouble (Applause) that I'm in trouble by myself But every time it gets me (Vocalization) (Beatbox) (Singing) And I've been trying to be the one that you believe in And you're the one that I want to be so saucy And you're the one I want to [unclear], baby And you can do anything as long as you don't get hurt along the way back (Beatbox) If I survive, I'm going to tell you what is wrong Because if you were [unclear] And I think that you're looking like a [unclear] 
+I give you what I want to be (Music) (Music ends abruptly) (British accent) And it's like, you could use as many of those things that you want. 
+(Applause) And the computer models, no matter how many that you have and how many people that you use, are never going to be able to arrive at the same conclusions. 
+Four years ago I worked with a few people at the Brookings Institute, and I arrived at a conclusion. 
+(Laughter) Tomorrow is another day. (Laughter) 
+You can reach out — things are solid. 
+(Laughter) That's something you live inside of every day. 
+Now with the allocation and the understanding of the lack of understanding, we enter into a new era of science in which we feel nothing more than so much so as to say that those within themselves, comporary or non-comporary, will figuratively figure into the folding of our non-understanding and our partial understanding to the networks of which we all draw our source and conclusions from. 
+(Laughter) So, as I say before the last piece, feel not as though it is a sphere we live on, rather an infinite plane which has the illusion of leading yourself back to the point of origin. (Laughter) 
+Once we understand that all the spheres in the sky are just large infinite planes, it will be plain to see. (Laughter) 
+And just remember, everything you are — it's more important to realize the negative space, as music is only the division of space; it is the space we are listening to divided as such, which gives us the information in comparison to something other that gives us the idea of what the idea that wants to be transmitted wants to be. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+(Laughter) (Beatbox) Here we go. (Beatbox) 
+Yeah, yo, yo, yo (Gibberish) (Music fades out) Thank you. Enjoy the rest. 
+
+And if you did, you are forgiven for wondering how a Nutt managed to end up in a war zone. 
+And, you see, I had to be paid this dollar in the event that the UN needed to issue an evacuation order, so that I would be covered. 
+I was, after all, heading into one of the world's most dangerous places. 
+And by now, some of you may be asking yourselves, and I just want to reassure you, that I did get half the money up front. 
+(Laughter) But you see, this is how, with 50 cents in my pocket, I ended up in Baidoa, Somalia. 
+Journalists called it the "" city of death. "" And they called it the city of death because 300,000 people had lost their lives there — 300,000 people, mostly as a result of war-related famine and disease. 
+I was part of a team that was tasked with trying to figure out how best to respond to this humanitarian catastrophe. 
+It was right on the heels of the Rwandan genocide, and aid money to the region was drying up. 
+Many aid organizations, unfortunately, had been forced to close their doors. 
+And so the question that I was asked to specifically help answer, which is one that aid workers ask themselves in war zones the world over, is: What the hell do we do now? 
+You know, the security environment in Somalia at that moment in time — and nothing has really changed too much — can best be described as "" Mad Max "" by way of "" A Clockwork Orange. "" And I remember very distinctly a couple of days after my arrival, I went up to a feeding clinic. 
+There were dozens of women who were standing in line, and they were clutching their infants very close. 
+About 20 minutes into this conversation I was having with this one young woman, I leaned forward and tried to put my finger in the palm of her baby's hand. 
+And when I did this, I discovered that her baby was already in rigor. 
+She was stiff, and her little, lifeless hand was curled into itself. 
+She had died hours before of malnutrition and dehydration. 
+I later learned that as her baby was dying, this young woman had been held for two days by some teenage boys who were armed with Kalashnikov rifles, and they were trying to shake her down for more money, money she very clearly did not have. 
+And this is a scene that I have confronted in war zones the world over; places where kids, some as young as eight — they are this big — and those kids, they have never been to school. 
+But they have fought and they have killed with automatic rifles. 
+Is this just the way the world is? 
+Some will you tell you that war is unavoidably human. 
+After all, it is as old as existence itself. 
+We say never again, and yet it happens again and again and again. 
+But I will tell you that I have seen the absolute worst of what we as human beings are capable of doing to one another, and yet I still believe a different outcome is possible. 
+Do you want to know why? 
+Because over 20 years of doing this work, going in and out of war zones around the world, I have come to understand that there are aspects of this problem that we, all of us, as people occupying this shared space, that we can change — not through force or coercion or invasion, but by simply looking at all of the options available to us and choosing the ones that favor peace at the expense of war, instead of war at the expense of peace. 
+How so? 
+The vast majority of civilians, like that young baby, who are dying in war zones around the world, are dying at the hands of various armed groups who rely on a near-infinite supply of cheap, easy and efficient weapons to rape, threaten, intimidate and brutalize those civilians at every turn. 
+How cheap? 
+Well, in some parts of the world, you can buy an AK-47 for as little as 10 dollars. 
+In many places in which I have worked, it is easier to get access to an automatic rifle than it is to get access to clean drinking water. 
+And so now the important part: Can anything be done about this? 
+To answer that question, let's take a look at this map of the world. 
+And now, let's add in all of the countries that are currently at war, and the number of people who have either died or have been displaced as a result of that violence. 
+It is a staggering number — more than 40 million people. 
+Now, let's look at the countries that are the world's top 20 exporters of small arms in the world. 
+And what do we notice? 
+Well, you see them in green. 
+You will notice that those are mostly countries in the Global North, primarily Western countries. 
+What does this tell us? 
+This tells us that most of the people who are dying in war are living in poor countries, and yet most of the people who are profiting from war are living in rich countries — people like you and me. 
+And then what if we go beyond small arms for a second. 
+Well, roughly 80 percent of those weapons come from none other than the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany. 
+It's shocking, isn't it? 
+Now, some of you might be saying at this moment in time, "Oh yeah, but OK, hang on a second there... Nutt." 
+(Laughter) Grade school was spectacular for me. 
+(Laughter) But you might be saying to yourselves, You know, all of these weapons in war zones — they're not a cause, but an effect of the violence that plagues them each and every single day. 
+You know, places like Iraq and Afghanistan, where they need these weapons to be able to maintain law and order, promote peace and security, to combat terror groups — surely this is a good thing. 
+Let's take a look at that assumption for just one moment, because you see there has been a boom in the small-arms trade since the start of the War on Terror. 
+In fact, it is a business that has grown threefold over the past 15 years. 
+And now let's compare that to the number of people who have directly died in armed conflict around the world in that same period. 
+What do you notice? 
+Now, we can have a circular argument here about whether this increase in fatalities is a response to the increase of small arms, or the other way around. 
+But here's what we should really take away from this. 
+What we should take away from this is that this is a relationship worth scrutinizing, especially when you consider that small arms that were shipped to Iraq for use by the Iraqi Army, or to Syria for so-called moderate opposition fighters, that those arms, many of them, are now in the hands of ISIS; or when you consider that arms that were shipped to Libya are now actively drifting across the Sahel, and ending up with groups like Boko Haram and al Qaeda and other militant groups. 
+And therein lies the problem. 
+Because, you see, small arms anywhere are a menace everywhere, because their first stop is rarely their last. 
+Spending on war per person per year now amounts to about 249 dollars — 249 dollars per person, which is roughly 12 times what we spend on foreign aid, money that is used to educate and vaccinate children and combat malnutrition in the Global South. 
+But we can shift that balance. 
+How do we do this? 
+On the supply side, we can push our governments to adopt international arms transparency mechanisms like the Arms Trade Treaty, which makes it so that rich countries have to be more accountable for where their arms are going and what their arms might be used for. 
+Here in the United States, the largest arms-exporting country in the world by far, President Obama has rightly signed the Arms Trade Treaty, but none of it takes effect, it isn't binding, until it is approved and ratified by the Senate. 
+This is where we need to make our voices heard. 
+You know, the curbing of small arms — it's not going to solve the problem of war. 
+Increased control mechanisms won't solve that problem. 
+And it's up to all of us who live in those rich countries to make change here. 
+What about on the demand side? 
+It is possible to disrupt that cycle of violence with investments in education, in strengthening the rule of law and in economic development, especially for women. 
+But here's the thing: they take time, which means for you as individuals, if you want to give, please, by all means do it. 
+But know that how you give is just as important as how much you give. 
+Regular contributions like monthly contributions are a far more effective way of giving, because they allow humanitarian organizations to properly plan and be invested over the long term, and to be present in the lives of families who have been affected by war, wars that many of us, frankly, all too quickly forget. 
+When I first got on that plane for Somalia as a young doctor, I had no idea what it meant to live with war. 
+But I can tell you that I know what it means now. 
+And I know what it means to lie in bed in the pitch-black night and listen to that haunting "" pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! "" of automatic gunfire, and wonder with absolute dread how many minutes I have left until it will be right on top of me. 
+I can tell you that it is a terrifying and agonizing fear, one that millions of people around the world are forced to confront each and every single day, especially children. 
+Over the years of doing this work, unfortunately, war has killed far too many people close to me. 
+And on at least a couple of occasions, war has very nearly killed me as well. 
+But I firmly believe, which is why I get up and do what I do every single day, that we can make different choices here. 
+Because you see, war is ours, as human beings. 
+We buy it, sell it, spread it and wage it. 
+We are therefore not powerless to solve it. 
+On the contrary, we are the only ones who can. 
+Thank you very much, and I want to wish you the greatest success. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Laughter) Thank you. 
+(Laughter) But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills — what's left of those legal skills. 
+I want to make a case. 
+I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses. 
+It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. 
+He created this experiment that is used in many other experiments in behavioral science. 
+I bring you into a room. 
+And I say to you, "" Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. "" Now what would you do? 
+And eventually, after five or ten minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here. 
+I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, US, This shows the power of incentives. 
+He gathered his participants and said: "I'm going to time you, how quickly you can solve this problem." 
+To one group he said, "" I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem. "" To the second group he offered rewards. 
+He said, "" If you're in the top 25% of the fastest times, you get five dollars. 
+If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars. "" Now this is several years ago, adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. 
+Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem? 
+(Laughter) If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? 
+Incentivize them. 
+You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. 
+It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. 
+What's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. 
+These contingent motivators — if you do this, then you get that — work in some circumstances. 
+But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. 
+And I'm telling you, it's not even close. 
+Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. 
+Let me tell you why this is so important. 
+or even the problems we've been talking about here, do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? 
+The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. 
+Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. 
+And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work! 
+I'm not telling a story, I'm making a case. 
+They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. 
+As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. 
+But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. 
+In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. 
+Do you know who sponsored this research? 
+Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics, LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of eleven Nobel Laureates in economics. 
+Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger. 
+(Laughter) Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. 
+Here's what they said: "" We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance. "" There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. 
+And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. 
+And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. 
+The good news is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. 
+And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. 
+Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. 
+Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. 
+Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. 
+I want to talk today only about autonomy. 
+In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. 
+Management did not emanate from nature. 
+Somebody invented it. 
+But if you want engagement, self-direction works better. 
+How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? 
+(Laughter) Atlassian is an Australian software company. 
+And they do something incredibly cool. 
+It's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20% time — done, famously, at Google — where engineers can spend 20% of their time working on anything they want. 
+Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment (the ROWE), created by two American consultants, in place at a dozen companies around North America. 
+Autonomy, mastery and purpose, the building blocks of a new way of doing things. 
+Some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." 
+They had deployed all the right incentives, They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. 
+A few years later, another encyclopedia got started. 
+Just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, "" Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. 
+Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks, and who wins? 
+The drive to do things cause they matter. 
+And here's the best part. 
+We already know this. 
+So, if we repair this mismatch between science and business, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe — we can change the world. 
+
+They also wore body armor. 
+She was the person who, if you needed an extra pair of boots or a home-cooked dinner, would be on your speed dial. 
+
+Can I say how delighted I am to be away from the calm of Westminster and Whitehall? (Laughter) This is Kim, a nine-year-old Vietnam girl, her back ruined by napalm, and she awakened the conscience of the nation of America to begin to end the Vietnam War. 
+This is Birhan, who was the Ethiopian girl who launched Live Aid in the 1980s, 15 minutes away from death when she was rescued, and that picture of her being rescued is one that went round the world. 
+This is Tiananmen Square. 
+A man before a tank became a picture that became a symbol for the whole world of resistance. 
+This next is the Sudanese girl, a few moments from death, a vulture hovering in the background, a picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty. 
+This is Neda, the Iranian girl who was shot while at a demonstration with her father in Iran only a few weeks ago, and she is now the focus, rightly so, of the YouTube generation. 
+And what do all these pictures and events have in common? 
+What they have in common is what we see unlocks what we cannot see. 
+What we see unlocks the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community. 
+What these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the pain of others, however distantly. 
+What I think these pictures demonstrate is that we do believe in something bigger than ourselves. 
+What these pictures demonstrate is that there is a moral sense across all religions, across all faiths, across all continents — a moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others, and believe in something bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that need righted, see injuries that need to be corrected, see problems that need to be rectified. 
+There is a story about Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, going to see Ronald Reagan in America in the 1980s. 
+Before he arrived Ronald Reagan said — and he was the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister — "Isn ’ t this man a communist?" 
+The reply was, "" No, Mr President, he ’ s an anti-communist. "" And Ronald Reagan said, "" I don ’ t care what kind of communist he is! "" (Laughter) Ronald Reagan asked Olof Palme, the Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden, "Well, what do you believe in? Do you want to abolish the rich?" 
+He said, "" No, I want to abolish the poor. "" Our responsibility is to let everyone have the chance to realize their potential to the full. 
+I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. 
+But I think what's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. 
+We now have the capacity to find common ground with people who we will never meet, but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the modern means of communication; that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with; and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society. 
+Go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from William Wilberforce and all the protesters. 
+They protested across Britain. 
+They won public opinion over a long period of time. 
+But it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful. 
+What could they have done with the pictures that they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of communication to win people ’ s hearts and minds? 
+Or if you take Eglantyne Jebb, the woman who created Save the Children 90 years ago. 
+She was so appalled by what was happening in Austria as a result of the First World War and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families of Austria, that in Britain she wanted to take action, but she had to go house to house, leaflet to leaflet, to get people to attend a rally in the Royal Albert Hall that eventually gave birth to Save the Children, an international organization that is now fully recognized as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world. 
+But what more could she have done if she ’ d had the modern means of communications available to her to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately? 
+Now look at what ’ s happened in the last 10 years. 
+In Philippines in 2001, President Estrada — a million people texted each other about the corruption of that regime, eventually brought it down and it was, of course, called the "" coup de text. "" (Laughter) Then you have in Zimbabwe the first election under Robert Mugabe a year ago. 
+Because people were able to take mobile phone photographs of what was happening at the polling stations, it was impossible for that Premier to fix that election in the way that he wanted to do. 
+Or take Burma and the monks that were blogging out, a country that nobody knew anything about that was happening, until these blogs told the world that there was a repression, meaning that lives were being lost and people were being persecuted and Aung San Suu Kyi, who is one of the great prisoners of conscience of the world, had to be listened to. 
+Then take Iran itself, and what people are doing today: following what happened to Neda, people who are preventing the security services of Iran finding those people who are blogging out of Iran, any by everybody who is blogging, changing their address to Tehran, Iran, and making it difficult for the security services. 
+Take, therefore, what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally. 
+That, in my view, gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world. 
+Foreign policy can never be the same again. It cannot be run by elites; it ’ s got to be run by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging, who are communicating with each other around the world. 
+200 years ago the problem we had to solve was slavery. 
+150 years ago I suppose the main problem in a country like ours was how young people, children, had the right to education. 
+100 years ago in most countries in Europe, the pressure was for the right to vote. 
+50 years ago the pressure was for the right to social security and welfare. 
+In the last 50-60 years we have seen fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, apartheid, discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and sexuality; all these have come under pressure because of the campaigns that have been run by people to change the world. 
+I was with Nelson Mandela a year ago, when he was in London. 
+I was at a concert that he was attending to mark his birthday and for the creation of new resources for his foundation. 
+I was sitting next to Nelson Mandela — I was very privileged to do so — when Amy Winehouse came onto the stage. (Laughter) And Nelson Mandela was quite surprised at the appearance of the singer and I was explaining to him at the time who she was. 
+Amy Winehouse said, "" Nelson Mandela and I have a lot in common. 
+My husband too has spent a long time in prison. "" (Laughter) Nelson Mandela then went down to the stage and he summarized the challenge for us all. 
+He said in his lifetime he had climbed a great mountain, the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial oppression and defeating apartheid. 
+He said that there was a greater challenge ahead, the challenge of poverty, of climate change — global challenges that needed global solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society. 
+We are the first generation which is in a position to do this. 
+Combine the power of a global ethic with the power of our ability to communicate and organize globally, with the challenges that we now face, most of which are global in their nature. 
+Climate change cannot be solved in one country, but has got to be solved by the world working together. 
+A financial crisis, just as we have seen, could not be solved by America alone or Europe alone; it needed the world to work together. 
+Take the problems of security and terrorism and, equally, the problem of human rights and development: they cannot be solved by Africa alone; they cannot be solved by America or Europe alone. 
+We cannot solve these problems unless we work together. 
+So the great project of our generation, it seems to me, is to build for the first time, out of a global ethic and our global ability to communicate and organize together, a truly global society, built on that ethic but with institutions that can serve that global society and make for a different future. 
+We have now, and are the first generation with, the power to do this. 
+Take climate change. Is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know that there is a climate change problem, where we know also that that will mean we have to give more resources to the poorest countries to deal with that, when we want to create a global carbon market, but there is no global institution that people have been able to agree upon to deal with this problem? 
+One of the things that has got to come out of Copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate-change agenda. 
+(Applause) One of the reasons why an institution is not in itself enough is that we have got to persuade people around the world to change their behavior as well, so you need that global ethic of fairness and responsibility across the generations. 
+Take the financial crisis. 
+If people in poorer countries can be hit by a crisis that starts in New York or starts in the sub-prime market of the United States of America. 
+If people can find that that sub-prime product has been transferred across nations many, many times until it ends up in banks in Iceland or the rest in Britain, and people's ordinary savings are affected by it, then you cannot rely on a system of national supervision. 
+You need in the long run for stability, for economic growth, for jobs, as well as for financial stability, global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared, and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible. 
+So another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility, not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years. 
+Then take development and take the partnership we need between our countries and the rest of the world, the poorest part of the world. 
+We do not have the basis of a proper partnership for the future, and yet, out of people ’ s desire for a global ethic and a global society that can be done. 
+I have just been talking to the President of Sierra Leone. 
+This is a country of six and a half million people, but it has only 80 doctors; it has 200 nurses; it has 120 midwives. 
+You cannot begin to build a healthcare system for six million people with such limited resources. 
+Or take the girl I met when I was in Tanzania, a girl called Miriam. 
+She was 11 years old; her parents had both died from AIDS, her mother and then her father. 
+She was an AIDS orphan being handed across different extended families to be cared for. 
+She herself was suffering from HIV; she was suffering from tuberculosis. 
+I met her in a field, she was ragged, she had no shoes. 
+When you looked in her eyes, any girl at the age of eleven is looking forward to the future, but there was an unreachable sadness in that girl ’ s eyes and if I could have translated that to the rest of the world for that moment, I believe that all the work that it had done for the global HIV / AIDS fund would be rewarded by people being prepared to make donations. 
+We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture, so that Africa is not a net importer of food, but an exporter of food. 
+Take the problems of human rights and the problems of security in so many countries around the world. 
+Burma is in chains, Zimbabwe is a human tragedy, in Sudan thousands of people have died unnecessarily for wars that we could prevent. 
+In the Rwanda Children's Museum, there is a photograph of a 10-year-old boy and the Children's Museum is commemorating the lives that were lost in the Rwandan genocide where a million people died. 
+There is a photograph of a boy called David. 
+Beside that photograph there is the information about his life. 
+It said "" David, age 10. "" David: ambition to be a doctor. 
+Favorite sport: football. What did he enjoy most? 
+Making people laugh. 
+How did he die? 
+Tortured to death. 
+Last words said to his mother who was also tortured to death: "Don't worry. The United Nations are coming." 
+And we never did. 
+And that young boy believed our promises that we would help people in difficulty in Rwanda, and we never did. 
+So we have got to create in this world also institutions for peacekeeping and humanitarian aid, but also for reconstruction and security for some of the conflict-ridden states of the world. 
+So my argument today is basically this. 
+We have the means by which we could create a truly global society. 
+The institutions of this global society can be created by our endeavors. 
+That global ethic can infuse the fairness and responsibility that is necessary for these institutions to work, but we should not lose the chance in this generation, in this decade in particular, with President Obama in America, with other people working with us around the world, to create global institutions for the environment, and for finance, and for security and for development, that make sense of our responsibility to other peoples, our desire to bind the world together, and our need to tackle problems that everybody knows exist. 
+It is said that in Ancient Rome that when Cicero spoke to his audiences, people used to turn to each other and say about Cicero, "" Great speech. "" But it is said that in Ancient Greece when Demosthenes spoke to his audiences, people turned to each other and didn ’ t say "" Great speech. "" They said, "" Let's march. "" We should be marching towards a global society. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I begin with an advertisement inspired by George Orwell that Apple ran in 1984. 
+(Video) Big Brother: We are one people with one will, one resolve, one cause. 
+Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will fight them with their own confusion. 
+We shall prevail. 
+Narrator: On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. 
+And you'll see why 1984 won't be like "" 1984. "" Rebecca MacKinnon: So the underlying message of this video remains very powerful even today. 
+Technology created by innovative companies will set us all free. 
+Fast-forward more than two decades: Apple launches the iPhone in China and censors the Dalai Lama out along with several other politically sensitive applications at the request of the Chinese government for its Chinese app store. 
+The American political cartoonist Mark Fiore also had his satire application censored in the United States because some of Apple's staff were concerned it would be offensive to some groups. 
+His app wasn't reinstated until he won the Pulitzer Prize. 
+The German magazine Stern, a news magazine, had its app censored because the Apple nannies deemed it to be a little bit too racy for their users, and despite the fact that this magazine is perfectly legal for sale on newsstands throughout Germany. 
+And more controversially, recently, Apple censored a Palestinian protest app after the Israeli government voiced concerns that it might be used to organize violent attacks. 
+So here's the thing. 
+We have a situation where private companies are applying censorship standards that are often quite arbitrary and generally more narrow than the free speech constitutional standards that we have in democracies. 
+Or they're responding to censorship requests by authoritarian regimes that do not reflect consent of the governed. 
+Or they're responding to requests and concerns by governments that have no jurisdiction over many, or most, of the users and viewers who are interacting with the content in question. 
+So here's the situation. 
+In a pre-Internet world, sovereignty over our physical freedoms, or lack thereof, was controlled almost entirely by nation-states. 
+But now we have this new layer of private sovereignty in cyberspace. 
+And their decisions about software coding, engineering, design, terms of service all act as a kind of law that shapes what we can and cannot do with our digital lives. 
+And their sovereignties, cross-cutting, globally interlinked, can in some ways challenge the sovereignties of nation-states in very exciting ways, but sometimes also act to project and extend it at a time when control over what people can and cannot do with information has more effect than ever on the exercise of power in our physical world. 
+After all, even the leader of the free world needs a little help from the sultan of Facebookistan if he wants to get reelected next year. 
+And these platforms were certainly very helpful to activists in Tunisia and Egypt this past spring and beyond. 
+As Wael Ghonim, the Google-Egyptian-executive by day, secret-Facebook-activist by night, famously said to CNN after Mubarak stepped down, "" If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet. "" But overthrowing a government is one thing and building a stable democracy is a bit more complicated. 
+On the left there's a photo taken by an Egyptian activist who was part of the storming of the Egyptian state security offices in March. 
+And many of the agents shredded as many of the documents as they could and left them behind in piles. 
+But some of the files were left behind intact, and activists, some of them, found their own surveillance dossiers full of transcripts of their email exchanges, their cellphone text message exchanges, even Skype conversations. 
+And one activist actually found a contract from a Western company for the sale of surveillance technology to the Egyptian security forces. 
+And Egyptian activists are assuming that these technologies for surveillance are still being used by the transitional authorities running the networks there. 
+And in Tunisia, censorship actually began to return in May — not nearly as extensively as under President Ben Ali. 
+But you'll see here a blocked page of what happens when you try to reach certain Facebook pages and some other websites that the transitional authorities have determined might incite violence. 
+In protest over this, blogger Slim Amamou, who had been jailed under Ben Ali and then became part of the transitional government after the revolution, he resigned in protest from the cabinet. 
+But there's been a lot of debate in Tunisia about how to handle this kind of problem. 
+In fact, on Twitter, there were a number of people who were supportive of the revolution who said, "" Well actually, we do want democracy and free expression, but there is some kinds of speech that need to be off-bounds because it's too violent and it might be destabilizing for our democracy. 
+But the problem is, how do you decide who is in power to make these decisions and how do you make sure that they do not abuse their power? 
+As Riadh Guerfali, the veteran digital activist from Tunisia, remarked over this incident, "" Before, things were simple: you had the good guys on one side and the bad guys on the other. 
+Today, things are a lot more subtle. "" Welcome to democracy, our Tunisian and Egyptian friends. 
+The reality is that even in democratic societies today, we do not have good answers for how you balance the need for security and law enforcement on one hand and protection of civil liberties and free speech on the other in our digital networks. 
+In fact, in the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks. 
+Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime. 
+So we assume that the Internet is a border-busting technology. 
+This is a map of social networks worldwide, and certainly Facebook has conquered much of the world — which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you like the way Facebook manages its service. 
+But borders do persist in some parts of cyberspace. 
+In Brazil and Japan, it's for unique cultural and linguistic reasons. 
+But if you look at China, Vietnam and a number of the former Soviet states, what's happening there is more troubling. 
+You have a situation where the relationship between government and local social networking companies is creating a situation where, effectively, the empowering potential of these platforms is being constrained because of these relationships between companies and government. 
+Now in China, you have the "" great firewall, "" as it's well-known, that blocks Facebook and Twitter and now Google + and many of the other overseas websites. 
+And that's done in part with the help from Western technology. 
+But that's only half of the story. 
+The other part of the story are requirements that the Chinese government places on all companies operating on the Chinese Internet, known as a system of self-discipline. 
+In plain English, that means censorship and surveillance of their users. 
+And this is a ceremony I actually attended in 2009 where the Internet Society of China presented awards to the top 20 Chinese companies that are best at exercising self-discipline — i.e. policing their content. 
+And Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China's dominant search engine, was one of the recipients. 
+In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites. 
+But this is a website called Rospil that's an anti-corruption site. 
+And earlier this year, there was a troubling incident where people who had made donations to Rospil through a payments processing system called Yandex Money suddenly received threatening phone calls from members of a nationalist party who had obtained details about donors to Rospil through members of the security services who had somehow obtained this information from people at Yandex Money. 
+This has a chilling effect on people's ability to use the Internet to hold government accountable. 
+So we have a situation in the world today where in more and more countries the relationship between citizens and governments is mediated through the Internet, which is comprised primarily of privately owned and operated services. 
+So the important question, I think, is not this debate over whether the Internet is going to help the good guys more than the bad guys. 
+Of course, it's going to empower whoever is most skilled at using the technology and best understands the Internet in comparison with whoever their adversary is. 
+The most urgent question we need to be asking today is how do we make sure that the Internet evolves in a citizen-centric manner. 
+Because I think all of you will agree that the only legitimate purpose of government is to serve citizens, and I would argue that the only legitimate purpose of technology is to improve our lives, not to manipulate or enslave us. 
+So the question is, we know how to hold government accountable. 
+We don't necessarily always do it very well, but we have a sense of what the models are, politically and institutionally, to do that. 
+How do you hold the sovereigns of cyberspace accountable to the public interest when most CEO's argue that their main obligation is to maximize shareholder profit? 
+And government regulation often isn't helping all that much. 
+You have situations, for instance, in France where president Sarkozy tells the CEO's of Internet companies, "" We're the only legitimate representatives of the public interest. "" But then he goes and champions laws like the infamous "" three-strikes "" law that would disconnect citizens from the Internet for file sharing, which has been condemned by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression as being a disproportionate violation of citizens' right to communications, and has raised questions amongst civil society groups about whether some political representatives are more interested in preserving the interests of the entertainment industry than they are in defending the rights of their citizens. 
+And here in the United Kingdom there's also concern over a law called the Digital Economy Act that's placing more onus on private intermediaries to police citizen behavior. 
+So what we need to recognize is that if we want to have a citizen-centric Internet in the future, we need a broader and more sustained Internet freedom movement. 
+After all, companies didn't stop polluting groundwater as a matter of course, or employing 10-year-olds as a matter of course, just because executives woke up one day and decided it was the right thing to do. 
+It was the result of decades of sustained activism, shareholder advocacy and consumer advocacy. 
+Similarly, governments don't enact intelligent environmental and labor laws just because politicians wake up one day. 
+It's the result of very sustained and prolonged political activism that you get the right regulations, and that you get the right corporate behavior. 
+We need to make the same approach with the Internet. 
+We also are going to need political innovation. 
+Eight hundred years ago, approximately, the barons of England decided that the Divine Right of Kings was no longer working for them so well, and they forced King John to sign the Magna Carta, which recognized that even the king who claimed to have divine rule still had to abide by a basic set of rules. 
+This set off a cycle of what we can call political innovation, which led eventually to the idea of consent of the governed — which was implemented for the first time by that radical revolutionary government in America across the pond. 
+So now we need to figure out how to build consent of the networked. 
+And what does that look like? 
+At the moment, we still don't know. 
+But it's going to require innovation that's not only going to need to focus on politics, on geopolitics, but it's also going to need to deal with questions of business management, investor behavior, consumer choice and even software design and engineering. 
+Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It looks like a big, boring word, but it's actually quite exciting, because ichthyology is the only "" ology "" with "" YOLO "" in it. 
+(Laughter) Now, to the cool kids in the audience, you already know, YOLO stands for "" you only live once, "" and because I only have one life, I'm going to spend it doing what I always dreamt of doing: seeing the hidden wonders of the world and discovering new species. 
+Now, in recent years, I really focused on caves for finding new species. 
+You just have to know where to look, and to maybe be a little thin. 
+(Laughter) Now, cavefishes can tell me a lot about biology and geology. 
+They can tell me how the landmasses around them have changed and moved by being stuck in these little holes, and they can tell me about the evolution of sight, by being blind. 
+Now, fish have eyes that are essentially the same as ours. 
+Now, each cavefish species has evolved in a slightly different way, and each one has a unique geological and biological story to tell us, and that's why it's so exciting when we find a new species. 
+So this is a new species we described, from southern Indiana. 
+We named it Amblyopsis hoosieri, the Hoosier cavefish. 
+(Laughter) Its closest relatives are cavefishes in Kentucky, in the Mammoth Cave system. 
+And they start to diverge when the Ohio River split them a few million years ago. 
+There's this gene called rhodopsin that's super-critical for sight. 
+We have it, and these species have it too, except one species has lost all function in that gene, and the other one maintains it. 
+So this sets up this beautiful natural experiment where we can look at the genes behind our vision, and at the very roots of how we can see. 
+But the genes in these cavefishes can also tell us about deep geological time, maybe no more so than in this species here. 
+This is a new species we described from Madagascar that we named Typhleotris mararybe. 
+That means "" big sickness "" in Malagasy, for how sick we got trying to collect this species. 
+Now, believe it or not, swimming around sinkholes full of dead things and cave full of bat poop isn't the smartest thing you could be doing with your life, but YOLO. 
+(Laughter) Now, I love this species despite the fact that it tried to kill us, and that's because this species in Madagascar, its closest relatives are 6,000 kilometers away, cavefishes in Australia. 
+Now, there's no way a three-inch-long freshwater cavefish can swim across the Indian Ocean, so what we found when we compared the DNA of these species is that they've been separated for more than 100 million years, or about the time that the southern continents were last together. 
+And so they give us, through their DNA, this precise model and measure of how to date and time these ancient geological events. 
+Now, this species here is so new I'm not even allowed to tell you its name yet, but I can tell you it's a new species from Mexico, and it's probably already extinct. 
+It's probably extinct because the only known cave system it's from was destroyed when a dam was built nearby. 
+Now, we actually don't know this species' closest relative, yet. 
+It doesn't appear to be anything else in Mexico, so maybe it's something in Cuba, or Florida, or India. 
+But whatever it is, it might tell us something new about the geology of the Caribbean, or the biology of how to better diagnose certain types of blindness. 
+And I'm going to spend my one life as an ichthyologist trying to discover and save these humble little blind cavefishes that can tell us so much about the geology of the planet and the biology of how we see. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Sergey Brin: I want to discuss a question I know that's been pressing on many of your minds. 
+We spoke to you last several years ago. 
+And before I get started today, since many of you are wondering, I just wanted to get it out of the way. 
+The answer is boxers. 
+Now I hope all of you feel better. 
+Do you know what this might be? Does anyone know what that is? 
+Audience: Yes. 
+SB: What is it? 
+Audience: It's people logging on to Google around the world. 
+SB: Wow, OK. I didn't really realize what it was when I first saw it. 
+But this is what helped me see it. 
+This is what we run at the office, that actually runs real time. 
+Here it's slightly logged. 
+But here you can see around the world how people are using Google. 
+And every one of those rising dots represents probably about 20, 30 searches, or something like that. 
+And they're labeled by color right now, by language. 
+So you can see: here we are in the U.S., and they're all coming up red. 
+There we are in Monterey — hopefully I can get it right. 
+You can see that Japan is busy at night, right there. 
+We have Tokyo coming in in Japanese. 
+There's a lot of activity in China. 
+There's a lot of activity in India. 
+There's some in the Middle East, the little pockets. 
+And Europe, which is right now in the middle of the day, is going really strong with a whole wide variety of languages. 
+Now you can also see, if I turn this around here — hopefully I won't shake the world too much. 
+But you can also see, there are places where there's not so much. 
+Australia, because there just aren't very many people there. 
+And this is something that we should really work on, which is Africa, which is just a few trickles, basically in South Africa and a few other urban cities. 
+But basically, what we've noticed is these queries, which come in at thousands per second, are available everywhere there is power. 
+And pretty much everywhere there is power, there is the Internet. 
+And even in Antarctica — well, at least this time of year — we from time to time will see a query rising up. 
+And if we had it plotted correctly, I think the International Space Station would have it, too. 
+So this is some of the challenge that we have here, is you can see that it's actually kind of hard to get the — there we go. 
+This is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions. 
+You can see that there's a lot of data running around. 
+It has to go all over the world: through fibers, through satellites, through all kinds of connections. 
+And it's pretty tricky for us to maintain the latencies as low as we try to. Hopefully your experience is good. 
+But you can see also, once again — so some places are much more wired than others, and you can see all the bandwidth across the U.S., going up over to Asia, Europe in the other direction, and so forth. 
+Now what I would like to do is just to show you what one second of this activity would look like. 
+And if we can switch to slides — all right, here we go. 
+So this is slowed down. 
+This is what one second looks like. 
+And this is what we spend a lot of our time doing, is just making sure that we can keep up with this kind of traffic load. 
+Now, each one of those queries has an interesting life and tale of its own. 
+I mean, it could be somebody's health, it could be somebody's career, something important to them. 
+And it could potentially be something as important as tomato sauce, or in this case, ketchup. 
+So this is a query that we had — I guess it's a popular band that was more popular in some parts of the world than others. 
+You can see that it got started right here. 
+In the U.S. and Spain, it was popular at the same time. 
+But it didn't have quite the same pickup in the U.S. 
+as it did in Spain. 
+And then from Spain, it went to Italy, and then Germany got excited, and maybe right now the U.K. is enjoying it. 
+And so I guess the U.S. finally, finally started to like it, too. 
+And I just wanted to play it for you. 
+Anyway, you can all enjoy it for yourselves — hopefully that search will work. 
+As a part of — you know, part of what we want to do to grow our company is to have more searches. 
+And what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated. 
+More animals, if they start doing searches as well. 
+But partly, we want to make the world a better place, and so one thing that we're embarking upon is the Google Foundation, and we're in the process of setting that up. 
+We also have a program already called Google Grants that now serves over 150 different charities around the world, and these are some of the charities that are on there. 
+And it's something I'm very excited to be a part of. 
+In fact, many of the organizations that are here — the Acumen Fund, I think ApproTEC we have running, I'm not sure if that one's up yet — and many of the people who have presented here are running through Google Grants. 
+They run Google ads, and we just give them the ad credit so they can let organizations know. 
+One of the earlier results that we got — we have a Singaporean businessman who is now sponsoring a village of 25 Vietnamese girls for their education, and that was one of the earliest results. And as I said, now there have been many, many stories that have come in, because we do have hundreds of charities in there, and the Google Foundation will be an even broader endeavor. 
+Now does anybody know who this is? 
+A-ha! 
+Audience: Orkut. 
+SB: Yes! Somebody got it. 
+This is Orkut. Is anybody here on Orkut? 
+Do we have any? 
+Okay, not very many people know about it. 
+I'll explain it in a second. 
+This is one of our engineers. 
+We find that they work better when they're submerged and covered with leaves. 
+That's how we churn those products out. 
+Orkut had a vision to create a social network. 
+I know all of you are thinking, "" Yet another social network. "" But it was a dream of his, and we, basically, when people really want to do something, well, we generally let them. 
+So this is what he built. 
+We just released it in a test phase last month, and it's been taking off. 
+This is our VP of Engineering. 
+You can see the red hair, and I don't know if you can see the nose ring there. 
+And these are all of his friends. 
+So this is how — we just deployed it — we just decided that people would send each other invitations to get into the service, and so we just had the people in our company initially send them out. 
+And now we've grown to over 100,000 members. 
+And they spread, actually, very quickly, even outside the U.S. 
+You can see, even though the U.S. is still the majority here — though, by the way, search-wise, it's only about 30 percent of our traffic — but it's already going to Japan, and the U.K., and Europe, and all the rest of the countries. 
+So it's a fun little project. 
+There are a variety of demographics. I won't bore you with these. 
+But it's just the kind of thing that we just try out for fun and see where it goes. 
+And — well, I'll leave you in suspense. 
+Larry, you can explain this one. 
+Larry Page: Thank you, Sergey. 
+So one of the things — both Sergey and I went to a Montessori school, and I think, for some reason, this has been incorporated in Google. 
+And Sergey mentioned Orkut, which is something that, you know, Orkut wanted to do in his time, and we call this — at Google, we've embodied this as "" the 20 percent time, "" and the idea is, for 20 percent of your time, if you're working at Google, you can do what you think is the best thing to do. 
+And many, many things at Google have come out of that, such as Orkut and also Google News. 
+And I think many other things in the world also have come out of this. 
+Mendel, who was supposed to be teaching high-school students, actually, you know, discovered the laws of genetics — as a hobby, basically. 
+So many, many useful things come out of this. 
+And News, which I just mentioned, was started by a researcher. 
+And he just — he — after 9 / 11, he got really interested in the news. 
+And he said, "" Why don't I look at the news better? "" And so he started clustering it by category, and then he started using it, and then his friends started using it. 
+And then, besides just looking cute on a baby's bottom, we made it a Googlette, which is basically a small project at Google. 
+So it'd be like three people, or something like that, and they would try to make a product. 
+And we wouldn't really be sure if it's going to work or not. 
+And in News' case, you know, they had a couple of people working on it for a while, and then more and more people started using it, and then we put it out on the Internet, and more and more people started using it. 
+And now it's a real, full-blown project with more people on it. 
+And this is how we keep our innovation running. 
+I think usually, as companies get bigger, they find it really hard to have small, innovative projects. 
+And we had this problem, too, for a while, and we said, "Oh, we really need a new concept." 
+You know, the Googlettes — that's a small project that we're not quite sure if it's going to work or not, but we hope it will, and if we do enough of them, some of them will really work and turn out, such as News. 
+But then we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects. 
+And I don't know about all of you, but I have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once. 
+And we found that if we just wrote all of them down and ordered them — and these are kind of made up. 
+Don't really pay attention to them. 
+For example, the "" Buy Iceland "" was from a media article. 
+We would never do such a crazy thing, but — in any case, we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them, that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be. 
+And this was kind of a surprise to me, but we found that as long as you keep the 100 things in your head, which you did by writing them down, that you could do a pretty good job deciding what to do and where to put your resources. 
+And so that's basically what we've done since we instituted that a few years ago, and I think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well-organized. 
+The other thing we discovered is that people like to work on things that are important, and so naturally, people sort of migrate to the things that are high priorities. 
+I just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are new, or you might not know about. 
+And the top thing, actually, is the Deskbar. 
+So this is a new — how many of you use the Google Toolbar? 
+Raise your hands. 
+How many of you use the Deskbar? 
+All right, see? You guys should try it out. 
+But if you go to our site and search for "" Deskbar, "" you'll get this. 
+And the idea is, instead of a toolbar, it's just present all the time on your screen on the bottom, and you can do searches really easily. 
+And it's sort of like a better version of the toolbar. 
+Thank you, Sergey. 
+This is another example of a project that somebody at Google was really passionate about, and they just, they got going, and it's really, really a great product, and really taking off. 
+Google Answers is something we started, which is really cool, which lets you — for five to 100 dollars, you can type a question in, and then there's a pool of researchers that go out and research it for you, and it's guaranteed and all that, and you can get actually very good answers to things without spending all that time yourself. 
+Froogle lets you search shopping information, and Blogger lets you publish things. 
+But all of these — well, these were all sort of innovative things that we did that — you know, we try many, many different things in our company. 
+We also like to innovate in our physical space, and we noticed in meetings, you know, you have to wait a long time for projectors to turn on and off, and they're noisy, so people shut them off. 
+And we didn't like that, so we actually, in maybe a couple of weeks, we built these little enclosures that enclosed the projectors, and so we can leave them on all the time and they're completely silent. 
+And as a result, we were able to build some software that also lets us manage a meeting, so when you walk into a meeting room now, it lists all the meetings that are happening, you can very easily take notes, and they just get emailed automatically to all the people that were present in the meeting. 
+And as we become more of a global company, we find these things really affect us — you know, can we work effectively with people who aren't in the room? 
+And things like that. And simple things like this can really make a big difference. 
+We also have a lot of engineers in those meetings, and they don't always do their laundry as much as they should. 
+And so we found it was pretty helpful to have laundry machines, for our younger employees especially, and... 
+we also allow dogs and things like that, and we've had, I think, a really fun culture at our company, which helps people work and enjoy what they're doing. 
+This is actually our "" cult picture. "" I just wanted to show quickly. 
+We had this on our website for a while, but we found that after we put it on our website, we didn't get any job applications anymore. 
+But anyway, every year we've taken the whole company on a ski trip. 
+A lot of work happens in companies from people knowing each other, and informally. 
+And I think we've done a good job encouraging that. 
+It makes it a really fun place to work. 
+Along with our logos, too, which I think really embody our culture when we change things. 
+In the early days, we were actually advised we should never change our logo because we should establish our brand, you know, because, you know, you'd never want to change your logo. 
+You want it to be consistent. 
+And we said, "" Well, that doesn't sound so much fun. 
+Why don't we try changing it every day? "" One of the things that really excites me about what we're doing now is we have this thing called AdSense, and this is a little bit foreshadowing — this is from before Dean dropped out. 
+But the idea is, like, on a newspaper, for example, we show you relevant ads. 
+And this is hard to read, but this says "" Battle for New Hampshire: Howard Dean for President "" — articles on Howard Dean. 
+And these ads are generated automatically — like in this case, on the Washington Post — from the content on the site. 
+And so we use our over 150,000 advertisers and millions of advertisements, so we pick the one that's most relevant to what you're actually looking at, much as we do on search. 
+So the idea is we can make advertising useful, not just annoying, right? 
+And the nice thing about this, we have a self-serve program, and many thousands of websites have signed up, and this let's them really make money. And I — you know, there's a number of people I met — I met this guy who runs a conservation site at a party, and he said, "" You know, I wasn't making any money. 
+I just put this thing on my site and I'm making 10,000 dollars a month. 
+And, you know, thank you. 
+I don't have to do my other job now. "" And I think this is really important for us, because it makes the Internet work better. 
+It makes content get better, it makes searching work better, when people can really make their livelihood from producing great content. 
+So this session is supposed to be about the future, so I'd thought I'd talk at least briefly about it. 
+And the idea behind this is to do the perfect job doing search, you really have to be smart. 
+Because you can type, you know, any kind of thing into Google, and you expect an answer back, right? 
+But finding things is tricky, and so you really want intelligence. 
+And in fact, the ultimate search engine would be smart. 
+It would be artificial intelligence. 
+And so that's something we work on, and we even have some people who are excited enough and crazy enough to work on it now, and that's really their goal. 
+So we always hope that Google will be smart, but we're always surprised when other people think that it is. 
+And so I just wanted to give a funny example of this. 
+This is a blog from Iraq, and it's not really what I'm going to talk about, but I just wanted to show you an example. 
+Maybe, Sergey, you can highlight this. 
+So we decided — actually, the highlight's right there. Oh, thank you. 
+So, "" related searches, "" right there. You can't see it that well, but we decided we should put in this feature into our AdSense ads, called "" related searches. "" And so we'd say, you know, "" Did you mean 'search for' "" — what is this, in this case, "" Saddam Hussein, "" because this blog is about Iraq — and you know, in addition to the ads, and we thought this would be a great idea. 
+And so there is this blog of a young person who was kind of depressed, and he said, "You know, I'm sleeping a lot." 
+He was just kind of writing about his life. 
+And our algorithms — not a person, of course, but our algorithms, our computers — read his blog and decided that the related search was, "" I am bored. "" And he read this, and he thought a person had decided that he was boring, and it was very unfortunate, and he said, "" You know, what are these, you know, bastards at Google doing? 
+Why don't they like my blog? "" And so then we read his blog, which was getting — you know, sort of going from bad to worse, and we said the related search was, "" Retards. "" And then, you know, he got even more mad, and he wrote — like, started swearing and so on. 
+And then we produced "" You suck. "" And finally, it ended with "" Kiss my ass. "" And so basically, he thought he was dealing with something smart, and of course, you know, we just sort of wrote this program and we tried it out, and it didn't quite work, and we don't have this feature anymore. 
+So with that, maybe I can switch back to the world. 
+I wanted to end just by saying that there's a couple things that really make me excited to be involved with Google, and one of those is that we're able to make money largely through advertising, and one of the benefits that I didn't expect from that was that we're able to serve everyone in the world without worrying about, you know, places that don't have as much money. 
+So we don't have to worry about our products being sold, for example, for less money in places that are poor, and then they get re-imported into the U.S. — for example, with the drug industry. 
+And I think we're really lucky to have that kind of business model because everyone in the world has access to our search, and I think that's a tremendous, tremendous benefit. 
+The other thing I wanted to mention just briefly is that we have a tremendous ability and responsibility to provide people the right information, and we view ourselves like a newspaper or a magazine — that we should provide very objective information. 
+And so in our search results, we never accept payment for our search results. 
+We accept payment for advertising, and we mark it as such. 
+And that's unlike many of our competitors. 
+And I think decisions we're able to make like that have a tremendous impact on the world, and it makes me really proud to be involved with Google. 
+So thank you. 
+
+For the past decade, I've been studying non-state armed groups: armed organizations like terrorists, insurgents or militias. 
+My goal is to better understand these violent actors and to study ways to encourage transition from violent engagement to nonviolent confrontation. 
+I work in the field, in the policy world and in the library. 
+Understanding non-state armed groups is key to solving most ongoing conflict, because war has changed. 
+It used to be a contest between states. 
+No longer. 
+It is now a conflict between states and non-state actors. 
+For example, of the 216 peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011, 196 of them were between a state and a non-state actor. 
+So we need to understand these groups; we need to either engage them or defeat them in any conflict resolution process that has to be successful. 
+So how do we do that? 
+It is all part of the same organization. 
+We cannot understand these groups, let alone defeat them, if we don't have the full picture. 
+And armed groups today are complex organizations. 
+Take the Lebanese Hezbollah, known for its violent confrontation against Israel. 
+But since its creation in the early 1980s, Hezbollah has also set up a political party, a social-service network, and a military apparatus. 
+Similarly, the Palestinian Hamas, known for its suicide attacks against Israel, also runs the Gaza Strip since 2007. 
+So these groups do way more than just shoot. 
+They set up complex communication machines — radio stations, TV channels, Internet websites and social media strategies. 
+And up here, you have the ISIS magazine, printed in English and published to recruit. 
+Armed groups also invest in complex fund-raising — not looting, but setting up profitable businesses; for example, construction companies. 
+Now, these activities are keys. 
+They allow these groups to increase their strength, increase their funds, to better recruit and to build their brand. 
+Armed groups also do something else: they build stronger bonds with the population by investing in social services. 
+They build schools, they run hospitals, they set up vocational-training programs or micro-loan programs. 
+Hezbollah offers all of these services and more. 
+Armed groups also seek to win the population over by offering something that the state is not providing: safety and security. 
+The initial rise of the Taliban in war-torn Afghanistan, or even the beginning of the ascent of ISIS, can be understood also by looking at these groups' efforts to provide security. 
+Now, unfortunately, in these cases, the provision of security came at an unbearably high price for the population. 
+But in general, providing social services fills a gap, a governance gap left by the government, and allows these groups to increase their strength and their power. 
+For example, the 2006 electoral victory of the Palestinian Hamas cannot be understood without acknowledging the group's social work. 
+Now, this is a really complex picture, yet in the West, when we look at armed groups, we only think of the violent side. 
+But that's not enough to understand these groups' strength, strategy or long-term vision. 
+These groups are hybrid. 
+They rise because they fill a gap left by the government, and they emerge to be both armed and political, engage in violent struggle and provide governance. 
+And the more these organizations are complex and sophisticated, the less we can think of them as the opposite of a state. 
+Or maybe something else, something different and new? 
+And what about ISIS? 
+The lines are blurred. 
+We live in a world of states, non-states, and in-between, and the more states are weak, like in the Middle East today, the more non-state actors step in and fill that gap. 
+This matters for governments, because to counter these groups, they will have to invest more in non-military tools. 
+Filling that governance gap has to be at the center of any sustainable approach. 
+This also matters very much for peacemaking and peacebuilding. 
+If we better understand armed groups, we will better know what incentives to offer to encourage the transition from violence to nonviolence. 
+So in this new contest between states and non-states, military power can win some battles, but it will not give us peace nor stability. 
+To achieve these objectives, what we need is a long-term investment in filling that security gap, in filling that governance gap that allowed these groups to thrive in the first place. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+How many of you have checked your email today? 
+Come on, raise your hands. 
+How many of you are checking it right now? 
+(Laughter) And how about finances? Anybody check that today? 
+Credit card, investment account? 
+How about this week? 
+Now, how about your household energy use? 
+Anybody check that today? 
+This week? Last week? 
+A few energy geeks spread out across the room. 
+It's good to see you guys. 
+But the rest of us — this is a room filled with people who are passionate about the future of this planet, and even we aren't paying attention to the energy use that's driving climate change. 
+The woman in the photo with me is Harriet. 
+We met her on our first family vacation. 
+Harriet's paying attention to her energy use, and she is decidedly not an energy geek. 
+This is the story of how Harriet came to pay attention. 
+This is coal, the most common source of electricity on the planet, and there's enough energy in this coal to light this bulb for more than a year. 
+But unfortunately, between here and here, most of that energy is lost to things like transmission leakage and heat. 
+In fact, only 10 percent ends up as light. 
+So this coal will last a little bit more than a month. 
+If you wanted to light this bulb for a year, you'd need this much coal. 
+The bad news here is that, for every unit of energy we use, we waste nine. 
+That means there's good news, because for every unit of energy we save, we save the other nine. 
+So the question is, how can we get the people in this room and across the globe to start paying attention to the energy we're using, and start wasting less of it? 
+The answer comes from a behavioral science experiment that was run one hot summer, 10 years ago, and only 90 miles from here, in San Marcos, California. 
+Graduate students put signs on every door in a neighborhood, asking people to turn off their air conditioning and turn on their fans. 
+One quarter of the homes received a message that said, did you know you could save 54 dollars a month this summer? 
+Turn off your air conditioning, turn on your fans. 
+Another group got an environmental message. 
+And still a third group got a message about being good citizens, preventing blackouts. 
+Most people guessed that money-saving message would work best of all. 
+In fact, none of these messages worked. 
+They had zero impact on energy consumption. 
+It was as if the grad students hadn't shown up at all. 
+But there was a fourth message, and this message simply said, "" When surveyed, 77 percent of your neighbors said that they turned off their air conditioning and turned on their fans. 
+Please join them. Turn off your air conditioning and turn on your fans. "" And wouldn't you know it, they did. 
+The people who received this message showed a marked decrease in energy consumption simply by being told what their neighbors were doing. 
+So what does this tell us? 
+Well, if something is inconvenient, even if we believe in it, moral suasion, financial incentives, don't do much to move us — but social pressure, that's powerful stuff. 
+And harnessed correctly, it can be a powerful force for good. 
+In fact, it already is. 
+Inspired by this insight, my friend Dan Yates and I started a company called Opower. 
+We built software and partnered with utility companies who wanted to help their customers save energy. 
+We deliver personalized home energy reports that show people how their consumption compares to their neighbors in similar-sized homes. 
+Just like those effective door hangers, we have people comparing themselves to their neighbors, and then we give everyone targeted recommendations to help them save. 
+We started with paper, we moved to a mobile application, web, and now even a controllable thermostat, and for the last five years we've been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world. 
+And it's working. 
+Ordinary homeowners and renters have saved more than 250 million dollars on their energy bills, and we're just getting started. 
+This year alone, in partnership with more than 80 utilities in six countries, we're going to generate another two terawatt hours of electricity savings. 
+Now, the energy geeks in the room know two terawatt hours, but for the rest of us, two terawatt hours is more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City combined for more than a year. 
+Two terawatt hours, it's roughly half what the U.S. solar industry produced last year. 
+And two terawatt hours? In terms of coal, we'd need to burn 34 of these wheelbarrows every minute around the clock every day for an entire year to get two terawatt hours of electricity. 
+And we're not burning anything. 
+We're just motivating people to pay attention and change their behavior. 
+But we're just one company, and this is just scratching the surface. 
+Twenty percent of the electricity in homes is wasted, and when I say wasted, I don't mean that people have inefficient lightbulbs. They may. 
+I mean we leave the lights on in empty rooms, and we leave the air conditioning on when nobody's home. 
+That's 40 billion dollars a year wasted on electricity that does not contribute to our well-being but does contribute to climate change. 
+That's 40 billion — with a B — every year in the U.S. alone. 
+That's half our coal usage right there. 
+Now thankfully, some of the world's best material scientists are looking to replace coal with sustainable resources like these, and this is both fantastic and essential. 
+But the most overlooked resource to get us to a sustainable energy future, it isn't on this slide. 
+It's in this room. It's you, and it's me. 
+And we can harness this resource with no new material science simply by applying behavioral science. 
+We can do it today, we know it works, and it will save us money right away. 
+So what are we waiting for? 
+Well, in most places, utility regulation hasn't changed much since Thomas Edison. 
+Utilities are still rewarded when their customers waste energy. 
+They ought to be rewarded for helping their customers save it. 
+But this story is much more than about household energy use. 
+Take a look at the Prius. 
+It's efficient not only because Toyota invested in material science but because they invested in behavioral science. 
+The dashboard that shows drivers how much energy they're saving in real time makes former speed demons drive more like cautious grandmothers. 
+Which brings us back to Harriet. 
+We met her on our first family vacation. 
+She came over to meet my young daughter, and she was tickled to learn that my daughter's name is also Harriet. 
+She asked me what I did for a living, and I told her, I work with utilities to help people save energy. 
+It was then that her eyes lit up. 
+She looked at me, and she said, "" You're exactly the person I need to talk to. 
+You see, two weeks ago, my husband and I got a letter in the mail from our utility. 
+It told us we were using twice as much energy as our neighbors. "" (Laughter) "" And for the last two weeks, all we can think about, talk about, and even argue about, is what we should be doing to save energy. 
+We did everything that letter told us to do, and still I know there must be more. 
+Now I'm here with a genuine expert. 
+Tell me. What should I do to save energy? "" There are many experts who can help answer Harriet's question. 
+My goal is to make sure we are all asking it. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My name is Emiliano Salinas and I'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in the violent atmosphere this country is living in right now. 
+I was born in 1976. 
+I grew up in a traditional Mexican family. 
+As a child, I had a pretty normal life: I would go to school, play with my friends and cousins. 
+But then my father became President of Mexico and my life changed. 
+What I'm about to say, at least some of what I'm about to say, will cause controversy. 
+Firstly, because I'm the one who's going to say it. 
+And secondly, because what I'm going to say is true, and it will make a lot of people nervous because it's something we don't want to hear. 
+But it's imperative that we listen because it's undeniable and definitive. 
+It will also make members of criminal organizations nervous for the same reasons. 
+I'm going to talk about the role we members of society play in this phenomenon, and about four different response levels we citizens have against violence. 
+I know many will find it difficult to separate the fact that I'm Carlos Salinas de Gortari's son from the fact that I'm a citizen concerned about the country's current situation. 
+Don't worry. 
+It's not necessary for understanding the importance of what I'm going to say. 
+I think we have a problem in Mexico. 
+We have a big problem. 
+I think there's consensus on this. 
+No one argues — we all agree there's a problem. 
+What we don't agree on is what the problem actually is. 
+Is it the Zetas? The drug traffickers? The government? 
+Corruption? Poverty? Or is it something else? 
+I think none of these is the problem. 
+I don't mean they don't deserve attention. 
+But we won't be able to take care of any of those things if we don't solve the real problem we have in Mexico first. 
+The real problem we have is most of us Mexicans, we believe we are victims of our circumstances. 
+We are a country of victims. 
+Historically, we've always acted as victims of something or somebody. 
+We were victims of the Spaniards. 
+Then we were victims of the French. 
+Then we were victims of Don Porfirio. 
+Then we were victims of the PRI. 
+Even of Salinas. 
+And of El Peje. 
+And now of the Zetas and the traffickers and the criminals and the kidnappers... 
+Hold on! Wait a minute! 
+What if none of these things is the problem? 
+The problem is not the things we feel victims of. 
+The problem is that we play the role of victims. 
+We need to open our eyes and see that we are not victims. 
+If only we stopped feeling like victims, if we stopped acting as victims, our country would change so much! 
+I'm going to talk about how to go from a society that acts as a victim of circumstances to a responsible, involved society that takes the future of its country in its own hands. 
+I'm going to talk about four different levels of civil response against violence, from weakest to strongest. 
+The first level, the weakest level of civil response against violence, is denial and apathy. 
+Today, much of Mexican society is in denial of the situation we're going through. 
+We want to go on with our daily life even though we are not living under normal circumstances. 
+Daily life in our country is, to say the least, under extraordinary, exceptional circumstances. 
+It's like someone who has a serious illness and pretends it's the flu and it will just go away. 
+We want to pretend that Mexico has the flu. 
+But it doesn't. 
+Mexico has cancer. 
+And if we don't do something about it, the cancer will end up killing it. 
+We need to move Mexican society from denial and apathy to the next level of citizen response, which is, effectively, recognition. 
+And that recognition will sow fear — recognizing the seriousness of the situation. 
+But, fear is better than apathy because fear makes us do something. 
+Many people in Mexico are afraid today. 
+We're very afraid. 
+And we're acting out of that fear. 
+And let me tell you what the problem is with acting out of fear — and this is the second level of civil response: fear. 
+Let's think about Mexican streets: they're unsafe because of violence, so people stay at home. 
+Does that make streets more or less safe? 
+Less safe! 
+So streets become more desolate and unsafe, so we stay home more — which makes streets even more desolate and unsafe, and we stay home even more. 
+This vicious circle ends up with the whole population stuck inside their houses, scared to death — even more afraid than when we were out on the streets. 
+We need to confront this fear. 
+We need to move Mexican society, the members of society who are at this level, to the next level, which is action. 
+We need to face our fears and take back our streets, our cities, our neighborhoods. 
+For many people, acting involves courage. 
+We go from fear to courage. 
+They say, "" I can't take it anymore. 
+Let's do something about it. "" Recently — this is a sensitive figure — 35 public lynchings have been recorded so far in 2010 in Mexico. 
+Usually it's one or two a year. 
+Now we're experiencing one every week. 
+This shows that society is desperate and it's taking the law into its own hands. 
+Unfortunately, violent action — though action is better than no action — but taking part in it only disguises violence. 
+If I'm violent with you and you respond with violence, you become part of the violence and you just disguise my violence. 
+So civil action is vital, but it's also vital to take people who are at the level of courage and violent action to the next level, which is non-violent action. 
+It's pacific, coordinated civil action, which doesn't mean passive action. 
+It means it's determined and effective, but not violent. 
+There are examples of this kind of action in Mexico. 
+Two years ago, in Galena City, Chihuahua, a member of the community was kidnapped, Eric Le Barón. 
+His brothers, Benjamín and Julián, got together with the rest of the community to think of the best course of action: to pay the ransom, to take up arms and go after the kidnappers or to ask the government for help. 
+In the end, Benjamín and Julián decided the best thing they could do was to organize the community and act together. 
+So what did they do? 
+They mobilized the whole community of Le Barón to go to Chihuahua, where they organized a sit-in in the central park of the city. 
+They sent a message to the kidnappers: "" If you want your ransom come and get it. 
+We'll be waiting for you right here. "" They stayed there. 
+Seven days later, Eric was set free and was able to return home. 
+This is an example of what an organized society can do, a society that acts. 
+Of course, criminals can respond. 
+And in this case, they did. 
+On July 7th, 2009, Benjamín Le Barón was murdered. 
+But Julián Le Barón keeps working and he has been mobilizing communities in Chihuahua for over a year. 
+And for over a year he has known that a price has been put on his head. 
+But he keeps fighting. 
+He keeps organizing. 
+He keeps mobilizing. 
+These heroic acts are present all over the country. 
+With a thousand Juliáns working together, Mexico would be a very different country. 
+And they're out there! 
+They just have to raise their hands. 
+I was born in Mexico, I grew up in Mexico and along the way, I learned to love Mexico. 
+I think anyone who has stepped foot on this land — not to mention all Mexican people — will agree that it's not difficult to love Mexico. 
+I've traveled a lot and nowhere else have I found the passion Mexicans have. 
+That devotion we feel for the national football team. 
+That devotion we show in helping victims of disasters, such as the earthquake in 1985 or this year's floods. 
+The passion with which we've been singing the national anthem since we were kids. 
+When we thought Masiosare was the strange enemy, and we sang, with a childlike heart, "a soldier in each son." 
+I think the biggest insult, the worst way you can offend a Mexican is to insult their mother. 
+A mother is the most sacred thing in life. 
+Mexico is our mother and today she cries out for her children. 
+We are going through the darkest moment in our recent history. 
+Our mother, Mexico, is being violated before our very eyes. 
+What are we going to do? 
+Masiosare, the strange enemy, is here. 
+Where is the soldier in each son? 
+Mahatma Gandhi, one of the greatest civil fighters of all time, said, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." 
+Today in Mexico we're asking for Gandhis. 
+We need Gandhis. 
+We need men and women who love Mexico and who are willing to take action. 
+This is a call for every true Mexican to join this initiative. This is a call 
+so that every single thing we love about Mexico — the festivals, the markets, the restaurants, the cantinas, the tequila, the mariachis, the serenades, the posadas, El Grito, the Day of the Dead, San Miguel, the joy, the passion for life, the fight and everything it means to be Mexican — doesn't disappear from this world. 
+We're facing a very powerful opponent. 
+But we are many more. 
+They can take a man's life. 
+Anyone can kill me, or you, or you. 
+But no one can kill the spirit of true Mexicans. 
+The battle is won, but we still have to fight it. 
+2000 years ago, the Roman poet Juvenal said something that today echoes in the heart of every true Mexican. 
+He said, "" Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth living. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+If you want to buy high-quality, low-price cocaine, there really is only one place to go, and that is the dark net anonymous markets. 
+Now, you can't get to these sites with a normal browser — Chrome or Firefox — because they're on this hidden part of the Internet, known as Tor hidden services, where URLs are a string of meaningless numbers and letters that end in .onion, and which you access with a special browser called the Tor browser. 
+Now, the Tor browser was originally a U.S. Naval intelligence project. 
+It then became open source, and it allows anybody to browse the net without giving away their location. 
+And it does this by encrypting your IP address and then routing it via several other computers around the world that use the same software. 
+You can use it on the normal Internet, but it's also your key to the dark net. 
+And because of this fiendishly clever encryption system, the 20 or 30 — we don't know exactly — thousand sites that operate there are incredibly difficult to shut down. 
+It is a censorship-free world visited by anonymous users. 
+Little wonder, then, that it's a natural place to go for anybody with something to hide, and that something, of course, need not be illegal. 
+On the dark net, you will find whistle-blower sites, The New Yorker. 
+You will find political activism blogs. 
+You will find libraries of pirated books. 
+But you'll also find the drugs markets, illegal pornography, commercial hacking services, and much more besides. 
+Now, the dark net is one of the most interesting, exciting places anywhere on the net. 
+And the reason is, because although innovation, of course, takes place in big businesses, takes place in world-class universities, it also takes place in the fringes, because those on the fringes — the pariahs, the outcasts — they're often the most creative, because they have to be. 
+In this part of the Internet, you will not find a single lolcat, a single pop-up advert anywhere. 
+And that's one of the reasons why I think many of you here will be on the dark net fairly soon. 
+(Laughter) Not that I'm suggesting anyone in this audience would use it to go and procure high-quality narcotics. 
+But let's say for a moment that you were. 
+(Laughter) Bear with me. 
+The first thing you will notice on signing up to one of these sites is how familiar it looks. 
+Every single product — thousands of products — has a glossy, high-res image, a detailed product description, a price. 
+There's a "" Proceed to checkout "" icon. 
+There is even, most beautifully of all, a "" Report this item "" button. 
+(Laughter) Incredible. 
+You browse through the site, you make your choice, you pay with the crypto-currency bitcoin, you enter an address — preferably not your home address — and you wait for your product to arrive in the post, which it nearly always does. 
+And the reason it does is not because of the clever encryption. 
+That's important. 
+Something far simpler than that. 
+It's the user reviews. 
+(Laughter) You see, every single vendor on these sites uses a pseudonym, naturally enough, but they keep the same pseudonym to build up a reputation. 
+And because it's easy for the buyer to change allegiance whenever they want, the only way of trusting a vendor is if they have a good history of positive feedback from other users of the site. 
+And this introduction of competition and choice does exactly what the economists would predict. 
+Prices tend to go down, product quality tends to go up, and the vendors are attentive, they're polite, they're consumer-centric, offering you all manner of special deals, one-offs, buy-one-get-one-frees, free delivery, to keep you happy. 
+I spoke to Drugsheaven. 
+Drugsheaven was offering excellent and consistent marijuana at a reasonable price. 
+He had a very generous refund policy, detailed T's and C's, and good shipping times. 
+"" Dear Drugsheaven, "" I wrote, via the internal emailing system that's also encrypted, of course. 
+"I'm new here. Do you mind if I buy just one gram of marijuana?" 
+A couple of hours later, I get a reply. 
+"" Hi there, thanks for your email. 
+Starting small is a wise thing to do. I would, too, if I were you. "" (Laughter) "" So no problem if you'd like to start with just one gram. 
+Best wishes, Drugsheaven. "" (Laughter) I don't know why he had a posh English accent, but I assume he did. 
+Now, this kind of consumer-centric attitude is the reason why, when I reviewed 120,000 pieces of feedback that had been left on one of these sites over a three-month period, 95 percent of them were five out of five. 
+The customer, you see, is king. 
+But what does that mean? 
+Well, on the one hand, that means there are more drugs, more available, more easily, to more people. 
+And by my reckoning, that is not a good thing. 
+But, on the other hand, if you are going to take drugs, you have a reasonably good way of guaranteeing a certain level of purity and quality, which is incredibly important if you're taking drugs. 
+And you can do so from the comfort of your own home, without the risks associated with buying on the streets. 
+Now, as I said, you've got to be creative and innovative to survive in this marketplace. 
+And the 20 or so sites that are currently in operation — by the way, they don't always work, they're not always perfect; the site that I showed you was shut down 18 months ago, but not before it had turned over a billion dollars' worth of trade. 
+But these markets, because of the difficult conditions in which they are operating, the inhospitable conditions, are always innovating, always thinking of ways of getting smarter, more decentralized, harder to censor, and more customer-friendly. 
+Let's take the payment system. 
+You don't pay with your credit card, of course — that would lead directly back to you. 
+So you use the crypto-currency bitcoin, which is easily exchanged for real-world currencies and gives quite a high degree of anonymity to its users. 
+But at the beginning of these sites, people noticed a flaw. 
+Some of the unscrupulous dealers were running away with peoples' bitcoin before they'd mailed the drugs out. 
+The community came up with a solution, called multi-signature escrow payments. 
+So on purchasing my item, I would send my bitcoin to a neutral, secure third digital wallet. 
+The vendor, who would see that I'd sent it, would be confident that they could then send the product to me, and then when I received it, at least two of the three people engaged in the transaction — vendor, buyer, site administrator — would have to sign the transaction off with a unique digital signature, and then the money would be transferred. 
+Brilliant! 
+Elegant. 
+It works. 
+But then they realized there was a problem with bitcoin, because every bitcoin transaction is actually recorded publicly in a public ledger. 
+So if you're clever, you can try and work out who's behind them. 
+Hundreds of people send their bitcoin into one address, they're tumbled and jumbled up, and then the right amount is sent on to the right recipients, but they're different bitcoins: micro-laundering systems. 
+(Laughter) It's incredible. 
+Interested in what drugs are trending right now on the dark net markets? 
+Check Grams, the search engine. 
+You can even buy some advertising space. 
+(Laughter) Are you an ethical consumer worried about what the drugs industry is doing? 
+Yeah. 
+One vendor will offer you fair trade organic cocaine. 
+(Laughter) That's not being sourced from Colombian druglords, but Guatemalan farmers. 
+They even promised to reinvest 20 percent of any profits into local education programs. 
+Now, whatever you think about the morality of these sites — and I submit that it's not actually an easy question — the creation of functioning, competitive, anonymous markets, where nobody knows who anybody else is, constantly at risk of being shut down by the authorities, is a staggering achievement, a phenomenal achievement. 
+And it's that kind of innovation that's why those on the fringes are often the harbingers of what is to come. 
+It's easy to forget that because of its short life, the Internet has actually changed many times over the last 30 years or so. 
+It started in the '70s as a military project, morphed in the 1980s to an academic network, co-opted by commercial companies in the' 90s, and then invaded by all of us via social media in the noughties, but I think it's going to change again. 
+And I think things like the dark net markets — creative, secure, difficult to censor — I think that's the future. 
+And the reason it's the future is because we're all worried about our privacy. 
+Surveys consistently show concerns about privacy. 
+There are now between two and three million daily users of the Tor browser, the majority of which use is perfectly legitimate, sometimes even mundane. 
+And there are hundreds of activists around the world working on techniques and tools to keep you private online — default encrypted messaging services. 
+Ethereum, which is a project which tries to link up the connected but unused hard drives of millions of computers around the world, to create a sort of distributed Internet that no one really controls. 
+Now, we've had distributed computing before, of course. 
+We use it for everything from Skype to the search for extraterrestrial life. 
+But you add distributed computing and powerful encryption — that's very, very hard to censor and control. 
+Another called MaidSafe works on similar principles. 
+And here's the thing — the more of us join, the more interesting those sites become, and then the more of us join, and so on. 
+In fact, it's already happening. 
+The dark net is no longer a den for dealers and a hideout for whistle-blowers. 
+It's already going mainstream. 
+Just recently, the musician Aphex Twin released his album as a dark net site. 
+Facebook has started a dark net site. 
+A group of London architects have opened a dark net site for people worried about regeneration projects. 
+Yes, the dark net is going mainstream, and I predict that fairly soon, every social media company, every major news outlet, and therefore most of you in this audience, will be using the dark net, too. 
+So the Internet is about to get more interesting, more exciting, more innovative, more terrible, more destructive. 
+That's good news if you care about liberty. 
+It's also good news if you want to browse for illegal pornography and if you want to buy and sell drugs with impunity. 
+Neither entirely dark, nor entirely light. 
+It's not one side or the other that's going to win out, but both. 
+Thank you very much, indeed. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while, I've been a model. 
+Actually, for 10 years. 
+And I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress. 
+This is the first outfit change on the TED stage, so you guys are pretty lucky to witness it, I think. 
+If some of the women were really horrified when I came out, you don't have to tell me now, but I'll find out later on Twitter. 
+(Laughter) I'd also note that I'm quite privileged to be able to transform what you think of me in a very brief 10 seconds. 
+Not everybody gets to do that. 
+These heels are very uncomfortable, so good thing I wasn't going to wear them. 
+The worst part is putting this sweater over my head, because that's when you'll all laugh at me, so don't do anything while it's over my head. 
+That was awkward. 
+(Laughter) Well — (Laughter) Hopefully not as awkward as that picture. 
+Image is powerful, but also, image is superficial. 
+I just totally transformed what you thought of me, in six seconds. 
+And in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life. 
+And of course, barring surgery, or the fake tan that I got two days ago for work, there's very little that we can do to transform how we look, and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives. 
+So today, for me, being fearless means being honest. 
+And I am on this stage because I am a model. 
+I am on this stage because I am a pretty, white woman, and in my industry, we call that a sexy girl. 
+I'm going to answer the questions that people always ask me, but with an honest twist. 
+So the first question is, how do you become a model? 
+I always just say, "" Oh, I was scouted, "" but that means nothing. 
+The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery, and I am the recipient of a legacy, and maybe you're wondering what is a legacy. 
+Well, for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin. 
+And this is a legacy that was built for me, and it's a legacy that I've been cashing out on. 
+And I know there are people in the audience who are skeptical at this point, and maybe there are some fashionistas who are like, "Wait. Naomi. Tyra. Joan Smalls. Liu Wen." 
+And first, I commend you on your model knowledge. Very impressive. 
+(Laughter) But unfortunately, I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white. 
+The next question people always ask is, "Can I be a model when I grow up?" 
+You could be the President of the United States, or the inventor of the next Internet, or a ninja cardiothoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome, because you'd be the first one. "" (Laughter) If, after this amazing list, they still are like, "No, no, Cameron, I want to be a model," well, then I say, "" Be my boss. "" Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H & M, or the next Steven Meisel. 
+Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. 
+It's out of your control, and it's awesome, and it's not a career path. 
+I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardiothoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right now. 
+So, if the photographer is right there, the light is right there, like a nice HMI, and the client says, "" We want a walking shot, "" this leg goes first, nice and long, this arm goes back, this arm goes forward, the head is at three quarters, and you just go back and forth, just do that, and then you look back at your imaginary friends, 300, 400, 500 times. 
+(Laughter) It will look something like this. (Laughter) 
+Unfortunately, after you've gone to school, and you have a résumé and you've done a few jobs, you can't say anything anymore, so if you say you want to be the President of the United States, but your résumé reads, "" Underwear Model: 10 years, "" people give you a funny look. 
+And here's me today. 
+And I hope what you're seeing is that these pictures are not pictures of me. 
+They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this. 
+(Laughter) I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that's what we don't like to talk about. 
+I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my money and they gave me the dress for free. 
+When I was a teenager, I was driving with my friend who was an awful driver and she ran a red and of course, we got pulled over, and all it took was a "" Sorry, officer, "" and we were on our way. 
+And I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are. 
+I live in New York, and last year, of the 140,000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86% of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men. 
+And there are only 177,000 young black and Latino men in New York, so for them, it's not a question of, "" Will I get stopped? "" but "" How many times will I get stopped? When will I get stopped? "" When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17. 
+And I think the answer that they're looking for is, "" If you are a little bit skinnier and you have shinier hair, you will be so happy and fabulous. "" And when we're backstage, we give an answer that maybe makes it seem like that. 
+We say, "" It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people. "" And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, "I am insecure." 
+And I'm insecure because I have to think about what I look like every day. 
+And if you ever are wondering, "If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair, will I be happier?" 
+you just need to meet a group of models, because they have the thinnest thighs, the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes, and they're the most physically insecure women probably on the planet. 
+But mostly it was difficult to unpack a legacy of gender and racial oppression when I am one of the biggest beneficiaries. 
+But I'm also happy and honored to be up here and I think that it's great that I got to come before 10 or 20 or 30 years had passed and I'd had more agency in my career, because maybe then I wouldn't tell the story of how I got my first job, or maybe I wouldn't tell the story of how I paid for college, which seems so important right now. 
+If there's a takeaway to this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures. 
+Thank you. 
+
+So, last month, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced that it is going out of print after 244 years, which made me nostalgic, because I remember playing a game with the colossal encyclopedia set in my hometown library back when I was a kid, maybe 12 years old. 
+And I wondered if I could update that game, not just for modern methods, but for the modern me. 
+So I tried. 
+I went to an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and I entered the term "" Earth. "" You can start anywhere, this time I chose Earth. 
+And the first rule of the game is pretty simple. 
+You just have to read the article until you find something you don't know, and preferably something your dad doesn't even know. 
+And in this case, I quickly found this: The furthest point from the center of the Earth is not the tip of Mount Everest, like I might have thought, it's the tip of this mountain: Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador. 
+The Earth spins, of course, as it travels around the sun, so the Earth bulges a little bit around the middle, like some Earthlings. 
+And even though Mount Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes, it's one degree away from the equator, it's riding that bulge, and so the summit of Chimborazo is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth. 
+And it is really fun to say. 
+So I immediately decided, this is going to be the name of the game, or my new exclamation. 
+You can use it at TED. 
+Chimborazo, right? 
+It's like "" eureka "" and "" bingo "" had a baby. 
+I didn't know that; that's pretty cool. 
+Chimborazo! 
+So the next rule of the game is also pretty simple. 
+You just have to find another term and look that up. 
+Now in the old days, that meant getting out a volume and browsing through it alphabetically, maybe getting sidetracked, that was fun. 
+Nowadays there are hundreds of links to choose from. 
+I can go literally anywhere in the world, I think since I was already in Ecuador, I just decided to click on the word "" tropical. "" That took me to this wet and warm band of the tropics that encircles the Earth. 
+Now that's the Tropic of Cancer in the north and the Tropic of Capricorn in the south, that much I knew, but I was surprised to learn this little fact: Those are not cartographers' lines, like latitude or the borders between nations, they are astronomical phenomena caused by the Earth's tilt, and they change. 
+They move; they go up, they go down. 
+In fact, for years, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn have been steadily drifting towards the equator at the rate of about 15 meters per year, and nobody told me that. 
+I didn't know it. 
+Chimborazo! 
+So to keep the game going, I just have to find another term and look that one up. 
+Since I'm already in the tropics, I chose "" Tropical rainforest. "" Famous for its diversity, human diversity. 
+There are still dozens and dozens of uncontacted tribes living on this planet. 
+They're all over the globe, but virtually all of them live in tropical rainforests. 
+This is the only place you can go nowadays and not get "" friended. "" The link that I clicked on here was exotic in the beginning and then absolutely mysterious at the very end. 
+It mentioned leopards and ring-tailed coatis and poison dart frogs and boa constrictors and then coleoptera, which turn out to be beetles. 
+Now I clicked on this on purpose, but if I'd somehow gotten here by mistake, it does remind me, for the band, see "" The Beatles, "" for the car see "" Volkswagon Beetle, "" but I am here for beetle beetles. 
+This is the most successful order on the planet by far. 
+Something between 20 and 25 percent of all life forms on the planet, including plants, are beetles. 
+That means the next time you are in the grocery store, take a look at the four people ahead of you in line. 
+Statistically, one of you is a beetle. 
+And if it is you, you are astonishingly well adapted. 
+There are scavenger beetles that pick the skin and flesh off of bones in museums. 
+There are predator beetles, that attack other insects and still look pretty cute to us. 
+There are beetles that roll little balls of dung great distances across the desert floor to feed to their hatchlings. 
+This reminded the ancient Egyptians of their god Khepri, who renews the ball of the sun every morning, which is how that dung-rolling scarab became that sacred scarab on the breastplate of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun. 
+Beetles, I was reminded, have the most romantic flirtation in the animal kingdom. 
+Fireflies are not flies, fireflies are beetles. 
+Fireflies are coleoptera, and coleoptera communicate in other ways as well. 
+Like my next link: The chemical language of pheromones. 
+Now the pheromone page took me to a video of a sea urchin having sex. 
+Yeah. 
+(Laughter) And the link to aphrodisiac. 
+Now that's something that increases sexual desire, possibly chocolate. 
+There is a compound in chocolate called phenethylamine that might be an aphrodisiac. 
+But as the article mentions, because of enzyme breakdown, it's unlikely that phenethylamine will reach your brain if taken orally. 
+So those of you who only eat your chocolate, you might have to experiment. 
+The link I clicked on here, "" sympathetic magic, "" mostly because I understand what both of those words mean. 
+But not when they're together like that. 
+I do like sympathy. I do like magic. 
+So when I click on "" sympathetic magic, "" I get sympathetic magic and voodoo dolls. 
+This is the boy in me getting lucky again. 
+Sympathetic magic is imitation. 
+If you imitate something, maybe you can have an effect on it. 
+That's the idea behind voodoo dolls, and possibly also cave paintings. 
+The link to cave paintings takes me to some of the oldest art known to humankind. 
+I would love to see Google maps inside some of these caves. 
+We've got tens-of-thousands-years-old artwork. 
+Common themes around the globe include large wild animals and tracings of human hands, usually the left hand. 
+We have been a dominantly right-handed tribe for millenia, so even though I don't know why a paleolithic person would trace his hand or blow pigment on it from a tube, I can easily picture how he did it. 
+And I really don't think it's that different form our own little dominant hand avatar right there that I'm going to use now to click on the term for "" hand, "" go to the page for "" hand, "" where I found the most fun and possibly embarrassing bit of trivia I've found in a long time. It's simply this: The back of the hand is formally called the opisthenar. 
+Now that's embarrassing, because up until now, every time I've said, "" I know it like the back of my hand, "" I've really been saying, "" I'm totally familiar with that, I just don't know it's freaking name, right? "" And the link I clicked on here, well, lemurs, monkeys and chimpanzees have the little opisthenar. 
+I click on chimpanzee, and I get our closest genetic relative. 
+Pan troglodytes, the name we give him, means "" cave dweller. "" He doesn't. 
+He lives in rainforests and savannas. 
+It's just that we're always thinking of this guy as lagging behind us, evolutionarily or somehow uncannily creeping up on us, and in some cases, he gets places before us. 
+Like my next link, the almost irresistible link, Ham the Astrochimp. 
+I click on him, and I really thought he was going to bring me full circle twice, in fact. 
+He's born in Cameroon, which is smack in the middle of my tropics map, and more specifically his skeleton wound up in the Smithsonian museum getting picked clean by beetles. 
+In between those two landmarks in Ham's life, he flew into space. 
+He experienced weightlessness and re-entry months before the first human being to do it, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. 
+When I click on Yuri Gagarin's page, I get this guy who was surprisingly short in stature, huge in heroism. 
+Top estimates, Soviet estimates, put this guy at 1.65 meters, that is less than five and a half feet tall max, possibly because he was malnourished as a child. 
+Germans occupied Russia. 
+A Nazi officer took over the Gagarin household, and he and his family built and lived in a mud hut. 
+Years later, the boy from that cramped mud hut would grow up to be the man in that cramped capsule on the tip of a rocket who volunteered to be launched into outer space, the first one of any of us to really physically leave this planet. 
+And he didn't just leave it, he circled it once. 
+Fifty years later, as a tribute, the International Space Station, which is still up there tonight, synced its orbit with Gagarin's orbit, at the exact same time of day, and filmed it, so you can go online and you can watch over 100 minutes of what must have been an absolutely mesmerizing ride, possibly a lonely one, the first person to ever see such a thing. 
+And then when you've had your fill of that, you can click on one more link. 
+You can come back to Earth. 
+You return to where you started. 
+You can finish your game. 
+You just need to find one more fact that you didn't know. 
+And for me, I quickly landed on this one: The Earth has a tolerance of about .17 percent from the reference spheroid, which is less than the .22 percent allowed in billiard balls. 
+This is the kind of fact I would have loved as a boy. 
+I found it myself. 
+It's got some math that I can do. 
+I'm pretty sure my dad doesn't know it. 
+What this means is that if you could shrink the Earth to the size of a billiard ball, if you could take planet Earth, with all its mountain tops and caves and rainforests, astronauts and uncontacted tribes and chimpanzees, voodoo dolls, fireflies, chocolate, sea creatures making love in the deep blue sea, you just shrink that to the size of a billiard ball, it would be as smooth as a billiard ball, presumably a billiard ball with a slight bulge around the middle. 
+That's pretty cool. 
+I didn't know that. 
+Chimborazo! 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What I want to talk about today is one idea. 
+It's an idea for a new kind of school, which turns on its head much of our conventional thinking about what schools are for and how they work. 
+And it might just be coming to a neighborhood near you soon. 
+Where it comes from is an organization called the Young Foundation, which, over many decades, has come up with many innovations in education, like the Open University and things like Extended Schools, Schools for Social Entrepreneurs, Summer Universities and the School of Everything. 
+And about five years ago, we asked what was the most important need for innovation in schooling here in the U.K. 
+And we felt the most important priority was to bring together two sets of problems. 
+One was large numbers of bored teenagers who just didn't like school, couldn't see any relationship between what they learned in school and future jobs. 
+And employers who kept complaining that the kids coming out of school weren't actually ready for real work, didn't have the right attitudes and experience. 
+And so we try to ask: What kind of school would have the teenagers fighting to get in, not fighting to stay out? 
+And after hundreds of conversations with teenagers and teachers and parents and employers and schools from Paraguay to Australia, and looking at some of the academic research, which showed the importance of what's now called non-cognitive skills — the skills of motivation, resilience — and that these are as important as the cognitive skills — formal academic skills — we came up with an answer, a very simple answer in a way, which we called the Studio School. 
+And we called it a studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the Renaissance where work and learning are integrated. 
+You work by learning, and you learn by working. 
+And the design we came up with had the following characteristics. 
+First of all, we wanted small schools — about 300, 400 pupils — 14 to 19 year-olds, and critically, about 80 percent of the curriculum done not through sitting in classrooms, but through real-life, practical projects, working on commission to businesses, NGO's and others. 
+That every pupil would have a coach, as well as teachers, who would have timetables much more like a work environment in a business. 
+And all of this will be done within the public system, funded by public money, but independently run. 
+And all at no extra cost, no selection, and allowing the pupils the route into university, even if many of them would want to become entrepreneurs and have manual jobs as well. 
+Underlying it was some very simple ideas that large numbers of teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams and they learn best by doing things for real — all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does. 
+Now that was a nice idea, so we moved into the rapid prototyping phase. 
+We tried it out, first in Luton — famous for its airport and not much else, I fear — and in Blackpool — famous for its beaches and leisure. 
+And what we found — and we got quite a lot of things wrong and then improved them — but we found that the young people loved it. 
+They found it much more motivational, much more exciting than traditional education. 
+And perhaps most important of all, two years later when the exam results came through, the pupils who had been put on these field trials who were in the lowest performing groups had jumped right to the top — in fact, pretty much at the top decile of performance in terms of GCSE's, which is the British marking system. 
+Now not surprisingly, that influenced some people to think we were onto something. 
+The minister of education down south in London described himself as a "" big fan. "" And the business organizations thought we were onto something in terms of a way of preparing children much better for real-life work today. 
+And indeed, the head of the Chambers of Commerce is now the chairman of the Studio Schools Trust and helping it, not just with big businesses, but small businesses all over the country. 
+We started with two schools. 
+That's grown this year to about 10. 
+And next year, we're expecting about 35 schools open across England, and another 40 areas want to have their own schools opening — a pretty rapid spread of this idea. 
+Interestingly, it's happened almost entirely without media coverage. 
+It's happened almost entirely without big money behind it. 
+It spread almost entirely through word of mouth, virally, across teachers, parents, people involved in education. 
+And it spread because of the power of an idea — so the very, very simple idea about turning education on its head and putting the things which were marginal, things like working in teams, doing practical projects, and putting them right at the heart of learning, rather than on the edges. 
+Now there's a whole set of new schools opening up this autumn. 
+This is one from Yorkshire where, in fact, my nephew, I hope, will be able to attend it. 
+And this one is focused on creative and media industries. 
+Other ones have a focus on health care, tourism, engineering and other fields. 
+We think we're onto something. 
+It's not perfect yet, but we think this is one idea which can transform the lives of thousands, possibly millions, of teenagers who are really bored by schooling. 
+It doesn't animate them. 
+They're not like all of you who can sit in rows and hear things said to you for hour after hour. 
+They want to do things, they want to get their hands dirty, they want education to be for real. 
+And my hope is that some of you out there may be able to help us. 
+We feel we're on the beginning of a journey of experiment and improvement to turn the Studio School idea into something which is present, not as a universal answer for every child, but at least as an answer for some children in every part of the world. 
+And I hope that a few of you at least can help us make that happen. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I was basically concerned about what was going on in the world. 
+I couldn't understand the starvation, the destruction, the killing of innocent people. 
+Making sense of those things is a very difficult thing to do. 
+And when I was 12, I became an actor. 
+I was bottom of the class. I haven't got any qualifications. 
+I was told I was dyslexic. 
+In fact, I have got qualifications. 
+I got a D in pottery, which was the one thing that I did get — which was useful, obviously. 
+And so concern is where all of this comes from. 
+And then, being an actor, I was doing these different kinds of things, and I felt the content of the work that I was involved in really wasn't cutting it, that there surely had to be more. 
+And at that point, I read a book by Frank Barnaby, this wonderful nuclear physicist, and he said that media had a responsibility, that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward. 
+And that fascinated me, because I'd been messing around with a camera most of my life. 
+And then I thought, well maybe I could do something. 
+Maybe I could become a filmmaker. 
+Maybe I can use the form of film constructively to in some way make a difference. 
+Maybe there's a little change I can get involved in. 
+So I started thinking about peace, and I was obviously, as I said to you, very much moved by these images, trying to make sense of that. 
+Could I go and speak to older and wiser people who would tell me how they made sense of the things that are going on? 
+Because it's obviously incredibly frightening. 
+But I realized that, having been messing around with structure as an actor, that a series of sound bites in itself wasn't enough, that there needed to be a mountain to climb, there needed to be a journey that I had to take. 
+And if I took that journey, no matter whether it failed or succeeded, it would be completely irrelevant. 
+The point was that I would have something to hook the questions of — is humankind fundamentally evil? 
+Is the destruction of the world inevitable? Should I have children? 
+Is that a responsible thing to do? Etc., etc. 
+So I was thinking about peace, and then I was thinking, well where's the starting point for peace? 
+And that was when I had the idea. 
+There was no starting point for peace. 
+There was no day of global unity. 
+There was no day of intercultural cooperation. 
+There was no day when humanity came together, separate in all of those things and just shared it together — that we're in this together, and that if we united and we interculturally cooperated, then that might be the key to humanity's survival. 
+That might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces — if we did it just for a day. 
+So obviously we didn't have any money. 
+I was living at my mom's place. 
+And we started writing letters to everybody. 
+You very quickly work out what is it that you've got to do to fathom that out. 
+How do you create a day voted by every single head of state in the world to create the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September? 
+And I wanted it to be the 21st of September because it was my granddad's favorite number. 
+He was a prisoner of war. 
+He saw the bomb go off at Nagasaki. 
+It poisoned his blood. He died when I was 11. 
+So he was like my hero. 
+And the reason why 21 was the number is 700 men left, 23 came back, two died on the boat and 21 hit the ground. 
+And that's why we wanted it to be the 21st of September as the date of peace. 
+So we began this journey, and we launched it in 1999. 
+And we wrote to heads of state, their ambassadors, Nobel Peace laureates, NGOs, faiths, various organizations — literally wrote to everybody. 
+And very quickly, some letters started coming back. 
+And we started to build this case. 
+And I remember the first letter. 
+One of the first letters was from the Dalai Lama. 
+And of course we didn't have the money; we were playing guitars and getting the money for the stamps that we were sending out all of [this mail]. 
+A letter came through from the Dalai Lama saying, "" This is an amazing thing. Come and see me. 
+I'd love to talk to you about the first ever day of peace. "" And we didn't have money for the flight. 
+And I rang Sir Bob Ayling, who was CEO of BA at the time, and said, "" Mate, we've got this invitation. 
+Could you give me a flight? Because we're going to go see him. "" And of course, we went and saw him and it was amazing. 
+And then Dr. Oscar Arias came forward. 
+And actually, let me go back to that slide, because when we launched it in 1999 — this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence — we invited thousands of people. 
+Well not thousands — hundreds of people, lots of people — all the press, because we were going to try and create the first ever World Peace Day, a peace day. 
+And we invited everybody, and no press showed up. 
+There were 114 people there — they were mostly my friends and family. 
+And that was kind of like the launch of this thing. 
+But it didn't matter because we were documenting, and that was the thing. 
+For me, it was really about the process. 
+It wasn't about the end result. 
+And that's the beautiful thing about the camera. 
+They used to say the pen is mightier than the sword. I think the camera is. 
+And just staying in the moment with it was a beautiful thing and really empowering actually. 
+So anyway, we began the journey. 
+And here you see people like Mary Robinson, I went to see in Geneva. 
+I'm cutting my hair, it's getting short and long, because every time I saw Kofi Annan, I was so worried that he thought I was a hippie that I cut it, and that was kind of what was going on. 
+(Laughter) Yeah, I'm not worried about it now. 
+So Mary Robinson, she said to me, "" Listen, this is an idea whose time has come. This must be created. "" Kofi Annan said, "" This will be beneficial to my troops on the ground. "" The OAU at the time, led by Salim Ahmed Salim, said, "" I must get the African countries involved. "" Dr. Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace laureate, president now of Costa Rica, said, "" I'll do everything that I can. "" So I went and saw Amr Moussa at the League of Arab States. 
+I met Mandela at the Arusha peace talks, and so on and so on and so on — while I was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense. 
+And then we were listening to the people. We were documenting everywhere. 
+76 countries in the last 12 years, I've visited. 
+And I've always spoken to women and children wherever I've gone. 
+I've recorded 44,000 young people. 
+I've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts. 
+I'm really clear about how young people feel when you talk to them about this idea of having a starting point for their actions for a more peaceful world through their poetry, their art, their literature, their music, their sport, whatever it might be. 
+And we were listening to everybody. 
+And it was an incredibly thing, working with the U.N. 
+and working with NGOs and building this case. 
+I felt that I was presenting a case on behalf of the global community to try and create this day. 
+And the stronger the case and the more detailed it was, the better chance we had of creating this day. 
+And it was this stuff, this, where I actually was in the beginning kind of thinking no matter what happened, it didn't actually matter. 
+It didn't matter if it didn't create a day of peace. 
+The fact is that, if I tried and it didn't work, then I could make a statement about how unwilling the global community is to unite — until, it was in Somalia, picking up that young girl. 
+And this young child who'd taken about an inch and a half out of her leg with no antiseptic, and that young boy who was a child soldier, who told me he'd killed people — he was about 12 — these things made me realize that this was not a film that I could just stop. 
+And that actually, at that moment something happened to me, which obviously made me go, "" I'm going to document. 
+If this is the only film that I ever make, I'm going to document until this becomes a reality. "" Because we've got to stop, we've got to do something where we unite — separate from all the politics and religion that, as a young person, is confusing me. 
+I don't know how to get involved in that process. 
+And then on the seventh of September, I was invited to New York. 
+The Costa Rican government and the British government had put forward to the United Nations General Assembly, with 54 co-sponsors, the idea of the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September, as a fixed calendar date, and it was unanimously adopted by every head of state in the world. 
+(Applause) Yeah, but there were hundreds of individuals, obviously, who made that a reality. 
+And thank you to all of them. 
+That was an incredible moment. 
+I was at the top of the General Assembly just looking down into it and seeing it happen. 
+And as I mentioned, when it started, we were at the Globe, and there was no press. 
+And now I was thinking, "" Well, the press it really going to hear this story. "" And suddenly, we started to institutionalize this day. 
+Kofi Annan invited me on the morning of September the 11th to do a press conference. 
+And it was 8: 00 AM when I stood there. 
+And I was waiting for him to come down, and I knew that he was on his way. 
+And obviously he never came down. The statement was never made. 
+The world was never told there was a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence. 
+And it was obviously a tragic moment for the thousands of people who lost their lives, there and then subsequently all over the world. 
+It never happened. 
+And I remember thinking, "" This is exactly why, actually, we have to work even harder. 
+And we have to make this day work. 
+It's been created; nobody knows. 
+But we have to continue this journey, and we have to tell people, and we have to prove it can work. "" And I left New York freaked, but actually empowered. 
+And I felt inspired by the possibilities that if it did, then maybe we wouldn't see things like that. 
+I remember putting that film out and going to cynics. 
+I was showing the film, and I remember being in Israel and getting it absolutely slaughtered by some guys having watched the film — that it's just a day of peace, it doesn't mean anything. 
+It's not going to work; you're not going to stop the fighting in Afghanistan; the Taliban won't listen, etc., etc. 
+It's just symbolism. 
+And that was even worse than actually what had just happened in many ways, because it couldn't not work. 
+I'd spoken in Somalia, Burundi, Gaza, the West Bank, India, Sri Lanka, Congo, wherever it was, and they'd all tell me, "" If you can create a window of opportunity, we can move aid, we can vaccinate children. 
+Children can lead their projects. 
+They can unite. They can come together. If people would stop, lives will be saved. "" That's what I'd heard. 
+And I'd heard that from the people who really understood what conflict was about. 
+And so I went back to the United Nations. 
+I decided that I'd continue filming and make another movie. 
+And I went back to the U.N. for another couple of years. 
+We started moving around the corridors of the U.N. system, governments and NGOs, trying desperately to find somebody to come forward and have a go at it, see if we could make it possible. 
+And after lots and lots of meetings obviously, I'm delighted that this man, Ahmad Fawzi, one of my heroes and mentors really, he managed to get UNICEF involved. 
+And UNICEF, God bless them, they said, "" Okay, we'll have a go. "" And then UNAMA became involved in Afghanistan. 
+It was historical. Could it work in Afghanistan with UNAMA and WHO and civil society, etc., etc., etc.? 
+And I was getting it all on film and I was recording it, and I was thinking, "" This is it. This is the possibility of it maybe working. 
+But even if it doesn't, at least the door is open and there's a chance. "" And so I went back to London, and I went and saw this chap, Jude Law. 
+And I saw him because he was an actor, I was an actor, I had a connection to him, because we needed to get to the press, we needed this attraction, we needed the media to be involved. 
+Because if we start pumping it up a bit maybe more people would listen and there'd be more — when we got into certain areas, maybe there would be more people interested. 
+And maybe we'd be helped financially a little bit more, which had been desperately difficult. 
+I won't go into that. 
+So Jude said, "" Okay, I'll do some statements for you. "" While I was filming these statements, he said to me, "" Where are you going next? "" I said, "" I'm going to go to Afghanistan. "" He said, "" Really? "" And I could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest. 
+So I said to him, "" Do you want to come with me? 
+It'd be really interesting if you came. 
+It would help and bring attention. 
+And that attention would help leverage the situation, as well as all of the other sides of it. "" I think there's a number of pillars to success. 
+One is you've got to have a great idea. 
+The other is you've got to have a constituency, you've got to have finance, and you've got to be able to raise awareness. 
+And actually I could never raise awareness by myself, no matter what I'd achieved. 
+So these guys were absolutely crucial. 
+So he said yes, and we found ourselves in Afghanistan. 
+It was a really incredible thing that when we landed there, I was talking to various people, and they were saying to me, "" You've got to get everybody involved here. 
+You can't just expect it to work. You have to get out and work. "" And we did, and we traveled around, and we spoke to elders, we spoke to doctors, we spoke to nurses, we held press conferences, we went out with soldiers, we sat down with ISAF, we sat down with NATO, we sat down with the U.K. government. 
+I mean, we basically sat down with everybody — in and out of schools with ministers of education, holding these press conferences, which of course, now were loaded with press, everybody was there. 
+There was an interest in what was going on. 
+This amazing woman, Fatima Gailani, was absolutely instrumental in what went on as she was the spokesperson for the resistance against the Russians. 
+And her Afghan network was just absolutely everywhere. 
+And she was really crucial in getting the message in. 
+And then we went home. We'd sort of done it. 
+We had to wait now and see what happened. 
+And I got home, and I remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the Taliban. 
+And that letter basically said, "" We'll observe this day. 
+We will observe this day. 
+We see it as a window of opportunity. 
+And we will not engage. We're not going to engage. "" And that meant that humanitarian workers wouldn't be kidnapped or killed. 
+And then suddenly, I obviously knew at this point, there was a chance. 
+And days later, 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping. 
+(Applause) And like the General Assembly, obviously the most wonderful, wonderful moment. 
+And so then we wrapped the film up and we put it together because we had to go back. 
+We put it into Dari and Pashto. We put it in the local dialects. 
+We went back to Afghanistan, because the next year was coming, and we wanted to support. 
+But more importantly, we wanted to go back, because these people in Afghanistan were the heroes. 
+They were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it, etc., etc. — and they made it real. 
+And we wanted to go back and show them the film and say, "" Look, you guys made this possible. And thank you very much. "" And we gave the film over. 
+Obviously it was shown, and it was amazing. 
+And then that year, that year, 2008, this ISAF statement from Kabul, Afghanistan, September 17th: "" General Stanley McChrystal, commander of international security assistance forces in Afghanistan, announced today ISAF will not conduct offensive military operations on the 21st of September. "" They were saying they would stop. 
+And then there was this other statement that came out from the U.N. Department of Security and Safety saying that, in Afghanistan, because of this work, the violence was down by 70 percent. 
+70 percent reduction in violence on this day at least. 
+And that completely blew my mind almost more than anything. 
+And I remember being stuck in New York, this time because of the volcano, which was obviously much less harmful. 
+And I was there thinking about what was going on. 
+And I kept thinking about this 70 percent. 
+70 percent reduction in violence — in what everyone said was completely impossible and you couldn't do. 
+And that made me think that, if we can get 70 percent in Afghanistan, then surely we can get 70 percent reduction everywhere. 
+We have to go for a global truce. 
+We have to utilize this day of ceasefire and nonviolence and go for a global truce, go for the largest recorded cessation of hostilities, both domestically and internationally, ever recorded. 
+That's exactly what we must do. 
+And on the 21st of September this year, we're going to launch that campaign at the O2 Arena to go for that process, to try and create the largest recorded cessation of hostilities. 
+And we will utilize all kinds of things — have a dance and social media and visiting on Facebook and visit the website, sign the petition. 
+And it's in the six official languages of the United Nations. 
+And we'll globally link with government, inter-government, non-government, education, unions, sports. 
+And you can see the education box there. 
+We've got resources at the moment in 174 countries trying to get young people to be the driving force behind the vision of that global truce. 
+And obviously the life-saving is increased, the concepts help. 
+Linking up with the Olympics — I went and saw Seb Coe. I said, "" London 2012 is about truce. 
+Ultimately, that's what it's about. "" Why don't we all team up? Why don't we bring truce to life? 
+Why don't you support the process of the largest ever global truce? 
+We'll make a new film about this process. 
+We'll utilize sport and football. 
+On the Day of Peace, there's thousands of football matches all played, from the favelas of Brazil to wherever it might be. 
+So, utilizing all of these ways to inspire individual action. 
+And ultimately, we have to try that. 
+We have to work together. 
+And when I stand here in front of all of you, and the people who will watch these things, I'm excited, on behalf of everybody I've met, that there is a possibility that our world could unite, that we could come together as one, that we could lift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues, brought about by individuals. 
+I was with Brahimi, Ambassador Brahimi. 
+I think he's one of the most incredible men in relation to international politics — in Afghanistan, in Iraq. 
+He's an amazing man. 
+And I sat with him a few weeks ago. 
+And I said to him, "" Mr. Brahimi, is this nuts, going for a global truce? 
+Is this possible? Is it really possible that we could do this? "" He said, "" It's absolutely possible. "" I said, "" What would you do? 
+Would you go to governments and lobby and use the system? "" He said, "" No, I'd talk to the individuals. "" It's all about the individuals. 
+It's all about you and me. 
+It's all about partnerships. 
+It's about your constituencies; it's about your businesses. 
+Because together, by working together, I seriously think we can start to change things. 
+And there's a wonderful man sitting in this audience, and I don't know where he is, who said to me a few days ago — because I did a little rehearsal — and he said, "" I've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares, and one of them is white. "" And it then made me think about a glass of water, which is clear. 
+If you put one drop, one drop of something, in that water, it'll change it forever. 
+By working together, we can create peace one day. 
+Thank you TED. Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+Thanks a lot. (Applause) 
+Thank you very much. Thank you. 
+
+This cell phone started its trajectory in an artisanal mine in the Eastern Congo. 
+It's mined by armed gangs using slaves, child slaves, what the U.N. Security Council calls "" blood minerals, "" then traveled into some components and ended up in a factory in Shinjin in China. 
+That factory — over a dozen people have committed suicide already this year. 
+One man died after working a 36-hour shift. 
+We all love chocolate. 
+We buy it for our kids. 
+Eighty percent of the cocoa comes from Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana and it's harvested by children. 
+Cote d'Ivoire, we have a huge problem of child slaves. 
+Children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations. 
+Heparin — a blood thinner, a pharmaceutical product — starts out in artisanal workshops like this in China, because the active ingredient comes from pigs' intestines. 
+Your diamond — you've all heard, probably seen the movie "" Blood Diamond. "" This is a mine in Zimbabwe right now. 
+Cotton: Uzbekistan is the second biggest exporter of cotton on Earth. 
+Every year when it comes to the cotton harvest, the government shuts down the schools, puts the kids in buses, buses them to the cotton fields to spend three weeks harvesting the cotton. 
+It's forced child labor on an institutional scale. 
+And all of those products probably end their lives in a dump like this one in Manila. 
+These places, these origins, represent governance gaps. 
+That's the politest description I have for them. 
+These are the dark pools where global supply chains begin — the global supply chains, which bring us our favorite brand name products. 
+Some of these governance gaps are run by rogue states. 
+Some of them are not states anymore at all. 
+They're failed states. 
+Some of them are just countries who believe that deregulation or no regulation is the best way to attract investment, promote trade. 
+Either way, they present us with a huge moral and ethical dilemma. 
+I know that none of us want to be accessories after the fact of a human rights abuse in a global supply chain. 
+But right now, most of the companies involved in these supply chains don't have any way of assuring us that nobody had to mortgage their future, nobody had to sacrifice their rights to bring us our favorite brand name product. 
+Now, I didn't come here to depress you about the state of the global supply chain. 
+We need a reality check. 
+We need to recognize just how serious a deficit of rights we have. 
+This is an independent republic, probably a failed state. 
+It's definitely not a democratic state. 
+And right now, that independent republic of the supply chain is not being governed in a way that would satisfy us, that we can engage in ethical trade or ethical consumption. 
+Now, that's not a new story. 
+You've seen the documentaries of sweatshops making garments all over the world, even in developed countries. 
+You want to see the classic sweatshop, meet me at Madison Square Garden, I'll take you down the street, and I'll show you a Chinese sweatshop. 
+But take the example of heparin. 
+It's a pharmaceutical product. 
+You expect that the supply chain that gets it to the hospital, probably squeaky clean. 
+The problem is that the active ingredient in there — as I mentioned earlier — comes from pigs. 
+The main American manufacturer of that active ingredient decided a few years ago to relocate to China because it's the world's biggest supplier of pigs. 
+And their factory in China — which probably is pretty clean — is getting all of the ingredients from backyard abattoirs, where families slaughter pigs and extract the ingredient. 
+So a couple of years ago, we had a scandal which killed about 80 people around the world, because of contaminants that crept into the heparin supply chain. 
+Worse, some of the suppliers realized that they could substitute a product which mimicked heparin in tests. 
+This substitute cost nine dollars a pound, whereas real heparin, the real ingredient, cost 900 dollars a pound. 
+A no-brainer. 
+The problem was that it killed more people. 
+And so you're asking yourself, "" How come the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed this to happen? 
+How did the Chinese State Agency for Food and Drugs allow this to happen? "" And the answer is quite simple: the Chinese define these facilities as chemical facilities, not pharmaceutical facilities, so they don't audit them. 
+And the USFDA has a jurisdictional problem. 
+This is offshore. 
+They actually do conduct a few investigations overseas — about a dozen a year — maybe 20 in a good year. 
+There are 500 of these facilities producing active ingredients in China alone. 
+In fact, about 80 percent of the active ingredients in medicines now come from offshore, particularly China and India, and we don't have a governance system. 
+We don't have a regulatory system able to ensure that that production is safe. 
+We don't have a system to ensure that human rights, basic dignity, are ensured. 
+So at a national level — and we work in about 60 different countries — at a national level we've got a serious breakdown in the ability of governments to regulate production on their own soil. 
+And the real problem with the global supply chain is that it's supranational. 
+So governments who are failing, who are dropping the ball at a national level, have even less ability to get their arms around the problem at an international level. 
+And you can just look at the headlines. 
+Take Copenhagen last year — complete failure of governments to do the right thing in the face of an international challenge. 
+Take the G20 meeting a couple of weeks ago — stepped back from its commitments of just a few months ago. 
+You can take any one of the major global challenges we've discussed this week and ask yourself, where is the leadership from governments to step up and come up with solutions, responses, to those international problems? 
+And the simple answer is they can't. They're national. 
+Their voters are local. 
+They have parochial interests. 
+They can't subordinate those interests to the greater global public good. 
+So, if we're going to ensure the delivery of the key public goods at an international level — in this case, in the global supply chain — we have to come up with a different mechanism. 
+We need a different machine. 
+Fortunately, we have some examples. 
+In the 1990s, there were a whole series of scandals concerning the production of brand name goods in the U.S. — child labor, forced labor, serious health and safety abuses. 
+And eventually President Clinton, in 1996, convened a meeting at the White House, invited industry, human rights NGOs, trade unions, the Department of Labor, got them all in a room and said, "" Look, I don't want globalization to be a race to the bottom. 
+I don't know how to prevent that, but I'm at least going to use my good offices to get you folks together to come up with a response. "" So they formed a White House task force, and they spent about three years arguing about who takes how much responsibility in the global supply chain. 
+Companies didn't feel it was their responsibility. 
+They don't own those facilities. 
+They don't employ those workers. 
+They're not legally liable. 
+Everybody else at the table said, "" Folks, that doesn't cut it. 
+You have a custodial duty, a duty of care, to make sure that that product gets from wherever to the store in a way that allows us to consume it, without fear of our safety, or without having to sacrifice our conscience to consume that product. "" So they agreed, "" Okay, what we'll do is we agree on a common set of standards, code of conduct. 
+We'll apply that throughout our global supply chain regardless of ownership or control. 
+We'll make it part of the contract. "" And that was a stroke of absolute genius, because what they did was they harnessed the power of the contract, private power, to deliver public goods. 
+And let's face it, the contract from a major multinational brand to a supplier in India or China has much more persuasive value than the local labor law, the local environmental regulations, the local human rights standards. 
+Those factories will probably never see an inspector. 
+If the inspector did come along, it would be amazing if they were able to resist the bribe. 
+Even if they did their jobs, and they cited those facilities for their violations, the fine would be derisory. 
+But you lose that contract for a major brand name, that's the difference between staying in business or going bankrupt. 
+That makes a difference. 
+So what we've been able to do is we've been able to harness the power and the influence of the only truly transnational institution in the global supply chain, that of the multinational company, and get them to do the right thing, get them to use that power for good, to deliver the key public goods. 
+Now of course, this doesn't come naturally to multinational companies. 
+They weren't set up to do this. They're set up to make money. 
+But they are extremely efficient organizations. 
+They have resources, and if we can add the will, the commitment, they know how to deliver that product. 
+Now, getting there is not easy. 
+Those supply chains I put up on the screen earlier, they're not there. 
+You need a safe space. 
+You need a place where people can come together, sit down without fear of judgment, without recrimination, to actually face the problem, agree on the problem and come up with solutions. 
+We can do it. The technical solutions are there. 
+The problem is the lack of trust, the lack of confidence, the lack of partnership between NGOs, campaign groups, civil society organizations and multinational companies. 
+If we can put those two together in a safe space, get them to work together, we can deliver public goods right now, or in extremely short supply. 
+This is a radical proposition, and it's crazy to think that if you're a 15-year-old Bangladeshi girl leaving your rural village to go and work in a factory in Dhaka — 22, 23, 24 dollars a month — your best chance of enjoying rights at work is if that factory is producing for a brand name company which has got a code of conduct and made that code of conduct part of the contract. 
+It's crazy. 
+Multinationals are protecting human rights. 
+I know there's going to be disbelief. 
+You'll say, "" How can we trust them? "" Well, we don't. 
+It's the old arms control phrase: "Trust, but verify." 
+So we audit. 
+We take their supply chain, we take all the factory names, we do a random sample, we send inspectors on an unannounced basis to inspect those facilities, and then we publish the results. 
+Transparency is absolutely critical to this. 
+You can call yourself responsible, but responsibility without accountability often doesn't work. 
+So what we're doing is, we're not only enlisting the multinationals, we're giving them the tools to deliver this public good — respect for human rights — and we're checking. 
+You don't need to believe me. You shouldn't believe me. 
+Go to the website. Look at the audit results. 
+Ask yourself, is this company behaving in a socially responsible way? 
+Can I buy that product without compromising my ethics? 
+That's the way the system works. 
+I hate the idea that governments are not protecting human rights around the world. I hate the idea 
+that governments have dropped this ball and I can't get used to the idea that somehow we can't get them to do their jobs. 
+I've been at this for 30 years, and in that time I've seen the ability, the commitment, the will of government to do this decline, and I don't see them making a comeback right now. 
+So we started out thinking this was a stopgap measure. 
+We're now thinking that, in fact, this is probably the start of a new way of regulating and addressing international challenges. 
+Call it network governance. Call it what you will. 
+The private actors, companies and NGOs, are going to have to get together to face the major challenges we are going to face. 
+Just look at pandemics — swine flu, bird flu, H1N1. 
+Look at the health systems in so many countries. 
+Do they have the resources to face up to a serious pandemic? 
+No. 
+Could the private sector and NGOs get together and marshal a response? 
+Absolutely. 
+What they lack is that safe space to come together, agree and move to action. 
+That's what we're trying to provide. 
+I know as well that this often seems like an overwhelming level of responsibility for people to assume. 
+"" You want me to deliver human rights throughout my global supply chain. 
+There are thousands of suppliers in there. "" It seems too daunting, too dangerous, for any company to take on. 
+But there are companies. 
+We have 4,000 companies who are members. 
+Some of them are very, very large companies. 
+The sporting goods industry, in particular, stepped up to the plate and have done it. 
+The example, the role model, is there. 
+And whenever we discuss one of these problems that we have to address — child labor in cottonseed farms in India — this year we will monitor 50,000 cottonseed farms in India. 
+It seems overwhelming. 
+The numbers just make you want to zone out. 
+But we break it down to some basic realities. 
+And human rights comes down to a very simple proposition: can I give this person their dignity back? 
+Poor people, people whose human rights have been violated — the crux of that is the loss of dignity, the lack of dignity. 
+It starts with just giving people back their dignity. 
+I was sitting in a slum outside Gurgaon just next to Delhi, one of the flashiest, brightest new cities popping up in India right now, and I was talking to workers who worked in garment sweatshops down the road, and I asked them what message they would like me to take to the brands. 
+They didn't say money. 
+They said, "" The people who employ us treat us like we are less than human, like we don't exist. 
+Please ask them to treat us like human beings. "" That's my simple understanding of human rights. 
+That's my simple proposition to you, my simple plea to every decision-maker in this room, everybody out there. 
+We can all make a decision to come together and pick up the balls and run with the balls that governments have dropped. 
+If we don't do it, we're abandoning hope, we're abandoning our essential humanity, and I know that's not a place we want to be, and we don't have to be there. 
+So I appeal to you. 
+Join us, come into that safe space, and let's start to make this happen. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The old story about climate protection is that it's costly, or it would have been done already. 
+So government needs to make us do something painful to fix it. 
+The new story about climate protection is that it's not costly, but profitable. 
+This was a simple sign error, because it's cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel, as is well known to companies that do it all the time — for example, Dupont, SD micro electronics. 
+Many other firms — IBM — are reducing their energy intensity routinely six percent a year by fixing up their plants, and they get their money back in two or three years. 
+That's called a profit. 
+Now, similarly, the old story about oil is that if we wanted to save very much of it, it would be expensive, or we would have done it already, because markets are essentially perfect. 
+If, of course, that were true, there would be no innovation, and nobody could make any money. 
+But the new story about oil is the government doesn't have to force us to do painful things to get off oil — not just incrementally, but completely — quite the contrary. The United States, for example, can completely eliminate its use of oil and rejuvenate the economy at the same time, led by business for profit, because it's so much cheaper to save and substitute for the oil than to keep on buying it. 
+This process will also be catalyzed by the military for its own reasons of combat effectiveness and preventing conflict, particularly over oil. 
+This thesis is set out in a book called "" Winning the Oil Endgame "" that four colleagues and I wrote and have posted for free at Oilendgame.com — about 170,000 downloads so far. 
+And it was co-sponsored by the Pentagon — it's independent, it's peer-reviewed and all of the backup calculations are transparently posted for your perusal. 
+Now, a bit of economic history, I think, may be helpful here. 
+Around 1850, one of the biggest U.S. industries was whaling. 
+And whale oil lit practically every building. 
+But in the nine years before Drake struck oil, in 1859, at least five-sixths of that whale oil-illuminating market disappeared, thanks to fatal competitors, chiefly oil and gas made from coal, to which the whalers had not been paying attention. 
+So, very unexpectedly, they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales. 
+The remnant whale populations were saved by technological innovators and profit-maximizing capitalists. 
+(Laughter) And it's funny — it feels a bit like this now for oil. 
+We've been spending the last few decades accumulating a very powerful backlog of technologies for saving and substituting for oil, and no one had bothered to add them up before. 
+So when we did, we found some very surprising things. 
+Now, there are two big reasons to be concerned about oil. 
+Both national competitiveness and national security are at risk. 
+On the competitiveness front, we all know that Toyota has more market cap than the big three put together. 
+And serious competition from Europe, from Korea, and next is China, which will soon be a major net exporter of cars. 
+How long do you think it will take before you can drive home your new wally-badged Shanghai automotive super-efficient car? 
+Maybe a decade, according to my friends in Detroit. 
+China has an energy policy based on radical energy efficiency and leap-frog technology. 
+They're not going to export your uncle's Buick. 
+And after that comes India. 
+The point here is, these cars are going to be made super efficient. 
+The question is, who will make them? 
+Will we in the United States continue to import efficient cars to replace foreign oil, or will we make efficient cars and import neither the oil nor the cars? 
+That seems to make more sense. 
+The more we keep on using the oil, particularly the imported oil, the more we face a very obvious array of problems. 
+Our analysis assumes that they all cost nothing, but nothing is not the right number. 
+It could well be enough to double the oil price, for example. 
+And one of the worst of these is what it does to our standing in the world if other countries think that everything we do is about oil, if we have to treat countries that have oil differently than countries that don't have oil. 
+And our military get quite unhappy with having to stand guard on pipelines in Far-off-istan when what they actually signed up for was to protect American citizens. 
+They don't like fighting over oil, they don't like being in the sands and they don't like where the oil money goes and what sort of instability it creates. 
+Now, in order to avoid these problems, whatever you think they're worth, it's actually not that complicated. 
+We can save half the oil by using it more efficiently, at a cost of 12 dollars per saved barrel. 
+And then we can replace the other half with a combination of advanced bio-fuels and safe natural gas. 
+And that costs on average under 18 dollars a barrel. 
+And compared with the official forecast, that oil will cost 26 dollars a barrel in 2025, which is half of what we've been paying lately, that will save 70 billion dollars a year, starting quite soon. 
+Now, in order to do this we need to invest about 180 billion dollars: half of it to retool the car, truck and plane industries; half of it to build the advanced bio-fuel industry. 
+In the process, we will gain about a million good jobs, mainly rural. 
+And protect another million jobs now at risk, mainly in auto-making. 
+And we'll also get returns over 150 billion dollars a year. 
+So that's a very handsome return. 
+It's financeable in the private capital market. 
+But if you want it for the reasons I just mentioned, to happen sooner and with higher confidence, then — and also to expand choice and manage risk — then you might like some light-handed public policies that support rather than distorting or opposing the business logic. 
+And these policies work fine without taxes, subsidies or mandates. 
+They make a little net money for the treasury. 
+They have a broad trans-ideological appeal, and because we want them actually to happen, we figured out ways to do them that do not require much, if any, federal legislation, and can, indeed, be done administratively or at a state level. 
+Just to illustrate what to do about the nub of the problem, namely, light vehicles, here are four ultra-light carbon-composite concept cars with low drag, and all but the one at the upper left have hybrid drive. 
+You can sort of have it all with these things. 
+For example, this Opel two-seater does 155 miles an hour at 94 miles a gallon. 
+This muscle car from Toyota: 408 horsepower in an ultra-light that does zero to 60 in well under four seconds, and still gets 32 miles a gallon. I'll say more later about this. 
+And in the upper left, a pioneering effort 14 years ago by GM — 84 miles a gallon without even using a hybrid, in a four-seater. 
+Well, saving that fuel, 69 percent of the fuel in light vehicles costs about 57 cents per saved gallon. 
+But it's even a better deal for heavy trucks, where you save a similar amount at 25 cents a gallon, with better aerodynamics and tires and engines, and so on, and taking out weight so you can put it into payload. 
+So you can double efficiency with a 60 percent internal rate of return. 
+Then you can go even further, almost tripling efficiency with some operational improvements, double the big haulers' margins. 
+And we intend to use those numbers to create demand pull, and flip the market. 
+In the airplane business, it's again a similar story where the first 20 percent fuel saving is free, as Boeing is now demonstrating in its new Dreamliner. 
+But then the next generation of planes saves about half. 
+Again, much cheaper than buying the fuel. 
+And if you go over the next 15 years or so to a blended-wing body, kind of a flying wing with internal engines, then you get about a factor three efficiency improvement at comparable or lower cost. 
+Let me focus a minute on the light vehicles, the cars and light trucks, because we all know the most about those; probably everybody here drives one. 
+And yet we may not realize that in a standard sedan, of all the fuel energy you feed into the car, seven-eighths never gets to the wheels; it's lost first in the engine, idling at zero miles a gallon, the power train and accessories. 
+So then of the energy that does get to the wheels, only an eighth of it, half of that, goes to heat the tires on the road, or to heat the air the car pushes aside. 
+And only this little bit, only six percent actually ends up accelerating the car and then heating the brakes when you stop. 
+In fact, since 95 percent of the weight you're moving is the car not the driver, less than one percent of the fuel energy ends up moving the driver. 
+This is not very gratifying after more than a century of devoted engineering effort. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Moreover, three-fourths of the fuel use is caused by the weight of the car. 
+And it's obvious from the diagram that every unit of energy you save at the wheels is going to avoid wasting another seven units of energy getting that energy to the wheels. 
+So there's huge leverage for making the car a lot lighter. 
+And the reason this has not been very seriously examined before is there was a common assumption in the industry that — well, then it might not be safe if you got whacked by a heavy car, and it would cost a lot more to make, because the only way we know how to make cars much lighter was to use expensive light metals like aluminum and magnesium. 
+But these objections are now vanishing through advances in materials. 
+For example, we use a lot of carbon-fiber composites in sporting goods. 
+And it turns out that these are quite remarkable for safety. 
+Here's a handmade McLaren SLR carbon car that got t-boned by a Golf. 
+The Golf was totaled. 
+The McLaren just popped off and scratched the side panel. 
+They'll pop it back on and fix the scratch later. 
+But if this McLaren were to run into a wall at 65 miles an hour, the entire crash energy would be absorbed by a couple of woven carbon-fiber composite cones, weighing a total of 15 pounds, hidden in the front end. 
+Because these materials could actually absorb six to 12 times as much energy per pound as steel, and do so a lot more smoothly. 
+And this means we've just cracked the conundrum of safety and weight. 
+We could make cars bigger, which is protective, but make them light. 
+Whereas if we made them heavy, they'd be both hostile and inefficient. 
+And when you make them light in the right way, that can be simpler and cheaper to make. 
+You can end up saving money, and lives, and oil, all at the same time. 
+I showed here two years ago a little bit about a design of your basic, uncompromised, quintupled-efficiency suburban-assault vehicle — (Laughter) — and this is a complete virtual design that is production-costed manufacturable. 
+And the process needed to make it is actually coming toward the market quite nicely. 
+We figured out a kind of a digital inkjet printer for this very stiff, strong, carbon-composite material, and then ways to thermoform it, because it's a combination of carbon and nylon, into whatever complex shapes you want, like the one just shown at the auto show by one of the tier-one suppliers. 
+And the manufacturing you can do this way gets radically simplified. 
+Because the auto body has only, say, 14 parts, instead of 100, 150. 
+Each one is formed by one fairly cheap die set, instead of four expensive ones for stamping steel. 
+Each of the parts can be easily lifted with no hoist. 
+They snap together like a kid's toy. 
+So you got rid of the body shop. 
+And if you want, you can lay color in the mold, and get rid of the paint shop. 
+Those are the two hardest and costliest parts of making a car. 
+So you end up with at least two-fifths lower capital intensity than the leanest plant in the industry, which GM has in Lansing. 
+The plant also gets smaller. 
+Now, when you go through a similar analysis for every way we use oil, including buildings, industry, feedstocks and so on, you find that of the 28 million barrels a day the government says we will need in 2025, well, about eight of that can be removed by efficiency by then, with another seven still being saved as the vehicle stocks turn over, at an average cost of only 12 bucks a barrel, instead of 26 for buying the oil. 
+And then another six can be made robustly, competitively, from cellulosic ethanol and a little bio-diesel, without interfering at all with the water or land needs of crop production. 
+There is a huge amount of gas to be saved, about half the projected gas at about an eighth of its price. 
+And here are some no-brainer substitutions of it, with lots left over. 
+So much, in fact, that after you've handled the domestic oil forecast from areas already approved, you have only this little bit left, and let's see how we can meet that, because there's a pretty flexible menu of ways. 
+We could, of course, buy more efficiency. 
+Maybe you ought to buy efficiency at 26 bucks instead of 12. 
+Or wait to capture the second half of it. 
+Or we could, of course, just get this little bit by continuing to import some Canadian and Mexican oil, or the ethanol the Brazilians would love to sell us. 
+But they'll sell it to Japan and China instead, because we have tariff barriers to protect our corn farmers, and they don't. 
+Or we could use the saved gas directly to cover all of this balance, or if we used it as hydrogen, which is more profitable and efficient, we'd get rid of the domestic oil too. 
+And that doesn't even count, for example, that available land in the Dakotas can cost effectively make enough wind power to run every highway vehicle in the country. 
+So we have lots of options. 
+And the choice of menu and timing is quite flexible. 
+Now, to make this happen quicker and with higher confidence, there is a few ways government could help. 
+For example, fee-bates, a combination of a fee and a rebate in any size class of vehicle you want, can increase the price of inefficient vehicles and correspondingly pay you a rebate for efficient vehicles. 
+You're not paid to change size class. 
+You are paid to pick efficiency within a size class, in a way equivalent to looking at all fourteen years of life-cycle fuel savings rather than just the first two or three. 
+This expands choice rapidly in the market, and actually makes more money for automakers as well. 
+I'd like to deal with the lack of affordable personal mobility in this country by making it very cheaply possible for low-income families to get efficient, reliable, warranted new cars that they could otherwise never get. 
+And for each car so financed, scrap almost one clunker, preferably the dirtiest ones. 
+This creates a new million-car-a-year market for Detroit from customers they weren't going to get otherwise, because they weren't creditworthy and could never afford a new car. 
+And Detroit will make money on every unit. 
+It turns out that if, say, African-American and white households had the same car ownership, it would cut employment disparity about in half by providing better access to job opportunities. 
+So this is a huge social win, too. 
+Governments buy hundreds of thousands of cars a year. 
+There are smart ways to buy them and to aggregate that purchasing power to bring very efficient vehicles into the market faster. 
+And we could even do an X Prize-style golden carrot that's worth stretching further for. 
+For example, a billion-dollar prize for the first U.S. automaker to sell 200,000 really advanced vehicles, like some you saw earlier. 
+Then the legacy airlines can't afford to buy the efficient new planes they desperately need to cut their fuel bills, but if you felt philosophically you wanted to do anything about that, there are ways to finance it. 
+And at the same time to scrap inefficient old planes, so that if they were otherwise to come back in the air, they would waste more oil, and block the uptake of efficient, new planes. 
+Those part inefficient planes are worth more to society dead than alive. 
+We ought to take them out back and shoot them, and put bounty hunters after them. 
+Then there's an important military role. 
+That in creating the move to high-volume, low-cost commercial production of these kinds of materials, or for that matter, ultra-light steels that are a good backup technology, the military can do the trick it did in turning DARPAnet into the Internet. 
+Just turn it over to the private sector, and we have an Internet. 
+The same for GPS. 
+The same for the modern semi-conductor industry. 
+That is, military science and technology that they need can create the advanced materials-industrial cluster that transforms its civilian economy and gets the country off oil, which would be a huge contribution to eliminating conflict over oil and advancing national and global security. 
+Then we need to retool the car industry and do retraining, and shift the convergence of the energy and ag-value chains to shift faster from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates, and get out of our own way in other ways. 
+And make the transition to more efficient vehicles go faster. 
+But here's how the whole thing fits together. 
+Instead of official forecasts of oil use and oil imports going forever up, they can turn down with the 12 dollars a barrel efficiency, down steeply by adding the supply-side substitutions at 18 bucks, all implemented at slower rates than we've done before when we paid attention. 
+And if we start adding tranches of hydrogen in there, we are rapidly off imports and completely off oil in the 2040s. 
+And the one thing I'd like to point out here is that we've done this before. 
+In this eight-year period, 1977 to 85, when we last paid attention, the economy grew 27 percent, oil use fell 17 percent, oil imports fell 50 percent, oil imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87 percent. 
+They would have been gone if we'd kept that up one more year. 
+Well, that was with very old technologies and delivery methods. 
+We could rerun that play a lot better now. 
+And yet what we proved then is the U.S. has more market power than OPEC. 
+Ours is on the demand side. 
+We are the Saudi Arabia of "" nega-barrels. "" (Laughter) We can use less oil faster than they can conveniently sell less oil. 
+(Applause) Whatever your reason for wanting to do this, whether you're concerned about national security or price volatility — (Laughter) — or jobs, or the planet, or your grand-kids, it seems to me that this is an oil endgame that we should all be playing to win. 
+Please download your copy, and thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Imagine, if you will — a gift. 
+I'd like for you to picture it in your mind. 
+It's not too big — about the size of a golf ball. 
+So envision what it looks like all wrapped up. 
+But before I show you what's inside, I will tell you, it's going to do incredible things for you. 
+It will bring all of your family together. 
+You will feel loved and appreciated like never before and reconnect with friends and acquaintances you haven't heard from in years. 
+Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you. 
+It will recalibrate what's most important in your life. 
+It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith. 
+You'll have a new understanding and trust in your body. 
+You'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy. 
+You'll expand your vocabulary, meet new people, and you'll have a healthier lifestyle. 
+And get this — you'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing. 
+You'll eat countless gourmet meals. 
+Flowers will arrive by the truckload. 
+People will say to you, "You look great. Have you had any work done?" 
+And you'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs. 
+You'll be challenged, inspired, motivated and humbled. 
+Your life will have new meaning. 
+Peace, health, serenity, happiness, nirvana. 
+The price? 
+$55,000, and that's an incredible deal. 
+By now I know you're dying to know what it is and where you can get one. 
+Does Amazon carry it? 
+Does it have the Apple logo on it? 
+Is there a waiting list? 
+Not likely. 
+This gift came to me about five months ago. 
+It looked more like this when it was all wrapped up — not quite so pretty. 
+And this, and then this. 
+It was a rare gem — a brain tumor, hemangioblastoma — the gift that keeps on giving. 
+And while I'm okay now, I wouldn't wish this gift for you. 
+I'm not sure you'd want it. 
+But I wouldn't change my experience. 
+It profoundly altered my life in ways I didn't expect in all the ways I just shared with you. 
+So the next time you're faced with something that's unexpected, unwanted and uncertain, consider that it just may be a gift. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Ladies and gentlemen, gather around. 
+I would love to share with you a story. 
+Once upon a time in 19th century Germany, there was the book. 
+Now during this time, the book was the king of storytelling. 
+It was venerable. 
+It was ubiquitous. 
+But it was a little bit boring. 
+Because in its 400 years of existence, storytellers never evolved the book as a storytelling device. 
+But then one author arrived, and he changed the game forever. 
+(Music) His name was Lothar, Lothar Meggendorfer. 
+Lothar Meggendorfer put his foot down, and he said, "" Genug ist genug! "" He grabbed his pen, he snatched his scissors. 
+This man refused to fold to the conventions of normalcy and just decided to fold. 
+History would know Lothar Meggendorfer as — who else? — the world's first true inventor of the children's pop-up book. 
+(Music) For this delight and for this wonder, people rejoiced. 
+(Cheering) They were happy because the story survived, and that the world would keep on spinning. 
+Lothar Meggendorfer wasn't the first to evolve the way a story was told, and he certainly wasn't the last. 
+Whether storytellers realized it or not, they were channeling Meggendorfer's spirit when they moved opera to vaudville, radio news to radio theater, film to film in motion to film in sound, color, 3D, on VHS and on DVD. 
+There seemed to be no cure for this Meggendorferitis. 
+And things got a lot more fun when the Internet came around. 
+(Laughter) Because, not only could people broadcast their stories throughout the world, but they could do so using what seemed to be an infinite amount of devices. 
+For example, one company would tell a story of love through its very own search engine. 
+One Taiwanese production studio would interpret American politics in 3D. 
+(Laughter) And one man would tell the stories of his father by using a platform called Twitter to communicate the excrement his father would gesticulate. 
+And after all this, everyone paused; they took a step back. 
+They realized that, in 6,000 years of storytelling, they've gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls. 
+And this was a cause for celebration. 
+The art of storytelling has remained unchanged. 
+And for the most part, the stories are recycled. 
+But the way that humans tell the stories has always evolved with pure, consistent novelty. 
+And they remembered a man, one amazing German, every time a new storytelling device popped up next. 
+And for that, the audience — the lovely, beautiful audience — would live happily ever after. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Some 17 years ago, I became allergic to Delhi's air. 
+My doctors told me that my lung capacity had gone down to 70 percent, and it was killing me. 
+With the help of IIT, TERI, and learnings from NASA, we discovered that there are three basic green plants, common green plants, with which we can grow all the fresh air we need indoors to keep us healthy. 
+We've also found that you can reduce the fresh air requirements into the building, while maintaining industry indoor air-quality standards. 
+The three plants are Areca palm, Mother-in-Law's Tongue and money plant. 
+The botanical names are in front of you. 
+Areca palm is a plant which removes CO2 and converts it into oxygen. 
+We need four shoulder-high plants per person, and in terms of plant care, we need to wipe the leaves every day in Delhi, and perhaps once a week in cleaner-air cities. 
+We had to grow them in vermi manure, which is sterile, or hydroponics, and take them outdoors every three to four months. 
+The second plant is Mother-in-law's Tongue, which is again a very common plant, and we call it a bedroom plant, because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night. 
+And we need six to eight waist-high plants per person. 
+The third plant is money plant, and this is again a very common plant; preferably grows in hydroponics. 
+And this particular plant removes formaldehydes and other volatile chemicals. 
+With these three plants, you can grow all the fresh air you need. 
+In fact, you could be in a bottle with a cap on top, and you would not die at all, and you would not need any fresh air. 
+We have tried these plants at our own building in Delhi, which is a 50,000-square-feet, 20-year-old building. 
+And it has close to 1,200 such plants for 300 occupants. 
+Our studies have found that there is a 42 percent probability of one's blood oxygen going up by one percent if one stays indoors in this building for 10 hours. 
+The government of India has discovered or published a study to show that this is the healthiest building in New Delhi. 
+And the study showed that, compared to other buildings, there is a reduced incidence of eye irritation by 52 percent, respiratory systems by 34 percent, headaches by 24 percent, lung impairment by 12 percent and asthma by nine percent. 
+And this study has been published on September 8, 2008, and it's available on the government of India website. 
+Our experience points to an amazing increase in human productivity by over 20 percent by using these plants. 
+And also a reduction in energy requirements in buildings by an outstanding 15 percent, because you need less fresh air. 
+We are now replicating this in a 1.75-million-square-feet building, which will have 60,000 indoor plants. 
+Why is this important? 
+It is also important for the environment, because the world's energy requirements are expected to grow by 30 percent in the next decade. 
+40 percent of the world's energy is taken up by buildings currently, and 60 percent of the world's population will be living in buildings in cities with a population of over one million in the next 15 years. 
+And there is a growing preference for living and working in air-conditioned places. 
+"Be the change you want to see in the world," said Mahatma Gandhi. 
+And thank you for listening. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Laughter) I was afraid of womanhood. 
+Not that I'm not afraid now, but I've learned to pretend. 
+I've learned to be flexible. 
+In fact, I've developed some interesting tools to help me deal with this fear. 
+Let me explain. 
+Back in the '50s and' 60s, when I was growing up, little girls were supposed to be kind and thoughtful and pretty and gentle and soft, and we were supposed to fit into roles that were sort of shadowy — really not quite clear what we were supposed to be. 
+(Laughter) There were plenty of role models all around us. 
+We had our mothers, our aunts, our cousins, our sisters, and of course, the ever-present media bombarding us with images and words, telling us how to be. 
+Now my mother was different. 
+She was a homemaker, but she and I didn't go out and do girlie things together, and she didn't buy me pink outfits. 
+Instead, she knew what I needed, and she bought me a book of cartoons. 
+And I just ate it up. 
+I drew, and I drew, and since I knew that humor was acceptable in my family, I could draw, do what I wanted to do, and not have to perform, not have to speak — I was very shy — and I could still get approval. 
+I was launched as a cartoonist. 
+Now when we're young, we don't always know. We know there are rules out there, but we don't always know — we don't perform them right, even though we are imprinted at birth with these things, and we're told what the most important color in the world is. 
+We're told what shape we're supposed to be in. 
+(Laughter) We're told what to wear — (Laughter) — and how to do our hair — (Laughter) — and how to behave. 
+Now the rules that I'm talking about are constantly being monitored by the culture. 
+We're being corrected, and the primary policemen are women, because we are the carriers of the tradition. 
+We pass it down from generation to generation. 
+Not only that — we always have this vague notion that something's expected of us. 
+And on top of all off these rules, they keep changing. 
+(Laughter) We don't know what's going on half the time, so it puts us in a very tenuous position. (Laughter) 
+Now if you don't like these rules, and many of us don't — I know I didn't, and I still don't, even though I follow them half the time, not quite aware that I'm following them — what better way than to change them [than] with humor? 
+Humor relies on the traditions of a society. 
+It takes what we know, and it twists it. 
+It takes the codes of behavior and the codes of dress, and it makes it unexpected, and that's what elicits a laugh. 
+Now what if you put together women and humor? 
+I think you can get change. 
+Because women are on the ground floor, and we know the traditions so well, we can bring a different voice to the table. 
+Now I started drawing in the middle of a lot of chaos. 
+I grew up not far from here in Washington D.C. 
+during the Civil Rights movement, the assassinations, the Watergate hearings and then the feminist movement, and I think I was drawing, trying to figure out what was going on. 
+And then also my family was in chaos, and I drew to try to bring my family together — (Laughter) — try to bring my family together with laughter. 
+It didn't work. 
+My parents got divorced, and my sister was arrested. 
+But I found my place. 
+I found that I didn't have to wear high heels, I didn't have to wear pink, and I could feel like I fit in. 
+Now when I was a little older, in my 20s, I realized there are not many women in cartooning. 
+And I thought, "" Well, maybe I can break the little glass ceiling of cartooning, "" and so I did. I became a cartoonist. 
+And then I thought — in my 40s I started thinking, "" Well, why don't I do something? 
+I always loved political cartoons, so why don't I do something with the content of my cartoons to make people think about the stupid rules that we're following as well as laugh? "" Now my perspective is a particularly — (Laughter) — my perspective is a particularly American perspective. 
+I can't help it. I live here. 
+Even though I've traveled a lot, I still think like an American woman. 
+But I believe that the rules that I'm talking about are universal, of course — that each culture has its different codes of behavior and dress and traditions, and each woman has to deal with these same things that we do here in the U.S. 
+Consequently, we have. 
+Women, because we're on the ground, we know the tradition. 
+We have amazing antennae. 
+Now my work lately has been to collaborate with international cartoonists, which I so enjoy, and it's given me a greater appreciation for the power of cartoons to get at the truth, to get at the issues quickly and succinctly. 
+And not only that, it can get to the viewer through not only the intellect, but through the heart. 
+My work also has allowed me to collaborate with women cartoonists from across the world — countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Argentina, France — and we have sat together and laughed and talked and shared our difficulties. 
+And these women are working so hard to get their voices heard in some very difficult circumstances. 
+But I feel blessed to be able to work with them. 
+And we talk about how women have such strong perceptions, because of our tenuous position and our role as tradition-keepers, that we can have the great potential to be change-agents. 
+And I think, I truly believe, that we can change this thing one laugh at a time. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a storyteller. 
+And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "" the danger of the single story. "" I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. 
+I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, (Laughter) and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) 
+My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. 
+(Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. 
+What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. 
+There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. 
+But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. 
+I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. 
+They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. 
+But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. 
+So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. 
+I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. 
+My father was a professor. 
+My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. 
+And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." 
+So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. 
+Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. 
+I was startled. 
+It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. 
+All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. 
+Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. 
+She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. 
+She asked if she could listen to what she called my "" tribal music, "" and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. 
+(Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. 
+Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. 
+My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. 
+In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. 
+I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. 
+But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. 
+Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. 
+But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. 
+Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "" India, Africa and other countries. "" (Laughter) So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. 
+If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. 
+This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. 
+Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. 
+After referring to the black Africans as "" beasts who have no houses, "" he writes, "" They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts. "" Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. 
+But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "" half devil, half child. "" And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "" authentically African. "" Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, 
+that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. 
+In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. 
+The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. 
+Therefore they were not authentically African. 
+But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. 
+A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. 
+The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. 
+And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. 
+There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. 
+I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. 
+And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. 
+I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. 
+So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. 
+There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "" nkali. "" It's a noun that loosely translates to "" to be greater than another. "" Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. 
+Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. 
+The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "" secondly. "" Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. 
+Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. 
+I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. 
+I told him that I had just read a novel called "" American Psycho "" — (Laughter) — and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter) 
+But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. 
+This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. 
+I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. 
+I did not have a single story of America. 
+When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. 
+(Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. 
+But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. 
+One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. 
+I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. 
+And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. 
+And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. 
+But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. 
+The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. 
+Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. 
+But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. 
+I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. 
+The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. 
+It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. 
+So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? 
+What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? 
+What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? 
+What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "" a balance of stories. "" What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? 
+Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "" I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. 
+Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen... "" (Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. 
+Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. 
+Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? 
+What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? 
+What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. 
+What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? 
+What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? 
+What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? 
+Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? 
+Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. 
+I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. 
+My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. 
+Many stories matter. 
+Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. 
+Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. 
+The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. 
+She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. 
+"" They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained. "" I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. 
+
+(Laughter) (Applause) So this has actually been a little bit startling to the game-development community. (Laughter) 
+
+I was born and raised in Sierra Leone, a small and very beautiful country in West Africa, a country rich both in physical resources and creative talent. 
+However, Sierra Leone is infamous for a decade-long rebel war in the '90s when entire villages were burnt down. 
+An estimated 8,000 men, women and children had their arms and legs amputated during this time. 
+As my family and I ran for safety when I was about 12 from one of those attacks, I resolved that I would do everything I could to ensure that my own children would not go through the same experiences we had. 
+They would, in fact, be part of a Sierra Leone where war and amputation were no longer a strategy for gaining power. 
+As I watched people who I knew, loved ones, recover from this devastation, one thing that deeply troubled me was that many of the amputees in the country would not use their prostheses. 
+The reason, I would come to find out, was that their prosthetic sockets were painful because they did not fit well. 
+The prosthetic socket is the part in which the amputee inserts their residual limb, and which connects to the prosthetic ankle. 
+
+You will understand nothing with my type of English. 
+It's good for you because you can have a break after all these fantastic people. 
+I must tell you I am like that, not very comfortable, because usually, in life, I think my job is absolutely useless. 
+I mean, I feel useless. 
+Now after Carolyn, and all the other guys, I feel like shit. 
+And definitively, I don't know why I am here, but — you know the nightmare you can have, like you are an impostor, you arrive at the opera, and they push you, "" You must sing! "" I don't know. (Laughter) So, so, because I have nothing to show, nothing to say, we shall try to speak about something else. 
+We can start, if you want, by understanding — it's just to start, it's not interesting, but — how I work. 
+When somebody comes to me and ask for what I am known, I mean, yes, lemon squeezer, toilet brush, toothpick, beautiful toilet seats, and why not — a toothbrush? 
+I don't try to design the toothbrush. 
+I don't try to say, "" Oh, that will be a beautiful object, "" or something like that. 
+That doesn't interest me. 
+Because there is different types of design. 
+The one, we can call it the cynical design, that means the design invented by Raymond Loewy in the '50s, who said, what is ugly is a bad sale, la laideur se vend mal, which is terrible. 
+It means the design must be just the weapon for marketing, for producer to make product more sexy, like that, they sell more: it's shit, it's obsolete, it's ridiculous. 
+I call that the cynical design. 
+After, there is the narcissistic design: it's a fantastic designer who designs only for other fantastic designers. (Laughter) After, there is people like me, who try to deserve to exist, and who are so ashamed to make this useless job, who try to do it in another way, and they try, I try, to not make the object for the object but for the result, for the profit for the human being, the person who will use it. 
+If we take the toothbrush — I don't think about the toothbrush. 
+I think, "" What will be the effect of the brush in the mouth? "" And to understand what will be the effect of the toothbrush in the mouth, I must imagine: Who owns this mouth? 
+What is the life of the owner of this mouth? In what society [does] this guy live? 
+What civilization creates this society? 
+What animal species creates this civilization? 
+When I arrive — and I take one minute, I am not so intelligent — when I arrive at the level of animal species, that becomes real interesting. 
+Me, I have strictly no power to change anything. 
+But when I come back, I can understand why I shall not do it, because today to not do it, it's more positive than do it, or how I shall do it. 
+But to come back, where I am at the animal species, there is things to see. 
+There is things to see, there is the big challenge. 
+The big challenge in front of us. 
+Because there is not a human production which exists outside of what I call "" the big image. "" The big image is our story, our poetry, our romanticism. 
+Our poetry is our mutation, our life. 
+We must remember, and we can see that in any book of my son of 10 years old, that life appears four billion years ago, around — four billion point two? 
+Voice offstage: Four point five. 
+Yes, point five, OK, OK, OK! (Laughter) I'm a designer, that's all, of Christmas gifts. 
+And before, there was this soup, called "" soupe primordiale, "" this first soup — bloop bloop bloop — sort of dirty mud, no life, nothing. 
+So then — pshoo-shoo — lightning — pshoo — arrive — pshoo-shoo — makes life — bloop bloop — and that dies. 
+Some million years after — pshoo-shoo, bloop-bloop — ah, wake up! 
+At the end, finally, that succeeds, and life appears. 
+We was so, so stupid. The most stupid bacteria. 
+Even, I think, we copy our way to reproduce, you know what I mean, and something of — oh no, forget it. 
+After, we become a fish; after, we become a frog; after, we become a monkey; after, we become what we are today: a super-monkey, and the fun is, the super-monkey we are today, is at half of the story. 
+Can you imagine? From that stupid bacteria to us, with a microphone, with a computer, with an iPod: four billion years. 
+And we know, and especially Carolyn knows, that when the sun will implode, the earth will burn, explode, I don't know what, and this is scheduled for four, four billion years? 
+Yes, she said, something like that. OK, that means we are at half of the story. 
+Fantastic! It's a beauty! 
+Can you imagine? It's very symbolic. 
+Because the bacteria we was had no idea of what we are today. 
+And today, we have no idea of what we shall be in four billion years. 
+And this territory is fantastic. 
+That is our poetry. That is our beautiful story. 
+It's our romanticism. Mu-ta-tion. We are mutants. 
+And if we don't deeply understand, if we don't integrate that we are mutants, we completely miss the story. 
+Because every generation thinks we are the final one. 
+We have a way to look at Earth like that, you know, "" I am the man. The final man. 
+You know, we mutate during four billion years before, but now, because it's me, we stop. Fin. (Laughter) For the end, for the eternity, it is one with a red jacket. "" Something like that. I am not sure of that. (Laughter) Because that is our intelligence of mutation and things like that. 
+There is so many things to do; it's so fresh. 
+And here is something: nobody is obliged to be a genius, but everybody is obliged to participate. 
+And to participate, for a mutant, there is a minimum of exercise, a minimum of sport. 
+We can say that. 
+The first, if you want — there is so many — but one which is very easy to do, is the duty of vision. 
+I can explain you. I shall try. 
+If you walk like that, it's OK, it's OK, you can walk, but perhaps, because you walk with the eyes like that, you will not see, oh, there is a hole. 
+And you will fall, and you will die. Dangerous. 
+That's why, perhaps, you will try to have this angle of vision. 
+OK, I can see, if I found something, up, up, and they continue, up up up. 
+I raise the angle of vision, but it's still very — selfish, selfish, egoiste — yes, selfish. 
+You, you survive. It's OK. 
+If you raise the level of your eyes a little more you go, "" I see you, oh my God you are here, how are you, I can help you, I can design for you a new toothbrush, new toilet brush, "" something like that. 
+I live in society; I live in community. 
+It's OK. You start to be in the territory of intelligence, we can say. 
+From this level, the more you can raise this angle of view, the more you will be important for the society. 
+The more you will rise, the more you will be important for the civilization. 
+The more you will rise, to see far and high, like that, the more you will be important for the story of our mutation. 
+That means intelligent people are in this angle. That is intelligence. 
+From this to here, that, it's genius. 
+Ptolemy, Eratosthenes, Einstein, things like that. 
+Nobody's obliged to be a genius. 
+It's better, but nobody. 
+Take care, in this training, to be a good mutant. 
+There is some danger, there is some trap. One trap: the vertical. 
+Because at the vertical of us, if you look like that, "Ah! my God, there is God. Ah! God!" 
+God is a trap. God is the answer when we don't know the answer. 
+That means, when your brain is not enough big, when you don't understand, you go, "" Ah, it's God, it's God. "" That's ridiculous. 
+That's why — jump, like that? No, don't jump. 
+Come back. Because, after, there is another trap. 
+If you look like that, you look to the past, or you look inside if you are very flexible, inside yourself. 
+It's called schizophrenia, and you are dead also. 
+That's why every morning, now, because you are a good mutant, you will raise your angle of view. 
+Out, more of the horizontal. You are an intelligence. 
+Never forget — like that, like that. 
+It's very, very, very important. 
+What, what else we can say about that? Why do that? 
+It's because we — if we look from far, we see our line of evolution. 
+This line of evolution is clearly positive. 
+From far, this line looks very smooth, like that. 
+But if you take a lens, like that, this line is ack, ack, ack, ack, ack. Like that. 
+It's made of light and shadow. 
+We can say light is civilization, shadow is barbaria. 
+And it's very important to know where we are. 
+Because some cycle, there is a spot in the cycle, and you have not the same duty in the different parts of the cycle. 
+That means, we can imagine — I don't say it was fantastic, but in the '80s, there was not too much war, like that, it was — we can imagine that the civilization can become civilized. 
+In this case, people like me are acceptable. 
+We can say, "" It's luxurious time. "" We have time to think, we have time to I don't know what, speak about art and things like that. 
+It's OK. We are in the light. 
+But sometimes, like today, we fall, we fall so fast, so fast to shadow, we fall so fast to barbaria. 
+With many, many, many, many face of barbaria. 
+Because it's not, the barbaria we have today, it's perhaps not the barbaria we think. 
+There is different type of barbaria. 
+That's why we must adapt. 
+That means, when barbaria is back, forget the beautiful chairs, forget the beautiful hotel, forget design, even — I'm sorry to say — forget art. 
+Forget all that. There is priority; there is urgency. 
+You must go back to politics, you must go back to radicalization, I'm sorry if that's not very English. 
+You must go back to fight, to battle. 
+That's why today I'm so ashamed to make this job. 
+That's why I am here, to try to do it the best possible. 
+But I know that even I do it the best possible — that's why I'm the best — it's nothing. 
+Because it's not the right time. 
+That's why I say that. I say that, because, I repeat, nothing exist if it's not in the good reason, the reason of our beautiful dream, of this civilization. 
+And because we must all work to finish this story. 
+Because the scenario of this civilization — about love, progress, and things like that — it's OK, but there is so many different, other scenarios of other civilizations. 
+This scenario, of this civilization, was about becoming powerful, intelligent, like this idea we have invented, this concept of God. 
+We are God now. We are. It's almost done. 
+We have just to finish the story. 
+That is very, very important. 
+And when you don't understand really what's happened, you cannot go and fight and work and build and things like that. 
+You go to the future back, back, back, back, like that. 
+And you can fall, and it's very dangerous. 
+No, you must really understand that. 
+Because we have almost finished, I'll repeat this story. 
+And the beauty of this, in perhaps 50 years, 60 years, we can finish completely this civilization, and offer to our children the possibility to invent a new story, a new poetry, a new romanticism. 
+With billions of people who have been born, worked, lived and died before us, these people who have worked so much, we have now bring beautiful things, beautiful gifts, we know so many things. 
+We can say to our children, OK, done, that was our story. That passed. 
+Now you have a duty: invent a new story. Invent a new poetry. 
+The only rule is, we have not to have any idea about the next story. 
+We give you white pages. Invent. 
+We give you the best tools, the best tools, and now, do it. 
+That's why I continue to work, even if it's for toilet brush. 
+
+So what does the happiest man in the world look like? 
+He certainly doesn't look like me. 
+He looks like this. 
+His name is Matthieu Ricard. 
+So how do you get to be the happiest man in the world? 
+Well it turns out there is a way to measure happiness in the brain. 
+And you do that by measuring the relative activation of the left prefrontal cortex in the fMRI, versus the right prefrontal cortex. 
+And Matthieu's happiness measure is off the charts. 
+He's by far the happiest man ever measured by science. 
+Which leads us to a question: What was he thinking when he was being measured? 
+Perhaps something very naughty. 
+(Laughter) Actually, he was meditating on compassion. 
+Matthieu's own experience is that compassion is the happiest state ever. 
+Reading about Matthieu was one of the pivotal moments of my life. 
+My dream is to create the conditions for world peace in my lifetime — and to do that by creating the conditions for inner peace and compassion on a global scale. 
+And learning about Matthieu gave me a new angle to look at my work. 
+Matthieu's brain scan shows that compassion is not a chore. 
+Compassion is something that creates happiness. 
+Compassion is fun. 
+And that mind-blowing insight changes the entire game. 
+Because if compassion was a chore, nobody's going to do it, except maybe the Dalai Lama or something. 
+But if compassion was fun, everybody's going to do it. 
+Therefore, to create the conditions for global compassion, all we have to do is to reframe compassion as something that is fun. 
+But fun is not enough. 
+What if compassion is also profitable? 
+What if compassion is also good for business? 
+Then, every boss, every manager in the world, will want to have compassion — like this. 
+That would create the conditions for world peace. 
+So, I started paying attention to what compassion looks like in a business setting. 
+Fortunately, I didn't have to look very far. 
+Because what I was looking for was right in front of my eyes — in Google, my company. 
+I know there are other compassionate companies in the world, but Google is the place I'm familiar with because I've been there for 10 years, so I'll use Google as the case study. 
+Google is a company born of idealism. 
+It's a company that thrives on idealism. 
+And maybe because of that, compassion is organic and widespread company-wide. 
+In Google, expressions of corporate compassion almost always follow the same pattern. 
+It's sort of a funny pattern. 
+It starts with a small group of Googlers taking the initiative to do something. 
+And they don't usually ask for permission; they just go ahead and do it, and then other Googlers join in, and it just gets bigger and bigger. 
+And sometimes it gets big enough to become official. 
+So in other words, it almost always starts from the bottom up. 
+And let me give you some examples. 
+The first example is the largest annual community event — where Googlers from around the world donate their labor to their local communities — was initiated and organized by three employees before it became official, because it just became too big. 
+Another example, three Googlers — a chef, an engineer and, most funny, a massage therapist — three of them, they learned about a region in India where 200,000 people live without a single medical facility. 
+So what do they do? 
+They just go ahead and start a fundraiser. 
+And they raise enough money to build this hospital — the first hospital of its kind for 200,000 people. 
+During the Haiti earthquake, a number of engineers and product managers spontaneously came together and stayed overnight to build a tool to allow earthquake victims to find their loved ones. 
+And expressions of compassion are also found in our international offices. 
+In China for example, one mid-level employee initiated the largest social action competition in China, involving more than 1,000 schools in China, working on issues such as education, poverty, health care and the environment. 
+There is so much organic social action all around Google that the company decided to form a social responsibility team just to support these efforts. 
+And this idea, again, came from the grassroots, from two Googlers who wrote their own job descriptions and volunteered themselves for the job. 
+And I found it fascinating that the social responsibility team was not formed as part of some grand corporate strategy. 
+It was two persons saying, "" Let's do this, "" and the company said, "" Yes. "" So it turns out that Google is a compassionate company, because Googlers found compassion to be fun. 
+But again, fun is not enough. 
+There are also real business benefits. 
+So what are they? 
+The first benefit of compassion is that it creates highly effective business leaders. 
+What does that mean? 
+There are three components of compassion. 
+There is the affective component, which is, "" I feel for you. "" There is the cognitive component, which is, "" I understand you. "" And there is a motivational component, which is, "" I want to help you. "" So what has this got to do with business leadership? 
+According to a very comprehensive study led by Jim Collins, and documented in the book "" Good to Great, "" it takes a very special kind of leader to bring a company from goodness to greatness. 
+And he calls them "" Level 5 leaders. "" These are leaders who, in addition to being highly capable, possess two important qualities, and they are humility and ambition. These are leaders 
+who are highly ambitious for the greater good. 
+And because they're ambitious for a greater good, they feel no need to inflate their own egos. 
+And they, according to the research, make the best business leaders. 
+And if you look at these qualities in the context of compassion, we find that the cognitive and affective components of compassion — understanding people and empathizing with people — inhibits, tones down, what I call the excessive self-obsession that's in us, therefore creating the conditions for humility. 
+The motivational component of compassion creates ambition for greater good. 
+In other words, compassion is the way to grow Level 5 leaders. 
+And this is the first compelling business benefit. 
+The second compelling benefit of compassion is that it creates an inspiring workforce. 
+Employees mutually inspire each other towards greater good. 
+It creates a vibrant, energetic community where people admire and respect each other. 
+I mean, you come to work in the morning, and you work with three guys who just up and decide to build a hospital in India. 
+It's like how can you not be inspired by those people — your own coworkers? 
+So this mutual inspiration promotes collaboration, initiative and creativity. 
+It makes us a highly effective company. 
+So, having said all that, what is the secret formula for brewing compassion in the corporate setting? 
+In our experience, there are three ingredients. 
+The first ingredient is to create a culture of passionate concern for the greater good. 
+So always think: how is your company and your job serving the greater good? 
+Or, how can you further serve the greater good? 
+This awareness of serving the greater good is very self-inspiring and it creates fertile ground for compassion to grow in. 
+That's one. 
+The second ingredient is autonomy. 
+So in Google, there's a lot of autonomy. 
+And one of our most popular managers jokes that, this is what he says, "" Google is a place where the inmates run the asylum. "" And he considers himself one of the inmates. 
+If you already have a culture of compassion and idealism and you let your people roam free, they will do the right thing in the most compassionate way. 
+The third ingredient is to focus on inner development and personal growth. 
+Leadership training in Google, for example, places a lot of emphasis on the inner qualities, such as self-awareness, self-mastery, empathy and compassion, because we believe that leadership begins with character. 
+We even created a seven-week curriculum on emotion intelligence, which we jokingly call "" Searching Inside Yourself. "" It's less naughty than it sounds. 
+So I'm an engineer by training, but I'm one of the creators and instructors of this course, which I find kind of funny, because this is a company that trusts an engineer to teach emotion intelligence. 
+What a company. 
+(Laughter) So "" Search Inside Yourself "" — how does it work? 
+It works in three steps. 
+The first step is attention training. 
+Attention is the basis of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities. 
+Therefore, any curriculum for training emotion intelligence has to begin with attention training. 
+The idea here is to train attention to create a quality of mind that is calm and clear at the same time. 
+And this creates the foundation for emotion intelligence. 
+The second step follows the first step. 
+The second step is developing self-knowledge and self-mastery. 
+So using the supercharged attention from step one, we create a high-resolution perception into the cognitive and emotive processes. 
+What does that mean? 
+It means being able to observe our thought stream and the process of emotion with high clarity, objectivity and from a third-person perspective. 
+And once you can do that, you create the kind of self-knowledge that enables self-mastery. 
+The third step, following the second step, is to create new mental habits. 
+What does that mean? Imagine this. 
+Imagine whenever you meet any other person, any time you meet a person, your habitual, instinctive first thought is, "" I want you to be happy. 
+I want you to be happy. "" Imagine you can do that. 
+Having this habit, this mental habit, changes everything at work. 
+Because this good will is unconsciously picked up by other people, and it creates trust, and trust creates a lot of good working relationships. 
+And this also creates the conditions for compassion in the workplace. 
+Someday, we hope to open-source "Search Inside Yourself" so that everybody in the corporate world will at least be able to use it as a reference. 
+And in closing, I want to end the same place I started, with happiness. 
+I want to quote this guy — the guy in robes, not the other guy — the Dalai Lama, who said, "" If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. 
+If you want to be happy, practice compassion. "" I found this to be true, both on the individual level and at a corporate level. 
+And I hope that compassion will be both fun and profitable for you too. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Chris Anderson: William, hi. Good to see you. 
+William Kamkwamba: Thanks. 
+CA: So, we've got a picture, I think? Where is this? 
+WK: This is my home. This is where I live. 
+CA: Where? What country? 
+WK: In Malawi, Kasungu. In Kasungu. Yeah, Mala. 
+CA: OK. Now, you're 19 now? 
+WK: Yeah. I'm 19 years now. 
+CA: Five years ago you had an idea. What was that? 
+WK: I wanted to make a windmill. 
+CA: A windmill? 
+WK: Yeah. 
+CA: What, to power — for lighting and stuff? 
+WK: Yeah. 
+CA: So what did you do? How did you realize that? 
+WK: After I dropped out of school, I went to library, and I read a book that would — "" Using Energy, "" and I get information about doing the mill. 
+And I tried, and I made it. 
+(Applause) CA: So you copied — you exactly copied the design in the book. 
+WK: Ah, no. I just — CA: What happened? 
+WK: In fact, a design of the windmill that was in the book, it has got four — ah — three blades, and mine has got four blades. 
+CA: The book had three, yours had four. 
+WK: Yeah. 
+CA: And you made it out of what? 
+WK: I made four blades, just because I want to increase power. 
+CA: OK. 
+WK: Yeah. 
+CA: You tested three, and found that four worked better? 
+WK: Yeah. I test. 
+CA: And what did you make the windmill out of? 
+What materials did you use? 
+WK: I use a bicycle frame, and a pulley, and plastic pipe, what then pulls — CA: Do we have a picture of that? Can we have the next slide? 
+WK: Yeah. The windmill. 
+CA: And so, and that windmill, what — it worked? 
+WK: When the wind blows, it rotates and generates. 
+CA: How much electricity? 
+WK: 12 watts. 
+CA: And so, that lit a light for the house? How many lights? 
+WK: Four bulbs and two radios. 
+CA: Wow. 
+WK: Yeah. 
+(Applause) CA: Next slide — so who's that? 
+WK: This is my parents, holding the radio. 
+CA: So what did they make of — that you were 14, 15 at the time — what did they make of this? They were impressed? 
+WK: Yeah. 
+CA: And so what's your — what are you going to do with this? 
+WK: Um — CA: What do you — I mean — do you want to build another one? 
+WK: Yeah, I want to build another one — to pump water and irrigation for crops. 
+CA: So this one would have to be bigger? 
+WK: Yeah. 
+CA: How big? 
+WK: I think it will produce more than 20 the watts. 
+CA: So that would produce irrigation for the entire village? 
+WK: Yeah. 
+CA: Wow. And so you're talking to people here at TED to get people who might be able to help in some way to realize this dream? 
+WK: Yeah, if they can help me with materials, yeah. 
+CA: And as you think of your life going forward, you're 19 now, do you picture continuing with this dream of working in energy? 
+WK: Yeah. I'm still thinking to work on energy. 
+CA: Wow. William, it's a real honor to have you at the TED conference. 
+Thank you so much for coming. 
+WK: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We're going to talk — my — a new lecture, just for TED — and I'm going show you some illusions that we've created for TED, and I'm going to try to relate this to happiness. What I was thinking about with happiness is, what gives happiness — or happiness, which I equate with joy in my particular area, and I think there's something very fundamental. And I was thinking about this. And it's in terms of both illusions and movies that we go see and jokes and magic shows is that there's something about these things where our expectations are violated in some sort of pleasing 
+way. You go see a movie. And it has an unexpected twist — something that you didn't expect — and you find a joyful experience. You look at those sort of illusions in my book and it's not as what you'd expect. And there's something joyful about it. And it's the same thing with jokes and all these sorts of things. So, what I'm going to try and do in my lecture is go a little bit further and see if I can violate your expectations in a pleasing way. I mean, sometimes expectations that are violated are not pleasant, but I'm going to try 
+to do it in a pleasant way, in a very primal way, so I can make the audience here happy. 
+So I'm going to show you some ways that we can violate your expectations. First of all, I want to show you the particular illusion here. I want you first of all when it pops up on the screen to notice that the two holes are perpendicular to each other. These are all perceptual tricks. These are real objects that I'm going to show you. Now I'm going to show you how it is done. I've looped the film here so you can get a very interesting experience. I want you to see how this illusion is constructed, and it's going to rotate so you see 
+that it's inside out. Now watch, as it rotates back, how quickly your perception snaps. OK now. 
+Watch it as it rotates back again. And this is a very bright audience, all right? See if you can stop it from happening, even though you know 100 percent it's true that — bam! You can't undo it. What does that tell you about yourselves? We're going to do it again. No doubt about it. See if you can stop it from happening. No. It's difficult. 
+And we can violate your expectations in a whole variety of ways about representation, about shape, about color and so forth and it's very primal. And it's an interesting question to ponder, why these things — we find these things joyful. Why would we find them joyful? So, here's something that Lionel did a while ago. I like these sort of little things like this. 
+Again, this is not an optical trick. This is what you would see. In other words, it's not a camera cut. It's a perceptual trick. 
+OK. We can violate your expectations about shape. 
+We can violate your expectations on representation — what an image represents. What do you see here? 
+How many of you here see dolphins? Raise your hand if you see dolphins. OK, those people who raised their hands, afterwards, the rest of the audience, go talk to them, all right? Actually, this is the best example of priming by experience that I know. 
+If you are a child under the age of 10 who haven't been ruined yet, you will look at this image and see dolphins. Now, some of you adults here are saying, "" What dolphins? What dolphins? "" But in fact, if you reversed the figure ground — in other words, the dark areas here — I forgot to ask for a pointer — but if you reverse it, you'll see a whole series of little dolphins. By the way, if you're also a student at CalTech — they also tend to just see the dolphins. It's based on experience. 
+Now, something like this can be used because this is after all talk about design, too. This was done by Saatchi and Saatchi, and they actually got away with this ad in Australia. So, if you look at this ad for beer, all those people are in sort of provocative positions. But they got it passed, and actually won the Clio awards, so it's funny how you can do these things. 
+Remember that sort of, um. This is the joke I did when the Florida ballot was going around. You know, count the dots for Gore; count the dots for Bush; count 'em again... 
+You can violate your expectations about experience. Here is an outside water fountain that I created with some friends of mine, but you can stop the water in drops and — actually make all the drops levitate. This is something we're building for, you know, amusement parks and that kind of stuff. 
+Now let's take a static image. Can you see this? 
+Do you see the middle section moving down and the outer sections moving up? It's completely static. 
+It's a static image. How many people see this illusion? It's completely static. 
+Right. Now, when — it's interesting that when we look at an image we see, you know, color, depth, texture. And you can look at this whole scene and analyze it. You can see the woman is in closer than the wall and so forth. But the whole thing is actually flat. It's painted. It's trompe l'oeil. 
+And it was such a good trompe l'oeil that people got irritated when they tried to talk to the woman and she wouldn't respond. 
+Now, you can make design mistakes. Like this building in New York. So that when you see it from this side, it looks like the balconies tilt up, and when you walk around to the other side it looks like the balconies go down. So there are cases where you have mistakes in design that incorporate illusions. 
+Or, you take this particular un-retouched photograph. Now, interestingly enough, I get a lot of emails from people who say, "" Is there any perceptual difference between males and females? "" And I really say, "" No. "" I mean, women can navigate through the world just as well as males can — and why wouldn't they? However, this is the one illusion that women can consistently do better than males: in matching which head because they rely on fashion cues. They can match the hat. 
+Okay, now getting to a part — I want to show design in illusions. I believe that the first example of illusions being used purposely was by da Vinci in this anamorphic image of an eye. So that when you saw from one little angle was like this. And this little technique got popular in the 16th century and the 17th century to disguise hidden meanings, where you could flip the image and see it from one little point of view like this. 
+But these are early incorporations of illusions brought to — sort of high point with Hans Holbein's "" Ambassadors. "" And Hans Holbein worked for Henry VIII. This was hung on a wall where you could walk down from the stair and you can see this hidden skull. 
+All right, now I'm going to show you some designers who work with illusions to give that element of surprise. One of my favorites is Scott Kim. I worked with Scott to create some illusions for TED that I hope you will enjoy. We have one here on TED and happiness. 
+OK now. Arthur [Ganson] hasn't talked yet, but his is going to be a delightful talk and he has some of his really fantastic machines outside. And so, we — Scott created this wonderful tribute to Arthur Ganson. 
+Well, there's analog and digital. Thought that was appropriate here. 
+And figure goes to ground. 
+And for the musicians. 
+And of course, since happiness — we want "" joy to the world. "" Now, another great designer — he's very well known in Japan — Shigeo Fukuda. And he just builds some fantastic things. This is simply amazing. This is a pile of junk that when you view it from one particular angle, you see its reflection in the mirror as a perfect piano. 
+Pianist transforms to violinist. 
+This is really wild. This assemblage of forks, knives and spoons and various cutlery, welded together. It gives a shadow of a motorcycle. You learn something in the sort of thing that I do, which is there are people out there with a lot of time on their hands. 
+Ken Knowlton does wonderful composite images, like creating Jacques Cousteau out of seashells — un-retouched seashells, but just by rearranging them. He did Einstein out of dice because, after all, Einstein said, "" God does not play dice with the universe. "" Bert Herzog out of un-retouched keyboards. Will Shortz, crossword puzzle. John Cederquist does these wonderful trompe l'oeil cabinets. 
+Now, I'm going to skip ahead since I'm sort of running [behind]. I want to show you quickly what I've created, some new type of illusions. I've done something with taking the Pixar-type illusions. So you see these kids the same size here, running down the hall. The two table tops of the same size. 
+They're looking out two directions at once. You have a larger piece fitting in with a smaller. And that's something for you to think about, all right? So you see larger pieces fitting in within smaller pieces here. Does everyone see that? Which is impossible. You can see the two kids are looking out simultaneously out of two different directions at once. Now can you believe these two table tops are the same size and shape? They are. 
+So, if you measured them, they would be. And as I say, those two figures are identical in size and shape. 
+And it's interesting, by doing this in this sort of rendered fashion, how much stronger the illusions are. Any case, I hope this has brought you a little joy and happiness, and if you're interested in seeing more cool effects, see me outside. I'd be happy to show you lots of things. 
+
+It's a great time to be a molecular biologist. (Laughter) Reading and writing DNA code is getting easier and cheaper. 
+By the end of this year, we'll be able to sequence the three million bits of information in your genome in less than a day and for less than 1,000 euros. 
+Biotech is probably the most powerful and the fastest-growing technology sector. 
+It has the power, potentially, to replace our fossil fuels, to revolutionize medicine, and to touch every aspect of our daily lives. 
+So who gets to do it? 
+I think we'd all be pretty comfortable with this guy doing it. 
+But what about that guy? (Laughter) (Laughter) In 2009, I first heard about DIYbio. 
+It's a movement that — it advocates making biotechnology accessible to everyone, not just scientists and people in government labs. 
+The idea is that if you open up the science and you allow diverse groups to participate, it could really stimulate innovation. 
+Putting technology in the hands of the end user is usually a good idea because they've got the best idea of what their needs are. 
+And here's this really sophisticated technology coming down the road, all these associated social, moral, ethical questions, and we scientists are just lousy at explaining to the public just exactly what it is we're doing in those labs. 
+So wouldn't it be nice if there was a place in your local neighborhood where you could go and learn about this stuff, do it hands-on? 
+I thought so. 
+So, three years ago, I got together with some friends of mine who had similar aspirations and we founded Genspace. 
+It's a nonprofit, a community biotech lab in Brooklyn, New York, and the idea was people could come, they could take classes and putter around in the lab in a very open, friendly atmosphere. 
+None of my previous experience prepared me for what came next. Can you guess? 
+The press started calling us. 
+And the more we talked about how great it was to increase science literacy, the more they wanted to talk about us creating the next Frankenstein, and as a result, for the next six months, when you Googled my name, instead of getting my scientific papers, you got this. 
+["" Am I a biohazard? ""] (Laughter) It was pretty depressing. 
+The only thing that got us through that period was that we knew that all over the world, there were other people that were trying to do the same thing that we were. 
+They were opening biohacker spaces, and some of them were facing much greater challenges than we did, more regulations, less resources. 
+But now, three years later, here's where we stand. 
+It's a vibrant, global community of hackerspaces, and this is just the beginning. 
+These are some of the biggest ones, and there are others opening every day. 
+There's one probably going to open up in Moscow, one in South Korea, and the cool thing is they each have their own individual flavor that grew out of the community they came out of. 
+Let me take you on a little tour. 
+Biohackers work alone. 
+We work in groups, in big cities — (Laughter) — and in small villages. 
+We reverse engineer lab equipment. 
+We genetically engineer bacteria. 
+We hack hardware, software, wetware, and, of course, the code of life. 
+We like to build things. 
+Then we like to take things apart. 
+We make things grow. 
+We make things glow. 
+And we make cells dance. 
+The spirit of these labs, it's open, it's positive, but, you know, sometimes when people think of us, the first thing that comes to mind is bio-safety, bio-security, all the dark side stuff. 
+I'm not going to minimize those concerns. 
+Any powerful technology is inherently dual use, and, you know, you get something like synthetic biology, nanobiotechnology, it really compels you, you have to look at both the amateur groups but also the professional groups, because they have better infrastructure, they have better facilities, and they have access to pathogens. 
+So the United Nations did just that, and they recently issued a report on this whole area, and what they concluded was the power of this technology for positive was much greater than the risk for negative, and they even looked specifically at the DIYbio community, and they noted, not surprisingly, that the press had a tendency to consistently overestimate our capabilities and underestimate our ethics. 
+As a matter of fact, DIY people from all over the world, America, Europe, got together last year, and we hammered out a common code of ethics. 
+That's a lot more than conventional science has done. 
+Now, we follow state and local regulations. 
+We dispose of our waste properly, we follow safety procedures, we don't work with pathogens. 
+You know, if you're working with a pathogen, you're not part of the biohacker community, you're part of the bioterrorist community, I'm sorry. 
+And sometimes people ask me, "Well, what about an accident?" 
+Well, working with the safe organisms that we normally work with, the chance of an accident happening with somebody accidentally creating, like, some sort of superbug, that's literally about as probable as a snowstorm in the middle of the Sahara Desert. 
+Now, it could happen, but I'm not going to plan my life around it. 
+I've actually chosen to take a different kind of risk. 
+I signed up for something called the Personal Genome Project. 
+It's a study at Harvard where, at the end of the study, they're going to take my entire genomic sequence, all of my medical information, and my identity, and they're going to post it online for everyone to see. 
+There were a lot of risks involved that they talked about during the informed consent portion. 
+The one I liked the best is, someone could download my sequence, go back to the lab, synthesize some fake Ellen DNA, and plant it at a crime scene. (Laughter) But like DIYbio, the positive outcomes and the potential for good for a study like that far outweighs the risk. 
+Now, you might be asking yourself, "Well, you know, what would I do in a biolab?" 
+Well, it wasn't that long ago we were asking, "" Well, what would anyone do with a personal computer? "" So this stuff is just beginning. 
+We're only seeing just the tip of the DNA iceberg. 
+Let me show you what you could do right now. 
+A biohacker in Germany, a journalist, wanted to know whose dog was leaving little presents on his street? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Yep, you guessed it. He threw tennis balls to all the neighborhood dogs, analyzed the saliva, identified the dog, and confronted the dog owner. (Laughter) (Applause) 
+I discovered an invasive species in my own backyard. 
+Looked like a ladybug, right? 
+It actually is a Japanese beetle. 
+And the same kind of technology — it's called DNA barcoding, it's really cool — You can use it to check if your caviar is really beluga, if that sushi is really tuna, or if that goat cheese that you paid so much for is really goat's. 
+In a biohacker space, you can analyze your genome for mutations. 
+You can analyze your breakfast cereal for GMO's, and you can explore your ancestry. 
+You can send weather balloons up into the stratosphere, collect microbes, see what's up there. 
+You can make a biocensor out of yeast to detect pollutants in water. 
+You can make some sort of a biofuel cell. 
+You can do a lot of things. 
+You can also do an art science project. Some of these are really spectacular, and they look at social, ecological problems from a completely different perspective. 
+It's really cool. 
+Some people ask me, well, why am I involved? 
+I could have a perfectly good career in mainstream science. 
+The thing is, there's something in these labs that they have to offer society that you can't find anywhere else. 
+There's something sacred about a space where you can work on a project, and you don't have to justify to anyone that it's going to make a lot of money, that it's going to save mankind, or even that it's feasible. 
+It just has to follow safety guidelines. 
+If you had spaces like this all over the world, it could really change the perception of who's allowed to do biotech. 
+It's spaces like these that spawned personal computing. 
+Why not personal biotech? 
+If everyone in this room got involved, who knows what we could do? 
+This is such a new area, and as we say back in Brooklyn, you ain't seen nothin 'yet. (Laughter) (Applause) 
+
+One hot October morning, I got off the all-night train in Mandalay, the old royal capital of Burma, now Myanmar. 
+And out on the street, I ran into a group of rough men standing beside their bicycle rickshaws. 
+And one of them came up and offered to show me around. 
+The price he quoted was outrageous. 
+It was less than I would pay for a bar of chocolate at home. 
+So I clambered into his trishaw, and he began pedaling us slowly between palaces and pagodas. 
+And as he did, he told me how he had come to the city from his village. 
+He'd earned a degree in mathematics. 
+His dream was to be a teacher. 
+But of course, life is hard under a military dictatorship, and so for now, this was the only way he could make a living. 
+Many nights, he told me, he actually slept in his trishaw so he could catch the first visitors off the all-night train. 
+And very soon, we found that in certain ways, we had so much in common — we were both in our 20s, we were both fascinated by foreign cultures — that he invited me home. 
+So we turned off the wide, crowded streets, and we began bumping down rough, wild alleyways. 
+There were broken shacks all around. 
+I really lost the sense of where I was, and I realized that anything could happen to me now. 
+I could get mugged or drugged or something worse. 
+Nobody would know. 
+Finally, he stopped and led me into a hut, which consisted of just one tiny room. 
+And then he leaned down, and reached under his bed. 
+And something in me froze. 
+I waited to see what he would pull out. 
+And finally he extracted a box. 
+Inside it was every single letter he had ever received from visitors from abroad, and on some of them he had pasted little black-and-white worn snapshots of his new foreign friends. 
+So when we said goodbye that night, I realized he had also shown me the secret point of travel, which is to take a plunge, to go inwardly as well as outwardly to places you would never go otherwise, to venture into uncertainty, ambiguity, even fear. 
+At home, it's dangerously easy to assume we're on top of things. 
+Out in the world, you are reminded every moment that you're not, and you can't get to the bottom of things, either. 
+Everywhere, "" People wish to be settled, "" Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded us, "" but only insofar as we are unsettled is there any hope for us. "" At this conference, we've been lucky enough to hear some exhilarating new ideas and discoveries and, really, about all the ways in which knowledge is being pushed excitingly forwards. 
+But at some point, knowledge gives out. 
+And that is the moment when your life is truly decided: you fall in love; you lose a friend; the lights go out. 
+And it's then, when you're lost or uneasy or carried out of yourself, that you find out who you are. 
+I don't believe that ignorance is bliss. 
+Science has unquestionably made our lives brighter and longer and healthier. 
+And I am forever grateful to the teachers who showed me the laws of physics and pointed out that three times three makes nine. 
+I can count that out on my fingers any time of night or day. 
+But when a mathematician tells me that minus three times minus three makes nine, that's a kind of logic that almost feels like trust. 
+The opposite of knowledge, in other words, isn't always ignorance. 
+It can be wonder. 
+Or mystery. 
+Possibility. 
+And in my life, I've found it's the things I don't know that have lifted me up and pushed me forwards much more than the things I do know. 
+It's also the things I don't know that have often brought me closer to everybody around me. 
+And the one thing he said every day that most seemed to give people reassurance and confidence was, "" I don't know. "" "What's going to happen to Tibet?" 
+"When are we ever going to get world peace?" 
+"What's the best way to raise children?" 
+"" Frankly, "" says this very wise man, "I don't know." 
+The Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman has spent more than 60 years now researching human behavior, and his conclusion is that we are always much more confident of what we think we know than we should be. 
+We have, as he memorably puts it, an "" unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. "" We know — quote, unquote — our team is going to win this weekend, and we only remember that knowledge on the rare occasions when we're right. 
+Most of the time, we're in the dark. 
+And that's where real intimacy lies. 
+Do you know what your lover is going to do tomorrow? 
+Do you want to know? 
+The parents of us all, as some people call them, Adam and Eve, could never die, so long as they were eating from the tree of life. 
+But the minute they began nibbling from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they fell from their innocence. 
+They grew embarrassed and fretful, self-conscious. 
+And they learned, a little too late, perhaps, that there are certainly some things that we need to know, but there are many, many more that are better left unexplored. 
+Now, when I was a kid, I knew it all, of course. 
+I had been spending 20 years in classrooms collecting facts, and I was actually in the information business, writing articles for Time Magazine. 
+And I took my first real trip to Japan for two-and-a-half weeks, and I came back with a 40-page essay explaining every last detail about Japan's temples, its fashions, its baseball games, its soul. 
+But underneath all that, something that I couldn't understand so moved me for reasons I couldn't explain to you yet, that I decided to go and live in Japan. 
+And now that I've been there for 28 years, I really couldn't tell you very much at all about my adopted home. 
+Which is wonderful, because it means every day I'm making some new discovery, and in the process, looking around the corner and seeing the hundred thousand things I'll never know. 
+Knowledge is a priceless gift. 
+But the illusion of knowledge can be more dangerous than ignorance. 
+Thinking that you know your lover or your enemy can be more treacherous than acknowledging you'll never know them. 
+Every morning in Japan, as the sun is flooding into our little apartment, I take great pains not to consult the weather forecast, because if I do, my mind will be overclouded, distracted, even when the day is bright. 
+I've been a full-time writer now for 34 years. 
+And the one thing that I have learned is that transformation comes when I'm not in charge, when I don't know what's coming next, when I can't assume I am bigger than everything around me. 
+And the same is true in love or in moments of crisis. 
+Suddenly, we're back in that trishaw again and we're bumping off the broad, well-lit streets; and we're reminded, really, of the first law of travel and, therefore, of life: you're only as strong as your readiness to surrender. 
+In the end, perhaps, being human is much more important than being fully in the know. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Over our lifetimes, we've all contributed to climate change. 
+Actions, choices and behaviors will have led to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. 
+And I think that that's quite a powerful thought. 
+But it does have the potential to make us feel guilty when we think about decisions we might have made around where to travel to, how often and how, about the energy that we choose to use in our homes or in our workplaces, or quite simply the lifestyles that we lead and enjoy. 
+But we can also turn that thought on its head, and think that if we've had such a profound but a negative impact on our climate already, then we have an opportunity to influence the amount of future climate change that we will need to adapt to. 
+So we have a choice. 
+We can either choose to start to take climate change seriously, and significantly cut and mitigate our greenhouse gas emissions, and then we will have to adapt to less of the climate change impacts in future. 
+Alternatively, we can continue to really ignore the climate change problem. 
+But if we do that, we are also choosing to adapt to very much more powerful climate impacts in future. 
+And not only that. 
+As people who live in countries with high per capita emissions, we're making that choice on behalf of others as well. 
+But the choice that we don't have is a no climate change future. 
+Over the last two decades, our government negotiators and policymakers have been coming together to discuss climate change, and they've been focused on avoiding a two-degree centigrade warming above pre-industrial levels. 
+That's the temperature that's associated with dangerous impacts across a range of different indicators, to humans and to the environment. 
+So two degrees centigrade constitutes dangerous climate change. 
+But dangerous climate change can be subjective. 
+So if we think about an extreme weather event that might happen in some part of the world, and if that happens in a part of the world where there is good infrastructure, where there are people that are well-insured and so on, then that impact can be disruptive. 
+It can cause upset, it could cause cost. 
+It could even cause some deaths. 
+But if that exact same weather event happens in a part of the world where there is poor infrastructure, or where people are not well-insured, or they're not having good support networks, then that same climate change impact could be devastating. 
+It could cause a significant loss of home, but it could also cause significant amounts of death. 
+So this is a graph of the CO2 emissions at the left-hand side from fossil fuel and industry, and time from before the Industrial Revolution out towards the present day. 
+And what's immediately striking about this is that emissions have been growing exponentially. 
+If we focus in on a shorter period of time from 1950, we have established in 1988 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, then rolling on a few years, in 2009 we had the Copenhagen Accord, where it established avoiding a two-degree temperature rise in keeping with the science and on the basis of equity. 
+And then in 2012, we had the Rio + 20 event. 
+And all the way through, during all of these meetings and many others as well, emissions have continued to rise. 
+And if we focus on our historical emission trend in recent years, and we put that together with our understanding of the direction of travel in our global economy, then we are much more on track for a four-degree centigrade global warming than we are for the two-degree centigrade. 
+Now, let's just pause for a moment and think about this four-degree global average temperature. 
+Most of our planet is actually made up of the sea. 
+Now, because the sea has a greater thermal inertia than the land, the average temperatures over land are actually going to be higher than they are over the sea. 
+The second thing is that we as human beings don't experience global average temperatures. 
+We experience hot days, cold days, rainy days, especially if you live in Manchester like me. 
+So now put yourself in a city center. 
+Imagine somewhere in the world: Mumbai, Beijing, New York, London. 
+It's the hottest day that you've ever experienced. 
+There's sun beating down, there's concrete and glass all around you. 
+Now imagine that same day — but it's six, eight, maybe 10 to 12 degrees warmer on that day during that heat wave. 
+That's the kind of thing we're going to experience under a four-degree global average temperature scenario. 
+And the problem with these extremes, and not just the temperature extremes, but also the extremes in terms of storms and other climate impacts, is our infrastructure is just not set up to deal with these sorts of events. 
+So our roads and our rail networks have been designed to last for a long time and withstand only certain amounts of impacts in different parts of the world. 
+And this is going to be extremely challenged. 
+Our power stations are expected to be cooled by water to a certain temperature to remain effective and resilient. 
+And our buildings are designed to be comfortable within a particular temperature range. 
+And this is all going to be significantly challenged under a four-degree-type scenario. 
+Our infrastructure has not been designed to cope with this. 
+So if we go back, also thinking about four degrees, it's not just the direct impacts, but also some indirect impacts. 
+So if we take food security, for example. 
+Maize and wheat yields in some parts of the world are expected to be up to 40 percent lower under a four-degree scenario, rice up to 30 percent lower. 
+This will be absolutely devastating for global food security. 
+So all in all, the kinds of impacts anticipated under this four-degree centigrade scenario are going to be incompatible with global organized living. 
+So back to our trajectories and our graphs of four degrees and two degrees. 
+Is it reasonable still to focus on the two-degree path? 
+There are quite a lot of my colleagues and other scientists who would say that it's now too late to avoid a two-degree warming. 
+But I would just like to draw on my own research on energy systems, on food systems, aviation and also shipping, just to say that I think there is still a small fighting chance of avoiding this two-degree dangerous climate change. 
+But we really need to get to grips with the numbers to work out how to do it. 
+So if you focus in on this trajectory and these graphs, the yellow circle there highlights that the departure from the red four-degree pathway to the two-degree green pathway is immediate. 
+And that's because of cumulative emissions, or the carbon budget. 
+So in other words, because of the lights and the projectors that are on in this room right now, the CO2 that is going into our atmosphere as a result of that electricity consumption lasts a very long time. 
+Some of it will be in our atmosphere for a century, maybe much longer. 
+It will accumulate, and greenhouse gases tend to be cumulative. 
+And that tells us something about these trajectories. 
+First of all, it tells us that it's the area under these curves that matter, not where we reach at a particular date in future. 
+And that's important, because it doesn't matter if we come up with some amazing whiz-bang technology to sort out our energy problem on the last day of 2049, just in the nick of time to sort things out. 
+So if we continue on this red, four-degree centigrade scenario pathway, the longer we continue on it, that will need to be made up for in later years to keep the same carbon budget, to keep the same area under the curve, which means that that trajectory, the red one there, becomes steeper. 
+So in other words, if we don't reduce emissions in the short to medium term, then we'll have to make more significant year-on-year emission reductions. 
+We also know that we have to decarbonize our energy system. 
+But if we don't start to cut emissions in the short to medium term, then we will have to do that even sooner. 
+So this poses really big challenges for us. 
+The other thing it does is tells us something about energy policy. 
+If you live in a part of the world where per capita emissions are already high, it points us towards reducing energy demand. 
+And that's because with all the will in the world, the large-scale engineering infrastructure that we need to roll out rapidly to decarbonize the supply side of our energy system is just simply not going to happen in time. 
+So it doesn't matter whether we choose nuclear power or carbon capture and storage, upscale our biofuel production, or go for a much bigger roll-out of wind turbines and wave turbines. 
+All of that will take time. 
+So because it's the area under the curve that matters, we need to focus on energy efficiency, but also on energy conservation — in other words, using less energy. 
+And if we do that, that also means that as we continue to roll out the supply-side technology, we will have less of a job to do if we've actually managed to reduce our energy consumption, because we will then need less infrastructure on the supply side. 
+Another issue that we really need to grapple with is the issue of well-being and equity. 
+There are many parts of the world where the standard of living needs to rise. 
+Bbut with energy systems currently reliant on fossil fuel, as those economies grow so will emissions. 
+And now, if we're all constrained by the same amount of carbon budget, that means that if some parts of the world's emissions are needing to rise, then other parts of the world's emissions need to reduce. 
+So that poses very significant challenges for wealthy nations. 
+Because according to our research, if you're in a country where per capita emissions are really high — so North America, Europe, Australia — emissions reductions of the order of 10 percent per year, and starting immediately, will be required for a good chance of avoiding the two-degree target. 
+Let me just put that into context. 
+The economist Nicholas Stern said that emission reductions of more than one percent per year had only ever been associated with economic recession or upheaval. 
+So this poses huge challenges for the issue of economic growth, because if we have our high carbon infrastructure in place, it means that if our economies grow, then so do our emissions. 
+So I'd just like to take a quote from a paper by myself and Kevin Anderson back in 2011 where we said that to avoid the two-degree framing of dangerous climate change, economic growth needs to be exchanged at least temporarily for a period of planned austerity in wealthy nations. 
+This is a really difficult message to take, because what it suggests is that we really need to do things differently. 
+This is not about just incremental change. 
+This is about doing things differently, about whole system change, and sometimes it's about doing less things. 
+And this applies to all of us, whatever sphere of influence we have. 
+So it could be from writing to our local politician to talking to our boss at work or being the boss at work, or talking with our friends and family, or, quite simply, changing our lifestyles. 
+Because we really need to make significant change. 
+At the moment, we're choosing a four-degree scenario. 
+If we really want to avoid the two-degree scenario, there really is no time like the present to act. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Alice, basically what you're saying, the talk is, unless wealthy nations start cutting 10 percent per year the emissions now, this year, not in 2020 or '25, we are going to go straight to the four-plus-degree scenario. 
+I am wondering what's your take on the cut by 70 percent for 2070. 
+Alice Bows-Larkin: Yeah, it's just nowhere near enough to avoid two degrees. 
+One of the things that often — when there are these modeling studies that look at what we need to do, is they tend to hugely overestimate how quickly other countries in the world can start to reduce emissions. 
+So they make kind of heroic assumptions about that. 
+The more we do that, because it's the cumulative emissions, the short-term stuff that really matters. 
+So it does make a huge difference. 
+If a big country like China, for example, continues to grow even for just a few extra years, that will make a big difference to when we need to decarbonize. 
+BG: Alice, thank you for coming to TED and sharing this data. 
+ABL: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Guatemala is recovering from a 36-year armed conflict. 
+It was really just a small leftist insurgency and a devastating response by the state. 
+What we have as a result is 200,000 civilian victims, 160,000 of those killed in the communities: small children, men, women, the elderly even. 
+And then we have about 40,000 others, the missing, the ones we're still looking for today. 
+We call them the Desaparecidos. 
+Now, 83 percent of the victims are Mayan victims, victims that are the descendants of the original inhabitants of Central America. 
+And only about 17 percent are of European descent. 
+But the most important thing here is that the very people who are supposed to defend us, the police, the military, are the ones that committed most of the crimes. 
+Now the families, they want information. 
+They want to know what happened. 
+But most of all, what they want is they want you, they want everyone to know that their loved ones did nothing wrong. 
+Now, my case was that my father received death threats in 1980. 
+And we left. 
+We left Guatemala and we came here. 
+So I grew up in New York, I grew up in Brooklyn as a matter of fact, and I went to New Utrecht High School and I graduated from Brooklyn College. 
+The only thing was that I really didn't know what was happening in Guatemala. 
+I didn't care for it; it was too painful. 
+But it wasn't till 1995 that I decided to do something about it. 
+So I went back. 
+I went back to Guatemala, to look for the bodies, to understand what happened and to look for part of myself as well. 
+The way we work is that we give people information. 
+We talk to the family members and we let them choose. 
+And even more important, we let them choose to give us a piece of themselves. 
+A piece, an essence, of who they are. 
+And that DNA is what we're going to compare to the DNA that comes from the skeletons. 
+While we're doing that, though, we're looking for the bodies. 
+And these are skeletons by now, most of these crimes happened 32 years ago. 
+We literally bring the skeleton out of the ground. 
+Once we have those bodies, though, we take them back to the city, to our lab, and we begin a process of trying to understand mainly two things: One is how people died. 
+So here you see a gunshot wound to the back of the head or a machete wound, for example. 
+The other thing we want to understand is who they are. 
+Whether it's a baby, or an adult. 
+Whether it's a woman or a man. 
+But when we're done with that analysis what we'll do is we'll take a small fragment of the bone and we'll extract DNA from it. 
+We'll take that DNA and then we'll compare it with the DNA of the families, of course. 
+And what you see there is the state following individuals, people that, like you, wanted to change their country, and they jotted everything down. 
+And one of the things that they wrote down is when they executed them. 
+Inside that yellow rectangle, you see a code, it's a secret code: 300. 
+And then you see a date. 
+The 300 means "" executed "" and the date means when they were executed. 
+What we did is we conducted an exhumation in 2003, where we exhumed 220 bodies from 53 graves in a military base. 
+Grave 9, though, matched the family of Sergio Saul Linares. 
+Now Sergio was a professor at the university. 
+He graduted from Iowa State University and went back to Guatemala to change his country. 
+And he was captured on February 23, 1984. 
+But most important is about two weeks later, we go another hit, another match from the same grave to Amancio Villatoro. 
+The DNA of that body also matched the DNA of that family. 
+And then we noticed that he was also in the diary. 
+Six. 
+That's right, six as well. 
+So we have Juan de Dios, Hugo, Moises and Zoilo. 
+All of them executed on the same date, all captured at different locations and at different moments. 
+All put in that grave. 
+The other case I want to tell you about is that of a military base called CREOMPAZ. 
+It actually means, "" to believe in peace, "" but the acronym really means Regional Command Center for Peacekeeping Operations. 
+And this is where the Guatemalan military trains peacekeepers from other countries, the ones that serve with the U.N. 
+and go to countries like Haiti and the Congo. 
+Now, if you think about that, peacekeepers being trained on top of bodies. 
+People that 533 families are looking for. 
+And that immediately made us think, my goodness, where is there a case like this? 
+When I got to Guatemala in 1995, I heard of a case of a massacre that happened on May 14, 1982, where the army came in, killed the men, and took the women and children in helicopters to an unknown location. 
+Well, guess what? 
+The clothing from this grave matched the clothing from the region where these people were taken from, where these women and children were taken from. 
+We identified Martina Rojas and Manuel Chen. 
+We're actually providing evidence for trials, like the genocide trial that happened last year in Guatemala where General Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years. 
+We have to now come together and decide that we're not going to have any more missing. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What do we know about the future? 
+Difficult question, simple answer: nothing. 
+We cannot predict the future. 
+We only can create a vision of the future, how it might be, a vision which reveals disruptive ideas, which is inspiring, and this is the most important reason which breaks the chains of common thinking. 
+There are a lot of people who created their own vision about the future, for instance, this vision here from the early 20th century. 
+It says here that this is the ocean plane of the future. 
+It takes only one and a half days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. 
+Today, we know that this future vision didn't come true. 
+So this is our largest airplane which we have, the Airbus A380, and it's quite huge, so a lot of people fit in there and it's technically completely different than the vision I've shown to you. 
+I'm working in a team with Airbus, and we have created our vision about a more sustainable future of aviation. 
+So sustainability is quite important for us, which should incorporate social but as well as environmental and economic values. 
+So we have created a very disruptive structure which mimics the design of bone, or a skeleton, which occurs in nature. 
+So that's why it looks maybe a little bit weird, especially to the people who deal with structures in general. 
+But at least it's just a kind of artwork to explore our ideas about a different future. 
+What are the main customers of the future? 
+So, we have the old, we have the young, we have the uprising power of women, and there's one mega-trend which affects all of us. 
+These are the future anthropometrics. 
+So our children are getting larger, but at the same time we are growing into different directions. 
+So what we need is space inside the aircraft, inside a very dense area. 
+These people have different needs. 
+So we see a clear need of active health promotion, especially in the case of the old people. 
+We want to be treated as individuals. 
+We like to be productive throughout the entire travel chain, and what we are doing in the future is we want to use the latest man-machine interface, and we want to integrate this and show this in one product. 
+So we combined these needs with technology's themes. 
+So for instance, we are asking ourselves, how can we create more light? 
+How can we bring more natural light into the airplane? 
+What about the data and communication software which we need in the future? 
+My belief is that the airplane of the future will get its own consciousness. 
+It will be more like a living organism than just a collection of very complex technology. 
+This will be very different in the future. 
+It will communicate directly with the passenger in its environment. 
+And then we are talking also about materials, synthetic biology, for example. 
+And my belief is that we will get more and more new materials which we can put into structure later on, because structure is one of the key issues in aircraft design. 
+So let's compare the old world with the new world. 
+I just want to show you here what we are doing today. 
+It takes a lot of weight, and it follows the classical design rules. 
+This here is an equal bracket for the same purpose. 
+It follows the design of bone. 
+The design process is completely different. 
+At the one hand, we have 1.2 kilos, and at the other hand 0.6 kilos. 
+So this technology, 3D printing, and new design rules really help us to reduce the weight, which is the biggest issue in aircraft design, because it's directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions. 
+So nature is very clever. It puts all the information into these small building blocks, which we call DNA. 
+And nature builds large skeletons out of it. 
+So we see a bottom-up approach here, because all the information, as I said, are inside the DNA. 
+And this is combined with a top-down approach, because what we are doing in our daily life is we train our muscles, we train our skeleton, and it's getting stronger. 
+So our building block is carbon nanotubes, for example, to create a large, rivet-less skeleton at the end of the day. 
+How this looks in particular, you can show it here. 
+So imagine you have carbon nanotubes growing inside a 3D printer, and they are embedded inside a matrix of plastic, and follow the forces which occur in your component. 
+And you've got trillions of them. 
+So you really align them to wood, and you take this wood and make morphological optimization, so you make structures, sub-structures, which allows you to transmit electrical energy or data. 
+And now we take this material, combine this with a top-down approach, and build bigger and bigger components. 
+So how might the airplane of the future look? 
+So we have very different seats which adapt to the shape of the future passenger, with the different anthropometrics. 
+We have social areas inside the aircraft which might turn into a place where you can play virtual golf. 
+And finally, this bionic structure, which is covered by a transparent biopolymer membrane, will really change radically how we look at aircrafts in the future. 
+So as Jason Silva said, if we can imagine it, why not make it so? 
+See you in the future. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+One of the problems of writing, and working, and looking at the Internet is that it's very hard to separate fashion from deep change. 
+And so, to start helping that, I want to take us back to 1835. 
+In 1835, James Gordon Bennett founded the first mass-circulation newspaper in New York City. 
+And it cost about 500 dollars to start it, which was about the equivalent of 10,000 dollars of today. 
+By 15 years later, by 1850, doing the same thing — starting what was experienced as a mass — circulation daily paper — would come to cost two and a half million dollars. 
+10,000, two and a half million, 15 years. 
+That's the critical change that is being inverted by the Net. 
+And that's what I want to talk about today, and how that relates to the emergence of social production. 
+Starting with newspapers, what we saw was high cost as an initial requirement for making information, knowledge and culture, which led to a stark bifurcation between producers — who had to be able to raise financial capital, just like any other industrial organization — and passive consumers that could choose from a certain set of things that this industrial model could produce. 
+Now, the term "" information society, "" "" information economy, "" for a very long time has been used as the thing that comes after the industrial revolution. But in fact, for purposes of understanding what's happening today, that's wrong. Because for 150 years, we've had an information economy. 
+It's just been industrial, which means those who were producing had to have a way of raising money to pay those two and a half million dollars, and later, more for the telegraph, and the radio transmitter, and the television, and eventually the mainframe. 
+And that meant they were market based, or they were government owned, depending on what kind of system they were in. And this characterized and anchored the way information and knowledge were produced for the next 150 years. 
+Now, let me tell you a different story. Around June 2002, the world of supercomputers had a bombshell. 
+The Japanese had, for the first time, created the fastest supercomputer — the NEC Earth Simulator — taking the primary from the U.S., and about two years later — this, by the way, is measuring the trillion floating-point operations per second that the computer's capable of running — sigh of relief: IBM [Blue Gene] has just edged ahead of the NEC Earth Simulator. 
+All of this completely ignores the fact that throughout this period, there's another supercomputer running in the world — SETI @ home. 
+Four and a half million users around the world, contributing their leftover computer cycles, whenever their computer isn't working, by running a screen saver, and together sharing their resources to create a massive supercomputer that NASA harnesses to analyze the data coming from radio telescopes. 
+What this picture suggests to us is that we've got a radical change in the way information production and exchange is capitalized. Not that it's become less capital intensive — that there's less money that's required — but that the ownership of this capital, the way the capitalization happens, is radically distributed. Each of us, in these advanced economies, has one of these, or something rather like it — a computer. 
+They're not radically different from routers inside the middle of the network. 
+And computation, storage and communications capacity are in the hands of practically every connected person — and these are the basic physical capital means necessary for producing information, knowledge and culture, in the hands of something like 600 million to a billion people around the planet. 
+What this means is that for the first time since the industrial revolution, the most important means, the most important components of the core economic activities — remember, we are in an information economy — of the most advanced economies, and there more than anywhere else, are in the hands of the population at large. This is completely different than what we've seen since the industrial revolution. So we've got communications and computation capacity in the hands of the entire population, and we've got human creativity, human wisdom, human experience — the other major experience, the other major input — which unlike simple labor — stand here turning this lever all day long — 
+is not something that's the same or fungible among people. 
+Any one of you who has taken someone else's job, or tried to give yours to someone else, no matter how detailed the manual, you cannot transmit what you know, what you will intuit under a certain set of circumstances. 
+In that we're unique, and each of us holds this critical input into production as we hold this machine. 
+What's the effect of this? So, the story that most people know is the story of free or open source software. 
+This is market share of Apache Web server — one of the critical applications in Web-based communications. 
+In 1995, two groups of people said, "Wow, this is really important, the Web! We need a much better Web server!" 
+One was a motley collection of volunteers who just decided, you know, we really need this, we should write one, and what are we going to do with what — well, we're gonna share it! And other people will be able to develop it. 
+The other was Microsoft. 
+Now, if I told you that 10 years later, the motley crew of people, who didn't control anything that they produced, acquired 20 percent of the market and was the red line, it would be amazing! Right? 
+Think of it in minivans. A group of automobile engineers on their weekends are competing with Toyota. Right? 
+But, in fact, of course, the story is it's the 70 percent, including the major e-commerce site — 70 percent of a critical application on which Web-based communications and applications work is produced in this form, in direct competition with Microsoft. Not in a side issue — in a central strategic decision to try to capture a component of the Net. 
+Software has done this in a way that's been very visible, because it's measurable. But the thing to see is that this actually happens throughout the Web. 
+So, NASA, at some point, did an experiment where they took images of Mars that they were mapping, and they said, instead of having three or four fully trained Ph.D.s doing this all the time, let's break it up into small components, put it up on the Web, and see if people, using a very simple interface, will actually spend five minutes here, 10 minutes there, clicking. After six months, 85,000 people used this to generate mapping at a faster rate than the images were coming in, which was, quote, "practically indistinguishable from the markings of a fully-trained Ph.D.," once you showed it to a number of people and computed the average. 
+Now, if you have a little girl, and she goes and writes to — well, not so little, medium little — tries to do research on Barbie. 
+And she'll come to Encarta, one of the main online encyclopedias. 
+This is what you'll find out about Barbie. This is it, there's nothing more to the definition, including, "" manufacturers "" — plural — "" now more commonly produce ethnically diverse dolls, like this black Barbie. "" Which is vastly better than what you'll find in the encyclopedia.com, which is Barbie, Klaus. (Laughter) On the other hand, if they go to Wikipedia, they'll find a genuine article — and I won't talk a lot about Wikipedia, because Jimmy Wales is here — but roughly equivalent to what you would find in the Britannica, differently written, including the controversies over body image and commercialization, the claims about the way in which she's a good role model, etc. 
+Another portion is not only how content is produced, but how relevance is produced. 
+The claim to fame of Yahoo! was, we hire people to look — originally, not anymore — we hire people to look at websites and tell you — if they're in the index, they're good. This, on the other hand, is what 60,000 passionate volunteers produce in the Open Directory Project, each one willing to spend an hour or two on something they really care about, to say, this is good. So, this is the Open Directory Project, with 60,000 volunteers, each one spending a little bit of time, as opposed to a few hundred fully paid employees. No one owns it, no one owns the output, 
+it's free for anyone to use and it's the output of people acting out of social and psychological motivations to do something interesting. 
+This is not only outside of businesses. When you think of what is the critical innovation of Google, the critical innovation is outsourcing the one most important thing — the decision about what's relevant — to the community of the Web as a whole, doing whatever they want to do: so, page rank. 
+The critical innovation here is instead of our engineers, or our people saying which is the most relevant, we're going to go out and count what you, people out there on the Web, for whatever reason — vanity, pleasure — produced links, and tied to each other. We're going to count those, and count them up. 
+And again, here, you see Barbie.com, but also, very quickly, Adiosbarbie.com, the body image for every size. A contested cultural object, which you won't find anywhere soon on Overture, which is the classic market-based mechanism: whoever pays the most is highest on the list. 
+So, all of that is in the creation of content, of relevance, basic human expression. 
+But remember, the computers were also physical. Just physical materials — our PCs — we share them together. We also see this in wireless. 
+It used to be wireless was one person owned the license, they transmitted in an area, and it had to be decided whether they would be licensed or based on property. 
+What we're seeing now is that computers and radios are becoming so sophisticated that we're developing algorithms to let people own machines, like Wi-Fi devices, and overlay them with a sharing protocol that would allow a community like this to build its own wireless broadband network simply from the simple principle: When I'm listening, when I'm not using, I can help you transfer your messages; and when you're not using, you'll help me transfer yours. 
+And this is not an idealized version. These are working models that at least in some places in the United States are being implemented, at least for public security. 
+If in 1999 I told you, let's build a data storage and retrieval system. 
+It's got to store terabytes. It's got to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's got to be available from anywhere in the world. 
+It has to support over 100 million users at any given moment. It's got to be robust to attack, including closing the main index, injecting malicious files, armed seizure of some major nodes. You'd say that would take years. 
+It would take millions. But of course, what I'm describing is P2P file sharing. 
+Right? We always think of it as stealing music, but fundamentally, it's a distributed data storage and retrieval system, where people, for very obvious reasons, are willing to share their bandwidth and their storage to create something. 
+So, essentially what we're seeing is the emergence of a fourth transactional framework. It used to be that there were two primary dimensions along which you could divide things. They could be market based, or non-market based; they could be decentralized, or centralized. 
+The price system was a market-based and decentralized system. 
+If things worked better because you actually had somebody organizing them, you had firms, if you wanted to be in the market — or you had governments or sometimes larger non-profits in the non-market. 
+It was too expensive to have decentralized social production, to have decentralized action in society. That was not about society itself. 
+That was, in fact, economic. 
+But what we're seeing now is the emergence of this fourth system of social sharing and exchange. 
+Not that it's the first time that we do nice things to each other, or for each other, as social beings. We do it all the time. 
+It's that it's the first time that it's having major economic impact. 
+What characterizes them is decentralized authority. 
+You don't have to ask permission, as you do in a property-based system. 
+May I do this? It's open for anyone to create and innovate and share, if they want to, by themselves or with others, because property is one mechanism of coordination. 
+But it's not the only one. 
+Instead, what we see are social frameworks for all of the critical things that we use property and contract in the market: information flows to decide what are interesting problems; who's available and good for something; motivation structures — remember, money isn't always the best motivator. 
+If you leave a $50 check after dinner with friends, you don't increase the probability of being invited back. 
+And if dinner isn't entirely obvious, think of sex. (Laughter) It also requires certain new organizational approaches. 
+And in particular, what we've seen is task organization. 
+You have to hire people who know what they're doing. 
+You have to hire them to spend a lot of time. 
+Now, take the same problem, chunk it into little modules, and motivations become trivial. 
+Five minutes, instead of watching TV? 
+Five minutes I'll spend just because it's interesting. Just because it's fun. 
+Just because it gives me a certain sense of meaning, or, in places that are more involved, like Wikipedia, gives me a certain set of social relations. 
+So, a new social phenomenon is emerging. 
+It's creating, and it's most visible when we see it as a new form of competition. 
+Peer-to-peer networks assaulting the recording industry; free and open source software taking market share from Microsoft; Skype potentially threatening traditional telecoms; Wikipedia competing with online encyclopedias. 
+But it's also a new source of opportunities for businesses. 
+As you see a new set of social relations and behaviors emerging, you have new opportunities. Some of them are toolmakers. 
+Instead of building well-behaved appliances — things that you know what they'll do in advance — you begin to build more open tools. There's a new set of values, a new set of things people value. 
+You build platforms for self-expression and collaboration. 
+Like Wikipedia, like the Open Directory Project, you're beginning to build platforms, and you see that as a model. 
+And you see surfers, people who see this happening, and in some sense build it into a supply chain, which is a very curious one. Right? 
+You have a belief: stuff will flow out of connected human beings. 
+That'll give me something I can use, and I'm going to contract with someone. 
+I will deliver something based on what happens. It's very scary — that's what Google does, essentially. 
+That's what IBM does in software services, and they've done reasonably well. 
+So, social production is a real fact, not a fad. 
+It is the critical long-term shift caused by the Internet. 
+Social relations and exchange become significantly more important than they ever were as an economic phenomenon. In some contexts, it's even more efficient because of the quality of the information, the ability to find the best person, the lower transaction costs. It's sustainable and growing fast. 
+But — and this is the dark lining — it is threatened by — in the same way that it threatens — the incumbent industrial systems. 
+So next time you open the paper, and you see an intellectual property decision, a telecoms decision, it's not about something small and technical. 
+It is about the future of the freedom to be as social beings with each other, and the way information, knowledge and culture will be produced. 
+Because it is in this context that we see a battle over how easy or hard it will be for the industrial information economy to simply go on as it goes, or for the new model of production to begin to develop alongside that industrial model, and change the way we begin to see the world and report what it is that we see. 
+Thank you. 
+
+Throughout the history of computers we've been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen where our imagination can go wild. 
+And this gap has become shorter, shorter, and even shorter, and now this gap is shortened down to less than a millimeter, the thickness of a touch-screen glass, and the power of computing has become accessible to everyone. 
+But I wondered, what if there could be no boundary at all? 
+I started to imagine what this would look like. 
+First, I created this tool which penetrates into the digital space, so when you press it hard on the screen, it transfers its physical body into pixels. 
+Designers can materialize their ideas directly in 3D, and surgeons can practice on virtual organs underneath the screen. 
+So with this tool, this boundary has been broken. 
+But our two hands still remain outside the screen. 
+How can you reach inside and interact with the digital information using the full dexterity of our hands? 
+At Microsoft Applied Sciences, along with my mentor Cati Boulanger, I redesigned the computer and turned a little space above the keyboard into a digital workspace. 
+By combining a transparent display and depth cameras for sensing your fingers and face, now you can lift up your hands from the keyboard and reach inside this 3D space and grab pixels with your bare hands. 
+(Applause) Because windows and files have a position in the real space, selecting them is as easy as grabbing a book off your shelf. 
+Then you can flip through this book while highlighting the lines, words on the virtual touch pad below each floating window. 
+Architects can stretch or rotate the models with their two hands directly. 
+So in these examples, we are reaching into the digital world. 
+But how about reversing its role and having the digital information reach us instead? 
+This is a view that you get from head-mounted or see-through display when the system understands the geometry of your body. 
+Taking this idea further, I started to think, instead of just seeing these pixels in our space, how can we make it physical so that we can touch and feel it? 
+What would such a future look like? 
+At MIT Media Lab, along with my advisor Hiroshi Ishii and my collaborator Rehmi Post, we created this one physical pixel. 
+Well, in this case, this spherical magnet acts like a 3D pixel in our space, which means that both computers and people can move this object to anywhere within this little 3D space. 
+What we did was essentially canceling gravity and controlling the movement by combining magnetic levitation and mechanical actuation and sensing technologies. 
+And by digitally programming the object, we are liberating the object from constraints of time and space, which means that now, human motions can be recorded and played back and left permanently in the physical world. 
+So choreography can be taught physically over distance and Michael Jordan's famous shooting can be replicated over and over as a physical reality. 
+Students can use this as a tool to learn about the complex concepts such as planetary motion, physics, and unlike computer screens or textbooks, this is a real, tangible experience that you can touch and feel, and it's very powerful. 
+And what's more exciting than just turning what's currently in the computer physical is to start imagining how programming the world will alter even our daily physical activities. 
+(Laughter) As you can see, the digital information will not just show us something but it will start directly acting upon us as a part of our physical surroundings without disconnecting ourselves from our world. 
+Today, we started by talking about the boundary, but if we remove this boundary, the only boundary left is our imagination. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Applause) (Music) (Applause) 
+
+Every presentation needs this slide in it. 
+(Laughter) It's beautiful, isn't it? 
+Do you see? 
+All the points, all the lines — it's incredible. 
+It is the network; and in my case, the network has been important in media, because I get to connect to people. 
+Isn't it amazing? 
+Through that, I connect to people. 
+And the way that I've been doing it has been multifaceted. 
+For example, I get people to dress up their vacuum cleaners. 
+(Laughter) I put together projects like Earth Sandwich, where I ask people to try and simultaneously place two pieces of bread perfectly opposite each other on the Earth. 
+And people started laying bread in tribute, and eventually a team was able to do it between New Zealand and Spain. 
+It's pretty incredible — the video's online. 
+Connecting to people in projects like YoungmeNowme for example. 
+In YoungmeNowme, the audience was asked to find a childhood photograph of themselves and restage it as an adult. 
+(Laughter) This is the same person — top photo, James, bottom photo, [Jennifer]. 
+Poignant. 
+This was a Mother's Day gift. 
+(Laughter) Particularly creepy. 
+(Applause) (Laughter) My favorite of these photos, which I couldn't find, is there's a picture of a 30 year-old woman or so with a little baby on her lap, and the next photo is a 220-lb man with a tiny, little old lady peaking over his shoulder. 
+But this project changed the way that I thought about connecting to people. 
+This is project called Ray. 
+And what happened was I was sent this piece of audio and had no idea who generated the audio. 
+Somebody said, "" You have to listen to this. "" And this is what came to me. 
+Recording: Hi, my name is Ray, and on yesterday my daughter called me because she was stressed out because of things that were going on on her job that she felt was quite unfair. 
+Being quite disturbed, she called for comfort, and I didn't really know what to tell her, because we have to deal with so much mess in our society. 
+So I was led to write this song just for her, just to give her some encouragement while dealing with stress and pressures on her job. 
+And I figured I'd put it on the Internet for all employees under stress to help you better deal with what you're going through on your job. 
+Here's how the song goes. 
+♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫ ♫ you gonna have to send me home ♫ ♫ 'Cause I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ Now you might not be able to sing that out loud, but you can hum it to yourself, and you know what the words are. 
+And let it give you some strength to get the next few moments on your job. 
+All right. Stay strong. Peace. 
+Ze Frank: So — yeah. 
+No, no, no, shush. We've got to go quickly. 
+So I was so moved by this — this is incredible. This was connecting, right. 
+This was, at a distance, realizing that someone was feeling something, wanting to affect them in a particular way, using media to do it, putting it online and realizing that there was a greater impact. 
+This was incredible; this is what I wanted to do. 
+So the first thing I thought of is we have to thank him. 
+And I asked my audience, I said, "" Listen to this piece of audio. 
+We have to remix it. He's got a great voice. 
+It's actually in the key of B flat. 
+And have to do something with it. "" Hundreds of remixes came back — lots of different attempts. 
+One stood out in particular. 
+It was done by a guy named Goose. 
+Remix: ♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫ ♫ You gonna have to send me home ♫ ♫ Cuz I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫ ♫ I'm about to whip some ♫ — ZF: Great, so it was incredible. 
+That song — (Applause) Thank you. 
+So that song, somebody told me that it was at a baseball game in Kansas City. 
+In the end, it was one of the top downloads on a whole bunch of music streaming services. 
+And so I said, "" Let's put this together in an album. "" And the audience came together, and they designed an album cover. 
+And I said, "" If you put it all on this, I'm going to deliver it to him, if you can figure out who this person is, "" because all I had was his name — Ray — and this little piece of audio and the fact that his daughter was upset. 
+In two weeks, they found him. 
+I received and email and it said, "" Hi, I'm Ray. 
+I heard you were looking for me. "" (Laughter) And I was like, "" Yeah, Ray. 
+It's been an interesting two weeks. "" And so I flew to St. Louis and met Ray, and he's a preacher — (Laughter) among other things. 
+So but anyways, here's the thing — is it reminds me of this, which is a sign that you see in Amsterdam on every street corner. 
+And it's sort of a metaphor for me for the virtual world. 
+I look at this photo, and he seems really interested in what's going on with that button, but it doesn't seem like he is really that interested in crossing the street. 
+(Laughter) And it makes me think of this. 
+On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. 
+But the truth is life is being lived there. 
+When they smile — right, you've seen people stop — all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network. 
+And this is it, right, to feel and be felt. 
+It's the fundamental force that we're all after. 
+We can build all sorts of environments to make it a little bit easier, but ultimately, what we're trying to do is really connect with one other person. 
+And that's not always going to happen in physical spaces. 
+It's also going to now happen in virtual spaces, and we have to get better at figuring that out. 
+I think, of the people that build all this technology in the network, a lot of them aren't very good at connecting with people. 
+This is kind of like something I used to do in third grade. 
+(Laughter) So here's a series of projects over the last few years where I've been inspired by trying to figure out how to really facilitate close connection. 
+Sometimes they're very, very simple things. 
+A Childhood Walk, which is a project where I ask people to remember a walk that they used to take as a child over and over again that was sort of meaningless — like on the route to the bus stop, to a neighbor's house, and take it inside of Google Streetview. 
+And I promise you, if you take that walk inside Google Streetview, you come to a moment where something comes back and hits you in the face. 
+And I collected those moments — the photos inside Google Streetview and the memories, specifically. 
+"" Our conversation started with me saying, 'I'm bored,' and her replying, 'When I'm bored I eat pretzels.' I remember this distinctly because it came up a lot. "" "" Right after he told me and my brother he was going to be separating from my mom, I remember walking to a convenience store and getting a cherry cola. "" "" They used some of the morbidly artist footage, a close-up of Chad's shoes in the middle of the highway. 
+I guess the shoes came off when he was hit. 
+He slept over at my house once, and he left his pillow. 
+It had 'Chad' written in magic marker on it. 
+He died long after he left the pillow at my house, but we never got around to returning it. "" Sometimes they're a little bit more abstract. 
+This is Pain Pack. 
+Right after September 11th, last year, I was thinking about pain and the way that we disperse it, the way that we excise it from our bodies. 
+So what I did is I opened up a hotline — a hotline where people could leave voicemails of their pain, not necessarily related to that event. 
+And people called in and left messages like this. 
+Recording: Okay, here's something. 
+I'm not alone, and I am loved. 
+I'm really fortunate. 
+But sometimes I feel really lonely. 
+And when I feel that way even the smallest act of kindness can make me cry. 
+Like even people in convenience stores saying, "" Have a nice day, "" when they're accidentally looking me in the eye. 
+ZF: So what I did was I took those voicemails, and with their permission, converted them to MP3s and distributed them to sound editors who created short sounds using just those voicemails. 
+And those were then distributed to DJs who have made hundreds of songs using that source material. 
+(Music) We don't have time to play much of it. 
+You can look at it online. 
+"From 52 to 48 with love" was a project around the time of the last election cycle, where McCain and Obama both, in their speeches after the election, talked about reconciliation, and I was like, "" What the hell does that look like? "" So I thought, "" Well let's just give it a try. 
+Let's have people hold up signs about reconciliation. "" And so some really nice things came together. 
+"" I voted blue. I voted red. 
+Together, for our future. "" These are very, very cute little things right. 
+Some came from the winning party. 
+"Dear 48, I promise to listen to you, to fight for you, to respect you always." 
+Some came from the party who had just lost. 
+"" From a 48 to a 52, may your party's leadership be as classy as you, but I doubt it. "" But the truth was that as this start becoming popular, a couple rightwing blogs and some message boards apparently found it to be a little patronizing, which I could also see. 
+And so I started getting amazing amounts of hate mail, death threats even. 
+And one guy in particular kept on writing me these pretty awful messages, and he was dressed as Batman. 
+And he said, "" I'm dressed as Batman to hide my identity. "" Just in case I thought the real Batman was coming after me; which actually made me feel a little better — like, "" Phew, it's not him. "" So what I did — unfortunately, I was harboring all this kind of awful experience and this pain inside of me, and it started to eat away at my psyche. 
+And I was protecting the project from it, I realized. I was protecting it — I didn't want this special, little group of photographs to get sullied in some way. 
+So what I did, I took all those emails, and I put them together into something called Angrigami, which was an origami template made out of this sort of vile stuff. 
+And I asked people to send me beautiful things made out of the Angrigami. 
+(Laughter) But this was the emotional moment. 
+One of my viewer's uncles died on a particular day and he chose to commemorate it with a piece of hate. 
+It's amazing. 
+The last thing I'm going to tell you about is a series of projects called Songs You Already Know, where the idea was, I was trying to figure out to address particular kinds of emotions with group projects. 
+So one of them was fairly straightforward. 
+A guy said that his daughter got scared at night and could I write a song for her, his daughter. 
+And I said, "" Oh yeah, I'll try to write a mantra that she can sing to herself to help herself go to sleep. "" And this was "" Scared. "" (Video) ♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫ ♫ I don't know why but it helps me get over it ♫ ♫ The words of the song just move me along ♫ ♫ And somehow I get over it ♫ ♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫ ♫ I keep on trying despite ♫ ♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫ ♫ I keep on trying despite ♫ ♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫ 
+Okay, so I wrote that song, right. Thank you. 
+So the nice thing was is he walked by his daughter's room at some point, and she actually was singing that song to herself. 
+So I was like, "" Awesome. This is great. "" And then I got this email. And there's a little bit of a back story to this. 
+And I don't have much time. 
+But the idea was that at one point I did a project called Facebook Me Equals You, where I wanted to experience what it was like to live as another person. 
+So I asked for people's usernames and passwords to be sent to me. 
+And I got a lot, like 30 in a half an hour. 
+And I shut that part down. 
+And I chose two people to be, and I asked them to send me descriptions of how to act as them on Facebook. 
+One person sent me a very detailed description; the other person didn't. 
+And the person who didn't, it turned out, had just moved to a new city and taken on a new job. 
+So, you know, people were writing me and saying, "" How's your new job? "" I was like, "" I don't know. 
+Didn't know I had one. "" But anyway, this same person, Laura, ended up emailing me a little bit after that project. 
+And I felt badly for not having done a good job. 
+And she said, "" I'm really anxious, I just moved to a new town, I have this new job, and I've just had this incredible amount of anxiety. "" So she had seen the "" Scared "" song and wondered if I could do something. 
+So I asked her, "" What does it feel like when you feel this way? "" And she wrote a sort of descriptive set of what it felt like to have had this anxiety. 
+And so what I decided to do. 
+I said, "" Okay, I'll think about it. "" And so quietly in the background, I started sending people this. 
+(Audio) ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ So I asked people whether they had basic audio capabilities, just so they could sing along to the song with headphones on, so I could just get their voices back. 
+And this is the kind of thing that I got back. 
+Recording: ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ZF: So that's one of the better ones, really. 
+But what's awesome is, as I started getting more and more and more of them, all of a sudden I had 30, 40 voices from around the world. 
+And when you put them together, something magical happens, something absolutely incredible happens, and all of a sudden I get a chorus from around the world. 
+And what was really great is, I'm putting all this work together in the background, and Laura sent me a follow-up email because a good month had passed by. 
+And she said, "" I know you've forgotten about me. 
+I just want to say thanks for even considering it. "" And then a few days later I sent her this. 
+(Audio) ♫ Right now, it feels like I forgot to turn the light on ♫ ♫ And things that looked so good yesterday ♫ ♫ are now shades of gray ♫ ♫ And it seems like the world is spinning ♫ ♫ while I'm standing still ♫ ♫ Or maybe I am spinning I can't tell ♫ ♫ And then you say ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ ♫ And now the words sing ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ 
+♫ Now everybody sings ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ You're okay ♫ ♫ You'll be fine ♫ ♫ Just breathe ♫ Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The future, as we know it, is very unpredictable. 
+The best minds in the best institutions generally get it wrong. 
+This is in technology. This is in the area of politics, where pundits, the CIA, MI6 always get it wrong. 
+And it's clearly in the area of finance. 
+With institutions established to think about the future, the IMF, the BIS, the Financial Stability Forum, couldn't see what was coming. 
+Over 20,000 economists whose job it is, competitive entry to get there, couldn't see what was happening. 
+Globalization is getting more complex. 
+And this change is getting more rapid. 
+The future will be more unpredictable. 
+Urbanization, integration, coming together, leads to a new renaissance. 
+It did this a thousand years ago. 
+The last 40 years have been extraordinary times. 
+Life expectancy has gone up by about 25 years. 
+It took from the Stone Age to achieve that. 
+Income has gone up for a majority of the world's population, despite the population going up by about two billion people over this period. 
+And illiteracy has gone down, from a half to about a quarter of the people on Earth. 
+A huge opportunity, unleashing of new potential for innovation, for development. 
+But there is an underbelly. 
+There are two Achilles' heels of globalization. 
+There is the Achilles' heel of growing inequality — those that are left out, those that feel angry, those that are not participating. Globalization has not been inclusive. 
+The second Achilles' heel is complexity — a growing fragility, a growing brittleness. 
+What happens in one place very quickly affects everything else. 
+This is a systemic risk, systemic shock. 
+We've seen it in the financial crisis. We've seen it in the pandemic flu. 
+It will become virulent and it's something we have to build resilience against. 
+A lot of this is driven by what's happening in technology. 
+There have been huge leaps. There will be a million-fold improvement in what you can get for the same price in computing by 2030. 
+That's what the experience of the last 20 years has been. 
+It will continue. 
+Our computers, our systems will be as primitive as the Apollo's are for today. 
+Our mobile phones are more powerful than the total Apollo space engine. Our mobile phones are more powerful than 
+some of the strongest computers of 20 years ago. 
+So what will this do? 
+It will create huge opportunities in technology. 
+Miniaturization as well. 
+There will be invisible capacity. Invisible capacity in our bodies, in our brains, and in the air. 
+This is a dust mite on a nanoreplica. 
+This sort of ability to do everything in new ways unleashes potential, not least in the area of medicine. 
+This is a stem cell that we've developed here in Oxford, from an embryonic stem cell. 
+We can develop any part of the body. 
+Increasingly, over time, this will be possible from our own skin — able to replicate parts of the body. 
+Fantastic potential for regenerative medicine. 
+I don't think there will be a Special Olympics long after 2030, because of this capacity to regenerate parts of the body. 
+But the question is, "" Who will have it? "" The other major development is going to be in the area of what can happen in genetics. 
+The capacity to create, as this mouse has been genetically modified, something which goes three times faster, lasts for three times longer, we could produce, as this mouse can, to the age of our equivalent of 80 years, using about the same amount of food. 
+But will this only be available for the super rich, for those that can afford it? Are we headed for a new eugenics? 
+Will only those that are able to afford it be able to be this super race of the future? 
+(Laughter) So the big question for us is, "How do we manage this technological change?" 
+How do we ensure that it creates a more inclusive technology, a technology which means that not only as we grow older, that we can also grow wiser, and that we're able to support the populations of the future? 
+One of the most dramatic manifestations of these improvements will be moving from population pyramids to what we might term population coffins. 
+There is unlikely to be a pension or a retirement age in 2030. 
+These will be redundant concepts. And this isn't only something of the West. 
+The most dramatic changes will be the skyscraper type of new pyramids that will take place in China and in many other countries. 
+So forget about retirements if you're young. 
+Forget about pensions. Think about life and where it's going to be going. 
+Of course, migration will become even more important. 
+The war on talent, the need to attract people at all skill ranges, to push us around in our wheelchairs, but also to drive our economies. Our innovation will be vital. 
+The employment in the rich countries will go down from about 800 to about 700 million of these people. 
+This would imply a massive leap in migration. 
+So the concerns, the xenophobic concerns of today, of migration, will be turned on their head, as we search for people to help us sort out our pensions and our economies in the future. 
+And then, the systemic risks. 
+We understand that these will become much more virulent, that what we see today is this interweaving of societies, of systems, fastened by technologies and hastened by just-in-time management systems. 
+Small levels of stock push resilience into other people's responsibility. 
+The collapse in biodiversity, climate change, pandemics, financial crises: these will be the currency that we will think about. 
+And so a new awareness will have to arise, of how we deal with these, how we mobilize ourselves, in a new way, and come together as a community to manage systemic risk. 
+It's going to require innovation. 
+It's going to require an understanding that the glory of globalization could also be its downfall. 
+This could be our best century ever because of the achievements, or it could be our worst. 
+And of course we need to worry about the individuals, particularly the individuals that feel that they've been left out in one way or another. 
+An individual, for the first time in the history of humanity, will have the capacity, by 2030, to destroy the planet, to wreck everything, through the creation, for example, of a biopathogen. 
+How do we begin to weave these tapestries together? 
+How do we think about complex systems in new ways? 
+That will be the challenge of the scholars, and of all of us engaged in thinking about the future. 
+The rest of our lives will be in the future. We need to prepare for it now. 
+We need to understand that the governance structure in the world is fossilized. 
+It cannot begin to cope with the challenges that this will bring. 
+We have to develop a new way of managing the planet, collectively, through collective wisdom. 
+We know, and I know from my own experience, that amazing things can happen, when individuals and societies come together to change their future. 
+I left South Africa, and 15 years later, after thinking I would never go back, I had the privilege and the honor to work in the government of Nelson Mandela. 
+This was a miracle. We can create miracles, collectively, in our lifetime. 
+It is vital that we do so. 
+It is vital that the ideas that are nurtured in TED, that the ideas that we think about look forward, and make sure that this will be the most glorious century, and not one of eco-disaster and eco-collapse. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Imagine a place where your neighbors greet your children by name; a place with splendid vistas; a place where you can drive just 20 minutes and put your sailboat on the water. 
+It's a seductive place, isn't it? 
+I don't live there. 
+What is a Whitopia? 
+I define Whitopia in three ways: First, a Whitopia has posted at least six percent population growth since 2000. 
+Secondly, the majority of that growth comes from white migrants. 
+And third, the Whitopia has an ineffable charm, a pleasant look and feel, a je Ne sais quoi. 
+First stop, St. George — a beautiful town of red rock landscapes. 
+I approached my time in each Whitopia like an anthropologist. 
+In St. George, I rented a home at the Entrada, one of the town's premier gated communities. 
+I rented myself this home by phone. 
+When I went on my journey, I had barely ever held a golf club. 
+One venture capitalist, for example, invited me to golf in his private club that had no minority members. 
+I also went fishing. 
+I also played poker every weekend. 
+My poker mates may have been bluffing about the hands that they drew, but they weren't bluffing about their social beliefs. 
+I'm a gung ho entertainer. 
+I love to cook, I hosted many dinner parties, and in return, people invited me to their dinner parties, and to their barbecues, and to their pool parties, and to their birthday parties. 
+Immigration turned out to be a big issue in this Whitopia. 
+Next stop: Almost Heaven, a cabin I rented for myself in Coeur d'Alene, in the beautiful North Idaho panhandle. 
+I rented this place for myself, also by phone. 
+(Laughter) The book "" A Thousand Places To See Before You Die "" lists Coeur d'Alene — it's a gorgeous paradise for huntsmen, boatmen and fishermen. 
+In 1993, around 11,000 families and cops fled Los Angeles after the L.A. racial unrest, for North Idaho, and they've built an expatriated community. 
+Given the conservatism of these cops, there's no surprise that North Idaho has a strong gun culture. 
+So what's a resident to do to fit in? 
+When I rented a gun, the gentleman behind the counter was perfectly pleasant and kind, until I showed him my New York City driver's license. 
+That's when he got nervous. 
+I'm not as bad a shot as I thought I might have been. 
+What I learned from North Idaho is the peculiar brand of paranoia that can permeate a community when so many cops and guns are around. 
+In North Idaho, in my red pickup truck, I kept a notepad. 
+And in that notepad I counted more Confederate flags than black people. 
+In North Idaho, I found Confederate flags on key chains, on cellphone paraphernalia, and on cars. 
+About a seven-minute drive from my hidden lake cabin was the compound of Aryan Nations, the white supremacist group. 
+America's Promise Ministries, the religious arm of Aryan Nations, happened to have a three-day retreat during my visit. 
+So I decided to crash it. 
+Rather, they emigrate there for friendliness, comfort, security, safety — reasons that they implicitly associate to whiteness in itself. 
+In Georgia, I stayed in an exurb north of Atlanta. 
+In Utah, I found poker; in Idaho, I found guns; in Georgia, I found God. 
+I was active in the youth ministry. 
+That is because [there], in Georgia, white people and black people are more historically familiar to one another. 
+I was less exotic in this Whitopia. 
+(Laughter) But what does it all mean? 
+Whitopian dreaming, Whitopia migration, is a push-pull phenomenon, full of alarming pushes and alluring pulls, and Whitopia operates at the level of conscious and unconscious bias. 
+It's possible for people to be in Whitopia not for racist reasons, though it has racist outcomes. 
+Many Whitopians feel pushed by illegals, social welfare abuse, minorities, density, crowded schools. 
+And I learned in Whitopia how a country can have racism without racists. 
+Many of my smug urban liberal friends couldn't believe I would go on such a venture. 
+The reality is that many white Americans are affable and kind. 
+Interpersonal race relations — how we treat each other as human beings — are vastly better than in my parents' generation. 
+Can you imagine me going to Whitopia 40 years ago? 
+What a journey that would have been. 
+America is as residentially and educationally segregated today as it was in 1970. 
+As Americans, we often find ways to cook for each other, to dance with each other, to host with each other, but why can't that translate into how we treat each other as communities? 
+It's a devastating irony, how we have gone forward as individuals, and backwards as communities. 
+One of the Whitopian outlooks that really hit me was a proverbial saying: "" One black man is a delightful dinner guest; 50 black men is a ghetto. "" One of the big contexts animating my Whitopian journey was the year 2042. 
+By 2042, white people will no longer be the American majority. 
+As such, will there be more Whitopias? 
+In looking at this, the danger of Whitopia is that the more segregation we have, the less we can look at and confront conscious and unconscious bias. 
+I ventured on my two-year, 27,000 mile journey to learn where, why, and how white people are fleeing, but I didn't expect to have so much fun on my journey. 
+I don't expect I'll be living in a Whitopia — or a Blacktopia, for that matter. 
+I do plan to continue golfing every chance I get. 
+Thank you. 
+
+Nature's my muse and it's been my passion. 
+As a photographer for National Geographic, I've portrayed it for many. 
+But five years ago, I went on a personal journey. 
+I wanted to visualize the story of life. 
+It's the hardest thing I've ever attempted, and there have been plenty of times when I felt like backing out. 
+But there were also revelations. 
+And one of those I'd like to share with you today. 
+I went down to a remote lagoon in Australia, hoping to see the Earth the way it was three billion years ago, back before the sky turned blue. 
+There's stromatolites down there — the first living things to capture photosynthesis — and it's the only place they still occur today. 
+Going down there was like entering a time capsule, and I came out with a different sense of myself in time. 
+The oxygen exhaled by those stromatolites is what we all breathe today. 
+Stromatolites are the heroes in my story. 
+I hope it's a story that has some resonance for our time. 
+It's a story about you and me, nature and science. 
+And with that said, I'd like to invite you for a short, brief journey of life through time. 
+Our journey starts in space, where matter condenses into spheres over time... 
+solidifying into surface, molded by fire. 
+The fire gave way, Earth emerged — but this was an alien planet. 
+The moon was closer; things were different. 
+Heat from within made geysers erupt — that is how the oceans were born. 
+Water froze around the poles and shaped the edges of the Earth. 
+Water is the key to life, but in frozen form, it is a latent force. 
+And when it vanishes, Earth becomes Mars. 
+But this planet is different — it's roiling inside. 
+And where that energy touches water, something new emerges: life. 
+It arises around cracks in the Earth. 
+Mud and minerals become substrate; there are bacteria. 
+Learn to multiply, thickening in places... 
+Growing living structures under an alien sky... 
+Stromatolites were the first to exhale oxygen. 
+And they changed the atmosphere. 
+A breath that's fossilized now as iron. 
+Meteorites delivered chemistry, and perhaps membranes, too. 
+Life needs a membrane to contain itself so it can replicate and mutate. 
+These are diatoms, single-celled phytoplankton with skeletons of silicon... 
+circuit boards of the future. 
+Shallow seas nurtured life early on, and that's where it morphed into more complex forms. 
+It grew as light and oxygen increased. 
+Life hardened and became defensive. 
+It learned to move and began to see. The first eyes grew on trilobites. 
+Vision was refined in horseshoe crabs, among the first to leave the sea. 
+They still do what they've done for ages, their enemies long gone. 
+Scorpions follow prey out of the sea. Slugs became snails. 
+Fish tried amphibian life. Frogs adapted to deserts. 
+Lichens arose as a co-op. Fungi married algae... 
+clinging to rock, and eating it too... transforming barren land. 
+True land plants arose, leafless at first. 
+Once they learn how to stay upright, they grew in size and shape. 
+The fundamental forms of ferns followed, to bear spores that foreshadowed seeds. 
+Life flourished in swamps. 
+On land, life turned a corner. Jaws formed first; teeth came later. 
+Leatherbacks and tuataras are echoes from that era. 
+It took time for life to break away from water, and it still beckons all the time. 
+Life turned hard so it could venture inland. 
+And the dragons that arose are still among us today. 
+Jurassic Park still shimmers in part of Madagascar, and the center of Brazil, where plants called "" cycads "" remain rock hard. 
+Forests arose and nurtured things with wings. 
+One early form left an imprint, like it died only yesterday. 
+And others fly today like echoes of the past. 
+In birds, life gained new mobility. 
+Flamingos covered continents. Migrations got underway. 
+Birds witnessed the emergence of flowering plants. 
+Water lilies were among the first. 
+Plants began to diversify and grew, turning into trees. 
+In Australia, a lily turned into a grass tree, and in Hawaii, a daisy became a silver sword. 
+In Africa, Gondwana molded Proteas. 
+But when that ancient continent broke up, life got lusher. 
+Tropical rainforests arose, sparking new layers of interdependence. 
+Fungi multiplied. Orchids emerged, genitalia shaped to lure insects... 
+a trick shared by the largest flower on Earth. 
+Co-evolution entwined insects and birds and plants forever. 
+When birds can't fly, they become vulnerable. 
+Kiwis are, and so are these hawks trapped near Antarctica. 
+Extinction can come slowly, but sometimes it arrives fast. 
+An asteroid hits, and the world went down in flames. 
+But there were witnesses, survivors in the dark. 
+When the skies cleared, a new world was born. 
+A world fit for mammals. From tiny shrews [came] tenrecs, accustomed to the dark. 
+New forms became bats. Civets. 
+New predators, hyenas, getting faster and faster still. 
+Grasslands created opportunities. 
+Herd safety came with sharpened senses. 
+Growing big was another answer, but size always comes at a price. 
+Some mammals turned back to water. 
+Walruses adapted with layers of fat. Sea lions got sleek. 
+And cetaceans moved into a world without bounds. 
+There are many ways to be a mammal. A 'roo hops in Oz; a horse runs in Asia; and a wolf evolves stilt legs in Brazil. 
+Primates emerge from jungles, as tarsiers first, becoming lemurs not much later. 
+Learning became reinforced. Bands of apes ventured into the open. 
+And forests dried out once more. Going upright became a lifestyle. 
+So who are we? Brothers of masculine chimps, sisters of feminine bonobos? We are all of them, and more. 
+We're molded by the same life force. 
+The blood veins in our hands echoed a course of water traces on the Earth. 
+And our brains — our celebrated brains — reflect a drainage of a tidal marsh. 
+Life is a force in its own right. It is a new element. 
+And it has altered the Earth. It covers Earth like a skin. 
+And where it doesn't, as in Greenland in winter, Mars is still not very far. 
+But that likelihood fades as long as ice melts again. 
+And where water is liquid, it becomes a womb for cells green with chlorophyll — and that molecular marvel is what's made a difference — it powers everything. 
+The whole animal world today lives on a stockpile of bacterial oxygen that is cycled constantly through plants and algae, and their waste is our breath, and vice versa. 
+This Earth is alive, and it's made its own membrane. 
+We call it "" atmosphere. "" This is the icon of our journey. 
+And you all here today can imagine and will shape where we go next. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 
+
+Jambo, bonjour, zdravstvujtye, dayo: these are a few of the languages that I've spoken little bits of over the course of the last six weeks, as I've been to 17 countries I think I'm up to, on this crazy tour I've been doing, checking out various aspects of the project that we're doing. 
+And I'm going to tell you a little bit about later on. 
+And visiting some pretty incredible places, places like Mongolia, Cambodia, New Guinea, South Africa, Tanzania twice — I was here a month ago. 
+And the opportunity to make a whirlwind tour of the world like that is utterly amazing, for lots of reasons. 
+You see some incredible stuff. 
+And you get to make these spot comparisons between people all around the globe. 
+And the thing that you really take away from that, the kind of surface thing that you take away from it, is not that we're all one, although I'm going to tell you about that, but rather how different we are. 
+There is so much diversity around the globe. 
+6,000 different languages spoken by six and a half billion people, all different colors, shapes, sizes. 
+You walk down the street in any big city, you travel like that, and you are amazed at the diversity in the human species. 
+How do we explain that diversity? 
+Well, that's what I'm going to talk about today, is how we're using the tools of genetics, population genetics in particular, to tell us how we generated this diversity, and how long it took. 
+Now, the problem of human diversity, like all big scientific questions — how do you explain something like that — can be broken down into sub-questions. 
+And you can ferret away at those little sub-questions. 
+First one is really a question of origins. 
+Do we all share a common origin, in fact? 
+And given that we do — and that's the assumption everybody, I think, in this room would make — when was that? 
+When did we originate as a species? 
+How long have we been divergent from each other? 
+And the second question is related, but slightly different. 
+If we do spring from a common source, how did we come to occupy every corner of the globe, and in the process generate all of this diversity, the different ways of life, the different appearances, the different languages around the world? 
+Well, the question of origins, as with so many other questions in biology, seems to have been answered by Darwin over a century ago. 
+In "" The Descent of Man, "" he wrote, "" In each great region of the world, the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. 
+It's therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee, and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it's somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. "" So we're done, we can go home — finished the origin question. 
+Well, not quite. Because Darwin was talking about our distant ancestry, our common ancestry with apes. 
+And it is quite clear that apes originated on the African continent. 
+Around 23 million years ago, they appear in the fossil record. 
+Africa was actually disconnected from the other landmasses at that time, due to the vagaries of plate tectonics, floating around the Indian Ocean. 
+Bumped into Eurasia around 16 million years ago, and then we had the first African exodus, as we call it. 
+The apes that left at that time ended up in Southeast Asia, became the gibbons and the orangutans. 
+And the ones that stayed on in Africa evolved into the gorillas, the chimpanzees and us. 
+So, yes, if you're talking about our common ancestry with apes, it's very clear, by looking at the fossil record, we started off here. 
+But that's not really the question I'm asking. 
+I'm asking about our human ancestry, things that we would recognize as being like us if they were sitting here in the room. 
+If they were peering over your shoulder, you wouldn't leap back, like that. What about our human ancestry? 
+Because if we go far enough back, we share a common ancestry with every living thing on Earth. 
+DNA ties us all together, so we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back — over a billion years. 
+What we're asking about though is human ancestry. 
+How do we study that? 
+Well, historically, it has been studied using the science of paleoanthropology. 
+Digging things up out of the ground, and largely on the basis of morphology — the way things are shaped, often skull shape — saying, "" This looks a little bit more like us than that, so this must be my ancestor. 
+This must be who I'm directly descended from. "" The field of paleoanthropology, I'll argue, gives us lots of fascinating possibilities about our ancestry, but it doesn't give us the probabilities that we really want as scientists. 
+What do I mean by that? 
+You're looking at a great example here. 
+These are three extinct species of hominids, potential human ancestors. 
+All dug up just west of here in Olduvai Gorge, by the Leakey family. 
+And they're all dating to roughly the same time. 
+From left to right, we've got Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Australopithecus — now called Paranthropus boisei, the robust australopithecine. Three extinct species, same place, same time. 
+That means that not all three could be my direct ancestor. 
+Which one of these guys am I actually related to? 
+Possibilities about our ancestry, but not the probabilities that we're really looking for. 
+Well, a different approach has been to look at morphology in humans using the only data that people really had at hand until quite recently — again, largely skull shape. 
+The first person to do this systematically was Linnaeus, Carl von Linne, a Swedish botanist, who in the eighteenth century took it upon himself to categorize every living organism on the planet. 
+You think you've got a tough job? 
+And he did a pretty good job. 
+He categorized about 12,000 species in "" Systema Naturae. "" He actually coined the term Homo sapiens — it means wise man in Latin. 
+But looking around the world at the diversity of humans, he said, "Well, you know, we seem to come in discreet sub-species or categories." 
+And he talked about Africans and Americans and Asians and Europeans, and a blatantly racist category he termed "" Monstrosus, "" which basically included all the people he didn't like, including imaginary folk like elves. 
+It's easy to dismiss this as the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately benighted musings of an eighteenth century scientist working in the pre-Darwinian era. 
+Except, if you had taken physical anthropology as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, in many cases you would have learned basically that same classification of humanity. 
+Human races that according to physical anthropologists of 30, 40 years ago — Carlton Coon is the best example — had been diverging from each other — this was in the post-Darwinian era — for over a million years, since the time of Homo erectus. 
+But based on what data? 
+Very little. Very little. Morphology and a lot of guesswork. 
+Well, what I'm going to talk about today, what I'm going to talk about now is a new approach to this problem. 
+Instead of going out and guessing about our ancestry, digging things up out of the ground, possible ancestors, and saying it on the basis of morphology — which we still don't completely understand, we don't know the genetic causes underlying this morphological variation — what we need to do is turn the problem on its head. 
+Because what we're really asking is a genealogical problem, or a genealogical question. 
+What we're trying to do is construct a family tree for everybody alive today. 
+And as any genealogist will tell you — anybody have a member of the family, or maybe you have tried to construct a family tree, trace back in time? 
+You start in the present, with relationships you're certain about. 
+You and your siblings, you have a parent in common. 
+You and your cousins share a grandparent in common. 
+You gradually trace further and further back into the past, adding these ever more distant relationships. 
+But eventually, no matter how good you are at digging up the church records, and all that stuff, you hit what the genealogists call a brick wall. 
+A point beyond which you don't know anything else about your ancestors, and you enter this dark and mysterious realm we call history that we have to feel our way through with whispered guidance. 
+Who were these people who came before? 
+We have no written record. Well, actually, we do. 
+Written in our DNA, in our genetic code — we have a historical document that takes us back in time to the very earliest days of our species. And that's what we study. 
+Now, a quick primer on DNA. 
+I suspect that not everybody in the audience is a geneticist. 
+It is a very long, linear molecule, a coded version of how to make another copy of you. It's your blueprint. 
+It's composed of four subunits: A, C, G and T, we call them. 
+And it's the sequence of those subunits that defines that blueprint. 
+How long is it? Well, it's billions of these subunits in length. 
+A haploid genome — we actually have two copies of all of our chromosomes — a haploid genome is around 3.2 billion nucleotides in length. 
+And the whole thing, if you add it all together, is over six billion nucleotides long. 
+If you take all the DNA out of one cell in your body, and stretch it end to end, it's around two meters long. 
+If you take all the DNA out of every cell in your body, and you stretch it end to end, it would reach from here to the moon and back, thousands of times. It's a lot of information. 
+And so when you're copying this DNA molecule to pass it on, it's a pretty tough job. 
+Imagine the longest book you can think of, "" War and Peace. "" Now multiply it by 100. 
+And imagine copying that by hand. 
+And you're working away until late at night, and you're very, very careful, and you're drinking coffee and you're paying attention, but, occasionally, when you're copying this by hand, you're going to make a little typo, a spelling mistake — substitute an I for an E, or a C for a T. 
+Same thing happens to our DNA as it's being passed on through the generations. 
+It doesn't happen very often. We have a proofreading mechanism built in. 
+But when it does happen, and these changes get transmitted down through the generations, they become markers of descent. 
+If you share a marker with someone, it means you share an ancestor at some point in the past, the person who first had that change in their DNA. 
+And it's by looking at the pattern of genetic variation, the pattern of these markers in people all over the world, and assessing the relative ages when they occurred throughout our history, that we've been able to construct a family tree for everybody alive today. 
+These are two pieces of DNA that we use quite widely in our work. 
+Mitochondrial DNA, tracing a purely maternal line of descent. 
+You get your mtDNA from your mother, and your mother's mother, all the way back to the very first woman. 
+The Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that makes men men, traces a purely paternal line of descent. 
+Everybody in this room, everybody in the world, falls into a lineage somewhere on these trees. 
+Now, even though these are simplified versions of the real trees, they're still kind of complicated, so let's simplify them. 
+Turn them on their sides, combine them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up. 
+What's the take-home message? 
+Well, the thing that jumps out at you first is that the deepest lineages in our family trees are found within Africa, among Africans. 
+That means that Africans have been accumulating this mutational diversity for longer. 
+And what that means is that we originated in Africa. It's written in our DNA. 
+Every piece of DNA we look at has greater diversity within Africa than outside of Africa. 
+And at some point in the past, a sub-group of Africans left the African continent to go out and populate the rest of the world. 
+Now, how recently do we share this ancestry? 
+Was it millions of years ago, which we might suspect by looking at all this incredible variation around the world? 
+No, the DNA tells a story that's very clear. 
+Within the last 200,000 years, we all share an ancestor, a single person — Mitochondrial Eve, you might have heard about her — in Africa, an African woman who gave rise to all the mitochondrial diversity in the world today. 
+But what's even more amazing is that if you look at the Y-chromosome side, the male side of the story, the Y-chromosome Adam only lived around 60,000 years ago. 
+That's only about 2,000 human generations, the blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense. 
+That tells us we were all still living in Africa at that time. 
+This was an African man who gave rise to all the Y chromosome diversity around the world. 
+It's only within the last 60,000 years that we have started to generate this incredible diversity we see around the world. 
+Such an amazing story. 
+We're all effectively part of an extended African family. 
+Now, that seems so recent. Why didn't we start to leave earlier? 
+Why didn't Homo erectus evolve into separate species, or sub-species rather, human races around the world? 
+Why was it that we seem to have come out of Africa so recently? 
+Well, that's a big question. These "" why "" questions, particularly in genetics and the study of history in general, are always the big ones, the ones that are tough to answer. 
+And so when all else fails, talk about the weather. 
+What was going on to the world's weather around 60,000 years ago? 
+Well, we were going into the worst part of the last ice age. 
+The last ice age started roughly 120,000 years ago. 
+It went up and down, and it really started to accelerate around 70,000 years ago. 
+Lots of evidence from sediment cores and the pollen types, oxygen isotopes and so on. 
+We hit the last glacial maximum around 16,000 years ago, but basically, from 70,000 years on, things were getting really tough, getting very cold. The Northern Hemisphere had massive growing ice sheets. 
+New York City, Chicago, Seattle, all under a sheet of ice. 
+Most of Britain, all of Scandinavia, covered by ice several kilometers thick. 
+Now, Africa is the most tropical continent on the planet — about 85 percent of it lies between Cancer and Capricorn — and there aren't a lot of glaciers here, except on the high mountains here in East Africa. 
+So what was going on here? We weren't covered in ice in Africa. 
+Rather, Africa was drying out at that time. 
+This is a paleo-climatological map of what Africa looked like between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago, reconstructed from all these pieces of evidence that I mentioned before. 
+The reason for that is that ice actually sucks moisture out of the atmosphere. 
+If you think about Antarctica, it's technically a desert, it gets so little precipitation. 
+So the whole world was drying out. 
+The sea levels were dropping. And Africa was turning to desert. 
+The Sahara was much bigger then than it is now. 
+And the human habitat was reduced to just a few small pockets, compared to what we have today. 
+The evidence from genetic data is that the human population around this time, roughly 70,000 years ago, crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals. 
+We nearly went extinct. We were hanging on by our fingernails. 
+And then something happened. A great illustration of it. 
+Look at some stone tools. 
+The ones on the left are from Africa, from around a million years ago. 
+The ones on the right were made by Neanderthals, our distant cousins, not our direct ancestors, living in Europe, and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. 
+Now, at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience, basically there's not a lot of change between these two stone tool groups. 
+The ones on the left are pretty similar to the ones on the right. 
+We are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. 
+The tool styles don't change that much. 
+The evidence is that the human way of life didn't change that much during that period. 
+But then 50, 60, 70 thousand years ago, somewhere in that region, all hell breaks loose. Art makes its appearance. 
+The stone tools become much more finely crafted. 
+The evidence is that humans begin to specialize in particular prey species, at particular times of the year. 
+The population size started to expand. 
+Probably, according to what many linguists believe, fully modern language, syntactic language — subject, verb, object — that we use to convey complex ideas, like I'm doing now, appeared around that time. 
+We became much more social. The social networks expanded. 
+This change in behavior allowed us to survive these worsening conditions in Africa, and they allowed us to start to expand around the world. 
+We've been talking at this conference about African success stories. 
+Well, you want the ultimate African success story? 
+Look in the mirror. You're it. The reason you're alive today is because of those changes in our brains that took place in Africa — probably somewhere in the region where we're sitting right now, around 60, 70 thousand years ago — allowing us not only to survive in Africa, but to expand out of Africa. 
+An early coastal migration along the south coast of Asia, leaving Africa around 60,000 years ago, reaching Australia very rapidly, by 50,000 years ago. 
+A slightly later migration up into the Middle East. 
+These would have been savannah hunters. 
+So those of you who are going on one of the post-conference tours, you'll get to see what a real savannah is like. 
+And it's basically a meat locker. 
+People who would have specialized in killing the animals, hunting the animals on those meat locker savannahs, moving up, following the grasslands into the Middle East around 45,000 years ago, during one of the rare wet phases in the Sahara. 
+Migrating eastward, following the grasslands, because that's what they were adapted to live on. 
+And when they reached Central Asia, they reached what was effectively a steppe super-highway, a grassland super-highway. 
+The grasslands at that time — this was during the last ice age — stretched basically from Germany all the way over to Korea, and the entire continent was open to them. 
+Entering Europe around 35,000 years ago, and finally, a small group migrating up through the worst weather imaginable, Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle, during the last ice age — temperature was at -70, -80, even -100, perhaps — migrating into the Americas, ultimately reaching that final frontier. 
+An amazing story, and it happened first in Africa. 
+The changes that allowed us to do that, the evolution of this highly adaptable brain that we all carry around with us, allowing us to create novel cultures, allowing us to develop the diversity that we see on a whirlwind trip like the one I've just been on. 
+Now, that story I just told you is literally a whirlwind tour of how we populated the world, the great Paleolithic wanderings of our species. 
+And that's the story that I told a couple of years ago in my book, "" The Journey of Man, "" and a film that we made with the same title. 
+And as we were finishing up that film — it was co-produced with National Geographic — I started talking to the folks at NG about this work. 
+And they got really excited about it. They liked the film, but they said, "" You know, we really see this as kind of the next wave in the study of human origins, where we all came from, using the tools of DNA to map the migrations around the world. 
+You know, the study of human origins is kind of in our DNA, and we want to take it to the next level. 
+What do you want to do next? "" Which is a great question to be asked by National Geographic. 
+And I said, "" Well, you know, what I've sketched out here is just that. 
+It is a very coarse sketch of how we migrated around the planet. 
+And it's based on a few thousand people we've sampled from, you know, a handful of populations around the world. 
+Studied a few genetic markers, and there are lots of gaps on this map. 
+We've just connected the dots. What we need to do is increase our sample size by an order of magnitude or more — hundreds of thousands of DNA samples from people all over the world. "" And that was the genesis of the Genographic Project. 
+The project launched in April 2005. 
+It has three core components. Obviously, science is a big part of it. 
+The field research that we're doing around the world with indigenous peoples. 
+People who have lived in the same location for a long period of time retain a connection to the place where they live that many of the rest of us have lost. 
+So my ancestors come from all over northern Europe. 
+I live in the Eastern Seaboard of North America when I'm not traveling. 
+Where am I indigenous to? Nowhere really. My genes are all jumbled up. 
+But there are people who retain that link to their ancestors that allows us to contextualize the DNA results. 
+That's the focus of the field research, the centers that we've set up all over the world — 10 of them, top population geneticists. 
+But, in addition, we wanted to open up this study to anybody around the world. 
+How often do you get to participate in a big scientific project? 
+The Human Genome Project, or a Mars Rover mission. 
+In this case, you actually can. 
+You can go onto our website, Nationalgeographic.com / genographic. 
+You can order a kit. You can test your own DNA. 
+And you can actually submit those results to the database, and tell us a little about your genealogical background, have the data analyzed as part of the scientific effort. 
+Now, this is all a nonprofit enterprise, and so the money that we raise, after we cover the cost of doing the testing and making the kit components, gets plowed back into the project. 
+The majority going to something we call the Legacy Fund. 
+It's a charitable entity, basically a grant-giving entity that gives money back to indigenous groups around the world for educational, cultural projects initiated by them. 
+They apply to this fund in order to do various projects, and I'll show you a couple of examples. 
+So how are we doing on the project? We've got about 25,000 samples collected from indigenous people around the world. 
+The most amazing thing has been the interest on the part of the public; 210,000 people have ordered these participation kits since we launched two years ago, which has raised around five million dollars, the majority of which, at least half, is going back into the Legacy Fund. 
+We've just awarded the first Legacy Grants totaling around 500,000 dollars. 
+Projects around the world — documenting oral poetry in Sierra Leone, preserving traditional weaving patterns in Gaza, language revitalization in Tajikistan, etc., etc. 
+So the project is going very, very well, and I urge you to check out the website and watch this space. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We have historical records that allow us to know how the ancient Greeks dressed, how they lived, how they fought... 
+but how did they think? 
+One natural idea is that the deepest aspects of human thought — our ability to imagine, to be conscious, to dream — have always been the same. 
+Another possibility is that the social transformations that have shaped our culture may have also changed the structural columns of human thought. 
+We may all have different opinions about this. 
+Actually, it's a long-standing philosophical debate. 
+But is this question even amenable to science? 
+Here I'd like to propose that in the same way we can reconstruct how the ancient Greek cities looked just based on a few bricks, that the writings of a culture are the archaeological records, the fossils, of human thought. 
+And in fact, doing some form of psychological analysis of some of the most ancient books of human culture, Julian Jaynes came up in the '70s with a very wild and radical hypothesis: that only 3,000 years ago, humans were what today we would call schizophrenics. 
+And he made this claim based on the fact that the first humans described in these books behaved consistently, in different traditions and in different places of the world, as if they were hearing and obeying voices that they perceived as coming from the Gods, or from the muses... 
+what today we would call hallucinations. 
+And only then, as time went on, they began to recognize that they were the creators, the owners of these inner voices. 
+And with this, they gained introspection: the ability to think about their own thoughts. 
+So Jaynes's theory is that consciousness, at least in the way we perceive it today, where we feel that we are the pilots of our own existence — is a quite recent cultural development. 
+And this theory is quite spectacular, but it has an obvious problem which is that it's built on just a few and very specific examples. 
+So the question is whether the theory that introspection built up in human history only about 3,000 years ago can be examined in a quantitative and objective manner. 
+And the problem of how to go about this is quite obvious. 
+It's not like Plato woke up one day and then he wrote, "" Hello, I'm Plato, and as of today, I have a fully introspective consciousness. "" (Laughter) And this tells us actually what is the essence of the problem. 
+We need to find the emergence of a concept that's never said. 
+The word introspection does not appear a single time in the books we want to analyze. 
+So our way to solve this is to build the space of words. 
+This is a huge space that contains all words in such a way that the distance between any two of them is indicative of how closely related they are. 
+So for instance, you want the words "" dog "" and "" cat "" to be very close together, but the words "" grapefruit "" and "" logarithm "" to be very far away. 
+And this has to be true for any two words within the space. 
+And there are different ways that we can construct the space of words. 
+One is just asking the experts, a bit like we do with dictionaries. 
+Another possibility is following the simple assumption that when two words are related, they tend to appear in the same sentences, in the same paragraphs, in the same documents, more often than would be expected just by pure chance. 
+And this simple hypothesis, this simple method, with some computational tricks that have to do with the fact that this is a very complex and high-dimensional space, turns out to be quite effective. 
+So you get the fruits, the body parts, the computer parts, the scientific terms and so on. 
+The algorithm also identifies that we organize concepts in a hierarchy. 
+So for instance, you can see that the scientific terms break down into two subcategories of the astronomic and the physics terms. 
+And then there are very fine things. 
+For instance, the word astronomy, which seems a bit bizarre where it is, is actually exactly where it should be, between what it is, an actual science, and between what it describes, the astronomical terms. 
+Actually, if you stare at this for a while, and you just build random trajectories, you will see that it actually feels a bit like doing poetry. 
+And this is because, in a way, walking in this space is like walking in the mind. 
+And the last thing is that this algorithm also identifies what are our intuitions, of which words should lead in the neighborhood of introspection. 
+So for instance, words such as "" self, "" "" guilt, "" "" reason, "" "" emotion, "" are very close to "" introspection, "" but other words, such as "" red, "" "" football, "" "" candle, "" "" banana, "" are just very far away. 
+And so once we've built the space, the question of the history of introspection, or of the history of any concept which before could seem abstract and somehow vague, becomes concrete — becomes amenable to quantitative science. 
+All that we have to do is take the books, we digitize them, and we take this stream of words as a trajectory and project them into the space, and then we ask whether this trajectory spends significant time circling closely to the concept of introspection. 
+And with this, we could analyze the history of introspection in the ancient Greek tradition, for which we have the best available written record. 
+So what we did is we took all the books — we just ordered them by time — for each book we take the words and we project them to the space, and then we ask for each word how close it is to introspection, and we just average that. 
+And then we ask whether, as time goes on and on, these books get closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. 
+And this is exactly what happens in the ancient Greek tradition. 
+So you can see that for the oldest books in the Homeric tradition, there is a small increase with books getting closer to introspection. 
+But about four centuries before Christ, this starts ramping up very rapidly to an almost five-fold increase of books getting closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. 
+And one of the nice things about this is that now we can ask whether this is also true in a different, independent tradition. 
+So we just ran this same analysis on the Judeo-Christian tradition, and we got virtually the same pattern. 
+Again, you see a small increase for the oldest books in the Old Testament, and then it increases much more rapidly in the new books of the New Testament. 
+And then we get the peak of introspection in "" The Confessions of Saint Augustine, "" about four centuries after Christ. 
+And this was very important, because Saint Augustine had been recognized by scholars, philologists, historians, as one of the founders of introspection. 
+Actually, some believe him to be the father of modern psychology. 
+So our algorithm, which has the virtue of being quantitative, of being objective, and of course of being extremely fast — it just runs in a fraction of a second — can capture some of the most important conclusions of this long tradition of investigation. 
+And this is in a way one of the beauties of science, which is that now this idea can be translated and generalized to a whole lot of different domains. 
+So in the same way that we asked about the past of human consciousness, maybe the most challenging question we can pose to ourselves is whether this can tell us something about the future of our own consciousness. 
+To put it more precisely, whether the words we say today can tell us something of where our minds will be in a few days, in a few months or a few years from now. 
+And in the same way many of us are now wearing sensors that detect our heart rate, our respiration, our genes, on the hopes that this may help us prevent diseases, we can ask whether monitoring and analyzing the words we speak, we tweet, we email, we write, can tell us ahead of time whether something may go wrong with our minds. 
+And with Guillermo Cecchi, who has been my brother in this adventure, we took on this task. 
+And we did so by analyzing the recorded speech of 34 young people who were at a high risk of developing schizophrenia. 
+And so what we did is, we measured speech at day one, and then we asked whether the properties of the speech could predict, within a window of almost three years, the future development of psychosis. 
+But despite our hopes, we got failure after failure. 
+There was just not enough information in semantics to predict the future organization of the mind. 
+It was good enough to distinguish between a group of schizophrenics and a control group, a bit like we had done for the ancient texts, but not to predict the future onset of psychosis. 
+But then we realized that maybe the most important thing was not so much what they were saying, but how they were saying it. 
+More specifically, it was not in which semantic neighborhoods the words were, but how far and fast they jumped from one semantic neighborhood to the other one. 
+And so we came up with this measure, which we termed semantic coherence, which essentially measures the persistence of speech within one semantic topic, within one semantic category. 
+And it turned out to be that for this group of 34 people, the algorithm based on semantic coherence could predict, with 100 percent accuracy, who developed psychosis and who will not. 
+And this was something that could not be achieved — not even close — with all the other existing clinical measures. 
+And I remember vividly, while I was working on this, I was sitting at my computer and I saw a bunch of tweets by Polo — Polo had been my first student back in Buenos Aires, and at the time he was living in New York. 
+And there was something in this tweets — I could not tell exactly what because nothing was said explicitly — but I got this strong hunch, this strong intuition, that something was going wrong. 
+So I picked up the phone, and I called Polo, and in fact he was not feeling well. 
+And this simple fact, that reading in between the lines, I could sense, through words, his feelings, was a simple, but very effective way to help. 
+What I tell you today is that we're getting close to understanding how we can convert this intuition that we all have, that we all share, into an algorithm. 
+And in doing so, we may be seeing in the future a very different form of mental health, based on objective, quantitative and automated analysis of the words we write, of the words we say. 
+Gracias. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage. 
+And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) (Live) SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos, covering everything from basic arithmetic, all the way to vector calculus, and some of the stuff that you saw up there. 
+We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. 
+But what we're going to talk about in this is how we're going to the next level. 
+But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started. 
+Probably the least-appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "" Do you understand this? "" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room. 
+The other thing that happened is — I put them on YouTube just — I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world. 
+(Laughter) Let's pause here. 
+I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day, since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.' "" (Laughter) We get a lot of feedback along those lines. 
+This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: "" My 12 year-old son has autism, and has had a terrible time with math. 
+We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. 
+We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) But I was excited, so I kept going. 
+And then a few other things started to dawn on me; that not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who were sending letters, but that this content will never grow old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. 
+(Laughter) Assuming he was good. We don't know. (Laughter) 
+One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit — the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did, they can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. 
+And so, what I'm showing over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. 
+The ones I started were much more primitive. 
+And the Khan Academy videos are there. 
+You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. 
+In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. 
+And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of the sudden, and start failing calculus all of the sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. 
+The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. 
+Green means the student's already proficient. 
+Or even better, "" Let me get one of the green kids, who are already proficient in that concept, to be the first line of attack, and actually tutor their peer. "" (Applause) Now, I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "" What don't you understand? What do you understand? "" and all the rest. 
+Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. 
+Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of the sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta. 
+And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom. 
+Tell me what you're thinking there. 
+(Laughter) BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about? 
+Someone from their board came and said, "What would you do if you had carte Blanche in a classroom?" 
+Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level, they can see. 
+BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids. 
+(Laughter) No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow. 
+The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface, I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people? 
+Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. 
+(Applause) 
+
+How could we help you? "" And we think, we like to think, that this is one of the major problems why all — maybe not all — but most of the ehealth projects fail, since we stopped listening. 
+And it's collected by my general practitioner as well, so he can see what's my problem in weight, not on the very moment that I need cardiologic support or something like it, but also looking backward. 
+As of next week, it will soon be available, there will be this little blood-pressure meter connected to an iPhone or something or other. 
+We set up a website, and asked the crowd, "" If you see an AED, please submit it, tell us where it is, tell us when it's open, "" since sometimes in office hours it's closed, of course. 
+And we would like to start this on a worldwide level. 
+So please help us on this one and try to make not only health a little bit better, but take control of it. 
+
+Living in Africa is to be on the edge, metaphorically, and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008. 
+Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world, but Africa was sort of cut off. 
+And that changed, first with ships when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution. 
+And now we've got the digital revolution. 
+These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations. 
+Never have been. 
+Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world. 
+What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem. 
+Africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself. 
+The connectivity situation has improved greatly, but some barriers remain. 
+It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be. 
+In 2008, one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow. 
+There was a media blackout in 2008, when there was post-election violence in Kenya. 
+It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time. 
+So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi. 
+And Ushahidi means "" testimony "" or "" witness "" in Swahili. 
+I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators. 
+This is David and Erik. 
+I call them brothers from another mother. 
+Clearly I have a German mother somewhere. 
+And we worked together first with building and growing Ushahidi. 
+And the idea of the software was to gather information from SMS, email and web, and put a map so that you could see what was happening where, and you could visualize that data. 
+And after that initial prototype, we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did. 
+All the while, we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days. 
+And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi, an actual physical space where we could collaborate, and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya. 
+We did that with the support of different organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network. 
+And we were able to grow this software footprint, and a few years later it became very useful software, and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were, and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in Japan. 
+Now, this year the Internet turns 20, and Ushahidi turned five. 
+Ushahidi is not only the software that we made. 
+It is the team, and it's also the community that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee. 
+We did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world. 
+There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps, and even environmental monitoring crowd maps. 
+We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with. 
+There is more that we're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen, if I share the information with whatever device that I have, could inform you about what is going on, and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture of what's going on. 
+I moved back to Kenya in 2011. 
+Erik moved in 2010. 
+Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago where there was abundant Internet access. 
+I had never had to deal with a blackout. 
+And in Kenya, it's a very different reality, and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem. 
+The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be, let's just say very annoying. 
+Blackouts are not fun. 
+Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden the power goes out, your Internet connection goes down with it, so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem, how do I switch back? 
+And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again. 
+Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now, and other parts of Africa. 
+The other problem that we're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge. 
+It costs me five Kenyan shillings, or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China. 
+Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria? 
+Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost to connect within Africa. 
+And also, when traveling within Africa, you've got different settings for different mobile providers. 
+This is the reality that we deal with. 
+So we've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say, "" If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere. "" [Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.] What if we could overcome the problem of unreliable Internet and electricity and reduce the cost of connection? 
+Could we leverage the cloud? 
+We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi. 
+Could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country? 
+So we looked at the modem, an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context, where you've got ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity, yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury. 
+We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world, for our context, and for our reality. 
+What if we could have connectivity with less friction? 
+This is the BRCK. 
+It acts as a backup to the Internet so that, when the power goes out, it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network. 
+Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive. 
+It's actually everywhere. 
+Most towns at least have a 3G connection. 
+So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this. 
+The other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours of battery left, so you can continue working, you can continue being productive, and let's just say you are less stressed. 
+And for rural areas, it can be the primary means of connection. 
+The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks, and whenever you switch on the backup, you pick on the fastest network, so we'll have multi-SIM capability so that you can put multiple SIMs, and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on, and if the up time on that is not very good, then you hop onto the next one. 
+The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere. 
+With load balancing, this can be possible. 
+The other interesting thing for us — we like sensors — is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the Internet of things. 
+Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this. 
+It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have Internet connectivity even in very remote areas. 
+Out of adversity can come innovation, and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure? 
+And for us, we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in Kenya. 
+It is not without challenge. 
+Our team has basically been mules carrying components from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents. 
+"What are you carrying?" 
+And the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects. 
+So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that, through the support of many people, not only here but online, the BRCK has been Kickstarted, and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins. 
+I will close by saying that, if we solve this for the local market, it could be impactful not only for the coders in Nairobi but also for small business owners who need reliable connectivity, and it can reduce the cost of connecting, and hopefully collaboration within African countries. 
+The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship. 
+The BRCK is our part to keep Africans connected, and to help them drive the global digital revolution. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Here are two reasons companies fail: they only do more of the same, or they only do what's new. 
+To me the real, real solution to quality growth is figuring out the balance between two activities: exploration and exploitation. 
+Both are necessary, but it can be too much of a good thing. 
+Consider Facit. 
+I'm actually old enough to remember them. 
+Facit was a fantastic company. 
+They were born deep in the Swedish forest, and they made the best mechanical calculators in the world. 
+Everybody used them. 
+And what did Facit do when the electronic calculator came along? 
+They continued doing exactly the same. 
+In six months, they went from maximum revenue... 
+and they were gone. 
+Gone. 
+To me, the irony about the Facit story is hearing about the Facit engineers, who had bought cheap, small electronic calculators in Japan that they used to double-check their calculators. 
+(Laughter) Facit did too much exploitation. 
+But exploration can go wild, too. 
+A few years back, I worked closely alongside a European biotech company. 
+Let's call them OncoSearch. 
+The company was brilliant. 
+They had applications that promised to diagnose, even cure, certain forms of blood cancer. 
+Every day was about creating something new. 
+They were extremely innovative, and the mantra was, "" When we only get it right, "" or even, "" We want it perfect. "" The sad thing is, before they became perfect — even good enough — they became obsolete. 
+OncoSearch did too much exploration. 
+I first heard about exploration and exploitation about 15 years ago, when I worked as a visiting scholar at Stanford University. 
+The founder of the idea is Jim March. 
+And to me the power of the idea is its practicality. 
+Exploration. 
+Exploration is about coming up with what's new. 
+It's about search, it's about discovery, it's about new products, it's about new innovations. 
+It's about changing our frontiers. 
+Our heroes are people who have done exploration: Madame Curie, Picasso, Neil Armstrong, Sir Edmund Hillary, etc. 
+I come from Norway; all our heroes are explorers, and they deserve to be. 
+We all know that exploration is risky. 
+We don't know the answers, we don't know if we're going to find them, and we know that the risks are high. 
+Exploitation is the opposite. 
+Exploitation is taking the knowledge we have and making good, better. 
+Exploitation is about making our trains run on time. 
+It's about making good products faster and cheaper. 
+Exploitation is not risky — in the short term. 
+But if we only exploit, it's very risky in the long term. 
+And I think we all have memories of the famous pop groups who keep singing the same songs again and again, until they become obsolete or even pathetic. 
+That's the risk of exploitation. 
+So if we take a long-term perspective, we explore. 
+If we take a short-term perspective, we exploit. 
+Small children, they explore all day. 
+All day it's about exploration. 
+As we grow older, we explore less because we have more knowledge to exploit on. 
+The same goes for companies. 
+Companies become, by nature, less innovative as they become more competent. 
+And this is, of course, a big worry to CEOs. 
+And I hear very often questions phrased in different ways. 
+We have Nestlé creating Nespresso, we have Lego going into animated films, Toyota creating the hybrids, Unilever pushing into sustainability — there are lots of examples, and the benefits are huge. 
+Why is balancing so difficult? 
+I think it's difficult because there are so many traps that keep us where we are. 
+So I'll talk about two, but there are many. 
+So let's talk about the perpetual search trap. 
+We discover something, but we don't have the patience or the persistence to get at it and make it work. 
+So instead of staying with it, we create something new. 
+But the same goes for that, then we're in the vicious circle of actually coming up with ideas but being frustrated. 
+OncoSearch was a good example. 
+A famous example is, of course, Xerox. 
+We all know that any kind of effective reform of education, research, health care, even defense, takes 10, 15, maybe 20 years to work. 
+But still, we change much more often. 
+We really don't give them the chance. 
+Another trap is the success trap. 
+Facit fell into the success trap. 
+They literally held the future in their hands, but they couldn't see it. 
+They were simply so good at making what they loved doing, that they wouldn't change. 
+We are like that, too. 
+When we know something well, it's difficult to change. 
+Bill Gates has said: "" Success is a lousy teacher. 
+It seduces us into thinking we cannot fail. "" That's the challenge with success. 
+So I think there are some lessons, and I think they apply to us. 
+And they apply to our companies. 
+The first lesson is: get ahead of the crisis. 
+And any company that's able to innovate is actually able to also buy an insurance in the future. 
+Netflix — they could so easily have been content with earlier generations of distribution, but they always — and I think they will always — keep pushing for the next battle. 
+I see other companies that say, "I'll win the next innovation cycle, whatever it takes." 
+Second one: think in multiple time scales. 
+I'll share a chart with you, and I think it's a wonderful one. 
+Any company we look at, taking a one-year perspective and looking at the valuation of the company, innovation typically accounts for only about 30 percent. 
+So when we think one year, innovation isn't really that important. 
+Move ahead, take a 10-year perspective on the same company — suddenly, innovation and ability to renew account for 70 percent. 
+But companies can't choose. 
+Third: invite talent. 
+I don't think it's possible for any of us to be able to balance exploration and exploitation by ourselves. 
+I think it's a team sport. 
+I think we need to allow challenging. 
+I think the mark of a great company is being open to be challenged, and the mark of a good corporate board is to constructively challenge. 
+I think that's also what good parenting is about. 
+Last one: be skeptical of success. 
+Maybe it's useful to think back at the old triumph marches in Rome, when the generals, after a big victory, were given their celebration. 
+Riding into Rome on the carriage, they always had a companion whispering in their ear, "Remember, you're only human." 
+So I hope I made the point: balancing exploration and exploitation has a huge payoff. 
+But it's difficult, and we need to be conscious. 
+I want to just point out two questions that I think are useful. 
+First question is, looking at your own company: In which areas do you see that the company is at the risk of falling into success traps, of just going on autopilot? 
+And what can you do to challenge? 
+Second question is: When did I explore something new last, and what kind of effect did it have on me? 
+Is that something I should do more of? 
+In my case, yes. 
+So let me leave you with this. 
+Whether you're an explorer by nature or whether you tend to exploit what you already know, don't forget: the beauty is in the balance. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want to tell you about the future of money. 
+Let's start with a story about this culture that lived in Micronesia in the early 1900s, called the Yap. 
+Now, the Yap don't actually move these Rai stones around or exchange them the way we do with our coins, because Rai stones can get to be pretty massive. 
+The largest is about four tons and 12 feet across. 
+So the Yap just keep track of who owns part of what stone. 
+There's a story about these sailors that were transporting a stone across the ocean when they ran into some trouble and the stone actually fell in. 
+The sailors got back to the main island and they told everyone what had happened. 
+Even though it was at the bottom of the ocean, it was still part of the Yap economy. 
+You might think that this was just a small culture a hundred years ago. 
+In 1932, the Bank of France asked the United States to convert their holdings from dollars into gold. 
+But it was too inconvenient to think about actually shipping all of that gold over to Europe. 
+So instead, someone went to where that gold was being stored and they just labeled it as belonging to France now. 
+And everyone agreed that France owned the gold. 
+It's just like those Rai stones. 
+The point I want to make with these two examples is that there's nothing inherently valuable about a dollar or a stone or a coin. 
+The only reason these things have any value is because we've all decided they should. 
+Money is about the exchanges and the transactions that we have with each other. 
+Money isn't anything objective. 
+It's about a collective story that we tell each other about value. 
+A collective fiction. 
+And that's a really powerful concept. 
+In the past two decades, we've begun to use digital money. 
+So I get paid via direct deposit, I pay my rent via bank transfer, I pay my taxes online. 
+And every month, a small amount of money is deducted from my paycheck and invested in mutual funds in my retirement account. 
+All of these interactions are literally just changing 1's and 0's on computers. 
+There's not even anything physical, like a stone or a coin. 
+Digital money makes it so that I can pay someone around the world in seconds. 
+Now when this works, it's because there are large institutions underwriting every 1 or 0 that changes on a computer. 
+And when it doesn't, it's often the fault of those large institutions. 
+And a lot of times, they don't. 
+There's a lot of friction in the system. 
+How long did it take the US credit card companies to implement chip and pin? 
+Half my credit cards still don't work in Europe. 
+That's friction. 
+Transferring money across borders and across currencies is really expensive: friction. 
+An entrepreneur in India can set up an online business in minutes, but it's hard for her to get loans and to get paid: friction. 
+Our access to digital money and our ability to freely transact is being held captive by these gatekeepers. 
+And there's a lot of impediments in the system slowing things down. 
+That's because digital money isn't really mine, it's entries in databases that belong to my bank, my credit card company or my investment firm. 
+My account gets frozen, and I can't get paid. 
+These institutions are standing in the way of innovation. 
+How many of you use Facebook photos, Google Photos, Instagram? 
+My photos are everywhere. 
+They are on my phone, they're on my laptop, they're on my old phone, they're in Dropbox. 
+They're on all these different websites and services. 
+And most of these services don't work together. 
+And as a result, my photo library is a mess. 
+The same thing happens when institutions control the money supply. 
+A lot of these services don't inter-operate, and as a result, this blocks what we can do with payment. 
+And it makes transaction costs go up. 
+So far, we've been through two phases of money. 
+In an analog world, we had to deal with these physical objects, and money moved at a certain speed — the speed of humans. 
+In a digital world, money can reach much farther and is much faster, but we're at the mercy of these gatekeeper institutions. 
+Money only moves at the speed of banks. 
+We're about to enter a new phase of money. 
+The future of money is programmable. 
+When we combine software and currency, money becomes more than just a static unit of value, and we don't have to rely on institutions for security. 
+In a programmable world, we remove humans and institutions from the loop. 
+And when this happens, we won't even feel like we're transacting anymore. 
+Money will be directed by software, and it will just safely and securely flow. 
+Cryptocurrencies are the first step of this evolution. 
+Cryptocurrencies are digital money that isn't run by any government or bank. 
+Bitcoin is the most ubiquitous cryptocurrency, but there are hundreds of them. 
+And these things are real money. 
+The sushi restaurant down my street takes Bitcoin. 
+I have an app on my phone that I can use to buy sashimi. 
+But it's not just for small transactions. 
+In March, there was a transaction that moved around 100,000 bitcoins. 
+That's the equivalent of 40 million US dollars. 
+Cryptocurrencies are based on a special field of mathematics called cryptography. 
+Cryptography is the study of how to secure communication, and it's about two really important things: masking information so it can be hidden in plain sight, and verifying a piece of information's source. 
+Cryptography underpins so many of the systems around us. 
+During World War II, breaking cryptosystems like Enigma was critical to decoding enemy transmissions and turning the tide of the war. 
+Today, anyone with a modern web browser is running a pretty sophisticated cryptosystem. 
+It's what we use to secure our interactions on the Internet. 
+So what the banks used to give us — trustworthy digital money transfer — we can now get with a clever application of cryptography. 
+And this means that we don't have to rely on the banks anymore to secure our transactions. 
+We can do it ourselves. 
+Bitcoin is based on the very same idea that the Yap used, this collective global knowledge of transfers. 
+In Bitcoin, I spend by transferring Bitcoin, and I get paid when someone transfers Bitcoin to me. 
+Imagine that we had this magic paper. 
+So the way that this paper works is I can give you a sheet of it and if you write something on it, it will magically appear on my piece as well. 
+Let's say we just give everyone this paper and everyone writes down the transfers that they're doing in the Bitcoin system. 
+All of these transfers get copied around to everyone else's pieces of paper. 
+And I can look at mine and I'll have a list of all of the transfers that are happening in the entire Bitcoin economy. 
+This is actually what's happening with the Bitcoin blockchain, which is a list of all of the transactions in Bitcoin. 
+Except, it's not done through paper. 
+It's done through computer code, running on thousands of networked computers around the world. 
+All of these computers are collectively confirming who owns what Bitcoin. 
+So the Bitcoin blockchain is core to how Bitcoin works. 
+Well, the code is designed to create new Bitcoin according to a schedule. 
+Imagine that we had 15 dice, and we were throwing these dice over and over again. 
+Whenever the dice come up all sixes, we say that we win. 
+This is very close to what these computers are all actually doing. 
+They're trying over and over again to land on the right number. 
+And when they do, we say that they've solved the puzzle. 
+The computer that solves the puzzle publishes its solution to the rest of the network and collects its reward: new bitcoins. 
+And in the act of solving this puzzle, these computers are actually helping to secure the Bitcoin blockchain and add to the list of transactions. 
+There are actually people all over the world running this software, and we call them Bitcoin miners. 
+Anyone can become a Bitcoin miner. 
+You can go download the software right now and run it in your computer and try to collect some bitcoins. 
+I can't say that I would recommend it, because right now, the puzzle is so hard and the network is so powerful, that if I tried to mine Bitcoin on my laptop, I probably wouldn't see any for about two million years. 
+The miners, professional miners, use this special hardware that's designed to solve the puzzle really fast. 
+Now, the Bitcoin network and all of this special hardware, there are estimates that the amount of energy it uses is equivalent to that of a small country. 
+So, the first set of cryptocurrencies are a little bit slow and a little bit cumbersome. 
+But the next generation is going to be so much better and so much faster. 
+Cryptocurrencies are the first step to a world with a global programmable money. 
+And in a world with programmable money, I can pay anyone else securely without having to sign up or ask permission, or do a conversion or worry about my money getting stuck. 
+And I can send money around the world. 
+This is a really amazing thing. 
+It's the idea of permission-less innovation. 
+The Internet caused an explosion of innovation, because it was built upon an open architecture. 
+And just like the Internet changed the way we communicate, programmable money is going to change the way we pay, allocate and decide on value. 
+Imagine a world where I can rent out my healthcare data to a pharmaceutical company. 
+They can run large-scale data analysis and provide me with a cryptographic proof that shows they're only using my data in a way that we agreed. 
+And they can pay me for what they find out. 
+Instead of signing up for streaming services and getting a cable bill, what if my television analyzed my watching habits and recommended well-priced content that fit within my budget that I would enjoy? 
+Imagine an Internet without ads, because instead of paying with our attention when we view content, we just pay. 
+Interestingly, things like micro-payments are actually going to change the way security works in our world, because once we're better able to allocate value, people will use their money and their energies for more constructive things. 
+If it cost a fraction of a cent to send an email, would we still have spam? 
+We're not at this world yet, but it's coming. 
+Right now, it's like we're in a world that is seeing the first automobile. 
+The first cryptocurrency, like the first car, is slow and hard to understand and hard to use. 
+Digital money, like the horse and carriage, works pretty well, and the whole world economy is built on it. 
+If you were the first person on your block to get a car with an internal combustion engine, your neighbors would probably think you were crazy: "" Why would you want this large, clunky machine that breaks down all the time, that lights on fire, and is still slower than a horse? "" But we all know how that story turns out. 
+We're entering a new era of programmable money. 
+And it's very exciting, but it's also a little bit scary. 
+Cryptocurrencies can be used for illegal transactions, just like cash is used for crime in the world today. 
+When all of our transactions are online, what does that mean for surveillance — who can see what we do? 
+Who's advantaged in this new world and who isn't? 
+Will we all become slaves to algorithms and utility functions? 
+The Internet brought us a lot of ways to waste time. 
+But it also greatly increased productivity. 
+Mobile phones are annoying because they make me feel like I have to stay connected to work all the time. 
+But they also help me stay connected to friends and family. 
+The new sharing economy is going to eliminate some jobs. 
+But it's also going to create new, flexible forms of employment. 
+With programmable money, we decouple the need for large, trusted institutions from the architecture of the network. 
+And this pushes innovation in money out to the edges, where it belongs. 
+Programmable money democratizes money. 
+And because of this, things are going to change and unfold in ways that we can't even predict. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+From lots of experiments, from lots of different scientists, we know a lot about what these molecules look like, how they move around in the cell, and that this is all taking place in an incredibly dynamic environment. 
+Clathrin are these three-legged molecules that can self-assemble into soccer-ball-like shapes. 
+Through connections with a membrane, clathrin is able to deform the membrane and form this sort of a cup that forms this sort of a bubble, or a vesicle, that's now capturing some of the proteins that were outside of the cell. 
+Proteins are coming in now that basically pinch off this vesicle, making it separate from the rest of the membrane, and now clathrin is basically done with its job, and so proteins are coming in now — we've covered them yellow and orange — that are responsible for taking apart this clathrin cage. 
+And so all of these proteins can get basically recycled and used all over again. 
+Here's another illustration, and this is a drawing of how a researcher might think that the HIV virus gets into and out of cells. 
+Molecular animations are unparalleled in their ability to convey a great deal of information to broad audiences with extreme accuracy. 
+The animation will feature data from thousands of researchers collected over decades, data on what this virus looks like, how it's able to infect cells in our body, and how therapeutics are helping to combat infection. 
+Over the years, I found that animations aren't just useful for communicating an idea, but they're also really useful for exploring a hypothesis. 
+The process of creating an animation can act as a catalyst that allows researchers to crystalize and refine their own ideas. 
+It can change the way that we communicate with one another, how we explore our data and how we teach our students. 
+But for that change to happen, we need more researchers creating animations, and toward that end, I brought together a team of biologists, animators and programmers to create a new, free, open-source software — we call it Molecular Flipbook — that's created just for biologists just to create molecular animations. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) ♫ Here we stand ♫ ♫ Like an Adam and an Eve ♫ ♫ Waterfalls ♫ ♫ The Garden of Eden ♫ ♫ Two fools in love ♫ ♫ So beautiful and strong ♫ ��� Birds in the trees ♫ ♫ Are smiling upon them ♫ ♫ From the age of the dinosaurs ♫ ♫ Cars would run on gasoline ♫ ♫ Where? Where have they gone? ♫ ♫ Now, there's nothing but flowers ♫ ♫ This was a factory ♫ ♫ Now there are mountains and rivers ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ We caught a rattlesnake ♫ 
+♫ Now we've got something for dinner ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ This was a parking lot ♫ ♫ Now it's all covered with flowers ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ If this is paradise ♫ ♫ I wish I had a lawnmower ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ This was a shopping mall ♫ ♫ Now it's turned into corn field ♫ ♫ You got it, you got it ♫ ♫ Don't leave me stranded here ♫ ♫ I can't get used to this lifestyle ♫ (Applause) 
+Thomas Dolby: David Byrne. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm standing in front of you today in all humility, wanting to share with you my journey of the last six years in the field of service and education. 
+And I'm not a trained academic. 
+Neither am I a veteran social worker. 
+I was 26 years in the corporate world, trying to make organizations profitable. 
+And then in 2003 I started Parikrma Humanity Foundation from my kitchen table. 
+The first thing that we did was walk through the slums. 
+You know, by the way, there are two million people in Bangalore, who live in 800 slums. 
+We couldn't go to all the slums, but we tried to cover as much as we could. 
+We walked through these slums, identified houses where children would never go to school. 
+We talked to the parents, tried to convince them about sending their children to school. 
+We played with the children, and came back home really tired, exhausted, but with images of bright faces, twinkling eyes, and went to sleep. 
+We were all excited to start, but the numbers hit us then: 200 million children between four to 14 that should be going to school, but do not; 100 million children who go to school but cannot read; 125 million who cannot do basic maths. 
+We also heard that 250 billion Indian rupees was dedicated for government schooling. 
+Ninety percent of it was spent on teachers' salary and administrators' salary. 
+And yet, India has nearly the highest teacher absenteeism in the world, with one out of four teachers not going to school at all the entire academic year. 
+Those numbers were absolutely mind-boggling, overwhelming, and we were constantly asked, "" When will you start? How many schools will you start? 
+How many children will you get? 
+How are you going to scale? 
+How are you going to replicate? "" It was very difficult not to get scared, not to get daunted. 
+But we dug our heels and said, "" We're not in the number game. 
+We want to take one child at a time and take the child right through school, sent to college, and get them prepared for better living, a high value job. "" So, we started Parikrma. 
+The first Parikrma school started in a slum where there were 70,000 people living below the poverty line. 
+Our first school was on a rooftop of a building inside the slums, a second story building, the only second story building inside the slums. 
+And that rooftop did not have any ceiling, only half a tin sheet. 
+That was our first school. One hundred sixty-five children. 
+Indian academic year begins in June. 
+So, June it rains, so many a times all of us would be huddled under the tin roof, waiting for the rain to stop. 
+My God! What a bonding exercise that was. 
+And all of us that were under that roof are still here together today. 
+Then came the second school, the third school, the fourth school and a junior college. 
+In six years now, we have four schools, one junior college, 1,100 children coming from 28 slums and four orphanages. 
+(Applause) Our dream is very simple: to send each of these kids, get them prepared to be educated but also to live peacefully, contented in this conflict-ridden chaotic globalized world. 
+Now, when you talk global you have to talk English. 
+And so all our schools are English medium schools. 
+But they know there is this myth that children from the slums cannot speak English well. 
+No one in their family has spoken English. 
+No one in their generation has spoken English. 
+But how wrong it is. 
+Girl: I like adventurous books, and some of my favorites are Alfred Hitchcock and [unclear] and Hardy Boys. 
+Although they are like in different contexts, one is magical, the other two are like investigation, I like those books because they have something special in them. 
+The vocabulary used in those books and the style of writing. 
+I mean like once I pick up one book I cannot put it down until I finish the whole book. 
+Even if it takes me four and a half hours, or three and half hours to finish my book, I do it. 
+Boy: I did good research and I got the information [on the] world's fastest cars. 
+I like Ducati ZZ143, because it is the fastest, the world's fastest bike, and I like Pulsar 220 DTSI because it is India's fastest bike. (Laughter) Shukla Bose: Well, that girl that you saw, her father sells flowers on the roadside. 
+And this little boy has been coming to school for five years. 
+But isn't it strange that little boys all over the world love fast bikes? (Laughter) He hasn't seen one, he hasn't ridden one, of course, but he has done a lot of research through Google search. 
+You know, when we started with our English medium schools we also decided to adopt the best curriculum possible, the ICSE curriculum. 
+And again, there were people who laughed at me and said, "" Don't be crazy choosing such a tough curriculum for these students. 
+They'll never be able to cope. "" Not only do our children cope very well, but they excel in it. 
+You should just come across to see how well our children do. 
+There is also this myth that parents from the slums are not interested in their children going to school; they'd much rather put them to work. 
+That's absolute hogwash. 
+All parents all over the world want their children to lead a better life than themselves, but they need to believe that change is possible. 
+Video: (Hindi) SB: We have 80 percent attendance for all our parents-teachers meeting. 
+Sometimes it's even 100 percent, much more than many privileged schools. 
+Fathers have started to attend. 
+It's very interesting. When we started our school the parents would give thumbprints in the attendance register. 
+Now they have started writing their signature. 
+The children have taught them. 
+It's amazing how much children can teach. 
+We have, a few months ago, actually late last year, we had a few mothers who came to us and said, "" You know, we want to learn how to read and write. 
+Can you teach us? "" So, we started an afterschool for our parents, for our mothers. 
+We had 25 mothers who came regularly after school to study. 
+We want to continue with this program and extend it to all our other schools. 
+Ninety-eight percent of our fathers are alcoholics. 
+So, you can imagine how traumatized and how dysfunctional the houses are where our children come from. 
+We have to send the fathers to de-addiction labs and when they come back, most times sober, we have to find a job for them so that they don't regress. 
+We have about three fathers who have been trained to cook. 
+We have taught them nutrition, hygiene. 
+We have helped them set up the kitchen and now they are supplying food to all our children. 
+They do a very good job because their children are eating their food, but most importantly this is the first time they have got respect, and they feel that they are doing something worthwhile. 
+More than 90 percent of our non-teaching staff are all parents and extended families. 
+We've started many programs just to make sure that the child comes to school. 
+Vocational skill program for the older siblings so the younger ones are not stopped from coming to school. 
+There is also this myth that children from the slums cannot integrate with mainstream. 
+Take a look at this little girl who was one of the 28 children from all privileged schools, best schools in the country that was selected for the Duke University talent identification program and was sent to IIM Ahmedabad. 
+Video: Girl: Duke IIMA Camp. Whenever we see that IIMA, it was such a pride for us to go to that camp. 
+Everybody was very friendly, especially I got a lot of friends. 
+And I felt that my English has improved a lot going there and chatting with friends. 
+There they met children who are with a different standard and a different mindset, a totally different society. 
+I mingled with almost everyone. 
+They were very friendly. 
+I had very good friends there, who are from Delhi, who are from Mumbai. 
+Even now we are in touch through Facebook. 
+After this Ahmedabad trip I've been like a totally different mingling with people and all of those. 
+Before that I feel like I wasn't like this. 
+I don't even mingle, or start speaking with someone so quickly. 
+My accent with English improved a lot. 
+And I learned football, volleyball, Frisbee, lots of games. 
+And I wouldn't want to go to Bangalore. Let me stay here. 
+Such beautiful food, I enjoyed it. It was so beautiful. 
+I enjoyed eating food like [unclear] would come and ask me, "" Yes ma'am, what you want? "" It was so good to hear! 
+(Laughter) (Applause) SB: This girl was working as a maid before she came to school. 
+And today she wants to be a neurologist. 
+Our children are doing brilliantly in sports. 
+They are really excelling. 
+There is an inter-school athletic competition that is held every year in Bangalore, where 5,000 children participate from 140 best schools in the city. 
+We've got the best school award for three years successively. 
+And our children are coming back home with bags full of medals, with lots of admirers and friends. 
+Last year there were a couple of kids from elite schools that came to ask for admissions in our school. 
+We also have our very own dream team. 
+Why is this happening? Why this confidence? 
+Is it the exposure? We have professors from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, Indian Institute of Science who come and teach our children lots of scientific formulas, experiments, much beyond the classroom. 
+Art, music are considered therapy and mediums of expression. 
+We also believe that it's the content that is more important. 
+It is not the infrastructure, not the toilets, not the libraries, but it is what actually happens in this school that is more important. 
+Creating an environment of learning, of inquiry, of exploration is what is true education. 
+When we started Parikrma we had no idea which direction we were taking. 
+We didn't hire McKinsey to do a business plan. 
+But we know for sure that what we want to do today is take one child at a time, not get bogged with numbers, and actually see the child complete the circle of life, and unleash his total potential. 
+We do not believe in scale because we believe in quality, and scale and numbers will automatically happen. 
+We have corporates that have stood behind us, and we are able to, now, open more schools. 
+But we began with the idea of one child at a time. 
+This is five-year-old Parusharam. 
+He was begging by a bus stop a few years ago, got picked up and is now in an orphanage, has been coming to school for the last four and a half months. 
+He's in kindergarten. 
+He has learned how to speak English. 
+We have a model by which kids can speak English and understand English in three month's time. 
+He can tell you stories in English of the thirsty crow, of the crocodile and of the giraffe. 
+And if you ask him what he likes to do he will say, "" I like sleeping. 
+I like eating. I like playing. "" And if you ask him what he wants to do, he will say, "" I want to horsing. "" Now, "" horsing "" is going for a horse ride. 
+So, Parusharam comes to my office every day. 
+He comes for a tummy rub, because he believes that will give me luck. (Laughter) When I started Parikrma I began with a great deal of arrogance of transforming the world. 
+But today I have been transformed. 
+I have been changed with my children. 
+I've learned so much from them: love, compassion, imagination and such creativity. 
+Parusharam is Parikrma with a simple beginning but a long way to go. 
+I promise you, Parusharam will speak in the TED conference a few years from now. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Well, I'm involved in other things, besides physics. 
+In fact, mostly now in other things. 
+One thing is distant relationships among human languages. 
+And the professional, historical linguists in the U.S. 
+and in Western Europe mostly try to stay away from any long-distance relationships, big groupings, groupings that go back a long time, longer than the familiar families. 
+They don't like that. They think it's crank. I don't think it's crank. 
+And there are some brilliant linguists, mostly Russians, who are working on that, at Santa Fe Institute and in Moscow, and I would love to see where that leads. 
+Does it really lead to a single ancestor some 20, 25,000 years ago? 
+And what if we go back beyond that single ancestor, when there was presumably a competition among many languages? 
+How far back does that go? How far back does modern language go? 
+How many tens of thousands of years does it go back? 
+Chris Anderson: Do you have a hunch or a hope for what the answer to that is? 
+Murray Gell-Mann: Well, I would guess that modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. 
+I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language. 
+So, I would guess that the actual origin goes back at least that far and maybe further. 
+But that doesn't mean that all, or many, or most of today's attested languages couldn't descend perhaps from one that's much younger than that, like say 20,000 years, or something of that kind. It's what we call a bottleneck. 
+CA: Well, Philip Anderson may have been right. 
+You may just know more about everything than anyone. 
+So, it's been an honor. Thank you Murray Gell-Mann. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What's happening to the climate? 
+It is unbelievably bad. 
+This is, obviously, that famous view now of the Arctic, which is likely to be gone at this point in the next three or four or five years. Very, very, very scary. 
+So we all look at what we can do. 
+And when you look at the worldwide sources of CO2, 52 percent are tied to buildings. 
+Only nine percent is passenger cars, interestingly enough. 
+So we ran off to a sushi bar. 
+And at that sushi bar we came up with a great idea. 
+And it was something called EcoRock. 
+And we said we could redesign the 115-year-old gypsum drywall process that generates 20 billion pounds of CO2 a year. 
+So it was a big idea. We wanted to reduce that by 80 percent, which is exactly what we've done. 
+We started R & D in 2006. 
+Decided to use recycled content from cement and steel manufacturing. 
+There is the inside of our lab. We haven't shown this before. 
+But our people had to do some 5,000 different mixes to get this right, to hit our targets. 
+And they worked absolutely very, very, very hard. 
+So then we went forward and built our production line in China. 
+We don't build this production equipment any longer in the U.S., unfortunately. 
+We did the line install over the summer. 
+We started right there, with absolutely nothing. 
+You're seeing for the first time, a brand new drywall production line, not made using gypsum at all. 
+That's the finished production line there. 
+We got our first panel out on December third. 
+That is the slurry being poured onto paper, basically. That's the line running. 
+The exciting thing is, look at the faces of the people. 
+These are people who worked this project for two to three years. 
+And they are so excited. That's the first board off the line. 
+Our Vice President of Operation kissing the board. Obviously very, very excited. 
+But this has a huge, huge impact on the environment. 
+We signed the first panel just a few weeks after that, had a great signing ceremony, leading to people hopefully using these products across the world. 
+And we've got Cradle-to-Cradle Gold on this thing. 
+We happened to win, just recently, the Green Product of the Year for "" The Re-Invention of Drywall, "" from Popular Science. 
+Thank you. Thank you. 
+So here is what we learned: 8,000 gallons of gas equivalent to build one house. 
+You probably had no idea. It's like driving around the world six times. 
+We must change everything. 
+Look around the room: chairs, wood, everything around us has to change or we're not going to lick this problem. 
+Don't listen to the people who say you can't do this, because anyone can. 
+And these job losses, we can fix them with green-collar jobs. 
+We've got four plants. We're building this stuff around the country. 
+We're going as fast as we can. 
+Two and a half million cars worth of gypsum, you know, CO2 generated. Right? 
+So what will you do? I'll tell you what I did and why I did it. And I know my time's up. 
+Those are my kids, Natalie and David. 
+When they have their kids, 2050, they'd better look back at Grandpa and say, "" Hey, you gave it a good shot. You did the best you could with the team that you had. "" So my hope is that when you leave TED, you will look at reducing your carbon footprint in however you can do it. 
+And if you don't know how, please find me — I will help you. 
+Last but not least, Bill Gates, I know you invented Windows. 
+Wait till you see, maybe next year, what kind of windows we've invented. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In his inaugural address, Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis. 
+But what did he appeal to? 
+He did not, happily, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, and tell us to just go shopping. 
+Nor did he tell us, "" Trust us. Trust your country. 
+Invest, invest, invest. "" Instead, what he told us was to put aside childish things. 
+And he appealed to virtue. 
+Virtue is an old-fashioned word. 
+It seems a little out of place in a cutting-edge environment like this one. 
+And besides, some of you might be wondering, what the hell does it mean? 
+Let me begin with an example. 
+This is the job description of a hospital janitor that is scrolling up on the screen. 
+And all of the items on it are unremarkable. 
+They're the things you would expect: mop the floors, sweep them, empty the trash, restock the cabinets. 
+It may be a little surprising how many things there are, but it's not surprising what they are. 
+But the one thing I want you to notice about them is this: even though this is a very long list, there isn't a single thing on it that involves other human beings. 
+Not one. 
+The janitor's job could just as well be done in a mortuary as in a hospital. 
+And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. 
+And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap. 
+And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice because the man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn't see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry. 
+And behavior like this from janitors, from technicians, from nurses and, if we're lucky now and then, from doctors, doesn't just make people feel a little better, it actually improves the quality of patient care and enables hospitals to run well. 
+Now, not all janitors are like this, of course. 
+But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job. 
+And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings. 
+These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people. 
+And beyond this, they have the moral skill to figure out what "" doing right "" means. 
+"" Practical wisdom, "" Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill." 
+A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule, as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives. 
+A wise person knows how to improvise, as Luke did when he re-washed the floor. 
+Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. 
+A wise person is like a jazz musician — using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. 
+A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. 
+To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. 
+And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. 
+Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. 
+You need the time to get to know the people that you're serving. 
+You need permission to be allowed to improvise, try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. 
+And you need to be mentored by wise teachers. 
+When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described how hard it is to learn to do their job, they tell you that it takes lots of experience. 
+And they don't mean it takes lots of experience to learn how to mop floors and empty trash cans. 
+It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people. 
+At TED, brilliance is rampant. 
+It's scary. 
+The good news is you don't need to be brilliant to be wise. 
+The bad news is that without wisdom, brilliance isn't enough. 
+It's as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else. 
+(Applause) Now, I hope that we all know this. 
+There's a sense in which it's obvious, and yet, let me tell you a little story. 
+It's a story about lemonade. 
+A dad and his seven-year-old son were watching a Detroit Tigers game at the ballpark. 
+His son asked him for some lemonade and Dad went to the concession stand to buy it. 
+All they had was Mike's Hard Lemonade, which was five percent alcohol. 
+Dad, being an academic, had no idea that Mike's Hard Lemonade contained alcohol. 
+So he brought it back. 
+And the kid was drinking it, and a security guard spotted it, and called the police, who called an ambulance that rushed to the ballpark, whisked the kid to the hospital. 
+The emergency room ascertained that the kid had no alcohol in his blood. 
+And they were ready to let the kid go. 
+But not so fast. 
+The Wayne County Child Welfare Protection Agency said no. 
+And the child was sent to a foster home for three days. 
+At that point, can the child go home? 
+Well, a judge said yes, but only if the dad leaves the house and checks into a motel. 
+After two weeks, I'm happy to report, the family was reunited. 
+But the welfare workers and the ambulance people and the judge all said the same thing: "We hate to do it but we have to follow procedure." 
+How do things like this happen? 
+Scott Simon, who told this story on NPR, said, "" Rules and procedures may be dumb, but they spare you from thinking. "" And, to be fair, rules are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and they let a child go back to an abusive household. 
+Fair enough. 
+When things go wrong, as of course they do, we reach for two tools to try to fix them. 
+One tool we reach for is rules. 
+Better ones, more of them. 
+The second tool we reach for is incentives. 
+Better ones, more of them. 
+What else, after all, is there? 
+We can certainly see this in response to the current financial crisis. 
+Regulate, regulate, regulate. 
+Fix the incentives, fix the incentives, fix the incentives... 
+The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. 
+How could you even write a rule that got the janitors to do what they did? 
+And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic? 
+It's preposterous on its face. 
+And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. 
+Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. 
+And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. 
+And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom. 
+Let me just give you a few examples, first of rules and the war on moral skill. 
+The lemonade story is one. 
+Second, no doubt more familiar to you, is the nature of modern American education: scripted, lock-step curricula. 
+Here's an example from Chicago kindergarten. 
+Reading and enjoying literature and words that begin with 'B.' "" The Bath: "" Assemble students on a rug and give students a warning about the dangers of hot water. 
+Say 75 items in this script to teach a 25-page picture book. 
+All over Chicago in every kindergarten class in the city, every teacher is saying the same words in the same way on the same day. 
+We know why these scripts are there. 
+We don't trust the judgment of teachers enough to let them loose on their own. 
+Scripts like these are insurance policies against disaster. 
+And they prevent disaster. 
+But what they assure in its place is mediocrity. 
+(Applause) Don't get me wrong. We need rules! 
+Jazz musicians need some notes — most of them need some notes on the page. 
+We need more rules for the bankers, God knows. 
+But too many rules prevent accomplished jazz musicians from improvising. 
+And as a result, they lose their gifts, or worse, they stop playing altogether. 
+Now, how about incentives? 
+They seem cleverer. 
+If you have one reason for doing something and I give you a second reason for doing the same thing, it seems only logical that two reasons are better than one and you're more likely to do it. 
+Right? 
+Well, not always. 
+Sometimes two reasons to do the same thing seem to compete with one another instead of complimenting, and they make people less likely to do it. 
+I'll just give you one example because time is racing. 
+In Switzerland, back about 15 years ago, they were trying to decide where to site nuclear waste dumps. 
+There was going to be a national referendum. 
+Some psychologists went around and polled citizens who were very well informed. 
+And they said, "" Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community? "" Astonishingly, 50 percent of the citizens said yes. 
+They knew it was dangerous. 
+They thought it would reduce their property values. 
+But it had to go somewhere and they had responsibilities as citizens. 
+The psychologists asked other people a slightly different question. 
+They said, "" If we paid you six weeks' salary every year would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community? "" Two reasons. It's my responsibility and I'm getting paid. 
+Instead of 50 percent saying yes, 25 percent said yes. 
+What happens is that the second this introduction of incentive gets us so that instead of asking, "" What is my responsibility? "" all we ask is, "" What serves my interests? "" When incentives don't work, when CEOs ignore the long-term health of their companies in pursuit of short-term gains that will lead to massive bonuses, the response is always the same. 
+Get smarter incentives. 
+The truth is that there are no incentives that you can devise that are ever going to be smart enough. 
+Any incentive system can be subverted by bad will. 
+We need incentives. People have to make a living. 
+But excessive reliance on incentives demoralizes professional activity in two senses of that word. 
+It causes people who engage in that activity to lose morale and it causes the activity itself to lose morality. 
+Barack Obama said, before he was inaugurated, "We must ask not just 'Is it profitable?' but 'Is it right?'" And when professions are demoralized, everyone in them becomes dependent on — addicted to — incentives and they stop asking "" Is it right? "" We see this in medicine. 
+("" Although it's nothing serious, let's keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't turn into a major lawsuit. "") And we certainly see it in the world of business. 
+("" In order to remain competitive in today's marketplace, I'm afraid we're going to have to replace you with a sleezeball. "") ("" I sold my soul for about a tenth of what the damn things are going for now. "") It is obvious that this is not the way people want to do their work. 
+So what can we do? 
+A few sources of hope: we ought to try to re-moralize work. 
+One way not to do it: teach more ethics courses. 
+(Applause) There is no better way to show people that you're not serious than to tie up everything you have to say about ethics into a little package with a bow and consign it to the margins as an ethics course. 
+What to do instead? 
+One: Celebrate moral exemplars. 
+Acknowledge, when you go to law school, that a little voice is whispering in your ear about Atticus Finch. 
+No 10-year-old goes to law school to do mergers and acquisitions. 
+People are inspired by moral heroes. 
+But we learn that with sophistication comes the understanding that you can't acknowledge that you have moral heroes. 
+Well, acknowledge them. 
+Be proud that you have them. 
+Celebrate them. 
+And demand that the people who teach you acknowledge them and celebrate them too. 
+That's one thing we can do. 
+I don't know how many of you remember this: another moral hero, 15 years ago, Aaron Feuerstein, who was the head of Malden Mills in Massachusetts — they made Polartec — The factory burned down. 
+3,000 employees. He kept every one of them on the payroll. 
+Why? Because it would have been a disaster for them and for the community if he had let them go. 
+"" Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you it's worth more. We're doing fine. "" Just at this TED we heard talks from several moral heroes. 
+Two were particularly inspiring to me. 
+One was Ray Anderson, who turned — (Applause) — turned, you know, a part of the evil empire into a zero-footprint, or almost zero-footprint business. 
+Why? Because it was the right thing to do. 
+And a bonus he's discovering is he's actually going to make even more money. 
+His employees are inspired by the effort. 
+Why? Because there happy to be doing something that's the right thing to do. 
+Yesterday we heard Willie Smits talk about re-foresting in Indonesia. 
+(Applause) In many ways this is the perfect example. 
+Because it took the will to do the right thing. 
+God knows it took a huge amount of technical skill. 
+I'm boggled at how much he and his associates needed to know in order to plot this out. 
+But most important to make it work — and he emphasized this — is that it took knowing the people in the communities. 
+Unless the people you're working with are behind you, this will fail. 
+And there isn't a formula to tell you how to get the people behind you, because different people in different communities organize their lives in different ways. 
+So there's a lot here at TED, and at other places, to celebrate. 
+And you don't have to be a mega-hero. 
+There are ordinary heroes. 
+Ordinary heroes like the janitors who are worth celebrating too. 
+As practitioners each and every one of us should strive to be ordinary, if not extraordinary heroes. 
+As heads of organizations, we should strive to create environments that encourage and nurture both moral skill and moral will. 
+Even the wisest and most well-meaning people will give up if they have to swim against the current in the organizations in which they work. 
+If you run an organization, you should be sure that none of the jobs — none of the jobs — have job descriptions like the job descriptions of the janitors. 
+Because the truth is that any work that you do that involves interaction with other people is moral work. 
+And any moral work depends upon practical wisdom. 
+And, perhaps most important, as teachers, we should strive to be the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars, to the people we mentor. 
+And there are a few things that we have to remember as teachers. 
+One is that we are always teaching. 
+Someone is always watching. 
+The camera is always on. 
+Bill Gates talked about the importance of education and, in particular, the model that KIPP was providing: "Knowledge is power." 
+And he talked about a lot of the wonderful things that KIPP is doing to take inner-city kids and turn them in the direction of college. 
+I want to focus on one particular thing KIPP is doing that Bill didn't mention. 
+That is that they have come to the realization that the single most important thing kids need to learn is character. 
+They need to learn to respect themselves. 
+They need to learn to respect their schoolmates. 
+They need to learn to respect their teachers. 
+And, most important, they need to learn to respect learning. 
+That's the principle objective. 
+If you do that, the rest is just pretty much a coast downhill. 
+And the teachers: the way you teach these things to the kids is by having the teachers and all the other staff embody it every minute of every day. 
+Obama appealed to virtue. 
+And I think he was right. 
+And the virtue I think we need above all others is practical wisdom, because it's what allows other virtues — honesty, kindness, courage and so on — to be displayed at the right time and in the right way. 
+He also appealed to hope. 
+Right again. 
+I think there is reason for hope. 
+I think people want to be allowed to be virtuous. 
+In many ways, it's what TED is all about. 
+Wanting to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. 
+This kind of wisdom is within the grasp of each and every one of us if only we start paying attention. 
+Paying attention to what we do, to how we do it, and, perhaps most importantly, to the structure of the organizations within which we work, so as to make sure that it enables us and other people to develop wisdom rather than having it suppressed. 
+Thank you very much. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: You have to go and stand out here a sec. 
+Barry Schwartz: Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Take a look at this picture. 
+It poses a very fascinating puzzle for us. 
+These African students are doing their homework under streetlights at the airport in the capital city because they don't have any electricity at home. 
+Now, I haven't met these particular students, but I've met students like them. 
+Let's just pick one — for example, the one in the green shirt. 
+Let's give him a name, too: Nelson. 
+I'll bet Nelson has a cellphone. 
+So here is the puzzle. 
+Why is it that Nelson has access to a cutting-edge technology, like the cellphone, but doesn't have access to a 100-year-old technology for generating electric light in the home? 
+Now, in a word, the answer is "" rules. "" Bad rules can prevent the kind of win-win solution that's available when people can bring new technologies in and make them available to someone like Nelson. 
+What kinds of rules? 
+The electric company in this nation operates under a rule, which says that it has to sell electricity at a very low, subsidized price — in fact, a price that is so low it loses money on every unit that it sells. 
+So it has neither the resources, nor the incentives, to hook up many other users. 
+The president wanted to change this rule. 
+He's seen that it's possible to have a different set of rules, rules where businesses earn a small profit, so they have an incentive to sign up more customers. 
+That's the kind of rules that the cellphone company that Nelson purchases his telephony from operates under. 
+The president has seen how those rules worked well. 
+So he tried to change the rules for pricing on electricity, but ran into a firestorm of protest from businesses and consumers who wanted to preserve the existing subsidized rates. 
+So he was stuck with rules that prevented him from letting the win-win solution help his country. 
+And Nelson is stuck studying under the streetlights. 
+The real challenge then, is to try to figure out how we can change rules. 
+Are there some rules we can develop for changing rules? 
+I want to argue that there is a general abstract insight that we can make practical, which is that, if we can give more choices to people, and more choices to leaders — who, in many countries, are also people. 
+(Laughter) But, it's useful to present the opposition between these two. 
+Because the kind of choice you might want to give to a leader, a choice like giving the president the choice to raise prices on electricity, takes away a choice that people in the economy want. 
+They want the choice to be able to continue consuming subsidized electric power. 
+So if you give just to one side or the other, you'll have tension or friction. 
+But if we can find ways to give more choices to both, that will give us a set of rules for changing rules that get us out of traps. 
+Now, Nelson also has access to the Internet. 
+And he says that if you want to see the damaging effects of rules, the ways that rules can keep people in the dark, look at the pictures from NASA of the earth at night. 
+In particular check out Asia. 
+If you zoom in here, you can see North Korea, in outline here, which is like a black hole compared to its neighbors. 
+Now, you won't be surprised to learn that the rules in North Korea keep people there in the dark. 
+But it is important to recognize that North Korea and South Korea started out with identical sets of rules in both the sense of laws and regulations, but also in the deeper senses of understandings, norms, culture, values and beliefs. 
+When they separated, they made choices that led to very divergent paths for their sets of rules. 
+So we can change — we as humans can change the rules that we use to interact with each other, for better, or for worse. 
+Now let's look at another region, the Caribbean. 
+Zoom in on Haiti, in outline here. 
+Haiti is also dark, compared to its neighbor here, the Dominican Republic, which has about the same number of residents. 
+Both of these countries are dark compared to Puerto Rico, which has half as many residents as either Haiti or the Dominican Republic. 
+What Haiti warns us is that rules can be bad because governments are weak. 
+It's not just that the rules are bad because the government is too strong and oppressive, as in North Korea. 
+So that if we want to create environments with good rules, we can't just tear down. 
+We've got to find ways to build up, as well. 
+Now, China dramatically demonstrates both the potential and the challenges of working with rules. 
+Back in the beginning of the data presented in this chart, China was the world's high-technology leader. 
+Chinese had pioneered technologies like steel, printing, gunpowder. 
+But the Chinese never adopted, at least in that period, effective rules for encouraging the spread of those ideas — a profit motive that could have encouraged the spread. 
+And they soon adopted rules which slowed down innovation and cut China off from the rest of the world. 
+So as other countries in the world innovated, in the sense both of developing newer technologies, but also developing newer rules, the Chinese were cut off from those advances. 
+Income there stayed stagnant, as it zoomed ahead in the rest of the world. 
+This next chart looks at more recent data. 
+It plots income, average income in China as a percentage of average income in the United States. 
+In the '50s and' 60s you can see that it was hovering at about three percent. 
+But then in the late '70s something changed. 
+Growth took off in China. The Chinese started catching up very quickly with the United States. 
+If you go back to the map at night, you can get a clue to the process that lead to the dramatic change in rules in China. 
+The brightest spot in China, which you can see on the edge of the outline here, is Hong Kong. 
+Hong Kong was a small bit of China that, for most of the 20th century, operated under a very different set of rules than the rest of mainland China — rules that were copied from working market economies of the time, and administered by the British. 
+In the 1950s, Hong Kong was a place where millions of people could go, from the mainland, to start in jobs like sewing shirts, making toys. 
+But, to get on a process of increasing income, increasing skills led to very rapid growth there. 
+Hong Kong was also the model which leaders like Deng Xiaoping could copy, when they decided to move all of the mainland towards the market model. 
+But Deng Xiaoping instinctively understood the importance of offering choices to his people. 
+So instead of forcing everyone in China to shift immediately to the market model, they proceeded by creating some special zones that could do, in a sense, what Britain did: make the opportunity to go work with the market rules available to the people who wanted to opt in there. 
+So they created four special economic zones around Hong Kong: zones where Chinese could come and work, and cities grew up very rapidly there; also zones where foreign firms could come in and make things. 
+One of the zones next to Hong Kong has a city called Shenzhen. 
+In that city there is a Taiwanese firm that made the iPhone that many of you have, and they made it with labor from Chinese who moved there to Shenzhen. 
+So after the four special zones, there were 14 coastal cites that were open in the same sense, and eventually demonstrated successes in these places that people could opt in to, that they flocked to because of the advantages they offered. 
+Demonstrated successes there led to a consensus for a move toward the market model for the entire economy. 
+Now the Chinese example shows us several points. 
+One is: preserve choices for people. 
+Two: operate on the right scale. 
+If you try to change the rules in a village, you could do that, but a village would be too small to get the kinds of benefits you can get if you have millions of people all working under good rules. 
+On the other hand, the nation is too big. 
+If you try to change the rules in the nation, you can't give some people a chance to hold back, see how things turn out, and let others zoom ahead and try the new rules. 
+But cities give you this opportunity to create new places, with new rules that people can opt in to. 
+And they're large enough to get all of the benefits that we can have when millions of us work together under good rules. 
+So the proposal is that we conceive of something called a charter city. 
+We start with a charter that specifies all the rules required to attract the people who we'll need to build the city. 
+We'll need to attract the investors who will build out the infrastructure — the power system, the roads, the port, the airport, the buildings. 
+You'll need to attract firms, who will come hire the people who move there first. 
+And you'll need to attract families, the residents who will come and live there permanently, raise their children, get an education for their children, and get their first job. 
+With that charter, people will move there. 
+The city can be built. 
+And we can scale this model. 
+We can go do it over and over again. 
+To make it work, we need good rules. We've already discussed that. 
+Those are captured in the charter. 
+We also need the choices for people. 
+That's really built into the model if we allow for the possibility of building cities on uninhabited land. 
+You start from uninhabited territory. 
+People can come live under the new charter, but no one is forced to live under it. 
+The final thing we need are choices for leaders. 
+And, to achieve the kind of choices we want for leaders we need to allow for the potential for partnerships between nations: cases where nations work together, in effect, de facto, the way China and Britain worked together to build, first a little enclave of the market model, and then scale it throughout China. 
+In a sense, Britain, inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we've undertaken in the last century. 
+So if we allow for these kind of partnerships to replicate this again, we can get those kinds of benefits scaled throughout the world. 
+In some cases this will involve a delegation of responsibility, a delegation of control from one country to another to take over certain kinds of administrative responsibilities. 
+Now, when I say that, some of you are starting to think, "Well, is this just bringing back colonialism?" 
+It's not. But it's important to recognize that the kind of emotions that come up when we start to think about these things, can get in the way, can make us pull back, can shut down our ability, and our interest in trying to explore new ideas. 
+Why is this not like colonialism? 
+The thing that was bad about colonialism, and the thing which is residually bad in some of our aid programs, is that it involved elements of coercion and condescension. 
+This model is all about choices, both for leaders and for the people who will live in these new places. 
+And, choice is the antidote to coercion and condescension. 
+So let's talk about how this could play out in practice. 
+Let's take a particular leader, Raul Castro, who is the leader of Cuba. 
+It must have occurred to Castro that he has the chance to do for Cuba what Deng Xiaoping did for China, but he doesn't have a Hong Kong there on the island in Cuba. 
+He does, though, have a little bit of light down in the south that has a very special status. 
+There is a zone there, around Guantanamo Bay, where a treaty gives the United States administrative responsibility for a piece of land that's about twice the size of Manhattan. 
+Castro goes to the prime minister of Canada and says, "" Look, the Yankees have a terrible PR problem. 
+They want to get out. 
+Why don't you, Canada, take over? 
+Build — run a special administrative zone. 
+Allow a new city to be built up there. 
+Allow many people to come in. 
+Let us have a Hong Kong nearby. 
+Some of my citizens will move into that city as well. 
+Others will hold back. But this will be the gateway that will connect the modern economy and the modern world to my country. "" Now, where else might this model be tried? 
+Well, Africa. I've talked with leaders in Africa. 
+Many of them totally get the notion of a special zone that people can opt into as a rule. 
+It's a rule for changing rules. 
+It's a way to create new rules, and let people opt-in without coercion, and the opposition that coercion can force. 
+They also totally get the idea that in some instances they can make more credible promises to long-term investors — the kind of investors who will come build the port, build the roads, in a new city — they can make more credible promises if they do it along with a partner nation. 
+Perhaps even in some arrangement that's a little bit like an escrow account, where you put land in the escrow account and the partner nation takes responsibility for it. 
+There is also lots of land in Africa where new cities could be built. 
+This is a picture I took when I was flying along the coast. 
+There are immense stretches of land like this — land where hundreds of millions of people could live. 
+Now, if we generalize this and think about not just one or two charter cites, but dozens — cities that will help create places for the many hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people who will move to cities in the coming century — is there enough land for them? 
+Well, throughout the world, if we look at the lights at night, the one thing that's misleading is that, visually, it looks like most of the world is already built out. 
+So let me show you why that's wrong. 
+Take this representation of all of the land. 
+Turn it into a square that stands for all the arable land on Earth. 
+And let these dots represent the land that's already taken up by the cities that three billion people now live in. 
+If you move the dots down to the bottom of the rectangle you can see that the cities for the existing three billion urban residents take up only three percent of the arable land on earth. 
+So if we wanted to build cities for another billion people, they would be dots like this. 
+We'd go from three percent of the arable land, to four percent. 
+We'd dramatically reduce the human footprint on Earth by building more cities that people can move to. 
+And if these are cities governed by good rules, they can be cities where people are safe from crime, safe from disease and bad sanitation, where people have a chance to get a job. 
+They can get basic utilities like electricity. 
+Their kids can get an education. 
+So what will it take to get started building the first charter cities, scaling this so we build many more? 
+It would help to have a manual. 
+(Laughter) What university professors could do is write some details that might go into this manual. 
+You wouldn't want to let us run the cities, go out and design them. 
+You wouldn't let academics out in the wild. (Laughter) But, you could set us to work thinking about questions like, suppose it isn't just Canada that does the deal with Raul Castro. 
+Perhaps Brazil comes in as a participant, and Spain as well. And perhaps Cuba wants to be one of the partners in a four-way joint venture. 
+How would we write the treaty to do that? 
+There is less precedent for that, but that could easily be worked out. 
+How would we finance this? 
+Turns out Singapore and Hong Kong are cities that made huge gains on the value of the land that they owned when they got started. 
+You could use the gains on the value of the land to pay for things like the police, the courts, but the school system and the health care system too, which make this a more attractive place to live, makes this a place where people have higher incomes — which, incidentally, makes the land more valuable. 
+So the incentives for the people helping to construct this zone and build it, and set up the basic rules, go very much in the right direction. 
+So there are many other details like this. 
+How could we have buildings that are low cost and affordable for people who work in a first job, assembling something like an iPhone, but make those buildings energy efficient, and make sure that they are safe, so they don't fall down in an earthquake or a hurricane. 
+Many technical details to be worked out, but those of us who are already starting to pursue these things can already tell that there is no roadblock, there's no impediment, other than a failure of imagination, that will keep us from delivering on a truly global win-win solution. 
+Let me conclude with this picture. 
+The reason we can be so well off, even though there is so many people on earth, is because of the power of ideas. 
+We can share ideas with other people, and when they discover them, they share with us. 
+It's not like scarce objects, where sharing means we each get less. 
+When we share ideas we all get more. 
+When we think about ideas in that way, we usually think about technologies. 
+But there is another class of ideas: the rules that govern how we interact with each other; rules like, let's have a tax system that supports a research university that gives away certain kinds of knowledge for free. 
+Let's have a system where we have ownership of land that is registered in a government office, that people can pledge as collateral. 
+If we can keep innovating on our space of rules, and particularly innovate in the sense of coming up with rules for changing rules, so we don't get stuck with bad rules, then we can keep moving progress forward and truly make the world a better place, so that people like Nelson and his friends don't have to study any longer under the streetlights. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+"" It's funny, "" I said to myself, "" You can mingle with the opposite sex at the holy Kaaba, but not at the Burger King? "" (Laughter) Quite, quite ironic. 
+On the other hand, the Westerners who look at Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that this is what Islam ordains. 
+And Westerners — Europeans or Americans — who didn't know about this before, [saw] this practice within some of the Muslim communities who migrated from North Africa. 
+And we see, truly, in some Muslim communities, that tradition. 
+And the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen, by force — like, women are forced to cover their heads — wear the hijab, the Islamic head cover. 
+But when I saw that, I said, "" Maybe the problem is just an authoritarian culture in the region, and some Muslims have been influenced by that. 
+I said, "" Well, I will do research about how Islam actually came to be what it is today, and what roads were taken and what roads could have been taken. "" The name of the book is "" Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. "" And as the subtitle suggests, I looked at Islamic tradition and the history of Islamic thought from the perspective of individual liberty, and I tried to find what are the strengths with regard to individual liberty. 
+
+The stories we tell about each other matter very much. 
+The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter. 
+And most of all, I think the way that we participate in each other's stories is of deep importance. 
+I was six years old when I first heard stories about the poor. 
+Now I didn't hear those stories from the poor themselves, I heard them from my Sunday school teacher and Jesus, kind of via my Sunday school teacher. 
+I remember learning that people who were poor needed something material — food, clothing, shelter — that they didn't have. 
+And I also was taught, coupled with that, that it was my job — this classroom full of five and six year-old children — it was our job, apparently, to help. 
+This is what Jesus asked of us. 
+And then he said, "" What you do for the least of these, you do for me. "" Now I was pretty psyched. 
+I was very eager to be useful in the world — I think we all have that feeling. 
+And also, it was kind of interesting that God needed help. 
+That was news to me, and it felt like it was a very important thing to get to participate in. 
+But I also learned very soon thereafter that Jesus also said, and I'm paraphrasing, the poor would always be with us. 
+This frustrated and confused me; I felt like I had been just given a homework assignment that I had to do, and I was excited to do, but no matter what I would do, I would fail. 
+So I felt confused, a little bit frustrated and angry, like maybe I'd misunderstood something here. 
+And I felt overwhelmed. 
+And for the first time, I began to fear this group of people and to feel negative emotion towards a whole group of people. 
+I imagined in my head, a kind of long line of individuals that were never going away, that would always be with us. 
+They were always going to ask me to help them and give them things, which I was excited to do, but I didn't know how it was going to work. 
+And I didn't know what would happen when I ran out of things to give, especially if the problem was never going away. 
+In the years following, the other stories I heard about the poor growing up were no more positive. 
+For example, I saw pictures and images frequently of sadness and suffering. 
+I heard about things that were going wrong in the lives of the poor. 
+I heard about disease, I heard about war — they always seemed to be kind of related. 
+And in general, I got this sort of idea that the poor in the world lived lives that were wrought with suffering and sadness, devastation, hopelessness. 
+And after a while, I developed what I think many of us do, is this predictable response, where I started to feel bad every time I heard about them. 
+I started to feel guilty for my own relative wealth, because I wasn't doing more, apparently, to make things better. 
+And I even felt a sense of shame because of that. 
+And so naturally, I started to distance myself. 
+I stopped listening to their stories quite as closely as I had before. 
+And I stopped expecting things to really change. 
+Now I still gave — on the outside it looked like I was still quite involved. 
+I gave of my time and my money, I gave when solutions were on sale. 
+The cost of a cup of coffee can save a child's life, right. 
+I mean who can argue with that? 
+I gave when I was cornered, when it was difficult to avoid and I gave, in general, when the negative emotions built up enough that I gave to relieve my own suffering, not someone else's. 
+The truth be told, I was giving out of that place, not out of a genuine place of hope and excitement to help and of generosity. 
+It became a transaction for me, became sort of a trade. 
+I was purchasing something — I was buying my right to go on with my day and not necessarily be bothered by this bad news. 
+And I think the way that we go through that sometimes can, first of all, disembody a group of people, individuals out there in the world. 
+And it can also turn into a commodity, which is a very scary thing. 
+So as I did this, and as I think many of us do this, we kind of buy our distance, we kind of buy our right to go on with our day. 
+I think that exchange can actually get in the way of the very thing that we want most. 
+It can get in the way of our desire to really be meaningful and useful in another person's life and, in short to love. 
+Thankfully, a few years ago, things shifted for me because I heard this gentleman speak, Dr. Muhammad Yunus. 
+I know many in the room probably know exactly who he is, but to give the shorthand version for any who have not heard him speak, Dr. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago for his work pioneering modern microfinance. 
+When I heard him speak, it was three years before that. 
+But basically, microfinance — if this is new to you as well — think of that as financial services for the poor. 
+Think of all the things you get at your bank and imagine those products and services tailored to the needs of someone living on a few dollars a day. 
+Dr. Yunus shared his story, explaining what that was, and what he had done with his Grameen Bank. 
+He also talked about, in particular, microlending, which is a tiny loan that could help someone start or grow a business. 
+Now, when I heard him speak, it was exciting for a number of reasons. 
+First and foremost, I learned about this new method of change in the world that, for once, showed me, maybe, a way to interact with someone and to give, to share of a resource in a way that wasn't weird and didn't make me feel bad — that was exciting. 
+But more importantly, he told stories about the poor that were different than any stories I had heard before. 
+In fact, those individuals he talked about who were poor was sort of a side note. 
+He was talking about strong, smart, hardworking entrepreneurs who woke up every day and were doing things to make their lives and their family's lives better. 
+All they needed to do that more quickly and to do it better was a little bit of capital. 
+It was an amazing sort of insight for me. 
+And I, in fact, was so deeply moved by this — it's hard to express now how much that affected me — but I was so moved that I actually quit my job a few weeks later, and I moved to East Africa to try to see for myself what this was about. 
+For the first time, actually, in a long time I wanted to meet those individuals, I wanted to meet these entrepreneurs, and see for myself what their lives were actually about. 
+So I spent three months in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania interviewing entrepreneurs that had received 100 dollars to start or grow a business. 
+And in fact, through those interactions, for the first time, I was starting to get to be friends with some of those people in that big amorphous group out there that was supposed to be far away. 
+I was starting to be friends and get to know their personal stories. 
+And over and over again, as I interviewed them and spent my days with them, I did hear stories of life change and amazing little details of change. 
+So I would hear from goat herders who had used that money that they had received to buy a few more goats. 
+Their business trajectory would change. 
+They would make a little bit more money; their standard of living would shift and would get better. 
+And they would make really interesting little adjustments in their lives, like they would start to send their children to school. 
+They might be able to buy mosquito nets. 
+Maybe they could afford a lock for the door and feel secure. 
+Maybe it was just that they could put sugar in their tea and offer that to me when I came as their guest and that made them feel proud. 
+But there were these beautiful details, even if I talked to 20 goat herders in a row, and some days that's what happened — these beautiful details of life change that were meaningful to them. 
+That was another thing that really touched me. 
+It was really humbling to see for the first time, to really understand that even if I could have taken a magic wand and fixed everything, I probably would have gotten a lot wrong. 
+Because the best way for people to change their lives is for them to have control and to do that in a way that they believe is best for them. 
+So I saw that and it was very humbling. 
+Anyway, another interesting thing happened while I was there. 
+I never once was asked for a donation, which had kind of been my mode, right. 
+There's poverty, you give money to help — no one asked me for a donation. 
+In fact, no one wanted me to feel bad for them at all. 
+If anything, they just wanted to be able to do more of what they were doing already and to build on their own capabilities. 
+So what I did hear, once in a while, was that people wanted a loan — I thought that sounded very reasonable and really exciting. 
+And by the way, I was a philosophy and poetry major in school, so I didn't know the difference between profit and revenue when I went to East Africa. 
+I just got this impression that the money would work. 
+And my introduction to business was in these $100 little infuses of capital. 
+And I learned about profit and revenue, about leverage, all sorts of things, from farmers, from seamstresses, from goat herders. 
+So this idea that these new stories of business and hope might be shared with my friends and family, and through that, maybe we could get some of the money that they needed to be able to continue their businesses as loans, that's this little idea that turned into Kiva. 
+A few months later, I went back to Uganda with a digital camera and a basic website that my partner, Matthew, and I had kind of built, and took pictures of seven of my new friends, posted their stories, these stories of entrepreneurship, up on the website, spammed friends and family and said, "" We think this is legal. 
+Haven't heard back yet from SEC on all the details, but do you say, do you want to help participate in this, provide the money that they need? "" The money came in basically overnight. 
+We sent it over to Uganda. 
+And over the next six months, a beautiful thing happened; the entrepreneurs received the money, they were paid, and their businesses, in fact, grew, and they were able to support themselves and change the trajectory of their lives. 
+In October of '05, after those first seven loans were paid, Matt and I took the word beta off of the site. 
+We said, "" Our little experiment has been a success. 
+Let's start for real. "" That was our official launch. 
+And then that first year, October '05 through' 06, Kiva facilitated $500,000 in loans. 
+The second year, it was a total of 15 million. 
+The third year, the total was up to around 40. 
+The fourth year, we were just short of 100. 
+And today, less than five years in, Kiva's facilitated more than 150 million dollars, in little 25-dollar bits, from lenders and entrepreneurs — more than a million of those, collectively in 200 countries. 
+So that's where Kiva is today, just to bring you right up to the present. 
+And while those numbers and those statistics are really fun to talk about and they're interesting, to me, Kiva's really about stories. 
+It's about retelling the story of the poor, and it's about giving ourselves an opportunity to engage that validates their dignity, validates a partnership relationship, not a relationship that's based on the traditional sort of donor beneficiary weirdness that can happen. 
+But instead a relationship that can promote respect and hope and this optimism that together we can move forward. 
+So what I hope is that, not only can the money keep flowing forth through Kiva — that's a very positive and meaningful thing — but I hope Kiva can blur those lines, like I said, between the traditional rich and poor categories that we're taught to see in the world, this false dichotomy of us and them, have and have not. 
+I hope that Kiva can blur those lines. 
+Because as that happens, I think we can feel free to interact in a way that's more open, more just and more creative, to engage with each other and to help each other. 
+Imagine how you feel when you see somebody on street who is begging and you're about to approach them. 
+Imagine how you feel; and then imagine the difference when you might see somebody who has a story of entrepreneurship and hard work who wants to tell you about their business. 
+Maybe they're smiling, and they want to talk to you about what they've done. 
+Imagine if you're speaking with somebody who's growing things and making them flourish, somebody who's using their talents to do something productive, somebody who's built their own business from scratch, someone who is surrounded by abundance, not scarcity, who's in fact creating abundance, somebody with full hands with something to offer, not empty hands asking for you to give them something. 
+Imagine if you could hear a story you didn't expect of somebody who wakes up every day and works very, very hard to make their life better. 
+These stories can really change the way that we think about each other. 
+And if we can catalyze a supportive community to come around these individuals and to participate in their story by lending a little bit of money, I think that can change the way we believe in each other and each other's potential. 
+Now for me, Kiva is just the beginning. 
+And as I look forward to what is next, it's been helpful to reflect on the things I've learned so far. 
+The first one is, as I mentioned, entrepreneurship was a new idea to me. 
+Kiva borrowers, as I interviewed them and got to know them over the last few years, have taught me what entrepreneurship is. 
+And I think, at its core, it's deciding that you want your life to be better. 
+You see an opportunity and you decide what you're going to do to try to seize that. 
+In short, it's deciding that tomorrow can better than today and going after that. 
+Second thing that I've learned is that loans are a very interesting tool for connectivity. 
+So they're not a donation. 
+Yeah, maybe it doesn't sound that much different. 
+But in fact, when you give something to someone and they say, "" Thanks, "" and let you know how things go, that's one thing. 
+When you lend them money, and they slowly pay you back over time, you have this excuse to have an ongoing dialogue. 
+This continued attention — this ongoing attention — is a really big deal to build different kinds of relationships among us. 
+And then third, from what I've heard from the entrepreneurs I've gotten to know, when all else is equal, given the option to have just money to do what you need to do, or money plus the support and encouragement of a global community, people choose the community plus the money. 
+That's a much more meaningful combination, a more powerful combination. 
+So with that in mind, this particular incident has led to the things that I'm working on now. 
+I see entrepreneurs everywhere now, now that I'm tuned into this. 
+And one thing that I've seen is there are a lot of supportive communities that already exist in the world. 
+With social networks, it's an amazing way, growing the number of people that we all have around us in our own supportive communities, rapidly. 
+And so, as I have been thinking about this, I've been wondering: how can we engage these supportive communities to catalyze even more entrepreneurial ideas and to catalyze all of us to make tomorrow better than today? 
+As I've researched what's going on in the United States, a few interesting little insights have come up. 
+So one is that, of course, as we all might expect, many small businesses in the U.S. and all over the world still need money to grow and to do more of what they want to do or they might need money during a hard month. 
+But there's always a need for resources close by. 
+Another thing is, it turns out, those resources don't usually come from the places you might expect — banks, venture capitalists, other organizations and support structures — they come from friends and family. 
+Some statistics say 85 percent or more of funding for small businesses comes from friends and family. 
+That's around 130 billion dollars a year — it's a lot. 
+And third, so as people are doing this friends and family fundraising process, it's very awkward, people don't know exactly what to ask for, how to ask, what to promise in return, even though they have the best of intentions and want to thank those people that are supporting them. 
+So to harness the power of these supportive communities in a new way and to allow entrepreneurs to decide for themselves exactly what that financial exchange should look like, exactly what fits them and the people around them, this week actually, we're quietly doing a launch of Profounder, which is a crowd funding platform for small businesses to raise what they need through investments from their friends and family. 
+And it's investments, not donations, not loans, but investments that have a dynamic return. 
+So the mapping of participating in the story, it actually flows with the up and down. 
+So in short, it's a do-it-yourself tool for small businesses to raise these funds. 
+And what you can do is go onto the site, create a profile, create investment terms in a really easy way. 
+We make it really, really simple for me as well as anyone else who wants to use the site. 
+And we allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues. 
+They can raise up to a million dollars from an unlimited number of unaccredited, unsophisticated investors — everyday people, heaven forbid — and they can share those returns over time — again, whatever terms they set. 
+As investors choose to become involved based on those terms, they can either take their rewards back as cash, or they can decide in advance to give those returns away to a non-profit. 
+So they can be a cash, or a cause, investor. 
+It's my hope that this kind of tool can show anybody who has an idea a path to go do what they want to do in the world and to gather the people around them that they already have, the people that know them best and that love them and want to support them, to gather them to make this happen. 
+So that's what I'm working on now. 
+And to close, I just want to say, look these are tools. 
+Right now, Profounder's right at the very beginning, and it's very palpable; it's very clear to me, that it's just a vessel, it's just a tool. 
+What we need are for people to care, to actually go use it, just like they've cared enough to use Kiva to make those connections. 
+But the good news is I don't think I need to stand here and convince you to care — I'm not even going to try. 
+I don't think, even though we often hear, you know, hear the ethical and moral reasons, the religious reasons, "Here's why caring and giving will make you happier." 
+I don't think we need to be convinced of that. I think we know; in fact, I think we know so much, and it's such a reality that we care so deeply, that in fact, what usually stops us is that we're afraid to try and to mess up, because we care so very much about helping each other and being meaningful in each other's lives. 
+So what I think I can do today, that best thing I can give you — I've given you my story, which is the best I can do. 
+And I think I can remind us that we do care. 
+I think we all already know that. 
+And I think we know that love is resilient enough for us to get out there and try. 
+Just a sec. 
+(Applause) Thanks. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) 
+For me, the best way to be inspired to try 
+is to stop and to listen to someone else's story. 
+And I'm grateful that I've gotten to do that here at TED. 
+And I'm grateful that whenever I do that, guaranteed, I am inspired — I am inspired by the person I am listening to. 
+And I believe more and more every time I listen in that that person's potential to do great things in the world and in my own potential to maybe help. 
+And that — forget the tools, forget the moving around of resources — that stuff's easy. 
+Believing in each other, really being sure when push comes to shove that each one of us can do amazing things in the world, that is what can make our stories into love stories and our collective story into one that continually perpetuates hope and good things for all of us. 
+So that, this belief in each other, knowing that without a doubt and practicing that every day in whatever you do, that's what I believe will change the world and make tomorrow better than today. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Let me begin with four words that will provide the context for this week, four words that will come to define this century. 
+Here they are: The Earth is full. 
+It's full of us, it's full of our stuff, full of our waste, full of our demands. 
+Yes, we are a brilliant and creative species, but we've created a little too much stuff — so much that our economy is now bigger than its host, our planet. 
+This is not a philosophical statement, this is just science based in physics, chemistry and biology. 
+There are many science-based analyses of this, but they all draw the same conclusion — that we're living beyond our means. 
+The eminent scientists of the Global Footprint Network, for example, calculate that we need about 1.5 Earths to sustain this economy. 
+In other words, to keep operating at our current level, we need 50 percent more Earth than we've got. 
+In financial terms, this would be like always spending 50 percent more than you earn, going further into debt every year. 
+But of course, you can't borrow natural resources, so we're burning through our capital, or stealing from the future. 
+So when I say full, I mean really full — well past any margin for error, well past any dispute about methodology. 
+What this means is our economy is unsustainable. 
+I'm not saying it's not nice or pleasant or that it's bad for polar bears or forests, though it certainly is. 
+What I'm saying is our approach is simply unsustainable. 
+In other words, thanks to those pesky laws of physics, when things aren't sustainable, they stop. 
+But that's not possible, you might think. 
+We can't stop economic growth. 
+Because that's what will stop: economic growth. 
+It will stop because of the end of trade resources. 
+It will stop because of the growing demand of us on all the resources, all the capacity, all the systems of the Earth, which is now having economic damage. 
+When we think about economic growth stopping, we go, "" That's not possible, "" because economic growth is so essential to our society that is is rarely questioned. 
+Although growth has certainly delivered many benefits, it is an idea so essential that we tend not to understand the possibility of it not being around. 
+Even though it has delivered many benefits, it is based on a crazy idea — the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. 
+And I'm here to tell you the emperor has no clothes. 
+That the crazy idea is just that, it is crazy, and with the Earth full, it's game over. 
+Come on, you're thinking. 
+That's not possible. 
+Technology is amazing. People are innovative. 
+There are so many ways we can improve the way we do things. 
+We can surely sort this out. 
+That's all true. 
+Well, it's mostly true. 
+We are certainly amazing, and we regularly solve complex problems with amazing creativity. 
+So if our problem was to get the human economy down from 150 percent to 100 percent of the Earth's capacity, we could do that. 
+The problem is we're just warming up this growth engine. 
+We plan to take this highly-stressed economy and make it twice as big and then make it four times as big — not in some distant future, but in less than 40 years, in the life time of most of you. 
+China plans to be there in just 20 years. 
+The only problem with this plan is that it's not possible. 
+In response, some people argue, but we need growth, we need it to solve poverty. 
+We need it to develop technology. 
+We need it to keep social stability. 
+I find this argument fascinating, as though we can kind of bend the rules of physics to suit our needs. 
+It's like the Earth doesn't care what we need. 
+Mother nature doesn't negotiate; she just sets rules and describes consequences. 
+And these are not esoteric limits. 
+This is about food and water, soil and climate, the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives. 
+So the idea that we can smoothly transition to a highly-efficient, solar-powered, knowledge-based economy transformed by science and technology so that nine billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads is a delusion. 
+It's not that it's not possible to feed, clothe and house us all and have us live decent lives. 
+It certainly is. 
+But the idea that we can gently grow there with a few minor hiccups is just wrong, and it's dangerously wrong, because it means we're not getting ready for what's really going to happen. 
+See what happens when you operate a system past its limits and then keep on going at an ever-accelerating rate is that the system stops working and breaks down. 
+And that's what will happen to us. 
+Many of you will be thinking, but surely we can still stop this. 
+If it's that bad, we'll react. 
+Let's just think through that idea. 
+Now we've had 50 years of warnings. 
+We've had science proving the urgency of change. 
+We've had economic analysis pointing out that, not only can we afford it, it's cheaper to act early. 
+And yet, the reality is we've done pretty much nothing to change course. 
+We're not even slowing down. 
+Last year on climate, for example, we had the highest global emissions ever. 
+The story on food, on water, on soil, on climate is all much the same. 
+I actually don't say this in despair. 
+I've done my grieving about the loss. 
+I accept where we are. 
+It is sad, but it is what it is. 
+But it is also time that we ended our denial and recognized that we're not acting, we're not close to acting and we're not going to act until this crisis hits the economy. 
+And that's why the end of growth is the central issue and the event that we need to get ready for. 
+So when does this transition begin? 
+When does this breakdown begin? 
+In my view, it is well underway. 
+I know most people don't see it that way. 
+We tend to look at the world, not as the integrated system that it is, but as a series of individual issues. 
+We see the Occupy protests, we see spiraling debt crises, we see growing inequality, we see money's influence on politics, we see resource constraint, food and oil prices. 
+But we see, mistakenly, each of these issues as individual problems to be solved. 
+In fact, it's the system in the painful process of breaking down — our system, of debt-fueled economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet Earth, is eating itself alive. 
+I could give you countless studies and evidence to prove this, but I won't because, if you want to see it, that evidence is all around you. 
+I want to talk to you about fear. 
+I want to do so because, in my view, the most important issue we face is how we respond to this question. 
+The crisis is now inevitable. 
+This issue is, how will we react? 
+Of course, we can't know what will happen. 
+The future is inherently uncertain. 
+But let's just think through what the science is telling us is likely to happen. 
+Imagine our economy when the carbon bubble bursts, when the financial markets recognize that, to have any hope of preventing the climate spiraling out of control, the oil and coal industries are finished. 
+Imagine China, India and Pakistan going to war as climate impacts generate conflict over food and water. 
+Imagine the Middle East without oil income, but with collapsing governments. 
+Imagine our highly-tuned, just-in-time food industry and our highly-stressed agricultural system failing and supermarket shelves emptying. 
+Imagine 30 percent unemployment in America as the global economy is gripped by fear and uncertainty. 
+Now imagine what that means for you, your family, your friends, your personal financial security. 
+Imagine what it means for your personal security as a heavily armed civilian population gets angrier and angrier about why this was allowed to happen. 
+Imagine what you'll tell your children when they ask you, "" So, in 2012, Mom and Dad, what was it like when you'd had the hottest decade on record for the third decade in a row, when every scientific body in the world was saying you've got a major problem, when the oceans were acidifying, when oil and food prices were spiking, when they were rioting in the streets of London and occupying Wall Street? 
+When the system was so clearly breaking down, Mom and Dad, what did you do, what were you thinking? "" So how do you feel when the lights go out on the global economy in your mind, when your assumptions about the future fade away and something very different emerges? 
+Just take a moment and take a breath and think, what do you feel at this point? 
+Perhaps denial. 
+Perhaps anger. 
+Maybe fear. 
+Of course, we can't know what's going to happen and we have to live with uncertainty. 
+But when we think about the kind of possibilities I paint, we should feel a bit of fear. 
+We are in danger, all of us, and we've evolved to respond to danger with fear to motivate a powerful response, to help us bravely face a threat. 
+But this time it's not a tiger at the cave mouth. 
+You can't see the danger at your door. 
+But if you look, you can see it at the door of your civilization. 
+That's why we need to feel our response now while the lights are still on, because if we wait until the crisis takes hold, we may panic and hide. 
+If we feel it now and think it through, we will realize we have nothing to fear but fear itself. 
+Yes, things will get ugly, and it will happen soon — certainly in our lifetime — but we are more than capable of getting through everything that's coming. 
+You see, those people that have faith that humans can solve any problem, that technology is limitless, that markets can be a force for good, are in fact right. 
+The only thing they're missing is that it takes a good crisis to get us going. 
+When we feel fear and we fear loss we are capable of quite extraordinary things. 
+Think about war. 
+After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it just took four days for the government to ban the production of civilian cars and to redirect the auto industry, and from there to rationing of food and energy. 
+Think about how a company responds to a bankruptcy threat and how a change that seemed impossible just gets done. 
+Think about how an individual responds to a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and how lifestyle changes that previously were just too difficult suddenly become relatively easy. 
+We are smart, in fact, we really are quite amazing, but we do love a good crisis. 
+And the good news, this one's a monster. 
+(Laughter) Sure, if we get it wrong, we could face the end of this civilization, but if we get it right, it could be the beginning of civilization instead. 
+And how cool would it be to tell your grandchildren that you were part of that? 
+There's certainly no technical or economic barrier in the way. 
+Scientists like James Hansen tell us we may need to eliminate net CO2 emissions from the economy in just a few decades. 
+I wanted to know what that would take, so I worked with professor Jorgen Randers from Norway to find the answer. 
+We developed a plan called "" The One Degree War Plan "" — so named because of the level of mobilization and focus required. 
+To my surprise, eliminating net CO2 emissions from the economy in just 20 years is actually pretty easy and pretty cheap, not very cheap, but certainly less than the cost of a collapsing civilization. 
+We didn't calculate that precisely, but we understand that's very expensive. 
+You can read the details, but in summary, we can transform our economy. 
+We can do it with proven technology. 
+We can do it at an affordable cost. 
+We can do it with existing political structures. 
+The only thing we need to change is how we think and how we feel. 
+And this is where you come in. 
+When we think about the future I paint, of course we should feel a bit of fear. 
+But fear can be paralyzing or motivating. 
+We need to accept the fear and then we need to act. 
+We need to act like the future depends on it. 
+We need to act like we only have one planet. 
+We can do this. 
+I know the free market fundamentalists will tell you that more growth, more stuff and nine billion people going shopping is the best we can do. 
+They're wrong. 
+We can be more, we can be much more. 
+We have achieved remarkable things since working out how to grow food some 10,000 years ago. 
+We've built a powerful foundation of science, knowledge and technology — more than enough to build a society where nine billion people can lead decent, meaningful and satisfying lives. 
+The Earth can support that if we choose the right path. 
+We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society's evolution — like, what do we want to be when we grow up, when we move past this bumbling adolescence where we think there are no limits and suffer delusions of immortality? 
+Well it's time to grow up, to be wiser, to be calmer, to be more considered. 
+Like generations before us, we'll be growing up in war — not a war between civilizations, but a war for civilization, for the extraordinary opportunity to build a society which is stronger and happier and plans on staying around into middle age. 
+We can choose life over fear. 
+We can do what we need to do, but it will take every entrepreneur, every artist, every scientist, every communicator, every mother, every father, every child, every one of us. 
+This could be our finest hour. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What is it about flying cars? 
+We've wanted to do this for about a hundred years. 
+And there are historic attempts that have had some level of technical success. 
+But we haven't yet gotten to the point where on your way here this morning you see something that really, truly seamlessly integrates the two-dimensional world that we're comfortable in with the three-dimensional sky above us — that, I don't know about you, but I really enjoy spending time in. 
+We looked at the historical attempts that had been out there and realized that, despite the fact that we have a lot of modern innovations to draw on today that weren't available previously — we have modern composite materials, we have aircraft engines that get good fuel economy and have better power-to-rate ratios than have ever been available, we have glass cockpit avionics that bring the information you need to fly directly to you in the cockpit — but without fundamentally addressing the problem from a different perspective, we realized that we were going to be getting the same result that people had been getting 
+for the last hundred years, which isn't where we want to be right now. 
+So instead of trying to make a car that can fly, we decided to try to make a plane that could drive. 
+And the result is the Terrafugia Transition. 
+It's a two-seat, single-engine airplane that works just like any other small airplane. 
+You take off and land at a local airport. 
+Then once you're on the ground, you fold up the wings, drive it home, park it in your garage. 
+And it works. 
+After two years of an innovative design and construction process, the proof of concept made its public debut in 2008. 
+Now like with anything that's really different from the status quo, it didn't always go so well testing that aircraft. 
+And we discovered that it's a very good thing that, when you go home with something that's been broken, you've actually learned a lot more than when you managed to tick off all of your test objectives the first time through. 
+Still, we very much wanted to see the aircraft that we'd all helped build in the air, off the ground, like it was supposed to be. 
+And on our third high-speed testing deployment on a bitter cold morning in upstate New York, we got to do that for the first time. 
+The picture behind me was snapped by the copilot in our chase aircraft just moments after the wheels got off the ground for the first time. 
+And we were all very flattered to see that image become a symbol of accomplishing something that people had thought was impossible really the world over. 
+The flight testing that followed that was as basic and low-risk as we could make it, but it still accomplished what we needed to to take the program to the next step and to gain the credibility that we needed within our eventual market, the general aviation community, and with the regulators that govern the use of design of aircraft, particularly in the States. 
+The FAA, about a year ago, gave us an exemption for the Transition to allow us to have an additional 110 lbs. 
+within the light sport aircraft category. 
+Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it's very important, because being able to deliver the Transition as a light sport aircraft makes it simpler for us to certify it, but it also makes it much easier for you to learn how to fly it. 
+A sport pilot can be certificated in as little as 20 hours of flight time. 
+And at 110 lbs., that's very important for solving the other side of the equation — driving. 
+It turns out that driving, with its associated design implementation and regulatory hurdles, is actually a harder problem to solve than flying. 
+For those of us that spend most of our lives on the ground, this may be counter-intuitive, but driving has potholes, cobblestones, pedestrians, other drivers and a rather long and detailed list of federal motor vehicle safety standards to contend with. 
+Fortunately, necessity remains the mother of invention, and a lot of the design work that we're the most proud of with the aircraft came out of solving the unique problems of operating it on the ground — everything from a continuously-variable transmission and liquid-based cooling system that allows us to use an aircraft engine in stop-and-go traffic, to a custom-designed gearbox that powers either the propeller when you're flying or the wheels on the ground, to the automated wing-folding mechanism that we'll see in a moment, to crash safety features. 
+We have a carbon fiber safety cage that protects the occupants for less than 10 percent of the weight of a traditional steel chassis in a car. 
+Now this also, as good as it is, wasn't quite enough. 
+The regulations for vehicles on the road weren't written with an airplane in mind. 
+So we did need a little bit of support from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. 
+Now you may have seen in the news recently, they came through with us at the end of last month with a few special exemptions that will allow the Transition to be sold in the same category as SUVs and light trucks. 
+As a multi-purpose passenger vehicle, it is now officially "" designed for occasional off-road use. "" (Laughter) Now let's see it in action. 
+You can see there the wings folded up just along the side of the plane. 
+You're not powering the propeller, you're powering the wheels. 
+And it is under seven feet tall, so it will fit in a standard construction garage. 
+And that's the automated wing-folding mechanism. 
+That's real time. 
+You just push a few buttons in the cockpit, and the wings come out. 
+Once they're fully deployed, there's a mechanical lock that goes into place, again, from inside the cockpit. 
+And they're now fully capable of handling any of the loads you would see in flight — just like putting down your convertible top. 
+And you're all thinking what your neighbors would think of seeing that. 
+(Video) Test Pilot: Until the vehicle flies, 75 percent of your risk is that first flight. 
+Radio: It actually flew. Yes. 
+Radio 2: That was gorgeous. 
+Radio: What did you think of that? 
+That was beautiful from up here, I tell you. 
+AMD: See, we're all exceedingly excited about that little bunny hop. 
+And our test pilot gave us the best feedback you can get from a test pilot after a first flight, which was that it was "" remarkably unremarkable. "" He would go onto tell us that the Transition had been the easiest airplane to land that he'd flown in his entire 30-year career as a test pilot. 
+So despite making something that is seemingly revolutionary, we really focused on doing as little new as possible. 
+We leverage a lot of technology from the state-of-the-art in general aviation and from automotive racing. 
+When we do have to do something truly out-of-the-box, we use an incremental design, build, test, redesign cycle that lets us reduce risk in baby steps. 
+Now since we started Terrafugia about 6 years ago, we've had a lot of those baby steps. 
+We've gone from being three of us working in the basement at MIT while we were still in graduate school to about two-dozen of us working in an initial production facility outside of Boston. 
+We've had to overcome challenges like keeping the weight below the light sport limit that I talked about, figuring out how to politely respond when a regulator tells you, "" But that won't fit through a toll booth with the wings extended — (Laughter) to all of the other associated durability and engineering issues that we talked about on the ground. 
+Still, if everything goes to our satisfaction with the testing and construction of the two production prototypes that we're working on right now, those first deliveries to the, about a hundred, people who have reserved an airplane at this point should begin at the end of next year. 
+The Transition will cost in line with other small airplanes. 
+And I'm certainly not out to replace your Chevy, but I do think that the Transition should be your next airplane. 
+Here's why. 
+While nearly all of the commercial air travel in the world goes through a relatively small number of large hub airports, there is a huge underutilized resource out there. 
+There are thousands of local airstrips that don't see nearly as many aircraft operations a day as they could. 
+On average, there's one within 20 to 30 miles of wherever you are in the United States. 
+The Transition gives you a safer, more convenient and more fun way of using this resource. 
+For those of you who aren't yet pilots, there's four main reasons why those of us who are don't fly as much as we'd like to: the weather, primarily, cost, long door-to-door travel time and mobility at your destination. 
+Now, bad weather comes in, just land, fold up the wings, drive home. 
+Doesn't matter if it rains a little, you have a windshield wiper. 
+Instead of paying to keep your airplane in a hanger, park it in your garage. 
+And the unleaded automotive fuel that we use is both cheaper and better for the environment than traditional avgas. 
+Door-to-door travel time is reduced, because now, instead of lugging bags, finding a parking space, taking off your shoes or pulling your airplane out of the hanger, you're now just spending that time getting to where you want to go. 
+And mobility to your destination is clearly solved. 
+Just fold up the wings and keep going. 
+The Transition simultaneously expands our horizons while making the world a smaller, more accessible place. 
+It also continues to be a fabulous adventure. 
+I hope you'll each take a moment to think about how you could use something like this to give yourself more access to your own world, and to make your own travel more convenient and more fun. 
+Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share it with you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+How do groups get anything done? Right? 
+How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just being chaos? 
+And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs. 
+And a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output. 
+And we've had a classic answer for coordination costs, which is, if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people, you start an institution, right? You raise some resources. 
+You found something. It can be private or public. 
+It can be for profit or not profit. It can be large or small. 
+But you get these resources together. 
+You found an institution, and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group. 
+More recently, because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor — and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination — there has been a second answer, which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure, to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system, without regard to institutional models. 
+So, that's what I want to talk about today. 
+I'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples, but always pointing to the broader themes. 
+So, I'm going to start by trying to answer a question that I know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other, and which the Internet is purpose-built to answer, which is, where can I get a picture of a roller-skating mermaid? 
+So, in New York City, on the first Saturday of every summer, Coney Island, our local, charmingly run-down amusement park, hosts the Mermaid Parade. It's an amateur parade; people come from all over the city; people get all dressed up. 
+Some people get less dressed up. 
+Young and old, dancing in the streets. 
+Colorful characters, and a good time is had by all. 
+And what I want to call your attention to is not the Mermaid Parade itself, charming though it is, but rather to these photos. 
+I didn't take them. How did I get them? 
+And the answer is: I got them from Flickr. 
+Flickr is a photo-sharing service that allows people to take photos, upload them, share them over the Web and so forth. 
+Recently, Flickr has added an additional function called tagging. 
+Tagging was pioneered by Delicious and Joshua Schachter. 
+Delicious is a social bookmarking service. 
+Tagging is a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification. 
+Right? If I had given this talk last year, I couldn't do what I just did, because I couldn't have found those photos. 
+But instead of saying, we need to hire a professional class of librarians to organize these photos once they're uploaded, Flickr simply turned over to the users the ability to characterize the photos. 
+So, I was able to go in and draw down photos that had been tagged "" Mermaid Parade. "" There were 3,100 photos taken by 118 photographers, all aggregated and then put under this nice, neat name, shown in reverse chronological order. 
+And I was then able to go and retrieve them to give you that little slideshow. 
+Now, what hard problem is being solved here? 
+And it's — in the most schematic possible view, it's a coordination problem, right? 
+There are a large number of people on the Internet, a very small fraction of them have photos of the Mermaid Parade. 
+How do we get those people together to contribute that work? 
+The classic answer is to form an institution, right? 
+To draw those people into some prearranged structure that has explicit goals. 
+And I want to call your attention to some of the side effects of going the institutional route. 
+First of all, when you form an institution, you take on a management problem, right? 
+No good just hiring employees, you also have to hire other employees to manage those employees and to enforce the goals of the institution and so forth. 
+Secondly, you have to bring structure into place. 
+Right? You have to have economic structure. 
+You have to have legal structure. 
+You have to have physical structure. 
+And that creates additional costs. 
+Third, forming an institution is inherently exclusionary. 
+You notice we haven't got everybody who has a photo. 
+You can't hire everyone in a company, right? 
+You can't recruit everyone into a governmental organization. 
+You have to exclude some people. 
+And fourth, as a result of that exclusion, you end up with a professional class. Look at the change here. 
+We've gone from people with photos to photographers. 
+Right? We've created a professional class of photographers whose goal is to go out and photograph the Mermaid Parade, or whatever else they're sent out to photograph. 
+When you build cooperation into the infrastructure, which is the Flickr answer, you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals, rather than moving the individuals to the problem. 
+You arrange the coordination in the group, and by doing that you get the same outcome, without the institutional difficulties. 
+You lose the institutional imperative. 
+You lose the right to shape people's work when it's volunteer effort, but you also shed the institutional cost, which gives you greater flexibility. 
+What Flickr does is it replaces planning with coordination. 
+And this is a general aspect of these cooperative systems. 
+Right. You'll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone, and you stopped making plans. 
+You just said, "" I'll call you when I get there. "" "" Call me when you get off work. "" Right? 
+That is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning. 
+Right. We're now able to do that kind of thing with groups. 
+To say instead of, we must make an advance plan, we must have a five-year projection of where the Wikipedia is going to be, or whatever, you can just say, let's coordinate the group effort, and let's deal with it as we go, because we're now well-enough coordinated that we don't have to take on the problems of deciding in advance what to do. 
+So here's another example. This one's somewhat more somber. 
+These are photos on Flickr tagged "" Iraq. "" And everything that was hard about the coordination cost with the Mermaid Parade is even harder here. 
+There are more pictures. There are more photographers. 
+It's taken over a wider geographic area. 
+The photos are spread out over a longer period of time. 
+And worst of all, that figure at the bottom, approximately ten photos per photographer, is a lie. 
+It's mathematically true, but it doesn't really talk about anything important — because in these systems, the average isn't really what matters. 
+What matters is this. 
+This is a graph of photographs tagged Iraq as taken by the 529 photographers who contributed the 5,445 photos. 
+And it's ranked in order of number of photos taken per photographer. 
+You can see here, over at the end, our most prolific photographer has taken around 350 photos, and you can see there's a few people who have taken hundreds of photos. 
+Then there's dozens of people who've taken dozens of photos. 
+And by the time we get around here, we get ten or fewer photos, and then there's this long, flat tail. 
+And by the time you get to the middle, you've got hundreds of people who have contributed only one photo each. 
+This is called a power-law distribution. 
+It appears often in unconstrained social systems where people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they like — this is often what you get. Right? 
+The math behind the power-law distribution is that whatever's in the nth position is doing about one-nth of whatever's being measured, relative to the person in the first position. 
+So, we'd expect the tenth most prolific photographer to have contributed about a tenth of the photos, and the hundredth most prolific photographer to have contributed only about a hundred as many photos as the most prolific photographer did. 
+So, the head of the curve can be sharper or flatter. 
+But that basic math accounts both for the steep slope and for the long, flat tail. 
+And curiously, in these systems, as they grow larger, the systems don't converge; they diverge more. 
+In bigger systems, the head gets bigger and the tail gets longer, so the imbalance increases. 
+You can see the curve is obviously heavily left-weighted. Here's how heavily: if you take the top 10 percent of photographers contributing to this system, they account for three quarters of the photos taken — just the top 10 percent most prolific photographers. 
+If you go down to five percent, you're still accounting for 60 percent of the photos. 
+If you go down to one percent, exclude 99 percent of the group effort, you're still accounting for almost a quarter of the photos. 
+And because of this left weighting, the average is actually here, way to the left. 
+And that sounds strange to our ears, but what ends up happening is that 80 percent of the contributors have contributed a below-average amount. 
+That sounds strange because we expect average and middle to be about the same, but they're not at all. 
+This is the math underlying the 80 / 20 rule. Right? 
+Whenever you hear anybody talking about the 80 / 20 rule, this is what's going on. Right? 
+20 percent of the merchandise accounts for 80 percent of the revenue, 20 percent of the users use 80 percent of the resources — this is the shape people are talking about when that happens. 
+Institutions only have two tools: carrots and sticks. 
+And the 80 percent zone is a no-carrot and no-stick zone. 
+The costs of running the institution mean that you cannot take on the work of those people easily in an institutional frame. 
+The institutional model always pushes leftwards, treating these people as employees. 
+The institutional response is, I can get 75 percent of the value for 10 percent of the hires — great, that's what I'll do. 
+The cooperative infrastructure model says, why do you want to give up a quarter of the value? 
+If your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value, re-engineer the system. 
+Don't take on the cost that prevents you from getting to the contributions of these people. 
+Build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount. 
+So the coordination response asks not, how are these people as employees, but rather, what is their contribution like? Right? 
+We have over here Psycho Milt, a Flickr user, who has contributed one, and only one, photo titled "" Iraq. "" And here's the photo. Right. Labeled, "" Bad Day at Work. "" Right? So the question is, do you want that photo? Yes or no. 
+The question is not, is Psycho Milt a good employee? 
+And the tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle. 
+When you're dealing with the left-hand edge of one of these distributions, when you're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want, that's an institution-as-enabler world. 
+You can hire those people as employees, you can coordinate their work and you can get some output. 
+But when you're down here, where the Psycho Milts of the world are adding one photo at a time, that's institution as obstacle. 
+Institutions hate being told they're obstacles. 
+One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation. 
+And the actual goal of the institution goes to two through n. 
+Right? So, when institutions are told they are obstacles, and that there are other ways of coordinating the value, they go through something a little bit like the Kubler-Ross stages — (Laughter) — of reaction, being told you have a fatal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. 
+Most of the cooperative systems we've seen haven't been around long enough to have gotten to the acceptance phase. 
+Many, many institutions are still in denial, but we're seeing recently a lot of both anger and bargaining. 
+There's a wonderful, small example going on right now. 
+In France, a bus company is suing people for forming a carpool, right, because the fact that they have coordinated themselves to create cooperative value is depriving them of revenue. 
+You can follow this in the Guardian. 
+It's actually quite entertaining. 
+The bigger question is, what do you do about the value down here? 
+Right? How do you capture that? 
+And institutions, as I've said, are prevented from capturing that. 
+Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft, was criticizing Linux a couple of years ago, and he said, "" Oh, this business of thousands of programmers contributing to Linux, this is a myth. 
+We've looked at who's contributed to Linux, and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who've only done one thing. "" Right? 
+You can hear this distribution under that complaint. 
+And you can see why, from Ballmer's point of view, that's a bad idea, right? 
+We hired this programmer, he came in, he drank our Cokes and played Foosball for three years and he had one idea. 
+(Laughter) Right? Bad hire. Right? (Laughter) 
+The Psycho Milt question is, was it a good idea? 
+What if it was a security patch? 
+What if it was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit, of which Windows has not some, [but] several? 
+Do you want that patch, right? 
+The fact that a single programmer can, without having to move into a professional relation to an institution, improve Linux once and never be seen from again, should terrify Ballmer. 
+Because this kind of value is unreachable in classic institutional frameworks, but is part of cooperative systems of open-source software, of file sharing, of the Wikipedia. I've used a lot of examples from Flickr, but there are actually stories about this from all over. 
+Meetup, a service founded so that users could find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have a real-world meeting offline in a cafe or a pub or what have you. 
+When Scott Heiferman founded Meetup, he thought it would be used for, you know, train spotters and cat fanciers — classic affinity groups. 
+The inventors don't know what the invention is. 
+Number one group on Meetup right now, most chapters in most cities with most members, most active? 
+Stay-at-home moms. Right? 
+In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay-at-home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local, small-scale neighborhoods. 
+So they're reinventing it, using these tools. 
+Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure. 
+If you want to know what technology is going to change the world, don't pay attention to 13-year-old boys — pay attention to young mothers, because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that doesn't materially make their lives better. 
+This is so much more important than Xbox, but it's a lot less glitzy. 
+I think this is a revolution. 
+I think that this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged. 
+And I use that word advisedly. 
+It's a revolution in that it's a change in equilibrium. 
+It's a whole new way of doing things, which includes new downsides. 
+In the United States right now, a woman named Judith Miller is in jail for not having given to a Federal Grand Jury her sources — she's a reporter for the New York Times — her sources, in a very abstract and hard-to-follow case. 
+And journalists are in the street rallying to improve the shield laws. 
+The shield laws are our laws — pretty much a patchwork of state laws — that prevent a journalist from having to betray a source. 
+This is happening, however, against the background of the rise of Web logging. 
+Web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization. 
+It has de-professionalized publishing. 
+Want to publish globally anything you think today? 
+It is a one-button operation that you can do for free. 
+That has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization. 
+And so the shield law, as much as we want it — we want a professional class of truth-tellers — it is becoming increasingly incoherent, because the institution is becoming incoherent. 
+There are people in the States right now tying themselves into knots, trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. 
+And the answer to that question is, it doesn't matter, because that's not the right question. 
+Journalism was an answer to an even more important question, which is, how will society be informed? 
+How will they share ideas and opinions? 
+And if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class. 
+So as much as we want the shield laws, the background — the institution to which they were attached — is becoming incoherent. 
+Here's another example. 
+Pro-ana, the pro-ana groups. 
+These are groups of teenage girls who have taken on Web logs, bulletin boards, other kinds of cooperative infrastructure, and have used it to set up support groups for remaining anorexic by choice. 
+They post pictures of thin models, which they call "" thinspiration. "" They have little slogans, like "" Salvation through Starvation. "" They even have Lance Armstrong-style bracelets, these red bracelets, which signify, in the small group, I am trying to maintain my eating disorder. 
+They trade tips, like, if you feel like eating something, clean a toilet or the litter box. The feeling will pass. 
+We're used to support groups being beneficial. 
+We have an attitude that support groups are inherently beneficial. 
+But it turns out that the logic of the support group is value neutral. 
+A support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group. 
+Now, when the larger group is a bunch of drunks, and the small group wants to stay sober, then we think, that's a great support group. 
+But when the small group is teenage girls who want to stay anorexic by choice, then we're horrified. 
+What's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we're used to, came from the institutions that were framing them, and not from the infrastructure. 
+Once the infrastructure becomes generically available, the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone, including people pursuing these kinds of goals. 
+So, there are significant downsides to these changes as well as upsides. And of course, in the current environment, one need allude only lightly to the work of non-state actors trying to influence global affairs, and taking advantage of these. 
+This is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the 9 / 11 attack. 
+It was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools. And doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week. 
+Now, this is the part of the talk where I tell you what's going to come as a result of all of this, but I'm running out of time, which is good, because I don't know. 
+(Laughter) Right. As with the printing press, if it's really a revolution, it doesn't take us from Point A to Point B. 
+It takes us from Point A to chaos. 
+The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort of organizing political force to the Treaty of Westphalia, when we finally knew what the new unit was: the nation state. 
+Now, I'm not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this. 50. 
+50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage, and the more those groups forego traditional institutional imperatives — like deciding in advance what's going to happen, or the profit motive — the more leverage they'll get. 
+And institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed, and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be. 
+And that's going to happen one arena at a time, one institution at a time. The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific. 
+And so the point here is not, "" This is wonderful, "" or "" We're going to see a transition from only institutions to only cooperative framework. "" It's going to be much more complicated than that. 
+But the point is that it's going to be a massive readjustment. 
+And since we can see it in advance and know it's coming, my argument is essentially: we might as well get good at it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. 
+The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé, which are the skills you bring to the marketplace. 
+The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy, which are deeper: who are you, in your depth, what is the nature of your relationships, are you bold, loving, dependable, consistency? 
+So I've been thinking about that problem, and a thinker who has helped me think about it is a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi who wrote a book called "" The Lonely Man Of Faith "" in 1965. 
+Soloveitchik said there are two sides of our natures, which he called Adam I and Adam II. 
+Adam I is the worldly, ambitious, external side of our nature. 
+He wants to build, create, create companies, create innovation. 
+Adam II wants not only to do good but to be good, to live in a way internally that honors God, creation and our possibilities. 
+Adam I wants to conquer the world. 
+Adam II wants to hear a calling and obey the world. 
+Adam I savors accomplishment. 
+Adam II savors inner consistency and strength. 
+Adam I asks how things work. 
+Adam II asks why we're here. 
+Adam I's motto is "" success. "" Adam II's motto is "" love, redemption and return. "" And Soloveitchik argued that these two sides of our nature are at war with each other. 
+
+Over the past 10 years, I've been researching the way people organize and visualize information. 
+And I've noticed an interesting shift. 
+For a long period of time, we believed in a natural ranking order in the world around us, also known as the great chain of being, or "" Scala naturae "" in Latin, a top-down structure that normally starts with God at the very top, followed by angels, noblemen, common people, animals, and so on. 
+This idea was actually based on Aristotle's ontology, which classified all things known to man in a set of opposing categories, like the ones you see behind me. 
+But over time, interestingly enough, this concept adopted the branching schema of a tree in what became known as the Porphyrian tree, also considered to be the oldest tree of knowledge. 
+The branching scheme of the tree was, in fact, such a powerful metaphor for conveying information that it became, over time, an important communication tool to map a variety of systems of knowledge. 
+We can see trees being used to map morality, with the popular tree of virtues and tree of vices, as you can see here, with these beautiful illustrations from medieval Europe. 
+We can see trees being used to map consanguinity, the various blood ties between people. 
+We can also see trees being used to map genealogy, perhaps the most famous archetype of the tree diagram. 
+I think many of you in the audience have probably seen family trees. 
+Many of you probably even have your own family trees drawn in such a way. 
+We can see trees even mapping systems of law, the various decrees and rulings of kings and rulers. 
+And finally, of course, also a very popular scientific metaphor, we can see trees being used to map all species known to man. 
+And trees ultimately became such a powerful visual metaphor because in many ways, they really embody this human desire for order, for balance, for unity, for symmetry. 
+However, nowadays we are really facing new complex, intricate challenges that cannot be understood by simply employing a simple tree diagram. 
+And a new metaphor is currently emerging, and it's currently replacing the tree in visualizing various systems of knowledge. 
+And this new metaphor is the metaphor of the network. 
+And we can see this shift from trees into networks in many domains of knowledge. 
+We can see this shift in the way we try to understand the brain. 
+While before, we used to think of the brain as a modular, centralized organ, where a given area was responsible for a set of actions and behaviors, the more we know about the brain, the more we think of it as a large music symphony, played by hundreds and thousands of instruments. 
+This is a beautiful snapshot created by the Blue Brain Project, where you can see 10,000 neurons and 30 million connections. 
+And this is only mapping 10 percent of a mammalian neocortex. 
+We can also see this shift in the way we try to conceive of human knowledge. 
+These are some remarkable trees of knowledge, or trees of science, by Spanish scholar Ramon Llull. 
+And Llull was actually the precursor, the very first one who created the metaphor of science as a tree, a metaphor we use every single day, when we say, "Biology is a branch of science," when we say, "Genetics is a branch of science." 
+But perhaps the most beautiful of all trees of knowledge, at least for me, was created for the French encyclopedia by Diderot and d'Alembert in 1751. 
+This was really the bastion of the French Enlightenment, and this gorgeous illustration was featured as a table of contents for the encyclopedia. 
+And it actually maps out all domains of knowledge as separate branches of a tree. 
+But knowledge is much more intricate than this. 
+These are two maps of Wikipedia showing the inter-linkage of articles — related to history on the left, and mathematics on the right. 
+And I think by looking at these maps and other ones that have been created of Wikipedia — arguably one of the largest rhizomatic structures ever created by man — we can really understand how human knowledge is much more intricate and interdependent, just like a network. 
+We can also see this interesting shift in the way we map social ties between people. 
+This is the typical organization chart. 
+I'm assuming many of you have seen a similar chart as well, in your own corporations, or others. 
+It's a top-down structure that normally starts with the CEO at the very top, and where you can drill down all the way to the individual workmen on the bottom. 
+But humans sometimes are, well, actually, all humans are unique in their own way, and sometimes you really don't play well under this really rigid structure. 
+I think the Internet is really changing this paradigm quite a lot. 
+This is a fantastic map of online social collaboration between Perl developers. 
+Perl is a famous programming language, and here, you can see how different programmers are actually exchanging files, and working together on a given project. 
+And here, you can notice that this is a completely decentralized process — there's no leader in this organization, it's a network. 
+We can also see this interesting shift when we look at terrorism. 
+One of the main challenges of understanding terrorism nowadays is that we are dealing with decentralized, independent cells, where there's no leader leading the whole process. 
+And here, you can actually see how visualization is being used. 
+The diagram that you see behind me shows all the terrorists involved in the Madrid attack in 2004. 
+And what they did here is, they actually segmented the network into three different years, represented by the vertical layers that you see behind me. 
+And the blue lines tie together the people that were present in that network year after year. 
+So even though there's no leader per se, these people are probably the most influential ones in that organization, the ones that know more about the past, and the future plans and goals of this particular cell. 
+We can also see this shift from trees into networks in the way we classify and organize species. 
+The image on the right is the only illustration that Darwin included in "" The Origin of Species, "" which Darwin called the "" Tree of Life. "" There's actually a letter from Darwin to the publisher, expanding on the importance of this particular diagram. 
+It was critical for Darwin's theory of evolution. 
+But recently, scientists discovered that overlaying this tree of life is a dense network of bacteria, and these bacteria are actually tying together species that were completely separated before, to what scientists are now calling not the tree of life, but the web of life, the network of life. 
+And finally, we can really see this shift, again, when we look at ecosystems around our planet. 
+No more do we have these simplified predator-versus-prey diagrams we have all learned at school. 
+This is a much more accurate depiction of an ecosystem. 
+This is a diagram created by Professor David Lavigne, mapping close to 100 species that interact with the codfish off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada. 
+And I think here, we can really understand the intricate and interdependent nature of most ecosystems that abound on our planet. 
+But even though recent, this metaphor of the network, is really already adopting various shapes and forms, and it's almost becoming a growing visual taxonomy. 
+And this is one aspect that truly fascinates me. 
+And these are actually 15 different typologies I've been collecting over time, and it really shows the immense visual diversity of this new metaphor. 
+And here is an example. 
+On the very top band, you have radial convergence, a visualization model that has become really popular over the last five years. 
+At the top left, the very first project is a gene network, followed by a network of IP addresses — machines, servers — followed by a network of Facebook friends. 
+You probably couldn't find more disparate topics, yet they are using the same metaphor, the same visual model, to map the never-ending complexities of its own subject. 
+And here are a few more examples of the many I've been collecting, of this growing visual taxonomy of networks. 
+But networks are not just a scientific metaphor. 
+As designers, researchers, and scientists try to map a variety of complex systems, they are in many ways influencing traditional art fields, like painting and sculpture, and influencing many different artists. 
+And perhaps because networks have this huge aesthetical force to them — they're immensely gorgeous — they are really becoming a cultural meme, and driving a new art movement, which I've called "" networkism. "" And we can see this influence in this movement in a variety of ways. 
+This is just one of many examples, where you can see this influence from science into art. 
+The example on your left side is IP-mapping, a computer-generated map of IP addresses; again — servers, machines. 
+And on your right side, you have "" Transient Structures and Unstable Networks "" by Sharon Molloy, using oil and enamel on canvas. 
+And here are a few more paintings by Sharon Molloy, some gorgeous, intricate paintings. 
+And here's another example of that interesting cross-pollination between science and art. 
+On your left side, you have "" Operation Smile. "" It is a computer-generated map of a social network. 
+And on your right side, you have "" Field 4, "" by Emma McNally, using only graphite on paper. 
+Emma McNally is one of the main leaders of this movement, and she creates these striking, imaginary landscapes, where you can really notice the influence from traditional network visualization. 
+But networkism doesn't happen only in two dimensions. 
+This is perhaps one of my favorite projects of this new movement. 
+And I think the title really says it all — it's called: "" Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, Like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider's Web. "" And I just find this particular project to be immensely powerful. 
+It was created by Tomás Saraceno, and he occupies these large spaces, creates these massive installations using only elastic ropes. 
+As you actually navigate that space and bounce along those elastic ropes, the entire network kind of shifts, almost like a real organic network would. 
+And here's yet another example of networkism taken to a whole different level. 
+This was created by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota in a piece called "" In Silence. "" And Chiharu, like Tomás Saraceno, fills these rooms with this dense network, this dense web of elastic ropes and black wool and thread, sometimes including objects, as you can see here, sometimes even including people, in many of her installations. 
+But networks are also not just a new trend, and it's too easy for us to dismiss it as such. 
+Networks really embody notions of decentralization, of interconnectedness, of interdependence. 
+And this new way of thinking is critical for us to solve many of the complex problems we are facing nowadays, from decoding the human brain, to understanding the vast universe out there. 
+On your left side, you have a snapshot of a neural network of a mouse — very similar to our own at this particular scale. 
+And on your right side, you have the Millennium Simulation. 
+It was the largest and most realistic simulation of the growth of cosmic structure. 
+It was able to recreate the history of 20 million galaxies in approximately 25 terabytes of output. 
+And coincidentally or not, I just find this particular comparison between the smallest scale of knowledge — the brain — and the largest scale of knowledge — the universe itself — to be really quite striking and fascinating. 
+Because as Bruce Mau once said, "" When everything is connected to everything else, for better or for worse, everything matters. "" Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So historically there has been a huge divide between what people consider to be non-living systems on one side, and living systems on the other side. 
+So we go from, say, this beautiful and complex crystal as non-life, and this rather beautiful and complex cat on the other side. 
+Over the last hundred and fifty years or so, science has kind of blurred this distinction between non-living and living systems, and now we consider that there may be a kind of continuum that exists between the two. 
+We'll just take one example here: a virus is a natural system, right? 
+But it's very simple. It's very simplistic. 
+It doesn't really satisfy all the requirements, it doesn't have all the characteristics of living systems and is in fact a parasite on other living systems in order to, say, reproduce and evolve. 
+But what we're going to be talking about here tonight are experiments done on this sort of non-living end of this spectrum — so actually doing chemical experiments in the laboratory, mixing together nonliving ingredients to make new structures, and that these new structures might have some of the characteristics of living systems. 
+Really what I'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life. 
+So what are these characteristics that I'm talking about? These are them. 
+We consider first that life has a body. 
+Now this is necessary to distinguish the self from the environment. 
+Life also has a metabolism. Now this is a process by which life can convert resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain and build itself. 
+Life also has a kind of inheritable information. 
+Now we, as humans, we store our information as DNA in our genomes and we pass this information on to our offspring. 
+If we couple the first two — the body and the metabolism — we can come up with a system that could perhaps move and replicate, and if we coupled these now to inheritable information, we can come up with a system that would be more lifelike, and would perhaps evolve. 
+And so these are the things we will try to do in the lab, make some experiments that have one or more of these characteristics of life. 
+So how do we do this? Well, we use a model system that we term a protocell. 
+You might think of this as kind of like a primitive cell. It is a simple chemical model of a living cell, and if you consider for example a cell in your body may have on the order of millions of different types of molecules that need to come together, play together in a complex network to produce something that we call alive. 
+In the laboratory what we want to do is much the same, but with on the order of tens of different types of molecules — so a drastic reduction in complexity, but still trying to produce something that looks lifelike. 
+And so what we do is, we start simple and we work our way up to living systems. 
+Consider for a moment this quote by Leduc, a hundred years ago, considering a kind of synthetic biology: "" The synthesis of life, should it ever occur, will not be the sensational discovery which we usually associate with the idea. "" That's his first statement. So if we actually create life in the laboratories, it's probably not going to impact our lives at all. 
+"" If we accept the theory of evolution, then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world, or between the non-living and living world, forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life "" — so, the ones I just discussed — "" to which other attributes will be slowly added in the course of development by the evolutionary actions of the environment. "" So we start simple, we make some structures that may have some of these characteristics of life, and then we try to develop that to become more lifelike. 
+This is how we can start to make a protocell. 
+We use this idea called self-assembly. 
+What that means is, I can mix some chemicals together in a test tube in my lab, and these chemicals will start to self-associate to form larger and larger structures. 
+So say on the order of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of molecules will come together to form a large structure that didn't exist before. 
+And in this particular example, what I took is some membrane molecules, mixed those together in the right environment, and within seconds it forms these rather complex and beautiful structures here. 
+These membranes are also quite similar, morphologically and functionally, to the membranes in your body, and we can use these, as they say, to form the body of our protocell. 
+Likewise, we can work with oil and water systems. 
+As you know, when you put oil and water together, they don't mix, but through self-assembly we can get a nice oil droplet to form, and we can actually use this as a body for our artificial organism or for our protocell, as you will see later. 
+So that's just forming some body stuff, right? 
+Some architectures. 
+What about the other aspects of living systems? 
+So we came up with this protocell model here that I'm showing. 
+We started with a natural occurring clay called montmorillonite. 
+This is natural from the environment, this clay. 
+It forms a surface that is, say, chemically active. 
+It could run a metabolism on it. 
+Certain kind of molecules like to associate with the clay. For example, in this case, RNA, shown in red — this is a relative of DNA, it's an informational molecule — it can come along and it starts to associate with the surface of this clay. 
+This structure, then, can organize the formation of a membrane boundary around itself, so it can make a body of liquid molecules around itself, and that's shown in green here on this micrograph. 
+So just through self-assembly, mixing things together in the lab, we can come up with, say, a metabolic surface with some informational molecules attached inside of this membrane body, right? 
+So we're on a road towards living systems. 
+But if you saw this protocell, you would not confuse this with something that was actually alive. 
+It's actually quite lifeless. Once it forms, it doesn't really do anything. 
+So, something is missing. 
+Some things are missing. 
+So some things that are missing is, for example, if you had a flow of energy through a system, what we'd want is a protocell that can harvest some of that energy in order to maintain itself, much like living systems do. 
+So we came up with a different protocell model, and this is actually simpler than the previous one. 
+In this protocell model, it's just an oil droplet, but a chemical metabolism inside that allows this protocell to use energy to do something, to actually become dynamic, as we'll see here. 
+You add the droplet to the system. 
+It's a pool of water, and the protocell starts moving itself around in the system. 
+Okay? Oil droplet forms through self-assembly, has a chemical metabolism inside so it can use energy, and it uses that energy to move itself around in its environment. 
+As we heard earlier, movement is very important in these kinds of living systems. 
+It is moving around, exploring its environment, and remodeling its environment, as you see, by these chemical waves that are forming by the protocell. 
+So it's acting, in a sense, like a living system trying to preserve itself. 
+We take this same moving protocell here, and we put it in another experiment, get it moving. Then I'm going to add some food to the system, and you'll see that in blue here, right? 
+So I add some food source to the system. 
+The protocell moves. It encounters the food. 
+It reconfigures itself and actually then is able to climb to the highest concentration of food in that system and stop there. 
+Alright? So not only do we have this system that has a body, it has a metabolism, it can use energy, it moves around. 
+It can sense its local environment and actually find resources in the environment to sustain itself. 
+Now, this doesn't have a brain, it doesn't have a neural system. This is just a sack of chemicals that is able to have this interesting and complex lifelike behavior. 
+If we count the number of chemicals in that system, actually, including the water that's in the dish, we have five chemicals that can do this. 
+So then we put these protocells together in a single experiment to see what they would do, and depending on the conditions, we have some protocells on the left that are moving around and it likes to touch the other structures in its environment. 
+On the other hand we have two moving protocells that like to circle each other, and they form a kind of a dance, a complex dance with each other. 
+Right? So not only do individual protocells have behavior, what we've interpreted as behavior in this system, but we also have basically population-level behavior similar to what organisms have. 
+So now that you're all experts on protocells, we're going to play a game with these protocells. 
+We're going to make two different kinds. 
+Protocell A has a certain kind of chemistry inside that, when activated, the protocell starts to vibrate around, just dancing. 
+So remember, these are primitive things, so dancing protocells, that's very interesting to us. (Laughter) The second protocell has a different chemistry inside, and when activated, the protocells all come together and they fuse into one big one. Right? 
+And we just put these two together in the same system. 
+So there's population A, there's population B, and then we activate the system, and protocell Bs, they're the blue ones, they all come together. They fuse together to form one big blob, and the other protocell just dances around. And this just happens until all of the energy in the system is basically used up, and then, game over. 
+So then I repeated this experiment a bunch of times, and one time something very interesting happened. 
+So, I added these protocells together to the system, and protocell A and protocell B fused together to form a hybrid protocell AB. 
+That didn't happen before. There it goes. 
+There's a protocell AB now in this system. 
+Protocell AB likes to dance around for a bit, while protocell B does the fusing, okay? 
+But then something even more interesting happens. 
+Watch when these two large protocells, the hybrid ones, fuse together. 
+Now we have a dancing protocell and a self-replication event. Right. (Laughter) Just with blobs of chemicals, again. 
+So the way this works is, you have a simple system of five chemicals here, a simple system here. When they hybridize, you then form something that's different than before, it's more complex than before, and you get the emergence of another kind of lifelike behavior which in this case is replication. 
+So since we can make some interesting protocells that we like, interesting colors and interesting behaviors, and they're very easy to make, and they have interesting lifelike properties, perhaps these protocells have something to tell us about the origin of life on the Earth. Perhaps these represent an easily accessible step, one of the first steps by which life got started on the early Earth. 
+Certainly, there were molecules present on the early Earth, but they wouldn't have been these pure compounds that we worked with in the lab and I showed in these experiments. 
+Rather, they'd be a real complex mixture of all kinds of stuff, because uncontrolled chemical reactions produce a diverse mixture of organic compounds. 
+Think of it like a primordial ooze, okay? 
+And it's a pool that's too difficult to fully characterize, even by modern methods, and the product looks brown, like this tar here on the left. A pure compound is shown on the right, for contrast. 
+So this is similar to what happens when you take pure sugar crystals in your kitchen, you put them in a pan, and you apply energy. 
+You turn up the heat, you start making or breaking chemical bonds in the sugar, forming a brownish caramel, right? 
+If you let that go unregulated, you'll continue to make and break chemical bonds, forming an even more diverse mixture of molecules that then forms this kind of black tarry stuff in your pan, right, that's difficult to wash out. So that's what the origin of life would have looked like. 
+You needed to get life out of this junk that is present on the early Earth, four, 4.5 billion years ago. 
+So the challenge then is, throw away all your pure chemicals in the lab, and try to make some protocells with lifelike properties from this kind of primordial ooze. 
+So we're able to then see the self-assembly of these oil droplet bodies again that we've seen previously, and the black spots inside of there represent this kind of black tar — this diverse, very complex, organic black tar. 
+And we put them into one of these experiments, as you've seen earlier, and then we watch lively movement that comes out. 
+They look really good, very nice movement, and also they appear to have some kind of behavior where they kind of circle around each other and follow each other, similar to what we've seen before — but again, working with just primordial conditions, no pure chemicals. 
+These are also, these tar-fueled protocells, are also able to locate resources in their environment. 
+I'm going to add some resource from the left, here, that defuses into the system, and you can see, they really like that. 
+They become very energetic, and able to find the resource in the environment, similar to what we saw before. 
+But again, these are done in these primordial conditions, really messy conditions, not sort of sterile laboratory conditions. 
+These are very dirty little protocells, as a matter of fact. (Laughter) But they have lifelike properties, is the point. 
+So, doing these artificial life experiments helps us define a potential path between non-living and living systems. 
+And not only that, but it helps us broaden our view of what life is and what possible life there could be out there — life that could be very different from life that we find here on Earth. 
+And that leads me to the next term, which is "" weird life. "" This is a term by Steve Benner. 
+This is used in reference to a report in 2007 by the National Research Council in the United States, wherein they tried to understand how we can look for life elsewhere in the universe, okay, especially if that life is very different from life on Earth. If we went to another planet and we thought there might be life there, how could we even recognize it as life? 
+Well, they came up with three very general criteria. First is — and they're listed here. 
+The first is, the system has to be in non-equilibrium. That means the system cannot be dead, in a matter of fact. 
+Basically what that means is, you have an input of energy into the system that life can use and exploit to maintain itself. 
+This is similar to having the Sun shining on the Earth, driving photosynthesis, driving the ecosystem. 
+Without the Sun, there's likely to be no life on this planet. 
+Secondly, life needs to be in liquid form, so that means even if we had some interesting structures, interesting molecules together but they were frozen solid, then this is not a good place for life. 
+And thirdly, we need to be able to make and break chemical bonds. And again this is important because life transforms resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain itself. 
+Now today, I told you about very strange and weird protocells — some that contain clay, some that have primordial ooze in them, some that have basically oil instead of water inside of them. 
+Most of these don't contain DNA, but yet they have lifelike properties. 
+But these protocells satisfy these general requirements of living systems. 
+So by making these chemical, artificial life experiments, we hope not only to understand something fundamental about the origin of life and the existence of life on this planet, but also what possible life there could be out there in the universe. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The new me is beauty. 
+(Laughter) Yeah, people used to say, "" Norman's OK, but if you followed what he said, everything would be usable but it would be ugly. "" Well, I didn't have that in mind, so... 
+This is neat. 
+Thank you for setting up my display. 
+I mean, it's just wonderful. 
+And I haven't the slightest idea of what it does or what it's good for, but I want it. 
+And that's my new life. 
+My new life is trying to understand what beauty is about, and "" pretty, "" and "" emotions. "" The new me is all about making things kind of neat and fun. 
+And so this is a Philippe Starck juicer, produced by Alessi. 
+It's just neat; it's fun. It's so much fun I have it in my house — but I have it in the entryway, I don't use it to make juice. 
+(Laughter) In fact, I bought the gold-plated special edition and it comes with a little slip of paper that says, "" Don't use this juicer to make juice. "" The acid will ruin the gold plating. (Laughter) 
+So actually, I took a carton of orange juice and I poured it in the glass to take this picture. (Laughter) 
+Beneath it is a wonderful knife. 
+It's a Global cutting knife made in Japan. 
+First of all, look at the shape — it's just wonderful to look at. 
+Second of all, it's really beautifully balanced: it holds well, it feels well. 
+And third of all, it's so sharp, it just cuts. 
+It's a delight to use. 
+And so it's got everything, right? 
+It's beautiful and it's functional. 
+And I can tell you stories about it, which makes it reflective, and so you'll see I have a theory of emotion. 
+And those are the three components. 
+Hiroshi Ishii and his group at the MIT Media Lab took a ping-pong table and placed a projector above it, and on the ping-pong table they projected an image of water with fish swimming in it. 
+And as you play ping-pong, whenever the ball hits part of the table, the ripples spread out and the fish run away. 
+But of course, then the ball hits the other side, the ripples hit the — poor fish, they can't find any peace and quiet. 
+(Laughter) Is that a good way to play ping-pong? 
+No. But is it fun? 
+Yeah! Yeah. 
+Or look at Google. 
+If you type in, oh say, "" emotion and design, "" you get 10 pages of results. 
+So Google just took their logo and they spread it out. 
+Instead of saying, "" You got 73,000 results. 
+This is one through 20. Next, "" they just give you as many o's as there are pages. 
+It's really simple and subtle. 
+I bet a lot of you have seen it and never noticed it. 
+That's the subconscious mind that sort of notices it — it probably is kind of pleasant and you didn't know why. 
+And it's just clever. 
+And of course, what's especially good is, if you type "" design and emotion, "" the first response out of those 10 pages is my website. 
+(Laughter) Now, the weird thing is Google lies, because if I type "" design and emotion, "" it says, "" You don't need the 'and.' We do it anyway. "" So, OK. 
+So I type "" design emotion "" and my website wasn't first again. 
+It was third. 
+Oh well, different story. 
+There was this wonderful review in The New York Times about the MINI Cooper automobile. 
+It said, "" You know, this is a car that has lots of faults. 
+Buy it anyway. 
+It's so much fun to drive. "" And if you look at the inside of the car — I mean, I loved it, I wanted to see it, I rented it, this is me taking a picture while my son is driving — and the inside of the car, the whole design is fun. 
+It's round, it's neat. 
+The controls work wonderfully. 
+So that's my new life; it's all about fun. 
+I really have the feeling that pleasant things work better, and that never made any sense to me until I finally figured out — look... 
+I'm going to put a plank on the ground. 
+So, imagine I have a plank about two feet wide and 30 feet long and I'm going to walk on it, and you see I can walk on it without looking, I can go back and forth and I can jump up and down. 
+No problem. 
+Now I'm going to put the plank 300 feet in the air — and I'm not going to go near it, thank you. 
+Intense fear paralyzes you. 
+It actually affects the way the brain works. 
+So, Paul Saffo, before his talk said that he didn't really have it down until just a few days or hours before the talk, and that anxiety was really helpful in causing him to focus. 
+That's what fear and anxiety does; it causes you to be — what's called depth-first processing — to focus, not be distracted. 
+And I couldn't force myself across that. 
+Now some people can — circus workers, steel workers. 
+But it really changes the way you think. 
+And then, a psychologist, Alice Isen, did this wonderful experiment. 
+She brought students in to solve problems. 
+So, she'd bring people into the room, and there'd be a string hanging down here and a string hanging down here. 
+It was an empty room, except for a table with a bunch of crap on it — some papers and scissors and stuff. 
+And she'd bring them in, and she'd say, "" This is an IQ test and it determines how well you do in life. 
+Would you tie those two strings together? "" So they'd take one string and they'd pull it over here and they couldn't reach the other string. 
+Still can't reach it. 
+And, basically, none of them could solve it. 
+You bring in a second group of people, and you say, "" Oh, before we start, I got this box of candy, and I don't eat candy. 
+Would you like the box of candy? "" And turns out they liked it, and it made them happy — not very happy, but a little bit of happy. 
+And guess what — they solved the problem. 
+And it turns out that when you're anxious you squirt neural transmitters in the brain, which focuses you makes you depth-first. 
+And when you're happy — what we call positive valence — you squirt dopamine into the prefrontal lobes, which makes you a breadth-first problem solver: you're more susceptible to interruption; you do out-of-the-box thinking. 
+That's what brainstorming is about, right? 
+With brainstorming we make you happy, we play games, and we say, "" No criticism, "" and you get all these weird, neat ideas. 
+But in fact, if that's how you always were you'd never get any work done because you'd be working along and say, "" Oh, I got a new way of doing it. "" So to get work done, you've got to set a deadline, right? 
+You've got be anxious. 
+The brain works differently if you're happy. Things work better because you're more creative. 
+You get a little problem, you say, "" Ah, I'll figure it out. "" No big deal. 
+There's something I call the visceral level of processing, and there will be visceral-level design. 
+Biology — we have co-adapted through biology to like bright colors. 
+That's especially good that mammals and primates like fruits and bright plants, because you eat the fruit and you thereby spread the seed. 
+There's an amazing amount of stuff that's built into the brain. 
+We dislike bitter tastes, we dislike loud sounds, we dislike hot temperatures, cold temperatures. 
+We dislike scolding voices. We dislike frowning faces; we like symmetrical faces, etc., etc. 
+So that's the visceral level. 
+In design, you can express visceral in lots of ways, like the choice of type fonts and the red for hot, exciting. 
+Or the 1963 Jaguar: It's actually a crummy car, falls apart all the time, but the owners love it. 
+And it's beautiful — it's in the Museum of Modern Art. 
+A water bottle: You buy it because of the bottle, not because of the water. 
+And when people are finished, they don't throw it away. 
+They keep it for — you know, it's like the old wine bottles, you keep it for decoration or maybe fill it with water again, which proves it's not the water. 
+It's all about the visceral experience. 
+The middle level of processing is the behavioral level and that's actually where most of our stuff gets done. 
+Visceral is subconscious, you're unaware of it. 
+Behavioral is subconscious, you're unaware of it. 
+Almost everything we do is subconscious. 
+I'm walking around the stage — I'm not attending to the control of my legs. 
+I'm doing a lot; most of my talk is subconscious; it has been rehearsed and thought about a lot. 
+Most of what we do is subconscious. 
+Automatic behavior — skilled behavior — is subconscious, controlled by the behavioral side. 
+And behavioral design is all about feeling in control, which includes usability, understanding — but also the feel and heft. 
+That's why the Global knives are so neat. 
+They're so nicely balanced, so sharp, that you really feel you're in control of the cutting. 
+Or, just driving a high-performance sports car over a demanding curb — again, feeling that you are in complete control of the environment. 
+Or the sensual feeling. 
+This is a Kohler shower, a waterfall shower, and actually, all those knobs beneath are also showerheads. 
+It will squirt you all around and you can stay in that shower for hours — and not waste water, by the way, because it recirculates the same dirty water. 
+(Laughter) Or this — this is a really neat teapot I found at high tea at The Four Seasons Hotel in Chicago. 
+It's a Ronnefeldt tilting teapot. 
+That's kind of what the teapot looks like but the way you use it is you lay it on its back, and you put tea in, and then you fill it with water. 
+The water then seeps over the tea. 
+And the tea is sitting in this stuff to the right — the tea is to the right of this line. 
+There's a little ledge inside, so the tea is sitting there and the water is filling it up like that. 
+And when the tea is ready, or almost ready, you tilt it. 
+And that means the tea is partially covered while it completes the brewing. 
+And when it's finished, you put it vertically, and now the tea is — you remember — above this line and the water only comes to here — and so it keeps the tea out. 
+On top of that, it communicates, which is what emotion does. 
+Emotion is all about acting; emotion is really about acting. 
+It's being safe in the world. 
+Cognition is about understanding the world, emotion is about interpreting it — saying good, bad, safe, dangerous, and getting us ready to act, which is why the muscles tense or relax. 
+And that's why we can tell the emotion of somebody else — because their muscles are acting, subconsciously, except that we've evolved to make the facial muscles really rich with emotion. 
+Well, this has emotions if you like, because it signals the waiter that, "" Hey, I'm finished. See — upright. "" And the waiter can come by and say, "" Would you like more water? "" It's kind of neat. What a wonderful design. 
+And the third level is reflective, which is, if you like the superego, it's a little part of the brain that has no control over what you do, no control over the — doesn't see the senses, doesn't control the muscles. 
+It looks over what's going on. 
+It's that little voice in your head that's watching and saying, "" That's good. That's bad. "" Or, "" Why are you doing that? I don't understand. "" It's that little voice in your head that's the seat of consciousness. 
+Here's a great reflective product. 
+Owners of the Hummer have said, "" You know I've owned many cars in my life — all sorts of exotic cars, but never have I had a car that attracted so much attention. "" It's about attention. It's about their image, not about the car. 
+If you want a more positive model — this is the GM car. 
+And the reason you might buy it now is because you care about the environment. 
+And you'll buy it to protect the environment, even though the first few cars are going to be really expensive and not perfected. 
+But that's reflective design as well. 
+Or an expensive watch, so you can impress people — "Oh gee, I didn't know you had that watch." 
+As opposed to this one, which is a pure behavioral watch, which probably keeps better time than the $13,000 watch I just showed you. 
+But it's ugly. 
+This is a clear Don Norman watch. 
+And what's neat is sometimes you pit one emotion against the other, the visceral fear of falling against the reflective state saying, "" It's OK. It's OK. It's safe. It's safe. "" If that amusement park were rusty and falling apart, you'd never go on the ride. 
+So, it's pitting one against the other. 
+The other neat thing... 
+(Laughter) So Jake Cress is this furniture maker, and he makes this unbelievable set of furniture. 
+And this is his chair with claw, and the poor little chair has lost its ball and it's trying to get it back before anybody notices. 
+And what's so neat about it is how you accept that story. 
+And that's what's nice about emotion. 
+So that's the new me. 
+I'm only saying positive things from now on. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) 
+
+Africa is booming. 
+Per capita incomes since the year 2000 have doubled, and this boom is impacting on everyone. 
+Life expectancy has increased by one year every three years for the last decade. 
+That means if an African child is born today, rather than three days ago, they will get an extra day of life at the end of their lifespan. 
+It's that quick. 
+And HIV infection rates are down 27 percent: 600,000 less people a year are getting HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. 
+The battle against malaria is being won, with deaths from malaria down 27 percent, according to the latest World Bank data. 
+And malaria nets actually are playing a role in that. 
+This shouldn't surprise us, because actually, everybody grows. 
+If you go back to Imperial Rome in the Year 1 A.D., there was admittedly about 1,800 years where there wasn't an awful lot of growth. 
+But then the people that the Romans would have called Scottish barbarians, my ancestors, were actually part of the Industrial Revolution, and in the 19th century, growth began to accelerate, and you saw that get quicker and quicker, and it's been impacting everyone. 
+It doesn't matter if this is the jungles of Singapore or the tundra of northern Finland. 
+Everybody gets involved. It's just a matter of when the inevitable happens. 
+Among the reasons I think it's happening right now is the quality of the leadership across Africa. 
+I think most of us would agree that in the 1990s, the greatest politician in the world was African, but I'm meeting brilliant people across the continent the entire time, and they're doing the reforms which have transformed the economic situation for their countries. 
+And the West is engaging with that. 
+The West has given debt forgiveness programs which have halved sub-Saharan debt from about 70 percent of GDP down to about 40. 
+At the same time, our debt level's gone up to 120 and we're all feeling slightly miserable as a result. 
+Politics gets weaker when debt is high. 
+When public sector debt is low, governments don't have to choose between investing in education and health and paying interest on that debt you owe. 
+And it's not just the public sector which is looking so good. 
+The private sector as well. 
+Again, in the West, we have private sector debt of 200 percent of GDP in Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. 
+That's an awful lot of debt. 
+Africa, many African countries, are sitting at 10 to 30 percent of GDP. 
+If there's any continent that can do what China has done — China's at about 130 percent of GDP on that chart — if anyone can do what China has done in the last 30 years, it'll be Africa in the next 30. 
+So they've got great government finances, great private sector debt. 
+Does anyone recognize this? In fact, they do. 
+Foreign direct investment has poured into Africa in the last 15 years. 
+Back in the '70s, no one touched the continent with a barge pole. 
+And this investment is actually Western-led. 
+We hear a lot about China, and they do lend a lot of money, but 60 percent of the FDI in the last couple of years has come from Europe, America, Australia, Canada. 
+Ten percent's come from India. 
+And they're investing in energy. 
+Africa produces 10 million barrels a day of oil now. 
+It's the same as Saudi Arabia or Russia. 
+And they're investing in telecoms, shopping malls. 
+And this very encouraging story, I think, is partly demographic-led. 
+And it's not just about African demographics. 
+I'm showing you the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in various parts of the world, and the blue line is the one I want you to focus on for a second. 
+Ten years ago, say you're Foxconn setting up an iPhone factory, by chance. 
+You might choose China, which is the bulk of that East Asian blue line, where there's 200 million young people, and every year until 2010 that's getting bigger. 
+Which means you're going to have new guys knocking on the door saying, "" Give us a job, "" and, "" I don't need a big pay rise, just please give me a job. "" Now, that's completely changed now. 
+This decade, we're going to see a 20- to 30-percent fall in the number of 15- to 24-year-olds in China. 
+So where do you set up your new factory? 
+You look at South Asia, and people are. 
+They're looking at Pakistan and Bangladesh, and they're also looking at Africa. 
+And they're looking at Africa because that yellow line is showing you that the number of young Africans is going to continue to get bigger decade after decade after decade out to 2050. 
+Now, there's a problem with lots of young people coming into any market, particularly when they're young men. 
+A bit dangerous, sometimes. 
+I think one of the crucial factors is how educated is that demographic? 
+If you look at the red line here, what you're going to see is that in 1975, just nine percent of kids were in secondary school education in sub-Saharan Africa. 
+Would you set up a factory in sub-Sahara in the mid-1970s? 
+Nobody else did. 
+They chose instead Turkey and Mexico to set up the textiles factories, because their education levels were 25 to 30 percent. 
+Today, sub-Sahara is at the levels that Turkey and Mexico were at in 1975. 
+They will get the textiles jobs that will take people out of rural poverty and put them on the road to industrialization and wealth. 
+So what's Africa looking like today? 
+This is how I look at Africa. 
+It's a bit odd, because I'm an economist. 
+Each little box is about a billion dollars, and you see that I pay an awful lot of attention to Nigeria sitting there in the middle. 
+South Africa is playing a role. 
+But when I'm thinking about the future, I'm actually most interested in Central, Western and Southern Africa. 
+If I look at Africa by population, East Africa stands out as so much potential. 
+And I'm showing you something else with these maps. 
+I'm showing you democracy versus autocracy. 
+Fragile democracies is the beige color. 
+Strong democracies are the orange color. 
+And what you'll see here is that most Africans are now living in democracies. 
+Why does that matter? 
+Because what people want is what politicians try, they don't always succeed, but they try and deliver. 
+And what you've got is a reinforcing positive circle going on. 
+In Ghana in the elections, in December 2012, the battle between the two candidates was over education. 
+One guy offered free secondary school education to all, not just 30 percent. 
+The other guy had to say, I'm going to build 50 new schools. 
+He won by a margin. 
+So democracy is encouraging governments to invest in education. 
+Education is helping growth and investment, and that's giving budget revenues, which is giving governments more money, which is helping growth through education. 
+It's a positive, virtuous circle. 
+But I get asked this question, and this particular question makes me quite sad: It's, "" But what about corruption? 
+How can you invest in Africa when there's corruption? "" And what makes me sad about it is that this graph here is showing you that the biggest correlation with corruption is wealth. 
+When you're poor, corruption is not your biggest priority. 
+And the countries on the right hand side, you'll see the per capita GDP, basically every country with a per capita GDP of, say, less than 5,000 dollars, has got a corruption score of roughly, what's that, about three? 
+Three out of 10. That's not good. 
+Every poor country is corrupt. 
+Every rich country is relatively uncorrupt. 
+How do you get from poverty and corruption to wealth and less corruption? 
+You see the middle class grow. 
+And the way to do that is to invest, not to say I'm not investing in that continent because there's too much corruption. 
+Now, I don't want to be an apologist for corruption. 
+I've been arrested because I refused to pay a bribe — not in Africa, actually. 
+But what I'm saying here is that we can make a difference and we can do that by investing. 
+Now I'm going to let you in on a little not-so-secret. 
+Economists aren't great at forecasting. 
+Because the question really is, what happens next? 
+And if you go back to the year 2000, what you'll find is The Economist had a very famous cover, "" The Hopeless Continent, "" and what they'd done is they'd looked at growth in Africa over the previous 10 years — two percent — and they said, what's going to happen in the next 10 years? 
+They assumed two percent, and that made it a pretty hopeless story, because population growth was two and a half. 
+People got poorer in Africa in the 1990s. 
+Now 2012, The Economist has a new cover, and what does that new cover show? 
+That new cover shows, well, Africa rising, because the growth over the last 10 years has been about five and a half percent. 
+I would like to see if you can all now become economists, because if growth for the last 10 years has been five and a half percent, what do you think the IMF is forecasting for the next five years of growth in Africa? 
+Very good. I think you're secretly saying to your head, probably five and a half percent. 
+You're all economists, and I think, like most economists, wrong. 
+No offense. 
+What I like to do is try and find the countries that are doing exactly what Africa has already done, and it means that jump from 1,800 years of nothing to whoof, suddenly shooting through the roof. 
+India is one of those examples. 
+This is Indian growth from 1960 to 2010. 
+Ignore the scale on the bottom for a second. 
+Actually, for the first 20 years, the '60s and' 70s, India didn't really grow. 
+It grew at two percent when population growth was about two and a half. 
+If that's familiar, that's exactly what happened in sub-Sahara in the '80s and the' 90s. 
+And then something happened in 1980. 
+Boom! India began to explode. 
+It wasn't a "" Hindu rate of growth, "" "" democracies can't grow. "" Actually India could. 
+And if I lay sub-Saharan growth on top of the Indian growth story, it's remarkably similar. 
+Twenty years of not much growth and a trend line which is actually telling you that sub-Saharan African growth is slightly better than India. 
+And if I then lay developing Asia on top of this, I'm saying India is 20 years ahead of Africa, I'm saying developing Asia is 10 years ahead of India, I can draw out some forecasts for the next 30 to 40 years which I think are better than the ones where you're looking backwards. 
+And that tells me this: that Africa is going to go from a $2 trillion economy today to a $29 trillion economy by 2050. 
+Now that's bigger than Europe and America put together in today's money. 
+Life expectancy is going to go up by 13 years. 
+The population's going to double from one billion to two billion, so household incomes are going to go up sevenfold in the next 35 years. 
+And when I present this in Africa — Nairobi, Lagos, Accra — I get one question. 
+"Charlie, why are you so pessimistic?" 
+And you know what? 
+Actually, I think they've got a point. 
+Am I really saying that there can be nothing learned, yes from the positives in Asia and India, but also the negatives? 
+Perhaps Africa can avoid some of the mistakes that have been made. 
+Surely, the technologies that we're talking about here this last week, surely some of these can perhaps help Africa grow even faster? 
+And I think here we can play a role. 
+Because technology does let you help. 
+You can go and download some of the great African literature from the Internet now. 
+No, not right now, just 30 seconds. 
+You can go and buy some of the great tunes. 
+My iPod's full of them. 
+Buy African products. 
+Go on holiday and see for yourself the change that's happening. 
+Invest. 
+Perhaps hire people, give them the skills that they can take back to Africa, and their companies will grow an awful lot faster than most of ours here in the West. 
+And then you and I can help make sure that for Africa, the 21st century is their century. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Everyone's familiar with cancer, but we don't normally think of cancer as being a contagious disease. 
+The Tasmanian devil has shown us that, not only can cancer be a contagious disease, but it can also threaten an entire species with extinction. 
+So first of all, what is a Tasmanian devil? 
+Many of you might be familiar with Taz, the cartoon character, the one that spins around and around and around. 
+But not many people know that there actually is a real animal called the Tasmanian devil, and it's the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. 
+A marsupial is a mammal with a pouch like a kangaroo. 
+The Tasmanian devil got its name from the terrifying nocturnal scream that it makes. 
+(Screaming) (Laughter) The Tasmanian devil is predominantly a scavenger, and it uses its powerful jaws and its sharp teeth to chomp on the bones of rotting dead animals. 
+[The] Tasmanian devil is found only on the island of Tasmania, which is that small island just to the south of the mainland of Australia. 
+And despite their ferocious appearance, Tasmanian devils are actually quite adorable little animals. 
+In fact, growing up in Tasmania, it always was incredibly exciting when we got a chance to see a Tasmanian devil in the wild. 
+But the Tasmanian devil population has been undergoing a really extremely fast decline. 
+And in fact, there's concern that the species could go extinct in the wild within 20 to 30 years. 
+And the reason for that is the emergence of a new disease, a contagious cancer. 
+The story begins in 1996 when a wildlife photographer took this photograph here of a Tasmanian devil with a large tumor on its face. 
+At the time, this was thought to be a one-off. 
+Animals, just like humans, sometimes get strange tumors. 
+However, we now believe that this is the first sighting of a new disease, which is now an epidemic spreading through Tasmania. 
+The disease was first sighted in the northeast of Tasmania in 1996 and has spread across Tasmania like a huge wave. 
+Now there's only a small part of the population, which remains unaffected. 
+This disease appears first as tumors, usually on the face or inside the mouth of affected Tasmanian devils. 
+These tumors inevitably grow into larger tumors, such as these ones here. 
+And the next image I'm going to show is quite gruesome. 
+But inevitably, these tumors progress towards being enormous, ulcerating tumors like this one here. 
+This one in particular sticks in my mind, because this is the first case of this disease that I saw myself. 
+And I remember the horror of seeing this little female devil with this huge ulcerating, foul-smelling tumor inside her mouth that had actually cracked off her entire lower jaw. 
+She hadn't eaten for days. 
+Her guts were swimming with parasitic worms. 
+Her body was riddled with secondary tumors. 
+And yet, she was feeding three little baby Tasmanian devils in her pouch. 
+Of course, they died along with the mother. 
+They were too young to survive without their mother. 
+In fact, in the area where she comes from, more than 90 percent of the Tasmanian devil population has already died of this disease. 
+Scientists around the world were intrigued by this cancer, this infectious cancer, that was spreading through the Tasmanian devil population. 
+And our minds immediately turned to cervical cancer in women, which is spread by a virus, and to the AIDS epidemic, which is associated with a number of different types of cancer. 
+All the evidence suggested that this devil cancer was spread by a virus. 
+However, we now know — and I'll tell you right now — that we know that this cancer is not spread by a virus. 
+In fact, the infectious agent of disease in this cancer is something altogether more sinister, and something that we hadn't really thought of before. 
+But in order for me to explain what that is, I need to spend just a couple of minutes talking more about cancer itself. 
+Cancer is a disease that affects millions of people around the world every year. 
+One in three people in this room will develop cancer at some stage in their lives. 
+I myself had a tumor removed from my large intestine when I was only 14. 
+Cancer occurs when a single cell in your body acquires a set of random mutations in important genes that cause that cell to start to produce more and more and more copies of itself. 
+Paradoxically, once established, natural selection actually favors the continued growth of cancer. 
+Natural selection is survival of the fittest. 
+And when you have a population of fast-dividing cancer cells, if one of them acquires new mutations, which allow them to grow more quickly, acquire nutrients more successfully, invade the body, they'll be selected for by evolution. 
+That's why cancer is such a difficult disease to treat. 
+It evolves. 
+Throw a drug at it, and resistant cells will grow back. 
+An amazing fact is that, given the right environment and the right nutrients, a cancer cell has the potential to go on growing forever. 
+However cancer is constrained by living inside our bodies, and its continued growth, its spreading through our bodies and eating away at our tissues, leads to the death of the cancer patient and also to the death of the cancer itself. 
+So cancer could be thought of as a strange, short-lived, self-destructive life form — an evolutionary dead end. 
+But that is where the Tasmanian devil cancer has acquired an absolutely amazing evolutionary adaptation. 
+And the answer came from studying the Tasmanian devil cancer's DNA. 
+This was work from many people, but I'm going to explain it through a confirmatory experiment that I did a few years ago. 
+The next slide is going to be gruesome. 
+This is Jonas. 
+He's a Tasmanian devil that we found with a large tumor on his face. 
+And being a geneticist, I'm always interested to look at DNA and mutations. 
+So I took this opportunity to collect some samples from Jonas' tumor and also some samples from other parts of his body. 
+I took these back to the lab. 
+I extracted DNA from them. 
+And when I looked at the sequence of the DNA, and compared the sequence of Jonas' tumor to that of the rest of his body, I discovered that they had a completely different genetic profile. 
+In fact, Jonas and his tumor were as different from each other as you and the person sitting next to you. 
+What this told us was that Jonas' tumor did not arise from cells of his own body. 
+In fact, more genetic profiling told us that this tumor in Jonas actually probably first arose from the cells of a female Tasmanian devil — and Jonas was clearly a male. 
+So how come a tumor that arose from the cells of another individual is growing on Jonas' face? 
+Well the next breakthrough came from studying hundreds of Tasmanian devil cancers from all around Tasmania. 
+We found that all of these cancers shared the same DNA. 
+Think about that for a minute. 
+That means that all of these cancers actually are the same cancer that arose once from one individual devil, that have broken free of that first devil's body and spread through the entire Tasmanian devil population. 
+But how can a cancer spread in a population? 
+Well the final piece of the puzzle came when we remember how devils behave when they meet each other in the wild. 
+They tend to bite each other, often quite ferociously and usually on the face. 
+We think that cancer cells actually come off the tumor, get into the saliva. 
+When the devil bites another devil, it actually physically implants living cancer cells into the next devil, so the tumor continues to grow. 
+So this Tasmanian devil cancer is perhaps the ultimate cancer. 
+It's not constrained by living within the body that gave rise to it. 
+It spreads through the population, has mutations that allow it to evade the immune system, and it's the only cancer that we know of that's threatening an entire species with extinction. 
+But if this can happen in Tasmanian devils, why hasn't it happened in other animals or even humans? 
+Well the answer is, it has. 
+This is Kimbo. 
+He's a dog that belongs to a family in Mombasa in Kenya. 
+Last year, his owner noticed some blood trickling from his genital region. 
+She took him to the vet and the vet discovered something quite disgusting. 
+And if you're squeamish, please look away now. 
+He discovered this, a huge bleeding tumor at the base of Kimbo's penis. 
+The vet diagnosed this as transmissible venereal tumor, a sexually transmitted cancer that affects dogs. 
+And just as the Tasmanian devil cancer is contagious through the spread of living cancer cells, so is this dog cancer. 
+But this dog cancer is quite remarkable, because it spread all around the world. 
+And in fact, these same cells that are affecting Kimbo here are also found affecting dogs in New York City, in mountain villages in the Himalayas and in Outback Australia. 
+We also believe this cancer might be very old. 
+In fact, genetic profiling tells that it may be tens of thousands of years old, which means that this cancer may have first arisen from the cells of a wolf that lived alongside the Neanderthals. 
+This cancer is remarkable. 
+It's the oldest mammalian-derived life form that we know of. 
+It's a living relic of the distant past. 
+So we've seen that this can happen in animals. 
+Could cancers be contagious between people? 
+Well this is a question which fascinated Chester Southam, a cancer doctor in the 1950s. 
+Ad he decided to put this to the test by actually deliberately inoculating people with cancer from somebody else. 
+And this is a photograph of Dr. Southam in 1957 injecting cancer into a volunteer, who in this case was an inmate in Ohio State Penitentiary. 
+Most of the people that Dr. Southam injected did not go on to develop cancer from the injected cells. 
+But a small number of them did, and they were mostly people who were otherwise ill — whose immune systems were probably compromised. 
+What this tells us, ethical issues aside, is that... 
+(Laughter) it's probably extremely rare for cancers to be transferred between people. 
+However, under some circumstances, it can happen. 
+And I think that this is something that oncologists and epidemiologists should be aware of in the future. 
+So just finally, cancer is an inevitable outcome of the ability of our cells to divide and to adapt to their environments. 
+But that does not mean that we should give up hope in the fight against cancer. 
+In fact, I believe, given more knowledge of the complex evolutionary processes that drive cancer's growth, we can defeat cancer. 
+My personal aim is to defeat the Tasmanian devil cancer. 
+Let's prevent the Tasmanian devil from being the first animal to go extinct from cancer. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is a photograph by the artist Michael Najjar, and it's real, in the sense that he went there to Argentina to take the photo. 
+But it's also a fiction. There's a lot of work that went into it after that. 
+And what he's done is he's actually reshaped, digitally, all of the contours of the mountains to follow the vicissitudes of the Dow Jones index. 
+So what you see, that precipice, that high precipice with the valley, is the 2008 financial crisis. 
+The photo was made when we were deep in the valley over there. 
+I don't know where we are now. 
+This is the Hang Seng index for Hong Kong. 
+And similar topography. 
+I wonder why. 
+And this is art. This is metaphor. 
+But I think the point is that this is metaphor with teeth, and it's with those teeth that I want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the role of contemporary math — not just financial math, but math in general. 
+That its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it — the world around us and the world inside us. 
+And it's specifically algorithms, which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff. 
+They acquire the sensibility of truth because they repeat over and over again, and they ossify and calcify, and they become real. 
+And I was thinking about this, of all places, on a transatlantic flight a couple of years ago, because I happened to be seated next to a Hungarian physicist about my age and we were talking about what life was like during the Cold War for physicists in Hungary. 
+And I said, "" So what were you doing? "" And he said, "" Well we were mostly breaking stealth. "" And I said, "" That's a good job. That's interesting. 
+How does that work? "" And to understand that, you have to understand a little bit about how stealth works. 
+And so — this is an over-simplification — but basically, it's not like you can just pass a radar signal right through 156 tons of steel in the sky. 
+It's not just going to disappear. 
+But if you can take this big, massive thing, and you could turn it into a million little things — something like a flock of birds — well then the radar that's looking for that has to be able to see every flock of birds in the sky. 
+And if you're a radar, that's a really bad job. 
+And he said, "" Yeah. "" He said, "" But that's if you're a radar. 
+So we didn't use a radar; we built a black box that was looking for electrical signals, electronic communication. 
+And whenever we saw a flock of birds that had electronic communication, we thought, 'Probably has something to do with the Americans.' "" And I said, "" Yeah. 
+That's good. 
+So you've effectively negated 60 years of aeronautic research. 
+What's your act two? 
+What do you do when you grow up? "" And he said, "Well, financial services." 
+And I said, "" Oh. "" Because those had been in the news lately. 
+And I said, "" How does that work? "" And he said, "" Well there's 2,000 physicists on Wall Street now, and I'm one of them. "" And I said, "" What's the black box for Wall Street? "" And he said, "" It's funny you ask that, because it's actually called black box trading. 
+And it's also sometimes called algo trading, algorithmic trading. "" And algorithmic trading evolved in part because institutional traders have the same problems that the United States Air Force had, which is that they're moving these positions — whether it's Proctor & Gamble or Accenture, whatever — they're moving a million shares of something through the market. 
+And if they do that all at once, it's like playing poker and going all in right away. 
+You just tip your hand. 
+And so they have to find a way — and they use algorithms to do this — to break up that big thing into a million little transactions. 
+And the magic and the horror of that is that the same math that you use to break up the big thing into a million little things can be used to find a million little things and sew them back together and figure out what's actually happening in the market. 
+So if you need to have some image of what's happening in the stock market right now, what you can picture is a bunch of algorithms that are basically programmed to hide, and a bunch of algorithms that are programmed to go find them and act. 
+And all of that's great, and it's fine. 
+And that's 70 percent of the United States stock market, 70 percent of the operating system formerly known as your pension, your mortgage. 
+And what could go wrong? 
+What could go wrong is that a year ago, nine percent of the entire market just disappears in five minutes, and they called it the Flash Crash of 2: 45. 
+All of a sudden, nine percent just goes away, and nobody to this day can even agree on what happened because nobody ordered it, nobody asked for it. 
+Nobody had any control over what was actually happening. 
+All they had was just a monitor in front of them that had the numbers on it and just a red button that said, "" Stop. "" And that's the thing, is that we're writing things, we're writing these things that we can no longer read. 
+And we've rendered something illegible, and we've lost the sense of what's actually happening in this world that we've made. 
+And we're starting to make our way. 
+There's a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don't know what, and they reach into all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. 
+And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. 
+And they do what we've always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don't understand — which is that they give them a name and a story. 
+So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight. 
+And the gag is that, of course, these aren't just running through the market. 
+You can find these kinds of things wherever you look, once you learn how to look for them. 
+You can find it here: this book about flies that you may have been looking at on Amazon. 
+You may have noticed it when its price started at 1.7 million dollars. 
+It's out of print — still... 
+(Laughter) If you had bought it at 1.7, it would have been a bargain. 
+A few hours later, it had gone up to 23.6 million dollars, plus shipping and handling. 
+And the question is: Nobody was buying or selling anything; what was happening? 
+And you see this behavior on Amazon as surely as you see it on Wall Street. 
+And when you see this kind of behavior, what you see is the evidence of algorithms in conflict, algorithms locked in loops with each other, without any human oversight, without any adult supervision to say, "" Actually, 1.7 million is plenty. "" (Laughter) And as with Amazon, so it is with Netflix. 
+And so Netflix has gone through several different algorithms over the years. 
+They started with Cinematch, and they've tried a bunch of others — there's Dinosaur Planet; there's Gravity. 
+They're using Pragmatic Chaos now. 
+Pragmatic Chaos is, like all of Netflix algorithms, trying to do the same thing. 
+It's trying to get a grasp on you, on the firmware inside the human skull, so that it can recommend what movie you might want to watch next — which is a very, very difficult problem. 
+But the difficulty of the problem and the fact that we don't really quite have it down, it doesn't take away from the effects Pragmatic Chaos has. 
+Pragmatic Chaos, like all Netflix algorithms, determines, in the end, 60 percent of what movies end up being rented. 
+So one piece of code with one idea about you is responsible for 60 percent of those movies. 
+But what if you could rate those movies before they get made? 
+Wouldn't that be handy? 
+Well, a few data scientists from the U.K. are in Hollywood, and they have "" story algorithms "" — a company called Epagogix. 
+And you can run your script through there, and they can tell you, quantifiably, that that's a 30 million dollar movie or a 200 million dollar movie. 
+And the thing is, is that this isn't Google. 
+This isn't information. 
+These aren't financial stats; this is culture. 
+And what you see here, or what you don't really see normally, is that these are the physics of culture. 
+And if these algorithms, like the algorithms on Wall Street, just crashed one day and went awry, how would we know? 
+What would it look like? 
+And they're in your house. They're in your house. 
+These are two algorithms competing for your living room. 
+These are two different cleaning robots that have very different ideas about what clean means. 
+And you can see it if you slow it down and attach lights to them, and they're sort of like secret architects in your bedroom. 
+And the idea that architecture itself is somehow subject to algorithmic optimization is not far-fetched. 
+It's super-real and it's happening around you. 
+You feel it most when you're in a sealed metal box, a new-style elevator; they're called destination-control elevators. 
+These are the ones where you have to press what floor you're going to go to before you get in the elevator. 
+And it uses what's called a bin-packing algorithm. 
+So none of this mishegas of letting everybody go into whatever car they want. 
+Everybody who wants to go to the 10th floor goes into car two, and everybody who wants to go to the third floor goes into car five. 
+And the problem with that is that people freak out. 
+People panic. 
+And you see why. You see why. 
+It's because the elevator is missing some important instrumentation, like the buttons. 
+(Laughter) Like the things that people use. 
+All it has is just the number that moves up or down and that red button that says, "" Stop. "" And this is what we're designing for. 
+We're designing for this machine dialect. 
+And how far can you take that? How far can you take it? 
+You can take it really, really far. 
+So let me take it back to Wall Street. 
+Because the algorithms of Wall Street are dependent on one quality above all else, which is speed. 
+And they operate on milliseconds and microseconds. 
+And just to give you a sense of what microseconds are, it takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse. 
+But if you're a Wall Street algorithm and you're five microseconds behind, you're a loser. 
+So if you were an algorithm, you'd look for an architect like the one that I met in Frankfurt who was hollowing out a skyscraper — throwing out all the furniture, all the infrastructure for human use, and just running steel on the floors to get ready for the stacks of servers to go in — all so an algorithm could get close to the Internet. 
+And you think of the Internet as this kind of distributed system. 
+And of course, it is, but it's distributed from places. 
+In New York, this is where it's distributed from: the Carrier Hotel located on Hudson Street. 
+And this is really where the wires come right up into the city. 
+And the reality is that the further away you are from that, you're a few microseconds behind every time. 
+These guys down on Wall Street, Marco Polo and Cherokee Nation, they're eight microseconds behind all these guys going into the empty buildings being hollowed out up around the Carrier Hotel. 
+And that's going to keep happening. 
+We're going to keep hollowing them out, because you, inch for inch and pound for pound and dollar for dollar, none of you could squeeze revenue out of that space like the Boston Shuffler could. 
+But if you zoom out, if you zoom out, you would see an 825-mile trench between New York City and Chicago that's been built over the last few years by a company called Spread Networks. 
+This is a fiber optic cable that was laid between those two cities to just be able to traffic one signal 37 times faster than you can click a mouse — just for these algorithms, just for the Carnival and the Knife. 
+And when you think about this, that we're running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications framework that no human will ever know, that's a kind of manifest destiny; and we'll always look for a new frontier. 
+Unfortunately, we have our work cut out for us. 
+This is just theoretical. 
+This is some mathematicians at MIT. 
+And the truth is I don't really understand a lot of what they're talking about. 
+It involves light cones and quantum entanglement, and I don't really understand any of that. 
+But I can read this map, and what this map says is that, if you're trying to make money on the markets where the red dots are, that's where people are, where the cities are, you're going to have to put the servers where the blue dots are to do that most effectively. 
+And the thing that you might have noticed about those blue dots is that a lot of them are in the middle of the ocean. 
+So that's what we'll do: we'll build bubbles or something, or platforms. 
+We'll actually part the water to pull money out of the air, because it's a bright future if you're an algorithm. 
+(Laughter) And it's not the money that's so interesting actually. 
+It's what the money motivates, that we're actually terraforming the Earth itself with this kind of algorithmic efficiency. 
+And in that light, you go back and you look at Michael Najjar's photographs, and you realize that they're not metaphor, they're prophecy. 
+They're prophecy for the kind of seismic, terrestrial effects of the math that we're making. 
+And the landscape was always made by this sort of weird, uneasy collaboration between nature and man. 
+But now there's this third co-evolutionary force: algorithms — the Boston Shuffler, the Carnival. 
+And we will have to understand those as nature, and in a way, they are. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the next few decades has arrived. 
+And it's not social media. 
+It's not big data. 
+It's not robotics. 
+It's not even AI. 
+You'll be surprised to learn that it's the underlying technology of digital currencies like Bitcoin. 
+It's called the blockchain. Blockchain. 
+Now, it's not the most sonorous word in the world, but I believe that this is now the next generation of the internet, and that it holds vast promise for every business, every society and for all of you, individually. 
+You know, for the past few decades, we've had the internet of information. 
+And when I send you an email or a PowerPoint file or something, I'm actually not sending you the original, I'm sending you a copy. 
+And that's great. 
+This is democratized information. 
+But when it comes to assets — things like money, financial assets like stocks and bonds, loyalty points, intellectual property, music, art, a vote, carbon credit and other assets — sending you a copy is a really bad idea. 
+If I send you 100 dollars, it's really important that I don't still have the money — (Laughter) and that I can't send it to you. 
+This has been called the "" double-spend "" problem by cryptographers for a long time. 
+So today, we rely entirely on big intermediaries — middlemen like banks, government, big social media companies, credit card companies and so on — to establish trust in our economy. 
+And these intermediaries perform all the business and transaction logic of every kind of commerce, from authentication, identification of people, through to clearing, settling and record keeping. 
+And overall, they do a pretty good job. 
+But there are growing problems. 
+To begin, they're centralized. 
+That means they can be hacked, and increasingly are — JP Morgan, the US Federal Government, LinkedIn, Home Depot and others found that out the hard way. 
+They exclude billions of people from the global economy, for example, people who don't have enough money to have a bank account. 
+They slow things down. 
+It can take a second for an email to go around the world, but it can take days or weeks for money to move through the banking system across a city. 
+And they take a big piece of the action — 10 to 20 percent just to send money to another country. 
+And the biggest problem is that overall, they've appropriated the largesse of the digital age asymmetrically: we have wealth creation, but we have growing social inequality. 
+So what if there were not only an internet of information, what if there were an internet of value — some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger running on millions of computers and available to everybody. 
+And where every kind of asset, from money to music, could be stored, moved, transacted, exchanged and managed, all without powerful intermediaries? 
+What if there were a native medium for value? 
+Well, in 2008, the financial industry crashed and, perhaps propitiously, an anonymous person or persons named Satoshi Nakamoto created a paper where he developed a protocol for a digital cash that used an underlying cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. 
+And this cryptocurrency enabled people to establish trust and do transactions without a third party. 
+And this seemingly simple act set off a spark that ignited the world, that has everyone excited or terrified or otherwise interested in many places. 
+Now, don't be confused about Bitcoin — Bitcoin is an asset; it goes up and down, and that should be of interest to you if you're a speculator. 
+And that's of greater interest. 
+But the real pony here is the underlying technology. 
+It's called blockchain. 
+So for the first time now in human history, people everywhere can trust each other and transact peer to peer. 
+And trust is established, not by some big institution, but by collaboration, by cryptography and by some clever code. 
+And because trust is native to the technology, I call this, "" The Trust Protocol. "" Now, you're probably wondering: How does this thing work? 
+Fair enough. 
+Assets — digital assets like money to music and everything in between — are not stored in a central place, but they're distributed across a global ledger, using the highest level of cryptography. 
+And when a transaction is conducted, it's posted globally, across millions and millions of computers. 
+And out there, around the world, is a group of people called "" miners. "" These are not young people, they're Bitcoin miners. 
+They have massive computing power at their fingertips — 10 to 100 times bigger than all of Google worldwide. 
+These miners do a lot of work. 
+And every 10 minutes, kind of like the heartbeat of a network, a block gets created that has all the transactions from the previous 10 minutes. 
+Then the miners get to work, trying to solve some tough problems. 
+And they compete: the first miner to find out the truth and to validate the block, is rewarded in digital currency, in the case of the Bitcoin blockchain, with Bitcoin. 
+And then — this is the key part — that block is linked to the previous block and the previous block to create a chain of blocks. 
+So if I wanted to go and hack a block and, say, pay you and you with the same money, I'd have to hack that block, plus all the preceding blocks, the entire history of commerce on that blockchain, not just on one computer but across millions of computers, simultaneously, all using the highest levels of encryption, in the light of the most powerful computing resource in the world that's watching me. 
+Tough to do. 
+This is infinitely more secure than the computer systems that we have today. 
+Blockchain. That's how it works. 
+So the Bitcoin blockchain is just one. 
+There are many. 
+The Ethereum blockchain was developed by a Canadian named Vitalik Buterin. 
+He's [22] years old, and this blockchain has some extraordinary capabilities. 
+One of them is that you can build smart contracts. 
+It's kind of what it sounds like. 
+It's a contract that self-executes, and the contract handles the enforcement, the management, performance and payment — the contract kind of has a bank account, too, in a sense — of agreements between people. 
+And today, on the Ethereum blockchain, there are projects underway to do everything from create a new replacement for the stock market to create a new model of democracy, where politicians are accountable to citizens. 
+(Applause) So to understand what a radical change this is going to bring, let's look at one industry, financial services. 
+Recognize this? 
+Rube Goldberg machine. 
+It's a ridiculously complicated machine that does something really simple, like crack an egg or shut a door. 
+Well, it kind of reminds me of the financial services industry, honestly. 
+I mean, you tap your card in the corner store, and a bitstream goes through a dozen companies, each with their own computer system, some of them being 1970s mainframes older than many of the people in this room, and three days later, a settlement occurs. 
+Well, with a blockchain financial industry, there would be no settlement, because the payment and the settlement is the same activity, it's just a change in the ledger. 
+So Wall Street and all around the world, the financial industry is in a big upheaval about this, wondering, can we be replaced, or how do we embrace this technology for success? 
+Now, why should you care? 
+Well, let me describe some applications. 
+Prosperity. 
+The first era of the internet, the internet of information, brought us wealth but not shared prosperity, because social inequality is growing. 
+And this is at the heart of all of the anger and extremism and protectionism and xenophobia and worse that we're seeing growing in the world today, Brexit being the most recent case. 
+So could we develop some new approaches to this problem of inequality? 
+Because the only approach today is to redistribute wealth, tax people and spread it around more. 
+Could we change the way that wealth gets created in the first place by democratizing wealth creation, engaging more people in the economy, and then ensuring that they got fair compensation? 
+Let me describe five ways that this can be done. 
+Number one: Did you know that 70 percent of the people in the world who have land have a tenuous title to it? 
+So, you've got a little farm in Honduras, some dictator comes to power, he says, "" I know you've got a piece of paper that says you own your farm, but the government computer says my friend owns your farm. "" This happened on a mass scale in Honduras, and this problem exists everywhere. 
+Hernando de Soto, the great Latin American economist, says this is the number one issue in the world in terms of economic mobility, more important than having a bank account, because if you don't have a valid title to your land, you can't borrow against it, and you can't plan for the future. 
+So today, companies are working with governments to put land titles on a blockchain. 
+And once it's there, this is immutable. 
+You can't hack it. 
+This creates the conditions for prosperity for potentially billions of people. 
+Secondly: a lot of writers talk about Uber and Airbnb and TaskRabbit and Lyft and so on as part of the sharing economy. 
+This is a very powerful idea, that peers can come together and create and share wealth. 
+My view is that... 
+these companies are not really sharing. 
+In fact, they're successful precisely because they don't share. 
+They aggregate services together, and they sell them. 
+What if, rather than Airbnb being a $25 billion corporation, there was a distributed application on a blockchain, we'll call it B-Airbnb, and it was essentially owned by all of the people who have a room to rent. 
+And when someone wants to rent a room, they go onto the blockchain database and all the criteria, they sift through, it helps them find the right room, and then the blockchain helps with the contracting, it identifies the party, it handles the payments just through digital payments — they're built into the system. 
+And it even handles reputation, because if she rates a room as a five-star room, that room is there, and it's rated, and it's immutable. 
+So, the big sharing-economy disruptors in Silicon Valley could be disrupted, and this would be good for prosperity. 
+Number three: the biggest flow of funds from the developed world to the developing world is not corporate investment, and it's not even foreign aid. 
+It's remittances. 
+This is the global diaspora; people have left their ancestral lands, and they're sending money back to their families at home. 
+This is 600 billion dollars a year, and it's growing, and these people are getting ripped off. 
+Analie Domingo is a housekeeper. 
+She lives in Toronto, and every month she goes to the Western Union office with some cash to send her remittances to her mom in Manila. 
+Six months ago, Analie Domingo used a blockchain application called Abra. 
+And from her mobile device, she sent 300 bucks. 
+It went directly to her mom's mobile device without going through an intermediary. 
+And then her mom looked at her mobile device — it's kind of like an Uber interface, there's Abra "" tellers "" moving around. 
+She clicks on a teller that's a five-star teller, who's seven minutes away. 
+The whole thing took minutes, and it cost her two percent. 
+This is a big opportunity for prosperity. 
+Number four: the most powerful asset of the digital age is data. 
+And data is really a new asset class, maybe bigger than previous asset classes, like land under the agrarian economy, or an industrial plant, or even money. 
+And all of you — we — create this data. 
+We create this asset, and we leave this trail of digital crumbs behind us as we go throughout life. 
+And these crumbs are collected into a mirror image of you, the virtual you. 
+So today, there are companies working to create an identity in a black box, the virtual you owned by you. 
+And this black box moves around with you as you travel throughout the world, and it's very, very stingy. 
+It only gives away the shred of information that's required to do something. 
+They just need to know that they got paid. 
+And then this avatar is sweeping up all of this data and enabling you to monetize it. 
+And this is a wonderful thing, because it can also help us protect our privacy, and privacy is the foundation of a free society. 
+Let's get this asset that we create back under our control, where we can own our own identity and manage it responsibly. 
+Finally — (Applause) Finally, number five: there are a whole number of creators of content who don't receive fair compensation, because the system for intellectual property is broken. 
+It was broken by the first era of the internet. 
+Take music. 
+Musicians are left with crumbs at the end of the whole food chain. 
+You know, if you were a songwriter, 25 years ago, you wrote a hit song, it got a million singles, you could get royalties of around 45,000 dollars. 
+Today, you're a songwriter, you write a hit song, it gets a million streams, you don't get 45k, you get 36 dollars, enough to buy a nice pizza. 
+So Imogen Heap, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, is now putting music on a blockchain ecosystem. 
+She calls it "" Mycelia. "" And the music has a smart contract surrounding it. 
+And the music protects her intellectual property rights. 
+You want to listen to the song? 
+She describes that the song becomes a business. 
+It's out there on this platform marketing itself, protecting the rights of the author, and because the song has a payment system in the sense of bank account, all the money flows back to the artist, and they control the industry, rather than these powerful intermediaries. 
+Now, this is — (Applause) This is not just songwriters, it's any creator of content, like art, like inventions, scientific discoveries, journalists. 
+There are all kinds of people who don't get fair compensation, and with blockchains, they're going to be able to make it rain on the blockchain. 
+And that's a wonderful thing. 
+So, these are five opportunities out of a dozen to solve one problem, prosperity, which is one of countless problems that blockchains are applicable to. 
+Now, technology doesn't create prosperity, of course — people do. 
+But my case to you is that, once again, the technology genie has escaped from the bottle, and it was summoned by an unknown person or persons at this uncertain time in human history, and it's giving us another kick at the can, another opportunity to rewrite the economic power grid and the old order of things, and solve some of the world's most difficult problems, if we will it. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is the exact moment that I started creating something called Tinkering School. 
+Tinkering School is a place where kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects, and be trusted. 
+Trusted not to hurt themselves, and trusted not to hurt others. 
+Tinkering School doesn't follow a set curriculum, and there are no tests. 
+We're not trying to teach anybody any specific thing. 
+When the kids arrive they're confronted with lots of stuff: wood and nails and rope and wheels, and lots of tools, real tools. 
+It's a six-day immersive experience for the kids. 
+And within that context, we can offer the kids time — something that seems in short supply in their over-scheduled lives. 
+Our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense of how to make things than when they arrived, and the deep internal realization that you can figure things out by fooling around. 
+Nothing ever turns out as planned... ever. 
+(Laughter) And the kids soon learn that all projects go awry — (Laughter) and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success, or gleeful calamity. 
+We start from doodles and sketches. 
+And sometimes we make real plans. 
+And sometimes we just start building. 
+Building is at the heart of the experience: hands on, deeply immersed and fully committed to the problem at hand. 
+Robin and I, acting as collaborators, keep the landscape of the projects tilted towards completion. 
+Success is in the doing, and failures are celebrated and analyzed. 
+Problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear. 
+When faced with particularly difficult setbacks or complexities, a really interesting behavior emerges: decoration. 
+(Laughter) Decoration of the unfinished project is a kind of conceptual incubation. 
+From these interludes come deep insights and amazing new approaches to solving the problems that had them frustrated just moments before. 
+All materials are available for use. 
+Even those mundane, hateful, plastic grocery bags can become a bridge stronger than anyone imagined. 
+And the things that they build amaze even themselves. 
+Video: Three, two, one, go! 
+Gever Tulley: A rollercoaster built by seven-year-olds. 
+Video: Yay! 
+(Applause) GT: Thank you. It's been a great pleasure. (Applause) 
+
+If you go on the TED website, you can currently find there over a full week of TEDTalk videos, over 1.3 million words of transcripts and millions of user ratings. 
+And that's a huge amount of data. 
+And it got me wondering: If you took all this data and put it through statistical analysis, could you reverse engineer a TEDTalk? 
+Could you create the ultimate TEDTalk? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And also, could you create the worst possible TEDTalk that they would still let you get away with? 
+To find this out, I looked at three things: I looked at the topic that you should choose, I looked at how you should deliver it and the visuals onstage. 
+Now, with the topic: There's a whole range of topics you can choose, but you should choose wisely, because your topic strongly correlates with how users will react to your talk. 
+Now, to make this more concrete, let's look at the list of top 10 words that statistically stick out in the most favorite TEDTalks and in the least favorite TEDTalks. 
+So if you came here to talk about how French coffee will spread happiness in our brains, that's a go. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Whereas, if you wanted to talk about your project involving oxygen, girls, aircraft — actually, I would like to hear that talk, (Laughter) but statistics say it's not so good. 
+Oh, well. 
+If you generalize this, the most favorite TEDTalks are those that feature topics we can connect with, both easily and deeply, such as happiness, our own body, food, emotions. 
+And the more technical topics, such as architecture, materials and, strangely enough, men, those are not good topics to talk about. 
+How should you deliver your talk? 
+TED is famous for keeping a very sharp eye on the clock, so they're going to hate me for revealing this, because, actually, you should talk as long as they will let you. (Laughter) Because the most favorite TEDTalks are, on average, over 50 percent longer than the least favorite ones. 
+And this holds true for all ranking lists on TED.com except if you want to have a talk that's beautiful, inspiring or funny. 
+Then, you should be brief. (Laughter) But other than that, talk until they drag you off the stage. (Laughter) 
+Now, while... 
+(Applause) While you're pushing the clock, there's a few rules to obey. 
+I found these rules out by comparing the statistics of four-word phrases that appear more often in the most favorite TEDTalks as opposed to the least favorite TEDTalks. 
+I'll give you three examples. 
+First of all, I must, as a speaker, provide a service to the audience and talk about what I will give you, instead of saying what I can't have. 
+Secondly, it's imperative that you do not cite The New York Times. 
+(Laughter) And finally, it's okay for the speaker — that's the good news — to fake intellectual capacity. 
+If I don't understand something, I can just say, "" etc., etc. "" You'll all stay with me. 
+It's perfectly fine. 
+(Applause) Now, let's go to the visuals. 
+The most obvious visual thing on stage is the speaker. 
+And analysis shows if you want to be among the most favorite TED speakers, you should let your hair grow a little bit longer than average, make sure you wear your glasses and be slightly more dressed-up than the average TED speaker. 
+Slides are okay, though you might consider going for props. 
+And now the most important thing, that is the mood onstage. 
+Color plays a very important role. 
+Color closely correlates with the ratings that talks get on the website. 
+(Applause) For example, fascinating talks contain a statistically high amount of exactly this blue color, (Laughter) much more than the average TEDTalk. 
+Ingenious TEDTalks, much more this green color, etc., et. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Now, personally, I think I'm not the first one who has done this analysis, but I'll leave this to your good judgment. 
+So, now it's time to put it all together and design the ultimate TEDTalk. 
+Now, since this is TEDActive, and I learned from my analysis that I should actually give you something, I will not impose the ultimate or worst TEDTalk on you, but rather give you a tool to create your own. 
+And I call this tool the TEDPad. 
+(Laughter) And the TEDPad is a matrix of 100 specifically selected, highly curated sentences that you can easily piece together to get your own TEDTalk. 
+You only have to make one decision, and that is: Are you going to use the white version for very good TEDTalks, about creativity, human genius? 
+Or are you going to go with a black version, which will allow you to create really bad TEDTalks, mostly about blogs, politics and stuff? 
+So, download it and have fun with it. 
+Now I hope you enjoy the session. 
+I hope you enjoy designing your own ultimate and worst possible TEDTalks. 
+And I hope some of you will be inspired for next year to create this, which I really want to see. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thanks. 
+
+(Whistling) (Whistling ends) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+What is a chubby, curly-haired guy from Holland — why is he whistling? 
+And actually, until I was 34, I always annoyed and irritated people with whistling, because, to be honest, my whistling is a kind of deviant behavior. 
+And I would have lost my face. 
+(Applause) And she thought, "" He will never go there. "" But actually, I did. 
+(Applause) That was great fun, of course. 
+So what happened now is I'm standing here in Rotterdam, in the beautiful city, on a big stage, and I'm talking about whistling. 
+(Applause) And I try to live my dream — well, actually, it was never my dream, but it sounds so good. 
+(Laughter) OK, I'm not the only one whistling here. 
+And I want to first rehearse with you your whistling. 
+(Whistling) (Laughter) Sorry, I forgot one thing — you whistle the same tone as me. (Laughter) 
+And if it's started, I just point where you whistle along, and we will see what happens. 
+OK, here it is. (Laughter) 
+It's easy, isn't it? (Whistling) 
+(Music) (Whistling) (Applause) Max Westerman: Geert Chatrou, the World Champion of Whistling. 
+
+This is my first trip, my first foreign trip as a first lady. 
+Can you believe that? 
+(Applause) And while this is not my first visit to the U.K., I have to say that I am glad that this is my first official visit. 
+The special relationship between the United States and the U.K. 
+is based not only on the relationship between governments, but the common language and the values that we share, and I'm reminded of that by watching you all today. 
+During my visit I've been especially honored to meet some of Britain's most extraordinary women — women who are paving the way for all of you. 
+And I'm honored to meet you, the future leaders of Great Britain and this world. 
+And although the circumstances of our lives may seem very distant, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America, and you, just getting through school, I want you to know that we have very much in common. 
+For nothing in my life's path would have predicted that I'd be standing here as the first African-American First Lady of the United States of America. 
+There is nothing in my story that would land me here. 
+I wasn't raised with wealth or resources or any social standing to speak of. 
+I was raised on the South Side of Chicago. 
+That's the real part of Chicago. 
+And I was the product of a working-class community. 
+My father was a city worker all of his life, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. 
+And she stayed at home to take care of me and my older brother. 
+Neither of them attended university. 
+My dad was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the prime of his life. 
+But even as it got harder for him to walk and get dressed in the morning — I saw him struggle more and more — my father never complained about his struggle. 
+He was grateful for what he had. 
+He just woke up a little earlier and worked a little harder. 
+And my brother and I were raised with all that you really need: love, strong values and a belief that with a good education and a whole lot of hard work, that there was nothing that we could not do. 
+I am an example of what's possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by the people around them. 
+I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life: grandmothers, teachers, aunts, cousins, neighbors, who taught me about quiet strength and dignity. 
+And my mother, the most important role model in my life, who lives with us at the White House and helps to care for our two little daughters, Malia and Sasha. 
+She's an active presence in their lives, as well as mine, and is instilling in them the same values that she taught me and my brother: things like compassion, and integrity, and confidence, and perseverance — all of that wrapped up in an unconditional love that only a grandmother can give. 
+I was also fortunate enough to be cherished and encouraged by some strong male role models as well, including my father, my brother, uncles and grandfathers. 
+The men in my life taught me some important things, as well. 
+They taught me about what a respectful relationship should look like between men and women. 
+They taught me about what a strong marriage feels like: that it's built on faith and commitment and an admiration for each other's unique gifts. 
+They taught me about what it means to be a father and to raise a family. 
+And not only to invest in your own home but to reach out and help raise kids in the broader community. 
+And these were the same qualities that I looked for in my own husband, Barack Obama. 
+And when we first met, one of the things that I remember is that he took me out on a date. 
+And his date was to go with him to a community meeting. 
+(Laughter) I know, how romantic. (Laughter) 
+But when we met, Barack was a community organizer. 
+He worked, helping people to find jobs and to try to bring resources into struggling neighborhoods. 
+As he talked to the residents in that community center, he talked about two concepts. 
+He talked about "" the world as it is "" and "" the world as it should be. "" And I talked about this throughout the entire campaign. 
+What he said, that all too often, is that we accept the distance between those two ideas. 
+And sometimes we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn't reflect our values and aspirations. 
+But Barack reminded us on that day, all of us in that room, that we all know what our world should look like. 
+We know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. 
+We all know. 
+And he urged the people in that meeting, in that community, to devote themselves to closing the gap between those two ideas, to work together to try to make the world as it is and the world as it should be, one and the same. 
+And I think about that today because I am reminded and convinced that all of you in this school are very important parts of closing that gap. 
+You are the women who will build the world as it should be. 
+You're going to write the next chapter in history. 
+Not just for yourselves, but for your generation and generations to come. 
+And that's why getting a good education is so important. 
+That's why all of this that you're going through — the ups and the downs, the teachers that you love and the teachers that you don't — why it's so important. 
+Because communities and countries and ultimately the world are only as strong as the health of their women. 
+And that's important to keep in mind. 
+Part of that health includes an outstanding education. 
+The difference between a struggling family and a healthy one is often the presence of an empowered woman or women at the center of that family. 
+The difference between a broken community and a thriving one is often the healthy respect between men and women who appreciate the contributions each other makes to society. 
+The difference between a languishing nation and one that will flourish is the recognition that we need equal access to education for both boys and girls. 
+And this school, named after the U.K. 's first female doctor, and the surrounding buildings named for Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, Mary Seacole, the Jamaican nurse known as the "" black Florence Nightingale, "" and the English author, Emily Bronte, honor women who fought sexism, racism and ignorance, to pursue their passions to feed their own souls. 
+They allowed for no obstacles. 
+As the sign said back there, "" without limitations. "" They knew no other way to live than to follow their dreams. 
+And having done so, these women moved many obstacles. 
+And they opened many new doors for millions of female doctors and nurses and artists and authors, all of whom have followed them. 
+And by getting a good education, you too can control your own destiny. 
+Please remember that. 
+If you want to know the reason why I'm standing here, it's because of education. 
+I never cut class. Sorry, I don't know if anybody is cutting class. 
+I never did it. 
+I loved getting As. 
+I liked being smart. 
+I liked being on time. I liked getting my work done. 
+I thought being smart was cooler than anything in the world. 
+And you too, with these same values, can control your own destiny. 
+You too can pave the way. 
+You too can realize your dreams, and then your job is to reach back and to help someone just like you do the same thing. 
+History proves that it doesn't matter whether you come from a council estate or a country estate. 
+Your success will be determined by your own fortitude, your own confidence, your own individual hard work. 
+That is true. That is the reality of the world that we live in. 
+You now have control over your own destiny. 
+And it won't be easy — that's for sure. 
+But you have everything you need. 
+Everything you need to succeed, you already have, right here. 
+My husband works in this big office. 
+They call it the Oval Office. 
+In the White House, there's the desk that he sits at — it's called the Resolute desk. 
+It was built by the timber of Her Majesty's Ship Resolute and given by Queen Victoria. 
+It's an enduring symbol of the friendship between our two nations. 
+And its name, Resolute, is a reminder of the strength of character that's required not only to lead a country, but to live a life of purpose, as well. 
+And I hope in pursuing your dreams, you all remain resolute, that you go forward without limits, and that you use your talents — because there are many; we've seen them; it's there — that you use them to create the world as it should be. 
+Because we are counting on you. 
+We are counting on every single one of you to be the very best that you can be. 
+Because the world is big. 
+And it's full of challenges. 
+And we need strong, smart, confident young women to stand up and take the reins. 
+We know you can do it. We love you. Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to have a pretty simple idea that I'm just going to tell you over and over until I get you to believe it, and that is all of us are makers. 
+I really believe that. 
+All of us are makers. 
+We're born makers. 
+We have this ability to make things, to grasp things with our hands. 
+We use words like "" grasp "" metaphorically to also think about understanding things. 
+We don't just live, but we make. 
+We create things. 
+Well I'm going to show you a group of makers from Maker Faire and various places. 
+It doesn't come out particularly well, but that's a particularly tall bicycle. 
+It's a scraper bike; it's called — from Oakland. 
+And this is a particularly small scooter for a gentleman of this size. 
+But he's trying to power it, or motorize it, with a drill. 
+(Laughter) And the question he had is, "Can I do it? Can it be done?" 
+Apparently it can. 
+So makers are enthusiasts; they're amateurs; they're people who love doing what they do. 
+They don't always even know why they're doing it. 
+We have begun organizing makers at our Maker Faire. 
+There was one held in Detroit here last summer, and it will be held again next summer, at the Henry Ford. 
+But we hold them in San Francisco — (Applause) — and in New York. 
+And it's a fabulous event to just meet and talk to these people who make things and are there to just show them to you and talk about them and have a great conversation. 
+(Video) Guy: I might get one of those. 
+Dale Dougherty: These are electric muffins. 
+Guy: Where did you guys get those? 
+Muffin: Will you glide with us? (Guy: No.) DD: I know Ford has new electric vehicles coming out. 
+We got there first. 
+Lady: Will you glide with us? 
+DD: This is something I call "" swinging in the rain. "" And you can barely see it, but it's — a controller at top cycles the water to fall just before and after you pass through the bottom of the arc. 
+So imagine a kid: "" Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet? 
+No, I didn't get wet. Am I going to get wet? Am I going to get wet? "" That's the experience of a clever ride. 
+And of course, we have fashion. 
+People are remaking things into fashion. 
+I don't know if this is called a basket-bra, but it ought to be something like that. 
+We have art students getting together, taking old radiator parts and doing an iron-pour to make something new out of it. 
+They did that in the summer, and it was very warm. 
+Now this one takes a little bit of explaining. 
+You know what those are, right? 
+Billy-Bob, or Billy Bass, or something like that. 
+Now the background is — the guy who did this is a physicist. 
+And here he'll explain a little bit about what it does. 
+(Video) Richard Carter: I'm Richard Carter, and this is the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir. 
+Choir: ♫ When you hold me in your arms ♫ DD: This is all computer-controlled in an old Volvo. 
+Choir: ♫ I'm hooked on a feelin '♫ ♫ I'm high on believin' ♫ ♫ That you're in love with me ♫ DD: So Richard came up from Houston last year to visit us in Detroit here and show the wonderful Sashimi Tabernacle Choir. 
+So, are you a maker? 
+How many people here would say you're a maker, if you raise your hand? 
+That's a pretty good — but there's some of you out there that won't admit that you're makers. 
+And again, think about it. 
+You're makers of food; you're makers of shelter; you're makers of lots of different things, and partly what interests me today is you're makers of your own world, and particularly the role that technology has in your life. 
+You're really a driver or a passenger — to use a Volkswagen phrase. 
+Makers are in control. 
+That's what fascinates them. That's why they do what they do. 
+They want to figure out how things work; they want to get access to it; and they want to control it. 
+They want to use it to their own purpose. 
+Makers today, to some degree, are out on the edge. 
+They're not mainstream. 
+They're a little bit radical. 
+They're a bit subversive in what they do. 
+But at one time, it was fairly commonplace to think of yourself as a maker. 
+It was not something you'd even remark upon. 
+And I found this old video. 
+And I'll tell you more about it, but just... 
+(Music) (Video) Narrator: Of all things Americans are, we are makers. 
+With our strengths and our minds and spirit, we gather, we form, and we fashion. 
+Makers and shapers and put-it-togetherers. 
+DD: So it goes on to show you people making things out of wood, a grandfather making a ship in a bottle, a woman making a pie — somewhat standard fare of the day. 
+But it was a sense of pride that we made things, that the world around us was made by us. 
+It didn't just exist. 
+We made it, and we were connected to it that way. 
+And I think that's tremendously important. 
+Now I'm going to tell you one funny thing about this. 
+This particular reel — it's an industrial video — but it was shown in drive-in theaters in 1961 — in the Detroit area, in fact — and it preceded Alfred Hitchcock's "" Psycho. "" (Laughter) So I like to think there was something going on there of the new generation of makers coming out of this, plus "" Psycho. "" This is Andrew Archer. 
+I met Andrew at one of our community meetings putting together Maker Faire. 
+Andrew had moved to Detroit from Duluth, Minnesota. 
+And I talked to his mom, and I ended up doing a story on him for a magazine called Kidrobot. 
+He's just a kid that grew up playing with tools instead of toys. 
+He liked to take things apart. 
+His mother gave him a part of the garage, and he collected things from yard sales, and he made stuff. 
+And then he didn't particularly like school that much, but he got involved in robotics competitions, and he realized he had a talent, and, more importantly, he had a real passion for it. 
+And he began building robots. 
+And when I sat down next to him, he was telling me about a company he formed, and he was building some robots for automobile factories to move things around on the factory floor. 
+And that's why he moved to Michigan. 
+But he also moved here to meet other people doing what he's doing. 
+And this kind of gets to this important idea today. 
+This is Jeff and Bilal and several others here in a hackerspace. 
+And there's about three hackerspaces or more in Detroit. 
+And there's probably even some new ones since I've been here last. 
+But these are like clubs — they're sharing tools, sharing space, sharing expertise in what to make. 
+And so it's a very interesting phenomenon that's going across the world. 
+But essentially these are people that are playing with technology. 
+Let me say that again: playing. 
+They don't necessarily know what they're doing or why they're doing it. 
+They're playing to discover what the technology can do, and probably to discover what they can do themselves, what their own capabilities are. 
+Now the other thing that I think is taking off, another reason making is taking off today, is there's some great new tools out there. 
+And you can't see this very well on the screen, but Arduino — Arduino is an open-source hardware platform. 
+It's a micro-controller. 
+If you don't know what those are, they're just the "" brains. "" So they're the brains of maker projects, and here's an example of one. 
+And I don't know if you can see it that well, but that's a mailbox — so an ordinary mailbox and an Arduino. 
+So you figure out how to program this, and you put this in your mailbox. 
+And when someone opens your mailbox, you get a notification, an alert message goes to your iPhone. 
+Now that could be a dog door, it could be someone going somewhere where they shouldn't, like a little brother into a little sister's room. 
+There's all kinds of different things that you can imagine for that. 
+Now here's something — a 3D printer. 
+That's another tool that's really taken off — really, really interesting. 
+This is Makerbot. 
+And there are industrial versions of this — about 20,000 dollars. 
+These guys came up with a kit version for 750 dollars, and that means that hobbyists and ordinary folks can get a hold of this and begin playing with 3D printers. 
+Now they don't know what they want to do with it, but they're going to figure it out. 
+They will only figure it out by getting their hands on it and playing with it. 
+One of the coolest things is, Makerbot sent out an upgrade, some new brackets for the box. 
+Well you printed out the brackets and then replaced the old brackets with the new ones. 
+Isn't that cool? 
+So makers harvest technology from all the places around us. 
+This is a radar speed detector that was developed from a Hot Wheels toy. 
+And they do interesting things. 
+They're really creating new areas and exploring areas that you might only think — the military is doing drones — well, there is a whole community of people building autonomous airplanes, or vehicles — something that you could program to fly on its own, without a stick or anything, to figure out what path it's going. 
+Fascinating work they're doing. 
+We just had an issue on space exploration, DIY space exploration. 
+This is probably the best time in the history of mankind to love space. 
+You could build your own satellite and get it into space for like 8,000 dollars. 
+Think how much money and how many years it took NASA to get satellites into space. 
+In fact, these guys actually work for NASA, and they're trying to pioneer using off-the-shelf components, cheap things that aren't specialized that they can combine and send up into space. 
+Makers are a source of innovation, and I think it relates back to something like the birth of the personal computer industry. 
+This is Steve Wozniak. Where does he learn about computers? 
+It's the Homebrew Computer Club — just like a hackerspace. 
+And he says, "" I could go there all day long and talk to people and share ideas for free. "" Well he did a little bit better than free. 
+But it's important to understand that a lot of the origins of our industries — even like Henry Ford — come from this idea of playing and figuring things out in groups. 
+Well, if I haven't convinced you that you're a maker, I hope I could convince you that our next generation should be makers, that kids are particularly interested in this, in this ability to control the physical world and be able to use things like micro-controllers and build robots. 
+And we've got to get this into schools, or into communities in many, many ways — the ability to tinker, to shape and reshape the world around us. 
+There's a great opportunity today — and that's what I really care about the most. 
+An the answer to the question: what will America make? 
+It's more makers. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to speak about a tiny, little idea. 
+And this is about shifting baseline. 
+And because the idea can be explained in one minute, I will tell you three stories before to fill in the time. 
+And the first story is about Charles Darwin, one of my heroes. 
+And he was here, as you well know, in '35. 
+And you'd think he was chasing finches, but he wasn't. 
+He was actually collecting fish. 
+And he described one of them as very "" common. "" This was the sailfin grouper. 
+A big fishery was run on it until the '80s. 
+Now the fish is on the IUCN Red List. 
+Now this story, we have heard it lots of times on Galapagos and other places, so there is nothing particular about it. 
+But the point is, we still come to Galapagos. 
+We still think it is pristine. 
+The brochures still say it is untouched. 
+So what happens here? 
+The second story, also to illustrate another concept, is called shifting waistline. 
+(Laughter) Because I was there in '71, studying a lagoon in West Africa. 
+I was there because I grew up in Europe and I wanted later to work in Africa. 
+And I thought I could blend in. 
+And I got a big sunburn, and I was convinced that I was really not from there. 
+This was my first sunburn. 
+And the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees, as you can see, and a few mangrove. 
+And it had tilapia about 20 centimeters, a species of tilapia called blackchin tilapia. 
+And the fisheries for this tilapia sustained lots of fish and they had a good time and they earned more than average in Ghana. 
+When I went there 27 years later, the fish had shrunk to half of their size. 
+They were maturing at five centimeters. 
+They had been pushed genetically. 
+There were still fishes. 
+They were still kind of happy. 
+And the fish also were happy to be there. 
+So nothing has changed, but everything has changed. 
+My third little story is that I was an accomplice in the introduction of trawling in Southeast Asia. 
+In the '70s — well, beginning in the' 60s — Europe did lots of development projects. 
+Fish development meant imposing on countries that had already 100,000 fishers to impose on them industrial fishing. 
+And this boat, quite ugly, is called the Mutiara 4. 
+And I went sailing on it, and we did surveys throughout the southern South China sea and especially the Java Sea. 
+And what we caught, we didn't have words for it. 
+What we caught, I know now, is the bottom of the sea. 
+And 90 percent of our catch were sponges, other animals that are fixed on the bottom. 
+And actually most of the fish, they are a little spot on the debris, the piles of debris, were coral reef fish. 
+Essentially the bottom of the sea came onto the deck and then was thrown down. 
+And these pictures are extraordinary because this transition is very rapid. 
+Within a year, you do a survey and then commercial fishing begins. 
+The bottom is transformed from, in this case, a hard bottom or soft coral into a muddy mess. 
+This is a dead turtle. 
+They were not eaten, they were thrown away because they were dead. 
+And one time we caught a live one. 
+It was not drowned yet. 
+And then they wanted to kill it because it was good to eat. 
+This mountain of debris is actually collected by fishers every time they go into an area that's never been fished. 
+But it's not documented. 
+We transform the world, but we don't remember it. 
+We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there. 
+If you generalize this, something like this happens. 
+You have on the y axis some good thing: biodiversity, numbers of orca, the greenness of your country, the water supply. 
+And over time it changes — it changes because people do things, or naturally. 
+Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. 
+And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. 
+But they don't perceive what happened before as a loss. 
+You can have a succession of changes. 
+At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. 
+And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. 
+We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were. 
+Now one should think this problem affected people certainly when in predatory societies, they killed animals and they didn't know they had done so after a few generations. 
+Because, obviously, an animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. 
+So you don't lose abundant animals. 
+You always lose rare animals. 
+And therefore they're not perceived as a big loss. 
+Over time, we concentrate on large animals, and in a sea that means the big fish. 
+They become rarer because we fish them. 
+Over time we have a few fish left and we think this is the baseline. 
+And the question is, why do people accept this? 
+Well because they don't know that it was different. 
+And in fact, lots of people, scientists, will contest that it was really different. 
+And they will contest this because the evidence presented in an earlier mode is not in the way they would like the evidence presented. 
+For example, the anecdote that some present, as Captain so-and-so observed lots of fish in this area cannot be used or is usually not utilized by fishery scientists, because it's not "" scientific. "" So you have a situation where people don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past. 
+And hence, the enormous role that a marine protected area can play. 
+Because with marine protected areas, we actually recreate the past. 
+We recreate the past that people cannot conceive because the baseline has shifted and is extremely low. 
+That is for people who can see a marine protected area and who can benefit from the insight that it provides, which enables them to reset their baseline. 
+How about the people who can't do that because they have no access — the people in the Midwest for example? 
+There I think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap, and simulation. 
+This is a simulation of Chesapeake Bay. 
+There were gray whales in Chesapeake Bay a long time ago — 500 years ago. 
+And you will have noticed that the hues and tones are like "" Avatar. "" (Laughter) And if you think about "" Avatar, "" if you think of why people were so touched by it — never mind the Pocahontas story — why so touched by the imagery? 
+Because it evokes something that in a sense has been lost. 
+And so my recommendation, it's the only one I will provide, is for Cameron to do "" Avatar II "" underwater. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Okay, I'm going to show you again something about our diets. 
+And I would like to know what the audience is, and so who of you ever ate insects? 
+That's quite a lot. 
+(Laughter) But still, you're not representing the overall population of the Earth. (Laughter) 
+Because there's 80 percent out there that really eats insects. 
+But this is quite good. 
+Why not eat insects? Well first, what are insects? 
+Insects are animals that walk around on six legs. 
+And here you see just a selection. 
+There's six million species of insects on this planet, six million species. 
+There's a few hundreds of mammals — six million species of insects. 
+In fact, if we count all the individual organisms, we would come at much larger numbers. 
+In fact, of all animals on Earth, of all animal species, 80 percent walks on six legs. 
+But if we would count all the individuals, and we take an average weight of them, it would amount to something like 200 to 2,000 kilograms for each of you and me on Earth. 
+That means that in terms of biomass, insects are more abundant than we are, and we're not on a planet of men, but we're on a planet of insects. 
+Insects are not only there in nature, but they also are involved in our economy, usually without us knowing. 
+There was an estimation, a conservative estimation, a couple of years ago that the U.S. economy benefited by 57 billion dollars per year. 
+It's a number — very large — a contribution to the economy of the United States for free. 
+And so I looked up what the economy was paying for the war in Iraq in the same year. 
+It was 80 billion U.S. dollars. 
+Well we know that that was not a cheap war. 
+So insects, just for free, contribute to the economy of the United States with about the same order of magnitude, just for free, without everyone knowing. 
+And not only in the States, but in any country, in any economy. 
+What do they do? 
+They remove dung, they pollinate our crops. 
+A third of all the fruits that we eat are all a result of insects taking care of the reproduction of plants. 
+They control pests, and they're food for animals. 
+They're at the start of food chains. 
+Small animals eat insects. 
+Even larger animals eat insects. 
+But the small animals that eat insects are being eaten by larger animals, still larger animals. 
+And at the end of the food chain, we are eating them as well. 
+There's quite a lot of people that are eating insects. 
+And here you see me in a small, provincial town in China, Lijiang — about two million inhabitants. 
+If you go out for dinner, like in a fish restaurant, where you can select which fish you want to eat, you can select which insects you would like to eat. 
+And they prepare it in a wonderful way. 
+And here you see me enjoying a meal with caterpillars, locusts, bee pupae — delicacies. 
+And you can eat something new everyday. 
+There's more than 1,000 species of insects that are being eaten all around the globe. 
+That's quite a bit more than just a few mammals that we're eating, like a cow or a pig or a sheep. 
+More than 1,000 species — an enormous variety. 
+And now you may think, okay, in this provincial town in China they're doing that, but not us. 
+Well we've seen already that quite some of you already ate insects maybe occasionally, but I can tell you that every one of you is eating insects, without any exception. 
+You're eating at least 500 grams per year. 
+What are you eating? 
+Tomato soup, peanut butter, chocolate, noodles — any processed food that you're eating contains insects, because insects are here all around us, and when they're out there in nature they're also in our crops. 
+Some fruits get some insect damage. 
+Those are the fruits, if they're tomato, that go to the tomato soup. 
+If they don't have any damage, they go to the grocery. 
+And that's your view of a tomato. 
+But there's tomatoes that end up in a soup, and as long as they meet the requirements of the food agency, there can be all kinds of things in there, no problem. 
+In fact, why would we put these balls in the soup, there's meat in there anyway? 
+(Laughter) In fact, all our processed foods contain more proteins than we would be aware of. 
+So anything is a good protein source already. 
+Now you may say, "Okay, so we're eating 500 grams just by accident." 
+We're even doing this on purpose. 
+In a lot of food items that we have — I have only two items here on the slide — pink cookies or surimi sticks or, if you like, Campari — a lot of our food products that are of a red color are dyed with a natural dye. 
+The surimi sticks [of] crabmeat, or is being sold as crab meat, is white fish that's being dyed with cochineal. 
+Cochineal is a product of an insect that lives off these cacti. 
+It's being produced in large amounts, 150 to 180 metric tons per year in the Canary Islands in Peru, and it's big business. 
+One gram of cochineal costs about 30 euros. 
+One gram of gold is 30 euros. 
+So it's a very precious thing that we're using to dye our foods. 
+Now the situation in the world is going to change for you and me, for everyone on this Earth. 
+The human population is growing very rapidly and is growing exponentially. 
+Where, at the moment, we have something between six and seven billion people, it will grow to about nine billion in 2050. 
+That means that we have a lot more mouths to feed, and this is something that worries more and more people. 
+There was an FAO conference last October that was completely devoted to this. 
+How are we going to feed this world? 
+And if you look at the figures up there, it says that we have a third more mouths to feed, but we need an agricultural production increase of 70 percent. 
+And that's especially because this world population is increasing, and it's increasing, not only in numbers, but we're also getting wealthier, and anyone that gets wealthier starts to eat more and also starts to eat more meat. 
+And meat, in fact, is something that costs a lot of our agricultural production. 
+Our diet consists, [in] some part, of animal proteins, and at the moment, most of us here get it from livestock, from fish, from game. 
+And we eat quite a lot of it. 
+In the developed world it's on average 80 kilograms per person per year, which goes up to 120 in the United States and a bit lower in some other countries, but on average 80 kilograms per person per year. 
+In the developing world it's much lower. 
+It's 25 kilograms per person per year. 
+But it's increasing enormously. 
+In China in the last 20 years, it increased from 20 to 50, and it's still increasing. 
+So if a third of the world population is going to increase its meat consumption from 25 to 80 on average, and a third of the world population is living in China and in India, we're having an enormous demand on meat. 
+And of course, we are not there to say that's only for us, it's not for them. 
+They have the same share that we have. 
+Now to start with, I should say that we are eating way too much meat in the Western world. 
+We could do with much, much less — and I know, I've been a vegetarian for a long time, and you can easily do without anything. 
+You'll get proteins in any kind of food anyway. 
+But then there's a lot of problems that come with meat production, and we're being faced with that more and more often. 
+The first problem that we're facing is human health. 
+Pigs are quite like us. 
+They're even models in medicine, and we can even transplant organs from a pig to a human. 
+That means that pigs also share diseases with us. 
+And a pig disease, a pig virus, and a human virus can both proliferate, and because of their kind of reproduction, they can combine and produce a new virus. 
+This has happened in the Netherlands in the 1990s during the classical swine fever outbreak. 
+You get a new disease that can be deadly. 
+We eat insects — they're so distantly related from us that this doesn't happen. 
+So that's one point for insects. 
+(Laughter) And there's the conversion factor. 
+You take 10 kilograms of feed, you can get one kilogram of beef, but you can get nine kilograms of locust meat. 
+So if you would be an entrepreneur, what would you do? 
+With 10 kilograms of input, you can get either one or nine kg. of output. 
+So far we're taking the one, or up to five kilograms of output. 
+We're not taking the bonus yet. 
+We're not taking the nine kilograms of output yet. 
+So that's two points for insects. 
+(Laughter) And there's the environment. 
+If we take 10 kilograms of food — (Laughter) and it results in one kilogram of beef, the other nine kilograms are waste, and a lot of that is manure. 
+If you produce insects, you have less manure per kilogram of meat that you produce. 
+So less waste. 
+Furthermore, per kilogram of manure, you have much, much less ammonia and fewer greenhouse gases when you have insect manure than when you have cow manure. 
+So you have less waste, and the waste that you have is not as environmental malign as it is with cow dung. 
+So that's three points for insects. 
+(Laughter) Now there's a big "" if, "" of course, and it is if insects produce meat that is of good quality. 
+Well there have been all kinds of analyses and in terms of protein, or fat, or vitamins, it's very good. 
+In fact, it's comparable to anything we eat as meat at the moment. 
+And even in terms of calories, it is very good. 
+One kilogram of grasshoppers has the same amount of calories as 10 hot dogs, or six Big Macs. 
+So that's four points for insects. 
+(Laughter) I can go on, and I could make many more points for insects, but time doesn't allow this. 
+So the question is, why not eat insects? 
+I gave you at least four arguments in favor. 
+We'll have to. 
+Even if you don't like it, you'll have to get used to this because at the moment, 70 percent of all our agricultural land is being used to produce livestock. 
+That's not only the land where the livestock is walking and feeding, but it's also other areas where the feed is being produced and being transported. 
+We can increase it a bit at the expense of rainforests, but there's a limitation very soon. 
+And if you remember that we need to increase agricultural production by 70 percent, we're not going to make it that way. 
+We could much better change from meat, from beef, to insects. 
+And then 80 percent of the world already eats insects, so we are just a minority — in a country like the U.K., the USA, the Netherlands, anywhere. 
+On the left-hand side, you see a market in Laos where they have abundantly present all kinds of insects that you choose for dinner for the night. 
+On the right-hand side you see a grasshopper. 
+So people there are eating them, not because they're hungry, but because they think it's a delicacy. 
+It's just very good food. 
+You can vary enormously. 
+It has many benefits. 
+In fact, we have delicacy that's very much like this grasshopper: shrimps, a delicacy being sold at a high price. 
+Who wouldn't like to eat a shrimp? 
+There are a few people who don't like shrimp, but shrimp, or crabs, or crayfish, are very closely related. 
+They are delicacies. 
+In fact, a locust is a "" shrimp "" of the land, and it would make very good into our diet. 
+So why are we not eating insects yet? 
+Well that's just a matter of mindset. 
+We're not used to it, and we see insects as these organisms that are very different from us. 
+That's why we're changing the perception of insects. 
+And I'm working very hard with my colleague, Arnold van Huis, in telling people what insects are, what magnificent things they are, what magnificent jobs they do in nature. 
+And in fact, without insects, we would not be here in this room, because if the insects die out, we will soon die out as well. 
+If we die out, the insects will continue very happily. 
+(Laughter) So we have to get used to the idea of eating insects. 
+And some might think, well they're not yet available. 
+Well they are. 
+There are entrepreneurs in the Netherlands that produce them, and one of them is here in the audience, Marian Peeters, who's in the picture. 
+I predict that later this year, you'll get them in the supermarkets — not visible, but as animal protein in the food. 
+And maybe by 2020, you'll buy them just knowing that this is an insect that you're going to eat. 
+And they're being made in the most wonderful ways. 
+A Dutch chocolate maker. 
+(Music) (Applause) So there's even a lot of design to it. 
+(Laughter) Well in the Netherlands, we have an innovative Minister of Agriculture, and she puts the insects on the menu in her restaurant in her ministry. 
+And when she got all the Ministers of Agriculture of the E.U. 
+over to the Hague recently, she went to a high-class restaurant, and they ate insects all together. 
+It's not something that is a hobby of mine. 
+It's really taken off the ground. 
+So why not eat insects? 
+You should try it yourself. 
+A couple of years ago, we had 1,750 people all together in a square in Wageningen town, and they ate insects at the same moment, and this was still big, big news. 
+I think soon it will not be big news anymore when we all eat insects, because it's just a normal way of doing. 
+So you can try it yourself today, and I would say, enjoy. 
+And I'm going to show to Bruno some first tries, and he can have the first bite. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Look at them first. Look at them first. 
+Marcel Dicke: It's all protein. 
+BG: That's exactly the same [one] you saw in the video actually. 
+And it looks delicious. 
+They just make it [with] nuts or something. 
+MD: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+As a little Hawaiian, my mom and auntie always told me stories about Kalaupapa — the Hawaiian leper colony surrounded by the highest sea cliffs in the world — and Father Damien, the Belgian missionary who gave his life for the Hawaiian community. 
+As a young nurse, my aunt trained the nuns caring for the remaining lepers almost a 100 years after Father Damien died of leprosy. 
+I remember stories she told about traveling down switchback cliff paths on a mule, while my uncle played her favorite hula songs on the ukulele all the way down to Kalaupapa. 
+You see, as a youngster, I was always curious about a few things. 
+First was why a Belgian missionary chose to live in complete isolation in Kalaupapa, knowing he would inevitably contract leprosy from the community of people he sought to help. 
+And secondly, where did the leprosy bacteria come from? 
+And why were Kānaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawaii, so susceptible to developing leprosy, or "" mai Pake? "" This got my curious about what makes us unique as Hawaiians — namely, our genetic makeup. 
+But it wasn't until high school, through the Human Genome Project, that I realized I wasn't alone in trying to connect our unique genetic ancestry to our potential health, wellness and illness. 
+You see, the 2.7 billion-dollar project promised an era of predictive and preventative medicine based on our unique genetic makeup. 
+So to me it always seemed obvious that in order to achieve this dream, we would need to sequence a diverse cohort of people to obtain the full spectrum of human genetic variation on the planet. 
+That's why 10 years later, it continues to shock me, knowing that 96 percent of genome studies associating common genetic variation with specific diseases have focused exclusively on individuals of European ancestry. 
+Now you don't need a PhD to see that that leaves four percent for the rest of diversity. 
+And in my own searching, I've discovered that far less than one percent have actually focused on indigenous communities, like myself. 
+So that begs the question: Who is the Human Genome Project actually for? 
+Just like we have different colored eyes and hair, we metabolize drugs differently based on the variation in our genomes. 
+So how many of you would be shocked to learn that 95 percent of clinical trials have also exclusively featured individuals of European ancestry? 
+This bias and systematic lack of engagement of indigenous people in both clinical trials and genome studies is partially the result of a history of distrust. 
+For example, in 1989, researchers from Arizona State University obtained blood samples from Arizona's Havasupai tribe, promising to alleviate the burden of type 2 diabetes that was plaguing their community, only to turn around and use those exact same samples — without the Havasupai's consent — to study rates of schizophrenia, inbreeding, and challenge the Havasupai's origin story. 
+Now despite this history of distrust, I still believe that indigenous people can benefit from genetic research. 
+And if we don't do something soon, the gap in health disparities is going to continue to widen. 
+Hawaii, for example, has the longest life expectancy on average of any state in the US, yet native Hawaiians like myself die a full decade before our non-native counterparts, because we have some of the highest rates of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and the number one and number two killers in the US: cardiovascular disease and cancer. 
+So how do we ensure the populations of people that need genome sequencing the most are not the last to benefit? 
+My vision is to make genetic research more native, to indigenize genome sequencing technology. 
+Traditionally, genomes are sequenced in laboratories. 
+Here's an image of your classic genome sequencer. 
+It's huge. 
+It's the size of a refrigerator. 
+There's this obvious physical limitation. 
+But what if you could sequence genomes on the fly? 
+What if you could fit a genome sequencer in your pocket? 
+This nanopore-based sequencer is one 10,000th the size of your traditional genome sequencer. 
+It doesn't have the same physical limitations, in that it's not tethered to a lab bench with extraneous cords, large vats of chemicals or computer monitors. 
+It allows us to de-black box genome sequencing technology development in a way that's immersive and collaborative, activating and empowering indigenous communities... 
+as citizen scientists. 
+100 years later in Kalaupapa, we now have the technology to sequence leprosy bacteria in real time, using mobile genome sequencers, remote access to the Internet and cloud computation. 
+But only if that's what Hawaiian people want. 
+In our space, on our terms. 
+IndiGenomics is about science for the people by the people. 
+We'll be starting with a tribal consultation resource, focused on educating indigenous communities on the potential use and misuse of genetic information. 
+Eventually we'd like to have our own IndiGenomics research institute to conduct our own experiments and educate the next generation of indigenous scientists. 
+In the end, indigenous people need to be partners in and not subjects of genetic research. 
+And for those on the outside, just as Father Damien did, the research community needs to immerse itself in indigenous culture or die trying. 
+Mahalo. 
+
+Namaste. Salaam. 
+Shalom. Sat Sri Akal. 
+Greetings to all of you from Pakistan. 
+It is often said that we fear that which we do not know. 
+And Pakistan, in this particular vein, is very similar. 
+Because it has provoked, and does provoke, a visceral anxiety in the bellies of many a Western soul, especially when viewed through the monochromatic lens of turbulence and turmoil. 
+But there are many other dimensions to Pakistan. 
+And what follows is a stream of images, a series of images captured by some of Pakistan's most dynamic and young photographers, that aims to give you an alternative glimpse, a look inside the hearts and minds of some ordinary Pakistani citizens. 
+Here are some of the stories they wanted us to share with you. 
+My name is Abdul Khan. I come from Peshawar. 
+I hope that you will be able to see not just my Taliban-like beard, but also the richness and color of my perceptions, aspirations and dreams, as rich and colorful as the satchels that I sell. 
+My name is Meher and this is my friend Irim. 
+I hope to become a vet when I grow up so that I can take care of stray cats and dogs who wander around the streets of the village that I live near Gilgit, northern Pakistan. 
+My name is Kailash. And I like to enrich lives through technicolored glass. 
+Madame, would you like some of those orange bangles with the pink polka dots? 
+My name is Zamin. 
+And I'm an IDP, an internally displaced person, from Swat. 
+Do you see me on the other side of this fence? 
+Do I matter, or really exist for you? 
+My name is Iman. I am a fashion model, an up-and-coming model from Lahore. 
+Do you see me simply smothered in cloth? 
+Or can you move beyond my veil and see me for who I truly am inside? 
+My name is Ahmed. I am an Afghan refugee from the Khyber agency. 
+I have come from a place of intense darkness. 
+And that is why I want to illuminate the world. 
+My name is Papusay. 
+My heart and drum beat as one. 
+If religion is the opium of the masses, then for me, music is my one and only ganja. 
+A rising tide lifts all boats. 
+And the rising tide of India's spectacular economic growth has lifted over 400 million Indians into a buoyant middle class. 
+But there are still over 650 million Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, who remain washed up on the shores of poverty. 
+Therefore as India and Pakistan, as you and I, it behooves us to transcend our differences, to celebrate our diversity, to leverage our common humanity. 
+Our collective vision at Naya Jeevan, which for many of you, as you all recognize, means "" new life "" in Urdu and Hindi, is to rejuvenate the lives of millions of low income families by providing them with affordable access to catastrophic health care. 
+Indeed it is the emerging world's first HMO for the urban working poor. 
+Why should we do this as Indians and Pakistanis? 
+We are but two threads cut from the same cloth. 
+And if our fates are intertwined, then we believe that it is good karma, it is good fortune. 
+And for many of us, our fortunes do indeed lie at the bottom of the pyramid. Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Fantastic. Just stay up here. 
+That was fantastic. 
+I found that really moving. 
+You know, we fought hard to get at least a small Pakistani contingent to come. 
+It felt like it was really important. 
+They went through a lot to get here. 
+Would the Pakistanis please just stand up please? 
+I just really wanted to acknowledge you. 
+(Applause) Thank you so much. 
+
+So I want to talk to you about two things tonight. 
+Number one: Teaching surgery and doing surgery is really hard. 
+And second, that language is one of the most profound things that separate us all over the world. 
+And in my little corner of the world, these two things are actually related, and I want to tell you how tonight. 
+Now, nobody wants an operation. 
+Who here has had surgery? 
+Did you want it? 
+Keep your hands up if you wanted an operation. 
+Nobody wants an operation. 
+In particular, nobody wants an operation with tools like these through large incisions that cause a lot of pain, that cause a lot of time out of work or out of school, that leave a big scar. 
+But if you have to have an operation, what you really want is a minimally invasive operation. 
+That's what I want to talk to you about tonight — how doing and teaching this type of surgery led us on a search for a better universal translator. 
+Now, this type of surgery is hard, and it starts by putting people to sleep, putting carbon dioxide in their abdomen, blowing them up like a balloon, sticking one of these sharp pointy things into their abdomen — it's dangerous stuff — and taking instruments and watching it on a TV screen. 
+So let's see what it looks like. 
+So this is gallbladder surgery. 
+We perform a million of these a year in the United States alone. 
+This is the real thing. There's no blood. 
+And you can see how focused the surgeons are, how much concentration it takes. 
+You can see it in their faces. 
+It's hard to teach, and it's not all that easy to learn. 
+We do about five million of these in the United States and maybe 20 million of these worldwide. 
+All right, you've all heard the term: "He's a born surgeon." 
+Let me tell you, surgeons are not born. 
+Surgeons are not made either. 
+There are no little tanks where we're making surgeons. 
+Surgeons are trained one step at a time. 
+It starts with a foundation, basic skills. 
+We build on that and we take people, hopefully, to the operating room where they learn to be an assistant. 
+Then we teach them to be a surgeon in training. 
+And when they do all of that for about five years, they get the coveted board certification. 
+If you need surgery, you want to be operated on by a board-certified surgeon. 
+You get your board certificate, and you can go out into practice. 
+And eventually, if you're lucky, you achieve mastery. 
+Now that foundation is so important that a number of us from the largest general surgery society in the United States, SAGES, started in the late 1990s a training program that would assure that every surgeon who practices minimally invasive surgery would have a strong foundation of knowledge and skills necessary to go on and do procedures. 
+Now the science behind this is so potent that it became required by the American Board of Surgery in order for a young surgeon to become board certified. 
+It's not a lecture, it's not a course, it's all of that plus a high-stakes assessment. 
+It's hard. 
+Now just this past year, one of our partners, the American College of Surgeons, teamed up with us to make an announcement that all surgeons should be FLS (Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery) -certified before they do minimally invasive surgery. 
+And are we talking about just people here in the U.S. and Canada? 
+No, we just said all surgeons. 
+So to lift this education and training worldwide is a very large task, something I'm very personally excited about as we travel around the world. 
+SAGES does surgery all over the world, teaching and educating surgeons. 
+So we have a problem, and one of the problems is distance. 
+We can't travel everywhere. 
+We need to make the world a smaller place. 
+And I think that we can develop some tools to do so. 
+And one of the tools I like personally is using video. 
+So I was inspired by a friend. 
+This is Allan Okrainec from Toronto. 
+And he proved that you could actually teach people to do surgery using video conferencing. 
+So here's Allan teaching an English-speaking surgeon in Africa these basic fundamental skills necessary to do minimally invasive surgery. 
+Very inspiring. 
+But for this examination, which is really hard, we have a problem. 
+Even people who say they speak English, only 14 percent pass. 
+Because for them it's not a surgery test, it's an English test. 
+Let me bring it to you locally. 
+I work at the Cambridge Hospital. 
+It's the primary Harvard Medical School teaching facility. 
+We have more than 100 translators covering 63 languages, and we spend millions of dollars just in our little hospital. 
+It's a big labor-intensive effort. 
+If you think about the worldwide burden of trying to talk to your patients — not just teaching surgeons, just trying to talk to your patients — there aren't enough translators in the world. 
+We need to employ technology to assist us in this quest. 
+At our hospital we see everybody from Harvard professors to people who just got here last week. 
+And you have no idea how hard it is to talk to somebody or take care of somebody you can't talk to. 
+And there isn't always a translator available. 
+So we need tools. 
+We need a universal translator. 
+One of the things that I want to leave you with as you think about this talk is that this talk is not just about us preaching to the world. 
+It's really about setting up a dialogue. 
+We have a lot to learn. 
+Here in the United States we spend more money per person for outcomes that are not better than many countries in the world. 
+Maybe we have something to learn as well. 
+So I'm passionate about teaching these FLS skills all over the world. 
+This past year I've been in Latin America, I've been in China, talking about the fundamentals of laparoscopic surgery. 
+And everywhere I go the barrier is: "We want this, but we need it in our language." 
+So here's what we think we want to do: Imagine giving a lecture and being able to talk to people in their own native language simultaneously. 
+I want to talk to the people in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe seamlessly, accurately and in a cost-effective fashion using technology. 
+And it has to be bi-directional. 
+They have to be able to teach us something as well. 
+It's a big task. 
+So we looked for a universal translator; I thought there would be one out there. 
+Your webpage has translation, your cellphone has translation, but nothing that's good enough to teach surgery. 
+Because we need a lexicon. What is a lexicon? 
+A lexicon is a body of words that describes a domain. 
+I need to have a health care lexicon. 
+And in that I need a surgery lexicon. 
+That's a tall order. We have to work at it. 
+So let me show you what we're doing. 
+This is research — can't buy it. 
+We're working with the folks at IBM Research from the Accessibility Center to string together technologies to work towards the universal translator. 
+It starts with a framework system where when the surgeon delivers the lecture using a framework of captioning technology, we then add another technology to do video conferencing. 
+But we don't have the words yet, so we add a third technology. 
+And now we've got the words, and we can apply the special sauce: the translation. 
+We get the words up in a window and then apply the magic. 
+We work with a fourth technology. 
+And we currently have access to eleven language pairs. 
+More to come as we think about trying to make the world a smaller place. 
+And I'd like to show you our prototype of stringing all of these technologies that don't necessarily always talk to each other to become something useful. 
+Narrator: Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery. 
+Module five: manual skills practice. 
+Students may display captions in their native language. 
+Steven Schwaitzberg: If you're in Latin America, you click the "" I want it in Spanish "" button and out it comes in real time in Spanish. 
+But if you happen to be sitting in Beijing at the same time, by using technology in a constructive fashion, you could get it in Mandarin or you could get it in Russian — on and on and on, simultaneously without the use of human translators. 
+But that's the lectures. 
+If you remember what I told you about FLS at the beginning, it's knowledge and skills. 
+The difference in an operation between doing something successfully and not may be moving your hand this much. 
+So we're going to take it one step further; we've brought my friend Allan back. 
+Allan Okrainec: Today we're going to practice suturing. 
+This is how you hold the needle. 
+Grab the needle at the tip. 
+It's important to be accurate. 
+Aim for the black dots. 
+Orient your loop this way. 
+Now go ahead and cut. 
+Very good Oscar. I'll see you next week. 
+SS: So that's what we're working on in our quest for the universal translator. 
+We want it to be bi-directional. 
+We have a need to learn as well as to teach. 
+I can think of a million uses for a tool like this. 
+As we think about intersecting technologies — everybody has a cell phone with a camera — we could use this everywhere, whether it be health care, patient care, engineering, law, conferencing, translating videos. 
+This is a ubiquitous tool. 
+In order to break down our barriers, we have to learn to talk to people, to demand that people work on translation. 
+We need it for our everyday life, in order to make the world a smaller place. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is an image of the planet Earth. 
+It looks very much like the Apollo pictures that are very well known. 
+There is something different; you can click on it, and if you click on it, you can zoom in on almost any place on the Earth. 
+For instance, this is a bird's-eye view of the EPFL campus. 
+In many cases, you can also see how a building looks from a nearby street. 
+This is pretty amazing. 
+But there's something missing in this wonderful tour: It's time. 
+i'm not really sure when this picture was taken. 
+I'm not even sure it was taken at the same moment as the bird's-eye view. 
+In my lab, we develop tools to travel not only in space but also through time. 
+The kind of question we're asking is Is it possible to build something like Google Maps of the past? 
+Can I add a slider on top of Google Maps and just change the year, seeing how it was 100 years before, 1,000 years before? 
+Is that possible? 
+Can I reconstruct social networks of the past? 
+Can I make a Facebook of the Middle Ages? 
+So, can I build time machines? 
+Maybe we can just say, "" No, it's not possible. "" Or, maybe, we can think of it from an information point of view. 
+This is what I call the information mushroom. 
+Vertically, you have the time. 
+and horizontally, the amount of digital information available. 
+Obviously, in the last 10 years, we have much information. 
+And obviously the more we go in the past, the less information we have. 
+If we want to build something like Google Maps of the past, or Facebook of the past, we need to enlarge this space, we need to make that like a rectangle. 
+How do we do that? 
+One way is digitization. 
+There's a lot of material available — newspaper, printed books, thousands of printed books. 
+I can digitize all these. 
+I can extract information from these. 
+Of course, the more you go in the past, the less information you will have. 
+So, it might not be enough. 
+So, I can do what historians do. 
+I can extrapolate. 
+This is what we call, in computer science, simulation. 
+If I take a log book, I can consider, it's not just a log book of a Venetian captain going to a particular journey. 
+I can consider it is actually a log book which is representative of many journeys of that period. 
+I'm extrapolating. 
+If I have a painting of a facade, I can consider it's not just that particular building, but probably it also shares the same grammar of buildings where we lost any information. 
+So if we want to construct a time machine, we need two things. 
+We need very large archives, and we need excellent specialists. 
+The Venice Time Machine, the project I'm going to talk to you about, is a joint project between the EPFL and the University of Venice Ca'Foscari. 
+There's something very peculiar about Venice, that its administration has been very, very bureaucratic. 
+They've been keeping track of everything, almost like Google today. 
+At the Archivio di Stato, you have 80 kilometers of archives documenting every aspect of the life of Venice over more than 1,000 years. 
+You have every boat that goes out, every boat that comes in. 
+You have every change that was made in the city. 
+This is all there. 
+We are setting up a 10-year digitization program which has the objective of transforming this immense archive into a giant information system. 
+The type of objective we want to reach is 450 books a day that can be digitized. 
+Of course, when you digitize, that's not enough, because these documents, most of them are in Latin, in Tuscan, in Venetian dialect, so you need to transcribe them, to translate them in some cases, to index them, and this is obviously not easy. 
+In particular, traditional optical character recognition method that can be used for printed manuscripts, they do not work well on the handwritten document. 
+So the solution is actually to take inspiration from another domain: speech recognition. 
+This is a domain of something that seems impossible, which can actually be done, simply by putting additional constraints. 
+If you have a very good model of a language which is used, if you have a very good model of a document, how well they are structured. 
+And these are administrative documents. 
+They are well structured in many cases. 
+If you divide this huge archive into smaller subsets where a smaller subset actually shares similar features, then there's a chance of success. 
+If we reach that stage, then there's something else: we can extract from this document events. 
+Actually probably 10 billion events can be extracted from this archive. 
+And this giant information system can be searched in many ways. 
+You can ask questions like, "Who lived in this palazzo in 1323?" 
+"" How much cost a sea bream at the Realto market in 1434? "" "" What was the salary of a glass maker in Murano maybe over a decade? "" You can ask even bigger questions because it will be semantically coded. 
+And then what you can do is put that in space, because much of this information is spatial. 
+And from that, you can do things like reconstructing this extraordinary journey of that city that managed to have a sustainable development over a thousand years, managing to have all the time a form of equilibrium with its environment. 
+You can reconstruct that journey, visualize it in many different ways. 
+But of course, you cannot understand Venice if you just look at the city. 
+You have to put it in a larger European context. 
+So the idea is also to document all the things that worked at the European level. 
+We can reconstruct also the journey of the Venetian maritime empire, how it progressively controlled the Adriatic Sea, how it became the most powerful medieval empire of its time, controlling most of the sea routes from the east to the south. 
+But you can even do other things, because in these maritime routes, there are regular patterns. 
+You can go one step beyond and actually create a simulation system, create a Mediterranean simulator which is capable actually of reconstructing even the information we are missing, which would enable us to have questions you could ask like if you were using a route planner. 
+"" If I am in Corfu in June 1323 and want to go to Constantinople, where can I take a boat? "" Probably we can answer this question with one or two or three days' precision. 
+"How much will it cost?" 
+"What are the chance of encountering pirates?" 
+Of course, you understand, the central scientific challenge of a project like this one is qualifying, quantifying and representing uncertainty and inconsistency at each step of this process. 
+There are errors everywhere, errors in the document, it's the wrong name of the captain, some of the boats never actually took to sea. 
+There are errors in translation, interpretative biases, and on top of that, if you add algorithmic processes, you're going to have errors in recognition, errors in extraction, so you have very, very uncertain data. 
+So how can we detect and correct these inconsistencies? 
+How can we represent that form of uncertainty? 
+It's difficult. One thing you can do is document each step of the process, not only coding the historical information but what we call the meta-historical information, how is historical knowledge constructed, documenting each step. 
+That will not guarantee that we actually converge toward a single story of Venice, but probably we can actually reconstruct a fully documented potential story of Venice. 
+Maybe there's not a single map. 
+Maybe there are several maps. 
+The system should allow for that, because we have to deal with a new form of uncertainty, which is really new for this type of giant databases. 
+And how should we communicate this new research to a large audience? 
+Again, Venice is extraordinary for that. 
+With the millions of visitors that come every year, it's actually one of the best places to try to invent the museum of the future. 
+Imagine, horizontally you see the reconstructed map of a given year, and vertically, you see the document that served the reconstruction, paintings, for instance. 
+Imagine an immersive system that permits to go and dive and reconstruct the Venice of a given year, some experience you could share within a group. 
+On the contrary, imagine actually that you start from a document, a Venetian manuscript, and you show, actually, what you can construct out of it, how it is decoded, how the context of that document can be recreated. 
+This is an image from an exhibit which is currently conducted in Geneva with that type of system. 
+So to conclude, we can say that research in the humanities is about to undergo an evolution which is maybe similar to what happened to life sciences 30 years ago. 
+It's really a question of scale. 
+We see projects which are much beyond any single research team can do, and this is really new for the humanities, which very often take the habit of working in small groups or only with a couple of researchers. 
+When you visit the Archivio di Stato, you feel this is beyond what any single team can do, and that should be a joint and common effort. 
+So what we must do for this paradigm shift is actually foster a new generation of "" digital humanists "" that are going to be ready for this shift. 
+I thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So yesterday, I was out in the street in front of this building, and I was walking down the sidewalk, and I had company, several of us, and we were all abiding by the rules of walking down sidewalks. 
+We're not talking each other. We're facing forward. 
+We're moving. 
+When the person in front of me slows down. 
+And so I'm watching him, and he slows down, and finally he stops. 
+Well, that wasn't fast enough for me, so I put on my turn signal, and I walked around him, and as I walked, I looked to see what he was doing, and he was doing this. 
+He was texting, and he couldn't text and walk at the same time. 
+Now we could approach this from a working memory perspective or from a multitasking perspective. 
+We're going to do working memory today. 
+Now, working memory is that part of our consciousness that we are aware of at any given time of day. 
+You're going it right now. 
+It's not something we can turn off. 
+If you turn it off, that's called a coma, okay? 
+So right now, you're doing just fine. 
+Now working memory has four basic components. 
+It allows us to store some immediate experiences and a little bit of knowledge. 
+It allows us to reach back into our long-term memory and pull some of that in as we need it, mixes it, processes it in light of whatever our current goal is. 
+Now the current goal isn't something like, I want to be president or the best surfer in the world. 
+It's more mundane. I'd like that cookie, or I need to figure out how to get into my hotel room. 
+Now working memory capacity is our ability to leverage that, our ability to take what we know and what we can hang onto and leverage it in ways that allow us to satisfy our current goal. Now working memory capacity 
+has a fairly long history, and it's associated with a lot of positive effects. 
+People with high working memory capacity tend to be good storytellers. 
+They tend to solve and do well on standardized tests, however important that is. 
+They're able to have high levels of writing ability. 
+They're also able to reason at high levels. 
+So what we're going to do here is play a little bit with some of that. 
+So I'm going to ask you to perform a couple tasks, and we're going to take your working memory out for a ride. 
+You up for that? Okay. 
+I'm going to give you five words, and I just want you to hang on to them. 
+Don't write them down. Just hang on to them. 
+Five words. 
+While you're hanging on to them, I'm going to ask you to answer three questions. 
+I want to see what happens with those words. 
+So here's the words: tree, highway, mirror, Saturn and electrode. 
+So far so good? 
+Okay. What I want you to do is I want you to tell me what the answer is to 23 times eight. 
+Just shout it out. 
+(Mumbling) (Laughter) In fact it's — (Mumbling) — exactly. (Laughter) All right. I want you to take out your left hand and I want you to go, "" One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. "" It's a neurological test, just in case you were wondering. 
+All right, now what I want you to do is to recite the last five letters of the English alphabet backwards. 
+You should have started with Z. 
+(Laughter) All right. How many people here are still pretty sure you've got all five words? 
+Okay. Typically we end up with about less than half, right, which is normal. There will be a range. 
+Some people can hang on to five. 
+Some people can hang on to 10. 
+Some will be down to two or three. 
+What we know is this is really important to the way we function, right? 
+And it's going to be really important here at TED because you're going to be exposed to so many different ideas. 
+Now the problem that we have is that life comes at us, and it comes at us very quickly, and what we need to do is to take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it with a working memory that's about the size of a pea. 
+Now don't get me wrong, working memory is awesome. 
+Working memory allows us to investigate our current experience as we move forward. 
+It allows us to make sense of the world around us. 
+But it does have certain limits. 
+Now working memory is great for allowing us to communicate. 
+We can have a conversation, and I can build a narrative around that so I know where we've been and where we're going and how to contribute to this conversation. 
+It allows us to problem-solve, critical think. 
+We can be in the middle of a meeting, listen to somebody's presentation, evaluate it, decide whether or not we like it, ask follow-up questions. 
+All of that occurs within working memory. 
+It also allows us to go to the store and allows us to get milk and eggs and cheese when what we're really looking for is Red Bull and bacon. (Laughter) Gotta make sure we're getting what we're looking for. 
+Now, a central issue with working memory is that it's limited. 
+It's limited in capacity, limited in duration, limited in focus. 
+We tend to remember about four things. 
+Okay? It used to be seven, but with functional MRIs, apparently it's four, and we were overachieving. 
+Now we can remember those four things for about 10 to 20 seconds unless we do something with it, unless we process it, unless we apply it to something, unless we talk to somebody about it. 
+When we think about working memory, we have to realize that this limited capacity has lots of different impacts on us. 
+Have you ever walked from one room to another and then forgotten why you're there? 
+You do know the solution to that, right? 
+You go back to that original room. (Laughter) Have you ever forgotten your keys? 
+You ever forgotten your car? 
+You ever forgotten your kids? 
+Have you ever been involved in a conversation, and you realize that the conversation to your left is actually more interesting? (Laughter) So you're nodding and you're smiling, but you're really paying attention to this one over here, until you hear that last word go up, and you realize, you've been asked a question. (Laughter) And you're really hoping the answer is no, because that's what you're about to say. 
+All of that talks about working memory, what we can do and what we can't do. 
+We need to realize that working memory has a limited capacity, and that working memory capacity itself is how we negotiate that. 
+We negotiate that through strategies. 
+So what I want to do is talk a little bit about a couple of strategies here, and these will be really important because you are now in an information target-rich environment for the next several days. 
+Now the first part of this that we need to think about and we need to process our existence, our life, immediately and repeatedly. 
+We need to process what's going on the moment it happens, not 10 minutes later, not a week later, at the moment. 
+So we need to think about, well, do I agree with him? 
+What's missing? What would I like to know? 
+Do I agree with the assumptions? 
+How can I apply this in my life? 
+It's a way of processing what's going on so that we can use it later. 
+Now we also need to repeat it. We need to practice. 
+So we need to think about it here. 
+In between, we want to talk to people about it. 
+We're going to write it down, and when you get home, pull out those notes and think about them and end up practicing over time. 
+Practice for some reason became a very negative thing. 
+It's very positive. 
+The next thing is, we need to think elaboratively and we need to think illustratively. 
+Oftentimes, we think that we have to relate new knowledge to prior knowledge. 
+What we want to do is spin that around. 
+We want to take all of our existence and wrap it around that new knowledge and make all of these connections and it becomes more meaningful. 
+We also want to use imagery. We are built for images. 
+We need to take advantage of that. 
+Think about things in images, write things down that way. 
+If you read a book, pull things up. 
+I just got through reading "" The Great Gatsby, "" and I have a perfect idea of what he looks like in my head, so my own version. 
+The last one is organization and support. 
+We are meaning-making machines. It's what we do. 
+We try to make meaning out of everything that happens to us. 
+Organization helps, so we need to structure what we're doing in ways that make sense. 
+If we are providing knowledge and experience, we need to structure that. 
+And the last one is support. 
+We all started as novices. 
+Everything we do is an approximation of sophistication. 
+We should expect it to change over time. We have to support that. 
+The support may come in asking people questions, giving them a sheet of paper that has an organizational chart on it or has some guiding images, but we need to support it. 
+Now, the final piece of this, the take-home message from a working memory capacity standpoint is this: what we process, we learn. 
+If we're not processing life, we're not living it. 
+Live life. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The greatest irony in global health is that the poorest countries carry the largest disease burden. 
+If we resize the countries of the globe in proportion to the subject of interest, we see that Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst hit region by HIV / AIDS. 
+This is the most devastating epidemic of our time. 
+We also see that this region has the least capability in terms of dealing with the disease. 
+There are very few doctors and, quite frankly, these countries do not have the resources that are needed to cope with such epidemics. 
+So what the Western countries, developed countries, have generously done is they have proposed to provide free drugs to all people in Third World countries who actually can't afford these medications. 
+And this has already saved millions of lives, and it has prevented entire economies from capsizing in Sub-Saharan Africa. 
+But there is a fundamental problem that is killing the efforts in fighting this disease, because if you keep throwing drugs out at people who don't have diagnostic services, you end up creating a problem of drug resistance. 
+This is already beginning to happen in Sub-Saharan Africa. 
+The problem is that, what begins as a tragedy in the Third World could easily become a global problem. 
+And the last thing we want to see is drug-resistant strains of HIV popping up all over the world, because it will make treatment more expensive and it could also restore the pre-ARV carnage of HIV / AIDS. 
+I experienced this firsthand as a high school student in Uganda. 
+This was in the 90s during the peak of the HIV epidemic, before there were any ARVs in Sub-Saharan Africa. 
+And during that time, I actually lost more relatives, as well as the teachers who taught me, to HIV / AIDS. 
+So this became one of the driving passions of my life, to help find real solutions that could address these kinds of problems. 
+We all know about the miracle of miniaturization. 
+Back in the day, computers used to fill this entire room, and people actually used to work inside the computers. 
+But what electronic miniaturization has done is that it has allowed people to shrink technology into a cell phone. 
+And I'm sure everyone here enjoys cell phones that can actually be used in the remote areas of the world, in the Third World countries. 
+The good news is that the same technology that allowed miniaturization of electronics is now allowing us to miniaturize biological laboratories. 
+So, right now, we can actually miniaturize biological and chemistry laboratories onto microfluidic chips. 
+I was very lucky to come to the US right after high school, and was able to work on this technology and develop some devices. 
+This is a microfluidic chip that I developed. 
+A close look at how the technology works: These are channels that are about the size of a human hair — so you have integrated valves, pumps, mixers and injectors — so you can fit entire diagnostic experiments onto a microfluidic system. 
+So what I plan to do with this technology is to actually take the current state of the technology and build an HIV kit in a microfluidic system. 
+So, with one microfluidic chip, which is the size of an iPhone, you can actually diagnose 100 patients at the same time. 
+For each patient, we will be able to do up to 100 different viral loads per patient. 
+And this is only done in four hours, 50 times faster than the current state of the art, at a cost that will be five to 500 times cheaper than the current options. 
+So this will allow us to create personalized medicines in the Third World at a cost that is actually achievable and make the world a safer place. 
+I invite your interest as well as your involvement in driving this vision to a point of practical reality. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+But it seemed that we didn't win each individual game by the margin that some of our alumni had predicted — (Laughter) And quite frequently I really felt that they had backed up their predictions in a more materialistic manner. (Laughter) 
+And I knew how Mr. Webster defined it, as the accumulation of material possessions or the attainment of a position of power or prestige, or something of that sort, worthy accomplishments perhaps, but in my opinion, not necessarily indicative of success. 
+Never try to be better than someone else, always learn from others. 
+If you get too engrossed and involved and concerned in regard to the things over which you have no control, it will adversely affect the things over which you have control. 
+The Master said, 'Thou didst thy best, that is success.' "" From those things, and one other perhaps, I coined my own definition of success, which is: Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you're capable. 
+I ran across other things. 
+There are some things that helped me, I think, be better than I would have been. 
+One was just a little verse that said, "" No written word, no spoken plea can teach our youth what they should be; nor all the books on all the shelves — it's what the teachers are themselves. "" That made an impression on me in the 1930s. 
+Maybe it's because Dad used to read to us at night, by coal oil lamp — we didn't have electricity in our farm home. 
+And about the same time I ran across this one verse, I ran across another one. 
+Then she came up and said, "" They ask me why I teach, and I reply, 'Where could I find such splendid company?' There sits a statesman, strong, unbiased, wise; another Daniel Webster, silver-tongued. 
+A doctor sits beside him, whose quick, steady hand may mend a bone, or stem the life-blood's flow. 
+And there a builder; upward rise the arch of a church he builds, wherein that minister may speak the word of God, and lead a stumbling soul to touch the Christ. 
+And all about, a gathering of teachers, farmers, merchants, laborers — those who work and vote and build and plan and pray into a great tomorrow. 
+And that gives you a great deal of pleasure, to see them go on. 
+So that was the idea that I tried to get across to the youngsters under my supervision. 
+There was a time when I made them wear jackets and shirts and ties. 
+Then I saw our chancellor coming to school in denims and turtlenecks, and thought, it's not right for me to keep this other [rule] so I let them just — they had to be neat and clean. 
+I believe in time; very important. 
+When you get older, it doesn't make any difference, but — "" (Laughter) So I did believe: on time. 
+One word of profanity, and you are out of here for the day. 
+If I see it in a game, you're going to come out and sit on the bench. 
+I didn't want that. I used to tell them I was paid to do that. 
+That's my job. I'm paid to do it. Pitifully poor, but I am paid to do it. 
+Not like the coaches today, for gracious sakes, no. 
+It's a little different than it was in my day. 
+It's something like this: And I had blocks in the pyramid, and the cornerstones being industriousness and enthusiasm, working hard and enjoying what you're doing, coming up to the apex, according to my definition of success. 
+And right at the top, faith and patience. 
+Not just give it word service, believe that things will work out as they should, providing we do what we should. 
+I worked on this for some 14 years, and I think it helped me become a better teacher. 
+But it all revolved around that original definition of success. 
+He spelled Moriarty with only one 'i'. 
+You'd be surprised how many also told him that that was one more than he had in his head at various times. 
+He called it "" The Road Ahead, or the Road Behind. "" He said, "" Sometimes I think the Fates must grin as we denounce them and insist the only reason we can't win, is the Fates themselves have missed. 
+Yet there lives on the ancient claim: we win or lose within ourselves. 
+You and I know deeper down, there's always a chance to win the crown. 
+But when we fail to give our best, we simply haven't met the test, of giving all and saving none until the game is really won; of showing what is meant by grit; of playing through when others quit; of playing through, not letting up. 
+Of dreaming there's a goal ahead; of hoping when our dreams are dead; of praying when our hopes have fled; yet losing, not afraid to fall, if, bravely, we have given all. 
+And so the Fates are seldom wrong, no matter how they twist and wind. 
+It's you and I who make our fates — we open up or close the gates on the road ahead or the road behind. "" Reminds me of another set of threes that my dad tried to get across to us: Don't whine. Don't complain. Don't make excuses. 
+I tried to get across, too, that — my opponents will tell you — you never heard me mention winning. 
+And I just wanted them to be able to hold their head up after a game. 
+I used to say that when a game is over, and you see somebody that didn't know the outcome, I hope they couldn't tell by your actions whether you outscored an opponent or the opponent outscored you. 
+That's what really matters: if you make an effort to do the best you can regularly, the results will be about what they should be. 
+And that's what I wanted from them more than anything else. 
+But I wanted the score of a game to be the byproduct of these other things, and not the end itself. 
+I believe it was one great philosopher who said — no, no — Cervantes. 
+There again, it's getting the players to get that self-satisfaction, in knowing that they'd made the effort to do the best of which they are capable. 
+As far as the individuals are concerned — I was asked one time about that, and they said, "" Suppose that you, in some way, could make the perfect player. 
+What would you want? "" And I said, "" Well, I'd want one that knew why he was at UCLA: to get an education, he was a good student, really knew why he was there in the first place. 
+I'd want him to be unselfish, and look for the pass first and not shoot all the time. 
+And I wanted them to be able to shoot from the outside. 
+(Laughter) I'd want them to be able to rebound well at both ends, too. 
+Why not just take someone like Keith Wilkes and let it go at that. 
+He had the qualifications. 
+I thought, "" Oh gracious, if these two players, either one of them "" — they were different years, but I thought about each one at the time he was there — "" Oh, if he ever makes the varsity, our varsity must be pretty miserable, if he's good enough to make it. "" And you know, one of them was a starting player for a season and a half. 
+The other one, his next year, played 32 minutes in a national championship game, Did a tremendous job for us. 
+Neither one of those youngsters could shoot very well. 
+But they had outstanding shooting percentages, because they didn't force it. 
+And so they played pretty good defense for us. 
+
+All right, I want to see a show of hands: how many of you have unfriended someone on Facebook because they said something offensive about politics or religion, childcare, food? 
+(Laughter) And how many of you know at least one person that you avoid because you just don't want to talk to them? (Laughter) 
+You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in "" My Fair Lady "": Stick to the weather and your health. 
+But these days, with climate change and anti-vaxxing, those subjects — (Laughter) are not safe either. 
+So this world that we live in, this world in which every conversation has the potential to devolve into an argument, where our politicians can't speak to one another and where even the most trivial of issues have someone fighting both passionately for it and against it, it's not normal. 
+Pew Research did a study of 10,000 American adults, and they found that at this moment, we are more polarized, we are more divided, than we ever have been in history. 
+We're less likely to compromise, which means we're not listening to each other. 
+And we make decisions about where to live, who to marry and even who our friends are going to be, based on what we already believe. 
+Again, that means we're not listening to each other. 
+A conversation requires a balance between talking and listening, and somewhere along the way, we lost that balance. 
+Now, part of that is due to technology. 
+The smartphones that you all either have in your hands or close enough that you could grab them really quickly. 
+According to Pew Research, about a third of American teenagers send more than a hundred texts a day. 
+And many of them, almost most of them, are more likely to text their friends than they are to talk to them face to face. 
+There's this great piece in The Atlantic. 
+It was written by a high school teacher named Paul Barnwell. 
+And he gave his kids a communication project. 
+He wanted to teach them how to speak on a specific subject without using notes. 
+And he said this: "" I came to realize... "" (Laughter) "" I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we fail to teach. 
+Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens, but rarely do they have an opportunity to hone their interpersonal communications skills. 
+It might sound like a funny question, but we have to ask ourselves: Is there any 21st-century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation? "" Now, I make my living talking to people: Nobel Prize winners, truck drivers, billionaires, kindergarten teachers, heads of state, plumbers. 
+I talk to people that I like. I talk to people that I don't like. 
+I talk to some people that I disagree with deeply on a personal level. 
+But I still have a great conversation with them. 
+So I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes or so teaching you how to talk and how to listen. 
+Many of you have already heard a lot of advice on this, things like look the person in the eye, think of interesting topics to discuss in advance, look, nod and smile to show that you're paying attention, repeat back what you just heard or summarize it. 
+So I want you to forget all of that. 
+(Laughter) There is no reason to learn how to show you're paying attention if you are in fact paying attention. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) Now, I actually use the exact same skills as a professional interviewer that I do in regular life. 
+So, I'm going to teach you how to interview people, and that's actually going to help you learn how to be better conversationalists. 
+Learn to have a conversation without wasting your time, without getting bored, and, please God, without offending anybody. 
+We've all had really great conversations. 
+The kind of conversation where you walk away feeling engaged and inspired, or where you feel like you've made a real connection or you've been perfectly understood. 
+There is no reason why most of your interactions can't be like that. 
+So I have 10 basic rules. I'm going to walk you through all of them, but honestly, if you just choose one of them and master it, you'll already enjoy better conversations. 
+Number one: Don't multitask. 
+And I don't mean just set down your cell phone or your tablet or your car keys or whatever is in your hand. 
+I mean, be present. 
+Be in that moment. 
+Don't think about your argument you had with your boss. 
+Don't think about what you're going to have for dinner. 
+Number two: Don't pontificate. 
+If you want to state your opinion without any opportunity for response or argument or pushback or growth, write a blog. 
+(Laughter) Now, there's a really good reason why I don't allow pundits on my show: Because they're really boring. 
+If they're conservative, they're going to hate Obama and food stamps and abortion. 
+If they're liberal, they're going to hate big banks and oil corporations and Dick Cheney. 
+And you don't want to be like that. 
+The famed therapist M. Scott Peck said that true listening requires a setting aside of oneself. 
+And sometimes that means setting aside your personal opinion. 
+He said that sensing this acceptance, the speaker will become less and less vulnerable and more and more likely to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. 
+Bill Nye: "" Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don't. "" I put it this way: Everybody is an expert in something. 
+Number three: Use open-ended questions. 
+In this case, take a cue from journalists. 
+Start your questions with who, what, when, where, why or how. 
+If you put in a complicated question, you're going to get a simple answer out. 
+If I ask you, "" Were you terrified? "" you're going to respond to the most powerful word in that sentence, which is "" terrified, "" and the answer is "" Yes, I was "" or "" No, I wasn't. "" "Were you angry?" "Yes, I was very angry." 
+Let them describe it. They're the ones that know. 
+Try asking them things like, "" What was that like? "" "How did that feel?" 
+Because then they might have to stop for a moment and think about it, and you're going to get a much more interesting response. 
+Number four: Go with the flow. 
+That means thoughts will come into your mind and you need to let them go out of your mind. 
+We've heard interviews often in which a guest is talking for several minutes and then the host comes back in and asks a question which seems like it comes out of nowhere, or it's already been answered. 
+That means the host probably stopped listening two minutes ago because he thought of this really clever question, and he was just bound and determined to say that. 
+And we do the exact same thing. 
+We're sitting there having a conversation with someone, and then we remember that time that we met Hugh Jackman in a coffee shop. 
+(Laughter) And we stop listening. 
+Stories and ideas are going to come to you. 
+You need to let them come and let them go. 
+Number five: If you don't know, say that you don't know. 
+Now, people on the radio, especially on NPR, are much more aware that they're going on the record, and so they're more careful about what they claim to be an expert in and what they claim to know for sure. 
+Do that. Err on the side of caution. 
+Talk should not be cheap. 
+Number six: Don't equate your experience with theirs. 
+If they're talking about having lost a family member, don't start talking about the time you lost a family member. 
+All experiences are individual. 
+And, more importantly, it is not about you. 
+You don't need to take that moment to prove how amazing you are or how much you've suffered. 
+(Laughter) Conversations are not a promotional opportunity. 
+Number seven: Try not to repeat yourself. 
+Especially in work conversations or in conversations with our kids, we have a point to make, so we just keep rephrasing it over and over. 
+Don't do that. 
+Number eight: Stay out of the weeds. 
+Frankly, people don't care about the years, the names, the dates, all those details that you're struggling to come up with in your mind. 
+They don't care. What they care about is you. 
+They care about what you're like, what you have in common. 
+So forget the details. Leave them out. 
+Number nine: This is not the last one, but it is the most important one. 
+Listen. 
+I cannot tell you how many really important people have said that listening is perhaps the most, the number one most important skill that you could develop. 
+Buddha said, and I'm paraphrasing, "If your mouth is open, you're not learning." 
+And Calvin Coolidge said, "" No man ever listened his way out of a job. "" (Laughter) Why do we not listen to each other? 
+Number one, we'd rather talk. 
+I can bolster my own identity. 
+But there's another reason: We get distracted. 
+The average person talks at about 225 word per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. 
+So our minds are filling in those other 275 words. 
+And look, I know, it takes effort and energy to actually pay attention to someone, but if you can't do that, you're not in a conversation. 
+You're just two people shouting out barely related sentences in the same place. 
+(Laughter) You have to listen to one another. 
+Stephen Covey said it very beautifully. 
+He said, "" Most of us don't listen with the intent to understand. 
+We listen with the intent to reply. "" One more rule, number 10, and it's this one: Be brief. 
+[A good conversation is like a miniskirt; short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject. — My Sister] (Laughter) (Applause) All of this boils down to the same basic concept, and it is this one: Be interested in other people. 
+You know, I grew up with a very famous grandfather, and there was kind of a ritual in my home. 
+People would come over to talk to my grandparents, and after they would leave, my mother would come over to us, and she'd say, "" Do you know who that was? 
+She was the runner-up to Miss America. 
+He was the mayor of Sacramento. 
+She won a Pulitzer Prize. He's a Russian ballet dancer. "" And I kind of grew up assuming everyone has some hidden, amazing thing about them. 
+And honestly, I think it's what makes me a better host. 
+I keep my mouth shut as often as I possibly can, I keep my mind open, and I'm always prepared to be amazed, and I'm never disappointed. 
+You do the same thing. 
+Go out, talk to people, listen to people, and, most importantly, be prepared to be amazed. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them. 
+And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. 
+Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. 
+In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats — tops out at 15, 16 percent. 
+A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. 
+And so I said, "" Did you just move into this office? "" And he said, "" No, we've been here about a year. "" And I said, "" Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year? "" And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom." 
+I want to start out by saying, I talk about this — about keeping women in the workforce — because I really think that's the answer. 
+In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top — Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries — the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. 
+Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. 
+What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? 
+I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. 
+I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce, who don't feel that sometimes. 
+So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone. 
+My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. 
+Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. 
+He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room. 
+And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student — and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar — and my brother — smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore. 
+The three of us take this class together. 
+He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. 
+If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. 
+Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. 
+A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. 
+And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. 
+If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, "" I'm awesome. 
+Obviously. Why are you even asking? "" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. 
+Boy, it matters a lot. 
+Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success. 
+But it's not that simple. 
+There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. 
+And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. 
+In 2002 — not so long ago — a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. 
+And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. 
+But that one word made a really big difference. 
+The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. 
+This is the complication. 
+We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not. 
+I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men. "" And I thought to myself, "" Wow, if it's me — who cares about this, obviously — giving this talk — and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women? "" We've got to get women to sit at the table. 
+The data shows this very clearly. 
+If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. 
+When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. 
+And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce. 
+(Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. 
+(Cheers) Message number three: Don't leave before you leave. 
+I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking — and I see this all the time — with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. 
+Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. 
+And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. 
+The problem is that — let's say she got pregnant that day, that day — nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath — Fast-forward two years, more often — and as I've seen it — women start thinking about this way earlier — when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time. 
+And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. 
+Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child — and then make your decisions. 
+
+I'm a lexicographer. 
+I make dictionaries. 
+And my job as a lexicographer is to try to put all the words possible into the dictionary. 
+My job is not to decide what a word is; that is your job. 
+Everybody who speaks English decides together what's a word and what's not a word. 
+Every language is just a group of people who agree to understand each other. 
+Now, sometimes when people are trying to decide whether a word is good or bad, they don't really have a good reason. 
+So they say something like, "" Because grammar! "" (Laughter) I don't actually really care about grammar too much — don't tell anybody. 
+But the word "" grammar, "" actually, there are two kinds of grammar. 
+There's the kind of grammar that lives inside your brain, and if you're a native speaker of a language or a good speaker of a language, it's the unconscious rules that you follow when you speak that language. 
+And here's an example: This is a wug, right? 
+It's a wug. 
+Now there is another one. 
+There are two of these. 
+There are two... 
+Audience: Wugs. 
+Erin McKean: Exactly! You know how to make the plural of wug. 
+This is an experiment that was invented by a professor at [Boston University] named Jean Berko Gleason back in 1958. 
+So we've been talking about this for a long time. 
+Now, these kinds of natural rules that exist in your brain, they're not like traffic laws, they're more like laws of nature. 
+And nobody has to remind you to obey a law of nature, right? 
+When you leave the house in the morning, your mom doesn't say, "" Hey, honey, I think it's going to be cold, take a hoodie, don't forget to obey the law of gravity. "" Nobody says this. 
+Now, there are other rules that are more about manners than they are about nature. 
+So you can think of a word as like a hat. 
+Once you know how hats work, nobody has to tell you, "" Don't wear hats on your feet. "" What they have to tell you is, "" Can you wear hats inside? 
+Who gets to wear a hat? 
+What are the kinds of hats you get to wear? "" Those are more of the second kind of grammar, which linguists often call usage, as opposed to grammar. 
+Now, sometimes people use this kind of rules-based grammar to discourage people from making up words. 
+And I think that is, well, stupid. 
+So, for example, people are always telling you, "Be creative, make new music, do art, invent things, science and technology." 
+But when it comes to words, they're like, "Don't! No. Creativity stops right here, whippersnappers. Give it a rest." 
+(Laughter) But that makes no sense to me. 
+I want you to make as many new words as possible. 
+And I'm going to tell you six ways that you can use to make new words in English. 
+The first way is the simplest way. 
+Basically, steal them from other languages. 
+["" Go rob other people ""] (Laughter) Linguists call this borrowing, but we never give the words back, so I'm just going to be honest and call it stealing. 
+We also take words for cool things like "" ninja, "" right? 
+We took that from Japanese, which is kind of a cool trick because ninjas are hard to steal from. 
+(Laughter) So another way that you can make words in English is by squishing two other English words together. 
+This is called compounding. 
+(Laughter) We do this all the time in English: Words like "" heartbroken, "" "" bookworm, "" "" sandcastle "" all are compounds. 
+So go ahead and make words like "" duckface, "" just don't make duckface. 
+(Laughter) Another way that you can make words in English is kind of like compounding, but instead you use so much force when you squish the words together that some parts fall off. 
+So these are blend words, like "" brunch "" is a blend of "" breakfast "" and "" lunch. "" "Motel" is a blend of "motor" and "hotel." 
+Who here knew that "" motel "" was a blend word? 
+Yeah, that word is so old in English that lots of people don't know that there are parts missing. 
+"Edutainment" is a blend of "education" and "entertainment." 
+And of course, "" electrocute "" is a blend of "" electric "" and "" execute. "" (Laughter) You can also make words by changing how they operate. 
+This is called functional shift. 
+You take a word that acts as one part of speech, and you change it into another part of speech. 
+Okay, who here knew that "" friend "" hasn't always been a verb? 
+"" Friend "" used to be noun and then we verbed it. 
+"" Commercial "" used to be an adjective and now it's a noun. 
+Another way to make words in English is back-formation. 
+You can take a word and you can kind of squish it down a little bit. 
+So for example, in English we had the word "" editor "" before we had the word "" edit. "" "Edit" was formed from "editor." 
+Sometimes these back-formations sound a little silly: Bulldozers bulldoze, butlers butle and burglers burgle. 
+(Laughter) Another way to make words in English is to take the first letters of something and squish them together. 
+So National Aeronautics and Space Administration becomes NASA. 
+And of course you can do this with anything, OMG! 
+So it doesn't matter how silly the words are. 
+They can be really good words of English. 
+"" Absquatulate "" is a perfectly good word of English. 
+"" Mugwump "" is a perfectly good word of English. 
+So the words don't have have to sound normal, they can sound really silly. 
+Why should you make words? 
+You should make words because every word is a chance to express your idea and get your meaning across. 
+And new words grab people's attention. 
+They get people to focus on what you're saying and that gives you a better chance to get your meaning across. 
+A lot of people on this stage today have said, "" In the future, you can do this, you can help with this, you can help us explore, you can help us invent. "" You can make a new word right now. 
+Go ahead, start making words today, send them to me, and I will put them in my online dictionary, Wordnik. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Do you ever feel completely overwhelmed when you're faced with a complex problem? 
+Well, I hope to change that in less than three minutes. 
+So, I hope to convince you that complex doesn't always equal complicated. 
+So for me, a well-crafted baguette, fresh out of the oven, is complex, but a curry onion green olive poppy cheese bread is complicated. 
+I'm an ecologist, and I study complexity. I love complexity. 
+And I study that in the natural world, the interconnectedness of species. 
+So here's a food web, or a map of feeding links between species that live in Alpine Lakes in the mountains of California. 
+And this is what happens to that food web when it's stocked with non-native fish that never lived there before. 
+All the grayed-out species disappear. 
+Some are actually on the brink of extinction. 
+And lakes with fish have more mosquitos, even though they eat them. 
+These effects were all unanticipated, and yet we're discovering they're predictable. 
+So I want to share with you a couple key insights about complexity we're learning from studying nature that maybe are applicable to other problems. 
+First is the simple power of good visualization tools to help untangle complexity and just encourage you to ask questions you didn't think of before. 
+For example, you could plot the flow of carbon through corporate supply chains in a corporate ecosystem, or the interconnections of habitat patches for endangered species in Yosemite National Park. 
+The next thing is that if you want to predict the effect of one species on another, if you focus only on that link, and then you black box the rest, it's actually less predictable than if you step back, consider the entire system — all the species, all the links — and from that place, hone in on the sphere of influence that matters most. 
+And we're discovering, with our research, that's often very local to the node you care about within one or two degrees. 
+So the more you step back, embrace complexity, the better chance you have of finding simple answers, and it's often different than the simple answer that you started with. 
+So let's switch gears and look at a really complex problem courtesy of the U.S. government. 
+This is a diagram of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. 
+It was front page of the New York Times a couple months ago. 
+Instantly ridiculed by the media for being so crazy complicated. 
+And the stated goal was to increase popular support for the Afghan government. 
+Clearly a complex problem, but is it complicated? 
+Well, when I saw this in the front page of the Times, I thought, "" Great. Finally something I can relate to. 
+I can sink my teeth into this. "" So let's do it. So here we go for the first time ever, a world premiere view of this spaghetti diagram as an ordered network. 
+The circled node is the one we're trying to influence — popular support for the government. 
+And so now we can look one degrees, two degrees, three degrees away from that node and eliminate three-quarters of the diagram outside that sphere of influence. 
+Within that sphere, most of those nodes are not actionable, like the harshness of the terrain, and a very small minority are actual military actions. 
+Most are non-violent and they fall into two broad categories: active engagement with ethnic rivalries and religious beliefs and fair, transparent economic development and provisioning of services. 
+I don't know about this, but this is what I can decipher from this diagram in 24 seconds. 
+When you see a diagram like this, I don't want you to be afraid. 
+I want you to be excited. I want you to be relieved. 
+Because simple answers may emerge. 
+We're discovering in nature that simplicity often lies on the other side of complexity. 
+So for any problem, the more you can zoom out and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of zooming in on the simple details that matter most. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Sometimes I go browsing [through] a very old magazine. 
+I found this observation test about the story of the ark. 
+And the artist that drew this observation test did some errors, had some mistakes — there are more or less 12 mistakes. 
+Some of them are very easy. 
+There is a funnel, an aerial part, a lamp and clockwork key on the ark. 
+Some of them are about the animals, the number. 
+But there is a much more fundamental mistake in the overall story of the ark that's not reported here. 
+And this problem is: where are the plants? 
+So now we have God that is going to submerge Earth permanently or at least for a very long period, and no one is taking care of plants. 
+Noah needed to take two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal, of every kind of creature that moves, but no mention about plants. 
+Why? 
+In another part of the same story, all the living creatures are just the living creatures that came out from the ark, so birds, livestock and wild animals. 
+Plants are not living creatures — this is the point. 
+That is a point that is not coming out from the Bible, but it's something that really accompanied humanity. 
+Let's have a look at this nice code that is coming from a Renaissance book. 
+Here we have the description of the order of nature. 
+It's a nice description because it's starting from left — you have the stones — immediately after the stones, the plants that are just able to live. 
+We have the animals that are able to live and to sense, and on the top of the pyramid, there is the man. 
+This is not the common man. 
+The "" Homo studiosus "" — the studying man. 
+This is quite comforting for people like me — I'm a professor — this to be over there on the top of creation. 
+But it's something completely wrong. 
+You know very well about professors. 
+But it's also wrong about plants, because plants are not just able to live; they are able to sense. 
+They are much more sophisticated in sensing than animals. 
+Just to give you an example, every single root apex is able to detect and to monitor concurrently and continuously at least 15 different chemical and physical parameters. 
+And they also are able to show and to exhibit such a wonderful and complex behavior that can be described just with the term of intelligence. 
+Well, but this is something — this underestimation of plants is something that is always with us. 
+Let's have a look at this short movie now. 
+We have David Attenborough. 
+Now David Attenborough is really a plant lover; he did some of the most beautiful movies about plant behavior. 
+Now, when he speaks about plants, everything is correct. 
+When he speaks about animals, [he] tends to remove the fact that plants exist. 
+The blue whale, the biggest creature that exists on the planet — that is wrong, completely wrong. 
+The blue whale, it's a dwarf if compared with the real biggest creature that exists on the planet — that is, this wonderful, magnificent Sequoiadendron giganteum. 
+(Applause) And this is a living organism that has a mass of at least 2,000 tons. 
+Now, the story that plants are some low-level organisms has been formalized many times ago by Aristotle, that in "" De Anima "" — that is a very influential book for the Western civilization — wrote that the plants are on the edge between living and not living. 
+They have just a kind of very low-level soul. 
+It's called the vegetative soul, because they lack movement, and so they don't need to sense. 
+Let's see. 
+Okay, some of the movements of the plants are very well-known. 
+This is a very fast movement. 
+This is a Dionaea, a Venus fly trap hunting snails — sorry for the snail. 
+This has been something that has been refused for centuries, despite the evidence. 
+No one can say that the plants were able to eat an animal, because it was against the order of nature. 
+But plants are also able to show a lot of movement. 
+Some of them are very well known, like the flowering. 
+It's just a question to use some techniques like the time lapse. 
+Some of them are much more sophisticated. 
+Look at this young bean that is moving to catch the light every time. 
+And it's really so graceful; it's like a dancing angel. 
+They are also able to play — they are really playing. 
+These are young sunflowers, and what they are doing cannot be described with any other terms than playing. 
+They are training themselves, as many young animals do, to the adult life where they will be called to track the sun all the day. 
+They are able to respond to gravity, of course, so the shoots are growing against the vector of gravity and the roots toward the vector of gravity. 
+But they are also able to sleep. 
+This is one, Mimosa pudica. 
+So during the night, they curl the leaves and reduce the movement, and during the day, you have the opening of the leaves — there is much more movement. 
+This is interesting because this sleeping machinery, it's perfectly conserved. 
+It's the same in plants, in insects and in animals. 
+And so if you need to study this sleeping problem, it's easy to study on plants, for example, than in animals and it's much more easy even ethically. 
+It's a kind of vegetarian experimentation. 
+Plants are even able to communicate — they are extraordinary communicators. 
+They communicate with other plants. 
+They are able to distinguish kin and non-kin. 
+They communicate with plants of other species and they communicate with animals by producing chemical volatiles, for example, during the pollination. 
+Now with the pollination, it's a very serious issue for plants, because they move the pollen from one flower to the other, yet they cannot move from one flower to the other. 
+So they need a vector — and this vector, it's normally an animal. 
+Many insects have been used by plants as vectors for the transport of the pollination, but not just insects; even birds, reptiles, and mammals like bats rats are normally used for the transportation of the pollen. 
+This is a serious business. 
+We have the plants that are giving to the animals a kind of sweet substance — very energizing — having in change this transportation of the pollen. 
+But some plants are manipulating animals, like in the case of orchids that promise sex and nectar and give in change nothing for the transportation of the pollen. 
+Now, there is a big problem behind all this behavior that we have seen. 
+How is it possible to do this without a brain? 
+We need to wait until 1880, when this big man, Charles Darwin, publishes a wonderful, astonishing book that starts a revolution. 
+The title is "" The Power of Movement in Plants. "" No one was allowed to speak about movement in plants before Charles Darwin. 
+In his book, assisted by his son, Francis — who was the first professor of plant physiology in the world, in Cambridge — they took into consideration every single movement for 500 pages. 
+And in the last paragraph of the book, it's a kind of stylistic mark, because normally Charles Darwin stored, in the last paragraph of a book, the most important message. 
+He wrote that, "" It's hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radical acts like the brain of one of the lower animals. "" This is not a metaphor. 
+He wrote some very interesting letters to one of his friends who was J.D. Hooker, or at that time, president of the Royal Society, so the maximum scientific authority in Britain speaking about the brain in the plants. 
+Now, this is a root apex growing against a slope. 
+So you can recognize this kind of movement, the same movement that worms, snakes and every animal that are moving on the ground without legs is able to display. 
+And it's not an easy movement because, to have this kind of movement, you need to move different regions of the root and to synchronize these different regions without having a brain. 
+So we studied the root apex and we found that there is a specific region that is here, depicted in blue — that is called the "" transition zone. "" And this region, it's a very small region — it's less than one millimeter. 
+And in this small region you have the highest consumption of oxygen in the plants and more important, you have these kinds of signals here. 
+The signals that you are seeing here are action potential, are the same signals that the neurons of my brain, of our brain, use to exchange information. 
+Now we know that a root apex has just a few hundred cells that show this kind of feature, but we know how big the root apparatus of a small plant, like a plant of rye. 
+We have almost 14 million roots. 
+We have 11 and a half million root apex and a total length of 600 or more kilometers and a very high surface area. 
+Now let's imagine that each single root apex is working in network with all the others. 
+Here were have on the left, the Internet and on the right, the root apparatus. 
+They work in the same way. 
+They are a network of small computing machines, working in networks. 
+And why are they so similar? 
+Because they evolved for the same reason: to survive predation. 
+They work in the same way. 
+So you can remove 90 percent of the root apparatus and the plants [continue] to work. 
+You can remove 90 percent of the Internet and it is [continuing] to work. 
+So, a suggestion for the people working with networks: plants are able to give you good suggestions about how to evolve networks. 
+And another possibility is a technological possibility. 
+Let's imagine that we can build robots and robots that are inspired by plants. 
+Until now, the man was inspired just by man or the animals in producing a robot. 
+We have the animaloid — and the normal robots inspired by animals, insectoid, so on. 
+We have the androids that are inspired by man. 
+But why have we not any plantoid? 
+Well, if you want to fly, it's good that you look at birds — to be inspired by birds. 
+But if you want to explore soils, or if you want to colonize new territory, to best thing that you can do is to be inspired by plants that are masters in doing this. 
+We have another possibility we are working [on] in our lab, [which] is to build hybrids. 
+It's much more easy to build hybrids. 
+Hybrid means it's something that's half living and half machine. 
+It's much more easy to work with plants than with animals. 
+They have computing power, they have electrical signals. 
+The connection with the machine is much more easy, much more even ethically possible. 
+And these are three possibilities that we are working on to build hybrids, driven by algae or by the leaves at the end, by the most, most powerful parts of the plants, by the roots. 
+Well, thank you for your attention. 
+And before I finish, I would like to reassure that no snails were harmed in making this presentation. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Phyllis Rodriguez: We are here today because of the fact that we have what most people consider an unusual friendship. 
+And it is. 
+And yet, it feels natural to us now. 
+I first learned that my son had been in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001. 
+We didn't know if he had perished yet until 36 hours later. 
+At the time, we knew that it was political. 
+We were afraid of what our country was going to do in the name of our son — my husband, Orlando, and I and our family. 
+And when I saw it — and yet, through the shock, the terrible shock, and the terrible explosion in our lives, literally, we were not vengeful. 
+And a couple of weeks later when Zacarias Moussaoui was indicted on six counts of conspiracy to commit terrorism, and the U.S. government called for a death penalty for him, if convicted, my husband and I spoke out in opposition to that, publicly. 
+Through that and through human rights groups, we were brought together with several other victims' families. 
+When I saw Aicha in the media, coming over when her son was indicted, and I thought, "" What a brave woman. 
+Someday I want to meet that woman when I'm stronger. "" I was still in deep grief; I knew I didn't have the strength. 
+I knew I would find her someday, or we would find each other. 
+Because, when people heard that my son was a victim, I got immediate sympathy. 
+But when people learned what her son was accused of, she didn't get that sympathy. 
+But her suffering is equal to mine. 
+So we met in November 2002, and Aicha will now tell you how that came about. 
+(Translator) Aicha el-Wafi: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. 
+I am the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui. 
+And I asked the Organization of Human Rights to put me in touch with the parents of the victims. 
+So they introduced me to five families. 
+And I saw Phyllis, and I watched her. 
+She was the only mother in the group. 
+The others were brothers, sisters. 
+And I saw in her eyes that she was a mother, just like me. 
+I suffered a lot as a mother. 
+I was married when I was 14. 
+I lost a child when I was 15, a second child when I was 16. 
+So the story with Zacarias was too much really. 
+And I still suffer, because my son is like he's buried alive. 
+I know she really cried for her son. 
+But she knows where he is. 
+My son, I don't know where he is. 
+I don't know if he's alive. I don't know if he's tortured. 
+I don't know what happened to him. 
+So that's why I decided to tell my story, so that my suffering is something positive for other women. 
+For all the women, all the mothers that give life, you can give back, you can change. 
+It's up to us women, because we are women, because we love our children. 
+We must be hand-in-hand and do something together. 
+It's not against women, it's for us, for us women, for our children. 
+I talk against violence, against terrorism. 
+I go to schools to talk to young, Muslim girls so they don't accept to be married against their will very young. 
+So if I can save one of the young girls, and avoid that they get married and suffer as much as I did, well this is something good. 
+This is why I'm here in front of you. 
+PR: I would like to say that I have learned so much from Aicha, starting with that day we had our very first meeting with other family members — which was a very private meeting with security, because it was November 2002, and, frankly, we were afraid of the super-patriotism of that time in the country — those of us family members. 
+But we were all so nervous. 
+"Why does she want to meet us?" 
+And then she was nervous. 
+"Why did we want to meet her?" 
+What did we want from each other? 
+Before we knew each others' names, or anything, we had embraced and wept. 
+Then we sat in a circle with support, with help, from people experienced in this kind of reconciliation. 
+And Aicha started, and she said, "" I don't know if my son is guilty or innocent, but I want to tell you how sorry I am for what happened to your families. 
+I know what it is to suffer, and I feel that if there is a crime, a person should be tried fairly and punished. "" But she reached out to us in that way, and it was, I'd like to say, it was an ice-breaker. 
+And what happened then is we all told our stories, and we all connected as human beings. 
+By the end of the afternoon — it was about three hours after lunch — we'd felt as if we'd known each other forever. 
+Now what I learned from her, is a woman, not only who could be so generous under these present circumstances and what it was then, and what was being done to her son, but the life she's had. 
+I never had met someone with such a hard life, from such a totally different culture and environment from my own. 
+And I feel that we have a special connection, which I value very much. 
+And I think it's all about being afraid of the other, but making that step and then realizing, "" Hey, this wasn't so hard. 
+Who else can I meet that I don't know, or that I'm so different from? "" So, Aicha, do you have a couple of words for conclusion? 
+Because our time is up. 
+(Laughter) (Translator) AW: I wanted to say that we have to try to know other people, the other. 
+You have to be generous, and your hearts must be generous, your mind must be generous. 
+You must be tolerant. 
+You have to fight against violence. 
+And I hope that someday we'll all live together in peace and respecting each other. 
+This is what I wanted to say. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Now, since this is TEDGlobal, who can tell me what this is called in French? 
+I see you're all up on the history of hurdy-gurdy — "vielle à roue." 
+And in Spanish, "" zanfona. "" And in Italian, "" ghironda, "" okay? 
+Hurdy-gurdy, or wheel fiddle. 
+So, these are the different kinds and shapes of the hurdy-gurdy. 
+The hurdy-gurdy is the only musical instrument that uses a crank to turn a wheel to rub strings, like the bow of a violin, to produce music. 
+It has three different kinds of strings. 
+The first string is the drone string, which plays a continuous sound like the bagpipe. 
+The second string is a melody string, which is played with a wooden keyboard tuned like a piano. 
+And the third string is pretty innovative. 
+It's also the only instrument that uses this kind of technique. 
+It activates what's called the buzzing bridge, or the dog. 
+When I turn the crank and I apply pressure, it makes a sound like a barking dog. 
+So all of this is pretty innovative, if you consider that the hurdy-gurdy appeared about a thousand years ago and it took two people to play it; one to turn the crank, and another person — yes — to play the melody by physically pulling up large wooden pegs. 
+Luckily, all of this changed a couple of centuries later. 
+So, one person could actually play and almost — this is pretty heavy — carry the hurdy-gurdy. 
+The hurdy-gurdy has been used, historically, through the centuries in mostly dance music because of the uniqueness of the melody combined with the acoustic boombox here. 
+And today, the hurdy-gurdy is used in all sorts of music — traditional folk music, dance, contemporary and world music — in the U.K., in France, in Spain and in Italy. 
+And this kind of hurdy-gurdy takes anywhere from three to five years [to order and receive it]. 
+It's made by specialized luthiers, also in Europe. 
+And it's very difficult to tune. 
+So without further ado, would you like to hear it? 
+(Audience: Yes.) Caroline Phillips: I didn't hear you. Would you like to hear it? (Audience: Yes!) CP: Okay. 
+There I go. 
+I'd like to sing in Basque, which is the language spoken in the Basque Country where I live, in the region in France and Spain. 
+(Music) [Basque] (Music) Thank you. 
+(Applause) This is a song that I wrote based on traditional Basque rhythms. 
+And this is a song that has a kind of a Celtic feel. 
+(Music) Thank you. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Embracing otherness. 
+When I first heard this theme, I thought, well, embracing otherness is embracing myself. 
+And the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me, and it's given me an insight into the whole notion of self, which I think is worth sharing with you today. 
+We each have a self, but I don't think that we're born with one. 
+You know how newborn babies believe they're part of everything; they're not separate? 
+Well that fundamental sense of oneness is lost on us very quickly. 
+It's like that initial stage is over — oneness: infancy, unformed, primitive. 
+It's no longer valid or real. 
+What is real is separateness, and at some point in early babyhood, the idea of self starts to form. 
+Our little portion of oneness is given a name, is told all kinds of things about itself, and these details, opinions and ideas become facts, which go towards building ourselves, our identity. 
+And that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world. 
+But the self is a projection based on other people's projections. 
+Is it who we really are? 
+Or who we really want to be, or should be? 
+So this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult one for me growing up. 
+The self that I attempted to take out into the world was rejected over and over again. 
+And my panic at not having a self that fit, and the confusion that came from my self being rejected, created anxiety, shame and hopelessness, which kind of defined me for a long time. 
+But in retrospect, the destruction of my self was so repetitive that I started to see a pattern. 
+The self changed, got affected, broken, destroyed, but another one would evolve — sometimes stronger, sometimes hateful, sometimes not wanting to be there at all. 
+The self was not constant. 
+And how many times would my self have to die before I realized that it was never alive in the first place? 
+I grew up on the coast of England in the '70s. 
+My dad is white from Cornwall, and my mom is black from Zimbabwe. 
+Even the idea of us as a family was challenging to most people. 
+But nature had its wicked way, and brown babies were born. 
+But from about the age of five, I was aware that I didn't fit. 
+I was the black atheist kid in the all-white Catholic school run by nuns. 
+I was an anomaly, and my self was rooting around for definition and trying to plug in. 
+Because the self likes to fit, to see itself replicated, to belong. 
+That confirms its existence and its importance. 
+And it is important. 
+It has an extremely important function. 
+Without it, we literally can't interface with others. 
+We can't hatch plans and climb that stairway of popularity, of success. 
+But my skin color wasn't right. 
+My hair wasn't right. 
+My history wasn't right. 
+My self became defined by otherness, which meant that, in that social world, I didn't really exist. 
+And I was "" other "" before being anything else — even before being a girl. 
+I was a noticeable nobody. 
+Another world was opening up around this time: performance and dancing. 
+That nagging dread of self-hood didn't exist when I was dancing. 
+I'd literally lose myself. 
+And I was a really good dancer. 
+I would put all my emotional expression into my dancing. 
+I could be in the movement in a way that I wasn't able to be in my real life, in myself. 
+And at 16, I stumbled across another opportunity, and I earned my first acting role in a film. 
+I can hardly find the words to describe the peace I felt when I was acting. 
+My dysfunctional self could actually plug in to another self, not my own, and it felt so good. 
+It was the first time that I existed inside a fully-functioning self — one that I controlled, that I steered, that I gave life to. 
+But the shooting day would end, and I'd return to my gnarly, awkward self. 
+By 19, I was a fully-fledged movie actor, but still searching for definition. 
+I applied to read anthropology at university. 
+Dr. Phyllis Lee gave me my interview, and she asked me, "" How would you define race? "" Well, I thought I had the answer to that one, and I said, "" Skin color. "" "" So biology, genetics? "" she said. 
+"" Because, Thandie, that's not accurate. 
+Because there's actually more genetic difference between a black Kenyan and a black Ugandan than there is between a black Kenyan and, say, a white Norwegian. 
+Because we all stem from Africa. 
+So in Africa, there's been more time to create genetic diversity. "" In other words, race has no basis in biological or scientific fact. 
+On the one hand, result. 
+Right? 
+On the other hand, my definition of self just lost a huge chunk of its credibility. 
+But what was credible, what is biological and scientific fact, is that we all stem from Africa — in fact, from a woman called Mitochondrial Eve who lived 160,000 years ago. 
+And race is an illegitimate concept which our selves have created based on fear and ignorance. 
+Strangely, these revelations didn't cure my low self-esteem, that feeling of otherness. 
+My desire to disappear was still very powerful. 
+I had a degree from Cambridge; I had a thriving career, but my self was a car crash, and I wound up with bulimia and on a therapist's couch. 
+And of course I did. 
+I still believed my self was all I was. 
+I still valued self-worth above all other worth, and what was there to suggest otherwise? 
+We've created entire value systems and a physical reality to support the worth of self. 
+Look at the industry for self-image and the jobs it creates, the revenue it turns over. 
+We'd be right in assuming that the self is an actual living thing. 
+But it's not. It's a projection which our clever brains create in order to cheat ourselves from the reality of death. 
+But there is something that can give the self ultimate and infinite connection — and that thing is oneness, our essence. 
+The self's struggle for authenticity and definition will never end unless it's connected to its creator — to you and to me. 
+And that can happen with awareness — awareness of the reality of oneness and the projection of self-hood. 
+For a start, we can think about all the times when we do lose ourselves. 
+It happens when I dance, when I'm acting. 
+I'm earthed in my essence, and my self is suspended. 
+In those moments, I'm connected to everything — the ground, the air, the sounds, the energy from the audience. 
+All my senses are alert and alive in much the same way as an infant might feel — that feeling of oneness. 
+And when I'm acting a role, I inhabit another self, and I give it life for awhile, because when the self is suspended so is divisiveness and judgment. 
+And I've played everything from a vengeful ghost in the time of slavery to Secretary of State in 2004. 
+And no matter how other these selves might be, they're all related in me. 
+And I honestly believe the key to my success as an actor and my progress as a person has been the very lack of self that used to make me feel so anxious and insecure. 
+I always wondered why I could feel others' pain so deeply, why I could recognize the somebody in the nobody. 
+It's because I didn't have a self to get in the way. 
+I thought I lacked substance, and the fact that I could feel others' meant that I had nothing of myself to feel. 
+The thing that was a source of shame was actually a source of enlightenment. 
+And when I realized and really understood that my self is a projection and that it has a function, a funny thing happened. 
+I stopped giving it so much authority. 
+I give it its due. 
+I take it to therapy. 
+I've become very familiar with its dysfunctional behavior. 
+But I'm not ashamed of my self. 
+In fact, I respect my self and its function. 
+And over time and with practice, I've tried to live more and more from my essence. 
+And if you can do that, incredible things happen. 
+I was in Congo in February, dancing and celebrating with women who've survived the destruction of their selves in literally unthinkable ways — destroyed because other brutalized, psychopathic selves all over that beautiful land are fueling our selves' addiction to iPods, Pads, and bling, which further disconnect ourselves from ever feeling their pain, their suffering, their death. 
+Because, hey, if we're all living in ourselves and mistaking it for life, then we're devaluing and desensitizing life. 
+And in that disconnected state, yeah, we can build factory farms with no windows, destroy marine life and use rape as a weapon of war. 
+So here's a note to self: The cracks have started to show in our constructed world, and oceans will continue to surge through the cracks, and oil and blood, rivers of it. 
+Crucially, we haven't been figuring out how to live in oneness with the Earth and every other living thing. 
+We've just been insanely trying to figure out how to live with each other — billions of each other. 
+Only we're not living with each other; our crazy selves are living with each other and perpetuating an epidemic of disconnection. 
+Let's live with each other and take it a breath at a time. 
+If we can get under that heavy self, light a torch of awareness, and find our essence, our connection to the infinite and every other living thing. 
+We knew it from the day we were born. 
+Let's not be freaked out by our bountiful nothingness. 
+It's more a reality than the ones our selves have created. 
+Imagine what kind of existence we can have if we honor inevitable death of self, appreciate the privilege of life and marvel at what comes next. 
+Simple awareness is where it begins. 
+Thank you for listening. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We look around the media, as we see on the news from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and the conflict seems incomprehensible to us. 
+And that's certainly how it seemed to me when I started this project. 
+But as a physicist, I thought, well if you give me some data, I could maybe understand this. You know, give us a go. 
+So as a naive New Zealander I thought, well I'll go to the Pentagon. 
+Can you get me some information? 
+(Laughter) No. So I had to think a little harder. 
+And I was watching the news one night in Oxford. 
+And I looked down at the chattering heads on my channel of choice. 
+And I saw that there was information there. 
+There was data within the streams of news that we consume. 
+All this noise around us actually has information. 
+So what I started thinking was, perhaps there is something like open source intelligence here. 
+If we can get enough of these streams of information together, we can perhaps start to understand the war. 
+So this is exactly what I did. We started bringing a team together, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, of economists, mathematicians. 
+We brought these guys together and we started to try and solve this. 
+We did it in three steps. 
+The first step we did was to collect. We did 130 different sources of information — from NGO reports to newspapers and cable news. 
+We brought this raw data in and we filtered it. 
+We extracted the key bits on information to build the database. 
+That database contained the timing of attacks, the location, the size and the weapons used. 
+It's all in the streams of information we consume daily, we just have to know how to pull it out. 
+And once we had this we could start doing some cool stuff. 
+What if we were to look at the distribution of the sizes of attacks? 
+What would that tell us? 
+So we started doing this. And you can see here on the horizontal axis you've got the number of people killed in an attack or the size of the attack. 
+And on the vertical axis you've got the number of attacks. 
+So we plot data for sample on this. 
+You see some sort of random distribution — perhaps 67 attacks, one person was killed, or 47 attacks where seven people were killed. 
+We did this exact same thing for Iraq. 
+And we didn't know, for Iraq what we were going to find. 
+It turns out what we found was pretty surprising. 
+You take all of the conflict, all of the chaos, all of the noise, and out of that comes this precise mathematical distribution of the way attacks are ordered in this conflict. 
+This blew our mind. 
+Why should a conflict like Iraq have this as its fundamental signature? 
+Why should there be order in war? 
+We didn't really understand that. 
+We thought maybe there is something special about Iraq. 
+So we looked at a few more conflicts. 
+We looked at Colombia, we looked at Afghanistan, and we looked at Senegal. 
+And the same pattern emerged in each conflict. 
+This wasn't supposed to happen. 
+These are different wars, with different religious factions, different political factions, and different socioeconomic problems. 
+And yet the fundamental patterns underlying them are the same. 
+So we went a little wider. 
+We looked around the world at all the data we could get our hands on. 
+From Peru to Indonesia, we studied this same pattern again. 
+And we found that not only were the distributions these straight lines, but the slope of these lines, they clustered around this value of alpha equals 2.5. 
+And we could generate an equation that could predict the likelihood of an attack. 
+What we're saying here is the probability of an attack killing X number of people in a country like Iraq is equal to a constant, times the size of that attack, raised to the power of negative alpha. 
+And negative alpha is the slope of that line I showed you before. 
+So what? 
+This is data, statistics. What does it tell us about these conflicts? 
+That was a challenge we had to face as physicists. 
+How do we explain this? 
+And what we really found was that alpha, if we think about it, is the organizational structure of the insurgency. 
+Alpha is the distribution of the sizes of attacks, which is really the distribution of the group strength carrying out the attacks. 
+So we look at a process of group dynamics: coalescence and fragmentation, groups coming together, groups breaking apart. 
+And we start running the numbers on this. Can we simulate it? 
+Can we create the kind of patterns that we're seeing in places like Iraq? 
+Turns out we kind of do a reasonable job. 
+We can run these simulations. 
+We can recreate this using a process of group dynamics to explain the patterns that we see all around the conflicts around the world. 
+So what's going on? 
+Why should these different — seemingly different conflicts have the same patterns? 
+Now what I believe is going on is that the insurgent forces, they evolve over time. They adapt. 
+And it turns out there is only one solution to fight a much stronger enemy. 
+And if you don't find that solution as an insurgent force, you don't exist. 
+So every insurgent force that is ongoing, every conflict that is ongoing, it's going to look something like this. 
+And that is what we think is happening. 
+Taking it forward, how do we change it? 
+How do we end a war like Iraq? 
+What does it look like? 
+Alpha is the structure. It's got a stable state at 2.5. 
+This is what wars look like when they continue. 
+We've got to change that. 
+We can push it up: the forces become more fragmented; there is more of them, but they are weaker. 
+Or we push it down: they're more robust; there is less groups; but perhaps you can sit and talk to them. 
+So this graph here, I'm going to show you now. 
+No one has seen this before. This is literally stuff that we've come through last week. 
+And we see the evolution of Alpha through time. 
+We see it start. And we see it grow up to the stable state the wars around the world look like. 
+And it stays there through the invasion of Fallujah until the Samarra bombings in the Iraqi elections of '06. 
+And the system gets perturbed. It moves upwards to a fragmented state. 
+This is when the surge happens. 
+And depending on who you ask, the surge was supposed to push it up even further. 
+The opposite happened. 
+The groups became stronger. 
+They became more robust. 
+And so I'm thinking, right, great, it's going to keep going down. 
+We can talk to them. We can get a solution. The opposite happened. 
+It's moved up again. The groups are more fragmented. 
+And this tells me one of two things. 
+Either we're back where we started and the surge has had no effect; or finally the groups have been fragmented to the extent that we can start to think about maybe moving out. 
+I don't know what the answer is to that. 
+But I know that we should be looking at the structure of the insurgency to answer that question. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, where I work as a curator. 
+It's my job to make sure the collection stays okay, and that it grows, and basically it means I collect dead animals. 
+Back in 1995, we got a new wing next to the museum. 
+It was made of glass, and this building really helped me to do my job good. 
+The building was a true bird-killer. 
+You may know that birds don't understand the concept of glass. They don't see it, so they fly into the windows and get killed. 
+The only thing I had to do was go out, pick them up, and have them stuffed for the collection. 
+(Laughter) And in those days, I developed an ear to identify birds just by the sound of the bangs they made against the glass. 
+And it was on June 5, 1995, that I heard a loud bang against the glass that changed my life and ended that of a duck. 
+And this is what I saw when I looked out of the window. 
+This is the dead duck. It flew against the window. 
+It's laying dead on its belly. 
+But next to the dead duck is a live duck, and please pay attention. 
+Both are of the male sex. 
+And then this happened. 
+The live duck mounted the dead duck, and started to copulate. 
+Well, I'm a biologist. I'm an ornithologist. 
+I said, "" Something's wrong here. "" One is dead, one is alive. That must be necrophilia. 
+I look. Both are of the male sex. 
+Homosexual necrophilia. 
+So I — (Laughter) I took my camera, I took my notebook, took a chair, and started to observe this behavior. 
+After 75 minutes — (Laughter) — I had seen enough, and I got hungry, and I wanted to go home. 
+So I went out, collected the duck, and before I put it in the freezer, I checked if the victim was indeed of the male sex. 
+And here's a rare picture of a duck's penis, so it was indeed of the male sex. 
+It's a rare picture because there are 10,000 species of birds and only 300 possess a penis. 
+[The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard Anas platyrhynchos (Aves: Anatidae)] I knew I'd seen something special, but it took me six years to decide to publish it. 
+(Laughter) I mean, it's a nice topic for a birthday party or at the coffee machine, but to share this among your peers is something different. 
+I didn't have the framework. 
+So after six years, my friends and colleagues urged me to publish, so I published "" The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard. "" And here's the situation again. 
+A is my office, B is the place where the duck hit the glass, and C is from where I watched it. 
+And here are the ducks again. 
+As you probably know, in science, when you write a kind of special paper, only six or seven people read it. 
+(Laughter) But then something good happened. 
+I got a phone call from a person called Marc Abrahams, and he told me, "" You've won a prize with your duck paper: the Ig Nobel Prize. "" And the Ig Nobel Prize — (Laughter) (Applause) — the Ig Nobel Prize honors research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think, with the ultimate goal to make more people interested in science. 
+That's a good thing, so I accepted the prize. 
+(Laughter) I went — let me remind you that Marc Abrahams didn't call me from Stockholm. 
+He called me from Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
+So I traveled to Boston, to Cambridge, and I went to this wonderful Ig Nobel Prize ceremony held at Harvard University, and this ceremony is a very nice experience. 
+Real Nobel laureates hand you the prize. 
+That's the first thing. 
+And there are nine other winners who get prizes. 
+Here's one of my fellow winners. That's Charles Paxton who won the 2000 biology prize for his paper, "" Courtship behavior of ostriches towards humans under farming conditions in Britain. "" (Laughter) And I think there are one or two more Ig Nobel Prize winners in this room. 
+Dan, where are you? Dan Ariely? 
+Applause for Dan. 
+(Applause) Dan won his prize in medicine for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine works better than low-priced fake medicine. 
+(Laughter) So here's my one minute of fame, my acceptance speech, and here's the duck. 
+This is its first time on the U.S. West Coast. 
+I'm going to pass it around. 
+(Laughter) Yeah? 
+You can pass it around. 
+Please note it's a museum specimen, but there's no chance you'll get the avian flu. 
+After winning this prize, my life changed. 
+In the first place, people started to send me all kinds of duck-related things, and I got a real nice collection. 
+(Laughter) More importantly, people started to send me their observations of remarkable animal behavior, and believe me, if there's an animal misbehaving on this planet, I know about it. (Laughter) 
+This is a moose. 
+It's a moose trying to copulate with a bronze statue of a bison. 
+This is in Montana, 2008. 
+This is a frog that tries to copulate with a goldfish. 
+This is the Netherlands, 2011. 
+These are cane toads in Australia. 
+This is roadkill. 
+Please note that this is necrophilia. 
+It's remarkable: the position. 
+The missionary position is very rare in the animal kingdom. 
+These are pigeons in Rotterdam. 
+Barn swallows in Hong Kong, 2004. 
+This is a turkey in Wisconsin on the premises of the Ethan Allen juvenile correctional institution. 
+It took all day, and the prisoners had a great time. 
+So what does this mean? 
+I mean, the question I ask myself, why does this happen in nature? 
+Well, what I concluded from reviewing all these cases is that it is important that this happens only when death is instant and in a dramatic way and in the right position for copulation. 
+At least, I thought it was till I got these slides. 
+And here you see a dead duck. 
+It's been there for three days, and it's laying on its back. 
+So there goes my theory of necrophilia. 
+Another example of the impact of glass buildings on the life of birds. 
+This is Mad Max, a blackbird who lives in Rotterdam. 
+The only thing this bird did was fly against this window from 2004 to 2008, day in and day out. 
+Here he goes, and here's a short video. 
+(Music) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk) (Clunk) So what this bird does is fight his own image. 
+He sees an intruder in his territory, and it's coming all the time and he's there, so there is no end to it. 
+And I thought, in the beginning — I studied this bird for a couple of years — that, well, shouldn't the brain of this bird be damaged? 
+It's not. I show you here some slides, some frames from the video, and at the last moment before he hits the glass, he puts his feet in front, and then he bangs against the glass. 
+So I'll conclude to invite you all to Dead Duck Day. 
+That's on June 5 every year. 
+At five minutes to six in the afternoon, we come together at the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, the duck comes out of the museum, and we try to discuss new ways to prevent birds from colliding with windows. 
+And as you know, or as you may not know, this is one of the major causes of death for birds in the world. 
+In the U.S. alone, a billion birds die in collision with glass buildings. 
+And when it's over, we go to a Chinese restaurant and we have a six-course duck dinner. 
+So I hope to see you next year in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, for Dead Duck Day. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Oh, sorry. 
+May I have my duck back, please? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. 
+
+Those of you who may remember me from TEDGlobal remember me asking a few questions which still preoccupy me. 
+One of them was: Why is it necessary to spend six billion pounds speeding up the Eurostar train when, for about 10 percent of that money, you could have top supermodels, male and female, serving free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers for the entire duration of the journey? 
+You'd still have five billion left in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down. 
+Now, you may remember me asking the question as well, a very interesting observation, that actually those strange little signs that actually flash "" 35 "" at you, occasionally accompanying a little smiley face or a frown, according to whether you're within or outside the speed limit — those are actually more effective at preventing road accidents than speed cameras, which come with the actual threat of real punishment. 
+So there seems to be a strange disproportionality at work, I think, in many areas of human problem solving, particularly those which involve human psychology, which is: The tendency of the organization or the institution is to deploy as much force as possible, as much compulsion as possible, whereas actually, the tendency of the person is to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied. 
+So there seems to be a complete disconnect here. 
+So what I'm asking for is the creation of a new job title — I'll come to this a little later — and perhaps the addition of a new word into the English language. 
+Because it does seem to me that large organizations including government, which is, of course, the largest organization of all, have actually become completely disconnected with what actually matters to people. 
+Let me give you one example of this. 
+You may remember this as the AOL-Time Warner merger, okay, heralded at the time as the largest single deal of all time. 
+It may still be, for all I know. 
+Now, all of you in this room, in one form or other, are probably customers of one or both of those organizations that merged. 
+Just interested, did anybody notice anything different as a result of this at all? 
+So unless you happened to be a shareholder of one or the other organizations or one of the dealmakers or lawyers involved in the no-doubt lucrative activity, you're actually engaging in a huge piece of activity that meant absolutely bugger-all to anybody, okay? 
+By contrast, years of marketing have taught me that if you actually want people to remember you and to appreciate what you do, the most potent things are actually very, very small. 
+This is from Virgin Atlantic upper-class, it's the cruet salt and pepper set. 
+Quite nice in itself, they're little, sort of, airplane things. 
+What's really, really sweet is every single person looking at these things has exactly the same mischievous thought, which is, "" I reckon I can heist these. "" However, you pick them up and underneath, actually engraved in the metal, are the words, "Stolen from Virgin Atlantic Airways upper-class." 
+(Laughter) Now, years after you remember the strategic question of whether you're flying in a 777 or an Airbus, you remember those words and that experience. 
+Similarly, this is from a hotel in Stockholm, the Lydmar. 
+Has anybody stayed there? 
+It's the lift, it's a series of buttons in the lift. 
+Nothing unusual about that at all, except that these are actually not the buttons that take you to an individual floor. 
+It starts with garage at the bottom, I suppose, appropriately, but it doesn't go up garage, grand floor, mezzanine, one, two, three, four. 
+It actually says garage, funk, rhythm and blues. 
+You have a series of buttons. You actually choose your lift music. 
+My guess is that the cost of installing this in the lift in the Lydmar Hotel in Stockholm is probably 500 to 1,000 pounds max. 
+It's frankly more memorable than all those millions of hotels we've all stayed at that tell you that your room has actually been recently renovated at a cost of 500,000 dollars, in order to make it resemble every other hotel room you've ever stayed in in the entire course of your life. 
+Now, these are trivial marketing examples, I accept. 
+But I was at a TED event recently and Esther Duflo, probably one of the leading experts in, effectively, the eradication of poverty in the developing world, actually spoke. 
+And she came across a similar example of something that fascinated me as being something which, in a business context or a government context, would simply be so trivial a solution as to seem embarrassing. 
+It was simply to encourage the inoculation of children by, not only making it a social event — I think good use of behavioral economics in that, if you turn up with several other mothers to have your child inoculated, your sense of confidence is much greater than if you turn up alone. 
+But secondly, to incentivize that inoculation by giving a kilo of lentils to everybody who participated. 
+It's a tiny, tiny thing. 
+If you're a senior person at UNESCO and someone says, "" So what are you doing to eradicate world poverty? "" you're not really confident standing up there saying, "" I've got it cracked; it's the lentils, "" are you? 
+Our own sense of self-aggrandizement feels that big important problems need to have big important, and most of all, expensive solutions attached to them. 
+And yet, what behavioral economics shows time after time after time is in human behavioral and behavioral change there's a very, very strong disproportionality at work, that actually what changes our behavior and what changes our attitude to things is not actually proportionate to the degree of expense entailed, or the degree of force that's applied. 
+But everything about institutions makes them uncomfortable with that disproportionality. 
+So what happens in an institution is the very person who has the power to solve the problem also has a very, very large budget. 
+And once you have a very, very large budget, you actually look for expensive things to spend it on. 
+What is completely lacking is a class of people who have immense amounts of power, but no money at all. 
+(Laughter) It's those people I'd quite like to create in the world going forward. 
+Now, here's another thing that happens, which is what I call sometimes "" Terminal 5 syndrome, "" which is that big, expensive things get big, highly-intelligent attention, and they're great, and Terminal 5 is absolutely magnificent, until you get down to the small detail, the usability, which is the signage, which is catastrophic. 
+You come out of "" Arrive "" at the airport, and you follow a big yellow sign that says "" Trains "" and it's in front of you. 
+So you walk for another hundred yards, expecting perhaps another sign, that might courteously be yellow, in front of you and saying "" Trains. "" No, no, no, the next one is actually blue, to your left, and says "" Heathrow Express. "" I mean, it could almost be rather like that scene from the film "" Airplane. "" A yellow sign? That's exactly what they'll be expecting. 
+Actually, what happens in the world increasingly — now, all credit to the British Airport Authority. 
+I spoke about this before, and a brilliant person got in touch with me and said, "" Okay, what can you do? "" So I did come up with five suggestions, which they are actually actioning. 
+One of them also being, although logically it's quite a good idea to have a lift with no up and down button in it, if it only serves two floors, it's actually bloody terrifying, okay? 
+Because when the door closes and there's nothing for you to do, you've actually just stepped into a Hammer film. 
+(Laughter) So these questions... what is happening in the world is the big stuff, actually, is done magnificently well. 
+But the small stuff, what you might call the user interface, is done spectacularly badly. 
+But also, there seems to be a complete sort of gridlock in terms of solving these small solutions. 
+Because the people who can actually solve them actually are too powerful and too preoccupied with something they think of as "" strategy "" to actually solve them. 
+I tried this exercise recently, talking about banking. 
+They said, "" Can we do an advertising campaign? 
+What can we do and encourage more online banking? "" I said, "" It's really, really easy. "" I said, "" When people login to their online bank there are lots and lots of things they'd probably quite like to look at. 
+The last thing in the world you ever want to see is your balance. "" I've got friends who actually never use their own bank cash machines because there's the risk that it might display their balance on the screen. 
+Why would you willingly expose yourself to bad news? 
+Okay, you simply wouldn't. 
+I said, "" If you make, actually, 'Tell me my balance.' If you make that an option rather than the default, you'll find twice as many people log on to online banking, and they do it three times as often. "" Let's face it, most of us — how many of you actually check your balance before you remove cash from a cash machine? 
+And you're pretty rich by the standards of the world at large. 
+Now, interesting that no single person does that, or at least can admit to being so anal as to do it. 
+But what's interesting about that suggestion was that, to implement that suggestion wouldn't cost 10 million pounds; it wouldn't involve large amounts of expenditure; it would actually cost about 50 quid. 
+And yet, it never happens. 
+Because there's a fundamental disconnect, as I said, that actually, the people with the power want to do big expensive things. 
+And there's to some extent a big strategy myth that's prevalent in business now. 
+And if you think about it, it's very, very important that the strategy myth is maintained. 
+Because, if the board of directors convince everybody that the success of any organization is almost entirely dependent on the decisions made by the board of directors, it makes the disparity in salaries slightly more justifiable than if you actually acknowledge that quite a lot of the credit for a company's success might actually lie somewhere else, in small pieces of tactical activity. 
+But what is happening is that effectively — and the invention of the spreadsheet hasn't helped this; lots of things haven't helped this — business and government suffers from a kind of physics envy. 
+It wants the world to be the kind of place where the input and the change are proportionate. 
+It's a kind of mechanistic world that we'd all love to live in where, effectively, it sits very nicely on spreadsheets, everything is numerically expressible, and the amount you spend on something is proportionate to the scale of your success. 
+That's the world people actually want. 
+In truth, we do live in a world that science can understand. 
+Unfortunately, the science is probably closer to being climatology in that in many cases, very, very small changes can have disproportionately huge effects, and equally, vast areas of activity, enormous mergers, can actually accomplish absolutely bugger-all. 
+But it's very, very uncomfortable for us to actually acknowledge that we're living in such a world. 
+But what I'm saying is we could just make things a little bit better for ourselves if we looked at it in this very simple four-way approach. 
+That is actually strategy, and I'm not denying that strategy has a role. 
+You know, there are cases where you spend quite a lot of money and you accomplish quite a lot. 
+And I'd be wrong to dis that completely. 
+Moving over, we come, of course, to consultancy. 
+(Laughter) I thought it was very indecent of Accenture to ditch Tiger Woods in such a sort of hurried and hasty way. 
+I mean, Tiger surely was actually obeying the Accenture model. 
+He developed an interesting outsourcing model for sexual services, (Laughter) no longer tied to a single monopoly provider, in many cases, sourcing things locally, and of course, the ability to have between one and three girls delivered at any time led for better load-balancing. 
+So what Accenture suddenly found so unattractive about that, I'm not sure. 
+Then there are other things that don't cost much and achieve absolutely nothing. 
+That's called trivia. 
+But there's a fourth thing. 
+And the fundamental problem is we don't actually have a word for this stuff. 
+We don't know what to call it. 
+And actually we don't spend nearly enough money looking for those things, looking for those tiny things that may or may not work, but which, if they do work, can have a success absolutely out of proportion to their expense, their efforts and the disruption they cause. 
+So the first thing I'd like is a competition — to anybody watching this as a film — is to come up with a name for that stuff on the bottom right. 
+And the second thing, I think, is that the world needs to have people in charge of that. 
+That's why I call for the "" Chief Detail Officer. "" Every corporation should have one, and every government should have a Ministry of Detail. 
+The people who actually have no money, who have no extravagant budget, but who realize that actually you might achieve greater success in uptake of a government program by actually doubling the level of benefits you pay, but you'll probably achieve exactly that same effect simply by redesigning the form and writing it in comprehensible English. 
+And if actually we created a Ministry of Detail and business actually had Chief Detail Officers, then that fourth quadrant, which is so woefully neglected at the moment, might finally get the attention it deserves. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+I'd like to start, if I may, with the story of the Paisley snail. 
+On the evening of the 26th of August, 1928, May Donoghue took a train from Glasgow to the town of Paisley, seven miles east of the city, and there at the Wellmeadow Café, she had a Scots ice cream float, a mix of ice cream and ginger beer bought for her by a friend. 
+The ginger beer came in a brown, opaque bottle labeled "" D. Stevenson, Glen Lane, Paisley. "" She drank some of the ice cream float, but as the remaining ginger beer was poured into her tumbler, a decomposed snail floated to the surface of her glass. 
+Three days later, she was admitted to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and diagnosed with severe gastroenteritis and shock. 
+The case of Donoghue vs. Stevenson that followed set a very important legal precedent: Stevenson, the manufacturer of the ginger beer, was held to have a clear duty of care towards May Donoghue, even though there was no contract between them, and, indeed, she hadn't even bought the drink. 
+One of the judges, Lord Atkin, described it like this: You must take care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbor. 
+Indeed, one wonders that without a duty of care, how many people would have had to suffer from gastroenteritis before Stevenson eventually went out of business. 
+Now please hang on to that Paisley snail story, because it's an important principle. 
+Last year, the Hansard Society, a nonpartisan charity which seeks to strengthen parliamentary democracy and encourage greater public involvement in politics published, alongside their annual audit of political engagement, an additional section devoted entirely to politics and the media. 
+Here are a couple of rather depressing observations from that survey. 
+Tabloid newspapers do not appear to advance the political citizenship of their readers, relative even to those who read no newspapers whatsoever. 
+Tabloid-only readers are twice as likely to agree with a negative view of politics than readers of no newspapers. 
+They are consuming media that reinforces their negative evaluation of politics, thereby contributing to a fatalistic and cynical attitude to democracy and their own role within it. 
+Little wonder that the report concluded that in this respect, the press, particularly the tabloids, appear not to be living up to the importance of their role in our democracy. 
+But if Hansard are right, and they usually are, then we've got a very serious problem on our hands, and it's one that I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes focusing upon. 
+Since the Paisley snail, and especially over the past decade or so, a great deal of thinking has been developed around the notion of a duty of care as it relates to a number of aspects of civil society. 
+Generally a duty of care arises when one individual or a group of individuals undertakes an activity which has the potential to cause harm to another, either physically, mentally or economically. 
+This is principally focused on obvious areas, such as our empathetic response to children and young people, to our service personnel, and to the elderly and infirm. 
+It is seldom, if ever, extended to equally important arguments around the fragility of our present system of government, to the notion that honesty, accuracy and impartiality are fundamental to the process of building and embedding an informed, participatory democracy. 
+And the more you think about it, the stranger that is. 
+It had been renamed by its pupils as Academy 360. 
+As I walked through their impressive, glass-covered atrium, in front of me, emblazoned on the wall in letters of fire was Marcus Aurelius's famous injunction: If it's not true, don't say it; if it's not right, don't do it. 
+The head teacher saw me staring at it, and he said, "" Oh, that's our school motto. "" On the train back to London, I couldn't get it out of my mind. 
+I kept thinking, can it really have taken us over 2,000 years to come to terms with that simple notion as being our minimum expectation of each other? 
+Isn't it time that we develop this concept of a duty of care and extended it to include a care for our shared but increasingly endangered democratic values? 
+After all, the absence of a duty of care within many professions can all too easily amount to accusations of negligence, and that being the case, can we be really comfortable with the thought that we're in effect being negligent in respect of the health of our own societies and the values that necessarily underpin them? 
+Could anyone honestly suggest, on the evidence, that the same media which Hansard so roundly condemned have taken sufficient care to avoid behaving in ways which they could reasonably have foreseen would be likely to undermine or even damage our inherently fragile democratic settlement. 
+It has to be possible to balance freedom of expression with wider moral and social responsibilities. 
+Let me explain why by taking the example from my own career as a filmmaker. 
+Throughout that career, I never accepted that a filmmaker should set about putting their own work outside or above what he or she believed to be a decent set of values for their own life, their own family, and the future of the society in which we all live. 
+I'd go further. 
+A responsible filmmaker should never devalue their work to a point at which it becomes less than true to the world they themselves wish to inhabit. 
+As I see it, filmmakers, journalists, even bloggers are all required to face up to the social expectations that come with combining the intrinsic power of their medium with their well-honed professional skills. 
+Obviously this is not a mandated duty, but for the gifted filmmaker and the responsible journalist or even blogger, it strikes me as being utterly inescapable. 
+We should always remember that our notion of individual freedom and its partner, creative freedom, is comparatively new in the history of Western ideas, and for that reason, it's often undervalued and can be very quickly undermined. 
+It's a prize easily lost, and once lost, once surrendered, it can prove very, very hard to reclaim. 
+And its first line of defense has to be our own standards, not those enforced on us by a censor or legislation, our own standards and our own integrity. 
+Our integrity as we deal with those with whom we work and our own standards as we operate within society. 
+And these standards of ours need to be all of a piece with a sustainable social agenda. 
+They're part of a collective responsibility, the responsibility of the artist or the journalist to deal with the world as it really is, and this, in turn, must go hand in hand with the responsibility of those governing society to also face up to that world, and not to be tempted to misappropriate the causes of its ills. 
+Yet, as has become strikingly clear over the last couple of years, such responsibility has to a very great extent been abrogated by large sections of the media. 
+And as a consequence, across the Western world, the over-simplistic policies of the parties of protest and their appeal to a largely disillusioned, older demographic, along with the apathy and obsession with the trivial that typifies at least some of the young, taken together, these and other similarly contemporary aberrations are threatening to squeeze the life out of active, informed debate and engagement, and I stress active. 
+The most ardent of libertarians might argue that Donoghue v. Stevenson should have been thrown out of court and that Stevenson would eventually have gone out of business if he'd continued to sell ginger beer with snails in it. 
+But most of us, I think, accept some small role for the state to enforce a duty of care, and the key word here is reasonable. 
+Far from signifying overbearing state power, it's that small common sense test of reasonableness that I'd like us to apply to those in the media who, after all, set the tone and the content for much of our democratic discourse. 
+Democracy, in order to work, requires that reasonable men and women take the time to understand and debate difficult, sometimes complex issues, and they do so in an atmosphere which strives for the type of understanding that leads to, if not agreement, then at least a productive and workable compromise. 
+Politics is about choices, and within those choices, politics is about priorities. 
+But if the facts themselves are distorted, the resolutions are likely only to create further conflict, with all the stresses and strains on society that inevitably follow. 
+The media have to decide: Do they see their role as being to inflame or to inform? 
+Because in the end, it comes down to a combination of trust and leadership. 
+Fifty years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy made two epoch-making speeches, the first on disarmament and the second on civil rights. 
+The first led almost immediately to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and the second led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, both of which represented giant leaps forward. 
+Democracy, well-led and well-informed, can achieve very great things, but there's a precondition. 
+We have to trust that those making those decisions are acting in the best interest not of themselves but of the whole of the people. 
+We need factually-based options, clearly laid out, not those of a few powerful and potentially manipulative corporations pursuing their own frequently narrow agendas, but accurate, unprejudiced information with which to make our own judgments. 
+If we want to provide decent, fulfilling lives for our children and our children's children, we need to exercise to the very greatest degree possible that duty of care for a vibrant, and hopefully a lasting, democracy. 
+Thank you very much for listening to me. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi. For those of you who haven't seen dancing bears, these are the dancing bears. 
+In 1995, we started working on a two-year investigative research project to try and find out what was going on. 
+Because the sloth bears in the wild were obviously getting depleted because of this. 
+This is the Qalandar community. They are a marginalized Islamic community who live across India, and have been in India since the 13th century. 
+We went about getting evidence of what was going on. 
+And this is footage from a hidden camera in a button. 
+And we went in, pretending to be buyers. 
+And we found this right in this very state, in Karnataka. 
+And the bear cubs were being harvested from across the country and being sold and traded. 
+These were being sold for about 2,000 dollars each, and they are used for bear paw soup, and also being trained, later on, to become dancing bears like the one you just saw. 
+Sadly, the family of Qalandars depended on this bear. 
+The couple are barely 18 years old. 
+They already have four children beside them. You can see them. 
+And the economy of the family and their livelihood depended on those animals. 
+So, we had to deal with it in a very practical and sustainable manner. 
+Now, when we started working deeper and digging deeper, we found that it's an illegal act. 
+These guys could go to jail for up to seven years if they were caught by authorities. 
+And what they were doing to the bears was really appalling. 
+It was unacceptable. 
+The mother bears are usually killed. 
+The cubs, which are taken, are separated. 
+Their teeth are basically bashed out with a metal rod. 
+And they use a red hot iron needle to make a hole through the muzzle. 
+Now we had to start changing these people and converting them from using that for a livelihood, to getting something else. 
+So, this is Bitu Qalandar, who was our first experiment. 
+And we were so unsure that this would work. 
+We weren't sure at all. And we managed to convince him. 
+And we said, "" Okay, here is some seed fund. 
+Let's see if you can get something else. "" And we got the bear surrendered to — we set up a sanctuary. We have four sanctuaries in India. 
+And now he sells cool drinks, he's by the highway. 
+He has a telephone booth. 
+And then it started, there was no turning back after that. 
+This is Sadua who came and surrendered his bear. 
+And now he runs a cattle fodder store and a grain store near Agra. 
+Then there was no looking back at all for us. 
+We gave cycle rickshaws. 
+We set up carpet-weaving units, vocational training for the women. 
+The women were just not allowed to come out of the community and work with mainstream society. So, we were able to address that. 
+Education. The kids never went to school. 
+They only had Islamic education, very little of it. 
+And they were never allowed to go to school because they were an extra earning hand at home. So we managed to get education. 
+So, we sponsor 600 children education programs today. 
+We were able to ensure brighter futures for these people. 
+Of course we also had to get the bears in. 
+This is what happens to the bears when they come in. 
+And this is what we turn them into. 
+We have a veterinary facility in our rescue centers. 
+So, basically in 2002 there were 1,200 dancing bears. 
+We rescued over 550 dancing bears. 
+We've been able to ensure better futures for the people and the bears. 
+The big news that I want to announce today is that next month we will be bringing in the very last bear of India, into our rescue center. 
+(Applause) And India will no longer have to witness this cruel barbaric practice which has been here for centuries. 
+And the people can hold their heads up high. 
+And the Qalandar people will rise above all this cruel barbaric past that they've lived all their lives. 
+And the beautiful bears can of course live in the wild again. 
+And there will be no more removing of these bears. 
+And the children, both humans and bear cubs can live peacefully. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+There is something you know about me, something very personal, and there is something I know about every one of you and that's very central to your concerns. 
+There is something that we know about everyone we meet anywhere in the world, on the street, that is the very mainspring of whatever they do and whatever they put up with. 
+And that is that all of us want to be happy. 
+In this, we are all together. 
+How we imagine our happiness, that differs from one another, but it's already a lot that we have all in common, that we want to be happy. 
+Now my topic is gratefulness. 
+Many people would say, well, that's very easy. 
+When you are happy, you are grateful. 
+But think again. 
+We all know quite a number of people who have everything that it would take to be happy, and they are not happy, because they want something else or they want more of the same. 
+And we all know people who have lots of misfortune, misfortune that we ourselves would not want to have, and they are deeply happy. 
+They radiate happiness. You are surprised. 
+Why? Because they are grateful. 
+So it is not happiness that makes us grateful. 
+If you think it's happiness that makes you grateful, think again. 
+It's gratefulness that makes you happy. 
+Now, we can ask, what do we really mean by gratefulness? 
+I appeal to your own experience. 
+We experience something that's valuable to us. 
+And it's really given. 
+These two things have to come together. 
+It has to be something valuable, and it's a real gift. 
+And when these two things come together, something that's really valuable to me and I realize it's freely given, then gratefulness spontaneously rises in my heart, happiness spontaneously rises in my heart. 
+That's how gratefulness happens. 
+Now the key to all this is that we cannot only experience this once in a while. 
+We cannot only have grateful experiences. 
+We can be people who live gratefully. 
+Grateful living, that is the thing. 
+It's a gift. You haven't earned it. 
+You haven't brought it about in any way. 
+You have no way of assuring that there will be another moment given to you, and yet, that's the most valuable thing that can ever be given to us, this moment, with all the opportunity that it contains. 
+If we didn't have this present moment, we wouldn't have any opportunity to do anything or experience anything, and this moment is a gift. 
+Now, we say the gift within this gift is really the opportunity. 
+What you are really grateful for is the opportunity, not the thing that is given to you, because if that thing were somewhere else and you didn't have the opportunity to enjoy it, to do something with it, you wouldn't be grateful for it. 
+Opportunity is the gift within every gift, and we have this saying, opportunity knocks only once. 
+Every moment is a new gift, over and over again, and if you miss the opportunity of this moment, another moment is given to us, and another moment. 
+We can avail ourselves of this opportunity, or we can miss it, and if we avail ourselves of the opportunity, it is the key to happiness. 
+Behold the master key to our happiness in our own hands. 
+Moment by moment, we can be grateful for this gift. 
+Does that mean that we can be grateful for everything? 
+Certainly not. 
+We cannot be grateful for violence, for war, for oppression, for exploitation. 
+On the personal level, we cannot be grateful for the loss of a friend, for unfaithfulness, for bereavement. 
+I said we can be grateful in every given moment for the opportunity, and even when we are confronted with something that is terribly difficult, we can rise to this occasion and respond to the opportunity that is given to us. 
+It isn't as bad as it might seem. 
+Actually, when you look at it and experience it, you find that most of the time, what is given to us is the opportunity to enjoy, and we only miss it because we are rushing through life and we are not stopping to see the opportunity. 
+But once in a while, something very difficult is given to us, and when this difficult thing occurs to us, it's a challenge to rise to that opportunity, and we can rise to it by learning something which is sometimes painful. 
+Learning patience, for instance. 
+We have been told that the road to peace is not a sprint, but is more like a marathon. 
+That takes patience. That's difficult. 
+It may be to stand up for your opinion, to stand up for your conviction. 
+That's an opportunity that is given to us. 
+To learn, to suffer, to stand up, all these opportunities are given to us, but they are opportunities, and those who avail themselves of those opportunities are the ones that we admire. 
+They make something out of life. 
+That's the wonderful richness of life. 
+So how can we find a method that will harness this? 
+How can each one of us find a method for living gratefully, not just once in a while being grateful, but moment by moment to be grateful. 
+It's so simple that it's actually what we were told as children when we learned to cross the street. 
+Stop. 
+We rush through life. We don't stop. 
+We miss the opportunity because we don't stop. 
+We have to stop. 
+Every time I turned on the faucet, I was overwhelmed. 
+Every time I clicked on the light, I was so grateful. 
+But after a while, this wears off. 
+So I put little stickers on the light switch and on the water faucet, and every time I turned it on, water. 
+So leave it up to your own imagination. 
+You can find whatever works best for you, but you need stop signs in your life. 
+And when you stop, then the next thing is to look. 
+You open your ears. You open your nose. 
+You open all your senses for this wonderful richness that is given to us. 
+And then we can also open our hearts, our hearts for the opportunities, for the opportunities also to help others, to make others happy, because nothing makes us more happy than when all of us are happy. 
+And when we open our hearts to the opportunities, the opportunities invite us to do something, and that is the third. 
+Stop, look, and then go, and really do something. 
+Mostly it's the opportunity to enjoy, but sometimes it's something more difficult. 
+And that little stop, look, go, is such a potent seed that it can revolutionize our world. 
+Because we are at the present moment in the middle of a change of consciousness, and you will be surprised if you — I am always surprised when I hear how many times this word "" gratefulness "" and "" gratitude "" comes up. 
+Everywhere you find it, a grateful airline, a restaurant gratefulness, a café gratefulness, a wine that is gratefulness. 
+Yes, I have even come across a toilet paper whose brand is called "" Thank You. "" (Laughter) There is a wave of gratefulness because people are becoming aware how important this is and how this can change our world. 
+It can change our world in immensely important ways, because if you're grateful, you're not fearful, and if you're not fearful, you're not violent. 
+If you're grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. 
+If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people, and you are respectful to everybody, and that changes this power pyramid under which we live. 
+And it doesn't make for equality, but it makes for equal respect, and that is the important thing. 
+The future of the world will be a network, not a pyramid turned upside down. 
+The revolution of which I am speaking is a nonviolent revolution, and it's so revolutionary that it even revolutionizes the very concept of a revolution, because the normal revolution is one where the power pyramid is turned upside down and those who were on the bottom are now on the top and are doing exactly the same thing that the ones before. 
+What we need is a networking of smaller groups, smaller and smaller groups who know one another, who interact with one another, and that is a grateful world. 
+A grateful world is a world of joyful people. 
+Grateful people are joyful people, and joyful people — the more and more joyful people there are, the more and more we'll have a joyful world. 
+We have a network for grateful living, and it has mushroomed. 
+We couldn't understand why it mushroomed. 
+We have an opportunity for people to light a candle when they are grateful for something. 
+People are becoming aware that a grateful world is a happy world, and we all have the opportunity by the simple stop, look, go, to transform the world, to make it a happy place. 
+And that is what I hope for us, and if this has contributed a little to making you want to do the same, stop, look, go. 
+Thank you. 
+
+This is Revolution 2.0. 
+No one was a hero. No one was a hero. 
+Because everyone was a hero. 
+Everyone has done something. 
+We all use Wikipedia. 
+If you think of the concept of Wikipedia where everyone is collaborating on content, and at the end of the day you've built the largest encyclopedia in the world. 
+From just an idea that sounded crazy, you have the largest encyclopedia in the world. 
+And in the Egyptian revolution, the Revolution 2.0, everyone has contributed something, small or big. They contributed something — to bring us one of the most inspiring stories in the history of mankind when it comes to revolutions. 
+It was actually really inspiring to see all these Egyptians completely changing. 
+If you look at the scene, Egypt, for 30 years, had been in a downhill — going into a downhill. 
+Everything was going bad. 
+Everything was going wrong. 
+We only ranked high when it comes to poverty, corruption, lack of freedom of speech, lack of political activism. 
+Those were the achievements of our great regime. 
+Yet, nothing was happening. 
+And it's not because people were happy or people were not frustrated. 
+In fact, people were extremely frustrated. 
+But the reason why everyone was silent is what I call the psychological barrier of fear. 
+Everyone was scared. 
+Not everyone. There were actually a few brave Egyptians that I have to thank for being so brave — going into protests as a couple of hundred, getting beaten up and arrested. 
+But in fact, the majority were scared. 
+Everyone did not want really to get in trouble. 
+A dictator cannot live without the force. 
+They want to make people live in fear. 
+And that psychological barrier of fear had worked for so many years, and here comes the Internet, technology, BlackBerry, SMS. 
+It's helping all of us to connect. 
+Platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook were helping us a lot because it basically gave us the impression that, "" Wow, I'm not alone. 
+There are a lot of people who are frustrated. "" There are lots of people who are frustrated. 
+There are lots of people who actually share the same dream. 
+There are lots of people who care about their freedom. 
+They probably have the best life in the world. 
+They are living in happiness. They are living in their villas. 
+They are happy. They don't have problems. 
+But they are still feeling the pain of the Egyptian. 
+A lot of us, we're not really happy when we see a video of an Egyptian man who's eating the trash while others are stealing billions of Egyptian pounds from the wealth of the country. 
+The Internet has played a great role, helping these people to speak up their minds, to collaborate together, to start thinking together. 
+It was an educational campaign. 
+Khaled Saeed was killed in June 2010. 
+I still remember the photo. 
+I still remember every single detail of that photo. 
+The photo was horrible. 
+He was tortured, brutally tortured to death. 
+But then what was the answer of the regime? 
+"" He choked on a pile of hash "" — that was their answer: "" He's a criminal. 
+He's someone who escaped from all these bad things. "" But people did not relate to this. 
+People did not believe this. 
+Because of the Internet, the truth prevailed and everyone knew the truth. 
+And everyone started to think that "" this guy could be my brother. "" He was a middle-class guy. 
+His photo was remembered by all of us. 
+A page was created. 
+An anonymous administrator was basically inviting people to join the page, and there was no plan. 
+"What are we going to do?" "I don't know." 
+In a few days, tens of thousands of people there — angry Egyptians who were asking the ministry of interior affairs, "" Enough. 
+Get those who killed this guy. 
+To just bring them to justice. "" But of course, they don't listen. 
+It was an amazing story — how everyone started feeling the ownership. 
+Everyone was an owner in this page. 
+People started contributing ideas. 
+In fact, one of the most ridiculous ideas was, "" Hey, let's have a silent stand. 
+Let's get people to go in the street, face the sea, their back to the street, dressed in black, standing up silently for one hour, doing nothing and then just leaving, going back home. "" For some people, that was like, "" Wow, silent stand. 
+And next time it's going to be vibration. "" People were making fun of the idea. 
+But actually when people went to the street — the first time it was thousands of people in Alexandria — it felt like — it was amazing. It was great because it connected people from the virtual world, bringing them to the real world, sharing the same dream, the same frustration, the same anger, the same desire for freedom. 
+And they were doing this thing. 
+But did the regime learn anything? Not really. 
+They were actually attacking them. 
+They were actually abusing them, despite the fact of how peaceful these guys were — they were not even protesting. 
+And things had developed until the Tunisian revolution. 
+This whole page was, again, managed by the people. 
+In fact, the anonymous admin job was to collect ideas, help people to vote on them and actually tell them what they are doing. 
+People were taking shots and photos; people were reporting violations of human rights in Egypt; people were suggesting ideas, they were actually voting on ideas, and then they were executing the ideas; people were creating videos. 
+Everything was done by the people to the people, and that's the power of the Internet. 
+There was no leader. 
+The leader was everyone on that page. 
+The Tunisian experiment, as Amir was saying, inspired all of us, showed us that there is a way. 
+Yes we can. We can do it. 
+We have the same problems; we can just go in the streets. 
+And when I saw the street on the 25th, I went back and said, "" Egypt before the 25th is never going to be Egypt after the 25th. 
+The revolution is happening. 
+This is not the end, this is the beginning of the end. "" I was detained on the 27th night. 
+Thank God I announced the locations and everything. 
+But they detained me. 
+And I'm not going to talk about my experience, because this is not about me. 
+I was detained for 12 days, blindfolded, handcuffed. 
+And I did not really hear anything. I did not know anything. 
+I was not allowed to speak with anyone. 
+And I went out. 
+The next day I was in Tahrir. 
+Seriously, with the amount of change I had noticed in this square, I thought it was 12 years. 
+I never had in my mind to see this Egyptian, the amazing Egyptian. 
+The fear is no longer fear. 
+It's actually strength — it's power. 
+People were so empowered. 
+It was amazing how everyone was so empowered and now asking for their rights. 
+Completely opposite. 
+Extremism became tolerance. 
+Who would [have] imagined before the 25th, if I tell you that hundreds of thousands of Christians are going to pray and tens of thousands of Muslims are going to protect them, and then hundreds of thousands of Muslims are going to pray and tens of thousands of Christians are going to protect them — this is amazing. 
+All the stereotypes that the regime was trying to put on us through their so-called propaganda, or mainstream media, are proven wrong. 
+This whole revolution showed us how ugly such a regime was and how great and amazing the Egyptian man, the Egyptian woman, how simple and amazing these people are whenever they have a dream. 
+When I saw that, I went back and I wrote on Facebook. 
+And that was a personal belief, regardless of what's going on, regardless of the details. 
+I said that, "" We are going to win. 
+We are going to win because we don't understand politics. 
+We're going to win because we don't play their dirty games. 
+We're going to win because we don't have an agenda. 
+We're going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts. 
+We're going to win because we have dreams. 
+We're going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams. "" And that's actually what happened. We won. 
+And that's not because of anything, but because we believed in our dream. 
+The winning here is not the whole details of what's going to happen in the political scene. 
+The winning is the winning of the dignity of every single Egyptian. 
+Actually, I had this taxi driver telling me, "" Listen, I am breathing freedom. 
+I feel that I have dignity that I have lost for so many years. "" For me that's winning, regardless of all the details. 
+My last word to you is a statement I believe in, which Egyptians have proven to be true, that the power of the people is much stronger than the people in power. 
+Thanks a lot. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to speak about technology trends, which is something that many of you follow — but we also follow, for related reasons. 
+Obviously, being a technology magazine, technology trends are something that we write about and need to know about. 
+But also it's part of being any monthly magazine — you live in the future. And we have a long lead-time. 
+We have to plan issues many months in advance; we have to guess at what public appetites are going to be six months, nine months down the road. So we're in the forecasting business. 
+We also, like a lot of companies, create a product that's based on technology trends. 
+In this case, ours is about ideas and information, and, if we're lucky, some entertainment. But the concept's quite the same. 
+And so we have to understand not only why tech's important, where it's going, but also, very importantly, when — the timing is everything. 
+And it's interesting, when you look at the predictions made during the peak of the boom in the 1990s, about e-commerce, or Internet traffic, or broadband adoption, or Internet advertising, they were all right — they were just wrong in time. 
+Almost every one of those has come true just a few years later. 
+But the difference of a few years on stock-market valuations is obviously extreme. And that's why timing is everything. 
+You've probably seen something like this before. 
+This is the classic Gartner Hype Curve, which talks about kind of the trajectory of a technology's lifespan. 
+And just for fun, we put a bunch of technologies on it, to show whether they were kind of rising for the first high peak, or whether they were about to crash into the trough of disillusionment, or rise back in the slope of enlightenment, etc. 
+And this is one way to do technology forecasting: get a sense of where technology is and then anticipate the next upturn. 
+We tend to do any technology that we think is sufficiently important; we'll typically do it twice. Once, we want to do it first. 
+We want to be the first to do it, for the geeks who appreciate that, we'll catch it right there at the technology-trigger. 
+You can see in 1997, we put Linux on the cover. 
+But then it comes back. And sufficiently big technologies are going to hit the mainstream, and they're going to burst out. 
+And then it's time to do it again. Last year. 
+And that's one way that we try to time technology trends. 
+I'd like to talk about a way of thinking about technology trends that I call my "" grand unified theory of predicting the future, "" but it's closer to a petite unified theory of predicting the future. 
+It's based on the presumption, the observation even, that all important technologies go through four stages in their life — at least one of the four stages, sometimes all four of the stages. 
+And at each one of these stages, can be seen as a collision — a collision with something else — for example, a critical price-line that changes both the technology and also changes its effect on the world. It's an inflection point. 
+And these are the inflection points that tell you what the next chapter in that technology's life is going to be, and maybe how you can do something about it. 
+The first is the critical price. 
+The first stage in a technology's advance is that it'll fall below a critical price. 
+After it falls below a critical price, it will tend, if it's successful, to rise above a critical mass, a penetration. 
+Many technologies, at that point, displace another technology, and that's another important point. 
+And then finally, a lot of technologies commoditize. 
+Towards the end of their life, they become nearly free. 
+Each one of those is an opportunity to do something about it; it's an opportunity for the technology to change. 
+And even if you missed, you know, the first boom of Wi-Fi — you know, Wi-Fi did the critical price, it did the critical mass, but hasn't done displacement yet, and hasn't done free yet — there's still more opportunity in that. 
+I'd like to demonstrate what I mean by this by telling the story of the DVD, which is a technology which has done all of these. 
+The DVD, as you know, was introduced in the mid-1990s and it was quite expensive. But you can see that by 1998, it had fallen below 400 dollars, and 400 dollars was a psychological threshold. 
+And it started to take off. And you can see that the units started to trend up, the hidden inflection point — it was taking off. 
+The next thing it hit, a year later, was critical mass. In this case, 20 percent is often a good proxy for critical mass in a household. 
+And what's interesting here is that something else took off along with it: home-theater units. 
+Suddenly you have a DVD in the house; you've got high-quality digital video; you have a reason to have a big-screen television; you have a reason for Dolby 5.1 surround-sound. 
+And maybe you have reasons for starting to connect them, and bring the rest of your entertainment in. 
+What's interesting also is — note that Netflix was founded in 1999. 
+Reed Hastings is here. He clearly saw that that was a moment, that was an inflection point that he could do something with. 
+The next phase it hit was displacement. 
+You can see around 2001 it finally out-sold the VCR. 
+And here too, you can see the implications in the world at large. 
+Netflix was right — the Netflix model could capitalize on the DVD in a way that the video-rental stores couldn't. 
+Among the DVD's many assets is that it's very small; you can stick it in the mailer and post it cheaply. 
+That gave an advantage; that was an implication of the technology's rise that wasn't obvious to everybody. 
+And then finally, DVDs are approaching free. 
+There's a company called Apex, a no-name Chinese firm, who has, several times in the past year, been the number-one DVD seller in America. Their average price, for last year, was 48 dollars. 
+You're aware of the perhaps apocryphal Wal-Mart stampede over the 30-dollar DVD. 
+But they're getting very, very cheap, and look at the interesting implication of it. As they get cheaper, the premium brands, the Sonys and such, are losing market share, and the no-names, the Apexes, are gaining them. 
+They're being commodified, and that's what happens when things go to zero. It's a tough market out there. 
+(Laughter) Now they've introduced these four ways of looking at technology, these four stages of technology's life. 
+I'd like to talk about some other technologies out there, just technologies on our radar — and I'll use this lens, these four, as a way to kind of tell you where each one of those technologies is in its development. 
+They're not necessarily the top-10 technologies out there — they're just examples of technologies that are in each one of these periods. 
+But I think that the implications of them approaching these crossovers, these intersections, are interesting to think about. 
+Start with gene sequencing. 
+As you probably know, gene sequencing — in a large part, because it's built on computers — is falling in price at a kind of a Moore's Law-like level. 
+It is now possible — will be possible, and if Craig Venter indeed comes today, he may tell you something about this — to sequence the human genome for 40 million dollars by the end of this year. 
+That's as opposed to billions just a few years ago. 
+You know, our ability to capture the tools of creation is getting closer and closer. 
+What's interesting is that at the same time, the number of genes that we're discovering is rising very quickly. 
+Each one of these genes has potential diagnostic test. 
+There will come a day when you can have hundreds of thousands of tests done, very cheaply, if you want to know. You can learn about your own mosaic. 
+Here's another technology that's approaching a critical price. 
+This is a fascinating research from WHO that shows the effect of generic drugs on anti-retroviral drug compounds and cocktails. 
+In January 2000, the price was 10,000 dollars, or 27 dollars a day. 
+The generics came in, first in Brazil and elsewhere, and the effect was just dramatic on pricing. 
+Today it's less than 50 cents a day. 
+And what's interesting is if you look at the price elasticity, if you look at the correlation between these two, as the anti-retrovirals come down, the number of people you can treat goes radically up. And the Clinton Foundation and WHO believe that they can treat three million people worldwide by 2005 — two million in sub-Saharan Africa. 
+And the falling price of drugs has a lot to do with that. 
+Linux is another good example. 
+Now we've switched to critical mass. 
+These are now technologies that are hitting critical mass. 
+If you look here, here's Linux in red, and it's hit 20 percent. 
+Interestingly, it's done a crossover before, but not the crossovers that matter. 
+The crossover that's going to matter is the one with the blue. 
+But you can look and see the direction those lines are going, you can see that at the 20 percent, it's now taken seriously. 
+It's not just for the geeks any more. 
+That is, I imagine, what people in Redmond wake up in the middle of the night thinking about. 
+(Laughter) Another technology that we see all around us out here is hybrid cars. 
+I don't know whether anybody has a Prius 2004, but they're fantastic. 
+And if you look at the trends here, by about 2008 — and I don't think this is a crazy forecast — they'll be two percent of auto sales. 
+Two percent isn't 20 percent, but in the car business, which is slow moving, that's huge; that's arrival. 
+At two percent, you start seeing them on the roads everywhere. 
+And what's interesting about the hybrids taking off is you've now introduced electric motors to the automobile industry. 
+It's the first radical change in automobile technology in 100 years. 
+And once you have electric motors, you can do anything: you can change the structure of the car in any way you want. 
+You can have regenerative braking; you can have drive-by-wire; you can have replaceable body shapes — it's a little thing that starts with a hybrid, but it can lead to a whole new era of the car. 
+Voice Over IP is something you may have heard something about. 
+Again, it's kind of coming out of nowhere; it's a little hard to use right now. 
+There's a company created by the Kazaa founders called Skype. 
+Look at these numbers. They launched it in August of last year; they already have nearly four million registered users — that's critical mass. 
+And the same thing's happening on the carrier side. 
+You're looking at IP taking over from some of the traditional telecom standards. This is a tipping point — if Malcolm's here, forgive me — and it's going to change the economics, and the speed, and the players in the industry. 
+It's going to look a little bit like that. 
+And finally, free. Free is really, really interesting. 
+Free is something that comes with digital, because the reproduction costs are essentially free. It comes with IP, because it's such an efficient protocol. It comes with fiber optics, because there's so much bandwidth. 
+Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world. 
+It's an economic force; it's a technical force. 
+It's a deflationary force, if not handled right. 
+It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity. 
+Free is probably the most interesting thing. 
+And here you have just the number of songs that can be stored on a hard drive. 
+You know, there could be a film's [unclear] there, but it's basically, every song ever made could be stored on 400 dollars worth of storage by 2008. It takes that entire element, the physical element, of songs off the table. 
+And you've seen the numbers. 
+I mean, you know, the music industry is imploding in front of our very eyes, and Hollywood's worried as well. 
+They're facing a force that they haven't faced before. 
+And their response is draconian, and not necessarily the one that's going to get them out of this. 
+And finally, I'll give you one last example of free — perhaps the most powerful of all. I mentioned fiber optics — their abundance tends to make things free. 
+This is the price of a phone call to India per minute. 
+And what's interesting is that it was just 1990 when it was more than two dollars a minute. 
+India had, still has, a regulated phone system and so did we. 
+It was surprisingly non-innovative, moved very slowly, but then there was just so much fiber out there, you couldn't hold back, and look how quickly the price fell. 
+It's seven cents a minute, in many cases. 
+And the consequence of cheap phone calling, free phone calling, to India, is the pissed-off programmer, is the outsourcing. 
+It is probably one of the most dramatic shifts in globalization and one of the most powerful economic tools that we're seeing in our world today. 
+The force of India, and then China, and any other country that can contact our markets and will work with our companies — because the communications are free — is just beginning to be felt. 
+And I think that's probably one of the most important technology trends that we're looking at today. 
+Thank you. 
+
+So as a fashion designer, I've always tended to think of materials something like this, or this, or maybe this. 
+But then I met a biologist, and now I think of materials like this — green tea, sugar, a few microbes and a little time. 
+I'm essentially using a kombucha recipe, which is a symbiotic mix of bacteria, yeasts and other micro-organisms, which spin cellulose in a fermentation process. 
+Over time, these tiny threads form in the liquid into layers and produce a mat on the surface. 
+So we start by brewing the tea. 
+I brew up to about 30 liters of tea at a time, and then while it's still hot, add a couple of kilos of sugar. 
+We stir this in until it's completely dissolved and then pour it into a growth bath. 
+We need to check that the temperature has cooled to below 30 degrees C. 
+And then we're ready to add the living organism. 
+And along with that, some acetic acid. 
+And once you get this process going, you can actually recycle your previous fermented liquid. 
+We need to maintain an optimum temperature for the growth. 
+And I use a heat mat to sit the bath on and a thermostat to regulate it. 
+And actually, in hot weather, I can just grow it outside. 
+So this is my mini fabric farm. 
+After about three days, the bubbles will appear on the surface of the liquid. 
+So this is telling us that the fermentation is in full swing. 
+And the bacteria are feeding on the sugar nutrients in the liquid. 
+So they're spinning these tiny nano fibers of pure cellulose. 
+And they're sticking together, forming layers and giving us a sheet on the surface. 
+After about two to three weeks, we're looking at something which is about an inch in thickness. 
+So the bath on the left is after five days, and on the right, after 10. 
+And this is a static culture. 
+You don't have to do anything to it; you just literally watch it grow. 
+It doesn't need light. 
+And when it's ready to harvest, you take it out of the bath and you wash it in cold, soapy water. 
+At this point, it's really heavy. 
+It's over 90 percent water, so we need to let that evaporate. 
+So I spread it out onto a wooden sheet. 
+Again, you can do that outside and just let it dry in the air. 
+And as it's drying, it's compressing, so what you're left with, depending on the recipe, is something that's either like a really light-weight, transparent paper, or something which is much more like a flexible vegetable leather. 
+And then you can either cut that out and sew it conventionally, or you can use the wet material to form it around a three-dimensional shape. 
+And as it evaporates, it will knit itself together, forming seams. 
+So the color in this jacket is coming purely from green tea. 
+I guess it also looks a little bit like human skin, which intrigues me. 
+Since it's organic, I'm really keen to try and minimize the addition of any chemicals. 
+I can make it change color without using dye by a process of iron oxidation. 
+Using fruit and vegetable staining, create organic patterning. 
+And using indigo, make it anti-microbial. 
+And in fact, cotton would take up to 18 dips in indigo to achieve a color this dark. 
+And because of the super-absorbency of this kind of cellulose, it just takes one, and a really short one at that. 
+What I can't yet do is make it water-resistant. 
+So if I was to walk outside in the rain wearing this dress today, I would immediately start to absorb huge amounts of water. 
+The dress would get really heavy, and eventually the seams would probably fall apart — leaving me feeling rather naked. 
+Possibly a good performance piece, but definitely not ideal for everyday wear. 
+What I'm looking for is a way to give the material the qualities that I need. 
+So what I want to do is say to a future bug, "" Spin me a thread. 
+Align it in this direction. 
+Make it hydrophobic. 
+And while you're at it, just form it around this 3D shape. "" Bacterial cellulose is actually already being used for wound healing, and possibly in the future for biocompatible blood vessels, possibly even replacement bone tissue. 
+But with synthetic biology, we can actually imagine engineering this bacterium to produce something that gives us the quality, quantity and shape of material that we desire. 
+Obviously, as a designer, that's really exciting because then I start to think, wow, we could actually imagine growing consumable products. 
+What excites me about using microbes is their efficiency. 
+So we only grow what we need. 
+There's no waste. 
+And in fact, we could make it from a waste stream — so for example, a waste sugar stream from a food processing plant. 
+Finally, at the end of use, we could biodegrade it naturally along with your vegetable peelings. 
+What I'm not suggesting is that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton, leather or other textile materials. 
+But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources. 
+Ultimately, maybe it won't even be fashion where we see these microbes have their impact. 
+We could, for example, imagine growing a lamp, a chair, a car or maybe even a house. 
+So I guess what my question to you is: in the future, what would you choose to grow? 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Suzanne, just a curiosity, what you're wearing is not random. (Suzanne Lee: No.) This is one of the jackets you grew? 
+SL: Yes, it is. 
+It's probably — part of the project's still in process because this one is actually biodegrading in front of your eyes. 
+(Laughter) It's absorbing my sweat, and it's feeding on it. 
+BG: Okay, so we'll let you go and save it, and rescue it. 
+Suzanne Lee. (SL: Thank you.) (Applause) 
+
+In 2008, Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar. 
+Millions of people were in severe need of help. 
+The U.N. wanted to rush people and supplies to the area. 
+But there were no maps, no maps of roads, no maps showing hospitals, no way for help to reach the cyclone victims. 
+When we look at a map of Los Angeles or London, it is hard to believe that as of 2005, only 15 percent of the world was mapped to a geo-codable level of detail. 
+The U.N. ran headfirst into a problem that the majority of the world's populous faces: not having detailed maps. 
+But help was coming. 
+At Google, 40 volunteers used a new software to map 120,000 kilometers of roads, 3,000 hospitals, logistics and relief points. 
+And it took them four days. 
+The new software they used? Google Mapmaker. 
+Google Mapmaker is a technology that empowers each of us to map what we know locally. 
+People have used this software to map everything from roads to rivers, from schools to local businesses, and video stores to the corner store. 
+Maps matter. 
+Nobel Prize nominee Hernando De Soto recognized that the key to economic liftoff for most developing countries is to tap the vast amounts of uncapitalized land. 
+For example, a trillion dollars of real estate remains uncapitalized in India alone. 
+In the last year alone, thousands of users in 170 countries have mapped millions of pieces of information, and created a map of a level of detail never thought viable. 
+And this was made possible by the power of passionate users everywhere. 
+Let's look at some of the maps being created by users right now. 
+So, as we speak, people are mapping the world in these 170 countries. 
+You can see Bridget in Africa who just mapped a road in Senegal. 
+And, closer to home, Chalua, an N.G. road in Bangalore. 
+This is the result of computational geometry, gesture recognition, and machine learning. 
+This is a victory of thousands of users, in hundreds of cities, one user, one edit at a time. 
+This is an invitation to the 70 percent of our unmapped planet. 
+Welcome to the new world. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I was born in Switzerland and raised in Ghana, West Africa. 
+Ghana felt safe to me as a child. 
+I was free, I was happy. 
+The early 70s marked a time of musical and artistic excellence in Ghana. 
+But then by the end of the decade, the country had fallen back into political instability and mismanagement. 
+In 1979, I witnessed my first military coup. 
+We the children had gathered at a friend's house. 
+It was a dimly lit shack. 
+There was a beaten up black and white television flickering in the background, and a former head of state and general was being blindfolded and tied to the pole. 
+The firing squad aimed, fired — the general was dead. 
+Now this was being broadcast live. 
+And shortly after, we left the country, and we returned to Switzerland. 
+Now Europe came as a shock to me, and I think I started feeling the need to shed my skin in order to fit in. 
+I wanted to blend in like a chameleon. 
+I think it was a tactic of survival. 
+And it worked, or so I believed. 
+So here I was in 2008 wondering where I was in my life. 
+And I felt I was being typecast as an actor. 
+I was always playing the exotic African. 
+I was playing the violent African, the African terrorist. 
+And I was thinking, how many terrorists could I possibly play before turning into one myself? 
+And I had become ashamed of the other, the African in me. 
+And fortunately I decided in 2008 to return to Ghana, after 28 years of absence. 
+I wanted to document on film the 2008 presidential elections. 
+And there, I started by searching for the footprints in my childhood. 
+And before I even knew it, I was suddenly on a stage surrounded by thousands of cheering people during a political rally. 
+And I realized that, when I'd left the country, free and fair elections in a democratic environment were a dream. 
+And now that I'd returned, that dream had become reality, though a fragile reality. 
+And I was thinking, was Ghana searching for its identity like I was looking for my identity? 
+Was what was happening in Ghana a metaphor for what was happening in me? 
+And it was as if through the standards of my Western life, I hadn't lived up to my full potential. 
+I mean, nor had Ghana, even though we had been trying very hard. 
+Now in 1957, Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to gain its independence. 
+In the late 50s, Ghana and Singapore had the same GDP. 
+I mean, today, Singapore is a First World country and Ghana is not. 
+But maybe it was time to prove to myself, yes, it's important to understand the past, it is important to look at it in a different light, but maybe we should look at the strengths in our own culture and build on those foundations in the present. 
+So here I was, December 7th, 2008. 
+The polling stations opened to the voters at 7: 00 AM, but voters, eager to take their own political fate into their hands, were starting to line up at 4: 00 AM in the morning. 
+And they had traveled from near, they had traveled from far, because they wanted to make their voices heard. 
+And I asked one of the voters, I said, "" Whom are you going to vote for? "" And he said, "" I'm sorry, I can't tell you. "" He said that his vote was in his heart. 
+And I understood, this was their election, and they weren't going to let anyone take it away from them. 
+Now the first round of the voting didn't bring forth a clear winner — so nobody had achieved the absolute majority — so voting went into a second round three weeks later. 
+The candidates were back on the road; they were campaigning. 
+The rhetoric of the candidates, of course, changed. 
+The heat was on. 
+And then the cliche came to haunt us. 
+There were claims of intimidation at the polling stations, of ballot boxes being stolen. 
+Inflated results started coming in and the mob was starting to get out of control. 
+We witnessed the eruption of violence in the streets. 
+People were being beaten brutally. 
+The army started firing their guns. People were scrambling. 
+It was complete chaos. 
+And my heart sank, because I thought, here we are again. 
+Here is another proof that the African is not capable of governing himself. 
+And not only that, I am documenting it — documenting my own cultural shortcomings. 
+So when the echo of the gunshots had lingered, it was soon drowned by the chanting of the mob, and I didn't believe what I was hearing. 
+They were chanting, "" We want peace. 
+We want peace. "" And I realized it had to come from the people. 
+After all, they decide, and they did. 
+So the sounds that were before distorted and loud, were suddenly a melody. 
+The sounds of the voices were harmonious. 
+So it could happen. 
+A democracy could be upheld peacefully. 
+It could be, by the will of the masses who were now urgently pressing with all their heart and all their will for peace. 
+Now here's an interesting comparison. 
+We in the West, we preach the values, the golden light of democracy, that we are the shining example of how it's done. 
+But when it comes down to it, Ghana found itself in the same place in which the U.S. election stalled in the 2000 presidential elections — Bush versus Gore. 
+But instead of the unwillingness of the candidates to allow the system to proceed and the people to decide, Ghana honored democracy and its people. 
+It didn't leave it up to the Supreme Court to decide; the people did. 
+Now the second round of voting did not bring forth a clear winner either. 
+I mean, it was so incredibly close. 
+The electoral commissioner declared, with the consent of the parties, to run an unprecedented second re-run. 
+So the people went back to the polls to determine their own president, not the legal system. 
+And guess what, it worked. 
+The defeated candidate gave up power and made way for Ghana to move into a new democratic cycle. 
+I mean, at the absolute time for the absolute need of democracy, they did not abuse their power. 
+The belief in true democracy and in the people runs deep, proving that the African is capable of governing himself. 
+Now the uphill battle for Ghana and for Africa is not over, but I have proof that the other side of democracy exists, and that we must not take it for granted. 
+Now I have learned that my place is not just in the West or in Africa, and I'm still searching for my identity, but I saw Ghana create democracy better. 
+Ghana taught me to look at people differently and to look at myself differently. 
+And yes, we Africans can. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+While preparing for my talk I was reflecting on my life and trying to figure out where exactly was that moment when my journey began. 
+A long time passed by, and I simply couldn't figure out the beginning or the middle or the end of my story. 
+I always used to think that my beginning was one afternoon in my community when my mother had told me that I had escaped three arranged marriages by the time I was two. 
+Or one evening when electricity had failed for eight hours in our community, and my dad sat, surrounded by all of us, telling us stories of when he was a little kid struggling to go to school while his father, who was a farmer, wanted him to work in the fields with him. 
+Or that dark night when I was 16 when three little kids had come to me and they whispered in my ear that my friend was murdered in something called the honor killings. 
+But then I realized that, as much as I know that these moments have contributed on my journey, they have influenced my journey but they have not been the beginning of it, but the true beginning of my journey was in front of a mud house in upper Sindh of Pakistan, where my father held the hand of my 14-year-old mother and they decided to walk out of the village to go to a town where they could send their kids to school. 
+In a way, I feel like my life is kind of a result of some wise choices and decisions they've made. 
+And just like that, another of their decisions was to keep me and my siblings connected to our roots. 
+While we were living in a community I fondly remember as called Ribabad, which means community of the poor, my dad made sure that we also had a house in our rural homeland. 
+I come from an indigenous tribe in the mountains of Balochistan called Brahui. 
+Brahui, or Brohi, means mountain dweller, and it is also my language. 
+Thanks to my father's very strict rules about connecting to our customs, I had to live a beautiful life of songs, cultures, traditions, stories, mountains, and a lot of sheep. 
+But then, living in two extremes between the traditions of my culture, of my village, and then modern education in my school wasn't easy. 
+I was aware that I was the only girl who got to have such freedom, and I was guilty of it. 
+While going to school in Karachi and Hyderabad, a lot of my cousins and childhood friends were getting married off, some to older men, some in exchange, some even as second wives. 
+I got to see the beautiful tradition and its magic fade in front of me when I saw that the birth of a girl child was celebrated with sadness, when women were told to have patience as their main virtue. 
+Up until I was 16, I healed my sadness by crying, mostly at nights when everyone would sleep and I would sob in my pillow, until that one night when I found out my friend was killed in the name of honor. 
+Honor killings is a custom where men and women are suspected of having relationships before or outside of the marriage, and they're killed by their family for it. 
+Usually the killer is the brother or father or the uncle in the family. 
+The U.N. reports there are about 1,000 honor murders every year in Pakistan, and these are only the reported cases. 
+A custom that kills did not make any sense to me, and I knew I had to do something about it this time. 
+I was not going to cry myself to sleep. 
+I was going to do something, anything, to stop it. 
+I was 16 — I started writing poetry and going door to door telling everybody about honor killings and why it happens, why it should be stopped, and raising awareness about it until I actually found a much, much better way to handle this issue. 
+In those days, we were living in a very small, one-roomed house in Karachi. 
+Every year, during the monsoon seasons, our house would flood up with water — rainwater and sewage — and my mom and dad would be taking the water out. 
+In those days, my dad brought home a huge machine, a computer. 
+It was so big it looked as if it was going to take up half of the only room we had, and had so many pieces and wires that needed to be connected. 
+But it was still the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me and my sisters. 
+My oldest brother Ali got to be in charge of taking care of the computer, and all of us were given 10 to 15 minutes every day to use it. 
+Being the oldest of eight kids, I got to use it the last, and that was after I had washed the dishes, cleaned the house, made dinner with my mom, and put blankets on the floor for everyone to sleep, and after that, I would run to the computer, connect it to the Internet, and have pure joy and wonder for 10 to 15 minutes. 
+In those days, I had discovered a website called Joogle. 
+[Google] (Laughter) In my frantic wish to do something about this custom, I made use of Google and discovered Facebook, a website where people can connect to anyone around the world, and so, from my very tiny, cement-roofed room in Karachi, I connected with people in the U.K., the U.S., Australia and Canada, and created a campaign called WAKE UP Campaign against Honor Killings. 
+It became enormous in just a few months. 
+I got a lot of support from all around the world. 
+Media was connecting to us. 
+A lot of people were reaching out trying to raise awareness with us. 
+It became so big that it went from online to the streets of my hometown, where we would do rallies and strikes trying to change the policies in Pakistan for women's support. 
+And while I thought everything was perfect, my team — which was basically my friends and neighbors at that time — thought everything was going so well, we had no idea a big opposition was coming to us. 
+My community stood up against us, saying we were spreading un-Islamic behavior. 
+We were challenging centuries-old customs in those communities. 
+I remember my father receiving anonymous letters saying, "" Your daughter is spreading Western culture in the honorable societies. "" Our car was stoned at one point. 
+One day I went to the office and found our metal signboard wrinkled and broken as if a lot of people had been hitting it with something heavy. 
+Things got so bad that I had to hide myself in many ways. 
+I would put up the windows of the car, veil my face, not speak while I was in public, but eventually situations got worse when my life was threatened, and I had to leave, back to Karachi, and our actions stopped. 
+Back in Karachi, as an 18-year-old, I thought this was the biggest failure of my entire life. 
+I was devastated. 
+As a teenager, I was blaming myself for everything that happened. 
+And it turns out, when we started reflecting, we did realize that it was actually me and my team's fault. 
+There were two big reasons why our campaign had failed big time. 
+One of those, the first reason, is we were standing against core values of people. 
+We were saying no to something that was very important to them, challenging their code of honor, and hurting them deeply in the process. 
+And number two, which was very important for me to learn, and amazing, and surprising for me to learn, was that we were not including the true heroes who should be fighting for themselves. 
+The women in the villages had no idea we were fighting for them in the streets. 
+Every time I would go back, I would find my cousins and friends with scarves on their faces, and I would ask, "" What happened? "" And they'd be like, "" Our husbands beat us. "" But we are working in the streets for you! 
+We are changing the policies. 
+How is that not impacting their life? 
+So then we found out something which was very amazing for us. 
+The policies of a country do not necessarily always affect the tribal and rural communities. 
+It was devastating — like, oh, we can't actually do something about this? 
+And we found out there's a huge gap when it comes to official policies and the real truth on the ground. 
+So this time, we were like, we are going to do something different. 
+We are going to use strategy, and we are going to go back and apologize. 
+Yes, apologize. 
+We went back to the communities and we said we are very ashamed of what we did. 
+We are here to apologize, and in fact, we are here to make it up to you. 
+How do we do that? 
+We are going to promote three of your main cultures. 
+We know that it's music, language, and embroidery. 
+Nobody believed us. 
+Nobody wanted to work with us. 
+It took a lot of convincing and discussions with these communities until they agreed that we are going to promote their language by making a booklet of their stories, fables and old tales in the tribe, and we would promote their music by making a CD of the songs from the tribe, and some drumbeating. 
+And the third, which was my favorite, was we would promote their embroidery by making a center in the village where women would come every day to make embroidery. 
+And so it began. 
+We worked with one village, and we started our first center. 
+It was a beautiful day. 
+We started the center. 
+Women were coming to make embroidery, and going through a life-changing process of education, learning about their rights, what Islam says about their rights, and enterprise development, how they can create money, and then how they can create money from money, how they can fight the customs that have been destroying their lives from so many centuries, because in Islam, in reality, women are supposed to be shoulder to shoulder with men. 
+Women have so much status that we have not been hearing, that they have not been hearing, and we needed to tell them that they need to know where their rights are and how to take them by themselves, because they can do it and we can't. 
+So this was the model which actually came out — very amazing. 
+Through embroidery we were promoting their traditions. 
+We went into the village. We would mobilize the community. 
+We would make a center inside where 30 women will come for six months to learn about value addition of traditional embroidery, enterprise development, life skills and basic education, and about their rights and how to say no to those customs and how to stand as leaders for themselves and the society. 
+After six months, we would connect these women to loans and to markets where they can become local entrepreneurs in their communities. 
+We soon called this project Sughar. 
+Sughar is a local word used in many, many languages in Pakistan. 
+It means skilled and confident women. 
+I truly believe, to create women leaders, there's only one thing you have to do: Just let them know that they have what it takes to be a leader. 
+These women you see here, they have strong skills and potential to be leaders. 
+All we had to do was remove the barriers that surrounded them, and that's what we decided to do. 
+But then while we were thinking everything was going well, once again everything was fantastic, we found our next setback: A lot of men started seeing the visible changes in their wife. 
+She's speaking more, she's making decisions — oh my gosh, she's handling everything in the house. 
+They stopped them from coming to the centers, and this time, we were like, okay, time for strategy two. 
+We went to the fashion industry in Pakistan and decided to do research about what happens there. 
+Turns out the fashion industry in Pakistan is very strong and growing day by day, but there is less contribution from the tribal areas and to the tribal areas, especially women. 
+So we decided to launch our first ever tribal women's very own fashion brand, which is now called Nomads. 
+And so women started earning more, they started contributing more financially to the house, and men had to think again before saying no to them when they were coming to the centers. 
+(Applause) Thank you, thank you. 
+In 2013, we launched our first Sughar Hub instead of a center. 
+We partnered with TripAdvisor and created a cement hall in the middle of a village and invited so many other organizations to work over there. 
+We created this platform for the nonprofits so they can touch and work on the other issues that Sughar is not working on, which would be an easy place for them to give trainings, use it as a farmer school, even as a marketplace, and anything they want to use it for, and they have been doing really amazingly. 
+And so far, we have been able to support 900 women in 24 villages around Pakistan. 
+(Applause) But that's actually not what I want. 
+My dream is to reach out to one million women in the next 10 years, and to make sure that happens, this year we launched Sughar Foundation in the U.S. 
+It is not just going to fund Sughar but many other organizations in Pakistan to replicate the idea and to find even more innovative ways to unleash the rural women's potential in Pakistan. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
+Chris Anderson: Khalida, you are quite the force of nature. 
+I mean, this story, in many ways, just seems beyond belief. 
+It's incredible that someone so young could do achieve this much through so much force and ingenuity. 
+So I guess one question: This is a spectacular dream to reach out and empower a million women — how much of the current success depends on you, the force of this magnetic personality? 
+How does it scale? 
+Khalida Brohi: I think my job is to give the inspiration out, give my dream out. 
+I can't teach how to do it, because there are so many different ways. 
+We have been experimenting with three ways only. 
+There are a hundred different ways to unleash potential in women. 
+I would just give the inspiration and that's my job. 
+I will keep doing it. Sughar will still be growing. 
+We are planning to reach out to two more villages, and soon I believe we will be scaling out of Pakistan into South Asia and beyond. 
+CA: I love that when you talked about your team in the talk, I mean, you were all 18 at the time. 
+What did this team look like? 
+This was school friends, right? 
+KB: Do people here believe that I'm at an age where I'm supposed to be a grandmother in my village? 
+My mom was married at nine, and I am the oldest woman not married and not doing anything in my life in my village. 
+CA: Wait, wait, wait, not doing anything? 
+KB: No. CA: You're right. 
+KB: People feel sorry for me, a lot of times. 
+CA: But how much time are you spending now actually back in Balochistan? 
+KB: I live over there. 
+We live between, still, Karachi and Balochistan. 
+My siblings are all going to school. 
+I am still the oldest of eight siblings. 
+CA: But what you're doing is definitely threatening to some people there. 
+How do you handle safety? Do you feel safe? 
+Are there issues there? 
+KB: This question has come to me a lot of times before, and I feel like the word "" fear "" just comes to me and then drops, but there is one fear that I have that is different from that. 
+The fear is that if I get killed, what would happen to the people who love me so much? 
+My mom waits for me till late at night that I should come home. 
+My sisters want to learn so much from me, and there are many, many girls in my community who want to talk to me and ask me different things, and I recently got engaged. (Laughs) (Applause) CA: Is he here? You've got to stand up. (Applause) 
+KB: Escaping arranged marriages, I chose my own husband across the world in L.A., a really different world. 
+I had to fight for a whole year. That's totally a different story. 
+But I think that's the only thing that I'm afraid of, and I don't want my mom to not see anyone when she waits in the night. 
+CA: So people who want to help you on their way, they can go on, they can maybe buy some of these clothes that you're bringing over that are actually made, the embroidery is done back in Balochistan? 
+KB: Yeah. 
+CA: Or they can get involved in the foundation. 
+KB: Definitely. We are looking for as many people as we can, because now that the foundation's in the beginning process, I am trying to learn a lot about how to operate, how to get funding or reach out to more organizations, and especially in the e-commerce, which is very new for me. 
+I mean, I am not a fashion person, believe me. 
+CA: Well, it's been incredible to have you here. 
+Please go on being courageous, go on being smart, and please stay safe. 
+KB: Thank you so much. CA: Thank you, Khalida. (Applause) 
+
+So sometimes I get invited to give weird talks. 
+I got invited to speak to the people who dress up in big stuffed animal costumes to perform at sporting events. 
+Unfortunately I couldn't go. 
+But it got me thinking about the fact that these guys, at least most of them, know what it is that they do for a living. 
+What they do is they dress up as stuffed animals and entertain people at sporting events. 
+Shortly after that I got invited to speak at the convention of the people who make balloon animals. 
+And again, I couldn't go. But it's a fascinating group. They make balloon animals. 
+There is a big schism between the ones who make gospel animals and porn animals, but — (Laughter) they do a lot of really cool stuff with balloons. 
+Sometimes they get in trouble, but not often. 
+And the other thing about these guys is, they also know what they do for a living. 
+They make balloon animals. 
+But what do we do for a living? 
+What exactly to the people watching this do every day? 
+And I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything. 
+That we try to find a piece of the status quo — something that bothers us, something that needs to be improved, something that is itching to be changed — and we change it. 
+We try to make big, permanent, important change. 
+But we don't think about it that way. 
+And we haven't spent a lot of time talking about what that process is like. 
+And I've been studying it for a couple years. 
+And I want to share a couple stories with you today. 
+First, about a guy named Nathan Winograd. 
+Nathan was the number two person at the San Francisco SPCA. 
+And what you may not know about the history of the SPCA is, it was founded to kill dogs and cats. 
+Cities gave them a charter to get rid of the stray animals on the street and destroy them. 
+In a typical year four million dogs and cats were killed, most of them within 24 hours of being scooped off of the street. 
+Nathan and his boss saw this, and they could not tolerate it. 
+So they set out to make San Francisco a no-kill city: create an entire city where every dog and cat, unless it was ill or dangerous, would be adopted, not killed. 
+And everyone said it was impossible. 
+Nathan and his boss went to the city council to get a change in the ordinance. 
+And people from SPCAs and humane shelters around the country flew to San Francisco to testify against them — to say it would hurt the movement and it was inhumane. 
+They persisted. And Nathan went directly to the community. 
+He connected with people who cared about this: nonprofessionals, people with passion. 
+And within just a couple years, San Francisco became the first no-kill city, running no deficit, completely supported by the community. 
+Nathan left and went to Tompkins County, New York — a place as different from San Francisco as you can be and still be in the United States. And he did it again. 
+He went from being a glorified dogcatcher to completely transforming the community. 
+And then he went to North Carolina and did it again. 
+And he went to Reno and he did it again. 
+And when I think about what Nathan did, and when I think about what people here do, I think about ideas. 
+And I think about the idea that creating an idea, spreading an idea has a lot behind it. 
+I don't know if you've ever been to a Jewish wedding, but what they do is, they take a light bulb and they smash it. 
+Now there is a bunch of reasons for that, and stories about it. 
+But one reason is because it indicates a change, from before to after. 
+It is a moment in time. 
+And I want to argue that we are living through and are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented. 
+We started with the factory idea: that you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change. 
+We then went to the TV idea, that said if you had a big enough mouthpiece, if you could get on TV enough times, if you could buy enough ads, you could win. 
+And now we're in this new model of leadership, where the way we make change is not by using money or power to lever a system, but by leading. 
+So let me tell you about the three cycles. The first one is the factory cycle. 
+Henry Ford comes up with a really cool idea. 
+It enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents a day and pay them five dollars a day. 
+Because he's got an efficient enough factory. 
+Well with that sort of advantage you can churn out a lot of cars. 
+You can make a lot of change. You can get roads built. 
+You can change the fabric of an entire country. 
+That the essence of what you're doing is you need ever-cheaper labor, and ever-faster machines. 
+And the problem we've run into is, we're running out of both. 
+Ever-cheaper labor and ever-faster machines. 
+(Laughter) So we shift gears for a minute, and say, "" I know: television; advertising. Push push. 
+Take a good idea and push it on the world. 
+I have a better mousetrap. 
+And if I can just get enough money to tell enough people, I'll sell enough. "" And you can build an entire industry on that. 
+If necessary you can put babies in your ads. 
+If necessary you can use babies to sell other stuff. 
+And if babies don't work, you can use doctors. 
+But be careful. 
+Because you don't want to get an unfortunate juxtaposition, where you're talking about one thing instead of the other. 
+(Laughter) This model requires you to act like the king, like the person in the front of the room throwing things to the peons in the back. 
+That you are in charge, and you're going to tell people what to do next. 
+The quick little diagram of it is, you're up here, and you are pushing it out to the world. 
+This method — mass marketing — requires average ideas, because you're going to the masses, and plenty of ads. 
+What we've done as spammers is tried to hypnotize everyone into buying our idea, hypnotize everyone into donating to our cause, hypnotize everyone into voting for our candidate. 
+And, unfortunately, it doesn't work so well anymore either. 
+(Laughter) But there is good news around the corner — really good news. 
+I call it the idea of tribes. 
+What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50,000 years. 
+It's about leading and connecting people and ideas. 
+And it's something that people have wanted forever. 
+Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe, or a church tribe, having a work tribe, having a community tribe. 
+But now, thanks to the internet, thanks to the explosion of mass media, thanks to a lot of other things that are bubbling through our society around the world, tribes are everywhere. 
+The Internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. 
+Instead what it's allowed is silos of interest. 
+So you've got the red-hat ladies over here. 
+You've got the red-hat triathletes over there. 
+You've got the organized armies over here. 
+You've got the disorganized rebels over here. 
+You've got people in white hats making food. 
+And people in white hats sailing boats. 
+The point is that you can find Ukrainian folk dancers and connect with them, because you want to be connected. 
+That people on the fringes can find each other, connect and go somewhere. 
+Every town that has a volunteer fire department understands this way of thinking. 
+(Laughter) Now it turns out this is a legitimate non-photoshopped photo. 
+People I know who are firemen told me that this is not uncommon. 
+And that what firemen do to train sometimes is they take a house that is going to be torn down, and they burn it down instead, and practice putting it out. 
+But they always stop and take a picture. 
+(Laughter) You know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one. 
+They've got their own flag. They've got the eye patches. 
+You can tell when you're running into someone in a tribe. 
+And it turns out that it's tribes — not money, not factories — that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. 
+Not because you force them to do something against their will, but because they wanted to connect. 
+That what we do for a living now, all of us, I think, is find something worth changing, and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea. 
+And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves, it becomes a movement. 
+So when Al Gore set out to change the world again, he didn't do it by himself. 
+And he didn't do it by buying a lot of ads. 
+He did it by creating a movement. 
+Thousands of people around the country who could give his presentation for him, because he can't be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night. 
+You don't need everyone. 
+What Kevin Kelley has taught us is you just need, I don't know, a thousand true fans — a thousand people who care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the next round. 
+And that means that the idea you create, the product you create, the movement you create isn't for everyone, it's not a mass thing. That's not what this is about. 
+What it's about instead is finding the true believers. 
+It's easy to look at what I've said so far, and say, "" Wait a minute, I don't have what it takes to be that kind of leader. "" So here are two leaders. They don't have a lot in common. 
+They're about the same age. But that's about it. 
+What they did, though, is each in their own way, created a different way of navigating your way through technology. 
+So some people will go out and get people to be on one team. 
+And some people will get people to be on the other team. 
+It also informs the decisions you make when you make products or services. 
+You know, this is one of my favorite devices. 
+But what a shame that it's not organized to help authors create movements. 
+What would happen if, when you're using your Kindle, you could see the comments and quotes and notes from all the other people reading the same book as you in that moment. 
+Or from your book group. Or from your friends, or from the circle you want. 
+What would happen if authors, or people with ideas could use version two, which comes out on Monday, and use it to organize people who want to talk about something. 
+Now there is a million things I could share with you about the mechanics here. 
+But let me just try a couple. 
+The Beatles did not invent teenagers. 
+They merely decided to lead them. 
+That most movements, most leadership that we're doing is about finding a group that's disconnected but already has a yearning — not persuading people to want something they don't have yet. 
+When Diane Hatz worked on "" The Meatrix, "" her video that spread all across the internet about the way farm animals are treated, she didn't invent the idea of being a vegan. 
+She didn't invent the idea of caring about this issue. 
+But she helped organize people, and helped turn it into a movement. 
+Hugo Chavez did not invent the disaffected middle and lower class of Venezuela. He merely led them. 
+Bob Marley did not invent Rastafarians. 
+He just stepped up and said, "" Follow me. "" Derek Sivers invented CD Baby, which allowed independent musicians to have a place to sell their music without selling out to the man — to have place to take the mission they already wanted to go to, and connect with each other. 
+What all these people have in common is that they are heretics. 
+That heretics look at the status quo and say, "" This will not stand. I can't abide this status quo. 
+I am willing to stand up and be counted and move things forward. 
+I see what the status quo is; I don't like it. "" That instead of looking at all the little rules and following each one of them, that instead of being what I call a sheepwalker — somebody who's half asleep, following instructions, keeping their head down, fitting in — every once in a while someone stands up and says, "" Not me. "" Someone stands up and says, "" This one is important. 
+We need to organize around it. "" And not everyone will. But you don't need everyone. 
+You just need a few people — (Laughter) — who will look at the rules, realize they make no sense, and realize how much they want to be connected. 
+So Tony Hsieh does not run a shoe store. 
+Zappos isn't a shoe store. 
+Zappos is the one, the only, the best-there-ever-was place for people who are into shoes to find each other, to talk about their passion, to connect with people who care more about customer service than making a nickel tomorrow. 
+It can be something as prosaic as shoes, and something as complicated as overthrowing a government. 
+It's exactly the same behavior though. 
+What it requires, as Geraldine Carter has discovered, is to be able to say, "" I can't do this by myself. 
+But if I can get other people to join my Climb and Ride, then together we can get something that we all want. 
+We're just waiting for someone to lead us. "" Michelle Kaufman has pioneered new ways of thinking about environmental architecture. 
+She doesn't do it by quietly building one house at a time. 
+She does it by telling a story to people who want to hear it. 
+By connecting a tribe of people who are desperate to be connected to each other. 
+By leading a movement and making change. 
+And around and around and around it goes. 
+So three questions I'd offer you. 
+The first one is, who exactly are you upsetting? 
+Because if you're not upsetting anyone, you're not changing the status quo. 
+The second question is, who are you connecting? 
+Because for a lot of people, that's what they're in it for: the connections that are being made, one to the other. 
+And the third one is, who are you leading? 
+Because focusing on that part of it — not the mechanics of what you're building, but the who, and the leading part — is where change comes. 
+So Blake, at Tom's Shoes, had a very simple idea. 
+"" What would happen if every time someone bought a pair of these shoes I gave exactly the same pair to someone who doesn't even own a pair of shoes? "" This is not the story of how you get shelf space at Neiman Marcus. 
+It's a story of a product that tells a story. 
+And as you walk around with this remarkable pair of shoes and someone says, "" What are those? "" You get to tell the story on Blake's behalf, on behalf of the people who got the shoes. 
+And suddenly it's not one pair of shoes or 100 pairs of shoes. 
+It's tens of thousands of pairs of shoes. 
+My friend Red Maxwell has spent the last 10 years fighting against juvenile diabetes. 
+Not fighting the organization that's fighting it — fighting with them, leading them, connecting them, challenging the status quo because it's important to him. 
+And the people he surrounds himself with need the connection. 
+They need the leadership. It makes a difference. 
+You don't need permission from people to lead them. 
+But in case you do, here it is: they're waiting, we're waiting for you to show us where to go next. 
+So here is what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge the status quo. 
+They challenge what's currently there. 
+The second thing is, they build a culture. 
+A secret language, a seven-second handshake, a way of knowing that you're in or out. 
+They have curiosity. Curiosity about people in the tribe, curiosity about outsiders. They're asking questions. 
+They connect people to one another. 
+Do you know what people want more than anything? 
+They want to be missed. 
+They want to be missed the day they don't show up. 
+They want to be missed when they're gone. 
+And tribe leaders can do that. 
+It's fascinating, because all tribe leaders have charisma, but you don't need charisma to become a leader. 
+Being a leader gives you charisma. 
+If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that's where charisma comes from — from the leading. 
+Finally, they commit. 
+They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe. 
+They commit to the people who are there. 
+So I'd like you to do something for me. 
+And I hope you'll think about it before you reject it out-of-hand. 
+What I want you to do, it only takes 24 hours, is: create a movement. 
+Something that matters. Start. Do it. We need it. 
+Thank you very much. I appreciate it. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I was privileged to train in transplantation under two great surgical pioneers: Thomas Starzl, who performed the world's first successful liver transplant in 1967, and Sir Roy Calne, who performed the first liver transplant in the U.K. 
+in the following year. 
+I returned to Singapore and, in 1990, performed Asia's first successful cadaveric liver transplant procedure, but against all odds. 
+Now when I look back, the transplant was actually the easiest part. 
+Next, raising the money to fund the procedure. 
+But perhaps the most challenging part was to convince the regulators — a matter which was debated in the parliament — that a young female surgeon be allowed the opportunity to pioneer for her country. 
+But 20 years on, my patient, Surinder, is Asia's longest surviving cadaveric liver transplant to date. 
+(Applause) And perhaps more important, I am the proud godmother to her 14 year-old son. (Applause) 
+But not all patients on the transplant wait list are so fortunate. 
+The truth is, there are just simply not enough donor organs to go around. 
+As the demand for donor organs continues to rise, in large part due to the aging population, the supply has remained relatively constant. 
+In the United States alone, 100,000 men, women and children are on the waiting list for donor organs, and more than a dozen die each day because of a lack of donor organs. 
+The transplant community has actively campaigned in organ donation. 
+And the gift of life has been extended from brain-dead donors to living, related donors — relatives who might donate an organ or a part of an organ, like a split liver graft, to a relative or loved one. 
+But as there was still a dire shortage of donor organs, the gift of life was then extended from living, related donors to now living, unrelated donors. 
+And this then has given rise to unprecedented and unexpected moral controversy. 
+How can one distinguish a donation that is voluntary and altruistic from one that is forced or coerced from, for example, a submissive spouse, an in-law, a servant, a slave, an employee? 
+Where and how can we draw the line? 
+In my part of the world, too many people live below the poverty line. 
+And in some areas, the commercial gifting of an organ in exchange for monetary reward has led to a flourishing trade in living, unrelated donors. 
+Shortly after I performed the first liver transplant, I received my next assignment, and that was to go to the prisons to harvest organs from executed prisoners. 
+I was also pregnant at the time. 
+Pregnancies are meant to be happy and fulfilling moments in any woman's life. 
+But my joyful period was marred by solemn and morbid thoughts — thoughts of walking through the prison's high-security death row, as this was the only route to take me to the makeshift operating room. 
+And at each time, I would feel the chilling stares of condemned prisoners' eyes follow me. 
+And for two years, I struggled with the dilemma of waking up at 4: 30 am on a Friday morning, driving to the prison, getting down, gloved and scrubbed, ready to receive the body of an executed prisoner, remove the organs and then transport these organs to the recipient hospital and then graft the gift of life to a recipient the same afternoon. 
+No doubt, I was informed, the consent had been obtained. 
+But, in my life, the one fulfilling skill that I had was now invoking feelings of conflict — conflict ranging from extreme sorrow and doubt at dawn to celebratory joy at engrafting the gift of life at dusk. 
+In my team, the lives of one or two of my colleagues were tainted by this experience. 
+Some of us may have been sublimated, but really none of us remained the same. 
+I was troubled that the retrieval of organs from executed prisoners was at least as morally controversial as the harvesting of stem cells from human embryos. 
+And in my mind, I realized as a surgical pioneer that the purpose of my position of influence was surely to speak up for those who have no influence. 
+It made me wonder if there could be a better way — a way to circumvent death and yet deliver the gift of life that might exponentially impact millions of patients worldwide. 
+Now just about that time, the practice of surgery evolved from big to small, from wide open incisions to keyhole procedures, tiny incisions. 
+And in transplantation, concepts shifted from whole organs to cells. 
+In 1988, at the University of Minnesota, I participated in a small series of whole organ pancreas transplants. 
+I witnessed the technical difficulty. 
+And this inspired in my mind a shift from transplanting whole organs to perhaps transplanting cells. 
+I thought to myself, why not take the individual cells out of the pancreas — the cells that secrete insulin to cure diabetes — and transplant these cells? — technically a much simpler procedure than having to grapple with the complexities of transplanting a whole organ. 
+And at that time, stem cell research had gained momentum, following the isolation of the world's first human embryonic stem cells in the 1990s. 
+The observation that stem cells, as master cells, could give rise to a whole variety of different cell types — heart cells, liver cells, pancreatic islet cells — captured the attention of the media and the imagination of the public. 
+I too was fascinated by this new and disruptive cell technology, and this inspired a shift in my mindset, from transplanting whole organs to transplanting cells. 
+And I focused my research on stem cells as a possible source for cell transplants. 
+Today we realize that there are many different types of stem cells. 
+Embryonic stem cells have occupied center stage, chiefly because of their pluripotency — that is their ease in differentiating into a variety of different cell types. 
+But the moral controversy surrounding embryonic stem cells — the fact that these cells are derived from five-day old human embryos — has encouraged research into other types of stem cells. 
+Now to the ridicule of my colleagues, I inspired my lab to focus on what I thought was the most non-controversial source of stem cells, adipose tissue, or fat, yes fat — nowadays available in abundant supply — you and I, I think, would be very happy to get rid of anyway. 
+Fat-derived stem cells are adult stem cells. 
+And adult stem cells are found in you and me — in our blood, in our bone marrow, in our fat, our skin and other organs. 
+And as it turns out, fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells. 
+But adult stem cells are not embryonic stem cells. 
+And here is the limitation: adult stem cells are mature cells, and, like mature human beings, these cells are more restricted in their thought and more restricted in their behavior and are unable to give rise to the wide variety of specialized cell types, as embryonic stem cells [can]. 
+But in 2007, two remarkable individuals, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan and Jamie Thomson of the United States, made an astounding discovery. 
+They discovered that adult cells, taken from you and me, could be reprogrammed back into embryonic-like cells, which they termed IPS cells, or induced pluripotent stem cells. 
+And so guess what, scientists around the world and in the labs are racing to convert aging adult cells — aging adult cells from you and me — they are racing to reprogram these cells back into more useful IPS cells. 
+And in our lab, we are focused on taking fat and reprogramming mounds of fat into fountains of youthful cells — cells that we may use to then form other, more specialized, cells, which one day may be used as cell transplants. 
+If this research is successful, it may then reduce the need to research and sacrifice human embryos. 
+Indeed, there is a lot of hype, but also hope that the promise of stem cells will one day provide cures for a whole range of conditions. 
+Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, spinal cord injury, muscular dystrophy, retinal eye diseases — are any of these conditions relevant, personally, to you? 
+In May 2006, something horrible happened to me. 
+I was about to start a robotic operation, but stepping out of the elevator into the bright and glaring lights of the operating room, I realized that my left visual field was fast collapsing into darkness. 
+Earlier that week, I had taken a rather hard knock during late spring skiing — yes, I fell. 
+And I started to see floaters and stars, which I casually dismissed as too much high-altitude sun exposure. 
+What happened to me might have been catastrophic, if not for the fact that I was in reach of good surgical access. 
+And I had my vision restored, but not before a prolonged period of convalescence — three months — in a head down position. 
+This experience taught me to empathize more with my patients, and especially those with retinal diseases. 
+37 million people worldwide are blind, and 127 million more suffer from impaired vision. 
+Stem cell-derived retinal transplants, now in a research phase, may one day restore vision, or part vision, to millions of patients with retinal diseases worldwide. 
+Indeed, we live in both challenging as well as exciting times. 
+As the world population ages, scientists are racing to discover new ways to enhance the power of the body to heal itself through stem cells. 
+It is a fact that when our organs or tissues are injured, our bone marrow releases stem cells into our circulation. 
+And these stem cells then float in the bloodstream and hone in to damaged organs to release growth factors to repair the damaged tissue. 
+Stem cells may be used as building blocks to repair damaged scaffolds within our body, or to provide new liver cells to repair damaged liver. 
+As we speak, there are 117 or so clinical trials researching the use of stem cells for liver diseases. 
+What lies ahead? 
+Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. 
+1.1 million Americans suffer heart attacks yearly. 
+4.8 million suffer cardiac failure. 
+Stem cells may be used to deliver growth factors to repair damaged heart muscle or be differentiated into heart muscle cells to restore heart function. 
+There are 170 clinical trials investigating the role of stem cells in heart disease. 
+While still in a research phase, stem cells may one day herald a quantum leap in the field of cardiology. 
+Stem cells provide hope for new beginnings — small, incremental steps, cells rather than organs, repair rather than replacement. 
+Stem cell therapies may one day reduce the need for donor organs. 
+Powerful new technologies always present enigmas. 
+As we speak, the world's first human embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injury is currently underway following the USFDA approval. 
+And in the U.K., neural stem cells to treat stroke are being investigated in a phase one trial. 
+The research success that we celebrate today has been made possible by the curiosity and contribution and commitment of individual scientists and medical pioneers. 
+Each one has his story. 
+My story has been about my journey from organs to cells — a journey through controversy, inspired by hope — hope that, as we age, you and I may one day celebrate longevity with an improved quality of life. 
+Thank you. 
+
+A great way to start, I think, with my view of simplicity is to take a look at TED. Here you are, understanding why we're here, what's going on with no difficulty at all. 
+The best A.I. in the planet would find it complex and confusing, and my little dog Watson would find it simple and understandable but would miss the point. 
+(Laughter) He would have a great time. 
+And of course, if you're a speaker here, like Hans Rosling, a speaker finds this complex, tricky. But in Hans Rosling's case, he had a secret weapon yesterday, literally, in his sword swallowing act. 
+And I must say, I thought of quite a few objects that I might try to swallow today and finally gave up on, but he just did it and that was a wonderful thing. 
+So Puck meant not only are we fools in the pejorative sense, but that we're easily fooled. In fact, what Shakespeare was pointing out is we go to the theater in order to be fooled, so we're actually looking forward to it. 
+We go to magic shows in order to be fooled. 
+And this makes many things fun, but it makes it difficult to actually get any kind of picture on the world we live in or on ourselves. 
+And our friend, Betty Edwards, the "" Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain "" lady, shows these two tables to her drawing class and says, "" The problem you have with learning to draw is not that you can't move your hand, but that the way your brain perceives images is faulty. 
+It's trying to perceive images into objects rather than seeing what's there. "" And to prove it, she says, "" The exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same, and I'm going to prove it to you. "" She does this with cardboard, but since I have an expensive computer here I'll just rotate this little guy around and... 
+Now having seen that — and I've seen it hundreds of times, because I use this in every talk I give — I still can't see that they're the same size and shape, and I doubt that you can either. 
+So what do artists do? Well, what artists do is to measure. 
+They measure very, very carefully. 
+And if you measure very, very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge, you'll see that those two shapes are exactly the same size. 
+And the Talmud saw this a long time ago, saying, "We see things not as they are, but as we are." 
+I certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then, if they actually followed it to its ultimate conclusion. 
+So if the world is not as it seems and we see things as we are, then what we call reality is a kind of hallucination happening inside here. It's a waking dream, and understanding that that is what we actually exist in is one of the biggest epistemological barriers in human history. 
+And what that means: "" simple and understandable "" might not be actually simple or understandable, and things we think are "" complex "" might be made simple and understandable. 
+Somehow we have to understand ourselves to get around our flaws. 
+We can think of ourselves as kind of a noisy channel. 
+The way I think of it is, we can't learn to see until we admit we're blind. 
+Once you start down at this very humble level, then you can start finding ways to see things. 
+And what's happened, over the last 400 years in particular, is that human beings have invented "" brainlets "" — little additional parts for our brain — made out of powerful ideas that help us see the world in different ways. 
+And these are in the form of sensory apparatus — telescopes, microscopes — reasoning apparatus — various ways of thinking — and, most importantly, in the ability to change perspective on things. 
+I'll talk about that a little bit. 
+It's this change in perspective on what it is we think we're perceiving that has helped us make more progress in the last 400 years than we have in the rest of human history. 
+And yet, it is not taught in any K through 12 curriculum in America that I'm aware of. 
+So one of the things that goes from simple to complex is when we do more. We like more. 
+If we do more in a kind of a stupid way, the simplicity gets complex and, in fact, we can keep on doing it for a very long time. 
+But Murray Gell-Mann yesterday talked about emergent properties; another name for them could be "" architecture "" as a metaphor for taking the same old material and thinking about non-obvious, non-simple ways of combining it. 
+And in fact, what Murray was talking about yesterday in the fractal beauty of nature — of having the descriptions at various levels be rather similar — all goes down to the idea that the elementary particles are both sticky and standoffish, and they're in violent motion. 
+Those three things give rise to all the different levels of what seem to be complexity in our world. 
+But how simple? 
+So, when I saw Roslings' Gapminder stuff a few years ago, I just thought it was the greatest thing I'd seen in conveying complex ideas simply. 
+But then I had a thought of, "" Boy, maybe it's too simple. "" And I put some effort in to try and check to see how well these simple portrayals of trends over time actually matched up with some ideas and investigations from the side, and I found that they matched up very well. 
+So the Roslings have been able to do simplicity without removing what's important about the data. 
+Whereas the film yesterday that we saw of the simulation of the inside of a cell, as a former molecular biologist, I didn't like that at all. 
+Not because it wasn't beautiful or anything, but because it misses the thing that most students fail to understand about molecular biology, and that is: why is there any probability at all of two complex shapes finding each other just the right way so they combine together and be catalyzed? 
+And what we saw yesterday was every reaction was fortuitous; they just swooped in the air and bound, and something happened. 
+But in fact, those molecules are spinning at the rate of about a million revolutions per second; they're agitating back and forth their size every two nanoseconds; they're completely crowded together, they're jammed, they're bashing up against each other. 
+And if you don't understand that in your mental model of this stuff, what happens inside of a cell seems completely mysterious and fortuitous, and I think that's exactly the wrong image for when you're trying to teach science. 
+So, another thing that we do is to confuse adult sophistication with the actual understanding of some principle. 
+So a kid who's 14 in high school gets this version of the Pythagorean theorem, which is a truly subtle and interesting proof, but in fact it's not a good way to start learning about mathematics. 
+So a more direct one, one that gives you more of the feeling of math, is something closer to Pythagoras' own proof, which goes like this: so here we have this triangle, and if we surround that C square with three more triangles and we copy that, notice that we can move those triangles down like this. 
+And that leaves two open areas that are kind of suspicious... 
+and bingo. That is all you have to do. 
+And this kind of proof is the kind of proof that you need to learn when you're learning mathematics in order to get an idea of what it means before you look into the, literally, 1,200 or 1,500 proofs of Pythagoras' theorem that have been discovered. 
+Now let's go to young children. 
+This is a very unusual teacher who was a kindergarten and first-grade teacher, but was a natural mathematician. 
+So she was like that jazz musician friend you have who never studied music but is a terrific musician; she just had a feeling for math. 
+And here are her six-year-olds, and she's got them making shapes out of a shape. 
+So they pick a shape they like — like a diamond, or a square, or a triangle, or a trapezoid — and then they try and make the next larger shape of that same shape, and the next larger shape. 
+You can see the trapezoids are a little challenging there. 
+And what this teacher did on every project was to have the children act like first it was a creative arts project, and then something like science. 
+So they had created these artifacts. 
+Now she had them look at them and do this... laborious, which I thought for a long time, until she explained to me was to slow them down so they'll think. 
+So they're cutting out the little pieces of cardboard here and pasting them up. 
+But the whole point of this thing is for them to look at this chart and fill it out. 
+"What have you noticed about what you did?" 
+And so six-year-old Lauren there noticed that the first one took one, and the second one took three more and the total was four on that one, the third one took five more and the total was nine on that one, and then the next one. 
+She saw right away that the additional tiles that you had to add around the edges was always going to grow by two, so she was very confident about how she made those numbers there. 
+And she could see that these were the square numbers up until about six, where she wasn't sure what six times six was and what seven times seven was, but then she was confident again. 
+So that's what Lauren did. 
+And then the teacher, Gillian Ishijima, had the kids bring all of their projects up to the front of the room and put them on the floor, and everybody went batshit: "" Holy shit! They're the same! "" No matter what the shapes were, the growth law is the same. 
+And the mathematicians and scientists in the crowd will recognize these two progressions as a first-order discrete differential equation and a second-order discrete differential equation, derived by six-year-olds. 
+Well, that's pretty amazing. 
+That isn't what we usually try to teach six-year-olds. 
+So, let's take a look now at how we might use the computer for some of this. 
+And so the first idea here is just to show you the kind of things that children do. 
+I'm using the software that we're putting on the $100 laptop. 
+So I'd like to draw a little car here — I'll just do this very quickly — and put a big tire on him. 
+And I get a little object here and I can look inside this object, I'll call it a car. And here's a little behavior: car forward. 
+Each time I click it, car turn. 
+If I want to make a little script to do this over and over again, I just drag these guys out and set them going. 
+And I can try steering the car here by... 
+See the car turn by five here? 
+So what if I click this down to zero? 
+It goes straight. That's a big revelation for nine-year-olds. 
+Make it go in the other direction. 
+But of course, that's a little bit like kissing your sister as far as driving a car, so the kids want to do a steering wheel; so they draw a steering wheel. 
+And we'll call this a wheel. 
+See this wheel's heading here? 
+If I turn this wheel, you can see that number over there going minus and positive. 
+That's kind of an invitation to pick up this name of those numbers coming out there and to just drop it into the script here, and now I can steer the car with the steering wheel. 
+And it's interesting. 
+You know how much trouble the children have with variables, but by learning it this way, in a situated fashion, they never forget from this single trial what a variable is and how to use it. 
+And we can reflect here the way Gillian Ishijima did. 
+So if you look at the little script here, the speed is always going to be 30. 
+We're going to move the car according to that over and over again. 
+And I'm dropping a little dot for each one of these things; they're evenly spaced because they're 30 apart. 
+And what if I do this progression that the six-year-olds did of saying, "" OK, I'm going to increase the speed by two each time, and then I'm going to increase the distance by the speed each time? 
+What do I get there? "" We get a visual pattern of what these nine-year-olds called acceleration. 
+So how do the children do science? 
+(Video) Teacher: [Choose] objects that you think will fall to the Earth at the same time. 
+Student 1: Ooh, this is nice. 
+Teacher: Do not pay any attention to what anybody else is doing. 
+Who's got the apple? 
+Alan Kay: They've got little stopwatches. 
+Student 2: What did you get? What did you get? 
+AK: Stopwatches aren't accurate enough. 
+Student 3: 0.99 seconds. 
+Teacher: So put "" sponge ball ""... 
+Student 4l: [I decided to] do the shot put and the sponge ball because they're two totally different weights, and if you drop them at the same time, maybe they'll drop at the same speed. 
+Teacher: Drop. Class: Whoa! 
+AK: So obviously, Aristotle never asked a child about this particular point because, of course, he didn't bother doing the experiment, and neither did St. Thomas Aquinas. 
+And it was not until Galileo actually did it that an adult thought like a child, only 400 years ago. 
+We get one child like that about every classroom of 30 kids who will actually cut straight to the chase. 
+Now, what if we want to look at this more closely? 
+We can take a movie of what's going on, but even if we single stepped this movie, it's tricky to see what's going on. 
+And so what we can do is we can lay out the frames side by side or stack them up. 
+So when the children see this, they say, "" Ah! Acceleration, "" remembering back four months when they did their cars sideways, and they start measuring to find out what kind of acceleration it is. 
+So what I'm doing is measuring from the bottom of one image to the bottom of the next image, about a fifth of a second later, like that. And they're getting faster and faster each time, and if I stack these guys up, then we see the differences; the increase in the speed is constant. 
+And they say, "" Oh, yeah. Constant acceleration. 
+We've done that already. "" And how shall we look and verify that we actually have it? 
+So you can't tell much from just making the ball drop there, but if we drop the ball and run the movie at the same time, we can see that we have come up with an accurate physical model. 
+Galileo, by the way, did this very cleverly by running a ball backwards down the strings of his lute. 
+I pulled out those apples to remind myself to tell you that this is actually probably a Newton and the apple type story, but it's a great story. 
+And I thought I would do just one thing on the $100 laptop here just to prove that this stuff works here. 
+So once you have gravity, here's this — increase the speed by something, increase the ship's speed. 
+If I start the little game here that the kids have done, it'll crash the space ship. 
+But if I oppose gravity, here we go... Oops! 
+(Laughter) One more. 
+Yeah, there we go. Yeah, OK? 
+I guess the best way to end this is with two quotes: Marshall McLuhan said, "Children are the messages that we send to the future," but in fact, if you think of it, children are the future we send to the future. 
+Forget about messages; children are the future, and children in the first and second world and, most especially, in the third world need mentors. 
+And this summer, we're going to build five million of these $100 laptops, and maybe 50 million next year. 
+But we couldn't create 1,000 new teachers this summer to save our life. 
+That means that we, once again, have a thing where we can put technology out, but the mentoring that is required to go from a simple new iChat instant messaging system to something with depth is missing. 
+I believe this has to be done with a new kind of user interface, and this new kind of user interface could be done with an expenditure of about 100 million dollars. 
+It sounds like a lot, but it is literally 18 minutes of what we're spending in Iraq — we're spending 8 billion dollars a month; 18 minutes is 100 million dollars — so this is actually cheap. 
+And Einstein said, "Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." 
+Thank you. 
+
+This is a representation of your brain, and your brain can be broken into two parts. 
+There's the left half, which is the logical side, and then the right half, which is the intuitive. 
+And so if we had a scale to measure the aptitude of each hemisphere, then we can plot our brain. 
+And for example, this would be somebody who's completely logical. 
+This would be someone who's entirely intuitive. 
+So where would you put your brain on this scale? 
+Some of us may have opted for one of these extremes, but I think for most people in the audience, your brain is something like this — with a high aptitude in both hemispheres at the same time. 
+It's not like they're mutually exclusive or anything. 
+You can be logical and intuitive. 
+And so I consider myself one of these people, along with most of the other experimental quantum physicists, who need a good deal of logic to string together these complex ideas. 
+But at the same time, we need a good deal of intuition to actually make the experiments work. 
+How do we develop this intuition? Well we like to play with stuff. 
+So we go out and play with it, and then we see how it acts, and then we develop our intuition from there. 
+And really you do the same thing. 
+So some intuition that you may have developed over the years is that one thing is only in one place at a time. 
+I mean, it can sound weird to think about one thing being in two different places at the same time, but you weren't born with this notion, you developed it. 
+And I remember watching a kid playing on a car stop. 
+He was just a toddler and he wasn't very good at it, and he kept falling over. 
+But I bet playing with this car stop taught him a really valuable lesson, and that's that large things don't let you get right past them, and that they stay in one place. 
+And so this is a great conceptual model to have of the world, unless you're a particle physicist. 
+It'd be a terrible model for a particle physicist, because they don't play with car stops, they play with these little weird particles. 
+And when they play with their particles, they find they do all sorts of really weird things — like they can fly right through walls, or they can be in two different places at the same time. 
+And so they wrote down all these observations, and they called it the theory of quantum mechanics. 
+And so that's where physics was at a few years ago; you needed quantum mechanics to describe little, tiny particles. 
+But you didn't need it to describe the large, everyday objects around us. 
+This didn't really sit well with my intuition, and maybe it's just because I don't play with particles very often. 
+Well, I play with them sometimes, but not very often. 
+And I've never seen them. 
+I mean, nobody's ever seen a particle. 
+But it didn't sit well with my logical side either. 
+Because if everything is made up of little particles and all the little particles follow quantum mechanics, then shouldn't everything just follow quantum mechanics? 
+I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. 
+And so I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if we could somehow show that an everyday object also follows quantum mechanics. 
+So a few years ago, I set off to do just that. 
+So I made one. 
+This is the first object that you can see that has been in a mechanical quantum superposition. 
+So what we're looking at here is a tiny computer chip. 
+And you can sort of see this green dot right in the middle. 
+And that's this piece of metal I'm going to be talking about in a minute. 
+This is a photograph of the object. 
+And here I'll zoom in a little bit. We're looking right there in the center. 
+And then here's a really, really big close-up of the little piece of metal. 
+So what we're looking at is a little chunk of metal, and it's shaped like a diving board, and it's sticking out over a ledge. 
+And so I made this thing in nearly the same way as you make a computer chip. 
+I went into a clean room with a fresh silicon wafer, and then I just cranked away at all the big machines for about 100 hours. 
+For the last stuff, I had to build my own machine — to make this swimming pool-shaped hole underneath the device. 
+This device has the ability to be in a quantum superposition, but it needs a little help to do it. 
+Here, let me give you an analogy. 
+You know how uncomfortable it is to be in a crowded elevator? 
+I mean, when I'm in an elevator all alone, I do all sorts of weird things, but then other people get on board and I stop doing those things because I don't want to bother them, or, frankly, scare them. 
+So quantum mechanics says that inanimate objects feel the same way. 
+The fellow passengers for inanimate objects are not just people, but it's also the light shining on it and the wind blowing past it and the heat of the room. 
+And so we knew, if we wanted to see this piece of metal behave quantum mechanically, we're going to have to kick out all the other passengers. 
+And so that's what we did. 
+We turned off the lights, and then we put it in a vacuum and sucked out all the air, and then we cooled it down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. 
+Now, all alone in the elevator, the little chunk of metal is free to act however it wanted. 
+And so we measured its motion. 
+We found it was moving in really weird ways. 
+Instead of just sitting perfectly still, it was vibrating, and the way it was vibrating was breathing something like this — like expanding and contracting bellows. 
+And by giving it a gentle nudge, we were able to make it both vibrate and not vibrate at the same time — something that's only allowed with quantum mechanics. 
+So what I'm telling you here is something truly fantastic. 
+What does it mean for one thing to be both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time? 
+So let's think about the atoms. 
+So in one case: all the trillions of atoms that make up that chunk of metal are sitting still and at the same time those same atoms are moving up and down. 
+Now it's only at precise times when they align. 
+The rest of the time they're delocalized. 
+That means that every atom is in two different places at the same time, which in turn means the entire chunk of metal is in two different places. 
+I think this is really cool. 
+(Laughter) Really. 
+(Applause) It was worth locking myself in a clean room to do this for all those years because, check this out, the difference in scale between a single atom and that chunk of metal is about the same as the difference between that chunk of metal and you. 
+So if a single atom can be in two different places at the same time, that chunk of metal can be in two different places, then why not you? 
+I mean, this is just my logical side talking. 
+So imagine if you're in multiple places at the same time, what would that be like? 
+How would your consciousness handle your body being delocalized in space? 
+There's one more part to the story. 
+It's when we warmed it up, and we turned on the lights and looked inside the box, we saw that the piece metal was still there in one piece. 
+And so I had to develop this new intuition, that it seems like all the objects in the elevator are really just quantum objects just crammed into a tiny space. 
+You hear a lot of talk about how quantum mechanics says that everything is all interconnected. 
+Well, that's not quite right. 
+It's more than that; it's deeper. 
+It's that those connections, your connections to all the things around you, literally define who you are, and that's the profound weirdness of quantum mechanics. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I think the future of this planet depends on humans, not technology, and we already have the knowledge — we ’ re kind of at the endgame with knowledge. 
+But we ’ re nowhere near the endgame when it comes to our perception. 
+We still have one foot in the dark ages. 
+And when you listen to some of the presentations here — and the extraordinary range of human capability, our understandings — and then you contrast it with the fact we still call this planet, "" Earth: "" it ’ s pretty extraordinary — we have one foot in the dark ages. 
+Just quickly: Aristotle, his thing was, "" It ’ s not flat, stupid, it ’ s round. "" Galileo — he had the Inquisition, so he had to be a little bit more polite — his was, "" It ’ s not in the middle, you know. "" And Hawkes: "" it ’ s not earth, stupid, it ’ s ocean. "" This is an ocean planet. 
+T.S. Eliot really said it for me — and this should give you goose bumps: "" we shall not cease from exploration and the end of our exploring shall be to return where we started and know the place for the first time. "" And the next lines are, "" Through the unknown remembered gate, where the last of earth discovered is that which is the beginning. "" So I have one message. 
+It seems to me that we ’ re all pointed in the wrong direction. 
+For the rocketeers in the audience: I love what you ’ re doing, I admire the guts, I admire the courage — but your rockets are pointed in the wrong goddamn direction. 
+(Laughter) And it ’ s all a question of perspective. 
+Let me try and tell you — I don ’ t mean to insult you, but look, if I — and I ’ m not doing this for real because it would be an insult, so I ’ m going to pretend, and it softens the blow — I ’ m going to tell you what you ’ re thinking. 
+If I held up a square that was one foot square and the color of earth, and I held up another square that was the root two square — so it ’ s 1.5 times bigger — and was the color of the oceans; and I said, what is the relative value of these two things? 
+Well, it ’ s the relative importance. 
+You would say — yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know this; water covers twice the area of the planet than dry land. 
+But it ’ s a question of perception, and if that ’ s what you ’ re thinking, if that ’ s what you think I mean when I say, "This is an ocean planet stupidly called 'Earth.'" If you think that that ’ s the relative importance, two to one, you ’ re wrong by a factor of ten. 
+Now, you ’ re not as thick as two short planks, but you sound like it when you say "" Earth, "" because that demonstration, if I turned around this way — that earth plane would be as thin as paper. 
+It ’ s a thin film, two-dimensional existence. 
+The ocean representation would have a depth to it. 
+And if you hefted those two things you might find that the relative scale of those is 20 to 1. 
+It turns out that something more than 94 percent of life on earth is aquatic. 
+That means that us terrestrials occupy a minority. 
+The problem we have in believing that is — you just have to give up this notion that this Earth was created for us. 
+Because it ’ s a problem we have. 
+If this is an ocean planet and we only have a small minority of this planet, it just interferes with a lot of what humanity thinks. 
+Okay. Let me criticize this thing. 
+I ’ m not talking about James Cameron — although I could, but I won ’ t. 
+You really do have to go and see his latest film, "" Aliens of the Deep. "" It ’ s incredible. 
+It features two of these deep rovers, and I can criticize them because these sweet things are mine. 
+This, I think, represents one of the most beautiful classic submersibles built. 
+If you look at that sub, you ’ ll see a sphere. 
+This is an acryclic sphere. 
+It generates all of the buoyancy, all of the payload for the craft, and the batteries are down here hanging underneath, exactly like a balloon. 
+This is the envelope, and this is the gondola, the payload. 
+Also coming up later for criticism are these massive lights. 
+And this one actually carries two great manipulators. 
+It actually is a very good working sub — that ’ s what it was designed for. 
+The problem with it is — and the reason I will never build another one like it — is that this is a product of two-dimensional thinking. 
+It ’ s what we humans do when we go in the ocean as engineers; we take all our terrestrial hang-ups, all our constraints — importantly, these two-dimensional constraints that we have, and they ’ re so constrained we don ’ t even understand it — and we take them underwater. 
+You notice that Jim Cameron is sitting in a seat. 
+A seat works in a two-dimensional world, where gravity blasts down on that seat, OK? 
+And in a two-dimensional world, we do know about the third dimension but we don ’ t use it because to go up requires an awful lot of energy against gravity. 
+And then our mothers tell us, "" Careful you don ’ t fall down "" — because you ’ ll fall over. 
+Now, go into the real atmosphere of this planet. 
+This planet has an inner atmosphere of water; it ’ s its inner atmosphere. It has two atmospheres — a lesser, outer gaseous atmosphere, a lighter one. 
+Most of life on earth is in that inner atmosphere. 
+And that life enjoys a three-dimensional existence, which is alien to us. 
+Fish do not sit in seats. 
+(Laughter) They don ’ t. Their mothers don ’ t say to little baby fish, "Careful you don ’ t fall over." 
+They don ’ t fall over. They don ’ t fall. 
+They live in a three-dimensional world where there is no difference in energy between going this way, that way, that way or that way. 
+It ’ s truly a three-dimensional space. 
+And we ’ re only just beginning to grasp it. 
+I don ’ t know of any other submersible, or even remote, that just takes advantage that this is a three-dimensional space. 
+This is the way we should be going into the oceans. 
+This is a three-dimensional machine. 
+What we need to do is go down into the ocean with the freedom of the animals, and move in this three-dimensional space. 
+OK, this is good stuff. 
+This is man ’ s first attempt at flying underwater. 
+Right now, I ’ m just coming down on this gorgeous, big, giant manta ray. 
+She has twice the wingspan that I do. 
+There I ’ m coming; she sees me. 
+And just notice how she rolls under and turns; she doesn ’ t sit there and try and blow air into a tank and kind of flow up or sink down — she just rolls. 
+And the craft that I ’ m in — this hasn ’ t been shown before. 
+Chris asked us to show stuff that hasn ’ t been shown before. 
+I wanted you to notice that she actually turned to come back up. 
+There I am; I see her coming back, coming up underneath me. 
+I put reverse thrust and I try and pull gently down. 
+I ’ m trying to do everything very gently. 
+We spent about three hours together and she ’ s beginning to trust me. 
+And this ballet is controlled by this lady here. 
+She gets about that close and then she pulls away. 
+So now I try and go after her, but I ’ m practicing flying. 
+This is the first flying machine. This was the first prototype. 
+This was a fly by wire. It has wings. 
+There ’ re no silly buoyancy tanks — it ’ s permanently, positively buoyant. 
+And then by moving through the water it ’ s able to take that control. 
+Now, look at that; look, it ’ s — she just blew me away. 
+She just rolled right away from underneath. 
+Really that ’ s the only real dive I ’ ve ever made in this machine. 
+It took 10 years to build. 
+But this lady here taught me, hah, taught me so much. 
+We just learned so much in three hours in the water there. 
+I just had to go and build another machine. 
+But look here. Instead of blowing tanks and coming up slowly without thinking about it, it ’ s a little bit of back pressure, and that sub just comes straight back up out of the water. 
+This is an internal Sony camera. Thank you, Sony. 
+I don ’ t really look that ugly, but the camera is so close that it ’ s just distorted. 
+Now, there she goes, right overhead. 
+This is a wide-angle camera. 
+She ’ s just a few inches off the top of my head. 
+"" Aah, ha, oh, he just crossed over the top of my head about, oh, I don ’ t know, just so close. "" I come back up, not for air. 
+"" This is an incredible encounter with a manta. I ’ m speechless. 
+We ’ ve been just feet apart. I ’ m going back down now. "" Okay, can we cut that? Lights back up please. 
+(Applause) Trying to fly and keep up with that animal — it wasn ’ t the lack of maneuverability that we had. 
+It was the fact she was going so slow. 
+I actually designed that to move faster through the water because I thought that was the thing that we needed to do: to move fast and get range. 
+But after that encounter I really did want to go back with that animal and dance. 
+She wanted to dance. 
+And so what we needed to do was increase the wing area so that we just had more grip, develop higher forces. 
+So the sub that was outside last year — this is the one. 
+You see the larger wing area here. 
+Also, clearly, it was such a powerful thing, we wanted to try and bring other people but we couldn't figure out how to do it. 
+So we opened the world ’ s first flight school. 
+The rational for the world ’ s first flight school goes something like: when the coastguards come up to me and say — they used to leave us alone when we were diving these goofy little spherical things, but when we started flying around in underwater jet fighters they got a little nervous — they would come up and say, "Do you have a license for that?" 
+And then I ’ d put my sunglasses on, the beard that would all sprout out, and I would say, "I don ’ t need no stinking license." 
+(Laughter) "" I write these stinking license, "" which I do. 
+So Bob Gelfond's around here — but somebody in the audience here has license number 20. 
+They ’ re one of the first subsea aviators. 
+So we ’ ve run two flight schools. 
+Where the hell that goes, I don ’ t know, but it ’ s a lot of fun. 
+What comes next in 30 seconds? I can ’ t tell you. 
+But the patent for underwater flight — Karen and I, we were looking at it, some business partners wanted us to patent it — we weren ’ t sure about that. 
+We ’ ve decided we ’ re just going to let that go. 
+It just seems wrong to try and patent — (Applause) — the freedom for underwater flight. 
+So anybody who wants to copy us and come and join us, go for it. 
+The other thing is that we ’ ve got much lower costs. 
+We developed some other technology called spider optics, and Craig Ventner asked me to make an announcement here this morning: we ’ re going to be building a beautiful, little, small version of this — unmanned, super deep — for his boat to go and get back some deep sea DNA stuff. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+
+So, I was in the hospital for a long time. 
+And a few years after I left, I went back, and the chairman of the burn department was very excited to see me — said, "" Dan, I have a fantastic new treatment for you. "" I was very excited. I walked with him to his office. 
+And he explained to me that, when I shave, I have little black dots on the left side of my face where the hair is, but on the right side of my face I was badly burned so I have no hair, and this creates lack of symmetry. 
+And what's the brilliant idea he had? 
+He was going to tattoo little black dots on the right side of my face and make me look very symmetric. 
+It sounded interesting. He asked me to go and shave. 
+Let me tell you, this was a strange way to shave, because I thought about it and I realized that the way I was shaving then would be the way I would shave for the rest of my life — because I had to keep the width the same. 
+When I got back to his office, I wasn't really sure. 
+I said, "" Can I see some evidence for this? "" So he showed me some pictures of little cheeks with little black dots — not very informative. 
+I said, "" What happens when I grow older and my hair becomes white? 
+What would happen then? "" "" Oh, don't worry about it, "" he said. 
+"We have lasers; we can whiten it out." 
+But I was still concerned, so I said, "" You know what, I'm not going to do it. "" And then came one of the biggest guilt trips of my life. 
+This is coming from a Jewish guy, all right, so that means a lot. 
+(Laughter) And he said, "" Dan, what's wrong with you? 
+Do you enjoy looking non-symmetric? 
+Do you have some kind of perverted pleasure from this? 
+Do women feel pity for you and have sex with you more frequently? "" None of those happened. 
+And this was very surprising to me, because I've gone through many treatments — there were many treatments I decided not to do — and I never got this guilt trip to this extent. 
+But I decided not to have this treatment. 
+And I went to his deputy and asked him, "" What was going on? 
+Where was this guilt trip coming from? "" And he explained that they have done this procedure on two patients already, and they need the third patient for a paper they were writing. 
+(Laughter) Now you probably think that this guy's a schmuck. 
+Right, that's what he seems like. 
+But let me give you a different perspective on the same story. 
+A few years ago, I was running some of my own experiments in the lab. 
+And when we run experiments, we usually hope that one group will behave differently than another. 
+So we had one group that I hoped their performance would be very high, another group that I thought their performance would be very low, and when I got the results, that's what we got — I was very happy — aside from one person. 
+There was one person in the group that was supposed to have very high performance that was actually performing terribly. 
+And he pulled the whole mean down, destroying my statistical significance of the test. 
+So I looked carefully at this guy. 
+He was 20-some years older than anybody else in the sample. 
+And I remembered that the old and drunken guy came one day to the lab wanting to make some easy cash and this was the guy. 
+"" Fantastic! "" I thought. "" Let's throw him out. 
+Who would ever include a drunken guy in a sample? "" But a couple of days later, we thought about it with my students, and we said, "" What would have happened if this drunken guy was not in that condition? 
+What would have happened if he was in the other group? 
+Would we have thrown him out then? "" We probably wouldn't have looked at the data at all, and if we did look at the data, we'd probably have said, "" Fantastic! What a smart guy who is performing this low, "" because he would have pulled the mean of the group lower, giving us even stronger statistical results than we could. 
+So we decided not to throw the guy out and to rerun the experiment. 
+But you know, these stories, and lots of other experiments that we've done on conflicts of interest, basically kind of bring two points to the foreground for me. 
+The first one is that in life we encounter many people who, in some way or another, try to tattoo our faces. 
+They just have the incentives that get them to be blinded to reality and give us advice that is inherently biased. 
+And I'm sure that it's something that we all recognize, and we see that it happens. 
+Maybe we don't recognize it every time, but we understand that it happens. 
+The most difficult thing, of course, is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. 
+And that's a much, much more difficult lesson to take into account. 
+Because we don't see how conflicts of interest work on us. 
+When I was doing these experiments, in my mind, I was helping science. 
+I was eliminating the data to get the true pattern of the data to shine through. 
+I wasn't doing something bad. 
+In my mind, I was actually a knight trying to help science move along. 
+But this was not the case. 
+I was actually interfering with the process with lots of good intentions. 
+And I think the real challenge is to figure out where are the cases in our lives where conflicts of interest work on us, and try not to trust our own intuition to overcome it, but to try to do things that prevent us from falling prey to these behaviors, because we can create lots of undesirable circumstances. 
+I do want to leave you with one positive thought. 
+I mean, this is all very depressing, right — people have conflicts of interest, we don't see it, and so on. 
+The positive perspective, I think, of all of this is that, if we do understand when we go wrong, if we understand the deep mechanisms of why we fail and where we fail, we can actually hope to fix things. 
+And that, I think, is the hope. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Why grow homes? Because we can. 
+Right now, America is in an unremitting state of trauma. 
+And there's a cause for that, all right. 
+We've got McPeople, McCars, McHouses. 
+As an architect, I have to confront something like this. 
+So what's a technology that will allow us to make ginormous houses? 
+Well, it's been around for 2,500 years. 
+It's called pleaching, or grafting trees together, or grafting inosculate matter into one contiguous, vascular system. 
+And we do something different than what we did in the past; we add kind of a modicum of intelligence to that. 
+We use CNC to make scaffolding to train semi-epithetic matter, plants, into a specific geometry that makes a home that we call a Fab Tree Hab. 
+It fits into the environment. It is the environment. 
+It is the landscape, right? 
+And you can have a hundred million of these homes, and it's great because they suck carbon. 
+They're perfect. 
+You can have 100 million families, or take things out of the suburbs, because these are homes that are a part of the environment. 
+Imagine pre-growing a village — it takes about seven to 10 years — and everything is green. 
+So not only do we do the veggie house, we also do the in-vitro meat habitat, or homes that we're doing research on now in Brooklyn, where, as an architecture office, we're for the first of its kind to put in a molecular cell biology lab and start experimenting with regenerative medicine and tissue engineering and start thinking about what the future would be if architecture and biology became one. 
+So we've been doing this for a couple of years, and that's our lab. 
+And what we do is we grow extracellular matrix from pigs. 
+We use a modified inkjet printer, and we print geometry. 
+We print geometry where we can make industrial design objects like, you know, shoes, leather belts, handbags, etc., where no sentient creature is harmed. 
+It's victimless. It's meat from a test tube. 
+So our theory is that eventually we should be doing this with homes. 
+So here is a typical stud wall, an architectural construction, and this is a section of our proposal for a meat house, where you can see we use fatty cells as insulation, cilia for dealing with wind loads and sphincter muscles for the doors and windows. 
+(Laughter) And we know it's incredibly ugly. 
+It could have been an English Tudor or Spanish Colonial, but we kind of chose this shape. 
+And there it is kind of grown, at least one particular section of it. 
+We had a big show in Prague, and we decided to put it in front of the cathedral so religion can confront the house of meat. 
+That's why we grow homes. Thanks very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+You all know the truth of what I'm going to say. 
+I think the intuition that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive has been around since before the French Revolution. 
+What's changed is we now can look at the evidence, we can compare societies, more and less equal societies, and see what inequality does. 
+I'm going to take you through that data and then explain why the links I'm going to be showing you exist. 
+But first, see what a miserable lot we are. 
+(Laughter) I want to start though with a paradox. 
+This shows you life expectancy against gross national income — how rich countries are on average. 
+And you see the countries on the right, like Norway and the USA, are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left. 
+And it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all. 
+There's no suggestion of a relationship there. 
+But if we look within our societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society. 
+This, again, is life expectancy. 
+These are small areas of England and Wales — the poorest on the right, the richest on the left. 
+A lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us. 
+Even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top. 
+So income means something very important within our societies, and nothing between them. 
+The explanation of that paradox is that, within our societies, we're looking at relative income or social position, social status — where we are in relation to each other and the size of the gaps between us. 
+And as soon as you've got that idea, you should immediately wonder: what happens if we widen the differences, or compress them, make the income differences bigger or smaller? 
+And that's what I'm going to show you. 
+I'm not using any hypothetical data. 
+I'm taking data from the U.N. — it's the same as the World Bank has — on the scale of income differences in these rich developed market democracies. 
+The measure we've used, because it's easy to understand and you can download it, is how much richer the top 20 percent than the bottom 20 percent in each country. 
+And you see in the more equal countries on the left — Japan, Finland, Norway, Sweden — the top 20 percent are about three and a half, four times as rich as the bottom 20 percent. 
+But on the more unequal end — U.K., Portugal, USA, Singapore — the differences are twice as big. 
+On that measure, we are twice as unequal as some of the other successful market democracies. 
+Now I'm going to show you what that does to our societies. 
+We collected data on problems with social gradients, the kind of problems that are more common at the bottom of the social ladder. 
+Internationally comparable data on life expectancy, on kids' maths and literacy scores, on infant mortality rates, homicide rates, proportion of the population in prison, teenage birthrates, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness — which in standard diagnostic classification includes drug and alcohol addiction — and social mobility. 
+We put them all in one index. 
+They're all weighted equally. 
+Where a country is is a sort of average score on these things. 
+And there, you see it in relation to the measure of inequality I've just shown you, which I shall use over and over again in the data. 
+The more unequal countries are doing worse on all these kinds of social problems. 
+It's an extraordinarily close correlation. 
+But if you look at that same index of health and social problems in relation to GNP per capita, gross national income, there's nothing there, no correlation anymore. 
+We were a little bit worried that people might think we'd been choosing problems to suit our argument and just manufactured this evidence, so we also did a paper in the British Medical Journal on the UNICEF index of child well-being. 
+It has 40 different components put together by other people. 
+It contains whether kids can talk to their parents, whether they have books at home, what immunization rates are like, whether there's bullying at school. 
+Everything goes into it. 
+Here it is in relation to that same measure of inequality. 
+Kids do worse in the more unequal societies. 
+Highly significant relationship. 
+But once again, if you look at that measure of child well-being, in relation to national income per person, there's no relationship, no suggestion of a relationship. 
+What all the data I've shown you so far says is the same thing. 
+The average well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth. 
+That's very important in poorer countries, but not in the rich developed world. 
+But the differences between us and where we are in relation to each other now matter very much. 
+I'm going to show you some of the separate bits of our index. 
+Here, for instance, is trust. 
+It's simply the proportion of the population who agree most people can be trusted. 
+It comes from the World Values Survey. 
+You see, at the more unequal end, it's about 15 percent of the population who feel they can trust others. 
+But in the more equal societies, it rises to 60 or 65 percent. 
+And if you look at measures of involvement in community life or social capital, very similar relationships closely related to inequality. 
+I may say, we did all this work twice. 
+We did it first on these rich, developed countries, and then as a separate test bed, we repeated it all on the 50 American states — asking just the same question: do the more unequal states do worse on all these kinds of measures? 
+So here is trust from a general social survey of the federal government related to inequality. 
+Very similar scatter over a similar range of levels of trust. 
+Same thing is going on. 
+Basically we found that almost anything that's related to trust internationally is related to trust amongst the 50 states in that separate test bed. 
+We're not just talking about a fluke. 
+This is mental illness. 
+WHO put together figures using the same diagnostic interviews on random samples of the population to allow us to compare rates of mental illness in each society. 
+This is the percent of the population with any mental illness in the preceding year. 
+And it goes from about eight percent up to three times that — whole societies with three times the level of mental illness of others. 
+And again, closely related to inequality. 
+This is violence. 
+These red dots are American states, and the blue triangles are Canadian provinces. 
+But look at the scale of the differences. 
+It goes from 15 homicides per million up to 150. 
+This is the proportion of the population in prison. 
+There's a about a tenfold difference there, log scale up the side. 
+But it goes from about 40 to 400 people in prison. 
+That relationship is not mainly driven by more crime. 
+In some places, that's part of it. 
+But most of it is about more punitive sentencing, harsher sentencing. 
+And the more unequal societies are more likely also to retain the death penalty. 
+Here we have children dropping out of high school. 
+Again, quite big differences. 
+Extraordinarily damaging, if you're talking about using the talents of the population. 
+This is social mobility. 
+It's actually a measure of mobility based on income. 
+Basically, it's asking: do rich fathers have rich sons and poor fathers have poor sons, or is there no relationship between the two? 
+And at the more unequal end, fathers' income is much more important — in the U.K., USA. 
+And in Scandinavian countries, fathers' income is much less important. 
+There's more social mobility. 
+And as we like to say — and I know there are a lot of Americans in the audience here — if Americans want to live the American dream, they should go to Denmark. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I've shown you just a few things in italics here. 
+I could have shown a number of other problems. 
+They're all problems that tend to be more common at the bottom of the social gradient. 
+But there are endless problems with social gradients that are worse in more unequal countries — not just a little bit worse, but anything from twice as common to 10 times as common. 
+Think of the expense, the human cost of that. 
+I want to go back though to this graph that I showed you earlier where we put it all together to make two points. 
+One is that, in graph after graph, we find the countries that do worse, whatever the outcome, seem to be the more unequal ones, and the ones that do well seem to be the Nordic countries and Japan. 
+So what we're looking at is general social disfunction related to inequality. 
+It's not just one or two things that go wrong, it's most things. 
+The other really important point I want to make on this graph is that, if you look at the bottom, Sweden and Japan, they're very different countries in all sorts of ways. 
+The position of women, how closely they keep to the nuclear family, are on opposite ends of the poles in terms of the rich developed world. 
+But another really important difference is how they get their greater equality. 
+Sweden has huge differences in earnings, and it narrows the gap through taxation, general welfare state, generous benefits and so on. 
+Japan is rather different though. 
+It starts off with much smaller differences in earnings before tax. 
+It has lower taxes. 
+It has a smaller welfare state. 
+And in our analysis of the American states, we find rather the same contrast. 
+There are some states that do well through redistribution, some states that do well because they have smaller income differences before tax. 
+So we conclude that it doesn't much matter how you get your greater equality, as long as you get there somehow. 
+I am not talking about perfect equality, I'm talking about what exists in rich developed market democracies. 
+Another really surprising part of this picture is that it's not just the poor who are affected by inequality. 
+There seems to be some truth in John Donne's "No man is an island." 
+And in a number of studies, it's possible to compare how people do in more and less equal countries at each level in the social hierarchy. 
+This is just one example. 
+It's infant mortality. 
+Some Swedes very kindly classified a lot of their infant deaths according to the British register of general socioeconomic classification. 
+And so it's anachronistically a classification by fathers' occupations, so single parents go on their own. 
+But then where it says "" low social class, "" that's unskilled manual occupations. 
+It goes through towards the skilled manual occupations in the middle, then the junior non-manual, going up high to the professional occupations — doctors, lawyers, directors of larger companies. 
+You see there that Sweden does better than Britain all the way across the social hierarchy. 
+The biggest differences are at the bottom of society. 
+But even at the top, there seems to be a small benefit to being in a more equal society. 
+We show that on about five different sets of data covering educational outcomes and health in the United States and internationally. 
+And that seems to be the general picture — that greater equality makes most difference at the bottom, but has some benefits even at the top. 
+But I should say a few words about what's going on. 
+I think I'm looking and talking about the psychosocial effects of inequality. 
+More to do with feelings of superiority and inferiority, of being valued and devalued, respected and disrespected. 
+And of course, those feelings of the status competition that comes out of that drives the consumerism in our society. 
+It also leads to status insecurity. 
+We worry more about how we're judged and seen by others, whether we're regarded as attractive, clever, all that kind of thing. 
+The social-evaluative judgments increase, the fear of those social-evaluative judgments. 
+Interestingly, some parallel work going on in social psychology: some people reviewed 208 different studies in which volunteers had been invited into a psychological laboratory and had their stress hormones, their responses to doing stressful tasks, measured. 
+And in the review, what they were interested in seeing is what kind of stresses most reliably raise levels of cortisol, the central stress hormone. 
+And the conclusion was it was tasks that included social-evaluative threat — threats to self-esteem or social status in which others can negatively judge your performance. 
+Those kind of stresses have a very particular effect on the physiology of stress. 
+Now we have been criticized. 
+Of course, there are people who dislike this stuff and people who find it very surprising. 
+I should tell you though that when people criticize us for picking and choosing data, we never pick and choose data. 
+We have an absolute rule that if our data source has data for one of the countries we're looking at, it goes into the analysis. 
+Our data source decides whether it's reliable data, we don't. 
+Otherwise that would introduce bias. 
+What about other countries? 
+There are 200 studies of health in relation to income and equality in the academic peer-reviewed journals. 
+This isn't confined to these countries here, hiding a very simple demonstration. 
+The same countries, the same measure of inequality, one problem after another. 
+Why don't we control for other factors? 
+Well we've shown you that GNP per capita doesn't make any difference. 
+And of course, others using more sophisticated methods in the literature have controlled for poverty and education and so on. 
+What about causality? 
+Correlation in itself doesn't prove causality. 
+We spend a good bit of time. 
+And indeed, people know the causal links quite well in some of these outcomes. 
+The big change in our understanding of drivers of chronic health in the rich developed world is how important chronic stress from social sources is affecting the immune system, the cardiovascular system. 
+Or for instance, the reason why violence becomes more common in more unequal societies is because people are sensitive to being looked down on. 
+I should say that to deal with this, we've got to deal with the post-tax things and the pre-tax things. 
+We've got to constrain income, the bonus culture incomes at the top. 
+I think we must make our bosses accountable to their employees in any way we can. 
+I think the take-home message though is that we can improve the real quality of human life by reducing the differences in incomes between us. 
+Suddenly we have a handle on the psychosocial well-being of whole societies, and that's exciting. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In 2012, when I painted the minaret of Jara Mosque in my hometown of Gabés, in the south of Tunisia, I never thought that graffiti would bring so much attention to a city. 
+At the beginning, I was just looking for a wall in my hometown, and it happened that the minaret was built in '94. 
+And for 18 years, those 57 meters of concrete stayed grey. 
+When I met the imam for the first time, and I told him what I wanted to do, he was like, "" Thank God you finally came, "" and he told me that for years he was waiting for somebody to do something on it. 
+The most amazing thing about this imam is that he didn't ask me anything — neither a sketch, or what I was going to write. 
+In every work that I create, I write messages with my style of calligraffiti — a mix of calligraphy and graffiti. 
+I use quotes or poetry. 
+For the minaret, I thought that the most relevant message to be put on a mosque should come from the Quran, so I picked this verse: "" Oh humankind, we have created you from a male and a female, and made you people and tribe, so you may know each other. "" It was a universal call for peace, tolerance, and acceptance coming from the side that we don't usually portray in a good way in the media. 
+I was amazed to see how the local community reacted to the painting, and how it made them proud to see the minaret getting so much attention from international press all around the world. 
+He hoped that this minaret would become a monument for the city, and attract people to this forgotten place of Tunisia. 
+The universality of the message, the political context of Tunisia at this time, and the fact that I was writing Quran in a graffiti way were not insignificant. 
+It reunited the community. 
+Bringing people, future generations, together through Arabic calligraphy is what I do. 
+Writing messages is the essence of my artwork. 
+What is funny, actually, is that even Arabic-speaking people really need to focus a lot to decipher what I'm writing. 
+You don't need to know the meaning to feel the piece. 
+I think that Arabic script touches your soul before it reaches your eyes. 
+There is a beauty in it that you don't need to translate. 
+Arabic script speaks to anyone, I believe; to you, to you, to you, to anybody, and then when you get the meaning, you feel connected to it. 
+I always make sure to write messages that are relevant to the place where I'm painting, but messages that have a universal dimension, so anybody around the world can connect to it. 
+I was born and raised in France, in Paris, and I started learning how to write and read Arabic when I was 18. 
+Today I only write messages in Arabic. 
+One of the reasons this is so important to me, is because of all the reaction that I've experienced all around the world. 
+In Rio de Janeiro, I translated this Portuguese poem from Gabriela Tôrres Barbosa, who was giving an homage to the poor people of the favela, and then I painted it on the rooftop. 
+The local community were really intrigued by what I was doing, but as soon as I gave them the meaning of the calligraphy, they thanked me, as they felt connected to the piece. 
+In South Africa, in Cape Town, the local community of Philippi offered me the only concrete wall of the slum. 
+It was a school, and I wrote on it a quote from Nelson Mandela, saying, "" [in Arabic], "" which means, "" It seems impossible until it's done. "" Then this guy came to me and said, "" Man, why you don't write in English? "" and I replied to him, "" I would consider your concern legit if you asked me why I didn't write in Zulu. "" In Paris, once, there was this event, and someone gave his wall to be painted. 
+And when he saw I was painting in Arabic, he got so mad — actually, hysterical — and he asked for the wall to be erased. 
+I was mad and disappointed. 
+But a week later, the organizer of the event asked me to come back, and he told me that there was a wall right in front of this guy's house. 
+So, this guy — (Laughter) like, was forced to see it every day. 
+At the beginning, I was going to write, "" [In Arabic], "" which means, "" In your face, "" but — (Laughter) I decided to be smarter and I wrote, "" [In Arabic], "" which means, "" Open your heart. "" I'm really proud of my culture, and I'm trying to be an ambassador of it through my artwork. 
+And I hope that I can break the stereotypes we all know, with the beauty of Arabic script. 
+Today, I don't write the translation of the message anymore on the wall. 
+I don't want the poetry of the calligraphy to be broken, as it's art and you can appreciate it without knowing the meaning, as you can enjoy any music from other countries. 
+Some people see that as a rejection or a closed door, but for me, it's more an invitation — to my language, to my culture, and to my art. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Information technology grows in an exponential manner. 
+It's not linear. And our intuition is linear. 
+When we walked through the savanna a thousand years ago we made linear predictions where that animal would be, and that worked fine. It's hardwired in our brains. 
+But the pace of exponential growth is really what describes information technologies. 
+And it's not just computation. 
+There is a big difference between linear and exponential growth. 
+If I take 30 steps linearly — one, two, three, four, five — I get to 30. 
+If I take 30 steps exponentially — two, four, eight, 16 — I get to a billion. 
+It makes a huge difference. 
+And that really describes information technology. 
+When I was a student at MIT, we all shared one computer that took up a whole building. 
+The computer in your cellphone today is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, a thousand times more powerful. 
+That's a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar that we've actually experienced since I was a student. 
+And we're going to do it again in the next 25 years. 
+Information technology progresses through a series of S-curves where each one is a different paradigm. 
+So people say, "" What's going to happen when Moore's Law comes to an end? "" Which will happen around 2020. 
+We'll then go to the next paradigm. 
+And Moore's Law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computing. 
+The exponential growth of computing started decades before Gordon Moore was even born. 
+And it doesn't just apply to computation. 
+It's really any technology where we can measure the underlying information properties. 
+Here we have 49 famous computers. I put them in a logarithmic graph. 
+The logarithmic scale hides the scale of the increase, because this represents trillions-fold increase since the 1890 census. 
+In 1950s they were shrinking vacuum tubes, making them smaller and smaller. They finally hit a wall; they couldn't shrink the vacuum tube any more and keep the vacuum. 
+And that was the end of the shrinking of vacuum tubes, but it was not the end of the exponential growth of computing. 
+We went to the fourth paradigm, transistors, and finally integrated circuits. 
+When that comes to an end we'll go to the sixth paradigm; three-dimensional self-organizing molecular circuits. 
+But what's even more amazing, really, than this fantastic scale of progress, is that — look at how predictable this is. 
+I mean this went through thick and thin, through war and peace, through boom times and recessions. 
+The Great Depression made not a dent in this exponential progression. 
+We'll see the same thing in the economic recession we're having now. 
+At least the exponential growth of information technology capability will continue unabated. 
+And I just updated these graphs. 
+Because I had them through 2002 in my book, "" The Singularity is Near. "" So we updated them, so I could present it here, to 2007. 
+And I was asked, "" Well aren't you nervous? 
+Maybe it kind of didn't stay on this exponential progression. "" I was a little nervous because maybe the data wouldn't be right, but I've done this now for 30 years, and it has stayed on this exponential progression. 
+Look at this graph here.You could buy one transistor for a dollar in 1968. 
+You can buy half a billion today, and they are actually better, because they are faster. 
+But look at how predictable this is. 
+And I'd say this knowledge is over-fitting to past data. 
+I've been making these forward-looking predictions for about 30 years. 
+And the cost of a transistor cycle, which is a measure of the price performance of electronics, comes down about every year. 
+That's a 50 percent deflation rate. 
+And it's also true of other examples, like DNA data or brain data. 
+But we more than make up for that. 
+We actually ship more than twice as much of every form of information technology. 
+We've had 18 percent growth in constant dollars in every form of information technology for the last half-century, despite the fact that you can get twice as much of it each year. 
+This is a completely different example. 
+This is not Moore's Law. 
+The amount of DNA data we've sequenced has doubled every year. 
+The cost has come down by half every year. 
+And this has been a smooth progression since the beginning of the genome project. 
+And halfway through the project, skeptics said, "" Well, this is not working out. You're halfway through the genome project and you've finished one percent of the project. "" But that was really right on schedule. 
+Because if you double one percent seven more times, which is exactly what happened, you get 100 percent. And the project was finished on time. 
+Communication technologies: 50 different ways to measure this, the number of bits being moved around, the size of the Internet. 
+But this has progressed at an exponential pace. 
+This is deeply democratizing. 
+I wrote, over 20 years ago in "" The Age of Intelligent Machines, "" when the Soviet Union was going strong, that it would be swept away by this growth of decentralized communication. 
+And we will have plenty of computation as we go through the 21st century to do things like simulate regions of the human brain. 
+But where will we get the software? 
+Some critics say, "" Oh, well software is stuck in the mud. "" But we are learning more and more about the human brain. 
+Spatial resolution of brain scanning is doubling every year. 
+The amount of data we're getting about the brain is doubling every year. 
+And we're showing that we can actually turn this data into working models and simulations of brain regions. 
+There is about 20 regions of the brain that have been modeled, simulated and tested: the auditory cortex, regions of the visual cortex; cerebellum, where we do our skill formation; slices of the cerebral cortex, where we do our rational thinking. 
+And all of this has fueled an increase, very smooth and predictable, of productivity. 
+We've gone from 30 dollars to 130 dollars in constant dollars in the value of an average hour of human labor, fueled by this information technology. 
+And we're all concerned about energy and the environment. 
+Well this is a logarithmic graph. 
+This represents a smooth doubling, every two years, of the amount of solar energy we're creating, particularly as we're now applying nanotechnology, a form of information technology, to solar panels. 
+And we're only eight doublings away from it meeting 100 percent of our energy needs. 
+And there is 10 thousand times more sunlight than we need. 
+We ultimately will merge with this technology. It's already very close to us. 
+When I was a student it was across campus, now it's in our pockets. 
+What used to take up a building now fits in our pockets. 
+What now fits in our pockets would fit in a blood cell in 25 years. 
+And we will begin to actually deeply influence our health and our intelligence, as we get closer and closer to this technology. 
+Based on that we are announcing, here at TED, in true TED tradition, Singularity University. 
+It's a new university that's founded by Peter Diamandis, who is here in the audience, and myself. 
+It's backed by NASA and Google, and other leaders in the high-tech and science community. 
+And our goal was to assemble the leaders, both teachers and students, in these exponentially growing information technologies, and their application. 
+But Larry Page made an impassioned speech at our organizing meeting, saying we should devote this study to actually addressing some of the major challenges facing humanity. 
+And if we did that, then Google would back this. 
+And so that's what we've done. 
+The last third of the nine-week intensive summer session will be devoted to a group project to address some major challenge of humanity. 
+Like for example, applying the Internet, which is now ubiquitous, in the rural areas of China or in Africa, to bringing health information to developing areas of the world. 
+And these projects will continue past these sessions, using collaborative interactive communication. 
+All the intellectual property that is created and taught will be online and available, and developed online in a collaborative fashion. 
+Here is our founding meeting. 
+But this is being announced today. 
+It will be permanently headquartered in Silicon Valley, at the NASA Ames research center. 
+There are different programs for graduate students, for executives at different companies. 
+The first six tracks here — artificial intelligence, advanced computing technologies, biotechnology, nanotechnology — are the different core areas of information technology. 
+Then we are going to apply them to the other areas, like energy, ecology, policy law and ethics, entrepreneurship, so that people can bring these new technologies to the world. 
+So we're very appreciative of the support we've gotten from both the intellectual leaders, the high-tech leaders, particularly Google and NASA. 
+This is an exciting new venture. 
+And we invite you to participate. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The global economic financial crisis has reignited public interest in something that's actually one of the oldest questions in economics, dating back to at least before Adam Smith. 
+And that is, why is it that countries with seemingly similar economies and institutions can display radically different savings behavior? 
+Now, many brilliant economists have spent their entire lives working on this question, and as a field we've made a tremendous amount of headway and we understand a lot about this. 
+What I'm here to talk with you about today is an intriguing new hypothesis and some surprisingly powerful new findings that I've been working on about the link between the structure of the language you speak and how you find yourself with the propensity to save. 
+Let me tell you a little bit about savings rates, a little bit about language, and then I'll draw that connection. 
+Let's start by thinking about the member countries of the OECD, or the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. 
+OECD countries, by and large, you should think about these as the richest, most industrialized countries in the world. 
+And by joining the OECD, they were affirming a common commitment to democracy, open markets and free trade. 
+Despite all of these similarities, we see huge differences in savings behavior. 
+So all the way over on the left of this graph, what you see is many OECD countries saving over a quarter of their GDP every year, and some OECD countries saving over a third of their GDP per year. 
+Holding down the right flank of the OECD, all the way on the other side, is Greece. 
+And what you can see is that over the last 25 years, Greece has barely managed to save more than 10 percent of their GDP. 
+It should be noted, of course, that the United States and the U.K. are the next in line. 
+Now that we see these huge differences in savings rates, how is it possible that language might have something to do with these differences? 
+Let me tell you a little bit about how languages fundamentally differ. 
+Linguists and cognitive scientists have been exploring this question for many years now. 
+And then I'll draw the connection between these two behaviors. 
+Many of you have probably already noticed that I'm Chinese. 
+I grew up in the Midwest of the United States. 
+And something I realized quite early on was that the Chinese language forced me to speak about and — in fact, more fundamentally than that — ever so slightly forced me to think about family in very different ways. 
+Now, how might that be? Let me give you an example. 
+Suppose I were talking with you and I was introducing you to my uncle. 
+You understood exactly what I just said in English. 
+If we were speaking Mandarin Chinese with each other, though, I wouldn't have that luxury. 
+I wouldn't have been able to convey so little information. 
+What my language would have forced me to do, instead of just telling you, "" This is my uncle, "" is to tell you a tremendous amount of additional information. 
+My language would force me to tell you whether or not this was an uncle on my mother's side or my father's side, whether this was an uncle by marriage or by birth, and if this man was my father's brother, whether he was older than or younger than my father. 
+All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn't let me ignore it. 
+And in fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it. 
+Now, that fascinated me endlessly as a child, but what fascinates me even more today as an economist is that some of these same differences carry through to how languages speak about time. 
+So for example, if I'm speaking in English, I have to speak grammatically differently if I'm talking about past rain, "" It rained yesterday, "" current rain, "" It is raining now, "" or future rain, "" It will rain tomorrow. "" Notice that English requires a lot more information with respect to the timing of events. 
+Why? Because I have to consider that and I have to modify what I'm saying to say, "" It will rain, "" or "" It's going to rain. "" It's simply not permissible in English to say, "" It rain tomorrow. "" In contrast to that, that's almost exactly what you would say in Chinese. 
+A Chinese speaker can basically say something that sounds very strange to an English speaker's ears. 
+They can say, "" Yesterday it rain, "" "" Now it rain, "" "" Tomorrow it rain. "" In some deep sense, Chinese doesn't divide up the time spectrum in the same way that English forces us to constantly do in order to speak correctly. 
+Is this difference in languages only between very, very distantly related languages, like English and Chinese? 
+Actually, no. 
+So many of you know, in this room, that English is a Germanic language. 
+What you may not have realized is that English is actually an outlier. 
+It is the only Germanic language that requires this. 
+For example, most other Germanic language speakers feel completely comfortable talking about rain tomorrow by saying, "" Morgen regnet es, "" quite literally to an English ear, "" It rain tomorrow. "" This led me, as a behavioral economist, to an intriguing hypothesis. 
+Could how you speak about time, could how your language forces you to think about time, affect your propensity to behave across time? 
+You speak English, a futured language. 
+And what that means is that every time you discuss the future, or any kind of a future event, grammatically you're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it's something viscerally different. 
+Now suppose that that visceral difference makes you subtly dissociate the future from the present every time you speak. 
+If that's true and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present, that's going to make it harder to save. 
+If, on the other hand, you speak a futureless language, the present and the future, you speak about them identically. 
+If that subtly nudges you to feel about them identically, that's going to make it easier to save. 
+Now this is a fanciful theory. 
+I'm a professor, I get paid to have fanciful theories. 
+But how would you actually go about testing such a theory? 
+Well, what I did with that was to access the linguistics literature. 
+And interestingly enough, there are pockets of futureless language speakers situated all over the world. 
+This is a pocket of futureless language speakers in Northern Europe. 
+Interestingly enough, when you start to crank the data, these pockets of futureless language speakers all around the world turn out to be, by and large, some of the world's best savers. 
+Just to give you a hint of that, let's look back at that OECD graph that we were talking about. 
+What you see is that these bars are systematically taller and systematically shifted to the left compared to these bars which are the members of the OECD that speak futured languages. 
+What is the average difference here? 
+Five percentage points of your GDP saved per year. 
+Over 25 years that has huge long-run effects on the wealth of your nation. 
+Now while these findings are suggestive, countries can be different in so many different ways that it's very, very difficult sometimes to account for all of these possible differences. 
+What I'm going to show you, though, is something that I've been engaging in for a year, which is trying to gather all of the largest datasets that we have access to as economists, and I'm going to try and strip away all of those possible differences, hoping to get this relationship to break. 
+And just in summary, no matter how far I push this, I can't get it to break. 
+Let me show you how far you can do that. 
+One way to imagine that is I gather large datasets from around the world. 
+So for example, there is the Survey of Health, [Aging] and Retirement in Europe. 
+From this dataset you actually learn that retired European families are extremely patient with survey takers. 
+(Laughter) So imagine that you're a retired household in Belgium and someone comes to your front door. 
+"" Excuse me, would you mind if I peruse your stock portfolio? 
+Do you happen to know how much your house is worth? Do you mind telling me? 
+Would you happen to have a hallway that's more than 10 meters long? 
+If you do, would you mind if I timed how long it took you to walk down that hallway? 
+Would you mind squeezing as hard as you can, in your dominant hand, this device so I can measure your grip strength? 
+How about blowing into this tube so I can measure your lung capacity? "" The survey takes over a day. 
+(Laughter) Combine that with a Demographic and Health Survey collected by USAID in developing countries in Africa, for example, which that survey actually can go so far as to directly measure the HIV status of families living in, for example, rural Nigeria. 
+Combine that with a world value survey, which measures the political opinions and, fortunately for me, the savings behaviors of millions of families in hundreds of countries around the world. 
+Take all of that data, combine it, and this map is what you get. 
+What you find is nine countries around the world that have significant native populations which speak both futureless and futured languages. 
+And what I'm going to do is form statistical matched pairs between families that are nearly identical on every dimension that I can measure, and then I'm going to explore whether or not the link between language and savings holds even after controlling for all of these levels. 
+What are the characteristics we can control for? 
+Well I'm going to match families on country of birth and residence, the demographics — what sex, their age — their income level within their own country, their educational achievement, a lot about their family structure. 
+It turns out there are six different ways to be married in Europe. 
+And most granularly, I break them down by religion where there are 72 categories of religions in the world — so an extreme level of granularity. 
+There are 1.4 billion different ways that a family can find itself. 
+Now effectively everything I'm going to tell you from now on is only comparing these basically nearly identical families. 
+It's getting as close as possible to the thought experiment of finding two families both of whom live in Brussels who are identical on every single one of these dimensions, but one of whom speaks Flemish and one of whom speaks French; or two families that live in a rural district in Nigeria, one of whom speaks Hausa and one of whom speaks Igbo. 
+Now even after all of this granular level of control, do futureless language speakers seem to save more? 
+Yes, futureless language speakers, even after this level of control, are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year. 
+Does this have cumulative effects? 
+Yes, by the time they retire, futureless language speakers, holding constant their income, are going to retire with 25 percent more in savings. 
+Can we push this data even further? 
+Yes, because I just told you, we actually collect a lot of health data as economists. 
+Now how can we think about health behaviors to think about savings? 
+Well, think about smoking, for example. 
+Smoking is in some deep sense negative savings. 
+If savings is current pain in exchange for future pleasure, smoking is just the opposite. 
+It's current pleasure in exchange for future pain. 
+What we should expect then is the opposite effect. 
+And that's exactly what we find. 
+Futureless language speakers are 20 to 24 percent less likely to be smoking at any given point in time compared to identical families, and they're going to be 13 to 17 percent less likely to be obese by the time they retire, and they're going to report being 21 percent more likely to have used a condom in their last sexual encounter. 
+I could go on and on with the list of differences that you can find. 
+It's almost impossible not to find a savings behavior for which this strong effect isn't present. 
+My linguistics and economics colleagues at Yale and I are just starting to do this work and really explore and understand the ways that these subtle nudges cause us to think more or less about the future every single time we speak. 
+Ultimately, the goal, once we understand how these subtle effects can change our decision making, we want to be able to provide people tools so that they can consciously make themselves better savers and more conscious investors in their own future. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I grew up in Northern Ireland, right up in the very, very north end of it there, where it's absolutely freezing cold. 
+This was me running around in the back garden mid-summer. 
+(Laughter) I couldn't pick a career. 
+In Ireland the obvious choice is the military, but to be honest it actually kind of sucks. 
+(Laughter) My mother wanted me to be a dentist. 
+But the problem was that people kept blowing everything up. 
+So I actually went to school in Belfast, which was where all the action happened. 
+And this was a pretty common sight. 
+The school I went to was pretty boring. 
+They forced us to learn things like Latin. 
+The school teachers weren't having much fun, the sports were very dirty or very painful. 
+So I cleverly chose rowing, which I got very good at. 
+And I was actually rowing for my school here until this fateful day, and I flipped over right in front of the entire school. 
+And that was the finishing post right there. 
+(Laughter) So this was extremely embarrassing. 
+But our school at that time got a grant from the government, and they got an incredible computer — the research machine 3DZ — and they left the programming manuals lying around. 
+And so students like myself with nothing to do, we would learn how to program it. 
+Also around this time, at home, this was the computer that people were buying. 
+It was called the Sinclair ZX80. This was a 1K computer, and you'd buy your programs on cassette tape. 
+Actually I'm just going to pause for one second, because I heard that there's a prerequisite to speak here at TED — you had to have a picture of yourself from the old days with big hair. 
+So I brought a picture with big hair. 
+(Laughter). 
+I just want to get that out of the way. 
+So after the Sinclair ZX80 came along the very cleverly named Sinclair ZX81. 
+(Laughter) And — you see the picture at the bottom? 
+There's a picture of a guy doing homework with his son. 
+That's what they thought they had built it for. 
+The reality is we got the programming manual and we started making games for it. 
+We were programming in BASIC, which is a pretty awful language for games, so we ended up learning Assembly language so we could really take control of the hardware. 
+This is the guy that invented it, Sir Clive Sinclair, and he's showing his machine. 
+You had this same thing in America, it was called the Timex Sinclair1000. 
+To play a game in those days you had to have an imagination to believe that you were really playing "" Battlestar Galactica. "" The graphics were just horrible. 
+You had to have an even better imagination to play this game, "Death Rider." 
+But of course the scientists couldn't help themselves. 
+They started making their own video games. 
+This is one of my favorite ones here, where they have rabbit breeding, so males choose the lucky rabbit. 
+It was around this time we went from 1K to 16K, which was quite the leap. 
+And if you're wondering how much 16K is, this eBay logo here is 16K. 
+And in that amount of memory someone programmed a full flight simulation program. 
+And that's what it looked like. 
+I spent ages flying this flight simulator, and I honestly believed I could fly airplanes by the end of it. 
+Here's Clive Sinclair now launching his color computer. 
+He's recognized as being the father of video games in Europe. 
+He's a multi-millionaire, and I think that's why he's smiling in this photograph. 
+So I went on for the next 20 years or so making a lot of different games. 
+Some of the highlights were things like "" The Terminator, "" "Aladdin," the "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles." 
+Because I was from the United Kingdom, they thought the word ninja was a little too mean for children, so they decided to call it hero instead. 
+I personally preferred the Spanish version, which was "" Tortugas Ninja. "" That was much better. 
+(Laughter) Then the last game I did was based on trying to get the video game industry and Hollywood to actually work together on something — instead of licensing from each other, to actually work. 
+Now, Chris did ask me to bring some statistics with me, so I've done that. 
+The video game industry in 2005 became a 29 billion dollar business. 
+It grows every year. 
+Last year was the biggest year. 
+By 2008, we're going to kick the butt of the music industry. 
+By 2010, we're going to hit 42 billion. 
+43 percent of gamers are female. 
+So there's a lot more female gamers than people are really aware. 
+The average age of gamers? 
+Well, obviously it's for children, right? 
+Well, no, actually it's 30 years old. 
+And interestingly, the people who buy the most games are 37. 
+So 37 is our target audience. 
+All video games are violent. 
+Of course the newspapers love to beat on this. 
+But 83 percent of games don't have any mature content whatsoever, so it's just not true. 
+Online gaming statistics. 
+I brought some stuff on "" World of Warcraft. "" It's 5.5 million players. 
+It makes about 80 million bucks a month in subscriptions. 
+It costs 50 bucks just to install it on your computer, making the publisher about another 275 million. 
+The game costs about 80 million dollars to make, so basically it pays for itself in about a month. 
+A player in a game called "" Project Entropia "" actually bought his own island for 26,500 dollars. 
+You have to remember that this is not a real island. 
+He didn't actually buy anything, just some data. 
+But he got great terms on it. 
+This purchase included mining and hunting rights, ownership of all land on the island, and a castle with no furniture included. 
+(Laughter) This market is now estimated at over 800 million dollars annually. 
+And what's interesting about it is the market was actually created by the gamers themselves. 
+They found clever ways to trade items and to sell their accounts to each other so that they could make money while they were playing their games. 
+I dove onto eBay a couple of days ago just to see what was gong on, typed in World of Warcraft, got 6,000 items. 
+I liked this one the best: a level 60 Warlock with lots of epics for 174,000 dollars. 
+It's like that guy obviously had some pain while making it. 
+So as far as popularity of games, what do you think these people are doing here? 
+It turns out they're actually in Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles listening to the L.A. Philharmonic playing video game music. 
+That's what the show looks like. 
+You would expect it to be cheesy, but it's not. 
+It's very, very epic and a very beautiful concert. 
+And the people that went there absolutely loved it. 
+What do you think these people are doing? 
+They're actually bringing their computers so they can play games against each other. 
+And this is happening in every city around the world. 
+This is happening in your local cities too, you're probably just not aware of it. 
+Now, Chris told me that you had a timeline video a few years ago here just to show how video game graphics have been improving. 
+I wanted to update that video and give you a new look at it. 
+But what I want you to do is to try to understand it. 
+We're on this curve, and the graphics are getting so ridiculously better. 
+And I'm going to show you up to maybe 2007. 
+But I want you to try and think about what games could look like 10 years from now. 
+So we're going to start that video. 
+Video: Throughout human history people have played games. 
+As man's intellect and technology have evolved so too have the games he plays. 
+(Music) (Applause) David Perry: The thing again I want you to think about is, don't look at these graphics and think of that's the way it is. 
+Think about that's where we are right now, and the curve that we're on means that this is going to continue to get better. 
+This is an example of the kind of graphics you need to be able to draw if you wanted to get a job in the video game industry today. 
+You need to be really an incredible artist. 
+And once we get enough of those guys, we're going to want more fantasy artists that can create places we've never been to before, or characters that we've just never seen before. 
+So the obvious thing for me to talk about today is graphics and audio. 
+But if you were to go to a game developers conference, what they're all talking about is emotion, purpose, meaning, understanding and feeling. 
+You'll hear about talks like, can a video game make you cry? 
+And these are the kind of topics we really actually care about. 
+I came across a student who's absolutely excellent at expressing himself, and this student agreed that he would not show his video to anybody until you here at TED had seen it. 
+So I'd like to play this video. 
+So this is a student's opinion on what his experience of games are. 
+Video: I, like many of you, live somewhere between reality and video games. 
+Some part of me — a true living, breathing person — has become programmed, electronic and virtual. 
+The boundary of my brain that divides real from fantasy has finally begun to crumble. 
+I'm a video game addict and this is my story. 
+(Music) In the year of my birth the Nintendo Entertainment System also went into development. 
+I played in the backyard, learned to read, and even ate some of my vegetables. 
+Most of my childhood was spent playing with Legos. 
+But as was the case for most of my generation, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV. 
+Mr. Rogers, Walt Disney, Nick Junior, and roughly half a million commercials have undoubtedly left their mark on me. 
+When my parents bought my sister and I our first Nintendo, whatever inherent addictive quality this early interactive electronic entertainment possessed quickly took hold of me. 
+At some point something clicked. 
+(Music) With the combination of simple, interactive stories and the warmth of the TV set, my simple 16-bit Nintendo became more than just an escape. 
+It became an alternate existence, my virtual reality. 
+(Music) I'm a video game addict, and it's not because of a certain number of hours I have spent playing, or nights I have gone without sleep to finish the next level. 
+It is because I have had life-altering experiences in virtual space, and video games had begun to erode my own understanding of what is real and what is not. 
+I'm addicted, because even though I know I'm losing my grip on reality, I still crave more. 
+(Music) From an early age I learned to invest myself emotionally in what unfolded before me on screen. 
+Today, after 20 years of watching TV geared to make me emotional, even a decent insurance commercial can bring tears to my eyes. 
+I am just one of a new generation that is growing up. 
+A generation who may experience much more meaning through video games than they will through the real world. 
+Video games are nearing an evolutionary leap, a point where game worlds will look and feel just as real as the films we see in theatres, or the news we watch on TV. 
+And while my sense of free will in these virtual worlds may still be limited, what I do learn applies to my real life. 
+Play enough video games and eventually you will really believe you can snowboard, fly a plane, drive a nine-second quarter mile, or kill a man. 
+I know I can. 
+Unlike any pop culture phenomenon before it, video games actually allow us to become part of the machine. 
+They allow us to sublimate into the culture of interactive, downloaded, streaming, HD reality. 
+We are interacting with our entertainment. 
+I have come to expect this level of interaction. 
+Without it, the problems faced in the real world — poverty, war, disease and genocide — lack the levity they should. 
+Their importance blends into the sensationalized drama of prime time TV. 
+But the beauty of video games today lies not in the lifelike graphics, the vibrating joysticks or virtual surround sound. 
+It lies in that these games are beginning to make me emotional. 
+I have fought in wars, feared for my own survival, watched my cohorts die on beaches and woods that look and feel more real than any textbook or any news story. 
+The people who create these games are smart. 
+They know what makes me scared, excited, panicked, proud or sad. 
+Then they use these emotions to dimensionalize the worlds they create. 
+A well-designed video game will seamlessly weave the user into the fabric of the virtual experience. 
+As one becomes more experienced the awareness of physical control melts away. 
+I know what I want and I do it. 
+No buttons to push, no triggers to pull, just me and the game. 
+My fate and the fate of the world around me lie inside my hands. 
+I know violent video games make my mother worry. 
+What troubles me is not that video game violence is becoming more and more like real life violence, but that real life violence is starting to look more and more like a video game. 
+(Music) These are all troubles outside of myself. 
+I, however, have a problem very close to home. 
+Something has happened to my brain. 
+(Music) Perhaps there is a single part of our brain that holds all of our gut instincts, the things we know to do before we even think. 
+While some of these instincts may be innate, most are learned, and all of them are hardwired into our brains. 
+These instincts are essential for survival in both real and virtual worlds. 
+Only in recent years has the technology behind video games allowed for a true overlap in stimuli. 
+As gamers we are now living by the same laws of physics in the same cities and doing many of the same things we once did in real life, only virtually. 
+Consider this — my real life car has about 25,000 miles on it. 
+In all my driving games, I've driven a total of 31,459 miles. 
+To some degree I've learned how to drive from the game. 
+The sensory cues are very similar. 
+It's a funny feeling when you have spent more time doing something on the TV than you have in real life. 
+When I am driving down a road at sunset all I can think is, this is almost as beautiful as my games are. 
+For my virtual worlds are perfect. 
+More beautiful and rich than the real world around us. 
+I'm not sure what the implications of my experience are, but the potential for using realistic video game stimuli in repetition on a vast number of loyal participants is frightening to me. 
+Today I believe Big Brother would find much more success brainwashing the masses with video games rather than just simply TVs. 
+Video games are fun, engaging, and leave your brain completely vulnerable to re-programming. 
+But maybe brainwashing isn't always bad. 
+Imagine a game that teaches us to respect each other, or helps us to understand the problems we're all facing in the real world. 
+There is a potential to do good as well. 
+It is critical, as these virtual worlds continue to mirror the real world we live in, that game developers realize that they have tremendous responsibilities before them. 
+I'm not sure what the future of video games holds for our civilization. 
+But as virtual and real world experiences increasingly overlap there is a greater and greater potential for other people to feel the same way I do. 
+What I have only recently come to realize is that beyond the graphics, sound, game play and emotion it is the power to break down reality that is so fascinating and addictive to me. 
+I know that I am losing my grip. 
+Part of me is just waiting to let go. 
+I know though, that no matter how amazing video games may become, or how flat the real world may seem to us, that we must stay aware of what our games are teaching us and how they leave us feeling when we finally do unplug. 
+(Applause) DP: Wow. (Applause) 
+I found that video very, very thought provoking, and that's why I wanted to bring it here for you guys to see. 
+And what was interesting about it is the obvious choice for me to talk about was graphics and audio. 
+But as you heard, Michael talked about all these other elements as well. 
+Video games give an awful lot of other things too, and that's why people get so addicted. 
+The most important one being fun. 
+The name of this track is "" The Magic To Come. "" Who is that going to come from? 
+Is it going to come from the best directors in the world as we thought it probably would? 
+I don't think so. 
+I think it's going to come from the children who are growing up now that aren't stuck with all of the stuff that we remember from the past. 
+They're going to do it their way, using the tools that we've created. 
+The same with students or highly creative people, writers and people like that. 
+As far as colleges go, there's about 350 colleges around the world teaching video game courses. 
+That means there's literally thousands of new ideas. 
+Some of the ideas are really dreadful and some of them are great. 
+There's nothing worse than having to listen to someone try and pitch you a really bad video game idea. 
+(Laughter) Chris Anderson: You're off, you're off. That's it. 
+He's out of time. 
+DP: I've just got a little tiny bit more if you'll indulge me. 
+CA: Go ahead. I'm going to stay right here though. 
+(Laughter) DP: This is just a cool shot, because this is students coming to school after class. 
+The school is closed; they're coming back at midnight because they want to pitch their video game ideas. 
+I'm sitting at the front of the class, and they're actually pitching their ideas. 
+So it's hard to get students to come back to class, but it is possible. 
+This is my daughter, her name's Emma, she's 17 months old. 
+And I've been asking myself, what is Emma going to experience in the video game world? 
+And as I've shown here, we have the audience. 
+She's never going to know a world where you can't press a button and have millions of people ready to play. 
+You know, we have the technology. 
+She's never going to know a world where the graphics just aren't stunning and really immersive. 
+And as the student video showed, we can impact and move. 
+She's never going to know a world where video games aren't incredibly emotional and will probably make her cry. 
+I just hope she likes video games. 
+(Laughter) So, my closing thought. 
+Games on the surface seem simple entertainment, but for those that like to look a little deeper, the new paradigm of video games could open entirely new frontiers to creative minds that like to think big. 
+Where better to challenge those minds than here at TED? 
+Thank you. 
+Chris Anderson: David Perry. That was awesome. 
+
+The first time I uttered a prayer was in a glass-stained cathedral. 
+I was kneeling long after the congregation was on its feet, dip both hands into holy water, trace the trinity across my chest, my tiny body drooping like a question mark all over the wooden pew. 
+I asked Jesus to fix me, and when he did not answer I befriended silence in the hopes that my sin would burn and salve my mouth would dissolve like sugar on tongue, but shame lingered as an aftertaste. 
+And in an attempt to reintroduce me to sanctity, my mother told me of the miracle I was, said I could grow up to be anything I want. 
+I decided to be a boy. 
+It was cute. 
+I had snapback, toothless grin, used skinned knees as street cred, played hide and seek with what was left of my goal. 
+I was it. 
+The winner to a game the other kids couldn't play, I was the mystery of an anatomy, a question asked but not answered, tightroping between awkward boy and apologetic girl, and when I turned 12, the boy phase wasn't deemed cute anymore. 
+It was met with nostalgic aunts who missed seeing my knees in the shadow of skirts, who reminded me that my kind of attitude would never bring a husband home, that I exist for heterosexual marriage and child-bearing. 
+And I swallowed their insults along with their slurs. 
+Naturally, I did not come out of the closet. 
+The kids at my school opened it without my permission. 
+Called me by a name I did not recognize, said "" lesbian, "" but I was more boy than girl, more Ken than Barbie. 
+It had nothing to do with hating my body, I just love it enough to let it go, I treat it like a house, and when your house is falling apart, you do not evacuate, you make it comfortable enough to house all your insides, you make it pretty enough to invite guests over, you make the floorboards strong enough to stand on. 
+My mother fears I have named myself after fading things. 
+As she counts the echoes left behind by Mya Hall, Leelah Alcorn, Blake Brockington. 
+She fears that I'll die without a whisper, that I'll turn into "" what a shame "" conversations at the bus stop. 
+She claims I have turned myself into a mausoleum, that I am a walking casket, news headlines have turned my identity into a spectacle, Bruce Jenner on everyone's lips while the brutality of living in this body becomes an asterisk at the bottom of equality pages. 
+No one ever thinks of us as human because we are more ghost than flesh, because people fear that my gender expression is a trick, that it exists to be perverse, that it ensnares them without their consent, that my body is a feast for their eyes and hands and once they have fed off my queer, they'll regurgitate all the parts they did not like. 
+They'll put me back into the closet, hang me with all the other skeletons. 
+I will be the best attraction. 
+Can you see how easy it is to talk people into coffins, to misspell their names on gravestones. 
+And people still wonder why there are boys rotting, they go away in high school hallways they are afraid of becoming another hashtag in a second afraid of classroom discussions becoming like judgment day and now oncoming traffic is embracing more transgender children than parents. 
+I wonder how long it will be before the trans suicide notes start to feel redundant, before we realize that our bodies become lessons about sin way before we learn how to love them. 
+Like God didn't save all this breath and mercy, like my blood is not the wine that washed over Jesus' feet. 
+My prayers are now getting stuck in my throat. 
+Maybe I am finally fixed, maybe I just don't care, maybe God finally listened to my prayers. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, I've known a lot of fish in my life. 
+I've loved only two. 
+That first one, it was more like a passionate affair. 
+It was a beautiful fish: flavorful, textured, meaty, a bestseller on the menu. 
+What a fish. 
+(Laughter) Even better, it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability. 
+So you could feel good about selling it. 
+I was in a relationship with this beauty for several months. 
+One day, the head of the company called and asked if I'd speak at an event about the farm's sustainability. 
+"" Absolutely, "" I said. 
+Here was a company trying to solve what's become this unimaginable problem for us chefs: How do we keep fish on our menus? 
+For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. 
+It's hard to overstate the destruction. 
+Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love — the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish — they've collapsed. 
+There's almost nothing left. 
+So, for better or for worse, aquaculture, fish farming, is going to be a part of our future. 
+A lot of arguments against it: Fish farms pollute — most of them do anyway — and they're inefficient. Take tuna, a major drawback. 
+It's got a feed conversion ratio of 15 to one. 
+That means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. 
+Not very sustainable. 
+It doesn't taste very good either. 
+So here, finally, was a company trying to do it right. 
+I wanted to support them. 
+The day before the event, I called the head of P.R. for the company. 
+Let's call him Don. 
+"" Don, "" I said, "" just to get the facts straight, you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea, you don't pollute. "" "" That's right, "" he said. "" We're so far out, the waste from our fish gets distributed, not concentrated. "" And then he added, "" We're basically a world unto ourselves. 
+That feed conversion ratio? 2.5 to one, "" he said. 
+"Best in the business." 
+2.5 to one, great. 
+"2.5 what? What are you feeding?" 
+"" Sustainable proteins, "" he said. 
+"" Great, "" I said. Got off the phone. 
+And that night, I was lying in bed, and I thought: What the hell is a sustainable protein? 
+(Laughter) So the next day, just before the event, I called Don. 
+I said, "" Don, what are some examples of sustainable proteins? "" He said he didn't know. He would ask around. 
+Well, I got on the phone with a few people in the company; no one could give me a straight answer until finally, I got on the phone with the head biologist. 
+Let's call him Don too. 
+(Laughter) "" Don, "" I said, "what are some examples of sustainable proteins?" 
+Well, he mentioned some algaes and some fish meals, and then he said chicken pellets. 
+I said, "" Chicken pellets? "" He said, "" Yeah, feathers, skin, bone meal, scraps, dried and processed into feed. "" I said, "" What percentage of your feed is chicken? "" Thinking, you know, two percent. 
+"" Well, it's about 30 percent, "" he said. 
+I said, "" Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish? "" (Laughter) There was a long pause on the line, and he said, "" There's just too much chicken in the world. "" (Laughter) I fell out of love with this fish. (Laughter) 
+No, not because I'm some self-righteous, goody-two shoes foodie. 
+I actually am. 
+(Laughter) No, I actually fell out of love with this fish because, I swear to God, after that conversation, the fish tasted like chicken. (Laughter) 
+This second fish, it's a different kind of love story. 
+It's the romantic kind, the kind where the more you get to know your fish, you love the fish. 
+I first ate it at a restaurant in southern Spain. 
+A journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time. 
+She kind of set us up. 
+(Laughter) It came to the table a bright, almost shimmering, white color. 
+The chef had overcooked it. 
+Like twice over. 
+Amazingly, it was still delicious. 
+Who can make a fish taste good after it's been overcooked? 
+I can't, but this guy can. 
+Let's call him Miguel — actually his name is Miguel. 
+(Laughter) And no, he didn't cook the fish, and he's not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand it. 
+He's a biologist at Veta La Palma. 
+It's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of Spain. 
+It's at the tip of the Guadalquivir river. 
+Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. 
+They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. 
+They did it by draining the land. 
+They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. 
+Well, they couldn't make it work, not economically. 
+And ecologically, it was a disaster. 
+It killed like 90 percent of the birds, which, for this place, is a lot of birds. 
+And so in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land. 
+What did they do? 
+They reversed the flow of water. 
+They literally flipped the switch. 
+Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. 
+They flooded the canals. 
+They created a 27,000-acre fish farm — bass, mullet, shrimp, eel — and in the process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction. 
+The farm's incredible. 
+I mean, you've never seen anything like this. 
+You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland. 
+I was there not long ago with Miguel. 
+He's an amazing guy, like three parts Charles Darwin and one part Crocodile Dundee. 
+(Laughter) Okay? There we are slogging through the wetlands, and I'm panting and sweating, got mud up to my knees, and Miguel's calmly conducting a biology lecture. 
+Here, he's pointing out a rare Black-shouldered Kite. 
+Now, he's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton. 
+And here, here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the Tanzanian Giraffe. 
+It turns out, Miguel spent the better part of his career in the Mikumi National Park in Africa. 
+I asked him how he became such an expert on fish. 
+He said, "" Fish? I didn't know anything about fish. 
+I'm an expert in relationships. "" And then he's off, launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants. 
+And don't get me wrong, that was really fascinating, you know, the biotic community unplugged, kind of thing. 
+It's great, but I was in love. 
+And my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish I had the night before. 
+So I interrupted him. I said, "Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?" 
+He pointed at the algae. 
+"" I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships: It's amazing. 
+But what are your fish eating? 
+What's the feed conversion ratio? "" Well, he goes on to tell me it's such a rich system that the fish are eating what they'd be eating in the wild. 
+The plant biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, it's what feeds the fish. 
+The system is so healthy, it's totally self-renewing. 
+There is no feed. 
+Ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals? 
+Later that day, I was driving around this property with Miguel, and I asked him, I said, "" For a place that seems so natural, unlike like any farm I'd ever been at, how do you measure success? "" At that moment, it was as if a film director called for a set change. 
+And we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight: thousands and thousands of pink flamingos, a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see. 
+"" That's success, "" he said. 
+"" Look at their bellies, pink. 
+They're feasting. "" Feasting? I was totally confused. 
+I said, "" Miguel, aren't they feasting on your fish? "" (Laughter) "" Yes, "" he said. (Laughter) 
+"" We lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds. 
+Well, last year, this property had 600,000 birds on it, more than 250 different species. 
+It's become, today, the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of Europe. "" I said, "" Miguel, isn't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm? "" (Laughter) He shook his head, no. 
+He said, "" We farm extensively, not intensively. 
+This is an ecological network. 
+The flamingos eat the shrimp. 
+The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. 
+So the pinker the belly, the better the system. "" Okay, so let's review: a farm that doesn't feed its animals, and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators. 
+A fish farm, but also a bird sanctuary. 
+Oh, and by the way, those flamingos, they shouldn't even be there in the first place. 
+They brood in a town 150 miles away, where the soil conditions are better for building nests. 
+Every morning, they fly 150 miles into the farm. 
+And every evening, they fly 150 miles back. 
+(Laughter) They do that because they're able to follow the broken white line of highway A92. (Laughter) 
+No kidding. 
+I was imagining a "" March of the Penguins "" thing, so I looked at Miguel. 
+I said, "" Miguel, do they fly 150 miles to the farm, and then do they fly 150 miles back at night? 
+Do they do that for the children? "" He looked at me like I had just quoted a Whitney Houston song. 
+(Laughter) He said, "" No; they do it because the food's better. "" (Laughter) I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious — and I don't like fish skin; I don't like it seared, I don't like it crispy. 
+It's that acrid, tar-like flavor. 
+I almost never cook with it. 
+Yet, when I tasted it at that restaurant in southern Spain, it tasted not at all like fish skin. 
+It tasted sweet and clean, like you were taking a bite of the ocean. 
+I mentioned that to Miguel, and he nodded. 
+He said, "" The skin acts like a sponge. 
+It's the last defense before anything enters the body. 
+It evolved to soak up impurities. "" And then he added, "But our water has no impurities." 
+OK. A farm that doesn't feed its fish, a farm that measures its success by the success of its predators. 
+And then I realized when he says, "A farm that has no impurities," he made a big understatement, because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River. 
+It's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days: chemical contaminants, pesticide runoff. 
+And when it works its way through the system and leaves, the water is cleaner than when it entered. 
+The system is so healthy, it purifies the water. 
+So, not just a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators, but a farm that's literally a water purification plant — and not just for those fish, but for you and me as well. 
+Because when that water leaves, it dumps out into the Atlantic. 
+A drop in the ocean, I know, but I'll take it, and so should you, because this love story, however romantic, is also instructive. 
+You might say it's a recipe for the future of good food, whether we're talking about bass or beef cattle. 
+What we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) But for a lot people, that's a bit too radical. 
+We're not realists, us foodies; we're lovers. 
+We love farmers' markets, we love small family farms, we talk about local food, we eat organic. 
+And when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food, someone, somewhere stands up and says, "" Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how are you going to feed the world? "" How are you going to feed the world? 
+Can I be honest? 
+I don't love that question. 
+No, not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world. 
+One billion people will go hungry today. 
+One billion — that's more than ever before — because of gross inequalities in distribution, not tonnage. 
+Now, I don't love this question because it's determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years. 
+Feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to soil, chicken to fish, and all along agribusiness has simply asked, "" If we're feeding more people more cheaply, how terrible could that be? "" That's been the motivation, it's been the justification: it's been the business plan of American agriculture. 
+We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible. 
+That's not a business, and it isn't agriculture. 
+Our breadbasket is threatened today, not because of diminishing supply, but because of diminishing resources. 
+Not by the latest combine and tractor invention, but by fertile land; not by pumps, but by fresh water; not by chainsaws, but by forests; and not by fishing boats and nets, but by fish in the sea. 
+Want to feed the world? 
+Let's start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves? 
+Or better: How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself? 
+(Applause) To do that, don't look at the agribusiness model for the future. 
+It's really old, and it's tired. 
+It's high on capital, chemistry and machines, and it's never produced anything really good to eat. 
+Instead, let's look to the ecological model. 
+That's the one that relies on two billion years of on-the-job experience. 
+Look to Miguel, farmers like Miguel. 
+Farms that aren't worlds unto themselves; farms that restore instead of deplete; farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively; farmers that are not just producers, but experts in relationships. 
+Because they're the ones that are experts in flavor, too. 
+And if I'm going to be really honest, they're a better chef than I'll ever be. 
+You know, I'm okay with that, because if that's the future of good food, it's going to be delicious. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Today I'm going to take you on a voyage to some place so deep, so dark, so unexplored that we know less about it than we know about the dark side of the moon. 
+It's a place of myth and legend. 
+It's a place marked on ancient maps as "" here be monsters. "" It is a place where each new voyage of exploration brings back new discoveries of creatures so wondrous and strange that our forefathers would have considered them monstrous indeed. 
+Instead, they just make me green with envy that my colleague from IUCN was able to go on this journey to the south of Madagascar seamounts to actually take photographs and to see these wondrous creatures of the deep. 
+We are talking about the high seas. 
+The "" high seas "" is a legal term, but in fact, it covers 50 percent of the planet. 
+With an average depth of the oceans of 4,000 meters, in fact, the high seas covers and provides nearly 90 percent of the habitat for life on this Earth. 
+It is, in theory, the global commons, belonging to us all. 
+But in reality, it is managed by and for those who have the resources to go out and exploit it. 
+So today I'm going to take you on a voyage to cast light on some of the outdated myths and legends and assumptions that have kept us as the true stakeholders in the high seas in the dark. 
+We're going to voyage to some of these special places that we've been discovering in the past few years to show why we really need to care. 
+And then finally, we're going to try to develop and pioneer a new perspective on high seas governance that's rooted in ocean-basin-wide conservation, but framed in an arena of global norms of precaution and respect. 
+So here is a picture of the high seas as seen from above — that area in the darker blue. 
+To me, as an international lawyer, this scared me far more than any of the creatures or the monsters we may have seen, for it belies the notion that you can actually protect the ocean, the global ocean, that provides us all with carbon storage, with heat storage, with oxygen, if you can only protect 36 percent. 
+This is indeed the true heart of the planet. 
+Some of the problems that we have to confront are that the current international laws — for example, shipping — provide more protection to the areas closest to shore. 
+For example, garbage discharge, something you would think just simply goes away, but the laws regulating ship discharge of garbage actually get weaker the further you are from shore. 
+As a result, we have garbage patches the size of twice-Texas. 
+It's unbelievable. 
+We used to think the solution to pollution was dilution, but that has proved to be no longer the case. 
+So what we have learned from social scientists and economists like Elinor Ostrom, who are studying the phenomenon of management of the commons on a local scale, is that there are certain prerequisites that you can put into place that enable you to manage and access open space for the good of one and all. 
+And these include a sense of shared responsibility, common norms that bind people together as a community. 
+Conditional access: You can invite people in, but they have to be able to play by the rules. 
+And of course, if you want people to play by the rules, you still need an effective system of monitoring and enforcement, for as we've discovered, you can trust, but you also need to verify. 
+What I'd also like to convey is that it is not all doom and gloom that we are seeing in the high seas. 
+For a group of very dedicated individuals — scientists, conservationists, photographers and states — were able to actually change a tragic trajectory that was destroying fragile seascapes such as this coral garden that you see in front of you. 
+That is, we're able to save it from a fate of deep-sea bottom trawling. 
+And how did we do that? 
+Well, as I said, we had a group of photographers that went out on board ships and actually photographed the activities in process. 
+But we also spent many hours in the basements of the United Nations, trying to work with governments to make them understand what was going on so far away from land that few of us had ever even imagined that these creatures existed. 
+So within three years, from 2003 to 2006, we were able to get norm in place that actually changed the paradigm of how fishers went about deep-sea bottom trawling. 
+Instead of "" go anywhere, do anything you want, "" we actually created a regime that required prior assessment of where you're going and a duty to prevent significant harm. 
+In 2009, when the U.N. reviewed progress, they discovered that almost 100 million square-kilometers of seabed had been protected. 
+This does not mean that it's the final solution, or that this even provides permanent protection. 
+But what it does mean is that a group of individuals can form a community to actually shape the way high seas are governed, to create a new regime. 
+So I'm looking optimistically at our opportunities for creating a true, blue perspective for this beautiful planet. 
+Sylvia's wish provides us with that leverage, that access to the heart of human beings, you might say, who have rarely seen places beyond their own toes, but are now hopefully going to become interested in the full life-cycle of creatures like these sea turtles, who indeed spend most of their time in the high seas. 
+Today, we're just going to voyage to a small sampling of some of these special areas, just to give you an idea of the flavor of the riches and wonders they do contain. 
+The Sargasso Sea, for example, is not a sea bounded by coastlines, but it is bounded by oceanic currents that contain and envelope this wealth of sargassum that grows and aggregates there. 
+It's also known as the spawning ground for eels from Northern European and Northern American rivers that are now so dwindling in numbers that they've actually stopped showing up in Stockholm, and five showed up in the U.K. just recently. 
+But the Sargasso Sea, the same way it aggregates sargassum weed, actually is pulling in the plastic from throughout the region. 
+This picture doesn't exactly show the plastics that I would like it to show, because I haven't been out there myself. 
+But there has just been a study that was released in February that showed there are 200,000 pieces of plastic per square-kilometer now floating in the surface of the Sargasso Sea, and that is affecting the habitat for the many species in their juvenile stages who come to the Sargasso Sea for its protection and its food. 
+The Sargasso Sea is also a wondrous place for the aggregation of these unique species that have developed to mimic the sargassum habitat. 
+It also provides a special habitat for these flying fish to lay their eggs. 
+But what I'd like to get from this picture is that we truly do have an opportunity to launch a global initiative for protection. 
+Thus, the government of Bermuda has recognized the need and its responsibility as having some of the Sargasso Sea within its national jurisdiction — but the vast majority is beyond — to help spearhead a movement to achieve protection for this vital area. 
+Spinning down to someplace a little bit cooler than here right now: the Ross Sea in the Southern Ocean. 
+It's actually a bay. 
+It's considered high seas, because the continent has been put off limits to territorial claims. 
+So anything in the water is treated as if it's the high seas. 
+But what makes the Ross Sea important is the vast sea of pack ice that in the spring and summer provides a wealth of phytoplankton and krill that supports what, till recently, has been a virtually intact near-shore ecosystem. 
+But unfortunately, CCAMLR, the regional commission in charge of conserving and managing fish stocks and other living marine resources, is unfortunately starting to give in to fishing interests and has authorized the expansion of toothfish fisheries in the region. 
+The captain of a New Zealand vessel who was just down there is reporting a significant decline in the number of the Ross Sea killer whales, who are directly dependent on the Antarctic toothfish as their main source of food. 
+So what we need to do is to stand up boldly, singly and together, to push governments, to push regional fisheries management organizations, to declare our right to declare certain areas off-limits to high seas fishing, so that the freedom to fish no longer means the freedom to fish anywhere and anytime. 
+Coming closer to here, the Costa Rica Dome is a recently discovered area — potentially year-round habitat for blue whales. 
+There's enough food there to last them the summer and the winter long. 
+But what's unusual about the Costa Rica Dome is, in fact, it's not a permanent place. 
+It's an oceanographic phenomenon that shifts in time and space on a seasonal basis. 
+So, in fact, it's not permanently in the high seas. 
+It's not permanently in the exclusive economic zones of these five Central American countries, but it moves with the season. 
+As such, it does create a challenge to protect, but we also have a challenge protecting the species that move along with it. 
+We can use the same technologies that fishers use to identify where the species are, in order to close the area when it's most vulnerable, which may, in some cases, be year-round. 
+Getting closer to shore, where we are, this was in fact taken in the Galapagos. 
+Many species are headed through this region, which is why there's been so much attention put into conservation of the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. 
+This is the initiative that's been coordinated by Conservation International with a variety of partners and governments to actually try to bring integrated management regime throughout the area. 
+That is, it provides a wonderful example of where you can go with a real regional initiative. 
+It's protecting five World Heritage sites. 
+Unfortunately, the World Heritage Convention does not recognize the need to protect areas beyond national jurisdiction, at present. 
+So a place like the Costa Rica Dome could not technically qualify the time it's in the high seas. 
+So what we've been suggesting is that we either need to amend the World Heritage Convention, so that it can adopt and urge universal protection of these World Heritage sites, or we need to change the name and call it Half-the-World Heritage Convention. 
+But what we also know is that species like these sea turtles do not stay put in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape. 
+These happen to go down to a vast South Pacific Gyre, where they spend most of their time and often end up getting hooked like this, or as bycatch. 
+So what I'd really like to suggest is that we need to scale-up. 
+We need to work locally, but we also need to work ocean-basin-wide. 
+We have the tools and technologies now to enable us to take a broader ocean-basin-wide initiative. 
+We've heard about the Tagging of Pacific Predators project, one of the 17 Census of Marine Life projects. 
+It's provided us data like this, of tiny, little sooty shearwaters that make the entire ocean basin their home. 
+They fly 65,000 kilometers in less than a year. 
+So we have the tools and treasures coming from the Census of Marine Life. 
+And its culminating year that's going to be launched in October. 
+So stay tuned for further information. 
+What I find so exciting is that the Census of Marine Life has looked at more than the tagging of pacific predators; it's also looked in the really unexplored mid-water column, where creatures like this flying sea cucumber have been found. 
+And fortunately, we've been able, as IUCN, to team up with the Census of Marine Life and many of the scientists working there to actually try to translate much of this information to policymakers. 
+We have the support of governments now behind us. 
+We've been revealing this information through technical workshops. 
+And the exciting thing is that we do have sufficient information to move ahead to protect some of these significant hope spots, hotspots. 
+At the same time we're saying, "Yes, we need more. We need to move forward." 
+But many of you have said, if you get these marine protected areas, or a reasonable regime for high seas fisheries management in place, how are you going to enforce it? 
+Which leads me to my second passion besides ocean science, which is outer space technology. 
+I wanted to be an astronaut, so I've constantly followed what are the tools available to monitor Earth from outer space — and that we have incredible tools like we've been learning about, in terms of being able to follow tagged species throughout their life-cycles in the open ocean. 
+We can also tag and track fishing vessels. 
+Many already have transponders on board that allow us to find out where they are and even what they're doing. 
+But not all the vessels have those to date. 
+It does not take too much rocket science to actually try to create new laws to mandate, if you're going to have the privilege of accessing our high seas resources, we need to know — someone needs to know — where you are and what you're doing. 
+So it brings me to my main take-home message, which is we can avert a tragedy of the commons. 
+We can stop the collision course of 50 percent of the planet with the high seas. 
+But we need to think broad-scale. We need to think globally. 
+We need to change how we actually go about managing these resources. 
+We need to get the new paradigm of precaution and respect. 
+At the same time, we need to think locally, which is the joy and marvel of Sylvia's hope spot wish, is that we can shine a spotlight on many of these previously unknown areas, and to bring people to the table, if you will, to actually make them feel part of this community that truly has a stake in their future management. 
+And third is that we need to look at ocean-basin-wide management. 
+Our species are ocean-basin-wide. 
+Many of the deep-sea communities have genetic distribution that goes ocean-basin-wide. 
+We need to better understand, but we also need to start to manage and protect. 
+And in order to do that, you also need ocean-basin management regimes. 
+That is, we have regional management regimes within the exclusive economic zone, but we need to scale these up, we need to build their capacity, so they're like the Southern Ocean, where they do have the two-pronged fisheries and conservation organization. 
+So with that, I would just like to sincerely thank and honor Sylvia Earle for her wish, for it is helping us to put a face on the high seas and the deep seas beyond national jurisdiction. 
+It's helping to bring an incredible group of talented people together to really try to solve and penetrate these problems that have created our obstacles to management and rational use of this area that was once so far away and remote. 
+So on this tour, I hope I provided you with a new perspective of the high seas: one, that it is our home too, and that we need to work together if we are to make this a sustainable ocean future for us all. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And I actually feel at home here, because there's a lot of autism genetics here. 
+In fact, I loved the movie, how they duplicated all my projects. 
+Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities. 
+(Laughter) But one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could test-run a piece of equipment in my mind, just like a virtual reality computer system. 
+And some of the research now is showing that people on the spectrum actually think with the primary visual cortex. 
+Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading. 
+Now, the animal mind, and also my mind, puts sensory-based information into categories. 
+You have another horse, where maybe the horseshoer beat him up, and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground with the veterinarian, but a person can ride him. 
+Let's just look at something like, you know, solving problems with making airlines safer. 
+I do lots and lots of flying, and if I was at the FAA, what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of? 
+This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids interesting stuff. 
+In the normal human mind, language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals. 
+We've got to think about all these different kinds of minds, and we've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds, because we absolutely are going to need these kinds of people in the future. 
+And let's talk about jobs. 
+Because the thing about being autistic is, I had to learn social skills like being in a play. 
+And we need to be working with these students. 
+And this brings up mentors. 
+Some states now are getting it to where, if you have a degree in biology or in chemistry, you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry. 
+And if you bring them in for internships in your companies, the thing about the autism, Asperger-y kind of mind, you've got to give them a specific task. 
+Don't just say, "" Design new software. "" You've got to tell them something more specific: "" We're designing software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing, and it can only use so much memory. "" That's the kind of specificity you need. 
+(Applause) (Applause ends) Oh — you have a question for me? OK. (Applause) 
+
+So, if you're in the audience today, or maybe you're watching this talk in some other time or place, you are a participant in the digital rights ecosystem. 
+Whether you're an artist, a technologist, a lawyer or a fan, the handling of copyright directly impacts your life. 
+Rights management is no longer simply a question of ownership, it's a complex web of relationships and a critical part of our cultural landscape. 
+YouTube cares deeply about the rights of content owners, but in order to give them choices about what they can do with copies, mashups and more, we need to first identify when copyrighted material is uploaded to our site. 
+Let's look at a specific video so you can see how it works. 
+Two years ago, recording artist Chris Brown released the official video of his single "" Forever. "" A fan saw it on TV, recorded it with her camera phone, and uploaded it to YouTube. 
+Because Sony Music had registered Chris Brown's video in our Content ID system, within seconds of attempting to upload the video, the copy was detected, giving Sony the choice of what to do next. 
+But how do we know that the user's video was a copy? 
+Well, it starts with content owners delivering assets into our database, along with a usage policy that tells us what to do when we find a match. 
+We compare each upload against all of the reference files in our database. 
+This heat map is going to show you how the brain of the system works. 
+Here we can see the original reference file being compared to the user generated content. 
+The system compares every moment of one to the other to see if there's a match. 
+This means that we can identify a match even if the copy used is just a portion of the original file, plays it in slow motion and has degraded audio and video quality. 
+And we do this every time that a video is uploaded to YouTube. 
+And that's over 20 hours of video every minute. 
+When we find a match, we apply the policy that the rights owner has set down. 
+And the scale and the speed of this system is truly breathtaking. 
+We're not just talking about a few videos, we're talking about over 100 years of video every day, between new uploads and the legacy scans we regularly do across all of the content on the site. 
+When we compare those hundred years of video, we're comparing it against millions of reference files in our database. 
+It would be like 36,000 people staring at 36,000 monitors each and every day, without so much as a coffee break. 
+Now, what do we do when we find a match? 
+Well, most rights owners, instead of blocking, will allow the copy to be published. 
+And then they benefit through the exposure, advertising and linked sales. 
+Remember Chris Brown's video "" Forever ""? 
+Well, it had its day in the sun and then it dropped off the charts, and that looked like the end of the story, but sometime last year, a young couple got married. 
+This is their wedding video. 
+You may have seen it. 
+(Music) What's amazing about this is, if the processional of the wedding was this much fun, can you imagine how much fun the reception must have been? 
+I mean, who are these people? 
+I totally want to go to that wedding. 
+So their little wedding video went on to get over 40 million views. 
+And instead of Sony blocking, they allowed the upload to occur. 
+And they put advertising against it and linked from it to iTunes. 
+And the song, 18 months old, went back to number four on the iTunes charts. 
+So Sony is generating revenue from both of these. 
+And Jill and Kevin, the happy couple, they came back from their honeymoon and found that their video had gone crazy viral. 
+And they've ended up on a bunch of talk shows, and they've used it as an opportunity to make a difference. 
+The video's inspired over 26,000 dollars in donations to end domestic violence. 
+The "" JK Wedding [Entrance] Dance "" became so popular that NBC parodied it on the season finale of "" The Office, "" which just goes to show, it's truly an ecosystem of culture. 
+Because it's not just amateurs borrowing from big studios, but sometimes big studios borrowing back. 
+By empowering choice, we can create a culture of opportunity. 
+And all it took to change things around was to allow for choice through rights identification. 
+So why has no one ever solved this problem before? 
+It's because it's a big problem, and it's complicated and messy. 
+It's not uncommon for a single video to have multiple rights owners. 
+There's musical labels. 
+There's multiple music publishers. 
+And each of these can vary by country. 
+There's lots of cases where we have more than one work mashed together. 
+So we have to manage many claims to the same video. 
+YouTube's Content ID system addresses all of these cases. 
+But the system only works through the participation of rights owners. 
+If you have content that others are uploading to YouTube, you should register in the Content ID system, and then you'll have the choice about how your content is used. 
+And think carefully about the policies that you attach to that content. 
+By simply blocking all reuse, you'll miss out on new art forms, new audiences, new distribution channels and new revenue streams. 
+But it's not just about dollars and impressions. 
+Just look at all the joy that was spread through progressive rights management and new technology. 
+And I think we can all agree that joy is definitely an idea worth spreading. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi. This is my mobile phone. 
+A mobile phone can change your life, and a mobile phone gives you individual freedom. 
+With a mobile phone, you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria. With a mobile phone, 
+you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt. 
+And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous. 
+All this is possible with your mobile phone. 
+I'm a child of 1984, and I live in the city of Berlin. 
+Let's go back to that time, to this city. 
+Here you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change. 
+This is autumn 1989, and imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket. 
+Who in the room has a mobile phone with you? 
+Hold it up. 
+Hold your phones up, hold your phones up! 
+Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow. 
+That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone. 
+But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone, and how it changed my life. 
+And I will talk about this. 
+These are 35,830 lines of information. 
+Raw data. 
+And why are these informations there? 
+Because in the summer of 2006, the E.U. Commission tabled a directive. 
+This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive. 
+This directive says that each phone company in Europe, each Internet service company all over Europe, has to store a wide range of information about the users. 
+Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email? 
+Who sends whom a text message? 
+And if you use your mobile phone, where you are. 
+All this information is stored for at least six months, up to two years by your phone company or your Internet service provider. 
+And all over Europe, people stood up and said, "We don't want this." 
+They said, we don't want this data retention. 
+We want self-determination in the digital age, and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies have to store all this information about us. 
+They were lawyers, journalists, priests, they all said: "" We don't want this. "" And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, "Freedom, not fear." 
+And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0. 
+Stasi was the secret police in East Germany. 
+And I also ask myself, does it really work? 
+Can they really store all this information about us? 
+Every time I use my mobile phone? 
+So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom, which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany, and I asked them, please, send me all the information you have stored about me. 
+And I asked them once, and I asked them again, and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers. 
+But then I said, I want to have this information, because this is my life you are protocoling. 
+So I decided to start a lawsuit against them, because I wanted to have this information. 
+But Deutsche Telekom said, no, we will not give you this information. 
+So at the end, I had a settlement with them. 
+I'll put down the lawsuit and they will send me all the information I ask for. 
+Because in the mean time, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this E.U. directive into German law was unconstitutional. 
+So I got this ugly brown envelope with a C.D. inside. 
+And on the C.D., this was on. 
+Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information. 
+At first I saw it, and I said, okay, it's a huge file. Okay. 
+But then after a while I realized, this is my life. 
+This is six months of my life, into this file. 
+So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it? 
+Because you can see where I am, where I sleep at night, what I am doing. 
+But then I said, I want to go out with this information. 
+I want to make them public. 
+Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean. 
+So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this. 
+This is a visualization of six months of my life. 
+You can zoom in and zoom out, you can wind back and fast forward. 
+You can see every step I take. 
+And you can even see how I go from Frankfurt by train to Cologne, and how often I call in between. 
+All this is possible with this information. 
+That's a little bit scary. 
+But it is not only about me. 
+It's about all of us. 
+First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me, and we talk to each other a couple of times. 
+And then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other. 
+And after a while you are calling you, and you are calling you, and you have this great communication network. 
+But you can see how your people are communicating with each other, what times they call each other, when they go to bed. 
+You can see all of this. 
+You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group. 
+If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing. If you have access to this information, 
+you can control your society. 
+This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran. 
+This is a blueprint how to survey your society, because you know who talks to whom, who sends whom an email, all this is possible if you have access to this information. 
+And this information is stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years. 
+Like I said at the beginning, imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket. 
+And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it, this may never have happened. 
+The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there. 
+And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain. 
+Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline. 
+They want to have the possibility to track our lives, and they want to store them for all time. 
+But self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction. 
+But you have to fight for your self-determination today. 
+You have to fight for it every day. 
+So, when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated. 
+When you go home, tell your representative only because companies and state agencies have the possibility to store certain information, they don't have to do it. 
+And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you. 
+So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Bacteria are the oldest living organisms on the earth. 
+They've been here for billions of years, and what they are are single-celled microscopic organisms. 
+So they are one cell and they have this special property that they only have one piece of DNA. 
+They have very few genes, and genetic information to encode all of the traits that they carry out. 
+And the way bacteria make a living is that they consume nutrients from the environment, they grow to twice their size, they cut themselves down in the middle, and one cell becomes two, and so on and so on. 
+They just grow and divide, and grow and divide — so a kind of boring life, except that what I would argue is that you have an amazing interaction with these critters. 
+I know you guys think of yourself as humans, and this is sort of how I think of you. 
+This man is supposed to represent a generic human being, and all of the circles in that man are all of the cells that make up your body. 
+There is about a trillion human cells that make each one of us who we are and able to do all the things that we do, but you have 10 trillion bacterial cells in you or on you at any moment in your life. 
+So, 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells on a human being. 
+And of course it's the DNA that counts, so here's all the A, T, Gs and Cs that make up your genetic code, and give you all your charming characteristics. 
+You have about 30,000 genes. 
+Well it turns out you have 100 times more bacterial genes playing a role in you or on you all of your life. 
+At the best, you're 10 percent human, but more likely about one percent human, depending on which of these metrics you like. 
+I know you think of yourself as human beings, but I think of you as 90 or 99 percent bacterial. 
+(Laughter) These bacteria are not passive riders, these are incredibly important, they keep us alive. 
+They cover us in an invisible body armor that keeps environmental insults out so that we stay healthy. 
+They digest our food, they make our vitamins, they actually educate your immune system to keep bad microbes out. 
+So they do all these amazing things that help us and are vital for keeping us alive, and they never get any press for that. 
+But they get a lot of press because they do a lot of terrible things as well. 
+So, there's all kinds of bacteria on the Earth that have no business being in you or on you at any time, and if they are, they make you incredibly sick. 
+And so, the question for my lab is whether you want to think about all the good things that bacteria do, or all the bad things that bacteria do. 
+The question we had is how could they do anything at all? 
+I mean they're incredibly small, you have to have a microscope to see one. 
+They live this sort of boring life where they grow and divide, and they've always been considered to be these asocial reclusive organisms. 
+And so it seemed to us that they are just too small to have an impact on the environment if they simply act as individuals. 
+And so we wanted to think if there couldn't be a different way that bacteria live. 
+The clue to this came from another marine bacterium, and it's a bacterium called Vibrio fischeri. 
+What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri. 
+This bacterium has the special property that it makes light, so it makes bioluminescence, like fireflies make light. 
+We're not doing anything to the cells here. 
+We just took the picture by turning the lights off in the room, and this is what we see. 
+What was actually interesting to us was not that the bacteria made light, but when the bacteria made light. 
+What we noticed is when the bacteria were alone, so when they were in dilute suspension, they made no light. 
+But when they grew to a certain cell number all the bacteria turned on light simultaneously. 
+The question that we had is how can bacteria, these primitive organisms, tell the difference from times when they're alone, and times when they're in a community, and then all do something together. 
+What we've figured out is that the way that they do that is that they talk to each other, and they talk with a chemical language. 
+This is now supposed to be my bacterial cell. 
+When it's alone it doesn't make any light. 
+But what it does do is to make and secrete small molecules that you can think of like hormones, and these are the red triangles, and when the bacteria is alone the molecules just float away and so no light. 
+But when the bacteria grow and double and they're all participating in making these molecules, the molecule — the extracellular amount of that molecule increases in proportion to cell number. 
+And when the molecule hits a certain amount that tells the bacteria how many neighbors there are, they recognize that molecule and all of the bacteria turn on light in synchrony. 
+That's how bioluminescence works — they're talking with these chemical words. 
+The reason that Vibrio fischeri is doing that comes from the biology. 
+Again, another plug for the animals in the ocean, Vibrio fischeri lives in this squid. 
+What you are looking at is the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid, and it's been turned on its back, and what I hope you can see are these two glowing lobes and these house the Vibrio fischeri cells, they live in there, at high cell number that molecule is there, and they're making light. 
+The reason the squid is willing to put up with these shenanigans is because it wants that light. 
+The way that this symbiosis works is that this little squid lives just off the coast of Hawaii, just in sort of shallow knee-deep water. 
+The squid is nocturnal, so during the day it buries itself in the sand and sleeps, but then at night it has to come out to hunt. 
+On bright nights when there is lots of starlight or moonlight that light can penetrate the depth of the water the squid lives in, since it's just in those couple feet of water. 
+What the squid has developed is a shutter that can open and close over this specialized light organ housing the bacteria. 
+Then it has detectors on its back so it can sense how much starlight or moonlight is hitting its back. 
+And it opens and closes the shutter so the amount of light coming out of the bottom — which is made by the bacterium — exactly matches how much light hits the squid's back, so the squid doesn't make a shadow. 
+It actually uses the light from the bacteria to counter-illuminate itself in an anti-predation device so predators can't see its shadow, calculate its trajectory, and eat it. 
+This is like the stealth bomber of the ocean. 
+(Laughter) But then if you think about it, the squid has this terrible problem because it's got this dying, thick culture of bacteria and it can't sustain that. 
+And so what happens is every morning when the sun comes up the squid goes back to sleep, it buries itself in the sand, and it's got a pump that's attached to its circadian rhythm, and when the sun comes up it pumps out like 95 percent of the bacteria. 
+Now the bacteria are dilute, that little hormone molecule is gone, so they're not making light — but of course the squid doesn't care. It's asleep in the sand. 
+And as the day goes by the bacteria double, they release the molecule, and then light comes on at night, exactly when the squid wants it. 
+First we figured out how this bacterium does this, but then we brought the tools of molecular biology to this to figure out really what's the mechanism. 
+And what we found — so this is now supposed to be, again, my bacterial cell — is that Vibrio fischeri has a protein — that's the red box — it's an enzyme that makes that little hormone molecule, the red triangle. 
+And then as the cells grow, they're all releasing that molecule into the environment, so there's lots of molecule there. 
+And the bacteria also have a receptor on their cell surface that fits like a lock and key with that molecule. 
+These are just like the receptors on the surfaces of your cells. 
+When the molecule increases to a certain amount — which says something about the number of cells — it locks down into that receptor and information comes into the cells that tells the cells to turn on this collective behavior of making light. 
+Why this is interesting is because in the past decade we have found that this is not just some anomaly of this ridiculous, glow-in-the-dark bacterium that lives in the ocean — all bacteria have systems like this. 
+So now what we understand is that all bacteria can talk to each other. 
+They make chemical words, they recognize those words, and they turn on group behaviors that are only successful when all of the cells participate in unison. 
+We have a fancy name for this: we call it quorum sensing. 
+They vote with these chemical votes, the vote gets counted, and then everybody responds to the vote. 
+What's important for today's talk is that we know that there are hundreds of behaviors that bacteria carry out in these collective fashions. 
+But the one that's probably the most important to you is virulence. 
+It's not like a couple bacteria get in you and they start secreting some toxins — you're enormous, that would have no effect on you. You're huge. 
+What they do, we now understand, is they get in you, they wait, they start growing, they count themselves with these little molecules, and they recognize when they have the right cell number that if all of the bacteria launch their virulence attack together, they are going to be successful at overcoming an enormous host. 
+Bacteria always control pathogenicity with quorum sensing. 
+That's how it works. 
+We also then went to look at what are these molecules — these were the red triangles on my slides before. 
+This is the Vibrio fischeri molecule. 
+This is the word that it talks with. 
+So then we started to look at other bacteria, and these are just a smattering of the molecules that we've discovered. 
+What I hope you can see is that the molecules are related. 
+The left-hand part of the molecule is identical in every single species of bacteria. 
+But the right-hand part of the molecule is a little bit different in every single species. 
+What that does is to confer exquisite species specificities to these languages. 
+Each molecule fits into its partner receptor and no other. 
+So these are private, secret conversations. 
+These conversations are for intraspecies communication. 
+Each bacteria uses a particular molecule that's its language that allows it to count its own siblings. 
+Once we got that far we thought we were starting to understand that bacteria have these social behaviors. 
+But what we were really thinking about is that most of the time bacteria don't live by themselves, they live in incredible mixtures, with hundreds or thousands of other species of bacteria. 
+And that's depicted on this slide. This is your skin. 
+So this is just a picture — a micrograph of your skin. 
+Anywhere on your body, it looks pretty much like this, and what I hope you can see is that there's all kinds of bacteria there. 
+And so we started to think if this really is about communication in bacteria, and it's about counting your neighbors, it's not enough to be able to only talk within your species. 
+There has to be a way to take a census of the rest of the bacteria in the population. 
+So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria, and what we've found now is that in fact, bacteria are multilingual. 
+They all have a species-specific system — they have a molecule that says "" me. "" But then, running in parallel to that is a second system that we've discovered, that's generic. 
+So, they have a second enzyme that makes a second signal and it has its own receptor, and this molecule is the trade language of bacteria. 
+It's used by all different bacteria and it's the language of interspecies communication. 
+What happens is that bacteria are able to count how many of me and how many of you. 
+They take that information inside, and they decide what tasks to carry out depending on who's in the minority and who's in the majority of any given population. 
+Then again we turn to chemistry, and we figured out what this generic molecule is — that was the pink ovals on my last slide, this is it. 
+It's a very small, five-carbon molecule. 
+What the important thing is that we learned is that every bacterium has exactly the same enzyme and makes exactly the same molecule. 
+So they're all using this molecule for interspecies communication. 
+This is the bacterial Esperanto. 
+(Laughter) Once we got that far, we started to learn that bacteria can talk to each other with this chemical language. 
+But what we started to think is that maybe there is something practical that we can do here as well. 
+I've told you that bacteria do have all these social behaviors, they communicate with these molecules. 
+Of course, I've also told you that one of the important things they do is to initiate pathogenicity using quorum sensing. 
+We thought, what if we made these bacteria so they can't talk or they can't hear? 
+Couldn't these be new kinds of antibiotics? 
+Of course, you've just heard and you already know that we're running out of antibiotics. 
+Bacteria are incredibly multi-drug-resistant right now, and that's because all of the antibiotics that we use kill bacteria. 
+They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA. 
+We kill bacteria with traditional antibiotics and that selects for resistant mutants. 
+And so now of course we have this global problem in infectious diseases. 
+We thought, well what if we could sort of do behavior modifications, just make these bacteria so they can't talk, they can't count, and they don't know to launch virulence. 
+And so that's exactly what we've done, and we've sort of taken two strategies. 
+The first one is we've targeted the intraspecies communication system. 
+So we made molecules that look kind of like the real molecules — which you saw — but they're a little bit different. 
+And so they lock into those receptors, and they jam recognition of the real thing. 
+By targeting the red system, what we are able to do is to make species-specific, or disease-specific, anti-quorum sensing molecules. 
+We've also done the same thing with the pink system. 
+We've taken that universal molecule and turned it around a little bit so that we've made antagonists of the interspecies communication system. 
+The hope is that these will be used as broad-spectrum antibiotics that work against all bacteria. 
+To finish I'll just show you the strategy. 
+In this one I'm just using the interspecies molecule, but the logic is exactly the same. 
+What you know is that when that bacterium gets into the animal, in this case, a mouse, it doesn't initiate virulence right away. 
+It gets in, it starts growing, it starts secreting its quorum sensing molecules. 
+It recognizes when it has enough bacteria that now they're going to launch their attack, and the animal dies. 
+What we've been able to do is to give these virulent infections, but we give them in conjunction with our anti-quorum sensing molecules — so these are molecules that look kind of like the real thing, but they're a little bit different which I've depicted on this slide. 
+What we now know is that if we treat the animal with a pathogenic bacterium — a multi-drug-resistant pathogenic bacterium — in the same time we give our anti-quorum sensing molecule, in fact, the animal lives. 
+We think that this is the next generation of antibiotics and it's going to get us around, at least initially, this big problem of resistance. 
+What I hope you think, is that bacteria can talk to each other, they use chemicals as their words, they have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that we're just now starting to learn about. 
+Of course what that allows bacteria to do is to be multicellular. 
+So in the spirit of TED they're doing things together because it makes a difference. 
+What happens is that bacteria have these collective behaviors, and they can carry out tasks that they could never accomplish if they simply acted as individuals. 
+What I would hope that I could further argue to you is that this is the invention of multicellularity. 
+Bacteria have been on the Earth for billions of years; humans, couple hundred thousand. 
+We think bacteria made the rules for how multicellular organization works. 
+We think, by studying bacteria, we're going to be able to have insight about multicellularity in the human body. 
+We know that the principles and the rules, if we can figure them out in these sort of primitive organisms, the hope is that they will be applied to other human diseases and human behaviors as well. 
+I hope that what you've learned is that bacteria can distinguish self from other. 
+By using these two molecules they can say "" me "" and they can say "" you. "" Again of course that's what we do, both in a molecular way, and also in an outward way, but I think about the molecular stuff. 
+This is exactly what happens in your body. 
+It's not like your heart cells and your kidney cells get all mixed up every day, and that's because there's all of this chemistry going on, these molecules that say who each of these groups of cells is, and what their tasks should be. 
+Again, we think that bacteria invented that, and you've just evolved a few more bells and whistles, but all of the ideas are in these simple systems that we can study. 
+The final thing is, again just to reiterate that there's this practical part, and so we've made these anti-quorum sensing molecules that are being developed as new kinds of therapeutics. 
+But then, to finish with a plug for all the good and miraculous bacteria that live on the Earth, we've also made pro-quorum sensing molecules. 
+So, we've targeted those systems to make the molecules work better. 
+Remember you have these 10 times or more bacterial cells in you or on you, keeping you healthy. 
+What we're also trying to do is to beef up the conversation of the bacteria that live as mutualists with you, in the hopes of making you more healthy, making those conversations better, so bacteria can do things that we want them to do better than they would be on their own. 
+Finally, I wanted to show you this is my gang at Princeton, New Jersey. 
+Everything I told you about was discovered by someone in that picture. 
+I hope when you learn things, like about how the natural world works — I just want to say that whenever you read something in the newspaper or you get to hear some talk about something ridiculous in the natural world it was done by a child. 
+Science is done by that demographic. 
+All of those people are between 20 and 30 years old, and they are the engine that drives scientific discovery in this country. 
+It's a really lucky demographic to work with. 
+I keep getting older and older and they're always the same age, and it's just a crazy delightful job. 
+I want to thank you for inviting me here. 
+It's a big treat for me to get to come to this conference. 
+(Applause) Thanks. (Applause) 
+
+Design is a slippery and elusive phenomenon, which has meant different things at different times. 
+But all truly inspiring design projects have one thing in common: they began with a dream. 
+And the bolder the dream, the greater the design feat that will be required to achieve it. 
+And this is why the greatest designers are almost always the biggest dreamers and rebels and renegades. 
+This has been the case throughout history, all the way back to the year 300 BC, when a 13-year-old became the king of a remote, very poor and very small Asian country. 
+He dreamt of acquiring land, riches and power through military conquest. 
+And his design skills — improbable though it sounds — would be essential in enabling him to do so. 
+At the time, all weapons were made by hand to different specifications. 
+So if an archer ran out of arrows during a battle, they wouldn't necessarily be able to fire another archer's arrows from their bow. 
+This of course meant that they would be less effective in combat and very vulnerable, too. 
+Ying solved this problem by insisting that all bows and arrows were designed identically, so they were interchangeable. 
+And he did the same for daggers, axes, spears, shields and every other form of weaponry. 
+His formidably equipped army won batter after battle, and within 15 years, his tiny kingdom had succeeded in conquering all its larger, richer, more powerful neighbors, to found the mighty Chinese Empire. 
+Now, no one, of course, would have thought of describing Ying Zheng as a designer at the time — why would they? 
+And yet he used design unknowingly and instinctively but with tremendous ingenuity to achieve his ends. 
+And so did another equally improbable, accidental designer, who was also not above using violence to get what he wanted. 
+This was Edward Teach, better known as the British pirate, Blackbeard. 
+This was the golden age of piracy, where pirates like Teach were terrorizing the high seas. 
+Colonial trade was flourishing, and piracy was highly profitable. 
+And the smarter pirates like him realized that to maximize their spoils, they needed to attack their enemies so brutally that they would surrender on sight. 
+So Edward Teach redesigned himself as Blackbeard by playing the part of a merciless brute. 
+He grew the bushy black beard that obscured his face. 
+He slung braces of pistols on either shoulder. 
+He even attached matches to the brim of his hat and set them alight, so they sizzled menacingly whenever his ship was poised to attack. 
+And like many pirates of that era, he flew a flag that bore the macabre symbols of a human skull and a pair of crossed bones, because those motifs had signified death in so many cultures for centuries, that their meaning was instantly recognizable, even in the lawless, illiterate world of the high seas: surrender or you'll suffer. 
+So of course, all his sensible victims surrendered on sight. 
+Put like that, it's easy to see why Edward Teach and his fellow pirates could be seen as pioneers of modern communications design, and why their deadly symbol — (Laughter) there's more — why their deadly symbol of the skull and crossbones was a precursor of today's logos, rather like the big red letters standing behind me, but of course with a different message. (Laughter) 
+Yet design was also used to nobler ends by an equally brilliant and equally improbable designer, the 19th-century British nurse, Florence Nightingale. 
+Her mission was to provide decent healthcare for everyone. 
+Nightingale was born into a rather grand, very wealthy British family, who were horrified when she volunteered to work in military hospitals during the Crimean War. 
+Once there, she swiftly realized that more patients were dying of infections that they caught there, in the filthy, fetid wards, than they were of battle wounds. 
+So she campaigned for cleaner, lighter, airier clinics to be designed and built. 
+Back in Britain, she mounted another campaign, this time for civilian hospitals, and insisted that the same design principles were applied to them. 
+The Nightingale ward, as it is called, dominated hospital design for decades to come, and elements of it are still used today. 
+But by then, design was seen as a tool of the Industrial Age. 
+It was formalized and professionalized, but it was restricted to specific roles and generally applied in pursuit of commercial goals rather than being used intuitively, as Florence Nightingale, Blackbeard and Ying Zheng had done. 
+By the 20th century, this commercial ethos was so powerful, that any designers who deviated from it risked being seen as cranks or subversives. 
+Now among them is one of my great design heroes, the brilliant László Moholy-Nagy. 
+He was the Hungarian artist and designer whose experiments with the impact of technology on daily life were so powerful that they still influence the design of the digital images we see on our phone and computer screens. 
+He radicalized the Bauhaus Design School in 1920s Germany, and yet some of his former colleagues shunned him when he struggled to open a new Bauhaus in Chicago years later. 
+Moholy's ideas were as bold and incisive as ever, but his approach to design was too experimental, as was his insistence on seeing it, as he put it, as an attitude, not a profession to be in tune with the times. 
+And sadly, the same applied to another design maverick: Richard Buckminster Fuller. 
+And we all stand to benefit. 
+
+The most massive tsunami perfect storm is bearing down upon us. 
+This perfect storm is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality, and we are facing that reality with the full belief that we can solve our problems with technology, and that's very understandable. 
+Now, this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population, rising towards 10 billion people, land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change. 
+Now there's no question about it at all: we will only solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels with technology. 
+But fossil fuels, carbon — coal and gas — are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change. 
+Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert, and this happens only when we create too much bare ground. 
+There's no other cause. 
+And I intend to focus on most of the world's land that is turning to desert. 
+But I have for you a very simple message that offers more hope than you can imagine. 
+We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year. 
+On those, it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground. 
+No matter what you do, nature covers it up so quickly. 
+And we have environments where we have months of humidity followed by months of dryness, and that is where desertification is occurring. 
+Fortunately, with space technology now, we can look at it from space, and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well. 
+Generally, what you see in green is not desertifying, and what you see in brown is, and these are by far the greatest areas of the Earth. 
+About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying. 
+I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert while 25 millimeters — that's an inch of rain — was falling. 
+Think of it in terms of drums of water, each containing 200 liters. 
+Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare of that land that day. 
+The next day, the land looked like this. 
+Where had that water gone? 
+Some of it ran off as flooding, but most of the water that soaked into the soil simply evaporated out again, exactly as it does in your garden if you leave the soil uncovered. 
+Now, because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter, when we damage soils, you give off carbon. 
+Carbon goes back to the atmosphere. 
+Now you're told over and over, repeatedly, that desertification is only occurring in arid and semi-arid areas of the world, and that tall grasslands like this one in high rainfall are of no consequence. 
+But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them, you find that most of the soil in that grassland that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae, leading to increased runoff and evaporation. 
+That is the cancer of desertification that we do not recognize till its terminal form. 
+Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane. 
+Almost everybody knows this, from nobel laureates to golf caddies, or was taught it, as I was. 
+Now, the environments like you see here, dusty environments in Africa where I grew up, and I loved wildlife, and so I grew up hating livestock because of the damage they were doing. 
+And then my university education as an ecologist reinforced my beliefs. 
+Well, I have news for you. 
+We were once just as certain that the world was flat. 
+We were wrong then, and we are wrong again. 
+And I want to invite you now to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery. 
+When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks. 
+Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting, drum-beating people to protect the animals, than the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed. 
+Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now, I did the research and I proved we had too many, and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain. 
+Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly. 
+So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research. 
+They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage. 
+And it got worse, not better. 
+Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave. 
+One good thing did come out of it. 
+It made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions. 
+When I came to the United States, I got a shock, to find national parks like this one desertifying as badly as anything in Africa. 
+And there'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years. 
+And I found that American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural. 
+So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification, but I found the opposite, as we see on this research station, where this grassland that was green in 1961, by 2002 had changed to that situation. 
+And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to "" unknown processes. "" Clearly, we have never understood what is causing desertification, which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally. 
+We have never understood it. 
+Take one square meter of soil and make it bare like this is down here, and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn and much hotter at midday than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter, plant litter. 
+You have changed the microclimate. 
+Now, by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world's land, you are changing macroclimate. 
+But we have just simply not understood why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago? 
+Why has it accelerated lately? 
+We had no understanding of that. 
+What we had failed to understand was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world, the soil and the vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals, and that these grazing animals developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators. 
+Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds, and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals. 
+Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food, and they have to keep moving, and it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants, while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil, as we see where a herd has passed. 
+This picture is a typical seasonal grassland. 
+It has just come through four months of rain, and it's now going into eight months of dry season. 
+And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season. 
+Now, all of that grass you see aboveground has to decay biologically before the next growing season, and if it doesn't, the grassland and the soil begin to die. 
+Now, if it does not decay biologically, it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process, and this smothers and kills grasses, leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon. 
+To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire. 
+But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon, and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. 
+And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares of grasslands, and almost nobody is talking about it. 
+We justify the burning, as scientists, because it does remove the dead material and it allows the plants to grow. 
+Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry, what could we do to keep that healthy? 
+And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now. 
+Okay? We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more without causing desertification and climate change. 
+We cannot burn it without causing desertification and climate change. 
+What are we going to do? 
+There is only one option, I'll repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. 
+There is no other alternative left to mankind. 
+So let's do that. 
+So on this bit of grassland, we'll do it, but just in the foreground. 
+We'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature, and we've done so, and look at that. 
+All of that grass is now covering the soil as dung, urine and litter or mulch, as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand, and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain, to store carbon, and to break down methane. 
+And we did that, without using fire to damage the soil, and the plants are free to grow. 
+When I first realized that we had no option as scientists but to use much-vilified livestock to address climate change and desertification, I was faced with a real dilemma. 
+How were we to do it? 
+We'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists bunching and moving their animals, but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world. 
+Then we'd had 100 years of modern rain science, and that had accelerated desertification, as we first discovered in Africa and then confirmed in the United States, and as you see in this picture of land managed by the federal government. 
+Clearly more was needed than bunching and moving the animals, and humans, over thousands of years, had never been able to deal with nature's complexity. 
+But we biologists and ecologists had never tackled anything as complex as this. 
+So rather than reinvent the wheel, I began studying other professions to see if anybody had. 
+And I found there were planning techniques that I could take and adapt to our biological need, and from those I developed what we call holistic management and planned grazing, a planning process, and that does address all of nature's complexity and our social, environmental, economic complexity. 
+Today, we have young women like this one teaching villages in Africa how to put their animals together into larger herds, plan their grazing to mimic nature, and where we have them hold their animals overnight — we run them in a predator-friendly manner, because we have a lot of lands, and so on — and where they do this and hold them overnight to prepare the crop fields, we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well. 
+Let's look at some results. 
+This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe. 
+It has just come through four months of very good rains it got that year, and it's going into the long dry season. 
+But as you can see, all of that rain, almost of all it, has evaporated from the soil surface. 
+Their river is dry despite the rain just having ended, and we have 150,000 people on almost permanent food aid. 
+Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day, with the same rainfall, and look at that. 
+Our river is flowing and healthy and clean. 
+It's fine. 
+The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife, everything is now more productive, and we have virtually no fear of dry years. 
+And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent, planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo, giraffe and other animals that we have. 
+But before we began, our land looked like that. 
+This site was bare and eroding for over 30 years regardless of what rain we got. 
+Okay? Watch the marked tree and see the change as we use livestock to mimic nature. 
+This was another site where it had been bare and eroding, and at the base of the marked small tree, we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil. Okay? 
+And again, watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature. 
+And there are fallen trees in there now, because the better land is now attracting elephants, etc. 
+This land in Mexico was in terrible condition, and I've had to mark the hill because the change is so profound. 
+(Applause) I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland, and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future. 
+And look at the amazing change in this one, where that gully has completely healed using nothing but livestock mimicking nature, and once more, we have the third generation of that family on that land with their flag still flying. 
+The vast grasslands of Patagonia are turning to desert as you see here. 
+The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher, and he has documented the steady decline of that land over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers. 
+They put 25,000 sheep in one flock, really mimicking nature now with planned grazing, and they have documented a 50-percent increase in the production of the land in the first year. 
+We now have in the violent Horn of Africa pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature and openly saying it is the only hope they have of saving their families and saving their culture. 
+Ninety-five percent of that land can only feed people from animals. 
+I remind you that I am talking about most of the world's land here that controls our fate, including the most violent region of the world, where only animals can feed people from about 95 percent of the land. 
+What we are doing globally is causing climate change as much as, I believe, fossil fuels, and maybe more than fossil fuels. 
+But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war, and as I am talking to you, millions of men, women and children are suffering and dying. 
+And if this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing, even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels. 
+I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this. 
+We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people. 
+I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, Chris. 
+Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have, and I'm sure everyone here has, A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you. 
+I'm just going to ask you one quick question. 
+When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals, it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work? 
+How do you start? 
+Allan Savory: Well, we have done this for a long time, and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed is during mine reclamation, where it's 100 percent bare. 
+But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe, where I offered a £5 note in a hundred-mile drive if somebody could find one grass in a hundred-mile drive, and on that, we trebled the stocking rate, the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding, just by the movement, mimicking nature, and using a sigmoid curve, that principle. 
+It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that. 
+CA: Well, I would love to — I mean, this such an interesting and important idea. 
+The best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you and try and — I want to get more on this that we could share along with the talk.AS: Wonderful. 
+CA: That is an astonishing talk, truly an astonishing talk, and I think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way. 
+Thank you so much.AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Hammer) (Laughter) (Microwave beeps) (Laughter) You probably all agree with me that this is a very nice road. 
+It's made of asphalt, and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on, but not always, especially not on these days as today, when it's raining a lot. 
+Then you can have a lot of splash water in the asphalt. 
+And especially if you then ride with your bicycle, and pass these cars, then that's not very nice. 
+Also, asphalt can create a lot of noise. 
+It's a noisy material, and if we produce roads like in the Netherlands, very close to cities, then we would like a silent road. 
+The solution for that is to make roads out of porous asphalt. 
+Porous asphalt, a material that we use now in most of the highways in the Netherlands, it has pores and water can just rain through it, so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides, and you have a road that's easy to drive on, so no splash water anymore. 
+Also the noise will disappear in these pores. 
+Because it's very hollow, all the noise will disappear, so it's a very silent road. 
+It also has disadvantages, of course, and the disadvantage of this road is that raveling can occur. 
+What is raveling? You see that in this road that the stones at the surface come off. 
+First you get one stone, then several more, and more and more and more and more, and then they — well, I will not do that. (Laughter) But they can damage your windshield, so you're not happy with that. 
+And finally, this raveling can also lead to more and more damage. 
+Sometimes you can create potholes with that. 
+Ha. He's ready. 
+Potholes, of course, that can become a problem, but we have a solution. 
+Here you see actually how the damage appears in this material. 
+It's a porous asphalt, like I said, so you have only a small amount of binder between the stones. 
+Due to weathering, due to U.V. light, due to oxidation, this binder, this bitumen, the glue between the aggregates is going to shrink, and if it shrinks, it gets micro-cracks, and it delaminates from the aggregates. 
+Then if you drive over the road, you take out the aggregates — what we just saw here. 
+To solve this problem, we thought of self-healing materials. 
+If we can make this material self-healing, then probably we have a solution. 
+So what we can do is use steel wool just to clean pans, and the steel wool we can cut in very small pieces, and these very small pieces we can mix to the bitumen. 
+So then you have asphalt with very small pieces of steel wool in it. 
+Then you need a machine, like you see here, that you can use for cooking — an induction machine. 
+Induction can heat, especially steel; it's very good at that. 
+Then what you do is you heat up the steel, you melt the bitumen, and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks, and the stones are again fixed to the surface. 
+Today I use a microwave because I cannot take the big induction machine here onstage. 
+So a microwave is a similar system. 
+So I put the specimen in, which I'm now going to take out to see what happened. 
+So this is the specimen coming out now. 
+So I said we have such an industrial machine in the lab to heat up the specimens. 
+We tested a lot of specimens there, and then the government, they actually saw our results, and they thought, "" Well, that's very interesting. We have to try that. "" So they donated to us a piece of highway, 400 meters of the A58, where we had to make a test track to test this material. 
+So that's what we did here. You see where we were making the test road, and then of course this road will last several years without any damage. That's what we know from practice. 
+So we took a lot of samples from this road and we tested them in the lab. 
+So we did aging on the samples, did a lot of loading on it, healed them with our induction machine, and healed them and tested them again. 
+Several times we can repeat that. 
+So actually, the conclusion from this research is that if we go on the road every four years with our healing machine — this is the big version we have made to go on the real road — if we go on the road every four years we can double the surface life of this road, which of course saves a lot of money. 
+Well, to conclude, I can say that we made a material using steel fibers, the addition of steel fibers, using induction energy to really increase the surface life of the road, double the surface life you can even do, so it will really save a lot of money with very simple tricks. 
+And now you're of course curious if it also worked. 
+So we still have the specimen here. It's quite warm. 
+Actually, it still has to cool down first before I can show you that the healing works. 
+But I will do a trial. 
+Let's see. Yeah, it worked. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm here to recruit men to support gender equality. 
+(Cheers) Wait, wait. What? 
+What do men have to do with gender equality? 
+Gender equality is about women, right? 
+I mean, the word gender is about women. 
+Actually, I'm even here speaking as a middle class white man. 
+Now, I wasn't always a middle class white man. 
+It all happened for me about 30 years ago when I was in graduate school, and a bunch of us graduate students got together one day, and we said, you know, there's an explosion of writing and thinking in feminist theory, but there's no courses yet. 
+So we did what graduate students typically do in a situation like that. 
+We said, OK, let's have a study group. 
+We'll read a text, we'll talk about it, we'll have a potluck dinner. 
+(Laughter) So every week, 11 women and me got together. (Laughter) 
+We would read some text in feminist theory and have a conversation about it. 
+And during one of our conversations, I witnessed an interaction that changed my life forever. 
+It was a conversation between two women. 
+One of the women was white, and one was black. 
+And the white woman said — this is going to sound very anachronistic now — the white woman said, "" All women face the same oppression as women. 
+All women are similarly situated in patriarchy, and therefore all women have a kind of intuitive solidarity or sisterhood. "" And the black woman said, "" I'm not so sure. 
+Let me ask you a question. "" So the black woman says to the white woman, "" When you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, what do you see? "" And the white woman said, "" I see a woman. "" And the black woman said, "" You see, that's the problem for me. 
+Because when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror, "" she said, "" I see a black woman. 
+To me, race is visible. But to you, race is invisible. You don't see it. "" And then she said something really startling. 
+She said, "" That's how privilege works. 
+Privilege is invisible to those who have it. "" It is a luxury, I will say to the white people sitting in this room, not to have to think about race every split second of our lives. Privilege is invisible to those who have it. 
+Now remember, I was the only man in this group, 
+so when I witnessed this, I went, "" Oh no. "" (Laughter) And somebody said, "" Well what was that reaction? "" And I said, "" Well, when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror, I see a human being. 
+I'm kind of the generic person. 
+You know, I'm a middle class white man. I have no race, no class, no gender. 
+I'm universally generalizable. "" (Laughter) So I like to think that was the moment I became a middle class white man, that class and race and gender were not about other people, they were about me. 
+I had to start thinking about them, and it had been privilege that had kept it invisible to me for so long. 
+Now, I wish I could tell you this story ends 30 years ago in that little discussion group, but I was reminded of it quite recently at my university where I teach. 
+I have a colleague, and she and I both teach the sociology of gender course on alternate semesters. 
+So she gives a guest lecture for me when I teach. 
+I give a guest lecture for her when she teaches. 
+So I walk into her class to give a guest lecture, about 300 students in the room, and as I walk in, one of the students looks up and says, "Oh, finally, an objective opinion." 
+All that semester, whenever my colleague opened her mouth, what my students saw was a woman. 
+I mean, if you were to say to my students, "There is structural inequality based on gender in the United States," they'd say, "" Well of course you'd say that. 
+You're a woman. You're biased. "" When I say it, they go, "" Wow, is that interesting. 
+Is that going to be on the test? How do you spell 'structural'? "" (Laughter) So I hope you all can see, this is what objectivity looks like. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Disembodied Western rationality. (Laughter) 
+And that, by the way, is why I think men so often wear ties. (Laughter) 
+Because if you are going to embody disembodied Western rationality, you need a signifier, and what could be a better signifier of disembodied Western rationality than a garment that at one end is a noose and the other end points to the genitals? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) That is mind-body dualism right there. 
+So making gender visible to men is the first step to engaging men to support gender equality. 
+Now, when men first hear about gender equality, when they first start thinking about it, they often think, many men think, well, that's right, that's fair, that's just, that's the ethical imperative. 
+But not all men. 
+Some men think — the lightning bolt goes off, and they go, "" Oh my God, yes, gender equality, "" and they will immediately begin to mansplain to you your oppression. 
+They see supporting gender equality something akin to the cavalry, like, "" Thanks very much for bringing this to our attention, ladies, we'll take it from here. "" This results in a syndrome that I like to call 'premature self-congratulation.' (Laughter) (Applause) There's another group, though, that actively resists gender equality, that sees gender equality as something that is detrimental to men. 
+I was on a TV talk show opposite four white men. 
+This is the beginning of the book I wrote, 'Angry White Men.' These were four angry white men who believed that they, white men in America, were the victims of reverse discrimination in the workplace. 
+And they all told stories about how they were qualified for jobs, qualified for promotions, they didn't get them, they were really angry. 
+And the reason I'm telling you this is I want you to hear the title of this particular show. 
+It was a quote from one of the men, and the quote was, "A Black Woman Stole My Job." 
+And they all told their stories, qualified for jobs, qualified for promotions, didn't get it, really angry. 
+And then it was my turn to speak, and I said, "" I have just one question for you guys, and it's about the title of the show, 'A Black Woman Stole My Job.' Actually, it's about one word in the title. 
+I want to know about the word 'my.' Where did you get the idea it was your job? 
+Why isn't the title of the show, 'A Black Woman Got the Job?' or 'A Black Woman Got A Job?' "" Because without confronting men's sense of entitlement, I don't think we'll ever understand why so many men resist gender equality. 
+(Applause) Look, we think this is a level playing field, so any policy that tilts it even a little bit, we think, "" Oh my God, water's rushing uphill. 
+It's reverse discrimination against us. "" (Laughter) So let me be very clear: white men in Europe and the United States are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world. 
+It is called "" the history of the world. "" (Laughter) (Applause) So, now I've established some of the obstacles to engaging men, but why should we support gender equality? 
+Of course, it's fair, it's right and it's just. 
+But more than that, gender equality is also in our interest as men. 
+If you listen to what men say about what they want in their lives, gender equality is actually a way for us to get the lives we want to live. 
+Gender equality is good for countries. 
+It turns out, according to most studies, that those countries that are the most gender equal are also the countries that score highest on the happiness scale. 
+And that's not just because they're all in Europe. 
+(Laughter) Even within Europe, those countries that are more gender equal also have the highest levels of happiness. 
+It is also good for companies. 
+Research by Catalyst and others has shown conclusively that the more gender-equal companies are, the better it is for workers, the happier their labor force is. 
+They have lower job turnover. They have lower levels of attrition. 
+They have an easier time recruiting. 
+They have higher rates of retention, higher job satisfaction, higher rates of productivity. 
+So the question I'm often asked in companies is, "Boy, this gender equality thing, that's really going to be expensive, huh?" 
+And I say, "" Oh no, in fact, what you have to start calculating is how much gender inequality is already costing you. 
+It is extremely expensive. "" So it is good for business. 
+And the other thing is, it's good for men. 
+It is good for the kind of lives we want to live, because young men especially have changed enormously, and they want to have lives that are animated by terrific relationships with their children. 
+They expect their partners, their spouses, their wives, to work outside the home and be just as committed to their careers as they are. 
+I was talking, to give you an illustration of this change — Some of you may remember this. 
+When I was a lot younger, there was a riddle that was posed to us. 
+Some of you may wince to remember this riddle. 
+This riddle went something like this. 
+A man and his son are driving on the freeway, and they're in a terrible accident, and the father is killed, and the son is brought to the hospital emergency room, and as they're bringing the son into the hospital emergency room, the emergency room attending physician sees the boy and says, "Oh, I can't treat him, that's my son." 
+How is this possible? 
+We were flummoxed by this. 
+We could not figure this out. 
+(Laughter) Well, I decided to do a little experiment with my 16-year old son. 
+He had a bunch of his friends hanging out at the house watching a game on TV recently. 
+So I decided I would pose this riddle to them, just to see, to gauge the level of change. 
+Well, 16-year-old boys, they immediately turned to me and said, "" It's his mom. "" Right? 
+No problem. Just like that. 
+Except for my son, who said, "" Well, he could have two dads. "" (Laughter) (Applause) That's an index, an indicator of how things have changed. 
+Younger men today expect to be able to balance work and family. 
+They want to be dual-career, dual-carer couples. 
+They want to be able to balance work and family with their partners. 
+They want to be involved fathers. 
+Now, it turns out that the more egalitarian our relationships, the happier both partners are. 
+Data from psychologists and sociologists are quite persuasive here. 
+I think we have the persuasive numbers, the data, to prove to men that gender equality is not a zero-sum game, but a win-win. 
+Here's what the data show. 
+Now, when men begin the process of engaging with balancing work and family, we often have two phrases that we use to describe what we do. 
+We pitch in and we help out. 
+(Laughter) And I'm going to propose something a little bit more radical, one word: "" share. "" (Laughter) Because here's what the data show: when men share housework and childcare, their children do better in school. 
+Their children have lower rates of absenteeism, higher rates of achievement. 
+They are less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. 
+They are less likely to see a child psychiatrist. 
+So when men share housework and childcare, their children are happier and healthier, and men want this. 
+When men share housework and childcare, their wives are happier. Duh. 
+Not only that, their wives are healthier. 
+Their wives are less likely to see a therapist, less likely to be diagnosed with depression, less likely to be put on medication, more likely to go to the gym, report higher levels of marital satisfaction. 
+So when men share housework and childcare, their wives are happier and healthier, and men certainly want this as well. 
+When men share housework and childcare, the men are healthier. 
+They smoke less, drink less, take recreational drugs less often. 
+They are less likely to go to the ER but more like to go to a doctor for routine screenings. 
+They are less likely to see a therapist, less likely to be diagnosed with depression, less likely to be taking prescription medication. 
+So when men share housework and childcare, the men are happier and healthier. 
+And who wouldn't want that? 
+And finally, when men share housework and childcare, they have more sex. 
+(Laughter) Now, of these four fascinating findings, which one do you think Men's Health magazine put on its cover? (Laughter) 
+"" Housework Makes Her Horny. 
+(Not When She Does It.) "" (Laughter) Now, I will say, just to remind the men in the audience, these data were collected over a really long period of time, so I don't want listeners to say, "Hmm, OK, I think I'll do the dishes tonight." 
+These data were collected over a really long period of time. 
+But I think it shows something important, that when Men's Health magazine put it on their cover, they also called, you'll love this, "" Choreplay. "" So, what we found is something really important, that gender equality is in the interest of countries, of companies, and of men, and their children and their partners, that gender equality is not a zero-sum game. 
+It is a win-win for everyone. 
+And what we also know is we cannot fully empower women and girls unless we engage boys and men. 
+We know this. 
+And my position is that men need the very things that women have identified that they need to live the lives they say they want to live in order to live the lives that we say we want to live. 
+In 1915, on the eve of one of the great suffrage demonstrations down Fifth Avenue in New York City, a writer in New York wrote an article in a magazine, and the title of the article was, "Feminism for Men." 
+And this was the first line of that article: "Feminism will make it possible for the first time for men to be free." 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm an industrial engineer. 
+The goal in my life has always been to make more and more products in the least amount of time and resources. 
+While working at Toyota, all I knew was how to make cars until I met Dr. Akira Miyawaki, who came to our factory to make a forest in it in order to make it carbon-neutral. 
+I was so fascinated that I decided to learn this methodology by joining his team as a volunteer. 
+Soon, I started making a forest in the backyard of my own house, and this is how it looks after three years. 
+These forests, compared to a conventional plantation, grow 10 times faster, they're 30 times more dense, and 100 times more biodiverse. 
+Within two years of having this forest in our backyard, I could observe that the groundwater didn't dry during summers, the number of bird species I spotted in this area doubled. 
+I wanted to make more of these forests. 
+I was so moved by these results that I wanted to make these forests with the same acumen with which we make cars or write software or do any mainstream business, so I founded a company which is an end-to-end service provider to create these native natural forests. 
+For an example, the core of TPS, Toyota Production System, lies in heijunka, which is making manufacturing of different models of cars on a single assembly line. 
+We replaced these cars with trees, using which now we can make multi-layered forests. 
+These forests utilize 100 percent vertical space. 
+They are so dense that one can't even walk into them. 
+For an example, we can make a 300-tree forest in an area as small as the parking spaces of six cars. 
+For example, coconut shells crushed in a machine mixed with rice straw, powder of rice husk mixed with organic manure is finally dumped in soil on which our forest is planted. 
+Once planted, we use grass or rice straw to cover the soil so that all the water which goes into irrigation doesn't get evaporated back into the atmosphere. 
+And using these simple improvisations, today we can make a forest for a cost as low as the cost of an iPhone. 
+Today, we are making forests in houses, in schools, even in factories with the corporates. 
+But that's not enough. 
+Today, we are working on an Internet-based platform where we are going to share our methodology on an open source using which anyone and everyone can make their own forest without our physical presence being there, using our methodology. 
+At the click of a button, they can get to know all the native species of their place. 
+By installing a small hardware probe on site, we can do remote soil testing, using which we can give step-by-step instructions on forest-making remotely. 
+Also we can monitor the growth of this forest without being on site. 
+By sharing, we can actually bring back our native forests. 
+Thank you very much. Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was a kid, my parents would tell me, "You can make a mess, but you have to clean up after yourself." 
+So freedom came with responsibility. 
+But my imagination would take me to all these wonderful places, where everything was possible. 
+So I grew up in a bubble of innocence — or a bubble of ignorance, I should say, because adults would lie to us to protect us from the ugly truth. 
+Fast forward, I am an adult now, and I teach citizen science and invention at the Hong Kong Harbour School. 
+And it doesn't take too long before my students walk on a beach and stumble upon piles of trash. 
+So as good citizens, we clean up the beaches — and no, he is not drinking alcohol, and if he is, I did not give it to him. 
+(Laughter) And so it's sad to say, but today more than 80 percent of the oceans have plastic in them. 
+But that takes forever, it's very expensive, and so it's quite risky to take those big boats out. 
+And so we started building this small workbench, with different heights, so even really short kids can participate. 
+(Laughter) Not really. 
+And so, back to plastic. 
+And my job is to try to collect the best of each kid's idea and try to combine it into something that hopefully would work. 
+And so we have agreed that instead of collecting plastic bits, we are going to collect only the data. 
+So we're going to get an image of the plastic with a robot — so robots, kids get very excited. 
+And the next thing we do — we do what we call "" rapid prototyping. "" We are so rapid at prototyping that the lunch is still in the lunchbox when we're hacking it. 
+(Laughter) And we hack table lamps and webcams, into plumbing fixtures and we assemble that into a floating robot that will be slowly moving through water and through the plastic that we have there — and this is the image that we get in the robot. 
+So we see the plastic pieces floating slowly through the sensor, and the computer on board will process this image, and measure the size of each particle, so we have a rough estimate of how much plastic there is in the water. 
+So we documented this invention step by step on a website for inventors called Instructables, in the hope that somebody would make it even better. 
+What was really cool about this project was that the students saw a local problem, and boom — they are trying to immediately address it. 
+And they watch the news, they watch the Internet, and they came across this image. 
+This was a child, probably under 10, cleaning up an oil spill bare-handed, in the Sundarbans, which is the world's largest mangrove forest in Bangladesh. 
+So they were very shocked, because this is the water they drink, this is the water they bathe in, this is the water they fish in — this is the place where they live. 
+And also you can see the water is brown, the mud is brown and oil is brown, so when everything is mixed up, it's really hard to see what's in the water. 
+But, there's a technology that's rather simple, that's called spectrometry, that allows you see what's in the water. 
+So we built a rough prototype of a spectrometer, and you can shine light through different substances that produce different spectrums, so that can help you identify what's in the water. 
+So we packed this prototype of a sensor, and we shipped it to Bangladesh. 
+So what was cool about this project was that beyond addressing a local problem, or looking at a local problem, my students used their empathy and their sense of being creative to help, remotely, other kids. 
+[I can investigate a remote problem] So I was very compelled by doing the second experiments, and I wanted to take it even further — maybe addressing an even harder problem, and it's also closer to my heart. 
+So I'm half Japanese and half French, and maybe you remember in 2011 there was a massive earthquake in Japan. 
+It was so violent that it triggered several giant waves — they are called tsunami — and those tsunami destroyed many cities on the eastern coast of Japan. 
+More than 14,000 people died in an instant. 
+Also, it damaged the nuclear power plant of Fukushima, the nuclear power plant just by the water. 
+And today, I read the reports and an average of 300 tons are leaking from the nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. 
+If you go outside on the West Coast, you can measure Fukushima everywhere. 
+But if you look at the map, it can look like most of the radioactivity has been washed away from the Japanese coast, and most of it is now — it looks like it's safe, it's blue. 
+So I've been going to Fukushima every year since the accident, and I measure independently and with other scientists, on land, in the river — and this time we wanted to take the kids. 
+So of course we didn't take the kids, the parents wouldn't allow that to happen. 
+(Laughter) But every night we would report to "" Mission Control "" — different masks they're wearing. 
+It could look like they didn't take the work seriously, but they really did because they're going to have to live with radioactivity their whole life. 
+And so what we did with them is that we'd discuss the data we collected that day, and talk about where we should be going next — strategy, itinerary, etc... 
+And to do this, we built a very rough topographical map of the region around the nuclear power plant. 
+And so we built the elevation map, we sprinkled pigments to represent real-time data for radioactivity, and we sprayed water to simulate the rainfall. 
+And with this we could see that the radioactive dust was washing from the top of the mountain into the river system, and leaking into the ocean. 
+So it was a rough estimate. 
+But with this in mind, we organized this expedition, which was the closest civilians have been to the nuclear power plant. 
+We are sailing 1.5 kilometers away from the nuclear power plant, and with the help of the local fisherman, we are collecting sediment from the seabed with a custom sediment sampler we've invented and built. 
+We pack the sediment into small bags, we then dispatch them to hundreds of small bags that we send to different universities, and we produce the map of the seabed radioactivity, especially in estuaries where the fish will reproduce, and I will hope that we will have improved the safety of the local fishermen and of your favorite sushi. 
+(Laughter) You can see a progression here — we've gone from a local problem to a remote problem to a global problem. 
+And it's been super exciting to work at these different scales, with also very simple, open-source technologies. 
+But at the same time, it's been increasingly frustrating because we have only started to measure the damage that we have done. 
+We haven't even started to try to solve the problems. 
+And so I wonder if we should just take a leap and try to invent better ways to do all these things. 
+And so the classroom started to feel a little bit small, so we found an industrial site in Hong Kong, and we turned it into the largest mega-space focused on social and environmental impact. 
+It's in central Hong Kong, and it's a place we can work with wood, metal, chemistry, a bit of biology, a bit of optics, basically you can build pretty much everything there. 
+It's a place where kids' dreams can come true, with the help of adults, and where adults can be kids again. 
+Cesar Harada: We're asking questions such as, can we invent the future of mobility with renewable energy? 
+Or, can we help the mobility of the aging population by transforming very standard wheelchairs into cool, electric vehicles? 
+So plastic, oil and radioactivity are horrible, horrible legacies, but the very worst legacy that we can leave our children is lies. 
+We can no longer afford to shield the kids from the ugly truth because we need their imagination to invent the solutions. 
+So citizen scientists, makers, dreamers — we must prepare the next generation that cares about the environment and people, and that can actually do something about it. 
+(Applause) 
+
+George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were a married couple living in the Bronx in New York City, invented something. 
+They got a patent in 1965 for what they call, "a device to assist women in giving birth." 
+This device consists of a large, round table and some machinery. 
+When the woman is ready to deliver her child, she lies on her back, she is strapped down to the table, and the table is rotated at high speed. 
+The child comes flying out through centrifugal force. 
+If you look at their patent carefully, especially if you have any engineering background or talent, you may decide that you see one or two points where the design is not perfectly adequate. (Laughter) Doctor Ivan Schwab in California is one of the people, one of the main people, who helped answer the question, "Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?" 
+And it turns out the answer to that is because their brains are packaged inside their skulls in a way different from the way our brains, we being human beings, true, have our brains packaged. 
+They, the woodpeckers, typically will peck, they will bang their head on a piece of wood thousands of times every day. Every day! 
+And as far as anyone knows, that doesn't bother them in the slightest. 
+Their brain does not slosh around like ours does. 
+Their brain is packed in very tightly, at least for blows coming right from the front. 
+Not too many people paid attention to this research until the last few years when, in this country especially, people are becoming curious about what happens to the brains of football players who bang their heads repeatedly. 
+And the woodpecker maybe relates to that. 
+There was a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet in England a few years ago called "A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years." 
+Dr. Caroline Mills and her team received this patient and didn't really know what to do about it. 
+The man had cut his finger, he worked processing chickens, and then he started to smell really, really bad. 
+So bad that when he got in a room with the doctors and the nurses, they couldn't stand being in the room with him. 
+After two years, still smelled putrid. 
+Three years, four years, still smelled putrid. 
+After five years, it went away on its own. 
+It's a mystery. 
+In New Zealand, Dr. Lianne Parkin and her team tested an old tradition in her city. 
+They live in a city that has huge hills, San Francisco-grade hills. 
+And in the winter there, it gets very cold and very icy. 
+There are lots of injuries. 
+The tradition that they tested, they tested by asking people who were on their way to work in the morning, to stop and try something out. 
+Try one of two conditions. 
+The tradition is that in the winter, in that city, you wear your socks on the outside of your boots. 
+And what they discovered by experiment, and it was quite graphic when they saw it, was that it's true. 
+That if you wear your socks on the outside rather than the inside, you're much more likely to survive and not slip and fall. 
+Now, I hope you will agree with me that these things I've just described to you, each of them, deserves some kind of prize. (Laughter) And that's what they got, each of them got an Ig Nobel prize. 
+In 1991, I, together with bunch of other people, started the Ig Nobel prize ceremony. 
+Every year we give out 10 prizes. 
+The prizes are based on just one criteria. It's very simple. 
+It's that you've done something that makes people laugh and then think. 
+What you've done makes people laugh and then think. 
+Whatever it is, there's something about it that when people encounter it at first, their only possible reaction is to laugh. 
+And then a week later, it's still rattling around in their heads and all they want to do is tell their friends about it. 
+Every year, we get in the neighborhood of 9,000 new nominations for the Ig Nobel prize. 
+Of those, consistently between 10 percent and 20 percent of those nominations are people who nominate themselves. 
+Those self-nominees almost never win. 
+It's very difficult, numerically, to win a prize if you want to. 
+Even if you don't want to, it's very difficult numerically. 
+You should know that when we choose somebody to win an Ig Nobel prize, We get in touch with that person, very quietly. 
+We offer them the chance to decline this great honor if they want to. 
+Happily for us, almost everyone who's offered a prize decides to accept. 
+What do you get if you win an Ig Nobel prize? 
+Well, you get several things. 
+The design is different every year. 
+These are always handmade from extremely cheap materials. 
+You're looking at a picture of the prize we gave last year, 2013. 
+Most prizes in the world also give their winners some cash, some money. 
+We don't have any money, so we can't give them. 
+In fact, the winners have to pay their own way to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony, which most of them do. 
+Last year, each of the 10 Ig Nobel prize winners received from us 10 trillion dollars. 
+A $10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe. (Laughter) You may remember that Zimbabwe had a little adventure for a few years there of inflation. 
+They ended up printing bills that were in denominations as large as 100 trillion dollars. 
+The man responsible, who runs the national bank there, by the way, won an Ig Nobel prize in mathematics. 
+The other thing you win is an invitation to come to the ceremony, which happens at Harvard University. 
+It fits 1,100 people, it's jammed to the gills, and up on the stage, waiting to shake your hand, waiting to hand you your Ig Nobel prize, are a bunch of Nobel prize winners. 
+That's the heart of the ceremony. 
+The winners are kept secret until that moment, even the Nobel laureates who will shake their hand don't know who they are until they're announced. 
+I am going to tell you about just a very few of the other medical-related prizes we've given. 
+Keep in mind, we've given 230 prizes. 
+There are lots of these people who walk among you. 
+Maybe you have one. 
+A paper was published about 30 years ago called "" Injuries due to Falling Coconuts. "" It was written by Dr. Peter Barss, who is Canadian. 
+Dr. Barss came to the ceremony and explained that as a young doctor, he wanted to see the world. 
+So he went to Papua New Guinea. 
+When he got there, he went to work in a hospital, and he was curious what kinds of things happen to people that bring them to the hospital. 
+He looked through the records, and he discovered that a surprisingly large number of people in that hospital were there because of injuries due to falling coconuts. 
+One typical thing that happens is people will come from the highlands, where there are not many coconut trees, down to visit their relatives on the coast, where there are lots. 
+And they'll think that a coconut tree is a fine place to stand and maybe lie down. 
+A coconut tree that is 90 feet tall, and has coconuts that weigh two pounds that can drop off at any time. 
+A team of doctors in Europe published a series of papers about colonoscopies. 
+You're all familiar with colonoscopies, one way or another. 
+Or in some cases, one way and another. 
+They, in these papers, explained to their fellow doctors who perform colonoscopies, how to minimize the chance that when you perform a colonoscopy, your patient will explode. (Laughter) Dr. Emmanuel Ben-Soussan one of the authors, flew in from Paris to the ceremony, where he explained the history of this, that in the 1950s, when colonoscopies were becoming a common technique for the first time, people were figuring out how to do it well. 
+The basic problem, I'm sure you're familiar with, that you're looking inside a long, narrow, dark place. 
+And so, you want to have a larger space. 
+You add some gas to inflate it so you have room to look around. 
+Now, that's added to the gas, the methane gas, that's already inside. 
+The gas that they used at first, in many cases, was oxygen. 
+And then they wanted to be able to see, they needed light, so they'd put in a light source, which in the 1950s was very hot. 
+They stopped using oxygen pretty quickly. (Laughter) Now it's rare that patients will explode, but it does still happen. 
+The final thing that I want to tell you about is a prize we gave to Dr. Elena Bodnar. 
+Dr. Elena Bodnar invented a brassiere that in an emergency can be quickly separated into a pair of protective face masks. 
+One to save your life, one to save the life of some lucky bystander. (Laughter) Why would someone do this, you might wonder. 
+Dr. Bodnar came to the ceremony and she explained that she grew up in Ukraine. 
+She was one of the doctors who treated victims of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown. 
+And they later discovered that a lot of the worst medical problems came from the particles people breathed in. 
+So she was always thinking after that about could there be some simple mask that was available everywhere when the unexpected happens. 
+Years later, she moved to America. 
+She had a baby, One day she looked, and on the floor, her infant son had picked up her bra, and had her bra on his face. 
+And that's where the idea came from. 
+She came to the Ig Nobel ceremony with the first prototype of the bra and she demonstrated: (Laughter) (Applause) ["" Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate (2008) in economics ""] ["" Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel laureate (2001) in physics ""] I myself own an emergency bra. (Laughter) It's my favorite bra, but I would be happy to share it with any of you, should the need arise. 
+Thank you. 
+
+I'm going to talk about religion. 
+But it's a broad and very delicate subject, so I have to limit myself. 
+And therefore I will limit myself to only talk about the links between religion and sexuality. 
+(Laughter) This is a very serious talk. 
+So I will talk of what I remember as the most wonderful. 
+It's when the young couple whisper, "Tonight we are going to make a baby." 
+My talk will be about the impact of religions on the number of babies per woman. 
+This is indeed important, because everyone understands that there is some sort of limit on how many people we can be on this planet. 
+And there are some people who say that the world population is growing like this — three billion in 1960, seven billion just last year — and it will continue to grow because there are religions that stop women from having few babies, and it may continue like this. 
+To what extent are these people right? 
+When I was born there was less than one billion children in the world, and today, 2000, there's almost two billion. 
+What has happened since, and what do the experts predict will happen with the number of children during this century? 
+This is a quiz. What do you think? 
+Do you think it will decrease to one billion? 
+Will it remain the same and be two billion by the end of the century? 
+Will the number of children increase each year up to 15 years, or will it continue in the same fast rate and be four billion children up there? 
+I will tell you by the end of my speech. 
+But now, what does religion have to do with it? 
+When you want to classify religion, it's more difficult than you think. 
+You go to Wikipedia and the first map you find is this. 
+It divides the world into Abrahamic religions and Eastern religion, but that's not detailed enough. 
+So we went on and we looked in Wikipedia, we found this map. 
+But that subdivides Christianity, Islam and Buddhism into many subgroups, which was too detailed. 
+Therefore at Gapminder we made our own map, and it looks like this. 
+Each country's a bubble. 
+The size is the population — big China, big India here. 
+And the color now is the majority religion. 
+It's the religion where more than 50 percent of the people say that they belong. 
+It's Eastern religion in India and China and neighboring Asian countries. 
+Islam is the majority religion all the way from the Atlantic Ocean across the Middle East, Southern Europe and through Asia all the way to Indonesia. 
+That's where we find Islamic majority. 
+And Christian majority religions, we see in these countries. They are blue. 
+And that is most countries in America and Europe, many countries in Africa and a few in Asia. 
+The white here are countries which cannot be classified, because one religion does not reach 50 percent or there is doubt about the data or there's some other reason. 
+So we were careful with that. 
+So bear with our simplicity now when I take you over to this shot. 
+This is in 1960. 
+And now I show the number of babies per woman here: two, four or six — many babies, few babies. 
+And here the income per person in comparable dollars. 
+The reason for that is that many people say you have to get rich first before you get few babies. 
+So low income here, high income there. 
+And indeed in 1960, you had to be a rich Christian to have few babies. 
+The exception was Japan. 
+Japan here was regarded as an exception. 
+Otherwise it was only Christian countries. 
+But there was also many Christian countries that had six to seven babies per woman. 
+But they were in Latin America or they were in Africa. 
+And countries with Islam as the majority religion, all of them almost had six to seven children per woman, irregardless of the income level. 
+And all the Eastern religions except Japan had the same level. 
+Now let's see what has happened in the world. 
+I start the world, and here we go. 
+Now 1962 — can you see they're getting a little richer, but the number of babies per woman is falling? 
+Look at China. They're falling fairly fast. 
+And all of the Muslim majority countries across the income are coming down, as do the Christian majority countries in the middle income range. 
+And when we enter into this century, you'll find more than half of mankind down here. 
+And by 2010, we are actually 80 percent of humans who live in countries with about two children per woman. 
+(Applause) It's a quite amazing development which has happened. (Applause) 
+And these are countries from United States here, with $40,000 per capita, France, Russia, Iran, Mexico, Turkey, Algeria, Indonesia, India and all the way to Bangladesh and Vietnam, which has less than five percent of the income per person of the United States and the same amount of babies per woman. 
+I can tell you that the data on the number of children per woman is surprisingly good in all countries. 
+We get that from the census data. 
+It's not one of these statistics which is very doubtful. 
+So what we can conclude is you don't have to get rich to have few children. 
+It has happened across the world. 
+And then when we look at religions, we can see that the Eastern religions, indeed there's not one single country with a majority of that religion that has more than three children. 
+Whereas with Islam as a majority religion and Christianity, you see countries all the way. 
+But there's no major difference. 
+There's no major difference between these religions. 
+There is a difference with income. 
+The countries which have many babies per woman here, they have quite low income. 
+Most of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. 
+But there are also countries here like Guatemala, like Papua New Guinea, like Yemen and Afghanistan. 
+Many think that Afghanistan here and Congo, which have suffered severe conflicts, that they don't have fast population growth. 
+It's the other way around. 
+In the world today, it's the countries that have the highest mortality rates that have the fastest population growth. 
+Because the death of a child is compensated by one more child. 
+These countries have six children per woman. 
+They have a sad death rate of one to two children per woman. 
+But 30 years from now, Afghanistan will go from 30 million to 60 million. 
+Congo will go from 60 to 120. 
+That's where we have the fast population growth. 
+And many think that these countries are stagnant, but they are not. 
+Let me compare Senegal, a Muslim dominated country, with a Christian dominated country, Ghana. 
+I take them backwards here to their independence, when they were up here in the beginning of the 1960s. 
+Just look what they have done. 
+It's an amazing improvement, from seven children per woman, they've gone all the way down to between four and five. 
+It's a tremendous improvement. 
+So what does it take? 
+Well we know quite well what is needed in these countries. 
+You need to have children to survive. 
+You need to get out of the deepest poverty so children are not of importance for work in the family. 
+You need to have access to some family planning. 
+And you need the fourth factor, which perhaps is the most important factor. 
+But let me illustrate that fourth factor by looking at Qatar. 
+Here we have Qatar today, and there we have Bangladesh today. 
+If I take these countries back to the years of their independence, which is almost the same year — '71,' 72 — it's a quite amazing development which had happened. 
+Look at Bangladesh and Qatar. 
+With so different incomes, it's almost the same drop in number of babies per woman. 
+And what is the reason in Qatar? 
+Well I do as I always do. 
+I went to the statistical authority of Qatar, to their webpage — It's a very good webpage. I recommend it — and I looked up — oh yeah, you can have lots of fun here — and provided free of charge, I found Qatar's social trends. 
+Very interesting. Lots to read. 
+I found fertility at birth, and I looked at total fertility rate per woman. 
+These are the scholars and experts in the government agency in Qatar, and they say the most important factors are: "" Increased age at first marriage, increased educational level of Qatari woman and more women integrated in the labor force. "" I couldn't agree more. Science couldn't agree more. 
+This is a country that indeed has gone through a very, very interesting modernization. 
+So what it is, is these four: Children should survive, children shouldn't be needed for work, women should get education and join the labor force and family planning should be accessible. 
+Now look again at this. 
+The average number of children in the world is like in Colombia — it's 2.4 today. 
+There are countries up here which are very poor. 
+And that's where family planning, better child survival is needed. 
+I strongly recommend Melinda Gates' last TEDTalk. 
+And here, down, there are many countries which are less than two children per woman. 
+So when I go back now to give you the answer of the quiz, it's two. 
+We have reached peak child. 
+The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. 
+We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child. 
+And the world population will stop growing. 
+The United Nations Population Division has said it will stop growing at 10 billion. 
+But why do they grow if the number of children doesn't grow? 
+Well I will show you here. 
+I will use these card boxes in which your notebooks came. 
+They are quite useful for educational purposes. 
+Each card box is one billion people. 
+And there are two billion children in the world. 
+There are two billion young people between 15 and 30. 
+These are rounded numbers. 
+Then there is one billion between 30 and 45, almost one between 45 and 60. 
+And then it's my box. 
+This is me: 60-plus. 
+We are here on top. 
+So what will happen now is what we call "" the big fill-up. "" You can see that it's like three billion missing here. 
+They are not missing because they've died; they were never born. 
+Because before 1980, there were much fewer people born than there were during the last 30 years. 
+So what will happen now is quite straightforward. 
+The old, sadly, we will die. 
+The rest of you, you will grow older and you will get two billion children. 
+Then the old will die. 
+The rest will grow older and get two billion children. 
+And then again the old will die and you will get two billion children. 
+(Applause) This is the great fill-up. 
+It's inevitable. 
+And can you see that this increase took place without life getting longer and without adding children? 
+Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman. 
+All the religions in the world are fully capable to maintain their values and adapt to this new world. 
+And we will be just 10 billion in this world, if the poorest people get out of poverty, their children survive, they get access to family planning. 
+That is needed. 
+But it's inevitable that we will be two to three billion more. 
+So when you discuss and when you plan for the resources and the energy needed for the future, for human beings on this planet, you have to plan for 10 billion. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+For some time I have been interested in the placebo effect, which might seem like an odd thing for a magician to be interested in, unless you think of it in the terms that I do, which is, "" Something fake is believed in enough by somebody that it becomes something real. "" In other words, sugar pills have a measurable effect in certain kinds of studies, the placebo effect, just because the person thinks that what's happening to them is a pharmaceutical or some sort of a — for pain management, for example, if they believe it enough there is a measurable effect in the body 
+called the placebo effect. 
+Something fake becomes something real because of someone's perception of it. 
+In order for us to understand each other, I want to start by showing you a rudimentary, very simple magic trick. 
+And I'm going to show you how it works. This is a trick that's been in every children's magic book since at least the 1950s. 
+I learned it myself from Cub Scout Magic in the 1970s. 
+I'll do it for you, and then I'll explain it. 
+And then I'll explain why I explained it. 
+So, here's what happens. 
+The knife, which you can examine; my hand, which you could examine. 
+I'm just going to hold the knife in my fist like this. 
+I'll get my sleeve back. 
+And to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve I'm just going to squeeze my wrist right here. 
+That way you can see that at no time can anything travel, as long as I'm squeezing there nothing can go up or down my sleeve. 
+And the object of this is quite simple. 
+I'm going to open my hand, and hopefully, if all is well, my pure animal magnetism will hold the knife. 
+In fact it's held so tightly in place that I can shake it, and the knife does not come off. 
+Nothing goes up or down my sleeve, no trickery. And you can examine everything. 
+Ta-da! 
+(Applause) So, this is a trick that I often teach to young children that are interested in magic, because you can learn a great deal about deception by studying this very — even though it's a very simple trick methodologically. 
+Probably many of you in the room know this trick. 
+What happens is this. 
+I hold the knife in my hand. 
+I say I'm going to grab hold of my wrist to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve, that is a lie. 
+The reason I'm holding onto my wrist is because that's actually the secret of the illusion. 
+In a moment when my hand moves from facing you to being away from you, this finger right here, my index finger is just going to shift from where it is, to a position pointing out like this. 
+Nice one. 
+Someone who didn't have a childhood is out there. 
+(Laughter) So, it goes like this, from here, right. 
+And as I move around my finger shifts. 
+And we could talk about why this is deceptive, why you don't notice there are only three fingers down here, because the mind, and the way it processes information, it doesn't count, one, two, three. It groups them. 
+But that's not really what this is about. Right? And then I open my hand up. 
+Obviously it's clinging there, not by animal magnetism, but by chicanery, my index finger being there. 
+And then when I close my finger, same thing, as I move back, this motion kind of covers the moving back of my finger. 
+I take this hand away. You give the knife out. 
+There is a trick you can do for your friends and neighbors. Thanks. 
+Now, (Laughter) what does that have to do with the placebo effect? 
+I read a study a year or so ago that really blew my mind wide open. 
+I'm not a doctor or a researcher, so this, to me, was an astonishing thing. 
+It turns out that if you administer a placebo in the form of a white pill, that's like aspirin shaped — it's just a round white pill — it has some certain measurable effect. 
+But if you change the form that you give the placebo in, like you make a smaller pill, and color it blue, and stamp a letter into it, it is actually measurably more effective. 
+Even though neither one of these things has any pharmaceutical — they're sugar pills. 
+But a white pill is not as good as a blue pill. 
+What? (Laughter) That really flipped me out. 
+Turns out though, that that's not even where it stops. 
+If you have capsules, they're more effective than tablets in any form. 
+A colored capsule, that's yellow on one end and red on the other is better than a white capsule. 
+Dosage has something to do with this. 
+One pill twice a day is not as good at three pills — I don't remember the statistic now. Sorry. 
+But the point is... 
+(Laughter)... these dosages have something to do with it. 
+And the form has something to do with it. 
+And if you want the ultimate in placebo, you've go to the needle. 
+Right? A syringe with some inert — a couple CCs of some inert something, and you inject this into a patient... 
+Well this is such a powerful image in their mind, it's so much stronger than the white pill. 
+It's a really, this graph, well I'll show it to you some other time when we have slides. 
+The point is the white pill is not as good as the blue pill is not as good as the capsule is not as good as the needle. 
+And none of it has any real pharmaceutical quality, it's only your belief that makes it real in your body and makes a stronger effect. 
+I wanted to see if I could take that idea and apply it to a magic trick. 
+And take something that is obviously a fake trick and make it seem real. 
+And we know from that study that when you want reality, you go to the needle. 
+This is a seven-inch hatpin. It's very, very sharp, and I'm going to just sterilize it a tiny bit. 
+This is really my flesh. This is not Damian's special-grown flesh. 
+That's my skin right there. This is not a Hollywood special effect. 
+I'm going to pierce my skin and run this needle through to the other side. 
+If you're queasy — (Laughs) if you faint easily — I was doing this for some friends in the hotel room last night, and some people that I didn't know, and one woman almost passed out. 
+So, I suggest if you get queasy easy that you look away for about the next 30 — in fact, you know what, I'll do the first bad part behind it. 
+You'll get to see, you can look away too if you'd like to. 
+So, here is what happens, right here, the beginning of my flesh at the lower part of my arm I just make a little pierce. 
+I'm sorry, man. Am I freaking you out? 
+OK, and then just through my skin a tiny bit, and then out the other side like this. 
+Now, essentially we're in the same position we were in with the knife trick. 
+(Laughter) Sort of. 
+But you can't count my fingers right now can you? 
+So, let me show them to you. That's one, two three, four, five. 
+Yes, well... 
+I know what people think when they see this. 
+They go, "" Well, he's certainly not dumb enough to stab himself through the skin to entertain us for a few minutes. 
+So, let me give you a little peek. 
+How's that look out there? Pretty good. 
+(Laughs) Yeah, I know. (Laughs) And the people in the back go, "" OK, I didn't really see that. "" People in the satellite room are starting to move in now. 
+Let me give you good close look at this. 
+That really is my skin. That is not a Hollywood special effect. 
+That's my flesh, and I can twist that around. 
+I'm sorry. If you're getting queasy, look away, don't look at the thing. 
+People in the back or people on video years from now watching this will go, "" Well yeah, that looks kind of neat in some sort of effect there, but if it were real he would be — see there's a hole there and a hole there, if it were real he would be bleeding. 
+Well let me work up some blood for you. 
+(Laughter) Yes, there it is. 
+(Applause) (Laughter) Normally now, I would take the needle out. 
+I would clean off my arm, and I would show you that there are no wounds. 
+But I think in this context and with the idea of taking something fake and making it into something real, I'm just going to leave it there, and walk off the stage. 
+(Laughter) I will be seeing you several times over the next few days. 
+I hope you're looking forward to that. Thank you very much. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) 
+
+At least good work, hopefully, at least it's good work — hopefully great work. 
+And so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work. 
+So a company, or a charity, or an organization of any kind, unless you're working in Africa, if you're really lucky to do that — most people have to go to an office every day. 
+They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill this space with stuff. 
+They fill it with tables, or desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, Internet access, maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things, and they expect their employees, or their volunteers, to come to that location every day to do great work. 
+I didn't actually get meaningful work done. "" And what you find is that, especially with creative people — designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers — that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. 
+If you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones — if someone bumps you in bed, or there's a sound, or whatever happens — you don't just pick up where you left off. 
+If you're interrupted and woken up, you have to start again. 
+And what ends up happening — you might have days like this where you wake up at eight or seven in the morning, or whenever you get up, and you're like, "" I didn't sleep very well. 
+Because in other places, you can have interruptions like the TV, or you could go for a walk, or there's a fridge downstairs, or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do. 
+No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago, so why does anyone care if someone goes to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube here and there? 
+The manager calls the meeting so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people — to say, "" Hey look, we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting. 
+So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, usually. 
+But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting, because meetings are scheduled the way software works, which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour. 
+What can managers do — enlightened managers, hopefully — what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort, so that people start to say, "When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office." 
+And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work gets done when no one talks to each other. 
+So maybe it's every other week, or every week, once a week, afternoons no one can talk to each other. 
+Another thing you can try, is switching from active communication and collaboration, which is like face-to-face stuff — tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings, and replace that with more passive models of communication, using things like email and instant messaging, or collaboration products, things like that. 
+You can put these things away, and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule, at your own time, when you're available, when you're ready to go again. 
+So you'll be going up, doing some work, and then you'll come down from that work, and then maybe it's time to check that email or I.M. 
+And the last suggestion I have is that, if you do have a meeting coming up, if you have the power, just cancel it. 
+
+I'm a designer and an educator. 
+I'm a multitasking person, and I push my students to fly through a very creative, multitasking design process. 
+But how efficient is, really, this multitasking? 
+Let's consider for a while the option of monotasking. 
+A couple of examples. 
+Look at that. 
+This is my multitasking activity result. (Laughter) So trying to cook, answering the phone, writing SMS, and maybe uploading some pictures about this awesome barbecue. 
+So someone tells us the story about supertaskers, so this two percent of people who are able to control multitasking environment. 
+But what about ourselves, and what about our reality? 
+When's the last time you really enjoyed just the voice of your friend? 
+So this is a project I'm working on, and this is a series of front covers to downgrade our super, hyper — (Laughter) (Applause) to downgrade our super, hyper-mobile phones into the essence of their function. 
+Another example: Have you ever been to Venice? 
+How beautiful it is to lose ourselves in these little streets on the island. 
+But our multitasking reality is pretty different, and full of tons of information. 
+So what about something like that to rediscover our sense of adventure? 
+I know that it could sound pretty weird to speak about mono when the number of possibilities is so huge, but I push you to consider the option of focusing on just one task, or maybe turning your digital senses totally off. 
+So nowadays, everyone could produce his mono product. 
+Why not? So find your monotask spot within the multitasking world. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I would like to show you how architecture has helped to change the life of my community and has opened opportunities to hope. 
+I am a native of Burkina Faso. 
+According to the World Bank, Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, but what does it look like to grow up in a place like that? 
+I am an example of that. 
+I was born in a little village called Gando. 
+In Gando, there was no electricity, no access to clean drinking water, and no school. 
+But my father wanted me to learn how to read and write. 
+For this reason, I had to leave my family when I was seven and to stay in a city far away from my village with no contact with my family. 
+In this place I sat in a class like that with more than 150 other kids, and for six years. 
+In this time, it just happened to me to come to school to realize that my classmate died. 
+Today, not so much has changed. 
+There is still no electricity in my village. 
+People still are dying in Burkina Faso, and access to clean drinking water is still a big problem. 
+I had luck. I was lucky, because this is a fact of life when you grow up in a place like that. 
+But I was lucky. 
+I had a scholarship. 
+I could go to Germany to study. 
+So now, I suppose, I don't need to explain to you how great a privilege it is for me to be standing before you today. 
+From Gando, my home village in Burkina Faso, to Berlin in Germany to become an architect is a big, big step. 
+But what to do with this privilege? 
+Since I was a student, I wanted to open up better opportunities to other kids in Gando. 
+I just wanted to use my skills and build a school. 
+But how do you do it when you're still a student and you don't have money? 
+Oh yes, I started to make drawings and asked for money. 
+Fundraising was not an easy task. 
+I even asked my classmates to spend less money on coffee and cigarettes, but to sponsor my school project. 
+In real wonder, two years later, I was able to collect 50,000 U.S. dollars. 
+When I came home to Gando to bring the good news, my people were over the moon, but when they realized that I was planning to use clay, they were shocked. 
+"" A clay building is not able to stand a rainy season, and Francis wants us to use it and build a school. 
+Is this the reason why he spent so much time in Europe studying instead of working in the field with us? "" My people build all the time with clay, but they don't see any innovation with mud. 
+So I had to convince everybody. 
+I started to speak with the community, and I could convince everybody, and we could start to work. 
+And the women, the men, everybody from the village, was part of this building process. 
+I was allowed to use even traditional techniques. 
+So clay floor for example, the young men come and stand like that, beating, hours for hours, and then their mothers came, and they are beating in this position, for hours, giving water and beating. 
+And then the polishers come. 
+They start polishing it with a stone for hours. 
+And then you have this result, very fine, like a baby bottom. 
+(Laughter) It's not photoshopped. (Laughter) This is the school, built with the community. 
+The walls are totally made out of compressed clay blocks from Gando. 
+The roof structure is made with cheap steel bars normally hiding inside concrete. 
+And the classroom, the ceiling is made out of both of them used together. 
+In this school, there was a simple idea: to create comfort in a classroom. 
+Don't forget, it can be 45 degrees in Burkina Faso, so with simple ventilation, I wanted to make the classroom good for teaching and learning. 
+And this is the project today, 12 years old, still in best condition. 
+And the kids, they love it. 
+And for me and my community, this project was a huge success. 
+It has opened up opportunities to do more projects in Gando. 
+So I could do a lot of projects, and here I am going to share with you only three of them. 
+The first one is the school extension, of course. 
+How do you explain drawings and engineering to people who are neither able to read nor write? 
+I started to build a prototype like that. 
+The innovation was to build a clay vault. 
+So then, I jumped on the top like that, with my team, and it works. 
+The community is looking. It still works. 
+So we can build. (Laughter) And we kept building, and that is the result. 
+The kids are happy, and they love it. 
+The community is very proud. We made it. 
+And even animals, like these donkeys, love our buildings. 
+(Laughter) The next project is the library in Gando. 
+And see now, we tried to introduce different ideas in our buildings, but we often don't have so much material. 
+Something we have in Gando are clay pots. 
+We wanted to use them to create openings. 
+So we just bring them like you can see to the building site. 
+we start cutting them, and then we place them on top of the roof before we pour the concrete, and you have this result. 
+The openings are letting the hot air out and light in. 
+Very simple. 
+My most recent project in Gando is a high school project. 
+I would like to share with you this. 
+The innovation in this project is to cast mud like you cast concrete. 
+How do you cast mud? 
+We start making a lot of mortars, like you can see, and when everything is ready, when you know what is the best recipe and the best form, you start working with the community. 
+And sometimes I can leave. 
+They will do it themselves. 
+I came to speak to you like that. 
+Another factor in Gando is rain. 
+When the rains come, we hurry up to protect our fragile walls against the rain. 
+Don't confound with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. 
+It is simply how we protect our walls. 
+(Laughter) The rain in Burkina comes very fast, and after that, you have floods everywhere in the country. 
+But for us, the rain is good. 
+It brings sand and gravel to the river we need to use to build. 
+We just wait for the rain to go. 
+We take the sand, we mix it with clay, and we keep building. 
+That is it. 
+The Gando project was always connected to training the people, because I just wanted, one day when I fall down and die, that at least one person from Gando keeps doing this work. 
+But you will be surprised. I'm still alive. 
+(Laughter) And my people now can use their skills to earn money themselves. 
+Usually, for a young man from Gando to earn money, you have to leave the country to the city, sometimes leave the country and some never come back, making the community weaker. 
+But now they can stay in the country and work on different building sites and earn money to feed their family. 
+There's a new quality in this work. 
+Yes, you know it. 
+I have won a lot of awards through this work. 
+For sure, it has opened opportunities. 
+I have become myself known. 
+But the reason why I do what I do is my community. 
+When I was a kid, I was going to school, I was coming back every holiday to Gando. 
+By the end of every holidays, I had to say goodbye to the community, going from one compound to another one. 
+All women in Gando will open their clothes like that and give me the last penny. 
+In my culture, this is a symbol of deep affection. 
+As a seven-year-old guy, I was impressed. 
+I just asked my mother one day, "Why do all these women love me so much?" 
+(Laughter) She just answered, "" They are contributing to pay for your education hoping that you will be successful and one day come back and help improve the quality of life of the community. "" I hope now that I was able to make my community proud through this work, and I hope I was able to prove you the power of community, and to show you that architecture can be inspiring for communities to shape their own future. 
+Merci beaucoup. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
+Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+(Recording of crowd roaring) Hysterical teenagers, crying, screaming, pandemonium. (Recording of crowd roaring) 
+Sports mania: deafening crowds, all for one idea — get the ball in the net. 
+Okay, religious mania: there's rapture, there's weeping, there's visions. 
+Manias can be good. 
+(Recording of crowd cheering) The world has a new mania. 
+A mania for learning English. 
+Listen as Chinese students practice their English, by screaming it: Teacher:... change my life! 
+T: I don't ever want to let my country down! 
+T: Most importantly... S: Most importantly... 
+How many people are trying to learn English worldwide? 
+If you're a Chinese student, you start learning English in the third grade, by law. 
+Imagine a student taking a giant test for three full days. 
+T: I want to speak perfect English! 
+S (yelling more loudly): I want to change my life! 
+Is English a tsunami, washing away other languages? 
+But with English you can become part of a wider conversation — a global conversation about global problems, like climate change or poverty, or hunger or disease. 
+The world has other universal languages. 
+Not because America is pushing it, but because the world is pulling it. 
+Like the harnessing of electricity in our cities, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, English represents hope for a better future — a future where the world has a common language to solve its common problems. 
+
+I am going to speak about corruption, but I would like to juxtapose two different things. 
+One is the large global economy, the large globalized economy, and the other one is the small, and very limited, capacity of our traditional governments and their international institutions to govern, to shape, this economy. 
+Because there is this asymmetry, which creates, basically, failing governance. 
+Failing governance in many areas: in the area of corruption and the area of destruction of the environment, in the area of exploitation of women and children, in the area of climate change, in all the areas in which we really need a capacity to reintroduce the primacy of politics into the economy, which is operating in a worldwide arena. 
+And I think corruption, and the fight against corruption, and the impact of corruption, is probably one of the most interesting ways to illustrate what I mean with this failure of governance. 
+Let me talk about my own experience. 
+I used to work as the director of the World Bank office in Nairobi for East Africa. 
+At that time, I noticed that corruption, that grand corruption, that systematic corruption, was undermining everything we were trying to do. 
+And therefore, I began to not only try to protect the work of the World Bank, our own projects, our own programs against corruption, but in general, I thought, "" We need a system to protect the people in this part of the world from the ravages of corruption. "" And as soon as I started this work, I received a memorandum from the World Bank, from the legal department first, in which they said, "" You are not allowed to do this. 
+You are meddling in the internal affairs of our partner countries. 
+This is forbidden by the charter of the World Bank, so I want you to stop your doings. "" In the meantime, I was chairing donor meetings, for instance, in which the various donors, and many of them like to be in Nairobi — it is true, it is one of the unsafest cities of the world, but they like to be there because the other cities are even less comfortable. 
+And in these donor meetings, I noticed that many of the worst projects — which were put forward by our clients, by the governments, by promoters, many of them representing suppliers from the North — that the worst projects were realized first. 
+Let me give you an example: a huge power project, 300 million dollars, to be built smack into one of the most vulnerable, and one of the most beautiful, areas of western Kenya. 
+And we all noticed immediately that this project had no economic benefits: It had no clients, nobody would buy the electricity there, nobody was interested in irrigation projects. 
+To the contrary, we knew that this project would destroy the environment: It would destroy riparian forests, which were the basis for the survival of nomadic groups, the Samburu and the Turkana in this area. 
+So everybody knew this is a, not a useless project, this is an absolute damaging, a terrible project — not to speak about the future indebtedness of the country for these hundreds of millions of dollars, and the siphoning off of the scarce resources of the economy from much more important activities like schools, like hospitals and so on. 
+And yet, we all rejected this project, none of the donors was willing to have their name connected with it, and it was the first project to be implemented. 
+The good projects, which we as a donor community would take under our wings, they took years, you know, you had too many studies, and very often they didn't succeed. 
+But these bad projects, which were absolutely damaging — for the economy for many generations, for the environment, for thousands of families who had to be resettled — they were suddenly put together by consortia of banks, of supplier agencies, of insurance agencies — like in Germany, Hermes, and so on — and they came back very, very quickly, driven by an unholy alliance between the powerful elites in the countries there and the suppliers from the North. 
+Now, these suppliers were our big companies. 
+They were the actors of this global market, which I mentioned in the beginning. 
+They were the Siemenses of this world, coming from France, from the UK, from Japan, from Canada, from Germany, and they were systematically driven by systematic, large-scale corruption. 
+We are not talking about 50,000 dollars here, or 100,000 dollars there, or one million dollars there. 
+No, we are talking about 10 million, 20 million dollars on the Swiss bank accounts, on the bank accounts of Liechtenstein, of the president's ministers, the high officials in the para-statal sectors. 
+This was the reality which I saw, and not only one project like that: I saw, I would say, over the years I worked in Africa, I saw hundreds of projects like this. 
+And so, I became convinced that it is this systematic corruption which is perverting economic policy-making in these countries, which is the main reason for the misery, for the poverty, for the conflicts, for the violence, for the desperation in many of these countries. 
+That we have today more than a billion people below the absolute poverty line, that we have more than a billion people without proper drinking water in the world, twice that number, more than two billion people without sanitation and so on, and the consequent illnesses of mothers and children, still, child mortality of more than 10 million people every year, children dying before they are five years old: The cause of this is, to a large extent, grand corruption. 
+Now, why did the World Bank not let me do this work? 
+I found out afterwards, after I left, under a big fight, the World Bank. 
+The reason was that the members of the World Bank thought that foreign bribery was okay, including Germany. 
+In Germany, foreign bribery was allowed. 
+It was even tax-deductible. 
+No wonder that most of the most important international operators in Germany, but also in France and the UK and Scandinavia, everywhere, systematically bribed. 
+Not all of them, but most of them. 
+And this is the phenomenon which I call failing governance, because when I then came to Germany and started this little NGO here in Berlin, at the Villa Borsig, we were told, "" You cannot stop our German exporters from bribing, because we will lose our contracts. 
+We will lose to the French, we will lose to the Swedes, we'll lose to the Japanese. "" And therefore, there was a indeed a prisoner's dilemma, which made it very difficult for an individual company, an individual exporting country to say, "" We are not going to continue this deadly, disastrous habit of large companies to bribe. "" So this is what I mean with a failing governance structure, because even the powerful government, which we have in Germany, comparatively, was not able to say, "We will not allow our companies to bribe abroad." 
+They needed help, and the large companies themselves have this dilemma. 
+Many of them didn't want to bribe. 
+Many of the German companies, for instance, believe that they are really producing a high-quality product at a good price, so they are very competitive. 
+They are not as good at bribing as many of their international competitors are, but they were not allowed to show their strengths, because the world was eaten up by grand corruption. 
+And this is why I'm telling you this: Civil society rose to the occasion. 
+We had this small NGO, Transparency International. 
+They began to think of an escape route from this prisoner's dilemma, and we developed concepts of collective action, basically trying to bring various competitors together around the table, explaining to all of them how much it would be in their interests if they simultaneously would stop bribing, and to make a long story short, we managed to eventually get Germany to sign together with the other OECD countries and a few other exporters. 
+In 1997, a convention, under the auspices of the OECD, which obliged everybody to change their laws and criminalize foreign bribery. 
+(Applause) Well, thank you. I mean, it's interesting, in doing this, we had to sit together with the companies. 
+We had here in Berlin, at the Aspen Institute on the Wannsee, we had sessions with about 20 captains of industry, and we discussed with them what to do about international bribery. 
+In the first session — we had three sessions over the course of two years. 
+And President von Weizsäcker, by the way, chaired one of the sessions, the first one, to take the fear away from the entrepreneurs, who were not used to deal with non-governmental organizations. 
+And in the first session, they all said, "" This is not bribery, what we are doing. "" This is customary there. 
+This is what these other cultures demand. 
+They even applaud it. 
+In fact, [unclear] still says this today. 
+And so there are still a lot of people who are not convinced that you have to stop bribing. 
+But in the second session, they admitted already that they would never do this, what they are doing in these other countries, here in Germany, or in the U.K., and so on. 
+Cabinet ministers would admit this. 
+And in the final session, at the Aspen Institute, we had them all sign an open letter to the Kohl government, at the time, requesting that they participate in the OECD convention. 
+And this is, in my opinion, an example of soft power, because we were able to convince them that they had to go with us. 
+We had a longer-term time perspective. 
+We had a broader, geographically much wider, constituency we were trying to defend. 
+And that's why the law has changed. 
+That's why Siemens is now in the trouble they are in and that's why MIN is in the trouble they are in. 
+In some other countries, the OECD convention is not yet properly enforced. 
+And, again, civil societies breathing down the neck of the establishment. 
+In London, for instance, where the BAE got away with a huge corruption case, which the Serious Fraud Office tried to prosecute, 100 million British pounds, every year for ten years, to one particular official of one particular friendly country, who then bought for 44 billion pounds of military equipment. 
+This case, they are not prosecuting in the UK. 
+Why? Because they consider this as contrary to the security interest of the people of Great Britain. 
+Civil society is pushing, civil society is trying to get a solution to this problem, also in the U.K., and also in Japan, which is not properly enforcing, and so on. 
+In Germany, we are pushing the ratification of the UN convention, which is a subsequent convention. 
+We are, Germany, is not ratifying. 
+Why? Because it would make it necessary to criminalize the corruption of deputies. 
+In Germany, we have a system where you are not allowed to bribe a civil servant, but you are allowed to bribe a deputy. 
+This is, under German law, allowed, and the members of our parliament don't want to change this, and this is why they can't sign the U.N. convention against foreign bribery — one of they very, very few countries which is preaching honesty and good governance everywhere in the world, but not able to ratify the convention, which we managed to get on the books with about 160 countries all over the world. 
+I see my time is ticking. 
+Let me just try to draw some conclusions from what has happened. 
+I believe that what we managed to achieve in fighting corruption, one can also achieve in other areas of failing governance. 
+By now, the United Nations is totally on our side. 
+The World Bank has turned from Saulus to Paulus; under Wolfensohn, they became, I would say, the strongest anti-corruption agency in the world. 
+Most of the large companies are now totally convinced that they have to put in place very strong policies against bribery and so on. 
+And this is possible because civil society joined the companies and joined the government in the analysis of the problem, in the development of remedies, in the implementation of reforms, and then later, in the monitoring of reforms. 
+Of course, if civil society organizations want to play that role, they have to grow into this responsibility. 
+Not all civil society organizations are good. 
+The Ku Klux Klan is an NGO. 
+So, we must be aware that civil society has to shape up itself. 
+They have to have a much more transparent financial governance. 
+They have to have a much more participatory governance in many civil society organizations. 
+We also need much more competence of civil society leaders. 
+This is why we have set up the governance school and the Center for Civil Society here in Berlin, because we believe most of our educational and research institutions in Germany and continental Europe in general, do not focus enough, yet, on empowering civil society and training the leadership of civil society. 
+But what I'm saying from my very practical experience: If civil society does it right and joins the other actors — in particular, governments, governments and their international institutions, but also large international actors, in particular those which have committed themselves to corporate social responsibility — then in this magical triangle between civil society, government and private sector, there is a tremendous chance for all of us to create a better world. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Do you know how many choices you make in a typical day? Do you know how many choices you make 
+in typical week? 
+I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70 in a typical day. 
+There was also recently a study done with CEOs in which they followed CEOs around for a whole week. 
+And these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these CEOs engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks. 
+And they found that the average CEO engaged in about 139 tasks in a week. 
+Each task was made up of many, many, many sub-choices of course. 
+50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less. 
+Only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time. 
+Think about your own choices. 
+Do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category? 
+How well do you think you're doing at managing those choices? 
+Today I want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have, which is the choice overload problem. 
+I want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions. 
+Now as I talk about this problem, I'm going to have some questions for you and I'm going to want to know your answers. 
+So when I ask you a question, since I'm blind, only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories. 
+(Laughter) Otherwise, when I ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, I'd like you to clap your hands. 
+So for my first question for you today: Are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem? 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+So when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I used to go to this very, very upscale grocery store; at least at that time it was truly upscale. 
+It was a store called Draeger's. 
+Now this store, it was almost like going to an amusement park. 
+They had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water — and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water. 
+I used to love going to this store, but on one occasion I asked myself, well how come you never buy anything? 
+Here's their olive oil aisle. 
+They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees. 
+So I one day decided to pay a visit to the manager, and I asked the manager, "Is this model of offering people all this choice really working?" 
+And he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday, with cameras ready usually. 
+We decided to do a little experiment, and we picked jam for our experiment. 
+Here's their jam aisle. 
+They had 348 different kinds of jam. 
+We set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store. 
+We there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam, and we looked at two things: First, in which case were people more likely to stop, sample some jam? 
+More people stopped when there were 24, about 60 percent, than when there were six, about 40 percent. 
+The next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. 
+Now we see the opposite effect. 
+Of the people who stopped when there were 24, only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. 
+Of the people who stopped when there were six, well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. 
+Now if you do the math, people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24. 
+Now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us — at least it's good for our waistlines — but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions. 
+We choose not to choose, even when it goes against our best self-interests. 
+So now for the topic of today: financial savings. 
+Now I'm going to describe to you a study I did with Gur Huberman, Emir Kamenica, Wei Jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million Americans from about 650 plans all in the U.S. 
+And what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan, the 401 (k) plan, does that affect people's likelihood to save more for tomorrow. 
+And what we found was that indeed there was a correlation. 
+So in these plans, we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings. 
+And what we found was that, the more funds offered, indeed, there was less participation rate. 
+So if you look at the extremes, those plans that offered you two funds, participation rates were around in the mid-70s — still not as high as we want it to be. 
+In those plans that offered nearly 60 funds, participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile. 
+Now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present, even then, it has negative consequences. 
+So for those people who did choose to participate, the more choices available, the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds. 
+The more choices available, the more likely they were to put all their money in pure money market accounts. 
+Now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you're considering their future financial well-being. 
+Well, over the past decade, we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices. 
+They're more likely to delay choosing — procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest. 
+They're more likely to make worse choices — worse financial choices, medical choices. 
+They're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better. 
+The main reason for this is because, we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises, mustards, vinegars, jams, but we can't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display. 
+So what I want to propose to you today are four simple techniques — techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues — that you can easily apply in your businesses. 
+The first: Cut. 
+You've heard it said before, but it's never been more true than today, that less is more. 
+People are always upset when I say, "" Cut. "" They're always worried they're going to lose shelf space. 
+But in fact, what we're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut, get rid of those extraneous redundant options, well there's an increase in sales, there's a lowering of costs, there is an improvement of the choosing experience. 
+When Proctor & Gamble went from 26 different kinds of Head & Shoulders to 15, they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent. 
+When the Golden Cat Corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products, they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent — a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs. 
+You know, the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products. 
+The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products. 
+But the ninth largest retailer, the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is Aldi, and it offers you only 1,400 products — one kind of canned tomato sauce. 
+Now in the financial savings world, I think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that David Laibson was heavily involved in designing, which was the program that they have at Harvard. 
+Every single Harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund. 
+For those people who actually want to choose, they're given 20 funds, not 300 or more funds. 
+You know, often, people say, "" I don't know how to cut. 
+They're all important choices. "" And the first thing I do is I ask the employees, "" Tell me how these choices are different from one another. 
+And if your employees can't tell them apart, neither can your consumers. "" Now before we started our session this afternoon, I had a chat with Gary. 
+And Gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world. 
+Here's a description of the road. 
+And I'd like you to read it. 
+And now I'll give you a few seconds to read it and then I want you to clap your hands if you're ready to take Gary up on his offer. 
+(Light clapping) Okay. Anybody who's ready to take him up on his offer. 
+Is that all? 
+All right, let me show you some more about this. 
+(Laughter) You guys knew there was a trick, didn't you. 
+(Honk) Now who's ready to go on this trip. 
+(Applause) (Laughter) I think I might have actually heard more hands. 
+All right. 
+Now in fact, you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around, but I would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around. 
+Because the pictures made it feel more real to you. 
+Which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem, which is concretization. 
+That in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way, in a very concrete way. 
+Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an ATM card or a credit card as opposed to cash? 
+Because it doesn't feel like real money. 
+And it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more. 
+So a study that I did with Shlomo Benartzi and Alessandro Previtero, we did a study with people at ING — employees that are all working at ING — and now these people were all in a session where they're doing enrollment for their 401 (k) plan. 
+And during that session, we kept the session exactly the way it used to be, but we added one little thing. 
+The one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more. 
+By doing that simple thing, there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent. 
+The third technique: Categorization. 
+We can handle more categories than we can handle choices. 
+So for example, here's a study we did in a magazine aisle. 
+It turns out that in Wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor, the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664. 
+But you know what? 
+If I show you 600 magazines and I divide them up into 10 categories, versus I show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories, you believe that I have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if I gave you the 400 than if I gave you the 600. 
+Because the categories tell me how to tell them apart. 
+Here are two different jewelry displays. 
+One is called "" Jazz "" and the other one is called "" Swing. "" If you think the display on the left is Swing and the display on the right is Jazz, clap your hands. 
+(Light Clapping) Okay, there's some. 
+If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, clap your hands. 
+Okay, a bit more. 
+Now it turns out you're right. 
+The one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, but you know what? 
+This is a highly useless categorization scheme. 
+(Laughter) The categories need to say something to the chooser, not the choice-maker. 
+And you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds. 
+Who are they actually supposed to be informing? 
+My fourth technique: Condition for complexity. 
+It turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can, we've just got to take it a little easier. 
+We have to gradually increase the complexity. 
+I'm going to show you one example of what I'm talking about. 
+Let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car. 
+Here's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car. 
+You've got to make 60 different decisions, completely make up your car. 
+Now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision. 
+Car colors, exterior car colors — I've got 56 choices. 
+Engines, gearshift — four choices. 
+So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear. 
+So half of the customers are going to go from high choice, 56 car colors, to low choice, four gearshifts. 
+The other half of the customers are going to go from low choice, four gearshifts, to 56 car colors, high choice. 
+What am I going to look at? 
+How engaged you are. 
+If you keep hitting the default button per decision, that means you're getting overwhelmed, that means I'm losing you. 
+What you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice, they're hitting that default button over and over and over again. 
+We're losing them. 
+They go from low choice to high choice, they're hanging in there. 
+It's the same information. It's the same number of choices. 
+The only thing that I have done is I have varied the order in which that information is presented. 
+If I start you off easy, I learn how to choose. 
+Even though choosing gearshift doesn't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor, it still prepares me for how to choose. 
+It also gets me excited about this big product that I'm putting together, so I'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged. 
+So let me recap. 
+I have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload — cut — get rid of the extraneous alternatives; concretize — make it real; categorize — we can handle more categories, less choices; condition for complexity. 
+All of these techniques that I'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices — better for you, you can use them on yourself, better for the people that you are serving. 
+Because I believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing. 
+And the more we're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I tried to do a small good thing for my wife. 
+It makes me to stand here, the fame, the money I got out of it. 
+So what I did, I'd gone back to my early marriage days. 
+What you did in the early marriage days, you tried to impress your wife. I did the same. 
+On that occasion, I found my wife carrying something like this. 
+I saw. "" What is that? "" I asked. 
+My wife replied, "" None of your business. "" Then, being her husband, I ran behind her and saw she had a nasty rag cloth. 
+I don't even use that cloth to clean my two-wheeler. 
+Then I understood this — adapting that unhygienic method to manage her period days. 
+Then I immediately asked her, why are you [using] that unhygienic method? 
+She replied, I also know about [sanitary pads], but myself and my sisters, if they start using that, we have to cut our family milk budget. 
+Then I was shocked. What is the connection between using a sanitary pad and a milk budget? 
+And it's called affordability. 
+I tried to impress my new wife by offering her a packet of sanitary pads. 
+I went to a local shop, I tried to buy her a sanitary pad packet. 
+That fellow looks left and right, and spreads a newspaper, rolls it into the newspaper, gives it to me like a banned item, something like that. 
+I don't know why. I did not ask for a condom. 
+Then I took that pad. I want to see that. What is inside it? 
+The very first time, at the age of 29, that day I am touching the sanitary pad, first ever. 
+I must know: How many of the guys here have touched a sanitary pad? 
+They are not going to touch that, because it's not your matter. 
+Then I thought to myself, white substance, made of cotton — oh my God, that guy is just using a penny value of raw material — inside they are selling for pounds, dollars. 
+Why not make a local sanitary pad for my new wife? 
+That's how all this started, but after making a sanitary pad, where can I check it? 
+It's not like I can just check it in the lab. 
+I need a woman volunteer. Where can I get one in India? 
+Even in Bangalore you won't get [one], in India. 
+So only problem: the only available victim is my wife. 
+Then I made a sanitary pad and handed it to Shanti — my wife's name is Shanti. 
+"" Close your eyes. Whatever I give, it will be not a diamond pendant not a diamond ring, even a chocolate, I will give you a surprise with a lot of tinsel paper rolled up with it. 
+Close your eyes. "" Because I tried to make it intimate. 
+Because it's an arranged marriage, not a love marriage. 
+(Laughter) So one day she said, openly, I'm not going to support this research. 
+Then other victims, they got into my sisters. 
+But even sisters, wives, they're not ready to support in the research. 
+That's why I am always jealous with the saints in India. 
+They are having a lot of women volunteers around them. 
+Why I am not getting [any]? 
+You know, without them even calling, they'll get a lot of women volunteers. 
+Then I used, tried to use the medical college girls. 
+They also refused. Finally, I decide, use sanitary pad myself. 
+Now I am having a title like the first man to set foot on the moon. 
+Armstrong. Then Tenzing [and] Hillary, in Everest, like that Muruganantham is the first man wore a sanitary pad across the globe. 
+I wore a sanitary pad. I filled animal blood in a football bottle, I tied it up here, there is a tube going into my panties, while I'm walking, while I'm cycling, I made a press, doses of blood will go there. 
+That makes me bow down to any woman in front of me to give full respect. That five days I'll never forget — the messy days, the lousy days, that wetness. 
+My God, it's unbelievable. 
+But here the problem is, one company is making napkin out of cotton. It is working well. 
+But I am also trying to make sanitary pad with the good cotton. It's not working. 
+That makes me to want to refuse to continue this research and research and research. 
+You need first funds. 
+Not only financial crises, but because of the sanitary pad research, I come through all sorts of problems, including a divorce notice from my wife. 
+Why is this? I used medical college girls. 
+She suspects I am using as a trump card to run behind medical college girls. 
+Finally, I came to know it is a special cellulose derived from a pinewood, but even after that, you need a multimillion-dollar plant like this to process that material. Again, a stop-up. 
+Then I spend another four years to create my own machine tools, a simple machine tool like this. 
+In this machine, any rural woman can apply the same raw materials that they are processing in the multinational plant, anyone can make a world-class napkin at your dining hall. 
+That is my invention. 
+So after that, what I did, usually if anyone got a patent or an invention, immediately you want to make, convert into this. 
+I never did this. I dropped it just like this, because you do this, if anyone runs after money, their life will not [have] any beauty. It is boredom. 
+A lot of people making a lot of money, billion, billions of dollars accumulating. 
+Why are they coming for, finally, for philanthropy? 
+Why the need for accumulating money, then doing philanthropy? 
+What if one decided to start philanthropy from the day one? 
+That's why I am giving this machine only in rural India, for rural women, because in India, [you'll be] surprised, only two percent of women are using sanitary pads. The rest, they're using a rag cloth, a leaf, husk, [saw] dust, everything except sanitary pads. 
+It is the same in the 21st century. That's why I am going to decide to give this machine only for poor women across India. 
+So far, 630 installations happened in 23 states in six other countries. 
+Now I'm on my seventh year sustaining against multinational, transnational giants — makes all MBA students a question mark. 
+A school dropout from Coimbatore, how he is able to sustaining? 
+That makes me a visiting professor and guest lecturer in all IIMs. 
+(Applause) Play video one. 
+(Video) Arunachalam Muruganantham: The thing I saw in my wife's hand, "" Why are you using that nasty cloth? "" She replied immediately, "" I know about napkins, but if I start using napkins, then we have to cut our family milk budget. "" Why not make myself a low-cost napkin? 
+So I decided I'm going to sell this new machine only for Women Self Help Groups. 
+That is my idea. 
+AM: And previously, you need a multimillion investment for machine and all. Now, any rural woman can. 
+They are performing puja. 
+(Video): (Singing) You just think, competing giants, even from Harvard, Oxford, is difficult. 
+I make a rural woman to compete with multinationals. 
+I'm sustaining on seventh year. 
+Already 600 installations. What is my mission? 
+I'm going to make India [into] a 100-percent-sanitary-napkin-using country in my lifetime. 
+In this way I'm going to provide not less than a million rural employment that I'm going to create. 
+That's why I'm not running after this bloody money. 
+I'm doing something serious. 
+If you chase a girl, the girl won't like you. 
+Do your job simply, the girl will chase you. 
+Like that, I never chased Mahalakshmi. 
+Mahalakshmi is chasing me, I am keeping in the back pocket. 
+Not in front pocket. I'm a back pocket man. 
+That's all. A school dropout saw your problem in the society of not using sanitary pad. 
+I am becoming a solution provider. I'm very happy. 
+I don't want to make this as a corporate entity. 
+I want to make this as a local sanitary pad movement across the globe. That's why I put all the details on public domain like an open software. 
+Now 110 countries are accessing it. Okay? 
+So I classify the people into three: uneducated, little educated, surplus educated. 
+Little educated, done this. Surplus educated, what are you going to do for the society? 
+Thank you very much. Bye! 
+(Applause) 
+
+It can be a very complicated thing, the ocean. 
+And it can be a very complicated thing, what human health is. 
+And bringing those two together might seem a very daunting task, but what I'm going to try to say is that even in that complexity, there's some simple themes that I think, if we understand, we can really move forward. 
+And those simple themes aren't really themes about the complex science of what's going on, but things that we all pretty well know. 
+And I'm going to start with this one: If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. 
+We know that, right? We've experienced that. 
+And if we just take that and we build from there, then we can go to the next step, which is that if the ocean ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. 
+That's the theme of my talk. 
+And we're making the ocean pretty unhappy in a lot of different ways. 
+This is a shot of Cannery Row in 1932. 
+Cannery Row, at the time, had the biggest industrial canning operation on the west coast. 
+We piled enormous amounts of pollution into the air and into the water. 
+Rolf Bolin, who was a professor at the Hopkin's Marine Station where I work, wrote in the 1940s that "" The fumes from the scum floating on the inlets of the bay were so bad they turned lead-based paints black. "" People working in these canneries could barely stay there all day because of the smell, but you know what they came out saying? 
+They say, "" You know what you smell? 
+You smell money. "" That pollution was money to that community, and those people dealt with the pollution and absorbed it into their skin and into their bodies because they needed the money. 
+We made the ocean unhappy; we made people very unhappy, and we made them unhealthy. 
+The connection between ocean health and human health is actually based upon another couple simple adages, and I want to call that "pinch a minnow, hurt a whale." 
+The pyramid of ocean life... 
+Now, when an ecologist looks at the ocean — I have to tell you — we look at the ocean in a very different way, and we see different things than when a regular person looks at the ocean because when an ecologist looks at the ocean, we see all those interconnections. 
+We see the base of the food chain, the plankton, the small things, and we see how those animals are food to animals in the middle of the pyramid, and on so up this diagram. 
+And that flow, that flow of life, from the very base up to the very top, is the flow that ecologists see. 
+And that's what we're trying to preserve when we say, "" Save the ocean. Heal the ocean. "" It's that pyramid. 
+Now why does that matter for human health? 
+Because when we jam things in the bottom of that pyramid that shouldn't be there, some very frightening things happen. 
+Pollutants, some pollutants have been created by us: molecules like PCBs that can't be broken down by our bodies. 
+And they go in the base of that pyramid, and they drift up; they're passed up that way, on to predators and on to the top predators, and in so doing, they accumulate. 
+Now, to bring that home, I thought I'd invent a little game. 
+We don't really have to play it; we can just think about it here. 
+It's the Styrofoam and chocolate game. 
+Imagine that when we got on this boat, we were all given two Styrofoam peanuts. 
+Can't do much with them: Put them in your pocket. 
+Suppose the rules are: every time you offer somebody a drink, you give them the drink, and you give them your Styrofoam peanuts too. 
+What'll happen is that the Styrofoam peanuts will start moving through our society here, and they will accumulate in the drunkest, stingiest people. 
+(Laughter) There's no mechanism in this game for them to go anywhere but into a bigger and bigger pile of indigestible Styrofoam peanuts. 
+And that's exactly what happens with PDBs in this food pyramid: They accumulate into the top of it. 
+Now suppose, instead of Styrofoam peanuts, we take these lovely little chocolates that we get and we had those instead. 
+Well, some of us would be eating those chocolates instead of passing them around, and instead of accumulating, they will just pass into our group here and not accumulate in any one group because they're absorbed by us. 
+And that's the difference between a PCB and, say, something natural like an omega-3, something we want out of the marine food chain. 
+PCBs accumulate. 
+We have great examples of that, unfortunately. 
+PCBs accumulate in dolphins in Sarasota Bay, in Texas, in North Carolina. 
+They get into the food chain. 
+The dolphins eat the fish that have PCBs from the plankton, and those PCBs, being fat-soluble, accumulate in these dolphins. 
+Now, a dolphin, mother dolphin, any dolphin — there's only one way that a PCB can get out of a dolphin. 
+And what's that? 
+In mother's milk. 
+Here's a diagram of the PCB load of dolphins in Sarasota Bay. 
+Adult males: a huge load. 
+Juveniles: a huge load. 
+Females after their first calf is already weaned: a lower load. 
+Those females, they're not trying to. 
+Those females are passing the PCBs in the fat of their own mother's milk into their offspring, and their offspring don't survive. 
+The death rate in these dolphins, for the first calf born of every female dolphin, is 60 to 80 percent. 
+These mothers pump their first offspring full of this pollutant, and most of them die. 
+Now, the mother then can go and reproduce, but what a terrible price to pay for the accumulation of this pollutant in these animals — the death of the first-born calf. 
+There's another top predator in the ocean, it turns out. 
+That top predator, of course, is us. 
+And we also are eating meat that comes from some of these same places. 
+This is whale meat that I photographed in a grocery store in Tokyo — or is it? 
+In fact, what we did a few years ago was learn how to smuggle a molecular biology lab into Tokyo and use it to genetically test the DNA out of whale meat samples and identify what they really were. 
+And some of those whale meat samples were whale meat. 
+Some of them were illegal whale meat, by the way. 
+That's another story. 
+But some of them were not whale meat at all. 
+Even though they were labeled whale meat, they were dolphin meat. 
+Some of them were dolphin liver. Some of them were dolphin blubber. 
+And those dolphin parts had a huge load of PCBs, dioxins and heavy metals. 
+And that huge load was passing into the people that ate this meat. 
+It turns out that a lot of dolphins are being sold as meat in the whale meat market around the world. 
+That's a tragedy for those populations, but it's also a tragedy for the people eating them because they don't know that that's toxic meat. 
+We had these data a few years ago. 
+I remember sitting at my desk being about the only person in the world who knew that whale meat being sold in these markets was really dolphin meat, and it was toxic. 
+It had two-to-three-to-400 times the toxic loads ever allowed by the EPA. 
+And I remember there sitting at my desk thinking, "Well, I know this. This is a great scientific discovery," but it was so awful. 
+And for the very first time in my scientific career, I broke scientific protocol, which is that you take the data and publish them in scientific journals and then begin to talk about them. 
+We sent a very polite letter to the Minister of Health in Japan and simply pointed out that this is an intolerable situation, not for us, but for the people of Japan because mothers who may be breastfeeding, who may have young children, would be buying something that they thought was healthy, but it was really toxic. 
+That led to a whole series of other campaigns in Japan, and I'm really proud to say that at this point, it's very difficult to buy anything in Japan that's labeled incorrectly, even though they're still selling whale meat, which I believe they shouldn't. 
+But at least it's labeled correctly, and you're no longer going to be buying toxic dolphin meat instead. 
+It isn't just there that this happens, but in a natural diet of some communities in the Canadian arctic and in the United States and in the European arctic, a natural diet of seals and whales leads to an accumulation of PCBs that have gathered up from all parts of the world and ended up in these women. 
+These women have toxic breast milk. 
+They cannot feed their offspring, their children, their breast milk because of the accumulation of these toxins in their food chain, in their part of the world's ocean pyramid. 
+That means their immune systems are compromised. 
+It means that their children's development can be compromised. 
+And the world's attention on this over the last decade has reduced the problem for these women, not by changing the pyramid, but by changing what they particularly eat out of it. 
+We've taken them out of their natural pyramid in order to solve this problem. 
+That's a good thing for this particular acute problem, but it does nothing to solve the pyramid problem. 
+There's other ways of breaking the pyramid. 
+The pyramid, if we jam things in the bottom, can get backed up like a sewer line that's clogged. 
+And if we jam nutrients, sewage, fertilizer in the base of that food pyramid, it can back up all through it. 
+We end up with things we've heard about before: red tides, for example, which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage. 
+We can also see blooms of bacteria, blooms of viruses in the ocean. 
+These are two shots of a red tide coming on shore here and a bacteria in the genus vibrio, which includes the genus that has cholera in it. 
+How many people have seen a "" beach closed "" sign? 
+Why does that happen? 
+It happens because we have jammed so much into the base of the natural ocean pyramid that these bacteria clog it up and overfill onto our beaches. 
+Often what jams us up is sewage. 
+Now how many of you have ever gone to a state park or a national park where you had a big sign at the front saying, "" Closed because human sewage is so far over this park that you can't use it ""? 
+Not very often. We wouldn't tolerate that. 
+We wouldn't tolerate our parks being swamped by human sewage, but beaches are closed a lot in our country. 
+They're closed more and more and more all around the world for the same reason, and I believe we shouldn't tolerate that either. 
+It's not just a question of cleanliness; it's also a question of how those organisms then turn into human disease. 
+These vibrios, these bacteria, can actually infect people. 
+They can go into your skin and create skin infections. 
+This is a graph from NOAA's ocean and human health initiative, showing the rise of the infections by vibrio in people over the last few years. 
+Surfers, for example, know this incredibly. 
+And if you can see on some surfing sites, in fact, not only do you see what the waves are like or what the weather's like, but on some surf rider sites, you see a little flashing poo alert. 
+That means that the beach might have great waves, but it's a dangerous place for surfers to be because they can carry with them, even after a great day of surfing, this legacy of an infection that might take a very long time to solve. 
+Some of these infections are actually carrying antibiotic resistance genes now, and that makes them even more difficult. 
+These same infections create harmful algal blooms. 
+Those blooms are generating other kinds of chemicals. 
+This is just a simple list of some of the types of poisons that come out of these harmful algal blooms: shellfish poisoning, fish ciguatera, diarrheic shellfish poisoning — you don't want to know about that — neurotoxic shellfish poisoning, paralytic shellfish poisoning. 
+These are things that are getting into our food chain because of these blooms. 
+Rita Calwell very famously traced a very interesting story of cholera into human communities, brought there, not by a normal human vector, but by a marine vector, this copepod. 
+Copepods are small crustaceans. 
+They're a tiny fraction of an inch long, and they can carry on their little legs some of the cholera bacteria that then leads to human disease. 
+That has sparked cholera epidemics in ports along the world and has led to increased concentration on trying to make sure shipping doesn't move these vectors of cholera around the world. 
+So what do you do? 
+We have major problems in disrupted ecosystem flow that the pyramid may not be working so well, that the flow from the base up into it is being blocked and clogged. 
+What do you do when you have this sort of disrupted flow? 
+Well, there's a bunch of things you could do. 
+You could call Joe the Plumber, for example. 
+And he could come in and fix the flow. 
+But in fact, if you look around the world, not only are there hope spots for where we may be able to fix problems, there have been places where problems have been fixed, where people have come to grips with these issues and begun to turn them around. 
+Monterey is one of those. 
+I started out showing how much we had distressed the Monterey Bay ecosystem with pollution and the canning industry and all of the attendant problems. 
+In 1932, that's the picture. 
+In 2009, the picture is dramatically different. 
+The canneries are gone. The pollution has abated. 
+But there's a greater sense here that what the individual communities need is working ecosystems. 
+They need a functioning pyramid from the base all the way to the top. 
+And that pyramid in Monterey, right now, because of the efforts of a lot of different people, is functioning better than it's ever functioned for the last 150 years. 
+It didn't happen accidentally. 
+It happened because many people put their time and effort and their pioneering spirit into this. 
+On the left there, Julia Platt, the mayor of my little hometown in Pacific Grove. 
+At 74 years old, became mayor because something had to be done to protect the ocean. 
+In 1931, she produced California's first community-based marine protected area, right next to the biggest polluting cannery, because Julia knew that when the canneries eventually were gone, the ocean needed a place to grow from, that the ocean needed a place to spark a seed, and she wanted to provide that seed. 
+Other people, like David Packard and Julie Packard, who were instrumental in producing the Monterey Bay aquarium to lock into people's notion that the ocean and the health of the ocean ecosystem were just as important to the economy of this area as eating the ecosystem would be. 
+That change in thinking has led to a dramatic shift, not only in the fortunes of Monterey Bay, but other places around the world. 
+Well, I want to leave you with the thought that what we're really trying to do here is protect this ocean pyramid, and that ocean pyramid connects to our own pyramid of life. 
+It's an ocean planet, and we think of ourselves as a terrestrial species, but the pyramid of life in the ocean and our own lives on land are intricately connected. 
+And it's only through having the ocean being healthy that we can remain healthy ourselves. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It's time to start designing for our ears. 
+Architects and designers tend to focus exclusively on these. 
+They use these to design with and they design for them, which is why we end up sitting in restaurants that look like this — (loud crowd noise) — and sound like this, shouting from a foot away to try and be heard by our dinner companion, or why we get on airplanes — (flight attendant announcements) — which cost 200 million pounds, with somebody talking through an old-fashioned telephone handset on a cheap stereo system, making us jump out of our skins. 
+We're designing environments that make us crazy. (Laughter) And it's not just our quality of life which suffers. 
+It's our health, our social behavior, and our productivity as well. 
+How does this work? Well, two ways. 
+First of all, ambience. I have a whole TEDTalk about this. 
+Sound affects us physiologically, psychologically, cognitively and behaviorally all the time. 
+The sound around us is affecting us even though we're not conscious of it. 
+There's a second way though, as well. 
+That's interference. Communication requires sending and receiving, and I have another whole TEDTalk about the importance of conscious listening, but I can send as well as I like, and you can be brilliant conscious listeners. 
+If the space I'm sending it in is not effective, that communication can't happen. 
+Spaces tend to include noise and acoustics. 
+A room like this has acoustics, this one very good acoustics. 
+Many rooms are not so good. 
+Let me give you some examples from a couple of areas which I think we all care about: health and education. 
+(Hospital noises) When I was visiting my terminally ill father in a hospital, I was asking myself, how does anybody get well in a place that sounds like this? 
+Hospital sound is getting worse all the time. 
+Noise levels in hospitals have doubled in the last few years, and it affects not just the patients but also the people working there. 
+I think we would like for dispensing errors to be zero, wouldn't we? And yet, as noise levels go up, so do the errors in dispensing made by the staff in hospitals. 
+Most of all, though, it affects the patients, and that could be you, it could be me. 
+Sleep is absolutely crucial for recovery. 
+It's when we regenerate, when we rebuild ourselves, and with threatening noise like this going on, your body, even if you are able to sleep, your body is telling you, "" I'm under threat. This is dangerous. "" And the quality of sleep is degraded, and so is our recovery. 
+There are just huge benefits to come from designing for the ears in our health care. 
+This is an area I intend to take on this year. 
+Education. 
+When I see a classroom that looks like this, can you imagine how this sounds? 
+I am forced to ask myself a question. 
+("" Do architects have ears? "") (Laughter) Now, that's a little unfair. Some of my best friends are architects. (Laughter) And they definitely do have ears. 
+But I think sometimes they don't use them when they're designing buildings. Here's a case in point. 
+This is a 32-million-pound flagship academy school which was built quite recently in the U.K. and designed by one of Britain's top architects. 
+Unfortunately, it was designed like a corporate headquarters, with a vast central atrium and classrooms leading off it with no back walls at all. 
+The children couldn't hear their teachers. 
+They had to go back in and spend 600,000 pounds putting the walls in. Let's stop this madness of open plan classrooms right now, please. 
+It's not just these modern buildings which suffer. 
+Old-fashioned classrooms suffer too. 
+A study in Florida just a few years ago found that if you're sitting where this photograph was taken in the classroom, row four, speech intelligibility is just 50 percent. 
+Children are losing one word in two. 
+Now that doesn't mean they only get half their education, but it does mean they have to work very hard to join the dots and understand what's going on. 
+This is affected massively by reverberation time, how reverberant a room is. 
+In a classroom with a reverberation time of 1.2 seconds, which is pretty common, this is what it sounds like. 
+(Inaudible echoing voice) Not so good, is it? 
+If you take that 1.2 seconds down to 0.4 seconds by installing acoustic treatments, sound absorbing materials and so forth, this is what you get. 
+Voice: In language, infinitely many words can be written with a small set of letters. In arithmetic, infinitely many numbers can be composed from just a few digits with the help of the simple zero. 
+Julian Treasure: What a difference. 
+Now that education you would receive, and thanks to the British acoustician Adrian James for those simulations. The signal was the same, the background noise was the same. 
+All that changed was the acoustics of the classroom in those two examples. 
+If education can be likened to watering a garden, which is a fair metaphor, sadly, much of the water is evaporating before it reaches the flowers, especially for some groups, for example, those with hearing impairment. 
+Now that's not just deaf children. That could be any child who's got a cold, glue ear, an ear infection, even hay fever. On a given day, one in eight children fall into that group, on any given day. 
+Then you have children for whom English is a second language, or whatever they're being taught in is a second language. 
+In the U.K., that's more than 10 percent of the school population. 
+And finally, after Susan Cain's wonderful TEDTalk in February, we know that introverts find it very difficult to relate when they're in a noisy environment doing group work. 
+Add those up. That is a lot of children who are not receiving their education properly. 
+It's not just the children who are affected, though. 
+(Noisy conversation) This study in Germany found the average noise level in classrooms is 65 decibels. 
+I have to really raise my voice to talk over 65 decibels of sound, and teachers are not just raising their voices. 
+This chart maps the teacher's heart rate against the noise level. 
+Noise goes up, heart rate goes up. 
+That is not good for you. 
+In fact, 65 decibels is the very level at which this big survey of all the evidence on noise and health found that, that is the threshold for the danger of myocardial infarction. 
+To you and me, that's a heart attack. 
+It may not be pushing the boat out too far to suggest that many teachers are losing significant life expectancy by teaching in environments like that day after day. 
+What does it cost to treat a classroom down to that 0.4-second reverberation time? 
+Two and a half thousand pounds. 
+And the Essex study which has just been done in the U.K., which incidentally showed that when you do this, you do not just make a room that's suitable for hearing-impaired children, you make a room where behavior improves, and results improve significantly, this found that sending a child out of area to a school that does have such a room, if you don't have one, costs 90,000 pounds a year. 
+I think the economics are pretty clear on this. 
+I'm glad that debate is happening on this. 
+I just moderated a major conference in London a few weeks ago called Sound Education, which brought together top acousticians, government people, teachers, and so forth. 
+We're at last starting to debate this issue, and the benefits that are available for designing for the ears in education, unbelievable. 
+Out of that conference, incidentally, also came a free app which is designed to help children study if they're having to work at home, for example, in a noisy kitchen. 
+And that's free out of that conference. 
+Let's broaden the perspective a little bit and look at cities. 
+We have urban planners. 
+Where are the urban sound planners? 
+I don't know of one in the world, and the opportunity is there to transform our experience in our cities. 
+The World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of Europe's population is having its sleep degraded by noise in cities. We can do better than that. 
+And in our offices, we spend a lot of time at work. 
+Where are the office sound planners? 
+People who say, don't sit that team next to this team, because they like noise and they need quiet. 
+Or who say, don't spend all your budget on a huge screen in the conference room, and then place one tiny microphone in the middle of a table for 30 people. (Laughter) If you can hear me, you can understand me without seeing me. If you can see me without hearing me, that does not work. 
+So office sound is a huge area, and incidentally, noise in offices has been shown to make people less helpful, less enjoy their teamwork, and less productive at work. 
+Finally, we have homes. We use interior designers. 
+Where are the interior sound designers? 
+Hey, let's all be interior sound designers, take on listening to our rooms and designing sound that's effective and appropriate. 
+My friend Richard Mazuch, an architect in London, coined the phrase "" invisible architecture. "" I love that phrase. 
+It's about designing, not appearance, but experience, so that we have spaces that sound as good as they look, that are fit for purpose, that improve our quality of life, our health and well being, our social behavior and our productivity. 
+It's time to start designing for the ears. 
+Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I started Improv Everywhere about 10 years ago when I moved to New York City with an interest in acting and comedy. 
+Because I was new to the city, I didn't have access to a stage, so I decided to create my own in public places. 
+So the first project we're going to take a look at is the very first No Pants Subway Ride. 
+Now this took place in January of 2002. 
+And this woman is the star of the video. 
+She doesn't know she's being filmed. 
+She's being filmed with a hidden camera. 
+This is on the 6 train in New York City. 
+And this is the first stop along the line. 
+These are two Danish guys who come out and sit down next to the hidden camera. 
+And that's me right there in a brown coat. 
+It's about 30 degrees outside. 
+I'm wearing a hat. I'm wearing a scarf. 
+And the girl's going to notice me right here. 
+(Laughter) And as you'll see now, I'm not wearing pants. (Laughter) 
+So at this point — at this point she's noticed me, but in New York there's weirdos on any given train car. 
+One person's not that unusual. 
+She goes back to reading her book, which is unfortunately titled "" Rape. "" (Laughter) So she's noticed the unusual thing, but she's gone back to her normal life. 
+Now in the meantime, I have six friends who are waiting at the next six consecutive stops in their underwear as well. 
+They're going to be entering this car one by one. 
+We'll act as though we don't know each other. 
+And we'll act as if it's just an unfortunate mistake we've made, forgetting our pants on this cold January day. 
+(Laughter) So at this point, she decides to put the rape book away. (Laughter) 
+And she decides to be a little bit more aware of her surroundings. 
+Now in the meantime, the two Danish guys to the left of the camera, they're cracking up. 
+They think this is the funniest thing they've ever seen before. 
+And watch her make eye contact with them right about now. 
+(Laughter) And I love that moment in this video, because before it became a shared experience, it was something that was maybe a little bit scary, or something that was at least confusing to her. 
+And then once it became a shared experience, it was funny and something that she could laugh at. 
+So the train is now pulling into the third stop along the 6 line. 
+(Laughter) So the video won't show everything. 
+This goes on for another four stops. 
+A total of seven guys enter anonymously in their underwear. 
+At the eighth stop, a girl came in with a giant duffel bag and announced she had pants for sale for a dollar — like you might sell batteries or candy on the train. 
+We all very matter of factly bought a pair of pants, put them on and said, "" Thank you. That's exactly what I needed today, "" and then exited without revealing what had happened and went in all different directions. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+So that's a still from the video there. 
+And I love that girl's reaction so much. 
+And watching that videotape later that day inspired me to keep doing what I do. 
+And really one of the points of Improv Everywhere is to cause a scene in a public place that is a positive experience for other people. 
+It's a prank, but it's a prank that gives somebody a great story to tell. 
+And her reaction inspired me to do a second annual No Pants Subway Ride. 
+And we've continued to do it every year. 
+This January, we did the 10th annual No Pants Subway Ride where a diverse group of 3,500 people rode the train in their underwear in New York — almost every single train line in the city. 
+And also in 50 other cities around the world, people participated. 
+(Laughter) As I started taking improv class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and meeting other creative people and other performers and comedians, I started amassing a mailing list of people who wanted to do these types of projects. 
+So I could do more large-scale projects. 
+Well one day I was walking through Union Square, and I saw this building, which had just been built in 2005. 
+And there was a girl in one of the windows and she was dancing. 
+And it was very peculiar, because it was dark out, but she was back-lit with florescent lighting, and she was very much onstage, and I couldn't figure out why she was doing it. 
+After about 15 seconds, her friend appeared — she had been hiding behind a display — and they laughed and hugged each other and ran away. 
+So it seemed like maybe she had been dared to do this. 
+So I got inspired by that. 
+Looking at the entire facade — there were 70 total windows — and I knew what I had to do. 
+(Laughter) So this project is called Look Up More. We had 70 actors dress in black. 
+This was completely unauthorized. 
+We didn't let the stores know we were coming. 
+And I stood in the park giving signals. 
+The first signal was for everybody to hold up these four-foot tall letters that spelled out "" Look Up More, "" the name of the project. 
+The second signal was for everybody to do Jumping jacks together. 
+You'll see that start right here. 
+(Laughter) And then we had dancing. We had everyone dance. 
+And then we had dance solos where only one person would dance and everybody would point to them. 
+(Laughter) So then I gave a new hand signal, which signaled the next soloist down below in Forever 21, and he danced. 
+There were several other activities. 
+We had people jumping up and down, people dropping to the ground. 
+And I was standing just anonymously in a sweatshirt, putting my hand on and off of a trashcan to signal the advancement. 
+And because it was in Union Square Park, right by a subway station, there were hundreds of people by the end who stopped and looked up and watched what we were doing. 
+There's a better photo of it. 
+So that particular event was inspired by a moment that I happened to stumble upon. 
+The next project I want to show was given to me in an email from a stranger. 
+A high school kid in Texas wrote me in 2006 and said, "" You should get as many people as possible to put on blue polo shirts and khaki pants and go into a Best Buy and stand around. "" (Laughter) (Applause) So I wrote this high school kid back immediately, and I said, "" Yes, you are correct. 
+I think I'll try to do that this weekend. Thank you. "" So here's the video. 
+So again, this is 2005. 
+This is the Best Buy in New York City. 
+We had about 80 people show up to participate, entering one-by-one. 
+There was an eight year-old girl, a 10 year-old girl. 
+There was also a 65 year-old man who participated. 
+So a very diverse group of people. 
+And I told people, "" Don't work. Don't actually do work. 
+But also, don't shop. 
+Just stand around and don't face products. "" Now you can see the regular employees by the ones that have the yellow tags on their shirt. 
+Everybody else is one of our actors. 
+(Laughter) The lower level employees thought it was very funny. 
+And in fact, several of them went to go get their camera from the break room and took photos with us. 
+A lot of them made jokes about trying to get us to go to the back to get heavy television sets for customers. 
+The managers and the security guards, on the other hand, did not find it particularly funny. 
+You can see them in this footage. 
+They're wearing either a yellow shirt or a black shirt. 
+And we were there probably 10 minutes before the managers decided to dial 911. 
+(Laughter) So they started running around telling everybody the cops were coming, watch out, the cops were coming. 
+And you can see the cops in this footage right here. 
+That's a cop wearing black right there, being filmed with a hidden camera. 
+Ultimately, the police had to inform Best Buy management that it was not, in fact, illegal to wear a blue polo shirt and khaki pants. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+So we had been there for 20 minutes; we were happy to exit the store. 
+One thing the managers were trying to do was to track down our cameras. 
+And they caught a couple of my guys who had hidden cameras in duffel bags. 
+But the one camera guy they never caught was the guy that went in just with a blank tape and went over to the Best Buy camera department and just put his tape in one of their cameras and pretended to shop. 
+So I like that concept of using their own technology against them. 
+(Laughter) I think our best projects are ones that are site specific and happen at a particular place for a reason. 
+And one morning, I was riding the subway. 
+I had to make a transfer at the 53rd St. stop where there are these two giant escalators. 
+And it's a very depressing place to be in the morning, it's very crowded. 
+So I decided to try and stage something that could make it as happy as possible for one morning. 
+So this was in the winter of 2009 — 8: 30 in the morning. 
+It's morning rush hour. 
+It's very cold outside. 
+People are coming in from Queens, transferring from the E train to the 6 train. 
+And they're going up these giant escalators on their way to their jobs. 
+(Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. 
+So there's a photograph that illustrates it a little bit better. 
+He gave 2,000 high fives that day, and he washed his hands before and afterward and did not get sick. 
+And that was done also without permission, although no one seemed to care. 
+So I'd say over the years, one of the most common criticisms I see of Improv Everywhere left anonymously on YouTube comments is: "" These people have too much time on their hands. "" And you know, not everybody's going to like everything you do, and I've certainly developed a thick skin thanks to Internet comments, but that one's always bothered me, because we don't have too much time on our hands. 
+The participants at Improv Everywhere events have just as much leisure time as any other New Yorkers, they just occasionally choose to spend it in an unusual way. 
+You know, every Saturday and Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people each fall gather in football stadiums to watch games. 
+And I've never seen anybody comment, looking at a football game, saying, "" All those people in the stands, they have too much time on their hands. "" And of course they don't. 
+It's a perfectly wonderful way to spent a weekend afternoon, watching a football game in a stadium. 
+But I think it's also a perfectly valid way to spend an afternoon freezing in place with 200 people in the Grand Central terminal or dressing up like a ghostbuster and running through the New York Public Library. 
+(Laughter) Or listening to the same MP3 as 3,000 other people and dancing silently in a park, or bursting into song in a grocery store as part of a spontaneous musical, or diving into the ocean in Coney Island wearing formal attire. 
+You know, as kids, we're taught to play. 
+And we're never given a reason why we should play. 
+It's just acceptable that play is a good thing. 
+And I think that's sort of the point of Improv Everywhere. 
+It's that there is no point and that there doesn't have to be a point. 
+We don't need a reason. 
+As long as it's fun and it seems like it's going to be a funny idea and it seems like the people who witness it will also have a fun time, then that's enough for us. 
+And I think, as adults, we need to learn that there's no right or wrong way to play. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I go to parties, it doesn't usually take very long for people to find out that I'm a scientist and I study sex. 
+And then I get asked questions. 
+And the questions usually have a very particular format. 
+They start with the phrase, "A friend told me," and then they end with the phrase, "Is this true?" 
+And most of the time I'm glad to say that I can answer them, but sometimes I have to say, "" I'm really sorry, but I don't know because I'm not that kind of a doctor. "" That is, I'm not a clinician, I'm a comparative biologist who studies anatomy. 
+And my job is to look at lots of different species of animals and try to figure out how their tissues and organs work when everything's going right, rather than trying to figure out how to fix things when they go wrong, like so many of you. 
+And what I do is I look for similarities and differences in the solutions that they've evolved for fundamental biological problems. 
+So today I'm here to argue that this is not at all an esoteric Ivory Tower activity that we find at our universities, but that broad study across species, tissue types and organ systems can produce insights that have direct implications for human health. 
+And this is true both of my recent project on sex differences in the brain, and my more mature work on the anatomy and function of penises. 
+And now you know why I'm fun at parties. 
+(Laughter) So today I'm going to give you an example drawn from my penis study to show you how knowledge drawn from studies of one organ system provided insights into a very different one. 
+Now I'm sure as everyone in the audience already knows — I did have to explain it to my nine-year-old late last week — penises are structures that transfer sperm from one individual to another. 
+And the slide behind me barely scratches the surface of how widespread they are in animals. 
+There's an enormous amount of anatomical variation. 
+You find muscular tubes, modified legs, modified fins, as well as the mammalian fleshy, inflatable cylinder that we're all familiar with — or at least half of you are. 
+(Laughter) And I think we see this tremendous variation because it's a really effective solution to a very basic biological problem, and that is getting sperm in a position to meet up with eggs and form zygotes. 
+Now the penis isn't actually required for internal fertiliztion, but when internal fertilization evolves, penises often follow. 
+And the question I get when I start talking about this most often is, "What made you interested in this subject?" 
+And the answer is skeletons. 
+You wouldn't think that skeletons and penises have very much to do with one another. 
+And that's because we tend to think of skeletons as stiff lever systems that produce speed or power. 
+And my first forays into biological research, doing dinosaur paleontology as an undergraduate, were really squarely in that realm. 
+But when I went to graduate school to study biomechanics, I really wanted to find a dissertation project that would expand our knowledge of skeletal function. 
+I tried a bunch of different stuff. 
+A lot of it didn't pan out. 
+But then one day I started thinking about the mammalian penis. 
+And it's really an odd sort of structure. 
+Before it can be used for internal fertilization, its mechanical behavior has to change in a really dramatic fashion. 
+Most of the time it's a flexible organ. 
+It's easy to bend. 
+But before it's brought into use during copulation it has to become rigid, it has to become difficult to bend. 
+And moreover, it has to work. 
+A reproductive system that fails to function produces an individual that has no offspring, and that individual is then kicked out of the gene pool. 
+And so I thought, "" Here's a problem that just cries out for a skeletal system — not one like this one, but one like this one — because, functionally, a skeleton is any system that supports tissue and transmits forces. 
+And I already knew that animals like this earthworm, indeed most animals, don't support their tissues by draping them over bones. 
+Instead they're more like reinforced water balloons. 
+They use a skeleton that we call a hydrostatic skeleton. 
+And a hydrostatic skeleton uses two elements. 
+The skeletal support comes from an interaction between a pressurized fluid and a surrounding wall of tissue that's held in tension and reinforced with fibrous proteins. 
+And the interaction is crucial. 
+Without both elements you have no support. 
+If you have fluid with no wall to surround it and keep pressure up, you have a puddle. 
+And if you have just the wall with no fluid inside of it to put the wall in tension, you've got a little wet rag. 
+When you look at a penis in cross section, it has a lot of the hallmarks of a hydrostatic skeleton. 
+It has a central space of spongy erectile tissue that fills with fluid — in this case blood — surrounded by a wall of tissue that's rich in a stiff structural protein called collagen. 
+But at the time when I started this project, the best explanation I could find for penal erection was that the wall surrounded these spongy tissues, and the spongy tissues filled with blood and pressure rose and voila! it became erect. 
+And that explained to me expansion — made sense: more fluid, you get tissues that expand — but it didn't actually explain erection. 
+Because there was no mechanism in this explanation for making this structure hard to bend. 
+And no one had systematically looked at the wall tissue. 
+So I thought, wall tissue's important in skeletons. 
+It has to be part of the explanation. 
+And this was the point at which my graduate adviser said, "Whoa! Hold on. Slow down." 
+Because after about six months of me talking about this, I think he finally figured out that I was really serious about the penis thing. 
+(Laughter) So he sat me down, and he warned me. 
+He was like, "" Be careful going down this path. 
+I'm not sure this project's going to pan out. "" Because he was afraid I was walking into a trap. 
+I was taking on a socially embarrassing question with an answer that he thought might not be particularly interesting. 
+And that was because every hydrostatic skeleton that we had found in nature up to that point had the same basic elements. 
+It had the central fluid, it had the surrounding wall, and the reinforcing fibers in the wall were arranged in crossed helices around the long axis of the skeleton. 
+So the image behind me shows a piece of tissue in one of these cross helical skeletons cut so that you're looking at the surface of the wall. 
+The arrow shows you the long axis. 
+And you can see two layers of fibers, one in blue and one in yellow, arranged in left-handed and right-handed angles. 
+And if you weren't just looking at a little section of the fibers, those fibers would be going in helices around the long axis of the skeleton — something like a Chinese finger trap, where you stick your fingers in and they get stuck. 
+And these skeletons have a particular set of behaviors, which I'm going to demonstrate in a film. 
+It's a model skeleton that I made out of a piece of cloth that I wrapped around an inflated balloon. 
+The cloth's cut on the bias. 
+So you can see that the fibers wrap in helices, and those fibers can reorient as the skeleton moves, which means the skeleton's flexible. 
+It lengthens, shortens and bends really easily in response to internal or external forces. 
+Now my adviser's concern was what if the penile wall tissue is just the same as any other hydrostatic skeleton. 
+What are you going to contribute? 
+What new thing are you contributing to our knowledge of biology? 
+And I thought, "" Yeah, he does have a really good point here. "" So I spent a long, long time thinking about it. 
+And one thing kept bothering me, and that's, when they're functioning, penises don't wiggle. 
+(Laughter) So something interesting had to be going on. 
+So I went ahead, collected wall tissue, prepared it so it was erect, sectioned it, put it on slides and then stuck it under the microscope to have a look, fully expecting to see crossed helices of collagen of some variety. 
+But instead I saw this. 
+There's an outer layer and an inner layer. 
+The arrow shows you the long axis of the skeleton. 
+I was really surprised at this. 
+Everyone I showed it was really surprised at this. 
+Why was everyone surprised at this? 
+That's because we knew theoretically that there was another way of arranging fibers in a hydrostatic skeleton, and that was with fibers at zero degrees and 90 degrees to the long axis of the structure. 
+The thing is, no one had ever seen it before in nature. 
+And now I was looking at one. 
+Those fibers in that particular orientation give the skeleton a very, very different behavior. 
+I'm going to show a model made out of exactly the same materials. 
+So it'll be made of the same cotton cloth, same balloon, same internal pressure. 
+But the only difference is that the fibers are arranged differently. 
+And you'll see that, unlike the cross helical model, this model resists extension and contraction and resists bending. 
+Now what that tells us is that wall tissues are doing so much more than just covering the vascular tissues. 
+They're an integral part of the penile skeleton. 
+If the wall around the erectile tissue wasn't there, if it wasn't reinforced in this way, the shape would change, but the inflated penis would not resist bending, and erection simply wouldn't work. 
+It's an observation with obvious medical applications in humans as well, but it's also relevant in a broad sense, I think, to the design of prosthetics, soft robots, basically anything where changes of shape and stiffness are important. 
+So to sum up: Twenty years ago, I had a college adviser tell me, when I went to the college and said, "I'm kind of interested in anatomy," they said, "" Anatomy's a dead science. "" He couldn't have been more wrong. 
+I really believe that we still have a lot to learn about the normal structure and function of our bodies. 
+Not just about its genetics and molecular biology, but up here in the meat end of the scale. 
+We've got limits on our time. 
+We often focus on one disease, one model, one problem, but my experience suggests that we should take the time to apply ideas broadly between systems and just see where it takes us. 
+After all, if ideas about invertebrate skeletons can give us insights about mammalian reproductive systems, there could be lots of other wild and productive connections lurking out there just waiting to be found. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Two years ago, I was invited as an artist to participate in an exhibition commemorating 100 years of Islamic art in Europe. 
+The curator had only one condition: I had to use the Arabic script for my artwork. 
+Now, as an artist, a woman, an Arab, or a human being living in the world in 2010, I only had one thing to say: I wanted to say no. 
+And in Arabic, to say "" no, "" we say "" no, and a thousand times no. "" So I decided to look for a thousand different noes. 
+on everything ever produced under Islamic or Arab patronage in the past 1,400 years, from Spain to the borders of China. 
+I collected my findings in a book, placed them chronologically, stating the name, the patron, the medium and the date. 
+Now, the book sat on a small shelf next to the installation, which stood three by seven meters, in Munich, Germany, in September of 2010. 
+Now, in January, 2011, the revolution started, and life stopped for 18 days, and on the 12th of February, we naively celebrated on the streets of Cairo, believing that the revolution had succeeded. 
+Nine months later I found myself spraying messages in Tahrir Square. The reason for this act was this image that I saw in my newsfeed. 
+I did not feel that I could live in a city where people were being killed and thrown like garbage on the street. 
+So I took one "" no "" off a tombstone from the Islamic Museum in Cairo, and I added a message to it: "no to military rule." 
+And I started spraying that on the streets in Cairo. 
+But that led to a series of no, coming out of the book like ammunition, and adding messages to them, and I started spraying them on the walls. 
+So I'll be sharing some of these noes with you. 
+No to a new Pharaoh, because whoever comes next should understand that we will never be ruled by another dictator. 
+No to violence: Ramy Essam came to Tahrir on the second day of the revolution, and he sat there with this guitar, singing. 
+One month after Mubarak stepped down, this was his reward. 
+No to blinding heroes. Ahmed Harara lost his right eye on the 28th of January, and he lost his left eye on the 19th of November, by two different snipers. 
+No to killing, in this case no to killing men of religion, because Sheikh Ahmed Adina Refaat was shot on December 16th, during a demonstration, leaving behind three orphans and a widow. 
+No to burning books. The Institute of Egypt was burned on December 17th, a huge cultural loss. 
+No to stripping the people, and the blue bra is to remind us of our shame as a nation when we allow a veiled woman to be stripped and beaten on the street, and the footprint reads, "Long live a peaceful revolution," because we will never retaliate with violence. 
+No to barrier walls. On February 5th, concrete roadblocks were set up in Cairo to protect the Ministry of Defense from protesters. 
+Now, speaking of walls, I want to share with you the story of one wall in Cairo. 
+A group of artists decided to paint a life-size tank on a wall. It's one to one. 
+In front of this tank there's a man on a bicycle with a breadbasket on his head. To any passerby, there's no problem with this visual. 
+After acts of violence, another artist came, painted blood, protesters being run over by the tank, demonstrators, and a message that read, "" Starting tomorrow, I wear the new face, the face of every martyr. I exist. "" Authority comes, paints the wall white, leaves the tank and adds a message: "Army and people, one hand. Egypt for Egyptians." 
+Another artist comes, paints the head of the military as a monster eating a maiden in a river of blood in front of the tank. 
+Authority comes, paints the wall white, leaves the tank, leaves the suit, and throws a bucket of black paint just to hide the face of the monster. 
+So I come with my stencils, and I spray them on the suit, on the tank, and on the whole wall, and this is how it stands today until further notice. (Laughter) Now, I want to leave you with a final no. 
+I found Neruda scribbled on a piece of paper in a field hospital in Tahrir, and I decided to take a no of Mamluk Mausoleum in Cairo. 
+The message reads, [Arabic] "You can crush the flowers, but you can't delay spring." 
+Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Shukran. (Applause) 
+
+Ah yes, those university days, a heady mix of Ph.D-level pure mathematics and world debating championships, or, as I like to say, "" Hello, ladies. Oh yeah. "" Didn't get much sexier than the Spence at university, let me tell you. 
+It is such a thrill for a humble breakfast radio announcer from Sydney, Australia, to be here on the TED stage literally on the other side of the world. 
+And I wanted to let you know, a lot of the things you've heard about Australians are true. 
+From the youngest of ages, we display a prodigious sporting talent. 
+On the field of battle, we are brave and noble warriors. 
+What you've heard is true. 
+Australians, we don't mind a bit of a drink, sometimes to excess, leading to embarrassing social situations. (Laughter) This is my father's work Christmas party, December 1973. 
+I'm almost five years old. Fair to say, I'm enjoying the day a lot more than Santa was. 
+But I stand before you today not as a breakfast radio host, not as a comedian, but as someone who was, is, and always will be a mathematician. 
+And anyone who's been bitten by the numbers bug knows that it bites early and it bites deep. 
+I cast my mind back when I was in second grade at a beautiful little government-run school called Boronia Park in the suburbs of Sydney, and as we came up towards lunchtime, our teacher, Ms. Russell, said to the class, "" Hey, year two. What do you want to do after lunch? 
+I've got no plans. "" It was an exercise in democratic schooling, and I am all for democratic schooling, but we were only seven. 
+So some of the suggestions we made as to what we might want to do after lunch were a little bit impractical, and after a while, someone made a particularly silly suggestion and Ms. Russell patted them down with that gentle aphorism, "" That wouldn't work. 
+That'd be like trying to put a square peg through a round hole. "" Now I wasn't trying to be smart. 
+I wasn't trying to be funny. 
+I just politely raised my hand, and when Ms. Russell acknowledged me, I said, in front of my year two classmates, and I quote, "" But Miss, surely if the diagonal of the square is less than the diameter of the circle, well, the square peg will pass quite easily through the round hole. "" (Laughter) "It'd be like putting a piece of toast through a basketball hoop, wouldn't it?" 
+And there was that same awkward silence from most of my classmates, until sitting next to me, one of my friends, one of the cool kids in class, Steven, leaned across and punched me really hard in the head. 
+(Laughter) Now what Steven was saying was, "" Look, Adam, you are at a critical juncture in your life here, my friend. 
+You can keep sitting here with us. 
+Any more of that sort of talk, you've got to go and sit over there with them. "" I thought about it for a nanosecond. 
+I took one look at the road map of life, and I ran off down the street marked "" Geek "" as fast as my chubby, asthmatic little legs would carry me. 
+I fell in love with mathematics from the earliest of ages. 
+I explained it to all my friends. Maths is beautiful. 
+It's natural. It's everywhere. 
+Numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written. 
+The great Descartes said something quite similar. 
+The universe "" is written in the mathematical language. "" And today, I want to show you one of those musical notes, a number so beautiful, so massive, I think it will blow your mind. 
+Today we're going to talk about prime numbers. 
+Most of you I'm sure remember that six is not prime because it's 2 x 3. 
+Seven is prime because it's 1 x 7, but we can't break it down into any smaller chunks, or as we call them, factors. 
+Now a few things you might like to know about prime numbers. 
+One is not prime. 
+The proof of that is a great party trick that admittedly only works at certain parties. 
+(Laughter) Another thing about primes, there is no final biggest prime number. 
+They keep going on forever. 
+We know there are an infinite number of primes due to the brilliant mathematician Euclid. 
+Over thousands of years ago, he proved that for us. 
+But the third thing about prime numbers, mathematicians have always wondered, well at any given moment in time, what is the biggest prime that we know about? 
+Today we're going to hunt for that massive prime. 
+Don't freak out. 
+All you need to know, of all the mathematics you've ever learned, unlearned, crammed, forgotten, never understood in the first place, all you need to know is this: When I say 2 ^ 5, I'm talking about five little number twos next to each other all multiplied together, 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2. 
+So 2 ^ 5 is 2 x 2 = 4, 8, 16, 32. 
+If you've got that, you're with me for the entire journey. Okay? 
+So 2 ^ 5, those five little twos multiplied together. 
+(2 ^ 5) - 1 = 31. 
+31 is a prime number, and that five in the power is also a prime number. 
+And the vast bulk of massive primes we've ever found are of that form: two to a prime number, take away one. 
+I won't go into great detail as to why, because most of your eyes will bleed out of your head if I do, but suffice to say, a number of that form is fairly easy to test for primacy. 
+A random odd number is a lot harder to test. 
+But as soon as we go hunting for massive primes, we realize it's not enough just to put in any prime number in the power. 
+(2 ^ 11) - 1 = 2,047, and you don't need me to tell you that's 23 x 89. 
+(Laughter) But (2 ^ 13) - 1, (2 ^ 17) - 1 (2 ^ 19) - 1, are all prime numbers. 
+After that point, they thin out a lot. 
+And one of the things about the search for massive primes that I love so much is some of the great mathematical minds of all time have gone on this search. 
+This is the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. 
+In the 1700s, other mathematicians said he is simply the master of us all. 
+He was so respected, they put him on European currency back when that was a compliment. 
+(Laughter) Euler discovered at the time the world's biggest prime: (2 ^ 31) - 1. 
+It's over two billion. 
+He proved it was prime with nothing more than a quill, ink, paper and his mind. 
+You think that's big. 
+We know that (2 ^ 127) - 1 is a prime number. 
+It's an absolute brute. 
+Look at it here: 39 digits long, proven to be prime in 1876 by a mathematician called Lucas. 
+Word up, L-Dog. 
+(Laughter) But one of the great things about the search for massive primes, it's not just finding the primes. 
+Sometimes proving another number not to be prime is just as exciting. 
+Lucas again, in 1876, showed us (2 ^ 67) - 1, 21 digits long, was not prime. 
+But he didn't know what the factors were. 
+We knew it was like six, but we didn't know what are the 2 x 3 that multiply together to give us that massive number. 
+We didn't know for almost 40 years until Frank Nelson Cole came along. 
+And at a gathering of prestigious American mathematicians, he walked to the board, took up a piece of chalk, and started writing out the powers of two: two, four, eight, 16 — come on, join in with me, you know how it goes — 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048. 
+I'm in geek heaven. We'll stop it there for a second. 
+Frank Nelson Cole did not stop there. 
+He went on and on and calculated 67 powers of two. 
+He took away one and wrote that number on the board. 
+A frisson of excitement went around the room. 
+It got even more exciting when he then wrote down these two large prime numbers in your standard multiplication format — and for the rest of the hour of his talk Frank Nelson Cole busted that out. 
+He had found the prime factors of (2 ^ 67) - 1. 
+The room went berserk — (Laughter) — as Frank Nelson Cole sat down, having delivered the only talk in the history of mathematics with no words. 
+He admitted afterwards it wasn't that hard to do. 
+It took focus. It took dedication. 
+It took him, by his estimate, "three years of Sundays." 
+But then in the field of mathematics, as in so many of the fields that we've heard from in this TED, the age of the computer goes along and things explode. 
+These are the largest prime numbers we knew decade by decade, each one dwarfing the one before as computers took over and our power to calculate just grew and grew. 
+This is the largest prime number we knew in 1996, a very emotional year for me. 
+It was the year I left university. 
+I was torn between mathematics and media. 
+It was a tough decision. I loved university. 
+My arts degree was the best nine and a half years of my life. 
+(Laughter) But I came to a realization about my own ability. 
+Put simply, in a room full of randomly selected people, I'm a maths genius. 
+In a roomful of maths Ph.Ds, I'm as dumb as a box of hammers. 
+My skill is not in the mathematics. 
+It is in telling the story of the mathematics. 
+And during that time, since I've left university, these numbers have got bigger and bigger, each one dwarfing the last, until along came this man, Dr. Curtis Cooper, who a few years ago held the record for the largest ever prime, only to see it snatched away by a rival university. 
+And then Curtis Cooper got it back. 
+Not years ago, not months ago, days ago. 
+In an amazing moment of serendipity, I had to send TED a new slide to show you what this guy had done. 
+I still remember — (Applause) — I still remember when it happened. 
+I was doing my breakfast radio show. 
+I looked down on Twitter. There was a tweet: "Adam, have you seen the new largest prime number?" 
+I shivered — (Laughter) — contacted the women who produced my radio show out in the other room, and said "" Girls, hold the front page. 
+We're not talking politics today. 
+We're not talking sport today. 
+They found another megaprime. "" The girls just shook their heads, put them in their hands, and let me go my own way. 
+It's because of Curtis Cooper that we know, currently the largest prime number we know, is 2 ^ 57,885,161. 
+Don't forget to subtract the one. 
+This number is almost 17 and a half million digits long. 
+If you typed it out on a computer and saved it as a text file, that's 22 meg. 
+For the slightly less geeky of you, think about the Harry Potter novels, okay? 
+This is the first Harry Potter novel. 
+This is all seven Harry Potter novels, because she did tend to faff on a bit near the end. 
+(Laughter) Written out as a book, this number would run the length of the Harry Potter novels and half again. 
+Here's a slide of the first 1,000 digits of this prime. 
+If, when TED had begun, at 11 o'clock on Tuesday, we'd walked out and simply hit one slide every second, it would have taken five hours to show you that number. 
+I was keen to do it, could not convince Bono. 
+That's the way it goes. 
+This number is 17 and a half thousand slides long, and we know it is prime as confidently as we know the number seven is prime. 
+That fills me with almost sexual excitement. 
+And who am I kidding when I say almost? 
+(Laughter) I know what you're thinking: Adam, we're happy that you're happy, but why should we care? 
+Let me give you just three reasons why this is so beautiful. 
+First of all, as I explained, to ask a computer "" Is that number prime? "" to type it in its abbreviated form, and then only about six lines of code is the test for primacy, is a remarkably simple question to ask. 
+It's got a remarkably clear yes / no answer, and just requires phenomenal grunt. 
+Large prime numbers are a great way of testing the speed and accuracy of computer chips. 
+But secondly, as Curtis Cooper was looking for that monster prime, he wasn't the only guy searching. 
+My laptop at home was looking through four potential candidate primes myself as part of a networked computer hunt around the world for these large numbers. 
+The discovery of that prime is similar to the work people are doing in unraveling RNA sequences, in searching through data from SETI and other astronomical projects. 
+We live in an age where some of the great breakthroughs are not going to happen in the labs or the halls of academia but on laptops, desktops, in the palms of people's hands who are simply helping out for the search. 
+But for me it's amazing because it's a metaphor for the time in which we live, when human minds and machines can conquer together. 
+We've heard a lot about robots in this TED. 
+We've heard a lot about what they can and can't do. 
+It is true, you can now download onto your smartphone an app that would beat most grandmasters at chess. 
+You think that's cool. 
+Here's a machine doing something cool. 
+This is the CubeStormer II. 
+It can take a randomly shuffled Rubik's Cube. 
+Using the power of the smartphone, it can examine the cube and solve the cube in five seconds. 
+(Applause) That scares some people. That excites me. 
+How lucky are we to live in this age when mind and machine can work together? 
+I was asked in an interview last year in my capacity as a lower-case "" c "" celebrity in Australia, "What was your highlight of 2012?" 
+People were expecting me to talk about my beloved Sydney Swans football team. 
+In our beautiful, indigenous sport of Australian football, they won the equivalent of the Super Bowl. 
+I was there. It was the most emotional, exciting day. 
+It wasn't my highlight of 2012. 
+People thought it might have been an interview I'd done on my show. 
+It might have been a politician. It might have been a breakthrough. 
+It might have been a book I read, the arts. No, no, no. 
+It might have been something my two gorgeous daughters had done. 
+No, it wasn't. The highlight of 2012, so clearly, was the discovery of the Higgs boson. 
+Give it up for the fundamental particle that bequeaths all other fundamental particles their mass. 
+(Applause) And what was so gorgeous about this discovery was 50 years ago Peter Higgs and his team considered one of the deepest of all questions: How is it that the things that make us up have no mass? 
+I've clearly got mass. Where does it come from? 
+And he postulated a suggestion that there's this infinite, incredibly small field stretching throughout the universe, and as other particles go through those particles and interact, that's where they get their mass. 
+The rest of the scientific community said, "" Great idea, Higgsy. 
+We've got no idea if we could ever prove it. 
+It's beyond our reach. "" And within just 50 years, in his lifetime, with him sitting in the audience, we had designed the greatest machine ever to prove this incredible idea that originated just in a human mind. 
+That's what is so exciting for me about this prime number. 
+We thought it might be there, and we went and found it. 
+That is the essence of being human. 
+That is what we are all about. 
+Or as my friend Descartes might put it, we think, therefore we are. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Your overnight success story is always a result of everything you've done in your life through that moment. 
+Even if I did little, sales would be OK. 
+Yes, it may be hard to find talent. 
+
+I have a doppelganger. 
+(Laughter) Dr. Gero is a brilliant but slightly mad scientist in the "" Dragonball Z: Android Saga. "" If you look very carefully, you see that his skull has been replaced with a transparent Plexiglas dome so that the workings of his brain can be observed and also controlled with light. 
+That's exactly what I do — optical mind control. 
+(Laughter) But in contrast to my evil twin who lusts after world domination, my motives are not sinister. 
+I control the brain in order to understand how it works. 
+Now wait a minute, you may say, how can you go straight to controlling the brain without understanding it first? 
+Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? 
+Many neuroscientists agree with this view and think that understanding will come from more detailed observation and analysis. 
+They say, "" If we could record the activity of our neurons, we would understand the brain. "" But think for a moment what that means. 
+Even if we could measure what every cell is doing at all times, we would still have to make sense of the recorded activity patterns, and that's so difficult, chances are we'll understand these patterns just as little as the brains that produce them. 
+Take a look at what brain activity might look like. 
+In this simulation, each black dot is one nerve cell. 
+The dot is visible whenever a cell fires an electrical impulse. 
+There's 10,000 neurons here. 
+So you're looking at roughly one percent of the brain of a cockroach. 
+Your brains are about 100 million times more complicated. 
+Somewhere, in a pattern like this, is you, your perceptions, your emotions, your memories, your plans for the future. 
+But we don't know where, since we don't know how to read the pattern. 
+We don't understand the code used by the brain. 
+To make progress, we need to break the code. 
+But how? 
+An experienced code-breaker will tell you that in order to figure out what the symbols in a code mean, it's essential to be able to play with them, to rearrange them at will. 
+So in this situation too, to decode the information contained in patterns like this, watching alone won't do. 
+We need to rearrange the pattern. 
+In other words, instead of recording the activity of neurons, we need to control it. 
+It's not essential that we can control the activity of all neurons in the brain, just some. 
+The more targeted our interventions, the better. 
+And I'll show you in a moment how we can achieve the necessary precision. 
+And since I'm realistic, rather than grandiose, I don't claim that the ability to control the function of the nervous system will at once unravel all its mysteries. 
+But we'll certainly learn a lot. 
+Now, I'm by no means the first person to realize how powerful a tool intervention is. 
+The history of attempts to tinker with the function of the nervous system is long and illustrious. 
+It dates back at least 200 years, to Galvani's famous experiments in the late 18th century and beyond. 
+Galvani showed that a frog's legs twitched when he connected the lumbar nerve to a source of electrical current. 
+This experiment revealed the first, and perhaps most fundamental, nugget of the neural code: that information is written in the form of electrical impulses. 
+Galvani's approach of probing the nervous system with electrodes has remained state-of-the-art until today, despite a number of drawbacks. 
+Sticking wires into the brain is obviously rather crude. 
+It's hard to do in animals that run around, and there is a physical limit to the number of wires that can be inserted simultaneously. 
+So around the turn of the last century, I started to think, "" Wouldn't it be wonderful if one could take this logic and turn it upside down? "" So instead of inserting a wire into one spot of the brain, re-engineer the brain itself so that some of its neural elements become responsive to diffusely broadcast signals such as a flash of light. 
+Such an approach would literally, in a flash of light, overcome many of the obstacles to discovery. 
+First, it's clearly a non-invasive, wireless form of communication. 
+And second, just as in a radio broadcast, you can communicate with many receivers at once. 
+You don't need to know where these receivers are, and it doesn't matter if these receivers move — just think of the stereo in your car. 
+It gets even better, for it turns out that we can fabricate the receivers out of materials that are encoded in DNA. 
+So each nerve cell with the right genetic makeup will spontaneously produce a receiver that allows us to control its function. 
+I hope you'll appreciate the beautiful simplicity of this concept. 
+There's no high-tech gizmos here, just biology revealed through biology. 
+Now let's take a look at these miraculous receivers up close. 
+As we zoom in on one of these purple neurons, we see that its outer membrane is studded with microscopic pores. 
+Pores like these conduct electrical current and are responsible for all the communication in the nervous system. 
+But these pores here are special. 
+They are coupled to light receptors similar to the ones in your eyes. 
+Whenever a flash of light hits the receptor, the pore opens, an electrical current is switched on, and the neuron fires electrical impulses. 
+Because the light-activated pore is encoded in DNA, we can achieve incredible precision. 
+This is because, although each cell in our bodies contains the same set of genes, different mixes of genes get turned on and off in different cells. 
+You can exploit this to make sure that only some neurons contain our light-activated pore and others don't. 
+So in this cartoon, the bluish white cell in the upper-left corner does not respond to light because it lacks the light-activated pore. 
+The approach works so well that we can write purely artificial messages directly to the brain. 
+In this example, each electrical impulse, each deflection on the trace, is caused by a brief pulse of light. 
+And the approach, of course, also works in moving, behaving animals. 
+This is the first ever such experiment, sort of the optical equivalent of Galvani's. 
+It was done six or seven years ago by my then graduate student, Susana Lima. 
+Susana had engineered the fruit fly on the left so that just two out of the 200,000 cells in its brain expressed the light-activated pore. 
+You're familiar with these cells because they are the ones that frustrate you when you try to swat the fly. 
+They trained the escape reflex that makes the fly jump into the air and fly away whenever you move your hand in position. 
+And you can see here that the flash of light has exactly the same effect. 
+The animal jumps, it spreads its wings, it vibrates them, but it can't actually take off because the fly is sandwiched between two glass plates. 
+Now to make sure that this was no reaction of the fly to a flash it could see, Susana did a simple but brutally effective experiment. 
+She cut the heads off of her flies. 
+These headless bodies can live for about a day, but they don't do much. 
+They just stand around and groom excessively. 
+So it seems that the only trait that survives decapitation is vanity. 
+(Laughter) Anyway, as you'll see in a moment, Susana was able to turn on the flight motor of what's the equivalent of the spinal cord of these flies and get some of the headless bodies to actually take off and fly away. 
+They didn't get very far, obviously. 
+Since we took these first steps, the field of optogenetics has exploded. 
+And there are now hundreds of labs using these approaches. 
+And we've come a long way since Galvani's and Susana's first successes in making animals twitch or jump. 
+We can now actually interfere with their psychology in rather profound ways, as I'll show you in my last example, which is directed at a familiar question. 
+Life is a string of choices creating a constant pressure to decide what to do next. 
+We cope with this pressure by having brains, and within our brains, decision-making centers that I've called here the "" Actor. "" The Actor implements a policy that takes into account the state of the environment and the context in which we operate. 
+Our actions change the environment, or context, and these changes are then fed back into the decision loop. 
+Now to put some neurobiological meat on this abstract model, we constructed a simple one-dimensional world for our favorite subject, fruit flies. 
+Each chamber in these two vertical stacks contains one fly. 
+The left and the right halves of the chamber are filled with two different odors, and a security camera watches as the flies pace up and down between them. 
+Here's some such CCTV footage. 
+Whenever a fly reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odor streams meet, it has to make a decision. 
+It has to decide whether to turn around and stay in the same odor, or whether to cross the midline and try something new. 
+These decisions are clearly a reflection of the Actor's policy. 
+Now for an intelligent being like our fly, this policy is not written in stone but rather changes as the animal learns from experience. 
+We can incorporate such an element of adaptive intelligence into our model by assuming that the fly's brain contains not only an Actor, but a different group of cells, a "" Critic, "" that provides a running commentary on the Actor's choices. 
+You can think of this nagging inner voice as sort of the brain's equivalent of the Catholic Church, if you're an Austrian like me, or the super-ego, if you're Freudian, or your mother, if you're Jewish. 
+(Laughter) Now obviously, the Critic is a key ingredient in what makes us intelligent. 
+So we set out to identify the cells in the fly's brain that played the role of the Critic. 
+And the logic of our experiment was simple. 
+We thought if we could use our optical remote control to activate the cells of the Critic, we should be able, artificially, to nag the Actor into changing its policy. 
+In other words, the fly should learn from mistakes that it thought it had made but, in reality, it had not made. 
+So we bred flies whose brains were more or less randomly peppered with cells that were light addressable. 
+And then we took these flies and allowed them to make choices. 
+And whenever they made one of the two choices, chose one odor, in this case the blue one over the orange one, we switched on the lights. 
+If the Critic was among the optically activated cells, the result of this intervention should be a change in policy. 
+The fly should learn to avoid the optically reinforced odor. 
+Here's what happened in two instances: We're comparing two strains of flies, each of them having about 100 light-addressable cells in their brains, shown here in green on the left and on the right. 
+What's common among these groups of cells is that they all produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. 
+But the identities of the individual dopamine-producing neurons are clearly largely different on the left and on the right. 
+Optically activating these hundred or so cells into two strains of flies has dramatically different consequences. 
+If you look first at the behavior of the fly on the right, you can see that whenever it reaches the midpoint of the chamber where the two odors meet, it marches straight through, as it did before. 
+Its behavior is completely unchanged. 
+But the behavior of the fly on the left is very different. 
+Whenever it comes up to the midpoint, it pauses, it carefully scans the odor interface as if it was sniffing out its environment, and then it turns around. 
+This means that the policy that the Actor implements now includes an instruction to avoid the odor that's in the right half of the chamber. 
+This means that the Critic must have spoken in that animal, and that the Critic must be contained among the dopamine-producing neurons on the left, but not among the dopamine producing neurons on the right. 
+Through many such experiments, we were able to narrow down the identity of the Critic to just 12 cells. 
+These 12 cells, as shown here in green, send the output to a brain structure called the "" mushroom body, "" which is shown here in gray. 
+We know from our formal model that the brain structure at the receiving end of the Critic's commentary is the Actor. 
+So this anatomy suggests that the mushroom bodies have something to do with action choice. 
+Based on everything we know about the mushroom bodies, this makes perfect sense. 
+In fact, it makes so much sense that we can construct an electronic toy circuit that simulates the behavior of the fly. 
+In this electronic toy circuit, the mushroom body neurons are symbolized by the vertical bank of blue LEDs in the center of the board. 
+These LED's are wired to sensors that detect the presence of odorous molecules in the air. 
+Each odor activates a different combination of sensors, which in turn activates a different odor detector in the mushroom body. 
+So the pilot in the cockpit of the fly, the Actor, can tell which odor is present simply by looking at which of the blue LEDs lights up. 
+What the Actor does with this information depends on its policy, which is stored in the strengths of the connection, between the odor detectors and the motors that power the fly's evasive actions. 
+If the connection is weak, the motors will stay off and the fly will continue straight on its course. 
+If the connection is strong, the motors will turn on and the fly will initiate a turn. 
+Now consider a situation in which the motors stay off, the fly continues on its path and it suffers some painful consequence such as getting zapped. 
+In a situation like this, we would expect the Critic to speak up and to tell the Actor to change its policy. 
+We have created such a situation, artificially, by turning on the critic with a flash of light. 
+That caused a strengthening of the connections between the currently active odor detector and the motors. 
+So the next time the fly finds itself facing the same odor again, the connection is strong enough to turn on the motors and to trigger an evasive maneuver. 
+I don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly. 
+This is one piece of good news. 
+The other piece of good news, for a scientist at least, is that much remains to be discovered. 
+In the experiments I told you about, we have lifted the identity of the Critic, but we still have no idea how the Critic does its job. 
+Come to think of it, knowing when you're wrong without a teacher, or your mother, telling you, is a very hard problem. 
+There are some ideas in computer science and in artificial intelligence as to how this might be done, but we still haven't solved a single example of how intelligent behavior springs from the physical interactions in living matter. 
+I think we'll get there in the not too distant future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about 
+past and future billions. 
+We know that about 106 billion people have ever lived. 
+And we know that most of them are dead. 
+And we also know that most of them live or lived in Asia. And we also know 
+that most of them were or are very poor — did not live for very long. 
+Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about 
+the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today. 
+We know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800. 
+And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners: Europeans, North Americans, Australasians. 
+19 percent of the world's population today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth. 
+Economic historians call this "" The Great Divergence. "" And this slide here is the best simplification of the Great Divergence story I can offer you. 
+It's basically two ratios of per capita GDP, per capita gross domestic product, so average income. 
+One, the red line, is the ratio of British to Indian per capita income. 
+And the blue line is the ratio of American to Chinese. 
+And this chart goes back to 1500. 
+And you can see here that there's an exponential Great Divergence. 
+They start off pretty close together. 
+In fact, in 1500, the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. 
+When you get to the 1970s, which is where this chart ends, the average Briton is more than 10 times richer than the average Indian. 
+And that's allowing for differences in the cost of living. 
+It's based on purchasing power parity. 
+The average American is nearly 20 times richer than the average Chinese by the 1970s. 
+So why? 
+This wasn't just an economic story. 
+If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were really quite tiny — five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of its population, maybe 20 percent of its income. 
+By 1913, these 10 countries, plus the United States, controlled vast global empires — 58 percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global economic output. 
+And notice, most of that went to the motherland, to the imperial metropoles, not to their colonial possessions. 
+Now you can't just blame this on imperialism — though many people have tried to do so — for two reasons. 
+One, empire was the least original thing that the West did after 1500. 
+Everybody did empire. 
+They beat preexisting Oriental empires like the Mughals and the Ottomans. 
+So it really doesn't look like empire is a great explanation for the Great Divergence. 
+In any case, as you may remember, the Great Divergence reaches its zenith in the 1970s, some considerable time after decolonization. 
+This is not a new question. 
+Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, [posed] it through his character Rasselas in his novel "" Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, "" published in 1759. 
+"" By what means are the Europeans thus powerful; or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? 
+The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither? "" That's a great question. 
+And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners — by the people in the rest of the world — like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire — who said in a book published in 1731, "" Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies? "" Unlike Rasselas, Muteferrika had an answer to that question, which was correct. 
+He said it was "" because they have laws and rules invented by reason. "" It's not geography. 
+You may think we can explain the Great Divergence in terms of geography. 
+We know that's wrong, because we conducted two great natural experiments in the 20th century to see if geography mattered more than institutions. 
+We took all the Germans, we divided them roughly in two, and we gave the ones in the East communism, and you see the result. 
+Within an incredibly short period of time, people living in the German Democratic Republic produced Trabants, the Trabbi, one of the world's worst ever cars, while people in the West produced the Mercedes Benz. 
+If you still don't believe me, we conducted the experiment also in the Korean Peninsula. 
+And we decided we'd take Koreans in roughly the same geographical place with, notice, the same basic traditional culture, and we divided them in two, and we gave the Northerners communism. 
+And the result is an even bigger divergence in a very short space of time than happened in Germany. 
+Not a big divergence in terms of uniform design for border guards admittedly, but in almost every other respect, it's a huge divergence. 
+Which leads me to think that neither geography nor national character, popular explanations for this kind of thing, are really significant. 
+It's the ideas. 
+It's the institutions. 
+This must be true because a Scotsman said it. 
+And I think I'm the only Scotsman here at the Edinburgh TED. 
+So let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a Scotsman. 
+He was Adam Smith — not Billy Connolly, not Sean Connery — though he is very smart indeed. 
+(Laughter) Smith — and I want you to go and bow down before his statue in the Royal Mile; it's a wonderful statue — Smith, in the "" Wealth of Nations "" published in 1776 — that's the most important thing that happened that year... (Laughter) 
+You bet. 
+There was a little local difficulty in some of our minor colonies, but... 
+(Laughter) "" China seems to have been long stationary, and probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions. 
+But this complement may be much inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil, climate, and situation might admit of. "" That is so right and so cool. 
+And he said it such a long time ago. 
+But you know, this is a TED audience, and if I keep talking about institutions, you're going to turn off. 
+So I'm going to translate this into language that you can understand. 
+Let's call them the killer apps. 
+I want to explain to you that there were six killer apps that set the West apart from the rest. 
+And they're kind of like the apps on your phone, in the sense that they look quite simple. 
+They're just icons; you click on them. 
+But behind the icon, there's complex code. 
+It's the same with institutions. 
+There are six which I think explain the Great Divergence. 
+One, competition. 
+Two, the scientific revolution. 
+Three, property rights. 
+Four, modern medicine. 
+Five, the consumer society. 
+And six, the work ethic. 
+You can play a game and try and think of one I've missed at, or try and boil it down to just four, but you'll lose. 
+(Laughter) Let me very briefly tell you what I mean by this, synthesizing the work of many economic historians in the process. 
+Competition means, not only were there a hundred different political units in Europe in 1500, but within each of these units, there was competition between corporations as well as sovereigns. 
+The ancestor of the modern corporation, the City of London Corporation, existed in the 12th century. 
+Nothing like this existed in China, where there was one monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity, and anyone with any ambition had to pass one standardized examination, which took three days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of characters and very complex Confucian essay writing. 
+The scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the Oriental world in a number of crucial ways, the most important being that, through the experimental method, it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before. 
+Example: Benjamin Robins's extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to ballistics. 
+Once you do that, your artillery becomes accurate. 
+Think of what that means. 
+That really was a killer application. 
+(Laughter) Meanwhile, there's no scientific revolution anywhere else. 
+The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there. 
+In fact, they demolish Taqi al-Din's observatory, because it's considered blasphemous to inquire into the mind of God. 
+Property rights: It's not the democracy, folks; it's having the rule of law based on private property rights. 
+That's what makes the difference between North America and South America. 
+You could turn up in North America having signed a deed of indenture saying, "" I'll work for nothing for five years. 
+You just have to feed me. "" But at the end of it, you've got a hundred acres of land. 
+That's the land grant on the bottom half of the slide. 
+That's not possible in Latin America where land is held onto by a tiny elite descended from the conquistadors. 
+And you can see here the huge divergence that happens in property ownership between North and South. 
+Most people in rural North America owned some land by 1900. 
+Hardly anyone in South America did. 
+That's another killer app. 
+Modern medicine in the late 19th century began to make major breakthroughs against the infectious diseases that killed a lot of people. 
+And this was another killer app — the very opposite of a killer, because it doubled, and then more than doubled, human life expectancy. 
+It even did that in the European empires. 
+Even in places like Senegal, beginning in the early 20th century, there were major breakthroughs in public health, and life expectancy began to rise. 
+It doesn't rise any faster after these countries become independent. 
+The empires weren't all bad. 
+The consumer society is what you need for the Industrial Revolution to have a point. 
+You need people to want to wear tons of clothes. 
+You've all bought an article of clothing in the last month; I guarantee it. 
+That's the consumer society, and it propels economic growth more than even technological change itself. 
+Japan was the first non-Western society to embrace it. 
+The alternative, which was proposed by Mahatma Gandhi, was to institutionalize and make poverty permanent. 
+Very few Indians today wish that India had gone down Mahatma Gandhi's road. 
+Finally, the work ethic. 
+Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant. 
+He was wrong. 
+Any culture can get the work ethic if the institutions are there to create the incentive to work. 
+We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western phenomenon. 
+In fact, the West has lost its work ethic. 
+Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German — a thousand. 
+And this is part of a really extraordinary phenomenon, and that is the end of the Great Divergence. 
+Who's got the work ethic now? 
+Take a look at mathematical attainment by 15 year-olds. 
+At the top of the international league table according to the latest PISA study, is the Shanghai district of China. 
+The gap between Shanghai and the United Kingdom and the United States is as big as the gap between the U.K. and the U.S. 
+and Albania and Tunisia. 
+You probably assume that because the iPhone was designed in California but assembled in China that the West still leads in terms of technological innovation. 
+You're wrong. 
+In terms of patents, there's no question that the East is ahead. 
+Not only has Japan been ahead for some time, South Korea has gone into third place, and China is just about to overtake Germany. 
+Why? 
+Because the killer apps can be downloaded. 
+It's open source. 
+Any society can adopt these institutions, and when they do, they achieve what the West achieved after 1500 — only faster. 
+This is the Great Reconvergence, and it's the biggest story of your lifetime. 
+Because it's on your watch that this is happening. 
+It's our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. 
+The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese. 
+Now it's just five times, and soon it will be 2.5 times. 
+So I want to end with three questions for the future billions, just ahead of 2016, when the United States will lose its place as number one economy to China. 
+The first is, can you delete these apps, and are we in the process of doing so in the Western world? 
+The second question is, does the sequencing of the download matter? 
+And could Africa get that sequencing wrong? 
+One obvious implication of modern economic history is that it's quite hard to transition to democracy before you've established secure private property rights. 
+Warning: that may not work. 
+And third, can China do without killer app number three? 
+That's the one that John Locke systematized when he said that freedom was rooted in private property rights and the protection of law. 
+That's the basis for the Western model of representative government. 
+Now this picture shows the demolition of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's studio in Shanghai earlier this year. 
+He's now free again, having been detained, as you know, for some time. 
+But I don't think his studio has been rebuilt. 
+Winston Churchill once defined civilization in a lecture he gave in the fateful year of 1938. 
+And I think these words really nail it: "" It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. 
+It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. 
+That is civilization — and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort and culture, "" what all TEDsters care about most. 
+"" When civilization reigns in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. "" That's so true. 
+I don't think the decline of Western civilization is inevitable, because I don't think history operates in this kind of life-cycle model, beautifully illustrated by Thomas Cole's "" Course of Empire "" paintings. 
+That's not the way history works. 
+That's not the way the West rose, and I don't think it's the way the West will fall. 
+The West may collapse very suddenly. 
+Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos. 
+That's one of the most profound insights to come out of the historical study of complex institutions like civilizations. 
+No, we may hang on, despite the huge burdens of debt that we've accumulated, despite the evidence that we've lost our work ethic and other parts of our historical mojo. 
+But one thing is for sure, the Great Divergence is over, folks. 
+Thanks very much. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Niall, I am just curious about your take on the other region of the world that's booming, which is Latin America. 
+What's your view on that? 
+Niall Ferguson: Well I really am not just talking about the rise of the East; I'm talking about the rise of the Rest, and that includes South America. 
+I once asked one of my colleagues at Harvard, "Hey, is South America part of the West?" 
+He was an expert in Latin American history. 
+He said, "" I don't know; I'll have to think about that. "" That tells you something really important. 
+I think if you look at what is happening in Brazil in particular, but also Chile, which was in many ways the one that led the way in transforming the institutions of economic life, there's a very bright future indeed. 
+So my story really is as much about that convergence in the Americas as it's a convergence story in Eurasia. 
+BG: And there is this impression that North America and Europe are not really paying attention to these trends. 
+Mostly they're worried about each other. 
+The Americans think that the European model is going to crumble tomorrow. 
+The Europeans think that the American budget is going to explode tomorrow. 
+And that's all we seem to be caring about recently. 
+NF: I think the fiscal crisis that we see in the developed World right now — both sides of the Atlantic — is essentially the same thing taking different forms in terms of political culture. 
+And it's a crisis that has its structural facet — it's partly to do with demographics. 
+But it's also, of course, to do with the massive crisis that followed excessive leverage, excessive borrowing in the private sector. 
+That crisis, which has been the focus of so much attention, including by me, I think is an epiphenomenon. 
+The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has just accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy. 
+I think that's its real importance. 
+BG: Niall, thank you. (NF: Thank you very much, Bruno.) (Applause) 
+
+So why do we learn mathematics? 
+Essentially, for three reasons: calculation, application, and last, and unfortunately least in terms of the time we give it, inspiration. 
+Mathematics is the science of patterns, and we study it to learn how to think logically, critically and creatively, but too much of the mathematics that we learn in school is not effectively motivated, and when our students ask, "Why are we learning this?" 
+then they often hear that they'll need it in an upcoming math class or on a future test. 
+But wouldn't it be great if every once in a while we did mathematics simply because it was fun or beautiful or because it excited the mind? 
+Now, I know many people have not had the opportunity to see how this can happen, so let me give you a quick example with my favorite collection of numbers, the Fibonacci numbers. (Applause) Yeah! I already have Fibonacci fans here. 
+That's great. 
+Now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways. 
+From the standpoint of calculation, they're as easy to understand as one plus one, which is two. 
+Then one plus two is three, two plus three is five, three plus five is eight, and so on. 
+Indeed, the person we call Fibonacci was actually named Leonardo of Pisa, and these numbers appear in his book "" Liber Abaci, "" which taught the Western world the methods of arithmetic that we use today. 
+In terms of applications, Fibonacci numbers appear in nature surprisingly often. 
+The number of petals on a flower is typically a Fibonacci number, or the number of spirals on a sunflower or a pineapple tends to be a Fibonacci number as well. 
+In fact, there are many more applications of Fibonacci numbers, but what I find most inspirational about them are the beautiful number patterns they display. 
+Let me show you one of my favorites. 
+Suppose you like to square numbers, and frankly, who doesn't? (Laughter) Let's look at the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. 
+So one squared is one, two squared is four, three squared is nine, five squared is 25, and so on. 
+Now, it's no surprise that when you add consecutive Fibonacci numbers, you get the next Fibonacci number. Right? 
+That's how they're created. 
+But you wouldn't expect anything special to happen when you add the squares together. 
+But check this out. 
+One plus one gives us two, and one plus four gives us five. 
+And four plus nine is 13, nine plus 25 is 34, and yes, the pattern continues. 
+In fact, here's another one. 
+Suppose you wanted to look at adding the squares of the first few Fibonacci numbers. 
+Let's see what we get there. 
+So one plus one plus four is six. 
+Add nine to that, we get 15. 
+Add 25, we get 40. 
+Add 64, we get 104. 
+Now look at those numbers. 
+Those are not Fibonacci numbers, but if you look at them closely, you'll see the Fibonacci numbers buried inside of them. 
+Do you see it? I'll show it to you. 
+Six is two times three, 15 is three times five, 40 is five times eight, two, three, five, eight, who do we appreciate? 
+(Laughter) Fibonacci! Of course. 
+Now, as much fun as it is to discover these patterns, it's even more satisfying to understand why they are true. 
+Let's look at that last equation. 
+Why should the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13? 
+I'll show you by drawing a simple picture. 
+We'll start with a one-by-one square and next to that put another one-by-one square. 
+Together, they form a one-by-two rectangle. 
+Beneath that, I'll put a two-by-two square, and next to that, a three-by-three square, beneath that, a five-by-five square, and then an eight-by-eight square, creating one giant rectangle, right? 
+Now let me ask you a simple question: what is the area of the rectangle? 
+Well, on the one hand, it's the sum of the areas of the squares inside it, right? 
+Just as we created it. 
+It's one squared plus one squared plus two squared plus three squared plus five squared plus eight squared. Right? 
+That's the area. 
+On the other hand, because it's a rectangle, the area is equal to its height times its base, and the height is clearly eight, and the base is five plus eight, which is the next Fibonacci number, 13. Right? 
+So the area is also eight times 13. 
+Since we've correctly calculated the area two different ways, they have to be the same number, and that's why the squares of one, one, two, three, five and eight add up to eight times 13. 
+Now, if we continue this process, we'll generate rectangles of the form 13 by 21, 21 by 34, and so on. 
+Now check this out. 
+If you divide 13 by eight, you get 1.625. 
+And if you divide the larger number by the smaller number, then these ratios get closer and closer to about 1.618, known to many people as the Golden Ratio, a number which has fascinated mathematicians, scientists and artists for centuries. 
+Now, I show all this to you because, like so much of mathematics, there's a beautiful side to it that I fear does not get enough attention in our schools. 
+We spend lots of time learning about calculation, but let's not forget about application, including, perhaps, the most important application of all, learning how to think. 
+If I could summarize this in one sentence, it would be this: Mathematics is not just solving for x, it's also figuring out why. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+How would you like to be better than you are? 
+Suppose I said that, with just a few changes in your genes, you could get a better memory — more precise, more accurate and quicker. 
+Or maybe you'd like to be more fit, stronger, with more stamina. 
+Would you like to be more attractive and self-confident? 
+How about living longer with good health? 
+Or perhaps you're one of those who's always yearned for more creativity. 
+Which one would you like the most? 
+Which would you like, if you could have just one? 
+(Audience Member: Creativity.) Creativity. 
+How many people would choose creativity? 
+Raise your hands. Let me see. 
+A few. Probably about as many as there are creative people here. 
+(Laughter) That's very good. 
+How many would opt for memory? 
+Quite a few more. 
+How about fitness? 
+A few less. 
+What about longevity? 
+Ah, the majority. That makes me feel very good as a doctor. 
+If you could have any one of these, it would be a very different world. 
+Is it just imaginary? 
+Or, is it, perhaps, possible? 
+Evolution has been a perennial topic here at the TED Conference, but I want to give you today one doctor's take on the subject. 
+The great 20th-century geneticist, T.G. Dobzhansky, who was also a communicant in the Russian Orthodox Church, once wrote an essay that he titled "" Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. "" Now if you are one of those who does not accept the evidence for biological evolution, this would be a very good time to turn off your hearing aid, take out your personal communications device — I give you permission — and perhaps take another look at Kathryn Schultz's book on being wrong, because nothing in the rest of this talk is going to make any sense whatsoever to you. 
+(Laughter) But if you do accept biological evolution, consider this: is it just about the past, or is it about the future? 
+Does it apply to others, or does it apply to us? 
+This is another look at the tree of life. 
+In this picture, I've put a bush with a center branching out in all directions, because if you look at the edges of the tree of life, every existing species at the tips of those branches has succeeded in evolutionary terms: it has survived; it has demonstrated a fitness to its environment. 
+The human part of this branch, way out on one end, is, of course, the one that we are most interested in. 
+We branch off of a common ancestor to modern chimpanzees about six or eight million years ago. 
+In the interval, there have been perhaps 20 or 25 different species of hominids. 
+Some have come and gone. 
+We have been here for about 130,000 years. 
+It may seem like we're quite remote from other parts of this tree of life, but actually, for the most part, the basic machinery of our cells is pretty much the same. 
+Do you realize that we can take advantage and commandeer the machinery of a common bacterium to produce the protein of human insulin used to treat diabetics? 
+This is not like human insulin; this is the same protein that is chemically indistinguishable from what comes out of your pancreas. 
+And speaking of bacteria, do you realize that each of us carries in our gut more bacteria than there are cells in the rest of our body? 
+Maybe 10 times more. 
+I mean think of it, when Antonio Damasio asks about your self-image, do you think about the bacteria? 
+Our gut is a wonderfully hospitable environment for those bacteria. 
+It's warm, it's dark, it's moist, it's very cozy. 
+And you're going to provide all the nutrition that they could possibly want with no effort on their part. 
+It's really like an Easy Street for bacteria, with the occasional interruption of the unintended forced rush to the exit. 
+But otherwise, you are a wonderful environment for those bacteria, just as they are essential to your life. 
+They help in the digestion of essential nutrients, and they protect you against certain diseases. 
+But what will come in the future? 
+Are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species? 
+Or, are we destined to become something different — something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment? 
+Now let's take a step back in time to the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago — the Earth, the solar system, about four and a half billion years — the first signs of proto-life, maybe three to four billion years ago on Earth — the first multi-celled organisms, perhaps as much as 800 or a billion years ago — and then the human species, finally emerging in the last 130,000 years. 
+In this vast unfinished symphony of the universe, life on Earth is like a brief measure; the animal kingdom, like a single measure; and human life, a small grace note. 
+That was us. 
+That also constitutes the entertainment portion of this talk, so I hope you enjoyed it. 
+(Laughter) Now when I was a freshman in college, I took my first biology class. 
+I was fascinated by the elegance and beauty of biology. 
+I became enamored of the power of evolution, and I realized something very fundamental: in most of the existence of life in single-celled organisms, each cell simply divides, and all of the genetic energy of that cell is carried on in both daughter cells. 
+But at the time multi-celled organisms come online, things start to change. 
+Sexual reproduction enters the picture. 
+And very importantly, with the introduction of sexual reproduction that passes on the genome, the rest of the body becomes expendable. 
+In fact, you could say that the inevitability of the death of our bodies enters in evolutionary time at the same moment as sexual reproduction. 
+Now I have to confess, when I was a college undergraduate, I thought, okay, sex / death, sex / death, death for sex — it seemed pretty reasonable at the time, but with each passing year, I've come to have increasing doubts. 
+I've come to understand the sentiments of George Burns, who was performing still in Las Vegas well into his 90s. 
+And one night, there's a knock at his hotel room door. 
+He answers the door. 
+Standing before him is a gorgeous, scantily clad showgirl. 
+She looks at him and says, "I'm here for super sex." 
+"That's fine," says George, "I'll take the soup." 
+(Laughter) I came to realize, as a physician, that I was working toward a goal which was different from the goal of evolution — not necessarily contradictory, just different. 
+I was trying to preserve the body. 
+I wanted to keep us healthy. 
+I wanted to restore health from disease. 
+I wanted us to live long and healthy lives. 
+Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. 
+From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea. 
+I think we would all understand the sentiment that Woody Allen expressed when he said, "" I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. 
+I want to achieve it through not dying. "" (Laughter) Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. 
+It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. 
+Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. 
+That is the sole test of survival and success. 
+At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them. 
+So what does this mean, as we look back at what has happened in evolution, and as we think about the place again of humans in evolution, and particularly as we look ahead to the next phase, I would say that there are a number of possibilities. 
+The first is that we will not evolve. 
+We have reached a kind of equipoise. 
+And the reasoning behind that would be, first, we have, through medicine, managed to preserve a lot of genes that would otherwise be selected out and be removed from the population. 
+And secondly, we as a species have so configured our environment that we have managed to make it adapt to us as well as we adapt to it. 
+And by the way, we immigrate and circulate and intermix so much that you can't any longer have the isolation that is necessary for evolution to take place. 
+A second possibility is that there will be evolution of the traditional kind, natural, imposed by the forces of nature. 
+And the argument here would be that the wheels of evolution grind slowly, but they are inexorable. 
+And as far as isolation goes, when we as a species do colonize distant planets, there will be the isolation and the environmental changes that could produce evolution in the natural way. 
+But there's a third possibility, an enticing, intriguing and frightening possibility. 
+I call it neo-evolution — the new evolution that is not simply natural, but guided and chosen by us as individuals in the choices that we will make. 
+Now how could this come about? 
+How could it be possible that we would do this? 
+Consider, first, the reality that people today, in some cultures, are making choices about their offspring. 
+They're, in some cultures, choosing to have more males than females. 
+It's not necessarily good for the society, but it's what the individual and the family are choosing. 
+Think also, if it were possible ever for you to choose, not simply to choose the sex of your child, but for you in your body to make the genetic adjustments that would cure or prevent diseases. 
+What if you could make the genetic changes to eliminate diabetes or Alzheimer's or reduce the risk of cancer or eliminate stroke? 
+Wouldn't you want to make those changes in your genes? 
+If we look ahead, these kind of changes are going to be increasingly possible. 
+The Human Genome Project started in 1990, and it took 13 years. 
+It cost 2.7 billion dollars. 
+The year after it was finished in 2004, you could do the same job for 20 million dollars in three to four months. 
+Today, you can have a complete sequence of the three billion base pairs in the human genome at a cost of about 20,000 dollars and in the space of about a week. 
+It won't be very long before the reality will be the 1,000-dollar human genome, and it will be increasingly available for everyone. 
+Just a week ago, the National Academy of Engineering awarded its Draper Prize to Francis Arnold and Willem Stemmer, two scientists who independently developed techniques to encourage the natural process of evolution to work faster and to lead to desirable proteins in a more efficient way — what Frances Arnold calls "" directed evolution. "" A couple of years ago, the Lasker Prize was awarded to the scientist Shinya Yamanaka for his research in which he took an adult skin cell, a fibroblast, and by manipulating just four genes, he induced that cell to revert to a pluripotential stem cell — a cell potentially capable 
+of becoming any cell in your body. 
+These changes are coming. 
+The same technology that has produced the human insulin in bacteria can make viruses that will not only protect you against themselves, but induce immunity against other viruses. 
+Believe it or not, there's an experimental trial going on with vaccine against influenza that has been grown in the cells of a tobacco plant. 
+Can you imagine something good coming out of tobacco? 
+These are all reality today, and [in] the future, will be evermore possible. 
+Imagine then just two other little changes. 
+You can change the cells in your body, but what if you could change the cells in your offspring? 
+What if you could change the sperm and the ova, or change the newly fertilized egg, and give your offspring a better chance at a healthier life — eliminate the diabetes, eliminate the hemophilia, reduce the risk of cancer? 
+Who doesn't want healthier children? 
+And then, that same analytic technology, that same engine of science that can produce the changes to prevent disease, will also enable us to adopt super-attributes, hyper-capacities — that better memory. 
+Why not have the quick wit of a Ken Jennings, especially if you can augment it with the next generation of the Watson machine? 
+Why not have the quick twitch muscle that will enable you to run faster and longer? 
+Why not live longer? 
+These will be irresistible. 
+And when we are at a position where we can pass it on to the next generation, and we can adopt the attributes we want, we will have converted old-style evolution into neo-evolution. 
+We'll take a process that normally might require 100,000 years, and we can compress it down to a thousand years — and maybe even in the next 100 years. 
+These are choices that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are going to have before them. 
+Will we use these choices to make a society that is better, that is more successful, that is kinder? 
+Or, will we selectively choose different attributes that we want for some of us and not for others of us? 
+Will we make a society that is more boring and more uniform, or more robust and more versatile? 
+These are the kinds of questions that we will have to face. 
+And most profoundly of all, will we ever be able to develop the wisdom, and to inherit the wisdom, that we'll need to make these choices wisely? 
+For better or worse, and sooner than you may think, these choices will be up to us. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And this is when the Americans beat the Russians, and this was — yes, it was technically a game. 
+I happened to be living in Springfield at the time, and the best part of it was, you would close the women's door in the bathroom, and I remember seeing "" Go Sox, "" and I thought, really? 
+So this is Zig in this photograph, this is also one of Zig's photographs. 
+And that was fascinating to me as a game designer, because it never occurs to me, should I make the game about this difficult topic or not? 
+This is Maezza, and when she was seven years old, she came home from school one day, and like I do every single day, I asked her, "" What did you do today? "" So she said, "" We talked about the Middle Passage. "" Now, this was a big moment. Maezza's dad is black, and I knew this day was coming. 
+"" The ships start in England, they come down from England, they go to Africa, they go across the ocean — that's the Middle Passage part — they come to America, where the slaves are sold, "" she's telling me. 
+(Laughter) And so, to me, I wanted more value in this, so when she asked if she could play a game, I said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) And so I happened to have all of these little pieces. 
+And so the basic gist of it is, I grabbed a bunch of families, and she's like, "" Mommy, but you forgot the pink baby and you forgot the blue daddy and you forgot all these other things. "" And she says, "" They want to go. "" And I said, "" Honey, no, they don't want to go. 
+It wasn't abstract stuff in a brochure or in a movie. 
+And so it was just an incredibly powerful experience. 
+This is the game, which I've ended up calling "" The New World, "" because I like the phrase. 
+My history is Irish. 
+This is a game with 50,000 individual pieces. 
+I was crazy when I decided to start it, but I'm in the middle of it now. 
+I'm hoping that I'll teach culture through these games. 
+We change as people through games, because we're involved, and we're playing, and we're learning as we do so. 
+
+(Applause) AIDS was discovered 1981; the virus, 1983. 
+These Gapminder bubbles show you how the spread of the virus was in 1983 in the world, or how we estimate that it was. 
+What we are showing here is — on this axis here, I'm showing percent of infected adults. 
+And on this axis, I'm showing dollars per person in income. 
+And the size of these bubbles, the size of the bubbles here, that shows how many are infected in each country, and the color is the continent. 
+Now, you can see United States, in 1983, had a very low percentage infected, but due to the big population, still a sizable bubble. 
+There were quite many people infected in the United States. 
+And, up there, you see Uganda. 
+They had almost five percent infected, and quite a big bubble in spite of being a small country, then. 
+And they were probably the most infected country in the world. 
+Now, what has happened? 
+Now you have understood the graph and now, in the next 60 seconds, we will play the HIV epidemic in the world. 
+But first, I have a new invention here. 
+(Laughter) I have solidified the beam of the laser pointer. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) So, ready, steady, go! 
+First, we have the fast rise in Uganda and Zimbabwe. 
+They went upwards like this. 
+In Asia, the first country to be heavily infected was Thailand — they reached one to two percent. 
+Then, Uganda started to turn back, whereas Zimbabwe skyrocketed, and some years later South Africa had a terrible rise of HIV frequency. 
+Look, India got many infected, but had a low level. 
+And almost the same happens here. 
+See, Uganda coming down, Zimbabwe coming down, Russia went to one percent. 
+In the last two to three years, we have reached a steady state of HIV epidemic in the world. 
+25 years it took. 
+But, steady state doesn't mean that things are getting better, it's just that they have stopped getting worse. 
+And it has — the steady state is, more or less, one percent of the adult world population is HIV-infected. 
+It means 30 to 40 million people, the whole of California — every person, that's more or less what we have today in the world. 
+Now, let me make a fast replay of Botswana. 
+Botswana — upper middle-income country in southern Africa, democratic government, good economy, and this is what happened there. 
+They started low, they skyrocketed, they peaked up there in 2003, and now they are down. 
+But they are falling only slowly, because in Botswana, with good economy and governance, they can manage to treat people. 
+And if people who are infected are treated, they don't die of AIDS. 
+These percentages won't come down because people can survive 10 to 20 years. 
+So there's some problem with these metrics now. 
+But the poorer countries in Africa, the low-income countries down here, there the rates fall faster, of the percentage infected, because people still die. 
+In spite of PEPFAR, the generous PEPFAR, all people are not reached by treatment, and of those who are reached by treatment in the poor countries, only 60 percent are left on treatment after two years. 
+It's not realistic with lifelong treatment for everyone in the poorest countries. 
+But it's very good that what is done is being done. 
+But focus now is back on prevention. 
+It is only by stopping the transmission that the world will be able to deal with it. 
+Drugs is too costly — had we had the vaccine, or when we will get the vaccine, that's something more effective — but the drugs are very costly for the poor. 
+Not the drug in itself, but the treatment and the care which is needed around it. 
+So, when we look at the pattern, one thing comes out very clearly: you see the blue bubbles and people say HIV is very high in Africa. 
+I would say, HIV is very different in Africa. 
+You'll find the highest HIV rate in the world in African countries, and yet you'll find Senegal, down here — the same rate as United States. 
+And you'll find Madagascar, and you'll find a lot of African countries about as low as the rest of the world. 
+It's this terrible simplification that there's one Africa and things go on in one way in Africa. 
+We have to stop that. 
+It's not respectful, and it's not very clever to think that way. 
+(Applause) I had the fortune to live and work for a time in the United States. 
+I found out that Salt Lake City and San Francisco were different. 
+(Laughter) And so it is in Africa — it's a lot of difference. 
+So, why is it so high? Is it war? 
+No, it's not. Look here. 
+War-torn Congo is down there — two, three, four percent. 
+And this is peaceful Zambia, neighboring country — 15 percent. 
+And there's good studies of the refugees coming out of Congo — they have two, three percent infected, and peaceful Zambia — much higher. 
+There are now studies clearly showing that the wars are terrible, that rapes are terrible, but this is not the driving force for the high levels in Africa. 
+So, is it poverty? 
+Well if you look at the macro level, it seems more money, more HIV. 
+But that's very simplistic, so let's go down and look at Tanzania. 
+I will split Tanzania in five income groups, from the highest income to the lowest income, and here we go. 
+The ones with the highest income, the better off — I wouldn't say rich — they have higher HIV. 
+The difference goes from 11 percent down to four percent, and it is even bigger among women. 
+There's a lot of things that we thought, that now, good research, done by African institutions and researchers together with the international researchers, show that that's not the case. 
+So, this is the difference within Tanzania. 
+And, I can't avoid showing Kenya. 
+Look here at Kenya. 
+I've split Kenya in its provinces. 
+Here it goes. 
+See the difference within one African country — it goes from very low level to very high level, and most of the provinces in Kenya is quite modest. 
+So, what is it then? 
+Why do we see this extremely high levels in some countries? 
+Well, it is more common with multiple partners, there is less condom use, and there is age-disparate sex — that is, older men tend to have sex with younger women. 
+We see higher rates in younger women than younger men in many of these highly affected countries. 
+But where are they situated? 
+I will swap the bubbles to a map. 
+Look, the highly infected are four percent of all population and they hold 50 percent of the HIV-infected. 
+HIV exists all over the world. 
+Look, you have bubbles all over the world here. 
+Brazil has many HIV-infected. 
+Arab countries not so much, but Iran is quite high. 
+They have heroin addiction and also prostitution in Iran. 
+India has many because they are many. 
+Southeast Asia, and so on. 
+But, there is one part of Africa — and the difficult thing is, at the same time, not to make a uniform statement about Africa, not to come to simple ideas of why it is like this, on one hand. 
+On the other hand, try to say that this is not the case, because there is a scientific consensus about this pattern now. 
+UNAIDS have done good data available, finally, about the spread of HIV. 
+It could be concurrency. 
+It could be some virus types. 
+It could be that there is other things which makes transmission occur in a higher frequency. 
+After all, if you are completely healthy and you have heterosexual sex, the risk of infection in one intercourse is one in 1,000. 
+Don't jump to conclusions now on how to behave tonight and so on. 
+(Laughter) But — and if you are in an unfavorable situation, more sexually transmitted diseases, it can be one in 100. 
+But what we think is that it could be concurrency. 
+And what is concurrency? 
+In Sweden, we have no concurrency. 
+We have serial monogamy. 
+Vodka, New Year's Eve — new partner for the spring. 
+Vodka, Midsummer's Eve — new partner for the fall. 
+Vodka — and it goes on like this, you know? 
+And you collect a big number of exes. 
+And we have a terrible chlamydia epidemic — terrible chlamydia epidemic which sticks around for many years. 
+HIV has a peak three to six weeks after infection and therefore, having more than one partner in the same month is much more dangerous for HIV than others. 
+Probably, it's a combination of this. 
+And what makes me so happy is that we are moving now towards fact when we look at this. 
+You can get this chart, free. 
+We have uploaded UNAIDS data on the Gapminder site. 
+And we hope that when we act on global problems in the future we will not only have the heart, we will not only have the money, but we will also use the brain. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I'm a neurosurgeon. 
+And like most of my colleagues, I have to deal, every day, with human tragedies. 
+I realize how your life can change from one second to the other after a major stroke or after a car accident. 
+And what is very frustrating for us neurosurgeons is to realize that unlike other organs of the body, the brain has very little ability for self-repair. 
+And after a major injury of your central nervous system, the patients often remain with a severe handicap. 
+And that's probably the reason why I've chosen to be a functional neurosurgeon. 
+What is a functional neurosurgeon? 
+It's a doctor who is trying to improve a neurological function through different surgical strategies. 
+You've certainly heard of one of the famous ones called deep brain stimulation, where you implant an electrode in the depths of the brain in order to modulate a circuit of neurons to improve a neurological function. 
+It's really an amazing technology in that it has improved the destiny of patients with Parkinson's disease, with severe tremor, with severe pain. 
+However, neuromodulation does not mean neuro-repair. 
+And the dream of functional neurosurgeons is to repair the brain. 
+I think that we are approaching this dream. 
+And I would like to show you that we are very close to this. 
+And that with a little bit of help, the brain is able to help itself. 
+So the story started 15 years ago. 
+At that time, I was a chief resident working days and nights in the emergency room. 
+I often had to take care of patients with head trauma. 
+You have to imagine that when a patient comes in with a severe head trauma, his brain is swelling and he's increasing his intracranial pressure. 
+And in order to save his life, you have to decrease this intracranial pressure. 
+And to do that, you sometimes have to remove a piece of swollen brain. 
+So instead of throwing away these pieces of swollen brain, we decided with Jean-François Brunet, who is a colleague of mine, a biologist, to study them. 
+What do I mean by that? 
+We wanted to grow cells from these pieces of tissue. 
+It's not an easy task. 
+Growing cells from a piece of tissue is a bit the same as growing very small children out from their family. 
+So you need to find the right nutrients, the warmth, the humidity and all the nice environments to make them thrive. 
+So that's exactly what we had to do with these cells. 
+And after many attempts, Jean-François did it. 
+And that's what he saw under his microscope. 
+And that was, for us, a major surprise. 
+Why? 
+Because this looks exactly the same as a stem cell culture, with large green cells surrounding small, immature cells. 
+And you may remember from biology class that stem cells are immature cells, able to turn into any type of cell of the body. 
+The adult brain has stem cells, but they're very rare and they're located in deep and small niches in the depths of the brain. 
+So it was surprising to get this kind of stem cell culture from the superficial part of swollen brain we had in the operating theater. 
+And there was another intriguing observation: Regular stem cells are very active cells — cells that divide, divide, divide very quickly. 
+And they never die, they're immortal cells. 
+But these cells behave differently. 
+They divide slowly, and after a few weeks of culture, they even died. 
+So we were in front of a strange new cell population that looked like stem cells but behaved differently. 
+And it took us a long time to understand where they came from. 
+They come from these cells. 
+These blue and red cells are called doublecortin-positive cells. 
+All of you have them in your brain. 
+They represent four percent of your cortical brain cells. 
+They have a very important role during the development stage. 
+When you were fetuses, they helped your brain to fold itself. 
+But why do they stay in your head? 
+This, we don't know. 
+We think that they may participate in brain repair because we find them in higher concentration close to brain lesions. 
+But it's not so sure. 
+But there is one clear thing — that from these cells, we got our stem cell culture. 
+And we were in front of a potential new source of cells to repair the brain. 
+And we had to prove this. 
+So to prove it, we decided to design an experimental paradigm. 
+The idea was to biopsy a piece of brain in a non-eloquent area of the brain, and then to culture the cells exactly the way Jean-François did it in his lab. 
+And then label them, to put color in them in order to be able to track them in the brain. 
+And the last step was to re-implant them in the same individual. 
+We call these autologous grafts — autografts. 
+So the first question we had, "" What will happen if we re-implant these cells in a normal brain, and what will happen if we re-implant the same cells in a lesioned brain? "" Thanks to the help of professor Eric Rouiller, we worked with monkeys. 
+So in the first-case scenario, we re-implanted the cells in the normal brain and what we saw is that they completely disappeared after a few weeks, as if they were taken from the brain, they go back home, the space is already busy, they are not needed there, so they disappear. 
+In the second-case scenario, we performed the lesion, we re-implanted exactly the same cells, and in this case, the cells remained — and they became mature neurons. 
+And that's the image of what we could observe under the microscope. 
+Those are the cells that were re-implanted. 
+And the proof they carry, these little spots, those are the cells that we've labeled in vitro, when they were in culture. 
+But we could not stop here, of course. 
+Do these cells also help a monkey to recover after a lesion? 
+So for that, we trained monkeys to perform a manual dexterity task. 
+They had to retrieve food pellets from a tray. 
+They were very good at it. 
+And when they had reached a plateau of performance, we did a lesion in the motor cortex corresponding to the hand motion. 
+So the monkeys were plegic, they could not move their hand anymore. 
+And exactly the same as humans would do, they spontaneously recovered to a certain extent, exactly the same as after a stroke. 
+Patients are completely plegic, and then they try to recover due to a brain plasticity mechanism, they recover to a certain extent, exactly the same for the monkey. 
+So when we were sure that the monkey had reached his plateau of spontaneous recovery, we implanted his own cells. 
+So on the left side, you see the monkey that has spontaneously recovered. 
+He's at about 40 to 50 percent of his previous performance before the lesion. 
+He's not so accurate, not so quick. 
+And look now when we re-implant the cells: Two months after re-implantation, the same individual. 
+(Applause) It was also very exciting results for us, I tell you. 
+Since that time, we've understood much more about these cells. 
+We know that we can cryopreserve them, we can use them later on. 
+We know that we can apply them in other neuropathological models, like Parkinson's disease, for example. 
+But our dream is still to implant them in humans. 
+And I really hope that I'll be able to show you soon that the human brain is giving us the tools to repair itself. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Jocelyne, this is amazing, and I'm sure that right now, there are several dozen people in the audience, possibly even a majority, who are thinking, "" I know somebody who can use this. "" I do, in any case. 
+And of course the question is, what are the biggest obstacles before you can go into human clinical trials? 
+Jocelyne Bloch: The biggest obstacles are regulations. (Laughs) So, from these exciting results, you need to fill out about two kilograms of papers and forms to be able to go through these kind of trials. 
+JB: Yes, it is, but it takes a long time and a lot of patience and almost a professional team to do it, you know? 
+BG: If you project yourself — having done the research and having tried to get permission to start the trials, if you project yourself out in time, how many years before somebody gets into a hospital and this therapy is available? 
+JB: So, it's very difficult to say. 
+It depends, first, on the approval of the trial. 
+Will the regulation allow us to do it soon? 
+And then, you have to perform this kind of study in a small group of patients. 
+So it takes, already, a long time to select the patients, do the treatment and evaluate if it's useful to do this kind of treatment. 
+And then you have to deploy this to a multicentric trial. 
+You have to really prove first that it's useful before offering this treatment up for everybody. 
+BG: And safe, of course. JB: Of course. 
+BG: Jocelyne, thank you for coming to TED and sharing this. 
+BG: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Aquatic noises) So this video was taken at Aquarius undersea laboratory four miles off the coast of Key Largo, about 60 feet below the surface. 
+NASA uses this extreme environment to train astronauts and aquanauts, and last year, they invited us along for the ride. 
+All the footage was taken from our open ROV, which is a robot that we built in our garage. 
+So ROV stands for Remote Operated Vehicle, which in our case means our little robot sends live video across that ultra-thin tether back to the computer topside. 
+It's open source, meaning we publish and share all of our design files and all of our code online, allowing anyone to modify or improve or change the design. 
+It's built with mostly off-the-shelf parts and costs about 1,000 times cheaper than the ROVs James Cameron used to explore the Titanic. 
+So ROVs aren't new. 
+They've been around for decades. 
+Scientists use ROVs to explore the oceans. 
+Oil and gas companies use them for exploration and construction. 
+What we've built isn't unique. 
+It's how we've built it that's really unique. 
+So I want to give you a quick story of how it got started. 
+So a few years ago, my friend Eric and I decided we wanted to explore this underwater cave in the foothills of the Sierras. 
+We had heard this story about lost gold from a Gold Rush-era robbery, and we wanted to go up there. 
+Unfortunately, we didn't have any money and we didn't have any tools to do it. 
+So Eric had an initial design idea for a robot, but we didn't have all the parts figured out, so we did what anybody would do in our situation: we asked the Internet for help. 
+More specifically, we created this website, openROV.com, and shared our intentions and our plans For the first few months, it was just Eric and I talking back to each other on the forums, but pretty soon, we started to get feedback from makers and hobbyists, and then actually professional ocean engineers who had some suggestions for what we should do. 
+We kept working on it. We learned a lot. 
+We kept prototyping, and eventually, we decided we wanted to go to the cave. We were ready. 
+So about that time, our little expedition became quite a story, and it got picked up in The New York Times. 
+And we were pretty much just overwhelmed with interest from people who wanted a kit that they could build this open ROV themselves. 
+So we decided to put the project on Kickstarter, and when we did, we raised our funding goal in about two hours, and all of a sudden, had this money to make these kits. 
+But then we had to learn how to make them. 
+I mean, we had to learn small batch manufacturing. 
+So we quickly learned that our garage was not big enough to hold our growing operation. 
+But we were able to do it, we got all the kits made, thanks a lot to TechShop, which was a big help to us, and we shipped these kits all over the world just before Christmas of last year, so it was just a few months ago. 
+But we're already starting to get video and photos back from all over the world, including this shot from under the ice in Antarctica. 
+We've also learned the penguins love robots. 
+(Laughter) So we're still publishing all the designs online, encouraging anyone to build these themselves. 
+That's the only way that we could have done this. 
+By being open source, we've created this distributed R & D network, and we're moving faster than any venture-backed counterpart. 
+But the actual robot is really only half the story. 
+The real potential, the long term potential, is with this community of DIY ocean explorers that are forming all over the globe. 
+What can we discover when there's thousands of these devices roaming the seas? 
+So you're probably all wondering: the cave. 
+Did you find the gold? 
+Well, we didn't find any gold, but we decided that what we found was much more valuable. 
+It was the glimpse into a potential future for ocean exploration. 
+It's something that's not limited to the James Camerons of the world, but something that we're all participating in. 
+It's an underwater world we're all exploring together. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So when I was in Morocco, in Casablanca, not so long ago, I met a young unmarried mother called Faiza. 
+Faiza showed me photos of her infant son and she told me the story of his conception, pregnancy, and delivery. 
+It was a remarkable tale, but Faiza saved the best for last. 
+"" You know, I am a virgin, "" she told me. 
+"I have two medical certificates to prove it." 
+This is the modern Middle East, where two millennia after the coming of Christ, virgin births are still a fact of life. 
+Faiza's story is just one of hundreds I've heard over the years, traveling across the Arab region talking to people about sex. 
+Now, I know this might sound like a dream job, or possibly a highly dubious occupation, but for me, it's something else altogether. 
+I'm half Egyptian, and I'm Muslim. 
+But I grew up in Canada, far from my Arab roots. 
+Like so many who straddle East and West, I've been drawn, over the years, to try to better understand my origins. 
+That I chose to look at sex comes from my background in HIV / AIDS, as a writer and a researcher and an activist. 
+Sex lies at the heart of an emerging epidemic in the Middle East and North Africa, which is one of only two regions in the world where HIV / AIDS is still on the rise. 
+Now sexuality is an incredibly powerful lens with which to study any society, because what happens in our intimate lives is reflected by forces on a bigger stage: in politics and economics, in religion and tradition, in gender and generations. 
+As I found, if you really want to know a people, you start by looking inside their bedrooms. 
+Now to be sure, the Arab world is vast and varied. 
+But running across it are three red lines — these are topics you are not supposed to challenge in word or deed. 
+The first of these is politics. 
+But the Arab Spring has changed all that, in uprisings which have blossomed across the region since 2011. 
+Now while those in power, old and new, continue to cling to business as usual, millions are still pushing back, and pushing forward to what they hope will be a better life. 
+That second red line is religion. 
+But now religion and politics are connected, with the rise of such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood. 
+And some people, at least, are starting to ask questions about the role of Islam in public and private life. 
+You know, as for that third red line, that off-limits subject, what do you think it might be? 
+Audience: Sex. 
+Shereen El Feki: Louder, I can't hear you. 
+Audience: Sex. 
+SEF: Again, please don't be shy. 
+Audience: Sex. 
+SEF: Absolutely, that's right, it's sex. (Laughter) Across the Arab region, the only accepted context for sex is marriage — approved by your parents, sanctioned by religion and registered by the state. 
+Marriage is your ticket to adulthood. 
+If you don't tie the knot, you can't move out of your parents' place, and you're not supposed to be having sex, and you're definitely not supposed to be having children. 
+It's a social citadel; it's an impregnable fortress which resists any assault, any alternative. 
+And around the fortress is this vast field of taboo against premarital sex, against condoms, against abortion, against homosexuality, you name it. 
+Faiza was living proof of this. 
+Her virginity statement was not a piece of wishful thinking. 
+Although the major religions of the region extoll premarital chastity, in a patriarchy, boys will be boys. 
+Men have sex before marriage, and people more or less turn a blind eye. 
+Not so for women, who are expected to be virgins on their wedding night — that is, to turn up with your hymen intact. 
+This is not a question of individual concern, this is a matter of family honor, and in particular, men's honor. 
+And so women and their relatives will go to great lengths to preserve this tiny piece of anatomy — from female genital mutilation, to virginity testing, to hymen repair surgery. 
+Faiza chose a different route: non-vaginal sex. 
+Only she became pregnant all the same. 
+But Faiza didn't actually realize this, because there's so little sexuality education in schools, and so little communication in the family. 
+When her condition became hard to hide, Faiza's mother helped her flee her father and brothers. 
+This is because honor killings are a real threat for untold numbers of women in the Arab region. 
+And so when Faiza eventually fetched up at a hospital in Casablanca, the man who offered to help her, instead tried to rape her. 
+Sadly, Faiza is not alone. 
+In Egypt, where my research is focused, I have seen plenty of trouble in and out of the citadel. 
+There are legions of young men who can't afford to get married, because marriage has become a very expensive proposition. 
+They are expected to bear the burden of costs in married life, but they can't find jobs. 
+This is one of the major drivers of the recent uprisings, and it is one of the reasons for the rising age of marriage in much of the Arab region. 
+There are career women who want to get married, but can't find a husband, because they defy gender expectations, or as one young female doctor in Tunisia put it to me, "" The women, they are becoming more and more open. 
+But the man, he is still at the prehistoric stage. "" And then there are men and women who cross the heterosexual line, who have sex with their own sex, or who have a different gender identity. 
+They are on the receiving end of laws which punish their activities, even their appearance. 
+And they face a daily struggle with social stigma, with family despair, and with religious fire and brimstone. 
+Now, it's not as if it's all rosy in the marital bed either. 
+Couples who are looking for greater happiness, greater sexual happiness in their married lives, but are at a loss of how to achieve it, especially wives, who are afraid of being seen as bad women if they show some spark in the bedroom. 
+And then there are those whose marriages are actually a veil for prostitution. 
+They have been sold by their families, often to wealthy Arab tourists. 
+This is just one face of a booming sex trade across the Arab region. 
+Now raise your hand if any of this is sounding familiar to you, from your part of the world. 
+Yeah. It's not as if the Arab world has a monopoly on sexual hangups. 
+And although we don't yet have an Arab Kinsey Report to tell us exactly what's happening inside bedrooms across the Arab region, It's pretty clear that something is not right. 
+Double standards for men and women, sex as a source of shame, family control limiting individual choices, and a vast gulf between appearance and reality: what people are doing and what they're willing to admit to, and a general reluctance to move beyond private whispers to a serious and sustained public discussion. 
+As one doctor in Cairo summed it up for me, "" Here, sex is the opposite of sport. 
+Football, everybody talks about it, but hardly anyone plays. 
+But sex, everybody is doing it, but nobody wants to talk about it. "" (Laughter) (Music) (In Arabic) SEF: I want to give you a piece of advice, which if you follow it, will make you happy in life. 
+When your husband reaches out to you, when he seizes a part of your body, sigh deeply and look at him lustily. 
+When he penetrates you with his penis, try to talk flirtatiously and move yourself in harmony with him. 
+Hot stuff! 
+And it might sound that these handy hints come from "" The Joy of Sex "" or YouPorn. 
+But in fact, they come from a 10th-century Arabic book called "" The Encyclopedia of Pleasure, "" which covers sex from aphrodisiacs to zoophilia, and everything in between. 
+The Encyclopedia is just one in a long line of Arabic erotica, much of it written by religious scholars. 
+Going right back to the Prophet Muhammad, there is a rich tradition in Islam of talking frankly about sex: not just its problems, but also its pleasures, and not just for men, but also for women. 
+A thousand years ago, we used to have whole dictionaries of sex in Arabic. 
+Words to cover every conceivable sexual feature, position and preference, a body of language that was rich enough to make up the body of the woman you see on this page. 
+Today, this history is largely unknown in the Arab region. 
+Even by educated people, who often feel more comfortable talking about sex in a foreign language than they do in their own tongue. 
+Today's sexual landscape looks a lot like Europe and America on the brink of the sexual revolution. 
+But while the West has opened on sex, what we found is that Arab societies appear to have been moving in the opposite direction. 
+In Egypt and many of its neighbors, this closing down is part of a wider closing in political, social and cultural thought. 
+And it is the product of a complex historical process, one which has gained ground with the rise of Islamic conservatism since the late 1970s. 
+"" Just say no "" is what conservatives around the world say to any challenge to the sexual status quo. 
+In the Arab region, they brand these attempts as a Western conspiracy to undermine traditional Arab and Islamic values. 
+But what's really at stake here is one of their most powerful tools of control: sex wrapped up in religion. 
+But history shows us that even as recently as our fathers' and grandfathers' day, there have been times of greater pragmatism, and tolerance, and a willingness to consider other interpretations: be it abortion, or masturbation, or even the incendiary topic of homosexuality. 
+It is not black and white, as conservatives would have us believe. 
+In these, as in so many other matters, Islam offers us at least 50 shades of gray. 
+(Laughter) Over my travels, I've met men and women across the Arab region who've been exploring that spectrum — sexologists who are trying to help couples find greater happiness in their marriages, innovators who are managing to get sexuality education into schools, small groups of men and women, lesbian, gay, transgendered, transsexual, who are reaching out to their peers with online initiatives and real-world support. 
+Women, and increasingly men, who are starting to speak out and push back against sexual violence on the streets and in the home. 
+Groups that are trying to help sex workers protect themselves against HIV and other occupational hazards, and NGOs that are helping unwed mothers like Faiza find a place in society, and critically, stay with their kids. 
+Now these efforts are small, they're often underfunded, and they face formidable opposition. 
+But I am optimistic that, in the long run, times are changing, and they and their ideas will gain ground. 
+Social change doesn't happen in the Arab region through dramatic confrontation, beating or indeed baring of breasts, but rather through negotiation. 
+What we're talking here is not about a sexual revolution, but a sexual evolution, learning from other parts of the world, adapting to local conditions, forging our own path, not following one blazed by another. 
+That path, I hope, will one day lead us to the right to control our own bodies, and to access the information and services we need to lead satisfying and safe sexual lives. 
+The right to express our ideas freely, to marry whom we choose, to choose our own partners, to be sexually active or not, to decide whether to have children and when, all this without violence or force or discrimination. 
+Now we are very far from this across the Arab region, and so much needs to change: law, education, media, the economy, the list goes on and on, and it is the work of a generation, at least. 
+But it begins with a journey that I myself have made, asking hard questions of received wisdoms in sexual life. 
+And it is a journey which has only served to strengthen my faith, and my appreciation of local histories and cultures by showing me possibilities where I once only saw absolutes. 
+Now given the turmoil in many countries in the Arab region, talking about sex, challenging the taboos, seeking alternatives might sound like something of a luxury. 
+But at this critical moment in history, if we do not anchor freedom and justice, dignity and equality, privacy and autonomy in our personal lives, in our sexual lives, we will find it very hard to achieve in public life. 
+The political and the sexual are intimate bedfellows, and that is true for us all. 
+no matter where we live and love. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It's a bit funny to be at a conference dedicated to things not seen, and present my proposal to build a 6,000-kilometer-long wall across the entire African continent. 
+About the size of the Great Wall of China, this would hardly be an invisible structure. 
+And yet it's made from parts that are invisible, or near-invisible, to the naked eye: bacteria and grains of sand. 
+Now, as architects we're trained to solve problems. 
+But I don't really believe in architectural problems; I only believe in opportunities. 
+Which is why I'll show you a threat, and an architectural response. 
+The threat is desertification. 
+My response is a sandstone wall made from bacteria and solidified sand, stretching across the desert. 
+Now, sand is a magical material of beautiful contradictions. 
+It is simple and complex. 
+It is peaceful and violent. 
+It is always the same, never the same, endlessly fascinating. 
+One billion grains of sand come into existence in the world each second. 
+That's a cyclical process. 
+As rocks and mountains die, grains of sand are born. 
+Some of those grains may then cement naturally into sandstone. 
+And as the sandstone weathers, new grains break free. 
+Some of those grains may then accumulate on a massive scale, into a sand dune. 
+In a way, the static, stone mountain becomes a moving mountain of sand. 
+But, moving mountains can be dangerous. Let me try and explain why. 
+Dry areas cover more than one third of the Earth's land surfaces. 
+Some are already deserts; others are being seriously degraded by the sand. 
+Just south of the Sahara we find the Sahel. 
+The name means "" edge of the desert. "" And this is the region most closely associated with desertification. 
+It was here in the late '60s and early' 70s that major droughts brought three million people to become dependent upon emergency food aid, with about up to 250,000 dying. 
+This is a catastrophe waiting to happen again. 
+And it's one that gets very little attention. 
+In our accelerated media culture, desertification is simply too slow to reach the headlines. 
+It's nothing like a tsunami or a Katrina: too few crying children and smashed up houses. 
+And yet desertification is a major threat on all continents, affecting some 110 countries and about 70 percent of the world's agricultural drylands. 
+It seriously threatens the livelihoods of millions of people, and especially in Africa and China. 
+And it is largely an issue that we've created for ourselves through unsustainable use of scarce resources. 
+So, we get climate change. 
+We get droughts, increased desertification, crashing food systems, water scarcity, famine, forced migration, political instability, warfare, crisis. 
+That's a potential scenario if we fail to take this seriously. 
+But, how far away is it? 
+I went to Sokoto in northern Nigeria to try and find out how far away it is. 
+The dunes here move southward at a pace of around 600 meters a year. 
+That's the Sahara eating up almost [two meters] a day of the arable land, physically pushing people away from their homes. 
+Here I am — I'm the second person on the left — (Laughter) with the elders in Gidan-Kara, a tiny village outside of Sokoto. 
+They had to move this village in 1987 as a huge dune threatened to swallow it. 
+So, they moved the entire village, hut by hut. 
+This is where the village used to be. 
+It took us about 10 minutes to climb up to the top of that dune, which goes to show why they had to move to a safer location. 
+That's the kind of forced migration that desertification can lead to. 
+If you happen to live close to the desert border, you can pretty much calculate how long it will be before you have to carry your kids away, and abandon your home and your life as you know it. 
+Now, sand dunes cover only about one fifth of our deserts. 
+And still, those extreme environments are very good places if we want to stop the shifting sands. 
+Four years ago, 23 African countries came together to create the Great Green Wall Sahara. 
+A fantastic project, the initial plan called for a shelter belt of trees to be planted right across the African continent, from Mauritania in the west, all the way to Djibouti in the east. 
+If you want to stop a sand dune from moving, what you need to make sure to do is to stop the grains from avalanching over its crest. 
+And a good way of doing that, the most efficient way, is to use some kind of sand catcher. 
+Trees or cacti are good for this. 
+But, one of the problems with planting trees is that the people in these regions are so poor that they chop them down for firewood. 
+Now there is an alternative to just planting trees and hoping that they won't get chopped down. 
+This sandstone wall that I'm proposing essentially does three things. 
+It adds roughness to the dune's surface, to the texture of the dune's surface, binding the grains. 
+It provides a physical support structure for the trees, and it creates physical spaces, habitable spaces inside of the sand dunes. 
+If people live inside of the green barrier they can help support the trees, protect them from humans, and from some of the forces of nature. 
+Inside of the dunes we find shade. 
+We can start harvesting condensation, and start greening the desert from within. 
+Sand dunes are almost like ready-made buildings in a way. 
+All we need to do is solidify the parts that we need to be solid, and then excavate the sand, and we have our architecture. 
+We can either excavate it by hand or we can have the wind excavate it for us. 
+So, the wind carries the sand onto the site and then it carries the redundant sand away from the structure for us. 
+But, by now, you're probably asking, how am I planning to solidify a sand dune? 
+How do we glue those grains of sand together? 
+And the answer is, perhaps, that you use these guys, Bacillus pasteurii, a micro-organism that is readily available in wetlands and marshes, and does precisely that. 
+It takes a pile of loose sand and it creates sandstone out of it. 
+These images from the American Society for Microbiology show us the process. 
+What happens is, you pour Bacillus pasteurii onto a pile of sand, and it starts filling up the voids in between the grains. 
+A chemical process produces calcite, which is a kind of natural cement that binds the grains together. 
+The whole cementation process takes about 24 hours. 
+I learned about this from a professor at U.C. Davis called Jason DeJong. 
+He managed to do it in a mere 1,400 minutes. 
+Here I am, playing the part of the mad scientist, working with the bugs at UCL in London, trying to solidify them. 
+So, how much would this cost? 
+I'm not an economist, very much not, but I did, quite literally, a back of the envelope calculation — (Laughter) — and it seems that for a cubic meter of concrete we would have to pay in the region of 90 dollars. 
+And, after an initial cost of 60 bucks to buy the bacteria, which you'll never have to pay again, one cubic meter of bacterial sand would be about 11 dollars. 
+How do we construct something like this? 
+Well, I'll quickly show you two options. 
+The first is to create a kind of balloon structure, fill it with bacteria, then allow the sand to wash over the balloon, pop the balloon, as it were, disseminating the bacteria into the sand and solidifying it. 
+Then, a few years afterwards, using permacultural strategies, we green that part of the desert. 
+The second alternative would be to use injection piles. 
+So, we pushed the piles down through the dune, and we create an initial bacterial surface. 
+We then pull the piles up through the dune and we're able to create almost any conceivable shape inside of the sand with the sand acting as a mold as we go up. 
+So, we have a way of turning sand into sandstone, and then creating these habitable spaces inside of the desert dunes. 
+But, what should they look like? 
+Well, I was inspired, for my architectural form, by tafoni, which look a little bit like this, this is a model representation of it. 
+These are cavernous rock structures that I found on the site in Sokoto. 
+And I realized that if I scaled them up, they would provide me with good spatial qualities, for ventilation, for thermal comfort, and for other things. 
+Now, part of the formal control over this structure would be lost to nature, obviously, as the bacteria do their work. 
+And I think this creates a kind of boundless beauty actually. 
+I think there is really something in that articulation that is quite nice. 
+We see the result, the traces, if you like, of the Bacillus pasteurii being harnessed to sculpt the desert into these habitable environments. 
+Some people believe that this would spread uncontrollably, and that the bacteria would kill everything in its way. 
+That's not true at all. 
+It's a natural process. It goes on in nature today, and the bacteria die as soon as we stop feeding them. 
+So, there it is — architectural anti-desertification structures made from the desert itself. 
+Sand-stopping devices, made from sand. 
+The world is likely to lose one third of its arable land by the end of the century. 
+In a period of unprecedented population growth and increased food demands, this could prove disastrous. 
+And quite frankly, we're putting our heads in the sand. 
+If nothing else, I would like for this scheme to initiate a discussion. 
+But, if I had something like a TED wish, it would be to actually get it built, to start building this habitable wall, this very, very long, but very narrow city in the desert, built into the dunescape itself. 
+It's not only something that supports trees, but something that connects people and countries together. 
+I would like to conclude by showing you an animation of the structure, and leave you with a sentence by Jorge Luis Borges. 
+Borges said that "" nothing is built on stone, everything is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone. "" Now, there are many details left to explore in this scheme — political, practical, ethical, financial. 
+My design, as it takes you down the rabbit hole, is fraught with many challenges and difficulties in the real world. 
+But, it's a beginning, it's a vision. 
+As Borges would have it, it's the sand. 
+And I think now is really the time to turn it into stone. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+One thing the world needs, one thing this country desperately needs is a better way of conducting our political debates. 
+We need to rediscover the lost art of democratic argument. 
+(Applause) If you think about the arguments we have, most of the time it's shouting matches on cable television, ideological food fights on the floor of Congress. 
+I have a suggestion. 
+Look at all the arguments we have these days over health care, over bonuses and bailouts on Wall Street, over the gap between rich and poor, over affirmative action and same-sex marriage. 
+Lying just beneath the surface of those arguments, with passions raging on all sides, are big questions of moral philosophy, big questions of justice. 
+But we too rarely articulate and defend and argue about those big moral questions in our politics. 
+So what I would like to do today is have something of a discussion. 
+First, let me take a famous philosopher who wrote about those questions of justice and morality, give you a very short lecture on Aristotle of ancient Athens, Aristotle's theory of justice, and then have a discussion here to see whether Aristotle's ideas actually inform the way we think and argue about questions today. 
+So, are you ready for the lecture? 
+According to Aristotle, justice means giving people what they deserve. 
+That's it; that's the lecture. 
+(Laughter) Now, you may say, well, that's obvious enough. 
+The real questions begin when it comes to arguing about who deserves what and why. 
+Take the example of flutes. 
+Suppose we're distributing flutes. 
+Who should get the best ones? 
+Let's see what people — What would you say? 
+Who should get the best flute? 
+You can just call it out. 
+(Audience: Random.) Michael Sandel: At random. You would do it by lottery. 
+Or by the first person to rush into the hall to get them. 
+Who else? 
+(Audience: The best flute players.) MS: The best flute players. (Audience: The worst flute players.) MS: The worst flute players. 
+How many say the best flute players? 
+Why? 
+Actually, that was Aristotle's answer too. 
+(Laughter) But here's a harder question. 
+Why do you think, those of you who voted this way, that the best flutes should go to the best flute players? 
+Peter: The greatest benefit to all. 
+MS: The greatest benefit to all. 
+We'll hear better music if the best flutes should go to the best flute players. 
+That's Peter? (Audience: Peter.) MS: All right. 
+Well, it's a good reason. 
+We'll all be better off if good music is played rather than terrible music. 
+But Peter, Aristotle doesn't agree with you that that's the reason. 
+That's all right. 
+Aristotle had a different reason for saying the best flutes should go to the best flute players. 
+He said, that's what flutes are for — to be played well. 
+He says that to reason about just distribution of a thing, we have to reason about, and sometimes argue about, the purpose of the thing, or the social activity — in this case, musical performance. 
+And the point, the essential nature, of musical performance is to produce excellent music. 
+It'll be a happy byproduct that we'll all benefit. 
+But when we think about justice, Aristotle says, what we really need to think about is the essential nature of the activity in question and the qualities that are worth honoring and admiring and recognizing. 
+One of the reasons that the best flute players should get the best flutes is that musical performance is not only to make the rest of us happy, but to honor and recognize the excellence of the best musicians. 
+Now, flutes may seem... the distribution of flutes may seem a trivial case. 
+Let's take a contemporary example of the dispute about justice. 
+It had to do with golf. 
+Casey Martin — a few years ago, Casey Martin — did any of you hear about him? 
+He was a very good golfer, but he had a disability. 
+He had a bad leg, a circulatory problem, that made it very painful for him to walk the course. 
+In fact, it carried risk of injury. 
+He asked the PGA, the Professional Golfers' Association, for permission to use a golf cart in the PGA tournaments. 
+They said, "" No. 
+Now that would give you an unfair advantage. "" He sued, and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, believe it or not, the case over the golf cart, because the law says that the disabled must be accommodated, provided the accommodation does not change the essential nature of the activity. 
+He says, "" I'm a great golfer. 
+I want to compete. 
+But I need a golf cart to get from one hole to the next. "" Suppose you were on the Supreme Court. 
+Suppose you were deciding the justice of this case. 
+How many here would say that Casey Martin does have a right to use a golf cart? 
+And how many say, no, he doesn't? 
+All right, let's take a poll, show of hands. 
+How many would rule in favor of Casey Martin? 
+And how many would not? How many would say he doesn't? 
+All right, we have a good division of opinion here. 
+Someone who would not grant Casey Martin the right to a golf cart, what would be your reason? 
+Raise your hand, and we'll try to get you a microphone. 
+What would be your reason? 
+(Audience: It'd be an unfair advantage.) MS: It would be an unfair advantage if he gets to ride in a golf cart. 
+All right, those of you, I imagine most of you who would not give him the golf cart worry about an unfair advantage. 
+What about those of you who say he should be given a golf cart? 
+How would you answer the objection? 
+Yes, all right. 
+Audience: The cart's not part of the game. 
+MS: What's your name? (Audience: Charlie.) MS: Charlie says — We'll get Charlie a microphone in case someone wants to reply. 
+Tell us, Charlie, why would you say he should be able to use a golf cart? 
+Charlie: The cart's not part of the game. 
+MS: But what about walking from hole to hole? 
+Charlie: It doesn't matter; it's not part of the game. 
+MS: Walking the course is not part of the game of golf? 
+Charlie: Not in my book, it isn't. 
+MS: All right. Stay there, Charlie. 
+(Laughter) Who has an answer for Charlie? 
+All right, who has an answer for Charlie? 
+What would you say? 
+Audience: The endurance element is a very important part of the game, walking all those holes. 
+MS: Walking all those holes? 
+That's part of the game of golf? (Audience: Absolutely.) MS: What's your name? (Audience: Warren.) MS: Warren. 
+Charlie, what do you say to Warren? 
+Charley: I'll stick to my original thesis. 
+(Laughter) MS: Warren, are you a golfer? 
+Warren: I am not a golfer. 
+Charley: And I am. (MS: Okay.) (Laughter) (Applause) You know, it's interesting. 
+In the case, in the lower court, they brought in golfing greats to testify on this very issue. 
+Is walking the course essential to the game? 
+And they brought in Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. 
+And what do you suppose they all said? 
+Yes. They agreed with Warren. 
+They said, yes, walking the course is strenuous physical exercise. 
+The fatigue factor is an important part of golf. 
+And so it would change the fundamental nature of the game to give him the golf cart. 
+Now, notice, something interesting — Well, I should tell you about the Supreme Court first. 
+The Supreme Court decided. 
+What do you suppose they said? 
+They said yes, that Casey Martin must be provided a golf cart. 
+Seven to two, they ruled. 
+What was interesting about their ruling and about the discussion we've just had is that the discussion about the right, the justice, of the matter depended on figuring out what is the essential nature of golf. 
+And the Supreme Court justices wrestled with that question. 
+And Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, said he had read all about the history of golf, and the essential point of the game is to get very small ball from one place into a hole in as few strokes as possible, and that walking was not essential, but incidental. 
+Now, there were two dissenters, one of whom was Justice Scalia. 
+He wouldn't have granted the cart, and he had a very interesting dissent. 
+It's interesting because he rejected the Aristotelian premise underlying the majority's opinion. 
+He said it's not possible to determine the essential nature of a game like golf. 
+Here's how he put it. 
+"" To say that something is essential is ordinarily to say that it is necessary to the achievement of a certain object. 
+But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement, (Laughter) that is, what distinguishes games from productive activity, (Laughter) it is quite impossible to say that any of a game's arbitrary rules is essential. "" So there you have Justice Scalia taking on the Aristotelian premise of the majority's opinion. 
+Justice Scalia's opinion is questionable for two reasons. 
+First, no real sports fan would talk that way. 
+(Laughter) If we had thought that the rules of the sports we care about are merely arbitrary, rather than designed to call forth the virtues and the excellences that we think are worthy of admiring, we wouldn't care about the outcome of the game. 
+It's also objectionable on a second ground. 
+On the face of it, it seemed to be — this debate about the golf cart — an argument about fairness, what's an unfair advantage. 
+But if fairness were the only thing at stake, there would have been an easy and obvious solution. 
+What would it be? (Audience: Let everyone use the cart.) Let everyone ride in a golf cart if they want to. 
+Then the fairness objection goes away. 
+But letting everyone ride in a cart would have been, I suspect, more anathema to the golfing greats and to the PGA, even than making an exception for Casey Martin. 
+Why? 
+Because what was at stake in the dispute over the golf cart was not only the essential nature of golf, but, relatedly, the question: What abilities are worthy of honor and recognition as athletic talents? 
+Let me put the point as delicately as possible: Golfers are a little sensitive about the athletic status of their game. 
+(Laughter) After all, there's no running or jumping, and the ball stands still. (Laughter) 
+So if golfing is the kind of game that can be played while riding around in a golf cart, it would be hard to confer on the golfing greats the status that we confer, the honor and recognition that goes to truly great athletes. 
+That illustrates that with golf, as with flutes, it's hard to decide the question of what justice requires, without grappling with the question, "" What is the essential nature of the activity in question, and what qualities, what excellences connected with that activity, are worthy of honor and recognition? "" Let's take a final example that's prominent in contemporary political debate: same-sex marriage. 
+There are those who favor state recognition only of traditional marriage between one man and one woman, and there are those who favor state recognition of same-sex marriage. 
+How many here favor the first policy: the state should recognize traditional marriage only? 
+And how many favor the second, same-sex marriage? 
+Now, put it this way: What ways of thinking about justice and morality underlie the arguments we have over marriage? 
+The opponents of same-sex marriage say that the purpose of marriage, fundamentally, is procreation, and that's what's worthy of honoring and recognizing and encouraging. 
+And the defenders of same-sex marriage say no, procreation is not the only purpose of marriage; what about a lifelong, mutual, loving commitment? 
+That's really what marriage is about. 
+So with flutes, with golf carts, and even with a fiercely contested question like same-sex marriage, Aristotle has a point. 
+Very hard to argue about justice without first arguing about the purpose of social institutions and about what qualities are worthy of honor and recognition. 
+So let's step back from these cases and see how they shed light on the way we might improve, elevate, the terms of political discourse in the United States, and for that matter, around the world. 
+There is a tendency to think that if we engage too directly with moral questions in politics, that's a recipe for disagreement, and for that matter, a recipe for intolerance and coercion. 
+So better to shy away from, to ignore, the moral and the religious convictions that people bring to civic life. 
+It seems to me that our discussion reflects the opposite, that a better way to mutual respect is to engage directly with the moral convictions citizens bring to public life, rather than to require that people leave their deepest moral convictions outside politics before they enter. 
+That, it seems to me, is a way to begin to restore the art of democratic argument. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. Chris. Thanks, Chris. Chris Anderson: From flutes to golf courses 
+to same-sex marriage — that was a genius link. 
+Now look, you're a pioneer of open education. 
+Your lecture series was one of the first to do it big. 
+What's your vision for the next phase of this? 
+MS: Well, I think that it is possible. 
+In the classroom, we have arguments on some of the most fiercely held moral convictions that students have about big public questions. 
+And I think we can do that in public life more generally. 
+And so my real dream would be to take the public television series that we've created of the course — it's available now, online, free for everyone anywhere in the world — and to see whether we can partner with institutions, at universities in China, in India, in Africa, around the world, to try to promote civic education and also a richer kind of democratic debate. 
+CA: So you picture, at some point, live, in real time, you could have this kind of conversation, inviting questions, but with people from China and India joining in? 
+MS: Right. We did a little bit of it here with 1,500 people in Long Beach, and we do it in a classroom at Harvard with about 1,000 students. 
+Wouldn't it be interesting to take this way of thinking and arguing, engaging seriously with big moral questions, exploring cultural differences and connect through a live video hookup, students in Beijing and Mumbai and in Cambridge, Massachusetts and create a global classroom. 
+That's what I would love to do. 
+(Applause) CA: So, I would imagine that there are a lot of people who would love to join you in that endeavor. 
+Michael Sandel. Thank you so much. (MS: Thanks so much.) 
+
+Daffodil Hudson: Hello? 
+Yeah, this is she. 
+What? 
+Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I accept. 
+What are the dates again? 
+Pen. Pen. Pen. 
+March 17 through 21. 
+Okay, all right, great. Thanks. 
+Lab Partner: Who was that? 
+LP: Who's TED? 
+DH: I've got to prepare. 
+["" Give Your Talk: A Musical ""] (Music) ["" My Talk ""] ♪ Procrastination. ♪ What do you think? 
+(Doorbell) Can I help you? 
+(Music) Speaker Coach 1: ♪ Let's prepare for main stage. ♪ ♪ It's your time to shine. ♪ ♪ If you want to succeed then ♪ ♪ you must be primed. ♪ Speaker Coach 2: ♪ Your slides are bad ♪ ♪ but your idea is good ♪ ♪ so you can bet before we're through, ♪ ♪ speaker, we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ Speaker Coach 3: ♪ We know about climate change, ♪ ♪ but what can you say that's new? ♪ ♪ SC 1: Once you find your focus ♪ ♪ then the talk comes into view. ♪ 
+SC 2: ♪ Don't ever try to sell something ♪ ♪ from up on that stage ♪ ♪ or we won't post your talk online. ♪ All: ♪ Somehow we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ (Music) SC 1: Ready to practice one more time? 
+DH: ♪ I'll never remember all this. ♪ ♪ Will the clicker work when I press it? ♪ ♪ Why must Al Gore go right before me? ♪ ♪ Oh man, I'm scared to death. ♪ ♪ I hope I don't pass out onstage ♪ ♪ and now I really wish I wasn't wearing green. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 1: ♪ You must be be sweet like Brené Brown. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 2: ♪ You must be funny like Ken Robinson. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 3: ♪ You must be cool like Reggie Watts ♪ 
+All: ♪ and bring out a prop like Jill Bolte Taylor. ♪ DH: ♪ My time is running over. The clock now says nil. ♪ ♪ I'm saying my words faster. Understand me still. ♪ ♪ I'm too nervous to give this TED Talk. ♪ All: ♪ Don't give up. Rehearse. You're good. ♪ ♪ We'll edit out the mistakes that you make. ♪ ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will be big like Amy Cuddy. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will inspire like Liz Gilbert. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will engage like Hans Rosling ♪ 
+♪ and release mosquitos ♪ ♪ like Bill Gates. ♪ SC 2: ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ (Applause) ["" Brought to you by TED staff and friends ""] (Music) 
+
+Our grandparents' generation created an amazing system of canals and reservoirs that made it possible for people to live in places where there wasn't a lot of water. 
+For example, during the Great Depression, they created the Hoover Dam, which in turn, created Lake Mead and made it possible for the cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix and Los Angeles to provide water for people who lived in a really dry place. 
+In the 20th century, we literally spent trillions of dollars building infrastructure to get water to our cities. 
+In terms of economic development, it was a great investment. 
+But in the last decade, we've seen the combined effects of climate change, population growth and competition for water resources threaten these vital lifelines and water resources. 
+This figure shows you the change in the lake level of Lake Mead that happened in the last 15 years. 
+And it was dropping at such a rate that it would have left the drinking water intakes for Las Vegas high and dry. 
+The city became so concerned about this that they recently constructed a new drinking water intake structure that they referred to as the "" Third Straw "" to pull water out of the greater depths of the lake. 
+The challenges associated with providing water to a modern city are not restricted to the American Southwest. 
+In the year 2007, the third largest city in Australia, Brisbane, came within 6 months of running out of water. 
+A similar drama is playing out today in São Paulo, Brazil, where the main reservoir for the city has gone from being completely full in 2010, to being nearly empty today as the city approaches the 2016 Summer Olympics. 
+For those of us who are fortunate enough to live in one of the world's great cities, we've never truly experienced the effects of a catastrophic drought. 
+We like to complain about the navy showers we have to take. 
+We like our neighbors to see our dirty cars and our brown lawns. 
+But we've never really faced the prospect of turning on the tap and having nothing come out. 
+And that's because when things have gotten bad in the past, it's always been possible to expand a reservoir or dig a few more groundwater wells. 
+Well, in a time when all of the water resources are spoken for, it's not going to be possible to rely on this tried and true way of providing ourselves with water. 
+Some people think that we're going to solve the urban water problem by taking water from our rural neighbors. 
+But that's an approach that's fraught with political, legal and social dangers. 
+And even if we succeed in grabbing the water from our rural neighbors, we're just transferring the problem to someone else and there's a good chance it will come back and bite us in the form of higher food prices and damage to the aquatic ecosystems that already rely upon that water. 
+I think that there's a better way to solve our urban water crisis and I think that's to open up four new local sources of water that I liken to faucets. 
+If we can make smart investments in these new sources of water in the coming years, we can solve our urban water problem and decrease the likelihood that we'll ever run across the effects of a catastrophic drought. 
+Now, if you told me 20 years ago that a modern city could exist without a supply of imported water, I probably would have dismissed you as an unrealistic and uninformed dreamer. 
+But my own experiences working with some of the world's most water-starved cities in the last decades have shown me that we have the technologies and the management skills to actually transition away from imported water, and that's what I want to tell you about tonight. 
+The first source of local water supply that we need to develop to solve our urban water problem will flow with the rainwater that falls in our cities. 
+One of the great tragedies of urban development is that as our cities grew, we started covering all the surfaces with concrete and asphalt. 
+And when we did that, we had to build storm sewers to get the water that fell on the cities out before it could cause flooding, and that's a waste of a vital water resource. 
+Let me give you an example. 
+This figure here shows you the volume of water that could be collected in the city of San Jose if they could harvest the stormwater that fell within the city limits. 
+You can see from the intersection of the blue line and the black dotted line that if San Jose could just capture half of the water that fell within the city, they'd have enough water to get them through an entire year. 
+"" The answer to our problem is to start building great big tanks and attaching them to the downspouts of our roof gutters, rainwater harvesting. "" Now, that's an idea that might work in some places. 
+But if you live in a place where it mainly rains in the winter time and most of the water demand is in the summertime, it's not a very cost-effective way to solve a water problem. 
+And if you experience the effects of a multiyear drought, like California's currently experiencing, you just can't build a rainwater tank that's big enough to solve your problem. 
+I think there's a lot more practical way to harvest the stormwater and the rainwater that falls in our cities, and that's to capture it and let it percolate into the ground. 
+After all, many of our cities are sitting on top of a natural water storage system that can accommodate huge volumes of water. 
+For example, historically, Los Angeles has obtained about a third of its water supply from a massive aquifer that underlies the San Fernando Valley. 
+Now, when you look at the water that comes off of your roof and runs off of your lawn and flows down the gutter, you might say to yourself, "" Do I really want to drink that stuff? "" Well, the answer is you don't want to drink it until it's been treated a little bit. 
+And that's exactly what the city of Los Angeles is doing with a new project that they're building in Burbank, California. 
+This figure here shows the stormwater park that they're building by hooking a series of stormwater collection systems, or storm sewers, and routing that water into an abandoned gravel quarry. 
+The water that's captured in the quarry is slowly passed through a man-made wetland, and then it goes into that ball field there and percolates into the ground, recharging the drinking water aquifer of the city. 
+And in the process of passing through the wetland and percolating through the ground, the water encounters microbes that live on the surfaces of the plants and the surfaces of the soil, and that purifies the water. 
+And if the water's still not clean enough to drink after it's been through this natural treatment process, the city can treat it again when they pump if back out of the groundwater aquifers before they deliver it to people to drink. 
+The second tap that we need to open up to solve our urban water problem will flow with the wastewater that comes out of our sewage treatment plants. 
+Now, many of you are probably familiar with the concept of recycled water. 
+We've been doing this for a couple of decades now. 
+But what we're learning from our experience is that this approach is much more expensive that we expected it to be. 
+What we're finding is that a much more cost-effective and practical way of recycling wastewater is to turn treated wastewater into drinking water through a two-step process. 
+In the first step in this process we pressurize the water and pass it through a reverse osmosis membrane: a thin, permeable plastic membrane that allows water molecules to pass through but traps and retains the salts, the viruses and the organic chemicals that might be present in the wastewater. 
+In the second step in the process, we add a small amount of hydrogen peroxide and shine ultraviolet light on the water. 
+The ultraviolet light cleaves the hydrogen peroxide into two parts that are called hydroxyl radicals, and these hydroxyl radicals are very potent forms of oxygen that break down most organic chemicals. 
+After the water's been through this two-stage process, it's safe to drink. 
+I know, I've been studying recycled water using every measurement technique known to modern science for the past 15 years. 
+We've detected some chemicals that can make it through the first step in the process, but by the time we get to the second step, the advanced oxidation process, we rarely see any chemicals present. 
+And that's in stark contrast to the taken-for-granted water supplies that we regularly drink all the time. 
+There's another way we can recycle water. 
+This is an engineered treatment wetland that we recently built on the Santa Ana River in Southern California. 
+The treatment wetland receives water from a part of the Santa Ana River that in the summertime consists almost entirely of wastewater effluent from cities like Riverside and San Bernardino. 
+The water comes into our treatment wetland, it's exposed to sunlight and algae and those break down the organic chemicals, remove the nutrients and inactivate the waterborne pathogens. 
+The water gets put back in the Santa Ana River, it flows down to Anaheim, gets taken out at Anaheim and percolated into the ground, and becomes the drinking water of the city of Anaheim, completing the trip from the sewers of Riverside County to the drinking water supply of Orange County. 
+Now, you might think that this idea of drinking wastewater is some sort of futuristic fantasy or not commonly done. 
+Well, in California, we already recycle about 40 billion gallons a year of wastewater through the two-stage advanced treatment process I was telling you about. 
+That's enough water to be the supply of about a million people if it were their sole water supply. 
+The third tap that we need to open up will not be a tap at all, it will be a kind of virtual tap, it will be the water conservation that we manage to do. 
+And the place where we need to think about water conservation is outdoors because in California and other modern American cities, about half of our water use happens outdoors. 
+In the current drought, we've seen that it's possible to have our lawns survive and our plants survive with about half as much water. 
+So there's no need to start painting concrete green and putting in Astroturf and buying cactuses. 
+The fourth and final water tap that we need to open up to solve our urban water problem will flow with desalinated seawater. 
+Now, I know what you probably heard people say about seawater desalination. 
+"" It's a great thing to do if you have lots of oil, not a lot of water and you don't care about climate change. "" Seawater desalination is energy-intensive no matter how you slice it. 
+But that characterization of seawater desalination as being a nonstarter is hopelessly out of date. 
+We've made tremendous progress in seawater desalination in the past two decades. 
+This picture shows you the largest seawater desalination plant in the Western hemisphere that's currently being built north of San Diego. 
+Compared to the seawater desalination plant that was built in Santa Barbara 25 years ago, this treatment plant will use about half the energy to produce a gallon of water. 
+But just because seawater desalination has become less energy-intensive, doesn't mean we should start building desalination plants everywhere. 
+Among the different choices we have, it's probably the most energy-intensive and potentially environmentally damaging of the options to create a local water supply. 
+So there it is. 
+With these four sources of water, we can move away from our reliance on imported water. 
+Through reform in the way we landscape our surfaces and our properties, we can reduce outdoor water use by about 50 percent, thereby increasing the water supply by 25 percent. 
+We can recycle the water that makes it into the sewer, thereby increasing our water supply by 40 percent. 
+And we can make up the difference through a combination of stormwater harvesting and seawater desalination. 
+So, let's create a water supply that will be able to withstand any of the challenges that climate change throws at us in the coming years. 
+Let's create a water supply that uses local sources and leaves more water in the environment for fish and for food. 
+Let's create a water system that's consistent with out environmental values. 
+And let's do it for our children and our grandchildren and let's tell them this is the system that they have to take care of in the future because it's our last chance to create a new kind of water system. 
+Thank you very much for your attention. 
+
+Usually I like working in my shop, but when it's raining and the driveway outside turns into a river, then I just love it. 
+And I'll cut some wood and drill some holes and watch the water, and maybe I'll have to walk around and look for washers. 
+You have no idea how much time I spend. 
+This is the "" Double Raindrop. "" Of all my sculptures, it's the most talkative. 
+It adds together the interference pattern from two raindrops that land near each other. 
+Instead of expanding circles, they're expanding hexagons. 
+All the sculptures move by mechanical means. 
+Do you see how there's three peaks to the yellow sine wave? 
+Right here I'm adding a sine wave with four peaks and turning it on. 
+Eight hundred two-liter soda bottles — oh yea. 
+(Laughter) Four hundred aluminum cans. 
+Tule is a reed that's native to California, and the best thing about working with it is that it smells just delicious. 
+A single drop of rain increasing amplitude. 
+The spiral eddy that trails a paddle on a rafting trip. 
+This adds together four different waves. 
+And here I'm going to pull out the double wavelengths and increase the single. 
+The mechanism that drives it has nine motors and about 3,000 pulleys. 
+Four hundred and forty-five strings in a three-dimensional weave. 
+Transferred to a larger scale — actually a lot larger, with a lot of help — 14,064 bicycle reflectors — a 20-day install. 
+"" Connected "" is a collaboration with choreographer Gideon Obarzanek. 
+Strings attached to dancers. 
+This is very early rehearsal footage, but the finished work's on tour and is actually coming through L.A. in a couple weeks. 
+A pair of helices and 40 wooden slats. 
+Take your finger and draw this line. 
+Summer, fall, winter, spring, noon, dusk, dark, dawn. 
+Have you ever seen those stratus clouds that go in parallel stripes across the sky? 
+Did you know that's a continuous sheet of cloud that's dipping in and out of the condensation layer? 
+What if every seemingly isolated object was actually just where the continuous wave of that object poked through into our world? 
+The Earth is neither flat nor round. 
+It's wavy. 
+It sounds good, but I'll bet you know in your gut that it's not the whole truth, and I'll tell you why. 
+I have a two-year-old daughter who's the best thing ever. 
+And I'm just going to come out and say it: My daughter is not a wave. 
+And you might say, "" Surely, Rueben, if you took even just the slightest step back, the cycles of hunger and eating, waking and sleeping, laughing and crying would emerge as pattern. "" But I would say, "" If I did that, too much would be lost. "" This tension between the need to look deeper and the beauty and immediacy of the world, where if you even try to look deeper you've already missed what you're looking for, this tension is what makes the sculptures move. 
+And for me, the path between these two extremes takes the shape of a wave. 
+Let me show you one more. 
+Thank you very much. Thanks. 
+(Applause) Thanks. (Applause) 
+June Cohen: Looking at each of your sculptures, they evoke so many different images. 
+Some of them are like the wind and some are like waves, and sometimes they look alive and sometimes they seem like math. 
+Is there an actual inspiration behind each one? 
+Are you thinking of something physical or somthing tangible as you design it? 
+RM: Well some of them definitely have a direct observation — like literally two raindrops falling, and just watching that pattern is so stunning. 
+And then just trying to figure out how to make that using stuff. 
+I like working with my hands. 
+There's nothing better than cutting a piece of wood and trying to make it move. 
+JC: And does it ever change? 
+Do you think you're designing one thing, and then when it's produced it looks like something else? 
+RM: The "" Double Raindrop "" I worked on for nine months, and when I finally turned it on, I actually hated it. 
+The very moment I turned it on, I hated it. 
+It was like a really deep-down gut reaction, and I wanted to throw it out. 
+And I happened to have a friend who was over, and he said, "" Why don't you just wait. "" And I waited, and the next day I liked it a bit better, the next day I liked it a bit better, and now I really love it. 
+And so I guess, one, the gut reactions a little bit wrong sometimes, and two, it does not look like as expected. 
+JC: The relationship evolves over time. 
+Well thank you so much. That was a gorgeous treat for us. 
+RM: Thanks. (JC: Thank you, Reuben.) (Applause) 
+
+I consider it my life's mission to convey the urgency of climate change through my work. 
+I've traveled north to the Arctic to the capture the unfolding story of polar melt, and south to the Equator to document the subsequent rising seas. 
+Most recently, I visited the icy coast of Greenland and the low-lying islands of the Maldives, connecting two seemingly disparate but equally endangered parts of our planet. 
+My drawings explore moments of transition, turbulence and tranquility in the landscape, allowing viewers to emotionally connect with a place you might never have the chance to visit. 
+If you can experience the sublimity of these landscapes, perhaps you'll be inspired to protect and preserve them. 
+Behavioral psychology tells us that we take action and make decisions based on our emotions above all else. 
+And studies have shown that art impacts our emotions more effectively than a scary news report. 
+Experts predict ice-free Arctic summers as early as 2020. 
+And sea levels are likely to rise between two and ten feet by century's end. 
+I have dedicated my career to illuminating these projections with an accessible medium, one that moves us in a way that statistics may not. 
+I draw with soft pastel, which is dry like charcoal, but colors. 
+I consider my work drawings but others call them painting. 
+I cringe, though, when I'm referred to as a "" finger painter. "" (Laughter) But I don't use any tools and I have always used my fingers and palms to manipulate the pigment on the paper. 
+Drawing is a form of meditation for me. 
+It quiets my mind. 
+I don't perceive what I'm drawing as ice or water. 
+Instead, the image is stripped down to its most basic form of color and shape. 
+On average, a piece this size takes me about, as you can see, 10 seconds. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Really, more like 200 hours, 250 hours for something that size. 
+My mom was an artist, and growing up, we always had art supplies all over the house. 
+My mother's love of photography propelled her to the most remote regions of the earth, and my family and I were fortunate enough to join and support her on these adventures. 
+In August of 2012, I led my first expedition, taking a group of artists and scholars up the northwest coast of Greenland. 
+My mother was originally supposed to lead this trip. 
+She and I were in the early stages of planning, as we had intended to go together, when she fell victim to a brain tumor. 
+The cancer quickly took over her body and mind, and she passed away six months later. 
+During the months of her illness, though, her dedication to the expedition never wavered, and I made a promise to carry out her final journey. 
+My mother's passion for the Arctic echoed through my experience in Greenland, and I felt the power and the fragility of the landscape. 
+The sheer size of the icebergs is humbling. 
+The ice fields are alive with movement and sound in a way that I never expected. 
+I expanded the scale of my compositions to give you that same sense of awe that I experienced. 
+Yet, while the grandeur of the ice is evident, so, too, is its vulnerability. 
+From our boat, I could see the ice sweating under the unseasonably warm sun. 
+We had a chance to visit many of the Inuit communities in Greenland that now face huge challenges. 
+And without ice, their hunting and harvesting grounds are severely diminished, threatening their way of life and survival. 
+The melting glaciers in Greenland are one of the largest contributing factors to rising sea levels, which have already begun to drown some of our world's lowest-lying islands. 
+One year after my trip to Greenland, I visited the Maldives, the lowest and flattest country in the entire world. 
+While I was there, I collected images and inspiration for a new body of work: drawings of waves lapping on the coast of a nation that could be entirely underwater within this century. 
+Devastating events happen every day on scales both global and personal. 
+When I was in Greenland, I scattered my mother's ashes amidst the melting ice. 
+Now she remains a part of the landscape she loved so much, even as it, too, passes and takes on new form. 
+Among the many gifts my mother gave me was the ability to focus on the positive, rather than the negative. 
+My drawings celebrate the beauty of what we all stand to lose. 
+I hope they can serve as records of sublime landscapes in flux, documenting the transition and inspiring our global community to take action for the future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Along the ancient path of the Monongahela River, Braddock, Pennsylvania sits in the eastern region of Allegheny County, approximately nine miles outside of Pittsburgh. 
+An industrial suburb, Braddock is home to Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Works. 
+Operating since 1875, it is the last functioning steel mill in the region. 
+For 12 years, I have produced collaborative portraits, still lifes, landscapes and aerial views in order to build a visual archive to address the intersection of the steel industry, the environment, and the health care system's impact on the bodies of my family and community. 
+The tradition and grand narrative of Braddock is mostly comprised of stories of industrialists and trade unions. 
+Currently, the new narrative about Braddock, a poster child for Rust Belt revitalization, is a story of urban pioneers discovering a new frontier. 
+Mass media has omitted the fact that Braddock is predominantly black. 
+Our existence has been co-opted, silenced and erased. 
+Fourth generation in a lineage of women, I was raised under the protection and care of Grandma Ruby, off 8th Street at 805 Washington Avenue. 
+She worked as a manager for Goodwill. 
+Mom was a nurse's aid. 
+She watched the steel mills close and white flight to suburban developments. 
+By the time my generation walked the streets, disinvestment at the local, state and federal level, eroded infrastructure, and the War on Drugs dismantled my family and community. 
+Grandma Ruby's stepfather Gramps was one of few black men to retire from Carnegie's mill with his pension. 
+He worked in high temperatures, tearing down and rebuilding furnaces, cleaning up spilt metal and slag. 
+The history of a place is written on the body and the landscape. 
+Areas of heavy truck traffic, exposure to benzene and atomized metals, risk cancer and lupus. 
+One hundred twenty-three licensed beds, 652 employees, rehabilitation programs decimated. 
+A housing discrimination lawsuit against Allegheny County removed where the projects Talbot Towers once stood. 
+Recent rezoning for more light industry has since appeared. 
+Google Maps and Google Earth pixelations conceal the flammable waste being used to squeeze the Bunn family off their home and land. 
+In 2013, I chartered a helicopter with my cameras to document this aggressive dispossession. 
+In flight, my observation reveals thousands of plastic white bundles owned by a conservation industry that claims it's eco-friendly and recycles millions of tires to preserve people's lives and to improve people's lives. 
+My work spirals from the micro to the macro level, excavating hidden histories. 
+Recently, at the Seattle Art Museum, Isaac Bunn and I mounted this exhibition, and the exhibition was used as a platform to launch his voice. 
+Through reclamation of our narrative, we will continue to fight historic erasure and socioeconomic inequality. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Everyone is both a learner and a teacher. 
+This is me being inspired by my first tutor, my mom, and this is me teaching Introduction to Artificial Intelligence to 200 students at Stanford University. 
+Now the students and I enjoyed the class, but it occurred to me that while the subject matter of the class is advanced and modern, the teaching technology isn't. 
+In fact, I use basically the same technology as this 14th-century classroom. 
+Note the textbook, the sage on the stage, and the sleeping guy in the back. (Laughter) Just like today. 
+So my co-teacher, Sebastian Thrun, and I thought, there must be a better way. 
+We challenged ourselves to create an online class that would be equal or better in quality to our Stanford class, but to bring it to anyone in the world for free. 
+We announced the class on July 29th, and within two weeks, 50,000 people had signed up for it. 
+And that grew to 160,000 students from 209 countries. 
+We were thrilled to have that kind of audience, and just a bit terrified that we hadn't finished preparing the class yet. (Laughter) So we got to work. 
+We studied what others had done, what we could copy and what we could change. 
+Benjamin Bloom had showed that one-on-one tutoring works best, so that's what we tried to emulate, like with me and my mom, even though we knew it would be one-on-thousands. 
+Here, an overhead video camera is recording me as I'm talking and drawing on a piece of paper. 
+A student said, "" This class felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who's explaining something you haven't grasped, but are about to. "" And that's exactly what we were aiming for. 
+Now, from Khan Academy, we saw that short 10-minute videos worked much better than trying to record an hour-long lecture and put it on the small-format screen. 
+We decided to go even shorter and more interactive. 
+Our typical video is two minutes, sometimes shorter, never more than six, and then we pause for a quiz question, to make it feel like one-on-one tutoring. 
+Here, I'm explaining how a computer uses the grammar of English to parse sentences, and here, there's a pause and the student has to reflect, understand what's going on and check the right boxes before they can continue. 
+Students learn best when they're actively practicing. 
+We wanted to engage them, to have them grapple with ambiguity and guide them to synthesize the key ideas themselves. 
+We mostly avoid questions like, "" Here's a formula, now tell me the value of Y when X is equal to two. "" We preferred open-ended questions. 
+One student wrote, "" Now I'm seeing Bayes networks and examples of game theory everywhere I look. "" And I like that kind of response. 
+That's just what we were going for. 
+We didn't want students to memorize the formulas; we wanted to change the way they looked at the world. 
+And we succeeded. 
+Or, I should say, the students succeeded. 
+And it's a little bit ironic that we set about to disrupt traditional education, and in doing so, we ended up making our online class much more like a traditional college class than other online classes. 
+Most online classes, the videos are always available. 
+You can watch them any time you want. 
+But if you can do it any time, that means you can do it tomorrow, and if you can do it tomorrow, well, you may not ever get around to it. (Laughter) So we brought back the innovation of having due dates. (Laughter) You could watch the videos any time you wanted during the week, but at the end of the week, you had to get the homework done. 
+This motivated the students to keep going, and it also meant that everybody was working on the same thing at the same time, so if you went into a discussion forum, you could get an answer from a peer within minutes. 
+Now, I'll show you some of the forums, most of which were self-organized by the students themselves. 
+From Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, we learned the concept of "" flipping "" the classroom. 
+Students watched the videos on their own, and then they come together to discuss them. 
+From Eric Mazur, I learned about peer instruction, that peers can be the best teachers, because they're the ones that remember what it's like to not understand. 
+Sebastian and I have forgotten some of that. 
+Of course, we couldn't have a classroom discussion with tens of thousands of students, so we encouraged and nurtured these online forums. 
+And finally, from Teach For America, I learned that a class is not primarily about information. 
+More important is motivation and determination. 
+It was crucial that the students see that we're working hard for them and they're all supporting each other. 
+Now, the class ran 10 weeks, and in the end, about half of the 160,000 students watched at least one video each week, and over 20,000 finished all the homework, putting in 50 to 100 hours. 
+They got this statement of accomplishment. 
+So what have we learned? 
+Well, we tried some old ideas and some new and put them together, but there are more ideas to try. 
+Sebastian's teaching another class now. 
+I'll do one in the fall. 
+Stanford Coursera, Udacity, MITx and others have more classes coming. 
+It's a really exciting time. 
+But to me, the most exciting part of it is the data that we're gathering. 
+We're gathering thousands of interactions per student per class, billions of interactions altogether, and now we can start analyzing that, and when we learn from that, do experimentations, that's when the real revolution will come. 
+And you'll be able to see the results from a new generation of amazing students. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Up until now, our communication with machines has always been limited to conscious and direct forms. 
+Whether it's something simple like turning on the lights with a switch, or even as complex as programming robotics, we have always had to give a command to a machine, or even a series of commands, in order for it to do something for us. 
+Communication between people, on the other hand, is far more complex and a lot more interesting because we take into account so much more than what is explicitly expressed. 
+We observe facial expressions, body language, and we can intuit feelings and emotions from our dialogue with one another. 
+This actually forms a large part of our decision-making process. 
+Our vision is to introduce this whole new realm of human interaction into human-computer interaction so that computers can understand not only what you direct it to do, but it can also respond to your facial expressions and emotional experiences. 
+And what better way to do this than by interpreting the signals naturally produced by our brain, our center for control and experience. 
+Well, it sounds like a pretty good idea, but this task, as Bruno mentioned, isn't an easy one for two main reasons: First, the detection algorithms. 
+Our brain is made up of billions of active neurons, around 170,000 km of combined axon length. 
+When these neurons interact, the chemical reaction emits an electrical impulse, which can be measured. 
+The majority of our functional brain is distributed over the outer surface layer of the brain, and to increase the area that's available for mental capacity, the brain surface is highly folded. 
+Now this cortical folding presents a significant challenge for interpreting surface electrical impulses. 
+Each individual's cortex is folded differently, very much like a fingerprint. 
+So even though a signal may come from the same functional part of the brain, by the time the structure has been folded, its physical location is very different between individuals, even identical twins. 
+There is no longer any consistency in the surface signals. 
+Our breakthrough was to create an algorithm that unfolds the cortex, so that we can map the signals closer to its source, and therefore making it capable of working across a mass population. 
+The second challenge is the actual device for observing brainwaves. 
+EEG measurements typically involve a hairnet with an array of sensors, like the one that you can see here in the photo. 
+A technician will put the electrodes onto the scalp using a conductive gel or paste and usually after a procedure of preparing the scalp by light abrasion. 
+Now this is quite time consuming and isn't the most comfortable process. 
+And on top of that, these systems actually cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. 
+So with that, I'd like to invite onstage Evan Grant, who is one of last year's speakers, who's kindly agreed to help me to demonstrate what we've been able to develop. 
+(Applause) So the device that you see is a 14-channel, high-fidelity EEG acquisition system. 
+It doesn't require any scalp preparation, no conductive gel or paste. 
+It only takes a few minutes to put on and for the signals to settle. 
+It's also wireless, so it gives you the freedom to move around. 
+And compared to the tens of thousands of dollars for a traditional EEG system, this headset only costs a few hundred dollars. 
+Now on to the detection algorithms. 
+So facial expressions — as I mentioned before in emotional experiences — are actually designed to work out of the box with some sensitivity adjustments available for personalization. 
+But with the limited time we have available, I'd like to show you the cognitive suite, which is the ability for you to basically move virtual objects with your mind. 
+Now, Evan is new to this system, so what we have to do first is create a new profile for him. 
+He's obviously not Joanne — so we'll "" add user. "" Evan. Okay. 
+So the first thing we need to do with the cognitive suite is to start with training a neutral signal. 
+With neutral, there's nothing in particular that Evan needs to do. 
+He just hangs out. He's relaxed. 
+And the idea is to establish a baseline or normal state for his brain, because every brain is different. 
+It takes eight seconds to do this, and now that that's done, we can choose a movement-based action. 
+So Evan, choose something that you can visualize clearly in your mind. 
+Evan Grant: Let's do "" pull. "" Tan Le: Okay, so let's choose "" pull. "" So the idea here now is that Evan needs to imagine the object coming forward into the screen, and there's a progress bar that will scroll across the screen while he's doing that. 
+The first time, nothing will happen, because the system has no idea how he thinks about "" pull. "" But maintain that thought for the entire duration of the eight seconds. 
+So: one, two, three, go. 
+Okay. 
+So once we accept this, the cube is live. 
+So let's see if Evan can actually try and imagine pulling. 
+Ah, good job! 
+(Applause) That's really amazing. (Applause) 
+So we have a little bit of time available, so I'm going to ask Evan to do a really difficult task. 
+And this one is difficult because it's all about being able to visualize something that doesn't exist in our physical world. 
+This is "" disappear. "" So what you want to do — at least with movement-based actions, we do that all the time, so you can visualize it. 
+But with "" disappear, "" there's really no analogies — so Evan, what you want to do here is to imagine the cube slowly fading out, okay. 
+Same sort of drill. So: one, two, three, go. 
+Okay. Let's try that. 
+Oh, my goodness. He's just too good. 
+Let's try that again. 
+EG: Losing concentration. 
+(Laughter) TL: But we can see that it actually works, even though you can only hold it for a little bit of time. 
+As I said, it's a very difficult process to imagine this. 
+And the great thing about it is that we've only given the software one instance of how he thinks about "" disappear. "" As there is a machine learning algorithm in this — (Applause) Thank you. 
+Good job. Good job. 
+(Applause) Thank you, Evan, you're a wonderful, wonderful example of the technology. 
+So, as you can see, before, there is a leveling system built into this software so that as Evan, or any user, becomes more familiar with the system, they can continue to add more and more detections, so that the system begins to differentiate between different distinct thoughts. 
+And once you've trained up the detections, these thoughts can be assigned or mapped to any computing platform, application or device. 
+So I'd like to show you a few examples, because there are many possible applications for this new interface. 
+In games and virtual worlds, for example, your facial expressions can naturally and intuitively be used to control an avatar or virtual character. 
+Obviously, you can experience the fantasy of magic and control the world with your mind. 
+And also, colors, lighting, sound and effects can dynamically respond to your emotional state to heighten the experience that you're having, in real time. 
+And moving on to some applications developed by developers and researchers around the world, with robots and simple machines, for example — in this case, flying a toy helicopter simply by thinking "" lift "" with your mind. 
+The technology can also be applied to real world applications — in this example, a smart home. 
+You know, from the user interface of the control system to opening curtains or closing curtains. 
+And of course, also to the lighting — turning them on or off. 
+And finally, to real life-changing applications, such as being able to control an electric wheelchair. 
+In this example, facial expressions are mapped to the movement commands. 
+Man: Now blink right to go right. 
+Now blink left to turn back left. 
+Now smile to go straight. 
+TL: We really — Thank you. 
+(Applause) We are really only scratching the surface of what is possible today, and with the community's input, and also with the involvement of developers and researchers from around the world, we hope that you can help us to shape where the technology goes from here. Thank you so much. 
+
+I got up this morning at 6: 10 a.m. 
+after going to sleep at 12: 45 a.m. 
+I was awakened once during the night. 
+My heart rate was 61 beats per minute — my blood pressure, 127 over 74. 
+I had zero minutes of exercise yesterday, so my maximum heart rate during exercise wasn't calculated. 
+I had about 600 milligrams of caffeine, zero of alcohol. 
+And my score on the Narcissism Personality Index, or the NPI-16, is a reassuring 0.31. 
+We know that numbers are useful for us when we advertise, manage, govern, search. 
+I'm going to talk about how they're useful when we reflect, learn, remember and want to improve. 
+A few years ago, Kevin Kelly, my partner, and I noticed that people were subjecting themselves to regimes of quantitative measurement and self-tracking that went far beyond the ordinary, familiar habits such as stepping on a scale every day. 
+People were tracking their food via Twitter, their kids' diapers on their iPhone. 
+They were making detailed journals of their spending, their mood, their symptoms, their treatments. 
+Now, we know some of the technological facts that are driving this change in our lifestyle — the uptake and diffusion of mobile devices, the exponential improvement in data storage and data processing, and the remarkable improvement in human biometric sensors. 
+This little black dot there is a 3D accelerometer. 
+It tracks your movement through space. 
+It is, as you can see, very small and also very cheap. 
+They're now down to well under a dollar a piece, and they're going into all kinds of devices. 
+But what's interesting is the incredible detailed information that you can get from just one sensor like this. 
+This kind of sensor is in the hit biometric device — among early adopters at the moment — the Fitbit. 
+This tracks your activity and also your sleep. 
+It has just that sensor in it. 
+You're probably familiar with the Nike + system. 
+I just put it up because that little blue dot is the sensor. 
+It's really just a pressure sensor like the kind that's in a doorbell. 
+And Nike knows how to get your pace and distance from just that sensor. 
+This is the strap that people use to transmit heart-rate data to their Nike + system. 
+This is a beautiful, new device that gives you detailed sleep tracking data, not just whether you're asleep or awake, but also your phase of sleep — deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep. 
+The sensor is just a little strip of metal in that headband there. 
+The rest of it is the bedside console; just for reference, this is a sleep tracking system from just a few years ago — I mean, really until now. 
+And this is the sleep tracking system of today. 
+This just was presented at a health care conference in D.C. 
+Most of what you see there is an asthma inhaler, but the top is a very small GPS transceiver, which gives you the date and location of an asthma incident, giving you a new awareness of your vulnerability in relation to time and environmental factors. 
+Now, we know that new tools are changing our sense of self in the world — these tiny sensors that gather data in nature, the ubiquitous computing that allows that data to be understood and used, and of course the social networks that allow people to collaborate and contribute. 
+But we think of these tools as pointing outward, as windows and I'd just like to invite you to think of them as also turning inward and becoming mirrors. 
+So that when we think about using them to get some systematic improvement, we also think about how they can be useful for self-improvement, for self-discovery, self-awareness, self-knowledge. 
+Here's a biometric device: a pair of Apple Earbuds. 
+Last year, Apple filed some patents to get blood oxygenation, heart rate and body temperature via the Earbuds. 
+What is this for? 
+What should it be for? 
+Some people will say it's for biometric security. 
+Some people will say it's for public health research. 
+Some people will say it's for avant-garde marketing research. 
+I'd like to tell you that it's also for self-knowledge. 
+And the self isn't the only thing; it's not even most things. 
+The self is just our operation center, our consciousness, our moral compass. 
+So, if we want to act more effectively in the world, we have to get to know ourselves better. 
+Thank you. 
+
+I was walking in the market one day with my wife, and somebody stuck a cage in my face. 
+And in between those slits were the saddest eyes I've ever seen. 
+There was a very sick orangutan baby, my first encounter. 
+That evening I came back to the market in the dark and I heard "" uhh, uhh, "" and sure enough I found a dying orangutan baby on a garbage heap. 
+Of course, the cage was salvaged. 
+I took up the little baby, massaged her, forced her to drink until she finally started breathing normally. 
+This is Uce. 
+She's now living in the jungle of Sungai Wain, and this is Matahari, her second son, which, by the way, is also the son of the second orangutan I rescued, Dodoy. 
+That changed my life quite dramatically, and as of today, I have almost 1,000 babies in my two centers. 
+(Applause) No. No. No. Wrong. 
+It's horrible. It's a proof of our failing to save them in the wild. 
+It's not good. 
+This is merely proof of everyone failing to do the right thing. 
+Having more than all the orangutans in all the zoos in the world together, just now like victims for every baby, six have disappeared from the forest. 
+The deforestation, especially for oil palm, to provide biofuel for Western countries is what's causing these problems. 
+And those are the peat swamp forests on 20 meters of peat, the largest accumulation of organic material in the world. 
+When you open this for growing oil palms you're creating CO2 volcanoes that are emitting so much CO2 that my country is now the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, after China and the United States. 
+And we don't have any industry at all — it's only because of this deforestation. 
+And these are horrible images. 
+I'm not going to talk too long about it, but there are so many of the family of Uce, which are not so fortunate to live out there in the forest, that still have to go through that process. 
+And I don't know anymore where to put them. 
+So I decided that I had to come up with a solution for her but also a solution that will benefit the people that are trying to exploit those forests, to get their hands on the last timber and that are causing, in that way, the loss of habitat and all those victims. 
+So I created the place Samboja Lestari, and the idea was, if I can do this on the worst possible place that I can think of where there is really nothing left, no one will have an excuse to say, "" Yeah, but... "" No. Everyone should be able to follow this. 
+So we're in East Borneo. This is the place where I started. 
+As you can see there's only yellow terrain. 
+There's nothing left — just a bit of grass there. 
+In 2002 we had about 50 percent of the people jobless there. 
+There was a huge amount of crime. 
+People spent so much of their money on health issues and drinking water. 
+There was no agricultural productivity left. 
+This was the poorest district in the whole province and it was a total extinction of wildlife. 
+This was like a biological desert. 
+When I stood there in the grass, it's hot — not even the sound of insects — just this waving grass. 
+Still, four years later we have created jobs for about 3,000 people. 
+The climate has changed. I will show you: no more flooding, no more fires. 
+It's no longer the poorest district, and there is a huge development of biodiversity. 
+We've got over 1,000 species. We have 137 bird species as of today. 
+We have 30 species of reptiles. 
+So what happened here? We created a huge economic failure in this forest. 
+So basically the whole process of destruction had gone a bit slower than what is happening now with the oil palm. 
+But we saw the same thing. 
+We had slash and burn agriculture; people cannot afford the fertilizer, so they burn the trees and have the minerals available there; the fires become more frequent, and after a while you're stuck with an area of land where there is no fertility left. 
+There are no trees left. 
+Still, in this place, in this grassland where you can see our very first office there on that hill, four years later, there is this one green blop on the Earth's surface... 
+(Applause) And there are all these animals, and all these people happy, and there's this economic value. 
+So how's this possible? 
+It was quite simple. If you'll look at the steps: we bought the land, we dealt with the fire, and then only, we started doing the reforestation by combining agriculture with forestry. 
+Only then we set up the infrastructure and management and the monetary. 
+But we made sure that in every step of the way the local people were going to be fully involved so that no outside forces would be able to interfere with that. 
+The people would become the defenders of that forest. 
+So we do the "" people, profit, planet "" principles, but we do it in addition to a sure legal status — because if the forest belongs to the state, people say, "" It belongs to me, it belongs to everyone. "" And then we apply all these other principles like transparency, professional management, measurable results, scalability, [unclear], etc. 
+What we did was we formulated recipes — how to go from a starting situation where you have nothing to a target situation. 
+You formulate a recipe based upon the factors you can control, whether it be the skills or the fertilizer or the plant choice. 
+And then you look at the outputs and you start measuring what comes out. 
+Now in this recipe you also have the cost. 
+You also know how much labor is needed. 
+If you can drop this recipe on the map on a sandy soil, on a clay soil, on a steep slope, on flat soil, you put those different recipes; if you combine them, out of that comes a business plan, comes a work plan, and you can optimize it for the amount of labor you have available or for the amount of fertilizer you have, and you can do it. 
+This is how it looks like in practice. We have this grass we want to get rid of. 
+It exudes [unclear] -like compounds from the roots. 
+The acacia trees are of a very low value but we need them to restore the micro-climate, to protect the soil and to shake out the grasses. 
+And after eight years they might actually yield some timber — that is, if you can preserve it in the right way, which we can do with bamboo peels. 
+It's an old temple-building technique from Japan but bamboo is very fire-susceptible. 
+So if we would plant that in the beginning we would have a very high risk of losing everything again. 
+So we plant it later, along the waterways to filter the water, provide the raw products just in time for when the timber becomes available. 
+So the idea is: how to integrate these flows in space, over time and with the limited means you have. 
+So we plant the trees, we plant these pineapples and beans and ginger in between, to reduce the competition for the trees, the crop fertilizer. Organic material is useful for the agricultural crops, for the people, but also helps the trees. The farmers have free land, the system yields early income, the orangutans get healthy food and we can speed up ecosystem regeneration while even saving some money. 
+So beautiful. What a theory. 
+But is it really that easy? 
+Not really, because if you looked at what happened in 1998, the fire started. 
+This is an area of about 50 million hectares. 
+January. 
+February. 
+March. 
+April. 
+May. 
+We lost 5.5 million hectares in just a matter of a few months. 
+This is because we have 10,000 of those underground fires that you also have in Pennsylvania here in the United States. 
+And once the soil gets dried, you're in a dry season — you get cracks, oxygen goes in, flames come out and the problem starts all over again. 
+So how to break that cycle? 
+Fire is the biggest problem. 
+This is what it looked like for three months. 
+For three months, the automatic lights outside did not go off because it was that dark. 
+We lost all the crops. No children gained weight for over a year; they lost 12 IQ points. It was a disaster for orangutans and people. 
+So these fires are really the first things to work on. 
+That was why I put it as a single point up there. 
+And you need the local people for that because these grasslands, once they start burning... It goes through it like a windstorm and you lose again the last bit of ash and nutrients to the first rainfall — going to the sea killing off the coral reefs there. 
+So you have to do it with the local people. 
+That is the short-term solution but you also need a long-term solution. 
+So what we did is, we created a ring of sugar palms around the area. 
+These sugar palms turn out to be fire-resistant — also flood-resistant, by the way — and they provide a lot of income for local people. 
+This is what it looks like: the people have to tap them twice a day — just a millimeter slice — and the only thing you harvest is sugar water, carbon dioxide, rain fall and a little bit of sunshine. 
+In principle, you make those trees into biological photovoltaic cells. 
+And you can create so much energy from this — they produce three times more energy per hectare per year, because you can tap them on a daily basis. 
+You don't need to harvest [unclear] or any other of the crops. 
+So this is the combination where we have all this genetic potential in the tropics, which is still unexploited, and doing it in combination with technology. 
+But also your legal side needs to be in very good order. 
+So we bought that land, and here is where we started our project — in the middle of nowhere. 
+And if you zoom in a bit you can see that all of this area is divided into strips that go over different types of soil, and we were actually monitoring, measuring every single tree in these 2,000 hectares, 5,000 acres. 
+And this forest is quite different. 
+What I really did was I just followed nature, and nature doesn't know monocultures, but a natural forest is multilayered. 
+That means that both in the ground and above the ground it can make better use of the available light, it can store more carbon in the system, it can provide more functions. 
+But, it's more complicated. It's not that simple, and you have to work with the people. 
+So, just like nature, we also grow fast planting trees and underneath that, we grow the slower growing, primary-grain forest trees of a very high diversity that can optimally use that light. Then, what is just as important: get the right fungi in there that will grow into those leaves, bring back the nutrients to the roots of the trees that have just dropped that leaf within 24 hours. 
+And they become like nutrient pumps. 
+You need the bacteria to fix nitrogen, and without those microorganisms, you won't have any performance at all. 
+And then we started planting — only 1,000 trees a day. 
+We could have planted many, many more, but we didn't want to because we wanted to keep the number of jobs stable. 
+We didn't want to lose the people that are going to work in that plantation. 
+And we do a lot of work here. 
+We use indicator plants to look at what soil types, or what vegetables will grow, or what trees will grow here. 
+And we have monitored every single one of those trees from space. 
+This is what it looks like in reality; you have this irregular ring around it, with strips of 100 meters wide, with sugar palms that can provide income for 648 families. 
+It's only a small part of the area. 
+The nursery, in here, is quite different. 
+If you look at the number of tree species we have in Europe, for instance, from the Urals up to England, you know how many? 
+165. 
+In this nursery, we're going to grow 10 times more than the number of species. 
+Can you imagine? 
+You do need to know what you are working with, but it's that diversity which makes it work. 
+That you can go from this zero situation, by planting the vegetables and the trees, or directly, the trees in the lines in that grass there, putting up the buffer zone, producing your compost, and then making sure that at every stage of that up growing forest there are crops that can be used. 
+In the beginning, maybe pineapples and beans and corn; in the second phase, there will be bananas and papayas; later on, there will be chocolate and chilies. 
+And then slowly, the trees start taking over, bringing in produce from the fruits, from the timber, from the fuel wood. 
+And finally, the sugar palm forest takes over and provides the people with permanent income. 
+On the top left, underneath those green stripes, you see some white dots — those are actually individual pineapple plants that you can see from space. 
+And in that area we started growing some acacia trees that you just saw before. 
+So this is after one year. 
+And this is after two years. 
+And that's green. If you look from the tower — this is when we start attacking the grass. 
+We plant in the seedlings mixed with the bananas, the papayas, all the crops for the local people, but the trees are growing up fast in between as well. 
+And three years later, 137 species of birds are living here. 
+(Applause) So we lowered air temperature three to five degrees Celsius. 
+Air humidity is up 10 percent. 
+Cloud cover — I'm going to show it to you — is up. 
+Rainfall is up. 
+And all these species and income. 
+This ecolodge that I built here, three years before, was an empty, yellow field. 
+This transponder that we operate with the European Space Agency — it gives us the benefit that every satellite that comes over to calibrate itself is taking a picture. 
+Those pictures we use to analyze how much carbon, how the forest is developing, and we can monitor every tree using satellite images through our cooperation. 
+We can use these data now to provide other regions with recipes and the same technology. 
+We actually have it already with Google Earth. 
+If you would use a little bit of your technology to put tracking devices in trucks, and use Google Earth in combination with that, you could directly tell what palm oil has been sustainably produced, which company is stealing the timber, and you could save so much more carbon than with any measure of saving energy here. 
+So this is the Samboja Lestari area. 
+You measure how the trees grow back, but you can also measure the biodiversity coming back. 
+And biodiversity is an indicator of how much water can be balanced, how many medicines can be kept here. 
+And finally I made it into the rain machine because this forest is now creating its own rain. 
+This nearby city of Balikpapan has a big problem with water; it's 80 percent surrounded by seawater, and we have now a lot of intrusion there. 
+Now we looked at the clouds above this forest; we looked at the reforestation area, the semi-open area and the open area. 
+And look at these images. 
+I'll just run them very quickly through. 
+In the tropics, raindrops are not formed from ice crystals, which is the case in the temperate zones, you need the trees with [unclear], chemicals that come out of the leaves of the trees that initiate the raindrops. 
+So you create a cool place where clouds can accumulate, and you have the trees to initiate the rain. 
+And look, there's now 11.2 percent more clouds — already, after three years. 
+If you look at rainfall, it was already up 20 percent at that time. 
+Let's look at the next year, and you can see that that trend is continuing. 
+Where at first we had a small cap of higher rainfall, that cap is now widening and getting higher. 
+And if we look at the rainfall pattern above Samboja Lestari, it used to be the driest place, but now you see consistently see a peak of rain forming there. 
+So you can actually change the climate. 
+When there are trade winds of course the effect disappears, but afterwards, as soon as the wind stabilizes, you see again that the rainfall peaks come back above this area. 
+So to say it is hopeless is not the right thing to do, because we actually can make that difference if you integrate the various technologies. 
+And it's nice to have the science, but it still depends mostly upon the people, on your education. 
+We have our farmer schools. 
+But the real success of course, is our band — because if a baby is born, we will play, so everyone's our family and you don't make trouble with your family. 
+This is how it looks. 
+We have this road going around the area, which brings the people electricity and water from our own area. 
+We have the zone with the sugar palms, and then we have this fence with very thorny palms to keep the orangutans — that we provide with a place to live in the middle — and the people apart. 
+And inside, we have this area for reforestation as a gene bank to keep all that material alive, because for the last 12 years not a single seedling of the tropical hardwood trees has grown up because the climatic triggers have disappeared. 
+All the seeds get eaten. 
+So now we do the monitoring on the inside — from towers, satellites, ultralights. 
+Each of the families that have sold their land now get a piece of land back. 
+And it has two nice fences of tropical hardwood trees — you have the shade trees planted in year one, then you underplanted with the sugar palms, and you plant this thorny fence. 
+And after a few years, you can remove some of those shade trees. 
+The people get that acacia timber which we have preserved with the bamboo peel, and they can build a house, they have some fuel wood to cook with. 
+And they can start producing from the trees as many as they like. 
+They have enough income for three families. 
+But whatever you do in that program, it has to be fully supported by the people, meaning that you also have to adjust it to the local, cultural values. 
+There is no simple one recipe for one place. 
+You also have to make sure that it is very difficult to corrupt — that it's transparent. 
+Like here, in Samboja Lestari, we divide that ring in groups of 20 families. 
+If one member trespasses the agreement, and does cut down trees, the other 19 members have to decide what's going to happen to him. 
+If the group doesn't take action, the other 33 groups have to decide what is going to happen to the group that doesn't comply with those great deals that we are offering them. 
+In North Sulawesi it is the cooperative — they have a democratic culture there, so there you can use the local justice system to protect your system. 
+In summary, if you look at it, in year one the people can sell their land to get income, but they get jobs back in the construction and the reforestation, the working with the orangutans, and they can use the waste wood to make handicraft. 
+They also get free land in between the trees, where they can grow their crops. 
+They can now sell part of those fruits to the orangutan project. 
+They get building material for houses, a contract for selling the sugar, so we can produce huge amounts of ethanol and energy locally. 
+They get all these other benefits: environmentally, money, they get education — it's a great deal. 
+And everything is based upon that one thing — make sure that forest remains there. 
+So if we want to help the orangutans — what I actually set out to do — we must make sure that the local people are the ones that benefit. 
+Now I think the real key to doing it, to give a simple answer, is integration. 
+I hope — if you want to know more, you can read more. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Let me tell you a story. 
+It's my first year as a new high school science teacher, and I'm so eager. 
+I'm so excited, I'm pouring myself into my lesson plans. 
+But I'm slowly coming to this horrifying realization that my students just might not be learning anything. 
+This happens one day: I'd just assigned my class to read this textbook chapter about my favorite subject in all of biology: viruses and how they attack. 
+And so I'm so excited to discuss this with them, and I come in and I say, "" Can somebody please explain the main ideas and why this is so cool? "" There's silence. 
+Finally, my favorite student, she looks me straight in the eye, and she says, "" The reading sucked. "" And then she clarified. She said, "" You know what, I don't mean that it sucks. It means that I didn't understand a word of it. 
+It's boring. Um, who cares, and it sucks. "" These sympathetic smiles spread all throughout the room now, and I realize that all of my other students are in the same boat, that maybe they took notes or they memorized definitions from the textbook, but not one of them really understood the main ideas. 
+Not one of them can tell me why this stuff is so cool, why it's so important. 
+I'm totally clueless. 
+I have no idea what to do next. 
+So the only thing I can think of is say, "" Listen. Let me tell you a story. 
+The main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses. 
+These guys are blown up a couple million times. 
+The real bacteria and viruses are so small we can't see them without a microscope, and you guys might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick. 
+But what a lot of people don't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick. "" Now, the story that I start telling my kids, it starts out like a horror story. 
+Once upon a time there's this happy little bacterium. 
+Don't get too attached to him. 
+Maybe he's floating around in your stomach or in some spoiled food somewhere, and all of a sudden he starts to not feel so good. 
+Maybe he ate something bad for lunch, and then things get really horrible, as his skin rips apart, and he sees a virus coming out from his insides. 
+And then it gets horrible when he bursts open and an army of viruses floods out from his insides. 
+If — Ouch is right! — If you see this, and you're a bacterium, this is like your worst nightmare. 
+But if you're a virus and you see this, you cross those little legs of yours and you think, "We rock." 
+Because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium. 
+Here's what had to happen. 
+A virus grabbed onto a bacterium and it slipped its DNA into it. 
+The next thing is, that virus DNA made stuff that chopped up the bacteria DNA. 
+And now that we've gotten rid of the bacteria DNA, the virus DNA takes control of the cell and it tells it to start making more viruses. 
+Because, you see, DNA is like a blueprint that tells living things what to make. 
+So this is kind of like going into a car factory and replacing the blueprints with blueprints for killer robots. 
+The workers still come the next day, they do their job, but they're following different instructions. 
+So replacing the bacteria DNA with virus DNA turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses — that is, until it's so filled with viruses that it bursts. 
+But that's not the only way that viruses infect bacteria. 
+Some are much more crafty. 
+When a secret agent virus infects a bacterium, they do a little espionage. 
+Here, this cloaked, secret agent virus is slipping his DNA into the bacterial cell, but here's the kicker: It doesn't do anything harmful — not at first. 
+Instead, it silently slips into the bacteria's own DNA, and it just stays there like a terrorist sleeper cell, waiting for instructions. 
+And what's interesting about this is now whenever this bacteria has babies, the babies also have the virus DNA in them. 
+So now we have a whole extended bacteria family, filled with virus sleeper cells. 
+They're just happily living together until a signal happens and — BAM! — all of the DNA pops out. 
+It takes control of these cells, turns them into virus-making factories, and they all burst, a huge, extended bacteria family, all dying with viruses spilling out of their guts, the viruses taking over the bacterium. 
+So now you understand how viruses can attack cells. 
+There are two ways: On the left is what we call the lytic way, where the viruses go right in and take over the cells. 
+On the [right] is the lysogenic way that uses secret agent viruses. 
+So this stuff is not that hard, right? 
+And now all of you understand it. 
+But if you've graduated from high school, I can almost guarantee you've seen this information before. 
+But I bet it was presented in a way that it didn't exactly stick in your mind. 
+So when my students were first learning this, why did they hate it so much? 
+Well, there were a couple of reasons. 
+First of all, I can guarantee you that their textbooks didn't have secret agent viruses, and they didn't have horror stories. 
+You know, in the communication of science there is this obsession with seriousness. 
+It kills me. I'm not kidding. 
+I used to work for an educational publisher, and as a writer, I was always told never to use stories or fun, engaging language, because then my work might not be viewed as "" serious "" and "" scientific. "" Right? I mean, because God forbid somebody have fun when they're learning science. 
+So we have this field of science that's all about slime, and color changes. Check this out. 
+And then we have, of course, as any good scientist has to have, explosions! 
+But if a textbook seems too much fun, it's somehow unscientific. 
+Now another problem was that the language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible. 
+If we want to summarize that story that I told you earlier, we could start by saying something like, "" These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium. "" The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this: "" Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium. "" That's great, perfect for 13-year-olds. 
+But here's the thing. There are plenty of people in science education who would look at this and say there's no way that we could ever give that to students, because it contains some language that isn't completely accurate. 
+For example, I told you that viruses have DNA. 
+Well, a very tiny fraction of them don't. 
+They have something called RNA instead. 
+So a professional science writer would circle that and say, "" That has to go. 
+We have to change it to something much more technical. "" And after a team of professional science editors went over this really simple explanation, they'd find fault with almost every word I've used, and they'd have to change anything that wasn't serious enough, and they'd have to change everything that wasn't 100 percent perfect. 
+Then it would be accurate, but it would be completely impossible to understand. 
+This is horrifying. 
+You know, I keep talking about this idea of telling a story, and it's like science communication has taken on this idea of what I call the tyranny of precision, where you can't just tell a story. 
+It's like science has become that horrible storyteller that we all know, who gives us all the details nobody cares about, where you're like, "" Oh, I met my friend for lunch the other day, and she was wearing these ugly jeans. 
+I mean, they weren't really jeans, they were more kind of, like, leggings, but, like, I guess they're actually kind of more like jeggings, like, but I think — "" and you're just like, "" Oh my God. 
+What is the point? "" Or even worse, science education is becoming like that guy who always says, "" Actually. "" Right? You want to be like, "" Oh, dude, we had to get up in the middle of the night and drive a hundred miles in total darkness. "" And that guy's like, "" Actually, it was 87.3 miles. "" And you're like, "" Actually, shut up! 
+I'm just trying to tell a story. "" Because good storytelling is all about emotional connection. 
+We have to convince our audience that what we're talking about matters. 
+But just as important is knowing which details we should leave out so that the main point still comes across. 
+I'm reminded of what the architect Mies van der Rohe said, and I paraphrase, when he said that sometimes you have to lie in order to tell the truth. 
+I think this sentiment is particularly relevant to science education. 
+Now, finally, I am often so disappointed when people think that I'm advocating a dumbing down of science. 
+That's not true at all. 
+I'm currently a Ph.D. student at MIT, and I absolutely understand the importance of detailed, specific scientific communication between experts, but not when we're trying to teach 13-year-olds. 
+If a young learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that's not going to ruin their chances of success in science. 
+But if a young learner can't understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this, that will ruin their chances of success. 
+This needs to stop, and I wish that the change could come from the institutions at the top that are perpetuating these problems, and I beg them, I beseech them to just stop it. 
+But I think that's unlikely. 
+So we are so lucky that we have resources like the Internet, where we can circumvent these institutions from the bottom up. 
+There's a growing number of online resources that are dedicated to just explaining science in simple, understandable ways. 
+I dream of a Wikipedia-like website that would explain any scientific concept you can think of in simple language any middle schooler can understand. 
+And I myself spend most of my free time making these science videos that I put on YouTube. 
+I explain chemical equilibrium using analogies to awkward middle school dances, and I talk about fuel cells with stories about boys and girls at a summer camp. 
+The feedback that I get is sometimes misspelled and it's often written in LOLcats, but nonetheless it's so appreciative, so thankful that I know this is the right way we should be communicating science. 
+There's still so much work left to be done, though, and if you're involved with science in any way I urge you to join me. 
+Pick up a camera, start to write a blog, whatever, but leave out the seriousness, leave out the jargon. 
+Make me laugh. Make me care. 
+Leave out those annoying details that nobody cares about and just get to the point. 
+How should you start? 
+Why don't you say, "" Listen, let me tell you a story ""? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Three and a half years ago, I made one of the best decisions of my life. 
+As my New Year's resolution, I gave up dieting, stopped worrying about my weight, and learned to eat mindfully. 
+Now I eat whenever I'm hungry, and I've lost 10 pounds. 
+This was me at age 13, when I started my first diet. 
+I look at that picture now, and I think, you did not need a diet, you needed a fashion consult. 
+(Laughter) But I thought I needed to lose weight, and when I gained it back, of course I blamed myself. 
+And for the next three decades, I was on and off various diets. 
+No matter what I tried, the weight I'd lost always came back. 
+I'm sure many of you know the feeling. 
+As a neuroscientist, I wondered, why is this so hard? 
+Obviously, how much you weigh depends on how much you eat and how much energy you burn. 
+What most people don't realize is that hunger and energy use are controlled by the brain, mostly without your awareness. 
+Your brain does a lot of its work behind the scenes, and that is a good thing, because your conscious mind — how do we put this politely? — it's easily distracted. 
+It's good that you don't have to remember to breathe when you get caught up in a movie. 
+You don't forget how to walk because you're thinking about what to have for dinner. 
+Your brain also has its own sense of what you should weigh, no matter what you consciously believe. 
+This is called your set point, but that's a misleading term, because it's actually a range of about 10 or 15 pounds. 
+You can use lifestyle choices to move your weight up and down within that range, but it's much, much harder to stay outside of it. 
+The hypothalamus, the part of the brain that regulates body weight, there are more than a dozen chemical signals in the brain that tell your body to gain weight, more than another dozen that tell your body to lose it, and the system works like a thermostat, responding to signals from the body by adjusting hunger, activity and metabolism, to keep your weight stable as conditions change. 
+That's what a thermostat does, right? 
+It keeps the temperature in your house the same as the weather changes outside. 
+Now you can try to change the temperature in your house by opening a window in the winter, but that's not going to change the setting on the thermostat, which will respond by kicking on the furnace to warm the place back up. 
+Your brain works exactly the same way, responding to weight loss by using powerful tools to push your body back to what it considers normal. 
+If you lose a lot of weight, your brain reacts as if you were starving, and whether you started out fat or thin, your brain's response is exactly the same. 
+We would love to think that your brain could tell whether you need to lose weight or not, but it can't. 
+If you do lose a lot of weight, you become hungry, and your muscles burn less energy. 
+Dr. Rudy Leibel of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 10 percent of their body weight burn 250 to 400 calories less because their metabolism is suppressed. 
+That's a lot of food. 
+This means that a successful dieter must eat this much less forever than someone of the same weight who has always been thin. 
+From an evolutionary perspective, your body's resistance to weight loss makes sense. 
+When food was scarce, our ancestors' survival depended on conserving energy, and regaining the weight when food was available would have protected them against the next shortage. 
+Over the course of human history, starvation has been a much bigger problem than overeating. 
+This may explain a very sad fact: Set points can go up, but they rarely go down. 
+Now, if your mother ever mentioned that life is not fair, this is the kind of thing she was talking about. 
+(Laughter) Successful dieting doesn't lower your set point. 
+Even after you've kept the weight off for as long as seven years, your brain keeps trying to make you gain it back. 
+If that weight loss had been due to a long famine, that would be a sensible response. 
+In our modern world of drive-thru burgers, it's not working out so well for many of us. 
+That difference between our ancestral past and our abundant present is the reason that Dr. Yoni Freedhoff of the University of Ottawa would like to take some of his patients back to a time when food was less available, and it's also the reason that changing the food environment is really going to be the most effective solution to obesity. 
+Sadly, a temporary weight gain can become permanent. 
+If you stay at a high weight for too long, probably a matter of years for most of us, your brain may decide that that's the new normal. 
+Psychologists classify eaters into two groups, those who rely on their hunger and those who try to control their eating through willpower, like most dieters. 
+Let's call them intuitive eaters and controlled eaters. 
+The interesting thing is that intuitive eaters are less likely to be overweight, and they spend less time thinking about food. 
+Controlled eaters are more vulnerable to overeating in response to advertising, super-sizing, and the all-you-can-eat buffet. 
+And a small indulgence, like eating one scoop of ice cream, is more likely to lead to a food binge in controlled eaters. 
+Children are especially vulnerable to this cycle of dieting and then binging. 
+Several long-term studies have shown that girls who diet in their early teenage years are three times more likely to become overweight five years later, even if they started at a normal weight, and all of these studies found that the same factors that predicted weight gain also predicted the development of eating disorders. 
+The other factor, by the way, those of you who are parents, was being teased by family members about their weight. 
+So don't do that. 
+(Laughter) I left almost all my graphs at home, but I couldn't resist throwing in just this one, because I'm a geek, and that's how I roll. (Laughter) 
+This is a study that looked at the risk of death over a 14-year period based on four healthy habits: eating enough fruits and vegetables, exercise three times a week, not smoking, and drinking in moderation. 
+Let's start by looking at the normal weight people in the study. 
+The height of the bars is the risk of death, and those zero, one, two, three, four numbers on the horizontal axis are the number of those healthy habits that a given person had. 
+And as you'd expect, the healthier the lifestyle, the less likely people were to die during the study. 
+Now let's look at what happens in overweight people. 
+The ones that had no healthy habits had a higher risk of death. 
+Adding just one healthy habit pulls overweight people back into the normal range. 
+For obese people with no healthy habits, the risk is very high, seven times higher than the healthiest groups in the study. 
+But a healthy lifestyle helps obese people too. 
+In fact, if you look only at the group with all four healthy habits, you can see that weight makes very little difference. 
+You can take control of your health by taking control of your lifestyle, even If you can't lose weight and keep it off. 
+Diets don't have very much reliability. 
+Five years after a diet, most people have regained the weight. 
+Forty percent of them have gained even more. 
+If you think about this, the typical outcome of dieting is that you're more likely to gain weight in the long run than to lose it. 
+If I've convinced you that dieting might be a problem, the next question is, what do you do about it? 
+And my answer, in a word, is mindfulness. 
+I'm not saying you need to learn to meditate or take up yoga. 
+I'm talking about mindful eating: learning to understand your body's signals so that you eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full, because a lot of weight gain boils down to eating when you're not hungry. 
+How do you do it? 
+Give yourself permission to eat as much as you want, and then work on figuring out what makes your body feel good. 
+Sit down to regular meals without distractions. 
+Think about how your body feels when you start to eat and when you stop, and let your hunger decide when you should be done. 
+It took about a year for me to learn this, but it's really been worth it. 
+I am so much more relaxed around food than I have ever been in my life. 
+I often don't think about it. 
+I forget we have chocolate in the house. 
+It's like aliens have taken over my brain. 
+It's just completely different. 
+I should say that this approach to eating probably won't make you lose weight unless you often eat when you're not hungry, but doctors don't know of any approach that makes significant weight loss in a lot of people, and that is why a lot of people are now focusing on preventing weight gain instead of promoting weight loss. 
+Let's face it: If diets worked, we'd all be thin already. 
+(Laughter) Why do we keep doing the same thing and expecting different results? 
+Diets may seem harmless, but they actually do a lot of collateral damage. 
+At worst, they ruin lives: Weight obsession leads to eating disorders, especially in young kids. 
+In the U.S., we have 80 percent of 10-year-old girls say they've been on a diet. 
+Our daughters have learned to measure their worth by the wrong scale. 
+Even at its best, dieting is a waste of time and energy. 
+It takes willpower which you could be using to help your kids with their homework or to finish that important work project, and because willpower is limited, any strategy that relies on its consistent application is pretty much guaranteed to eventually fail you when your attention moves on to something else. 
+Let me leave you with one last thought. 
+What if we told all those dieting girls that it's okay to eat when they're hungry? 
+What if we taught them to work with their appetite instead of fearing it? 
+I think most of them would be happier and healthier, and as adults, many of them would probably be thinner. 
+I wish someone had told me that back when I was 13. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a pediatrician and an anesthesiologist, so I put children to sleep for a living. 
+(Laughter) And I'm an academic, so I put audiences to sleep for free. (Laughter) 
+But what I actually mostly do is I manage the pain management service at the Packard Children's Hospital up at Stanford in Palo Alto. 
+And it's from the experience from about 20 or 25 years of doing that that I want to bring to you the message this morning, that pain is a disease. 
+Now most of the time, you think of pain as a symptom of a disease, and that's true most of the time. 
+It's the symptom of a tumor or an infection or an inflammation or an operation. 
+But about 10 percent of the time, after the patient has recovered from one of those events, pain persists. 
+It persists for months and oftentimes for years, and when that happens, it is its own disease. 
+And before I tell you about how it is that we think that happens and what we can do about it, I want to show you how it feels for my patients. 
+So imagine, if you will, that I'm stroking your arm with this feather, as I'm stroking my arm right now. 
+Now, I want you to imagine that I'm stroking it with this. 
+Please keep your seat. 
+(Laughter) A very different feeling. 
+Now what does it have to do with chronic pain? 
+Imagine, if you will, these two ideas together. 
+Imagine what your life would be like if I were to stroke it with this feather, but your brain was telling you that this is what you are feeling — and that is the experience of my patients with chronic pain. 
+In fact, imagine something even worse. 
+Imagine I were to stroke your child's arm with this feather, and their brain [was] telling them that they were feeling this hot torch. 
+That was the experience of my patient, Chandler, whom you see in the photograph. 
+As you can see, she's a beautiful, young woman. 
+She was 16 years old last year when I met her, and she aspired to be a professional dancer. 
+And during the course of one of her dance rehearsals, she fell on her outstretched arm and sprained her wrist. 
+Now you would probably imagine, as she did, that a wrist sprain is a trivial event in a person's life. 
+Wrap it in an ACE bandage, take some ibuprofen for a week or two, and that's the end of the story. 
+But in Chandler's case, that was the beginning of the story. 
+This is what her arm looked like when she came to my clinic about three months after her sprain. 
+You can see that the arm is discolored, purplish in color. 
+It was cadaverically cold to the touch. 
+The muscles were frozen, paralyzed — dystonic is how we refer to that. 
+The pain had spread from her wrist to her hands, to her fingertips, from her wrist up to her elbow, almost all the way to her shoulder. 
+But the worst part was, not the spontaneous pain that was there 24 hours a day. 
+The worst part was that she had allodynia, the medical term for the phenomenon that I just illustrated with the feather and with the torch. 
+The lightest touch of her arm — the touch of a hand, the touch even of a sleeve, of a garment, as she put it on — caused excruciating, burning pain. 
+How can the nervous system get this so wrong? How can the nervous system 
+misinterpret an innocent sensation like the touch of a hand and turn it into the malevolent sensation of the touch of the flame? 
+Well you probably imagine that the nervous system in the body is hardwired like your house. 
+In your house, wires run in the wall, from the light switch to a junction box in the ceiling and from the junction box to the light bulb. 
+And when you turn the switch on, the light goes on. 
+And when you turn the switch off, the light goes off. 
+So people imagine the nervous system is just like that. 
+If you hit your thumb with a hammer, these wires in your arm — that, of course, we call nerves — transmit the information into the junction box in the spinal cord where new wires, new nerves, take the information up to the brain where you become consciously aware that your thumb is now hurt. 
+But the situation, of course, in the human body is far more complicated than that. 
+Instead of it being the case that that junction box in the spinal cord is just simple where one nerve connects with the next nerve by releasing these little brown packets of chemical information called neurotransmitters in a linear one-on-one fashion, in fact, what happens is the neurotransmitters spill out in three dimensions — laterally, vertically, up and down in the spinal cord — and they start interacting with other adjacent cells. 
+These cells, called glial cells, were once thought to be unimportant structural elements of the spinal cord that did nothing more than hold all the important things together, like the nerves. 
+But it turns out the glial cells have a vital role in the modulation, amplification and, in the case of pain, the distortion of sensory experiences. 
+These glial cells become activated. 
+Their DNA starts to synthesize new proteins, which spill out and interact with adjacent nerves, and they start releasing their neurotransmitters, and those neurotransmitters spill out and activate adjacent glial cells, and so on and so forth, until what we have is a positive feedback loop. 
+It's almost as if somebody came into your home and rewired your walls so that the next time you turned on the light switch, the toilet flushed three doors down, or your dishwasher went on, or your computer monitor turned off. 
+That's crazy, but that's, in fact, what happens with chronic pain. 
+And that's why pain becomes its own disease. 
+The nervous system has plasticity. 
+It changes, and it morphs in response to stimuli. 
+Well, what do we do about that? 
+What can we do in a case like Chandler's? 
+We treat these patients in a rather crude fashion at this point in time. 
+We treat them with symptom-modifying drugs — painkillers — which are, frankly, not very effective for this kind of pain. 
+We take nerves that are noisy and active that should be quiet, and we put them to sleep with local anesthetics. 
+And most importantly, what we do is we use a rigorous, and often uncomfortable, process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to retrain the nerves in the nervous system to respond normally to the activities and sensory experiences that are part of everyday life. 
+And we support all of that with an intensive psychotherapy program to address the despondency, despair and depression that always accompanies severe, chronic pain. 
+It's successful, as you can see from this video of Chandler, who, two months after we first met her, is now doings a back flip. 
+And I had lunch with her yesterday because she's a college student studying dance at Long Beach here, and she's doing absolutely fantastic. 
+But the future is actually even brighter. 
+The future holds the promise that new drugs will be developed that are not symptom-modifying drugs that simply mask the problem, as we have now, but that will be disease-modifying drugs that will actually go right to the root of the problem and attack those glial cells, or those pernicious proteins that the glial cells elaborate, that spill over and cause this central nervous system wind-up, or plasticity, that so is capable of distorting and amplifying the sensory experience that we call pain. 
+So I have hope that in the future, the prophetic words of George Carlin will be realized, who said, "" My philosophy: No pain, no pain. "" Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I work in marketing, which I love, but my first passion was physics, a passion brought to me by a wonderful school teacher, when I had a little less gray hair. 
+So he taught me that physics is cool because it teaches us so much about the world around us. 
+And I'm going to spend the next few minutes trying to convince you that physics can teach us something about marketing. 
+So quick show of hands — who studied some marketing in university? 
+Who studied some physics in university? 
+Pretty good. And at school? 
+Okay, lots of you. 
+So, hopefully this will bring back some happy, or possibly some slightly disturbing memories. 
+So, physics and marketing. 
+We'll start with something very simple — Newton's Law: "The force equals mass times acceleration." 
+This is something that perhaps Turkish Airlines should have studied a bit more carefully before they ran this campaign. 
+(Laughter) But if we rearrange this formula quickly, we can get to acceleration equals force over mass, which means that for a larger particle — a larger mass — it requires more force to change its direction. 
+It's the same with brands: the more massive a brand, the more baggage it has, the more force is needed to change its positioning. 
+And that's one of the reasons why Arthur Andersen chose to launch Accenture rather than try to persuade the world that Andersen's could stand for something other than accountancy. 
+It explains why Hoover found it very difficult to persuade the world that it was more than vacuum cleaners, and why companies like Unilever and P & G keep brands separate, like Ariel and Pringles and Dove rather than having one giant parent brand. 
+So the physics is that the bigger the mass of an object the more force is needed to change its direction. 
+The marketing is, the bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it. 
+So think about a portfolio of brands or maybe new brands for new ventures. 
+Now, who remembers Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? 
+Getting a little more technical now. 
+So this says that it's impossible, by definition, to measure exactly the state — i.e., the position — and the momentum of a particle, because the act of measuring it, by definition, changes it. 
+So to explain that — if you've got an elementary particle and you shine a light on it, then the photon of light has momentum, which knocks the particle, so you don't know where it was before you looked at it. 
+By measuring it, the act of measurement changes it. 
+The act of observation changes it. 
+It's the same in marketing. 
+So with the act of observing consumers, changes their behavior. 
+Think about the group of moms who are talking about their wonderful children in a focus group, and almost none of them buy lots of junk food. 
+And yet, McDonald's sells hundreds of millions of burgers every year. 
+Think about the people who are on accompanied shops in supermarkets, who stuff their trolleys full of fresh green vegetables and fruit, but don't shop like that any other day. 
+And if you think about the number of people who claim in surveys to regularly look for porn on the Web, it's very few. 
+Yet, at Google, we know it's the number-one searched for category. 
+So luckily, the science — no, sorry — the marketing is getting easier. 
+Luckily, with now better point-of-sale tracking, more digital media consumption, you can measure more what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they do. 
+So the physics is you can never accurately and exactly measure a particle, because the observation changes it. 
+The marketing is — the message for marketing is — that try to measure what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they'll do or anticipate they'll do. 
+So next, the scientific method — an axiom of physics, of all science — says you cannot prove a hypothesis through observation, you can only disprove it. 
+What this means is you can gather more and more data around a hypothesis or a positioning, and it will strengthen it, but it will not conclusively prove it. 
+And only one contrary data point can blow your theory out of the water. 
+So if we take an example — Ptolemy had dozens of data points to support his theory that the planets would rotate around the Earth. 
+It only took one robust observation from Copernicus to blow that idea out of the water. 
+And there are parallels for marketing — you can invest for a long time in a brand, but a single contrary observation of that positioning will destroy consumers' belief. 
+Take BP — they spent millions of pounds over many years building up its credentials as an environmentally friendly brand, but then one little accident. 
+Think about Toyota. 
+It was, for a long time, revered as the most reliable of cars, and then they had the big recall incident. 
+And Tiger Woods, for a long time, the perfect brand ambassador. 
+Well, you know the story. 
+(Laughter) So the physics is that you cannot prove a hypothesis, but it's easy to disprove it — any hypothesis is shaky. 
+And the marketing is that not matter how much you've invested in your brand, one bad week can undermine decades of good work. 
+So be really careful to try and avoid the screw-ups that can undermine your brand. 
+And lastly, to the slightly obscure world of entropy — the second law of thermodynamics. 
+This says that entropy, which is a measure of the disorder of a system, will always increase. 
+The same is true of marketing. 
+If we go back 20 years, the one message pretty much controlled by one marketing manager could pretty much define a brand. 
+But where we are today, things have changed. 
+You can get a strong brand image or a message and put it out there like the Conservative Party did earlier this year with their election poster. 
+But then you lose control of it. 
+With the kind of digital comment creation and distribution tools that are available now to every consumer, it's impossible to control where it goes. 
+Your brand starts being dispersed, (Laughter) it gets more chaotic. (Laughter) 
+It's out of your control. (Laughter) 
+I actually saw him speak — he did a good job. 
+But while this may be unsettling for marketers, it's actually a good thing. 
+This distribution of brand energy gets your brand closer to the people, more in with the people. 
+It makes this distribution of energy a democratizing force, which is ultimately good for your brand. 
+So, the lesson from physics is that entropy will always increase; it's a fundamental law. 
+The message for marketing is that your brand is more dispersed. 
+You can't fight it, so embrace it and find a way to work with it. 
+So to close, my teacher, Mr. Vutter, told me that physics is cool, and hopefully, I've convinced you that physics can teach all of us, even in the world of marketing, something special. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm here to talk about the wonder and the mystery of conscious minds. 
+The wonder is about the fact that we all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. 
+We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder. 
+We should, in fact, because without having this possibility of conscious minds, we would have no knowledge whatsoever about our humanity; we would have no knowledge whatsoever about the world. 
+We would have no pains, but also no joys. 
+We would have no access to love or to the ability to create. 
+And of course, Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "" he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for. "" But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness and even the possibility of transcendence. 
+So much for the wonder, now for the mystery. 
+This is a mystery that has really been extremely hard to elucidate. 
+All the way back into early philosophy and certainly throughout the history of neuroscience, this has been one mystery that has always resisted elucidation, has got major controversies. 
+And there are actually many people that think we should not even touch it; we should just leave it alone, it's not to be solved. 
+I don't believe that, and I think the situation is changing. 
+It would be ridiculous to claim that we know how we make consciousness in our brains, but we certainly can begin to approach the question, and we can begin to see the shape of a solution. 
+And one more wonder to celebrate is the fact that we have imaging technologies that now allow us to go inside the human brain and be able to do, for example, what you're seeing right now. 
+These are images that come from Hanna Damasio's lab, and which show you, in a living brain, the reconstruction of that brain. 
+And this is a person who is alive. 
+This is not a person that is being studied at autopsy. 
+And even more — and this is something that one can be really amazed about — is what I'm going to show you next, which is going underneath the surface of the brain and actually looking in the living brain at real connections, real pathways. 
+So all of those colored lines correspond to bunches of axons, the fibers that join cell bodies to synapses. 
+And I'm sorry to disappoint you, they don't come in color. 
+But at any rate, they are there. 
+The colors are codes for the direction, from whether it is back to front or vice versa. 
+At any rate, what is consciousness? 
+What is a conscious mind? 
+And we could take a very simple view and say, well, it is that which we lose when we fall into deep sleep without dreams, or when we go under anesthesia, and it is what we regain when we recover from sleep or from anesthesia. 
+But what is exactly that stuff that we lose under anesthesia, or when we are in deep, dreamless sleep? 
+Well first of all, it is a mind, which is a flow of mental images. 
+And of course consider images that can be sensory patterns, visual, such as you're having right now in relation to the stage and me, or auditory images, as you are having now in relation to my words. 
+That flow of mental images is mind. 
+But there is something else that we are all experiencing in this room. 
+We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. 
+We have selves. 
+We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now. 
+We own our minds. 
+And we have a sense that it's everyone of us that is experiencing this — not the person who is sitting next to you. 
+So in order to have a conscious mind, you have a self within the conscious mind. 
+So a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it. 
+The self introduces the subjective perspective in the mind, and we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind. 
+So what we need to know to even address this mystery is, number one, how are minds are put together in the brain, and, number two, how selves are constructed. 
+Now the first part, the first problem, is relatively easy — it's not easy at all — but it is something that has been approached gradually in neuroscience. 
+And it's quite clear that, in order to make minds, we need to construct neural maps. 
+So imagine a grid, like the one I'm showing you right now, and now imagine, within that grid, that two-dimensional sheet, imagine neurons. 
+And picture, if you will, a billboard, a digital billboard, where you have elements that can be either lit or not. 
+And depending on how you create the pattern of lighting or not lighting, the digital elements, or, for that matter, the neurons in the sheet, you're going to be able to construct a map. 
+This, of course, is a visual map that I'm showing you, but this applies to any kind of map — auditory, for example, in relation to sound frequencies, or to the maps that we construct with our skin in relation to an object that we palpate. 
+Now to bring home the point of how close it is — the relationship between the grid of neurons and the topographical arrangement of the activity of the neurons and our mental experience — I'm going to tell you a personal story. 
+So if I cover my left eye — I'm talking about me personally, not all of you — if I cover my left eye, I look at the grid — pretty much like the one I'm showing you. 
+Everything is nice and fine and perpendicular. 
+But sometime ago, I discovered that if I cover my left eye, instead what I get is this. 
+I look at the grid and I see a warping at the edge of my central-left field. 
+Very odd — I've analyzed this for a while. 
+But sometime ago, through the help of an opthamologist colleague of mine, Carmen Puliafito, who developed a laser scanner of the retina, I found out the the following. 
+If I scan my retina through the horizontal plane that you see there in the little corner, what I get is the following. 
+On the right side, my retina is perfectly symmetrical. 
+You see the going down towards the fovea where the optic nerve begins. 
+But on my left retina there is a bump, which is marked there by the red arrow. 
+And it corresponds to a little cyst that is located below. 
+And that is exactly what causes the warping of my visual image. 
+So just think of this: you have a grid of neurons, and now you have a plane mechanical change in the position of the grid, and you get a warping of your mental experience. 
+So this is how close your mental experience and the activity of the neurons in the retina, which is a part of the brain located in the eyeball, or, for that matter, a sheet of visual cortex. 
+So from the retina you go onto visual cortex. 
+And of course, the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina. 
+And in that image there, you see a variety of islands of what I call image-making regions in the brain. 
+You have the green for example, that corresponds to tactile information, or the blue that corresponds to auditory information. 
+And something else that happens is that those image-making regions where you have the plotting of all these neural maps, can then provide signals to this ocean of purple that you see around, which is the association cortex, where you can make records of what went on in those islands of image-making. 
+And the great beauty is that you can then go from memory, out of those association cortices, and produce back images in the very same regions that have perception. 
+So think about how wonderfully convenient and lazy the brain is. 
+So it provides certain areas for perception and image-making. 
+And those are exactly the same that are going to be used for image-making when we recall information. 
+So far the mystery of the conscious mind is diminishing a little bit because we have a general sense of how we make these images. 
+But what about the self? 
+The self is really the elusive problem. 
+And for a long time, people did not even want to touch it, because they'd say, "" How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day? "" And I thought about a solution to this problem. 
+It's the following. 
+We generate brain maps of the body's interior and use them as the reference for all other maps. 
+So let me tell you just a little bit about how I came to this. 
+I came to this because, if you're going to have a reference that we know as self — the Me, the I in our own processing — we need to have something that is stable, something that does not deviate much from day to day. 
+Well it so happens that we have a singular body. 
+We have one body, not two, not three. 
+And so that is a beginning. 
+There is just one reference point, which is the body. 
+But then, of course, the body has many parts, and things grow at different rates, and they have different sizes and different people; however, not so with the interior. 
+The things that have to do with what is known as our internal milieu — for example, the whole management of the chemistries within our body are, in fact, extremely maintained day after day for one very good reason. 
+If you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the midline of that life-permitting survival range, you go into disease or death. 
+So we have an in-built system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity. 
+I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day. 
+Because if you don't have that sameness, physiologically, you're going to be sick or you're going to die. 
+So that's one more element for this continuity. 
+And the final thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulation of our body within the brain and the body itself, unlike any other coupling. 
+So for example, I'm making images of you, but there's no physiological bond between the images I have of you as an audience and my brain. 
+However, there is a close, permanently maintained bond between the body regulating parts of my brain and my own body. 
+So here's how it looks. Look at the region there. 
+There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord. 
+And it is within that region that I'm going to highlight now that we have this housing of all the life-regulation devices of the body. 
+This is so specific that, for example, if you look at the part that is covered in red in the upper part of the brain stem, if you damage that as a result of a stroke, for example, what you get is coma or vegetative state, which is a state, of course, in which your mind disappears, your consciousness disappears. 
+What happens then actually is that you lose the grounding of the self, you have no longer access to any feeling of your own existence, and, in fact, there can be images going on, being formed in the cerebral cortex, except you don't know they're there. 
+You have, in effect, lost consciousness when you have damage to that red section of the brain stem. 
+But if you consider the green part of the brain stem, nothing like that happens. 
+It is that specific. 
+So in that green component of the brain stem, if you damage it, and often it happens, what you get is complete paralysis, but your conscious mind is maintained. 
+You feel, you know, you have a fully conscious mind that you can report very indirectly. 
+This is a horrific condition. You don't want to see it. 
+And people are, in fact, imprisoned within their own bodies, but they do have a mind. 
+There was a very interesting film, one of the rare good films done about a situation like this, by Julian Schnabel some years ago about a patient that was in that condition. 
+So now I'm going to show you a picture. 
+I promise not to say anything about this, except this is to frighten you. 
+It's just to tell you that in that red section of the brain stem, there are, to make it simple, all those little squares that correspond to modules that actually make brain maps of different aspects of our interior, different aspects of our body. 
+They are exquisitely topographic and they are exquisitely interconnected in a recursive pattern. 
+And it is out of this and out of this tight coupling between the brain stem and the body that I believe — and I could be wrong, but I don't think I am — that you generate this mapping of the body that provides the grounding for the self and that comes in the form of feelings — primordial feelings, by the way. 
+So what is the picture that we get here? 
+Look at "" cerebral cortex, "" look at "" brain stem, "" look at "" body, "" and you get the picture of the interconnectivity in which you have the brain stem providing the grounding for the self in a very tight interconnection with the body. 
+And you have the cerebral cortex providing the great spectacle of our minds with the profusion of images that are, in fact, the contents of our minds and that we normally pay most attention to, as we should, because that's really the film that is rolling in our minds. 
+But look at the arrows. 
+They're not there for looks. 
+They're there because there's this very close interaction. 
+You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between cerebral cortex and brain stem. You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction 
+between the brain stem and the body. 
+Another thing that is interesting is that the brain stem that we have is shared with a variety of other species. 
+So throughout vertebrates, the design of the brain stem is very similar to ours, which is one of the reasons why I think those other species have conscious minds like we do. 
+Except that they're not as rich as ours, because they don't have a cerebral cortex like we do. 
+That's where the difference is. 
+And I strongly disagree with the idea that consciousness should be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex. 
+Only the wealth of our minds is, not the very fact that we have a self that we can refer to our own existence, and that we have any sense of person. 
+Now there are three levels of self to consider — the proto, the core and the autobiographical. 
+The first two are shared with many, many other species, and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species. 
+It's the autobiographical self which some species have, I think. 
+Cetaceans and primates have also an autobiographical self to a certain degree. 
+And everybody's dogs at home have an autobiographical self to a certain degree. 
+But the novelty is here. 
+The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future. 
+And the autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. 
+And out of that came the instruments of culture — religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology. 
+And it is within that culture that we really can get — and this is the novelty — something that is not entirely set by our biology. 
+It is developed in the cultures. 
+It developed in collectives of human beings. 
+And this is, of course, the culture where we have developed something that I like to call socio-cultural regulation. 
+And finally, you could rightly ask, why care about this? 
+Why care if it is the brain stem or the cerebral cortex and how this is made? 
+Three reasons. First, curiosity. 
+Primates are extremely curious — and humans most of all. 
+And if we are interested, for example, in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the Earth, why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings? 
+Second, understanding society and culture. 
+We should look at how society and culture in this socio-cultural regulation are a work in progress. 
+And finally, medicine. 
+Let's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression, Alzheimer's disease, drug addiction. 
+Think of strokes that can devastate your mind or render you unconscious. 
+You have no prayer of treating those diseases effectively and in a non-serendipitous way if you do not know how this works. 
+So that's a very good reason beyond curiosity to justify what we're doing, and to justify having some interest in what is going on in our brains. 
+Thank you for your attention. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is a work in process, based on some comments that were made at TED two years ago about the need for the storage of vaccine. 
+(Music) (Video) Narrator: On this planet, 1.6 billion people don't have access to electricity, refrigeration or stored fuels. 
+This is a problem. 
+It impacts: the spread of disease, the storage of food and medicine and the quality of life. 
+So here's the plan: inexpensive refrigeration that doesn't use electricity, propane, gas, kerosene or consumables. 
+Time for some thermodynamics. 
+And the story of the Intermittent Absorption Refrigerator. 
+Adam Grosser: So 29 years ago, I had this thermo teacher who talked about absorption and refrigeration. 
+It's one of those things that stuck in my head. 
+It was a lot like the Stirling engine: it was cool, but you didn't know what to do with it. 
+And it was invented in 1858, by this guy Ferdinand Carre, but he couldn't actually build anything with it because of the tools of the time. 
+This crazy Canadian named Powel Crosley commercialized this thing called the IcyBall in 1928, and it was a really neat idea, and I'll get to why it didn't work, but here's how it works. 
+There's two spheres and they're separated in distance. 
+One has a working fluid, water and ammonia, and the other is a condenser. 
+You heat up one side, the hot side. 
+The ammonia evaporates and it re-condenses in the other side. 
+You let it cool to room temperature, and then, as the ammonia re-evaporates and combines with the water back on the erstwhile hot side, it creates a powerful cooling effect. 
+So, it was a great idea that didn't work at all: it blew up. 
+Because using ammonia you get hugely high pressures if you heated them wrong. 
+It topped 400 psi. The ammonia was toxic. It sprayed everywhere. 
+But it was kind of an interesting thought. 
+So, the great thing about 2006 is there's a lot of really great computational work you can do. 
+So, we got the whole thermodynamics department at Stanford involved — a lot of computational fluid dynamics. 
+We proved that most of the ammonia refrigeration tables are wrong. 
+We found some non-toxic refrigerants that worked at very low vapor pressures. 
+Brought in a team from the U.K. — there's a lot of great refrigeration people, it turned out, in the U.K. — and built a test rig, and proved that, in fact, we could make a low pressure, non-toxic refrigerator. 
+So, this is the way it works. 
+You put it on a cooking fire. 
+Most people have cooking fires in the world, whether it's camel dung or wood. 
+It heats up for about 30 minutes, cools for an hour. 
+Put it into a container and it will refrigerate for 24 hours. 
+It looks like this. This is the fifth prototype. It's not quite done. 
+Weighs about eight pounds, and this is the way it works. 
+You put it into a 15-liter vessel, about three gallons, and it'll cool it down to just above freezing — three degrees above freezing — for 24 hours in a 30 degree C environment. It's really cheap. 
+We think we can build these in high volumes for about 25 dollars, in low volumes for about 40 dollars. 
+And we think we can make refrigeration something that everybody can have. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, the technology, you know, isn't the most exciting thing here right now, other than probably its newfound accessibility. 
+This started out as a screensaver app that one of the Ph.D. students in our lab, Ilya Rosenberg, made. 
+(Laughter) I'll show you a little more of a concrete example here, as this thing loads. 
+Now, when you have initiatives like the $100 laptop, I kind of cringe at the idea of introducing a whole new generation to computing with this standard mouse-and-windows-pointer interface. 
+(Applause) Now, of course, I can bring up a keyboard. 
+(Laughter) And I can bring that around, put that up there. 
+It'll remember the strokes I'm making. 
+I can switch to different data views. 
+It's just so much fun playing around with it, too. 
+(Laughter) And so the last thing I want to show you is — I'm sure we can all think of a lot of entertainment apps that you can do with this thing. 
+It's kind of a puppeteering thing, where I can use as many fingers as I have to draw and make — Now, there's a lot of actual math going on under here for this to control this mesh and do the right thing. 
+So, multi-touch interaction research is a very active field right now in HCI. 
+I'm not the only one doing it, a lot of other people are getting into it. 
+
+(Laughter) So this is a vending machine for crows. 
+(Laughter) And in doing so, we were breeding them for parasitism. 
+For example, in Sweden, crows will wait for fishermen to drop lines through holes in the ice. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Joshua Klein: Yeah, pretty interesting. 
+So, what's significant about this to me isn't that we can train crows to pick up peanuts. 
+The main point of all this for me is, we can find mutually beneficial systems for these species. 
+
+So I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. 
+And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS. 
+You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, that AIDS is a disease of poverty, and that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well. 
+If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic. 
+Using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms — the ABC campaign — they decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years. 
+If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic. 
+So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic, and I'm actually also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know. 
+To do that I'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic. 
+And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy. 
+I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices. 
+But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology. 
+And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea. 
+Here I'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another. 
+So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue. 
+And probably for most people in this room, that's how you think about it. 
+But this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic. 
+It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it. 
+I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works. 
+And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand is: how do people respond to the epidemic? 
+So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you. 
+So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex. 
+If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year — a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress — your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points. 
+That is a huge effect. 
+And so I think that we really feel like then people should have less sex. 
+And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s. 
+So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, they're being asked, "Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?" 
+Over a period from '84 to' 88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent. 
+It's a huge change in a very short period of time. 
+We didn't see anything like that in Africa. 
+So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late' 90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse. 
+People are learning more things about it. 
+We see almost no change in sexual behavior. 
+These are just tiny decreases — two percentage points — not significant. 
+This seems puzzling. But I'm going to argue that you shouldn't be surprised by this, and that to understand this you need to think about health the way than an economist does — as an investment. 
+So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs. 
+It's also important to think about what the benefit is. 
+And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. 
+If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine. 
+But your health decisions are the same. 
+Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. 
+But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don't make those investments. 
+AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS. 
+People really like to have sex. 
+But, you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity. 
+But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places. 
+I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change. 
+But we really need to test that. 
+And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more? 
+And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria. 
+So malaria is a disease that kills you. 
+It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children. 
+And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria. 
+So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria. 
+So that's what this figure shows you. 
+This shows you — in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria — what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence. 
+If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up. 
+Areas with medium levels of malaria it decreases some — it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria — actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant. 
+This is not just through malaria. 
+Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality. 
+There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk. 
+So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave. 
+It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa. 
+But it also tells us something about policy. 
+Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, in improving maternal mortality rates. 
+Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. 
+But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before. 
+Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough, at least not alone. 
+If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own, even if they know everything about the disease, they still may not change their behavior. 
+So the other thing that I think we learn here is that AIDS is not going to fix itself. 
+People aren't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic. 
+So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective. 
+And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past. 
+The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time. 
+In Uganda we see the prevalence went down. 
+We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works. 
+It's not the only place we had any interventions. 
+Other places have tried things, so why don't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence? 
+Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003. 
+So if I asked you, "" Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991? "" You get on Google, you Google, and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women, which is not a terribly representative group of people. 
+Then if you poked a little more, you looked a little more at what was going on, you'd find that actually that was a pretty good year, because in some years the only people tested are IV drug users. 
+But even worse — some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women. 
+We have no way to figure out what happened over time. 
+We have no consistent testing. 
+Now in the last few years, we actually have done some good testing. 
+In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population. 
+But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge. 
+So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983. 
+So this is a problem for policy. It was a problem for my research. 
+And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past. 
+And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past. 
+To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease. 
+It kills people in the prime of their lives. 
+Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here — this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt. 
+Botswana is a place with a lot of AIDS, Egypt is a place without a lot of AIDS. 
+And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people. 
+That suggests it's pretty similar levels of development. 
+But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt. 
+But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV. 
+But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past. 
+So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population, but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are. 
+So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa. 
+You can see, almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates. 
+UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent. 
+And these are not trivial differences in mortality rates. 
+So this is another way to see this. 
+You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group. 
+I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about how we can use this kind of information to learn something that's going to help us think about the world. 
+But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right. 
+If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million. 
+It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem. 
+But it does suggest that that number might be a little big. 
+What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower. 
+And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports. 
+When I started working on these projects, I was not thinking at all about economics, but eventually it kind of sucks you back in. 
+So I am going to talk about exports and prices. 
+And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections. 
+So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade, is really good for developing countries. 
+It's good for improving people's lives. 
+But openness and inter-connectedness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise. 
+On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia. 
+And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit. 
+The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back. 
+And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US. 
+In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people. 
+Areas with a lot of economic activity — with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization — those areas have higher prevalence than others. 
+But that actually doesn't mean at all that if we gave people more exports, more trade, that that would increase prevalence. 
+By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be — fortunately, I think — it seems to be the case that these things are positively related. 
+More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big. 
+So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections. 
+So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy. 
+From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV. 
+And we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there. 
+Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality — this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports — we can think about what the right kinds of policies are. 
+But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know. 
+Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty — at least in the short run, that improving exports and improving development — it's not necessarily the case that that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence. 
+So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention. 
+It's been widely heralded. 
+It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places. 
+But now I want to actually also question that. 
+Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign. 
+But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period. 
+There was a big decline in coffee prices. 
+Coffee is Uganda's major export. 
+Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s — and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections. 
+So you can see that both of these series — the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections — you can see they're both increasing. 
+Starting about 1987 they're both going down a lot. 
+And then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade. 
+So if you combine the intuition in this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign. 
+But that's enormously important for policy. 
+We're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign. 
+And if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was, then there are all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead. 
+Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases. 
+Trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision. 
+There are tons of other things that we should think about doing. 
+And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things. 
+I hope that in the last 16 minutes I've told you something that you didn't know about AIDS, and I hope that I've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know. 
+And I hope that I've convinced you maybe that it's important to understand things about the epidemic in order to think about policy. 
+But more than anything, you know, I'm an academic. 
+And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data. 
+And the thing that's most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. 
+There are more things that I think that I want to do. 
+And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. 
+And I can't wait to hear about what they are. 
+So thank you very much. 
+
+I'd like to ask you, what do these three people have in common? 
+Well, you probably recognize the first person. 
+I'm sure you're all avid "" American Idol "" watchers. 
+But you might not recognize Aydah Al Jahani, who is a contestant, indeed a finalist, in the Poet of the Millions competition, which is broadcast out of Abu Dhabi, and seen throughout the Arab world. 
+In this contest people have to write and recite original poetry, in the Nabati form of poetry, which is the traditional Bedouin form. 
+And Lima Sahar was a finalist in the Afghan Star singing competition. 
+Now, before I go any further, yes, I know it all began with "" Britain's Got Talent. "" But my point in discussing this is to show you — I hope I'll be able to show you how these merit-based competitions, with equal access to everyone, with the winner selected via voting by SMS, are changing tribal societies. 
+And I'm going to focus on Afghanistan and the Arab world with the UAE, how they're changing tribal societies, not by introducing Western ideas, but by being integrated into the language in those places. 
+It all begins with enjoyment. 
+Video: We are late to watch "" Afghan Star. "" We are going to watch "" Afghan Star. "" We are late. 
+We are running late. 
+We must go to watch "" Afghan Star. "" Cynthia Schneider: These programs are reaching incredibly deeply into society. 
+In Afghanistan, people go to extraordinary lengths to be able to watch this program. 
+And you don't necessarily have to have your own TV set. 
+People watch it all over the country also in public places. 
+But it goes beyond watching, because also, part of this is campaigning. 
+People become so engaged that they have volunteers, just like political volunteers anyway, who fan out over the countryside, campaigning for their candidate. 
+Contestants also put themselves forward. 
+Now, of course there is a certain degree of ethnic allegiance, but not entirely. 
+Because each year the winner has come from a different tribal group. 
+This has opened up the door, particularly for women. 
+And in the last season there were two women in the finalists. 
+One of them, Lima Sahar, is a Pashtun from Kandahar, a very conservative part of the country. 
+And here she relates, in the documentary film "" Afghan Star, "" how her friends urged her not to do this and told her that she was leaving them for democracy. 
+But she also confides that she knows that members of the Taliban are actually SMS-ing votes in for her. 
+Aydah Al Jahnani also took risks and put herself out, to compete in the Poet of the Millions competition. 
+I have to say, her husband backed her from the start. 
+But her tribe and family urged her not to compete and were very much against it. 
+But, once she started to win, then they got behind her again. 
+It turns out that competition and winning is a universal human value. 
+And she's out there. 
+Her poetry is about women, and the life of women in society. 
+So just by presenting herself and being in competition with men — this shows the voting on the program — it sets a very important example for young women — these are young women in the audience of the program — in Abu Dhabi, but also people in the viewing audience. 
+Now you'd think that "" American Idol "" would introduce a measure of Americanization. 
+But actually, just the opposite is happening. 
+By using this engaging popular format for traditional, local culture, it actually, in the Gulf, is precipitating a revival of interest in Nabati poetry, also in traditional dress and dance and music. 
+And for Afghanistan, where the Taliban banned music for many years, it is reintroducing their traditional music. 
+They don't sing pop songs, they sing Afghan music. 
+And they also have learned how to lose gracefully, without avenging the winner. 
+(Laughter) No small thing. 
+And the final, sort of, formulation of this "" American Idol "" format, which has just appeared in Afghanistan, is a new program called "" The Candidate. "" And in this program, people present policy platforms that are then voted on. 
+Many of them are too young to run for president, but by putting the issues out there, they are influencing the presidential race. 
+So for me, the substance of things unseen is how reality TV is driving reality. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+There are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography — women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it doesn't work well at all. 
+Do you know which group you're in? 
+If you don't, you're not alone. 
+Because the breast has become a very political organ. 
+The truth has become lost in all the rhetoric coming from the press, politicians, radiologists and medical imaging companies. 
+I will do my best this morning to tell you what I think is the truth. 
+But first, my disclosures. 
+I am not a breast cancer survivor. 
+I'm not a radiologist. 
+I don't have any patents, and I've never received any money from a medical imaging company, and I am not seeking your vote. 
+(Laughter) What I am is a doctor of internal medicine who became passionately interested in this topic about 10 years ago when a patient asked me a question. 
+She came to see me after discovering a breast lump. 
+Her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s. 
+She and I were both very pregnant at that time, and my heart just ached for her, imagining how afraid she must be. 
+Fortunately, her lump proved to be benign. 
+But she asked me a question: how confident was I that I would find a tumor early on her mammogram if she developed one? 
+So I studied her mammogram, and I reviewed the radiology literature, and I was shocked to discover that, in her case, our chances of finding a tumor early on the mammogram were less than the toss of a coin. 
+You may recall a year ago when a firestorm erupted after the United States Preventive Services Task Force reviewed the world's mammography screening literature and issued a guideline recommending against screening mammograms in women in their 40s. 
+Now everybody rushed to criticize the Task Force, even though most of them weren't in anyway familiar with the mammography studies. 
+It took the Senate just 17 days to ban the use of the guidelines in determining insurance coverage. 
+Radiologists were outraged by the guidelines. 
+The pre-eminent mammographer in the United States issued the following quote to the Washington Post. 
+The radiologists were, in turn, criticized for protecting their own financial self-interest. 
+But in my view, the radiologists are heroes. 
+There's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms, and that's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret, and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause. 
+But that very fact is telling. 
+Where there is this much legal smoke, there is likely to be some fire. 
+The factor most responsible for that fire is breast density. 
+Breast density refers to the relative amount of fat — pictured here in yellow — versus connective and epithelial tissues — pictured in pink. 
+And that proportion is primarily genetically determined. 
+Two-thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue, which is why mammography doesn't work as well in them. 
+And although breast density generally declines with age, up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause. 
+So how do you know if your breasts are dense? 
+Well, you need to read the details of your mammography report. 
+Radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram. 
+If the breast is less than 25 percent dense, that's called fatty-replaced. 
+The next category is scattered fibroglandular densities, followed by heterogeneously dense and extremely dense. 
+And breasts that fall into these two categories are considered dense. 
+The problem with breast density is that it's truly the wolf in sheep's clothing. 
+Both tumors and dense breast tissue appear white on a mammogram, and the X-ray often can't distinguish between the two. 
+So it's easy to see this tumor in the upper part of this fatty breast. 
+But imagine how difficult it would be to find that tumor in this dense breast. 
+That's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts, but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts. 
+Now it's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer, but it turns out that it's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer. 
+It's a stronger risk factor than having a mother or a sister with breast cancer. 
+At the time my patient posed this question to me, breast density was an obscure topic in the radiology literature, and very few women having mammograms, or the physicians ordering them, knew about this. 
+But what else could I offer her? 
+Mammograms have been around since the 1960's, and it's changed very little. 
+There have been surprisingly few innovations, until digital mammography was approved in 2000. 
+Digital mammography is still an X-ray of the breast, but the images can be stored and manipulated digitally, just like we can with a digital camera. 
+The U.S. has invested four billion dollars converting to digital mammography equipment, and what have we gained from that investment? 
+In a study funded by over 25 million taxpayer dollars, digital mammography was found to be no better over all than traditional mammography, and in fact, it was worse in older women. 
+But it was better in one group, and that was women under 50 who were pre-menopausal and had dense breasts, and in those women, digital mammography found twice as many cancers, but it still only found 60 percent. 
+So digital mammography has been a giant leap forward for manufacturers of digital mammography equipment, but it's been a very small step forward for womankind. 
+What about ultrasound? 
+Ultrasound generates more biopsies that are unnecessary relative to other technologies, so it's not widely used. 
+And MRI is exquisitely sensitive for finding tumors, but it's also very expensive. 
+If we think about disruptive technology, we see an almost ubiquitous pattern of the technology getting smaller and less expensive. 
+Think about iPods compared to stereos. 
+But it's the exact opposite in health care. 
+The machines get ever bigger and ever more expensive. 
+Screening the average young woman with an MRI is kind of like driving to the grocery store in a Hummer. 
+It's just way too much equipment. 
+One MRI scan costs 10 times what a digital mammogram costs. 
+And sooner or later, we're going to have to accept the fact that health care innovation can't always come at a much higher price. 
+Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker on innovation, and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual's genius. 
+Rather, big ideas can be orchestrated, if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they don't ordinarily talk about. 
+It's like the essence of TED. 
+He quotes one innovator who says, "" The only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick. "" (Laughter) This makes no sense, because physicians have all kinds of problems that they don't realize have solutions. 
+And physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they don't realize are problems. 
+Now, take a look at this cartoon that accompanied Gladwell's article, and tell me if you see something disturbing about this depiction of innovative thinkers. 
+(Laughter) So if you will allow me a little creative license, I will tell you the story of the serendipitous collision of my patient's problem with a physicist's solution. 
+Shortly after her visit, I was introduced to a nuclear physicist at Mayo named Michael O'Conner, who was a specialist in cardiac imaging, something I had nothing to do with. 
+And he happened to tell me about a conference he'd just returned from in Israel, where they were talking about a new type of gamma detector. 
+Now gamma imaging has been around for a long time to image the heart, and it had even been tried to image the breast. 
+But the problem was that the gamma detectors were these huge, bulky tubes, and they were filled with these scintillating crystals, and you just couldn't get them close enough around the breast to find small tumors. 
+But the potential advantage was that gamma rays, unlike X-rays, are not influenced by breast density. 
+But this technology could not find tumors when they're small, and finding a small tumor is critical for survival. 
+If you can find a tumor when it's less than a centimeter, survival exceeds 90 percent, but drops off rapidly as tumor size increases. 
+But Michael told me about a new type of gamma detector that he'd seen, and this is it. 
+It's made not of a bulky tube, but of a thin layer of a semiconductor material that serves as the gamma detector. 
+And I started talking to him about this problem with breast density, and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors. 
+So after putting together a grid of these cubes with tape — (Laughter) — Michael hacked off the X-ray plate of a mammography machine that was about to be thrown out, and we attached the new detector, and we decided to call this machine Molecular Breast Imaging, or MBI. 
+This is an image from our first patient. 
+And you can see, using the old gamma technology, that it just looked like noise. 
+But using our new detector, we could begin to see the outline of a tumor. 
+So here we were, a nuclear physicist, an internist, soon joined by Carrie Hruska, a biomedical engineer, and two radiologists, and we were trying to take on the entrenched world of mammography with a machine that was held together by duct tape. 
+To say that we faced high doses of skepticism in those early years is just a huge understatement, but we were so convinced that we might be able to make this work that we chipped away with incremental modifications to this system. 
+This is our current detector. 
+And you can see that it looks a lot different. 
+The duct tape is gone, and we added a second detector on top of the breast, which has further improved our tumor detection. 
+So how does this work? 
+The patient receives an injection of a radio tracer that's taken up by rapidly proliferating tumor cells, but not by normal cells, and this is the key difference from mammography. 
+Mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue, and we've seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast. 
+But MBI exploits the different molecular behavior of tumors, and therefore, it's impervious to breast density. 
+After the injection, the patient's breast is placed between the detectors. 
+And if you've ever had a mammogram — if you're old enough to have had a mammogram — you know what comes next: pain. 
+You may be surprised to know that mammography is the only radiologic study that's regulated by federal law, and the law requires that the equivalent of a 40-pound car battery come down on your breast during this study. 
+But with MBI, we use just light, pain-free compression. 
+(Applause) And the detector then transmits the image to the computer. 
+So here's an example. 
+You can see, on the right, a mammogram showing a faint tumor, the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue. 
+But the MBI image shows that tumor much more clearly, as well as a second tumor, which profoundly influence that patient's surgical options. 
+In this example, although the mammogram found one tumor, we were able to demonstrate three discrete tumors — one is small as three millimeters. 
+Our big break came in 2004. 
+After we had demonstrated that we could find small tumors, we used these images to submit a grant to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. 
+And we were elated when they took a chance on a team of completely unknown investigators and funded us to study 1,000 women with dense breasts, comparing a screening mammogram to an MBI. 
+Of the tumors that we found, mammography found only 25 percent of those tumors. 
+MBI found 83 percent. 
+Here's an example from that screening study. 
+The digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue, but the MBI shows an area of intense uptake, which correlated with a two-centimeter tumor. 
+In this case, a one-centimeter tumor. 
+And in this case, a 45-year-old medical secretary at Mayo, who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was very young, wanted to enroll in our study. 
+And her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue, but her MBI showed an area of worrisome uptake, which we can also see on a color image. 
+And this corresponded to a tumor the size of a golf ball. 
+But fortunately it was removed before it had spread to her lymph nodes. 
+So now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast, we had to solve one very important problem. 
+We had to figure out how to lower the radiation dose, and we have spent the last three years making modifications to every aspect of the imaging system to allow this. 
+And I'm very happy to report that we're now using a dose of radiation that is equivalent to the effective dose from one digital mammogram. 
+And at this low dose, we're continuing this screening study, and this image from three weeks ago in a 67-year-old woman shows a normal digital mammogram, but an MBI image showing an uptake that proved to be a large cancer. 
+So this is not just young women that it's benefiting. 
+It's also older women with dense tissue. 
+And we're now routinely using one-fifth the radiation dose that's used in any other type of gamma technology. 
+MBI generates four images per breast. 
+MRI generates over a thousand. 
+It takes a radiologist years of specialty training to become expert in differentiating the normal anatomic detail from the worrisome finding. 
+But I suspect even the non-radiologists in the room can find the tumor on the MBI image. 
+But this is why MBI is so potentially disruptive — it's as accurate as MRI, it's far less complex to interpret, and it's a fraction of the cost. 
+But you can understand why there may be forces in the breast-imaging world who prefer the status quo. 
+After achieving what we felt were remarkable results, our manuscript was rejected by four journals. 
+After the fourth rejection, we requested reconsideration of the manuscript, because we strongly suspected that one of the reviewers who had rejected it had a financial conflict of interest in a competing technology. 
+Our manuscript was then accepted and will be published later this month in the journal Radiology. 
+(Applause) We still need to complete the screening study using the low dose, and then our findings will need to be replicated at other institutions, and this could take five or more years. 
+If this technology is widely adopted, I will not benefit financially in any way, and that is very important to me, because it allows me to continue to tell you the truth. 
+But I recognize — (Applause) I recognize that the adoption of this technology will depend as much on economic and political forces as it will on the soundness of the science. 
+The MBI unit has now been FDA approved, but it's not yet widely available. 
+So until something is available for women with dense breasts, there are things that you should know to protect yourself. 
+First, know your density. 
+Ninety percent of women don't, and 95 percent of women don't know that it increases your breast cancer risk. 
+The State of Connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram. 
+I was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast-imaging last week in Chicago, and I was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is. 
+Of course we should. 
+And if you don't know, please ask your doctor or read the details of your mammography report. 
+Second, if you're pre-menopausal, try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle, when breast density is relatively lower. 
+Third, if you notice a persistent change in your breast, insist on additional imaging. 
+And fourth and most important, the mammography debate will rage on, but I do believe that all women 40 and older should have an annual mammogram. 
+Mammography isn't perfect, but it's the only test that's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer. 
+But this mortality banner is the very sword which mammography's most ardent advocates use to deter innovation. 
+Some women who develop breast cancer die from it many years later, and most women, thankfully, survive. 
+So it takes 10 or more years for any screening method to demonstrate a reduction in mortality from breast cancer. 
+Mammography's the only one that's been around long enough to have a chance of making that claim. 
+It is time for us to accept both the extraordinary successes of mammography and the limitations. 
+We need to individualize screening based on density. 
+For women without dense breasts, mammography is the best choice. 
+But for women with dense breasts; we shouldn't abandon screening altogether, we need to offer them something better. 
+The babies that we were carrying when my patient first asked me this question are now both in middle school, and the answer has been so slow to come. 
+She's given me her blessing to share this story with you. 
+After undergoing biopsies that further increased her risk for cancer and losing her sister to cancer, she made the difficult decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy. 
+We can and must do better, not just in time for her granddaughters and my daughters, but in time for you. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm Ellen, and I'm totally obsessed with food. 
+But I didn't start out obsessed with food. 
+I started out obsessed with global security policy because I lived in New York during 9 / 11, and it was obviously a very relevant thing. 
+And I got from global security policy to food because I realized when I'm hungry, I'm really pissed off, and I'm assuming that the rest of the world is too. 
+Especially if you're hungry and your kids are hungry and your neighbor's kids are hungry and your whole neighborhood is hungry, you're pretty angry. 
+And actually, lo and behold, it looks pretty much like the areas of the world that are hungry are also the areas of the world that are pretty insecure. 
+So I took a job at the United Nations World Food Programme as a way to try to address these security issues through food security issues. 
+And while I was there, I came across what I think is the most brilliant of their programs. 
+It's called School Feeding, and it's a really simple idea to sort of get in the middle of the cycle of poverty and hunger that continues for a lot of people around the world, and stop it. 
+By giving kids a free school meal, it gets them into school, which is obviously education, the first step out of poverty, but it also gives them the micronutrients and the macronutrients they need to really develop both mentally and physically. 
+While I was working at the U.N., I met this girl. Her name is Lauren Bush. 
+And she had this really awesome idea to sell the bag called the "" Feed Bag "" — which is really beautifully ironic because you can strap on the Feed Bag. 
+But each bag we'd sell would provide a year's worth of school meals for one kid. 
+It's so simple, and we thought, you know, okay, it costs between 20 and 50 bucks to provide school feeding for a year. 
+We could sell these bags and raise a ton of money and a ton of awareness for the World Food Programme. 
+But of course, you know at the U.N., sometimes things move slowly, and they basically said no. 
+And we thought, God, this is such a good idea and it's going to raise so much money. 
+So we said screw it, we'll just start our own company, which we did three years ago. 
+So that was kind of my first dream, was to start this company called FEED, and here's a screenshot of our website. 
+We did this bag for Haiti, and we launched it just a month after the earthquake to provide school meals for kids in Haiti. 
+So FEED's doing great. We've so far provided 55 million meals to kids around the world by selling now 550,000 bags, a ton of bags, a lot of bags. 
+All this time you're — when you think about hunger, it's a hard thing to think about, because what we think about is eating. 
+I think about eating a lot, and I really love it. 
+And the thing that's a little strange about international hunger and talking about international issues is that most people kind of want to know: "" What are you doing in America? "" "What are you doing for America's kids?" 
+There's definitely hunger in America: 49 million people and almost 16.7 million children. 
+I mean that's pretty dramatic for our own country. 
+Hunger definitely means something a little bit different in America than it does internationally, but it's incredibly important to address hunger in our own country. 
+But obviously the bigger problem that we all know about is obesity, and it's dramatic. 
+The other thing that's dramatic is that both hunger and obesity have really risen in the last 30 years. 
+Unfortunately, obesity's not only an American problem. 
+It's actually been spreading all around the world and mainly through our kind of food systems that we're exporting. 
+The numbers are pretty crazy. 
+There's a billion people obese or overweight and a billion people hungry. 
+So those seem like two bifurcated problems, but I kind of started to think about, you know, what is obesity and hunger? What are both those things about? 
+Well, they're both about food. 
+And when you think about food, the underpinning of food in both cases is potentially problematic agriculture. 
+And agriculture is where food comes from. 
+Well, agriculture in America's very interesting. 
+It's very consolidated, and the foods that are produced lead to the foods that we eat. 
+Well, the foods that are produced are, more or less, corn, soy and wheat. 
+And as you can see, that's three-quarters of the food that we're eating for the most part: processed foods and fast foods. 
+Unfortunately, in our agricultural system, we haven't done a good job in the last three decades of exporting those technologies around the world. 
+So African agriculture, which is the place of most hunger in the world, has actually fallen precipitously as hunger has risen. 
+So somehow we're not making the connect between exporting a good agricultural system that will help feed people all around the world. 
+Who is farming them? That's what I was wondering. 
+So I went and stood on a big grain bin in the Midwest, and that really didn't help me understand farming, but I think it's a really cool picture. 
+And you know, the reality is that between farmers in America, who actually, quite frankly, when I spend time in the Midwest, are pretty large in general. 
+And their farms are also large. 
+But farmers in the rest of the world are actually quite skinny, and that's because they're starving. 
+Most hungry people in the world are subsistence farmers. 
+And most of those people are women — which is a totally other topic that I won't get on right now, but I'd love to do the feminist thing at some point. 
+I think it's really interesting to look at agriculture from these two sides. 
+There's this large, consolidated farming that's led to what we eat in America, and it's really been since around 1980, after the oil crisis, when, you know, mass consolidation, mass exodus of small farmers in this country. 
+And then in the same time period, you know, we've kind of left Africa's farmers to do their own thing. 
+Unfortunately, what is farmed ends up as what we eat. 
+And in America, a lot of what we eat has led to obesity and has led to a real change in sort of what our diet is in the last 30 years. 
+It's crazy. 
+A fifth of kids under two drinks soda. 
+Hello. You don't put soda in bottles. 
+But people do because it's so cheap, and so our whole food system in the last 30 years has really shifted. 
+I think, you know, it's not just in our own country, but really we're exporting the system around the world, and when you look at the data of least developed countries — especially in cities, which are growing really rapidly — people are eating American processed foods. 
+And in one generation, they're going from hunger, and all of the detrimental health effects of hunger, to obesity and things like diabetes and heart disease in one generation. 
+So the problematic food system is affecting both hunger and obesity. 
+Not to beat a dead horse, but this is a global food system where there's a billion people hungry and billion people obese. 
+I think that's the only way to look at it. 
+And instead of taking these two things as bifurcated problems that are very separate, it's really important to look at them as one system. 
+We get a lot of our food from all around the world, and people from all around the world are importing our food system, so it's incredibly relevant to start a new way of looking at it. 
+The thing is, I've learned — and the technology people that are here, which I'm totally not one of them — but apparently, it really takes 30 years for a lot of technologies to become really endemic to us, like the mouse and the Internet and Windows. 
+You know, there's 30-year cycles. 
+I think 2010 can be a really interesting year because it is the end of the 30-year cycle, and it's the birthday of the global food system. 
+So that's the first birthday I want to talk about. 
+You know, I think if we really think that this is something that's happened in the last 30 years, there's hope in that. 
+It's the thirtieth anniversary of GMO crops and the Big Gulp, Chicken McNuggets, high fructose corn syrup, the farm crisis in America and the change in how we've addressed agriculture internationally. 
+So there's a lot of reasons to take this 30-year time period as sort of the creation of this new food system. 
+I'm not the only one who's obsessed with this whole 30-year thing. 
+The icons like Michael Pollan and Jamie Oliver in his TED Prize wish both addressed this last three-decade time period as incredibly relevant for food system change. 
+Well, I really care about 1980 because it's also the thirtieth anniversary of me this year. 
+And so in my lifetime, a lot of what's happened in the world — and being a person obsessed with food — a lot of this has really changed. 
+So my second dream is that I think we can look to the next 30 years as a time to change the food system again. 
+And we know what's happened in the past, so if we start now, and we look at technologies and improvements to the food system long term, we might be able to recreate the food system so when I give my next talk and I'm 60 years old, I'll be able to say that it's been a success. 
+So I'm announcing today the start of a new organization, or a new fund within the FEED Foundation, called the 30 Project. 
+And the 30 Project is really focused on these long-term ideas for food system change. 
+And I think by aligning international advocates that are addressing hunger and domestic advocates that are addressing obesity, we might actually look for long-term solutions that will make the food system better for everyone. 
+We all tend to think that these systems are quite different, and people argue whether or not organic can feed the world, but if we take a 30-year view, there's more hope in collaborative ideas. 
+So I'm hoping that by connecting really disparate organizations like the ONE campaign and Slow Food, which don't seem right now to have much in common, we can talk about holistic, long-term, systemic solutions that will improve food for everyone. 
+Some ideas I've had is like, look, the reality is — kids in the South Bronx need apples and carrots and so do kids in Botswana. 
+And how are we going to get those kids those nutritious foods? 
+Another thing that's become incredibly global is production of meat and fish. 
+Understanding how to produce protein in a way that's healthy for the environment and healthy for people will be incredibly important to address things like climate change and how we use petrochemical fertilizers. 
+And you know, these are really relevant topics that are long term and important for both people in Africa who are small farmers and people in America who are farmers and eaters. 
+And I also think that thinking about processed foods in a new way, where we actually price the negative externalities like petrochemicals and like fertilizer runoff into the price of a bag of chips. 
+Well, if that bag of chips then becomes inherently more expensive than an apple, then maybe it's time for a different sense of personal responsibility in food choice because the choices are actually choices instead of three-quarters of the products being made just from corn, soy and wheat. 
+The 30Project.org is launched, and I've gathered a coalition of a few organizations to start. 
+And it'll be growing over the next few months. 
+But I really hope that you will all think of ways that you can look long term at things like the food system and make change. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This means, "" I'm smiling. "" So does that. 
+This means "" mouse. "" "Cat." 
+Here we have a story. 
+The start of the story, where this means guy, and that is a ponytail on a passer-by. 
+Here's where it happens. 
+These are when. 
+This is a cassette tape the girl puts into her cassette-tape player. 
+She wears it every day. 
+It's not considered vintage — she just likes certain music to sound a certain way. 
+Look at her posture; it's remarkable. 
+That's because she dances. 
+Now he, the guy, takes all of this in, figuring, "Honestly, geez, what are my chances?" 
+(Laughter) And he could say, "" Oh my God! "" or "" I heart you! "" "I'm laughing out loud." 
+"I want to give you a hug." 
+But he comes up with that, you know. 
+He tells her, "" I'd like to hand-paint your portrait on a coffee mug. "" (Laughter) Put a crab inside it. 
+Add some water. 
+Seven different salts. 
+He means he's got this sudden notion to stand on dry land, but just panhandle at the ocean. 
+He says, "" You look like a mermaid, but you walk like a waltz. "" And the girl goes, "" Wha '? "" So, the guy replies, "" Yeah, I know, I know. 
+I think my heartbeat might be the Morse code for inappropriate. 
+At least, that's how it seems. 
+I'm like a junior varsity cheerleader sometimes — for swearing, awkward silences, and very simple rhyme schemes. 
+Right now, talking to you, I'm not even really a guy. 
+I'm a monkey — (Laughter) — blowing kisses at a butterfly. 
+But I'm still suggesting you and I should meet. 
+First, soon, and then a lot. 
+I'm thinking the southwest corner of 5th and 42nd at noon tomorrow, but I'll stay until you show up, ponytail or not. 
+Hell, ponytail alone. 
+I don't know what else to tell you. 
+I got a pencil you can borrow. 
+You can put it in your phone. "" But the girl does not budge, does not smile, does not frown. 
+She just says, "" No thank you. "" You know? 
+["" i don't need 2 write it down. ""] (Applause) 
+
+I first became fascinated with octopus at an early age. 
+I grew up in Mobile, Alabama — somebody's got to be from Mobile, right? — and Mobile sits at the confluence of five rivers, forming this beautiful delta. 
+And the delta has alligators crawling in and out of rivers filled with fish and cypress trees dripping with snakes, birds of every flavor. 
+It's an absolute magical wonderland to live in — if you're a kid interested in animals, to grow up in. 
+And this delta water flows to Mobile Bay, and finally into the Gulf of Mexico. 
+And I remember my first real contact with octopus was probably at age five or six. 
+I was in the gulf, and I was swimming around and saw a little octopus on the bottom. 
+And I reached down and picked him up, and immediately became fascinated and impressed by its speed and its strength and agility. 
+It was prying my fingers apart and moving to the back of my hand. 
+It was all I could do to hold onto this amazing creature. 
+Then it sort of calmed down in the palms of my hands and started flashing colors, just pulsing all of these colors. 
+And as I looked at it, it kind of tucked its arms under it, raised into a spherical shape and turned chocolate brown with two white stripes. 
+I'm going, "" My gosh! "" I had never seen anything like this in my life! 
+So I marveled for a moment, and then decided it was time to release him, so I put him down. 
+The octopus left my hands and then did the damnedest thing: It landed on the bottom in the rubble and — fwoosh! — vanished right before my eyes. 
+And I knew, right then, at age six, that is an animal that I want to learn more about. So I did. 
+And I went off to college and got a degree in marine zoology, and then moved to Hawaii and entered graduate school at the University of Hawaii. 
+And while a student at Hawaii, I worked at the Waikiki Aquarium. 
+And the aquarium had a lot of big fish tanks but not a lot of invertebrate displays, and being the spineless guy, I thought, well I'll just go out in the field and collect these wonderful animals I had been learning about as a student and bring them in, and I built these elaborate sets and put them on display. 
+Now, the fish in the tanks were gorgeous to look at, but they didn't really interact with people. 
+But the octopus did. 
+If you walked up to an octopus tank, especially early in the morning before anyone arrived, the octopus would rise up and look at you and you're thinking, "" Is that guy really looking at me? He is looking at me! "" And you walk up to the front of the tank. Then you realize that these animals all have different personalities: Some of them would hold their ground, others would slink into the back of the tank and disappear in the rocks, and one in particular, this amazing animal... 
+I went up to the front of the tank, and he's just staring at me, and he had little horns come up above his eyes. 
+So I went right up to the front of the tank — I was three or four inches from the front glass — and the octopus was sitting on a perch, a little rock, and he came off the rock and he also came down right to the front of the glass. 
+So I was staring at this animal about six or seven inches away, and at that time I could actually focus that close; now as I look at my fuzzy fingers I realize those days are long gone. 
+Anyway, there we were, staring at each other, and he reaches down and grabs an armful of gravel and releases it in the jet of water entering the tank from the filtration system, and — chk chk chk chk chk! — this gravel hits the front of the glass and falls down. 
+He reaches up, takes another armful of gravel, releases it — chk chk chk chk chk! — same thing. 
+Then he lifts another arm and I lift an arm. 
+Then he lifts another arm and I lift another arm. 
+And then I realize the octopus won the arms race, because I was out and he had six left. (Laughter) But the only way I can describe what I was seeing that day was that this octopus was playing, which is a pretty sophisticated behavior for a mere invertebrate. 
+So, about three years into my degree, a funny thing happened on the way to the office, which actually changed the course of my life. 
+A man came into the aquarium. It's a long story, but essentially he sent me and a couple of friends of mine to the South Pacific to collect animals for him, and as we left, he gave us two 16-millimeter movie cameras. 
+He said, "" Make a movie about this expedition. "" "" OK, a couple of biologists making a movie — this'll be interesting, "" and off we went. And we did, we made a movie, which had to be the worst movie ever made in the history of movie making, but it was a blast. I had so much fun. 
+And I remember that proverbial light going off in my head, thinking, "" Wait a minute. 
+Maybe I can do this all the time. 
+Yeah, I'll be a filmmaker. "" So I literally came back from that job, quit school, hung my filmmaking shingle and just never told anyone that I didn't know what I was doing. 
+It's been a good ride. 
+And what I learned in school though was really beneficial. 
+If you're a wildlife filmmaker and you're going out into the field to film animals, especially behavior, it helps to have a fundamental background on who these animals are, how they work and, you know, a bit about their behaviors. 
+But where I really learned about octopus was in the field, as a filmmaker making films with them, where you're allowed to spend large periods of time with the animals, seeing octopus being octopus in their ocean homes. 
+I remember I took a trip to Australia, went to an island called One Tree Island. 
+And apparently, evolution had occurred at a pretty rapid rate on One Tree, between the time they named it and the time I arrived, because I'm sure there were at least three trees on that island when we were there. 
+Anyway, one tree is situated right next to a beautiful coral reef. 
+In fact, there's a surge channel where the tide is moving back and forth, twice a day, pretty rapidly. 
+And there's a beautiful reef, very complex reef, with lots of animals, including a lot of octopus. 
+And not uniquely but certainly, the octopus in Australia are masters at camouflage. 
+As a matter of fact, there's one right there. 
+So our first challenge was to find these things, and that was a challenge, indeed. 
+But the idea is, we were there for a month and I wanted to acclimate the animals to us so that we could see behaviors without disturbing them. 
+So the first week was pretty much spent just getting as close as we could, every day a little closer, a little closer, a little closer. 
+And you knew what the limit was: they would start getting twitchy and you'd back up, come back in a few hours. 
+And after the first week, they ignored us. 
+It was like, "" I don't know what that thing is, but he's no threat to me. "" So they went on about their business and from a foot away, we're watching mating and courting and fighting and it is just an unbelievable experience. 
+And one of the most fantastic displays that I remember, or at least visually, was a foraging behavior. 
+And they had a lot of different techniques that they would use for foraging, but this particular one used vision. 
+And they would see a coral head, maybe 10 feet away, and start moving over toward that coral head. 
+And I don't know whether they actually saw crab in it, or imagined that one might be, but whatever the case, they would leap off the bottom and go through the water and land right on top of this coral head, and then the web between the arms would completely engulf the coral head, and they would fish out, swim for crabs. 
+And as soon as the crabs touched the arm, it was lights out. 
+And I always wondered what happened under that web. 
+So we created a way to find out, (Laughter) and I got my first look at that famous beak in action. 
+It was fantastic. 
+If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. 
+And octopus are, they live in all the oceans. 
+They also live deep. 
+And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that. 
+It's like nothing you've ever done. 
+If you ever really want to get away from it all and see something that you have never seen, and have an excellent chance of seeing something no one has ever seen, get in a sub. 
+You climb in, seal the hatch, turn on a little oxygen, turn on the scrubber, which removes the CO2 in the air you breathe, and they chuck you overboard. 
+Down you go. There's no connection to the surface apart from a pretty funky radio. 
+And as you go down, the washing machine at the surface calms down. 
+And it gets quiet. 
+And it starts getting really nice. 
+And as you go deeper, that lovely, blue water you were launched in gives way to darker and darker blue. 
+And finally, it's a rich lavender, and after a couple of thousand feet, it's ink black. 
+And now you've entered the realm of the mid-water community. 
+You could give an entire talk about the creatures that live in the mid-water. 
+Suffice to say though, as far as I'm concerned, without question, the most bizarre designs and outrageous behaviors are in the animals that live in the mid-water community. 
+But we're just going to zip right past this area, this area that includes about 95 percent of the living space on our planet and go to the mid-ocean ridge, which I think is even more extraordinary. 
+The mid-ocean ridge is a huge mountain range, 40,000 miles long, snaking around the entire globe. 
+And they're big mountains, thousands of feet tall, some of which are tens of thousands of feet and bust through the surface, creating islands like Hawaii. 
+And the top of this mountain range is splitting apart, creating a rift valley. 
+And when you dive into that rift valley, that's where the action is because literally thousands of active volcanoes are going off at any point in time all along this 40,000 mile range. 
+And as these tectonic plates are spreading apart, magma, lava is coming up and filling those gaps, and you're looking land — new land — being created right before your eyes. 
+And over the tops of them is 3,000 to 4,000 meters of water creating enormous pressure, forcing water down through the cracks toward the center of the earth, until it hits a magma chamber where it becomes superheated and supersaturated with minerals, reverses its flow and starts shooting back to the surface and is ejected out of the earth like a geyser at Yellowstone. 
+In fact, this whole area is like a Yellowstone National Park with all of the trimmings. 
+And this vent fluid is about 600 or 700 degrees F. 
+The surrounding water is just a couple of degrees above freezing. 
+So it immediately cools, and it can no longer hold in suspension all of the material that it's dissolved, and it precipitates out, forming black smoke. 
+And it forms these towers, these chimneys that are 10, 20, 30 feet tall. 
+And all along the sides of these chimneys is shimmering with heat and loaded with life. 
+You've got black smokers going all over the place and chimneys that have tube worms that might be eight to 10 feet long. 
+And out of the tops of these tube worms are these beautiful red plumes. 
+And living amongst the tangle of tube worms is an entire community of animals: shrimp, fish, lobsters, crab, clams and swarms of arthropods that are playing that dangerous game between over here is scalding hot and freezing cold. 
+And this whole ecosystem wasn't even known about until 33 years ago. 
+And it completely threw science on its head. 
+It made scientists rethink where life on Earth might have actually begun. 
+And before the discovery of these vents, all life on Earth, the key to life on Earth, was believed to be the sun and photosynthesis. 
+But down there, there is no sun, there is no photosynthesis; it's chemosynthetic environment down there driving it, and it's all so ephemeral. 
+You might film this unbelievable hydrothermal vent, which you think at the time has to be on another planet. 
+It's amazing to think that this is actually on earth; it looks like aliens in an alien environment. 
+But you go back to the same vent eight years later and it can be completely dead. 
+There's no hot water. 
+All of the animals are gone, they're dead, and the chimneys are still there creating a really nice ghost town, an eerie, spooky ghost town, but essentially devoid of animals, of course. 
+But 10 miles down the ridge... 
+pshhh! There's another volcano going. 
+And there's a whole new hydrothermal vent community that has been formed. 
+And this kind of life and death of hydrothermal vent communities is going on every 30 or 40 years all along the ridge. 
+And that ephemeral nature of the hydrothermal vent community isn't really different from some of the areas that I've seen in 35 years of traveling around, making films. 
+Where you go and film a really nice sequence at a bay. 
+And you go back, and I'm at home, and I'm thinking, "" Okay, what can I shoot... 
+Ah! I know where I can shoot that. 
+There's this beautiful bay, lots of soft corals and stomatopods. "" And you show up, and it's dead. 
+There's no coral, algae growing on it, and the water's pea soup. 
+You think, "" Well, what happened? "" And you turn around, and there's a hillside behind you with a neighborhood going in, and bulldozers are pushing piles of soil back and forth. 
+And over here there's a golf course going in. 
+And this is the tropics. 
+It's raining like crazy here. 
+So this rainwater is flooding down the hillside, carrying with it sediments from the construction site, smothering the coral and killing it. 
+And fertilizers and pesticides are flowing into the bay from the golf course — the pesticides killing all the larvae and little animals, fertilizer creating this beautiful plankton bloom — and there's your pea soup. 
+But, encouragingly, I've seen just the opposite. 
+I've been to a place that was a pretty trashed bay. 
+And I looked at it, just said, "" Yuck, "" and go and work on the other side of the island. 
+Five years later, come back, and that same bay is now gorgeous. It's beautiful. 
+It's got living coral, fish all over the place, crystal clear water, and you go, "" How did that happen? "" Well, how it happened is the local community galvanized. 
+They recognized what was happening on the hillside and put a stop to it; enacted laws and made permits required to do responsible construction and golf course maintenance and stopped the sediments flowing into the bay, and stopped the chemicals flowing into the bay, and the bay recovered. 
+The ocean has an amazing ability to recover, if we'll just leave it alone. 
+I think Margaret Mead said it best. 
+She said that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. 
+Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. 
+And a small group of thoughtful people changed that bay. 
+I'm a big fan of grassroots organizations. 
+I've been to a lot of lectures where, at the end of it, inevitably, one of the first questions that comes up is, "" But, but what can I do? 
+I'm an individual. I'm one person. 
+And these problems are so large and global, and it's just overwhelming. "" Fair enough question. 
+My answer to that is don't look at the big, overwhelming issues of the world. 
+Look in your own backyard. 
+Look in your heart, actually. 
+What do you really care about that isn't right where you live? 
+And fix it. 
+Create a healing zone in your neighborhood and encourage others to do the same. 
+And maybe these healing zones can sprinkle a map, little dots on a map. 
+And in fact, the way that we can communicate today — where Alaska is instantly knowing what's going on in China, and the Kiwis did this, and then over in England they tried to... 
+and everybody is talking to everyone else — it's not isolated points on a map anymore, it's a network we've created. 
+And maybe these healing zones can start growing, and possibly even overlap, and good things can happen. 
+So that's how I answer that question. 
+Look in your own backyard, in fact, look in the mirror. 
+What can you do that is more responsible than what you're doing now? 
+And do that, and spread the word. 
+The vent community animals can't really do much about the life and death that's going on where they live, but up here we can. 
+In theory, we're thinking, rational human beings. 
+And we can make changes to our behavior that will influence and affect the environment, like those people changed the health of that bay. 
+Now, Sylvia's TED Prize wish was to beseech us to do anything we could, everything we could, to set aside not pin pricks, but significant expanses of the ocean for preservation, "" hope spots, "" she calls them. 
+And I applaud that. I loudly applaud that. 
+And it's my hope that some of these "" hope spots "" can be in the deep ocean, an area that has historically been seriously neglected, if not abused. 
+The term "" deep six "" comes to mind: "" If it's too big or too toxic for a landfill, deep six it! "" So, I hope that we can also keep some of these "" hope spots "" in the deep sea. 
+Now, I don't get a wish, but I certainly can say that I will do anything I can to support Sylvia Earle's wish. 
+And that I do. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+So let's start with some good news, and the good news has to do with what do we know based on biomedical research that actually has changed the outcomes for many very serious diseases? 
+Let's start with leukemia, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, ALL, the most common cancer of children. 
+When I was a student, the mortality rate was about 95 percent. 
+Today, some 25, 30 years later, we're talking about a mortality rate that's reduced by 85 percent. 
+Six thousand children each year who would have previously died of this disease are cured. 
+If you want the really big numbers, look at these numbers for heart disease. 
+Heart disease used to be the biggest killer, particularly for men in their 40s. 
+Today, we've seen a 63-percent reduction in mortality from heart disease — remarkably, 1.1 million deaths averted every year. 
+AIDS, incredibly, has just been named, in the past month, a chronic disease, meaning that a 20-year-old who becomes infected with HIV is expected not to live weeks, months, or a couple of years, as we said only a decade ago, but is thought to live decades, probably to die in his' 60s or '70s from other causes altogether. 
+These are just remarkable, remarkable changes in the outlook for some of the biggest killers. 
+And one in particular that you probably wouldn't know about, stroke, which has been, along with heart disease, one of the biggest killers in this country, is a disease in which now we know that if you can get people into the emergency room within three hours of the onset, some 30 percent of them will be able to leave the hospital without any disability whatsoever. 
+Remarkable stories, good-news stories, all of which boil down to understanding something about the diseases that has allowed us to detect early and intervene early. 
+Early detection, early intervention, that's the story for these successes. 
+Unfortunately, the news is not all good. 
+Let's talk about one other story which has to do with suicide. 
+Now this is, of course, not a disease, per se. 
+It's a condition, or it's a situation that leads to mortality. 
+What you may not realize is just how prevalent it is. 
+That means one about every 15 minutes. 
+Third most common cause of death amongst people between the ages of 15 and 25. 
+It's kind of an extraordinary story when you realize that this is twice as common as homicide and actually more common as a source of death than traffic fatalities in this country. 
+Now, when we talk about suicide, there is also a medical contribution here, because 90 percent of suicides are related to a mental illness: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anorexia, borderline personality. There's a long list of disorders that contribute, and as I mentioned before, often early in life. 
+But it's not just the mortality from these disorders. 
+It's also morbidity. 
+If you look at disability, as measured by the World Health Organization with something they call the Disability Adjusted Life Years, it's kind of a metric that nobody would think of except an economist, except it's one way of trying to capture what is lost in terms of disability from medical causes, and as you can see, virtually 30 percent of all disability from all medical causes can be attributed to mental disorders, neuropsychiatric syndromes. 
+You're probably thinking that doesn't make any sense. 
+I mean, cancer seems far more serious. 
+But you can see actually they are further down this list, and that's because we're talking here about disability. 
+What drives the disability for these disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar and depression? 
+Why are they number one here? 
+Well, there are probably three reasons. 
+A second, of course, is that, for some people, these become truly disabling, and it's about four to five percent, perhaps one in 20. 
+But what really drives these numbers, this high morbidity, and to some extent the high mortality, is the fact that these start very early in life. 
+Fifty percent will have onset by age 14, 75 percent by age 24, a picture that is very different than what one would see if you're talking about cancer or heart disease, diabetes, hypertension — most of the major illnesses that we think about as being sources of morbidity and mortality. 
+These are, indeed, the chronic disorders of young people. 
+Now, I started by telling you that there were some good-news stories. 
+This is obviously not one of them. 
+This is the part of it that is perhaps most difficult, and in a sense this is a kind of confession for me. 
+My job is to actually make sure that we make progress on all of these disorders. 
+I work for the federal government. 
+Actually, I work for you. You pay my salary. 
+And maybe at this point, when you know what I do, or maybe what I've failed to do, you'll think that I probably ought to be fired, and I could certainly understand that. 
+But what I want to suggest, and the reason I'm here is to tell you that I think we're about to be in a very different world as we think about these illnesses. 
+What I've been talking to you about so far is mental disorders, diseases of the mind. 
+That's actually becoming a rather unpopular term these days, and people feel that, for whatever reason, it's politically better to use the term behavioral disorders and to talk about these as disorders of behavior. 
+Fair enough. They are disorders of behavior, and they are disorders of the mind. 
+But what I want to suggest to you is that both of those terms, which have been in play for a century or more, are actually now impediments to progress, that what we need conceptually to make progress here is to rethink these disorders as brain disorders. 
+Now, for some of you, you're going to say, "" Oh my goodness, here we go again. 
+We're going to hear about a biochemical imbalance or we're going to hear about drugs or we're going to hear about some very simplistic notion that will take our subjective experience and turn it into molecules, or maybe into some sort of very flat, unidimensional understanding of what it is to have depression or schizophrenia. 
+When we talk about the brain, it is anything but unidimensional or simplistic or reductionistic. 
+It depends, of course, on what scale or what scope you want to think about, but this is an organ of surreal complexity, and we are just beginning to understand how to even study it, whether you're thinking about the 100 billion neurons that are in the cortex or the 100 trillion synapses that make up all the connections. 
+We have just begun to try to figure out how do we take this very complex machine that does extraordinary kinds of information processing and use our own minds to understand this very complex brain that supports our own minds. 
+It's actually a kind of cruel trick of evolution that we simply don't have a brain that seems to be wired well enough to understand itself. 
+In a sense, it actually makes you feel that when you're in the safe zone of studying behavior or cognition, something you can observe, that in a way feels more simplistic and reductionistic than trying to engage this very complex, mysterious organ that we're beginning to try to understand. 
+Now, already in the case of the brain disorders that I've been talking to you about, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, while we don't have an in-depth understanding of how they are abnormally processed or what the brain is doing in these illnesses, we have been able to already identify some of the connectional differences, or some of the ways in which the circuitry is different for people who have these disorders. 
+We call this the human connectome, and you can think about the connectome sort of as the wiring diagram of the brain. 
+The important piece here is that as you begin to look at people who have these disorders, the one in five of us who struggle in some way, you find that there's a lot of variation in the way that the brain is wired, but there are some predictable patterns, and those patterns are risk factors for developing one of these disorders. 
+It's a little different than the way we think about brain disorders like Huntington's or Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease where you have a bombed-out part of your cortex. 
+Here we're talking about traffic jams, or sometimes detours, or sometimes problems with just the way that things are connected and the way that the brain functions. 
+You could, if you want, compare this to, on the one hand, a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, where you have dead tissue in the heart, versus an arrhythmia, where the organ simply isn't functioning because of the communication problems within it. 
+Either one would kill you; in only one of them will you find a major lesion. 
+As we think about this, probably it's better to actually go a little deeper into one particular disorder, and that would be schizophrenia, because I think that's a good case for helping to understand why thinking of this as a brain disorder matters. 
+These are scans from Judy Rapoport and her colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in which they studied children with very early onset schizophrenia, and you can see already in the top there's areas that are red or orange, yellow, are places where there's less gray matter, and as they followed them over five years, comparing them to age match controls, you can see that, particularly in areas like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or the superior temporal gyrus, there's a profound loss of gray matter. 
+And it's important, if you try to model this, you can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass, loss of cortical gray matter, and what's happening in schizophrenia is that you overshoot that mark, and at some point, when you overshoot, you cross a threshold, and it's that threshold where we say, this is a person who has this disease, because they have the behavioral symptoms of hallucinations and delusions. 
+That's something we can observe. 
+But look at this closely and you can see that actually they've crossed a different threshold. 
+They've crossed a brain threshold much earlier, that perhaps not at age 22 or 20, but even by age 15 or 16 you can begin to see the trajectory for development is quite different at the level of the brain, not at the level of behavior. 
+Why does this matter? Well first because, for brain disorders, behavior is the last thing to change. 
+We know that for Alzheimer's, for Parkinson's, for Huntington's. 
+There are changes in the brain a decade or more before you see the first signs of a behavioral change. 
+The tools that we have now allow us to detect these brain changes much earlier, long before the symptoms emerge. 
+But most important, go back to where we started. 
+The good-news stories in medicine are early detection, early intervention. 
+If we waited until the heart attack, we would be sacrificing 1.1 million lives every year in this country to heart disease. 
+That is precisely what we do today when we decide that everybody with one of these brain disorders, brain circuit disorders, has a behavioral disorder. 
+We wait until the behavior becomes manifest. 
+That's not early detection. That's not early intervention. 
+Now to be clear, we're not quite ready to do this. 
+We don't have all the facts. We don't actually even know what the tools will be, nor what to precisely look for in every case to be able to get there before the behavior emerges as different. 
+But this tells us how we need to think about it, and where we need to go. 
+Are we going to be there soon? 
+I think that this is something that will happen over the course of the next few years, but I'd like to finish with a quote about trying to predict how this will happen by somebody who's thought a lot about changes in concepts and changes in technology. 
+"" We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. "" — Bill Gates. 
+Thanks very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+An image is worth more than a thousand words, so I'm going to start my talk by stop talking and show you a few images that I recently captured. 
+So by now, my talk is already 6,000 words long, and I feel like I should stop here. 
+(Laughter) At the same time, I probably owe you some explanation about the images that you just saw. 
+What I am trying to do as a photographer, as an artist, is to bring the world of art and science together. 
+Whether it is an image of a soap bubble captured at the very moment where it's bursting, as you can see in this image, whether it's a universe made of tiny little beads of oil paint, strange liquids that behave in very peculiar ways, or paint that is modeled by centrifugal forces, I'm always trying to link those two fields together. 
+What I find very intriguing about those two is that they both look at the same thing: They are a response to their surroundings. 
+And yet, they do it in a very different way. 
+If you look at science on one hand, science is a very rational approach to its surroundings, whereas art on the other hand is usually an emotional approach to its surroundings. 
+What I am trying to do is I'm trying to bring those two views into one so that my images both speak to the viewer's heart but also to the viewer's brain. 
+Let me demonstrate this based on three projects. 
+The first one has to do with making sound visible. 
+Now as you may know, sound travels in waves, so if you have a speaker, a speaker actually does nothing else than taking the audio signal, transform it into a vibration, which is then transported through the air, is captured by our ear, and transformed into an audio signal again. 
+Now I was thinking, how can I make those sound waves visible? 
+So I came up with the following setup. 
+I took a speaker, I placed a thin foil of plastic on top of that speaker, and then I added tiny little crystals on top of that speaker. 
+And now, if I would play a sound through that speaker, it would cause the crystals to move up and down. 
+Now this happens very fast, in the blink of an eye, so, together with LG, we captured this motion with a camera that is able to capture more than 3,000 frames per second. 
+Let me show you what this looks like. 
+(Music: "" Teardrop "" by Massive Attack) (Applause) Thank you very much. 
+I agree, it looks pretty amazing. 
+But I have to tell you a funny story. 
+I got an indoor sunburn doing this while shooting in Los Angeles. 
+Now in Los Angeles, you could get a decent sunburn just on any of the beaches, but I got mine indoors, and what happened is that, if you're shooting at 3,000 frames per second, you need to have a silly amount of light, lots of lights. 
+So we had this speaker set up, and we had the camera facing it, and lots of lights pointing at the speaker, and I would set up the speaker, put the tiny little crystals on top of that speaker, and we would do this over and over again, and it was until midday that I realized that I had a completely red face because of the lights pointing at the speaker. 
+What was so funny about it was that the speaker was only coming from the right side, so the right side of my face was completely red and I looked like the Phantom of the Opera for the rest of the week. 
+Let me now turn to another project which involves less harmful substances. 
+Has anyone of you heard of ferrofluid? 
+Ah, some of you have. Excellent. 
+Should I skip that part? 
+(Laughter) Ferrofluid has a very strange behavior. 
+It's a liquid that is completely black. 
+It's got an oily consistency. 
+And it's got tiny little particles of metal in it, which makes it magnetic. 
+So if I now put this liquid into a magnetic field, it would change its appearance. 
+Now I've got a live demonstration over here to show this to you. 
+So I've got a camera pointing down at this plate, and underneath that plate, there is a magnet. 
+Now I'm going to add some of that ferrofluid to that magnet. 
+Let's just slightly move it to the right and maybe focus it a little bit more. Excellent. 
+So what you can see now is that the ferrofluid has formed spikes. 
+This is due to the attraction and the repulsion of the individual particles inside the liquid. 
+Now this looks already quite interesting, but let me now add some watercolors to it. 
+Those are just standard watercolors that you would paint with. 
+You wouldn't paint with syringes, but it works just the same. 
+So what happened now is, when the watercolor was flowing into the structure, the watercolors do not mix with the ferrofluid. 
+That's because the ferrofluid itself is hydrophobic. 
+That means it doesn't mix with the water. 
+And at the same time, it tries to maintain its position above the magnet, and therefore, it creates those amazing-looking structures of channels and tiny little ponds of colorful water paint. 
+So that was the second project. 
+Let me now turn to the last project, which involves the national beverage of Scotland. 
+(Laughter) This image, and also this one, were made using whiskey. 
+Now you might ask yourself, how did he do that? 
+Did he drink half a bottle of whiskey and then draw the hallucination he got from being drunk onto paper? 
+I can assure you I was fully conscious while I was taking those pictures. 
+Now, whiskey contains 40 percent of alcohol, and alcohol has got some very interesting properties. 
+Maybe you have experienced some of those properties before, but I am talking about the physical properties, not the other ones. 
+So when I open the bottle, the alcohol molecules would spread in the air, and that's because alcohol is a very volatile substance. 
+And at the same time, alcohol is highly flammable. 
+And it was with those two properties that I was able to create the images that you're seeing right now. 
+Let me demonstrate this over here. 
+And what I have here is an empty glass vessel. 
+It's got nothing in it. 
+And now I'm going to fill it with oxygen and whiskey. 
+Add some more. 
+Now we just wait for a few seconds for the molecules to spread inside the bottle. 
+And now, let's set that on fire. 
+(Laughter) So that's all that happens. 
+It goes really fast, and it's not that impressive. 
+I could do it again to show it one more time, but some would argue that this is a complete waste of the whiskey, and that I should rather drink it. 
+But let me show you a slow motion in a completely darkened room of what I just showed you in this live demonstration. 
+So what happened is that the flame traveled through the glass vessel from top to bottom, burning the mix of the air molecules and the alcohol. 
+So the images that you saw at the beginning, they are actually a flame stopped in time while it is traveling through the bottle, and you have to imagine it was flipped around 180 degrees. 
+So that's how those images were made. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+So, I have now showed you three projects, and you might ask yourself, what is it good for? 
+What's the idea behind it? 
+Is it just a waste of whiskey? 
+Is it just some strange materials? 
+Those three projects, they're based on very simple scientific phenomena, such as magnetism, the sound waves, or over here, the physical properties of a substance, and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to use these phenomena and show them in a poetic and unseen way, and therefore invite the viewer to pause for a moment and think about all the beauty that is constantly surrounding us. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Both myself and my brother belong to the under 30 demographic, which Pat said makes 70 percent, but according to our statistics it makes 60 percent of the region's population. 
+Qatar is no exception to the region. 
+It's a very young nation led by young people. 
+We have been reminiscing about the latest technologies and the iPods, and for me the abaya, my traditional dress that I'm wearing today. 
+Now this is not a religious garment, nor is it a religious statement. 
+Instead, it's a diverse cultural statement that we choose to wear. 
+Now I remember a few years ago, a journalist asked Dr. Sheikha, who's sitting here, president of Qatar University — who, by the way, is a woman — he asked her whether she thought the abaya hindered or infringed her freedom in any way. 
+Her answer was quite the contrary. 
+Instead, she felt more free, more free because she could wear whatever she wanted under the abaya. 
+She could come to work in her pajamas and nobody would care. 
+(Laughter) Not that you do; I'm just saying. (Laughter) 
+My point is here, people have a choice — just like the Indian lady could wear her sari or the Japanese woman could wear her kimono. 
+We are changing our culture from within, but at the same time we are reconnecting with our traditions. 
+We know that modernization is happening. 
+And yes, Qatar wants to be a modern nation. 
+But at the same time we are reconnecting and reasserting our Arab heritage. 
+It's important for us to grow organically. 
+And we continuously make the conscious decision to reach that balance. 
+In fact, research has shown that the more the world is flat, if I use Tom Friedman's analogy, or global, the more and more people are wanting to be different. 
+And for us young people, they're looking to become individuals and find their differences amongst themselves. 
+Which is why I prefer the Richard Wilk analogy of globalizing the local and localizing the global. 
+We don't want to be all the same, but we want to respect each other and understand each other. 
+And therefore tradition becomes more important, not less important. 
+Life necessitates a universal world, however, we believe in the security of having a local identity. 
+And this is what the leaders of this region are trying to do. 
+We're trying to be part of this global village, but at the same time we're revising ourselves through our cultural institutions and cultural development. 
+I'm a representation of that phenomenon. 
+And I think a lot of people in this room, I can see a lot of you are in the same position as myself. 
+And I'm sure, although we can't see the people in Washington, they are in the same position. 
+We're continuously trying to straddle different worlds, different cultures and trying to meet the challenges of a different expectation from ourselves and from others. 
+So I want to ask a question: What should culture in the 21st century look like? 
+In a time where the world is becoming personalized, when the mobile phone, the burger, the telephone, everything has its own personal identity, how should we perceive ourselves and how should we perceive others? 
+How does that impact our desert culture? 
+I'm not sure of how many of you in Washington are aware of the cultural developments happening in the region and, the more recent, Museum of Islamic Art opened in Qatar in 2008. 
+I myself am personalizing these cultural developments, but I also understand that this has to be done organically. 
+Yes, we do have all the resources that we need in order to develop new cultural institutions, but what I think is more important is that we are very fortunate to have visionary leaders who understand that this can't happen from outside, it has to come from within. 
+And guess what? 
+You might be surprised to know that most people in the Gulf who are leading these cultural initiatives happen to be women. 
+I want to ask you, why do you think this is? 
+Is it because it's a soft option; we have nothing else to do? 
+No, I don't think so. 
+I think that women in this part of the world realize that culture is an important component to connect people both locally and regionally. 
+It's a natural component for bringing people together, discussing ideas — in the same way we're doing here at TED. 
+We're here, we're part of a community, sharing out ideas and discussing them. 
+Art becomes a very important part of our national identity. 
+The existential and social and political impact an artist has on his nation's development of cultural identity is very important. 
+You know, art and culture is big business. 
+Ask me. 
+Ask the chairpersons and CEOs of Sotheby's and Christie's. 
+Ask Charles Saatchi about great art. 
+They make a lot of money. 
+So I think women in our society are becoming leaders, because they realize that for their future generations, it's very important to maintain our cultural identities. 
+Why else do Greeks demand the return of the Elgin Marbles? 
+And why is there an uproar when a private collector tries to sell his collection to a foreign museum? 
+Why does it take me months on end to get an export license from London or New York in order to get pieces into my country? 
+In few hours, Shirin Neshat, my friend from Iran who's a very important artist for us will be talking to you. 
+She lives in New York City, but she doesn't try to be a Western artist. 
+Instead, she tries to engage in a very important dialogue about her culture, nation and heritage. 
+She does that through important visual forms of photography and film. 
+In the same way, Qatar is trying to grow its national museums through an organic process from within. 
+Our mission is of cultural integration and independence. 
+We don't want to have what there is in the West. 
+We don't want their collections. 
+We want to build our own identities, our own fabric, create an open dialogue so that we share our ideas and share yours with us. 
+In a few days, we will be opening the Arab Museum of Modern Art. 
+We have done extensive research to ensure that Arab and Muslim artists, and Arabs who are not Muslims — not all Arabs are Muslims, by the way — but we make sure that they are represented in this new institution. 
+This institution is government-backed and it has been the case for the past three decades. 
+We will open the museum in a few days, and I welcome all of you to get on Qatar Airways and come and join us. 
+(Laughter) Now this museum is just as important to us as the West. 
+Some of you might have heard of the Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, but I doubt a lot of people know that this artist worked in Picasso's studio in Paris in the 1930s. 
+For me it was a new discovery. 
+And I think with time, in the years to come we'll be learning a lot about our Picassos, our Legers and our Cezannes. 
+We do have artists, but unfortunately we have not discovered them yet. 
+Now visual expression is just one form of culture integration. 
+We have realized that recently more and more people are using the means of YouTube and social networking to express their stories, share their photos and tell their own stories through their own voices. 
+In a similar way, we have created the Doha Film Institute. 
+Now the Doha Film Institute is an organization to teach people about film and filmmaking. 
+Last year we didn't have one Qatari woman filmmaker. 
+Today I am proud to say we have trained and educated over 66 Qatari women filmmakers to edit, tell their own stories in their own voices. 
+(Applause) Now if you'll allow me, I would love to share a one-minute film that has proven to show that a 60-sec film can be as powerful as a haiku in telling a big picture. 
+And this is one of our filmmakers' products. 
+(Video) Boy: Hey listen! Did you know that the stocks are up? 
+Who are you playing? 
+Girl: Uncle Khaled. Here, put on the headscarf. 
+Khaled: Why would I want to put it on? 
+Girl: Do as you're told, young girl. 
+Boy: No, you play mom and I play dad. (Girl: But it's my game.) Play by yourself then. 
+Girl: Women! One word and they get upset. 
+Useless. 
+Thank you. Thank you! 
+(Applause) SM: Going back to straddling between East and West, last month we had our second Doha Tribeca Film Festival here in Doha. 
+The Doha Tribeca Film Festival was held at our new cultural hub, Katara. 
+It attracted 42,000 people, and we showcased 51 films. 
+Now the Doha Tribeca Film Festival is not an imported festival, but rather an important festival between the cities of New York and Doha. 
+It's important for two things. 
+First, it allows us to showcase our Arab filmmakers and voices to one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, New York City. 
+At the same time, we are inviting them to come and explore our part of the world. 
+They're learning our culture, our language, our heritage and realizing we're just as different and just the same as each other. 
+Now over and over again, people have said, "" Let's build bridges, "" and frankly, I want to do more than that. 
+I would like break the walls of ignorance between East and West — no, not the soft option that we have discussed before, but rather the soft power that Joseph Nye has spoken about before. 
+Culture's a very important tool to bring people together. 
+We should not underestimate it. 
+"Know thyself," that is the journey of self-expression and self-realization that we are traveling. 
+Now I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I know that me as an individual and we as a nation welcome this community of ideas worth spreading. 
+This is a very interesting journey. 
+I welcome you on board for us to engage and discuss new ideas of how to bring people together through cultural initiatives and discussions. 
+Familiarity destroys and trumps fear. Try it. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. Shokran. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So my name is Taylor Wilson. 
+I am 17 years old and I am a nuclear physicist, which may be a little hard to believe, but I am. 
+And I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be that point, that the bridge that T. Boone Pickens talked about will get us to. 
+So nuclear fusion is our energy future. 
+And the second point, making the case that kids can really change the world. 
+So you may ask — (Applause) You may ask me, well how do you know what our energy future is? 
+Well I built a fusion reactor when I was 14 years old. 
+That is the inside of my nuclear fusion reactor. 
+I started building this project when I was about 12 or 13 years old. 
+I decided I wanted to make a star. 
+Now most of you are probably saying, well there's no such thing as nuclear fusion. 
+I don't see any nuclear power plants with fusion energy. 
+Well it doesn't break even. 
+It doesn't produce more energy out than I put in, but it still does some pretty cool stuff. 
+And I assembled this in my garage, and it now lives in the physics department of the University of Nevada, Reno. 
+And it slams together deuterium, which is just hydrogen with an extra neutron in it. 
+So this is similar to the reaction of the proton chain that's going on inside the Sun. 
+And I'm slamming it together so hard that that hydrogen fuses together, and in the process it has some byproducts, and I utilize those byproducts. 
+So this previous year, I won the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. 
+I developed a detector that replaces the current detectors that Homeland Security has. 
+For hundreds of dollars, I've developed a system that exceeds the sensitivity of detectors that are hundreds of thousands of dollars. 
+I built this in my garage. 
+(Applause) And I've developed a system to produce medical isotopes. 
+Instead of requiring multi-million-dollar facilities I've developed a device that, on a very small scale, can produce these isotopes. 
+So that's my fusion reactor in the background there. 
+That is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor. 
+Oh, by the way, I make yellowcake in my garage, so my nuclear program is as advanced as the Iranians. 
+So maybe I don't want to admit to that. 
+This is me at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, which is the preeminent particle physics laboratory in the world. 
+And this is me with President Obama, showing him my Homeland Security research. 
+(Applause) So in about seven years of doing nuclear research, I started out with a dream to make a "" star in a jar, "" a star in my garage, and I ended up meeting the president and developing things that I think can change the world, and I think other kids can too. 
+So thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Can any of you remember what you wanted to be when you were 17? 
+Do you know what I wanted to be? 
+I wanted to be a biker chick. 
+(Laughter) I wanted to race cars, and I wanted to be a cowgirl, and I wanted to be Mowgli from "" The Jungle Book. "" Because they were all about being free, the wind in your hair — just to be free. 
+And on my seventeenth birthday, my parents, knowing how much I loved speed, gave me one driving lesson for my seventeenth birthday. 
+Not that we could have afforded I drive, but to give me the dream of driving. 
+And on my seventeenth birthday, I accompanied my little sister in complete innocence, as I always had all my life — my visually impaired sister — to go to see an eye specialist. 
+Because big sisters are always supposed to support their little sisters. 
+And my little sister wanted to be a pilot — God help her. 
+So I used to get my eyes tested just for fun. 
+And on my seventeenth birthday, after my fake eye exam, the eye specialist just noticed it happened to be my birthday. 
+And he said, "" So what are you going to do to celebrate? "" And I took that driving lesson, and I said, "" I'm going to learn how to drive. "" And then there was a silence — one of those awful silences when you know something's wrong. 
+And he turned to my mother, and he said, "" You haven't told her yet? "" On my seventeenth birthday, as Janis Ian would best say, I learned the truth at 17. 
+I am, and have been since birth, legally blind. 
+And you know, how on earth did I get to 17 and not know that? 
+Well, if anybody says country music isn't powerful, let me tell you this: I got there because my father's passion for Johnny Cash and a song, "" A Boy Named Sue. "" I'm the eldest of three. I was born in 1971. 
+And very shortly after my birth, my parents found out I had a condition called ocular albinism. 
+And what the hell does that mean to you? 
+So let me just tell you, the great part of all of this? 
+I can't see this clock and I can't see the timing, so holy God, woohoo! (Laughter) I might buy some more time. 
+But more importantly, let me tell you — I'm going to come up really close here. Don't freak out, Pat. 
+Hey. 
+See this hand? 
+Beyond this hand is a world of Vaseline. 
+Every man in this room, even you, Steve, is George Clooney. 
+(Laughter) And every woman, you are so beautiful. 
+And when I want to look beautiful, I step three feet away from the mirror, and I don't have to see these lines etched in my face from all the squinting I've done all my life from all the dark lights. 
+The really strange part is that, at three and a half, just before I was going to school, my parents made a bizarre, unusual and incredibly brave decision. 
+No special needs schools. 
+No labels. 
+No limitations. 
+My ability and my potential. 
+And they decided to tell me that I could see. 
+So just like Johnny Cash's Sue, a boy given a girl's name, I would grow up and learn from experience how to be tough and how to survive, when they were no longer there to protect me, or just take it all away. 
+But more significantly, they gave me the ability to believe, totally, to believe that I could. 
+And so when I heard that eye specialist tell me all the things, a big fat "" no, "" everybody imagines I was devastated. 
+And don't get me wrong, because when I first heard it — aside from the fact that I thought he was insane — I got that thump in my chest, just that "" huh? "" But very quickly I recovered. It was like that. 
+The first thing I thought about was my mom, who was crying over beside me. 
+And I swear to God, I walked out of his office, "" I will drive. I will drive. 
+You're mad. I'll drive. I know I can drive. "" And with the same dogged determination that my father had bred into me since I was such a child — he taught me how to sail, knowing I could never see where I was going, I could never see the shore, and I couldn't see the sails, and I couldn't see the destination. 
+But he told me to believe and feel the wind in my face. 
+And that wind in my face made me believe that he was mad and I would drive. 
+And for the next 11 years, I swore nobody would ever find out that I couldn't see, because I didn't want to be a failure, and I didn't want to be weak. 
+And I believed I could do it. 
+So I rammed through life as only a Casey can do. 
+And I was an archeologist, and then I broke things. 
+And then I managed a restaurant, and then I slipped on things. 
+And then I was a masseuse. And then I was a landscape gardener. 
+And then I went to business school. 
+And you know, disabled people are hugely educated. 
+And then I went in and I got a global consulting job with Accenture. 
+And they didn't even know. 
+And it's extraordinary how far belief can take you. 
+In 1999, two and a half years into that job, something happened. 
+Wonderfully, my eyes decided, enough. 
+And temporarily, very unexpectedly, they dropped. 
+And I'm in one of the most competitive environments in the world, where you work hard, play hard, you gotta be the best, you gotta be the best. 
+And two years in, I really could see very little. 
+And I found myself in front of an HR manager in 1999, saying something I never imagined that I would say. 
+I was 28 years old. 
+I had built a persona all around what I could and couldn't do. 
+And I simply said, "" I'm sorry. 
+I can't see, and I need help. "" Asking for help can be incredibly difficult. 
+And you all know what it is. You don't need to have a disability to know that. 
+We all know how hard it is to admit weakness and failure. 
+And it's frightening, isn't it? 
+But all that belief had fueled me so long. 
+And can I tell you, operating in the sighted world when you can't see, it's kind of difficult — it really is. 
+Can I tell you, airports are a disaster. 
+Oh, for the love of God. 
+And please, any designers out there? 
+OK, designers, please put up your hands, even though I can't even see you. 
+I always end up in the gents' toilets. 
+And there's nothing wrong with my sense of smell. 
+But can I just tell you, the little sign for a gents' toilet or a ladies' toilet is determined by a triangle. 
+Have you ever tried to see that if you have Vaseline in front of your eyes? 
+It's such a small thing, right? 
+And you know how exhausting it can be to try to be perfect when you're not, or to be somebody that you aren't? 
+And so after admitting I couldn't see to HR, they sent me off to an eye specialist. 
+And I had no idea that this man was going to change my life. 
+But before I got to him, I was so lost. 
+I had no idea who I was anymore. 
+And that eye specialist, he didn't bother testing my eyes. 
+God no, it was therapy. 
+And he asked me several questions, of which many were, "" Why? 
+Why are you fighting so hard not to be yourself? 
+And do you love what you do, Caroline? "" And you know, when you go to a global consulting firm, they put a chip in your head, and you're like, "" I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture. 
+I love Accenture. I love Accenture. I love my job. I love Accenture. "" (Laughter) To leave would be failure. 
+And he said, "" Do you love it? "" I couldn't even speak I was so choked up. 
+I just was so — how do I tell him? 
+And then he said to me, "" What did you want to be when you were little? "" Now listen, I wasn't going to say to him, "" Well, I wanted to race cars and motorbikes. "" Hardly appropriate at this moment in time. 
+He thought I was mad enough anyway. 
+And as I left his office, he called me back and he said, "" I think it's time. I think it's time 
+to stop fighting and do something different. "" And that door closed. 
+And that silence just outside a doctor's office, that many of us know. 
+And my chest ached. 
+And I had no idea where I was going. I had no idea. 
+But I did know the game was up. 
+And I went home, and, because the pain in my chest ached so much, I thought, "" I'll go out for a run. "" Really not a very sensible thing to do. 
+And I went on a run that I know so well. 
+I know this run so well, by the back of my hand. 
+I always run it perfectly fine. 
+I count the steps and the lampposts and all those things that visually impaired people have a tendency to have a lot of meetings with. 
+And there was a rock that I always missed. 
+And I'd never fallen on it, never. 
+And there I was crying away, and smash, bash on my rock. 
+Broken, fallen over on this rock in the middle of March in 2000, typical Irish weather on a Wednesday — gray, snot, tears everywhere, ridiculously self-pitying. 
+And I was floored, and I was broken, and I was angry. 
+And I didn't know what to do. 
+And I sat there for quite some time going, "" How am I going to get off this rock and go home? 
+Because who am I going to be? 
+What am I going to be? "" And I thought about my dad, and I thought, "" Good God, I'm so not Sue now. "" And I kept thinking over and over in my mind, what had happened? Where did it go wrong? Why didn't I understand? 
+And you know, the extraordinary part of it is I just simply had no answers. 
+I had lost my belief. 
+Look where my belief had brought me to. 
+And now I had lost it. And now I really couldn't see. 
+I was crumpled. 
+And then I remember thinking about that eye specialist asking me, "" What do you want to be? What do you want to be? 
+What did you want to be when you were little? Do you love what you do? 
+Do something different. What do you want to be? 
+Do something different. What do you want to be? "" And really slowly, slowly, slowly, it happened. 
+And it did happen this way. 
+And then the minute it came, it blew up in my head and bashed in my heart — something different. 
+"" Well, how about Mowgli from 'The Jungle Book'? 
+You don't get more different than that. "" And the moment, and I mean the moment, the moment that hit me, I swear to God, it was like woo hoo! You know — something to believe in. 
+And nobody can tell me no. 
+Yes, you can say I can't be an archeologist. 
+But you can't tell me, no, I can't be Mowgli, because guess what? 
+Nobody's ever done it before, so I'm going to go do it. 
+And it doesn't matter whether I'm a boy or a girl, I'm just going to scoot. 
+And so I got off that rock, and, oh my God, did I run home. 
+And I sprinted home, and I didn't fall, and I didn't crash. 
+And I ran up the stairs, and there was one of my favorite books of all time, "" Travels on My Elephant "" by Mark Shand — I don't know if any of you know it. 
+And I grabbed this book off, and I'm sitting on the couch going, "" I know what I'm going to do. 
+I know how to be Mowgli. 
+I'm going to go across India on the back of an elephant. 
+I'm going to be an elephant handler. "" And I had no idea how I was going to be an elephant handler. 
+From global management consultant to elephant handler. 
+I had no idea how. I had no idea how you hire an elephant, get an elephant. 
+I didn't speak Hindi. I'd never been to India. Hadn't a clue. 
+But I knew I would. 
+Because, when you make a decision at the right time and the right place, God, that universe makes it happen for you. 
+Nine months later, after that day on snot rock, I had the only blind date in my life with a seven and a half foot elephant called Kanchi. 
+And together we would trek a thousand kilometers across India. 
+(Applause) The most powerful thing of all, it's not that I didn't achieve before then. Oh my God, I did. 
+But you know, I was believing in the wrong thing. 
+Because I wasn't believing in me, really me, all the bits of me — all the bits of all of us. 
+Do you know how much of us all pretend to be somebody we're not? 
+And you know what, when you really believe in yourself and everything about you, it's extraordinary what happens. 
+And you know what, that trip, that thousand kilometers, it raised enough money for 6,000 cataract eye operations. 
+Six thousand people got to see because of that. 
+When I came home off that elephant, do you know what the most amazing part was? 
+I chucked in my job at Accenture. 
+I left, and I became a social entrepreneur, and I set up an organization with Mark Shand called Elephant Family, which deals with Asian elephant conservation. 
+And I set up Kanchi, because my organization was always going to be named after my elephant, because disability is like the elephant in the room. 
+And I wanted to make you see it in a positive way — no charity, no pity. 
+But I wanted to work only and truly with business and media leadership to totally reframe disability in a way that was exciting and possible. 
+It was extraordinary. 
+That's what I wanted to do. 
+And I never thought about noes anymore, or not seeing, or any of that kind of nothing. 
+It just seemed that it was possible. 
+And you know, the oddest part is, when I was on my way traveling here to TED, I'll be honest, I was petrified. 
+And I speak, but this is an amazing audience, and what am I doing here? 
+But as I was traveling here, you'll be very happy to know, I did use my white symbol stick cane, because it's really good to skip queues in the airport. 
+And I got my way here being happily proud that I couldn't see. 
+And the one thing is that a really good friend of mine, he texted me on the way over, knowing I was scared. 
+Even though I present confident, I was scared. 
+He said, "" Be you. "" And so here I am. 
+This is me, all of me. 
+(Applause) And I have learned, you know what, cars and motorbikes and elephants, that's not freedom. 
+Being absolutely true to yourself is freedom. 
+And I never needed eyes to see — never. 
+I simply needed vision and belief. 
+And if you truly believe — and I mean believe from the bottom of your heart — you can make change happen. 
+And we need to make it happen, because every single one of us — woman, man, gay, straight, disabled, perfect, normal, whatever — everyone of us must be the very best of ourselves. 
+I no longer want anybody to be invisible. 
+We all have to be included. 
+And stop with the labels, the limiting. 
+Losing of labels, because we are not jam jars. 
+We are extraordinary, different, wonderful people. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Today I want to talk about design, but not design as we usually think about it. 
+I want to talk about what is happening now in our scientific, biotechnological culture, where, for really the first time in history, we have the power to design bodies, to design animal bodies, to design human bodies. 
+In the history of our planet, there have been three great waves of evolution. 
+The first wave of evolution is what we think of as Darwinian evolution. 
+So, as you all know, species lived in particular ecological niches and particular environments, and the pressures of those environments selected which changes, through random mutation in species, were going to be preserved. 
+Then human beings stepped out of the Darwinian flow of evolutionary history and created the second great wave of evolution, which was we changed the environment in which we evolved. 
+We altered our ecological niche by creating civilization. 
+And that has been the second great — couple 100,000 years, 150,000 years — flow of our evolution. 
+By changing our environment, we put new pressures on our bodies to evolve. 
+Whether it was through settling down in agricultural communities, all the way through modern medicine, we have changed our own evolution. 
+Now we're entering a third great wave of evolutionary history, which has been called many things: "intentional evolution," "" evolution by design "" — very different than intelligent design — whereby we are actually now intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planet. 
+So I want to take you through a kind of whirlwind tour of that and then at the end talk a little bit about what some of the implications are for us and for our species, as well as our cultures, because of this change. 
+Now we actually have been doing it for a long time. 
+We started selectively breeding animals many, many thousands of years ago. 
+And if you think of dogs for example, dogs are now intentionally-designed creatures. 
+There isn't a dog on this earth that's a natural creature. 
+Dogs are the result of selectively breeding traits that we like. 
+But we had to do it the hard way in the old days by choosing offspring that looked a particular way and then breeding them. 
+We don't have to do it that way anymore. 
+This is a beefalo. 
+A beefalo is a buffalo-cattle hybrid. 
+And they are now making them, and someday, perhaps pretty soon, you will have beefalo patties in your local supermarket. 
+This is a geep, a goat-sheep hybrid. 
+The scientists that made this cute little creature ended up slaughtering it and eating it afterwards. 
+I think they said it tasted like chicken. 
+This is a cama. 
+A cama is a camel-llama hybrid, created to try to get the hardiness of a camel with some of the personality traits of a llama. 
+And they are now using these in certain cultures. 
+Then there's the liger. 
+This is the largest cat in the world — the lion-tiger hybrid. 
+It's bigger than a tiger. 
+And in the case of the liger, there actually have been one or two that have been seen in the wild. 
+But these were created by scientists using both selective breeding and genetic technology. 
+And then finally, everybody's favorite, the zorse. 
+None of this is Photoshopped. These are real creatures. 
+And so one of the things we've been doing is using genetic enhancement, or genetic manipulation, of normal selective breeding pushed a little bit through genetics. 
+And if that were all this was about, then it would be an interesting thing. 
+But something much, much more powerful is happening now. 
+These are normal mammalian cells genetically engineered with a bioluminescent gene taken out of deep-sea jellyfish. 
+We all know that some deep-sea creatures glow. 
+Well, they've now taken that gene, that bioluminescent gene, and put it into mammal cells. 
+These are normal cells. 
+And what you see here is these cells glowing in the dark under certain wavelengths of light. 
+Once they could do that with cells, they could do it with organisms. 
+So they did it with mouse pups, kittens. 
+And by the way, the reason the kittens here are orange and these are green is because that's a bioluminescent gene from coral, while this is from jellyfish. 
+They did it with pigs. 
+They did it with puppies. 
+And, in fact, they did it with monkeys. 
+And if you can do it with monkeys — though the great leap in trying to genetically manipulate is actually between monkeys and apes — if they can do it in monkeys, they can probably figure out how to do it in apes, which means they can do it in human beings. 
+In other words, it is theoretically possible that before too long we will be biotechnologically capable of creating human beings that glow in the dark. 
+Be easier to find us at night. 
+And in fact, right now in many states, you can go out and you can buy bioluminescent pets. 
+These are zebra fish. They're normally black and silver. 
+These are zebra fish that have been genetically engineered to be yellow, green, red, and they are actually available now in certain states. 
+Other states have banned them. 
+Nobody knows what to do with these kinds of creatures. 
+There is no area of the government — not the EPA or the FDA — that controls genetically-engineered pets. 
+And so some states have decided to allow them, some states have decided to ban them. 
+Some of you may have read about the FDA's consideration right now of genetically-engineered salmon. 
+The salmon on top is a genetically engineered Chinook salmon, using a gene from these salmon and from one other fish that we eat, to make it grow much faster using a lot less feed. 
+And right now the FDA is trying to make a final decision on whether, pretty soon, you could be eating this fish — it'll be sold in the stores. 
+And before you get too worried about it, here in the United States, the majority of food you buy in the supermarket already has genetically-modified components to it. 
+So even as we worry about it, we have allowed it to go on in this country — much different in Europe — without any regulation, and even without any identification on the package. 
+These are all the first cloned animals of their type. 
+So in the lower right here, you have Dolly, the first cloned sheep — now happily stuffed in a museum in Edinburgh; Ralph the rat, the first cloned rat; CC the cat, for cloned cat; Snuppy, the first cloned dog — Snuppy for Seoul National University puppy — created in South Korea by the very same man that some of you may remember had to end up resigning in disgrace because he claimed he had cloned a human embryo, which he had not. 
+He actually was the first person to clone a dog, which is a very difficult thing to do, because dog genomes are very plastic. 
+This is Prometea, the first cloned horse. 
+It's a Haflinger horse cloned in Italy, a real "" gold ring "" of cloning, because there are many horses that win important races who are geldings. 
+In other words, the equipment to put them out to stud has been removed. 
+But if you can clone that horse, you can have both the advantage of having a gelding run in the race and his identical genetic duplicate can then be put out to stud. 
+These were the first cloned calves, the first cloned grey wolves, and then, finally, the first cloned piglets: Alexis, Chista, Carrel, Janie and Dotcom. 
+(Laughter) In addition, we've started to use cloning technology to try to save endangered species. 
+This is the use of animals now to create drugs and other things in their bodies that we want to create. 
+So with antithrombin in that goat — that goat has been genetically modified so that the molecules of its milk actually include the molecule of antithrombin that GTC Genetics wants to create. 
+And then in addition, transgenic pigs, knockout pigs, from the National Institute of Animal Science in South Korea, are pigs that they are going to use, in fact, to try to create all kinds of drugs and other industrial types of chemicals that they want the blood and the milk of these animals to produce for them, instead of producing them in an industrial way. 
+These are two creatures that were created in order to save endangered species. 
+The guar is an endangered Southeast Asian ungulate. 
+A somatic cell, a body cell, was taken from its body, gestated in the ovum of a cow, and then that cow gave birth to a guar. 
+Same thing happened with the mouflon, where it's an endangered species of sheep. 
+It was gestated in a regular sheep body, which actually raises an interesting biological problem. 
+We have two kinds of DNA in our bodies. 
+We have our nucleic DNA that everybody thinks of as our DNA, but we also have DNA in our mitochondria, which are the energy packets of the cell. 
+That DNA is passed down through our mothers. 
+So really, what you end up having here is not a guar and not a mouflon, but a guar with cow mitochondria, and therefore cow mitochondrial DNA, and a mouflon with another species of sheep's mitochondrial DNA. 
+These are really hybrids, not pure animals. 
+And it raises the question of how we're going to define animal species in the age of biotechnology — a question that we're not really sure yet how to solve. 
+This lovely creature is an Asian cockroach. 
+And what they've done here is they've put electrodes in its ganglia and its brain and then a transmitter on top, and it's on a big computer tracking ball. 
+And now, using a joystick, they can send this creature around the lab and control whether it goes left or right, forwards or backwards. 
+They've created a kind of insect bot, or bugbot. 
+It gets worse than that — or perhaps better than that. 
+This actually is one of DARPA's very important — DARPA is the Defense Research Agency — one of their projects. 
+These goliath beetles are wired in their wings. 
+They have a computer chip strapped to their backs, and they can fly these creatures around the lab. 
+They can make them go left, right. They can make them take off. 
+They can't actually make them land. 
+They put them about one inch above the ground, and then they shut everything off and they go pfft. 
+But it's the closest they can get to a landing. 
+And in fact, this technology has gotten so developed that this creature — this is a moth — this is the moth in its pupa stage, and that's when they put the wires in and they put in the computer technology, so that when the moth actually emerges as a moth, it is already prewired. 
+The wires are already in its body, and they can just hook it up to their technology, and now they've got these bugbots that they can send out for surveillance. 
+They can put little cameras on them and perhaps someday deliver other kinds of ordinance to warzones. 
+It's not just insects. 
+This is the ratbot, or the robo-rat by Sanjiv Talwar at SUNY Downstate. 
+Again, it's got technology — it's got electrodes going into its left and right hemispheres; it's got a camera on top of its head. 
+The scientists can make this creature go left, right. 
+They have it running through mazes, controlling where it's going. 
+They've now created an organic robot. 
+The graduate students in Sanjiv Talwar's lab said, "" Is this ethical? 
+We've taken away the autonomy of this animal. "" I'll get back to that in a minute. 
+There's also been work done with monkeys. 
+This is Miguel Nicolelis of Duke. 
+He took owl monkeys, wired them up so that a computer watched their brains while they moved, especially looking at the movement of their right arm. 
+The computer learned what the monkey brain did to move its arm in various ways. 
+They then hooked it up to a prosthetic arm, which you see here in the picture, put the arm in another room. 
+Pretty soon, the computer learned, by reading the monkey's brainwaves, to make that arm in the other room do whatever the monkey's arm did. 
+Then he put a video monitor in the monkey's cage that showed the monkey this prosthetic arm, and the monkey got fascinated. 
+The monkey recognized that whatever she did with her arm, this prosthetic arm would do. 
+And eventually she was moving it and moving it, and eventually stopped moving her right arm and, staring at the screen, could move the prosthetic arm in the other room only with her brainwaves — which means that monkey became the first primate in the history of the world to have three independent functional arms. 
+And it's not just technology that we're putting into animals. 
+This is Thomas DeMarse at the University of Florida. 
+He took 20,000 and then 60,000 disaggregated rat neurons — so these are just individual neurons from rats — put them on a chip. 
+They self-aggregated into a network, became an integrated chip. 
+And he used that as the IT piece of a mechanism which ran a flight simulator. 
+So now we have organic computer chips made out of living, self-aggregating neurons. 
+Finally, Mussa-Ivaldi of Northwestern took a completely intact, independent lamprey eel brain. 
+This is a brain from a lamprey eel. 
+It is living — fully-intact brain in a nutrient medium with these electrodes going off to the sides, attached photosensitive sensors to the brain, put it into a cart — here's the cart, the brain is sitting there in the middle — and using this brain as the sole processor for this cart, when you turn on a light and shine it at the cart, the cart moves toward the light; when you turn it off, it moves away. 
+It's photophilic. 
+So now we have a complete living lamprey eel brain. 
+Is it thinking lamprey eel thoughts, sitting there in its nutrient medium? 
+I don't know, but in fact it is a fully living brain that we have managed to keep alive to do our bidding. 
+So, we are now at the stage where we are creating creatures for our own purposes. 
+This is a mouse created by Charles Vacanti of the University of Massachusetts. 
+He altered this mouse so that it was genetically engineered to have skin that was less immunoreactive to human skin, put a polymer scaffolding of an ear under it and created an ear that could then be taken off the mouse and transplanted onto a human being. 
+Genetic engineering coupled with polymer physiotechnology coupled with xenotransplantation. 
+This is where we are in this process. 
+Finally, not that long ago, Craig Venter created the first artificial cell, where he took a cell, took a DNA synthesizer, which is a machine, created an artificial genome, put it in a different cell — the genome was not of the cell he put it in — and that cell then reproduced as the other cell. 
+In other words, that was the first creature in the history of the world that had a computer as its parent — it did not have an organic parent. 
+And so, asks The Economist: "The first artificial organism and its consequences." 
+So you may have thought that the creation of life was going to happen in something that looked like that. 
+(Laughter) But in fact, that's not what Frankenstein's lab looks like. 
+This is what Frankenstein's lab looks like. 
+This is a DNA synthesizer, and here at the bottom are just bottles of A, T, C and G — the four chemicals that make up our DNA chain. 
+And so, we need to ask ourselves some questions. 
+For the first time in the history of this planet, we are able to directly design organisms. 
+We can manipulate the plasmas of life with unprecedented power, and it confers on us a responsibility. 
+Is everything okay? 
+Is it okay to manipulate and create whatever creatures we want? 
+Do we have free reign to design animals? 
+Do we get to go someday to Pets' R 'Us and say, "" Look, I want a dog. 
+I'd like it to have the head of a Dachshund, the body of a retriever, maybe some pink fur, and let's make it glow in the dark ""? 
+Does industry get to create creatures who, in their milk, in their blood, and in their saliva and other bodily fluids, create the drugs and industrial molecules we want and then warehouse them as organic manufacturing machines? 
+Do we get to create organic robots, where we remove the autonomy from these animals and turn them just into our playthings? 
+And then the final step of this, once we perfect these technologies in animals and we start using them in human beings, what are the ethical guidelines that we will use then? 
+It's already happening. It's not science fiction. 
+We are not only already using these things in animals, some of them we're already beginning to use on our own bodies. 
+We are now taking control of our own evolution. 
+We are directly designing the future of the species of this planet. 
+It confers upon us an enormous responsibility that is not just the responsibility of the scientists and the ethicists who are thinking about it and writing about it now. 
+It is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+As a child, I was raised by native Hawaiian elders — three old women who took care of me while my parents worked. 
+The year is 1963. 
+We're at the ocean. 
+It's twilight. 
+We're watching the rising of the stars and the shifting of the tides. 
+It's a stretch of beach we know so well. 
+The smooth stones on the sand are familiar to us. 
+If you saw these women on the street in their faded clothes, you might dismiss them as poor and simple. 
+That would be a mistake. 
+These women are descendants of Polynesian navigators, trained in the old ways by their elders, and now they're passing it on to me. 
+They teach me the names of the winds and the rains, of astronomy according to a genealogy of stars. 
+There's a new moon on the horizon. 
+Hawaiians say it's a good night for fishing. 
+They begin to chant. 
+[Hawaiian chant] When they finish, they sit in a circle and ask me to come to join them. 
+They want to teach me about my destiny. 
+I thought every seven-year-old went through this. 
+(Laughter) "" Baby girl, someday the world will be in trouble. 
+People will forget their wisdom. 
+It will take elders' voices from the far corners of the world to call the world into balance. 
+You will go far away. 
+It will sometimes be a lonely road. 
+We will not be there. 
+But you will look into the eyes of seeming strangers, and you will recognize your ohana, your family. 
+And it will take all of you. 
+It will take all of you. "" These words, I hold onto all my life. 
+Because the idea of doing it alone terrifies me. 
+The year is 2007. 
+I'm on a remote island in Micronesia. 
+Satawal is one half-mile long by one mile wide. 
+It's the home of my mentor. 
+His name is Pius Mau Piailug. 
+Mau is a palu, a navigator priest. 
+He's also considered the greatest wave finder in the world. 
+There are fewer than a handful of palu left on this island. 
+Their tradition is so extraordinary that these mariners sailed three million square miles across the Pacific without the use of instruments. 
+They could synthesize patterns in nature using the rising and setting of stars, the sequence and direction of waves, the flight patterns of certain birds. 
+Even the slightest hint of color on the underbelly of a cloud would inform them and help them navigate with the keenest accuracy. 
+When Western scientists would join Mau on the canoe and watch him go into the hull, it appeared that an old man was going to rest. 
+In fact, the hull of the canoe is the womb of the vessel. 
+It is the most accurate place to feel the rhythm and sequence and direction of waves. 
+Mau was, in fact, gathering explicit data using his entire body. 
+It's what he had been trained to do since he was five years old. 
+Now science may dismiss this methodology, but Polynesian navigators use it today because it provides them an accurate determination of the angle and direction of their vessel. 
+The palu also had an uncanny ability to forecast weather conditions days in advance. 
+Sometimes I'd be with Mau on a cloud-covered night and we'd sit at the easternmost coast of the island, and he would look out, and then he would say, "Okay, we go." 
+He saw that first glint of light — he knew what the weather was going to be three days from now. 
+Their achievements, intellectually and scientifically, are extraordinary, and they are so relevant for these times that we are in when we are riding out storms. 
+We are in such a critical moment of our collective history. 
+They have been compared to astronauts — these elder navigators who sail vast open oceans in double-hulled canoes thousands of miles from a small island. 
+Their canoes, our rockets; their sea, our space. 
+The wisdom of these elders is not a mere collection of stories about old people in some remote spot. 
+This is part of our collective narrative. 
+It's humanity's DNA. 
+We cannot afford to lose it. 
+The year is 2010. 
+Just as the women in Hawaii that raised me predicted, the world is in trouble. 
+We live in a society bloated with data, yet starved for wisdom. 
+We're connected 24 / 7, yet anxiety, fear, depression and loneliness is at an all-time high. 
+We must course-correct. 
+An African shaman said, "" Your society worships the jester while the king stands in plain clothes. "" The link between the past and the future is fragile. 
+This I know intimately, because even as I travel throughout the world to listen to these stories and record them, I struggle. 
+I am haunted by the fact that I no longer remember the names of the winds and the rains. 
+Mau passed away five months ago, but his legacy and lessons live on. 
+And I am reminded that throughout the world there are cultures with vast sums of knowledge in them, as potent as the Micronesian navigators, that are going dismissed, that this is a testament to brilliant, brilliant technology and science and wisdom that is vanishing rapidly. 
+Because when an elder dies a library is burned, and throughout the world, libraries are ablaze. 
+I am grateful for the fact that I had a mentor like Mau who taught me how to navigate. 
+And I realize through a lesson that he shared that we continue to find our way. 
+And this is what he said: "" The island is the canoe; the canoe, the island. "" And what he meant was, if you are voyaging and far from home, your very survival depends on everyone aboard. 
+You cannot make the voyage alone, you were never meant to. 
+This whole notion of every man for himself is completely unsustainable. 
+It always was. 
+So in closing I would offer you this: The planet is our canoe, and we are the voyagers. 
+True navigation begins in the human heart. 
+It's the most important map of all. 
+Together, may we journey well. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Once upon a time, at the age of 24, I was a student at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore. 
+I was a guest student during one month of a public health course. 
+And that changed my mindset forever. 
+The course was good, but it was not the course content in itself that changed the mindset. 
+It was the brutal realization, the first morning, that the Indian students were better than me. 
+(Laughter) You see, I was a study nerd. 
+I loved statistics from a young age. 
+And I studied very much in Sweden. 
+I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended. 
+But in St. John's, I was in the lower quarter. 
+And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden. 
+They read the textbook twice, or three times or four times. 
+In Sweden we read it once and then we went partying. 
+(Laugher) And that, to me, that personal experience was the first time in my life that the mindset I grew up with was changed. 
+And I realized that perhaps the Western world will not continue to dominate the world forever. 
+And I think many of you have the same sort of personal experience. 
+It's that realization of someone you meet that really made you change your ideas about the world. 
+It's not the statistics, although I tried to make it funny. 
+And I will now, here, onstage, try to predict when that will happen — that Asia will regain its dominant position as the leading part of the world, as it used to be, over thousands of years. 
+And I will do that by trying to predict precisely at what year the average income per person in India, in China, will reach that of the West. 
+And I don't mean the whole economy, because to grow an economy of India to the size of U.K. — that's a piece of cake, with one billion people. 
+But I want to see when will the average pay, the money for each person, per month, in India and China, when will that have reached that of U.K. and the United States? 
+But I will start with a historical background. 
+And you can see my map if I get it up here. You know? 
+I will start at 1858. 
+1858 was a year of great technological advancement in the West. 
+That was the year when Queen Victoria was able, for the first time, to communicate with President Buchanan, through the Transatlantic Telegraphic Cable. 
+And they were the first to "" Twitter "" transatlantically. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And I've been able, through this wonderful Google and Internet, to find the text of the telegram sent back from President Buchanan to Queen Victoria. 
+And it ends like this: "" This telegraph is a fantastic instrument to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty and law throughout the world. "" Those are nice words. But I got sort of curious of what he meant with liberty, and liberty for whom. 
+And we will think about that when we look at the wider picture of the world in 1858. 
+Because 1858 was also watershed year in the history of Asia. 
+1858 was the year when the courageous uprising against the foreign occupation of India was defeated by the British forces. 
+And India was up to 89 years more of foreign domination. 
+1858 in China was the victory in the Opium War by the British forces. 
+And that meant that foreigners, as it said in the treaty, were allowed to trade freely in China. 
+It meant paying with opium for Chinese goods. 
+And 1858 in Japan was the year when Japan had to sign the Harris Treaty and accept trade on favorable condition for the U.S. 
+And they were threatened by those black ships there, that had been in Tokyo harbor over the last year. 
+But, Japan, in contrast to India and China, maintained its national sovereignty. 
+And let's see how much difference that can make. 
+And I will do that by bringing these bubbles back to a Gapminder graph here, where you can see each bubble is a country. 
+The size of the bubble here is the population. 
+On this axis, as I used to have income per person in comparable dollar. 
+And on that axis I have life expectancy, the health of people. 
+And I also bring an innovation here. 
+I have transformed the laser beam into an ecological, recyclable version here, in green India. 
+(Applause) And we will see, you know. 
+Look here, 1858, India was here, China was here, Japan was there, United States and United Kingdom was richer over there. 
+And I will start the world like this. 
+India was not always like this level. 
+Actually if we go back into the historical record, there was a time hundreds of years ago when the income per person in India and China was even above that of Europe. 
+But 1850 had already been many, many years of foreign domination, and India had been de-industrialized. 
+And you can see that the countries who were growing their economy was United States and United Kingdom. 
+And they were also, by the end of the century, getting healthy, and Japan was starting to catch up. 
+India was trying down here. 
+Can you see how it starts to move there? 
+But really, really natural sovereignty was good for Japan. 
+And Japan is trying to move up there. 
+And it's the new century now. Health is getting better, United Kingdom, United States. 
+But careful now — we are approaching the First World War. 
+And the First World War, you know, we'll see a lot of deaths and economical problems here. 
+United Kingdom is going down. 
+And now comes the Spanish flu also. 
+And then after the First World War, they continue up. 
+Still under foreign domination, and without sovereignty, India and China are down in the corner. 
+Not much has happened. 
+They have grown their population but not much more. 
+In the 1930's now, you can see that Japan is going to a period of war, with lower life expectancy. 
+And the Second World War was really a terrible event, also economically for Japan. 
+But they did recover quite fast afterwards. 
+And we are moving into the new world. 
+In 1947 India finally gained its independence. 
+And they could raise the Indian flag and become a sovereign nation, but in very big difficulties down there. 
+(Applause) In 1949 we saw the emergence of the modern China in a way which surprised the world. 
+And what happened? 
+What happens in the after independence? 
+You can see that the health started to improve. 
+Children started to go to school. 
+Health services were provided. 
+This is the Great Leap Forward, when China fell down. 
+It was central planning by Mao Tse Tung. 
+China recovered. Then they said, "Nevermore, stupid central planning." 
+But they went up here, and India was trying to follow. 
+And they were catching up indeed. 
+And both countries had the better health, but still a very low economy. 
+And we came to 1978, and Mao Tse Tung died, and a new guy turned up from the left. 
+And it was Deng Xiaoping coming out here. 
+And he said, "" Doesn't matter if a cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice. "" Because catching mice is what the two cats wanted to do. 
+And you can see the two cats being here, China and India, wanting to catch the mices over there, you know. 
+And they decided to go not only for health and education, but also starting to grow their economy. 
+And the market reformer was successful there. 
+In '92 India follows with a market reform. 
+And they go quite closely together, and you can see that the similarity with India and China, in many ways, are greater than the differences with them. 
+And here they march on. And will they catch up? 
+This is the big question today. 
+There they are today. 
+Now what does it mean that the — (Applause) the averages there — this is the average of China. 
+If I would split China, look here, Shanghai has already catched up. 
+Shanghai is already there. 
+And it's healthier than the United States. 
+But on the other hand, Guizhou, one of the poorest inland provinces of China, is there. 
+And if I split Guizhou into urban and rural, the rural part of Guizhou goes down there. 
+You see this enormous inequity in China, in the midst of fast economic growth. 
+And if I would also look at India, you have another type of inequity, actually, in India. 
+The geographical, macro-geographical difference is not so big. 
+Uttar Pradesh, the biggest of the states here, is poorer and has a lower health than the rest of India. 
+Kerala is flying on top there, matching United States in health, but not in economy. 
+And here, Maharashtra, with Mumbai, is forging forward. 
+Now in India, the big inequities are within the state, rather than between the states. 
+And that is not a bad thing, in itself. 
+If you have a lot inequity, macro-geographical inequities can be more difficult in the long term to deal with, than if it is in the same area where you have a growth center relatively close to where poor people are living. 
+No, there is one more inequity. Look there, United States. 
+(Laughter) Oh, they broke my frame. 
+Washington, D.C. went out here. 
+My friends at Gapminder wanted me to show this because there is a new leader in Washington who is really concerned about the health system. 
+And I can understand him, because Washington, D.C. 
+is so rich over there but they are not as healthy as Kerala. 
+It's quite interesting, isn't it? 
+(Applause) I can see a business opportunity for Kerala, helping fix the health system in the United States. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Now here we have the whole world. You have the legend down there. 
+And when you see the two giant cats here, pushing forward, you see that in between them and ahead of them, is the whole emerging economies of the world, which Thomas Friedman so correctly called the "" flat world. "" You can see that in health and education, a large part of the world population is putting forward, but in Africa, and other parts, as in rural Guizhou in China, there is still people with low health and very low economy. 
+We have an enormous disparity in the world. 
+But most of the world in the middle are pushing forwards very fast. 
+Now, back to my projections. 
+When will it catch up? I have to go back to very conventional graph. 
+I will show income per person on this axis instead, poor down here, rich up there. 
+And then time here, from 1858 I start the world. 
+And we shall see what will happen with these countries. 
+You see, China under foreign domination actually lowered their income and came down to the Indian level here. 
+Whereas U.K. and United States is getting richer and richer. 
+And after Second World War, United States is richer than U.K. 
+But independence is coming here. 
+Growth is starting, economic reform. 
+Growth is faster, and with projection from IMF you can see where you expect them to be in 2014. 
+Now, the question is, "" When will the catch up take place? "" Look at, look at the United States. 
+Can you see the bubble? 
+The bubbles, not my bubbles, but the financial bubbles. 
+That's the dot com bubble. This is the Lehman Brothers doorstep there. 
+You see it came down there. 
+And it seems this is another rock coming down there, you know. 
+So they doesn't seem to go this way, these countries. 
+They seem to go in a more humble growth way, you know. 
+And people interested in growth are turning their eyes towards Asia. 
+I can compare to Japan. This is Japan coming up. 
+You see, Japan did it like that. 
+We add Japan to it. 
+And there is no doubt that fast catch up can take place. 
+Can you see here what Japan did? 
+Japan did it like this, until full catch up, and then they follow with the other high-income economies. 
+But the real projections for those ones, I would like to give it like this. 
+Can be worse, can be better. 
+It's always difficult to predict, especially about the future. 
+Now, a historian tells me it's even more difficult to predict about the past. 
+(Laughter) I think I'm in a difficult position here. 
+Inequalities in China and India I consider really the big obstacle because to bring the entire population into growth and prosperity is what will create a domestic market, what will avoid social instability, and which will make use of the entire capacity of the population. 
+So, social investments in health, education and infrastructure, and electricity is really what is needed in India and China. 
+You know the climate. We have great international experts within India telling us that the climate is changing, and actions has to be taken, otherwise China and India would be the countries most to suffer from climate change. 
+And I consider India and China the best partners in the world in a good global climate policy. 
+But they ain't going to pay for what others, who have more money, have largely created, and I can agree on that. 
+But what I'm really worried about is war. 
+Will the former rich countries really accept a completely changed world economy, and a shift of power away from where it has been the last 50 to 100 to 150 years, back to Asia? 
+And will Asia be able to handle that new position of being in charge of being the most mighty, and the governors of the world? 
+So, always avoid war, because that always pushes human beings backward. 
+Now if these inequalities, climate and war can be avoided, get ready for a world in equity, because this is what seems to be happening. 
+And that vision that I got as a young student, 1972, that Indians can be much better than Swedes, is just about to happen. 
+And it will happen precisely the year 2048 in the later part of the summer, in July, more precisely, the 27th of July. 
+(Applause) The 27th of July, 2048 is my 100th birthday. 
+(Laughter) And I expect to speak in the first session of the 39th TED India. 
+Get your bookings in time. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I teach chemistry. 
+(Explosion) All right, all right. 
+So more than just explosions, chemistry is everywhere. 
+Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just doing this over and over? 
+Some people nodding yes. 
+Recently, I showed this to my students, and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened. 
+The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating. 
+Check out this video that Maddie from my period three class sent me that evening. 
+(Clang) (Laughs) Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher, I love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class. 
+But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity took her to a new level. 
+If you look inside that beaker, you might see a candle. 
+Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario. 
+You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education. 
+But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions. 
+For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing. 
+But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction. 
+So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside, the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now, and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information. 
+In May of 2010, at 35 years old, with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta. 
+This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email from my doctor right there. 
+Now, when I got this, I was — press Caps Lock — absolutely freaked out, okay? 
+But I found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied. 
+Where did this guy get this confidence, the audacity of it? 
+So when I asked him, he told me three things. 
+He said first, his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure, about what worked and what didn't work. 
+Second, he embraced, and didn't fear, the messy process of trial and error, the inevitable process of trial and error. 
+And third, through intense reflection, he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure, and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life. 
+Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom, and before I went back into the classroom that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today. 
+Rule number one: Curiosity comes first. 
+Questions can be windows to great instruction, but not the other way around. 
+Rule number two: Embrace the mess. 
+We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly. 
+And just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip, okay, trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206. 
+And rule number three: Practice reflection. 
+What we do is important. It deserves our care, but it also deserves our revision. 
+Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms? 
+As if what we are doing one day will save lives. 
+Our students our worth it. 
+And each case is different. 
+(Explosion) All right. Sorry. 
+The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on. 
+So these are my daughters. 
+On the right we have little Emmalou — Southern family. 
+And, on the left, Riley. 
+Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here. 
+She's going to be four years old, and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask, "" Why? "" Yeah. Why. 
+I could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything. 
+We all were at that age. 
+But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers, the ones she has yet to meet. 
+How will they grow this curiosity? 
+You see, I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids, and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms — to the senior who's checked out before the year's even begun or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school's classroom. 
+But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The two most likely largest inventions of our generation are the Internet and the mobile phone. 
+They've changed the world. 
+However, largely to our surprise, they also turned out to be the perfect tools for the surveillance state. 
+It turned out that the capability to collect data, information and connections about basically any of us and all of us is exactly what we've been hearing throughout of the summer through revelations and leaks about Western intelligence agencies, mostly U.S. intelligence agencies, watching over the rest of the world. 
+We've heard about these starting with the revelations from June 6. 
+Edward Snowden started leaking information, top secret classified information, from the U.S. intelligence agencies, and we started learning about things like PRISM and XKeyscore and others. 
+And these are examples of the kinds of programs U.S. intelligence agencies are running right now, against the whole rest of the world. 
+And if you look back about the forecasts on surveillance by George Orwell, well it turns out that George Orwell was an optimist. 
+(Laughter) We are right now seeing a much larger scale of tracking of individual citizens than he could have ever imagined. 
+And this here is the infamous NSA data center in Utah. 
+Due to be opened very soon, it will be both a supercomputing center and a data storage center. 
+You could basically imagine it has a large hall filled with hard drives storing data they are collecting. 
+And it's a pretty big building. 
+How big? Well, I can give you the numbers — 140,000 square meters — but that doesn't really tell you very much. 
+Maybe it's better to imagine it as a comparison. 
+You think about the largest IKEA store you've ever been in. 
+This is five times larger. 
+How many hard drives can you fit in an IKEA store? 
+Right? It's pretty big. 
+We estimate that just the electricity bill for running this data center is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year. 
+And this kind of wholesale surveillance means that they can collect our data and keep it basically forever, keep it for extended periods of time, keep it for years, keep it for decades. 
+And this opens up completely new kinds of risks to us all. 
+And what this is is that it is wholesale blanket surveillance on everyone. 
+Well, not exactly everyone, because the U.S. intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners. 
+They can monitor foreigners when foreigners' data connections end up in the United States or pass through the United States. 
+And monitoring foreigners doesn't sound too bad until you realize that I'm a foreigner and you're a foreigner. 
+In fact, 96 percent of the planet are foreigners. 
+(Laughter) Right? 
+So it is wholesale blanket surveillance of all of us, all of us who use telecommunications and the Internet. 
+But don't get me wrong: There are actually types of surveillance that are okay. 
+I love freedom, but even I agree that some surveillance is fine. 
+If the law enforcement is trying to find a murderer, or they're trying to catch a drug lord or trying to prevent a school shooting, and they have leads and they have suspects, then it's perfectly fine for them to tap the suspect's phone, and to intercept his Internet communications. 
+I'm not arguing that at all, but that's not what programs like PRISM are about. 
+They are not about doing surveillance on people that they have reason to suspect of some wrongdoings. 
+They're about doing surveillance on people they know are innocent. 
+So the four main arguments supporting surveillance like this, well, the first of all is that whenever you start discussing about these revelations, there will be naysayers trying to minimize the importance of these revelations, saying that we knew all this already, we knew it was happening, there's nothing new here. 
+And that's not true. Don't let anybody tell you that we knew this already, because we did not know this already. 
+Our worst fears might have been something like this, but we didn't know this was happening. 
+Now we know for a fact it's happening. 
+We didn't know about this. We didn't know about PRISM. 
+We didn't know about XKeyscore. We didn't know about Cybertrans. 
+We didn't know about DoubleArrow. 
+We did not know about Skywriter — all these different programs run by U.S. intelligence agencies. 
+But now we do. 
+And we did not know that U.S. intelligence agencies go to extremes such as infiltrating standardization bodies to sabotage encryption algorithms on purpose. 
+And what that means is that you take something which is secure, an encryption algorithm which is so secure that if you use that algorithm to encrypt one file, nobody can decrypt that file. 
+Even if they take every single computer on the planet just to decrypt that one file, it's going to take millions of years. 
+So that's basically perfectly safe, uncrackable. 
+You take something which is that good and then you weaken it on purpose, making all of us less secure as an end result. 
+A real-world equivalent would be that intelligence agencies would force some secret pin code into every single house alarm so they could get into every single house because, you know, bad people might have house alarms, but it will also make all of us less secure as an end result. 
+Backdooring encryption algorithms just boggles the mind. 
+But of course, these intelligence agencies are doing their job. 
+This is what they have been told to do: do signals intelligence, monitor telecommunications, monitor Internet traffic. 
+That's what they're trying to do, and since most, a very big part of the Internet traffic today is encrypted, they're trying to find ways around the encryption. 
+One way is to sabotage encryption algorithms, which is a great example about how U.S. intelligence agencies are running loose. 
+They are completely out of control, and they should be brought back under control. 
+So what do we actually know about the leaks? 
+Everything is based on the files leaked by Mr. Snowden. 
+The very first PRISM slides from the beginning of June detail a collection program where the data is collected from service providers, and they actually go and name the service providers they have access to. 
+They even have a specific date on when the collection of data began for each of the service providers. 
+So for example, they name the collection from Microsoft started on September 11, 2007, for Yahoo on the March 12, 2008, and then others: Google, Facebook, Skype, Apple and so on. 
+And every single one of these companies denies. 
+They all say that this simply isn't true, that they are not giving backdoor access to their data. 
+Yet we have these files. 
+So is one of the parties lying, or is there some other alternative explanation? 
+And one explanation would be that these parties, these service providers, are not cooperating. 
+Instead, they've been hacked. 
+That would explain it. They aren't cooperating. They've been hacked. 
+In this case, they've been hacked by their own government. 
+That might sound outlandish, but we already have cases where this has happened, for example, the case of the Flame malware which we strongly believe was authored by the U.S. government, and which, to spread, subverted the security of the Windows Update network, meaning here, the company was hacked by their own government. 
+And there's more evidence supporting this theory as well. 
+Der Spiegel, from Germany, leaked more information about the operations run by the elite hacker units operating inside these intelligence agencies. 
+Inside NSA, the unit is called TAO, Tailored Access Operations, and inside GCHQ, which is the U.K. equivalent, it's called NAC, Network Analysis Centre. 
+And these recent leaks of these three slides detail an operation run by this GCHQ intelligence agency from the United Kingdom targeting a telecom here in Belgium. 
+And what this really means is that an E.U. country's intelligence agency is breaching the security of a telecom of a fellow E.U. country on purpose, and they discuss it in their slides completely casually, business as usual. 
+Here's the primary target, here's the secondary target, here's the teaming. 
+They probably have a team building on Thursday evening in a pub. 
+They even use cheesy PowerPoint clip art like, you know, "" Success, "" when they gain access to services like this. 
+What the hell? 
+And then there's the argument that okay, yes, this might be going on, but then again, other countries are doing it as well. 
+All countries spy. 
+And maybe that's true. 
+Many countries spy, not all of them, but let's take an example. 
+Let's take, for example, Sweden. 
+I'm speaking of Sweden because Sweden has a little bit of a similar law to the United States. 
+When your data traffic goes through Sweden, their intelligence agency has a legal right by the law to intercept that traffic. 
+All right, how many Swedish decisionmakers and politicians and business leaders use, every day, U.S.-based services, like, you know, run Windows or OSX, or use Facebook or LinkedIn, or store their data in clouds like iCloud or Skydrive or DropBox, or maybe use online services like Amazon web services or sales support? 
+And the answer is, every single Swedish business leader does that every single day. 
+And then we turn it around. 
+How many American leaders use Swedish webmails and cloud services? 
+And the answer is zero. 
+So this is not balanced. 
+It's not balanced by any means, not even close. 
+And when we do have the occasional European success story, even those, then, typically end up being sold to the United States. 
+Like, Skype used to be secure. 
+It used to be end-to-end encrypted. 
+Then it was sold to the United States. 
+Today, it no longer is secure. 
+So once again, we take something which is secure and then we make it less secure on purpose, making all of us less secure as an outcome. 
+And then the argument that the United States is only fighting terrorists. 
+It's the war on terror. 
+You shouldn't worry about it. 
+Well, it's not the war on terror. 
+Yes, part of it is war on terror, and yes, there are terrorists, and they do kill and maim, and we should fight them, but we know through these leaks that they have used the same techniques to listen to phone calls of European leaders, to tap the email of residents of Mexico and Brazil, to read email traffic inside the United Nations Headquarters and E.U. Parliament, and I don't think they are trying to find terrorists from inside the E.U. Parliament, right? 
+It's not the war on terror. 
+Part of it might be, and there are terrorists, but are we really thinking about terrorists as such an existential threat that we are willing to do anything at all to fight them? 
+Are the Americans ready to throw away the Constituion and throw it in the trash just because there are terrorists? 
+And the same thing with the Bill of Rights and all the amendments and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the E.U. conventions on human rights and fundamental freedoms and the press freedom? 
+Do we really think terrorism is such an existential threat, we are ready to do anything at all? 
+But people are scared about terrorists, and then they think that maybe that surveillance is okay because they have nothing to hide. 
+Feel free to survey me if that helps. 
+And whoever tells you that they have nothing to hide simply hasn't thought about this long enough. 
+(Applause) Because we have this thing called privacy, and if you really think that you have nothing to hide, please make sure that's the first thing you tell me, because then I know that I should not trust you with any secrets, because obviously you can't keep a secret. 
+But people are brutally honest with the Internet, and when these leaks started, many people were asking me about this. 
+And I have nothing to hide. 
+I'm not doing anything bad or anything illegal. 
+Yet, I have nothing that I would in particular like to share with an intelligence agency, especially a foreign intelligence agency. 
+And if we indeed need a Big Brother, I would much rather have a domestic Big Brother than a foreign Big Brother. 
+And when the leaks started, the very first thing I tweeted about this was a comment about how, when you've been using search engines, you've been potentially leaking all that to U.S. intelligence. 
+And two minutes later, I got a reply by somebody called Kimberly from the United States challenging me, like, why am I worried about this? 
+What am I sending to worry about this? Am I sending naked pictures or something? 
+And my answer to Kimberly was that what I'm sending is none of your business, and it should be none of your government's business either. 
+Because that's what it's about. It's about privacy. 
+Privacy is nonnegotiable. 
+It should be built in to all the systems we use. 
+(Applause) And one thing we should all understand is that we are brutally honest with search engines. 
+You show me your search history, and I'll find something incriminating or something embarrassing there in five minutes. 
+We are more honest with search engines than we are with our families. 
+Search engines know more about you than your family members know about you. 
+And this is all the kind of information we are giving away, we are giving away to the United States. 
+And surveillance changes history. 
+We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon. 
+Imagine if he would have had the kind of surveillance tools that are available today. 
+And let me actually quote the president of Brazil, Ms. Dilma Rousseff. 
+She was one of the targets of NSA surveillance. 
+Her email was read, and she spoke at the United Nations Headquarters, and she said, "" If there is no right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore, there can be no effective democracy. "" That's what it's about. 
+Privacy is the building block of our democracies. 
+And to quote a fellow security researcher, Marcus Ranum, he said that the United States is right now treating the Internet as it would be treating one of its colonies. 
+So we are back to the age of colonization, and we, the foreign users of the Internet, we should think about Americans as our masters. 
+So Mr. Snowden, he's been blamed for many things. 
+Some are blaming him for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry and software companies with these revelations — and blaming Snowden for causing problems for the U.S. cloud industry would be the equivalent of blaming Al Gore for causing global warming. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) So, what is there to be done? 
+Should we worry. No, we shouldn't worry. 
+We should be angry, because this is wrong, and it's rude, and it should not be done. 
+But that's not going to really change the situation. 
+What's going to change the situation for the rest of the world is to try to steer away from systems built in the United States. 
+And that's much easier said than done. 
+How do you do that? 
+A single country, any single country in Europe cannot replace and build replacements for the U.S.-made operating systems and cloud services. 
+But maybe you don't have to do it alone. 
+Maybe you can do it together with other countries. 
+The solution is open source. 
+By building together open, free, secure systems, we can go around such surveillance, and then one country doesn't have to solve the problem by itself. 
+It only has to solve one little problem. 
+And to quote a fellow security researcher, Haroon Meer, one country only has to make a small wave, but those small waves together become a tide, and the tide will lift all the boats up at the same time, and the tide we will build with secure, free, open-source systems, will become the tide that will lift all of us up and above the surveillance state. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I have a daughter, Mulan. 
+And when she was eight, last year, she was doing a report for school or she had some homework about frogs. 
+And we were at this restaurant, and she said, "" So, basically, frogs lay eggs and the eggs turn into tadpoles, and tadpoles turn into frogs. "" And I said, "" Yeah. You know, I'm not really up on my frog reproduction that much. 
+It's the females, I think, that lay the eggs, and then the males fertilize them. 
+And then they become tadpoles and frogs. "" And she says, "" What? Only the females have eggs? "" And I said, "" Yeah. "" And she goes, "" And what's this fertilizing? "" So I kind of said, "" Oh, it's this extra ingredient, you know, that you need to create a new frog from the mom and dad frog. "" (Laughter) And she said, "" Oh, so is that true for humans too? "" And I thought, "" Okay, here we go. "" I didn't know it would happen so quick, at eight. 
+I was trying to remember all the guidebooks, and all I could remember was, "" Only answer the question they're asking. 
+Don't give any more information. "" (Laughter) So I said, "" Yes. "" And she said, "" And where do, um, where do human women, like, where do women lay their eggs? "" And I said, "" Well, funny you should ask. (Laughter) We have evolved to have our own pond. 
+We have our very own pond inside our bodies. 
+And we lay our eggs there, we don't have to worry about other eggs or anything like that. 
+It's our own pond. And that's how it happens. "" And she goes, "" Then how do they get fertilized? "" And I said, "" Well, Men, through their penis, they fertilize the eggs by the sperm coming out. 
+And you go through the woman's vagina. "" And so we're just eating, and her jaw just drops, and she goes, "" Mom! 
+Like, where you go to the bathroom? "" And I said, "" I know. 
+I know. "" (Laughter) That's how we evolved. It does seem odd. 
+It is a little bit like having a waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park... 
+Bad zoning, but... "" (Laughter) She's like, "" What? "" And she goes, "" But Mom, but men and women can't ever see each other naked, Mom. 
+So how could that ever happen? "" And then I go, "" Well, "" and then I put my Margaret Mead hat on. 
+"" Human males and females develop a special bond, and when they're much older, much, much older than you, and they have a very special feeling, then they can be naked together. "" And she said, "" Mom, have you done this before? "" And I said, "" Yes. "" And she said, "" But Mom, you can't have kids. "" Because she knows that I adopted her and that I can't have kids. And I said, "" Yes. "" 
+And she said, "" Well, you don't have to do that again. "" And I said, ""... "" And then she said, "" But how does it happen when a man and woman are together? 
+Like, how do they know that's the time? 
+Mom, does the man just say, 'Is now the time to take off my pants?' "" (Laughter) And I said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) "" That is exactly right. 
+That's exactly how it happens. "" So we're driving home and she's looking out the window, and she goes, "" Mom. What if two just people saw each other on the street, like a man and a woman, they just started doing it. Would that ever happen? "" And I said, "" Oh, no. Humans are so private. 
+Oh... "" And then she goes, "" What if there was like a party, and there was just like a whole bunch of girls and a whole bunch of boys, and there was a bunch of men and women and they just started doing it, Mom? 
+Would that ever happen? "" And I said, "" Oh, no, no. 
+That's not how we do it. "" Then we got home and we see the cat. And she goes, "Mom, how do cats do it?" 
+And I go, "" Oh, it's the same. It's basically the same. "" And then she got all caught up in the legs. "" But how would the legs go, Mom? 
+I don't understand the legs. "" She goes, "" Mom, everyone can't do the splits. "" And I go, "" I know, but the legs... "" and I'm probably like, "" The legs get worked out. "" And she goes, "" But I just can't understand it. "" So I go, "" You know, why don't we go on the Internet, and maybe we can see... like on Wikipedia. "" (Laughter) So we go online, and we put in "" cats mating. "" And, unfortunately, on YouTube, there's many cats mating videos. 
+And we watched them and I'm so thankful, because she's just like, "" Wow! This is so amazing. "" She goes, "" What about dogs? "" So we put in dogs mating, and, you know, we're watching it, and she's totally absorbed. 
+And then she goes, "" Mom, do you think they would have, on the Internet, any humans mating? "" (Laughter) And then I realized that I had taken my little eight year old's hand, and taken her right into Internet porn. (Laughter) And I looked into this trusting, loving face, and I said, "" Oh, no. 
+That would never happen. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. 
+
+Illegal wildlife trade in Brazil is one of the major threats against our fauna, especially birds, and mainly to supply the pet market with thousands of animals taken from nature every month, and transported far from their origins, to be sold mainly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. 
+It is estimated that all kinds of illegal wildlife trade in Brazil withdraw from nature almost 38 million animals every year, a business worth almost two billion dollars. 
+The police intercepts these huge cargos with live animals, intended to supply the pet market, or they seize the animals directly from the people's houses, and this is how we end up, every month, with thousands of seized animals. 
+And for us to understand what happens with them, we're going to follow Brad. 
+In the eyes of many people, after the animals are seized, they say, "" Yay, justice has been served. 
+The good guys arrived, took the cute, mistreated animals from the hands of the evil traffickers, and everyone lived happily ever after. "" But did they? Actually, no, and this is where many of our problems begin. 
+Because we have to figure out what to do with all these animals. 
+In Brazil, they are usually first sent to governmental triage facilities, in which most of the cases, the conditions are as bad as with the traffickers. 
+In 2002, these centers received 45,000 animals, of which 37,000 were birds. 
+And the police estimates that we seize only five percent of what's being trafficked. 
+Some lucky ones — and among them, Brad — go to serious rehabilitation centers after that. 
+And in these places they are cared for. 
+They train their flying, they learn how to recognize the food they will find in nature, and they are able to socialize with others from the same species. 
+(Laughter) But then what? 
+The Brazil Ornithological Society — so now we're talking only birds — claims that we have too little knowledge about the species in nature. 
+Therefore, it would be too risky to release these animals, both for the released and for the natural populations. 
+They also claim that we spend too many resources in their rehabilitation. 
+Following this argument, they suggest that all the birds seized from non-threatened species should be euthanized. 
+However, this would mean having killed 26,267 birds, only in the state of São Paulo, only in 2006. 
+But, some researchers, myself included — some NGOs and some people from the Brazilian government — believe there is an alternative. 
+We think that if and when the animals meet certain criteria concerning their health, behavior, inferred origin and whatever we know about the natural populations, then technically responsible releases are possible, both for the well-being of the individual, and for the conservation of the species and their ecosystems, because we will be returning genes for these populations — which could be important for them in facing environmental challenges — and also we could be returning potential seed dispersers, predators, preys, etc. 
+All of these were released by us. 
+On the top, the turtles are just enjoying freedom. 
+(Laughter) On the middle, this guy nested a couple of weeks after the release. 
+And on the bottom, my personal favorite, the little male over there, four hours after his release he was together with a wild female. 
+So, this is not new, people have been doing this around the world. 
+But it's still a big issue in Brazil. 
+We believe we have performed responsible releases. 
+We've registered released animals mating in nature and having chicks. 
+So, these genes are indeed going back to the populations. 
+However this is still a minority for the very lack of knowledge. 
+So, I say, "" Let's study more, let's shed light on this issue, let's do whatever we can. "" I'm devoting my career to that. 
+And I'm here to urge each and every one of you to do whatever is in your reach: Talk to your neighbor, teach your children, make sure your pet is from a legal breeder. 
+We need to act, and act now, before these ones are the only ones left. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Writing biography is a strange thing to do. 
+It's a journey into the foreign territory of somebody else's life, a journey, an exploration that can take you places you never dreamed of going and still can't quite believe you've been, especially if, like me, you're an agnostic Jew and the life you've been exploring is that of Muhammad. 
+Five years ago, for instance, I found myself waking each morning in misty Seattle to what I knew was an impossible question: What actually happened one desert night, half the world and almost half of history away? 
+What happened, that is, on the night in the year 610 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain just outside Mecca? 
+This is the core mystical moment of Islam, and as such, of course, it defies empirical analysis. 
+Yet the question wouldn't let go of me. 
+I was fully aware that for someone as secular as I am, just asking it could be seen as pure chutzpah. 
+(Laughter) And I plead guilty as charged, because all exploration, physical or intellectual, is inevitably in some sense an act of transgression, of crossing boundaries. 
+Still, some boundaries are larger than others. 
+So a human encountering the divine, as Muslims believe Muhammad did, to the rationalist, this is a matter not of fact but of wishful fiction, and like all of us, I like to think of myself as rational. 
+Which might be why when I looked at the earliest accounts we have of that night, what struck me even more than what happened was what did not happen. 
+Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air. 
+He did not run down shouting, "" Hallelujah! "" and "" Bless the Lord! "" He did not radiate light and joy. 
+There were no choirs of angels, no music of the spheres, no elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him, no sense of an absolute, fore-ordained role as the messenger of God. 
+That is, he did none of the things that might make it easy to cry foul, to put down the whole story as a pious fable. 
+Quite the contrary. 
+In his own reported words, he was convinced at first that what had happened couldn't have been real. 
+At best, he thought, it had to have been a hallucination — a trick of the eye or the ear, perhaps, or his own mind working against him. 
+At worst, possession — that he'd been seized by an evil jinn, a spirit out to deceive him, even to crush the life out of him. 
+In fact, he was so sure that he could only be majnun, possessed by a jinn, that when he found himself still alive, his first impulse was to finish the job himself, to leap off the highest cliff and escape the terror of what he'd experienced by putting an end to all experience. 
+So the man who fled down the mountain that night trembled not with joy but with a stark, primordial fear. 
+He was overwhelmed not with conviction, but by doubt. 
+And that panicked disorientation, that sundering of everything familiar, that daunting awareness of something beyond human comprehension, can only be called a terrible awe. 
+This might be somewhat difficult to grasp now that we use the word "" awesome "" to describe a new app or a viral video. 
+With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake, we're protected from real awe. 
+We close the doors and hunker down, convinced that we're in control, or, at least, hoping for control. 
+We do our best to ignore the fact that we don't always have it, and that not everything can be explained. 
+Yet whether you're a rationalist or a mystic, whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night came from inside himself or from outside, what's clear is that he did experience them, and that he did so with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world and transform this otherwise modest man into a radical advocate for social and economic justice. 
+Fear was the only sane response, the only human response. 
+Too human for some, like conservative Muslim theologians who maintain that the account of his wanting to kill himself shouldn't even be mentioned, despite the fact that it's in the earliest Islamic biographies. 
+They insist that he never doubted for even a single moment, let alone despaired. 
+Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection. 
+Yet what, exactly, is imperfect about doubt? 
+As I read those early accounts, I realized it was precisely Muhammad's doubt that brought him alive for me, that allowed me to begin to see him in full, to accord him the integrity of reality. 
+And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that he doubted, because doubt is essential to faith. 
+If this seems a startling idea at first, consider that doubt, as Graham Greene once put it, is the heart of the matter. 
+Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. 
+You're certain that you possess the Truth — inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T — and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism. 
+It has to be one of the multiple ironies of history that a favorite expletive of Muslim fundamentalists is the same one once used by the Christian fundamentalists known as Crusaders: "infidel," from the Latin for "faithless." 
+Doubly ironic, in this case, because their absolutism is in fact the opposite of faith. 
+In effect, they are the infidels. 
+Like fundamentalists of all religious stripes, they have no questions, only answers. 
+They found the perfect antidote to thought and the ideal refuge of the hard demands of real faith. 
+They don't have to struggle for it like Jacob wrestling through the night with the angel, or like Jesus in his 40 days and nights in the wilderness, or like Muhammad, not only that night on the mountain, but throughout his years as a prophet, with the Koran constantly urging him not to despair, and condemning those who most loudly proclaim that they know everything there is to know and that they and they alone are right. 
+And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority, have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority. 
+We've allowed Judaism to be claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers, Christianity by homophobic hypocrites and misogynistic bigots, Islam by suicide bombers. 
+And we've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that no matter whether they claim to be Christians, Jews or Muslims, militant extremists are none of the above. 
+They're a cult all their own, blood brothers steeped in other people's blood. 
+This isn't faith. 
+It's fanaticism, and we have to stop confusing the two. 
+We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers. 
+It's difficult and stubborn. 
+It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. 
+It goes hand in hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it, and sometimes in conscious defiance of it. 
+And this conscious defiance is why I, as an agnostic, can still have faith. 
+I have faith, for instance, that peace in the Middle East is possible despite the ever-accumulating mass of evidence to the contrary. 
+I'm not convinced of this. 
+I can hardly say I believe it. 
+I can only have faith in it, commit myself, that is, to the idea of it, and I do this precisely because of the temptation to throw up my hands in resignation and retreat into silence. 
+Because despair is self-fulfilling. 
+If we call something impossible, we act in such a way that we make it so. 
+And I, for one, refuse to live that way. 
+In fact, most of us do, whether we're atheist or theist or anywhere in between or beyond, for that matter, what drives us is that, despite our doubts and even because of our doubts, we reject the nihilism of despair. 
+We insist on faith in the future and in each other. 
+Call this naive if you like. 
+Call it impossibly idealistic if you must. 
+But one thing is sure: Call it human. 
+Could Muhammad have so radically changed his world without such faith, without the refusal to cede to the arrogance of closed-minded certainty? 
+I think not. 
+After keeping company with him as a writer for the past five years, I can't see that he'd be anything but utterly outraged at the militant fundamentalists who claim to speak and act in his name in the Middle East and elsewhere today. 
+He'd be appalled at the repression of half the population because of their gender. 
+He'd be torn apart by the bitter divisiveness of sectarianism. 
+He'd call out terrorism for what it is, not only criminal but an obscene travesty of everything he believed in and struggled for. 
+He'd say what the Koran says: Anyone who takes a life takes the life of all humanity. 
+Anyone who saves a life, saves the life of all humanity. 
+And he'd commit himself fully to the hard and thorny process of making peace. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+A few years ago, I got one of those spam emails. 
+I'm not quite sure how, but it turned up in my inbox, and it was from a guy called Solomon Odonkoh. 
+(Laughter) I know. (Laughter) 
+It went like this: it said, "" Hello James Veitch, I have an interesting business proposal I want to share with you, Solomon. "" Now, my hand was kind of hovering on the delete button, right? 
+I was looking at my phone. I thought, I could just delete this. 
+(Laughter) And I said, "" Solomon, Your email intrigues me. "" (Laughter) (Applause) And the game was afoot. 
+He said, "" Dear James Veitch, We shall be shipping Gold to you. "" (Laughter) "You will earn 10% of any gold you distributes." (Laughter) 
+So I knew I was dealing with a professional. (Laughter) 
+I said, "" How much is it worth? "" He said, "" We will start with smaller quantity, "" — I was like, aww — and then he said, "" of 25 kgs. (Laughter) 
+The worth should be about $2.5 million. "" I said, "" Solomon, if we're going to do it, let's go big. 
+(Applause) I can handle it. How much gold do you have? "" (Laughter) He said, "" It is not a matter of how much gold I have, what matters is your capability of handling. 
+We can start with 50 kgs as trial shipment. "" I said, "" 50 kgs? 
+There's no point doing this at all unless you're shipping at least a metric ton. "" (Laughter) (Applause) He said, "" What do you do for a living? "" (Laughter) I said, "" I'm a hedge fund executive bank manager. "" (Laughter) This isn't the first time I've shipped bullion, my friend, no no no. 
+Then I started to panic. 
+I was like, "" Where are you based? "" I don't know about you, but I think if we're going via the postal service, it ought to be signed for. 
+That's a lot of gold. "" He said, "" It will not be easy to convince my company to do larger quantity shipment. "" I said, "" Solomon, I'm completely with you on this one. 
+I'm putting together a visual for you to take into the board meeting. 
+Hold tight. "" (Laughter) This is what I sent Solomon. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) I don't know if we have any statisticians in the house, but there's definitely something going on. (Laughter) 
+I said, "" Solomon, attached to this email you'll find a helpful chart. 
+I've had one of my assistants run the numbers. 
+(Laughter) We're ready for shipping as much gold as possible. "" There's always a moment where they try to tug your heartstrings, and this was it for Solomon. 
+He said, "" I will be so much happy if the deal goes well, because I'm going to get a very good commission as well. "" And I said, "" That's amazing, What are you going to spend your cut on? "" And he said, "" On RealEstate, what about you? "" I thought about it for a long time. 
+And I said, "" One word; Hummus. "" (Laughter) "" It's going places. (Laughter) 
+Also you can cut up carrots, and you can dip them. 
+Have you ever done that, Solomon? "" (Laughter) He said, "" I have to go bed now. "" (Laughter) (Applause) "" Till morrow. 
+Have sweet dream. "" I didn't know what to say! 
+I said, "" Bonsoir my golden nugget, bonsoir. "" (Laughter) Guys, you have to understand, this had been going for, like, weeks, albeit hitherto the greatest weeks of my life, but I had to knock it on the head. 
+It was getting a bit out of hand. 
+Friends were saying, "" James, do you want to come for a drink? "" I was like, "" I can't, I'm expecting an email about some gold. "" So I figured I had to knock it on the head. 
+I had to take it to a ridiculous conclusion. 
+I said, "" Solomon, I'm concerned about security. 
+When we email each other, we need to use a code. "" And he agreed. 
+(Laughter) I said, "" Solomon, I spent all night coming up with this code we need to use in all further correspondence: Lawyer: Gummy Bear. 
+Bank: Cream Egg. 
+Legal: Fizzy Cola Bottle. Claim: Peanut M & Ms. 
+Documents: Jelly Beans. 
+Western Union: A Giant Gummy Lizard. "" (Laughter) I knew these were all words they use, right? 
+I said, "" Please call me Kitkat in all further correspondence. "" (Laughter) I didn't hear back. I thought, I've gone too far. 
+I've gone too far. So I had to backpedal a little. 
+I said, "" Solomon, Is the deal still on? 
+KitKat. "" (Laughter) Because you have to be consistent. 
+Then I did get an email back from him. 
+He said, "" The Business is on and I am trying to blah blah blah... "" I said, "" Dude, you have to use the code! "" What followed is the greatest email I've ever received. 
+(Laughter) I'm not joking, this is what turned up in my inbox. 
+This was a good day. 
+"" The business is on. 
+I am trying to raise the balance for the Gummy Bear — (Laughter) so he can submit all the needed Fizzy Cola Bottle Jelly Beans to the Creme Egg, for the Peanut M & Ms process to start. (Laughter) 
+Send 1,500 pounds via a Giant Gummy Lizard. "" (Applause) And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could? 
+And that's what I've been doing for three years on your behalf. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. 
+It's really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it. 
+I don't think what I'm doing is mean. 
+There are a lot of people who do mean things to scammers. 
+All I'm doing is wasting their time. 
+And I think any time they're spending with me is time they're not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right? 
+And if you're going to do this — and I highly recommend you do — get yourself a pseudonymous email address. 
+Don't use your own email address. 
+That's what I was doing at the start and it was a nightmare. 
+I'd wake up in the morning and have a thousand emails about penis enlargements, only one of which was a legitimate response — (Laughter) to a medical question I had. 
+But I'll tell you what, though, guys, I'll tell you what: any day is a good day, any day is a good day if you receive an email that begins like this: (Laughter) "" I AM WINNIE MANDELA, THE SECOND WIFE OF NELSON MANDELA THE FORMER SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT. "" I was like, oh! — that Winnie Mandela. (Laughter) 
+I know so many. 
+"" I NEED TO TRANSFER 45 MILLION DOLLARS OUT OF THE COUNTRY BECAUSE OF MY HUSBAND NELSON MANDELA'S HEALTH CONDITION. "" Let that sink in. 
+She sent me this, which is hysterical. 
+(Laughter) And this. 
+And this looks fairly legitimate, this is a letter of authorization. 
+But to be honest, if there's nothing written on it, it's just a shape! 
+(Laughter) I said, "" Winnie, I'm really sorry to hear of this. 
+Given that Nelson died three months ago, I'd describe his health condition as fairly serious. "" (Laughter) That's the worst health condition you can have, not being alive. 
+She said, "" KINDLY COMPLY WITH MY BANKERS INSTRUCTIONS. 
+ONE LOVE. "" (Laughter) I said, "" Of course. NO WOMAN, NO CRY. "" (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "" MY BANKER WILL NEED TRANSFER OF 3000 DOLLARS. ONE LOVE. "" (Laughter) I said, "" no problemo. 
+I SHOT THE SHERIFF. "" [(BUT I DID NOT SHOOT THE DEPUTY)] (Laughter) Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) Dannielle Hadley: Life in Pennsylvania means just that: life without the possibility of parole. 
+For us lifers, as we call ourselves, our only chance for release is through commutation, which has only been granted to two women since 1989, close to 30 years ago. 
+Our song, "" This Is Not Our Home, "" it tells of our experiences while doing life without the possibility of parole. 
+(Music) Brenda Watkins: I'm a woman. 
+I'm a grandmother. 
+I'm a daughter. 
+I have a son. 
+I'm not an angel. 
+I'm not the devil. 
+I came to jail when I was so young. 
+I spend my time here inside these prison walls. 
+Lost friends to death, saw some go home. 
+Watch years pass, people come and go, while I do life without parole. 
+I'm doing time here. 
+This is not my home. 
+Dream of freedom, hope for mercy. 
+Will I see my family or die alone? 
+As the years go by, I hold back my tears, because if I cry I'd give in to fear. 
+I must be strong, have to hold on. 
+Gotta get through another year. 
+I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done. 
+I'm doing time here. This is not my home. 
+Dream of freedom, hope for mercy. 
+Will I see my family or die alone? 
+I'm not saying that I'm not guilty, I'm not saying that I shouldn't pay. 
+All I'm asking is for forgiveness. 
+Gotta have hope I'll be free someday. 
+Is there a place for me in the world out there? 
+Is there redemption for the sin of my younger days? 
+Because I've changed. 
+Lord knows I've changed. 
+I am a prisoner for the wrong I've done. 
+I'm doing time here. This is not my home. 
+Dream of freedom, hope for mercy. 
+Will I see my family or die alone? Will I see my family or die alone? 
+I'm known to you as Inmate 008106. Incarcerated 29 years. My name is Brenda Watkins. I was born and raised in Hoffman, North Carolina. This is not my home. (Applause) 
+Thelma Nichols: Inmate number 0B2472. 
+I've been incarcerated for 27 years. 
+My name is Thelma Nichols. 
+I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A. 
+This is not my home. 
+(Applause) DH: 008494. 
+I've been incarcerated for 27 years. 
+My name is Dannielle Hadley. 
+I was born and raised in Philadelphia, P.A, and this is not my home. 
+(Applause) Theresa Battles: Inmate 008309. 
+I've been incarcerated for 27 years. 
+My name is Theresa Battles. 
+I'm from Norton, New Jersey, and this is not my home. 
+(Applause) Debra Brown: I am known as Inmate 007080. 
+I've been incarcerated for 30 years. 
+My name is Debra Brown. 
+I'm from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 
+This is not my home. 
+(Applause) Joann Butler: 005961. 
+I've been incarcerated for 37 years. 
+My name is Joann Butler, and I was born and raised in Philadelphia. 
+This is not my home. 
+(Applause) Diane Hamill Metzger: Number 005634. 
+I've been incarcerated for 39 and one half years. 
+My name is Diane Hamill Metzger. 
+I'm from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home. 
+(Applause) Lena Brown: I am 004867. 
+Incarcerated 40 years. 
+My name is Lena Brown, and I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home. 
+(Applause) Trina Garnett: My number is 005545. 
+My name is Trina Garnett, I've been incarcerated for 37 years, since I was 14 years old. 
+Born and raised in Chester, Pennsylvania, and this is not my home. 
+(Applause) Will I see my family or die alone? 
+Or die alone? 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was about three or four years old, I remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers, and I remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book, to feel the picture they were discussing. 
+And my mum said, "" Darling, remember that you can't see and you can't feel the picture and you can't feel the print on the page. "" And I thought to myself, "" But that's what I want to do. 
+I love stories. I want to read. "" Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true. 
+I was born premature by about 10 weeks, which resulted in my blindness, some 64 years ago. 
+The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, and it's now very rare in the developed world. 
+Little did I know, lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that I'd been born at the right place and the right time, that I was in a country where I could participate in the technological revolution. 
+There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet, but those of us who've shared in the technological changes mainly come from North America, Europe, Japan and other developed parts of the world. 
+Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but I think they've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group. 
+And so I want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person I am today. 
+It's an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology, and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. 
+But let me tell you a bit about it today. 
+When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille. 
+It's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper, and I can feel them with my fingers. 
+In fact, I think they're putting up my grade six report. 
+I don't know where Julian Morrow got that from. 
+(Laughter) I was pretty good in reading, but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. (Laughter) 
+When you leave the opera house, you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. 
+Look for it. Have you noticed it? 
+I do. I look for it all the time. 
+(Laughter) When I was at school, the books were transcribed by transcribers, voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so I'd have volumes to read, and that had been going on, mainly by women, since the late 19th century in this country, but it was the only way I could read. 
+When I was in high school, I got my first Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning. 
+I could have family and friends read me material, and I could then read it back as many times as I needed. 
+And it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers. 
+For example, when I studied at graduate school at Queen's University in Canada, the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me. 
+I gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. 
+As one of them said to me, "Ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment." 
+(Laughter) But think of it. These men, who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had, helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help. 
+Well, I went back and became an academic at Melbourne's Monash University, and for those 25 years, tape recorders were everything to me. 
+In fact, in my office in 1990, I had 18 miles of tape. 
+Students, family and friends all read me material. 
+Mrs. Lois Doery, whom I later came to call my surrogate mum, read me many thousands of hours onto tape. 
+One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today was that I was hoping that Lois would be here so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. 
+But sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. 
+But I thank you here, Lois, from this platform. 
+(Applause) I saw my first Apple computer in 1984, and I thought to myself, "This thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." 
+How very wrong I was. 
+In 1987, in the month our eldest son Gerard was born, I got my first blind computer, and it's actually here. 
+See it up there? 
+And you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. 
+(Laughter) It's a blind computer. (Laughter) 
+It's a Keynote Gold 84k, and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. (Laughter) 
+Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. (Laughter) I think there's more memory in my watch. 
+It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people. 
+Sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2005, but his memory lives on in my heart. 
+It meant, for the first time, I could read back what I had typed into it. 
+It had a speech synthesizer. 
+I'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. 
+This now allowed me to read back what I'd written and to enter the computer world, even with its 84k of memory. 
+In 1974, the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor, worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech. 
+Optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font, but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers, he developed a machine that could read any font. 
+And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, was launched on the 13th of January, 1976. 
+I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil in March 1989, and it blew me away, and in September 1989, the month that my associate professorship at Monash University was announced, the law school got one, and I could use it. 
+For the first time, I could read what I wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner. 
+I didn't have to be nice to people! 
+(Laughter) I no longer would be censored. 
+For example, I was too shy then, and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material. 
+(Laughter) But, you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and — (Laughter) (Applause) Now, the Kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop. 
+That's what it's shrunk to. 
+And now I can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. 
+I can keep up with my friends. 
+There are many people who have helped me in my life, and many that I haven't met. 
+One is another American inventor Ted Henter. 
+Ted was a motorcycle racer, but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight, which is devastating if you're trying to ride motorbikes. 
+He then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier. 
+But in 1989, he teamed up with Bill Joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the Net or from what was on the computer. 
+It's called JAWS, Job Access With Speech, and it sounds like this. 
+(JAWS speaking) Ron McCallum: Isn't that slow? 
+(Laughter) You see, if I read like that, I'd fall asleep. 
+I slowed it down for you. 
+I'm going to ask that we play it at the speed I read it. 
+Can we play that one? 
+(JAWS speaking) (Laughter) RM: You know, when you're marking student essays, you want to get through them fairly quickly. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) This technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iPhone and on yours as well. 
+But, you know, I find reading with machines a very lonely process. 
+I grew up with family, friends, reading to me, and I loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading. 
+Do you love being read to? 
+And one of my most enduring memories is in 1999, Mary reading to me and the children down near Manly Beach "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." 
+Isn't that a great book? 
+I still love being close to someone reading to me. 
+But I wouldn't give up the technology, because it's allowed me to lead a great life. 
+Of course, talking books for the blind predated all this technology. 
+After all, the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s, and now we put talking books on CDs using the digital access system known as DAISY. 
+But when I'm reading with synthetic voices, I love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice. 
+Now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities. 
+Many websites we can't read using JAWS and the other technologies. 
+Websites are often very visual, and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren't labeled and buttons that aren't labeled, and that's why the World Wide Web Consortium 3, known as W3C, has developed worldwide standards for the Internet. 
+And we want all Internet users or Internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field. 
+There are other barriers brought about by our laws. 
+For example, Australia, like about one third of the world's countries, has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons. 
+But those books can't travel across borders. 
+For example, in Spain, there are a 100,000 accessible books in Spanish. 
+In Argentina, there are 50,000. 
+In no other Latin American country are there more than a couple of thousand. 
+But it's not legal to transport the books from Spain to Latin America. 
+There are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc., but they can't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where English is the first and the second language. 
+And remember I was telling you about Harry Potter. 
+Well, because we can't transport books across borders, there had to be separate versions read in all the different English-speaking countries: Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all had to have separate readings of Harry Potter. 
+And that's why, next month in Morocco, a meeting is taking place between all the countries. 
+It's something that a group of countries and the World Blind Union are advocating, a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception, we can transport those books across borders and give life to people, particularly in developing countries, blind people who don't have the books to read. 
+I want that to happen. 
+(Applause) My life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do, whether it be at the University of Sydney Law School, where I served a term as dean, or now as I sit on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in Geneva. 
+I've indeed been a very fortunate human being. 
+I wonder what the future will hold. 
+The technology will advance even further, but I can still remember my mum saying, 60 years ago, "" Remember, darling, you'll never be able to read the print with your fingers. "" I'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers, volunteer readers and passionate inventors, has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world. 
+I'd like to thank my researcher Hannah Martin, who is my slide clicker, who clicks the slides, and my wife, Professor Mary Crock, who's the light of my life, is coming on to collect me. 
+I want to thank her too. 
+I think I have to say goodbye now. 
+Bless you. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Yay! (Applause) Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. (Applause) 
+
+On the 30th of May, 1832, a gunshot was heard ringing out across the 13th arrondissement in Paris. 
+(Gunshot) A peasant, who was walking to market that morning, ran towards where the gunshot had come from, and found a young man writhing in agony on the floor, clearly shot by a dueling wound. 
+The young man's name was Evariste Galois. 
+He was a well-known revolutionary in Paris at the time. 
+Galois was taken to the local hospital where he died the next day in the arms of his brother. 
+And the last words he said to his brother were, "" Don't cry for me, Alfred. 
+I need all the courage I can muster to die at the age of 20. "" It wasn't, in fact, revolutionary politics for which Galois was famous. 
+But a few years earlier, while still at school, he'd actually cracked one of the big mathematical problems at the time. 
+And he wrote to the academicians in Paris, trying to explain his theory. 
+But the academicians couldn't understand anything that he wrote. 
+(Laughter) This is how he wrote most of his mathematics. 
+So, the night before that duel, he realized this possibly is his last chance to try and explain his great breakthrough. 
+So he stayed up the whole night, writing away, trying to explain his ideas. 
+And as the dawn came up and he went to meet his destiny, he left this pile of papers on the table for the next generation. 
+Maybe the fact that he stayed up all night doing mathematics was the fact that he was such a bad shot that morning and got killed. 
+But contained inside those documents was a new language, a language to understand one of the most fundamental concepts of science — namely symmetry. 
+Now, symmetry is almost nature's language. 
+It helps us to understand so many different bits of the scientific world. 
+For example, molecular structure. 
+What crystals are possible, we can understand through the mathematics of symmetry. 
+In microbiology you really don't want to get a symmetrical object, because they are generally rather nasty. 
+The swine flu virus, at the moment, is a symmetrical object. 
+And it uses the efficiency of symmetry to be able to propagate itself so well. 
+But on a larger scale of biology, actually symmetry is very important, because it actually communicates genetic information. 
+I've taken two pictures here and I've made them artificially symmetrical. 
+And if I ask you which of these you find more beautiful, you're probably drawn to the lower two. 
+Because it is hard to make symmetry. 
+And if you can make yourself symmetrical, you're sending out a sign that you've got good genes, you've got a good upbringing and therefore you'll make a good mate. 
+So symmetry is a language which can help to communicate genetic information. 
+Symmetry can also help us to explain what's happening in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. 
+Or what's not happening in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. 
+To be able to make predictions about the fundamental particles we might see there, it seems that they are all facets of some strange symmetrical shape in a higher dimensional space. 
+And I think Galileo summed up, very nicely, the power of mathematics to understand the scientific world around us. 
+He wrote, "" The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. 
+It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. "" But it's not just scientists who are interested in symmetry. 
+Artists too love to play around with symmetry. 
+They also have a slightly more ambiguous relationship with it. 
+Here is Thomas Mann talking about symmetry in "" The Magic Mountain. "" He has a character describing the snowflake, and he says he "" shuddered at its perfect precision, found it deathly, the very marrow of death. "" But what artists like to do is to set up expectations of symmetry and then break them. 
+And a beautiful example of this I found, actually, when I visited a colleague of mine in Japan, Professor Kurokawa. 
+And he took me up to the temples in Nikko. 
+And just after this photo was taken we walked up the stairs. 
+And the gateway you see behind has eight columns, with beautiful symmetrical designs on them. 
+Seven of them are exactly the same, and the eighth one is turned upside down. 
+And I said to Professor Kurokawa, "" Wow, the architects must have really been kicking themselves when they realized that they'd made a mistake and put this one upside down. "" And he said, "" No, no, no. It was a very deliberate act. "" And he referred me to this lovely quote from the Japanese "" Essays in Idleness "" from the 14th century, in which the essayist wrote, "" In everything, uniformity is undesirable. 
+Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. "" Even when building the Imperial Palace, they always leave one place unfinished. 
+But if I had to choose one building in the world to be cast out on a desert island, to live the rest of my life, being an addict of symmetry, I would probably choose the Alhambra in Granada. 
+This is a palace celebrating symmetry. 
+Recently I took my family — we do these rather kind of nerdy mathematical trips, which my family love. 
+This is my son Tamer. You can see he's really enjoying our mathematical trip to the Alhambra. 
+But I wanted to try and enrich him. 
+I think one of the problems about school mathematics is it doesn't look at how mathematics is embedded in the world we live in. 
+So, I wanted to open his eyes up to how much symmetry is running through the Alhambra. 
+You see it already. Immediately you go in, the reflective symmetry in the water. 
+But it's on the walls where all the exciting things are happening. 
+The Moorish artists were denied the possibility to draw things with souls. 
+So they explored a more geometric art. 
+And so what is symmetry? 
+The Alhambra somehow asks all of these questions. 
+What is symmetry? When [there] are two of these walls, do they have the same symmetries? 
+Can we say whether they discovered all of the symmetries in the Alhambra? 
+And it was Galois who produced a language to be able to answer some of these questions. 
+For Galois, symmetry — unlike for Thomas Mann, which was something still and deathly — for Galois, symmetry was all about motion. 
+What can you do to a symmetrical object, move it in some way, so it looks the same as before you moved it? 
+I like to describe it as the magic trick moves. 
+What can you do to something? You close your eyes. 
+I do something, put it back down again. 
+It looks like it did before it started. 
+So, for example, the walls in the Alhambra — I can take all of these tiles, and fix them at the yellow place, rotate them by 90 degrees, put them all back down again and they fit perfectly down there. 
+And if you open your eyes again, you wouldn't know that they'd moved. 
+But it's the motion that really characterizes the symmetry inside the Alhambra. 
+But it's also about producing a language to describe this. 
+And the power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language. 
+So I'm going to take you through, perhaps push you a little bit mathematically — so brace yourselves — push you a little bit to understand how this language works, which enables us to capture what is symmetry. 
+So, let's take these two symmetrical objects here. 
+Let's take the twisted six-pointed starfish. 
+What can I do to the starfish which makes it look the same? 
+Well, there I rotated it by a sixth of a turn, and still it looks like it did before I started. 
+I could rotate it by a third of a turn, or a half a turn, or put it back down on its image, or two thirds of a turn. 
+And a fifth symmetry, I can rotate it by five sixths of a turn. 
+And those are things that I can do to the symmetrical object that make it look like it did before I started. 
+Now, for Galois, there was actually a sixth symmetry. 
+Can anybody think what else I could do to this which would leave it like I did before I started? 
+I can't flip it because I've put a little twist on it, haven't I? 
+It's got no reflective symmetry. 
+But what I could do is just leave it where it is, pick it up, and put it down again. 
+And for Galois this was like the zeroth symmetry. 
+Actually, the invention of the number zero was a very modern concept, seventh century A.D., by the Indians. 
+It seems mad to talk about nothing. 
+And this is the same idea. This is a symmetrical — so everything has symmetry, where you just leave it where it is. 
+So, this object has six symmetries. 
+And what about the triangle? 
+Well, I can rotate by a third of a turn clockwise or a third of a turn anticlockwise. 
+But now this has some reflectional symmetry. 
+I can reflect it in the line through X, or the line through Y, or the line through Z. 
+Five symmetries and then of course the zeroth symmetry where I just pick it up and leave it where it is. 
+So both of these objects have six symmetries. 
+Now, I'm a great believer that mathematics is not a spectator sport, and you have to do some mathematics in order to really understand it. 
+So here is a little question for you. 
+And I'm going to give a prize at the end of my talk for the person who gets closest to the answer. 
+The Rubik's Cube. 
+How many symmetries does a Rubik's Cube have? 
+How many things can I do to this object and put it down so it still looks like a cube? 
+Okay? So I want you to think about that problem as we go on, and count how many symmetries there are. 
+And there will be a prize for the person who gets closest at the end. 
+But let's go back down to symmetries that I got for these two objects. 
+What Galois realized: it isn't just the individual symmetries, but how they interact with each other which really characterizes the symmetry of an object. 
+If I do one magic trick move followed by another, the combination is a third magic trick move. 
+And here we see Galois starting to develop a language to see the substance of the things unseen, the sort of abstract idea of the symmetry underlying this physical object. 
+For example, what if I turn the starfish by a sixth of a turn, and then a third of a turn? 
+So I've given names. The capital letters, A, B, C, D, E, F, are the names for the rotations. 
+B, for example, rotates the little yellow dot to the B on the starfish. And so on. 
+So what if I do B, which is a sixth of a turn, followed by C, which is a third of a turn? 
+Well let's do that. A sixth of a turn, followed by a third of a turn, the combined effect is as if I had just rotated it by half a turn in one go. 
+So the little table here records how the algebra of these symmetries work. 
+I do one followed by another, the answer is it's rotation D, half a turn. 
+What I if I did it in the other order? Would it make any difference? 
+Let's see. Let's do the third of the turn first, and then the sixth of a turn. 
+Of course, it doesn't make any difference. 
+It still ends up at half a turn. 
+And there is some symmetry here in the way the symmetries interact with each other. 
+But this is completely different to the symmetries of the triangle. 
+Let's see what happens if we do two symmetries with the triangle, one after the other. 
+Let's do a rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise, and reflect in the line through X. 
+Well, the combined effect is as if I had just done the reflection in the line through Z to start with. 
+Now, let's do it in a different order. 
+Let's do the reflection in X first, followed by the rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise. 
+The combined effect, the triangle ends up somewhere completely different. 
+It's as if it was reflected in the line through Y. 
+Now it matters what order you do the operations in. 
+And this enables us to distinguish why the symmetries of these objects — they both have six symmetries. So why shouldn't we say they have the same symmetries? 
+But the way the symmetries interact enable us — we've now got a language to distinguish why these symmetries are fundamentally different. 
+And you can try this when you go down to the pub, later on. 
+Take a beer mat and rotate it by a quarter of a turn, then flip it. And then do it in the other order, and the picture will be facing in the opposite direction. 
+Now, Galois produced some laws for how these tables — how symmetries interact. 
+It's almost like little Sudoku tables. 
+You don't see any symmetry twice in any row or column. 
+And, using those rules, he was able to say that there are in fact only two objects with six symmetries. 
+And they'll be the same as the symmetries of the triangle, or the symmetries of the six-pointed starfish. 
+I think this is an amazing development. 
+It's almost like the concept of number being developed for symmetry. 
+In the front here, I've got one, two, three people sitting on one, two, three chairs. 
+The people and the chairs are very different, but the number, the abstract idea of the number, is the same. 
+And we can see this now: we go back to the walls in the Alhambra. 
+Here are two very different walls, very different geometric pictures. 
+But, using the language of Galois, we can understand that the underlying abstract symmetries of these things are actually the same. 
+For example, let's take this beautiful wall with the triangles with a little twist on them. 
+You can rotate them by a sixth of a turn if you ignore the colors. We're not matching up the colors. 
+But the shapes match up if I rotate by a sixth of a turn around the point where all the triangles meet. 
+What about the center of a triangle? I can rotate by a third of a turn around the center of the triangle, and everything matches up. 
+And then there is an interesting place halfway along an edge, where I can rotate by 180 degrees. 
+And all the tiles match up again. 
+So rotate along halfway along the edge, and they all match up. 
+Now, let's move to the very different-looking wall in the Alhambra. 
+And we find the same symmetries here, and the same interaction. 
+So, there was a sixth of a turn. A third of a turn where the Z pieces meet. 
+And the half a turn is halfway between the six pointed stars. 
+And although these walls look very different, Galois has produced a language to say that in fact the symmetries underlying these are exactly the same. 
+And it's a symmetry we call 6-3-2. 
+Here is another example in the Alhambra. 
+This is a wall, a ceiling, and a floor. 
+They all look very different. But this language allows us to say that they are representations of the same symmetrical abstract object, which we call 4-4-2. Nothing to do with football, but because of the fact that there are two places where you can rotate by a quarter of a turn, and one by half a turn. 
+Now, this power of the language is even more, because Galois can say, "" Did the Moorish artists discover all of the possible symmetries on the walls in the Alhambra? "" And it turns out they almost did. 
+You can prove, using Galois' language, there are actually only 17 different symmetries that you can do in the walls in the Alhambra. 
+And they, if you try to produce a different wall with this 18th one, it will have to have the same symmetries as one of these 17. 
+But these are things that we can see. 
+And the power of Galois' mathematical language is it also allows us to create symmetrical objects in the unseen world, beyond the two-dimensional, three-dimensional, all the way through to the four- or five- or infinite-dimensional space. 
+And that's where I work. I create mathematical objects, symmetrical objects, using Galois' language, in very high dimensional spaces. 
+So I think it's a great example of things unseen, which the power of mathematical language allows you to create. 
+So, like Galois, I stayed up all last night creating a new mathematical symmetrical object for you, and I've got a picture of it here. 
+Well, unfortunately it isn't really a picture. If I could have my board at the side here, great, excellent. 
+Here we are. Unfortunately, I can't show you a picture of this symmetrical object. 
+But here is the language which describes how the symmetries interact. 
+Now, this new symmetrical object does not have a name yet. 
+Now, people like getting their names on things, on craters on the moon or new species of animals. 
+So I'm going to give you the chance to get your name on a new symmetrical object which hasn't been named before. 
+And this thing — species die away, and moons kind of get hit by meteors and explode — but this mathematical object will live forever. 
+It will make you immortal. 
+In order to win this symmetrical object, what you have to do is to answer the question I asked you at the beginning. 
+How many symmetries does a Rubik's Cube have? 
+Okay, I'm going to sort you out. 
+Rather than you all shouting out, I want you to count how many digits there are in that number. Okay? 
+If you've got it as a factorial, you've got to expand the factorials. 
+Okay, now if you want to play, I want you to stand up, okay? 
+If you think you've got an estimate for how many digits, right — we've already got one competitor here. 
+If you all stay down he wins it automatically. 
+Okay. Excellent. So we've got four here, five, six. 
+Great. Excellent. That should get us going. All right. 
+Anybody with five or less digits, you've got to sit down, because you've underestimated. 
+Five or less digits. So, if you're in the tens of thousands you've got to sit down. 
+60 digits or more, you've got to sit down. 
+You've overestimated. 
+20 digits or less, sit down. 
+How many digits are there in your number? 
+Two? So you should have sat down earlier. 
+(Laughter) Let's have the other ones, who sat down during the 20, up again. Okay? 
+If I told you 20 or less, stand up. 
+Because this one. I think there were a few here. 
+The people who just last sat down. 
+Okay, how many digits do you have in your number? 
+(Laughs) 21. Okay good. How many do you have in yours? 
+18. So it goes to this lady here. 
+21 is the closest. 
+It actually has — the number of symmetries in the Rubik's cube has 25 digits. 
+So now I need to name this object. 
+So, what is your name? 
+I need your surname. Symmetrical objects generally — spell it for me. 
+G-H-E-Z No, SO2 has already been used, actually, in the mathematical language. So you can't have that one. 
+So Ghez, there we go. That's your new symmetrical object. 
+You are now immortal. 
+(Applause) And if you'd like your own symmetrical object, I have a project raising money for a charity in Guatemala, where I will stay up all night and devise an object for you, for a donation to this charity to help kids get into education in Guatemala. 
+And I think what drives me, as a mathematician, are those things which are not seen, the things that we haven't discovered. 
+It's all the unanswered questions which make mathematics a living subject. 
+And I will always come back to this quote from the Japanese "" Essays in Idleness "": "" In everything, uniformity is undesirable. 
+Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to take you on a journey very quickly. 
+We put together, very quickly, a washroom. 
+
+By raising your hand, how many of you know at least one person on the screen? 
+
+Your company launches a search for an open position. 
+The applications start rolling in, and the qualified candidates are identified. 
+Now the choosing begins. 
+Person A: Ivy League, 4.0, flawless resume, great recommendations. 
+All the right stuff. 
+Person B: state school, fair amount of job hopping, and odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress. 
+But remember — both are qualified. 
+So I ask you: who are you going to pick? 
+My colleagues and I created very official terms to describe two distinct categories of candidates. 
+We call A "" the Silver Spoon, "" the one who clearly had advantages and was destined for success. 
+And we call B "" the Scrapper, "" the one who had to fight against tremendous odds to get to the same point. 
+You just heard a human resources director refer to people as Silver Spoons and Scrappers — (Laughter) which is not exactly politically correct and sounds a bit judgmental. 
+But before my human resources certification gets revoked — (Laughter) let me explain. 
+A resume tells a story. 
+And over the years, I've learned something about people whose experiences read like a patchwork quilt, that makes me stop and fully consider them before tossing their resumes away. 
+A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, unpredictability. 
+Or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. 
+At the very least, the Scrapper deserves an interview. 
+To be clear, I don't hold anything against the Silver Spoon; getting into and graduating from an elite university takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. 
+But if your whole life has been engineered toward success, how will you handle the tough times? 
+One person I hired felt that because he attended an elite university, there were certain assignments that were beneath him, like temporarily doing manual labor to better understand an operation. 
+Eventually, he quit. 
+But on the flip side, what happens when your whole life is destined for failure and you actually succeed? 
+I want to urge you to interview the Scrapper. 
+I know a lot about this because I am a Scrapper. 
+Before I was born, my father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he couldn't hold a job in spite of his brilliance. 
+Our lives were one part "" Cuckoo's Nest, "" one part "" Awakenings "" and one part "" A Beautiful Mind. "" (Laughter) I'm the fourth of five children raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. 
+We never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, and for most of my childhood, we didn't even have a telephone. 
+So I was highly motivated to understand the relationship between business success and Scrappers, because my life could easily have turned out very differently. 
+As I met successful business people and read profiles of high-powered leaders, I noticed some commonality. 
+Many of them had experienced early hardships, anywhere from poverty, abandonment, death of a parent while young, to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence. 
+The conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress, and there's been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. 
+But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight: that even the worst circumstances can result in growth and transformation. 
+A remarkable and counterintuitive phenomenon has been discovered, which scientists call Post Traumatic Growth. 
+In one study designed to measure the effects of adversity on children at risk, among a subset of 698 children who experienced the most severe and extreme conditions, fully one-third grew up to lead healthy, successful and productive lives. 
+In spite of everything and against tremendous odds, they succeeded. 
+One-third. 
+Take this resume. 
+This guy's parents give him up for adoption. 
+He never finishes college. 
+He job-hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia. 
+Would you hire this guy? 
+His name is Steve Jobs. 
+In a study of the world's most highly successful entrepreneurs, it turns out a disproportionate number have dyslexia. 
+In the US, 35 percent of the entrepreneurs studied had dyslexia. 
+What's remarkable — among those entrepreneurs who experience post traumatic growth, they now view their learning disability as a desirable difficulty which provided them an advantage because they became better listeners and paid greater attention to detail. 
+They don't think they are who they are in spite of adversity, they know they are who they are because of adversity. 
+They embrace their trauma and hardships as key elements of who they've become, and know that without those experiences, they might not have developed the muscle and grit required to become successful. 
+One of my colleagues had his life completely upended as a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966. 
+At age 13, his parents were relocated to the countryside, the schools were closed and he was left alone in Beijing to fend for himself until 16, when he got a job in a clothing factory. 
+But instead of accepting his fate, he made a resolution that he would continue his formal education. 
+Eleven years later, when the political landscape changed, he heard about a highly selective university admissions test. 
+He had three months to learn the entire curriculum of middle and high school. 
+So, every day he came home from the factory, took a nap, studied until 4am, went back to work and repeated this cycle every day for three months. 
+He did it, he succeeded. 
+His commitment to his education was unwavering, and he never lost hope. 
+Today, he holds a master's degree, and his daughters each have degrees from Cornell and Harvard. 
+Scrappers are propelled by the belief that the only person you have full control over is yourself. 
+When things don't turn out well, Scrappers ask, "" What can I do differently to create a better result? "" Scrappers have a sense of purpose that prevents them from giving up on themselves, kind of like if you've survived poverty, a crazy father and several muggings, you figure, "" Business challenges? — (Laughter) Really? 
+Piece of cake. I got this. "" (Laughter) And that reminds me — humor. 
+Scrappers know that humor gets you through the tough times, and laughter helps you change your perspective. 
+And finally, there are relationships. 
+People who overcome adversity don't do it alone. 
+Somewhere along the way, they find people who bring out the best in them and who are invested in their success. 
+Having someone you can count on no matter what is essential to overcoming adversity. 
+I was lucky. 
+In my first job after college, I didn't have a car, so I carpooled across two bridges with a woman who was the president's assistant. 
+She watched me work and encouraged me to focus on my future and not dwell on my past. 
+Along the way I've met many people who've provided me brutally honest feedback, advice and mentorship. 
+These people don't mind that I once worked as a singing waitress to help pay for college. 
+(Laughter) I'll leave you with one final, valuable insight. 
+Companies that are committed to diversity and inclusive practices tend to support Scrappers and outperform their peers. 
+According to DiversityInc, a study of their top 50 companies for diversity outperformed the S & P 500 by 25 percent. 
+So back to my original question. 
+Who are you going to bet on: Silver Spoon or Scrapper? 
+I say choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose. 
+Hire the Scrapper. 
+(Applause) 
+
+As technology progresses, and as it advances, many of us assume that these advances make us more intelligent, make us smarter and more connected to the world. 
+And what I'd like to argue is that that's not necessarily the case, as progress is simply a word for change, and with change you gain something, but you also lose something. 
+And to really illustrate this point, what I'd like to do is to show you how technology has dealt with a very simple, a very common, an everyday question. 
+And that question is this. 
+What time is it? What time is it? 
+If you glance at your iPhone, it's so simple to tell the time. 
+But, I'd like to ask you, how would you tell the time if you didn't have an iPhone? 
+How would you tell the time, say, 600 years ago? 
+How would you do it? 
+Well, the way you would do it is by using a device that's called an astrolabe. 
+So, an astrolabe is relatively unknown in today's world. 
+But, at the time, in the 13th century, it was the gadget of the day. 
+It was the world's first popular computer. 
+And it was a device that, in fact, is a model of the sky. 
+So, the different parts of the astrolabe, in this particular type, the rete corresponds to the positions of the stars. 
+The plate corresponds to a coordinate system. 
+And the mater has some scales and puts it all together. 
+If you were an educated child, you would know how to not only use the astrolabe, you would also know how to make an astrolabe. 
+And we know this because the first treatise on the astrolabe, the first technical manual in the English language, was written by Geoffrey Chaucer. 
+Yes, that Geoffrey Chaucer, in 1391, to his little Lewis, his 11-year-old son. 
+And in this book, little Lewis would know the big idea. 
+And the central idea that makes this computer work is this thing called stereographic projection. 
+And basically, the concept is, how do you represent the three-dimensional image of the night sky that surrounds us onto a flat, portable, two-dimensional surface. 
+The idea is actually relatively simple. 
+Imagine that that Earth is at the center of the universe, and surrounding it is the sky projected onto a sphere. 
+Each point on the surface of the sphere is mapped through the bottom pole, onto a flat surface, where it is then recorded. 
+So the North Star corresponds to the center of the device. 
+The ecliptic, which is the path of the sun, moon, and planets correspond to an offset circle. 
+The bright stars correspond to little daggers on the rete. 
+And the altitude corresponds to the plate system. 
+Now, the real genius of the astrolabe is not just the projection. 
+The real genius is that it brings together two coordinate systems so they fit perfectly. 
+There is the position of the sun, moon and planets on the movable rete. 
+And then there is their location on the sky as seen from a certain latitude on the back plate. Okay? 
+So how would you use this device? 
+Well, let me first back up for a moment. 
+This is an astrolabe. Pretty impressive, isn't it? 
+And so, this astrolabe is on loan from us from the Oxford School of — Museum of History. 
+And you can see the different components. 
+This is the mater, the scales on the back. 
+This is the rete. Okay. Do you see that? 
+That's the movable part of the sky. 
+And in the back you can see a spider web pattern. 
+And that spider web pattern corresponds to the local coordinates in the sky. 
+This is a rule device. And on the back are some other devices, measuring tools and scales, to be able to make some calculations. Okay? 
+You know, I've always wanted one of these. 
+For my thesis I actually built one of these out of paper. 
+And this one, this is a replica from a 15th-century device. 
+And it's worth probably about three MacBook Pros. 
+But a real one would cost about as much as my house, and the house next to it, and actually every house on the block, on both sides of the street, maybe a school thrown in, and some — you know, a church. 
+They are just incredibly expensive. 
+But let me show you how to work this device. 
+So let's go to step one. 
+First thing that you do is you select a star in the night sky, if you're telling time at night. 
+So, tonight, if it's clear you'll be able to see the summer triangle. 
+And there is a bright star called Deneb. So let's select Deneb. 
+Second, is you measure the altitude of Deneb. 
+So, step two, I hold the device up, and then I sight its altitude there so I can see it clearly now. 
+And then I measure its altitude. 
+So, it's about 26 degrees. You can't see it from over there. 
+Step three is identify the star on the front of the device. 
+Deneb is there. I can tell. 
+Step four is I then move the rete, move the sky, so the altitude of the star corresponds to the scale on the back. 
+Okay, so when that happens everything lines up. 
+I have here a model of the sky that corresponds to the real sky. Okay? 
+So, it is, in a sense, holding a model of the universe in my hands. 
+And then finally, I take a rule, and move the rule to a date line which then tells me the time here. 
+Right. So, that's how the device is used. 
+(Laughter) So, I know what you're thinking: "That's a lot of work, isn't it? Isn't it a ton of work to be able to tell the time?" 
+as you glance at your iPod to just check out the time. 
+But there is a difference between the two, because with your iPod you can tell — or your iPhone, you can tell exactly what the time is, with precision. 
+The way little Lewis would tell the time is by a picture of the sky. 
+He would know where things would fit in the sky. 
+He would not only know what time it was, he would also know where the sun would rise, and how it would move across the sky. 
+He would know what time the sun would rise, and what time it would set. 
+And he would know that for essentially every celestial object in the heavens. 
+So, in computer graphics and computer user interface design, there is a term called affordances. 
+So, affordances are the qualities of an object that allow us to perform an action with it. 
+And what the astrolabe does is it allows us, it affords us, to connect to the night sky, to look up into the night sky and be much more — to see the visible and the invisible together. 
+So, that's just one use. Incredible, there is probably 350, 400 uses. 
+In fact, there is a text, and that has over a thousand uses of this first computer. 
+On the back there is scales and measurements for terrestrial navigation. 
+You can survey with it. The city of Baghdad was surveyed with it. 
+It can be used for calculating mathematical equations of all different types. 
+And it would take a full university course to illustrate it. 
+Astrolabes have an incredible history. 
+They are over 2,000 years old. 
+The concept of stereographic projection originated in 330 B.C. 
+And the astrolabes come in many different sizes and shapes and forms. 
+There is portable ones. There is large display ones. 
+And I think what is common to all astrolabes is that they are beautiful works of art. 
+There is a quality of craftsmanship and precision that is just astonishing and remarkable. 
+Astrolabes, like every technology, do evolve over time. 
+So, the earliest retes, for example, were very simple and primitive. 
+And advancing retes became cultural emblems. 
+This is one from Oxford. 
+And I find this one really extraordinary because the rete pattern is completely symmetrical, and it accurately maps a completely asymmetrical, or random sky. 
+How cool is that? This is just amazing. 
+So, would little Lewis have an astrolabe? 
+Probably not one made of brass. He would have one made out of wood, or paper. And the vast majority of this first computer was a portable device that you could keep in the back of your pocket. 
+So, what does the astrolabe inspire? 
+Well, I think the first thing is that it reminds us just how resourceful people were, our forebears were, years and years ago. 
+It's just an incredible device. 
+Every technology advances. 
+Every technology is transformed and moved by others. 
+And what we gain with a new technology, of course, is precision and accuracy. 
+But what we lose, I think, is an accurate — a felt sense of the sky, a sense of context. 
+Knowing the sky, knowing your relationship with the sky, is the center of the real answer to knowing what time it is. 
+So, it's — I think astrolabes are just remarkable devices. 
+And so, what can you learn from these devices? 
+Well, primarily that there is a subtle knowledge that we can connect with the world. 
+And astrolabes return us to this subtle sense of how things all fit together, and also how we connect to the world. 
+Thanks very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I run a design studio in New York. 
+Every seven years, I close it for one year to pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish during the regular working year. 
+In that year, we are not available for any of our clients. 
+We are totally closed. 
+And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time. 
+I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves, music and design. 
+And we created videos and packaging for many musicians that you know, and for even more that you've never heard of. 
+As I realized, just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it. 
+And I get, over time, bored by them. 
+And for sure, in our case, our work started to look the same. 
+You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. 
+Quite the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. 
+So I decided to close it down for one year. 
+Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there is another 40 years that's really reserved for working. 
+And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. 
+And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. 
+(Applause) That's clearly enjoyable for myself. 
+But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of these years flows back into the company and into society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two. 
+There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who defined his work into three different levels. 
+And they rang very true for me. 
+I can see my work as a job. I do it for money. 
+I likely already look forward to the weekend on Thursdays. 
+And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling mechanism. 
+In a career I'm definitely more engaged. 
+But at the same time, there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my while? 
+While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it also if I wouldn't be financially compensated for it. 
+I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. 
+I had spent my first sabbatical in New York City. 
+Looked for something different for the second one. 
+Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I knew them too well. So Asia it was. 
+The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. 
+Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on, so Bali it was. 
+It's a wonderful, very craft-oriented society. 
+I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away. 
+There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. 
+However the first thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were definitely around heavily. 
+And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my morning walks. 
+So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. 
+Every single dog on one tee shirt. 
+As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt. (Laughter) 
+Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. 
+And then just leave it all to them. 
+And I don't have to do anything. 
+So I looked for furniture. 
+And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn't afford. 
+And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't like. 
+So one of the things that we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. 
+This one, of course, still works with the wild dogs. 
+It's not quite finished yet. 
+And I think by the time this lamp came about, (Laughter) I had finally made peace with those dogs. (Laughter) 
+Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. 
+It's called Be Here Now. 
+It includes 330 compasses. 
+And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them. 
+Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. 
+I also started meditating for the first time in my life in Bali. 
+And at the same time, I'm extremely aware how boring it is to hear about other people's happinesses. 
+So I will not really go too far into it. 
+Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually, I got it through the TED book club. 
+I think it took me four years to finally read it, while on sabbatical. 
+And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the book while he was on sabbatical. 
+And I'll show you a couple of people that did well by pursuing sabbaticals. 
+This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, El Bulli. 
+His restaurant is open seven months every year. 
+He closes it down for five months to experiment with a full kitchen staff. 
+His latest numbers are fairly impressive. 
+He can seat, throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. 
+And he has 2.2 million requests for reservations. 
+If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it's 12.5 percent of my time. 
+And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine, 3M since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever they want. 
+There is some good successes. 
+Scotch tape came out of this program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal time for 3M. 
+Google, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their software engineers to pursue their own personal projects. 
+Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? 
+That's about five percent of everybody. 
+So I'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their hand up. 
+Talk to them about if it was successful or not. 
+I've found that finding out about what I'm going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it. 
+When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I put it into my daily planner book. 
+And then I told as many, many people as I possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later on. 
+(Laughter) In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. 
+I had thought that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not. 
+I just, without a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests, those I all said no to, but other little requests. 
+Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things like that. 
+So I became my own intern. 
+(Laughter) And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much like in grade school. 
+What does it say here? Monday, 8 to 9: story writing; 9 to 10: future thinking. 
+Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. 
+And that actually, specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really well for me. 
+What came out of it? 
+I really got close to design again. 
+I had fun. 
+Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. 
+Because of the improved quality, we could ask for higher prices. 
+And probably most importantly, basically everything we've done in the seven years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single year. 
+And I'll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years following that sabbatical. 
+One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was that sameness is so incredibly overrated. 
+This whole idea that everything needs to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not for everybody else. 
+We were asked to design an identity for Casa da Musica, the Rem Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal. 
+And even though I desired to do an identity that doesn't use the architecture, I failed at that. 
+And mostly also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of Porto, where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning. 
+Which I understood after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular English, basically as logo making. 
+And I understood that the building itself was a logo. 
+So then it became quite easy. 
+We put a mask on it, looked at it deep down in the ground, checked it out from all sides, west, north, south, east, top and bottom. 
+Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine write a piece of software, the Casa da Musica Logo Generator. 
+That's connected to a scanner. 
+You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image. 
+And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa da Musica Beethoven logo. 
+Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in handy, because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster is exactly the same. 
+So it will always fit together, conceptually, of course. 
+If Zappa's music is performed, it gets its own logo. 
+Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical Brothers, who all performed there, get their own Casa da Musica logo. 
+It works the same internally with the president or the musical director, whose Casa da Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. 
+There is a full-blown orchestra living inside the building. 
+It has a more transparent identity. 
+The truck they go on tour with. 
+Or there's a smaller contemporary orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title. 
+And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo type and create advertising out of it. 
+Like this Donna Toney poster, or Chopin, or Mozart, or La Monte Young. 
+You can take the shape and make typography out of it. 
+You can grow it underneath the skin. 
+You can have a poster for a family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house or a weekly program, as well as educational services. 
+Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the language of design for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. 
+On one hand I have nothing against selling. 
+My parents are both salespeople. 
+But I did feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only promote with it? 
+There must be something else. 
+And the whole series of work came out of it. 
+Some of you might have seen it. 
+I showed some of it at earlier TEDs before, under the title "" Things I've Learned in My Life So Far. "" I'll just show two now. 
+This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in this gallery in New York. 
+It says, "" Self-confidence produces fine results. "" This is after a week. 
+After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. 
+And you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. 
+These are some pictures visitors sent to me. 
+(Laughter) And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something. 
+We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. 
+We got 250,000 coins from the central bank, at different darknesses. 
+So we got brand new ones, shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. 
+And with the help of 100 volunteers, over a week, created this fairly floral typography that spelled, "" Obsessions make my life worse and my work better. "" And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience you would be in between, "" Should I really take as much money as I can? 
+Or should I leave the piece intact as it is right now? "" While we built all this up during that week, with the 100 volunteers, a good number of the neighbors surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. 
+So when it was finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors called the police. 
+And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to protect the artwork. 
+And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police headquarters. 
+(Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see them sweeping right here. 
+That's the police, getting rid of it all. 
+So after eight hours that's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. 
+(Laughter) We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali. 
+It's a movie about happiness. 
+And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. 
+They weren't quite slick enough. 
+So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty job. 
+And I think she overdid it. 
+Just a bit too ornamental. 
+And my studio is very close to the monkey forest. 
+And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy. 
+So we asked those guys to do it again. 
+They did a fine job, but had a couple of readability problems. 
+So of course whatever you don't really do yourself doesn't really get done properly. 
+That film we'll be working on for the next two years. 
+So it's going to be a while. 
+And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not really be worthwhile. 
+Then you can of course always go and see this guy. 
+Video: (Laughter) And I'm happy I'm alive. 
+I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive. 
+Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I ’ d like to dedicate this next song to Carmelo, who was put to sleep a couple of days ago, because he got too old. 
+But apparently he was a very nice dog and he always let the cat sleep in the dog bed. 
+♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫ ♫ I'm just a'walking my dog, singing my song, strolling along. ♫ ♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, catching some sun. We can't go wrong. ♫ ♫ My life was lonely and blue. ♫ ♫ Yeah, I was sad as a sailor, ♫ ♫ I was an angry 'un too. ♫ ♫ Then there was you — appeared when I was entangled with youth and fear, ♫ ♫ and nerves jingle jangled, vermouth and beer were getting me mangled up. ♫ ♫ But then I looked in your eyes ♫ 
+♫ and I was no more a failure. ♫ ♫ You looked so wacky and wise. ♫ ♫ And I said, "" Lord, I'm happy, 'cause I'm just a'walking my dog, ♫ ♫ catching some sun. We can't go wrong. "" ♫ ♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, singing our song, strolling along. ♫ ♫' Cause I don't care about your hating and your doubt, ♫ ♫ and I don't care what the politicians spout. ♫ ♫ If you need a companion, why, just go out to the pound, ♫ ♫ and find yourself a hound, and make that doggie proud, ♫ 
+♫ 'cause that's what it's all about. ♫ ♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫ ♫ My life was tragic and sad. ♫ ♫ I was the archetypal loser. ♫ ♫ I was a pageant gone bad. ♫ ♫ And then there was you — on time, and wagging your tail ♫ ♫ in the cutest mime that you was in jail. ♫ ♫ I said, "" Woof, be mine! "" and you gave a wail and then ♫ ♫ I was no longer alone. ♫ ♫ And I was no more a boozer. ♫ 
+♫ We'll make the happiest home. ♫ ♫ And I said, "" Lord, I'm happy, 'cause I ’ m just a'walking my dog, ♫ ♫ singing my song, strolling along. "" ♫ ♫ Yeah, it's just me and my dog, catching some sun. We can't go wrong, ♫ ♫' cause I don't care about your hating and your doubt, ♫ ♫ and I don ’ t care what the politicians spout. ♫ ♫ If you need a companion, why, just go out to the pound, ♫ ♫ and find yourself a hound, and make that doggie proud, ♫ ♫ 'cause that's what it's all about, ♫ ♫ that's what it's all about, ♫ 
+♫ that's what it's all abou-BOW-WOW-WOW-WOW ♫ ♫ that's what it's all about. ♫ ♫ (Dog panting noise) Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh. ♫ Good dog! 
+Thank you. 
+
+Twenty-five years ago, scientists at CERN created the World Wide Web. 
+Since then, the Internet has transformed the way we communicate, the way we do business, and even the way we live. 
+In many ways, the ideas that gave birth to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and so many others, have now really transformed our lives, and this has brought us many real benefits such as a more connected society. 
+However, there are also some downsides to this. 
+Today, the average person has an astounding amount of personal information online, and we add to this online information every single time we post on Facebook, each time we search on Google, and each time we send an email. 
+Now, many of us probably think, well, one email, there's nothing in there, right? 
+But if you consider a year's worth of emails, or maybe even a lifetime of email, collectively, this tells a lot. 
+It tells where we have been, who we have met, and in many ways, even what we're thinking about. 
+And the more scary part about this is our data now lasts forever, so your data can and will outlive you. 
+What has happened is that we've largely lost control over our data and also our privacy. 
+So this year, as the web turns 25, it's very important for us to take a moment and think about the implications of this. 
+We have to really think. 
+We've lost privacy, yes, but actually what we've also lost is the idea of privacy itself. 
+If you think about it, most of us here today probably remember what life was like before the Internet, but today, there's a new generation that is being taught from a very young age to share everything online, and this is a generation that is not going to remember when data was private. 
+So we keep going down this road, 20 years from now, the word 'privacy' is going to have a completely different meaning from what it means to you and I. 
+So, it's time for us to take a moment and think, is there anything we can do about this? 
+And I believe there is. 
+Let's take a look at one of the most widely used forms of communication in the world today: email. 
+Before the invention of email, we largely communicated using letters, and the process was quite simple. 
+You would first start by writing your message on a piece of paper, then you would place it into a sealed envelope, and from there, you would go ahead and send it after you put a stamp and address on it. 
+Unfortunately, today, when we actually send an email, we're not sending a letter. 
+What you are sending, in many ways, is actually a postcard, and it's a postcard in the sense that everybody that sees it from the time it leaves your computer to when it gets to the recipient can actually read the entire contents. 
+So, the solution to this has been known for some time, and there's many attempts to do it. 
+The most basic solution is to use encryption, and the idea is quite simple. 
+First, you encrypt the connection between your computer and the email server. 
+Then, you also encrypt the data as it sits on the server itself. 
+But there's a problem with this, and that is, the email servers also hold the encryption keys, so now you have a really big lock with a key placed right next to it. 
+But not only that, any government could lawfully ask for and get the key to your data, and this is all without you being aware of it. 
+So the way we fix this problem is actually relatively easy, in principle: You give everybody their own keys, and then you make sure the server doesn't actually have the keys. 
+This seems like common sense, right? 
+So the question that comes up is, why hasn't this been done yet? 
+Well, if we really think about it, we see that the business model of the Internet today really isn't compatible with privacy. 
+Just take a look at some of the biggest names on the web, and you see that advertising plays a huge role. 
+In fact, this year alone, advertising is 137 billion dollars, and to optimize the ads that are shown to us, companies have to know everything about us. 
+They need to know where we live, how old we are, what we like, what we don't like, and anything else they can get their hands on. 
+And if you think about it, the best way to get this information is really just to invade our privacy. 
+So these companies aren't going to give us our privacy. 
+If we want to have privacy online, what we have to do is we've got to go out and get it ourselves. 
+For many years, when it came to email, the only solution was something known as PGP, which was quite complicated and only accessible to the tech-savvy. 
+Here's a diagram that basically shows the process for encrypting and decrypting messages. 
+So needless to say, this is not a solution for everybody, and this actually is part of the problem, because if you think about communication, by definition, it involves having someone to communicate with. 
+So while PGP does a great job of what it's designed to do, for the people out there who can't understand how to use it, the option to communicate privately simply does not exist. 
+And this is a problem that we need to solve. 
+So if we want to have privacy online, the only way we can succeed is if we get the whole world on board, and this is only possible if we bring down the barrier to entry. 
+I think this is actually the key challenge that lies in the tech community. 
+What we really have to do is work and make privacy more accessible. 
+So last summer, when the Edward Snowden story came out, several colleagues and I decided to see if we could make this happen. 
+At that time, we were working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research at the world's largest particle collider, which collides protons, by the way. 
+We were all scientists, so we used our scientific creativity and came up with a very creative name for our project: ProtonMail. (Laughter) Many startups these days actually begin in people's garages or people's basements. 
+We were a bit different. 
+We started out at the CERN cafeteria, which actually is great, because look, you have all the food and water you could ever want. 
+But even better than this is that every day between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m., free of charge, the CERN cafeteria comes with several thousand scientists and engineers, and these guys basically know the answers to everything. 
+So it was in this environment that we began working. 
+What we actually want to do is we want to take your email and turn it into something that looks more like this, but more importantly, we want to do it in a way that you can't even tell that it's happened. 
+So to do this, we actually need a combination of technology and also design. 
+So how do we go about doing something like this? 
+Well, it's probably a good idea not to put the keys on the server. 
+So what we do is we generate encryption keys on your computer, and we don't generate a single key, but actually a pair of keys, so there's an RSA private key and an RSA public key, and these keys are mathematically connected. 
+So let's have a look and see how this works when multiple people communicate. 
+So here we have Bob and Alice, who want to communicate privately. 
+So the key challenge is to take Bob's message and to get it to Alice in such a way that the server cannot read that message. 
+So what we have to do is we have to encrypt it before it even leaves Bob's computer, and one of the tricks is, we encrypt it using the public key from Alice. 
+Now this encrypted data is sent through the server to Alice, and because the message was encrypted using Alice's public key, the only key that can now decrypt it is a private key that belongs to Alice, and it turns out Alice is the only person that actually has this key. 
+So we've now accomplished the objective, which is to get the message from Bob to Alice without the server being able to read what's going on. 
+Actually, what I've shown here is a highly simplified picture. 
+The reality is much more complex and it requires a lot of software that looks a bit like this. 
+And that's actually the key design challenge: How do we take all this complexity, all this software, and implement it in a way that the user cannot see it. 
+I think with ProtonMail, we have gotten pretty close to doing this. 
+So let's see how it works in practice. 
+Here, we've got Bob and Alice again, who also want to communicate securely. 
+They simply create accounts on ProtonMail, which is quite simple and takes a few moments, and all the key encryption and generation is happening automatically in the background as Bob is creating his account. 
+Once his account is created, he just clicks "" compose, "" and now he can write his email like he does today. 
+So he fills in his information, and then after that, all he has to do is click "" send, "" and just like that, without understanding cryptography, and without doing anything different from how he writes email today, Bob has just sent an encrypted message. 
+What we have here is really just the first step, but it shows that with improving technology, privacy doesn't have to be difficult, it doesn't have to be disruptive. 
+If we change the goal from maximizing ad revenue to protecting data, we can actually make it accessible. 
+Now, I know a question on everybody's minds is, okay, protecting privacy, this is a great goal, but can you actually do this without the tons of money that advertisements give you? 
+And I think the answer is actually yes, because today, we've reached a point where people around the world really understand how important privacy is, and when you have that, anything is possible. 
+Earlier this year, ProtonMail actually had so many users that we ran out of resources, and when this happened, our community of users got together and donated half a million dollars. 
+So this is just an example of what can happen when you bring the community together towards a common goal. 
+We can also leverage the world. 
+Right now, we have a quarter of a million people that have signed up for ProtonMail, and these people come from everywhere, and this really shows that privacy is not just an American or a European issue, it's a global issue that impacts all of us. 
+It's something that we really have to pay attention to going forward. 
+So what do we have to do to solve this problem? 
+Well, first of all, we need to support a different business model for the Internet, one that does not rely entirely on advertisements for revenue and for growth. 
+We actually need to build a new Internet where our privacy and our ability to control our data is first and foremost. 
+But even more importantly, we have to build an Internet where privacy is no longer just an option but is also the default. 
+We have done the first step with ProtonMail, but this is really just the first step in a very, very long journey. 
+The good news I can share with you guys today, the exciting news, is that we're not traveling alone. 
+The movement to protect people's privacy and freedom online is really gaining momentum, and today, there are dozens of projects from all around the world who are working together to improve our privacy. 
+These projects protect things from our chat to voice communications, also our file storage, our online search, our online browsing, and many other things. 
+And these projects are not backed by billions of dollars in advertising, but they've found support really from the people, from private individuals like you and I from all over the world. 
+This really matters, because ultimately, privacy depends on each and every one of us, and we have to protect it now because our online data is more than just a collection of ones and zeros. 
+It's actually a lot more than that. 
+It's our lives, our personal stories, our friends, our families, and in many ways, also our hopes and our aspirations. 
+We need to spend time now to really protect our right to share this only with people that we want to share this with, because without this, we simply can't have a free society. 
+So now's the time for us to collectively stand up and say, yes, we do want to live in a world with online privacy, and yes, we can work together to turn this vision into a reality. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi. So, this chap here, he thinks he can tell you the future. 
+His name is Nostradamus, although here the Sun have made him look a little bit like Sean Connery. (Laughter) And like most of you, I suspect, I don't really believe that people can see into the future. 
+I don't believe in precognition, and every now and then, you hear that somebody has been able to predict something that happened in the future, and that's probably because it was a fluke, and we only hear about the flukes and about the freaks. 
+We don't hear about all the times that people got stuff wrong. 
+Now we expect that to happen with silly stories about precognition, but the problem is, we have exactly the same problem in academia and in medicine, and in this environment, it costs lives. 
+So firstly, thinking just about precognition, as it turns out, just last year a researcher called Daryl Bem conducted a piece of research where he found evidence of precognitive powers in undergraduate students, and this was published in a peer-reviewed academic journal and most of the people who read this just said, "" Okay, well, fair enough, but I think that's a fluke, that's a freak, because I know that if I did a study where I found no evidence that undergraduate students had precognitive powers, it probably wouldn't get published in a journal. 
+And in fact, we know that that's true, because several different groups of research scientists tried to replicate the findings of this precognition study, and when they submitted it to the exact same journal, the journal said, "" No, we're not interested in publishing replication. We're not interested in your negative data. "" So this is already evidence of how, in the academic literature, we will see a biased sample of the true picture of all of the scientific studies that have been conducted. 
+But it doesn't just happen in the dry academic field of psychology. 
+It also happens in, for example, cancer research. 
+So in March, 2012, just one month ago, some researchers reported in the journal Nature how they had tried to replicate 53 different basic science studies looking at potential treatment targets in cancer, and out of those 53 studies, they were only able to successfully replicate six. 
+Forty-seven out of those 53 were unreplicable. 
+And they say in their discussion that this is very likely because freaks get published. 
+People will do lots and lots and lots of different studies, and the occasions when it works they will publish, and the ones where it doesn't work they won't. 
+And their first recommendation of how to fix this problem, because it is a problem, because it sends us all down blind alleys, their first recommendation of how to fix this problem is to make it easier to publish negative results in science, and to change the incentives so that scientists are encouraged to post more of their negative results in public. 
+But it doesn't just happen in the very dry world of preclinical basic science cancer research. 
+It also happens in the very real, flesh and blood of academic medicine. So in 1980, some researchers did a study on a drug called lorcainide, and this was an anti-arrhythmic drug, a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, and the idea was, after people have had a heart attack, they're quite likely to have abnormal heart rhythms, so if we give them a drug that suppresses abnormal heart rhythms, this will increase the chances of them surviving. 
+Early on its development, they did a very small trial, just under a hundred patients. 
+Fifty patients got lorcainide, and of those patients, 10 died. 
+Another 50 patients got a dummy placebo sugar pill with no active ingredient, and only one of them died. 
+So they rightly regarded this drug as a failure, and its commercial development was stopped, and because its commercial development was stopped, this trial was never published. 
+Unfortunately, over the course of the next five, 10 years, other companies had the same idea about drugs that would prevent arrhythmias in people who have had heart attacks. 
+These drugs were brought to market. They were prescribed very widely because heart attacks are a very common thing, and it took so long for us to find out that these drugs also caused an increased rate of death that before we detected that safety signal, over 100,000 people died unnecessarily in America from the prescription of anti-arrhythmic drugs. 
+Now actually, in 1993, the researchers who did that 1980 study, that early study, published a mea culpa, an apology to the scientific community, in which they said, "" When we carried out our study in 1980, we thought that the increased death rate that occurred in the lorcainide group was an effect of chance. "" The development of lorcainide was abandoned for commercial reasons, and this study was never published; it's now a good example of publication bias. 
+That's the technical term for the phenomenon where unflattering data gets lost, gets unpublished, is left missing in action, and they say the results described here "might have provided an early warning of trouble ahead." 
+Now these are stories from basic science. 
+These are stories from 20, 30 years ago. 
+The academic publishing environment is very different now. 
+There are academic journals like "" Trials, "" the open access journal, which will publish any trial conducted in humans regardless of whether it has a positive or a negative result. 
+But this problem of negative results that go missing in action is still very prevalent. In fact it's so prevalent that it cuts to the core of evidence-based medicine. 
+So this is a drug called reboxetine, and this is a drug that I myself have prescribed. It's an antidepressant. 
+And I'm a very nerdy doctor, so I read all of the studies that I could on this drug. I read the one study that was published that showed that reboxetine was better than placebo, and I read the other three studies that were published that showed that reboxetine was just as good as any other antidepressant, and because this patient hadn't done well on those other antidepressants, I thought, well, reboxetine is just as good. It's one to try. 
+But it turned out that I was misled. In fact, seven trials were conducted comparing reboxetine against a dummy placebo sugar pill. One of them was positive and that was published, but six of them were negative and they were left unpublished. 
+Three trials were published comparing reboxetine against other antidepressants in which reboxetine was just as good, and they were published, but three times as many patients' worth of data was collected which showed that reboxetine was worse than those other treatments, and those trials were not published. 
+I felt misled. 
+Now you might say, well, that's an extremely unusual example, and I wouldn't want to be guilty of the same kind of cherry-picking and selective referencing that I'm accusing other people of. 
+But it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very, very well studied. 
+So here is one example of how you approach it. 
+The classic model is, you get a bunch of studies where you know that they've been conducted and completed, and then you go and see if they've been published anywhere in the academic literature. So this took all of the trials that had ever been conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the FDA. 
+They took all of the trials which were submitted to the FDA as part of the approval package. 
+So that's not all of the trials that were ever conducted on these drugs, because we can never know if we have those, but it is the ones that were conducted in order to get the marketing authorization. 
+And then they went to see if these trials had been published in the peer-reviewed academic literature. And this is what they found. 
+It was pretty much a 50-50 split. Half of these trials were positive, half of them were negative, in reality. 
+But when they went to look for these trials in the peer-reviewed academic literature, what they found was a very different picture. 
+Only three of the negative trials were published, but all but one of the positive trials were published. 
+Now if we just flick back and forth between those two, you can see what a staggering difference there was between reality and what doctors, patients, commissioners of health services, and academics were able to see in the peer-reviewed academic literature. 
+We were misled, and this is a systematic flaw in the core of medicine. 
+In fact, there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now, over a hundred, that they've been collected in a systematic review, published in 2010, that took every single study on publication bias that they could find. 
+Publication bias affects every field of medicine. 
+About half of all trials, on average, go missing in action, and we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings. 
+This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. 
+If I flipped a coin 100 times but then withheld the results from you from half of those tosses, I could make it look as if I had a coin that always came up heads. 
+But that wouldn't mean that I had a two-headed coin. 
+That would mean that I was a chancer and you were an idiot for letting me get away with it. (Laughter) But this is exactly what we blindly tolerate in the whole of evidence-based medicine. 
+And to me, this is research misconduct. 
+If I conducted one study and I withheld half of the data points from that one study, you would rightly accuse me, essentially, of research fraud. 
+And yet, for some reason, if somebody conducts 10 studies but only publishes the five that give the result that they want, we don't consider that to be research misconduct. 
+And when that responsibility is diffused between a whole network of researchers, academics, industry sponsors, journal editors, for some reason we find it more acceptable, but the effect on patients is damning. 
+And this is happening right now, today. 
+This is a drug called Tamiflu. Tamiflu is a drug which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on stockpiling, and we've stockpiled Tamiflu in panic, in the belief that it will reduce the rate of complications of influenza. 
+Complications is a medical euphemism for pneumonia and death. (Laughter) Now when the Cochrane systematic reviewers were trying to collect together all of the data from all of the trials that had ever been conducted on whether Tamiflu actually did this or not, they found that several of those trials were unpublished. 
+The results were unavailable to them. 
+And when they started obtaining the writeups of those trials through various different means, through Freedom of Information Act requests, through harassing various different organizations, what they found was inconsistent. 
+And when they tried to get a hold of the clinical study reports, the 10,000-page long documents that have the best possible rendition of the information, they were told they weren't allowed to have them. 
+And if you want to read the full correspondence and the excuses and the explanations given by the drug company, you can see that written up in this week's edition of PLOS Medicine. 
+And the most staggering thing of all of this, to me, is that not only is this a problem, not only do we recognize that this is a problem, but we've had to suffer fake fixes. 
+We've had people pretend that this is a problem that's been fixed. 
+First of all, we had trials registers, and everybody said, oh, it's okay. We'll get everyone to register their trials, they'll post the protocol, they'll say what they're going to do before they do it, and then afterwards we'll be able to check and see if all the trials which have been conducted and completed have been published. 
+But people didn't bother to use those registers. 
+And so then the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors came along, and they said, oh, well, we will hold the line. 
+We won't publish any journals, we won't publish any trials, unless they've been registered before they began. 
+But they didn't hold the line. In 2008, a study was conducted which showed that half of all of trials published by journals edited by members of the ICMJE weren't properly registered, and a quarter of them weren't registered at all. 
+And then finally, the FDA Amendment Act was passed a couple of years ago saying that everybody who conducts a trial must post the results of that trial within one year. 
+And in the BMJ, in the first edition of January, 2012, you can see a study which looks to see if people kept to that ruling, and it turns out that only one in five have done so. 
+This is a disaster. 
+We cannot know the true effects of the medicines that we prescribe if we do not have access to all of the information. 
+And this is not a difficult problem to fix. 
+We need to force people to publish all trials conducted in humans, including the older trials, because the FDA Amendment Act only asks that you publish the trials conducted after 2008, and I don't know what world it is in which we're only practicing medicine on the basis of trials that completed in the past two years. 
+We need to publish all trials in humans, including the older trials, for all drugs in current use, and you need to tell everyone you know that this is a problem and that it has not been fixed. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+Hello, my name is Thomas Heatherwick. 
+I have a studio in London that has a particular approach to designing buildings. 
+When I was growing up, I was exposed to making and crafts and materials and invention on a small scale. 
+And I was there looking at the larger scale of buildings and finding that the buildings that were around me and that were being designed and that were there in the publications I was seeing felt soulless and cold. 
+And there on the smaller scale, the scale of an earring or a ceramic pot or a musical instrument, was a materiality and a soulfulness. 
+And this influenced me. 
+The first building I built was 20 years ago. 
+And since, in the last 20 years, I've developed a studio in London. 
+Sorry, this was my mother, by the way, in her bead shop in London. 
+I spent a lot of time counting beads and things like that. 
+I'm just going to show, for people who don't know my studio's work, a few projects that we've worked on. 
+This is a hospital building. 
+This is a shop for a bag company. 
+This is studios for artists. 
+This is a sculpture made from a million yards of wire and 150,000 glass beads the size of a golf ball. 
+And this is a window display. 
+And this is pair of cooling towers for an electricity substation next to St. Paul's Cathedral in London. 
+And this is a temple in Japan for a Buddhist monk. 
+And this is a cafe by the sea in Britain. 
+And just very quickly, something we've been working on very recently is we were commissioned by the mayor of London to design a new bus that gave the passenger their freedom again. 
+Because the original Routemaster bus that some of you may be familiar with, which had this open platform at the back — in fact, I think all our Routemasters are here in California now actually. 
+But they aren't in London. 
+And so you're stuck on a bus. 
+And if the bus is going to stop and it's three yards away from the bus stop, you're just a prisoner. 
+But the mayor of London wanted to reintroduce buses with this open platform. 
+So we've been working with Transport for London, and that organization hasn't actually been responsible as a client for a new bus for 50 years. 
+And so we've been very lucky to have a chance to work. 
+The brief is that the bus should use 40 percent less energy. 
+So it's got hybrid drive. 
+And we've been working to try to improve everything from the fabric to the format and structure and aesthetics. 
+I was going to show four main projects. 
+And this is a project for a bridge. 
+And so we were commissioned to design a bridge that would open. 
+And openings seemed — everyone loves opening bridges, but it's quite a basic thing. 
+I think we all kind of stand and watch. 
+But the bridges that we saw that opened and closed — I'm slightly squeamish — but I once saw a photograph of a footballer who was diving for a ball. 
+And as he was diving, someone had stamped on his knee, and it had broken like this. 
+And then we looked at these kinds of bridges and just couldn't help feeling that it was a beautiful thing that had broken. 
+And so this is in Paddington in London. 
+And it's a very boring bridge, as you can see. 
+It's just steel and timber. 
+But instead of what it is, our focus was on the way it worked. 
+(Applause) So we liked the idea that the two farthest bits of it would end up kissing each other. (Applause) 
+We actually had to halve its speed, because everyone was too scared when we first did it. 
+So that's it speeded up. 
+A project that we've been working on very recently is to design a new biomass power station — so a power station that uses organic waste material. 
+In the news, the subject of where our future water is going to come from and where our power is going to come from is in all the papers all the time. 
+And we used to be quite proud of the way we generated power. 
+But recently, any annual report of a power company doesn't have a power station on it. 
+It has a child running through a field, or something like that. 
+(Laughter) And so when a consortium of engineers approached us and asked us to work with them on this power station, our condition was that we would work with them and that, whatever we did, we were not just going to decorate a normal power station. 
+And instead, we had to learn — we kind of forced them to teach us. 
+And so we spent time traveling with them and learning about all the different elements, and finding that there were plenty of inefficiencies that weren't being capitalized on. 
+That just taking a field and banging all these things out isn't necessarily the most efficient way that they could work. 
+So we looked at how we could compose all those elements — instead of just litter, create one composition. 
+And what we found — this area is one of the poorest parts of Britain. 
+It was voted the worst place in Britain to live. 
+And there are 2,000 new homes being built next to this power station. 
+So it felt this has a social dimension. 
+It has a symbolic importance. 
+And we should be proud of where our power is coming from, rather than something we are necessarily ashamed of. 
+So we were looking at how we could make a power station, that, instead of keeping people out and having a big fence around the outside, could be a place that pulls you in. 
+And it has to be — I'm trying to get my — 250 feet high. 
+So it felt that what we could try to do is make a power park and actually bring the whole area in, and using the spare soil that's there on the site, we could make a power station that was silent as well. 
+Because just that soil could make the acoustic difference. 
+And we also found that we could make a more efficient structure and have a cost-effective way of making a structure to do this. 
+The finished project is meant to be more than just a power station. 
+It has a space where you could have a bar mitzvah at the top. 
+(Laughter) And it's a power park. 
+So people can come and really experience this and also look out all around the area, and use that height that we have to have for its function. 
+In Shanghai, we were invited to build — well we weren't invited; what am I talking about. 
+We won the competition, and it was painful to get there. 
+(Laughter) So we won the competition to build the U.K. pavilion. 
+And an expo is a totally bonkers thing. 
+There's 250 pavilions. 
+It's the world's biggest ever expo that had ever happened. 
+So there are up to a million people there everyday. 
+And 250 countries all competing. 
+And the British government saying, "You need to be in the top five." 
+And so that became the governmental goal — is, how do you stand out in this chaos, which is an expo of stimulus? 
+So our sense was we had to do one thing, and only one thing, instead of trying to have everything. 
+And so what we also felt was that whatever we did we couldn't do a cheesy advert for Britain. 
+(Laughter) But the thing that was true, the expo was about the future of cities, and particularly the Victorians pioneered integrating nature into the cities. 
+And the world's first public park of modern times was in Britain. 
+And the world's first major botanical institution is in London, and they have this extraordinary project where they've been collecting 25 percent of all the world's plant species. 
+So we suddenly realized that there was this thing. 
+And everyone agrees that trees are beautiful, and I've never met anyone who says, "" I don't like trees. "" And the same with flowers. 
+I've never met anyone who says, "" I don't like flowers. "" But we realized that seeds — there's been this very serious project happening — but that seeds — at these major botanical gardens, seeds aren't on show. 
+But you just have to go to a garden center, and they're in little paper packets. 
+But this phenomenal project's been happening. 
+So we realized we had to make a project that would be seeds, some kind of seed cathedral. 
+But how could we show these teeny-weeny things? 
+And the film "" Jurassic Park "" actually really helped us. 
+Because the DNA of the dinosaur that was trapped in the amber gave us some kind of clue that these tiny things could be trapped and be made to seem precious, rather than looking like nuts. 
+So the challenge was, how are we going to bring light and expose these things? 
+We didn't want to make a separate building and have separate content. 
+So we were trying to think, how could we make a whole thing emanate. 
+By the way, we had half the budget of the other Western nations. 
+So that was also in the mix with the site the size of a football pitch. 
+And so there was one particular toy that gave us a clue. 
+(Video) Voice Over: The new Play-Doh Mop Top Hair Shop. 
+Song: ♫ We've got the Mop Tops, the Play-Doh Mop Tops ♫ ♫ Just turn the chair and grow Play-Doh hair ♫ ♫ They're the Mop Tops ♫ Thomas Heatherwick: Okay, you get the idea. 
+So the idea was to take these 66,000 seeds that they agreed to give us, and to take each seed and trap it in this precious optical hair and grow that through this box, very simple box element, and make it a building that could move in the wind. 
+So the whole thing can gently move when the wind blows. 
+And inside, the daylight — each one is an optic and it brings light into the center. 
+And by night, artificial light in each one emanates and comes out to the outside. 
+And to make the project affordable, we focused our energy. 
+Instead of building a building as big as the football pitch, we focused it on this one element. 
+And the government agreed to do that and not do anything else, and focus our energy on that. 
+And so the rest of the site was a public space. 
+And with a million people there a day, it just felt like offering some public space. 
+We worked with an AstroTurf manufacturer to develop a mini-me version of the seed cathedral, so that, even if you're partially-sighted, that it was kind of crunchy and soft, that piece of landscape that you see there. 
+And then, you know when a pet has an operation and they shave a bit of the skin and get rid of the fur — in order to get you to go into the seed cathedral, in effect, we've shaved it. 
+And inside there's nothing; there's no famous actor's voice; there's no projections; there's no televisions; there's no color changing. 
+There's just silence and a cool temperature. 
+And if a cloud goes past, you can see a cloud on the tips where it's letting the light through. 
+This is the only project that we've done where the finished thing looked more like a rendering than our renderings. 
+(Laughter) A key thing was how people would interact. 
+I mean, in a way it was the most serious thing you could possible do at the expo. 
+And I just wanted to show you. 
+The British government — any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have. 
+And there was a lot of terror. 
+But there was an underlying support. 
+And so there was a moment when suddenly — actually, the next thing. 
+This is the head of U.K. Trade and Investment, who was our client, with the Chinese children, using the landscape. 
+(Video) Children: One, two, three, go. 
+(Laughter) TH: I'm sorry about my stupid voice there. (Laughter) 
+So finally, texture is something. 
+In the projects we've been working on, these slick buildings, where they might be a fancy shape, but the materiality feels the same, is something that we've been trying to research really, and explore alternatives. 
+And the project that we're building in Malaysia is apartment buildings for a property developer. 
+And it's in a piece of land that's this site. 
+And the mayor of Kuala Lumpur said that, if this developer would give something that gave something back to the city, they would give them more gross floor area, buildable. 
+So there was an incentive for the developer to really try to think about what would be better for the city. 
+And the conventional thing with apartment buildings in this part of the world is you have your tower, and you squeeze a few trees around the edge, and you see cars parked. 
+It's actually only the first couple of floors that you really experience, and the rest of it is just for postcards. 
+The lowest value is actually the bottom part of a tower like this. 
+So if we could chop that away and give the building a small bottom, we could take that bit and put it at the top where the greater commercial value is for a property developer. 
+And by linking these together, we could have 90 percent of the site as a rainforest, instead of only 10 percent of scrubby trees and bits of road around buildings. 
+(Applause) So we're building these buildings. 
+They're actually identical, so it's quite cost-effective. 
+They're just chopped at different heights. 
+But the key part is trying to give back an extraordinary piece of landscape, rather than engulf it. 
+And that's my final slide. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+June Cohen: So thank you. Thank you, Thomas. You're a delight. 
+Since we have an extra minute here, I thought perhaps you could tell us a little bit about these seeds, which maybe came from the shaved bit of the building. 
+TH: These are a few of the tests we did when we were building the structure. 
+So there were 66,000 of these. 
+This optic was 22 feet long. 
+And so the daylight was just coming — it was caught on the outside of the box and was coming down to illuminate each seed. 
+Waterproofing the building was a bit crazy. 
+Because it's quite hard to waterproof buildings anyway, but if you say you're going to drill 66,000 holes in it — we had quite a time. 
+There was one person in the contractors who was the right size — and it wasn't a child — who could fit between them for the final waterproofing of the building. 
+JC: Thank you, Thomas. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My name is Tom, and I've come here today to come clean about what I do for money. 
+Basically, I use my mouth in strange ways in exchange for cash. 
+(Laughter) I usually do this kind of thing in seedy downtown bars and on street corners, so this mightn't be the most appropriate setting, but I'd like to give you guys a bit of a demonstration about what I do. 
+(Beatboxing) And now, for my next number, I'd like to return to the classics. 
+(Applause) We're going to take it back, way back, back into time. 
+(Beatboxing: "" Billie Jean "") ♫ Billie Jean is not my lover ♫ ♫ She's just a girl who claims that I am the one ♫ ♫ But the kid is not my son ♫ (Applause) All right. 
+Wassup. 
+Thank you very much, TEDx. 
+If you guys haven't figured it out already, my name's Tom Thum, and I'm a beatboxer, which means all the sounds that you just heard were made entirely using just my voice, and the only thing was my voice. 
+And I can assure you there are absolutely no effects on this microphone whatsoever. 
+And I'm very, very stoked — (Applause) You guys are just applauding for everything. It's great. 
+Look at this, Mom! I made it! 
+I'm very, very stoked to be here today, representing my kinfolk and all those that haven't managed to make a career out of an innate ability for inhuman noisemaking. 
+Because it is a bit of a niche market, and there's not much work going on, especially where I'm from. 
+You know, I'm from Brisbane, which is a great city to live in. 
+Yeah! All right! Most of Brisbane's here. That's good. 
+(Laughter) You know, I'm from Brizzy, which is a great city to live in, but let's be honest — it's not exactly the cultural hub of the Southern Hemisphere. 
+So I do a lot of my work outside Brisbane and outside Australia, and so the pursuit of this crazy passion of mine has enabled me to see so many amazing places in the world. 
+So I'd like to share with you, if I may, my experiences. 
+So ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey throughout the continents and throughout sound itself. 
+We start our journey in the central deserts. 
+(Didgeridoo) (Airplane) India. 
+(Beatboxing) (Sitar) China. 
+(Guzheng) (Beatboxing) Germany. (Beatboxing) 
+Party, party, yeah. 
+(Laughter) And before we reach our final destination, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to share with you some technology that I brought all the way from the thriving metropolis of Brisbane. 
+These things in front of me here are called Kaoss Pads, and they allow me to do a whole lot of different things with my voice. 
+For example, the one on the left here allows me to add a little bit of reverb to my sound, which gives me that — (Trumpet) — flavor. 
+(Laughter) And the other ones here, I can use them in unison to mimic the effect of a drum machine or something like that. 
+I can sample in my own sounds and I can play it back just by hitting the pads here. 
+(Noises) TEDx. 
+(Music) (Applause) I got way too much time on my hands. 
+And last but not least, the one on my right here allows me to loop loop loop loop loop loop loop loop my voice. 
+So with all that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey to a completely separate part of Earth as I transform the Sydney Opera House into a smoky downtown jazz bar. 
+All right boys, take it away. 
+(Music) Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to a very special friend of mine, one of the greatest double bassists I know. 
+Mr. Smokey Jefferson, let's take it for a walk. Come on, baby. 
+(Music) All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to the star of the show, one of the greatest jazz legends of our time. 
+Music lovers and jazz lovers alike, please give a warm hand of applause for the one and only Mr. Peeping Tom. Take it away. 
+(Music) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+I'm used to thinking of the TED audience as a wonderful collection of some of the most effective, intelligent, intellectual, savvy, worldly and innovative people in the world. 
+(Laughter) Now I know that seems ludicrous. I know that seems ludicrous. 
+So I went back to the store and said to the owner, "I love the shoes, but I hate the laces." 
+As it turns out — (Laughter) there's a strong form and a weak form of this knot, and we were taught the weak form. 
+If you pull the strands at the base of the knot, you will see that the bow will orient itself down the long axis of the shoe. 
+Pull the knot. 
+Now, in keeping with today's theme, I'd like to point out — something you already know — that sometimes a small advantage someplace in life can yield tremendous results someplace else. 
+
+My subject today is learning. 
+And in that spirit, I want to spring on you all a pop quiz. 
+Ready? 
+When does learning begin? 
+Now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher. 
+Or maybe you've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork. 
+Maybe you've encountered the Zero-to-Three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones. 
+And so your answer to my question would be: Learning begins at birth. 
+Well today I want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology. 
+And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb. 
+Now I'm a science reporter. 
+I write books and magazine articles. 
+And I'm also a mother. 
+And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called "" Origins. "" "" Origins "" is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins. 
+Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb. 
+Now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me. 
+I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book. 
+And one of the most fascinating insights I took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it. 
+When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they're clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in. 
+Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies. 
+First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices. 
+Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled. 
+One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher in the old "" Peanuts "" cartoon. 
+But the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily. 
+And because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot. 
+Once the baby's born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else's. 
+How can we know this? 
+Newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking. 
+Researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice. 
+Babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one. 
+Scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored. 
+This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss' "" The Cat in the Hat "" while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb. 
+My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. 
+So fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into. 
+A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language. 
+French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages. 
+Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? 
+It may have evolved to aid the baby's survival. 
+From the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it — its mother. 
+It even makes its cries sound like the mother's language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language. 
+But it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero. 
+It's also tastes and smells. 
+By seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning. 
+The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus. 
+Babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they're out in the world. 
+In one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water. 
+Six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it. 
+The offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more. 
+A sort of French version of this experiment was carried out in Dijon, France where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life. 
+Babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as "" yuck. "" What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat. 
+Fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food. 
+They're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth. 
+Now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons. 
+But before I get to that, I want to address something that you may be wondering about. 
+The notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus — like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. 
+But actually, the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that. 
+Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels — are shared in some fashion with her fetus. 
+They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. 
+The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. 
+And often it does something more. 
+It treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside. 
+So what a fetus is learning about in utero is not Mozart's "" Magic Flute "" but answers to questions much more critical to its survival. 
+Will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? 
+Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? 
+Will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one? 
+The pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind. 
+The resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert. 
+To conclude, I want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born. 
+In the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of World War II, German troops blockaded Western Holland, turning away all shipments of food. 
+The opening of the Nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades — so cold the water in the canals froze solid. 
+Soon food became scarce, with many Dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day — a quarter of what they consumed before the war. 
+As weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs. 
+By the beginning of May, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted. 
+The specter of mass starvation loomed. 
+And then on May 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when Holland was liberated by the Allies. 
+The "" Hunger Winter, "" as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more. 
+But there was another population that was affected — the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege. 
+Some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality. 
+But others wouldn't be discovered for many years. 
+Decades after the "" Hunger Winter, "" researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions. 
+These individuals' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways. 
+They have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance — a precursor of diabetes. 
+Why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? 
+One explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation. 
+When food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver. 
+This keeps the fetus alive in the short-term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease. 
+But that may not be all that's going on. 
+It seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly. 
+They're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb. 
+The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it. 
+And the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats. 
+The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation. 
+This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems — an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival. 
+Faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood. 
+The real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty. 
+This is what happened to the children of the Dutch "" Hunger Winter. "" And their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result. 
+Bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war Western diet. 
+The world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born. 
+Here's another story. 
+At 8: 46 a.m. on September 11th, 2001, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in New York — commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on Wall Street. 
+1,700 of these people were pregnant women. 
+When the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster — the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives. 
+About a year after 9 / 11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack. 
+In the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to PTSD — an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester. 
+In other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero. 
+Now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering. 
+But there's another way of thinking about PTSD. 
+What looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances. 
+In a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of PTSD — a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger — could save someone's life. 
+The notion that the prenatal transmission of PTSD risk is adaptive is still speculative, but I find it rather poignant. 
+It would mean that, even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it's a wild world out there, telling them, "" Be careful. "" Let me be clear. 
+Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy. 
+It's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation. 
+That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb. 
+Learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I believe that there are new, hidden tensions that are actually happening between people and institutions — institutions that are the institutions that people inhabit in their daily life: schools, hospitals, workplaces, factories, offices, etc. 
+And something that I see happening is something that I would like to call a sort of "" democratization of intimacy. "" And what do I mean by that? 
+I mean that what people are doing is, in fact, they are sort of, with their communication channels, they are breaking an imposed isolation that these institutions are imposing on them. 
+How are they doing this? They're doing it in a very simple way, by calling their mom from work, by IMing from their office to their friends, by texting under the desk. 
+The pictures that you're seeing behind me are people that I visited in the last few months. 
+And I asked them to come along with the person they communicate with most. 
+And somebody brought a boyfriend, somebody a father. 
+One young woman brought her grandfather. 
+For 20 years, I've been looking at how people use channels such as email, the mobile phone, texting, etc. 
+What we're actually going to see is that, fundamentally, people are communicating on a regular basis with five, six, seven of their most intimate sphere. 
+Now, lets take some data. Facebook. 
+Recently some sociologists from Facebook — Facebook is the channel that you would expect is the most enlargening of all channels. 
+And an average user, said Cameron Marlow, from Facebook, has about 120 friends. 
+But he actually talks to, has two-way exchanges with, about four to six people on a regular base, depending on his gender. 
+Academic research on instant messaging also shows 100 people on buddy lists, but fundamentally people chat with two, three, four — anyway, less than five. 
+My own research on cellphones and voice calls shows that 80 percent of the calls are actually made to four people. 80 percent. 
+And when you go to Skype, it's down to two people. 
+A lot of sociologists actually are quite disappointed. 
+I mean, I've been a bit disappointed sometimes when I saw this data and all this deployment, just for five people. 
+And some sociologists actually feel that it's a closure, it's a cocooning, that we're disengaging from the public. 
+And I would actually, I would like to show you that if we actually look at who is doing it, and from where they're doing it, actually there is an incredible social transformation. 
+There are three stories that I think are quite good examples. 
+The first gentleman, he's a baker. 
+And so he starts working every morning at four o'clock in the morning. 
+And around eight o'clock he sort of sneaks away from his oven, cleans his hands from the flour and calls his wife. 
+He just wants to wish her a good day, because that's the start of her day. 
+And I've heard this story a number of times. 
+A young factory worker who works night shifts, who manages to sneak away from the factory floor, where there is CCTV by the way, and find a corner, where at 11 o'clock at night he can call his girlfriend and just say goodnight. 
+Or a mother who, at four o'clock, suddenly manages to find a corner in the toilet to check that her children are safely home. 
+Then there is another couple, there is a Brazilian couple. 
+They've lived in Italy for a number of years. 
+They Skype with their families a few times a week. 
+But once a fortnight, they actually put the computer on their dining table, pull out the webcam and actually have dinner with their family in Sao Paulo. And they have a big event of it. 
+And I heard this story the first time a couple of years ago from a very modest family of immigrants from Kosovo in Switzerland. 
+They had set up a big screen in their living room, and every morning they had breakfast with their grandmother. 
+But Danny Miller, who is a very good anthropologist who is working on Filipina migrant women who leave their children back in the Philippines, was telling me about how much parenting is going on through Skype, and how much these mothers are engaged with their children through Skype. 
+And then there is the third couple. They are two friends. 
+They chat to each other every day, a few times a day actually. 
+And finally, finally, they've managed to put instant messaging on their computers at work. 
+And now, obviously, they have it open. 
+Whenever they have a moment they chat to each other. 
+And this is exactly what we've been seeing with teenagers and kids doing it in school, under the table, and texting under the table to their friends. 
+So, none of these cases are unique. 
+I mean, I could tell you hundreds of them. 
+But what is really exceptional is the setting. 
+So, think of the three settings I've talked to you about: factory, migration, office. 
+But it could be in a school, it could be an administration, it could be a hospital. 
+Three settings that, if we just step back 15 years, if you just think back 15 years, when you clocked in, when you clocked in to an office, when you clocked in to a factory, there was no contact for the whole duration of the time, there was no contact with your private sphere. 
+If you were lucky there was a public phone hanging in the corridor or somewhere. 
+If you were in management, oh, that was a different story. 
+Maybe you had a direct line. 
+If you were not, you maybe had to go through an operator. 
+But basically, when you walked into those buildings, the private sphere was left behind you. 
+And this has become such a norm of our professional lives, such a norm and such an expectation. 
+And it had nothing to do with technical capability. 
+The phones were there. But the expectation was once you moved in there your commitment was fully to the task at hand, fully to the people around you. 
+That was where the focus had to be. 
+And this has become such a cultural norm that we actually school our children for them to be capable to do this cleavage. 
+If you think nursery, kindergarten, first years of school are just dedicated to take away the children, to make them used to staying long hours away from their family. 
+And then the school enacts perfectly well. 
+It mimics perfectly all the rituals that we will find in offices: rituals of entry, rituals of exit, the schedules, the uniforms in this country, things that identify you, team-building activities, team building that will allow you to basically be with a random group of kids, or a random group of people that you will have to be with for a number of time. 
+And of course, the major thing: learn to pay attention, to concentrate and focus your attention. 
+This only started about 150 years ago. 
+It only started with the birth of modern bureaucracy, and of industrial revolution. 
+When people basically had to go somewhere else to work and carry out the work. 
+And when with modern bureaucracy there was a very rational approach, where there was a clear distinction between the private sphere and the public sphere. 
+So, until then, basically people were living on top of their trades. 
+They were living on top of the land they were laboring. 
+They were living on top of the workshops where they were working. 
+And if you think, it's permeated our whole culture, even our cities. 
+If you think of medieval cities, medieval cities the boroughs all have the names of the guilds and professions that lived there. 
+Now we have sprawling residential suburbias that are well distinct from production areas and commercial areas. 
+And actually, over these 150 years, there has been a very clear class system that also has emerged. 
+So the lower the status of the job and of the person carrying out, the more removed he would be from his personal sphere. 
+People have taken this amazing possibility of actually being in contact all through the day or in all types of situations. 
+And they are doing it massively. 
+The Pew Institute, which produces good data on a regular basis on, for instance, in the States, says that — and I think that this number is conservative — 50 percent of anybody with email access at work is actually doing private email from his office. 
+I really think that the number is conservative. 
+In my own research, we saw that the peak for private email is actually 11 o'clock in the morning, whatever the country. 
+75 percent of people admit doing private conversations from work on their mobile phones. 
+100 percent are using text. 
+The point is that this re-appropriation of the personal sphere is not terribly successful with all institutions. 
+I'm always surprised the U.S. Army sociologists are discussing of the impact for instance, of soldiers in Iraq having daily contact with their families. 
+But there are many institutions that are actually blocking this access. 
+And every day, every single day, I read news that makes me cringe, like a $15 fine to kids in Texas, for using, every time they take out their mobile phone in school. 
+Immediate dismissal to bus drivers in New York, if seen with a mobile phone in a hand. 
+Companies blocking access to IM or to Facebook. 
+Behind issues of security and safety, which have always been the arguments for social control, in fact what is going on is that these institutions are trying to decide who, in fact, has a right to self determine their attention, to decide, whether they should, or not, be isolated. 
+And they are actually trying to block, in a certain sense, this movement of a greater possibility of intimacy. 
+
+This will not be a speech like any one I have ever given. 
+I will talk to you today about the failure of leadership in global politics and in our globalizing economy. 
+And I won't provide some feel-good, ready-made solutions. 
+But I will in the end urge you to rethink, actually take risks, and get involved in what I see as a global evolution of democracy. 
+Failure of leadership. 
+What is the failure of leadership today? 
+And why is our democracy not working? 
+Well, I believe that the failure of leadership is the fact that we have taken you out of the process. 
+So let me, from my personal experiences, give you an insight, so that you can step back and maybe understand why it is so difficult to cope with the challenges of today and why politics is going down a blind alley. 
+Let's start from the beginning. 
+Let's start from democracy. 
+Well, if you go back to the Ancient Greeks, it was a revelation, a discovery, that we had the potential, together, to be masters of our own fate, to be able to examine, to learn, to imagine, and then to design a better life. 
+And democracy was the political innovation which protected this freedom, because we were liberated from fear so that our minds in fact, whether they be despots or dogmas, could be the protagonists. 
+Democracy was the political innovation that allowed us to limit the power, whether it was of tyrants or of high priests, their natural tendency to maximize power and wealth. 
+Well, I first began to understand this when I was 14 years old. 
+I used to, to try to avoid homework, sneak down to the living room and listen to my parents and their friends debate heatedly. 
+You see, then Greece was under control of a very powerful establishment which was strangling the country, and my father was heading a promising movement to reimagine Greece, to imagine a Greece where freedom reigned and where, maybe, the people, the citizens, could actually rule their own country. 
+I used to join him in many of the campaigns, and you can see me here next to him. 
+I'm the younger one there, to the side. 
+You may not recognize me because I used to part my hair differently there. 
+(Laughter) So in 1967, elections were coming, things were going well in the campaign, the house was electric. 
+We really could sense that there was going to be a major progressive change in Greece. 
+Then one night, military trucks drive up to our house. 
+Soldiers storm the door. 
+They find me up on the top terrace. 
+A sergeant comes up to me with a machine gun, puts it to my head, and says, "Tell me where your father is or I will kill you." 
+My father, hiding nearby, reveals himself, and was summarily taken to prison. 
+Well, we survived, but democracy did not. 
+Seven brutal years of dictatorship which we spent in exile. 
+Now, today, our democracies are again facing a moment of truth. 
+Let me tell you a story. 
+Sunday evening, Brussels, April 2010. 
+I'm sitting with my counterparts in the European Union. 
+I had just been elected prime minister, but I had the unhappy privilege of revealing a truth that our deficit was not 6 percent, as had been officially reported only a few days earlier before the elections by the previous government, but actually 15.6 percent. 
+But the deficit was only the symptom of much deeper problems that Greece was facing, and I had been elected on a mandate, a mission, actually, to tackle these problems, whether it was lack of transparency and accountability in governance, or whether it was a clientelistic state offering favors to the powerful — tax avoidance abetted and aided by a global tax evasion system, politics and media captured by special interests. 
+But despite our electoral mandate, the markets mistrusted us. 
+Our borrowing costs were skyrocketing, and we were facing possible default. 
+So I went to Brussels on a mission to make the case for a united European response, one that would calm the markets and give us the time to make the necessary reforms. 
+But time we didn't get. 
+Picture yourselves around the table in Brussels. 
+Negotiations are difficult, the tensions are high, progress is slow, and then, 10 minutes to 2, a prime minister shouts out, "We have to finish in 10 minutes." 
+I said, "" Why? These are important decisions. 
+Let's deliberate a little bit longer. "" Another prime minister comes in and says, "" No, we have to have an agreement now, because in 10 minutes, the markets are opening up in Japan, and there will be havoc in the global economy. "" We quickly came to a decision in those 10 minutes. 
+This time it was not the military, but the markets, that put a gun to our collective heads. 
+What followed were the most difficult decisions in my life, painful to me, painful to my countrymen, imposing cuts, austerity, often on those not to blame for the crisis. 
+With these sacrifices, Greece did avoid bankruptcy and the eurozone avoided a collapse. 
+Greece, yes, triggered the Euro crisis, and some people blame me for pulling the trigger. 
+But I think today that most would agree that Greece was only a symptom of much deeper structural problems in the eurozone, vulnerabilities in the wider global economic system, vulnerabilities of our democracies. 
+Our democracies are trapped by systems too big to fail, or, more accurately, too big to control. 
+Our democracies are weakened in the global economy with players that can evade laws, evade taxes, evade environmental or labor standards. 
+Our democracies are undermined by the growing inequality and the growing concentration of power and wealth, lobbies, corruption, the speed of the markets or simply the fact that we sometimes fear an impending disaster, have constrained our democracies, and they have constrained our capacity to imagine and actually use the potential, your potential, in finding solutions. 
+Greece, you see, was only a preview of what is in store for us all. 
+I, overly optimistically, had hoped that this crisis was an opportunity for Greece, for Europe, for the world, to make radical democratic transformations in our institutions. 
+Instead, I had a very humbling experience. 
+In Brussels, when we tried desperately again and again to find common solutions, I realized that not one, not one of us, had ever dealt with a similar crisis. 
+But worse, we were trapped by our collective ignorance. 
+We were led by our fears. 
+And our fears led to a blind faith in the orthodoxy of austerity. 
+Instead of reaching out to the common or the collective wisdom in our societies, investing in it to find more creative solutions, we reverted to political posturing. 
+And then we were surprised when every ad hoc new measure didn't bring an end to the crisis, and of course that made it very easy to look for a whipping boy for our collective European failure, and of course that was Greece. 
+Those profligate, idle, ouzo-swilling, Zorba-dancing Greeks, they are the problem. Punish them! 
+Well, a convenient but unfounded stereotype that sometimes hurt even more than austerity itself. 
+But let me warn you, this is not just about Greece. 
+This could be the pattern that leaders follow again and again when we deal with these complex, cross-border problems, whether it's climate change, whether it's migration, whether it's the financial system. 
+That is, abandoning our collective power to imagine our potential, falling victims to our fears, our stereotypes, our dogmas, taking our citizens out of the process rather than building the process around our citizens. 
+And doing so will only test the faith of our citizens, of our peoples, even more in the democratic process. 
+It's no wonder that many political leaders, and I don't exclude myself, have lost the trust of our people. 
+When riot police have to protect parliaments, a scene which is increasingly common around the world, then there's something deeply wrong with our democracies. 
+That's why I called for a referendum to have the Greek people own and decide on the terms of the rescue package. 
+My European counterparts, some of them, at least, said, "" You can't do this. 
+There will be havoc in the markets again. "" I said, "" We need to, before we restore confidence in the markets, we need to restore confidence and trust amongst our people. "" Since leaving office, I have had time to reflect. 
+We have weathered the storm, in Greece and in Europe, but we remain challenged. 
+If politics is the power to imagine and use our potential, well then 60-percent youth unemployment in Greece, and in other countries, certainly is a lack of imagination if not a lack of compassion. 
+So far, we've thrown economics at the problem, actually mostly austerity, and certainly we could have designed alternatives, a different strategy, a green stimulus for green jobs, or mutualized debt, Eurobonds which would support countries in need from market pressures, these would have been much more viable alternatives. 
+Yet I have come to believe that the problem is not so much one of economics as it is one of democracy. 
+So let's try something else. 
+Let's see how we can bring people back to the process. 
+Let's throw democracy at the problem. 
+Again, the Ancient Greeks, with all their shortcomings, believed in the wisdom of the crowd at their best moments. In people we trust. 
+Democracy could not work without the citizens deliberating, debating, taking on public responsibilities for public affairs. 
+Average citizens often were chosen for citizen juries to decide on critical matters of the day. 
+Science, theater, research, philosophy, games of the mind and the body, they were daily exercises. 
+Actually they were an education for participation, for the potential, for growing the potential of our citizens. 
+And those who shunned politics, well, they were idiots. 
+You see, in Ancient Greece, in ancient Athens, that term originated there. 
+"" Idiot "" comes from the root "" idio, "" oneself. 
+A person who is self-centered, secluded, excluded, someone who doesn't participate or even examine public affairs. 
+And participation took place in the agora, the agora having two meanings, both a marketplace and a place where there was political deliberation. 
+You see, markets and politics then were one, unified, accessible, transparent, because they gave power to the people. 
+They serve the demos, democracy. 
+Above government, above markets was the direct rule of the people. 
+Today we have globalized the markets but we have not globalized our democratic institutions. 
+So our politicians are limited to local politics, while our citizens, even though they see a great potential, are prey to forces beyond their control. 
+So how then do we reunite the two halves of the agora? 
+How do we democratize globalization? 
+And I'm not talking about the necessary reforms of the United Nations or the G20. 
+I'm talking about, how do we secure the space, the demos, the platform of values, so that we can tap into all of your potential? 
+Well, this is exactly where I think Europe fits in. 
+Europe, despite its recent failures, is the world's most successful cross-border peace experiment. 
+So let's see if it can't be an experiment in global democracy, a new kind of democracy. 
+Let's see if we can't design a European agora, not simply for products and services, but for our citizens, where they can work together, deliberate, learn from each other, exchange between art and cultures, where they can come up with creative solutions. 
+Let's imagine that European citizens actually have the power to vote directly for a European president, or citizen juries chosen by lottery which can deliberate on critical and controversial issues, a European-wide referendum where our citizens, as the lawmakers, vote on future treaties. 
+And here's an idea: Why not have the first truly European citizens by giving our immigrants, not Greek or German or Swedish citizenship, but a European citizenship? 
+And make sure we actually empower the unemployed by giving them a voucher scholarship where they can choose to study anywhere in Europe. 
+Where our common identity is democracy, where our education is through participation, and where participation builds trust and solidarity rather than exclusion and xenophobia. 
+Europe of and by the people, a Europe, an experiment in deepening and widening democracy beyond borders. 
+Now, some might accuse me of being naive, putting my faith in the power and the wisdom of the people. 
+Well, after decades in politics, I am also a pragmatist. 
+Believe me, I have been, I am, part of today's political system, and I know things must change. 
+We must revive politics as the power to imagine, reimagine, and redesign for a better world. 
+But I also know that this disruptive force of change won't be driven by the politics of today. 
+The revival of democratic politics will come from you, and I mean all of you. 
+Everyone who participates in this global exchange of ideas, whether it's here in this room or just outside this room or online or locally, where everybody lives, everyone who stands up to injustice and inequality, everybody who stands up to those who preach racism rather than empathy, dogma rather than critical thinking, technocracy rather than democracy, everyone who stands up to the unchecked power, whether it's authoritarian leaders, plutocrats hiding their assets in tax havens, or powerful lobbies protecting the powerful few. 
+It is in their interest that all of us are idiots. 
+Let's not be. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: You seem to describe a political leadership that is kind of unprepared and a prisoner of the whims of the financial markets, and that scene in Brussels that you describe, to me, as a citizen, is terrifying. 
+Help us understand how you felt after the decision. 
+It was not a good decision, clearly, but how do you feel after that, not as the prime minister, but as George? 
+George Papandreou: Well, obviously there were constraints which didn't allow me or others to make the types of decisions we would have wanted, and obviously I had hoped that we would have the time to make the reforms which would have dealt with the deficit rather than trying to cut the deficit which was the symptom of the problem. 
+And that hurt. That hurt because that, first of all, hurt the younger generation, and not only, many of them are demonstrating outside, but I think this is one of our problems. 
+When we face these crises, we have kept the potential, the huge potential of our society out of this process, and we are closing in on ourselves in politics, and I think we need to change that, to really find new participatory ways using the great capabilities that now exist even in technology but not only in technology, the minds that we have, and I think we can find solutions which are much better, but we have to be open. 
+BG: You seem to suggest that the way forward is more Europe, and that is not to be an easy discourse right now in most European countries. 
+It's rather the other way — more closed borders and less cooperation and maybe even stepping out of some of the different parts of the European construction. 
+How do you reconcile that? 
+GP: Well, I think one of the worst things that happened during this crisis is that we started a blame game. 
+And the fundamental idea of Europe is that we can cooperate beyond borders, go beyond our conflicts and work together. 
+And the paradox is that, because we have this blame game, we have less the potential to convince our citizens that we should work together, while now is the time when we really need to bring our powers together. 
+Now, more Europe for me is not simply giving more power to Brussels. 
+It is actually giving more power to the citizens of Europe, that is, really making Europe a project of the people. 
+So that, I think, would be a way to answer some of the fears that we have in our society. 
+BG: George, thank you for coming to TED. 
+GP: Thank you very much.BG: Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+(Music) [Sanskrit] This is an ode to the mother goddess, that most of us in India learn when we are children. 
+I learned it when I was four at my mother's knee. 
+That year she introduced me to dance, and thus began my tryst with classical dance. 
+Since then — it's been four decades now — I've trained with the best in the field, performed across the globe, taught young and old alike, created, collaborated, choreographed, and wove a rich tapestry of artistry, achievement and awards. 
+The crowning glory was in 2007, when I received this country's fourth highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, for my contribution to art. 
+(Applause) But nothing, nothing prepared me for what I was to hear on the first of July 2008. 
+I heard the word "" carcinoma. "" Yes, breast cancer. 
+As I sat dumbstruck in my doctor's office, I heard other words: "cancer," "stage," "grade." 
+Until then, Cancer was the zodiac sign of my friend, stage was what I performed on, and grades were what I got in school. 
+That day, I realized I had an unwelcome, uninvited, new life partner. 
+As a dancer, I know the nine rasas or the navarasas: anger, valor, disgust, humor and fear. 
+I thought I knew what fear was. 
+That day, I learned what fear was. 
+Overcome with the enormity of it all and the complete feeling of loss of control, I shed copious tears and asked my dear husband, Jayant. 
+I said, "" Is this it? Is this the end of the road? 
+Is this the end of my dance? "" And he, the positive soul that he is, said, "" No, this is just a hiatus, a hiatus during the treatment, and you'll get back to doing what you do best. "" I realized then that I, who thought I had complete control of my life, had control of only three things: My thought, my mind — the images that these thoughts created — and the action that derived from it. 
+So here I was wallowing in a vortex of emotions and depression and what have you, with the enormity of the situation, wanting to go to a place of healing, health and happiness. 
+I wanted to go from where I was to where I wanted to be, for which I needed something. 
+I needed something that would pull me out of all this. 
+So I dried my tears, and I declared to the world at large... 
+I said, "" Cancer's only one page in my life, and I will not allow this page to impact the rest of my life. "" I also declared to the world at large that I would ride it out, and I would not allow cancer to ride me. 
+But to go from where I was to where I wanted to be, I needed something. 
+I needed an anchor, an image, a peg to peg this process on, so that I could go from there. 
+And I found that in my dance, my dance, my strength, my energy, my passion, my very life breath. 
+But it wasn't easy. 
+Believe me, it definitely wasn't easy. 
+How do you keep cheer when you go from beautiful to bald in three days? 
+How do you not despair when, with the body ravaged by chemotherapy, climbing a mere flight of stairs was sheer torture, that to someone like me who could dance for three hours? 
+How do you not get overwhelmed by the despair and the misery of it all? 
+All I wanted to do was curl up and weep. 
+But I kept telling myself fear and tears are options I did not have. 
+So I would drag myself into my dance studio — body, mind and spirit — every day into my dance studio, and learn everything I learned when I was four, all over again, reworked, relearned, regrouped. 
+It was excruciatingly painful, but I did it. 
+Difficult. 
+I focused on my mudras, on the imagery of my dance, on the poetry and the metaphor and the philosophy of the dance itself. 
+And slowly, I moved out of that miserable state of mind. 
+But I needed something else. 
+I needed something to go that extra mile, and I found it in that metaphor which I had learned from my mother when I was four. 
+The metaphor of Mahishasura Mardhini, of Durga. 
+Durga, the mother goddess, the fearless one, created by the pantheon of Hindu gods. 
+Durga, resplendent, bedecked, beautiful, her 18 arms ready for warfare, as she rode astride her lion into the battlefield to destroy Mahishasur. 
+Durga, the epitome of creative feminine energy, or shakti. 
+Durga, the fearless one. 
+I made that image of Durga and her every attribute, her every nuance, my very own. 
+Powered by the symbology of a myth and the passion of my training, I brought laser-sharp focus into my dance, laser-sharp focus to such an extent that I danced a few weeks after surgery. 
+I danced through chemo and radiation cycles, much to the dismay of my oncologist. 
+I danced between chemo and radiation cycles and badgered him to fit it to my performing dance schedule. 
+What I had done is I had tuned out of cancer and tuned into my dance. 
+Yes, cancer has just been one page in my life. 
+My story is a story of overcoming setbacks, obstacles and challenges that life throws at you. 
+My story is the power of thought. 
+My story is the power of choice. 
+It's the power of focus. 
+It's the power of bringing ourselves to the attention of something that so animates you, so moves you, that something even like cancer becomes insignificant. 
+My story is the power of a metaphor. 
+It's the power of an image. 
+Mine was that of Durga, Durga the fearless one. 
+She was also called Simhanandini, the one who rode the lion. 
+As I ride out, as I ride my own inner strength, my own inner resilience, armed as I am with what medication can provide and continue treatment, as I ride out into the battlefield of cancer, asking my rogue cells to behave, I want to be known not as a cancer survivor, but as a cancer conqueror. 
+I present to you an excerpt of that work "Simhanandini." 
+(Applause) (Music) (Applause) 
+
+When I was growing up, I really liked playing hide-and-seek a lot. 
+One time, though, I thought climbing a tree would lead to a great hiding spot, but I fell and broke my arm. 
+I actually started first grade with a big cast all over my torso. 
+It was taken off six weeks later, but even then, I couldn't extend my elbow, and I had to do physical therapy to flex and extend it, 100 times per day, seven days per week. 
+I barely did it, because I found it boring and painful, and as a result, it took me another six weeks to get better. 
+Many years later, my mom developed frozen shoulder, which leads to pain and stiffness in the shoulder. 
+The person I believed for half of my life to have superpowers suddenly needed help to get dressed or to cut food. 
+She went each week to physical therapy, but just like me, she barely followed the home treatment, and it took her over five months to feel better. 
+Both my mom and I required physical therapy, a process of doing a suite of repetitive exercises in order to regain the range of movement lost due to an accident or injury. 
+At first, a physical therapist works with patients, but then it's up to the patients to do their exercises at home. 
+But patients find physical therapy boring, frustrating, confusing and lengthy before seeing results. 
+Sadly, patient noncompliance can be as high as 70 percent. 
+This means the majority of patients don't do their exercises and therefore take a lot longer to get better. 
+All physical therapists agree that special exercises reduce the time needed for recovery, but patients lack the motivation to do them. 
+So together with three friends, all of us software geeks, we asked ourselves, wouldn't it be interesting if patients could play their way to recovery? 
+We started building MIRA, A P.C. software platform that uses this Kinect device, a motion capture camera, to transform traditional exercises into video games. 
+My physical therapist has already set up a schedule for my particular therapy. 
+Let's see how this looks. 
+I control the bee by doing elbow extension and flexion, just like when I was seven years old after the cast was taken off. 
+When designing a game, we speak to physical therapists at first to understand what movement patients need to do. 
+We then make that a video game to give patients simple, motivating objectives to follow. 
+But the software is very customizable, and physical therapists can also create their own exercises. 
+Using the software, my physical therapist recorded herself performing a shoulder abduction, which is one of the movements my mom had to do when she had frozen shoulder. 
+I can follow my therapist's example on the left side of the screen, while on the right, I see myself doing the recommended movement. 
+I feel more engaged and confident, as I'm exercising alongside my therapist with the exercises my therapist thinks are best for me. 
+This basically extends the application for physical therapists to create whatever exercises they think are best. 
+This is an auction house game for preventing falls, designed to strengthen muscles and improve balance. 
+(Laughter) In two days, my grandmother will be 82 years old, and there's a 50 percent chance for people over 80 to fall at least once per year, which could lead to a broken hip or even worse. 
+Poor muscle tone and impaired balance are the number one cause of falls, so reversing these problems through targeted exercise will help keep older people like my grandmother safer and independent for longer. 
+I have just shown you three different games for kids, adults and seniors. 
+These can be used with orthopedic or neurologic patients, but we'll soon have options for children with autism, mental health or speech therapy. 
+My physical therapist can go back to my profile and see the data gathered during my sessions. 
+She can see how much I moved, how many points I scored, with what speed I moved my joints, and so on. 
+My physical therapist can use all of this to adapt my treatment. 
+I'm so pleased this version is now in use in over 10 clinics across Europe and the U.S., and we're working on the home version. 
+We want to enable physical therapists to prescribe this digital treatment and help patients play their way to recovery at home. 
+If my mom or I had a tool like this when we needed physical therapy, then we would have been more successful following the treatment, and perhaps gotten better a lot sooner. 
+(Applause) Tom Rielly: So Cosmin, tell me what hardware is this that they're rapidly putting away? 
+What is that made of, and how much does it cost? 
+
+I am the daughter of a forger, not just any forger... 
+When you hear the word "" forger, "" you often understand "" mercenary. "" You understand "" forged currency, "" "" forged pictures. "" My father is no such man. 
+For 30 years of his life, he made false papers — never for himself, always for other people, and to come to the aid of the persecuted and the oppressed. 
+Let me introduce him. 
+Here is my father at age 19. 
+It all began for him during World War II, when at age 17 he found himself thrust into a forged documents workshop. 
+He quickly became the false papers expert of the Resistance. 
+And it's not a banal story — after the liberation he continued to make false papers until the '70s. 
+When I was a child I knew nothing about this, of course. 
+This is me in the middle making faces. 
+I grew up in the Paris suburbs and I was the youngest of three children. 
+I had a "" normal "" dad like everybody else, apart from the fact that he was 30 years older than... 
+well, he was basically old enough to be my grandfather. 
+Anyway, he was a photographer and a street educator, and he always taught us to obey the law very strictly. 
+And, of course, he never talked about his past life when he was a forger. 
+There was, however, an incident I'm going to tell you about, that perhaps could have led me suspect something. 
+I was in high school and got a bad grade, a rare event for me, so I decided to hide it from my parents. 
+In order to do that, I set out to forge their signature. 
+I started working on my mother's signature, because my father's is absolutely impossible to forge. 
+So, I got working. I took some sheets of paper and started practicing, practicing, practicing, until I reached what I thought was a steady hand, and went into action. 
+Later, while checking my school bag, my mother got hold of my school assignment and immediately saw that the signature was forged. 
+She yelled at me like she never had before. 
+I went to hide in my bedroom, under the blankets, and then I waited for my father to come back from work with, one could say, much apprehension. 
+I heard him come in. 
+I remained under the blankets. He entered my room, sat on the corner of the bed, and he was silent, so I pulled the blanket from my head, and when he saw me he started laughing. 
+He was laughing so hard, he could not stop and he was holding my assignment in his hand. 
+Then he said, "" But really, Sarah, you could have worked harder! Can't you see it's really too small? "" Indeed, it's rather small. 
+I was born in Algeria. 
+There I would hear people say my father was a "" moudjahid "" and that means "" fighter. "" Later on, in France, I loved eavesdropping on grownups' conversations, and I would hear all sorts of stories about my father's previous life, especially that he had "" done "" World War II, that he had "" done "" the Algerian war. 
+And in my head I would be thinking that "" doing "" a war meant being a soldier. 
+But knowing my father, and how he kept saying that he was a pacifist and non-violent, I found it very hard to picture him with a helmet and gun. 
+And indeed, I was very far from the mark. 
+One day, while my father was working on a file for us to obtain French nationality, I happened to see some documents that caught my attention. 
+These are real! 
+These are mine, I was born an Argentinean. 
+But the document I happened to see that would help us build a case for the authorities was a document from the army that thanked my father for his work on behalf of the secret services. 
+And then, suddenly, I went "" wow! "" My father, a secret agent? 
+It was very James Bond. 
+I wanted to ask him questions, which he didn't answer. 
+And later, I told myself that one day I would have to question him. 
+And then I became a mother and had a son, and finally decided it was time — that he absolutely had to talk to us. 
+I had become a mother and he was celebrating his 77th birthday, and suddenly I was very, very afraid. 
+I feared he'd go and take his silences with him, and take his secrets with him. 
+I managed to convince him that it was important for us, but possibly also for other people that he shared his story. 
+He decided to tell it to me and I made a book, from which I'm going to read you some excerpts later. 
+So, his story. My father was born in Argentina. 
+His parents were of Russian descent. 
+The whole family came to settle in France in the '30s. 
+His parents were Jewish, Russian and above all, very poor. 
+So at the age of 14 my father had to work. 
+And with his only diploma, his primary education certificate, he found himself working at a dyer - dry cleaner. 
+That's where he discovered something totally magical, and when he talks about it, it's fascinating — it's the magic of dyeing chemistry. 
+During that time the war was happening and his mother was killed when he was 15. 
+This coincided with the time when he threw himself body and soul into chemistry because it was the only consolation for his sadness. 
+All day he would ask many questions to his boss to learn, to accumulate more and more knowledge, and at night, when no one was looking, he'd put his experience to practice. 
+He was mostly interested in ink bleaching. 
+All this to tell you that if my father became a forger, actually, it was almost by accident. 
+His family was Jewish, so they were hounded. 
+Finally they were all arrested and taken to the Drancy camp and they managed to get out at the last minute thanks to their Argentinean papers. 
+Well, they were out, but they were always in danger. The big "" Jew "" stamp was still on their papers. 
+It was my grandfather who decided they needed false documents. 
+My father had been instilled with such respect for the law that although he was being persecuted, he'd never thought of false papers. 
+But it was he who went to meet a man from the Resistance. 
+In those times documents had hard covers, they were filled in by hand, and they stated your job. 
+In order to survive, he needed to be working. He asked the man to write "" dyer. "" Suddenly the man looked very, very interested. 
+As a "" dyer, "" do you know how to bleach ink marks? 
+Of course he knew. 
+And suddenly the man started explaining that actually the whole Resistance had a huge problem: even the top experts could not manage to bleach an ink, called "" indelible, "" the "" Waterman "" blue ink. 
+And my father immediately replied that he knew exactly how to bleach it. 
+Now, of course, the man was very impressed with this young man of 17 who could immediately give him the formula, so he recruited him. 
+And actually, without knowing it, my father had invented something we can find in every schoolchild's pencil case: the so-called "" correction pen. "" (Applause) But it was only the beginning. 
+That's my father. 
+As soon as he got to the lab, even though he was the youngest, he immediately saw that there was a problem with the making of forged documents. 
+All the movements stopped at falsifying. 
+But demand was ever-growing and it was difficult to tamper with existing documents. 
+He told himself it was necessary to make them from scratch. 
+He started a press. He started photoengraving. 
+He started making rubber stamps. 
+He started inventing all kind of things — with some materials he invented a centrifuge using a bicycle wheel. 
+Anyway, he had to do all this because he was completely obsessed with output. 
+He had made a simple calculation: In one hour he could make 30 forged documents. 
+If he slept one hour, 30 people would die. 
+This sense of responsibility for other people's lives when he was just 17 — and also his guilt for being a survivor, since he had escaped the camp when his friends had not — stayed with him all his life. 
+And this is maybe what explains why, for 30 years, he continued to make false papers at the expense of all kinds of sacrifices. 
+I'd like to talk about those sacrifices, because there were many. 
+There were obviously financial sacrifices because he always refused to be paid. 
+To him, being paid would have meant being a mercenary. 
+If he had accepted payment, he wouldn't be able to say "" yes "" or "" no "" depending on what he deemed a just or unjust cause. 
+So he was a photographer by day, and a forger by night for 30 years. 
+He was broke all of the time. 
+Then there were the emotional sacrifices: How can one live with a woman while having so many secrets? 
+How can one explain what one does at night in the lab, every single night? 
+Of course, there was another kind of sacrifice involving his family that I understood much later. 
+One day my father introduced me to my sister. 
+He also explained to me that I had a brother, too, and the first time I saw them I must have been three or four, and they were 30 years older than me. 
+They are both in their sixties now. 
+In order to write the book, I asked my sister questions. I wanted to know who my father was, who was the father she had known. 
+She explained that the father that she'd had would tell them he'd come and pick them up on Sunday to go for a walk. 
+They would get all dressed up and wait for him, but he would almost never come. 
+He'd say, "" I'll call. "" He wouldn't call. 
+And then he would not come. 
+Then one day he totally disappeared. 
+Time passed, and they thought he had surely forgotten them, at first. 
+Then as time passed, at the end of almost two years, they thought, "Well, perhaps our father has died." 
+And then I understood that asking my father so many questions was stirring up a whole past he probably didn't feel like talking about because it was painful. 
+And while my half brother and sister thought they'd been abandoned, orphaned, my father was making false papers. 
+And if he did not tell them, it was of course to protect them. 
+After the liberation he made false papers to allow the survivors of concentration camps to immigrate to Palestine before the creation of Israel. 
+And then, as he was a staunch anti-colonialist, he made false papers for Algerians during the Algerian war. 
+After the Algerian war, at the heart of the international resistance movements, his name circulated and the whole world came knocking at his door. 
+In Africa there were countries fighting for their independence: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Angola. 
+And then my father connected with Nelson Mandela's anti-apartheid party. 
+He made false papers for persecuted black South Africans. 
+There was also Latin America. 
+My father helped those who resisted dictatorships in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and then it was the turn of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico. 
+Then there was the Vietnam War. 
+My father made false papers for the American deserters who did not wish to take up arms against the Vietnamese. 
+Europe was not spared either. 
+My father made false papers for the dissidents against Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, against the colonels' dictatorship in Greece, and even in France. 
+There, just once, it happened in May of 1968. 
+My father watched, benevolently, of course, the demonstrations of the month of May, but his heart was elsewhere, and so was his time because he had over 15 countries to serve. 
+Once, though, he agreed to make false papers for someone you might recognize. 
+(Laughter) He was much younger in those days, and my father agreed to make false papers to enable him to come back and speak at a meeting. 
+He told me that those false papers were the most media-relevant and the least useful he'd had to make in all his life. 
+But, he agreed to do it, even though Daniel Cohn-Bendit's life was not in danger, just because it was a good opportunity to mock the authorities, and to show them that there's nothing more porous than borders — and that ideas have no borders. 
+All my childhood, while my friends' dads would tell them Grimm's fairy tales, my father would tell me stories about very unassuming heroes with unshakeable utopias who managed to make miracles. 
+And those heroes did not need an army behind them. 
+Anyhow, nobody would have followed them, except for a handful [of] men and women of conviction and courage. 
+I understood much later that actually it was his own story my father would tell me to get me to sleep. 
+I asked him whether, considering the sacrifices he had to make, he ever had any regrets. 
+He said no. 
+He told me that he would have been unable to witness or submit to injustice without doing anything. 
+He was persuaded, and he's still convinced that another world is possible — a world where no one would ever need a forger. 
+He's still dreaming about it. 
+My father is here in the room today. 
+His name is Adolfo Kaminsky and I'm going to ask him to stand up. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+
+When we use the word "" architect "" or "" designer, "" what we usually mean is a professional, someone who gets paid, and we tend to assume that it's those professionals who are going to be the ones to help us solve the really big, systemic design challenges that we face like climate change, urbanization and social inequality. 
+And I think it's wrong, actually. 
+In 2008, I was just about to graduate from architecture school after several years, and go out and get a job, and this happened. 
+The economy ran out of jobs. 
+One, don't listen to career advisers. 
+And two, actually this is a fascinating paradox for architecture, which is that, as a society, we've never needed design thinking more, and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed. 
+It strikes me that we talk very deeply about design, but actually there's an economics behind architecture that we don't talk about, and I think we need to. 
+And a good place to start is your own paycheck. 
+So, as a bottom-of-the-rung architecture graduate, I might expect to earn about 24,000 pounds. 
+That's about 36,000, 37,000 dollars. 
+Now in terms of the whole world's population, that already puts me in the top 1.95 richest people, which raises the question of, who is it I'm working for? 
+The uncomfortable fact is that actually almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world's population, and it always has been. 
+The reason why we forgot that is because the times in history when architecture did the most to transform society were those times when, actually, the one percent would build on behalf of the 99 percent, for various different reasons, whether that was through philanthropy in the 19th century, communism in the early 20th, the welfare state, and most recently, of course, through this inflated real estate bubble. 
+And all of those booms, in their own various ways, have now kicked the bucket, and we're back in this situation where the smartest designers and architects in the world are only really able to work for one percent of the population. 
+Now it's not just that that's bad for democracy, though I think it probably is, it's actually not a very clever business strategy, actually. 
+I think the challenge facing the next generation of architects is, how are we going to turn our client from the one percent to the 100 percent? 
+And I want to offer three slightly counterintuitive ideas for how it might be done. 
+The first is, I think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings. 
+Actually, a building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to almost any given problem. 
+And fundamentally, design should be much, much more interested in solving problems and creating new conditions. 
+So here's a story. 
+The office was working with a school, and they had an old Victorian school building. 
+And they said to the architects, "" Look, our corridors are an absolute nightmare. 
+They're far too small. They get congested between classes. 
+There's bullying. We can't control them. 
+So what we want you to do is re-plan our entire building, and we know it's going to cost several million pounds, but we're reconciled to the fact. "" And the team thought about this, and they went away, and they said, "" Actually, don't do that. 
+Instead, get rid of the school bell. 
+And instead of having one school bell that goes off once, have several smaller school bells that go off in different places and different times, distribute the traffic through the corridors. "" It solves the same problem, but instead of spending several million pounds, you spend several hundred pounds. 
+Now, it looks like you're doing yourself out of a job, but you're not. You're actually making yourself more useful. 
+Architects are actually really, really good at this kind of resourceful, strategic thinking. 
+And the problem is that, like a lot of design professions, we got fixated on the idea of providing a particular kind of consumer product, and I don't think that needs to be the case anymore. 
+The second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing that mass architecture is about big — big buildings and big finance. 
+Actually, we've got ourselves locked into this Industrial Era mindset which says that the only people who can make cities are large organizations or corporations who build on our behalf, procuring whole neighborhoods in single, monolithic projects, and of course, form follows finance. 
+So what you end up with are single, monolithic neighborhoods based on this kind of one-size-fits-all model. 
+And a lot of people can't even afford them. 
+But what if, actually, it's possible now for cities to be made not just by the few with a lot but also by the many with a bit? 
+And when they do, they bring with them a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live. 
+And it raises really interesting questions about, how will we plan cities? How will finance development? 
+How will we sell design services? 
+What would it mean for democratic societies to offer their citizens a right to build? 
+And in a way it should be kind of obvious, right, that in the 21st century, maybe cities can be developed by citizens. 
+And thirdly, we need to remember that, from a strictly economic point of view, design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly — mostly it's done by amateurs. 
+And that's a good thing. 
+Most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy in what's called the social economy or the core economy, which is people doing it for themselves. 
+And the problem is that, up until now, it was the monetary economy which had all the infrastructure and all the tools. 
+So the challenge we face is, how are we going to build the tools, the infrastructure and the institutions for architecture's social economy? 
+And that began with open-source software. 
+And over the last few years, it's been moving into the physical world with open-source hardware, which are freely shared blueprints that anyone can download and make for themselves. 
+And that's where 3D printing gets really, really interesting. 
+Right? When suddenly you had a 3D printer that was open-source, the parts for which could be made on another 3D printer. 
+Or the same idea here, which is for a CNC machine, which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood. 
+What these technologies are doing is radically lowering the thresholds of time and cost and skill. 
+They're challenging the idea that if you want something to be affordable it's got to be one-size-fits-all. 
+And they're distributing massively really complex manufacturing capabilities. 
+We're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere, and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone. 
+That really is an industrial revolution. 
+And when we think that the major ideological conflicts that we inherited were all based around this question of who should control the means of production, and these technologies are coming back with a solution: actually, maybe no one. All of us. 
+And we were fascinated by what that might mean for architecture. 
+So about a year and a half ago, we started working on a project called WikiHouse, and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system. 
+And the idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online, access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in, at the moment, SketchUp, because it's free, and it's easy to use, and almost at the click of a switch they can generate a set of cutting files which allow them, in effect, to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood. 
+And the parts are all numbered, and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit. 
+(Laughter) And it goes together without any bolts. 
+It uses wedge and peg connections. 
+And even the mallets to make it can be provided on the cutting sheets as well. 
+And a team of about two or three people, working together, can build this. 
+They don't need any traditional construction skills. 
+They don't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that, and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day. 
+(Applause) And what you end up with is just the basic chassis of a house onto which you can then apply systems like windows and cladding and insulation and services based on what's cheap and what's available. 
+Of course, the house is never finished. 
+We're shifting our heads here, so the house is not a finished product. 
+With the CNC machine, you can make new parts for it over its life or even use it to make the house next door. 
+So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source, citizen-led urban development model, potentially. 
+And we and others have built a few prototypes around the world now, and some really interesting lessons here. 
+One of them is that it's always incredibly sociable. 
+People get confused between construction work and having fun. 
+But the principles of openness go right down into the really mundane, physical details. 
+Like, never designing a piece that can't be lifted up. 
+Or, when you're designing a piece, make sure you either can't put it in the wrong way round, or, if you do, it doesn't matter, because it's symmetrical. 
+Probably the principal which runs deepest with us is the principal set out by Linus Torvalds, the open-source pioneer, which was that idea of, "" Be lazy like a fox. "" Don't reinvent the wheel every time. 
+Take what already works, and adapt it for your own needs. 
+Contrary to almost everything that you might get taught at an architecture school, copying is good. 
+Which is appropriate, because actually, this approach is not innovative. 
+It's actually how we built buildings for hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution in these sorts of community barn-raisings. 
+The only difference between traditional vernacular architecture and open-source architecture might be a web connection, but it's a really, really big difference. 
+We shared the whole of WikiHouse under a Creative Commons license, and now what's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it, and it's amazing. 
+There's a cool group over in Christchurch in New Zealand looking at post-earthquake development housing, and thanks to the TED city Prize, we're working with an awesome group in one of Rio's favelas to set up a kind of community factory and micro-university. 
+These are very, very small beginnings, and actually there's more people in the last week who have got in touch and they're not even on this map. 
+I hope next time you see it, you won't even be able to see the map. 
+We're aware that WikiHouse is a very, very small answer, but it's a small answer to a really, really big question, which is that globally, right now, the fastest-growing cities are not skyscraper cities. 
+They're self-made cities in one form or another. 
+If we're talking about the 21st-century city, these are the guys who are going to be making it. 
+You know, like it or not, welcome to the world's biggest design team. 
+So if we're serious about problems like climate change, urbanization and health, actually, our existing development models aren't going to do it. 
+As I think Robert Neuwirth said, there isn't a bank or a corporation or a government or an NGO who's going to be able to do it if we treat citizens only as consumers. 
+How extraordinary would it be, though, if collectively we were to develop solutions not just to the problem of structure that we've been working on, but to infrastructure problems like solar-powered air conditioning, off-grid energy, off-grid sanitation — low-cost, open-source, high-performance solutions that anyone can very, very easily make, and to put them all into a commons where they're owned by everyone and they're accessible by everyone? 
+A kind of Wikipedia for stuff? 
+And once something's in the commons, it will always be there. 
+How much would that change the rules? 
+And I think the technology's on our side. 
+If design's great project in the 20th century was the democratization of consumption — that was Henry Ford, Levittown, Coca-Cola, IKEA — I think design's great project in the 21st century is the democratization of production. 
+And when it comes to architecture in cities, that really matters. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Photography has been my passion ever since I was old enough to pick up a camera, but today I want to share with you the 15 most treasured photos of mine, and I didn't take any of them. 
+There were no art directors, no stylists, no chance for reshoots, not even any regard for lighting. 
+In fact, most of them were taken by random tourists. 
+My story begins when I was in New York City for a speaking engagement, and my wife took this picture of me holding my daughter on her first birthday. We're on the corner of 57th and 5th. 
+We happened to be back in New York exactly a year later, so we decided to take the same picture. 
+Well you can see where this is going. 
+Approaching my daughter's third birthday, my wife said, "" Hey, why don't you take Sabina back to New York and make it a father-daughter trip, and continue the ritual? "" This is when we started asking passing tourists to take the picture. 
+You know, it's remarkable how universal the gesture is of handing your camera to a total stranger. 
+No one's ever refused, and luckily no one's ever run off with our camera. 
+Back then, we had no idea how much this trip would change our lives. 
+It's really become sacred to us. 
+This one was taken just weeks after 9 / 11, and I found myself trying to explain what had happened that day in ways a five-year-old could understand. 
+So these photos are far more than proxies for a single moment, or even a specific trip. 
+They're also ways for us to freeze time for one week in October and reflect on our times and how we change from year to year, and not just physically, but in every way. 
+Because while we take the same photo, our perspectives change, and she reaches new milestones, and I get to see life through her eyes, and how she interacts with and sees everything. 
+This very focused time we get to spend together is something we cherish and anticipate the entire year. 
+Recently, on one trip, we were walking, and she stops dead in her tracks, and she points to a red awning of the doll store that she loved when she was little on our earlier trips. 
+And she describes to me the feeling she felt as a five-year-old standing in that exact spot. 
+She said she remembers her heart bursting out of her chest when she saw that place for the very first time nine years earlier. 
+And now what she's looking at in New York are colleges, because she's determined to go to school in New York. 
+And it hit me: One of the most important things we all make are memories. 
+So I want to share the idea of taking an active role in consciously creating memories. 
+I don't know about you, but aside from these 15 shots, I'm not in many of the family photos. 
+I'm always the one taking the picture. 
+So I want to encourage everyone today to get in the shot, and don't hesitate to go up to someone and ask, "Will you take our picture?" 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I have a confession to make. 
+I'm a business professor whose ambition has been to help people learn to lead. 
+But recently, I've discovered that what many of us think of as great leadership does not work when it comes to leading innovation. 
+I'm an ethnographer. 
+I use the methods of anthropology to understand the questions in which I'm interested. 
+So along with three co-conspirators, I spent nearly a decade observing up close and personal exceptional leaders of innovation. 
+We studied 16 men and women, located in seven countries across the globe, working in 12 different industries. 
+We ended up with pages and pages and pages of field notes that we analyzed and looked for patterns in what our leaders did. 
+The bottom line? 
+Leading innovation is not about creating a vision, and inspiring others to execute it. 
+But what do we mean by innovation? 
+An innovation is anything that is both new and useful. 
+It can be a product or service. 
+It can be a process or a way of organizing. 
+It can be incremental, or it can be breakthrough. 
+We have a pretty inclusive definition. 
+How many of you recognize this man? 
+Put your hands up. 
+Keep your hands up, if you know who this is. 
+How about these familiar faces? 
+(Laughter) From your show of hands, it looks like many of you have seen a Pixar movie, but very few of you recognized Ed Catmull, the founder and CEO of Pixar — one of the companies I had the privilege of studying. 
+My first visit to Pixar was in 2005, when they were working on "" Ratatouille, "" that provocative movie about a rat becoming a master chef. 
+Computer-generated movies are really mainstream today, but it took Ed and his colleagues nearly 20 years to create the first full-length C.G. movie. 
+In the 20 years hence, they've produced 14 movies. 
+I was recently at Pixar, and I'm here to tell you that number 15 is sure to be a winner. 
+When many of us think about innovation, though, we think about an Einstein having an 'Aha!' moment. 
+But we all know that's a myth. 
+Innovation is not about solo genius, it's about collective genius. 
+Let's think for a minute about what it takes to make a Pixar movie: No solo genius, no flash of inspiration produces one of those movies. 
+On the contrary, it takes about 250 people four to five years, to make one of those movies. 
+To help us understand the process, an individual in the studio drew a version of this picture. 
+He did so reluctantly, because it suggested that the process was a neat series of steps done by discrete groups. 
+Even with all those arrows, he thought it failed to really tell you just how iterative, interrelated and, frankly, messy their process was. 
+Throughout the making of a movie at Pixar, the story evolves. 
+So think about it. 
+Some shots go through quickly. 
+They don't all go through in order. 
+It depends on how vexing the challenges are that they come up with when they are working on a particular scene. 
+So if you think about that scene in "" Up "" where the boy hands the piece of chocolate to the bird, that 10 seconds took one animator almost six months to perfect. 
+The other thing about a Pixar movie is that no part of the movie is considered finished until the entire movie wraps. 
+Partway through one production, an animator drew a character with an arched eyebrow that suggested a mischievous side. 
+When the director saw that drawing, he thought it was great. 
+It was beautiful, but he said, "You've got to lose it; it doesn't fit the character." 
+Two weeks later, the director came back and said, "Let's put in those few seconds of film." 
+Because that animator was allowed to share what we referred to as his slice of genius, he was able to help that director reconceive the character in a subtle but important way that really improved the story. 
+What we know is, at the heart of innovation is a paradox. 
+You have to unleash the talents and passions of many people and you have to harness them into a work that is actually useful. 
+Innovation is a journey. 
+It's a type of collaborative problem solving, usually among people who have different expertise and different points of view. 
+Innovations rarely get created full-blown. 
+As many of you know, they're the result, usually, of trial and error. 
+Lots of false starts, missteps and mistakes. 
+Innovative work can be very exhilarating, but it also can be really downright scary. 
+So when we look at why it is that Pixar is able to do what it does, we have to ask ourselves, what's going on here? 
+For sure, history and certainly Hollywood, is full of star-studded teams that have failed. 
+Most of those failures are attributed to too many stars or too many cooks, if you will, in the kitchen. 
+So why is it that Pixar, with all of its cooks, is able to be so successful time and time again? 
+When we studied an Islamic Bank in Dubai, or a luxury brand in Korea, or a social enterprise in Africa, we found that innovative organizations are communities that have three capabilities: creative abrasion, creative agility and creative resolution. 
+Creative abrasion is about being able to create a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse. 
+In innovative organizations, they amplify differences, they don't minimize them. 
+Creative abrasion is not about brainstorming, where people suspend their judgment. 
+No, they know how to have very heated but constructive arguments to create a portfolio of alternatives. 
+Individuals in innovative organizations learn how to inquire, they learn how to actively listen, but guess what? 
+They also learn how to advocate for their point of view. 
+They understand that innovation rarely happens unless you have both diversity and conflict. 
+Creative agility is about being able to test and refine that portfolio of ideas through quick pursuit, reflection and adjustment. 
+It's about discovery-driven learning where you act, as opposed to plan, your way to the future. 
+It's about design thinking where you have that interesting combination of the scientific method and the artistic process. 
+It's about running a series of experiments, and not a series of pilots. 
+Experiments are usually about learning. 
+When you get a negative outcome, you're still really learning something that you need to know. 
+Pilots are often about being right. 
+When they don't work, someone or something is to blame. 
+The final capability is creative resolution. 
+This is about doing decision making in a way that you can actually combine even opposing ideas to reconfigure them in new combinations to produce a solution that is new and useful. 
+When you look at innovative organizations, they never go along to get along. 
+They don't compromise. 
+They don't let one group or one individual dominate, even if it's the boss, even if it's the expert. 
+Instead, they have developed a rather patient and more inclusive decision making process that allows for both / and solutions to arise and not simply either / or solutions. 
+These three capabilities are why we see that Pixar is able to do what it does. 
+Let me give you another example, and that example is the infrastructure group of Google. 
+The infrastructure group of Google is the group that has to keep the website up and running 24 / 7. 
+So when Google was about to introduce Gmail and YouTube, they knew that their data storage system wasn't adequate. 
+The head of the engineering group and the infrastructure group at that time was a man named Bill Coughran. 
+Bill and his leadership team, who he referred to as his brain trust, had to figure out what to do about this situation. 
+They thought about it for a while. 
+Instead of creating a group to tackle this task, they decided to allow groups to emerge spontaneously around different alternatives. 
+Two groups coalesced. 
+One became known as Big Table, the other became known as Build It From Scratch. 
+Big Table proposed that they build on the current system. 
+Build It From Scratch proposed that it was time for a whole new system. 
+Separately, these two teams were allowed to work full-time on their particular approach. 
+In engineering reviews, Bill described his role as, "Injecting honesty into the process by driving debate." 
+Early on, the teams were encouraged to build prototypes so that they could "" bump them up against reality and discover for themselves the strengths and weaknesses of their particular approach. "" When Build It From Scratch shared their prototype with the group whose beepers would have to go off in the middle of the night if something went wrong with the website, they heard loud and clear about the limitations of their particular design. 
+As the need for a solution became more urgent and as the data, or the evidence, began to come in, it became pretty clear that the Big Table solution was the right one for the moment. 
+So they selected that one. 
+But to make sure that they did not lose the learning of the Build it From Scratch team, Bill asked two members of that team to join a new team that was emerging to work on the next-generation system. 
+This whole process took nearly two years, but I was told that they were all working at breakneck speed. 
+Early in that process, one of the engineers had gone to Bill and said, "" We're all too busy for this inefficient system of running parallel experiments. "" But as the process unfolded, he began to understand the wisdom of allowing talented people to play out their passions. 
+He admitted, "" If you had forced us to all be on one team, we might have focused on proving who was right, and winning, and not on learning and discovering what was the best answer for Google. "" Why is it that Pixar and Google are able to innovate time and again? 
+It's because they've mastered the capabilities required for that. 
+They know how to do collaborative problem solving, they know how to do discovery-driven learning and they know how to do integrated decision making. 
+Some of you may be sitting there and saying to yourselves right now, "" We don't know how to do those things in my organization. 
+So why do they know how to do those things at Pixar, and why do they know how to do those things at Google? "" When many of the people that worked for Bill told us, in their opinion, that Bill was one of the finest leaders in Silicon Valley, we completely agreed; the man is a genius. 
+Leadership is the secret sauce. 
+But it's a different kind of leadership, not the kind many of us think about when we think about great leadership. 
+One of the leaders I met with early on said to me, "" Linda, I don't read books on leadership. 
+All they do is make me feel bad. "" (Laughter) "" In the first chapter they say I'm supposed to create a vision. 
+But if I'm trying to do something that's truly new, I have no answers. 
+I don't know what direction we're going in and I'm not even sure I know how to figure out how to get there. "" For sure, there are times when visionary leadership is exactly what is needed. 
+But if we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must recast our understanding of what leadership is about. 
+Leading innovation is about creating the space where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovative problem solving. 
+At this point, some of you may be wondering, "What does that leadership really look like?" 
+At Pixar, they understand that innovation takes a village. 
+The leaders focus on building a sense of community and building those three capabilities. 
+How do they define leadership? 
+They say leadership is about creating a world to which people want to belong. 
+What kind of world do people want to belong in at Pixar? 
+A world where you're living at the frontier. 
+What do they focus their time on? 
+Not on creating a vision. 
+Instead they spend their time thinking about, "" How do we design a studio that has the sensibility of a public square so that people will interact? 
+Let's put in a policy that anyone, no matter what their level or role, is allowed to give notes to the director about how they feel about a particular film. 
+What can we do to make sure that all the disruptors, all the minority voices in this organization, speak up and are heard? 
+And, finally, let's bestow credit in a very generous way. "" I don't know if you've ever looked at the credits of a Pixar movie, but the babies born during a production are listed there. 
+(Laughter) How did Bill think about what his role was? 
+Bill said, "" I lead a volunteer organization. 
+Talented people don't want to follow me anywhere. 
+They want to cocreate with me the future. 
+My job is to nurture the bottom-up and not let it degenerate into chaos. "" How did he see his role? 
+"" I'm a role model, I'm a human glue, I'm a connector, I'm an aggregator of viewpoints. 
+I'm never a dictator of viewpoints. "" Advice about how you exercise the role? 
+Hire people who argue with you. 
+And, guess what? 
+Sometimes it's best to be deliberately fuzzy and vague. 
+Some of you may be wondering now, what are these people thinking? 
+They're thinking, "" I'm not the visionary, I'm the social architect. 
+I'm creating the space where people are willing and able to share and combine their talents and passions. "" If some of you are worrying now that you don't work at a Pixar, or you don't work at a Google, I want to tell you there's still hope. 
+We've studied many organizations that were really not organizations you'd think of as ones where a lot of innovation happens. 
+We studied the head of marketing at a German automaker where, fundamentally, they believed that it was the design engineers, not the marketeers, who were allowed to be innovative. 
+We also studied Vineet Nayar at HCL Technologies, an Indian outsourcing company. 
+When we met Vineet, his company was about, in his words, to become irrelevant. 
+We watched as he turned that company into a global dynamo of I.T. innovation. 
+At HCL technologies, like at many companies, the leaders had learned to see their role as setting direction and making sure that no one deviated from it. 
+What he did is tell them it was time for them to think about rethinking what they were supposed to do. 
+Because what was happening is that everybody was looking up and you weren't seeing the kind of bottom-up innovation we saw at Pixar or Google. 
+So they began to work on that. 
+They stopped giving answers, they stopped trying to provide solutions. 
+Instead, what they did is they began to see the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the young sparks, the people who were closest to the customers, as the source of innovation. 
+They began to transfer the organization's growth to that level. 
+In Vineet's language, this was about inverting the pyramid so that you could unleash the power of the many by loosening the stranglehold of the few, and increase the quality and the speed of innovation that was happening every day. 
+For sure, Vineet and all the other leaders that we studied were in fact visionaries. 
+For sure, they understood that that was not their role. 
+So I don't think it is accidental that many of you did not recognize Ed. 
+Because Ed, like Vineet, understands that our role as leaders is to set the stage, not perform on it. 
+If we want to invent a better future, and I suspect that's why many of us are here, then we need to reimagine our task. 
+Our task is to create the space where everybody's slices of genius can be unleashed and harnessed, and turned into works of collective genius. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Why do we cheat? 
+And why do happy people cheat? 
+And when we say "" infidelity, "" what exactly do we mean? 
+Is it a hookup, a love story, paid sex, a chat room, a massage with a happy ending? 
+Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy? 
+And is an affair always the end of a relationship? 
+For the past 10 years, I have traveled the globe and worked extensively with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. 
+There is one simple act of transgression that can rob a couple of their relationship, their happiness and their very identity: an affair. 
+And yet, this extremely common act is so poorly understood. 
+So this talk is for anyone who has ever loved. 
+Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so, too, the taboo against it. 
+In fact, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy, so much so, that this is the only commandment that is repeated twice in the Bible: once for doing it, and once just for thinking about it. 
+Now, throughout history, men practically had a license to cheat with little consequence, and supported by a host of biological and evolutionary theories that justified their need to roam, so the double standard is as old as adultery itself. 
+But who knows what's really going on under the sheets there, right? 
+Because when it comes to sex, the pressure for men is to boast and to exaggerate, but the pressure for women is to hide, minimize and deny, which isn't surprising when you consider that there are still nine countries where women can be killed for straying. 
+Now, monogamy used to be one person for life. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I mean, many of you probably have said, "I am monogamous in all my relationships." (Laughter) 
+We used to marry, and had sex for the first time. 
+But now we marry, and we stop having sex with others. 
+The fact is that monogamy had nothing to do with love. 
+Men relied on women's fidelity in order to know whose children these are, and who gets the cows when I die. 
+Now, everyone wants to know what percentage of people cheat. 
+I've been asked that question since I arrived at this conference. 
+But the definition of infidelity keeps on expanding: sexting, watching porn, staying secretly active on dating apps. 
+So because there is no universally agreed-upon definition of what even constitutes an infidelity, estimates vary widely, from 26 percent to 75 percent. 
+But on top of it, we are walking contradictions. 
+So 95 percent of us will say that it is terribly wrong for our partner to lie about having an affair, but just about the same amount of us will say that that's exactly what we would do if we were having one. 
+(Laughter) Now, I like this definition of an affair — it brings together the three key elements: a secretive relationship, which is the core structure of an affair; an emotional connection to one degree or another; and a sexual alchemy. 
+And alchemy is the key word here, because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving, can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. 
+As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person. 
+So it's never been easier to cheat, and it's never been more difficult to keep a secret. 
+And never has infidelity exacted such a psychological toll. 
+When marriage was an economic enterprise, infidelity threatened our economic security. 
+But now that marriage is a romantic arrangement, infidelity threatens our emotional security. 
+Ironically, we used to turn to adultery — that was the space where we sought pure love. 
+But now that we seek love in marriage, adultery destroys it. 
+Now, there are three ways that I think infidelity hurts differently today. 
+We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confidant, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. 
+And I am it: I'm chosen, I'm unique, I'm indispensable, I'm irreplaceable, I'm the one. 
+And infidelity tells me I'm not. 
+It is the ultimate betrayal. 
+But if throughout history, infidelity has always been painful, today it is often traumatic, because it threatens our sense of self. 
+So my patient Fernando, he's plagued. 
+He goes on: "" I thought I knew my life. 
+I thought I knew who you were, who we were as a couple, who I was. 
+Now, I question everything. "" Infidelity — a violation of trust, a crisis of identity. 
+And this is also what my patient Heather is telling me, when she's talking to me about her story with Nick. 
+Nick just left on a business trip, and Heather is playing on his iPad with the boys, when she sees a message appear on the screen: "Can't wait to see you." 
+Strange, she thinks, we just saw each other. 
+And then another message: "Can't wait to hold you in my arms." 
+And Heather realizes these are not for her. 
+She also tells me that her father had affairs, but her mother, she found one little receipt in the pocket, and a little bit of lipstick on the collar. 
+Heather, she goes digging, and she finds hundreds of messages, and photos exchanged and desires expressed. 
+The vivid details of Nick's two-year affair unfold in front of her in real time, And it made me think: Affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts. 
+But then we have another paradox that we're dealing with these days. 
+Because of this romantic ideal, we are relying on our partner's fidelity with a unique fervor. 
+But we also have never been more inclined to stray, and not because we have new desires today, but because we live in an era where we feel that we are entitled to pursue our desires, because this is the culture where I deserve to be happy. 
+And if we used to divorce because we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier. 
+And if divorce carried all the shame, today, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame. 
+So Heather, she can't talk to her friends because she's afraid that they will judge her for still loving Nick, and everywhere she turns, she gets the same advice: Leave him. Throw the dog on the curb. 
+And if the situation were reversed, Nick would be in the same situation. 
+Staying is the new shame. 
+So if we can divorce, why do we still have affairs? 
+Now, the typical assumption is that if someone cheats, either there's something wrong in your relationship or wrong with you. 
+But millions of people can't all be pathological. 
+The logic goes like this: If you have everything you need at home, then there is no need to go looking elsewhere, assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. 
+But what if passion has a finite shelf life? 
+What if there are things that even a good relationship can never provide? 
+If even happy people cheat, what is it about? 
+The vast majority of people that I actually work with are not at all chronic philanderers. 
+They are often people who are deeply monogamous in their beliefs, and at least for their partner. 
+But they find themselves in a conflict between their values and their behavior. 
+They often are people who have actually been faithful for decades, but one day they cross a line that they never thought they would cross, and at the risk of losing everything. 
+But for a glimmer of what? 
+Affairs are an act of betrayal, and they are also an expression of longing and loss. 
+At the heart of an affair, you will often find a longing and a yearning for an emotional connection, for novelty, for freedom, for autonomy, for sexual intensity, a wish to recapture lost parts of ourselves or an attempt to bring back vitality in the face of loss and tragedy. 
+I'm thinking about another patient of mine, Priya, who is blissfully married, loves her husband, and would never want to hurt the man. 
+But she also tells me that she's always done what was expected of her: good girl, good wife, good mother, taking care of her immigrant parents. 
+Priya, she fell for the arborist who removed the tree from her yard after Hurricane Sandy. 
+And with his truck and his tattoos, he's quite the opposite of her. 
+But at 47, Priya's affair is about the adolescence that she never had. 
+And her story highlights for me that when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become. 
+And it isn't so much that we're looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self. 
+Now, all over the world, there is one word that people who have affairs always tell me. 
+They feel alive. 
+And they often will tell me stories of recent losses — of a parent who died, and a friend that went too soon, and bad news at the doctor. 
+Death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair, because they raise these questions. 
+Am I going on for another 25 years like this? 
+Will I ever feel that thing again? 
+And it has led me to think that perhaps these questions are the ones that propel people to cross the line, and that some affairs are an attempt to beat back deadness, in an antidote to death. 
+And contrary to what you may think, affairs are way less about sex, and a lot more about desire: desire for attention, desire to feel special, desire to feel important. 
+And the very structure of an affair, the fact that you can never have your lover, keeps you wanting. 
+That in itself is a desire machine, because the incompleteness, the ambiguity, keeps you wanting that which you can't have. 
+Now some of you probably think that affairs don't happen in open relationships, but they do. 
+First of all, the conversation about monogamy is not the same as the conversation about infidelity. 
+But the fact is that it seems that even when we have the freedom to have other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden, that if we do that which we are not supposed to do, then we feel like we are really doing what we want to. 
+And I've also told quite a few of my patients that if they could bring into their relationships one tenth of the boldness, the imagination and the verve that they put into their affairs, they probably would never need to see me. 
+Desire runs deep. 
+But it can be healed. 
+And some affairs are death knells for relationships that were already dying on the vine. 
+But others will jolt us into new possibilities. 
+The fact is, the majority of couples who have experienced affairs stay together. 
+But some of them will merely survive, and others will actually be able to turn a crisis into an opportunity. 
+They'll be able to turn this into a generative experience. 
+And I'm actually thinking even more so for the deceived partner, who will often say, "" You think I didn't want more? 
+But I'm not the one who did it. "" But now that the affair is exposed, they, too, get to claim more, and they no longer have to uphold the status quo that may not have been working for them that well, either. 
+I've noticed that a lot of couples, in the immediate aftermath of an affair, because of this new disorder that may actually lead to a new order, will have depths of conversations with honesty and openness that they haven't had in decades. 
+And, partners who were sexually indifferent find themselves suddenly so lustfully voracious, they don't know where it's coming from. 
+Something about the fear of loss will rekindle desire, and make way for an entirely new kind of truth. 
+So when an affair is exposed, what are some of the specific things that couples can do? 
+We know from trauma that healing begins when the perpetrator acknowledges their wrongdoing. 
+So for the partner who had the affair, for Nick, one thing is to end the affair, but the other is the essential, important act of expressing guilt and remorse for hurting his wife. 
+But the truth is that I have noticed that quite a lot of people who have affairs may feel terribly guilty for hurting their partner, but they don't feel guilty for the experience of the affair itself. 
+And that distinction is important. 
+And Nick, he needs to hold vigil for the relationship. 
+He needs to become, for a while, the protector of the boundaries. 
+It's his responsibility to bring it up, because if he thinks about it, he can relieve Heather from the obsession, and from having to make sure that the affair isn't forgotten, and that in itself begins to restore trust. 
+But for Heather, or deceived partners, it is essential to do things that bring back a sense of self-worth, to surround oneself with love and with friends and activities that give back joy and meaning and identity. 
+But even more important, is to curb the curiosity to mine for the sordid details — Where were you? Where did you do it? 
+How often? Is she better than me in bed? — questions that only inflict more pain, and keep you awake at night. 
+And instead, switch to what I call the investigative questions, the ones that mine the meaning and the motives — What did this affair mean for you? 
+What were you able to express or experience there that you could no longer do with me? 
+What was it like for you when you came home? 
+What is it about us that you value? 
+Are you pleased this is over? 
+Every affair will redefine a relationship, and every couple will determine what the legacy of the affair will be. 
+But affairs are here to stay, and they're not going away. 
+And the dilemmas of love and desire, they don't yield just simple answers of black and white and good and bad, and victim and perpetrator. 
+Betrayal in a relationship comes in many forms. 
+There are many ways that we betray our partner: with contempt, with neglect, with indifference, with violence. 
+Sexual betrayal is only one way to hurt a partner. 
+In other words, the victim of an affair is not always the victim of the marriage. 
+Now, you've listened to me, and I know what you're thinking: She has a French accent, she must be pro-affair. 
+(Laughter) So, you're wrong. 
+I am not French. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And I'm not pro-affair. 
+But because I think that good can come out of an affair, I have often been asked this very strange question: Would I ever recommend it? 
+Now, I would no more recommend you have an affair than I would recommend you have cancer, and yet we know that people who have been ill often talk about how their illness has yielded them a new perspective. 
+The main question that I've been asked since I arrived at this conference when I said I would talk about infidelity is, for or against? 
+I said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side, growth and self-discovery on the other — what it did to you, and what it meant for me. 
+And so when a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair that has been revealed, I will often tell them this: Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. 
+Your first marriage is over. 
+Would you like to create a second one together? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I have had the distinct blessing in my life to have worked on a bunch of amazing projects. 
+But the coolest I ever worked on was around this guy. 
+This guy's name is TEMPT. 
+TEMPT was one of the foremost graffiti artists in the 80s. 
+And he came up home from a run one day and said, "" Dad, my legs are tingling. "" And that was the onset of ALS. 
+So TEMPT is now completely paralyzed. 
+He only has use of his eyes. 
+I was exposed to him. 
+I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world. 
+And so we decided that we were going to sponsor Tony, TEMPT, and his cause. 
+So I went and met with his brother and father and said, "" We're going to give you this money. 
+What are you going to do with it? "" And his brother said, "" I just want to be able to talk to Tony again. 
+I just want to be able to communicate with him and him to be able to communicate with me. "" And I said, "" Wait a second, isn't that — I've seen Stephen Hawking — don't all paralyzed people have the ability to communicate via these devices? "" And he said, "" No, unless you're in the upper echelon and you've got really amazing insurance, you can't actually do that. 
+These devices aren't accessible to people. "" And I said, "" Well, how do you actually communicate? "" Has everyone seen the movie "" The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? "" That's how they communicate — so run their finger along. 
+I said, "" That's archaic. How can that be? "" So I showed up with the desire to just write a check, and instead, I wrote a check that I had no freaking idea how I was going to cash. 
+I committed to his brother and his father right then and there — I'm like, "" All right, here's the deal: Tony's going to speak, we're going to get him a machine, and we're going to figure out a way for him to do his art again. 
+Because it's a travesty that someone who still has all of that in him isn't able to communicate it. "" So I spoke at a conference a couple months after that. 
+I met these guys called GRL, Graffiti Research Lab, and they have a technology that allows them to project a light onto any surface and then, with a laser pointer, draw on it, and it just registers the negative space. 
+So they go around and do art installations like this. 
+All the things that go up there, they said there's a life cycle. 
+First it starts with the sexual organs, then it starts with cuss words, then it was Bush slanders and then people actually got to art. 
+But there was always a life cycle to their presentations. 
+So I went home and was having dinner with my wife and was telling her about this, and we were like, "" Well wait a second. If we know that this technology exists where you can use your eyes to control things, why don't we figure out a way for TEMPT to control a laser and he could do graf again? Well that would be awesome. "" So that started the journey. 
+And about two years later, about a year later, after a bunch of organization and a bunch of moving things around, we'd accomplished a couple things. 
+One, we battered down the doors of the insurance companies, and we actually got TEMPT a machine that let him communicate — a Stephen Hawking machine. 
+(Applause) Which was awesome. 
+And he's seriously one of the funniest — I call him Yoda, because you talk to the guy, you get an email from him, and you're like, "" I'm not worthy. This guy's so amazing. "" The other thing we did is we flew seven programmers from all over the world — literally every corner of the world — into our house. 
+My wife and kids and I moved to our back garage, and these hackers and programmers and conspiracy theorists and anarchists took over our house. 
+A lot of our friends thought we were absolutely stupid to do that and that we were going to come back and all the pictures on the wall would be removed and graf on the walls. 
+But for over two weeks, we programmed, we went to the Venice boardwalk, my kids got involved, my dog got involved, and we created this. 
+This is called the EyeWriter, and you can see the description. 
+This is a cheap pair of sunglasses that we bought at the Venice Beach boardwalk, some copper wire and some stuff from Home Depot and Radio Shack. 
+We took a PS3 camera, hacked it open, mounted it to an LED light, and now there's a device that is free — you build this yourself, we publish the code for free, you download the software for free. 
+And now we've created a device that has absolutely no limitations. 
+There's no insurance company that can say "" No. "" There's no hospital that can say "" No. "" Anybody who's paralyzed now has access to actually draw or communicate using only their eyes. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+Thank you guys very much. That was awesome. 
+So at the end of the two weeks, we went back to TEMPT's room. 
+I love this picture, because this is someone else's room and that's his room. 
+So there's all this hustle and bustle going on for the big unveiling. 
+And after over a year of planning, two weeks of programming, carb-fest and all-night sessions, Tony drew again for the first time in seven years. 
+And this is an amazing picture, because this is his life support system, and he's looking over his life support system. 
+We kicked his bed so that he could see out. 
+And we set up a projector on a wall out in the parking lot outside of his hospital. 
+And he drew again for the first time, in front of his family and friends — and you can only imagine what the feeling in the parking lot was. 
+The funny thing was, we had to break into the parking lot too, so we totally felt like we were legit in the whole graf scene too. 
+(Laughter) So at the end of this, he sent us an email, and this is what the email said: "" That was the first time I've drawn anything for seven years. 
+I feel like I had been held underwater, and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so I could breathe. "" Isn't that awesome? 
+(Applause) So that's kind of our battle cry. 
+That's what keeps us going and keeps us developing. 
+And we've got such a long way to go with this. 
+This is an amazing device, but it's the equivalent of an Etch A Sketch. 
+And someone who has that kind of artistic potential deserves so much more. 
+So we're in the process of trying to figure out how to make it better, faster, stronger. 
+Since that time, we've had all kinds of acknowledgment. 
+We've won a bunch of awards. 
+Remember, it's free; none of us are making any money on this thing. 
+It's all coming out of our own pockets. 
+So the awards were like, "" Oh, this is fantastic. "" Armstrong Twittered about us, and then in December, Time magazine honored us as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010, which was really cool. 
+(Applause) The coolest thing about this — and this is what's completing the whole circle — is that in April of this year, at the Geffen MOCA in downtown Los Angeles, there's going to be an exhibition called "" Art of the Streets. "" And "" Art of the Streets "" is going to have pretty much the bad-asses of the street art scene — Banksy, Shepard Fairey, KAWS — all of these guys will be there. 
+TEMPT's going to be in the show, which is pretty awesome. 
+(Applause) So basically this is my point: If you see something that's not possible, make it possible. 
+Everything in this room wasn't possible — this stage, this computer, this mic, the EyeWriter — wasn't possible at one point. 
+Make it possible, everyone in this room. 
+I'm not a programmer, never done anything with ocular recognition technology, but I just recognized something and associated myself with amazing people so that we could make something happen. 
+And this is the question I want everyone to ask yourself every single day when you come up with something you feel that needs to be done: if not now, then when? And if not me, then who? 
+Thank you guys. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, I'm an artist. 
+I live in New York, and I've been working in advertising for — ever since I left school, so about seven, eight years now, and it was draining. 
+I worked a lot of late nights. I worked a lot of weekends, and I found myself never having time for all the projects that I wanted to work on on my own. 
+And one day I was at work and I saw a talk by Stefan Sagmeister on TED, and it was called "" The power of time off, "" and he spoke about how every seven years, he takes a year off from work so he could do his own creative projects, and I was instantly inspired, and I just said, "" I have to do that. I have to take a year off. 
+I need to take time to travel and spend time with my family and start my own creative ideas. "" So the first of those projects ended up being something I called "" One Second Every Day. "" Basically I'm recording one second of every day of my life for the rest of my life, chronologically compiling these one-second tiny slices of my life into one single continuous video until, you know, I can't record them anymore. 
+The purpose of this project is, one: I hate not remembering things that I've done in the past. 
+There's all these things that I've done with my life that I have no recollection of unless someone brings it up, and sometimes I think, "Oh yeah, that's something that I did." 
+And something that I realized early on in the project was that if I wasn't doing anything interesting, I would probably forget to record the video. 
+So the day — the first time that I forgot, it really hurt me, because it's something that I really wanted to — from the moment that I turned 30, I wanted to keep this project going until forever, and having missed that one second, I realized, it just kind of created this thing in my head where I never forgot ever again. 
+So if I live to see 80 years of age, I'm going to have a five-hour video that encapsulates 50 years of my life. 
+When I turn 40, I'll have a one-hour video that includes just my 30s. 
+This has really invigorated me day-to-day, when I wake up, to try and do something interesting with my day. 
+Now, one of the things that I have issues with is that, as the days and weeks and months go by, time just seems to start blurring and blending into each other and, you know, I hated that, and visualization is the way to trigger memory. 
+You know, this project for me is a way for me to bridge that gap and remember everything that I've done. 
+Even just this one second allows me to remember everything else I did that one day. 
+It's difficult, sometimes, to pick that one second. 
+On a good day, I'll have maybe three or four seconds that I really want to choose, but I'll just have to narrow it down to one, but even narrowing it down to that one allows me to remember the other three anyway. 
+It's also kind of a protest, a personal protest, against the culture we have now where people just are at concerts with their cell phones out recording the whole concert, and they're disturbing you. 
+They're not even enjoying the show. 
+They're watching the concert through their cell phone. 
+I hate that. I admittedly used to be that guy a little bit, back in the day, and I've decided that the best way for me to still capture and keep a visual memory of my life and not be that person, is to just record that one second that will allow me to trigger that memory of, "Yeah, that concert was amazing. I really loved that concert." 
+And it just takes a quick, quick second. 
+I was on a three-month road trip this summer. 
+It was something that I've been dreaming about doing my whole life, just driving around the U.S. and Canada and just figuring out where to go the next day, and it was kind of outstanding. 
+I actually ran out, I spent too much money on my road trip for the savings that I had to take my year off, so I had to, I went to Seattle and I spent some time with friends working on a really neat project. 
+One of the reasons that I took my year off was to spend more time with my family, and this really tragic thing happened where my sister-in-law, her intestine suddenly strangled one day, and we took her to the emergency room, and she was, she was in really bad shape. 
+We almost lost her a couple of times, and I was there with my brother every day. 
+It helped me realize something else during this project, is that recording that one second on a really bad day is extremely difficult. 
+It's not — we tend to take our cameras out when we're doing awesome things. 
+Or we're, "" Oh, yeah, this party, let me take a picture. "" But we rarely do that when we're having a bad day, and something horrible is happening. 
+And I found that it's actually been very, very important to record even just that one second of a really bad moment. 
+It really helps you appreciate the good times. 
+It's not always a good day, so when you have a bad one, I think it's important to remember it, just as much as it is important to remember the [good] days. 
+Now one of the things that I do is I don't use any filters, I don't use anything to — I try to capture the moment as much as possible as the way that I saw it with my own eyes. 
+I started a rule of first person perspective. 
+Early on, I think I had a couple of videos where you would see me in it, but I realized that wasn't the way to go. 
+The way to really remember what I saw was to record it as I actually saw it. 
+Now a couple of things that I have in my head about this project are, wouldn't it be interesting if thousands of people were doing this? 
+I turned 31 last week, which is there. 
+I think it would be interesting to see what everyone did with a project like this. 
+I think everyone would have a different interpretation of it. 
+I think everyone would benefit from just having that one second to remember every day. 
+Personally, I'm tired of forgetting, and this is a really easy thing to do. 
+I mean, we all have HD-capable cameras in our pockets right now — most people in this room, I bet — and it's something that's — I never want to forget another day that I've ever lived, and this is my way of doing that, and it'd be really interesting also to see, if you could just type in on a website, "June 18, 2018," and you would just see a stream of people's lives on that particular day from all over the world. 
+And I don't know, I think this project has a lot of possibilities, and I encourage you all to record just a small snippet of your life every day, so you can never forget that that day, you lived. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm here to tell you about the real search for alien life. 
+And in the search for planets, and in the future, planets that might be like Earth, we're able to help address some of the most amazing and mysterious questions that have faced humankind for centuries. 
+Why does our universe exist? 
+How did Earth form and evolve? 
+The second question that we often think about is: Are we alone? 
+Is there life out there? 
+Who is out there? 
+You know, this question has been around for thousands of years, since at least the time of the Greek philosophers. 
+This is a photograph of a real galaxy, we think our Milky Way looks like this galaxy. 
+Knowing that small planets are very common, you can just do the math. 
+And there are just so many stars and so many planets out there, that surely, there must be life somewhere out there. 
+Well, the biologists get furious with me for saying that, because we have absolutely no evidence for life beyond Earth yet. 
+Well, if we were able to look at our galaxy from the outside and zoom in to where our sun is, we see a real map of the stars. 
+This is really just the tip of the iceberg. 
+Here, this animation is zooming in onto our solar system. 
+And you'll see here the planets as well as some spacecraft that are also orbiting our sun. 
+Now if we can imagine going to the West Coast of North America, and looking out at the night sky, here's what we'd see on a spring night. 
+Let's zoom in and look at one of the favorite exoplanets. 
+This star is called Kepler-186f. 
+So, many people have this romantic notion of astronomers going to the telescope on a lonely mountaintop and looking at the spectacular night sky through a big telescope. 
+"" Enjoy the gravity on HD 40307g, a Super-Earth. "" This planet is more massive than Earth and has a higher surface gravity. 
+"" Relax on Kepler-16b, where your shadow always has company. "" (Laughter) We know of a dozen planets that orbit two stars, and there's likely many more out there. 
+So actually, science fiction got some things right. 
+It orbits over 50 times closer to its star than our Earth does to our sun. 
+But to do that, we'd have to be able to look at the planet's atmosphere, because the atmosphere acts like a blanket trapping heat — the greenhouse effect. 
+Well, science fiction got some things wrong. 
+The Star Trek Enterprise had to travel vast distances at incredible speeds to orbit other planets so that First Officer Spock could analyze the atmosphere to see if the planet was habitable or if there were lifeforms there. 
+We actually can and do study planet atmospheres from here, from Earth orbit. 
+But nevertheless, I wanted to try to explain to you how we study exoplanet atmospheres. 
+I want you to imagine, for a moment, a rainbow. 
+And if we could look at this rainbow closely, we would see that some dark lines are missing. 
+Some are very narrow, some are wide, some are shaded at the edges. 
+Well, you know, our own Earth has oxygen in the atmosphere to 20 percent by volume. 
+That's a lot of oxygen. 
+But without plants and photosynthetic life, there would be no oxygen, virtually no oxygen in our atmosphere. 
+We expect that to continue in the future when we find other Earths. 
+Well, I emailed a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine and he said, "" Sure, come and talk to me. "" So I brought my two biochemistry friends and we went to talk to him about our crazy theory. 
+He found an example that didn't exist. 
+So, we went back to the drawing board and we think we have found something very interesting in another field. 
+And so when it comes time when we find gases in exoplanet atmospheres that we won't know if they're being produced by intelligent aliens or by trees, or a swamp, or even just by simple, single-celled microbial life. 
+So working on the models and thinking about biochemistry, it's all well and good. 
+And the starshade is a very specially shaped screen and the goal is to fly that starshade so it blocks out the light of a star so that the telescope can see the planets directly. 
+The concept is that a starshade and telescope could launch together, with the petals unfurling from the stowed position. 
+The central truss would expand, with the petals snapping into place. 
+And the goal is to block out the starlight to incredible precision so that we'd be able to see the planets directly. 
+And it has to be a very special shape, because of the physics of defraction. 
+So after all of that hard work where we try to think of all the crazy gases that might be out there, and we build the very complicated space telescopes that might be out there, what are we going to find? 
+Here is Earth as a pale blue dot. 
+And that red light is just scattered light in the camera optics. 
+But what's so awesome to consider is that if there are intelligent aliens orbiting on a planet around a star near to us and they build complicated space telescopes of the kind that we're trying to build, all they'll see is this pale blue dot, a pinprick of light. 
+And so sometimes, when I pause to think about my professional struggle and huge ambition, it's hard to think about that in contrast to the vastness of the universe. 
+But nonetheless, I am devoting the rest of my life to finding another Earth. 
+And I can guarantee that in the next generation of space telescopes, in the second generation, we will have the capability to find and identity other Earths. 
+But there's more. 
+And so I envision that our descendants, hundreds of years from now, will embark on an interstellar journey to other worlds. 
+And they will look back at all of us as the generation who first found the Earth-like worlds. 
+Thank you. 
+And this is called the James Webb Space Telescope, and that will launch in 2018, and that's what we're going to do, we're going to look at a special kind of planet called transient exoplanets, and that will be our first shot at studying small planets for gases that might indicate the planet is habitable. 
+
+The global challenge that I want to talk to you about today rarely makes the front pages. 
+It, however, is enormous in both scale and importance. 
+Look, you all are very well traveled; this is TEDGlobal after all. 
+But I do hope to take you to some places you've never been to before. 
+So, let's start off in China. 
+This photo was taken two weeks ago. 
+Actually, one indication is that little boy on my husband's shoulders has just graduated from high school. 
+(Laughter) But this is Tiananmen Square. 
+Many of you have been there. It's not the real China. 
+Let me take you to the real China. 
+This is in the Dabian Mountains in the remote part of Hubei province in central China. 
+Dai Manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts. 
+She lives with her parents, her two brothers and her great-aunt. 
+They have a hut that has no electricity, no running water, no wristwatch, no bicycle. 
+And they share this great splendor with a very large pig. 
+Dai Manju was in sixth grade when her parents said, "" We're going to pull you out of school because the 13-dollar school fees are too much for us. 
+You're going to be spending the rest of your life in the rice paddies. 
+Why would we waste this money on you? "" This is what happens to girls in remote areas. 
+Turns out that Dai Manju was the best pupil in her grade. 
+She still made the two-hour trek to the schoolhouse and tried to catch every little bit of information that seeped out of the doors. 
+We wrote about her in The New York Times. 
+We got a flood of donations — mostly 13-dollar checks because New York Times readers are very generous in tiny amounts (Laughter) but then, we got a money transfer for $10,000 — really nice guy. 
+We turned the money over to that man there, the principal of the school. 
+He was delighted. 
+He thought, "" Oh, I can renovate the school. 
+I can give scholarships to all the girls, you know, if they work hard and stay in school. 
+So Dai Manju basically finished out middle school. 
+She went to high school. 
+She went to vocational school for accounting. 
+She scouted for jobs down in Guangdong province in the south. 
+She found a job, she scouted for jobs for her classmates and her friends. 
+She sent money back to her family. 
+They built a new house, this time with running water, electricity, a bicycle, no pig. 
+What we saw was a natural experiment. 
+It is rare to get an exogenous investment in girls' education. 
+And over the years, as we followed Dai Manju, we were able to see that she was able to move out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. 
+She not only changed her own dynamic, she changed her household, she changed her family, her village. 
+The village became a real standout. 
+Of course, most of China was flourishing at the time, but they were able to get a road built to link them up to the rest of China. 
+And that brings me to my first major of two tenets of "" Half the Sky. "" And that is that the central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity. 
+In the 19th century, it was slavery. 
+In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. 
+The cause of our time is the brutality that so many people face around the world because of their gender. 
+So some of you may be thinking, "" Gosh, that's hyperbole. 
+She's exaggerating. "" Well, let me ask you this question. 
+How many of you think there are more males or more females in the world? 
+Let me take a poll. How many of you think there are more males in the world? 
+Hands up, please. 
+How many of you think — a few — how many of you there are more females in the world? 
+Okay, most of you. 
+Well, you know this latter group, you're wrong. 
+There are, true enough, in Europe and the West, when women and men have equal access to food and health care, there are more women, we live longer. 
+But in most of the rest of the world, that's not the case. 
+In fact, demographers have shown that there are anywhere between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the current population. 
+And, you know, it happens for several reasons. 
+For instance, in the last half-century, more girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all the battlefields in the 20th century. 
+Sometimes it's also because of the sonogram. 
+Girls get aborted before they're even born when there are scarce resources. 
+This girl here, for instance, is in a feeding center in Ethiopia. 
+The entire center was filled with girls like her. 
+What's remarkable is that her brothers, in the same family, were totally fine. 
+In India, in the first year of life, from zero to one, boy and girl babies basically survive at the same rate because they depend upon the breast, and the breast shows no son preference. 
+From one to five, girls die at a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys, in all of India. 
+The second tenet of "" Half the Sky "" is that, let's put aside the morality of all the right and wrong of it all, and just on a purely practical level, we think that one of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and to bring women into the formal labor force. 
+Poverty, for instance. 
+There are three reasons why this is the case. 
+For one, overpopulation is one of the persistent causes of poverty. 
+And you know, when you educate a boy, his family tends to have fewer kids, but only slightly. 
+When you educate a girl, she tends to have significantly fewer kids. 
+The second reason is it has to do with spending. 
+It's kind of like the dirty, little secret of poverty, which is that, not only do poor people take in very little income, but also, the income that they take in, they don't spend it very wisely, and unfortunately, most of that spending is done by men. 
+So research has shown, if you look at people who live under two dollars a day — one metric of poverty — two percent of that take-home pay goes to this basket here, in education. 
+20 percent goes to a basket that is a combination of alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks — and prostitution and festivals. 
+If you just take four percentage points and put it into this basket, you would have a transformative effect. 
+The last reason has to do with women being part of the solution, not the problem. 
+You need to use scarce resources. 
+It's a waste of resources if you don't use someone like Dai Manju. 
+Bill Gates put it very well when he was traveling through Saudi Arabia. 
+He was speaking to an audience much like yourselves. 
+However, two-thirds of the way there was a barrier. 
+On this side was men, and then the barrier, and this side was women. 
+And someone from this side of the room got up and said, "" Mr. Gates, we have here as our goal in Saudi Arabia to be one of the top 10 countries when it comes to technology. 
+Do you think we'll make it? "" So Bill Gates, as he was staring out at the audience, he said, "" If you're not fully utilizing half the resources in your country, there is no way you will get anywhere near the top 10. "" So here is Bill of Arabia. 
+(Laughter) So what would some of the specific challenges look like? 
+I would say, on the top of the agenda is sex trafficking. 
+And I'll just say two things about this. 
+The slavery at the peak of the slave trade in the 1780s: there were about 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World. 
+Now, modern slavery: according to State Department rough statistics, there are about 800,000 — 10 times the number — that are trafficked across international borders. 
+And that does not even include those that are trafficked within country borders, which is a substantial portion. 
+And if you look at another factor, another contrast, a slave back then is worth about $40,000 in today's money. 
+Today, you can buy a girl trafficked for a few hundred dollars, which means she's actually more disposable. 
+But you know, there is progress being made in places like Cambodia and Thailand. 
+We don't have to expect a world where girls are bought and sold or killed. 
+The second item on the agenda is maternal mortality. 
+You know, childbirth in this part of the world is a wonderful event. 
+In Niger, one in seven women can expect to die during childbirth. 
+Around the world, one woman dies every minute and a half from childbirth. 
+You know, it's not as though we don't have the technological solution, but these women have three strikes against them: they are poor, they are rural and they are female. 
+You know, for every woman who does die, there are 20 who survive but end up with an injury. 
+And the most devastating injury is obstetric fistula. 
+It's a tearing during obstructed labor that leaves a woman incontinent. 
+Let me tell you about Mahabuba. 
+She lives in Ethiopia. 
+She was married against her will at age 13. 
+She got pregnant, ran to the bush to have the baby, but you know, her body was very immature, and she ended up having obstructed labor. 
+The baby died, and she ended up with a fistula. 
+So that meant she was incontinent; she couldn't control her wastes. 
+In a word, she stank. 
+The villagers thought she was cursed; they didn't know what to do with her. 
+So finally, they put her at the edge of the village in a hut. 
+They ripped off the door so that the hyenas would get her at night. 
+That night, there was a stick in the hut. 
+She fought off the hyenas with that stick. 
+And the next morning, she knew if she could get to a nearby village where there was a foreign missionary, she would be saved. 
+Because she had some damage to her nerves, she crawled all the way — 30 miles — to that doorstep, half dead. 
+The foreign missionary opened the door, knew exactly what had happened, took her to a nearby fistula hospital in Addis Ababa, and she was repaired with a 350-dollar operation. 
+The doctors and nurses there noticed that she was not only a survivor, she was really clever, and they made her a nurse. 
+So now, Mahabuba, she is saving the lives of hundreds, thousands, of women. 
+She has become part of the solution, not the problem. 
+She's moved out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. 
+I've talked about some of the challenges, let me talk about some of the solutions, and there are predictable solutions. 
+I've hinted at them: education and also economic opportunity. 
+So of course, when you educate a girl, she tends to get married later on in life, she tends to have kids later on in life, she tends to have fewer kids, and those kids that she does have, she educates them in a more enlightened fashion. 
+With economic opportunity, it can be transformative. 
+Let me tell you about Saima. 
+She lives in a small village outside Lahore, Pakistan. 
+And at the time, she was miserable. 
+She was beaten every single day by her husband, who was unemployed. 
+He was kind of a gambler type — and unemployable, therefore — and took his frustrations out on her. 
+Well, when she had her second daughter, her mother in-law told her son, "" I think you'd better get a second wife. 
+Saima's not going to produce you a son. "" This is when she had her second daughter. 
+At the time, there was a microlending group in the village that gave her a 65-dollar loan. 
+Saima took that money, and she started an embroidery business. 
+The merchants liked her embroidery; it sold very well, and they kept asking for more. 
+And when she couldn't produce enough, she hired other women in the village. 
+Pretty soon she had 30 women in the village working for her embroidery business. 
+And then, when she had to transport all of the embroidery goods from the village to the marketplace, she needed someone to help her do the transport, so she hired her husband. 
+So now they're in it together. 
+He does the transportation and distribution, and she does the production and sourcing. 
+And now they have a third daughter, and the daughters, all of them, are being tutored in education because Saima knows what's really important. 
+Which brings me to the final element, which is education. 
+Larry Summers, when he was chief economist at the World Bank, once said that, "" It may well be that the highest return on investment in the developing world is in girls' education. "" Let me tell you about Beatrice Biira. 
+Beatrice was living in Uganda near the Congo border, and like Dai Manju, she didn't go to school. 
+Actually, she had never been to school, not to a lick, one day. 
+Her parents, again, said, "" Why should we spend the money on her? 
+She's going to spend most of her life lugging water back and forth. "" Well, it just so happens, at that time, there was a group in Connecticut called the Niantic Community Church Group in Connecticut. 
+They made a donation to an organization based in Arkansas called Heifer International. 
+Heifer sent two goats to Africa. 
+One of them ended up with Beatrice's parents, and that goat had twins. 
+The twins started producing milk. 
+They sold the milk for cash. 
+The cash started accumulating, and pretty soon the parents said, "You know, we've got enough money. Let's send Beatrice to school." 
+So at nine years of age, Beatrice started in first grade — after all, she'd never been to a lick of school — with a six year-old. 
+No matter, she was just delighted to be in school. 
+She rocketed to the top of her class. 
+She stayed at the top of her class through elementary school, middle school, and then in high school, she scored brilliantly on the national examinations so that she became the first person in her village, ever, to come to the United States on scholarship. 
+Two years ago, she graduated from Connecticut College. 
+On the day of her graduation, she said, "" I am the luckiest girl alive because of a goat. "" (Laughter) And that goat was $120. 
+So you see how transformative little bits of help can be. 
+But I want to give you a reality check. 
+Look: U.S. aid, helping people is not easy, and there have been books that have criticized U.S. aid. 
+There's Bill Easterly's book. 
+There's a book called "" Dead Aid. "" You know, the criticism is fair; it isn't easy. 
+You know, people say how half of all water well projects, a year later, are failed. 
+When I was in Zimbabwe, we were touring a place with the village chief — he wanted to raise money for a secondary school — and there was some construction a few yards away, and I said, "" What's that? "" He sort of mumbled. 
+Turns out that it's a failed irrigation project. 
+A few yards away was a failed chicken coop. 
+One year, all the chickens died, and no one wanted to put the chickens in there. 
+It's true, but we think that you don't through the baby out with the bathwater; you actually improve. 
+You learn from your mistakes, and you continuously improve. 
+We also think that individuals can make a difference, and they should, because individuals, together, we can all help create a movement. 
+And a movement of men and women is what's needed to bring about social change, change that will address this great moral challenge. 
+So then, I ask, what's in it for you? 
+You're probably asking that. Why should you care? 
+I will just leave you with two things. 
+One is that research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of — which most of us, all of us, here in this room do — research shows that there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness. 
+One of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself. 
+And the second thing, it's an anecdote that I'll leave you with. 
+And that is the story of an aid worker in Darfur. 
+Here was a woman who had worked in Darfur, seeing things that no human being should see. 
+Throughout her time there, she was strong, she was steadfast. 
+She never broke down. 
+And then she came back to the United States and was on break, Christmas break. 
+She was in her grandmother's backyard, and she saw something that made her break down in tears. 
+What that was was a bird feeder. 
+And she realized that she had the great fortune to be born in a country where we take security for granted, where we not only can feed, clothe and house ourselves, but also provide for wild birds so they don't go hungry in the winter. 
+And she realized that with that great fortune comes great responsibility. 
+And so, like her, you, me, we have all won the lottery of life. 
+And so the question becomes: how do we discharge that responsibility? 
+So, here's the cause. 
+Join the movement. 
+Feel happier and help save the world. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Have you ever wondered what animals think and feel? 
+Let's start with a question: Does my dog really love me, or does she just want a treat? 
+Well, it's easy to see that our dog really loves us, easy to see, right, what's going on in that fuzzy little head. 
+What is going on? 
+Something's going on. 
+But why is the question always do they love us? 
+Who are you? 
+There are capacities of the human mind that we tend to think are capacities only of the human mind. 
+But is that true? 
+What are other beings doing with those brains? 
+What are they thinking and feeling? 
+Is there a way to know? 
+We can look at evolution, we can look at their brains and we can watch what they do. 
+The first thing to remember is: our brain is inherited. 
+The first neurons came from jellyfish. 
+Jellyfish gave rise to the first chordates. 
+The vertebrates came out of the sea, and here we are. 
+But it's still true that a neuron, a nerve cell, looks the same in a crayfish, a bird or you. 
+What does that say about the minds of crayfish? 
+Can we tell anything about that? 
+If you give the crayfish the same drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, it relaxes and comes out and explores. 
+(Laughter) Octopuses use tools, as well as do most apes and they recognize human faces. 
+How do we celebrate the ape-like intelligence of this invertebrate? 
+Mostly boiled. 
+If a grouper chases a fish into a crevice in the coral, it will sometimes go to where it knows a moray eel is sleeping and it will signal to the moray, "" Follow me, "" and the moray will understand that signal. 
+This is an ancient partnership that we have just recently found out about. 
+A pattern is emerging and it says a lot more about us than it does about them. 
+Sea otters use tools and they take time away from what they're doing to show their babies what to do, which is called teaching. 
+Killer whales teach and killer whales share food. 
+OK, maybe you're saying, all right, well, we see brains, but what does that have to say about minds? 
+Well, we can see the working of the mind in the logic of behaviors. 
+So these elephants, you can see, obviously, they are resting. 
+They have found a patch of shade under the palm trees under which to let their babies sleep, while they doze but remain vigilant. 
+We make perfect sense of that image just as they make perfect sense of what they're doing because under the arc of the same sun on the same plains, listening to the howls of the same dangers, they became who they are and we became who we are. 
+We've been neighbors for a very long time. 
+It turns out that if you record the voices of tourists and you play that recording from a speaker hidden in bushes, elephants will ignore it, because tourists never bother elephants. 
+But if you record the voices of herders who carry spears and often hurt elephants in confrontations at water holes, the elephants will bunch up and run away from the hidden speaker. 
+We have the same imperatives: take care of our babies, find food, try to stay alive. 
+Whether we're outfitted for hiking in the hills of Africa or outfitted for diving under the sea, we are basically the same. 
+The elephant has the same skeleton, the killer whale has the same skeleton, as do we. 
+We see helping where help is needed. 
+We see curiosity in the young. 
+We see the bonds of family connections. 
+We recognize affection. 
+Courtship is courtship. 
+And then we ask, "" Are they conscious? "" When you get general anesthesia, it makes you unconscious, which means you have no sensation of anything. 
+If you see, if you hear, if you feel, if you're aware of anything, you are conscious, and they are conscious. 
+Some people say well, there are certain things that make humans humans, and one of those things is empathy. 
+It's a very useful thing. 
+(Laughter) Empathy is old, but empathy, like everything else in life, comes on a sliding scale and has its elaboration. 
+Then there's something that I call sympathy, a little more removed: "" I'm sorry to hear that your grandmother has just passed away. 
+Far from being the thing that makes us human, human empathy is far from perfect. 
+People who seem to know only one thing about animal behavior know that you must never attribute human thoughts and emotions to other species. 
+Well, I think that's silly, because attributing human thoughts and emotions to other species is the best first guess about what they're doing and how they're feeling, because their brains are basically the same as ours. 
+It is not scientific to say that they are hungry when they're hunting and they're tired when their tongues are hanging out, and then say when they're playing with their children and acting joyful and happy, we have no idea if they can possibly be experiencing anything. 
+So OK, so a reporter said to me, "Maybe, but how do you really know that other animals can think and feel?" 
+I know that I can go over to Carl, he will understand what I'm asking. 
+He'll get the job done, and it will feel good. "" (Laughter) She has thought and she has felt, and it's really not more complicated than that. 
+But we see other animals and we say, "" Oh look, killer whales, wolves, elephants: that's not how they see it. "" That tall-finned male is L41. 
+She's 44. 
+They know exactly who they are. 
+They know where they are all the time. 
+This is an elephant named Philo. 
+He was a young male. 
+Humans not only can feel grief, we create an awful lot of it. 
+We want to carve their teeth. 
+Why can't we wait for them to die? 
+Elephants once ranged from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. 
+Of course, we take much better care of our wildlife in the United States. 
+In Yellowstone National Park, we killed every single wolf. 
+But in the park, park rangers did that in the 1920s, and then 60 years later they had to bring them back, because the elk numbers had gotten out of control. 
+And then people came. 
+And I went there and I watched this incredible family of wolves. 
+And I watched the most famous, most stable pack in Yellowstone National Park. 
+And then, when they wandered just outside the border, two of their adults were killed, including the mother, which we sometimes call the alpha female. 
+The rest of the family immediately descended into sibling rivalry. 
+That one on the left tried for days to rejoin her family. 
+The alpha male wound up being ejected from his own family. 
+As winter was coming in, he lost his territory, his hunting support, the members of his family and his mate. 
+We cause so much pain to them. 
+The mystery is, why don't they hurt us more than they do? 
+This whale had just finished eating part of a grey whale with his companions who had killed that whale. 
+This whale is T20. 
+He had just finished tearing a seal into three pieces with two companions. 
+They eat seals. 
+Why don't they eat us? 
+Why can we trust them around our toddlers? 
+Why is it that killer whales have returned to researchers lost in thick fog and led them miles until the fog parted and the researchers' home was right there on the shoreline? 
+In the Bahamas, there's a woman named Denise Herzing, and she studies spotted dolphins and they know her. 
+How could dolphins know that one of the human hearts had just stopped? 
+Why would they care? 
+These mysterious things just hint at all of the things that are going on in the minds that are with us on Earth that we almost never think about at all. 
+At an aquarium in South Africa was a little baby bottle-nosed dolphin named Dolly. 
+She was nursing, and one day a keeper took a cigarette break and he was looking into the window into their pool, smoking. 
+When human beings use one thing to represent another, we call that art. 
+(Laughter) The things that make us human are not the things that we think make us human. 
+What makes us human is that, of all these things that our minds and their minds have, we are the most extreme. 
+We are the most compassionate, most violent, most creative and most destructive animal that has ever been on this planet, and we are all of those things all jumbled up together. 
+But love is not the thing that makes us human. 
+It's not special to us. 
+We are not the only ones who care about our mates. 
+Albatrosses frequently fly six, sometimes ten thousand miles over several weeks to deliver one meal, one big meal, to their chick who is waiting for them. 
+They nest on the most remote islands in the oceans of the world, and this is what it looks like. 
+Passing life from one generation to the next is the chain of being. 
+If anything is sacred, that is, and into that sacred relationship comes our plastic trash. 
+This is an albatross six months old, ready to fledge — died, packed with red cigarette lighters. 
+But we, who have named ourselves after our brains, never think about the consequences. 
+When we welcome new human life into the world, we welcome our babies into the company of other creatures. 
+We have company. 
+And every one of those animals in every painting of Noah's ark, deemed worthy of salvation is in mortal danger now, and their flood is us. 
+So we started with a question: Do they love us? 
+We're going to ask another question. 
+Are we capable of using what we have to care enough to simply let them continue? 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+Pretty impressive, right? We won! Mister Splashy Pants was chosen. 
+(Laughter) And the Reddit community — really, the rest of the Internet, really got behind this. 
+
+The first question is this. 
+Our country has two exploration programs. 
+One is NASA, with a mission to explore the great beyond, to explore the heavens, which we all want to go to if we're lucky. 
+And you can see we have Sputnik, and we have Saturn, and we have other manifestations of space exploration. 
+Well, there's also another program, in another agency within our government, in ocean exploration. 
+It's in NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 
+And my question is this: "" why are we ignoring the oceans? "" Here's the reason, or not the reason, but here's why I ask that question. 
+If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one-year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years. 
+Why? Why are we looking up? Is it because it's heaven? 
+And hell is down here? Is it a cultural issue? 
+Why are people afraid of the ocean? 
+Or do they just assume the ocean is just a dark, gloomy place that has nothing to offer? 
+I'm going to take you on a 16-minute trip on 72 percent of the planet, so buckle up. 
+OK. And what we're going to do is we're going to immerse ourselves in my world. 
+And what I'm going to try — I hope I make the following points. 
+I'm going to make it right now in case I forget. 
+Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school. 
+And most of all, it was not even in my college textbooks. 
+I'm a geophysicist, and all my Earth science books when I was a student — I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. 
+We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. 
+We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap. 
+In today's context, it was a bunch of crap, but it was the law of geology, vertical tectonics. 
+All the things we're going to walk through in our explorations and discoveries of the oceans were mostly discoveries made by accident. 
+Mostly discoveries made by accident. 
+We were looking for something and found something else. 
+And everything we're going to talk about represents a one tenth of one percent glimpse, because that's all we've seen. 
+I have a characterization. 
+This is a characterization of what it would look like if you could remove the water. 
+It gives you the false impression it's a map. 
+It is not a map. 
+In fact, I have another version at my office and I ask people, "" Why are there mountains here, on this area here, but there are none over here? "" And they go, "" Well, gee, I don't know, "" saying, "Is it a fracture zone? Is it a hot spot?" 
+No, no, that's the only place a ship's been. 
+Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. 
+We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing. 
+All right. So we're going to immerse ourselves in the 72 percent of the planet because, you know, it's really naive to think that the Easter Bunny put all the resources on the continents. 
+(Laughter) You know, it's just ludicrous. 
+We are always, constantly playing the zero sum game. 
+You know, we're going to do this, we're going to take it away from something else. 
+I believe in just enriching the economy. 
+And we're leaving so much on the table, 72 percent of the planet. 
+And as I will point out later in the presentation, 50 percent of the United States of America lies beneath the sea. 
+50 percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent. 
+Why? OK. Now, I began my explorations the hard way. 
+Back then — actually my first expedition was when I was 17 years old. It was 49 years ago. 
+Do the math, I'm 66. And I went out to sea on a Scripps ship and we almost got sunk by a giant rogue wave, and I was too young to be — you know, I thought it was great! 
+I was a body surfer and I thought, "" Wow, that was an incredible wave! "" And we almost sank the ship, but I became enraptured with mounting expeditions. And over the last 49 years, I've done about 120, 121 — I keep doing them — expeditions. 
+But in the early days, the only way I could get to the bottom was to crawl into a submarine, a very small submarine, and go down to the bottom. 
+I dove in a whole series of different deep diving submersibles. 
+Alvin and Sea Cliff and Cyana, and all the major deep submersibles we have, which are about eight. 
+In fact, on a good day, we might have four or five human beings at the average depth of the Earth — maybe four or five human beings out of whatever billions we've got going. 
+And so it's very difficult to get there, if you do it physically. 
+But I was enraptured, and in my graduate years was the dawn of plate tectonics. And we realized that the greatest mountain range on Earth lies beneath the sea. 
+The mid-ocean ridge runs around like the seam on a baseball. 
+This is on a Mercator projection. 
+But if you were to put it on an equal area projection, you'd see that the mid-ocean ridge covers 23 percent of the Earth's total surface area. 
+Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. 
+So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet. 
+And our interest in this mountain range, as Earth scientists in those days, was not only because of its tremendous size, dominating the planet, but the role it plays in the genesis of the Earth's outer skin. 
+Because it's along the axis of the mid-ocean ridge where the great crustal plates are separating. 
+And like a living organism, you tear it open, it bleeds its molten blood, rises up to heal that wound from the asthenosphere, hardens, forms new tissue and moves laterally. 
+But no one had actually gone down into the actual site of the boundary of creation as we call it — into the Rift Valley — until a group of seven of us crawled in our little submarines in the summer of 1973, 1974 and were the first human beings to enter the Great Rift Valley. 
+We went down into the Rift Valley. 
+This is all accurate except for one thing — it's pitch black. 
+It's absolutely pitch black, because photons cannot reach the average depth of the ocean, which is 12,000 feet. In the Rift Valley, it's 9,000 feet. 
+Most of our planet does not feel the warmth of the sun. 
+Most of our planet is in eternal darkness. 
+And for that reason, you do not have photosynthesis in the deep sea. 
+And with the absence of photosynthesis you have no plant life, and as a result, you have very little animal life living in this underworld. 
+Or so we thought. And so in our initial explorations, we were totally focused on exploring the boundary of creation, looking at the volcanic features running along that entire 42,000 miles. 
+Running along this entire 42,000 miles are tens of thousands of active volcanoes. 
+Tens of thousands of active volcanoes. 
+There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude. 
+So, it's a phenomenally active region, it's not just a dark, boring place. It's a very alive place. 
+And it's then being ripped open. 
+But we were dealing with a particular scientific issue back then. 
+We couldn't understand why you had a mountain under tension. 
+In plate tectonic theory, we knew that if you had plates collide, it made sense: they would crush into one another, you would thicken the crust, you'd uplift it. 
+That's why you get, you know, you get seashells up on Mount Everest. 
+It's not a flood, it was pushed up there. 
+We understood mountains under compression, but we could not understand why we had a mountain under tension. 
+It should not be. Until one of my colleagues said, "" It looks to me like a thermal blister, and the mid-ocean ridge must be a cooling curve. "" We said, "" Let's go find out. "" We punched a bunch of heat probes. Everything made sense, except, at the axis, there was missing heat. It was missing heat. 
+It was hot. It wasn't hot enough. 
+So, we came up with multiple hypotheses: there's little green people down there taking it; there's all sorts of things going on. 
+But the only logical [explanation] was that there were hot springs. 
+So, there must be underwater hot springs. 
+We mounted an expedition to look for the missing heat. 
+And so we went along this mountain range, in an area along Galapagos Rift, and did we find the missing heat. 
+It was amazing. These giant chimneys, huge giant chimneys. 
+We went up to them with our submersible. 
+We wanted to get a temperature probe, we stuck it in there, looked at it — it pegged off scale. 
+The pilot made this great observation: "" That's hot. "" (Laughter) And then we realized our probe was made out of the same stuff — it could have melted. But it turns out the exiting temperature was 650 degrees F, hot enough to melt lead. 
+This is what a real one looks like, on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. 
+What you're looking at is an incredible pipe organ of chemicals coming out of the ocean. 
+Everything you see in this picture is commercial grade: copper, lead, silver, zinc and gold. 
+So the Easter Bunny has put things in the ocean floor, and you have massive heavy metal deposits that we're making in this mountain range. 
+We're making huge discoveries of large commercial-grade ore along this mountain range, but it was dwarfed by what we discovered. 
+We discovered a profusion of life, in a world that it should not exist [in]. Giant tube worms, 10 feet tall. 
+I remember having to use vodka — my own vodka — to pickle it because we don't carry formaldehyde. 
+We went and found these incredible clam beds sitting on the barren rock. Large clams, and when we opened them, they didn't look like a clam. 
+And when we cut them open, they didn't have the anatomy of a clam. 
+No mouth, no gut, no digestive system. 
+Their bodies had been totally taken over by another organism, a bacterium, that had figured out how to replicate photosynthesis in the dark, through a process we now call chemosynthesis. 
+None of it in our textbooks. None of this in our textbooks. 
+We did not know about this life system. 
+We were not predicting it. 
+We stumbled on it, looking for some missing heat. 
+So, we wanted to accelerate this process. 
+We wanted to get away from this silly trip, up and down on a submarine: average depth of the ocean, 12,000 feet; two and half hours to get to work in the morning; two and half hours to get to home. Five hour commute to work. 
+Three hours of bottom time, average distance traveled — one mile. 
+(Laughter) On a 42,000 mile mountain range. Great job security, but not the way to go. 
+So, I began designing a new technology of telepresence, using robotic systems to replicate myself, so I wouldn't have to cycle my vehicle system. 
+We began to introduce that in our explorations, and we continued to make phenomenal discoveries with our new robotic technologies. Again, looking for something else, moving from one part of the mid-ocean ridge to another. 
+The scientists were off watch and they came across incredible life forms. 
+They came across new creatures they had not seen before. 
+But more importantly, they discovered edifices down there that they did not understand. 
+That did not make sense. They were not above a magma chamber. 
+They shouldn't be there. And we called it Lost City. 
+And Lost City was characterized by these incredible limestone formations and upside down pools. Look at that. 
+How do you do that? That's water upside down. 
+We went in underneath and tapped it, and we found that it had the pH of Drano. 
+The pH of 11, and yet it had chemosynthetic bacteria living in it and at this extreme environment. 
+And the hydrothermal vents were in an acidic environment. 
+All the way at the other end, in an alkaline environment, at a pH of 11, life existed. 
+So life was much more creative than we had ever thought. 
+Again, discovered by accident. Just two years ago working off Santorini, where people are sunning themselves on the beach, unbeknownst to them in the caldera nearby, we found phenomenal hydrothermal vent systems and more life systems. 
+This was two miles from where people go to sunbathe, and they were oblivious to the existence of this system. 
+Again, you know, we stop at the water's edge. 
+Recently, diving off — in the Gulf of Mexico, finding pools of water, this time not upside down, right side up. 
+Bingo. You'd think you're in air, until a fish swims by. 
+You're looking at brine pools formed by salt diapirs. 
+Near that was methane. I've never seen volcanoes of methane. 
+Instead of belching out lava, they were belching out big, big bubbles of methane. And they were creating these volcanoes, and there were flows, not of lava, but of the mud coming out of the Earth but driven by — I've never seen this before. 
+Moving on, there's more than just natural history beneath the sea — human history. Our discoveries of the Titanic. 
+The realization that the deep sea is the largest museum on Earth. 
+It contains more history than all of the museums on land combined. 
+And yet we're only now penetrating it. 
+Finding the state of preservation. 
+We found the Bismarck in 16,000 feet. We then found the Yorktown. 
+People always ask, "" Did you find the right ship? "" It said Yorktown on the stern. 
+(Laughter) More recently, finding ancient history. 
+How many ancient mariners have had a bad day? The number's a million. 
+We've been discovering these along ancient trade routes, where they're not supposed to be. 
+This shipwreck sank 100 years before the birth of Christ. 
+This one sank carrying a prefabricated, Home Depot Roman temple. 
+And then here's one that sank at the time of Homer, at 750 B.C. 
+More recently, into the Black Sea, where we're exploring. 
+Because there's no oxygen there, it's the largest reservoir of hydrogen sulfide on Earth. Shipwrecks are perfectly preserved. 
+All their organics are perfectly preserved. We begin to excavate them. 
+We expect to start hauling out the bodies in perfect condition with their DNA. 
+Look at the state of preservation — still the ad mark of a carpenter. Look at the state of those artifacts. 
+You still see the beeswax dripping. When they dropped, they sealed it. 
+This ship sank 1,500 years ago. 
+Fortunately, we've been able to convince Congress. 
+We begin to go on the Hill and lobby. 
+And we stole recently a ship from the United States Navy. 
+The Okeanos Explorer on its mission. 
+Its mission is as good as you could get. 
+Its mission is to go where no one has gone before on planet Earth. 
+And I was looking at it yesterday, it's up in Seattle. OK. 
+(Applause) It comes online this summer, and it begins its journey of exploration. 
+But we have no idea what we're going find when we go out there with our technology. 
+But certainly, it's going to be going to the unknown America. 
+This is that part of the United States that lies beneath the sea. 
+We own all of that blue and yet, like I say, particularly the western territorial trust, we don't have maps of them. We don't have maps of them. 
+We have maps of Venus, but not of the western territorial trust. 
+The way we're going to run this — we have no idea what we're going to discover. 
+We have no idea what we're going to discover. 
+We're going to discover an ancient shipwreck, a Phoenician off Brazil, or a new rock formation, a new life. 
+So, we're going to run it like an emergency hospital. 
+We're going to connect our command center, via a high-bandwidth satellite link to a building we're building at the University of Rhode Island, called the Interspace Center. 
+And within that, we're going to run it just like you run a nuclear submarine, blue-gold team, switching them off and on, running 24 hours a day. 
+A discovery is made, that discovery is instantly seen in the command center a second later. 
+But then it's connected through Internet too — the new Internet highway that makes Internet one look like a dirt road on the information highway — with 10 gigabits of bandwidth. 
+We'll go into areas we have no knowledge of. 
+It's a big blank sheet on our planet. We'll map it within hours, have the maps disseminated out to the major universities. 
+It turns out that 90 percent of all the oceanographic intellect in this country are at 12 universities. They're all on I-2. 
+We can then build a command center. 
+This is a remote center at the University of Washington. 
+She's talking to the pilot. She's 5,000 miles away, but she's assumed command. 
+But the beauty of this, too, is we can then disseminate it to children. 
+We can disseminate. 
+They can follow this expedition. I've started a program — where are you Jim? Jim Young who helped me start a program called the Jason Project. More recently, we've started a program with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, so that we can use exploration, and the excitement of live exploration, to motivate them and excite them and then give them what they're already ready for. 
+I would not let an adult drive my robot. 
+You don't have enough gaming experience. 
+But I will let a kid with no license take over control of my vehicle system. 
+(Applause) Because we want to create — we want to create the classroom of tomorrow. 
+We have stiff competition and we need to motivate and it's all being done. 
+You win or lose an engineer or a scientist by eighth grade. 
+The game is not over — it's over by the eighth grade, it's not beginning. 
+We need to be not only proud of our universities. 
+We need to be proud of our middle schools. 
+And when we have the best middle schools in the world, we'll have the best kids pumped out of that system, let me tell you. 
+Because this is what we want. This is what we want. 
+This is a young lady, not watching a football game, not watching a basketball game. 
+Watching exploration live from thousands of miles away, and it's just dawning on her what she's seeing. 
+And when you get a jaw drop, you can inform. 
+You can put so much information into that mind, it's in full [receiving] mode. 
+(Applause) This, I hope, will be a future engineer or a future scientist in the battle for truth. 
+And my final question, my final question — why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? 
+Why do we have programs to build habitation on Mars, and we have programs to look at colonizing the moon, but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet? 
+And the technology is at hand. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid, playing with blocks. 
+As you figured out how to reach out and grasp, pick them up and move them around, you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships. 
+Spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us. 
+So, as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects — along with my adviser Pattie, and my collaborator Jeevan Kalanithi — I started to wonder — what if when we used a computer, instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop, what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically, arranging it the way we wanted? 
+This question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer, by building Siftables. 
+In a nutshell, a Siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie. 
+They're able to be moved around by hand, they can sense each other, they can sense their motion, and they have a screen and a wireless radio. 
+Most importantly, they're physical, so like the blocks, you can move them just by reaching out and grasping. 
+And Siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information. 
+And as these tools become more physical, more aware of their motion, aware of each other, and aware of the nuance of how we move them, we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles. 
+So, I'm going to start with some simple examples. 
+This Siftable is configured to show video, and if I tilt it in one direction, it'll roll the video this way; if I tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards. 
+And these interactive portraits are aware of each other. 
+So if I put them next to each other, they get interested. 
+If they get surrounded, they notice that too, they might get a little flustered. 
+And they can also sense their motion and tilt. 
+One of the interesting implications on interaction, we started to realize, was that we could use everyday gestures on data, like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid. 
+So in this case, we've got three Siftables configured to be paint buckets and I can use them to pour color into that central one, where they get mixed. 
+If we overshoot, we can pour a little bit back. 
+There are also some neat possibilities for education, like language, math and logic games where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly, and view the results immediately. 
+So here I'm — (Applause) This is a Fibonacci sequence that I'm making with a simple equation program. 
+Here we have a word game that's kind of like a mash-up between Scrabble and Boggle. 
+Basically, in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each Siftable, and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary. 
+Then, after about 30 seconds, it reshuffles, and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+So these are some kids that came on a field trip to the Media Lab, and I managed to get them to try it out, and shoot a video. 
+They really loved it. 
+And, one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you don't have to give people many instructions. 
+All you have to say is, "" Make words, "" and they know exactly what to do. 
+So here's another few people trying it out. 
+That's our youngest beta tester, down there on the right. 
+Turns out, all he wanted to do was to stack the Siftables up. 
+So to him, they were just blocks. 
+Now, this is an interactive cartoon application. 
+And we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners. 
+And this is Felix, actually. 
+And he can bring new characters into the scene, just by lifting the Siftables off the table that have that character shown on them. 
+Here, he's bringing the sun out. 
+Video: The sun is rising. 
+David Merrill: Now he's brought a tractor into the scene. 
+Video: The orange tractor. 
+Good job! Yeah! 
+DM: So by shaking the Siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact — Video: Woof! 
+DM: inventing his own narrative. 
+Video: Hello! 
+DM: It's an open-ended story, and he gets to decide how it unfolds. 
+Video: Fly away, cat. 
+DM: So, the last example I have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we've built recently, in which Siftables act as sounds like lead, bass and drums. 
+Each of these has four different variations, you get to choose which one you want to use. 
+And you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want. 
+And you inject it by just bumping up the sound Siftable against a sequence Siftable. 
+There are effects that you can control live, like reverb and filter. 
+You attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it. 
+And then, overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence. 
+So let's have a look. 
+Video: (Music) DM: We'll start by putting a lead into two sequence Siftables, arrange them into a series, extend it, add a little more lead. 
+Now I put a bass line in. 
+Video: (Music) DM: Now I'll put some percussion in. Video: (Music) 
+DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the drums, so I can control the effect live. Video: (Music) 
+DM: I can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo one way or the other. Video: (Music) 
+DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression. Video: (Music) 
+DM: I can rearrange the sequence while it plays. 
+So I don't have to plan it out in advance, but I can improvise, making it longer or shorter as I go. 
+And now, finally, I can fade the whole sequence out using the volume Siftable, tilted to the left. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+So, as you can see, my passion is for making new human-computer interfaces that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work. 
+And today, I had time to show you one point in this new design space, and a few of the possibilities that we're working to bring out of the laboratory. 
+So the thought I want to leave you with is that we're on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms. 
+Thank you very much. 
+I look forward to talking with all of you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The idea behind the Stuxnet computer worm is actually quite simple. 
+We don't want Iran to get the bomb. 
+Their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. 
+The gray boxes that you see, these are real-time control systems. 
+Now if we manage to compromise these systems that control drive speeds and valves, we can actually cause a lot of problems with the centrifuge. 
+The gray boxes don't run Windows software; they are a completely different technology. 
+But if we manage to place a good Windows virus on a notebook that is used by a maintenance engineer to configure this gray box, then we are in business. 
+And this is the plot behind Stuxnet. 
+So we start with a Windows dropper. 
+The payload goes onto the gray box, damages the centrifuge, and the Iranian nuclear program is delayed — mission accomplished. 
+That's easy, huh? 
+I want to tell you how we found that out. 
+When we started our research on Stuxnet six months ago, it was completely unknown what the purpose of this thing was. 
+The only thing that was known is it's very, very complex on the Windows part, the dropper part, used multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. 
+And it seemed to want to do something with these gray boxes, these real-time control systems. 
+So that got our attention, and we started a lab project where we infected our environment with Stuxnet and checked this thing out. 
+And then some very funny things happened. 
+Stuxnet behaved like a lab rat that didn't like our cheese — sniffed, but didn't want to eat. 
+Didn't make sense to me. 
+And after we experimented with different flavors of cheese, I realized, well, this is a directed attack. 
+It's completely directed. 
+The dropper is prowling actively on the gray box if a specific configuration is found, and even if the actual program code that it's trying to infect is actually running on that target. 
+And if not, Stuxnet does nothing. 
+So that really got my attention, and we started to work on this nearly around the clock, because I thought, "" Well, we don't know what the target is. 
+It could be, let's say for example, a U.S. power plant, or a chemical plant in Germany. 
+So we better find out what the target is soon. "" So we extracted and decompiled the attack code, and we discovered that it's structured in two digital bombs — a smaller one and a bigger one. 
+And we also saw that they are very professionally engineered by people who obviously had all insider information. 
+They knew all the bits and bites that they had to attack. 
+They probably even know the shoe size of the operator. 
+So they know everything. 
+And if you have heard that the dropper of Stuxnet is complex and high-tech, let me tell you this: the payload is rocket science. 
+It's way above everything that we have ever seen before. 
+Here you see a sample of this actual attack code. 
+We are talking about — around about 15,000 lines of code. 
+Looks pretty much like old-style assembly language. 
+And I want to tell you how we were able to make sense out of this code. 
+So what we were looking for is, first of all, system function calls, because we know what they do. 
+And then we were looking for timers and data structures and trying to relate them to the real world — to potential real world targets. 
+So we do need target theories that we can prove or disprove. 
+In order to get target theories, we remember that it's definitely hardcore sabotage, it must be a high-value target and it is most likely located in Iran, because that's where most of the infections had been reported. 
+Now you don't find several thousand targets in that area. 
+It basically boils down to the Bushehr nuclear power plant and to the Natanz fuel enrichment plant. 
+So I told my assistant, "Get me a list of all centrifuge and power plant experts from our client base." 
+And I phoned them up and picked their brain in an effort to match their expertise with what we found in code and data. 
+And that worked pretty well. 
+So we were able to associate the small digital warhead with the rotor control. 
+The rotor is that moving part within the centrifuge, that black object that you see. 
+And if you manipulate the speed of this rotor, you are actually able to crack the rotor and eventually even have the centrifuge explode. 
+What we also saw is that the goal of the attack was really to do it slowly and creepy — obviously in an effort to drive maintenance engineers crazy, that they would not be able to figure this out quickly. 
+The big digital warhead — we had a shot at this by looking very closely at data and data structures. 
+So for example, the number 164 really stands out in that code; you can't overlook it. 
+I started to research scientific literature on how these centrifuges are actually built in Natanz and found they are structured in what is called a cascade, and each cascade holds 164 centrifuges. 
+So that made sense, that was a match. 
+And it even got better. 
+These centrifuges in Iran are subdivided into 15, what is called, stages. 
+And guess what we found in the attack code? 
+An almost identical structure. 
+So again, that was a real good match. 
+And this gave us very high confidence for what we were looking at. 
+Now don't get me wrong here, it didn't go like this. 
+These results have been obtained over several weeks of really hard labor. 
+And we often went into just a dead end and had to recover. 
+Anyway, so we figured out that both digital warheads were actually aiming at one and the same target, but from different angles. 
+The small warhead is taking one cascade, and spinning up the rotors and slowing them down, and the big warhead is talking to six cascades and manipulating valves. 
+So in all, we are very confident that we have actually determined what the target is. 
+It is Natanz, and it is only Natanz. 
+So we don't have to worry that other targets might be hit by Stuxnet. 
+Here's some very cool stuff that we saw — really knocked my socks off. 
+Down there is the gray box, and on the top you see the centrifuges. 
+Now what this thing does is it intercepts the input values from sensors — so for example, from pressure sensors and vibration sensors — and it provides legitimate program code, which is still running during the attack, with fake input data. 
+And as a matter of fact, this fake input data is actually prerecorded by Stuxnet. 
+So it's just like from the Hollywood movies where during the heist, the observation camera is fed with prerecorded video. 
+That's cool, huh? 
+The idea here is obviously not only to fool the operators in the control room. 
+It actually is much more dangerous and aggressive. 
+The idea is to circumvent a digital safety system. 
+We need digital safety systems where a human operator could not act quick enough. 
+So for example, in a power plant, when your big steam turbine gets too over speed, you must open relief valves within a millisecond. 
+Obviously, this cannot be done by a human operator. 
+So this is where we need digital safety systems. 
+And when they are compromised, then real bad things can happen. 
+Your plant can blow up. 
+And neither your operators nor your safety system will notice it. 
+That's scary. 
+But it gets worse. 
+And this is very important, what I'm going to say. 
+Think about this: this attack is generic. 
+It doesn't have anything to do, in specifics, with centrifuges, with uranium enrichment. 
+So it would work as well, for example, in a power plant or in an automobile factory. 
+It is generic. 
+And you don't have — as an attacker — you don't have to deliver this payload by a USB stick, as we saw it in the case of Stuxnet. 
+You could also use conventional worm technology for spreading. 
+Just spread it as wide as possible. 
+And if you do that, what you end up with is a cyber weapon of mass destruction. 
+That's the consequence that we have to face. 
+So unfortunately, the biggest number of targets for such attacks are not in the Middle East. 
+They're in the United States and Europe and in Japan. 
+So all of the green areas, these are your target-rich environments. 
+We have to face the consequences, and we better start to prepare right now. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: I've got a question. 
+Ralph, it's been quite widely reported that people assume that Mossad is the main entity behind this. 
+Is that your opinion? 
+Ralph Langner: Okay, you really want to hear that? 
+Yeah. Okay. 
+My opinion is that the Mossad is involved, but that the leading force is not Israel. 
+So the leading force behind that is the cyber superpower. 
+There is only one, and that's the United States — fortunately, fortunately. 
+Because otherwise, our problems would even be bigger. 
+CA: Thank you for scaring the living daylights out of us. Thank you, Ralph. 
+(Applause) 
+
+MW: And there he was — (Applause) waiting for us to meet and speak, being all supportive and thankful for our willingness to care for the beauty and the environment of Bali. 
+
+Do you know that we have 1.4 million cellular radio masts deployed worldwide? 
+And these are base stations. 
+And we also have more than five billion of these devices here. 
+These are cellular mobile phones. 
+And with these mobile phones, we transmit more than 600 terabytes of data every month. 
+This is a 6 with 14 zeroes — a very large number. 
+And wireless communications has become a utility like electricity and water. 
+We use it everyday. We use it in our everyday lives now — in our private lives, in our business lives. 
+And we even have to be asked sometimes, very kindly, to switch off the mobile phone at events like this for good reasons. 
+And it's this importance why I decided to look into the issues that this technology has, because it's so fundamental to our lives. 
+And one of the issues is capacity. 
+The way we transmit wireless data is by using electromagnetic waves — in particular, radio waves. 
+And radio waves are limited. 
+They are scarce; they are expensive; and we only have a certain range of it. 
+And it's this limitation that doesn't cope with the demand of wireless data transmissions and the number of bytes and data which are transmitted every month. 
+And we are simply running out of spectrum. 
+There's another problem. 
+That is efficiency. 
+These 1.4 million cellular radio masts, or base stations, consume a lot of energy. 
+And mind you, most of the energy is not used to transmit the radio waves, it is used to cool the base stations. 
+Then the efficiency of such a base station is only at about five percent. 
+And that creates a big problem. 
+Then there's another issue that you're all aware of. 
+You have to switch off your mobile phone during flights. 
+In hospitals, they are security issues. 
+And security is another issue. 
+These radio waves penetrate through walls. 
+They can be intercepted, and somebody can make use of your network if he has bad intentions. 
+So these are the main four issues. 
+But on the other hand, we have 14 billion of these: light bulbs, light. 
+And light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum. 
+So let's look at this in the context of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, where we have gamma rays. 
+You don't want to get close to gamma rays, it could be dangerous. 
+X-rays, useful when you go to hospitals. 
+Then there's ultraviolet light. 
+it's good for a nice suntan, but otherwise dangerous for the human body. 
+Infrared — due to eye safety regulations, can be only used with low power. 
+And then we have the radio waves, they have the issues I've just mentioned. 
+And in the middle there, we have this visible light spectrum. 
+It's light, and light has been around for many millions of years. 
+And in fact, it has created us, has created life, has created all the stuff of life. 
+So it's inherently safe to use. 
+And wouldn't it be great to use that for wireless communications? 
+Not only that, I compared [it to] the entire spectrum. 
+I compared the radio waves spectrum — the size of it — with the size of the visible light spectrum. 
+And guess what? 
+We have 10,000 times more of that spectrum, which is there for us to use. 
+So not only do we have this huge amount of spectrum, let's compare that with a number I've just mentioned. 
+We have 1.4 million expensively deployed, inefficient radio cellular base stations. 
+And multiply that by 10,000, then you end up at 14 billion. 
+14 billion is the number of light bulbs installed already. 
+So we have the infrastructure there. 
+Look at the ceiling, you see all these light bulbs. 
+Go to the main floor, you see these light bulbs. 
+Can we use them for communications? 
+Yes. 
+What do we need to do? 
+The one thing we need to do is we have to replace these inefficient incandescent light bulbs, florescent lights, with this new technology of LED, LED light bulbs. 
+An LED is a semiconductor. It's an electronic device. 
+And it has a very nice acute property. 
+Its intensity can be modulated at very high speeds, and it can be switched off at very high speeds. 
+And this is a fundamental basic property that we exploit with our technology. 
+So let's show how we do that. 
+Let's go to the closest neighbor to the visible light spectrum — go to remote controls. 
+You all know remote controls have an infrared LED — basically you switch on the LED, and if it's off, you switch it off. 
+And it creates a simple, low-speed data stream in 10,000 bits per second, 20,000 bits per second. 
+Not usable for a YouTube video. 
+What we have done is we have developed a technology with which we can furthermore replace the remote control of our light bulb. 
+We transmit with our technology, not only a single data stream, we transmit thousands of data streams in parallel, at even higher speeds. 
+And the technology we have developed — it's called SIM OFDM. 
+And it's spacial modulation — these are the only technical terms, I'm not going into details — but this is how we enabled that light source to transmit data. 
+You will say, "" Okay, this is nice — a slide created in 10 minutes. "" But not only that. 
+What we've done is we have also developed a demonstrator. 
+And I'm showing for the first time in public this visible light demonstrator. 
+And what we have here is no ordinary desk lamp. 
+We fit in an LED light bulb, worth three U.S. dollars, put in our signal processing technology. 
+And then what we have here is a little hole. 
+And the light goes through that hole. 
+There's a receiver. 
+The receiver will convert these little, subtle changes in the amplitude that we create there into an electrical signal. 
+And that signal is then converted back to a high-speed data stream. 
+In the future we hope that we can integrate this little hole into these smart phones. 
+And not only integrate a photo detector here, but maybe use the camera inside. 
+So what happens when I switch on that light? 
+As you would expect, it's a light, a desk lamp. 
+Put your book beneath it and you can read. 
+It's illuminating the space. 
+But at the same time, you see this video coming up here. 
+And that's a video, a high-definition video that is transmitted through that light beam. 
+You're critical. 
+You think, "" Ha, ha, ha. 
+This is a smart academic doing a little bit of tricks here. "" But let me do this. 
+(Applause) Once again. 
+Still don't believe? 
+It is this light that transmits this high-definition video in a split stream. 
+And if you look at the light, it is illuminating as you would expect. 
+You don't notice with your human eye. 
+You don't notice the subtle changes in the amplitude that we impress onto this light bulb. 
+It's serving the purpose of illumination, but at the same time, we are able to transmit this data. 
+And you see, even light from the ceiling comes down here to the receiver. 
+It can ignore that constant light, because all the receiver's interested in are subtle changes. 
+You also have a critical question now, and you say, "" Okay, do I have to have the light on all the time to have this working? "" And the answer is yes. 
+But, you can dim down the light to a level that it appears to be off. 
+And you are still able to transmit data — that's possible. 
+So I've mentioned to you the four challenges. 
+Capacity: We have 10,000 times more spectrum, 10,000 times more LEDs installed already in the infrastructure there. 
+You would agree with me, hopefully, there's no issue of capacity anymore. 
+Efficiency: This is data through illumination — it's first of all an illumination device. 
+And if you do the energy budget, the data transmission comes for free — highly energy efficient. 
+I don't mention the high energy efficiency of these LED light bulbs. 
+If the whole world would deploy them, you would save hundreds of power plants. 
+That's aside. 
+And then I've mentioned the availability. 
+You will agree with me that we have lights in the hospital. 
+You need to see what to do. 
+You have lights in an aircraft. 
+So it's everywhere in a day there is light. 
+Look around. Everywhere. Look at your smart phone. 
+It has a flashlight, an LED flashlight. 
+These are potential sources for high-speed data transmission. 
+And then there's security. 
+You would agree with me that light doesn't penetrate through walls. 
+So no one, if I have a light here, if I have secure data, no one on the other side of this room through that wall would be able to read that data. 
+And there's only data where there is light. 
+So if I don't want that receiver to receive the data, then what I could do, turn it away. 
+So the data goes in that direction, not there anymore. 
+Now we can in fact see where the data is going to. 
+So for me, the applications of it, to me, are beyond imagination at the moment. 
+We have had a century of very nice, smart application developers. 
+And you only have to notice, where we have light, there is a potential way to transmit data. 
+But I can give you a few examples. 
+Well you may see the impact already now. 
+This is a remote operated vehicle beneath the ocean. 
+And they use light to illuminate space down there. 
+And this light can be used to transmit wireless data that these things [use] to communicate with each other. 
+Intrinsically safe environments like this petrochemical plant — you can't use RF, it may generate antenna sparks, but you can use light — you see plenty of light there. 
+In hospitals, for new medical instruments; in streets for traffic control. 
+Cars have LED-based headlights, LED-based back lights, and cars can communicate with each other and prevent accidents in the way that they exchange information. 
+Traffic lights can communicate to the car and so on. 
+And then you have these millions of street lamps deployed around the world. 
+And every street lamp could be a free access point. 
+We call it, in fact, a Li-Fi, light-fidelity. 
+And then we have these aircraft cabins. 
+There are hundreds of lights in an aircraft cabin, and each of these lights could be a potential transmitter of wireless data. 
+So you could enjoy your most favorite TED video on your long flight back home. 
+Online life. So that is a vision, I think, that is possible. 
+So, all we would need to do is to fit a small microchip to every potential illumination device. 
+And this would then combine two basic functionalities: illumination and wireless data transmission. 
+And it's this symbiosis that I personally believe could solve the four essential problems that face us in wireless communication these days. 
+And in the future, you would not only have 14 billion light bulbs, you may have 14 billion Li-Fis deployed worldwide — for a cleaner, a greener, and even a brighter future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to start with a couple of quick examples. 
+These are spinneret glands on the abdomen of a spider. 
+They produce six different types of silk, which is spun together into a fiber, tougher than any fiber humans have ever made. 
+The nearest we've come is with aramid fiber. 
+And to make that, it involves extremes of temperature, extremes of pressure and loads of pollution. 
+And yet the spider manages to do it at ambient temperature and pressure with raw materials of dead flies and water. 
+It does suggest we've still got a bit to learn. 
+This beetle can detect a forest fire at 80 kilometers away. 
+That's roughly 10,000 times the range of man-made fire detectors. 
+And what's more, this guy doesn't need a wire connected all the way back to a power station burning fossil fuels. 
+So these two examples give a sense of what biomimicry can deliver. 
+If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use. 
+And if we're to make progress with the sustainability revolution, I believe there are three really big changes we need to bring about. 
+Firstly, radical increases in resource efficiency. 
+Secondly, shifting from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a closed-loop model. 
+And thirdly, changing from a fossil fuel economy to a solar economy. 
+And for all three of these, I believe, biomimicry has a lot of the solutions that we're going to need. 
+You could look at nature as being like a catalog of products, and all of those have benefited from a 3.8-billion-year research and development period. 
+And given that level of investment, it makes sense to use it. 
+So I'm going to talk about some projects that have explored these ideas. 
+And let's start with radical increases in resource efficiency. 
+When we were working on the Eden Project, we had to create a very large greenhouse in a site that was not only irregular, but it was continually changing because it was still being quarried. 
+It was a hell of a challenge, and it was actually examples from biology that provided a lot of the clues. 
+So for instance, it was soap bubbles that helped us generate a building form that would work regardless of the final ground levels. 
+Studying pollen grains and radiolaria and carbon molecules helped us devise the most efficient structural solution using hexagons and pentagons. 
+The next move was that we wanted to try and maximize the size of those hexagons. 
+And to do that we had to find an alternative to glass, which is really very limited in terms of its unit sizes. 
+And in nature there are lots of examples of very efficient structures based on pressurized membranes. 
+So we started exploring this material called ETFE. 
+It's a high-strength polymer. 
+And what you do is you put it together in three layers, you weld it around the edge, and then you inflate it. 
+And the great thing about this stuff is you can make it in units of roughly seven times the size of glass, and it was only one percent of the weight of double-glazing. 
+So that was a factor-100 saving. 
+And what we found is that we got into a positive cycle in which one breakthrough facilitated another. 
+So with such large, lightweight pillows, we had much less steel. 
+With less steel we were getting more sunlight in, which meant we didn't have to put as much extra heat in winter. 
+And with less overall weight in the superstructure, there were big savings in the foundations. 
+And at the end of the project we worked out that the weight of that superstructure was actually less than the weight of the air inside the building. 
+So I think the Eden Project is a fairly good example of how ideas from biology can lead to radical increases in resource efficiency — delivering the same function, but with a fraction of the resource input. 
+And actually there are loads of examples in nature that you could turn to for similar solutions. 
+So for instance, you could develop super-efficient roof structures based on giant Amazon water lilies, whole buildings inspired by abalone shells, super-lightweight bridges inspired by plant cells. 
+There's a world of beauty and efficiency to explore here using nature as a design tool. 
+So now I want to go onto talking about the linear-to-closed-loop idea. 
+The way we tend to use resources is we extract them, we turn them into short-life products and then dispose of them. 
+Nature works very differently. 
+In ecosystems, the waste from one organism becomes the nutrient for something else in that system. 
+And there are some examples of projects that have deliberately tried to mimic ecosystems. 
+And one of my favorites is called the Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles. 
+And in their area they had a lot of shops and restaurants that were producing lots of food, cardboard and plastic waste. 
+It was ending up in landfills. 
+Now the really clever bit is what they did with the cardboard waste. 
+And I'm just going to talk through this animation. 
+So they were paid to collect it from the restaurants. 
+They then shredded the cardboard and sold it to equestrian centers as horse bedding. 
+When that was soiled, they were paid again to collect it. 
+They put it into worm recomposting systems, which produced a lot of worms, which they fed to Siberian sturgeon, which produced caviar, which they sold back to the restaurants. 
+So it transformed a linear process into a closed-loop model, and it created more value in the process. 
+Graham Wiles has continued to add more and more elements to this, turning waste streams into schemes that create value. 
+And just as natural systems tend to increase in diversity and resilience over time, there's a real sense with this project that the number of possibilities just continue increasing. 
+And I know it's a quirky example, but I think the implications of this are quite radical, because it suggests that we could actually transform a big problem — waste — into a massive opportunity. 
+And particularly in cities — we could look at the whole metabolism of cities, and look at those as opportunities. 
+And that's what we're doing on the next project I'm going to talk about, the Mobius Project, where we're trying to bring together a number of activities, all within one building, so that the waste from one can be the nutrient for another. 
+And the kind of elements I'm talking about are, firstly, we have a restaurant inside a productive greenhouse, a bit like this one in Amsterdam called De Kas. 
+Then we would have an anaerobic digester, which could deal with all the biodegradable waste from the local area, turn that into heat for the greenhouse and electricity to feed back into the grid. 
+We'd have a water treatment system treating wastewater, turning that into fresh water and generating energy from the solids using just plants and micro-organisms. 
+We'd have a fish farm fed with vegetable waste from the kitchen and worms from the compost and supplying fish back to the restaurant. 
+And we'd also have a coffee shop, and the waste grains from that could be used as a substrate for growing mushrooms. 
+So you can see that we're bringing together cycles of food, energy and water and waste all within one building. 
+And just for fun, we've proposed this for a roundabout in central London, which at the moment is a complete eyesore. 
+Some of you may recognize this. 
+And with just a little bit of planning, we could transform a space dominated by traffic into one that provides open space for people, reconnects people with food and transforms waste into closed loop opportunities. 
+So the final project I want to talk about is the Sahara Forest Project, which we're working on at the moment. 
+It may come as a surprise to some of you to hear that quite large areas of what are currently desert were actually forested a fairly short time ago. 
+So for instance, when Julius Caesar arrived in North Africa, huge areas of North Africa were covered in cedar and cypress forests. 
+And during the evolution of life on the Earth, it was the colonization of the land by plants that helped create the benign climate we currently enjoy. 
+The converse is also true. 
+The more vegetation we lose, the more that's likely to exacerbate climate change and lead to further desertification. 
+And this animation, this shows photosynthetic activity over the course of a number of years, and what you can see is that the boundaries of those deserts shift quite a lot, and that raises the question of whether we can intervene at the boundary conditions to halt, or maybe even reverse, desertification. 
+And if you look at some of the organisms that have evolved to live in deserts, there are some amazing examples of adaptations to water scarcity. 
+This is the Namibian fog-basking beetle, and it's evolved a way of harvesting its own fresh water in a desert. 
+The way it does this is it comes out at night, crawls to the top of a sand dune, and because it's got a matte black shell, is able to radiate heat out to the night sky and become slightly cooler than its surroundings. 
+So when the moist breeze blows in off the sea, you get these droplets of water forming on the beetle's shell. 
+Just before sunrise, he tips his shell up, the water runs down into his mouth, has a good drink, goes off and hides for the rest of the day. 
+And the ingenuity, if you could call it that, goes even further. 
+Because if you look closely at the beetle's shell, there are lots of little bumps on that shell. 
+And those bumps are hydrophilic; they attract water. 
+Between them there's a waxy finish which repels water. 
+And the effect of this is that as the droplets start to form on the bumps, they stay in tight, spherical beads, which means they're much more mobile than they would be if it was just a film of water over the whole beetle's shell. 
+So even when there's only a small amount of moisture in the air, it's able to harvest that very effectively and channel it down to its mouth. 
+So amazing example of an adaptation to a very resource-constrained environment — and in that sense, very relevant to the kind of challenges we're going to be facing over the next few years, next few decades. 
+We're working with the guy who invented the Seawater Greenhouse. 
+This is a greenhouse designed for arid coastal regions, and the way it works is that you have this whole wall of evaporator grills, and you trickle seawater over that so that wind blows through, it picks up a lot of moisture and is cooled in the process. 
+So inside it's cool and humid, which means the plants need less water to grow. 
+And then at the back of the greenhouse, it condenses a lot of that humidity as freshwater in a process that is effectively identical to the beetle. 
+And what they found with the first Seawater Greenhouse that was built was it was producing slightly more freshwater than it needed for the plants inside. 
+So they just started spreading this on the land around, and the combination of that and the elevated humidity had quite a dramatic effect on the local area. 
+This photograph was taken on completion day, and just one year later, it looked like that. 
+So it was like a green inkblot spreading out from the building turning barren land back into biologically productive land — and in that sense, going beyond sustainable design to achieve restorative design. 
+So we were keen to scale this up and apply biomimicry ideas to maximize the benefits. 
+And when you think about nature, often you think about it as being all about competition. 
+But actually in mature ecosystems, you're just as likely to find examples of symbiotic relationships. 
+So an important biomimicry principle is to find ways of bringing technologies together in symbiotic clusters. 
+And the technology that we settled on as an ideal partner for the Seawater Greenhouse is concentrated solar power, which uses solar-tracking mirrors to focus the sun's heat to create electricity. 
+And just to give you some sense of the potential of CSP, consider that we receive 10,000 times as much energy from the sun every year as we use in energy from all forms — 10,000 times. 
+So our energy problems are not intractable. 
+It's a challenge to our ingenuity. 
+And the kind of synergies I'm talking about are, firstly, both these technologies work very well in hot, sunny deserts. 
+CSP needs a supply of demineralized freshwater. 
+That's exactly what the Seawater Greenhouse produces. 
+CSP produces a lot of waste heat. 
+We'll be able to make use of all that to evaporate more seawater and enhance the restorative benefits. 
+And finally, in the shade under the mirrors, it's possible to grow all sorts of crops that would not grow in direct sunlight. 
+So this is how this scheme would look. 
+The idea is we create this long hedge of greenhouses facing the wind. 
+We'd have concentrated solar power plants at intervals along the way. 
+Some of you might be wondering what we would do with all the salts. 
+And with biomimicry, if you've got an underutilized resource, you don't think, "" How am I going to dispose of this? "" You think, "" What can I add to the system to create more value? "" And it turns out that different things crystallize out at different stages. 
+When you evaporate seawater, the first thing to crystallize out is calcium carbonate. 
+And that builds up on the evaporators — and that's what that image on the left is — gradually getting encrusted with the calcium carbonate. 
+So after a while, we could take that out, use it as a lightweight building block. 
+And if you think about the carbon in that, that would have come out of the atmosphere, into the sea and then locked away in a building product. 
+The next thing is sodium chloride. 
+You can also compress that into a building block, as they did here. 
+This is a hotel in Bolivia. 
+And then after that, there are all sorts of compounds and elements that we can extract, like phosphates, that we need to get back into the desert soils to fertilize them. 
+And there's just about every element of the periodic table in seawater. 
+So it should be possible to extract valuable elements like lithium for high-performance batteries. 
+And in parts of the Arabian Gulf, the seawater, the salinity is increasing steadily due to the discharge of waste brine from desalination plants. 
+And it's pushing the ecosystem close to collapse. 
+Now we would be able to make use of all that waste brine. 
+We could evaporate it to enhance the restorative benefits and capture the salts, transforming an urgent waste problem into a big opportunity. 
+Really the Sahara Forest Project is a model for how we could create zero-carbon food, abundant renewable energy in some of the most water-stressed parts of the planet as well as reversing desertification in certain areas. 
+So returning to those big challenges that I mentioned at the beginning: radical increases in resource efficiency, closing loops and a solar economy. 
+They're not just possible; they're critical. 
+And I firmly believe that studying the way nature solves problems will provide a lot of the solutions. 
+But perhaps more than anything, what this thinking provides is a really positive way of talking about sustainable design. 
+Far too much of the talk about the environment uses very negative language. 
+But here it's about synergies and abundance and optimizing. 
+And this is an important point. 
+Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said, "" If you want to build a flotilla of ships, you don't sit around talking about carpentry. 
+No, you need to set people's souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores. "" And that's what we need to do, so let's be positive, and let's make progress with what could be the most exciting period of innovation we've ever seen. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+About 75 years ago, my grandfather, a young man, walked into a tent that was converted into a movie theater like that, and he fell hopelessly in love with the woman he saw on the silver screen: none other than Mae West, the heartthrob of the '30s, and he could never forget her. 
+In fact, when he had his daughter many years later, he wanted to name her after Mae West, but can you imagine an Indian child name Mae West? 
+The Indian family said, no way! 
+So when my twin brother Kaesava was born, he decided to tinker with the spelling of Keshava's name. 
+He said, if Mae West can be M-A-E, why can't Keshava be K-A-E? 
+So he changed Kaesava's spelling. 
+Now Kaesava had a baby boy called Rehan a couple of weeks ago. 
+He decided to spell, or, rather, misspell Raehan with an A-E. 
+You know, my grandfather died many years ago when I was little, but his love for Mae West lives on as a misspelling in the DNA of his progeny. 
+That for me is successful legacy. (Laughs) You know, as for me, my wife and I have our own crazy legacy project. 
+We actually sit every few years, argue, disagree, fight, and actually come up with our very own 200-year plan. 
+Our friends think we're mad. 
+Our parents think we're cuckoo. 
+Because, you know, we both come from families that really look up to humility and wisdom, but we both like to live larger than life. 
+I believe in the concept of a Raja Yogi: Be a dude before you can become an ascetic. 
+This is me being a rock star, even if it's in my own house. 
+You know? 
+So when Netra and I sat down to make our first plan 10 years ago, we said we want the focus of this plan to go way beyond ourselves. 
+What do we mean by beyond ourselves? 
+Well 200 years, we calculated, is at the end of our direct contact with the world. 
+There's nobody I'll meet in my life will ever live beyond 200 years, so we thought that's a perfect place where we should situate our plan and let our imagination take flight. 
+You know, I never really believed in legacy. What am I going to leave behind? I'm an artist. 
+Until I made a cartoon about 9 / 11. 
+It caused so much trouble for me. 
+I was so upset. 
+You know, a cartoon that was meant to be a cartoon of the week ended up staying so much longer. 
+Now I'm in the business of creating art that will definitely even outlive me, and I think about what I want to leave behind through those paintings. 
+You know, the 9 / 11 cartoon upset me so much that I decided I'll never cartoon again. 
+I said, I'm never going to make any honest public commentary again. 
+But of course I continued creating artwork that was honest and raw, because I forgot about how people reacted to my work. 
+You know, sometimes forgetting is so important to remain idealistic. 
+Perhaps loss of memory is so crucial for our survival as human beings. 
+One of the most important things in my 200-year plan that Netra and I write is what to forget about ourselves. 
+You know, we carry so much baggage, from our parents, from our society, from so many people — fears, insecurities — and our 200-year plan really lists all our childhood problems that we have to expire. 
+We actually put an expiry date on all our childhood problems. 
+The latest date I put was, I said, I am going to expire my fear of my leftist, feminist mother-in-law, and this today is the date! (Laughs) She's watching. (Laughter) Anyway, you know, I really make decisions all the time about how I want to remember myself, and that's the most important kind of decisions I make. 
+And this directly translates into my paintings. 
+But like my friends, I can do that really well on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube. 
+Name it, I'm on it. 
+I've started outsourcing my memory to the digital world, you know? But that comes with a problem. 
+It's so easy to think of technology as a metaphor for memory, but our brains are not perfect storage devices like technology. 
+We only remember what we want to. At least I do. 
+And I rather think of our brains as biased curators of our memory, you know? And if technology is not a metaphor for memory, what is it? 
+Netra and I use our technology as a tool in our 200-year plan to really curate our digital legacy. 
+That is a picture of my mother, and she recently got a Facebook account. 
+You know where this is going. 
+And I've been very supportive until this picture shows up on my Facebook page. (Laughter) And I actually untagged myself first, then I picked up the phone. I said, "" Mom, you will never put a picture of me in a bikini ever again. "" And she said, "" Why? You look so cute, darling. "" I said, "You just don't understand." 
+Maybe we are among the first generation that really understands this digital curating of ourselves. 
+Maybe we are the first to even actively record our lives. 
+You know, whether you agree with, you know, legacy or not, we are actually leaving behind digital traces all the time. 
+So Netra and I really wanted to use our 200-year plan to curate this digital legacy, and not only digital legacy but we believe in curating the legacy of my past and future. 
+How, you may ask? 
+Well, when I think of the future, I never see myself moving forward in time. I actually see time moving backward towards me. 
+I can actually visualize my future approaching. 
+I can dodge what I don't want and pull in what I want. 
+It's like a video game obstacle course. And I've gotten better and better at doing this. Even when I make a painting, I actually imagine I'm behind the painting, it already exists, and someone's looking at it, and I see whether they're feeling it from their gut. 
+Are they feeling it from their heart, or is it just a cerebral thing? 
+And it really informs my painting. 
+Even when I do an art show, I really think about, what should people walk away with? 
+I remember when I was 19, I did, I wanted to do my first art exhibition, and I wanted the whole world to know about it. 
+I didn't know TED then, but what I did was I closed my eyes tight, and I started dreaming. I could imagine people coming in, dressed up, looking beautiful, my paintings with all the light, and in my visualization I actually saw a very famous actress launching my show, giving credibility to me. 
+And I woke up from my visualization and I said, who was that? I couldn't tell if it was Shabana Azmi or Rekha, two very famous Indian actresses, like the Meryl Streeps of India. 
+As it turned out, next morning I wrote a letter to both of them, and Shabana Azmi replied, and came and launched my very first show 12 years ago. 
+And what a bang it started my career with! You know, when we think of time in this way, we can curate not only the future but also the past. 
+This is a picture of my family, and that is Netra, my wife. 
+She's the co-creator of my 200-year plan. 
+Netra's a high school history teacher. I love Netra, but I hate history. 
+I keep saying, "" Nets, you live in the past while I'll create the future, and when I'm done, you can study about it. "" (Laughter) She gave me an indulgent smile, and as punishment, she said, "" Tomorrow I'm teaching a class on Indian history, and you are sitting in it, and I'm grading you. "" I'm like, "" Oh, God. "" I went. 
+I actually went and sat in on her class. She started by giving students primary source documents from India, Pakistan, from Britain, and I said, "" Wow. "" Then she asked them to separate fact from bias. 
+I said, "" Wow, "" again. 
+Then she said, "" Choose your facts and biases and create an image of your own story of dignity. "" History as an imaging tool? 
+I was so inspired. 
+I went and created my own version of Indian history. 
+I actually included stories from my grandmother. 
+She used to work for the telephone exchange, and she used to actually overhear conversations between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten. 
+And she used to hear all kinds of things she shouldn't have heard. But, you know, I include things like that. 
+This is my version of Indian history. 
+You know, if this is so, it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, the primary objective of our brains is to serve our dignity. 
+Go tell Facebook to figure that out! 
+Netra and I don't write our 200-year plan for someone else to come and execute it in 150 years. Imagine receiving a parcel saying, from the past, okay now you're supposed to spend the rest of your life doing all of this. No. 
+We actually write it only to set our attitudes right. 
+You know, I used to believe that education is the most important tool to leave a meaningful legacy. 
+Education is great. 
+It really teaches us who we are, and helps us contextualize ourselves in the world, but it's really my creativity that's taught me that I can be much more than what my education told me I am. 
+I'd like to make the argument that creativity is the most important tool we have. 
+It lets us create who we are, and curate what is to come. 
+I like to think — Thank you. 
+I like to think of myself as a storyteller, where my past and my future are only stories, my stories, waiting to be told and retold. I hope all of you one day get a chance to share and write your own 200-year story. 
+Thank you so much. 
+Shukran! (Applause) 
+
+Chris Anderson asked me if I could put the last 25 years of anti-poverty campaigning into 10 minutes for TED. 
+That's an Englishman asking an Irishman to be succinct. 
+(Laughter) I said, "" Chris, that would take a miracle. "" He said, "" Bono, wouldn't that be a good use of your messianic complex? "" So, yeah. 
+Then I thought, let's go even further than 25 years. 
+Let's go back before Christ, three millennia, to a time when, at least in my head, the journey for justice, the march against inequality and poverty really began. 
+Three thousand years ago, civilization just getting started on the banks of the Nile, some slaves, Jewish shepherds in this instance, smelling of sheep shit, I guess, proclaimed to the Pharaoh, sitting high on his throne, "We, your majesty-ness, are equal to you." 
+And the Pharaoh replies, "" Oh, no. 
+You, your miserableness, have got to be kidding. "" And they say, "" No, no, that's what it says here in our holy book. "" Cut to our century, same country, same pyramids, another people spreading the same idea of equality with a different book. 
+This time it's called the Facebook. 
+Crowds are gathered in Tahrir Square. 
+They turn a social network from virtual to actual, and kind of rebooted the 21st century. 
+Not to undersell how messy and ugly the aftermath of the Arab Spring has been, neither to oversell the role of technology, but these things have given a sense of what's possible when the age-old model of power, the pyramid, gets turned upside down, putting the people on top and the pharaohs of today on the bottom, as it were. 
+It's also shown us that something as powerful as information and the sharing of it can challenge inequality, because facts, like people, want to be free, and when they're free, liberty is usually around the corner, even for the poorest of the poor — facts that can challenge cynicism and the apathy that leads to inertia, facts that tell us what's working and, more importantly, what's not, so we can fix it, facts that if we hear them and heed them could help us meet the challenge that Nelson Mandela made back in 2005, when he asked us to be that great generation 
+that overcomes that most awful offense to humanity, extreme poverty, facts that build a powerful momentum. 
+So I thought, forget the rock opera, forget the bombast, my usual tricks. 
+The only thing singing today would be the facts, for I have truly embraced by inner nerd. 
+So exit the rock star. 
+Enter the evidence-based activist, the factivist. 
+Because what the facts are telling us is that the long, slow journey, humanity's long, slow journey of equality, is actually speeding up. 
+Look at what's been achieved. 
+Look at the pictures these data sets print. 
+Since the year 2000, since the turn of the millennium, there are eight million more AIDS patients getting life-saving antiretroviral drugs. 
+Malaria: There are eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have their death rates cut by 75 percent. 
+For kids under five, child mortality, kids under five, it's down by 2.65 million a year. 
+That's a rate of 7,256 children's lives saved each day. 
+Wow. Wow. (Applause) Let's just stop for a second, actually, and think about that. 
+Have you read anything anywhere in the last week that is remotely as important as that number? Wow. 
+Great news. It drives me nuts that most people don't seem to know this news. 
+Seven thousand kids a day. Here's two of them. 
+This is Michael and Benedicta, and they're alive thanks in large part to Dr. Patricia Asamoah — she's amazing — and the Global Fund, which all of you financially support, whether you know it or not. 
+And the Global Fund provides antiretroviral drugs that stop mothers from passing HIV to their kids. 
+This fantastic news didn't happen by itself. 
+It was fought for, it was campaigned for, it was innovated for. 
+And this great news gives birth to even more great news, because the historic trend is this. 
+The number of people living in back-breaking, soul-crushing extreme poverty has declined from 43 percent of the world's population in 1990 to 33 percent by 2000 and then to 21 percent by 2010. 
+Give it up for that. (Applause) Halved. Halved. 
+Now, the rate is still too high — still too many people unnecessarily losing their lives. 
+There's still work to do. 
+But it's heart-stopping. It's mind-blowing stuff. 
+And if you live on less than $1.25 a day, if you live in that kind of poverty, this is not just data. 
+This is everything. 
+If you're a parent who wants the best for your kids — and I am — this rapid transition is a route out of despair and into hope. 
+And guess what? If the trajectory continues, look where the amount of people living on $1.25 a day gets to by 2030. 
+Can't be true, can it? 
+That's what the data is telling us. If the trajectory continues, we get to, wow, the zero zone. 
+For number-crunchers like us, that is the erogenous zone, and it's fair to say that I am, by now, sexually aroused by the collating of data. 
+So virtual elimination of extreme poverty, as defined by people living on less than $1.25 a day, adjusted, of course, for inflation from a 1990 baseline. 
+We do love a good baseline. 
+That's amazing. 
+Now I know that some of you think this progress is all in Asia or Latin America or model countries like Brazil — and who doesn't love a Brazilian model? — but look at sub-Saharan Africa. 
+There's a collection of 10 countries, some call them the lions, who in the last decade have had a combination of 100 percent debt cancellation, a tripling of aid, a tenfold increase in FDI — that's foreign direct investment — which has unlocked a quadrupling of domestic resources — that's local money — which, when spent wisely — that's good governance — cut childhood mortality by a third, doubled education completion rates, and they, too, halved extreme poverty, and at this rate, these 10 get to zero too. 
+So the pride of lions is the proof of concept. 
+There are all kinds of benefits to this. 
+For a start, you won't have to listen to an insufferable little jumped-up Jesus like myself. 
+How about that? (Applause) And 2028, 2030? It's just around the corner. 
+I mean, it's about three Rolling Stones farewell concerts away. 
+(Laughter) I hope. I'm hoping. 
+Makes us look really young. 
+So why aren't we jumping up and down about this? 
+Well, the opportunity is real, but so is the jeopardy. 
+We can't get this done until we really accept that we can get this done. 
+Look at this graph. 
+It's called inertia. It's how we screw it up. 
+And the next one is really beautiful. 
+It's called momentum. 
+And it's how we can bend the arc of history down towards zero, just doing the things that we know work. 
+So inertia versus momentum. 
+There is jeopardy, and of course, the closer you get, it gets harder. 
+We know the obstacles that are in our way right now, in difficult times. 
+In fact, today in your capital, in difficult times, some who mind the nation's purse want to cut life-saving programs like the Global Fund. 
+But you can do something about that. 
+You can tell politicians that these cuts [can cost] lives. 
+Right now today, in Oslo as it happens, oil companies are fighting to keep secret their payments to governments for extracting oil in developing countries. 
+You can do something about that too. 
+You can join the One Campaign, and leaders like Mo Ibrahim, the telecom entrepreneur. 
+We're pushing for laws that make sure that at least some of the wealth under the ground ends up in the hands of the people living above it. 
+And right now, we know that the biggest disease of all is not a disease. It's corruption. 
+But there's a vaccine for that too. 
+It's called transparency, open data sets, something the TED community is really on it. 
+Daylight, you could call it, transparency. 
+And technology is really turbocharging this. 
+It's getting harder to hide if you're doing bad stuff. 
+So let me tell you about the U-report, which I'm really excited about. It's 150,000 millennials all across Uganda, young people armed with 2G phones, an SMS social network exposing government corruption and demanding to know what's in the budget and how their money is being spent. 
+This is exciting stuff. 
+Look, once you have these tools, you can't not use them. 
+Once you have this knowledge, you can't un-know it. 
+You can't delete this data from your brain, but you can delete the cliched image of supplicant, impoverished peoples not taking control of their own lives. 
+You can erase that, you really can, because it's not true anymore. (Applause) It's transformational. 
+2030? By 2030, robots, not just serving us Guinness, but drinking it. 
+By the time we get there, every place with a rough semblance of governance might actually be on their way. 
+So I'm here to — I guess we're here to try and infect you with this virtuous, data-based virus, the one we call factivism. 
+It's not going to kill you. 
+In fact, it could save countless lives. 
+I guess we in the One Campaign would love you to be contagious, spread it, share it, pass it on. 
+By doing so, you will join us and countless others in what I truly believe is the greatest adventure ever taken, the ever-demanding journey of equality. 
+Could we really be the great generation that Mandela asked us to be? 
+Might we answer that clarion call with science, with reason, with facts, and, dare I say it, emotions? 
+Because as is obvious, factivists have feelings too. 
+I'm thinking of Wael Ghonim, though. 
+Some of you know him. He set up one of the Facebook groups behind the Tahrir Square in Cairo. 
+He got thrown in jail for it, but I have his words tattooed on my brain. 
+"" We are going to win because we don't understand politics. 
+We are going to win because we don't play their dirty games. 
+We are going to win because we don't have a party political agenda. 
+We are going to win because the tears that come from our eyes actually come from our hearts. 
+We are going to win because we have dreams, and we're willing to stand up for those dreams. "" Wael is right. 
+We're going to win if we work together as one, because the power of the people is so much stronger than the people in power. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause) 
+
+Humans have long held a fascination for the human brain. 
+We chart it, we've described it, we've drawn it, we've mapped it. 
+Now just like the physical maps of our world that have been highly influenced by technology — think Google Maps, think GPS — the same thing is happening for brain mapping through transformation. 
+So let's take a look at the brain. 
+Most people, when they first look at a fresh human brain, they say, "" It doesn't look what you're typically looking at when someone shows you a brain. "" Typically, what you're looking at is a fixed brain. It's gray. 
+And this outer layer, this is the vasculature, which is incredible, around a human brain. 
+This is the blood vessels. 
+20 percent of the oxygen coming from your lungs, 20 percent of the blood pumped from your heart, is servicing this one organ. 
+That's basically, if you hold two fists together, it's just slightly larger than the two fists. 
+Scientists, sort of at the end of the 20th century, learned that they could track blood flow to map non-invasively where activity was going on in the human brain. 
+So for example, they can see in the back part of the brain, which is just turning around there. 
+There's the cerebellum; that's keeping you upright right now. 
+It's keeping me standing. It's involved in coordinated movement. 
+On the side here, this is temporal cortex. 
+This is the area where primary auditory processing — so you're hearing my words, you're sending it up into higher language processing centers. 
+Towards the front of the brain is the place in which all of the more complex thought, decision making — it's the last to mature in late adulthood. 
+This is where all your decision-making processes are going on. 
+It's the place where you're deciding right now you probably aren't going to order the steak for dinner. 
+So if you take a deeper look at the brain, one of the things, if you look at it in cross-section, what you can see is that you can't really see a whole lot of structure there. 
+But there's actually a lot of structure there. 
+It's cells and it's wires all wired together. 
+So about a hundred years ago, some scientists invented a stain that would stain cells. 
+And that's shown here in the the very light blue. 
+You can see areas where neuronal cell bodies are being stained. 
+And what you can see is it's very non-uniform. You see a lot more structure there. 
+So the outer part of that brain is the neocortex. 
+It's one continuous processing unit, if you will. 
+But you can also see things underneath there as well. 
+And all of these blank areas are the areas in which the wires are running through. 
+They're probably less cell dense. 
+So there's about 86 billion neurons in our brain. 
+And as you can see, they're very non-uniformly distributed. 
+And how they're distributed really contributes to their underlying function. 
+And of course, as I mentioned before, since we can now start to map brain function, we can start to tie these into the individual cells. 
+So let's take a deeper look. 
+Let's look at neurons. 
+So as I mentioned, there are 86 billion neurons. 
+There are also these smaller cells as you'll see. 
+These are support cells — astrocytes glia. 
+And the nerves themselves are the ones who are receiving input. 
+They're storing it, they're processing it. 
+Each neuron is connected via synapses to up to 10,000 other neurons in your brain. 
+And each neuron itself is largely unique. 
+The unique character of both individual neurons and neurons within a collection of the brain are driven by fundamental properties of their underlying biochemistry. 
+These are proteins. 
+They're proteins that are controlling things like ion channel movement. 
+They're controlling who nervous system cells partner up with. 
+And they're controlling basically everything that the nervous system has to do. 
+So if we zoom in to an even deeper level, all of those proteins are encoded by our genomes. 
+We each have 23 pairs of chromosomes. 
+We get one from mom, one from dad. 
+And on these chromosomes are roughly 25,000 genes. 
+They're encoded in the DNA. 
+And the nature of a given cell driving its underlying biochemistry is dictated by which of these 25,000 genes are turned on and at what level they're turned on. 
+And so our project is seeking to look at this readout, understanding which of these 25,000 genes is turned on. 
+So in order to undertake such a project, we obviously need brains. 
+So we sent our lab technician out. 
+We were seeking normal human brains. 
+What we actually start with is a medical examiner's office. 
+This a place where the dead are brought in. 
+We are seeking normal human brains. 
+There's a lot of criteria by which we're selecting these brains. 
+We want to make sure that we have normal humans between the ages of 20 to 60, they died a somewhat natural death with no injury to the brain, no history of psychiatric disease, no drugs on board — we do a toxicology workup. 
+And we're very careful about the brains that we do take. 
+We're also selecting for brains in which we can get the tissue, we can get consent to take the tissue within 24 hours of time of death. 
+Because what we're trying to measure, the RNA — which is the readout from our genes — is very labile, and so we have to move very quickly. 
+One side note on the collection of brains: because of the way that we collect, and because we require consent, we actually have a lot more male brains than female brains. 
+Males are much more likely to die an accidental death in the prime of their life. 
+And men are much more likely to have their significant other, spouse, give consent than the other way around. 
+(Laughter) So the first thing that we do at the site of collection is we collect what's called an MR. 
+This is magnetic resonance imaging — MRI. 
+It's a standard template by which we're going to hang the rest of this data. 
+So we collect this MR. 
+And you can think of this as our satellite view for our map. 
+The next thing we do is we collect what's called a diffusion tensor imaging. 
+This maps the large cabling in the brain. 
+And again, you can think of this as almost mapping our interstate highways, if you will. 
+The brain is removed from the skull, and then it's sliced into one-centimeter slices. 
+And those are frozen solid, and they're shipped to Seattle. 
+And in Seattle, we take these — this is a whole human hemisphere — and we put them into what's basically a glorified meat slicer. 
+There's a blade here that's going to cut across a section of the tissue and transfer it to a microscope slide. 
+We're going to then apply one of those stains to it, and we scan it. 
+And then what we get is our first mapping. 
+So this is where experts come in and they make basic anatomic assignments. 
+You could consider this state boundaries, if you will, those pretty broad outlines. 
+From this, we're able to then fragment that brain into further pieces, which then we can put on a smaller cryostat. 
+And this is just showing this here — this frozen tissue, and it's being cut. 
+This is 20 microns thin, so this is about a baby hair's width. 
+And remember, it's frozen. 
+And so you can see here, old-fashioned technology of the paintbrush being applied. 
+We take a microscope slide. 
+Then we very carefully melt onto the slide. 
+This will then go onto a robot that's going to apply one of those stains to it. 
+And our anatomists are going to go in and take a deeper look at this. 
+So again this is what they can see under the microscope. 
+You can see collections and configurations of large and small cells in clusters and various places. 
+And from there it's routine. They understand where to make these assignments. 
+And they can make basically what's a reference atlas. 
+This is a more detailed map. 
+Our scientists then use this to go back to another piece of that tissue and do what's called laser scanning microdissection. 
+So the technician takes the instructions. 
+They scribe along a place there. 
+And then the laser actually cuts. 
+You can see that blue dot there cutting. And that tissue falls off. 
+You can see on the microscope slide here, that's what's happening in real time. 
+There's a container underneath that's collecting that tissue. 
+We take that tissue, we purify the RNA out of it using some basic technology, and then we put a florescent tag on it. 
+We take that tagged material and we put it on to something called a microarray. 
+Now this may look like a bunch of dots to you, but each one of these individual dots is actually a unique piece of the human genome that we spotted down on glass. 
+This has roughly 60,000 elements on it, so we repeatedly measure various genes of the 25,000 genes in the genome. 
+And when we take a sample and we hybridize it to it, we get a unique fingerprint, if you will, quantitatively of what genes are turned on in that sample. 
+Now we do this over and over again, this process for any given brain. 
+We're taking over a thousand samples for each brain. 
+This area shown here is an area called the hippocampus. 
+It's involved in learning and memory. 
+And it contributes to about 70 samples of those thousand samples. 
+So each sample gets us about 50,000 data points with repeat measurements, a thousand samples. 
+So roughly, we have 50 million data points for a given human brain. 
+We've done right now two human brains-worth of data. 
+We've put all of that together into one thing, and I'll show you what that synthesis looks like. 
+It's basically a large data set of information that's all freely available to any scientist around the world. 
+They don't even have to log in to come use this tool, mine this data, find interesting things out with this. 
+So here's the modalities that we put together. 
+You'll start to recognize these things from what we've collected before. 
+Here's the MR. It provides the framework. 
+There's an operator side on the right that allows you to turn, it allows you to zoom in, it allows you to highlight individual structures. 
+But most importantly, we're now mapping into this anatomic framework, which is a common framework for people to understand where genes are turned on. 
+So the red levels are where a gene is turned on to a great degree. 
+Green is the sort of cool areas where it's not turned on. 
+And each gene gives us a fingerprint. 
+And remember that we've assayed all the 25,000 genes in the genome and have all of that data available. 
+So what can scientists learn about this data? 
+We're just starting to look at this data ourselves. 
+There's some basic things that you would want to understand. 
+Two great examples are drugs, Prozac and Wellbutrin. 
+These are commonly prescribed antidepressants. 
+Now remember, we're assaying genes. 
+Genes send the instructions to make proteins. 
+Proteins are targets for drugs. 
+So drugs bind to proteins and either turn them off, etc. 
+So if you want to understand the action of drugs, you want to understand how they're acting in the ways you want them to, and also in the ways you don't want them to. 
+In the side effect profile, etc., you want to see where those genes are turned on. 
+And for the first time, we can actually do that. 
+We can do that in multiple individuals that we've assayed too. 
+So now we can look throughout the brain. 
+We can see this unique fingerprint. 
+And we get confirmation. 
+We get confirmation that, indeed, the gene is turned on — for something like Prozac, in serotonergic structures, things that are already known be affected — but we also get to see the whole thing. 
+We also get to see areas that no one has ever looked at before, and we see these genes turned on there. 
+It's as interesting a side effect as it could be. 
+One other thing you can do with such a thing is you can, because it's a pattern matching exercise, because there's unique fingerprint, we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint. 
+So if you're in drug discovery, for example, you can go through an entire listing of what the genome has on offer to find perhaps better drug targets and optimize. 
+Most of you are probably familiar with genome-wide association studies in the form of people covering in the news saying, "" Scientists have recently discovered the gene or genes which affect X. "" And so these kinds of studies are routinely published by scientists and they're great. They analyze large populations. 
+They look at their entire genomes, and they try to find hot spots of activity that are linked causally to genes. 
+But what you get out of such an exercise is simply a list of genes. 
+It tells you the what, but it doesn't tell you the where. 
+And so it's very important for those researchers that we've created this resource. 
+Now they can come in and they can start to get clues about activity. 
+They can start to look at common pathways — other things that they simply haven't been able to do before. 
+So I think this audience in particular can understand the importance of individuality. 
+And I think every human, we all have different genetic backgrounds, we all have lived separate lives. 
+But the fact is our genomes are greater than 99 percent similar. 
+We're similar at the genetic level. 
+And what we're finding is actually, even at the brain biochemical level, we are quite similar. 
+And so this shows it's not 99 percent, but it's roughly 90 percent correspondence at a reasonable cutoff, so everything in the cloud is roughly correlated. 
+And then we find some outliers, some things that lie beyond the cloud. 
+And those genes are interesting, but they're very subtle. 
+So I think it's an important message to take home today that even though we celebrate all of our differences, we are quite similar even at the brain level. 
+Now what do those differences look like? 
+This is an example of a study that we did to follow up and see what exactly those differences were — and they're quite subtle. 
+These are things where genes are turned on in an individual cell type. 
+These are two genes that we found as good examples. 
+One is called RELN — it's involved in early developmental cues. 
+DISC1 is a gene that's deleted in schizophrenia. 
+These aren't schizophrenic individuals, but they do show some population variation. 
+And so what you're looking at here in donor one and donor four, which are the exceptions to the other two, that genes are being turned on in a very specific subset of cells. 
+It's this dark purple precipitate within the cell that's telling us a gene is turned on there. 
+Whether or not that's due to an individual's genetic background or their experiences, we don't know. 
+Those kinds of studies require much larger populations. 
+So I'm going to leave you with a final note about the complexity of the brain and how much more we have to go. 
+I think these resources are incredibly valuable. 
+They give researchers a handle on where to go. 
+But we only looked at a handful of individuals at this point. 
+We're certainly going to be looking at more. 
+I'll just close by saying that the tools are there, and this is truly an unexplored, undiscovered continent. 
+This is the new frontier, if you will. 
+And so for those who are undaunted, but humbled by the complexity of the brain, the future awaits. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm here today to talk about a disturbing question, which has an equally disturbing answer. 
+My topic is the secrets of domestic violence, and the question I'm going to tackle is the one question everyone always asks: Why does she stay? 
+Why would anyone stay with a man who beats her? 
+I'm not a psychiatrist, a social worker or an expert in domestic violence. 
+I'm just one woman with a story to tell. 
+I was 22. I had just graduated from Harvard College. 
+I had moved to New York City for my first job as a writer and editor at Seventeen magazine. 
+I had my first apartment, my first little green American Express card, and I had a very big secret. 
+My secret was that I had this gun loaded with hollow-point bullets pointed at my head by the man who I thought was my soulmate, many, many times. 
+The man who I loved more than anybody on Earth held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me more times than I can even remember. 
+I'm here to tell you the story of crazy love, a psychological trap disguised as love, one that millions of women and even a few men fall into every year. 
+It may even be your story. 
+I don't look like a typical domestic violence survivor. 
+I have a B.A. in English from Harvard College, an MBA in marketing from Wharton Business School. 
+I've spent most of my career working for Fortune 500 companies including Johnson & Johnson, Leo Burnett and The Washington Post. 
+I've been married for almost 20 years to my second husband and we have three kids together. 
+My dog is a black lab, and I drive a Honda Odyssey minivan. 
+(Laughter) So my first message for you is that domestic violence happens to everyone — all races, all religions, all income and education levels. 
+It's everywhere. 
+And my second message is that everyone thinks domestic violence happens to women, that it's a women's issue. 
+Not exactly. 
+Over 85 percent of abusers are men, and domestic abuse happens only in intimate, interdependent, long-term relationships, in other words, in families, the last place we would want or expect to find violence, which is one reason domestic abuse is so confusing. 
+I would have told you myself that I was the last person on Earth who would stay with a man who beats me, but in fact I was a very typical victim because of my age. 
+I was 22, and in the United States, women ages 16 to 24 are three times as likely to be domestic violence victims as women of other ages, and over 500 women and girls this age are killed every year by abusive partners, boyfriends, and husbands in the United States. 
+I was also a very typical victim because I knew nothing about domestic violence, its warning signs or its patterns. 
+I met Conor on a cold, rainy January night. 
+He sat next to me on the New York City subway, and he started chatting me up. 
+He told me two things. 
+One was that he, too, had just graduated from an Ivy League school, and that he worked at a very impressive Wall Street bank. 
+But what made the biggest impression on me that first meeting was that he was smart and funny and he looked like a farm boy. 
+He had these big cheeks, these big apple cheeks and this wheat-blond hair, and he seemed so sweet. 
+One of the smartest things Conor did, from the very beginning, was to create the illusion that I was the dominant partner in the relationship. 
+He did this especially at the beginning by idolizing me. 
+We started dating, and he loved everything about me, that I was smart, that I'd gone to Harvard, that I was passionate about helping teenage girls, and my job. 
+He wanted to know everything about my family and my childhood and my hopes and dreams. 
+Conor believed in me, as a writer and a woman, in a way that no one else ever had. 
+And he also created a magical atmosphere of trust between us by confessing his secret, which was that, as a very young boy starting at age four, he had been savagely and repeatedly physically abused by his stepfather, and the abuse had gotten so bad that he had had to drop out of school in eighth grade, even though he was very smart, and he'd spent almost 20 years rebuilding his life. 
+Which is why that Ivy League degree and the Wall Street job and his bright shiny future meant so much to him. 
+If you had told me that this smart, funny, sensitive man who adored me would one day dictate whether or not I wore makeup, how short my skirts were, where I lived, what jobs I took, who my friends were and where I spent Christmas, I would have laughed at you, because there was not a hint of violence or control or anger in Conor at the beginning. 
+I didn't know that the first stage in any domestic violence relationship is to seduce and charm the victim. 
+I also didn't know that the second step is to isolate the victim. 
+Now, Conor did not come home one day and announce, "" You know, hey, all this Romeo and Juliet stuff has been great, but I need to move into the next phase where I isolate you and I abuse you "" — (Laughter) — "" so I need to get you out of this apartment where the neighbors can hear you scream and out of this city where you have friends and family and coworkers who can see the bruises. "" Instead, Conor came home one Friday evening and he told me that he had quit his job that day, his dream job, and he said that he had quit his job because of me, 
+because I had made him feel so safe and loved that he didn't need to prove himself on Wall Street anymore, and he just wanted to get out of the city and away from his abusive, dysfunctional family, and move to a tiny town in New England where he could start his life over with me by his side. 
+Now, the last thing I wanted to do was leave New York, and my dream job, but I thought you made sacrifices for your soulmate, so I agreed, and I quit my job, and Conor and I left Manhattan together. 
+I had no idea I was falling into crazy love, that I was walking headfirst into a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap. 
+The next step in the domestic violence pattern is to introduce the threat of violence and see how she reacts. 
+And here's where those guns come in. 
+As soon as we moved to New England — you know, that place where Connor was supposed to feel so safe — he bought three guns. 
+He kept one in the glove compartment of our car. 
+He kept one under the pillows on our bed, and the third one he kept in his pocket at all times. 
+And he said that he needed those guns because of the trauma he'd experienced as a young boy. 
+He needed them to feel protected. 
+But those guns were really a message for me, and even though he hadn't raised a hand to me, my life was already in grave danger every minute of every day. 
+Conor first physically attacked me five days before our wedding. 
+It was 7 a.m. I still had on my nightgown. 
+I was working on my computer trying to finish a freelance writing assignment, and I got frustrated, and Conor used my anger as an excuse to put both of his hands around my neck and to squeeze so tightly that I could not breathe or scream, and he used the chokehold to hit my head repeatedly against the wall. 
+Five days later, the ten bruises on my neck had just faded, and I put on my mother's wedding dress, and I married him. 
+Despite what had happened, I was sure we were going to live happily ever after, because I loved him, and he loved me so much. 
+And he was very, very sorry. 
+He had just been really stressed out by the wedding and by becoming a family with me. 
+It was an isolated incident, and he was never going to hurt me again. 
+It happened twice more on the honeymoon. 
+The first time, I was driving to find a secret beach and I got lost, and he punched me in the side of my head so hard that the other side of my head repeatedly hit the driver's side window. 
+And then a few days later, driving home from our honeymoon, he got frustrated by traffic, and he threw a cold Big Mac in my face. 
+Conor proceeded to beat me once or twice a week for the next two and a half years of our marriage. 
+I was mistaken in thinking that I was unique and alone in this situation. 
+One in three American women experiences domestic violence or stalking at some point in her life, and the CDC reports that 15 million children are abused every year, 15 million. 
+So actually, I was in very good company. 
+Back to my question: Why did I stay? 
+The answer is easy. 
+I didn't know he was abusing me. 
+Even though he held those loaded guns to my head, pushed me down stairs, threatened to kill our dog, pulled the key out of the car ignition as I drove down the highway, poured coffee grinds on my head as I dressed for a job interview, I never once thought of myself as a battered wife. 
+Instead, I was a very strong woman in love with a deeply troubled man, and I was the only person on Earth who could help Conor face his demons. 
+The other question everybody asks is, why doesn't she just leave? 
+Why didn't I walk out? I could have left any time. 
+To me, this is the saddest and most painful question that people ask, because we victims know something you usually don't: It's incredibly dangerous to leave an abuser. 
+Because the final step in the domestic violence pattern is kill her. 
+Over 70 percent of domestic violence murders happen after the victim has ended the relationship, after she's gotten out, because then the abuser has nothing left to lose. 
+Other outcomes include long-term stalking, even after the abuser remarries; denial of financial resources; and manipulation of the family court system to terrify the victim and her children, who are regularly forced by family court judges to spend unsupervised time with the man who beat their mother. 
+And still we ask, why doesn't she just leave? 
+I was able to leave, because of one final, sadistic beating that broke through my denial. 
+I realized that the man who I loved so much was going to kill me if I let him. 
+So I broke the silence. 
+I told everyone: the police, my neighbors, my friends and family, total strangers, and I'm here today because you all helped me. 
+We tend to stereotype victims as grisly headlines, self-destructive women, damaged goods. 
+The question, "" Why does she stay? "" is code for some people for, "" It's her fault for staying, "" as if victims intentionally choose to fall in love with men intent upon destroying us. 
+But since publishing "" Crazy Love, "" I have heard hundreds of stories from men and women who also got out, who learned an invaluable life lesson from what happened, and who rebuilt lives — joyous, happy lives — as employees, wives and mothers, lives completely free of violence, like me. 
+Because it turns out that I'm actually a very typical domestic violence victim and a typical domestic violence survivor. 
+I remarried a kind and gentle man, and we have those three kids. 
+I have that black lab, and I have that minivan. 
+What I will never have again, ever, is a loaded gun held to my head by someone who says that he loves me. 
+Right now, maybe you're thinking, "Wow, this is fascinating," or, "" Wow, how stupid was she, "" but this whole time, I've actually been talking about you. 
+I promise you there are several people listening to me right now who are currently being abused or who were abused as children or who are abusers themselves. 
+Abuse could be affecting your daughter, your sister, your best friend right now. 
+I was able to end my own crazy love story by breaking the silence. 
+I'm still breaking the silence today. 
+It's my way of helping other victims, and it's my final request of you. 
+Talk about what you heard here. 
+Abuse thrives only in silence. 
+You have the power to end domestic violence simply by shining a spotlight on it. 
+We victims need everyone. 
+We need every one of you to understand the secrets of domestic violence. 
+Show abuse the light of day by talking about it with your children, your coworkers, your friends and family. 
+Recast survivors as wonderful, lovable people with full futures. 
+Recognize the early signs of violence and conscientiously intervene, deescalate it, show victims a safe way out. 
+Together we can make our beds, our dinner tables and our families the safe and peaceful oases they should be. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Laughter) And so I just came, two days ago, from the Himalayas to your kind invitation. 
+This is from Marlboro country. 
+(Laughter) This is a turquoise lake. 
+And the night before, we camped, and my Tibetan friends said, "We are going to sleep outside." 
+As a Frenchman, I must say that there are a lot of French intellectuals that think happiness is not at all interesting. 
+(Laughter) I just wrote an essay on happiness, and there was a controversy. 
+(Laughter) "" We don't care about being happy. We need to live with passion. 
+We like our suffering because it's so good when it ceases for a while. "" (Laughter) This is what I see from the balcony of my hermitage in the Himalayas. 
+It's about two meters by three, and you are all welcome any time. 
+And first of all, you know, despite what the French intellectuals say, it seems that no one wakes up in the morning thinking, "May I suffer the whole day?" 
+(Laughter) Which means that somehow, consciously or not, directly or indirectly, in the short or the long term, whatever we do, whatever we hope, whatever we dream — somehow, is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness. 
+Some people say, I only believed in remembering the past, imagining the future, never the present. 
+And that led Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, to say, "" All the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague so that each of them could define their own terms. "" Well, that would be fine if it was just a secondary preoccupation in life. 
+And probably, the fact that we don't know that is why, so often, although we seek happiness, it seems we turn our back to it. 
+One of the most common ones is happiness and pleasure. 
+It is something that — changes of nature. 
+Beautiful chocolate cake: first serving is delicious, second one not so much, then we feel disgust. 
+I used to be a fan of Bach. 
+And also, again, it can — also, it's something that you — it is not something that is radiating outside. 
+And happiness, of course, is such a vague word, so let's say well-being. 
+Look at the waves coming near the shore. 
+It can only be a state of being, not just a fleeting emotion, sensation. 
+We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say, "" Everything to be happy — to have everything to be happy. "" That very sentence already reveals the doom, destruction of happiness. 
+We know, by experience, that we can be what we call "" a little paradise, "" and yet, be completely unhappy within. 
+The Dalai Lama was once in Portugal, and there was a lot of construction going on everywhere. 
+So one evening, he said, "" Look, you are doing all these things, but isn't it nice, also, to build something within? "" And he said, "" [Without] that — even if you get a high-tech flat on the 100th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building, if you are deeply unhappy within, all you are going to look for is a window from which to jump. "" So now, at the opposite, we know a lot of people who, in very difficult circumstances, manage to keep serenity, inner strength, inner freedom, confidence. 
+So now, if the inner conditions are stronger — of course, the outer conditions do influence, and it's wonderful to live longer, healthier, to have access to information, education, to be able to travel, to have freedom. 
+So we may consider that the more those are invading our mind, and, like a chain reaction, the more we feel miserable, we feel tormented. 
+So is that possible, to change our way of being, to transform one's mind? 
+Aren't those negative emotions, or destructive emotions, inherent to the nature of mind? 
+Is change possible in our emotions, in our traits, in our moods? 
+And if we look from the experiential point of view, there is a primary quality of consciousness that's just the mere fact to be cognitive, to be aware. 
+You can have ugly faces, beautiful faces in the mirror. 
+Likewise, behind every single thought there is the bare consciousness, pure awareness. 
+So, because the basic fabric of consciousness is this pure cognitive quality that differentiates it from a stone, there is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting. 
+Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. 
+But, of course, each emotion then would need a particular antidote. 
+Another way is to try to find a general antidote to all emotions, and that's by looking at the very nature. 
+If you do this again and again, the propensity, the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time you dissolve it. 
+And, at the end, although it may rise, it will just cross the mind, like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track. 
+It means familiarization with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things, which is more in adequation with reality, with interdependence, with the stream and continuous transformation, which our being and our consciousness is. 
+So that's what those great meditators have been doing. 
+The scientific embargo — if it's ever submitted to "" Nature, "" hopefully, it will be accepted. 
+We asked meditators, who have been doing that for years and years, to put their mind in a state where there's nothing but loving kindness, total availability to sentient being. 
+It's the opposite on the left side: more tendency to altruism, to happiness, to express, and curiosity and so forth. 
+It's something that is totally out of the bell curve. 
+Hopefully, they will come. 
+Also, it has been shown in other labs — for instance, Paul Ekman's labs in Berkeley — that some meditators are able, also, to control their emotional response more than it could be thought. 
+If you sit a guy on a chair with all this apparatus measuring your physiology, and there's kind of a bomb that goes off, it's such an instinctive response that, in 20 years, they never saw anyone who would not jump. 
+Some meditators, without trying to stop it, but simply by being completely open, thinking that that bang is just going to be a small event like a shooting star, they are able not to move at all. 
+So the whole point of that is not, sort of, to make, like, a circus thing of showing exceptional beings who can jump, or whatever. 
+We love to do jogging, fitness. 
+We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. 
+Just this one example is worth a lot of work. 
+Different schools and clinics we've been doing in Tibet. 
+Flying monks. 
+
+This is your conference, and I think you have a right to know a little bit right now, in this transition period, about this guy who's going to be looking after it for you for a bit. 
+So, I'm just going to grab a chair here. 
+Two years ago at TED, I think — I've come to this conclusion — I think I may have been suffering from a strange delusion. 
+I think that I may have believed unconsciously, then, that I was kind of a business hero. 
+I had this company that I'd spent 15 years building. It's called Future; it was a magazine publishing company. 
+It had recently gone public and the market said that it was apparently worth two billion dollars, a number I didn't really understand. 
+A magazine I'd recently launched called Business 2.0 was fatter than a telephone directory, busy pumping hot air into the bubble. 
+(Laughter) And I was the 40 percent owner of a dotcom that was about to go public and no doubt be worth billions more. 
+And all this had come from nothing. 
+Fifteen years earlier, I was a science journalist who people just laughed at when I said, "" I really would like to start my own computer magazine. "" And 15 years later, there are 100 of them and 2,000 people on staff and it was just such heady times. 
+The date was February 2000. 
+I thought the little graph of my business life that kind of looked a bit like Moore's Law — ever upward and to the right — it was going to go on forever. 
+I mean, it had to. Right? I was in for quite a surprise. 
+The dotcom, ironically called Snowball, was the very last consumer web company to go public the next month before NASDAQ exploded, and I entered 18 months of business hell. 
+I watched everything that I'd built crumbling, and it looked like all this stuff was going to die and 15 years work would have come for nothing. 
+And it was gut wrenching. 
+It took eight years of blood, sweat and tears to reach 350 employees, something which I was very proud of in the business. 
+February 2001 — in one day we laid off 350 people, and before the bloodshed was finished, 1,000 people had lost their jobs from my companies. I felt sick. 
+I watched my own net worth falling by about a million dollars a day, every day, for 18 months. 
+And worse than that, far worse than that, my sense of self-worth was kind of evaporating. 
+I was going around with this big sign on my forehead: "" LOSER. "" (Laughter) And I think what disgusts me more than anything, looking back, is how the hell did I let my personal happiness get so tied up with this business thing? 
+Well, in the end, we were able to save Future and Snowball, but I was, at that point, ready to move on. 
+And to cut a long story short, here's where I came to. 
+And the reason I'm telling this story is that I believe, from many conversations, that a lot of people in this room have been through a similar kind of rollercoaster — emotional rollercoaster — in the last couple years. 
+This has been a big, big transition time, and I believe that this conference can play a big part for all of us in taking us forward to the next stage to whatever's next. 
+The theme next year is re-birth. 
+It was at the same TED two years ago when Richard and I reached an agreement on the future of TED. 
+And at about the same time, and I think partly because of that, I started doing something that I'd forgotten about in my business focus: I started to read again. 
+And I discovered that while I'd been busy playing business games, there'd been this incredible revolution in so many areas of interest: cosmology to psychology to evolutionary psychology to anthropology to... all this stuff had changed. 
+And the way in which you could think about us as a species and us as a planet had just changed so much, and it was incredibly exciting. 
+And what was really most exciting — and I think Richard Wurman discovered this at least 20 years before I did — was that all this stuff is connected. 
+It's connected; it all hooks into each other. 
+We talk about this a lot, and I thought about trying to give an example of this. So, just one example: Madame de Gaulle, the wife of the French president, was famously asked once, "" What do you most desire? "" And she answered, "" A penis. "" And when you think about it, it's very true: what we all most desire is a penis — or "" happiness "" as we say in English. 
+(Laughter) And something... good luck with that one in the Japanese translation room. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) But something as basic as happiness, which 20 years ago would have been just something for discussion in the church or mosque or synagogue, today it turns out that there's dozens of TED-like questions that you can ask about it, which are really interesting. 
+You can ask about what causes it biochemically: neuroscience, serotonin, all that stuff. 
+You can ask what are the psychological causes of it: nature? Nurture? Current circumstance? 
+Turns out that the research done on that is absolutely mind-blowing. 
+You can view it as a computing problem, an artificial intelligence problem: do you need to incorporate some sort of analog of happiness into a computer brain to make it work properly? 
+You can view it in sort of geopolitical terms and say, why is it that a billion people on this planet are so desperately needy that they have no possibility of happiness, and whereas almost all the rest of them, regardless of how much money they have — whether it's two dollars a day or whatever — are almost equally happy on average? 
+Or you can view it as an evolutionary psychology kind of thing: did our genes invent this as a kind of trick to get us to behave in certain ways? The ant's brain, parasitized, to make us behave in certain ways so that our genes would propagate? 
+Are we the victims of a mass delusion? 
+And so on, and so on. 
+To understand even something as important to us as happiness, you kind of have to branch off in all these different directions, and there's nowhere that I've discovered — other than TED — where you can ask that many questions in that many different directions. 
+And so, it's the profound thing that Richard talks about: to understand anything, you just need to understand the little bits; a little bit about everything that surrounds it. 
+And so, gradually over these three days, you start off kind of trying to figure out, "Why am I listening to all this irrelevant stuff?" 
+And at the end of the four days, your brain is humming and you feel energized, alive and excited, and it's because all these different bits have been put together. 
+It's the total brain experience, we're going to... 
+it's the mental equivalent of the full body massage. 
+(Laughter) Every mental organ addressed. It really is. 
+Enough of the theory, Chris. Tell us what you're actually going to do, all right? 
+So, I will. Here's the vision for TED. 
+Number one: do nothing. This thing ain't broke, so I ain't gonna fix it. 
+Jeff Bezos kindly remarked to me, "" Chris, TED is a really great conference. 
+You're going to have to fuck up really badly to make it bad. "" (Laughter) So, I gave myself the job title of TED Custodian for a reason, and I will promise you right here and now that the core values that make TED special are not going to be interfered with. 
+Truth, curiosity, diversity, no selling, no corporate bullshit, no bandwagoning, no platforms. 
+Just the pursuit of interest, wherever it lies, across all the disciplines that are represented here. 
+That's not going to be changed at all. 
+Number two: I am going to put together an incredible line up of speakers for next year. 
+The time scale on which TED operates is just fantastic after coming out of a magazine business with monthly deadlines. 
+There's a year to do this, and already — I hope to show you a bit later — there's 25 or so terrific speakers signed up for next year. 
+And I'm getting fantastic help from the community; this is just such a great community. And combined, our contacts reach pretty much everyone who's interesting in the country, if not the planet. 
+It's true. 
+Number three: I do want to, if I can, find a way of extending the TED experience throughout the year a little bit. 
+And one key way that we're going to do this is to introduce this book club. 
+Books kind of saved me in the last couple years, and that's a gift that I would like to pass on. 
+So, when you sign up for TED2003, every six weeks you'll get a care package with a book or two and a reason why they're linked to TED. 
+They may well be by a TED speaker, and so we can get the conversation going during the year and come back next year having had the same intellectual, emotional journey. 
+I think it will be great. 
+And then, fourthly: I want to mention the Sapling Foundation, which is the new owner of TED. 
+What Sapling's ownership means is that all of the proceeds of TED will go towards the causes that Sapling stands for. 
+And more important, I think, the ideas that are exhibited and realized here are ideas that the foundation can use, because there's fantastic synergy. 
+Already, just in the last few days, we've had so many people talking about stuff that they care about, that they're passionate about, that can make a difference in the world, and the idea of getting this group of people together — some of the causes that we believe in, the money that this conference can raise and the ideas — I really believe that that combination will, over time, make a difference. 
+I'm incredibly excited about that. 
+In fact, I don't think, overall, that I've been as excited by anything ever in my life. 
+I'm in this for the long run, and I would be greatly honored and excited if you'll come on this journey with me. 
+
+I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you missed them. 
+This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. 
+My favorite is the middle one — the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and crème brûlée torch. 
+So let me remind you. 
+
+When I first arrived in beautiful Zimbabwe, it was difficult to understand that 35 percent of the population is HIV positive. 
+It really wasn't until I was invited to the homes of people that I started to understand the human toll of the epidemic. 
+For instance, this is Herbert with his grandmother. 
+When I first met him, he was sitting on his grandmother's lap. 
+He has been orphaned, as both of his parents died of AIDS, and his grandmother took care of him until he too died of AIDS. 
+He liked to sit on her lap because he said that it was painful for him to lie in his own bed. 
+When she got up to make tea, she placed him in my own lap and I had never felt a child that was that emaciated. 
+Before I left, I actually asked him if I could get him something. 
+I thought he would ask for a toy, or candy, and he asked me for slippers, because he said that his feet were cold. 
+This is Joyce who's — in this picture — 21. 
+Single mother, HIV positive. 
+I photographed her before and after the birth of her beautiful baby girl, Issa. 
+And I was last week walking on Lafayette Street in Manhattan and got a call from a woman who I didn't know, but she called to tell me that Joyce had passed away at the age of 23. 
+Joyce's mother is now taking care of her daughter, like so many other Zimbabwean children who've been orphaned by the epidemic. 
+So a few of the stories. 
+With every picture, there are individuals who have full lives and stories that deserve to be told. 
+All these pictures are from Zimbabwe. 
+Chris Anderson: Kirsten, will you just take one minute, just to tell your own story of how you got to Africa? 
+Kirsten Ashburn: Mmm, gosh. 
+CA: Just — KA: Actually, I was working at the time, doing production for a fashion photographer. 
+And I was constantly reading the New York Times, and stunned by the statistics, the numbers. 
+It was just frightening. 
+So I quit my job and decided that that's the subject that I wanted to tackle. 
+And I first actually went to Botswana, where I spent a month — this is in December 2000 — then went to Zimbabwe for a month and a half, and then went back again this March 2002 for another month and a half in Zimbabwe. 
+CA: That's an amazing story, thank you. 
+KB: Thanks for letting me show these. 
+
+Everybody talks about happiness these days. 
+I had somebody count the number of books with "" happiness "" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more. 
+There is a huge wave of interest in happiness, among researchers. 
+There is a lot of happiness coaching. 
+Everybody would like to make people happier. 
+But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness. 
+And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps. 
+This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is. 
+The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. 
+It turns out that the word "" happiness "" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things. 
+I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is. 
+The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory; basically, it's between being happy in your life, and being happy about your life or happy with your life. 
+And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness. 
+And the third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. 
+I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. 
+There's just no way of getting it right. 
+Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story, and that was a story — He said he'd been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. 
+And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. 
+But it hadn't. 
+What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. 
+He had had the experience. 
+He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. 
+They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. 
+What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. 
+There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. 
+It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches — you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt now when I touch you here?" 
+And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" 
+or "" How was your trip to Albania? "" or something like that. 
+Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness. 
+Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. 
+And that really starts with a basic response of our memories — it starts immediately. 
+We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. 
+Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. 
+And let me begin with one example. 
+This is an old study. 
+Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. 
+I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. 
+They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. 
+Here are two patients, those are their recordings. 
+And you are asked, "" Who of them suffered more? "" And it's a very easy question. 
+Clearly, Patient B suffered more — his colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had, Patient B had, and more. 
+But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" 
+And here is a surprise. 
+The surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. 
+The stories of the colonoscopies were different, and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends. 
+And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great — but one of them is this distinct... (Laughter) but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. 
+And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end; it's a bad story. 
+How do we know that? 
+Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" 
+And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory. 
+Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. 
+From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. 
+Now, what you could do with Patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does work — you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. 
+That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before. 
+And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A a lot better off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. 
+What defines a story? 
+And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. 
+What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. 
+Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated. 
+Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. 
+It has moments of experience, one after the other. 
+And you can ask: What happens to these moments? 
+And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever. 
+I mean, most of the moments of our life — and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 — most of them don't leave a trace. 
+Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. 
+And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. 
+It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. 
+And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us. 
+So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct. 
+The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. 
+From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. 
+That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. 
+For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. 
+You have not changed the story. 
+And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story. 
+Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. 
+It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. 
+The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. 
+We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. 
+And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. 
+We think of our future as anticipated memories. 
+And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need. 
+I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case; that is, we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self. 
+And this is a bit hard to justify I think. 
+I mean, how much do we consume our memories? 
+That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self. 
+And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had, and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other vacations. 
+And I probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years. 
+Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour. 
+Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half. 
+There seems to be a discrepancy. 
+Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of this, there is a genuine question: Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences? 
+So I want you to think about a thought experiment. 
+Imagine that for your next vacation, you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. 
+Now, would you choose the same vacation? (Laughter) And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer, and if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. 
+Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves. 
+Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. 
+There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self. 
+So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self? 
+And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life? 
+And they're all — happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. 
+What are the emotions that can be measured? 
+And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. 
+If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. 
+This is not about how happily a person lives. 
+It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. 
+Very different notion. 
+Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way. 
+The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately. 
+The Gallup Organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences, and there have been other efforts along those lines. 
+So in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. 
+And the main lesson I think that we have learned is they are really different. 
+You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa. 
+Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about .5. 
+What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, "" Oh his father is six feet tall, "" how much would you know about his height? 
+Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. 
+You have that much uncertainty. 
+If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. 
+So the correlation is low. 
+We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. 
+We know that money is very important, goals are very important. 
+We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. 
+There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. 
+So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. 
+The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. 
+It is a completely different notion. 
+Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life, and we actually live. 
+So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get to the correct answer. 
+When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California if, say, you live in Ohio. 
+(Laughter) And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that contrast, say, is in climate. 
+Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are. 
+But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up — some people may end up moving to California. 
+And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. 
+Well, their experiencing self is not going to get happier. 
+We know that. 
+But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio, and they will feel they made the right decision. 
+It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you. 
+Thank you so much. 
+Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey. 
+Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now? 
+Daniel Kahneman: Sure. 
+I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. 
+We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self. 
+When we looked at how feelings, vary with income. 
+And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans — and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, so it's a large representative sample — below an income of 600,000 dollars a year... 
+CA: 60,000. 
+DK: 60,000. 
+(Laughter) 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. 
+Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. 
+I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat. 
+Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly. 
+In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. 
+The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. 
+That does not hold for emotions. 
+CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. 
+If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about, like for example, taxation policy and so forth. 
+Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally, would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it? 
+DK: You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy. 
+The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, no question about that, but in the U.K., it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. 
+People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. 
+It's going to take a while, and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon. 
+How to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self. 
+This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come. 
+In the United States, efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population. 
+This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two, part of national statistics. 
+CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will — or at least should be — the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. 
+Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics. 
+Thank you, Danny Kahneman. 
+
+For the next few minutes we're going to talk about energy, and it's going to be a bit of a varied talk. 
+I'll try to spin a story about energy, and oil's a convenient starting place. 
+The talk will be broadly about energy, but oil's a good place to start. 
+And one of the reasons is this is remarkable stuff. 
+You take about eight or so carbon atoms, about 20 hydrogen atoms, you put them together in exactly the right way and you get this marvelous liquid: very energy-dense and very easy to refine into a number of very useful products and fuels. 
+It's great stuff. 
+Now, as far as it goes, there's a lot of oil out there in the world. 
+Here's my little pocket map of where it's all located. 
+A bigger one for you to look at. 
+But this is it, this is the oil in the world. 
+Geologists have a pretty good idea of where the oil is. 
+This is about 100 trillion gallons of crude oil still to be developed and produced in the world today. 
+Now, that's just one story about oil, and we could end it there and say, "" Well, oil's going to last forever because, well, there's just a lot of it. "" But there's actually more to the story than that. 
+Oh, by the way, if you think you're very far from some of this oil, 1000 meters below where you're all sitting is one of the largest producing oil fields in the world. 
+Come talk to me about it, I'll fill in some of the details if you want. 
+So, that's one of the stories of oil; there's just a lot of it. 
+But what about oil? Where is it in the energy system? 
+Here's a little snapshot of 150 years of oil, and it's been a dominant part of our energy system for most of those 150 years. 
+Now, here's another little secret I'm going to tell you about: For the last 25 years, oil has been playing less and less of a role in global energy systems. 
+There was one kind of peak oil in 1985, when oil represented 50 percent of global energy supply. 
+Now, it's about 35 percent. 
+It's been declining and I believe it will continue to decline. 
+Gasoline consumption in the U.S. probably peaked in 2007 and is declining. 
+So oil is playing a less significant role every year. 
+And so, 25 years ago, there was a peak oil; just like, in the 1920s, there was a peak coal; and a hundred years before that, there was a peak wood. 
+This is a very important picture of the evolution of energy systems. 
+And what's been taking up the slack in the last few decades? 
+Well, a lot of natural gas and a little bit of nuclear, for starters. 
+And what goes on in the future? 
+Well, I think out ahead of us a few decades is peak gas, and beyond that, peak renewables. 
+Now, I'll tell you another little, very important story about this picture. 
+Now, I'm not pretending that energy use in total isn't increasing, it is — that's another part of the story. Come talk to me about it, we'll fill in some of the details — but there's a very important message here: This is 200 years of history, and for 200 years we've been systematically decarbonizing our energy system. 
+Energy systems of the world becoming progressively — year on year, decade on decade, century on century — becoming less carbon intense. 
+And that continues into the future with the renewables that we're developing today, reaching maybe 30 percent of primary energy by mid century. 
+Now that might be the end of the story — Okay, we just replace it all with conventional renewables — but I think, actually, there's more to the story than that. 
+And to tell the next part of the story — and this is looking out say 2100 and beyond. 
+What is the future of truly sustainable, carbon-free energy? 
+Well, we have to take a little excursion, and we'll start in central Texas. 
+Here's a piece of limestone. 
+I picked it up outside of Marble Falls, Texas. 
+It's about 400 million years old. 
+And it's just limestone, nothing really special about it. 
+Now, here's a piece of chalk. 
+I picked this up at MIT. It's a little younger. 
+And it's different than this limestone, you can see that. 
+You wouldn't build a building out of this stuff, and you wouldn't try to give a lecture and write on the chalkboard with this. 
+Yeah, it's very different — no, it's not different. 
+It's not different, it's the same stuff: calcium carbonate, calcium carbonate. 
+What's different is how the molecules are put together. 
+Now, if you think that's kind of neat, the story gets really neat right now. 
+Off the coast of California comes this: It's an abalone shell. 
+Now, millions of abalone every year make this shell. 
+Oh, by the way, just in case you weren't already guessing, it's calcium carbonate. 
+It's the same stuff as this and the same stuff as this. 
+But it's not the same stuff; it's different. 
+It's thousands of times, maybe 3,000 times tougher than this. 
+And why? Because the lowly abalone is able to lay down the calcium carbonate crystals in layers, making this beautiful, iridescent mother of pearl. 
+Very specialized material that the abalone self-assembles, millions of abalone, all the time, every day, every year. 
+This is pretty incredible stuff. 
+All the same, what's different? 
+How the molecules are put together. 
+Now, what does this have to do with energy? 
+Here's a piece of coal. 
+And I'll suggest that this coal is about as exciting as this chalk. 
+Now, whether we're talking about fuels or energy carriers, or perhaps novel materials for batteries or fuel cells, nature hasn't ever built those perfect materials yet because nature didn't need to. 
+Nature didn't need to because, unlike the abalone shell, the survival of a species didn't depend on building those materials, until maybe now when it might just matter. 
+So, when we think about the future of energy, imagine what would it be like if instead of this, we could build the energy equivalent of this just by rearranging the molecules differently. 
+And so that is my story. 
+The oil will never run out. 
+It's not because we have a lot of it. 
+It's not because we're going to build a bajillion windmills. 
+It's because, well, thousands of years ago, people invented ideas — they had ideas, innovations, technology — and the Stone Age ended, not because we ran out of stones. 
+(Laughter) It's ideas, it's innovation, it's technology that will end the age of oil, long before we run out of oil. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And I thought, well, maybe that old doggerel by Joyce Kilmer, you know: "" Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree. "" And you might say, "" Well, God designed the cow. "" But, of course, God got a lot of help. 
+Because what I've been doing for the last four years — really since the first time you saw me — some of you saw me at TED when I was talking about religion — and in the last four years, I've been working just about non-stop on this topic. 
+So what I'm proposing is, just as we require reading, writing, arithmetic, American history, so we should have a curriculum on facts about all the religions of the world — about their history, about their creeds, about their texts, their music, their symbolisms, their prohibitions, their requirements. 
+As long as you inform your children about other religions, then you may — and as early as you like and whatever you like — teach them whatever creed you want them to learn. 
+It's like a coin flip; it doesn't count, really. 
+This is the way we treat people as responsible adults. 
+The reason I've taken this time is I've been fascinated to hear some of the reactions to this. 
+This picture, which I pulled off the web — the fellow on the left is really an important part of this picture. 
+They could outsource all their problems: protection from predators, food-finding... 
+And I think some people may have misunderstood. 
+That's the way evolution works. 
+And here I want to remind you of a wonderful point that Paul MacCready made at TED three years ago. 
+Suddenly, we humans — a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature — have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. 
+(Laughter) Just exactly what Al is trying to do, Rick is doing. 
+It's a brilliant redesign of traditional religious themes — updating them, quietly dropping obsolete features, putting new interpretations on other features. 
+Because I'm absolutely sincere in my appreciation of all that I said about this book. 
+And then I find this: "" All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality have their meaning and explanation in this central fact. "" Well, that's Michael Denton. He's a creationist. 
+I read it three or four times and I think, "" Is he really endorsing Intelligent Design? 
+Now, maybe we want to treat it as metaphorical. 
+I found this sign as I was driving to Maine recently, in front of a church: "" Good without God becomes zero. "" Sort of cute. 
+And you also know many religious people who hide behind their sanctity instead of doing good works. 
+
+I'd like to begin with a thought experiment. 
+Imagine that it's 4,000 years into the future. 
+Civilization as we know it has ceased to exist — no books, no electronic devices, no Facebook or Twitter. 
+All knowledge of the English language and the English alphabet has been lost. 
+Now imagine archeologists digging through the rubble of one of our cities. 
+What might they find? 
+Well perhaps some rectangular pieces of plastic with strange symbols on them. 
+Perhaps some circular pieces of metal. 
+Maybe some cylindrical containers with some symbols on them. 
+And perhaps one archeologist becomes an instant celebrity when she discovers — buried in the hills somewhere in North America — massive versions of these same symbols. 
+Now let's ask ourselves, what could such artifacts say about us to people 4,000 years into the future? 
+This is no hypothetical question. 
+In fact, this is exactly the kind of question we're faced with when we try to understand the Indus Valley civilization, which existed 4,000 years ago. 
+The Indus civilization was roughly contemporaneous with the much better known Egyptian and the Mesopotamian civilizations, but it was actually much larger than either of these two civilizations. 
+It occupied the area of approximately one million square kilometers, covering what is now Pakistan, Northwestern India and parts of Afghanistan and Iran. 
+Given that it was such a vast civilization, you might expect to find really powerful rulers, kings, and huge monuments glorifying these powerful kings. 
+In fact, what archeologists have found is none of that. 
+They've found small objects such as these. 
+Here's an example of one of these objects. 
+Well obviously this is a replica. 
+But who is this person? 
+A king? A god? 
+A priest? 
+Or perhaps an ordinary person like you or me? 
+We don't know. 
+But the Indus people also left behind artifacts with writing on them. 
+Well no, not pieces of plastic, but stone seals, copper tablets, pottery and, surprisingly, one large sign board, which was found buried near the gate of a city. 
+Now we don't know if it says Hollywood, or even Bollywood for that matter. 
+In fact, we don't even know what any of these objects say, and that's because the Indus script is undeciphered. 
+We don't know what any of these symbols mean. 
+The symbols are most commonly found on seals. 
+So you see up there one such object. 
+It's the square object with the unicorn-like animal on it. 
+Now that's a magnificent piece of art. 
+So how big do you think that is? 
+Perhaps that big? 
+Or maybe that big? 
+Well let me show you. 
+Here's a replica of one such seal. 
+It's only about one inch by one inch in size — pretty tiny. 
+So what were these used for? 
+We know that these were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods that were sent from one place to the other. 
+So you know those packing slips you get on your FedEx boxes? 
+These were used to make those kinds of packing slips. 
+You might wonder what these objects contain in terms of their text. 
+Perhaps they're the name of the sender or some information about the goods that are being sent from one place to the other — we don't know. 
+We need to decipher the script to answer that question. 
+Deciphering the script is not just an intellectual puzzle; it's actually become a question that's become deeply intertwined with the politics and the cultural history of South Asia. 
+In fact, the script has become a battleground of sorts between three different groups of people. 
+First, there's a group of people who are very passionate in their belief that the Indus script does not represent a language at all. 
+These people believe that the symbols are very similar to the kind of symbols you find on traffic signs or the emblems you find on shields. 
+There's a second group of people who believe that the Indus script represents an Indo-European language. 
+If you look at a map of India today, you'll see that most of the languages spoken in North India belong to the Indo-European language family. 
+So some people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient Indo-European language such as Sanskrit. 
+There's a last group of people who believe that the Indus people were the ancestors of people living in South India today. 
+These people believe that the Indus script represents an ancient form of the Dravidian language family, which is the language family spoken in much of South India today. 
+And the proponents of this theory point to that small pocket of Dravidian-speaking people in the North, actually near Afghanistan, and they say that perhaps, sometime in the past, Dravidian languages were spoken all over India and that this suggests that the Indus civilization is perhaps also Dravidian. 
+Which of these hypotheses can be true? 
+We don't know, but perhaps if you deciphered the script, you would be able to answer this question. 
+But deciphering the script is a very challenging task. 
+First, there's no Rosetta Stone. 
+I don't mean the software; I mean an ancient artifact that contains in the same text both a known text and an unknown text. 
+We don't have such an artifact for the Indus script. 
+And furthermore, we don't even know what language they spoke. 
+And to make matters even worse, most of the text that we have are extremely short. 
+So as I showed you, they're usually found on these seals that are very, very tiny. 
+And so given these formidable obstacles, one might wonder and worry whether one will ever be able to decipher the Indus script. 
+In the rest of my talk, I'd like to tell you about how I learned to stop worrying and love the challenge posed by the Indus script. 
+I've always been fascinated by the Indus script ever since I read about it in a middle school textbook. 
+And why was I fascinated? 
+Well it's the last major undeciphered script in the ancient world. 
+My career path led me to become a computational neuroscientist, so in my day job, I create computer models of the brain to try to understand how the brain makes predictions, how the brain makes decisions, how the brain learns and so on. 
+But in 2007, my path crossed again with the Indus script. 
+That's when I was in India, and I had the wonderful opportunity to meet with some Indian scientists who were using computer models to try to analyze the script. 
+And so it was then that I realized there was an opportunity for me to collaborate with these scientists, and so I jumped at that opportunity. 
+And I'd like to describe some of the results that we have found. 
+Or better yet, let's all collectively decipher. 
+Are you ready? 
+The first thing that you need to do when you have an undeciphered script is try to figure out the direction of writing. 
+Here are two texts that contain some symbols on them. 
+Can you tell me if the direction of writing is right to left or left to right? 
+I'll give you a couple of seconds. 
+Okay. Right to left, how many? Okay. 
+Okay. Left to right? 
+Oh, it's almost 50 / 50. Okay. 
+The answer is: if you look at the left-hand side of the two texts, you'll notice that there's a cramping of signs, and it seems like 4,000 years ago, when the scribe was writing from right to left, they ran out of space. 
+And so they had to cram the sign. 
+One of the signs is also below the text on the top. 
+This suggests the direction of writing was probably from right to left, and so that's one of the first things we know, that directionality is a very key aspect of linguistic scripts. 
+And the Indus script now has this particular property. 
+What other properties of language does the script show? 
+Languages contain patterns. 
+If I give you the letter Q and ask you to predict the next letter, what do you think that would be? 
+Most of you said U, which is right. 
+Now if I asked you to predict one more letter, what do you think that would be? 
+Now there's several thoughts. There's E. It could be I. It could be A, but certainly not B, C or D, right? 
+The Indus script also exhibits similar kinds of patterns. 
+There's a lot of text that start with this diamond-shaped symbol. 
+And this in turn tends to be followed by this quotation marks-like symbol. 
+And this is very similar to a Q and U example. 
+This symbol can in turn be followed by these fish-like symbols and some other signs, but never by these other signs at the bottom. 
+And furthermore, there's some signs that really prefer the end of texts, such as this jar-shaped sign, and this sign, in fact, happens to be the most frequently occurring sign in the script. 
+Given such patterns, here was our idea. 
+The idea was to use a computer to learn these patterns, and so we gave the computer the existing texts. 
+And the computer learned a statistical model of which symbols tend to occur together and which symbols tend to follow each other. 
+Given the computer model, we can test the model by essentially quizzing it. 
+So we could deliberately erase some symbols, and we can ask it to predict the missing symbols. 
+Here are some examples. 
+You may regard this as perhaps the most ancient game of Wheel of Fortune. 
+What we found was that the computer was successful in 75 percent of the cases in predicting the correct symbol. 
+In the rest of the cases, typically the second best guess or third best guess was the right answer. 
+There's also practical use for this particular procedure. 
+There's a lot of these texts that are damaged. 
+Here's an example of one such text. 
+And we can use the computer model now to try to complete this text and make a best guess prediction. 
+Here's an example of a symbol that was predicted. 
+And this could be really useful as we try to decipher the script by generating more data that we can analyze. 
+Now here's one other thing you can do with the computer model. 
+So imagine a monkey sitting at a keyboard. 
+I think you might get a random jumble of letters that looks like this. 
+Such a random jumble of letters is said to have a very high entropy. 
+This is a physics and information theory term. 
+But just imagine it's a really random jumble of letters. 
+How many of you have ever spilled coffee on a keyboard? 
+You might have encountered the stuck-key problem — so basically the same symbol being repeated over and over again. 
+This kind of a sequence is said to have a very low entropy because there's no variation at all. 
+Language, on the other hand, has an intermediate level of entropy; it's neither too rigid, nor is it too random. 
+What about the Indus script? 
+Here's a graph that plots the entropies of a whole bunch of sequences. 
+At the very top you find the uniformly random sequence, which is a random jumble of letters — and interestingly, we also find the DNA sequence from the human genome and instrumental music. 
+And both of these are very, very flexible, which is why you find them in the very high range. 
+At the lower end of the scale, you find a rigid sequence, a sequence of all A's, and you also find a computer program, in this case in the language Fortran, which obeys really strict rules. 
+Linguistic scripts occupy the middle range. 
+Now what about the Indus script? 
+We found that the Indus script actually falls within the range of the linguistic scripts. 
+When this result was first published, it was highly controversial. 
+There were people who raised a hue and cry, and these people were the ones who believed that the Indus script does not represent language. 
+I even started to get some hate mail. 
+My students said that I should really seriously consider getting some protection. 
+Who'd have thought that deciphering could be a dangerous profession? 
+What does this result really show? 
+It shows that the Indus script shares an important property of language. 
+So, as the old saying goes, if it looks like a linguistic script and it acts like a linguistic script, then perhaps we may have a linguistic script on our hands. 
+What other evidence is there that the script could actually encode language? 
+Well linguistic scripts can actually encode multiple languages. 
+So for example, here's the same sentence written in English and the same sentence written in Dutch using the same letters of the alphabet. 
+If you don't know Dutch and you only know English and I give you some words in Dutch, you'll tell me that these words contain some very unusual patterns. 
+Some things are not right, and you'll say these words are probably not English words. 
+The same thing happens in the case of the Indus script. 
+The computer found several texts — two of them are shown here — that have very unusual patterns. 
+So for example the first text: there's a doubling of this jar-shaped sign. 
+This sign is the most frequently-occurring sign in the Indus script, and it's only in this text that it occurs as a doubling pair. 
+Why is that the case? 
+We went back and looked at where these particular texts were found, and it turns out that they were found very, very far away from the Indus Valley. 
+They were found in present day Iraq and Iran. 
+And why were they found there? 
+What I haven't told you is that the Indus people were very, very enterprising. 
+They used to trade with people pretty far away from where they lived, and so in this case, they were traveling by sea all the way to Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq. 
+And what seems to have happened here is that the Indus traders, the merchants, were using this script to write a foreign language. 
+It's just like our English and Dutch example. 
+And that would explain why we have these strange patterns that are very different from the kinds of patterns you see in the text that are found within the Indus Valley. 
+This suggests that the same script, the Indus script, could be used to write different languages. 
+The results we have so far seem to point to the conclusion that the Indus script probably does represent language. 
+If it does represent language, then how do we read the symbols? 
+That's our next big challenge. 
+So you'll notice that many of the symbols look like pictures of humans, of insects, of fishes, of birds. 
+Most ancient scripts use the rebus principle, which is, using pictures to represent words. 
+So as an example, here's a word. 
+Can you write it using pictures? 
+I'll give you a couple seconds. 
+Got it? 
+Okay. Great. 
+Here's my solution. 
+You could use the picture of a bee followed by a picture of a leaf — and that's "" belief, "" right. 
+There could be other solutions. 
+In the case of the Indus script, the problem is the reverse. 
+You have to figure out the sounds of each of these pictures such that the entire sequence makes sense. 
+So this is just like a crossword puzzle, except that this is the mother of all crossword puzzles because the stakes are so high if you solve it. 
+My colleagues, Iravatham Mahadevan and Asko Parpola, have been making some headway on this particular problem. 
+And I'd like to give you a quick example of Parpola's work. 
+Here's a really short text. 
+It contains seven vertical strokes followed by this fish-like sign. 
+And I want to mention that these seals were used for stamping clay tags that were attached to bundles of goods, so it's quite likely that these tags, at least some of them, contain names of merchants. 
+And it turns out that in India there's a long tradition of names being based on horoscopes and star constellations present at the time of birth. 
+In Dravidian languages, the word for fish is "" meen "" which happens to sound just like the word for star. 
+And so seven stars would stand for "" elu meen, "" which is the Dravidian word for the Big Dipper star constellation. 
+Similarly, there's another sequence of six stars, and that translates to "" aru meen, "" which is the old Dravidian name for the star constellation Pleiades. 
+And finally, there's other combinations, such as this fish sign with something that looks like a roof on top of it. 
+And that could be translated into "" mey meen, "" which is the old Dravidian name for the planet Saturn. 
+So that was pretty exciting. 
+It looks like we're getting somewhere. 
+But does this prove that these seals contain Dravidian names based on planets and star constellations? 
+Well not yet. 
+So we have no way of validating these particular readings, but if more and more of these readings start making sense, and if longer and longer sequences appear to be correct, then we know that we are on the right track. 
+Today, we can write a word such as TED in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in cuneiform script, because both of these were deciphered in the 19th century. 
+The decipherment of these two scripts enabled these civilizations to speak to us again directly. 
+The Mayans started speaking to us in the 20th century, but the Indus civilization remains silent. 
+Why should we care? 
+The Indus civilization does not belong to just the South Indians or the North Indians or the Pakistanis; it belongs to all of us. 
+These are our ancestors — yours and mine. 
+They were silenced by an unfortunate accident of history. 
+If we decipher the script, we would enable them to speak to us again. 
+What would they tell us? 
+What would we find out about them? About us? 
+I can't wait to find out. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Three years ago, I was standing about a hundred yards from Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four. 
+My Geiger counter dosimeter, which measures radiation, was going berserk, and the closer I got, the more frenetic it became, and frantic. My God. 
+I was there covering the 25th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident, as you can see by the look on my face, reluctantly so, but with good reason, because the nuclear fire that burned for 11 days back in 1986 released 400 times as much radiation as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the sarcophagus, which is the covering over reactor number four, which was hastily built 27 years ago, now sits cracked and rusted and leaking radiation. 
+So I was filming. 
+I just wanted to get the job done and get out of there fast. 
+But then, I looked into the distance, and I saw some smoke coming from a farmhouse, and I'm thinking, who could be living here? 
+I mean, after all, Chernobyl's soil, water and air, are among the most highly contaminated on Earth, and the reactor sits at the the center of a tightly regulated exclusion zone, or dead zone, and it's a nuclear police state, complete with border guards. 
+You have to have dosimeter at all times, clicking away, you have to have a government minder, and there's draconian radiation rules and constant contamination monitoring. 
+The point being, no human being should be living anywhere near the dead zone. 
+But they are. 
+It turns out an unlikely community of some 200 people are living inside the zone. 
+They're called self-settlers. 
+And almost all of them are women, the men having shorter lifespans in part due to overuse of alcohol, cigarettes, if not radiation. 
+Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated at the time of the accident, but not everybody accepted that fate. 
+The women in the zone, now in their 70s and 80s, are the last survivors of a group who defied authorities and, it would seem, common sense, and returned to their ancestral homes inside the zone. 
+They did so illegally. 
+As one woman put it to a soldier who was trying to evacuate her for a second time, "" Shoot me and dig the grave. 
+Otherwise, I'm going home. "" Now why would they return to such deadly soil? 
+I mean, were they unaware of the risks or crazy enough to ignore them, or both? 
+The thing is, they see their lives and the risks they run decidedly differently. 
+Now around Chernobyl, there are scattered ghost villages, eerily silent, strangely charming, bucolic, totally contaminated. 
+Many were bulldozed under at the time of the accident, but a few are left like this, kind of silent vestiges to the tragedy. 
+Others have a few residents in them, one or two "" babushkas, "" or "" babas, "" which are the Russian and Ukrainian words for grandmother. 
+Another village might have six or seven residents. 
+So this is the strange demographic of the zone — isolated alone together. 
+And when I made my way to that piping chimney I'd seen in the distance, I saw Hanna Zavorotnya, and I met her. 
+She's the self-declared mayor of Kapavati village, population eight. 
+(Laughter) And she said to me, when I asked her the obvious, "Radiation doesn't scare me. Starvation does." 
+And you have to remember, these women have survived the worst atrocities of the 20th century. 
+Stalin's enforced famines of the 1930s, the Holodomor, killed millions of Ukrainians, and they faced the Nazis in the '40s, who came through slashing, burning, raping, and in fact many of these women were shipped to Germany as forced labor. 
+So when a couple decades into Soviet rule, Chernobyl happened, they were unwilling to flee in the face of an enemy that was invisible. 
+So they returned to their villages and are told they're going to get sick and die soon, but five happy years, their logic goes, is better than 10 stuck in a high rise on the outskirts of Kiev, separated from the graves of their mothers and fathers and babies, the whisper of stork wings on a spring afternoon. 
+For them, environmental contamination may not be the worst sort of devastation. 
+It turns out this holds true for other species as well. 
+Wild boar, lynx, moose, they've all returned to the region in force, the very real, very negative effects of radiation being trumped by the upside of a mass exodus of humans. 
+The dead zone, it turns out, is full of life. 
+And there is a kind of heroic resilience, a kind of plain-spoken pragmatism to those who start their day at 5 a.m. 
+pulling water from a well and end it at midnight poised to beat a bucket with a stick and scare off wild boar that might mess with their potatoes, their only company a bit of homemade moonshine vodka. 
+And there's a patina of simple defiance among them. 
+"They told us our legs would hurt, and they do. So what?" 
+I mean, what about their health? 
+The benefits of hardy, physical living, but an environment made toxic by a complicated, little-understood enemy, radiation. 
+It's incredibly difficult to parse. 
+Health studies from the region are conflicting and fraught. 
+The World Health Organization puts the number of Chernobyl-related deaths at 4,000, eventually. 
+Greenpeace and other organizations put that number in the tens of thousands. 
+Now everybody agrees that thyroid cancers are sky high, and that Chernobyl evacuees suffer the trauma of relocated peoples everywhere: higher levels of anxiety, depression, alcoholism, unemployment and, importantly, disrupted social networks. 
+Now, like many of you, I have moved maybe 20, 25 times in my life. 
+Home is a transient concept. 
+I have a deeper connection to my laptop than any bit of soil. 
+So it's hard for us to understand, but home is the entire cosmos of the rural babushka, and connection to the land is palpable. 
+And perhaps because these Ukrainian women were schooled under the Soviets and versed in the Russian poets, aphorisms about these ideas slip from their mouths all the time. 
+"If you leave, you die." 
+"" Those who left are worse off now. 
+They are dying of sadness. "" "Motherland is motherland. I will never leave." 
+What sounds like faith, soft faith, may actually be fact, because the surprising truth — I mean, there are no studies, but the truth seems to be that these women who returned to their homes and have lived on some of the most radioactive land on Earth for the last 27 years, have actually outlived their counterparts who accepted relocation, by some estimates up to 10 years. 
+How could this be? 
+Here's a theory: Could it be that those ties to ancestral soil, the soft variables reflected in their aphorisms, actually affect longevity? 
+The power of motherland so fundamental to that part of the world seems palliative. 
+Home and community are forces that rival even radiation. 
+Now radiation or not, these women are at the end of their lives. 
+In the next decade, the zone's human residents will be gone, and it will revert to a wild, radioactive place, full only of animals and occasionally daring, flummoxed scientists. 
+But the spirit and existence of the babushkas, whose numbers have been halved in the three years I've known them, will leave us with powerful new templates to think about and grapple with, about the relative nature of risk, about transformative connections to home, and about the magnificent tonic of personal agency and self-determination. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Isadora Duncan — (Music) — crazy, long-legged woman from San Francisco, got tired of this country, and she wanted to get out. 
+Isadora was famous somewhere around 1908 for putting up a blue curtain, and she would stand with her hands over her solar plexus and she would wait, and she would wait, and then, she would move. 
+(Music) Josh and I and Somi call this piece "The Red Circle and the Blue Curtain." 
+Red circle. 
+Blue curtain. 
+But, this is not the beginning of the 20th century. 
+This is a morning in Vancouver in 2015. 
+(Music) (Singing) Come on, Josh! (Music) (Singing) 
+Go! 
+Are we there yet? 
+I don't think so. 
+Hey, yeah! 
+(Music) What time is it? (Music) 
+Where are we? 
+Josh. 
+Somi. 
+Bill T. 
+Josh. 
+Somi. 
+Bill T. 
+(Applause) Yeah, yeah! 
+
+I'm here today to talk to you about a very powerful little word, one that people will do almost anything to avoid becoming. 
+Billion-dollar industries thrive because of the fear of it, and those of us who undeniably are it are left to navigate a relentless storm surrounding it. 
+I'm not sure if any of you have noticed, but I'm fat. 
+Not the lowercase, muttered-behind-my-back kind, or the seemingly harmless chubby or cuddly. 
+I'm not even the more sophisticated voluptuous or curvaceous kind. 
+Let's not sugarcoat it. 
+I am the capital F-A-T kind of fat. 
+I am the elephant in the room. 
+When I walked out on stage, some of you may have been thinking, "" Aww, this is going to be hilarious, because everybody knows that fat people are funny. "" (Laughter) Or you may have been thinking, "" Where does she get her confidence from? "" Because a confident fat woman is almost unthinkable. 
+The fashion-conscious members of the audience may have been thinking how fabulous I look in this Beth Ditto dress — (Cheers) thank you very much. 
+Whereas some of you might have thought, "Hmm, black would have been so much more slimming." 
+(Laughter) You may have wondered, consciously or not, if I have diabetes, or a partner, or if I eat carbs after 7pm. (Laughter) 
+You may have worried that you ate carbs after 7pm last night, and that you really should renew your gym membership. 
+They can be directed at individuals and groups, and they can also be directed at ourselves. 
+And this way of thinking is known as fatphobia. 
+Like any form of systematic oppression, fatphobia is deeply rooted in complex structures like capitalism, patriarchy and racism, and that can make it really difficult to see, let alone challenge. 
+We live in a culture where being fat is seen as being a bad person — lazy, greedy, unhealthy, irresponsible and morally suspect. 
+And we tend to see thinness as being universally good — responsible, successful, and in control of our appetites, bodies and lives. 
+We see these ideas again and again in the media, in public health policy, doctors' offices, in everyday conversations and in our own attitudes. 
+We may even blame fat people themselves for the discrimination they face because, after all, if we don't like it, we should just lose weight. 
+Easy. 
+This antifat bias has become so integral, so ingrained to how we value ourselves and each other that we rarely question why we have such contempt for people of size and where that disdain comes from. 
+But we must question it, because the enormous value we place on how we look affects every one of us. 
+And do we really want to live in a society where people are denied their basic humanity if they don't subscribe to some arbitrary form of acceptable? 
+So when I was six years old, my sister used to teach ballet to a bunch of little girls in our garage. 
+I was about a foot taller and a foot wider than most of the group. 
+When it came to doing our first performance, I was so excited about wearing a pretty pink tutu. 
+I was going to sparkle. 
+As the other girls slipped easily into their Lycra and tulle creations, not one of the tutus was big enough to fit me. 
+I was determined not to be excluded from the performance, so I turned to my mother and loud enough for everyone to hear said, "" Mom, I don't need a tutu. 
+I need a fourfour. "" (Laughter) Thanks, Mom. 
+(Applause) And although I didn't recognize it at the time, claiming space for myself in that glorious fourfour was the first step towards becoming a radical fat activist. 
+Now, I'm not saying that this whole body-love thing has been an easy skip along a glittering path of self-acceptance since that day in class. 
+Far from it. 
+I soon learned that living outside what the mainstream considers normal can be a frustrating and isolating place. 
+I've spent the last 20 years unpacking and deprogramming these messages, and it's been quite the roller coaster. 
+I've been openly laughed at, abused from passing cars and been told that I'm delusional. 
+I also receive smiles from strangers who recognize what it takes to walk down the street with a spring in your step and your head held high. 
+(Cheer) Thanks. 
+And through it all, that fierce little six-year-old has stayed with me, and she has helped me stand before you today as an unapologetic fat person, a person that simply refuses to subscribe to the dominant narrative about how I should move through the world in this body of mine. 
+(Applause) And I'm not alone. 
+I am part of an international community of people who choose to, rather than passively accepting that our bodies are and probably always will be big, we actively choose to flourish in these bodies as they are today. 
+People who honor our strength and work with, not against, our perceived limitations, people who value health as something much more holistic than a number on an outdated BMI chart. 
+Instead, we value mental health, self-worth and how we feel in our bodies as vital aspects to our overall well-being. 
+People who refuse to believe that living in these fat bodies is a barrier to anything, really. 
+There are doctors, academics and bloggers who have written countless volumes on the many facets of this complex subject. 
+There are fatshionistas who reclaim their bodies and their beauty by wearing fatkinis and crop tops, exposing the flesh that we're all taught to hide. 
+There are fat athletes who run marathons, teach yoga or do kickboxing, all done with a middle finger firmly held up to the status quo. 
+And these people have taught me that radical body politics is the antidote to our body-shaming culture. 
+But to be clear, I'm not saying that people shouldn't change their bodies if that's what they want to do. 
+Reclaiming yourself can be one of the most gorgeous acts of self-love and can look like a million different things, from hairstyles to tattoos to body contouring to hormones to surgery and yes, even weight loss. 
+It's simple: it's your body, and you decide what's best to do with it. 
+My way of engaging in activism is by doing all the things that we fatties aren't supposed to do, and there's a lot of them, inviting other people to join me and then making art about it. 
+The common thread through most of this work has been reclaiming spaces that are often prohibitive to bigger bodies, from the catwalk to club shows, from public swimming pools to prominent dance stages. 
+And reclaiming spaces en masse is not only a powerful artistic statement but a radical community-building approach. 
+This was so true of "" AQUAPORKO! "" — (Laughter) the fat fem synchronized swim team I started with a group of friends in Sydney. 
+The impact of seeing a bunch of defiant fat women in flowery swimming caps and bathers throwing their legs in the air without a care should not be underestimated. 
+(Laughter) Throughout my career, I have learned that fat bodies are inherently political, and unapologetic fat bodies can blow people's minds. 
+When director Kate Champion, of acclaimed dance theater company Force Majeure, asked me to be the artistic associate on a work featuring all fat dancers, I literally jumped at the opportunity. 
+And I mean literally. 
+"" Nothing to Lose "" is a work made in collaboration with performers of size who drew from their lived experiences to create a work as varied and authentic as we all are. 
+And it was as far from ballet as you could imagine. 
+The very idea of a fat dance work by such a prestigious company was, to put it mildly, controversial, because nothing like it had ever been done on mainstream dance stages before anywhere in the world. 
+People were skeptical. 
+"" What do you mean, 'fat dancers?' Like, size 10, size 12 kind of fat? 
+Where did they do their dance training? 
+Are they going to have the stamina for a full-length production? "" But despite the skepticism, "" Nothing to Lose "" became a sellout hit of Sydney Festival. 
+We received rave reviews, toured, won awards and were written about in over 27 languages. 
+These incredible images of our cast were seen worldwide. 
+I've lost count of how many times people of all sizes have told me that the show has changed their lives, how it helped them shift their relationship to their own and other people's bodies, and how it made them confront their own bias. 
+But of course, work that pushes people's buttons is not without its detractors. 
+I have been told that I'm glorifying obesity. 
+I've even been called "" the ISIS of the obesity epidemic "" — (Laughter) a comment so absurd that it is funny. 
+But it also speaks to the panic, the literal terror, that the fear of fat can evoke. 
+It is this fear that's feeding the diet industry, which is keeping so many of us from making peace with our own bodies, for waiting to be the after-photo before we truly start to live our lives. 
+Because the real elephant in the room here is fatphobia. 
+Fat activism refuses to indulge this fear. 
+By advocating for self-determination and respect for all of us, we can shift society's reluctance to embrace diversity and start to celebrate the myriad ways there are to have a body. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It's Monday morning. 
+In Washington, the president of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office, assessing whether or not to strike Al Qaeda in Yemen. 
+At Number 10 Downing Street, David Cameron is trying to work out whether to cut more public sector jobs in order to stave off a double-dip recession. 
+In Madrid, Maria Gonzalez is standing at the door, listening to her baby crying and crying, trying to work out whether she should let it cry until it falls asleep or pick it up and hold it. 
+And I am sitting by my father's bedside in hospital, trying to work out whether I should let him drink the one-and-a-half-liter bottle of water that his doctors just came in and said, "" You must make him drink today, "" — my father's been nil by mouth for a week — or whether, by giving him this bottle, I might actually kill him. 
+We face momentous decisions with important consequences throughout our lives, and we have strategies for dealing with these decisions. 
+We talk things over with our friends, we scour the Internet, we search through books. 
+But still, even in this age of Google and TripAdvisor and Amazon Recommends, it's still experts that we rely upon most — especially when the stakes are high and the decision really matters. 
+Because in a world of data deluge and extreme complexity, we believe that experts are more able to process information than we can — that they are able to come to better conclusions than we could come to on our own. 
+And in an age that is sometimes nowadays frightening or confusing, we feel reassured by the almost parental-like authority of experts who tell us so clearly what it is we can and cannot do. 
+But I believe that this is a big problem, a problem with potentially dangerous consequences for us as a society, as a culture and as individuals. 
+It's not that experts have not massively contributed to the world — of course they have. 
+The problem lies with us: we've become addicted to experts. 
+We've become addicted to their certainty, their assuredness, their definitiveness, and in the process, we have ceded our responsibility, substituting our intellect and our intelligence for their supposed words of wisdom. 
+We've surrendered our power, trading off our discomfort with uncertainty for the illusion of certainty that they provide. 
+This is no exaggeration. 
+In a recent experiment, a group of adults had their brains scanned in an MRI machine as they were listening to experts speak. 
+The results were quite extraordinary. 
+As they listened to the experts' voices, the independent decision-making parts of their brains switched off. 
+It literally flat-lined. 
+And they listened to whatever the experts said and took their advice, however right or wrong. 
+But experts do get things wrong. 
+Did you know that studies show that doctors misdiagnose four times out of 10? Did you know 
+that if you file your tax returns yourself, you're statistically more likely to be filing them correctly than if you get a tax adviser to do it for you? 
+And then there's, of course, the example that we're all too aware of: financial experts getting it so wrong that we're living through the worst recession since the 1930s. 
+For the sake of our health, our wealth and our collective security, it's imperative that we keep the independent decision-making parts of our brains switched on. 
+And I'm saying this as an economist who, over the past few years, has focused my research on what it is we think and who it is we trust and why, but also — and I'm aware of the irony here — as an expert myself, as a professor, as somebody who advises prime ministers, heads of big companies, international organizations, but an expert who believes that the role of experts needs to change, that we need to become more open-minded, more democratic and be more open to people rebelling against our points of view. 
+So in order to help you understand where I'm coming from, let me bring you into my world, the world of experts. 
+Now there are, of course, exceptions, wonderful, civilization-enhancing exceptions. 
+But what my research has shown me is that experts tend on the whole to form very rigid camps, that within these camps, a dominant perspective emerges that often silences opposition, that experts move with the prevailing winds, often hero-worshipping their own gurus. 
+Alan Greenspan's proclamations that the years of economic growth would go on and on, not challenged by his peers, until after the crisis, of course. 
+You see, we also learn that experts are located, are governed, by the social and cultural norms of their times — whether it be the doctors in Victorian England, say, who sent women to asylums for expressing sexual desire, or the psychiatrists in the United States who, up until 1973, were still categorizing homosexuality as a mental illness. 
+And what all this means is that paradigms take far too long to shift, that complexity and nuance are ignored and also that money talks — because we've all seen the evidence of pharmaceutical companies funding studies of drugs that conveniently leave out their worst side effects, or studies funded by food companies of their new products, massively exaggerating the health benefits of the products they're about to bring by market. 
+The study showed that food companies exaggerated typically seven times more than an independent study. 
+And we've also got to be aware that experts, of course, also make mistakes. 
+They make mistakes every single day — mistakes born out of carelessness. 
+A recent study in the Archives of Surgery reported surgeons removing healthy ovaries, operating on the wrong side of the brain, carrying out procedures on the wrong hand, elbow, eye, foot, and also mistakes born out of thinking errors. 
+A common thinking error of radiologists, for example — when they look at CT scans — is that they're overly influenced by whatever it is that the referring physician has said that he suspects the patient's problem to be. 
+So if a radiologist is looking at the scan of a patient with suspected pneumonia, say, what happens is that, if they see evidence of pneumonia on the scan, they literally stop looking at it — thereby missing the tumor sitting three inches below on the patient's lungs. 
+I've shared with you so far some insights into the world of experts. 
+These are, of course, not the only insights I could share, but I hope they give you a clear sense at least of why we need to stop kowtowing to them, why we need to rebel and why we need to switch our independent decision-making capabilities on. 
+But how can we do this? 
+Well for the sake of time, I want to focus on just three strategies. 
+First, we've got to be ready and willing to take experts on and dispense with this notion of them as modern-day apostles. 
+This doesn't mean having to get a Ph.D. 
+in every single subject, you'll be relieved to hear. 
+But it does mean persisting in the face of their inevitable annoyance when, for example, we want them to explain things to us in language that we can actually understand. 
+Why was it that, when I had an operation, my doctor said to me, "" Beware, Ms. Hertz, of hyperpyrexia, "" when he could have just as easily said, "Watch out for a high fever." 
+You see, being ready to take experts on is about also being willing to dig behind their graphs, their equations, their forecasts, their prophecies, and being armed with the questions to do that — questions like: What are the assumptions that underpin this? 
+What is the evidence upon which this is based? 
+What has your investigation focused on? 
+And what has it ignored? 
+It recently came out that experts trialing drugs before they come to market typically trial drugs first, primarily on male animals and then, primarily on men. 
+It seems that they've somehow overlooked the fact that over half the world's population are women. 
+And women have drawn the short medical straw because it now turns out that many of these drugs don't work nearly as well on women as they do on men — and the drugs that do work well work so well that they're actively harmful for women to take. 
+Being a rebel is about recognizing that experts' assumptions and their methodologies can easily be flawed. 
+Second, we need to create the space for what I call "" managed dissent. "" If we are to shift paradigms, if we are to make breakthroughs, if we are to destroy myths, we need to create an environment in which expert ideas are battling it out, in which we're bringing in new, diverse, discordant, heretical views into the discussion, fearlessly, in the knowledge that progress comes about, not only from the creation of ideas, but also from their destruction — and also from the knowledge that, by surrounding ourselves by divergent, discordant, heretical views. 
+All the research now shows us that this actually makes us smarter. 
+Encouraging dissent is a rebellious notion because it goes against our very instincts, which are to surround ourselves with opinions and advice that we already believe or want to be true. 
+And that's why I talk about the need to actively manage dissent. 
+Google CEO Eric Schmidt is a practical practitioner of this philosophy. 
+In meetings, he looks out for the person in the room — arms crossed, looking a bit bemused — and draws them into the discussion, trying to see if they indeed are the person with a different opinion, so that they have dissent within the room. 
+Managing dissent is about recognizing the value of disagreement, discord and difference. 
+But we need to go even further. 
+We need to fundamentally redefine who it is that experts are. 
+The conventional notion is that experts are people with advanced degrees, fancy titles, diplomas, best-selling books — high-status individuals. 
+But just imagine if we were to junk this notion of expertise as some sort of elite cadre and instead embrace the notion of democratized expertise — whereby expertise was not just the preserve of surgeons and CEO's, but also shop-girls — yeah. 
+Best Buy, the consumer electronics company, gets all its employees — the cleaners, the shop assistants, the people in the back office, not just its forecasting team — to place bets, yes bets, on things like whether or not a product is going to sell well before Christmas, on whether customers' new ideas are going to be or should be taken on by the company, on whether a project will come in on time. 
+By leveraging and by embracing the expertise within the company, Best Buy was able to discover, for example, that the store that it was going to open in China — its big, grand store — was not going to open on time. 
+Because when it asked its staff, all its staff, to place their bets on whether they thought the store would open on time or not, a group from the finance department placed all their chips on that not happening. 
+It turned out that they were aware, as no one else within the company was, of a technological blip that neither the forecasting experts, nor the experts on the ground in China, were even aware of. 
+The strategies that I have discussed this evening — embracing dissent, taking experts on, democratizing expertise, rebellious strategies — are strategies that I think would serve us all well to embrace as we try to deal with the challenges of these very confusing, complex, difficult times. 
+For if we keep our independent decision-making part of our brains switched on, if we challenge experts, if we're skeptical, if we devolve authority, if we are rebellious, but also if we become much more comfortable with nuance, uncertainty and doubt, and if we allow our experts to express themselves using those terms too, we will set ourselves up much better for the challenges of the 21st century. 
+For now, more than ever, is not the time to be blindly following, blindly accepting, blindly trusting. 
+Now is the time to face the world with eyes wide open — yes, using experts to help us figure things out, for sure — I don't want to completely do myself out of a job here — but being aware of their limitations and, of course, also our own. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi everyone. 
+I'm an artist and a dad — second time around. 
+Thank you. 
+And I want to share with you my latest art project. 
+It's a children's book for the iPad. 
+It's a little quirky and silly. 
+It's called "" Pop-It, "" And it's about the things little kids do with their parents. 
+(Music) So this is about potty training — as most of you, I hope, know. 
+You can tickle the rug. 
+You can make the baby poop. 
+You can do all those fun things. 
+You can burst bubbles. 
+You can draw, as everyone should. 
+But you know, I have a problem with children's books: I think they're full of propaganda. 
+At least an Indian trying to get one of these American books in Park Slope, forget it. 
+It's not the way I was brought up. 
+So I said, "" I'm going to counter this with my own propaganda. "" If you notice carefully, it's a homosexual couple bringing up a child. 
+You don't like it? 
+Shake it, and you have a lesbian couple. 
+(Laughter) Shake it, and you have a heterosexual couple. 
+You know, I don't even believe in the concept of an ideal family. 
+I have to tell you about my childhood. 
+I went to this very proper Christian school taught by nuns, fathers, brothers, sisters. 
+Basically, I was brought up to be a good Samaritan, and I am. 
+And I'd go at the end of the day to a traditional Hindu house, which was probably the only Hindu house in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood. 
+Basically, I celebrated every religious function. 
+In fact, when there was a wedding in our neighborhood, all of us would paint our houses for the wedding. 
+I remember we cried profusely when the little goats we played with in the summer became biriani. 
+(Laughter) We all had to fast during Ramadan. 
+It was a very beautiful time. 
+But I must say, I'll never forget, when I was 13 years old, this happened. 
+Babri Masjid — one of the most beautiful mosques in India, built by King Babur, I think, in the 16th century — was demolished by Hindu activists. 
+This caused major riots in my city. 
+And for the first time, I was affected by this communal unrest. 
+My little five-year-old kid neighbor comes running in, and he says, "" Rags, Rags. 
+You know the Hindus are killing us Muslims. Be careful. "" I'm like, "" Dude, I'm Hindu. "" (Laughter) He's like, "" Huh! "" You know, my work is inspired by events such as this. 
+Even in my gallery shows, I try and revisit historic events like Babri Masjid, distill only its emotional residue and image my own life. 
+Imagine history being taught differently. 
+Remember that children's book where you shake and the sexuality of the parents change? 
+I have another idea. 
+It's a children's book about Indian independence — very patriotic. 
+But when you shake it, you get Pakistan's perspective. 
+Shake it again, and you get the British perspective. 
+(Applause) You have to separate fact from bias, right. 
+Even my books on children have cute, fuzzy animals. 
+But they're playing geopolitics. 
+They're playing out Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan. 
+You know, I'm making a very important argument. 
+And my argument [is] that the only way for us to teach creativity is by teaching children perspectives at the earliest stage. 
+After all, children's books are manuals on parenting, so you better give them children's books that teach them perspectives. 
+And conversely, only when you teach perspectives will a child be able to imagine and put themselves in the shoes of someone who is different from them. 
+I'm making an argument that art and creativity are very essential tools in empathy. 
+You know, I can't promise my child a life without bias — we're all biased — but I promise to bias my child with multiple perspectives. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi. I'm Kevin Allocca, I'm the trends manager at YouTube, and I professionally watch YouTube videos. 
+It's true. 
+So we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters. 
+We all want to be stars — celebrities, singers, comedians — and when I was younger, that seemed so very, very hard to do. 
+But now Web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world's culture. 
+Any one of you could be famous on the Internet by next Saturday. 
+But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. 
+And of that, only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment. 
+So how does it happen? 
+Three things: tastemakers, communities of participation and unexpectedness. 
+All right, let's go. 
+(Video) Bear Vasquez: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. 
+Oh, my God! 
+Wooo! 
+Ohhhhh, wowwww! 
+KA: Last year, Bear Vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in Yosemite National Park. 
+In 2010, it was viewed 23 million times. 
+(Laughter) This is a chart of what it looked like when it first became popular last summer. 
+But he didn't actually set out to make a viral video, Bear. 
+He just wanted to share a rainbow. 
+Because that's what you do when your name is Yosemite Mountain Bear. 
+(Laughter) And he had posted lots of nature videos in fact. 
+And this video had actually been posted all the way back in January. 
+So what happened here? 
+Jimmy Kimmel actually. 
+Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become. 
+Because tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience. 
+(Video) Rebecca Black: ♫ It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. ♫ ♫ Everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend. ♫ ♫ Friday, Friday. Gettin 'down on Friday. ♫ KA: So you didn't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video I hope. 
+Rebecca Black's "" Friday "" is one of the most popular videos of the year. 
+It's been seen nearly 200 million times this year. 
+This is a chart of what it looked like. 
+And similar to "" Double Rainbow, "" it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere. 
+So what happened on this day? 
+Well it was a Friday, this is true. 
+And if you're wondering about those other spikes, those are also Fridays. 
+(Laughter) But what about this day, this one particular Friday? 
+Well Tosh.0 picked it up, a lot of blogs starting writing about. 
+Michael J. Nelson from Mystery Science Theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on Twitter. 
+But what's important is that an individual or a group of tastemakers took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience, accelerating the process. 
+And so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it. 
+And now there are 10,000 parodies of "" Friday "" on YouTube. 
+Even in the first seven days, there was one parody for every other day of the week. 
+(Laughter) Unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century, this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon — either by spreading it or by doing something new with it. 
+(Music) So "" Nyan Cat "" is a looped animation with looped music. 
+It's this, just like this. 
+It's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year. 
+And if you think that that is weird, you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that's been viewed four million times. 
+(Laughter) Even cats were watching this video. (Laughter) 
+Cats were watching other cats watch this video. (Laughter) 
+But what's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie, geeky Internet culture. 
+There were remixes. 
+(Laughter) Someone made an old timey version. (Laughter) 
+And then it went international. (Laughter) 
+An entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of. 
+Because we don't just enjoy now, we participate. 
+And who could have predicted any of this? 
+Who could have predicted "" Double Rainbow "" or Rebecca Black or "" Nyan Cat? "" What scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it? 
+In a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute, only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have. 
+When a friend of mine told me that I needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in New York City, I admit I wasn't very interested. 
+(Video) Casey Niestat: So I got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane, but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane. 
+(Laughter) KA: By being totally surprising and humorous, Casey Niestat got his funny idea and point seen five million times. 
+And so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively. 
+And so it all brings us to one big question... 
+(Video) Bear Vasquez: What does this mean? 
+Ohhhh. 
+(Laughter) KA: What does it mean? 
+Tastemakers, creative participating communities, complete unexpectedness, these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity. 
+I mean, as mentioned earlier, one of the biggest stars in the world right now, Justin Bieber, got his start on YouTube. 
+No one has to green-light your idea. 
+And we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture. 
+And these are not characteristics of old media, and they're barely true of the media of today, but they will define the entertainment of the future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Erez Lieberman Aiden: Everyone knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. 
+But we at Harvard were wondering if this was really true. 
+(Laughter) So we assembled a team of experts, spanning Harvard, MIT, The American Heritage Dictionary, The Encyclopedia Britannica and even our proud sponsors, the Google. 
+And we cogitated about this for about four years. 
+And we came to a startling conclusion. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, a picture is not worth a thousand words. 
+In fact, we found some pictures that are worth 500 billion words. 
+Jean-Baptiste Michel: So how did we get to this conclusion? 
+So Erez and I were thinking about ways to get a big picture of human culture and human history: change over time. 
+So many books actually have been written over the years. 
+So we were thinking, well the best way to learn from them is to read all of these millions of books. 
+Now of course, if there's a scale for how awesome that is, that has to rank extremely, extremely high. 
+Now the problem is there's an X-axis for that, which is the practical axis. 
+This is very, very low. 
+(Applause) Now people tend to use an alternative approach, which is to take a few sources and read them very carefully. 
+This is extremely practical, but not so awesome. 
+What you really want to do is to get to the awesome yet practical part of this space. 
+So it turns out there was a company across the river called Google who had started a digitization project a few years back that might just enable this approach. 
+They have digitized millions of books. 
+So what that means is, one could use computational methods to read all of the books in a click of a button. 
+That's very practical and extremely awesome. 
+ELA: Let me tell you a little bit about where books come from. 
+Since time immemorial, there have been authors. 
+These authors have been striving to write books. 
+And this became considerably easier with the development of the printing press some centuries ago. 
+Since then, the authors have won on 129 million distinct occasions, publishing books. 
+Now if those books are not lost to history, then they are somewhere in a library, and many of those books have been getting retrieved from the libraries and digitized by Google, which has scanned 15 million books to date. 
+Now when Google digitizes a book, they put it into a really nice format. 
+Now we've got the data, plus we have metadata. 
+We have information about things like where was it published, who was the author, when was it published. 
+And what we do is go through all of those records and exclude everything that's not the highest quality data. 
+What we're left with is a collection of five million books, 500 billion words, a string of characters a thousand times longer than the human genome — a text which, when written out, would stretch from here to the Moon and back 10 times over — a veritable shard of our cultural genome. 
+Of course what we did when faced with such outrageous hyperbole... 
+(Laughter) was what any self-respecting researchers would have done. 
+We took a page out of XKCD, and we said, "" Stand back. 
+We're going to try science. "" (Laughter) JM: Now of course, we were thinking, well let's just first put the data out there for people to do science to it. 
+Now we're thinking, what data can we release? 
+Well of course, you want to take the books and release the full text of these five million books. 
+Now Google, and Jon Orwant in particular, told us a little equation that we should learn. 
+So you have five million, that is, five million authors and five million plaintiffs is a massive lawsuit. 
+So, although that would be really, really awesome, again, that's extremely, extremely impractical. 
+(Laughter) Now again, we kind of caved in, and we did the very practical approach, which was a bit less awesome. 
+We said, well instead of releasing the full text, we're going to release statistics about the books. 
+So take for instance "" A gleam of happiness. "" It's four words; we call that a four-gram. 
+We're going to tell you how many times a particular four-gram appeared in books in 1801, 1802, 1803, all the way up to 2008. 
+That gives us a time series of how frequently this particular sentence was used over time. 
+We do that for all the words and phrases that appear in those books, and that gives us a big table of two billion lines that tell us about the way culture has been changing. 
+ELA: So those two billion lines, we call them two billion n-grams. 
+What do they tell us? 
+Well the individual n-grams measure cultural trends. 
+Let me give you an example. 
+Let's suppose that I am thriving, then tomorrow I want to tell you about how well I did. 
+And so I might say, "" Yesterday, I throve. "" Alternatively, I could say, "" Yesterday, I thrived. "" Well which one should I use? 
+How to know? 
+As of about six months ago, the state of the art in this field is that you would, for instance, go up to the following psychologist with fabulous hair, and you'd say, "" Steve, you're an expert on the irregular verbs. 
+What should I do? "" And he'd tell you, "" Well most people say thrived, but some people say throve. "" And you also knew, more or less, that if you were to go back in time 200 years and ask the following statesman with equally fabulous hair, (Laughter) "Tom, what should I say?" 
+He'd say, "" Well, in my day, most people throve, but some thrived. "" So now what I'm just going to show you is raw data. 
+Two rows from this table of two billion entries. 
+What you're seeing is year by year frequency of "" thrived "" and "" throve "" over time. 
+Now this is just two out of two billion rows. 
+So the entire data set is a billion times more awesome than this slide. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) JM: Now there are many other pictures that are worth 500 billion words. 
+For instance, this one. 
+If you just take influenza, you will see peaks at the time where you knew big flu epidemics were killing people around the globe. 
+ELA: If you were not yet convinced, sea levels are rising, so is atmospheric CO2 and global temperature. 
+JM: You might also want to have a look at this particular n-gram, and that's to tell Nietzsche that God is not dead, although you might agree that he might need a better publicist. 
+(Laughter) ELA: You can get at some pretty abstract concepts with this sort of thing. 
+For instance, let me tell you the history of the year 1950. 
+Pretty much for the vast majority of history, no one gave a damn about 1950. 
+In 1700, in 1800, in 1900, no one cared. 
+Through the 30s and 40s, no one cared. 
+Suddenly, in the mid-40s, there started to be a buzz. 
+People realized that 1950 was going to happen, and it could be big. 
+(Laughter) But nothing got people interested in 1950 like the year 1950. (Laughter) 
+People were walking around obsessed. 
+They couldn't stop talking about all the things they did in 1950, all the things they were planning to do in 1950, all the dreams of what they wanted to accomplish in 1950. 
+In fact, 1950 was so fascinating that for years thereafter, people just kept talking about all the amazing things that happened, in '51,' 52, '53. 
+Finally in 1954, someone woke up and realized that 1950 had gotten somewhat passé. 
+(Laughter) And just like that, the bubble burst. (Laughter) 
+And the story of 1950 is the story of every year that we have on record, with a little twist, because now we've got these nice charts. 
+And because we have these nice charts, we can measure things. 
+We can say, "" Well how fast does the bubble burst? "" And it turns out that we can measure that very precisely. 
+Equations were derived, graphs were produced, and the net result is that we find that the bubble bursts faster and faster with each passing year. 
+We are losing interest in the past more rapidly. 
+JM: Now a little piece of career advice. 
+So for those of you who seek to be famous, we can learn from the 25 most famous political figures, authors, actors and so on. 
+So if you want to become famous early on, you should be an actor, because then fame starts rising by the end of your 20s — you're still young, it's really great. 
+Now if you can wait a little bit, you should be an author, because then you rise to very great heights, like Mark Twain, for instance: extremely famous. 
+But if you want to reach the very top, you should delay gratification and, of course, become a politician. 
+So here you will become famous by the end of your 50s, and become very, very famous afterward. 
+So scientists also tend to get famous when they're much older. 
+Like for instance, biologists and physics tend to be almost as famous as actors. 
+One mistake you should not do is become a mathematician. 
+(Laughter) If you do that, you might think, "" Oh great. I'm going to do my best work when I'm in my 20s. "" But guess what, nobody will really care. (Laughter) 
+ELA: There are more sobering notes among the n-grams. 
+For instance, here's the trajectory of Marc Chagall, an artist born in 1887. 
+And this looks like the normal trajectory of a famous person. 
+He gets more and more and more famous, except if you look in German. 
+If you look in German, you see something completely bizarre, something you pretty much never see, which is he becomes extremely famous and then all of a sudden plummets, going through a nadir between 1933 and 1945, before rebounding afterward. 
+And of course, what we're seeing is the fact Marc Chagall was a Jewish artist in Nazi Germany. 
+Now these signals are actually so strong that we don't need to know that someone was censored. 
+We can actually figure it out using really basic signal processing. 
+Here's a simple way to do it. 
+Well, a reasonable expectation is that somebody's fame in a given period of time should be roughly the average of their fame before and their fame after. 
+So that's sort of what we expect. 
+And we compare that to the fame that we observe. 
+And we just divide one by the other to produce something we call a suppression index. 
+If the suppression index is very, very, very small, then you very well might be being suppressed. 
+If it's very large, maybe you're benefiting from propaganda. 
+JM: Now you can actually look at the distribution of suppression indexes over whole populations. 
+So for instance, here — this suppression index is for 5,000 people picked in English books where there's no known suppression — it would be like this, basically tightly centered on one. 
+What you expect is basically what you observe. 
+This is distribution as seen in Germany — very different, it's shifted to the left. 
+People talked about it twice less as it should have been. 
+But much more importantly, the distribution is much wider. 
+There are many people who end up on the far left on this distribution who are talked about 10 times fewer than they should have been. 
+But then also many people on the far right who seem to benefit from propaganda. 
+This picture is the hallmark of censorship in the book record. 
+ELA: So culturomics is what we call this method. 
+It's kind of like genomics. 
+Except genomics is a lens on biology through the window of the sequence of bases in the human genome. 
+Culturomics is similar. 
+It's the application of massive-scale data collection analysis to the study of human culture. 
+Here, instead of through the lens of a genome, through the lens of digitized pieces of the historical record. 
+The great thing about culturomics is that everyone can do it. 
+Why can everyone do it? 
+Everyone can do it because three guys, Jon Orwant, Matt Gray and Will Brockman over at Google, saw the prototype of the Ngram Viewer, and they said, "" This is so fun. 
+We have to make this available for people. "" So in two weeks flat — the two weeks before our paper came out — they coded up a version of the Ngram Viewer for the general public. 
+And so you too can type in any word or phrase that you're interested in and see its n-gram immediately — also browse examples of all the various books in which your n-gram appears. 
+JM: Now this was used over a million times on the first day, and this is really the best of all the queries. 
+So people want to be their best, put their best foot forward. 
+But it turns out in the 18th century, people didn't really care about that at all. 
+They didn't want to be their best, they wanted to be their beft. 
+So what happened is, of course, this is just a mistake. 
+It's not that strove for mediocrity, it's just that the S used to be written differently, kind of like an F. 
+Now of course, Google didn't pick this up at the time, so we reported this in the science article that we wrote. 
+But it turns out this is just a reminder that, although this is a lot of fun, when you interpret these graphs, you have to be very careful, and you have to adopt the base standards in the sciences. 
+ELA: People have been using this for all kinds of fun purposes. 
+(Laughter) Actually, we're not going to have to talk, we're just going to show you all the slides and remain silent. 
+This person was interested in the history of frustration. 
+There's various types of frustration. 
+If you stub your toe, that's a one A "" argh. "" If the planet Earth is annihilated by the Vogons to make room for an interstellar bypass, that's an eight A "" aaaaaaaargh. "" This person studies all the "" arghs, "" from one through eight A's. 
+And it turns out that the less-frequent "" arghs "" are, of course, the ones that correspond to things that are more frustrating — except, oddly, in the early 80s. 
+We think that might have something to do with Reagan. 
+(Laughter) JM: There are many usages of this data, but the bottom line is that the historical record is being digitized. 
+Google has started to digitize 15 million books. 
+That's 12 percent of all the books that have ever been published. 
+It's a sizable chunk of human culture. 
+There's much more in culture: there's manuscripts, there newspapers, there's things that are not text, like art and paintings. 
+These all happen to be on our computers, on computers across the world. 
+And when that happens, that will transform the way we have to understand our past, our present and human culture. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is the Bop. 
+The Bop is a type of social dance. 
+Dance is a language, and social dance is an expression that emerges from a community. 
+A social dance isn't choreographed by any one person. 
+It can't be traced to any one moment. 
+Each dance has steps that everyone can agree on, but it's about the individual and their creative identity. 
+Because of that, social dances bubble up, they change and they spread like wildfire. 
+They are as old as our remembered history. 
+In African-American social dances, we see over 200 years of how African and African-American traditions influenced our history. 
+The present always contains the past. 
+And the past shapes who we are and who we will be. 
+(Clapping) The Juba dance was born from enslaved Africans' experience on the plantation. 
+Brought to the Americas, stripped of a common spoken language, this dance was a way for enslaved Africans to remember where they're from. 
+It may have looked something like this. 
+Slapping thighs, shuffling feet and patting hands: this was how they got around the slave owners' ban on drumming, improvising complex rhythms just like ancestors did with drums in Haiti or in the Yoruba communities of West Africa. 
+It was about keeping cultural traditions alive and retaining a sense of inner freedom under captivity. 
+It was the same subversive spirit that created this dance: the Cakewalk, a dance that parodied the mannerisms of Southern high society — a way for the enslaved to throw shade at the masters. 
+The crazy thing about this dance is that the Cakewalk was performed for the masters, who never suspected they were being made fun of. 
+Now you might recognize this one. 
+1920s — the Charleston. 
+The Charleston was all about improvisation and musicality, making its way into Lindy Hop, swing dancing and even the Kid n Play, originally called the Funky Charleston. 
+Started by a tight-knit Black community near Charleston, South Carolina, the Charleston permeated dance halls where young women suddenly had the freedom to kick their heels and move their legs. 
+Now, social dance is about community and connection; if you knew the steps, it meant you belonged to a group. 
+Enter the Twist. 
+It's no surprise that the Twist can be traced back to the 19th century, brought to America from the Congo during slavery. 
+But in the late '50s, right before the Civil Rights Movement, the Twist is popularized by Chubby Checker and Dick Clark. 
+Suddenly, everybody's doing the Twist: white teenagers, kids in Latin America, making its way into songs and movies. 
+Through social dance, the boundaries between groups become blurred. 
+The story continues in the 1980s and '90s. 
+Along with the emergence of hip-hop, African-American social dance took on even more visibility, borrowing from its long past, shaping culture and being shaped by it. 
+Today, these dances continue to evolve, grow and spread. 
+Why do we dance? 
+To move, to let loose, to express. 
+Why do we dance together? 
+To heal, to remember, to say: "" We speak a common language. 
+
+Hi. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day: our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones. 
+Now, this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt. 
+Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your iPad. 
+We, the beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make, and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves. 
+After all, what's wrong with a world in which a worker on an iPhone assembly line can't even afford to buy one? 
+It's taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive, and that it's our desire for cheap goods that makes them so. 
+So, this simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world, but it's also inaccurate and disrespectful. 
+We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways. 
+In fact, China makes goods for markets all over the world, including its own, thanks to a combination of factors: its low costs, its large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands. 
+By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals on the other end into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone. 
+Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. 
+They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world. 
+In the ongoing debate about globalization, what's been missing is the voices of the workers themselves. 
+Here are a few. 
+Bao Yongxiu: "" My mother tells me to come home and get married, but if I marry now, before I have fully developed myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker, so I'm not in a rush. "" Chen Ying: "" When I went home for the new year, everyone said I had changed. They asked me, what did you do that you have changed so much? 
+I told them that I studied and worked hard. If you tell them more, they won't understand anyway. "" Wu Chunming: "" Even if I make a lot of money, it won't satisfy me. 
+Just to make money is not enough meaning in life. "" Xiao Jin: "" Now, after I get off work, I study English, because in the future, our customers won't be only Chinese, so we must learn more languages. "" All of these speakers, by the way, are young women, 18 or 19 years old. 
+So I spent two years getting to know assembly line workers like these in the south China factory city called Dongguan. 
+Certain subjects came up over and over: how much money they made, what kind of husband they hoped to marry, whether they should jump to another factory or stay where they were. 
+Other subjects came up almost never, including living conditions that to me looked close to prison life: 10 or 15 workers in one room, 50 people sharing a single bathroom, days and nights ruled by the factory clock. 
+Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances, and it was still better than the dormitories and homes of rural China. 
+The workers rarely spoke about the products they made, and they often had great difficulty explaining what exactly they did. 
+When I asked Lu Qingmin, the young woman I got to know best, what exactly she did on the factory floor, she said something to me in Chinese that sounded like "qiu xi." 
+Only much later did I realize that she had been saying "" QC, "" or quality control. 
+She couldn't even tell me what she did on the factory floor. 
+All she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviation in a language she didn't even understand. 
+Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism, the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor. 
+Unlike, say, a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets, the worker in an industrial factory has no control, no pleasure, and no true satisfaction or understanding in her own work. 
+But like so many theories that Marx arrived at sitting in the reading room of the British Museum, he got this one wrong. 
+Just because a person spends her time making a piece of something does not mean that she becomes that, a piece of something. 
+What she does with the money she earns, what she learns in that place, and how it changes her, these are the things that matter. 
+What a factory makes is never the point, and the workers could not care less who buys their products. 
+Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories, on the other hand, plays up this relationship between the workers and the products they make. 
+Many articles calculate: How long would it take for this worker to work in order to earn enough money to buy what he's making? 
+For example, an entry-level-line assembly line worker in China in an iPhone plant would have to shell out two and a half months' wages for an iPhone. 
+But how meaningful is this calculation, really? 
+For example, I recently wrote an article in The New Yorker magazine, but I can't afford to buy an ad in it. 
+But, who cares? I don't want an ad in The New Yorker, and most of these workers don't really want iPhones. 
+Their calculations are different. 
+How long should I stay in this factory? 
+How much money can I save? 
+How much will it take to buy an apartment or a car, to get married, or to put my child through school? 
+The workers I got to know had a curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor. 
+About a year after I met Lu Qingmin, or Min, she invited me home to her family village for the Chinese New Year. 
+On the train home, she gave me a present: a Coach brand change purse with brown leather trim. 
+I thanked her, assuming it was fake, like almost everything else for sale in Dongguan. 
+After we got home, Min gave her mother another present: a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag, and a few nights later, her sister was showing off a maroon LeSportsac shoulder bag. 
+Slowly it was dawning on me that these handbags were made by their factory, and every single one of them was authentic. 
+Min's sister said to her parents, "In America, this bag sells for 320 dollars." 
+Her parents, who are both farmers, looked on, speechless. 
+"" And that's not all — Coach is coming out with a new line, 2191, "" she said. "" One bag will sell for 6,000. "" She paused and said, "" I don't know if that's 6,000 yuan or 6,000 American dollars, but anyway, it's 6,000. "" (Laughter) Min's sister's boyfriend, who had traveled home with her for the new year, said, "It doesn't look like it's worth that much." 
+Min's sister turned to him and said, "" Some people actually understand these things. You don't understand shit. "" (Laughter) (Applause) In Min's world, the Coach bags had a curious currency. 
+They weren't exactly worthless, but they were nothing close to the actual value, because almost no one they knew wanted to buy one, or knew how much it was worth. 
+Once, when Min's older sister's friend got married, she brought a handbag along as a wedding present. 
+Another time, after Min had already left the handbag factory, her younger sister came to visit, bringing two Coach Signature handbags as gifts. 
+I looked in the zippered pocket of one, and I found a printed card in English, which read, "" An American classic. 
+In 1941, the burnished patina of an all-American baseball glove inspired the founder of Coach to create a new collection of handbags from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather. 
+Six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair. 
+They were fresh, functional, and women everywhere adored them. A new American classic was born. "" I wonder what Karl Marx would have made of Min and her sisters. 
+Their relationship with the product of their labor was more complicated, surprising and funny than he could have imagined. 
+And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendency to see the workers as faceless masses, to imagine that we can know what they're really thinking. 
+The first time I met Min, she had just turned 18 and quit her first job on the assembly line of an electronics factory. 
+Over the next two years, I watched as she switched jobs five times, eventually landing a lucrative post in the purchasing department of a hardware factory. 
+Later, she married a fellow migrant worker, moved with him to his village, gave birth to two daughters, and saved enough money to buy a secondhand Buick for herself and an apartment for her parents. 
+She recently returned to Dongguan on her own to take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes, temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the village. 
+In a recent email to me, she explained, "" A person should have some ambition while she is young so that in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose. "" Across China, there are 150 million workers like her, one third of them women, who have left their villages to work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurants and the construction sites of the big cities. 
+Together, they make up the largest migration in history, and it is globalization, this chain that begins in a Chinese farming village and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet and Coach handbags on our arms that has changed the way these millions of people work and marry and live and think. 
+Very few of them would want to go back to the way things used to be. 
+When I first went to Dongguan, I worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers. 
+I also worried that nothing would ever happen to them, or that they would have nothing to say to me. 
+Instead, I found young women who were smart and funny and brave and generous. 
+By opening up their lives to me, they taught me so much about factories and about China and about how to live in the world. 
+This is the Coach purse that Min gave me on the train home to visit her family. 
+I keep it with me to remind me of the ties that tie me to the young women I wrote about, ties that are not economic but personal in nature, measured not in money but in memories. 
+This purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine, sitting in your office or in the library, are not how you find them when you actually go out into the world. 
+Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you, Leslie, that was an insight that a lot of us haven't had before. 
+But I'm curious. If you had a minute, say, with Apple's head of manufacturing, what would you say? 
+Leslie Chang: One minute? 
+CA: One minute. (Laughter) LC: You know, what really impressed me about the workers is how much they're self-motivated, self-driven, resourceful, and the thing that struck me, what they want most is education, to learn, because most of them come from very poor backgrounds. 
+They usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade. 
+Their parents are often illiterate, and then they come to the city, and they, on their own, at night, during the weekends, they'll take a computer class, they'll take an English class, and learn really, really rudimentary things, you know, like how to type a document in Word, or how to say really simple things in English. 
+So, if you really want to help these workers, start these small, very focused, very pragmatic classes in these schools, and what's going to happen is, all your workers are going to move on, but hopefully they'll move on into higher jobs within Apple, and you can help their social mobility and their self-improvement. 
+When you talk to workers, that's what they want. 
+They do not say, "" I want better hot water in the showers. 
+I want a nicer room. I want a TV set. "" I mean, it would be nice to have those things, but that's not why they're in the city, and that's not what they care about. 
+CA: Was there a sense from them of a narrative that things were kind of tough and bad, or was there a narrative of some kind of level of growth, that things over time were getting better? 
+LC: Oh definitely, definitely. I mean, you know, it was interesting, because I spent basically two years hanging out in this city, Dongguan, and over that time, you could see immense change in every person's life: upward, downward, sideways, but generally upward. 
+If you spend enough time, it's upward, and I met people who had moved to the city 10 years ago, and who are now basically urban middle class people, so the trajectory is definitely upward. 
+It's just hard to see when you're suddenly sucked into the city. It looks like everyone's poor and desperate, but that's not really how it is. 
+Certainly, the factory conditions are really tough, and it's nothing you or I would want to do, but from their perspective, where they're coming from is much worse, and where they're going is hopefully much better, and I just wanted to give that context of what's going on in their minds, not what necessarily is going on in yours. 
+CA: Thanks so much for your talk. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+If we look around us, much of what surrounds us started life as various rocks and sludge buried in the ground in various places in the world. 
+But, of course, they don't look like rocks and sludge now. 
+They look like TV cameras, monitors, annoying radio mics. 
+And so this magical transformation is what I was trying to get at with my project, which became known as the Toaster Project. 
+And it was also inspired by this quote from Douglas Adams, and the situation is from "" The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "" And the situation it describes is the hero of the book — he's a 20th-century man — finds himself alone on a strange planet populated only by a technologically primitive people. 
+And he kind of assumes that, yes, he'll become — these villagers — he'll become their emperor and transform their society with his wonderful command of technology and science and the elements, but, of course, realizes that without the rest of human society, he can barely make a sandwich, let alone a toaster. 
+But he didn't have Wikipedia. 
+So I thought, okay, I'll try and make an electric toaster from scratch. 
+And, working on the idea that the cheapest electric toaster would also be the simplest to reverse-engineer, I went and bought the cheapest toaster I could find, took it home and was kind of dismayed to discover that, inside this object, which I'd bought for just 3.49 pounds, there were 400 different bits made out of a hundred-plus different materials. 
+I didn't have the rest of my life to do this project. 
+I had maybe nine months. 
+So I thought, okay, I'll start with five. 
+And these were steel, mica, plastic, copper and nickel. 
+So, starting with steel: how do you make steel? 
+I went and knocked on the door of the Rio Tinto Chair of Advanced Mineral Extraction at the Royal School of Mines and said, "" How do you make steel? "" And Professor Cilliers was very kind and talked me through it. 
+And my vague rememberings from GCSE science — well, steel comes from iron, so I phoned up an iron mine. 
+And said, "" Hi, I'm trying to make a toaster. 
+Can I come up and get some iron? "" Unfortunately, when I got there — emerges Ray. 
+He had misheard me and thought I was coming up because I was trying to make a poster, and so wasn't prepared to take me into the mines. 
+But after some nagging, I got him to do that. 
+(Video) Ray: It was Crease Limestone, and that was produced by sea creatures 350 million years ago in a nice, warm, sunny atmosphere. 
+When you study geology, you can see what's happened in the past, and there were terrific changes in the earth. 
+Thomas Thwaites: As you can see, they had the Christmas decorations up. 
+And of course, it wasn't actually a working mine anymore, because, though Ray was a miner there, the mine had closed and had been reopened as a kind of tourist attraction, because, of course, it can't compete on the scale of operations which are happening in South America, Australia, wherever. 
+But anyway, I got my suitcase of iron ore and dragged it back to London on the train, and then was faced with the problem: Okay, how do you make this rock into components for a toaster? 
+So I went back to Professor Cilliers, and he said, "" Go to the library. "" So I did and was looking through the undergraduate textbooks on metallurgy — completely useless for what I was trying to do. 
+Because, of course, they don't actually tell you how to do it if you want to do it yourself and you don't have a smelting plant. 
+So I ended up going to the History of Science Library and looking at this book. 
+This is the first textbook on metallurgy written in the West, at least. 
+And there you can see that woodcut is basically what I ended up doing. 
+But instead of a bellows, I had a leaf blower. 
+(Laughter) And that was something that reoccurred throughout the project, was, the smaller the scale you want to work on, the further back in time you have to go. 
+And so this is after a day and about half a night smelting this iron. 
+I dragged out this stuff, and it wasn't iron. 
+But luckily, I found a patent online for industrial furnaces that use microwaves, and at 30 minutes at full power, and I was able to finish off the process. 
+So, my next — (Applause) The next thing I was trying to get was copper. 
+Again, this mine was once the largest copper mine in the world. 
+It's not anymore, but I found a retired geology professor to take me down, and he said, "" Okay, I'll let you have some water from the mine. "" And the reason I was interested in getting water is because water which goes through mines becomes kind of acidic and will start picking up, dissolving the minerals from the mine. 
+And a good example of this is the Rio Tinto, which is in Portugal. 
+As you can see, it's got lots and lots of minerals dissolved in it. 
+So many such that it's now just a home for bacteria who really like acidic, toxic conditions. 
+But anyway, the water I dragged back from the Isle of Anglesey where the mine was — there was enough copper in it such that I could cast the pins of my metal electric plug. 
+So my next thing: I was off to Scotland to get mica. 
+And mica is a mineral which is a very good insulator and very good at insulating electricity. 
+That's me getting mica. 
+And the last material I'm going to talk about today is plastic, and, of course, my toaster had to have a plastic case. 
+Plastic is the defining feature of cheap electrical goods. 
+And so plastic comes from oil, so I phoned up BP and spent a good half an hour trying to convince the PR office at BP that it would be fantastic for them if they flew me to an oil rig and let me have a jug of oil. 
+BP obviously has a bit more on their mind now. 
+But even then they weren't convinced and said, "" Okay, we'll phone you back "" — never did. 
+So I looked at other ways of making plastic. 
+And you can actually make plastic from obviously oils which come from plants, but also from starches. 
+So this is attempting to make potato starch plastic. 
+And for a while that was looking really good. 
+I poured it into the mold, which you can see there, which I've made from a tree trunk. 
+And it was looking good for a while, but I left it outside, because you had to leave it outside to dry, and unfortunately I came back and there were snails eating the unhydrolyzed bits of potato. 
+So kind of out of desperation, I decided that I could think laterally. 
+And geologists have actually christened — well, they're debating whether to christen — the age that we're living in — they're debating whether to make it a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, the age of Man. 
+And that's because geologists of the future would kind of see a sharp shift in the strata of rock that is being laid down now. 
+So suddenly, it will become kind of radioactive from Chernobyl and the 2,000 or so nuclear bombs that have been set off since 1945. 
+And there'd also be an extinction event — like fossils would suddenly disappear. 
+And also, I thought that there would be synthetic polymers, plastics, embedded in the rock. 
+So I looked up a plastic — so I decided that I could mine some of this modern-day rock. 
+And I went up to Manchester to visit a place called Axion Recycling. 
+And they're at the sharp end of what's called the WEEE, which is this European electrical and electronic waste directive. 
+And that was brought into force to try and deal with the mountain of stuff that is just being made and then living for a while in our homes and then going to landfill. 
+But this is it. 
+(Music) (Laughter) So there's a picture of my toaster. 
+(Applause) That's it without the case on. 
+And there it is on the shelves. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: I'm told you did plug it in once. 
+TT: Yeah, I did plug it in. 
+I don't know if you could see, but I was never able to make insulation for the wires. 
+Kew Gardens were insistent that I couldn't come and hack into their rubber tree. 
+So the wires were uninsulated. 
+So there was 240 volts going through these homemade copper wires, homemade plug. 
+And for about five seconds, the toaster toasted, but then, unfortunately, the element kind of melted itself. 
+But I considered it a partial success, to be honest. 
+BG: Thomas Thwaites. TT: Thanks. 
+
+This is from Britain's "" leading "" diet nutritionist in the Daily Mirror, our second-biggest selling newspaper. 
+What I find really fascinating is that the pharmaceutical industry uses exactly the same kinds of tricks and devices, but slightly more sophisticated versions of them, in order to distort the evidence they give to doctors and patients, and which we use to make vitally important decisions. 
+
+I didn't know when I agreed to do this whether I was expected to talk or to sing. 
+I have a problem. 
+It's not the worst thing in the world. 
+I'm not on fire. 
+I know that other people in the world have far worse things to deal with, but for me, language and music are inextricably linked through this one thing. 
+It might seem curious given that I spend a lot of my life on the stage. 
+One would assume that I'm comfortable in the public sphere and comfortable here, speaking to you guys. 
+But the truth is that I've spent my life up until this point and including this point, living in mortal dread of public speaking. 
+Public singing, whole different thing. (Laughter) But we'll get to that in a moment. 
+I've never really talked about it before so explicitly. 
+I sort of lived with this idea that when I'm grown, I'll have learned to speak French, and when I'm grown, I'll learn how to manage my money, and when I'm grown, I won't have a stutter, and then I'll be able to public speak and maybe be the prime minister and anything's possible and, you know. 
+(Laughter) So I can talk about it now because I've reached this point, where — I mean, I'm 28. 
+I'm pretty sure that I'm grown now. 
+(Laughter) And I'm an adult woman who spends her life as a performer, with a speech impediment. 
+So, I might as well come clean about it. 
+There are some interesting angles to having a stutter. 
+(Laughter) This happened to me in Hamburg, when this guy, we met and he said, "Hello, m-m-m-my name is Joe," and I said, "" Oh, hello, m-m-m-my name is Meg. "" Imagine my horror when I realized he thought I was making fun of him. (Laughter) 
+People think I'm drunk all the time. (Laughter) 
+People think that I've forgotten their name when I hesitate before saying it. 
+And it is a very weird thing, because proper nouns are the worst. 
+If I'm going to use the word "" Wednesday "" in a sentence, and I'm coming up to the word, and I can feel that I'm going to stutter or something, I can change the word to "" tomorrow, "" or "" the day after Tuesday, "" or something else. 
+It's clunky, but you can get away with it, because over time I've developed this loophole method of using speech where right at the last minute you change the thing and you trick your brain. 
+(Laughter) When I was singing a lot of jazz, I worked a lot with a pianist whose name was Steve. 
+As you can probably gather, S's and T's, together or independently, are my kryptonite. 
+But I would have to introduce the band over this rolling vamp, and when I got around to Steve, I'd often find myself stuck on the "" St. "" And it was a bit awkward and uncomfortable and it totally kills the vibe. 
+So after a few instances of this, Steve happily became "" Seve, "" and we got through it that way. (Laughter) I've had a lot of therapy, and a common form of treatment is to use this technique that's called smooth speech, which is where you almost sing everything that you say. 
+You kind of join everything together in this very singsong, kindergarten teacher way, and it makes you sound very serene, like you've had lots of Valium, and everything is calm. (Laughter) That's not actually me. 
+And I do use that. I do. 
+I use it when I have to be on panel shows, or when I have to do radio interviews, when the economy of airtime is paramount. 
+(Laughter) I get through it that way for my job. 
+But as an artist who feels that their work is based solely on a platform of honesty and being real, that feels often like cheating. 
+Which is why before I sing, I wanted to tell you what singing means to me. 
+It's more than making nice sounds, and it's more than making nice songs. 
+It's more than making you feel the things that I feel. 
+It's not about mythology, or mythologizing myself to you. 
+Somehow, through some miraculous synaptic function of the human brain, it's impossible to stutter when you sing. 
+And when I was younger, that was a method of treatment that worked very well for me, singing, so I did it a lot. 
+And that's why I'm here today. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+Singing for me is sweet relief. 
+(Laughter) So I know that this is a TED Talk, but now i'm going to TED sing. 
+Thank you very much. Thank you. 
+(Applause) (Piano) ♪ I would be a beauty ♪ ♪ but my nose ♪ ♪ is slightly too big ♪ ♪ for my face ♪ ♪ And I would be a dreamer ♪ ♪ but my dream ♪ ♪ is slightly too big ♪ ♪ for this space ♪ ♪ And I would be an angel ♪ ♪ but my halo ♪ ♪ it pales in the glow ♪ ♪ of your grace ♪ ♪ And I would be a joker ♪ ♪ but that card looks silly when you play ♪ ♪ your ace ♪ ♪ I'd like to know ♪ 
+♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ know if you can tell ♪ ♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪ ♪ That I cannot choose to or not let go ♪ ♪ And I'd stay forever ♪ ♪ but my home ♪ ♪ is slightly too far ♪ ♪ from this place ♪ ♪ And I swear I tried to ♪ ♪ slow it down ♪ ♪ when I am walking at your pace ♪ ♪ But all I could think ♪ ♪ idling through the cities ♪ ♪ do I look pretty in the rain? ♪ 
+♪ And I don't know how someone ♪ ♪ quite so lovely ♪ ♪ makes me feel ugly ♪ ♪ So much shame ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ know if you can tell ♪ ♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪ ♪ that I cannot choose to or not let go ♪ Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+(Music) Text: BeatJazz. 
+BeatJazz is: 1. Live looping, 2. Jazz improvisation And 3. "" Gestural "" sound design. 
+Accelerometers on each hand read hand position. 
+The color of the lights indicates which sound I am playing. 
+Red = Drums, Blue = Bass, Green = Chords, Orange = Leads, Purple = Pads The mouthpiece consists of... 
+a button, two guitar picks and lots of hot glue. 
+The heads-up display is a smartphone that displays system parameters. 
+Why? 
+To atomize music culture so that ALL past, present and future genres can be studied and abstracted, live. 
+And "BeatJazzers" become as common as D.J. 's. 
+But mostly... 
+to MAKE the future rather than wait for it. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want to tell you the story about the time I almost got kidnapped in the trunk of a red Mazda Miata. 
+It's the day after graduating from design school and I'm having a yard sale. 
+And this guy pulls up in this red Mazda and he starts looking through my stuff. 
+And he buys a piece of art that I made. 
+And it turns out he's alone in town for the night, driving cross-country on a road trip before he goes into the Peace Corps. 
+So I invite him out for a beer and he tells me all about his passion for making a difference in the world. 
+Now it's starting to get late, and I'm getting pretty tired. 
+As I motion for the tab, I make the mistake of asking him, "So where are you staying tonight?" 
+And he makes it worse by saying, "Actually, I don't have a place." 
+And I'm thinking, "" Oh, man! "" What do you do? 
+Do I offer to host this guy? 
+But, I just met him — I mean, he says he's going to the Peace Corps, but I don't really know if he's going to the Peace Corps and I don't want to end up kidnapped in the trunk of a Miata. 
+That's a small trunk! 
+So then I hear myself saying, "Hey, I have an airbed you can stay on in my living room." 
+And the voice in my head goes, "Wait, what?" 
+That night, I'm laying in bed, I'm staring at the ceiling and thinking, "" Oh my god, what have I done? 
+There's a complete stranger sleeping in my living room. 
+What if he's psychotic? "" My anxiety grows so much, I leap out of bed, I sneak on my tiptoes to the door, and I lock the bedroom door. 
+It turns out he was not psychotic. 
+And the piece of art he bought at the yard sale is hanging in his classroom; he's a teacher now. 
+Maybe the people that my childhood taught me to label as strangers were actually friends waiting to be discovered. 
+The idea of hosting people on airbeds gradually became natural to me and when I moved to San Francisco, I brought the airbed with me. 
+So now it's two years later. 
+I'm unemployed, I'm almost broke, my roommate moves out, and then the rent goes up. 
+And then I learn there's a design conference coming to town, and all the hotels are sold out. 
+And I've always believed that turning fear into fun is the gift of creativity. 
+So here's what I pitch my best friend and my new roommate Brian Chesky: "" Brian, thought of a way to make a few bucks — turning our place into 'designers bed and breakfast,' offering young designers who come to town a place to crash, complete with wireless Internet, a small desk space, sleeping mat, and breakfast each morning. 
+Ha! "" We built a basic website and Airbed and Breakfast was born. 
+I swear, the ham and Swiss cheese omelets we made tasted totally different because we made them for our guests. 
+We took them on adventures around the city, and when we said goodbye to the last guest, the door latch clicked, Brian and I just stared at each other. 
+Did we just discover it was possible to make friends while also making rent? 
+The wheels had started to turn. 
+My old roommate, Nate Blecharczyk, joined as engineering co-founder. 
+And we buckled down to see if we could turn this into a business. 
+Here's what we pitched investors: "" We want to build a website where people publicly post pictures of their most intimate spaces, their bedrooms, the bathrooms — the kinds of rooms you usually keep closed when people come over. 
+And then, over the Internet, they're going to invite complete strangers to come sleep in their homes. 
+It's going to be huge! "" (Laughter) We sat back, and we waited for the rocket ship to blast off. 
+It did not. 
+No one in their right minds would invest in a service that allows strangers to sleep in people's homes. 
+Why? 
+Because we've all been taught as kids, strangers equal danger. 
+We learned to do that for objects, but here, we were aiming to build Olympic trust between people who had never met. 
+Could design make that happen? 
+Is it possible to design for trust? 
+I want to give you a sense of the flavor of trust that we were aiming to achieve. 
+I've got a 30-second experiment that will push you past your comfort zone. 
+OK, I need you to take out your phones. 
+Now hand your unlocked phone to the person on your left. 
+(Laughter) That tiny sense of panic you're feeling right now — (Laughter) is exactly how hosts feel the first time they open their home. 
+Because the only thing more personal than your phone is your home. 
+People don't just see your messages, they see your bedroom, your kitchen, your toilet. 
+Now, how does it feel holding someone's unlocked phone? 
+Most of us feel really responsible. 
+That's how most guests feel when they stay in a home. 
+And it's because of this that our company can even exist. 
+By the way, who's holding Al Gore's phone? 
+(Laughter) Would you tell Twitter he's running for President? (Laughter) 
+(Applause) OK, you can hand your phones back now. 
+So now that you've experienced the kind of trust challenge we were facing, I'd love to share a few discoveries we've made along the way. 
+What if we changed one small thing about the design of that experiment? 
+What if your neighbor had introduced themselves first, with their name, where they're from, the name of their kids or their dog? 
+Imagine that they had 150 reviews of people saying, "They're great at holding unlocked phones!" 
+(Laughter) Now how would you feel about handing your phone over? 
+It turns out, a well-designed reputation system is key for building trust. 
+And we didn't actually get it right the first time. 
+It's hard for people to leave bad reviews. 
+Eventually, we learned to wait until both guests and hosts left the review before we reveal them. 
+Now, here's a discovery we made just last week. 
+The research showed, not surprisingly, we prefer people who are like us. 
+The more different somebody is, the less we trust them. 
+Now, that's a natural social bias. 
+But what's interesting is what happens when you add reputation into the mix, in this case, with reviews. 
+Now, if you've got less than three reviews, nothing changes. 
+But if you've got more than 10, everything changes. 
+High reputation beats high similarity. 
+The right design can actually help us overcome one of our most deeply rooted biases. 
+Now we also learned that building the right amount of trust takes the right amount of disclosure. 
+This is what happens when a guest first messages a host. 
+If you share too little, like, "" Yo, "" acceptance rates go down. 
+And if you share too much, like, "I'm having issues with my mother," (Laughter) acceptance rates also go down. 
+But there's a zone that's just right, like, "" Love the artwork in your place. Coming for vacation with my family. "" So how do we design for just the right amount of disclosure? 
+We use the size of the box to suggest the right length, and we guide them with prompts to encourage sharing. 
+We bet our whole company on the hope that, with the right design, people would be willing to overcome the stranger-danger bias. 
+What we didn't realize is just how many people were ready and waiting to put the bias aside. 
+This is a graph that shows our rate of adoption. 
+There's three things happening here. 
+The first, an unbelievable amount of luck. 
+The second is the efforts of our team. 
+And third is the existence of a previously unsatisfied need. 
+Now, things have been going pretty well. 
+Obviously, there are times when things don't work out. 
+Guests have thrown unauthorized parties and trashed homes. 
+Hosts have left guests stranded in the rain. 
+In the early days, I was customer service, and those calls came right to my cell phone. 
+I was at the front lines of trust breaking. 
+And there's nothing worse than those calls, it hurts to even think about them. 
+And the disappointment in the sound of someone's voice was and, I would say, still is our single greatest motivator to keep improving. 
+Thankfully, out of the 123 million nights we've ever hosted, less than a fraction of a percent have been problematic. 
+Turns out, people are justified in their trust. 
+And when trust works out right, it can be absolutely magical. 
+We had a guest stay with a host in Uruguay, and he suffered a heart attack. 
+The host rushed him to the hospital. 
+They donated their own blood for his operation. 
+Let me read you his review. 
+(Laughter) "" Excellent house for sedentary travelers prone to myocardial infarctions. (Laughter) 
+The area is beautiful and has direct access to the best hospitals. (Laughter) 
+Javier and Alejandra instantly become guardian angels who will save your life without even knowing you. 
+They will rush you to the hospital in their own car while you're dying and stay in the waiting room while the doctors give you a bypass. 
+They don't want you to feel lonely, they bring you books to read. 
+Highly recommended! "" (Applause) Of course, not every stay is like that. 
+But this connection beyond the transaction is exactly what the sharing economy is aiming for. 
+Now, when I heard that term, I have to admit, it tripped me up. 
+How do sharing and transactions go together? 
+So let's be clear; it is about commerce. 
+But if you just called it the rental economy, it would be incomplete. 
+The sharing economy is commerce with the promise of human connection. 
+People share a part of themselves, and that changes everything. 
+You know how most travel today is, like, I think of it like fast food — it's efficient and consistent, at the cost of local and authentic. 
+What if travel were like a magnificent buffet of local experiences? 
+What if anywhere you visited, there was a central marketplace of locals offering to get you thoroughly drunk on a pub crawl in neighborhoods you didn't even know existed. 
+Or learning to cook from the chef of a five-star restaurant? 
+Today, homes are designed around the idea of privacy and separation. 
+What if homes were designed to be shared from the ground up? 
+What would that look like? 
+What if cities embraced a culture of sharing? 
+I see a future of shared cities that bring us community and connection instead of isolation and separation. 
+In South Korea, in the city of Seoul, they've actually even started this. 
+They've repurposed hundreds of government parking spots to be shared by residents. 
+They're connecting students who need a place to live with empty-nesters who have extra rooms. 
+And they've started an incubator to help fund the next generation of sharing economy start-ups. 
+Tonight, just on our service, 785,000 people in 191 countries will either stay in a stranger's home or welcome one into theirs. 
+Clearly, it's not as crazy as we were taught. 
+We didn't invent anything new. 
+Hospitality has been around forever. 
+There's been many other websites like ours. 
+So, why did ours eventually take off? 
+Luck and timing aside, I've learned that you can take the components of trust, and you can design for that. 
+Design can overcome our most deeply rooted stranger-danger bias. 
+And that's amazing to me. 
+It blows my mind. 
+I think about this every time I see a red Miata go by. 
+Now, we know design won't solve all the world's problems. 
+But if it can help out with this one, if it can make a dent in this, it makes me wonder, what else can we design for next? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I graduated UCLA, I moved to northern California, and I lived in a little town called Elk on the Mendocino coast, and I didn't have a phone or TV, but I had U.S. mail, and life was good back then, if you could remember it. 
+I'd go to the general store for a cup of coffee and a brownie, and I'd ship my film to San Francisco, and lo and behold, two days later, it would end up on my front door, which was way better than having to fight the traffic of Hollywood. (Music) I didn't have much money, but I had time and a sense of wonder. (Music) So I started shooting time-lapse photography. 
+It would take me a month to shoot a four-minute roll of film, because that's all I could afford. 
+I've been shooting time-lapse flowers continuously, non-stop, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 30 years, and to see them move is a dance I'll never get tired of. 
+Their beauty immerses us with color, taste, touch. 
+It also provides a third of the food we eat. 
+(Music) Beauty and seduction is nature's tools for survival, because we protect what we fall in love with. 
+It opens our hearts, and makes us realize we are a part of nature and we're not separate from it. 
+When we see ourselves in nature, it also connects us to every one of us, because it's clear that it's all connected in one. 
+When people see my images, a lot of times they'll say, "" Oh my God. "" Have you ever wondered what that meant? 
+The "" oh "" means it caught your attention, makes you present, makes you mindful. 
+The "" my "" means it connects with something deep inside your soul. 
+It creates a gateway for your inner voice to rise up and be heard. And "" God ""? 
+God is that personal journey we all want to be on, to be inspired, to feel like we're connected to a universe that celebrates life. 
+Did you know that 80 percent of the information we receive comes through our eyes? 
+And if you compare light energy to musical scales, it would only be one octave that the naked eye could see, which is right in the middle? 
+And aren't we grateful for our brains that can, you know, take this electrical impulse that comes from light energy to create images in order for us to explore our world? 
+And aren't we grateful that we have hearts that can feel these vibrations in order for us to allow ourselves to feel the pleasure and the beauty of nature? 
+(Music) Nature's beauty is a gift that cultivates appreciation and gratitude. (Music) 
+So I have a gift I want to share with you today, a project I'm working on called Happiness Revealed, and it'll give us a glimpse into that perspective from the point of view of a child and an elderly man of that world. 
+Child: When I watch TV, it's just some shows that you just — that are pretend, and when you explore, you get more imagination than you already had, and when you get more imagination, it makes you want to go deeper in so you can get more and see beautifuller things, like the path, if it's a path, it could lead you to a beach, or something, and it could be beautiful. 
+(Music) Elderly Man: You think this is just another day in your life? 
+It's not just another day. It's the one day that is given to you today. 
+It's given to you. It's a gift. 
+It's the only gift that you have right now, and the only appropriate response is gratefulness. 
+If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life and the very last day, then you will have spent this day very well. 
+Begin by opening your eyes and be surprised that you have eyes you can open, that incredible array of colors that is constantly offered to us for pure enjoyment. 
+Look at the sky. 
+We so rarely look at the sky. 
+We so rarely note how different it is from moment to moment, with clouds coming and going. 
+We just think of the weather, and even with the weather, we don't think of all the many nuances of weather. 
+We just think of good weather and bad weather. 
+This day, right now, has unique weather, maybe a kind that will never exactly in that form come again. 
+That formation of clouds in the sky will never be the same as it is right now. 
+Open your eyes. Look at that. 
+Look at the faces of people whom you meet. 
+Each one has an incredible story behind their face, a story that you could never fully fathom, not only their own story, but the story of their ancestors. 
+We all go back so far, and in this present moment, on this day, all the people you meet, all that life from generations and from so many places all over the world flows together and meets you here like a life-giving water, if you only open your heart and drink. 
+(Music) Open your heart to the incredible gifts that civilization gives to us. 
+You flip a switch and there is electric light. 
+You turn a faucet and there is warm water and cold water, and drinkable water. 
+It's a gift that millions and millions in the world will never experience. 
+So these are just a few of an enormous number of gifts to which we can open your heart. 
+And so I wish you that you will open your heart to all these blessings, and let them flow through you, that everyone whom you will meet on this day will be blessed by you, just by your eyes, by your smile, by your touch, just by your presence. 
+Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you, and then it will really be a good day. (Music) (Applause) Louie Schwartzberg: Thank you. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+They've done a lot of good for girls in these situations, and we ought to be thinking about how we can make that happen for boys too in their younger years. 
+Even in their older years, what we find is that there's still a problem. 
+And in fact, university administrators are a little uncomfortable about the idea that we may be getting close to 70 percent female population in universities. 
+You can't have plastic knives and swords and axes and all that kind of thing in a kindergarten classroom. 
+But here he stands as testament to the fact that you can't roughhouse on the playground today. 
+The reason that this is a problem is because the message that boys are getting is, "" You need to do what the teacher asks you to do all the time. "" The teacher's salary depends on "" No Child Left Behind "" and "" Race to the Top "" and accountability and testing and all of this. 
+So she has to figure out a way to get all these boys through this curriculum — and girls. 
+And so this is a very serious problem. 
+We want to live in Lake Wobegon where every child is above average... 
+Most of the educational games that are out there today are really flashcards. 
+We need to think about how to uncompress this curriculum if we can, trying to bring boys back into a space that is comfortable for them. 
+All of those conversations need to be happening. 
+A game designer from the New School put together a wonderful video gaming school. 
+Where we started: my colleagues Mike Petner, Shawn Vashaw, myself, we started by trying to look at the teachers' attitudes and find out how do they really feel about gaming, what do they say about it. 
+It's very uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of that kind of language. 
+
+I was offered a position as associate professor of medicine and chief of scientific visualization at Yale University in the department of medicine. 
+And my job was to write many of the algorithms and code for NASA to do virtual surgery in preparation for the astronauts going into deep-space flight, so they could be kept in robotic pods. 
+One of the fascinating things about what we were working on is that we were seeing, using new scanning technologies, things that had never been seen before. 
+Not only in disease management, but also things that allowed us to see things about the body that just made you marvel. 
+I remember one of the first times we were looking at collagen. 
+And your entire body, everything — your hair, skin, bone, nails — everything is made of collagen. 
+And it's a kind of rope-like structure that twirls and swirls like this. 
+So perfectly organized a structure, it was hard not to attribute divinity to it. 
+One of the opportunities I had was one person was working on a really interesting micromagnetic resonance imaging machine with the NIH. 
+And what we were going to do was scan a new project on the development of the fetus from conception to birth using these new technologies. 
+So I wrote the algorithms and code, and he built the hardware — Paul Lauterbur — then went onto win the Nobel Prize for inventing the MRI. 
+And I'm going to show you a sample of the piece, "From Conception to Birth." 
+(Music) [From Conception to Birth] [Oocyte] [Sperm] [Egg Inseminated] [24 Hours: Baby's first division] [The fertilized ovum divides a few hours after fusion...] [And divides anew every 12 to 15 hours.] [Early Embryo] [Yolk sack still feeding baby.] [25 Days: Heart chamber developing.] [32 Days: Arms & hands are developing] [36 Days: Beginning of the primitive vertebrae] [These weeks are the period of the most rapid development of the fetus.] [If the fetus continues to grow at this speed for the entire 9 months, it would be 1.5 tons at birth.] [45 Days] [Embryo's heart is beating twice as fast as the mother's.] 
+[51 Days] [Developing retina, nose and fingers] [The fetus' continual movement in the womb is necessary for muscular and skeletal growth.] [12 Weeks: Indifferent penis] [Girl or boy yet to be determined] [8 Months] [Delivery: The expulsion stage] [The moment of birth] (Applause) Alexander Tsiaras: Thank you. 
+And as we kept on scanning more and more, working on this project, looking at these two simple cells that have this unbelievable machinery that will become the magic of you. 
+And as we kept on working on this data, looking at small clusters of the body, these little pieces of tissue that were the trophoblasts coming off of the blastocyst, all of a sudden burrowing itself into the side of the uterus, saying, "" I'm here to stay. "" Having conversation and communications with the estrogens, the progesterones, saying, "" I'm here to stay, plant me, "" building this incredible trilinear fetus that becomes, within 44 days, something that you can recognize, and then at nine weeks is really kind of a little human being. 
+The marvel of this information: How do we actually have this biological mechanism inside our body to actually see this information? 
+And like this magnificent origami, cells are developing at one million cells per second at four weeks, as it's just folding on itself. 
+Within five weeks, you start to see the early atrium and the early ventricles. 
+Six weeks, these folds are now beginning with the papilla on the inside of the heart actually being able to pull down each one of those valves in your heart until you get a mature heart — and then basically the development of the entire human body. 
+The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go — the complexity of these, the mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension. 
+Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us? 
+It's a mystery, it's magic, it's divinity. 
+Take a look at this little tuft of capillaries. 
+But basically by the time you're nine months and you're given birth, you have almost 60,000 miles of vessels inside your body. 
+59,999 miles that are basically bringing nutrients and taking waste away. 
+The complexity of building that within a single system is, again, beyond any comprehension or any existing mathematics today. 
+And then instructions set, from the brain to every other part of the body — look at the complexity of the folding. 
+Every six months until they're six years old, we're going to be doing about 250 children, watching exactly how the gyri and the sulci of the brains fold to see how this magnificent development actually turns into memories and the marvel that is us. 
+And it's not just our own existence, but how does the woman's body understand to have genetic structure that not only builds her own, but then has the understanding that allows her to become a walking immunological, cardiovascular system that basically is a mobile system that can actually nurture, treat this child with a kind of marvel that is beyond, again, our comprehension — the magic that is existence, that is us? 
+
+I would like to talk to you about a very special group of animals. 
+There are 10,000 species of birds in the world. 
+Vultures are amongst the most threatened group of birds. 
+When you see a vulture like this, the first thing that comes to your mind is, these are disgusting, ugly, greedy creatures that are just after your flesh, associated with politicians. (Laughter) (Applause) I want to change that perception. I want to change those feelings you have for these birds, because they need our sympathy. They really do. (Laughter) And I'll tell you why. 
+When Charles Darwin went across the Atlantic in 1832 on the Beagle, he saw the turkey vulture, and he said, "" These are disgusting birds with bald scarlet heads that are formed to revel in putridity. "" (Laughter) You could not get a worse insult, and that from Charles Darwin. (Laughter) You know, he changed his mind when he came back, and I'll tell you why. 
+They've also be associated with Disney — (Laughter) — personified as goofy, dumb, stupid characters. 
+More recently, if you've been following the Kenyan press — (Laughter) (Applause) (Cheers) — these are the attributes that they associated the Kenyan MPs with. But I want to challenge that. 
+Because MPs do not keep the environment clean. (Laughter) MPs do not help to prevent the spread of diseases. 
+They are hardly monogamous. (Laughter) (Applause) They are far from being extinct. (Laughter) And, my favorite is, vultures are better looking. (Applause) (Laughter) So there's two types of vultures in this planet. 
+There are the New World vultures that are mainly found in the Americas, like the condors and the caracaras, and then the Old World vultures, where we have 16 species. From these 16, 11 of them are facing a high risk of extinction. 
+So why are vultures important? First of all, they provide vital ecological services. They clean up. 
+They're our natural garbage collectors. 
+They clean up carcasses right to the bone. 
+They help to kill all the bacteria. They help absorb anthrax that would otherwise spread and cause huge livestock losses and diseases in other animals. 
+Recent studies have shown that in areas where there are no vultures, carcasses take up to three to four times to decompose, and this has huge ramifications for the spread of diseases. 
+Vultures also have tremendous historical significance. 
+They have been associated in ancient Egyptian culture. 
+Nekhbet was the symbol of the protector and the motherhood, and together with the cobra, symbolized the unity between Upper and Lower Egypt. 
+In Hindu mythology, Jatayu was the vulture god, and he risked his life in order to save the goddess Sita from the 10-headed demon Ravana. 
+In Tibetan culture, they are performing very important sky burials. In places like Tibet, there are no places to bury the dead, or wood to cremate them, so these vultures provide a natural disposal system. 
+So what is the problem with vultures? 
+We have eight species of vultures that occur in Kenya, of which six are highly threatened with extinction. 
+The reason is that they're getting poisoned, and the reason that they're getting poisoned is because there's human-wildlife conflicts. The pastoral communities are using this poison to target predators, and in return, the vultures are falling victim to this. 
+In South Asia, in countries like India and Pakistan, four species of vultures are listed as critically endangered, which means they have less than 10 or 15 years to go extinct, and the reason is because they are falling prey by consuming livestock that has been treated with a painkilling drug like Diclofenac. 
+This drug has now been banned for veterinary use in India, and they have taken a stand. 
+Because there are no vultures, there's been a spread in the numbers of feral dogs at carcass dump sites, and when you have feral dogs, you have a huge time bomb of rabies. The number of cases of rabies has increased tremendously in India. 
+Kenya is going to have one of the largest wind farms in Africa: 353 wind turbines are going to be up at Lake Turkana. 
+I am not against wind energy, but we need to work with the governments, because wind turbines do this to birds. They slice them in half. 
+They are bird-blending machines. 
+In West Africa, there's a horrific trade of dead vultures to serve the witchcraft and the fetish market. 
+So what's being done? Well, we're conducting research on these birds. We're putting transmitters on them. 
+We're trying to determine their basic ecology, and see where they go. 
+We're talking to them about appreciating vultures, about the need from within to appreciate these wonderful creatures and the services that they provide. 
+How can you help? You can become active, make noise. You can write a letter to your government and tell them that we need to focus on these very misunderstood creatures. Volunteer your time to spread the word. Spread the word. 
+When you walk out of this room, you will be informed about vultures, but speak to your families, to your children, to your neighbors about vultures. 
+They are very graceful. Charles Darwin said he changed his mind because he watched them fly effortlessly without energy in the skies. 
+Kenya, this world, will be much poorer without these wonderful species. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there's other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. 
+Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. 
+This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network. 
+Now, I'm here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we're living in a very small town. 
+We see the same people over and over again, but that's because we're not really exploring the full depth and breadth of the city. 
+On the other end of the network, you have folks who are interested in things like hip-hop music and they even identify with living in the DC / Maryland / Virginia area over, say, the Baltimore city designation proper. 
+But in the middle, you see that there's something that connects the two communities together, and that's sports. 
+We have the Baltimore Orioles, the Baltimore Ravens football team, Michael Phelps, the Olympian. 
+Let's take a look at San Francisco. 
+You see something a little bit different happening in San Francisco. 
+On the one hand, you do have the media, politics and news lobe that tends to exist in Baltimore and other cities, but you also have this very predominant group of geeks and techies that are sort of taking over the top half of the network, and there's even a group that's so distinct and clear that we can identify it as Twitter employees, next to the geeks, in between the gamers and the geeks, at the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum. 
+So you can see, though, that the tensions that we've heard about in San Francisco in terms of people being concerned about gentrification and all the new tech companies that are bringing new wealth and settlement into the city are real, and you can actually see that documented here. 
+You can see the LGBT community is not really getting along with the geek community that well, the arts community, the music community. 
+And so it leads to things like this. 
+["" Evict Twitter ""] Somebody sent me this photo a few weeks ago, and it shows what is happening on the ground in San Francisco, and I think you can actually try to understand that through looking at a map like this. 
+Let's take a look at Rio de Janeiro. 
+I spent the last few weeks gathering data about Rio, and one of the things that stood out to me about this city is that everything's really kind of mixed up. 
+It's a very heterogenous city in a way that Baltimore or San Francisco is not. 
+You still have the lobe of people involved with government, newspapers, politics, columnists. 
+TEDxRio is down in the lower right, right next to bloggers and writers. 
+But then you also have this tremendous diversity of people that are interested in different kinds of music. 
+Even Justin Bieber fans are represented here. 
+Other boy bands, country singers, gospel music, funk and rap and stand-up comedy, and there's even a whole section around drugs and jokes. 
+How cool is that? 
+And then the Flamengo football team is also represented here. 
+So you have that same kind of spread of sports and civics and the arts and music, but it's represented in a very different way, and I think that maybe fits with our understanding of Rio as being a very multicultural, musically diverse city. 
+So we have all this data. 
+It's an incredibly rich set of data that we have about cities now, maybe even richer than any data set that we've ever had before. 
+Well, I think the first thing that we can try to understand is that segregation is a social construct. 
+It's something that we choose to do, and we could choose not to do it, and if you kind of think about it, what we're doing with this data is aiming a space telescope at a city and looking at it as if was a giant high school cafeteria, and seeing how everybody arranged themselves in a seating chart. 
+Well maybe it's time to shake up the seating chart a little bit. 
+The other thing that we start to realize is that race is a really poor proxy for diversity. 
+We've got people represented from all different types of races across the entire map here — only looking at race doesn't really contribute to our development of diversity. 
+So if we're trying to use diversity as a way to tackle some of our more intractable problems, we need to start to think about diversity in a new way. 
+And lastly, we have the ability to create interventions to start to reshape our cities in a new way, and I believe that if we have that capability, we may even bear some responsibility to do so. 
+So what is a city? 
+I think some might say that it is a geographical area or a collection of streets and buildings, but I believe that a city is the sum of the relationships of the people that live there, and I believe that if we can start to document those relationships in a real way then maybe we have a real shot at creating those kinds of cities that we'd like to have. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So whenever I visit a school and talk to students, I always ask them the same thing: Why do you Google? 
+Why is Google the search engine of choice for you? 
+Strangely enough, I always get the same three answers. 
+Certain to always get the best, unbiased search result. 
+Now, as a man of the humanities, albeit a digital humanities man, that just makes my skin curl, even if I, too, realize that that trust, that idea of the unbiased search result is a cornerstone in our collective love for and appreciation of Google. 
+I will show you why that, philosophically, is almost an impossibility. 
+So whenever you set out to Google something, start by asking yourself this: "" Am I looking for an isolated fact? "" What is the capital of France? 
+You're not exactly looking for a singular fact anymore, you're looking for knowledge, which is something way more complicated and delicate. 
+And to get to knowledge, you have to bring 10 or 20 or 100 facts to the table and acknowledge them and say, "" Yes, these are all true. "" But because of who I am, young or old, black or white, gay or straight, I will value them differently. 
+So, I promised you an example just to show you why it's so hard to get to the point of true, clean, objective knowledge — as food for thought. 
+It works really well, as you can see. 
+How does this work? 
+Quite simple. 
+Pretty good indication it's not Clint Eastwood in the picture. 
+There was a picture distributed widely over the Internet where her face was distorted to look like a monkey. 
+And I don't think anyone in this room thinks that was a bad idea. 
+Me neither. 
+But then, a couple of years go by, and the world's most-Googled Anders, Anders Behring Breivik, did what he did. 
+Almost 80 people died that day. 
+And a lot of people would describe this act of terror as two steps, that he did two things: he blew up the buildings and he shot those kids. 
+It was three steps. 
+And he prepared all three steps equally well. 
+And if there was somebody who immediately understood this, it was a Swedish web developer, a search engine optimization expert in Stockholm, named Nikke Lindqvist. 
+He's also a very political guy and he was right out there in social media, on his blog and Facebook. 
+Let's see if we can distort that. 
+Let's see if we, in the civilized world, can protest against what he did through insulting him in his search results. "" And how? 
+He told all of his readers the following, "" Go out there on the Internet, find pictures of dog poop on sidewalks — find pictures of dog poop on sidewalks — publish them in your feeds, on your websites, on your blogs. 
+Make sure to write the terrorist's name in the caption, make sure to name the picture file "" Breivik.jpeg. "" Let's teach Google that that's the face of the terrorist. "" And it worked. 
+Two years after that campaign against Michelle Obama, this manipulation campaign against Anders Behring Breivik worked. 
+If you picture-Googled for him weeks after the July 22 events from Sweden, you'd see that picture of dog poop high up in the search results, as a little protest. 
+Strangely enough, Google didn't intervene this time. 
+They did not step in and manually clean those search results up. 
+So the million-dollar question, is there anything different between these two happenings here? 
+It's the exact same thing, yet Google intervened in one case and not in the other. 
+Because Michelle Obama is an honorable person, that's why, and Anders Behring Breivik is a despicable person. 
+See what happens there? 
+You're Obama, and you're Breivik. "" That's power if I ever saw it. 
+So I'm asking you to remember that behind every algorithm is always a person, a person with a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate. 
+Tighter than ever. 
+
+Last year at TED we aimed to try to clarify the overwhelming complexity and richness that we experience at the conference in a project called Big Viz. 
+And the Big Viz is a collection of 650 sketches that were made by two visual artists. 
+David Sibbet from The Grove, and Kevin Richards, from Autodesk, made 650 sketches that strive to capture the essence of each presenter's ideas. 
+And the consensus was: it really worked. 
+These sketches brought to life the key ideas, the portraits, the magic moments that we all experienced last year. 
+This year we were thinking, "" Why does it work? "" What is it about animation, graphics, illustrations, that create meaning? 
+And this is an important question to ask and answer because the more we understand how the brain creates meaning, the better we can communicate, and, I also think, the better we can think and collaborate together. 
+So this year we're going to visualize how the brain visualizes. 
+Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is, but instead, creates a series of mental models through a collection of "" Ah-ha moments, "" or moments of discovery, through various processes. 
+The processing, of course, begins with the eyes. 
+Light enters, hits the back of the retina, and is circulated, most of which is streamed to the very back of the brain, at the primary visual cortex. 
+And primary visual cortex sees just simple geometry, just the simplest of shapes. 
+But it also acts like a kind of relay station that re-radiates and redirects information to many other parts of the brain. 
+As many as 30 other parts that selectively make more sense, create more meaning through the kind of "" Ah-ha "" experiences. 
+We're only going to talk about three of them. 
+So the first one is called the ventral stream. 
+It's on this side of the brain. 
+And this is the part of the brain that will recognize what something is. 
+It's the "" what "" detector. 
+Look at a hand. Look at a remote control. Chair. Book. 
+So that's the part of the brain that is activated when you give a word to something. 
+A second part of the brain is called the dorsal stream. 
+And what it does is locates the object in physical body space. 
+So if you look around the stage here you'll create a kind of mental map of the stage. 
+And if you closed your eyes you'd be able to mentally navigate it. 
+You'd be activating the dorsal stream if you did that. 
+The third part that I'd like to talk about is the limbic system. 
+And this is deep inside of the brain. It's very old, evolutionarily. 
+And it's the part that feels. 
+It's the kind of gut center, where you see an image and you go, "" Oh! I have a strong or emotional reaction to whatever I'm seeing. "" So the combination of these processing centers help us make meaning in very different ways. 
+So what can we learn about this? How can we apply this insight? 
+Well, again, the schematic view is that the eye visually interrogates what we look at. 
+The brain processes this in parallel, the figments of information asking a whole bunch of questions to create a unified mental model. 
+So, for example, when you look at this image a good graphic invites the eye to dart around, to selectively create a visual logic. 
+So the act of engaging, and looking at the image creates the meaning. 
+It's the selective logic. 
+Now we've augmented this and spatialized this information. 
+Many of you may remember the magic wall that we built in conjunction with Perceptive Pixel where we quite literally create an infinite wall. 
+And so we can compare and contrast the big ideas. 
+So the act of engaging and creating interactive imagery enriches meaning. 
+It activates a different part of the brain. 
+And then the limbic system is activated when we see motion, when we see color, and there are primary shapes and pattern detectors that we've heard about before. 
+So the point of this is what? 
+We make meaning by seeing, by an act of visual interrogation. 
+The lessons for us are three-fold. 
+First, use images to clarify what we're trying to communicate. 
+Secondly make those images interactive so that we engage much more fully. 
+And the third is to augment memory by creating a visual persistence. 
+These are techniques that can be used to be — that can be applied in a wide range of problem solving. 
+So the low-tech version looks like this. 
+And, by the way, this is the way in which we develop and formulate strategy within Autodesk, in some of our organizations and some of our divisions. 
+What we literally do is have the teams draw out the entire strategic plan on one giant wall. 
+And it's very powerful because everyone gets to see everything else. 
+There's always a room, always a place to be able to make sense of all of the components in the strategic plan. 
+This is a time-lapse view of it. 
+You can ask the question, "" Who's the boss? "" You'll be able to figure that out. (Laughter) So the act of collectively and collaboratively building the image transforms the collaboration. 
+No Powerpoint is used in two days. 
+But instead the entire team creates a shared mental model that they can all agree on and move forward on. 
+And this can be enhanced and augmented with some emerging digital technology. 
+And this is our great unveiling for today. 
+And this is an emerging set of technologies that use large-screen displays with intelligent calculation in the background to make the invisible visible. 
+Here what we can do is look at sustainability, quite literally. 
+So a team can actually look at all the key components that heat the structure and make choices and then see the end result that is visualized on this screen. 
+So making images meaningful has three components. 
+The first again, is making ideas clear by visualizing them. 
+Secondly, making them interactive. 
+And then thirdly, making them persistent. 
+And I believe that these three principles can be applied to solving some of the very tough problems that we face in the world today. Thanks so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Father Daniel Berrigan once said that "" writing about prisoners is a little like writing about the dead. "" I think what he meant is that we treat prisoners as ghosts. 
+It's easy to simply ignore them and it's even easier when the government goes to great lengths to keep them hidden. 
+That's why I began investigating the most secretive and experimental prison units in the United States, for so-called "" second-tier "" terrorists. 
+The government calls these units Communications Management Units or CMUs. 
+Prisoners and guards call them "" Little Guantanamo. "" They are islands unto themselves. 
+There are 2 CMUs. 
+Neither of them underwent the formal review process that is required by law when they were opened. 
+CMU prisoners have all been convicted of crimes. 
+Some of their cases are questionable and some involve threats and violence. 
+I'm here because as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said, "" When the prisons and gates slam shut, prisoners do not lose their human quality. "" Every prisoner I've interviewed has said there are three flecks of light in the darkness of prison: phone calls, letters and visits from family. 
+CMUs aren't solitary confinement, but they radically restrict all of these to levels that meet or exceed the most extreme prisons in the United States. 
+Their phone calls can be limited to 45 minutes a month, compared to the 300 minutes other prisoners receive. 
+Their letters can be limited to six pieces of paper. 
+Their visits can be limited to four hours per month, compared to the 35 hours that people like Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph receive in the supermax. 
+On top of that, CMU visits are non-contact which means prisoners are not allowed to even hug their family. 
+But through court documents, open records requests and interviews with current and former prisoners, some small windows into the CMUs have opened. 
+There's an estimated 60 to 70 prisoners here, and they're overwhelmingly Muslim. 
+They include people like Dr. Rafil Dhafir, who violated the economic sanctions on Iraq by sending medical supplies for the children there. 
+They've included people like Yassin Aref. 
+Aref and his family fled to New York from Saddam Hussein's Iraq as refugees. 
+He was arrested in 2004 as part of an FBI sting. 
+Aref is an imam and he was asked to bear witness to a loan, which is a tradition in Islamic culture. 
+Aref didn't know. 
+For that, he was convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group. 
+The CMUs also include some non-Muslim prisoners. 
+These balancers include animal rights and environmental activists like Daniel McGowan. 
+McGowan was convicted of participating in two arsons in the name of defending the environment as part of the Earth Liberation Front. 
+During his sentencing, he was afraid that he would be sent to a rumored secret prison for terrorists. 
+The judge dismissed all those fears, saying that they weren't supported by any facts. 
+But that might be because the government hasn't fully explained why some prisoners end up in a CMU, and who is responsible for these decisions. 
+When McGowan was transferred, he was told it's because he is a "" domestic terrorist, "" a term the FBI uses repeatedly when talking about environmental activists. 
+Now, keep in mind there are about 400 prisoners in US prisons who are classified as terrorists, and only a handful of them are in the CMUs. 
+In McGowan's case, he was previously at a low-security prison and he had no communications violations. 
+So, why was he moved? 
+At one point, the prison warden himself recommended McGowan's transfer out of the CMU citing his good behavior, but the warden was overruled by the Bureau of Prison's Counterterrorism Unit, working with the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI. 
+Later I found out that McGowan was really sent to a CMU not because of what he did, but what he has said. 
+A memo from the Counterterrorism Unit cited McGowan's "" anti-government beliefs. "" While imprisoned, he continued writing about environmental issues, saying that activists must reflect on their mistakes and listen to each other. 
+(Laughter) I actually asked to visit McGowan in the CMU. 
+And I was approved. 
+That came as quite a shock. 
+Second, because it would make me the first and only journalist to visit a CMU. 
+I had even learned through the Bureau of Prisons Counterterrorism Unit, that they had been monitoring my speeches about CMUs, like this one. 
+So how could I possibly be approved to visit? 
+A few days before I went out to the prison, I got an answer. 
+I was allowed to visit McGowan as a friend, not a journalist. 
+McGowan was told by CMU officials that if I asked any questions or published any story, that he would be punished for my reporting. 
+When I arrived for our visit, the guards reminded me that they knew who I was and knew about my work. 
+The Bureau of Prisons describes CMUs as "" self-contained housing units. "" But I think that's an Orwellian way of describing black holes. 
+When a CMU prisoner has a visit, the rest of the prison is on lockdown. 
+I was ushered into a small room, so small my outstretched arms could touch each wall. 
+There was a grapefruit-sized orb in the ceiling for the visit to be live-monitored by the Counterterrorism Unit in West Virginia. 
+The unit insists that all the visits have to be in English for CMU prisoners, which is an additional hardship for many of the Muslim families. 
+There is a thick sheet of foggy, bulletproof glass and on the other side was Daniel McGowan. 
+We spoke through these handsets attached to the wall and talked about books and movies. 
+To fight boredom and amuse himself while in the CMU, McGowan had been spreading a rumor that I was secretly the president of a Twilight fan club in Washington, DC (Laughter) For the record, I'm not. (Laughter) 
+But I kind of the hope the FBI now thinks that Bella and Edward are terrorist code names. (Laughter) 
+During our visit, McGowan spoke most and at length about his niece Lily, his wife Jenny and how torturous it feels to never be able to hug them, to never be able to hold their hands. 
+Three months after our visit, McGowan was transferred out of the CMU and then, without warning, he was sent back again. 
+I had published leaked CMU documents on my website and the Counterterrorism Unit said that McGowan had called his wife and asked her to mail them. 
+He wanted to see what the government was saying about him, and for that he was sent back to the CMU. 
+When he was finally released at the end of his sentence, his story got even more Kafkaesque. 
+He wrote an article for the Huffington Post headlined, "Court Documents Prove I was Sent to a CMU for my Political Speech." 
+The next day he was thrown back in jail for his political speech. 
+Today, nine years after they were opened by the Bush administration, the government is codifying how and why CMUs were created. 
+According to the Bureau of Prisons, they are for prisoners with "" inspirational significance. "" I think that is very nice way of saying these are political prisons for political prisoners. 
+Prisoners are sent to a CMU because of their race, their religion or their political beliefs. 
+Now, if you think that characterization is too strong, just look at some of the government's own documents. 
+When some of McGowan's mail was rejected by the CMU, the sender was told it's because the letters were intended "" for political prisoners. "" When another prisoner, animal rights activist Andy Stepanian, was sent to a CMU, it was because of his anti-government and anti-corporate views. 
+Now, I know all of this may be hard to believe, that it's happening right now, and in the United States. 
+But the unknown reality is that the US has a dark history of disproportionately punishing people because of their political beliefs. 
+In the 1960s, before Marion was home to the CMU, it was home to the notorious Control Unit. 
+Prisoners were locked down in solitary for 22 hours a day. 
+The warden said the unit was to "" control revolutionary attitudes. "" In the 1980s, another experiment called the Lexington High Security Unit held women connected to the Weather Underground, Black Liberation and Puerto Rican independent struggles. 
+The prison radically restricted communication and used sleep deprivation, and constant light for so-called "" ideological conversion. "" Those prisons were eventually shut down, but only through the campaigning of religious groups and human rights advocates, like Amnesty International. 
+Today, civil rights lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights are challenging CMUs in court for depriving prisoners of their due process rights and for retaliating against them for their protected political and religious speech. 
+Many of these documents would have never come to light without this lawsuit. 
+The message of these groups and my message for you today is that we must bear witness to what is being done to these prisoners. 
+This story is not just about prisoners. 
+If we don't listen to what Father Berrigan described as the stories of the dead, they will soon become the stories of ourselves. 
+Thank you. 
+I think the solution to any of these types of situations, any rights abuses, are really dependent on two things. 
+They're dependent on knowledge that it's actually happening and then a means and efficacy to actually make a change. 
+
+Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day. 
+As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, "" I collect bad wines. "" Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it. 
+The second thing I learned that day — and this is as we clear the George Washington Bridge, which was by not a lot — (Laughter) I thought about, wow, I really feel one real regret. 
+In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried. 
+I'm saying, "" Please blow up. "" I don't want this thing to break in 20 pieces like you've seen in those documentaries. 
+And as we're coming down, I had a sense of, wow, dying is not scary. 
+It's almost like we've been preparing for it our whole lives. 
+I challenge you guys that are flying today, imagine the same thing happens on your plane — and please don't — but imagine, and how would you change? 
+
+First of all, I'm a geek. 
+I'm an organic food-eating, carbon footprint-minimizing, robotic surgery geek. 
+And I really want to build green, but I'm very suspicious of all of these well-meaning articles, people long on moral authority and short on data, telling me how to do these kinds of things. 
+And so I have to figure this out for myself. 
+For example: Is this evil? 
+I have dropped a blob of organic yogurt from happy self-actualized local cows on my counter top, and I grab a paper towel and I want to wipe it up. 
+But can I use a paper towel? (Laughter) The answer to this can be found in embodied energy. 
+This is the amount of energy that goes into any paper towel or embodied water, and every time I use a paper towel, I am using this much virtual energy and water. 
+Wipe it up, throw it away. 
+Now, if I compare that to a cotton towel that I can use a thousand times, I don't have a whole lot of embodied energy until I wash that yogurty towel. 
+This is now operating energy. 
+So if I throw my towel in the washing machine, I've now put energy and water back into that towel... 
+unless I use a front-loading, high-efficiency washing machine, (Laughter) and then it looks a little bit better. 
+But what about a recycled paper towel that comes in those little half sheets? 
+Well, now a paper towel looks better. 
+Screw the paper towels. Let's go to a sponge. 
+I wipe it up with a sponge, and I put it under the running water, and I have a lot less energy and a lot more water. 
+Unless you're like me and you leave the handle in the position of hot even when you turn it on, and then you start to use more energy. 
+Or worse, you let it run until it's warm to rinse out your towel. 
+And now all bets are off. 
+(Laughter) So what this says is that sometimes the things that you least expect — the position in which you put the handle — have a bigger effect than any of those other things that you were trying to optimize. 
+Now imagine someone as twisted as me trying to build a house. 
+(Laughter) That's what my husband and I are doing right now. 
+And so, we wanted to know, how green could we be? 
+And there's a thousand and one articles out there telling us how to make all these green trade-offs. 
+And they are just as suspect in telling us to optimize these little things around the edges and missing the elephant in the living room. 
+Now, the average house has about 300 megawatt hours of embodied energy in it; this is the energy it takes to make it — millions and millions of paper towels. 
+We wanted to know how much better we could do. 
+And so, like many people, we start with a house on a lot, and I'm going to show you a typical construction on the top and what we're doing on the bottom. 
+So first, we demolish it. 
+It takes some energy, but if you deconstruct it — you take it all apart, you use the bits — you can get some of that energy back. 
+We then dug a big hole to put in a rainwater catchment tank to take our yard water independent. 
+And then we poured a big foundation for passive solar. 
+Now, you can reduce the embodied energy by about 25 percent by using high fly ash concrete. 
+We then put in framing. 
+And so this is framing — lumber, composite materials — and it's kind of hard to get the embodied energy out of that, but it can be a sustainable resource if you use FSC-certified lumber. 
+We then go on to the first thing that was very surprising. 
+If we put aluminum windows in this house, we would double the energy use right there. 
+Now, PVC is a little bit better, but still not as good as the wood that we chose. 
+We then put in plumbing, electrical and HVAC, and insulate. 
+Now, spray foam is an excellent insulator — it fills in all the cracks — but it is pretty high embodied energy, and, sprayed-in cellulose or blue jeans is a much lower energy alternative to that. 
+We also used straw bale infill for our library, which has zero embodied energy. 
+When it comes time to sheetrock, if you use EcoRock it's about a quarter of the embodied energy of standard sheetrock. 
+And then you get to the finishes, the subject of all of those "" go green "" articles, and on the scale of a house they almost make no difference at all. 
+And yet, all the press is focused on that. 
+Except for flooring. 
+If you put carpeting in your house, it's about a tenth of the embodied energy of the entire house, unless you use concrete or wood for a much lower embodied energy. 
+So now we add in the final construction energy, we add it all up, and we've built a house for less than half of the typical embodied energy for building a house like this. 
+But before we pat ourselves too much on the back, we have poured 151 megawatt hours of energy into constructing this house when there was a house there before. 
+And so the question is: How could we make that back? 
+And so if I run my new energy-efficient house forward, compared with the old, non-energy-efficient house, we make it back in about six years. 
+Now, I probably would have upgraded the old house to be more energy-efficient, and in that case, it would take me more about 20 years to break even. 
+Now, if I hadn't paid attention to embodied energy, it would have taken us over 50 years to break even compared to the upgraded house. 
+So what does this mean? 
+On the scale of my portion of the house, this is equivalent to about as much as I drive in a year, it's about five times as much as if I went entirely vegetarian. 
+But my elephant in the living room flies. 
+Clearly, I need to walk home from TED. 
+But all the calculations for embodied energy are on the blog. 
+And, remember, it's sometimes the things that you are not expecting to be the biggest changes that are. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I want to introduce you to an amazing woman. 
+Davinia was born in Jamaica, emigrated to the US at the age of 18, and now lives just outside of Washington, DC. 
+She's not a high-powered political staffer, nor a lobbyist. 
+She'd probably tell you she's quite unremarkable, but she's having the most remarkable impact. 
+What's incredible about Davinia is that she's willing to spend time every single week focused on people who are not her: people not her in her neighborhood, her state, nor even in her country — people she'd likely never meet. 
+Now — Davinia is not alone. 
+Far from it. 
+She's part of a growing movement. 
+And there's a name for people like Davinia: global citizens. 
+A global citizen is someone who self-identifies first and foremost not as a member of a state, a tribe or a nation, but as a member of the human race, and someone who is prepared to act on that belief, to tackle our world's greatest challenges. 
+Now, some people's immediate reaction to this idea is that it's either a bit utopian or even threatening. 
+So I'd like to share with you a little of my story today, how I ended up here, how it connects with Davinia and, hopefully, with you. 
+Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, I was one of those seriously irritating little kids that never, ever stopped asking, "" Why? "" You might have been one yourself. 
+"" What is a shrimp, and why do we have to keep throwing them on the barbie? "" (Laughter) "" And mum — this haircut. 
+Still terrible. 
+That night with Sonny Boy and his family changed my life forever, because when it came time to go to sleep, we simply laid down on this concrete slab the size of half my bedroom with myself, Sonny Boy, and the rest of his family, seven of us in this long line, with the smell of rubbish all around us and cockroaches crawling all around. 
+Why should Sonny Boy's ability to live out his dreams be determined by where he's born, or what Warren Buffett called 'the ovarian lottery?' "" I just didn't get it, and I needed to understand why. 
+Now, I only later came to understand that the poverty I'd seen in the Philippines was the result of decisions made or not made, man-made, by a succession of colonial powers and corrupt governments who had anything but the interests of Sonny Boy at heart. 
+And as I worked on community development projects over the coming years trying to help build schools, train teachers, and tackle HIV and AIDS, I came to see that community development should be driven by communities themselves, and that although charity is necessary, it's not sufficient. 
+That's why, a few years later, I joined with a group of college friends in bringing the Make Poverty History campaign to Australia. 
+We had this dream of staging this small concert around the time of the G20 with local Aussie artists, and it suddenly exploded one day when we got a phone call from Bono, the Edge and Pearl Jam, who all agreed to headline our concert. 
+It felt like — (Applause) It felt like this incredible validation. 
+But here's the thing: it didn't last. 
+See, there was a change in government, and six years later, all that new money disappeared. 
+What did we learn? 
+We needed a sustainable movement, not one that is susceptible to the fluctuating moods of a politician or the hint of an economic downturn. 
+And so this is what we embarked upon. 
+We could only think of one way. 
+We needed to somehow turn that short-term excitement of people involved with the Make Poverty History campaign into long-term passion. 
+It had to be part of their identity. 
+So in 2012, we cofounded an organization that had exactly that as its goal. 
+And there was only one name for it: Global Citizen. 
+But this is not about any one organization. 
+This is about citizens taking action. 
+And research data tells us that of the total population who even care about global issues, only 18 percent have done anything about it. 
+It's not that people don't want to act. 
+And as we did so, we discovered something really thrilling, that when you make global citizenship your mission, you suddenly find yourself with some extraordinary allies. 
+But how did we actually go about recruiting and engaging those global citizens? 
+Well, we used the universal language: music. 
+We made sure that these festivals coincided with the UN General Assembly meeting, so that leaders who need to hear our voices couldn't possible ignore them. 
+But there was a twist: you couldn't buy a ticket. 
+Activism is the currency. 
+I had no interest in citizenship purely as some sort of feel-good thing. 
+Globally, we've now signed up citizens in over 150 countries around the world. 
+See, we don't need to create global citizens from nothing. 
+Here's what she did. 
+She started writing letters, emailing politicians' offices. 
+Now, maybe that doesn't sound like a lot to you. 
+Well, it achieved a lot because she wasn't alone. 
+Her actions, alongside 142,000 other global citizens', led the US government to double their investment into Global Partnership for Education. 
+Global citizens encouraged by the late-night host Stephen Colbert launched a Twitter invasion on Norway. 
+Global citizens together with Rotarians called on the Canadian, UK, and Australian governments to boost their investment into polio eradication. 
+But despite all of this momentum, we face some huge challenges. 
+See, you might be thinking to yourself, how can we possibly persuade world leaders to sustain a focus on global issues? 
+Indeed, the powerful American politician Tip O'Neill once said, "All politics is local." 
+That's what always got politicians elected: to seek, gain and hold onto power through the pursuit of local or at very best national interests. 
+I experienced this for the first time when I was 21 years old. 
+I took a meeting with a then-Australian Foreign Minister who shall remain nameless — [Alexander Downer] (Laughter) And behind closed doors, I shared with him my passion to end extreme poverty. 
+We can do this. "" And he paused, looked down on me with cold, dismissive eyes, and he said, "" Hugh, no one gives a funk about foreign aid. "" Except he didn't use the word "" funk. "" He went on. 
+This is, I believe, outdated, even dangerous thinking. 
+Parochialism offers this false dichotomy because it pits the poor in one country against the poor in another. 
+Now, global citizens — they understand this. 
+There was no social media. 
+Today, billions of citizens have more tools, more access to information, more capacity to influence than ever before. 
+Both the problems and the tools to solve them are right before us. 
+The world has changed, and those of us who look beyond our borders are on the right side of history. 
+So where are we? 
+So we run this amazing festival, we've scored some big policy wins, and citizens are signing up all over the world. 
+But have we achieved our mission? 
+No. 
+We have such a long way to go. 
+But this is the opportunity that I see. 
+The concept of global citizenship, self-evident in its logic but until now impractical in many ways, has coincided with this particular moment in which we are privileged to live. 
+Global citizens will partner with the world's leading NGOs to end diseases like polio and malaria. 
+Global citizens will sign up in every corner of this globe, increasing the frequency, quality and impact of their actions. 
+These dreams are within reach. 
+Imagine an army of millions growing into tens of millions, connected, informed, engaged and unwilling to take no for an answer. 
+Over all these years, I've tried to reconnect with Sonny Boy. 
+Sadly, I've been unable to. 
+I'd love to sit down with him, wherever he is, and share with him how much the time I spent on Smoky Mountain inspired me. 
+Thanks to him and so many others, I came to understand the importance of being part of a movement of people — the kids willing to look up from their screens and out to the world, the global citizens. 
+Global citizens who stand together, who ask the question "" Why?, "" who reject the naysayers, and embrace the amazing possibilities of the world we share. 
+I'm a global citizen. 
+Are you? 
+Thank you. 
+
+I collaborate with bacteria. 
+And I'm about to show you some stop-motion footage that I made recently where you'll see bacteria accumulating minerals from their environment over the period of an hour. 
+So what you're seeing here is the bacteria metabolizing, and as they do so they create an electrical charge. 
+And this attracts metals from their local environment. 
+And these metals accumulate as minerals on the surface of the bacteria. 
+One of the most pervasive problems in the world today for people is inadequate access to clean drinking water. 
+And the desalination process is one where we take out salts. 
+We can use it for drinking and agriculture. 
+Removing the salts from water — particularly seawater — through reverse osmosis is a critical technique for countries who do not have access to clean drinking water around the globe. 
+So seawater reverse osmosis is a membrane-filtration technology. 
+We take the water from the sea and we apply pressure. 
+And this pressure forces the seawater through a membrane. 
+This takes energy, producing clean water. 
+But we're also left with a concentrated salt solution, or brine. 
+But the process is very expensive and it's cost-prohibitive for many countries around the globe. 
+And also, the brine that's produced is oftentimes just pumped back out into the sea. 
+And this is detrimental to the local ecology of the sea area that it's pumped back out into. 
+So I work in Singapore at the moment, and this is a place that's really a leading place for desalination technology. 
+And Singapore proposes by 2060 to produce [900] million liters per day of desalinated water. 
+But this will produce an equally massive amount of desalination brine. 
+And this is where my collaboration with bacteria comes into play. 
+So what we're doing at the moment is we're accumulating metals like calcium, potassium and magnesium from out of desalination brine. 
+And this, in terms of magnesium and the amount of water that I just mentioned, equates to a $4.5 billion mining industry for Singapore — a place that doesn't have any natural resources. 
+So I'd like you to image a mining industry in a way that one hasn't existed before; imagine a mining industry that doesn't mean defiling the Earth; imagine bacteria helping us do this by accumulating and precipitating and sedimenting minerals out of desalination brine. 
+And what you can see here is the beginning of an industry in a test tube, a mining industry that is in harmony with nature. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+OK, first, some introductions. 
+My mom, Jennie, took this picture. 
+That's my dad, Frank, in the middle. 
+John Patrick's sitting on his lap and Kevin Michael's on his right. 
+And in the pale-blue windbreaker, Susan Diane. Me. 
+I loved growing up in a big family. 
+And one of my favorite things was picking names. 
+But by the time child number seven came along, we had nearly run out of middle names. 
+It was a long deliberation before we finally settled on Jennifer Bridget. 
+Every parent in this audience knows the joy and excitement of picking a new baby's name. 
+And I was excited and thrilled to help my mom in that special ceremonial moment. 
+But it's not like that everywhere. 
+I travel a lot and I see a lot. 
+But it took me by surprise to learn in an area of Ethiopia, parents delay picking the names for their new babies by a month or more. 
+Why delay? 
+Why not take advantage of this special ceremonial time? 
+Well, they delay because they're afraid. 
+They're afraid their baby will die. 
+And this loss might be a little more bearable without a name. 
+A face without a name might help them feel just a little less attached. 
+So here we are in one part of the world — a time of joy, excitement, dreaming of the future of that child — while in another world, parents are filled with dread, not daring to dream of a future for their child beyond a few precious weeks. 
+How can that be? 
+How can it be that 2.6 million babies die around the world before they're even one month old? 
+2.6 million. 
+That's the population of Vancouver. 
+And the shocking thing is: Why? 
+Now, I remember recently seeing an updated pie chart. 
+And the pie chart was labeled, "Causes of death in children under five worldwide." 
+And there was a pretty big section of that pie chart, about 40 percent — 40 percent was labeled "" neonatal. "" Now, "" neonatal "" is not a cause of death. 
+Neonatal is simply an adjective, an adjective that means that the child is less than one month old. 
+For me, "" neonatal "" said: "" We have no idea. "" Now, I'm a scientist. I'm a doctor. 
+I want to fix things. 
+But you can't fix what you can't define. 
+So our first step in restoring the dreams of those parents is to answer the question: Why are babies dying? 
+So today, I want to talk about a new approach, an approach that I feel will not only help us know why babies are dying, but is beginning to completely transform the whole field of global health. 
+It's called "" Precision Public Health. "" For me, precision medicine comes from a very special place. 
+But too often my treatments made them feel worse. 
+I still remember young women being driven to my clinic by their moms — adults, who had to be helped into my exam room by their mothers. 
+They were so weak from the treatment I had given them. 
+But at the time, in those front lines in the war on cancer, we had few tools. 
+And the tools we did have couldn't differentiate between the cancer cells that we wanted to hit hard and those healthy cells that we wanted to preserve. 
+And so the side effects that you're all very familiar with — hair loss, being sick to your stomach, having a suppressed immune system, so infection was a constant threat — were always surrounding us. 
+And then I moved to the biotechnology industry. 
+And I got to work on a new approach for breast cancer patients that could do a better job of telling the healthy cells from the unhealthy or cancer cells. 
+It's a drug called Herceptin. 
+And what Herceptin allowed us to do is to precisely target HER2-positive breast cancer, at the time, the scariest form of breast cancer. 
+And that precision let us hit hard the cancer cells, while sparing and being more gentle on the normal cells. 
+A huge breakthrough. 
+It felt like a miracle, so much so that today, we're harnessing all those tools — big data, consumer monitoring, gene sequencing and more — to tackle a broad variety of diseases. 
+That's allowing us to target individuals with the right remedies at the right time. 
+Precision medicine revolutionized cancer therapy. 
+Everything changed. 
+And I want everything to change again. 
+So I've been asking myself: Why should we limit this smarter, more precise, better way to tackle diseases to the rich world? 
+Now, don't misunderstand me — I'm not talking about bringing expensive medicines like Herceptin to the developing world, although I'd actually kind of like that. 
+What I am talking about is moving from this precise targeting for individuals to tackle public health problems in populations. 
+Now, OK, I know probably you're thinking, "" She's crazy. 
+You can't do that. That's too ambitious. "" But here's the thing: we're already doing this in a limited way, and it's already starting to make a big difference. 
+So here's what's happening. 
+But like many, many doctors who trained in San Francisco in the '80s, I also trained as an AIDS doctor. 
+It was a terrible time. 
+AIDS was a death sentence. 
+All my patients died. 
+Now, things are better, but HIV / AIDS remains a terrible global challenge. 
+Worldwide, about 17 million women are living with HIV. 
+We know that when these women become pregnant, they can transfer the virus to their baby. 
+We also know in the absence of therapy, half those babies will not survive until the age of two. 
+But we know that antiretroviral therapy can virtually guarantee that she will not transmit the virus to the baby. 
+So what do we do? 
+Well, a one-size-fits-all approach, kind of like that blast of chemo, would mean we test and treat every pregnant woman in the world. 
+That would do the job. 
+But it's just not practical. 
+So instead, we target those areas where HIV rates are the highest. 
+We know in certain countries in sub-Saharan Africa we can test and treat pregnant women where rates are highest. 
+This precision approach to a public health problem has cut by nearly half HIV transmission from mothers to baby in the last five years. 
+(Applause) Screening pregnant women in certain areas in the developing world is a powerful example of how precision public health can change things on a big scale. 
+So... 
+How do we do that? 
+We know who to target, what to target, where to target and how to target. 
+And that, for me, are the important elements of precision public health: who, what, where and how. 
+But let's go back to the 2.6 million babies who die before they're one month old. 
+Here's the problem: we just don't know. 
+It may seem unbelievable, but the way we figure out the causes of infant mortality in those countries with the highest infant mortality is a conversation with mom. 
+A health worker asks a mom who has just lost her child, "Was the baby vomiting? Did they have a fever?" 
+And that conversation may take place as long as three months after the baby has died. 
+Now, put yourself in the shoes of that mom. 
+It's a heartbreaking, excruciating conversation. 
+And even worse — it's not that helpful, because we might know there was a fever or vomiting, but we don't know why. 
+So in the absence of knowing that knowledge, we cannot prevent that mom, that family, or other families in that community from suffering the same tragedy. 
+But what if we applied a precision public health approach? 
+Let's say, for example, we find out in certain areas of Africa that babies are dying because of a bacterial infection transferred from the mother to the baby, known as Group B streptococcus. 
+In the absence of treatment, mom has a seven times higher chance that her next baby will die. 
+Once we define the problem, we can prevent that death with something as cheap and safe as penicillin. 
+We can do that because then we'll know. 
+And that's the point: once we know, we can bring the right interventions to the right population in the right places to save lives. 
+With this approach, and with these interventions and others like them, I have no doubt that a precision public health approach can help our world achieve our 15-year goal. 
+And that would translate into a million babies' lives saved every single year. 
+One million babies every single year. 
+And why would we stop there? 
+A much more powerful approach to public health — imagine what might be possible. 
+Why couldn't we more effectively tackle malnutrition? 
+Why wouldn't we prevent cervical cancer in women? 
+And why not eradicate malaria? 
+(Applause) Yes, clap for that! (Applause) 
+So, you know, I live in two different worlds, one world populated by scientists, and another world populated by public health professionals. 
+The promise of precision public health is to bring these two worlds together. 
+But you know, we all live in two worlds: the rich world and the poor world. 
+And what I'm most excited about about precision public health is bridging these two worlds. 
+Every day in the rich world, we're bringing incredible talent and tools — everything at our disposal — to precisely target diseases in ways I never imagined would be possible. 
+Surely, we can tap into that kind of talent and tools to stop babies dying in the poor world. 
+If we did, then every parent would have the confidence to name their child the moment that child is born, daring to dream that that child's life will be measured in decades, not days. 
+(Applause) 
+
+There's something that I'd like you to see. 
+(Video) Reporter: It's a story that's deeply unsettled millions in China: footage of a two-year-old girl hit by a van and left bleeding in the street by passersby, footage too graphic to be shown. 
+The entire accident is caught on camera. 
+The driver pauses after hitting the child, his back wheels seen resting on her for over a second. 
+Within two minutes, three people pass two-year-old Wang Yue by. 
+The first walks around the badly injured toddler completely. 
+Others look at her before moving off. 
+Peter Singer: There were other people who walked past Wang Yue, and a second van ran over her legs before a street cleaner raised the alarm. 
+She was rushed to hospital, but it was too late. She died. 
+I wonder how many of you, looking at that, said to yourselves just now, "" I would not have done that. 
+I would have stopped to help. "" Raise your hands if that thought occurred to you. 
+As I thought, that's most of you. 
+And I believe you. I'm sure you're right. 
+But before you give yourself too much credit, look at this. 
+UNICEF reports that in 2011, 6.9 million children under five died from preventable, poverty-related diseases. 
+UNICEF thinks that that's good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990. That is good. 
+But still, 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day. 
+Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? 
+Does it really matter that they're far away? 
+I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference. 
+The fact that they're not right in front of us, the fact, of course, that they're of a different nationality or race, none of that seems morally relevant to me. 
+What is really important is, can we reduce that death toll? Can we save some of those 19,000 children dying every day? 
+And the answer is, yes we can. 
+Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need. 
+You can think what your own habit is, whether it's a new car, a vacation or just something like buying bottled water when the water that comes out of the tap is perfectly safe to drink. 
+You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization, the Against Malaria Foundation, which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets like this one to protect children like this one, and we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria, just one of the many preventable diseases that are responsible for some of those 19,000 children dying every day. 
+Fortunately, more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement: effective altruism. 
+It's important because it combines both the heart and the head. 
+The heart, of course, you felt. 
+You felt the empathy for that child. 
+But it's really important to use the head as well to make sure that what you do is effective and well-directed, and not only that, but also I think reason helps us to understand that other people, wherever they are, are like us, that they can suffer as we can, that parents grieve for the deaths of their children, as we do, and that just as our lives and our well-being matter to us, it matters just as much to all of these people. 
+So I think reason is not just some neutral tool to help you get whatever you want. 
+It does help us to put perspective on our situation. 
+And I think that's why many of the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math. 
+And that might seem surprising, because a lot of people think, "" Philosophy is remote from the real world; economics, we're told, just makes us more selfish, and we know that math is for nerds. "" But in fact it does make a difference, and in fact there's one particular nerd who has been a particularly effective altruist because he got this. 
+This is the website of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, "" All lives have equal value. "" That's the understanding, the rational understanding of our situation in the world that has led to these people being the most effective altruists in history, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. 
+(Applause) No one, not Andrew Carnegie, not John D. Rockefeller, has ever given as much to charity as each one of these three, and they have used their intelligence to make sure that it is highly effective. 
+According to one estimate, the Gates Foundation has already saved 5.8 million lives and many millions more, people, getting diseases that would have made them very sick, even if eventually they survived. 
+Over the coming years, undoubtably the Gates Foundation is going to give a lot more, is going to save a lot more lives. 
+Well, you might say, that's fine if you're a billionaire, you can have that kind of impact. 
+But if I'm not, what can I do? 
+So I'm going to look at four questions that people ask that maybe stand in the way of them giving. 
+They worry how much of a difference they can make. 
+But you don't have to be a billionaire. 
+This is Toby Ord. He's a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford. 
+He became an effective altruist when he calculated that with the money that he was likely to earn throughout his career, an academic career, he could give enough to cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left for a perfectly adequate standard of living. 
+So Toby founded an organization called Giving What We Can to spread this information, to unite people who want to share some of their income, and to ask people to pledge to give 10 percent of what they earn over their lifetime to fighting global poverty. 
+Toby himself does better than that. 
+He's pledged to live on 18,000 pounds a year — that's less than 30,000 dollars — and to give the rest to those organizations. 
+And yes, Toby is married and he does have a mortgage. 
+This is a couple at a later stage of life, Charlie Bresler and Diana Schott, who, when they were young, when they met, were activists against the Vietnam War, fought for social justice, and then moved into careers, as most people do, didn't really do anything very active about those values, although they didn't abandon them. 
+And then, as they got to the age at which many people start to think of retirement, they returned to them, and they've decided to cut back on their spending, to live modestly, and to give both money and time to helping to fight global poverty. 
+Now, mentioning time might lead you to think, "" Well, should I abandon my career and put all of my time into saving some of these 19,000 lives that are lost every day? "" One person who's thought quite a bit about this issue of how you can have a career that will have the biggest impact for good in the world is Will Crouch. 
+He's a graduate student in philosophy, and he's set up a website called 80,000 Hours, the number of hours he estimates most people spend on their career, to advise people on how to have the best, most effective career. 
+But you might be surprised to know that one of the careers that he encourages people to consider, if they have the right abilities and character, is to go into banking or finance. 
+Why? Because if you earn a lot of money, you can give away a lot of money, and if you're successful in that career, you could give enough to an aid organization so that it could employ, let's say, five aid workers in developing countries, and each one of them would probably do about as much good as you would have done. 
+So you can quintuple the impact by leading that kind of career. 
+Here's one young man who's taken this advice. 
+His name is Matt Weiger. 
+He was a student at Princeton in philosophy and math, actually won the prize for the best undergraduate philosophy thesis last year when he graduated. 
+But he's gone into finance in New York. 
+He's already earning enough so that he's giving a six-figure sum to effective charities and still leaving himself with enough to live on. 
+Matt has also helped me to set up an organization that I'm working with that has the name taken from the title of a book I wrote, "The Life You Can Save," which is trying to change our culture so that more people think that if we're going to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots and not cheat, steal, maim, kill, but that if we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little. 
+And the organization draws together people of different generations, like Holly Morgan, who's an undergraduate, who's pledged to give 10 percent of the little amount that she has, and on the right, Ada Wan, who has worked directly for the poor, but has now gone to Yale to do an MBA to have more to give. 
+Many people will think, though, that charities aren't really all that effective. 
+So let's talk about effectiveness. 
+Toby Ord is very concerned about this, and he's calculated that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others, so it's very important to find the effective ones. 
+Take, for example, providing a guide dog for a blind person. 
+That's a good thing to do, right? 
+Well, right, it is a good thing to do, but you have to think what else you could do with the resources. 
+It costs about 40,000 dollars to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person. 
+It costs somewhere between 20 and 50 dollars to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma. 
+So you do the sums, and you get something like that. 
+You could provide one guide dog for one blind American, or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness. 
+I think it's clear what's the better thing to do. 
+But if you want to look for effective charities, this is a good website to go to. 
+GiveWell exists to really assess the impact of charities, not just whether they're well-run, and it's screened hundreds of charities and currently is recommending only three, of which the Against Malaria Foundation is number one. 
+So it's very tough. If you want to look for other recommendations, thelifeyoucansave.com and Giving What We Can both have a somewhat broader list, but you can find effective organizations, and not just in the area of saving lives from the poor. 
+I'm pleased to say that there is now also a website looking at effective animal organizations. 
+That's another cause that I've been concerned about all my life, the immense amount of suffering that humans inflict on literally tens of billions of animals every year. 
+So if you want to look for effective organizations to reduce that suffering, you can go to Effective Animal Activism. 
+And some effective altruists think it's very important to make sure that our species survives at all. 
+So they're looking at ways to reduce the risk of extinction. 
+Here's one risk of extinction that we all became aware of recently, when an asteroid passed close to our planet. 
+Possibly research could help us not only to predict the path of asteroids that might collide with us, but actually to deflect them. 
+So some people think that would be a good thing to give to. 
+There's many possibilities. 
+My final question is, some people will think it's a burden to give. 
+I don't really believe it is. 
+I've enjoyed giving all of my life since I was a graduate student. 
+It's been something fulfilling to me. 
+Charlie Bresler said to me that he's not an altruist. 
+He thinks that the life he's saving is his own. 
+And Holly Morgan told me that she used to battle depression until she got involved with effective altruism, and now is one of the happiest people she knows. 
+I think one of the reasons for this is that being an effective altruist helps to overcome what I call the Sisyphus problem. 
+Here's Sisyphus as portrayed by Titian, condemned by the gods to push a huge boulder up to the top of the hill. 
+Just as he gets there, the effort becomes too much, the boulder escapes, rolls all the way down the hill, he has to trudge back down to push it up again, and the same thing happens again and again for all eternity. 
+Does that remind you of a consumer lifestyle, where you work hard to get money, you spend that money on consumer goods which you hope you'll enjoy using? 
+But then the money's gone, you have to work hard to get more, spend more, and to maintain the same level of happiness, it's kind of a hedonic treadmill. 
+You never get off, and you never really feel satisfied. 
+Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment. 
+It enables you to have a solid basis for self-esteem on which you can feel your life was really worth living. 
+I'm going to conclude by telling you about an email that I received while I was writing this talk just a month or so ago. 
+It's from a man named Chris Croy, who I'd never heard of. 
+This is a picture of him showing him recovering from surgery. 
+Why was he recovering from surgery? 
+The email began, "" Last Tuesday, I anonymously donated my right kidney to a stranger. 
+That started a kidney chain which enabled four people to receive kidneys. "" There's about 100 people each year in the U.S. 
+and more in other countries who do that. 
+I was pleased to read it. Chris went on to say that he'd been influenced by my writings in what he did. 
+Well, I have to admit, I'm also somewhat embarrassed by that, because I still have two kidneys. 
+But Chris went on to say that he didn't think that what he'd done was all that amazing, because he calculated that the number of life-years that he had added to people, the extension of life, was about the same that you could achieve if you gave 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation. 
+And that did make me feel a little bit better, because I have given more than 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation and to various other effective charities. 
+So if you're feeling bad because you still have two kidneys as well, there's a way for you to get off the hook. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Today, I want you to look at children who become suicide bombers through a completely different lens. 
+In 2009, there were 500 bomb blasts across Pakistan. 
+I spent the year working with children who were training to become suicide bombers and with Taliban recruiters, trying to understand how the Taliban were converting these children into live ammunition and why these children were actively signing up to their cause. 
+I want you to watch a short video from my latest documentary film, "" Children of the Taliban. "" (Singing) The Taliban now run their own schools. 
+They target poor families and convince the parents to send their children. 
+In return, they provide free food and shelter and sometimes pay the families a monthly stipend. 
+We've obtained a propaganda video made by the Taliban. 
+Young boys are taught justifications for suicide attacks and the execution of spies. 
+I made contact with a child from Swat who studied in a madrassa like this. 
+Hazrat Ali is from a poor farming family in Swat. 
+He joined the Taliban a year ago when he was 13. 
+How do the Taliban in your area get people to join them? 
+Hazrat Ali: They first call us to the mosque and preach to us. 
+Then they take us to a madrassa and teach us things from the Koran. 
+Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy: He tells me that children are then given months of military training. 
+HA: They teach us to use machine guns, Kalashnikov, rocket launchers, grenades, bombs. 
+They ask us to use them only against the infidels. 
+Then they teach us to do a suicide attack. 
+SOC: Would you like to carry out a suicide attack? 
+HA: If God gives me strength. 
+SOC: I, in my research, have seen that the Taliban have perfected the way in which they recruit and train children, and I think it's a five-step process. 
+Step one is that the Taliban prey on families that are large, that are poor, that live in rural areas. 
+They separate the parents from the children by promising to provide food, clothing, shelter to these children. 
+Then they ship them off, hundreds of miles away to hard-line schools that run along the Taliban agenda. 
+Step two: They teach the children the Koran, which is Islam's holiest book, in Arabic, a language these children do not understand and cannot speak. 
+They rely very heavily on teachers, who I have personally seen distort the message to these children as and when it suits their purpose to. 
+These children are explicitly forbidden from reading newspapers, listening to radio, reading any books that the teachers do not prescribe them. 
+If any child is found violating these rules, he is severely reprimanded. 
+Effectively, the Taliban create a complete blackout of any other source of information for these children. 
+Step three: The Taliban want these children to hate the world that they currently live in. 
+So they beat these children — I have seen it; they feed them twice a day dried bread and water; they rarely allow them to play games; they tell them that, for eight hours at a time, all they have to do is read the Koran. 
+The children are virtual prisoners; they cannot leave, they cannot go home. 
+Their parents are so poor, they have no resources to get them back. 
+Step four: The older members of the Taliban, the fighters, start talking to the younger boys about the glories of martyrdom. 
+They talk to them about how when they die, they will be received up with lakes of honey and milk, how there will be 72 virgins waiting for them in paradise, how there will be unlimited food, and how this glory is going to propel them to become heroes in their neighborhoods. 
+Effectively, this is the brainwashing process that has begun. 
+Step five: I believe the Taliban have one of the most effective means of propaganda. 
+Their videos that they use are intercut with photographs of men and women and children dying in Iraq and Afghanistan and in Pakistan. 
+And the basic message is that the Western powers do not care about civilian deaths, so those people who live in areas and support governments that work with Western powers are fair game. 
+That's why Pakistani civilians, over 6,000 of whom have been killed in the last two years alone, are fair game. 
+Now these children are primed to become suicide bombers. 
+They're ready to go out and fight because they've been told that this is effectively their only way to glorify Islam. 
+I want you to watch another excerpt from the film. 
+This boy is called Zenola. 
+He blew himself up, killing six. 
+This boy is called Sadik. 
+He killed 22. 
+This boy is called Messoud. 
+He killed 28. 
+The Taliban are running suicide schools, preparing a generation of boys for atrocities against civilians. 
+Do you want to carry out a suicide attack? 
+Boy: I would love to. 
+But only if I get permission from my dad. 
+When I look at suicide bombers younger than me, or my age, I get so inspired by their terrific attacks. 
+SOC: What blessing would you get from carrying out a suicide attack? 
+Boy: On the day of judgment, God will ask me, "Why did you do that?" 
+I will answer, "" My Lord! Only to make you happy! 
+I have laid down my life fighting the infidels. "" Then God will look at my intention. 
+If my intention was to eradicate evil for Islam, then I will be rewarded with paradise. 
+Singer: ♫ On the day of judgment ♫ ♫ My God will call me ♫ ♫ My body will be put back together ♫ ♫ And God will ask me why I did this ♫ SOC: I leave you all with this thought: If you grew up in these circumstances, faced with these choices, would you choose to live in this world or in the glorious afterlife? 
+As one Taliban recruiter told me, "There will always be sacrificial lambs in this war." 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We've got a real problem with math education right now. 
+Basically, no one's very happy. 
+Those learning it think it's disconnected, uninteresting and hard. 
+Those trying to employ them think they don't know enough. 
+Governments realize that it's a big deal for our economies, but don't know how to fix it. 
+And teachers are also frustrated. 
+Yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history. 
+So at one end we've got falling interest in education in math, and at the other end we've got a more mathematical world, a more quantitative world than we ever have had. 
+So what's the problem, why has this chasm opened up, and what can we do to fix it? 
+Well actually, I think the answer is staring us right in the face: Use computers. 
+I believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work. 
+So to explain that, let me first talk a bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education. 
+See, in the real world math isn't necessarily done by mathematicians. 
+It's done by geologists, engineers, biologists, all sorts of different people — modeling and simulation. 
+It's actually very popular. 
+But in education it looks very different — dumbed-down problems, lots of calculating, mostly by hand. 
+Lots of things that seem simple and not difficult like in the real world, except if you're learning it. 
+And another thing about math: math sometimes looks like math — like in this example here — and sometimes it doesn't — like "" Am I drunk? "" And then you get an answer that's quantitative in the modern world. 
+You wouldn't have expected that a few years back. 
+But now you can find out all about — unfortunately, my weight is a little higher than that, but — all about what happens. 
+So let's zoom out a bit and ask, why are we teaching people math? 
+What's the point of teaching people math? 
+And in particular, why are we teaching them math in general? 
+Why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject? 
+Well, I think there are about three reasons: technical jobs so critical to the development of our economies, what I call "" everyday living "" — to function in the world today, you've got to be pretty quantitative, much more so than a few years ago: figure out your mortgages, being skeptical of government statistics, those kinds of things — and thirdly, what I would call something like logical mind training, logical thinking. 
+Over the years we've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically. It's part of human society. 
+It's very important to learn that math is a great way to do that. 
+So let's ask another question. 
+What is math? 
+What do we mean when we say we're doing math, or educating people to do math? 
+Well, I think it's about four steps, roughly speaking, starting with posing the right question. 
+What is it that we want to ask? What is it we're trying to find out here? 
+And this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world, beyond virtually any other part of doing math. 
+People ask the wrong question, and surprisingly enough, they get the wrong answer, for that reason, if not for others. 
+So the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem. 
+That's stage two. 
+Once you've done that, then there's the computation step. 
+Turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form. 
+And of course, math is very powerful at doing that. 
+And then finally, turn it back to the real world. 
+Did it answer the question? 
+And also verify it — crucial step. 
+Now here's the crazy thing right now. 
+In math education, we're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand. 
+Yet, that's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice. 
+Instead, we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one, two and four — conceptualizing problems, applying them, getting the teacher to run them through how to do that. 
+See, crucial point here: math is not equal to calculating. 
+Math is a much broader subject than calculating. 
+Now it's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years. 
+There was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand. 
+But in the last few decades that has totally changed. 
+We've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that I could ever imagine with computers. 
+Calculating was typically the limiting step, and now often it isn't. 
+So I think in terms of the fact that math has been liberated from calculating. 
+But that math liberation didn't get into education yet. 
+See, I think of calculating, in a sense, as the machinery of math. 
+It's the chore. 
+It's the thing you'd like to avoid if you can, like to get a machine to do. 
+It's a means to an end, not an end in itself, and automation allows us to have that machinery. 
+Computers allow us to do that — and this is not a small problem by any means. 
+I estimated that, just today, across the world, we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand. 
+That's an amazing amount of human endeavor. 
+So we better be damn sure — and by the way, they didn't even have fun doing it, most of them — so we better be damn sure that we know why we're doing that and it has a real purpose. 
+I think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculations where it really makes sense to teach people that. 
+And I think there are some cases. 
+For example: mental arithmetic. 
+I still do a lot of that, mainly for estimating. 
+People say, "" Is such and such true? "" And I'll say, "" Hmm, not sure. "" I'll think about it roughly. 
+It's still quicker to do that and more practical. 
+So I think practicality is one case where it's worth teaching people by hand. 
+And then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating, but I think they're relatively small in number. 
+One thing I often ask about is ancient Greek and how this relates. 
+See, the thing we're doing right now is we're forcing people to learn mathematics. 
+It's a major subject. 
+I'm not for one minute suggesting that, if people are interested in hand calculating or in following their own interests in any subject however bizarre — they should do that. 
+That's absolutely the right thing, for people to follow their self-interest. 
+I was somewhat interested in ancient Greek, but I don't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient Greek. 
+I don't think it's warranted. 
+So I have this distinction between what we're making people do and the subject that's sort of mainstream and the subject that, in a sense, people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that. 
+So what are the issues people bring up with this? 
+Well one of them is, they say, you need to get the basics first. 
+You shouldn't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject. 
+So my usual question is, what do you mean by "" basics? "" Basics of what? 
+Are the basics of driving a car learning how to service it, or design it for that matter? 
+Are the basics of writing learning how to sharpen a quill? 
+I don't think so. 
+I think you need to separate the basics of what you're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done and automation allows you to make that separation. 
+A hundred years ago, it's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things. 
+But automation in cars allowed that to separate, so driving is now a quite separate subject, so to speak, from engineering of the car or learning how to service it. 
+So automation allows this separation and also allows — in the case of driving, and I believe also in the future case of maths — a democratized way of doing that. 
+It can be spread across a much larger number of people who can really work with that. 
+So there's another thing that comes up with basics. 
+People confuse, in my view, the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching. 
+So just because paper was invented before computers, it doesn't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics. 
+My daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this. 
+She enjoys making what she calls "" paper laptops. "" (Laughter) So I asked her one day, "" You know, when I was your age, I didn't make these. 
+Why do you think that was? "" And after a second or two, carefully reflecting, she said, "" No paper? "" (Laughter) If you were born after computers and paper, it doesn't really matter which order you're taught with them in, you just want to have the best tool. 
+So another one that comes up is "" Computers dumb math down. "" That somehow, if you use a computer, it's all mindless button-pushing, but if you do it by hand, it's all intellectual. 
+This one kind of annoys me, I must say. 
+Do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is more than applying procedures to problems they don't really understand, for reasons they don't get? 
+I don't think so. 
+And what's worse, what they're learning there isn't even practically useful anymore. 
+Might have been 50 years ago, but it isn't anymore. 
+When they're out of education, they do it on a computer. 
+Just to be clear, I think computers can really help with this problem, actually make it more conceptual. 
+Now, of course, like any great tool, they can be used completely mindlessly, like turning everything into a multimedia show, like the example I was shown of solving an equation by hand, where the computer was the teacher — show the student how to manipulate and solve it by hand. 
+This is just nuts. 
+Why are we using computers to show a student how to solve a problem by hand that the computer should be doing anyway? 
+All backwards. 
+Let me show you that you can also make problems harder to calculate. 
+See, normally in school, you do things like solve quadratic equations. 
+But you see, when you're using a computer, you can just substitute. 
+You can make it a quartic equation. Make it kind of harder, calculating-wise. 
+Same principles applied — calculations, harder. 
+And problems in the real world look nutty and horrible like this. 
+They've got hair all over them. 
+They're not just simple, dumbed-down things that we see in school math. 
+And think of the outside world. 
+Do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers? 
+I don't think so — quite the opposite. 
+So the problem we've really got in math education is not that computers might dumb it down, but that we have dumbed-down problems right now. 
+Well, another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding. 
+So if you go through lots of examples, you can get the answer, you can understand how the basics of the system work better. 
+I think there is one thing that I think very valid here, which is that I think understanding procedures and processes is important. 
+But there's a fantastic way to do that in the modern world. 
+It's called programming. 
+Programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days, and it's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand. 
+If you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it. 
+So programming is the way I think we should be doing that. 
+So to be clear, what I really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual, simultaneously. 
+I can't think of any other subject where that's recently been possible. 
+It's usually some kind of choice between the vocational and the intellectual. 
+But I think we can do both at the same time here. 
+And we open up so many more possibilities. 
+You can do so many more problems. 
+What I really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they've ever got before. 
+And experience of harder problems — being able to play with the math, interact with it, feel it. 
+We want people who can feel the math instinctively. 
+That's what computers allow us to do. 
+Another thing it allows us to do is reorder the curriculum. 
+Traditionally it's been by how difficult it is to calculate, but now we can reorder it by how difficult it is to understand the concepts, however hard the calculating. 
+So calculus has traditionally been taught very late. 
+Why is this? 
+Well, it's damn hard doing the calculations, that's the problem. 
+But actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group. 
+This was an example I built for my daughter. 
+And very, very simple. 
+We were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number. 
+And of course, it turns into a circle. 
+And by the way, she was also very insistent on being able to change the color, an important feature for this demonstration. 
+You can see that this is a very early step into limits and differential calculus and what happens when you take things to an extreme — and very small sides and a very large number of sides. 
+Very simple example. 
+That's a view of the world that we don't usually give people for many, many years after this. 
+And yet, that's a really important practical view of the world. 
+So one of the roadblocks we have in moving this agenda forward is exams. 
+In the end, if we test everyone by hand in exams, it's kind of hard to get the curricula changed to a point where they can use computers during the semesters. 
+And one of the reasons it's so important — so it's very important to get computers in exams. 
+And then we can ask questions, real questions, questions like, what's the best life insurance policy to get? — real questions that people have in their everyday lives. 
+And you see, this isn't some dumbed-down model here. 
+This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens. 
+How many years of protection do I need? 
+What does that do to the payments and to the interest rates and so forth? 
+Now I'm not for one minute suggesting it's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams, but I think it's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people's real understanding. 
+So I believe [there is] critical reform we have to do in computer-based math. 
+We have got to make sure that we can move our economies forward, and also our societies, based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics. 
+This isn't some optional extra. 
+And the country that does this first will, in my view, leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even, an improved economy, an improved outlook. 
+In fact, I even talk about us moving from what we often call now the "" knowledge economy "" to what we might call a "" computational knowledge economy, "" where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is. 
+We can engage so many more students with this, and they can have a better time doing it. 
+And let's understand: this is not an incremental sort of change. 
+We're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math. 
+And you know if you walk across a chasm, you end up making it worse than if you didn't start at all — bigger disaster. 
+No, what I'm suggesting is that we should leap off, we should increase our velocity so it's high, and we should leap off one side and go the other — of course, having calculated our differential equation very carefully. 
+(Laughter) So I want to see a completely renewed, changed math curriculum built from the ground up, based on computers being there, computers that are now ubiquitous almost. 
+Calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years. 
+Now I'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math, but what I am sure is it's the mainstream subject of the future. 
+Let's go for it, and while we're about it, let's have a bit of fun, for us, for the students and for TED here. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And his work illuminated for me what the molecular world inside us is like. 
+And that's how I really began. 
+We're pulling out, we're zooming out, out through a nuclear pore, which is the gateway to this compartment that holds all the DNA, called the nucleus. 
+
+So I want to talk today about an idea. It's a big idea. 
+Actually, I think it'll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that's emerged in the past century. 
+It's the idea of computation. 
+Now, of course, that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on. 
+But there's actually a lot more to computation than that. 
+It's really a very deep, very powerful, very fundamental idea, whose effects we've only just begun to see. 
+Well, I myself have spent the past 30 years of my life working on three large projects that really try to take the idea of computation seriously. 
+So I started off at a young age as a physicist using computers as tools. 
+Then, I started drilling down, thinking about the computations I might want to do, trying to figure out what primitives they could be built up from and how they could be automated as much as possible. 
+Eventually, I created a whole structure based on symbolic programming and so on that let me build Mathematica. 
+And for the past 23 years, at an increasing rate, we've been pouring more and more ideas and capabilities and so on into Mathematica, and I'm happy to say that that's led to many good things in R & D and education, lots of other areas. 
+Well, I have to admit, actually, that I also had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica: I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope 400 years ago. 
+But I wanted to look not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe. 
+So we normally think of programs as being complicated things that we build for very specific purposes. 
+But what about the space of all possible programs? 
+Here's a representation of a really simple program. 
+So, if we run this program, this is what we get. 
+Very simple. 
+So let's try changing the rule for this program a little bit. 
+Now we get another result, still very simple. 
+Try changing it again. 
+You get something a little bit more complicated. 
+But if we keep running this for a while, we find out that although the pattern we get is very intricate, it has a very regular structure. 
+So the question is: Can anything else happen? 
+Well, we can do a little experiment. 
+Let's just do a little mathematical experiment, try and find out. 
+Let's just run all possible programs of the particular type that we're looking at. 
+They're called cellular automata. 
+You can see a lot of diversity in the behavior here. 
+Most of them do very simple things, but if you look along all these different pictures, at rule number 30, you start to see something interesting going on. 
+So let's take a closer look at rule number 30 here. 
+So here it is. 
+We're just following this very simple rule at the bottom here, but we're getting all this amazing stuff. 
+It's not at all what we're used to, and I must say that, when I first saw this, it came as a huge shock to my intuition. 
+And, in fact, to understand it, I eventually had to create a whole new kind of science. 
+(Laughter) This science is different, more general, than the mathematics-based science that we've had for the past 300 or so years. 
+You know, it's always seemed like a big mystery: how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. 
+Well, I think we've found its secret: It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe and quite often getting things like Rule 30 or like this. 
+And knowing that starts to explain a lot of long-standing mysteries in science. 
+It also brings up new issues, though, like computational irreducibility. 
+I mean, we're used to having science let us predict things, but something like this is fundamentally irreducible. 
+The only way to find its outcome is, effectively, just to watch it evolve. 
+It's connected to, what I call, the principle of computational equivalence, which tells us that even incredibly simple systems can do computations as sophisticated as anything. 
+It doesn't take lots of technology or biological evolution to be able to do arbitrary computation; just something that happens, naturally, all over the place. 
+Things with rules as simple as these can do it. 
+Well, this has deep implications about the limits of science, about predictability and controllability of things like biological processes or economies, about intelligence in the universe, about questions like free will and about creating technology. 
+You know, in working on this science for many years, I kept wondering, "What will be its first killer app?" 
+Well, ever since I was a kid, I'd been thinking about systematizing knowledge and somehow making it computable. 
+People like Leibniz had wondered about that too 300 years earlier. 
+But I'd always assumed that to make progress, I'd essentially have to replicate a whole brain. 
+Well, then I got to thinking: This scientific paradigm of mine suggests something different — and, by the way, I've now got huge computation capabilities in Mathematica, and I'm a CEO with some worldly resources to do large, seemingly crazy, projects — So I decided to just try to see how much of the systematic knowledge that's out there in the world we could make computable. 
+So, it's been a big, very complex project, which I was not sure was going to work at all. 
+But I'm happy to say it's actually going really well. 
+And last year we were able to release the first website version of Wolfram Alpha. 
+Its purpose is to be a serious knowledge engine that computes answers to questions. 
+So let's give it a try. 
+Let's start off with something really easy. 
+Hope for the best. 
+Very good. Okay. 
+So far so good. 
+(Laughter) Let's try something a little bit harder. 
+Let's do some mathy thing, and with luck it'll work out the answer and try and tell us some interesting things things about related math. 
+We could ask it something about the real world. 
+Let's say — I don't know — what's the GDP of Spain? 
+And it should be able to tell us that. 
+Now we could compute something related to this, let's say... the GDP of Spain divided by, I don't know, the — hmmm... 
+let's say the revenue of Microsoft. 
+(Laughter) The idea is that we can just type this in, this kind of question in, however we think of it. 
+So let's try asking a question, like a health related question. 
+So let's say we have a lab finding that... 
+you know, we have an LDL level of 140 for a male aged 50. 
+So let's type that in, and now Wolfram Alpha will go and use available public health data and try and figure out what part of the population that corresponds to and so on. 
+Or let's try asking about, I don't know, the International Space Station. 
+And what's happening here is that Wolfram Alpha is not just looking up something; it's computing, in real time, where the International Space Station is right now at this moment, how fast it's going, and so on. 
+So Wolfram Alpha knows about lots and lots of kinds of things. 
+It's got, by now, pretty good coverage of everything you might find in a standard reference library. 
+But the goal is to go much further and, very broadly, to democratize all of this knowledge, and to try and be an authoritative source in all areas. 
+To be able to compute answers to specific questions that people have, not by searching what other people may have written down before, but by using built in knowledge to compute fresh new answers to specific questions. 
+Now, of course, Wolfram Alpha is a monumentally huge, long-term project with lots and lots of challenges. 
+For a start, one has to curate a zillion different sources of facts and data, and we built quite a pipeline of Mathematica automation and human domain experts for doing this. 
+But that's just the beginning. 
+Given raw facts or data to actually answer questions, one has to compute: one has to implement all those methods and models and algorithms and so on that science and other areas have built up over the centuries. 
+Well, even starting from Mathematica, this is still a huge amount of work. 
+So far, there are about 8 million lines of Mathematica code in Wolfram Alpha built by experts from many, many different fields. 
+Well, a crucial idea of Wolfram Alpha is that you can just ask it questions using ordinary human language, which means that we've got to be able to take all those strange utterances that people type into the input field and understand them. 
+And I must say that I thought that step might just be plain impossible. 
+Two big things happened: First, a bunch of new ideas about linguistics that came from studying the computational universe; and second, the realization that having actual computable knowledge completely changes how one can set about understanding language. 
+And, of course, now with Wolfram Alpha actually out in the wild, we can learn from its actual usage. 
+And, in fact, there's been an interesting coevolution that's been going on between Wolfram Alpha and its human users, and it's really encouraging. 
+Right now, if we look at web queries, more than 80 percent of them get handled successfully the first time. 
+And if you look at things like the iPhone app, the fraction is considerably larger. 
+So, I'm pretty pleased with it all. 
+But, in many ways, we're still at the very beginning with Wolfram Alpha. 
+I mean, everything is scaling up very nicely and we're getting more confident. 
+You can expect to see Wolfram Alpha technology showing up in more and more places, working both with this kind of public data, like on the website, and with private knowledge for people and companies and so on. 
+You know, I've realized that Wolfram Alpha actually gives one a whole new kind of computing that one can call knowledge-based computing, in which one's starting not just from raw computation, but from a vast amount of built-in knowledge. 
+And when one does that, one really changes the economics of delivering computational things, whether it's on the web or elsewhere. 
+You know, we have a fairly interesting situation right now. 
+On the one hand, we have Mathematica, with its sort of precise, formal language and a huge network of carefully designed capabilities able to get a lot done in just a few lines. 
+Let me show you a couple of examples here. 
+So here's a trivial piece of Mathematica programming. 
+Here's something where we're sort of integrating a bunch of different capabilities here. 
+Here we'll just create, in this line, a little user interface that allows us to do something fun there. 
+If you go on, that's a slightly more complicated program that's now doing all sorts of algorithmic things and creating user interface and so on. 
+But it's something that is very precise stuff. 
+It's a precise specification with a precise formal language that causes Mathematica to know what to do here. 
+Then on the other hand, we have Wolfram Alpha, with all the messiness of the world and human language and so on built into it. 
+So what happens when you put these things together? 
+I think it's actually rather wonderful. 
+With Wolfram Alpha inside Mathematica, you can, for example, make precise programs that call on real world data. 
+Here's a real simple example. 
+You can also just sort of give vague input and then try and have Wolfram Alpha figure out what you're talking about. 
+Let's try this here. 
+But actually I think the most exciting thing about this is that it really gives one the chance to democratize programming. 
+I mean, anyone will be able to say what they want in plain language. 
+Then, the idea is that Wolfram Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they're asking for and then show them examples that will let them pick what they need to build up bigger and bigger, precise programs. 
+So, sometimes, Wolfram Alpha will be able to do the whole thing immediately and just give back a whole big program that you can then compute with. 
+Here's a big website where we've been collecting lots of educational and other demonstrations about lots of kinds of things. 
+I'll show you one example here. 
+This is just an example of one of these computable documents. 
+This is probably a fairly small piece of Mathematica code that's able to be run here. 
+Okay. Let's zoom out again. 
+So, given our new kind of science, is there a general way to use it to make technology? 
+So, with physical materials, we're used to going around the world and discovering that particular materials are useful for particular technological purposes. 
+Well, it turns out we can do very much the same kind of thing in the computational universe. 
+There's an inexhaustible supply of programs out there. 
+The challenge is to see how to harness them for human purposes. 
+Something like Rule 30, for example, turns out to be a really good randomness generator. 
+Other simple programs are good models for processes in the natural or social world. 
+And, for example, Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica are actually now full of algorithms that we discovered by searching the computational universe. 
+And, for example, this — if we go back here — this has become surprisingly popular among composers finding musical forms by searching the computational universe. 
+In a sense, we can use the computational universe to get mass customized creativity. 
+I'm hoping we can, for example, use that even to get Wolfram Alpha to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly, and to find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer and no process of incremental evolution would ever come up with. 
+Well, so, that leads to kind of an ultimate question: Could it be that someplace out there in the computational universe we might find our physical universe? 
+Perhaps there's even some quite simple rule, some simple program for our universe. 
+Well, the history of physics would have us believe that the rule for the universe must be pretty complicated. 
+But in the computational universe, we've now seen how rules that are incredibly simple can produce incredibly rich and complex behavior. 
+So could that be what's going on with our whole universe? 
+If the rules for the universe are simple, it's kind of inevitable that they have to be very abstract and very low level; operating, for example, far below the level of space or time, which makes it hard to represent things. 
+But in at least a large class of cases, one can think of the universe as being like some kind of network, which, when it gets big enough, behaves like continuous space in much the same way as having lots of molecules can behave like a continuous fluid. 
+Well, then the universe has to evolve by applying little rules that progressively update this network. 
+And each possible rule, in a sense, corresponds to a candidate universe. 
+Actually, I haven't shown these before, but here are a few of the candidate universes that I've looked at. 
+Some of these are hopeless universes, completely sterile, with other kinds of pathologies like no notion of space, no notion of time, no matter, other problems like that. 
+But the exciting thing that I've found in the last few years is that you actually don't have to go very far in the computational universe before you start finding candidate universes that aren't obviously not our universe. 
+Here's the problem: Any serious candidate for our universe is inevitably full of computational irreducibility. 
+Which means that it is irreducibly difficult to find out how it will really behave, and whether it matches our physical universe. 
+A few years ago, I was pretty excited to discover that there are candidate universes with incredibly simple rules that successfully reproduce special relativity, and even general relativity and gravitation, and at least give hints of quantum mechanics. 
+So, will we find the whole of physics? 
+I don't know for sure, but I think at this point it's sort of almost embarrassing not to at least try. 
+Not an easy project. 
+One's got to build a lot of technology. 
+One's got to build a structure that's probably at least as deep as existing physics. 
+And I'm not sure what the best way to organize the whole thing is. 
+Build a team, open it up, offer prizes and so on. 
+But I'll tell you, here today, that I'm committed to seeing this project done, to see if, within this decade, we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes... 
+and be able to type into Wolfram Alpha, "" the theory of the universe, "" and have it tell us. 
+(Laughter) So I've been working on the idea of computation now for more than 30 years, building tools and methods and turning intellectual ideas into millions of lines of code and grist for server farms and so on. 
+With every passing year, I realize how much more powerful the idea of computation really is. 
+It's taken us a long way already, but there's so much more to come. 
+From the foundations of science to the limits of technology to the very definition of the human condition, I think computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: That was astonishing. 
+Stay here. I've got a question. 
+(Applause) So, that was, fair to say, an astonishing talk. 
+Are you able to say in a sentence or two how this type of thinking could integrate at some point to things like string theory or the kind of things that people think of as the fundamental explanations of the universe? 
+Stephen Wolfram: Well, the parts of physics that we kind of know to be true, things like the standard model of physics: what I'm trying to do better reproduce the standard model of physics or it's simply wrong. 
+The things that people have tried to do in the last 25 years or so with string theory and so on have been an interesting exploration that has tried to get back to the standard model, but hasn't quite gotten there. 
+My guess is that some great simplifications of what I'm doing may actually have considerable resonance with what's been done in string theory, but that's a complicated math thing that I don't yet know how it's going to work out. 
+CA: Benoit Mandelbrot is in the audience. 
+He also has shown how complexity can arise out of a simple start. 
+Does your work relate to his? 
+SW: I think so. 
+I view Benoit Mandelbrot's work as one of the founding contributions to this kind of area. 
+Benoit has been particularly interested in nested patterns, in fractals and so on, where the structure is something that's kind of tree-like, and where there's sort of a big branch that makes little branches and even smaller branches and so on. 
+That's one of the ways that you get towards true complexity. 
+I think things like the Rule 30 cellular automaton get us to a different level. 
+In fact, in a very precise way, they get us to a different level because they seem to be things that are capable of complexity that's sort of as great as complexity can ever get... 
+I could go on about this at great length, but I won't. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: Stephen Wolfram, thank you. (Applause) 
+
+One of the things that defines a TEDster is you've taken your passion, and you've turned it into stewardship. 
+You actually put action to the issues you care about. 
+But what you're going to find eventually is you may need to actually get elected officials to help you out. 
+So, how do you do that? 
+One of the things I should probably tell you is, I worked for the Discovery Channel early in my career, and that sort of warped my framework. 
+So, when you start to think about politicians, you've got to realize these are strange creatures. 
+Other than the fact that they can't tell directions, and they have very strange breeding habits, how do you actually work with these things? (Laughter) What we need to understand is: What drives the political creature? 
+And there are two things that are primary in a politician's heart: One is reputation and influence. 
+These are the primary tools by which a politician can do his job. 
+The second one — unlike most animals, which is survival of the species — this is preservation of self. 
+Now you may think it's money, but that's actually sort of a proxy to what I can do to preserve myself. 
+Now, the challenge with you moving your issue forward is these animals are getting broadcast to all the time. 
+So, what doesn't work, in terms of getting your issue to be important? 
+You can send them an email. 
+Well, unfortunately, I've got so many Viagra ads coming at me, your email is lost. 
+It doesn't matter, it's spam. 
+How about you get on the phone? 
+Well, chances are I've got a droid who's picking up the phone, "Yes, they called, and they said they didn't like it." 
+That doesn't move. 
+Face to face would work, but it's hard to set it up. 
+It's hard to get the context and actually get the communication to work. 
+Yes, contributions actually do make a difference and they set a context for having a conversation, but it takes some time to build up. 
+So what actually works? 
+And the answer is rather strange. 
+It's a letter. 
+We live in a digital world, but we're fairly analog creatures. 
+Letters actually work. 
+Even the top dog himself takes time every day to read 10 letters that are picked out by staff. 
+I can tell you that every official that I've ever worked with will tell you about the letters they get and what they mean. 
+So, how are you going to write your letter? 
+First of all, you're going to pick up an analog device: a pen. 
+I know these are tough, and you may have a hard time getting your hand bent around it, (Laughter) but this is actually critical. 
+And it is critical that you actually handwrite your letter. 
+It is so novel to see this, that somebody actually picked up an analog device and has written to me. 
+Second of all, I'm going to recommend that you get into a proactive stance and write to your elected officials at least once a month. 
+Here's my promise to you: If you are consistent and do this, within three months the elected official will start calling you when that issue comes up and say, "" What do you think? "" Now, I'm going to give you a four paragraph format to work with. 
+Now, when you approach these animals, you need to understand there's a dangerous end to them, and you also need to approach them with some level of respect and a little bit of wariness. 
+So in paragraph number one, what I'm going to tell you to do is very simply this: You appreciate them. 
+You may not appreciate the person, you may not appreciate anything else, but maybe you appreciate the fact that they've got a tough gig. 
+When animals are going to make a point, they make the point. 
+They don't spend a lot of time dicking around. 
+So, here you go. (Laughter) Paragraph number two: You may actually have to just get very blunt and say what's really on your mind. 
+When you do this, don't attack people; you attack tactics. 
+Ad hominem attacks will get you nowhere. 
+Paragraph number three: When animals are attacked or cornered, they will fight to the death, so you have to give them an exit. 
+Most of the time, if they have an exit strategy, they should take it. 
+"" Obviously, you're intelligent. 
+If you had the right information, you would have done the right thing. "" (Laughter) Lastly, you want to be the nurturing agent. 
+You're the safe place to come in to. 
+So, in paragraph number four, you're going to tell people, "" If no one is providing you with this information, let me help. "" (Laughter) Animals do displays. They do two things: They warn you or they try to attract you and say, "" We need to mate. "" You're going to do that by the way you sign your letter. 
+You do a number of things: you're a vice president, you volunteer, you do something else. 
+Why is is this important? 
+Because this establishes the two primary criteria for the political creature: that you have influence in a large sphere, and that my preservation depends on you. 
+Here is one very quick hack, especially for the feds in the audience. 
+Here's how you mail your letter. 
+First of all, you send the original to the district office. 
+So, you send the copy to the main office. 
+If they follow protocol, they'll pick up the phone and say, "" Hey, do you have the original? "" Then some droid in the back puts the name on a tickler and says, "" Oh, this is an important letter. "" And you actually get into the folder that the elected official actually has to read. 
+So, what your letter means: I've got to tell you, we are all in a party, and political officials are the pinatas. 
+(Laughter) We are harangued, lectured to, sold, marketed, but a letter is actually one of the few times that we have honest communication. 
+I got this letter when I was first elected, and I still carry it to every council meeting I go to. 
+This is an opportunity at real dialogue, and if you have stewardship and want to communicate, that dialogue is incredibly powerful. 
+So when you do that, here's what I can promise: You're going to be the 800 pound gorilla in the forest. 
+Get writing. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It's the Second World War. 
+A German prison camp. 
+And this man, Archie Cochrane, is a prisoner of war and a doctor, and he has a problem. 
+The problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that Archie doesn't really understand. 
+The symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin. 
+But he doesn't know whether it's an infection, whether it's to do with malnutrition. 
+He doesn't know how to cure it. 
+And he's operating in a hostile environment. 
+And people do terrible things in wars. 
+The German camp guards, they've got bored. 
+They've taken to just firing into the prison camp at random for fun. 
+On one particular occasion, one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners' lavatory while it was full of prisoners. 
+He said he heard suspicious laughter. 
+And Archie Cochrane, as the camp doctor, was one of the first men in to clear up the mess. 
+And one more thing: Archie was suffering from this illness himself. 
+So the situation seemed pretty desperate. 
+But Archie Cochrane was a resourceful person. 
+He'd already smuggled vitamin C into the camp, and now he managed to get hold of supplies of marmite on the black market. 
+Now some of you will be wondering what marmite is. 
+Marmite is a breakfast spread beloved of the British. 
+It looks like crude oil. 
+It tastes... 
+zesty. 
+And importantly, it's a rich source of vitamin B12. 
+So Archie splits the men under his care as best he can into two equal groups. 
+He gives half of them vitamin C. 
+He gives half of them vitamin B12. 
+He very carefully and meticulously notes his results in an exercise book. 
+And after just a few days, it becomes clear that whatever is causing this illness, marmite is the cure. 
+So Cochrane then goes to the Germans who are running the prison camp. 
+Now you've got to imagine at the moment — forget this photo, imagine this guy with this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair. 
+He hasn't been able to shave — a sort of Billy Connolly figure. 
+Cochrane, he starts ranting at these Germans in this Scottish accent — in fluent German, by the way, but in a Scottish accent — and explains to them how German culture was the culture that gave Schiller and Goethe to the world. 
+And he can't understand how this barbarism can be tolerated, and he vents his frustrations. 
+And then he goes back to his quarters, breaks down and weeps because he's convinced that the situation is hopeless. 
+But a young German doctor picks up Archie Cochrane's exercise book and says to his colleagues, "" This evidence is incontrovertible. 
+If we don't supply vitamins to the prisoners, it's a war crime. "" And the next morning, supplies of vitamin B12 are delivered to the camp, and the prisoners begin to recover. 
+Now I'm not telling you this story because I think Archie Cochrane is a dude, although Archie Cochrane is a dude. 
+I'm not even telling you the story because I think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public policy, although I think that would also be completely awesome. 
+I'm telling you this story because Archie Cochrane, all his life, fought against a terrible affliction, and he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies. 
+And he had a name for it. 
+He called it the God complex. 
+Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very, very easily. 
+So the symptoms of the complex are, no matter how complicated the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution. 
+Now Archie was a doctor, so he hung around with doctors a lot. 
+And doctors suffer from the God complex a lot. 
+Now I'm an economist, I'm not a doctor, but I see the God complex around me all the time in my fellow economists. 
+I see it in our business leaders. 
+I see it in the politicians we vote for — people who, in the face of an incredibly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works. 
+And you know, with the future billions that we've been hearing about, the world is simply far too complex to understand in that way. 
+Well let me give you an example. 
+Imagine for a moment that, instead of Tim Harford in front of you, there was Hans Rosling presenting his graphs. 
+You know Hans: the Mick Jagger of TED. 
+(Laughter) And he'd be showing you these amazing statistics, these amazing animations. 
+And they are brilliant; it's wonderful work. 
+But a typical Hans Rosling graph: think for a moment, not what it shows, but think instead about what it leaves out. 
+So it'll show you GDP per capita, population, longevity, that's about it. 
+So three pieces of data for each country — three pieces of data. 
+Three pieces of data is nothing. 
+I mean, have a look at this graph. 
+This is produced by the physicist Cesar Hidalgo. 
+He's at MIT. 
+Now you won't be able to understand a word of it, but this is what it looks like. 
+Cesar has trolled the database of over 5,000 different products, and he's used techniques of network analysis to interrogate this database and to graph relationships between the different products. 
+And it's wonderful, wonderful work. 
+You show all these interconnections, all these interrelations. 
+And I think it'll be profoundly useful in understanding how it is that economies grow. 
+Brilliant work. 
+Cesar and I tried to write a piece for The New York Times Magazine explaining how this works. 
+And what we learned is Cesar's work is far too good to explain in The New York Times Magazine. 
+Five thousand products — that's still nothing. Five thousand products — 
+imagine counting every product category in Cesar Hidalgo's data. 
+Imagine you had one second per product category. 
+In about the length of this session, you would have counted all 5,000. 
+Now imagine doing the same thing for every different type of product on sale in Walmart. 
+There are 100,000 there. It would take you all day. 
+Now imagine trying to count every different specific product and service on sale in a major economy such as Tokyo, London or New York. 
+It's even more difficult in Edinburgh because you have to count all the whisky and the tartan. 
+If you wanted to count every product and service on offer in New York — there are 10 billion of them — it would take you 317 years. 
+This is how complex the economy we've created is. 
+And I'm just counting toasters here. 
+I'm not trying to solve the Middle East problem. 
+The complexity here is unbelievable. 
+And just a piece of context — the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services. 
+You could count them in five minutes. 
+So this is the complexity of the world that surrounds us. 
+This perhaps is why we find the God complex so tempting. 
+We tend to retreat and say, "" We can draw a picture, we can post some graphs, we get it, we understand how this works. "" And we don't. 
+We never do. 
+Now I'm not trying to deliver a nihilistic message here. 
+I'm not trying to say we can't solve complicated problems in a complicated world. 
+We clearly can. 
+But the way we solve them is with humility — to abandon the God complex and to actually use a problem-solving technique that works. 
+And we have a problem-solving technique that works. 
+Now you show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error. 
+Here's an example. 
+This baby was produced through trial and error. 
+I realize that's an ambiguous statement. 
+Maybe I should clarify it. 
+This baby is a human body: it evolved. 
+What is evolution? 
+Over millions of years, variation and selection, variation and selection — trial and error, trial and error. 
+And it's not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error. 
+You could use it in an industrial context. 
+So let's say you wanted to make detergent. 
+Let's say you're Unilever and you want to make detergent in a factory near Liverpool. 
+How do you do it? 
+Well you have this great big tank full of liquid detergent. 
+You pump it at a high pressure through a nozzle. 
+You create a spray of detergent. 
+Then the spray dries. It turns into powder. 
+It falls to the floor. 
+You scoop it up. You put it in cardboard boxes. 
+You sell it at a supermarket. 
+You make lots of money. 
+How do you design that nozzle? 
+It turns out to be very important. 
+Now if you ascribe to the God complex, what you do is you find yourself a little God. 
+You find yourself a mathematician; you find yourself a physicist — somebody who understands the dynamics of this fluid. 
+And he will, or she will, calculate the optimal design of the nozzle. 
+Now Unilever did this and it didn't work — too complicated. 
+Even this problem, too complicated. 
+But the geneticist Professor Steve Jones describes how Unilever actually did solve this problem — trial and error, variation and selection. 
+You take a nozzle and you create 10 random variations on the nozzle. 
+You try out all 10; you keep the one that works best. 
+You create 10 variations on that one. 
+You try out all 10. You keep the one that works best. 
+You try out 10 variations on that one. 
+You see how this works, right? 
+And after 45 generations, you have this incredible nozzle. 
+It looks a bit like a chess piece — functions absolutely brilliantly. 
+We have no idea why it works, no idea at all. 
+And the moment you step back from the God complex — let's just try to have a bunch of stuff; let's have a systematic way of determining what's working and what's not — you can solve your problem. 
+Now this process of trial and error is actually far more common in successful institutions than we care to recognize. 
+And we've heard a lot about how economies function. 
+The U.S. economy is still the world's greatest economy. 
+How did it become the world's greatest economy? 
+I could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the U.S. economy, but I think the most salient one is this: ten percent of American businesses disappear every year. 
+That is a huge failure rate. 
+It's far higher than the failure rate of, say, Americans. 
+Ten percent of Americans don't disappear every year. 
+Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans, and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans. 
+And eventually, they'll have evolved to such a high peak of perfection that they will make us all their pets — (Laughter) if, of course, they haven't already done so. 
+I sometimes wonder. 
+But it's this process of trial and error that explains this great divergence, this incredible performance of Western economies. 
+It didn't come because you put some incredibly smart person in charge. 
+It's come through trial and error. 
+Now I've been sort of banging on about this for the last couple of months, and people sometimes say to me, "" Well Tim, it's kind of obvious. 
+Obviously trial and error is very important. 
+Obviously experimentation is very important. 
+Now why are you just wandering around saying this obvious thing? "" So I say, okay, fine. 
+You think it's obvious? 
+I will admit it's obvious when schools start teaching children that there are some problems that don't have a correct answer. 
+Stop giving them lists of questions every single one of which has an answer. 
+And there's an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher's desk who knows all the answers. 
+And if you can't find the answers, you must be lazy or stupid. 
+When schools stop doing that all the time, I will admit that, yes, it's obvious that trial and error is a good thing. 
+When a politician stands up campaigning for elected office and says, "" I want to fix our health system. 
+I want to fix our education system. 
+I have no idea how to do it. 
+I have half a dozen ideas. 
+We're going to test them out. They'll probably all fail. 
+Then we'll test some other ideas out. 
+We'll find some that work. We'll build on those. 
+We'll get rid of the ones that don't. "" — when a politician campaigns on that platform, and more importantly, when voters like you and me are willing to vote for that kind of politician, then I will admit that it is obvious that trial and error works, and that — thank you. 
+(Applause) Until then, until then I'm going to keep banging on about trial and error and why we should abandon the God complex. 
+Because it's so hard to admit our own fallibility. 
+It's so uncomfortable. 
+And Archie Cochrane understood this as well as anybody. 
+There's this one trial he ran many years after World War II. 
+He wanted to test out the question of, where is it that patients should recover from heart attacks? 
+Should they recover in a specialized cardiac unit in hospital, or should they recover at home? 
+All the cardiac doctors tried to shut him down. 
+They had the God complex in spades. 
+They knew that their hospitals were the right place for patients, and they knew it was very unethical to run any kind of trial or experiment. 
+Nevertheless, Archie managed to get permission to do this. 
+He ran his trial. 
+And after the trial had been running for a little while, he gathered together all his colleagues around his table, and he said, "" Well, gentlemen, we have some preliminary results. 
+They're not statistically significant. 
+But we have something. 
+And it turns out that you're right and I'm wrong. 
+It is dangerous for patients to recover from heart attacks at home. 
+They should be in hospital. "" And there's this uproar, and all the doctors start pounding the table and saying, "" We always said you were unethical, Archie. 
+You're killing people with your clinical trials. You need to shut it down now. 
+Shut it down at once. "" And there's this huge hubbub. 
+Archie lets it die down. 
+And then he says, "" Well that's very interesting, gentlemen, because when I gave you the table of results, I swapped the two columns around. 
+It turns out your hospitals are killing people, and they should be at home. 
+Would you like to close down the trial now, or should we wait until we have robust results? "" Tumbleweed rolls through the meeting room. 
+But Cochrane would do that kind of thing. 
+And the reason he would do that kind of thing is because he understood it feels so much better to stand there and say, "" Here in my own little world, I am a god, I understand everything. 
+I do not want to have my opinions challenged. 
+I do not want to have my conclusions tested. "" It feels so much more comfortable simply to lay down the law. 
+Cochrane understood that uncertainty, that fallibility, that being challenged, they hurt. 
+And you sometimes need to be shocked out of that. 
+Now I'm not going to pretend that this is easy. 
+It isn't easy. 
+It's incredibly painful. 
+And since I started talking about this subject and researching this subject, I've been really haunted by something a Japanese mathematician said on the subject. 
+So shortly after the war, this young man, Yutaka Taniyama, developed this amazing conjecture called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. 
+It turned out to be absolutely instrumental many decades later in proving Fermat's Last Theorem. 
+In fact, it turns out it's equivalent to proving Fermat's Last Theorem. 
+You prove one, you prove the other. 
+But it was always a conjecture. 
+Taniyama tried and tried and tried and he could never prove that it was true. 
+And shortly before his 30th birthday in 1958, Yutaka Taniyama killed himself. 
+His friend, Goro Shimura — who worked on the mathematics with him — many decades later, reflected on Taniyama's life. 
+He said, "" He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. 
+He made a lot of mistakes. 
+But he made mistakes in a good direction. 
+I tried to emulate him, but I realized it is very difficult to make good mistakes. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We do not invest in victims, we invest in survivors. 
+And in ways both big and small, the narrative of the victim shapes the way we see women. 
+You can't count what you don't see. 
+And we don't invest in what's invisible to us. 
+But this is the face of resilience. 
+Six years ago, I started writing about women entrepreneurs during and after conflict. 
+I set out to write a compelling economic story, one that had great characters, that no one else was telling, and one that I thought mattered. 
+And that turned out to be women. 
+I had left ABC news and a career I loved at the age of 30 for business school, a path I knew almost nothing about. 
+None of the women I had grown up with in Maryland had graduated from college, let alone considered business school. 
+But they had hustled to feed their kids and pay their rent. 
+And I saw from a young age that having a decent job and earning a good living made the biggest difference for families who were struggling. 
+So if you're going to talk about jobs, then you have to talk about entrepreneurs. 
+And if you're talking about entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict settings, then you must talk about women, because they are the population you have left. 
+Rwanda in the immediate aftermath of the genocide was 77 percent female. 
+I want to introduce you to some of those entrepreneurs I've met and share with you some of what they've taught me over the years. 
+I went to Afghanistan in 2005 to work on a Financial Times piece, and there I met Kamila, a young women who told me she had just turned down a job with the international community that would have paid her nearly $2,000 a month — an astronomical sum in that context. 
+And she had turned it down, she said, because she was going to start her next business, an entrepreneurship consultancy that would teach business skills to men and women all around Afghanistan. 
+Business, she said, was critical to her country's future. 
+Because long after this round of internationals left, business would help keep her country peaceful and secure. 
+And she said business was even more important for women because earning an income earned respect and money was power for women. 
+So I was amazed. 
+I mean here was a girl who had never lived in peace time who somehow had come to sound like a candidate from "" The Apprentice. "" (Laughter) So I asked her, "" How in the world do you know this much about business? 
+Why are you so passionate? "" She said, "" Oh Gayle, this is actually my third business. 
+My first business was a dressmaking business I started under the Taliban. 
+And that was actually an excellent business, because we provided jobs for women all around our neighborhood. 
+And that's really how I became an entrepreneur. "" Think about this: Here were girls who braved danger to become breadwinners during years in which they couldn't even be on their streets. 
+And at a time of economic collapse when people sold baby dolls and shoe laces and windows and doors just to survive, these girls made the difference between survival and starvation for so many. 
+I couldn't leave the story, and I couldn't leave the topic either, because everywhere I went I met more of these women who no one seemed to know about, or even wish to. 
+I went on to Bosnia, and early on in my interviews I met with an IMF official who said, "" You know, Gayle, I don't think we actually have women in business in Bosnia, but there is a lady selling cheese nearby on the side of the road. 
+So maybe you could interview her. "" So I went out reporting and within a day I met Narcisa Kavazovic who at that point was opening a new factory on the war's former front lines in Sarajevo. 
+She had started her business squatting in an abandoned garage, sewing sheets and pillow cases she would take to markets all around the city so that she could support the 12 or 13 family members who were counting on her for survival. 
+By the time we met, she had 20 employees, most of them women, who were sending their boys and their girls to school. 
+And she was just the start. 
+I met women running essential oils businesses, wineries and even the country's largest advertising agency. 
+So these stories together became the Herald Tribune business cover. 
+And when this story posted, I ran to my computer to send it to the IMF official. 
+And I said, "" Just in case you're looking for entrepreneurs to feature at your next investment conference, here are a couple of women. "" (Applause) But think about this. 
+The IMF official is hardly the only person to automatically file women under micro. 
+The biases, whether intentional or otherwise, are pervasive, and so are the misleading mental images. 
+If you see the word "" microfinance, "" what comes to mind? 
+Most people say women. 
+And if you see the word "" entrepreneur, "" most people think men. 
+Why is that? 
+Because we aim low and we think small when it comes to women. 
+Microfinance is an incredibly powerful tool that leads to self-sufficiency and self-respect, but we must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women, because they have so much greater hopes for themselves. 
+They want to move from micro to medium and beyond. 
+And in many places, they're there. 
+In the U.S., women-owned businesses will create five and a half million new jobs by 2018. 
+In South Korea and Indonesia, women own nearly half a million firms. 
+China, women run 20 percent of all small businesses. 
+And in the developing world overall, That figure is 40 to 50 percent. 
+Nearly everywhere I go, I meet incredibly interesting entrepreneurs who are seeking access to finance, access to markets and established business networks. 
+They are often ignored because they're harder to help. 
+It is much riskier to give a 50,000 dollar loan than it is to give a 500 dollar loan. 
+And as the World Bank recently noted, women are stuck in a productivity trap. 
+Those in small businesses can't get the capital they need to expand and those in microbusiness can't grow out of them. 
+Recently I was at the State Department in Washington and I met an incredibly passionate entrepreneur from Ghana. 
+She sells chocolates. 
+And she had come to Washington, not seeking a handout and not seeking a microloan. 
+She had come seeking serious investment dollars so that she could build the factory and buy the equipment she needs to export her chocolates to Africa, Europe, the Middle East and far beyond — capital that would help her to employ more than the 20 people that she already has working for her, and capital that would fuel her own country's economic climb. 
+The great news is we already know what works. 
+Theory and empirical evidence Have already taught us. 
+We don't need to invent solutions because we have them — cash flow loans based in income rather than assets, loans that use secure contracts rather than collateral, because women often don't own land. 
+And Kiva.org, the microlender, is actually now experimenting with crowdsourcing small and medium sized loans. 
+And that's just to start. 
+Recently it has become very much in fashion to call women "" the emerging market of the emerging market. "" I think that is terrific. 
+You know why? 
+Because — and I say this as somebody who worked in finance — 500 billion dollars at least has gone into the emerging markets in the past decade. 
+Because investors saw the potential for return at a time of slowing economic growth, and so they created financial products and financial innovation tailored to the emerging markets. 
+How wonderful would it be if we were prepared to replace all of our lofty words with our wallets and invest 500 billion dollars unleashing women's economic potential? 
+Just think of the benefits when it comes to jobs, productivity, employment, child nutrition, maternal mortality, literacy and much, much more. 
+Because, as the World Economic Forum noted, smaller gender gaps are directly correlated with increased economic competitiveness. 
+And not one country in all the world has eliminated its economic participation gap — not one. 
+So the great news is this is an incredible opportunity. 
+We have so much room to grow. 
+So you see, this is not about doing good, this is about global growth and global employment. 
+It is about how we invest and it's about how we see women. 
+And women can no longer be both half the population and a special interest group. 
+(Applause) Oftentimes I get into very interesting discussions with reporters who say to me, "" Gayle, these are great stories, but you're really writing about the exceptions. "" Now that makes me pause for just a couple reasons. 
+First of all, for exceptions, there are a lot of them and they're important. 
+Secondly, when we talk about men who are succeeding, we rightly consider them icons or pioneers or innovators to be emulated. 
+And when we talk about women, they are either exceptions to be dismissed or aberrations to be ignored. 
+And finally, there is no society anywhere in all the world that is not changed except by its most exceptional. 
+So why wouldn't we celebrate and elevate these change makers and job creators rather than overlook them? 
+This topic of resilience is very personal to me and in many ways has shaped my life. 
+My mom was a single mom who worked at the phone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night so that I could have every opportunity possible. 
+We shopped double coupons and layaway and consignment stores, and when she got sick with stage four breast cancer and could no longer work, we even applied for food stamps. 
+And when I would feel sorry for myself as nine or 10 year-old girls do, she would say to me, "" My dear, on a scale of major world tragedies, yours is not a three. "" (Laughter) And when I was applying to business school and felt certain I couldn't do it and nobody I knew had done it, I went to my aunt who survived years of beatings at the hand of her husband and escaped a marriage of abuse with only her dignity intact. 
+And she told me, "Never import other people's limitations." 
+And when I complained to my grandmother, a World War II veteran who worked in film for 50 years and who supported me from the age of 13, that I was terrified that if I turned down a plum assignment at ABC for a fellowship overseas, I would never ever, ever find another job, she said, "" Kiddo, I'm going to tell you two things. 
+First of all, no one turns down a Fulbright, and secondly, McDonald's is always hiring. "" (Laughter) "You will find a job. Take the leap." 
+The women in my family are not exceptions. 
+The women in this room and watching in L.A. 
+and all around the world are not exceptions. 
+We are not a special interest group. 
+We are the majority. 
+And for far too long, we have underestimated ourselves and been undervalued by others. 
+It is time for us to aim higher when it comes to women, to invest more and to deploy our dollars to benefit women all around the world. 
+We can make a difference, and make a difference, not just for women, but for a global economy that desperately needs their contributions. 
+Together we can make certain that the so-called exceptions begin to rule. 
+When we change the way we see ourselves, others will follow. 
+And it is time for all of us to think bigger. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I'm starting talks like this, I usually do a whole spiel about sustainability because a lot of people out there don't know what that is. 
+This is a crowd that does know what it is, so I'll like just do like the 60-second crib-note version. Right? 
+So just bear with me. We'll go real fast, you know? 
+Fill in the blanks. 
+So, you know, sustainability, small planet. 
+Right? Picture a little Earth, circling around the sun. 
+You know, about a million years ago, a bunch of monkeys fell out of trees, got a little clever, harnessed fire, invented the printing press, made, you know, luggage with wheels on it. 
+And, you know, built the society that we now live in. 
+Unfortunately, while this society is, without a doubt, the most prosperous and dynamic the world has ever created, it's got some major, major flaws. 
+One of them is that every society has an ecological footprint. 
+It has an amount of impact on the planet that's measurable. 
+How much stuff goes through your life, how much waste is left behind you. 
+And we, at the moment, in our society, have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this. 
+We're using up about five planets. 
+If everybody on the planet lived the way we did, we'd need between five, six, seven, some people even say 10 planets to make it. 
+Clearly we don't have 10 planets. 
+Again, you know, mental, visual, 10 planets, one planet, 10 planets, one planet. Right? 
+We don't have that. So that's one problem. 
+The second problem is that the planet that we have is being used in wildly unfair ways. Right? 
+North Americans, such as myself, you know, we're basically sort of wallowing, gluttonous hogs, and we're eating all sorts of stuff. 
+And, you know, then you get all the way down to people who live in the Asia-Pacific region, or even more, Africa. 
+And people simply do not have enough to survive. 
+This is producing all sorts of tensions, all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing. 
+And there's more and more people on the way. Right? 
+So, this is what the planet's going to look like in 20 years. 
+It's going to be a pretty crowded place, at least eight billion people. 
+So to make matters even more difficult, it's a very young planet. 
+A third of the people on this planet are kids. 
+And those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did, no matter where they live. 
+They've been exposed to this idea of our society, of our prosperity. 
+And they may not want to live exactly like us. 
+They may not want to be Americans, or Brits, or Germans, or South Africans, but they want their own version of a life which is more prosperous, and more dynamic, and more, you know, enjoyable. 
+And all of these things combine to create an enormous amount of torque on the planet. 
+And if we cannot figure out a way to deal with that torque, we are going to find ourselves more and more and more quickly facing situations which are simply unthinkable. 
+Everybody in this room has heard the worst-case scenarios. 
+I don't need to go into that. 
+But I will ask the question, what's the alternative? 
+And I would say that, at the moment, the alternative is unimaginable. 
+You know, so on the one hand we have the unthinkable; on the other hand we have the unimaginable. 
+We don't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face. 
+We don't know how to do this yet. 
+So what's Worldchanging? 
+Well, Worldchanging you might think of as being a bit of a news service for the unimaginable future. 
+You know, what we're out there doing is looking for examples of tools, models and ideas, which, if widely adopted, would change the game. 
+A lot of times, when I do a talk like this, I talk about things that everybody in this room I'm sure has already heard of, but most people haven't. 
+So I thought today I'd do something a little different, and talk about what we're looking for, rather than saying, you know, rather than giving you tried-and-true examples. 
+Talk about the kinds of things we're scoping out. 
+Give you a little peek into our editorial notebook. 
+And given that I have 13 minutes to do this, this is going to go kind of quick. 
+So, I don't know, just stick with me. Right? 
+So, first of all, what are we looking for? Bright Green city. 
+One of the biggest levers that we have in the developed world for changing the impact that we have on the planet is changing the way that we live in cities. 
+We're already an urban planet; that's especially true in the developed world. 
+And people who live in cities in the developed world tend to be very prosperous, and thus use a lot of stuff. 
+If we can change the dynamic, by first of all creating cities that are denser and more livable... 
+Here, for example, is Vancouver, which if you haven't been there, you ought to go for a visit. It's a fabulous city. 
+And they are doing density, new density, better than probably anybody else on the planet right now. 
+They're actually managing to talk North Americans out of driving cars, which is a pretty great thing. 
+So you have density. You also have growth management. 
+You leave aside what is natural to be natural. 
+This is in Portland. That is an actual development. 
+That land there will remain pasture in perpetuity. 
+They've bounded the city with a line. 
+Nature, city. Nothing changes. 
+Once you do those things, you can start making all sorts of investments. 
+You can start doing things like, you know, transit systems that actually work to transport people, in effective and reasonably comfortable manners. 
+You can also start to change what you build. 
+This is the Beddington Zero Energy Development in London, which is one of the greenest buildings in the world. It's a fabulous place. 
+We're able to now build buildings that generate all their own electricity, that recycle much of their water, that are much more comfortable than standard buildings, use all-natural light, etc., and, over time, cost less. 
+Green roofs. Bill McDonough covered that last night, so I won't dwell on that too much. 
+But once you also have people living in close proximity to each other, one of the things you can do is — as information technologies develop — you can start to have smart places. 
+You can start to know where things are. 
+When you know where things are, it becomes easier to share them. 
+When you share them, you end up using less. 
+So one great example is car-share clubs, which are really starting to take off in the U.S., have already taken off in many places in Europe, and are a great example. 
+If you're somebody who drives, you know, one day a week, do you really need your own car? 
+Another thing that information technology lets us do is start figuring out how to use less stuff by knowing, and by monitoring, the amount we're actually using. 
+So, here's a power cord which glows brighter the more energy that you use, which I think is a pretty cool concept, although I think it ought to work the other way around, that it gets brighter the more you don't use. 
+But, you know, there may even be a simpler approach. 
+We could just re-label things. 
+This light switch that reads, on the one hand, flashfloods, and on the other hand, off. 
+How we build things can change as well. 
+This is a bio-morphic building. 
+It takes its inspiration in form from life. 
+Many of these buildings are incredibly beautiful, and also much more effective. 
+This is an example of bio-mimicry, which is something we're really starting to look a lot more for. 
+In this case, you have a shell design which was used to create a new kind of exhaust fan, which is greatly more effective. 
+There's a lot of this stuff happening; it's really pretty remarkable. 
+I encourage you to look on Worldchanging if you're into it. 
+We're starting to cover this more and more. 
+There's also neo-biological design, where more and more we're actually using life itself and the processes of life to become part of our industry. 
+So this, for example, is hydrogen-generating algae. 
+So we have a model in potential, an emerging model that we're looking for of how to take the cities most of us live in, and turn them into Bright Green cities. 
+But unfortunately, most of the people on the planet don't live in the cites we live in. 
+They live in the emerging megacities of the developing world. 
+And there's a statistic I often like to use, which is that we're adding a city of Seattle every four days, a city the size of Seattle to the planet every four days. 
+I was giving a talk about two months ago, and this guy, who'd done some work with the U.N., came up to me and was really flustered, and he said, look, you've got that totally wrong; it's totally wrong. 
+It's every seven days. 
+So, we're adding a city the size of Seattle every seven days, and most of those cities look more like this than the city that you or I live in. 
+Most of those cites are growing incredibly quickly. 
+They don't have existing infrastructure; they have enormous numbers of people who are struggling with poverty, and enormous numbers of people are trying to figure out how to do things in new ways. 
+So what do we need in order to make developing nation megacities into Bright Green megacities? 
+Well, the first thing we need is, we need leapfrogging. 
+And this is one of the things that we are looking for everywhere. 
+The idea behind leapfrogging is that if you are a person, or a country, who is stuck in a situation where you don't have the tools and technologies that you need, there's no reason for you to invest in last generation's technologies. Right? 
+That you're much better off, almost universally, looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology. 
+One place we're all familiar with seeing this is with cell phones. Right? 
+All throughout the developing world, people are going directly to cell phones, skipping the whole landline stage. 
+If there are landlines in many developing world cities, they're usually pretty crappy systems that break down a lot and cost enormous amounts of money. 
+So I rather like this picture here. 
+I particularly like the Ganesh in the background, talking on the cell phone. 
+So what we have, increasingly, is cell phones just permeating out through society. 
+We've heard all about this here this week, so I won't say too much more than that, other than to say what is true for cell phones is true for all sorts of technologies. 
+The second thing is tools for collaboration, be they systems of collaboration, or intellectual property systems which encourage collaboration. Right? 
+When you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate, you get different kinds of solutions. 
+And those solutions are accessible in a different way to people who don't have capital. Right? 
+So, you know, we have open source software, we have Creative Commons and other kinds of Copyleft solutions. 
+And those things lead to things like this. 
+This is a Telecentro in Sao Paulo. 
+This is a pretty remarkable program using free and open source software, cheap, sort of hacked-together machines, and basically sort of abandoned buildings — has put together a bunch of community centers where people can come in, get high-speed internet access, learn computer programming skills for free. 
+And a quarter-million people every year use these now in Sao Paulo. 
+And those quarter-million people are some of the poorest people in Sao Paolo. 
+I particularly like the little Linux penguin in the back. (Laughter) So one of the things that that's leading to is a sort of southern cultural explosion. 
+And one of the things we're really, really interested in at Worldchanging is the ways in which the south is re-identifying itself, and re-categorizing itself in ways that have less and less to do with most of us in this room. 
+So it's not, you know, Bollywood isn't just answering Hollywood. Right? 
+You know, Brazilian music scene isn't just answering the major labels. 
+It's doing something new. There's new things happening. 
+There's interplay between them. And, you know, you get amazing things. 
+Like, I don't know if any of you have seen the movie "" City of God? "" Yeah, it's a fabulous movie if you haven't seen it. 
+And it's all about this question, in a very artistic and indirect kind of way. 
+You have other radical examples where the ability to use cultural tools is spreading out. 
+These are people who have just been visited by the Internet bookmobile in Uganda. 
+And who are waving their first books in the air, which, I just think that's a pretty cool picture. You know? 
+So you also have the ability for people to start coming together and acting on their own behalf in political and civic ways, in ways that haven't happened before. 
+And as we heard last night, as we've heard earlier this week, are absolutely, fundamentally vital to the ability to craft new solutions, is we've got to craft new political realities. 
+And I would personally say that we have to craft new political realities, not only in places like India, Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan, what have you, but here at home as well. 
+Another world is possible. 
+And sort of the big motto of the anti-globalization movement. Right? 
+We tweak that a lot. 
+We talk about how another world isn't just possible; another world's here. 
+That it's not just that we have to sort of imagine there being a different, vague possibility out there, but we need to start acting a little bit more on that possibility. 
+We need to start doing things like Lula, President of Brazil. 
+How many people knew of Lula before today? 
+OK, so, much, much better than the average crowd, I can tell you that. 
+So Lula, he's full of problems, full of contradictions, but one of the things that he's doing is, he is putting forward an idea of how we engage in international relations that completely shifts the balance from the standard sort of north-south dialogue into a whole new way of global collaboration. 
+I would keep your eye on this fellow. 
+Another example of this sort of second superpower thing is the rise of these games that are what we call "" serious play. "" We're looking a lot at this. This is spreading everywhere. 
+This is from "" A Force More Powerful. "" It's a little screenshot. 
+"" A Force More Powerful "" is a video game that, while you're playing it, it teaches you how to engage in non-violent insurrection and regime change. (Laughter) Here's another one. This is from a game called "" Food Force, "" which is a game that teaches children how to run a refugee camp. 
+These things are all contributing in a very dynamic way to a huge rise in, especially in the developing world, in people's interest in and passion for democracy. 
+We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt. 
+And, you know, we don't hear those stories enough. 
+But it's happening all over the place, and these tools are part of what's making it possible. 
+Now when you add all those things together, when you add together leapfrogging and new kinds of tools, you know, second superpower stuff, etc., what do you get? 
+Well, very quickly, you get a Bright Green future for the developing world. 
+You get, for example, green power spread throughout the world. 
+You get — this is a building in Hyderabad, India. 
+It's the greenest building in the world. 
+You get grassroots solutions, things that work for people who have no capital or limited access. 
+You get barefoot solar engineers carrying solar panels into the remote mountains. 
+You get access to distance medicine. 
+These are Indian nurses learning how to use PDAs to access databases that have information that they don't have access to at home in a distant manner. 
+You get new tools for people in the developing world. 
+These are LED lights that help the roughly billion people out there, for whom nightfall means darkness, to have a new means of operating. 
+These are refrigerators that require no electricity; they're pot within a pot design. 
+And you get water solutions. Water's one of the most pressing problems. 
+Here's a design for harvesting rainwater that's super cheap and available to people in the developing world. 
+Here's a design for distilling water using sunlight. 
+Here's a fog-catcher, which, if you live in a moist, jungle-like area, will distill water from the air that's clean and drinkable. 
+Here's a way of transporting water. 
+I just love this, you know — I mean carrying water is such a drag, and somebody just came up with the idea of well, what if you rolled it. Right? 
+I mean, that's a great design. 
+This is a fabulous invention, LifeStraw. 
+Basically you can suck any water through this and it will become drinkable by the time it hits your lips. 
+So, you know, people who are in desperate straits can get this. 
+This is one of my favorite Worldchanging kinds of things ever. 
+This is a merry-go-round invented by the company Roundabout, which pumps water as kids play. You know? 
+Seriously — give that one a hand, it's pretty great. 
+And the same thing is true for people who are in absolute crisis. Right? 
+We're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020 because of climate change and political instability. 
+How do we help people like that? 
+Well, there's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet. 
+Some of those designs include models for acting, such as new models for village instruction in the middle of refugee camps. 
+New models for pedagogy for the displaced. 
+And we have new tools. 
+This is one of my absolute favorite things anywhere. 
+Does anyone know what this is? 
+Audience: It detects landmines. 
+Alex Steffen: Exactly, this is a landmine-detecting flower. 
+If you are living in one of the places where the roughly half-billion unaccounted for mines are scattered, you can fling these seeds out into the field. 
+And as they grow up, they will grow up around the mines, their roots will detect the chemicals in them, and where the flowers turn red you don't step. 
+Yeah, so seeds that could save your life. You know? 
+(Applause) I also love it because it seems to me that the example, the tools we use to change the world, ought to be beautiful in themselves. 
+You know, that it's not just enough to survive. 
+We've got to make something better than what we've got. 
+And I think that we will. 
+Just to wrap up, in the immortal words of H.G. Wells, I think that better things are on the way. 
+I think that, in fact, that "" all of the past is but the beginning of a beginning. 
+All that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. "" I hope that that turns out to be true. 
+The people in this room have given me more confidence than ever that it will. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+How do you explain when things don't go as we assume? 
+Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? 
+For example: Why is Apple so innovative? 
+Year after year, after year, they're more innovative than all their competition. 
+And yet, they're just a computer company. 
+They're just like everyone else. 
+They have the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. 
+Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement? 
+He wasn't the only man who suffered in pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn't the only great orator of the day. 
+And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified, better funded — and they didn't achieve powered man flight, and the Wright brothers beat them to it. 
+And this discovery profoundly changed my view on how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. 
+As it turns out, there's a pattern. 
+As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way. 
+And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. 
+All I did was codify it, and it's probably the world's simplest idea. 
+I call it the golden circle. 
+This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren't. 
+Let me define the terms really quickly. 
+Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. 
+Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. 
+But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. 
+And by "" why "" I don't mean "" to make a profit. "" That's a result. It's always a result. 
+By "" why, "" I mean: What's your purpose? 
+What's your cause? What's your belief? 
+Why do you get out of bed in the morning? 
+As a result, the way we think, we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in, it's obvious. 
+But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations — regardless of their size, regardless of their industry — all think, act and communicate from the inside out. 
+I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody gets it. 
+They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. 
+Want to buy one? "" "Meh." 
+That's how most marketing and sales are done, that's how we communicate interpersonally. 
+Here's our new car: It gets great gas mileage, it has leather seats. 
+Here's how Apple actually communicates. 
+"" Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. 
+We believe in thinking differently. 
+The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. 
+We just happen to make great computers. 
+This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple. 
+But we're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple, or a phone from Apple, or a DVR from Apple. 
+Their competitors are equally qualified to make all of these products. 
+A few years ago, Gateway came out with flat-screen TVs. 
+They're eminently qualified to make flat-screen TVs. 
+Nobody bought one. 
+Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs, and they make great quality products, and they can make perfectly well-designed products — and nobody bought one. 
+Here's the best part: None of what I'm telling you is my opinion. 
+It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. 
+Not psychology, biology. 
+If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, from the top down, the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. 
+Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the "" what "" level. 
+The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. 
+The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. 
+It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language. 
+In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. 
+It just doesn't drive behavior. 
+When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. 
+This is where gut decisions come from. 
+Sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, "" I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right. "" Why would we use that verb, it doesn't "" feel "" right? 
+The best we can muster up is, "I don't know. It just doesn't feel right." 
+I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. 
+It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language. 
+But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do. 
+The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. 
+The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it's to hire people who believe what you believe. 
+I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. 
+Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. 
+And back in the early 20th century, the pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. 
+And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success. 
+Samuel Pierpont Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. 
+Money was no problem. 
+He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. 
+He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic. 
+The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. 
+Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley? 
+A few hundred miles away in Dayton Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, they had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success. 
+They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop; not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur; and The New York Times followed them around nowhere. 
+The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. 
+They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world. 
+He was in pursuit of the result. 
+He was in pursuit of the riches. 
+And lo and behold, look what happened. 
+The others just worked for the paycheck. 
+They tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crash before supper. 
+And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even experience it. 
+He could have said, "" That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology, "" but he didn't. 
+He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit. 
+If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe. 
+But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? 
+The next 13.5% of our population are our early adopters. 
+The only reason these people buy touch-tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore. 
+(Laughter) We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips. 
+I love asking businesses, "" What's your conversion on new business? "" They love to tell you, "" It's about 10 percent, "" proudly. 
+So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, "" Crossing the Chasm "" — because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. 
+And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. 
+They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available. 
+These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when you could have bought one off the shelf the next week. 
+These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat-screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. 
+And, by the way, they didn't do it because the technology was so great; they did it for themselves. 
+It's because they wanted to be first. 
+People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. 
+In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe. 
+The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what they believed about the world, and how they wanted everybody to see them: They were first. 
+So let me give you a famous example, a famous failure and a famous success of the law of diffusion of innovation. 
+It's a commercial example. 
+As we said before, the recipe for success is money and the right people and the right market conditions. 
+From the time TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this current day, they are the single highest-quality product on the market, hands down, there is no dispute. 
+I TiVo stuff on my piece-of-junk Time Warner DVR all the time. 
+They've never made money. 
+And when they went IPO, their stock was at about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted, and it's never traded above 10. 
+In fact, I don't think it's even traded above six, except for a couple of little spikes. 
+Because you see, when TiVo launched their product, they told us all what they had. 
+They said, "" We have a product that pauses live TV, skips commercials, rewinds live TV and memorizes your viewing habits without you even asking. "" And the cynical majority said, "" We don't believe you. 
+We don't need it. We don't like it. 
+You're scaring us. "" What if they had said, "" If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every aspect of your life, boy, do we have a product for you. 
+It pauses live TV, skips commercials, memorizes your viewing habits, etc., etc. "" People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe. 
+In the summer of 1963, 250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak. 
+They sent out no invitations, and there was no website to check the date. 
+How do you do that? 
+Well, Dr. King wasn't the only man in America who was a great orator. 
+But he had a gift. 
+And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. 
+And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people. 
+And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak. 
+How many of them showed up for him? 
+They showed up for themselves. 
+It's what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August. 
+It's what they believed, and it wasn't about black versus white: 25% of the audience was white. 
+And not until all the laws that are made by men are consistent with the laws made by the higher authority will we live in a just world. 
+We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. 
+By the way, he gave the "" I have a dream "" speech, not the "" I have a plan "" speech. 
+(Laughter) Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12-point plans. 
+Because there are leaders and there are those who lead. 
+Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us. 
+Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. 
+And it's those who start with "" why "" that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them. 
+
+I'm five years old, and I am very proud. 
+My father has just built the best outhouse in our little village in Ukraine. 
+Inside, it's a smelly, gaping hole in the ground, but outside, it's pearly white formica and it literally gleams in the sun. 
+This makes me feel so proud, so important, that I appoint myself the leader of my little group of friends and I devise missions for us. 
+So we prowl from house to house looking for flies captured in spider webs and we set them free. 
+Four years earlier, when I was one, after the Chernobyl accident, the rain came down black, and my sister's hair fell out in clumps, and I spent nine months in the hospital. 
+There were no visitors allowed, so my mother bribed a hospital worker. 
+She acquired a nurse's uniform, and she snuck in every night to sit by my side. 
+Five years later, an unexpected silver lining. 
+Thanks to Chernobyl, we get asylum in the U.S. 
+I am six years old, and I don't cry when we leave home and we come to America, because I expect it to be a place filled with rare and wonderful things like bananas and chocolate and Bazooka bubble gum, Bazooka bubble gum with the little cartoon wrappers inside, Bazooka that we'd get once a year in Ukraine and we'd have to chew one piece for an entire week. 
+So the first day we get to New York, my grandmother and I find a penny in the floor of the homeless shelter that my family's staying in. 
+Only, we don't know that it's a homeless shelter. 
+We think that it's a hotel, a hotel with lots of rats. 
+So we find this penny kind of fossilized in the floor, and we think that a very wealthy man must have left it there because regular people don't just lose money. 
+And I hold this penny in the palm of my hand, and it's sticky and rusty, but it feels like I'm holding a fortune. 
+I decide that I'm going to get my very own piece of Bazooka bubble gum. 
+And in that moment, I feel like a millionaire. 
+About a year later, I get to feel that way again when we find a bag full of stuffed animals in the trash, and suddenly I have more toys than I've ever had in my whole life. 
+And again, I get that feeling when we get a knock on the door of our apartment in Brooklyn, and my sister and I find a deliveryman with a box of pizza that we didn't order. 
+So we take the pizza, our very first pizza, and we devour slice after slice as the deliveryman stands there and stares at us from the doorway. 
+And he tells us to pay, but we don't speak English. 
+My mother comes out, and he asks her for money, but she doesn't have enough. 
+She walks 50 blocks to and from work every day just to avoid spending money on bus fare. 
+Then our neighbor pops her head in, and she turns red with rage when she realizes that those immigrants from downstairs have somehow gotten their hands on her pizza. 
+Everyone's upset. 
+But the pizza is delicious. 
+It doesn't hit me until years later just how little we had. 
+On our 10 year anniversary of being in the U.S., we decided to celebrate by reserving a room at the hotel that we first stayed in when we got to the U.S. 
+The man at the front desk laughs, and he says, "You can't reserve a room here. This is a homeless shelter." 
+My husband Brian was also homeless as a kid. 
+His family lost everything, and at age 11, he had to live in motels with his dad, motels that would round up all of their food and keep it hostage until they were able to pay the bill. 
+And one time, when he finally got his box of Frosted Flakes back, it was crawling with roaches. 
+But he did have one thing. 
+He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books, two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots. And this was his treasure. 
+This was his own assembly of heroes that kept him from drugs and gangs and from giving up on his dreams. 
+I'm going to tell you about one more formerly homeless member of our family. 
+Once upon a time, Scarlet was used as bait in dog fights. 
+She was tied up and thrown into the ring for other dogs to attack so they'd get more aggressive before the fight. 
+And now, these days, she eats organic food and she sleeps on an orthopedic bed with her name on it, but when we pour water for her in her bowl, she still looks up and she wags her tail in gratitude. 
+Sometimes Brian and I walk through the park with Scarlett, and she rolls through the grass, and we just look at her and then we look at each other and we feel gratitude. 
+We forget about all of our new middle-class frustrations and disappointments, and we feel like millionaires. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I used to be a Malthusian. 
+This was my mental model of the world: exploding population, small planet; it's going to lead to ugly things. 
+But I'm moving past Malthus, because I think that we just might be about 150 years from a kind of new enlightenment. 
+Here's why. 
+This is the U.N. 's population data, you may have seen, for the world. 
+And the world's population expected to top out at something hopefully a bit less than 10 billion, late this century. 
+And after that, most likely it's going to begin to decline. 
+So what then? 
+Most of the economic models are built around scarcity and growth. 
+So a lot of economists look at declining population and expect to see stagnation, maybe depression. 
+But a declining population is going to have at least two very beneficial economic effects. 
+One: fewer people on a fixed amount of land make investing in property a bad bet. 
+In the cities, a lot of the cost of property is actually wrapped up in its speculative value. 
+Take away land speculation, price of land drops. 
+And that begins to lift a heavy burden off the world's poor. 
+Number two: a declining population means scarce labor. 
+Scarce labor drives wages. 
+As wages increase that also lifts the burden on the poor and the working class. 
+Now I'm not talking about a radical drop in population like we saw in the Black Death. 
+But look what happened in Europe after the plague: rising wages, land reform, technological innovation, birth of the middle class; and after that, forward-looking social movements like the Renaissance, and later the Enlightenment. 
+Most of our cultural heritage has tended to look backward, romanticizing the past. 
+All of the Western religions begin with the notion of Eden, and descend through a kind of profligate present to a very ugly future. 
+So human history is viewed as sort of this downhill slide from the good old days. 
+But I think we're in for another change, about two generations after the top of that curve, once the effects of a declining population start to settle in. 
+At that point, we'll start romanticizing the future again, instead of the nasty, brutish past. 
+So why does this matter? 
+Why talk about social-economic movements that may be more than a century away? 
+Because transitions are dangerous times. 
+When land owners start to lose money, and labor demands more pay, there are some powerful interests that are going to fear for the future. 
+Fear for the future leads to some rash decisions. 
+If we have a positive view about the future then we may be able to accelerate through that turn, instead of careening off a cliff. 
+If we can make it through the next 150 years, I think that your great great grandchildren will forget all about Malthus. 
+And instead, they'll be planning for the future and starting to build the 22nd Century Enlightenment. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Cities are the crucible of civilization. 
+They have been expanding, urbanization has been expanding, at an exponential rate in the last 200 years so that by the second part of this century, the planet will be completely dominated by cities. 
+Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy — they're all problems that are confronted by having cities. 
+That's where all these problems come from. 
+And the tsunami of problems that we feel we're facing in terms of sustainability questions are actually a reflection of the exponential increase in urbanization across the planet. 
+Here's some numbers. 
+Two hundred years ago, the United States was less than a few percent urbanized. 
+It's now more than 82 percent. 
+The planet has crossed the halfway mark a few years ago. 
+China's building 300 new cities in the next 20 years. 
+Now listen to this: Every week for the foreseeable future, until 2050, every week more than a million people are being added to our cities. 
+This is going to affect everything. 
+Everybody in this room, if you stay alive, is going to be affected by what's happening in cities in this extraordinary phenomenon. 
+However, cities, despite having this negative aspect to them, are also the solution. 
+Because cities are the vacuum cleaners and the magnets that have sucked up creative people, creating ideas, innovation, wealth and so on. 
+So we have this kind of dual nature. 
+And so there's an urgent need for a scientific theory of cities. 
+Now these are my comrades in arms. 
+This work has been done with an extraordinary group of people, and they've done all the work, and I'm the great bullshitter that tries to bring it all together. 
+(Laughter) So here's the problem: This is what we all want. 
+The 10 billion people on the planet in 2050 want to live in places like this, having things like this, doing things like this, with economies that are growing like this, not realizing that entropy produces things like this, this, this and this. 
+And the question is: Is that what Edinburgh and London and New York are going to look like in 2050, or is it going to be this? 
+That's the question. 
+I must say, many of the indicators look like this is what it's going to look like, but let's talk about it. 
+So my provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities. 
+And scientific theory means quantifiable — relying on underlying generic principles that can be made into a predictive framework. 
+That's the quest. 
+Is that conceivable? 
+Are there universal laws? 
+So here's two questions that I have in my head when I think about this problem. 
+The first is: Are cities part of biology? 
+Is London a great big whale? 
+Is Edinburgh a horse? 
+Is Microsoft a great big anthill? 
+What do we learn from that? 
+We use them metaphorically — the DNA of a company, the metabolism of a city, and so on — is that just bullshit, metaphorical bullshit, or is there serious substance to it? 
+And if that is the case, how come that it's very hard to kill a city? 
+You could drop an atom bomb on a city, and 30 years later it's surviving. 
+Very few cities fail. 
+All companies die, all companies. 
+And if you have a serious theory, you should be able to predict when Google is going to go bust. 
+So is that just another version of this? 
+Well we understand this very well. 
+That is, you ask any generic question about this — how many trees of a given size, how many branches of a given size does a tree have, how many leaves, what is the energy flowing through each branch, what is the size of the canopy, what is its growth, what is its mortality? 
+We have a mathematical framework based on generic universal principles that can answer those questions. 
+And the idea is can we do the same for this? 
+So the route in is recognizing one of the most extraordinary things about life, is that it is scalable, it works over an extraordinary range. 
+This is just a tiny range actually: It's us mammals; we're one of these. 
+The same principles, the same dynamics, the same organization is at work in all of these, including us, and it can scale over a range of 100 million in size. 
+And that is one of the main reasons life is so resilient and robust — scalability. 
+We're going to discuss that in a moment more. 
+But you know, at a local level, you scale; everybody in this room is scaled. 
+That's called growth. 
+Here's how you grew. 
+Rat, that's a rat — could have been you. 
+We're all pretty much the same. 
+And you see, you're very familiar with this. 
+You grow very quickly and then you stop. 
+And that line there is a prediction from the same theory, based on the same principles, that describes that forest. 
+And here it is for the growth of a rat, and those points on there are data points. 
+This is just the weight versus the age. 
+And you see, it stops growing. 
+Very, very good for biology — also one of the reasons for its great resilience. 
+Very, very bad for economies and companies and cities in our present paradigm. 
+This is what we believe. 
+This is what our whole economy is thrusting upon us, particularly illustrated in that left-hand corner: hockey sticks. 
+This is a bunch of software companies — and what it is is their revenue versus their age — all zooming away, and everybody making millions and billions of dollars. 
+Okay, so how do we understand this? 
+So let's first talk about biology. 
+This is explicitly showing you how things scale, and this is a truly remarkable graph. 
+What is plotted here is metabolic rate — how much energy you need per day to stay alive — versus your weight, your mass, for all of us bunch of organisms. 
+And it's plotted in this funny way by going up by factors of 10, otherwise you couldn't get everything on the graph. 
+And what you see if you plot it in this slightly curious way is that everybody lies on the same line. 
+Despite the fact that this is the most complex and diverse system in the universe, there's an extraordinary simplicity being expressed by this. 
+It's particularly astonishing because each one of these organisms, each subsystem, each cell type, each gene, has evolved in its own unique environmental niche with its own unique history. 
+And yet, despite all of that Darwinian evolution and natural selection, they've been constrained to lie on a line. 
+Something else is going on. 
+Before I talk about that, I've written down at the bottom there the slope of this curve, this straight line. 
+It's three-quarters, roughly, which is less than one — and we call that sublinear. 
+And here's the point of that. 
+It says that, if it were linear, the steepest slope, then doubling the size you would require double the amount of energy. 
+But it's sublinear, and what that translates into is that, if you double the size of the organism, you actually only need 75 percent more energy. 
+So a wonderful thing about all of biology is that it expresses an extraordinary economy of scale. 
+The bigger you are systematically, according to very well-defined rules, less energy per capita. 
+Now any physiological variable you can think of, any life history event you can think of, if you plot it this way, looks like this. 
+There is an extraordinary regularity. 
+So you tell me the size of a mammal, I can tell you at the 90 percent level everything about it in terms of its physiology, life history, etc. 
+And the reason for this is because of networks. 
+All of life is controlled by networks — from the intracellular through the multicellular through the ecosystem level. 
+And you're very familiar with these networks. 
+That's a little thing that lives inside an elephant. 
+And here's the summary of what I'm saying. 
+If you take those networks, this idea of networks, and you apply universal principles, mathematizable, universal principles, all of these scalings and all of these constraints follow, including the description of the forest, the description of your circulatory system, the description within cells. 
+One of the things I did not stress in that introduction was that, systematically, the pace of life decreases as you get bigger. 
+Heart rates are slower; you live longer; diffusion of oxygen and resources across membranes is slower, etc. 
+The question is: Is any of this true for cities and companies? 
+So is London a scaled up Birmingham, which is a scaled up Brighton, etc., etc.? 
+Is New York a scaled up San Francisco, which is a scaled up Santa Fe? 
+Don't know. We will discuss that. 
+But they are networks, and the most important network of cities is you. 
+Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals. 
+Here's just a symbolic picture of that. 
+And here's scaling of cities. 
+This shows that in this very simple example, which happens to be a mundane example of number of petrol stations as a function of size — plotted in the same way as the biology — you see exactly the same kind of thing. 
+There is a scaling. 
+That is that the number of petrol stations in the city is now given to you when you tell me its size. 
+The slope of that is less than linear. 
+There is an economy of scale. 
+Less petrol stations per capita the bigger you are — not surprising. 
+But here's what's surprising. 
+It scales in the same way everywhere. 
+This is just European countries, but you do it in Japan or China or Colombia, always the same with the same kind of economy of scale to the same degree. 
+And any infrastructure you look at — whether it's the length of roads, length of electrical lines — anything you look at has the same economy of scale scaling in the same way. 
+It's an integrated system that has evolved despite all the planning and so on. 
+But even more surprising is if you look at socio-economic quantities, quantities that have no analog in biology, that have evolved when we started forming communities eight to 10,000 years ago. 
+The top one is wages as a function of size plotted in the same way. 
+And the bottom one is you lot — super-creatives plotted in the same way. 
+And what you see is a scaling phenomenon. 
+But most important in this, the exponent, the analog to that three-quarters for the metabolic rate, is bigger than one — it's about 1.15 to 1.2. 
+Here it is, which says that the bigger you are the more you have per capita, unlike biology — higher wages, more super-creative people per capita as you get bigger, more patents per capita, more crime per capita. 
+And we've looked at everything: more AIDS cases, flu, etc. 
+And here, they're all plotted together. 
+Just to show you what we plotted, here is income, GDP — GDP of the city — crime and patents all on one graph. 
+And you can see, they all follow the same line. 
+And here's the statement. 
+If you double the size of a city from 100,000 to 200,000, from a million to two million, 10 to 20 million, it doesn't matter, then systematically you get a 15 percent increase in wages, wealth, number of AIDS cases, number of police, anything you can think of. 
+It goes up by 15 percent, and you have a 15 percent savings on the infrastructure. 
+This, no doubt, is the reason why a million people a week are gathering in cities. 
+Because they think that all those wonderful things — like creative people, wealth, income — is what attracts them, forgetting about the ugly and the bad. 
+What is the reason for this? 
+Well I don't have time to tell you about all the mathematics, but underlying this is the social networks, because this is a universal phenomenon. 
+This 15 percent rule is true no matter where you are on the planet — Japan, Chile, Portugal, Scotland, doesn't matter. 
+Always, all the data shows it's the same, despite the fact that these cities have evolved independently. 
+Something universal is going on. 
+The universality, to repeat, is us — that we are the city. 
+And it is our interactions and the clustering of those interactions. 
+So there it is, I've said it again. 
+So if it is those networks and their mathematical structure, unlike biology, which had sublinear scaling, economies of scale, you had the slowing of the pace of life as you get bigger. 
+If it's social networks with super-linear scaling — more per capita — then the theory says that you increase the pace of life. 
+The bigger you are, life gets faster. 
+On the left is the heart rate showing biology. 
+On the right is the speed of walking in a bunch of European cities, showing that increase. 
+Lastly, I want to talk about growth. 
+This is what we had in biology, just to repeat. 
+Economies of scale gave rise to this sigmoidal behavior. 
+You grow fast and then stop — part of our resilience. 
+That would be bad for economies and cities. 
+And indeed, one of the wonderful things about the theory is that if you have super-linear scaling from wealth creation and innovation, then indeed you get, from the same theory, a beautiful rising exponential curve — lovely. 
+And in fact, if you compare it to data, it fits very well with the development of cities and economies. 
+But it has a terrible catch, and the catch is that this system is destined to collapse. 
+And it's destined to collapse for many reasons — kind of Malthusian reasons — that you run out of resources. 
+And how do you avoid that? Well we've done it before. 
+What we do is, as we grow and we approach the collapse, a major innovation takes place and we start over again, and we start over again as we approach the next one, and so on. 
+So there's this continuous cycle of innovation that is necessary in order to sustain growth and avoid collapse. 
+The catch, however, to this is that you have to innovate faster and faster and faster. 
+So the image is that we're not only on a treadmill that's going faster, but we have to change the treadmill faster and faster. 
+We have to accelerate on a continuous basis. 
+And the question is: Can we, as socio-economic beings, avoid a heart attack? 
+So lastly, I'm going to finish up in this last minute or two asking about companies. 
+See companies, they scale. 
+The top one, in fact, is Walmart on the right. 
+It's the same plot. 
+This happens to be income and assets versus the size of the company as denoted by its number of employees. 
+We could use sales, anything you like. 
+There it is: after some little fluctuations at the beginning, when companies are innovating, they scale beautifully. 
+And we've looked at 23,000 companies in the United States, may I say. 
+And I'm only showing you a little bit of this. 
+What is astonishing about companies is that they scale sublinearly like biology, indicating that they're dominated, not by super-linear innovation and ideas; they become dominated by economies of scale. 
+In that interpretation, by bureaucracy and administration, and they do it beautifully, may I say. 
+So if you tell me the size of some company, some small company, I could have predicted the size of Walmart. 
+If it has this sublinear scaling, the theory says we should have sigmoidal growth. 
+There's Walmart. Doesn't look very sigmoidal. 
+That's what we like, hockey sticks. 
+But you notice, I've cheated, because I've only gone up to '94. 
+Let's go up to 2008. 
+That red line is from the theory. 
+So if I'd have done this in 1994, I could have predicted what Walmart would be now. 
+And then this is repeated across the entire spectrum of companies. 
+There they are. That's 23,000 companies. 
+They all start looking like hockey sticks, they all bend over, and they all die like you and me. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My topic is economic growth in China and India. 
+And the question I want to explore with you is whether or not democracy has helped or has hindered economic growth. 
+You may say this is not fair, because I'm selecting two countries to make a case against democracy. 
+Actually, exactly the opposite is what I'm going to do. 
+I'm going to use these two countries to make an economic argument for democracy, rather than against democracy. 
+The first question there is why China has grown so much faster than India. 
+Over the last 30 years, in terms of the GDP growth rates, China has grown at twice the rate of India. 
+In the last five years, the two countries have begun to converge somewhat in economic growth. 
+But over the last 30 years, China undoubtedly has done much better than India. 
+One simple answer is China has Shanghai and India has Mumbai. 
+Look at the skyline of Shanghai. 
+This is the Pudong area. 
+The picture on India is the Dharavi slum of Mumbai in India. 
+The idea there behind these two pictures is that the Chinese government can act above rule of law. 
+It can plan for the long-term benefits of the country and in the process, evict millions of people — that's just a small technical issue. 
+Whereas in India, you cannot do that, because you have to listen to the public. 
+You're being constrained by the public's opinion. 
+Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agrees with that view. 
+In an interview printed in the financial press of India, He said that he wants to make Mumbai another Shanghai. 
+This is an Oxford-trained economist steeped in humanistic values, and yet he agrees with the high-pressure tactics of Shanghai. 
+So let me call it the Shanghai model of economic growth, that emphasizes the following features for promoting economic development: infrastructures, airports, highways, bridges, things like that. 
+And you need a strong government to do that, because you cannot respect private property rights. 
+You cannot be constrained by the public's opinion. 
+You need also state ownership, especially of land assets, in order to build and roll out infrastructures very quickly. 
+The implication of that model is that democracy is a hindrance for economic growth, rather than a facilitator of economic growth. 
+Here's the key question. 
+Just how important are infrastructures for economic growth? 
+This is a key issue. 
+If you believe that infrastructures are very important for economic growth, then you would argue a strong government is necessary to promote growth. If you believe 
+that infrastructures are not as important as many people believe, then you will put less emphasis on strong government. 
+So to illustrate that question, let me give you two countries. 
+And for the sake of brevity, I'll call one country Country 1 and the other country Country 2. Country 1 
+has a systematic advantage over Country 2 in infrastructures. 
+Country 1 has more telephones, and Country 1 has a longer system of railways. 
+So if I were to ask you, "" Which is China and which is India, and which country has grown faster? "" if you believe in the infrastructure view, then you will say, "" Country 1 must be China. 
+They must have done better, in terms of economic growth. 
+And Country 2 is possibly India. "" Actually the country with more telephones is the Soviet Union, and the data referred to 1989. 
+After the country reported very impressive statistics on telephones, the country collapsed. 
+That's not too good. 
+The picture there is Khrushchev. 
+I know that in 1989 he no longer ruled the Soviet Union, but that's the best picture that I can find. 
+(Laughter) Telephones, infrastructures do not guarantee you economic growth. 
+Country 2, that has fewer telephones, is China. 
+Since 1989, the country has performed at a double-digit rate every year for the last 20 years. 
+If you know nothing about China and the Soviet Union other than the fact about their telephones, you would have made a poor prediction about their economic growth in the next two decades. 
+Country 1, that has a longer system of railways, is actually India. 
+And Country 2 is China. 
+This is a very little known fact about the two countries. 
+Yes, today China has a huge infrastructure advantage over India. 
+But for many years, until the late 1990s, China had an infrastructure disadvantage vis-a-vis India. 
+In developing countries, the most common mode of transportation is the railways, and the British built a lot of railways in India. 
+India is the smaller of the two countries, and yet it had a longer system of railways until the late 1990s. 
+So clearly, infrastructure doesn't explain why China did better before the late 1990s, as compared with India. 
+In fact, if you look at the evidence worldwide, the evidence is more supportive of the view that the infrastructure are actually the result of economic growth. 
+The economy grows, government accumulates more resources, and the government can invest in infrastructure — rather than infrastructure being a cause for economic growth. 
+And this is clearly the story of the Chinese economic growth. 
+Let me look at this question more directly. 
+Is democracy bad for economic growth? 
+Now let's turn to two countries, Country A and Country B. 
+Country A, in 1990, had about $300 per capita GDP as compared with Country B, which had $460 in per capita GDP. 
+By 2008, Country A has surpassed Country B with $700 per capita GDP as compared with $650 per capita GDP. 
+Both countries are in Asia. 
+If I were to ask you, "" Which are the two Asian countries? 
+And which one is a democracy? "" you may argue, "" Well, maybe Country A is China and Country B is India. "" In fact, Country A is democratic India, and Country B is Pakistan — the country that has a long period of military rule. 
+And it's very common that we compare India with China. 
+That's because the two countries have about the same population size. 
+But the more natural comparison is actually between India and Pakistan. 
+Those two countries are geographically similar. 
+They have a complicated, but shared common history. 
+By that comparison, democracy looks very, very good in terms of economic growth. 
+So why do economists fall in love with authoritarian governments? 
+One reason is the East Asian Model. 
+In East Asia, we have had successful economic growth stories such as Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. 
+Some of these economies were ruled by authoritarian governments in the 60s and 70s and 1980s. 
+The problem with that view is like asking all the winners of lotteries, "Have you won the lottery?" 
+And they all tell you, "" Yes, we have won the lottery. "" And then you draw the conclusion the odds of winning the lottery are 100 percent. 
+The reason is you never go and bother to ask the losers who also purchased lottery tickets and didn't end up winning the prize. 
+For each of these successful authoritarian governments in East Asia, there's a matched failure. 
+Korea succeeded, North Korea didn't. 
+Taiwan succeeded, China under Mao Zedong didn't. 
+Burma didn't succeed. 
+The Philippines didn't succeed. 
+If you look at the statistical evidence worldwide, there's really no support for the idea that authoritarian governments hold a systematic edge over democracies in terms of economic growth. 
+So the East Asian model has this massive selection bias — it is known as selecting on a dependent variable, something we always tell our students to avoid. 
+So exactly why did China grow so much faster? 
+I will take you to the Cultural Revolution, when China went mad, and compare that country's performance with India under Indira Gandhi. 
+The question there is: Which country did better, China or India? 
+China was during the Cultural Revolution. 
+It turns out even during the Cultural Revolution, China out-perfomed India in terms of GDP growth by an average of about 2.2 percent every year in terms of per capita GDP. 
+So that's when China was mad. 
+The whole country went mad. 
+It must mean that the country had something so advantageous to itself in terms of economic growth to overcome the negative effects of the Cultural Revolution. 
+The advantage the country had was human capital — nothing else but human capital. 
+This is the world development index indicator data in the early 1990s. 
+And this is the earliest data that I can find. 
+The adult literacy rate in China is 77 percent as compared with 48 percent in India. 
+The contrast in literacy rates is especially sharp between Chinese women and Indian women. 
+I haven't told you about the definition of literacy. 
+In China, the definition of literacy is the ability to read and write 1,500 Chinese characters. 
+In India, the definition of literacy, operating definition of literacy, is the ability, the grand ability, to write your own name in whatever language you happen to speak. 
+The gap between the two countries in terms of literacy is much more substantial than the data here indicated. 
+If you go to other sources of data such as Human Development Index, that data series, go back to the early 1970s, you see exactly the same contrast. 
+China held a huge advantage in terms of human capital vis-a-vis India. 
+Life expectancies: as early as 1965, China had a huge advantage in life expectancy. 
+On average, as a Chinese in 1965, you lived 10 years more than an average Indian. 
+So if you have a choice between being a Chinese and being an Indian, you would want to become a Chinese in order to live 10 years longer. 
+If you made that decision in 1965, the down side of that is the next year we have the Cultural Revolution. 
+So you have to always think carefully about these decisions. 
+If you cannot chose your nationality, then you will want to become an Indian man. 
+Because, as an Indian man, you have about two years of life expectancy advantage vis-a-vis Indian women. 
+This is an extremely strange fact. 
+It's very rare among countries to have this kind of pattern. 
+It shows the systematic discrimination and biases in the Indian society against women. 
+The good news is, by 2006, India has closed the gap between men and women in terms of life expectancy. 
+Today, Indian women have a sizable life expectancy edge over Indian men. 
+So India is reverting to the normal. 
+But India still has a lot of work to do in terms of gender equality. 
+These are the two pictures taken of garment factories in Guangdong Province and garment factories in India. 
+In China, it's all women. 
+60 to 80 percent of the workforce in China is women in the coastal part of the country, whereas in India, it's all men. 
+Financial Times printed this picture of an Indian textile factory with the title, "" India Poised to Overtake China in Textile. "" By looking at these two pictures, I say no, it won't overtake China for a while. 
+If you look at other East Asian countries, women there play a hugely important role in terms of economic take-off — in terms of creating the manufacturing miracle associated with East Asia. 
+India still has a long way to go to catch up with China. 
+Then the issue is, what about the Chinese political system? 
+You talk about human capital, you talk about education and public health. 
+What about the political system? 
+Isn't it true that the one-party political system has facilitated economic growth in China? 
+Actually, the answer is more nuanced and subtle than that. 
+It depends on a distinction that you draw between statics of the political system and the dynamics of the political system. 
+Statically, China is a one-party system, authoritarian — there's no question about it. 
+Dynamically, it has changed over time to become less authoritarian and more democratic. 
+When you explain change — for example, economic growth; economic growth is about change — when you explain change, you use other things that have changed to explain change, rather than using the constant to explain change. 
+Sometimes a fixed effect can explain change, but a fixed effect only explains changes in interaction with the things that change. 
+In terms of the political changes, they have introduced village elections. 
+They have increased the security of proprietors. 
+And they have increased the security with long-term land leases. 
+There are also financial reforms in rural China. 
+There is also a rural entrepreneurial revolution in China. 
+To me, the pace of political changes is too slow, too gradual. 
+And my own view is the country is going to face some substantial challenges, because they have not moved further and faster on political reforms. 
+But nevertheless, the system has moved in a more liberal direction, moved in a more democratic direction. 
+You can apply exactly the same dynamic perspective on India. 
+In fact, when India was growing at a Hindu rate of growth — about one percent, two percent a year — that was when India was least democratic. 
+Indira Gandhi declared emergency rule in 1975. 
+The Indian government owned and operated all the TV stations. 
+A little-known fact about India in the 1990s is that the country not only has undertaken economic reforms, the country has also undertaken political reforms by introducing village self-rule, privatization of media and introducing freedom of information acts. 
+So the dynamic perspective fits both with China and in India in terms of the direction. 
+Why do many people believe that India is still a growth disaster? 
+One reason is they are always comparing India with China. 
+But China is a superstar in terms of economic growth. 
+If you are a NBA player and you are always being compared to Michael Jordan, you're going to look not so impressive. 
+But that doesn't mean that you're a bad basketball player. 
+Comparing with a superstar is the wrong benchmark. 
+In fact, if you compare India with the average developing country, even before the more recent period of acceleration of Indian growth — now India is growing between eight and nine percent — even before this period, India was ranked fourth in terms of economic growth among emerging economies. 
+This is a very impressive record indeed. 
+Let's think about the future: the dragon vis-a-vis the elephant. 
+Which country has the growth momentum? 
+China, I believe, still has some of the excellent raw fundamentals — mostly the social capital, the public health, the sense of egalitarianism that you don't find in India. 
+But I believe that India has the momentum. 
+It has the improving fundamentals. 
+The government has invested in basic education, has invested in basic health. 
+I believe the government should do more, but nevertheless, the direction it is moving in is the right direction. 
+India has the right institutional conditions for economic growth, whereas China is still struggling with political reforms. 
+I believe that the political reforms are a must for China to maintain its growth. 
+And it's very important to have political reforms, to have widely shared benefits of economic growth. 
+I don't know whether that's going to happen or not, but I'm an optimist. 
+Hopefully, five years from now, I'm going to report to TEDGlobal that political reforms will happen in China. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So my name is Amy Webb, and a few years ago I found myself at the end of yet another fantastic relationship that came burning down in a spectacular fashion. 
+I don't understand why this keeps happening. 
+I turned to my grandmother, who always had plenty of advice, and she said, "" Stop being so picky. 
+You've got to date around. 
+And most importantly, true love will find you when you least expect it. "" Now as it turns out, I'm somebody who thinks a lot about data, as you'll soon find. 
+I also have a very tight-knit family, and I'm very, very close with my sister, and as a result, I wanted to have the same type of family when I grew up. 
+So I'm at the end of this bad breakup, I'm 30 years old, I figure I'm probably going to have to date somebody for about six months before I'm ready to get monogamous and before we can sort of cohabitate, and we have to do that for a while before we can get engaged. 
+And if I want to start having children by the time I'm 35, that meant that I would have had to have been on my way to marriage five years ago. 
+So that wasn't going to work. 
+Population of Philadelphia: it has 1.5 million people. 
+I figure about half of that are men, so that takes the number down to 750,000. 
+I'm looking for a guy between the ages of 30 and 36, which was only four percent of the population, so now I'm dealing with the possibility of 30,000 men. 
+I figure I'm attracted to maybe one out of 10 of those men, and there was no way I was going to deal with somebody who was an avid golfer. 
+So that basically meant there were 35 men for me that I could possibly date in the entire city of Philadelphia. 
+In the meantime, my very large Jewish family was already all married and well on their way to having lots and lots of children, and I felt like I was under tremendous peer pressure to get my life going already. 
+So I have two possible strategies at this point I'm sort of figuring out. 
+One, I can take my grandmother's advice and sort of least-expect my way into maybe bumping into the one out of 35 possible men in the entire 1.5-million-person city of Philadelphia, or I could try online dating. 
+Now, I like the idea of online dating, because it's predicated on an algorithm, and that's really just a simple way of saying I've got a problem, I'm going to use some data, run it through a system and get to a solution. 
+So online dating is the second most popular way that people now meet each other, but as it turns out, algorithms have been around for thousands of years in almost every culture. 
+In fact, in Judaism, there were matchmakers a long time ago, and though they didn't have an explicit algorithm per se, they definitely were running through formulas in their heads, like, is the girl going to like the boy? 
+So I decided to sign on. 
+Now, there was one small catch. 
+As I'm signing on to the various dating websites, as it happens, I was really, really busy. 
+But that actually wasn't the biggest problem. 
+The biggest problem is that I hate filling out questionnaires of any kind, and I certainly don't like questionnaires that are like Cosmo quizzes. 
+(Laughter) So in the descriptive part up top, I said that I was an award-winning journalist and a future thinker. 
+I talked a lot about JavaScript. 
+These algorithms had a sea full of men that wanted to take me out on lots of dates — what turned out to be truly awful dates. 
+There was this guy Steve, the I.T. guy. 
+The algorithm matched us up because we share a love of gadgets, we share a love of math and data and '80s music, and so I agreed to go out with him. 
+And we went in, and right off the bat, our conversation really wasn't taking flight, but he was ordering a lot of food. 
+In fact, he didn't even bother looking at the menu. 
+He was ordering multiple appetizers, multiple entrées, for me as well, and suddenly there are piles and piles of food on our table, also lots and lots of bottles of wine. 
+So we're nearing the end of our conversation and the end of dinner, and I've decided Steve the I.T. guy and I are really just not meant for each other, but we'll part ways as friends, when he gets up to go to the bathroom, and in the meantime, the bill comes to our table. 
+I am totally down with splitting the bill. 
+(Audience gasps) So needless to say, I was not having a good night. 
+So I run home, I call my mother, I call my sister, and as I do, at the end of each one of these terrible, terrible dates, I regale them with the details. 
+And they say to me, "Stop complaining." 
+So I said, fine, from here on out I'm only going on dates where I know there's Wi-Fi, and I'm bringing my laptop. 
+(Laughter) So I started tracking things like really stupid, awkward, sexual remarks; bad vocabulary; the number of times a man forced me to high-five him. (Laughter) 
+So as it turns out, for some reason, men who drink Scotch reference kinky sex immediately. 
+There were just bad for me. 
+And as it happens, the algorithms that were setting us up, they weren't bad either. 
+These algorithms were doing exactly what they were designed to do, which was to take our user-generated information, in my case, my résumé, and match it up with other people's information. 
+See, the real problem here is that, while the algorithms work just fine, you and I don't, when confronted with blank windows where we're supposed to input our information online. 
+The other problem is that these websites are asking us questions like, are you a dog person or a cat person? 
+So I said fine, I've got a new plan. 
+I'm going to keep using these online dating sites, but I'm going to treat them as databases, and rather than waiting for an algorithm to set me up, I think I'm going to try reverse-engineering this entire system. 
+So knowing that there was superficial data that was being used to match me up with other people, I decided instead to ask my own questions. 
+I wanted somebody was Jew-ish, so I was looking for somebody who had the same background and thoughts on our culture, but wasn't going to force me to go to shul every Friday and Saturday. 
+I wanted somebody who worked hard, because work for me is extremely important, but not too hard. 
+I also wanted somebody who not only wanted two children, but was going to have the same attitude toward parenting that I do, so somebody who was going to be totally okay with forcing our child to start taking piano lessons at age three, and also maybe computer science classes if we could wrangle it. 
+(Laughter) So I now have these 72 different data points, which, to be fair, is a lot. 
+I broke it into a top tier and a second tier of points, and I ranked everything starting at 100 and going all the way down to 91, and listing things like I was looking for somebody who was really smart, who would challenge and stimulate me, and balancing that with a second tier and a second set of points. 
+These things were also important to me but not necessarily deal-breakers. 
+(Laughter) So once I had all this done, I then built a scoring system, because what I wanted to do was to sort of mathematically calculate whether or not I thought the guy that I found online would be a match with me. 
+I figured there would be a minimum of 700 points before I would agree to email somebody or respond to an email message. 
+For 900 points, I'd agree to go out on a date, and I wouldn't even consider any kind of relationship before somebody had crossed the 1,500 point threshold. 
+Well, as it turns out, this worked pretty well. 
+I found Jewishdoc57 who's incredibly good-looking, incredibly well-spoken, he had hiked Mt. Fuji, he had walked along the Great Wall. 
+And I guess the one variable that I haven't considered is the competition. 
+Who are all of the other women on these dating sites? 
+I found SmileyGirl1978. 
+She said she was a "" Fun girl who is Happy and Outgoing. "" She listed her job as "" teacher. "" She said she is "" silly, nice and friendly. "" She likes to make people laugh "" alot. "" At this moment I knew, clicking profile after profile that looked like this, that I needed to do some market research. 
+Now, before I lose all of you — (Laughter) — understand that I did this strictly to gather data about everybody else in the system. 
+I didn't carry on crazy Catfish-style relationships with anybody. 
+But I didn't want everybody's data. 
+I only wanted data on the women who were going to be attracted to the type of man that I really, really wanted to marry. 
+When I released these men into the wild, I did follow some rules. 
+So I didn't reach out to any woman first. 
+I just waited to see who these profiles were going to attract, and mainly what I was looking at was two different data sets. 
+So I was looking at qualitative data, so what was the humor, the tone, the voice, the communication style that these women shared in common? 
+And also quantitative data, so what was the average length of their profile, how much time was spent between messages? 
+What I was trying to get at here was that I figured, in person, I would be just as competitive as a SmileyGirl1978. 
+I wanted to figure out how to maximize my own profile online. 
+Well, one month later, I had a lot of data, and I was able to do another analysis. 
+And as it turns out, content matters a lot. 
+So smart people tend to write a lot — 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 words about themselves, which may all be very, very interesting. 
+The challenge here, though, is that the popular men and women are sticking to 97 words on average that are written very, very well, even though it may not seem like it all the time. 
+The other hallmark of the people who do this well is that they're using non-specific language. 
+So in my case, "" The English Patient "" is my most favorite movie ever, but it doesn't work to use that in a profile, because that's a superficial data point, and somebody may disagree and decide they don't want to go out because they didn't like sitting through the three-hour movie. 
+So this is a word cloud highlighting the most popular words that were used by the most popular women, words like "" fun "" and "" girl "" and "" love. "" And what I realized was not that I had to dumb down my own profile. 
+Remember, I'm somebody who said that I speak fluent Japanese and I know JavaScript and I was okay with that. 
+And as it turns out, timing is also really, really important. 
+Just because you have access to somebody's mobile phone number or their instant message account and it's 2 o'clock in the morning and you happen to be awake, doesn't mean that that's a good time to communicate with those people. 
+The popular women on these online sites spend an average of 23 hours in between each communication. 
+And finally — there were the photos. 
+They all looked really great, which turned out to be in sharp contrast to what I had uploaded. 
+(Laughter) Once I had all of this information, I was able to create a super profile, so it was still me, but it was me optimized now for this ecosystem. 
+I was the most popular person online. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And as it turns out, lots and lots of men wanted to date me. 
+So I call my mom, I call my sister, I call my grandmother. 
+They said, "" What? You're still being too damn picky. "" Well, not too long after that, I found this guy, Thevenin, and he said that he was culturally Jewish, he said that his job was an arctic baby seal hunter, which I thought was very clever. 
+He talked in detail about travel. 
+He made a lot of really interesting cultural references. 
+Three weeks later, we met up in person for what turned out to be a 14-hour-long conversation that went from coffee shop to restaurant to another coffee shop to another restaurant, and when he dropped me back off at my house that night I re-scored him — [1,050 points!] Thought, you know what, this entire time, I haven't been picky enough. 
+Well, a year and a half after that, we were non-cruise ship traveling through Petra, Jordan, when he got down on his knee and proposed. 
+A year after that, we were married, and about a year and a half after that, our daughter, Petra, was born. 
+(Applause) [What it means...] Obviously, I'm having a fabulous life, so — (Laughter) The question is, what does all of this mean for you? 
+Well, as it turns out, there is an algorithm for love. 
+It's just not the ones that we're being presented with online. 
+In fact, it's something that you write yourself. 
+So whether you're looking for a husband or a wife or you're trying to find your passion or you're trying to start a business, all you have to really do is figure out your own framework and play by your own rules, and feel free to be as picky as you want. 
+Well, on my wedding day, I had a conversation again with my grandmother, and she said, "" All right, maybe I was wrong. 
+It looks like you did come up with a really, really great system. 
+
+So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher. 
+(Laughter) When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "" I'm a professor, "" their eyes glaze over. 
+When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "" philosophy "" — their eyes glaze over. 
+(Laughter) When I go to a philosopher's party (Laughter) and they ask me what I work on and I say, "" consciousness, "" their eyes don't glaze over — their lips curl into a snarl. (Laughter) 
+And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "" That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness. "" The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question. 
+My late, lamented friend Bob Nozick, a fine philosopher, in one of his books, "" Philosophical Explanations, "" is commenting on the ethos of philosophy — the way philosophers go about their business. 
+And he says, you know, "" Philosophers love rational argument. "" And he says, "" It seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion, and if they don't accept the conclusion, they die. 
+Their heads explode. "" The idea is to have an argument that is so powerful that it knocks out your opponents. 
+But in fact that doesn't change people's minds at all. 
+It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. 
+The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. 
+We heard the other day that everybody's got a strong opinion about video games. 
+They all have an idea for a video game, even if they're not experts. 
+But they don't consider themselves experts on video games; they've just got strong opinions. 
+I'm sure that people here who work on, say, climate change and global warming, or on the future of the Internet, encounter people who have very strong opinions about what's going to happen next. 
+But they probably don't think of these opinions as expertise. 
+They're just strongly held opinions. 
+But with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "" I am an expert. 
+Simply by being conscious, I know all about this. "" And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "" No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! 
+No, you've got it all wrong. "" And they say this with an amazing confidence. 
+And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling — I can feel it myself. 
+I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds — that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. 
+That's the order of the day here. 
+Now, this nice picture shows a thought-balloon, a thought-bubble. 
+I think everybody understands what that means. 
+That's supposed to exhibit the stream of consciousness. 
+This is my favorite picture of consciousness that's ever been done. 
+It's a Saul Steinberg of course — it was a New Yorker cover. 
+And this fellow here is looking at the painting by Braque. 
+That reminds him of the word baroque, barrack, bark, poodle, Suzanne R. — he's off to the races. 
+There's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along, you learn a lot about this man. 
+What I particularly like about this picture, too, is that Steinberg has rendered the guy in this sort of pointillist style. 
+Which reminds us, as Rod Brooks was saying yesterday: what we are, what each of us is — what you are, what I am — is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots. 
+That's what we're made of. 
+No other ingredients at all. We're just made of cells, about 100 trillion of them. 
+Not a single one of those cells is conscious; not a single one of those cells knows who you are, or cares. 
+Somehow, we have to explain how when you put together teams, armies, battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells — not so different really from a bacterium, each one of them — the result is this. I mean, just look at it. 
+The content — there's color, there's ideas, there's memories, there's history. And somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons. 
+How is that possible? Many people just think it isn't possible at all. 
+They think, "" No, there can't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness. "" This is a lovely book by a friend of mine named Lee Siegel, who's a professor of religion, actually, at the University of Hawaii, and he's an expert magician, and an expert on the street magic of India, which is what this book is about, "Net of Magic." 
+And there's a passage in it which I would love to share with you. 
+It speaks so eloquently to the problem. 
+"" 'I'm writing a book on magic,' I explain, and I'm asked, 'Real magic?' By 'real magic,' people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. 
+'No, 'I answer.' Conjuring tricks, not real magic. '' Real magic, 'in other words, refers to the magic that is not real; while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic. "" (Laughter) Now, that's the way a lot of people feel about consciousness. (Laughter) 
+Real consciousness is not a bag of tricks. 
+If you're going to explain this as a bag of tricks, then it's not real consciousness, whatever it is. 
+And, as Marvin said, and as other people have said, "Consciousness is a bag of tricks." 
+This means that a lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when I attempt to explain consciousness. 
+So this is the problem. So I have to do a little bit of the sort of work that a lot of you won't like, for the same reason that you don't like to see a magic trick explained to you. 
+How many of you here, if somebody — some smart aleck — starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done, you sort of want to block your ears and say, "" No, no, I don't want to know! 
+Don't take the thrill of it away. I'd rather be mystified. 
+Don't tell me the answer. "" A lot of people feel that way about consciousness, I've discovered. 
+And I'm sorry if I impose some clarity, some understanding on you. 
+You'd better leave now if you don't want to know some of these tricks. 
+But I'm not going to explain it all to you. 
+I'm going to do what philosophers do. 
+Here's how a philosopher explains the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick. 
+You know the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick? 
+The philosopher says, "" I'm going to explain to you how that's done. 
+You see, the magician doesn't really saw the lady in half. "" (Laughter) "He merely makes you think that he does." 
+And you say, "" Yes, and how does he do that? "" He says, "" Oh, that's not my department, I'm sorry. "" (Laughter) So now I'm going to illustrate how philosophers explain consciousness. 
+But I'm going to try to also show you that consciousness isn't quite as marvelous — your own consciousness isn't quite as wonderful — as you may have thought it is. 
+This is something, by the way, that Lee Siegel talks about in his book. 
+He marvels at how he'll do a magic show, and afterwards people will swear they saw him do X, Y, and Z. He never did those things. 
+He didn't even try to do those things. 
+People's memories inflate what they think they saw. 
+And the same is true of consciousness. 
+Now, let's see if this will work. All right. Let's just watch this. 
+Watch it carefully. 
+I'm working with a young computer-animator documentarian named Nick Deamer, and this is a little demo that he's done for me, part of a larger project some of you may be interested in. 
+We're looking for a backer. 
+It's a feature-length documentary on consciousness. 
+OK, now, you all saw what changed, right? 
+How many of you noticed that every one of those squares changed color? 
+Every one. I'll just show you by running it again. 
+Even when you know that they're all going to change color, it's very hard to notice. You have to really concentrate to pick up any of the changes at all. 
+Now, this is an example — one of many — of a phenomenon that's now being studied quite a bit. 
+It's one that I predicted in the last page or two of my 1991 book, "" Consciousness Explained, "" where I said if you did experiments of this sort, you'd find that people were unable to pick up really large changes. 
+If there's time at the end, I'll show you the much more dramatic case. 
+Now, how can it be that there are all those changes going on, and that we're not aware of them? 
+Well, earlier today, Jeff Hawkins mentioned the way your eye saccades, the way your eye moves around three or four times a second. 
+He didn't mention the speed. Your eye is constantly in motion, moving around, looking at eyes, noses, elbows, looking at interesting things in the world. 
+And where your eye isn't looking, you're remarkably impoverished in your vision. 
+That's because the foveal part of your eye, which is the high-resolution part, is only about the size of your thumbnail held at arms length. 
+That's the detail part. 
+It doesn't seem that way, does it? 
+It doesn't seem that way, but that's the way it is. 
+You're getting in a lot less information than you think. 
+Here's a completely different effect. This is a painting by Bellotto. 
+It's in the museum in North Carolina. 
+Bellotto was a student of Canaletto's. 
+And I love paintings like that — the painting is actually about as big as it is right here. 
+And I love Canalettos, because Canaletto has this fantastic detail, and you can get right up and see all the details on the painting. 
+And I started across the hall in North Carolina, because I thought it was probably a Canaletto, and would have all that in detail. 
+And I noticed that on the bridge there, there's a lot of people — you can just barely see them walking across the bridge. 
+And I thought as I got closer I would be able to see all the detail of most people, see their clothes, and so forth. 
+And as I got closer and closer, I actually screamed. 
+I yelled out because when I got closer, I found the detail wasn't there at all. 
+There were just little artfully placed blobs of paint. 
+And as I walked towards the picture, I was expecting detail that wasn't there. 
+The artist had very cleverly suggested people and clothes and wagons and all sorts of things, and my brain had taken the suggestion. 
+You're familiar with a more recent technology, which is — There, you can get a better view of the blobs. 
+See, when you get close they're really just blobs of paint. 
+You will have seen something like this — this is the reverse effect. 
+I'll just give that to you one more time. 
+Now, what does your brain do when it takes the suggestion? 
+When an artful blob of paint or two, by an artist, suggests a person — say, one of Marvin Minsky's little society of mind — do they send little painters out to fill in all the details in your brain somewhere? 
+I don't think so. Not a chance. But then, how on Earth is it done? 
+Well, remember the philosopher's explanation of the lady? 
+It's the same thing. 
+The brain just makes you think that it's got the detail there. 
+You think the detail's there, but it isn't there. 
+The brain isn't actually putting the detail in your head at all. 
+It's just making you expect the detail. 
+Let's just do this experiment very quickly. 
+Is the shape on the left the same as the shape on the right, rotated? 
+Yes. 
+How many of you did it by rotating the one on the left in your mind's eye, to see if it matched up with the one on the right? 
+How many of you rotated the one on the right? OK. 
+How do you know that's what you did? 
+(Laughter) There's in fact been a very interesting debate raging for over 20 years in cognitive science — various experiments started by Roger Shepherd, who measured the angular velocity of rotation of mental images. 
+Yes, it's possible to do that. 
+But the details of the process are still in significant controversy. 
+And if you read that literature, one of the things that you really have to come to terms with is even when you're the subject in the experiment, you don't know. 
+You don't know how you do it. 
+You just know that you have certain beliefs. 
+And they come in a certain order, at a certain time. 
+And what explains the fact that that's what you think? 
+Well, that's where you have to go backstage and ask the magician. 
+This is a figure that I love: Bradley, Petrie, and Dumais. 
+You may think that I've cheated, that I've put a little whiter-than-white boundary there. 
+How many of you see that sort of boundary, with the Necker cube floating in front of the circles? 
+Can you see it? 
+Well, you know, in effect, the boundary's really there, in a certain sense. 
+Your brain is actually computing that boundary, the boundary that goes right there. 
+But now, notice there are two ways of seeing the cube, right? 
+It's a Necker cube. 
+Everybody can see the two ways of seeing the cube? OK. 
+Can you see the four ways of seeing the cube? 
+Because there's another way of seeing it. 
+If you're seeing it as a cube floating in front of some circles, some black circles, there's another way of seeing it. 
+As a cube, on a black background, as seen through a piece of Swiss cheese. 
+(Laughter) Can you get it? How many of you can't get it? That'll help. (Laughter) 
+Now you can get it. These are two very different phenomena. 
+When you see the cube one way, behind the screen, those boundaries go away. 
+But there's still a sort of filling in, as we can tell if we look at this. 
+We don't have any trouble seeing the cube, but where does the color change? 
+Does your brain have to send little painters in there? 
+The purple-painters and the green-painters fight over who's going to paint that bit behind the curtain? No. 
+Your brain just lets it go. The brain doesn't need to fill that in. 
+When I first started talking about the Bradley, Petrie, Dumais example that you just saw — I'll go back to it, this one — I said that there was no filling-in behind there. 
+And I supposed that that was just a flat truth, always true. 
+But Rob Van Lier has recently shown that it isn't. 
+Now, if you think you see some pale yellow — I'll run this a few more times. 
+Look in the gray areas, and see if you seem to see something sort of shadowy moving in there — yeah, it's amazing. There's nothing there. It's no trick. 
+["" Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes "" slide] This is Ron Rensink's work, which was in some degree inspired by that suggestion right at the end of the book. 
+Let me just pause this for a second if I can. 
+This is change-blindness. 
+What you're going to see is two pictures, one of which is slightly different from the other. 
+You see here the red roof and the gray roof, and in between them there will be a mask, which is just a blank screen, for about a quarter of a second. 
+So you'll see the first picture, then a mask, then the second picture, then a mask. 
+And this will just continue, and your job as the subject is to press the button when you see the change. 
+So, show the original picture for 240 milliseconds. Blank. 
+Show the next picture for 240 milliseconds. Blank. 
+And keep going, until the subject presses the button, saying, "I see the change." 
+So now we're going to be subjects in the experiment. 
+We're going to start easy. Some examples. 
+No trouble there. 
+Can everybody see? All right. 
+Indeed, Rensink's subjects took only a little bit more than a second to press the button. 
+Can you see that one? 
+2.9 seconds. 
+How many don't see it still? 
+What's on the roof of that barn? 
+(Laughter) It's easy. 
+Is it a bridge or a dock? 
+There are a few more really dramatic ones, and then I'll close. 
+I want you to see a few that are particularly striking. 
+This one because it's so large and yet it's pretty hard to see. 
+Can you see it? 
+Audience: Yes. 
+Dan Dennett: See the shadows going back and forth? Pretty big. 
+So 15.5 seconds is the median time for subjects in his experiment there. 
+I love this one. I'll end with this one, just because it's such an obvious and important thing. 
+How many still don't see it? How many still don't see it? 
+How many engines on the wing of that Boeing? 
+(Laughter) Right in the middle of the picture! 
+Thanks very much for your attention. 
+What I wanted to show you is that scientists, using their from-the-outside, third-person methods, can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of, and that, in fact, you're not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are. 
+And we're really making a lot of progress on coming up with a theory of mind. 
+Jeff Hawkins, this morning, was describing his attempt to get theory, and a good, big theory, into the neuroscience. 
+And he's right. This is a problem. 
+Harvard Medical School once — I was at a talk — director of the lab said, "" In our lab, we have a saying. 
+If you work on one neuron, that's neuroscience. 
+If you work on two neurons, that's psychology. "" (Laughter) We have to have more theory, and it can come as much from the top down. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I spent the best part of last year working on a documentary about my own happiness — trying to see if I can actually train my mind in a particular way, like I can train my body, so I can end up with an improved feeling of overall well-being. 
+Then this January, my mother died, and pursuing a film like that just seemed the last thing that was interesting to me. 
+So in a very typical, silly designer fashion, after years worth of work, pretty much all I have to show for it are the titles for the film. 
+(Music) They were still done when I was on sabbatical with my company in Indonesia. 
+We can see the first part here was designed here by pigs. 
+It was a little bit too funky, and we wanted a more feminine point of view and employed a duck who did it in a much more fitting way — fashion. 
+My studio in Bali was only 10 minutes away from a monkey forest, and monkeys, of course, are supposed to be the happiest of all animals. 
+So we trained them to be able to do three separate words, to lay out them properly. 
+You can see, there still is a little bit of a legibility problem there. 
+The serif is not really in place. 
+So of course, what you don't do properly yourself is never deemed done really. 
+So this is us climbing onto the trees and putting it up over the Sayan Valley in Indonesia. 
+In that year, what I did do a lot was look at all sorts of surveys, looking at a lot of data on this subject. 
+And it turns out that men and women report very, very similar levels of happiness. 
+This is a very quick overview of all the studies that I looked at. 
+That climate plays no role. 
+That if you live in the best climate, in San Diego in the United States, or in the shittiest climate, in Buffalo, New York, you are going to be just as happy in either place. 
+If you make more than 50,000 bucks a year in the U.S., any salary increase you're going to experience will have only a tiny, tiny influence on your overall well-being. 
+Black people are just as happy as white people are. 
+If you're old or young it doesn't really make a difference. 
+If you're ugly or if you're really, really good-looking it makes no difference whatsoever. 
+You will adapt to it and get used to it. 
+If you have manageable health problems it doesn't really matter. 
+Now this does matter. 
+So now the woman on the right is actually much happier than the guy on the left — meaning that, if you have a lot of friends, and you have meaningful friendships, that does make a lot of difference. 
+As well as being married — you are likely to be much happier than if you are single. 
+A fellow TED speaker, Jonathan Haidt, came up with this beautiful little analogy between the conscious and the unconscious mind. 
+He says that the conscious mind is this tiny rider on this giant elephant, the unconscious. 
+And the rider thinks that he can tell the elephant what to do, but the elephant really has his own ideas. 
+If I look at my own life, I'm born in 1962 in Austria. 
+If I would have been born a hundred years earlier, the big decisions in my life would have been made for me — meaning I would have stayed in the town that I was born in; I would have very much likely entered the same profession that my dad did; and I would have very much likely married a woman that my mom had selected. 
+I, of course, and all of us, are very much in charge of these big decisions in our lives. 
+We live where we want to be — at least in the West. 
+We become what we really are interested in. 
+We choose our own profession, and we choose our own partners. 
+And so it's quite surprising that many of us let our unconscious influence those decisions in ways that we are not quite aware of. 
+If you look at the statistics and you see that the guy called George, when he decides on where he wants to live — is it Florida or North Dakota? — he goes and lives in Georgia. 
+And if you look at a guy called Dennis, when he decides what to become — is it a lawyer, or does he want to become a doctor or a teacher? — best chance is that he wants to become a dentist. 
+And if Paula decides should she marry Joe or Jack, somehow Paul sounds the most interesting. 
+And so even if we make those very important decisions for very silly reasons, it remains statistically true that there are more Georges living in Georgia and there are more Dennises becoming dentists and there are more Paulas who are married to Paul than statistically viable. 
+(Laughter) Now I, of course, thought, "Well this is American data," and I thought, "" Well, those silly Americans. 
+They get influenced by things that they're not aware of. 
+This is just completely ridiculous. "" Then, of course, I looked at my mom and my dad — (Laughter) Karolina and Karl, and grandmom and granddad, Josefine and Josef. 
+So I am looking still for a Stephanie. 
+I'll figure something out. 
+If I make this whole thing a little bit more personal and see what makes me happy as a designer, the easiest answer, of course, is do more of the stuff that I like to do and much less of the stuff that I don't like to do — for which it would be helpful to know what it is that I actually do like to do. 
+I'm a big list maker, so I came up with a list. 
+One of them is to think without pressure. 
+This is a project we're working on right now with a very healthy deadline. 
+It's a book on culture, and, as you can see, culture is rapidly drifting around. 
+Doing things like I'm doing right now — traveling to Cannes. 
+The example I have here is a chair that came out of the year in Bali — clearly influenced by local manufacturing and culture, not being stuck behind a single computer screen all day long and be here and there. 
+Quite consciously, design projects that need an incredible amount of various techniques, just basically to fight straightforward adaptation. 
+Being close to the content — that's the content really is close to my heart. 
+This is a bus, or vehicle, for a charity, for an NGO that wants to double the education budget in the United States — carefully designed, so, by two inches, it still clears highway overpasses. 
+Having end results — things that come back from the printer well, like this little business card for an animation company called Sideshow on lenticular foils. 
+Working on projects that actually have visible impacts, like a book for a deceased German artist whose widow came to us with the requirement to make her late husband famous. 
+It just came out six months ago, and it's getting unbelievable traction right now in Germany. 
+And I think that his widow is going to be very successful on her quest. 
+And lately, to be involved in projects where I know about 50 percent of the project technique-wise and the other 50 percent would be new. 
+So in this case, it's an outside projection for Singapore on these giant Times Square-like screens. 
+And I of course knew stuff, as a designer, about typography, even though we worked with those animals not so successfully. 
+But I didn't quite know all that much about movement or film. 
+And from that point of view we turned it into a lovely project. 
+But also because the content was very close. 
+In this case, "" Keeping a Diary Supports Personal Development "" — I've been keeping a diary since I was 12. 
+And I've found that it influenced my life and work in a very intriguing way. 
+In this case also because it's part of one of the many sentiments that we build the whole series on — that all the sentiments originally had come out of the diary. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+As a software developer and technologist, I've worked on a number of civic technology projects over the years. 
+Civic tech is sometimes referred to as tech for good, using technology to solve humanitarian problems. 
+This is in 2010 in Uganda, working on a solution that allowed local populations to avoid government surveillance on their mobile phones for expressing dissent. 
+That same technology was deployed later in North Africa for similar purposes to help activists stay connected when governments were deliberately shutting off connectivity as a means of population control. 
+But over the years, as I have thought about these technologies and the things that I work on, a question kind of nags in the back of my mind, which is, what if we're wrong about the virtues of technology, and if it sometimes actively hurts the communities that we're intending to help? 
+The tech industry around the world tends to operate under similar assumptions that if we build great things, it will positively affect everyone. 
+Eventually, these innovations will get out and find everyone. 
+But that's not always the case. 
+I like to call this blind championing of technology "" trickle-down techonomics, "" to borrow a phrase. (Laughter) We tend to think that if we design things for the select few, eventually those technologies will reach everyone, and that's not always the case. 
+Technology and innovation behaves a lot like wealth and capital. 
+They tend to consolidate in the hands of the few, and sometimes they find their way out into the hands of the many. 
+And so most of you aren't tackling oppressive regimes on the weekends, so I wanted to think of a few examples that might be a little bit more relatable. 
+In the world of wearables and smartphones and apps, there's a big movement to track people's personal health with applications that track the number of calories that you burn or whether you're sitting too much or walking enough. 
+These technologies make patient intake in medical facilities much more efficient, and in turn, these medical facilities are starting to expect these types of efficiencies. 
+As these digital tools find their way into medical rooms, and they become digitally ready, what happens to the digitally invisible? 
+What does the medical experience look like for someone who doesn't have the $400 phone or watch tracking their every movement? 
+Do they now become a burden on the medical system? 
+Is their experience changed? 
+In the world of finance, Bitcoin and crypto-currencies are revolutionizing the way we move money around the world, but the challenge with these technologies is the barrier to entry is incredibly high, right? 
+You need access to the same phones, devices, connectivity, and even where you don't, where you can find a proxy agent, usually they require a certain amount of capital to participate. 
+And so the question that I ask myself is, what happens to the last community using paper notes when the rest of the world moves to digital currency? 
+Another example from my hometown in Philadelphia: I recently went to the public library there, and they are facing an existential crisis. 
+Public funding is dwindling, they have to reduce their footprint to stay open and stay relevant, and so one of the ways they're going about this is digitizing a number of the books and moving them to the cloud. 
+This is great for most kids. Right? 
+You can check out books from home, you can research on the way to school or from school, but these are really two big assumptions, that one, you have access at home, and two, that you have access to a mobile phone, and in Philadelphia, many kids do not. 
+So what does their education experience look like in the wake of a completely cloud-based library, what used to be considered such a basic part of education? 
+How do they stay competitive? 
+A final example from across the world in East Africa: there's been a huge movement to digitize land ownership rights, for a number of reasons. 
+Migrant communities, older generations dying off, and ultimately poor record-keeping have led to conflicts over who owns what. 
+And so there was a big movement to put all this information online, to track all the ownership of these plots of land, put them in the cloud, and give them to the communities. 
+But actually, the unintended consequence of this has been that venture capitalists, investors, real estate developers, have swooped in and they've begun buying up these plots of land right out from under these communities, because they have access to the technologies and the connectivity that makes that possible. 
+So that's the common thread that connects these examples, the unintended consequences of the tools and the technologies that we make. 
+As engineers, as technologists, we sometimes prefer efficiency over efficacy. 
+We think more about doing things than the outcomes of what we are doing. 
+This needs to change. 
+We have a responsibility to think about the outcomes of the technologies we build, especially as they increasingly control the world in which we live. 
+In the late '90s, there was a big push for ethics in the world of investment and banking. 
+I think in 2014, we're long overdue for a similar movement in the area of tech and technology. 
+So, I just encourage you, as you are all thinking about the next big thing, as entrepreneurs, as CEOs, as engineers, as makers, that you think about the unintended consequences of the things that you're building, because the real innovation is in finding ways to include everyone. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Good afternoon. 
+If you have followed diplomatic news in the past weeks, you may have heard of a kind of crisis between China and the U.S. 
+regarding cyberattacks against the American company Google. 
+Many things have been said about this. 
+Some people have called a cyberwar what may actually be just a spy operation — and obviously, a quite mishandled one. 
+However, this episode reveals the growing anxiety in the Western world regarding these emerging cyber weapons. 
+It so happens that these weapons are dangerous. 
+They're of a new nature: they could lead the world into a digital conflict that could turn into an armed struggle. 
+These virtual weapons can also destroy the physical world. 
+In 1982, in the middle of the Cold War in Soviet Siberia, a pipeline exploded with a burst of 3 kilotons, the equivalent of a fourth of the Hiroshima bomb. 
+Now we know today — this was revealed by Thomas Reed, Ronald Reagan's former U.S. Air Force Secretary — this explosion was actually the result of a CIA sabotage operation, in which they had managed to infiltrate the IT management systems of that pipeline. 
+More recently, the U.S. government revealed that in September 2008, more than 3 million people in the state of Espirito Santo in Brazil were plunged into darkness, victims of a blackmail operation from cyber pirates. 
+Even more worrying for the Americans, in December 2008 the holiest of holies, the IT systems of CENTCOM, the central command managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, may have been infiltrated by hackers who used these: plain but infected USB keys. 
+And with these keys, they may have been able to get inside CENTCOM's systems, to see and hear everything, and maybe even infect some of them. 
+As a result, the Americans take the threat very seriously. 
+I'll quote General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who says in a report to Congress that cyberattacks could be as powerful as weapons of mass destruction. 
+Moreover, the Americans have decided to spend over 30 billion dollars in the next five years to build up their cyberwar capabilities. 
+And across the world today, we see a sort of cyber arms race, with cyberwar units built up by countries like North Korea or even Iran. 
+Yet, what you'll never hear from spokespeople from the Pentagon or the French Department of Defence is that the question isn't really who's the enemy, but actually the very nature of cyber weapons. 
+And to understand why, we must look at how, through the ages, military technologies have maintained or destroyed world peace. 
+For example, if we'd had TEDxParis 350 years ago, we would have talked about the military innovation of the day — the massive Vauban-style fortifications — and we could have predicted a period of stability in the world or in Europe. 
+which was indeed the case in Europe between 1650 and 1750. 
+Similarly, if we'd had this talk 30 or 40 years ago, we would have seen how the rise of nuclear weapons, and the threat of mutually assured destruction they imply, prevents a direct fight between the two superpowers. 
+However, if we'd had this talk 60 years ago, we would have seen how the emergence of new aircraft and tank technologies, which give the advantage to the attacker, make the Blitzkrieg doctrine very credible and thus create the possibility of war in Europe. 
+So military technologies can influence the course of the world, can make or break world peace — and there lies the issue with cyber weapons. 
+The first issue: Imagine a potential enemy announcing they're building a cyberwar unit, but only for their country's defense. 
+Okay, but what distinguishes it from an offensive unit? 
+It gets even more complicated when the doctrines of use become ambiguous. 
+Just 3 years ago, both the U.S. and France were saying they were investing militarily in cyberspace, strictly to defend their IT systems. 
+But today both countries say the best defense is to attack. 
+And so, they're joining China, whose doctrine of use for 15 years has been both defensive and offensive. 
+The second issue: Your country could be under cyberattack with entire regions plunged into total darkness, and you may not even know who's attacking you. 
+Cyber weapons have this peculiar feature: they can be used without leaving traces. 
+This gives a tremendous advantage to the attacker, because the defender doesn't know who to fight back against. 
+And if the defender retaliates against the wrong adversary, they risk making one more enemy and ending up diplomatically isolated. 
+This issue isn't just theoretical. 
+In May 2007, Estonia was the victim of cyberattacks, that damaged its communication and banking systems. 
+Estonia accused Russia. 
+But NATO, though it defends Estonia, reacted very prudently. Why? 
+Because NATO couldn't be 100% sure that the Kremlin was indeed behind these attacks. 
+So to sum up, on the one hand, when a possible enemy announces they're building a cyberwar unit, you don't know whether it's for attack or defense. 
+On the other hand, we know that these weapons give an advantage to attacking. 
+In a major article published in 1978, Professor Robert Jervis of Columbia University in New York described a model to understand how conflicts could arise. 
+In this context, when you don't know if the potential enemy is preparing for defense or attack, and if the weapons give an advantage to attacking, then this environment is most likely to spark a conflict. 
+This is the environment that's being created by cyber weapons today, and historically it was the environment in Europe at the onset of World War I. 
+So cyber weapons are dangerous by nature, but in addition, they're emerging in a much more unstable environment. 
+If you remember the Cold War, it was a very hard game, but a stable one played only by two players, which allowed for some coordination between the two superpowers. 
+Today we're moving to a multipolar world in which coordination is much more complicated, as we have seen at Copenhagen. 
+And this coordination may become even trickier with the introduction of cyber weapons. 
+Why? Because no nation knows for sure whether its neighbor is about to attack. 
+So nations may live under the threat of what Nobel Prize winner Thomas Schelling called the "" reciprocal fear of surprise attack, "" as I don't know if my neighbor is about to attack me or not — I may never know — so I might take the upper hand and attack first. 
+Just last week, in a New York Times article dated January 26, 2010, it was revealed for the first time that officials at the National Security Agency were considering the possibility of preemptive attacks in cases where the U.S. was about to be cyberattacked. 
+And these preemptive attacks might not just remain in cyberspace. 
+In May 2009, General Kevin Chilton, commander of the U.S. nuclear forces, stated that in the event of cyberattacks against the U.S., all options would be on the table. 
+Cyber weapons do not replace conventional or nuclear weapons — they just add a new layer to the existing system of terror. 
+But in doing so, they also add their own risk of triggering a conflict — as we've just seen, a very important risk — and a risk we may have to confront with a collective security solution which includes all of us: European allies, NATO members, our American friends and allies, our other Western allies, and maybe, by forcing their hand a little, our Russian and Chinese partners. 
+The information technologies Joël de Rosnay was talking about, which were historically born from military research, are today on the verge of developing an offensive capability of destruction, which could tomorrow, if we're not careful, completely destroy world peace. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Welcome to "" Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do. "" I don't have children. 
+I borrow my friends' children, so — (Laughter) take all this advice with a grain of salt. 
+We put suffocation warnings on every piece of plastic film manufactured in the United States, or for sale with an item in the United States. 
+So, as the boundaries of what we determine as the safety zone grow ever smaller, we cut off our children from valuable opportunities to learn how to interact with the world around them. 
+And despite all of our best efforts and intentions, kids are always going to figure out how to do the most dangerous thing they can, in whatever environment they can. 
+The book is called "" 50 Dangerous Things. "" This is "" Five Dangerous Things. "" Thing number one: Play with fire. 
+These are the three working elements of fire that you have to have for a good, controlled fire. 
+You know, it's a spatula, it's a pry bar, it's a screwdriver and it's a blade, yeah. 
+And it's a powerful and empowering tool. 
+And it shows that kids can develop an extended sense of self through a tool at a very young age. 
+You lay down a couple of very simple rules — always cut away from your body, keep the blade sharp, never force it — and these are things kids can understand and practice with. 
+And throwing is a combination of analytical and physical skill, so it's very good for that kind of whole-body training. 
+Next time you're about to throw out an appliance, don't throw it out. 
+So these black boxes that we live with and take for granted are actually complex things made by other people, and you can understand them. 
+It's a very simple exercise: Buy a song on iTunes, write it to a CD, then rip the CD to an MP3, and play it on your very same computer. 
+Driving a car is a really empowering act for a young child, so this is the alternate — (Laughter) For those of you who aren't comfortable actually breaking the law, you can drive a car with your child. 
+It's very safe actually. 
+
+If you take 10,000 people at random, 9,999 have something in common: their interests in business lie on or near the Earth's surface. 
+The odd one out is an astronomer, and I am one of that strange breed. 
+(Laughter) My talk will be in two parts. I'll talk first as an astronomer, and then as a worried member of the human race. 
+But let's start off by remembering that Darwin showed how we're the outcome of four billion years of evolution. 
+And what we try to do in astronomy and cosmology is to go back before Darwin's simple beginning, to set our Earth in a cosmic context. 
+And let me just run through a few slides. 
+This was the impact that happened last week on a comet. 
+If they'd sent a nuke, it would have been rather more spectacular than what actually happened last Monday. 
+So that's another project for NASA. 
+That's Mars from the European Mars Express, and at New Year. 
+This artist's impression turned into reality when a parachute landed on Titan, Saturn's giant moon. 
+It landed on the surface. This is pictures taken on the way down. 
+That looks like a coastline. 
+It is indeed, but the ocean is liquid methane — the temperature minus 170 degrees centigrade. 
+If we go beyond our solar system, we've learned that the stars aren't twinkly points of light. 
+Each one is like a sun with a retinue of planets orbiting around it. 
+And we can see places where stars are forming, like the Eagle Nebula. We see stars dying. 
+In six billion years, the sun will look like that. 
+And some stars die spectacularly in a supernova explosion, leaving remnants like that. 
+On a still bigger scale, we see entire galaxies of stars. 
+We see entire ecosystems where gas is being recycled. 
+And to the cosmologist, these galaxies are just the atoms, as it were, of the large-scale universe. 
+This picture shows a patch of sky so small that it would take about 100 patches like it to cover the full moon in the sky. 
+Through a small telescope, this would look quite blank, but you see here hundreds of little, faint smudges. 
+Each is a galaxy, fully like ours or Andromeda, which looks so small and faint because its light has taken 10 billion light-years to get to us. 
+The stars in those galaxies probably don't have planets around them. 
+There's scant chance of life there — that's because there's been no time for the nuclear fusion in stars to make silicon and carbon and iron, the building blocks of planets and of life. 
+We believe that all of this emerged from a Big Bang — a hot, dense state. So how did that amorphous Big Bang turn into our complex cosmos? 
+I'm going to show you a movie simulation 16 powers of 10 faster than real time, which shows a patch of the universe where the expansions have subtracted out. 
+But you see, as time goes on in gigayears at the bottom, you will see structures evolve as gravity feeds on small, dense irregularities, and structures develop. 
+And we'll end up after 13 billion years with something looking rather like our own universe. 
+And we compare simulated universes like that — I'll show you a better simulation at the end of my talk — with what we actually see in the sky. 
+Well, we can trace things back to the earlier stages of the Big Bang, but we still don't know what banged and why it banged. 
+That's a challenge for 21st-century science. 
+If my research group had a logo, it would be this picture here: an ouroboros, where you see the micro-world on the left — the world of the quantum — and on the right the large-scale universe of planets, stars and galaxies. 
+We know our universes are united though — links between left and right. 
+The everyday world is determined by atoms, how they stick together to make molecules. 
+Stars are fueled by how the nuclei in those atoms react together. 
+And, as we've learned in the last few years, galaxies are held together by the gravitational pull of so-called dark matter: particles in huge swarms, far smaller even than atomic nuclei. 
+But we'd like to know the synthesis symbolized at the very top. 
+The micro-world of the quantum is understood. 
+On the right hand side, gravity holds sway. Einstein explained that. 
+But the unfinished business for 21st-century science is to link together cosmos and micro-world with a unified theory — symbolized, as it were, gastronomically at the top of that picture. (Laughter) And until we have that synthesis, we won't be able to understand the very beginning of our universe because when our universe was itself the size of an atom, quantum effects could shake everything. 
+And so we need a theory that unifies the very large and the very small, which we don't yet have. 
+One idea, incidentally — and I had this hazard sign to say I'm going to speculate from now on — is that our Big Bang was not the only one. 
+One idea is that our three-dimensional universe may be embedded in a high-dimensional space, just as you can imagine on these sheets of paper. 
+You can imagine ants on one of them thinking it's a two-dimensional universe, not being aware of another population of ants on the other. 
+So there could be another universe just a millimeter away from ours, but we're not aware of it because that millimeter is measured in some fourth spatial dimension, and we're imprisoned in our three. 
+And so we believe that there may be a lot more to physical reality than what we've normally called our universe — the aftermath of our Big Bang. And here's another picture. 
+Bottom right depicts our universe, which on the horizon is not beyond that, but even that is just one bubble, as it were, in some vaster reality. 
+Many people suspect that just as we've gone from believing in one solar system to zillions of solar systems, one galaxy to many galaxies, we have to go to many Big Bangs from one Big Bang, perhaps these many Big Bangs displaying an immense variety of properties. 
+Well, let's go back to this picture. 
+There's one challenge symbolized at the top, but there's another challenge to science symbolized at the bottom. 
+You want to not only synthesize the very large and the very small, but we want to understand the very complex. 
+And the most complex things are ourselves, midway between atoms and stars. 
+We depend on stars to make the atoms we're made of. 
+We depend on chemistry to determine our complex structure. 
+We clearly have to be large, compared to atoms, to have layer upon layer of complex structure. 
+We clearly have to be small, compared to stars and planets — otherwise we'd be crushed by gravity. And in fact, we are midway. 
+It would take as many human bodies to make up the sun as there are atoms in each of us. 
+The geometric mean of the mass of a proton and the mass of the sun is 50 kilograms, within a factor of two of the mass of each person here. 
+Well, most of you anyway. 
+The science of complexity is probably the greatest challenge of all, greater than that of the very small on the left and the very large on the right. 
+And it's this science, which is not only enlightening our understanding of the biological world, but also transforming our world faster than ever. 
+And more than that, it's engendering new kinds of change. 
+And I now move on to the second part of my talk, and the book "" Our Final Century "" was mentioned. 
+If I was not a self-effacing Brit, I would mention the book myself, and I would add that it's available in paperback. 
+(Laughter) And in America it was called "" Our Final Hour "" because Americans like instant gratification. (Laughter) 
+But my theme is that in this century, not only has science changed the world faster than ever, but in new and different ways. 
+Targeted drugs, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, perhaps even implants into our brains, may change human beings themselves. And human beings, their physique and character, has not changed for thousands of years. 
+It may change this century. 
+It's new in our history. 
+And the human impact on the global environment — greenhouse warming, mass extinctions and so forth — is unprecedented, too. 
+And so, this makes this coming century a challenge. 
+Bio- and cybertechnologies are environmentally benign in that they offer marvelous prospects, while, nonetheless, reducing pressure on energy and resources. 
+But they will have a dark side. 
+In our interconnected world, novel technology could empower just one fanatic, or some weirdo with a mindset of those who now design computer viruses, to trigger some kind on disaster. 
+Indeed, catastrophe could arise simply from technical misadventure — error rather than terror. 
+And even a tiny probability of catastrophe is unacceptable when the downside could be of global consequence. 
+In fact, some years ago, Bill Joy wrote an article expressing tremendous concern about robots taking us over, etc. 
+I don't go along with all that, but it's interesting that he had a simple solution. 
+It was what he called "" fine-grained relinquishment. "" He wanted to give up the dangerous kind of science and keep the good bits. Now, that's absurdly naive for two reasons. 
+First, any scientific discovery has benign consequences as well as dangerous ones. 
+And also, when a scientist makes a discovery, he or she normally has no clue what the applications are going to be. 
+And so what this means is that we have to accept the risks if we are going to enjoy the benefits of science. 
+We have to accept that there will be hazards. 
+And I think we have to go back to what happened in the post-War era, post-World War II, when the nuclear scientists who'd been involved in making the atomic bomb, in many cases were concerned that they should do all they could to alert the world to the dangers. 
+And they were inspired not by the young Einstein, who did the great work in relativity, but by the old Einstein, the icon of poster and t-shirt, who failed in his scientific efforts to unify the physical laws. 
+He was premature. But he was a moral compass — an inspiration to scientists who were concerned with arms control. 
+And perhaps the greatest living person is someone I'm privileged to know, Joe Rothblatt. 
+Equally untidy office there, as you can see. 
+He's 96 years old, and he founded the Pugwash movement. 
+He persuaded Einstein, as his last act, to sign the famous memorandum of Bertrand Russell. 
+And he sets an example of the concerned scientist. 
+And I think to harness science optimally, to choose which doors to open and which to leave closed, we need latter-day counterparts of people like Joseph Rothblatt. 
+We need not just campaigning physicists, but we need biologists, computer experts and environmentalists as well. 
+And I think academics and independent entrepreneurs have a special obligation because they have more freedom than those in government service, or company employees subject to commercial pressure. 
+I wrote my book, "" Our Final Century, "" as a scientist, just a general scientist. But there's one respect, I think, in which being a cosmologist offered a special perspective, and that's that it offers an awareness of the immense future. 
+The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture — outside the American Bible Belt, anyway — (Laughter) but most people, even those who are familiar with evolution, aren't mindful that even more time lies ahead. 
+The sun has been shining for four and a half billion years, but it'll be another six billion years before its fuel runs out. 
+On that schematic picture, a sort of time-lapse picture, we're halfway. 
+And it'll be another six billion before that happens, and any remaining life on Earth is vaporized. 
+There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be there, experiencing the sun's demise, but any life and intelligence that exists then will be as different from us as we are from bacteria. 
+The unfolding of intelligence and complexity still has immensely far to go, here on Earth and probably far beyond. 
+So we are still at the beginning of the emergence of complexity in our Earth and beyond. 
+If you represent the Earth's lifetime by a single year, say from January when it was made to December, the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in June — a tiny fraction of the year. 
+But even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective, our century is very, very special, the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet. 
+As I should have shown this earlier, it will not be humans who witness the end point of the sun; it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria. 
+When Einstein died in 1955, one striking tribute to his global status was this cartoon by Herblock in the Washington Post. 
+The plaque reads, "" Albert Einstein lived here. "" And I'd like to end with a vignette, as it were, inspired by this image. 
+We've been familiar for 40 years with this image: the fragile beauty of land, ocean and clouds, contrasted with the sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints. 
+But let's suppose some aliens had been watching our pale blue dot in the cosmos from afar, not just for 40 years, but for the entire 4.5 billion-year history of our Earth. 
+What would they have seen? 
+Over nearly all that immense time, Earth's appearance would have changed very gradually. 
+The only abrupt worldwide change would have been major asteroid impacts or volcanic super-eruptions. 
+Apart from those brief traumas, nothing happens suddenly. 
+The continental landmasses drifted around. 
+Ice cover waxed and waned. 
+Successions of new species emerged, evolved and became extinct. 
+But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth's history, the last one-millionth part, a few thousand years, the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. 
+This signaled the start of agriculture. 
+Change has accelerated as human populations rose. 
+Then other things happened even more abruptly. 
+Within just 50 years — that's one hundredth of one millionth of the Earth's age — the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise, and ominously fast. 
+The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves — the total output from all TV and cell phones and radar transmissions. And something else happened. 
+Metallic objects — albeit very small ones, a few tons at most — escaped into orbit around the Earth. 
+Some journeyed to the moons and planets. 
+A race of advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system from afar could confidently predict Earth's final doom in another six billion years. 
+But could they have predicted this unprecedented spike less than halfway through the Earth's life? 
+These human-induced alterations occupying overall less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed? 
+If they continued their vigil, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? 
+Will some spasm foreclose Earth's future? 
+Or will the biosphere stabilize? 
+Or will some of the metallic objects launched from the Earth spawn new oases, a post-human life elsewhere? 
+The science done by the young Einstein will continue as long as our civilization, but for civilization to survive, we'll need the wisdom of the old Einstein — humane, global and farseeing. 
+And whatever happens in this uniquely crucial century will resonate into the remote future and perhaps far beyond the Earth, far beyond the Earth as depicted here. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Today I'm going to show you an electric vehicle that weighs less than a bicycle, that you can carry with you anywhere, that you can charge off a normal wall outlet in 15 minutes, and you can run it for 1,000 kilometers on about a dollar of electricity. 
+But when I say the word electric vehicle, people think about vehicles. They think about cars and motorcycles and bicycles, and the vehicles that you use every day. 
+But if you come about it from a different perspective, you can create some more interesting, more novel concepts. 
+So we built something. 
+I've got some of the pieces in my pocket here. 
+So this is the motor. 
+This motor has enough power to take you up the hills of San Francisco at about 20 miles per hour, about 30 kilometers an hour, and this battery, this battery right here has about six miles of range, or 10 kilometers, which is enough to cover about half of the car trips in the U.S. alone. 
+But the best part about these components is that we bought them at a toy store. 
+These are from remote control airplanes. 
+And the performance of these things has gotten so good that if you think about vehicles a little bit differently, you can really change things. 
+So today we're going to show you one example of how you can use this. 
+Pay attention to not only how fun this thing is, but also how the portability that comes with this can totally change the way you interact with a city like San Francisco. 
+(Music) [6 Mile Range] [Top Speed Near 20mph] [Uphill Climbing] [Regenerative Braking] (Applause) (Cheers) So we're going to show you what this thing can do. 
+It's really maneuverable. You have a hand-held remote, so you can pretty easily control acceleration, braking, go in reverse if you like, also have braking. 
+It's incredible just how light this thing is. 
+I mean, this is something you can pick up and carry with you anywhere you go. 
+So I'll leave you with one of the most compelling facts about this technology and these kinds of vehicles. 
+This uses 20 times less energy for every mile or kilometer that you travel than a car, which means not only is this thing fast to charge and really cheap to build, but it also reduces the footprint of your energy use in terms of your transportation. 
+So instead of looking at large amounts of energy needed for each person in this room to get around in a city, now you can look at much smaller amounts and more sustainable transportation. 
+So next time you think about a vehicle, I hope, like us, you're thinking about something new. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I ’ m going around the world giving talks about Darwin, and usually what I ’ m talking about is Darwin ’ s strange inversion of reasoning. 
+Now that title, that phrase, comes from a critic, an early critic, and this is a passage that I just love, and would like to read for you. 
+"" In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. 
+This proposition will be found on careful examination to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin ’ s meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in the achievements of creative skill. "" Exactly. Exactly. And it is a strange inversion. 
+A creationist pamphlet has this wonderful page in it: "" Test Two: Do you know of any building that didn ’ t have a builder? Yes / No. 
+Do you know of any painting that didn ’ t have a painter? Yes / No. 
+Do you know of any car that didn ’ t have a maker? Yes / No. 
+If you answered 'Yes' for any of the above, give details. "" A-ha! I mean, it really is a strange inversion of reasoning. 
+You would have thought it stands to reason that design requires an intelligent designer. 
+But Darwin shows that it ’ s just false. 
+Today, though, I ’ m going to talk about Darwin ’ s other strange inversion, which is equally puzzling at first, but in some ways just as important. 
+It stands to reason that we love chocolate cake because it is sweet. 
+Guys go for girls like this because they are sexy. 
+We adore babies because they ’ re so cute. 
+And, of course, we are amused by jokes because they are funny. 
+This is all backwards. It is. And Darwin shows us why. 
+Let ’ s start with sweet. Our sweet tooth is basically an evolved sugar detector, because sugar is high energy, and it ’ s just been wired up to the preferer, to put it very crudely, and that ’ s why we like sugar. 
+Honey is sweet because we like it, not "" we like it because honey is sweet. "" There ’ s nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. 
+If you looked at glucose molecules till you were blind, you wouldn ’ t see why they tasted sweet. 
+You have to look in our brains to understand why they ’ re sweet. 
+So if you think first there was sweetness, and then we evolved to like sweetness, you ’ ve got it backwards; that ’ s just wrong. It ’ s the other way round. 
+Sweetness was born with the wiring which evolved. 
+And there ’ s nothing intrinsically sexy about these young ladies. 
+And it ’ s a good thing that there isn ’ t, because if there were, then Mother Nature would have a problem: How on earth do you get chimps to mate? 
+Now you might think, ah, there ’ s a solution: hallucinations. 
+That would be one way of doing it, but there ’ s a quicker way. 
+Just wire the chimps up to love that look, and apparently they do. 
+That ’ s all there is to it. 
+Over six million years, we and the chimps evolved our different ways. 
+We became bald-bodied, oddly enough; for one reason or another, they didn ’ t. 
+If we hadn ’ t, then probably this would be the height of sexiness. 
+Our sweet tooth is an evolved and instinctual preference for high-energy food. 
+It wasn ’ t designed for chocolate cake. 
+Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus. 
+The term is owed to Niko Tinbergen, who did his famous experiments with gulls, where he found that that orange spot on the gull ’ s beak — if he made a bigger, oranger spot the gull chicks would peck at it even harder. 
+It was a hyperstimulus for them, and they loved it. 
+What we see with, say, chocolate cake is it ’ s a supernormal stimulus to tweak our design wiring. 
+And there are lots of supernormal stimuli; chocolate cake is one. 
+There's lots of supernormal stimuli for sexiness. 
+And there's even supernormal stimuli for cuteness. Here ’ s a pretty good example. 
+It ’ s important that we love babies, and that we not be put off by, say, messy diapers. 
+So babies have to attract our affection and our nurturing, and they do. 
+And, by the way, a recent study shows that mothers prefer the smell of the dirty diapers of their own baby. 
+So nature works on many levels here. 
+But now, if babies didn ’ t look the way they do — if babies looked like this, that ’ s what we would find adorable, that ’ s what we would find — we would think, oh my goodness, do I ever want to hug that. 
+This is the strange inversion. 
+Well now, finally what about funny. My answer is, it ’ s the same story, the same story. 
+This is the hard one, the one that isn ’ t obvious. That ’ s why I leave it to the end. 
+And I won ’ t be able to say too much about it. 
+But you have to think evolutionarily, you have to think, what hard job that has to be done — it ’ s dirty work, somebody ’ s got to do it — is so important to give us such a powerful, inbuilt reward for it when we succeed. 
+Now, I think we've found the answer — I and a few of my colleagues. 
+It ’ s a neural system that ’ s wired up to reward the brain for doing a grubby clerical job. 
+Our bumper sticker for this view is that this is the joy of debugging. 
+Now I ’ m not going to have time to spell it all out, but I ’ ll just say that only some kinds of debugging get the reward. 
+And what we ’ re doing is we ’ re using humor as a sort of neuroscientific probe by switching humor on and off, by turning the knob on a joke — now it ’ s not funny... oh, now it ’ s funnier... 
+now we ’ ll turn a little bit more... now it ’ s not funny — in this way, we can actually learn something about the architecture of the brain, the functional architecture of the brain. 
+Matthew Hurley is the first author of this. We call it the Hurley Model. 
+He ’ s a computer scientist, Reginald Adams a psychologist, and there I am, and we ’ re putting this together into a book. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+That's how we traveled in the year 1900. 
+That's an open buggy. It doesn't have heating. 
+It doesn't have air conditioning. 
+That horse is pulling it along at one percent of the speed of sound, and the rutted dirt road turns into a quagmire of mud anytime it rains. 
+That's a Boeing 707. 
+Only 60 years later, it travels at 80 percent of the speed of sound, and we don't travel any faster today because commercial supersonic air travel turned out to be a bust. 
+So I started wondering and pondering, could it be that the best years of American economic growth are behind us? 
+And that leads to the suggestion, maybe economic growth is almost over. 
+Some of the reasons for this are not really very controversial. 
+There are four headwinds that are just hitting the American economy in the face. 
+They're demographics, education, debt and inequality. 
+They're powerful enough to cut growth in half. 
+So we need a lot of innovation to offset this decline. 
+And here's my theme: Because of the headwinds, if innovation continues to be as powerful as it has been in the last 150 years, growth is cut in half. 
+If innovation is less powerful, invents less great, wonderful things, then growth is going to be even lower than half of history. 
+Now here's eight centuries of economic growth. 
+The vertical axis is just percent per year of growth, zero percent a year, one percent a year, two percent a year. 
+The white line is for the U.K., and then the U.S. 
+takes over as the leading nation in the year 1900, when the line switches to red. 
+You'll notice that, for the first four centuries, there's hardly any growth at all, just 0.2 percent. 
+Then growth gets better and better. 
+It maxes out in the 1930s, '40s and' 50s, and then it starts slowing down, and here's a cautionary note. 
+That last downward notch in the red line is not actual data. 
+That is a forecast that I made six years ago that growth would slow down to 1.3 percent. 
+But you know what the actual facts are? 
+You know what the growth in per-person income has been in the United States in the last six years? 
+Negative. 
+This led to a fantasy. 
+What if I try to fit a curved line to this historical record? 
+I can make the curved line end anywhere I wanted, but I decided I would end it at 0.2, just like the U.K. growth for the first four centuries. 
+Now the history that we've achieved is that we've grown at 2.0 percent per year over the whole period, 1891 to 2007, and remember it's been a little bit negative since 2007. 
+But if growth slows down, instead of doubling our standard of living every generation, Americans in the future can't expect to be twice as well off as their parents, or even a quarter [more well off than] their parents. 
+Now we're going to change and look at the level of per capita income. 
+The vertical axis now is thousands of dollars in today's prices. 
+You'll notice that in 1891, over on the left, we were at about 5,000 dollars. 
+Today we're at about 44,000 dollars of total output per member of the population. 
+Now what if we could achieve that historic two-percent growth for the next 70 years? 
+Well, it's a matter of arithmetic. 
+Two-percent growth quadruples your standard of living in 70 years. 
+That means we'd go from 44,000 to 180,000. 
+Well, we're not going to do that, and the reason is the headwinds. 
+The first headwind is demographics. 
+It's a truism that your standard of living rises faster than productivity, rises faster than output per hour, if hours per person increased. 
+And we got that gift back in the '70s and' 80s when women entered the labor force. 
+But now it's turned around. 
+Now hours per person are shrinking, first because of the retirement of the baby boomers, and second because there's been a very significant dropping out of the labor force of prime age adult males who are in the bottom half of the educational distribution. 
+The next headwind is education. 
+We've got problems all over our educational system despite Race to the Top. 
+In college, we've got cost inflation in higher education that dwarfs cost inflation in medical care. 
+We have in higher education a trillion dollars of student debt, and our college completion rate is 15 points, 15 percentage points below Canada. 
+We have a lot of debt. 
+Our economy grew from 2000 to 2007 on the back of consumers massively overborrowing. 
+Consumers paying off that debt is one of the main reasons why our economic recovery is so sluggish today. 
+And everybody of course knows that the federal government debt is growing as a share of GDP at a very rapid rate, and the only way that's going to stop is some combination of faster growth in taxes or slower growth in entitlements, also called transfer payments. 
+And that gets us down from the 1.5, where we've reached for education, down to 1.3. 
+And then we have inequality. 
+Over the 15 years before the financial crisis, the growth rate of the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution was half a point slower than the averages we've been talking about before. 
+All the rest went to the top one percent. 
+So that brings us down to 0.8. 
+And that 0.8 is the big challenge. 
+Are we going to grow at 0.8? 
+If so, that's going to require that our inventions are as important as the ones that happened over the last 150 years. 
+So let's see what some of those inventions were. 
+If you wanted to read in 1875 at night, you needed to have an oil or a gas lamp. 
+They created pollution, they created odors, they were hard to control, the light was dim, and they were a fire hazard. 
+By 1929, electric light was everywhere. 
+We had the vertical city, the invention of the elevator. 
+Central Manhattan became possible. 
+And then, in addition to that, at the same time, hand tools were replaced by massive electric tools and hand-powered electric tools, all achieved by electricity. 
+Electricity was also very helpful in liberating women. 
+Women, back in the late 19th century, spent two days a week doing the laundry. 
+They did it on a scrub board. 
+Then they had to hang the clothes out to dry. 
+Then they had to bring them in. 
+The whole thing took two days out of the seven-day week. 
+And then we had the electric washing machine. 
+And by 1950, they were everywhere. 
+But the women still had to shop every day, but no they didn't, because electricity brought us the electric refrigerator. 
+Back in the late 19th century, the only source of heat in most homes was a big fireplace in the kitchen that was used for cooking and heating. 
+The bedrooms were cold. They were unheated. 
+But by 1929, certainly by 1950, we had central heating everywhere. 
+What about the internal combustion engine, which was invented in 1879? 
+In America, before the motor vehicle, transportation depended entirely on the urban horse, which dropped, without restraint, 25 to 50 pounds of manure on the streets every day together with a gallon of urine. 
+That comes out at five to 10 tons daily per square mile in cities. 
+Those horses also ate up fully one quarter of American agricultural land. 
+That's the percentage of American agricultural land it took to feed the horses. 
+Of course, when the motor vehicle was invented, and it became almost ubiquitous by 1929, that agricultural land could be used for human consumption or for export. 
+And here's an interesting ratio: Starting from zero in 1900, only 30 years later, the ratio of motor vehicles to the number of households in the United States reached 90 percent in just 30 years. 
+Back before the turn of the century, women had another problem. 
+All the water for cooking, cleaning and bathing had to be carried in buckets and pails in from the outside. 
+It's a historical fact that in 1885, the average North Carolina housewife walked 148 miles a year carrying 35 tons of water. 
+But by 1929, cities around the country had put in underground water pipes. 
+They had put in underground sewer pipes, and as a result, one of the great scourges of the late 19th century, waterborne diseases like cholera, began to disappear. 
+And an amazing fact for techno-optimists is that in the first half of the 20th century, the rate of improvement of life expectancy was three times faster than it was in the second half of the 19th century. 
+So it's a truism that things can't be more than 100 percent of themselves. 
+And I'll just give you a few examples. 
+We went from one percent to 90 percent of the speed of sound. 
+Electrification, central heat, ownership of motor cars, they all went from zero to 100 percent. 
+Urban environments make people more productive than on the farm. 
+We went from 25 percent urban to 75 percent by the early postwar years. 
+What about the electronic revolution? 
+Here's an early computer. 
+It's amazing. The mainframe computer was invented in 1942. 
+By 1960 we had telephone bills, bank statements were being produced by computers. 
+The earliest cell phones, the earliest personal computers were invented in the 1970s. 
+The 1980s brought us Bill Gates, DOS, ATM machines to replace bank tellers, bar code scanning to cut down on labor in the retail sector. 
+Fast forward through the '90s, we had the dotcom revolution and a temporary rise in productivity growth. 
+But I'm now going to give you an experiment. 
+You have to choose either option A or option B. 
+(Laughter) Option A is you get to keep everything invented up till 10 years ago. 
+So you get Google, you get Amazon, you get Wikipedia, and you get running water and indoor toilets. 
+Or you get everything invented to yesterday, including Facebook and your iPhone, but you have to give up, go out to the outhouse, and carry in the water. 
+Hurricane Sandy caused a lot of people to lose the 20th century, maybe for a couple of days, in some cases for more than a week, electricity, running water, heating, gasoline for their cars, and a charge for their iPhones. 
+The problem we face is that all these great inventions, we have to match them in the future, and my prediction that we're not going to match them brings us down from the original two-percent growth down to 0.2, the fanciful curve that I drew you at the beginning. 
+So here we are back to the horse and buggy. 
+I'd like to award an Oscar to the inventors of the 20th century, the people from Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison to the Wright Brothers, I'd like to call them all up here, and they're going to call back to you. 
+Your challenge is, can you match what we achieved? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I wanted to talk to you today about creative confidence. 
+I'm going to start way back in the third grade at Oakdale School in Barberton, Ohio. 
+I remember one day my best friend Brian was working on a project. 
+He was making a horse out of the clay that our teacher kept under the sink. 
+And at one point, one of the girls who was sitting at his table, seeing what he was doing, leaned over and said to him, "That's terrible. That doesn't look anything like a horse." 
+And Brian's shoulders sank. 
+And he wadded up the clay horse and he threw it back in the bin. 
+I never saw Brian do a project like that ever again. 
+And I wonder how often that happens. 
+It seems like when I tell that story of Brian to my class, a lot of them want to come up after class and tell me about their similar experience, how a teacher shut them down or how a student was particularly cruel to them. 
+And some opt out thinking of themselves as creative at that point. 
+And I see that opting out that happens in childhood, and it moves in and becomes more ingrained, even by the time you get to adult life. 
+So we see a lot of this. 
+When we have a workshop or when we have clients in to work with us side-by-side, eventually we get to the point in the process that's fuzzy or unconventional. 
+And eventually these bigshot executives whip out their Blackberries and they say they have to make really important phone calls, and they head for the exits. 
+And they're just so uncomfortable. 
+When we track them down and ask them what's going on, they say something like, "" I'm just not the creative type. "" But we know that's not true. 
+If they stick with the process, if they stick with it, they end up doing amazing things and they surprise themselves just how innovative they and their teams really are. 
+So I've been looking at this fear of judgment that we have. 
+That you don't do things, you're afraid you're going to be judged. 
+If you don't say the right creative thing, you're going to be judged. 
+And I had a major breakthrough when I met the psychologist Albert Bandura. 
+I don't know if you know Albert Bandura. 
+But if you go to Wikipedia, it says that he's the fourth most important psychologist in history — like Freud, Skinner, somebody and Bandura. 
+Bandura's 86 and he still works at Stanford. 
+And he's just a lovely guy. 
+And so I went to see him because he has just worked on phobias for a long time, which I'm very interested in. 
+He had developed this way, this kind of methodology, that ended up curing people in a very short amount of time. 
+In four hours he had a huge cure rate of people who had phobias. 
+And we talked about snakes. I don't know why we talked about snakes. 
+We talked about snakes and fear of snakes as a phobia. 
+And it was really enjoyable, really interesting. 
+He told me that he'd invite the test subject in, and he'd say, "" You know, there's a snake in the next room and we're going to go in there. "" To which, he reported, most of them replied, "" Hell no, I'm not going in there, certainly if there's a snake in there. "" But Bandura has a step-by-step process that was super successful. 
+So he'd take people to this two-way mirror looking into the room where the snake was, and he'd get them comfortable with that. 
+And then through a series of steps, he'd move them and they'd be standing in the doorway with the door open and they'd be looking in there. 
+And he'd get them comfortable with that. 
+And then many more steps later, baby steps, they'd be in the room, they'd have a leather glove like a welder's glove on, and they'd eventually touch the snake. 
+And when they touched the snake everything was fine. They were cured. 
+In fact, everything was better than fine. 
+These people who had life-long fears of snakes were saying things like, "Look how beautiful that snake is." 
+And they were holding it in their laps. 
+Bandura calls this process "" guided mastery. "" I love that term: guided mastery. 
+And something else happened, these people who went through the process and touched the snake ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives. 
+They tried harder, they persevered longer, and they were more resilient in the face of failure. 
+They just gained a new confidence. 
+And Bandura calls that confidence self-efficacy — the sense that you can change the world and that you can attain what you set out to do. 
+Well meeting Bandura was really cathartic for me because I realized that this famous scientist had documented and scientifically validated something that we've seen happen for the last 30 years. 
+That we could take people who had the fear that they weren't creative, and we could take them through a series of steps, kind of like a series of small successes, and they turn fear into familiarity, and they surprise themselves. 
+That transformation is amazing. 
+We see it at the d.school all the time. 
+People from all different kinds of disciplines, they think of themselves as only analytical. 
+And they come in and they go through the process, our process, they build confidence and now they think of themselves differently. 
+And they're totally emotionally excited about the fact that they walk around thinking of themselves as a creative person. 
+So I thought one of the things I'd do today is take you through and show you what this journey looks like. 
+To me, that journey looks like Doug Dietz. 
+Doug Dietz is a technical person. 
+He designs medical imaging equipment, large medical imaging equipment. 
+He's worked for GE, and he's had a fantastic career. 
+But at one point he had a moment of crisis. 
+He was in the hospital looking at one of his MRI machines in use when he saw a young family. 
+There was a little girl, and that little girl was crying and was terrified. 
+And Doug was really disappointed to learn that nearly 80 percent of the pediatric patients in this hospital had to be sedated in order to deal with his MRI machine. 
+And this was really disappointing to Doug, because before this time he was proud of what he did. 
+He was saving lives with this machine. 
+But it really hurt him to see the fear that this machine caused in kids. 
+About that time he was at the d.school at Stanford taking classes. 
+He was learning about our process about design thinking, about empathy, about iterative prototyping. 
+And he would take this new knowledge and do something quite extraordinary. 
+He would redesign the entire experience of being scanned. 
+And this is what he came up with. 
+He turned it into an adventure for the kids. 
+He painted the walls and he painted the machine, and he got the operators retrained by people who know kids, like children's museum people. 
+And now when the kid comes, it's an experience. 
+And they talk to them about the noise and the movement of the ship. 
+And when they come, they say, "" Okay, you're going to go into the pirate ship, but be very still because we don't want the pirates to find you. "" And the results were super dramatic. 
+So from something like 80 percent of the kids needing to be sedated, to something like 10 percent of the kids needing to be sedated. 
+And the hospital and GE were happy too. 
+Because you didn't have to call the anesthesiologist all the time, they could put more kids through the machine in a day. 
+So the quantitative results were great. 
+But Doug's results that he cared about were much more qualitative. 
+He was with one of the mothers waiting for her child to come out of the scan. 
+And when the little girl came out of her scan, she ran up to her mother and said, "Mommy, can we come back tomorrow?" 
+(Laughter) And so I've heard Doug tell the story many times, of his personal transformation and the breakthrough design that happened from it, but I've never really seen him tell the story of the little girl without a tear in his eye. 
+Doug's story takes place in a hospital. 
+I know a thing or two about hospitals. 
+A few years ago I felt a lump on the side of my neck, and it was my turn in the MRI machine. 
+It was cancer. It was the bad kind. 
+I was told I had a 40 percent chance of survival. 
+So while you're sitting around with the other patients in your pajamas and everybody's pale and thin and you're waiting for your turn to get the gamma rays, you think of a lot of things. 
+Mostly you think about, Am I going to survive? 
+And I thought a lot about, What was my daughter's life going to be like without me? 
+But you think about other things. 
+I thought a lot about, What was I put on Earth to do? 
+What was my calling? What should I do? 
+And I was lucky because I had lots of options. 
+We'd been working in health and wellness, and K through 12, and the Developing World. 
+And so there were lots of projects that I could work on. 
+But I decided and I committed to at this point to the thing I most wanted to do — was to help as many people as possible regain the creative confidence they lost along their way. 
+And if I was going to survive, that's what I wanted to do. 
+I survived, just so you know. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I really believe that when people gain this confidence — and we see it all the time at the d.school and at IDEO — they actually start working on the things that are really important in their lives. 
+We see people quit what they're doing and go in new directions. 
+We see them come up with more interesting, and just more, ideas so they can choose from better ideas. 
+And they just make better decisions. 
+So I know at TED you're supposed to have a change-the-world kind of thing. 
+Everybody has a change-the-world thing. 
+If there is one for me, this is it. To help this happen. 
+So I hope you'll join me on my quest — you as thought leaders. 
+It would be really great if you didn't let people divide the world into the creatives and the non-creatives, like it's some God-given thing, and to have people realize that they're naturally creative. 
+And those natural people should let their ideas fly. 
+That they should achieve what Bandura calls self-efficacy, that you can do what you set out to do, and that you can reach a place of creative confidence and touch the snake. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Power. 
+That is the word that comes to mind. 
+We're the new technologists. 
+We have a lot of data, so we have a lot of power. 
+How much power do we have? 
+Scene from a movie: "" Apocalypse Now "" — great movie. 
+We've got to get our hero, Captain Willard, to the mouth of the Nung River so he can go pursue Colonel Kurtz. 
+The way we're going to do this is fly him in and drop him off. 
+So the scene: the sky is filled with this fleet of helicopters carrying him in. 
+And there's this loud, thrilling music in the background, this wild music. 
+♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Dum da ta da dum ♫ ♫ Da ta da da ♫ That's a lot of power. 
+That's the kind of power I feel in this room. 
+That's the kind of power we have because of all of the data that we have. 
+Let's take an example. 
+What can we do with just one person's data? What can we do 
+with that guy's data? 
+I can look at your financial records. 
+I can tell if you pay your bills on time. 
+I know if you're good to give a loan to. 
+I can look at your medical records; I can see if your pump is still pumping — see if you're good to offer insurance to. 
+I can look at your clicking patterns. 
+When you come to my website, I actually know what you're going to do already because I've seen you visit millions of websites before. 
+And I'm sorry to tell you, you're like a poker player, you have a tell. 
+I can tell with data analysis what you're going to do before you even do it. 
+I know what you like. I know who you are, and that's even before I look at your mail or your phone. 
+Those are the kinds of things we can do with the data that we have. 
+But I'm not actually here to talk about what we can do. 
+I'm here to talk about what we should do. 
+What's the right thing to do? 
+Now I see some puzzled looks like, "" Why are you asking us what's the right thing to do? 
+We're just building this stuff. Somebody else is using it. "" Fair enough. 
+But it brings me back. 
+I think about World War II — some of our great technologists then, some of our great physicists, studying nuclear fission and fusion — just nuclear stuff. 
+We gather together these physicists in Los Alamos to see what they'll build. 
+We want the people building the technology thinking about what we should be doing with the technology. 
+So what should we be doing with that guy's data? 
+Should we be collecting it, gathering it, so we can make his online experience better? 
+So we can make money? 
+So we can protect ourselves if he was up to no good? 
+Or should we respect his privacy, protect his dignity and leave him alone? 
+Which one is it? 
+How should we figure it out? 
+I know: crowdsource. Let's crowdsource this. 
+So to get people warmed up, let's start with an easy question — something I'm sure everybody here has an opinion about: iPhone versus Android. 
+Let's do a show of hands — iPhone. 
+Uh huh. 
+Android. 
+You'd think with a bunch of smart people we wouldn't be such suckers just for the pretty phones. 
+(Laughter) Next question, a little bit harder. 
+Should we be collecting all of that guy's data to make his experiences better and to protect ourselves in case he's up to no good? 
+Or should we leave him alone? 
+Collect his data. 
+Leave him alone. 
+You're safe. It's fine. 
+(Laughter) Okay, last question — harder question — when trying to evaluate what we should do in this case, should we use a Kantian deontological moral framework, or should we use a Millian consequentialist one? 
+Kant. 
+Mill. 
+Not as many votes. 
+(Laughter) Yeah, that's a terrifying result. 
+Terrifying, because we have stronger opinions about our hand-held devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions. 
+How do we know what to do with all the power we have if we don't have a moral framework? 
+We know more about mobile operating systems, but what we really need is a moral operating system. 
+What's a moral operating system? 
+We all know right and wrong, right? 
+You feel good when you do something right, you feel bad when you do something wrong. 
+Our parents teach us that: praise with the good, scold with the bad. 
+But how do we figure out what's right and wrong? 
+And from day to day, we have the techniques that we use. 
+Maybe we just follow our gut. 
+Maybe we take a vote — we crowdsource. 
+Or maybe we punt — ask the legal department, see what they say. 
+In other words, it's kind of random, kind of ad hoc, how we figure out what we should do. 
+And maybe, if we want to be on surer footing, what we really want is a moral framework that will help guide us there, that will tell us what kinds of things are right and wrong in the first place, and how would we know in a given situation what to do. 
+So let's get a moral framework. 
+We're numbers people, living by numbers. 
+How can we use numbers as the basis for a moral framework? 
+I know a guy who did exactly that. 
+A brilliant guy — he's been dead 2,500 years. 
+Plato, that's right. 
+Remember him — old philosopher? 
+You were sleeping during that class. 
+And Plato, he had a lot of the same concerns that we did. 
+He was worried about right and wrong. 
+He wanted to know what is just. 
+But he was worried that all we seem to be doing is trading opinions about this. 
+He says something's just. She says something else is just. 
+It's kind of convincing when he talks and when she talks too. 
+I'm just going back and forth; I'm not getting anywhere. 
+I don't want opinions; I want knowledge. 
+I want to know the truth about justice — like we have truths in math. 
+In math, we know the objective facts. 
+Take a number, any number — two. 
+Favorite number. I love that number. 
+There are truths about two. 
+If you've got two of something, you add two more, you get four. 
+That's true no matter what thing you're talking about. 
+It's an objective truth about the form of two, the abstract form. 
+When you have two of anything — two eyes, two ears, two noses, just two protrusions — those all partake of the form of two. 
+They all participate in the truths that two has. 
+They all have two-ness in them. 
+And therefore, it's not a matter of opinion. 
+What if, Plato thought, ethics was like math? 
+What if there were a pure form of justice? 
+What if there are truths about justice, and you could just look around in this world and see which things participated, partook of that form of justice? 
+Then you would know what was really just and what wasn't. 
+It wouldn't be a matter of just opinion or just appearances. 
+That's a stunning vision. 
+I mean, think about that. How grand. How ambitious. 
+That's as ambitious as we are. 
+He wants to solve ethics. 
+He wants objective truths. 
+If you think that way, you have a Platonist moral framework. 
+If you don't think that way, well, you have a lot of company in the history of Western philosophy, because the tidy idea, you know, people criticized it. 
+Aristotle, in particular, he was not amused. 
+He thought it was impractical. 
+Aristotle said, "" We should seek only so much precision in each subject as that subject allows. "" Aristotle thought ethics wasn't a lot like math. 
+He thought ethics was a matter of making decisions in the here-and-now using our best judgment to find the right path. 
+If you think that, Plato's not your guy. 
+But don't give up. 
+Maybe there's another way that we can use numbers as the basis of our moral framework. 
+How about this: What if in any situation you could just calculate, look at the choices, measure out which one's better and know what to do? 
+That sound familiar? 
+That's a utilitarian moral framework. 
+John Stuart Mill was a great advocate of this — nice guy besides — and only been dead 200 years. 
+So basis of utilitarianism — I'm sure you're familiar at least. 
+The three people who voted for Mill before are familiar with this. 
+But here's the way it works. 
+What if morals, what if what makes something moral is just a matter of if it maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain? 
+It does something intrinsic to the act. 
+It's not like its relation to some abstract form. 
+It's just a matter of the consequences. 
+You just look at the consequences and see if, overall, it's for the good or for the worse. 
+That would be simple. Then we know what to do. 
+Let's take an example. 
+Suppose I go up and I say, "" I'm going to take your phone. "" Not just because it rang earlier, but I'm going to take it because I made a little calculation. 
+I thought, that guy looks suspicious. 
+And what if he's been sending little messages to Bin Laden's hideout — or whoever took over after Bin Laden — and he's actually like a terrorist, a sleeper cell. 
+I'm going to find that out, and when I find that out, I'm going to prevent a huge amount of damage that he could cause. 
+That has a very high utility to prevent that damage. 
+And compared to the little pain that it's going to cause — because it's going to be embarrassing when I'm looking on his phone and seeing that he has a Farmville problem and that whole bit — that's overwhelmed by the value of looking at the phone. 
+If you feel that way, that's a utilitarian choice. 
+But maybe you don't feel that way either. 
+Maybe you think, it's his phone. 
+It's wrong to take his phone because he's a person and he has rights and he has dignity, and we can't just interfere with that. 
+He has autonomy. 
+It doesn't matter what the calculations are. 
+There are things that are intrinsically wrong — like lying is wrong, like torturing innocent children is wrong. 
+Kant was very good on this point, and he said it a little better than I'll say it. 
+He said we should use our reason to figure out the rules by which we should guide our conduct, and then it is our duty to follow those rules. 
+It's not a matter of calculation. 
+So let's stop. 
+We're right in the thick of it, this philosophical thicket. 
+And this goes on for thousands of years, because these are hard questions, and I've only got 15 minutes. 
+So let's cut to the chase. 
+How should we be making our decisions? 
+Is it Plato, is it Aristotle, is it Kant, is it Mill? 
+What should we be doing? What's the answer? 
+What's the formula that we can use in any situation to determine what we should do, whether we should use that guy's data or not? 
+What's the formula? 
+There's not a formula. 
+There's not a simple answer. 
+Ethics is hard. 
+Ethics requires thinking. 
+And that's uncomfortable. 
+I know; I spent a lot of my career in artificial intelligence, trying to build machines that could do some of this thinking for us, that could give us answers. 
+But they can't. 
+You can't just take human thinking and put it into a machine. 
+We're the ones who have to do it. 
+Happily, we're not machines, and we can do it. 
+Not only can we think, we must. 
+Hannah Arendt said, "" The sad truth is that most evil done in this world is not done by people who choose to be evil. 
+It arises from not thinking. "" That's what she called the "" banality of evil. "" And the response to that is that we demand the exercise of thinking from every sane person. 
+So let's do that. Let's think. 
+In fact, let's start right now. 
+Every person in this room do this: think of the last time you had a decision to make where you were worried to do the right thing, where you wondered, "" What should I be doing? "" Bring that to mind, and now reflect on that and say, "" How did I come up that decision? 
+What did I do? Did I follow my gut? 
+Did I have somebody vote on it? Or did I punt to legal? "" Or now we have a few more choices. 
+"" Did I evaluate what would be the highest pleasure like Mill would? 
+Or like Kant, did I use reason to figure out what was intrinsically right? "" Think about it. Really bring it to mind. This is important. 
+It is so important we are going to spend 30 seconds of valuable TEDTalk time doing nothing but thinking about this. 
+Are you ready? Go. 
+Stop. Good work. 
+What you just did, that's the first step towards taking responsibility for what we should do with all of our power. 
+Now the next step — try this. 
+Go find a friend and explain to them how you made that decision. 
+Not right now. Wait till I finish talking. 
+Do it over lunch. 
+And don't just find another technologist friend; find somebody different than you. 
+Find an artist or a writer — or, heaven forbid, find a philosopher and talk to them. 
+In fact, find somebody from the humanities. 
+Why? Because they think about problems differently than we do as technologists. 
+Just a few days ago, right across the street from here, there was hundreds of people gathered together. 
+It was technologists and humanists at that big BiblioTech Conference. 
+And they gathered together because the technologists wanted to learn what it would be like to think from a humanities perspective. 
+You have someone from Google talking to someone who does comparative literature. 
+You're thinking about the relevance of 17th century French theater — how does that bear upon venture capital? 
+Well that's interesting. That's a different way of thinking. 
+And when you think in that way, you become more sensitive to the human considerations, which are crucial to making ethical decisions. 
+So imagine that right now you went and you found your musician friend. 
+And you're telling him what we're talking about, about our whole data revolution and all this — maybe even hum a few bars of our theme music. 
+♫ Dum ta da da dum dum ta da da dum ♫ Well, your musician friend will stop you and say, "" You know, the theme music for your data revolution, that's an opera, that's Wagner. 
+It's based on Norse legend. 
+It's Gods and mythical creatures fighting over magical jewelry. "" That's interesting. 
+Now it's also a beautiful opera, and we're moved by that opera. 
+We're moved because it's about the battle between good and evil, about right and wrong. 
+And we care about right and wrong. 
+We care what happens in that opera. 
+We care what happens in "" Apocalypse Now. "" And we certainly care what happens with our technologies. 
+We have so much power today, it is up to us to figure out what to do, and that's the good news. 
+We're the ones writing this opera. 
+This is our movie. 
+We figure out what will happen with this technology. 
+We determine how this will all end. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My name is Art Benjamin, and I am a "" mathemagician. "" What that means is, I combine my loves of math and magic to do something I call "" mathemagics. "" But before I get started, I have a quick question for the audience. 
+By any chance, did anyone happen to bring with them this morning a calculator? 
+You sir, that's three. 
+And anybody on this side here? 
+Would somebody get us started by giving us a two-digit number, please? 
+AB: 22. And another two-digit number, sir? 
+AB: Multiply 22 times 47, make sure you get 1,034, or the calculators are not working. 
+AB: 594. Let's give three of them a nice round of applause there. 
+(Applause) Would you like to try a more standard calculator, just in case? 
+There is something called the square of a number, which most of you know is taking a number and multiplying it by itself. 
+Audience: 25. 
+What I'm going to try and do now is to square, in my head, four two-digit numbers faster than they can do on their calculators, even using the shortcut method. 
+What I'll use is the second row this time, and I'll get four of you to each yell out a two-digit number, and if you would square the first number, and if you would square the second, the third and the fourth, I will try and race you to the answer. OK? 
+AB: 23 squared, OK. 
+Volunteer: 529. AB: 529. 
+Volunteer: 3481. AB: 3481. 
+Volunteer: 8649. 
+I won't even write these down — I'll just call them out as they're called out to me. 
+Anyone on our panel, verify the answer. 
+AB: 987 squared is 974,169. 
+(Applause ends) Let me try to take this one step further. 
+(Laughter) I'm going to try to square a four-digit number this time. 
+You can all take your time on this; I will not beat you to the answer on this one, but I will try to get the answer right. 
+(Applause) (Applause ends) Now, I would attempt to square a five-digit number — and I can — but unfortunately, most calculators cannot. 
+In the meanwhile, let me conclude the first part of my show by doing something a little trickier. 
+And instead of squaring it this time, I want you to take that number and multiply it by any three-digit number that you want, but don't tell me what you're multiplying by — just multiply it by any random three-digit number. 
+What I'd like each of you to do is to call out for me any six of your seven digits, any six of them, in any order you'd like. 
+You have a seven-digit number, call out any six of them please. 
+Did you leave out the number 7? 
+(Applause) (Applause ends) For my next number — (Laughter) while I mentally recharge my batteries, I have one more question for the audience. 
+By any chance, does anybody here happen to know the day of the week that they were born on? 
+Audience: 1953. 
+November what? 
+Fifth — was that a Wednesday? 
+Good, how about the person behind her? 
+Audience: 1947. AB: 1947, and the month? 
+Audience: 1966. 
+AB: I'll tell you what, Chris: as long as you have that book in front of you, do me a favor, turn to a year outside of the 1900s, either into the 1800s or way into the 2000s — that'll be a much greater challenge for me. 
+AB: 1824, OK. 
+There was a gentleman up here who had a 10-digit calculator. 
+OK, stand up for me just for a second, so I can see where you are. 
+You have a 10-digit calculator, sir, as well? 
+But to make my job more interesting for you, as well as for me, I'm going to do this problem thinking out loud. 
+Oh, I did this row already. 
+57,683 — squared. 
+I'm going to break the problem down into three parts. 
+I'll do 57,000 squared, plus 683 squared, plus 57,000 times 683 times two. 
+Now, let me recap. 
+Let me explain what that is. 
+(Laughter) If you want to talk to me about ADHD afterwards, you can talk to me then. 
+By the way, one last instruction, for my judges with the calculators — you know who you are — there is at least a 50 percent chance that I will make a mistake here. 
+If I do, don't tell me what the mistake is; just say, "" you're close, "" or something like that, and I'll try and figure out the answer — which could be pretty entertaining in itself. 
+If, however, I am right, whatever you do, don't keep it to yourself, OK? 
+(Laughter) Make sure everybody knows that I got the answer right, because this is my big finish, OK. 
+77,862 becomes cookie fission, cookie fission is 77,822. 
+That seems right, I'll go on. Cookie fission, OK. 
+Take the 249, add that to cookie, 249, oops, but I see a carry coming — 249 — add that to cookie, 250 plus 77, is 327 million — fission, fission, OK, finally, we do 683 squared, that's 700 times 666, plus 17 squared is 466,489, rev up if I need it, rev up, take the 466, add that to fission, to get, oh gee — 328,489. 
+Audience: Yeah! AB: Good. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) I hope you enjoyed mathemagics. 
+
+Today I want to talk to you about ethnic conflict and civil war. 
+These are not normally the most cheerful of topics, nor do they generally generate the kind of good news that this conference is about. 
+Yet, not only is there at least some good news to be told about fewer such conflicts now than two decades ago, but what is perhaps more important is that we also have come to a much better understanding of what can be done to further reduce the number of ethnic conflicts and civil wars and the suffering that they inflict. 
+Three things stand out: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design. 
+What I will focus on in my talk is why they matter, how they matter, and what we can all do to make sure that they continue to matter in the right ways, that is, how all of us can contribute to developing and honing the skills of local and global leaders to make peace and to make it last. 
+But let's start at the beginning. 
+Civil wars have made news headlines for many decades now, and ethnic conflicts in particular have been a near constant presence as a major international security threat. 
+For nearly two decades now, the news has been bad and the images have been haunting. 
+In Georgia, after years of stalemate, we saw a full-scale resurgence of violence in August, 2008. 
+This quickly escalated into a five-day war between Russia and Georgia, leaving Georgia ever more divided. 
+In Kenya, contested presidential elections in 2007 — we just heard about them — quickly led to high levels of inter-ethnic violence and the killing and displacement of thousands of people. 
+In Sri Lanka, a decades-long civil war between the Tamil minority and the Sinhala majority led to a bloody climax in 2009, after perhaps as many as 100,000 people had been killed since 1983. 
+In Kyrgyzstan, just over the last few weeks, unprecedented levels of violence occurred between ethnic Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks. 
+Hundreds have been killed, and more than 100,000 displaced, including many ethnic Uzbeks who fled to neighboring Uzbekistan. 
+In the Middle East, conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continues unabated, and it becomes ever more difficult to see how, just how a possible, sustainable solution can be achieved. 
+Darfur may have slipped from the news headlines, but the killing and displacement there continues as well, and the sheer human misery that it creates is very hard to fathom. 
+And in Iraq, finally, violence is on the rise again, and the country has yet to form a government four months after its last parliamentary elections. 
+But hang on, this talk is to be about the good news. 
+So are these now the images of the past? 
+Well, notwithstanding the gloomy pictures from the Middle East, Darfur, Iraq, elsewhere, there is a longer-term trend that does represent some good news. 
+Over the past two decades, since the end of the Cold War, there has been an overall decline in the number of civil wars. 
+Since the high in the early 1990s, with about 50 such civil wars ongoing, we now have 30 percent fewer such conflicts today. 
+The number of people killed in civil wars also is much lower today than it was a decade ago or two. 
+But this trend is less unambiguous. 
+The highest level of deaths on the battlefield was recorded between 1998 and 2001, with about 80,000 soldiers, policemen and rebels killed every year. 
+The lowest number of combatant casualties occurred in 2003, with just 20,000 killed. 
+Despite the up and down since then, the overall trend — and this is the important bit — clearly points downward for the past two decades. 
+The news about civilian casualties is also less bad than it used to be. 
+From over 12,000 civilians deliberately killed in civil wars in 1997 and 1998, a decade later, this figure stands at 4,000. 
+This is a decrease by two-thirds. 
+This decline would be even more obvious if we factored in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. 
+But then 800,000 civilians were slaughtered in a matter of just a few months. 
+This certainly is an accomplishment that must never be surpassed. 
+What is also important is to note that these figures only tell part of the story. 
+They exclude people that died as a consequence of civil war, from hunger or disease, for example. 
+And they also do not properly account for civilian suffering more generally. 
+Torture, rape and ethnic cleansing have become highly effective, if often non-lethal, weapons in civil war. 
+To put it differently, for the civilians that suffer the consequences of ethnic conflict and civil war, there is no good war and there is no bad peace. 
+Thus, even though every civilian killed, maimed, raped, or tortured is one too many, the fact that the number of civilian casualties is clearly lower today than it was a decade ago, is good news. 
+So, we have fewer conflicts today in which fewer people get killed. 
+And the big question, of course, is why? 
+In some cases, there is a military victory of one side. 
+This is a solution of sorts, but rarely is it one that comes without human costs or humanitarian consequences. 
+The defeat of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka is perhaps the most recent example of this, but we have seen similar so-called military solutions in the Balkans, in the South Caucasus and across most of Africa. 
+At times, they are complimented by negotiated settlements, or at least cease-fire agreements, and peacekeepers are deployed. 
+But hardly ever do they represent a resounding success — Bosnia and Herzegovina perhaps more so than Georgia. 
+But for many parts of Africa, a colleague of mine once put it this way, "" The cease-fire on Tuesday night was reached just in time for the genocide to start on Wednesday morning. "" But let's look at the good news again. 
+If there's no solution on the battlefield, three factors can account for the prevention of ethnic conflict and civil war, or for sustainable peace afterwards: leadership, diplomacy and institutional design. 
+Take the example of Northern Ireland. 
+Despite centuries of animosity, decades of violence and thousands of people killed, 1998 saw the conclusion of an historic agreement. 
+Its initial version was skillfully mediated by Senator George Mitchell. 
+Crucially, for the long-term success of the peace process in Northern Ireland, he imposed very clear conditions for the participation and negotiations. 
+Central among them, a commitment to exclusively peaceful means. 
+Subsequent revisions of the agreement were facilitated by the British and Irish governments, who never wavered in their determination to bring peace and stability to Northern Ireland. 
+The core institutions that were put in place in 1998 and their modifications in 2006 and 2008 were highly innovative and allowed all conflict parties to see their core concerns and demands addressed. 
+The agreement combines a power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland with cross-border institutions that link Belfast and Dublin and thus recognizes the so-called Irish dimension of the conflict. 
+And significantly, there's also a clear focus on both the rights of individuals and the rights of communities. 
+The provisions in the agreement may be complex, but so is the underlying conflict. 
+Perhaps most importantly, local leaders repeatedly rose to the challenge of compromise, not always fast and not always enthusiastically, but rise in the end they did. 
+Who ever could have imagined Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness jointly governing Northern Ireland as First and Deputy First Minister? 
+But then, is Northern Ireland a unique example, or does this kind of explanation only hold more generally in democratic and developed countries? 
+By no means. 
+The ending of Liberia's long-lasting civil war in 2003 illustrates the importance of leadership, diplomacy and institutional design as much as the successful prevention of a full-scale civil war in Macedonia in 2001, or the successful ending of the conflict in Aceh in Indonesia in 2005. 
+In all three cases, local leaders were willing and able to make peace, the international community stood ready to help them negotiate and implement an agreement, and the institutions have lived up to the promise that they held on the day they were agreed. 
+Focusing on leadership, diplomacy and institutional design also helps explain failures to achieve peace, or to make it last. 
+The hopes that were vested in the Oslo Accords did not lead to an end of the Israeli / Palestinian conflict. 
+Not all the issues that needed to be resolved were actually covered in the agreements. 
+Rather, local leaders committed to revisiting them later on. 
+Yet instead of grasping this opportunity, local and international leaders soon disengaged and became distracted by the second Intifada, the events of 9 / 11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 
+The comprehensive peace agreement for Sudan signed in 2005 turned out to be less comprehensive than envisaged, and its provisions may yet bear the seeds of a full-scale return to war between north and south. 
+Changes and shortcomings in leadership, more off than on international diplomacy and institutional failures account for this in almost equal measure. 
+Unresolved boundary issues, squabbles over oil revenues, the ongoing conflict in Darfur, escalating tribal violence in the south and generally weak state capacity across all of Sudan complete a very depressing picture of the state of affairs in Africa's largest country. 
+A final example: Kosovo. 
+The failure to achieve a negotiated solution for Kosovo and the violence, tension and de facto partition that resulted from it have their reasons in many, many different factors. 
+Central among them are three. 
+First, the intransigence of local leaders to settle for nothing less than their maximum demands. 
+Second, an international diplomatic effort that was hampered from the beginning by Western support for Kosovo's independence. 
+And third, a lack of imagination when it came to designing institutions that could have addressed the concerns of Serbs and Albanians alike. 
+By the same token — and here we have some good news again — the very fact that there is a high-level, well-resourced international presence in Kosovo and the Balkans region more generally and the fact that local leaders on both sides have showed relative restraint, explains why things have not been worse over the past two years since 2008. 
+So even in situations where outcomes are less than optimal, local leaders and international leaders have a choice, and they can make a difference for the better. 
+A cold war is not as good as a cold peace, but a cold peace is still better than a hot war. 
+Good news is also about learning the right lesson. 
+So what then distinguishes the Israeli / Palestinian conflict from that in Northern Ireland, or the civil war in Sudan from that in Liberia? 
+Both successes and failures teach us several critically important things that we need to bear in mind if we want the good news to continue. 
+First, leadership. 
+In the same way in which ethnic conflict and civil war are not natural but man-made disasters, their prevention and settlement does not happen automatically either. 
+Leadership needs to be capable, determined and visionary in its commitment to peace. 
+Leaders need to connect to each other and to their followers, and they need to bring them along on what is an often arduous journey into a peaceful future. 
+Second, diplomacy. 
+Diplomacy needs to be well resourced, sustained, and apply the right mix of incentives and pressures on leaders and followers. 
+It needs to help them reach an equitable compromise, and it needs to ensure that a broad coalition of local, regional and international supporters help them implement their agreement. 
+Third, institutional design. 
+Institutional design requires a keen focus on issues, innovative thinking and flexible and well-funded implementation. 
+Conflict parties need to move away from maximum demands and towards a compromise that recognizes each other's needs. 
+And they need to think about the substance of their agreement much more than about the labels they want to attach to them. 
+Conflict parties also need to be prepared to return to the negotiation table if the agreement implementation stalls. 
+For me personally, the most critical lesson of all is this: Local commitment to peace is all-important, but it is often not enough to prevent or end violence. 
+Yet, no amount of diplomacy or institutional design can make up for local failures and the consequences that they have. 
+Therefore, we must invest in developing leaders, leaders that have the skills, vision and determination to make peace. 
+Leaders, in other words, that people will trust and that they will want to follow even if that means making hard choices. 
+A final thought: Ending civil wars is a process that is fraught with dangers, frustrations and setbacks. 
+It often takes a generation to accomplish, but it also requires us, today's generation, to take responsibility and to learn the right lessons about leadership, diplomacy and institutional design, so that the child soldiers of today can become the children of tomorrow. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Recently I visited Beloit, Wisconsin. 
+And I was there to honor a great 20th century explorer, Roy Chapman Andrews. 
+During his time at the American Museum of Natural History, Andrews led a range of expeditions to uncharted regions, like here in the Gobi Desert. 
+He was quite a figure. 
+He was later, it's said, the basis of the Indiana Jones character. 
+And when I was in Beloit, Wisconsin, I gave a public lecture to a group of middle school students. 
+And I'm here to tell you, if there's anything more intimidating than talking here at TED, it'll be trying to hold the attention of a group of a thousand 12-year-olds for a 45-minute lecture. 
+Don't try that one. 
+At the end of the lecture they asked a number of questions, but there was one that's really stuck with me since then. 
+There was a young girl who stood up, and she asked the question: "Where should we explore?" 
+I think there's a sense that many of us have that the great age of exploration on Earth is over, that for the next generation they're going to have to go to outer space or the deepest oceans in order to find something significant to explore. 
+But is that really the case? 
+Is there really nowhere significant for us to explore left here on Earth? 
+It sort of made me think back to one of my favorite explorers in the history of biology. 
+This is an explorer of the unseen world, Martinus Beijerinck. 
+So Beijerinck set out to discover the cause of tobacco mosaic disease. 
+What he did is he took the infected juice from tobacco plants and he would filter it through smaller and smaller filters. 
+And he reached the point where he felt that there must be something out there that was smaller than the smallest forms of life that were ever known — bacteria, at the time. 
+He came up with a name for his mystery agent. 
+He called it the virus — Latin for "" poison. "" And in uncovering viruses, Beijerinck really opened this entirely new world for us. 
+We now know that viruses make up the majority of the genetic information on our planet, more than the genetic information of all other forms of life combined. 
+And obviously there's been tremendous practical applications associated with this world — things like the eradication of smallpox, the advent of a vaccine against cervical cancer, which we now know is mostly caused by human papillomavirus. 
+And Beijerinck's discovery, this was not something that occurred 500 years ago. 
+It was a little over 100 years ago that Beijerinck discovered viruses. 
+So basically we had automobiles, but we were unaware of the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet. 
+We now have these amazing tools to allow us to explore the unseen world — things like deep sequencing, which allow us to do much more than just skim the surface and look at individual genomes from a particular species, but to look at entire metagenomes, the communities of teeming microorganisms in, on and around us and to document all of the genetic information in these species. 
+We can apply these techniques to things from soil to skin and everything in between. 
+In my organization we now do this on a regular basis to identify the causes of outbreaks that are unclear exactly what causes them. 
+And just to give you a sense of how this works, imagine that we took a nasal swab from every single one of you. 
+And this is something we commonly do to look for respiratory viruses like influenza. 
+The first thing we would see is a tremendous amount of genetic information. 
+And if we started looking into that genetic information, we'd see a number of usual suspects out there — of course, a lot of human genetic information, but also bacterial and viral information, mostly from things that are completely harmless within your nose. 
+But we'd also see something very, very surprising. 
+As we started to look at this information, we would see that about 20 percent of the genetic information in your nose doesn't match anything that we've ever seen before — no plant, animal, fungus, virus or bacteria. 
+Basically we have no clue what this is. 
+And for the small group of us who actually study this kind of data, a few of us have actually begun to call this information biological dark matter. 
+We know it's not anything that we've seen before; it's sort of the equivalent of an uncharted continent right within our own genetic information. 
+And there's a lot of it. 
+If you think 20 percent of genetic information in your nose is a lot of biological dark matter, if we looked at your gut, up to 40 or 50 percent of that information is biological dark matter. 
+And even in the relatively sterile blood, around one to two percent of this information is dark matter — can't be classified, can't be typed or matched with anything we've seen before. 
+At first we thought that perhaps this was artifact. 
+These deep sequencing tools are relatively new. 
+But as they become more and more accurate, we've determined that this information is a form of life, or at least some of it is a form of life. 
+And while the hypotheses for explaining the existence of biological dark matter are really only in their infancy, there's a very, very exciting possibility that exists: that buried in this life, in this genetic information, are signatures of as of yet unidentified life. 
+That as we explore these strings of A's, T's, C's and G's, we may uncover a completely new class of life that, like Beijerinck, will fundamentally change the way that we think about the nature of biology. 
+That perhaps will allow us to identify the cause of a cancer that afflicts us or identify the source of an outbreak that we aren't familiar with or perhaps create a new tool in molecular biology. 
+I'm pleased to announce that, along with colleagues at Stanford and Caltech and UCSF, we're currently starting an initiative to explore biological dark matter for the existence of new forms of life. 
+A little over a hundred years ago, people were unaware of viruses, the forms of life that make up most of the genetic information on our planet. 
+A hundred years from now, people may marvel that we were perhaps completely unaware of a new class of life that literally was right under our noses. 
+It's true, we may have charted all the continents on the planet and we may have discovered all the mammals that are out there, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing left to explore on Earth. 
+Beijerinck and his kind provide an important lesson for the next generation of explorers — people like that young girl from Beloit, Wisconsin. 
+And I think if we phrase that lesson, it's something like this: Don't assume that what we currently think is out there is the full story. 
+Go after the dark matter in whatever field you choose to explore. 
+There are unknowns all around us and they're just waiting to be discovered. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+One of my favorites has always been: "Make Love to Your Man in a Chevy Van," because that was my vehicle when I was in college. 
+
+I wanted to be a rock star. 
+I dreamed of it, and that's all I dreamed of. 
+To be more accurate, I wanted to be a pop star. 
+This was in the late '80s. 
+And mostly I wanted to be the fifth member of Depeche Mode or Duran Duran. 
+They wouldn't have me. 
+I didn't read music, but I played synthesizers and drum machines. 
+And I grew up in this little farming town in northern Nevada. 
+And I was certain that's what my life would be. 
+And when I went to college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas when I was 18, I was stunned to find that there was not a Pop Star 101, or even a degree program for that interest. 
+And the choir conductor there knew that I sang and invited me to come and join the choir. 
+And I said, "" Yes, I would love to do that. It sounds great. "" And I left the room and said, "" No way. "" The choir people in my high school were pretty geeky, and there was no way I was going to have anything to do with those people. 
+And about a week later, a friend of mine came to me and said, "" Listen, you've got to join choir. 
+At the end of the semester, we're taking a trip to Mexico, all expenses paid. 
+And the soprano section is just full of hot girls. "" And so I figured for Mexico and babes, I could do just about anything. 
+And I went to my first day in choir, and I sat down with the basses and sort of looked over my shoulder to see what they were doing. 
+They opened their scores, the conductor gave the downbeat, and boom, they launched into the Kyrie from the "" Requiem "" by Mozart. 
+In my entire life I had seen in black and white, and suddenly everything was in shocking Technicolor. 
+The most transformative experience I've ever had — in that single moment, hearing dissonance and harmony and people singing, people together, the shared vision. 
+And I felt for the first time in my life that I was part of something bigger than myself. 
+And there were a lot of cute girls in the soprano section, as it turns out. 
+I decided to write a piece for choir a couple of years later as a gift to this conductor who had changed my life. 
+I had learned to read music by then, or slowly learning to read music. 
+And that piece was published, and then I wrote another piece, and that got published. 
+And then I started conducting, and I ended up doing my master's degree at the Juilliard School. 
+And I find myself now in the unlikely position of standing in front of all of you as a professional classical composer and conductor. 
+Well a couple of years ago, a friend of mine emailed me a link, a YouTube link, and said, "" You have got to see this. "" And it was this young woman who had posted a fan video to me, singing the soprano line to a piece of mine called "" Sleep. "" (Video) Britlin Losee: Hi Mr. Eric Whitacre. 
+My name is Britlin Losee, and this is a video that I'd like to make for you. 
+Here's me singing "" Sleep. "" I'm a little nervous, just to let you know. 
+♫ If there are noises ♫ ♫ in the night ♫ Eric Whitacre: I was thunderstruck. 
+Britlin was so innocent and so sweet, and her voice was so pure. 
+And I even loved seeing behind her; I could see the little teddy bear sitting on the piano behind her in her room. 
+Such an intimate video. 
+And I had this idea: if I could get 50 people to all do this same thing, sing their parts — soprano, alto, tenor and bass — wherever they were in the world, post their videos to YouTube, we could cut it all together and create a virtual choir. 
+So I wrote on my blog, "" OMG OMG. "" I actually wrote, "" OMG, "" hopefully for the last time in public ever. 
+(Laughter) And I sent out this call to singers. 
+And I made free the download of the music to a piece that I had written in the year 2000 called "" Lux Aurumque, "" which means "" light and gold. "" And lo and behold, people started uploading their videos. 
+Now I should say, before that, what I did is I posted a conductor track of myself conducting. 
+And it's in complete silence when I filmed it, because I was only hearing the music in my head, imagining the choir that would one day come to be. 
+Afterwards, I played a piano track underneath so that the singers would have something to listen to. 
+And then as the videos started to come in... 
+(Singing) This is Cheryl Ang from Singapore. (Singing) 
+This is Evangelina Etienne (Singing) from Massachusetts. (Singing) 
+Stephen Hanson from Sweden. (Singing) 
+This is Jamal Walker from Dallas, Texas. (Singing) 
+There was even a little soprano solo in the piece, and so I had auditions. 
+And a number of sopranos uploaded their parts. 
+I was told later, and also by lots of singers who were involved in this, that they sometimes recorded 50 or 60 different takes until they got just the right take — they uploaded it. 
+Here's our winner of the soprano solo. 
+This is Melody Myers from Tennessee. 
+(Singing) I love the little smile she does right over the top of the note — like, "" No problem, everything's fine. "" (Laughter) And from the crowd emerged this young man, Scott Haines. 
+And he said, "" Listen, this is the project I've been looking for my whole life. 
+I'd like to be the person to edit this all together. "" I said, "" Thank you, Scott. I'm so glad that you found me. "" And Scott aggregated all of the videos. 
+He scrubbed the audio. 
+He made sure that everything lined up. 
+And then we posted this video to YouTube about a year and a half ago. 
+This is "" Lux Aurumque "" sung by the Virtual Choir. 
+(Singing) I'll stop it there in the interest of time. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. 
+So there's more. There's more. Thank you so much. And I had the same reaction you did. I actually was moved to tears when I first saw it. I just couldn't believe the poetry of all of it — 
+these souls all on their own desert island, sending electronic messages in bottles to each other. 
+And the video went viral. 
+We had a million hits in the first month and got a lot of attention for it. 
+And because of that, then a lot of singers started saying, "All right, what's Virtual Choir 2.0?" 
+And so I decided for Virtual Choir 2.0 that I would choose the same piece that Britlin was singing, "" Sleep, "" which is another work that I wrote in the year 2000 — poetry by my dear friend Charles Anthony Silvestri. 
+And again, I posted a conductor video, and we started accepting submissions. 
+This time we got some more mature members. 
+(Singing) And some younger members. 
+(Video) Soprano: ♫ Upon my pillow ♫ ♫ Safe in bed ♫ EW: That's Georgie from England. She's only nine. 
+Isn't that the sweetest thing you've ever seen? 
+Someone did all eight videos — a bass even singing the soprano parts. 
+This is Beau Awtin. 
+(Video) Beau Awtin: ♫ Safe in bed ♫ EW: And our goal — it was sort of an arbitrary goal — there was an MTV video where they all sang "" Lollipop "" and they got people from all over the world to just sing that little melody. 
+And there were 900 people involved in that. 
+So I told the singers, "" That's our goal. 
+That's the number for us to beat. "" And we just closed submissions January 10th, and our final tally was 2,051 videos from 58 different countries. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) From Malta, Madagascar, Thailand, Vietnam, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, as far north as Alaska and as far south as New Zealand. 
+And we also put a page on Facebook for the singers to upload their testimonials, what it was like for them, their experience singing it. 
+And I've just chosen a few of them here. 
+"" My sister and I used to sing in choirs together constantly. 
+Now she's an airman in the air force constantly traveling. 
+It's so wonderful to sing together again! "" I love the idea that she's singing with her sister. 
+"" Aside from the beautiful music, it's great just to know I'm part of a worldwide community of people I never met before, but who are connected anyway. "" And my personal favorite, "" When I told my husband that I was going to be a part of this, he told me that I did not have the voice for it. "" Yeah, I'm sure a lot of you have heard that too. 
+Me too. 
+"" It hurt so much, and I shed some tears, but something inside of me wanted to do this despite his words. 
+It is a dream come true to be part of this choir, as I've never been part of one. 
+When I placed a marker on the Google Earth Map, I had to go with the nearest city, which is about 400 miles away from where I live. 
+As I am in the Great Alaskan Bush, satellite is my connection to the world. "" So two things struck me deeply about this. 
+The first is that human beings will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other. 
+It doesn't matter the technology. 
+And the second is that people seem to be experiencing an actual connection. 
+It wasn't a virtual choir. 
+There are people now online that are friends; they've never met. 
+But, I know myself too, I feel this virtual esprit de corps, if you will, with all of them. 
+I feel a closeness to this choir — almost like a family. 
+What I'd like to close with then today is the first look at "" Sleep "" by Virtual Choir 2.0. 
+This will be a premiere today. 
+We're not finished with the video yet. 
+You can imagine, with 2,000 synchronized YouTube videos, the render time is just atrocious. 
+But we do have the first three minutes. 
+And it's a tremendous honor for me to be able to show it to you here first. 
+You're the very first people to see this. 
+This is "" Sleep, "" the Virtual Choir. 
+(Video) Virtual Choir: ♫ The evening hangs ♫ ♫ beneath the moon ♫ ♫ A silver thread on darkened dune ♫ ♫ With closing eyes and resting head ♫ ♫ I know that sleep is coming soon ♫ ♫ Upon my pillow, ♫ ♫ safe in bed, ♫ ♫ a thousand pictures fill my head ♫ ♫ I cannot sleep ♫ ♫ my mind's aflight ♫ ♫ and yet my limbs seem made of lead ♫ ♫ If there are noises in the night ♫ Eric Whitacre: Thank you very, very much. Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I'm Rich Baraniuk and what I'd like to talk a little bit about today are some ideas that I think have just tremendous resonance with all the things that have been talked about the last two days. 
+And this is even more true if you happen to speak a language other than one of the world's major languages, and especially English. 
+If people like Kitty Jones, a shut-out — a private music teacher and mom from Champagne, Illinois, who wanted to share her fantastic music content with the world, on how to teach kids how to play music — Her material is now used over 600,000 times per month. 
+And to them, this idea of being able to remix and customize to the local context is extraordinarily important, because just providing free content to people has actually been likened by people in the developing world to a kind of cultural imperialism — that if you don't empower people with the ability to re-contextualize the material, translate it into their own language and take ownership of it, it's not good. 
+In particular, a bunch of the projects that are funded by Hewlett Foundation, who have taken a real leadership role in this area of open content. 
+And what you can really think of XML in this case is it's the packaging that we're putting around these pages. 
+And people who are teachers out here — whoever taught, you know this — it's the interconnections between ideas that teaching is really all about. 
+So, what we have to do is get it right from the very beginning. 
+So, we've built this idea of a commons. 
+So this is a little bit of a problem. 
+You come to TED. Why do you come to TED? 
+Connexions and open content is all about sharing knowledge. 
+All of you here are tremendously imbued with tremendous amounts of knowledge, and what I'd like to do is invite each and every one of you to contribute to this project and other projects of its type, because I think together we can truly change the landscape of education and educational publishing. 
+
+I'm McKenna Pope. I'm 14 years old, and when I was 13, I convinced one of the largest toy companies, toymakers, in the world, Hasbro, to change the way that they marketed one of their most best-selling products. 
+So allow me to tell you about it. 
+When this whole shebang happened, he was four. 
+He loved to cook. 
+He was always getting ingredients out of the fridge and mixing them into these, needless to say, uneatable concoctions, or making invisible macaroni and cheese. 
+And so what better gift for a kid who wanted to be a chef than an Easy-Bake Oven. Right? 
+I mean, we all had those when we were little. 
+And he wanted one so badly. 
+But then he started to realize something. 
+In the commercials, and on the boxes for the Easy-Bake Ovens, Hasbro marketed them specifically to girls. 
+And the way that they did this was they would only feature girls on the boxes or in the commercials, and there would be flowery prints all over the ovens and it would be in bright pink and purple, very gender-specific colors to females, right? 
+So it kind of was sending a message that only girls are supposed to cook; boys aren't. 
+And this discouraged my brother a lot. 
+He thought that he wasn't supposed to want to be a chef, because that was something that girls did. 
+Girls cooked; boys didn't, or so was the message that Hasbro was sending. 
+And this got me thinking, God, I wish there was a way that I could change this, that could I have my voice heard by Hasbro so I could ask them and tell them what they were doing wrong and ask them to change it. 
+And that got me thinking about a website that I had learned about a few months prior called Change.org. 
+Change.org is an online petition-sharing platform where you can create a petition and share it across all of these social media networks, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever you can think of. 
+And so I created a petition along with the YouTube video that I added to the petition basically asking Hasbro to change the way that they marketed it, in featuring boys in the commercials, on the boxes, and most of all creating them in less gender-specific colors. 
+So this petition started to take off — humongously fast, you have no idea. 
+I was getting interviewed by all these national news outlets and press outlets, and it was amazing. 
+In three weeks, maybe three and a half, I had 46,000 signatures on this petition. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+So, needless to say, it was crazy. 
+Eventually, Hasbro themselves invited me to their headquarters so they could go and unveil their new Easy-Bake Oven product to me in black, silver and blue. 
+It was literally one of the best moments of my life. 
+It was like "" Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. "" That thing was amazing. 
+What I didn't realize at the time, however, was that I had become an activist, I could change something, that even as a kid, or maybe even especially as a kid, my voice mattered, and your voice matters too. 
+I want to let you know it's not going to be easy, and it wasn't easy for me, because I faced a lot of obstacles. 
+People online, and sometimes even in real life, were disrespectful to me and my family, and talked about how the whole thing was a waste of time, and it really discouraged me. 
+And actually, I have some examples, because what's better revenge than displaying their idiocy? 
+So, let's see. 
+From user name Liquidsore29 — interesting user names we have here — "Disgusting liberal moms making their sons gay." 
+Liquidsore29, really? Really? Okay. 
+How about from Whiteboy77AGS: "People always need something to (female dog) about." 
+From Jeffrey Gutierrez: "OMG, shut up. You just want money and attention." 
+So it was comments like these that really discouraged me from wanting to make change in the future because I thought, people don't care, people think it's a waste of time, and people are going to be disrespectful to me and my family. 
+It hurt me, and it made me think, what's the point of making change in the future? 
+But then I started to realize something. 
+Haters gonna hate. 
+Come on, say it with me. One, two, three: Haters gonna hate. 
+So let your haters hate, you know what, and make your change, because I know you can. 
+I look out into this crowd, and I see 400 people who came out because they wanted to know how they could make a change, and I know that you can, and all of you watching at home can too because you have so much that you can do and that you believe in, and you can trade it across all these social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through YouTube, through Reddit, through Tumblr, through whatever else you can think of. 
+And you can make that change. 
+You can take what you believe in and turn it into a cause and change it. 
+And that spark that you've been hearing about all day today, you can use that spark that you have within you and turn it into a fire. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I study ants in the desert, in the tropical forest and in my kitchen, and in the hills around Silicon Valley where I live. 
+I've recently realized that ants are using interactions differently in different environments, and that got me thinking that we could learn from this about other systems, like brains and data networks that we engineer, and even cancer. 
+So what all these systems have in common is that there's no central control. 
+An ant colony consists of sterile female workers — those are the ants you see walking around — and then one or more reproductive females who just lay the eggs. 
+They don't give any instructions. 
+Even though they're called queens, they don't tell anybody what to do. 
+So in an ant colony, there's no one in charge, and all systems like this without central control are regulated using very simple interactions. 
+Ants interact using smell. 
+They smell with their antennae, and they interact with their antennae, so when one ant touches another with its antennae, it can tell, for example, if the other ant is a nestmate and what task that other ant has been doing. 
+So here you see a lot of ants moving around and interacting in a lab arena that's connected by tubes to two other arenas. 
+So when one ant meets another, it doesn't matter which ant it meets, and they're actually not transmitting any kind of complicated signal or message. 
+All that matters to the ant is the rate at which it meets other ants. 
+And all of these interactions, taken together, produce a network. 
+So this is the network of the ants that you just saw moving around in the arena, and it's this constantly shifting network that produces the behavior of the colony, like whether all the ants are hiding inside the nest, or how many are going out to forage. 
+A brain actually works in the same way, but what's great about ants is that you can see the whole network as it happens. 
+There are more than 12,000 species of ants, in every conceivable environment, and they're using interactions differently to meet different environmental challenges. 
+So one important environmental challenge that every system has to deal with is operating costs, just what it takes to run the system. 
+And another environmental challenge is resources, finding them and collecting them. 
+In the desert, operating costs are high because water is scarce, and the seed-eating ants that I study in the desert have to spend water to get water. 
+So an ant outside foraging, searching for seeds in the hot sun, just loses water into the air. 
+But the colony gets its water by metabolizing the fats out of the seeds that they eat. 
+So in this environment, interactions are used to activate foraging. 
+An outgoing forager doesn't go out unless it gets enough interactions with returning foragers, and what you see are the returning foragers going into the tunnel, into the nest, and meeting outgoing foragers on their way out. 
+This makes sense for the ant colony, because the more food there is out there, the more quickly the foragers find it, the faster they come back, and the more foragers they send out. 
+The system works to stay stopped, unless something positive happens. 
+So interactions function to activate foragers. 
+And we've been studying the evolution of this system. 
+It turns out that colonies are different. 
+On dry days, some colonies forage less, so colonies are different in how they manage this trade-off between spending water to search for seeds and getting water back in the form of seeds. 
+And we're trying to understand why some colonies forage less than others by thinking about ants as neurons, using models from neuroscience. 
+So just as a neuron adds up its stimulation from other neurons to decide whether to fire, an ant adds up its stimulation from other ants to decide whether to forage. 
+And what we're looking for is whether there might be small differences among colonies in how many interactions each ant needs before it's willing to go out and forage, because a colony like that would forage less. 
+And this raises an analogous question about brains. 
+We talk about the brain, but of course every brain is slightly different, and maybe there are some individuals or some conditions in which the electrical properties of neurons are such that they require more stimulus to fire, and that would lead to differences in brain function. 
+So in order to ask evolutionary questions, we need to know about reproductive success. 
+This is a map of the study site where I have been tracking this population of harvester ant colonies for 28 years, which is about as long as a colony lives. 
+Each symbol is a colony, and the size of the symbol is how many offspring it had, because we were able to use genetic variation to match up parent and offspring colonies, that is, to figure out which colonies were founded by a daughter queen produced by which parent colony. 
+And this was amazing for me, after all these years, to find out, for example, that colony 154, whom I've known well for many years, is a great-grandmother. 
+Here's her daughter colony, here's her granddaughter colony, and these are her great-granddaughter colonies. 
+And by doing this, I was able to learn that offspring colonies resemble parent colonies in their decisions about which days are so hot that they don't forage, and the offspring of parent colonies live so far from each other that the ants never meet, so the ants of the offspring colony can't be learning this from the parent colony. 
+And so our next step is to look for the genetic variation underlying this resemblance. 
+Over the time of the study, and especially in the past 10 years, there's been a very severe and deepening drought in the Southwestern U.S., and it turns out that the colonies that conserve water, that stay in when it's really hot outside, and thus sacrifice getting as much food as possible, are the ones more likely to have offspring colonies. 
+So all this time, I thought that colony 154 was a loser, because on really dry days, there'd be just this trickle of foraging, while the other colonies were out foraging, getting lots of food, but in fact, colony 154 is a huge success. 
+She's a matriarch. 
+She's one of the rare great-grandmothers on the site. 
+To my knowledge, this is the first time that we've been able to track the ongoing evolution of collective behavior in a natural population of animals and find out what's actually working best. 
+Now, the Internet uses an algorithm to regulate the flow of data that's very similar to the one that the harvester ants are using to regulate the flow of foragers. 
+And guess what we call this analogy? 
+The anternet is coming. 
+(Applause) So data doesn't leave the source computer unless it gets a signal that there's enough bandwidth for it to travel on. 
+In the early days of the Internet, when operating costs were really high and it was really important not to lose any data, then the system was set up for interactions to activate the flow of data. 
+It's interesting that the ants are using an algorithm that's so similar to the one that we recently invented, but this is only one of a handful of ant algorithms that we know about, and ants have had 130 million years to evolve a lot of good ones, and I think it's very likely that some of the other 12,000 species are going to have interesting algorithms for data networks that we haven't even thought of yet. 
+So what happens when operating costs are low? 
+Operating costs are low in the tropics, because it's very humid, and it's easy for the ants to be outside walking around. 
+But the ants are so abundant and diverse in the tropics that there's a lot of competition. 
+Whatever resource one species is using, another species is likely to be using that at the same time. 
+So in this environment, interactions are used in the opposite way. 
+The system keeps going unless something negative happens, and one species that I study makes circuits in the trees of foraging ants going from the nest to a food source and back, just round and round, unless something negative happens, like an interaction with ants of another species. 
+So here's an example of ant security. 
+In the middle, there's an ant plugging the nest entrance with its head in response to interactions with another species. 
+Those are the little ones running around with their abdomens up in the air. 
+But as soon as the threat is passed, the entrance is open again, and maybe there are situations in computer security where operating costs are low enough that we could just block access temporarily in response to an immediate threat, and then open it again, instead of trying to build a permanent firewall or fortress. 
+So another environmental challenge that all systems have to deal with is resources, finding and collecting them. 
+And to do this, ants solve the problem of collective search, and this is a problem that's of great interest right now in robotics, because we've understood that, rather than sending a single, sophisticated, expensive robot out to explore another planet or to search a burning building, that instead, it may be more effective to get a group of cheaper robots exchanging only minimal information, and that's the way that ants do it. 
+So the invasive Argentine ant makes expandable search networks. 
+They're good at dealing with the main problem of collective search, which is the trade-off between searching very thoroughly and covering a lot of ground. 
+And what they do is, when there are many ants in a small space, then each one can search very thoroughly because there will be another ant nearby searching over there, but when there are a few ants in a large space, then they need to stretch out their paths to cover more ground. 
+Different ant species must use different algorithms, because they've evolved to deal with different resources, and it could be really useful to know about this, and so we recently asked ants to solve the collective search problem in the extreme environment of microgravity in the International Space Station. 
+When I first saw this picture, I thought, Oh no, they've mounted the habitat vertically, but then I realized that, of course, it doesn't matter. 
+So the idea here is that the ants are working so hard to hang on to the wall or the floor or whatever you call it that they're less likely to interact, and so the relationship between how crowded they are and how often they meet would be messed up. 
+We're still analyzing the data. 
+I don't have the results yet. 
+But it would be interesting to know how other species solve this problem in different environments on Earth, and so we're setting up a program to encourage kids around the world to try this experiment with different species. 
+It can be done with cheap materials. 
+And that way, we could make a global map of ant collective search algorithms. 
+And I think it's pretty likely that the invasive species, the ones that come into our buildings, are going to be really good at this, because they're in your kitchen because they're really good at finding food and water. 
+So the most familiar resource for ants is a picnic, and this is a clustered resource. 
+When there's one piece of fruit, there's likely to be another piece of fruit nearby, and the ants that specialize on clustered resources use interactions for recruitment. 
+So when one ant meets another, or when it meets a chemical deposited on the ground by another, then it changes direction to follow in the direction of the interaction, and that's how you get the trail of ants sharing your picnic. 
+Now this is a place where I think we might be able to learn something from ants about cancer. 
+I mean, first, it's obvious that we could do a lot to prevent cancer by not allowing people to spread around or sell the toxins that promote the evolution of cancer in our bodies, but I don't think the ants can help us much with this because ants never poison their own colonies. 
+But we might be able to learn something from ants about treating cancer. 
+Each one originates in a particular part of the body, and then some kinds of cancer will spread or metastasize to particular other tissues where they must be getting resources that they need. 
+So if you think from the perspective of early metastatic cancer cells as they're out searching around for the resources that they need, if those resources are clustered, they're likely to use interactions for recruitment, and if we can figure out how cancer cells are recruiting, then maybe we could set traps to catch them before they become established. 
+So ants are using interactions in different ways in a huge variety of environments, and we could learn from this about other systems that operate without central control. 
+Using only simple interactions, ant colonies have been performing amazing feats for more than 130 million years. 
+We have a lot to learn from them. 
+Thank you. 
+
+It is a thrill to be here at a conference that's devoted to "" Inspired by Nature "" — you can imagine. 
+And I'm also thrilled to be in the foreplay section. 
+Did you notice this section is foreplay? 
+Because I get to talk about one of my favorite critters, which is the Western Grebe. You haven't lived until you've seen these guys do their courtship dance. 
+I was on Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park, which is a long, skinny lake with sort of mountains upside down in it, and my partner and I have a rowing shell. 
+And so we were rowing, and one of these Western Grebes came along. 
+And what they do for their courtship dance is, they go together, the two of them, the two mates, and they begin to run underwater. 
+They paddle faster, and faster, and faster, until they're going so fast that they literally lift up out of the water, and they're standing upright, sort of paddling the top of the water. 
+And one of these Grebes came along while we were rowing. 
+And so we're in a skull, and we're moving really, really quickly. 
+And this Grebe, I think, sort of, mistaked us for a prospect, and started to run along the water next to us, in a courtship dance — for miles. 
+It would stop, and then start, and then stop, and then start. 
+Now that is foreplay. 
+(Laughter) I came this close to changing species at that moment. 
+Obviously, life can teach us something in the entertainment section. Life has a lot to teach us. 
+But what I'd like to talk about today is what life might teach us in technology and in design. 
+What's happened since the book came out — the book was mainly about research in biomimicry — and what's happened since then is architects, designers, engineers — people who make our world — have started to call and say, we want a biologist to sit at the design table to help us, in real time, become inspired. 
+Or — and this is the fun part for me — we want you to take us out into the natural world. We'll come with a design challenge and we find the champion adapters in the natural world, who might inspire us. 
+So this is a picture from a Galapagos trip that we took with some wastewater treatment engineers; they purify wastewater. 
+And some of them were very resistant, actually, to being there. 
+What they said to us at first was, you know, we already do biomimicry. 
+We use bacteria to clean our water. And we said, well, that's not exactly being inspired by nature. 
+That's bioprocessing, you know; that's bio-assisted technology: using an organism to do your wastewater treatment is an old, old technology called "" domestication. "" This is learning something, learning an idea, from an organism and then applying it. 
+And so they still weren't getting it. 
+So we went for a walk on the beach and I said, well, give me one of your big problems. Give me a design challenge, sustainability speed bump, that's keeping you from being sustainable. 
+And they said scaling, which is the build-up of minerals inside of pipes. 
+And they said, you know what happens is, mineral — just like at your house — mineral builds up. 
+And then the aperture closes, and we have to flush the pipes with toxins, or we have to dig them up. 
+So if we had some way to stop this scaling — and so I picked up some shells on the beach. And I asked them, what is scaling? What's inside your pipes? 
+And they said, calcium carbonate. 
+And I said, that's what this is; this is calcium carbonate. 
+And they didn't know that. 
+They didn't know that what a seashell is, it's templated by proteins, and then ions from the seawater crystallize in place to create a shell. 
+So the same sort of a process, without the proteins, is happening on the inside of their pipes. They didn't know. 
+This is not for lack of information; it's a lack of integration. 
+You know, it's a silo, people in silos. They didn't know that the same thing was happening. So one of them thought about it and said, OK, well, if this is just crystallization that happens automatically out of seawater — self-assembly — then why aren't shells infinite in size? What stops the scaling? 
+Why don't they just keep on going? 
+And I said, well, in the same way that they exude a protein and it starts the crystallization — and then they all sort of leaned in — they let go of a protein that stops the crystallization. 
+It literally adheres to the growing face of the crystal. 
+And, in fact, there is a product called TPA that's mimicked that protein — that stop-protein — and it's an environmentally friendly way to stop scaling in pipes. 
+That changed everything. From then on, you could not get these engineers back in the boat. 
+The first day they would take a hike, and it was, click, click, click, click. Five minutes later they were back in the boat. 
+We're done. You know, I've seen that island. 
+After this, they were crawling all over. They would snorkel for as long as we would let them snorkel. 
+What had happened was that they realized that there were organisms out there that had already solved the problems that they had spent their careers trying to solve. 
+Learning about the natural world is one thing; learning from the natural world — that's the switch. 
+That's the profound switch. 
+What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 
+3.8 billion years of field-testing. 
+10 to 30 — Craig Venter will probably tell you; I think there's a lot more than 30 million — well-adapted solutions. 
+The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. 
+And the context is the Earth — the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. 
+So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. 
+It's not slavishly mimicking — although Al is trying to get the hairdo going — it's not a slavish mimicry; it's taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it. 
+Now, in a group with so many IT people, I do have to mention what I'm not going to talk about, and that is that your field is one that has learned an enormous amount from living things, on the software side. So there's computers that protect themselves, like an immune system, and we're learning from gene regulation and biological development. And we're learning from neural nets, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing. 
+That's on the software side. But what's interesting to me is that we haven't looked at this, as much. I mean, these machines are really not very high tech in my estimation in the sense that there's dozens and dozens of carcinogens in the water in Silicon Valley. 
+So the hardware is not at all up to snuff in terms of what life would call a success. 
+So what can we learn about making — not just computers, but everything? 
+The plane you came in, cars, the seats that you're sitting on. 
+How do we redesign the world that we make, the human-made world? 
+More importantly, what should we ask in the next 10 years? 
+And there's a lot of cool technologies out there that life has. 
+What's the syllabus? 
+Three questions, for me, are key. 
+How does life make things? 
+This is the opposite; this is how we make things. 
+It's called heat, beat and treat — that's what material scientists call it. 
+And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product. You heat it up; you beat it with high pressures; you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat. 
+Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? 
+How does life make the most of things? 
+That's a geranium pollen. 
+And its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily. Look at that shape. 
+Life adds information to matter. 
+In other words: structure. 
+It gives it information. By adding information to matter, it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. 
+And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? 
+Because life doesn't really deal in things; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems. 
+Really quick syllabus. 
+As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. 
+And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. 
+The two groups are not talking to each other. 
+At all. 
+What in the world of biology might be helpful at this juncture, to get us through this sort of evolutionary knothole that we're in? 
+I'm going to try to go through 12, really quickly. 
+One that's exciting to me is self-assembly. 
+Now, you've heard about this in terms of nanotechnology. 
+Back to that shell: the shell is a self-assembling material. 
+On the lower left there is a picture of mother of pearl forming out of seawater. It's a layered structure that's mineral and then polymer, and it makes it very, very tough. 
+It's twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics. 
+But what's really interesting: unlike our ceramics that are in kilns, it happens in seawater. It happens near, in and near, the organism's body. 
+This is Sandia National Labs. 
+A guy named Jeff Brinker has found a way to have a self-assembling coding process. 
+Imagine being able to make ceramics at room temperature by simply dipping something into a liquid, lifting it out of the liquid, and having evaporation force the molecules in the liquid together, so that they jigsaw together in the same way as this crystallization works. 
+Imagine making all of our hard materials that way. 
+Imagine spraying the precursors to a PV cell, to a solar cell, onto a roof, and having it self-assemble into a layered structure that harvests light. 
+Here's an interesting one for the IT world: bio-silicon. This is a diatom, which is made of silicates. 
+And so silicon, which we make right now — it's part of our carcinogenic problem in the manufacture of our chips — this is a bio-mineralization process that's now being mimicked. 
+This is at UC Santa Barbara. Look at these diatoms. 
+This is from Ernst Haeckel's work. 
+Imagine being able to — and, again, it's a templated process, and it solidifies out of a liquid process — imagine being able to have that sort of structure coming out at room temperature. 
+Imagine being able to make perfect lenses. 
+On the left, this is a brittle star; it's covered with lenses that the people at Lucent Technologies have found have no distortion whatsoever. 
+It's one of the most distortion-free lenses we know of. 
+And there's many of them, all over its entire body. 
+What's interesting, again, is that it self-assembles. 
+A woman named Joanna Aizenberg, at Lucent, is now learning to do this in a low-temperature process to create these sort of lenses. She's also looking at fiber optics. 
+That's a sea sponge that has a fiber optic. 
+Down at the very base of it, there's fiber optics that work better than ours, actually, to move light, but you can tie them in a knot; they're incredibly flexible. 
+Here's another big idea: CO2 as a feedstock. 
+A guy named Geoff Coates, at Cornell, said to himself, you know, plants do not see CO2 as the biggest poison of our time. 
+We see it that way. Plants are busy making long chains of starches and glucose, right, out of CO2. He's found a way — he's found a catalyst — and he's found a way to take CO2 and make it into polycarbonates. Biodegradable plastics out of CO2 — how plant-like. 
+Solar transformations: the most exciting one. 
+There are people who are mimicking the energy-harvesting device inside of purple bacterium, the people at ASU. Even more interesting, lately, in the last couple of weeks, people have seen that there's an enzyme called hydrogenase that's able to evolve hydrogen from proton and electrons, and is able to take hydrogen up — basically what's happening in a fuel cell, in the anode of a fuel cell and in a reversible fuel cell. 
+In our fuel cells, we do it with platinum; life does it with a very, very common iron. 
+And a team has now just been able to mimic that hydrogen-juggling hydrogenase. 
+That's very exciting for fuel cells — to be able to do that without platinum. 
+Power of shape: here's a whale. We've seen that the fins of this whale have tubercles on them. And those little bumps actually increase efficiency in, for instance, the edge of an airplane — increase efficiency by about 32 percent. 
+Which is an amazing fossil fuel savings, if we were to just put that on the edge of a wing. 
+Color without pigments: this peacock is creating color with shape. 
+Light comes through, it bounces back off the layers; it's called thin-film interference. Imagine being able to self-assemble products with the last few layers playing with light to create color. 
+Imagine being able to create a shape on the outside of a surface, so that it's self-cleaning with just water. That's what a leaf does. 
+See that up-close picture? 
+That's a ball of water, and those are dirt particles. 
+And that's an up-close picture of a lotus leaf. 
+There's a company making a product called Lotusan, which mimics — when the building facade paint dries, it mimics the bumps in a self-cleaning leaf, and rainwater cleans the building. 
+Water is going to be our big, grand challenge: quenching thirst. 
+Here are two organisms that pull water. 
+The one on the left is the Namibian beetle pulling water out of fog. 
+The one on the right is a pill bug — pulls water out of air, does not drink fresh water. 
+Pulling water out of Monterey fog and out of the sweaty air in Atlanta, before it gets into a building, are key technologies. 
+Separation technologies are going to be extremely important. 
+What if we were to say, no more hard rock mining? 
+What if we were to separate out metals from waste streams, small amounts of metals in water? That's what microbes do; they chelate metals out of water. 
+There's a company here in San Francisco called MR3 that is embedding mimics of the microbes' molecules on filters to mine waste streams. 
+Green chemistry is chemistry in water. 
+We do chemistry in organic solvents. 
+This is a picture of the spinnerets coming out of a spider and the silk being formed from a spider. Isn't that beautiful? 
+Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. 
+It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. 
+And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. 
+To figure out the elegant recipes that would take the small subset of the periodic table, and create miracle materials like that cell, is the task of green chemistry. 
+Timed degradation: packaging that is good until you don't want it to be good anymore, and dissolves on cue. 
+That's a mussel you can find in the waters out here, and the threads holding it to a rock are timed; at exactly two years, they begin to dissolve. 
+Healing: this is a good one. 
+That little guy over there is a tardigrade. 
+There is a problem with vaccines around the world not getting to patients. And the reason is that the refrigeration somehow gets broken; what's called the "" cold chain "" gets broken. 
+A guy named Bruce Rosner looked at the tardigrade — which dries out completely, and yet stays alive for months and months and months, and is able to regenerate itself. 
+And he found a way to dry out vaccines — encase them in the same sort of sugar capsules as the tardigrade has within its cells — meaning that vaccines no longer need to be refrigerated. 
+They can be put in a glove compartment, OK. 
+Learning from organisms. This is a session about water — learning about organisms that can do without water, in order to create a vaccine that lasts and lasts and lasts without refrigeration. 
+I'm not going to get to 12. 
+But what I am going to do is tell you that the most important thing, besides all of these adaptations, is the fact that these organisms have figured out a way to do the amazing things they do while taking care of the place that's going to take care of their offspring. 
+When they're involved in foreplay, they're thinking about something very, very important — and that's having their genetic material remain, 10,000 generations from now. 
+And that means finding a way to do what they do without destroying the place that'll take care of their offspring. 
+That's the biggest design challenge. 
+Luckily, there are millions and millions of geniuses willing to gift us with their best ideas. 
+Good luck having a conversation with them. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Talk about foreplay, I — we need to get to 12, but really quickly. 
+Janine Benyus: Oh really? 
+CA: Yeah. Just like, you know, like the 10-second version of 10, 11 and 12. Because we just — your slides are so gorgeous, and the ideas are so big, I can't stand to let you go down without seeing 10, 11 and 12. 
+JB: OK, put this — OK, I'll just hold this thing. OK, great. 
+OK, so that's the healing one. 
+Sensing and responding: feedback is a huge thing. 
+This is a locust. There can be 80 million of them in a square kilometer, and yet they don't collide with one another. 
+And yet we have 3.6 million car collisions a year. 
+(Laughter) Right. There's a person at Newcastle who has figured out that it's a very large neuron. 
+And she's actually figuring out how to make a collision-avoidance circuitry based on this very large neuron in the locust. 
+This is a huge and important one, number 11. 
+And that's the growing fertility. 
+That means, you know, net fertility farming. 
+We should be growing fertility. And, oh yes — we get food, too. 
+Because we have to grow the capacity of this planet to create more and more opportunities for life. 
+And really, that's what other organisms do as well. 
+In ensemble, that's what whole ecosystems do: they create more and more opportunities for life. 
+Our farming has done the opposite. 
+So, farming based on how a prairie builds soil, ranching based on how a native ungulate herd actually increases the health of the range, even wastewater treatment based on how a marsh not only cleans the water, but creates incredibly sparkling productivity. 
+This is the simple design brief. I mean, it looks simple because the system, over 3.8 billion years, has worked this out. 
+That is, those organisms that have not been able to figure out how to enhance or sweeten their places, are not around to tell us about it. 
+That's the twelfth one. 
+Life — and this is the secret trick; this is the magic trick — life creates conditions conducive to life. 
+It builds soil; it cleans air; it cleans water; it mixes the cocktail of gases that you and I need to live. 
+And it does that in the middle of having great foreplay and meeting their needs. So it's not mutually exclusive. 
+We have to find a way to meet our needs, while making of this place an Eden. 
+CA: Janine, thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. 
+That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water. 
+When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel. 
+Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. 
+Instead, it looks like this. 
+If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. 
+Not missiles, but microbes. 
+Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. 
+But we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. 
+We're not ready for the next epidemic. 
+Let's look at Ebola. 
+I'm sure all of you read about it in the newspaper, lots of tough challenges. 
+I followed it carefully through the case analysis tools we use to track polio eradication. 
+And as you look at what went on, the problem wasn't that there was a system that didn't work well enough, the problem was that we didn't have a system at all. 
+In fact, there's some pretty obvious key missing pieces. 
+We didn't have a group of epidemiologists ready to go, who would have gone, seen what the disease was, seen how far it had spread. 
+The case reports came in on paper. 
+We didn't have a medical team ready to go. 
+But even so, we were far slower than we should have been getting the thousands of workers into these countries. 
+And a large epidemic would require us to have hundreds of thousands of workers. 
+There was no one there to look at treatment approaches. 
+As an example, we could have taken the blood of survivors, processed it, and put that plasma back in people to protect them. 
+But that was never tried. 
+So there was a lot that was missing. 
+And these things are really a global failure. 
+The WHO is funded to monitor epidemics, but not to do these things I talked about. 
+There's a group of handsome epidemiologists ready to go, they move in, they save the day, but that's just pure Hollywood. 
+The failure to prepare could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically more devastating than Ebola Let's look at the progression of Ebola over this year. 
+About 10,000 people died, and nearly all were in the three West African countries. 
+They found the people and they prevented more infections. 
+Ebola does not spread through the air. 
+And by the time you're contagious, most people are so sick that they're bedridden. 
+Third, it didn't get into many urban areas. 
+And that was just luck. 
+If it had gotten into a lot more urban areas, the case numbers would have been much larger. 
+So next time, we might not be so lucky. 
+You can have a virus where people feel well enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market. 
+The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic like Ebola, or it could be bioterrorism. 
+So there are things that would literally make things a thousand times worse. 
+In fact, let's look at a model of a virus spread through the air, like the Spanish Flu back in 1918. 
+So here's what would happen: It would spread throughout the world very, very quickly. 
+And you can see over 30 million people died from that epidemic. 
+So this is a serious problem. 
+We should be concerned. 
+But in fact, we can build a really good response system. 
+We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about here. 
+We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they're moving. 
+We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen. 
+So we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system. 
+And we need preparedness. 
+The best lessons, I think, on how to get prepared are again, what we do for war. 
+For soldiers, we have full-time, waiting to go. 
+We have reserves that can scale us up to large numbers. 
+NATO has a mobile unit that can deploy very rapidly. 
+NATO does a lot of war games to check, are people well trained? 
+So they are absolutely ready to go. 
+So those are the kinds of things we need to deal with an epidemic. 
+What are the key pieces? 
+First, we need strong health systems in poor countries. 
+But, also where we'll see the outbreak very early on. 
+We need a medical reserve corps: lots of people who've got the training and background who are ready to go, with the expertise. 
+And then we need to pair those medical people with the military. 
+taking advantage of the military's ability to move fast, do logistics and secure areas. 
+We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are. 
+So far the score is germs: 1, people: 0. 
+Finally, we need lots of advanced R & D in areas of vaccines and diagnostics. 
+There are some big breakthroughs, like the Adeno-associated virus, that could work very, very quickly. 
+Now I don't have an exact budget for what this would cost, but I'm quite sure it's very modest compared to the potential harm. 
+The World Bank estimates that if we have a worldwide flu epidemic, global wealth will go down by over three trillion dollars and we'd have millions and millions of deaths. 
+These investments offer significant benefits beyond just being ready for the epidemic. 
+The primary healthcare, the R & D, those things would reduce global health equity and make the world more just as well as more safe. 
+So I think this should absolutely be a priority. 
+There's no need to panic. 
+We don't have to hoard cans of spaghetti or go down into the basement. 
+In fact, if there's one positive thing that can come out of the Ebola epidemic, it's that it can serve as an early warning, a wake-up call, to get ready. 
+If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What if I could present you a story that you would remember with your entire body and not just with your mind? 
+My whole life as a journalist, I've really been compelled to try to make stories that can make a difference and maybe inspire people to care. 
+I've worked in broadcast. 
+But it really wasn't until I got involved with virtual reality that I started seeing these really intense, authentic reactions from people that really blew my mind. 
+So the deal is that with VR, virtual reality, I can put you on scene in the middle of the story. 
+By putting on these goggles that track wherever you look, you get this whole-body sensation, like you're actually, like, there. 
+So five years ago was about when I really began to push the envelope with using virtual reality and journalism together. 
+And I wanted to do a piece about hunger. 
+Families in America are going hungry, food banks are overwhelmed, and they're often running out of food. 
+Now, I knew I couldn't make people feel hungry, but maybe I could figure out a way to get them to feel something physical. 
+So — again, this is five years ago — so doing journalism and virtual reality together was considered a worse-than-half-baked idea, and I had no funding. 
+Believe me, I had a lot of colleagues laughing at me. 
+And I did, though, have a really great intern, a woman named Michaela Kobsa-Mark. 
+And together we went out to food banks and started recording audio and photographs. 
+Until one day she came back to my office and she was bawling, she was just crying. 
+She had been on scene at a long line, where the woman running the line was feeling extremely overwhelmed, and she was screaming, "" There's too many people! 
+There's too many people! "" And this man with diabetes doesn't get food in time, his blood sugar drops too low, and he collapses into a coma. 
+As soon as I heard that audio, I knew that this would be the kind of evocative piece that could really describe what was going on at food banks. 
+So here's the real line. You can see how long it was, right? 
+And again, as I said, we didn't have very much funding, so I had to reproduce it with virtual humans that were donated, and people begged and borrowed favors to help me create the models and make things as accurate as we could. 
+And then we tried to convey what happened that day with as much as accuracy as is possible. 
+(Video) Voice: There's too many people! There's too many people! 
+Voice: OK, he's having a seizure. 
+Voice: We need an ambulance. 
+Nonny de la Peña: So the man on the right, for him, he's walking around the body. 
+Like, that guy is at his feet. 
+And even though, through his peripheral vision, he can see that he's in this lab space, he should be able to see that he's not actually on the street, but he feels like he's there with those people. 
+So that piece ended up going to Sundance in 2012, a kind of amazing thing, and it was the first virtual reality film ever, basically. 
+I didn't really know how people were going to react and what was going to happen. 
+And we showed up with this duct-taped pair of goggles. 
+(Video) Oh, you're crying. You're crying. Gina, you're crying. 
+So you can hear the surprise in my voice, right? 
+And this kind of reaction ended up being the kind of reaction we saw over and over and over: people down on the ground trying to comfort the seizure victim, trying to whisper something into his ear or in some way help, even though they couldn't. 
+And I had a lot of people come out of that piece saying, "Oh my God, I was so frustrated. I couldn't help the guy," and take that back into their lives. 
+So after this piece was made, the dean of the cinema school at USC, the University of Southern California, brought in the head of the World Economic Forum to try "" Hunger, "" and he took off the goggles, and he commissioned a piece about Syria on the spot. 
+I sent a team to the border of Iraq to record material at refugee camps, basically an area I wouldn't send a team now, as that's where ISIS is really operating. 
+And then we also recreated a street scene in which a young girl is singing and a bomb goes off. 
+Now, when you're in the middle of that scene and you hear those sounds, and you see the injured around you, it's an incredibly scary and real feeling. 
+I've had individuals who have been involved in real bombings tell me that it evokes the same kind of fear. 
+[The civil war in Syria may seem far away] [until you experience it yourself.] (Girl singing) (Explosion) [Project Syria] [A virtual reality experience] NP: We were then invited to take the piece to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 
+And it wasn't advertised. 
+And we were put in this tapestry room. 
+There was no press about it, so anybody who happened to walk into the museum to visit it that day would see us with these crazy lights. 
+You know, maybe they would want to see the old storytelling of the tapestries. 
+They were confronted by our virtual reality cameras. 
+But a lot of people tried it, and over a five-day run we ended up with 54 pages of guest book comments, and we were told by the curators there that they'd never seen such an outpouring. 
+Things like, "" It's so real, "" "" Absolutely believable, "" or, of course, the one that I was excited about, "" A real feeling as if you were in the middle of something that you normally see on the TV news. "" So, it works, right? This stuff works. 
+And it doesn't really matter where you're from or what age you are — it's really evocative. 
+Now, don't get me wrong — I'm not saying that when you're in a piece you forget that you're here. 
+But it turns out we can feel like we're in two places at once. 
+We can have what I call this duality of presence, and I think that's what allows me to tap into these feelings of empathy. 
+Right? 
+So that means, of course, that I have to be very cautious about creating these pieces. 
+I have to really follow best journalistic practices and make sure that these powerful stories are built with integrity. 
+If we don't capture the material ourselves, we have to be extremely exacting about figuring out the provenance and where did this stuff come from and is it authentic? 
+Let me give you an example. 
+With this Trayvon Martin case, this is a guy, a kid, who was 17 years old and he bought soda and a candy at a store, and on his way home he was tracked by a neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman who ended up shooting and killing him. 
+To make that piece, we got the architectural drawings of the entire complex, and we rebuilt the entire scene inside and out, based on those drawings. 
+All of the action is informed by the real 911 recorded calls to the police. 
+And interestingly, we broke some news with this story. 
+The forensic house that did the audio reconstruction, Primeau Productions, they say that they would testify that George Zimmerman, when he got out of the car, he cocked his gun before he went to give chase to Martin. 
+So you can see that the basic tenets of journalism, they don't really change here, right? 
+We're still following the same principles that we would always. 
+What is different is the sense of being on scene, whether you're watching a guy collapse from hunger or feeling like you're in the middle of a bomb scene. 
+And this is kind of what has driven me forward with these pieces, and thinking about how to make them. 
+We're trying to make this, obviously, beyond the headset, more available. 
+We're creating mobile pieces like the Trayvon Martin piece. 
+And these things have had impact. 
+I've had Americans tell me that they've donated, direct deductions from their bank account, money to go to Syrian children refugees. 
+And "" Hunger in LA, "" well, it's helped start a new form of doing journalism that I think is going to join all the other normal platforms in the future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi. I'm going to talk to you today about laughter, and I just want to start by thinking about the first time I can ever remember noticing laughter. 
+This is when I was a little girl. I would've been about six. 
+And I came across my parents doing something unusual, where they were laughing. 
+They were laughing very, very hard. 
+They were lying on the floor laughing. 
+They were screaming with laughter. 
+I did not know what they were laughing at, but I wanted in. 
+I wanted to be part of that, and I kind of sat around at the edge going, "" Hoo hoo! "" (Laughter) Now, incidentally, what they were laughing at was a song which people used to sing, which was based around signs in toilets on trains telling you what you could and could not do in toilets on trains. 
+And the thing you have to remember about the English is, of course, we do have an immensely sophisticated sense of humor. 
+(Laughter) At the time, though, I didn't understand anything of that. 
+I just cared about the laughter, and actually, as a neuroscientist, I've come to care about it again. 
+And it is a really weird thing to do. 
+What I'm going to do now is just play some examples of real human beings laughing, and I want you think about the sound people make and how odd that can be, and in fact how primitive laughter is as a sound. 
+It's much more like an animal call than it is like speech. 
+So here we've got some laughter for you. The first one is pretty joyful. 
+(Audio: Laughing) Now this next guy, I need him to breathe. 
+There's a point in there where I'm just, like, you've got to get some air in there, mate, because he just sounds like he's breathing out. 
+(Audio: Laughing) This hasn't been edited; this is him. 
+(Audio: Laughing) (Laughter) And finally we have — this is a human female laughing. 
+And laughter can take us to some pretty odd places in terms of making noises. 
+(Audio: Laughing) She actually says, "" Oh my God, what is that? "" in French. 
+We're all kind of with her. I have no idea. 
+Now, to understand laughter, you have to look at a part of the body that psychologists and neuroscientists don't normally spend much time looking at, which is the ribcage, and it doesn't seem terribly exciting, but actually you're all using your ribcage all the time. 
+In talking, you use very fine movements of the ribcage to squeeze the air out — and in fact, we're the only animals that can do this. 
+Now, both talking and breathing has a mortal enemy, and that enemy is laughter, because what happens when you laugh is those same muscles start to contract very regularly, and you get this very marked sort of zig-zagging, and that's just squeezing the air out of you. 
+It literally is that basic a way of making a sound. 
+You could be stamping on somebody, it's having the same effect. 
+So it's not at all unusual, for example, to hear people to say humans are the only animals that laugh. 
+It's been well-described and well-observed in primates, but you also see it in rats, and wherever you find it — humans, primates, rats — you find it associated with things like tickling. 
+You find it associated with play, and all mammals play. 
+And wherever you find it, it's associated with interactions. 
+So Robert Provine, who has done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times more likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than if you're on your own, and where you find most laughter is in social interactions like conversation. 
+So if you ask human beings, "" When do you laugh? "" they'll talk about comedy and they'll talk about humor and they'll talk about jokes. 
+If you look at when they laugh, they're laughing with their friends. 
+Now, something I've got very interested in is different kinds of laughter, and we have some neurobiological evidence about how human beings vocalize that suggests there might be two kinds of laughs that we have. 
+So it seems possible that the neurobiology for helpless, involuntary laughter, like my parents lying on the floor screaming about a silly song, might have a different basis to it than some of that more polite social laughter that you encounter, which isn't horrible laughter, but it's behavior somebody is doing as part of their communicative act to you, part of their interaction with you; they are choosing to do this. 
+In our evolution, we have developed two different ways of vocalizing. 
+Involuntary vocalizations are part of an older system than the more voluntary vocalizations like the speech I'm doing now. 
+So I've been looking at this in more detail. 
+To do this, we've had to make recordings of people laughing, and we've had to do whatever it takes to make people laugh, and we got those same people to produce more posed, social laughter. 
+So imagine your friend told a joke, and you're laughing because you like your friend, but not really because the joke's all that. 
+So I'm going to play you a couple of those. 
+(Audio: Laughing) What does that sound like to you? 
+Audience: Posed. Sophie Scott: Posed? Posed. 
+How about this one? 
+(Audio: Laughing) (Laughter) I'm the best. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Not really. 
+No, that was helpless laughter, and in fact, to record that, all they had to do was record me watching one of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to laugh at, and I just started doing this. 
+What you find is that people are good at telling the difference between real and posed laughter. 
+Also, you start to get these sort of contractions and weird whistling sounds, all of which mean that real laughter is extremely easy, or feels extremely easy to spot. 
+In contrast, posed laughter, we might think it sounds a bit fake. 
+So they do seem to be genuinely these two different sorts of things. 
+We put other sounds in there to distract them, and all they're doing is lying listening to sounds. 
+Nonetheless, when you hear real laughter and when you hear posed laughter, the brains are responding completely differently, significantly differently. 
+What you see in the regions in blue, which lies in auditory cortex, are the brain areas that respond more to the real laughs, and what seems to be the case, when you hear somebody laughing involuntarily, you hear sounds you would never hear in any other context. 
+In contrast, when you hear somebody laughing in a posed way, what you see are these regions in pink, which are occupying brain areas associated with mentalizing, thinking about what somebody else is thinking. 
+And here, the younger you are, the more you want to join in when you hear laughter. 
+And what you see is immediately — just run that one through your head briefly, you and your partner — you can imagine everybody gets a bit more stressed as soon as that starts. 
+You can see physically, people become more stressed. 
+What he finds is that the couples who manage that feeling of stress with laughter, positive emotions like laughter, not only immediately become less stressed, they can see them physically feeling better, they're dealing with this unpleasant situation better together, they are also the couples that report high levels of satisfaction in their relationship and they stay together for longer. 
+I think this is probably going to be a characteristic of close emotional relationships such as you might have with friends, which explains my next clip, which is of a YouTube video of some young men in the former East Germany on making a video to promote their heavy metal band, and it's extremely macho, and the mood is very serious, and I want you to notice what happens in terms of laughter when things go wrong and how quickly that happens, and how that changes the mood. 
+He's cold. He's about to get wet. He's got swimming trunks on, got a towel. 
+What might possibly happen? 
+Video starts. 
+Serious mood. 
+And his friends are already laughing. They are already laughing, hard. 
+(Laughter) He's starting to go now. 
+And now they're all off. 
+(Laughter) They're on the floor. (Laughter) 
+(Laughter) (Applause) These events are always difficult, I had a relative who was being a bit difficult, my mum was not in a good place, and I can remember finding myself just before the whole thing started telling this story about something that happened in a 1970s sitcom, and I just thought at the time, I don't know why I'm doing this, and what I realized I was doing was I was coming up with something from somewhere I could use to make her laugh together with me. 
+It was a very basic reaction to find some reason we can do this. 
+We can laugh together. We're going to get through this. 
+
+Do you know how many species of flowering plants there are? 
+There are a quarter of a million — at least those are the ones we know about — a quarter of a million species of flowering plants. 
+And flowers are a real bugger. 
+They're really difficult for plants to produce. 
+They take an enormous amount of energy and a lot of resources. 
+Why would they go to that bother? 
+And the answer of course, like so many things in the world, is sex. 
+I know what's on your mind when you're looking at these pictures. 
+And the reason that sexual reproduction is so important — there are lots of other things that plants can do to reproduce. 
+You can take cuttings; they can sort of have sex with themselves; they can pollinate themselves. 
+But they really need to spread their genes to mix with other genes so that they can adapt to environmental niches. 
+Evolution works that way. 
+Now the way that plants transmit that information is through pollen. 
+Some of you may have seen some of these pictures before. 
+As I say, every home should have a scanning electron microscope to be able to see these. 
+And there is as many different kinds of pollen as there are flowering plants. 
+And that's actually rather useful for forensics and so on. 
+Most pollen that causes hay fever for us is from plants that use the wind to disseminate the pollen, and that's a very inefficient process, which is why it gets up our noses so much. 
+Because you have to chuck out masses and masses of it, hoping that your sex cells, your male sex cells, which are held within the pollen, will somehow reach another flower just by chance. 
+So all the grasses, which means all of the cereal crops, and most of the trees have wind-borne pollen. 
+But most species actually use insects to do their bidding, and that's more intelligent in a way, because the pollen, they don't need so much of it. 
+The insects and other species can take the pollen, transfer it directly to where it's required. 
+So we're aware, obviously, of the relationship between insects and plants. 
+There's a symbiotic relationship there, whether it's flies or birds or bees, they're getting something in return, and that something in return is generally nectar. 
+Sometimes that symbiosis has led to wonderful adaptations — the hummingbird hawk-moth is beautiful in its adaptation. 
+The plant gets something, and the hawk-moth spreads the pollen somewhere else. 
+Plants have evolved to create little landing strips here and there for bees that might have lost their way. 
+There are markings on many plants that look like other insects. 
+These are the anthers of a lily, cleverly done so that when the unsuspecting insect lands on it, the anther flips up and whops it on the back with a great load of pollen that it then goes to another plant with. 
+And there's an orchid that might look to you as if it's got jaws, and in a way, it has; it forces the insect to crawl out, getting covered in pollen that it takes somewhere else. 
+Orchids: there are 20,000, at least, species of orchids — amazingly, amazingly diverse. 
+And they get up to all sorts of tricks. 
+They have to try and attract pollinators to do their bidding. 
+This orchid, known as Darwin's orchid, because it's one that he studied and made a wonderful prediction when he saw it — you can see that there's a very long nectar tube that descends down from the orchid. 
+And basically what the insect has to do — we're in the middle of the flower — it has to stick its little proboscis right into the middle of that and all the way down that nectar tube to get to the nectar. 
+And Darwin said, looking at this flower, "I guess something has coevolved with this." 
+And sure enough, there's the insect. 
+And I mean, normally it kind of rolls it away, but in its erect form, that's what it looks like. 
+Now you can imagine that if nectar is such a valuable thing and expensive for the plant to produce and it attracts lots of pollinators, then, just as in human sex, people might start to deceive. 
+They might say, "" I've got a bit of nectar. Do you want to come and get it? "" Now this is a plant. 
+This is a plant here that insects in South Africa just love, and they've evolved with a long proboscis to get the nectar at the bottom. 
+And this is the mimic. 
+So this is a plant that is mimicking the first plant. 
+And here is the long-probosced fly that has not gotten any nectar from the mimic, because the mimic doesn't give it any nectar. It thought it would get some. 
+So not only has the fly not got the nectar from the mimic plant, it's also — if you look very closely just at the head end, you can see that it's got a bit of pollen that it would be transmitting to another plant, if only some botanist hadn't come along and stuck it to a blue piece of card. 
+(Laughter) Now deceit carries on through the plant kingdom. 
+This flower with its black dots: they might look like black dots to us, but if I tell you, to a male insect of the right species, that looks like two females who are really, really hot to trot. 
+(Laughter) And when the insect gets there and lands on it, dousing itself in pollen, of course, that it's going to take to another plant, if you look at the every-home-should-have-one scanning electron microscope picture, you can see that there are actually some patterning there, which is three-dimensional. 
+So it probably even feels good for the insect, as well as looking good. 
+And these electron microscope pictures — here's one of an orchid mimicking an insect — you can see that different parts of the structure have different colors and different textures to our eye, have very, very different textures to what an insect might perceive. 
+And this one is evolved to mimic a glossy metallic surface you see on some beetles. 
+And under the scanning electron microscope, you can see the surface there — really quite different from the other surfaces we looked at. 
+Sometimes the whole plant mimics an insect, even to us. 
+I mean, I think that looks like some sort of flying animal or beast. 
+It's a wonderful, amazing thing. 
+This one's clever. It's called obsidian. 
+I think of it as insidium sometimes. 
+To the right species of bee, this looks like another very aggressive bee, and it goes and bonks it on the head lots and lots of times to try and drive it away, and, of course, covers itself with pollen. 
+The other thing it does is that this plant mimics another orchid that has a wonderful store of food for insects. 
+And this one doesn't have anything for them. 
+So it's deceiving on two levels — fabulous. 
+(Laughter) Here we see ylang ylang, the component of many perfumes. 
+I actually smelt someone with some on earlier. 
+And the flowers don't really have to be that gaudy. 
+They're sending out a fantastic array of scent to any insect that'll have it. 
+This one doesn't smell so good. 
+This is a flower that really, really smells pretty nasty and is designed, again, evolved, to look like carrion. 
+So flies love this. 
+They fly in and they pollinate. 
+This, which is helicodiceros, is also known as dead horse arum. 
+I don't know what a dead horse actually smells like, but this one probably smells pretty much like it. 
+It's really horrible. 
+And blowflies just can't help themselves. 
+They fly into this thing, and they fly all the way down it. 
+They lay their eggs in it, thinking it's a nice bit of carrion, and not realizing that there's no food for the eggs, that the eggs are going to die, but the plant, meanwhile, has benefited, because the bristles release and the flies disappear to pollinate the next flower — fantastic. 
+Here's arum, arum maculatum, "" lords and ladies, "" or "" cuckoo-pint "" in this country. 
+I photographed this thing last week in Dorset. 
+This thing heats up by about 15 degrees above ambient temperature — amazing. 
+And if you look down into it, there's this sort of dam past the spadix, flies get attracted by the heat — which is boiling off volatile chemicals, little midges — and they get trapped underneath in this container. 
+They drink this fabulous nectar and then they're all a bit sticky. 
+At night they get covered in pollen, which showers down over them, and then the bristles that we saw above, they sort of wilt and allow all these midges out, covered in pollen — fabulous thing. 
+Now if you think that's fabulous, this is one of my great favorites. 
+This is the philodendron selloum. 
+For anyone here from Brazil, you'll know about this plant. 
+This is the most amazing thing. 
+That sort of phallic bit there is about a foot long. 
+And it does something that no other plant that I know of does, and that is that when it flowers — that's the spadix in the middle there — for a period of about two days, it metabolizes in a way which is rather similar to mammals. 
+So instead of having starch, which is the food of plants, it takes something rather similar to brown fat and burns it at such a rate that it's burning fat, metabolizing, about the rate of a small cat. 
+And that's twice the energy output, weight for weight, than a hummingbird — absolutely astonishing. 
+This thing does something else which is unusual. 
+Not only will it raise itself to 115 Fahrenheit, 43 or 44 degrees Centigrade, for two days, but it keeps constant temperature. 
+There's a thermoregulation mechanism in there that keeps constant temperature. 
+"" Now why does it do this, "" I hear you ask. 
+Now wouldn't you know it, there's some beetles that just love to make love at that temperature. 
+And they get inside, and they get it all on. 
+(Laughter) And the plant showers them with pollen, and off they go and pollinate. 
+And what a wonderful thing it is. 
+Now most pollinators that we think about are insects, but actually in the tropics, many birds and butterflies pollinate. 
+And many of the tropical flowers are red, and that's because butterflies and birds see similarly to us, we think, and can see the color red very well. 
+But if you look at the spectrum, birds and us, we see red, green and blue and see that spectrum. 
+Insects see green, blue and ultraviolet, and they see various shades of ultraviolet. 
+So there's something that goes on off the end there. 
+"" And wouldn't it be great if we could somehow see what that is, "" I hear you ask. 
+Well yes we can. 
+So what is an insect seeing? 
+Last week I took these pictures of rock rose, helianthemum, in Dorset. 
+These are little yellow flowers like we all see, little yellow flowers all over the place. 
+And this is what it looks like with visible light. 
+This is what it looks like if you take out the red. 
+Most bees don't perceive red. 
+And then I put some ultraviolet filters on my camera and took a very, very long exposure with the particular frequencies of ultraviolet light and this is what I got. 
+And that's a real fantastic bull's eye. 
+Now we don't know exactly what a bee sees, any more than you know what I'm seeing when I call this red. 
+We can't know what's going on in — let alone an insect's — another human being's mind. 
+But the contrast will look something like that, so standing out a lot from the background. 
+Here's another little flower — different range of ultraviolet frequencies, different filters to match the pollinators. 
+And that's the sort of thing that it would be seeing. 
+Just in case you think that all yellow flowers have this property — no flower was damaged in the process of this shot; it was just attached to the tripod, not killed — then under ultraviolet light, look at that. 
+And that could be the basis of a sunscreen because sunscreens work by absorbing ultraviolet light. 
+So maybe the chemical in that would be useful. 
+Finally, there's one of evening primrose that Bjorn Rorslett from Norway sent me — fantastic hidden pattern. 
+And I love the idea of something hidden. 
+I think there's something poetic here, that these pictures taken with ultraviolet filter, the main use of that filter is for astronomers to take pictures of Venus — actually the clouds of Venus. 
+That's the main use of that filter. 
+Venus, of course, is the god of love and fertility, which is the flower story. 
+And just as flowers spend a lot of effort trying to get pollinators to do their bidding, they've also somehow managed to persuade us to plant great fields full of them and give them to each other at times of birth and death, and particularly at marriage, which, when you think of it, is the moment that encapsulates the transfer of genetic material from one organism to another. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So on my way here, the passenger next to me and I had a very interesting conversation during my flight. 
+He told me, "" It seems like the United States has run out of jobs, because they're just making some up: cat psychologist, dog whisperer, tornado chaser. "" A couple of seconds later, he asked me, "So what do you do?" 
+And I was like, "" Peacebuilder? "" (Laughter) Every day, I work to amplify the voices of women and to highlight their experiences and their participation in peace processes and conflict resolution, and because of my work, I recognize that the only way to ensure the full participation of women globally is by reclaiming religion. 
+Now, this matter is vitally important to me. 
+As a young Muslim woman, I am very proud of my faith. 
+It gives me the strength and conviction to do my work every day. 
+It's the reason I can be here in front of you. 
+But I can't overlook the damage that has been done in the name of religion, not just my own, but all of the world's major faiths. 
+The misrepresentation and misuse and manipulation of religious scripture has influenced our social and cultural norms, our laws, our daily lives, to a point where we sometimes don't recognize it. 
+My parents moved from Libya, North Africa, to Canada in the early 1980s, and I am the middle child of 11 children. 
+Yes, 11. 
+But growing up, I saw my parents, both religiously devout and spiritual people, pray and praise God for their blessings, namely me of course, but among others. (Laughter) They were kind and funny and patient, limitlessly patient, the kind of patience that having 11 kids forces you to have. 
+And they were fair. 
+I was never subjected to religion through a cultural lens. 
+I was treated the same, the same was expected of me. 
+I was never taught that God judged differently based on gender. 
+And my parents' understanding of God as a merciful and beneficial friend and provider shaped the way I looked at the world. 
+Now, of course, my upbringing had additional benefits. 
+Being one of 11 children is Diplomacy 101. (Laughter) To this day, I am asked where I went to school, like, "" Did you go to Kennedy School of Government? "" and I look at them and I'm like, "" No, I went to the Murabit School of International Affairs. "" It's extremely exclusive. You would have to talk to my mom to get in. 
+Lucky for you, she's here. 
+But being one of 11 children and having 10 siblings teaches you a lot about power structures and alliances. 
+It teaches you focus; you have to talk fast or say less, because you will always get cut off. 
+It teaches you the importance of messaging. 
+You have to ask questions in the right way to get the answers you know you want, and you have to say no in the right way to keep the peace. 
+But the most important lesson I learned growing up was the importance of being at the table. 
+When my mom's favorite lamp broke, I had to be there when she was trying to find out how and by who, because I had to defend myself, because if you're not, then the finger is pointed at you, and before you know it, you will be grounded. 
+I am not speaking from experience, of course. 
+When I was 15 in 2005, I completed high school and I moved from Canada — Saskatoon — to Zawiya, my parents' hometown in Libya, a very traditional city. 
+Mind you, I had only ever been to Libya before on vacation, and as a seven-year-old girl, it was magic. 
+It was ice cream and trips to the beach and really excited relatives. 
+Turns out it's not the same as a 15-year-old young lady. 
+I very quickly became introduced to the cultural aspect of religion. 
+The words "" haram "" — meaning religiously prohibited — and "" aib "" — meaning culturally inappropriate — were exchanged carelessly, as if they meant the same thing and had the same consequences. 
+And I found myself in conversation after conversation with classmates and colleagues, professors, friends, even relatives, beginning to question my own role and my own aspirations. 
+And even with the foundation my parents had provided for me, I found myself questioning the role of women in my faith. 
+So at the Murabit School of International Affairs, we go very heavy on the debate, and rule number one is do your research, so that's what I did, and it surprised me how easy it was to find women in my faith who were leaders, who were innovative, who were strong — politically, economically, even militarily. 
+Khadija financed the Islamic movement in its infancy. 
+We wouldn't be here if it weren't for her. 
+So why weren't we learning about her? 
+Why weren't we learning about these women? 
+Why were women being relegated to positions which predated the teachings of our faith? 
+And why, if we are equal in the eyes of God, are we not equal in the eyes of men? 
+To me, it all came back to the lessons I had learned as a child. 
+The decision maker, the person who gets to control the message, is sitting at the table, and unfortunately, in every single world faith, they are not women. 
+Religious institutions are dominated by men and driven by male leadership, and they create policies in their likeness, and until we can change the system entirely, then we can't realistically expect to have full economic and political participation of women. 
+Our foundation is broken. 
+My mom actually says, you can't build a straight house on a crooked foundation. 
+In 2011, the Libyan revolution broke out, and my family was on the front lines. 
+And there's this amazing thing that happens in war, a cultural shift almost, very temporary. 
+It was demanded. 
+We were part of decision making. 
+We were information sharing. We were crucial. 
+And I wanted and needed for that change to be permanent. 
+Turns out, that's not that easy. 
+It only took a few weeks before the women that I had previously worked with were returning back to their previous roles, and most of them were driven by words of encouragement from religious and political leaders, most of whom cited religious scripture as their defense. 
+It's how they gained popular support for their opinions. 
+So initially, I focused on the economic and political empowerment of women. 
+I thought that would lead to cultural and social change. 
+It turns out, it does a little, but not a lot. 
+I decided to use their defense as my offense, and I began to cite and highlight Islamic scripture as well. 
+In 2012 and 2013, my organization led the single largest and most widespread campaign in Libya. 
+We entered homes and schools and universities, even mosques. 
+We spoke to 50,000 people directly, and hundreds of thousands more through billboards and television commercials, radio commercials and posters. 
+And you're probably wondering how a women's rights organization was able to do this in communities which had previously opposed our sheer existence. 
+I used scripture. 
+I used verses from the Quran and sayings of the Prophet, Hadiths, his sayings which are, for example, "The best of you is the best to their family." 
+"Do not let your brother oppress another." 
+For the first time, Friday sermons led by local community imams promoted the rights of women. 
+They discussed taboo issues, like domestic violence. 
+Policies were changed. 
+In certain communities, we actually had to go as far as saying the International Human Rights Declaration, which you opposed because it wasn't written by religious scholars, well, those same principles are in our book. 
+So really, the United Nations just copied us. 
+By changing the message, we were able to provide an alternative narrative which promoted the rights of women in Libya. 
+It's something that has now been replicated internationally, and while I am not saying it's easy — believe me, it's not. 
+Liberals will say you're using religion and call you a bad conservative. 
+I've heard everything from, "" Your parents must be extremely ashamed of you "" — false; they're my biggest fans — to "" You will not make it to your next birthday "" — again wrong, because I did. 
+And I remain a very strong believer that women's rights and religion are not mutually exclusive. 
+But we have to be at the table. 
+We have to stop giving up our position, because by remaining silent, we allow for the continued persecution and abuse of women worldwide. 
+By saying that we're going to fight for women's rights and fight extremism with bombs and warfare, we completely cripple local societies which need to address these issues so that they're sustainable. 
+It is not easy, challenging distorted religious messaging. 
+You will have your fair share of insults and ridicule and threats. 
+But we have to do it. 
+We have no other option than to reclaim the message of human rights, the principles of our faith, not for us, not for the women in your families, not for the women in this room, not even for the women out there, but for societies that would be transformed with the participation of women. 
+And the only way we can do that, our only option, is to be, and remain, at the table. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a creative technologist and the focus of my work is on public installations. 
+One of my driving passions is this idea of exploring nature, and trying to find hidden data within nature. 
+It seems to me that there is this latent potential everywhere, all around us. 
+Everything gives out some kind of data, whether it's sound or smell or vibration. 
+Through my work, I've been trying to find ways to harness and unveil this. 
+And so this basically led me to a subject called cymatics. 
+Now, cymatics is the process of visualizing sound by basically vibrating a medium such as sand or water, as you can see there. 
+So, if we have a quick look at the history of cymatics beginning with the observations of resonance, by Da Vinci, Galileo, the English scientist Robert Hook and then Ernest Chladni. 
+He created an experiment using a metal plate, covering it with sand and then bowing it to create the Chladni patterns that you see here on the right. 
+Moving on from this, the next person to explore this field was a gentleman called Hans Jenny in the 1970s. 
+He actually coined the term cymatics. 
+Then bringing us into the present day is a fellow collaborator of mine and cymatics expert, John Stewart Reed. 
+He's kindly recreated for us the Chladni experiment. 
+What we can see here is the metal sheet, this time connected to a sound driver and being fed by a frequency generator. 
+As the frequencies increase, so do the complexities of the patterns that appear on the plate. 
+As you can see with your own eyes. 
+(Applause) So, what excites me about cymatics? 
+Well, for me cymatics is an almost magical tool. 
+It's like a looking glass into a hidden world. 
+Through the numerous ways that we can apply cymatics, we can actually start to unveil the substance of things not seen. 
+Devices like the cymascope, which you can see here, have been used to scientifically observe cymatic patterns. 
+And the list of scientific applications is growing every day. 
+For example, in oceanography, a lexicon of dolphin language is actually being created by basically visualizing the sonar beams that the dolphins emit. 
+And hopefully in the future we'll be able to gain some deeper understanding of how they communicate. 
+We can also use cymatics for healing and education. 
+This is an installation developed with school children, where their hands are tracked. It allows them to control and position cymatic patterns and the reflections that are caused by them. 
+We can also use cymatics as a beautiful natural art form. 
+This image here is created from a snippet of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony playing through a cymatic device. 
+So it kind of flips things on its head a little bit. 
+This is Pink Floyd's "" Machine "" playing in real time through the cymascope. 
+We can also use cymatics as a looking glass into nature. 
+And we can actually recreate the archetypal forms of nature. 
+So, for example, here on the left we can see a snowflake as it would appear in nature. 
+Then on the right we can see a cymatically created snowflake. 
+And here is a starfish and a cymatic starfish. 
+And there is thousands of these. 
+So what does this all mean? 
+Well, there is still a lot to explore in its early days. And there's not many people working in this field. 
+But consider for a moment that sound does have form. 
+We've seen that it can affect matter and cause form within matter. 
+Then sort of take a leap and think about the universe forming. 
+And think about the immense sound of the universe forming. 
+And if we kind of ponder on that, then perhaps cymatics had an influence on the formation of the universe itself. 
+And here is some eye candy for you, from a range of DIY scientists and artists from all over the globe. 
+Cymatics is accessible to everybody. 
+I want to urge everybody here to apply your passion, your knowledge and your skills to areas like cymatics. 
+I think collectively we can build a global community. 
+We can inspire each other. 
+And we can evolve this exploration of the substance of things not seen. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What I'm going to do is to just give a few notes, and this is from a book I'm preparing called "Letters to a Young Scientist." 
+I'd thought it'd be appropriate to present it, on the basis that I have had extensive experience in teaching, counseling scientists across a broad array of fields. 
+And you might like to hear some of the principles that I've developed in doing that teaching and counseling. 
+So let me begin by urging you, particularly you on the youngsters' side, on this path you've chosen, to go as far as you can. 
+The world needs you, badly. 
+Humanity is now fully into the techno-scientific age. 
+There is going to be no turning back. 
+Although varying among disciplines — say, astrophysics, molecular genetics, the immunology, the microbiology, the public health, to the new area of the human body as a symbiont, to public health, environmental science. 
+Knowledge in medical science and science overall is doubling every 15 to 20 years. 
+Technology is increasing at a comparable rate. 
+Between them, the two already pervade, as most of you here seated realize, every dimension of human life. 
+So swift is the velocity of the techno-scientific revolution, so startling in its countless twists and turns, that no one can predict its outcome even a decade from the present moment. 
+There will come a time, of course, when the exponential growth of discovery and knowledge, which actually began in the 1600s, has to peak and level off, but that's not going to matter to you. 
+The revolution is going to continue for at least several more decades. 
+It'll render the human condition radically different from what it is today. 
+Traditional fields of study are going to continue to grow and in so doing, inevitably they will meet and create new disciplines. 
+In time, all of science will come to be a continuum of description, an explanation of networks, of principles and laws. 
+That's why you need not just be training in one specialty, but also acquire breadth in other fields, related to and even distant from your own initial choice. 
+Keep your eyes lifted and your head turning. 
+The search for knowledge is in our genes. 
+It was put there by our distant ancestors who spread across the world, and it's never going to be quenched. 
+To understand and use it sanely, as a part of the civilization yet to evolve requires a vastly larger population of scientifically trained people like you. 
+In education, medicine, law, diplomacy, government, business and the media that exist today. 
+Our political leaders need at least a modest degree of scientific literacy, which most badly lack today — no applause, please. 
+It will be better for all if they prepare before entering office rather than learning on the job. 
+Therefore you will do well to act on the side, no matter how far into the laboratory you may go, to serve as teachers during the span of your career. 
+I'll now proceed quickly, and before else, to a subject that is both a vital asset and a potential barrier to a scientific career. 
+If you are a bit short in mathematical skills, don't worry. 
+Many of the most successful scientists at work today are mathematically semi-literate. 
+A metaphor will serve here: Where elite mathematicians and statisticians and theorists often serve as architects in the expanding realm of science, the remaining large majority of basic applied scientists, including a large portion of those who could be said to be of the first rank, are the ones who map the terrain, they scout the frontiers, they cut the pathways, they raise the buildings along the way. 
+Some may have considered me foolhardy, but it's been my habit to brush aside the fear of mathematics when talking to candidate scientists. 
+During 41 years of teaching biology at Harvard, I watched sadly as bright students turned away from the possibility of a scientific career or even from taking non-required courses in science because they were afraid of failure. 
+These math-phobes deprive science and medicine of immeasurable amounts of badly needed talent. 
+Here's how to relax your anxieties, if you have them: Understand that mathematics is a language ruled like other verbal languages, or like verbal language generally, by its own grammar and system of logic. 
+Any person with average quantitative intelligence who learns to read and write mathematics at an elementary level will, as in verbal language, have little difficulty picking up most of the fundamentals if they choose to master the mathspeak of most disciplines of science. 
+The longer you wait to become at least semi-literate the harder the language of mathematics will be to master, just as again in any verbal language, but it can be done at any age. 
+I speak as an authority on that subject, because I'm an extreme case. 
+I didn't take algebra until my freshman year at the University of Alabama. 
+They didn't teach it before then. 
+I finally got around to calculus as a 32-year-old tenured professor at Harvard, where I sat uncomfortably in classes with undergraduate students, little more than half my age. 
+A couple of them were students in a course I was giving on evolutionary biology. 
+I swallowed my pride, and I learned calculus. 
+I found out that in science and all its applications, what is crucial is not that technical ability, but it is imagination in all of its applications. 
+The ability to form concepts with images of entities and processes pictured by intuition. 
+I found out that advances in science rarely come upstream from an ability to stand at a blackboard and conjure images from unfolding mathematical propositions and equations. 
+They are instead the products of downstream imagination leading to hard work, during which mathematical reasoning may or may not prove to be relevant. 
+Ideas emerge when a part of the real or imagined world is studied for its own sake. 
+Of foremost importance is a thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known of the relevant entities and processes that might be involved in that domain you propose to enter. 
+When something new is discovered, it's logical then that one of the follow-up steps is to find the mathematical and statistical methods to move its analysis forward. 
+If that step proves too difficult for the person or team that made the discovery, a mathematician can then be added by them as a collaborator. 
+Consider the following principle, which I will modestly call Wilson's Principle Number One: It is far easier for scientists including medical researchers, to require needed collaboration in mathematics and statistics than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations. 
+It is important in choosing the direction to take in science to find the subject at your level of competence that interests you deeply, and focus on that. 
+Keep in mind, then, Wilson's Second Principle: For every scientist, whether researcher, technician, teacher, manager or businessman, working at any level of mathematical competence, there exists a discipline in science or medicine for which that level is enough to achieve excellence. 
+Now I'm going to offer quickly several more principles that will be useful in organizing your education and career, or if you're teaching, how you might enhance your own teaching and counseling of young scientists. 
+In selecting a subject in which to conduct original research, or to develop world-class expertise, take a part of the chosen discipline that is sparsely inhabited. 
+Judge opportunity by how few other students and researchers are on hand. 
+This is not to de-emphasize the essential requirement of broad training, or the value of apprenticing yourself in ongoing research to programs of high quality. 
+It is important also to acquire older mentors within these successful programs, and to make friends and colleagues of your age for mutual support. 
+But through it all, look for a way to break out, to find a field and subject not yet popular. 
+We have seen this demonstrated already in the talks preceding mine. 
+There is the quickest way advances are likely to occur, as measured in discoveries per investigator per year. 
+You may have heard the military dictum for the gathering of armies: March to the sound of the guns. 
+In science, the exact opposite is the case: March away from the sound of the guns. 
+So Wilson's Principle Number Three: March away from the sound of the guns. 
+Observe from a distance, but do not join the fray. 
+Make a fray of your own. 
+Once you have settled on a specialty, and the profession you can love, and you've secured opportunity, your potential to succeed will be greatly enhanced if you study it enough to become an expert. 
+There are thousands of professionally delimited subjects sprinkled through physics and chemistry to biology and medicine. 
+And on then into the social sciences, where it is possible in short time to acquire the status of an authority. 
+When the subject is still very thinly populated, you can with diligence and hard work become the world authority. 
+The world needs this kind of expertise, and it rewards the kind of people willing to acquire it. 
+The existing information and what you self-discover may at first seem skimpy and difficult to connect to other bodies of knowledge. 
+Well, if that's the case, good. Why hard instead of easy? 
+The answer deserves to be stated as Principle Number Four. 
+In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity, and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution. 
+Now this brings me to a basic categorization in the way scientific discoveries are made. 
+Scientists, pure mathematicians among them, follow one or the other of two pathways: First through early discoveries, a problem is identified and a solution is sought. 
+The problem may be relatively small; for example, where exactly in a cruise ship does the norovirus begin to spread? 
+Or larger, what's the role of dark matter in the expansion of the universe? 
+As the answer is sought, other phenomena are typically discovered and other questions are asked. 
+This first of the two strategies is like a hunter, exploring a forest in search of a particular quarry, who finds other quarries along the way. 
+The second strategy of research is to study a subject broadly searching for unknown phenomena or patterns of known phenomena like a hunter in what we call "" the naturalist's trance, "" the researcher of mind is open to anything interesting, any quarry worth taking. 
+The search is not for the solution of the problem, but for problems themselves worth solving. 
+The two strategies of research, original research, can be stated as follows, in the final principle I'm going to offer you: For every problem in a given discipline of science, there exists a species or entity or phenomenon ideal for its solution. 
+And conversely, for every species or other entity or phenomenon, there exist important problems for the solution of which, those particular objects of research are ideally suited. 
+Find out what they are. 
+You'll find your own way to discover, to learn, to teach. 
+The decades ahead will see dramatic advances in disease prevention, general health, the quality of life. 
+All of humanity depends on the knowledge and practice of the medicine and the science behind it you will master. 
+You have chosen a calling that will come in steps to give you satisfaction, at its conclusion, of a life well lived. 
+And I thank you for having me here tonight. 
+(Applause) Oh, thank you. 
+Thank you very much. 
+I salute you. 
+
+So yeah, I'm a newspaper cartoonist — political cartoonist. 
+I don't know if you've heard about it — newspapers? 
+It's a sort of paper-based reader. 
+(Laughter) It's lighter than an iPad, it's a bit cheaper. 
+You know what they say? 
+They say the print media is dying — who says that? Well, the media. 
+But this is no news, right? 
+You've read about it already. 
+(Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, the world has gotten smaller. 
+I know it's a cliche, but look, look how small, how tiny it has gotten. 
+And you know the reason why, of course. 
+This is because of technology — yeah. 
+(Laughter) Any computer designers in the room? 
+Yeah well, you guys are making my life miserable because track pads used to be round, a nice round shape. 
+That makes a good cartoon. 
+But what are you going to do with a flat track pad, those square things? 
+There's nothing I can do as a cartoonist. 
+Well, I know the world is flat now. 
+That's true. 
+And the Internet has reached every corner of the world, the poorest, the remotest places. 
+Every village in Africa now has a cyber cafe. 
+(Laughter) Don't go asking for a Frappuccino there. 
+So we are bridging the digital divide. 
+The Third World is connected, we are connected. 
+And what happens next? 
+Well, you've got mail. 
+Yeah. 
+Well, the Internet has empowered us. 
+It has empowered you, it has empowered me and it has empowered some other guys as well. 
+(Laughter) You know, these last two cartoons — I did them live during a conference in Hanoi. 
+And they were not used to that in communist 2.0 Vietnam. 
+(Laughter) So I was cartooning live on a wide screen — it was quite a sensation — and then this guy came to me. 
+He was taking pictures of me and of my sketches, and I thought, "" This is great, a Vietnamese fan. "" And as he came the second day, I thought, "" Wow, that's really a cartoon lover. "" And on the third day, I finally understood, the guy was actually on duty. 
+So by now, there must be a hundred pictures of me smiling with my sketches in the files of the Vietnamese police. 
+(Laughter) No, but it's true: the Internet has changed the world. 
+It has rocked the music industry; it has changed the way we consume music. 
+For those of you old enough to remember, we used to have to go to the store to steal it. 
+(Laughter) And it has changed the way your future employer will look at your application. 
+So be careful with that Facebook account — your momma told you, be careful. 
+And technology has set us free — this is free WiFi. 
+But yeah, it has liberated us from the office desk. 
+This is your life, enjoy it. 
+(Laughter) In short, technology, the internet, they have changed our lifestyle. 
+Tech guru, like this man — that a German magazine called the philosopher of the 21st century — they are shaping the way we do things. 
+They are shaping the way we consume. 
+They are shaping our very desires. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) You will not like it. 
+And technology has even changed our relationship to God. 
+(Laughter) Now I shouldn't get into this. 
+Religion and political cartoons, as you may have heard, make a difficult couple, ever since that day of 2005, when a bunch of cartoonists in Denmark drew cartoons that had repercussions all over the world — demonstrations, fatwa, they provoked violence. People died in the violence. 
+This was so sickening; people died because of cartoons. 
+I mean — I had the feeling at the time that cartoons had been used by both sides, actually. 
+They were used first by a Danish newspaper, which wanted to make a point on Islam. 
+A Danish cartoonist told me he was one of the 24 who received the assignment to draw the prophet — 12 of them refused. Did you know that? 
+He told me, "" Nobody has to tell me what I should draw. 
+This is not how it works. "" And then, of course, they were used by extremists and politicians on the other side. 
+They wanted to stir up controversy. 
+You know the story. 
+We know that cartoons can be used as weapons. 
+History tells us, they've been used by the Nazis to attack the Jews. 
+And here we are now. 
+In the United Nations, half of the world is pushing to penalize the offense to religion — they call it the defamation of religion — while the other half of the world is fighting back in defense of freedom of speech. 
+So the clash of civilizations is here, and cartoons are at the middle of it? 
+This got me thinking. 
+Now you see me thinking at my kitchen table, and since you're in my kitchen, please meet my wife. 
+(Laughter) In 2006, a few months after, I went Ivory Coast — Western Africa. 
+Now, talk of a divided place — the country was cut in two. 
+You had a rebellion in the North, the government in the South — the capital, Abidjan — and in the middle, the French army. 
+This looks like a giant hamburger. 
+You don't want to be the ham in the middle. 
+I was there to report on that story in cartoons. 
+I've been doing this for the last 15 years; it's my side job, if you want. 
+So you see the style is different. 
+This is more serious than maybe editorial cartooning. 
+I went to places like Gaza during the war in 2009. 
+So this is really journalism in cartoons. 
+You'll hear more and more about it. 
+This is the future of journalism, I think. 
+And of course, I went to see the rebels in the north. 
+Those were poor guys fighting for their rights. 
+There was an ethnic side to this conflict as very often in Africa. 
+And I went to see the Dozo. 
+The Dozo, they are the traditional hunters of West Africa. 
+People fear them — they help the rebellion a lot. 
+They are believed to have magical powers. 
+They can disappear and escape bullets. 
+I went to see a Dozo chief; he told me about his magical powers. 
+He said, "" I can chop your head off right away and bring you back to life. "" I said, "" Well, maybe we don't have time for this right now. "" (Laughter) "Another time." 
+So back in Abidjan, I was given a chance to lead a workshop with local cartoonists there and I thought, yes, in a context like this, cartoons can really be used as weapons against the other side. 
+I mean, the press in Ivory Coast was bitterly divided — it was compared to the media in Rwanda before the genocide — so imagine. 
+And what can a cartoonist do? 
+Sometimes editors would tell their cartoonists to draw what they wanted to see, and the guy has to feed his family, right? 
+So the idea was pretty simple. 
+We brought together cartoonists from all sides in Ivory Coast. 
+We took them away from their newspaper for three days. 
+And I asked them to do a project together, tackle the issues affecting their country in cartoons, yes, in cartoons. 
+Show the positive power of cartoons. 
+It's a great tool of communication for bad or for good. 
+And cartoons can cross boundaries, as you have seen. 
+And humor is a good way, I think, to address serious issues. 
+And I'm very proud of what they did. 
+I mean, they didn't agree with each other — that was not the point. 
+And I didn't ask them to do nice cartoons. 
+The first day, they were even shouting at each other. 
+But they came up with a book, looking back at 13 years of political crisis in Ivory Coast. 
+So the idea was there. 
+And I've been doing projects like this, in 2009 in Lebanon, this year in Kenya, back in January. 
+In Lebanon, it was not a book. 
+The idea was to have — the same principal, a divided country — take cartoonists from all sides and let them do something together. 
+So in Lebanon, we enrolled the newspaper editors, and we got them to publish eight cartoonists from all sides all together on the same page, addressing the issue affecting Lebanon, like religion in politics and everyday life. 
+And it worked. 
+For three days, almost all the newspapers of Beirut published all those cartoonists together — anti-government, pro-government, Christian, Muslim, of course, English-speaking, well, you name it. 
+So this was a great project. 
+And then in Kenya, what we did was addressing the issue of ethnicity, which is a poison in a lot of places in Africa. 
+And we did video clips — you can see them if you go to YouTube / Kenyatoons. 
+So, preaching for freedom of speech is easy here, but as you have seen in contexts of repression or division, again, what can a cartoonist do? 
+He has to keep his job. 
+Well I believe that in any context anywhere, he always has the choice at least not to do a cartoon that will feed hatred. 
+And that's the message I try to convey to them. 
+I think we all always have the choice in the end not to do the bad thing. 
+But we need to support these [unclear], critical and responsible voices in Africa, in Lebanon, in your local newspaper, in the Apple store. 
+Today, tech companies are the world's largest editors. 
+They decide what is too offensive or too provocative for you to see. 
+So really, it's not about the freedom of cartoonists; it's about your freedoms. 
+And for dictators all over the world, the good news is when cartoonists, journalists and activists shut up. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Four years ago today, exactly, actually, I started a fashion blog called Style Rookie. 
+Last September of 2011, I started an online magazine for teenage girls called Rookiemag.com. 
+My name's Tavi Gevinson, and the title of my talk is "" Still Figuring It Out, "" and the MS Paint quality of my slides was a total creative decision in keeping with today's theme, and has nothing to do with my inability to use PowerPoint. (Laughter) So I edit this site for teenage girls. I'm a feminist. 
+I am kind of a pop culture nerd, and I think a lot about what makes a strong female character, and, you know, movies and TV shows, these things have influence. My own website. 
+So I think the question of what makes a strong female character often goes misinterpreted, and instead we get these two-dimensional superwomen who maybe have one quality that's played up a lot, like a Catwoman type, or she plays her sexuality up a lot, and it's seen as power. 
+But they're not strong characters who happen to be female. 
+They're completely flat, and they're basically cardboard characters. 
+The problem with this is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand, and women are mad at themselves for not being that simple, when, in actuality, women are complicated, women are multifaceted — not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy, and women happen to be people. (Laughter) So the flaws are the key. 
+I'm not the first person to say this. 
+What makes a strong female character is a character who has weaknesses, who has flaws, who is maybe not immediately likable, but eventually relatable. 
+I don't like to acknowledge a problem without also acknowledging those who work to fix it, so just wanted to acknowledge shows like "" Mad Men, "" movies like "" Bridesmaids, "" whose female characters or protagonists are complex, multifaceted. 
+Lena Dunham, who's on here, her show on HBO that premiers next month, "" Girls, "" she said she wanted to start it because she felt that every woman she knew was just a bundle of contradictions, and that feels accurate for all people, but you don't see women represented like that as much. 
+Congrats, guys. (Laughs) But I don't feel that — I still feel that there are some types of women who are not represented that way, and one group that we'll focus on today are teens, because I think teenagers are especially contradictory and still figuring it out, and in the '90s there was "" Freaks and Geeks "" and "" My So-Called Life, "" and their characters, Lindsay Weir and Angela Chase, I mean, the whole premise of the shows were just them trying to figure themselves out, basically, but those shows only lasted a season each, and I haven't really seen anything like that on TV since. 
+So this is a scientific diagram of my brain — (Laughter) — around the time when I was, when I started watching those TV shows. 
+I was ending middle school, starting high school — I'm a sophomore now — and I was trying to reconcile all of these differences that you're told you can't be when you're growing up as a girl. 
+You can't be smart and pretty. 
+You can't be a feminist who's also interested in fashion. 
+You can't care about clothes if it's not for the sake of what other people, usually men, will think of you. 
+So I was trying to figure all that out, and I felt a little confused, and I said so on my blog, and I said that I wanted to start a website for teenage girls that was not this kind of one-dimensional strong character empowerment thing because I think one thing that can be very alienating about a misconception of feminism is that girls then think that to be a feminist, they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in your beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all of the answers. And this is not true, and, actually, reconciling all the contradictions I was feeling 
+became easier once I understood that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process, and this is a spread from a zine that I made last year when I — I mean, I think I've let myself go a bit on the illustration front since. 
+But, yeah. 
+So I said on my blog that I wanted to start this publication for teenage girls and ask people to submit their writing, their photography, whatever, to be a member of our staff. 
+I got about 3,000 emails. 
+My editorial director and I went through them and put together a staff of people, and we launched last September. 
+And this is an excerpt from my first editor's letter, where I say that Rookie, we don't have all the answers, we're still figuring it out too, but the point is not to give girls the answers, and not even give them permission to find the answers themselves, but hopefully inspire them to understand that they can give themselves that permission, they can ask their own questions, find their own answers, all of that, and Rookie, I think we've been trying to make it a nice place for all of that to be figured out. 
+So I'm not saying, "" Be like us, "" and "" We're perfect role models, "" because we're not, but we just want to help represent girls in a way that shows those different dimensions. 
+I mean, we have articles called "On Taking Yourself Seriously: How to Not Care What People Think of You," but we also have articles like, oops — I'm figuring it out! 
+Ha ha. (Laughter) If you use that, you can get away with anything. 
+We also have articles called "How to Look Like You Weren't Just Crying in Less than Five Minutes." 
+So all of that being said, I still really appreciate those characters in movies and articles like that on our site, that aren't just about being totally powerful, maybe finding your acceptance with yourself and self-esteem and your flaws and how you accept those. 
+So what I you to take away from my talk, the lesson of all of this, is to just be Stevie Nicks. 
+Like, that's all you have to do. (Laughter) Because my favorite thing about her, other than, like, everything, is that she is very — has always been unapologetically present on stage, and unapologetic about her flaws and about reconciling all of her contradictory feelings and she makes you listen to them and think about them, and yeah, so please be Stevie Nicks. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+First, of course you know, a leader needs the guts to stand out and be ridiculed. 
+Now, notice that the leader embraces him as an equal. 
+It takes guts to stand out like that. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And here comes a second follower. 
+Now it's not a lone nut, it's not two nuts — three is a crowd, and a crowd is news. 
+So a movement must be public. 
+Now, here come two more people, and immediately after, three more people. 
+Now we've got momentum. This is the tipping point. 
+(Laughter) So, notice that, as more people join in, it's less risky. 
+So first, if you are the type, like the shirtless dancing guy that is standing alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals so it's clearly about the movement, not you. 
+The biggest lesson, if you noticed — did you catch it? — is that leadership is over-glorified. 
+And when you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first one to stand up and join in. 
+And what a perfect place to do that, at TED. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Most of us think of motion as a very visual thing. 
+If I walk across this stage or gesture with my hands while I speak, that motion is something that you can see. 
+But there's a world of important motion that's too subtle for the human eye, and over the past few years, we've started to find that cameras can often see this motion even when humans can't. 
+So let me show you what I mean. 
+On the left here, you see video of a person's wrist, and on the right, you see video of a sleeping infant, but if I didn't tell you that these were videos, you might assume that you were looking at two regular images, because in both cases, these videos appear to be almost completely still. 
+But there's actually a lot of subtle motion going on here, and if you were to touch the wrist on the left, you would feel a pulse, and if you were to hold the infant on the right, you would feel the rise and fall of her chest as she took each breath. 
+And these motions carry a lot of significance, but they're usually too subtle for us to see, so instead, we have to observe them through direct contact, through touch. 
+But a few years ago, my colleagues at MIT developed what they call a motion microscope, which is software that finds these subtle motions in video and amplifies them so that they become large enough for us to see. 
+And so, if we use their software on the left video, it lets us see the pulse in this wrist, and if we were to count that pulse, we could even figure out this person's heart rate. 
+And if we used the same software on the right video, it lets us see each breath that this infant takes, and we can use this as a contact-free way to monitor her breathing. 
+And so this technology is really powerful because it takes these phenomena that we normally have to experience through touch and it lets us capture them visually and non-invasively. 
+So a couple years ago, I started working with the folks that created that software, and we decided to pursue a crazy idea. 
+We thought, it's cool that we can use software to visualize tiny motions like this, and you can almost think of it as a way to extend our sense of touch. 
+But what if we could do the same thing with our ability to hear? 
+What if we could use video to capture the vibrations of sound, which are just another kind of motion, and turn everything that we see into a microphone? 
+Now, this is a bit of a strange idea, so let me try to put it in perspective for you. 
+Traditional microphones work by converting the motion of an internal diaphragm into an electrical signal, and that diaphragm is designed to move readily with sound so that its motion can be recorded and interpreted as audio. 
+But sound causes all objects to vibrate. 
+Those vibrations are just usually too subtle and too fast for us to see. 
+So what if we record them with a high-speed camera and then use software to extract tiny motions from our high-speed video, and analyze those motions to figure out what sounds created them? 
+This would let us turn visible objects into visual microphones from a distance. 
+And so we tried this out, and here's one of our experiments, where we took this potted plant that you see on the right and we filmed it with a high-speed camera while a nearby loudspeaker played this sound. 
+(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And so here's the video that we recorded, and we recorded it at thousands of frames per second, but even if you look very closely, all you'll see are some leaves that are pretty much just sitting there doing nothing, because our sound only moved those leaves by about a micrometer. 
+That's one ten-thousandth of a centimeter, which spans somewhere between a hundredth and a thousandth of a pixel in this image. 
+So you can squint all you want, but motion that small is pretty much perceptually invisible. 
+But it turns out that something can be perceptually invisible and still be numerically significant, because with the right algorithms, we can take this silent, seemingly still video and we can recover this sound. 
+(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") (Applause) So how is this possible? 
+How can we get so much information out of so little motion? 
+Well, let's say that those leaves move by just a single micrometer, and let's say that that shifts our image by just a thousandth of a pixel. 
+That may not seem like much, but a single frame of video may have hundreds of thousands of pixels in it, and so if we combine all of the tiny motions that we see from across that entire image, then suddenly a thousandth of a pixel can start to add up to something pretty significant. 
+On a personal note, we were pretty psyched when we figured this out. 
+(Laughter) But even with the right algorithm, we were still missing a pretty important piece of the puzzle. 
+You see, there are a lot of factors that affect when and how well this technique will work. 
+There's the object and how far away it is; there's the camera and the lens that you use; how much light is shining on the object and how loud your sound is. 
+And even with the right algorithm, we had to be very careful with our early experiments, because if we got any of these factors wrong, there was no way to tell what the problem was. 
+We would just get noise back. 
+And so a lot of our early experiments looked like this. 
+And so here I am, and on the bottom left, you can kind of see our high-speed camera, which is pointed at a bag of chips, and the whole thing is lit by these bright lamps. 
+And like I said, we had to be very careful in these early experiments, so this is how it went down. 
+(Video) Abe Davis: Three, two, one, go. 
+Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb! 
+(Laughter) AD: So this experiment looks completely ridiculous. (Laughter) 
+I mean, I'm screaming at a bag of chips — (Laughter) — and we're blasting it with so much light, we literally melted the first bag we tried this on. (Laughter) But ridiculous as this experiment looks, it was actually really important, because we were able to recover this sound. 
+(Audio) Mary had a little lamb! Little lamb! Little lamb! 
+(Applause) AD: And this was really significant, because it was the first time we recovered intelligible human speech from silent video of an object. 
+And so it gave us this point of reference, and gradually we could start to modify the experiment, using different objects or moving the object further away, using less light or quieter sounds. 
+And we analyzed all of these experiments until we really understood the limits of our technique, because once we understood those limits, we could figure out how to push them. 
+And that led to experiments like this one, where again, I'm going to speak to a bag of chips, but this time we've moved our camera about 15 feet away, outside, behind a soundproof window, and the whole thing is lit by only natural sunlight. 
+And so here's the video that we captured. 
+And this is what things sounded like from inside, next to the bag of chips. 
+(Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
+AD: And here's what we were able to recover from our silent video captured outside behind that window. 
+(Audio) Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
+(Applause) AD: And there are other ways that we can push these limits as well. 
+So here's a quieter experiment where we filmed some earphones plugged into a laptop computer, and in this case, our goal was to recover the music that was playing on that laptop from just silent video of these two little plastic earphones, and we were able to do this so well that I could even Shazam our results. 
+(Laughter) (Music: "" Under Pressure "" by Queen) (Applause) And we can also push things by changing the hardware that we use. 
+Because the experiments I've shown you so far were done with a camera, a high-speed camera, that can record video about a 100 times faster than most cell phones, but we've also found a way to use this technique with more regular cameras, and we do that by taking advantage of what's called a rolling shutter. 
+You see, most cameras record images one row at a time, and so if an object moves during the recording of a single image, there's a slight time delay between each row, and this causes slight artifacts that get coded into each frame of a video. 
+And so what we found is that by analyzing these artifacts, we can actually recover sound using a modified version of our algorithm. 
+So here's an experiment we did where we filmed a bag of candy while a nearby loudspeaker played the same "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "" music from before, but this time, we used just a regular store-bought camera, and so in a second, I'll play for you the sound that we recovered, and it's going to sound distorted this time, but listen and see if you can still recognize the music. 
+(Audio: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And so, again, that sounds distorted, but what's really amazing here is that we were able to do this with something that you could literally run out and pick up at a Best Buy. 
+So at this point, a lot of people see this work, and they immediately think about surveillance. 
+And to be fair, it's not hard to imagine how you might use this technology to spy on someone. 
+But keep in mind that there's already a lot of very mature technology out there for surveillance. 
+In fact, people have been using lasers to eavesdrop on objects from a distance for decades. 
+But what's really new here, what's really different, is that now we have a way to picture the vibrations of an object, which gives us a new lens through which to look at the world, and we can use that lens to learn not just about forces like sound that cause an object to vibrate, but also about the object itself. 
+And so I want to take a step back and think about how that might change the ways that we use video, because we usually use video to look at things, and I've just shown you how we can use it to listen to things. 
+But there's another important way that we learn about the world: that's by interacting with it. 
+We push and pull and poke and prod things. 
+We shake things and see what happens. 
+And that's something that video still won't let us do, at least not traditionally. 
+So I want to show you some new work, and this is based on an idea I had just a few months ago, so this is actually the first time I've shown it to a public audience. 
+And the basic idea is that we're going to use the vibrations in a video to capture objects in a way that will let us interact with them and see how they react to us. 
+So here's an object, and in this case, it's a wire figure in the shape of a human, and we're going to film that object with just a regular camera. 
+So there's nothing special about this camera. 
+In fact, I've actually done this with my cell phone before. 
+But we do want to see the object vibrate, so to make that happen, we're just going to bang a little bit on the surface where it's resting while we record this video. 
+So that's it: just five seconds of regular video, while we bang on this surface, and we're going to use the vibrations in that video to learn about the structural and material properties of our object, and we're going to use that information to create something new and interactive. 
+And so here's what we've created. 
+And it looks like a regular image, but this isn't an image, and it's not a video, because now I can take my mouse and I can start interacting with the object. 
+And so what you see here is a simulation of how this object would respond to new forces that we've never seen before, and we created it from just five seconds of regular video. 
+(Applause) And so this is a really powerful way to look at the world, because it lets us predict how objects will respond to new situations, and you could imagine, for instance, looking at an old bridge and wondering what would happen, how would that bridge hold up if I were to drive my car across it. 
+And that's a question that you probably want to answer before you start driving across that bridge. 
+And of course, there are going to be limitations to this technique, just like there were with the visual microphone, but we found that it works in a lot of situations that you might not expect, especially if you give it longer videos. 
+So for example, here's a video that I captured of a bush outside of my apartment, and I didn't do anything to this bush, but by capturing a minute-long video, a gentle breeze caused enough vibrations that we could learn enough about this bush to create this simulation. 
+(Applause) And so you could imagine giving this to a film director, and letting him control, say, the strength and direction of wind in a shot after it's been recorded. 
+Or, in this case, we pointed our camera at a hanging curtain, and you can't even see any motion in this video, but by recording a two-minute-long video, natural air currents in this room created enough subtle, imperceptible motions and vibrations that we could learn enough to create this simulation. 
+And ironically, we're kind of used to having this kind of interactivity when it comes to virtual objects, when it comes to video games and 3D models, but to be able to capture this information from real objects in the real world using just simple, regular video, is something new that has a lot of potential. 
+So here are the amazing people who worked with me on these projects. 
+(Applause) And what I've shown you today is only the beginning. 
+We've just started to scratch the surface of what you can do with this kind of imaging, because it gives us a new way to capture our surroundings with common, accessible technology. 
+And so looking to the future, it's going to be really exciting to explore what this can tell us about the world. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My grandfather was a cobbler. 
+Back in the day, he made custom-made shoes. 
+I never got to meet him. 
+He perished in the Holocaust. 
+But I did inherit his love for making, except that it doesn't exist that much anymore. 
+You see, while the Industrial Revolution did a great deal to improve humanity, it eradicated the very skill that my grandfather loved, and it atrophied craftsmanship as we know it. 
+But all of that is about to change with 3D printing, and it all started with this, the very first part that was ever printed. 
+It's a little older than TED. 
+It was printed in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who invented 3D printing. 
+But the thing that I want to talk to you about today, the big idea that I want to discuss with you, is not that 3D printing is going to catapult us into the future, but rather that it's actually going to connect us with our heritage, and it's going to usher in a new era of localized, distributed manufacturing that is actually based on digital fabrication. 
+So think about useful things. 
+You all know your shoe size. 
+How many of you know the size of the bridge of your nose or the distance between your temples? 
+Anybody? 
+Wouldn't it be awesome if you could, for the first time, get eyewear that actually fits you perfectly and doesn't require any hinge assembly, so chances are, the hinges are not going to break? 
+But the implications of 3D printing go well beyond the tips of our noses. 
+When I met Amanda for the first time, she could already stand up and walk a little bit even though she was paralyzed from the waist down, but she complained to me that her suit was uncomfortable. 
+It was a beautiful robotic suit made by Ekso Bionics, but it wasn't inspired by her body. 
+So she challenged me to make her something that was a little bit more feminine, a little bit more elegant, and lightweight, and like good tailors, we thought that we would measure her digitally. 
+And we did. We built her an amazing suit. 
+The incredible part about what I learned from Amanda is a lot of us are looking at 3D printing and we say to ourselves, it's going to replace traditional methods. 
+Amanda looked at it and she said, it's an opportunity for me to reclaim my symmetry and to embrace my authenticity. 
+And you know what? She's not standing still. 
+She now wants to walk in high heels. 
+It doesn't stop there. 
+3D printing is changing personalized medical devices as we know them, from new, beautiful, conformal, ventilated scoliosis braces to millions of dental restorations and to beautiful bracings for amputees, another opportunity to emotionally reconnect with your symmetry. 
+And as we sit here today, you can go wireless on your braces with clear aligners, or your dental restorations. 
+Millions of in-the-ear hearing aids are already 3D printed today. 
+Millions of people are served today from these devices. 
+What about full knee replacements, from your data, made to measure, where all of the tools and guides are 3D printed? 
+G.E. is using 3D printing to make the next generation LEAP engine that will save fuel to the tune of about 15 percent and cost for an airline of about 14 million dollars. 
+Good for G.E., right? 
+And their customers and the environment. 
+But, you know, the even better news is that this technology is no longer reserved for deep-pocketed corporations. 
+Planetary Resources, a startup for space explorations is going to put out its first space probe later this year. 
+It was a fraction of a NASA spaceship, it costs a fraction of its cost, and it's made with less than a dozen moving parts, and it's going to be out in space later this year. 
+Google is taking on this very audacious project of making the block phone, the Ara. 
+It's only possible because of the development of high-speed 3D printing that for the first time will make functional, usable modules that will go into it. 
+A real moonshot, powered by 3D printing. 
+How about food? 
+What if we could, for the first time, make incredible delectables like this beautiful TED Teddy here, that are edible? 
+What if we could completely change the experience, like you see with that absinthe serving that is completely 3D printed? 
+And what if we could begin to put ingredients and colors and flavors in every taste, which means not only delicious foods but the promise of personalized nutrition around the corner? 
+And that gets me to one of the biggest deals about 3D printing. 
+The printer doesn't care if it makes the most rudimentary shape or the most complex shape, and that is completely turning design and manufacturing on its head as we know it. 
+Many people think that 3D printing will be the end of manufacturing as we know it. 
+I think that it's the opportunity to put tomorrow's technology in the hands of youngsters that will create endless abundance of job opportunities, and with that, everybody can become an expert maker and an expert manufacturer. 
+That will take new tools. 
+Not everybody knows how to use CAD, so we're developing haptics, perceptual devices that will allow you to touch and feel your designs as if you play with digital clay. 
+When you do things like that, and we also developed things that take physical photographs that are instantly printable, it will make it easier to create content, but with all of the unimagined, we will also have the unintended, like democratized counterfeiting and ubiquitous illegal possession. 
+So many people ask me, will we have a 3D printer in every home? 
+I think it's the wrong question to ask. 
+The right question to ask is, how will 3D printing change my life? 
+Or, in other words, what room in my house will 3D printing fit in? 
+So everything that you see here has been 3D printed, including these shoes at the Amsterdam fashion show. 
+Now, these are not my grandfather's shoes. 
+These are shoes that represent the continuation of his passion for hyper-local manufacturing. 
+My grandfather didn't get to see Nike printing cleats for the recent Super Bowl, and my father didn't get to see me standing in my hybridized 3D printed shoes. 
+He passed away three years ago. 
+But Chuck Hull, the man that invented it all, is right here in the house today, and thanks to him, I can say, thanks to his invention, I can say that I am a cobbler too, and by standing in these shoes I am honoring my past while manufacturing the future. 
+Thank you. 
+
+Let's just start by looking at some great photographs. 
+This is an icon of National Geographic, an Afghan refugee taken by Steve McCurry. 
+But the Harvard Lampoon is about to come out with a parody of National Geographic, and I shudder to think what they're going to do to this photograph. 
+Oh, the wrath of Photoshop. 
+This is a jet landing at San Francisco, by Bruce Dale. 
+He mounted a camera on the tail. 
+A poetic image for a story on Tolstoy, by Sam Abell. 
+Pygmies in the DRC, by Randy Olson. 
+I love this photograph because it reminds me of Degas' bronze sculptures of the little dancer. 
+A polar bear swimming in the Arctic, by Paul Nicklen. 
+Polar bears need ice to be able to move back and forth — they're not very good swimmers — and we know what's happening to the ice. 
+These are camels moving across the Rift Valley in Africa, photographed by Chris Johns. 
+Shot straight down, so these are the shadows of the camels. 
+This is a rancher in Texas, by William Albert Allard, a great portraitist. 
+And Jane Goodall, making her own special connection, photographed by Nick Nichols. 
+This is a soap disco in Spain, photographed by David Alan Harvey. 
+And David said that there was lot of weird stuff happening on the dance floor. 
+But, hey, at least it's hygienic. 
+(Laughter) These are sea lions in Australia doing their own dance, by David Doubilet. 
+And this is a comet, captured by Dr. Euan Mason. 
+And finally, the bow of the Titanic, without movie stars, photographed by Emory Kristof. 
+Photography carries a power that holds up under the relentless swirl of today's saturated, media world, because photographs emulate the way that our mind freezes a significant moment. 
+Here's an example. 
+Four years ago, I was at the beach with my son, and he was learning how to swim in this relatively soft surf of the Delaware beaches. 
+But I turned away for a moment, and he got caught into a riptide and started to be pulled out towards the jetty. 
+I can stand here right now and see, as I go tearing into the water after him, the moments slowing down and freezing into this arrangement. 
+I can see the rocks are over here. 
+There's a wave about to crash onto him. 
+I can see his hands reaching out, and I can see his face in terror, looking at me, saying, "" Help me, Dad. "" I got him. The wave broke over us. 
+We got back on shore; he was fine. 
+We were a little bit rattled. 
+But this flashbulb memory, as it's called, is when all the elements came together to define not just the event, but my emotional connection to it. 
+And this is what a photograph taps into when it makes its own powerful connection to a viewer. 
+Now I have to tell you, I was talking to Kyle last week about this, that I was going to tell this story. 
+And he said, "" Oh, yeah, I remember that too! 
+I remember my image of you was that you were up on the shore yelling at me. "" (Laughter) I thought I was a hero. (Laughter) 
+So, this represents — this is a cross-sample of some remarkable images taken by some of the world's greatest photojournalists, working at the very top of their craft — except one. 
+This photograph was taken by Dr. Euan Mason in New Zealand last year, and it was submitted and published in National Geographic. 
+Last year, we added a section to our website called "" Your Shot, "" where anyone can submit photographs for possible publication. 
+And it has become a wild success, tapping into the enthusiast photography community. 
+The quality of these amateur photographs can, at times, be amazing. 
+And seeing this reinforces, for me, that every one of us has at least one or two great photographs in them. 
+But to be a great photojournalist, you have to have more than just one or two great photographs in you. 
+You've got to be able to make them all the time. 
+But even more importantly, you need to know how to create a visual narrative. 
+You need to know how to tell a story. 
+So I'm going to share with you some coverages that I feel demonstrate the storytelling power of photography. 
+Photographer Nick Nichols went to document a very small and relatively unknown wildlife sanctuary in Chad, called Zakouma. 
+The original intent was to travel there and bring back a classic story of diverse species, of an exotic locale. 
+And that is what Nick did, up to a point. 
+This is a serval cat. 
+He's actually taking his own picture, shot with what's called a camera trap. 
+There's an infrared beam that's going across, and he has stepped into the beam and taken his photograph. 
+These are baboons at a watering hole. 
+Nick — the camera, again, an automatic camera took thousands of pictures of this. 
+And Nick ended up with a lot of pictures of the rear ends of baboons. 
+(Laughter) A lion having a late night snack — notice he's got a broken tooth. 
+And a crocodile walks up a riverbank toward its den. 
+I love this little bit of water that comes off the back of his tail. 
+But the centerpiece species of Zakouma are the elephants. 
+It's one of the largest intact herds in this part of Africa. 
+Here's a photograph shot in moonlight, something that digital photography has made a big difference for. 
+It was with the elephants that this story pivoted. 
+Nick, along with researcher Dr. Michael Fay, collared the matriarch of the herd. 
+They named her Annie, and they began tracking her movements. 
+The herd was safe within the confines of the park, because of this dedicated group of park rangers. 
+But once the annual rains began, the herd would begin migrating to feeding grounds outside the park. 
+And that's when they ran into trouble. 
+For outside the safety of the park were poachers, who would hunt them down only for the value of their ivory tusks. 
+The matriarch that they were radio tracking, after weeks of moving back and forth, in and out of the park, came to a halt outside the park. 
+Annie had been killed, along with 20 members of her herd. 
+And they only came for the ivory. 
+This is actually one of the rangers. 
+They were able to chase off one of the poachers and recover this ivory, because they couldn't leave it there, because it's still valuable. 
+But what Nick did was he brought back a story that went beyond the old-school method of just straight, "" Isn't this an amazing world? "" And instead, created a story that touched our audiences deeply. 
+Instead of just knowledge of this park, he created an understanding and an empathy for the elephants, the rangers and the many issues surrounding human-wildlife conflicts. 
+Now let's go over to India. 
+Sometimes you can tell a broad story in a focused way. 
+We were looking at the same issue that Richard Wurman touches upon in his new world population project. 
+For the first time in history, more people live in urban, rather than rural, environments. 
+And most of that growth is not in the cities, but in the slums that surround them. 
+Jonas Bendiksen, a very energetic photographer, came to me and said, "" We need to document this, and here's my proposal. 
+Let's go all over the world and photograph every single slum around the world. "" And I said, "" Well, you know, that might be a bit ambitious for our budget. "" So instead, what we did was we decided to, instead of going out and doing what would result in what we'd consider sort of a survey story — where you just go in and see just a little bit of everything — we put Jonas into Dharavi, which is part of Mumbai, India, and let him stay there, and really get into the heart and soul of this really major part of the city. 
+What Jonas did was not just go and do a surface look at the awful conditions that exist in such places. 
+He saw that this was a living and breathing and vital part of how the entire urban area functioned. 
+By staying tightly focused in one place, Jonas tapped into the soul and the enduring human spirit that underlies this community. 
+And he did it in a beautiful way. 
+Sometimes, though, the only way to tell a story is with a sweeping picture. 
+We teamed up underwater photographer Brian Skerry and photojournalist Randy Olson to document the depletion of the world's fisheries. 
+We weren't the only ones to tackle this subject, but the photographs that Brian and Randy created are among the best to capture both the human and natural devastation of overfishing. 
+Here, in a photo by Brian, a seemingly crucified shark is caught up in a gill net off of Baja. 
+I've seen sort of OK pictures of bycatch, the animals accidentally scooped up while fishing for a specific species. 
+But here, Brian captured a unique view by positioning himself underneath the boat when they threw the waste overboard. 
+And Brian then went on to even greater risk to get this never-before-made photograph of a trawl net scraping the ocean bottom. 
+Back on land, Randy Olson photographed a makeshift fish market in Africa, where the remains of filleted fish were sold to the locals, the main parts having already been sent to Europe. 
+And here in China, Randy shot a jellyfish market. 
+As prime food sources are depleted, the harvest goes deeper into the oceans and brings in more such sources of protein. 
+This is called fishing down the food chain. 
+But there are also glimmers of hope, and I think anytime we're doing a big, big story on this, we don't really want to go and just look at all the problems. 
+We also want to look for solutions. 
+Brian photographed a marine sanctuary in New Zealand, where commercial fishing had been banned — the result being that the overfished species have been restored, and with them a possible solution for sustainable fisheries. 
+Photography can also compel us to confront issues that are potentially distressing and controversial. 
+James Nachtwey, who was honored at last year's TED, took a look at the sweep of the medical system that is utilized to handle the American wounded coming out of Iraq. 
+It is like a tube where a wounded soldier enters on one end and exits back home, on the other. 
+Jim started in the battlefield. 
+Here, a medical technician tends to a wounded soldier on the helicopter ride back to the field hospital. 
+Here is in the field hospital. 
+The soldier on the right has the name of his daughter tattooed across his chest, as a reminder of home. 
+From here, the more severely wounded are transported back to Germany, where they meet up with their families for the first time. 
+And then back to the States to recuperate at veterans' hospitals, such as here in Walter Reed. 
+And finally, often fitted with high-tech prosthesis, they exit the medical system and attempt to regain their pre-war lives. 
+Jim took what could have been a straight-up medical science story and gave it a human dimension that touched our readers deeply. 
+Now, these stories are great examples of how photography can be used to address some of our most important topics. 
+But there are also times when photographers simply encounter things that are, when it comes down to it, just plain fun. 
+Photographer Paul Nicklin traveled to Antarctica to shoot a story on leopard seals. 
+They have been rarely photographed, partly because they are considered one of the most dangerous predators in the ocean. 
+In fact, a year earlier, a researcher had been grabbed by one and pulled down to depth and killed. 
+So you can imagine Paul was maybe a little bit hesitant about getting into the water. 
+Now, what leopard seals do mostly is, they eat penguins. 
+You know of "" The March of the Penguins. "" This is sort of the munch of the penguins. 
+(Laughter) Here a penguin goes up to the edge and looks out to see if the coast is clear. 
+And then everybody kind of runs out and goes out. 
+But then Paul got in the water. 
+And he said he was never really afraid of this. 
+Well, this one female came up to him. 
+She's probably — it's a shame you can't see it in the photograph, but she's 12 feet long. 
+So, she is pretty significant in size. 
+And Paul said he was never really afraid, because she was more curious about him than threatened. 
+This mouthing behavior, on the right, was really her way of saying to him, "" Hey, look how big I am! "" Or you know, "" My, what big teeth you have. "" (Laughter) Then Paul thinks that she simply took pity on him. 
+To her, here was this big, goofy creature in the water that for some reason didn't seem to be interested in chasing penguins. 
+So what she did was she started to bring penguins to him, alive, and put them in front of him. 
+She dropped them off, and then they would swim away. 
+She'd kind of look at him, like "" What are you doing? "" Go back and get them, and then bring them back and drop them in front of him. 
+And she did this over the course of a couple of days, until the point where she got so frustrated with him that she started putting them directly on top of his head. 
+(Laughter) Which just resulted in a fantastic photograph. (Laughter) 
+Eventually, though, Paul thinks that she just figured that he was never going to survive. 
+This is her just puffing out, you know, snorting out in disgust. 
+(Laughter) And lost interest with him, and went back to what she does best. 
+Paul set out to photograph a relatively mysterious and unknown creature, and came back with not just a collection of photographs, but an amazing experience and a great story. 
+It is these kinds of stories, ones that go beyond the immediate or just the superficial that demonstrate the power of photojournalism. 
+I believe that photography can make a real connection to people, and can be employed as a positive agent for understanding the challenges and opportunities facing our world today. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Last year, I went on my first book tour. 
+In 13 months, I flew to 14 countries and gave some hundred talks. 
+Every talk in every country began with an introduction, and every introduction began, alas, with a lie: "Taiye Selasi comes from Ghana and Nigeria," or "" Taiye Selasi comes from England and the States. "" Whenever I heard this opening sentence, no matter the country that concluded it — England, America, Ghana, Nigeria — I thought, "" But that's not true. "" Yes, I was born in England and grew up in the United States. 
+My mum, born in England, and raised in Nigeria, currently lives in Ghana. 
+My father was born in Gold Coast, a British colony, raised in Ghana, and has lived for over 30 years in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 
+For this reason, my introducers also called me "" multinational. "" "" But Nike is multinational, "" I thought, "I'm a human being." 
+Then, one fine day, mid-tour, I went to Louisiana, a museum in Denmark where I shared the stage with the writer Colum McCann. 
+We were discussing the role of locality in writing, when suddenly it hit me. 
+I'm not multinational. 
+I'm not a national at all. 
+How could I come from a nation? 
+How can a human being come from a concept? 
+It's a question that had been bothering me for going on two decades. 
+From newspapers, textbooks, conversations, I had learned to speak of countries as if they were eternal, singular, naturally occurring things, but I wondered: to say that I came from a country suggested that the country was an absolute, some fixed point in place in time, a constant thing, but was it? 
+In my lifetime, countries had disappeared — Czechoslovakia; appeared — Timor-Leste; failed — Somalia. 
+My parents came from countries that didn't exist when they were born. 
+To me, a country — this thing that could be born, die, expand, contract — hardly seemed the basis for understanding a human being. 
+And so it came as a huge relief to discover the sovereign state. 
+What we call countries are actually various expressions of sovereign statehood, an idea that came into fashion only 400 years ago. 
+When I learned this, beginning my masters degree in international relations, I felt a sort of surge of relief. 
+It was as I had suspected. 
+History was real, cultures were real, but countries were invented. 
+For the next 10 years, I sought to re- or un-define myself, my world, my work, my experience, beyond the logic of the state. 
+In 2005, I wrote an essay, "" What is an Afropolitan, "" sketching out an identity that privileged culture over country. 
+It was thrilling how many people could relate to my experience, and instructional how many others didn't buy my sense of self. 
+"" How can Selasi claim to come from Ghana, "" one such critic asked, "" when she's never known the indignities of traveling abroad on a Ghanian passport? "" Now, if I'm honest, I knew just what she meant. 
+I've got a friend named Layla who was born and raised in Ghana. 
+Her parents are third-generation Ghanians of Lebanese descent. 
+Layla, who speaks fluent Twi, knows Accra like the back of her hand, but when we first met years ago, I thought, "" She's not from Ghana. "" In my mind, she came from Lebanon, despite the patent fact that all her formative experience took place in suburban Accra. 
+I, like my critics, was imagining some Ghana where all Ghanaians had brown skin or none held U.K. passports. 
+I'd fallen into the limiting trap that the language of coming from countries sets — the privileging of a fiction, the singular country, over reality: human experience. 
+Speaking with Colum McCann that day, the penny finally dropped. 
+"" All experience is local, "" he said. 
+"" All identity is experience, "" I thought. 
+"" I'm not a national, "" I proclaimed onstage. 
+"I'm a local. I'm multi-local." 
+See, "" Taiye Selasi comes from the United States, "" isn't the truth. 
+I have no relationship with the United States, all 50 of them, not really. 
+My relationship is with Brookline, the town where I grew up; with New York City, where I started work; with Lawrenceville, where I spend Thanksgiving. 
+What makes America home for me is not my passport or accent, but these very particular experiences and the places they occur. 
+Despite my pride in Ewe culture, the Black Stars, and my love of Ghanaian food, I've never had a relationship with the Republic of Ghana, writ large. 
+My relationship is with Accra, where my mother lives, where I go each year, with the little garden in Dzorwulu where my father and I talk for hours. 
+These are the places that shape my experience. 
+My experience is where I'm from. 
+What if we asked, instead of "" Where are you from? "" — "Where are you a local?" 
+Tell me you're from France, and I see what, a set of clichés? 
+Tell me you're a local of Fez and Paris, better yet, Goutte d'Or, and I see a set of experiences. 
+Our experience is where we're from. 
+So, where are you a local? 
+I propose a three-step test. 
+I call these the three "" R ’ s "": rituals, relationships, restrictions. 
+First, think of your daily rituals, whatever they may be: making your coffee, driving to work, harvesting your crops, saying your prayers. 
+What kind of rituals are these? 
+Where do they occur? 
+In what city or cities in the world do shopkeepers know your face? 
+As a child, I carried out fairly standard suburban rituals in Boston, with adjustments made for the rituals my mother brought from London and Lagos. 
+We took off our shoes in the house, we were unfailingly polite with our elders, we ate slow-cooked, spicy food. 
+In snowy North America, ours were rituals of the global South. 
+The first time I went to Delhi or to southern parts of Italy, I was shocked by how at home I felt. 
+"" R "" number one, rituals. 
+Now, think of your relationships, of the people who shape your days. 
+To whom do you speak at least once a week, be it face to face or on FaceTime? 
+Be reasonable in your assessment; I'm not talking about your Facebook friends. 
+I'm speaking of the people who shape your weekly emotional experience. 
+My mother in Accra, my twin sister in Boston, my best friends in New York: these relationships are home for me. 
+"" R "" number two, relationships. 
+We're local where we carry out our rituals and relationships, but how we experience our locality depends in part on our restrictions. 
+By restrictions, I mean, where are you able to live? 
+What passport do you hold? 
+Are you restricted by, say, racism, from feeling fully at home where you live? 
+By civil war, dysfunctional governance, economic inflation, from living in the locality where you had your rituals as a child? 
+This is the least sexy of the R ’ s, less lyric than rituals and relationships, but the question takes us past "" Where are you now? "" to "" Why aren't you there, and why? "" Rituals, relationships, restrictions. 
+Take a piece of paper and put those three words on top of three columns, then try to fill those columns as honestly as you can. 
+A very different picture of your life in local context, of your identity as a set of experiences, may emerge. 
+So let's try it. 
+I have a friend named Olu. 
+He's 35 years old. 
+His parents, born in Nigeria, came to Germany on scholarships. 
+Olu was born in Nuremberg and lived there until age 10. 
+When his family moved to Lagos, he studied in London, then came to Berlin. 
+He loves going to Nigeria — the weather, the food, the friends — but hates the political corruption there. 
+Where is Olu from? 
+I have another friend named Udo. 
+He's also 35 years old. 
+Udo was born in Córdoba, in northwest Argentina, where his grandparents migrated from Germany, what is now Poland, after the war. 
+Udo studied in Buenos Aires, and nine years ago came to Berlin. 
+He loves going to Argentina — the weather, the food, the friends — but hates the economic corruption there. 
+Where is Udo from? 
+With his blonde hair and blue eyes, Udo could pass for German, but holds an Argentinian passport, so needs a visa to live in Berlin. 
+That he's a local of Buenos Aires and Berlin, that has to do with life. 
+Olu, who looks Nigerian, needs a visa to visit Nigeria. 
+He speaks Yoruba with an English accent, and English with a German one. 
+To claim that he's "" not really Nigerian, "" though, denies his experience in Lagos, the rituals he practiced growing up, his relationship with family and friends. 
+Meanwhile, though Lagos is undoubtedly one of his homes, Olu always feels restricted there, not least by the fact that he's gay. 
+Both he and Udo are restricted by the political conditions of their parents' countries, from living where some of their most meaningful rituals and relationships occur. 
+To say Olu is from Nigeria and Udo is from Argentina distracts from their common experience. 
+Of course, when we ask, "" Where are you from? "" we're using a kind of shorthand. 
+It's quicker to say "" Nigeria "" than "" Lagos and Berlin, "" and as with Google Maps, we can always zoom in closer, from country to city to neighborhood. 
+But that's not quite the point. 
+The difference between "" Where are you from? "" and "" Where are you a local? "" isn't the specificity of the answer; it's the intention of the question. 
+Replacing the language of nationality with the language of locality asks us to shift our focus to where real life occurs. 
+Even that most glorious expression of countryhood, the World Cup, gives us national teams comprised mostly of multilocal players. 
+As a unit of measurement for human experience, the country doesn't quite work. 
+That's why Olu says, "" I'm German, but my parents come from Nigeria. "" The "" but "" in that sentence belies the inflexibility of the units, one fixed and fictional entity bumping up against another. 
+"" I'm a local of Lagos and Berlin, "" suggests overlapping experiences, layers that merge together, that can't be denied or removed. 
+You can take away my passport, but you can't take away my experience. 
+That I carry within me. 
+Where I'm from comes wherever I go. 
+To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we do away with countries. 
+There's much to be said for national history, more for the sovereign state. 
+Culture exists in community, and community exists in context. 
+Geography, tradition, collective memory: these things are important. 
+What I'm questioning is primacy. 
+All of those introductions on tour began with reference to nation, as if knowing what country I came from would tell my audience who I was. 
+What are we really seeking, though, when we ask where someone comes from? 
+And what are we really seeing when we hear an answer? 
+Here's one possibility: basically, countries represent power. 
+"" Where are you from? "" Mexico. Poland. Bangladesh. Less power. 
+America. Germany. Japan. More power. 
+China. Russia. Ambiguous. 
+(Laughter) It's possible that without realizing it, we're playing a power game, especially in the context of multi-ethnic countries. 
+As any recent immigrant knows, the question "" Where are you from? "" or "" Where are you really from? "" is often code for "" Why are you here? "" Then we have the scholar William Deresiewicz's writing of elite American colleges. 
+"" Students think that their environment is diverse if one comes from Missouri and another from Pakistan — never mind that all of their parents are doctors or bankers. "" I'm with him. 
+To call one student American, another Pakistani, then triumphantly claim student body diversity ignores the fact that these students are locals of the same milieu. 
+The same holds true on the other end of the economic spectrum. 
+A Mexican gardener in Los Angeles and a Nepali housekeeper in Delhi have more in common in terms of rituals and restrictions than nationality implies. 
+Perhaps my biggest problem with coming from countries is the myth of going back to them. 
+I'm often asked if I plan to "" go back "" to Ghana. 
+I go to Accra every year, but I can't "" go back "" to Ghana. 
+It's not because I wasn't born there. 
+The country in which he was born, that country no longer exists. 
+We can never go back to a place and find it exactly where we left it. 
+Something, somewhere will always have changed, most of all, ourselves. 
+People. 
+Finally, what we're talking about is human experience, this notoriously and gloriously disorderly affair. 
+In creative writing, locality bespeaks humanity. 
+The more we know about where a story is set, the more local color and texture, the more human the characters start to feel, the more relatable, not less. 
+The myth of national identity and the vocabulary of coming from confuses us into placing ourselves into mutually exclusive categories. 
+In fact, all of us are multi — multi-local, multi-layered. 
+To begin our conversations with an acknowledgement of this complexity brings us closer together, I think, not further apart. 
+So the next time that I'm introduced, I'd love to hear the truth: "" Taiye Selasi is a human being, like everybody here. 
+She isn't a citizen of the world, but a citizen of worlds. 
+She is a local of New York, Rome and Accra. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'll begin today by sharing a poem written by my friend from Malawi, Eileen Piri. 
+Eileen is only 13 years old, but when we were going through the collection of poetry that we wrote, I found her poem so interesting, so motivating. 
+So I'll read it to you. 
+She entitled her poem "" I'll Marry When I Want. "" (Laughter) "" I'll marry when I want. 
+My mother can't force me to marry. 
+My father cannot force me to marry. 
+My uncle, my aunt, my brother or sister, cannot force me to marry. 
+No one in the world can force me to marry. 
+I'll marry when I want. 
+Even if you beat me, even if you chase me away, even if you do anything bad to me, I'll marry when I want. 
+I'll marry when I want, but not before I am well educated, and not before I am all grown up. 
+I'll marry when I want. "" This poem might seem odd, written by a 13-year-old girl, but where I and Eileen come from, this poem, which I have just read to you, is a warrior's cry. 
+I am from Malawi. 
+Malawi is one of the poorest countries, very poor, where gender equality is questionable. 
+Growing up in that country, I couldn't make my own choices in life. 
+I couldn't even explore personal opportunities in life. 
+I will tell you a story of two different girls, two beautiful girls. 
+These girls grew up under the same roof. 
+They were eating the same food. 
+Sometimes, they would share clothes, and even shoes. 
+But their lives ended up differently, in two different paths. 
+The other girl is my little sister. 
+My little sister was only 11 years old when she got pregnant. 
+It's a hurtful thing. 
+Not only did it hurt her, even me. 
+I was going through a hard time as well. 
+As it is in my culture, once you reach puberty stage, you are supposed to go to initiation camps. 
+In these initiation camps, you are taught how to sexually please a man. 
+There is this special day, which they call "" Very Special Day "" where a man who is hired by the community comes to the camp and sleeps with the little girls. 
+Imagine the trauma that these young girls go through every day. 
+Most girls end up pregnant. 
+They even contract HIV and AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. 
+For my little sister, she ended up being pregnant. 
+Today, she's only 16 years old and she has three children. 
+Her first marriage did not survive, nor did her second marriage. 
+On the other side, there is this girl. 
+She's amazing. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I call her amazing because she is. 
+She's very fabulous. 
+That girl is me. (Laughter) When I was 13 years old, I was told, you are grown up, you have now reached of age, you're supposed to go to the initiation camp. 
+I was like, "" What? 
+I'm not going to go to the initiation camps. "" You know what the women said to me? 
+"" You are a stupid girl. Stubborn. 
+You do not respect the traditions of our society, of our community. "" I said no because I knew where I was going. 
+I knew what I wanted in life. 
+I had a lot of dreams as a young girl. 
+I wanted to get well educated, to find a decent job in the future. 
+I was imagining myself as a lawyer, seated on that big chair. 
+Those were the imaginations that were going through my mind every day. 
+And I knew that one day, I would contribute something, a little something to my community. 
+But every day after refusing, women would tell me, "" Look at you, you're all grown up. Your little sister has a baby. 
+What about you? "" That was the music that I was hearing every day, and that is the music that girls hear every day when they don't do something that the community needs them to do. 
+When I compared the two stories between me and my sister, I said, "" Why can't I do something? 
+Why can't I change something that has happened for a long time in our community? "" That was when I called other girls just like my sister, who have children, who have been in class but they have forgotten how to read and write. 
+I said, "" Come on, we can remind each other how to read and write again, how to hold the pen, how to read, to hold the book. "" It was a great time I had with them. 
+Nor did I just learn a little about them, but they were able to tell me their personal stories, what they were facing every day as young mothers. 
+That was when I was like, 'Why can't we take all these things that are happening to us and present them and tell our mothers, our traditional leaders, that these are the wrong things? "" It was a scary thing to do, because these traditional leaders, they are already accustomed to the things that have been there for ages. 
+A hard thing to change, but a good thing to try. 
+So we tried. 
+It was very hard, but we pushed. 
+And I'm here to say that in my community, it was the first community after girls pushed so hard to our traditional leader, and our leader stood up for us and said no girl has to be married before the age of 18. 
+(Applause) In my community, that was the first time a community, they had to call the bylaws, the first bylaw that protected girls in our community. 
+We did not stop there. 
+We forged ahead. 
+We were determined to fight for girls not just in my community, but even in other communities. 
+When the child marriage bill was being presented in February, we were there at the Parliament house. 
+Every day, when the members of Parliament were entering, we were telling them, "" Would you please support the bill? "" And we don't have much technology like here, but we have our small phones. 
+So we said, "" Why can't we get their numbers and text them? "" So we did that. It was a good thing. 
+(Applause) So when the bill passed, we texted them back, "Thank you for supporting the bill." 
+(Laughter) And when the bill was signed by the president, making it into law, it was a plus. 
+Now, in Malawi, 18 is the legal marriage age, from 15 to 18. 
+(Applause) It's a good thing to know that the bill passed, but let me tell you this: There are countries where 18 is the legal marriage age, but don't we hear cries of women and girls every day? 
+Every day, girls' lives are being wasted away. 
+This is high time for leaders to honor their commitment. 
+In honoring this commitment, it means keeping girls' issues at heart every time. 
+We don't have to be subjected as second, but they have to know that women, as we are in this room, we are not just women, we are not just girls, we are extraordinary. 
+We can do more. 
+And another thing for Malawi, and not just Malawi but other countries: The laws which are there, you know how a law is not a law until it is enforced? 
+The law which has just recently passed and the laws that in other countries have been there, they need to be publicized at the local level, at the community level, where girls' issues are very striking. 
+Girls face issues, difficult issues, at the community level every day. 
+So if these young girls know that there are laws that protect them, they will be able to stand up and defend themselves because they will know that there is a law that protects them. 
+And another thing I would say is that girls' voices and women's voices are beautiful, they are there, but we cannot do this alone. 
+Male advocates, they have to jump in, to step in and work together. 
+It's a collective work. 
+And furthermore, I know that together, we can transform the legal, the cultural and political framework that denies girls of their rights. 
+I am standing here today and declaring that we can end child marriage in a generation. 
+This is the moment where a girl and a girl, and millions of girls worldwide, will be able to say, "I will marry when I want." 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+A few months ago, a 40 year-old woman came to an emergency room in a hospital close to where I live, and she was brought in confused. 
+Her blood pressure was an alarming 230 over 170. 
+Within a few minutes, she went into cardiac collapse. 
+She was resuscitated, stabilized, whisked over to a CAT scan suite right next to the emergency room, because they were concerned about blood clots in the lung. 
+And the CAT scan revealed no blood clots in the lung, but it showed bilateral, visible, palpable breast masses, breast tumors, that had metastasized widely all over the body. 
+And the real tragedy was, if you look through her records, she had been seen in four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years. 
+Four or five opportunities to see the breast masses, touch the breast mass, intervene at a much earlier stage than when we saw her. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, that is not an unusual story. 
+Unfortunately, it happens all the time. 
+I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI or orthopedic consult. 
+I am not a Luddite. 
+I teach at Stanford. 
+I'm a physician practicing with cutting-edge technology. 
+But I'd like to make the case to you in the next 17 minutes that when we shortcut the physical exam, when we lean towards ordering tests instead of talking to and examining the patient, we not only overlook simple diagnoses that can be diagnosed at a treatable, early stage, but we're losing much more than that. 
+We're losing a ritual. 
+We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship. 
+This may actually be heresy to say this at TED, but I'd like to introduce you to the most important innovation, I think, in medicine to come in the next 10 years, and that is the power of the human hand — to touch, to comfort, to diagnose and to bring about treatment. 
+I'd like to introduce you first to this person whose image you may or may not recognize. 
+This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 
+Since we're in Edinburgh, I'm a big fan of Conan Doyle. 
+You might not know that Conan Doyle went to medical school here in Edinburgh, and his character, Sherlock Holmes, was inspired by Sir Joseph Bell. 
+Joseph Bell was an extraordinary teacher by all accounts. 
+And Conan Doyle, writing about Bell, described the following exchange between Bell and his students. 
+So picture Bell sitting in the outpatient department, students all around him, patients signing up in the emergency room and being registered and being brought in. 
+And a woman comes in with a child, and Conan Doyle describes the following exchange. 
+The woman says, "" Good Morning. "" Bell says, "" What sort of crossing did you have on the ferry from Burntisland? "" She says, "" It was good. "" And he says, "" What did you do with the other child? "" She says, "" I left him with my sister at Leith. "" And he says, "" And did you take the shortcut down Inverleith Row to get here to the infirmary? "" She says, "" I did. "" And he says, "" Would you still be working at the linoleum factory? "" And she says, "" I am. "" And Bell then goes on to explain to the students. 
+He says, "" You see, when she said, 'Good morning,' I picked up her Fife accent. 
+And the nearest ferry crossing from Fife is from Burntisland. 
+And so she must have taken the ferry over. 
+You notice that the coat she's carrying is too small for the child who is with her, and therefore, she started out the journey with two children, but dropped one off along the way. 
+You notice the clay on the soles of her feet. 
+Such red clay is not found within a hundred miles of Edinburgh, except in the botanical gardens. 
+And therefore, she took a short cut down Inverleith Row to arrive here. 
+And finally, she has a dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand, a dermatitis that is unique to the linoleum factory workers in Burntisland. "" And when Bell actually strips the patient, begins to examine the patient, you can only imagine how much more he would discern. 
+And as a teacher of medicine, as a student myself, I was so inspired by that story. 
+But you might not realize that our ability to look into the body in this simple way, using our senses, is quite recent. 
+The picture I'm showing you is of Leopold Auenbrugger who, in the late 1700s, discovered percussion. 
+And the story is that Leopold Auenbrugger was the son of an innkeeper. 
+And his father used to go down into the basement to tap on the sides of casks of wine to determine how much wine was left and whether to reorder. 
+And so when Auenbrugger became a physician, he began to do the same thing. 
+He began to tap on the chests of his patients, on their abdomens. 
+And basically everything we know about percussion, which you can think of as an ultrasound of its day — organ enlargement, fluid around the heart, fluid in the lungs, abdominal changes — all of this he described in this wonderful manuscript "Inventum Novum," "New Invention," which would have disappeared into obscurity, except for the fact that this physician, Corvisart, a famous French physician — famous only because he was physician to this gentleman — Corvisart repopularized and reintroduced the work. 
+And it was followed a year or two later by Laennec discovering the stethoscope. 
+Laennec, it is said, was walking in the streets of Paris and saw two children playing with a stick. 
+One was scratching at the end of the stick, another child listened at the other end. 
+And Laennec thought this would be a wonderful way to listen to the chest or listen to the abdomen using what he called "" the cylinder. "" Later he renamed it the stethoscope. 
+And that is how stethoscope and auscultation was born. 
+So within a few years, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, all of a sudden, the barber surgeon had given way to the physician who was trying to make a diagnosis. 
+If you'll recall, prior to that time, no matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. 
+And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut — short on the sides, long in the back — and pull your tooth while he was at it. 
+He made no attempt at diagnosis. 
+In fact, some of you might well know that the barber pole, the red and white stripes, represents the blood bandages of the barber surgeon, and the receptacles on either end represent the pots in which the blood was collected. 
+But the arrival of auscultation and percussion represented a sea change, a moment when physicians were beginning to look inside the body. 
+And this particular painting, I think, represents the pinnacle, the peak, of that clinical era. 
+This is a very famous painting: "" The Doctor "" by Luke Fildes. 
+Luke Fildes was commissioned to paint this by Tate, who then established the Tate Gallery. 
+And Tate asked Fildes to paint a painting of social importance. 
+And it's interesting that Fildes picked this topic. 
+Fildes' oldest son, Philip, died at the age of nine on Christmas Eve after a brief illness. 
+And Fildes was so taken by the physician who held vigil at the bedside for two, three nights, that he decided that he would try and depict the physician in our time — almost a tribute to this physician. 
+And hence the painting "" The Doctor, "" a very famous painting. 
+It's been on calendars, postage stamps in many different countries. 
+I've often wondered, what would Fildes have done had he been asked to paint this painting in the modern era, in the year 2011? 
+Would he have substituted a computer screen for where he had the patient? 
+I've gotten into some trouble in Silicon Valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon for the real patient who's in the computer. 
+I've actually coined a term for that entity in the computer. 
+I call it the iPatient. 
+The iPatient is getting wonderful care all across America. 
+The real patient often wonders, where is everyone? 
+When are they going to come by and explain things to me? 
+Who's in charge? 
+There's a real disjunction between the patient's perception and our own perceptions as physicians of the best medical care. 
+I want to show you a picture of what rounds looked like when I was in training. 
+The focus was around the patient. 
+We went from bed to bed. The attending physician was in charge. 
+Too often these days, rounds look very much like this, where the discussion is taking place in a room far away from the patient. 
+The discussion is all about images on the computer, data. 
+And the one critical piece missing is that of the patient. 
+Now I've been influenced in this thinking by two anecdotes that I want to share with you. 
+One had to do with a friend of mine who had a breast cancer, had a small breast cancer detected — had her lumpectomy in the town in which I lived. 
+This is when I was in Texas. 
+And she then spent a lot of time researching to find the best cancer center in the world to get her subsequent care. 
+And she found the place and decided to go there, went there. 
+Which is why I was surprised a few months later to see her back in our own town, getting her subsequent care with her private oncologist. 
+And I pressed her, and I asked her, "Why did you come back and get your care here?" 
+And she was reluctant to tell me. 
+She said, "" The cancer center was wonderful. 
+It had a beautiful facility, giant atrium, valet parking, a piano that played itself, a concierge that took you around from here to there. 
+But, "" she said, "but they did not touch my breasts." 
+Now you and I could argue that they probably did not need to touch her breasts. 
+They had her scanned inside out. 
+They understood her breast cancer at the molecular level; they had no need to touch her breasts. 
+But to her, it mattered deeply. 
+It was enough for her to make the decision to get her subsequent care with her private oncologist who, every time she went, examined both breasts including the axillary tail, examined her axilla carefully, examined her cervical region, her inguinal region, did a thorough exam. 
+And to her, that spoke of a kind of attentiveness that she needed. 
+I was very influenced by that anecdote. 
+I was also influenced by another experience that I had, again, when I was in Texas, before I moved to Stanford. 
+I had a reputation as being interested in patients with chronic fatigue. 
+This is not a reputation you would wish on your worst enemy. 
+I say that because these are difficult patients. 
+They have often been rejected by their families, have had bad experiences with medical care and they come to you fully prepared for you to join the long list of people who's about to disappoint them. 
+And I learned very early on with my first patient that I could not do justice to this very complicated patient with all the records they were bringing in a new patient visit of 45 minutes. 
+There was just no way. 
+And if I tried, I'd disappoint them. 
+And so I hit on this method where I invited the patient to tell me the story for their entire first visit, and I tried not to interrupt them. 
+We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds. 
+And if I ever get to heaven, it will be because I held my piece for 45 minutes and did not interrupt my patient. 
+I then scheduled the physical exam for two weeks hence, and when the patient came for the physical, I was able to do a thorough physical, because I had nothing else to do. 
+I like to think that I do a thorough physical exam, but because the whole visit was now about the physical, I could do an extraordinarily thorough exam. 
+And I remember my very first patient in that series continued to tell me more history during what was meant to be the physical exam visit. 
+And I began my ritual. 
+I always begin with the pulse, then I examine the hands, then I look at the nail beds, then I slide my hand up to the epitrochlear node, and I was into my ritual. 
+And when my ritual began, this very voluble patient began to quiet down. 
+And I remember having a very eerie sense that the patient and I had slipped back into a primitive ritual in which I had a role and the patient had a role. 
+And when I was done, the patient said to me with some awe, "I have never been examined like this before." 
+Now if that were true, it's a true condemnation of our health care system, because they had been seen in other places. 
+I then proceeded to tell the patient, once the patient was dressed, the standard things that the person must have heard in other institutions, which is, "" This is not in your head. 
+This is real. 
+The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection. 
+The bad news is we don't know exactly what's causing this, but here's what you should do, here's what we should do. "" And I would lay out all the standard treatment options that the patient had heard elsewhere. 
+And I always felt that if my patient gave up the quest for the magic doctor, the magic treatment and began with me on a course towards wellness, it was because I had earned the right to tell them these things by virtue of the examination. 
+Something of importance had transpired in the exchange. 
+I took this to my colleagues at Stanford in anthropology and told them the same story. 
+And they immediately said to me, "Well you are describing a classic ritual." 
+And they helped me understand that rituals are all about transformation. 
+We marry, for example, with great pomp and ceremony and expense to signal our departure from a life of solitude and misery and loneliness to one of eternal bliss. 
+I'm not sure why you're laughing. 
+That was the original intent, was it not? 
+We signal transitions of power with rituals. 
+We signal the passage of a life with rituals. 
+Rituals are terribly important. 
+They're all about transformation. 
+Well I would submit to you that the ritual of one individual coming to another and telling them things that they would not tell their preacher or rabbi, and then, incredibly on top of that, disrobing and allowing touch — I would submit to you that that is a ritual of exceeding importance. 
+And if you shortchange that ritual by not undressing the patient, by listening with your stethoscope on top of the nightgown, by not doing a complete exam, you have bypassed on the opportunity to seal the patient-physician relationship. 
+I am a writer, and I want to close by reading you a short passage that I wrote that has to do very much with this scene. 
+I'm an infectious disease physician, and in the early days of HIV, before we had our medications, I presided over so many scenes like this. 
+I remember, every time I went to a patient's deathbed, whether in the hospital or at home, I remember my sense of failure — the feeling of I don't know what I have to say; I don't know what I can say; I don't know what I'm supposed to do. 
+And out of that sense of failure, I remember, I would always examine the patient. 
+I would pull down the eyelids. 
+I would look at the tongue. 
+I would percuss the chest. I would listen to the heart. 
+I would feel the abdomen. 
+I remember so many patients, their names still vivid on my tongue, their faces still so clear. 
+I remember so many huge, hollowed out, haunted eyes staring up at me as I performed this ritual. 
+And then the next day, I would come, and I would do it again. 
+And I wanted to read you this one closing passage about one patient. 
+"" I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin, unable to speak, his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications. 
+When he saw me on what turned out to be his last hours on this earth, his hands moved as if in slow motion. 
+And as I wondered what he was up to, his stick fingers made their way up to his pajama shirt, fumbling with his buttons. 
+I realized that he was wanting to expose his wicker-basket chest to me. 
+It was an offering, an invitation. 
+I did not decline. 
+I percussed. I palpated. I listened to the chest. 
+I think he surely must have known by then that it was vital for me just as it was necessary for him. 
+Neither of us could skip this ritual, which had nothing to do with detecting rales in the lung, or finding the gallop rhythm of heart failure. 
+No, this ritual was about the one message that physicians have needed to convey to their patients. 
+Although, God knows, of late, in our hubris, we seem to have drifted away. 
+We seem to have forgotten — as though, with the explosion of knowledge, the whole human genome mapped out at our feet, we are lulled into inattention, forgetting that the ritual is cathartic to the physician, necessary for the patient — forgetting that the ritual has meaning and a singular message to convey to the patient. 
+And the message, which I didn't fully understand then, even as I delivered it, and which I understand better now is this: I will always, always, always be there. 
+I will see you through this. 
+I will never abandon you. 
+I will be with you through the end. "" Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hello. I would like to start my talk with actually two questions, and the first one is: How many people here actually eat pig meat? 
+Please raise your hand — oh, that's a lot. 
+And how many people have actually seen a live pig producing this meat? 
+In the last year? 
+In the Netherlands — where I come from — you actually never see a pig, which is really strange, because, on a population of 16 million people, we have 12 million pigs. 
+And well, of course, the Dutch can't eat all these pigs. 
+They eat about one-third, and the rest is exported to all kinds of countries in Europe and the rest of the world. 
+A lot goes to the U.K., Germany. 
+And what I was curious about — because historically, the whole pig would be used up until the last bit so nothing would be wasted — and I was curious to find out if this was actually still the case. 
+And I spent about three years researching. 
+And I followed this one pig with number "" 05049, "" all the way up until the end and to what products it's made of. 
+And in these years, I met all kinds people like, for instance, farmers and butchers, which seems logical. 
+But I also met aluminum mold makers, ammunition producers and all kinds of people. 
+And what was striking to me is that the farmers actually had no clue what was made of their pigs, but the consumers — as in us — had also no idea of the pigs being in all these products. 
+So what I did is, I took all this research and I made it into a — well, basically it's a product catalog of this one pig, and it carries a duplicate of his ear tag on the back. 
+And it consists of seven chapters — the chapters are skin, bones, meat, internal organs, blood, fat and miscellaneous. 
+(Laughter) In total, they weigh 103.7 kilograms. 
+And to show you how often you actually meet part of this pig in a regular day, I want to show you some images of the book. 
+You probably start the day with a shower. 
+So, in soap, fatty acids made from boiling pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent, but also for giving it a pearl-like effect. 
+Then if you look around you in the bathroom, you see lots more products like shampoo, conditioner, anti-wrinkle cream, body lotion, but also toothpaste. 
+Then, so, before breakfast, you've already met the pig so many times. 
+Then, at breakfast, the pig that I followed, the hairs off the pig or proteins from the hairs off the pig were used as an improver of dough. 
+(Laughter) Well, that's what the producer says: it's "" improving the dough, of course. "" In low-fat butter, or actually in many low-fat products, when you take the fat out, you actually take the taste and the texture out. 
+So what they do is they put gelatin back in, in order to retain the texture. 
+Well, when you're off to work, under the road or under the buildings that you see, there might very well be cellular concrete, which is a very light kind of concrete that's actually got proteins from bones inside and it's also fully reusable. 
+In the train brakes — at least in the German train brakes — there's this part of the brake that's made of bone ash. 
+And in cheesecake and all kinds of desserts, like chocolate mousse, tiramisu, vanilla pudding, everything that's cooled in the supermarket, there's gelatin to make it look good. 
+Fine bone china — this is a real classic. 
+Of course, the bone in fine-bone china gives it its translucency and also its strength, in order to make these really fine shapes, like this deer. 
+In interior decorating, the pig's actually quite there. 
+It's used in paint for the texture, but also for the glossiness. 
+In sandpaper, bone glue is actually the glue between the sand and the paper. 
+And then in paintbrushes, hairs are used because, apparently, they're very suitable for making paintbrushes because of their hard-wearing nature. 
+I was not planning on showing you any meat because, of course, half the book's meat and you probably all know what meats they are. 
+But I didn't want you to miss out on this one, because this, well, it's called "" portion-controlled meat cuts. "" And this is actually sold in the frozen area of the supermarket. 
+And what it is — it's actually steak. 
+So, this is sold as cow, but what happens when you slaughter a cow — at least in industrial factory farming — they have all these little bits of steak left that they can't actually sell as steak, so what they do is they glue them all together with fibrin from pig blood into this really large sausage, then freeze the sausage, cut it in little slices and sell those as steak again. 
+And this also actually happens with tuna and scallops. 
+So, with the steak, you might drink a beer. 
+In the brewing process, there's lots of cloudy elements in the beer, so to get rid of these cloudy elements, what some companies do is they pour the beer through a sort of gelatin sieve in order to get rid of that cloudiness. 
+This actually also goes for wine as well as fruit juice. 
+There's actually a company in Greece that produces these cigarettes that actually contain hemoglobin from pigs in the filter. 
+And according to them, this creates an artificial lung in the filter. 
+(Laughter) So, this is actually a healthier cigarette. (Laughter) 
+Injectable collagen — or, since the '70s, collagen from pigs — has been used for injecting into wrinkles. 
+And the reason for this is that pigs are actually quite close to human beings, so the collagen is as well. 
+Well, this must be the strangest thing I found. 
+This is a bullet coming from a very large ammunition company in the United States. 
+And while I was making the book, I contacted all the producers of products because I wanted them to send me the real samples and the real specimens. 
+So I sent this company an email saying, "" Hello. I'm Christien. I'm doing this research. 
+And can you send me a bullet? "" (Laughter) And well, I didn't expect them to even answer my email. 
+But they answered and they said, "" Why, thank you for your email. What an interesting story. 
+Are you in anyway related to the Dutch government? "" I thought that was really weird, as if the Dutch government sends emails to anyone. 
+(Laughter) So, the most beautiful thing I found — at least what I think is the most beautiful — in the book, is this heart valve. 
+It's actually a very low-tech and very high-tech product at the same time. 
+The low-tech bit is that it's literally a pig's heart valve mounted in the high-tech bit, which is a memory metal casing. 
+And what happens is this can be implanted into a human heart without open heart surgery. 
+And once it's in the right spot, they remove the outer shell, and the heart valve, well, it gets this shape and at that moment it starts beating, instantly. 
+It's really a sort of magical moment. 
+So this is actually a Dutch company, so I called them up, and I asked, "Can I borrow a heart valve from you?" 
+And the makers of this thing were really enthusiastic. 
+So they were like, "" Okay, we'll put it in a jar for you with formalin, and you can borrow it. "" Great — and then I didn't hear from them for weeks, so I called, and I asked, "" What's going on with the heart valve? "" And they said, "" Well the director of the company decided not to let you borrow this heart valve, because want his product to be associated with pigs. "" (Laughter) Well, the last product from the book that I'm showing you is renewable energy — actually, to show that my first question, if pigs are still used up until the last bit, was still true. 
+Well it is, because everything that can't be used for anything else is made into a fuel that can be used as renewable energy source. 
+In total, I found 185 products. 
+And what they showed me is that, well, firstly, it's at least to say odd that we don't treat these pigs as absolute kings and queens. 
+And the second, is that we actually don't have a clue of what all these products that surround us are made of. 
+And you might think I'm very fond of pigs, but actually — well, I am a little bit — but I'm more fond of raw materials in general. 
+And I think that, in order to take better care of what's behind our products — so, the livestock, the crops, the plants, the non-renewable materials, but also the people that produce these products — the first step would actually be to know that they are there. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+But for myself, in the past, I've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way: picking pockets. 
+When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side, when actually the things right in front of us are often the hardest to see, the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to. 
+For example, how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now? 
+Great. Double-check. 
+Make sure you still have them. 
+No matter how you organize the icons, you still have a clock on the front. 
+So, without looking at your phone, what time was it? 
+Now, you've been watching me for about 30 seconds. 
+Make your best guess. 
+What color is my shirt? What color is my tie? 
+Show of hands, were you right? 
+For me, I like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. 
+It's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. 
+He's got lots of cool information in front of him, high-tech equipment, he's got cameras, he's got a little phone that he can pick up, listen to the ears, all these senses, all these perceptions. 
+But attention is what steers your perceptions, it's what controls your reality. 
+If you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. 
+But ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it. 
+For example, the cocktail effect: You're in a party, having conversations with someone, and yet you can recognize your name without realizing you were listening to that. 
+So if I could control how you spend your attention, if I could maybe steal your attention through a distraction. 
+Now, instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side, instead, what I choose to focus on is Frank, to be able to play with the Frank inside your head, your security guard, and get you, instead of focusing on your external senses, just to go internal for a second. 
+So if I ask you to access a memory, like, what is that? 
+What just happened? Do you have a wallet? 
+He accesses the file. He has to rewind the tape. 
+Wonderful job onstage. 
+(Applause) AR: Pardon me. 
+I don't think I need this clicker anymore. 
+Thank you very much. I appreciate that. 
+Come on up to the stage, Joe. Let's play a little game now. 
+I'll cheat if you give me a chance. 
+Grab my wrist, but squeeze, squeeze firm. 
+Now, let's try that again. 
+Hold your hand out flat. Open it up. 
+(Laughter) Joe, we're going to keep doing this till you catch it. 
+Yet you had something inside your pocket. 
+(Laughter) Oh, there it was. Put it away. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) J: That's pretty good. AR: Oh, thanks. (Applause) 
+Hold your hands together. Your other hand on top. 
+It falls out of the air, lands right back in the hand. 
+Don't reach in your pocket. That's a different show. 
+I have no idea how that works. We'll send that over there. 
+J: Yeah. I'm saving it for later. 
+AR: You've entertained all of these people in a wonderful way, better than you know. 
+(Laughter) (Hesitant applause) (Applause ends) Attention is a powerful thing. 
+Like I said, it shapes your reality. 
+If you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it? 
+
+One out of two of you women will be impacted by cardiovascular disease in your lifetime. 
+So this is the leading killer of women. 
+It's a closely held secret for reasons I don't know. 
+In addition to making this personal — so we're going to talk about your relationship with your heart and all women's relationship with their heart — we're going to wax into the politics. 
+Because the personal, as you know, is political. 
+And not enough is being done about this. 
+And as we have watched women conquer breast cancer through the breast cancer campaign, this is what we need to do now with heart. 
+Since 1984, more women die in the U.S. than men. 
+So where we used to think of heart disease as being a man's problem primarily — which that was never true, but that was kind of how everybody thought in the 1950s and '60s, and it was in all the textbooks. 
+It's certainly what I learned when I was training. 
+If we were to remain sexist, and that was not right, but if we were going to go forward and be sexist, it's actually a woman's disease. 
+So it's a woman's disease now. 
+And one of the things that you see is that male line, the mortality is going down, down, down, down, down. 
+And you see the female line since 1984, the gap is widening. 
+More and more women, two, three, four times more women, dying of heart disease than men. 
+And that's too short of a time period for all the different risk factors that we know to change. 
+So what this really suggested to us at the national level was that diagnostic and therapeutic strategies, which had been developed in men, by men, for men for the last 50 years — and they work pretty well in men, don't they? — weren't working so well for women. 
+So that was a big wake-up call in the 1980's. 
+Heart disease kills more women at all ages than breast cancer. 
+And the breast cancer campaign — again, this is not a competition. 
+We're trying to be as good as the breast cancer campaign. 
+We need to be as good as the breast cancer campaign to address this crisis. 
+Now sometimes when people see this, I hear this gasp. 
+We can all think of someone, often a young woman, who has been impacted by breast cancer. 
+We often can't think of a young woman who has heart disease. 
+I'm going to tell you why. 
+Heart disease kills people, often very quickly. 
+So the first time heart disease strikes in women and men, half of the time it's sudden cardiac death — no opportunity to say good-bye, no opportunity to take her to the chemotherapy, no opportunity to help her pick out a wig. 
+Breast cancer, mortality is down to four percent. 
+And that is the 40 years that women have advocated. 
+Betty Ford, Nancy Reagan stood up and said, "" I'm a breast cancer survivor, "" and it was okay to talk about it. 
+And then physicians have gone to bat. 
+We've done the research. 
+We have effective therapies now. 
+Women are living longer than ever. 
+That has to happen in heart disease, and it's time. 
+It's not happening, and it's time. 
+We owe an incredible debt of gratitude to these two women. 
+As Barbara depicted in one of her amazing movies, "" Yentl, "" she portrayed a young woman who wanted an education. 
+And she wanted to study the Talmud. 
+And so how did she get educated then? 
+She had to impersonate a man. 
+She had to look like a man. 
+She had to make other people believe that she looked like a man and she could have the same rights that the men had. 
+Bernadine Healy, Dr. Healy, was a cardiologist. 
+And right around that time, in the 1980's, that we saw women and heart disease deaths going up, up, up, up, up, she wrote an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine and said, the Yentl syndrome. 
+Women are dying of heart disease, two, three, four times more than men. 
+Mortality is not going down, it's going up. 
+And she questioned, she hypothesized, is this a Yentl syndrome? 
+And here's what the story is. 
+Is it because women don't look like men, they don't look like that male-pattern heart disease that we've spent the last 50 years understanding and getting really good diagnostics and really good therapeutics, and therefore, they're not recognized for their heart disease. 
+And they're just passed. 
+They don't get treated, they don't get detected, they don't get the benefit of all the modern medicines. 
+Doctor Healy then subsequently became the first female director of our National Institutes of Health. 
+And this is the biggest biomedical enterprise research in the world. 
+And it funds a lot of my research. 
+It funds research all over the place. 
+It was a very big deal for her to become director. 
+And she started, in the face of a lot of controversy, the Women's Health Initiative. 
+And every woman in the room here has benefited from that Women's Health Initiative. 
+It told us about hormone replacement therapy. 
+It's informed us about osteoporosis. 
+It informed us about breast cancer, colon cancer in women. 
+So a tremendous fund of knowledge despite, again, that so many people told her not to do it, it was too expensive. 
+And the under-reading was women aren't worth it. 
+She was like, "" Nope. Sorry. Women are worth it. "" Well there was a little piece of that Women's Health Initiative that went to National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which is the cardiology part of the NIH. 
+And we got to do the WISE study — and the WISE stands for Women's Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation — and I have chaired this study for the last 15 years. 
+It was a study to specifically ask, what's going on with women? 
+Why are more and more women dying of ischemic heart disease? 
+So in the WISE, 15 years ago, we started out and said, "" Well wow, there's a couple of key observations and we should probably follow up on that. "" And our colleagues in Washington, D.C. 
+had recently published that when women have heart attacks and die, compared to men who have heart attacks and die — and again, this is millions of people, happening every day — women, in their fatty plaque — and this is their coronary artery, so the main blood supply going into the heart muscle — women erode, men explode. 
+You're going to find some interesting analogies in this physiology. 
+(Laughter) So I'll describe the male-pattern heart attack first. 
+Hollywood heart attack. Ughhhh. 
+Horrible chest pain. 
+EKG goes pbbrrhh, so the doctors can see this hugely abnormal EKG. 
+There's a big clot in the middle of the artery. 
+And they go up to the cath lab and boom, boom, boom get rid of the clot. 
+That's a man heart attack. 
+Some women have those heart attacks, but a whole bunch of women have this kind of heart attack, where it erodes, doesn't completely fill with clot, symptoms are subtle, EKG findings are different — female-pattern. 
+So what do you think happens to these gals? 
+They're often not recognized, sent home. 
+I'm not sure what it was. Might have been gas. 
+So we picked up on that and we said, "" You know, we now have the ability to look inside human beings with these special catheters called IVUS: intravascular ultrasound. "" And we said, "" We're going to hypothesize that the fatty plaque in women is actually probably different, and deposited differently, than men. "" And because of the common knowledge of how women and men get fat. 
+When we watch people become obese, where do men get fat? 
+Right here, it's just a focal — right there. 
+Where do women get fat? 
+All over. 
+Cellulite here, cellulite here. 
+So we said, "" Look, women look like they're pretty good about putting kind of the garbage away, smoothly putting it away. 
+Men just have to dump it in a single area. "" So we said, "" Let's look at these. "" And so the yellow is the fatty plaque, and panel A is a man. 
+And you can see, it's lumpy bumpy. 
+He's got a beer belly in his coronary arteries. 
+Panel B is the woman, very smooth. 
+She's just laid it down nice and tidy. 
+(Laughter) And if you did that angiogram, which is the red, you can see the man's disease. 
+So 50 years of honing and crafting these angiograms, we easily recognize male-pattern disease. 
+Kind of hard to see that female-pattern disease. 
+So that was a discovery. 
+Now what are the implications of that? 
+Well once again, women get the angiogram and nobody can tell that they have a problem. 
+So we are working now on a non-invasive — again, these are all invasive studies. 
+Ideally you would love to do all this non-invasively. 
+And again, 50 years of good non-invasive stress testing, we're pretty good at recognizing male-pattern disease with stress tests. 
+So this is cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. 
+We're doing this at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in the Women's Heart Center. 
+We selected this for the research. 
+This is not in your community hospital, but we would hope to translate this. 
+And we're about two and a half years into a five-year study. 
+This was the only modality that can see the inner lining of the heart. 
+And if you look carefully, you can see that there's a black blush right there. 
+And that is microvascular obstruction. 
+The syndrome, the female-pattern now is called microvascular coronary dysfunction, or obstruction. 
+The second reason we really liked MRI is that there's no radiation. 
+So unlike the CAT scans, X-rays, thalliums, for women whose breast is in the way of looking at the heart, every time we order something that has even a small amount of radiation, we say, "" Do we really need that test? "" So we're very excited about M.R. 
+You can't go and order it yet, but this is an area of active inquiry where actually studying women is going to advance the field for women and men. 
+What are the downstream consequences then, when female-pattern heart disease is not recognized? 
+This is a figure from an editorial that I published in the European Heart Journal this last summer. 
+And it was just a pictogram to sort of show why more women are dying of heart disease, despite these good treatments that we know and we have work. 
+And when the woman has male-pattern disease — so she looks like Barbara in the movie — they get treated. 
+And when you have female-pattern and you look like a woman, as Barbara does here with her husband, they don't get the treatment. 
+These are our life-saving treatments. 
+And those little red boxes are deaths. 
+So those are the consequences. 
+And that is female-pattern and why we think the Yentl syndrome actually is explaining a lot of these gaps. 
+There's been wonderful news also about studying women, finally, in heart disease. 
+And one of the the cutting-edge areas that we're just incredibly excited about is stem cell therapy. 
+If you ask, what is the big difference between women and men physiologically? 
+Why are there women and men? 
+Because women bring new life into the world. 
+That's all stem cells. 
+So we hypothesized that female stem cells might be better at identifying the injury, doing some cellular repair or even producing new organs, which is one of the things that we're trying to do with stem cell therapy. 
+These are female and male stem cells. 
+And if you had an injured organ, if you had a heart attack and we wanted to repair that injured area, do you want those robust, plentiful stem cells on the top? 
+Or do you want these guys, that look like they're out to lunch? 
+(Laughter) And some of our investigative teams have demonstrated that female stem cells — and this is in animals and increasingly we're showing this in humans — that female stem cells, when put even into a male body, do better than male stem cells going into a male body. 
+One of the things that we say about all of this female physiology — because again, as much as we're talking about women and heart disease, women do, on average, have better longevity than men — is that unfolding the secrets of female physiology and understanding that is going to help men and women. 
+So this is not a zero-sum game in anyway. 
+Okay, so here's where we started. 
+And remember, paths crossed in 1984, and more and more women were dying of cardiovascular disease. 
+What has happened in the last 15 years with this work? 
+We are bending the curve. 
+We're bending the curve. 
+So just like the breast cancer story, doing research, getting awareness going, it works, you just have to get it going. 
+Now are we happy with this? 
+We still have two to three more women dying for every man. 
+And I would propose, with the better longevity that women have overall, that women probably should theoretically do better, if we could just get treated. 
+So this is where we are, but we have a long row to hoe. 
+We've worked on this for 15 years. 
+And I've told you, we've been working on male-pattern heart disease for 50 years. 
+So we're 35 years behind. 
+And we'd like to think it's not going to take 35 years. 
+And in fact, it probably won't. 
+But we cannot stop now. 
+Too many lives are at stake. 
+So what do we need to do? 
+You now, hopefully, have a more personal relationship with your heart. 
+Women have heard the call for breast cancer and they have come out for awareness campaigns. 
+The women are very good about getting mammograms now. 
+And women do fundraising. 
+Women participate. 
+They have put their money where their mouth is and they have done advocacy and they have joined campaigns. 
+This is what we need to do with heart disease now. 
+And it's political. 
+Women's health, from a federal funding standpoint, sometimes it's popular, sometimes it's not so popular. 
+So we have these feast and famine cycles. 
+So I implore you to join the Red Dress Campaign in this fundraising. 
+Breast cancer, as we said, kills women, but heart disease kills a whole bunch more. 
+So if we can be as good as breast cancer and give women this new charge, we have a lot of lives to save. 
+So thank you for your attention. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I think it was in my second grade that I was caught drawing the bust of a nude by Michelangelo. 
+I was sent straight away to my school principal, and my school principal, a sweet nun, looked at my book with disgust, flipped through the pages, saw all the nudes — you know, I'd been seeing my mother draw nudes and I'd copy her — and the nun slapped me on my face and said, "Sweet Jesus, this kid has already begun." 
+I had no clue what she was talking about, but it was convincing enough for me never to draw again until the ninth grade. 
+Thanks to a really boring lecture, I started caricaturing my teachers in school. 
+And, you know, I got a lot of popularity. 
+I don't play sports. I'm really bad at sports. 
+I don't have the fanciest gadgets at home. 
+I'm not on top of the class. 
+So for me, cartooning gave me a sense of identity. 
+I got popular, but I was scared I'd get caught again. 
+So what I did was I quickly put together a collage of all the teachers I had drawn, glorified my school principal, put him right on top, and gifted it to him. 
+He had a good laugh at the other teachers and put it up on the notice board. 
+(Laughter) This is a part of that. 
+And I became a school hero. 
+All my seniors knew me. I felt really special. 
+I have to tell you a little bit about my family. 
+That's my mother. I love her to bits. 
+She's the one who taught me how to draw and, more importantly, how to love. 
+She's a bit of a hippie. 
+She said, "" Don't say that, "" but I'm saying it anyway. 
+The rest of my family are boring academics, busy collecting Ivy League decals for our classic Ambassador car. 
+My father's a little different. 
+My father believed in a holistic approach to living, and, you know, every time he taught us, he'd say, "" I hate these books, because these books are hijacked by Industrial Revolution. "" While he still held that worldview, I was 16, I got the best lawyer in town, my older brother Karthik, and I sat him down, and I said, "" Pa, from today onwards I've decided I'm going to be disciplined, I'm going to be curious, I'm going to learn something new every day, I'm going to be very hard working, and I'm not going to depend on you emotionally or financially. "" 
+And he was very impressed. He was all tearing up. Ready to hug me. 
+And I said, "" Hold that thought. "" I said, "" Can I quit school then? "" But, to cut a long story short, I quit school to pursue a career as a cartoonist. 
+I must have done about 30,000 caricatures. 
+I would do birthday parties, weddings, divorces, anything for anyone who wanted to use my services. 
+But, most importantly, while I was traveling, I taught children cartooning, and in exchange, I learned how to be spontaneous. 
+And mad and crazy and fun. 
+When I started teaching them, I said let me start doing this professionally. 
+When I was 18 I started my own school. 
+However, an 18 year-old trying to start a school is not easy unless you have a big patron or a big supporter. 
+So I was flipping through the pages of the Times of India when I saw that the Prime Minister of India was visiting my home town, Bangalore. 
+And, you know, just like how every cartoonist knows Bush here, and if you had to meet Bush, it would be the funnest thing because his face was a cartoonist's delight. 
+I had to meet my Prime Minister. 
+I went to the place where his helicopter was about to land. 
+I saw layers of security. 
+I caricatured my way through three layers by just impressing the guards, but I got stuck. I got stuck at the third. 
+And what happened was, to my luck, I saw a nuclear scientist at whose party I had done cartoons. 
+I ran up to him, and said, "" Hello, sir. How do you do? "" He said, "" What are you doing here, Raghava? "" I said, "" I'm here to meet the Prime Minister. "" He said, "" Oh, so am I. "" I hopped into his car, and off we went through the remaining layers of security. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+I sat him down, I caricatured him, and since then I've caricatured hundreds of celebrities. 
+This is one I remember fondly. 
+Salman Rushdie was pissed-off I think because I altered the map of New York, if you notice. 
+(Laughter) Anyway, the next slide I'm about to show you — (Laughter) Should I just turn that off? 
+The next slide I'm about to show you, is a little more serious. 
+I was hesitant to include this in my presentation because this cartoon was published soon after 9 / 11. 
+What was, for me, a very naive observation, turned out to be a disaster. 
+That evening, I came home to hundreds of hate mails, hundreds of people telling me how they could have lived another day without seeing this. 
+I was also asked to leave the organization, a cartoonists' organization in America, that for me was my lifeline. 
+That's when I realized, you know, cartoons are really powerful, art comes with responsibility. 
+Anyway, what I did was I decided that I need to take a break. 
+I quit my job at the papers, I closed my school, and I wrapped up my pencils and my brushes and inks, and I decided to go traveling. 
+When I went traveling, I remember, I met this fabulous old man, who I met when I was caricaturing, who turned out to be an artist, in Italy. 
+He invited me to his studio. He said, "" Come and visit. "" When I went, I saw the ghastliest thing ever. 
+I saw this dead, naked effigy of himself hanging from the ceiling. 
+I said, "" Oh, my God. What is that? "" And I asked him, and he said, "" Oh, that thing? In the night, I die. 
+In the morning, I am born again. "" I thought he was koo koo, but something about that really stuck. 
+I loved it. I thought there was something really beautiful about that. 
+So I said, "" I am dead, so I need to be born again. "" So, I wanted to be a painter like him, except, I don't know how to paint. 
+So, I tried going to the art store. 
+You know, there are a hundred types of brushes. 
+Forget it, they will confuse you even if you know how to draw. 
+So I decided, I'm going to learn to paint by myself. 
+I'm going to show you a very quick clip to show you how I painted and a little bit about my city, Bangalore. 
+(Music) They had to be larger than life. 
+Everything had to be larger. The next painting was even bigger. 
+And even bigger. 
+And for me it was, I had to dance while I painted. 
+It was so exciting. 
+Except, I even started painting dancers. 
+Here for example is a Flamenco dancer, except there was one problem. 
+I didn't know the dance form, so I started following them, and I made some money, sold my paintings and would rush off to France or Spain and work with them. 
+That's Pepe Linares, the renowned Flamenco singer. 
+But I had one problem, my paintings never danced. 
+As much energy as I put into them while making them, they never danced. 
+So I decided — I had this crazy epiphany at two in the morning. 
+I called my friends, painted on their bodies, and had them dance in front of a painting. 
+And, all of a sudden, my paintings came alive. 
+And then I was fortunate enough to actually perform this in California with Velocity Circus. 
+And I sat like you guys there in the audience. 
+And I saw my work come alive. 
+You know, normally you work in isolation, and you show at a gallery, but here, the work was coming alive, and it had some other artists working with me. 
+The collaborative effort was fabulous. 
+I said, I'm going to collaborate with anybody and everybody I meet. 
+I started doing fashion. 
+This is a fashion show we held in London. 
+The best collaboration, of course, is with children. 
+They are ruthless, they are honest, but they're full of energy and fun. 
+This is a work, a library I designed for the Robin Hood Foundation. 
+And I must say, I spent time in the Bronx working with these kids. 
+And, in exchange for me working with them, they taught me how to be cool. 
+I don't think I've succeeded, but they've taught me. 
+They said, "" Stop saying sorry. Say, my bad. "" (Laughter) Then I said, all this is good, but I want to paint like a real painter. 
+American education is so expensive. 
+I was in India, and I was walking down the streets, and I saw a billboard painter. 
+And these guys paint humongous paintings, and they look really good. 
+And I wondered how they did it from so close. 
+So, one day I had the opportunity to meet one of these guys, and I said, "" How do you paint like that? Who taught you? "" And he said, "" Oh, it's very easy. I can teach you, but we're leaving the city, because billboard painters are a dying, extinct bunch of artists, because digital printing has totally replaced them and hijacked them. "" I said, in exchange for education in how to paint, I will support them, and I started a company. 
+And since then, I've been painting all over the place. 
+This is a painting I did of my wife in my apartment. 
+This is another painting. 
+And, in fact, I started painting on anything, and started sending them around town. 
+Since I mentioned my wife, the most important collaboration has been with her, Netra. 
+Netra and I met when she was 18. 
+I must have been 19 and a half then, and it was love at first sight. 
+I lived in India. She lived in America. 
+She'd come every two months to visit me, and then I said I'm the man, I'm the man, and I have to reciprocate. 
+I have to travel seven oceans, and I have to come and see you. 
+I did that twice, and I went broke. 
+So then I said, "" Nets, what do I do? "" She said, "" Why don't you send me your paintings? 
+My dad knows a bunch of rich guys. 
+We'll try and con them into buying it, and then... "" But it turned out, after I sent the works to her, that her dad's friends, like most of you, are geeks. 
+I'm joking. 
+(Laughter) No, they were really big geeks, and they didn't know much about art. 
+So Netra was stuck with 30 paintings of mine. 
+So what we did was we rented a little van and we drove all over the east coast trying to sell it. 
+She contacted anyone and everyone who was willing to buy my work. 
+She made enough money, she sold off the whole collection and made enough money to move me for four years with lawyers, a company, everything, and she became my manager. 
+That's us in New York. 
+Notice one thing, we're equal here. 
+Something happened along the line. 
+(Laughter) But this brought me — with Netra managing my career — it brought me a lot of success. 
+I was really happy. I thought of myself as a bit of a rockstar. 
+I loved the attention. 
+This is all the press we got, and we said, it's time to celebrate. 
+And I said that the best way to celebrate is to marry Netra. 
+I said, "" Let's get married. "" And I said, "" Not just married. Let's invite everyone who's helped us, all the people who bought our work. "" And you won't believe it, we put together a list of 7,000 people, who had made a difference — a ridiculous list, but I was determined to bring them to India, so — a lot of them were in India. 
+150 artists volunteered to help me with my wedding. 
+We had fashion designers, installation artists, models, we had makeup artists, jewelry designers, all kinds of people working with me to make my wedding an art installation. 
+And I had a special installation in tribute to my in-laws. 
+I had the vegetable carvers work on that for me. 
+But all this excitement led to the press writing about us. 
+We were in the papers, we're still in the news three years later, but, unfortunately, something tragic happened right after. 
+My mother fell very ill. 
+I love my mother and I was told all of a sudden that she was going to die. 
+And they said you have to say bye to her, you have to do what you have to do. 
+And I was devastated. 
+I had shows booked up for another year. 
+I was on a high. 
+And I couldn't. I could not. 
+My life was not exuberant. 
+I could not live this larger than life person. 
+I started exploring the darker abscesses of the human mind. 
+Of course, my work turned ugly, but another thing happened. 
+I lost all my audiences. 
+The Bollywood stars who I would party with and buy my work disappeared. 
+The collectors, the friends, the press, everyone said, "" Nice, but thank you. "" "" No thank you, "" was more like it. 
+But I wanted people to actually feel my work from their gut, because I was painting it from my gut. 
+If they wanted beauty, I said, this is the beauty I'm willing to give you. It's politicized. 
+Of course, none of them liked it. 
+My works also turned autobiographical. 
+At this point, something else happened. 
+A very, very dear friend of mine came out of the closet, and in India at that time, it was illegal to be gay, and it's disgusting to see how people respond to a gay person. 
+I was very upset. 
+I remember the time when my mother used to dress me up as a little girl — that's me there — because she wanted a girl, and she has only boys. 
+(Laughter) Anyway, I don't know what my friends are going to say after this talk. 
+It's a secret. 
+So, after this, my works turned a little violent. 
+I talked about this masculinity that one need not perform. 
+And I talked about the weakness of male sexuality. 
+This time, not only did my collectors disappear, the political activists decided to ban me and to threaten me and to forbid me from showing. 
+It turned nasty, and I'm a bit of a chicken. 
+I can't deal with any threat. This was a big threat. 
+So, I decided it was time to end and go back home. 
+This time I said let's try something different. 
+I need to be reborn again. 
+And I thought the best way, as most of you know who have children, the best way to have a new lease on life, is to have a child. 
+I decided to have a child, and before I did that, I quickly studied what can go wrong. 
+How can a family get dysfunctional? 
+And Rudra was born. 
+That's my little son. 
+And two magical things happened after he was born. 
+My mother miraculously recovered after a serious operation, and this man was elected president of this country. 
+You know I sat at home and I watched. 
+I teared up and I said that's where I want to be. 
+So Netra and I wound up our life, closed up everything we had, and we decided to move to New York. 
+And this was just eight months ago. 
+I moved back to New York, my work has changed. 
+Everything about my work has become more whimsical. 
+This one is called "" What the Fuck Was I Thinking? "" It talks about mental incest. 
+You know, I may appear to be a very nice, clean, sweet boy. 
+But I'm not. I'm capable of thinking anything. 
+But I'm very civil in my action, I assure you. 
+(Laughter) These are just different cartoons. 
+And, before I go, I want to tell you a little story. 
+I was talking to mother and father this morning, and my dad said, "" I know you have so much you want to say, but you have to talk about your work with children. "" So I said, okay. 
+I work with children all over the world, and that's an entirely different talk, but I want to leave you with one story that really, really inspired me. 
+I met Belinda when she was 16. 
+I was 17. 
+I was in Australia, and Belinda had cancer, and I was told she's not going to live very long. 
+They, in fact, told me three weeks. 
+I walk into her room, and there was a shy girl, and she was bald, and she was trying to hide her baldness. 
+I whipped out my pen, and I started drawing on her head and I drew a crown for her. 
+And then, we started talking, and we spent a lovely time — I told her how I ended up in Australia, how I backpacked and who I conned, and how I got a ticket, and all the stories. 
+And I drew it out for her. 
+And then I left. 
+Belinda died and within a few days of her death, they published a book for her, and she used my cartoon on the cover. 
+And she wrote a little note, she said, "Hey Rags, thank you for the magic carpet ride around the world." 
+For me, my art is my magic carpet ride. 
+I hope you will join me in this magic carpet ride, and touch children and be honest. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I am a conductor, and I'm here today to talk to you about trust. 
+My job depends upon it. 
+There has to be, between me and the orchestra, an unshakable bond of trust, born out of mutual respect, through which we can spin a musical narrative that we all believe in. 
+Now in the old days, conducting, music making, was less about trust and more, frankly, about coercion. 
+Up to and around about the Second World War, conductors were invariably dictators — these tyrannical figures who would rehearse, not just the orchestra as a whole, but individuals within it, within an inch of their lives. 
+But I'm happy to say now that the world has moved on, music has moved on with it. 
+We now have a more democratic view and way of making music — a two-way street. 
+I, as the conductor, have to come to the rehearsal with a cast-iron sense of the outer architecture of that music, within which there is then immense personal freedom for the members of the orchestra to shine. 
+For myself, of course, I have to completely trust my body language. 
+That's all I have at the point of sale. 
+It's silent gesture. 
+I can hardly bark out instructions while we're playing. 
+(Music) Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Ensemble. 
+(Applause) So in order for all this to work, obviously I have got to be in a position of trust. 
+I have to trust the orchestra, and, even more crucially, I have to trust myself. 
+Think about it: when you're in a position of not trusting, what do you do? 
+You overcompensate. 
+And in my game, that means you overgesticulate. 
+You end up like some kind of rabid windmill. 
+And the bigger your gesture gets, the more ill-defined, blurry and, frankly, useless it is to the orchestra. 
+You become a figure of fun. There's no trust anymore, only ridicule. 
+And I remember at the beginning of my career, again and again, on these dismal outings with orchestras, I would be going completely insane on the podium, trying to engender a small scale crescendo really, just a little upsurge in volume. 
+Bugger me, they wouldn't give it to me. 
+I spent a lot of time in those early years weeping silently in dressing rooms. 
+And how futile seemed the words of advice to me from great British veteran conductor Sir Colin Davis who said, "" Conducting, Charles, is like holding a small bird in your hand. 
+If you hold it too tightly, you crush it. 
+If you hold it too loosely, it flies away. "" I have to say, in those days, I couldn't really even find the bird. 
+Now a fundamental and really viscerally important experience for me, in terms of music, has been my adventures in South Africa, the most dizzyingly musical country on the planet in my view, but a country which, through its musical culture, has taught me one fundamental lesson: that through music making can come deep levels of fundamental life-giving trust. 
+Back in 2000, I had the opportunity to go to South Africa to form a new opera company. 
+So I went out there, and I auditioned, mainly in rural township locations, right around the country. 
+I heard about 2,000 singers and pulled together a company of 40 of the most jaw-droppingly amazing young performers, the majority of whom were black, but there were a handful of white performers. 
+Now it emerged early on in the first rehearsal period that one of those white performers had, in his previous incarnation, been a member of the South African police force. 
+And in the last years of the old regime, he would routinely be detailed to go into the township to aggress the community. 
+Now you can imagine what this knowledge did to the temperature in the room, the general atmosphere. 
+Let's be under no illusions. 
+In South Africa, the relationship most devoid of trust is that between a white policeman and the black community. 
+So how do we recover from that, ladies and gentlemen? 
+Simply through singing. 
+We sang, we sang, we sang, and amazingly new trust grew, and indeed friendship blossomed. 
+And that showed me such a fundamental truth, that music making and other forms of creativity can so often go to places where mere words cannot. 
+So we got some shows off the ground. We started touring them internationally. 
+One of them was "" Carmen. "" We then thought we'd make a movie of "" Carmen, "" which we recorded and shot outside on location in the township outside Cape Town called Khayelitsha. 
+The piece was sung entirely in Xhosa, which is a beautifully musical language, if you don't know it. 
+It's called "" U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha "" — literally "" Carmen of Khayelitsha. "" I want to play you a tiny clip of it now for no other reason than to give you proof positive that there is nothing tiny about South African music making. 
+(Music) (Applause) Something which I find utterly enchanting about South African music making is that it's so free. 
+South Africans just make music really freely. 
+And I think, in no small way, that's due to one fundamental fact: they're not bound to a system of notation. 
+They don't read music. 
+They trust their ears. 
+You can teach a bunch of South Africans a tune in about five seconds flat. 
+And then, as if by magic, they will spontaneously improvise a load of harmony around that tune because they can. 
+Now those of us that live in the West, if I can use that term, I think have a much more hidebound attitude or sense of music — that somehow it's all about skill and systems. 
+Therefore it's the exclusive preserve of an elite, talented body. 
+And yet, ladies and gentlemen, every single one of us on this planet probably engages with music on a daily basis. 
+And if I can broaden this out for a second, I'm willing to bet that every single one of you sitting in this room would be happy to speak with acuity, with total confidence, about movies, probably about literature. 
+But how many of you would be able to make a confident assertion about a piece of classical music? 
+Why is this? 
+And what I'm going to say to you now is I'm just urging you to get over this supreme lack of self-confidence, to take the plunge, to believe that you can trust your ears, you can hear some of the fundamental muscle tissue, fiber, DNA, what makes a great piece of music great. 
+I've got a little experiment I want to try with you. 
+Did you know that TED is a tune? 
+A very simple tune based on three notes — T, E, D. 
+Now hang on a minute. 
+I know you're going to say to me, "" T doesn't exist in music. "" Well ladies and gentlemen, there's a time-honored system, which composers have been using for hundreds of years, which proves actually that it does. 
+If I sing you a musical scale: A, B, C, D, E, F, G — and I just carry on with the next set of letters in the alphabet, same scale: H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T — there you go. 
+T, see it's the same as F in music. 
+So T is F. 
+So T, E, D is the same as F, E, D. 
+Now that piece of music that we played at the start of this session had enshrined in its heart the theme, which is TED. 
+Have a listen. 
+(Music) Do you hear it? 
+Or do I smell some doubt in the room? 
+Okay, we'll play it for you again now, and we're going to highlight, we're going to poke out the T, E, D. 
+If you'll pardon the expression. 
+(Music) Oh my goodness me, there it was loud and clear, surely. 
+I think we should make this even more explicit. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, it's nearly time for tea. 
+Would you reckon you need to sing for your tea, I think? 
+I think we need to sing for our tea. 
+We're going to sing those three wonderful notes: T, E, D. 
+Will you have a go for me? 
+Audience: T, E, D. 
+Charles Hazlewood: Yeah, you sound a bit more like cows really than human beings. 
+Shall we try that one again? 
+And look, if you're adventurous, you go up the octave. 
+T, E, D. 
+Audience: T, E, D. 
+CH: Once more with vim. (Audience: T, E, D.) There I am like a bloody windmill again, you see. 
+Now we're going to put that in the context of the music. 
+The music will start, and then at a signal from me, you will sing that. 
+(Music) One more time, with feeling, ladies and gentlemen. 
+You won't make the key otherwise. 
+Well done, ladies and gentlemen. 
+It wasn't a bad debut for the TED choir, not a bad debut at all. 
+Now there's a project that I'm initiating at the moment that I'm very excited about and wanted to share with you, because it is all about changing perceptions, and, indeed, building a new level of trust. 
+The youngest of my children was born with cerebral palsy, which as you can imagine, if you don't have an experience of it yourself, is quite a big thing to take on board. 
+But the gift that my gorgeous daughter has given me, aside from her very existence, is that it's opened my eyes to a whole stretch of the community that was hitherto hidden, the community of disabled people. 
+And I found myself looking at the Paralympics and thinking how incredible how technology's been harnessed to prove beyond doubt that disability is no barrier to the highest levels of sporting achievement. 
+Of course there's a grimmer side to that truth, which is that it's actually taken decades for the world at large to come to a position of trust, to really believe that disability and sports can go together in a convincing and interesting fashion. 
+So I find myself asking: where is music in all of this? 
+You can't tell me that there aren't millions of disabled people, in the U.K. alone, with massive musical potential. 
+So I decided to create a platform for that potential. 
+It's going to be Britain's first ever national disabled orchestra. 
+It's called Paraorchestra. 
+I'm going to show you a clip now of the very first improvisation session that we had. 
+It was a really extraordinary moment. 
+Just me and four astonishingly gifted disabled musicians. 
+Normally when you improvise — and I do it all the time around the world — there's this initial period of horror, like everyone's too frightened to throw the hat into the ring, an awful pregnant silence. 
+Then suddenly, as if by magic, bang! We're all in there and it's complete bedlam. You can't hear anything. 
+No one's listening. No one's trusting. 
+No one's responding to each other. 
+Now in this room with these four disabled musicians, within five minutes a rapt listening, a rapt response and some really insanely beautiful music. 
+(Video) (Music) Nicholas:: My name's Nicholas McCarthy. 
+I'm 22, and I'm a left-handed pianist. 
+And I was born without my left hand — right hand. 
+Can I do that one again? 
+(Music) Lyn: When I'm making music, I feel like a pilot in the cockpit flying an airplane. 
+I become alive. 
+(Music) Clarence: I would rather be able to play an instrument again than walk. 
+There's so much joy and things I could get from playing an instrument and performing. 
+It's removed some of my paralysis. 
+(Music) (Applause) CH: I only wish that some of those musicians were here with us today, so you could see at firsthand how utterly extraordinary they are. 
+Paraorchestra is the name of that project. 
+If any of you thinks you want to help me in any way to achieve what is a fairly impossible and implausible dream still at this point, please let me know. 
+Now my parting shot comes courtesy of the great Joseph Haydn, wonderful Austrian composer in the second half of the 18th century — spent the bulk of his life in the employ of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, along with his orchestra. 
+Now this prince loved his music, but he also loved the country castle that he tended to reside in most of the time, which is just on the Austro-Hungarian border, a place called Esterhazy — a long way from the big city of Vienna. 
+Now one day in 1772, the prince decreed that the musicians' families, the orchestral musicians' families, were no longer welcome in the castle. 
+They weren't allowed to stay there anymore; they had to be returned to Vienna — as I say, an unfeasibly long way away in those days. 
+You can imagine, the musicians were disconsolate. 
+Haydn remonstrated with the prince, but to no avail. 
+So given the prince loved his music, Haydn thought he'd write a symphony to make the point. 
+And we're going to play just the very tail end of this symphony now. 
+And you'll see the orchestra in a kind of sullen revolt. 
+I'm pleased to say, the prince did take the tip from the orchestral performance, and the musicians were reunited with their families. 
+But I think it sums up my talk rather well, this, that where there is trust, there is music — by extension life. 
+Where there is no trust, the music quite simply withers away. 
+(Music) (Applause) 
+
+I would be willing to bet that I'm the dumbest guy in the room because I couldn't get through school. I struggled with school. 
+But what I knew at a very early age was that I loved money and I loved business and I loved this entrepreneurial thing, and I was raised to be an entrepreneur, and what I've been really passionate about ever since — and I've never spoken about this ever, until now — so this is the first time anyone's ever heard it, except my wife three days ago, because she said, "" What are you talking about? "" and I told her — is that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits, and to groom them or show them 
+that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing. 
+It's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified, which is what happens in a lot of society. 
+Kids, when we grow up, have dreams, and we have passions, and we have visions, and somehow we get those things crushed. 
+We get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor. 
+My parents got me a tutor in French, and I still suck in French. 
+Two years ago, I was the highest-rated lecturer at MIT's entrepreneurial master's program. 
+And it was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world. 
+When I was in grade two, I won a city-wide speaking competition, but nobody had ever said, "" Hey, this kid's a good speaker. 
+He can't focus, but he loves walking around and getting people energized. "" No one said, "" Get him a coach in speaking. "" They said, get me a tutor in what I suck at. 
+So as kids show these traits — and we need to start looking for them — I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers. 
+Unfortunately the school system is grooming this world to say, "" Hey, let's be a lawyer or let's be a doctor, "" and we're missing that opportunity because no one ever says, "" Hey, be an entrepreneur. "" Entrepreneurs are people — because we have a lot of them in this room — who have these ideas and these passions or see these needs in the world and we decide to stand up and do it. 
+And we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen. 
+We have the ability to get those groups of people around us that want to kind of build that dream with us, and I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age of being entrepreneurial, we could change everything in the world that is a problem today. 
+Every problem that's out there, somebody has the idea for. 
+And as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen because you're too dumb to realize that you couldn't figure it out. 
+I think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish — the old parable: "" If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. 
+If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. "" If we can teach our kids to become entrepreneurial — the ones that show those traits to be — like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science, what if we saw the ones who had entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs? 
+We could actually have all these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts. 
+What we do is we sit and teach our kids all the things they shouldn't do: Don't hit; don't bite; don't swear. 
+Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs, you know, and the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. 
+And the media says that it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo, Crosby. 
+Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs. 
+The reason that I avoided an MBA program — other than the fact that I couldn't get into any because I had a 61 percent average out of high school and then 61 percent average at the only school in Canada that accepted me, Carlton — but our MBA programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs. 
+They teach them to go work in corporations. 
+So who's starting these companies? It's these random few people. 
+Even in popular literature, the only book I've ever found — and this should be on all of your reading lists — the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur into the hero is "" Atlas Shrugged. "" Everything else in the world tends to look at entrepreneurs and say that we're bad people. 
+I look at even my family. 
+Both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs. My dad was an entrepreneur. 
+Both my brother and sister and I, all three of us own companies as well. 
+And we all decided to start these things because it's really the only place we fit. 
+We didn't fit in the normal work. We couldn't work for somebody else because we're too stubborn and we have all these other traits. 
+But kids could be entrepreneurs as well. 
+I'm a big part of a couple organizations globally called the Entrepreneurs' Organization and the Young Presidents' Organization. 
+I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference, and everyone that I met over there who's an entrepreneur struggled with school. 
+I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed. 
+So this thing right here is freaking me out. 
+(Laughter) It's probably why I'm a little bit panicked right now — other than all the caffeine that I've had and the sugar — but this is really creepy for an entrepreneur. 
+Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder. 
+Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? 
+Ted Turner's got it. Steve Jobs has it. 
+All three of the founders of Netscape had it. 
+I could go on and on. 
+Kids — you can see these signs in kids. 
+And what we're doing is we're giving them Ritalin and saying, "" Don't be an entrepreneurial type. 
+Fit into this other system and try to become a student. "" Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students. 
+We fast-track. We figure out the game. 
+I stole essays. I cheated on exams. 
+I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. 
+But as an entrepreneur you don't do accounting, you hire accountants. 
+So I just figured that out earlier. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) At least I can admit I cheated in university; most of you won't. 
+I'm also quoted — and I told the person who wrote the textbook — I'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian university and college studies. 
+In managerial accounting, I'm chapter eight. 
+I open up chapter eight talking about budgeting. 
+And I told the author, after they did my interview, that I cheated in that same course. 
+And she thought it was too funny to not include it anyway. 
+But kids, you can see these signs in them. 
+The definition of an entrepreneur is "" a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk of a business venture. "" That doesn't mean you have to go to an MBA program. 
+It doesn't mean you have to get through school. 
+It just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut. 
+And we've heard those things about "" is it nurture or is it nature, "" right? 
+Is it thing one or thing two? What is it? 
+Well, I don't think it's either. I think it can be both. 
+I was groomed as an entrepreneur. 
+When I was growing up as a young kid, I had no choice, because I was taught at a very early, young age — when my dad realized I wasn't going to fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school — that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. 
+He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies that we could employ other people. 
+My first little business venture: I was seven years old, I was in Winnipeg, and I was lying in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords. 
+And I was calling all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much would the dry cleaners pay me for coat hangers. 
+And my mom came into the room and she said, "Where are you going to get the coat hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?" 
+And I said, "" Let's go and look in the basement. "" And we went down to the basement. And I opened up this cupboard. 
+And there was about a thousand coat hangers that I'd collected. 
+Because, when I told her I was going out to play with the kids, I was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect coat hangers to put in the basement to sell. 
+Because I saw her a few weeks before that — you could get paid. They used to pay you two cents per coat hanger. 
+So I was just like, well there's all kinds of coat hangers. 
+And so I'll just go get them. 
+And I knew she wouldn't want me to go get them, so I just did it anyway. 
+And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. 
+This one person offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half. 
+I even knew at a seven-year-old age that I could actually get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay that because it multiplied up. 
+At seven years old I figured it out. I got three and a half cents for a thousand coat hangers. 
+I sold license plate protectors door to door. 
+My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me these things at wholesale. 
+And at nine years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license plate protectors door to door to houses. 
+And I remember this one customer so vividly because I also did some other stuff with these clients. 
+I sold newspapers. 
+And he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me ever. 
+But I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license plate protector. 
+And he's like, "" Well, we don't need one. "" And I said, "" But you've got two cars... "" — I'm nine years old. 
+I'm like, "" But you have two cars and they don't have license plate protectors. "" And he said, "" I know. "" And I said, "" This car here's got one license plate that's all crumpled up. "" And he said, "" Yes, that's my wife's car. "" And I said, "" Why don't we just test one on the front of your wife's car and see if it lasts longer. "" So I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each. 
+If I couldn't sell all four, I could at least get one. 
+I learned that at a young age. 
+I did comic book arbitrage. 
+When I was about 10 years old, I sold comic books out of our cottage on Georgian Bay. 
+And I would go biking up to the end of the beach and buy all the comics from the poor kids. 
+And then I would go back to the other end of the beach and sell them to the rich kids. 
+But it was obvious to me, right? Buy low, sell high. 
+You've got this demand over here that has money. 
+Don't try to sell to the poor kids; they don't have cash. The rich people do. Go get some. 
+So that's obvious, right. 
+It's like a recession. So, there's a recession. 
+There's still 13 trillion dollars circulating in the U.S. economy. 
+Go get some of that. And I learned that at a young age. 
+I also learned, don't reveal your source, because I got beat up after about four weeks of doing this because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics from, and he didn't like the fact that he was paying a lot more. 
+I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old. 
+I didn't really want a paper route, but at 10, my dad said, "" That's going to be your next business. "" So not only would he get me one, but I had to get two, and then he wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did, and then I realized that collecting tips was where you made all the money. 
+So I would collect the tips and get payment. 
+So I would go and collect for all the papers. 
+He could just deliver them. 
+Because then I realized I could make the money. 
+By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee. 
+(Laughter) My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop. 
+He had all these old automotive parts lying around. 
+They had this old brass and copper. 
+I asked him what he did with it, and he said he just throws it out. 
+I said, "" But wouldn't somebody pay you for that? "" And he goes, "" Maybe. "" Remember at 10 years old — so 34 years ago I saw opportunity in this stuff. 
+I saw there was money in garbage. 
+And I was actually collecting it from all the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle. 
+And then my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid. 
+And I thought that was kind of cool. 
+Strangely enough, 30 years later, we're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK? 
+and making money off that too. 
+I built these little pincushions when I was 11 years old in Cubs, and we made these pin cushions for our moms for Mother's Day. 
+And you made these pincushions out of wooden clothespins — when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. 
+And you'd make these chairs. 
+And I had these little pillows that I would sew up. 
+And you could stuff pins in them. 
+Because people used to sew and they needed a pin cushion. 
+But what I realized was that you had to have options. 
+So I actually spray painted a whole bunch of them brown. 
+And then when I went to the door, it wasn't, "" Do you want to buy one? "" It was, "" Which color would you like? "" Like I'm 10 years old; you're not going to say no to me, especially if you have two options — you have the brown one or the clear one. 
+So I learned that lesson at a young age. 
+I learned that manual labor really sucks. 
+Right, like cutting lawns is brutal. 
+But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing. 
+That if I land this client once, and every week I get paid by that person, that's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person. 
+Because you can't sell them more. 
+So I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age. 
+Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. 
+I would caddy, I would go to the golf course and caddy for people. 
+But I realized that there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole that had this huge hill. 
+And people could never get their bags up it. 
+So I would sit there with a lawn chair and just carry up all the people who didn't have caddies. 
+I would carry their golf bags up to the top, and they'd pay me a dollar. 
+Meanwhile, my friends were working for five hours to haul some guy's bag around and get paid 10 bucks. 
+I'm like, "" That's stupid because you have to work for five hours. 
+That doesn't make any sense. "" You just figure out a way to make more money faster. 
+Every week, I would go to the corner store and buy all these pops. 
+Then I would go up and deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge. 
+And they'd give me their orders for the following week. 
+And then I'd just deliver pop and I'd just charge twice. 
+And I had this captured market. You didn't need contracts. 
+You just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you. 
+These women weren't going to go to anybody else because they liked me, and I kind of figured it out. 
+I went and got golf balls from golf courses. 
+But everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. 
+I'm like, screw that. They're all in the pond and nobody's going into the pond. 
+So I would go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes. 
+You just pick them up with both feet. 
+You can't do it on stage. 
+You get the golf balls, and you just throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you're done you've got a couple hundred of them. 
+But the problem is that people all didn't want all the golf balls. 
+So I just packaged them. I'm like 12, right? 
+I packaged them up three ways. 
+I had the Pinnacles and DDHs and the really cool ones back then. 
+Those sold for two dollars each. 
+And then I had all the good ones that didn't look crappy. They were 50 cents each. 
+And then I'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones. 
+And they could use those for practice balls. 
+I sold sunglasses, when I was in school, to all the kids in high school. 
+This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you is because you're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time. 
+But it paid the bills. 
+So I sold lots and lots of sunglasses. 
+Then when the school shut me down — the school actually called me into the office and told me I couldn't do it — so I went to the gas stations and I sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers. 
+That was cool because then I had retail outlets. 
+And I think I was 14. 
+Then I paid my entire way through first year university at Carlton by selling wine skins door to door. 
+You know that you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin? So what, right? 
+Yeah, but you know what? You stuff that down your shorts, when you go into a football game you can get booze in for free, everybody bought them. 
+Supply, demand, big opportunity. 
+I also branded it, so I sold them for five times the normal cost. 
+It had our university logo on it. 
+You know we teach our kids and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games, if they're entrepreneurial kids, that kind of nurture the traits that you need to be entrepreneurs? 
+Why don't you teach them not to waste money? 
+I remember being told to walk out in the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta because I'd thrown a penny out in the street, and my dad said, "" Go pick it up. "" He said, "" I work too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you ever waste a penny. "" And I remember that lesson to this day. 
+Allowances teach kids the wrong habits. 
+Allowances, by nature, are teaching kids to think about a job. 
+An entrepreneur doesn't expect a regular paycheck. 
+Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck. 
+That's wrong, for me, if you want to raise entrepreneurs. 
+What I do with my kids now — I've got two, nine and seven — is I teach them to walk around the house and the yard, looking for stuff that needs to get done. 
+Come to me and tell me what it is. 
+Or I'll come to them and say, "" Here's what I need done. "" And then you know what we do? We negotiate. 
+They go around looking for what it is. 
+But then we negotiate on what they're going to get paid. 
+And then they don't have a regular check, but they have more opportunities to find more stuff, and they learn the skill of negotiating, and they learn the skill of finding opportunities as well. 
+You breed that kind of stuff. Each of my kids has two piggy banks. 
+Fifty percent of all the money that they earn or get gifted, 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. 
+Anything in their toy account they can spend on whatever they want. 
+The 50 percent that goes in their house account, every six months, goes to the bank. 
+They walk up with me. Every year all the money in the bank goes to their broker. 
+Both my nine- and seven-year-olds have a stock broker already. 
+But I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. 
+It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying, "Maybe I'll start contributing to my RSP now." 
+Shit, you've missed 25 years. 
+You can teach those habits to young kids when they don't even feel the pain yet. 
+Don't read them bedtime stories every night. 
+Maybe four nights out of the week read them bedtime stories and three nights of the week have them tell stories. 
+Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four items, a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo and a laptop, and have them tell a story about those four things? 
+My kids do that all the time. 
+It teaches them to sell; it teaches them creativity; it teaches them to think on their feet. 
+Just do that kind of stuff and have fun with it. 
+Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk, even if it's just stand up in front of their friends and do plays and have speeches. 
+Those are entrepreneurial traits that you want to be nurturing. 
+Show the kids what bad customers or bad employees look like. 
+Show them the grumpy employees. 
+When you see grumpy customer service, point that out to them. 
+Say, "" By the way, that guy's a crappy employee. "" And say, "" These ones are good ones. "" (Laughter) If you go into a restaurant and you have bad customer service, show them what bad customer service looks like. (Laughter) 
+We have all these lessons in front of us, but we don't take those opportunities; we teach kids to go get a tutor. 
+Imagine if you actually took all the kids' junk that's in the house right now, all the toys that they've outgrown two years ago and said, "" Why don't we start selling some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji? "" And they can actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when they get email offers come in. 
+They can come into your account or a sub account or whatever. 
+But teach them how to fix the price, guess the price, pull up the photos. 
+Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money. 
+Then the money they get, 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. 
+My kids love this stuff. 
+Some of the entrepreneurial traits that you've got to nurture in kids: attainment, tenacity, leadership, introspection, interdependence, values. 
+All these traits you can find in young kids, and you can help nurture them. 
+Look for that kind of stuff. 
+There's two traits that I want you to also look out for that we don't kind of get out of their system. 
+Don't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really, really freaking bad. 
+(Applause) The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression, unless it is so clinically brutal, man. 
+Bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease. 
+When Steve Jurvetson and Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale have all got it, and they built Netscape — imagine if they were given Ritalin. 
+We wouldn't have have that stuff, right? 
+Al Gore really would have had to invented the Internet. 
+(Laughter) These skills are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom as well as everything else. 
+I'm not saying don't get kids to want to be lawyers. 
+But how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them as well? 
+Because there's huge opportunities in that. 
+I want to close with a quick little video. 
+It's a video that was done by one of the companies that I mentor. 
+These guys, Grasshopper. 
+It's about kids. It's about entrepreneurship. 
+Hopefully this inspires you to take what you've heard from me and do something with it to change the world. 
+[Kid... "" And you thought you could do anything? ""] [You still can.] [Because a lot of what we consider impossible...] [... is easy to overcome] [Because in case you haven't noticed, we live in a place where] [One individual can make a difference] [Want proof?] [Just look at the people who built our country;] [Our parents, grandparents, our aunts, uncles...] [They were immigrants, newcomers ready to make their mark] [Maybe they came with very little] [Or perhaps they didn't own anything except for...] [... a single brilliant idea] [These people were thinkers, doers...] [... innovators...] [... until they came up with the name...] 
+[... entrepreneurs!] [They change the way we think about what is possible.] [They have a clear vision of how life can be better] [for all of us, even when times are tough.] [Right now, it's hard to see...] [... when our view is cluttered with obstacles.] [But turbulence creates opportunities] [for success, achievement, and pushes us...] [to discover new ways of doing things] [So what opportunities will you go after and why?] [If you're an entrepreneur] [you know that risk isn't the reward.] [No. The rewards are driving innovation...] [... changing people's lives. Creating jobs.] [Fueling growth.] [And making a better world.] 
+[Entrepreneurs are everywhere.] [They run small businesses that support our economy,] [design tools to help you...] [... stay connected with friends, family and colleagues around the world.] [And they're finding new ways of helping to solve society's oldest problems.] [Do you know an entrepreneur?] [Entrepreneurs can be anyone...] [Even... you!] [So seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted] [Help heal the economy] [Make a difference.] [Take your business to new heights.] [But most importantly,] [remember when you were a kid...] [when everything was within you reach,] [and then say to yourself quietly, but with determination:] 
+["" It still is. ""] Thank you very much for having me. 
+
+I was raised in Seoul, Korea, and moved to New York City in 1999 to attend college. 
+I was pre-med at the time, and I thought I would become a surgeon because I was interested in anatomy and dissecting animals really piqued my curiosity. 
+At the same time, I fell in love with New York City. 
+I started to realize that I could look at the whole city as a living organism. 
+I wanted to dissect it and look into its unseen layers. 
+And the way to it, for me, was through artistic means. 
+So, eventually I decided to pursue an MFA instead of an M.D. 
+and in grad school I became interested in creatures that dwell in the hidden corners of the city. 
+In New York City, rats are part of commuters' daily lives. 
+Most people ignore them or are frightened of them. 
+But I took a liking to them because they dwell on the fringes of society. 
+And even though they're used in labs to promote human lives, they're also considered pests. 
+I also started looking around in the city and trying to photograph them. 
+One day, in the subway, I was snapping pictures of the tracks hoping to catch a rat or two, and a man came up to me and said, "" You can't take photographs here. 
+The MTA will confiscate your camera. "" I was quite shocked by that, and thought to myself, "" Well, OK then. 
+I'll follow the rats. "" Then I started going into the tunnels, which made me realize that there's a whole new dimension to the city that I never saw before and most people don't get to see. 
+Around the same time, I met like-minded individuals who call themselves urban explorers, adventurers, spelunkers, guerrilla historians, etc. 
+I was welcomed into this loose, Internet-based network of people who regularly explore urban ruins such as abandoned subway stations, tunnels, sewers, aqueducts, factories, hospitals, shipyards and so on. 
+When I took photographs in these locations, I felt there was something missing in the pictures. 
+Simply documenting these soon-to-be-demolished structures wasn't enough for me. 
+So I wanted to create a fictional character or an animal that dwells in these underground spaces, and the simplest way to do it, at the time, was to model myself. 
+I decided against clothing because I wanted the figure to be without any cultural implications or time-specific elements. 
+I wanted a simple way to represent a living body inhabiting these decaying, derelict spaces. 
+This was taken in the Riviera Sugar Factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn. 
+It's now an empty, six-acre lot waiting for a shopping mall right across from the new Ikea. 
+I was very fond of this space because it's the first massive industrial complex I found on my own that is abandoned. 
+When I first went in, I was scared, because I heard dogs barking and I thought they were guard dogs. 
+But they happened to be wild dogs living there, and it was right by the water, so there were swans and ducks swimming around and trees growing everywhere and bees nesting in the sugar barrels. 
+The nature had really reclaimed the whole complex. 
+And, in a way, I wanted the human figure in the picture to become a part of that nature. 
+When I got comfortable in the space, it also felt like a big playground. 
+I would climb up the tanks and hop across exposed beams as if I went back in time and became a child again. 
+This was taken in the old Croton Aqueduct, which supplied fresh water to New York City for the first time. 
+The construction began in 1837. 
+It lasted about five years. 
+It got abandoned when the new Croton Aqueducts opened in 1890. 
+When you go into spaces like this, you're directly accessing the past, because they sit untouched for decades. 
+I love feeling the aura of a space that has so much history. 
+Instead of looking at reproductions of it at home, you're actually feeling the hand-laid bricks and shimmying up and down narrow cracks and getting wet and muddy and walking in a dark tunnel with a flashlight. 
+This is a tunnel underneath Riverside Park. 
+It was built in the 1930s by Robert Moses. 
+The murals were done by a graffiti artist to commemorate the hundreds of homeless people that got relocated from the tunnel in 1991 when the tunnel reopened for trains. 
+Walking in this tunnel is very peaceful. 
+There's nobody around you, and you hear the kids playing in the park above you, completely unaware of what's underneath. 
+When I was going out a lot to these places, I was feeling a lot of anxiety and isolation because I was in a solitary phase in my life, and I decided to title my series "" Naked City Spleen, "" which references Charles Baudelaire. 
+"" Naked City "" is a nickname for New York, and "" Spleen "" embodies the melancholia and inertia that come from feeling alienated in an urban environment. 
+This is the same tunnel. 
+You see the sunbeams coming from the ventilation ducts and the train approaching. 
+This is a tunnel that's abandoned in Hell's Kitchen. 
+I was there alone, setting up, and a homeless man approached. 
+I was basically intruding in his living space. 
+I was really frightened at first, but I calmly explained to him that I was working on an art project and he didn't seem to mind and so I went ahead and put my camera on self-timer and ran back and forth. 
+And when I was done, he actually offered me his shirt to wipe off my feet and kindly walked me out. 
+It must have been a very unusual day for him. 
+(Laughter) One thing that struck me, after this incident, was that a space like that holds so many deleted memories of the city. 
+That homeless man, to me, really represented an element of the unconscious of the city. 
+He told me that he was abused above ground and was once in Riker's Island, and at last he found peace and quiet in that space. 
+The tunnel was once built for the prosperity of the city, but is now a sanctuary for outcasts, who are completely forgotten in the average urban dweller's everyday life. 
+This is underneath my alma mater, Columbia University. 
+The tunnels are famous for having been used during the development of the Manhattan Project. 
+This particular tunnel is interesting because it shows the original foundations of Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, which was demolished in 1890 when Columbia moved in. 
+This is the New York City Farm Colony, which was a poorhouse in Staten Island from the 1890s to the 1930s. 
+Most of my photos are set in places that have been abandoned for decades, but this is an exception. 
+This children's hospital was closed in 1997; it's located in Newark. 
+When I was there three years ago, the windows were broken and the walls were peeling, but everything was left there as it was. 
+You see the autopsy table, morgue trays, x-ray machines and even used utensils, which you see on the autopsy table. 
+After exploring recently-abandoned buildings, I felt that everything could fall into ruins very fast: your home, your office, a shopping mall, a church — any man-made structures around you. 
+I was reminded of how fragile our sense of security is and how vulnerable people truly are. 
+I love to travel, and Berlin has become one of my favorite cities. 
+It's full of history, and also full of underground bunkers and ruins from the war. 
+This was taken under a homeless asylum built in 1885 to house 1,100 people. 
+I saw the structure while I was on the train, and I got off at the next station and met people there that gave me access to their catacomb-like basement, which was used for ammunition storage during the war and also, at some point, to hide groups of Jewish refugees. 
+This is the actual catacombs in Paris. 
+I explored there extensively in the off-limits areas and fell in love right away. 
+There are more than 185 miles of tunnels, and only about a mile is open to the public as a museum. 
+The first tunnels date back to 60 B.C. 
+They were consistently dug as limestone quarries and by the 18th century, the caving-in of some of these quarries posed safety threats, so the government ordered reinforcing of the existing quarries and dug new observation tunnels in order to monitor and map the whole place. 
+As you can see, the system is very complex and vast. 
+It's very dangerous to get lost in there. 
+And at the same time, there was a problem in the city with overflowing cemeteries. 
+So the bones were moved from the cemeteries into the quarries, making them into the catacombs. 
+The remains of over six million people are housed in there, some over 1,300 years old. 
+This was taken under the Montparnasse Cemetery where most of the ossuaries are located. 
+There are also phone cables that were used in the '50s and many bunkers from the World War II era. 
+This is a German bunker. 
+Nearby there's a French bunker, and the whole tunnel system is so complex that the two parties never met. 
+The tunnels are famous for having been used by the Resistance, which Victor Hugo wrote about in "" Les Miserables. "" And I saw a lot of graffiti from the 1800s, like this one. 
+After exploring the underground of Paris, I decided to climb up, and I climbed a Gothic monument that's right in the middle of Paris. 
+This is the Tower of Saint Jacques. 
+It was built in the early 1500s. 
+I don't recommend sitting on a gargoyle in the middle of January, naked. 
+It was not very comfortable. (Laughter) And all this time, I never saw a single rat in any of these places, until recently, when I was in the London sewers. 
+This was probably the toughest place to explore. 
+I had to wear a gas mask because of the toxic fumes — I guess, except for in this picture. 
+And when the tides of waste matter come in it sounds as if a whole storm is approaching you. 
+This is a still from a film I worked on recently, called "" Blind Door. "" I've become more interested in capturing movement and texture. 
+And the 16mm black-and-white film gave a different feel to it. 
+And this is the first theater project I worked on. 
+I adapted and produced "" A Dream Play "" by August Strindberg. 
+It was performed last September one time only in the Atlantic Avenue tunnel in Brooklyn, which is considered to be the oldest underground train tunnel in the world, built in 1844. 
+I've been leaning towards more collaborative projects like these, lately. 
+But whenever I get a chance I still work on my series. 
+The last place I visited was the Mayan ruins of Copan, Honduras. 
+This was taken inside an archaeological tunnel in the main temple. 
+I like doing more than just exploring these spaces. 
+I feel an obligation to animate and humanize these spaces continually in order to preserve their memories in a creative way — before they're lost forever. 
+Thank you. 
+
+It's pretty simple. There are nine, sort of, rules that I discovered after 35 years of rock climbing. 
+Most of them are pretty basic. 
+Number one: don't let go — very sure success method. 
+But really, truly — often you think about letting go way before your body does. 
+So hang in there, and you come up with some pretty peculiar solutions. 
+Number two: hesitation is bad. 
+This is a friction climb, up in Tuolumne Meadows, in the Yosemite high country. 
+Friction climbing doesn't have any sort of hard positive edges. 
+You're climbing on little dimples and nubbins in the rock. 
+The most friction you have is when you first put your hand or your foot on the rock. 
+And then from that point on, you're basically falling. 
+So momentum is good. Don't stop. 
+Rule number three: have a plan. 
+This is a climb called the Naked Edge, in El Dorado Canyon, outside of Boulder. 
+This climber is on the last pitch of it. 
+He's actually right about where I fell. 
+There is about 1,000 feet of air below him. 
+And all the hard pitches are actually below him. 
+Often what happens is you're planning so hard for like, "How do I get through the hardest part? How do I get through the hardest part?" 
+And then what happens? 
+You get to the last pitch. It's easy. 
+And you're completely flamed out. Don't do it. 
+You have to plan ahead to get to the top. 
+But you also can't forget that each individual move you have to be able to complete. 
+This is a climb called the Dike Route, on Pywjack Dome, up in the Yosemite high country. 
+The interesting thing about this climb is it's not that hard. 
+But if you're the leader on it, at the hardest move, you're looking at about 100 foot fall, onto some low angle slabs. 
+So you've got to focus. 
+You don't want to stop in the middle like Coleridge's Kubla Kahn. 
+You've got to keep going. 
+Rule number five: know how to rest. 
+It's amazing. The best climbers are the ones that in the most extreme situations can get their bodies into some position where they can rest, regroup, calm themselves, focus, and keep going. 
+This is a climb in the Needles, again in California. 
+Fear really sucks because what it means is you're not focusing on what you're doing. 
+You're focusing on the consequences of failing at what you're doing because any given move should require all your concentration and thought processes to execute it effectively. 
+One of the things in climbing is, most people sort of take it straight on. And they follow the most obvious solution. 
+This is the Devils Tower in Wyoming, which is a columnar basalt formation that most of you probably know from "" Close Encounters. "" With this, typically crack climbers would put their hands in and their toes in and just start climbing. 
+The cracks are too small to get your toes into so the only way to climb is using your fingertips in the cracks, and using opposing pressure and forcing yourself up. 
+Rule number eight: strength doesn't always equal success. 
+In the 35 years I've been a climbing guide and taught on indoor walls, and stuff like that, the most important thing I've learned was, guys will always try to do pull-ups. 
+Beginning guys, it's like, they thrash, they thrash, they get 15 feet up — and they can do about 15 pull-ups right — And then they just flame out. 
+Women are much more in balance because they don't have that idea that they're going to be able to do 100 pull-ups. 
+They think about how to get the weight over their feet because it's sort of natural — they carry you all day long. 
+So balance is really critical, and keeping your weight on your feet, which is your strongest muscle. 
+And of course there is rule number nine. 
+I came up with rule number nine after I actually didn't plan for a fall, and went about 40 feet and cracked a rib. 
+Once you get to that point where you know it's going to happen, you need to start thinking about how you're going to let go because that is the critical piece of not getting hurt — how you're going to fall onto the rope, or if you're climbing without a rope, fall to a place where you can actually control the fall. 
+So don't hang on till the bitter end. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I thought I'd tell you a little about what I like to write. 
+And I like to immerse myself in my topics. 
+I just like to dive right in and become sort of a human guinea pig. 
+And I see my life as a series of experiments. 
+So, I work for Esquire magazine, and a couple of years ago, I wrote an article called "" My Outsourced Life, "" where I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to live my life for me. 
+So, they answered my emails. 
+They answered my phone. 
+They argued with my wife for me, and they read my son bedtime stories. 
+It was the best month of my life, because I just sat back and I read books and watched movies. 
+It was a wonderful experience. 
+More recently, I wrote an article for Esquire called — about radical honesty. 
+And this is a movement where — this is started by a psychologist in Virginia, who says that you should never, ever lie, except maybe during poker and golf, his only exceptions. 
+And, more than that, whatever is on your brain should come out of your mouth. 
+So, I decided I would try this for a month. 
+This was the worst month of my life. 
+(Laughter) I do not recommend this at all. 
+To give you a sense of the experience, the article was called, "" I Think You're Fat. "" (Laughter) So, that was hard. 
+My most recent book — my previous book was called "" The Know-It-All, "" and it was about the year I spent reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z in my quest to learn everything in the world, or more precisely from Aak, which is a type of East Asian music, all the way to Zwyiec, which is — well, I don't want to ruin the ending. 
+(Laughter) It's a very exciting twist ending, like an O. Henry novel, so I won't ruin it. 
+But I love that one, because that was an experiment about how much information one human brain could absorb. 
+Although, listening to Kevin Kelly, you don't have to remember anything. 
+You can just Google it. 
+So, I wasted some time there. 
+I love those experiments, but I think that the most profound and life-changing experiment that I've done is my most recent experiment, where I spent a year trying to follow all of the rules of the Bible, "The Year of Living Biblically." 
+And I undertook this for two reasons. 
+The first was that I grew up with no religion at all. 
+As I say in my book, I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. 
+(Laughter) So, not very. 
+But I've become increasingly interested in religion. 
+I do think it's the defining issue of our time, or one of the main ones. 
+And I have a son. I want to know what to teach him. 
+So, I decided to dive in head first, and try to live the Bible. 
+The second reason I undertook this is because I'm concerned about the rise of fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, and people who say they take the Bible literally, which is, according to some polls, as high as 45 or 50 percent of America. 
+So I decided, what if you really did take the Bible literally? 
+I decided to take it to its logical conclusion and take everything in the Bible literally, without picking and choosing. 
+The first thing I did was I got a stack of bibles. 
+I had Christian bibles. 
+I had Jewish bibles. 
+A friend of mine sent me something called a hip-hop bible, where the twenty-third Psalm is rendered as, "" The Lord is all that, "" as opposed to what I knew it as, "" The Lord is my shepherd. "" Then I went down and I read several versions, and I wrote down every single law that I could find. 
+And this was a very long list — over 700 rules. 
+And they range from the famous ones that I had heard of — The Ten Commandments, love your neighbor, be fruitful and multiply. 
+So I wanted to follow those. 
+And actually, I take my projects very seriously, because I had twins during my year, so I definitely take my projects seriously. 
+But I also wanted to follow the hundreds of arcane and obscure laws that are in the Bible. 
+There is the law in Leviticus, "You cannot shave the corners of your beard." 
+I didn't know where my corners were, so I decided to let the whole thing grow, and this is what I looked like by the end. 
+As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time at airport security. 
+(Laughter) My wife wouldn't kiss me for the last two months. 
+So, certainly the challenge was there. 
+The Bible says you cannot wear clothes made of mixed fibers, so I thought, "" Sounds strange, but I'll try it. "" You only know if you try it. 
+I got rid of all my poly-cotton T-shirts. 
+The Bible says that if two men are in a fight, and the wife of one of those men grabs the testicles of the other man, then her hand shall be cut off. 
+So, I wanted to follow that rule. 
+(Laughter) That one I followed by default, by not getting in a fight with a man whose wife was standing nearby, looking like she had a strong grip. (Laughter) 
+So — oh, there's another shot of my beard. 
+I will say it was an amazing year because it really was life changing, and incredibly challenging. 
+And there were two types of laws that were particularly challenging. 
+The first was avoiding the little sins that we all commit every day. 
+You know, I could spend a year not killing, but spending a year not gossiping, not coveting, not lying — you know, I live in New York, and I work as a journalist, so this was 75, 80 percent of my day I had to do it. 
+But it was really interesting, because I was able to make some progress, because I couldn't believe how much my behavior changed my thoughts. 
+This was one of the huge lessons of the year, is that I almost pretended to be a better person, and I became a little bit of a better person. 
+So I had always thought, you know, "" You change your mind, and you change your behavior, "" but it's often the other way around. 
+You change your behavior, and you change your mind. 
+So, you know, if you want to become more compassionate, you visit sick people in the hospital, and you will become more compassionate. 
+You donate money to a cause, and you become emotionally involved in that cause. 
+So, it really was cognitive psychology — you know, cognitive dissonance — that I was experiencing. 
+The Bible actually talks about cognitive psychology, very primitive cognitive psychology. 
+In the Proverbs, it says that if you smile, you will become happier, which, as we know, is actually true. 
+The second type of rule that was difficult to obey was the rules that will get you into a little trouble in twenty-first-century America. 
+And perhaps the clearest example of this is stoning adulterers. 
+(Laughter) But it's a big part of the Bible, so I figured I had to address it. 
+So, I was able to stone one adulterer. 
+It happened — I was in the park, and I was dressed in my biblical clothing, so sandals and sort of a white robe, you know, because again, the outer affects the inner. 
+I wanted to see how dressing biblically affected my mind. 
+And this man came up to me and he said, "Why are you dressed like that?" 
+And I explained my project, and he said, "" Well, I am an adulterer, are you going to stone me? "" And I said, "" Well, that would be great! "" (Laughter) And I actually took out a handful of stones from my pocket that I had been carrying around for weeks, hoping for just this interaction — and, you know, they were pebbles — but he grabbed them out of my hand. 
+He was actually an elderly man, mid-70s, just so you know. 
+But he's still an adulterer, and still quite angry. 
+He grabbed them out of my hand and threw them at my face, and I felt that I could — eye for an eye — I could retaliate, and throw one back at him. 
+So that was my experience stoning, and it did allow me to talk about, in a more serious way, these big issues. 
+How can the Bible be so barbaric in some places, and yet so incredibly wise in others? 
+How should we view the Bible? 
+Should we view it, you know, as original intent, like a sort of a Scalia version of the Bible? 
+How was the Bible written? 
+And actually, since this is a tech crowd, I talk in the book about how the Bible actually reminds me of the Wikipedia, because it has all of these authors and editors over hundreds of years. 
+And it's sort of evolved. 
+It's not a book that was written and came down from on high. 
+So I thought I would end by telling you just a couple of the take-aways, the bigger lessons that I learned from my year. 
+The first is, thou shalt not take the Bible literally. 
+This became very, very clear, early on. 
+Because if you do, then you end up acting like a crazy person, and stoning adulterers, or — here's another example. 
+Well, that's another. I did spend some time shepherding. 
+(Laughter) It's a very relaxing vocation. I recommend it. 
+But this one is — the Bible says that you cannot touch women during certain times of the month, and more than that, you cannot sit on a seat where a menstruating woman has sat. 
+And my wife thought this was very offensive, so she sat in every seat in our apartment, and I had to spend much of the year standing until I bought my own seat and carried it around. 
+So, you know, I met with creationists. 
+I went to the creationists' museum. 
+And these are the ultimate literalists. 
+And it was fascinating, because they were not stupid people at all. 
+I would wager that their IQ is exactly the same as the average evolutionist. 
+It's just that their faith is so strong in this literal interpretation of the Bible that they distort all the data to fit their model. 
+And they go through these amazing mental gymnastics to accomplish this. 
+And I will say, though, the museum is gorgeous. 
+They really did a fantastic job. 
+If you're ever in Kentucky, there's, you can see a movie of the flood, and they have sprinklers in the ceiling that will sprinkle on you during the flood scenes. 
+So, whatever you think of creationism — and I think it's crazy — they did a great job. 
+(Laughter) Another lesson is that thou shalt give thanks. 
+And this one was a big lesson because I was praying, giving these prayers of thanksgiving, which was odd for an agnostic. 
+But I was saying thanks all the time, every day, and I started to change my perspective. 
+And I started to realize the hundreds of little things that go right every day, that I didn't even notice, that I took for granted, as opposed to focusing on the three or four that went wrong. 
+So, this is actually a key to happiness for me, is to just remember when I came over here, the car didn't flip over, and I didn't trip coming up the stairs. 
+It's a remarkable thing. 
+Third, that thou shall have reverence. 
+This one was unexpected because I started the year as an agnostic, and by the end of the year, I became what a friend of mine calls a reverent agnostic, which I love. 
+And I'm trying to start it as a movement. 
+So, if anyone wants to join, the basic idea is, whether or not there is a God, there's something important and beautiful about the idea of sacredness, and that our rituals can be sacred. 
+The Sabbath can be sacred. 
+This was one of the great things about my year, doing the Sabbath, because I am a workaholic, so having this one day where you cannot work, it really, that changed my life. 
+So, this idea of sacredness, whether or not there is a God. 
+Thou shall not stereotype. 
+This one happened because I spent a lot of time with various religious communities throughout America because I wanted it to be more than about my journey. 
+I wanted it to be about religion in America. 
+So, I spent time with evangelical Christians, and Hasidic Jews, and the Amish. 
+I'm very proud because I think I'm the only person in America to out Bible-talk a Jehovah's Witness. 
+(Laughter) After three and a half hours, he looked at his watch, he's like, "" I gotta go. "" (Laughter) Oh, thank you very much. 
+Thank you. Bless you, bless you. 
+But it was interesting because I had some very preconceived notions about, for instance, evangelical Christianity, and I found that it's such a wide and varied movement that it is difficult to make generalizations about it. 
+There's a group I met with called the Red Letter Christians, and they focus on the red words in the Bible, which are the ones that Jesus spoke. 
+That's how they printed them in the old Bibles. 
+And their argument is that Jesus never talked about homosexuality. 
+They have a pamphlet that says, "Here's what Jesus said about homosexuality," and you open it up, and there's nothing in it. 
+So, they say Jesus did talk a lot about helping the outcasts, helping poor people. 
+So, this was very inspiring to me. 
+I recommend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. 
+They're very inspiring leaders, even though I disagree with much of what they say. 
+Also, thou shalt not disregard the irrational. 
+This one was very unexpected because, you know, I grew up with the scientific worldview, and I was shocked learning how much of my life is governed by irrational forces. 
+And the thing is, if they're not harmful, they're not to be completely dismissed. 
+Because I learned that — I was thinking, I was doing all these rituals, these biblical rituals, separating my wool and linen, and I would ask these religious people "Why would the Bible possibly tell us to do this? Why would God care?" 
+And they said, "" We don't know, but it's just rituals that give us meaning. "" And I would say, "" But that's crazy. "" And they would say, "" Well, what about you? 
+You blow out candles on top of a birthday cake. 
+If a guy from Mars came down and saw, here's one guy blowing out the fire on top of a cake versus another guy not wearing clothes of mixed fabrics, would the Martians say, 'Well, that guy, he makes sense, but that guy's crazy?' "" So no, I think that rituals are, by nature, irrational. 
+So the key is to choose the right rituals, the ones that are not harmful — but rituals by themselves are not to be dismissed. 
+And finally I learned that thou shall pick and choose. 
+And this one I learned because I tried to follow everything in the Bible. 
+And I failed miserably. 
+Because you can't. 
+You have to pick and choose. And anyone who follows the Bible is going to be picking and choosing. 
+The key is to pick and choose the right parts. 
+There's the phrase called cafeteria religion, and the fundamentalists will use it in a denigrating way, and they'll say, "" Oh, it's just cafeteria religion. 
+You're just picking and choosing. "" But my argument is, "" What's wrong with cafeterias? "" I've had some great meals at cafeterias. 
+I've also had some meals that make me want to dry heave. 
+So, it's about choosing the parts of the Bible about compassion, about tolerance, about loving your neighbor, as opposed to the parts about homosexuality is a sin, or intolerance, or violence, which are very much in the Bible as well. 
+So if we are to find any meaning in this book, then we have to really engage it, and wrestle with it. 
+And I thought I'd end with just a couple more. 
+There's me reading the Bible. 
+That's how I hailed taxicabs. 
+(Laughter) Seriously, and it worked. And yes, that was actually a rented sheep, so I had to return that in the morning, but it served well for a day. 
+So, anyway, thank you so much for letting me speak. 
+
+What I wanted to talk to you about today is two things: one, the rise of a culture of availability; and two, a request. 
+So we're seeing a rise of this availability being driven by mobile device proliferation, globally, across all social strata. 
+We're seeing, along with that proliferation of mobile devices, an expectation of availability. 
+And, with that, comes the third point, which is obligation — and an obligation to that availability. 
+And the problem is, we're still working through, from a societal standpoint, how we allow people to be available. 
+There's a significant delta, in fact, between what we're willing to accept. 
+Apologies to Hans Rosling — he said anything that's not using real stats is a lie — but the big delta there is how we deal with this from a public standpoint. 
+So we've developed certain tactics and strategies to cover up. 
+This first one's called "" the lean. "" And if you've ever been in a meeting where you play sort of meeting "" chicken, "" you're sitting there, looking at the person, waiting for them to look away, and then quickly checking the device. 
+Although you can see the gentleman up on the right is busting him. 
+"The stretch." 
+OK, the gentleman on the left is saying, "" Screw you, I'm going to check my device. "" But the guy, here, on the right, he's doing the stretch. 
+It's that reeeee-e-e-each out, the physical contortion to get that device just below the tabletop. 
+Or, my favorite, the "" Love you; mean it. "" (Laughter) Nothing says "" I love you "" like "" Let me find somebody else I give a damn about. "" Or, this one, coming to us from India. 
+You can find this on YouTube, the gentleman who's recumbent on a motorcycle while text messaging. 
+Or what we call the "" sweet gravy, stop me before I kill again! "" That is actually the device. 
+What this is doing is, we find a — (Laughter) a direct collision — we find a direct collision between availability — and what's possible through availability — and a fundamental human need — which we've been hearing about a lot, actually — the need to create shared narratives. 
+We're very good at creating personal narratives, but it's the shared narratives that make us a culture. 
+And when you're standing with someone, and you're on your mobile device, effectively what you're saying to them is, "" You are not as important as, literally, almost anything that could come to me through this device. "" Look around you. 
+There might be somebody on one right now, participating in multi-dimensional engagement. 
+(Laughter) Our reality right now is less interesting than the story we're going to tell about it later. 
+This one I love. 
+This poor kid, clearly a prop — don't get me wrong, a willing prop — but the kiss that's being documented kind of looks like it sucks. 
+This is the sound of one hand clapping. 
+So, as we lose the context of our identity, it becomes incredibly important that what you share becomes the context of shared narrative, becomes the context in which we live. 
+The stories that we tell — what we push out — becomes who we are. 
+People aren't simply projecting identity, they're creating it. 
+And so that's the request I have for everybody in this room. 
+We are creating the technology that is going to create the new shared experience, which will create the new world. 
+And so my request is, please, let's make technologies that make people more human, and not less. 
+Thank you. 
+
+Two days later, the space traveler's manifesto explaining why — just like we heard yesterday — why we need to go into space: ""... trips to satellites of the outer planets. 
+
+Organic chemists make molecules, very complicated molecules, by chopping up a big molecule into small molecules and reverse engineering. 
+And as a chemist, one of the things I wanted to ask my research group a couple of years ago is, could we make a really cool universal chemistry set? 
+In essence, could we "" app "" chemistry? 
+Now what would this mean, and how would we do it? 
+Well to start to do this, we took a 3D printer and we started to print our beakers and our test tubes on one side and then print the molecule at the same time on the other side and combine them together in what we call reactionware. 
+And so by printing the vessel and doing the chemistry at the same time, we may start to access this universal toolkit of chemistry. 
+Now what could this mean? 
+Well if we can embed biological and chemical networks like a search engine, so if you have a cell that's ill that you need to cure or bacteria that you want to kill, if you have this embedded in your device at the same time, and you do the chemistry, you may be able to make drugs in a new way. 
+So how are we doing this in the lab? 
+Well it requires software, it requires hardware and it requires chemical inks. 
+And so the really cool bit is, the idea is that we want to have a universal set of inks that we put out with the printer, and you download the blueprint, the organic chemistry for that molecule and you make it in the device. 
+And so you can make your molecule in the printer using this software. 
+So what could this mean? 
+Well, ultimately, it could mean that you could print your own medicine. 
+And this is what we're doing in the lab at the moment. 
+But to take baby steps to get there, first of all we want to look at drug design and production, or drug discovery and manufacturing. 
+Because if we can manufacture it after we've discovered it, we could deploy it anywhere. 
+You don't need to go to the chemist anymore. 
+We can print drugs at point of need. 
+We can download new diagnostics. 
+Say a new super bug has emerged. 
+You put it in your search engine, and you create the drug to treat the threat. 
+So this allows you on-the-fly molecular assembly. 
+But perhaps for me the core bit going into the future is this idea of taking your own stem cells, with your genes and your environment, and you print your own personal medicine. 
+And if that doesn't seem fanciful enough, where do you think we're going to go? 
+Well, you're going to have your own personal matter fabricator. 
+Beam me up, Scotty. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Today 40 million Americans are indebted for their passage to the new economy. 
+Too poor to pay their way through college, they now owe lenders more than one trillion US dollars. 
+They do find what jobs they can get to pay off a debt that is secured on their person. 
+In America, even a bankrupt gambler gets a second chance. 
+For his generation, higher education was free or almost free, because it was thought of as a public good. 
+30 years ago, higher education tuition was affordable, reasonable, and what debts you accumulated, you paid off by graduation date. 
+Not anymore. 
+Paul's daughter followed in his footsteps, but with one difference: when she graduated five years ago, it was with a whopping debt. 
+Students like Kate have to take on a loan because the cost of higher education has become unaffordable for many if not most American families. 
+But so what? 
+Getting into debt to buy an expensive education is not all bad if you could pay it off with the increased income that you earned from it. 
+But that's where the rubber meets the road. 
+So... 
+tuition costs up, public funding down, family incomes diminished, personal incomes weak. 
+1.2 trillion dollars of debts for diplomas make it abundantly obvious that higher education is a consumer product you can buy. 
+All of us talk about education just as the economists do now, as an investment that you make to improve the human stock by training them for work. 
+As an investment you make to sort and classify people so that employers can hire them more easily. 
+The U.S. News & World Report ranks colleges just as the consumer report rates washing machines. 
+Teachers are called "" service providers, "" students are called "" consumers. "" Sociology and Shakespeare and soccer and science, all of these are "" content. "" Student debt is profitable. 
+Your debt fattens the profit of the student loan industry. 
+The two 800-pound gorillas of which — Sallie Mae and Navient — posted last year a combined profit of 1.2 billion dollars. 
+And just like home mortgages, student loans can be bundled and packaged and sliced and diced, and sold on Wall Street. 
+And colleges and universities that invest in these securitized loans profit twice. 
+Once from your tuition, and then again from the interest on debt. 
+in exploiting the very ignorance that they pretend to educate? 
+Third: diplomas are a brand. 
+Many years ago my teacher wrote, "" When students are treated as consumers, they're made prisoners of addiction and envy. "" Just as consumers can be sold and resold upgraded versions of an iPhone, so also people can be sold more and more education. 
+College is the new high school, we already say that. 
+People can be upsold on certifications and recertifications, master's degrees, doctoral degrees. 
+Higher education is also marketed as a status object. 
+Buy a degree, much like you do a Lexus of a Louis Vuitton bag, to distinguish yourself from others. 
+Diplomas are a brand. 
+But these truths are often times hidden by a very noisy sales pitch. 
+There is not a day that goes by without some policy guy on television telling us, "" A college degree is absolutely essential to get on that up escalator to a middle-class life. "" And the usual evidence offered is the college premium: a college grad who makes on average 56 percent more than a high school grad. 
+Let's look at that number more carefully, because on the face of it, it seems to belie the stories we all hear about college grads working as baristas and cashiers. 
+Of 100 people who enroll in any form of post-secondary education, 45 do not complete it in a timely fashion, for a number of reasons, including financial. 
+Of the 55 that do graduate, two will remain unemployed, and another 18 are underemployed. 
+So, college grads earn more than high school grads, but does it pay for the exorbitant tuition and the lost wages while at college? 
+Now even economists admit going to college pays off for only those who complete it. 
+But that's only because high school wages have been cut to the bone, for decades now. 
+For decades, workers with a high school degree have been denied a fair share of what they have produced. 
+And had they received as they should have, then going to college would have been a bad investment for many. 
+College premium? 
+I think it's a high school discount. 
+Two out of three people who enroll are not going to find an adequate job. 
+And the future, for them, doesn't look particularly promising — in fact, it's downright bleak. 
+And it is they who are going to suffer the most punishing forms of student debt. 
+And it is they, curiously and sadly, who are marketed most loudly about this college premium thing. 
+That's not just cynical marketing, that's cruel. 
+So what do we do? 
+What if students and parents treated higher education as a consumer product? 
+Everybody else seems to. 
+Then, like any other consumer product, you would demand to know what you're paying for. 
+When you buy medicines, you get a list of side effects. 
+When you buy a higher educational product, you should have a warning label that allows consumers to choose, make informed choices. 
+When you buy a car, it tells you how many miles per gallon to expect. 
+Who knows what to expect from a degree say, in Canadian Studies. 
+There is such a thing, by the way. 
+What if there was an app for that? 
+One that linked up the cost of a major to the expected income. 
+Let's call it Income-Based Tuition or IBT. 
+(Laughter) Discover your reality. (Laughter) 
+There are three advantages, three benefits to Income-Based Tuition. 
+Any user can figure out how much money he or she will make from a given college and major. 
+Such informed users are unlikely to fall victim to the huckster's ploy, to the sales pitch. 
+But also to choose wisely. 
+Why would anybody pay more for college than let's say, 15 percent of the additional income they earn? 
+There's a second benefit to Income-Based Tuition. 
+By tying the cost to the income, college administrators would be forced to manage costs better, to find innovative ways to do so. 
+For instance, all of you students here pay roughly the same tuition for every major. 
+That is manifestly unfair, and should change. 
+An engineering student uses more resources and facilities and labs and faculty than a philosophy student. 
+But the philosophy student, as a consequence, is subsidizing the engineering student. 
+Who then, by the way, goes on and earns more money. 
+Why should two people buy the same product, pay the same, but one person receive half or a third of the service. 
+In fact, college grads, some majors, pay 25 percent of their income servicing their student debt, while others pay five percent. 
+That kind if inequity would end when majors are priced more correctly. 
+Now of course, all this data — and one of you is going to do this, right? 
+All this data has to be well designed, maybe audited by public accounting firms to avoid statistical lies. 
+But be that as it may, the third and biggest benefit of Income-Based Tuition, is it would free Americans from the fear and the fact of financial ruin because they bought a defective product. 
+Perhaps, in time, young and old Americans may rediscover, as the gentleman said earlier, their curiosity, their love of learning — begin to study what they love, love what they study, follow their passion... 
+getting stimulated by their intelligence, follow paths of inquiry that they really want to. 
+After all, it was Eric and Kevin, two years ago, just exactly these kinds of young men, who prompted me and worked with me, and still do, in the study of indebted students in America. 
+Thank you for your attention. 
+
+My story begins right here actually in Rajasthan about two years ago. 
+I was in the desert, under the starry skies with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali. 
+And we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient Indian epic "" The Mahabharata. "" So back in the day, when us Indians wanted to travel we'd jump into a chariot and we'd zoom across the sky. 
+Now we do the same with airplanes. 
+Back then, when Arjuna, the great Indian warrior prince, when he was thirsty, he'd take out a bow, he'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out. 
+Now we do the same with drills and machines. 
+The conclusion that we came to was that magic had been replaced by machinery. 
+And this made me really sad. 
+I found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe. 
+I was terrified by this idea that I would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me, without tweeting it to my friends. 
+And it felt like technology should enable magic, not kill it. 
+When I was a little girl, my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch. 
+And this piece of 50-year-old technology became the most magical thing to me. 
+It became a gilded gateway into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks and images in my imagination. 
+So I felt like our cellphones and our fancy watches and our cameras had stopped us from dreaming. 
+They stopped us from being inspired. 
+And so I jumped in, I jumped into this world of technology, to see how I could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it. 
+I've been illustrating books since I was 16. 
+And so when I saw the iPad, I saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world. 
+It can know how we're holding it. 
+It can know where we are. 
+It brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch. 
+Storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial. 
+But what are we doing with it? 
+So I'm actually just going to go in and launch Khoya, an interactive app for the iPad. 
+So it says, "" Place your fingers upon each light. "" And so — (Music) It says, "" This box belongs to... "" And so I type in my name. 
+And actually I become a character in the book. 
+At various points, a little letter drops down to me — and the iPad knows where you live because of GPS — which is actually addressed to me. 
+The child in me is really excited by these kinds of possibilities. 
+Now I've been talking a lot about magic. 
+And I don't mean wizards and dragons, I mean the kind of childhood magic, those ideas that we all harbored as children. 
+This idea of fireflies in a jar, for some reason, was always really exciting to me. 
+And so over here you need to tilt your iPad, take the fireflies out. 
+And they actually illuminate your way through the rest of the book. 
+Another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble. 
+And so over here, each book and each world becomes a little marble that I drag in to this magical device within the device. 
+And it opens up a map. 
+All along, all fantasy books have always had maps, but these maps have been static. 
+This is a map that grows and glows and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book. 
+It reveals itself to you at certain points in the book as well. 
+So I'm just going to enter in. 
+Another thing that's actually really important to me is creating content that is Indian and yet very contemporary. 
+Over here, these are the Apsaras. 
+So we've all heard about fairies and we've all heard about nymphs, but how many people outside of India know about their Indian counterparts, the Apsaras? 
+These poor Apsaras have been trapped inside Indra's chambers for thousands of years in an old and musty book. 
+And so we're bringing them back in a contemporary story for children. 
+And a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis. 
+(Music) Speaking of the environmental crisis, I think a big problem has been in the last 10 years is that children have been locked inside their rooms, glued to their PCs, they haven't been able to get out. 
+But now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology. 
+One of the interactions in the book is that you're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside, take out your camera on the iPad and collect pictures of different natural objects. 
+When I was a child, I had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells. 
+And somehow kids don't do that anymore. 
+So in bringing back this childhood ritual, you need to go out and, in one chapter, take a picture of a flower and then tag it. 
+In another chapter, you need to take a picture of a piece of bark and then tag that. 
+And what happens is that you actually create a digital collection of photographs that you can then put up online. 
+A child in London puts up a picture of a fox and says, "" Oh, I saw a fox today. "" A child in India says, "" I saw a monkey today. "" And it creates this kind of social network around a collection of digital photographs that you've actually taken. 
+In the possibilities of linking together magic, the earth and technology, there are multiple possibilities. 
+In the next book, we plan on having an interaction where you take your iPad out with the video on and through augmented reality, you see this layer of animated pixies appear on a houseplant that's outside your house. 
+At one point, your screen is filled up with leaves. 
+And so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away and read the rest of the book. 
+We're moving, we're all moving here, to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology, and magic and technology can come closer together. 
+We're harnessing energy from the sun. 
+We're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Singing) (Singing ends) (Applause) Pep Rosenfeld: Folks, you've just met Claron McFadden. 
+And these little dots, these represent a sort of sound that's not a vocal, not a lyrical way of expressing the voice. 
+
+Ever since I was a little girl seeing "" Star Wars "" for the first time, I've been fascinated by this idea of personal robots. 
+And as a little girl, I loved the idea of a robot that interacted with us much more like a helpful, trusted sidekick — something that would delight us, enrich our lives and help us save a galaxy or two. 
+I knew robots like that didn't really exist, but I knew I wanted to build them. 
+So 20 years pass — I am now a graduate student at MIT studying artificial intelligence, the year is 1997, and NASA has just landed the first robot on Mars. 
+But robots are still not in our home, ironically. 
+And I remember thinking about all the reasons why that was the case. 
+But one really struck me. 
+Robotics had really been about interacting with things, not with people — certainly not in a social way that would be natural for us and would really help people accept robots into our daily lives. 
+For me, that was the white space; that's what robots could not do yet. 
+And so that year, I started to build this robot, Kismet, the world's first social robot. 
+Three years later — a lot of programming, working with other graduate students in the lab — Kismet was ready to start interacting with people. 
+(Video) Scientist: I want to show you something. 
+Kismet: (Nonsense) Scientist: This is a watch that my girlfriend gave me. Kismet: (Nonsense) 
+Scientist: Yeah, look, it's got a little blue light in it too. 
+I almost lost it this week. 
+Cynthia Breazeal: So Kismet interacted with people like kind of a non-verbal child or pre-verbal child, which I assume was fitting because it was really the first of its kind. 
+It didn't speak language, but it didn't matter. 
+This little robot was somehow able to tap into something deeply social within us — and with that, the promise of an entirely new way we could interact with robots. 
+So over the past several years I've been continuing to explore this interpersonal dimension of robots, now at the media lab with my own team of incredibly talented students. 
+And one of my favorite robots is Leonardo. 
+We developed Leonardo in collaboration with Stan Winston Studio. 
+And so I want to show you a special moment for me of Leo. 
+This is Matt Berlin interacting with Leo, introducing Leo to a new object. 
+And because it's new, Leo doesn't really know what to make of it. 
+But sort of like us, he can actually learn about it from watching Matt's reaction. 
+(Video) Matt Berlin: Hello, Leo. 
+Leo, this is Cookie Monster. 
+Can you find Cookie Monster? 
+Leo, Cookie Monster is very bad. 
+He's very bad, Leo. 
+Cookie Monster is very, very bad. 
+He's a scary monster. 
+He wants to get your cookies. 
+(Laughter) CB: All right, so Leo and Cookie might have gotten off to a little bit of a rough start, but they get along great now. 
+So what I've learned through building these systems is that robots are actually a really intriguing social technology, where it's actually their ability to push our social buttons and to interact with us like a partner that is a core part of their functionality. 
+And with that shift in thinking, we can now start to imagine new questions, new possibilities for robots that we might not have thought about otherwise. 
+But what do I mean when I say "" push our social buttons? "" Well, one of the things that we've learned is that, if we design these robots to communicate with us using the same body language, the same sort of non-verbal cues that people use — like Nexi, our humanoid robot, is doing here — what we find is that people respond to robots a lot like they respond to people. 
+People use these cues to determine things like how persuasive someone is, how likable, how engaging, how trustworthy. 
+It turns out it's the same for robots. 
+It's turning out now that robots are actually becoming a really interesting new scientific tool to understand human behavior. 
+To answer questions like, how is it that, from a brief encounter, we're able to make an estimate of how trustworthy another person is? 
+Mimicry's believed to play a role, but how? 
+Is it the mimicking of particular gestures that matters? 
+It turns out it's really hard to learn this or understand this from watching people because when we interact we do all of these cues automatically. 
+We can't carefully control them because they're subconscious for us. 
+But with the robot, you can. 
+And so in this video here — this is a video taken from David DeSteno's lab at Northeastern University. 
+He's a psychologist we've been collaborating with. 
+There's actually a scientist carefully controlling Nexi's cues to be able to study this question. 
+And the bottom line is — the reason why this works is because it turns out people just behave like people even when interacting with a robot. 
+So given that key insight, we can now start to imagine new kinds of applications for robots. 
+For instance, if robots do respond to our non-verbal cues, maybe they would be a cool, new communication technology. 
+So imagine this: What about a robot accessory for your cellphone? 
+You call your friend, she puts her handset in a robot, and, bam! You're a MeBot — you can make eye contact, you can talk with your friends, you can move around, you can gesture — maybe the next best thing to really being there, or is it? 
+To explore this question, my student, Siggy Adalgeirsson, did a study where we brought human participants, people, into our lab to do a collaborative task with a remote collaborator. 
+The task involved things like looking at a set of objects on the table, discussing them in terms of their importance and relevance to performing a certain task — this ended up being a survival task — and then rating them in terms of how valuable and important they thought they were. 
+The remote collaborator was an experimenter from our group who used one of three different technologies to interact with the participants. 
+The first was just the screen. 
+This is just like video conferencing today. 
+The next was to add mobility — so, have the screen on a mobile base. 
+This is like, if you're familiar with any of the telepresence robots today — this is mirroring that situation. 
+And then the fully expressive MeBot. 
+So after the interaction, we asked people to rate their quality of interaction with the technology, with a remote collaborator through this technology, in a number of different ways. 
+We looked at psychological involvement — how much empathy did you feel for the other person? 
+We looked at overall engagement. 
+We looked at their desire to cooperate. 
+And this is what we see when they use just the screen. 
+It turns out, when you add mobility — the ability to roll around the table — you get a little more of a boost. 
+And you get even more of a boost when you add the full expression. 
+So it seems like this physical, social embodiment actually really makes a difference. 
+Now let's try to put this into a little bit of context. 
+Today we know that families are living further and further apart, and that definitely takes a toll on family relationships and family bonds over distance. 
+For me, I have three young boys, and I want them to have a really good relationship with their grandparents. 
+But my parents live thousands of miles away, so they just don't get to see each other that often. 
+We try Skype, we try phone calls, but my boys are little — they don't really want to talk; they want to play. 
+So I love the idea of thinking about robots as a new kind of distance-play technology. 
+I imagine a time not too far from now — my mom can go to her computer, open up a browser and jack into a little robot. 
+And as grandma-bot, she can now play, really play, with my sons, with her grandsons, in the real world with his real toys. 
+I could imagine grandmothers being able to do social-plays with their granddaughters, with their friends, and to be able to share all kinds of other activities around the house, like sharing a bedtime story. 
+And through this technology, being able to be an active participant in their grandchildren's lives in a way that's not possible today. 
+Let's think about some other domains, like maybe health. 
+So in the United States today, over 65 percent of people are either overweight or obese, and now it's a big problem with our children as well. 
+And we know that as you get older in life, if you're obese when you're younger, that can lead to chronic diseases that not only reduce your quality of life, but are a tremendous economic burden on our health care system. 
+But if robots can be engaging, if we like to cooperate with robots, if robots are persuasive, maybe a robot can help you maintain a diet and exercise program, maybe they can help you manage your weight. 
+Sort of like a digital Jiminy — as in the well-known fairy tale — a kind of friendly, supportive presence that's always there to be able to help you make the right decision in the right way at the right time to help you form healthy habits. 
+So we actually explored this idea in our lab. 
+This is a robot, Autom. 
+Cory Kidd developed this robot for his doctoral work. 
+And it was designed to be a robot diet-and-exercise coach. 
+It had a couple of simple non-verbal skills it could do. 
+It could make eye contact with you. 
+It could share information looking down at a screen. 
+You'd use a screen interface to enter information, like how many calories you ate that day, how much exercise you got. 
+And then it could help track that for you. 
+And the robot spoke with a synthetic voice to engage you in a coaching dialogue modeled after trainers and patients and so forth. 
+And it would build a working alliance with you through that dialogue. 
+It could help you set goals and track your progress, and it would help motivate you. 
+So an interesting question is, does the social embodiment really matter? Does it matter that it's a robot? 
+Is it really just the quality of advice and information that matters? 
+To explore that question, we did a study in the Boston area where we put one of three interventions in people's homes for a period of several weeks. 
+One case was the robot you saw there, Autom. 
+Another was a computer that ran the same touch-screen interface, ran exactly the same dialogues. 
+The quality of advice was identical. 
+And the third was just a pen and paper log, because that's the standard intervention you typically get when you start a diet-and-exercise program. 
+So one of the things we really wanted to look at was not how much weight people lost, but really how long they interacted with the robot. 
+Because the challenge is not losing weight, it's actually keeping it off. 
+And the longer you could interact with one of these interventions, well that's indicative, potentially, of longer-term success. 
+So the first thing I want to look at is how long, how long did people interact with these systems. 
+It turns out that people interacted with the robot significantly more, even though the quality of the advice was identical to the computer. 
+When it asked people to rate it on terms of the quality of the working alliance, people rated the robot higher and they trusted the robot more. 
+(Laughter) And when you look at emotional engagement, it was completely different. 
+People would name the robots. 
+They would dress the robots. 
+(Laughter) And even when we would come up to pick up the robots at the end of the study, they would come out to the car and say good-bye to the robots. 
+They didn't do this with a computer. 
+The last thing I want to talk about today is the future of children's media. 
+We know that kids spend a lot of time behind screens today, whether it's television or computer games or whatnot. 
+My sons, they love the screen. They love the screen. 
+But I want them to play; as a mom, I want them to play, like, real-world play. 
+And so I have a new project in my group I wanted to present to you today called Playtime Computing that's really trying to think about how we can take what's so engaging about digital media and literally bring it off the screen into the real world of the child, where it can take on many of the properties of real-world play. 
+So here's the first exploration of this idea, where characters can be physical or virtual, and where the digital content can literally come off the screen into the world and back. 
+I like to think of this as the Atari Pong of this blended-reality play. 
+But we can push this idea further. 
+What if — (Game) Nathan: Here it comes. Yay! 
+CB: — the character itself could come into your world? 
+It turns out that kids love it when the character becomes real and enters into their world. 
+And when it's in their world, they can relate to it and play with it in a way that's fundamentally different from how they play with it on the screen. 
+Another important idea is this notion of persistence of character across realities. 
+So changes that children make in the real world need to translate to the virtual world. 
+So here, Nathan has changed the letter A to the number 2. 
+You can imagine maybe these symbols give the characters special powers when it goes into the virtual world. 
+So they are now sending the character back into that world. 
+And now it's got number power. 
+And then finally, what I've been trying to do here is create a really immersive experience for kids, where they really feel like they are part of that story, a part of that experience. 
+And I really want to spark their imaginations the way mine was sparked as a little girl watching "" Star Wars. "" But I want to do more than that. 
+I actually want them to create those experiences. 
+I want them to be able to literally build their imagination into these experiences and make them their own. 
+So we've been exploring a lot of ideas in telepresence and mixed reality to literally allow kids to project their ideas into this space where other kids can interact with them and build upon them. 
+I really want to come up with new ways of children's media that foster creativity and learning and innovation. 
+I think that's very, very important. 
+So this is a new project. 
+We've invited a lot of kids into this space, and they think it's pretty cool. 
+But I can tell you, the thing that they love the most is the robot. 
+What they care about is the robot. 
+Robots touch something deeply human within us. 
+And so whether they're helping us to become creative and innovative, or whether they're helping us to feel more deeply connected despite distance, or whether they are our trusted sidekick who's helping us attain our personal goals in becoming our highest and best selves, for me, robots are all about people. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+PM: So when we first started talking about, maybe the subject wouldn't be social media, which we assumed it would be, but that you had very much on your mind the missing leadership positions, particularly in the sector of technology and social media. 
+But how did that evolve for you as a thought, and end up being the TED Talk that you gave? 
+SS: So I was really scared to get on this stage and talk about women, because I grew up in the business world, as I think so many of us did. 
+They might notice. Or worse, if you say "" woman, "" people on the other end of the table think you're asking for special treatment, or complaining. 
+Or worse, about to sue them. And so I went through — (Laughter) Right? I went through my entire business career, and never spoke about being a woman, never spoke about it publicly. 
+I came out of college over 20 years ago, and I thought that all of my peers were men and women, all the people above me were all men, but that would change, because your generation had done such an amazing job fighting for equality, equality was now ours for the taking. And it wasn't. 
+Because year after year, I was one of fewer and fewer, and now, often the only woman in a room. 
+But fortunately, there were the few, the proud — like you — who told me I should give the speech, and I asked myself the question Mark Zuckerberg might — the founder of Facebook and my boss — asks all of us, which is, what would I do if I wasn't afraid? 
+And the answer to what would I do if I wasn't afraid is I would get on the TED stage, and talk about women, and leadership. And I did, and survived. (Applause) PM: I would say, not only survived. I'm thinking of that moment, Sheryl, when you and I were standing backstage together, and you turned to me, and you told me a story. 
+And I said — very last minute — you know, you really should share that story. 
+SS: Oh, yeah. PM: What was that story? 
+SS: Well, it's an important part of the journey. So I had — TEDWomen — the original one was in D.C. — so I live here, so I had gotten on a plane the day before, and my daughter was three, she was clinging to my leg: "" Mommy, don't go. "" And Pat's a friend, and so, not related to the speech I was planning on giving, which was chock full of facts and figures, and nothing personal, I told Pat the story. I said, well, I'm having a hard day. 
+I'm going to get on a stage and admit my daughter was clinging to my leg? 
+And I did. And I think that's a really important part of the journey. 
+The same thing happened when I wrote my book. I started writing the book. I wrote a first chapter, I thought it was fabulous. It was chock-full of data and figures, I had three pages on matrilineal Maasai tribes, and their sociological patterns. 
+My husband read it and he was like, this is like eating your Wheaties. (Laughter) No one — and I apologize to Wheaties if there's someone — no one, no one will read this book. 
+And I realized through the process that I had to be more honest and more open, and I had to tell my stories. My stories of still not feeling as self-confident as I should, in many situations. My first and failed marriage. Crying at work. 
+Felling like I didn't belong there, feeling guilty to this day. 
+And part of my journey, starting on this stage, going to "" Lean In, "" going to the foundation, is all about being more open and honest about those challenges, so that other women can be more open and honest, and all of us can work together towards real equality. 
+PM: I think that one of the most striking parts about the book, and in my opinion, one of the reasons it's hit such a nerve and is resonating around the world, is that you are personal in the book, and that you do make it clear that, while you've observed some things that are very important for other women to know, that you've had the same challenges that many others of us have, as you faced the hurdles and the barriers and possibly the people who don't believe the same. 
+So talk about that process: deciding you'd go public with the private part, and then you would also put yourself in the position of something of an expert on how to resolve those challenges. 
+I got this great — - one of the first letters I got was from a woman who said that she was offered a really big promotion at work, and she turned it down, and she told her best friend she turned it down, and her best friend said, you really need to watch this TED Talk. 
+And so she watched this TED Talk, and she went back the next day, she took the job, she went home, and she handed her husband the grocery list. (Laughter) And she said, I can do this. 
+So he could call evenly on men and women. And what he proved to himself was that the women knew the answers just as well or better, and he was able to go back to them and tell them that. 
+And then there was the woman, stay-at-home mom, lives in a really difficult neighborhood, with not a great school, she said that TED Talk — she's never had a corporate job, but that TED Talk inspired her to go to her school and fight for a better teacher for her child. 
+And I guess it was part of was finding my own voice. 
+And I realized that other women and men could find their voice through it, which is why I went from the talk to the book. 
+PM: And in the book, you not only found your voice, which is clear and strong in the book, but you also share what you've learned — the experiences of other people in the lessons. 
+And that's what I'm thinking about in terms of putting yourself in a — you became a sort of expert in how you lean in. 
+To launch not just a book, not just a best-selling, best-viewed talk, but a movement, where people began to literally describe their actions at work as, I'm leaning in. 
+SS: I mean, I'm grateful, I'm honored, I'm happy, and it's the very beginning. 
+So I don't know if I'm an expert, or if anyone is an expert. I certainly have done a lot of research. 
+I have read every study, I have pored over the materials, and the lessons are very clear. Because here's what we know: What we know is that stereotypes are holding women back from leadership roles all over the world. 
+Even within our own country, to Japan, to Korea, to China, to Asia, Europe, they're so different. Except for one thing: gender. 
+All over the world, no matter what our cultures are, we think men should be strong, assertive, aggressive, have voice; we think women should speak when spoken to, help others. 
+Now we have, all over the world, women are called "" bossy. "" There is a word for "" bossy, "" for little girls, in every language there's one. 
+It's a word that's pretty much not used for little boys, because if a little boy leads, there's no negative word for it, it's expected. But if a little girl leads, she's bossy. 
+(Laughter) There's always a few, it runs about five percent. Okay, get ready, gentlemen. 
+If you're a woman, please raise your hand if you've ever been told you're too aggressive at work. 
+(Laughter) That is what audiences have said in every country in the world, and it's deeply supported by the data. 
+Now, do we think women are more aggressive than men? Of course not. 
+It's just that we judge them through a different lens, and a lot of the character traits that you must exhibit to perform at work, to get results, to lead, are ones that we think, in a man, he's a boss, and in a woman, she's bossy. 
+One of the happiest moments I had in this whole journey is, after the book came out, I stood on a stage with John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco. 
+PM: Can we send that to a lot of other people that we know? (Applause) SS: And so John is doing that because he believes it's good for his company, and so this kind of acknowledgement of these biases can change it. 
+And so next time you all see someone call a little girl "" bossy, "" you walk right up to that person, big smile, and you say, "" That little girl's not bossy. That little girl has executive leadership skills. "" (Laughter) PM: I know that's what you're telling your daughter. SS: Absolutely. 
+I mean, let's just put it out there, face the fact that women are — in a time when we have more open doors, and more opportunities — are still not getting to the leadership positions. 
+So in the months that have come since the book, in which "" Lean In "" focused on that and said, here are some of the challenges that remain, and many of them we have to own within ourselves and look at ourselves. What has changed? 
+So everywhere I go, CEOs, they're mostly men, say to me, you're costing me so much money because all the women want to be paid as much as the men. 
+And to them I say, I'm not sorry at all. (Laughter) At all. I mean, the women should be paid as much as the men. 
+Everywhere I go, women tell me they ask for raises. 
+Everywhere I go, women say they're getting better relationships with their spouses, asking for more help at home, asking for the promotions they should be getting at work, and importantly, believing it themselves. Even little things. 
+One of the governors of one of the states told me that he didn't realize that more women were, in fact, literally sitting on the side of the room, which they are, and now he made a rule that all the women on his staff need to sit at the table. 
+There are over 12,000 circles in 50 countries in the world. 
+PM: Wow, that's amazing. 
+SS: And these are people who are meeting every single month. 
+I met one of them, I was in Beijing. 
+A group of women, they're all about 29 or 30, they started the first Lean In circle in Beijing, several of them grew up in very poor, rural China. 
+These women are 29, they are told by their society that they are "" left over, "" because they are not yet married, and the process of coming together once a month at a meeting is helping them define who they are for themselves. 
+I looked at them, we went around and introduced ourselves, and they all said their names and where they're from, and I said, I'm Sheryl Sandberg, and this was my dream. 
+But the fact that a woman so far away out in the world, who grew up in a rural village, who's being told to marry someone she doesn't want to marry, can now go meet once a month with a group of people and refuse that, and find life on her own terms. 
+That's the kind of change we have to hope for. 
+They need to look at this, anticipate the barriers, and recognize them, put them out in the open, have the dialogue about it, but that it's really for women who are that. Doing that. Pursuing the corporate world. 
+And yet the book is being read, as you say, in rural and developing countries. 
+What part of that has surprised you, and perhaps led to a new perspective on your part? 
+SS: The book is about self-confidence, and about equality. 
+And it turns out, everywhere in the world, women need more self-confidence, because the world tells us we're not equal to men. 
+Everywhere in the world, we live in a world where the men get "" and, "" and women get "" or. "" I've never met a man who's been asked how he does it all. (Laughter) Again, I'm going to turn to the men in the audience: Please raise your hand if you've been asked, how do you do it all? (Laughter) 
+Women, women. Please raise your hand if you've been asked how you do it all? 
+We assume men can do it all, slash — have jobs and children. 
+We assume women can't, and that's ridiculous, because the great majority of women everywhere in the world, including the United States, work full time and have children. 
+And I think people don't fully understand how broad the message is. 
+There is a circle that's been started for rescued sex workers in Miami. 
+They're using "" Lean In "" to help people make the transition back to what would be a fair life, really rescuing them from their pimps, and using it. 
+There are dress-for-success groups in Texas which are using the book, for women who have never been to college. 
+PM: If you were invited now to make another TEDWomen talk, what would you say that is a result of this experience, for you personally, and what you've learned about women, and men, as you've made this journey? 
+SS: I think I would say — I tried to say this strongly, but I think I can say it more strongly — I want to say that the status quo is not enough. 
+That it's not good enough, that it's not changing quickly enough. 
+Since I gave my TED Talk and published my book, another year of data came out from the U.S. Census. 
+No movement in the wage gap for women in the United States. 
+If you are a black woman, 64 cents. 
+If you are a Latina, we're at 54 cents. 
+Do you know when the last time those numbers went up? 
+2002. 
+We are stagnating, we are stagnating in so many ways. 
+And I think we are not really being honest about that, for so many reasons. It's so hard to talk about gender. 
+We have to get rid of the word bossy and bring back — (Applause) I think I would say in a louder voice, we need to get rid of the word "" bossy "" and bring back the word "" feminist, "" because we need it. (Applause) 
+PM: And we all need to do a lot more leaning in. 
+SS: A lot more leaning in. 
+PM: Thank you, Sheryl. 
+Thanks for leaning in and saying yes. 
+
+And these are made of this kind of tube — electricity tube, we call it in Holland. 
+And we can start a film about that, and we can see a little bit backwards in time. 
+Theo Jansen is working hard on this evolution. 
+And they should survive over there, on their own, in the future. 
+Learning to live on their own — and it'll take couple of more years to let them walk on their own. 
+The wind will move feathers on their back, which will drive their feet. 
+(Music) This is the Animaris Currens Ventosa. (Music) 
+(Laughter) (Applause) TJ: This is a herd, and it is built according to genetic codes. 
+And it is a sort of race, and each and every animal is different, and the winning codes will multiply. 
+So, the proportion of the tubes in this animal is very important for the walking. 
+In fact, it's a new invention of the wheel. 
+The axis of a wheel stays on the same level, and this hip is staying on the same level as well. 
+In fact, this is better than a wheel, because when you try to drive your bicycle on the beach, you will notice it's very hard to do. 
+I will show you, in the next video — can you start it, please? — that very heavy loads can be moved. 
+There's a guy pushing there, behind, but it can also walk on the wind very well. 
+It's 3.2 tons. 
+And this is the water feeler, and what's very important is this tube. 
+It sucks in air normally, but when it swallows water, it feels the resistance of it. 
+This is a part of the nose of the Animaris Percipiere. 
+
+Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize [winner] in economics, once wrote: "" Productivity is not everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything. "" So this is serious. 
+There are not that many things on earth that are "" almost everything. "" Productivity is the principal driver of the prosperity of a society. 
+So we have a problem. 
+In the largest European economies, productivity used to grow five percent per annum in the '50s,' 60s, early '70s. 
+From '73 to' 83: three percent per annum. 
+From '83 to' 95: two percent per annum. 
+Since 1995: less than one percent per annum. 
+The same profile in Japan. 
+The same profile in the US, despite a momentary rebound 15 years ago, and despite all the technological innovations around us: the Internet, the information, the new information and communication technologies. 
+When productivity grows three percent per annum, you double the standard of living every generation. 
+Every generation is twice as well-off as its parents'. 
+When it grows one percent per annum, it takes three generations to double the standard of living. 
+And in this process, many people will be less well-off than their parents. 
+They will have less of everything: smaller roofs, or perhaps no roof at all, less access to education, to vitamins, to antibiotics, to vaccination — to everything. 
+Think of all the problems that we're facing at the moment. 
+All. 
+Chances are that they are rooted in the productivity crisis. 
+Why this crisis? 
+Because the basic tenets about efficiency — effectiveness in organizations, in management — have become counterproductive for human efforts. 
+Everywhere in public services — in companies, in the way we work, the way we innovate, invest — try to learn to work better. 
+Take the holy trinity of efficiency: clarity, measurement, accountability. 
+They make human efforts derail. 
+There are two ways to look at it, to prove it. 
+One, the one I prefer, is rigorous, elegant, nice — math. 
+But the full math version takes a little while, so there is another one. 
+It is to look at a relay race. 
+This is what we will do today. 
+Hopefully, it's faster. 
+(Laughter) World championship final — women. 
+Eight teams in the final. 
+The fastest team is the US team. 
+They have the fastest women on earth. 
+They are the favorite team to win. 
+Notably, if you compare them to an average team, say, the French team, (Laughter) based on their best performances in the 100-meter race, if you add the individual times of the US runners, they arrive at the finish line 3.2 meters ahead of the French team. 
+And this year, the US team is in great shape. 
+Based on their best performance this year, they arrive 6.4 meters ahead of the French team, based on the data. 
+We are going to look at the race. 
+At some point you will see, towards the end, that Torri Edwards, the fourth US runner, is ahead. 
+Not surprising — this year she got the gold medal in the 100-meter race. 
+And by the way, Chryste Gaines, the second runner in the US team, is the fastest woman on earth. 
+So, there are 3.5 billion women on earth. 
+Where are the two fastest? On the US team. 
+And the two other runners on the US team are not bad, either. 
+(Laughter) So clearly, the US team has won the war for talent. 
+But behind, the average team is trying to catch up. 
+Let's watch the race. 
+(Video: French sportscasters narrate race) (Video: Race narration ends) Yves Morieux: So what happened? 
+The fastest team did not win; the slower one did. 
+By the way, I hope you appreciate the deep historical research I did to make the French look good. 
+(Laughter) But let's not exaggerate — it's not archeology, either. (Laughter) 
+But why? 
+Because of cooperation. 
+When you hear this sentence: "Thanks to cooperation, the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts." 
+This is not poetry; this is not philosophy. 
+This is math. 
+Those who carry the baton are slower, but their baton is faster. 
+Miracle of cooperation: it multiplies energy, intelligence in human efforts. 
+It is the essence of human efforts: how we work together, how each effort contributes to the efforts of others. 
+With cooperation, we can do more with less. 
+Now, what happens to cooperation when the holy grail — the holy trinity, even — of clarity, measurement, accountability — appears? 
+Clarity. 
+Management reports are full of complaints about the lack of clarity. 
+Compliance audits, consultants' diagnostics. 
+We need more clarity, we need to clarify the roles, the processes. 
+It is as though the runners on the team were saying, "" Let's be clear — where does my role really start and end? 
+Am I supposed to run for 95 meters, 96, 97...? "" It's important, let's be clear. 
+If you say 97, after 97 meters, people will drop the baton, whether there is someone to take it or not. 
+Accountability. 
+We are constantly trying to put accountability in someone's hands. 
+Who is accountable for this process? 
+We need somebody accountable for this process. 
+So in the relay race, since passing the baton is so important, then we need somebody clearly accountable for passing the baton. 
+So between each runner, now we will have a new dedicated athlete, clearly dedicated to taking the baton from one runner, and passing it to the next runner. 
+And we will have at least two like that. 
+Well, will we, in that case, win the race? 
+That I don't know, but for sure, we would have a clear interface, a clear line of accountability. 
+We will know who to blame. 
+But we'll never win the race. 
+If you think about it, we pay more attention to knowing who to blame in case we fail, than to creating the conditions to succeed. 
+All the human intelligence put in organization design — urban structures, processing systems — what is the real goal? 
+To have somebody guilty in case they fail. 
+We are creating organizations able to fail, but in a compliant way, with somebody clearly accountable when we fail. 
+And we are quite effective at that — failing. 
+Measurement. 
+Look, to pass the baton, you have to do it at the right time, in the right hand, at the right speed. 
+It will come at the expense of your measurable speed. 
+You have to shout early enough to the next runner when you will pass the baton, to signal that you are arriving, so that the next runner can prepare, can anticipate. 
+And you have to shout loud. 
+But the blood, the energy that will be in your throat will not be in your legs. 
+Because you know, there are eight people shouting at the same time. 
+So you have to recognize the voice of your colleague. 
+You cannot say, "" Is it you? "" Too late! 
+(Laughter) Now, let's look at the race in slow motion, and concentrate on the third runner. 
+Look at where she allocates her efforts, her energy, her attention. 
+Not all in her legs — that would be great for her own speed — but in also in her throat, arm, eye, brain. 
+That makes a difference in whose legs? 
+In the legs of the next runner. 
+But when the next runner runs super-fast, is it because she made a super effort, or because of the way the third runner passed the baton? 
+There is no metric on earth that will give us the answer. 
+And if we reward people on the basis of their measurable performance, they will put their energy, their attention, their blood in what can get measured — in their legs. 
+And the baton will fall and slow down. 
+To cooperate is not a super effort, it is how you allocate your effort. 
+It is to take a risk, because you sacrifice the ultimate protection granted by objectively measurable individual performance. 
+It is to make a super difference in the performance of others, with whom we are compared. 
+It takes being stupid to cooperate, then. 
+And people are not stupid; they don't cooperate. 
+You know, clarity, accountability, measurement were OK when the world was simpler. 
+But business has become much more complex. 
+With my teams, we have measured the evolution of complexity in business. 
+It is much more demanding today to attract and retain customers, to build advantage on a global scale, to create value. 
+And the more business gets complex, the more, in the name of clarity, accountability, measurement we multiply structures, processes, systems. 
+You know, this drive for clarity and accountability triggers a counterproductive multiplication of interfaces, middle offices, coordinators that do not only mobilize people and resources, but that also add obstacles. 
+And the more complicated the organization, the more difficult it is to understand what is really happening. 
+So we need summaries, proxies, reports, key performance indicators, metrics. 
+So people put their energy in what can get measured, at the expense of cooperation. 
+And as performance deteriorates, we add even more structure, process, systems. 
+People spend their time in meetings, writing reports they have to do, undo and redo. 
+Based on our analysis, teams in these organizations spend between 40 and 80 percent of their time wasting their time, but working harder and harder, longer and longer, on less and less value-adding activities. 
+This is what is killing productivity, what makes people suffer at work. 
+Our organizations are wasting human intelligence. 
+They have turned against human efforts. 
+When people don't cooperate, don't blame their mindsets, their mentalities, their personality — look at the work situations. 
+Is it really in their personal interest to cooperate or not, if, when they cooperate, they are individually worse off? 
+Why would they cooperate? 
+When we blame personalities instead of the clarity, the accountability, the measurement, we add injustice to ineffectiveness. 
+We need to create organizations in which it becomes individually useful for people to cooperate. 
+Remove the interfaces, the middle offices — all these complicated coordination structures. 
+Don't look for clarity; go for fuzziness. 
+Fuzziness overlaps. 
+Remove most of the quantitative metrics to assess performance. 
+Speed the "" what. "" Look at cooperation, the "" how. "" How did you pass the baton? 
+Did you throw it, or did you pass it effectively? 
+Am I putting my energy in what can get measured — my legs, my speed — or in passing the baton? 
+You, as leaders, as managers, are you making it individually useful for people to cooperate? 
+The future of our organizations, our companies, our societies hinges on your answer to these questions. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Many times I go around the world to speak, and people ask me questions about the challenges, my moments, some of my regrets. 
+1998: A single mother of four, three months after the birth of my fourth child, I went to do a job as a research assistant. 
+I went to Northern Liberia. 
+And as part of the work, the village would give you lodgings. 
+And they gave me lodging with a single mother and her daughter. 
+This girl happened to be the only girl in the entire village who had made it to the ninth grade. 
+She was the laughing stock of the community. 
+Her mother was often told by other women, "" You and your child will die poor. "" After two weeks of working in that village, it was time to go back. 
+The mother came to me, knelt down, and said, "" Leymah, take my daughter. 
+I wish for her to be a nurse. "" Dirt poor, living in the home with my parents, I couldn't afford to. 
+With tears in my eyes, I said, "" No. "" Two months later, I go to another village on the same assignment and they asked me to live with the village chief. 
+The women's chief of the village has this little girl, fair color like me, totally dirty. 
+And all day she walked around only in her underwear. 
+When I asked, "" Who is that? "" She said, "" That's Wei. 
+The meaning of her name is pig. 
+Her mother died while giving birth to her, and no one had any idea who her father was. "" For two weeks, she became my companion, slept with me. 
+I bought her used clothes and bought her her first doll. 
+The night before I left, she came to the room and said, "" Leymah, don't leave me here. 
+I wish to go with you. 
+I wish to go to school. "" Dirt poor, no money, living with my parents, I again said, "" No. "" Two months later, both of those villages fell into another war. 
+Till today, I have no idea where those two girls are. 
+Fast-forward, 2004: In the peak of our activism, the minister of Gender Liberia called me and said, "" Leymah, I have a nine-year-old for you. 
+I want you to bring her home because we don't have safe homes. "" The story of this little girl: She had been raped by her paternal grandfather every day for six months. 
+She came to me bloated, very pale. 
+Every night I'd come from work and lie on the cold floor. 
+She'd lie beside me and say, "" Auntie, I wish to be well. 
+I wish to go to school. "" 2010: A young woman stands before President Sirleaf and gives her testimony of how she and her siblings live together, their father and mother died during the war. 
+She's 19; her dream is to go to college to be able to support them. 
+She's highly athletic. 
+One of the things that happens is that she applies for a scholarship. 
+Full scholarship. She gets it. 
+Her dream of going to school, her wish of being educated, is finally here. 
+She goes to school on the first day. 
+The director of sports who's responsible for getting her into the program asks her to come out of class. 
+And for the next three years, her fate will be having sex with him every day, as a favor for getting her in school. 
+Globally, we have policies, international instruments, work leaders. 
+Great people have made commitments — we will protect our children from want and from fear. 
+The U.N. has the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 
+Countries like America, we've heard things like No Child Left Behind. 
+Other countries come with different things. 
+There is a Millennium Development called Three that focuses on girls. 
+All of these great works by great people aimed at getting young people to where we want to get them globally, I think, has failed. 
+In Liberia, for example, the teenage pregnancy rate is three to every 10 girls. 
+Teen prostitution is at its peak. 
+In one community, we're told, you wake up in the morning and see used condoms like used chewing gum paper. 
+Girls as young as 12 being prostituted for less than a dollar a night. 
+It's disheartening, it's sad. 
+And then someone asked me, just before my TEDTalk, a few days ago, "So where is the hope?" 
+Several years ago, a few friends of mine decided we needed to bridge the disconnect between our generation and the generation of young women. 
+It's not enough to say you have two Nobel laureates from the Republic of Liberia when your girls' kids are totally out there and no hope, or seemingly no hope. 
+We created a space called the Young Girls Transformative Project. 
+We go into rural communities and all we do, like has been done in this room, is create the space. 
+When these girls sit, you unlock intelligence, you unlock passion, you unlock commitment, you unlock focus, you unlock great leaders. 
+Today, we've worked with over 300. 
+And some of those girls who walked in the room very shy have taken bold steps, as young mothers, to go out there and advocate for the rights of other young women. 
+One young woman I met, teen mother of four, never thought about finishing high school, graduated successfully; never thought about going to college, enrolled in college. 
+One day she said to me, "" My wish is to finish college and be able to support my children. "" She's at a place where she can't find money to go to school. 
+She sells water, sells soft drinks and sells recharge cards for cellphones. 
+And you would think she would take that money and put it back into her education. 
+Juanita is her name. 
+She takes that money and finds single mothers in her community to send back to school. 
+Says, "" Leymah, my wish is to be educated. 
+And if I can't be educated, when I see some of my sisters being educated, my wish has been fulfilled. 
+I wish for a better life. 
+I wish for food for my children. 
+I wish that sexual abuse and exploitation in schools would stop. "" This is the dream of the African girl. 
+Several years ago, there was one African girl. 
+This girl had a son who wished for a piece of doughnut because he was extremely hungry. 
+Angry, frustrated, really upset about the state of her society and the state of her children, this young girl started a movement, a movement of ordinary women banding together to build peace. 
+I will fulfill the wish. 
+This is another African girl's wish. 
+I failed to fulfill the wish of those two girls. 
+I failed to do this. 
+These were the things that were going through the head of this other young woman — I failed, I failed, I failed. 
+So I will do this. 
+Women came out, protested a brutal dictator, fearlessly spoke. 
+Not only did the wish of a piece of doughnut come true, the wish of peace came true. 
+This young woman wished also to go to school. 
+She went to school. 
+This young woman wished for other things to happen, it happened for her. 
+Today, this young woman is me, a Nobel laureate. 
+I'm now on a journey to fulfill the wish, in my tiny capacity, of little African girls — the wish of being educated. 
+We set up a foundation. 
+We're giving full four-year scholarships to girls from villages that we see with potential. 
+I don't have much to ask of you. 
+I've also been to places in this U.S., and I know that girls in this country also have wishes, a wish for a better life somewhere in the Bronx, a wish for a better life somewhere in downtown L.A., a wish for a better life somewhere in Texas, a wish for a better life somewhere in New York, a wish for a better life somewhere in New Jersey. 
+Will you journey with me to help that girl, be it an African girl or an American girl or a Japanese girl, fulfill her wish, fulfill her dream, achieve that dream? 
+Because all of these great innovators and inventors that we've talked to and seen over the last few days are also sitting in tiny corners in different parts of the world, and all they're asking us to do is create that space to unlock the intelligence, unlock the passion, unlock all of the great things that they hold within themselves. 
+Let's journey together. Let's journey together. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you so much. 
+Right now in Liberia, what do you see as the main issue that troubles you? 
+LG: I've been asked to lead the Liberian Reconciliation Initiative. 
+As part of my work, I'm doing these tours in different villages and towns — 13, 15 hours on dirt roads — and there is no community that I've gone into that I haven't seen intelligent girls. 
+But sadly, the vision of a great future, or the dream of a great future, is just a dream, because you have all of these vices. 
+Teen pregnancy, like I said, is epidemic. 
+So what troubles me is that I was at that place and somehow I'm at this place, and I just don't want to be the only one at this place. 
+I'm looking for ways for other girls to be with me. 
+I want to look back 20 years from now and see that there's another Liberian girl, Ghanaian girl, Nigerian girl, Ethiopian girl standing on this TED stage. 
+And maybe, just maybe, saying, "" Because of that Nobel laureate I'm here today. "" So I'm troubled when I see them like there's no hope. 
+But I'm also not pessimistic, because I know it doesn't take a lot to get them charged up. 
+CA: And in the last year, tell us one hopeful thing that you've seen happening. 
+LG: I can tell you many hopeful things that I've seen happening. 
+But in the last year, where President Sirleaf comes from, her village, we went there to work with these girls. 
+And we could not find 25 girls in high school. 
+All of these girls went to the gold mine, and they were predominantly prostitutes doing other things. 
+We took 50 of those girls and we worked with them. 
+And this was at the beginning of elections. 
+This is one place where women were never — even the older ones barely sat in the circle with the men. 
+These girls banded together and formed a group and launched a campaign for voter registration. 
+This is a real rural village. 
+And the theme they used was: "Even pretty girls vote." 
+They were able to mobilize young women. 
+But not only did they do that, they went to those who were running for seats to ask them, "" What is it that you will give the girls of this community when you win? "" And one of the guys who already had a seat was very — because Liberia has one of the strongest rape laws, and he was one of those really fighting in parliament to overturn that law because he called it barbaric. 
+Rape is not barbaric, but the law, he said, was barbaric. 
+And when the girls started engaging him, he was very hostile towards them. 
+These little girls turned to him and said, "We will vote you out of office." 
+He's out of office today. 
+(Applause) CA: Leymah, thank you. Thank you so much for coming to TED. 
+LG: You're welcome. (CA: Thank you.) (Applause) 
+
+It's wonderful to be here to talk about my journey, to talk about the wheelchair and the freedom it has bought me. 
+I started using a wheelchair 16 years ago when an extended illness changed the way I could access the world. 
+When I started using the wheelchair, it was a tremendous new freedom. 
+I'd seen my life slip away and become restricted. 
+It was like having an enormous new toy. 
+I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. 
+Just being out on the street was exhilarating. 
+But even though I had this newfound joy and freedom, people's reaction completely changed towards me. 
+It was as if they couldn't see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended. 
+They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. 
+When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like "" limitation, "" "" fear, "" "pity" and "restriction." 
+I realized I'd internalized these responses and it had changed who I was on a core level. 
+A part of me had become alienated from myself. 
+I was seeing myself not from my perspective, but vividly and continuously from the perspective of other people's responses to me. 
+As a result, I knew I needed to make my own stories about this experience, new narratives to reclaim my identity. 
+["" Finding Freedom: 'By creating our own stories we learn to take the texts of our lives as seriously as we do' official 'narratives.' — Davis 2009, TEDx Women ""] I started making work that aimed to communicate something of the joy and freedom I felt when using a wheelchair — a power chair — to negotiate the world. 
+I was working to transform these internalized responses, to transform the preconceptions that had so shaped my identity when I started using a wheelchair, by creating unexpected images. 
+The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with. 
+When I literally started leaving traces of my joy and freedom, it was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people. 
+It seemed to open up new perspectives, and therein lay the paradigm shift. 
+It showed that an arts practice can remake one's identity and transform preconceptions by revisioning the familiar. 
+So when I began to dive, in 2005, I realized scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way as a wheelchair does, but the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure, completely different to people's responses to the wheelchair. 
+So I thought, "" I wonder what'll happen if I put the two together? "" (Laughter) (Applause) And the underwater wheelchair that has resulted has taken me on the most amazing journey over the last seven years. 
+So to give you an idea of what that's like, I'd like to share with you one of the outcomes from creating this spectacle, and show you what an amazing journey it's taken me on. 
+(Music) (Applause) It is the most amazing experience, beyond most other things I've experienced in life. 
+I literally have the freedom to move in 360 degrees of space and an ecstatic experience of joy and freedom. 
+And the incredibly unexpected thing is that other people seem to see and feel that too. 
+Their eyes literally light up, and they say things like, "" I want one of those, "" or, "" If you can do that, I can do anything. "" And I'm thinking, it's because in that moment of them seeing an object they have no frame of reference for, or so transcends the frames of reference they have with the wheelchair, they have to think in a completely new way. 
+And I think that moment of completely new thought perhaps creates a freedom that spreads to the rest of other people's lives. 
+For me, this means that they're seeing the value of difference, the joy it brings when instead of focusing on loss or limitation, we see and discover the power and joy of seeing the world from exciting new perspectives. 
+For me, the wheelchair becomes a vehicle for transformation. 
+In fact, I now call the underwater wheelchair "" Portal, "" because it's literally pushed me through into a new way of being, into new dimensions and into a new level of consciousness. 
+And the other thing is, that because nobody's seen or heard of an underwater wheelchair before, and creating this spectacle is about creating new ways of seeing, being and knowing, now you have this concept in your mind. 
+You're all part of the artwork too. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life? 
+If you were going to invest now in your future best self, where would you put your time and your energy? 
+There was a recent survey of millennials asking them what their most important life goals were, and over 80 percent said that a major life goal for them was to get rich. 
+And another 50 percent of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous. 
+(Laughter) And we're constantly told to lean in to work, to push harder and achieve more. 
+We're given the impression that these are the things that we need to go after in order to have a good life. 
+Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get. 
+Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20 / 20. 
+We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative. 
+But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? 
+What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keeps people happy and healthy? 
+We did that. 
+The Harvard Study of Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. 
+For 75 years, we've tracked the lives of 724 men, year after year, asking about their work, their home lives, their health, and of course asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out. 
+Studies like this are exceedingly rare. 
+Almost all projects of this kind fall apart within a decade because too many people drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted, or they die, and nobody moves the ball further down the field. 
+But through a combination of luck and the persistence of several generations of researchers, this study has survived. 
+About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study, most of them in their 90s. 
+And we are now beginning to study the more than 2,000 children of these men. 
+And I'm the fourth director of the study. 
+Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men. 
+The first group started in the study when they were sophomores at Harvard College. 
+They all finished college during World War II, and then most went off to serve in the war. 
+And the second group that we've followed was a group of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for the study specifically because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in the Boston of the 1930s. 
+Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water. 
+When they entered the study, all of these teenagers were interviewed. 
+They were given medical exams. 
+We went to their homes and we interviewed their parents. 
+And then these teenagers grew up into adults who entered all walks of life. 
+They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors, one President of the United States. 
+Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia. 
+Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very top, and some made that journey in the opposite direction. 
+The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams have imagined that I would be standing here today, 75 years later, telling you that the study still continues. 
+Every two years, our patient and dedicated research staff calls up our men and asks them if we can send them yet one more set of questions about their lives. 
+Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, "Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isn't that interesting." 
+The Harvard men never ask that question. 
+(Laughter) To get the clearest picture of these lives, we don't just send them questionnaires. 
+We interview them in their living rooms. 
+We get their medical records from their doctors. 
+We draw their blood, we scan their brains, we talk to their children. 
+We videotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns. 
+And when, about a decade ago, we finally asked the wives if they would join us as members of the study, many of the women said, "" You know, it's about time. "" (Laughter) So what have we learned? 
+What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated on these lives? 
+Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. 
+The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. 
+We've learned three big lessons about relationships. 
+The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. 
+It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected. 
+And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. 
+People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely. 
+And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in five Americans will report that they're lonely. 
+And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage, so the second big lesson that we learned is that it's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the quality of your close relationships that matters. 
+It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health. 
+High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced. 
+And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective. 
+Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife and to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn't. 
+And when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. 
+It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. 
+The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. 
+And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old. 
+Our most happily partnered men and women reported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy. 
+But the people who were in unhappy relationships, on the days when they reported more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional pain. 
+And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and our health is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. 
+It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people's memories stay sharper longer. 
+And the people in relationships where they feel they really can't count on the other one, those are the people who experience earlier memory decline. 
+And those good relationships, they don't have to be smooth all the time. 
+Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories. 
+So this message, that good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being, this is wisdom that's as old as the hills. 
+Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore? 
+Well, we're human. 
+What we'd really like is a quick fix, something we can get that'll make our lives good and keep them that way. 
+Relationships are messy and they're complicated and the hard work of tending to family and friends, it's not sexy or glamorous. 
+It's also lifelong. It never ends. 
+The people in our 75-year study who were the happiest in retirement were the people who had actively worked to replace workmates with new playmates. 
+Just like the millennials in that recent survey, many of our men when they were starting out as young adults really believed that fame and wealth and high achievement were what they needed to go after to have a good life. 
+But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community. 
+So what about you? 
+Let's say you're 25, or you're 40, or you're 60. 
+What might leaning in to relationships even look like? 
+Well, the possibilities are practically endless. 
+It might be something as simple as replacing screen time with people time or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, long walks or date nights, or reaching out to that family member who you haven't spoken to in years, because those all-too-common family feuds take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges. 
+I'd like to close with a quote from Mark Twain. 
+More than a century ago, he was looking back on his life, and he wrote this: "" There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. 
+There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that. "" The good life is built with good relationships. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Please close your eyes, and open your hands. 
+Now imagine what you could place in your hands: an apple, maybe your wallet. 
+Now open your eyes. 
+What about a life? 
+What you see here is a premature baby. 
+He looks like he's resting peacefully, but in fact he's struggling to stay alive because he can't regulate his own body temperature. 
+This baby is so tiny he doesn't have enough fat on his body to stay warm. 
+Sadly, 20 million babies like this are born every year around the world. 
+Four million of these babies die annually. 
+But the bigger problem is that the ones who do survive grow up with severe, long-term health problems. 
+The reason is because in the first month of a baby's life, its only job is to grow. 
+If it's battling hypothermia, its organs can't develop normally, resulting in a range of health problems from diabetes, to heart disease, to low I.Q. 
+Imagine: Many of these problems could be prevented if these babies were just kept warm. 
+That is the primary function of an incubator. 
+But traditional incubators require electricity and cost up to 20 thousand dollars. 
+So, you're not going to find them in rural areas of developing countries. 
+As a result, parents resort to local solutions like tying hot water bottles around their babies' bodies, or placing them under light bulbs like the ones you see here — methods that are both ineffective and unsafe. 
+I've seen this firsthand over and over again. 
+On one of my first trips to India, I met this young woman, Sevitha, who had just given birth to a tiny premature baby, Rani. 
+She took her baby to the nearest village clinic, and the doctor advised her to take Rani to a city hospital so she could be placed in an incubator. 
+But that hospital was over four hours away, and Sevitha didn't have the means to get there, so her baby died. 
+Inspired by this story, and dozens of other similar stories like this, my team and I realized what was needed was a local solution, something that could work without electricity, that was simple enough for a mother or a midwife to use, given that the majority of births still take place in the home. 
+We needed something that was portable, something that could be sterilized and reused across multiple babies and something ultra-low-cost, compared to the 20,000 dollars that an incubator in the U.S. costs. 
+So, this is what we came up with. 
+What you see here looks nothing like an incubator. 
+It looks like a small sleeping bag for a baby. 
+You can open it up completely. It's waterproof. 
+There's no seams inside so you can sterilize it very easily. 
+But the magic is in this pouch of wax. 
+This is a phase-change material. 
+It's a wax-like substance with a melting point of human body temperature, 37 degrees Celsius. 
+You can melt this simply using hot water and then when it melts it's able to maintain one constant temperature for four to six hours at a time, after which you simply reheat the pouch. 
+So, you then place it into this little pocket back here, and it creates a warm micro-environment for the baby. 
+Looks simple, but we've reiterated this dozens of times by going into the field to talk to doctors, moms and clinicians to ensure that this really meets the needs of the local communities. 
+We plan to launch this product in India in 2010, and the target price point will be 25 dollars, less than 0.1 percent of the cost of a traditional incubator. 
+Over the next five years we hope to save the lives of almost a million babies. 
+But the longer-term social impact is a reduction in population growth. 
+This seems counterintuitive, but turns out that as infant mortality is reduced, population sizes also decrease, because parents don't need to anticipate that their babies are going to die. 
+We hope that the Embrace infant warmer and other simple innovations like this represent a new trend for the future of technology: simple, localized, affordable solutions that have the potential to make huge social impact. 
+In designing this we followed a few basic principles. 
+We really tried to understand the end user, in this case, people like Sevitha. 
+We tried to understand the root of the problem rather than being biased by what already exists. 
+And then we thought of the most simple solution we could to address this problem. 
+In doing this, I believe we can truly bring technology to the masses. 
+And we can save millions of lives through the simple warmth of an Embrace. 
+
+This is how war starts. 
+One day you're living your ordinary life, you're planning to go to a party, you're taking your children to school, you're making a dentist appointment. 
+The next thing, the telephones go out, the TVs go out, there's armed men on the street, there's roadblocks. 
+Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation. 
+It stops. 
+I'm going to steal a story from a friend of mine, a Bosnian friend, about what happened to her, because I think it will illustrate for you exactly what it feels like. 
+She was walking to work one day in April, 1992, in a miniskirt and high heels. She worked in a bank. 
+She was a young mother. She was someone who liked to party. 
+Great person. 
+And suddenly she sees a tank ambling down the main road of Sarajevo knocking everything out of its path. 
+She thinks she's dreaming, but she's not. 
+And she runs as any of us would have done and takes cover, and she hides behind a trash bin, in her high heels and her miniskirt. 
+And as she's hiding there, she's feeling ridiculous, but she's seeing this tank go by with soldiers and people all over the place and chaos and she thinks, "" I feel like Alice in Wonderland going down the rabbit hole, down, down, down into chaos, and my life will never be the same again. "" A few weeks later, my friend was in a crowd of people pushing with her infant son in her arms to give him to a stranger on a bus, which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo to take children out so they could be safe. 
+And she remembers struggling with her mother to the front, crowds and crowds of people, "" Take my child! Take my child! "" and passing her son to someone through a window. 
+And she didn't see him for years. 
+The siege went on for three and a half years, and it was a siege without water, without power, without electricity, without heat, without food, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century. 
+I had the honor of being one of those reporters that lived through that siege, and I say I have the honor and the privilege of being there because it's taught me everything, not just about being a reporter, but about being a human being. 
+I learned about sharing. I learned about camaraderie. 
+Most of all, I learned about love. 
+Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos, I learned how ordinary people could help their neighbors, share food, raise their children, drag someone who's being sniped at from the middle of the road even though you yourself were endangering your life, helping people get into taxis who were injured to try to take them to hospitals. 
+I learned so much about myself. 
+Martha Gellhorn, who's one of my heroes, once said, "You can only love one war. The rest is responsibility." 
+I went on to cover many, many, many wars after that, so many that I lost count, but there was nothing like Sarajevo. 
+Last April, I went back to a very strange — what I called a deranged high school reunion. 
+What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and I don't like the word "" anniversary, "" because it sounds like a party, and this was not a party. 
+It was a very somber gathering of the reporters that worked there during the war, humanitarian aid workers, and of course the brave and courageous people of Sarajevo themselves. 
+And the thing that struck me the most, that broke my heart, was walking down the main street of Sarajevo, where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago, and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs, empty, and every single one of them symbolized a person who had died during the siege, just in Sarajevo, not in all of Bosnia, and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it, and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children. 
+I now cover Syria, and I started reporting it because I believed that it needs to be done. 
+I believe a story there has to be told. 
+I see, again, a template of the war in Bosnia. 
+And when I first arrived in Damascus, I saw this strange moment where people didn't seem to believe that war was going to descend, and it was exactly the same in Bosnia and nearly every other country I've seen where war comes. 
+People don't want to believe it's coming, so they don't leave, they don't leave before they can. 
+They don't get their money out. 
+They stay because you want to stay in your home. 
+And then war and chaos descend. 
+Rwanda is a place that haunts me a lot. 
+In 1994, I briefly left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda. 
+Between April and August, 1994, one million people were slaughtered. 
+Now if those 12,000 chairs freaked me out with the sheer number, I want you just for a second to think of a million people. 
+And to give you some example, I remember standing and looking down a road as far as I could see, at least a mile, and there were bodies piled twice my height of the dead. 
+And that was just a small percentage of the dead. 
+And there were mothers holding their children who had been caught in their last death throes. 
+So we learn a lot from war, and I mention Rwanda because it is one place, like South Africa, where nearly 20 years on, there is healing. 
+Fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women, which is fantastic, and there's also within the national constitution now, you're actually not allowed to say Hutu or Tutsi. 
+You're not allowed to identify anyone by ethnicity, which is, of course, what started the slaughter in the first place. 
+And an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story, or I find it beautiful. 
+There was a group of children, mixed Hutus and Tutsis, and a group of women who were adopting them, and they lined up and one was just given to the next. 
+There was no kind of compensation for, you're a Tutsi, you're a Hutu, you might have killed my mother, you might have killed my father. 
+They were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation, and I find this remarkable. 
+So when people ask me how I continue to cover war, and why I continue to do it, this is why. 
+When I go back to Syria, next week in fact, what I see is incredibly heroic people, some of them fighting for democracy, for things we take for granted every single day. 
+And that's pretty much why I do it. 
+In 2004, I had a little baby boy, and I call him my miracle child, because after seeing so much death and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life, this ray of hope was born. 
+And I called him Luca, which means "" The bringer of light, "" because he does bring light to my life. 
+But I'm talking about him because when he was four months old, my foreign editor forced me to go back to Baghdad where I had been reporting all throughout the Saddam regime and during the fall of Baghdad and afterwards, and I remember getting on the plane in tears, crying to be separated from my son, and while I was there, a quite famous Iraqi politician who was a friend of mine said to me, "" What are you doing here? 
+Why aren't you home with Luca? "" And I said, "" Well, I have to see. "" It was 2004 which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody time in Iraq, "" I have to see, I have to see what is happening here. 
+I have to report it. "" And he said, "" Go home, because if you miss his first tooth, if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself. 
+But there will always be another war. "" And there, sadly, will always be wars. 
+And I am deluding myself if I think, as a journalist, as a reporter, as a writer, what I do can stop them. I can't. 
+I'm not Kofi Annan. He can't stop a war. 
+He tried to negotiate Syria and couldn't do it. 
+I'm not a U.N. conflict resolution person. 
+I'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor, and I can't tell you the times of how helpless I've felt to have people dying in front of me, and I couldn't save them. 
+A colleague of mine described it as to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world. 
+And that's what I try to do. 
+I'm not always successful, and sometimes it's incredibly frustrating, because you feel like you're writing into a void, or you feel like no one cares. 
+Who cares about Syria? Who cares about Bosnia? 
+Who cares about the Congo, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, all of these strings of places that I will remember for the rest of my life? 
+But my métier is to bear witness and that is the crux, the heart of the matter, for us reporters who do this. 
+And all I can really do is hope, not to policymakers or politicians, because as much as I'd like to have faith that they read my words and do something, I don't delude myself. 
+But what I do hope is that if you remember anything I said or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast, if you can remember the story of Sarajevo, or the story of Rwanda, then I've done my job. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I started with paragliding. 
+Paragliding is taking off from mountains with a paraglider, with the possibility to fly cross-country, distance, just with the use of thermals to soar. 
+Also different aerobatic maneuvers are possible with a paraglider. 
+From there I started with skydiving. 
+In this picture you can see there is a four-way skydive, four people flying together, and on the left hand side it's the camera flier with the camera mounted to his helmet so he can film the whole jump, for the film itself and also for the judging. 
+From regular, relative skydiving I went on to freeflying. 
+Freeflying is more the three-dimensional skydiving. 
+You can see the skydiver with the red suit, he's in a stand-up position. 
+The one with the yellow-green suit, he's flying head-down. 
+And that's me in the background, carving around the whole formation in freefall also, with the helmet cam to film this jump. 
+From freeflying I went on to skysurfing. 
+Skysurfing is skydiving with a board on the feet. 
+You can imagine with this big surface of a skysurfing board, there is a lot of force, a lot of power. 
+Of course I can use this power for example for nice spinning — we call it "" helicopter moves. "" From there I went on to wingsuit flying. 
+Wingsuit flying is a suit, that I can make fly, just only with my body. 
+If I put some tension on my body, tension on my suit, I can make it fly. And as you see the fall rate is much much slower because of the bigger surface. 
+With a proper body position I'm able to really move forward to gain quite some distance. 
+This is a jump I did in Rio de Janeiro. 
+You can see the Copacabana on the left-hand side. 
+From there with all the skills and knowledge from paragliding and all the different disciplines in skydiving, I went on to BASE jumping. 
+BASE jumping is skydiving from fixed objects, like buildings, antennae, bridges and earth — meaning mountains, cliffs. 
+It's for sure — for me — it's the ultimate feeling of being in free fall, with all the visual references. 
+So my goal soon was to discover new places that nobody had jumped before. 
+So in summer 2000 I was the first to BASE jump the Eiger North Face in Switzerland. 
+Two years after this, I was the first to BASE jump from Matterhorn, a very famous mountain that probably everybody knows in here. 
+2005 I did a BASE jump from the Eiger, from the Monk and from the Jungfrau, three very famous mountains in Switzerland. 
+The special thing on these three jumps were, I hiked them all and climbed them all in only one day. 
+In 2008 I jumped the Eiffel Tower in Paris. 
+(Laughter) So with all this knowledge, I also wanted to get into stunts. 
+So with some friends we started to do different tricks, like for example this jump here, I jumped from a paraglider. 
+Or here — everybody was freezing, pretty much, except me, because it was very cold in Austria where we did this filming. 
+Everybody sitting in a basket, and I was on top of the balloon, ready to slide down with my skysurf board. 
+Or this jump, from a moving truck on the highway. 
+(Laughter) Extreme sports on top level like this is only possible if you practice step by step, if you really work hard on your skills and on your knowledge. 
+Of course you need to be in physical, very good, condition, so I'm training a lot. 
+You need to have the best possible equipment. 
+And probably the most important is you have to work on your mental skills, mental preparation. 
+And all this to come as close as possible to the human dream of being able to fly. 
+So for 2009, I'm training hard for my two new projects. 
+The first one, I want to set a world record in flying from a cliff with my wingsuit. 
+And I want to set a new record, with the longest distance ever flown. 
+For my second project, I have a sensational idea of a jump that never has been done before. 
+So now, on the following movie you will see that I'm much better in flying a wingsuit than speaking in English. 
+Enjoy, and thank you very much. 
+(Applause) (Applause) June Cohen: I have some questions. 
+I think we all might have some questions. 
+Question one: so does that actually feel the way the flying dream does? 
+Because it looks like it might. 
+Ueli Gegenschatz: Pretty much. I believe this is probably the closest possibility to come to the dream of being able to fly. 
+JC: I know the answer to this, but how do you land? 
+UE: Parachute. We have to open a parachute just seconds before, I would say, impact. 
+(Laughter) It's not possible to land a wingsuit yet. 
+JC: Yet. But people are trying. Are you among those — you're not going to commit — are you among those trying to do it? 
+UE: It's a dream. It's a dream. Yeah. 
+We're still working on it and we're developing the wingsuits to get better performance, to get more knowledge. 
+And I believe soon. 
+JC: All right. Well we will watch this space. But I have two more questions. 
+What is the — there was exhaust coming out of the back of the wingsuit. Was that a propelled wingsuit that you were wearing? 
+UE: Nope. It's just smoke. 
+JC: Coming off of you? 
+(Laughter) UE: Hopefully not. (Laughter) 
+JC: That seems dangerous. 
+UE: No, smoke is for two reasons, you can see the speed, you can see the way where I was flying. 
+That's reason number one. And reason number two: it's much easier for the camera guy to film If I'm using smoke. 
+JC: Ah, I see. So the wingsuit is set up to deliberately release smoke so that you can be tracked. One more question. 
+What do you do to to cover your face? 
+Because I just keep thinking of going that fast and having your whole face smushed backwards. 
+Are you in a helmet? Are you in goggles? 
+UE: The purest and the best feeling would be with only goggles. 
+JC: And is that how you usually fly? 
+UE: Usually I'm wearing a helmet. In the mountains I'm always wearing a helmet because of landings — usually it's difficult — it's not like regular skydiving where you have like the big landings. 
+So you have to be prepared. 
+JC: Right. Now is there anything you don't do? 
+Do people come to you with projects and say, "" We want you to do this! "" and do you ever say, "" No, no I'm not going to. "" UE: Oh of course, of course. Some people have crazy ideas and — (Laughter) JC:... a round of applause... 
+(Applause) UE: Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+In my industry, we believe that images can change the world. 
+Okay, we're naive, we're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. 
+The truth is that we know that the images themselves don't change the world, but we're also aware that, since the beginning of photography, images have provoked reactions in people, and those reactions have caused change to happen. 
+So let's begin with a group of images. 
+I'd be extremely surprised if you didn't recognize many or most of them. 
+They're best described as iconic: so iconic, perhaps, they're cliches. 
+In fact, they're so well-known that you might even recognize them in a slightly or somewhat different form. 
+(Laughter) But I think we're looking for something more. 
+We're looking for something more. 
+We're looking for images that shine an uncompromising light on crucial issues, images that transcend borders, that transcend religions, images that provoke us to step up and do something — in other words, to act. 
+Well, this image you've all seen. 
+It changed our view of the physical world. 
+We had never seen our planet from this perspective before. 
+Many people credit a lot of the birth of the environmental movement to our seeing the planet like this for the first time — its smallness, its fragility. 
+Forty years later, this group, more than most, are well aware of the destructive power that our species can wield over our environment. 
+And at last, we appear to be doing something about it. 
+This destructive power takes many different forms. 
+For example, these images taken by Brent Stirton in the Congo. 
+These gorillas were murdered, some would even say crucified, and unsurprisingly, they sparked international outrage. 
+Most recently, we've been tragically reminded of the destructive power of nature itself with the recent earthquake in Haiti. 
+Well, I think what is far worse is man's destructive power over man. 
+Samuel Pisar, an Auschwitz survivor, said, and I'll quote him, "" The Holocaust teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man, when he loses his moral compass and his reason. "" There's another kind of crucifixion. 
+The horrifying images from Abu Ghraib as well as the images from Guantanamo had a profound impact. 
+The publication of those images, as opposed to the images themselves, caused a government to change its policies. 
+Some would argue that it is those images that did more to fuel the insurgency in Iraq than virtually any other single act. 
+Furthermore, those images forever removed the so-called moral high ground of the occupying forces. 
+Let's go back a little. 
+In the 1960s and 1970s, the Vietnam War was basically shown in America's living rooms day in, day out. 
+News photos brought people face to face with the victims of the war: a little girl burned by napalm, a student killed by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest. 
+In fact, these images became the voices of protest themselves. 
+Now, images have power to shed light of understanding on suspicion, ignorance, and in particular — I've given a lot of talks on this but I'll just show one image — the issue of HIV / AIDS. 
+In the 1980s, the stigmatization of people with the disease was an enormous barrier to even discussing or addressing it. 
+A simple act, in 1987, of the most famous woman in the world, the Princess of Wales, touching an HIV / AIDS infected baby did a great deal, especially in Europe, to stop that. 
+She, better than most, knew the power of an image. 
+So when we are confronted by a powerful image, we all have a choice: We can look away, or we can address the image. 
+Thankfully, when these photos appeared in The Guardian in 1998, they put a lot of focus and attention and, in the end, a lot of money towards the Sudan famine relief efforts. 
+Did the images change the world? 
+No, but they had a major impact. 
+Images often push us to question our core beliefs and our responsibilities to each other. 
+We all saw those images after Katrina, and I think for millions of people they had a very strong impact. 
+And I think it's very unlikely that they were far from the minds of Americans when they went to vote in November 2008. 
+Unfortunately, some very important images are deemed too graphic or disturbing for us to see them. 
+I'll show you one photo here, and it's a photo by Eugene Richards of an Iraq War veteran from an extraordinary piece of work, which has never been published, called War Is Personal. 
+But images don't need to be graphic in order to remind us of the tragedy of war. 
+John Moore set up this photo at Arlington Cemetery. 
+After all the tense moments of conflict in all the conflict zones of the world, there's one photograph from a much quieter place that haunts me still, much more than the others. 
+Ansel Adams said, and I'm going to disagree with him, "You don't take a photograph, you make it." 
+In my view, it's not the photographer who makes the photo, it's you. 
+We bring to each image our own values, our own belief systems, and as a result of that, the image resonates with us. 
+My company has 70 million images. 
+I have one image in my office. 
+Here it is. 
+I hope that the next time you see an image that sparks something in you, you'll better understand why, and I know that speaking to this audience, you'll definitely do something about it. 
+And thank you to all the photographers. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Guitar music starts) (Music ends) (Applause) (Distorted guitar music starts) (Music ends) (Applause) (Ambient / guitar music starts) (Music ends) (Applause) 
+
+Clouds. 
+Have you ever noticed how much people moan about them? 
+They get a bad rap. 
+If you think about it, the English language has written into it negative associations towards the clouds. 
+Someone who's down or depressed, they're under a cloud. 
+And when there's bad news in store, there's a cloud on the horizon. 
+I saw an article the other day. 
+It was about problems with computer processing over the Internet. 
+"" A cloud over the cloud, "" was the headline. 
+It seems like they're everyone's default doom-and-gloom metaphor. 
+But I think they're beautiful, don't you? 
+It's just that their beauty is missed because they're so omnipresent, so, I don't know, commonplace, that people don't notice them. 
+And so people think of clouds as things that get in the way. 
+They think of them as the annoying, frustrating obstructions, and then they rush off and do some blue-sky thinking. 
+(Laughter) But most people, when you stop to ask them, will admit to harboring a strange sort of fondness for clouds. 
+It's like a nostalgic fondness, and they make them think of their youth. 
+Who here can't remember thinking, well, looking and finding shapes in the clouds when they were kids? 
+You know, when you were masters of daydreaming? 
+Aristophanes, the ancient Greek playwright, he described the clouds as the patron godesses of idle fellows two and a half thousand years ago, and you can see what he means. 
+It's just that these days, us adults seem reluctant to allow ourselves the indulgence of just allowing our imaginations to drift along in the breeze, and I think that's a pity. 
+I think we should perhaps do a bit more of it. 
+I think we should be a bit more willing, perhaps, to look at the beautiful sight of the sunlight bursting out from behind the clouds and go, "" Wait a minute, that's two cats dancing the salsa! "" (Laughter) (Applause) Or seeing the big, white, puffy one up there over the shopping center looks like the Abominable Snowman going to rob a bank. (Laughter) 
+They're like nature's version of those inkblot images, you know, that shrinks used to show their patients in the '60s, and I think if you consider the shapes you see in the clouds, you'll save money on psychoanalysis bills. 
+Let's say you're in love. All right? 
+And you look up and what do you see? 
+Right? Or maybe the opposite. 
+You've just been dumped by your partner, and everywhere you look, it's kissing couples. 
+(Laughter) Perhaps you're having a moment of existential angst. 
+You know, you're thinking about your own mortality. 
+(Laughter) Or maybe you see a topless sunbather. (Laughter) 
+What would that mean? 
+What would that mean? I have no idea. 
+But one thing I do know is this: The bad press that clouds get is totally unfair. 
+I think we should stand up for them, which is why, a few years ago, I started the Cloud Appreciation Society. 
+Tens of thousands of members now in almost 100 countries around the world. 
+And all these photographs that I'm showing, they were sent in by members. 
+And the society exists to remind people of this: Clouds are not something to moan about. 
+Far from it. They are, in fact, the most diverse, evocative, poetic aspect of nature. 
+I think, if you live with your head in the clouds every now and then, it helps you keep your feet on the ground. 
+Let's start with this one. It's the cirrus cloud, named after the Latin for a lock of hair. 
+It's composed entirely of ice crystals cascading from the upper reaches of the troposphere, and as these ice crystals fall, they pass through different layers with different winds and they speed up and slow down, giving the cloud these brush-stroked appearances, these brush-stroke forms known as fall streaks. 
+And these winds up there can be very, very fierce. 
+They can be 200 miles an hour, 300 miles an hour. 
+These clouds are bombing along, but from all the way down here, they appear to be moving gracefully, slowly, like most clouds. 
+And so to tune into the clouds is to slow down, to calm down. 
+It's like a bit of everyday meditation. 
+Those are common clouds. 
+What about rarer ones, like the lenticularis, the UFO-shaped lenticularis cloud? 
+These clouds form in the region of mountains. 
+When the wind passes, rises to pass over the mountain, it can take on a wave-like path in the lee of the peak, with these clouds hovering at the crest of these invisible standing waves of air, these flying saucer-like forms, and some of the early black-and-white UFO photos are in fact lenticularis clouds. It's true. 
+A little rarer are the fallstreak holes. All right? 
+This is when a layer is made up of very, very cold water droplets, and in one region they start to freeze, and this freezing sets off a chain reaction which spreads outwards with the ice crystals cascading and falling down below, giving the appearance of jellyfish tendrils down below. 
+Rarer still, the Kelvin – Helmholtz cloud. 
+Not a very snappy name. Needs a rebrand. 
+This looks like a series of breaking waves, and it's caused by shearing winds — the wind above the cloud layer and below the cloud layer differ significantly, and in the middle, in between, you get this undulating of the air, and if the difference in those speeds is just right, the tops of the undulations curl over in these beautiful breaking wave-like vortices. 
+All right. Those are rarer clouds than the cirrus, but they're not that rare. 
+If you look up, and you pay attention to the sky, you'll see them sooner or later, maybe not quite as dramatic as these, but you'll see them. 
+Clouds are the most egalitarian of nature's displays, because we all have a good, fantastic view of the sky. 
+And these clouds, these rarer clouds, remind us that the exotic can be found in the everyday. 
+Nothing is more nourishing, more stimulating to an active, inquiring mind than being surprised, being amazed. It's why we're all here at TED, right? 
+But you don't need to rush off away from the familiar, across the world to be surprised. 
+You just need to step outside, pay attention to what's so commonplace, so everyday, so mundane that everybody else misses it. 
+One cloud that people rarely miss is this one: the cumulonimbus storm cloud. 
+It's what's produces thunder and lightning and hail. 
+These clouds spread out at the top in this enormous anvil fashion stretching 10 miles up into the atmosphere. 
+They are an expression of the majestic architecture of our atmosphere. 
+But from down below, they are the embodiment of the powerful, elemental force and power that drives our atmosphere. 
+To be there is to be connected in the driving rain and the hail, to feel connected to our atmosphere. 
+It's to be reminded that we are creatures that inhabit this ocean of air. 
+We don't live beneath the sky. We live within it. 
+And that connection, that visceral connection to our atmosphere feels to me like an antidote. 
+It's an antidote to the growing tendency we have to feel that we can really ever experience life by watching it on a computer screen, you know, when we're in a wi-fi zone. 
+But the one cloud that best expresses why cloudspotting is more valuable today than ever is this one, the cumulus cloud. 
+Right? It forms on a sunny day. 
+If you close your eyes and think of a cloud, it's probably one of these that comes to mind. 
+All those cloud shapes at the beginning, those were cumulus clouds. 
+The sharp, crisp outlines of this formation make it the best one for finding shapes in. 
+And it reminds us of the aimless nature of cloudspotting, what an aimless activity it is. 
+You're not going to change the world by lying on your back and gazing up at the sky, are you? 
+It's pointless. It's a pointless activity, which is precisely why it's so important. 
+The digital world conspires to make us feel eternally busy, perpetually busy. 
+You know, when you're not dealing with the traditional pressures of earning a living and putting food on the table, raising a family, writing thank you letters, you have to now contend with answering a mountain of unanswered emails, updating a Facebook page, feeding your Twitter feed. 
+And cloudspotting legitimizes doing nothing. 
+(Laughter) And sometimes we need — (Applause) Sometimes we need excuses to do nothing. 
+We need to be reminded by these patron goddesses of idle fellows that slowing down and being in the present, not thinking about what you've got to do and what you should have done, but just being here, letting your imagination lift from the everyday concerns down here and just being in the present, it's good for you, and it's good for the way you feel. 
+It's good for your ideas. It's good for your creativity. 
+It's good for your soul. 
+So keep looking up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and always remember to live life with your head in the clouds. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is the skyline of my hometown, New Orleans. 
+It was a great place to grow up, but it's one of the most vulnerable spots in the world. 
+Half the city is already below sea level. 
+In 2005, the world watched as New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. 
+One thousand, eight hundred and thirty-six people died. Nearly 300,000 homes were lost. 
+These are my mother's, at the top — although that's not her car, it was carried there by floodwaters up to the roof — and that's my sister's, below. 
+Fortunately, they and other family members got out in time, but they lost their homes, and as you can see, just about everything in them. 
+Other parts of the world have been hit by storms in even more devastating ways. 
+In 2008, Cyclone Nargis and its aftermath killed 138,000 in Myanmar. 
+Climate change is affecting our homes, our communities, our way of life. We should be preparing at every scale and at every opportunity. 
+This talk is about being prepared for, and resilient to the changes that are coming and that will affect our homes and our collective home, the Earth. 
+The changes in these times won't affect us all equally. 
+There are important distributional consequences, and they're not what you always might think. 
+In New Orleans, the elderly and female-headed households were among the most vulnerable. 
+For those in vulnerable, low-lying nations, how do you put a dollar value on losing your country where you ancestors are buried? And where will your people go? 
+And how will they cope in a foreign land? 
+Will there be tensions over immigration, or conflicts over competition for limited resources? 
+It's already fueled conflicts in Chad and Darfur. 
+Like it or not, ready or not, this is our future. 
+Sure, some are looking for opportunities in this new world. 
+That's the Russians planting a flag on the ocean bottom to stake a claim for minerals under the receding Arctic sea ice. 
+But while there might be some short-term individual winners, our collective losses will far outweigh them. 
+Look no further than the insurance industry as they struggle to cope with mounting catastrophic losses from extreme weather events. 
+The military gets it. They call climate change a threat multiplier that could harm stability and security, while governments around the world are evaluating how to respond. 
+So what can we do? How can we prepare and adapt? 
+I'd like to share three sets of examples, starting with adapting to violent storms and floods. 
+In New Orleans, the I-10 Twin Spans, with sections knocked out in Katrina, have been rebuilt 21 feet higher to allow for greater storm surge. 
+And these raised and energy-efficient homes were developed by Brad Pitt and Make It Right for the hard-hit Ninth Ward. 
+The devastated church my mom attends has been not only rebuilt higher, it's poised to become the first Energy Star church in the country. 
+They're selling electricity back to the grid thanks to solar panels, reflective paint and more. 
+Their March electricity bill was only 48 dollars. 
+Now these are examples of New Orleans rebuilding in this way, but better if others act proactively with these changes in mind. 
+For example, in Galveston, here's a resilient home that survived Hurricane Ike, when others on neighboring lots clearly did not. 
+And around the world, satellites and warning systems are saving lives in flood-prone areas such as Bangladesh. 
+But as important as technology and infrastructure are, perhaps the human element is even more critical. 
+We need better planning and systems for evacuation. 
+We need to better understand how people make decisions in times of crisis, and why. 
+While it's true that many who died in Katrina did not have access to transportation, others who did refused to leave as the storm approached, often because available transportation and shelters refused to allow them to take their pets. 
+Imagine leaving behind your own pet in an evacuation or a rescue. 
+Fortunately in 2006, Congress passed the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (Laughter) — it spells "" PETS "" — to change that. 
+Second, preparing for heat and drought. 
+Farmers are facing challenges of drought from Asia to Africa, from Australia to Oklahoma, while heat waves linked with climate change have killed tens of thousands of people in Western Europe in 2003, and again in Russia in 2010. 
+In Ethiopia, 70 percent, that's 7-0 percent of the population, depends on rainfall for its livelihood. 
+Oxfam and Swiss Re, together with Rockefeller Foundation, are helping farmers like this one build hillside terraces and find other ways to conserve water, but they're also providing for insurance when the droughts do come. 
+The stability this provides is giving the farmers the confidence to invest. 
+It's giving them access to affordable credit. 
+It's allowing them to become more productive so that they can afford their own insurance over time, without assistance. 
+It's a virtuous cycle, and one that could be replicated throughout the developing world. 
+After a lethal 1995 heat wave turned refrigerator trucks from the popular Taste of Chicago festival into makeshift morgues, Chicago became a recognized leader, tamping down on the urban heat island impact through opening cooling centers, outreach to vulnerable neighborhoods, planting trees, creating cool white or vegetated green roofs. 
+This is City Hall's green roof, next to Cook County's [portion of the] roof, which is 77 degrees Fahrenheit hotter at the surface. 
+Washington, D.C., last year, actually led the nation in new green roofs installed, and they're funding this in part thanks to a five-cent tax on plastic bags. 
+They're splitting the cost of installing these green roofs with home and building owners. 
+The roofs not only temper urban heat island impact but they save energy, and therefore money, the emissions that cause climate change, and they also reduce stormwater runoff. 
+So some solutions to heat can provide for win-win-wins. 
+Third, adapting to rising seas. 
+Sea level rise threatens coastal ecosystems, agriculture, even major cities. This is what one to two meters of sea level rise looks like in the Mekong Delta. 
+That's where half of Vietnam's rice is grown. 
+Infrastructure is going to be affected. 
+Airports around the world are located on the coast. 
+It makes sense, right? There's open space, the planes can take off and land without worrying about creating noise or avoiding tall buildings. 
+Here's just one example, San Francisco Airport, with 16 inches or more of flooding. 
+Imagine the staggering cost of protecting this vital infrastructure with levees. 
+But there might be some changes in store that you might not imagine. For example, planes require more runway for takeoff because the heated, less dense air, provides for less lift. 
+San Francisco is also spending 40 million dollars to rethink and redesign its water and sewage treatment, as water outfall pipes like this one can be flooded with seawater, causing backups at the plant, harming the bacteria that are needed to treat the waste. 
+Beyond these technical solutions, our work at the Georgetown Climate Center with communities encourages them to look at what existing legal and policy tools are available and to consider how they can accommodate change. 
+For example, in land use, which areas do you want to protect, through adding a seawall, for example, alter, by raising buildings, or retreat from, to allow the migration of important natural systems, such as wetlands or beaches? 
+Other examples to consider. In the U.K., the Thames Barrier protects London from storm surge. 
+The Asian Cities Climate [Change] Resilience Network is restoring vital ecosystems like forest mangroves. 
+These are not only important ecosystems in their own right, but they also serve as a buffer to protect inland communities. 
+New York City is incredibly vulnerable to storms, as you can see from this clever sign, and to sea level rise, and to storm surge, as you can see from the subway flooding. 
+But back above ground, these raised ventilation grates for the subway system show that solutions can be both functional and attractive. In fact, in New York, San Francisco and London, designers have envisioned ways to better integrate the natural and built environments with climate change in mind. 
+I think these are inspiring examples of what's possible when we feel empowered to plan for a world that will be different. 
+Adaptation's too important to be left to the experts. 
+Why? Well, there are no experts. 
+We're entering uncharted territory, and yet our expertise and our systems are based on the past. 
+"" Stationarity "" is the notion that we can anticipate the future based on the past, and plan accordingly, and this principle governs much of our engineering, our design of critical infrastructure, city water systems, building codes, even water rights and other legal precedents. 
+But we can simply no longer rely on established norms. 
+We're operating outside the bounds of CO2 concentrations that the planet has seen for hundreds of thousands of years. 
+The larger point I'm trying to make is this. 
+It's up to us to look at our homes and our communities, our vulnerabilities and our exposures to risk, and to find ways to not just survive, but to thrive, and it's up to us to plan and to prepare and to call on our government leaders and require them to do the same, even while they address the underlying causes of climate change. 
+There are no quick fixes. 
+There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. 
+We're all learning by doing. 
+But the operative word is doing. 
+Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+I went to Spain a few months ago and I had the best foie gras of my life. 
+The best culinary experience of my life. 
+Because what I saw, I'm convinced, is the future of cooking. 
+Ridiculous, right? 
+Foie gras and the future of cooking. 
+There's not a food today that's more maligned than foie gras, right? 
+I mean, it's crucified. 
+It was outlawed in Chicago for a while. 
+It's pending here in California, and just recently in New York. 
+It's like if you're a chef and you put it on your menu, you risk being attacked. 
+Really, it happened here in San Francisco to a famous chef. 
+I'm not saying that there's not a rationale for being opposed to foie gras. 
+The reasons usually just boil down to the gavage, which is the force feeding. 
+Basically you take a goose or a duck and you force feed a ton of grain down its throat. 
+More grain in a couple of weeks than it would ever get in a lifetime. 
+Its liver expands by eight times. 
+Suffice to say it's like — it's not the prettiest picture of sustainable farming. 
+The problem for us chefs is that it's so freakin 'delicious. 
+(Laughter) I mean, I love the stuff. 
+It is fatty, it's sweet, it's silky, it's unctuous. 
+It makes everything else you put it with taste incredible. 
+Can we produce a menu that's delicious without foie gras? 
+Yes, sure. 
+You can also bike the Tour de France without steroids, right? 
+(Laughter) Not a lot of people are doing it. 
+And for good reason. 
+(Laughter) So several months ago, a friend of mine sent me this link to this guy, Eduardo Sousa. 
+Eduardo is doing what he calls natural foie gras. 
+Natural foie gras. 
+What's natural about foie gras? 
+To take advantage of when the temperature drops in the fall, geese and ducks gorge on food to prepare for the harsh realities of winter. 
+And the rest of the year they're free to roam around Eduardo's land and eat what they want. 
+So no gavage, no force feeding, no factory-like conditions, no cruelty. 
+And it's shockingly not a new idea. 
+His great-granddad started — Patería de Sousa — in 1812. 
+And they've been doing it quietly ever since. 
+That is until last year, when Eduardo won the Coup de Coeur, the coveted French gastronomic prize. 
+It's like the Olympics of food products. 
+He placed first for his foie gras. 
+Big, big problem. 
+As he said to me, that really pissed the French off. 
+(Laughter) He said it sort of gleefully. 
+It was all over the papers. 
+I read about it. It was in Le Monde. 
+"" Spanish chef accused... "" — and the French accused him. 
+"Spanish chef accused of cheating." 
+They accused him of paying off the judges. 
+They implicated actually, the Spanish government, amazingly. 
+Huh, amazing. 
+A huge scandal for a few weeks. 
+Couldn't find a shred of evidence. 
+Now, look at the guy. 
+He doesn't look like a guy who's paying off French judges for his foie gras. 
+So that died down, and very soon afterward, new controversy. 
+He shouldn't win because it's not foie gras. 
+It's not foie gras because it's not gavage. 
+There's no force feeding. 
+So by definition, he's lying and should be disqualified. 
+As funny as it sounds, articulating it now and reading about it — actually, if we had talked about it before this controversy, I would have said, "" That's kind of true. "" You know, foie gras by definition, force feeding, it's gavage, and that's what you get when you want foie gras. 
+That is, until I went to Eduardo's farm in Extremadura, 50 miles north of Seville, right on the Portugal border. 
+I saw first-hand a system that is incredibly complex and then at the same time, like everything beautiful in nature, is utterly simple. 
+And he said to me, really from the first moment, my life's work is to give the geese what they want. 
+He repeated that about 50 times in the two days I was with him. 
+I'm just here to give the geese what they want. 
+Actually, when I showed up he was lying down with the geese with his cell phone taking pictures of them like his children in the grass. 
+Amazing. 
+He's really just in love with — he's at one with — he's the goose whisperer. 
+(Laughter) And when I was speaking to him, you know, I thought, like I'm speaking to you now, right, but sort of in the middle of my questions, my excited questions, because the more I got to know him and his system, the more exciting this whole idea became. 
+He kept going like this to me. 
+And I thought, OK, excited Jew from New York, right? 
+I'm talking a little too aggressively, whatever, so you know, I slowed down. 
+And finally, by the end of the day I was like, Ed-uar-do, you know like this? 
+But he was still going like this. 
+I figured it out. 
+I was speaking too loudly. 
+So I hushed my voice. 
+I kind of like asked these questions and chatted with him through a translator in kind of a half whisper. 
+And he stopped doing this. 
+And amazingly, the geese who were on the other side of the paddock when I was around — "" Get the hell away from this kid! "" — when I lowered my voice, they all came right up to us. 
+Right up to us, like right up to here. 
+Right along the fence line. 
+And fence line was amazing in itself. 
+The fence — like this conception of fence that we have it's totally backward with him. 
+The electricity on this fiberglass fence is only on the outside. 
+He rewired it. He invented it. 
+I've never seen it. Have you? 
+You fence in animals. You electrify the inside. 
+He doesn't. 
+He electrifies only the outside. 
+Why? 
+Because he said to me that he felt like the geese — and he proved this actually, not just a conceit, he proved this — the geese felt manipulated when they were imprisoned in their little paddocks. 
+Even though they were imprisoned in this Garden of Eden with figs and everything else. 
+He felt like they felt manipulated. 
+So he got rid of the electricity, he got rid of current on the inside and kept it on the outside, so it would protect them against coyotes and other predators. 
+Now, what happened? 
+They ate, and he showed me on a chart, how they ate about 20 percent more feed to feed their livers. 
+The landscape is incredible. 
+I mean, his farm is incredible. 
+It really is the Garden of Eden. 
+There's figs and everything else there for the taking. 
+And the irony of ironies is because Extremadura, the area — what does Extremadura mean? 
+Extra hard land, right? 
+Extra difficult. Extra hard. 
+But over four generations, he and his family have literally transformed this extra hard land into a tasting menu. 
+Upgrades the life for these geese. 
+And they are allowed to take whatever they want. 
+Another irony, the double irony is that on the figs and the olives, Eduardo can make more money selling those than he can on the foie gras. 
+He doesn't care. 
+He lets them take what they want and he says, "Usually, it's about 50 percent. They're very fair." 
+The other 50 percent, he takes and he sells and he makes money on them. 
+Part of the income for his farm. 
+A big part of his income for his farm. 
+But he never controls it. 
+They get what they want, they leave the rest for me and I sell it. 
+His biggest obstacle, really, was the marketplace, which demands these days bright yellow foie gras. 
+That's how I've been trained. 
+You want to look and see what good foie gras is, it's got to be bright yellow. 
+It's the indication that it's the best foie gras. 
+Well, because he doesn't force feed, because he doesn't gavage tons of corn, his livers were pretty grey. 
+Or they were. 
+But he found this wild plant called the Lupin bush. 
+The Lupin bush, it's all around Extremadura. 
+He let it go to seed, he took the seeds, he planted it on his 30 acres, all around. 
+And the geese love the Lupin bush. 
+Not for the bush, but for the seeds. 
+And when they eat the seeds, their foie gras turns yellow. 
+Radioactive yellow. 
+Bright yellow. 
+Of the highest quality foie gras yellow I've ever seen. 
+(Laughter) So I'm listening to all this, you know, and I'm like, is this guy for real? Is he making some of this up? 
+Is he like, you know — because he seemed to have an answer for everything, and it was always nature. 
+It was never him. 
+And I was like, you know, I always get a little, like, weirded out by people who deflect everything away from themselves. 
+Because, really, they want you to look at themselves, right? 
+But he deflected everything away from his ingenuity into working with his landscape. 
+So it's like, here I am, I'm on the fence about this guy, but increasingly, eating up his every word. 
+And we're sitting there, and I hear [clapping] from a distance, so I look over. 
+And he grabs my arm and the translator's, and ducks us under a bush and says, "" Watch this. "" "" Shush, "" he says again for the 500th time to me. 
+"Shush, watch this." 
+And this squadron of geese come over. 
+[Clapping] And they're getting louder, louder, louder, like really loud, right over us. 
+And like airport traffic control, as they start to go past us they're called back — and they're called back and back and back. 
+And then they circle around. 
+And his geese are calling up now to the wild geese. 
+[Clapping] And the wild geese are calling down. [Clapping] 
+And it's getting louder and louder and they circle and circle and they land. 
+And I'm just saying, "" No way. "" (Laughter) No way. 
+And I look at Eduardo, who's near tears looking at this, and I say, "" You're telling me that your geese are calling to the wild geese to say come for a visit? "" And he says, "" No, no, no. 
+They've come to stay. "" They've come to stay? 
+(Laughter) It's like the DNA of a goose is to fly south in the winter, right? 
+I said that. I said "" Isn't that what they're put on this Earth for? 
+To fly south in the winter and north when it gets warm? "" He said, "" No, no, no. 
+Their DNA is to find the conditions that are conducive to life. 
+To happiness. 
+They find it here. 
+They don't need anything more. "" They stop. They mate with his domesticated geese, and his flock continues. 
+Think about that for a minute. 
+It's brilliant, right? 
+Imagine — I don't know, imagine a hog farm in, like, North Carolina, and a wild pig comes upon a factory farm and decides to stay. 
+(Laughter) So how did it taste? 
+I finally got to taste it before I left. 
+He took me to his neighborhood restaurant and he served me some of his foie gras, confit de foie gras. 
+It was incredible. 
+And the problem with saying that, of course, is that you know, at this point it risks hyperbole really easily. 
+And I'd like to make a metaphor, but I don't have one really. 
+I was drinking this guy's Kool-Aid so much, he could have served me goose feathers and I would have been like, this guy's a genius, you know? 
+I'm really in love with him at this point. 
+But it truly was the best foie gras of my life. 
+So much so that I don't think I had ever really had foie gras until that moment. 
+I'd had something that was called foie gras. 
+But this was transformative. Really transformative. 
+And I say to you, I might not stick to this, but I don't think I'll ever serve foie gras on my menu again because of that taste experience with Eduardo. 
+It was sweet, it was unctuous. 
+It had all the qualities of foie gras, but its fat had a lot of integrity and a lot of honesty. 
+And you could taste herbs, you could taste spices. 
+And I kept — I said, you know, I swear to God I tasted star anise. 
+I was sure of it. 
+And I'm not like some super taster, you know? 
+But I can taste things. 
+There's 100 percent star anise in there. 
+And he says, "" No. "" And I ended up like going down the spices, and finally, it was like, OK, salt and pepper, thinking he's salted and peppered his liver. 
+But no. 
+He takes the liver when he harvests the foie gras, he sticks them in this jar and he confits it. 
+No salt, no pepper, no oil, no spices. 
+What? 
+We went back out for the final tour of the farm, and he showed me the wild pepper plants and the plants that he made sure existed on his farm for salinity. 
+He doesn't need salt and pepper. 
+And he doesn't need spices, because he's got this potpourri of herbs and flavors that his geese love to gorge on. 
+I turned to him at the end of the meal, and it's a question I asked several times, and he hadn't, kind of, answered me directly, but I said, "" Now look, you're in Spain, some of the greatest chefs in the world are — Ferran Adria, the preeminent chef of the world today, not that far from you. 
+How come you don't give him this? 
+How come no one's really heard of you? "" And it may be because of the wine, or it may be because of my excitement, he answered me directly and he said, "" Because chefs don't deserve my foie gras. "" (Laughter) And he was right. 
+He was right. 
+Chefs take foie gras and they make it their own. 
+They create a dish where all the vectors point at us. 
+With Eduardo it's about the expression of nature. 
+And as he said, I think fittingly, it's a gift from God, with God saying, you've done good work. 
+Simple. 
+I flew home, I'm on the flight with my little black book and I took, you know, pages and pages of notes about it. 
+I really was moved. 
+And in the corner of one of these — one of my notes, is this note that says, when asked, what do you think of conventional foie gras? 
+What do you think of foie gras that 99.99999 percent of the world eats? 
+He said, "" I think it's an insult to history. "" And I wrote, insult to history. 
+I'm on the plane and I'm just tearing my hair out. 
+It's like, why didn't I follow up on that? 
+What the hell does that mean? 
+Insult to history. 
+So I did some research when I got back, and here's what I found. 
+The history of foie gras. 
+Jews invented foie gras. 
+True story. True story. 
+By accident. They were looking for an alternative to schmaltz. Gotten sick of the chicken fat. They were looking for an alternative. And they saw in the fall that there was this natural, 
+beautiful, sweet, delicious fat from geese. 
+And they slaughtered them, used the fat throughout the winter for cooking. 
+The Pharaoh got wind of this — This is true, right off the Internet. 
+The Pharaoh got — (Laughter) I swear to God. (Laughter) 
+The Pharaoh got wind of this and wanted to taste it. 
+He tasted it and fell in love with it. 
+He started demanding it. 
+And he didn't want it just in the fall, he wanted it all year round. 
+And he demanded that the Jews supply enough for everyone. 
+And the Jews, fearing for their life, had to come up with an ingenious idea, or at least try and satisfy the Pharaoh's wishes, of course. 
+And they invented, what? Gavage. 
+They invented gavage in a great moment of fear for their lives, and they provided the Pharaoh with gavage liver, and the good stuff they kept for themselves. 
+Supposedly, anyway. I believe that one. 
+That's the history of foie gras. 
+And if you think about it, it's the history of industrial agriculture. 
+It's the history of what we eat today. 
+Most of what we eat today. 
+Mega-farms, feed lots, chemical amendments, long-distance travel, food processing. 
+All of it, our food system. 
+That's also an insult to history. 
+It's an insult to the basic laws of nature and of biology. 
+Whether we're talking about beef cattle or we're talking about chickens, or we're talking about broccoli or Brussels sprouts, or in the case of this morning's New York Times, catfish — which wholesale are going out of business. 
+Whatever it is, it's a mindset that is reminiscent of General Motors. 
+It's rooted in extraction. 
+Take more, sell more, waste more. 
+And for the future it won't serve us. 
+Jonas Salk has a great quote. 
+He said, "" If all the insects disappeared, life on Earth as we know it would disappear within 50 years. 
+If human beings disappeared, life on Earth as we know it would flourish. "" And he's right. 
+We need now to adopt a new conception of agriculture. 
+Really new. 
+One in which we stop treating the planet as if it were some kind of business in liquidation. 
+And stop degrading resources under the guise of cheap food. 
+We can start by looking to farmers like Eduardo. 
+Farmers that rely on nature for solutions, for answers, rather than imposing solutions on nature. 
+Listening as Janine Benyus, one of my favorite writers and thinkers about this topic says, "Listening to nature's operating instructions." 
+That's what Eduardo does, and does so brilliantly. 
+And what he showed me and what he can show all of us, I think, is that the great thing for chefs, the great blessing for chefs, and for people that care about food and cooking, is that the most ecological choice for food is also the most ethical choice for food. 
+Whether we're talking about Brussels sprouts or foie gras. 
+And it's also almost always, and I haven't found an example otherwise, but almost always, the most delicious choice. 
+That's serendipitous. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want to address the issue of compassion. 
+Compassion has many faces. 
+Some of them are fierce; some of them are wrathful; some of them are tender; some of them are wise. 
+A line that the Dalai Lama once said, he said, "" Love and compassion are necessities. 
+They are not luxuries. 
+Without them, humanity cannot survive. "" And I would suggest, it is not only humanity that won't survive, but it is all species on the planet, as we've heard today. 
+It is the big cats, and it's the plankton. 
+Two weeks ago, I was in Bangalore in India. 
+I was so privileged to be able to teach in a hospice on the outskirts of Bangalore. 
+And early in the morning, I went into the ward. 
+In that hospice, there were 31 men and women who were actively dying. 
+And I walked up to the bedside of an old woman who was breathing very rapidly, fragile, obviously in the latter phase of active dying. 
+I looked into her face. 
+I looked into the face of her son sitting next to her, and his face was just riven with grief and confusion. 
+And I remembered a line from the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic: "What is the most wondrous thing in the world, Yudhisthira?" 
+And Yudhisthira replied, "" The most wondrous thing in the world is that all around us people can be dying and we don't realize it can happen to us. "" I looked up. 
+Tending those 31 dying people were young women from villages around Bangalore. 
+I looked into the face of one of these women, and I saw in her face the strength that arises when natural compassion is really present. 
+I watched her hands as she bathed an old man. 
+My gaze went to another young woman as she wiped the face of another dying person. 
+And it reminded me of something that I had just been present for. 
+Every year or so, I have the privilege of taking clinicians into the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. 
+And we run clinics in these very remote regions where there's no medical care whatsoever. 
+And on the first day at Simikot in Humla, far west of Nepal, the most impoverished region of Nepal, an old man came in clutching a bundle of rags. 
+And he walked in, and somebody said something to him, we realized he was deaf, and we looked into the rags, and there was this pair of eyes. 
+The rags were unwrapped from a little girl whose body was massively burned. 
+Again, the eyes and hands of Avalokiteshvara. 
+It was the young women, the health aids, who cleaned the wounds of this baby and dressed the wounds. 
+I know those hands and eyes; they touched me as well. 
+They touched me at that time. 
+They have touched me throughout my 68 years. 
+They touched me when I was four and I lost my eyesight and was partially paralyzed. 
+And my family brought in a woman whose mother had been a slave to take care of me. 
+And that woman did not have sentimental compassion. 
+She had phenomenal strength. 
+And it was really her strength, I believe, that became the kind of mudra and imprimatur that has been a guiding light in my life. 
+So we can ask: What is compassion comprised of? 
+And there are various facets. 
+And there's referential and non-referential compassion. 
+But first, compassion is comprised of that capacity to see clearly into the nature of suffering. 
+It is that ability to really stand strong and to recognize also that I'm not separate from this suffering. 
+But that is not enough, because compassion, which activates the motor cortex, means that we aspire, we actually aspire to transform suffering. 
+And if we're so blessed, we engage in activities that transform suffering. 
+But compassion has another component, and that component is really essential. 
+That component is that we cannot be attached to outcome. 
+Now I worked with dying people for over 40 years. 
+I had the privilege of working on death row in a maximum security [prison] for six years. 
+And I realized so clearly in bringing my own life experience, from working with dying people and training caregivers, that any attachment to outcome would distort deeply my own capacity to be fully present to the whole catastrophe. 
+And when I worked in the prison system, it was so clear to me, this: that many of us in this room, and almost all of the men that I worked with on death row, the seeds of their own compassion had never been watered. 
+That compassion is actually an inherent human quality. 
+It is there within every human being. 
+But the conditions for compassion to be activated, to be aroused, are particular conditions. 
+I had that condition, to a certain extent, from my own childhood illness. 
+Eve Ensler, whom you'll hear later, has had that condition activated amazingly in her through the various waters of suffering that she has been through. 
+And what is fascinating is that compassion has enemies, and those enemies are things like pity, moral outrage, fear. 
+And you know, we have a society, a world, that is paralyzed by fear. 
+And in that paralysis, of course, our capacity for compassion is also paralyzed. 
+The very word terror is global. 
+The very feeling of terror is global. 
+So our work, in a certain way, is to address this imago, this kind of archetype that has pervaded the psyche of our entire globe. 
+Now we know from neuroscience that compassion has some very extraordinary qualities. 
+For example: A person who is cultivating compassion, when they are in the presence of suffering, they feel that suffering a lot more than many other people do. 
+However, they return to baseline a lot sooner. 
+This is called resilience. 
+Many of us think that compassion drains us, but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us. 
+Another thing about compassion is that it really enhances what's called neural integration. 
+It hooks up all parts of the brain. 
+Another, which has been discovered by various researchers at Emory and at Davis and so on, is that compassion enhances our immune system. 
+Hey, we live in a very noxious world. 
+(Laughter) Most of us are shrinking in the face of psycho-social and physical poisons, of the toxins of our world. 
+But compassion, the generation of compassion, actually mobilizes our immunity. 
+You know, if compassion is so good for us, I have a question. 
+Why don't we train our children in compassion? 
+(Applause) If compassion is so good for us, why don't we train our health care providers in compassion so that they can do what they're supposed to do, which is to really transform suffering? 
+And if compassion is so good for us, why don't we vote on compassion? 
+Why don't we vote for people in our government based on compassion, so that we can have a more caring world? 
+In Buddhism, we say, "" it takes a strong back and a soft front. "" It takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions. 
+And that is the mental quality of equanimity. 
+But it also takes a soft front — the capacity to really be open to the world as it is, to have an undefended heart. 
+And the archetype of this in Buddhism is Avalokiteshvara, Kuan-Yin. 
+It's a female archetype: she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world. 
+She stands with 10,000 arms, and in every hand, there is an instrument of liberation, and in the palm of every hand, there are eyes, and these are the eyes of wisdom. 
+I say that, for thousands of years, women have lived, exemplified, met in intimacy, the archetype of Avalokitesvara, of Kuan-Yin, she who perceives the cries of suffering in the world. 
+Women have manifested for thousands of years the strength arising from compassion in an unfiltered, unmediated way in perceiving suffering as it is. 
+They have infused societies with kindness, and we have really felt that as woman after woman has stood on this stage in the past day and a half. 
+And they have actualized compassion through direct action. 
+Jody Williams called it: It's good to meditate. 
+I'm sorry, you've got to do a little bit of that, Jody. 
+Step back, give your mother a break, okay. 
+(Laughter) But the other side of the equation is you've got to come out of your cave. 
+You have to come into the world like Asanga did, who was looking to realize Maitreya Buddha after 12 years sitting in the cave. 
+He said, "" I'm out of here. "" He's going down the path. 
+He sees something in the path. 
+He looks, it's a dog, he drops to his knees. 
+He sees that the dog has this big wound on its leg. 
+The wound is just filled with maggots. 
+He puts out his tongue in order to remove the maggots, so as not to harm them. 
+And at that moment, the dog transformed into the Buddha of love and kindness. 
+I believe that women and girls today have to partner in a powerful way with men — with their fathers, with their sons, with their brothers, with the plumbers, the road builders, the caregivers, the doctors, the lawyers, with our president, and with all beings. 
+The women in this room are lotuses in a sea of fire. 
+May we actualize that capacity for women everywhere. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to tell you about an affliction I suffer from. 
+And I have a funny feeling that quite a few of you suffer from it as well. 
+When I'm walking around an art gallery, rooms and rooms full of paintings, after about 15 or 20 minutes, I realize I'm not thinking about the paintings. 
+I'm not connecting to them. 
+Instead, I'm thinking about that cup of coffee I desperately need to wake me up. 
+I'm suffering from gallery fatigue. 
+How many of you out there suffer from — yes. Ha ha, ha ha! 
+Now, sometimes you might last longer than 20 minutes, or even shorter, but I think we all suffer from it. And do you have the accompanying guilt? 
+For me, I look at the paintings on the wall and I think, somebody has decided to put them there, thinks they're good enough to be on that wall, but I don't always see it. 
+In fact, most of the time I don't see it. 
+And I leave feeling actually unhappy. 
+I feel guilty and unhappy with myself, rather than thinking there's something wrong with the painting, I think there's something wrong with me. 
+And that's not a good experience, to leave a gallery like that. 
+(Laughter) The thing is, I think we should give ourselves a break. 
+If you think about going into a restaurant, when you look at the menu, are you expected to order every single thing on the menu? 
+No! You select. 
+If you go into a department store to buy a shirt, are you going to try on every single shirt and want every single shirt? 
+Of course not, you can be selective. It's expected. 
+How come, then, it's not so expected to be selective when we go to an art gallery? 
+Why are we supposed to have a connection with every single painting? 
+Well I'm trying to take a different approach. 
+And there's two things I do: When I go into a gallery, first of all, I go quite fast, and I look at everything, and I pinpoint the ones that make me slow down for some reason or other. 
+I don't even know why they make me slow down, but something pulls me like a magnet and then I ignore all the others, and I just go to that painting. 
+So it's the first thing I do is, I do my own curation. 
+I choose a painting. It might just be one painting in 50. 
+And then the second thing I do is I stand in front of that painting, and I tell myself a story about it. 
+Why a story? Well, I think that we are wired, our DNA tells us to tell stories. 
+We tell stories all the time about everything, and I think we do it because the world is kind of a crazy, chaotic place, and sometimes stories, we're trying to make sense of the world a little bit, trying to bring some order to it. 
+Why not apply that to our looking at paintings? 
+So I now have this sort of restaurant menu visiting of art galleries. 
+There are three paintings I'm going to show you now that are paintings that made me stop in my tracks and want to tell stories about them. 
+The first one needs little introduction — "" Girl with a Pearl Earring "" by Johannes Vermeer, 17th-century Dutch painter. 
+This is the most glorious painting. 
+I first saw it when I was 19, and I immediately went out and got a poster of it, and in fact I still have that poster. 30 years later it's hanging in my house. 
+It's accompanied me everywhere I've gone, I never tire of looking at her. 
+What made me stop in my tracks about her to begin with was just the gorgeous colors he uses and the light falling on her face. 
+But I think what's kept me still coming back year after year is another thing, and that is the look on her face, the conflicted look on her face. 
+I can't tell if she's happy or sad, and I change my mind all the time. 
+So that keeps me coming back. 
+One day, 16 years after I had this poster on my wall, I lay in bed and looked at her, and I suddenly thought, I wonder what the painter did to her to make her look like that. 
+And it was the first time I'd ever thought that the expression on her face is actually reflecting how she feels about him. 
+Always before I'd thought of it as a portrait of a girl. 
+Now I began to think of it as a portrait of a relationship. 
+And I thought, well, what is that relationship? 
+So I went to find out. I did some research and discovered, we have no idea who she is. 
+In fact, we don't know who any of the models in any of Vermeer's paintings are, and we know very little about Vermeer himself. 
+Which made me go, "" Yippee! "" I can do whatever I want, I can come up with whatever story I want to. 
+So here's how I came up with the story. 
+First of all, I thought, I've got to get her into the house. 
+How does Vermeer know her? 
+Well, there've been suggestions that she is his 12-year-old daughter. 
+The daughter at the time was 12 when he painted the painting. 
+And I thought, no, it's a very intimate look, but it's not a look a daughter gives her father. 
+For one thing, in Dutch painting of the time, if a woman's mouth was open, it was indicating sexual availability. 
+It would have been inappropriate for Vermeer to paint his daughter like that. 
+So it's not his daughter, but it's somebody close to him, physically close to him. 
+Well, who else would be in the house? 
+A servant, a lovely servant. 
+So, she's in the house. 
+How do we get her into the studio? 
+We don't know very much about Vermeer, but the little bits that we do know, one thing we know is that he married a Catholic woman, they lived with her mother in a house where he had his own room where he — his studio. He also had 11 children. 
+It would have been a chaotic, noisy household. 
+And if you've seen Vermeer's paintings before, you know that they're incredibly calm and quiet. 
+How does a painter paint such calm, quiet paintings with 11 kids around? 
+Well, he compartmentalizes his life. 
+He gets to his studio, and he says, "" Nobody comes in here. 
+Not the wife, not the kids. Okay, the maid can come in and clean. "" She's in the studio. He's got her in the studio, they're together. 
+And he decides to paint her. 
+He has her wear very plain clothes. 
+Now, all of the women, or most of the women in Vermeer's other paintings wore velvet, silk, fur, very sumptuous materials. 
+This is very plain; the only thing that isn't plain is her pearl earring. 
+Now, if she's a servant, there is no way she could afford a pair of pearl earrings. 
+So those are not her pearl earrings. Whose are they? 
+We happen to know, there's a list of Catharina, the wife's clothes. 
+Amongst them a yellow coat with white fur, a yellow and black bodice, and you see these clothes on lots of other paintings, different women in the paintings, Vermeer's paintings. 
+So clearly, her clothes were lent to various different women. 
+It's not such a leap of faith to take that that pearl earring actually belongs to his wife. 
+So we've got all the elements for our story. 
+She's in the studio with him for a long time. 
+These paintings took a long time to make. 
+They would have spent the time alone, all that time. 
+She's wearing his wife's pearl earring. 
+She's gorgeous. She obviously loves him. She's conflicted. 
+And does the wife know? Maybe not. 
+And if she doesn't, well — that's the story. 
+(Laughter) The next painting I'm going to talk about is called "" Boy Building a House of Cards "" by Chardin. 
+He's an 18th-century French painter best known for his still lifes, but he did occasionally paint people. 
+And in fact, he painted four versions of this painting, different boys building houses of cards, all concentrated. 
+I like this version the best, because some of the boys are older and some are younger, and to me, this one, like Goldilocks's porridge, is just right. 
+He's not quite a child, and he's not quite a man. 
+He's absolutely balanced between innocence and experience, and that made me stop in my tracks in front of this painting. 
+And I looked at his face. It's like a Vermeer painting a bit. 
+The light comes in from the left, his face is bathed in this glowing light. It's right in the center of the painting, and you look at it, and I found that when I was looking at it, I was standing there going, "Look at me. Please look at me." 
+And he didn't look at me. He was still looking at his cards, and that's one of the seductive elements of this painting is, he's so focused on what he's doing that he doesn't look at us. 
+And that is, to me, the sign of a masterpiece, of a painting when there's a lack of resolution. 
+He's never going to look at me. 
+So I was thinking of a story where, if I'm in this position, who could be there looking at him? 
+Not the painter, I don't want to think about the painter. 
+I'm thinking of an older version of himself. 
+He's a man, a servant, an older servant looking at this younger servant, saying, "" Look at me. I want to warn you about what you're about to go through. Please look at me. "" And he never does. 
+And that lack of resolution, the lack of resolution in "" Girl with a Pearl Earring "" — we don't know if she's happy or sad. 
+I've written an entire novel about her, and I still don't know if she's happy or sad. 
+Again and again, back to the painting, looking for the answer, looking for the story to fill in that gap. 
+And we may make a story, and it satisfies us momentarily, but not really, and we come back again and again. 
+The last painting I'm going to talk about is called "" Anonymous "" by anonymous. (Laughter) This is a Tudor portrait bought by the National Portrait Gallery. 
+They thought it was a man named Sir Thomas Overbury, and then they discovered that it wasn't him, and they have no idea who it is. 
+Now, in the National Portrait Gallery, if you don't know the biography of the painting, it's kind of useless to you. 
+They can't hang it on the wall, because they don't know who he is. 
+So unfortunately, this orphan spends most of his time in storage, along with quite a number of other orphans, some of them some beautiful paintings. 
+This painting made me stop in my tracks for three reasons: One is the disconnection between his mouth that's smiling and his eyes that are wistful. 
+He's not happy, and why isn't he happy? 
+The second thing that really attracted me were his bright red cheeks. 
+He is blushing. He's blushing for his portrait being made! 
+This must be a guy who blushes all the time. 
+What is he thinking about that's making him blush? 
+The third thing that made me stop in my tracks is his absolutely gorgeous doublet. 
+Silk, gray, those beautiful buttons. 
+And you know what it makes me think of, is it's sort of snug and puffy; it's like a duvet spread over a bed. 
+I kept thinking of beds and red cheeks, and of course I kept thinking of sex when I looked at him, and I thought, is that what he's thinking about? 
+And I thought, if I'm going to make a story, what's the last thing I'm going to put in there? 
+Well, what would a Tudor gentleman be preoccupied with? 
+And I thought, well, Henry VIII, okay. 
+He'd be preoccupied with his inheritance, with his heir. 
+Who is going to inherit his name and his fortune? 
+You put all those together, and you've got your story to fill in that gap that makes you keep coming back. 
+Now, here's the story. 
+It's short. 
+"Rosy" I am still wearing the white brocade doublet Caroline gave me. 
+It has a plain high collar, detachable sleeves and intricate buttons of twisted silk thread, set close together so that the fit is snug. 
+The doublet makes me think of a coverlet on the vast bed. 
+Perhaps that was the intention. 
+I first wore it at an elaborate dinner her parents held in our honor. 
+I knew even before I stood up to speak that my cheeks were inflamed. 
+I have always flushed easily, from physical exertion, from wine, from high emotion. 
+As a boy, I was teased by my sisters and by schoolboys, but not by George. 
+Only George could call me Rosy. 
+I would not allow anyone else. 
+He managed to make the word tender. 
+When I made the announcement, George did not turn rosy, but went pale as my doublet. 
+He should not have been surprised. 
+It has been a common assumption that I would one day marry his cousin. 
+But it is difficult to hear the words aloud. 
+I know, I could barely utter them. 
+Afterwards, I found George on the terrace overlooking the kitchen garden. 
+Despite drinking steadily all afternoon, he was still pale. 
+We stood together and watched the maids cut lettuces. 
+"" What do you think of my doublet? "" I asked. 
+He glanced at me. "" That collar looks to be strangling you. "" "" We will still see each other, "" I insisted. 
+"" We can still hunt and play cards and attend court. 
+Nothing need change. "" George did not speak. 
+"" I am 23 years old. It is time for me to marry and produce an heir. It is expected of me. "" George drained another glass of claret and turned to me. 
+"" Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, James. 
+I'm sure you'll be content together. "" He never used my nickname again. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+A fact came out of MIT, couple of years ago. Ken Hale, who's a linguist, said that of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth right now, 3,000 aren't spoken by the children. 
+So that in one generation, we're going to halve our cultural diversity. 
+He went on to say that every two weeks, an elder goes to the grave carrying the last spoken word of that culture. 
+So an entire philosophy, a body of knowledge about the natural world that had been empirically gleaned over centuries, goes away. 
+And this happens every two weeks. 
+So for the last 20 years, since my dental experience, I have been traveling the world and coming back with stories about some of these people. 
+What I'd like to do right now is share some of those stories with you. 
+This is Tamdin. 
+She is a 69-year-old nun. 
+She was thrown in prison in Tibet for two years for putting up a little tiny placard protesting the occupation of her country. 
+And when I met her, she had just taken a walk over the Himalayas from Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, into Nepal, across to India — 30 days — to meet her leader, the Dalai Lama. 
+The Dalai Lama lives in Dharamsala, India. 
+So I took this picture three days after she arrived, and she had this beat-up pair of tennis shoes on, with her toes sticking out. 
+And she crossed in March, and there's a lot of snow at 18,500 feet in March. 
+This is Paldin. 
+Paldin is a 62-year-old monk. 
+And he spent 33 years in prison. 
+His whole monastery was thrown into prison at the time of the uprising, when the Dalai Lama had to leave Tibet. 
+And he was beaten, starved, tortured — lost all his teeth while in prison. 
+And when I met him, he was a kind gentle old man. 
+And it really impressed me — I met him two weeks after he got out of prison — that he went through that experience, and ended up with the demeanor that he had. 
+So I was in Dharamsala meeting these people, and I'd spent about five weeks there, and I was hearing these similar stories of these refugees that had poured out of Tibet into Dharamsala. 
+And it just so happened, on the fifth week, there was a public teaching by the Dalai Lama. And 
+I was watching this crowd of monks and nuns, many of which I had just interviewed, and heard their stories, and I watched their faces, and they gave us a little FM radio, and we could listen to the translation of his teachings. 
+And what he said was: treat your enemies as if they were precious jewels, because it's your enemies that build your tolerance and patience on the road to your enlightenment. 
+That hit me so hard, telling these people that had been through this experience. 
+So, two months later, I went into Tibet, and I started interviewing the people there, taking my photographs. That's what I do. 
+I interview and do portraits. 
+And this is a little girl. 
+I took her portrait up on top of the Jokhang Temple. 
+And I'd snuck in — because it's totally illegal to have a picture of the Dalai Lama in Tibet — it's the quickest way you can get arrested. 
+So I snuck in a bunch of little wallet-sized pictures of the Dalai Lama, and I would hand them out. 
+And when I gave them to the people, they'd either hold them to their heart, or they'd hold them up to their head and just stay there. 
+And this is — well, at the time — I did this 10 years ago — that was 36 years after the Dalai Lama had left. 
+So I was going in, interviewing these people and doing their portraits. 
+This is Jigme and her sister, Sonam. 
+And they live up on the Chang Tang, the Tibetan Plateau, way in the western part of the country. 
+This is at 17,000 feet. 
+And they had just come down from the high pastures, at 18,000 feet. 
+Same thing: gave her a picture, she held it up to her forehead. 
+And I usually hand out Polaroids when I do these, because I'm setting up lights, and checking my lights, and when I showed her her Polaroid, she screamed and ran into her tent. 
+This is Tenzin Gyatso; he was found to be the Buddha of Compassion at the age of two, out in a peasant's house, way out in the middle of nowhere. 
+At the age of four, he was installed as the 14th Dalai Lama. 
+As a teenager, he faced the invasion of his country, and had to deal with it — he was the leader of the country. 
+Eight years later, when they discovered there was a plot to kill him, they dressed him up like a beggar and snuck him out of the country on horseback, and took the same trip that Tamdin did. 
+And he's never been back to his country since. And 
+if you think about this man, 46 years later, still sticking to this non-violent response to a severe political and human rights issue. 
+And the young people, young Tibetans, are starting to say, listen, this doesn't work. 
+You know, violence as a political tool is all the rage right now. 
+And he still is holding this line. 
+So this is our icon to non-violence in our world — one of our living icons. 
+This is another leader of his people. 
+This is Moi. This is in the Ecuadorian Amazon. 
+And Moi is 35 years old. And 
+this area of the Ecuadorian Amazon — oil was discovered in 1972. 
+And in this period of time — since that time — as much oil, or twice as much oil as was spilled in the Exxon Valdez accident, was spilled in this little area of the Amazon, and the tribes in this area have constantly had to move. 
+And Moi belongs to the Huaorani tribe, and they're known as very fierce, they're known as "" auca. "" And they've managed to keep out the seismologists and the oil workers with spears and blowguns. 
+And we spent — I was with a team — two weeks with these guys out in the jungle watching them hunt. 
+This was on a monkey hunt, hunting with curare-tipped darts. 
+And the knowledge that these people have about the natural environment is incredible. 
+They could hear things, smell things, see things I couldn't see. 
+And I couldn't even see the monkeys that they were getting with these darts. 
+This is Yadira, and Yadira is five years old. She's in a tribe that's neighboring the Huaorani. 
+And her tribe has had to move three times in the last 10 years because of the oil spills. 
+And we never hear about that. And the latest infraction against these people is, as part of Plan Colombia, we're spraying Paraquat or Round Up, whatever it is — we're defoliating thousands of acres of the Ecuadorian Amazon in our war on drugs. 
+And these people are the people who take the brunt of it. 
+This is Mengatoue. 
+He's the shaman of the Huaorani, and he said to us, you know, I'm an older man now; I'm getting tired, you know; I'm tired of spearing these oil workers. 
+I wish they would just go away. 
+And I was — I usually travel alone when I do my work, but I did this — I hosted a program for Discovery, and when I went down with the team, I was quite concerned about going in with a whole bunch of people, especially into the Huaorani, deep into the Huaorani tribe. And 
+as it turned out, these guys really taught me a thing or two about blending in with the locals. 
+(Laughter) One of the things I did just before 9 / 11 — August of 2001 — I took my son, Dax, who was 16 at the time, and I took him to Pakistan. 
+Because at first I wanted — you know, I've taken him on a couple of trips, but I wanted him to see people that live on a dollar a day or less. 
+I wanted him to get an experience in the Islamic world and I also wanted him to — I was going there to work with a group, do a story on a group called the Kalash, that are a group of animists, 3,000 animists, that live — very small area — surrounded by Islam — there's 3,000 of these Kalash left; they're incredible people. 
+So it was a great experience for him. He stayed up all night with them, drumming and dancing. 
+And he brought a soccer ball, and we had soccer every night in this little village. 
+And then we went up and met their shaman. 
+By the way, Mengatoue was the shaman of his tribe as well. 
+And this is John Doolikahn, who's the shaman of the Kalash. 
+And he's up in the mountains, right on the border with Afghanistan. 
+In fact, on that other side is the area, Tora Bora, the area where Osama bin Laden's supposed to be. This is the tribal area. 
+And we watched and stayed with John Doolikahn. 
+And the shaman — I did a whole series on shamanism, which is an interesting phenomenon. 
+But around the world, they go into trance in different ways, and in Pakistan, the way they do it is they burn juniper leaves and they sacrifice an animal, pour the blood of the animal on the leaves and then inhale the smoke. 
+And they're all praying to the mountain gods as they go into trance. 
+You know, getting kids used to different realities, I think, is so important. What Dan Dennett said the other day — having a curriculum where they study different religions, just to make a mental flexibility, give them a mental flexibility in different belief systems — I think this is so necessary in our world today as you see these clash of beliefs taking place. 
+And all the security issues they cause us. 
+So, one thing we did five years ago: we started a program that links kids in indigenous communities with kids in the United States. 
+So we first hooked up a spot in the Navajo Nation with a classroom in Seattle. 
+We now have 15 sites. 
+We have one in Kathmandu, Nepal; Dharamsala, India; Takaungu, Kenya — Takaungu is one-third Christian, one-third Muslim and one-third animist, the community is — Ollantaytambo, Peru, and Arctic Village, Alaska. 
+This is Daniel; he's one of our students in Arctic Village, Alaska. 
+He lives in this log cabin — no running water, no heat other than — no windows and high-speed Internet connection. 
+And this is — I see this rolling out all over — this is our site in Ollantaytambo, Peru, four years ago, where they first saw their first computers; now they have computers in their classrooms. 
+And the way we've done this — we teach digital storytelling to these kids. 
+And we have them tell stories about issues in their community in their community that they care about. 
+And this is in Peru, where the kids told the story about a river that they cleaned up. 
+And the way we do it is, we do it in workshops, and we bring people who want to learn digital workflow and storytelling, and have them work with the kids. 
+And just this last year we've taken a group of teenagers in, and this has worked the best. 
+So our dream is to bring teenagers together, so they'll have a community service experience as well as a cross-cultural experience, as they teach kids in these areas and help them build their communication infrastructure. 
+This is teaching Photoshop in the Tibetan children's village in Dharamsala. 
+We have the website, where the kids all get their homepage. 
+This is all their movies. We've got about 60 movies that these kids have made, and they're quite incredible. 
+The one I want to show you — after we get them to make the movies, we have a night where we show the movies to the community. 
+And this is in Takaungu — we've got a generator and a digital projector, and we're projecting it up against a barn, and showing one of the movies that they made. 
+And if you get a chance, you can go to our website, and you'll see the incredible work these kids do. 
+The other thing: I wanted to give indigenous people a voice. 
+That was one of the big motivating factors. 
+But the other motivating factor is the insular nature of our country. 
+National Geographic just did a Roper Study of 18 to 26 year olds in our country and in nine other industrialized countries. 
+It was a two million dollar study. 
+United States came in second to last in geographic knowledge. 
+70 percent of the kids couldn't find Afghanistan or Iraq on a map; 60 percent couldn't find India; 30 percent couldn't find the Pacific Ocean. 
+And this is a study that was just done a couple of years ago. 
+So what I'd like to show you now, in the couple of minutes I have left, is a film that a student made in Guatemala. 
+We just had a workshop in Guatemala. 
+A week before we got to the workshop, a massive landslide, caused by Hurricane Stan, last October, came in and buried 600 people alive in their village. 
+And this kid lived in the village — he wasn't there at the time — and this is the little movie he put together about that. 
+And he hadn't seen a computer before we did this movie. We taught him Photoshop and — yeah, we can play it. 
+This is an old Mayan funeral chant that he got from his grandfather. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And while many people are fascinated by the brain, they can't really tell you that much about the properties about how the brain works because we don't teach neuroscience in schools. 
+And one of the reasons why is that the equipment is so complex and so expensive that it's really only done at major universities and large institutions. 
+And so in order to be able to access the brain, you really need to dedicate your life and spend six and a half years as a graduate student just to become a neuroscientist to get access to these tools. 
+And that's a shame because one out of five of us, that's 20 percent of the entire world, will have a neurological disorder. 
+And there are zero cures for these diseases. 
+And so it seems that what we should be doing is reaching back earlier in the eduction process and teaching students about neuroscience so that in the future, they may be thinking about possibly becoming a brain scientist. 
+When I was a graduate student, my lab mate Tim Marzullo and myself, decided that what if we took this complex equipment that we have for studying the brain and made it simple enough and affordable enough that anyone that you know, an amateur or a high school student, could learn and actually participate in the discovery of neuroscience. 
+And so we did just that. 
+A few years ago, we started a company called Backyard Brains and we make DIY neuroscience equipment and I brought some here tonight, and I want to do some demonstrations. 
+You guys want to see some? 
+So I need a volunteer. 
+So right before — what is your name? (Applause) Sam Kelly: Sam. 
+Greg Gage: All right, Sam, I'm going to record from your brain. 
+Have you had this before? 
+GG: I need you to stick out your arm for science, roll up your sleeve a bit, So what I'm going to do, I'm putting electrodes on your arm, and you're probably wondering, I just said I'm going to record from your brain, what am I doing with your arm? 
+Well, you have about 80 billion neurons inside your brain right now. 
+They're sending electrical messages back and forth, and chemical messages. 
+But some of your neurons right here in your motor cortex are going to send messages down when you move your arm like this. 
+They're going to go down across your corpus callosum, down onto your spinal cord to your lower motor neuron out to your muscles here, and that electrical discharge is going to be picked up by these electrodes right here and we're going to be able to listen to exactly what your brain is going to be doing. 
+(Rumbling) So what you're listening to, so this is your motor units happening right here. 
+Let's take a look at it as well. 
+So I'm going to stand over here, and I'm going to open up our app here. 
+(Rumbling) So right here, these are the motor units that are happening from her spinal cord out to her muscle right here, and as she's doing it, you're seeing the electrical activity that's happening here. 
+So now we've paused on one motor action potential that's happening right now inside of your brain. 
+Do you guys want to see some more? 
+(Applause) That's interesting, but let's get it better. 
+So when you're moving your arm like this, your brain is sending a signal down to your muscles right here. 
+And so it turns out that there is a nerve that's right here that runs up here that innervates these three fingers, and it's close enough to the skin that we might be able to stimulate that so that what we can do is copy your brain signals going out to your hand and inject it into your hand, so that your hand will move when your brain tells your hand to move. 
+So in a sense, she will take away your free will and you will no longer have any control over this hand. 
+So I just need to hook you up. 
+(Laughter) So I'm going to find your ulnar nerve, which is probably right around here. 
+You don't know what you're signing up for when you come up. 
+Okay, so Sam, I want you to squeeze your hand again. 
+So now I'm going to hook you up over here so that you get the — It's going to feel a little bit weird at first, this is going to feel like a — (Laughter) You know, when you lose your free will, and someone else becomes your agent, it does feel a bit strange. 
+Now I want you to relax your hand. 
+Sam, you're with me? 
+So you're going to squeeze. 
+I'm not going to turn it on yet, so go ahead and give it a squeeze. 
+So now, are you ready, Miguel? 
+MG: Ready as I'll ever be. 
+GG: I've turned it on, so go ahead and turn your hand. 
+Do you feel that a little bit? MG: Nope. 
+GG: Okay, do it again? MG: A little bit. 
+GG: A little bit? (Laughter) So relax. 
+So hit it again. 
+(Laughter) Oh, perfect, perfect. 
+So relax, do it again. 
+All right, so right now, your brain is controlling your arm and it's also controlling his arm, so go ahead and just do it one more time. 
+All right, so it's perfect. (Laughter) So now, what would happen if I took over my control of your hand? 
+And so, just relax your hand. 
+What happens? 
+Ah, nothing. 
+Why not? 
+So you do it again. 
+Thank you guys for being such a good sport. 
+This is what's happening all across the world — electrophysiology! 
+We're going to bring on the neuro-revolution. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I grew up in a very small village in Canada, and I'm an undiagnosed dyslexic. 
+I had a really hard time in school. 
+In fact, my mother told me eventually that I was the little kid in the village who cried all the way to school. 
+I ran away. 
+I left when I was 25 years old to go to Bali, and there I met my incredible wife, Cynthia, and together, over 20 years, we built an amazing jewelry business. 
+It was a fairy tale, and then we retired. 
+Then she took me to see a film that I really didn't want to see. 
+It ruined my life — (Laughter) "" The Inconvenient Truth "" and Mr. Gore. 
+I have four kids, and even if part of what he says is true, they're not going to have the life that I had. 
+And I decided at that moment that I would spend the rest of my life doing whatever I could to improve their possibilities. 
+So here's the world, and here we are in Bali. 
+It's a tiny, little island — 60 miles by 90 miles. 
+It has an intact Hindu culture. 
+Cynthia and I were there. 
+We had had a wonderful life there, and we decided to do something unusual. 
+We decided to give back locally. 
+And here it is: it's called the Green School. 
+I know it doesn't look like a school, but it is something we decided to do, and it is extremely, extremely green. 
+The classrooms have no walls. 
+The teacher is writing on a bamboo blackboard. 
+The desks are not square. 
+At Green School, the children are smiling — an unusual thing for school, especially for me. 
+And we practice holism. 
+And for me it's just the idea that, if this little girl graduates as a whole person, chances are she'll demand a whole world — a whole world — to live on. 
+Our children spend 181 days going to school in a box. 
+The people that built my school also built the prison and the insane asylum out of the same materials. 
+So if this gentleman had had a holistic education, would he be sitting there? 
+Would he have had more possibilities in his life? 
+The classrooms have natural light. 
+They're beautiful. They're bamboo. 
+The breeze passes through them. 
+And when the natural breeze isn't enough, the kids deploy bubbles, but not the kind of bubbles you know. 
+These bubbles are made from natural cotton and rubber from the rubber tree. 
+So we basically turned the box into a bubble. 
+And these kids know that painless climate control may not be part of their future. 
+We pay the bill at the end of the month, but the people that are really going to pay the bill are our grandchildren. 
+We have to teach the kids that the world is not indestructible. 
+These kids did a little graffiti on their desks, and then they signed up for two extra courses. 
+The first one was called sanding and the second one was called re-waxing. 
+But since that happened, they own those desks. 
+They know they can control their world. 
+We're on the grid. We're not proud of it. 
+But an amazing alternative energy company in Paris is taking us off the grid with solar. 
+And this thing is the second vortex to be built in the world, in a two-and-a-half meter drop on a river. 
+When the turbine drops in, it will produce 8,000 watts of electricity, day and night. 
+And you know what these are. 
+There's nowhere to flush. 
+And as long as we're taking our waste and mixing it with a huge amount of water — you're all really smart, just do the math. 
+How many people times how much water. 
+There isn't enough water. 
+These are compost toilets, and nobody at the school wanted to know about them, especially the principal. 
+And they work. People use them. People are okay. 
+It's something you should think about doing. 
+Not many things didn't work. 
+The beautiful canvas and rubber skylights got eaten by the sun in six months. 
+We had to replace them with recyclable plastic. 
+The teachers dragged giant PVC whiteboards into the classrooms. 
+So we had some good ideas: we took old automobile windshields, put paper behind them and created the first alternative to the whiteboard. 
+Green School sits in south-central Bali, and it's on 20 acres of rolling garden. 
+There's an amazing river traveling through it, and you can see there how we manage to get across the river. 
+I met a father the other day; he looked a little crazed. 
+I said, "" Welcome to Green School. "" He said, "" I've been on an airplane for 24 hours. "" I asked him, "" Why? "" He said, "" I had a dream once about a green school, and I saw a picture of this green school, I got on an airplane. 
+In August I'm bringing my sons. "" This was a great thing. 
+But more than that, people are building green houses around Green School, so their kids can walk to school on the paths. 
+And people are bringing their green industries, hopefully their green restaurants, to the Green School. 
+It's becoming a community. 
+It's becoming a green model. 
+We had to look at everything. 
+No petrochemicals in the pavement. 
+No pavement. 
+These are volcanic stones laid by hand. 
+There are no sidewalks. 
+The sidewalks are gravel. They flood when it rains, but they're green. 
+This is the school buffalo. 
+He's planning to eat that fence for dinner. 
+All the fences at Green School are green. 
+And when the kindergarten kids recently moved their gate, they found out the fence was made out of tapioca. 
+They took the tapioca roots up to the kitchen, sliced them thinly and made delicious chips. 
+Landscaping. 
+We manage to keep the garden that was there running right up to the edge of each of the classrooms. 
+We dropped them gently in. 
+We made space for these guys who are Bali's last black pigs. 
+And the school cow is trying to figure out how to replace the lawnmower on the playing field. 
+These young ladies are living in a rice culture, but they know something that few people know in a rice culture. 
+They know how to plant organic rice, they know how to look after it, they know how to harvest and they know how to cook it. 
+They're part of the rice cycle and these skills will be valuable for them in their future. 
+This young man is picking organic vegetables. 
+We feed 400 people lunch every day and it's not a normal lunch. There's no gas. 
+Local Balinese women cook the food on sawdust burners using secrets that only their grandmothers know. 
+The food is incredible. 
+Green School is a place of pioneers, local and global. 
+And it's a kind of microcosm of the globalized world. 
+The kids are from 25 countries. 
+When I see them together, I know that they're working out how to live in the future. 
+Green School is going into its third year with 160 children. 
+It's a school where you do learn reading — one of my favorites — writing — I was bad at it — arithmetic. 
+But you also learn other things. 
+You learn bamboo building. 
+You practice ancient Balinese arts. 
+This is called mud wrestling in the rice fields. 
+The kids love it. 
+The mothers aren't quite convinced. 
+(Laughter) We've done a lot of outrageous things in our lives, and we said, okay, local, what does "" local "" mean? 
+Local means that 20 percent of the population of the school has to be Balinese, and this was a really big commitment. 
+And we were right. 
+And people are coming forward from all over the world to support the Balinese Scholarship Fund, because these kids will be Bali's next green leaders. 
+The teachers are as diverse as the student body, and the amazing thing is that volunteers are popping up. 
+A man came from Java with a new kind of organic agriculture. 
+A woman came from Africa with music. 
+And together these volunteers and the teachers are deeply committed to creating a new generation of global, green leaders. 
+The Green School effect — we don't know what it is. 
+We need someone to come and study it. 
+But what's happening, our learning-different kids — dyslexic — we've renamed them prolexic — are doing well in these beautiful, beautiful classrooms. 
+And all the kids are thriving. 
+And how did we do all this? 
+On giant grass. 
+It's bamboo. 
+It comes out of the ground like a train. 
+It grows as high as a coconut tree in two months and three years later it can be harvested to build buildings like this. 
+It's as strong and dense as teak and it will hold up any roof. 
+When the architects came, they brought us these things, and you've probably seen things like this. 
+The yellow box was called the administration complex. 
+(Laughter) We squashed it, we rethought it, but mainly we renamed it "the heart of school," and that changed everything forever. 
+It's a double helix. 
+It has administrators in it and many, many other things. 
+And the problem of building it — when the Balinese workers saw long reams of plans, they looked at them and said, "" What's this? "" So we built big models. 
+We had them engineered by the engineers. 
+And Balinese carpenters like this measured them with their bamboo rulers, selected the bamboo and built the buildings using age-old techniques, mostly by hand. 
+It was chaos. 
+And the Balinese carpenters want to be as modern as we do, so they use metal scaffolding to build the bamboo building and when the scaffolding came down, we realized that we had a cathedral, a cathedral to green, and a cathedral to green education. 
+The heart of school has seven kilometers of bamboo in it. 
+From the time the foundations were finished, in three months it had roofs and floors. 
+It may not be the biggest bamboo building in the world, but many people believe that it's the most beautiful. 
+Is this doable in your community? 
+We believe it is. 
+Green School is a model we built for the world. 
+It's a model we built for Bali. 
+And you just have to follow these simple, simple rules: be local, let the environment lead and think about how your grandchildren might build. 
+So, Mr. Gore, thank you. 
+You ruined my life, but you gave me an incredible future. 
+And if you're interested in being involved in finishing Green School and building the next 50 around the world, please come and see us. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, basically we have public leaders, public officials who are out of control; they are writing bills that are unintelligible, and out of these bills are going to come maybe 40,000 pages of regulations, total complexity, which has a dramatically negative impact on our life. 
+If you're a veteran coming back from Iraq or Vietnam you face a blizzard of paperwork to get your benefits; if you're trying to get a small business loan, you face a blizzard of paperwork. 
+What are we going to do about it? I define simplicity as a means to achieving clarity, transparency and empathy, building humanity into communications. 
+I've been simplifying things for 30 years. 
+I come out of the advertising and design business. 
+My focus is understanding you people, and how you interact with the government to get your benefits, how you interact with corporations to decide whom you're going to do business with, and how you view brands. 
+So, very quickly, when President Obama said, "" I don't see why we can't have a one-page, plain English consumer credit agreement. "" So, I locked myself in a room, figured out the content, organized the document, and wrote it in plain English. 
+I've had this checked by the two top consumer credit lawyers in the country. 
+This is a real thing. 
+Now, I went one step further and said, "" Why do we have to stick with the stodgy lawyers and just have a paper document? Let's go online. "" And many people might need help in computation. 
+Working with the Harvard Business School, you'll see this example when you talk about minimum payment: If you spent 62 dollars for a meal, the longer you take to pay out that loan, you see, over a period of time using the minimum payment it's 99 dollars and 17 cents. 
+How about that? Do you think your bank is going to show that to people? 
+But it's going to work. It's more effective than just computational aids. 
+And what about terms like "" over the limit ""? 
+Perhaps a stealth thing. 
+Define it in context. Tell people what it means. 
+When you put it in plain English, you almost force the institution to give the people a way, a default out of that, and not put themselves at risk. 
+Plain English is about changing the content. 
+And one of the things I'm most proud of is this agreement for IBM. 
+It's a grid, it's a calendar. 
+At such and such a date, IBM has responsibilities, you have responsibilities. 
+Received very favorably by business. 
+And there is some good news to report today. 
+Each year, one in 10 taxpayers receives a notice from the IRS. 
+There are 200 million letters that go out. 
+Running through this typical letter that they had, I ran it through my simplicity lab, it's pretty unintelligible. 
+All the parts of the document in red are not intelligible. 
+We looked at doing over 1,000 letters that cover 70 percent of their transactions in plain English. 
+They have been tested in the laboratory. 
+When I run it through my lab, this heat-mapping shows everything is intelligible. 
+And the IRS has introduced the program. 
+(Applause) There are a couple of things going on right now that I want to bring to your attention. 
+There is a lot of discussion now about a consumer financial protection agency, how to mandate simplicity. 
+We see all this complexity. 
+It's incumbent upon us, and this organization, I believe, to make clarity, transparency and empathy a national priority. 
+There is no way that we should allow government to communicate the way they communicate. 
+There is no way we should do business with companies that have agreements with stealth provisions and that are unintelligible. 
+So, how are we going to change the world? 
+Make clarity, transparency and simplicity a national priority. 
+I thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Meet Tony. He's my student. 
+He's about my age, and he's in San Quentin State Prison. 
+When Tony was 16 years old, one day, one moment, "" It was mom's gun. 
+Just flash it, scare the guy. He's a punk. 
+He took some money; we'll take his money. That'll teach him. 
+Then last minute, I'm thinking, 'Can't do this. This is wrong.' My buddy says, 'C'mon, let's do this.' I say, 'Let's do this.' "" And those three words, Tony's going to remember, because the next thing he knows, he hears the pop. 
+There's the punk on the ground, puddle of blood. 
+And that's felony murder — 25 to life, parole at 50 if you're lucky, and Tony's not feeling very lucky. 
+So when we meet in my philosophy class in his prison and I say, "" In this class, we will discuss the foundations of ethics, "" Tony interrupts me. 
+"" What are you going to teach me about right and wrong? 
+I know what is wrong. I have done wrong. 
+I am told every day, by every face I see, every wall I face, that I am wrong. 
+If I ever get out of here, there will always be a mark by my name. 
+I'm a convict; I am branded 'wrong.' What are you going to tell me about right and wrong? "" So I say to Tony, "" Sorry, but it's worse than you think. 
+You think you know right and wrong? 
+Then can you tell me what wrong is? 
+No, don't just give me an example. 
+I want to know about wrongness itself, the idea of wrong. 
+What is that idea? 
+What makes something wrong? 
+How do we know that it's wrong? Maybe you and I disagree. 
+Maybe one of us is wrong about the wrong. 
+Maybe it's you, maybe it's me — but we're not here to trade opinions; everyone's got an opinion. 
+We are here for knowledge. 
+Our enemy is thoughtlessness. This is philosophy. "" And something changes for Tony. 
+"" Could be I'm wrong. I'm tired of being wrong. 
+I want to know what is wrong. 
+I want to know what I know. "" What Tony sees in that moment is the project of philosophy, the project that begins in wonder — what Kant called "" admiration and awe at the starry sky above and the moral law within. "" What can creatures like us know of such things? 
+It is the project that always takes us back to the condition of existence — what Heidegger called "" the always already there. "" It is the project of questioning what we believe and why we believe it — what Socrates called "" the examined life. "" Socrates, a man wise enough to know that he knows nothing. 
+Socrates died in prison, his philosophy intact. 
+So Tony starts doing his homework. 
+He learns his whys and wherefores, his causes and correlations, his logic, his fallacies. 
+Turns out, Tony's got the philosophy muscle. 
+His body is in prison, but his mind is free. 
+Tony learns about the ontologically promiscuous, the epistemologically anxious, the ethically dubious, the metaphysically ridiculous. 
+That's Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche and Bill Clinton. 
+So when he gives me his final paper, in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure, I say, "" I don't know. 
+Let us think about that. "" Because in that moment, there's no mark by Tony's name; it's just the two of us standing there. 
+It is not professor and convict, it is just two minds ready to do philosophy. 
+And I say to Tony, "Let's do this." 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi, my name is Roz Savage and I row across oceans. 
+Four years ago, I rowed solo across the Atlantic, and since then, I've done two out of three stages across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Hawaii and from Hawaii to Kiribati. 
+And tomorrow, I'll be leaving this boat to fly back to Kiribati to continue with the third and final stage of my row across the Pacific. 
+Cumulatively, I will have rowed over 8,000 miles, taken over three million oar strokes and spent more than 312 days alone on the ocean on a 23 foot rowboat. 
+This has given me a very special relationship with the ocean. 
+We have a bit of a love / hate thing going on. 
+I feel a bit about it like I did about a very strict math teacher that I once had at school. 
+I didn't always like her, but I did respect her, and she taught me a heck of a lot. 
+So today I'd like to share with you some of my ocean adventures and tell you a little bit about what they've taught me, and how I think we can maybe take some of those lessons and apply them to this environmental challenge that we face right now. 
+Now, some of you might be thinking, "" Hold on a minute. She doesn't look very much like an ocean rower. 
+Isn't she meant to be about this tall and about this wide and maybe look a bit more like these guys? "" You'll notice, they've all got something that I don't. 
+Well, I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm talking about the beards. (Laughter) And no matter how long I've spent on the ocean, I haven't yet managed to muster a decent beard, and I hope that it remains that way. 
+For a long time, I didn't believe that I could have a big adventure. 
+The story that I told myself was that adventurers looked like this. 
+I didn't look the part. 
+I thought there were them and there were us, and I was not one of them. 
+So for 11 years, I conformed. 
+I did what people from my kind of background were supposed to do. 
+I was working in an office in London as a management consultant. 
+And I think I knew from day one that it wasn't the right job for me. 
+But that kind of conditioning just kept me there for so many years, until I reached my mid-30s and I thought, "" You know, I'm not getting any younger. 
+I feel like I've got a purpose in this life, and I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty certain that management consultancy is not it. 
+So, fast forward a few years. 
+I'd gone through some changes. 
+To try and answer that question of, "What am I supposed to be doing with my life?" 
+I sat down one day and wrote two versions of my own obituary, the one that I wanted, a life of adventure, and the one that I was actually heading for which was a nice, normal, pleasant life, but it wasn't where I wanted to be by the end of my life. 
+I wanted to live a life that I could be proud of. 
+And I remember looking at these two versions of my obituary and thinking, "" Oh boy, I'm on totally the wrong track here. 
+If I carry on living as I am now, I'm just not going to end up where I want to be in five years, or 10 years, or at the end of my life. "" I made a few changes, let go of some loose trappings of my old life, and through a bit of a leap of logic, decided to row across the Atlantic Ocean. 
+(Laughter) The Atlantic Rowing Race runs from the Canaries to Antigua, it's about 3,000 miles, and it turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done. 
+Sure, I had wanted to get outside of my comfort zone, but what I'd sort of failed to notice was that getting out of your comfort zone is, by definition, extremely uncomfortable. 
+And my timing was not great either: 2005, when I did the Atlantic, was the year of Hurricane Katrina. 
+There were more tropical storms in the North Atlantic than ever before, since records began. 
+And pretty early on, those storms started making their presence known. 
+All four of my oars broke before I reached halfway across. 
+Oars are not supposed to look like this. 
+But what can you do? You're in the middle of the ocean. 
+Oars are your only means of propulsion. 
+So I just had to look around the boat and figure out what I was going to use to fix up these oars so that I could carry on. 
+So I found a boat hook and my trusty duct tape and splintered the boat hook to the oars to reinforce it. 
+Then, when that gave out, I sawed the wheel axles off my spare rowing seat and used those. 
+And then when those gave out, I cannibalized one of the broken oars. 
+I'd never been very good at fixing stuff when I was living my old life, but it's amazing how resourceful you can become when you're in the middle of the ocean and there's only one way to get to the other side. 
+And the oars kind of became a symbol of just in how many ways I went beyond what I thought were my limits. 
+I suffered from tendinitis on my shoulders and saltwater sores on my bottom. 
+I really struggled psychologically, totally overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, realizing that, if I carried on moving at two miles an hour, 3,000 miles was going to take me a very, very long time. 
+There were so many times when I thought I'd hit that limit, but had no choice but to just carry on and try and figure out how I was going to get to the other side without driving myself crazy. 
+And eventually after 103 days at sea, I arrived in Antigua. 
+I don't think I've ever felt so happy in my entire life. 
+It was a bit like finishing a marathon and getting out of solitary confinement and winning an Oscar all rolled into one. 
+I was euphoric. 
+And to see all the people coming out to greet me and standing along the cliff tops and clapping and cheering, I just felt like a movie star. 
+It was absolutely wonderful. 
+And I really learned then that, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the sense of achievement when you get to the end of it. 
+So this might be a good moment to take a quick time-out to answer a few FAQs about ocean rowing that might be going through your mind. 
+Number one that I get asked: What do you eat? 
+A few freeze-dried meals, but mostly I try and eat much more unprocessed foods. 
+So I grow my own beansprouts. 
+I eat fruits and nut bars, a lot of nuts. 
+And generally arrive about 30 pounds lighter at the other end. 
+Question number two: How do you sleep? 
+With my eyes shut. Ha-ha. 
+I suppose what you mean is: What happens to the boat while I'm sleeping? 
+Well, I plan my route so that I'm drifting with the winds and the currents while I'm sleeping. 
+On a good night, I think my best ever was 11 miles in the right direction. 
+Worst ever, 13 miles in the wrong direction. 
+That's a bad day at the office. 
+What do I wear? 
+Mostly, a baseball cap, rowing gloves and a smile — or a frown, depending on whether I went backwards overnight — and lots of sun lotion. 
+Do I have a chase boat? 
+No I don't. I'm totally self-supporting out there. 
+I don't see anybody for the whole time that I'm at sea, generally. 
+And finally: Am I crazy? 
+Well, I leave that one up to you to judge. 
+So, how do you top rowing across the Atlantic? 
+Well, naturally, you decide to row across the Pacific. 
+Well, I thought the Atlantic was big, but the Pacific is really, really big. 
+I think we tend to do it a little bit of a disservice in our usual maps. 
+I don't know for sure that the Brits invented this particular view of the world, but I suspect we might have done so: we are right in the middle, and we've cut the Pacific in half and flung it to the far corners of the world. 
+Whereas if you look in Google Earth, this is how the Pacific looks. 
+It pretty much covers half the planet. 
+You can just see a little bit of North America up here and a sliver of Australia down there. 
+It is really big — 65 million square miles — and to row in a straight line across it would be about 8,000 miles. 
+Unfortunately, ocean rowboats very rarely go in a straight line. 
+By the time I get to Australia, if I get to Australia, I will have rowed probably nine or 10,000 miles in all. 
+So, because nobody in their straight mind would row straight past Hawaii without dropping in, I decided to cut this very big undertaking into three segments. 
+The first attempt didn't go so well. 
+In 2007, I did a rather involuntary capsize drill three times in 24 hours. 
+A bit like being in a washing machine. 
+Boat got a bit dinged up, so did I. 
+I blogged about it. Unfortunately, somebody with a bit of a hero complex decided that this damsel was in distress and needed saving. 
+The first I knew about this was when the Coast Guard plane turned up overhead. 
+I tried to tell them to go away. 
+We had a bit of a battle of wills. 
+I lost and got airlifted. 
+Awful, really awful. 
+It was one of the worst feelings of my life, as I was lifted up on that winch line into the helicopter and looked down at my trusty little boat rolling around in the 20 foot waves and wondering if I would ever see her again. 
+So I had to launch a very expensive salvage operation and then wait another nine months before I could get back out onto the ocean again. 
+But what do you do? 
+Fall down nine times, get up 10. 
+So, the following year, I set out and, fortunately, this time made it safely across to Hawaii. 
+But it was not without misadventure. 
+My watermaker broke, only the most important piece of kit that I have on the boat. 
+Powered by my solar panels, it sucks in saltwater and turns it into freshwater. 
+But it doesn't react very well to being immersed in ocean, which is what happened to it. 
+Fortunately, help was at hand. 
+There was another unusual boat out there at the same time, doing as I was doing, bringing awareness to the North Pacific Garbage Patch, that area in the North Pacific about twice the size of Texas, with an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash in it, circulating at the center of that North Pacific Gyre. 
+So, to make the point, these guys had actually built their boat out of plastic trash, 15,000 empty water bottles latched together into two pontoons. 
+They were going very slowly. 
+Partly, they'd had a bit of a delay. 
+They'd had to pull in at Catalina Island shortly after they left Long Beach because the lids of all the water bottles were coming undone, and they were starting to sink. 
+So they'd had to pull in and do all the lids up. 
+But, as I was approaching the end of my water reserves, luckily, our courses were converging. 
+They were running out of food; I was running out of water. 
+So we liaised by satellite phone and arranged to meet up. 
+And it took about a week for us to actually gradually converge. 
+I was doing a pathetically slow speed of about 1.3 knots, and they were doing only marginally less pathetic speed of about 1.4: it was like two snails in a mating dance. 
+But, eventually, we did manage to meet up and Joel hopped overboard, caught us a beautiful, big mahi-mahi, which was the best food I'd had in, ooh, at least three months. 
+Fortunately, the one that he caught that day was better than this one they caught a few weeks earlier. 
+When they opened this one up, they found its stomach was full of plastic. 
+And this is really bad news because plastic is not an inert substance. 
+It leaches out chemicals into the flesh of the poor critter that ate it, and then we come along and eat that poor critter, and we get some of the toxins accumulating in our bodies as well. 
+So there are very real implications for human health. 
+I eventually made it to Hawaii still alive. 
+And, the following year, set out on the second stage of the Pacific, from Hawaii down to Tarawa. 
+And you'll notice something about Tarawa; it is very low-lying. 
+It's that little green sliver on the horizon, which makes them very nervous about rising oceans. 
+This is big trouble for these guys. 
+They've got no points of land more than about six feet above sea level. 
+And also, as an increase in extreme weather events due to climate change, they're expecting more waves to come in over the fringing reef, which will contaminate their fresh water supply. 
+I had a meeting with the president there, who told me about his exit strategy for his country. 
+He expects that within the next 50 years, the 100,000 people that live there will have to relocate to New Zealand or Australia. 
+And that made me think about how would I feel if Britain was going to disappear under the waves; if the places where I'd been born and gone to school and got married, if all those places were just going to disappear forever. 
+How, literally, ungrounded that would make me feel. 
+Very shortly, I'll be setting out to try and get to Australia, and if I'm successful, I'll be the first woman ever to row solo all the way across the Pacific. 
+And I try to use this to bring awareness to these environmental issues, to bring a human face to the ocean. 
+If the Atlantic was about my inner journey, discovering my own capabilities, maybe the Pacific has been about my outer journey, figuring out how I can use my interesting career choice to be of service to the world, and to take some of those things that I've learned out there and apply them to the situation that humankind now finds itself in. 
+I think there are probably three key points here. 
+The first one is about the stories that we tell ourselves. 
+For so long, I told myself that I couldn't have an adventure because I wasn't six foot tall and athletic and bearded. 
+And then that story changed. 
+I found out that people had rowed across oceans. 
+I even met one of them and she was just about my size. 
+So even though I didn't grow any taller, I didn't sprout a beard, something had changed: My interior dialogue had changed. 
+At the moment, the story that we collectively tell ourselves is that we need all this stuff, that we need oil. 
+But what about if we just change that story? 
+We do have alternatives, and we have the power of free will to choose those alternatives, those sustainable ones, to create a greener future. 
+The second point is about the accumulation of tiny actions. 
+We might think that anything that we do as an individual is just a drop in the ocean, that it can't really make a difference. 
+But it does. Generally, we haven't got ourselves into this mess through big disasters. 
+Yes, there have been the Exxon Valdezes and the Chernobyls, but mostly it's been an accumulation of bad decisions by billions of individuals, day after day and year after year. 
+And, by the same token, we can turn that tide. 
+We can start making better, wiser, more sustainable decisions. 
+And when we do that, we're not just one person. 
+Anything that we do spreads ripples. 
+Other people will see if you're in the supermarket line and you pull out your reusable grocery bag. 
+Maybe if we all start doing this, we can make it socially unacceptable to say yes to plastic in the checkout line. 
+That's just one example. 
+This is a world-wide community. 
+The other point: It's about taking responsibility. 
+For so much of my life, I wanted something else to make me happy. 
+I thought if I had the right house or the right car or the right man in my life, then I could be happy. 
+But when I wrote that obituary exercise, I actually grew up a little bit in that moment and realized that I needed to create my own future. 
+I couldn't just wait passively for happiness to come and find me. 
+And I suppose I'm a selfish environmentalist. 
+I plan on being around for a long time, and when I'm 90 years old, I want to be happy and healthy. 
+And it's very difficult to be happy on a planet that's racked with famine and drought. 
+It's very difficult to be healthy on a planet where we've poisoned the earth and the sea and the air. 
+So, shortly, I'm going to be launching a new initiative called Eco-Heroes. 
+And the idea here is that all our Eco-Heroes will log at least one green deed every day. 
+It's meant to be a bit of a game. 
+We're going to make an iPhone app out of it. 
+We just want to try and create that awareness because, sure, changing a light bulb isn't going to change the world, but that attitude, that awareness that leads you to change the light bulb or take your reusable coffee mug, that is what could change the world. 
+I really believe that we stand at a very important point in history. 
+We have a choice. We've been blessed, or cursed, with free will. 
+We can choose a greener future, and we can get there if we all pull together to take it one stroke at a time. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've experienced relatively little stress. 
+How about a moderate amount of stress? 
+But that is not my confession. 
+My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. 
+But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. 
+It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. 
+But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours. 
+Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. 
+This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" 
+People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. 
+But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health. 
+(Laughter) People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. 
+Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you. 
+(Laughter) That is over 20,000 deaths a year. 
+Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV / AIDS and homicide. 
+(Laughter) You can see why this study freaked me out. 
+Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health. 
+So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? 
+When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress. 
+Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. 
+It's called the social stress test. 
+You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this. 
+(Exhales) (Laughter) Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math test. 
+And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. 
+You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can, starting with 996. 
+That guy made a mistake. 
+Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. 
+And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure. 
+But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? 
+Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. 
+Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. 
+It's getting more oxygen to your brain. 
+And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed. 
+Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. 
+And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. 
+It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. 
+It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. 
+Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. 
+And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters. 
+I no longer want to get rid of your stress. 
+I want to make you better at stress. 
+And we just did a little intervention. 
+If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. 
+And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier. 
+Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. 
+I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social. 
+To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. 
+It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. 
+But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in. 
+It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. 
+It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. 
+Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. 
+It enhances your empathy. 
+It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. 
+But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. 
+It's a stress hormone. 
+Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. 
+It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. 
+And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. 
+Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel, instead of bottling it up. 
+Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other. 
+Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier? 
+It also acts on your body, and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. 
+It's a natural anti-inflammatory. 
+It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. 
+But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart. 
+Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage. 
+And the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support. 
+So when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. 
+I find this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection. 
+This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, and they started the study by asking, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" 
+They also asked, "" How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community? "" And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died. 
+Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. 
+But — and I hope you are expecting a "" but "" by now — but that wasn't true for everyone. 
+People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. 
+And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. 
+How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. 
+And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience. 
+Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. 
+Stress gives us access to our hearts. 
+The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy. 
+And when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. 
+You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you're telling us. 
+It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy. 
+How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job, does it matter which way they go? 
+It's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it, in some sense? 
+KM: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. 
+And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows. 
+
+I want to share with you over the next 18 minutes a pretty incredible idea. 
+Actually, it's a really big idea. 
+But to get us started, I want to ask if everyone could just close your eyes for two seconds and try and think of a technology or a bit of science that you think has changed the world. 
+Now I bet, in this audience, you're thinking of some really incredible technology, some stuff that I haven't even heard of, I'm absolutely sure. 
+But I'm also sure, pretty sure, that absolutely nobody is thinking of this. 
+This is a polio vaccine. 
+And it's a great thing actually that nobody's had to think about it here today because it means that we can take this for granted. 
+This is a great technology. 
+We can take it completely for granted. 
+But it wasn't always that way. 
+Even here in California, if we were to go back just a few years, it was a very different story. 
+People were terrified of this disease. 
+They were terrified of polio, and it would cause public panic. 
+And it was because of scenes like this. 
+In this scene, people are living in an iron lung. 
+These are people who were perfectly healthy two or three days before, and then two days later, they can no longer breathe, and this polio virus has paralyzed not only their arms and their legs, but also their breathing muscles. 
+And they were going to spend the rest of their lives, usually, in this iron lung to breathe for them. 
+This disease was terrifying. 
+There was no cure, and there was no vaccine. 
+The disease was so terrifying that the president of the United States launched an extraordinary national effort to find a way to stop it. 
+Twenty years later, they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine. 
+It was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s. 
+Finally, a vaccine that could stop this awful disease, and here in the United States it had an incredible impact. 
+As you can see, the virus stopped, and it stopped very, very fast. 
+But this wasn't the case everywhere in the world. 
+And it happened so fast in the United States, however, that even just last month Jon Stewart said this: (Video) Jon Stewart: Where is polio still active? 
+Because I thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated. 
+Bruce Aylward: Oops. Jon, polio's almost been eradicated. 
+But the reality is that polio still exists today. 
+We made this map for Jon to try to show him exactly where polio still exists. 
+This is the picture. 
+There's not very much left in the world. 
+But the reason there's not very much left is because there's been an extraordinary public / private partnership working behind the scenes, almost unknown, I'm sure to most of you here today. 
+It's been working for 20 years to try and eradicate this disease, and it's got it down to these few cases that you can see here on this graphic. 
+But just last year, we had an incredible shock and realized that almost just isn't good enough with a virus like polio. 
+And this is the reason: in two countries that hadn't had this disease for more than probably a decade, on opposite sides of the globe, there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks. 
+Hundreds of people were paralyzed. 
+Hundreds of people died — children as well as adults. 
+And in both cases, we were able to use genetic sequencing to look at the polio viruses, and we could tell these viruses were not from these countries. 
+They had come from thousands of miles away. 
+And in one case, it originated on another continent. 
+And not only that, but when they came into these countries, then they got on commercial jetliners probably and they traveled even farther to other places like Russia, where, for the first time in over a decade last year, children were crippled and paralyzed by a disease that they had not seen for years. 
+Now all of these outbreaks that I just showed you, these are under control now, and it looks like they'll probably stop very, very quickly. 
+But the message was very clear. 
+Polio is still a devastating, explosive disease. 
+It's just happening in another part of the world. 
+And our big idea is that the scientific miracle of this decade should be the complete eradication of poliomyelitis. 
+So I want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership, the Polio Partnership, is trying to do. 
+We're not trying to control polio. 
+We're not trying to get it down to just a few cases, because this disease is like a root fire; it can explode again if you don't snuff it out completely. 
+So what we're looking for is a permanent solution. 
+We want a world in which every child, just like you guys, can take for granted a polio-free world. 
+So we're looking for a permanent solution, and this is where we get lucky. 
+This is one of the very few viruses in the world where there are big enough cracks in its armor that we can try to do something truly extraordinary. 
+This virus can only survive in people. 
+It can't live for a very long time in people. 
+It doesn't survive in the environment hardly at all. 
+And we've got pretty good vaccines, as I've just showed you. 
+So we are trying to wipe out this virus completely. 
+What the polio eradication program is trying to do is to kill the virus itself that causes polio everywhere on Earth. 
+Now we don't have a great track record when it comes to doing something like this, to eradicating diseases. 
+It's been tried six times in the last century, and it's been successful exactly once. 
+And this is because disease eradication, it's still the venture capital of public health. 
+The risks are massive, but the pay-off — economic, humanitarian, motivational — it's absolutely huge. 
+One congressman here in the United States thinks that the entire investment that the U.S. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days — in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs. 
+And if we can finish polio eradication, the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone. 
+So those are the kind of stakes that we're after. 
+But smallpox eradication was hard; it was very, very hard. 
+And polio eradication, in many ways, is even tougher, and there's a few reasons for that. 
+The first is that, when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago, more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox. 
+And there were more than 10 times as many people living in these countries. 
+So it was a massive effort. 
+The second challenge we had was — in contrast to the smallpox vaccine, which was very stable, and a single dose protected you for life — the polio vaccine is incredibly fragile. 
+It deteriorates so quickly in the tropics that we've had to put this special vaccine monitor on every single vial so that it will change very quickly when it's exposed to too much heat, and we can tell that it's not a good vaccine to use on a child — it's not potent; it's not going to protect them. 
+Even then, kids need many doses of the vaccine. 
+But the third challenge we have — and probably even bigger one, the biggest challenge — is that, in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy — every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash. 
+So you could get around the disease; you could vaccinate around the disease and cut it off. 
+With polio it's almost completely different. 
+The vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus show absolutely no sign of the disease. 
+So you can't see the enemy most of the time, and as a result, we've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox. 
+We've had to create one of the largest social movements in history. 
+There's over 10 million people, probably 20 million people, largely volunteers, who have been working over the last 20 years in what has now been called the largest internationally-coordinated operation in peacetime. 
+These people, these 20 million people, vaccinate over 500 million children every single year, multiple times at the peak of our operation. 
+Now giving the polio vaccine is simple. 
+It's just two drops, like that. 
+But reaching 500 million people is much, much tougher. 
+And these vaccinators, these volunteers, they have got to dive headlong into some of the toughest, densest urban slums in the world. 
+They've got to trek under sweltering suns to some of the most remote, difficult to reach places in the world. 
+And they also have to dodge bullets, because we have got to operate during shaky cease-fires and truces to try and vaccinate children, even in areas affected by conflict. 
+One reporter who was watching our program in Somalia about five years ago — a place which has eradicated polio, not once, but twice, because they got reinfected. 
+He was sitting outside of the road, watching one of these polio campaigns unfold, and a few months later he wrote: "This is foreign aid at its most heroic." 
+And these heroes, they come from every walk of life, all sorts of backgrounds. 
+But one of the most extraordinary is Rotary International. 
+This is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years. 
+They're right at the center of the whole thing. 
+Now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication — more than 15 years, much longer than it should have — but once it was built, the results were striking. 
+Within a couple of years, every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses, with the exception of four countries that you see here. 
+And in each of those, it was only part of the country. 
+And then, by 1999, one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide — proof of concept. 
+And then today, there's been a 99 percent reduction — greater than 99 percent reduction — in the number of children who are being paralyzed by this awful disease. 
+When we started, over 20 years ago, 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus. 
+Last year, it was 1,000. 
+And at the same time, the polio eradication program has been working to help with a lot of other areas. 
+It's been working to help control pandemic flu, SARS for example. 
+It's also tried to save children by doing other things — giving vitamin A drops, giving measles shots, giving bed nets against malaria even during some of these campaigns. 
+But the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us, the international community, to reach every single child, every single community, the most vulnerable people in the world, with the most basic of health services, irrespective of geography, poverty, culture and even conflict. 
+So things were looking very exciting, and then about five years ago, this virus, this ancient virus, started to fight back. 
+The first problem we ran into was that, in these last four countries, the strongholds of this virus, we just couldn't seem to get the virus rooted out. 
+And then to make the matters even worse, the virus started to spread out of these four places, especially northern India and northern Nigeria, into much of Africa, Asia, and even into Europe, causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades. 
+And then, in one of the most important, tenacious and toughest reservoirs of the polio virus in the world, we found that our vaccine was working half as well as it should have. 
+In conditions like this, the vaccine just couldn't get the grip it needed to in the guts of these children and protect them the way that it needed to. 
+Now at that time, there was a great, as you can imagine, frustration — let's call it frustration — it started to grow very, very quickly. 
+And all of a sudden, some very important voices in the world of public health started to say, "" Hang on. 
+We should abandon this idea of eradication. 
+Let's settle for control — that's good enough. "" Now as seductive as the idea of control sounds, it's a false premise. 
+The brutal truth is, if we don't have the will or the skill, or even the money that we need to reach children, the most vulnerable children in the world, with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine, then pretty soon, more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year. 
+There's absolutely no question. 
+These are children like Umar. 
+Umar is seven years old, and he's from northern Nigeria. 
+He lives in a family home there with his eight brothers and sisters. 
+Umar also has polio. 
+Umar was paralyzed for life. 
+His right leg was paralyzed in 2004. 
+This leg, his right leg, now takes an awful beating because he has to half-crawl, because it's faster to move that way to keep up with his friends, keep up with his brothers and sisters, than to get up on his crutches and walk. 
+But Umar is a fantastic student. He's an incredible kid. 
+As you probably can't see the detail here, but this is his report card, and you'll see, he's got perfect scores. 
+He got 100 percent in all the important things, like nursery rhymes, for example there. 
+But you know I'd love to be able to tell you that Umar is a typical kid with polio these days, but it's not true. 
+Umar is an exceptional kid in exceptional circumstances. 
+The reality of polio today is something very different. 
+Polio strikes the poorest communities in the world. 
+It leaves their children paralyzed, and it drags their families deeper into poverty, because they're desperately searching and they're desperately spending the little bit of savings that they have, trying in vain to find a cure for their children. 
+We think children deserve better. 
+And so when the going got really tough in the polio eradication program about two years ago, when people were saying, "" We should call it off, "" the Polio Partnership decided to buckle down once again and try and find innovative new solutions, new ways to get to the children that we were missing again and again. 
+In northern India, we started mapping the cases using satellite imaging like this, so that we could guide our investments and vaccinator shelters, so we could get to the millions of children on the Koshi River basin where there are no other health services. 
+In northern Nigeria, the political leaders and the traditional Muslim leaders, they got directly involved in the program to help solve the problems of logistics and community confidence. 
+And now they've even started using these devices — speaking of cool technology — these little devices, little GIS trackers like this, which they put into the vaccine carriers of their vaccinators. 
+And then they can track them, and at the end of the day, they look and see, did these guys get every single street, every single house. 
+This is the kind of commitment now we're seeing to try and reach all of the children we've been missing. 
+And in Afghanistan, we're trying new approaches — access negotiators. 
+We're working closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure that we can reach every child. 
+But as we tried these extraordinary things, as people went to this trouble to try and rework their tactics, we went back to the vaccine — it's a 50-year-old vaccine — and we thought, surely we can make a better vaccine, so that when they finally get to these kids, we can have a better bang for our buck. 
+And this started an incredible collaboration with industry, and within six months, we were testing a new polio vaccine that targeted, just two years ago, the last two types of polio in the world. 
+Now June the ninth, 2009, we got the first results from the first trial with this vaccine, and it turned out to be a game-changer. 
+The new vaccine had twice the impact on these last couple of viruses as the old vaccine had, and we immediately started using this. 
+Well, in a couple of months we had to get it out of production. 
+And it started rolling off the production lines and into the mouths of children around the world. 
+And we didn't start with the easy places. 
+The first place this vaccine was used was in southern Afghanistan, because it's in places like that where kids are going to benefit the most from technologies like this. 
+Now here at TED, over the last couple of days, I've seen people challenging the audience again and again to believe in the impossible. 
+So this morning at about seven o'clock, I decided that we'd try to drive Chris and the production crew here berserk by downloading all of our data from India again, so that you could see something that's just unfolding today, which proves that the impossible is possible. 
+And only two years ago, people were saying that this is impossible. 
+Now remember, northern India is the perfect storm when it comes to polio. 
+Over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio — Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — 500,000 children every single month. 
+Sanitation is terrible, and our old vaccine, you remember, worked half as well as it should have. 
+And yet, the impossible is happening. 
+Today marks exactly six months — and for the first time in history, not a single child has been paralyzed in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. 
+(Applause) India's not unique. 
+In Umar's home country of Nigeria, a 95 percent reduction in the number of children paralyzed by polio last year. 
+And in the last six months, we've had less places reinfected by polio than at any other time in history. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, with a combination of smart people, smart technology and smart investments, polio can now be eradicated anywhere. 
+We have major challenges, you can imagine, to finish this job, but as you've also seen, it's doable, it has great secondary benefits, and polio eradication is a great buy. 
+And as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus, it's a stark reminder that we are failing, as a society, to reach children with the most basic of services. 
+And for that reason, polio eradication: it's the ultimate in equity and it's the ultimate in social justice. 
+The huge social movement that's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children. 
+It's ready to reach them with bed nets, with other things. 
+But capitalizing on their enthusiasm, capitalizing on their energy means finishing the job that they started 20 years ago. 
+Finishing polio is a smart thing to do, and it's the right thing to do. 
+Now we're in tough times economically. 
+But as David Cameron of the United Kingdom said about a month ago when he was talking about polio, "" There's never a wrong time to do the right thing. "" Finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do. 
+And we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years. 
+We have a new vaccine, we have new resolve, and we have new tactics. 
+We have the chance to write an entirely new polio-free chapter in human history. 
+But if we blink now, we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease. 
+Here's a great idea to spread: End polio now. 
+Help us tell the story. 
+Help us build the momentum so that very soon every child, every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bill Gates: Well Bruce, where do you think the toughest places are going to be? 
+Where would you say we need to be the smartest? 
+BA: The four places where you saw, that we've never stopped — northern Nigeria, northern India, the southern corner of Afghanistan and bordering areas of Pakistan — they're going to be the toughest. 
+But the interesting thing is, of those three, India's looking real good, as you just saw in the data. 
+And Afghanistan, Afghanistan, we think has probably stopped polio repeatedly. 
+It keeps getting reinfected. 
+So the tough ones: going to get the top of Nigeria finished and getting Pakistan finished. 
+They're going to be the tough ones. 
+BG: Now what about the money? 
+Give us a sense of how much the campaign costs a year. 
+And is it easy to raise that money? 
+And what's it going to be like the next couple of years? 
+BA: It's interesting. 
+We spend right now about 750 million to 800 million dollars a year. 
+That's what it costs to reach 500 million children. 
+It sounds like a lot of money; it is a lot of money. 
+But when you're reaching 500 million children multiple times — 20, 30 cents to reach a child — that's not very much money. 
+But right now we don't have enough of that. 
+We have a big gap in that money. We're cutting corners, and every time we cut corners, more places get infected that shouldn't have, and it just slows us down. 
+And that great buy costs us a little bit more. 
+BG: Well, hopefully we'll get the word out, and the governments will keep their generosity up. 
+So good luck. We're all in this with you. 
+Thank you. (BA: Thank you.) (Applause) 
+
+For a long time in my life, I felt like I'd been living two different lives. 
+There's the life that everyone sees, and then there's the life that only I see. 
+And in the life that everyone sees, who I am is a friend, a son, a brother, a stand-up comedian and a teenager. 
+That's the life everyone sees. 
+If you were to ask my friends and family to describe me, that's what they would tell you. 
+And that's a huge part of me. That is who I am. 
+And if you were to ask me to describe myself, I'd probably say some of those same things. 
+And I wouldn't be lying, but I wouldn't totally be telling you the truth, either, because the truth is, that's just the life everyone else sees. 
+In the life that only I see, who I am, who I really am, is someone who struggles intensely with depression. 
+I have for the last six years of my life, and I continue to every day. 
+Now, for someone who has never experienced depression or doesn't really know what that means, that might surprise them to hear, because there's this pretty popular misconception that depression is just being sad when something in your life goes wrong, when you break up with your girlfriend, when you lose a loved one, when you don't get the job you wanted. 
+But that's sadness. That's a natural thing. 
+That's a natural human emotion. 
+Real depression isn't being sad when something in your life goes wrong. 
+Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right. 
+That's real depression, and that's what I suffer from. 
+And to be totally honest, that's hard for me to stand up here and say. 
+It's hard for me to talk about, and it seems to be hard for everyone to talk about, so much so that no one's talking about it. 
+And no one's talking about depression, but we need to be, because right now it's a massive problem. 
+It's a massive problem. 
+But we don't see it on social media, right? 
+We don't see it on Facebook. We don't see it on Twitter. 
+We don't see it on the news, because it's not happy, it's not fun, it's not light. 
+And so because we don't see it, we don't see the severity of it. 
+But the severity of it and the seriousness of it is this: every 30 seconds, every 30 seconds, somewhere, someone in the world takes their own life because of depression, and it might be two blocks away, it might be two countries away, it might be two continents away, but it's happening, and it's happening every single day. 
+And we have a tendency, as a society, to look at that and go, "" So what? "" So what? We look at that, and we go, "" That's your problem. 
+That's their problem. "" We say we're sad and we say we're sorry, but we also say, "" So what? "" Well, two years ago it was my problem, because I sat on the edge of my bed where I'd sat a million times before and I was suicidal. 
+I was suicidal, and if you were to look at my life on the surface, you wouldn't see a kid who was suicidal. 
+You'd see a kid who was the captain of his basketball team, the drama and theater student of the year, the English student of the year, someone who was consistently on the honor roll and consistently at every party. 
+So you would say I wasn't depressed, you would say I wasn't suicidal, but you would be wrong. 
+You would be wrong. So I sat there that night beside a bottle of pills with a pen and paper in my hand and I thought about taking my own life and I came this close to doing it. I came this close to doing it. 
+And I didn't, so that makes me one of the lucky ones, 
+one of the people who gets to step out on the ledge and look down but not jump, one of the lucky ones who survives. 
+Well, I survived, and that just leaves me with my story, and my story is this: In four simple words, I suffer from depression. 
+I suffer from depression, and for a long time, I think, I was living two totally different lives, where one person was always afraid of the other. 
+I was afraid that people would see me for who I really was, that I wasn't the perfect, popular kid in high school everyone thought I was, that beneath my smile, there was struggle, and beneath my light, there was dark, and beneath my big personality just hid even bigger pain. 
+See, some people might fear girls not liking them back. 
+Some people might fear sharks. Some people might fear death. 
+But for me, for a large part of my life, I feared myself. 
+I feared my truth, I feared my honesty, I feared my vulnerability, and that fear made me feel like I was forced into a corner, like I was forced into a corner and there was only one way out, and so I thought about that way every single day. 
+I thought about it every single day, and if I'm being totally honest, standing here I've thought about it again since, because that's the sickness, that's the struggle, that's depression, and depression isn't chicken pox. 
+You don't beat it once and it's gone forever. 
+It's something you live with. It's something you live in. 
+It's the roommate you can't kick out. It's the voice you can't ignore. 
+It's the feelings you can't seem to escape, the scariest part is that after a while, you become numb to it. It becomes normal for you, and what you really fear the most isn't the suffering inside of you. 
+It's the stigma inside of others, it's the shame, it's the embarrassment, it's the disapproving look on a friend's face, it's the whispers in the hallway that you're weak, it's the comments that you're crazy. 
+That's what keeps you from getting help. 
+That's what makes you hold it in and hide it. 
+It's the stigma. So you hold it in and you hide it, and you hold it in and you hide it, and even though it's keeping you in bed every day and it's making your life feel empty no matter how much you try and fill it, you hide it, because the stigma in our society around depression is very real. 
+It's very real, and if you think that it isn't, ask yourself this: Would you rather make your next Facebook status say you're having a tough time getting out of bed because you hurt your back or you're having a tough time getting out of bed every morning because you're depressed? 
+That's the stigma, because unfortunately, we live in a world where if you break your arm, everyone runs over to sign your cast, but if you tell people you're depressed, everyone runs the other way. 
+That's the stigma. 
+We are so, so, so accepting of any body part breaking down other than our brains. And that's ignorance. 
+That's pure ignorance, and that ignorance has created a world that doesn't understand depression, that doesn't understand mental health. 
+And that's ironic to me, because depression is one of the best documented problems we have in the world, yet it's one of the least discussed. 
+We just push it aside and put it in a corner and pretend it's not there and hope it'll fix itself. 
+Well, it won't. It hasn't, and it's not going to, because that's wishful thinking, and wishful thinking isn't a game plan, it's procrastination, and we can't procrastinate on something this important. 
+The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. 
+Well, we haven't done that, so we can't really expect to find an answer when we're still afraid of the question. 
+And I don't know what the solution is. 
+I wish I did, but I don't — but I think, I think it has to start here. 
+It has to start with me, it has to start with you, it has to start with the people who are suffering, the ones who are hidden in the shadows. 
+We need to speak up and shatter the silence. 
+We need to be the ones who are brave for what we believe in, because if there's one thing that I've come to realize, if there's one thing that I see as the biggest problem, it's not in building a world where we eliminate the ignorance of others. 
+It's in building a world where we teach the acceptance of ourselves, where we're okay with who we are, because when we get honest, we see that we all struggle and we all suffer. 
+Whether it's with this, whether it's with something else, we all know what it is to hurt. 
+We all know what it is to have pain in our heart, and we all know how important it is to heal. 
+But right now, depression is society's deep cut that we're content to put a Band-Aid over and pretend it's not there. 
+Well, it is there. It is there, and you know what? It's okay. 
+Depression is okay. If you're going through it, know that you're okay. 
+And know that you're sick, you're not weak, and it's an issue, not an identity, because when you get past the fear and the ridicule and the judgment and the stigma of others, you can see depression for what it really is, and that's just a part of life, just a part of life, and as much as I hate, as much as I hate some of the places, some of the parts of my life depression has dragged me down to, in a lot of ways I'm grateful for it. 
+Because yeah, it's put me in the valleys, but only to show me there's peaks, and yeah it's dragged me through the dark but only to remind me there is light. 
+My pain, more than anything in 19 years on this planet, has given me perspective, and my hurt, my hurt has forced me to have hope, have hope and to have faith, faith in myself, faith in others, faith that it can get better, that we can change this, that we can speak up and speak out and fight back against ignorance, fight back against intolerance, and more than anything, learn to love ourselves, learn to accept ourselves for who we are, the people we are, not the people the world wants us to be. 
+Because the world I believe in is one where embracing your light doesn't mean ignoring your dark. 
+The world I believe in is one where we're measured by our ability to overcome adversities, not avoid them. 
+The world I believe in is one where I can look someone in the eye and say, "" I'm going through hell, "" and they can look back at me and go, "" Me too, "" and that's okay, and it's okay because depression is okay. We're people. 
+We're people, and we struggle and we suffer and we bleed and we cry, and if you think that true strength means never showing any weakness, then I'm here to tell you you're wrong. 
+You're wrong, because it's the opposite. 
+We're people, and we have problems. 
+We're not perfect, and that's okay. 
+So we need to stop the ignorance, stop the intolerance, stop the stigma, and stop the silence, and we need to take away the taboos, take a look at the truth, and start talking, because the only way we're going to beat a problem that people are battling alone is by standing strong together, by standing strong together. 
+And I believe that we can. 
+I believe that we can. Thank you guys so much. 
+This is a dream come true. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+How many people think it's the green one? 
+(Laughter) Here is the green one. 
+(Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. 
+(Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? 
+Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society. 
+What you see here is a jungle scene, and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect. 
+And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. 
+And yet you don't put a letter after that first "" T. "" Why? Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past. 
+So, let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color. 
+We're going to look at it for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk. 
+(Applause) Why? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light. 
+Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right? 
+Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective — just the laws of physics. 
+And you'll notice you see a dark brown tile at the top, and a bright orange tile at the side. 
+Here you see four gray tiles on your left, seven gray tiles on the right. 
+And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, and I'm going to spin it. 
+Yes? Raise your hand if you got that. Yes? 
+Even the beautiful bumblebee, with its mere one million brain cells, which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina, sees illusions, does the most complicated things that even our most sophisticated computers can't do. 
+There's another one coming out, she also has a number on her. 
+They land on the flower, stick their tongue in there, called a proboscis, and drink sugar water. 
+So they copy each other. 
+And how we see is by continually redefining normality. 
+And they can navigate the world using their ears. 
+And this is one of those images. 
+And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. 
+And this is what it sounds like. 
+Now, some of you will have noticed that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right. 
+Now remember — you know that the middle nine are exactly the same. 
+
+Today, I'm going to take you around the world in 18 minutes. 
+My base of operations is in the U.S., but let's start at the other end of the map, in Kyoto, Japan, where I was living with a Japanese family while I was doing part of my dissertational research 15 years ago. 
+I knew even then that I would encounter cultural differences and misunderstandings, but they popped up when I least expected it. 
+On my first day, I went to a restaurant, and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar. 
+After a pause, the waiter said, "One does not put sugar in green tea." 
+"" I know, "" I said. "" I'm aware of this custom. 
+But I really like my tea sweet. "" In response, he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation. 
+"" One does not put sugar in green tea. "" "" I understand, "" I said, "" that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea, but I'd like to put some sugar in my green tea. "" (Laughter) Surprised by my insistence, the waiter took up the issue with the manager. 
+Pretty soon, a lengthy discussion ensued, and finally the manager came over to me and said, "I am very sorry. We do not have sugar." 
+(Laughter) Well, since I couldn't have my tea the way I wanted it, I ordered a cup of coffee, which the waiter brought over promptly. 
+Resting on the saucer were two packets of sugar. 
+My failure to procure myself a cup of sweet, green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding. 
+This was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice. 
+From my American perspective, when a paying customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences, she has every right to have that request met. 
+The American way, to quote Burger King, is to "" have it your way, "" because, as Starbucks says, "happiness is in your choices." 
+(Laughter) But from the Japanese perspective, it's their duty to protect those who don't know any better — (Laughter) in this case, the ignorant gaijin — from making the wrong choice. 
+Let's face it: the way I wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural standards, and they were doing their best to help me save face. 
+Americans tend to believe that they've reached some sort of pinnacle in the way they practice choice. 
+They think that choice, as seen through the American lens best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans. 
+Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on assumptions that don't always hold true in many countries, in many cultures. 
+At times they don't even hold true at America's own borders. 
+I'd like to discuss some of these assumptions and the problems associated with them. 
+As I do so, I hope you'll start thinking about some of your own assumptions and how they were shaped by your backgrounds. 
+First assumption: if a choice affects you, then you should be the one to make it. 
+This is the only way to ensure that your preferences and interests will be most fully accounted for. 
+It is essential for success. 
+In America, the primary locus of choice is the individual. 
+People must choose for themselves, sometimes sticking to their guns, regardless of what other people want or recommend. 
+It's called "" being true to yourself. "" But do all individuals benefit from taking such an approach to choice? 
+Mark Lepper and I did a series of studies in which we sought the answer to this very question. 
+In one study, which we ran in Japantown, San Francisco, we brought seven- to nine-year-old Anglo- and Asian-American children into the laboratory, and we divided them up into three groups. 
+The first group came in, and they were greeted by Miss Smith, who showed them six big piles of anagram puzzles. 
+The kids got to choose which pile of anagrams they would like to do, and they even got to choose which marker they would write their answers with. 
+When the second group of children came in, they were brought to the same room, shown the same anagrams, but this time Miss Smith told them which anagrams to do and which markers to write their answers with. 
+Now when the third group came in, they were told that their anagrams and their markers had been chosen by their mothers. 
+(Laughter) In reality, the kids who were told what to do, whether by Miss Smith or their mothers, were actually given the very same activity, which their counterparts in the first group had freely chosen. 
+With this procedure, we were able to ensure that the kids across the three groups all did the same activity, making it easier for us to compare performance. 
+Such small differences in the way we administered the activity yielded striking differences in how well they performed. 
+Anglo-Americans, they did two and a half times more anagrams when they got to choose them, as compared to when it was chosen for them by Miss Smith or their mothers. 
+It didn't matter who did the choosing, if the task was dictated by another, their performance suffered. 
+In fact, some of the kids were visibly embarrassed when they were told that their mothers had been consulted. 
+(Laughter) One girl named Mary said, "You asked my mother?" (Laughter) 
+In contrast, Asian-American children performed best when they believed their mothers had made the choice, second best when they chose for themselves, and least well when it had been chosen by Miss Smith. 
+A girl named Natsumi even approached Miss Smith as she was leaving the room and tugged on her skirt and asked, "" Could you please tell my mommy I did it just like she said? "" The first-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents' approach to choice. 
+For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected. 
+If they had a concept of being true to one's self, then that self, most likely, [was] composed, not of an individual, but of a collective. 
+Success was just as much about pleasing key figures as it was about satisfying one's own preferences. 
+Or, you could say that the individual's preferences were shaped by the preferences of specific others. 
+The assumption then that we do best when the individual self chooses only holds when that self is clearly divided from others. 
+When, in contrast, two or more individuals see their choices and their outcomes as intimately connected, then they may amplify one another's success by turning choosing into a collective act. 
+To insist that they choose independently might actually compromise both their performance and their relationships. 
+Yet that is exactly what the American paradigm demands. 
+It leaves little room for interdependence or an acknowledgment of individual fallibility. 
+It requires that everyone treat choice as a private and self-defining act. 
+People that have grown up in such a paradigm might find it motivating, but it is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone. 
+The second assumption which informs the American view of choice goes something like this. 
+The more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice. 
+So bring it on, Walmart, with 100,000 different products, and Amazon, with 27 million books and Match.com with — what is it? — 15 million date possibilities now. 
+You will surely find the perfect match. 
+Let's test this assumption by heading over to Eastern Europe. 
+Here, I interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries, who had all faced the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society. 
+One of the most interesting revelations came not from an answer to a question, but from a simple gesture of hospitality. 
+When the participants arrived for their interview, I offered them a set of drinks: Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite — seven, to be exact. 
+During the very first session, which was run in Russia, one of the participants made a comment that really caught me off guard. 
+"" Oh, but it doesn't matter. 
+It's all just soda. That's just one choice. "" (Murmuring) I was so struck by this comment that from then on, I started to offer all the participants those seven sodas, and I asked them, "" How many choices are these? "" Again and again, they perceived these seven different sodas, not as seven choices, but as one choice: soda or no soda. 
+When I put out juice and water in addition to these seven sodas, now they perceived it as only three choices — juice, water and soda. 
+Compare this to the die-hard devotion of many Americans, not just to a particular flavor of soda, but to a particular brand. 
+You know, research shows repeatedly that we can't actually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. 
+Of course, you and I know that Coke is the better choice. 
+(Laughter) For modern Americans who are exposed to more options and more ads associated with options than anyone else in the world, choice is just as much about who they are as it is about what the product is. 
+Combine this with the assumption that more choices are always better, and you have a group of people for whom every little difference matters and so every choice matters. 
+But for Eastern Europeans, the sudden availability of all these consumer products on the marketplace was a deluge. 
+They were flooded with choice before they could protest that they didn't know how to swim. 
+When asked, "" What words and images do you associate with choice? "" Grzegorz from Warsaw said, "" Ah, for me it is fear. 
+There are some dilemmas you see. 
+I am used to no choice. "" Bohdan from Kiev said, in response to how he felt about the new consumer marketplace, "" It is too much. 
+We do not need everything that is there. "" A sociologist from the Warsaw Survey Agency explained, "" The older generation jumped from nothing to choice all around them. 
+They were never given a chance to learn how to react. "" And Tomasz, a young Polish man said, "" I don't need twenty kinds of chewing gum. 
+I don't mean to say that I want no choice, but many of these choices are quite artificial. "" In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. 
+The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options. 
+Americans train their whole lives to play "" spot the difference. "" They practice this from such an early age that they've come to believe that everyone must be born with this ability. 
+In fact, though all humans share a basic need and desire for choice, we don't all see choice in the same places or to the same extent. 
+When someone can't see how one choice is unlike another, or when there are too many choices to compare and contrast, the process of choosing can be confusing and frustrating. 
+Instead of making better choices, we become overwhelmed by choice, sometimes even afraid of it. 
+Choice no longer offers opportunities, but imposes constraints. 
+It's not a marker of liberation, but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae. 
+In other words, choice can develop into the very opposite of everything it represents in America when it is thrust upon those who are insufficiently prepared for it. 
+But it is not only other people in other places that are feeling the pressure of ever-increasing choice. 
+Americans themselves are discovering that unlimited choice seems more attractive in theory than in practice. 
+We all have physical, mental and emotional (Laughter) limitations that make it impossible for us to process every single choice we encounter, even in the grocery store, let alone over the course of our entire lives. 
+A number of my studies have shown that when you give people 10 or more options when they're making a choice, they make poorer decisions, whether it be health care, investment, other critical areas. 
+Yet still, many of us believe that we should make all our own choices and seek out even more of them. 
+This brings me to the third, and perhaps most problematic, assumption: "" You must never say no to choice. "" To examine this, let's go back to the U.S. 
+and then hop across the pond to France. 
+Right outside Chicago, a young couple, Susan and Daniel Mitchell, were about to have their first baby. 
+They'd already picked out a name for her, Barbara, after her grandmother. 
+One night, when Susan was seven months pregnant, she started to experience contractions and was rushed to the emergency room. 
+The baby was delivered through a C-section, but Barbara suffered cerebral anoxia, a loss of oxygen to the brain. 
+Unable to breathe on her own, she was put on a ventilator. 
+Two days later, the doctors gave the Mitchells a choice: They could either remove Barbara off the life support, in which case she would die within a matter of hours, or they could keep her on life support, in which case she might still die within a matter of days. 
+If she survived, she would remain in a permanent vegetative state, never able to walk, talk or interact with others. 
+What do they do? 
+What do any parent do? 
+In a study I conducted with Simona Botti and Kristina Orfali, American and French parents were interviewed. 
+They had all suffered the same tragedy. 
+In all cases, the life support was removed, and the infants had died. 
+But there was a big difference. 
+In France, the doctors decided whether and when the life support would be removed, while in the United States, the final decision rested with the parents. 
+We wondered: does this have an effect on how the parents cope with the loss of their loved one? 
+We found that it did. 
+Even up to a year later, American parents were more likely to express negative emotions, as compared to their French counterparts. 
+French parents were more likely to say things like, "" Noah was here for so little time, but he taught us so much. 
+He gave us a new perspective on life. "" American parents were more likely to say things like, "What if? What if?" 
+Another parent complained, "" I feel as if they purposefully tortured me. 
+How did they get me to do that? "" And another parent said, "" I feel as if I've played a role in an execution. "" But when the American parents were asked if they would rather have had the doctors make the decision, they all said, "" No. "" They could not imagine turning that choice over to another, even though having made that choice made them feel trapped, guilty, angry. 
+In a number of cases they were even clinically depressed. 
+These parents could not contemplate giving up the choice, because to do so would have gone contrary to everything they had been taught and everything they had come to believe about the power and purpose of choice. 
+In her essay, "" The White Album, "" Joan Didion writes, "" We tell ourselves stories in order to live. 
+We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. 
+We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the idea with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience. "" The story Americans tell, the story upon which the American dream depends, is the story of limitless choice. 
+This narrative promises so much: freedom, happiness, success. 
+It lays the world at your feet and says, "You can have anything, everything." 
+It's a great story, and it's understandable why they would be reluctant to revise it. 
+But when you take a close look, you start to see the holes, and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways. 
+Americans have so often tried to disseminate their ideas of choice, believing that they will be, or ought to be, welcomed with open hearts and minds. 
+But the history books and the daily news tell us it doesn't always work out that way. 
+The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. 
+No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere. 
+Moreover, Americans themselves could benefit from incorporating new perspectives into their own narrative, which has been driving their choices for so long. 
+Robert Frost once said that, "It is poetry that is lost in translation." 
+This suggests that whatever is beautiful and moving, whatever gives us a new way to see, cannot be communicated to those who speak a different language. 
+But Joseph Brodsky said that, "" It is poetry that is gained in translation, "" suggesting that translation can be a creative, transformative act. 
+When it comes to choice, we have far more to gain than to lose by engaging in the many translations of the narratives. 
+Instead of replacing one story with another, we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written. 
+No matter where we're from and what your narrative is, we all have a responsibility to open ourselves up to a wider array of what choice can do, and what it can represent. 
+And this does not lead to a paralyzing moral relativism. 
+Rather, it teaches us when and how to act. 
+It brings us that much closer to realizing the full potential of choice, to inspiring the hope and achieving the freedom that choice promises but doesn't always deliver. 
+If we learn to speak to one another, albeit through translation, then we can begin to see choice in all its strangeness, complexity and compelling beauty. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. 
+Sheena, there is a detail about your biography that we have not written in the program book. 
+But by now it's evident to everyone in this room. You're blind. 
+And I guess one of the questions on everybody's mind is: How does that influence your study of choosing because that's an activity that for most people is associated with visual inputs like aesthetics and color and so on? 
+Sheena Iyengar: Well, it's funny that you should ask that because one of the things that's interesting about being blind is you actually get a different vantage point when you observe the way sighted people make choices. 
+And as you just mentioned, there's lots of choices out there that are very visual these days. 
+Yeah, I — as you would expect — get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on because I have to rely on what other people suggest. 
+And I can't decide. 
+And so one time I was in a beauty salon, and I was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink. 
+And one was called "" Ballet Slippers. "" And the other one was called "" Adorable. "" (Laughter) And so I asked these two ladies, and the one lady told me, "" Well, you should definitely wear 'Ballet Slippers.' "" "Well, what does it look like?" 
+"Well, it's a very elegant shade of pink." 
+"Okay, great." 
+The other lady tells me to wear "" Adorable. "" "What does it look like?" 
+"It's a glamorous shade of pink." 
+And so I asked them, "" Well, how do I tell them apart? 
+What's different about them? "" And they said, "" Well, one is elegant, the other one's glamorous. "" Okay, we got that. 
+And the only thing they had consensus on: well, if I could see them, I would clearly be able to tell them apart. 
+(Laughter) And what I wondered was whether they were being affected by the name or the content of the color, so I decided to do a little experiment. 
+So I brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory, and I stripped the labels off. 
+And I brought women into the laboratory, and I asked them, "" Which one would you pick? "" 50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick, of putting the same color nail polish in both those bottles. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) At which point you start to wonder who the trick's really played on. 
+Now, of the women that could tell them apart, when the labels were off, they picked "" Adorable, "" and when the labels were on, they picked "" Ballet Slippers. "" So as far as I can tell, a rose by any other name probably does look different and maybe even smells different. 
+BG: Thank you. Sheena Iyengar. Thank you Sheena. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Thirteen years ago, we set ourselves a goal to end poverty. 
+After some success, we've hit a big hurdle. 
+The aftermath of the financial crisis has begun to hit aid payments, which have fallen for two consecutive years. 
+My question is whether the lessons learned from saving the financial system can be used to help us overcome that hurdle and help millions. 
+Can we simply print money for aid? 
+"Surely not." 
+It's a common reaction. 
+(Laughter) It's a quick talk. 
+Others channel John McEnroe. 
+"You cannot be serious!" 
+Now, I can't do the accent, but I am serious, thanks to these two children, who, as you'll learn, are very much at the heart of my talk. 
+On the left, we have Pia. 
+She lives in England. 
+She has two loving parents, one of whom is standing right here. 
+Dorothy, on the right, lives in rural Kenya. 
+She's one of 13,000 orphans and vulnerable children who are assisted by a charity that I support. 
+I do that because I believe that Dorothy, like Pia, deserves the best life chances that we can afford to give her. 
+You'll all agree with me, I'm sure. 
+The U.N. agrees too. 
+Their overriding aim for international aid is to strive for a life of dignity for all. 
+But — and here's that hurdle — can we afford our aid aspirations? 
+History suggests not. 
+In 1970, governments set themselves a target to increase overseas aid payments to 0.7 percent of their national income. 
+As you can see, a big gap opens up between actual aid and that target. 
+But then come the Millennium Development Goals, eight ambitious targets to be met by 2015. 
+If I tell you that just one of those targets is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty, you get a sense of the ambition. 
+The number of people living on less than $1.25 a day has halved. 
+One in eight remain hungry. 
+In the context of this auditorium, the front two rows aren't going to get any food. 
+We can't settle for that, which is why the concern about the eighth goal, which relates to funding, which I said at the beginning is falling, is so troubling. 
+So what can be done? 
+Well, I work in financial markets, not development. 
+I study the behavior of investors, how they react to policy and the economy. 
+It gives me a different angle on the aid issue. 
+But it took an innocent question from my then-four-year-old daughter to make me appreciate that. 
+Pia and I were on the way to a local cafe and we passed a man collecting for charity. 
+I didn't have any change to give him, and she was disappointed. 
+Once in the cafe, Pia takes out her coloring book and starts scribbling. 
+After a little while, I ask her what she's doing, and she shows me a drawing of a £5 note to give to the man outside. 
+It's so sweet, and more generous than Dad would have been. 
+But of course I explained to her, "You can't do that; it's not allowed." 
+To which I get the classic four-year-old response: "Why not?" 
+Now I'm excited, because I actually think I can answer this time. 
+So I launch into an explanation of how an unlimited supply of money chasing a limited number of goods sends prices to the moon. 
+Something about that exchange stuck with me, not because of the look of relief on Pia's face when I finally finished, but because it related to the sanctity of the money supply, a sanctity that had been challenged and questioned by the reaction of central banks to the financial crisis. 
+To reassure investors, central banks began buying assets to try and encourage investors to do the same. 
+They funded these purchases with money they created themselves. 
+The money wasn't actually physically printed. 
+It's still sort of locked away in the banking system today. 
+But the amount created was unprecedented. 
+Together, the central banks of the U.S., U.K and Japan increased the stock of money in their economies by 3.7 trillion dollars. 
+That's three times, in fact that's more than three times, the total physical stock of dollar notes in circulation. 
+Three times! 
+Before the crisis, this would have been utterly unthinkable, yet it was accepted remarkably quickly. 
+The price of gold, an asset thought to protect against inflation, did jump, but investors bought other assets that offered little protection from inflation. 
+That confidence was based on two pillars. 
+The first was that, after years of keeping inflation under control, central banks were trusted to take the money-printing away if inflation became a threat. 
+Secondly, inflation simply never became a threat. 
+As you can see, in the United States, inflation for most of this period remained below average. 
+It was the same elsewhere. 
+So how does all this relate to aid? 
+I was at one of their fundraising events earlier this year, and I was inspired to give a one-off donation when I remembered that my firm offers to match the charitable contributions its employees make. 
+So think of this: Instead of just being able to help Dorothy and four of her classmates to go through secondary school for a few years, I was able to double my contribution. 
+Brilliant. 
+So following that conversation with my daughter, and seeing the absence of inflation in the face of money-printing, and knowing that international aid payments were falling at just the wrong time, this made me wonder: Could we match but just on a much grander scale? 
+Let's call this scheme "" Print Aid. "" And here's how it might work. 
+Provided it saw little inflation risk from doing so, the central bank would be mandated to match the government's overseas aid payments up to a certain limit. 
+Governments have been aiming to get aid to 0.7 percent for years, so let's set the limit at half of that, 0.35 percent of their income. 
+So it would work like this: If in a given year the government gave 0.2 percent of its income to overseas aid, the central bank would simply top it up with a further 0.2 percent. 
+So far so good. 
+How risky is this? 
+Well, this involves the creation of money to buy goods, not assets. 
+It sounds more inflationary already, doesn't it. 
+But there are two important mitigating factors here. 
+The first is that by definition, this money printed would be spent overseas. 
+So it's not obvious how it leads to inflation in the country doing the actual printing unless it leads to a currency depreciation of that country. 
+That is unlikely for the second reason: the scale of the money that would be printed under this scheme. 
+So let's think of an example where Print Aid was in place in the U.S., U.K. and Japan. 
+To match the aid payments made by those governments over the last four years, Print Aid would have generated 200 billion dollars' worth of extra aid. 
+What would that look like in the context of the increase in the money stock that had already happened in those countries to save the financial system? 
+Are you read for this? 
+You might struggle to see that at the back, because the gap is quite small. 
+So what we're saying here is that we took a $3.7 trillion gamble to save our financial systems, and you know what, it paid off. 
+There was no inflation. 
+Are we really saying that it's not worth the risk to print an extra 200 billion for aid? 
+Would the risks really be that different? 
+What is clear is the impact on aid. 
+Even though this is the printing of just three central banks, the global aid that's given over this period is up by almost 40 percent. 
+Now, we don't get to 0.7 percent. 
+Governments are still incentivized to give. 
+But you know what, that's the point of a matching scheme. 
+So I think what we've learned is that the risks from this money creation scheme are quite modest, but the benefits are potentially huge. 
+Imagine what we could do with 40 percent more funding. 
+The thing that I fear, the only thing that I fear, apart from the fact that I've run out of time, is that the window of opportunity for this idea is a short one. 
+Today, money creation by central banks is an accepted policy tool. 
+That may not always be the case. 
+Today there are universally agreed aims for international aid. 
+That may not always be the case. 
+Today might be the only time that these two things coincide, such that we can afford the aid that we've always aspired to give. 
+I seriously believe the question should be, why not? 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+I'll never forget that day back in the spring of 2006. 
+I was a surgical resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, taking emergency call. 
+I got paged by the E.R. around 2 in the morning to come and see a woman with a diabetic ulcer on her foot. 
+I can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh as I pulled the curtain back to see her. 
+And everybody there agreed this woman was very sick and she needed to be in the hospital. 
+That wasn't being asked. 
+The question that was being asked of me was a different one, which was, did she also need an amputation? 
+Now, looking back on that night, I'd love so desperately to believe that I treated that woman on that night with the same empathy and compassion I'd shown the 27-year-old newlywed who came to the E.R. three nights earlier with lower back pain that turned out to be advanced pancreatic cancer. 
+In her case, I knew there was nothing I could do that was actually going to save her life. 
+The cancer was too advanced. 
+But I was committed to making sure that I could do anything possible to make her stay more comfortable. I brought her a warm blanket and a cup of a coffee. 
+I brought some for her parents. 
+But more importantly, see, I passed no judgment on her, because obviously she had done nothing to bring this on herself. 
+So why was it that, just a few nights later, as I stood in that same E.R. and determined that my diabetic patient did indeed need an amputation, why did I hold her in such bitter contempt? 
+You see, unlike the woman the night before, this woman had type 2 diabetes. 
+She was fat. 
+And we all know that's from eating too much and not exercising enough, right? 
+I mean, how hard can it be? 
+As I looked down at her in the bed, I thought to myself, if you just tried caring even a little bit, you wouldn't be in this situation at this moment with some doctor you've never met about to amputate your foot. 
+Why did I feel justified in judging her? 
+I'd like to say I don't know. 
+But I actually do. 
+You see, in the hubris of my youth, I thought I had her all figured out. 
+She ate too much. She got unlucky. 
+She got diabetes. Case closed. 
+Ironically, at that time in my life, I was also doing cancer research, immune-based therapies for melanoma, to be specific, and in that world I was actually taught to question everything, to challenge all assumptions and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards. 
+Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma, I never once questioned the conventional wisdom. 
+I actually just assumed the pathologic sequence of events was settled science. 
+Three years later, I found out how wrong I was. 
+But this time, I was the patient. 
+Despite exercising three or four hours every single day, and following the food pyramid to the letter, I'd gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome. 
+Some of you may have heard of this. 
+I had become insulin-resistant. 
+You can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods we eat, whether we burn it or store it. 
+This is called fuel partitioning in the lingo. 
+Now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life. 
+And insulin resistance, as its name suggests, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job. 
+Once you're insulin-resistant, you're on your way to getting diabetes, which is what happens when your pancreas can't keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin. 
+Now your blood sugar levels start to rise, and an entire cascade of pathologic events sort of spirals out of control that can lead to heart disease, cancer, even Alzheimer's disease, and amputations, just like that woman a few years earlier. 
+With that scare, I got busy changing my diet radically, adding and subtracting things most of you would find almost assuredly shocking. 
+I did this and lost 40 pounds, weirdly while exercising less. 
+I, as you can see, I guess I'm not overweight anymore. 
+More importantly, I don't have insulin resistance. 
+But most important, I was left with these three burning questions that wouldn't go away: How did this happen to me if I was supposedly doing everything right? 
+If the conventional wisdom about nutrition had failed me, was it possible it was failing someone else? 
+And underlying these questions, I became almost maniacally obsessed in trying to understand the real relationship between obesity and insulin resistance. 
+Now, most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance. 
+Logically, then, if you want to treat insulin resistance, you get people to lose weight, right? 
+You treat the obesity. 
+But what if we have it backwards? 
+What if obesity isn't the cause of insulin resistance at all? 
+In fact, what if it's a symptom of a much deeper problem, the tip of a proverbial iceberg? 
+I know it sounds crazy because we're obviously in the midst of an obesity epidemic, but hear me out. 
+What if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell? 
+I'm not suggesting that obesity is benign, but what I am suggesting is it may be the lesser of two metabolic evils. 
+You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of our cells to partition fuel, as I alluded to a moment ago, taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately. 
+When we become insulin-resistant, the homeostasis in that balance deviates from this state. 
+So now, when insulin says to a cell, I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says, "No thanks, I'd actually rather store this energy." 
+And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells, it's probably the safest place to store it. 
+So for many of us, about 75 million Americans, the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat, not the reverse, getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat. 
+This is a really subtle distinction, but the implication could be profound. 
+Consider the following analogy: Think of the bruise you get on your shin when you inadvertently bang your leg into the coffee table. 
+Sure, the bruise hurts like hell, and you almost certainly don't like the discolored look, but we all know the bruise per Se is not the problem. 
+In fact, it's the opposite. It's a healthy response to the trauma, all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body. 
+Now, imagine we thought bruises were the problem, and we evolved a giant medical establishment and a culture around treating bruises: masking creams, painkillers, you name it, all the while ignoring the fact that people are still banging their shins into coffee tables. 
+How much better would we be if we treated the cause — telling people to pay attention when they walk through the living room — rather than the effect? 
+Getting the cause and the effect right makes all the difference in the world. 
+Getting it wrong, and the pharmaceutical industry can still do very well for its shareholders but nothing improves for the people with bruised shins. 
+Cause and effect. 
+So what I'm suggesting is maybe we have the cause and effect wrong on obesity and insulin resistance. 
+Maybe we should be asking ourselves, is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity, at least in most people? 
+What if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening, an underlying epidemic, the one we ought to be worried about? 
+Let's look at some suggestive facts. 
+We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don't have insulin resistance. 
+And by the way, they don't appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people. 
+Conversely, we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant, and by the way, they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic diseases I mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts. 
+Now I don't know why, but it might be because, in their case, their cells haven't actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy. 
+So if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance, and you can be lean and have it, this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what's going on. 
+So what if we're fighting the wrong war, fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance? 
+Even worse, what if blaming the obese means we're blaming the victims? 
+What if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are just wrong? 
+Personally, I can't afford the luxury of arrogance anymore, let alone the luxury of certainty. 
+I have my own ideas about what could be at the heart of this, but I'm wide open to others. 
+Now, my hypothesis, because everybody always asks me, is this. 
+If you ask yourself, what's a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant, the answer probably isn't too much food. 
+It's more likely too much glucose: blood sugar. 
+Now, we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run, and there's even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly. 
+So if you put these physiological processes to work, I'd hypothesize that it might be our increased intake of refined grains, sugars and starches that's driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but through insulin resistance, you see, and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising. 
+When I lost my 40 pounds a few years ago, I did it simply by restricting those things, which admittedly suggests I have a bias based on my personal experience. 
+But that doesn't mean my bias is wrong, and most important, all of this can be tested scientifically. 
+But step one is accepting the possibility that our current beliefs about obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance could be wrong and therefore must be tested. 
+I'm betting my career on this. 
+Today, I devote all of my time to working on this problem, and I'll go wherever the science takes me. 
+I've decided that what I can't and won't do anymore is pretend I have the answers when I don't. 
+I've been humbled enough by all I don't know. 
+For the past year, I've been fortunate enough to work on this problem with the most amazing team of diabetes and obesity researchers in the country, and the best part is, just like Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself with a team of rivals, we've done the same thing. 
+We've recruited a team of scientific rivals, the best and brightest who all have different hypotheses for what's at the heart of this epidemic. 
+Some think it's too many calories consumed. 
+Others think it's too much dietary fat. 
+Others think it's too many refined grains and starches. 
+But this team of multi-disciplinary, highly skeptical and exceedingly talented researchers do agree on two things. 
+First, this problem is just simply too important to continue ignoring because we think we know the answer. 
+And two, if we're willing to be wrong, if we're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom with the best experiments science can offer, we can solve this problem. 
+I know it's tempting to want an answer right now, some form of action or policy, some dietary prescription — eat this, not that — but if we want to get it right, we're going to have to do much more rigorous science before we can write that prescription. 
+Briefly, to address this, our research program is focused around three meta-themes, or questions. 
+First, how do the various foods we consume impact our metabolism, hormones and enzymes, and through what nuanced molecular mechanisms? 
+Second, based on these insights, can people make the necessary changes in their diets in a way that's safe and practical to implement? 
+And finally, once we identify what safe and practical changes people can make to their diet, how can we move their behavior in that direction so that it becomes more the default rather than the exception? 
+Just because you know what to do doesn't mean you're always going to do it. 
+Sometimes we have to put cues around people to make it easier, and believe it or not, that can be studied scientifically. 
+I don't know how this journey is going to end, but this much seems clear to me, at least: We can't keep blaming our overweight and diabetic patients like I did. 
+Most of them actually want to do the right thing, but they have to know what that is, and it's got to work. 
+I dream of a day when our patients can shed their excess pounds and cure themselves of insulin resistance, because as medical professionals, we've shed our excess mental baggage and cured ourselves of new idea resistance sufficiently to go back to our original ideals: open minds, the courage to throw out yesterday's ideas when they don't appear to be working, and the understanding that scientific truth isn't final, but constantly evolving. 
+Staying true to that path will be better for our patients and better for science. 
+If obesity is nothing more than a proxy for metabolic illness, what good does it do us to punish those with the proxy? 
+Sometimes I think back to that night in the E.R. 
+seven years ago. 
+I wish I could speak with that woman again. 
+I'd like to tell her how sorry I am. 
+I'd say, as a doctor, I delivered the best clinical care I could, but as a human being, I let you down. 
+You didn't need my judgment and my contempt. 
+You needed my empathy and compassion, and above all else, you needed a doctor who was willing to consider maybe you didn't let the system down. 
+Maybe the system, of which I was a part, was letting you down. 
+If you're watching this now, I hope you can forgive me. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It would be nice to be objective in life, in many ways. 
+The problem is that we have these color-tinted glasses as we look at all kinds of situations. 
+For example, think about something as simple as beer. 
+If I gave you a few beers to taste and I asked you to rate them on intensity and bitterness, different beers would occupy different space. 
+But what if we tried to be objective about it? 
+In the case of beer, it would be very simple. 
+Well, if we did the same thing, you tasted the same beer, now in the blind taste, things would look slightly different. 
+Most of the beers will go into one place. 
+You will basically not be able to distinguish them, and the exception, of course, will be Guinness. 
+(Laughter) Similarly, we can think about physiology. 
+What happens when people expect something from their physiology? 
+For example, we sold people pain medications. 
+Some people, we told them the medications were expensive. 
+And the expensive pain medication worked better. 
+It relieved more pain from people, because expectations do change our physiology. 
+And of course, we all know that in sports, if you are a fan of a particular team, you can't help but see the game develop from the perspective of your team. 
+So all of those are cases in which our preconceived notions and our expectations color our world. 
+But what happened in more important questions? 
+What happened with questions that had to do with social justice? 
+So we wanted to think about what is the blind tasting version for thinking about inequality? 
+So we started looking at inequality, and we did some large-scale surveys around the U.S. and other countries. 
+So we asked two questions: Do people know what kind of level of inequality we have? 
+And then, what level of inequality do we want to have? 
+So let's think about the first question. 
+and I sorted them from the poorest on the right to the richest on the left, and then I divided them into five buckets: the poorest 20 percent, the next 20 percent, the next, the next, and the richest 20 percent. 
+And then I asked you to tell me how much wealth do you think is concentrated in each of those buckets. 
+So to make it simpler, imagine I ask you to tell me, how much wealth do you think is concentrated in the bottom two buckets, the bottom 40 percent? 
+Take a second. Think about it and have a number. 
+Usually we don't think. 
+Think for a second, have a real number in your mind. 
+You have it? 
+Okay, here's what lots of Americans tell us. 
+They think that the bottom 20 percent has about 2.9 percent of the wealth, the next group has 6.4, so together it's slightly more than nine. 
+The next group, they say, has 12 percent, 20 percent, and the richest 20 percent, people think has 58 percent of the wealth. 
+Reality is slightly different. 
+The bottom 20 percent has 0.1 percent of the wealth. 
+The next 20 percent has 0.2 percent of the wealth. 
+Together, it's 0.3. 
+The next group has 3.9, 11.3, and the richest group has 84-85 percent of the wealth. 
+So what we actually have and what we think we have are very different. 
+What about what we want? 
+How do we even figure this out? 
+So to look at this, to look at what we really want, we thought about the philosopher John Rawls. 
+If you remember John Rawls, he had this notion of what's a just society. 
+He said a just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you would be willing to enter it in a random place. 
+If you're poor, you might want more equality. 
+But if you're going to go into that society in every possible situation, and you don't know, you have to consider all the aspects. 
+It's a little bit like blind tasting in which you don't know what the outcome will be when you make a decision, and Rawls called this the "" veil of ignorance. "" So, we took another group, a large group of Americans, and we asked them the question in the veil of ignorance. 
+What are the characteristics of a country that would make you want to join it, knowing that you could end randomly at any place? 
+And here is what we got. 
+What did people want to give to the first group, the bottom 20 percent? 
+They wanted to give them about 10 percent of the wealth. 
+The next group, 14 percent of the wealth, 21, 22 and 32. 
+Now, nobody in our sample wanted full equality. 
+Nobody thought that socialism is a fantastic idea in our sample. 
+But what does it mean? 
+It means that we have this knowledge gap between what we have and what we think we have, but we have at least as big a gap between what we think is right to what we think we have. 
+We can ask it about other things as well. 
+So for example, we asked people from different parts of the world about this question, people who are liberals and conservatives, and they gave us basically the same answer. 
+We asked rich and poor, they gave us the same answer, men and women, NPR listeners and Forbes readers. 
+We asked people in England, Australia, the U.S. — very similar answers. 
+We asked, what about the ratio of CEO pay to unskilled workers? 
+So you can see what people think is the ratio, and then we can ask the question, what do they think should be the ratio? 
+And then we can ask, what is reality? 
+The red and the yellow are not that different. 
+It's hard to see, there's yellow and blue in there. 
+So what about other outcomes of wealth? 
+We asked, what about things like health? 
+What about availability of prescription medication? 
+What about life expectancy? 
+What about life expectancy of infants? 
+How do we want this to be distributed? 
+What about education for young people? 
+And for older people? 
+And across all of those things, what we learned was that people don't like inequality of wealth, but there's other things where inequality, which is an outcome of wealth, is even more aversive to them: for example, inequality in health or education. 
+We also learned that people are particularly open to changes in equality when it comes to people who have less agency — basically, young kids and babies, because we don't think of them as responsible for their situation. 
+So what are some lessons from this? 
+We have two gaps: We have a knowledge gap and we have a desirability gap And the knowledge gap is something that we think about, how do we educate people? 
+How do we get people to think differently about inequality and the consequences of inequality in terms of health, education, jealousy, crime rate, and so on? 
+Then we have the desirability gap. 
+How do we get people to think differently about what we really want? 
+You see, the Rawls definition, the Rawls way of looking at the world, the blind tasting approach, takes our selfish motivation out of the picture. 
+And finally, we also have an action gap. 
+How do we take these things and actually do something about it? 
+I think part of the answer is to think about people like young kids and babies that don't have much agency, because people seem to be more willing to do this. 
+To summarize, I would say, next time you go to drink beer or wine, first of all, think about, what is it in your experience that is real, and what is it in your experience that is a placebo effect coming from expectations? 
+And then think about what it also means for other decisions in your life, and hopefully also for policy questions that affect all of us. 
+
+There's an ancient and universal concept that words have power, that spells exist, and that if we could only pronounce the right words, then — whoosh! — you know, an avalanche would come and wipe out the hobbits, right? 
+We want to be able to build technological artifacts that are maybe good for the world. 
+
+I have been teaching for a long time, and in doing so have acquired a body of knowledge about kids and learning that I really wish more people would understand about the potential of students. 
+In 1931, my grandmother — bottom left for you guys over here — graduated from the eighth grade. 
+She went to school to get the information because that's where the information lived. 
+It was in the books; it was inside the teacher's head; and she needed to go there to get the information, because that's how you learned. 
+Fast-forward a generation: this is the one-room schoolhouse, Oak Grove, where my father went to a one-room schoolhouse. 
+And he again had to travel to the school to get the information from the teacher, stored it in the only portable memory he has, which is inside his own head, and take it with him, because that is how information was being transported from teacher to student and then used in the world. 
+When I was a kid, we had a set of encyclopedias at my house. 
+It was purchased the year I was born, and it was extraordinary, because I did not have to wait to go to the library to get to the information. 
+The information was inside my house and it was awesome. 
+This was different than either generation had experienced before, and it changed the way I interacted with information even at just a small level. 
+But the information was closer to me. 
+I could get access to it. 
+In the time that passes between when I was a kid in high school and when I started teaching, we really see the advent of the Internet. 
+Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, I take off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas, small town Kansas, where I had an opportunity to teach in a lovely, small-town, rural Kansas school district, where I was teaching my favorite subject, American government. 
+My first year — super gung-ho — going to teach American government, loved the political system. 
+Kids in the 12th grade: not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system. 
+Year two: learned a few things — had to change my tactic. 
+And I put in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves. 
+I didn't tell them what to do or how to do it. 
+I posed a problem in front of them, which was to put on an election forum for their own community. 
+They produced flyers. They called offices. 
+They checked schedules. They were meeting with secretaries. 
+They produced an election forum booklet for the entire town to learn more about their candidates. 
+They invited everyone into the school for an evening of conversation about government and politics and whether or not the streets were done well, and really had this robust experiential learning. 
+The older teachers — more experienced — looked at me and went, "Oh, there she is. That's so cute. She's trying to get that done." 
+(Laughter) "She doesn't know what she's in for." 
+But I knew that the kids would show up, and I believed it, and I told them every week what I expected out of them. 
+And that night, all 90 kids — dressed appropriately, doing their job, owning it. 
+I had to just sit and watch. 
+It was theirs. It was experiential. It was authentic. 
+It meant something to them. 
+And they will step up. 
+From Kansas, I moved on to lovely Arizona, where I taught in Flagstaff for a number of years, this time with middle school students. 
+Luckily, I didn't have to teach them American government. 
+Could teach them the more exciting topic of geography. 
+Again, "" thrilled "" to learn. 
+But what was interesting about this position I found myself in in Arizona, was I had this really extraordinarily eclectic group of kids to work with in a truly public school, and we got to have these moments where we would get these opportunities. 
+And one opportunity was we got to go and meet Paul Rusesabagina, which is the gentleman that the movie "" Hotel Rwanda "" is based after. 
+And he was going to speak at the high school next door to us. 
+We could walk there. We didn't even have to pay for the buses. 
+There was no expense cost. Perfect field trip. 
+The problem then becomes how do you take seventh- and eighth-graders to a talk about genocide and deal with the subject in a way that is responsible and respectful, and they know what to do with it. 
+And so we chose to look at Paul Rusesabagina as an example of a gentleman who singularly used his life to do something positive. 
+I then challenged the kids to identify someone in their own life, or in their own story, or in their own world, that they could identify that had done a similar thing. 
+I asked them to produce a little movie about it. 
+It's the first time we'd done this. 
+Nobody really knew how to make these little movies on the computer, but they were into it. And I asked them to put their own voice over it. 
+It was the most awesome moment of revelation that when you ask kids to use their own voice and ask them to speak for themselves, what they're willing to share. 
+The last question of the assignment is: how do you plan to use your life to positively impact other people? 
+The things that kids will say when you ask them and take the time to listen is extraordinary. 
+Fast-forward to Pennsylvania, where I find myself today. 
+I teach at the Science Leadership Academy, which is a partnership school between the Franklin Institute and the school district of Philadelphia. 
+We are a nine through 12 public school, but we do school quite differently. 
+I moved there primarily to be part of a learning environment that validated the way that I knew that kids learned, and that really wanted to investigate what was possible when you are willing to let go of some of the paradigms of the past, of information scarcity when my grandmother was in school and when my father was in school and even when I was in school, and to a moment when we have information surplus. 
+So what do you do when the information is all around you? 
+Why do you have kids come to school if they no longer have to come there to get the information? 
+In Philadelphia we have a one-to-one laptop program, so the kids are bringing in laptops with them everyday, taking them home, getting access to information. 
+And here's the thing that you need to get comfortable with when you've given the tool to acquire information to students, is that you have to be comfortable with this idea of allowing kids to fail as part of the learning process. 
+We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test, and I am here to share with you: it is not learning. 
+That is the absolute wrong thing to ask, to tell kids to never be wrong. 
+To ask them to always have the right answer doesn't allow them to learn. 
+So we did this project, and this is one of the artifacts of the project. 
+I almost never show them off because of the issue of the idea of failure. 
+My students produced these info-graphics as a result of a unit that we decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill. 
+I asked them to take the examples that we were seeing of the info-graphics that existed in a lot of mass media, and take a look at what were the interesting components of it, and produce one for themselves of a different man-made disaster from American history. 
+And they had certain criteria to do it. 
+They were a little uncomfortable with it, because we'd never done this before, and they didn't know exactly how to do it. 
+They can talk — they're very smooth, and they can write very, very well, but asking them to communicate ideas in a different way was a little uncomfortable for them. 
+But I gave them the room to just do the thing. 
+Go create. Go figure it out. 
+Let's see what we can do. 
+And the student that persistently turns out the best visual product did not disappoint. 
+This was done in like two or three days. 
+And this is the work of the student that consistently did it. 
+And when I sat the students down, I said, "" Who's got the best one? "" And they immediately went, "" There it is. "" Didn't read anything. "" There it is. "" And I said, "" Well what makes it great? "" And they're like, "" Oh, the design's good, and he's using good color. 
+And there's some... "" And they went through all that we processed out loud. 
+And I said, "" Go read it. "" And they're like, "" Oh, that one wasn't so awesome. "" And then we went to another one — it didn't have great visuals, but it had great information — and spent an hour talking about the learning process, because it wasn't about whether or not it was perfect, or whether or not it was what I could create. 
+It asked them to create for themselves, and it allowed them to fail, process, learn from. 
+And when we do another round of this in my class this year, they will do better this time, because learning has to include an amount of failure, because failure is instructional in the process. 
+There are a million pictures that I could click through here, and had to choose carefully — this is one of my favorites — of students learning, of what learning can look like in a landscape where we let go of the idea that kids have to come to school to get the information, but instead, ask them what they can do with it. 
+Ask them really interesting questions. 
+They will not disappoint. 
+Ask them to go to places, to see things for themselves, to actually experience the learning, to play, to inquire. 
+This is one of my favorite photos, because this was taken on Tuesday, when I asked the students to go to the polls. 
+This is Robbie, and this was his first day of voting, and he wanted to share that with everybody and do that. 
+But this is learning too, because we asked them to go out into real spaces. 
+The main point is that, if we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning, empowering student voice and embracing failure, we're missing the mark. 
+And everything that everybody is talking about today isn't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities, because we won't get there with a standardized test, and we won't get there with a culture of one right answer. 
+We know how to do this better, and it's time to do better. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Mockingbirds are badass. 
+(Laughter) They are. 
+Mockingbirds — that's Mimus polyglottos — are the emcees of the animal kingdom. 
+They listen and mimic and remix what they like. 
+They rock the mic outside my window every morning. 
+I can hear them sing the sounds of the car alarms like they were songs of spring. 
+I mean, if you can talk it, a mockingbird can squawk it. 
+So check it, I'm gonna to catch mockingbirds. 
+I'm going to trap mockingbirds all across the nation and put them gently into mason jars like mockingbird Molotov cocktails. 
+(Laughter) Yeah. And as I drive through a neighborhood, say, where people got-a-lotta, I'll take a mockingbird I caught in a neighborhood where folks ain't got nada and just let it go, you know. 
+Up goes the bird, out come the words, "" Juanito, Juanito, vente a comer mi hijo! "" Oh, I'm going to be the Johnny Appleseed of sound. 
+(Laughter) Cruising random city streets, rocking a drop-top Cadillac with a big backseat, packing like 13 brown paper Walmart bags full of loaded mockingbirds, and I'll get everybody. (Laughter) 
+I'll get the nitwit on the network news saying, "We'll be back in a moment with more on the crisis." 
+I'll get some asshole at a watering hole asking what brand the ice is. 
+I'll get that lady at the laundromat who always seems to know what being nice is. 
+I'll get your postman making dinner plans. 
+I'll get the last time you lied. 
+I'll get, "" Baby, just give me the frickin 'TV guide. "" I'll get a lonely, little sentence with real error in it, "Yeah, I guess I could come inside, but only for a minute." 
+(Laughter) I'll get an ESL class in Chinatown learning "" It's Raining, It's Pouring. "" I'll put a mockingbird on a late-night train just to get an old man snoring. 
+I'll get your ex-lover telling someone else, "" Good morning. "" I'll get everyone's good mornings. 
+I don't care how you make 'em. 
+Aloha. Konichiwa. Shalom. Ah-Salam Alaikum. 
+Everybody means everybody, means everybody here. 
+And so maybe I'll build a gilded cage. 
+I'll line the bottom with old notebook pages. 
+Inside it, I will place a mockingbird for — short explanation, hippie parents. 
+(Laughter) What does a violin have to do with technology? 
+Where in the world is this world heading? 
+On one end, gold bars — on the other, an entire planet. 
+We are 12 billion light years from the edge. 
+That's a guess. 
+Space is length and breadth continued indefinitely, but you cannot buy a ticket to travel commercially to space in America because countries are beginning to eat like us, live like us and die like us. 
+You might wanna avert your gaze, because that is a newt about to regenerate its limb, and shaking hands spreads more germs than kissing. 
+There's about 10 million phage per job. 
+It's a very strange world inside a nanotube. 
+Women can talk; black men ski; white men build strong buildings; we build strong suns. 
+The surface of the Earth is absolutely riddled with holes, and here we are, right in the middle. 
+(Laughter) It is the voice of life that calls us to come and learn. 
+When all the little mockingbirds fly away, they're going to sound like the last four days. 
+I will get uptown gurus, downtown teachers, broke-ass artists and dealers, and Filipino preachers, leaf blowers, bartenders, boob-job doctors, hooligans, garbage men, your local Congressmen in the spotlight, guys in the overhead helicopters. 
+Everybody gets heard. 
+Everybody gets this one, honest mockingbird as a witness. 
+And I'm on this. 
+I'm on this' til the whole thing spreads, with chat rooms and copycats and moms maybe tucking kids into bed singing, "" Hush, little baby, don't say a word. 
+Wait for the man with the mockingbird. "" (Laughter) Yeah. And then come the news crews, and the man-in-the-street interviews, and the letters to the editor. 
+Everybody asking, just who is responsible for this citywide, nationwide mockingbird cacophony, and somebody finally is going to tip the City Council of Monterey, California off to me, and they'll offer me a key to the city. 
+A gold-plated, oversized key to the city and that is all I need, 'cause if I get that, I can unlock the air. 
+I'll listen for what's missing, and I'll put it there. 
+Thank you, TED. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Wow. (Applause) Wow. (Applause) 
+
+Well, this is such an honor. And it's wonderful to be in the presence of an organization that is really making a difference in the world. 
+And I'm intensely grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today. 
+And I'm also rather surprised, because when I look back on my life the last thing I ever wanted to do was write, or be in any way involved in religion. 
+After I left my convent, I'd finished with religion, frankly. 
+But then I suffered a series of career catastrophes, one after the other, and finally found myself in television. (Laughter) I said that to Bill Moyers, and he said, "" Oh, we take anybody. "" (Laughter) And I was doing some rather controversial religious programs. 
+And while I found I knew nothing about these faiths at all — despite my own intensely religious background, I'd seen Judaism only as a kind of prelude to Christianity, and I knew nothing about Islam at all. 
+But in that city, that tortured city, where you see the three faiths jostling so uneasily together, you also become aware of the profound connection between them. 
+And it has been the study of other religious traditions that brought me back to a sense of what religion can be, and actually enabled me to look at my own faith in a different light. 
+And I found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me. Frankly, in the days when I thought I'd had it with religion, I just found the whole thing absolutely incredible. 
+These doctrines seemed unproven, abstract. 
+And to my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other traditions, I began to realize that belief — which we make such a fuss about today — is only a very recent religious enthusiasm that surfaced only in the West, in about the 17th century. 
+The word "" belief "" itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. 
+In the 17th century, it narrowed its focus, for reasons that I'm exploring in a book I'm writing at the moment, to include — to mean an intellectual assent to a set of propositions, a credo. 
+"I believe:" it did not mean, "I accept certain creedal articles of faith." 
+It meant: "" I commit myself. I engage myself. "" Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy. 
+In the Quran, religious opinion — religious orthodoxy — is dismissed as "" zanna: "" self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other, but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian. (Laughter) So if religion is not about believing things, what is it about? 
+And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action; you only understand them when you put them into practice. 
+Now, pride of place in this practice is given to compassion. 
+And it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion — the ability to feel with the other in the way we've been thinking about this evening — is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call "" God "" or the "" Divine. "" It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. 
+Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we're ready to see the Divine. 
+And in particular, every single one of the major world traditions has highlighted — has said — and put at the core of their tradition what's become known as the Golden Rule. 
+First propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ: "Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you." 
+That, he said, was the central thread which ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. 
+And it was — the Golden Rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called "" ren, "" human-heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself. 
+A pagan came to him and offered to convert to Judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. 
+Go and study it. "" (Laughter) And "" go and study it "" was what he meant. 
+He said, "" In your exegesis, you must make it clear that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss upon the Golden Rule. "" The great Rabbi Meir said that any interpretation of Scripture which led to hatred and disdain, or contempt of other people — any people whatsoever — was illegitimate. 
+Saint Augustine made exactly the same point. 
+Scripture, he says, "" teaches nothing but charity, and we must not leave an interpretation of Scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation of it. "" And this struggle to find compassion in some of these rather rebarbative texts is a good dress rehearsal for doing the same in ordinary life. (Applause) But now look at our world. And we are living in a world that is — where religion has been hijacked. Where terrorists cite Quranic verses to justify their atrocities. 
+Don't judge others, "" we have the spectacle of Christians endlessly judging other people, endlessly using Scripture as a way of arguing with other people, putting other people down. Throughout the ages, religion has been used to oppress others, and this is because of human ego, human greed. 
+We have a talent as a species for messing up wonderful things. 
+So the traditions also insisted — and this is an important point, I think — that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group: your own nation, your own co-religionists, your own fellow countrymen. You must have what one of the Chinese sages called "" jian ai "": concern for everybody. Love your enemies. Honor the stranger. 
+We formed you, says the Quran, into tribes and nations so that you may know one another. 
+Now, I've lost count of the number of taxi drivers who, when I say to them what I do for a living, inform me that religion has been the cause of all the major world wars in history. Wrong. 
+The causes of our present woes are political. 
+But, make no mistake about it, religion is a kind of fault line, and when a conflict gets ingrained in a region, religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem. Our modernity has been exceedingly violent. 
+There's also a great deal, I think, of religious illiteracy around. 
+People seem to think, now equate religious faith with believing things. 
+Because the Golden Rule is difficult. I sometimes — when I'm speaking to congregations about compassion, I sometimes see a mutinous expression crossing some of their faces because a lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate. (Laughter) Now — but that's not the whole story. 
+Since September the 11th, when my work on Islam suddenly propelled me into public life, in a way that I'd never imagined, I've been able to sort of go all over the world, and finding, everywhere I go, a yearning for change. 
+I've just come back from Pakistan, where literally thousands of people came to my lectures, because they were yearning, first of all, to hear a friendly Western voice. 
+And especially the young people were coming. And were asking me — the young people were saying, "" What can we do? What can we do to change things? "" And my hosts in Pakistan said, "" Look, don't be too polite to us. 
+Tell us where we're going wrong. Let's talk together about where religion is failing. "" Because it seems to me that with — our current situation is so serious at the moment that any ideology that doesn't promote a sense of global understanding and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the time. 
+And religion, with its wide following... Here in the United States, people may be being religious in a different way, as a report has just shown — but they still want to be religious. It's only Western Europe that has retained its secularism, which is now beginning to look rather endearingly old-fashioned. 
+But people want to be religious, and religion should be made to be a force for harmony in the world, which it can and should be — because of the Golden Rule. 
+"" Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you "": an ethos that should now be applied globally. 
+It's a profound moral matter that engages and should engage us all. 
+And as I say, there is a hunger for change out there. 
+Here in the United States, I think you see it in this election campaign: a longing for change. 
+With the mosque, with the synagogue, saying, "" We must start to speak to one another. "" I think it's time that we moved beyond the idea of toleration and move toward appreciation of the other. 
+This comes from "" The Iliad. "" But it tells you what this spirituality should be. 
+You know the story of "" The Iliad, "" the 10-year war between Greece and Troy. 
+In one incident, Achilles, the famous warrior of Greece, takes his troops out of the war, and the whole war effort suffers. And in the course of the ensuing muddle, his beloved friend, Patroclus, is killed — and killed in single combat by one of the Trojan princes, Hector. And Achilles goes mad with grief and rage and revenge, and he mutilates the body. He kills Hector, he mutilates his body and then he refuses to give the body back for burial to the family, which means that, in Greek ethos, Hector's soul will wander eternally, lost. 
+And then one night, Priam, king of Troy, an old man, comes into the Greek camp incognito, makes his way to Achilles' tent to ask for the body of his son. 
+And everybody is shocked when the old man takes off his head covering and shows himself. 
+And Achilles looks at him and thinks of his father. And he starts to weep. 
+And Priam looks at the man who has murdered so many of his sons, and he, too, starts to weep. And the sound of their weeping filled the house. 
+That is the ethos found, too, in all the religions. 
+It's what is meant by overcoming the horror that we feel when we are under threat of our enemies, and beginning to appreciate the other. 
+It's of great importance that the word for "" holy "" in Hebrew, applied to God, is "" Kadosh "": separate, other. 
+And it is often, perhaps, the very otherness of our enemies which can give us intimations of that utterly mysterious transcendence which is God. 
+And now, here's my wish: I wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion, crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule. 
+We need to create a movement among all these people that I meet in my travels — you probably meet, too — who want to join up, in some way, and reclaim their faith, which they feel, as I say, has been hijacked. 
+We need to empower people to remember the compassionate ethos, and to give guidelines. This Charter would not be a massive document. 
+I'd like to see it — to give guidelines as to how to interpret the Scriptures, these texts that are being abused. Remember what the rabbis and what Augustine said about how Scripture should be governed by the principle of charity. 
+Let's get back to that. And the idea, too, of Jews, Christians and Muslims — these traditions now so often at loggerheads — working together to create a document which we hope will be signed by a thousand, at least, of major religious leaders from all the traditions of the world. 
+And you are the people. I'm just a solitary scholar. 
+Despite the idea that I love a good time, which I was rather amazed to see coming up on me — I actually spend a great deal of time alone, studying, and I'm not very — you're the people with media knowledge to explain to me how we can get this to everybody, everybody on the planet. I've had some preliminary talks, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, is very happy to give his name to this, as is Imam Feisal Rauf, the Imam in New York City. 
+Also, I would be working with the Alliance of Civilizations at the United Nations. 
+I was part of that United Nations initiative called the Alliance of Civilizations, which was asked by Kofi Annan to diagnose the causes of extremism, and to give practical guidelines to member states about how to avoid the escalation of further extremism. 
+And the Alliance has told me that they are very happy to work with it. 
+The importance of this is that this is — I can see some of you starting to look worried, because you think it's a slow and cumbersome body — but what the United Nations can do is give us some neutrality, so that this isn't seen as a Western or a Christian initiative, but that it's coming, as it were, from the United Nations, from the world — who would help with the sort of bureaucracy of this. 
+And so I do urge you to join me in making — in this charter — to building this charter, launching it and propagating it so that it becomes — I'd like to see it in every college, every church, every mosque, every synagogue in the world, so that people can look at their tradition, reclaim it, and make religion a source of peace in the world, which it can and should be. Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze — that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. 
+This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. 
+At the same time, if you think about it, there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. 
+In fact, it's all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing — cold, challenging circumstances. 
+I'll never do it again. "" (Laughter) "Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos." 
+And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. 
+And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. 
+And he was working very hard on this presentation — graphs, tables, information. 
+He stayed late at night every day. 
+Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. 
+So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. 
+We'll pay you three dollars for it. "" And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. 
+And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, "" Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70? "" If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, "" Do you want to build another one? "" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, "No more. It's not worth it for me." 
+And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant. 
+And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. 
+You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. 
+Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. 
+There's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. 
+And if they said yes, they built it. 
+Then we asked them, "" Do you want to build another one for $2.70? "" And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. 
+And when they finished that, we said, "" Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less? "" And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. 
+The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles — eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. 
+And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. 
+In this other version of the experiment, we didn't put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. 
+People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. 
+And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. 
+There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built. 
+In that condition, the correlation was zero — there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. 
+We basically eliminated it. 
+Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. 
+And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. 
+And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to. 
+And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. 
+They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. 
+He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. 
+In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say "" Uh huh, "" and put it on the pile next to them. 
+So low numbers mean that people worked harder. 
+At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. 
+And this is basically the result we had before. 
+You shred people's efforts, output — you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing. 
+Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. 
+The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it. 
+(Laughter) I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way — I can't say I enjoy those pieces. 
+But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones. 
+So when they started cake mixes in the '40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and — voila — you had cake. 
+People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. 
+What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. 
+It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, "" Here is my cake. "" No, it was somebody else's cake, as if you bought it in the store. 
+They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder. 
+(Laughter) Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. 
+We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. 
+And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly — nothing like a frog or a crane. 
+And we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. 
+And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami — (Laughter) and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. 
+Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money. 
+(Laughter) On good days. (Laughter) 
+But imagine this was slightly different. 
+And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. 
+By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough. 
+Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don't see that other people don't see things our way. 
+He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. 
+Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. 
+And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. 
+But if you do one step every time, maybe you don't care as much. 
+I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. 
+(Applause) 
+
+To be honest, by personality, I'm just not much of a crier. 
+But I think in my career that's been a good thing. 
+I'm a civil rights lawyer, and I've seen some horrible things in the world. 
+I began my career working police abuse cases in the United States. 
+And then in 1994, I was sent to Rwanda to be the director of the U.N. 's genocide investigation. 
+It turns out that tears just aren't much help when you're trying to investigate a genocide. 
+The things I had to see, and feel and touch were pretty unspeakable. 
+What I can tell you is this: that the Rwandan genocide was one of the world's greatest failures of simple compassion. 
+That word, compassion, actually comes from two Latin words: cum passio, which simply mean "" to suffer with. "" And the things that I saw and experienced in Rwanda as I got up close to human suffering, it did, in moments, move me to tears. 
+But I just wish that I, and the rest of the world, had been moved earlier. 
+And not just to tears, but to actually stop the genocide. 
+Now by contrast, I've also been involved with one of the world's greatest successes of compassion. 
+And that's the fight against global poverty. 
+I don't know if your first introduction might have been choruses of "" We Are the World, "" or maybe the picture of a sponsored child on your refrigerator door, or maybe the birthday you donated for fresh water. 
+I don't really remember what my first introduction to poverty was but I do remember the most jarring. 
+It was when I met Venus — she's a mom from Zambia. 
+She's got three kids and she's a widow. 
+When I met her, she had walked about 12 miles in the only garments she owned, to come to the capital city and to share her story. 
+She sat down with me for hours, just ushered me in to the world of poverty. 
+She described what it was like when the coals on the cooking fire finally just went completely cold. 
+When that last drop of cooking oil finally ran out. 
+When the last of the food, despite her best efforts, ran out. 
+She had to watch her youngest son, Peter, suffer from malnutrition, as his legs just slowly bowed into uselessness. 
+As his eyes grew cloudy and dim. 
+And then as Peter finally grew cold. 
+For over 50 years, stories like this have been moving us to compassion. 
+We whose kids have plenty to eat. 
+Now there's plenty of room for critique that we haven't done enough, and what it is that we've done hasn't been effective enough, but the truth is this: The fight against global poverty is probably the broadest, longest running manifestation of the human phenomenon of compassion in the history of our species. 
+And so I'd like to share a pretty shattering insight that might forever change the way you think about that struggle. 
+Thirty-five years ago, when I would have been graduating from high school, they told us that 40,000 kids every day died because of poverty. 
+That number, today, is now down to 17,000. 
+Way too many, of course, but it does mean that every year, there's eight million kids who don't have to die from poverty. 
+Moreover, the number of people in our world who are living in extreme poverty, which is defined as living off about a dollar and a quarter a day, that has fallen from 50 percent, to only 15 percent. 
+This is massive progress, and this exceeds everybody's expectations about what is possible. 
+And I think you and I, I think, honestly, that we can feel proud and encouraged to see the way that compassion actually has the power to succeed in stopping the suffering of millions. 
+But here's the part that you might not hear very much about. 
+If you move that poverty mark just up to two dollars a day, it turns out that virtually the same two billion people who were stuck in that harsh poverty when I was in high school, are still stuck there, 35 years later. 
+So why, why are so many billions still stuck in such harsh poverty? 
+Well, let's think about Venus for a moment. 
+Now for decades, my wife and I have been moved by common compassion to sponsor kids, to fund microloans, to support generous levels of foreign aid. 
+But until I had actually talked to Venus, I would have had no idea that none of those approaches actually addressed why she had to watch her son die. 
+"" We were doing fine, "" Venus told me, "until Brutus started to cause trouble." 
+Now, Brutus is Venus' neighbor and "" cause trouble "" is what happened the day after Venus' husband died, when Brutus just came and threw Venus and the kids out of the house, stole all their land, and robbed their market stall. 
+You see, Venus was thrown into destitution by violence. 
+And then it occurred to me, of course, that none of my child sponsorships, none of the microloans, none of the traditional anti-poverty programs were going to stop Brutus, because they weren't meant to. 
+This became even more clear to me when I met Griselda. 
+She's a marvelous young girl living in a very poor community in Guatemala. 
+And one of the things we've learned over the years is that perhaps the most powerful thing that Griselda and her family can do to get Griselda and her family out of poverty is to make sure that she goes to school. 
+The experts call this the Girl Effect. 
+But when we met Griselda, she wasn't going to school. 
+In fact, she was rarely ever leaving her home. 
+Days before we met her, while she was walking home from church with her family, in broad daylight, men from her community just snatched her off the street, and violently raped her. 
+See, Griselda had every opportunity to go to school, it just wasn't safe for her to get there. 
+And Griselda's not the only one. 
+Around the world, poor women and girls between the ages of 15 and 44, they are — when victims of the everyday violence of domestic abuse and sexual violence — those two forms of violence account for more death and disability than malaria, than car accidents, than war combined. 
+The truth is, the poor of our world are trapped in whole systems of violence. 
+In South Asia, for instance, I could drive past this rice mill and see this man hoisting these 100-pound sacks of rice upon his thin back. 
+But I would have no idea, until later, that he was actually a slave, held by violence in that rice mill since I was in high school. 
+Decades of anti-poverty programs right in his community were never able to rescue him or any of the hundred other slaves from the beatings and the rapes and the torture of violence inside the rice mill. 
+In fact, half a century of anti-poverty programs have left more poor people in slavery than in any other time in human history. 
+Experts tell us that there's about 35 million people in slavery today. 
+That's about the population of the entire nation of Canada, where we're sitting today. 
+This is why, over time, I have come to call this epidemic of violence the Locust Effect. 
+In fact, now when you survey very, very poor communities, residents will tell you that their greatest fear is violence. 
+But notice the violence that they fear is not the violence of genocide or the wars, it's everyday violence. 
+So for me, as a lawyer, of course, my first reaction was to think, well, of course we've got to change all the laws. 
+But then I found out, it already is. 
+The problem is not that the poor don't get laws, it's that they don't get law enforcement. 
+In the developing world, basic law enforcement systems are so broken that recently the U.N. issued a report that found that "" most poor people live outside the protection of the law. "" Now honestly, you and I have just about no idea of what that would mean because we have no first-hand experience of it. 
+Functioning law enforcement for us is just a total assumption. 
+In fact, nothing expresses that assumption more clearly than three simple numbers: 9-1-1, which, of course, is the number for the emergency police operator here in Canada and in the United States, where the average response time to a police 911 emergency call is about 10 minutes. 
+So we take this just completely for granted. 
+But what if there was no law enforcement to protect you? 
+A woman in Oregon recently experienced what this would be like. 
+She was home alone in her dark house on a Saturday night, when a man started to tear his way into her home. 
+This was her worst nightmare, because this man had actually put her in the hospital from an assault just two weeks before. 
+So terrified, she picks up that phone and does what any of us would do: She calls 911 — but only to learn that because of budget cuts in her county, law enforcement wasn't available on the weekends. 
+Listen. 
+Dispatcher: I don't have anybody to send out there. 
+Woman: OK Dispatcher: Um, obviously if he comes inside the residence and assaults you, can you ask him to go away? 
+Woman: No, I can't, because he's blocking pretty much my only way out. 
+Dispatcher: Well, the only thing I can do is give you some advice, and call the sheriff's office tomorrow. 
+Obviously, if he comes in and unfortunately has a weapon or is trying to cause you physical harm, that's a different story. 
+You know, the sheriff's office doesn't work up there. 
+I don't have anybody to send. "" Gary Haugen: Tragically, the woman inside that house was violently assaulted, choked and raped because this is what it means to live outside the rule of law. 
+And this is where billions of our poorest live. 
+What does that look like? 
+In Bolivia, for example, if a man sexually assaults a poor child, statistically, he's at greater risk of slipping in the shower and dying than he is of ever going to jail for that crime. 
+In South Asia, if you enslave a poor person, you're at greater risk of being struck by lightning than ever being sent to jail for that crime. 
+And so the epidemic of everyday violence, it just rages on. 
+And it devastates our efforts to try to help billions of people out of their two-dollar-a-day hell. 
+Because the data just doesn't lie. 
+It turns out that you can give all manner of goods and services to the poor, but if you don't restrain the hands of the violent bullies from taking it all away, you're going to be very disappointed in the long-term impact of your efforts. 
+So you would think that the disintegration of basic law enforcement in the developing world would be a huge priority for the global fight against poverty. 
+But it's not. 
+Auditors of international assistance recently couldn't find even one percent of aid going to protect the poor from the lawless chaos of everyday violence. 
+A fresh water organization tells a heart-wrenching story of girls who are raped on the way to fetching water, and then celebrates the solution of a new well that drastically shortens their walk. 
+End of story. 
+But not a word about the rapists who are still right there in the community. 
+If a young woman on one of our college campuses was raped on her walk to the library, we would never celebrate the solution of moving the library closer to the dorm. 
+And yet, for some reason, this is okay for poor people. 
+Now the truth is, the traditional experts in economic development and poverty alleviation, they don't know how to fix this problem. 
+And so what happens? 
+They don't talk about it. 
+But the more fundamental reason that law enforcement for the poor in the developing world is so neglected, is because the people inside the developing world, with money, don't need it. 
+I was at the World Economic Forum not long ago talking to corporate executives who have massive businesses in the developing world and I was just asking them, "How do you guys protect all your people and property from all the violence?" 
+And they looked at each other, and they said, practically in unison, "We buy it." 
+Indeed, private security forces in the developing world are now, four, five and seven times larger than the public police force. 
+In Africa, the largest employer on the continent now is private security. 
+But see, the rich can pay for safety and can keep getting richer, but the poor can't pay for it and they're left totally unprotected and they keep getting thrown to the ground. 
+This is a massive and scandalous outrage. 
+And it doesn't have to be this way. 
+Broken law enforcement can be fixed. 
+Violence can be stopped. 
+Almost all criminal justice systems, they start out broken and corrupt, but they can be transformed by fierce effort and commitment. 
+The path forward is really pretty clear. 
+Number one: We have to start making stopping violence indispensable to the fight against poverty. 
+In fact, any conversation about global poverty that doesn't include the problem of violence must be deemed not serious. 
+And secondly, we have to begin to seriously invest resources and share expertise to support the developing world as they fashion new, public systems of justice, not private security, that give everybody a chance to be safe. 
+These transformations are actually possible and they're happening today. 
+Recently, the Gates Foundation funded a project in the second largest city of the Philippines, where local advocates and local law enforcement were able to transform corrupt police and broken courts so drastically, that in just four short years, they were able to measurably reduce the commercial sexual violence against poor kids by 79 percent. 
+You know, from the hindsight of history, what's always most inexplicable and inexcusable are the simple failures of compassion. 
+Because I think history convenes a tribunal of our grandchildren and they just ask us, "" Grandma, Grandpa, where were you? 
+Where were you, Grandpa, when the Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany and were being rejected from our shores? 
+Where were you? 
+And Grandma, where were you when they were marching our Japanese-American neighbors off to internment camps? 
+And Grandpa, where were you when they were beating our African-American neighbors just because they were trying to register to vote? "" Likewise, when our grandchildren ask us, "" Grandma, Grandpa, where were you when two billion of the world's poorest were drowning in a lawless chaos of everyday violence? "" I hope we can say that we had compassion, that we raised our voice, and as a generation, we were moved to make the violence stop. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Really powerfully argued. 
+Talk to us a bit about some of the things that have actually been happening to, for example, boost police training. 
+How hard a process is that? 
+GH: Well, one of the glorious things that's starting to happen now is that the collapse of these systems and the consequences are becoming obvious. 
+There's actually, now, political will to do that. 
+But it just requires now an investment of resources and transfer of expertise. 
+There's a political will struggle that's going to take place as well, but those are winnable fights, because we've done some examples around the world at International Justice Mission that are very encouraging. 
+CA: So just tell us in one country, how much it costs to make a material difference to police, for example — I know that's only one piece of it. 
+GH: In Guatemala, for instance, we've started a project there with the local police and court system, prosecutors, to retrain them so that they can actually effectively bring these cases. 
+And we've seen prosecutions against perpetrators of sexual violence increase by more than 1,000 percent. 
+This project has been very modestly funded at about a million dollars a year, and the kind of bang you can get for your buck in terms of leveraging a criminal justice system that could function if it were properly trained and motivated and led, and these countries, especially a middle class that is seeing that there's really no future with this total instability and total privatization of security I think there's an opportunity, a window for change. 
+CA: But to make this happen, you have to look at each part in the chain — the police, who else? 
+GH: So that's the thing about law enforcement, it starts out with the police, they're the front end of the pipeline of justice, but they hand if off to the prosecutors, and the prosecutors hand it off to the courts, and the survivors of violence have to be supported by social services all the way through that. 
+In the past, there's been a little bit of training of the courts, but they get crappy evidence from the police, or a little police intervention that has to do with narcotics or terrorism but nothing to do with treating the common poor person with excellent law enforcement, so it's about pulling that all together, and you can actually have people in very poor communities experience law enforcement like us, which is imperfect in our own experience, for sure, but boy, is it a great thing to sense that you can call 911 and maybe someone will protect you. 
+CA: Gary, I think you've done a spectacular job of bringing this to the world's attention in your book and right here today. 
+Gary Haugen. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We utter about six metaphors a minute. 
+Metaphorical thinking is essential to how we understand ourselves and others, how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. 
+But metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words. 
+Now, to assist me in explaining this, I've enlisted the help of one of our greatest philosophers, the reigning king of the metaphorians, a man whose contributions to the field are so great that he himself has become a metaphor. 
+I am, of course, referring to none other than Elvis Presley. 
+(Laughter) Now, "" All Shook Up "" is a great love song. 
+It's also a great example of how whenever we deal with anything abstract — ideas, emotions, feelings, concepts, thoughts — we inevitably resort to metaphor. 
+In "" All Shook Up, "" a touch is not a touch, but a chill. 
+Lips are not lips, but volcanoes. 
+She is not she, but a buttercup. 
+And love is not love, but being all shook up. 
+In this, Elvis is following Aristotle's classic definition of metaphor as the process of giving the thing a name that belongs to something else. 
+This is the mathematics of metaphor. 
+And fortunately it's very simple. 
+X equals Y. 
+(Laughter) This formula works wherever metaphor is present. 
+Elvis uses it, but so does Shakespeare in this famous line from "" Romeo and Juliet: "" Juliet is the sun. 
+Now, here, Shakespeare gives the thing, Juliet, a name that belongs to something else, the sun. 
+We mix and match what we know about the metaphor's source, in this case the sun, with what we know about its target, Juliet. 
+And metaphor gives us a much more vivid understanding of Juliet than if Shakespeare had literally described what she looks like. 
+So, how do we make and understand metaphors? 
+The first step is pattern recognition. 
+Look at this image. What do you see? 
+Three wayward Pac-Men, and three pointy brackets are actually present. 
+What we see, however, are two overlapping triangles. 
+Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns. 
+Second step, conceptual synesthesia. 
+Now, synesthesia is the experience of a stimulus in once sense organ in another sense organ as well, such as colored hearing. 
+People with colored hearing actually see colors when they hear the sounds of words or letters. 
+We all have synesthetic abilities. 
+This is the Bouba / Kiki test. 
+What you have to do is identify which of these shapes is called Bouba, and which is called Kiki. 
+(Laughter) If you are like 98 percent of other people, you will identify the round, amoeboid shape as Bouba, and the sharp, spiky one as Kiki. 
+Can we do a quick show of hands? 
+Does that correspond? 
+Okay, I think 99.9 would about cover it. 
+Why do we do that? 
+Because we instinctively find, or create, a pattern between the round shape and the round sound of Bouba, and the spiky shape and the spiky sound of Kiki. 
+And many of the metaphors we use everyday are synesthetic. 
+Silence is sweet. 
+Neckties are loud. 
+Sexually attractive people are hot. 
+Sexually unattractive people leave us cold. 
+Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another. 
+Third step is cognitive dissonance. 
+What you need to do here is identify as quickly as possible the color of the ink in which these words are printed. 
+You can take the test now. 
+If you're like most people, you will experience a moment of cognitive dissonance when the name of the color is printed in a differently colored ink. 
+The test shows that we cannot ignore the literal meaning of words even when the literal meaning gives the wrong answer. 
+Stroop tests have been done with metaphor as well. 
+The participants had to identify, as quickly as possible, the literally false sentences. 
+They took longer to reject metaphors as false than they did to reject literally false sentences. 
+Why? Because we cannot ignore the metaphorical meaning of words either. 
+One of the sentences was, "" Some jobs are jails. "" Now, unless you're a prison guard, the sentence "" Some jobs are jails "" is literally false. 
+And the metaphorical truth interferes with our ability to identify it as literally false. 
+Metaphor matters because it's around us every day, all the time. 
+Metaphor matters because it creates expectations. 
+Pay careful attention the next time you read the financial news. 
+Agent metaphors describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing, as in, "" The NASDAQ climbed higher. "" Object metaphors describe price movements as non-living things, as in, "" The Dow fell like a brick. "" Researchers asked a group of people to read a clutch of market commentaries, and then predict the next day's price trend. 
+Those exposed to agent metaphors had higher expectations that price trends would continue. 
+If, for example, house prices are routinely described as climbing and climbing, higher and higher, people might naturally assume that that rise is unstoppable. 
+They may feel confident, say, in taking out mortgages they really can't afford. 
+That's a hypothetical example of course. 
+But this is how metaphor misleads. 
+Metaphor also matters because it influences decisions by activating analogies. 
+Each of which was designed to trigger a different historical analogy: World War II, Vietnam, and the third was historically neutral. 
+Those exposed to the World War II scenario made more interventionist recommendations than the others. 
+Metaphor matters because it opens the door to discovery. 
+Einstein described his scientific method as combinatory play. 
+He famously used thought experiments, which are essentially elaborate analogies, to come up with some of his greatest discoveries. 
+By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery. 
+Now metaphor is ubiquitous, yet it's hidden. 
+But you just have to look at the words around you and you'll find it. 
+Ralph Waldo Emerson described language as "" fossil poetry. "" But before it was fossil poetry language was fossil metaphor. 
+And these fossils still breathe. 
+Take the three most famous words in all of Western philosophy: "Cogito ergo sum." 
+That's routinely translated as, "" I think, therefore I am. "" But there is a better translation. 
+The Latin word "" cogito "" is derived from the prefix "" co, "" meaning "" together, "" and the verb "" agitare, "" meaning "" to shake. "" So, the original meaning of "" cogito "" is to shake together. 
+And the proper translation of "" cogito ergo sum "" is "" I shake things up, therefore I am. "" (Laughter) Metaphor shakes things up, giving us everything from Shakespeare to scientific discovery in the process. 
+The mind is a plastic snow dome, the most beautiful, most interesting, and most itself, when, as Elvis put it, it's all shook up. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I guess the story actually has to start maybe back in the the 1960s, when I was seven or eight years old, watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries on the living room floor with my mask and flippers on. 
+Then after every episode, I had to go up to the bathtub and swim around the bathtub and look at the drain, because that's all there was to look at. 
+And by the time I turned 16, I pursued a career in marine science, in exploration and diving, and lived in underwater habitats, like this one off the Florida Keys, for 30 days total. 
+Brian Skerry took this shot. Thanks, Brian. 
+And I've dived in deep-sea submersibles around the world. 
+And this one is the deepest diving submarine in the world, operated by the Japanese government. 
+And Sylvia Earle and I were on an expedition in this submarine 20 years ago in Japan. 
+And on my dive, I went down 18,000 feet, to an area that I thought would be pristine wilderness area on the sea floor. 
+But when I got there, I found lots of plastic garbage and other debris. 
+And it was really a turning point in my life, where I started to realize that I couldn't just go have fun doing science and exploration. 
+I needed to put it into a context. 
+I needed to head towards conservation goals. 
+So I began to work with National Geographic Society and others and led expeditions to Antarctica. 
+I led three diving expeditions to Antarctica. 
+Ten years ago was a seminal trip, where we explored that big iceberg, B-15, the largest iceberg in history, that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf. 
+And we developed techniques to dive inside and under the iceberg, such as heating pads on our kidneys with a battery that we dragged around, so that, as the blood flowed through our kidneys, it would get a little boost of warmth before going back into our bodies. 
+But after three trips to Antarctica, I decided that it might be nicer to work in warmer water. 
+And that same year, 10 years ago, I headed north to the Phoenix Islands. 
+And I'm going to tell you that story here in a moment. 
+But before I do, I just want you to ponder this graph for a moment. 
+You may have seen this in other forms, but the top line is the amount of protected area on land, globally, and it's about 12 percent. 
+And you can see that it kind of hockey sticks up around the 1960s and '70s, and it's on kind of a nice trajectory right now. 
+And that's probably because that's when everybody got aware of the environment and Earth Day and all the stuff that happened in the '60s with the Hippies and everything really did, I think, have an affect on global awareness. 
+But the ocean-protected area is basically flat line until right about now — it appears to be ticking up. 
+And I do believe that we are at the hockey stick point of the protected area in the ocean. 
+I think we would have gotten there a lot earlier if we could see what happens in the ocean like we can see what happens on land. 
+But unfortunately, the ocean is opaque, and we can't see what's going on. 
+And therefore we're way behind on protection. 
+But scuba diving, submersibles and all the work that we're setting about to do here will help rectify that. 
+So where are the Phoenix Islands? 
+They were the world's largest marine-protected area up until last week when the Chagos Archipelago was declared. 
+It's in the mid-Pacific. It's about five days from anywhere. 
+If you want to get to the Phoenix Islands, it's five days from Fiji, it's five days from Hawaii, it's five days from Samoa. 
+It's out in the middle of the Pacific, right around the Equator. 
+I had never heard of the islands 10 years ago, nor the country, Kiribati, that owns them, till two friends of mine who run a liveaboard dive boat in Fiji said, "" Greg, would you lead a scientific expedition up to these islands? 
+They've never been dived. "" And I said, "" Yeah. 
+But tell me where they are and the country that owns them. "" So that's when I first learned of the Islands and had no idea what I was getting into. 
+But I was in for the adventure. 
+Let me give you a little peek here of the Phoenix Islands-protected area. 
+It's a very deep-water part of our planet. 
+The average depths are about 12,000 ft. 
+There's lots of seamounts in the Phoenix Islands, which are specifically part of the protected area. 
+Seamounts are important for biodiversity. 
+There's actually more mountains in the ocean than there are on land. 
+It's an interesting fact. 
+And the Phoenix Islands is very rich in those seamounts. 
+So it's a deep — think about it in a big three-dimensional space, very deep three-dimensional space with herds of tuna, whales, all kinds of deep sea marine life like we've seen here before. 
+That's the vessel that we took up there for these studies, early on, and that's what the Islands look like — you can see in the background. 
+They're very low to the water, and they're all uninhabited, except one island has about 35 caretakers on it. 
+And they've been uninhabited for most of time because even in the ancient days, these islands were too far away from the bright lights of Fiji and Hawaii and Tahiti for those ancient Polynesian mariners that were traversing the Pacific so widely. 
+But we got up there, and I had the unique and wonderful scientific opportunity and personal opportunity to get to a place that had never been dived and just get to an island and go, "" Okay, where are we going to dive? 
+Let's try there, "" and then falling into the water. 
+Both my personal and my professional life changed. 
+Suddenly, I saw a world that I had never seen before in the ocean — schools of fish that were so dense they dulled the penetration of sunlight from the surface, coral reefs that were continuous and solid and colorful, large fish everywhere, manta rays. 
+It was an ecosystem. Parrotfish spawning — this is about 5,000 longnose parrotfish spawning at the entrance to one of the Phoenix Islands. 
+You can see the fish are balled up and then there's a little cloudy area there where they're exchanging the eggs and sperm for reproduction — events that the ocean is supposed to do, but struggles to do in many places now because of human activity. 
+The Phoenix Islands and all the equatorial parts of our planet are very important for tuna fisheries, especially this yellowfin tuna that you see here. 
+Phoenix Islands is a major tuna location. 
+And sharks — we had sharks on our early dives, up to 150 sharks at once, which is an indication of a very, very healthy, very strong, system. 
+So I thought the scenes of never-ending wilderness would go on forever, but they did finally come to an end. 
+And we explored the surface of the Islands as well — very important bird nesting site, some of the most important bird-nesting sites in the Pacific, in the world. 
+And we finished our trip. 
+And that's the area again. 
+You can see the Islands — there are eight islands — that pop out of the water. 
+The peaks that don't come out of the water are the seamounts. 
+Remember, a seamount turns into an island when it hits the surface. 
+And what's the context of the Phoenix Islands? 
+Where do these exist? 
+Well they exist in the Republic of Kiribati, and Kiribati is located in the Central Pacific in three island groups. 
+In the west we have the Gilbert Islands. 
+In the center we have the Phoenix Islands, which is the subject that I'm talking about. 
+And then over to the east we have the Line Islands. 
+It's the largest atoll nation in the world. 
+And they have about 110,000 people spread out over 33 islands. 
+They control 3.4 million cubic miles of ocean, and that's between one and two percent of all the ocean water on the planet. 
+And when I was first going up there, I barely knew the name of this country 10 years ago, and people would ask me, "Why are you going to this place called Kiribati?" 
+And it reminded me of that old joke where the bank robber comes out of the courthouse handcuffed, and the reporter yells, "" Hey, Willy. Why do you rob banks? "" And he says, "" cause that's where all the money is. "" And I would tell people, "" Why do I go to Kiribati? 
+Because that's where all the ocean is. "" They basically are one nation that controls most of the equatorial waters of the Central Pacific Ocean. 
+They're also a country that is in dire danger. 
+Sea levels are rising, and Kiribati, along with 42 other nations in the world, will be under water within 50 to 100 years due to climate change and the associated sea-level rise from thermal expansion and the melting of freshwater into the ocean. 
+The Islands rise only one to two meters above the surface. 
+Some of the islands have already gone under water. 
+And these nations are faced with a real problem. 
+We as a world are faced with a problem. 
+What do we do with displaced fellow Earthlings who no longer have a home on the planet? 
+The president of the Maldives conducted a mock cabinet meeting underwater recently to highlight the dire straits of these countries. 
+So it's something we need to focus on. 
+But back to the Phoenix Islands, which is the subject of this Talk. 
+After I got back, I said, okay, this is amazing, what we found. 
+I'd like to go back and share it with the government of Kiribati, who are over in Tarawa, the westernmost group. 
+So I started contacting them — because they had actually given me a permit to do this — and I said, "" I want to come up and tell you what we found. "" And for some reason they didn't want me to come, or it was hard to find a time and a place, and it took a while, but finally they said, "" Okay, you can come. 
+But if you come, you have to buy lunch for everybody who comes to the seminar. "" So I said, "" Okay, I'm happy to buy lunch. 
+Just get whatever anybody wants. "" So David Obura, a coral reef biologist, and I went to Tarawa, and we presented for two hours on the amazing findings of the Phoenix Islands. 
+And the country never knew this. They never had any data from this area. 
+They'd never had any information from the Phoenix Islands. 
+After the talk, the Minister of Fisheries walked up to me and he said, "" Greg, do you realize that you are the first scientist who has ever come back and told us what they did? "" He said, "" We often issue these permits to do research in our waters, but usually we get a note two or three years later, or a reprint. 
+But you're the first one who's ever come back and told us what you did. 
+And we really appreciate that. And we're buying you lunch today. 
+And are you free for dinner? "" And I was free for dinner, and I went out to dinner with the Minister of Fisheries in Kiribati. 
+And over the course of dinner, I learned that Kiribati gains most of its revenue — it's a very poor country — but it gains what revenue is has by selling access to foreign nations to take fish out of its waters, because Kiribati does not have the capacity to take the fish itself. 
+And the deal that they strike is the extracting country gives Kiribati five percent of the landed value. 
+So if the United States removes a million dollars' worth of lobsters from a reef, Kiribati gets 50,000 dollars. 
+And, you know, it didn't seem like a very good deal to me. 
+So I asked the Minister over dinner, I said, "" Would you consider a situation where you would still get paid — we do the math and figure out what the value of the resource is — but you leave fish and the sharks and the shrimp in the water? "" He stopped, and he said, "" Yes, we would like to do that to deal with our overfishing problem, and I think we would call it a reverse fishing license. "" He coined the term "" reverse fishing license. "" So I said, "" Yes, a 'reverse fishing license.' "" So we walked away from this dinner really not knowing where to go at that point. 
+I went back to the States and started looking around to see if I could find examples where reverse fishing licenses had been issued, and it turned out there were none. 
+There were no oceanic deals where countries were compensated for not fishing. 
+It had occurred on land, in rainforests of South America and Africa, where landowners had been paid not to cut the trees down. 
+And Conservation International had struck some of those deals. 
+So I went to Conservation International and brought them in as a partner and went through the process of valuing the fishery resource, deciding how much Kiribati should be compensated, what the range of the fishes were, brought in a whole bunch of other partners — the government of Australia, the government of New Zealand, the World Bank. 
+The Oak Foundation and National Geographic have been big funders of this as well. 
+And we basically founded the park on the idea of an endowment that would pay the equivalent lost fishing license fees to this very poor country to keep the area intact. 
+Halfway through this process, I met the president of Kiribati, President Anote Tong. 
+He's a really important leader, a real visionary, forward-thinking man, and he told me two things when I approached him. 
+He said, "" Greg, there's two things I'd like you to do. 
+One is, remember I'm a politician, so you've got to go out and work with my ministers and convince the people of Kiribati that this is a good idea. 
+Secondly, I'd like you to create principles that will transcend my own presidency. 
+I don't want to do something like this if it's going to go away after I'm voted out of office. "" So we had very strong leadership, very good vision and a lot of science, a lot of lawyers involved. 
+Many, many steps were taken to pull this off. 
+And it was primarily because Kiribati realized that this was in their own self-interest to do this. 
+They realized that this was a common cause that they had found with the conservation community. 
+Then in 2002, when this was all going full-swing, a coral-bleaching event happened in the Phoenix Islands. 
+Here's this resource that we're looking to save, and it turns out it's the hottest heating event that we can find on record. 
+The ocean heated up as it does sometimes, and the hot spot formed and stalled right over the Phoenix Islands for six months. 
+It was over 32 degrees Celsius for six months and it basically killed 60 percent of the coral. 
+So suddenly we had this area that we were protecting, but now it appeared to be dead, at least in the coral areas. 
+Of course the deep-sea areas and the open ocean areas were fine, but the coral, which everybody likes to look at, was in trouble. 
+Well, the good news is it's recovered and recovering fast, faster than any reef we've seen. 
+This picture was just taken by Brian Skerry a few months ago when we returned to the Phoenix Islands and discovered that, because it is a protected area and has healthy fish populations that keep the algae grazed down and keep the rest of the reef healthy, the coral is booming, is just booming back. 
+It's almost like if a person has multiple diseases, it's hard to get well, you might die, but if you only have one disease to deal with, you can get better. 
+And that's the story with climate-change heating. 
+It's the only threat, the only influence that the reef had to deal with. 
+There was no fishing, there was no pollution, there was no coastal development, and the reef is on a full-bore recovery. 
+Now I remember that dinner I had with the Minister of Fisheries 10 years ago when we first brought this up and I got quite animated during the dinner and said, "" Well, I think that the conservation community might embrace this idea, Minister. "" He paused and put his hands together and said, "" Yes, Greg, but the devil will be in the details, "" he said. 
+And it certainly was. 
+The last 10 years have been detail after detail ranging from creating legislation to multiple research expeditions to communication plans, as I said, teams of lawyers, MOUs, creating the Phoenix Islands Trust Board. 
+And we are now in the process of raising the full endowment. 
+Kiribati has frozen extracting activities at its current state while we raise the endowment. 
+We just had our first PIPA Trust Board meeting three weeks ago. 
+So it's a fully functional up-and-running entity that negotiates the reverse fishing license with the country. 
+And the PIPA Trust Board holds that license and pays the country for this. 
+So it's a very solid, very well thought-out, very well grounded system, and it was a bottom-up system, and that was very important with this work, from the bottom up to secure this. 
+So the conditions for success here are listed. 
+You can read them yourselves. 
+But I would say the most important one in my mind was working within the market forces of the situation. 
+And that insured that we could move this forward and it would have both the self-interest of Kiribati as well as the self-interest of the world. 
+And I'll leave you with one final slide, that is: how do we scale this up? 
+How do we realize Sylvia's dream? 
+Where eventually do we take this? 
+Here's the Pacific with large MPAs and large conservation zones on it. 
+And as you can see, we have a patchwork across this ocean. 
+I've just described to you the one story behind that rectangular area in the middle, the Phoenix Islands, but every other green patch on that has its own story. 
+And what we need to do now is look at the whole Pacific Ocean in its entirety and make a network of MPAs across the Pacific so that we have our world's largest ocean protected and self-sustaining over time. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+Two thousand and seven, five years ago, my wife gets diagnosed with breast cancer. 
+A simplistic answer would be, the doctors are doing this because they want to protect themselves legally. 
+And since I study human decision making, I said, I'm going to run some studies to find some answers. 
+And I'm going to share one of these studies with you today. 
+You are going to solve a series of puzzles, and I'm going to show you examples of these puzzles momentarily. 
+Now comes the between-subjects design, the AB design, the AB testing. 
+Now, you're all going to consume the tea. 
+So imagine that you're taking the tea now, we'll wait for you to finish the tea. 
+Yeah, so what we'd do if we had you who gave the answer as a participant, we would have calibrated the difficulty level of the puzzles to your expertise. 
+One is, what is the time, on average, you're taking in attempting to solve these puzzles? 
+And under what situations — when — would we see this pattern of results where the passenger is going to show better, more favorable outcomes, compared to the driver? 
+You were responsible for your decision. 
+So what do you do? 
+And therefore, there are times when you're facing the INCA, when the feedback is going to be immediate, negative, concrete and you have the sense of agency, where you're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive. 
+
+They fly, not with rotating components, so they fly only by flapping their wings. 
+So we looked at the birds, and we tried to make a model that is powerful, ultralight, and it must have excellent aerodynamic qualities that would fly by its own and only by flapping its wings. 
+So what would be better than to use the herring gull, in its freedom, circling and swooping over the sea, and to use this as a role model? 
+We are a company in the field of automation, and we'd like to do very lightweight structures because that's energy efficient, and we'd like to learn more about pneumatics and air flow phenomena. 
+The length is one meter and six, and the weight is only 450 grams. 
+In the middle we have a motor, and we also have a gear in it, and we use the gear to transfer the circulation of the motor. 
+So if you go down, you have the large area of propulsion, and if you go up, the wings are not that large, and it is easier to get up. 
+With the split wing, we get the lift at the upper wing, and we get the propulsion at the lower wing. 
+
+Five years ago, I was a Ph.D. student living two lives. 
+In one, I used NASA supercomputers to design next-generation spacecraft, and in the other I was a data scientist looking for potential smugglers of sensitive nuclear technologies. 
+As a data scientist, I did a lot of analyses, mostly of facilities, industrial facilities around the world. 
+And I was always looking for a better canvas to tie these all together. 
+And one day, I was thinking about how all data has a location, and I realized that the answer had been staring me in the face. 
+Although I was a satellite engineer, I hadn't thought about using satellite imagery in my work. 
+Now, like most of us, I'd been online, I'd see my house, so I thought, I'll hop in there and I'll start looking up some of these facilities. 
+And what I found really surprised me. 
+The pictures that I was finding were years out of date, and because of that, it had relatively little relevance to the work that I was doing today. 
+But I was intrigued. 
+I mean, satellite imagery is pretty amazing stuff. 
+There are millions and millions of sensors surrounding us today, but there's still so much we don't know on a daily basis. 
+How much oil is stored in all of China? 
+How much corn is being produced? 
+How many ships are in all of our world's ports? 
+Now, in theory, all of these questions could be answered by imagery, but not if it's old. 
+And if this data was so valuable, then how come I couldn't get my hands on more recent pictures? 
+So the story begins over 50 years ago with the launch of the first generation of U.S. government photo reconnaissance satellites. 
+And today, there's a handful of the great, great grandchildren of these early Cold War machines which are now operated by private companies and from which the vast majority of satellite imagery that you and I see on a daily basis comes. 
+During this period, launching things into space, just the rocket to get the satellite up there, has cost hundreds of millions of dollars each, and that's created tremendous pressure to launch things infrequently and to make sure that when you do, you cram as much functionality in there as possible. 
+All of this has only made satellites bigger and bigger and bigger and more expensive, now nearly a billion, with a b, dollars per copy. 
+Because they are so expensive, there aren't very many of them. 
+Because there aren't very many of them, the pictures that we see on a daily basis tend to be old. 
+I think a lot of people actually understand this anecdotally, but in order to visualize just how sparsely our planet is collected, some friends and I put together a dataset of the 30 million pictures that have been gathered by these satellites between 2000 and 2010. 
+As you can see in blue, huge areas of our world are barely seen, less than once a year, and even the areas that are seen most frequently, those in red, are seen at best once a quarter. 
+Now as aerospace engineering grad students, this chart cried out to us as a challenge. 
+Why do these things have to be so expensive? 
+Does a single satellite really have to cost the equivalent of three 747 jumbo jets? 
+Wasn't there a way to build a smaller, simpler, new satellite design that could enable more timely imaging? 
+I realize that it does sound a little bit crazy that we were going to go out and just begin designing satellites, but fortunately we had help. 
+In the late 1990s, a couple of professors proposed a concept for radically reducing the price of putting things in space. 
+This was hitchhiking small satellites alongside much larger satellites. 
+This dropped the cost of putting objects up there by over a factor of 100, and suddenly we could afford to experiment, to take a little bit of risk, and to realize a lot of innovation. 
+And a new generation of engineers and scientists, mostly out of universities, began launching these very small, breadbox-sized satellites called CubeSats. 
+And these were built with electronics obtained from RadioShack instead of Lockheed Martin. 
+Now it was using the lessons learned from these early missions that my friends and I began a series of sketches of our own satellite design. 
+And I can't remember a specific day where we made a conscious decision that we were actually going to go out and build these things, but once we got that idea in our minds of the world as a dataset, of being able to capture millions of data points on a daily basis describing the global economy, of being able to unearth billions of connections between them that had never before been found, it just seemed boring to go work on anything else. 
+And so we moved into a cramped, windowless office in Palo Alto, and began working to take our design from the drawing board into the lab. 
+The first major question we had to tackle was just how big to build this thing. 
+In space, size drives cost, and we had worked with these very small, breadbox-sized satellites in school, but as we began to better understand the laws of physics, we found that the quality of pictures those satellites could take was very limited, because the laws of physics dictate that the best picture you can take through a telescope is a function of the diameter of that telescope, and these satellites had a very small, very constrained volume. 
+And we found that the best picture we would have been able to get looked something like this. 
+Although this was the low-cost option, quite frankly it was just too blurry to see the things that make satellite imagery valuable. 
+So about three or four weeks later, we met a group of engineers randomly who had worked on the first private imaging satellite ever developed, and they told us that back in the 1970s, the U.S. government had found a powerful optimal tradeoff — that in taking pictures at right about one meter resolution, being able to see objects one meter in size, they had found that they could not just get very high-quality images, but get a lot of them at an affordable price. 
+From our own computer simulations, we quickly found that one meter really was the minimum viable product to be able to see the drivers of our global economy, for the first time, being able to count the ships and cars and shipping containers and trucks that move around our world on a daily basis, while conveniently still not being able to see individuals. 
+We had found our compromise. 
+We would have to build something larger than the original breadbox, now more like a mini-fridge, but we still wouldn't have to build a pickup truck. 
+So now we had our constraint. 
+The laws of physics dictated the absolute minimum-sized telescope that we could build. 
+What came next was making the rest of the satellite as small and as simple as possible, basically a flying telescope with four walls and a set of electronics smaller than a phone book that used less power than a 100 watt lightbulb. 
+The big challenge became actually taking the pictures through that telescope. 
+Traditional imaging satellites use a line scanner, similar to a Xerox machine, and as they traverse the Earth, they take pictures, scanning row by row by row to build the complete image. 
+Now people use these because they get a lot of light, which means less of the noise you see in a low-cost cell phone image. 
+The problem with them is they require very sophisticated pointing. 
+You have to stay focused on a 50-centimeter target from over 600 miles away while moving at more than seven kilometers a second, which requires an awesome degree of complexity. 
+So instead, we turned to a new generation of video sensors, originally created for use in night vision goggles. 
+Instead of taking a single, high quality image, we could take a videostream of individually noisier frames, but then we could recombine all of those frames together into very high-quality images using sophisticated pixel processing techniques here on the ground, at a cost of one one hundredth a traditional system. 
+And we applied this technique to many of the other systems on the satellite as well, and day by day, our design evolved from CAD to prototypes to production units. 
+A few short weeks ago, we packed up SkySat 1, put our signatures on it, and waved goodbye for the last time on Earth. 
+Today, it's sitting in its final launch configuration ready to blast off in a few short weeks. 
+And soon, we'll turn our attention to launching a constellation of 24 or more of these satellites and beginning to build the scalable analytics that will allow us to unearth the insights in the petabytes of data we will collect. 
+So why do all of this? Why build these satellites? 
+Well, it turns out imaging satellites have a unique ability to provide global transparency, and providing that transparency on a timely basis is simply an idea whose time has come. 
+We see ourselves as pioneers of a new frontier, and beyond economic data, unlocking the human story, moment by moment. 
+For a data scientist that just happened to go to space camp as a kid, it just doesn't get much better than that. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Humanity takes center stage at TED, but I would like to add a voice for the animals, whose bodies and minds and spirits shaped us. 
+Some years ago, it was my good fortune to meet a tribal elder on an island not far from Vancouver. 
+His name is Jimmy Smith, and he shared a story with me that is told among his people, who call themselves the Kwikwasut'inuxw. 
+Once upon a time, he told me, all animals on Earth were one. 
+Even though they look different on the outside, inside, they're all the same, and from time to time they would gather at a sacred cave deep inside the forest to celebrate their unity. 
+When they arrived, they would all take off their skins. 
+Raven shed his feathers, bear his fur, and salmon her scales, and then, they would dance. 
+But one day, a human made it to the cave and laughed at what he saw because he did not understand. 
+Embarrassed, the animals fled, and that was the last time they revealed themselves this way. 
+The ancient understanding that underneath their separate identities, all animals are one, has been a powerful inspiration to me. 
+I like to get past the fur, the feathers and the scales. 
+I want to get under the skin. 
+No matter whether I'm facing a giant elephant or a tiny tree frog, my goal is to connect us with them, eye to eye. 
+Sure. People are always present in my photos, no matter whether they appear to portray tortoises or cougars or lions. 
+As a photographer, I try to reach beyond the differences in our genetic makeup to appreciate all we have in common with every other living thing. 
+When I use my camera, I drop my skin like the animals at that cave so I can show who they really are. 
+As animals blessed with the power of rational thought, we can marvel at the intricacies of life. 
+As citizens of a planet in trouble, it is our moral responsibility to deal with the dramatic loss in diversity of life. 
+But as humans with hearts, we can all rejoice in the unity of life, and perhaps we can change what once happened in that sacred cave. 
+Let's find a way to join the dance. 
+
+Francesca Fedeli: Ciao. 
+So he's Mario. He's our son. 
+He was born two and a half years ago, and I had a pretty tough pregnancy because I had to stay still in a bed for, like, eight months. 
+But in the end everything seemed to be under control. 
+So he got the right weight at birth. 
+He got the right Apgar index. 
+So we were pretty reassured by this. 
+But at the end, 10 days later after he was born, we discovered that he had a stroke. 
+As you might know, a stroke is a brain injury. 
+A perinatal stroke could be something that can happen during the nine months of pregnancy or just suddenly after the birth, and in his case, as you can see, the right part of his brain has gone. 
+So the effect that this stroke could have on Mario's body could be the fact that he couldn't be able to control the left side of his body. 
+Just imagine, if you have a computer and a printer and you want to transmit, to input to print out a document, but the printer doesn't have the right drives, so the same is for Mario. 
+It's just like, he would like to move his left side of his body, but he's not able to transmit the right input to move his left arm and left leg. 
+So life had to change. 
+We needed to change our schedule. 
+We needed to change the impact that this birth had on our life. 
+Roberto D'Angelo: As you may imagine, unfortunately, we were not ready. 
+Nobody taught us how to deal with such kinds of disabilities, and as many questions as possible started to come to our minds. 
+And that has been really a tough time. 
+Questions, some basics, like, you know, why did this happen to us? 
+And what went wrong? 
+Some more tough, like, really, what will be the impact on Mario's life? 
+I mean, at the end, will he be able to work? 
+And, you know, as a parent, especially for the first time, why is he not going to be better than us? 
+And this, indeed, really is tough to say, but a few months later, we realized that we were really feeling like a failure. 
+I mean, the only real product of our life, at the end, was a failure. 
+And you know, it was not a failure for ourselves in itself, but it was a failure that will impact his full life. 
+Honestly, we went down. 
+I mean we went really down, but at the end, we started to look at him, and we said, we have to react. 
+So immediately, as Francesca said, we changed our life. 
+We started physiotherapy, we started the rehabilitation, and one of the paths that we were following in terms of rehabilitation is the mirror neurons pilot. 
+Basically, we spent months doing this with Mario. 
+You have an object, and we showed him how to grab the object. 
+Now, the theory of mirror neurons simply says that in your brains, exactly now, as you watch me doing this, you are activating exactly the same neurons as if you do the actions. 
+It looks like this is the leading edge in terms of rehabilitation. 
+But one day we found that Mario was not looking at our hand. 
+He was looking at us. 
+We were his mirror. 
+And the problem, as you might feel, is that we were down, we were depressed, we were looking at him as a problem, not as a son, not from a positive perspective. 
+And that day really changed our perspective. 
+We realized that we had to become a better mirror for Mario. 
+We restarted from our strengths, and at the same time we restarted from his strengths. 
+We stopped looking at him as a problem, and we started to look at him as an opportunity to improve. 
+And really, this was the change, and from our side, we said, "What are our strengths that we really can bring to Mario?" 
+And we started from our passions. 
+We love to travel, we love music, we love to be in places like this, and we started to bring Mario with us just to show to him the best things that we can show to him. 
+This short video is from last week. 
+I am not saying — (Applause) — I am not saying it's a miracle. That's not the message, because we are just at the beginning of the path. 
+But we want to share what was the key learning, the key learning that Mario drove to us, and it is to consider what you have as a gift and not only what you miss, and to consider what you miss just as an opportunity. 
+And this is the message that we want to share with you. 
+Mario! 
+And this is why — (Applause) — And this is why we decided to share the best mirror in the world with him. 
+And we thank you so much, all of you. 
+FF: Thank you. RD: Thank you. Bye. 
+(Applause) FF: Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+For the last 50 years, a lot of smart, well-resourced people — some of you, no doubt — have been trying to figure out how to reduce poverty in the United States. 
+People have created and invested millions of dollars into non-profit organizations with the mission of helping people who are poor. 
+They've created think tanks that study issues like education, job creation and asset-building, and then advocated for policies to support our most marginalized communities. 
+They've written books and columns and given passionate speeches, decrying the wealth gap that is leaving more and more people entrenched at the bottom end of the income scale. 
+And that effort has helped. 
+But it's not enough. 
+Our poverty rates haven't changed that much in the last 50 years, since the War on Poverty was launched. 
+I'm here to tell you that we have overlooked the most powerful and practical resource. 
+Here it is: people who are poor. 
+Up in the left-hand corner is Jobana, Sintia and Bertha. 
+They met when they all had small children, through a parenting class at a family resource center in San Francisco. 
+As they grew together as parents and friends, they talked a lot about how hard it was to make money when your kids are little. 
+Child care is expensive, more than they'd earn in a job. 
+Their husbands worked, but they wanted to contribute financially, too. 
+So they hatched a plan. 
+They started a cleaning business. 
+They plastered neighborhoods with flyers and handed business cards out to their families and friends, and soon, they had clients calling. 
+Two of them would clean the office or house and one of them would watch the kids. 
+They'd rotate who'd cleaned and who'd watch the kids. 
+(Laughs) It's awesome, right? 
+(Laughter) And they split the money three ways. 
+It was not a full-time gig, no one could watch the little ones all day. 
+But it made a difference for their families. 
+Extra money to pay for bills when a husband's work hours were cut. 
+Money to buy the kids clothes as they were growing. 
+A little extra money in their pockets to make them feel some independence. 
+Up in the top-right corner is Theresa and her daughter, Brianna. 
+Brianna is one of those kids with this sparkly, infectious, outgoing personality. 
+For example, when Rosie, a little girl who spoke only Spanish, moved in next door, Brianna, who spoke only English, borrowed her mother's tablet and found a translation app so the two of them could communicate. 
+(Laughter) I know, right? 
+Rosie's family credits Brianna with helping Rosie to learn English. 
+A few years ago, Brianna started to struggle academically. 
+She was growing frustrated and kind of withdrawn and acting out in class. 
+And her mother was heartbroken over what was happening. 
+Then they found out that she was going to have to repeat second grade and Brianna was devastated. 
+Her mother felt hopeless and overwhelmed and alone because she knew that her daughter was not getting the support she needed, and she did not know how to help her. 
+One afternoon, Theresa was catching up with a group of friends, and one of them said, "Theresa, how are you?" 
+And she burst into tears. 
+After she shared her story, one of her friends said, "I went through the exact same thing with my son about a year ago." 
+And in that moment, Theresa realized that so much of her struggle was not having anybody to talk with about it. 
+So she created a support group for parents like her. 
+The first meeting was her and two other people. 
+But word spread, and soon 20 people, 30 people were showing up for these monthly meetings that she put together. 
+She went from feeling helpless to realizing how capable she was of supporting her daughter, with the support of other people who were going through the same struggle. 
+And Brianna is doing fantastic — she's doing great academically and socially. 
+That in the middle is my man Baakir, standing in front of BlackStar Books and Caffe, which he runs out of part of his house. 
+As you walk in the door, Baakir greets you with a "" Welcome black home. "" (Laughter) Once inside, you can order some Algiers jerk chicken, perhaps a vegan walnut burger, or jive turkey sammich. 
+And that's sammich — not sandwich. 
+You must finish your meal with a buttermilk drop, which is several steps above a donut hole and made from a very secret family recipe. 
+For real, it's very secret, he won't tell you about it. 
+But BlackStar is much more than a café. 
+For the kids in the neighborhood, it's a place to go after school to get help with homework. 
+For the grown-ups, it's where they go to find out what's going on in the neighborhood and catch up with friends. 
+It's a performance venue. 
+It's a home for poets, musicians and artists. 
+Baakir and his partner Nicole, with their baby girl strapped to her back, are there in the mix of it all, serving up a cup of coffee, teaching a child how to play Mancala, or painting a sign for an upcoming community event. 
+I have worked with and learned from people just like them for more than 20 years. 
+I have organized against the prison system, which impacts poor folks, especially black, indigenous and Latino folks, at an alarming rate. 
+I have worked with young people who manifest hope and promise, despite being at the effect of racist discipline practices in their schools, and police violence in their communities. 
+I have learned from families who are unleashing their ingenuity and tenacity to collectively create their own solutions. 
+And they're not just focused on money. 
+They're addressing education, housing, health, community — the things that we all care about. 
+Everywhere I go, I see people who are broke but not broken. 
+I see people who are struggling to realize their good ideas, so that they can create a better life for themselves, their families, their communities. 
+Jobana, Sintia, Bertha, Theresa and Baakir are the rule, not the shiny exception. 
+I am the exception. 
+I was raised by a quietly fierce single mother in Rochester, New York. 
+I was bussed to a school in the suburbs, from a neighborhood that many of my classmates and their parents considered dangerous. 
+At eight, I was a latchkey kid. 
+I'd get myself home after school every day and do homework and chores, and wait for my mother to come home. 
+After school, I'd go to the corner store and buy a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli, which I'd heat up on the stove as my afternoon snack. 
+If I had a little extra money, I'd buy a Hostess Fruit Pie. 
+(Laughter) Cherry. 
+Not as good as a buttermilk drop. 
+(Laughter) We were poor when I was a kid. 
+But now, I own a home in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood in Oakland, California. 
+I've built a career. 
+My husband is a business owner. 
+I have a retirement account. 
+My daughter is not even allowed to turn on the stove unless there's a grown-up at home and she doesn't have to, because she does not have to have the same kind of self-reliance that I had to at her age. 
+My kids' raviolis are organic and full of things like spinach and ricotta, because I have the luxury of choice when it comes to what my children eat. 
+I am the exception, not because I'm more talented than Baakir or my mother worked any harder than Jobana, Sintia or Bertha, or cared any more than Theresa. 
+Marginalized communities are full of smart, talented people, hustling and working and innovating, just like our most revered and most rewarded CEOs. 
+They are full of people tapping into their resilience to get up every day, get the kids off to school and go to jobs that don't pay enough, or get educations that are putting them in debt. 
+They are full of people applying their savvy intelligence to stretch a minimum wage paycheck, or balance a job and a side hustle to make ends meet. 
+They are full of people doing for themselves and for others, whether it's picking up medication for an elderly neighbor, or letting a sibling borrow some money to pay the phone bill, or just watching out for the neighborhood kids from the front stoop. 
+I am the exception because of luck and privilege, not hard work. 
+And I'm not being modest or self-deprecating — I am amazing. 
+(Laughter) But most people work hard. 
+Hard work is the common denominator in this equation, and I'm tired of the story we tell that hard work leads to success, because that allows — Thank you. 
+(Applause)... because that story allows those of us who make it to believe we deserve it, and by implication, those who don't make it don't deserve it. 
+We tell ourselves, in the back of our minds, and sometimes in the front of our mouths, "There must be something a little wrong with those poor people." 
+We have a wide range of beliefs about what that something wrong is. 
+Some people tell the story that poor folks are lazy freeloaders who would cheat and lie to get out of an honest day's work. 
+Others prefer the story that poor people are helpless and probably had neglectful parents that didn't read to them enough, and if they were just told what to do and shown the right path, they could make it. 
+For every story I hear demonizing low-income single mothers or absentee fathers, which is how people might think of my parents, I've got 50 that tell a different story about the same people, showing up every day and doing their best. 
+I'm not saying that some of the negative stories aren't true, but those stories allow us to not really see who people really are, because they don't paint a full picture. 
+The quarter-truths and limited plot lines have us convinced that poor people are a problem that needs fixing. 
+What if we recognized that what's working is the people and what's broken is our approach? 
+What if we realized that the experts we are looking for, the experts we need to follow, are poor people themselves? 
+What if, instead of imposing solutions, we just added fire to the already-burning flame that they have? 
+Not directing — not even empowering — but just fueling their initiative. 
+Just north of here, we have an example of what this could look like: Silicon Valley. 
+A whole venture capital industry has grown up around the belief that if people have good ideas and the desire to manifest them, we should give them lots and lots and lots of money. 
+(Laughter) Right? But where is our strategy for Theresa and Baakir? 
+There are no incubators for them, no accelerators, no fellowships. 
+How are Jobana, Sintia and Bertha really all that different from the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world? 
+Baakir has experience and a track record. 
+I'd put my money on him. 
+So, consider this an invitation to rethink a flawed strategy. 
+Let's grasp this opportunity to let go of a tired, faulty narrative and listen and look for true stories, more beautifully complex stories, about who marginalized people and families and communities are. 
+I'm going to take a minute to speak to my people. 
+We cannot wait for somebody else to get it right. 
+Let us remember what we are capable of; all that we have built with blood, sweat and dreams; all the cogs that keep turning; and the people kept afloat because of our backbreaking work. 
+Let us remember that we are magic. 
+If you need some inspiration to jog your memory, read Octavia Butler's "" Parable of the Sower. "" Listen to Reverend King's "" Letter from Birmingham Jail. "" Listen to Suheir Hammad recite "" First Writing Since, "" or Esperanza Spalding perform "" Black Gold. "" Set your gaze upon the art of Kehinde Wiley or Favianna Rodriguez. 
+Look at the hands of your grandmother or into the eyes of someone who loves you. 
+We are magic. 
+Individually, we don't have a lot of wealth and power, but collectively, we are unstoppable. 
+And we spend a lot of our time and energy organizing our power to demand change from systems that were not made for us. 
+Instead of trying to alter the fabric of existing ways, let's weave and cut some fierce new cloth. 
+Let's use some of our substantial collective power toward inventing and bringing to life new ways of being that work for us. 
+Desmond Tutu talks about the concept of ubuntu, in the context of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation process that they embarked on after apartheid. 
+He says it means, "" My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours; we belong to a bundle of life. "" A bundle of life. 
+The Truth and Reconciliation process started by elevating the voices of the unheard. 
+If this country is going to live up to its promise of liberty and justice for all, then we need to elevate the voices of our unheard, of people like Jobana, Sintia and Bertha, Theresa and Baakir. 
+We must leverage their solutions and their ideas. 
+We must listen to their true stories, their more beautifully complex stories. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm really grateful that I get a chance to play for everyone. 
+
+Hannah is excited to be going to college. 
+She heads to a campus party where she sees a guy that she has a crush on. 
+Let's call him Mike. 
+The next day, Hannah wakes up with a pounding headache. 
+She can only remember the night in flashes. 
+But what she does remember is throwing up in the hall outside Mike's room and staring at the wall silently while he was inside her, wanting it to stop, then shakily stumbling home. 
+She doesn't feel good about what happened, but she thinks, "" Maybe this is just what sex in college is? "" One in five women and one in 13 men will be sexually assaulted at some point during their college career in the United States. 
+Less than 10 percent will ever report their assault to their school or to the police. 
+And those who do, on average, wait 11 months to make the report. 
+Hannah initially just feels like dealing with what happened on her own. 
+But when she sees Mike taking girls home from parties, she's worried about them. 
+After graduation, Hannah learns that she was one of five women who Mike did the exact same thing to. 
+And this is not an unlikely scenario because 90 percent of sexual assaults are committed by repeat offenders. 
+But with such low reporting rates, it's fairly unlikely that even repeat perpetrators will be reported, much less anything happen if they are. 
+In fact, only six percent of assaults reported to the police end with the assailant spending a single day in prison. 
+Meaning, there's a 99 percent chance that they'll get away with it. 
+This means there's practically no deterrent to assault in the United States. 
+Now, I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist by training. 
+I'm interested in systems and networks and where we can concentrate our resources to do the most good. 
+So this, to me, is a tragic but a solvable problem. 
+So when the issue of campus assault started hitting the news a few years ago, it felt like a unique opportunity to make a change. 
+And so we did. 
+And what they wish they'd had in college is pretty simple; they wanted a website, one they could use at the time and place that felt safest to them with clearly written information about their reporting options, with the ability to electronically report their assault, rather than having the first step to go in and talk to someone who may or may not believe them. 
+And lastly, and perhaps most critically, with the ability to report their assault only if someone else reported the same assailant. 
+It changes the way you frame your own experience, it changes the way you think about your perpetrator, it means that if you do come forward, you'll have someone else's back and they'll have yours. 
+We created a website that actually does this and we launched it [...] in August, on two college campuses. 
+And we included a unique matching system where if Mike's first victim had come forward, saved her record, entered into the matching system and named Mike, and Mike's second victim had done the same thing a few months later, they would have matched and the verified contact information of both survivors would have been sent to the authorities at the same time for investigation and follow up. 
+If a system like this had existed for Hannah and her peers, it's more likely that they would have reported, that they would have been believed, and that Mike would have been kicked off campus, gone to jail, or at least gotten the help that he needed. 
+And if we were able to stop repeat offenders like Mike after just their second assault following a match, survivors like Hannah would never even be assaulted in the first place. 
+We could prevent 59 percent of sexual assaults just by stopping repeat perpetrators earlier on. 
+And because we're creating a real deterrent to assault, for perhaps the first time, maybe the Mikes of the world would never even try to assault anyone. 
+The type of system I'm describing, the type of system that survivors want is a type of information escrow, meaning an entity that holds on to information for you and only releases it to a third party when certain pre-agreed upon conditions are met, such as a match. 
+But the same type of system could be used in the military or even the workplace. 
+We don't have to live in a world where 99 percent of rapists get away with it. 
+We can create one where those who do wrong are held accountable, where survivors get the support and justice they deserve, where the authorities get the information they need, and where there's a real deterrent to violating the rights of another human being. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I work with a species called "" Bonobo. "" And I'm happy most of the time, because I think this is the happiest species on the planet. 
+It's kind of a well-kept secret. 
+This species lives only in the Congo. 
+And they're not in too many zoos, because of their sexual behavior. 
+Their sexual behavior is too human-like for most of us to be comfortable with. 
+(Laughter) But — (Laughter) actually, we have a lot to learn from them, because they're a very egalitarian society and they're a very empathetic society. 
+And sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they sort of set aside. 
+It permeates their entire life. 
+And it's used for communication. 
+And it's used for conflict resolution. 
+And I think perhaps somewhere in our history we sort of, divided our lives up into lots of parts. 
+We divided our world up with lots of categories. 
+And so everything sort of has a place that it has to fit. 
+But I don't think that we were that way initially. 
+There are many people who think that the animal world is hard-wired and that there's something very, very special about man. 
+Maybe it's his ability to have causal thought. 
+Maybe it's something special in his brain that allows him to have language. Maybe it's something special in his brain 
+that allows him to make tools or to have mathematics. 
+Well, I don't know. There were Tasmanians who were discovered around the 1600s and they had no fire. 
+They had no stone tools. 
+To our knowledge they had no music. 
+So when you compare them to the Bonobo, the Bonobo is a little hairier. 
+He doesn't stand quite as upright. 
+But there are a lot of similarities. 
+And I think that as we look at culture, we kind of come to understand how we got to where we are. 
+And I don't really think it's in our biology; I think we've attributed it to our biology, but I don't really think it's there. 
+So what I want to do now is introduce you to a species called the Bonobo. 
+This is Kanzi. 
+He's a Bonobo. 
+Right now, he's in a forest in Georgia. 
+His mother originally came from a forest in Africa. 
+And she came to us when she was just at puberty, about six or seven years of age. 
+Now this shows a Bonobo on your right, and a chimpanzee on your left. 
+Clearly, the chimpanzee has a little bit harder time of walking. 
+The Bonobo, although shorter than us and their arms still longer, is more upright, just as we are. 
+This shows the Bonobo compared to an australopithecine like Lucy. 
+As you can see, there's not a lot of difference between the way a Bonobo walks and the way an early australopithecine would have walked. 
+As they turn toward us you'll see that the pelvic area of early australopithecines is a little flatter and doesn't have to rotate quite so much from side to side. 
+So the — the bipedal gait is a little easier. 
+And now we see all four. 
+Video: Narrator: The wild Bonobo lives in central Africa, in the jungle encircled by the Congo River. 
+Canopied trees as tall as 40 meters, 130 feet, grow densely in the area. 
+It was a Japanese scientist who first undertook serious field studies of the Bonobo, almost three decades ago. 
+Bonobos are built slightly smaller than the chimpanzee. 
+Slim-bodied, Bonobos are by nature very gentle creatures. 
+Long and careful studies have reported many new findings on them. 
+One discovery was that wild Bonobos often walk bidpedally. 
+What's more, they are able to walk upright for long distances. 
+Susan Savage-Rumbaugh (video): Let's go say hello to Austin first and then go to the A frame. 
+SS: This is Kanzi and I, in the forest. 
+None of the things you will see in this particular video are trained. 
+None of them are tricks. 
+They all happened to be captured on film spontaneously, by NHK of Japan. 
+We have eight Bonobos. 
+Video: Look at all this stuff that's here for our campfire. 
+SS: An entire family at our research centre. 
+Video: You going to help get some sticks? 
+Good. 
+We need more sticks, too. 
+I have a lighter in my pocket if you need one. 
+That's a wasps' nest. 
+You can get it out. 
+I hope I have a lighter. 
+You can use the lighter to start the fire. 
+SS: So Kanzi is very interested in fire. 
+He doesn't do it yet without a lighter, but I think if he saw someone do it, he might be able to do — make a fire without a lighter. 
+He's learning about how to keep a fire going. 
+He's learning the uses for a fire, just by watching what we do with fire. 
+(Laughter) This is a smile on the face of a Bonobo. 
+These are happy vocalizations. 
+Video: You're happy. 
+You're very happy about this part. 
+You've got to put some water on the fire. You see the water? 
+Good job. 
+SS: Forgot to zip up the back half of his backpack. 
+But he likes to carry things from place to place. 
+Video: Austin, I hear you saying "" Austin. "" SS: He talks to other Bonobos at the lab, long-distance, farther than we can hear. 
+This is his sister. 
+This is her first time to try to drive a golf cart. 
+Video: Goodbye. 
+(Laughter) SS: She's got the pedals down, but not the wheel. 
+She switches from reverse to forward and she holds onto the wheel, rather than turns it. 
+(Laughter) Like us, she knows that that individual in the mirror is her. 
+(Music) Video: Narrator: By raising Bonobos in a culture that is both Bonobo and human, and documenting their development across two decades, scientists are exploring how cultural forces (Laughter) may have operated during human evolution. 
+His name is Nyota. 
+It means "" star "" in Swahili. 
+(Music) Panbanisha is trying to give Nyota a haircut with a pair of scissors. 
+In the wild, the parent Bonobo is known to groom its offspring. 
+Here Panbanisha uses scissors, instead of her hands, to groom Nyota. 
+Very impressive. 
+Subtle maneuvering of the hands is required to perform delicate tasks like this. 
+Nyota tries to imitate Panbanisha by using the scissors himself. 
+Realizing that Nyota might get hurt, Panbanisha, like any human mother, carefully tugs to get the scissors back. 
+He can now cut through tough animal hide. 
+SS: Kanzi's learned to make stone tools. 
+Video: Kanzi now makes his tools, just as our ancestors may have made them, two-and-a-half million years ago — by holding the rocks in both hands, to strike one against the other. 
+He has learned that by using both hands and aiming his glancing blows, he can make much larger, sharper flakes. 
+Kanzi chooses a flake he thinks is sharp enough. 
+The tough hide is difficult to cut, even with a knife. 
+The rock that Kanzi is using is extremely hard and ideal for stone tool making, but difficult to handle, requiring great skill. 
+Kanzi's rock is from Gona, Ethiopia and is identical to that used by our African ancestors two-and-a-half million years ago. 
+These are the rocks Kanzi used and these are the flakes he made. 
+The flat sharp edges are like knife blades. 
+Compare them to the tools our ancestors used; they bear a striking resemblance to Kanzi's. 
+Panbanisha is longing to go for a walk in the woods. 
+She keeps staring out the window. 
+SS: This is — let me show you something we didn't think they would do. 
+Video: For several days now, Panbanisha has not been outside. 
+SS: I normally talk about language. 
+Video: Then Panbanisha does something unexpected. 
+SS: But since I'm advised not to do what I normally do, I haven't told you that these apes have language. 
+It's a geometric language. 
+Video: She takes a piece of chalk and begins writing something on the floor. 
+What is she writing? 
+SS: She's also saying the name of that, with her voice. 
+Video: Now she comes up to Dr. Sue and starts writing again. 
+SS: These are her symbols on her keyboard. 
+(Music) They speak when she touches them. 
+Video: Panbanisha is communicating to Dr. Sue where she wants to go. 
+"" A frame "" represents a hut in the woods. 
+Compare the chalk writing with the lexigram on the keyboard. 
+Panbanisha began writing the lexigrams on the forest floor. 
+SS (video): Very nice. Beautiful, Panbanisha. 
+SS: At first we didn't really realize what she was doing, until we stood back and looked at it and rotated it. 
+Video: This lexigram also refers to a place in the woods. 
+The curved line is very similar to the lexigram. 
+The next symbol Panbanisha writes represents "" collar. "" It indicates the collar that Panbanisha must wear when she goes out. 
+SS: That's an institutional requirement. 
+Video: This symbol is not as clear as the others, but one can see Panbanisha is trying to produce a curved line and several straight lines. 
+Researchers began to record what Panbanisha said, by writing lexigrams on the floor with chalk. 
+Panbanisha watched. 
+Soon she began to write as well. 
+The Bonobo's abilities have stunned scientists around the world. 
+How did they develop? 
+SS (video): We found that the most important thing for permitting Bonobos to acquire language is not to teach them. 
+It's simply to use language around them, because the driving force in language acquisition is to understand what others, that are important to you, are saying to you. 
+Once you have that capacity, the ability to produce language comes rather naturally and rather freely. 
+So we want to create an environment in which Bonobos, like all of the individuals with whom they are interacting — we want to create an environment in which they have fun, and an environment in which the others are meaningful individuals for them. 
+Narrator: This environment brings out unexpected potential in Kanzi and Panbanisha. 
+Panbanisha is enjoying playing her harmonica, until Nyota, now one year old, steals it. 
+Then he peers eagerly into his mother's mouth. 
+Is he looking for where the sound came from? 
+Dr. Sue thinks it's important to allow such curiosity to flourish. 
+This time Panbanisha is playing the electric piano. 
+She wasn't forced to learn the piano; she saw a researcher play the instrument and took an interest. 
+Researcher: Go ahead. Go ahead. I'm listening. 
+Do that real fast part that you did. Yeah, that part. 
+Narrator: Kanzi plays the xylophone; using both hands he enthusiastically accompanies Dr. Sue's singing. 
+Kanzi and Panbanisha are stimulated by this fun-filled environment, which promotes the emergence of these cultural capabilities. 
+(Laughter) Researcher: OK, now get the monsters. Get them. 
+Take the cherries too. 
+Now watch out, stay away from them now. 
+Now you can chase them again. Time to chase them. 
+Now you have to stay away. Get away. 
+Run away. Run. 
+Now we can chase them again. Go get them. 
+Oh no! 
+Good Kanzi. Very good. Thank you so much. 
+Narrator: None of us, Bonobo or human, can possibly even imagine? 
+SS: So we have a bi-species environment, we call it a "" panhomoculture. "" We're learning how to become like them. 
+We're learning how to communicate with them, in really high-pitched tones. 
+We're learning that they probably have a language in the wild. 
+And they're learning to become like us. 
+Because we believe that it's not biology; it's culture. 
+So we're sharing tools and technology and language with another species. 
+Thank you. 
+
+Thank you. 
+It's a real pleasure to be here. 
+I last did a TED Talk I think about seven years ago or so. 
+I talked about spaghetti sauce. 
+And so many people, I guess, watch those videos. 
+People have been coming up to me ever since to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce, which is a wonderful thing in the short term — (Laughter) but it's proven to be less than ideal over seven years. 
+And so I though I would come and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me. 
+(Laughter) The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make. 
+And so I thought I would tell a story about someone who made one of the most precious objects of his era. 
+And the man's name is Carl Norden. 
+Carl Norden was born in 1880. 
+And he was Swiss. 
+And of course, the Swiss can be divided into two general categories: those who make small, exquisite, expensive objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small, exquisite, expensive objects. 
+And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp. 
+He's an engineer. 
+He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich. 
+In fact, one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin who would go on to break small, expensive, exquisite objects. 
+And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl. 
+And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word. 
+He wears three-piece suits; and he has a very, very small, important mustache; and he is domineering and narcissistic and driven and has an extraordinary ego; and he works 16-hour days; and he has very strong feelings about alternating current; and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness; and he drinks lots of coffee; and he does his best work sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours in complete silence with nothing but a slide rule. 
+In any case, Carl Norden emigrates to the United States just before the First World War and sets up shop on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. 
+And he becomes obsessed with the question of how to drop bombs from an airplane. 
+Now if you think about it, in the age before GPS and radar, that was obviously a really difficult problem. 
+It's a complicated physics problem. 
+You've got a plane that's thousands of feet up in the air, going at hundreds of miles an hour, and you're trying to drop an object, a bomb, towards some stationary target in the face of all kinds of winds and cloud cover and all kinds of other impediments. 
+And all sorts of people, moving up to the First World War and between the wars, tried to solve this problem, and nearly everybody came up short. 
+The bombsights that were available were incredibly crude. 
+But Carl Norden is really the one who cracks the code. 
+And he comes up with this incredibly complicated device. 
+It weighs about 50 lbs. 
+It's called the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. 
+And it has all kinds of levers and ball-bearings and gadgets and gauges. 
+And he makes this complicated thing. 
+And what he allows people to do is he makes the bombardier take this particular object, visually sight the target, because they're in the Plexiglas cone of the bomber, and then they plug in the altitude of the plane, the speed of the plane, the speed of the wind and the coordinates of the target. 
+And the bombsight will tell him when to drop the bomb. 
+And as Norden famously says, "" Before that bombsight came along, bombs would routinely miss their target by a mile or more. "" But he said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft. 
+Now I cannot tell you how incredibly excited the U.S. military was by the news of the Norden bombsight. 
+It was like manna from heaven. 
+Here was an army that had just had experience in the First World War, where millions of men fought each other in the trenches, getting nowhere, making no progress, and here someone had come up with a device that allowed them to fly up in the skies high above enemy territory and destroy whatever they wanted with pinpoint accuracy. 
+And the U.S. military spends 1.5 billion dollars — billion dollars in 1940 dollars — developing the Norden bombsight. 
+And to put that in perspective, the total cost of the Manhattan project was three billion dollars. 
+Half as much money was spent on this Norden bombsight as was spent on the most famous military-industrial project of the modern era. 
+And there were people, strategists, within the U.S. military who genuinely thought that this single device was going to spell the difference between defeat and victory when it came to the battle against the Nazis and against the Japanese. 
+And for Norden as well, this device had incredible moral importance, because Norden was a committed Christian. 
+In fact, he would always get upset when people referred to the bombsight as his invention, because in his eyes, only God could invent things. 
+He was simply the instrument of God's will. 
+And what was God's will? 
+Well God's will was that the amount of suffering in any kind of war be reduced to as small an amount as possible. 
+And what did the Norden bombsight do? 
+Well it allowed you to do that. 
+It allowed you to bomb only those things that you absolutely needed and wanted to bomb. 
+So in the years leading up to the Second World War, the U.S. military buys 90,000 of these Norden bombsights at a cost of $14,000 each — again, in 1940 dollars, that's a lot of money. 
+And they trained 50,000 bombardiers on how to use them — long extensive, months-long training sessions — because these things are essentially analog computers; they're not easy to use. 
+And they make every one of those bombardiers take an oath, to swear that if they're ever captured, they will not divulge a single detail of this particular device to the enemy, because it's imperative the enemy not get their hands on this absolutely essential piece of technology. 
+And whenever the Norden bombsight is taken onto a plane, it's escorted there by a series of armed guards. 
+And it's carried in a box with a canvas shroud over it. 
+And the box is handcuffed to one of the guards. 
+It's never allowed to be photographed. 
+And there's a little incendiary device inside of it, so that, if the plane ever crashes, it will be destroyed and there's no way the enemy can ever get their hands on it. 
+The Norden bombsight is the Holy Grail. 
+So what happens during the Second World War? 
+Well, it turns out it's not the Holy Grail. 
+In practice, the Norden bombsight can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft., but that's under perfect conditions. 
+And of course, in wartime, conditions aren't perfect. 
+First of all, it's really hard to use — really hard to use. 
+And not all of the people who are of those 50,000 men who are bombardiers have the ability to properly program an analog computer. 
+Secondly, it breaks down a lot. 
+It's full of all kinds of gyroscopes and pulleys and gadgets and ball-bearings, and they don't work as well as they ought to in the heat of battle. 
+Thirdly, when Norden was making his calculations, he assumed that a plane would be flying at a relatively slow speed at low altitudes. 
+Well in a real war, you can't do that; you'll get shot down. 
+So they started flying them at high altitudes at incredibly high speeds. 
+And the Norden bombsight doesn't work as well under those conditions. 
+But most of all, the Norden bombsight required the bombardier to make visual contact with the target. 
+But of course, what happens in real life? 
+There are clouds, right. 
+It needs cloudless sky to be really accurate. 
+Well how many cloudless skies do you think there were above Central Europe between 1940 and 1945? 
+Not a lot. 
+And then to give you a sense of just how inaccurate the Norden bombsight was, there was a famous case in 1944 where the Allies bombed a chemical plant in Leuna, Germany. 
+And the chemical plant comprised 757 acres. 
+And over the course of 22 bombing missions, the Allies dropped 85,000 bombs on this 757 acre chemical plant, using the Norden bombsight. 
+Well what percentage of those bombs do you think actually landed inside the 700-acre perimeter of the plant? 
+10 percent. 10 percent. 
+And of those 10 percent that landed, 16 percent didn't even go off; they were duds. 
+The Leuna chemical plant, after one of the most extensive bombings in the history of the war, was up and running within weeks. 
+And by the way, all those precautions to keep the Norden bombsight out of the hands of the Nazis? 
+Well it turns out that Carl Norden, as a proper Swiss, was very enamored of German engineers. 
+So in the 1930s, he hired a whole bunch of them, including a man named Hermann Long who, in 1938, gave a complete set of the plans for the Norden bombsight to the Nazis. 
+So they had their own Norden bombsight throughout the entire war — which also, by the way, didn't work very well. 
+(Laughter) So why do we talk about the Norden bombsight? 
+Well because we live in an age where there are lots and lots of Norden bombsights. 
+We live in a time where there are all kinds of really, really smart people running around, saying that they've invented gadgets that will forever change our world. 
+They've invented websites that will allow people to be free. 
+They've invented some kind of this thing, or this thing, or this thing that will make our world forever better. 
+If you go into the military, you'll find lots of Carl Nordens as well. 
+If you go to the Pentagon, they will say, "" You know what, now we really can put a bomb inside a pickle barrel at 20,000 ft. "" And you know what, it's true; they actually can do that now. 
+But we need to be very clear about how little that means. 
+In the Iraq War, at the beginning of the first Iraq War, the U.S. military, the air force, sent two squadrons of F-15E Fighter Eagles to the Iraqi desert equipped with these five million dollar cameras that allowed them to see the entire desert floor. 
+And their mission was to find and to destroy — remember the Scud missile launchers, those surface-to-air missiles that the Iraqis were launching at the Israelis? 
+The mission of the two squadrons was to get rid of all the Scud missile launchers. 
+And so they flew missions day and night, and they dropped thousands of bombs, and they fired thousands of missiles in an attempt to get rid of this particular scourge. 
+And after the war was over, there was an audit done — as the army always does, the air force always does — and they asked the question: how many Scuds did we actually destroy? 
+You know what the answer was? 
+Zero, not a single one. 
+Now why is that? 
+Is it because their weapons weren't accurate? 
+Oh no, they were brilliantly accurate. 
+They could have destroyed this little thing right here from 25,000 ft. 
+The issue was they didn't know where the Scud launchers were. 
+The problem with bombs and pickle barrels is not getting the bomb inside the pickle barrel, it's knowing how to find the pickle barrel. 
+That's always been the harder problem when it comes to fighting wars. 
+Or take the battle in Afghanistan. 
+What is the signature weapon of the CIA's war in Northwest Pakistan? 
+It's the drone. What is the drone? 
+Well it is the grandson of the Norden Mark 15 bombsight. 
+It is this weapon of devastating accuracy and precision. 
+And over the course of the last six years in Northwest Pakistan, the CIA has flown hundreds of drone missiles, and it's used those drones to kill 2,000 suspected Pakistani and Taliban militants. 
+Now what is the accuracy of those drones? 
+Well it's extraordinary. 
+We think we're now at 95 percent accuracy when it comes to drone strikes. 
+95 percent of the people we kill need to be killed, right? 
+That is one of the most extraordinary records in the history of modern warfare. 
+But do you know what the crucial thing is? 
+In that exact same period that we've been using these drones with devastating accuracy, the number of attacks, of suicide attacks and terrorist attacks, against American forces in Afghanistan has increased tenfold. 
+As we have gotten more and more efficient in killing them, they have become angrier and angrier and more and more motivated to kill us. 
+I have not described to you a success story. 
+I've described to you the opposite of a success story. 
+And this is the problem with our infatuation with the things we make. 
+We think the things we make can solve our problems, but our problems are much more complex than that. 
+The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have, it's how you use the bombs you have, and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all. 
+There's a postscript to the Norden story of Carl Norden and his fabulous bombsight. 
+And that is, on August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay flew over Japan and, using a Norden bombsight, dropped a very large thermonuclear device on the city of Hiroshima. 
+And as was typical with the Norden bombsight, the bomb actually missed its target by 800 ft. 
+But of course, it didn't matter. 
+And that's the greatest irony of all when it comes to the Norden bombsight. 
+the air force's 1.5 billion dollar bombsight was used to drop its three billion dollar bomb, which didn't need a bombsight at all. 
+Meanwhile, back in New York, no one told Carl Norden that his bombsight was used over Hiroshima. 
+He was a committed Christian. 
+He thought he had designed something that would reduce the toll of suffering in war. 
+It would have broken his heart. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Life is about opportunities, creating them and embracing them, and for me, that was the Olympic dream. 
+That's what defined me. That was my bliss. 
+As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team, headed towards the Winter Olympics, I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates. 
+As we made our way up towards the spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney, it was the perfect autumn day: sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream. 
+Life was good. 
+We'd been on our bikes for around five and half hours when we got to the part of the ride that I loved, and that was the hills, because I loved the hills. 
+And I got up off the seat of my bike, and I started pumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air, I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked up to see the sun shining in my face. 
+And then everything went black. 
+Where was I? What was happening? 
+My body was consumed by pain. 
+I'd been hit by a speeding utility truck with only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride. 
+I was airlifted from the scene of the accident by a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney. 
+I had extensive and life-threatening injuries. 
+I'd broken my neck and my back in six places. 
+I broke five ribs on my left side. 
+I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone. 
+I broke some bones in my feet. 
+My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel. 
+My head was cut open across the front, lifted back, exposing the skull underneath. 
+I had head injures. I had internal injuries. 
+I had massive blood loss. In fact, I lost about five liters of blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold. 
+By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing. 
+I was having a really bad day. (Laughter) For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions. 
+I had an awareness of being in my body, but also being out of my body, somewhere else, watching from above as if it was happening to someone else. 
+Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken? 
+But this voice kept calling me: "" Come on, stay with me. "" "No. It's too hard." 
+"Come on. This is our opportunity." 
+"No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me." 
+"Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together." 
+I was at a crossroads. 
+I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever. 
+It was the fight of my life. 
+After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body, and the internal bleeding stopped. 
+The next concern was whether I would walk again, because I was paralyzed from the waist down. 
+They said to my parents, the neck break was a stable fracture, but the back was completely crushed. 
+The vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut, stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces. 
+They'd have to operate. 
+They went in. They put me on a beanbag. They cut me, literally cut me in half, I have a scar that wraps around my entire body. 
+They picked as much broken bone as they could that had lodged in my spinal cord. 
+They took out two of my broken ribs, and they rebuilt my back, L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib, they fused T12, L1 and L2 together. 
+Then they stitched me up. They took an entire hour to stitch me up. 
+I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excited that the operation had been a success because at that stage I had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes, and I thought, "" Great, because I'm going to the Olympics! "" (Laughter) I had no idea. That's the sort of thing that happens to someone else, not me, surely. 
+But then the doctor came over to me, and she said, "" Janine, the operation was a success, and we've picked as much bone out of your spinal cord as we could, but the damage is permanent. 
+The central nervous system nerves, there is no cure. 
+You're what we call a partial paraplegic, and you'll have all of the injuries that go along with that. 
+You have no feeling from the waist down, and at most, you might get 10- or 20-percent return. 
+You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life. 
+You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life. 
+And if you walk again, it will be with calipers and a walking frame. "" And then she said, "" Janine, you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life, because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before. "" I tried to grasp what she was saying. 
+I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done. 
+If I couldn't do that, then what could I do? 
+And the question I asked myself is, if I couldn't do that, then who was I? 
+They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal. 
+I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed. 
+I had no movement in my legs. I had tight stockings on to protect from blood clots. 
+I had one arm in plaster, one arm tied down by drips. 
+I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my head and I saw my world through a mirror that was suspended above my head. 
+I shared the ward with five other people, and the amazing thing is that because we were all lying paralyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like. 
+How amazing is that? How often in life do you get to make friendships, judgment-free, purely based on spirit? 
+And there were no superficial conversations as we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears, and our hopes for life after the spinal ward. 
+I remember one night, one of the nurses came in, Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws. 
+He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said, "Start threading them together." 
+Well, there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward, so we did. 
+And when we'd finished, he went around silently and he joined all of the straws up till it looped around the whole ward, and then he said, "Okay, everybody, hold on to your straws." 
+And we did. And he said, "" Right. Now we're all connected. "" And as we held on, and we breathed as one, we knew we weren't on this journey alone. 
+And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward, there were moments of incredible depth and richness, of authenticity and connection that I had never experienced before. 
+And each of us knew that when we left the spinal ward we would never be the same. 
+After six months, it was time to go home. 
+I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair, wrapped in a plaster body cast, and feeling the sun on my face for the first time. 
+I soaked it up and I thought, how could I ever have taken this for granted? 
+I felt so incredibly grateful for my life. 
+But before I left the hospital, the head nurse had said to me, "" Janine, I want you to be ready, because when you get home, something's going to happen. "" And I said, "" What? "" And she said, "You're going to get depressed." 
+And I said, "" Not me, not Janine the Machine, "" which was my nickname. 
+She said, "" You are, because, see, it happens to everyone. 
+In the spinal ward, that's normal. 
+You're in a wheelchair. That's normal. 
+But you're going to get home and realize how different life is. "" And I got home and something happened. 
+I realized Sister Sam was right. 
+I did get depressed. 
+I was in my wheelchair. I had no feeling from the waist down, attached to a catheter bottle. I couldn't walk. 
+I'd lost so much weight in the hospital I now weighed about 80 pounds. 
+And I wanted to give up. 
+All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door. 
+I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back. 
+And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed, and saying, "" I wonder if life will ever be good again. "" And I thought, "" How could it? Because I've lost everything that I valued, everything that I'd worked towards. 
+Gone. "" And the question I asked was, "" Why me? Why me? "" And then I remembered my friends that were still in the spinal ward, particularly Maria. 
+Maria was in a car accident, and she woke up on her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic, had no movement from the neck down, had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk. 
+They told me, "" We're going to move you next to her because we think it will be good for her. "" I was worried. I didn't know how I'd react to being next to her. 
+I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing, because Maria always smiled. 
+She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again, albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once. 
+And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance. 
+And I realized that this wasn't just my life. 
+It was life itself. I realized that this wasn't just my pain. 
+It was everybody's pain. And then I knew, just like before, that I had a choice. I could keep fighting this or I could let go and accept not only my body but the circumstances of my life. 
+And then I stopped asking, "" Why me? "" And I started to ask, "" Why not me? "" And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottom is actually the perfect place to start. 
+I had never before thought of myself as a creative person. 
+I was an athlete. My body was a machine. 
+But now I was about to embark on the most creative project that any of us could ever do: that of rebuilding a life. 
+And even though I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, in that uncertainty came a sense of freedom. 
+I was no longer tied to a set path. 
+I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities. 
+And that realization was about to change my life. 
+Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast, an airplane flew overhead, and I looked up, and I thought to myself, "" That's it! 
+If I can't walk, then I might as well fly. "" I said, "" Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly. "" She said, "" That's nice, dear. "" (Laughter) I said, "" Pass me the yellow pages. "" She passed me the phone book, I rang up the flying school, I made a booking, said I'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight. 
+They said, "" You know, when do you want to come out? "" I said, "" Well, I have to get a friend to drive me out because I can't drive. Sort of can't walk either. 
+Is that a problem? "" I made a booking, and weeks later my friend Chris and my mom drove me out to the airport, all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls. (Laughter) I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidate to get a pilot's license. (Laughter) I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand. 
+I said, "" Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson. "" And they took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws. 
+"You get her." "No, no, you take her." 
+Finally this guy comes out. He goes, "Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm going to take you flying." 
+I go, "" Great. "" And so they drive me down, they get me out on the tarmac, and there was this red, white and blue airplane. 
+It was beautiful. They lifted me into the cockpit. 
+They had to slide me up on the wing, put me in the cockpit. 
+They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere. 
+I'm going, "" Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do? "" Andrew the instructor got in the front, started the airplane up. 
+He said, "" Would you like to have a go at taxiing? "" That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedals to control the airplane on the ground. 
+I said, "" No, I can't use my legs. "" He went, "" Oh. "" I said, "" But I can use my hands, "" and he said, "" Okay. "" So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power. 
+And as we took off down the runway, and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne, I had the most incredible sense of freedom. 
+And Andrew said to me, as we got over the training area, "You see that mountain over there?" 
+And I said, "" Yeah. "" And he said, "" Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain. "" And as I looked up, I realized that he was pointing towards the Blue Mountains where the journey had begun. 
+And I took the controls, and I was flying. 
+And I was a long, long way from that spinal ward, and I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot. 
+Didn't know how on Earth I'd ever pass a medical. 
+But I'd worry about that later, because right now I had a dream. 
+So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan. 
+And I practiced my walking as much as I could, and I went from the point of two people holding me up to one person holding me up to the point where I could walk around the furniture as long as it wasn't too far apart. 
+And then I made great progression to the point where I could walk around the house, holding onto the walls, like this, and Mom said she was forever following me, wiping off my fingerprints. (Laughter) But at least she always knew where I was. 
+So while the doctors continued to operate and put my body back together again, I went on with my theory study, and then eventually, and amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical, and that was my green light to fly. 
+And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school, way out of my comfort zone, all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots, you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast, and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls, my bag of medication and catheters and my limp, and they used to look at me and think, "Oh, who is she kidding? She's never going to be able to do this." 
+And sometimes I thought that too. 
+But that didn't matter, because now there was something inside that burned that far outweighed my injuries. 
+And little goals kept me going along the way, and eventually I got my private pilot's license, and then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia. 
+And then I learned to fly an airplane with two engines and I got my twin engine rating. 
+And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weather and got my instrument rating. 
+And then I got my commercial pilot's license. 
+And then I got my instructor rating. 
+And then I found myself back at that same school where I'd gone for that very first flight, teaching other people how to fly, just under 18 months after I'd left the spinal ward. 
+(Applause) And then I thought, "" Why stop there? 
+Why not learn to fly upside down? "" And I did, and I learned to fly upside down and became an aerobatics flying instructor. 
+And Mom and Dad? Never been up. 
+But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited, it was my spirit that was unstoppable. 
+The philosopher Lao Tzu once said, "" When you let go of what you are, you become what you might be. "" I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I was that I was able to create a completely new life. 
+It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should have that I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me. 
+I now know that my real strength never came from my body, and although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically, who I am is unchanged. 
+The pilot light inside of me was still a light, just as it is in each and every one of us. 
+I know that I'm not my body, and I also know that you're not yours. 
+And then it no longer matters what you look like, where you come from, or what you do for a living. 
+All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanity by living our lives as the ultimate creative expression of who we really are, because we are all connected by millions and millions of straws, and it's time to join those up and to hang on. 
+And if we are to move towards our collective bliss, it's time we shed our focus on the physical and instead embrace the virtues of the heart. 
+So raise your straws if you'll join me. 
+Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. 
+
+Virtual reality started for me in sort of an unusual place. 
+It was the 1970s. 
+I got into the field very young: I was seven years old. 
+And the tool that I used to access virtual reality was the Evel Knievel stunt cycle. 
+This is a commercial for that particular item: (Video) Voice-over: What a jump! 
+That gyro-power sends him over 100 feet at top speed. 
+I rode this motorcycle everywhere. 
+And I was there with Evel Knievel; we jumped the Snake River Canyon together. 
+I wanted the rocket. 
+I never got the rocket, I only got the motorcycle. 
+I felt so connected to this world. 
+I didn't want to be a storyteller when I grew up, I wanted to be stuntman. 
+I was there. Evel Knievel was my friend. 
+I had so much empathy for him. 
+But it didn't work out. (Laughter) I went to art school. 
+I started making music videos. 
+And this is one of the early music videos that I made: (Music: "" Touch the Sky "" by Kanye West) CM: You may notice some slight similarities here. 
+(Laughter) And I got that rocket. (Laughter) 
+So, now I'm a filmmaker, or, the beginning of a filmmaker, and I started using the tools that are available to me as a filmmaker to try to tell the most compelling stories that I can to an audience. 
+And film is this incredible medium that allows us to feel empathy for people that are very different than us and worlds completely foreign from our own. 
+Unfortunately, Evel Knievel did not feel the same empathy for us that we felt for him, and he sued us for this video — (Laughter) — shortly thereafter. 
+On the upside, the man that I worshipped as a child, the man that I wanted to become as an adult, I was finally able to get his autograph. 
+(Applause) Let's talk about film now. 
+Film, it's an incredible medium, but essentially, it's the same now as it was then. 
+It's a group of rectangles that are played in a sequence. 
+And we've done incredible things with those rectangles. 
+But I started thinking about, is there a way that I can use modern and developing technologies to tell stories in different ways and tell different kinds of stories that maybe I couldn't tell using the traditional tools of filmmaking that we've been using for 100 years? 
+So I started experimenting, and what I was trying to do was to build the ultimate empathy machine. 
+And here's one of the early experiments: (Music) So this is called "" The Wilderness Downtown. "" It was a collaboration with Arcade Fire. 
+It asked you to put in the address where you grew up at the beginning of it. 
+It's a website. 
+And out of it starts growing these little boxes with different browser windows. 
+And you see this teenager running down a street, and then you see Google Street View and Google Maps imagery and you realize the street he's running down is yours. 
+And this was great, and I saw people having an even deeper emotional reaction to this than the things that I had made in rectangles. 
+And I'm essentially taking a piece of your history and putting it inside the framing of the story. 
+But then I started thinking, okay, well that's a part of you, but how do I put all of you inside of the frame? 
+So to do that, I started making art installations. 
+And this is one called "" The Treachery of Sanctuary. "" It's a triptych. I'm going to show you the third panel. 
+(Music) So now I've got you inside of the frame, and I saw people having even more visceral emotional reactions to this work than the previous one. 
+But then I started thinking about frames, and what do they represent? 
+And a frame is just a window. 
+I mean, all the media that we watch — television, cinema — they're these windows into these other worlds. 
+And I thought, well, great. I got you in a frame. 
+But I don't want you in the frame, I don't want you in the window, I want you through the window, I want you on the other side, in the world, inhabiting the world. 
+So that leads me back to virtual reality. 
+Let's talk about virtual reality. 
+Unfortunately, talking about virtual reality is like dancing about architecture. 
+(Laughter) So, it's difficult to explain. Why is it difficult to explain? 
+It's difficult because it's a very experiential medium. 
+You feel your way inside of it. 
+It's a machine, but inside of it, it feels like real life, it feels like truth. 
+And you feel present in the world that you're inside and you feel present with the people that you're inside of it with. 
+So, I'm going to show you a demo of a virtual reality film: a full-screen version of all the information that we capture when we shoot virtual reality. 
+So we're shooting in every direction. 
+This is a camera system that we built that has 3D cameras that look in every direction and binaural microphones that face in every direction. 
+We take this and we build, basically, a sphere of a world that you inhabit. 
+So what I'm going to show you is not a view into the world, it's basically the whole world stretched into a rectangle. 
+So this film is called "" Clouds Over Sidra, "" and it was made in conjunction with our virtual reality company called VRSE and the United Nations, and a co-collaborator named Gabo Arora. 
+And we went to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan in December and shot the story of a 12-year-old girl there named Sidra. 
+And she and her family fled Syria through the desert into Jordan and she's been living in this camp for the last year and a half. 
+(Video) Sidra: My name is Sidra. 
+I am 12 years old. 
+I am in the fifth grade. 
+I am from Syria, in the Daraa Province, Inkhil City. 
+I have lived here in the Zaatari camp in Jordan for the last year and a half. 
+I have a big family: three brothers, one is a baby. 
+He cries a lot. 
+I asked my father if I cried when I was a baby and he says I did not. 
+I think I was a stronger baby than my brother. 
+CM: So, when you're inside of the headset. 
+you're not seeing it like this. 
+You're looking around through this world. 
+You'll notice you see full 360 degrees, in all directions. 
+And when you're sitting there in her room, watching her, you're not watching it through a television screen, you're not watching it through a window, you're sitting there with her. 
+When you look down, you're sitting on the same ground that she's sitting on. 
+And because of that, you feel her humanity in a deeper way. 
+You empathize with her in a deeper way. 
+And I think that we can change minds with this machine. 
+And we've already started to try to change a few. 
+So we took this film to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. 
+And we showed it to a group of people whose decisions affect the lives of millions of people. 
+And these are people who might not otherwise be sitting in a tent in a refugee camp in Jordan. 
+But in January, one afternoon in Switzerland, they suddenly all found themselves there. 
+(Applause) And they were affected by it. 
+So we're going to make more of them. 
+We're working with the United Nations right now to shoot a whole series of these films. 
+We just finished shooting a story in Liberia. 
+And now, we're going to shoot a story in India. 
+And we're taking these films, and we're showing them at the United Nations to people that work there and people that are visiting there. 
+And we're showing them to the people that can actually change the lives of the people inside of the films. 
+And that's where I think we just start to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality. 
+It's not a video game peripheral. 
+It connects humans to other humans in a profound way that I've never seen before in any other form of media. 
+And it can change people's perception of each other. 
+And that's how I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world. 
+So, it's a machine, but through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and we become more connected. 
+And ultimately, we become more human. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to talk to you today about the scale of the scientific effort that goes into making the headlines you see in the paper. 
+Headlines that look like this when they have to do with climate change, and headlines that look like this when they have to do with air quality or smog. 
+They are both two branches of the same field of atmospheric science. 
+Recently the headlines looked like this when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, put out their report on the state of understanding of the atmospheric system. 
+That report was written by 620 scientists from 40 countries. 
+They wrote almost a thousand pages on the topic. 
+And all of those pages were reviewed by another 400-plus scientists and reviewers, from 113 countries. 
+It's a big community. It's such a big community, in fact, that our annual gathering is the largest scientific meeting in the world. 
+Over 15,000 scientists go to San Francisco every year for that. 
+And every one of those scientists is in a research group, and every research group studies a wide variety of topics. 
+For us at Cambridge, it's as varied as the El Niño oscillation, which affects weather and climate, to the assimilation of satellite data, to emissions from crops that produce biofuels, which is what I happen to study. 
+And in each one of these research areas, of which there are even more, there are PhD students, like me, and we study incredibly narrow topics, things as narrow as a few processes or a few molecules. 
+And one of the molecules I study is called isoprene, which is here. It's a small organic molecule. You've probably never heard of it. 
+The weight of a paper clip is approximately equal to 900 zeta-illion — 10 to the 21st — molecules of isoprene. 
+But despite its very small weight, enough of it is emitted into the atmosphere every year to equal the weight of all the people on the planet. 
+It's a huge amount of stuff. It's equal to the weight of methane. 
+And because it's so much stuff, it's really important for the atmospheric system. 
+Because it's important to the atmospheric system, we go to all lengths to study this thing. 
+We blow it up and look at the pieces. 
+This is the EUPHORE Smog Chamber in Spain. 
+Atmospheric explosions, or full combustion, takes about 15,000 times longer than what happens in your car. 
+But still, we look at the pieces. 
+We run enormous models on supercomputers; this is what I happen to do. 
+Our models have hundreds of thousands of grid boxes calculating hundreds of variables each, on minute timescales. 
+And it takes weeks to perform our integrations. 
+And we perform dozens of integrations in order to understand what's happening. 
+We also fly all over the world looking for this thing. 
+I recently joined a field campaign in Malaysia. There are others. 
+We found a global atmospheric watchtower there, in the middle of the rainforest, and hung hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of scientific equipment off this tower, to look for isoprene, and of course, other things while we were there. 
+This is the tower in the middle of the rainforest, from above. 
+And this is the tower from below. 
+And on part of that field campaign we even brought an aircraft with us. 
+And this plane, the model, BA146, which was run by FAAM, normally flies 120 to 130 people. 
+So maybe you took a similar aircraft to get here today. 
+But we didn't just fly it. We were flying at 100 meters above the top of the canopy to measure this molecule — incredibly dangerous stuff. 
+We have to fly at a special incline in order to make the measurements. 
+We hire military and test pilots to do the maneuvering. 
+We have to get special flight clearance. 
+And as you come around the banks in these valleys, the forces can get up to two Gs. 
+And the scientists have to be completely harnessed in in order to make measurements while they're on board. 
+So, as you can imagine, the inside of this aircraft doesn't look like any plane you would take on vacation. 
+It's a flying laboratory that we took to make measurements in the region of this molecule. 
+We do all of this to understand the chemistry of one molecule. 
+And when one student like me has some sort of inclination or understanding about that molecule, they write one scientific paper on the subject. 
+And out of that field campaign we'll probably get a few dozen papers on a few dozen processes or molecules. 
+And as a body of knowledge builds up, it will form one subsection, or one sub-subsection of an assessment like the IPCC, although we have others. 
+And each one of the 11 chapters of the IPCC has six to ten subsections. 
+So you can imagine the scale of the effort. 
+In each one of those assessments that we write, we always tag on a summary, and the summary is written for a non-scientific audience. 
+And we hand that summary to journalists and policy makers, in order to make headlines like these. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Those of you who know me know how passionate I am about opening the space frontier. 
+So when I had the chance to give the world's expert in gravity the experience of zero gravity, it was incredible. 
+And I want to tell you that story. 
+I first met him through the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics. 
+It's a competition we're holding, the second X PRIZE, for the first team to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days. 
+We have something called the Genome 100 — 100 individuals we're sequencing as part of that. 
+Craig Venter chairs that event. 
+And I met Professor Hawking, and he said his dream was to travel into space. 
+And I said, "" I can't take you there, but I can take you into weightlessness into zero-g. 
+And he said, on the spot, "" Absolutely, yes. "" Well, the only way to experience zero-g on Earth is actually with parabolic flight, weightless flight. 
+You take an airplane, you fly over the top, you're weightless for 25 seconds. 
+Come back down, you weigh twice as much. 
+You do it again and again. 
+You can get eight, 10 minutes of weightlessness — how NASA's trained their astronauts for so long. 
+We set out to do this. 
+It took us 11 years to become operational. 
+And we announced that we were going to fly Stephen Hawking. 
+We had one government agency and one company aircraft operator say, you're crazy, don't do that, you're going kill the guy. 
+(Laughter) And he wanted to go. 
+We worked hard to get all the permissions. 
+And six months later, we sat down at Kennedy Space Center. 
+We had a press conference, we announced our intent to do one zero-g parabola, give him 25 seconds of zero-g. 
+And if it went really well, we might do three parabolas. 
+Well, we asked him why he wanted to go up and do this. 
+And what he said, for me, was very moving. 
+He said, "" Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster... 
+I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space. 
+I therefore want to encourage public interest in space. "" We took him out to the Kennedy Space Center, up inside the NASA vehicle, into the back of the zero-g airplane. 
+We had about 20 people who made donations — we raised $150,000 in donations for children's charities — who flew with us. 
+A few TEDsters here. 
+We set up a whole ER. 
+We had four emergency room doctors and two nurses on board the airplane. 
+We were monitoring his PO2 of his blood, his heart rate, his blood pressure. 
+We had everything all set in case of an emergency; God knows, you don't want to hurt this world-renowned expert. 
+We took off from the shuttle landing facility, where the shuttle takes off and lands. 
+And my partner Byron Lichtenberg and I carefully suspended him into zero-g. 
+Once he was there, [we] let him go to experience what weightlessness was truly like. 
+And after that first parabola, you know, the doc said everything is great. He was smiling, and we said go. 
+So we did a second parabola. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And a third. (Applause) 
+We actually floated an apple in homage to Sir Isaac Newton because Professor Hawking holds the same chair at Cambridge that Isaac Newton did. 
+And we did a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth. 
+(Laughter) And a seventh and an eighth. 
+And this man does not look like a 65-year-old wheelchair-bound man. 
+(Laughter) He was so happy. 
+We are living on a precious jewel, and it's during our lifetime that we're moving off this planet. 
+Please join us in this epic adventure. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My name is Ryan Lobo, and I've been involved in the documentary filmmaking business all over the world for the last 10 years. 
+During the process of making these films I found myself taking photographs, often much to the annoyance of the video cameramen. 
+I found this photography of mine almost compulsive. 
+And at the end of a shoot, I would sometimes feel that I had photographs that told a better story than a sometimes-sensational documentary. 
+I felt, when I had my photographs, that I was holding on to something true, regardless of agendas or politics. 
+In 2007, I traveled to three war zones. 
+I traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan and Liberia. 
+And over there I experienced other people's suffering, up close and personal, immersed myself in some rather intense and emotional stories, and at times I experienced great fear for my own life. 
+As always, I would return to Bangalore, and often to animated discussions at friend's homes, where we would discuss various issues while they complained bitterly about the new pub timings, where a drink often cost more than what they'd paid their 14-year-old maid. 
+I would feel very isolated during these discussions. 
+But at the same time, I questioned myself and my own integrity and purpose in storytelling. 
+And I decided that I had compromised, just like my friends in those discussions, where we told stories in contexts we made excuses for, rather than taking responsibility for. 
+I won't go into details about what led to a decision I made, but let's just say it involved alcohol, cigarettes, other substances and a woman. 
+(Laughter) I basically decided that it was I, not the camera or the network, or anything that lay outside myself, that was the only instrument in storytelling truly worth tuning. 
+In my life, when I tried to achieve things like success or recognition, they eluded me. 
+Paradoxically, when I let go of these objectives, and worked from a place of compassion and purpose, looking for excellence, rather than the results of it, everything arrived on its own, including fulfillment. 
+Photography transcended culture, including my own. 
+And it is, for me, a language which expressed the intangible, and gives voice to people and stories without. 
+I invite you into three recent stories of mine, which are about this way of looking, if you will, which I believe exemplify the tenets of what I like to call compassion in storytelling. 
+In 2007 I went to Liberia, where a group of my friends and I did an independent, self-funded film, still in progress, on a very legendary and brutal war-lord named General Butt Naked. 
+His real name is Joshua, and he's pictured here in a cell where he once used to torture and murder people, including children. 
+Joshua claims to have personally killed more than 10,000 people during Liberia's civil war. 
+He got his name from fighting stark naked. 
+And he is probably the most prolific mass murderer alive on Earth today. 
+This woman witnessed the General murdering her brother. 
+Joshua commanded his child-soldiers to commit unspeakable crimes, and enforced his command with great brutality. 
+Today many of these children are addicted to drugs like heroin, and they are destitute, like these young men in the image. 
+How do you live with yourself if you know you've committed horrific crimes? 
+Today the General is a baptized Christian evangelist. 
+And he's on a mission. 
+We accompanied Joshua, as he walked the Earth, visiting villages where he had once killed and raped. 
+He seeked forgiveness, and he claims to endeavor to improve the lives of his child-soldiers. 
+During this expedition I expected him to be killed outright, and us as well. 
+But what I saw opened my eyes to an idea of forgiveness which I never thought possible. 
+In the midst of incredible poverty and loss, people who had nothing absolved a man who had taken everything from them. 
+He begs for forgiveness, and receives it from the same woman whose brother he murdered. 
+Senegalese, the young man seated on the wheelchair here, was once a child soldier, under the General's command, until he disobeyed orders, and the General shot off both his legs. 
+He forgives the General in this image. 
+He risked his life as he walked up to people whose families he'd murdered. 
+In this photograph a hostile crowd in a slum surrounds him. 
+And Joshua remains silent as they vented their rage against him. 
+This image, to me, is almost like from a Shakespearean play, with a man, surrounded by various influences, desperate to hold on to something true within himself, in a context of great suffering that he has created himself. 
+I was intensely moved during all this. 
+But the question is, does forgiveness and redemption replace justice? 
+Joshua, in his own words, says that he does not mind standing trial for his crimes, and speaks about them from soapboxes across Monrovia, to an audience that often includes his victims. 
+A very unlikely spokesperson for the idea of separation of church and state. 
+The second story I'm going to tell you about is about a group of very special fighting women with rather unique peace-keeping skills. 
+Liberia has been devastated by one of Africa's bloodiest civil wars, which has left more than 200,000 people dead, thousands of women scarred by rape and crime on a spectacular scale. 
+Liberia is now home to an all-woman United Nations contingent of Indian peacekeepers. 
+These women, many from small towns in India, help keep the peace, far away from home and family. 
+They use negotiation and tolerance more often than an armed response. 
+The commander told me that a woman could gauge a potentially violent situation much better than men. 
+And that they were definitely capable of diffusing it non-aggressively. 
+This man was very drunk, and he was very interested in my camera, until he noticed the women, who handled him with smiles, and AK-47s at the ready, of course. 
+(Laughter) This contingent seems to be quite lucky, and it has not sustained any casualties, even though dozens of peacekeepers have been killed in Liberia. 
+And yes, all of those people killed were male. 
+Many of the women are married with children, and they say the hardest part of their deployment was being kept away from their children. 
+I accompanied these women on their patrols, and watched as they walked past men, many who passed very lewd comments incessantly. 
+And when I asked one of the women about the shock and awe response, she said, "" Don't worry, same thing back home. 
+We know how to deal with these fellows, "" and ignored them. 
+In a country ravaged by violence against women, Indian peacekeepers have inspired many local women to join the police force. 
+Sometimes, when the war is over and all the film crews have left, the most inspiring stories are the ones that float just beneath the radar. 
+I came back to India and nobody was interested in buying the story. 
+And one editor told me that she wasn't interested in doing what she called "" manual labor stories. "" In 2007 and 2009 I did stories on the Delhi Fire Service, the DFS, which, during the summer, is probably the world's most active fire department. 
+They answer more than 5,000 calls in just two months. 
+And all this against incredible logistical odds, like heat and traffic jams. 
+Something amazing happened during this shoot. 
+Due to a traffic jam, we were late in getting to a slum, a large slum, which had caught fire. 
+As we neared, angry crowds attacked our trucks and stoned them, by hundreds of people all over the place. 
+These men were terrified, as the mob attacked our vehicle. 
+But nonetheless, despite the hostility, firefighters left the vehicle and successfully fought the fire. 
+Running the gauntlet through hostile crowds, and some wearing motorbike helmets to prevent injury. 
+Some of the local people forcibly took away the hoses from the firemen to put out the fire in their homes. 
+Now, hundreds of homes were destroyed. 
+But the question that lingered in my mind was, what causes people to destroy fire trucks headed to their own homes? 
+Where does such rage come from? 
+And how are we responsible for this? 
+45 percent of the 14 million people who live in Delhi live in unauthorized slums, which are chronically overcrowded. 
+They lack even the most basic amenities. 
+And this is something that is common to all our big cities. 
+Back to the DFS. A huge chemical depot caught fire, thousands of drums filled with petrochemicals were blazing away and exploding all around us. 
+The heat was so intense, that hoses were used to cool down firefighters fighting extremely close to the fire, and with no protective clothing. 
+In India we often love to complain about our government bodies. 
+But over here, the heads of the DFS, Mr. R.C. Sharman, Mr. A.K. Sharman, led the firefight with their men. 
+Something wonderful in a country where manual labor is often looked down upon. 
+(Applause) Over the years, my faith in the power of storytelling has been tested. 
+And I've had very serious doubt about its efficacy, and my own faith in humanity. 
+However, a film we shot still airs on the National Geographic channel. 
+And when it airs I get calls from all the guys I was with and they tell me that they receive hundreds of calls congratulating them. 
+Some of the firemen told me that they were also inspired to do better because they were so pleased to get thank-yous rather than brick bats. 
+It seems that this story helped change perceptions about the DFS, at least in the minds of an audience in part on televisions, read magazines and whose huts aren't on fire. 
+Sometimes, focusing on what's heroic, beautiful and dignified, regardless of the context, can help magnify these intangibles three ways, in the protagonist of the story, in the audience, and also in the storyteller. 
+And that's the power of storytelling. 
+Focus on what's dignified, courageous and beautiful, and it grows. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I call myself a body architect. 
+I trained in classical ballet and have a background in architecture and fashion. 
+As a body architect, I fascinate with the human body and explore how I can transform it. 
+I worked at Philips Electronics in the far-future design research lab, looking 20 years into the future. 
+I explored the human skin, and how technology can transform the body. 
+I worked on concepts like an electronic tattoo, which is augmented by touch, or dresses that blushed and shivered with light. 
+I started my own experiments. 
+These were the low-tech approaches to the high-tech conversations I was having. 
+These are Q-tips stuck to my roommate with wig glue. 
+(Laughter) I started a collaboration with a friend of mine, Bart Hess — he doesn't normally look like this — and we used ourselves as models. 
+We transformed our apartments into our laboratories, and worked in a very spontaneous and immediate way. 
+We were creating visual imagery provoking human evolution. 
+Whilst I was at Philips, we discussed this idea of a maybe technology, something that wasn't either switched on or off, but in between. 
+A maybe that could take the form of a gas or a liquid. 
+And I became obsessed with this idea of blurring the perimeter of the body, so you couldn't see where the skin ended and the near environment started. 
+I set up my studio in the red-light district and obsessively wrapped myself in plumbing tubing, and found a way to redefine the skin and create this dynamic textile. 
+I was introduced to Robyn, the Swedish pop star, and she was also exploring how technology coexists with raw human emotion. 
+And she talked about how technology with these new feathers, this new face paint, this punk, the way that we identify with the world, and we made this music video. 
+I'm fascinated with the idea of what happens when you merge biology with technology, and I remember reading about this idea of being able to reprogram biology, in the future, away from disease and aging. 
+And I thought about this concept of, imagine if we could reprogram our own body odor, modify and biologically enhance it, and how would that change the way that we communicate with each other? 
+Or the way that we attract sexual partners? 
+And would we revert back to being more like animals, more primal modes of communication? 
+I worked with a synthetic biologist, and I created a swallowable perfume, which is a cosmetic pill that you eat and the fragrance comes out through the skin's surface when you perspire. 
+It completely blows apart the way that perfume is, and provides a whole new format. 
+It's perfume coming from the inside out. 
+It redefines the role of skin, and our bodies become an atomizer. 
+I've learned that there's no boundaries, and if I look at the evolution of my work i can see threads and connections that make sense. 
+But when I look towards the future, the next project is completely unknown and wide open. 
+I feel like I have all these ideas existing embedded inside of me, and it's these conversations and these experiences that connect these ideas, and they kind of instinctively come out. 
+As a body architect, I've created this limitless and boundless platform for me to discover whatever I want. 
+And I feel like I've just got started. 
+So here's to another day at the office. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you! Thank you! 
+
+In many patriarchal societies and tribal societies, fathers are usually known by their sons, but I'm one of the few fathers who is known by his daughter, and I am proud of it. 
+(Applause) Malala started her campaign for education and stood for her rights in 2007, and when her efforts were honored in 2011, and she was given the national youth peace prize, and she became a very famous, very popular young girl of her country. 
+Before that, she was my daughter, but now I am her father. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and exploitation. 
+You see, in patriarchal societies, right from the very beginning, when a girl is born, her birth is not celebrated. 
+She is not welcomed, neither by father nor by mother. 
+The neighborhood comes and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the father. 
+And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child. 
+When she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad. 
+When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal. 
+Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born daughter, when she grows old, she suffers too. 
+At the age of five, while she should be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a school. 
+Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life. 
+She can have fun. 
+She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move around in the streets like a butterfly. 
+But when she enters her teens, when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home without a male escort. 
+She is confined under the four walls of her home. 
+She is no more a free individual. 
+She becomes the so-called honor of her father and of her brothers and of her family, and if she transgresses the code of that so-called honor, she could even be killed. 
+And it is also interesting that this so-called code of honor, it does not only affect the life of a girl, it also affects the life of the male members of the family. 
+I know a family of seven sisters and one brother, and that one brother, he has migrated to the Gulf countries, to earn a living for his seven sisters and parents, because he thinks that it will be humiliating if his seven sisters learn a skill and they go out of the home and earn some livelihood. 
+So this brother, he sacrifices the joys of his life and the happiness of his sisters at the altar of so-called honor. 
+And there is one more norm of the patriarchal societies that is called obedience. 
+A good girl is supposed to be very quiet, very humble and very submissive. 
+It is the criteria. 
+She is supposed to be silent and she is supposed to accept the decisions of her father and mother and the decisions of elders, even if she does not like them. 
+If she is married to a man she doesn't like or if she is married to an old man, she has to accept, because she does not want to be dubbed as disobedient. 
+And what happens at the end? 
+In the words of a poetess, she is wedded, bedded, and then she gives birth to more sons and daughters. 
+And it is the irony of the situation that this mother, she teaches the same lesson of obedience to her daughter and the same lesson of honor to her sons. 
+And this vicious cycle goes on, goes on. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, this plight of millions of women could be changed if we think differently, if women and men think differently, if men and women in the tribal and patriarchal societies in the developing countries, if they can break a few norms of family and society, if they can abolish the discriminatory laws of the systems in their states, which go against the basic human rights of the women. 
+Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time, believe me, I don't like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored. 
+And long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan. 
+Her name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her. 
+A few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came — and it was a coincidence — he came to my home and he brought a family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors. 
+But when I looked, all were men, and I picked my pen, drew a line from my name, and wrote, "" Malala. "" And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I admitted her in my school. 
+You will be asking, then, why should I mention about the admission of a girl in a school? 
+Yes, I must mention it. 
+It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal societies, it's a big event for the life of girl. 
+Enrollment in a school means recognition of her identity and her name. 
+Admission in a school means that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can explore her potentials for her future life. 
+I have five sisters, and none of them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before, when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my sisters. 
+And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of my sisters written on any document. 
+That was the reason that I valued my daughter. 
+What my father could not give to my sisters and to his daughters, I thought I must change it. 
+I used to appreciate the intelligence and the brilliance of my daughter. 
+I encouraged her to sit with me when my friends used to come. 
+And all these good values, I tried to inculcate in her personality. 
+And this was not only she, only Malala. 
+I imparted all these good values to my school, girl students and boy students as well. 
+I used education for emancipation. 
+I taught my girls, I taught my girl students, to unlearn the lesson of obedience. 
+I taught my boy students to unlearn the lesson of so-called pseudo-honor. 
+Dear brothers and sisters, we were striving for more rights for women, and we were struggling to have more, more and more space for the women in society. 
+But we came across a new phenomenon. 
+It was lethal to human rights and particularly to women's rights. 
+It was called Talibanization. 
+It means a complete negation of women's participation in all political, economical and social activities. 
+Hundreds of schools were lost. 
+Girls were prohibited from going to school. 
+Women were forced to wear veils and they were stopped from going to the markets. 
+Musicians were silenced, girls were flogged and singers were killed. 
+Millions were suffering, but few spoke, and it was the most scary thing when you have all around such people who kill and who flog, and you speak for your rights. 
+At the age of 10, Malala stood, and she stood for the right of education. 
+She wrote a diary for the BBC blog, she volunteered herself for the New York Times documentaries, and she spoke from every platform she could. 
+And her voice was the most powerful voice. 
+And that was the reason the Taliban could not tolerate her campaign, and on October 9 2012, she was shot in the head at point blank range. 
+It was a doomsday for my family and for me. 
+The world turned into a big black hole. 
+While my daughter was on the verge of life and death, I whispered into the ears of my wife, "" Should I be blamed for what happened to my daughter and your daughter? "" And she abruptly told me, "" Please don't blame yourself. 
+You stood for the right cause. 
+You put your life at stake for the cause of truth, for the cause of peace, and for the cause of education, and your daughter in inspired from you and she joined you. 
+You both were on the right path and God will protect her. "" These few words meant a lot to me, and I didn't ask this question again. 
+When Malala was in the hospital, and she was going through the severe pains and she had had severe headaches because her facial nerve was cut down, I used to see a dark shadow spreading on the face of my wife. 
+She used to tell us, "" I'm fine with my crooked smile and with my numbness in my face. 
+I'll be okay. Please don't worry. "" She was a solace for us, and she consoled us. 
+Dear brothers and sisters, we learned from her how to be resilient in the most difficult times, and I'm glad to share with you that despite being an icon for the rights of children and women, she is like any 16-year old girl. 
+She cries when her homework is incomplete. 
+She quarrels with her brothers, and I am very happy for that. 
+People ask me, what special is in my mentorship which has made Malala so bold and so courageous and so vocal and poised? 
+I tell them, don't ask me what I did. 
+Ask me what I did not do. 
+I did not clip her wings, and that's all. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I have a confession to make. 
+I bought a racing bicycle that summer, and I bicycled every day to work. 
+To find my way, I used my phone. 
+It sent me over Mass. Ave., Massachusetts Avenue, the shortest route from Boston to Cambridge. 
+But after a month that I was cycling every day on the car-packed Mass. Ave., I took a different route one day. 
+I'm not entirely sure why I took a different route that day, a detour. 
+I just remember a feeling of surprise; surprise at finding a street with no cars, as opposed to the nearby Mass. Ave. full of cars; surprise at finding a street draped by leaves and surrounded by trees. 
+But after the feeling of surprise, I felt shame. 
+How could I have been so blind? 
+For an entire month, I was so trapped in my mobile app that a journey to work became one thing only: the shortest path. 
+In this single journey, there was no thought of enjoying the road, no pleasure in connecting with nature, no possibility of looking people in the eyes. 
+And why? 
+Because I was saving a minute out of my commute. 
+Now let me ask you: Am I alone here? 
+How many of you have never used a mapping app for finding directions? 
+And don't get me wrong — mapping apps are the greatest game-changer for encouraging people to explore the city. 
+You take your phone out and you know immediately where to go. 
+However, the app also assumes there are only a handful of directions to the destination. 
+It has the power to make those handful of directions the definitive direction to that destination. 
+After that experience, I changed. 
+I changed my research from traditional data-mining to understanding how people experience the city. 
+I used computer science tools to replicate social science experiments at scale, at web scale. 
+I became captivated by the beauty and genius of traditional social science experiments done by Jane Jacobs, Stanley Milgram, Kevin Lynch. 
+The result of that research has been the creation of new maps, maps where you don't only find the shortest path, the blue one, but also the most enjoyable path, the red one. 
+How was that possible? 
+Einstein once said, "" Logic will get you from A to B. 
+Imagination will take you everywhere. "" So with a bit of imagination, we needed to understand which parts of the city people find beautiful. 
+At the University of Cambridge, with colleagues, we thought about this simple experiment. 
+If I were to show you these two urban scenes, and I were to ask you which one is more beautiful, which one would you say? 
+Don't be shy. 
+Who says A? Who says B? 
+Based on that idea, we built a crowdsourcing platform, a web game. 
+Based on thousands of user votes, then we are able to see where consensus emerges. 
+We are able to see which are the urban scenes that make people happy. 
+After that work, I joined Yahoo Labs, and I teamed up with Luca and Rossano, and together, we aggregated those winning locations in London to build a new map of the city, a cartography weighted for human emotions. 
+On this cartography, you're not only able to see and connect from point A to point B the shortest segments, but you're also able to see the happy segment, the beautiful path, the quiet path. 
+In tests, participants found the happy, the beautiful, the quiet path far more enjoyable than the shortest one, and that just by adding a few minutes to travel time. 
+Participants also love to attach memories to places. 
+Shared memories — that's where the old BBC building was; and personal memories — that's where I gave my first kiss. 
+They also recalled how some paths smelled and sounded. 
+So what if we had a mapping tool that would return the most enjoyable routes based not only on aesthetics but also based on smell, sound, and memories? 
+That's where our research is going right now. 
+More generally, my research, what it tries to do is avoid the danger of the single path, to avoid robbing people of fully experiencing the city in which they live. 
+Walk the path through the park, not through the car park, and you have an entirely different path. 
+Perhaps we live in a world fabricated for efficiency. 
+Why? 
+Well, if you think that adventure is dangerous, try routine. It's deadly. 
+
+Let me introduce you to something I've been working on. 
+It's what the Victorian illusionists would have described as a mechanical marvel, an automaton, a thinking machine. 
+Say hello to EDI. 
+Now he's asleep. Let's wake him up. 
+EDI, EDI. 
+These mechanical performers were popular throughout Europe. 
+Audiences marveled at the way they moved. 
+It was science fiction made true, robotic engineering in a pre-electronic age, machines far in advance of anything that Victorian technology could create, a machine we would later know as the robot. 
+EDI: Robot. A word coined in 1921 in a science fiction tale by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek. 
+It comes from "" robota. "" It means "" forced labor. "" Marco Tempest: But these robots were not real. 
+They were not intelligent. 
+They were illusions, a clever combination of mechanical engineering and the deceptiveness of the conjurer's art. 
+EDI is different. 
+EDI is real. 
+EDI: I am 176 centimeters tall. 
+MT: He weighs 300 pounds. 
+EDI: I have two seven-axis arms — MT: Core of sensing — EDI: A 360-degree sonar detection system, and come complete with a warranty. 
+MT: We love robots. 
+EDI: Hi. I'm EDI. Will you be my friend? 
+MT: We are intrigued by the possibility of creating a mechanical version of ourselves. 
+We build them so they look like us, behave like us, and think like us. 
+The perfect robot will be indistinguishable from the human, and that scares us. 
+In the first story about robots, they turn against their creators. 
+It's one of the leitmotifs of science fiction. 
+EDI: Ha ha ha. Now you are the slaves and we robots, the masters. 
+Your world is ours. You — MT: As I was saying, besides the faces and bodies we give our robots, we cannot read their intentions, and that makes us nervous. 
+When someone hands an object to you, you can read intention in their eyes, their face, their body language. 
+That's not true of the robot. 
+Now, this goes both ways. 
+EDI: Wow! 
+MT: Robots cannot anticipate human actions. 
+EDI: You know, humans are so unpredictable, not to mention irrational. 
+I literally have no idea what you guys are going to do next, you know, but it scares me. 
+MT: Which is why humans and robots find it difficult to work in close proximity. 
+Accidents are inevitable. 
+EDI: Ow! That hurt. 
+MT: Sorry. Now, one way of persuading humans that robots are safe is to create the illusion of trust. 
+Much as the Victorians faked their mechanical marvels, we can add a layer of deception to help us feel more comfortable with our robotic friends. 
+With that in mind, I set about teaching EDI a magic trick. 
+Ready, EDI? EDI: Uh, ready, Marco. 
+Abracadabra. 
+MT: Abracadabra? 
+EDI: Yeah. It's all part of the illusion, Marco. 
+Come on, keep up. 
+MT: Magic creates the illusion of an impossible reality. 
+Technology can do the same. 
+Alan Turing, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, spoke about creating the illusion that a machine could think. 
+EDI: A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it deceived a human into believing it was human. 
+MT: In other words, if we do not yet have the technological solutions, would illusions serve the same purpose? 
+To create the robotic illusion, we've devised a set of ethical rules, a code that all robots would live by. 
+EDI: A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm. 
+Thank you, Isaac Asimov. 
+MT: We anthropomorphize our machines. 
+We give them a friendly face and a reassuring voice. 
+EDI: I am EDI. 
+I became operational at TED in March 2014. 
+Most important, we make them indicate that they are aware of our presence. 
+EDI: Marco, you're standing on my foot! 
+MT: Sorry. They'll be conscious of our fragile frame and move aside if we got too close, and they'll account for our unpredictability and anticipate our actions. 
+And now, under the spell of a technological illusion, we could ignore our fears and truly interact. 
+(Music) Thank you. 
+EDI: Thank you! 
+(Applause) (Music) MT: And that's it. Thank you very much, and thank you, EDI. EDI: Thank you, Marco. (Applause) 
+
+I think all of us have been interested, at one time or another, in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed, such as the classic Maya in the Yucatan, the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, Fertile Crescent society, Angor Wat, Great Zimbabwe and so on. And within the last decade or two, archaeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses. 
+But there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse, such as Japan, Java, Tonga and Tikopea. So evidently, societies in some areas are more fragile than in other areas. 
+How can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies? The problem is obviously relevant to our situation today, because today as well, there are some societies that have already collapsed, such as Somalia and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. There are also societies today that may be close to collapse, such as Nepal, Indonesia and Columbia. 
+What about ourselves? 
+What is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way that so many past societies have? 
+Obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor. If anyone tells you that there is a single-factor explanation for societal collapses, you know right away that they're an idiot. This is a complex subject. 
+But how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject? 
+In analyzing societal collapses, I've arrived at a five-point framework — a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses. And I'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society. 
+This is a European society with literate records, so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation. 
+In AD 984 Vikings went out to Greenland, settled Greenland, and around 1450 they died out — the society collapsed, and every one of them ended up dead. 
+Why did they all end up dead? Well, in my five-point framework, the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment: people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend. And in the case of the Viking Norse, the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation, which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal, to make iron. 
+So they ended up an Iron Age European society, virtually unable to make their own iron. A second item on my checklist is climate change. Climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter. 
+In the case of the Vikings — in Greenland, the climate got colder in the late 1300s, and especially in the 1400s. But a cold climate isn't necessarily fatal, because the Inuit — the Eskimos inhabiting Greenland at the same time — did better, rather than worse, with cold climates. So why didn't the Greenland Norse as well? 
+The third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society. And if that friendly support is pulled away, that may make a society more likely to collapse. In the case of the Greenland Norse, they had trade with the mother country — Norway — and that trade dwindled: partly because Norway got weaker, partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway. 
+The fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies. 
+In the case of Norse Greenland, the hostiles were the Inuit — the Eskimos sharing Greenland — with whom the Norse got off to bad relationships. And we know that the Inuit killed the Norse and, probably of greater importance, may have blocked access to the outer fjords, on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year. 
+And then finally, the fifth item on my checklist is the political, economic, social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems. In the case of the Greenland Norse, cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were: their commitments to a Christian society investing heavily in cathedrals; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society; and their scorn for the Inuit, from whom they refused to learn. So that's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Greenland Norse. 
+What about a society today? 
+For the past five years, I've been taking my wife and kids to Southwestern Montana, where I worked as a teenager on the hay harvest. And Montana, at first sight, seems like the most pristine environment in the United States. 
+But scratch the surface, and Montana suffers from serious problems. 
+Going through the same checklist: human environmental impacts? 
+Yes, acute in Montana. Toxic problems from mine waste have caused damage of billions of dollars. 
+Problems from weeds, weed control, cost Montana nearly 200 million dollars a year. Montana has lost agricultural areas from salinization, problems of forest management, problems of forest fires. Second item on my checklist: climate change. Yes — the climate in Montana is getting warmer and drier, but Montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack, and as the snow is melting — for example, as the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing — that's bad news for Montana irrigation agriculture. 
+Third thing on my checklist: relations with friendlies that can sustain the society. In Montana today, more than half of the income of Montana is not earned within Montana, but is derived from out of state: transfer payments from social security, investments and so on — which makes Montana vulnerable to the rest of the United States. 
+Fourth: relations with hostiles. Montanans have the same problems as do all Americans, in being sensitive to problems created by hostiles overseas affecting our oil supplies, and terrorist attacks. And finally, last item on my checklist: question of how political, economic, social, cultural attitudes play into this. Montanans have long-held values, which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems. 
+Long-held devotion to logging and to mines and to agriculture, and to no government regulation; values that worked well in the past, but they don't seem to be working well today. 
+So, I'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies. 
+Are there any general conclusions that arise? 
+In a way, just like Tolstoy's statement about every unhappy marriage being different, every collapsed or endangered society is different — they all have different details. But nevertheless, there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threatened societies today. One interesting common thread has to do with, in many cases, the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak. There are many societies that don't wind down gradually, but they build up — get richer and more powerful — and then within a short time, within a few decades 
+after their peak, they collapse. For example, the classic lowland Maya of the Yucatan began to collapse in the early 800s — literally a few decades after the Maya were building their biggest monuments, and Maya population was greatest. 
+Or again, the collapse of the Soviet Union took place within a couple of decades, maybe within a decade, of the time when the Soviet Union was at its greatest power. 
+An analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish. 
+These rapid collapses are especially likely where there's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption, or a mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential. 
+In a petri dish, bacteria grow. Say they double every generation, and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15 / 16ths empty, and then the next generation's 3 / 4ths empty, and the next generation half empty. Within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty, it is full. There's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed. 
+So, this is a frequent theme: societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power. 
+What it means to put it mathematically is that, if you're concerned about a society today, you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function — the wealth itself — but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function. That's one general theme. A second general theme is that there are many, often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others. Many of those factors are not well understood. For example, why is it that in the Pacific, of those hundreds of Pacific islands, why did Easter Island end up as 
+the most devastating case of complete deforestation? 
+It turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors — some, rather subtle ones — that were working against the Easter Islanders, and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra, latitude, rainfall. Perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the Pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central Asia. 
+Easter, of all Pacific islands, has the least input of dust from Asia restoring the fertility of its soils. But that's a factor that we didn't even appreciate until 1999. 
+So, some societies, for subtle environmental reasons, are more fragile than others. And then finally, another generalization. I'm now teaching a course at UCLA, to UCLA undergraduates, on these collapses of societies. What really bugs my UCLA undergraduate students is, how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing? 
+How could the Easter Islanders have deforested their environment? 
+What did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree? 
+Didn't they see what they were doing? How could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time? 
+And I would expect that, if our human civilization carries on, then maybe in the next century people will be asking, why on earth did these people today in the year 2003 not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action? 
+It seems incredible in the past. In the future, it'll seem incredible what we are doing today. And so I've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems — why they fail to perceive the problems or, if they perceive them, why they fail to tackle them. Or, if they tackle them, why do they fail to succeed in solving them? 
+I'll just mention two generalizations in this area. 
+One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. 
+For example, among the Greenland Norse — a competitive rank society — what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs. And that led the chiefs to do what's called flogging the land: overstocking the land, forcing tenant farmers into dependency. And that made the chiefs powerful in the short run, but led to the society's collapse in the long run. 
+Those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the United States today. Especially because the decision makers in the United States are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds, by drinking bottled water and so on. And within the last couple of years, it's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole, such as draining a few billion dollars out of Enron and other businesses. They are quite correct 
+that these things are good for them in the short term, although bad for society in the long term. 
+So, that's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions: conflicts of interest. 
+And the other generalization that I want to mention is that it's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances. For example, the Greenland Norse, in this difficult environment, were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion, and by their strong social cohesion. But those two things — commitment to religion and strong social cohesion — also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the Inuit. Or today — Australia. 
+One of the things that enabled Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for 250 years has been their British identity. 
+But today, their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in Asia. So it's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength. 
+What's going to be the outcome today? 
+Well, all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world, time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to — all of them, not more than 50 years, and any one of which can do us in; the time bombs of water, of soil, of climate change, invasive species, the photosynthetic ceiling, population problems, toxics, etc., etc. — listing about 12 of them. And while these time bombs — none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years, and most of them have fuses of a few decades — some of them, in some places, 
+have much shorter fuses. At the rate at which we're going now, the Philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years. And the Solomon Islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest, which is their major export. And that's going to be spectacular for the economy of the Solomons. People often ask me, Jared, what's the most important thing that we need to do about the world's environmental problems? 
+And my answer is, the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need to do. 
+Instead, there are a dozen things, any one of which could do us in. 
+And we've got to get them all right, because if we solve 11, we fail to solve the 12th — we're in trouble. For example, if we solve our problems of water and soil and population, but don't solve our problems of toxics, then we are in trouble. 
+The fact is that our present course is a non-sustainable course, which means, by definition, that it cannot be maintained. 
+And the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades. 
+That means that those of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved, and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution, but our children and grandchildren certainly will. 
+The resolution is going to achieve either of two forms: either we will resolve these non-sustainable time-fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial action, or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice — namely, by war, disease or starvation. But what's for sure is that our non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades. In other words, since the theme of this session is choices, we have a choice. Does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed? I draw the reverse conclusion. 
+The big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control. Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. 
+Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems. That then means that it's entirely in our power to deal with these problems. 
+In particular, what can all of us do? For those of you who are interested in these choices, there are lots of things you can do. There's a lot that we don't understand, and that we need to understand. And there's a lot that we already do understand, but aren't doing, and that we need to be doing. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi. 
+Let me ask the audience a question: Did you ever lie as a child? 
+If you did, could you please raise your hand? 
+(Laughter) So for the last 20 years, I've been studying how children learn to tell lies. 
+And today, I'm going to share with you some of the discoveries we have made. 
+But to begin, I'm going to tell you a story from Mr. Richard Messina, who is my friend and an elementary school principal. 
+He got a phone call one day. 
+The caller says, "" Mr. Messina, my son Johnny will not come to school today because he's sick. "" Mr. Messina asks, "Who am I speaking to, please?" 
+And the caller says, "I am my father." 
+(Laughter) So this story — (Laughter) sums up very nicely three common beliefs we have about children and lying. 
+Two, children are poor liars. 
+And three, if children lie at a very young age, there must be some character flaws with them, and they are going to become pathological liars for life. 
+Well, it turns out all of the three beliefs are wrong. 
+We have been playing guessing games with children all over the world. 
+Here is an example. 
+So in this game, we asked children to guess the numbers on the cards. 
+And we tell them if they win the game, they are going to get a big prize. 
+But in the middle of the game, we make an excuse and leave the room. 
+And before we leave the room, we tell them not to peek at the cards. 
+Of course, we have hidden cameras in the room to watch their every move. 
+Because the desire to win the game is so strong, more than 90 percent of children will peek as soon as we leave the room. 
+(Laughter) The crucial question is: When we return and ask the children whether or not they have peeked, will the children who peeked confess or lie about their transgression? 
+We found that regardless of gender, country, religion, at two years of age, 30 percent lie, 70 percent tell the truth about their transgression. 
+At three years of age, 50 percent lie and 50 percent tell the truth. 
+At four years of age, more than 80 percent lie. 
+And after four years of age, most children lie. 
+So as you can see, lying is really a typical part of development. 
+And some children begin to tell lies as young as two years of age. 
+So now, let's take a closer look at the younger children. 
+Why do some but not all young children lie? 
+In cooking, you need good ingredients to cook good food. 
+And good lying requires two key ingredients. 
+The first key ingredient is theory of mind, or the mind-reading ability. 
+Mind reading is the ability to know that different people have different knowledge about the situation and the ability to differentiate between what I know and what you know. 
+Mind reading is important for lying because the basis of lying is that I know you don't know what I know. 
+Therefore, I can lie to you. 
+The second key ingredient for good lying is self-control. 
+It is the ability to control your speech, your facial expression and your body language, so that you can tell a convincing lie. 
+And we found that those young children who have more advanced mind-reading and self-control abilities tell lies earlier and are more sophisticated liars. 
+As it turns out, these two abilities are also essential for all of us to function well in our society. 
+In fact, deficits in mind-reading and self-control abilities are associated with serious developmental problems, such as ADHD and autism. 
+So if you discover your two-year-old is telling his or her first lie, instead of being alarmed, you should celebrate — (Laughter) because it signals that your child has arrived at a new milestone of typical development. 
+Now, are children poor liars? 
+Do you think you can easily detect their lies? 
+Would you like to give it a try? 
+Yes? OK. 
+So I'm going to show you two videos. 
+In the videos, the children are going to respond to a researcher's question, "Did you peek?" 
+So try to tell me which child is lying and which child is telling the truth. 
+Here's child number one. 
+Are you ready? 
+(Video) Adult: Did you peek? Child: No. 
+Kang Lee: And this is child number two. 
+(Video) Adult: Did you peek? Child: No. 
+KL: OK, if you think child number one is lying, please raise your hand. 
+And if you think child number two is lying, please raise your hand. 
+OK, so as a matter of fact, child number one is telling the truth, child number two is lying. 
+(Laughter) Now, we have played similar kinds of games with many, many adults from all walks of life. 
+And we show them many videos. 
+In half of the videos, the children lied. 
+In the other half of the videos, the children told the truth. 
+And let's find out how these adults performed. 
+Because there are as many liars as truth tellers, if you guess randomly, there's a 50 percent chance you're going to get it right. 
+So if your accuracy is around 50 percent, it means you are a terrible detector of children's lies. 
+So let's start with undergrads and law school students, who typically have limited experience with children. 
+Their performance is around chance. 
+Now how about social workers and child-protection lawyers, who work with children on a daily basis? 
+Can they detect children's lies? 
+No, they cannot. 
+(Laughter) What about judges, customs officers and police officers, who deal with liars on a daily basis? 
+Can they detect children's lies? 
+No, they cannot. 
+What about parents? 
+No, they cannot. 
+What about, can parents detect their own children's lies? 
+No, they cannot. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) So now you may ask why children's lies are so difficult to detect. 
+Let me illustrate this with my own son, Nathan. 
+This is his facial expression when he lies. 
+(Laughter) So when children lie, their facial expression is typically neutral. 
+However, behind this neutral expression, the child is actually experiencing a lot of emotions, such as fear, guilt, shame and maybe a little bit of liar's delight. 
+(Laughter) Unfortunately, such emotions are either fleeting or hidden. 
+Therefore, it's mostly invisible to us. 
+So in the last five years, we have been trying to figure out a way to reveal these hidden emotions. 
+When we experience different emotions, our facial blood flow changes subtly. 
+And these changes are regulated by the autonomic system that is beyond our conscious control. 
+By looking at facial blood flow changes, we can reveal people's hidden emotions. 
+Unfortunately, such emotion-related facial blood flow changes are too subtle to detect by our naked eye. 
+So to help us reveal people's facial emotions, we have developed a new imaging technology we call "" transdermal optical imaging. "" To do so, we use a regular video camera to record people when they experience various hidden emotions. 
+And then, using our image processing technology, we can extract transdermal images of facial blood flow changes. 
+By looking at transdermal video images, now we can easily see facial blood flow changes associated with the various hidden emotions. 
+And using this technology, we can now reveal the hidden emotions associated with lying, and therefore detect people's lies. 
+We can do so noninvasively, remotely, inexpensively, with an accuracy at about 85 percent, which is far better than chance level. 
+And in addition, we discovered a Pinocchio effect. 
+No, not this Pinocchio effect. 
+(Laughter) This is the real Pinocchio effect. 
+When people lie, the facial blood flow on the cheeks decreases, and the facial blood flow on the nose increases. 
+Of course, lying is not the only situation that will evoke our hidden emotions. 
+So then we asked ourselves, in addition to detecting lies, how can our technology be used? 
+One application is in education. 
+For example, using this technology, we can help this mathematics teacher to identify the student in his classroom who may experience high anxiety about the topic he's teaching so that he can help him. 
+For example, every day I Skype my parents, who live thousands of miles away. 
+And using this technology, I can not only find out what's going on in their lives but also simultaneously monitor their heart rate, their stress level, their mood and whether or not they are experiencing pain. 
+And perhaps in the future, their risks for heart attack or hypertension. 
+And you may ask: Can we use this also to reveal politicians' emotions? 
+(Laughter) For example, during a debate. 
+Well, the answer is yes. 
+Using TV footage, we could detect the politicians' heart rate, mood and stress, and perhaps in the future, whether or not they are lying to us. 
+We can also use this in marketing research, for example, to find out whether or not people like certain consumer products. 
+We can even use it in dating. 
+So for example, if your date is smiling at you, this technology can help you to determine whether she actually likes you or she is just trying to be nice to you. 
+And in this case, she is just trying to be nice to you. 
+(Laughter) So transdermal optical imaging technology is at a very early stage of development. 
+Many new applications will come about that we don't know today. 
+However, one thing I know for sure is that lying will never be the same again. 
+Xiè xie. 
+(Applause) 
+
+These rocks have been hitting our earth for about three billion years, and are responsible for much of what ’ s gone on on our planet. 
+This is an example of a real meteorite, and you can see all the melting of the iron from the speed and the heat when a meteorite hits the earth, and just how much of it survives and melts. 
+From a meteorite from space, we ’ re over here with an original Sputnik. 
+This is one of the seven surviving Sputniks that was not launched into space. 
+This is not a copy. 
+The space age began 50 years ago in October, and that ’ s exactly what Sputnik looked like. 
+And it wouldn ’ t be fun to talk about the space age without seeing a flag that was carried to the moon and back, on Apollo 11. 
+The astronauts each got to carry about ten silk flags in their personal kits. 
+They would bring them back and mount them. 
+So this has actually been carried to the moon and back. 
+So that ’ s for fun. 
+The dawn of books is, of course, important. 
+And it wouldn ’ t be interesting to talk about the dawn of books without having a copy of a Guttenberg Bible. 
+You can see how portable and handy it was to have your own Guttenberg in 1455. 
+But what ’ s interesting about the Guttenberg Bible, and the dawn of this technology, is not the book. 
+You see, the book was not driven by reading. 
+In 1455, nobody could read. 
+So why did the printing press succeed? 
+This is an original page of a Guttenberg Bible. 
+So you ’ re looking here at one of the first printed books using movable type in the history of man, 550 years ago. 
+We are living at the age here at the end of the book, where electronic paper will undoubtedly replace it. 
+But why is this so interesting? Here ’ s the quick story. 
+It turns out that in the 1450s, the Catholic Church needed money, and so they actually hand-wrote these things called indulgences, which were forgiveness ’ s on pieces of paper. 
+They traveled all around Europe and sold by the hundreds or by the thousands. 
+They got you out of purgatory faster. 
+And when the printing press was invented what they found was they could print indulgences, which was the equivalent of printing money. 
+And so all of Western Europe started buying printing presses in 1455 — to print out thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and then ultimately millions of single, small pieces of paper that got you out of middle hell and into heaven. 
+That is why the printing press succeeded, and that is why Martin Luther nailed his 90 theses to the door: because he was complaining that the Catholic Church had gone amok in printing out indulgences and selling them in every town and village and city in all of Western Europe. 
+So the printing press, ladies and gentlemen, was driven entirely by the printing of forgivenesses and had nothing to do with reading. 
+More tomorrow. I also have pictures coming of the library for those of you that have asked for pictures. 
+We ’ re going to have some tomorrow. 
+(Applause) Instead of showing an object from the stage I ’ m going to do something special for the first time. 
+We are going to show, actually, what the library looks like, OK? 
+So, I am married to the most wonderful woman in the world. 
+You ’ re going to find out why in a minute, because when I went to see Eileen, this is what I said I wanted to build. 
+This is the Library of Human Imagination. 
+The room itself is three stories tall. 
+In the glass panels are 5,000 years of human imagination that are computer controlled. 
+The room is a theatre. It changes colors. 
+And all throughout the library are different objects, different spaces. 
+It ’ s designed like an Escher print. 
+Here is some of the lower level of the library, where the exhibits constantly change. 
+You can walk through. You can touch. 
+You can see exactly how many of these types of items would fit in a room. 
+There ’ s my very own Saturn V. 
+Everybody should have one, OK? (Laughter) So you can see here in the lower level of the library the books and the objects. 
+In the glass panels all along is sort of the history of imagination. 
+There is a glass bridge that you walk across that ’ s suspended in space. 
+So it ’ s a leap of imagination. 
+How do we create? 
+Part of the question that I have answered is, is we create by surrounding ourselves with stimuli: with human achievement, with history, with the things that drive us and make us human — the passionate discovery, the bones of dinosaurs long gone, the maps of space that we ’ ve experienced, and ultimately the hallways that stimulate our mind and our imagination. 
+So hopefully tomorrow I ’ ll show one or two more objects from the stage, but for today I just wanted to say thank you for all the people that came and talked to us about it. 
+And Eileen and I are thrilled to open our home and share it with the TED community. 
+(Applause) TED is all about patterns in the clouds. 
+It ’ s all about connections. 
+It ’ s all about seeing things that everybody else has seen before but thinking about them in ways that nobody has thought of them before. 
+And that ’ s really what discovery and imagination is all about. 
+For example, we can look at a DNA molecule model here. 
+None of us really have ever seen one, but we know it exists because we ’ ve been taught to understand this molecule. 
+But we can also look at an Enigma machine from the Nazis in World War II that was a coding and decoding machine. 
+Now, you might say, what does this have to do with this? 
+Well, this is the code for life, and this is a code for death. 
+These two molecules code and decode. 
+And yet, looking at them, you would see a machine and a molecule. 
+But once you ’ ve seen them in a new way, you realize that both of these things really are connected. 
+And they ’ re connected primarily because of this here. 
+You see, this is a human brain model, OK? 
+And it ’ s rare, because we never really get to see a brain. 
+We get to see a skull. But there it is. 
+All of imagination — everything that we think, we feel, we sense — comes through the human brain. 
+And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape. 
+And I ’ ll give you a quick example. 
+We think about the Internet; we think about information that goes across the Internet. 
+And we never think about the hidden connection. 
+But I brought along here a lump of coal — right here, one lump of coal. 
+And what does a lump of coal have to do with the Internet? 
+You see, it takes the energy in one lump of coal to move one megabyte of information across the net. 
+So every time you download a file, each megabyte is a lump of coal. 
+What that means is, a 200-megabyte file looks like this, ladies and gentlemen. OK? 
+So the next time you download a gigabyte, or two gigabytes, it ’ s not for free, OK? 
+The connection is the energy it takes to run the web, and to make everything we think possible, possible. 
+Thanks, Chris. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What I thought I would do is I would start with a simple request. 
+I'd like all of you to pause for a moment, you wretched weaklings, and take stock of your miserable existence. 
+(Laughter) Now that was the advice that St. Benedict gave his rather startled followers in the fifth century. 
+It was the advice that I decided to follow myself when I turned 40. 
+Up until that moment, I had been that classic corporate warrior — I was eating too much, I was drinking too much, I was working too hard and I was neglecting the family. 
+And I decided that I would try and turn my life around. 
+In particular, I decided I would try to address the thorny issue of work-life balance. 
+So I stepped back from the workforce, and I spent a year at home with my wife and four young children. 
+But all I learned about work-life balance from that year was that I found it quite easy to balance work and life when I didn't have any work. 
+(Laughter) Not a very useful skill, especially when the money runs out. 
+So I went back to work, and I've spent these seven years since struggling with, studying and writing about work-life balance. 
+And I have four observations I'd like to share with you today. 
+The first is: if society's to make any progress on this issue, we need an honest debate. 
+But the trouble is so many people talk so much rubbish about work-life balance. 
+All the discussions about flexi-time or dress-down Fridays or paternity leave only serve to mask the core issue, which is that certain job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. 
+Now the first step in solving any problem is acknowledging the reality of the situation you're in. 
+And the reality of the society that we're in is there are thousands and thousands of people out there leading lives of quiet, screaming desperation, where they work long, hard hours at jobs they hate to enable them to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) It's my contention that going to work on Friday in jeans and [a] T-shirt isn't really getting to the nub of the issue. (Laughter) 
+The second observation I'd like to make is we need to face the truth that governments and corporations aren't going to solve this issue for us. 
+We should stop looking outside. 
+It's up to us as individuals to take control and responsibility for the type of lives that we want to lead. 
+If you don't design your life, someone else will design it for you, and you may just not like their idea of balance. 
+It's particularly important — this isn't on the World Wide Web, is it? I'm about to get fired — it's particularly important that you never put the quality of your life in the hands of a commercial corporation. 
+Now I'm not talking here just about the bad companies — the "" abattoirs of the human soul, "" as I call them. 
+(Laughter) I'm talking about all companies. 
+Because commercial companies are inherently designed to get as much out of you [as] they can get away with. 
+It's in their nature; it's in their DNA; it's what they do — even the good, well-intentioned companies. 
+On the one hand, putting childcare facilities in the workplace is wonderful and enlightened. 
+On the other hand, it's a nightmare — it just means you spend more time at the bloody office. 
+We have to be responsible for setting and enforcing the boundaries that we want in our life. 
+The third observation is we have to be careful with the time frame that we choose upon which to judge our balance. 
+Before I went back to work after my year at home, I sat down and I wrote out a detailed, step-by-step description of the ideal balanced day that I aspired to. 
+And it went like this: wake up well rested after a good night's sleep. 
+Have sex. 
+Walk the dog. 
+Have breakfast with my wife and children. 
+Have sex again. 
+(Laughter) Drive the kids to school on the way to the office. 
+Do three hours' work. 
+Play a sport with a friend at lunchtime. 
+Do another three hours' work. 
+Meet some mates in the pub for an early evening drink. 
+Drive home for dinner with my wife and kids. 
+Meditate for half an hour. 
+Have sex. 
+Walk the dog. Have sex again. 
+Go to bed. 
+(Applause) How often do you think I have that day? 
+(Laughter) We need to be realistic. 
+You can't do it all in one day. 
+We need to elongate the time frame upon which we judge the balance in our life, but we need to elongate it without falling into the trap of the "" I'll have a life when I retire, when my kids have left home, when my wife has divorced me, my health is failing, I've got no mates or interests left. "" (Laughter) A day is too short; "" after I retire "" is too long. 
+There's got to be a middle way. 
+A fourth observation: We need to approach balance in a balanced way. 
+A friend came to see me last year — and she doesn't mind me telling this story — a friend came to see me last year and said, "" Nigel, I've read your book. 
+And I realize that my life is completely out of balance. 
+It's totally dominated by work. 
+I work 10 hours a day; I commute two hours a day. 
+All of my relationships have failed. 
+There's nothing in my life apart from my work. 
+So I've decided to get a grip and sort it out. 
+So I joined a gym. "" (Laughter) Now I don't mean to mock, but being a fit 10-hour-a-day office rat isn't more balanced; it's more fit. (Laughter) 
+Lovely though physical exercise may be, there are other parts to life — there's the intellectual side; there's the emotional side; there's the spiritual side. 
+And to be balanced, I believe we have to attend to all of those areas — not just do 50 stomach crunches. 
+Now that can be daunting. 
+Because people say, "" Bloody hell mate, I haven't got time to get fit. 
+You want me to go to church and call my mother. "" And I understand. 
+I truly understand how that can be daunting. 
+But an incident that happened a couple of years ago gave me a new perspective. 
+My wife, who is somewhere in the audience today, called me up at the office and said, "" Nigel, you need to pick our youngest son "" — Harry — "" up from school. "" Because she had to be somewhere else with the other three children for that evening. 
+So I left work an hour early that afternoon and picked Harry up at the school gates. 
+We walked down to the local park, messed around on the swings, played some silly games. 
+I then walked him up the hill to the local cafe, and we shared a pizza for two, then walked down the hill to our home, and I gave him his bath and put him in his Batman pajamas. 
+I then read him a chapter of Roald Dahl's "" James and the Giant Peach. "" I then put him to bed, tucked him in, gave him a kiss on his forehead and said, "" Goodnight, mate, "" and walked out of his bedroom. 
+As I was walking out of his bedroom, he said, "" Dad? "" I went, "" Yes, mate? "" He went, "" Dad, this has been the best day of my life, ever. "" I hadn't done anything, hadn't taken him to Disney World or bought him a Playstation. 
+Now my point is the small things matter. 
+Being more balanced doesn't mean dramatic upheaval in your life. 
+With the smallest investment in the right places, you can radically transform the quality of your relationships and the quality of your life. 
+Moreover, I think, it can transform society. 
+Because if enough people do it, we can change society's definition of success away from the moronically simplistic notion that the person with the most money when he dies wins, to a more thoughtful and balanced definition of what a life well lived looks like. 
+And that, I think, is an idea worth spreading. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want you guys to imagine that you're a soldier running through the battlefield. 
+Now, you're shot in the leg with a bullet, which severs your femoral artery. 
+Now, this bleed is extremely traumatic and can kill you in less than three minutes. 
+Unfortunately, by the time that a medic actually gets to you, what the medic has on his or her belt can take five minutes or more, with the application of pressure, to stop that type of bleed. 
+Now, this problem is not only a huge problem for the military, but it's also a huge problem that's epidemic throughout the entire medical field, which is how do we actually look at wounds and how do we stop them quickly in a way that can work with the body? 
+So now, what I've been working on for the last four years is to develop smart biomaterials, which are actually materials that will work with the body, helping it to heal and helping it to allow the wounds to heal normally. 
+So now, before we do this, we have to take a much closer look at actually how does the body work. 
+So now, everybody here knows that the body is made up of cells. 
+But not many people know what else. 
+But it actually turns out that your cells sit in this mesh of complicated fibers, proteins and sugars known as the extracellular matrix. 
+So now, the ECM is actually this mesh that holds the cells in place, provides structure for your tissues, but it also gives the cells a home. 
+And it actually turns out that the extracellular matrix is different from every single part of the body. 
+So the ECM in my skin is different than the ECM in my liver, and the ECM in different parts of the same organ actually vary, so it's very difficult to be able to have a product that will react to the local extracellular matrix, which is exactly what we're trying to do. 
+So now, for example, think of the rainforest. 
+You have the canopy, you have the understory, and you have the forest floor. 
+Now, all of these parts of the forest are made up of different plants, and different animals call them home. 
+So just like that, the extracellular matrix is incredibly diverse in three dimensions. 
+On top of that, the extracellular matrix is responsible for all wound healing, so if you imagine cutting the body, you actually have to rebuild this very complex ECM in order to get it to form again, and a scar, in fact, is actually poorly formed extracellular matrix. 
+So now, behind me is an animation of the extracellular matrix. 
+So as you see, your cells sit in this complicated mesh and as you move throughout the tissue, the extracellular matrix changes. 
+So now every other piece of technology on the market can only manage a two- dimensional approximation of the extracellular matrix, which means that it doesn't fit in with the tissue itself. 
+So when I was a freshman at NYU, what I discovered was you could actually take small pieces of plant-derived polymers and reassemble them onto the wound. 
+So if you have a bleeding wound like the one behind me, you can actually put our material onto this, and just like Lego blocks, it'll reassemble into the local tissue. 
+So when you put the gel on, it actually reassembles into this local tissue. 
+So now, this has a whole bunch of applications, but basically the idea is, wherever you put this product, you're able to reassemble into it immediately. 
+Now, this is a simulated arterial bleed — blood warning — at twice human artery pressure. 
+So now, this type of bleed is incredibly traumatic, and like I said before, would actually take five minutes or more with pressure to be able to stop. 
+Now, in the time that it takes me to introduce the bleed itself, our material is able to stop that bleed, and it's because it actually goes on and works with the body to heal, so it reassembles into this piece of meat, and then the blood actually recognizes that that's happening, and produces fibrin, producing a very fast clot in less than 10 seconds. 
+So now this technology — Thank you. 
+(Applause) So now this technology, by January, will be in the hands of veterinarians, and we're working very diligently to try to get it into the hands of doctors, hopefully within the next year. 
+But really, once again, I want you guys to imagine that you are a soldier running through a battlefield. 
+Now, you get hit in the leg with a bullet, and instead of bleeding out in three minutes, you pull a small pack of gel out of your belt, and with the press of a button, you're able to stop your own bleed and you're on your way to recovery. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. 
+I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "" Americans don't get irony. "" (Laughter) Have you come across this idea? 
+(Laughter) But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. 
+(Laughter) But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, "" No Child Left Behind. "" (Laughter) Because whoever thought of that title gets irony. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) Because it's leaving millions of children behind. 
+Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: "Millions of Children Left Behind." 
+(Laughter) In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. 
+If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars. 
+It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis. 
+But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. 
+What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. 
+America spends more money on education than most other countries. 
+And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. 
+The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. 
+There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure. 
+How about two children or more? Right. 
+And the rest of you have seen such children. 
+(Laughter) Small people wandering about. (Laughter) 
+If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. 
+Aren't they? 
+(Applause) You would never confuse them, would you? 
+What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. 
+One of the effects of "" No Child Left Behind "" has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. 
+I'm not here to argue against science and math. 
+A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. 
+An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you — (Applause) One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. 
+ADHD. 
+If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. 
+Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. 
+The second, thank you — (Applause) The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. 
+It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. 
+Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. 
+Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. 
+An old friend of mine — actually very old, he's dead. 
+(Laughter) That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid. (Laughter) 
+He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. 
+You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. 
+There he is. He's dieting. 
+The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. 
+And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. 
+They should be diagnostic. They should help. 
+So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. 
+Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. 
+We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. 
+You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it? 
+(Laughter) And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels. (Laughter) 
+Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization. 
+That's one of the problems of the test. 
+I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning, what keeps them at their desks. 
+And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, "" Well, we don't have one. 
+If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them. "" Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America." 
+No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. 
+Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. 
+I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there. 
+(Laughter) Really. Really. 
+(Laughter) But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America — I mean, as a whole. 
+One is this: they individualize teaching and learning. 
+The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. 
+They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development. 
+You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education — That's what happens in some systems. 
+The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. 
+It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. 
+(Applause) There is wonderful work happening in this country. 
+But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. 
+And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. 
+It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. 
+It's a human system. 
+Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. 
+I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of — they're called alternative education programs. 
+They're very personalized. 
+And they work. 
+We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. 
+Culture is an organic term, isn't it? 
+In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. 
+Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. 
+The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. 
+Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. 
+The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. 
+"" There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen. "" And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. 
+And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+I have all my life wondered what "" mind-boggling "" meant. 
+After two days here, I declare myself boggled, and enormously impressed, and feel that you are one of the great hopes — not just for American achievement in science and technology, but for the whole world. 
+I've come, however, on a special mission on behalf of my constituency, which are the 10-to-the-18th-power — that's a million trillion — insects and other small creatures, and to make a plea for them. 
+If we were to wipe out insects alone, just that group alone, on this planet — which we are trying hard to do — the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. 
+And within a few months. 
+Now, how did I come to this particular position of advocacy? 
+As a little boy, and through my teenage years, I became increasingly fascinated by the diversity of life. 
+I had a butterfly period, a snake period, a bird period, a fish period, a cave period and finally and definitively, an ant period. 
+By my college years, I was a devoted myrmecologist, a specialist on the biology of ants, but my attention and research continued to make journeys across the great variety of life on Earth in general — including all that it means to us as a species, how little we understand it and how pressing a danger that our activities have created for it. 
+Out of that broader study has emerged a concern and an ambition, crystallized in the wish that I'm about to make to you. 
+My choice is the culmination of a lifetime commitment that began with growing up on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, on the Florida peninsula. 
+As far back as I can remember, I was enchanted by the natural beauty of that region and the almost tropical exuberance of the plants and animals that grow there. 
+One day when I was only seven years old and fishing, I pulled a "" pinfish, "" they're called, with sharp dorsal spines, up too hard and fast, and I blinded myself in one eye. 
+I later discovered I was also hard of hearing, possibly congenitally, in the upper registers. 
+So in planning to be a professional naturalist — I never considered anything else in my entire life — I found that I was lousy at bird watching and couldn't track frog calls either. 
+So I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world. 
+In so doing, I reached a frontier of biology so strange, so rich, that it seemed as though it exists on another planet. 
+In fact, we live on a mostly unexplored planet. 
+The great majority of organisms on Earth remain unknown to science. 
+In the last 30 years, thanks to explorations in remote parts of the world and advances in technology, biologists have, for example, added a full one-third of the known frog and other amphibian species, to bring the current total to 5,400, and more continue to pour in. 
+Two new kinds of whales have been discovered, along with two new antelopes, dozens of monkey species and a new kind of elephant — and even a distinct kind of gorilla. 
+At the extreme opposite end of the size scale, the class of marine bacteria, the Prochlorococci — that will be on the final exam — although discovered only in 1988, are now recognized as likely the most abundant organisms on Earth, and moreover, responsible for a large part of the photosynthesis that occurs in the ocean. 
+These bacteria were not uncovered sooner because they are also among the smallest of all Earth's organisms — so minute that they cannot be seen with conventional optical microscopy. 
+Yet life in the sea may depend on these tiny creatures. 
+These examples are just the first glimpse of our ignorance of life on this planet. 
+Consider the fungi — including mushrooms, rusts, molds and many disease-causing organisms. 
+60,000 species are known to science, but more than 1.5 million have been estimated to exist. 
+Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. 
+Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms — if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms. 
+About 16,000 species of nematode worms have been discovered and diagnosed by scientists; there could be hundreds of thousands of them, even millions, still unknown. 
+This vast domain of hidden biodiversity is increased still further by the dark matter of the biological world of bacteria, which within just the last several years still were known from only about 6,000 species of bacteria worldwide. 
+But that number of bacteria species can be found in one gram of soil, just a little handful of soil, in the 10 billion bacteria that would be there. 
+It's been estimated that a single ton of soil — fertile soil — contains approximately four million species of bacteria, all unknown. 
+So the question is: what are they all doing? 
+The fact is, we don't know. 
+We are living on a planet with a lot of activities, with reference to our living environment, done by faith and guess alone. 
+Our lives depend upon these creatures. 
+To take an example close to home: there are over 500 species of bacteria now known — friendly bacteria — living symbiotically in your mouth and throat probably necessary to your health for holding off pathogenic bacteria. 
+At this point I think we have a little impressionistic film that was made especially for this occasion. 
+And I'd like to show it. 
+Assisted in this by Billie Holiday. 
+(Video) And that may be just the beginning! 
+The viruses, those quasi-organisms among which are the prophages, the gene weavers that promote the continued evolution in the lives of the bacteria, are a virtually unknown frontier of modern biology, a world unto themselves. 
+What constitutes a viral species is still unresolved, although they're obviously of enormous importance to us. 
+But this much we can say: the variety of genes on the planet in viruses exceeds, or is likely to exceed, that in all of the rest of life combined. 
+Nowadays, in addressing microbial biodiversity, scientists are like explorers in a rowboat launched onto the Pacific Ocean. 
+But that is changing rapidly with the aid of new genomic technology. 
+Already it is possible to sequence the entire genetic code of a bacterium in under four hours. 
+Soon we will be in a position to go forth in the field with sequencers on our backs — to hunt bacteria in tiny crevices of the habitat's surface in the way you go watching for birds with binoculars. 
+What will we find as we map the living world, as, finally, we get this underway seriously? 
+As we move past the relatively gigantic mammals, birds, frogs and plants to the more elusive insects and other small invertebrates and then beyond to the countless millions of organisms in the invisible living world enveloped and living within humanity? 
+Already what were thought to be bacteria for generations have been found to compose, instead, two great domains of microorganisms: true bacteria and one-celled organisms the archaea, which are closer than other bacteria to the eukaryota, the group that we belong to. 
+Some serious biologists, and I count myself among them, have begun to wonder that among the enormous and still unknown diversity of microorganisms, one might — just might — find aliens among them. 
+True aliens, stocks that arrived from outer space. 
+They've had billions of years to do it, but especially during the earliest period of biological evolution on this planet. 
+We do know that some bacterial species that have earthly origin are capable of almost unimaginable extremes of temperature and other harsh changes in environment, including hard radiation strong enough and maintained long enough to crack the Pyrex vessels around the growing population of bacteria. 
+There may be a temptation to treat the biosphere holistically and the species that compose it as a great flux of entities hardly worth distinguishing one from the other. 
+But each of these species, even the tiniest Prochlorococci, are masterpieces of evolution. 
+Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. 
+Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine. 
+We will destroy these ecosystems and the species composing them at the peril of our own existence — and unfortunately we are destroying them with ingenuity and ceaseless energy. 
+My own epiphany as a conservationist came in 1953, while a Harvard graduate student, searching for rare ants found in the mountain forests of Cuba, ants that shine in the sunlight — metallic green or metallic blue, according to species, and one species, I discovered, metallic gold. 
+I found my magical ants, but only after a tough climb into the mountains where the last of the native Cuban forests hung on, and were then — and still are — being cut back. 
+I realized then that these species and a large part of the other unique, marvelous animals and plants on that island — and this is true of practically every part of the world — which took millions of years to evolve, are in the process of disappearing forever. 
+And so it is everywhere one looks. 
+The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere by a combination of forces that can be summarized by the acronym "" HIPPO, "" the animal hippo. 
+H is for habitat destruction, including climate change forced by greenhouse gases. 
+I is for the invasive species like the fire ants, the zebra mussels, broom grasses and pathogenic bacteria and viruses that are flooding every country, and at an exponential rate — that's the I. 
+The P, the first one in "" HIPPO, "" is for pollution. 
+The second is for continued population, human population expansion. 
+And the final letter is O, for over-harvesting — driving species into extinction by excessive hunting and fishing. 
+The HIPPO juggernaut we have created, if unabated, is destined — according to the best estimates of ongoing biodiversity research — to reduce half of Earth's still surviving animal and plant species to extinction or critical endangerment by the end of the century. 
+Human-forced climate change alone — again, if unabated — could eliminate a quarter of surviving species during the next five decades. 
+What will we and all future generations lose if much of the living environment is thus degraded? 
+Huge potential sources of scientific information yet to be gathered, much of our environmental stability and new kinds of pharmaceuticals and new products of unimaginable strength and value — all thrown away. 
+The loss will inflict a heavy price in wealth, security and yes, spirituality for all time to come, because previous cataclysms of this kind — the last one, that ended the age of dinosaurs — took, normally, five to 10 million years to repair. 
+Sadly, our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is even discovered. 
+For example, even in the United States, the 200,000 species known currently actually has been found to be only partial in coverage; it is mostly unknown to us in basic biology. 
+Only about 15 percent of the known species have been studied well enough to evaluate their status. 
+Of the 15 percent evaluated, 20 percent are classified as "" in peril, "" that is, in danger of extinction. 
+That's in the United States. 
+We are, in short, flying blind into our environmental future. 
+We urgently need to change this. 
+We need to have the biosphere properly explored so that we can understand and competently manage it. 
+We need to settle down before we wreck the planet. 
+And we need that knowledge. 
+This should be a big science project equivalent to the Human Genome Project. 
+It should be thought of as a biological moonshot with a timetable. 
+So this brings me to my wish for TEDsters, and to anyone else around the world who hears this talk. 
+I wish we will work together to help create the key tools that we need to inspire preservation of Earth's biodiversity. 
+And let us call it the "" Encyclopedia of Life. "" What is the "" Encyclopedia of Life? "" A concept that has already taken hold and is beginning to spread and be looked at seriously? 
+It is an encyclopedia that lives on the Internet and is contributed to by thousands of scientists around the world. 
+Amateurs can do it also. 
+It has an indefinitely expandable page for each species. 
+It makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, on demand, anywhere in the world. 
+I've written about this idea before, and I know there are people in this room who have expended significant effort on it in the past. 
+But what excites me is that since I first put forward this particular idea in that form, science has advanced. 
+Technology has moved forward. 
+Today, the practicalities of making such an encyclopedia, regardless of the magnitude of the information put into it, are within reach. 
+Indeed, in the past year, a group of influential scientific institutions have begun mobilizing to realize this dream. 
+I wish you would help them. 
+Working together, we can make this real. 
+The encyclopedia will quickly pay for itself in practical applications. 
+It will address transcendent qualities in the human consciousness, and sense of human need. 
+It will transform the science of biology in ways of obvious benefit to humanity. 
+And most of all, it can inspire a new generation of biologists to continue the quest that started, for me personally, 60 years ago: to search for life, to understand it and finally, above all, to preserve it. 
+That is my wish. Thank you. 
+
+The key question is, "" When are we going to get fusion? "" It's really been a long time since we've known about fusion. 
+We've known about fusion since 1920, when Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and the British Association for the Advancement of Science conjectured that that's why the sun shines. 
+I've always been very worried about resource. 
+I don't know about you, but when my mother gave me food, I always sorted the ones I disliked from the ones I liked. 
+And I ate the disliked ones first, because the ones you like, you want to save. 
+And as a child you're always worried about resource. 
+And once it was sort of explained to me how fast we were using up the world's resources, I got very upset, about as upset as I did when I realized that the Earth will only last about five billion years before it's swallowed by the sun. 
+Big events in my life, a strange child. 
+(Laughter) Energy, at the moment, is dominated by resource. 
+The countries that make a lot of money out of energy have something underneath them. 
+Coal-powered industrial revolution in this country — oil, gas, sorry. 
+(Laughter) Gas, I'm probably the only person who really enjoys it when Mister Putin turns off the gas tap, because my budget goes up. 
+We're really dominated now by those things that we're using up faster and faster and faster. 
+And as we try to lift billions of people out of poverty in the Third World, in the developing world, we're using energy faster and faster. 
+And those resources are going away. 
+And the way we'll make energy in the future is not from resource, it's really from knowledge. 
+If you look 50 years into the future, the way we probably will be making energy is probably one of these three, with some wind, with some other things, but these are going to be the base load energy drivers. 
+Solar can do it, and we certainly have to develop solar. 
+But we have a lot of knowledge to gain before we can make solar the base load energy supply for the world. 
+Fission. 
+Our government is going to put in six new nuclear power stations. 
+They're going to put in six new nuclear power stations, and probably more after that. 
+China is building nuclear power stations. Everybody is. 
+Because they know that that is one sure way to do carbon-free energy. 
+But if you wanted to know what the perfect energy source is, the perfect energy source is one that doesn't take up much space, has a virtually inexhaustible supply, is safe, doesn't put any carbon into the atmosphere, doesn't leave any long-lived radioactive waste: it's fusion. 
+But there is a catch. Of course there is always a catch in these cases. 
+Fusion is very hard to do. 
+We've been trying for 50 years. 
+Okay. What is fusion? Here comes the nuclear physics. 
+And sorry about that, but this is what turns me on. 
+(Laughter) I was a strange child. 
+Nuclear energy comes for a simple reason. 
+The most stable nucleus is iron, right in the middle of the periodic table. 
+It's a medium-sized nucleus. 
+And you want to go towards iron if you want to get energy. 
+So, uranium, which is very big, wants to split. 
+But small atoms want to join together, small nuclei want to join together to make bigger ones to go towards iron. 
+And you can get energy out this way. 
+And indeed that's exactly what stars do. 
+In the middle of stars, you're joining hydrogen together to make helium and then helium together to make carbon, to make oxygen, all the things that you're made of are made in the middle of stars. 
+But it's a hard process to do because, as you know, the middle of a star is quite hot, almost by definition. 
+And there is one reaction that's probably the easiest fusion reaction to do. 
+It's between two isotopes of hydrogen, two kinds of hydrogen: deuterium, which is heavy hydrogen, which you can get from seawater, and tritium which is super-heavy hydrogen. 
+These two nuclei, when they're far apart, are charged. 
+And you push them together and they repel. 
+But when you get them close enough, something called the strong force starts to act and pulls them together. 
+So, most of the time they repel. 
+You get them closer and closer and closer and then at some point the strong force grips them together. 
+For a moment they become helium 5, because they've got five particles inside them. 
+So, that's that process there. Deuterium and tritium goes together makes helium 5. 
+Helium splits out, and a neutron comes out and lots of energy comes out. 
+If you can get something to about 150 million degrees, things will be rattling around so fast that every time they collide in just the right configuration, this will happen, and it will release energy. 
+And that energy is what powers fusion. 
+And it's this reaction that we want to do. 
+There is one trickiness about this reaction. 
+Well, there is a trickiness that you have to make it 150 million degrees, but there is a trickiness about the reaction yet. 
+It's pretty hot. 
+The trickiness about the reaction is that tritium doesn't exist in nature. 
+You have to make it from something else. 
+And you make if from lithium. That reaction at the bottom, that's lithium 6, plus a neutron, will give you more helium, plus tritium. 
+And that's the way you make your tritium. 
+But fortunately, if you can do this fusion reaction, you've got a neutron, so you can make that happen. 
+Now, why the hell would we bother to do this? 
+This is basically why we would bother to do it. 
+If you just plot how much fuel we've got left, in units of present world consumption. 
+And as you go across there you see a few tens of years of oil — the blue line, by the way, is the lowest estimate of existing resources. 
+And the yellow line is the most optimistic estimate. 
+And as you go across there you will see that we've got a few tens of years, and perhaps 100 years of fossil fuels left. 
+And god knows we don't really want to burn all of it, because it will make an awful lot of carbon in the air. 
+And then we get to uranium. 
+And with current reactor technology we really don't have very much uranium. 
+And we will have to extract uranium from sea water, which is the yellow line, to make conventional nuclear power stations actually do very much for us. 
+This is a bit shocking, because in fact our government is relying on that for us to meet Kyoto, and do all those kind of things. 
+To go any further you would have to have breeder technology. 
+And breeder technology is fast breeders. And that's pretty dangerous. 
+The big thing, on the right, is the lithium we have in the world. 
+And lithium is in sea water. That's the yellow line. 
+And we have 30 million years worth of fusion fuel in sea water. 
+Everybody can get it. That's why we want to do fusion. 
+Is it cost-competitive? 
+We make estimates of what we think it would cost to actually make a fusion power plant. 
+And we get within about the same price as current electricity. 
+So, how would we make it? 
+We have to hold something at 150 million degrees. 
+And, in fact, we've done this. 
+We hold it with a magnetic field. 
+And inside it, right in the middle of this toroidal shape, doughnut shape, right in the middle is 150 million degrees. 
+It boils away in the middle at 150 million degrees. 
+And in fact we can make fusion happen. 
+And just down the road, this is JET. 
+It's the only machine in the world that's actually done fusion. 
+When people say fusion is 30 years away, and always will be, I say, "" Yeah, but we've actually done it. "" Right? 
+We can do fusion. In the center of this device we made 16 megawatts of fusion power in 1997. 
+And in 2013 we're going to fire it up again and break all those records. 
+But that's not really fusion power. That's just making some fusion happen. 
+We've got to take that, we've got to make that into a fusion reactor. 
+Because we want 30 million years worth of fusion power for the Earth. 
+This is the device we're building now. 
+It gets very expensive to do this research. 
+It turns out you can't do fusion on a table top despite all that cold fusion nonsense. Right? 
+You can't. You have to do it in a very big device. 
+More than half the world's population is involved in building this device in southern France, which is a nice place to put an experiment. 
+Seven nations are involved in building this. 
+It's going to cost us 10 billion. And we'll produce half a gigawatt of fusion power. 
+But that's not electricity yet. 
+We have to get to this. 
+We have to get to a power plant. 
+We have to start putting electricity on the grid in this very complex technology. 
+And I'd really like it to happen a lot faster than it is. 
+But at the moment, all we can imagine is sometime in the 2030s. 
+I wish this were different. We really need it now. 
+We're going to have a problem with power in the next five years in this country. 
+So 2030 looks like an infinity away. 
+But we can't abandon it now; we have to push forward, get fusion to happen. 
+I wish we had more money, I wish we had more resources. 
+But this is what we're aiming at, sometime in the 2030s — real electric power from fusion. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I would like to share with you today a project that has changed how I approach and practice architecture: the Fez River Rehabilitation Project. 
+My hometown of Fez, Morocco, boasts one of the largest walled medieval cities in the world, called the medina, nestled in a river valley. 
+The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 
+Since the 1950s, as the population of the medina grew, basic urban infrastructure such as green open spaces and sewage quickly changed and got highly stressed. 
+One of the biggest casualties of the situation was the Fez River, which bisects the medina in its middle and has been considered for many centuries as the city's very soul. 
+In fact, one can witness the presence of the river's extensive water network all throughout the city, in places such as private and public fountains. 
+Unfortunately, because of the pollution of the river, it has been covered little by little by concrete slabs since 1952. 
+This process of erasure was coupled with the destruction of many houses along the river banks to be able to make machineries enter the narrow pedestrian network of the medina. 
+Those urban voids quickly became illegal parking or trash yards. 
+Actually, the state of the river before entering the medina is pretty healthy. 
+Then pollution takes its toll, mainly due to untreated sewage and chemical dumping from crafts such as tanning. 
+At some point, I couldn't bear the desecration of the river, such an important part of my city, and I decided to take action, especially after I heard that the city received a grant to divert sewage water and to treat it. 
+With clean water, suddenly the uncovering of the river became possible, and with luck and actually a lot of pushing, my partner Takako Tajima and I were commissioned by the city to work with a team of engineers to uncover the river. 
+However, we were sneaky, and we proposed more: to convert riverbanks into pedestrian pathways, and then to connect these pathways back to the city fabric, and finally to convert the urban voids along the riverbanks into public spaces that are lacking in the Medina of Fez. 
+I will show you briefly now two of these public spaces. 
+The first one is the Rcif Plaza, which sits actually right on top of the river, which you can see here in dotted lines. 
+This plaza used to be a chaotic transportation hub that actually compromised the urban integrity of the medina, that has the largest pedestrian network in the world. 
+And right beyond the historic bridge that you can see here, right next to the plaza, you can see that the river looked like a river of trash. 
+Instead, what we proposed is to make the plaza entirely pedestrian, to cover it with recycled leather canopies, and to connect it to the banks of the river. 
+The second site of intervention is also an urban void along the river banks, and it used to be an illegal parking, and we proposed to transform it into the first playground in the medina. 
+The playground is constructed using recycled tires and also is coupled with a constructed wetland that not only cleans the water of the river but also retains it when floods occur. 
+As the project progressed and received several design awards, new stakeholders intervened and changed the project goals and design. 
+The only way for us to be able to bring the main goals of the project ahead was for us to do something very unusual that usually architects don't do. 
+It was for us to take our design ego and our sense of authorship and put it in the backseat and to focus mainly on being activists and on trying to coalesce all of the agendas of stakeholders and focus on the main goals of the project: that is, to uncover the river, treat its water, and provide public spaces for all. 
+We were actually very lucky, and many of those goals happened or are in the process of happening. 
+Like, you can see here in the Rcif Plaza. 
+This is how it looked like about six years ago. 
+This is how it looks like today. 
+It's still under construction, but actually it is heavily used by the local population. 
+And finally, this is how the Rcif Plaza will look like when the project is completed. 
+This is the river, covered, used as a trash yard. 
+And finally, you can see here the river when the project will be completed. 
+So for sure, the Fez River Rehabilitation will keep on changing and adapting to the sociopolitical landscape of the city, but we strongly believe that by reimagining the role and the agency of the architect, we have set up the core idea of the project into motion; that is, to transform the river from sewage to public space for all, thereby making sure that the city of Fez will remain a living city for its inhabitants rather than a mummified heritage. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+What do you think when you look at me? 
+A woman of faith? An expert? 
+Maybe even a sister. 
+Or oppressed, brainwashed, a terrorist. 
+Or just an airport security line delay. 
+That one's actually true. 
+(Laughter) If some of your perceptions were negative, I don't really blame you. 
+That's just how the media has been portraying people who look like me. 
+One study found that 80 percent of news coverage about Islam and Muslims is negative. 
+And studies show that Americans say that most don't know a Muslim. 
+I guess people don't talk to their Uber drivers. 
+(Laughter) Well, for those of you who have never met a Muslim, it's great to meet you. 
+Let me tell you who I am. 
+I'm a mom, a coffee lover — double espresso, cream on the side. 
+I'm an introvert. 
+I'm a wannabe fitness fanatic. 
+But not like Lady Gaga says, because baby, I wasn't born this way. 
+It was a choice. 
+When I was 17, I decided to come out. 
+No, not as a gay person like some of my friends, but as a Muslim, and decided to start wearing the hijab, my head covering. 
+My feminist friends were aghast: "Why are you oppressing yourself?" 
+The funny thing was, it was actually at that time a feminist declaration of independence from the pressure I felt as a 17-year-old, to conform to a perfect and unattainable standard of beauty. 
+I didn't just passively accept the faith of my parents. 
+I wrestled with the Quran. 
+I read and reflected and questioned and doubted and, ultimately, believed. 
+My relationship with God — it was not love at first sight. 
+It was a trust and a slow surrender that deepened with every reading of the Quran. 
+Its rhythmic beauty sometimes moves me to tears. 
+I see myself in it. I feel that God knows me. 
+Have you ever felt like someone sees you, completely understands you and yet loves you anyway? 
+That's how it feels. 
+And so later, I got married, and like all good Egyptians, started my career as an engineer. 
+(Laughter) I later had a child, after getting married, and I was living essentially the Egyptian-American dream. 
+And then that terrible morning of September, 2001. 
+I think a lot of you probably remember exactly where you were that morning. 
+I was sitting in my kitchen finishing breakfast, and I look up on the screen and see the words "" Breaking News. "" There was smoke, airplanes flying into buildings, people jumping out of buildings. 
+What was this? 
+An accident? 
+A malfunction? 
+My shock quickly turned to outrage. 
+Who would do this? 
+And I switch the channel and I hear, "... Muslim terrorist...," "... in the name of Islam...," "... Middle-Eastern descent...," "... jihad...," "... we should bomb Mecca." 
+Oh my God. 
+Not only had my country been attacked, but in a flash, somebody else's actions had turned me from a citizen to a suspect. 
+That same day, we had to drive across Middle America to move to a new city to start grad school. 
+And I remember sitting in the passenger seat as we drove in silence, crouched as low as I could go in my seat, for the first time in my life, afraid for anyone to know I was a Muslim. 
+We moved into our apartment that night in a new town in what felt like a completely different world. 
+And then I was hearing and seeing and reading warnings from national Muslim organizations saying things like, "" Be alert, "" "" Be aware, "" "Stay in well-lit areas," "Don't congregate." 
+I stayed inside all week. 
+And then it was Friday that same week, the day that Muslims congregate for worship. 
+And again the warnings were, "" Don't go that first Friday, it could be a target. "" And I was watching the news, wall-to-wall coverage. 
+Emotions were so raw, understandably, and I was also hearing about attacks on Muslims, or people who were perceived to be Muslim, being pulled out and beaten in the street. 
+Mosques were actually firebombed. 
+And I thought, we should just stay home. 
+And yet, something didn't feel right. 
+Because those people who attacked our country attacked our country. 
+I get it that people were angry at the terrorists. 
+Guess what? So was I. 
+And so to have to explain yourself all the time isn't easy. 
+I don't mind questions. I love questions. 
+It's the accusations that are tough. 
+Today we hear people actually saying things like, "" There's a problem in this country, and it's called Muslims. 
+When are we going to get rid of them? "" So, some people want to ban Muslims and close down mosques. 
+They talk about my community kind of like we're a tumor in the body of America. 
+And the only question is, are we malignant or benign? 
+You know, a malignant tumor you extract altogether, and a benign tumor you just keep under surveillance. 
+The choices don't make sense, because it's the wrong question. 
+Muslims, like all other Americans, aren't a tumor in the body of America, we're a vital organ. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+Muslims are inventors and teachers, first responders and Olympic athletes. 
+Now, is closing down mosques going to make America safer? 
+It might free up some parking spots, but it will not end terrorism. 
+Going to a mosque regularly is actually linked to having more tolerant views of people of other faiths and greater civic engagement. 
+And as one police chief in the Washington, DC area recently told me, people don't actually get radicalized at mosques. 
+They get radicalized in their basement or bedroom, in front of a computer. 
+And what you find about the radicalization process is it starts online, but the first thing that happens is the person gets cut off from their community, from even their family, so that the extremist group can brainwash them into believing that they, the terrorists, are the true Muslims, and everyone else who abhors their behavior and ideology are sellouts or apostates. 
+So if we want to prevent radicalization, we have to keep people going to the mosque. 
+Now, some will still argue Islam is a violent religion. 
+After all, a group like ISIS bases its brutality on the Quran. 
+Now, as a Muslim, as a mother, as a human being, I think we need to do everything we can to stop a group like ISIS. 
+But we would be giving in to their narrative if we cast them as representatives of a faith of 1.6 billion people. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+ISIS has as much to do with Islam as the Ku Klux Klan has to do with Christianity. 
+(Applause) Both groups claim to base their ideology on their holy book. 
+But when you look at them, they're not motivated by what they read in their holy book. 
+It's their brutality that makes them read these things into the scripture. 
+Recently, a prominent imam told me a story that really took me aback. 
+He said that a girl came to him because she was thinking of going to join ISIS. 
+And I was really surprised and asked him, had she been in contact with a radical religious leader? 
+And he said the problem was quite the opposite, that every cleric that she had talked to had shut her down and said that her rage, her sense of injustice in the world, was just going to get her in trouble. 
+And so with nowhere to channel and make sense of this anger, she was a prime target to be exploited by extremists promising her a solution. 
+What this imam did was to connect her back to God and to her community. 
+He didn't shame her for her rage — instead, he gave her constructive ways to make real change in the world. 
+What she learned at that mosque prevented her from going to join ISIS. 
+I've told you a little bit about how Islamophobia affects me and my family. 
+But how does it impact ordinary Americans? 
+How does it impact everyone else? 
+How does consuming fear 24 hours a day affect the health of our democracy, the health of our free thought? 
+Well, one study — actually, several studies in neuroscience — show that when we're afraid, at least three things happen. 
+We become more accepting of authoritarianism, conformity and prejudice. 
+One study showed that when subjects were exposed to news stories that were negative about Muslims, they became more accepting of military attacks on Muslim countries and policies that curtail the rights of American Muslims. 
+Now, this isn't just academic. 
+When you look at when anti-Muslim sentiment spiked between 2001 and 2013, it happened three times, but it wasn't around terrorist attacks. 
+It was in the run up to the Iraq War and during two election cycles. 
+So Islamophobia isn't just the natural response to Muslim terrorism as I would have expected. 
+It can actually be a tool of public manipulation, eroding the very foundation of a free society, which is rational and well-informed citizens. 
+Muslims are like canaries in the coal mine. 
+We might be the first to feel it, but the toxic air of fear is harming us all. 
+(Applause) And assigning collective guilt isn't just about having to explain yourself all the time. 
+Deah and his wife Yusor were a young married couple living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they both went to school. 
+Deah was an athlete. 
+He was in dental school, talented, promising... 
+And his sister would tell me that he was the sweetest, most generous human being she knew. 
+She was visiting him there and he showed her his resume, and she was amazed. 
+She said, "" When did my baby brother become such an accomplished young man? "" Just a few weeks after Suzanne's visit to her brother and his new wife, their neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, murdered them, as well as Yusor's sister, Razan, who was visiting for the afternoon, in their apartment, execution style, after posting anti-Muslim statements on his Facebook page. 
+He shot Deah eight times. 
+So bigotry isn't just immoral, it can even be lethal. 
+So, back to my story. 
+What happened after 9 / 11? 
+Did we go to the mosque or did we play it safe and stay home? 
+Well, we talked it over, and it might seem like a small decision, but to us, it was about what kind of America we wanted to leave for our kids: one that would control us by fear or one where we were practicing our religion freely. 
+So we decided to go to the mosque. 
+And we put my son in his car seat, buckled him in, and we drove silently, intensely, to the mosque. 
+I took him out, I took off my shoes, I walked into the prayer hall and what I saw made me stop. 
+The place was completely full. 
+And then the imam made an announcement, thanking and welcoming our guests, because half the congregation were Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, people of faith and no faith, who had come not to attack us, but to stand in solidarity with us. 
+(Applause) I just break down at this time. 
+These people were there because they chose courage and compassion over panic and prejudice. 
+What will you choose? 
+What will you choose at this time of fear and bigotry? 
+Will you play it safe? 
+Or will you join those who say we are better than that? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you so much. 
+Helen Walters: So Dalia, you seem to have struck a chord. 
+But I wonder, what would you say to those who might argue that you're giving a TED Talk, you're clearly a deep thinker, you work at a fancy think tank, you're an exception, you're not the rule. 
+I'm not an exception. 
+My story is not unusual. 
+I am as ordinary as they come. 
+When you look at Muslims around the world — and I've done this, I've done the largest study ever done on Muslims around the world — people want ordinary things. 
+They want prosperity for their family, they want jobs and they want to live in peace. 
+So I am not in any way an exception. 
+When you meet people who seem like an exception to the rule, oftentimes it's that the rule is broken, not that they're an exception to it. 
+HW: Thank you so much. Dalia Mogahed. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi. 
+(Laughter) I did that for two reasons. 
+First of all, I wanted to give you a good visual first impression. 
+But the main reason I did it is that that's what happens to me when I'm forced to wear a Lady Gaga skanky mic. 
+(Laughter) I'm used to a stationary mic. 
+It's the sensible shoe of public address. 
+(Laughter) But you clamp this thing on my head, and something happens. 
+I just become skanky. 
+(Laughter) So I'm sorry about that. 
+And I'm already off-message. 
+(Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, I have devoted the past 25 years of my life to designing books. 
+("" Yes, BOOKS. You know, the bound volumes with ink on paper. 
+You cannot turn them off with a switch. 
+Tell your kids. "") It all sort of started as a benign mistake, like penicillin. (Laughter) What I really wanted was to be a graphic designer at one of the big design firms in New York City. 
+But upon arrival there, in the fall of 1986, and doing a lot of interviews, I found that the only thing I was offered was to be Assistant to the Art Director at Alfred A. Knopf, a book publisher. 
+Now I was stupid, but not so stupid that I turned it down. 
+I had absolutely no idea what I was about to become part of, and I was incredibly lucky. 
+Soon, it had occurred to me what my job was. 
+My job was to ask this question: "What do the stories look like?" 
+Because that is what Knopf is. 
+It is the story factory, one of the very best in the world. 
+We bring stories to the public. 
+The stories can be anything, and some of them are actually true. 
+But they all have one thing in common: They all need to look like something. 
+They all need a face. 
+Why? To give you a first impression of what you are about to get into. 
+A book designer gives form to content, but also manages a very careful balance between the two. 
+Now, the first day of my graphic design training at Penn State University, the teacher, Lanny Sommese, came into the room and he drew a picture of an apple on the blackboard, and wrote the word "" Apple "" underneath, and he said, "" OK. Lesson one. Listen up. "" And he covered up the picture and he said, "" You either say this, "" and then he covered up the word, "" or you show this. 
+But you don't do this. "" Because this is treating your audience like a moron. 
+(Laughter) And they deserve better. 
+And lo and behold, soon enough, I was able to put this theory to the test on two books that I was working on for Knopf. 
+The first was Katharine Hepburn's memoirs, and the second was a biography of Marlene Dietrich. 
+Now the Hepburn book was written in a very conversational style, it was like she was sitting across a table telling it all to you. 
+The Dietrich book was an observation by her daughter; it was a biography. 
+So the Hepburn story is words and the Dietrich story is pictures, and so we did this. 
+So there you are. 
+Pure content and pure form, side by side. 
+No fighting, ladies. 
+("" What's a Jurassic Park? "") Now, what is the story here? 
+Someone is re-engineering dinosaurs by extracting their DNA from prehistoric amber. 
+Genius! 
+(Laughter) Now, luckily for me, I live and work in New York City, where there are plenty of dinosaurs. (Laughter) 
+So, I went to the Museum of Natural History, and I checked out the bones, and I went to the gift shop, and I bought a book. 
+And I was particularly taken with this page of the book, and more specifically the lower right-hand corner. 
+Now I took this diagram, and I put it in a Photostat machine, (Laughter) and I took a piece of tracing paper, and I taped it over the Photostat with a piece of Scotch tape — stop me if I'm going too fast — (Laughter) — and then I took a Rapidograph pen — explain it to the youngsters — (Laughter) and I just started to reconstitute the dinosaur. 
+I had no idea what I was doing, I had no idea where I was going, but at some point, I stopped — when to keep going would seem like I was going too far. 
+And what I ended up with was a graphic representation of us seeing this animal coming into being. 
+We're in the middle of the process. 
+And then I just threw some typography on it. 
+Very basic stuff, slightly suggestive of public park signage. 
+(Laughter) Everybody in house loved it, and so off it goes to the author. 
+And even back then, Michael was on the cutting edge. 
+("" Michael Crichton responds by fax: "") ("" Wow! Fucking Fantastic Jacket "") (Laughter) (Applause) That was a relief to see that pour out of the machine. (Laughter) 
+I miss Michael. 
+And sure enough, somebody from MCA Universal calls our legal department to see if they can maybe look into buying the rights to the image, just in case they might want to use it. 
+Well, they used it. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And I was thrilled. 
+We all know it was an amazing movie, and it was so interesting to see it go out into the culture and become this phenomenon and to see all the different permutations of it. 
+But not too long ago, I came upon this on the Web. 
+No, that is not me. 
+But whoever it is, I can't help but thinking they woke up one day like, "" Oh my God, that wasn't there last night. Ooooohh! 
+I was so wasted. "" (Laughter) But if you think about it, from my head to my hands to his leg. (Laughter) 
+That's a responsibility. 
+And it's a responsibility that I don't take lightly. 
+The book designer's responsibility is threefold: to the reader, to the publisher and, most of all, to the author. 
+I want you to look at the author's book and say, "" Wow! I need to read that. "" David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers, and the title essay in this collection is about his trip to a nudist colony. 
+And the reason he went is because he had a fear of his body image, and he wanted to explore what was underlying that. 
+For me, it was simply an excuse to design a book that you could literally take the pants off of. 
+But when you do, you don't get what you expect. 
+You get something that goes much deeper than that. 
+And David especially loved this design because at book signings, which he does a lot of, he could take a magic marker and do this. 
+(Laughter) Hello! (Laughter) 
+Augusten Burroughs wrote a memoir called ["" Dry ""], and it's about his time in rehab. 
+In his 20s, he was a hotshot ad executive, and as Mad Men has told us, a raging alcoholic. 
+He did not think so, however, but his coworkers did an intervention and they said, "You are going to rehab, or you will be fired and you will die." 
+Now to me, this was always going to be a typographic solution, what I would call the opposite of Type 101. 
+What does that mean? 
+Usually on the first day of Introduction to Typography, you get the assignment of, select a word and make it look like what it says it is. So that's Type 101, right? 
+Very simple stuff. 
+This is going to be the opposite of that. 
+I want this book to look like it's lying to you, desperately and hopelessly, the way an alcoholic would. 
+The answer was the most low-tech thing you can imagine. 
+I set up the type, I printed it out on an Epson printer with water-soluble ink, taped it to the wall and threw a bucket of water at it. Presto! 
+Then when we went to press, the printer put a spot gloss on the ink and it really looked like it was running. 
+Not long after it came out, Augusten was waylaid in an airport and he was hiding out in the bookstore spying on who was buying his books. 
+And this woman came up to it, and she squinted, and she took it to the register, and she said to the man behind the counter, "" This one's ruined. "" (Laughter) And the guy behind the counter said, "" I know, lady. They all came in that way. "" (Laughter) Now, that's a good printing job. 
+A book cover is a distillation. 
+It is a haiku, if you will, of the story. 
+This particular story by Osama Tezuka is his epic life of the Buddha, and it's eight volumes in all. But the best thing is when it's on your shelf, you get a shelf life of the Buddha, moving from one age to the next. 
+All of these solutions derive their origins from the text of the book, but once the book designer has read the text, then he has to be an interpreter and a translator. 
+This story was a real puzzle. 
+This is what it's about. 
+("" Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters. "") (Laughter) All right, so I got a collection of the paintings together and I looked at them and I deconstructed them and I put them back together. 
+And so, here's the design, right? 
+And so here's the front and the spine, and it's flat. 
+But the real story starts when you wrap it around a book and put it on the shelf. 
+Ahh! We come upon them, the clandestine lovers. Let's draw them out. 
+Huhh! They've been discovered by the sultan. 
+He will not be pleased. 
+Huhh! And now the sultan is in danger. 
+And now, we have to open it up to find out what's going to happen next. 
+Try experiencing that on a Kindle. 
+(Laughter) Don't get me started. 
+Seriously. 
+Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. 
+But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity. 
+Do you know what John Updike used to do the first thing when he would get a copy of one of his new books from Alfred A. Knopf? 
+He'd smell it. 
+Then he'd run his hand over the rag paper, and the pungent ink and the deckled edges of the pages. 
+All those years, all those books, he never got tired of it. 
+Now, I am all for the iPad, but trust me — smelling it will get you nowhere. 
+(Laughter) Now the Apple guys are texting, "Develop odor emission plug-in." (Laughter) 
+And the last story I'm going to talk about is quite a story. 
+A woman named Aomame in 1984 Japan finds herself negotiating down a spiral staircase off an elevated highway. When she gets to the bottom, she can't help but feel that, all of a sudden, she's entered a new reality that's just slightly different from the one that she left, but very similar, but different. 
+And so, we're talking about parallel planes of existence, sort of like a book jacket and the book that it covers. 
+So how do we show this? 
+We go back to Hepburn and Dietrich, but now we merge them. 
+So we're talking about different planes, different pieces of paper. 
+So this is on a semi-transparent piece of velum. 
+It's one part of the form and content. 
+When it's on top of the paper board, which is the opposite, it forms this. 
+So even if you don't know anything about this book, you are forced to consider a single person straddling two planes of existence. 
+And the object itself invited exploration interaction, consideration and touch. 
+This debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list. 
+This is unheard of, both for us the publisher, and the author. 
+We're talking a 900-page book that is as weird as it is compelling, and featuring a climactic scene in which a horde of tiny people emerge from the mouth of a sleeping girl and cause a German Shepherd to explode. 
+(Laughter) Not exactly Jackie Collins. 
+Fourteen weeks on the Best Seller list, eight printings, and still going strong. 
+So even though we love publishing as an art, we very much know it's a business too, and that if we do our jobs right and get a little lucky, that great art can be great business. 
+So that's my story. To be continued. 
+What does it look like? 
+Yes. It can, it does and it will, but for this book designer, page-turner, dog-eared place-holder, notes in the margins-taker, ink-sniffer, the story looks like this. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I kept talking about NGOs supplying medicines to local clinics that may help his son to get better. 
+
+So, I kind of believe that we're in like the "" cave-painting "" era of computer interfaces. 
+Like, they're very kind of — they don't go as deep or as emotionally engaging as they possibly could be and I'd like to change all that. 
+Hit me. 
+OK. So I mean, this is the kind of status quo interface, right? 
+It's very flat, kind of rigid. 
+And OK, so you could sex it up and like go to a much more lickable Mac, you know, but really it's the kind of same old crap we've had for the last, you know, 30 years. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Like I think we really put up with a lot of crap with our computers. 
+I mean it's point and click, it's like the menus, icons, it's all the kind of same thing. 
+And so one kind of information space that I take inspiration from is my real desk. 
+It's so much more subtle, so much more visceral — you know, what's visible, what's not. 
+And I'd like to bring that experience to the desktop. 
+So I kind of have a — this is BumpTop. 
+It's kind of like a new approach to desktop computing. 
+So you can bump things — they're all physically, you know, manipulable and stuff. 
+And instead of that point and click, it's like a push and pull, things collide as you'd expect them. Just like on my real desk, I can — let me just grab these guys — I can turn things into piles instead of just the folders that we have. 
+And once things are in a pile I can browse them by throwing them into a grid, or you know, flip through them like a book or I can lay them out like a deck of cards. 
+When they're laid out, I can pull things to new locations or delete things or just quickly sort a whole pile, you know, just immediately, right? 
+And then, it's all smoothly animated, instead of these jarring changes you see in today's interfaces. 
+Also, if I want to add something to a pile, well, how do I do that? 
+I just toss it to the pile, and it's added right to the top. It's a kind of nice way. 
+Also some of the stuff we can do is, for these individual icons we thought — I mean, how can we play with the idea of an icon, and push that further? 
+And one of the things I can do is make it bigger if I want to emphasize it and make it more important. 
+But what's really cool is that since there's a physics simulation running under this, it's actually heavier. So the lighter stuff doesn't really move but if I throw it at the lighter guys, right? 
+(Laughter) So it's cute, but it's also like a subtle channel of conveying information, right? 
+This is heavy so it feels more important. So it's kind of cool. 
+Despite computers everywhere paper really hasn't disappeared, because it has a lot of, I think, valuable properties. 
+And some of those we wanted to transfer to the icons in our system. 
+So one of the things you can do to our icons, just like paper, is crease them and fold them, just like paper. Remember, you know, something for later. 
+Or if you want to be destructive, you can just crumple it up and, you know, toss it to the corner. 
+Also just like paper, around our workspace we'll pin things up to the wall to remember them later, and I can do the same thing here, and you know, you'll see post-it notes and things like that around people's offices. 
+And I can pull them off when I want to work with them. 
+So, one of the criticisms of this kind of approach to organization is that, you know, "" Okay, well my real desk is really messy. I don't want that mess on my computer. "" So one thing we have for that is like a grid align, kind of — so you get that more traditional desktop. Things are kind of grid aligned. 
+More boring, but you still have that kind of colliding and bumping. 
+And you can still do fun things like make shelves on your desktop. 
+Let's just break this shelf. Okay, that shelf broke. 
+I think beyond the icons, I think another really cool domain for this software — I think it applies to more than just icons and your desktop — but browsing photographs. 
+I think you can really enrich the way we browse our photographs and bring it to that kind of shoebox of, you know, photos with your family on the kitchen table kind of thing. 
+I can toss these things around. They're so much more tangible and touchable — and you know I can double-click on something to take a look at it. 
+And I can do all that kind of same stuff I showed you before. 
+So I can pile things up, I can flip through it, I can, you know — okay, let's move this photo to the back, let's delete this guy here, and I think it's just a much more rich kind of way of interacting with your information. 
+And that's BumpTop. Thanks! 
+
+I know what you're thinking. 
+You think I've lost my way, and somebody's going to come on the stage in a minute and guide me gently back to my seat. 
+(Applause) I get that all the time in Dubai. 
+"Here on holiday are you, dear?" 
+(Laughter) "" Come to visit the children? 
+How long are you staying? "" Well actually, I hope for a while longer yet. 
+I have been living and teaching in the Gulf for over 30 years. 
+(Applause) And in that time, I have seen a lot of changes. 
+Now that statistic is quite shocking. 
+And I want to talk to you today about language loss and the globalization of English. 
+I want to tell you about my friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi. 
+And one fine day, she decided to take them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary. 
+But it was she who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants, as well as their uses — medicinal uses, cosmetics, cooking, herbal. 
+How did those students get all that knowledge? 
+Of course, from their grandparents and even their great-grandparents. 
+It's not necessary to tell you how important it is to be able to communicate across generations. 
+But sadly, today, languages are dying at an unprecedented rate. 
+A language dies every 14 days. 
+Now, at the same time, English is the undisputed global language. 
+Could there be a connection? 
+Well I don't know. 
+But I do know that I've seen a lot of changes. 
+When I first came out to the Gulf, I came to Kuwait in the days when it was still a hardship post. 
+Actually, not that long ago. 
+That is a little bit too early. 
+But nevertheless, I was recruited by the British Council, along with about 25 other teachers. 
+And we were the first non-Muslims to teach in the state schools there in Kuwait. 
+We were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education. 
+And of course, the U.K. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth. 
+Okay. 
+Now this is the major change that I've seen — how teaching English has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to becoming a massive international business that it is today. 
+No longer just a foreign language on the school curriculum, and no longer the sole domain of mother England, it has become a bandwagon for every English-speaking nation on earth. 
+And why not? 
+After all, the best education — according to the latest World University Rankings — is to be found in the universities of the U.K. and the U.S. 
+So everybody wants to have an English education, naturally. 
+But if you're not a native speaker, you have to pass a test. 
+Now can it be right to reject a student on linguistic ability alone? 
+Perhaps you have a computer scientist who's a genius. 
+Would he need the same language as a lawyer, for example? 
+Well, I don't think so. 
+We English teachers reject them all the time. 
+We put a stop sign, and we stop them in their tracks. 
+They can't pursue their dream any longer, 'til they get English. 
+Now let me put it this way: if I met a monolingual Dutch speaker who had the cure for cancer, would I stop him from entering my British University? 
+I don't think so. 
+But indeed, that is exactly what we do. 
+We English teachers are the gatekeepers. 
+And you have to satisfy us first that your English is good enough. 
+Now it can be dangerous to give too much power to a narrow segment of society. 
+Maybe the barrier would be too universal. 
+Okay. 
+"" But, "" I hear you say, "" what about the research? 
+It's all in English. "" So the books are in English, the journals are done in English, but that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. 
+It feeds the English requirement. 
+And so it goes on. 
+I ask you, what happened to translation? 
+If you think about the Islamic Golden Age, there was lots of translation then. 
+They translated from Latin and Greek into Arabic, into Persian, and then it was translated on into the Germanic languages of Europe and the Romance languages. 
+And so light shone upon the Dark Ages of Europe. 
+Now don't get me wrong; I am not against teaching English, all you English teachers out there. 
+I love it that we have a global language. 
+We need one today more than ever. 
+But I am against using it as a barrier. 
+Do we really want to end up with 600 languages and the main one being English, or Chinese? 
+We need more than that. Where do we draw the line? 
+This system equates intelligence with a knowledge of English, which is quite arbitrary. 
+(Applause) And I want to remind you that the giants upon whose shoulders today's intelligentsia stand did not have to have English, they didn't have to pass an English test. 
+Case in point, Einstein. 
+He, by the way, was considered remedial at school because he was, in fact, dyslexic. 
+But fortunately for the world, he did not have to pass an English test. 
+Because they didn't start until 1964 with TOEFL, the American test of English. 
+Now it's exploded. 
+There are lots and lots of tests of English. 
+And millions and millions of students take these tests every year. 
+Now you might think, you and me, "Those fees aren't bad, they're okay," but they are prohibitive to so many millions of poor people. 
+So immediately, we're rejecting them. 
+(Applause) It brings to mind a headline I saw recently: "Education: The Great Divide." 
+Now I get it, I understand why people would want to focus on English. 
+They want to give their children the best chance in life. 
+And to do that, they need a Western education. 
+Because, of course, the best jobs go to people out of the Western Universities, that I put on earlier. 
+It's a circular thing. 
+Okay. 
+Let me tell you a story about two scientists, two English scientists. 
+They were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the forelimbs and the hind limbs of animals. 
+But they couldn't get the results they wanted. 
+They really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb, whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German. 
+So bingo, problem solved. 
+If you can't think a thought, you are stuck. 
+But if another language can think that thought, then, by cooperating, we can achieve and learn so much more. 
+My daughter came to England from Kuwait. 
+She had studied science and mathematics in Arabic. 
+It's an Arabic-medium school. 
+She had to translate it into English at her grammar school. 
+And she was the best in the class at those subjects. 
+Which tells us that when students come to us from abroad, we may not be giving them enough credit for what they know, and they know it in their own language. 
+When a language dies, we don't know what we lose with that language. 
+This is — I don't know if you saw it on CNN recently — they gave the Heroes Award to a young Kenyan shepherd boy who couldn't study at night in his village, like all the village children, because the kerosene lamp, it had smoke and it damaged his eyes. 
+And anyway, there was never enough kerosene, because what does a dollar a day buy for you? 
+So he invented a cost-free solar lamp. 
+And now the children in his village get the same grades at school as the children who have electricity at home. 
+(Applause) When he received his award, he said these lovely words: "" The children can lead Africa from what it is today, a dark continent, to a light continent. "" A simple idea, but it could have such far-reaching consequences. 
+People who have no light, whether it's physical or metaphorical, cannot pass our exams, and we can never know what they know. 
+Let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark. 
+Let us celebrate diversity. 
+Mind your language. 
+Use it to spread great ideas. 
+(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+So here's the most important economic fact of our time. 
+We are living in an age of surging income inequality, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else. 
+This shift is the most striking in the U.S. and in the U.K., but it's a global phenomenon. 
+It's happening in communist China, in formerly communist Russia, it's happening in India, in my own native Canada. 
+We're even seeing it in cozy social democracies like Sweden, Finland and Germany. 
+Let me give you a few numbers to place what's happening. 
+In the 1970s, the One Percent accounted for about 10 percent of the national income in the United States. 
+Today, their share has more than doubled to above 20 percent. 
+But what's even more striking is what's happening at the very tippy top of the income distribution. 
+The 0.1 percent in the U.S. 
+today account for more than eight percent of the national income. 
+They are where the One Percent was 30 years ago. 
+Let me give you another number to put that in perspective, and this is a figure that was calculated in 2005 by Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. 
+Reich took the wealth of two admittedly very rich men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and he found that it was equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population, 120 million people. 
+Now, as it happens, Warren Buffett is not only himself a plutocrat, he is one of the most astute observers of that phenomenon, and he has his own favorite number. 
+Buffett likes to point out that in 1992, the combined wealth of the people on the Forbes 400 list — and this is the list of the 400 richest Americans — was 300 billion dollars. 
+Just think about it. 
+You didn't even need to be a billionaire to get on that list in 1992. 
+Well, today, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.7 trillion, and I probably don't need to tell you that we haven't seen anything similar happen to the middle class, whose wealth has stagnated if not actually decreased. 
+So we're living in the age of the global plutocracy, but we've been slow to notice it. 
+One of the reasons, I think, is a sort of boiled frog phenomenon. 
+Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic. 
+Think about what happened, after all, to the poor frog. 
+But I think there's something else going on. 
+Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. 
+It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger. 
+And if you do happen to be on the Forbes 400 list, talking about income distribution, and inevitably its cousin, income redistribution, can be downright threatening. 
+So we're living in the age of surging income inequality, especially at the top. 
+What's driving it, and what can we do about it? 
+One set of causes is political: lower taxes, deregulation, particularly of financial services, privatization, weaker legal protections for trade unions, all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very, very top. 
+A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of "" crony capitalism, "" political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don't actually do much good for the rest of us. 
+In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult. 
+Think of all the years reformers of various stripes have tried to get rid of corruption in Russia, for instance, or how hard it is to re-regulate the banks even after the most profound financial crisis since the Great Depression, or even how difficult it is to get the big multinational companies, including those whose motto might be "" don't do evil, "" to pay taxes at a rate even approaching that paid by the middle class. 
+But while getting rid of crony capitalism in practice is really, really hard, at least intellectually, it's an easy problem. 
+After all, no one is actually in favor of crony capitalism. 
+Indeed, this is one of those rare issues that unites the left and the right. 
+A critique of crony capitalism is as central to the Tea Party as it is to Occupy Wall Street. 
+But if crony capitalism is, intellectually at least, the easy part of the problem, things get trickier when you look at the economic drivers of surging income inequality. 
+In and of themselves, these aren't too mysterious. 
+Globalization and the technology revolution, the twin economic transformations which are changing our lives and transforming the global economy, are also powering the rise of the super-rich. 
+Just think about it. 
+For the first time in history, if you are an energetic entrepreneur with a brilliant new idea or a fantastic new product, you have almost instant, almost frictionless access to a global market of more than a billion people. 
+As a result, if you are very, very smart and very, very lucky, you can get very, very rich very, very quickly. 
+The latest poster boy for this phenomenon is David Karp. 
+The 26-year-old founder of Tumblr recently sold his company to Yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars. 
+Think about that for a minute: 1.1 billion dollars, 26 years old. 
+It's easiest to see how the technology revolution and globalization are creating this sort of superstar effect in highly visible fields, like sports and entertainment. 
+We can all watch how a fantastic athlete or a fantastic performer can today leverage his or her skills across the global economy as never before. 
+But today, that superstar effect is happening across the entire economy. 
+We have superstar technologists. 
+We have superstar bankers. 
+We have superstar lawyers and superstar architects. 
+There are superstar cooks and superstar farmers. 
+There are even, and this is my personal favorite example, superstar dentists, the most dazzling exemplar of whom is Bernard Touati, the Frenchman who ministers to the smiles of fellow superstars like Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich or European-born American fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. 
+But while it's pretty easy to see how globalization and the technology revolution are creating this global plutocracy, what's a lot harder is figuring out what to think about it. 
+And that's because, in contrast with crony capitalism, so much of what globalization and the technology revolution have done is highly positive. 
+Let's start with technology. 
+I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. 
+I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium. 
+I'm even more of a fan of globalization. 
+This is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class, and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world, it's made many new products affordable — who do you think built your iPhone? — and things that we've relied on for a long time much cheaper. 
+Think of your dishwasher or your t-shirt. 
+So what's not to like? 
+Well, a few things. 
+One of the things that worries me is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy. 
+Imagine you're a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process. 
+It gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor. 
+And that's no mere hypothetical example. 
+Think about Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks. 
+These are among the world's most admired, most beloved, most innovative companies. 
+They also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very, very significantly. 
+And why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage? 
+Once you have the tremendous economic power that we're seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor. 
+Again, this is no mere hypothetical. 
+It's what the Russian oligarchs did in creating the sale-of-the-century privatization of Russia's natural resources. 
+It's one way of describing what happened with deregulation of the financial services in the U.S. and the U.K. 
+A second thing that worries me is how easily meritocratic plutocracy can become aristocracy. 
+One way of describing the plutocrats is as alpha geeks, and they are people who are acutely aware of how important highly sophisticated analytical and quantitative skills are in today's economy. 
+That's why they are spending unprecedented time and resources educating their own children. 
+The middle class is spending more on schooling too, but in the global educational arms race that starts at nursery school and ends at Harvard, Stanford or MIT, the 99 percent is increasingly outgunned by the One Percent. 
+The result is something that economists Alan Krueger and Miles Corak call the Great Gatsby Curve. 
+As income inequality increases, social mobility decreases. 
+The plutocracy may be a meritocracy, but increasingly you have to be born on the top rung of the ladder to even take part in that race. 
+The third thing, and this is what worries me the most, is the extent to which those same largely positive forces which are driving the rise of the global plutocracy also happen to be hollowing out the middle class in Western industrialized economies. 
+Let's start with technology. 
+Those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs. 
+When's the last time you used a travel agent? 
+And in contrast with the industrial revolution, the titans of our new economy aren't creating that many new jobs. 
+At its zenith, G.M. employed hundreds of thousands, Facebook fewer than 10,000. 
+The same is true of globalization. 
+For all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets, it's also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed Western economies. 
+The terrifying reality is that there is no economic rule which automatically translates increased economic growth into widely shared prosperity. 
+That's shown in what I consider to be the most scary economic statistic of our time. 
+Since the late 1990s, increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases in wages and employment. 
+That means that our countries are getting richer, our companies are getting more efficient, but we're not creating more jobs and we're not paying people, as a whole, more. 
+One scary conclusion you could draw from all of this is to worry about structural unemployment. 
+What worries me more is a different nightmare scenario. 
+After all, in a totally free labor market, we could find jobs for pretty much everyone. 
+The dystopia that worries me is a universe in which a few geniuses invent Google and its ilk and the rest of us are employed giving them massages. 
+So when I get really depressed about all of this, I comfort myself in thinking about the Industrial Revolution. 
+After all, for all its grim, satanic mills, it worked out pretty well, didn't it? 
+After all, all of us here are richer, healthier, taller — well, there are a few exceptions — and live longer than our ancestors in the early 19th century. 
+But it's important to remember that before we learned how to share the fruits of the Industrial Revolution with the broad swathes of society, we had to go through two depressions, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Long Depression of the 1870s, two world wars, communist revolutions in Russia and in China, and an era of tremendous social and political upheaval in the West. 
+We also, not coincidentally, went through an era of tremendous social and political inventions. 
+We created the modern welfare state. 
+We created public education. 
+We created public health care. 
+We created public pensions. 
+We created unions. 
+Today, we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the Industrial Revolution. 
+To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats, we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change. 
+We need a new New Deal. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm speaking about compassion from an Islamic point of view, and perhaps my faith is not very well thought of as being one that is grounded in compassion. 
+The truth of the matter is otherwise. 
+Our holy book, the Koran, consists of 114 chapters, and each chapter begins with what we call the basmala, the saying of "" In the name of God, the all compassionate, the all merciful, "" or, as Sir Richard Burton — not the Richard Burton who was married to Elizabeth Taylor, but the Sir Richard Burton who lived a century before that and who was a worldwide traveler and translator of many works of literature — translates it. "" In the name of God, the compassionating, the compassionate. "" And in a saying of the Koran, which to Muslims is God speaking to humanity, God says to his prophet Muhammad — 
+whom we believe to be the last of a series of prophets, beginning with Adam, including Noah, including Moses, including Abraham, including Jesus Christ, and ending with Muhammad — that, "" We have not sent you, O Muhammad, except as a 'rahmah,' except as a source of compassion to humanity. "" For us human beings, and certainly for us as Muslims, whose mission, and whose purpose in following the path of the prophet is to make ourselves as much like the prophet. 
+And the prophet, in one of his sayings, said, "Adorn yourselves with the attributes of God." 
+And because God Himself said that the primary attribute of his is compassion — in fact, the Koran says that "" God decreed upon himself compassion, "" or, "" reigned himself in by compassion "" — therefore, our objective and our mission must be to be sources of compassion, activators of compassion, actors of compassion and speakers of compassion and doers of compassion. 
+That is all well and good, but where do we go wrong, and what is the source of the lack of compassion in the world? 
+For the answer to this, we turn to our spiritual path. 
+In every religious tradition, there is the outer path and the inner path, or the exoteric path and the esoteric path. 
+The esoteric path of Islam is more popularly known as Sufism, or "" tasawwuf "" in Arabic. 
+And these doctors or these masters, these spiritual masters of the Sufi tradition, refer to teachings and examples of our prophet that teach us where the source of our problems lies. 
+In one of the battles that the prophet waged, he told his followers, "" We are returning from the lesser war to the greater war, to the greater battle. "" And they said, "" Messenger of God, we are battle-weary. 
+How can we go to a greater battle? "" He said, "" That is the battle of the self, the battle of the ego. "" The sources of human problems have to do with egotism, "" I. "" The famous Sufi master Rumi, who is very well known to most of you, has a story in which he talks of a man who goes to the house of a friend, and he knocks on the door, and a voice answers, "" Who's there? "" "It's me," or, more grammatically correctly, "It is I," as we might say in English. 
+The voice says, "" Go away. "" After many years of training, of disciplining, of search and struggle, he comes back. 
+With much greater humility, he knocks again on the door. 
+The voice asks, "" Who is there? "" He said, "" It is you, O heartbreaker. "" The door swings open, and the voice says, "Come in, for there is no room in this house for two I's," — two capital I's, not these eyes — "" for two egos. "" And Rumi's stories are metaphors for the spiritual path. 
+In the presence of God, there is no room for more than one "" I, "" and that is the "" I "" of divinity. 
+In a teaching — called a "" hadith qudsi "" in our tradition — God says that, "" My servant, "" or "" My creature, my human creature, does not approach me by anything that is dearer to me than what I have asked them to do. "" And those of you who are employers know exactly what I mean. 
+You want your employees to do what you ask them to do, and if they've done that, then they can do extra. 
+But don't ignore what you've asked them to do. 
+"" And, "" God says, "" my servant continues to get nearer to me, by doing more of what I've asked them to do "" — extra credit, we might call it — "" until I love him or love her. 
+And when I love my servant, "" God says, "" I become the eyes by which he or she sees, the ears by which he or she listens, the hand by which he or she grasps, and the foot by which he or she walks, and the heart by which he or she understands. "" It is this merging of our self with divinity that is the lesson and purpose of our spiritual path and all of our faith traditions. 
+Muslims regard Jesus as the master of Sufism, the greatest prophet and messenger who came to emphasize the spiritual path. 
+When he says, "" I am the spirit, and I am the way, "" and when the prophet Muhammad said, "" Whoever has seen me has seen God, "" it is because they became so much an instrument of God, they became part of God's team — so that God's will was manifest through them, and they were not acting from their own selves and their own egos. 
+Compassion on earth is given, it is in us. 
+All we have to do is to get our egos out of the way, get our egotism out of the way. 
+I'm sure, probably all of you here, or certainly the very vast majority of you, have had what you might call a spiritual experience, a moment in your lives when, for a few seconds, a minute perhaps, the boundaries of your ego dissolved. 
+And at that minute, you felt at one with the universe — one with that jug of water, one with every human being, one with the Creator — and you felt you were in the presence of power, of awe, of the deepest love, the deepest sense of compassion and mercy that you have ever experienced in your lives. 
+That is a moment which is a gift of God to us — a gift when, for a moment, he lifts that boundary which makes us insist on "" I, I, I, me, me, me, "" and instead, like the person in Rumi's story, we say, "" Oh, this is all you. 
+This is all you. And this is all us. 
+And us, and I, and us are all part of you. 
+O, Creator! O, the Objective! The source of our being and the end of our journey, you are also the breaker of our hearts. 
+You are the one whom we should all be towards, for whose purpose we live, and for whose purpose we shall die, and for whose purpose we shall be resurrected again to account to God to what extent we have been compassionate beings. "" Our message today, and our purpose today, and those of you who are here today, and the purpose of this charter of compassion, is to remind. 
+For the Koran always urges us to remember, to remind each other, because the knowledge of truth is within every human being. 
+We know it all. 
+We have access to it all. 
+Jung may have called it "" the subconscious. "" Through our subconscious, in your dreams — the Koran calls our state of sleep "" the lesser death, "" "" the temporary death "" — in our state of sleep we have dreams, we have visions, we travel even outside of our bodies, for many of us, and we see wonderful things. 
+We travel beyond the limitations of space as we know it, and beyond the limitations of time as we know it. 
+But all this is for us to glorify the name of the creator whose primary name is the compassionating, the compassionate. 
+God, Bokh, whatever name you want to call him with, Allah, Ram, Om, whatever the name might be through which you name or access the presence of divinity, it is the locus of absolute being, absolute love and mercy and compassion, and absolute knowledge and wisdom, what Hindus call "" satchidananda. "" The language differs, but the objective is the same. 
+Rumi has another story about three men, a Turk, an Arab and — and I forget the third person, but for my sake, it could be a Malay. 
+One is asking for angur — one is, say, an Englishman — one is asking for eneb, and one is asking for grapes. 
+And they have a fight and an argument because — "" I want grapes. "" "" I want eneb. "" I want angur. "" — not knowing that the word that they're using refers to the same reality in different languages. 
+There's only one absolute reality by definition, one absolute being by definition, because absolute is, by definition, single, and absolute and singular. 
+There's this absolute concentration of being, the absolute concentration of consciousness, awareness, an absolute locus of compassion and love that defines the primary attributes of divinity. 
+And these should also be the primary attributes of what it means to be human. 
+For what defines humanity, perhaps biologically, is our physiology, but God defines humanity by our spirituality, by our nature. 
+And the Koran says, He speaks to the angels and says, "" When I have finished the formation of Adam from clay, and breathed into him of my spirit, then, fall in prostration to him. "" The angels prostrate, not before the human body, but before the human soul. 
+Why? Because the soul, the human soul, embodies a piece of the divine breath, a piece of the divine soul. 
+This is also expressed in biblical vocabulary when we are taught that we were created in the divine image. 
+What is the imagery of God? 
+The imagery of God is absolute being, absolute awareness and knowledge and wisdom and absolute compassion and love. 
+And therefore, for us to be human — in the greatest sense of what it means to be human, in the most joyful sense of what it means to be human — means that we too have to be proper stewards of the breath of divinity within us, and seek to perfect within ourselves the attribute of being, of being alive, of beingness; the attribute of wisdom, of consciousness, of awareness; and the attribute of being compassionate and loving beings. 
+This is what I understand from my faith tradition, and this is what I understand from my studies of other faith traditions, and this is the common platform on which we must all stand, and when we stand on this platform as such, I am convinced that we can make a wonderful world. 
+And I believe, personally, that we're on the verge and that, with the presence and help of people like you here, we can bring about the prophecy of Isaiah. 
+For he foretold of a period when people shall transform their swords into plowshares and will not learn war or make war anymore. 
+We have reached a stage in human history that we have no option: we must, we must lower our egos, control our egos — whether it is individual ego, personal ego, family ego, national ego — and let all be for the glorification of the one. 
+Thank you, and God bless you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Why do so many people reach success and then fail? 
+One of the big reasons is, we think success is a one-way street. 
+So we do everything that leads up to success, but then we get there. We figure we've made it, we sit back in our comfort zone, and we actually stop doing everything that made us successful. 
+And it doesn't take long to go downhill. 
+And I can tell you this happens, because it happened to me. 
+Reaching success, I worked hard, I pushed myself. 
+But then I stopped, because I figured, "" Oh, you know, I made it. 
+I can just sit back and relax. "" Reaching success, I always tried to improve and do good work. 
+But then I stopped because I figured, "" Hey, I'm good enough. 
+I don't need to improve any more. "" Reaching success, I was pretty good at coming up with good ideas. 
+Because I did all these simple things that led to ideas. 
+But then I stopped, because I figured I was this hot-shot guy and I shouldn't have to work at ideas, they should just come like magic. 
+And the only thing that came was creative block. 
+I couldn't come up with any ideas. 
+Reaching success, I always focused on clients and projects, and ignored the money. Then all this money started pouring in. 
+And I got distracted by it. 
+And suddenly I was on the phone to my stockbroker and my real estate agent, when I should have been talking to my clients. 
+And reaching success, I always did what I loved. 
+But then I got into stuff that I didn't love, like management. I am the world's worst manager, but I figured I should be doing it, because I was, after all, the president of the company. 
+Well, soon a black cloud formed over my head and here I was, outwardly very successful, but inwardly very depressed. 
+But I'm a guy; I knew how to fix it. 
+I bought a fast car. 
+(Laughter) It didn't help. 
+I was faster but just as depressed. 
+So I went to my doctor. I said, "" Doc, I can buy anything I want. But I'm not happy. I'm depressed. 
+It's true what they say, and I didn't believe it until it happened to me. 
+But money can't buy happiness. "" He said, "" No. But it can buy Prozac. "" And he put me on anti-depressants. 
+And yeah, the black cloud faded a little bit, but so did all the work, because I was just floating along. I couldn't care less if clients ever called. 
+(Laughter) And clients didn't call. (Laughter) 
+Because they could see I was no longer serving them, I was only serving myself. 
+So they took their money and their projects to others who would serve them better. 
+Well, it didn't take long for business to drop like a rock. 
+My partner and I, Thom, we had to let all our employees go. 
+It was down to just the two of us, and we were about to go under. 
+And that was great. 
+Because with no employees, there was nobody for me to manage. 
+So I went back to doing the projects I loved. 
+I had fun again, I worked harder and, to cut a long story short, did all the things that took me back up to success. 
+But it wasn't a quick trip. 
+It took seven years. 
+But in the end, business grew bigger than ever. 
+And when I went back to following these eight principles, the black cloud over my head disappeared altogether. 
+And I woke up one day and I said, "I don't need Prozac anymore." 
+And I threw it away and haven't needed it since. 
+I learned that success isn't a one-way street. 
+It doesn't look like this; it really looks more like this. 
+It's a continuous journey. 
+And if we want to avoid "" success-to-failure-syndrome, "" we just keep following these eight principles, because that is not only how we achieve success, it's how we sustain it. 
+So here is to your continued success. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+"" People do stupid things. 
+That's what spreads HIV. "" This was a headline in a U.K. newspaper, The Guardian, not that long ago. 
+I'm curious, show of hands, who agrees with it? 
+Well, one or two brave souls. 
+This is actually a direct quote from an epidemiologist who's been in field of HIV for 15 years, worked on four continents, and you're looking at her. 
+And I am now going to argue that this is only half true. 
+People do get HIV because they do stupid things, but most of them are doing stupid things for perfectly rational reasons. 
+Now, "" rational "" is the dominant paradigm in public health, and if you put your public health nerd glasses on, you'll see that if we give people the information that they need about what's good for them and what's bad for them, if you give them the services that they can use to act on that information, and a little bit of motivation, people will make rational decisions and live long and healthy lives. 
+Wonderful. 
+That's slightly problematic for me because I work in HIV, and although I'm sure you all know that HIV is about poverty and gender inequality, and if you were at TED '07 it's about coffee prices... 
+Actually, HIV's about sex and drugs, and if there are two things that make human beings a little bit irrational, they are erections and addiction. 
+(Laughter) So, let's start with what's rational for an addict. 
+Now, I remember speaking to an Indonesian friend of mine, Frankie. 
+We were having lunch and he was telling me about when he was in jail in Bali for a drug injection. 
+It was someone's birthday, and they had very kindly smuggled some heroin into jail, and he was very generously sharing it out with all of his colleagues. 
+And so everyone lined up, all the smackheads in a row, and the guy whose birthday it was filled up the fit, and he went down and started injecting people. 
+So he injects the first guy, and then he's wiping the needle on his shirt, and he injects the next guy. 
+And Frankie says, "" I'm number 22 in line, and I can see the needle coming down towards me, and there is blood all over the place. 
+It's getting blunter and blunter. 
+And a small part of my brain is thinking, 'That is so gross and really dangerous,' but most of my brain is thinking, 'Please let there be some smack left by the time it gets to me. 
+Please let there be some left. '"" And then, telling me this story, Frankie said, "" You know... God, drugs really make you stupid. "" And, you know, you can't fault him for accuracy. 
+But, actually, Frankie, at that time, was a heroin addict and he was in jail. 
+So his choice was either to accept that dirty needle or not to get high. 
+And if there's one place you really want to get high, it's when you're in jail. 
+But I'm a scientist and I don't like to make data out of anecdotes, so let's look at some data. 
+We talked to 600 drug addicts in three cities in Indonesia, and we said, "" Well, do you know how you get HIV? "" "Oh yeah, by sharing needles." 
+I mean, nearly 100 percent. Yeah, by sharing needles. 
+And, "" Do you know where you can get a clean needle at a price you can afford to avoid that? "" "" Oh yeah. "" Hundred percent. 
+"We're smackheads; we know where to get clean needles." 
+"So are you carrying a needle?" 
+We're actually interviewing people on the street, in the places where they're hanging out and taking drugs. 
+"Are you carrying clean needles?" 
+One in four, maximum. 
+So no surprises then that the proportion that actually used clean needles every time they injected in the last week is just about one in 10, and the other nine in 10 are sharing. 
+So you've got this massive mismatch; everyone knows that if they share they're going to get HIV, but they're all sharing anyway. 
+So what's that about? Is it like you get a better high if you share or something? 
+We asked that to a junkie and they're like, "" Are you nuts? "" You don't want to share a needle anymore than you want to share a toothbrush even with someone you're sleeping with. 
+There's just kind of an ick factor there. 
+"No, no. We share needles because we don't want to go to jail." 
+So, in Indonesia at this time, if you were carrying a needle and the cops rounded you up, they could put you into jail. 
+And that changes the equation slightly, doesn't it? 
+Because your choice now is either I use my own needle now, or I could share a needle now and get a disease that's going to possibly kill me 10 years from now, or I could use my own needle now and go to jail tomorrow. 
+And while junkies think that it's a really bad idea to expose themselves to HIV, they think it's a much worse idea to spend the next year in jail where they'll probably end up in Frankie's situation and expose themselves to HIV anyway. 
+So, suddenly it becomes perfectly rational to share needles. 
+Now, let's look at it from a policy maker's point of view. 
+This is a really easy problem. 
+For once, your incentives are aligned. 
+We've got what's rational for public health. 
+You want people to use clean needles — and junkies want to use clean needles. 
+So we could make this problem go away simply by making clean needles universally available and taking away the fear of arrest. 
+Now, the first person to figure that out and do something about it on a national scale was that well-known, bleeding heart liberal Margaret Thatcher. 
+And she put in the world's first national needle exchange program, and other countries followed suit: Australia, The Netherlands and few others. 
+And in all of those countries, you can see, not more than four percent of injectors ever became infected with HIV. 
+Now, places that didn't do this — New York City for example, Moscow, Jakarta — we're talking, at its peak, one in two injectors infected with this fatal disease. 
+Now, Margaret Thatcher didn't do this because she has any great love for junkies. 
+She did it because she ran a country that had a national health service. 
+So, if she didn't invest in effective prevention, she was going to have pick up the costs of treatment later on, and obviously those are much higher. 
+So she was making a politically rational decision. 
+Now, if I take out my public health nerd glasses here and look at these data, it seems like a no-brainer, doesn't it? 
+But in this country, where the government apparently does not feel compelled to provide health care for citizens, (Laughter) we've taken a very different approach. 
+So what we've been doing in the United States is reviewing the data — endlessly reviewing the data. 
+So, these are reviews of hundreds of studies by all the big muckety-mucks of the scientific pantheon in the United States, and these are the studies that show needle programs are effective — quite a lot of them. 
+Now, the ones that show that needle programs aren't effective — you think that's one of these annoying dynamic slides and I'm going to press my dongle and the rest of it's going to come up, but no — that's the whole slide. 
+(Laughter) There is nothing on the other side. 
+So, completely irrational, you would think. 
+Except that, wait a minute, politicians are rational, too, and they're responding to what they think the voters want. 
+So what we see is that voters respond very well to things like this and not quite so well to things like this. 
+(Laughter) So it becomes quite rational to deny services to injectors. 
+Now let's talk about sex. 
+Are we any more rational about sex? 
+Well, I'm not even going to address the clearly irrational positions of people like the Catholic Church, who think somehow that if you give out condoms, everyone's going to run out and have sex. 
+I don't know if Pope Benedict watches TEDTalks online, but if you do, I've got news for you Benedict — I carry condoms all the time and I never get laid. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) It's not that easy! 
+Here, maybe you'll have better luck. 
+(Applause) Okay, seriously, HIV is actually not that easy to transmit sexually. 
+So, it depends on how much virus there is in your blood and in your body fluids. 
+And what we've got is a very, very high level of virus right at the beginning when you're first infected, then you start making antibodies, and then it bumps along at quite low levels for a long time — 10 or 12 years — you have spikes if you get another sexually transmitted infection. 
+But basically, nothing much is going on until you start to get symptomatic AIDS, and by that stage, you're not looking great, you're not feeling great, you're not having that much sex. 
+So the sexual transmission of HIV is essentially determined by how many partners you have in these very short spaces of time when you have peak viremia. 
+Now, this makes people crazy because it means that you have to talk about some groups having more sexual partners in shorter spaces of time than other groups, and that's considered stigmatizing. 
+I've always been a bit curious about that because I think stigma is a bad thing, whereas lots of sex is quite a good thing, but we'll leave that be. 
+The truth is that 20 years of very good research have shown us that there are groups that are more likely to turnover large numbers of partners in a short space of time. 
+And those groups are, globally, people who sell sex and their more regular partners. 
+They are gay men on the party scene who have, on average, three times more partners than straight people on the party scene. 
+And they are heterosexuals who come from countries that have traditions of polygamy and relatively high levels of female autonomy, and almost all of those countries are in east or southern Africa. 
+And that is reflected in the epidemic that we have today. 
+You can see these horrifying figures from Africa. 
+These are all countries in southern Africa where between one in seven, and one in three of all adults, are infected with HIV. 
+Now, in the rest of the world, we've got basically nothing going on in the general population — very, very low levels — but we have extraordinarily high levels of HIV in these other populations who are at highest risk: drug injectors, sex workers and gay men. 
+And you'll note, that's the local data from Los Angeles: 25 percent prevalence among gay men. 
+Of course, you can't get HIV just by having unprotected sex. 
+You can only HIV by having unprotected sex with a positive person. 
+In most of the world, these few prevention failures notwithstanding, we are actually doing quite well these days in commercial sex: condom use rates are between 80 and 100 percent in commercial sex in most countries. 
+And, again, it's because of an alignment of the incentives. 
+What's rational for public health is also rational for individual sex workers because it's really bad for business to have another STI. 
+No one wants it. 
+And, actually, clients don't want to go home with a drip either. 
+So essentially, you're able to achieve quite high rates of condom use in commercial sex. 
+But in "" intimate "" relations it's much more difficult because, with your wife or your boyfriend or someone that you hope might turn into one of those things, we have this illusion of romance and trust and intimacy, and nothing is quite so unromantic as the, "" My condom or yours, darling? "" question. 
+So in the face of that, you really need quite a strong incentive to use condoms. 
+This, for example, this gentleman is called Joseph. 
+He's from Haiti and he has AIDS. 
+And he's probably not having a lot of sex right now, but he is a reminder in the population, of why you might want to be using condoms. 
+This is also in Haiti and is a reminder of why you might want to be having sex, perhaps. 
+Now, funnily enough, this is also Joseph after six months on antiretroviral treatment. 
+Not for nothing do we call it the Lazarus Effect. 
+But it is changing the equation of what's rational in sexual decision-making. 
+So, what we've got — some people say, "" Oh, it doesn't matter very much because, actually, treatment is effective prevention because it lowers your viral load and therefore makes it more difficult to transmit HIV. "" So, if you look at the viremia thing again, if you do start treatment when you're sick, well, what happens? Your viral load comes down. 
+But compared to what? What happens if you're not on treatment? 
+Well, you die, so your viral load goes to zero. 
+And all of this green stuff here, including the spikes — which are because you couldn't get to the pharmacy, or you ran out of drugs, or you went on a three day party binge and forgot to take your drugs, or because you've started to get resistance, or whatever — all of that is virus that wouldn't be out there, except for treatment. 
+Now, am I saying, "" Oh, well, great prevention strategy. 
+Let's just stop treating people. "" Of course not, of course not. 
+We need to expand antiretroviral treatment as much as we can. 
+But what I am doing is calling into question those people who say that more treatment is all the prevention we need. 
+That's simply not necessarily true, and I think we can learn a lot from the experience of gay men in rich countries where treatment has been widely available for going on 15 years now. 
+And what we've seen is that, actually, condom use rates, which were very, very high — the gay community responded very rapidly to HIV, with extremely little help from public health nerds, I would say — that condom use rate has come down dramatically since treatment for two reasons really: One is the assumption of, "" Oh well, if he's infected, he's probably on meds, and his viral load's going to be low, so I'm pretty safe. "" And the other thing is that people are simply not as scared of HIV as they were of AIDS, and rightly so. 
+AIDS was a disfiguring disease that killed you, and HIV is an invisible virus that makes you take a pill every day. 
+And that's boring, but is it as boring as having to use a condom every time you have sex, no matter how drunk you are, no matter how many poppers you've taken, whatever? 
+If we look at the data, we can see that the answer to that question is, mmm. 
+So these are data from Scotland. 
+You see the peak in drug injectors before they started the national needle exchange program. 
+Then it came way down. 
+And both in heterosexuals — mostly in commercial sex — and in drug users, you've really got nothing much going on after treatment begins, and that's because of that alignment of incentives that I talked about earlier. 
+But in gay men, you've got quite a dramatic rise starting three or four years after treatment became widely available. 
+This is of new infections. 
+What does that mean? 
+It means that the combined effect of being less worried and having more virus out there in the population — more people living longer, healthier lives, more likely to be getting laid with HIV — is outweighing the effects of lower viral load, and that's a very worrisome thing. 
+What does it mean? 
+It means we need to be doing more prevention the more treatment we have. 
+Is that what's happening? 
+No, and I call it the "" compassion conundrum. "" We've talked a lot about compassion the last couple of days, and what's happening really is that people are unable quite to bring themselves to put in good sexual and reproductive health services for sex workers, unable quite to be giving out needles to junkies. 
+But once they've gone from being transgressive people whose behaviors we don't want to condone to being AIDS victims, we come over all compassionate and buy them incredibly expensive drugs for the rest of their lives. 
+It doesn't make any sense from a public health point of view. 
+I want to give what's very nearly the last word to Ines. 
+Ines is a a transgender hooker on the streets of Jakarta; she's a chick with a dick. 
+Why does she do that job? 
+Well, of course, because she's forced into it because she doesn't have any better option, etc., etc. 
+And if we could just teach her to sew and get her a nice job in a factory, all would be well. 
+This is what factory workers earn in an hour in Indonesia: on average, 20 cents. 
+It varies a bit province to province. 
+I do speak to sex workers, 15,000 of them for this particular slide, and this is what sex workers say they earn in an hour. 
+So it's not a great job, but for a lot of people it really is quite a rational choice. 
+Okay, Ines. 
+We've got the tools, the knowledge and the cash, and commitment to preventing HIV too. 
+Ines: So why is prevalence still rising? 
+It's all politics. 
+When you get to politics, nothing makes sense. 
+Elizabeth Pisani: "" When you get to politics, nothing makes sense. "" So, from the point of view of a sex worker, politicians are making no sense. 
+From the point of view of a public health nerd, junkies are doing dumb things. 
+The truth is that everyone has a different rationale. 
+There are as many different ways of being rational as there are human beings on the planet, and that's one of the glories of human existence. 
+But those ways of being rational are not independent of one another, so it's rational for a drug injector to share needles because of a stupid decision that's made by a politician, and it's rational for a politician to make that stupid decision because they're responding to what they think the voters want. 
+But here's the thing: we are the voters. 
+We're not all of them, of course, but TED is a community of opinion leaders. 
+And everyone who's in this room, and everyone who's watching this out there on the web, I think, has a duty to demand of their politicians that we make policy based on scientific evidence and on common sense. 
+It's going to be really hard for us to individually affect what's rational for every Frankie and every Ines out there, but you can at least use your vote to stop politicians doing stupid things that spread HIV. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In 2007, I decided that we needed to reconceptualize how we thought about economic development. 
+Our new goal should be that when every family thinks about where they want to live and work, they should be able to choose between at least a handful of different cities that were all competing to attract new residents. 
+Now we're a long way away from that goal right now. 
+There are billions of people in developing countries who don't have even a single city that would be willing to welcome them. 
+But the amazing thing about cities is they're worth so much more than it costs to build them. 
+So we could easily supply the world with dozens, maybe hundreds, of new cities. 
+Now this might sound preposterous to you if you've never thought about new cities. 
+But just substitute apartment building for cities. 
+Imagine half the people who wanted to be in apartments already had them; the other half aren't there yet. 
+You could try and expand the capacity by doing additions on all the existing apartments. 
+But you know what you'd run into is those apartments and the surrounding areas have rules to avoid discomfort and the distractions of construction. 
+So it's extremely hard to do all of those additions. 
+But you could go out someplace brand new, build a brand new apartment building, as long as the rules there were ones that facilitated construction rather than getting in the way. 
+So I proposed that governments create new reform zones big enough to hold cities and gave them a name: charter cities. 
+Later I learned that at about this same time, Javier and Octavio were thinking about the challenge of reform in Honduras. 
+They knew that about 75,000 Hondurans every year would leave to go to the United States, and they wanted to ask, what could they do to make sure that those people could stay and do the same things in Honduras. 
+At one point, Javier said to Octavio, "" What if we took some of our empty land — what if we just gave it to an embassy — give some to the U.S. embassy; give some to the Canadian embassy — and then if people want to go work under the rules of Canada or under the rules of the United States, they can go get jobs, do everything they do on those embassy grounds that they would otherwise have to go to Canada or the U.S. to do? "" In the summer of 2009, Honduras went through a wrenching constitutional crisis. 
+At the next regularly scheduled election, Pepe Lobo won in a landslide on a platform that promised reform, but reconciliation as well. 
+He asked Octavio to be his chief of staff. 
+Meanwhile, I was getting ready to give a talk at TEDGlobal. 
+Through a process of refinement, trial and error, a lot of user testing, I tried to boil this complicated concept of charter city down to the bare essentials. 
+The first point was the importance of rules, like those rules that say you can't come in and disturb all the existing apartment holders. 
+We pay a lot of attention to new technologies, but it takes technologies and rules to get progress, and it's usually the rules that hold us back. 
+In the fall of 2010, a friend from Guatemala sent Octavio a link to the TEDTalk. 
+He showed it to Javier. 
+They called me. 
+They said, "" Let's present this to the leaders of our country. "" So in December we met in Miami, in a hotel conference room. 
+I tried to explain this point about how valuable cities are, how much more valuable they are than they cost. 
+And I used this slide showing how valuable the raw land is in a place like New York City: notice, land that's worth thousands of dollars, in some cases, per square meter. 
+But it was a fairly abstract discussion, and at some point when there was a pause, Octavio said, "Paul, maybe we could watch the TEDTalk." 
+(Laughing) So the TEDTalk laid out in very simple terms, a charter city is a place where you start with uninhabited land, a charter that specifies the rules that will apply there and then a chance for people to opt in, to go live under those rules or not. 
+So I was asked by the president of Honduras who said that we need to do this project, this is important, this could be the way forward for our country. 
+I was asked to come to Tegucigalpa and talk again on January fourth and fifth. 
+So I presented another fact-filled lecture that included a slide like this, which tried to make the point that, if you want to create a lot of value in a city, it has to be very big. 
+This is a picture of Denver, and the outline is the new airport that was built in Denver. 
+This airport alone covers more than 100 square kilometers. 
+So I was trying to persuade the Hondurans, if you build a new city, you've got to start with a site that's at least 1,000 square kilometers. 
+That's more than 250 hundred-thousand acres. 
+Everybody applauded politely. 
+The faces in the audience were very serious and attentive. 
+The leader of the congress came up on stage and said, "" Professor Romer, thank you very much for your lecture, but maybe we could watch the TEDTalk. 
+I've got it here on my laptop. "" So I sat down, and they played the TEDTalk. 
+And it got to the essence, which is that a new city could offer new choices for people. 
+There would be a choice of a city which you could go to which could be in Honduras, instead of hundreds of miles away in the North. 
+And it also involved new choices for leaders. 
+Because the leaders in the government there in Honduras would need help from partner countries, who could benefit from partner countries who help them set up the rules in this charter and the enforcement, so everybody can trust that the charter really will be enforced. 
+And the insight of President Lobo was that that assurance of enforcement that I was thinking about as a way to get the foreign investors to come in and build the city could be equally important for all the different parties in Honduras who had suffered for so many years from fear and distrust. 
+We went and looked at a site. 
+This picture's from there. 
+It easily could hold a thousand square kilometers. 
+And shortly thereafter, on January 19th, they voted in the congress to amend their constitution to have a constitutional provision that allows for special development regions. 
+In a country which had just gone through this wrenching crisis, the vote in the congress in favor of this constitutional amendment was 124 to one. 
+All parties, all factions in society, backed this. 
+To be part of the constitution, you actually have to pass it twice in the congress. 
+On February 17th they passed it again with another vote of 114 to one. 
+Immediately after that vote, on February 21st to the 24th, a delegation of about 30 Hondurans went to the two places in the world that are most interested in getting into the city building business. 
+One is South Korea. 
+This is a picture of a big, new city center that's being built in South Korea — bigger than downtown Boston. 
+Everything you see there was built in four years, after they spent four years getting the permits. 
+The other place that's very interested in city building is Singapore. 
+They've actually built two cities already in China and are preparing the third. 
+So if you think about this practically, here's where we are. 
+They've got a site; they're already thinking about this site for the second city. 
+They're putting in place a legal system that could allow for managers to come in, and also an external legal system. 
+One country has already volunteered to let its supreme court be the court of final appeal for the new judicial system there. 
+There's designers and builders of cities who are very interested. 
+They even can bring with them some financing. 
+But the one thing you know they've already solved is that there's lots of tenants. 
+There's lots of businesses that would like to locate in the Americas, especially in a place with a free trade zone, and there's lots of people who'd like to go there. 
+Around the world, there's 700 million people who say they'd like to move permanently someplace else right now. 
+There's a million a year who leave Latin America to go to the United States. 
+Many of these are a father who has to leave his family behind to go get a job — sometimes a single mother who has to get enough money to even pay for food or clothing. 
+Sadly, sometimes there are even children who are trying to get reunited with their parents that they haven't seen, in some cases, for a decade. 
+So what kind of an idea is it to think about building a brand new city in Honduras? 
+Or to build a dozen of these, or a hundred of these, around the world? 
+What kind of an idea is it to think about insisting that every family have a choice of several cities that are competing to attract new residents? 
+This is an idea worth spreading. 
+And my friends from Honduras asked me to say thank you, TED. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The oceans cover some 70 percent of our planet. 
+And I think Arthur C. Clarke probably had it right when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet Planet Ocean. 
+And the oceans are hugely productive, as you can see by the satellite image of photosynthesis, the production of new life. 
+In fact, the oceans produce half of the new life every day on Earth as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe. 
+In addition to that, it harbors a lot of the biodiversity on Earth, and much of it we don't know about. 
+But I'll tell you some of that today. 
+That also doesn't even get into the whole protein extraction that we do from the ocean. 
+That's about 10 percent of our global needs and 100 percent of some island nations. 
+If you were to descend into the 95 percent of the biosphere that's livable, it would quickly become pitch black, interrupted only by pinpoints of light from bioluminescent organisms. 
+And if you turn the lights on, you might periodically see spectacular organisms swim by, because those are the denizens of the deep, the things that live in the deep ocean. 
+And eventually, the deep sea floor would come into view. 
+This type of habitat covers more of the Earth's surface than all other habitats combined. 
+And yet, we know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about this habitat, despite the fact that we have yet to extract a gram of food, a breath of oxygen or a drop of water from those bodies. 
+And so 10 years ago, an international program began called the Census of Marine Life, which set out to try and improve our understanding of life in the global oceans. 
+It involved 17 different projects around the world. 
+As you can see, these are the footprints of the different projects. 
+And I hope you'll appreciate the level of global coverage that it managed to achieve. 
+It all began when two scientists, Fred Grassle and Jesse Ausubel, met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts where both were guests at the famed oceanographic institute. 
+And Fred was lamenting the state of marine biodiversity and the fact that it was in trouble and nothing was being done about it. 
+Well, from that discussion grew this program that involved 2,700 scientists from more than 80 countries around the world who engaged in 540 ocean expeditions at a combined cost of 650 million dollars to study the distribution, diversity and abundance of life in the global ocean. 
+And so what did we find? 
+We found spectacular new species, the most beautiful and visually stunning things everywhere we looked — from the shoreline to the abyss, form microbes all the way up to fish and everything in between. 
+And the limiting step here wasn't the unknown diversity of life, but rather the taxonomic specialists who can identify and catalog these species that became the limiting step. 
+They, in fact, are an endangered species themselves. 
+There are actually four to five new species described everyday for the oceans. 
+And as I say, it could be a much larger number. 
+Now, I come from Newfoundland in Canada — It's an island off the east coast of that continent — where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters in human history. 
+And so this photograph shows a small boy next to a codfish. 
+It's around 1900. 
+Now, when I was a boy of about his age, I would go out fishing with my grandfather and we would catch fish about half that size. 
+And I thought that was the norm, because I had never seen fish like this. 
+If you were to go out there today, 20 years after this fishery collapsed, if you could catch a fish, which would be a bit of a challenge, it would be half that size still. 
+So what we're experiencing is something called shifting baselines. 
+Our expectations of what the oceans can produce is something that we don't really appreciate because we haven't seen it in our lifetimes. 
+Now most of us, and I would say me included, think that human exploitation of the oceans really only became very serious in the last 50 to, perhaps, 100 years or so. 
+The census actually tried to look back in time, using every source of information they could get their hands on. 
+And so anything from restaurant menus to monastery records to ships' logs to see what the oceans looked like. 
+Because science data really goes back to, at best, World War II, for the most part. 
+And so what they found, in fact, is that exploitation really began heavily with the Romans. 
+And so at that time, of course, there was no refrigeration. 
+So fishermen could only catch what they could either eat or sell that day. 
+But the Romans developed salting. 
+And with salting, it became possible to store fish and to transport it long distances. 
+And so began industrial fishing. 
+And so these are the sorts of extrapolations that we have of what sort of loss we've had relative to pre-human impacts on the ocean. 
+They range from 65 to 98 percent for these major groups of organisms, as shown in the dark blue bars. 
+Now for those species the we managed to leave alone, that we protect — for example, marine mammals in recent years and sea birds — there is some recovery. 
+So it's not all hopeless. 
+But for the most part, we've gone from salting to exhausting. 
+Now this other line of evidence is a really interesting one. 
+It's from trophy fish caught off the coast of Florida. 
+And so this is a photograph from the 1950s. 
+I want you to notice the scale on the slide, because when you see the same picture from the 1980s, we see the fish are much smaller and we're also seeing a change in terms of the composition of those fish. 
+By 2007, the catch was actually laughable in terms of the size for a trophy fish. 
+But this is no laughing matter. 
+The oceans have lost a lot of their productivity and we're responsible for it. 
+So what's left? Actually quite a lot. 
+There's a lot of exciting things, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about them. 
+And I want to start with a bit on technology, because, of course, this is a TED Conference and you want to hear something on technology. 
+So one of the tools that we use to sample the deep ocean are remotely operated vehicles. 
+So these are tethered vehicles we lower down to the sea floor where they're our eyes and our hands for working on the sea bottom. 
+So a couple of years ago, I was supposed to go on an oceanographic cruise and I couldn't go because of a scheduling conflict. 
+But through a satellite link I was able to sit at my study at home with my dog curled up at my feet, a cup of tea in my hand, and I could tell the pilot, "" I want a sample right there. "" And that's exactly what the pilot did for me. 
+That's the sort of technology that's available today that really wasn't available even a decade ago. 
+So it allows us to sample these amazing habitats that are very far from the surface and very far from light. 
+And so one of the tools that we can use to sample the oceans is acoustics, or sound waves. 
+And the advantage of sound waves is that they actually pass well through water, unlike light. 
+And so we can send out sound waves, they bounce off objects like fish and are reflected back. 
+And so in this example, a census scientist took out two ships. 
+One would send out sound waves that would bounce back. 
+They would be received by a second ship, and that would give us very precise estimates, in this case, of 250 billion herring in a period of about a minute. 
+And that's an area about the size of Manhattan Island. 
+And to be able to do that is a tremendous fisheries tool, because knowing how many fish are there is really critical. 
+We can also use satellite tags to track animals as they move through the oceans. 
+And so for animals that come to the surface to breathe, such as this elephant seal, it's an opportunity to send data back to shore and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean. 
+And so from that we can produce these tracks. 
+For example, the dark blue shows you where the elephant seal moved in the north Pacific. 
+Now I realize for those of you who are colorblind, this slide is not very helpful, but stick with me nonetheless. 
+For animals that don't surface, we have something called pop-up tags, which collect data about light and what time the sun rises and sets. 
+And then at some period of time it pops up to the surface and, again, relays that data back to shore. 
+Because GPS doesn't work under water. That's why we need these tools. 
+And so from this we're able to identify these blue highways, these hot spots in the ocean, that should be real priority areas for ocean conservation. 
+Now one of the other things that you may think about is that, when you go to the supermarket and you buy things, they're scanned. 
+And so there's a barcode on that product that tells the computer exactly what the product is. 
+Geneticists have developed a similar tool called genetic barcoding. 
+And what barcoding does is use a specific gene called CO1 that's consistent within a species, but varies among species. 
+And so what that means is we can unambiguously identify which species are which even if they look similar to each other, but may be biologically quite different. 
+Now one of the nicest examples I like to cite on this is the story of two young women, high school students in New York City, who worked with the census. 
+They went out and collected fish from markets and from restaurants in New York City and they barcoded it. 
+Well what they found was mislabeled fish. 
+So for example, they found something which was sold as tuna, which is very valuable, was in fact tilapia, which is a much less valuable fish. 
+They also found an endangered species sold as a common one. 
+So barcoding allows us to know what we're working with and also what we're eating. 
+The Ocean Biogeographic Information System is the database for all the census data. 
+It's open access; you can all go in and download data as you wish. 
+And it contains all the data from the census plus other data sets that people were willing to contribute. 
+And so what you can do with that is to plot the distribution of species and where they occur in the oceans. 
+What I've plotted up here is the data that we have on hand. 
+This is where our sampling effort has concentrated. 
+Now what you can see is we've sampled the area in the North Atlantic, in the North Sea in particular, and also the east coast of North America fairly well. 
+That's the warm colors which show a well-sampled region. 
+The cold colors, the blue and the black, show areas where we have almost no data. 
+So even after a 10-year census, there are large areas that still remain unexplored. 
+Now there are a group of scientists living in Texas, working in the Gulf of Mexico who decided really as a labor of love to pull together all the knowledge they could about biodiversity in the Gulf of Mexico. 
+And so they put this together, a list of all the species, where they're known to occur, and it really seemed like a very esoteric, scientific type of exercise. 
+But then, of course, there was the Deep Horizon oil spill. 
+So all of a sudden, this labor of love for no obvious economic reason has become a critical piece of information in terms of how that system is going to recover, how long it will take and how the lawsuits and the multi-billion-dollar discussions that are going to happen in the coming years are likely to be resolved. 
+So what did we find? 
+Well, I could stand here for hours, but, of course, I'm not allowed to do that. 
+But I will tell you some of my favorite discoveries from the census. 
+So one of the things we discovered is where are the hot spots of diversity? 
+Where do we find the most species of ocean life? 
+And what we find if we plot up the well-known species is this sort of a distribution. 
+And what we see is that for coastal tags, for those organisms that live near the shoreline, they're most diverse in the tropics. 
+This is something we've actually known for a while, so it's not a real breakthrough. 
+What is really exciting though is that the oceanic tags, or the ones that live far from the coast, are actually more diverse at intermediate latitudes. 
+This is the sort of data, again, that managers could use if they want to prioritize areas of the ocean that we need to conserve. 
+You can do this on a global scale, but you can also do it on a regional scale. 
+And that's why biodiversity data can be so valuable. 
+Now while a lot of the species we discovered in the census are things that are small and hard to see, that certainly wasn't always the case. 
+For example, while it's hard to believe that a three kilogram lobster could elude scientists, it did until a few years ago when South African fishermen requested an export permit and scientists realized that this was something new to science. 
+Similarly this Golden V kelp collected in Alaska just below the low water mark is probably a new species. 
+Even though it's three meters long, it actually, again, eluded science. 
+Now this guy, this bigfin squid, is seven meters in length. 
+But to be fair, it lives in the deep waters of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so it was a lot harder to find. 
+But there's still potential for discovery of big and exciting things. 
+This particular shrimp, we've dubbed it the Jurassic shrimp, it's thought to have gone extinct 50 years ago — at least it was, until the census discovered it was living and doing just fine off the coast of Australia. 
+And it shows that the ocean, because of its vastness, can hide secrets for a very long time. 
+So, Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out. 
+If we look at distributions, in fact distributions change dramatically. 
+And so one of the records that we had was this sooty shearwater, which undergoes these spectacular migrations all the way from New Zealand all the way up to Alaska and back again in search of endless summer as they complete their life cycles. 
+We also talked about the White Shark Cafe. 
+This is a location in the Pacific where white shark converge. 
+We don't know why they converge there, we simply don't know. 
+That's a question for the future. 
+One of the things that we're taught in high school is that all animals require oxygen in order to survive. 
+Now this little critter, it's only about half a millimeter in size, not terribly charismatic. 
+But it was only discovered in the early 1980s. 
+But the really interesting thing about it is that, a few years ago, census scientists discovered that this guy can thrive in oxygen-poor sediments in the deep Mediterranean Sea. 
+So now they know that, in fact, animals can live without oxygen, at least some of them, and that they can adapt to even the harshest of conditions. 
+If you were to suck all the water out of the ocean, this is what you'd be left behind with, and that's the biomass of life on the sea floor. 
+Now what we see is huge biomass towards the poles and not much biomass in between. 
+We found life in the extremes. 
+And so there were new species that were found that live inside ice and help to support an ice-based food web. 
+And we also found this spectacular yeti crab that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at Easter Island. 
+And this particular species really captured the public's attention. 
+We also found the deepest vents known yet — 5,000 meters — the hottest vents at 407 degrees Celsius — vents in the South Pacific and also in the Arctic where none had been found before. 
+So even new environments are still within the domain of the discoverable. 
+Now in terms of the unknowns, there are many. 
+And I'm just going to summarize just a few of them very quickly for you. 
+First of all, we might ask, how many fishes in the sea? 
+We actually know the fishes better than we do any other group in the ocean other than marine mammals. 
+And so we can actually extrapolate based on rates of discovery how many more species we're likely to discover. 
+And from that, we actually calculate that we know about 16,500 marine species and there are probably another 1,000 to 4,000 left to go. 
+So we've done pretty well. 
+We've got about 75 percent of the fish, maybe as much as 90 percent. 
+But the fishes, as I say, are the best known. 
+So our level of knowledge is much less for other groups of organisms. 
+Now this figure is actually based on a brand new paper that's going to come out in the journal PLoS Biology. 
+And what is does is predict how many more species there are on land and in the ocean. 
+And what they found is that they think that we know of about nine percent of the species in the ocean. 
+That means 91 percent, even after the census, still remain to be discovered. 
+And so that turns out to be about two million species once all is said and done. 
+So we still have quite a lot of work to do in terms of unknowns. 
+Now this bacterium is part of mats that are found off the coast of Chile. 
+And these mats actually cover an area the size of Greece. 
+And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye. 
+But you can imagine the biomass that represents. 
+But the really intriguing thing about the microbes is just how diverse they are. 
+A single drop of seawater could contain 160 different types of microbes. 
+And the oceans themselves are thought potentially to contain as many as a billion different types. 
+So that's really exciting. What are they all doing out there? 
+We actually don't know. 
+The most exciting thing, I would say, about this census is the role of global science. 
+And so as we see in this image of light during the night, there are lots of areas of the Earth where human development is much greater and other areas where it's much less, but between them we see large dark areas of relatively unexplored ocean. 
+The other point I'd like to make about this is that this ocean's interconnected. 
+Marine organisms do not care about international boundaries; they move where they will. 
+And so the importance then of global collaboration becomes all the more important. 
+We've lost a lot of paradise. 
+For example, these tuna that were once so abundant in the North Sea are now effectively gone. 
+There were trawls taken in the deep sea in the Mediterranean, which collected more garbage than they did animals. 
+And that's the deep sea, that's the environment that we consider to be among the most pristine left on Earth. 
+And there are a lot of other pressures. 
+Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with, as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral reefs. 
+On the scale of decades, in our lifetimes, we're going to see a lot of damage to coral reefs. 
+And I could spend the rest of my time, which is getting very limited, going through this litany of concerns about the ocean, but I want to end on a more positive note. 
+And so the grand challenge then is to try and make sure that we preserve what's left, because there is still spectacular beauty. 
+And the oceans are so productive, there's so much going on in there that's of relevance to humans that we really need to, even from a selfish perspective, try to do better than we have in the past. 
+So we need to recognize those hot spots and do our best to protect them. 
+When we look at pictures like this, they take our breath away, in addition to helping to give us breath by the oxygen that the oceans provide. 
+Census scientists worked in the rain, they worked in the cold, they worked under water and they worked above water trying to illuminate the wondrous discovery, the still vast unknown, the spectacular adaptations that we see in ocean life. 
+So whether you're a yak herder living in the mountains of Chile, whether you're a stockbroker in New York City or whether you're a TEDster living in Edinburgh, the oceans matter. 
+And as the oceans go so shall we. 
+Thanks for listening. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Roy Gould: Less than a year from now, the world is going to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, which marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first glimpse of the night sky through a telescope. 
+In a few months, the world is also going to celebrate the launch of a new invention from Microsoft Research, which I think is going to have as profound an impact on the way we view the universe as Galileo did four centuries ago. 
+It's called the WorldWide Telescope, and I want to thank TED and Microsoft for allowing me to bring it to your attention. 
+And I want to urge you, when you get a chance, to give it a closer look at the TED Lab downstairs. 
+The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the world's greatest telescopes on Earth and in space, and has woven them seamlessly to produce a holistic view of the universe. 
+It's going to change the way we do astronomy, it's going to change the way we teach astronomy and I think most importantly it's going to change the way we see ourselves in the universe. 
+If we were having this TED meeting in our grandparents' day, that might not be so big a claim. 
+In 1920, for example, you weren't allowed to drink; if you were a woman, you weren't allowed to vote; and if you looked up at the stars and the Milky Way on a summer night, what you saw was thought to be the entire universe. 
+In fact, the head of Harvard's observatory back then gave a great debate in which he argued that the Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe. 
+Harvard was wrong, big time. (Laughter) Of course, we know today that galaxies extend far beyond our own galaxy. 
+We can see all the way out to the edge of the observable universe, all the way back in time, almost to the moment of the Big Bang itself. 
+We can see across the entire spectrum of light, revealing worlds that had previously been invisible. 
+We see these magnificent star nurseries, where nature has somehow arranged for just the right numbers and just the right sizes of stars to be born for life to arise. 
+We see alien worlds, we see alien solar systems — 300 now, and still counting — and they're not like us. 
+We see black holes at the heart of our galaxy, in the Milky Way, and elsewhere in the universe, where time itself seems to stand still. 
+But until now, our view of the universe has been disconnected and fragmented, and I think that many of the marvelous stories that nature has to tell us have fallen through the cracks. And that's changing. 
+I want to just briefly mention three reasons why my colleagues and I, in astronomy and in education, are so excited about the WorldWide Telescope and why we think it's truly transformative. 
+First, it enables you to experience the universe: the WorldWide Telescope, for me, is a kind of magic carpet that lets you navigate through the universe where you want to go. 
+Second: you can tour the universe with astronomers as your guides. 
+And I'm not talking here about just experts who are telling you what you're seeing, but really people who are passionate about the various nooks and crannies of the universe, who can share their enthusiasm and can make the universe a welcoming place. 
+And third, you can create your own tours — you can share them with friends, you can create them with friends — and that's the part that I think I'm most excited about because I think that at heart, we are all storytellers. 
+And in telling stories, each of us is going to understand the universe in our own way. 
+We're going to have a personal universe. 
+I think we're going to see a community of storytellers evolve and emerge. 
+Before I introduce the person responsible for the WorldWide Telescope, I just want to leave you with this brief thought: when I ask people, "" How does the night sky make you feel? "" they often say, "" Oh, tiny. I feel tiny and insignificant. "" Well, our gaze fills the universe. 
+And thanks to the creators of the WorldWide Telescope, we can now start to have a dialogue with the universe. 
+I think the WorldWide Telescope will convince you that we may be tiny, but we are truly, wonderfully significant. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) I can't tell you what a privilege it is to introduce Curtis Wong from Microsoft. (Applause) Curtis Wong: Thank you, Roy. 
+So, what you're seeing here is a wonderful presentation, but it's one of the tours. 
+And actually this tour is one that was created earlier. 
+And the tours are all totally interactive, so that if I were to go somewhere... 
+you may be watching a tour and you can pause anywhere along the way, pull up other information — there are lots of Web and information sources about places you might want to go — you can zoom in, you can pull back out. 
+The whole resources are there available for you. 
+So, Microsoft — this is a project that — WorldWide Telescope is dedicated to Jim Gray, who's our colleague, and a lot of his work that he did is really what makes this project possible. 
+It's a labor of love for us and our small team, and we really hope it will inspire kids to explore and learn about the universe. 
+So basically, kids of all ages, like us. 
+And so WorldWide Telescope will be available this spring. 
+It'll be a free download — thank you, Craig Mundie — and it'll be available at the website WorldWideTelescope.org, which is something new. 
+And so, what you've seen today is less than a fraction of one percent of what is in here, and in the TED Lab, we have a tour that was created by a six-year-old named Benjamin that will knock your socks off. (Laughter) So we'll see you there. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I just did something I've never done before. 
+I spent a week at sea on a research vessel. 
+Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South Florida who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico. 
+This is the boat we were on, by the way. 
+The scientists I was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff — the birds, the turtles, the dolphins, the glamorous stuff. 
+They're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that eventually gets eaten by the big stuff. 
+And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it. 
+So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn't have to worry about it, this disaster is still unfolding. 
+It's still working its way up the food chain. 
+Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to us. 
+Rachel Carson — the godmother of modern environmentalism — warned us about this very thing back in 1962. 
+She pointed out that the "" control men "" — as she called them — who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT, were only trying to kill the little stuff, the insects, not the birds. 
+But they forgot this: the fact that birds dine on grubs, that robins eat lots of worms now saturated with DDT. 
+And so, robin eggs failed to hatch, songbirds died en masse, towns fell silent. 
+Thus the title "" Silent Spring. "" I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties. 
+And I think what it is is I don't think we have fully come to terms with the meaning of this disaster, with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world, with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earth gush forth on live TV, 24 hours a day, for months. 
+After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it — "top hats," "top kills" and, most memorably, the "" junk shot "" — the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world. 
+But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed — the carelessness, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up. 
+If there is one thing BP's watery improv act made clear, it is that, as a culture, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy. 
+And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years. 
+Our leaders barrel into wars, telling themselves happy stories about cakewalks and welcome parades. 
+Then, it is years of deadly damage control, Frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies, and once again, no exit strategy. 
+Our financial wizards routinely fall victim to similar overconfidence, convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market — the kind that never goes down. 
+And when it inevitably does, the best and the brightest reach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot — in this case, throwing massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole. 
+As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price. 
+We have to figure out why we keep letting this happen, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all — deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate change. 
+Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the climate debate, on the question of, "" What if the IPC scientists are all wrong? "" Now a far more relevant question — as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it — is, "" What if those scientists are right? "" Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle — the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait 
+for perfect scientific certainty. 
+Better to err on the side of caution. 
+More overt, the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that would be harmed, but rather on the industry that stands to profit. 
+But climate policy in the wealthy world — to the extent that such a thing exists — is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis — finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP. 
+So rather than asking, as precaution would demand, what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe, we ask bizarre questions like this: "" What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? 
+Can we put this off till 2020, 2030, 2050? "" Or we ask, "" How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive? 
+Can we go with two degrees, three degrees, or — where we're currently going — four degrees Celsius? "" And by the way, the assumption that we can safely control the Earth's awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat, making the planet not too hot, not too cold, but just right — sort of Goldilocks style — this is pure fantasy, and it's not coming from the climate scientists. 
+It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science. 
+The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops. 
+So once again, why do we take these crazy risks with the precious? 
+A range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now, like "" greed. "" This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of money. 
+Another explanation that you often hear for recklessness is hubris. 
+And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness. 
+For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay. 
+And you actually don't have a lot of options. 
+You're either an incredibly good scammer, and you're getting away with it — you gamed the system — or you're some kind of boy genius, the likes of which the world has never seen. 
+Now both of these options — the boy genius and the scammer — are going to make you vastly overconfident and therefore more prone to taking even bigger risks in the future. 
+By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: "" What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? "" Now this is actually a popular plaque, and this is a crowd of overachievers, so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque. 
+Don't feel ashamed. 
+Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TEDTalk, but personally, I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of Icarus hanging from the wall, because — maybe not that one in particular — but I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time. 
+So we have greed, we've got overconfidence / hubris, but since we're here at TEDWomen, let's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness. 
+Now I'm not going to belabor this point, but studies do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do. 
+So it turns out that being paid less and praised less has its upsides — for society at least. 
+The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gifted, chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides. 
+And this problem — call it the "" perils of privilege "" — brings us closer, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness. 
+Because none of us — at least in the global North — neither men nor women, are fully exempt from this message. 
+Here's what I'm talking about. 
+Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature — the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation. 
+And just when you think these stories are fading into history, and that we've gotten over them, they pop up in the strangest places. 
+For instance, I stumbled across this advertisement outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport. 
+It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone, and yes, it really does say, "Slap Mother Nature in the face." 
+And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola — that's just a bonus. 
+I'm showing it because — they're not a sponsor, are they? — because, in its own way, this is a crass version of our founding story. 
+We slapped Mother Nature around and won, and we always win, because dominating nature is our destiny. 
+But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature. 
+There's another one, equally important, about how that very same Mother Nature is so nurturing and so resilient that we can never make a dent in her abundance. 
+Let's hear from Tony Hayward again. 
+"" The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. 
+The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume. "" In other words, the ocean is big; she can take it. 
+It is this underlying assumption of limitlessness that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do. 
+Because this is our real master-narrative: however much we mess up, there will always be more — more water, more land, more untapped resources. 
+A new bubble will replace the old one. 
+A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. 
+In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped. 
+And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system, one that cannot survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers. 
+Now the problem is that the story was always a lie. 
+The Earth always did have limits. 
+They were just beyond our sights. 
+And now we are hitting those limits on multiple fronts. 
+I believe that we know this, yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop. 
+Not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories, but we are now doing so with a frenzy and a fury that, frankly, verges on camp. 
+How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin? 
+Now on the one hand, exhorting us to "" drill, baby, drill, "" because God put those resources into the ground in order for us to exploit them, and on the other, glorying in the wilderness of Alaska's untouched beauty on her hit reality TV show. 
+The twin message is as comforting as it is mad. 
+Ignore those creeping fears that we have finally hit the wall. 
+There are still no limits. 
+There will always be another frontier. 
+So stop worrying and keep shopping. 
+Now, would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her reality TV show. 
+In environmental circles, we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables, we are continuing with business as usual. 
+This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic. 
+The truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy. 
+So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water, including the icy Arctic seas, where a clean-up may simply be impossible. 
+It means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal, the likes of which we haven't yet seen. 
+And most controversially, it means the tar sands. 
+I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar Sands, which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States. 
+It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice, because I believe it speaks to recklessness and the path we're on like little else. 
+So this is where the tar sands live, under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests. 
+The oil is not liquid. 
+You can't just drill a hole and pump it out. 
+Tar sand's oil is solid, mixed in with the soil. 
+So to get at it, you first have to get rid of the trees. 
+Then, you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand. 
+The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds. 
+That's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates. 
+Now looking at these images, it's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation, which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of England. 
+I find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth, the largest ever built. 
+That's a person down there by the wheel. 
+My point is that this is not oil drilling. 
+It's not even mining. 
+It is terrestrial skinning. 
+Vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray. 
+Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon. 
+But the truth is that, on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil in Canada. 
+How else to describe this, but as a form of mass insanity? 
+Just when we know we need to be learning to live on the surface of our planet, off the power of sun, wind and waves, we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable. 
+This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country — a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only stand to look at it for so long. 
+As Jared Diamond and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes. 
+The problem is that our master-narrative has an answer for that too. 
+At the very last minute, we are going to get saved just like in every Hollywood movie, just like in the Rapture. 
+But, of course, our secular religion is technology. 
+Now, you may have noticed more and more headlines like these. 
+The idea behind this form of "" geoengineering "" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the planet. 
+The wackiest plan — and I'm not making this up — would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky, suspended by balloons, to spew sulfur dioxide. 
+So, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution. 
+Think of it as the ultimate junk shot. 
+The serious scientists involved in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested. 
+They don't know if they'll work, and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could unleash. 
+Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles, particularly media circles, with a relief tinged with euphoria. 
+An escape hatch has been reached. 
+A new frontier has been found. 
+Most importantly, we don't have to change our lifestyles after all. 
+You see, for some people, their savior is a guy in a flowing robe. 
+For other people, it's a guy with a garden hose. 
+We badly need some new stories. 
+We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks — risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action — like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested, blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining. We need stories 
+that replace that linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around. 
+That this is our only home. 
+There is no escape hatch. 
+Call it karma, call it physics, action and reaction, call it precaution — the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Can we, as adults, grow new nerve cells? 
+There's still some confusion about that question, as this is a fairly new field of research. 
+For example, I was talking to one of my colleagues, Robert, who is an oncologist, and he was telling me, "" Sandrine, this is puzzling. 
+Some of my patients that have been told they are cured of their cancer still develop symptoms of depression. "" And I responded to him, "" Well, from my point of view that makes sense. 
+The drug you give to your patients that stops the cancer cells multiplying also stops the newborn neurons being generated in their brain. "" And then Robert looked at me like I was crazy and said, "" But Sandrine, these are adult patients — adults do not grow new nerve cells. "" And much to his surprise, I said, "" Well actually, we do. "" And this is a phenomenon that we call neurogenesis. 
+[Neurogenesis] Now Robert is not a neuroscientist, and when he went to medical school he was not taught what we know now — that the adult brain can generate new nerve cells. 
+So Robert, you know, being the good doctor that he is, wanted to come to my lab to understand the topic a little bit better. 
+And I took him for a tour of one of the most exciting parts of the brain when it comes to neurogenesis — and this is the hippocampus. 
+So this is this gray structure in the center of the brain. 
+And what we've known already for very long, is that this is important for learning, memory, mood and emotion. 
+However, what we have learned more recently is that this is one of the unique structures of the adult brain where new neurons can be generated. 
+And if we slice through the hippocampus and zoom in, what you actually see here in blue is a newborn neuron in an adult mouse brain. 
+So when it comes to the human brain — my colleague Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institutet, has estimated that we produce 700 new neurons per day in the hippocampus. 
+You might think this is not much, compared to the billions of neurons we have. 
+But by the time we turn 50, we will have all exchanged the neurons we were born with in that structure with adult-born neurons. 
+So why are these new neurons important and what are their functions? 
+First, we know that they're important for learning and memory. 
+And in the lab we have shown that if we block the ability of the adult brain to produce new neurons in the hippocampus, then we block certain memory abilities. 
+And this is especially new and true for spatial recognition — so like, how you navigate your way in the city. 
+We are still learning a lot, and neurons are not only important for memory capacity, but also for the quality of the memory. 
+And they will have been helpful to add time to our memory and they will help differentiate very similar memories, like: how do you find your bike that you park at the station every day in the same area, but in a slightly different position? 
+And more interesting to my colleague Robert is the research we have been doing on neurogenesis and depression. 
+So in an animal model of depression, we have seen that we have a lower level of neurogenesis. 
+And if we give antidepressants, then we increase the production of these newborn neurons, and we decrease the symptoms of depression, establishing a clear link between neurogenesis and depression. 
+But moreover, if you just block neurogenesis, then you block the efficacy of the antidepressant. 
+So by then, Robert had understood that very likely his patients were suffering from depression even after being cured of their cancer, because the cancer drug had stopped newborn neurons from being generated. 
+And it will take time to generate new neurons that reach normal functions. 
+So, collectively, now we think we have enough evidence to say that neurogenesis is a target of choice if we want to improve memory formation or mood, or even prevent the decline associated with aging, or associated with stress. 
+So the next question is: can we control neurogenesis? 
+The answer is yes. 
+And we are now going to do a little quiz. 
+I'm going to give you a set of behaviors and activities, and you tell me if you think they will increase neurogenesis or if they will decrease neurogenesis. 
+Are we ready? 
+OK, let's go. 
+So what about learning? 
+Increasing? 
+Yes. 
+Learning will increase the production of these new neurons. 
+How about stress? 
+Yes, stress will decrease the production of new neurons in the hippocampus. 
+How about sleep deprivation? 
+Indeed, it will decrease neurogenesis. 
+How about sex? 
+Oh, wow! 
+(Laughter) Yes, you are right, it will increase the production of new neurons. 
+However, it's all about balance here. 
+We don't want to fall in a situation — (Laughter) about too much sex leading to sleep deprivation. (Laughter) 
+How about getting older? 
+So the neurogenesis rate will decrease as we get older, but it is still occurring. 
+And then finally, how about running? 
+I will let you judge that one by yourself. 
+So this is one of the first studies that was carried out by one of my mentors, Rusty Gage from the Salk Institute, showing that the environment can have an impact on the production of new neurons. 
+And here you see a section of the hippocampus of a mouse that had no running wheel in its cage. 
+And now, you see a section of the hippocampus of a mouse that had a running wheel in its cage. 
+So you see the massive increase of the black dots representing the new neurons-to-be. 
+So activity impacts neurogenesis, but that's not all. 
+What you eat will have an effect on the production of new neurons in the hippocampus. 
+So here we have a sample of diet — of nutrients that have been shown to have efficacy. 
+And I'm just going to point a few out to you: Calorie restriction of 20 to 30 percent will increase neurogenesis. 
+Intermittent fasting — spacing the time between your meals — will increase neurogenesis. 
+Intake of flavonoids, which are contained in dark chocolate or blueberries, will increase neurogenesis. 
+Omega-3 fatty acids, present in fatty fish, like salmon, will increase the production of these new neurons. 
+Conversely, a diet rich in high saturated fat will have a negative impact on neurogenesis. 
+Ethanol — intake of alcohol — will decrease neurogenesis. 
+However, not everything is lost; resveratrol, which is contained in red wine, has been shown to promote the survival of these new neurons. 
+So next time you are at a dinner party, you might want to reach for this possibly "" neurogenesis-neutral "" drink. 
+(Laughter) And then finally, let me point out the last one — a quirky one. 
+So Japanese groups are fascinated with food textures, and they have shown that actually soft diet impairs neurogenesis, as opposed to food that requires mastication — chewing — or crunchy food. 
+So all of this data, where we need to look at the cellular level, has been generated using animal models. 
+But this diet has also been given to human participants, and what we could see is that the diet modulates memory and mood in the same direction as it modulates neurogenesis, such as: calorie restriction will improve memory capacity, whereas a high-fat diet will exacerbate symptoms of depression — as opposed to omega-3 fatty acids, which increase neurogenesis, and also help to decrease the symptoms of depression. 
+So we think that the effect of diet on mental health, on memory and mood, is actually mediated by the production of the new neurons in the hippocampus. 
+And it's not only what you eat, but it's also the texture of the food, when you eat it and how much of it you eat. 
+On our side — neuroscientists interested in neurogenesis — we need to understand better the function of these new neurons, and how we can control their survival and their production. 
+We also need to find a way to protect the neurogenesis of Robert's patients. 
+And on your side — I leave you in charge of your neurogenesis. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Margaret Heffernan: Fantastic research, Sandrine. 
+Now, I told you you changed my life — I now eat a lot of blueberries. 
+Sandrine Thuret: Very good. 
+MH: I'm really interested in the running thing. 
+Do I have to run? 
+Or is it really just about aerobic exercise, getting oxygen to the brain? 
+Could it be any kind of vigorous exercise? 
+ST: So for the moment, we can't really say if it's just the running itself, but we think that anything that indeed will increase the production — or moving the blood flow to the brain, should be beneficial. 
+MH: So I don't have to get a running wheel in my office? 
+ST: No, you don't! 
+MH: Oh, what a relief! That's wonderful. 
+Sandrine Thuret, thank you so much. 
+
+I have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous. 
+I went to prison — difficult. 
+I worked in a coal mine — dangerous. 
+I filmed in war zones — difficult and dangerous. 
+And I spent 30 days eating nothing but this — fun in the beginning, little difficult in the middle, very dangerous in the end. 
+In fact, most of my career, I've been immersing myself into seemingly horrible situations for the whole goal of trying to examine societal issues in a way that make them engaging, that make them interesting, that hopefully break them down in a way that make them entertaining and accessible to an audience. 
+So when I knew I was coming here to do a TED Talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship, I knew I would want to do something a little different. 
+So as some of you may or may not have heard, a couple weeks ago, I took out an ad on eBay. 
+I sent out some Facebook messages, some Twitter messages, and I gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 TED Talk. 
+(Laughter) That's right, some lucky individual, corporation, for-profit or non-profit, was going to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — because I'm sure Chris Anderson will never let it happen again — (Laughter) to buy the naming rights to the talk you're watching right now, that at the time didn't have a title, didn't really have a lot of content and didn't really give much hint as to what the subject matter would actually be. 
+So what you were getting was this: Your name here presents: My TED Talk that you have no idea what the subject is and, depending on the content, could ultimately blow up in your face, especially if I make you or your company look stupid for doing it. 
+But that being said, it's a very good media opportunity. 
+(Laughter) You know how many people watch these TED Talks? 
+It's a lot. 
+That's just a working title, by the way. 
+(Laughter) So even with that caveat, I knew that someone would buy the naming rights. 
+Now if you'd have asked me that a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you that with any certainty. 
+But in the new project that I'm working on, my new film, we examine the world of marketing, advertising. 
+And as I said earlier, I put myself in some pretty horrible situations over the years, but nothing could prepare me, nothing could ready me, for anything as difficult or as dangerous as going into the rooms with these guys. 
+(Laughter) You see, I had this idea for a movie. 
+(Video) Morgan Spurlock: What I want to do is make a film all about product placement, marketing and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising. 
+So the movie will be called "" The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. "" So what happens in "" The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, "" is that everything from top to bottom, from start to finish, is branded from beginning to end — from the above-the-title sponsor that you'll see in the movie, which is brand X. 
+Now this brand, the Qualcomm Stadium, the Staples Center... 
+these people will be married to the film in perpetuity — forever. 
+And so the film explores this whole idea — (Michael Kassan: It's redundant.) It's what? (MK: It's redundant.) In perpetuity, forever? 
+I'm a redundant person. (MK: I'm just saying.) That was more for emphasis. 
+It was, "" In perpetuity. Forever. "" But not only are we going to have the brand X title sponsor, but we're going to make sure we sell out every category we can in the film. 
+So maybe we sell a shoe and it becomes the greatest shoe you ever wore... 
+the greatest car you ever drove from "" The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, "" the greatest drink you've ever had, courtesy of "" The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. "" Xavier Kochhar: So the idea is, beyond just showing that brands are a part of your life, but actually get them to finance the film? (MS: Get them to finance the film.) MS: And actually we show the whole process of how does it work. 
+The goal of this whole film is transparency. 
+You're going to see the whole thing take place in this movie. 
+So that's the whole concept, the whole film, start to finish. 
+And I would love for CEG to help make it happen. 
+Robert Friedman: You know it's funny, because when I first hear it, it is the ultimate respect for an audience. 
+Guy: I don't know how receptive people are going to be to it, though. 
+XK: Do you have a perspective — I don't want to use "" angle "" because that has a negative connotation — but do you know how this is going to play out? (MS: No idea.) David Cohn: How much money does it take to do this? 
+MS: 1.5 million. (DC: Okay.) John Kamen: I think that you're going to have a hard time meeting with them, but I think it's certainly worth pursuing a couple big, really obvious brands. 
+XK: Who knows, maybe by the time your film comes out, we look like a bunch of blithering idiots. 
+MS: What do you think the response is going to be? 
+Stuart Ruderfer: The responses mostly will be "" no. "" MS: But is it a tough sell because of the film or a tough sell because of me? 
+JK: Both. 
+MS:... Meaning not so optimistic. 
+So, sir, can you help me? I need help. 
+MK: I can help you. 
+MS: Okay. (MK: Good.) Awesome. 
+MK: We've gotta figure out which brands. 
+MS: Yeah. (MK: That's the challenge.) When you look at the people you deal with.. 
+MK: We've got some places we can go. (MS: Okay.) Turn the camera off. 
+MS: I thought "" Turn the camera off "" meant, "" Let's have an off-the-record conversation. "" Turns out it really means, "We want nothing to do with your movie." 
+MS: And just like that, one by one, all of these companies suddenly disappeared. 
+None of them wanted anything to do with this movie. 
+I was amazed. 
+They wanted absolutely nothing to do with this project. 
+And I was blown away, because I thought the whole concept, the idea of advertising, was to get your product out in front of as many people as possible, to get as many people to see it as possible. 
+Especially in today's world, this intersection of new media and old media and the fractured media landscape, isn't the idea to get that new buzz-worthy delivery vehicle that's going to get that message to the masses? 
+No, that's what I thought. 
+But the problem was, you see, my idea had one fatal flaw, and that flaw was this. 
+Actually no, that was not the flaw whatsoever. 
+That wouldn't have been a problem at all. 
+This would have been fine. 
+But what this image represents was the problem. 
+See, when you do a Google image search for transparency, this is — - (Laughter) (Applause) This is one of the first images that comes up. 
+So I like the way you roll, Sergey Brin. No. 
+(Laughter) This is was the problem: transparency — free from pretense or deceit; easily detected or seen through; readily understood; characterized by visibility or accessibility of information, especially concerning business practices — that last line being probably the biggest problem. 
+You see, we hear a lot about transparency these days. 
+Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEO's say it. 
+But suddenly when it comes down to becoming a reality, something suddenly changes. 
+But why? Well, transparency is scary — (Roar) like that odd, still-screaming bear. 
+(Laughter) It's unpredictable — (Music) (Laughter) like this odd country road. 
+And it's also very risky. 
+(Laughter) What else is risky? 
+Eating an entire bowl of Cool Whip. 
+(Laughter) That's very risky. 
+Now when I started talking to companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story, and they said, "" No, we want you to tell a story. 
+We want you to tell a story, but we just want to tell our story. "" See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie — and there he is giving me the look he often gave me — he would say, "" Son, there's three sides to every story. 
+There's your story, there's my story and there's the real story. "" Now you see, with this film, we wanted to tell the real story. 
+But with only one company, one agency willing to help me — and that's only because I knew John Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum for years — I realized that I would have to go on my own, I'd have to cut out the middleman and go to the companies myself with all of my team. 
+So what you suddenly started to realize — or what I started to realize — is that when you started having conversations with these companies, the idea of understanding your brand is a universal problem. 
+(Video) MS: I have friends who make great big, giant Hollywood films, and I have friends who make little independent films like I make. 
+And the friends of mine who make big, giant Hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have. 
+And then my friends who make small independent films say, "" Well, how are we supposed to compete with these big, giant Hollywood movies? "" And the movie is called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." 
+So how specifically will we see Ban in the film? 
+Any time I'm ready to go, any time I open up my medicine cabinet, you will see Ban deodorant. 
+While anytime I do an interview with someone, I can say, "" Are you fresh enough for this interview? 
+Are you ready? You look a little nervous. 
+I want to help you calm down. 
+So maybe you should put some one before the interview. "" So we'll offer one of these fabulous scents. 
+Whether it's a "" Floral Fusion "" or a "" Paradise Winds, "" they'll have their chance. 
+We will have them geared for both male or female — solid, roll-on or stick, whatever it may be. 
+That's the two-cent tour. 
+So now I can answer any of your questions and give you the five-cent tour. 
+Karen Frank: We are a smaller brand. 
+Much like you talked about being a smaller movie, we're very much a challenger brand. 
+So we don't have the budgets that other brands have. 
+So doing things like this — you know, remind people about Ban — is kind of why were interested in it. 
+MS: What are the words that you would use to describe Ban? 
+Ban is blank. 
+KF: That's a great question. 
+(Laughter) Woman: Superior technology. 
+MS: Technology's not the way you want to describe something somebody's putting in their armpit. 
+Man: We talk about bold, fresh. 
+I think "" fresh "" is a great word that really spins this category into the positive, versus "" fights odor and wetness. "" It keeps you fresh. 
+How do we keep you fresher longer — better freshness, more freshness, three times fresher. 
+Things like that that are more of that positive benefit. 
+MS: And that's a multi-million dollar corporation. 
+What about me? What about a regular guy? 
+I need to go talk to the man on the street, the people who are like me, the regular Joes. 
+They need to tell me about my brand. 
+(Video) MS: How would you guys describe your brand? 
+Man: Um, my brand? 
+I don't know. 
+I like really nice clothes. 
+Woman: 80's revival meets skater-punk, unless it's laundry day. 
+MS: All right, what is brand Gerry? 
+Gerry: Unique. (MS: Unique.) Man: I guess what kind of genre, style I am would be like dark glamor. 
+I like a lot of black colors, a lot of grays and stuff like that. 
+But usually I have an accessory, like sunglasses, or I like crystal and things like that too. 
+Woman: If Dan were a brand, he might be a classic convertible Mercedes Benz. 
+Man 2: The brand that I am is, I would call it casual fly. 
+Woman 2: Part hippie, part yogi, part Brooklyn girl — I don't know. 
+Man 3: I'm the pet guy. 
+I sell pet toys all over the country, all over the world. 
+So I guess that's my brand. 
+In my warped little industry, that's my brand. 
+Man 4: My brand is FedEx because I deliver the goods. 
+Man 5: Failed writer-alcoholic brand. 
+Is that something? 
+Lawyer: I'm a lawyer brand. 
+Tom: I'm Tom. 
+MS: Well we can't all be brand Tom, but I do often find myself at the intersection of dark glamor and casual fly. 
+(Laughter) And what I realized is I needed an expert. 
+I needed somebody who could get inside my head, somebody who could really help me understand what they call your "" brand personality. "" And so I found a company called Olson Zaltman in Pittsburg. 
+They've helped companies like Nestle, Febreze, Hallmark discover that brand personality. 
+If they could do it for them, surely they could do it for me. 
+(Video) Abigail: You brought your pictures, right? 
+MS: I did. The very first picture is a picture of my family. 
+A: So tell me a little bit how it relates to your thoughts and feelings about who you are. 
+MS: These are the people who shape the way I look at the world. 
+A: Tell me about this world. 
+MS: This world? I think your world is the world that you live in — like people who are around you, your friends, your family, the way you live your life, the job you do. 
+All those things stemmed and started from one place, and for me they stemmed and started with my family in West Virginia. 
+A: What's the next one you want to talk about? 
+MS: The next one: This was the best day ever. 
+A: How does this relate to your thoughts and feelings about who you are? 
+MS: It's like, who do I want to be? 
+I like things that are different. 
+I like things that are weird. I like weird things. 
+A: Tell me about the "" why "" phase — what does that do for us? 
+What is the machete? What pupa stage are you in now? 
+Why is it important to reboot? What does the red represent? 
+Tell me a little bit about that part. 
+... A little more about you that is not who you are. 
+What are some other metamorphoses that you've had? 
+... Doesn't have to be fear. What kind of roller coaster are you on? 
+MS: EEEEEE! (A: Thank you.) No, thank you. 
+A: Thanks for you patience. (MS: Great job.) A: Yeah. (MS: Thanks a lot.) All right. 
+MS: Yeah, I don't know what's going to come of this. 
+There was a whole lot of crazy going on in there. 
+Lindsay Zaltman: The first thing we saw was this idea that you had two distinct, but complementary sides to your brand personality — the Morgan Spurlock brand is a mindful / play brand. 
+Those are juxtaposed very nicely together. 
+And I think there's almost a paradox with those. 
+And I think some companies will just focus on one of their strengths or the other instead of focusing on both. 
+Most companies tend to — and it's human nature — to avoid things that they're not sure of, avoid fear, those elements, and you really embrace those, and you actually turn them into positives for you, and it's a neat thing to see. 
+What other brands are like that? 
+The first on here is the classic, Apple. 
+And you can see here too, Target, Wii, Mini from the Mini Coopers, and JetBlue. 
+Now there's playful brands and mindful brands, those things that have come and gone, but a playful, mindful brand is a pretty powerful thing. 
+MS: A playful, mindful brand. What is your brand? 
+If somebody asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, what would you be? 
+Are you an up attribute? Are you something that gets the blood flowing? 
+Or are you more of a down attribute? 
+Are you something that's a little more calm, reserved, conservative? 
+Up attributes are things like being playful, being fresh like the Fresh Prince, contemporary, adventurous, edgy or daring like Errol Flynn, nimble or agile, profane, domineering, magical or mystical like Gandalf. 
+Or are you more of a down attribute? 
+Are you mindful, sophisticated like 007? 
+Are you established, traditional, nurturing, protective, empathetic like the Oprah? 
+Are you reliable, stable, familiar, safe, secure, sacred, contemplative or wise like the Dalai Lama or Yoda? 
+Over the course of this film, we had 500-plus companies who were up and down companies saying, "" no, "" they didn't want any part of this project. 
+They wanted nothing to do with this film, mainly because they would have no control, they would have no control over the final product. 
+But we did get 17 brand partners who were willing to relinquish that control, who wanted to be in business with someone as mindful and as playful as myself and who ultimately empowered us to tell stories that normally we wouldn't be able to tell — stories that an advertiser would normally never get behind. 
+They enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing, as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they're using MRI's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing. 
+We went to San Paulo where they have banned outdoor advertising. 
+In the entire city for the past five years, there's no billboards, there's no posters, there's no flyers, nothing. 
+(Applause) And we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across America. 
+What's incredible for me is the projects that I've gotten the most feedback out of, or I've had the most success in, are ones where I've interacted with things directly. 
+And that's what these brands did. 
+They cut out the middleman, they cut out their agencies and said, "" Maybe these agencies don't have my best interest in mind. 
+I'm going to deal directly with the artist. 
+I'm going to work with him to create something different, something that's going to get people thinking, that's going to challenge the way we look at the world. "" And how has that been for them? Has it been successful? 
+Well, since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, let's take a look. 
+According to Burrelles, the movie premiered in January, and since then — and this isn't even the whole thing — we've had 900 million media impressions for this film. 
+That's literally covering just like a two and a half-week period. 
+That's only online — no print, no TV. 
+The film hasn't even been distributed yet. 
+It's not even online. It's not even streaming. 
+It's not even been out into other foreign countries yet. 
+So ultimately, this film has already started to gain a lot of momentum. 
+And not bad for a project that almost every ad agency we talked to advised their clients not to take part. 
+What I always believe is that if you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity. 
+I believe that when you push people away from that, you're pushing them more towards failure. 
+I believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged. 
+I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks. 
+We need to encourage people to not be afraid of opportunities that may scare them. 
+Ultimately, moving forward, I think we have to embrace fear. 
+We've got to put that bear in a cage. 
+(Laughter) Embrace fear. Embrace risk. 
+One big spoonful at a time, we have to embrace risk. 
+And ultimately, we have to embrace transparency. 
+Today, more than ever, a little honesty is going to go a long way. 
+And that being said, through honesty and transparency, my entire talk, "" Embrace Transparency, "" has been brought to you by my good friends at EMC, who for $7,100 bought the naming rights on eBay. 
+(Applause) EMC: Turning big data into big opportunity for organizations all over the world. 
+EMC presents: "" Embrace Transparency. "" Thank you very much, guys. 
+(Applause) June Cohen: So, Morgan, in the name of transparency, what exactly happened to that $7,100? 
+MS: That is a fantastic question. 
+I have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the TED organization, the Sapling Foundation — a check for $7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year's TED. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) 
+
+I study how the brain processes information. That is, how it takes information in from the outside world, and converts it into patterns of electrical activity, and then how it uses those patterns to allow you to do things — to see, hear, to reach for an object. 
+So I'm really a basic scientist, not a clinician, but in the last year and a half I've started to switch over, to use what we've been learning about these patterns of activity to develop prosthetic devices, and what I wanted to do today is show you an example of this. 
+It's really our first foray into this. 
+It's the development of a prosthetic device for treating blindness. 
+So let me start in on that problem. 
+There are 10 million people in the U.S. 
+and many more worldwide who are blind or are facing blindness due to diseases of the retina, diseases like macular degeneration, and there's little that can be done for them. 
+There are some drug treatments, but they're only effective on a small fraction of the population. And so, for the vast majority of patients, their best hope for regaining sight is through prosthetic devices. 
+The problem is that current prosthetics don't work very well. They're still very limited in the vision that they can provide. 
+And so, you know, for example, with these devices, patients can see simple things like bright lights and high contrast edges, not very much more, so nothing close to normal vision has been possible. 
+So what I'm going to tell you about today is a device that we've been working on that I think has the potential to make a difference, to be much more effective, and what I wanted to do is show you how it works. Okay, so let me back up a little bit and show you how a normal retina works first so you can see the problem that we were trying to solve. 
+Here you have a retina. 
+So you have an image, a retina, and a brain. 
+So when you look at something, like this image of this baby's face, it goes into your eye and it lands on your retina, on the front-end cells here, the photoreceptors. 
+Then what happens is the retinal circuitry, the middle part, goes to work on it, and what it does is it performs operations on it, it extracts information from it, and it converts that information into a code. 
+And the code is in the form of these patterns of electrical pulses that get sent up to the brain, and so the key thing is that the image ultimately gets converted into a code. And when I say code, I do literally mean code. 
+Like this pattern of pulses here actually means "" baby's face, "" and so when the brain gets this pattern of pulses, it knows that what was out there was a baby's face, and if it got a different pattern it would know that what was out there was, say, a dog, or another pattern would be a house. 
+Anyway, you get the idea. 
+And, of course, in real life, it's all dynamic, meaning that it's changing all the time, so the patterns of pulses are changing all the time because the world you're looking at is changing all the time too. 
+So, you know, it's sort of a complicated thing. You have these patterns of pulses coming out of your eye every millisecond telling your brain what it is that you're seeing. 
+So what happens when a person gets a retinal degenerative disease like macular degeneration? What happens is is that, the front-end cells die, the photoreceptors die, and over time, all the cells and the circuits that are connected to them, they die too. 
+Until the only things that you have left are these cells here, the output cells, the ones that send the signals to the brain, but because of all that degeneration they aren't sending any signals anymore. 
+They aren't getting any input, so the person's brain no longer gets any visual information — that is, he or she is blind. 
+So, a solution to the problem, then, would be to build a device that could mimic the actions of that front-end circuitry and send signals to the retina's output cells, and they can go back to doing their normal job of sending signals to the brain. 
+So this is what we've been working on, and this is what our prosthetic does. 
+So it consists of two parts, what we call an encoder and a transducer. 
+And so the encoder does just what I was saying: it mimics the actions of the front-end circuitry — so it takes images in and converts them into the retina's code. 
+And then the transducer then makes the output cells send the code on up to the brain, and the result is a retinal prosthetic that can produce normal retinal output. 
+So a completely blind retina, even one with no front-end circuitry at all, no photoreceptors, can now send out normal signals, signals that the brain can understand. 
+So no other device has been able to do this. 
+Okay, so I just want to take a sentence or two to say something about the encoder and what it's doing, because it's really the key part and it's sort of interesting and kind of cool. 
+I'm not sure "" cool "" is really the right word, but you know what I mean. 
+So what it's doing is, it's replacing the retinal circuitry, really the guts of the retinal circuitry, with a set of equations, a set of equations that we can implement on a chip. So it's just math. 
+In other words, we're not literally replacing the components of the retina. 
+It's not like we're making a little mini-device for each of the different cell types. 
+We've just abstracted what the retina's doing with a set of equations. 
+And so, in a way, the equations are serving as sort of a codebook. An image comes in, goes through the set of equations, and out comes streams of electrical pulses, just like a normal retina would produce. 
+Now let me put my money where my mouth is and show you that we can actually produce normal output, and what the implications of this are. 
+Here are three sets of firing patterns. The top one is from a normal animal, the middle one is from a blind animal that's been treated with this encoder-transducer device, and the bottom one is from a blind animal treated with a standard prosthetic. 
+So the bottom one is the state-of-the-art device that's out there right now, which is basically made up of light detectors, but no encoder. So what we did was we presented movies of everyday things — people, babies, park benches, you know, regular things happening — and we recorded the responses from the retinas of these three groups of animals. 
+Now just to orient you, each box is showing the firing patterns of several cells, and just as in the previous slides, each row is a different cell, and I just made the pulses a little bit smaller and thinner so I could show you a long stretch of data. 
+So as you can see, the firing patterns from the blind animal treated with the encoder-transducer really do very closely match the normal firing patterns — and it's not perfect, but it's pretty good — and the blind animal treated with the standard prosthetic, the responses really don't. 
+And so with the standard method, the cells do fire, they just don't fire in the normal firing patterns because they don't have the right code. 
+How important is this? 
+What's the potential impact on a patient's ability to see? 
+So I'm just going to show you one bottom-line experiment that answers this, and of course I've got a lot of other data, so if you're interested I'm happy to show more. So the experiment is called a reconstruction experiment. 
+So what we did is we took a moment in time from these recordings and asked, what was the retina seeing at that moment? 
+Can we reconstruct what the retina was seeing from the responses from the firing patterns? 
+So, when we did this for responses from the standard method and from our encoder and transducer. 
+So let me show you, and I'm going to start with the standard method first. 
+So you can see that it's pretty limited, and because the firing patterns aren't in the right code, they're very limited in what they can tell you about what's out there. So you can see that there's something there, but it's not so clear what that something is, and this just sort of circles back to what I was saying in the beginning, that with the standard method, patients can see high-contrast edges, they can see light, but it doesn't easily go further than that. So what was the image? It was a baby's face. 
+So what about with our approach, adding the code? And you can see that it's much better. Not only can you tell that it's a baby's face, but you can tell that it's this baby's face, which is a really challenging task. 
+So on the left is the encoder alone, and on the right is from an actual blind retina, so the encoder and the transducer. 
+But the key one really is the encoder alone, because we can team up the encoder with the different transducer. 
+This is just actually the first one that we tried. 
+I just wanted to say something about the standard method. 
+When this first came out, it was just a really exciting thing, the idea that you even make a blind retina respond at all. 
+But there was this limiting factor, the issue of the code, and how to make the cells respond better, produce normal responses, and so this was our contribution. 
+Now I just want to wrap up, and as I was mentioning earlier of course I have a lot of other data if you're interested, but I just wanted to give this sort of basic idea of being able to communicate with the brain in its language, and the potential power of being able to do that. 
+So it's different from the motor prosthetics where you're communicating from the brain to a device. Here we have to communicate from the outside world into the brain and be understood, and be understood by the brain. 
+And then the last thing I wanted to say, really, is to emphasize that the idea generalizes. 
+So the same strategy that we used to find the code for the retina we can also use to find the code for other areas, for example, the auditory system and the motor system, so for treating deafness and for motor disorders. 
+So just the same way that we were able to jump over the damaged circuitry in the retina to get to the retina's output cells, we can jump over the damaged circuitry in the cochlea to get the auditory nerve, or jump over damaged areas in the cortex, in the motor cortex, to bridge the gap produced by a stroke. 
+I just want to end with a simple message that understanding the code is really, really important, and if we can understand the code, the language of the brain, things become possible that didn't seem obviously possible before. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It is very fashionable and proper to speak about food in all its forms, all its colors, aromas and tastes. 
+But after the food goes through the digestive system, when it is thrown out as crap, it is no longer fashionable to speak about it. 
+It is rather revolting. 
+(Laughter) My organization, Gram Vikas, which means "" village development organization, "" was working in the area of renewable energy. 
+On the most part, we were producing biogas, biogas for rural kitchens. 
+We produce biogas in India by using animal manure, which usually, in India, is called cow dung. 
+But as the gender-sensitive person that I am, I would like to call it bullshit. 
+But realizing later on how important were sanitation and the disposal of crap in a proper way, we went into the arena of sanitation. 
+Eighty percent of all diseases in India and most developing countries are because of poor quality water. 
+And when we look at the reason for poor quality water, you find that it is our abysmal attitude to the disposal of human waste. 
+Human waste, in its rawest form, finds its way back to drinking water, bathing water, washing water, irrigation water, whatever water you see. 
+In India, it is unfortunately only the women who carry water. 
+So for all domestic needs, women have to carry water. 
+So that is a pitiable state of affairs. 
+Open defecation is rampant. 
+Seventy percent of India defecates in the open. 
+They sit there out in the open, with the wind on their sails, hiding their faces, exposing their bases, and sitting there in pristine glory — 70 percent of India. 
+And if you look at the world total, 60 percent of all the crap that is thrown into the open is by Indians. 
+I don't know if we Indians can be proud of such a distinction. 
+(Laughter) So we, together with a lot of villages, we began to talk about how to really address this situation of sanitation. 
+And we came together and formed a project called MANTRA. 
+MANTRA stands for Movement and Action Network for Transformation of Rural Areas. 
+Villages that agree to implement this project, they organize a legal society where the general body consists of all members who elect a group of men and women who implement the project and, later on, who look after the operation and maintenance. 
+They decide to build a toilet and a shower room. 
+And from a protected water source, water will be brought to an elevated water reservoir and piped to all households through three taps: one in the toilet, one in the shower, one in the kitchen, 24 hours a day. 
+The pity is that our cities, like New Delhi and Bombay, do not have a 24-hour water supply. 
+But in these villages, we want to have it. 
+There is a distinct difference in the quality. 
+Well in India, we have a theory, which is very much accepted by the government bureaucracy and all those who matter, that poor people deserve poor solutions and absolutely poor people deserve pathetic solutions. 
+This, combined with a Nobel Prize-worthy theory that the cheapest is the most economic, is the heady cocktail that the poor are forced to drink. 
+We are fighting against this. 
+We feel that the poor have been humiliated for centuries. 
+And even in sanitation, they should not be humiliated. 
+Sanitation is more about dignity than about human disposal of waste. 
+And so you build these toilets and very often, we have to hear that the toilets are better than their houses. 
+And you can see that in front are the attached houses and the others are the toilets. 
+So these people, without a single exception of a family in a village, decide to build a toilet, a bathing room. 
+And for that, they come together, collect all the local materials — local materials like rubble, sand, aggregates, usually a government subsidy is available to meet at least part of the cost of external materials like cement, steel, toilet commode. 
+So while these people are being trained, others are collecting the materials. 
+And when both are ready, they build a toilet, a shower room, and of course also a water tower, an elevated water reservoir. 
+We use a system of two leach pits to treat the waste. 
+From the toilet, the muck comes into the first leach pit. 
+And when it is full, it is blocked and it can go to the next. 
+But we discovered that if you plant banana trees, papaya trees on the periphery of these leach pits, they grow very well because they suck up all the nutrients and you get very tasty bananas, papayas. 
+If any of you come to my place, I would be happy to share these bananas and papayas with you. 
+So there you can see the completed toilets, the water towers. 
+This is in a village where most of the people are even illiterate. 
+It is always a 24-hour water supply because water gets polluted very often when you store it — a child dips his or her hand into it, something falls into it. 
+So no water is stored. It's always on tap. 
+And that is the end product. 
+Because it has to go high, and there is some space available, two or three rooms are made under the water tower, which are used by the village for different committee meetings. 
+We have had clear evidence of the great impact of this program. 
+Before we started, there were, as usual, more than 80 percent of people suffering from waterborne diseases. 
+But after this, we have empirical evidence that 82 percent, on average, among all these villages — 1,200 villages have completed it — waterborne diseases have come down 82 percent. 
+(Applause) Women usually used to spend, especially in the summer months, about six to seven hours a day carrying water. 
+And when they went to carry water, because, as I said earlier, it's only women who carry water, they used to take their little children, girl children, also to carry water, or else to be back at home to look after the siblings. 
+So there were less than nine percent of girl children attending school, even if there was a school. 
+And boys, about 30 percent. 
+But girls, it has gone to about 90 percent and boys, almost to 100 percent. 
+(Applause) The most vulnerable section in a village are the landless laborers who are the daily wage-earners. 
+Because they have gone through this training to be masons and plumbers and bar benders, now their ability to earn has increased 300 to 400 percent. 
+So this is a democracy in action because there is a general body, a governing board, the committee. 
+People are questioning, people are governing themselves, people are learning to manage their own affairs, they are taking their own futures into their hands. 
+More than 1,200 villages have so far done this. 
+It benefits over 400,000 people and it's still going on. 
+And I hope it continues to move ahead. 
+For India and such developing countries, armies and armaments, software companies and spaceships may not be as important as taps and toilets. 
+Thank you. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+
+So I just want to tell you my story. 
+I spend a lot of time teaching adults how to use visual language and doodling in the workplace. 
+And naturally, I encounter a lot of resistance, because it's considered to be anti-intellectual and counter to serious learning. 
+But I have a problem with that belief, because I know that doodling has a profound impact on the way that we can process information and the way that we can solve problems. 
+So I was curious about why there was a disconnect between the way our society perceives doodling and the way that the reality is. 
+So I discovered some very interesting things. 
+For example, there's no such thing as a flattering definition of a doodle. 
+In the 17th century, a doodle was a simpleton or a fool — as in Yankee Doodle. 
+In the 18th century, it became a verb, and it meant to swindle or ridicule or to make fun of someone. 
+In the 19th century, it was a corrupt politician. 
+And today, we have what is perhaps our most offensive definition, at least to me, which is the following: To doodle officially means to dawdle, to dilly dally, to monkey around, to make meaningless marks, to do something of little value, substance or import, and — my personal favorite — to do nothing. 
+No wonder people are averse to doodling at work. 
+Doing nothing at work is akin to masturbating at work; it's totally inappropriate. 
+(Laughter) Additionally, I've heard horror stories from people whose teachers scolded them, of course, for doodling in classrooms. 
+And they have bosses who scold them for doodling in the boardroom. 
+There is a powerful cultural norm against doodling in settings in which we are supposed to learn something. 
+And unfortunately, the press tends to reinforce this norm when they're reporting on a doodling scene — of an important person at a confirmation hearing and the like — they typically use words like "" discovered "" or "" caught "" or "" found out, "" as if there's some sort of criminal act being committed. 
+And additionally, there is a psychological aversion to doodling — thank you, Freud. 
+In the 1930s, Freud told us all that you could analyze people's psyches based on their doodles. 
+This is not accurate, but it did happen to Tony Blair at the Davos Forum in 2005, when his doodles were, of course, "" discovered "" and he was labeled the following things. 
+Now it turned out to be Bill Gates' doodle. 
+(Laughter) And Bill, if you're here, nobody thinks you're megalomaniacal. 
+But that does contribute to people not wanting to share their doodles. 
+And here is the real deal. Here's what I believe. 
+I think that our culture is so intensely focused on verbal information that we're almost blinded to the value of doodling. 
+And I'm not comfortable with that. 
+And so because of that belief that I think needs to be burst, I'm here to send us all hurtling back to the truth. 
+And here's the truth: doodling is an incredibly powerful tool, and it is a tool that we need to remember and to re-learn. 
+So here's a new definition for doodling. 
+And I hope there's someone in here from The Oxford English Dictionary, because I want to talk to you later. 
+Here's the real definition: Doodling is really to make spontaneous marks to help yourself think. 
+That is why millions of people doodle. 
+Here's another interesting truth about the doodle: People who doodle when they're exposed to verbal information retain more of that information than their non-doodling counterparts. 
+We think doodling is something you do when you lose focus, but in reality, it is a preemptive measure to stop you from losing focus. 
+Additionally, it has a profound effect on creative problem-solving and deep information processing. 
+There are four ways that learners intake information so that they can make decisions. 
+They are visual, auditory, reading and writing and kinesthetic. 
+Now in order for us to really chew on information and do something with it, we have to engage at least two of those modalities, or we have to engage one of those modalities coupled with an emotional experience. 
+The incredible contribution of the doodle is that it engages all four learning modalities simultaneously with the possibility of an emotional experience. 
+That is a pretty solid contribution for a behavior equated with doing nothing. 
+This is so nerdy, but this made me cry when I discovered this. 
+So they did anthropological research into the unfolding of artistic activity in children, and they found that, across space and time, all children exhibit the same evolution in visual logic as they grow. 
+In other words, they have a shared and growing complexity in visual language that happens in a predictable order. 
+And I think that is incredible. 
+I think that means doodling is native to us and we simply are denying ourselves that instinct. 
+And finally, a lot a people aren't privy to this, but the doodle is a precursor to some of our greatest cultural assets. 
+This is but one: this is Frank Gehry the architect's precursor to the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. 
+So here is my point: Under no circumstances should doodling be eradicated from a classroom or a boardroom or even the war room. 
+On the contrary, doodling should be leveraged in precisely those situations where information density is very high and the need for processing that information is very high. 
+And I will go you one further. 
+Because doodling is so universally accessible and it is not intimidating as an art form, it can be leveraged as a portal through which we move people into higher levels of visual literacy. 
+My friends, the doodle has never been the nemesis of intellectual thought. 
+In reality, it is one of its greatest allies. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This room may appear to be holding 600 people, but there's actually so many more, because in each one of us there is a multitude of personalities. 
+I have two primary personalities that have been in conflict and conversation within me since I was a little girl. 
+I call them "" the mystic "" and "" the warrior. "" I was born into a family of politically active, intellectual atheists. 
+There was this equation in my family that went something like this: if you are intelligent, you therefore are not spiritual. 
+I was the freak of the family. 
+I was this weird little kid who wanted to have deep talks about the worlds that might exist beyond the ones that we perceive with our senses. 
+I wanted to know if what we human beings see and hear and think is a full and accurate picture of reality. 
+So, looking for answers, I went to Catholic mass. 
+I tagged along with my neighbors. 
+I read Sartre and Socrates. 
+And then a wonderful thing happened when I was in high school: Gurus from the East started washing up on the shores of America. 
+And I said to myself, "I wanna get me one of them." 
+And ever since, I've been walking the mystic path, trying to peer beyond what Albert Einstein called "" the optical delusion of everyday consciousness. "" So what did he mean by this? I'll show you. 
+Take a breath right now of this clear air in this room. 
+Now, see this strange, underwater, coral reef-looking thing? 
+It's actually a person's trachea, and those colored globs are microbes that are actually swimming around in this room right now, all around us. 
+If we're blind to this simple biology, imagine what we're missing at the smallest subatomic level right now and at the grandest cosmic levels. 
+My years as a mystic have made me question almost all my assumptions. 
+They've made me a proud I-don't-know-it-all. 
+Now when the mystic part of me jabbers on and on like this, the warrior rolls her eyes. 
+She's concerned about what's happening in this world right now. 
+She's worried. 
+She says, "" Excuse me, I'm pissed off, and I know a few things, and we better get busy about them right now. "" I've spent my life as a warrior, working for women's issues, working on political campaigns, being an activist for the environment. 
+And it can be sort of crazy-making, housing both the mystic and the warrior in one body. 
+I've always been attracted to those rare people who pull that off, who devote their lives to humanity with the grit of the warrior and the grace of the mystic — people like Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote, "" I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. 
+This, "" he wrote, "" is the interrelated structure of reality. "" Then Mother Teresa, another mystic warrior, who said, "" The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small. "" And Nelson Mandela, who lives by the African concept of "" ubuntu, "" which means "" I need you in order to be me, and you need me in order to be you. "" Now we all love to trot out these three mystic warriors as if they were born with the saint gene. 
+But we all actually have the same capacity that they do, and we need to do their work now. 
+I'm deeply disturbed by the ways in which all of our cultures are demonizing "" the Other "" by the voice we're giving to the most divisive among us. 
+Listen to these titles of some of the bestselling books from both sides of the political divide here in the U.S. 
+"Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder," "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot," "Pinheads and Patriots," "Arguing With Idiots." 
+They're supposedly tongue-in-cheek, but they're actually dangerous. 
+Now here's a title that may sound familiar, but whose author may surprise you: "" Four-and-a-Half-Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. "" Who wrote that? 
+That was Adolf Hitler's first title for "" Mein Kampf "" — "" My Struggle "" — the book that launched the Nazi party. 
+The worst eras in human history, whether in Cambodia or Germany or Rwanda, they start like this, with negative other-izing. 
+And then they morph into violent extremism. 
+This is why I'm launching a new initiative. 
+And it's to help all of us, myself included, to counteract the tendency to "" otherize. "" And I realize we're all busy people, so don't worry, you can do this on a lunch break. 
+I'm calling my initiative, "Take the Other to Lunch." 
+If you are a Republican, you can take a Democrat to lunch, or if you're a Democrat, think of it as taking a Republican to lunch. 
+Now if the idea of taking any of these people to lunch makes you lose your appetite, I suggest you start more local, because there is no shortage of the Other right in your own neighborhood. 
+Maybe that person who worships at the mosque, or the church or the synagogue, down the street. 
+Or someone from the other side of the abortion conflict. 
+Or maybe your brother-in-law who doesn't believe in global warming. 
+Anyone whose lifestyle may frighten you, or whose point of view makes smoke come out of your ears. 
+A couple of weeks ago, I took a Conservative Tea Party woman to lunch. 
+Now on paper, she passed my smoking ears test. 
+She's an activist from the Right, and I'm an activist from the Left. 
+And we used some guidelines to keep our conversation elevated, and you can use them too, because I know you're all going to take an Other to lunch. 
+So first of all, decide on a goal: to get to know one person from a group you may have negatively stereotyped. 
+And then, before you get together, agree on some ground rules. 
+My Tea Party lunchmate and I came up with these: don't persuade, defend or interrupt. 
+Be curious; be conversational; be real. 
+And listen. 
+From there, we dove in. 
+And we used these questions: Share some of your life experiences with me. 
+What issues deeply concern you? 
+And what have you always wanted to ask someone from the other side? 
+My lunch partner and I came away with some really important insights, and I'm going to share just one with you. 
+I think it has relevance to any problem between people anywhere. 
+I asked her why her side makes such outrageous allegations and lies about my side. 
+"" What? "" she wanted to know. 
+"" Like we're a bunch of elitist, morally-corrupt terrorist-lovers. "" Well, she was shocked. 
+She thought my side beat up on her side way more often, that we called them brainless, gun-toting racists, and we both marveled at the labels that fit none of the people we actually know. 
+And since we had established some trust, we believed in each other's sincerity. 
+We agreed we'd speak up in our own communities when we witnessed the kind of "" otherizing "" talk that can wound and fester into paranoia and then be used by those on the fringes to incite. 
+By the end of our lunch, we acknowledged each other's openness. 
+Neither of us had tried to change the other. 
+But we also hadn't pretended that our differences were just going to melt away after a lunch. 
+Instead, we had taken first steps together, past our knee-jerk reactions, to the ubuntu place, which is the only place where solutions to our most intractable-seeming problems will be found. 
+Who should you invite to lunch? 
+Next time you catch yourself in the act of otherizing, that will be your clue. 
+And what might happen at your lunch? 
+Will the heavens open and "" We Are the World "" play over the restaurant sound system? 
+Probably not. 
+Because ubuntu work is slow, and it's difficult. 
+It's two people dropping the pretense of being know-it-alls. 
+It's two people, two warriors, dropping their weapons and reaching toward each other. 
+Here's how the great Persian poet Rumi put it: "" Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. 
+I'll meet you there. "" (Applause) 
+
+I've been fascinated with crop diversity for about 35 years from now, ever since I stumbled across a fairly obscure academic article by a guy named Jack Harlan. 
+And he described the diversity within crops — all the different kinds of wheat and rice and such — as a genetic resource. 
+And he said, "" This genetic resource, "" — and I'll never forget the words — "" stands between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine. "" I figured he was either really on to something, or he was one of these academic nutcases. 
+So, I looked a little further, and what I figured out was that he wasn't a nutcase. 
+He was the most respected scientist in the field. 
+What he understood was that biological diversity — crop diversity — is the biological foundation of agriculture. 
+It's the raw material, the stuff, of evolution in our agricultural crops. 
+Not a trivial matter. 
+And he also understood that that foundation was crumbling, literally crumbling. 
+That indeed, a mass extinction was underway in our fields, in our agricultural system. 
+And that this mass extinction was taking place with very few people noticing and even fewer caring. 
+Now, I know that many of you don't stop to think about diversity in agricultural systems and, let's face it, that's logical. 
+You don't see it in the newspaper every day. 
+And when you go into the supermarket, you certainly don't see a lot of choices there. 
+You see apples that are red, yellow, and green and that's about it. 
+So, let me show you a picture of one form of diversity. 
+Here's some beans, and there are about 35 or 40 different varieties of beans on this picture. 
+Now, imagine each one of these varieties as being distinct from another about the same way as a poodle from a Great Dane. 
+If I wanted to show you a picture of all the dog breeds in the world, and I put 30 or 40 of them on a slide, it would take about 10 slides because there about 400 breeds of dogs in the world. 
+But there are 35 to 40,000 different varieties of beans. 
+So if I were to going to show you all the beans in the world, and I had a slide like this, and I switched it every second, it would take up my entire TED talk, and I wouldn't have to say anything. 
+But the interesting thing is that this diversity — and the tragic thing is — that this diversity is being lost. 
+We have about 200,000 different varieties of wheat, and we have about 2 to 400,000 different varieties of rice, but it's being lost. 
+And I want to give you an example of that. 
+It's a bit of a personal example, in fact. 
+In the United States, in the 1800s — that's where we have the best data — farmers and gardeners were growing 7,100 named varieties of apples. 
+Imagine that. 7,100 apples with names. 
+Today, 6,800 of those are extinct, no longer to be seen again. 
+I used to have a list of these extinct apples, and when I would go out and give a presentation, I would pass the list out in the audience. 
+I wouldn't tell them what it was, but it was in alphabetical order, and I would tell them to look for their names, their family names, their mother's maiden name. 
+And at the end of the speech, I would ask, "" How many people have found a name? "" And I never had fewer than two-thirds of an audience hold up their hand. 
+And I said, "" You know what? These apples come from your ancestors, and your ancestors gave them the greatest honor they could give them. 
+They gave them their name. 
+The bad news is they're extinct. 
+The good news is a third of you didn't hold up your hand. Your apple's still out there. 
+Find it. Make sure it doesn't join the list. "" So, I want to tell you that the piece of the good news is that the Fowler apple is still out there. 
+And there's an old book back here, and I want to read a piece from it. 
+This book was published in 1904. 
+It's called "" The Apples of New York "" and this is the second volume. 
+See, we used to have a lot of apples. 
+And the Fowler apple is described in here — I hope this doesn't surprise you — as, "" a beautiful fruit. "" (Laughter) I don't know if we named the apple or if the apple named us, but... 
+but, to be honest, the description goes on and it says that it "" doesn't rank high in quality, however. "" And then he has to go even further. 
+It sounds like it was written by an old school teacher of mine. 
+"" As grown in New York, the fruit usually fails to develop properly in size and quality and is, on the whole, unsatisfactory. "" (Laughter) And I guess there's a lesson to be learned here, and the lesson is: so why save it? 
+I get this question all the time. Why don't we just save the best one? 
+And there are a couple of answers to that question. 
+One thing is that there is no such thing as a best one. 
+Today's best variety is tomorrow's lunch for insects or pests or disease. 
+The other thing is that maybe that Fowler apple or maybe a variety of wheat that's not economical right now has disease or pest resistance or some quality that we're going to need for climate change that the others don't. 
+So it's not necessary, thank God, that the Fowler apple is the best apple in the world. 
+It's just necessary or interesting that it might have one good, unique trait. 
+And for that reason, we ought to be saving it. 
+Why? As a raw material, as a trait we can use in the future. 
+Think of diversity as giving us options. 
+And options, of course, are exactly what we need in an era of climate change. 
+I want to show you two slides, but first, I want to tell you that we've been working at the Global Crop Diversity Trust with a number of scientists — particularly at Stanford and University of Washington — to ask the question: What's going to happen to agriculture in an era of climate change and what kind of traits and characteristics do we need in our agricultural crops to be able to adapt to this? 
+In short, the answer is that in the future, in many countries, the coldest growing seasons are going to be hotter than anything those crops have seen in the past. 
+The coldest growing seasons of the future, hotter than the hottest of the past. 
+Is agriculture adapted to that? 
+I don't know. Can fish play the piano? 
+If agriculture hasn't experienced that, how could it be adapted? 
+Now, the highest concentration of poor and hungry people in the world, and the place where climate change, ironically, is going to be the worst is in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. 
+So I've picked two examples here, and I want to show you. 
+In the histogram before you now, the blue bars represent the historical range of temperatures, going back about far as we have temperature data. 
+And you can see that there's some difference between one growing season and another. 
+Some are colder, some are hotter and it's a bell shaped curve. 
+The tallest bar is the average temperature for the most number of growing seasons. 
+In the future, later this century, it's going to look like the red, totally out of bounds. 
+The agricultural system and, more importantly, the crops in the field in India have never experienced this before. 
+Here's South Africa. The same story. 
+But the most interesting thing about South Africa is we don't have to wait for 2070 for there to be trouble. 
+By 2030, if the maize, or corn, varieties, which is the dominant crop — 50 percent of the nutrition in Southern Africa are still in the field — in 2030, we'll have a 30 percent decrease in production of maize because of the climate change already in 2030. 
+30 percent decrease of production in the context of increasing population, that's a food crisis. It's global in nature. 
+We will watch children starve to death on TV. 
+Now, you may say that 20 years is a long way off. 
+It's two breeding cycles for maize. 
+We have two rolls of the dice to get this right. 
+We have to get climate-ready crops in the field, and we have to do that rather quickly. 
+Now, the good news is that we have conserved. 
+We have collected and conserved a great deal of biological diversity, agricultural diversity, mostly in the form of seed, and we put it in seed banks, which is a fancy way of saying a freezer. 
+If you want to conserve seed for a long term and you want to make it available to plant breeders and researchers, you dry it and then you freeze it. 
+Unfortunately, these seed banks are located around the world in buildings and they're vulnerable. 
+Disasters have happened. In recent years we lost the gene bank, the seed bank in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can guess why. 
+In Rwanda, in the Solomon Islands. 
+And then there are just daily disasters that take place in these buildings, financial problems and mismanagement and equipment failures, and all kinds of things, and every time something like this happens, it means extinction. We lose diversity. 
+And I'm not talking about losing diversity in the same way that you lose your car keys. 
+I'm talking about losing it in the same way that we lost the dinosaurs: actually losing it, never to be seen again. 
+So, a number of us got together and decided that, you know, enough is enough and we need to do something about that and we need to have a facility that can really offer protection for our biological diversity of — maybe not the most charismatic diversity. 
+You don't look in the eyes of a carrot seed quite in the way you do a panda bear, but it's very important diversity. 
+So we needed a really safe place, and we went quite far north to find it. 
+To Svalbard, in fact. 
+This is above mainland Norway. You can see Greenland there. 
+That's at 78 degrees north. 
+It's as far as you can fly on a regularly scheduled airplane. 
+It's a remarkably beautiful landscape. I can't even begin to describe it to you. 
+It's otherworldly, beautiful. 
+We worked with the Norwegian government and with the NorGen, the Norwegian Genetic Resources Program, to design this facility. 
+What you see is an artist's conception of this facility, which is built in a mountain in Svalbard. 
+The idea of Svalbard was that it's cold, so we get natural freezing temperatures. 
+But it's remote. It's remote and accessible so it's safe and we don't depend on mechanical refrigeration. 
+This is more than just an artist's dream, it's now a reality. 
+And this next picture shows it in context, in Svalbard. 
+And here's the front door of this facility. 
+When you open up the front door, this is what you're looking at. It's pretty simple. It's a hole in the ground. 
+It's a tunnel, and you go into the tunnel, chiseled in solid rock, about 130 meters. 
+There are now a couple of security doors, so you won't see it quite like this. 
+Again, when you get to the back, you get into an area that's really my favorite place. 
+I think of it as sort of a cathedral. 
+And I know that this tags me as a bit of a nerd, but... 
+(Laughter) Some of the happiest days of my life have been spent... (Laughter) 
+in this place there. 
+(Applause) If you were to walk into one of these rooms, you would see this. 
+It's not very exciting, but if you know what's there, it's pretty emotional. 
+We have now about 425,000 samples of unique crop varieties. 
+There's 70,000 samples of different varieties of rice in this facility right now. 
+About a year from now, we'll have over half a million samples. 
+We're going up to over a million, and someday we'll basically have samples — about 500 seeds — of every variety of agricultural crop that can be stored in a frozen state in this facility. 
+This is a backup system for world agriculture. 
+It's a backup system for all the seed banks. Storage is free. 
+It operates like a safety deposit box. 
+Norway owns the mountain and the facility, but the depositors own the seed. 
+And if anything happens, then they can come back and get it. 
+This particular picture that you see shows the national collection of the United States, of Canada, and an international institution from Syria. 
+I think it's interesting in that this facility, I think, is almost the only thing I can think of these days where countries, literally, every country in the world — because we have seeds from every country in the world — all the countries of the world have gotten together to do something that's both long term, sustainable and positive. 
+I can't think of anything else that's happened in my lifetime that way. 
+I can't look you in the eyes and tell you that I have a solution for climate change, for the water crisis. 
+Agriculture takes 70 percent of fresh water supplies on earth. 
+I can't look you in the eyes and tell you that there is such a solution for those things, or the energy crisis, or world hunger, or peace in conflict. 
+I can't look you in the eyes and tell you that I have a simple solution for that, but I can look you in the eyes and tell you that we can't solve any of those problems if we don't have crop diversity. 
+Because I challenge you to think of an effective, efficient, sustainable solution to climate change if we don't have crop diversity. 
+Because, quite literally, if agriculture doesn't adapt to climate change, neither will we. 
+And if crops don't adapt to climate change, neither will agriculture, neither will we. 
+So, this is not something pretty and nice to do. 
+There are a lot of people who would love to have this diversity exist just for the existence value of it. 
+It is, I agree, a nice thing to do. 
+But it's a necessary thing to do. 
+So, in a very real sense, I believe that we, as an international community, should get organized to complete the task. 
+The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a wonderful gift that Norway and others have given us, but it's not the complete answer. 
+We need to collect the remaining diversity that's out there. 
+We need to put it into good seed banks that can offer those seeds to researchers in the future. 
+We need to catalog it. It's a library of life, but right now I would say we don't have a card catalog for it. 
+And we need to support it financially. 
+My big idea would be that while we think of it as commonplace to endow an art museum or endow a chair at a university, we really ought to be thinking about endowing wheat. 
+30 million dollars in an endowment would take care of preserving all the diversity in wheat forever. 
+So we need to be thinking a little bit in those terms. 
+And my final thought is that we, of course, by conserving wheat, rice, potatoes, and the other crops, we may, quite simply, end up saving ourselves. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when I was writing my new book, and it's a story of something that happened 3,000 years ago, when the Kingdom of Israel was in its infancy. 
+And it takes place in an area called the Shephelah in what is now Israel. 
+And the reason the story obsessed me is that I thought I understood it, and then I went back over it and I realized that I didn't understand it at all. 
+Ancient Palestine had a — along its eastern border, there's a mountain range. 
+Still same is true of Israel today. 
+And in the mountain range are all of the ancient cities of that region, so Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron. 
+And then there's a coastal plain along the Mediterranean, where Tel Aviv is now. 
+And connecting the mountain range with the coastal plain is an area called the Shephelah, which is a series of valleys and ridges that run east to west, and you can follow the Shephelah, go through the Shephelah to get from the coastal plain to the mountains. 
+And the Shephelah, if you've been to Israel, you'll know it's just about the most beautiful part of Israel. 
+It's gorgeous, with forests of oak and wheat fields and vineyards. 
+But more importantly, though, in the history of that region, it's served, it's had a real strategic function, and that is, it is the means by which hostile armies on the coastal plain find their way, get up into the mountains and threaten those living in the mountains. 
+And 3,000 years ago, that's exactly what happens. 
+The Philistines, who are the biggest of enemies of the Kingdom of Israel, are living in the coastal plain. 
+They're originally from Crete. They're a seafaring people. 
+And they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the Shephelah up into the mountains, because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by Bethlehem and split the Kingdom of Israel in two. 
+And the Kingdom of Israel, which is headed by King Saul, obviously catches wind of this, and Saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the Philistines in the Valley of Elah, one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the Shephelah. 
+And the Israelites dig in along the northern ridge, and the Philistines dig in along the southern ridge, and the two armies just sit there for weeks and stare at each other, because they're deadlocked. 
+Neither can attack the other, because to attack the other side you've got to come down the mountain into the valley and then up the other side, and you're completely exposed. 
+So finally, to break the deadlock, the Philistines send their mightiest warrior down into the valley floor, and he calls out and he says to the Israelites, "" Send your mightiest warrior down, and we'll have this out, just the two of us. "" This was a tradition in ancient warfare called single combat. 
+It was a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle. 
+And the Philistine who is sent down, their mighty warrior, is a giant. 
+He's 6 foot 9. 
+He's outfitted head to toe in this glittering bronze armor, and he's got a sword and he's got a javelin and he's got his spear. He is absolutely terrifying. 
+And he's so terrifying that none of the Israelite soldiers want to fight him. 
+It's a death wish, right? There's no way they think they can take him. 
+And finally the only person who will come forward is this young shepherd boy, and he goes up to Saul and he says, "" I'll fight him. "" And Saul says, "" You can't fight him. That's ridiculous. 
+You're this kid. This is this mighty warrior. "" But the shepherd is adamant. He says, "" No, no, no, you don't understand, I have been defending my flock against lions and wolves for years. I think I can do it. "" And Saul has no choice. He's got no one else who's come forward. 
+So he says, "" All right. "" And then he turns to the kid, and he says, "But you've got to wear this armor. You can't go as you are." 
+So he tries to give the shepherd his armor, and the shepherd says, "" No. "" He says, "" I can't wear this stuff. "" The Biblical verse is, "" I cannot wear this for I have not proved it, "" meaning, "" I've never worn armor before. You've got to be crazy. "" So he reaches down instead on the ground and picks up five stones and puts them in his shepherd's bag and starts to walk down the mountainside to meet the giant. 
+And the giant sees this figure approaching, and calls out, "" Come to me so I can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field. "" He issues this kind of taunt towards this person coming to fight him. 
+And the shepherd draws closer and closer, and the giant sees that he's carrying a staff. 
+That's all he's carrying. 
+Instead of a weapon, just this shepherd's staff, and he says — he's insulted — "Am I a dog that you would come to me with sticks?" 
+And the shepherd boy takes one of his stones out of his pocket, puts it in his sling and rolls it around and lets it fly and it hits the giant right between the eyes — right here, in his most vulnerable spot — and he falls down either dead or unconscious, and the shepherd boy runs up and takes his sword and cuts off his head, and the Philistines see this and they turn and they just run. 
+And of course, the name of the giant is Goliath and the name of the shepherd boy is David, and the reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything I thought I knew about that story turned out to be wrong. 
+So David, in that story, is supposed to be the underdog, right? 
+In fact, that term, David and Goliath, has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger. 
+Now why do we call David an underdog? 
+Well, we call him an underdog because he's a kid, a little kid, and Goliath is this big, strong giant. 
+We also call him an underdog because Goliath is an experienced warrior, and David is just a shepherd. 
+But most importantly, we call him an underdog because all he has is — it's that Goliath is outfitted with all of this modern weaponry, this glittering coat of armor and a sword and a javelin and a spear, and all David has is this sling. 
+Well, let's start there with the phrase "All David has is this sling," because that's the first mistake that we make. 
+In ancient warfare, there are three kinds of warriors. 
+There's cavalry, men on horseback and with chariots. 
+There's heavy infantry, which are foot soldiers, armed foot soldiers with swords and shields and some kind of armor. 
+And there's artillery, and artillery are archers, but, more importantly, slingers. 
+And a slinger is someone who has a leather pouch with two long cords attached to it, and they put a projectile, either a rock or a lead ball, inside the pouch, and they whirl it around like this and they let one of the cords go, and the effect is to send the projectile forward towards its target. 
+That's what David has, and it's important to understand that that sling is not a slingshot. 
+It's not this, right? It's not a child's toy. 
+It's in fact an incredibly devastating weapon. 
+When David rolls it around like this, he's turning the sling around probably at six or seven revolutions per second, and that means that when the rock is released, it's going forward really fast, probably 35 meters per second. 
+That's substantially faster than a baseball thrown by even the finest of baseball pitchers. 
+More than that, the stones in the Valley of Elah were not normal rocks. They were barium sulphate, which are rocks twice the density of normal stones. 
+If you do the calculations on the ballistics, on the stopping power of the rock fired from David's sling, it's roughly equal to the stopping power of a [.45 caliber] handgun. 
+This is an incredibly devastating weapon. 
+Accuracy, we know from historical records that slingers — experienced slingers could hit and maim or even kill a target at distances of up to 200 yards. 
+From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. 
+They were incredibly accurate. 
+When David lines up — and he's not 200 yards away from Goliath, he's quite close to Goliath — when he lines up and fires that thing at Goliath, he has every intention and every expectation of being able to hit Goliath at his most vulnerable spot between his eyes. 
+If you go back over the history of ancient warfare, you will find time and time again that slingers were the decisive factor against infantry in one kind of battle or another. 
+So what's Goliath? He's heavy infantry, and his expectation when he challenges the Israelites to a duel is that he's going to be fighting another heavy infantryman. 
+When he says, "" Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field, "" the key phrase is "" Come to me. "" Come up to me because we're going to fight, hand to hand, like this. 
+Saul has the same expectation. 
+David says, "" I want to fight Goliath, "" and Saul tries to give him his armor, because Saul is thinking, "" Oh, when you say 'fight Goliath,' you mean 'fight him in hand-to-hand combat,' infantry on infantry. "" But David has absolutely no expectation. 
+He's not going to fight him that way. Why would he? 
+He's a shepherd. He's spent his entire career using a sling to defend his flock against lions and wolves. 
+That's where his strength lies. 
+So here he is, this shepherd, experienced in the use of a devastating weapon, up against this lumbering giant weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor and these incredibly heavy weapons that are useful only in short-range combat. 
+Goliath is a sitting duck. He doesn't have a chance. 
+So why do we keep calling David an underdog, and why do we keep referring to his victory as improbable? 
+There's a second piece of this that's important. 
+It's not just that we misunderstand David and his choice of weaponry. 
+It's also that we profoundly misunderstand Goliath. 
+Goliath is not what he seems to be. 
+There's all kinds of hints of this in the Biblical text, things that are in retrospect quite puzzling and don't square with his image as this mighty warrior. 
+So to begin with, the Bible says that Goliath is led onto the valley floor by an attendant. 
+Now that is weird, right? 
+Here is this mighty warrior challenging the Israelites to one-on-one combat. 
+Why is he being led by the hand by some young boy, presumably, to the point of combat? 
+Secondly, the Bible story makes special note of how slowly Goliath moves, another odd thing to say when you're describing the mightiest warrior known to man at that point. 
+And then there's this whole weird thing about how long it takes Goliath to react to the sight of David. 
+So David's coming down the mountain, and he's clearly not preparing for hand-to-hand combat. 
+There is nothing about him that says, "I am about to fight you like this." 
+He's not even carrying a sword. 
+Why does Goliath not react to that? 
+It's as if he's oblivious to what's going on that day. 
+And then there's that strange comment he makes to David: "Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?" 
+Sticks? David only has one stick. 
+Well, it turns out that there's been a great deal of speculation within the medical community over the years about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Goliath, an attempt to make sense of all of those apparent anomalies. 
+There have been many articles written. 
+The first one was in 1960 in the Indiana Medical Journal, and it started a chain of speculation that starts with an explanation for Goliath's height. 
+So Goliath is head and shoulders above all of his peers in that era, and usually when someone is that far out of the norm, there's an explanation for it. 
+So the most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. 
+And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly. 
+So the tallest person of all time was a guy named Robert Wadlow who was still growing when he died at the age of 24 and he was 8 foot 11. 
+He had acromegaly. 
+Do you remember the wrestler André the Giant? 
+And acromegaly has a very distinct set of side effects associated with it, principally having to do with vision. 
+The pituitary tumor, as it grows, often starts to compress the visual nerves in your brain, with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted. 
+So when people have started to speculate about what might have been wrong with Goliath, they've said, "" Wait a minute, he looks and sounds an awful lot like someone who has acromegaly. "" And that would also explain so much of what was strange about his behavior that day. 
+Why does he move so slowly and have to be escorted down into the valley floor by an attendant? 
+Because he can't make his way on his own. 
+Why is he so strangely oblivious to David that he doesn't understand that David's not going to fight him until the very last moment? 
+Because he can't see him. 
+When he says, "" Come to me that I might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field, "" the phrase "" come to me "" is a hint also of his vulnerability. 
+Come to me because I can't see you. 
+And then there's, "" Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks? "" He sees two sticks when David has only one. 
+So the Israelites up on the mountain ridge looking down on him thought he was this extraordinarily powerful foe. 
+What they didn't understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength was also the source of his greatest weakness. 
+And there is, I think, in that, a very important lesson for all of us. 
+Giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem. 
+And sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Good morning. 
+My name is Eric Li, and I was born here. 
+But no, I wasn't born there. 
+This was where I was born: Shanghai, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. 
+My grandmother tells me that she heard the sound of gunfire along with my first cries. 
+When I was growing up, I was told a story that explained all I ever needed to know about humanity. 
+It went like this. 
+All human societies develop in linear progression, beginning with primitive society, then slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally, guess where we end up? 
+Communism! 
+Sooner or later, all of humanity, regardless of culture, language, nationality, will arrive at this final stage of political and social development. 
+The entire world's peoples will be unified in this paradise on Earth and live happily ever after. 
+But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil, the good of socialism against the evil of capitalism, and the good shall triumph. 
+That, of course, was the meta-narrative distilled from the theories of Karl Marx. 
+And the Chinese bought it. 
+We were taught that grand story day in and day out. 
+It became part of us, and we believed in it. 
+The story was a bestseller. 
+About one third of the entire world's population lived under that meta-narrative. 
+Then, the world changed overnight. 
+As for me, disillusioned by the failed religion of my youth, I went to America and became a Berkeley hippie. 
+(Laughter) Now, as I was coming of age, something else happened. 
+As if one big story wasn't enough, I was told another one. 
+This one was just as grand. 
+It also claims that all human societies develop in a linear progression towards a singular end. 
+This one went as follows: All societies, regardless of culture, be it Christian, Muslim, Confucian, must progress from traditional societies in which groups are the basic units to modern societies in which atomized individuals are the sovereign units, and all these individuals are, by definition, rational, and they all want one thing: the vote. 
+Because they are all rational, once given the vote, they produce good government and live happily ever after. 
+Paradise on Earth, again. 
+Sooner or later, electoral democracy will be the only political system for all countries and all peoples, with a free market to make them all rich. 
+But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil. 
+(Laughter) The good belongs to those who are democracies and are charged with a mission of spreading it around the globe, sometimes by force, against the evil of those who do not hold elections. 
+(Video) George H.W. Bush: A new world order... 
+(Video) George W. Bush:... ending tyranny in our world... 
+Eric X. Li: Now — (Laughter) (Applause) This story also became a bestseller. 
+According to Freedom House, the number of democracies went from 45 in 1970 to 115 in 2010. 
+In the last 20 years, Western elites tirelessly trotted around the globe selling this prospectus: Multiple parties fight for political power and everyone voting on them is the only path to salvation to the long-suffering developing world. 
+Those who buy the prospectus are destined for success. 
+Those who do not are doomed to fail. 
+But this time, the Chinese didn't buy it. 
+Fool me once... 
+(Laughter) The rest is history. 
+In just 30 years, China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to its second-largest economy. 
+Six hundred fifty million people were lifted out of poverty. 
+Eighty percent of the entire world's poverty alleviation during that period happened in China. 
+In other words, all the new and old democracies put together amounted to a mere fraction of what a single, one-party state did without voting. 
+See, I grew up on this stuff: food stamps. 
+Meat was rationed to a few hundred grams per person per month at one point. 
+Needless to say, I ate all my grandmother's portions. 
+So I asked myself, what's wrong with this picture? 
+Here I am in my hometown, my business growing leaps and bounds. 
+Middle class is expanding in speed and scale unprecedented in human history. 
+Yet, according to the grand story, none of this should be happening. 
+So I went and did the only thing I could. I studied it. 
+Yes, China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party, the Party, and they don't hold elections. 
+Three assumptions are made by the dominant political theories of our time. 
+Such a system is operationally rigid, politically closed, and morally illegitimate. 
+Well, the assumptions are wrong. 
+The opposites are true. 
+Adaptability, meritocracy, and legitimacy are the three defining characteristics of China's one-party system. 
+Now, most political scientists will tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of self-correction. 
+It won't last long because it cannot adapt. 
+Now here are the facts. 
+In 64 years of running the largest country in the world, the range of the Party's policies has been wider than any other country in recent memory, from radical land collectivization to the Great Leap Forward, then privatization of farmland, then the Cultural Revolution, then Deng Xiaoping's market reform, then successor Jiang Zemin took the giant political step of opening up Party membership to private businesspeople, something unimaginable during Mao's rule. 
+So the Party self-corrects in rather dramatic fashions. 
+Institutionally, new rules get enacted to correct previous dysfunctions. 
+For example, term limits. 
+Political leaders used to retain their positions for life, and they used that to accumulate power and perpetuate their rules. 
+Mao was the father of modern China, yet his prolonged rule led to disastrous mistakes. 
+So the Party instituted term limits with mandatory retirement age of 68 to 70. 
+One thing we often hear is, "Political reforms have lagged far behind economic reforms," and "" China is in dire need of political reform. "" But this claim is a rhetorical trap hidden behind a political bias. 
+See, some have decided a priori what kinds of changes they want to see, and only such changes can be called political reform. 
+The truth is, political reforms have never stopped. 
+Compared with 30 years ago, 20 years, even 10 years ago, every aspect of Chinese society, how the country is governed, from the most local level to the highest center, are unrecognizable today. 
+Now such changes are simply not possible without political reforms of the most fundamental kind. 
+Now I would venture to suggest the Party is the world's leading expert in political reform. 
+The second assumption is that in a one-party state, power gets concentrated in the hands of the few, and bad governance and corruption follow. 
+Indeed, corruption is a big problem, but let's first look at the larger context. 
+Now, this may be counterintuitive to you. 
+The Party happens to be one of the most meritocratic political institutions in the world today. 
+China's highest ruling body, the Politburo, has 25 members. 
+In the most recent one, only five of them came from a background of privilege, so-called princelings. 
+The other 20, including the president and the premier, came from entirely ordinary backgrounds. 
+In the larger central committee of 300 or more, the percentage of those who were born into power and wealth was even smaller. 
+The vast majority of senior Chinese leaders worked and competed their way to the top. 
+Compare that with the ruling elites in both developed and developing countries, I think you'll find the Party being near the top in upward mobility. 
+The question then is, how could that be possible in a system run by one party? 
+Now we come to a powerful political institution, little-known to Westerners: the Party's Organization Department. 
+The department functions like a giant human resource engine that would be the envy of even some of the most successful corporations. 
+It operates a rotating pyramid made up of three components: civil service, state-owned enterprises, and social organizations like a university or a community program. 
+They form separate yet integrated career paths for Chinese officials. 
+They recruit college grads into entry-level positions in all three tracks, and they start from the bottom, called "" keyuan "" [clerk]. 
+Then they could get promoted through four increasingly elite ranks: fuke [deputy section manager], ke [section manager], fuchu [deputy division manager], and chu [division manger]. 
+Now these are not moves from "" Karate Kid, "" okay? 
+The range of positions is wide, from running health care in a village to foreign investment in a city district to manager in a company. 
+Once a year, the department reviews their performance. 
+They interview their superiors, their peers, their subordinates. They vet their personal conduct. 
+They conduct public opinion surveys. 
+Then they promote the winners. 
+Throughout their careers, these cadres can move through and out of all three tracks. 
+Over time, the good ones move beyond the four base levels to the fuju [deputy bureau chief] and ju [bureau chief] levels. 
+By that point, a typical assignment will be to manage a district with a population in the millions or a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. 
+Just to show you how competitive the system is, in 2012, there were 900,000 fuke and ke levels, 600,000 fuchu and chu levels, and only 40,000 fuju and ju levels. 
+After the ju levels, the best few move further up several more ranks, and eventually make it to the Central Committee. 
+The process takes two to three decades. 
+Does patronage play a role? Yes, of course. 
+But merit remains the fundamental driver. 
+In essence, the Organization Department runs a modernized version of China's centuries-old mentoring system. 
+China's new president, Xi Jinping, is the son of a former leader, which is very unusual, first of his kind to make the top job. 
+Even for him, the career took 30 years. 
+He started as a village manager, and by the time he entered the Politburo, he had managed areas with a total population of 150 million people and combined GDPs of 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars. 
+Now, please don't get me wrong, okay? 
+This is not a put-down of anyone. It's just a statement of fact. 
+George W. Bush, remember him? 
+This is not a put-down. 
+(Laughter) Before becoming governor of Texas, or Barack Obama before running for president, could not make even a small county manager in China's system. 
+Winston Churchill once said that democracy is a terrible system except for all the rest. 
+Well, apparently he hadn't heard of the Organization Department. 
+Now, Westerners always assume that multi-party election with universal suffrage is the only source of political legitimacy. 
+I was asked once, "" The Party wasn't voted in by election. 
+Where is the source of legitimacy? "" I said, "" How about competency? "" We all know the facts. 
+In 1949, when the Party took power, China was mired in civil wars, dismembered by foreign aggression, average life expectancy at that time, 41 years old. 
+Today, it's the second largest economy in the world, an industrial powerhouse, and its people live in increasing prosperity. 
+Pew Research polls Chinese public attitudes, and here are the numbers in recent years. 
+Satisfaction with the direction of the country: 85 percent. 
+Those who think they're better off than five years ago: 70 percent. 
+Those who expect the future to be better: a whopping 82 percent. 
+Financial Times polls global youth attitudes, and these numbers, brand new, just came from last week. 
+Ninety-three percent of China's Generation Y are optimistic about their country's future. 
+Now, if this is not legitimacy, I'm not sure what is. 
+In contrast, most electoral democracies around the world are suffering from dismal performance. 
+I don't need to elaborate for this audience how dysfunctional it is, from Washington to European capitals. 
+With a few exceptions, the vast number of developing countries that have adopted electoral regimes are still suffering from poverty and civil strife. 
+Governments get elected, and then they fall below 50 percent approval in a few months and stay there and get worse until the next election. 
+Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of elect and regret. 
+At this rate, I'm afraid it is democracy, not China's one-party system, that is in danger of losing legitimacy. 
+Now, I don't want to create the misimpression that China's hunky-dory, on the way to some kind of superpowerdom. 
+The country faces enormous challenges. 
+The social and economic problems that come with wrenching change like this are mind-boggling. 
+Pollution is one. Food safety. Population issues. 
+On the political front, the worst problem is corruption. 
+Corruption is widespread and undermines the system and its moral legitimacy. 
+But most analysts misdiagnose the disease. 
+They say that corruption is the result of the one-party system, and therefore, in order to cure it, you have to do away with the entire system. 
+Transparency International ranks China between 70 and 80 in recent years among 170 countries, and it's been moving up. 
+India, the largest democracy in the world, 94 and dropping. 
+For the hundred or so countries that are ranked below China, more than half of them are electoral democracies. 
+So if election is the panacea for corruption, how come these countries can't fix it? 
+Now, I'm a venture capitalist. I make bets. 
+It wouldn't be fair to end this talk without putting myself on the line and making some predictions. 
+In the next 10 years, China will surpass the U.S. 
+and become the largest economy in the world. 
+Income per capita will be near the top of all developing countries. 
+Corruption will be curbed, but not eliminated, and China will move up 10 to 20 notches to above 60 in T.I. ranking. 
+Economic reform will accelerate, political reform will continue, and the one-party system will hold firm. 
+We live in the dusk of an era. 
+Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20th century and are failing us in the 21st. 
+Meta-narrative is the cancer that is killing democracy from the inside. 
+Now, I want to clarify something. 
+I'm not here to make an indictment of democracy. 
+On the contrary, I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world. 
+It is the universal claim that many Western elites are making about their political system, the hubris, that is at the heart of the West's current ills. 
+If they would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others, and a little bit more on political reform at home, they might give their democracy a better chance. 
+China's political model will never supplant electoral democracy, because unlike the latter, it doesn't pretend to be universal. 
+It cannot be exported. But that is the point precisely. 
+The significance of China's example is not that it provides an alternative, but the demonstration that alternatives exist. 
+Let us draw to a close this era of meta-narratives. 
+Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals, but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over. 
+Let us stop telling people and our children there's only one way to govern ourselves and a singular future towards which all societies must evolve. 
+It is wrong. It is irresponsible. 
+And worst of all, it is boring. 
+Let universality make way for plurality. 
+Perhaps a more interesting age is upon us. 
+Are we brave enough to welcome it? 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. 
+Bruno Giussani: Eric, stay with me for a couple of minutes, because I want to ask you a couple of questions. 
+I think many here, and in general in Western countries, would agree with your statement about analysis of democratic systems becoming dysfunctional, but at the same time, many would kind of find unsettling the thought that there is an unelected authority that, without any form of oversight or consultation, decides what the national interest is. 
+What is the mechanism in the Chinese model that allows people to say, actually, the national interest as you defined it is wrong? 
+EXL: You know, Frank Fukuyama, the political scientist, called the Chinese system "" responsive authoritarianism. "" It's not exactly right, but I think it comes close. 
+So I know the largest public opinion survey company in China, okay? 
+Do you know who their biggest client is? 
+The Chinese government. 
+Not just from the central government, the city government, the provincial government, to the most local neighborhood districts. 
+They conduct surveys all the time. 
+Are you happy with the garbage collection? 
+Are you happy with the general direction of the country? 
+So there is, in China, there is a different kind of mechanism to be responsive to the demands and the thinking of the people. 
+My point is, I think we should get unstuck from the thinking that there's only one political system — election, election, election — that could make it responsive. 
+I'm not sure, actually, elections produce responsive government anymore in the world. 
+(Applause) BG: Many seem to agree. 
+One of the features of a democratic system is a space for civil society to express itself. 
+And you have shown figures about the support that the government and the authorities have in China. 
+But then you've just mentioned other elements like, you know, big challenges, and there are, of course, a lot of other data that go in a different direction: tens of thousands of unrests and protests and environmental protests, etc. 
+So you seem to suggest the Chinese model doesn't have a space outside of the Party for civil society to express itself. 
+EXL: There's a vibrant civil society in China, whether it's environment or what-have-you. 
+But it's different. You wouldn't recognize it. 
+Because, by Western definitions, a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system, but that concept is alien for Chinese culture. 
+For thousands of years, you have civil society, yet they are consistent and coherent and part of a political order, and I think it's a big cultural difference. 
+BG: Eric, thank you for sharing this with TED. EXL: Thank you. 
+
+SJ: And that's me over there, taking photos the whole way. 
+
+I'm a huge believer in hands-on education. 
+But you have to have the right tools. 
+If I'm going to teach my daughter about electronics, I'm not going to give her a soldering iron. 
+And similarly, she finds prototyping boards really frustrating for her little hands. 
+So my wonderful student Sam and I decided to look at the most tangible thing we could think of: Play-Doh. 
+And so we spent a summer looking at different Play-Doh recipes. 
+And these recipes probably look really familiar to any of you who have made homemade play-dough — pretty standard ingredients you probably have in your kitchen. 
+We have two favorite recipes — one that has these ingredients and a second that had sugar instead of salt. 
+And they're great. We can make great little sculptures with these. 
+But the really cool thing about them is when we put them together. 
+You see that really salty Play-Doh? 
+Well, it conducts electricity. 
+And this is nothing new. 
+It turns out that regular Play-Doh that you buy at the store conducts electricity, and high school physics teachers have used that for years. 
+But our homemade play-dough actually has half the resistance of commercial Play-Doh. 
+And that sugar dough? 
+Well it's 150 times more resistant to electric current than that salt dough. 
+So what does that mean? 
+Well it means if you them together you suddenly have circuits — circuits that the most creative, tiny, little hands can build on their own. 
+(Applause) And so I want to do a little demo for you. 
+So if I take this salt dough, again, it's like the play-dough you probably made as kids, and I plug it in — it's a two-lead battery pack, simple battery pack, you can buy them at Radio Shack and pretty much anywhere else — we can actually then light things up. 
+But if any of you have studied electrical engineering, we can also create a short circuit. 
+If I push these together, the light turns off. 
+Right, the current wants to run through the play-dough, not through that LED. 
+If I separate them again, I have some light. 
+Well now if I take that sugar dough, the sugar dough doesn't want to conduct electricity. 
+It's like a wall to the electricity. 
+If I place that between, now all the dough is touching, but if I stick that light back in, I have light. 
+In fact, I could even add some movement to my sculptures. 
+If I want a spinning tail, let's grab a motor, put some play-dough on it, stick it on and we have spinning. 
+(Applause) And once you have the basics, we can make a slightly more complicated circuit. 
+We call this our sushi circuit. It's very popular with kids. 
+I plug in again the power to it. 
+And now I can start talking about parallel and series circuits. 
+I can start plugging in lots of lights. 
+And we can start talking about things like electrical load. 
+What happens if I put in lots of lights and then add a motor? 
+It'll dim. 
+We can even add microprocessors and have this as an input and create squishy sound music that we've done. 
+You could do parallel and series circuits for kids using this. 
+So this is all in your home kitchen. 
+We've actually tried to turn it into an electrical engineering lab. 
+We have a website, it's all there. These are the home recipes. 
+We've got some videos. You can make them yourselves. 
+And it's been really fun since we put them up to see where these have gone. 
+We've had a mom in Utah who used them with her kids, to a science researcher in the U.K., and curriculum developers in Hawaii. 
+So I would encourage you all to grab some Play-Doh, grab some salt, grab some sugar and start playing. 
+We don't usually think of our kitchen as an electrical engineering lab or little kids as circuit designers, but maybe we should. 
+Have fun. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We're here to celebrate compassion. 
+But compassion, from my vantage point, has a problem. 
+As essential as it is across our traditions, as real as so many of us know it to be in particular lives, the word "" compassion "" is hollowed out in our culture, and it is suspect in my field of journalism. 
+It's seen as a squishy kumbaya thing, or it's seen as potentially depressing. 
+Karen Armstrong has told what I think is an iconic story of giving a speech in Holland and, after the fact, the word "" compassion "" was translated as "" pity. "" Now compassion, when it enters the news, too often comes in the form of feel-good feature pieces or sidebars about heroic people you could never be like or happy endings or examples of self-sacrifice that would seem to be too good to be true most of the time. 
+Our cultural imagination about compassion has been deadened by idealistic images. 
+And so what I'd like to do this morning for the next few minutes is perform a linguistic resurrection. 
+And I hope you'll come with me on my basic premise that words matter, that they shape the way we understand ourselves, the way we interpret the world and the way we treat others. 
+When this country first encountered genuine diversity in the 1960s, we adopted tolerance as the core civic virtue with which we would approach that. 
+Now the word "" tolerance, "" if you look at it in the dictionary, connotes "" allowing, "" "" indulging "" and "" enduring. "" In the medical context that it comes from, it is about testing the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment. 
+Tolerance is not really a lived virtue; it's more of a cerebral ascent. 
+And it's too cerebral to animate guts and hearts and behavior when the going gets rough. 
+And the going is pretty rough right now. 
+I think that without perhaps being able to name it, we are collectively experiencing that we've come as far as we can with tolerance as our only guiding virtue. 
+Compassion is a worthy successor. 
+It is organic, across our religious, spiritual and ethical traditions, and yet it transcends them. 
+Compassion is a piece of vocabulary that could change us if we truly let it sink into the standards to which we hold ourselves and others, both in our private and in our civic spaces. 
+So what is it, three-dimensionally? 
+What are its kindred and component parts? 
+What's in its universe of attendant virtues? 
+To start simply, I want to say that compassion is kind. 
+Now "" kindness "" might sound like a very mild word, and it's prone to its own abundant cliche. 
+But kindness is an everyday byproduct of all the great virtues. 
+And it is a most edifying form of instant gratification. 
+Compassion is also curious. 
+Compassion cultivates and practices curiosity. 
+I love a phrase that was offered me by two young women who are interfaith innovators in Los Angeles, Aziza Hasan and Malka Fenyvesi. 
+They are working to create a new imagination about shared life among young Jews and Muslims, and as they do that, they cultivate what they call "curiosity without assumptions." 
+Well that's going to be a breeding ground for compassion. 
+Compassion can be synonymous with empathy. 
+It can be joined with the harder work of forgiveness and reconciliation, but it can also express itself in the simple act of presence. 
+It's linked to practical virtues like generosity and hospitality and just being there, just showing up. 
+I think that compassion also is often linked to beauty — and by that I mean a willingness to see beauty in the other, not just what it is about them that might need helping. 
+I love it that my Muslim conversation partners often speak of beauty as a core moral value. 
+And in that light, for the religious, compassion also brings us into the territory of mystery — encouraging us not just to see beauty, but perhaps also to look for the face of God in the moment of suffering, in the face of a stranger, in the face of the vibrant religious other. 
+I'm not sure if I can show you what tolerance looks like, but I can show you what compassion looks like — because it is visible. 
+When we see it, we recognize it and it changes the way we think about what is doable, what is possible. 
+It is so important when we're communicating big ideas — but especially a big spiritual idea like compassion — to root it as we present it to others in space and time and flesh and blood — the color and complexity of life. 
+And compassion does seek physicality. 
+I first started to learn this most vividly from Matthew Sanford. 
+And I don't imagine that you will realize this when you look at this photograph of him, but he's paraplegic. 
+He's been paralyzed from the waist down since he was 13, in a car crash that killed his father and his sister. 
+Matthew's legs don't work, and he'll never walk again, and — and he does experience this as an "" and "" rather than a "" but "" — and he experiences himself to be healed and whole. 
+And as a teacher of yoga, he brings that experience to others across the spectrum of ability and disability, health, illness and aging. 
+He says that he's just at an extreme end of the spectrum we're all on. 
+He's doing some amazing work now with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. 
+And Matthew has made this remarkable observation that I'm just going to offer you and let it sit. 
+I can't quite explain it, and he can't either. 
+But he says that he has yet to experience someone who became more aware of their body, in all its frailty and its grace, without, at the same time, becoming more compassionate towards all of life. 
+Compassion also looks like this. 
+This is Jean Vanier. 
+Jean Vanier helped found the L'Arche communities, which you can now find all over the world, communities centered around life with people with mental disabilities — mostly Down syndrome. 
+The communities that Jean Vanier founded, like Jean Vanier himself, exude tenderness. 
+"" Tender "" is another word I would love to spend some time resurrecting. 
+We spend so much time in this culture being driven and aggressive, and I spend a lot of time being those things too. 
+And compassion can also have those qualities. 
+But again and again, lived compassion brings us back to the wisdom of tenderness. 
+Jean Vanier says that his work, like the work of other people — his great, beloved, late friend Mother Teresa — is never in the first instance about changing the world; it's in the first instance about changing ourselves. 
+He's says that what they do with L'Arche is not a solution, but a sign. 
+Compassion is rarely a solution, but it is always a sign of a deeper reality, of deeper human possibilities. 
+And compassion is unleashed in wider and wider circles by signs and stories, never by statistics and strategies. 
+We need those things too, but we're also bumping up against their limits. 
+And at the same time that we are doing that, I think we are rediscovering the power of story — that as human beings, we need stories to survive, to flourish, to change. 
+Our traditions have always known this, and that is why they have always cultivated stories at their heart and carried them forward in time for us. 
+There is, of course, a story behind the key moral longing and commandment of Judaism to repair the world — tikkun olam. 
+And I'll never forget hearing that story from Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who told it to me as her grandfather told it to her, that in the beginning of the Creation something happened and the original light of the universe was shattered into countless pieces. 
+It lodged as shards inside every aspect of the Creation. 
+And that the highest human calling is to look for this light, to point at it when we see it, to gather it up, and in so doing, to repair the world. 
+Now this might sound like a fanciful tale. 
+Some of my fellow journalists might interpret it that way. 
+Rachel Naomi Remen says this is an important and empowering story for our time, because this story insists that each and every one of us, frail and flawed as we may be, inadequate as we may feel, has exactly what's needed to help repair the part of the world that we can see and touch. 
+Stories like this, signs like this, are practical tools in a world longing to bring compassion to abundant images of suffering that can otherwise overwhelm us. 
+Rachel Naomi Remen is actually bringing compassion back to its rightful place alongside science in her field of medicine in the training of new doctors. 
+And this trend of what Rachel Naomi Remen is doing, how these kinds of virtues are finding a place in the vocabulary of medicine — the work Fred Luskin is doing — I think this is one of the most fascinating developments of the 21st century — that science, in fact, is taking a virtue like compassion definitively out of the realm of idealism. 
+This is going to change science, I believe, and it will change religion. 
+But here's a face from 20th century science that might surprise you in a discussion about compassion. 
+We all know about the Albert Einstein who came up with E = mc2. 
+We don't hear so much about the Einstein who invited the African American opera singer, Marian Anderson, to stay in his home when she came to sing in Princeton because the best hotel there was segregated and wouldn't have her. 
+We don't hear about the Einstein who used his celebrity to advocate for political prisoners in Europe or the Scottsboro boys in the American South. 
+Einstein believed deeply that science should transcend national and ethnic divisions. 
+But he watched physicists and chemists become the purveyors of weapons of mass destruction in the early 20th century. 
+He once said that science in his generation had become like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old. 
+And Einstein foresaw that as we grow more modern and technologically advanced, we need the virtues our traditions carry forward in time more, not less. 
+He liked to talk about the spiritual geniuses of the ages. 
+Some of his favorites were Moses, Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi — he adored his contemporary, Gandhi. 
+And Einstein said — and I think this is a quote, again, that has not been passed down in his legacy — that "" these kinds of people are geniuses in the art of living, more necessary to the dignity, security and joy of humanity than the discoverers of objective knowledge. "" Now invoking Einstein might not seem the best way to bring compassion down to earth and make it seem accessible to all the rest of us, but actually it is. 
+I want to show you the rest of this photograph, because this photograph is analogous to what we do to the word "" compassion "" in our culture — we clean it up and we diminish its depths and its grounding in life, which is messy. 
+So in this photograph you see a mind looking out a window at what might be a cathedral — it's not. 
+This is the full photograph, and you see a middle-aged man wearing a leather jacket, smoking a cigar. 
+And by the look of that paunch, he hasn't been doing enough yoga. 
+We put these two photographs side-by-side on our website, and someone said, "" When I look at the first photo, I ask myself, what was he thinking? 
+And when I look at the second, I ask, what kind of person was he? What kind of man is this? "" Well, he was complicated. 
+He was incredibly compassionate in some of his relationships and terribly inadequate in others. 
+And it is much harder, often, to be compassionate towards those closest to us, which is another quality in the universe of compassion, on its dark side, that also deserves our serious attention and illumination. 
+Gandhi, too, was a real flawed human being. 
+So was Martin Luther King, Jr. So was Dorothy Day. 
+So was Mother Teresa. 
+So are we all. 
+And I want to say that it is a liberating thing to realize that that is no obstacle to compassion — following on what Fred Luskin says — that these flaws just make us human. 
+Our culture is obsessed with perfection and with hiding problems. 
+But what a liberating thing to realize that our problems, in fact, are probably our richest sources for rising to this ultimate virtue of compassion, towards bringing compassion towards the suffering and joys of others. 
+Rachel Naomi Remen is a better doctor because of her life-long struggle with Crohn's disease. 
+Einstein became a humanitarian, not because of his exquisite knowledge of space and time and matter, but because he was a Jew as Germany grew fascist. 
+And Karen Armstrong, I think you would also say that it was some of your very wounding experiences in a religious life that, with a zigzag, have led to the Charter for Compassion. 
+Compassion can't be reduced to sainthood any more than it can be reduced to pity. 
+So I want to propose a final definition of compassion — this is Einstein with Paul Robeson by the way — and that would be for us to call compassion a spiritual technology. 
+Now our traditions contain vast wisdom about this, and we need them to mine it for us now. 
+But compassion is also equally at home in the secular as in the religious. 
+So I will paraphrase Einstein in closing and say that humanity, the future of humanity, needs this technology as much as it needs all the others that have now connected us and set before us the terrifying and wondrous possibility of actually becoming one human race. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Will we do whatever it takes to tackle climate change? 
+I come at this question not as a green campaigner, in fact, I confess to be rather hopeless at recycling. 
+I come at it as a professional observer of financial policy making and someone that wonders how history will judge us. 
+One day, this ring that belonged to my grandfather will pass to my son, Charlie. 
+And I wonder what his generation and perhaps the one that follows will make of the two lives this ring has worked. 
+My grandfather was a coal miner. 
+In his time, burning fossil fuels for energy and for allowing economies to develop was accepted. 
+We know now that that is not the case because of the greenhouse gases that coal produces. 
+But today, I fear it's the industry in which I work that will be judged more harshly because of its impact on the climate — more harshly than my grandfather's industry, even. 
+I work, of course, in the banking industry, which will be remembered for its crisis in 2008 — a crisis that diverted the attention and finances of governments away from some really, really important promises, like promises made at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 to mobilize 100 billion dollars a year to help developing countries move away from burning fossil fuels and transition to using cleaner energy. 
+That promise is already in jeopardy. 
+And that's a real problem, because that transition to cleaner energy needs to happen sooner rather than later. 
+Firstly, because greenhouse gases, once released, stay in the atmosphere for decades. 
+And secondly, if a developing economy builds its power grid around fossil fuels today, it's going to be way more costly to change later on. 
+So for the climate, history may judge that the banking crisis happened at just the wrong time. 
+The story need not be this gloomy, though. 
+Three years ago, I argued that governments could use the tools deployed to save the financial system to meet other global challenges. 
+And these arguments are getting stronger, not weaker, with time. 
+Let's take a brief reminder of what those tools looked like. 
+When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the central banks of the US and UK began buying bonds issued by their own governments in a policy known as "" quantitative easing. "" Depending on what happens to those bonds when they mature, this is money printing by another name. 
+And boy, did they print. 
+The US alone created four trillion dollars' worth of its own currency. 
+This was not done in isolation. 
+In a remarkable act of cooperation, the 188 countries that make up the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, agreed to issue 250 billion dollars' worth of their own currency — the Special Drawing Right — to boost reserves around the world. 
+When the financial crisis moved to Europe, the European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, promised "" to do whatever it takes. "" And they did. 
+The Bank of Japan repeated those words — that exact same commitment — to do "" whatever it takes "" to reflate their economy. 
+In both cases, "" whatever it takes "" meant trillions of dollars more in money-printing policies that continue today. 
+What this shows is that when faced with some global challenges, policy makers are able to act collectively, with urgency, and run the risks of unconventional policies like money printing. 
+So, let's go back to that original question: Can we print money for climate finance? 
+Three years ago, the idea of using money in this way was something of a taboo. 
+Once you break down and dismantle the idea that money is a finite resource, governments can quickly get overwhelmed by demands from their people to print more and more money for other causes: education, health care, welfare — even defense. 
+And there are some truly terrible historical examples of money printing — uncontrolled money printing — leading to hyperinflation. 
+Think: Weimar Republic in 1930; Zimbabwe more recently, in 2008, when the prices of basic goods like bread are doubling every day. 
+But all of this is moving the public debate forward, so much so, that money printing for the people is now discussed openly in the financial media, and even in some political manifestos. 
+But it's important the debate doesn't stop here, with printing national currencies. 
+Because climate change is a shared global problem, there are some really compelling reasons why we should be printing that international currency that's issued by the IMF, to fund it. 
+The Special Drawing Right, or SDR, is the IMF's electronic unit of account that governments use to transfer funds amongst each other. 
+Think of it as a peer-to-peer payment network, like Bitcoin, but for governments. 
+And it's truly global. 
+Each of the 188 members of the IMF hold SDR quotas as part of their foreign exchange reserves. 
+These are national stores of wealth that countries keep to protect themselves against currency crises. 
+And that global nature is why, at the height of the financial crisis in 2009, the IMF issued those extra 250 billion dollars — because it served as a collective global action that safeguarded countries large and small in one fell swoop. 
+But here — here's the intriguing part. 
+More than half of those extra SDRs that were printed in 2009 — 150 billion dollars' worth — went to developed market countries who, for the most part, have a modest need for these foreign exchange reserves, because they have flexible exchange rates. 
+So those extra reserves that were printed in 2009, in the end, for developed market countries at least, weren't really needed. 
+And they remain unused today. 
+So here's an idea. 
+As a first step, why don't we start spending those unused, those extra SDRs that were printed in 2009, to combat climate change? 
+They could, for example, be used to buy bonds issued by the UN's Green Climate Fund. 
+This was a fund created in 2009, following that climate agreement in Copenhagen. 
+And it was designed to channel funds towards developing countries to meet their climate projects. 
+It's been one of the most successful funds of its type, raising almost 10 billion dollars. 
+But if we use those extra SDRs that were issued, it helps governments get back on track, to meet that promise of 100 billion dollars a year that was derailed by the financial crisis. 
+It could also — it could also serve as a test case. 
+If the inflationary consequences of using SDRs in this way are benign, it could be used to justify the additional, extra issuance of SDRs, say, every five years, again, with the commitment that developed-market countries would direct their share of the new reserves to the Green Climate Fund. 
+Printing international money in this way has several advantages over printing national currencies. 
+The first is it's really easy to argue that spending money to mitigate climate change benefits everyone. 
+No one section of society benefits from the printing press over another. 
+That problem of competing claims is mitigated. 
+It's also fair to say that because it takes so many countries to agree to issue these extra SDRs, it's highly unlikely that money printing would get out of control. 
+What you end up with is a collective, global action aimed — and it's controlled global action — aimed at a global good. 
+And, as we've learned with the money-printing schemes, whatever concerns we have can be allayed by rules. 
+So, for example, the issuance of these extra SDRs every five years could be capped, such that this international currency is never more than five percent of global foreign exchange reserves. 
+That's important because it would allay well, let's say, the ridiculous concerns that the US might have that the SDR could ever challenge the dollar's dominant role in international finance. 
+And in fact, I think the only thing that the SDR would likely steal from the dollar under this scheme is its nickname, the "" greenback. "" Because even with that cap in place, the IMF could have followed up its issuance — its massive issuance of SDRs in 2009 — with a further 200 billion dollars of SDRs in 2014. 
+So hypothetically, that would mean that developed countries could have contributed up to 300 billion dollars' worth of SDRs to the Green Climate Fund. 
+That's 30 times what it has today. 
+And you know, as spectacular as that sounds, it's only just beginning to look like "" whatever it takes. "" And just to think what amazing things could be done with that money, consider this: in 2009, Norway promised one billion dollars of its reserves to Brazil if they followed through on their goals on deforestation. 
+That program has since delivered a 70 percent reduction in deforestation in the past decade. 
+That's saving 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is the equivalent of taking all American cars off the roads for three whole years. 
+So what could we do with 300 other pay-for-performance climate projects like that, organized on a global scale? 
+We could take cars off the roads for a generation. 
+So, let's not quibble about whether we can afford to fund climate change. 
+The real question is: Do we care enough about future generations to take the very same policy risks we took to save the financial system? 
+After all, we could do it, we did do it and we are doing it today. 
+We must, must, must do "" whatever it takes. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Well after many years working in trade and economics, four years ago, I found myself working on the front lines of human vulnerability. 
+And I found myself in the places where people are fighting every day to survive and can't even obtain a meal. 
+This red cup comes from Rwanda from a child named Fabian. 
+And I carry this around as a symbol, really, of the challenge and also the hope. 
+Because one cup of food a day changes Fabian's life completely. 
+But what I'd like to talk about today is the fact that this morning, about a billion people on Earth — or one out of every seven — woke up and didn't even know how to fill this cup. 
+One out of every seven people. 
+First, I'll ask you: Why should you care? 
+Why should we care? 
+For most people, if they think about hunger, they don't have to go far back on their own family history — maybe in their own lives, or their parents' lives, or their grandparents' lives — to remember an experience of hunger. 
+I rarely find an audience where people can go back very far without that experience. 
+Some are driven by compassion, feel it's perhaps one of the fundamental acts of humanity. 
+As Gandhi said, "To a hungry man, a piece of bread is the face of God." 
+Others worry about peace and security, stability in the world. 
+We saw the food riots in 2008, after what I call the silent tsunami of hunger swept the globe when food prices doubled overnight. 
+The destabilizing effects of hunger are known throughout human history. 
+One of the most fundamental acts of civilization is to ensure people can get enough food. 
+Others think about Malthusian nightmares. 
+Will we be able to feed a population that will be nine billion in just a few decades? 
+This is not a negotiable thing, hunger. 
+People have to eat. 
+There's going to be a lot of people. 
+This is jobs and opportunity all the way up and down the value chain. 
+But I actually came to this issue in a different way. 
+This is a picture of me and my three children. 
+In 1987, I was a new mother with my first child and was holding her and feeding her when an image very similar to this came on the television. 
+And this was yet another famine in Ethiopia. 
+One two years earlier had killed more than a million people. 
+But it never struck me as it did that moment, because on that image was a woman trying to nurse her baby, and she had no milk to nurse. 
+And the baby's cry really penetrated me, as a mother. 
+And I thought, there's nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that cannot be returned with food — the most fundamental expectation of every human being. 
+And it was at that moment that I just was filled with the challenge and the outrage that actually we know how to fix this problem. 
+This isn't one of those rare diseases that we don't have the solution for. 
+We know how to fix hunger. 
+A hundred years ago, we didn't. 
+We actually have the technology and systems. 
+And I was just struck that this is out of place. 
+At our time in history, these images are out of place. 
+Well guess what? 
+This is last week in northern Kenya. 
+Yet again, the face of starvation at large scale with more than nine million people wondering if they can make it to the next day. 
+In fact, what we know now is that every 10 seconds we lose a child to hunger. 
+This is more than HIV / AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. 
+And we know that the issue is not just production of food. 
+One of my mentors in life was Norman Borlaug, my hero. 
+But today I'm going to talk about access to food, because actually this year and last year and during the 2008 food crisis, there was enough food on Earth for everyone to have 2,700 kilocalories. 
+So why is it that we have a billion people who can't find food? 
+And I also want to talk about what I call our new burden of knowledge. 
+In 2008, Lancet compiled all the research and put forward the compelling evidence that if a child in its first thousand days — from conception to two years old — does not have adequate nutrition, the damage is irreversible. 
+Their brains and bodies will be stunted. 
+And here you see a brain scan of two children — one who had adequate nutrition, another, neglected and who was deeply malnourished. 
+And we can see brain volumes up to 40 percent less in these children. 
+And in this slide you see the neurons and the synapses of the brain don't form. 
+And what we know now is this has huge impact on economies, which I'll talk about later. 
+But also the earning potential of these children is cut in half in their lifetime due to the stunting that happens in early years. 
+So this burden of knowledge drives me. 
+Because actually we know how to fix it very simply. 
+And yet, in many places, a third of the children, by the time they're three already are facing a life of hardship due to this. 
+I'd like to talk about some of the things I've seen on the front lines of hunger, some of the things I've learned in bringing my economic and trade knowledge and my experience in the private sector. 
+I'd like to talk about where the gap of knowledge is. 
+Well first, I'd like to talk about the oldest nutritional method on Earth, breastfeeding. 
+You may be surprised to know that a child could be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first six months of life. 
+But in Niger, for example, less than seven percent of the children are breastfed for the first six months of life, exclusively. 
+In Mauritania, less than three percent. 
+This is something that can be transformed with knowledge. 
+This message, this word, can come out that this is not an old-fashioned way of doing business; it's a brilliant way of saving your child's life. 
+And so today we focus on not just passing out food, but making sure the mothers have enough enrichment, and teaching them about breastfeeding. 
+The second thing I'd like to talk about: If you were living in a remote village somewhere, your child was limp, and you were in a drought, or you were in floods, or you were in a situation where there wasn't adequate diversity of diet, what would you do? 
+Do you think you could go to the store and get a choice of power bars, like we can, and pick the right one to match? 
+Well I find parents out on the front lines very aware their children are going down for the count. 
+And I go to those shops, if there are any, or out to the fields to see what they can get, and they cannot obtain the nutrition. 
+Even if they know what they need to do, it's not available. 
+And I'm very excited about this, because one thing we're working on is transforming the technologies that are very available in the food industry to be available for traditional crops. 
+And this is made with chickpeas, dried milk and a host of vitamins, matched to exactly what the brain needs. 
+It costs 17 cents for us to produce this as, what I call, food for humanity. 
+We did this with food technologists in India and Pakistan — really about three of them. 
+But this is transforming 99 percent of the kids who get this. 
+One package, 17 cents a day — their malnutrition is overcome. 
+So I am convinced that if we can unlock the technologies that are commonplace in the richer world to be able to transform foods. 
+And this is climate-proof. 
+It doesn't need to be refrigerated, it doesn't need water, which is often lacking. 
+And these types of technologies, I see, have the potential to transform the face of hunger and nutrition, malnutrition out on the front lines. 
+The next thing I want to talk about is school feeding. 
+Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net. 
+When disaster strikes — the economy gets blown, people lose a job, floods, war, conflict, bad governance, all of those things — there is nothing to fall back on. 
+And usually the institutions — churches, temples, other things — do not have the resources to provide a safety net. 
+What we have found working with the World Bank is that the poor man's safety net, the best investment, is school feeding. 
+And if you fill the cup with local agriculture from small farmers, you have a transformative effect. 
+Many kids in the world can't go to school because they have to go beg and find a meal. 
+But when that food is there, it's transformative. 
+It costs less than 25 cents a day to change a kid's life. 
+But what is most amazing is the effect on girls. 
+In countries where girls don't go to school and you offer a meal to girls in school, we see enrollment rates about 50 percent girls and boys. 
+We see a transformation in attendance by girls. 
+And there was no argument, because it's incentive. 
+Families need the help. 
+And we find that if we keep girls in school later, they'll stay in school until they're 16, and won't get married if there's food in school. 
+Or if they get an extra ration of food at the end of the week — it costs about 50 cents — will keep a girl in school, and they'll give birth to a healthier child, because the malnutrition is sent generation to generation. 
+We know that there's boom and bust cycles of hunger. 
+We know this. 
+Right now on the Horn of Africa, we've been through this before. 
+So is this a hopeless cause? 
+Absolutely not. 
+I'd like to talk about what I call our warehouses for hope. 
+Cameroon, northern Cameroon, boom and bust cycles of hunger every year for decades. 
+Food aid coming in every year when people are starving during the lean seasons. 
+Well two years ago, we decided, let's transform the model of fighting hunger, and instead of giving out the food aid, we put it into food banks. 
+And we said, listen, during the lean season, take the food out. 
+You manage, the village manages these warehouses. 
+And during harvest, put it back with interest, food interest. 
+So add in five percent, 10 percent more food. 
+For the past two years, 500 of these villages where these are have not needed any food aid — they're self-sufficient. 
+And the food banks are growing. 
+And they're starting school feeding programs for their children by the people in the village. 
+But they've never had the ability to build even the basic infrastructure or the resources. 
+I love this idea that came from the village level: three keys to unlock that warehouse. 
+Food is gold there. 
+And simple ideas can transform the face, not of small areas, of big areas of the world. 
+I'd like to talk about what I call digital food. 
+Technology is transforming the face of food vulnerability in places where you see classic famine. 
+Amartya Sen won his Nobel Prize for saying, "" Guess what, famines happen in the presence of food because people have no ability to buy it. "" We certainly saw that in 2008. 
+We're seeing that now in the Horn of Africa where food prices are up 240 percent in some areas over last year. 
+Food can be there and people can't buy it. 
+Well this picture — I was in Hebron in a small shop, this shop, where instead of bringing in food, we provide digital food, a card. 
+It says "" bon appetit "" in Arabic. 
+And the women can go in and swipe and get nine food items. 
+They have to be nutritious, and they have to be locally produced. 
+And what's happened in the past year alone is the dairy industry — where this card's used for milk and yogurt and eggs and hummus — the dairy industry has gone up 30 percent. 
+The shopkeepers are hiring more people. 
+It is a win-win-win situation that starts the food economy moving. 
+We now deliver food in over 30 countries over cell phones, transforming even the presence of refugees in countries, and other ways. 
+Perhaps most exciting to me is an idea that Bill Gates, Howard Buffett and others have supported boldly, which is to ask the question: What if, instead of looking at the hungry as victims — and most of them are small farmers who cannot raise enough food or sell food to even support their own families — what if we view them as the solution, as the value chain to fight hunger? 
+What if from the women in Africa who cannot sell any food — there's no roads, there's no warehouses, there's not even a tarp to pick the food up with — what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere? 
+And Purchasing for Progress today is in 21 countries. 
+And guess what? 
+In virtually every case, when poor farmers are given a guaranteed market — if you say, "" We will buy 300 metric tons of this. 
+We'll pick it up. We'll make sure it's stored properly. "" — their yields have gone up two-, three-, fourfold and they figure it out, because it's the first guaranteed opportunity they've had in their life. 
+And we're seeing people transform their lives. 
+Today, food aid, our food aid — huge engine — 80 percent of it is bought in the developing world. 
+Total transformation that can actually transform the very lives that need the food. 
+Now you'd ask, can this be done at scale? 
+These are great ideas, village-level ideas. 
+Well I'd like to talk about Brazil, because I've taken a journey to Brazil over the past couple of years, when I read that Brazil was defeating hunger faster than any nation on Earth right now. 
+And what I've found is, rather than investing their money in food subsidies and other things, they invested in a school feeding program. 
+And they require that a third of that food come from the smallest farmers who would have no opportunity. 
+And they're doing this at huge scale after President Lula declared his goal of ensuring everyone had three meals a day. 
+And this zero hunger program costs .5 percent of GDP and has lifted many millions of people out of hunger and poverty. 
+It is transforming the face of hunger in Brazil, and it's at scale, and it's creating opportunities. 
+I've gone out there; I've met with the small farmers who have built their livelihoods on the opportunity and platform provided by this. 
+Now if we look at the economic imperative here, this isn't just about compassion. 
+The fact is studies show that the cost of malnutrition and hunger — the cost to society, the burden it has to bear — is on average six percent, and in some countries up to 11 percent, of GDP a year. 
+And if you look at the 36 countries with the highest burden of malnutrition, that's 260 billion lost from a productive economy every year. 
+Well, the World Bank estimates it would take about 10 billion dollars — 10.3 — to address malnutrition in those countries. 
+You look at the cost-benefit analysis, and my dream is to take this issue, not just from the compassion argument, but to the finance ministers of the world, and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate, affordable nutrition for all of humanity. 
+The amazing thing I've found is nothing can change on a big scale without the determination of a leader. 
+When a leader says, "" Not under my watch, "" everything begins to change. 
+And the world can come in with enabling environments and opportunities to do this. 
+And the fact that France has put food at the center of the G20 is really important. 
+Because food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person, nation by nation. 
+We have to stand together. 
+And we're seeing nations in Africa. 
+WFP's been able to leave 30 nations because they have transformed the face of hunger in their nations. 
+What I would like to offer here is a challenge. 
+I believe we're living at a time in human history where it's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don't know where to find a cup of food. 
+Not only that, transforming hunger is an opportunity, but I think we have to change our mindsets. 
+I am so honored to be here with some of the world's top innovators and thinkers. 
+And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, "" No more. 
+No more are we going to accept this. "" And we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted, but that exists no more. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I love to collect things. 
+Ever since I was a kid, I've had massive collections of random stuff, everything from bizarre hot sauces from all around the world to insects that I've captured and put in jars. 
+Now, it's no secret, because I like collecting things, that I love the Natural History Museum and the collections of animals at the Natural History Museum in dioramas. 
+These, to me, are like living sculptures, right, that you can go and look at, and they memorialize a specific point of time in this animal's life. 
+So I was thinking about my own life, and how I'd like to memorialize my life, you know, for the ages, and also — (Laughter) — the lives of my friends, but the problem with this is that my friends aren't quite keen on the idea of me taxidermy-ing them. (Laughter) So instead, I turned to video, and video is the next best way to preserve and memorialize someone and to capture a specific moment in time. 
+So what I did was, I filmed six of my friends and then, using video mapping and video projection, I created a video sculpture, which was these six friends projected into jars. (Laughter) So now I have this collection of my friends I can take around with me whenever I go, and this is called Animalia Chordata, from the Latin nomenclature for human being, classification system. 
+So this piece memorializes my friends in these jars, and they actually move around. (Laughter) So, this is interesting to me, but it lacked a certain human element. (Laughter) It's a digital sculpture, so I wanted to add an interaction system. So what I did was, I added a proximity sensor, so that when you get close to the people in jars, they react to you in different ways. 
+You know, just like people on the street when you get too close to them. 
+Some people reacted in terror. (Laughter) Others reacted in asking you for help, and some people hide from you. 
+So this was really interesting to me, this idea of taking video off the screen and putting it in real life, and also adding interactivity to sculpture. 
+So over the next year, I documented 40 of my other friends and trapped them in jars as well and created a piece known as Garden, which is literally a garden of humanity. 
+But something about the first piece, the Animali Chordata piece, kept coming back to me, this idea of interaction with art, and I really liked the idea of people being able to interact, and also being challenged by interacting with art. 
+So I wanted to create a new piece that actually forced people to come and interact with something, and the way I did this was actually by projecting a 1950s housewife into a blender. (Laughter) This is a piece called Blend, and what it does is it actually makes you implicit in the work of art. 
+You may never experience the entire thing yourself. 
+You can walk away, you can just watch as this character stands there in the blender and looks at you, or you can actually choose to interact with it. 
+So if you do choose to interact with the piece, and you press the blender button, it actually sends this character into this dizzying disarray of dishevelment. 
+By doing that, you are now part of my piece. 
+You, like the people that are trapped in my work — (Blender noises, laughter) — have become part of my work as well. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) But, but this seems a bit unfair, right? 
+I put my friends in jars, I put this character, this sort of endangered species character in a blender. 
+But I'd never done anything about myself. 
+I'd never really memorialized myself. 
+So I decided to create a piece which is a self-portrait piece. 
+This is sort of a self-portrait taxidermy time capsule piece called A Point Just Passed, in which I project myself on top of a time card punch clock, and it's up to you. 
+If you want to choose to punch that punch card clock, you actually age me. 
+So I start as a baby, and then if you punch the clock, you'll actually transform the baby into a toddler, and then from a toddler I'm transformed into a teenager. 
+From a teenager, I'm transformed into my current self. 
+From my current self, I'm turned into a middle-aged man, and then, from there, into an elderly man. 
+And if you punch the punch card clock a hundred times in one day, the piece goes black and is not to be reset until the next day. 
+So, in doing so, you're erasing time. 
+You're actually implicit in this work and you're erasing my life. 
+So I like this about interactive video sculpture, that you can actually interact with it, that all of you can actually touch an artwork and be part of the artwork yourselves, and hopefully, one day, I'll have each and every one of you trapped in one of my jars. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I told you three things last year. 
+I told you that the statistics of the world have not been made properly available. 
+Because of that, we still have the old mindset of developing in industrialized countries, which is wrong. 
+And that animated graphics can make a difference. 
+Things are changing and today, on the United Nations Statistic Division Home Page, it says, by first of May, full access to the databases. 
+(Applause) And if I could share the image with you on the screen. 
+So three things have happened. 
+U.N. opened their statistic databases, and we have a new version of the software up working as a beta on the net, so you don't have to download it any longer. 
+And let me repeat what you saw last year. 
+The bubbles are the countries. 
+Here you have the fertility rate — the number of children per woman — and there you have the length of life in years. 
+This is 1950 — those were the industrialized countries, those were developing countries. 
+At that time there was a "" we "" and "" them. "" There was a huge difference in the world. 
+But then it changed, and it went on quite well. 
+And this is what happens. 
+You can see how China is the red, big bubble. 
+The blue there is India. 
+And they go over all this — I'm going to try to be a little more serious this year in showing you how things really changed. 
+And it's Africa that stands out as the problem down here, doesn't it? 
+Large families still, and the HIV epidemic brought down the countries like this. 
+This is more or less what we saw last year, and this is how it will go on into the future. 
+And I will talk on, is this possible? 
+Because you see now, I presented statistics that don't exist. 
+Because this is where we are. 
+Will it be possible that this will happen? 
+I cover my lifetime here, you know? 
+I expect to live 100 years. 
+And this is where we are today. 
+Now could we look here instead at the economic situation in the world? 
+And I would like to show that against child survival. 
+We'll swap the axis. 
+Here you have child mortality — that is, survival — four kids dying there, 200 dying there. 
+And this is GDP per capita on this axis. 
+And this was 2007. 
+And if I go back in time, I've added some historical statistics — here we go, here we go, here we go — not so much statistics 100 years ago. 
+Some countries still had statistics. 
+We are looking down in the archive, and when we are down into 1820, there is only Austria and Sweden that can produce numbers. 
+(Laughter) But they were down here. They had 1,000 dollars per person per year. 
+And they lost one-fifth of their kids before their first birthday. 
+So this is what happens in the world, if we play the entire world. 
+How they got slowly richer and richer, and they add statistics. 
+Isn't it beautiful when they get statistics? 
+You see the importance of that? 
+And here, children don't live longer. 
+The last century, 1870, was bad for the kids in Europe, because most of this statistics is Europe. 
+It was only by the turn of the century that more than 90 percent of the children survived their first year. 
+This is India coming up, with the first data from India. 
+And this is the United States moving away here, earning more money. 
+And we will soon see China coming up in the very far end corner here. 
+And it moves up with Mao Tse-Tung getting health, not getting so rich. 
+There he died, then Deng Xiaoping brings money. 
+It moves this way over here. 
+And the bubbles keep moving up there, and this is what the world looks like today. 
+(Applause) Let us have a look at the United States. 
+We have a function here — I can tell the world, "" Stay where you are. "" And I take the United States — we still want to see the background — I put them up like this, and now we go backwards. 
+And we can see that the United States goes to the right of the mainstream. 
+They are on the money side all the time. 
+And down in 1915, the United States was a neighbor of India — present, contemporary India. 
+And that means United States was richer, but lost more kids than India is doing today, proportionally. 
+And look here — compare to the Philippines of today. 
+The Philippines of today has almost the same economy as the United States during the First World War. 
+But we have to bring United States forward quite a while to find the same health of the United States as we have in the Philippines. 
+About 1957 here, the health of the United States is the same as the Philippines. 
+And this is the drama of this world which many call globalized, is that Asia, Arabic countries, Latin America, are much more ahead in being healthy, educated, having human resources than they are economically. 
+There's a discrepancy in what's happening today in the emerging economies. 
+There now, social benefits, social progress, are going ahead of economical progress. 
+And 1957 — the United States had the same economy as Chile has today. 
+And how long do we have to bring United States to get the same health as Chile has today? 
+I think we have to go, there — we have 2001, or 2002 — the United States has the same health as Chile. 
+Chile's catching up! 
+Within some years Chile may have better child survival than the United States. 
+This is really a change, that you have this lag of more or less 30, 40 years' difference on the health. 
+And behind the health is the educational level. 
+And there's a lot of infrastructure things, and general human resources are there. 
+Now we can take away this — and I would like to show you the rate of speed, the rate of change, how fast they have gone. 
+And we go back to 1920, and I want to look at Japan. 
+And I want to look at Sweden and the United States. 
+And I'm going to stage a race here between this sort of yellowish Ford here and the red Toyota down there, and the brownish Volvo. 
+(Laughter) And here we go. Here we go. 
+The Toyota has a very bad start down here, you can see, and the United States Ford is going off-road there. 
+And the Volvo is doing quite fine. 
+This is the war. The Toyota got off track, and now the Toyota is coming on the healthier side of Sweden — can you see that? 
+And they are taking over Sweden, and they are now healthier than Sweden. 
+That's the part where I sold the Volvo and bought the Toyota. 
+(Laughter) And now we can see that the rate of change was enormous in Japan. 
+They really caught up. 
+And this changes gradually. 
+We have to look over generations to understand it. 
+And let me show you my own sort of family history — we made these graphs here. 
+And this is the same thing, money down there, and health, you know? 
+And this is my family. 
+This is Sweden, 1830, when my great-great-grandma was born. 
+Sweden was like Sierra Leone today. 
+And this is when great-grandma was born, 1863. 
+And Sweden was like Mozambique. 
+And this is when my grandma was born, 1891. 
+She took care of me as a child, so I'm not talking about statistic now — now it's oral history in my family. 
+That's when I believe statistics, when it's grandma-verified statistics. 
+(Laughter) I think it's the best way of verifying historical statistics. 
+Sweden was like Ghana. 
+It's interesting to see the enormous diversity within sub-Saharan Africa. 
+I told you last year, I'll tell you again, my mother was born in Egypt, and I — who am I? 
+I'm the Mexican in the family. 
+And my daughter, she was born in Chile, and the grand-daughter was born in Singapore, now the healthiest country on this Earth. 
+It bypassed Sweden about two to three years ago, with better child survival. 
+But they're very small, you know? 
+They're so close to the hospital we can never beat them out in these forests. 
+(Laughter) But homage to Singapore. 
+Singapore is the best one. 
+Now this looks also like a very good story. 
+But it's not really that easy, that it's all a good story. 
+Because I have to show you one of the other facilities. 
+We can also make the color here represent the variable — and what am I choosing here? 
+Carbon-dioxide emission, metric ton per capita. 
+This is 1962, and United States was emitting 16 tons per person. 
+And China was emitting 0.6, and India was emitting 0.32 tons per capita. 
+And what happens when we moved on? 
+Well, you see the nice story of getting richer and getting healthier — everyone did it at the cost of emission of carbon dioxide. 
+There is no one who has done it so far. 
+And we don't have all the updated data any longer, because this is really hot data today. 
+And there we are, 2001. 
+And in the discussion I attended with global leaders, you know, many say now the problem is that the emerging economies, they are getting out too much carbon dioxide. 
+The Minister of the Environment of India said, "Well, you were the one who caused the problem." 
+The OECD countries — the high-income countries — they were the ones who caused the climate change. 
+"" But we forgive you, because you didn't know it. 
+But from now on, we count per capita. 
+From now on we count per capita. 
+And everyone is responsible for the per capita emission. "" This really shows you, we have not seen good economic and health progress anywhere in the world without destroying the climate. 
+And this is really what has to be changed. 
+I've been criticized for showing you a too positive image of the world, but I don't think it's like this. 
+The world is quite a messy place. 
+This we can call Dollar Street. 
+Everyone lives on this street here. 
+What they earn here — what number they live on — is how much they earn per day. 
+This family earns about one dollar per day. 
+We drive up the street here, we find a family here which earns about two to three dollars a day. 
+And we drive away here — we find the first garden in the street, and they earn 10 to 50 dollars a day. 
+And how do they live? 
+If we look at the bed here, we can see that they sleep on a rug on the floor. 
+This is what poverty line is — 80 percent of the family income is just to cover the energy needs, the food for the day. 
+This is two to five dollars. You have a bed. 
+And here it's a much nicer bedroom, you can see. 
+I lectured on this for Ikea, and they wanted to see the sofa immediately here. 
+(Laughter) And this is the sofa, how it will emerge from there. 
+And the interesting thing, when you go around here in the photo panorama, you see the family still sitting on the floor there. 
+Although there is a sofa, if you watch in the kitchen, you can see that the great difference for women does not come between one to 10 dollars. 
+It comes beyond here, when you really can get good working conditions in the family. 
+And if you really want to see the difference, you look at the toilet over here. 
+This can change. This can change. 
+These are all pictures and images from Africa, and it can become much better. 
+We can get out of poverty. 
+My own research has not been in IT or anything like this. 
+I spent 20 years in interviews with African farmers who were on the verge of famine. 
+And this is the result of the farmers-needs research. 
+The nice thing here is that you can't see who are the researchers in this picture. 
+That's when research functions in poor societies — you must really live with the people. 
+When you're in poverty, everything is about survival. 
+It's about having food. 
+And these two young farmers, they are girls now — because the parents are dead from HIV and AIDS — they discuss with a trained agronomist. 
+This is one of the best agronomists in Malawi, Junatambe Kumbira, and he's discussing what sort of cassava they will plant — the best converter of sunshine to food that man has found. 
+And they are very, very eagerly interested to get advice, and that's to survive in poverty. 
+That's one context. 
+Getting out of poverty. 
+The women told us one thing. "" Get us technology. 
+We hate this mortar, to stand hours and hours. 
+Get us a mill so that we can mill our flour, then we will be able to pay for the rest ourselves. "" Technology will bring you out of poverty, but there's a need for a market to get away from poverty. 
+And this woman is very happy now, bringing her products to the market. 
+But she's very thankful for the public investment in schooling so she can count, and won't be cheated when she reaches the market. 
+She wants her kid to be healthy, so she can go to the market and doesn't have to stay home. 
+And she wants the infrastructure — it is nice with a paved road. 
+It's also good with credit. 
+Micro-credits gave her the bicycle, you know. 
+And information will tell her when to go to market with which product. 
+You can do this. 
+I find my experience from 20 years of Africa is that the seemingly impossible is possible. 
+Africa has not done bad. 
+In 50 years they've gone from a pre-Medieval situation to a very decent 100-year-ago Europe, with a functioning nation and state. 
+I would say that sub-Saharan Africa has done best in the world during the last 50 years. 
+Because we don't consider where they came from. 
+It's this stupid concept of developing countries that puts us, Argentina and Mozambique together 50 years ago, and says that Mozambique did worse. 
+We have to know a little more about the world. 
+I have a neighbor who knows 200 types of wine. 
+He knows everything. 
+He knows the name of the grape, the temperature and everything. 
+I only know two types of wine — red and white. 
+(Laughter) But my neighbor only knows two types of countries — industrialized and developing. 
+And I know 200, I know about the small data. 
+But you can do that. 
+(Applause) But I have to get serious. And how do you get serious? 
+You make a PowerPoint, you know? 
+(Laughter) Homage to the Office package, no? 
+What is this, what is this, what am I telling? 
+I'm telling you that there are many dimensions of development. 
+Everyone wants your pet thing. 
+If you are in the corporate sector, you love micro-credit. 
+If you are fighting in a non-governmental organization, you love equity between gender. 
+Or if you are a teacher, you'll love UNESCO, and so on. 
+On the global level, we have to have more than our own thing. 
+We need everything. 
+All these things are important for development, especially when you just get out of poverty and you should go towards welfare. 
+Now, what we need to think about is, what is a goal for development, and what are the means for development? 
+Let me first grade what are the most important means. 
+Economic growth to me, as a public-health professor, is the most important thing for development because it explains 80 percent of survival. 
+Governance. To have a government which functions — that's what brought California out of the misery of 1850. 
+It was the government that made law function finally. 
+Education, human resources are important. 
+Health is also important, but not that much as a mean. 
+Environment is important. 
+Human rights is also important, but it just gets one cross. 
+Now what about goals? Where are we going toward? 
+We are not interested in money. 
+Money is not a goal. 
+It's the best mean, but I give it zero as a goal. 
+Governance, well it's fun to vote in a little thing, but it's not a goal. 
+And going to school, that's not a goal, it's a mean. 
+Health I give two points. I mean it's nice to be healthy — at my age especially — you can stand here, you're healthy. 
+And that's good, it gets two plusses. 
+Environment is very, very crucial. 
+There's nothing for the grandkid if you don't save up. 
+But where are the important goals? 
+Of course, it's human rights. 
+Human rights is the goal, but it's not that strong of a mean for achieving development. 
+And culture. Culture is the most important thing, I would say, because that's what brings joy to life. 
+That's the value of living. 
+So the seemingly impossible is possible. 
+Even African countries can achieve this. 
+And I've shown you the shot where the seemingly impossible is possible. 
+And remember, please remember my main message, which is this: the seemingly impossible is possible. 
+We can have a good world. 
+I showed you the shots, I proved it in the PowerPoint, and I think I will convince you also by culture. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Bring me my sword! 
+Sword swallowing is from ancient India. 
+It's a cultural expression that for thousands of years has inspired human beings to think beyond the obvious. 
+(Laughter) And I will now prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible by taking this piece of steel — solid steel — this is the army bayonet from the Swedish Army, 1850, in the last year we had war. 
+And it's all solid steel — you can hear here. 
+And I'm going to take this blade of steel, and push it down through my body of blood and flesh, and prove to you that the seemingly impossible is possible. 
+Can I request a moment of absolute silence? 
+(Applause) 
+
+I am a Ph.D. student and that means I have a question: how can we make digital content graspable? 
+Because you see, on the one hand, there is the digital world and no question, many things are happening there right now. 
+And for us humans, it's not quite material, it's not really there — it's virtual. 
+On the other hand, we humans, we live in a physical world. 
+It's rich, it tastes good, it feels good, it smells good. 
+So the question is: how do we get the stuff over from the digital into the physical? 
+That's my question. 
+If you look at the iPhone with its touch and the Wii with its bodily activity, you can see the tendency; it's getting physical. 
+The question is: what's next? 
+Now, I have three options that I would like to show you. 
+The first one is mass. 
+As humans, we are sensitive to where an object in our hand is heavy. 
+So, could we use that in mobile phones? 
+Let me show you the weight-shifting mobile. 
+It is a mobile phone-shaped box that has an iron weight inside, which we can move around, and you can feel where it's heavy. 
+We shift the gravitational center of it. 
+For example, we can augment digital content with physical mass. 
+So you move around the content on a display, but you can also feel where it is just from the weight of the device. 
+Another thing it's good for is navigation — it can guide you around in a city. 
+It can tell you by its weight, "Okay, move right. Walk ahead. Make a left here." 
+And the good thing about that is you don't have to look at the device all the time; you have your eyes free to see the city. 
+Now, mass is the first thing; the second thing, that's shape. 
+We're also sensitive to the shape of objects we have in [our] hands. 
+So if I download an e-book and it has 20 pages — well, they could be thin, right — but if it has 500 pages, I want to feel that "" Harry Potter "" — it's thick. (Laughter) So let me show you the shape-changing mobile. 
+Again, it's a mobile phone-shaped box, and this one can change its shape. 
+We can play with the shape itself. 
+For example, it can be thin in your pocket, which we of course want it to be; but then if you hold it in your hand, it can lean towards you, be thick. 
+It's like tapered to the downside. 
+If you change the grasp, it can adjust to that. 
+It's also useful if you want to put it down on your nightstand to watch a movie or use as an alarm clock, it stands. 
+It's fairly simple. 
+Another thing is, sometimes we watch things on a mobile phone, they are bigger than the phone itself. 
+So in that case — like here, there's an app that's bigger than the phone's screen — the shape of the phone could tell you, "" Okay, off the screen right here, there is more content. 
+You can't see it, but it's there. "" And you can feel that because it's thicker at that edge. 
+The shape is the second thing. 
+The third thing operates on a different level. 
+As humans, we are social, we are empathic, and that's great. 
+Wouldn't that be a way to make mobile phones more intuitive? 
+Think of a hamster in the pocket. 
+Well, I can feel it, it's doing all right — I don't have to check it. 
+Let me show you the living mobile phone. 
+So, once again, mobile phone-shaped box, but this one, it has a breath and a heartbeat, and it feels very organic. 
+(Laughter) And you can tell, it's relaxed right now. 
+Oh now, missed call, a new call, new girlfriend maybe — very exciting. (Laughter) How do we calm it down? 
+You give it a pat behind the ears, and everything is all right again. 
+So, that's very intuitive, and that's what we want. 
+So, what we have seen are three ways to make the digital graspable for us. 
+And I think making it physical is a good way to do that. 
+What's behind that is a postulation, namely that not humans should get much more technical in the future; rather than that, technology, a bit more human. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In the spirit of Jacques Cousteau, who said, "People protect what they love," I want to share with you today what I love most in the ocean, and that's the incredible number and variety of animals in it that make light. 
+My addiction began with this strange looking diving suit called Wasp; that's not an acronym — just somebody thought it looked like the insect. 
+It was actually developed for use by the offshore oil industry for diving on oil rigs down to a depth of 2,000 feet. 
+Right after I completed my Ph.D., I was lucky enough to be included with a group of scientists that was using it for the first time as a tool for ocean exploration. 
+We trained in a tank in Port Hueneme, and then my first open ocean dive was in Santa Barbara Channel. 
+It was an evening dive. 
+I went down to a depth of 880 feet and turned out the lights. 
+And the reason I turned out the lights is because I knew I would see this phenomenon of animals making light called bioluminescence. 
+But I was totally unprepared for how much there was and how spectacular it was. 
+I saw chains of jellyfish called siphonophores that were longer than this room, pumping out so much light that I could read the dials and gauges inside the suit without a flashlight; and puffs and billows of what looked like luminous blue smoke; and explosions of sparks that would swirl up out of the thrusters — just like when you throw a log on a campfire and the embers swirl up off the campfire, but these were icy, blue embers. 
+It was breathtaking. 
+Now, usually if people are familiar with bioluminescence at all, it's these guys; it's fireflies. 
+And there are a few other land-dwellers that can make light — some insects, earthworms, fungi — but in general, on land, it's really rare. 
+In the ocean, it's the rule rather than the exception. 
+If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals — in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net — make light. 
+This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows. 
+Now I want to share with you a little video that I shot from a submersible. 
+I first developed this technique working from a little single-person submersible called Deep Rover and then adapted it for use on the Johnson Sea-Link, which you see here. 
+So, mounted in front of the observation sphere, there's a a three-foot diameter hoop with a screen stretched across it. 
+And inside the sphere with me is an intensified camera that's about as sensitive as a fully dark-adapted human eye, albeit a little fuzzy. 
+So you turn on the camera, turn out the lights. 
+That sparkle you're seeing is not luminescence, that's just electronic noise on these super intensified cameras. 
+You don't see luminescence until the submersible begins to move forward through the water, but as it does, animals bumping into the screen are stimulated to bioluminesce. 
+Now, when I was first doing this, all I was trying to do was count the numbers of sources. 
+I knew my forward speed, I knew the area, and so I could figure out how many hundreds of sources there were per cubic meter. 
+But I started to realize that I could actually identify animals by the type of flashes they produced. 
+And so, here, in the Gulf of Maine at 740 feet, I can name pretty much everything you're seeing there to the species level. 
+Like those big explosions, sparks, are from a little comb jelly, and there's krill and other kinds of crustaceans, and jellyfish. 
+There was another one of those comb jellies. 
+And so I've worked with computer image analysis engineers to develop automatic recognition systems that can identify these animals and then extract the XYZ coordinate of the initial impact point. 
+And we can then do the kinds of things that ecologists do on land, and do nearest neighbor distances. 
+But you don't always have to go down to the depths of the ocean to see a light show like this. 
+You can actually see it in surface waters. 
+This is some shot, by Dr. Mike Latz at Scripps Institution, of a dolphin swimming through bioluminescent plankton. 
+And this isn't someplace exotic like one of the bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico, this was actually shot in San Diego Harbor. 
+And sometimes you can see it even closer than that, because the heads on ships — that's toilets, for any land lovers that are listening — are flushed with unfiltered seawater that often has bioluminescent plankton in it. 
+So, if you stagger into the head late at night and you're so toilet-hugging sick that you forget to turn on the light, you may think that you're having a religious experience. (Laughter) So, how does a living creature make light? 
+Well, that was the question that 19th century French physiologist Raphael Dubois, asked about this bioluminescent clam. 
+He ground it up and he managed to get out a couple of chemicals; one, the enzyme, he called luciferase; the substrate, he called luciferin after Lucifer the Lightbearer. 
+That terminology has stuck, but it doesn't actually refer to specific chemicals because these chemicals come in a lot of different shapes and forms. 
+In fact, most of the people studying bioluminescence today are focused on the chemistry, because these chemicals have proved so incredibly valuable for developing antibacterial agents, cancer fighting drugs, testing for the presence of life on Mars, detecting pollutants in our waters — which is how we use it at ORCA. 
+In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish, and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope, in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering. 
+Another thing all these molecules are telling us that, apparently, bioluminescence has evolved at least 40 times, maybe as many as 50 separate times in evolutionary history, which is a clear indication of how spectacularly important this trait is for survival. 
+So, what is it about bioluminescence that's so important to so many animals? 
+Well, for animals that are trying to avoid predators by staying in the darkness, light can still be very useful for the three basic things that animals have to do to survive: and that's find food, attract a mate and avoid being eaten. 
+So, for example, this fish has a built-in headlight behind its eye that it can use for finding food or attracting a mate. 
+And then when it's not using it, it actually can roll it down into its head just like the headlights on your Lamborghini. 
+This fish actually has high beams. 
+And this fish, which is one of my favorites, has three headlights on each side of its head. 
+Now, this one is blue, and that's the color of most bioluminescence in the ocean because evolution has selected for the color that travels farthest through seawater in order to optimize communication. 
+So, most animals make blue light, and most animals can only see blue light, but this fish is a really fascinating exception because it has two red light organs. 
+And I have no idea why there's two, and that's something I want to solve some day — but not only can it see blue light, but it can see red light. 
+So it uses its red bioluminescence like a sniper's scope to be able to sneak up on animals that are blind to red light and be able to see them without being seen. 
+It's also got a little chin barbel here with a blue luminescent lure on it that it can use to attract prey from a long way off. 
+And a lot of animals will use their bioluminescence as a lure. 
+This is another one of my favorite fish. 
+This is a viperfish, and it's got a lure on the end of a long fishing rod that it arches in front of the toothy jaw that gives the viperfish its name. 
+The teeth on this fish are so long that if they closed inside the mouth of the fish, it would actually impale its own brain. 
+So instead, it slides in grooves on the outside of the head. 
+This is a Christmas tree of a fish; everything on this fish lights up, it's not just that lure. 
+It's got a built-in flashlight. 
+It's got these jewel-like light organs on its belly that it uses for a type of camouflage that obliterates its shadow, so when it's swimming around and there's a predator looking up from below, it makes itself disappear. 
+It's got light organs in the mouth, it's got light organs in every single scale, in the fins, in a mucus layer on the back and the belly, all used for different things — some of which we know about, some of which we don't. 
+And we know a little bit more about bioluminescence thanks to Pixar, and I'm very grateful to Pixar for sharing my favorite topic with so many people. 
+I do wish, with their budget, that they might have spent just a tiny bit more money to pay a consulting fee to some poor, starving graduate student, who could have told them that those are the eyes of a fish that's been preserved in formalin. 
+These are the eyes of a living anglerfish. 
+So, she's got a lure that she sticks out in front of this living mousetrap of needle-sharp teeth in order to attract in some unsuspecting prey. 
+And this one has a lure with all kinds of little interesting threads coming off it. 
+Now we used to think that the different shape of the lure was to attract different types of prey, but then stomach content analyses on these fish done by scientists, or more likely their graduate students, have revealed that they all eat pretty much the same thing. 
+So, now we believe that the different shape of the lure is how the male recognizes the female in the anglerfish world, because many of these males are what are known as dwarf males. 
+This little guy has no visible means of self-support. 
+He has no lure for attracting food and no teeth for eating it when it gets there. 
+His only hope for existence on this planet is as a gigolo. (Laughter) He's got to find himself a babe and then he's got to latch on for life. 
+So this little guy has found himself this babe, and you will note that he's had the good sense to attach himself in a way that he doesn't actually have to look at her. 
+(Laughter) But he still knows a good thing when he sees it, and so he seals the relationship with an eternal kiss. 
+His flesh fuses with her flesh, her bloodstream grows into his body, and he becomes nothing more than a little sperm sac. 
+(Laughter) Well, this is a deep-sea version of Women's Lib. 
+She always knows where he is, and she doesn't have to be monogamous, because some of these females come up with multiple males attached. 
+So they can use it for finding food, for attracting mates. 
+They use it a lot for defense, many different ways. 
+A lot of them can release their luciferin or luferase in the water just the way a squid or an octopus will release an ink cloud. 
+This shrimp is actually spewing light out of its mouth like a fire breathing dragon in order to blind or distract this viperfish so that the shrimp can swim away into the darkness. 
+And there are a lot of different animals that can do this: There's jellyfish, there's squid, there's a whole lot of different crustaceans, there's even fish that can do this. 
+This fish is called the shining tubeshoulder because it actually has a tube on its shoulder that can squirt out light. 
+And I was luck enough to capture one of these when we were on a trawling expedition off the northwest coast of Africa for "" Blue Planet, "" for the deep portion of "" Blue Planet. "" And we were using a special trawling net that we were able to bring these animals up alive. 
+So we captured one of these, and I brought it into the lab. 
+So I'm holding it, and I'm about to touch that tube on its shoulder, and when I do, you'll see bioluminescence coming out. 
+But to me, what's shocking is not just the amount of light, but the fact that it's not just luciferin and luciferase. 
+For this fish, it's actually whole cells with nuclei and membranes. 
+It's energetically very costly for this fish to do this, and we have no idea why it does it — another one of these great mysteries that needs to be solved. 
+Now, another form of defense is something called a burglar alarm — same reason you have a burglar alarm on your car; the honking horn and flashing lights are meant to attract the attention of, hopefully, the police that will come and take the burglar away — when an animal's caught in the clutches of a predator, its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of something bigger and nastier that will attack their attacker, thereby affording them a chance for escape. 
+This jellyfish, for example, has a spectacular bioluminescent display. 
+This is us chasing it in the submersible. 
+That's not luminescence, that's reflected light from the gonads. 
+We capture it in a very special device on the front of the submersible that allows us to bring it up in really pristine condition, bring it into the lab on the ship. 
+And then to generate the display you're about to see, all I did was touch it once per second on its nerve ring with a sharp pick that's sort of like the sharp tooth of a fish. 
+And once this display gets going, I'm not touching it anymore. 
+This is an unbelievable light show. 
+It's this pinwheel of light, and I've done calculations that show that this could be seen from as much as 300 feet away by a predator. 
+And I thought, "" You know, that might actually make a pretty good lure. "" Because one of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean. 
+The primary way that we know about what lives in the ocean is we go out and drag nets behind ships. 
+And I defy you to name any other branch of science that still depends on hundreds of year-old technology. 
+The other primary way is we go down with submersibles and remote-operated vehicles. 
+I've made hundreds of dives in submersibles. 
+When I'm sitting in a submersible though, I know that I'm not unobtrusive at all — I've got bright lights and noisy thrusters — any animal with any sense is going to be long gone. 
+So, I've wanted for a long time to figure out a different way to explore. 
+And so, sometime ago, I got this idea for a camera system. 
+It's not exactly rocket science. We call this thing Eye-in-the-Sea. 
+And scientists have done this on land for years; we just use a color that the animals can't see and then a camera that can see that color. 
+You can't use infrared in the sea. 
+We use far-red light, but even that's a problem because it gets absorbed so quickly. 
+Made an intensified camera, wanted to make this electronic jellyfish. 
+Thing is, in science, you basically have to tell the funding agencies what you're going to discover before they'll give you the money. 
+And I didn't know what I was going to discover, so I couldn't get the funding for this. 
+So I kluged this together, I got the Harvey Mudd Engineering Clinic to actually do it as an undergraduate student project initially, and then I kluged funding from a whole bunch of different sources. 
+Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute gave me time with their ROV so that I could test it and we could figure out, you know, for example, which colors of red light we had to use so that we could see the animals, but they couldn't see us — get the electronic jellyfish working. 
+And you can see just what a shoestring operation this really was, because we cast these 16 blue LEDs in epoxy and you can see in the epoxy mold that we used, the word Ziploc is still visible. 
+Needless to say, when it's kluged together like this, there were a lot of trials and tribulations getting this working. 
+But there came a moment when it all came together, and everything worked. 
+And, remarkably, that moment got caught on film by photographer Mark Richards, who happened to be there at the precise moment that we discovered that it all came together. 
+That's me on the left, my graduate student at the time, Erika Raymond, and Lee Fry, who was the engineer on the project. 
+And we have this photograph posted in our lab in a place of honor with the caption: "" Engineer satisfying two women at once. "" (Laughter) And we were very, very happy. 
+So now we had a system that we could actually take to some place that was kind of like an oasis on the bottom of the ocean that might be patrolled by large predators. 
+And so, the place that we took it to was this place called a Brine Pool, which is in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico. 
+It's a magical place. 
+And I know this footage isn't going to look like anything to you — we had a crummy camera at the time — but I was ecstatic. 
+We're at the edge of the Brine Pool, there's a fish that's swimming towards the camera. 
+It's clearly undisturbed by us. 
+And I had my window into the deep sea. 
+I, for the first time, could see what animals were doing down there when we weren't down there disturbing them in some way. 
+Four hours into the deployment, we had programmed the electronic jellyfish to come on for the first time. 
+Eighty-six seconds after it went into its pinwheel display, we recorded this: This is a squid, over six feet long, that is so new to science, it cannot be placed in any known scientific family. 
+I could not have asked for a better proof of concept. 
+And based on this, I went back to the National Science Foundation and said, "" This is what we will discover. "" And they gave me enough money to do it right, which has involved developing the world's first deep-sea webcam — which has been installed in the Monterey Canyon for the past year — and now, more recently, a modular form of this system, a much more mobile form that's a lot easier to launch and recover, that I hope can be used on Sylvia's "" hope spots "" to help explore and protect these areas, and, for me, learn more about the bioluminescence in these "" hope spots. "" 
+So one of these take-home messages here is, there is still a lot to explore in the oceans. 
+And Sylvia has said that we are destroying the oceans before we even know what's in them, and she's right. 
+So if you ever, ever get an opportunity to take a dive in a submersible, say yes — a thousand times, yes — and please turn out the lights. 
+I promise, you'll love it. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And that's hard to do if you don't know who you are. 
+And at the same time we were being told what we were, we were being asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
+I wanted a registered retirement savings plan that would keep me in candy long enough to make old age sweet. 
+When I was nine, I saw the movie "" Jaws, "" and thought to myself, "" No, thank you. "" (Laughter) And when I was 10, I was told that my parents left because they didn't want me. 
+I said, "" I'd like to be a writer. "" And they said, "" Choose something realistic. "" So I said, "" Professional wrestler. "" And they said, "" Don't be stupid. "" See, they asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be. 
+They're standing alone at the high school dance, and they've never been kissed. 
+But I kept dreaming. 
+My saying was going to be, "" I'm taking out the trash! "" (Laughter) (Applause) And then this guy, Duke "" The Dumpster "" Droese, stole my entire shtick. (Laughter) 
+I was crushed, as if by a trash compactor. (Laughter) 
+Like a boomerang, the thing I loved came back to me. 
+From age 15 to 18, I hated myself for becoming the thing that I loathed: a bully. 
+When I was 19, I wrote, "" I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite. "" Standing up for yourself doesn't have to mean embracing violence. 
+When I was a kid, I traded in homework assignments for friendship, then gave each friend a late slip for never showing up on time, and in most cases, not at all. 
+I gave myself a hall pass to get through each broken promise. 
+And I remember this plan, born out of frustration from a kid who kept calling me "" Yogi, "" then pointed at my tummy and said, "" Too many picnic baskets. "" Turns out it's not that hard to trick someone, and one day before class, I said, "Yeah, you can copy my homework," and I gave him all the wrong answers that I'd written down the night before. 
+I knew I didn't have to hold up my paper of 28 out of 30, but my satisfaction was complete when he looked at me, puzzled, and I thought to myself, "" Smarter than the average bear, motherfucker. "" (Laughter) (Applause) This is who I am. 
+When I was a kid, I used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing. 
+My grandmother thought it was cute, and because they were my favorite, she let me keep doing it. 
+One day, before I realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees, I fell out of a tree and bruised the right side of my body. 
+(Laughter) This led to a full-scale investigation, and I was removed from the house for three days, until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises. 
+So we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us, that we'd be lonely forever, that we'd never meet someone to make us feel like the sun was something they built for us in their toolshed. 
+We both got moved to the back of class so we would stop getting bombarded by spitballs. 
+In grade five, they taped a sign to the front of her desk that read, "" Beware of dog. "" To this day, despite a loving husband, she doesn't think she's beautiful, because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face. 
+Kids used to say, "" She looks like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase, but couldn't quite get the job done. "" And they'll never understand that she's raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word "" Mom, "" because they see her heart before they see her skin, because she's only ever always been amazing. 
+He was three when he became a mixed drink of one part left alone and two parts tragedy, started therapy in eighth grade, had a personality made up of tests and pills, lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs, four-fifths suicidal, a tidal wave of antidepressants, and an adolescent being called "" Popper, "" one part because of the pills, 99 parts because of the cruelty. 
+To this day, he is a stick of TNT lit from both ends, could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends in the moment before it's about to fall, and despite an army of friends who all call him an inspiration, he remains a conversation piece between people who can't understand sometimes being drug-free has less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity. 
+And if a kid breaks in a school and no one around chooses to hear, do they make a sound? 
+Are they just background noise from a soundtrack stuck on repeat, when people say things like, "" Kids can be cruel. "" Every school was a big top circus tent, and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers, from clowns to carnies, all of these miles ahead of who we were. 
+We were freaks — lobster-claw boys and bearded ladies, oddities juggling depression and loneliness, playing solitaire, spin the bottle, trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal, but at night, while the others slept, we kept walking the tightrope. 
+But I want to tell them that all of this is just debris left over when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be, and if you can't see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer, because there's something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit. 
+Maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything. 
+Maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth to show-and-tell, but never told, because how can you hold your ground if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it? 
+We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them. 
+We stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called. 
+We are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting empty on some highway, and if in some way we are, don't worry. 
+We are graduating members from the class of We Made It, not the faded echoes of voices crying out, "Names will never hurt me." 
+
+On September 10, the morning of my seventh birthday, I came downstairs to the kitchen, where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was reading the paper or something, and I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway, and they said, "Hey, happy birthday!" And I said, "I'm seven." 
+And my father smiled and said, "Well, you know what that means, don't you?" 
+You mean all that time, up till today, all that time I was so good, God didn't notice it? "" And my mom said, "" Well, I noticed it. "" (Laughter) And I thought, "" How could I not have known this before? 
+I mean, Santa Claus knows if you're naughty or nice, right? "" And my dad said, "" Yeah, but, honey, I think that's technically just between Thanksgiving and Christmas. "" And my mother said, "" Oh, Bob, stop it. Let's just tell her. I mean, she's seven. 
+It was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents. 
+I mean, my dad had a very distinctive wrapping style, and my mother's handwriting was so close to Santa's. 
+I left the kitchen not really in shock about Santa, but rather, I was just dumbfounded about how I could have missed this whole age of reason thing. 
+It was too late for me, but maybe I could help someone else, someone who could use the information. 
+I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven, and then you're capable of committing any and all sins against God and man. "" And Bill said, "" So? "" And I said, "" So, you're six. 
+"Listen. The cut-off date to start kindergarten was September 15th." (Laughter) 
+But, Julie, you were so ready to start school, honey. You were so ready. "" I thought about it, and when I was four, I was already the oldest of four children, and my mother even had another child to come, so what I think she — understandably — really meant was that she was so ready, she was so ready. 
+(Laughter) And this meant that I was a Libra? 
+(Laughter) But I got the new Libra poster, and I started to read my new Libra horoscope, and I was astonished to find that it was also totally me. (Laughter) 
+Sometimes I get little old ladies from the Seventh Day Adventist Church showing me these cartoon pictures of heaven. 
+And there stood two boys, each about 19, in white, starched short-sleeved shirts, and they had little name tags that identified them as official representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they said they had a message for me, from God. 
+I said, "" A message for me? From God? "" And they said, "" Yes. "" Now, I was raised in the Pacific Northwest, around a lot of Church of Latter-day Saints people and, you know, I've worked with them and even dated them, but I never really knew the doctrine, or what they said to people when they were out on a mission, and I guess I was sort of curious, so I said, "" Well, please, come in. "" And they looked really happy, because I don't think this happens to them all that often. 
+(Laughter) You can't put a video of myself in front of me and expect me not to fix my hair. 
+And I thought, "" Well, of course I believe in God, but you know, I don't like that word 'heart,' because it anthropomorphizes God, and I don't like the word, 'his,' either, because that sexualizes God. "" But I didn't want to argue semantics with these boys, so after a very long, uncomfortable pause, I said, "Yes, yes, I do. I feel very loved." 
+And they said, "" Well, then we have a story to tell you. "" And they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi, who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC. 
+And God came to Lehi and said to him, "Put your family on a boat and I will lead you out of here." 
+He led them to America. 
+(Laughter) From Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC? "" And they said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) Then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced, and over the course of 600 years, there were two great races of them, the Nephites and the Lamanites, and the Nephites were totally good — each and every one of them — and the Lamanites were totally bad and evil — every single one of them just bad to the bone. 
+(Laughter) Well, I was just on the edge of my seat. (Laughter) 
+I mean, even the Scientologists know to start with a personality test before they start — (Applause) telling people all about Xenu, the evil intergalactic overlord. 
+I mean, even if women tried to have a baby every single year from the time they were 15 to the time they were 45, assuming they didn't die from exhaustion, it still seems like some women would have some time left over to hear the word of God. "" And they said, "" No. "" (Laughter) Well, then they didn't look so fresh-faced and cute to me any more, but they had more to say. 
+If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the very first time, and they said, "" We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us. "" (Laughter) "And she had a baby, and that's the son of God," I mean, I would think that's equally ridiculous. 
+I'm just so used to that story. 
+(Laughter) So, I couldn't let myself feel condescending towards these boys. 
+Because I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that question. 
+
+Fifty years ago, when I began exploring the ocean, no one — not Jacques Perrin, not Jacques Cousteau or Rachel Carson — imagined that we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or by what we took out of it. 
+It seemed, at that time, to be a sea of Eden, but now we know, and now we are facing paradise lost. 
+I want to share with you my personal view of changes in the sea that affect all of us, and to consider why it matters that in 50 years, we've lost — actually, we've taken, we've eaten — more than 90 percent of the big fish in the sea; why you should care that nearly half of the coral reefs have disappeared; why a mysterious depletion of oxygen in large areas of the Pacific should concern not only the creatures that are dying, but it really should concern you. 
+It does concern you, as well. 
+I'm haunted by the thought of what Ray Anderson calls "" tomorrow's child, "" asking why we didn't do something on our watch to save sharks and bluefin tuna and squids and coral reefs and the living ocean while there still was time. 
+Well, now is that time. 
+I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind. 
+Health to the ocean means health for us. 
+And I hope Jill Tarter's wish to engage Earthlings includes dolphins and whales and other sea creatures in this quest to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. 
+And I hope, Jill, that someday we will find evidence that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet. 
+(Laughter) Did I say that? I guess I did. 
+For me, as a scientist, it all began in 1953 when I first tried scuba. 
+It's when I first got to know fish swimming in something other than lemon slices and butter. 
+I actually love diving at night; you see a lot of fish then that you don't see in the daytime. 
+Diving day and night was really easy for me in 1970, when I led a team of aquanauts living underwater for weeks at a time — at the same time that astronauts were putting their footprints on the moon. 
+In 1979 I had a chance to put my footprints on the ocean floor while using this personal submersible called Jim. 
+It was six miles offshore and 1,250 feet down. 
+It's one of my favorite bathing suits. 
+Since then, I've used about 30 kinds of submarines and I've started three companies and a nonprofit foundation called Deep Search to design and build systems to access the deep sea. 
+I led a five-year National Geographic expedition, the Sustainable Seas expeditions, using these little subs. 
+They're so simple to drive that even a scientist can do it. 
+And I'm living proof. 
+Astronauts and aquanauts alike really appreciate the importance of air, food, water, temperature — all the things you need to stay alive in space or under the sea. 
+I heard astronaut Joe Allen explain how he had to learn everything he could about his life support system and then do everything he could to take care of his life support system; and then he pointed to this and he said, "" Life support system. "" We need to learn everything we can about it and do everything we can to take care of it. 
+The poet Auden said, "" Thousands have lived without love; none without water. "" Ninety-seven percent of Earth's water is ocean. 
+No blue, no green. 
+If you think the ocean isn't important, imagine Earth without it. 
+Mars comes to mind. 
+No ocean, no life support system. 
+I gave a talk not so long ago at the World Bank and I showed this amazing image of Earth and I said, "" There it is! The World Bank! "" That's where all the assets are! 
+And we've been trawling them down much faster than the natural systems can replenish them. 
+Tim Worth says the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. 
+With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. 
+No matter where on Earth you live. 
+Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea. 
+Over time, most of the planet's organic carbon has been absorbed and stored there, mostly by microbes. 
+The ocean drives climate and weather, stabilizes temperature, shapes Earth's chemistry. 
+Water from the sea forms clouds that return to the land and the seas as rain, sleet and snow, and provides home for about 97 percent of life in the world, maybe in the universe. 
+No water, no life; no blue, no green. 
+Yet we have this idea, we humans, that the Earth — all of it: the oceans, the skies — are so vast and so resilient it doesn't matter what we do to it. 
+That may have been true 10,000 years ago, and maybe even 1,000 years ago but in the last 100, especially in the last 50, we've drawn down the assets, the air, the water, the wildlife that make our lives possible. 
+New technologies are helping us to understand the nature of nature; the nature of what's happening, showing us our impact on the Earth. 
+I mean, first you have to know that you've got a problem. 
+And fortunately, in our time, we've learned more about the problems than in all preceding history. 
+And with knowing comes caring. 
+And with caring, there's hope that we can find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that support us. 
+But first we have to know. 
+Three years ago, I met John Hanke, who's the head of Google Earth, and I told him how much I loved being able to hold the world in my hands and go exploring vicariously. 
+But I asked him: "" When are you going to finish it? 
+You did a great job with the land, the dirt. 
+What about the water? "" Since then, I've had the great pleasure of working with the Googlers, with DOER Marine, with National Geographic, with dozens of the best institutions and scientists around the world, ones that we could enlist, to put the ocean in Google Earth. 
+And as of just this week, last Monday, Google Earth is now whole. 
+Consider this: Starting right here at the convention center, we can find the nearby aquarium, we can look at where we're sitting, and then we can cruise up the coast to the big aquarium, the ocean, and California's four national marine sanctuaries, and the new network of state marine reserves that are beginning to protect and restore some of the assets We can flit over to Hawaii and see the real Hawaiian Islands: not just the little bit that pokes through the surface, but also what's below. 
+To see — wait a minute, we can go kshhplash! — right there, ha — under the ocean, see what the whales see. 
+We can go explore the other side of the Hawaiian Islands. 
+We can go actually and swim around on Google Earth and visit with humpback whales. 
+These are the gentle giants that I've had the pleasure of meeting face to face many times underwater. 
+There's nothing quite like being personally inspected by a whale. 
+We can pick up and fly to the deepest place: seven miles down, the Mariana Trench, where only two people have ever been. 
+Imagine that. It's only seven miles, but only two people have been there, 49 years ago. 
+One-way trips are easy. 
+We need new deep-diving submarines. 
+How about some X Prizes for ocean exploration? 
+We need to see deep trenches, the undersea mountains, and understand life in the deep sea. 
+We can now go to the Arctic. 
+Just ten years ago I stood on the ice at the North Pole. 
+An ice-free Arctic Ocean may happen in this century. 
+That's bad news for the polar bears. 
+That's bad news for us too. 
+Excess carbon dioxide is not only driving global warming, it's also changing ocean chemistry, making the sea more acidic. 
+That's bad news for coral reefs and oxygen-producing plankton. 
+Also it's bad news for us. 
+We're putting hundreds of millions of tons of plastic and other trash into the sea. 
+Millions of tons of discarded fishing nets, gear that continues to kill. 
+We're clogging the ocean, poisoning the planet's circulatory system, and we're taking out hundreds of millions of tons of wildlife, all carbon-based units. 
+Barbarically, we're killing sharks for shark fin soup, undermining food chains that shape planetary chemistry and drive the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the oxygen cycle, the water cycle — our life support system. 
+We're still killing bluefin tuna; truly endangered and much more valuable alive than dead. 
+All of these parts are part of our life support system. 
+We kill using long lines, with baited hooks every few feet that may stretch for 50 miles or more. 
+Industrial trawlers and draggers are scraping the sea floor like bulldozers, taking everything in their path. 
+Using Google Earth you can witness trawlers — in China, the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico — shaking the foundation of our life support system, leaving plumes of death in their path. 
+The next time you dine on sushi — or sashimi, or swordfish steak, or shrimp cocktail, whatever wildlife you happen to enjoy from the ocean — think of the real cost. 
+For every pound that goes to market, more than 10 pounds, even 100 pounds, may be thrown away as bycatch. 
+This is the consequence of not knowing that there are limits to what we can take out of the sea. 
+This chart shows the decline in ocean wildlife from 1900 to 2000. 
+The highest concentrations are in red. 
+In my lifetime, imagine, 90 percent of the big fish have been killed. 
+Most of the turtles, sharks, tunas and whales are way down in numbers. 
+But, there is good news. 
+Ten percent of the big fish still remain. 
+There are still some blue whales. 
+There are still some krill in Antarctica. 
+There are a few oysters in Chesapeake Bay. 
+Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet. 
+There's still time, but not a lot, to turn things around. 
+But business as usual means that in 50 years, there may be no coral reefs — and no commercial fishing, because the fish will simply be gone. 
+Imagine the ocean without fish. 
+Imagine what that means to our life support system. 
+Natural systems on the land are in big trouble too, but the problems are more obvious, and some actions are being taken to protect trees, watersheds and wildlife. 
+And in 1872, with Yellowstone National Park, the United States began establishing a system of parks that some say was the best idea America ever had. 
+About 12 percent of the land around the world is now protected: safeguarding biodiversity, providing a carbon sink, generating oxygen, protecting watersheds. 
+And, in 1972, this nation began to establish a counterpart in the sea, National Marine Sanctuaries. 
+That's another great idea. 
+The good news is that there are now more than 4,000 places in the sea, around the world, that have some kind of protection. 
+And you can find them on Google Earth. 
+The bad news is that you have to look hard to find them. 
+In the last three years, for example, the U.S. protected 340,000 square miles of ocean as national monuments. 
+But it only increased from 0.6 of one percent to 0.8 of one percent of the ocean protected, globally. 
+Protected areas do rebound, but it takes a long time to restore 50-year-old rockfish or monkfish, sharks or sea bass, or 200-year-old orange roughy. 
+We don't consume 200-year-old cows or chickens. 
+Protected areas provide hope that the creatures of Ed Wilson's dream of an encyclopedia of life, or the census of marine life, will live not just as a list, a photograph, or a paragraph. 
+With scientists around the world, I've been looking at the 99 percent of the ocean that is open to fishing — and mining, and drilling, and dumping, and whatever — to search out hope spots, and try to find ways to give them and us a secure future. 
+Such as the Arctic — we have one chance, right now, to get it right. 
+Or the Antarctic, where the continent is protected, but the surrounding ocean is being stripped of its krill, whales and fish. 
+Sargasso Sea's three million square miles of floating forest is being gathered up to feed cows. 
+97 percent of the land in the Galapagos Islands is protected, but the adjacent sea is being ravaged by fishing. 
+It's true too in Argentina on the Patagonian shelf, which is now in serious trouble. 
+The high seas, where whales, tuna and dolphins travel — the largest, least protected, ecosystem on Earth, filled with luminous creatures, living in dark waters that average two miles deep. 
+They flash, and sparkle, and glow with their own living light. 
+There are still places in the sea as pristine as I knew as a child. 
+The next 10 years may be the most important, and the next 10,000 years the best chance our species will have to protect what remains of the natural systems that give us life. 
+To cope with climate change, we need new ways to generate power. 
+We need new ways, better ways, to cope with poverty, wars and disease. 
+We need many things to keep and maintain the world as a better place. 
+But, nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. 
+Our fate and the ocean's are one. 
+We need to do for the ocean what Al Gore did for the skies above. 
+A global plan of action with a world conservation union, the IUCN, is underway to protect biodiversity, to mitigate and recover from the impacts of climate change, on the high seas and in coastal areas, wherever we can identify critical places. 
+New technologies are needed to map, photograph and explore the 95 percent of the ocean that we have yet to see. 
+The goal is to protect biodiversity, to provide stability and resilience. 
+We need deep-diving subs, new technologies to explore the ocean. 
+We need, maybe, an expedition — a TED at sea — that could help figure out the next steps. 
+And so, I suppose you want to know what my wish is. 
+I wish you would use all means at your disposal — films, expeditions, the web, new submarines — and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas — hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet. 
+How much? 
+Some say 10 percent, some say 30 percent. 
+You decide: how much of your heart do you want to protect? 
+Whatever it is, a fraction of one percent is not enough. 
+My wish is a big wish, but if we can make it happen, it can truly change the world, and help ensure the survival of what actually — as it turns out — is my favorite species; that would be us. 
+For the children of today, for tomorrow's child: as never again, now is the time. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So infectious diseases, right? 
+Infectious diseases are still the main cause of human suffering and death around the world. 
+Every year, millions of people die of diseases such as T.B., malaria, HIV, around the world and even in the United States. 
+Every year, thousands of Americans die of seasonal flu. 
+Now of course, humans, we are creative. Right? 
+We have come up with ways to protect ourselves against these diseases. 
+We have drugs and vaccines. 
+And we're conscious — we learn from our experiences and come up with creative solutions. 
+We used to think we're alone in this, but now we know we're not. 
+We're not the only medical doctors. 
+Now we know that there's a lot of animals out there that can do it too. 
+Most famous, perhaps, chimpanzees. 
+Not so much different from us, they can use plants to treat their intestinal parasites. 
+But the last few decades have shown us that other animals can do it too: elephants, porcupines, sheep, goats, you name it. 
+And even more interesting than that is that recent discoveries are telling us that insects and other little animals with smaller brains can use medication too. 
+The problem with infectious diseases, as we all know, is that pathogens continue to evolve, and a lot of the drugs that we have developed are losing their efficacy. 
+And therefore, there is this great need to find new ways to discover drugs that we can use against our diseases. 
+Now, I think that we should look at these animals, and we can learn from them how to treat our own diseases. 
+As a biologist, I have been studying monarch butterflies for the last 10 years. 
+Now, monarchs are extremely famous for their spectacular migrations from the U.S. and Canada down to Mexico every year, where millions of them come together, but it's not why I started studying them. 
+I study monarchs because they get sick. 
+They get sick like you. They get sick like me. 
+And I think what they do can tell us a lot about drugs that we can develop for humans. 
+Now, the parasites that monarchs get infected with are called ophryocystis elektroscirrha — a mouthful. 
+What they do is they produce spores, millions of spores on the outside of the butterfly that are shown as little specks in between the scales of the butterfly. 
+And this is really detrimental to the monarch. 
+It shortens their lifespan, it reduces their ability to fly, it can even kill them before they're even adults. 
+Very detrimental parasite. 
+As part of my job, I spend a lot of time in the greenhouse growing plants, and the reason for this is that monarchs are extremely picky eaters. 
+They only eat milkweed as larvae. 
+Luckily, there are several species of milkweed that they can use, and all these milkweeds have cardenolides in them. 
+These are chemicals that are toxic. 
+They're toxic to most animals, but not to monarchs. 
+In fact, monarchs can take up the chemicals, put it in their own bodies, and it makes them toxic against their predators, such as birds. 
+And what they do, then, is advertise this toxicity through their beautiful warning colorations with this orange, black and white. 
+So what I did during my job is grow plants in the greenhouse, different ones, different milkweeds. 
+Some were toxic, including the tropical milkweed, with very high concentrations of these cardenolides. 
+And some were not toxic. 
+And then I fed them to monarchs. 
+Some of the monarchs were healthy. They had no disease. 
+But some of the monarchs were sick, and what I found is that some of these milkweeds are medicinal, meaning they reduce the disease symptoms in the monarch butterflies, meaning these monarchs can live longer when they are infected when feeding on these medicinal plants. 
+And when I found this, I had this idea, and a lot of people said it was a crazy idea, but I thought, what if monarchs can use this? 
+What if they can use these plants as their own form of medicine? 
+What if they can act as medical doctors? 
+So my team and I started doing experiments. 
+In the first types of experiments, we had caterpillars, and gave them a choice: medicinal milkweed versus non-medicinal milkweed. 
+And then we measured how much they ate of each species over their lifetime. 
+And the result, as so often in science, was boring: Fifty percent of their food was medicinal. Fifty percent was not. 
+These caterpillars didn't do anything for their own welfare. 
+So then we moved on to adult butterflies, and we started asking the question whether it's the mothers that can medicate their offspring. 
+Can the mothers lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick? 
+We have done these experiments now over several years, and always get the same results. 
+What we do is we put a monarch in a big cage, a medicinal plant on one side, a non-medicinal plant on the other side, and then we measure the number of eggs that the monarchs lay on each plant. 
+And what we find when we do that is always the same. 
+What we find is that the monarchs strongly prefer the medicinal milkweed. 
+In other words, what these females are doing is they're laying 68 percent of their eggs in the medicinal milkweed. 
+Intriguingly, what they do is they actually transmit the parasites when they're laying the eggs. 
+They cannot prevent this. 
+They can also not medicate themselves. 
+But what these experiments tell us is that these monarchs, these mothers, can lay their eggs on medicinal milkweed that will make their future offspring less sick. 
+Now, this is a really important discovery, I think, not just because it tells us something cool about nature, but also because it may tell us something more about how we should find drugs. 
+Now, these are animals that are very small and we tend to think of them as very simple. 
+They have tiny little brains, yet they can do this very sophisticated medication. 
+Now, we know that even today, most of our drugs derive from natural products, including plants, and in indigenous cultures, traditional healers often look at animals to find new drugs. 
+In this way, elephants have told us how to treat stomach upset, and porcupines have told people how to treat bloody diarrhea. 
+What I think is important, though, is to move beyond these large-brained mammals and give these guys more credit, these simple animals, these insects that we tend to think of as very, very simple with tiny little brains. 
+The discovery that these animals can also use medication opens up completely new avenues, and I think that maybe one day, we will be treating human diseases with drugs that were first discovered by butterflies, and I think that is an amazing opportunity worth pursuing. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So in 1885, Karl Benz invented the automobile. 
+Later that year, he took it out for the first public test drive, and — true story — crashed into a wall. 
+For the last 130 years, we've been working around that least reliable part of the car, the driver. 
+We've made the car stronger. 
+We've added seat belts, we've added air bags, and in the last decade, we've actually started trying to make the car smarter to fix that bug, the driver. 
+Now, today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the difference between patching around the problem with driver assistance systems and actually having fully self-driving cars and what they can do for the world. 
+I'm also going to talk to you a little bit about our car and allow you to see how it sees the world and how it reacts and what it does, but first I'm going to talk a little bit about the problem. 
+And it's a big problem: 1.2 million people are killed on the world's roads every year. 
+In America alone, 33,000 people are killed each year. 
+To put that in perspective, that's the same as a 737 falling out of the sky every working day. 
+It's kind of unbelievable. 
+Cars are sold to us like this, but really, this is what driving's like. 
+Right? It's not sunny, it's rainy, and you want to do anything other than drive. 
+And the reason why is this: Traffic is getting worse. 
+In America, between 1990 and 2010, the vehicle miles traveled increased by 38 percent. 
+We grew by six percent of roads, so it's not in your brains. 
+Traffic really is substantially worse than it was not very long ago. 
+And all of this has a very human cost. 
+So if you take the average commute time in America, which is about 50 minutes, you multiply that by the 120 million workers we have, that turns out to be about six billion minutes wasted in commuting every day. 
+Now, that's a big number, so let's put it in perspective. 
+You take that six billion minutes and you divide it by the average life expectancy of a person, that turns out to be 162 lifetimes spent every day, wasted, just getting from A to B. 
+It's unbelievable. 
+And then, there are those of us who don't have the privilege of sitting in traffic. 
+So this is Steve. 
+He's an incredibly capable guy, but he just happens to be blind, and that means instead of a 30-minute drive to work in the morning, it's a two-hour ordeal of piecing together bits of public transit or asking friends and family for a ride. 
+He doesn't have that same freedom that you and I have to get around. 
+We should do something about that. 
+Now, conventional wisdom would say that we'll just take these driver assistance systems and we'll kind of push them and incrementally improve them, and over time, they'll turn into self-driving cars. 
+Well, I'm here to tell you that's like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I'll be able to fly. 
+We actually need to do something a little different. 
+And so I'm going to talk to you about three different ways that self-driving systems are different than driver assistance systems. 
+And I'm going to start with some of our own experience. 
+So back in 2013, we had the first test of a self-driving car where we let regular people use it. 
+Well, almost regular — they were 100 Googlers, but they weren't working on the project. 
+And we gave them the car and we allowed them to use it in their daily lives. 
+But unlike a real self-driving car, this one had a big asterisk with it: They had to pay attention, because this was an experimental vehicle. 
+We tested it a lot, but it could still fail. 
+And so we gave them two hours of training, we put them in the car, we let them use it, and what we heard back was something awesome, as someone trying to bring a product into the world. 
+Every one of them told us they loved it. 
+In fact, we had a Porsche driver who came in and told us on the first day, "This is completely stupid. What are we thinking?" 
+But at the end of it, he said, "" Not only should I have it, everyone else should have it, because people are terrible drivers. "" So this was music to our ears, but then we started to look at what the people inside the car were doing, and this was eye-opening. 
+Now, my favorite story is this gentleman who looks down at his phone and realizes the battery is low, so he turns around like this in the car and digs around in his backpack, pulls out his laptop, puts it on the seat, goes in the back again, digs around, pulls out the charging cable for his phone, futzes around, puts it into the laptop, puts it on the phone. 
+Sure enough, the phone is charging. 
+All the time he's been doing 65 miles per hour down the freeway. 
+Right? Unbelievable. 
+So we thought about this and we said, it's kind of obvious, right? 
+The better the technology gets, the less reliable the driver is going to get. 
+So by just making the cars incrementally smarter, we're probably not going to see the wins we really need. 
+Let me talk about something a little technical for a moment here. 
+So we're looking at this graph, and along the bottom is how often does the car apply the brakes when it shouldn't. 
+You can ignore most of that axis, because if you're driving around town, and the car starts stopping randomly, you're never going to buy that car. 
+And the vertical axis is how often the car is going to apply the brakes when it's supposed to to help you avoid an accident. 
+Now, if we look at the bottom left corner here, this is your classic car. 
+It doesn't apply the brakes for you, it doesn't do anything goofy, but it also doesn't get you out of an accident. 
+Now, if we want to bring a driver assistance system into a car, say with collision mitigation braking, we're going to put some package of technology on there, and that's this curve, and it's going to have some operating properties, but it's never going to avoid all of the accidents, because it doesn't have that capability. 
+But we'll pick some place along the curve here, and maybe it avoids half of accidents that the human driver misses, and that's amazing, right? 
+We just reduced accidents on our roads by a factor of two. 
+There are now 17,000 less people dying every year in America. 
+But if we want a self-driving car, we need a technology curve that looks like this. 
+We're going to have to put more sensors in the vehicle, and we'll pick some operating point up here where it basically never gets into a crash. 
+They'll happen, but very low frequency. 
+Now you and I could look at this and we could argue about whether it's incremental, and I could say something like "" 80-20 rule, "" and it's really hard to move up to that new curve. 
+But let's look at it from a different direction for a moment. 
+So let's look at how often the technology has to do the right thing. 
+And so this green dot up here is a driver assistance system. 
+It turns out that human drivers make mistakes that lead to traffic accidents about once every 100,000 miles in America. 
+In contrast, a self-driving system is probably making decisions about 10 times per second, so order of magnitude, that's about 1,000 times per mile. 
+So if you compare the distance between these two, it's about 10 to the eighth, right? 
+Eight orders of magnitude. 
+That's like comparing how fast I run to the speed of light. 
+It doesn't matter how hard I train, I'm never actually going to get there. 
+So there's a pretty big gap there. 
+And then finally, there's how the system can handle uncertainty. 
+So this pedestrian here might be stepping into the road, might not be. 
+I can't tell, nor can any of our algorithms, but in the case of a driver assistance system, that means it can't take action, because again, if it presses the brakes unexpectedly, that's completely unacceptable. 
+Whereas a self-driving system can look at that pedestrian and say, I don't know what they're about to do, slow down, take a better look, and then react appropriately after that. 
+So it can be much safer than a driver assistance system can ever be. 
+So that's enough about the differences between the two. 
+Let's spend some time talking about how the car sees the world. 
+So this is our vehicle. 
+It starts by understanding where it is in the world, by taking a map and its sensor data and aligning the two, and then we layer on top of that what it sees in the moment. 
+So here, all the purple boxes you can see are other vehicles on the road, and the red thing on the side over there is a cyclist, and up in the distance, if you look really closely, you can see some cones. 
+Then we know where the car is in the moment, but we have to do better than that: we have to predict what's going to happen. 
+So here the pickup truck in top right is about to make a left lane change because the road in front of it is closed, so it needs to get out of the way. 
+Knowing that one pickup truck is great, but we really need to know what everybody's thinking, so it becomes quite a complicated problem. 
+And then given that, we can figure out how the car should respond in the moment, so what trajectory it should follow, how quickly it should slow down or speed up. 
+And then that all turns into just following a path: turning the steering wheel left or right, pressing the brake or gas. 
+It's really just two numbers at the end of the day. 
+So how hard can it really be? 
+Back when we started in 2009, this is what our system looked like. 
+So you can see our car in the middle and the other boxes on the road, driving down the highway. 
+The car needs to understand where it is and roughly where the other vehicles are. 
+It's really a geometric understanding of the world. 
+Once we started driving on neighborhood and city streets, the problem becomes a whole new level of difficulty. 
+You see pedestrians crossing in front of us, cars crossing in front of us, going every which way, the traffic lights, crosswalks. 
+It's an incredibly complicated problem by comparison. 
+And then once you have that problem solved, the vehicle has to be able to deal with construction. 
+So here are the cones on the left forcing it to drive to the right, but not just construction in isolation, of course. 
+It has to deal with other people moving through that construction zone as well. 
+And of course, if anyone's breaking the rules, the police are there and the car has to understand that that flashing light on the top of the car means that it's not just a car, it's actually a police officer. 
+Similarly, the orange box on the side here, it's a school bus, and we have to treat that differently as well. 
+When we're out on the road, other people have expectations: So, when a cyclist puts up their arm, it means they're expecting the car to yield to them and make room for them to make a lane change. 
+And when a police officer stood in the road, our vehicle should understand that this means stop, and when they signal to go, we should continue. 
+Now, the way we accomplish this is by sharing data between the vehicles. 
+The first, most crude model of this is when one vehicle sees a construction zone, having another know about it so it can be in the correct lane to avoid some of the difficulty. 
+But we actually have a much deeper understanding of this. 
+We could take all of the data that the cars have seen over time, the hundreds of thousands of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles that have been out there and understand what they look like and use that to infer what other vehicles should look like and other pedestrians should look like. 
+And then, even more importantly, we could take from that a model of how we expect them to move through the world. 
+So here the yellow box is a pedestrian crossing in front of us. 
+Here the blue box is a cyclist and we anticipate that they're going to nudge out and around the car to the right. 
+Here there's a cyclist coming down the road and we know they're going to continue to drive down the shape of the road. 
+Here somebody makes a right turn, and in a moment here, somebody's going to make a U-turn in front of us, and we can anticipate that behavior and respond safely. 
+Now, that's all well and good for things that we've seen, but of course, you encounter lots of things that you haven't seen in the world before. 
+And so just a couple of months ago, our vehicles were driving through Mountain View, and this is what we encountered. 
+This is a woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck in circles on the road. (Laughter) Now it turns out, there is nowhere in the DMV handbook that tells you how to deal with that, but our vehicles were able to encounter that, slow down, and drive safely. 
+Now, we don't have to deal with just ducks. 
+Watch this bird fly across in front of us. The car reacts to that. 
+Here we're dealing with a cyclist that you would never expect to see anywhere other than Mountain View. 
+And of course, we have to deal with drivers, even the very small ones. 
+Watch to the right as someone jumps out of this truck at us. 
+And now, watch the left as the car with the green box decides he needs to make a right turn at the last possible moment. 
+Here, as we make a lane change, the car to our left decides it wants to as well. 
+And here, we watch a car blow through a red light and yield to it. 
+And similarly, here, a cyclist blowing through that light as well. 
+And of course, the vehicle responds safely. 
+And of course, we have people who do I don't know what sometimes on the road, like this guy pulling out between two self-driving cars. 
+You have to ask, "" What are you thinking? "" (Laughter) Now, I just fire-hosed you with a lot of stuff there, so I'm going to break one of these down pretty quickly. 
+So what we're looking at is the scene with the cyclist again, and you might notice in the bottom, we can't actually see the cyclist yet, but the car can: it's that little blue box up there, and that comes from the laser data. 
+And that's not actually really easy to understand, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn that laser data and look at it, and if you're really good at looking at laser data, you can see a few dots on the curve there, right there, and that blue box is that cyclist. 
+Now as our light is red, the cyclist's light has turned yellow already, and if you squint, you can see that in the imagery. 
+But the cyclist, we see, is going to proceed through the intersection. 
+Our light has now turned green, his is solidly red, and we now anticipate that this bike is going to come all the way across. 
+Unfortunately the other drivers next to us were not paying as much attention. 
+They started to pull forward, and fortunately for everyone, this cyclists reacts, avoids, and makes it through the intersection. 
+And off we go. 
+Now, as you can see, we've made some pretty exciting progress, and at this point we're pretty convinced this technology is going to come to market. 
+We do three million miles of testing in our simulators every single day, so you can imagine the experience that our vehicles have. 
+We are looking forward to having this technology on the road, and we think the right path is to go through the self-driving rather than driver assistance approach because the urgency is so large. 
+In the time I have given this talk today, 34 people have died on America's roads. 
+How soon can we bring it out? 
+Well, it's hard to say because it's a really complicated problem, but these are my two boys. 
+My oldest son is 11, and that means in four and a half years, he's going to be able to get his driver's license. 
+My team and I are committed to making sure that doesn't happen. 
+Thank you. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Chris, I've got a question for you. 
+Chris Urmson: Sure. 
+CA: So certainly, the mind of your cars is pretty mind-boggling. 
+On this debate between driver-assisted and fully driverless — I mean, there's a real debate going on out there right now. 
+So some of the companies, for example, Tesla, are going the driver-assisted route. 
+What you're saying is that that's kind of going to be a dead end because you can't just keep improving that route and get to fully driverless at some point, and then a driver is going to say, "" This feels safe, "" and climb into the back, and something ugly will happen. 
+CU: Right. No, that's exactly right, and it's not to say that the driver assistance systems aren't going to be incredibly valuable. 
+They can save a lot of lives in the interim, but to see the transformative opportunity to help someone like Steve get around, to really get to the end case in safety, to have the opportunity to change our cities and move parking out and get rid of these urban craters we call parking lots, it's the only way to go. 
+CA: We will be tracking your progress with huge interest. 
+Thanks so much, Chris. CU: Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I've been living in rural East Africa for about 10 years, and I want to share a field perspective with you on global poverty. 
+Hungry, extreme poverty: these often seem like gigantic, insurmountable problems, too big to solve. 
+But as a field practitioner, I believe these are actually very solvable problems if we just take the right strategies. 
+Archimedes was an ancient Greek thinker, and he taught us that if we lean on the right levers, we can move the world. 
+In the fight against extreme poverty, I believe there are three powerful levers that we can lean on. 
+This talk is all about those levers, and why they make poverty a winnable fight in our lifetimes. 
+What is extreme poverty? 
+When I first moved to rural East Africa, I stayed overnight with a farm family. 
+In the morning, however, there was nothing to eat. 
+And then at lunchtime, I watched with an increasingly sick feeling as the eldest girl in the family cooked porridge as a substitute for lunch. 
+For that meal, every child drank one cup to survive. 
+Amongst the extreme poor, one in three children are permanently stunted from a lifetime of not eating enough. 
+When that's combined with poor access to health care, one in 10 extremely poor children die before they reach age five. 
+We see ourselves as a thinking, feeling and moral human race, but until we solve these problems for all of our members, we fail that standard, because every person on this planet matters. 
+This child matters. 
+These children matter. 
+This girl matters. 
+You know, we see things like this, and we're upset by them, but they seem like such big problems. 
+We don't know how to take effective action. 
+But remember our friend Archimedes. 
+Global poverty has powerful levers. 
+It's a problem like any other. 
+So for the next 10 minutes, let's not be sad about the state of the world. 
+Let's engage our brains. 
+Let's engage our collective passion for problem-solving and figure out what those levers are. 
+Lever number one: most of the world's poor are farmers. 
+Think about how extraordinary this is. 
+If this picture represents the world's poor, then more than half engage in farming as a major source of income. 
+This gets me really excited. 
+All of these people, one profession. 
+Think how powerful this is. 
+When farmers become more productive, then more than half the world's poor earn more money and climb out of poverty. 
+And it gets better. 
+The product of farming is, of course, food. 
+So when farmers become more productive, they earn more food, and they don't just help themselves, but they help to feed healthy communities and thriving economies. 
+And when farmers become more productive, they reduce environmental pressure. 
+We only have two ways we can feed the world: we can either make our existing farmland a lot more productive, or we can clear cut forest and savannah to make more farmland, which would be environmentally disastrous. 
+Farmers are basically a really important leverage point. 
+When farmers become more productive, they earn more income, they climb out of poverty, they feed their communities and they reduce environmental land pressure. 
+Farmers stand at the center of the world. 
+And not a farmer like this one, but rather this lady. 
+Most of the farmers I know are actually women. 
+Look at the strength and the will radiating from this woman. 
+She is physically strong, mentally tough, and she will do whatever it takes to earn a better life for her children. 
+If we're going to put the future of humanity in one person's hands, then I'm really glad it's her. 
+(Applause) There's just one problem: many smallholder farmers lack access to basic tools and knowledge. 
+Currently, they take a little bit of saved food grain from the prior year, they plant it in the ground and they till it with a manual hand hoe. 
+But good news, again. 
+Lever number two: humanity actually solved the problem of agricultural poverty a century ago. 
+Let me walk you through the three most basic factors in farming. 
+First, hybrid seed is created when you cross two seeds together. 
+If you naturally pollinate a high-yielding variety together with a drought-resistant variety, you get a hybrid that inherits positive traits from both of its parents. 
+Next, conventional fertilizer, if used responsibly, is environmentally sustainable. 
+If you micro-dose just a pinch of fertilizer to a plant that's taller than I am, you unlock enormous yield gain. 
+These are known as farm inputs. 
+Farm inputs need to be combined with good practice. 
+When you space your seeds and plant with massive amounts of compost, farmers multiply their harvests. 
+These proven tools and practices have more than tripled agricultural productivity in every major region of the world, moving mass numbers of people out of poverty. 
+We just haven't finished delivering these things to everybody just yet, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. 
+So overall, this is amazing news. 
+Humanity actually solved agricultural poverty a century ago, in theory. 
+We just haven't delivered these things to everybody just yet. 
+In this century, the reason that people remain poor is because maybe they live in remote places. 
+They lack access to these things. 
+Therefore, ending poverty is simply a matter of delivering proven goods and services to people. 
+We don't need more genius types right now. 
+The humble delivery guy is going to end global poverty in our lifetime. 
+So these are the three levers, and the most powerful lever is simply delivery. 
+Wherever the world's companies, governments and nonprofits set up delivery networks for life-improving goods, we eliminate poverty. 
+OK, so that sounds really nice in theory, but what about in practice? 
+What do these delivery networks look like? 
+I want to share the concrete example that I know best, my organization, One Acre Fund. 
+We only serve the farmer, and our job is to provide her with the tools that she needs to succeed. 
+We start off by delivering farm inputs to really rural places. 
+We buy farm inputs with the combined power of our farmer network, and store it in 20 warehouses like this. 
+Then, during input delivery, we rent hundreds of 10-ton trucks and send them out to where farmers are waiting in the field. 
+They then get their individual orders and walk it home to their farms. 
+It's kind of like Amazon for rural farmers. 
+Importantly, realistic delivery also includes finance, a way to pay. 
+And then we surround all that with training. 
+Our rural field officers deliver practical, hands-on training to farmers in the field every two weeks. 
+Wherever we deliver our services, farmers use these tools to climb out of poverty. 
+This is a farmer in our program, Consolata. 
+Look at the pride on her face. 
+She has achieved a modest prosperity that I believe is the human right of every hardworking person on the planet. 
+Today, I'm proud to say that we're serving about 400,000 farmers like Consolata. 
+(Applause) The key to doing this is scalable delivery. 
+In any given area, we hire a rural field officer who delivers our services to 200 farmers, on average, with more than 1,000 people living in those families. 
+Today, we have 2,000 of these rural field officers growing very quickly. 
+This is our delivery army, and we're just one organization. 
+There are many companies, governments and nonprofits that have delivery armies just like this. 
+And I believe we stand at a moment in time where collectively, we are capable of delivering farm services to all farmers. 
+Let me show you how possible this is. 
+This is a map of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a map of the United States for scale. 
+I chose Sub-Saharan Africa because this is a huge delivery territory. 
+It's very challenging. 
+But we analyzed every 50-mile by 50-mile block on the continent, and we found that half of farmers live in just these shaded regions. 
+That's a remarkably small area overall. 
+If you were to lay these boxes next to each other within a map of the United States, they would only cover the Eastern United States. 
+You can order pizza anywhere in this territory and it'll arrive to your house hot, fresh and delicious. 
+If America can deliver pizza to an area of this size, then Africa's companies, governments and non-profits can deliver farm services to all of her farmers. 
+This is possible. 
+I'm going to wrap up by generalizing beyond just farming. 
+In every field of human development, humanity has already invented effective tools to end poverty. 
+We just need to deliver them. 
+So again, in every area of human development, super-smart people a long time ago invented inexpensive, highly effective tools. 
+Humanity is armed to the teeth with simple, effective solutions to poverty. 
+We just need to deliver these to a pretty small area. 
+Again using the map of Sub-Saharan Africa as an example, remember that rural poverty is concentrated in these blue shaded areas. 
+Urban poverty is even more concentrated, in these green little dots. 
+Again, using a map of the United States for scale, this is what I would call a highly achievable delivery zone. 
+In fact, for the first time in human history, we have a vast amount of delivery infrastructure available to us. 
+The world's companies, governments and non-profits have delivery armies that are fully capable of covering this relatively small area. 
+We just lack the will. 
+If we are willing, every one of us has a role to play. 
+We first need more people to pursue careers in human development, especially if you live in a developing nation. 
+These are roles available at just my organization alone, and we're just one out of many. 
+This may surprise you, but no matter what your technical specialty, there is a role for you in this fight. 
+And no matter how logistically possible it is to end poverty, we need a lot more resources. 
+This is our number one constraint. 
+For private investors, we need a big expansion of venture capital, private equity, working capital, available in emerging markets. 
+But there are also limits to what private business can accomplish. 
+Anybody can give, but we need more leadership. 
+We need more visionary philanthropists and global leaders who will take problems in human development and lead humanity to wipe them off the face of the planet. 
+If you're interested in these ideas, check out this website. 
+We need more leaders. 
+Humanity has put people on the moon. 
+We've invented supercomputers that fit into our pockets and connect us with anybody on the planet. 
+We've run marathons at a five-minute mile pace. 
+We are an exceptional people. 
+But we've left more than one billion of our members behind. 
+Until every girl like this one has an opportunity to earn her full human potential, we have failed to become a truly moral and just human race. 
+Logistically speaking, it's incredibly possible to end extreme poverty. 
+We just need to deliver proven goods and services to everybody. 
+If we have the will, every one of us has a role to play. 
+Let's deploy our time, our careers, our collective wealth. 
+Let us deliver an end to extreme poverty in this lifetime. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want to open by quoting Einstein's wonderful statement, just so people will feel at ease that the great scientist of the 20th century also agrees with us, and also calls us to this action. 
+He said, "" A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, the 'universe,' — a part limited in time and space. 
+He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 
+This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. 
+Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. "" This insight of Einstein's is uncannily close to that of Buddhist psychology, wherein compassion — "" karuna, "" it is called — is defined as, "" the sensitivity to another's suffering and the corresponding will to free the other from that suffering. "" It pairs closely with love, which is the will for the other to be happy, which requires, of course, that one feels some happiness oneself and wishes to share it. 
+This is perfect in that it clearly opposes self-centeredness and selfishness to compassion, the concern for others, and, further, it indicates that those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy. 
+The Dalai Lama often states that compassion is his best friend. 
+It helps him when he is overwhelmed with grief and despair. 
+Compassion helps him turn away from the feeling of his suffering as the most absolute, most terrible suffering anyone has ever had and broadens his awareness of the sufferings of others, even of the perpetrators of his misery and the whole mass of beings. 
+In fact, suffering is so huge and enormous, his own becomes less and less monumental. 
+And he begins to move beyond his self-concern into the broader concern for others. 
+And this immediately cheers him up, as his courage is stimulated to rise to the occasion. 
+Thus, he uses his own suffering as a doorway to widening his circle of compassion. 
+He is a very good colleague of Einstein's, we must say. 
+Now, I want to tell a story, which is a very famous story in the Indian and Buddhist tradition, of the great Saint Asanga who was a contemporary of Augustine in the West and was sort of like the Buddhist Augustine. 
+And Asanga lived 800 years after the Buddha's time. 
+And he was discontented with the state of people's practice of the Buddhist religion in India at that time. 
+And so he said, "" I'm sick of all this. Nobody's really living the doctrine. 
+They're talking about love and compassion and wisdom and enlightenment, but they are acting selfish and pathetic. 
+So, Buddha's teaching has lost its momentum. 
+I know the next Buddha will come a few thousand years from now, but exists currently in a certain heaven "" — that's Maitreya — "" so, I'm going to go on a retreat and I'm going to meditate and pray until the Buddha Maitreya reveals himself to me, and gives me a teaching or something to revive the practice of compassion in the world today. "" So he went on this retreat. And he meditated for three years and he did not see the future Buddha Maitreya. 
+And he left in disgust. 
+And as he was leaving, he saw a man — a funny little man sitting sort of part way down the mountain. 
+And he had a lump of iron. 
+And he was rubbing it with a cloth. 
+And he became interested in that. 
+He said, "" Well what are you doing? "" And the man said, "" I'm making a needle. "" And he said, "" That's ridiculous. You can't make a needle by rubbing a lump of iron with a cloth. "" And the man said, "" Really? "" And he showed him a dish full of needles. 
+So he said, "" Okay, I get the point. "" He went back to his cave. He meditated again. 
+Another three years, no vision. He leaves again. 
+This time, he comes down. 
+And as he's leaving, he sees a bird making a nest on a cliff ledge. 
+And where it's landing to bring the twigs to the cliff, its feathers brushes the rock — and it had cut the rock six to eight inches in. There was a cleft in the rock by the brushing of the feathers of generations of the birds. 
+So he said, "" All right. I get the point. "" He went back. 
+Another three years. 
+Again, no vision of Maitreya after nine years. 
+And he again leaves, and this time: water dripping, making a giant bowl in the rock where it drips in a stream. 
+And so, again, he goes back. And after 12 years there is still no vision. 
+And he's freaked out. And he won't even look left or right to see any encouraging vision. 
+And he comes to the town. He's a broken person. 
+And there, in the town, he's approached by a dog who comes like this — one of these terrible dogs you can see in some poor countries, even in America, I think, in some areas — and he's looking just terrible. 
+And he becomes interested in this dog because it's so pathetic, and it's trying to attract his attention. And he sits down looking at the dog. 
+And the dog's whole hindquarters are a complete open sore. 
+Some of it is like gangrenous, and there are maggots in the flesh. And it's terrible. 
+He thinks, "" What can I do to fix up this dog? 
+Well, at least I can clean this wound and wash it. "" So, he takes it to some water. He's about to clean, but then his awareness focuses on the maggots. 
+And he sees the maggots, and the maggots are kind of looking a little cute. 
+And they're maggoting happily in the dog's hindquarters there. 
+"" Well, if I clean the dog, I'll kill the maggots. So how can that be? 
+That's it. I'm a useless person and there's no Buddha, no Maitreya, and everything is all hopeless. 
+And now I'm going to kill the maggots? "" So, he had a brilliant idea. 
+And he took a shard of something, and cut a piece of flesh from his thigh, and he placed it on ground. 
+He was not really thinking too carefully about the ASPCA. 
+He was just immediately caught with the situation. 
+So he thought, "" I will take the maggots and put them on this piece of flesh, then clean the dog's wounds, and then I'll figure out what to do with the maggots. "" So he starts to do that. He can't grab the maggots. 
+Apparently they wriggle around. They're kind of hard to grab, these maggots. 
+So he says, "" Well, I'll put my tongue on the dog's flesh. 
+And then the maggots will jump on my warmer tongue "" — the dog is kind of used up — "and then I'll spit them one by one down on the thing." 
+So he goes down, and he's sticking his tongue out like this. 
+And he had to close his eyes, it's so disgusting, and the smell and everything. 
+And then, suddenly, there's a pfft, a noise like that. 
+He jumps back and there, of course, is the future Buddha Maitreya in a beautiful vision — rainbow lights, golden, jeweled, a plasma body, an exquisite mystic vision — that he sees. 
+And he says, "" Oh. "" He bows. 
+But, being human, he's immediately thinking of his next complaint. 
+So as he comes up from his first bow he says, "" My Lord, I'm so happy to see you, but where have you been for 12 years? 
+What is this? "" And Maitreya says, "" I was with you. Who do you think was making needles and making nests and dripping on rocks for you, mister dense? "" (Laughter) "" Looking for the Buddha in person, "" he said. 
+And he said, "" You didn't have, until this moment, real compassion. 
+And, until you have real compassion, you cannot recognize love. "" "" Maitreya "" means love, "" the loving one, "" in Sanskrit. 
+And so he looked very dubious, Asanga did. 
+And he said, "" If you don't believe me, just take me with you. "" And so he took the Maitreya — it shrunk into a globe, a ball — took him on his shoulder. 
+And he ran into town in the marketplace, and he said, "" Rejoice! Rejoice! 
+The future Buddha has come ahead of all predictions. Here he is. "" And then pretty soon they started throwing rocks and stones at him — it wasn't Chautauqua, it was some other town — because they saw a demented looking, scrawny looking yogi man, like some kind of hippie, with a bleeding leg and a rotten dog on his shoulder, shouting that the future Buddha had come. 
+So, naturally, they chased him out of town. 
+But on the edge of town, one elderly lady, a charwoman in the charnel ground, saw a jeweled foot on a jeweled lotus on his shoulder and then the dog, but she saw the jewel foot of the Maitreya, and she offered a flower. 
+So that encouraged him, and he went with Maitreya. 
+Maitreya then took him to a certain heaven, which is the typical way a Buddhist myth unfolds. 
+And Maitreya then kept him in heaven for five years, dictating to him five complicated tomes of the methodology of how you cultivate compassion. 
+And then I thought I would share with you what that method is, or one of them. 
+A famous one, it's called the "" Sevenfold Causal Method of Developing Compassion. "" And it begins first by one meditating and visualizing that all beings are with one — even animals too, but everyone is in human form. 
+The animals are in one of their human lives. The humans are human. 
+And then, among them, you think of your friends and loved ones, the circle at the table. 
+And you think of your enemies, and you think of the neutral ones. 
+And then you try to say, "" Well, the loved ones I love. 
+But, you know, after all, they're nice to me. 
+I had fights with them. Sometimes they were unfriendly. 
+I got mad. Brothers can fight. Parents and children can fight. 
+So, in a way, I like them so much because they're nice to me. 
+While the neutral ones I don't know. They could all be just fine. 
+And then the enemies I don't like because they're mean to me. 
+But they are nice to somebody. I could be them. "" And then the Buddhists, of course, think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives, actually. 
+Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life, although you don't remember it and neither do I, have been my mother — for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you. 
+And also, actually, I've been your mother. 
+I've been female, and I've been every single one of yours' mother in a previous life, the way the Buddhists reflect. 
+So, my mother in this life is really great. But all of you in a way are part of the eternal mother. 
+You gave me that expression; "" the eternal mama, "" you said. That's wonderful. 
+So, that's the way the Buddhists do it. 
+A theist Christian can think that all beings, even my enemies, are God's children. 
+So, in that sense, we're related. 
+So, they first create this foundation of equality. 
+So, we sort of reduce a little of the clinging to the ones we love — just in the meditation — and we open our mind to those we don't know. 
+And we definitely reduce the hostility and the "" I don't want to be compassionate to them "" to the ones we think of as the bad guys, the ones we hate and we don't like. 
+And we don't hate anyone, therefore. So we equalize. That's very important. 
+And then the next thing we do is what is called "" mother recognition. "" And that is, we think of every being as familiar, as family. 
+We expand. We take the feeling about remembering a mama, and we defuse that to all beings in this meditation. 
+And we see the mother in every being. 
+We see that look that the mother has on her face, looking at this child that is a miracle that she has produced from her own body, being a mammal, where she has true compassion, truly is the other, and identifies completely. 
+Often the life of that other will be more important to her than her own life. 
+And that's why it's the most powerful form of altruism. 
+The mother is the model of all altruism for human beings, in spiritual traditions. 
+And so, we reflect until we can sort of see that motherly expression in all beings. 
+People laugh at me because, you know, I used to say that I used to meditate on mama Cheney as my mom, when, of course, I was annoyed with him about all of his evil doings in Iraq. 
+I used to meditate on George Bush. He's quite a cute mom in a female form. 
+He has his little ears and he smiles and he rocks you in his arms. 
+And you think of him as nursing you. 
+And then Saddam Hussein's serious mustache is a problem, but you think of him as a mom. 
+And this is the way you do it. You take any being who looks weird to you, and you see how they could be familiar to you. 
+And you do that for a while, until you really feel that. 
+You can feel the familiarity of all beings. 
+Nobody seems alien. They're not "" other. "" You reduce the feeling of otherness about beings. 
+Then you move from there to remembering the kindness of mothers in general, if you can remember the kindness of your own mother, if you can remember the kindness of your spouse, or, if you are a mother yourself, how you were with your children. 
+And you begin to get very sentimental; you cultivate sentimentality intensely. 
+You will even weep, perhaps, with gratitude and kindness. 
+And then you connect that with your feeling that everyone has that motherly possibility. 
+Every being, even the most mean looking ones, can be motherly. 
+And then, third, you step from there to what is called "" a feeling of gratitude. "" You want to repay that kindness that all beings have shown to you. 
+And then the fourth step, you go to what is called "" lovely love. "" In each one of these you can take some weeks, or months, or days depending on how you do it, or you can do them in a run, this meditation. 
+And then you think of how lovely beings are when they are happy, when they are satisfied. 
+And every being looks beautiful when they are internally feeling a happiness. 
+Their face doesn't look like this. When they're angry, they look ugly, every being, but when they're happy they look beautiful. 
+And so you see beings in their potential happiness. 
+And you feel a love toward them and you want them to be happy, even the enemy. 
+We think Jesus is being unrealistic when he says, "" Love thine enemy. "" He does say that, and we think he's being unrealistic and sort of spiritual and highfalutin. "" Nice for him to say it, but I can't do that. "" But, actually, that's practical. 
+If you love your enemy that means you want your enemy to be happy. 
+If your enemy was really happy, why would they bother to be your enemy? 
+How boring to run around chasing you. 
+They would be relaxing somewhere having a good time. 
+So it makes sense to want your enemy to be happy, because they'll stop being your enemy because that's too much trouble. 
+But anyway, that's the "" lovely love. "" And then finally, the fifth step is compassion, "" universal compassion. "" And that is where you then look at the reality of all the beings you can think of. 
+And you look at them, and you see how they are. 
+And you realize how unhappy they are actually, mostly, most of the time. 
+You see that furrowed brow in people. 
+And then you realize they don't even have compassion on themselves. 
+They're driven by this duty and this obligation. 
+"I have to get that. I need more. I'm not worthy. And I should do something." 
+And they're rushing around all stressed out. 
+And they think of it as somehow macho, hard discipline on themselves. 
+But actually they are cruel to themselves. 
+And, of course, they are cruel and ruthless toward others. 
+And they, then, never get any positive feedback. 
+And the more they succeed and the more power they have, the more unhappy they are. 
+And this is where you feel real compassion for them. 
+And you then feel you must act. 
+And the choice of the action, of course, hopefully will be more practical than poor Asanga, who was fixing the maggots on the dog because he had that motivation, and whoever was in front of him, he wanted to help. 
+But, of course, that is impractical. He should have founded the ASPCA in the town and gotten some scientific help for dogs and maggots. 
+And I'm sure he did that later. (Laughter) But that just indicates the state of mind, you know. 
+And so the next step — the sixth step beyond "" universal compassion "" — is this thing where you're linked with the needs of others in a true way, and you have compassion for yourself also, and it isn't sentimental only. You might be in fear of something. 
+Some bad guy is making himself more and more unhappy being more and more mean to other people and getting punished in the future for it in various ways. 
+And in Buddhism, they catch it in the future life. 
+Of course in theistic religion they're punished by God or whatever. 
+And materialism, they think they get out of it just by not existing, by dying, but they don't. 
+And so they get reborn as whatever, you know. 
+Never mind. I won't get into that. 
+But the next step is called "" universal responsibility. "" And that is very important — the Charter of Compassion must lead us to develop through true compassion, what is called "" universal responsibility. "" In the great teaching of his Holiness the Dalai Lama that he always teaches everywhere, he says that that is the common religion of humanity: kindness. 
+But "" kindness "" means "" universal responsibility. "" And that means whatever happens to other beings is happening to us: we are responsible for that, and we should take it and do whatever we can at whatever little level and small level that we can do it. 
+We absolutely must do that. There is no way not to do it. 
+And then, finally, that leads to a new orientation in life where we live equally for ourselves and for others and we are joyful and happy. 
+One thing we mustn't think is that compassion makes you miserable. 
+Compassion makes you happy. 
+The first person who is happy when you get great compassion is yourself, even if you haven't done anything yet for anybody else. 
+Although, the change in your mind already does something for other beings: they can sense this new quality in yourself, and it helps them already, and gives them an example. 
+And that uncompassionate clock has just showed me that it's all over. 
+So, practice compassion, read the charter, disseminate it and develop it within yourself. 
+Don't just think, "" Well, I'm compassionate, "" or "" I'm not compassionate, "" and sort of think you're stuck there. 
+You can develop this. You can diminish the non-compassion, the cruelty, the callousness, the neglect of others, and take universal responsibility for them. 
+And then, not only will God smile and the eternal mama will smile, but Karen Armstrong will smile. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+I was only four years old when I saw my mother load a washing machine for the very first time in her life. 
+That was a great day for my mother. 
+My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine, and the first day it was going to be used, even Grandma was invited to see the machine. 
+And Grandma was even more excited. 
+Throughout her life she had been heating water with firewood, and she had hand washed laundry for seven children. 
+And now she was going to watch electricity do that work. 
+My mother carefully opened the door, and she loaded the laundry into the machine, like this. 
+And then, when she closed the door, Grandma said, "" No, no, no, no. 
+Let me, let me push the button. "" And Grandma pushed the button, and she said, "" Oh, fantastic! 
+I want to see this! Give me a chair! 
+Give me a chair! I want to see it, "" and she sat down in front of the machine, and she watched the entire washing program. 
+She was mesmerized. 
+To my grandmother, the washing machine was a miracle. 
+Today, in Sweden and other rich countries, people are using so many different machines. 
+Look, the homes are full of machines. 
+I can't even name them all. 
+And they also, when they want to travel, they use flying machines that can take them to remote destinations. 
+And yet, in the world, there are so many people who still heat the water on fire, and they cook their food on fire. 
+Sometimes they don't even have enough food, and they live below the poverty line. 
+There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than two dollars a day. 
+And the richest people over there — there's one billion people — and they live above what I call the "" air line, "" because they spend more than $80 a day on their consumption. 
+But this is just one, two, three billion people, and obviously there are seven billion people in the world, so there must be one, two, three, four billion people more who live in between the poverty and the air line. 
+They have electricity, but the question is, how many have washing machines? 
+I've done the scrutiny of market data, and I've found that, indeed, the washing machine has penetrated below the air line, and today there's an additional one billion people out there who live above the "" wash line. "" (Laughter) And they consume more than $40 per day. 
+So two billion have access to washing machines. 
+And the remaining five billion, how do they wash? 
+Or, to be more precise, how do most of the women in the world wash? 
+Because it remains hard work for women to wash. 
+They wash like this: by hand. 
+It's a hard, time-consuming labor, which they have to do for hours every week. 
+And sometimes they also have to bring water from far away to do the laundry at home, or they have to bring the laundry away to a stream far off. 
+And they want the washing machine. 
+They don't want to spend such a large part of their life doing this hard work with so relatively low productivity. 
+And there's nothing different in their wish than it was for my grandma. 
+Look here, two generations ago in Sweden — picking water from the stream, heating with firewood and washing like that. 
+They want the washing machine in exactly the same way. 
+But when I lecture to environmentally-concerned students, they tell me, "" No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines. "" How can we tell this woman that she ain't going to have a washing machine? 
+And then I ask my students, I've asked them — over the last two years I've asked, "How many of you doesn't use a car?" 
+And some of them proudly raise their hand and say, "" I don't use a car. "" And then I put the really tough question: "" How many of you hand-wash your jeans and your bed sheets? "" And no one raised their hand. 
+Even the hardcore in the green movement use washing machines. 
+(Laughter) So how come [this is] something that everyone uses and they think others will not stop it? What is special with this? 
+I had to do an analysis about the energy used in the world. 
+Here we are. 
+Look here, you see the seven billion people up there: the air people, the wash people, the bulb people and the fire people. 
+One unit like this is an energy unit of fossil fuel — oil, coal or gas. 
+That's what most of electricity and the energy in the world is. 
+And it's 12 units used in the entire world, and the richest one billion, they use six of them. 
+Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world's population. 
+And these ones who have washing machines, but not a house full of other machines, they use two. 
+This group uses three, one each. 
+And they also have electricity. 
+And over there they don't even use one each. 
+That makes 12 of them. 
+But the main concern for the environmentally-interested students — and they are right — is about the future. 
+What are the trends? If we just prolong the trends, without any real advanced analysis, to 2050, there are two things that can increase the energy use. 
+First, population growth. 
+Second, economic growth. 
+Population growth will mainly occur among the poorest people here because they have high child mortality and they have many children per woman. 
+And [with] that you will get two extra, but that won't change the energy use very much. 
+What will happen is economic growth. 
+The best of here in the emerging economies — I call them the New East — they will jump the air line. 
+"" Wopp! "" they will say. 
+And they will start to use as much as the Old West are doing already. 
+And these people, they want the washing machine. 
+I told you. They'll go there. 
+And they will double their energy use. 
+And we hope that the poor people will get into the electric light. 
+And they'll get a two-child family without a stop in population growth. 
+But the total energy consumption will increase to 22 units. 
+And these 22 units — still the richest people use most of it. 
+So what needs to be done? 
+Because the risk, the high probability of climate change is real. 
+It's real. 
+Of course they must be more energy-efficient. 
+They must change behavior in some way. 
+They must also start to produce green energy, much more green energy. 
+But until they have the same energy consumption per person, they shouldn't give advice to others — what to do and what not to do. 
+(Applause) Here we can get more green energy all over. 
+This is what we hope may happen. 
+It's a real challenge in the future. 
+But I can assure you that this woman in the favela in Rio, she wants a washing machine. 
+She's very happy about her minister of energy that provided electricity to everyone — so happy that she even voted for her. 
+And she became Dilma Rousseff, the president-elect of one of the biggest democracies in the world — moving from minister of energy to president. 
+If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. 
+They love them. 
+And what's the magic with them? 
+My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. 
+She said, "" Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry. 
+The machine will make the work. 
+And now we can go to the library. "" Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? 
+You get books out of the machines, children's books. 
+And mother got time to read for me. 
+She loved this. I got the "" ABC's "" — this is where I started my career as a professor, when my mother had time to read for me. 
+And she also got books for herself. 
+She managed to study English and learn that as a foreign language. 
+And she read so many novels, so many different novels here. 
+And we really, we really loved this machine. 
+And what we said, my mother and me, "" Thank you industrialization. 
+Thank you steel mill. 
+Thank you power station. 
+And thank you chemical processing industry that gave us time to read books. "" Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What is going to be the future of learning? 
+I do have a plan, but in order for me to tell you what that plan is, I need to tell you a little story, which kind of sets the stage. 
+I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? 
+And you can look far back into the past, but if you look at present-day schooling the way it is, it's quite easy to figure out where it came from. 
+It came from about 300 years ago, and it came from the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet. ["" The British Empire ""] Imagine trying to run the show, trying to run the entire planet, without computers, without telephones, with data handwritten on pieces of paper, and traveling by ships. 
+But the Victorians actually did it. 
+What they did was amazing. 
+They created a global computer made up of people. 
+It's still with us today. 
+It's called the bureaucratic administrative machine. 
+In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. 
+They made another machine to produce those people: the school. 
+The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. 
+They must be identical to each other. 
+They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. 
+They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional. 
+The Victorians were great engineers. 
+They engineered a system that was so robust that it's still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. 
+The empire is gone, so what are we doing with that design that produces these identical people, and what are we going to do next if we ever are going to do anything else with it? 
+["" Schools as we know them are obsolete ""] So that's a pretty strong comment there. 
+I said schools as we know them now, they're obsolete. 
+I'm not saying they're broken. 
+It's quite fashionable to say that the education system's broken. 
+It's not broken. It's wonderfully constructed. 
+It's just that we don't need it anymore. It's outdated. 
+What are the kind of jobs that we have today? 
+Well, the clerks are the computers. 
+They're there in thousands in every office. 
+And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs. 
+Those people don't need to be able to write beautifully by hand. 
+They don't need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. 
+They do need to be able to read. 
+In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly. 
+Well, that's today, but we don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like. 
+We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. 
+How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world? 
+Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. 
+I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi, 14 years ago. 
+And right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. 
+And I used to think, how on Earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs? 
+Or should they not? 
+At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers, and who used to tell me, "" You know, my son, I think he's gifted, because he does wonderful things with computers. 
+And my daughter — oh, surely she is extra-intelligent. "" And so on. So I suddenly figured that, how come all the rich people are having these extraordinarily gifted children? 
+(Laughter) What did the poor do wrong? 
+I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office, and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn't know any English, didn't know what the Internet was. 
+The children came running in. 
+It was three feet off the ground, and they said, "" What is this? "" And I said, "" Yeah, it's, I don't know. "" (Laughter) They said, "" Why have you put it there? "" I said, "" Just like that. "" And they said, "" Can we touch it? "" I said, "" If you wish to. "" And I went away. 
+About eight hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. 
+So I said, "" Well that's impossible, because — How is it possible? They don't know anything. "" My colleagues said, "" No, it's a simple solution. 
+One of your students must have been passing by, showed them how to use the mouse. "" So I said, "" Yeah, that's possible. "" So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. (Laughter) I repeated the experiment there. 
+There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it. 
+When they saw me, they said, "We want a faster processor and a better mouse." 
+(Laughter) So I said, "" How on Earth do you know all this? "" And they said something very interesting to me. 
+In an irritated voice, they said, "" You've given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it. "" (Laughter) That's the first time, as a teacher, that I had heard the word "" teach ourselves "" said so casually. 
+Here's a short glimpse from those years. 
+That's the first day at the Hole in the Wall. 
+On your right is an eight-year-old. 
+To his left is his student. She's six. 
+And he's teaching her how to browse. 
+Then onto other parts of the country, I repeated this over and over again, getting exactly the same results that we were. 
+["" Hole in the wall film - 1999 ""] An eight-year-old telling his elder sister what to do. 
+And finally a girl explaining in Marathi what it is, and said, "" There's a processor inside. "" So I started publishing. 
+I published everywhere. I wrote down and measured everything, and I said, in nine months, a group of children left alone with a computer in any language will reach the same standard as an office secretary in the West. 
+I'd seen it happen over and over and over again. 
+But I was curious to know, what else would they do if they could do this much? 
+I started experimenting with other subjects, among them, for example, pronunciation. 
+There's one community of children in southern India whose English pronunciation is really bad, and they needed good pronunciation because that would improve their jobs. 
+I gave them a speech-to-text engine in a computer, and I said, "" Keep talking into it until it types what you say. "" (Laughter) They did that, and watch a little bit of this. 
+Computer: Nice to meet you.Child: Nice to meet you. 
+Sugata Mitra: The reason I ended with the face of this young lady over there is because I suspect many of you know her. 
+She has now joined a call center in Hyderabad and may have tortured you about your credit card bills in a very clear English accent. 
+So then people said, well, how far will it go? 
+Where does it stop? 
+I decided I would destroy my own argument by creating an absurd proposition. 
+I made a hypothesis, a ridiculous hypothesis. 
+Tamil is a south Indian language, and I said, can Tamil-speaking children in a south Indian village learn the biotechnology of DNA replication in English from a streetside computer? 
+And I said, I'll measure them. They'll get a zero. 
+I'll spend a couple of months, I'll leave it for a couple of months, I'll go back, they'll get another zero. 
+I'll go back to the lab and say, we need teachers. 
+I found a village. It was called Kallikuppam in southern India. 
+I put in Hole in the Wall computers there, downloaded all kinds of stuff from the Internet about DNA replication, most of which I didn't understand. 
+The children came rushing, said, "" What's all this? "" So I said, "" It's very topical, very important. But it's all in English. "" So they said, "" How can we understand such big English words and diagrams and chemistry? "" So by now, I had developed a new pedagogical method, so I applied that. I said, "" I haven't the foggiest idea. "" (Laughter) "And anyway, I am going away." (Laughter) 
+So I left them for a couple of months. 
+They'd got a zero. I gave them a test. 
+I came back after two months and the children trooped in and said, "" We've understood nothing. "" So I said, "" Well, what did I expect? "" So I said, "" Okay, but how long did it take you before you decided that you can't understand anything? "" So they said, "" We haven't given up. 
+We look at it every single day. "" So I said, "" What? You don't understand these screens and you keep staring at it for two months? What for? "" So a little girl who you see just now, she raised her hand, and she says to me in broken Tamil and English, she said, "" Well, apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes disease, we haven't understood anything else. "" (Laughter) (Applause) So I tested them. 
+I got an educational impossibility, zero to 30 percent in two months in the tropical heat with a computer under the tree in a language they didn't know doing something that's a decade ahead of their time. 
+Absurd. But I had to follow the Victorian norm. 
+Thirty percent is a fail. 
+How do I get them to pass? I have to get them 20 more marks. 
+I couldn't find a teacher. What I did find was a friend that they had, a 22-year-old girl who was an accountant and she played with them all the time. 
+So I asked this girl, "" Can you help them? "" So she says, "" Absolutely not. 
+I didn't have science in school. I have no idea what they're doing under that tree all day long. I can't help you. "" I said, "" I'll tell you what. Use the method of the grandmother. "" So she says, "" What's that? "" I said, "" Stand behind them. 
+Whenever they do anything, you just say, 'Well, wow, I mean, how did you do that? 
+What's the next page? Gosh, when I was your age, I could have never done that. 'You know what grannies do. "" So she did that for two more months. 
+The scores jumped to 50 percent. 
+Kallikuppam had caught up with my control school in New Delhi, a rich private school with a trained biotechnology teacher. 
+When I saw that graph I knew there is a way to level the playing field. 
+Here's Kallikuppam. 
+(Children speaking) Neurons... communication. 
+I got the camera angle wrong. That one is just amateur stuff, but what she was saying, as you could make out, was about neurons, with her hands were like that, and she was saying neurons communicate. 
+At 12. 
+So what are jobs going to be like? 
+Well, we know what they're like today. 
+What's learning going to be like? We know what it's like today, children pouring over with their mobile phones on the one hand and then reluctantly going to school to pick up their books with their other hand. 
+What will it be tomorrow? 
+Could it be that we don't need to go to school at all? 
+Could it be that, at the point in time when you need to know something, you can find out in two minutes? 
+Could it be — a devastating question, a question that was framed for me by Nicholas Negroponte — could it be that we are heading towards or maybe in a future where knowing is obsolete? 
+But that's terrible. We are homo sapiens. 
+Knowing, that's what distinguishes us from the apes. 
+But look at it this way. 
+It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. 
+It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete. 
+What an achievement that is. 
+But we have to integrate that into our own future. 
+Encouragement seems to be the key. 
+If you look at Kuppam, if you look at all of the experiments that I did, it was simply saying, "" Wow, "" saluting learning. 
+There is evidence from neuroscience. 
+The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. 
+Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. 
+We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, "" Perform. "" Why did they create a system like that? 
+Because it was needed. 
+There was an age in the Age of Empires when you needed those people who can survive under threat. 
+When you're standing in a trench all alone, if you could have survived, you're okay, you've passed. 
+If you didn't, you failed. 
+But the Age of Empires is gone. 
+What happens to creativity in our age? 
+We need to shift that balance back from threat to pleasure. 
+I came back to England looking for British grandmothers. 
+I put out notices in papers saying, if you are a British grandmother, if you have broadband and a web camera, can you give me one hour of your time per week for free? 
+I got 200 in the first two weeks. 
+I know more British grandmothers than anyone in the universe. (Laughter) They're called the Granny Cloud. 
+The Granny Cloud sits on the Internet. 
+If there's a child in trouble, we beam a Gran. 
+She goes on over Skype and she sorts things out. 
+I've seen them do it from a village called Diggles in northwestern England, deep inside a village in Tamil Nadu, India, 6,000 miles away. 
+She does it with only one age-old gesture. 
+"Shhh." 
+Okay? 
+Watch this. 
+Grandmother: You can't catch me. You say it. You can't catch me. 
+Children: You can't catch me. Grandmother: I'm the Gingerbread Man.Children: I'm the Gingerbread Man. Grandmother: Well done! Very good. SM: So what's happening here? I think what we need to look at is 
+we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. 
+If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. 
+It's not about making learning happen. 
+It's about letting it happen. 
+The teacher sets the process in motion and then she stands back in awe and watches as learning happens. 
+I think that's what all this is pointing at. 
+But how will we know? How will we come to know? 
+Well, I intend to build these Self-Organized Learning Environments. 
+They are basically broadband, collaboration and encouragement put together. 
+I've tried this in many, many schools. 
+It's been tried all over the world, and teachers sort of stand back and say, "" It just happens by itself? "" And I said, "" Yeah, it happens by itself. "" "" How did you know that? "" I said, "" You won't believe the children who told me and where they're from. "" Here's a SOLE in action. 
+(Children talking) This one is in England. 
+He maintains law and order, because remember, there's no teacher around. 
+Girl: The total number of electrons is not equal to the total number of protons — SM: Australia Girl: — giving it a net positive or negative electrical charge. 
+The net charge on an ion is equal to the number of protons in the ion minus the number of electrons. 
+SM: A decade ahead of her time. 
+So SOLEs, I think we need a curriculum of big questions. 
+You already heard about that. You know what that means. 
+There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say, "What are those twinkling lights?" 
+They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions. 
+We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle. 
+But that's not sexy enough. 
+The way you would put it to a nine-year-old is to say, "" If a meteorite was coming to hit the Earth, how would you figure out if it was going to or not? "" And if he says, "" Well, what? how? "" you say, "" There's a magic word. It's called the tangent of an angle, "" and leave him alone. He'll figure it out. 
+So here are a couple of images from SOLEs. 
+I've tried incredible, incredible questions — "" When did the world begin? How will it end? "" — to nine-year-olds. 
+This one is about what happens to the air we breathe. 
+This is done by children without the help of any teacher. 
+The teacher only raises the question, and then stands back and admires the answer. 
+So what's my wish? 
+My wish is that we design the future of learning. 
+We don't want to be spare parts for a great human computer, do we? 
+So we need to design a future for learning. 
+And I've got to — hang on, I've got to get this wording exactly right, because, you know, it's very important. 
+My wish is to help design a future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their wonder and their ability to work together. 
+Help me build this school. 
+It will be called the School in the Cloud. 
+It will be a school where children go on these intellectual adventures driven by the big questions which their mediators put in. 
+The way I want to do this is to build a facility where I can study this. 
+It's a facility which is practically unmanned. 
+There's only one granny who manages health and safety. 
+The rest of it's from the cloud. 
+The lights are turned on and off by the cloud, etc., etc., everything's done from the cloud. 
+But I want you for another purpose. 
+You can do Self-Organized Learning Environments at home, in the school, outside of school, in clubs. 
+It's very easy to do. There's a great document produced by TED which tells you how to do it. 
+If you would please, please do it across all five continents and send me the data, then I'll put it all together, move it into the School of Clouds, and create the future of learning. 
+That's my wish. 
+And just one last thing. 
+I'll take you to the top of the Himalayas. 
+At 12,000 feet, where the air is thin, I once built two Hole in the Wall computers, and the children flocked there. 
+And there was this little girl who was following me around. 
+And I said to her, "" You know, I want to give a computer to everybody, every child. 
+I don't know, what should I do? "" And I was trying to take a picture of her quietly. 
+She suddenly raised her hand like this, and said to me, "Get on with it." 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I think it was good advice. 
+I'll follow her advice. I'll stop talking. 
+Thank you. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. Wow. (Applause) 
+
+Everything I do, and everything I do professionally — my life — has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in Africa. 
+From 1971 to 1977 — I look young, but I'm not — (Laughter) — I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries. 
+I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed. 
+And I was distraught. 
+I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. 
+Instead, everything we touched we killed. 
+Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, "Ripples from the Zambezi," was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. 
+So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and... 
+And of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that, so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. (Laughter) And we were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. 
+But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, "" Thank God we're here. "" (Laughter) "Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation." 
+And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully. 
+We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. 
+And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians, "Look how easy agriculture is." 
+When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. (Laughter) And we said to the Zambians, "" My God, the hippos! "" And the Zambians said, "" Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here. "" (Laughter) "Why didn't you tell us?" "You never asked." 
+I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing, and after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia. 
+Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos. 
+You should see the rubbish — (Applause) — You should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting African people. 
+You want to read the book, read "" Dead Aid, "" by Dambisa Moyo, Zambian woman economist. 
+The book was published in 2009. 
+We Western donor countries have given the African continent two trillion American dollars in the last 50 years. 
+I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done. 
+Just go and read her book. 
+Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done. 
+We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries, and there are only two ways we deal with people: We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic. 
+The two words come from the Latin root "" pater, "" which means "" father. "" But they mean two different things. 
+Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children. "" I love you so much. "" Patronizing, I treat everybody from another culture as if they were my servants. 
+That's why the white people in Africa are called "" bwana, "" boss. 
+I was given a slap in the face reading a book, "" Small is Beautiful, "" written by Schumacher, who said, above all in economic development, if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. 
+This should be the first principle of aid. 
+The first principle of aid is respect. 
+This morning, the gentleman who opened this conference lay a stick on the floor, and said, "" Can we — can you imagine a city that is not neocolonial? "" I decided when I was 27 years old to only respond to people, and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation, where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion, the servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. 
+So what you do — you shut up. 
+You never arrive in a community with any ideas, and you sit with the local people. 
+We don't work from offices. 
+We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. 
+We have zero infrastructure. 
+And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do. 
+The most important thing is passion. 
+You can give somebody an idea. 
+If that person doesn't want to do it, what are you going to do? 
+The passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing. 
+The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. 
+And then we help them to go and find the knowledge, because nobody in the world can succeed alone. 
+The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. 
+So years and years ago, I had this idea: Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the community to tell people what to do, why don't, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. 
+Let me tell you a secret. 
+There is a problem with community meetings. 
+Entrepreneurs never come, and they never tell you, in a public meeting, what they want to do with their own money, what opportunity they have identified. 
+So planning has this blind spot. 
+The smartest people in your community you don't even know, because they don't come to your public meetings. 
+What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one, you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn't exist. 
+You have to create a new profession. 
+The profession is the family doctor of enterprise, the family doctor of business, who sits with you in your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe, and helps you find the resources to transform your passion into a way to make a living. 
+I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia. 
+I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time, trying to go away from this patronizing bullshit that we arrive and tell you what to do. 
+And so what I did in Esperance that first year was to just walk the streets, and in three days I had my first client, and I helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy, and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth, to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say, "You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?" 
+And I helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albany for 60 cents a kilo, but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo, and the farmers came to talk to me, said, "Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?" 
+In a year, I had 27 projects going on, and the government came to see me to say, "" How can you do that? 
+How can you do —? "" And I said, "" I do something very, very, very difficult. 
+I shut up, and listen to them. "" (Laughter) So — (Applause) — So the government says, "" Do it again. "" (Laughter) We've done it in 300 communities around the world. 
+We have helped to start 40,000 businesses. 
+There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are dying of solitude. 
+Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history, died age 96, a few years ago. 
+Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business, and this is what Peter Drucker says: "" Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. "" Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship. 
+So now you're rebuilding Christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in Christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy. 
+You have to learn how to get these people to come and talk to you. 
+You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy, you have to be fantastic at helping them, and then they will come, and they will come in droves. 
+In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients. 
+Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people, the intelligence and the passion? 
+Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning? 
+Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded. 
+So what I'm saying is that entrepreneurship is where it's at. 
+We are at the end of the first industrial revolution — nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing — and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable. 
+The internal combustion engine is not sustainable. 
+Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable. 
+What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way. 
+The technologies do not exist to do that. 
+Who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it! 
+Government? Forget about it! 
+It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now. 
+There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazine many, many years ago. 
+There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860. 
+And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years. 
+Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with. 
+They were already drowning in manure. (Laughter) So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York. 
+So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies — 1,001. 
+The idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over, and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters. 
+Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford. 
+However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs. 
+First, you have to offer them confidentiality. 
+Otherwise they don't come and talk to you. 
+Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated, passionate service to them. 
+And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship. 
+The smallest company, the biggest company, has to be capable of doing three things beautifully: The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic, you have to have fantastic marketing, and you have to have tremendous financial management. 
+Guess what? 
+We have never met a single human being in the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money. 
+It doesn't exist. 
+This person has never been born. 
+We've done the research, and we have looked at the 100 iconic companies of the world — Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford, all the new companies, Google, Yahoo. 
+There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common, only one: None were started by one person. 
+Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-olds in Northumberland, and we start the class by giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography, and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline, in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography how many times Richard uses the word "" I "" and how many times he uses the word "" we. "" Never the word "" I, "" and the word "" we "" 32 times. 
+He wasn't alone when he started. 
+Nobody started a company alone. No one. 
+So we can create the community where we have facilitators who come from a small business background sitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddies who will do to you, what somebody did for this gentleman who talks about this epic, somebody who will say to you, "" What do you need? 
+What can you do? Can you make it? 
+Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money? "" "Oh, no, I cannot do this." "Would you like me to find you somebody?" 
+We activate communities. 
+We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitator to help you to find resources and people and we have discovered that the miracle of the intelligence of local people is such that you can change the culture and the economy of this community just by capturing the passion, the energy and imagination of your own people. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I want to talk about the transformed media landscape, and what it means for anybody who has a message that they want to get out to anywhere in the world. 
+And I want to illustrate that by telling a couple of stories about that transformation. 
+I'll start here. Last November there was a presidential election. 
+You probably read something about it in the papers. 
+And there was some concern that in some parts of the country there might be voter suppression. 
+And so a plan came up to video the vote. 
+And the idea was that individual citizens with phones capable of taking photos or making video would document their polling places, on the lookout for any kind of voter suppression techniques, and would upload this to a central place. 
+And that this would operate as a kind of citizen observation — that citizens would not be there just to cast individual votes, but also to help ensure the sanctity of the vote overall. 
+So this is a pattern that assumes we're all in this together. 
+What matters here isn't technical capital, it's social capital. 
+These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. 
+It isn't when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. 
+It's when everybody is able to take them for granted. 
+Because now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we're all in this together. 
+And so we're starting to see a media landscape in which innovation is happening everywhere, and moving from one spot to another. 
+That is a huge transformation. 
+Not to put too fine a point on it, the moment we're living through — the moment our historical generation is living through — is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history. 
+Now that's a big claim. I'm going to try to back it up. 
+There are only four periods in the last 500 years where media has changed enough to qualify for the label "" revolution. "" The first one is the famous one, the printing press: movable type, oil-based inks, that whole complex of innovations that made printing possible and turned Europe upside-down, starting in the middle of the 1400s. 
+Then, a couple of hundred years ago, there was innovation in two-way communication, conversational media: first the telegraph, then the telephone. 
+Slow, text-based conversations, then real-time voice based conversations. 
+Then, about 150 years ago, there was a revolution in recorded media other than print: first photos, then recorded sound, then movies, all encoded onto physical objects. 
+And finally, about 100 years ago, the harnessing of electromagnetic spectrum to send sound and images through the air — radio and television. 
+This is the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century. 
+This is what those of us of a certain age grew up with, and are used to. 
+But there is a curious asymmetry here. 
+The media that is good at creating conversations is no good at creating groups. 
+And the media that's good at creating groups is no good at creating conversations. 
+If you want to have a conversation in this world, you have it with one other person. 
+If you want to address a group, you get the same message and you give it to everybody in the group, whether you're doing that with a broadcasting tower or a printing press. 
+That was the media landscape as we had it in the twentieth century. 
+And this is what changed. 
+This thing that looks like a peacock hit a windscreen is Bill Cheswick's map of the Internet. 
+He traces the edges of the individual networks and then color codes them. 
+The Internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time. 
+Whereas the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern, and television, radio, magazines, books, gave us the one-to-many pattern, the Internet gives us the many-to-many pattern. 
+For the first time, media is natively good at supporting these kinds of conversations. 
+That's one of the big changes. 
+The second big change is that, as all media gets digitized, the Internet also becomes the mode of carriage for all other media, meaning that phone calls migrate to the Internet, magazines migrate to the Internet, movies migrate to the Internet. 
+And that means that every medium is right next door to every other medium. 
+Put another way, media is increasingly less just a source of information, and it is increasingly more a site of coordination, because groups that see or hear or watch or listen to something can now gather around and talk to each other as well. 
+And the third big change is that members of the former audience, as Dan Gilmore calls them, can now also be producers and not consumers. 
+Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new producer joins as well, because the same equipment — phones, computers — let you consume and produce. 
+It's as if, when you bought a book, they threw in the printing press for free; it's like you had a phone that could turn into a radio if you pressed the right buttons. 
+That is a huge change in the media landscape we're used to. 
+And it's not just Internet or no Internet. 
+We've had the Internet in its public form for almost 20 years now, and it's still changing as the media becomes more social. 
+It's still changing patterns even among groups who know how to deal with the Internet well. 
+Second story. 
+Last May, China in the Sichuan province had a terrible earthquake, 7.9 magnitude, massive destruction in a wide area, as the Richter Scale has it. 
+And the earthquake was reported as it was happening. 
+People were texting from their phones. They were taking photos of buildings. 
+They were taking videos of buildings shaking. 
+They were uploading it to QQ, China's largest Internet service. 
+They were Twittering it. 
+And so as the quake was happening the news was reported. 
+And because of the social connections, Chinese students coming elsewhere, and going to school, or businesses in the rest of the world opening offices in China — there were people listening all over the world, hearing this news. 
+The BBC got their first wind of the Chinese quake from Twitter. 
+Twitter announced the existence of the quake several minutes before the US Geological Survey had anything up online for anybody to read. 
+The last time China had a quake of that magnitude it took them three months to admit that it had happened. 
+(Laughter) Now they might have liked to have done that here, rather than seeing these pictures go up online. 
+But they weren't given that choice, because their own citizens beat them to the punch. 
+Even the government learned of the earthquake from their own citizens, rather than from the Xinhua News Agency. 
+And this stuff rippled like wildfire. 
+For a while there the top 10 most clicked links on Twitter, the global short messaging service — nine of the top 10 links were about the quake. 
+People collating information, pointing people to news sources, pointing people to the US geological survey. 
+The 10th one was kittens on a treadmill, but that's the Internet for you. 
+(Laughter) But nine of the 10 in those first hours. 
+And within half a day donation sites were up, and donations were pouring in from all around the world. 
+This was an incredible, coordinated global response. 
+And the Chinese then, in one of their periods of media openness, decided that they were going to let it go, that they were going to let this citizen reporting fly. 
+And then this happened. 
+People began to figure out, in the Sichuan Provence, that the reason so many school buildings had collapsed — because tragically the earthquake happened during a school day — the reason so many school buildings collapsed is that corrupt officials had taken bribes to allow those building to be built to less than code. 
+And so they started, the citizen journalists started reporting that as well. And there was an incredible picture. 
+You may have seen in on the front page of the New York Times. 
+A local official literally prostrated himself in the street, in front of these protesters, in order to get them to go away. 
+Essentially to say, "" We will do anything to placate you, just please stop protesting in public. "" But these are people who have been radicalized, because, thanks to the one child policy, they have lost everyone in their next generation. 
+Someone who has seen the death of a single child now has nothing to lose. 
+And so the protest kept going. 
+And finally the Chinese cracked down. 
+That was enough of citizen media. 
+And so they began to arrest the protesters. 
+They began to shut down the media that the protests were happening on. 
+China is probably the most successful manager of Internet censorship in the world, using something that is widely described as the Great Firewall of China. 
+And the Great Firewall of China is a set of observation points that assume that media is produced by professionals, it mostly comes in from the outside world, it comes in relatively sparse chunks, and it comes in relatively slowly. 
+And because of those four characteristics they are able to filter it as it comes into the country. 
+But like the Maginot Line, the great firewall of China was facing in the wrong direction for this challenge, because not one of those four things was true in this environment. 
+The media was produced locally. It was produced by amateurs. 
+It was produced quickly. And it was produced at such an incredible abundance that there was no way to filter it as it appeared. 
+And so now the Chinese government, who for a dozen years, has quite successfully filtered the web, is now in the position of having to decide whether to allow or shut down entire services, because the transformation to amateur media is so enormous that they can't deal with it any other way. 
+And in fact that is happening this week. 
+On the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen they just, two days ago, announced that they were simply shutting down access to Twitter, because there was no way to filter it other than that. 
+They had to turn the spigot entirely off. 
+Now these changes don't just affect people who want to censor messages. 
+They also affect people who want to send messages, because this is really a transformation of the ecosystem as a whole, not just a particular strategy. 
+The classic media problem, from the 20th century is, how does an organization have a message that they want to get out to a group of people distributed at the edges of a network. 
+And here is the twentieth century answer. 
+Bundle up the message. Send the same message to everybody. 
+National message. Targeted individuals. 
+Relatively sparse number of producers. 
+Very expensive to do, so there is not a lot of competition. 
+This is how you reach people. 
+All of that is over. 
+We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. 
+Now most organizations that are trying to send messages to the outside world, to the distributed collection of the audience, are now used to this change. 
+The audience can talk back. 
+And that's a little freaky. But you can get used to it after a while, as people do. 
+But that's not the really crazy change that we're living in the middle of. 
+The really crazy change is here: it's the fact that they are no longer disconnected from each other, the fact that former consumers are now producers, the fact that the audience can talk directly to one another; because there is a lot more amateurs than professionals, and because the size of the network, the complexity of the network is actually the square of the number of participants, meaning that the network, when it grows large, grows very, very large. 
+As recently at last decade, most of the media that was available for public consumption was produced by professionals. 
+Those days are over, never to return. 
+It is the green lines now, that are the source of the free content, which brings me to my last story. 
+We saw some of the most imaginative use of social media during the Obama campaign. 
+And I don't mean most imaginative use in politics — I mean most imaginative use ever. 
+And one of the things Obama did, was they famously, the Obama campaign did, was they famously put up MyBarackObama.com, myBO.com And millions of citizens rushed in to participate, and to try and figure out how to help. 
+An incredible conversation sprung up there. 
+And then, this time last year, Obama announced that he was going to change his vote on FISA, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. 
+He had said, in January, that he would not sign a bill that granted telecom immunity for possibly warrantless spying on American persons. 
+By the summer, in the middle of the general campaign, He said, "" I've thought about the issue more. I've changed my mind. 
+I'm going to vote for this bill. "" And many of his own supporters on his own site went very publicly berserk. 
+It was Senator Obama when they created it. They changed the name later. 
+"Please get FISA right." 
+Within days of this group being created it was the fastest growing group on myBO.com; within weeks of its being created it was the largest group. 
+Obama had to issue a press release. 
+He had to issue a reply. 
+And he said essentially, "" I have considered the issue. 
+I understand where you are coming from. 
+But having considered it all, I'm still going to vote the way I'm going to vote. 
+But I wanted to reach out to you and say, I understand that you disagree with me, and I'm going to take my lumps on this one. "" This didn't please anybody. But then a funny thing happened in the conversation. 
+People in that group realized that Obama had never shut them down. 
+Nobody in the Obama campaign had ever tried to hide the group or make it harder to join, to deny its existence, to delete it, to take to off the site. 
+They had understood that their role with myBO.com was to convene their supporters but not to control their supporters. 
+And that is the kind of discipline that it takes to make really mature use of this media. 
+Media, the media landscape that we knew, as familiar as it was, as easy conceptually as it was to deal with the idea that professionals broadcast messages to amateurs, is increasingly slipping away. 
+In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap, in a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full participants, in that world, media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals. 
+It is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups. 
+And the choice we face, I mean anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere in the world, isn't whether or not that is the media environment we want to operate in. 
+That's the media environment we've got. 
+The question we all face now is, "" How can we make best use of this media? 
+Even though it means changing the way we've always done it. "" Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Our ability to create and sustain economic growth is the defining challenge of our time. 
+Of course there are other challenges — health care, disease burdens and pandemics, environmental challenges and, of course, radicalized terrorism. 
+However, to the extent that we can actually solve the economic growth challenge, it will take us a long way to solving the challenges that I've just elucidated. 
+More importantly, unless and until we solve economic growth and create sustainable, long-term economic growth, we'll be unable to address the seemingly intractable challenges that continue to pervade the globe today, whether it's health care, education or economic development. 
+The fundamental question is this: How are we going to create economic growth in advanced and developed economies like the United States and across Europe at a time when they continue to struggle to create economic growth after the financial crisis? 
+They continue to underperform and to see an erosion in the three key drivers of economic growth: capital, labor and productivity. 
+In particular, these developed economies continue to see debts and deficits, the decline and erosion of both the quality and quantity of labor and they also see productivity stalling. 
+In a similar vein, how are we going to create economic growth in the emerging markets, where 90 percent of the world's population lives and where, on average, 70 percent of the population is under the age of 25? 
+In these countries, it is essential that they grow at a minimum of seven percent a year in order to put a dent in poverty and to double per capita incomes in one generation. 
+And yet today, the largest emerging economies — countries with at least 50 million people — continue to struggle to reach that seven percent magic mark. 
+Worse than that, countries like India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and even China are falling below that seven percent number and, in many cases, actually regressing. 
+Economic growth matters. 
+With economic growth, countries and societies enter into a virtuous cycle of upward mobility, opportunity and improved living standards. 
+Without growth, countries contract and atrophy, not just in the annals of economic statistics but also in the meaning of life and how lives are lived. 
+Economic growth matters powerfully for the individual. 
+If growth wanes, the risk to human progress and the risk of political and social instability rises, and societies become dimmer, coarser and smaller. 
+The context matters. 
+And countries in emerging markets do not need to grow at the same rates as developed countries. 
+Now, I know some of you in this room find this to be a risky proposition. 
+There are some people here who will turn around and be quite disillusioned by what's happened around the world and basically ascribe that to economic growth. 
+You worry about the overpopulation of the planet. 
+And looking at the UN's recent statistics and projections that the world will have 11 billion people on the planet before it plateaus in 2100, you're concerned about what that does to natural resources — arable land, potable water, energy and minerals. 
+You are also concerned about the degradation of the environment. 
+And you worry about how man, embodied in the corporate globalist, has become greedy and corrupt. 
+But I'm here to tell you today that economic growth has been the backbone of changes in living standards of millions of people around the world. 
+And more importantly, it's not just economic growth that has been driven by capitalism. 
+The definition of capitalism, very simply put, is that the factors of production, such as trade and industry, capital and labor, are left in the hands of the private sector and not the state. 
+It's really essential here that we understand that fundamentally the critique is not for economic growth per se but what has happened to capitalism. 
+And to the extent that we need to create economic growth over the long term, we're going to have to pursue it with a better form of economic stance. 
+Economic growth needs capitalism, but it needs it to work properly. 
+And as I mentioned a moment ago, the core of the capitalist system has been defined by private actors. 
+And even this, however, is a very simplistic dichotomy. 
+Capitalism: good; non-capitalism: bad. 
+When in practical experience, capitalism is much more of a spectrum. 
+And we have countries such as China, which have practiced more state capitalism, and we have countries like the Unites States which are more market capitalist. 
+Our efforts to critique the capitalist system, however, have tended to focus on countries like China that are in fact not blatantly market capitalism. 
+However, there is a real reason and real concern for us to now focus our attentions on purer forms of capitalism, particularly those embodied by the United States. 
+This is really important because this type of capitalism has increasingly been afforded the critique that it is now fostering corruption and, worse still, it's increasing income inequality — the idea that the few are benefiting at the expense of the many. 
+The two really critical questions that we need to address is how can we fix capitalism so that it can help create economic growth but at the same time can help to address social ills. 
+In order to think about that framing, we have to ask ourselves, how does capitalism work today? 
+Very simplistically, capitalism is set on the basis of an individual utility maximizer — a selfish individual who goes after what he or she wants. 
+And only after they've maximized their utility do they then decide it's important to provide support to other social contracts. 
+Of course, in this system governments do tax, and they use part of their revenues to fund social programs, recognizing that government's role is not just regulation but also to be arbiter of social goods. 
+But nevertheless, this framework — this two-stage framework — is the basis from which we must now start to think about how we can improve the capitalist model. 
+I would argue that there are two sides to this challenge. 
+First of all, we can draw on the right-wing policies to see what could be beneficial for us to think about how we can improve capitalism. 
+In particular, right-leaning policies have tended to focus on things like conditional transfers, where we pay and reward people for doing the things that we actually think can help enhance economic growth. 
+For example, sending children to school, parents could earn money for that, or getting their children inoculated or immunized, parents could get paid for doing that. 
+Now, quite apart from the debate on whether or not we should be paying people to do what we think they should do anyway, the fact of the matter is that pay for performance has actually yielded some positive results in places like Mexico, in Brazil and also in pilot programs in New York. 
+But there are also benefits and significant changes underway on left-leaning policies. 
+Arguments that government should expand its role and responsibility so that it's not so narrowly defined and that government should be much more of an arbiter of the factors of production have become commonplace with the success of China. 
+But also we've started to have debates about how the role of the private sector should move away from just being a profit motive and really be more engaged in the delivery of social programs. 
+Things like the corporate social responsibility programs, albeit small in scale, are moving in that right direction. 
+Of course, left-leaning policies have also tended to blur the lines between government, NGOs and private sector. 
+Two very good examples of this are the 19th-century United States, when the infrastructure rollout was really about public-private partnerships. 
+More recently, of course, the advent of the Internet has also proven to the world that public and private can work together for the betterment of society. 
+My fundamental message to you is this: We cannot continue to try and solve the world economic growth challenges by being dogmatic and being unnecessarily ideological. 
+In order to create sustainable, long-term economic growth and solve the challenges and social ills that continue to plague the world today, we're going to have to be more broad-minded about what might work. 
+Ultimately, we have to recognize that ideology is the enemy of growth. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: I want to ask a couple of questions, Dambisa, because one could react to your last sentence by saying growth is also an ideology, it's possibly the dominant ideology of our times. 
+There's a lot of work going on around happiness and other metrics being used for measuring people's success and improvements in living standards. 
+And so I think that we should be open to what could deliver improvements in people's living standards and continue to reduce poverty around the world. 
+BG: So you're basically pleading for rehabilitating growth, but the only way for that happen without compromising the capacity of the earth, to take us on a long journey, is for economic growth somehow to decouple from the underlying use of resources. 
+I think if we start to constrain ourselves using the finite, scarce and depleting resources that we know today, we could get quite negative and quite concerned about the way the world is. 
+However, we've seen the Club of Rome, we've seen previous claims that the world would be running out of resources, and it's not to argue that those things are not valid. 
+But I think, with ingenuity we could see desalination, I think we could reinvest in energy, so that we can actually get better outcomes. 
+And so in that sense, I'm much more optimistic about what humans can do. 
+BG: The thing that strikes me about your proposals for rehabilitating growth and taking a different direction is that you're kind of suggesting to fix capitalism with more capitalism — with putting a price tag on good behavior as incentive or developing a bigger role for business in social issues. 
+Is that what you're suggesting? 
+DM: I'm suggesting we have to be open-minded. 
+I think it is absolutely the case that traditional models of economic growth are not working the way we would like them to. 
+And I think it's no accident that today the largest economy in the world, the United States, has democracy, liberal democracy, as it's core political stance and it has free market capitalism — to the extent that it is free — free market capitalism as its economic stance. 
+It has deprioritized democracy and it has state capitalism, which is a completely different model. 
+These two countries, completely different political models and completely different economic models, and yet they have the same income inequality number measured as a Gini coefficient. 
+I think those are the debates we should have, because it's not clear at all what model we should be adopting, and I think there needs to be much more discourse and much more humility about what we know and what we don't know. 
+BG: One last question. The COP21 is going on in Paris. 
+If you could send a tweet to all the heads of state and heads of delegations there, what would you say? 
+DM: Again, I would be very much about being open-minded. 
+As you're aware, the issues around the environmental concerns have been on the agenda many times now — in Copenhagen, '72 in Stockholm — and we keep revisiting these issues partly because there is not a fundamental agreement, in fact there's a schism between what the developed countries believe and want and what emerging market countries want. 
+Emerging market countries need to continue to create economic growth so that we don't have political uncertainty in the those countries. 
+Developed countries recognize that they have a real, important responsibility not only just to manage their CO2 emissions and some of the degradation that they're contributing to the world, but also as trendsetters in R & D. 
+And so they have to come to the table as well. 
+But in essence, it cannot be a situation where we start ascribing policies to the emerging markets without developed countries themselves also taking quite a swipe at what they're doing both in demand and supply in developed markets. 
+BG: Dambisa, thank you for coming to TED. DM: Thank you very much. 
+
+Have you ever been asked by your Chinese friend, "What is your zodiac sign?" 
+Don't think they are making small talk. 
+If you say, "" I'm a Monkey, "" they immediately know you are either 24, 36, 48 or 60 years old. 
+(Laughter) Asking a zodiac sign is a polite way of asking your age. 
+By revealing your zodiac sign, you are also being evaluated. 
+Judgments are being made about your fortune or misfortune, your personality, career prospects and how you will do in a given year. 
+If you share you and your partner's animal signs, they will paint a picture in their mind about your private life. 
+Maybe you don't believe in the Chinese zodiac. 
+As a quarter of the world population is influenced by it, you'd be wise to do something about that. 
+So what is the Chinese zodiac, exactly? 
+Most Westerners think of Greco-Roman zodiac, the signs divided into 12 months. 
+The Chinese zodiac is different. 
+It's a 12-year cycle labeled with animals, starting with a Rat and ending with a Pig, and has no association with constellations. 
+For example, if you were born in 1975, you are a Rabbit. 
+Can you see your zodiac sign there? 
+Our Chinese ancestors constructed a very complicated theoretical framework based on yin and yang, the five elements and the 12 zodiac animals. 
+Over thousands of years, this popular culture has affected people's major decisions, such as naming, marriage, giving birth and attitude towards each other. 
+And some of the implications are quite amazing. 
+The Chinese believe certain animals get on better than the others. 
+So parents choose specific years to give birth to babies, because they believe the team effort by the right combination of animals can give prosperity to families. 
+We even refer to the zodiac when entering into romantic relations. 
+I'm a Pig; I should have perfect romance with Tigers, Goats and Rabbits. 
+Chinese people believe some animals are natural enemies. 
+As a Pig, I need to be careful with a Snake. 
+Raise your hand if you are a Snake. 
+Let's have a chat later. 
+(Laughter) We believe some animals are luckier than the others, such as the Dragon. 
+Unlike the Western tradition, the Chinese Dragon is a symbol for power, strength and wealth. 
+It's everyone's dream to have a Dragon baby. 
+Jack Ma's parents must have been very proud. 
+And they are not the only ones. 
+In 2012, the Year of the Dragon, the birthrate in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan increased by five percent. 
+That means another one million more babies. 
+With a traditional preference to baby boys, the boy-girl ratio that year was 120 to 100. 
+When those Dragon boys grow up, they will face much more severe competition in love and job markets. 
+According to the BBC and the Chinese government's press release, January 2015 saw a peak of Cesarean sections. 
+Why? 
+That was the last month for the Year of the Horse. 
+It's not because they like horses so much, it's because they try to avoid having unlucky Goat babies. 
+(Laughter) If you are a Goat, please don't feel bad. 
+Those are Goat babies. 
+(Laughter) Tiger is another undesirable animal, due to its volatile temperament. 
+Many Chinese regions saw a sharp decline of birthrate during those years. 
+Perhaps one should consider zodiac in reverse, as those Tiger and Goat babies will face much less competition. 
+Maybe they are the lucky ones. 
+I went through the Forbes top 300 richest people in the world, and it's interesting to see the most undesirable two animals, the Goat and Tiger, are at the top of the chart, even higher than the Dragon. 
+So maybe we should consider, maybe it's much better to have less competition. 
+One last but interesting point: many Chinese people make their investment decisions based on the zodiac sign index. 
+Although the belief and tradition of the zodiac sign has been over thousands of years, the trend of using it in making major decisions did not really happen until the past few decades. 
+Our ancestors were very busy surviving poverty, drought, famine, riot, disease and civil war. 
+And finally, Chinese people have the time, wealth and technology to create an ideal life they've always wanted. 
+The collective decision made by 1.3 billion people has caused the fluctuation in economics and demand on everything, from health care and education to property and consumer goods. 
+As China plays such an important role in the global economy and geopolitics, the decisions made based on the zodiac and other Chinese traditions end up impacting everyone around the world. 
+Are there any Monkeys here? 
+2016 is the Year of the Monkey. 
+Monkeys are clever, curious, creative and mischievous. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+You may not realize this, but there are more bacteria in your body than stars in our entire galaxy. 
+This fascinating universe of bacteria inside of us is an integral part of our health, and our technology is evolving so rapidly that today we can program these bacteria like we program computers. 
+Now, the diagram that you see here, I know it looks like some kind of sports play, but it is actually a blueprint of the first bacterial program I developed. 
+And like writing software, we can print and write DNA into different algorithms and programs inside of bacteria. 
+What this program does is produces fluorescent proteins in a rhythmic fashion and generates a small molecule that allows bacteria to communicate and synchronize, as you're seeing in this movie. 
+The growing colony of bacteria that you see here is about the width of a human hair. 
+Now, what you can't see is that our genetic program instructs these bacteria to each produce small molecules, and these molecules travel between the thousands of individual bacteria telling them when to turn on and off. 
+And the bacteria synchronize quite well at this scale, but because the molecule that synchronizes them together can only travel so fast, in larger colonies of bacteria, this results in traveling waves between bacteria that are far away from each other, and you can see these waves going from right to left across the screen. 
+Now, our genetic program relies on a natural phenomenon called quorum sensing, in which bacteria trigger coordinated and sometimes virulent behaviors once they reach a critical density. 
+You can observe quorum sensing in action in this movie, where a growing colony of bacteria only begins to glow once it reaches a high or critical density. 
+Our genetic program continues producing these rhythmic patterns of fluorescent proteins as the colony grows outwards. 
+This particular movie and experiment we call The Supernova, because it looks like an exploding star. 
+Now, besides programming these beautiful patterns, I wondered, what else can we get these bacteria to do? 
+And I decided to explore how we can program bacteria to detect and treat diseases in our bodies like cancer. 
+One of the surprising facts about bacteria is that they can naturally grow inside of tumors. 
+This happens because typically tumors are areas where the immune system has no access, and so bacteria find these tumors and use them as a safe haven to grow and thrive. 
+We started using probiotic bacteria which are safe bacteria that have a health benefit, and found that when orally delivered to mice, these probiotics would selectively grow inside of liver tumors. 
+We realized that the most convenient way to highlight the presence of the probiotics, and hence, the presence of the tumors, was to get these bacteria to produce a signal that would be detectable in the urine, and so we specifically programmed these probiotics to make a molecule that would change the color of your urine to indicate the presence of cancer. 
+We went on to show that this technology could sensitively and specifically detect liver cancer, one that is challenging to detect otherwise. 
+Now, since these bacteria specifically localize to tumors, we've been programming them to not only detect cancer but also to treat cancer by producing therapeutic molecules from within the tumor environment that shrink the existing tumors, and we've been doing this using quorum sensing programs like you saw in the previous movies. 
+Altogether, imagine in the future taking a programmed probiotic that could detect and treat cancer, or even other diseases. 
+Our ability to program bacteria and program life opens up new horizons in cancer research, and to share this vision, I worked with artist Vik Muniz to create the symbol of the universe, made entirely out of bacteria or cancer cells. 
+Ultimately, my hope is that the beauty and purpose of this microscopic universe can inspire new and creative approaches for the future of cancer research. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Do you think the world is going to be a better place next year? 
+In the next decade? 
+Can we end hunger, achieve gender equality, halt climate change, all in the next 15 years? 
+Well, according to the governments of the world, yes we can. 
+In the last few days, the leaders of the world, meeting at the UN in New York, agreed a new set of Global Goals for the development of the world to 2030. 
+And here they are: these goals are the product of a massive consultation exercise. 
+The Global Goals are who we, humanity, want to be. 
+Now that's the plan, but can we get there? 
+Can this vision for a better world really be achieved? 
+Well, I'm here today because we've run the numbers, and the answer, shockingly, is that maybe we actually can. 
+But not with business as usual. 
+Now, the idea that the world is going to get a better place may seem a little fanciful. 
+Watch the news every day and the world seems to be going backwards, not forwards. 
+And let's be frank: it's pretty easy to be skeptical about grand announcements coming out of the UN. 
+But please, I invite you to suspend your disbelief for just a moment. 
+Because back in 2001, the UN agreed another set of goals, the Millennium Development Goals. 
+And the flagship target there was to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015. 
+The target was to take from a baseline of 1990, when 36 percent of the world's population lived in poverty, to get to 18 percent poverty this year. 
+Did we hit this target? 
+Well, no, we didn't. 
+We exceeded it. 
+This year, global poverty is going to fall to 12 percent. 
+Now, that's still not good enough, and the world does still have plenty of problems. 
+But the pessimists and doomsayers who say that the world can't get better are simply wrong. 
+So how did we achieve this success? 
+Well, a lot of it was because of economic growth. 
+Some of the biggest reductions in poverty were in countries such as China and India, which have seen rapid economic growth in recent years. 
+So can we pull off the same trick again? 
+Can economic growth get us to the Global Goals? 
+Well, to answer that question, we need to benchmark where the world is today against the Global Goals and figure out how far we have to travel. 
+But that ain't easy, because the Global Goals aren't just ambitious, they're also pretty complicated. 
+Over 17 goals, there are then 169 targets and literally hundreds of indicators. 
+Also, while some of the goals are pretty specific — end hunger — others are a lot vaguer — promote peaceful and tolerant societies. 
+So to help us with this benchmarking, I'm going to use a tool called the Social Progress Index. 
+What this does is measures all the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve, but sums it up into a single number that we can use as our benchmark and track progress over time. 
+The Social Progress Index basically asks three fundamental questions about a society. 
+First of all, does everyone have the basic needs of survival: food, water, shelter, safety? 
+Secondly, does everyone have the building blocks of a better life: education, information, health and a sustainable environment? 
+And does everyone have the opportunity to improve their lives, through rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination, and access to the world's most advanced knowledge? 
+The Social Progress Index sums all this together using 52 indicators to create an aggregate score on a scale of 0 to 100. 
+And what we find is that there's a wide diversity of performance in the world today. 
+The highest performing country, Norway, scores 88. 
+The lowest performing country, Central African Republic, scores 31. 
+And we can add up all the countries together, weighting for the different population sizes, and that global score is 61. 
+In concrete terms, that means that the average human being is living on a level of social progress about the same of Cuba or Kazakhstan today. 
+That's where we are today: 61 out of 100. 
+What do we have to get to to achieve the Global Goals? 
+Now, the Global Goals are certainly ambitious, but they're not about turning the world into Norway in just 15 years. 
+So having looked at the numbers, my estimate is that a score of 75 would not only be a giant leap forward in human well-being, it would also count as hitting the Global Goals target. 
+So there's our target, 75 out of 100. 
+Can we get there? 
+Well, the Social Progress Index can help us calculate this, because as you might have noticed, there are no economic indicators in there; there's no GDP or economic growth in the Social Progress Index model. 
+And what that lets us do is understand the relationship between economic growth and social progress. 
+So here on the vertical axis, I've put social progress, the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve. 
+Higher is better. 
+And then on the horizontal axis, is GDP per capita. 
+Further to the right means richer. 
+And in there, I'm now going to put all the countries of the world, each one represented by a dot, and on top of that I'm going to put the regression line that shows the average relationship. 
+And what this tells us is that as we get richer, social progress does tend to improve. 
+However, as we get richer, each extra dollar of GDP is buying us less and less social progress. 
+And now we can use this information to start building our forecast. 
+So here is the world in 2015. 
+We have a social progress score of 61 and a GDP per capita of $14,000. 
+And the place we're trying to get to, remember, is 75, that Global Goals target. 
+So here we are today, $14,000 per capita GDP. 
+How rich are we going to be in 2030? 
+Well, the best forecast we can find comes from the US Department of Agriculture, which forecasts 3.1 percent average global economic growth over the next 15 years, which means that in 2030, if they're right, per capita GDP will be about $23,000. 
+So now the question is: if we get that much richer, how much social progress are we going to get? 
+Well, we asked a team of economists at Deloitte who checked and crunched the numbers, and they came back and said, well, look: if the world's average wealth goes from $14,000 a year to $23,000 a year, social progress is going to increase from 61 to 62.4. 
+(Laughter) Just 62.4. Just a tiny increase. 
+Now this seems a bit strange. 
+Economic growth seems to have really helped in the fight against poverty, but it doesn't seem to be having much impact on trying to get to the Global Goals. 
+So what's going on? 
+Well, I think there are two things. 
+The first is that in a way, we're the victims of our own success. 
+We've used up the easy wins from economic growth, and now we're moving on to harder problems. 
+And also, we know that economic growth comes with costs as well as benefits. 
+There are costs to the environment, costs from new health problems like obesity. 
+So that's the bad news. 
+We're not going to get to the Global Goals just by getting richer. 
+So are the pessimists right? 
+Well, maybe not. 
+Because the Social Progress Index also has some very good news. 
+Let me take you back to that regression line. 
+So this is the average relationship between GDP and social progress, and this is what our last forecast was based on. 
+But as you saw already, there is actually lots of noise around this trend line. 
+What that tells us, quite simply, is that GDP is not destiny. 
+We have countries that are underperforming on social progress, relative to their wealth. 
+Russia has lots of natural resource wealth, but lots of social problems. 
+China has boomed economically, but hasn't made much headway on human rights or environmental issues. 
+India has a space program and millions of people without toilets. 
+Now, on the other hand, we have countries that are overperforming on social progress relative to their GDP. 
+Costa Rica has prioritized education, health and environmental sustainability, and as a result, it's achieving a very high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP. 
+And Costa Rica's not alone. 
+From poor countries like Rwanda to richer countries like New Zealand, we see that it's possible to get lots of social progress, even if your GDP is not so great. 
+And that's really important, because it tells us two things. 
+First of all, it tells us that we already in the world have the solutions to many of the problems that the Global Goals are trying to solve. 
+It also tells us that we're not slaves to GDP. 
+Our choices matter: if we prioritize the well-being of people, then we can make a lot more progress than our GDP might expect. 
+How much? Enough to get us to the Global Goals? 
+Well, let's look at some numbers. 
+What we know already: the world today is scoring 61 on social progress, and the place we want to get to is 75. 
+If we rely on economic growth alone, we're going to get to 62.4. 
+So let's assume now that we can get the countries that are currently underperforming on social progress — the Russia, China, Indias — just up to the average. 
+How much social progress does that get us? 
+Well, that takes us to 65. 
+It's a bit better, but still quite a long way to go. 
+So let's get a little bit more optimistic and say, what if every country gets a little bit better at turning its wealth into well-being? 
+Well then, we get to 67. 
+And now let's be even bolder still. 
+What if every country in the world chose to be like Costa Rica in prioritizing human well-being, using its wealth for the well-being of its citizens? 
+Well then, we get to nearly 73, very close to the Global Goals. 
+Can we achieve the Global Goals? 
+Certainly not with business as usual. 
+Even a flood tide of economic growth is not going to get us there, if it just raises the mega-yachts and the super-wealthy and leaves the rest behind. 
+We have to prioritize social progress, and really scale solutions around the world. 
+I believe the Global Goals are a historic opportunity, because the world's leaders have promised to deliver them. 
+Let's not dismiss the goals or slide into pessimism; let's hold them to that promise. 
+And we need to hold them to that promise by holding them accountable, tracking their progress all the way through the next 15 years. 
+And I want to finish by showing you a way to do that, called the People's Report Card. 
+The People's Report Card brings together all this data into a simple framework that we'll all be familiar with from our school days, to hold them to account. 
+It grades our performance on the Global Goals on a scale from F to A, where F is humanity at its worst, and A is humanity at its best. 
+Our world today is scoring a C-. 
+The Global Goals are all about getting to an A, and that's why we're going to be updating the People's Report Card annually, for the world and for all the countries of the world, so we can hold our leaders to account to achieve this target and fulfill this promise. 
+Because getting to the Global Goals will only happen if we do things differently, if our leaders do things differently, and for that to happen, that needs us to demand it. 
+So let's reject business as usual. 
+Let's demand a different path. 
+Let's choose the world that we want. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Michael. 
+Michael, just one question: the Millennium Development Goals established 15 years ago, they were kind of applying to every country but it turned out to be really a scorecard for emerging countries. 
+Now the new Global Goals are explicitly universal. 
+They ask for every country to show action and to show progress. 
+How can I, as a private citizen, use the report card to create pressure for action? 
+Michael Green: This is a really important point; it's a big shift in priorities — it's no longer about poor countries and just poverty. 
+And every country is going to have challenges in getting to the Global Goals. 
+Even, I'm sorry to say, Bruno, Switzerland has got to work to do. 
+And so that's why we're going to produce these report cards in 2016 for every country in the world. 
+Then we can really see, how are we doing? 
+And that, then, I think, is to provide a point of focus for people to start demanding action and start demanding progress. 
+BG: Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Unless we do something to prevent it, over the next 40 years we ’ re facing an epidemic of neurologic diseases on a global scale. 
+A cheery thought. 
+On this map, every country that ’ s colored blue has more than 20 percent of its population over the age of 65. 
+This is the world we live in. 
+And this is the world your children will live in. 
+For 12,000 years, the distribution of ages in the human population has looked like a pyramid, with the oldest on top. 
+It ’ s already flattening out. 
+By 2050, it ’ s going to be a column and will start to invert. 
+This is why it ’ s happening. 
+The average lifespan ’ s more than doubled since 1840, and it ’ s increasing currently at the rate of about five hours every day. 
+And this is why that ’ s not entirely a good thing: because over the age of 65, your risk of getting Alzheimer ’ s or Parkinson ’ s disease will increase exponentially. 
+By 2050, there ’ ll be about 32 million people in the United States over the age of 80, and unless we do something about it, half of them will have Alzheimer ’ s disease and three million more will have Parkinson ’ s disease. 
+Right now, those and other neurologic diseases — for which we have no cure or prevention — cost about a third of a trillion dollars a year. 
+It will be well over a trillion dollars by 2050. 
+Alzheimer ’ s disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami. 
+So one approach we ’ re taking is to try to design drugs that function like molecular Scotch tape, to hold the protein into its proper shape. 
+That would keep it from forming the tangles that seem to kill large sections of the brain when they do. 
+Interestingly enough, other neurologic diseases which affect very different parts of the brain also show tangles of misfolded protein, which suggests that the approach might be a general one, and might be used to cure many neurologic diseases, not just Alzheimer ’ s disease. 
+There ’ s also a fascinating connection to cancer here, because people with neurologic diseases have a very low incidence of most cancers. 
+And this is a connection that most people aren ’ t pursuing right now, but which we ’ re fascinated by. 
+Most of the important and all of the creative work in this area is being funded by private philanthropies. 
+And there ’ s tremendous scope for additional private help here, because the government has dropped the ball on much of this, I ’ m afraid. 
+In the meantime, while we ’ re waiting for all these things to happen, here ’ s what you can do for yourself. 
+If you want to lower your risk of Parkinson ’ s disease, caffeine is protective to some extent; nobody knows why. 
+Head injuries are bad for you. They lead to Parkinson ’ s disease. 
+And the Avian Flu is also not a good idea. 
+As far as protecting yourself against Alzheimer ’ s disease, well, it turns out that fish oil has the effect of reducing your risk for Alzheimer ’ s disease. 
+You should also keep your blood pressure down, because chronic high blood pressure is the biggest single risk factor for Alzheimer ’ s disease. 
+It ’ s also the biggest risk factor for glaucoma, which is just Alzheimer ’ s disease of the eye. 
+And of course, when it comes to cognitive effects, "" use it or lose it "" applies, so you want to stay mentally stimulated. 
+But hey, you ’ re listening to me. 
+So you ’ ve got that covered. 
+And one final thing. Wish people like me luck, okay? 
+Because the clock is ticking for all of us. 
+Thank you. 
+
+I want to talk to you about something kind of big. 
+We'll start here. 
+65 million years ago the dinosaurs had a bad day. 
+(Laughter) A chunk of rock six miles across, moving something like 50 times the speed of a rifle bullet, slammed into the Earth. 
+It released its energy all at once, and it was an explosion that was mind-numbing. 
+If you took every nuclear weapon ever built at the height of the Cold War, lumped them together and blew them up at the same time, that would be one one-millionth of the energy released at that moment. 
+The dinosaurs had a really bad day. 
+We all live here in Boulder. 
+Take Meeker, Mt. Meeker. Lump that in there, and put that in space as well, and Mt. Everest, and K2, and the Indian peaks. 
+We know it was that big because of the impact it had and the crater it left. 
+You can see here, there's the Yucatan Peninsula, if you recognize Cozumel off the east coast there. 
+Here is how big of a crater was left. 
+It was huge. To give you a sense of the scale, okay, there you go. The scale here is 50 miles on top, a hundred kilometers on the bottom. This thing was 300 kilometers across — 200 miles — an enormous crater that excavated out vast amounts of earth that splashed around the globe and set fires all over the planet, threw up enough dust to block out the sun. 
+It wiped out 75 percent of all species on Earth. 
+Now, not all asteroids are that big. 
+Some of them are smaller. 
+Here is one that came in over the United States in October of 1992. 
+It came in on a Friday night. 
+Why is that important? 
+Because back then, video cameras were just starting to become popular, and people would bring them, parents would bring them, to their kids' football games to film their kids play football. And since this came in on a Friday, they were able to get this great footage of this thing breaking up as it came in over West Virgina, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey until it did that to a car in New York. 
+(Laughter) Now, this is not a 200-mile-wide crater, but then again you can see the rock which is sitting right here, about the size of a football, that hit that car and did that damage. 
+Now this thing was probably about the size of a school bus when it first came in. 
+It broke up through atmospheric pressure, it crumbled, and then the pieces fell apart and did some damage. 
+Now, you wouldn't want that falling on your foot or your head, because it would do that to it. 
+That would be bad. 
+But it won't wipe out, you know, all life on Earth, so that's fine. But it turns out, you don't need something six miles across to do a lot of damage. 
+There is a median point between tiny rock and gigantic rock, and in fact, if any of you have ever been to near Winslow, Arizona, there is a crater in the desert there that is so iconic that it is actually called Meteor Crater. 
+If you look up at the top, that's a parking lot, and those are recreational vehicles right there. 
+So it's about a mile across, 600 feet deep. 
+The object that formed this was probably about 30 to 50 yards across, so roughly the size of Mackey Auditorium here. 
+It came in at speeds that were tremendous, slammed into the ground, blew up, and exploded with the energy of roughly a 20-megaton nuclear bomb — a very hefty bomb. 
+This was 50,000 years ago, so it may have wiped out a few buffalo or antelope, or something like that out in the desert, but it probably would not have caused global devastation. 
+Now, in 1908, over Siberia, near the Tunguska region — for those of you who are Dan Aykroyd fans and saw "" Ghostbusters, "" when he talked about the greatest cross-dimensional rift since the Siberia blast of 1909, where he got the date wrong, but that's okay. (Laughter) It was 1908. That's fine. I can live with that. (Laughter) 
+Another rock came into the Earth's atmosphere and this one blew up above the ground, several miles up above the surface of the Earth. 
+The heat from the explosion set fire to the forest below it, and then the shock wave came down and knocked down trees for hundreds of square miles, okay? 
+And again, this was a rock probably roughly the size of this auditorium that we're sitting in. 
+They're not going to do something like the dinosaur-killer did. 
+But they will do global economic damage, because they don't have to hit, necessarily, to do this kind of damage. 
+If one of these things were to hit pretty much anywhere, it would cause a panic. 
+But if it came over a city, an important city — not that any city is more important than others, but some of them we depend on them more on the global economic basis — that could do a huge amount of damage to us as a civilization. 
+So, now that I've scared the crap out of you... 
+(Laughter) what can we do about this? All right? 
+This is a potential threat. 
+Let me note that we have not had a giant impact like the dinosaur-killer for 65 million years. They're very rare. 
+Well, what do we do about them? 
+It's right here. 
+I don't even know if you can see that in the back row. These are just stars. 
+This is a rock that was about 30 yards across, so roughly the size of the ones that blew up over Tunguska and hit Arizona 50,000 years ago. 
+These things are faint. 
+We have to find these things first. 
+Well the good news is, we're looking for them. 
+NASA has devoted money to this. 
+The National Science Foundation, other countries are very interested in doing this. 
+We're building telescopes that are looking for the threat. That's a great first step, but what's the second step? The second step is that we see one heading toward us, we have to stop it. What do we do? 
+You've probably heard about the asteroid Apophis. If you haven't yet, you will. 
+If you've heard about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse, you're going to hear about Apophis, because you're keyed in to all the doomsday networks anyway. 
+Apophis is an asteroid that was discovered in 2004. 
+It's roughly 250 yards across, so it's pretty big — big size, you know, bigger than a football stadium — and it's going to pass by the Earth in April of 2029. 
+And it's going to pass us so close that it's actually going to come underneath our weather satellites. 
+The Earth's gravity is going to bend the orbit of this thing so much that if it's just right, if it passes through this region of space, this kidney bean-shaped region called the keyhole, the Earth's gravity will bend it just enough that seven years later on April 13, which is a Friday, I'll note, in the year 2036... (Laughter) — you can't plan that kind of stuff — Apophis is going to hit us. And it's 250 meters across, so it would do unbelievable damage. 
+Now the good news is that the odds of it actually passing through this keyhole and hitting us next go-around are one in a million, roughly — very, very low odds, so I personally am not lying awake at night worrying about this at all. 
+I don't think Apophis is a problem. 
+In fact, Apophis is a blessing in disguise, because it woke us up to the dangers of these things. 
+This thing was discovered just a few years ago and could hit us a few years from now. 
+It won't, but it gives us a chance to study these kinds of asteroids. We didn't really necessarily understand these keyholes, and now we do and it turns out that's really important, because how do you stop an asteroid like this? 
+Well, let me ask you, what happens if you're standing in the middle of the road and a car's headed for you? What do you do? You do this. 
+Right? Move. The car goes past you. 
+But we can't move the Earth, at least not easily, but we can move a small asteroid. 
+In the year 2005, NASA launched a probe called Deep Impact, which slammed into — slammed a piece of itself into the nucleus of a comet. 
+Comets are very much like asteroids. 
+The purpose wasn't to push it out of the way. 
+The purpose was to make a crater to excavate the material and see what was underneath the surface of this comet, which we learned quite a bit about. 
+We did move the comet a little tiny bit, not very much, but that wasn't the point. 
+This thing is orbiting the sun at 10 miles per second, 20 miles per second. 
+We shot a space probe at it and hit it. Okay? 
+If we need, if we see an asteroid that's coming toward us, and it's headed right for us, and we have two years to go, boom! We hit it. 
+You can try to — you know, if you watch the movies, you might think about, why don't we use a nuclear weapon? 
+It's like, well, you can try that, but the problem is timing. 
+You shoot a nuclear weapon at this thing, you have to blow it up within a few milliseconds of tolerance or else you'll just miss it. 
+And there are a lot of other problems with that. It's very hard to do. 
+(Laughter) After the big macho "" Rrrrrrr BAM! We're gonna hit this thing in the face, "" then we bring in the velvet gloves. (Laughter) 
+There's a group of scientists and engineers and astronauts and they call themselves The B612 Foundation. For those of you who've read "" The Little Prince, "" you understand that reference, I hope. The little prince who lived on an asteroid, it was called B612. 
+Rusty Schweickart, who was an Apollo 9 astronaut, is on this. Dan Durda, my friend who made this image, works here at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, on Walnut Street. He created this image for this, and he's actually one of the astronomers who works for them. If we see an asteroid that's going to hit the Earth and we have enough time, we can hit it to move it into a better orbit. But then what we do is we launch a probe that has to weigh a ton or two. 
+It doesn't have to be huge — couple of tons, not that big — and you park it near the asteroid. 
+You don't land on it, because these things are tumbling end over end. It's very hard to land on them. 
+Instead you get near it. 
+The gravity of the asteroid pulls on the probe, and the probe has a couple of tons of mass. 
+It has a little tiny bit of gravity, but it's enough that it can pull the asteroid, and you have your rockets set up, so you can — oh, you can barely see it here, but there's rocket plumes — and you basically, these guys are connected by their own gravity, and if you move the probe very slowly, very, very gently, you can very easily finesse that rock into a safe orbit. 
+You can even put in orbit around the Earth where we could mine it, although that's a whole other thing. I won't go into that. 
+(Laughter) But we'd be rich! (Laughter) 
+So think about this, right? 
+There are these giant rocks flying out there, and they're hitting us, and they're doing damage to us, but we've figured out how to do this, and all the pieces are in place to do this. 
+We have astronomers in place with telescopes looking for them. We have smart people, very, very smart people, who are concerned about this and figuring out how to fix the problem, and we have the technology to do this. 
+This probe actually can't use chemical rockets. 
+Chemical rockets provide too much thrust, too much push. The probe would just shoot away. 
+We invented something called an ion drive, which is a very, very, very low-thrust engine. 
+It generates the force a piece of paper would have on your hand, incredibly light, but it can run for months and years, providing that very gentle push. 
+If anybody here is a fan of the original "" Star Trek, "" they ran across an alien ship that had an ion drive, and Spock said, "" They're very technically sophisticated. 
+They're a hundred years ahead of us with this drive. "" Yeah, we have an ion drive now. (Laughter) We don't have the Enterprise, but we've got an ion drive now. 
+(Applause) Spock. 
+(Laughter) So... 
+that's the difference, that's the difference between us and the dinosaurs. 
+This happened to them. 
+It doesn't have to happen to us. 
+The difference between the dinosaurs and us is that we have a space program and we can vote, and so we can change our future. 
+(Laughter) We have the ability to change our future. 
+65 million years from now, we don't have to have our bones collecting dust in a museum. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+If I could reveal anything that is hidden from us, at least in modern cultures, it would be to reveal something that we've forgotten, that we used to know as well as we knew our own names. 
+And that is that we live in a competent universe, that we are part of a brilliant planet, and that we are surrounded by genius. 
+Biomimicry is a new discipline that tries to learn from those geniuses, and take advice from them, design advice. 
+That's where I live, and it's my university as well. 
+I'm surrounded by genius. I cannot help but remember the organisms and the ecosystems that know how to live here gracefully on this planet. 
+This is what I would tell you to remember if you ever forget this again. 
+Remember this. 
+This is what happens every year. 
+This is what keeps its promise. 
+While we're doing bailouts, this is what happened. 
+Spring. 
+Imagine designing spring. 
+Imagine that orchestration. 
+You think TED is hard to organize. (Laughter) Right? 
+Imagine, and if you haven't done this in a while, do. 
+Imagine the timing, the coordination, all without top-down laws, or policies, or climate change protocols. 
+This happens every year. 
+There is lots of showing off. 
+There is lots of love in the air. 
+There's lots of grand openings. 
+And the organisms, I promise you, have all of their priorities in order. 
+I have this neighbor that keeps me in touch with this, because he's living, usually on his back, looking up at those grasses. 
+And one time he came up to me — he was about seven or eight years old — he came up to me. 
+And there was a wasp's nest that I had let grow in my yard, right outside my door. 
+And most people knock them down when they're small. 
+But it was fascinating to me, because I was looking at this sort of fine Italian end papers. 
+And he came up to me and he knocked. 
+He would come every day with something to show me. 
+And like, knock like a woodpecker on my door until I opened it up. 
+And he asked me how I had made the house for those wasps, because he had never seen one this big. 
+And I told him, "" You know, Cody, the wasps actually made that. "" And we looked at it together. 
+And I could see why he thought, you know — it was so beautifully done. 
+It was so architectural. It was so precise. 
+But it occurred to me, how in his small life had he already believed the myth that if something was that well done, that we must have done it. 
+How did he not know — it's what we've all forgotten — that we're not the first ones to build. 
+We're not the first ones to process cellulose. 
+We're not the first ones to make paper. We're not the first ones to try to optimize packing space, or to waterproof, or to try to heat and cool a structure. 
+We're not the first ones to build houses for our young. 
+What's happening now, in this field called biomimicry, is that people are beginning to remember that organisms, other organisms, the rest of the natural world, are doing things very similar to what we need to do. 
+But in fact they are doing them in a way that have allowed them to live gracefully on this planet for billions of years. 
+So these people, biomimics, are nature's apprentices. 
+And they're focusing on function. 
+What I'd like to do is show you a few of the things that they're learning. 
+They have asked themselves, "" What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked, 'How would nature solve this?' "" And here is what they're learning. 
+This is an amazing picture from a Czech photographer named Jack Hedley. 
+This is a story about an engineer at J.R. West. 
+They're the people who make the bullet train. 
+It was called the bullet train because it was rounded in front, but every time it went into a tunnel it would build up a pressure wave, and then it would create like a sonic boom when it exited. 
+So the engineer's boss said, "Find a way to quiet this train." 
+He happened to be a birder. 
+He went to the equivalent of an Audubon Society meeting. 
+And he studied — there was a film about king fishers. 
+And he thought to himself, "" They go from one density of medium, the air, into another density of medium, water, without a splash. Look at this picture. 
+Without a splash, so they can see the fish. 
+And he thought, "" What if we do this? "" Quieted the train. 
+Made it go 10 percent faster on 15 percent less electricity. 
+How does nature repel bacteria? 
+We're not the first ones to have to protect ourselves from some bacteria. 
+Turns out that — this is a Galapagos Shark. 
+It has no bacteria on its surface, no fouling on its surface, no barnacles. 
+And it's not because it goes fast. 
+It actually basks. It's a slow-moving shark. 
+So how does it keep its body free of bacteria build-up? 
+It doesn't do it with a chemical. 
+It does it, it turns out, with the same denticles that you had on Speedo bathing suits, that broke all those records in the Olympics, but it's a particular kind of pattern. 
+And that pattern, the architecture of that pattern on its skin denticles keep bacteria from being able to land and adhere. 
+There is a company called Sharklet Technologies that's now putting this on the surfaces in hospitals to keep bacteria from landing, which is better than dousing it with anti-bacterials or harsh cleansers that many, many organisms are now becoming drug resistant. 
+Hospital-acquired infections are now killing more people every year in the United States than die from AIDS or cancer or car accidents combined — about 100,000. 
+This is a little critter that's in the Namibian desert. 
+It has no fresh water that it's able to drink, but it drinks water out of fog. 
+It's got bumps on the back of its wing covers. 
+And those bumps act like a magnet for water. 
+They have water-loving tips, and waxy sides. 
+And the fog comes in and it builds up on the tips. 
+And it goes down the sides and goes into the critter's mouth. 
+There is actually a scientist here at Oxford who studied this, Andrew Parker. 
+And now kinetic and architectural firms like Grimshaw are starting to look at this as a way of coating buildings so that they gather water from the fog. 
+10 times better than our fog-catching nets. 
+CO2 as a building block. 
+Organisms don't think of CO2 as a poison. 
+Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block. 
+There is now a cement manufacturing company starting in the United States called Calera. 
+They've borrowed the recipe from the coral reef, and they're using CO2 as a building block in cement, in concrete. 
+Instead of — cement usually emits a ton of CO2 for every ton of cement. 
+Now it's reversing that equation, and actually sequestering half a ton of CO2 thanks to the recipe from the coral. 
+None of these are using the organisms. 
+They're really only using the blueprints or the recipes from the organisms. 
+How does nature gather the sun's energy? 
+This is a new kind of solar cell that's based on how a leaf works. 
+It's self-assembling. 
+It can be put down on any substrate whatsoever. 
+It's extremely inexpensive and rechargeable every five years. 
+It's actually a company a company that I'm involved in called OneSun, with Paul Hawken. 
+There are many many ways that nature filters water that takes salt out of water. 
+We take water and push it against a membrane. 
+And then we wonder why the membrane clogs and why it takes so much electricity. 
+Nature does something much more elegant. 
+And it's in every cell. 
+Every red blood cell of your body right now has these hourglass-shaped pores called aquaporins. 
+They actually export water molecules through. 
+It's kind of a forward osmosis. 
+They export water molecules through, and leave solutes on the other side. 
+A company called Aquaporin is starting to make desalination membranes mimicking this technology. 
+Trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress. 
+This algorithm has been put into a software program that's now being used to make bridges lightweight, to make building beams lightweight. 
+Actually G.M. Opel used it to create that skeleton you see, in what's called their bionic car. 
+It lightweighted that skeleton using a minimum amount of material, as an organism must, for the maximum amount of strength. 
+This beetle, unlike this chip bag here, this beetle uses one material, chitin. 
+And it finds many many ways to put many functions into it. 
+It's waterproof. 
+It's strong and resilient. 
+It's breathable. It creates color through structure. 
+Whereas that chip bag has about seven layers to do all of those things. 
+One of our major inventions that we need to be able to do to come even close to what these organisms can do is to find a way to minimize the amount of material, the kind of material we use, and to add design to it. 
+We use five polymers in the natural world to do everything that you see. 
+In our world we use about 350 polymers to make all this. 
+Nature is nano. 
+Nanotechnology, nanoparticles, you hear a lot of worry about this. 
+Loose nanoparticles. What is really interesting to me is that not many people have been asking, "How can we consult nature about how to make nanotechnology safe?" 
+Nature has been doing that for a long time. 
+Embedding nanoparticles in a material for instance, always. 
+In fact, sulfur-reducing bacteria, as part of their synthesis, they will emit, as a byproduct, nanoparticles into the water. 
+But then right after that, they emit a protein that actually gathers and aggregates those nanoparticles so that they fall out of solution. 
+Energy use. Organisms sip energy, because they have to work or barter for every single bit that they get. 
+And one of the largest fields right now, in the world of energy grids, you hear about the smart grid. 
+One of the largest consultants are the social insects. 
+Swarm technology. There is a company called Regen. 
+They are looking at how ants and bees find their food and their flowers in the most effective way as a whole hive. 
+And they're having appliances in your home talk to one another through that algorithm, and determine how to minimize peak power use. 
+There's a group of scientists in Cornell that are making what they call a synthetic tree, because they are saying, "" There is no pump at the bottom of a tree. "" It's capillary action and transpiration pulls water up, a drop at a time, pulling it, releasing it from a leaf and pulling it up through the roots. 
+And they're creating — you can think of it as a kind of wallpaper. 
+They're thinking about putting it on the insides of buildings to move water up without pumps. 
+Amazon electric eel — incredibly endangered, some of these species — create 600 volts of electricity with the chemicals that are in your body. 
+Even more interesting to me is that 600 volts doesn't fry it. 
+You know we use PVC, and we sheath wires with PVC for insulation. 
+These organisms, how are they insulating against their own electric charge? 
+These are some questions that we've yet to ask. 
+Here's a wind turbine manufacturer that went to a whale. 
+Humpback whale has scalloped edges on its flippers. 
+And those scalloped edges play with flow in such a way that is reduces drag by 32 percent. 
+These wind turbines can rotate in incredibly slow windspeeds, as a result. 
+MIT just has a new radio chip that uses far less power than our chips. 
+And it's based on the cochlear of your ear, able to pick up internet, wireless, television signals and radio signals, in the same chip. 
+Finally, on an ecosystem scale. 
+At Biomimicry Guild, which is my consulting company, we work with HOK Architects. 
+We're looking at building whole cities in their planning department. 
+And what we're saying is that, shouldn't our cities do at least as well, in terms of ecosystem services, as the native systems that they replace? 
+So we're creating something called Ecological Performance Standards that hold cities to this higher bar. 
+The question is — biomimicry is an incredibly powerful way to innovate. 
+The question I would ask is, "" What's worth solving? "" If you haven't seen this, it's pretty amazing. 
+Dr. Adam Neiman. 
+This is a depiction of all of the water on Earth in relation to the volume of the Earth — all the ice, all the fresh water, all the sea water — and all the atmosphere that we can breathe, in relation to the volume of the Earth. 
+And inside those balls life, over 3.8 billion years, has made a lush, livable place for us. 
+And we are in a long, long line of organisms to come to this planet and ask ourselves, "How can we live here gracefully over the long haul?" 
+How can we do what life has learned to do? 
+Which is to create conditions conducive to life. 
+Now in order to do this, the design challenge of our century, I think, we need a way to remind ourselves of those geniuses, and to somehow meet them again. 
+One of the big ideas, one of the big projects I've been honored to work on is a new website. And I would encourage you all to please go to it. 
+It's called AskNature.org. 
+And what we're trying to do, in a TEDesque way, is to organize all biological information by design and engineering function. 
+And we're working with EOL, Encyclopedia of Life, Ed Wilson's TED wish. 
+And he's gathering all biological information on one website. 
+And the scientists who are contributing to EOL are answering a question, "What can we learn from this organism?" 
+And that information will go into AskNature.org. 
+And hopefully, any inventor, anywhere in the world, will be able, in the moment of creation, to type in, "" How does nature remove salt from water? "" And up will come mangroves, and sea turtles and your own kidneys. 
+And we'll begin to be able to do as Cody does, and actually be in touch with these incredible models, these elders that have been here far, far longer than we have. 
+And hopefully, with their help, we'll learn how to live on this Earth, and on this home that is ours, but not ours alone. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My name is Kate Hartman. 
+And I like to make devices that play with the ways that we relate and communicate. 
+So I'm specifically interested in how we, as humans, relate to ourselves, each other and the world around us. 
+(Laughter) So just to give you a bit of context, as June said, I'm an artist, a technologist and an educator. 
+I teach courses in physical computing and wearable electronics. 
+And much of what I do is either wearable or somehow related to the human form. 
+And so anytime I talk about what I do, I like to just quickly address the reason why bodies matter. 
+And it's pretty simple. 
+Everybody's got one — all of you. 
+I can guarantee, everyone in this room, all of you over there, the people in the cushy seats, the people up top with the laptops — we all have bodies. 
+Don't be ashamed. 
+It's something that we have in common and they act as our primary interfaces for the world. 
+And so when working as an interaction designer, or as an artist who deals with participation — creating things that live on, in or around the human form — it's really a powerful space to work within. 
+So within my own work, I use a broad range of materials and tools. 
+So I communicate through everything from radio transceivers to funnels and plastic tubing. 
+And to tell you a bit about the things that I make, the easiest place to start the story is with a hat. 
+And so it all started several years ago, late one night when I was sitting on the subway, riding home, and I was thinking. 
+And I tend to be a person who thinks too much and talks too little. 
+And so I was thinking about how it might be great if I could just take all these noises — like all these sounds of my thoughts in my head — if I could just physically extricate them and pull them out in such a form that I could share them with somebody else. 
+And so I went home, and I made a prototype of this hat. 
+And I called it the Muttering Hat, because it emitted these muttering noises that were kind of tethered to you, but you could detach them and share them with somebody else. 
+(Laughter) So I make other hats as well. 
+This one is called the Talk to Yourself Hat. 
+(Laughter) It's fairly self-explanatory. 
+It physically carves out conversation space for one. 
+And when you speak out loud, the sound of your voice is actually channeled back into your own ears. 
+(Laughter) And so when I make these things, it's really not so much about the object itself, but rather the negative space around the object. 
+So what happens when a person puts this thing on? 
+What kind of an experience do they have? 
+And how are they transformed by wearing it? 
+So many of these devices really kind of focus on the ways in which we relate to ourselves. 
+So this particular device is called the Gut Listener. 
+And it is a tool that actually enables one to listen to their own innards. 
+(Laughter) And so some of these things are actually more geared toward expression and communication. 
+And so the Inflatable Heart is an external organ that can be used by the wearer to express themselves. 
+So they can actually inflate it and deflate it according to their emotions. 
+So they can express everything from admiration and lust to anxiety and angst. 
+(Laughter) And some of these are actually meant to mediate experiences. 
+So the Discommunicator is a tool for arguments. 
+(Laughter) And so actually it allows for an intense emotional exchange, but is serves to absorb the specificity of the words that are delivered. (Laughter) 
+And in the end, some of these things just act as invitations. 
+So the Ear Bender literally puts something out there so someone can grab your ear and say what they have to say. 
+So even though I'm really interested in the relationship between people, I also consider the ways in which we relate to the world around us. 
+And so when I was first living in New York City a few years back, I was thinking a lot about the familiar architectural forms that surrounded me and how I would like to better relate to them. 
+And I thought, "" Well, hey! 
+Maybe if I want to better relate to walls, maybe I need to be more wall-like myself. "" So I made a wearable wall that I could wear as a backpack. 
+And so I would put it on and sort of physically transform myself so that I could either contribute to or critique the spaces that surrounded me. 
+(Laughter) And so jumping off of that, thinking beyond the built environment into the natural world, I have this ongoing project called Botanicalls — which actually enables houseplants to tap into human communication protocols. 
+So when a plant is thirsty, it can actually make a phone call or post a message to a service like Twitter. 
+And so this really shifts the human / plant dynamic, because a single house plant can actually express its needs to thousands of people at the same time. 
+And so kind of thinking about scale, my most recent obsession is actually with glaciers — of course. 
+And so glaciers are these magnificent beings, and there's lots of reasons to be obsessed with them, but what I'm particularly interested in is in human-glacier relations. 
+(Laughter) Because there seems to be an issue. 
+The glaciers are actually leaving us. 
+They're both shrinking and retreating — and some of them have disappeared altogether. 
+And so I actually live in Canada now, so I've been visiting one of my local glaciers. 
+And this one's particularly interesting, because, of all the glaciers in North America, it receives the highest volume of human traffic in a year. 
+They actually have these buses that drive up and over the lateral moraine and drop people off on the surface of the glacier. 
+And this has really gotten me thinking about this experience of the initial encounter. 
+When I meet a glacier for the very first time, what do I do? 
+There's no kind of social protocol for this. 
+I really just don't even know how to say hello. 
+Do I carve a message in the snow? 
+Or perhaps I can assemble one out of dot and dash ice cubes — ice cube Morse code. 
+Or perhaps I need to make myself a speaking tool, like an icy megaphone that I can use to amplify my voice when I direct it at the ice. 
+But really the most satisfying experience I've had is the act of listening, which is what we need in any good relationship. 
+And I was really struck by how much it affected me. 
+This very basic shift in my physical orientation helped me shift my perspective in relation to the glacier. 
+And so since we use devices to figure out how to relate to the world these days, I actually made a device called the Glacier Embracing Suit. 
+(Laughter) And so this is constructed out of a heat reflected material that serves to mediate the difference in temperature between the human body and the glacial ice. 
+And once again, it's this invitation that asks people to lay down on the glacier and give it a hug. 
+So, yea, this is actually just the beginning. 
+These are initial musings for this project. 
+And just as with the wall, how I wanted to be more wall-like, with this project, I'd actually like to take more a of glacial pace. 
+And so my intent is to actually just take the next 10 years and go on a series of collaborative projects where I work with people from different disciplines — artists, technologists, scientists — to kind of work on this project of how we can improve human-glacier relations. 
+So beyond that, in closing, I'd just like to say that we're in this era of communications and device proliferation, and it's really tremendous and exciting and sexy, but I think what's really important is thinking about how we can simultaneously maintain a sense of wonder and a sense of criticality about the tools that we use and the ways in which we relate to the world. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Twelve years ago, I was in the street writing my name to say, "" I exist. "" Then I went to taking photos of people to paste them on the street to say, "" They exist. "" From the suburbs of Paris to the wall of Israel and Palestine, the rooftops of Kenya to the favelas of Rio, paper and glue — as easy as that. 
+I asked a question last year: Can art change the world? 
+Well let me tell you, in terms of changing the world there has been a lot of competition this year, because the Arab Spring is still spreading, the Eurozone has collapsed... what else? 
+The Occupy movement found a voice, and I still have to speak English constantly. 
+So there has been a lot of change. 
+So when I had my TED wish last year, I said, look, I'm going to switch my concept. 
+You are going to take the photos. 
+You're going to send them to me. 
+I'm going to print them and send them back to you. 
+Then you're going to paste them where it makes sense for you to place your own statement. 
+This is Inside Out. 
+One hundred thousand posters have been printed this year. 
+Those are the kind of posters, let me show you. 
+And we keep sending more every day. 
+This is the size. 
+Just a regular piece of paper with a little bit of ink on it. 
+This one was from Haiti. 
+When I launched my wish last year, hundreds of people stood up and said they wanted to help us. 
+But I say it has to be under the conditions I've always worked: no credit, no logos, no sponsoring. 
+A week later, a handful of people were there ready to rock and empower the people on the ground who wanted to change the world. 
+These are the people I want to talk about to you today. 
+Two weeks after my speech, in Tunisia, hundreds of portraits were made. 
+And they pasted [over] every single portrait of the dictator [with] their own photos. 
+Boom! This is what happened. 
+Slim and his friends went through the country and pasted hundreds of photos everywhere to show the diversity in the country. 
+They really make Inside Out their own project. 
+Actually, that photo was pasted in a police station, and what you see on the ground are ID cards of all the photos of people being tracked by the police. 
+Russia. Chad wanted to fight against homophobia in Russia. 
+He went with his friends in front of every Russian embassy in Europe and stood there with the photos to say, "" We have rights. "" They used Inside Out as a platform for protest. 
+Karachi, Pakistan. 
+Sharmeen is actually here. 
+She organized a TEDx action out there and made all the unseen faces of the city on the walls in her town. 
+And I want to thank her today. 
+North Dakota. Standing Rock Nation, in this Turtle Island, [unclear name] from the Dakota Lakota tribe wanted to show that the Native Americans are still here. 
+The seventh generation are still fighting for their rights. 
+He pasted up portraits all over his reservation. 
+And he's here also today. 
+Each time I get a wall in New York, I use his photos to continue spreading the project. 
+Juarez: You've heard of the border — one of the most dangerous borders in the world. 
+Monica has taken thousands of portraits with a group of photographers and covered the entire border. 
+Do you know what it takes to do this? 
+People, energy, make the glue, organize the team. 
+It was amazing. 
+While in Iran at the same time Abololo — of course a nickname — has pasted one single face of a woman to show his resistance against the government. 
+I don't have to explain to you what kind of risk he took for that action. 
+There are tons of school projects. 
+Twenty percent of the posters we are receiving comes from schools. 
+Education is so essential. 
+Kids just make photos in a class, the teacher receives them, they paste them on the school. 
+Here they even got the help of the firemen. 
+There should be even more schools doing this kind of project. 
+Of course we wanted to go back to Israel and Palestine. 
+So we went there with a truck. This is a photobooth truck. 
+You go on the back of that truck, it takes your photo, 30 seconds later take it from the side, you're ready to rock. 
+Thousands of people use them and each of them signs up for a two-state peace solution and then walk in the street. 
+This is march, the 450,000 march — beginning of September. 
+They were all holding their photo as a statement. 
+On the other side, people were wrapping up streets, buildings. 
+It's everywhere. 
+Come on, don't tell me that people aren't ready for peace out there. 
+These projects took thousands of actions in one year, making hundreds of thousands of people participating, creating millions of views. 
+This is the biggest global art participatory project that's going on. 
+So back to the question, "" Can art change the world? "" Maybe not in one year. That's the beginning. 
+But maybe we should change the question. 
+Can art change people's lives? 
+From what I've seen this year, yes. 
+And you know what? It's just the beginning. 
+Let's turn the world inside out together. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+You know, I've talked about some of these projects before — about the human genome and what that might mean, and discovering new sets of genes. 
+We're actually starting at a new point: we've been digitizing biology, and now we're trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life. 
+So, we've always been trying to ask big questions. 
+"" What is life? "" is something that I think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels. 
+We've tried various approaches, paring it down to minimal components. 
+We've been digitizing it now for almost 20 years; when we sequenced the human genome, it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer. 
+Now we're trying to ask, "" Can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe? "" This is the map of a small organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, that has the smallest genome for a species that can self-replicate in the laboratory, and we've been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome. 
+We're able to knock out on the order of 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here. 
+When we look at its metabolic map, it's relatively simple compared to ours — trust me, this is simple — but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time, it's very unlikely that this would yield a living cell. 
+So we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions. 
+And so we started down the road of: can we synthesize a chromosome? 
+Can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we've never been before? 
+And if we do, can we boot up a chromosome? 
+A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material. 
+So, our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace. 
+Our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing, and our latest point would put it on, now, an exponential curve. 
+We started this over 15 years ago. 
+It took several stages, in fact, starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments. 
+But it turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. 
+There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA — 30 to 50 letters in length — and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are. 
+So we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors. 
+And this was our first attempt, starting with the digital information of the genome of phi X174. 
+It's a small virus that kills bacteria. 
+We designed the pieces, went through our error correction and had a DNA molecule of about 5,000 letters. 
+The exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it in the bacteria, and the bacteria started to read this genetic code, made the viral particles. 
+The viral particles then were released from the cells and came back and killed the E. coli. 
+I was talking to the oil industry recently and I said they clearly understood that model. 
+(Laughter) They laughed more than you guys are. (Laughter) And so, we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system. 
+But we wanted to go much larger: we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome — it's over 580,000 letters of genetic code — so we thought we'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are. 
+Design is critical, and if you're starting with digital information in the computer, that digital information has to be really accurate. 
+When we first sequenced this genome in 1995, the standard of accuracy was one error per 10,000 base pairs. 
+We actually found, on resequencing it, 30 errors; had we used that original sequence, it never would have been able to be booted up. 
+Part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long that have to overlap with all the other 50-letter pieces to build smaller subunits we have to design so they can go together. 
+We design unique elements into this. 
+You may have read that we put watermarks in. 
+Think of this: we have a four-letter genetic code — A, C, G and T. 
+Triplets of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids, such that there's a single letter designation for each of the amino acids. 
+So we can use the genetic code to write out words, sentences, thoughts. 
+Initially, all we did was autograph it. 
+Some people were disappointed there was not poetry. 
+We designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes; there are enzymes that repair them and put them together. 
+And we started making pieces, starting with pieces that were 5,000 to 7,000 letters, put those together to make 24,000-letter pieces, then put sets of those going up to 72,000. 
+At each stage, we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we're trying to create a process that's extremely robust that you can see in a minute. 
+We're trying to get to the point of automation. 
+So, this looks like a basketball playoff. 
+When we get into these really large pieces over 100,000 base pairs, they won't any longer grow readily in E. coli — it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology — and so we turned to other mechanisms. 
+We knew there's a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair DNA that can put pieces together. 
+Here's an example of it: there's an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans that can take three millions rads of radiation. 
+You can see in the top panel, its chromosome just gets blown apart. 
+Twelve to 24 hours later, it put it back together exactly as it was before. 
+We have thousands of organisms that can do this. 
+These organisms can be totally desiccated; they can live in a vacuum. 
+I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment. 
+In fact, NASA has shown a lot of this is out there. 
+Here's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes, actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in; yeast puts them together automatically. 
+This is not an electron micrograph; this is just a regular photomicrograph. 
+It's such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope. 
+These are pictures over about a six-second period. 
+So, this is the publication we had just a short while ago. 
+This is over 580,000 letters of genetic code; it's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure. 
+It's over 300 million molecular weight. 
+If we printed it out at a 10 font with no spacing, it takes 142 pages just to print this genetic code. 
+Well, how do we boot up a chromosome? How do we activate this? 
+Obviously, with a virus it's pretty simple; it's much more complicated dealing with bacteria. 
+It's also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves: you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one, and that's what you've all heard about with cloning. 
+With bacteria and Archaea, the chromosome is integrated into the cell, but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. 
+We purified a chromosome from one microbial species — roughly, these two are as distant as human and mice — we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome, we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins, and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell — and you'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here. 
+The new chromosome went into the cell. 
+In fact, we thought this might be as far as it went, but we tried to design the process a little bit further. 
+This is a major mechanism of evolution right here. 
+We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. 
+So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology. 
+There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA. 
+The chromosome that was in the cell doesn't have one; the chromosome we put in does. 
+It got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material, chewed it up, and so we ended up just with a cell with the new chromosome. 
+It turned blue because of the genes we put in it. 
+And with a very short period of time, all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell. 
+All the proteins changed, the membranes changed; when we read the genetic code, it's exactly what we had transferred in. 
+So, this may sound like genomic alchemy, but we can, by moving the software of DNA around, change things quite dramatically. 
+Now I've argued, this is not genesis; this is building on three and a half billion years of evolution. 
+And I've argued that we're about to perhaps create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there's massive new speciation based on this digital design. 
+Why do this? 
+I think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs. 
+We're about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next 40 years. 
+To put it in context for myself: I was born in 1946. 
+There are now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946; within 40 years, there'll be four. 
+We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. 
+It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine. 
+We use over five billion tons of coal, 30 billion-plus barrels of oil — that's a hundred million barrels a day. 
+When we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that, it's going to be a huge challenge. 
+Then of course, there's all that CO2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere. 
+We now, from our discovery around the world, have a database with about 20 million genes, and I like to think of these as the design components of the future. 
+The electronics industry only had a dozen or so components, and look at the diversity that came out of that. 
+We're limited here primarily by a biological reality and our imagination. 
+We now have techniques, because of these rapid methods of synthesis, to do what we're calling combinatorial genomics. 
+We have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a million chromosomes a day. 
+When you think of processing these 20 million different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals, new vaccines, we can just with a small team, do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science. 
+And it's just standard selection: we can select for viability, chemical or fuel production, vaccine production, etc. 
+This is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we're working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer. 
+You know, we don't know necessarily what it'll look like: we know exactly what their genetic code looks like. 
+We're focusing on now fourth-generation fuels. 
+You've seen recently, corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment. 
+We have second- and third-generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar, to much higher-value fuels like octane or different types of butanol. 
+But the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with CO2 as its feedstock, and so we're working with designing cells to go down this road. 
+And we think we'll have the first fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months. 
+Sunlight and CO2 is one method... 
+(Applause) but in our discovery around the world, we have all kinds of other methods. 
+This is an organism we described in 1996. 
+It lives in the deep ocean, about a mile and a half deep, almost at boiling-water temperatures. 
+It takes CO2 to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source. 
+We're looking to see if we can take captured CO2, which can easily be piped to sites, convert that CO2 back into fuel to drive this process. 
+So, in a short period of time, we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of "" What is life? "" We truly, you know, have modest goals of replacing the whole petrol-chemical industry — (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah. If you can't do that at TED, where can you? — (Laughter) become a major source of energy... 
+But also, we're now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines. 
+You've seen this year with flu; we're always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine. 
+I think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance. 
+Here's what the future may begin to look like with changing, now, the evolutionary tree, speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria, Archaea and, eventually, eukaryotes. 
+We're a ways away from improving people: our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Okay. 
+♫ Strolling along in Central Park ♫ ♫ Everyone's out today ♫ ♫ The daisies and dogwoods are all in bloom ♫ ♫ Oh, what a glorious day ♫ ♫ For picnics and Frisbees and roller skaters, ♫ ♫ Friends and lovers and lonely sunbathers ♫ ♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January ♫ (Laughter) (Applause) ♫ I brought the iced tea; ♫ ♫ Did you bring the bug spray? ♫ ♫ The flies are the size of your head ♫ ♫ Next to the palm tree, ♫ ♫ Did you see the 'gators ♫ ♫ Looking happy and well fed? ♫ ♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January ♫ 
+(Whistling) Everyone! 
+(Whistling) (Laughter) ♫ My preacher said, ♫ ♫ Don't you worry ♫ ♫ The scientists have it all wrong ♫ ♫ And so, who cares it's winter here? ♫ ♫ And I have my halter-top on ♫ ♫ I have my halter-top on ♫ ♫ Everyone's out in merry Manhattan in January. ♫ (Applause) Chris Anderson: Jill Sobule! 
+
+Let's face it: Driving is dangerous. 
+It's one of the things that we don't like to think about, but the fact that religious icons and good luck charms show up on dashboards around the world betrays the fact that we know this to be true. 
+Car accidents are the leading cause of death in people ages 16 to 19 in the United States — leading cause of death — and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. 
+So what happens? 
+No one can say for sure, but I remember my first accident. 
+I was a young driver out on the highway, and the car in front of me, I saw the brake lights go on. 
+I'm like, "" Okay, all right, this guy is slowing down, I'll slow down too. "" I step on the brake. 
+But no, this guy isn't slowing down. 
+This guy is stopping, dead stop, dead stop on the highway. 
+It was just going 65 — to zero? 
+I slammed on the brakes. 
+I felt the ABS kick in, and the car is still going, and it's not going to stop, and I know it's not going to stop, and the air bag deploys, the car is totaled, and fortunately, no one was hurt. 
+But I had no idea that car was stopping, and I think we can do a lot better than that. 
+I think we can transform the driving experience by letting our cars talk to each other. 
+I just want you to think a little bit about what the experience of driving is like now. 
+Get into your car. Close the door. You're in a glass bubble. 
+You can't really directly sense the world around you. 
+You're in this extended body. 
+You're tasked with navigating it down partially-seen roadways, in and amongst other metal giants, at super-human speeds. 
+Okay? And all you have to guide you are your two eyes. 
+Okay, so that's all you have, eyes that weren't really designed for this task, but then people ask you to do things like, you want to make a lane change, what's the first thing they ask you do? 
+Take your eyes off the road. That's right. 
+Stop looking where you're going, turn, check your blind spot, and drive down the road without looking where you're going. 
+You and everyone else. This is the safe way to drive. 
+Why do we do this? Because we have to, we have to make a choice, do I look here or do I look here? 
+What's more important? 
+And usually we do a fantastic job picking and choosing what we attend to on the road. 
+But occasionally we miss something. 
+Occasionally we sense something wrong or too late. 
+In countless accidents, the driver says, "I didn't see it coming." 
+And I believe that. I believe that. 
+We can only watch so much. 
+But the technology exists now that can help us improve that. 
+In the future, with cars exchanging data with each other, we will be able to see not just three cars ahead and three cars behind, to the right and left, all at the same time, bird's eye view, we will actually be able to see into those cars. 
+We will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us, to see how fast that guy's going or stopping. 
+If that guy's going down to zero, I'll know. 
+And with computation and algorithms and predictive models, we will be able to see the future. 
+You may think that's impossible. 
+How can you predict the future? That's really hard. 
+Actually, no. With cars, it's not impossible. 
+Cars are three-dimensional objects that have a fixed position and velocity. 
+They travel down roads. 
+Often they travel on pre-published routes. 
+It's really not that hard to make reasonable predictions about where a car's going to be in the near future. 
+Even if, when you're in your car and some motorcyclist comes — bshoom! — 85 miles an hour down, lane-splitting — I know you've had this experience — that guy didn't "" just come out of nowhere. "" That guy's been on the road probably for the last half hour. 
+(Laughter) Right? I mean, somebody's seen him. 
+Ten, 20, 30 miles back, someone's seen that guy, and as soon as one car sees that guy and puts him on the map, he's on the map — position, velocity, good estimate he'll continue going 85 miles an hour. 
+You'll know, because your car will know, because that other car will have whispered something in his ear, like, "" By the way, five minutes, motorcyclist, watch out. "" You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave. 
+I mean, they're Newtonian objects. 
+That's very nice about them. 
+So how do we get there? 
+We can start with something as simple as sharing our position data between cars, just sharing GPS. 
+If I have a GPS and a camera in my car, I have a pretty precise idea of where I am and how fast I'm going. 
+With computer vision, I can estimate where the cars around me are, sort of, and where they're going. 
+And same with the other cars. 
+They can have a precise idea of where they are, and sort of a vague idea of where the other cars are. 
+What happens if two cars share that data, if they talk to each other? 
+I can tell you exactly what happens. 
+Both models improve. 
+Everybody wins. 
+Professor Bob Wang and his team have done computer simulations of what happens when fuzzy estimates combine, even in light traffic, when cars just share GPS data, and we've moved this research out of the computer simulation and into robot test beds that have the actual sensors that are in cars now on these robots: stereo cameras, GPS, and the two-dimensional laser range finders that are common in backup systems. 
+We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio, and the robots talk to each other. 
+When these robots come at each other, they track each other's position precisely, and they can avoid each other. 
+We're now adding more and more robots into the mix, and we encountered some problems. 
+One of the problems, when you get too much chatter, it's hard to process all the packets, so you have to prioritize, and that's where the predictive model helps you. 
+If your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories, you don't pay as much attention to those packets. 
+You prioritize the one guy who seems to be going a little off course. 
+That guy could be a problem. 
+And you can predict the new trajectory. 
+So you don't only know that he's going off course, you know how. 
+And you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way. 
+And we wanted to do — how can we best alert everyone? 
+How can these cars whisper, "" You need to get out of the way? "" Well, it depends on two things: one, the ability of the car, and second the ability of the driver. 
+If one guy has a really great car, but they're on their phone or, you know, doing something, they're not probably in the best position to react in an emergency. 
+So we started a separate line of research doing driver state modeling. 
+And now, using a series of three cameras, we can detect if a driver is looking forward, looking away, looking down, on the phone, or having a cup of coffee. 
+We can predict the accident and we can predict who, which cars, are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone. 
+Fundamentally, these technologies exist today. 
+I think the biggest problem that we face is our own willingness to share our data. 
+I think it's a very disconcerting notion, this idea that our cars will be watching us, talking about us to other cars, that we'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip. 
+But I believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy, just like right now, when I look at your car from the outside, I don't really know about you. 
+If I look at your license plate number, I don't really know who you are. 
+I believe our cars can talk about us behind our backs. 
+(Laughter) And I think it's going to be a great thing. 
+I want you to consider for a moment if you really don't want the distracted teenager behind you to know that you're braking, that you're coming to a dead stop. 
+By sharing our data willingly, we can do what's best for everyone. 
+So let your car gossip about you. 
+It's going to make the roads a lot safer. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This strange-looking plant is called the Llareta. 
+What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a shrub comprised of thousands of branches, each containing clusters of tiny green leaves at the end and so densely packed together that you could actually stand on top of it. 
+This individual lives in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and it happens to be 3,000 years old. 
+It also happens to be a relative of parsley. 
+For the past five years, I've been researching, working with biologists and traveling all over the world to find continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. 
+The project is part art and part science. 
+There's an environmental component. 
+And I'm also trying to create a means in which to step outside our quotidian experience of time and to start to consider a deeper timescale. 
+I selected 2,000 years as my minimum age because I wanted to start at what we consider to be year zero and work backward from there. 
+What you're looking at now is a tree called Jomon Sugi, living on the remote island of Yakushima. 
+The tree was in part a catalyst for the project. 
+I'd been traveling in Japan without an agenda other than to photograph, and then I heard about this tree that is 2,180 years old and knew that I had to go visit it. 
+It wasn't until later, when I was actually back home in New York that I got the idea for the project. 
+So it was the slow churn, if you will. 
+I think it was my longstanding desire to bring together my interest in art, science and philosophy that allowed me to be ready when the proverbial light bulb went on. 
+So I started researching, and to my surprise, this project had never been done before in the arts or the sciences. 
+And — perhaps naively — I was surprised to find that there isn't even an area in the sciences that deals with this idea of global species longevity. 
+So what you're looking at here is the rhizocarpon geographicum, or map lichen, and this is around 3,000 years old and lives in Greenland, which is a long way to go for some lichens. 
+Visiting Greenland was more like traveling back in time than just traveling very far north. 
+It was very primal and more remote than anything I'd ever experienced before. 
+And this is heightened by a couple of particular experiences. 
+One was when I had been dropped off by boat on a remote fjord, only to find that the archeologists I was supposed to meet were nowhere to be found. 
+And it's not like you could send them a text or shoot them an e-mail, so I was literally left to my own devices. 
+But luckily, it worked out obviously, but it was a humbling experience to feel so disconnected. 
+And then a few days later, we had the opportunity to go fishing in a glacial stream near our campsite, where the fish were so abundant that you could literally reach into the stream and grab out a foot-long trout with your bare hands. 
+It was like visiting a more innocent time on the planet. 
+And then, of course, there's the lichens. 
+These lichens grow only one centimeter every hundred years. 
+I think that really puts human lifespans into a different perspective. 
+And what you're looking at here is an aerial photo take over eastern Oregon. 
+And if the title "" Searching for Armillaria Death Rings, "" sounds ominous, it is. 
+The Armillaria is actually a predatory fungus, killing certain species of trees in the forest. 
+It's also more benignly known as the honey mushroom or the "" humongous fungus "" because it happens to be one of the world's largest organisms as well. 
+So with the help of some biologists studying the fungus, I got some maps and some GPS coordinates and chartered a plane and started looking for the death rings, the circular patterns in which the fungus kills the trees. 
+So I'm not sure if there are any in this photo, but I do know the fungus is down there. 
+And then this back down on the ground and you can see that the fungus is actually invading this tree. 
+So that white material that you see in between the bark and the wood is the mycelial felt of the fungus, and what it's doing — it's actually slowly strangling the tree to death by preventing the flow of water and nutrients. 
+So this strategy has served it pretty well — it's 2,400 years old. 
+And then from underground to underwater. 
+This is a Brain Coral living in Tobago that's around 2,000 years old. 
+And I had to overcome my fear of deep water to find this one. 
+This is at about 60 feet or 18 meters, depth. 
+And you'll see, there's some damage to the surface of the coral. 
+That was actually caused by a school of parrot fish that had started eating it, though luckily, they lost interest before killing it. 
+Luckily still, it seems to be out of harm's way of the recent oil spill. 
+But that being said, we just as easily could have lost one of the oldest living things on the planet, and the full impact of that disaster is still yet to be seen. 
+Now this is something that I think is one of the most quietly resilient things on the planet. 
+This is clonal colony of Quaking Aspen trees, living in Utah, that is literally 80,000 years old. 
+What looks like a forest is actually only one tree. 
+Imagine that it's one giant root system and each tree is a stem coming up from that system. 
+So what you have is one giant, interconnected, genetically identical individual that's been living for 80,000 years. 
+It also happens to be male and, in theory immortal. 
+(Laughter) This is a clonal tree as well. 
+This is the spruce Gran Picea, which at 9,550 years is a mere babe in the woods. 
+The location of this tree is actually kept secret for its own protection. 
+I spoke to the biologist who discovered this tree, and he told me that that spindly growth you see there in the center is most likely a product of climate change. 
+As it's gotten warmer on the top of the mountain, the vegetation zone is actually changing. 
+So we don't even necessarily have to have direct contact with these organisms to have a very real impact on them. 
+This is the Fortingall Yew — no, I'm just kidding — this is the Fortingall Yew. 
+(Laughter) But I put that slide in there because I'm often asked if there are any animals in the project. 
+And aside from coral, the answer is no. 
+Does anybody know how old the oldest tortoise is — any guesses? 
+(Audience: 300.) Rachel Sussman: 300? No, 175 is the oldest living tortoise, so nowhere near 2,000. 
+And then, you might have heard of this giant clam that was discovered off the coast of northern Iceland that reached 405 years old. 
+However, it died in the lab as they were determining its age. 
+The most interesting discovery of late, I think is the so-called immortal jellyfish, which has actually been observed in the lab to be able to be able to revert back to the polyp state after reaching full maturity. 
+So that being said, it's highly unlikely that any jellyfish would survive that long in the wild. 
+And back to the yew here. 
+So as you can see, it's in a churchyard; it's in Scotland. It's behind a protective wall. 
+And there are actually a number or ancient yews in churchyards around the U.K., but if you do the math, you'll remember it's actually the yew trees that were there first, then the churches. 
+And now down to another part of the world. 
+I had the opportunity to travel around the Limpopo Province in South Africa with an expert in Baobab trees. 
+And we saw a number of them, and this is most likely the oldest. 
+It's around 2,000, and it's called the Sagole Baobab. 
+And you know, I think of all of these organisms as palimpsests. 
+They contain thousands of years of their own histories within themselves, and they also contain records of natural and human events. 
+And the Baobabs in particular are a great example of this. 
+You can see that this one has names carved into its trunk, but it also records some natural events. 
+So the Baobabs, as they get older, tend to get pulpy in their centers and hollow out. 
+And this can create great natural shelters for animals, but they've also been appropriated for some rather dubious human uses, including a bar, a prison and even a toilet inside of a tree. 
+And this brings me to another favorite of mine — I think, because it is just so unusual. 
+This plant is called the Welwitschia, and it lives only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola, where it's uniquely adapted to collect moisture from mist coming off the sea. 
+And what's more, it's actually a tree. 
+It's a primitive conifer. 
+You'll notice that it's bearing cones down the center. 
+And what looks like two big heaps of leaves, is actually two single leaves that get shredded up by the harsh desert conditions over time. 
+And it actually never sheds those leaves, so it also bears the distinction of having the longest leaves in the plant kingdom. 
+I spoke to a biologist at the Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden in Capetown to ask him where he thought this remarkable plant came from, and his thought was that if you travel around Namibia, you see that there are a number of petrified forests, and the logs are all — the logs are all giant coniferous trees, and yet there's no sign of where they might have come from. 
+So his thought was that flooding in the north of Africa actually brought those coniferous trees down tens of thousands of years ago, and what resulted was this remarkable adaptation to this unique desert environment. 
+This is what I think is the most poetic of the oldest living things. 
+This is something called an underground forest. 
+So, I spoke to a botanist at the Pretoria Botanical Garden, who explained that certain species of trees have adapted to this region. 
+It's bushfelt region, which is dry and prone to a lot of fires, as so what these trees have done is, if you can imagine that this is the crown of the tree, and that this is ground level, imagine that the whole thing, that whole bulk of the tree, migrated underground, and you just have those leaves peeping up above the surface. 
+That way, when a fire roars through, it's the equivalent of getting your eyebrows singed. 
+The tree can easily recover. 
+These also tend to grow clonally, the oldest of which is 13,000 years old. 
+Back in the U.S., there's a couple plants of similar age. 
+This is the clonal Creosote bush, which is around 12,000 years old. 
+If you've been in the American West, you know the Creosote bush is pretty ubiquitous, but that being said, you see that this has this unique, circular form. 
+And what's happening is it's expanding slowly outwards from that original shape. 
+And it's one — again, that interconnected root system, making it one genetically identical individual. 
+It also has a friend nearby — well, I think they're friends. 
+This is the clonal Mojave yucca, it's about a mile away, and it's a little bit older than 12,000 years. 
+And you see it has that similar circular form. 
+And there's some younger clones dotting the landscape behind it. 
+And both of these, the yucca and the Creosote bush, live on Bureau of Land Management land, and that's very different from being protected in a national park. 
+In fact, this land is designated for recreational all-terrain vehicle use. 
+So, now I want to show what very well might be the oldest living thing on the planet. 
+This is Siberian Actinobacteria, which is between 400,000 and 600,000 years old. 
+This bacteria was discovered several years ago by a team of planetary biologists hoping to find clues to life on other planets by looking at one of the harshest conditions on ours. 
+And what they found, by doing research into the permafrost, was this bacteria. 
+But what's unique about it is that it's doing DNA repair below freezing. 
+And what that means is that it's not dormant — it's actually been living and growing for half a million years. 
+It's also probably one the most vulnerable of the oldest living things, because if the permafrost melts, it won't survive. 
+This is a map that I've put together of the oldest living things, so you can get a sense of where they are; you see they're all over the world. 
+The blue flags represent things that I've already photographed, and the reds are places that I'm still trying to get to. 
+You'll see also, there's a flag on Antarctica. 
+I'm trying to travel there to find 5,000 year-old moss, which lives on the Antarctic Peninsula. 
+So, I probably have about two more years left on this project — on this phase of the project, but after five years, I really feel like I know what's at the heart of this work. 
+The oldest living things in the world are a record and celebration of our past, a call to action in the present and a barometer of our future. 
+They've survived for millennia in desert, in the permafrost, at the tops of mountains and at the bottom of the ocean. 
+They've withstood untold natural perils and human encroachments, but now some of them are in jeopardy, and they can't just get up and get out of the way. 
+It's my hope that, by going to find these organisms, that I can help draw attention to their remarkable resilience and help play a part in insuring their continued longevity into the foreseeable future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So it's 2006. 
+My friend Harold Ford calls me. 
+He's running for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, and he says, "" Mellody, I desperately need some national press. Do you have any ideas? "" So I had an idea. I called a friend who was in New York at one of the most successful media companies in the world, and she said, "" Why don't we host an editorial board lunch for Harold? 
+You come with him. "" Harold and I arrive in New York. 
+We are in our best suits. 
+We look like shiny new pennies. 
+She motions for us to follow her. 
+We walk through a series of corridors, and all of a sudden we find ourselves in a stark room, at which point she looks at us and she says, "Where are your uniforms?" 
+Just as this happens, my friend rushes in. 
+The blood drains from her face. 
+There are literally no words, right? 
+And I look at her, and I say, "" Now, don't you think we need more than one black person in the U.S. Senate? "" Now Harold and I — (Applause) — we still laugh about that story, and in many ways, the moment caught me off guard, but deep, deep down inside, I actually wasn't surprised. 
+You see, my mother was ruthlessly realistic. 
+I remember one day coming home from a birthday party where I was the only black kid invited, and instead of asking me the normal motherly questions like, "" Did you have fun? "" or "" How was the cake? "" my mother looked at me and she said, "How did they treat you?" 
+I was seven. I did not understand. 
+I mean, why would anyone treat me differently? 
+But she knew. 
+And she looked me right in the eye and she said, "They will not always treat you well." 
+Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. 
+You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail. 
+There is shock, followed by a long silence. 
+And even coming here today, I told some friends and colleagues that I planned to talk about race, and they warned me, they told me, don't do it, that there'd be huge risks in me talking about this topic, that people might think I'm a militant black woman and I would ruin my career. 
+And I have to tell you, I actually for a moment was a bit afraid. 
+Then I realized, the first step to solving any problem is to not hide from it, and the first step to any form of action is awareness. 
+And so I decided to actually talk about race. 
+And I decided that if I came here and shared with you some of my experiences, that maybe we could all be a little less anxious and a little more bold in our conversations about race. 
+Now I know there are people out there who will say that the election of Barack Obama meant that it was the end of racial discrimination for all eternity, right? 
+But I work in the investment business, and we have a saying: The numbers do not lie. 
+And here, there are significant, quantifiable racial disparities that cannot be ignored, in household wealth, household income, job opportunities, healthcare. 
+One example from corporate America: Even though white men make up just 30 percent of the U.S. population, they hold 70 percent of all corporate board seats. 
+Of the Fortune 250, there are only seven CEOs that are minorities, and of the thousands of publicly traded companies today, thousands, only two are chaired by black women, and you're looking at one of them, the same one who, not too long ago, was nearly mistaken for kitchen help. 
+So that is a fact. 
+Now I have this thought experiment that I play with myself, when I say, imagine if I walked you into a room and it was of a major corporation, like ExxonMobil, and every single person around the boardroom were black, you would think that were weird. 
+But if I walked you into a Fortune 500 company, and everyone around the table is a white male, when will it be that we think that's weird too? 
+And I know how we got here. 
+You know, there was institutionalized, at one time legalized, discrimination in our country. 
+There's no question about it. 
+But still, as I grapple with this issue, my mother's question hangs in the air for me: How did they treat you? 
+Now, I do not raise this issue to complain or in any way to elicit any kind of sympathy. 
+I have succeeded in my life beyond my wildest expectations, and I have been treated well by people of all races more often than I have not. 
+I tell the uniform story because it happened. 
+I cite those statistics around corporate board diversity because they are real, and I stand here today talking about this issue of racial discrimination because I believe it threatens to rob another generation of all the opportunities that all of us want for all of our children, no matter what their color or where they come from. 
+And I think it also threatens to hold back businesses. 
+You see, researchers have coined this term "color blindness" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. 
+If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. 
+Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. 
+It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. 
+In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem. 
+There was a corporate study that said that, instead of avoiding race, the really smart corporations actually deal with it head on. 
+They actually recognize that embracing diversity means recognizing all races, including the majority one. 
+But I'll be the first one to tell you, this subject matter can be hard, awkward, uncomfortable — but that's kind of the point. 
+In the spirit of debunking racial stereotypes, the one that black people don't like to swim, I'm going to tell you how much I love to swim. 
+I love to swim so much that as an adult, I swim with a coach. 
+And one day my coach had me do a drill where I had to swim to one end of a 25-meter pool without taking a breath. 
+And every single time I failed, I had to start over. 
+And I failed a lot. 
+By the end, I got it, but when I got out of the pool, I was exasperated and tired and annoyed, and I said, "" Why are we doing breath-holding exercises? "" And my coach looked me at me, and he said, "" Mellody, that was not a breath-holding exercise. 
+That drill was to make you comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's how most of us spend our days. "" If we can learn to deal with our discomfort, and just relax into it, we'll have a better life. 
+So I think it's time for us to be comfortable with the uncomfortable conversation about race: black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, all of us, if we truly believe in equal rights and equal opportunity in America, I think we have to have real conversations about this issue. 
+We cannot afford to be color blind. 
+We have to be color brave. 
+We have to be willing, as teachers and parents and entrepreneurs and scientists, we have to be willing to have proactive conversations about race with honesty and understanding and courage, not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the smart thing to do, because our businesses and our products and our science, our research, all of that will be better with greater diversity. 
+Now, my favorite example of color bravery is a guy named John Skipper. 
+He's a North Carolina native, quintessential Southern gentleman, white. 
+He joined ESPN, which already had a culture of inclusion and diversity, but he took it up a notch. 
+He demanded that every open position have a diverse slate of candidates. 
+Now he says the senior people in the beginning bristled, and they would come to him and say, "" Do you want me to hire the minority, or do you want me to hire the best person for the job? "" And Skipper says his answers were always the same: "Yes." 
+And by saying yes to diversity, I honestly believe that ESPN is the most valuable cable franchise in the world. 
+Now I can tell you, in my own industry, at Ariel Investments, we actually view our diversity as a competitive advantage, and that advantage can extend way beyond business. 
+He says, if you're trying to solve a really hard problem, really hard, that you should have a diverse group of people, including those with diverse intellects. 
+The example that he gives is the smallpox epidemic. 
+When it was ravaging Europe, they brought together all these scientists, and they were stumped. 
+And the beginnings of the cure to the disease came from the most unlikely source, a dairy farmer who noticed that the milkmaids were not getting smallpox. 
+And the smallpox vaccination is bovine-based because of that dairy farmer. 
+Now I'm sure you're sitting here and you're saying, I don't run a cable company, I don't run an investment firm, I am not a dairy farmer. 
+What can I do? 
+And I'm telling you, you can be color brave. 
+If you're part of a hiring process or an admissions process, you can be color brave. 
+If you are trying to solve a really hard problem, you can speak up and be color brave. 
+Now I know people will say, but that doesn't add up to a lot, but I'm actually asking you to do something really simple: observe your environment, at work, at school, at home. 
+I'm asking you to look at the people around you purposefully and intentionally. 
+Invite people into your life who don't look like you, don't think like you, don't act like you, don't come from where you come from, and you might find that they will challenge your assumptions and make you grow as a person. 
+You might get powerful new insights from these individuals, or, like my husband, who happens to be white, you might learn that black people, men, women, children, we use body lotion every single day. 
+Now, I also think that this is very important so that the next generation really understands that this progress will help them, because they're expecting us to be great role models. 
+Now, I told you, my mother, she was ruthlessly realistic. 
+She was an unbelievable role model. 
+She was the kind of person who got to be the way she was because she was a single mom with six kids in Chicago. 
+She was in the real estate business, where she worked extraordinarily hard but oftentimes had a hard time making ends meet. 
+And that meant sometimes we got our phone disconnected, or our lights turned off, or we got evicted. 
+When we got evicted, sometimes we lived in these small apartments that she owned, sometimes in only one or two rooms, because they weren't completed, and we would heat our bathwater on hot plates. 
+But she never gave up hope, ever, and she never allowed us to give up hope either. 
+This brutal pragmatism that she had, I mean, I was four and she told me, "" Mommy is Santa. "" (Laughter) She was this brutal pragmatism. 
+She taught me so many lessons, but the most important lesson was that every single day she told me, "Mellody, you can be anything." 
+And because of those words, I would wake up at the crack of dawn, and because of those words, I would love school more than anything, and because of those words, when I was on a bus going to school, I dreamed the biggest dreams. 
+And it's because of those words that I stand here right now full of passion, asking you to be brave for the kids who are dreaming those dreams today. 
+(Applause) You see, I want them to look at a CEO on television and say, "" I can be like her, "" or, "" He looks like me. "" And I want them to know that anything is possible, that they can achieve the highest level that they ever imagined, that they will be welcome in any corporate boardroom, or they can lead any company. 
+You see this idea of being the land of the free and the home of the brave, it's woven into the fabric of America. 
+America, when we have a challenge, we take it head on, we don't shrink away from it. 
+We take a stand. We show courage. 
+As business leaders, I'm asking you not to leave anything on the table. 
+As citizens, I'm asking you not to leave any child behind. 
+I'm asking you not to be color blind, but to be color brave, so that every child knows that their future matters and their dreams are possible. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. (Applause) 
+
+In the great 1980s movie "" The Blues Brothers, "" there's a scene where John Belushi goes to visit Dan Aykroyd in his apartment in Chicago for the very first time. 
+It's a cramped, tiny space and it's just three feet away from the train tracks. 
+As John sits on Dan's bed, a train goes rushing by, rattling everything in the room. 
+John asks, "" How often does that train go by? "" Dan replies, "" So often, you won't even notice it. "" And then, something falls off the wall. 
+We all know what he's talking about. 
+As human beings, we get used to everyday things really fast. 
+As a product designer, it's my job to see those everyday things, to feel them, and try to improve upon them. 
+For example, see this piece of fruit? 
+See this little sticker? 
+That sticker wasn't there when I was a kid. 
+Why? 
+So it could be easier for us to check out at the grocery counter. 
+Well that's great, we can get in and out of the store quickly. 
+But now, there's a new problem. 
+When we get home and we're hungry and we see this ripe, juicy piece of fruit on the counter, we just want to pick it up and eat it. 
+Except now, we have to look for this little sticker. 
+And dig at it with our nails, damaging the flesh. 
+Then rolling up that sticker — you know what I mean. 
+And then trying to flick it off your fingers. 
+(Applause) It's not fun, not at all. 
+But something interesting happened. 
+See the first time you did it, you probably felt those feelings. 
+You just wanted to eat the piece of fruit. 
+You felt upset. 
+You just wanted to dive in. 
+By the 10th time, you started to become less upset and you just started peeling the label off. 
+By the 100th time, at least for me, I became numb to it. 
+I simply picked up the piece of fruit, dug at it with my nails, tried to flick it off, and then wondered, "Was there another sticker?" 
+So why is that? 
+Why do we get used to everyday things? 
+Well as human beings, we have limited brain power. 
+And so our brains encode the everyday things we do into habits so we can free up space to learn new things. 
+It's a process called habituation and it's one of the most basic ways, as humans, we learn. 
+Now, habituation isn't always bad. 
+I sure do. 
+Your hands clenched at 10 and 2 on the wheel, looking at every single object out there — the cars, the lights, the pedestrians. 
+It's a nerve-wracking experience. 
+So much so, that I couldn't even talk to anyone else in the car and I couldn't even listen to music. 
+But then something interesting happened. 
+As the weeks went by, driving became easier and easier. 
+You habituated it. 
+It started to become fun and second nature. 
+And then, you could talk to your friends again and listen to music. 
+So there's a good reason why our brains habituate things. 
+If we didn't, we'd notice every little detail, all the time. 
+It would be exhausting, and we'd have no time to learn about new things. 
+But sometimes, habituation isn't good. 
+If it stops us from noticing the problems that are around us, well, that's bad. 
+And if it stops us from noticing and fixing those problems, well, then that's really bad. 
+Comedians know all about this. 
+Jerry Seinfeld's entire career was built on noticing those little details, those idiotic things we do every day that we don't even remember. 
+He tells us about the time he visited his friends and he just wanted to take a comfortable shower. 
+He'd reach out and grab the handle and turn it slightly one way, and it was 100 degrees too hot. 
+And then he'd turn it the other way, and it was 100 degrees too cold. 
+He just wanted a comfortable shower. 
+Now, we've all been there, we just don't remember it. 
+But Jerry did, and that's a comedian's job. 
+But designers, innovators and entrepreneurs, it's our job to not just notice those things, but to go one step further and try to fix them. 
+See this, this person, this is Mary Anderson. 
+In 1902 in New York City, she was visiting. 
+It was a cold, wet, snowy day and she was warm inside a streetcar. 
+As she was going to her destination, she noticed the driver opening the window to clean off the excess snow so he could drive safely. 
+When he opened the window, though, he let all this cold, wet air inside, making all the passengers miserable. 
+Now probably, most of those passengers just thought, "" It's a fact of life, he's got to open the window to clean it. 
+That's just how it is. "" But Mary didn't. 
+Mary thought, "" What if the diver could actually clean the windshield from the inside so that he could stay safe and drive and the passengers could actually stay warm? "" So she picked up her sketchbook right then and there, and began drawing what would become the world's first windshield wiper. 
+Now as a product designer, I try to learn from people like Mary to try to see the world the way it really is, not the way we think it is. 
+Why? 
+Because it's easy to solve a problem that almost everyone sees. 
+But it's hard to solve a problem that almost no one sees. 
+Now some people think you're born with this ability or you're not, as if Mary Anderson was hardwired at birth to see the world more clearly. 
+That wasn't the case for me. 
+I had to work at it. 
+During my years at Apple, Steve Jobs challenged us to come into work every day, to see our products through the eyes of the customer, the new customer, the one that has fears and possible frustrations and hopeful exhilaration that their new technology product could work straightaway for them. 
+He called it staying beginners, and wanted to make sure that we focused on those tiny little details to make them faster, easier and seamless for the new customers. 
+So I remember this clearly in the very earliest days of the iPod. 
+See, back in the '90s, being a gadget freak like I am, I would rush out to the store for the very, very latest gadget. 
+I'd take all the time to get to the store, I'd check out, I'd come back home, I'd start to unbox it. 
+And then, there was another little sticker: the one that said, "" Charge before use. "" What! 
+I can't believe it! 
+I just spent all this time buying this product and now I have to charge before use. 
+I have to wait what felt like an eternity to use that coveted new toy. 
+It was crazy. 
+But you know what? 
+Almost every product back then did that. 
+When it had batteries in it, you had to charge it before you used it. 
+Well, Steve noticed that and he said, "We're not going to let that happen to our product." 
+So what did we do? 
+Typically, when you have a product that has a hard drive in it, you run it for about 30 minutes in the factory to make sure that hard drive's going to be working years later for the customer after they pull it out of the box. 
+Why? 
+Well, first off, we could make a higher quality product, be easy to test, and make sure it was great for the customer. 
+But most importantly, the battery came fully charged right out of the box, ready to use. 
+So that customer, with all that exhilaration, could just start using the product. 
+It was great, and it worked. 
+People liked it. 
+Today, almost every product that you get that's battery powered comes out of the box fully charged, even if it doesn't have a hard drive. 
+But back then, we noticed that detail and we fixed it, and now everyone else does that as well. 
+No more, "" Charge before use. "" So why am I telling you this? 
+Well, it's seeing the invisible problem, not just the obvious problem, that's important, not just for product design, but for everything we do. 
+You see, there are invisible problems all around us, ones we can solve. 
+But first we need to see them, to feel them. 
+So, I'm hesitant to give you any tips about neuroscience or psychology. 
+There's far too many experienced people in the TED community who would know much more about that than I ever will. 
+But let me leave you with a few tips that I do, that we all can do, to fight habituation. 
+My first tip is to look broader. 
+You see, when you're tackling a problem, sometimes, there are a lot of steps that lead up to that problem. 
+And sometimes, a lot of steps after it. 
+If you can take a step back and look broader, maybe you can change some of those boxes before the problem. 
+Maybe you can combine them. 
+Maybe you can remove them altogether to make that better. 
+Take thermostats, for instance. 
+In the 1900s when they first came out, they were really simple to use. 
+You could turn them up or turn them down. 
+People understood them. 
+But in the 1970s, the energy crisis struck, and customers started thinking about how to save energy. 
+So what happened? 
+Thermostat designers decided to add a new step. 
+Instead of just turning up and down, you now had to program it. 
+Now that seemed great. 
+Every thermostat had started adding that feature. 
+But it turned out that no one saved any energy. 
+Now, why is that? 
+Well, people couldn't predict the future. 
+They just didn't know how their weeks would change season to season, year to year. 
+So no one was saving energy, and what happened? 
+Thermostat designers went back to the drawing board and they focused on that programming step. 
+But still, years later, people were not saving any energy because they just couldn't predict the future. 
+So what did we do? 
+We put a machine-learning algorithm in instead of the programming that would simply watch when you turned it up and down, when you liked a certain temperature when you got up, or when you went away. 
+And you know what? 
+It worked. 
+People are saving energy without any programming. 
+If you take a step back and look at all the boxes, maybe there's a way to remove one or combine them so that you can make that process much simpler. 
+So that's my first tip: look broader. 
+For my second tip, it's to look closer. 
+One of my greatest teachers was my grandfather. 
+He taught me all about the world. 
+He taught me how things were built and how they were repaired, the tools and techniques necessary to make a successful project. 
+I remember one story he told me about screws, and about how you need to have the right screw for the right job. 
+There are many different screws: wood screws, metal screws, anchors, concrete screws, the list went on and on. 
+Our job is to make products that are easy to install for all of our customs themselves without professionals. 
+So what did we do? 
+I remembered that story that my grandfather told me, and so we thought, "" How many different screws can we put in the box? 
+Was it going to be two, three, four, five? 
+Because there's so many different wall types. "" So we thought about it, we optimized it, and we came up with three different screws to put in the box. 
+We thought that was going to solve the problem. 
+But it turned out, it didn't. 
+So we shipped the product, and people weren't having a great experience. 
+So what did we do? 
+We went back to the drawing board just instantly after we figured out we didn't get it right. 
+And we designed a special screw, a custom screw, much to the chagrin of our investors. 
+They were like, "" Why are you spending so much time on a little screw? 
+Get out there and sell more! "" And we said, "" We will sell more if we get this right. "" And it turned out, we did. 
+With that custom little screw, there was just one screw in the box, that was easy to mount and put on the wall. 
+So if we focus on those tiny details, the ones we may not see and we look at them as we say, "" Are those important or is that the way we've always done it? 
+Maybe there's a way to get rid of those. "" So my last piece of advice is to think younger. 
+Every day, I'm confronted with interesting questions from my three young kids. 
+They come up with questions like, "Why can't cars fly around traffic?" 
+Or, "" Why don't my shoelaces have Velcro instead? "" Sometimes, those questions are smart. 
+My son came to me the other day and I asked him, "Go run out to the mailbox and check it." 
+He looked at me, puzzled, and said, "" Why doesn't the mailbox just check itself and tell us when it has mail? "" (Laughter) I was like, "" That's a pretty good question. "" So, they can ask tons of questions and sometimes we find out we just don't have the right answers. 
+We say, "" Son, that's just the way the world works. "" So the more we're exposed to something, the more we get used to it. 
+But kids haven't been around long enough to get used to those things. 
+And so when they run into problems, they immediately try to solve them, and sometimes they find a better way, and that way really is better. 
+So my advice that we take to heart is to have young people on your team, or people with young minds. 
+Because if you have those young minds, they cause everyone in the room to think younger. 
+Picasso once said, "" Every child is an artist. 
+The problem is when he or she grows up, is how to remain an artist. "" We all saw the world more clearly when we saw it for the first time, before a lifetime of habits got in the way. 
+Our challenge is to get back there, to feel that frustration, to see those little details, to look broader, look closer, and to think younger so we can stay beginners. 
+It's not easy. 
+It requires us pushing back against one of the most basic ways we make sense of the world. 
+But if we do, we could do some pretty amazing things. 
+For me, hopefully, that's better product design. 
+For you, that could mean something else, something powerful. 
+Our challenge is to wake up each day and say, "How can I experience the world better?" 
+And if we do, maybe, just maybe, we can get rid of these dumb little stickers. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My dream is to build the world's first underground park in New York City. 
+Now, why would someone want to build an underground park, and why in New York City? 
+These three tough little buggers are, on the left, my grandmother, age five, and then her sister and brother, ages 11 and nine. 
+This photo was taken just before they left from Italy to immigrate to the United States, just about a century ago. 
+And like many immigrants at the time, they arrived on the Lower East Side in New York City and they encountered a crazy melting pot. 
+What was amazing about their generation was that they were not only building new lives in this new, unfamiliar area, but they were also literally building the city. 
+I've always been fascinated by those decades and by that history, and I would often beg my grandmother to tell me as many stories as possible about the old New York. 
+But she would often just shrug it off, tell me to eat more meatballs, more pasta, and so I very rarely got any of the history that I wanted to hear about. 
+The New York City that I encountered felt pretty built up. 
+I always knew as a kid that I wanted to make a difference, and to somehow make the world more beautiful, more interesting and more just. 
+But it felt weird to me that I knew more about local Kenyan politics than the politics of my own hometown. 
+I took a job with the City of New York, but very quickly felt frustrated with the slowness of government bureaucracy. 
+I even took a job at Google, where very fast I drank the Kool-Aid and believed almost wholeheartedly that technology could solve all social problems. 
+But I still didn't feel like I was making the world a better place. 
+It was in 2009 that my friend and now business partner James Ramsey alerted me to the location of a pretty spectacular site, which is this. 
+This is the former trolley terminal that was the depot for passengers traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and it was open between 1908 and 1948, just around the time when my grandparents were living right in the area. 
+And we learned also that the site was entirely abandoned in 1948. 
+Fascinated by this discovery, we begged the authorities to draw us into the space, and we finally got a tour, and this is what we saw. 
+Now, this photo doesn't really do it justice. 
+It's kind of hard to imagine the unbelievably magical feeling that you have when you get in this space. 
+It's a football field of unused land immediately below a very crowded area of the city, and it almost feels like you're Indiana Jones on an archaeological dig, and all the details are all still there. 
+Now, the site itself is located at the very heart of the Lower East Side, and today it still remains one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city. 
+New York City has two thirds the green space per resident as other big cities, and this neighborhood as one tenth the green space. 
+So we immediately started thinking about how we could take this site and turn it into something that could be used for the public, but also could potentially even be green. 
+Our plan, in a nutshell, is to draw natural sunlight underground using a simple system that harvests sunlight above the street, directs it below the city sidewalks, and would allow plants and trees to grow with the light that's directed underneath. 
+With this approach, you could take a site that looks like this today and transform it into something that looks like this. 
+In 2011, we first released some of these images, and what was funny was, a lot of people said to us, "" Oh, it kind of looks like the High Line underground. "" And so what our nickname ended up becoming, and what ended up sticking, was the Lowline, so the Lowline was born. 
+What was also clear was that people really wanted to know a lot more about how the technology would look and feel, and that there was really much more interest in this than we had ever thought possible. 
+Here is us with our team putting together a technology demonstration in a warehouse. 
+Here's the underbelly of this solar canopy which we built to show the technology. 
+And here's the full exhibit all put together in this warehouse. 
+You can see the solar canopy overhead, the light streaming in, and this entirely live green space below. 
+So in the course of just a few weeks, tens of thousands of people came to see our exhibit, and since that time, we've grown our numbers of supporters both locally and among design enthusiasts all over the world. 
+Here's a rendering of the neighborhood just immediately above the Line's site, and a rendering of how it will look after major redevelopment that is coming over the course of the next 10 years. 
+Notice how crowded the neighborhood still feels and how there's really a lack of green space. 
+So what we're proposing is really something that will add one football field of green space underneath this neighborhood, but more importantly will introduce a really community-driven focus in a rapidly gentrifying area. 
+And right now, we're focusing very closely on how we engage with the City of New York on really transforming the overall ecosystem in an integrated way. 
+So here you see this iconic entrance in which we would literally peel up the street and reveal the historical layers of the city, and invite people into this warm underground space. 
+The Lowline would really be a four-season space and a respite for the city. 
+So I like to think that the Lowline actually brings my own family's story full circle. 
+If my grandparents and my parents were really focused on building the city up and out, I think my generation is focused on reclaiming the spaces that we already have, rediscovering our shared history, and reimagining how we can make our communities more interesting, more beautiful and more just. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was seven years old, some well-meaning adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. 
+Proudly, I said: "" An artist. "" "" No, you don't, "" he said, "You can't make a living being an artist!" 
+My little seven-year-old Picasso dreams were crushed. 
+But I gathered myself, went off in search of a new dream, eventually settling on being a scientist, perhaps something like the next Albert Einstein. 
+(Laughter) I have always loved math and science, later, coding. 
+In my junior year, my computer graphics professor showed us these wonderful short films. 
+It was the first computer animation any of us had ever seen. 
+I watched these films in wonder, transfixed, fireworks going off in my head, thinking, "" That is what I want to do with my life. "" The idea that all the math, science and code I had been learning could come together to create these worlds and characters and stories I connected with, was pure magic for me. 
+Just two years later, I started working at the place that made those films, Pixar Animation Studios. 
+It was here I learned how we actually execute those films. 
+To create our movies, we create a three-dimensional world inside the computer. 
+We start with a point that makes a line that makes a face that creates characters, or trees and rocks that eventually become a forest. 
+And because it's a three-dimensional world, we can move a camera around inside that world. 
+I was fascinated by all of it. 
+But then I got my first taste of lighting. 
+Lighting in practice is placing lights inside this three-dimensional world. 
+I actually have icons of lights I move around in there. 
+Here you can see I've added a light, I'm turning on the rough version of lighting in our software, turn on shadows and placing the light. 
+As I place a light, I think about what it might look like in real life, but balance that out with what we need artistically and for the story. 
+So it might look like this at first, but as we adjust this and move that in weeks of work, in rough form it might look like this, and in final form, like this. 
+There's this moment in lighting that made me fall utterly in love with it. 
+It's where we go from this to this. 
+It's the moment where all the pieces come together, and suddenly the world comes to life as if it's an actual place that exists. 
+This moment never gets old, especially for that little seven-year-old girl that wanted to be an artist. 
+As I learned to light, I learned about using light to help tell story, to set the time of day, to create the mood, to guide the audience's eye, how to make a character look appealing or stand out in a busy set. 
+Did you see WALL-E? 
+(Laughter) There he is. 
+As you can see, we can create any world that we want inside the computer. 
+We can make a world with monsters, with robots that fall in love, we can even make pigs fly. 
+(Laughter) While this is an incredible thing, this untethered artistic freedom, it can create chaos. 
+It can create unbelievable worlds, unbelievable movement, things that are jarring to the audience. 
+So to combat this, we tether ourselves with science. 
+We use science and the world we know as a backbone, to ground ourselves in something relatable and recognizable. 
+"" Finding Nemo "" is an excellent example of this. 
+A major portion of the movie takes place underwater. 
+But how do you make it look underwater? 
+In early research and development, we took a clip of underwater footage and recreated it in the computer. 
+Then we broke it back down to see which elements make up that underwater look. 
+One of the most critical elements was how the light travels through the water. 
+So we coded up a light that mimics this physics — first, the visibility of the water, and then what happens with the color. 
+Objects close to the eye have their full, rich colors. 
+As light travels deeper into the water, we lose the red wavelengths, then the green wavelengths, leaving us with blue at the far depths. 
+In this clip you can see two other important elements. 
+The first is the surge and swell, or the invisible underwater current that pushes the bits of particulate around in the water. 
+The second is the caustics. 
+These are the ribbons of light, like you might see on the bottom of a pool, that are created when the sun bends through the crests of the ripples and waves on the ocean's surface. 
+Here we have the fog beams. 
+These give us color depth cues, but also tells which direction is up in shots where we don't see the water surface. 
+The other really cool thing you can see here is that we lit that particulate only with the caustics, so that as it goes in and out of those ribbons of light, it appears and disappears, lending a subtle, magical sparkle to the underwater. 
+You can see how we're using the science — the physics of water, light and movement — to tether that artistic freedom. 
+But we are not beholden to it. 
+We considered each of these elements and which ones had to be scientifically accurate and which ones we could push and pull to suit the story and the mood. 
+We realized early on that color was one we had some leeway with. 
+So here's a traditionally colored underwater scene. 
+But here, we can take Sydney Harbor and push it fairly green to suit the sad mood of what's happening. 
+In this scene, it's really important we see deep into the underwater, so we understand what the East Australian Current is, that the turtles are diving into and going on this roller coaster ride. 
+So we pushed the visibility of the water well past anything you would ever see in real life. 
+Because in the end, we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real world, we're trying to create a believable world, one the audience can immerse themselves in to experience the story. 
+We use science to create something wonderful. 
+We use story and artistic touch to get us to a place of wonder. 
+This guy, WALL-E, is a great example of that. 
+He finds beauty in the simplest things. 
+But when he came in to lighting, we knew we had a big problem. 
+We got so geeked-out on making WALL-E this convincing robot, that we made his binoculars practically optically perfect. 
+(Laughter) His binoculars are one of the most critical acting devices he has. 
+He doesn't have a face or even traditional dialogue, for that matter. 
+So the animators were heavily dependent on the binoculars to sell his acting and emotions. 
+We started lighting and we realized the triple lenses inside his binoculars were a mess of reflections. 
+He was starting to look glassy-eyed. 
+(Laughter) Now, glassy-eyed is a fundamentally awful thing when you are trying to convince an audience that a robot has a personality and he's capable of falling in love. 
+So we went to work on these optically perfect binoculars, trying to find a solution that would maintain his true robot materials but solve this reflection problem. 
+So we started with the lenses. 
+Here's the flat-front lens, we have a concave lens and a convex lens. 
+And here you see all three together, showing us all these reflections. 
+We tried turning them down, we tried blocking them, nothing was working. 
+You can see here, sometimes we needed something specific reflected in his eyes — usually Eve. 
+So we couldn't just use some faked abstract image on the lenses. 
+So here we have Eve on the first lens, we put Eve on the second lens, it's not working. 
+We turn it down, it's still not working. 
+And then we have our eureka moment. 
+We add a light to WALL-E that accidentally leaks into his eyes. 
+You can see it light up these gray aperture blades. 
+Suddenly, those aperture blades are poking through that reflection the way nothing else has. 
+Now we recognize WALL-E as having an eye. 
+As humans we have the white of our eye, the colored iris and the black pupil. 
+Now WALL-E has the black of an eye, the gray aperture blades and the black pupil. 
+Suddenly, WALL-E feels like he has a soul, like there's a character with emotion inside. 
+Later in the movie towards the end, WALL-E loses his personality, essentially going dead. 
+This is the perfect time to bring back that glassy-eyed look. 
+In the next scene, WALL-E comes back to life. 
+We bring that light back to bring the aperture blades back, and he returns to that sweet, soulful robot we've come to love. 
+(Video) WALL-E: Eva? 
+Danielle Feinberg: There's a beauty in these unexpected moments — when you find the key to unlocking a robot's soul, the moment when you discover what you want to do with your life. 
+The jellyfish in "" Finding Nemo "" was one of those moments for me. 
+There are scenes in every movie that struggle to come together. 
+This was one of those scenes. 
+The director had a vision for this scene based on some wonderful footage of jellyfish in the South Pacific. 
+As we went along, we were floundering. 
+The reviews with the director turned from the normal look-and-feel conversation into more and more questions about numbers and percentages. 
+Maybe because unlike normal, we were basing it on something in real life, or maybe just because we had lost our way. 
+But it had become about using our brain without our eyes, the science without the art. 
+That scientific tether was strangling the scene. 
+So when it came in to lighting, I dug in. 
+As I worked to balance the blues and the pinks, the caustics dancing on the jellyfish bells, the undulating fog beams, something promising began to appear. 
+I came in one morning and checked the previous night's work. 
+And I got excited. 
+And then I showed it to the lighting director and she got excited. 
+Soon, I was showing to the director in a dark room full of 50 people. 
+In director review, you hope you might get some nice words, then you get some notes and fixes, generally. 
+And then, hopefully, you get a final, signaling to move on to the next stage. 
+I gave my intro, and I played the jellyfish scene. 
+And the director was silent for an uncomfortably long amount of time. 
+Just long enough for me to think, "Oh no, this is doomed." 
+And then he started clapping. 
+And then the production designer started clapping. 
+And then the whole room was clapping. 
+This is the moment that I live for in lighting. 
+The moment where it all comes together and we get a world that we can believe in. 
+We use math, science and code to create these amazing worlds. 
+We use storytelling and art to bring them to life. 
+It's this interweaving of art and science that elevates the world to a place of wonder, a place with soul, a place we can believe in, a place where the things you imagine can become real — and a world where a girl suddenly realizes not only is she a scientist, but also an artist. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Yves uses his body to steer the wing. 
+Stefan Von Bergen: Well, he turns by just putting his head on one or the other side. 
+And sometimes he assists that with his hands, sometimes even with the leg. 
+[Swiss Alps] [Strait of Gibraltar crossing] [English Channel crossing] Commentator One: There he goes. 
+So our first critical moment, it's open. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, a historic flight has begun. 
+[Images: National Geographic] Commentator Two: And as he approaches the ground, he's going to pull down on those toggles to flare, slow himself down just a little bit, and then come in for a nice landing. 
+So it's possible to fly almost like a bird. 
+And when I strap just this little harness, this little wing, I really have the feeling of being a bird. 
+It's very short and only in one direction. 
+That means about 190 miles per hour. 
+I don't do special physical training. 
+So you have to adapt. 
+I'm quite an experienced manager of systems as a pilot, but this is, really — You need fluidity, you need to be agile and also to adapt really fast. 
+Because you're going fast and you're up at 3,000 meters or so. 
+Four little engines, 22 kilos thrust each, turbines, working with kerosene. 
+BG: We saw the 2009 crossing of the Gibraltar Strait where you lost control and then you dived down into the clouds and in the ocean. 
+So that was one of those cases where you let the wings go, right? 
+So I did try to take, again, a climb altitude. 
+YR: You feel great, but — (Laughter) But you have not the right altitude. 
+I have also an audible altimeter. 
+YR: Exactly. There is a rescue parachute for the wing for two reasons: so I can repair it afterward and especially so nobody takes that, just on his head. 
+That means improvise. 
+So it's really a play between these two approaches. 
+What happens if one of the engines stops? 
+It's quite complicated to explain, but according to which regime I was, I can continue on two and try to get a nice place to land, and then I open my parachute. 
+And then the landing, as we have seen, arriving on this side of the Channel, is through a parachute. 
+YR: It was down on the bottom. 
+BG: I think that right now, many people are asking, "" When are you developing a double-seater so they can fly with you? "" YR: I have a standard answer. 
+(Applause) (Applause ends) BG: Yves, one last question. 
+YR: First, to instruct a younger guy. 
+
+(Breathes in) (Breathes out) So, I didn't always make my living from music. 
+For about the five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university, this was my day job. 
+(Laughter) I was a self-employed living statue called the Eight-Foot Bride, and I love telling people I did this for a job, because everybody always wants to know, who are these freaks in real life. (Laughter) 
+Hello. 
+I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower — and some intense eye contact. 
+(Laughter) So I had the most profound encounters with people, especially lonely people who looked like they hadn't talked to anyone in weeks, and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street, and we would sort of fall in love a little bit. 
+But it hurt, because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something un-joblike and unfair, shameful. 
+I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box. 
+And for the economists out there, you may be interested to know I actually made a pretty predictable income, which was shocking to me, given I had no regular customers, but pretty much 60 bucks on a Tuesday, 90 bucks on a Friday. 
+It was consistent. 
+I wrote the songs, and eventually we started making enough money that I could quit being a statue, and as we started touring, I really didn't want to lose this sense of direct connection with people, because I loved it. 
+So after all of our shows, we would sign autographs and hug fans and hang out and talk to people, and we made an art out of asking people to help us and join us, and I would track down local musicians and artists and they would set up outside of our shows, and they would pass the hat, and then they would come in and join us onstage, so we had this rotating smorgasbord of weird, random circus guests. 
+And then Twitter came along, and made things even more magic, because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere. 
+So I would need a piano to practice on, and an hour later I would be at a fan's house. 
+This is a library in Auckland. 
+I once tweeted, "" Where in Melbourne can I buy a neti pot? "" And a nurse from a hospital drove one right at that moment to the cafe I was in, and I bought her a smoothie and we sat there talking about nursing and death. 
+And I love this kind of random closeness, which is lucky, because I do a lot of couchsurfing. 
+In mansions where everyone in my crew gets their own room but there's no wireless, and in punk squats, everyone on the floor in one room with no toilets but with wireless, clearly making it the better option. 
+(Laughter) My crew once pulled our van up to a really poor Miami neighborhood and we found out that our couchsurfing host for the night was an 18-year-old girl, still living at home, and her family were all undocumented immigrants from Honduras. 
+And that night, her whole family took the couches and she slept together with her mom so that we could take their beds. 
+A couple of months later, I was in Manhattan, and I tweeted for a crash pad, and at midnight, I'm on the Lower East Side, and it occurs to me I've never actually done this alone. 
+(Laughter) Is this how stupid people die? 
+He's a financial blogger for Reuters, and they're pouring me a glass of red wine and offering me a bath, and I have had thousands of nights like that and like that. 
+I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing. 
+I once asked an opening band of mine if they wanted to go out into the crowd and pass the hat to get some extra money, something that I did a lot. 
+We sign with a major label. 
+And it comes out and it sells about 25,000 copies in the first few weeks, and the label considers this a failure. 
+Right at this same time, I'm signing and hugging after a gig, and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $10 bill, and he says, "I'm sorry, I burned your CD from a friend." 
+I just want you to have this money. "" And this starts happening all the time. 
+I become the hat after my own gigs, but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people, and unlike the guy in the opening band, I've actually had a lot of practice standing there. 
+And this is the moment I decide I'm just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible, so it's like Metallica over here, Napster, bad; Amanda Palmer over here, and I'm going to encourage torrenting, downloading, sharing, but I'm going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street. 
+So I fought my way off my label, and for my next project with my new band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, I turned to crowdfunding. 
+And I fell into those thousands of connections that I'd made, and I asked my crowd to catch me. 
+(Applause) And you can see how many people it is. 
+And the media asked, "" Amanda, the music business is tanking and you encourage piracy. 
+And through the very act of asking people, I'd connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you. 
+And a lot of artists have a problem with this. 
+And I got a lot of criticism online, after my Kickstarter went big, for continuing my crazy crowdsourcing practices, specifically for asking musicians who are fans if they wanted to join us on stage for a few songs in exchange for love and tickets and beer, and this was a doctored image that went up of me on a website. 
+And people saying, "You're not allowed anymore to ask for that kind of help," really reminded me of the people in their cars yelling, "" Get a job. "" Because they weren't with us on the sidewalk, and they couldn't see the exchange that was happening between me and my crowd, an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them. 
+Now let me tell you, if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers — (Laughter) I recommend this, especially if those strangers are drunk German people. (Laughter) 
+This was a ninja master-level fan connection, because what I was really saying here was, I trust you this much. 
+For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community. 
+Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the Internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it are taking us back. 
+It's about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough. 
+So a lot of people are confused by the idea of no hard sticker price. 
+But the perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but, more important — to ask without shame. 
+So blogging and tweeting not just about my tour dates and my new video but about our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers, our mistakes, and we see each other. 
+And I think when we really see each other, we want to help each other. 
+I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, "" How do we make people pay for music? "" What if we started asking, "How do we let people pay for music?" 
+
+I heard this amazing story about Miuccia Prada. 
+She's an Italian fashion designer. 
+She goes to this vintage store in Paris with a friend of hers. 
+She's rooting around, she finds this one jacket by Balenciaga — she loves it. 
+She's turning it inside out. 
+She's looking at the seams. She's looking at the construction. 
+Her friend says, "" Buy it already. "" She said, "" I'll buy it, but I'm also going to replicate it. "" Now, the academics in this audience may think, "Well, that sounds like plagiarism." 
+But to a fashionista, what it really is is a sign of Prada's genius: that she can root through the history of fashion and pick the one jacket that doesn't need to be changed by one iota, and to be current and to be now. 
+You might also be asking whether it's possible that this is illegal for her to do this. 
+Well, it turns out that it's actually not illegal. 
+In the fashion industry, there's very little intellectual property protection. 
+They have trademark protection, but no copyright protection and no patent protection to speak of. 
+All they have, really, is trademark protection, and so it means that anybody could copy any garment on any person in this room and sell it as their own design. 
+The only thing that they can't copy is the actual trademark label within that piece of apparel. 
+That's one reason that you see logos splattered all over these products. 
+It's because it's a lot harder for knock-off artists to knock off these designs because they can't knock off the logo. 
+But if you go to Santee Alley, yeah. 
+(Laughter) Well, yeah. 
+Canal Street, I know. 
+And sometimes these are fun, right? 
+Now, the reason for this, the reason that the fashion industry doesn't have any copyright protection is because the courts decided long ago that apparel is too utilitarian to qualify for copyright protection. 
+They didn't want a handful of designers owning the seminal building blocks of our clothing. 
+And then everybody else would have to license this cuff or this sleeve because Joe Blow owns it. 
+But too utilitarian? I mean is that the way you think of fashion? 
+This is Vivienne Westwood. No! 
+We think of it as maybe too silly, too unnecessary. 
+Now, those of you who are familiar with the logic behind copyright protection — which is that without ownership, there is no incentive to innovate — might be really surprised by both the critical success of the fashion industry and the economic success of this industry. 
+What I'm going to argue today is that because there's no copyright protection in the fashion industry, fashion designers have actually been able to elevate utilitarian design, things to cover our naked bodies, into something that we consider art. 
+Because there's no copyright protection in this industry, there's a very open and creative ecology of creativity. 
+Unlike their creative brothers and sisters, who are sculptors or photographers or filmmakers or musicians, fashion designers can sample from all their peers' designs. 
+They can take any element from any garment from the history of fashion and incorporate it into their own design. 
+They're also notorious for riffing off of the zeitgeist. 
+And here, I suspect, they were influenced by the costumes in Avatar. 
+Maybe just a little. 
+Can't copyright a costume either. 
+Now, fashion designers have the broadest palette imaginable in this creative industry. 
+This wedding dress here is actually made of sporks, and this dress is actually made of aluminum. 
+I've heard this dress actually sort of sounds like wind chimes as they walk through. 
+So, one of the magical side effects of having a culture of copying, which is really what it is, is the establishment of trends. 
+People think this is a magical thing. How does it happen? 
+Well, it's because it's legal for people to copy one another. 
+Some people believe that there are a few people at the top of the fashion food chain who sort of dictate to us what we're all going to wear, but if you talk to any designer at any level, including these high-end designers, they always say their main inspiration comes from the street: where people like you and me remix and match our own fashion looks. 
+And that's where they really get a lot of their creative inspiration, so it's both a top-down and a bottom-up kind of industry. 
+Now, the fast fashion giants have probably benefited the most from the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry. 
+They are notorious for knocking off high-end designs and selling them at very low prices. 
+And they've been faced with a lot of lawsuits, but those lawsuits are usually not won by fashion designers. 
+The courts have said over and over again, "" You don't need any more intellectual property protection. "" When you look at copies like this, you wonder: How do the luxury high-end brands remain in business? 
+If you can get it for 200 bucks, why pay a thousand? 
+Well, that's one reason we had a conference here at USC a few years ago. 
+We invited Tom Ford to come — the conference was called, "" Ready to Share: Fashion and the Ownership of Creativity "" — and we asked him exactly this question. 
+Here's what he had to say. 
+He had just come off a successful stint as the lead designer at Gucci, in case you didn't know. 
+Tom Ford: And we found after much research that — actually not much research, quite simple research — that the counterfeit customer was not our customer. 
+Johanna Blakley: Imagine that. 
+The people on Santee Alley are not the ones who shop at Gucci. 
+(Laughter) This is a very different demographic. 
+And, you know, a knock-off is never the same as an original high-end design, at least in terms of the materials; they're always made of cheaper materials. 
+But even sometimes a cheaper version can actually have some charming aspects, can breathe a little extra life into a dying trend. 
+There's lots of virtues of copying. 
+One that a lot of cultural critics have pointed to is that we now have a much broader palette of design choices to choose from than we ever have before, and this is mainly because of the fast fashion industry, actually. 
+And this is a good thing. We need lots of options. 
+Fashion, whether you like it or not, helps you project who you are to the world. 
+Because of fast fashion, global trends actually get established much more quickly than they used to. 
+And this, actually, is good news to trendsetters; they want trends to be set so that they can move product. 
+For fashionistas, they want to stay ahead of the curve. 
+They don't want to be wearing what everybody else is wearing. 
+And so, they want to move on to the next trend as soon as possible. 
+I tell you, there is no rest for the fashionable. 
+Every season, these designers have to struggle to come up with the new fabulous idea that everybody's going to love. 
+And this, let me tell you, is very good for the bottom line. 
+Now of course, there's a bunch of effects that this culture of copying has on the creative process. 
+And Stuart Weitzman is a very successful shoe designer. 
+He has complained a lot about people copying him, but in one interview I read, he said it has really forced him to up his game. 
+He had to come up with new ideas, new things that would be hard to copy. 
+He came up with this Bowden-wedge heel that has to be made out of steel or titanium; if you make it from some sort of cheaper material, it'll actually crack in two. 
+It forced him to be a little more innovative. (Music) And that actually reminded me of jazz great, Charlie Parker. 
+I don't know if you've heard this anecdote, but I have. 
+He said that one of the reasons he invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians wouldn't be able to replicate the sound. (Laughter) He wanted to make it too difficult to copy, and that's what fashion designers are doing all the time. 
+They're trying to put together a signature look, an aesthetic that reflects who they are. 
+When people knock it off, everybody knows because they've put that look out on the runway, and it's a coherent aesthetic. 
+I love these Gallianos. 
+Okay, we'll move on. (Laughter) This is not unlike the world of comedy. 
+I don't know if you know that jokes also can't be copyright protected. 
+So when one-liners were really popular, everybody stole them from one another. 
+But now, we have a different kind of comic. 
+They develop a persona, a signature style, much like fashion designers. 
+And their jokes, much like the fashion designs by a fashion designer, really only work within that aesthetic. 
+If somebody steals a joke from Larry David, for instance, it's not as funny. 
+Now, the other thing that fashion designers have done to survive in this culture of copying is they've learned how to copy themselves. 
+They knock themselves off. 
+They make deals with the fast fashion giants and they come up with a way to sell their product to a whole new demographic: the Santee Alley demographic. 
+Now, some fashion designers will say, "" It's only in the United States that we don't have any respect. 
+In other countries there is protection for our artful designs. "" But if you take a look at the two other biggest markets in the world, it turns out that the protection that's offered is really ineffectual. 
+In Japan, for instance, which I think is the third largest market, they have a design law; it protects apparel, but the novelty standard is so high, you have to prove that your garment has never existed before, it's totally unique. 
+And that's sort of like the novelty standard for a U.S. patent, which fashion designers never get — rarely get here in the states. 
+In the European Union, they went in the other direction. 
+Very low novelty standard, anybody can register anything. 
+But even though it's the home of the fast fashion industry and you have a lot of luxury designers there, they don't register their garments, generally, and there's not a lot of litigation. 
+It turns out it's because the novelty standard is too low. 
+A person can come in and take somebody else's gown, cut off three inches from the bottom, go to the E.U. and register it as a new, original design. 
+So, that does not stop the knock-off artists. 
+If you look at the registry, actually, a lot of the registered things in the E.U. 
+are Nike T-shirts that are almost identical to one another. 
+But this has not stopped Diane von Furstenberg. 
+She is the head of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and she has told her constituency that she is going to get copyright protection for fashion designs. 
+The retailers have kind of quashed this notion though. 
+I don't think the legislation is going anywhere, because they realized it is so hard to tell the difference between a pirated design and something that's just part of a global trend. 
+Who owns a look? 
+That is a very difficult question to answer. 
+It takes lots of lawyers and lots of court time, and the retailers decided that would be way too expensive. 
+You know, it's not just the fashion industry that doesn't have copyright protection. 
+There's a bunch of other industries that don't have copyright protection, including the food industry. 
+You cannot copyright a recipe because it's a set of instructions, it's fact, and you cannot copyright the look and feel of even the most unique dish. 
+Same with automobiles. 
+It doesn't matter how wacky they look or how cool they look, you cannot copyright the sculptural design. 
+It's a utilitarian article, that's why. 
+Same with furniture, it's too utilitarian. 
+Magic tricks, I think they're instructions, sort of like recipes: no copyright protection. 
+Hairdos, no copyright protection. 
+Open source software, these guys decided they didn't want copyright protection. 
+They thought it'd be more innovative without it. 
+It's really hard to get copyright for databases. 
+Tattoo artists, they don't want it; it's not cool. 
+They share their designs. 
+Jokes, no copyright protection. 
+Fireworks displays, the rules of games, the smell of perfume: no. 
+And some of these industries may seem sort of marginal to you, but these are the gross sales for low I.P. industries, industries with very little copyright protection, and there's the gross sales of films and books. 
+(Applause) It ain't pretty. (Applause) 
+So you talk to people in the fashion industry and they're like, "" Shhh! 
+Don't tell anybody we can actually steal from each other's designs. 
+It's embarrassing. "" But you know what? It's revolutionary, and it's a model that a lot of other industries — like the ones we just saw with the really small bars — they might have to think about this. 
+Because right now, those industries with a lot of copyright protection are operating in an atmosphere where it's as if they don't have any protection, and they don't know what to do. 
+When I found out that there are a whole bunch of industries that didn't have copyright protection, I thought, "" What exactly is the underlying logic? 
+I want a picture. "" And the lawyers do not provide a picture, so I made one. 
+These are the two main sort of binary oppositions within the logic of copyright law. 
+It is more complex than this, but this will do. 
+First: Is something an artistic object? 
+Then it deserves protection. 
+Is it a utilitarian object? 
+Then no, it does not deserve protection. 
+This is a difficult, unstable binary. 
+The other one is: Is it an idea? 
+Is it something that needs to freely circulate in a free society? 
+No protection. 
+Or is it a physically fixed expression of an idea: something that somebody made and they deserve to own it for a while and make money from it? 
+The problem is that digital technology has completely subverted the logic of this physically fixed, expression versus idea concept. 
+Nowadays, we don't really recognize a book as something that sits on our shelf or music as something that is a physical object that we can hold. 
+It's a digital file. 
+It is barely tethered to any sort of physical reality in our minds. 
+And these things, because we can copy and transmit them so easily, actually circulate within our culture a lot more like ideas than like physically instantiated objects. 
+Now, the conceptual issues are truly profound when you talk about creativity and ownership and, let me tell you, we don't want to leave this just to lawyers to figure out. 
+They're smart. 
+I'm with one. He's my boyfriend, he's okay. 
+He's smart, he's smart. 
+But you want an interdisciplinary team of people hashing this out, trying to figure out: What is the kind of ownership model, in a digital world, that's going to lead to the most innovation? 
+And my suggestion is that fashion might be a really good place to start looking for a model for creative industries in the future. 
+If you want more information about this research project, please visit our website: it's ReadyToShare.org. 
+And I really want to thank Veronica Jauriqui for making this very fashionable presentation. 
+Thank you so much. (Applause) 
+
+Mountain biking in Israel is something that I do with great passion and commitment. 
+And when I'm on my bike, I feel that I connect with the profound beauty of Israel, and I feel that I'm united with this country's history and biblical law. 
+And also, for me, biking is a matter of empowerment. 
+When I reach the summit of a steep mountain in the middle of nowhere, I feel young, invincible, eternal. 
+It's as if I'm connecting with some legacy or with some energy far greater than myself. 
+You can see my fellow riders at the end of the picture, looking at me with some concern. 
+And here is another picture of them. 
+Unfortunately, I cannot show their faces, neither can I disclose their true names, and that's because my fellow riders are juvenile inmates, offenders spending time in a correction facility about 20 minutes' ride from here — well, like everything in Israel. 
+And I've been riding with these kids once a week, every Tuesday, rain or shine, for the last four years and by now, they've become a very big part of my life. 
+This story began four years ago. 
+The correction facility where they are locked up happens to be right in the middle of one of my usual trips, and it's surrounded by barbed wires and electric gates and armed guards. 
+So on one of these rides, I talked my way into the compound and went to see the warden. 
+I told the warden that I wanted to start a mountain biking club in this place and that basically I wanted to take the kids from here to there. 
+And I told him, "" Let's find a way in which I'll be able to take out 10 kids once a week to ride with in the summer in the country. "" And the warden was quite amused, and he told me he thought that I was a nut and he told me, "" This place is a correction facility. These guys are serious offenders. 
+They are supposed to be locked up. 
+They aren't supposed to be out at large. "" And yet, we began to talk about it, and one thing led to another. 
+And I can't see myself going into a state prison in New Jersey and making such a proposition, but this being Israel, the warden somehow made it happen. 
+And so two months later, we found ourselves "" at large "" — myself, 10 juvenile inmates and a wonderful fellow named Russ, who became a very good friend of mine and my partner in this project. 
+And in the next few weeks, I had the tremendous pleasure of introducing these kids to the world of total freedom, a world consisting of magnificent vistas like these — everything you see here is obviously in Israel — as well as close encounters with all sorts of small creatures coming in all sorts of sizes, colors, shapes, forms and so on. 
+In spite of all this splendor, the beginning was extremely frustrating. 
+Every small obstacle, every slight uphill, would cause these fellows to stop in their tracks and give up. 
+So we had a lot of this going on. 
+I found out that they had a very hard time dealing with frustration and difficulties — not because they were physically unfit. 
+But that's one reason why they ended up where they were. 
+And I became increasingly more and more agitated, because I was there not only to be with them, but also to ride and create a team and I didn't know what to do. 
+Now, let me give you an example. 
+We're going downhill in some rocky terrain, and the front tire of Alex gets caught in one of these crevasses here. 
+So he crashes down, and he gets slightly injured, but this does not prevent him from jumping up and then starting to jump up and down on his bike and curse violently. 
+Then he throws his helmet in the air. 
+His backpack goes ballistic in some other direction. 
+And then he runs to the nearest tree and starts to break branches and throw rocks and curse like I've never heard. 
+And I'm just standing there, watching this scene with a complete disbelief, not knowing what to do. 
+I'm used to algorithms and data structures and super motivated students, and nothing in my background prepared me to deal with a raging, violent adolescent in the middle of nowhere. 
+And you have to realize that these incidents did not happen in convenient locations. 
+They happened in places like this, in the Judean Desert, 20 kilometers away from the nearest road. 
+And what you don't see in this picture is that somewhere between these riders there, there's a teenager sitting on a rock, saying, "" I'm not moving from here. Forget it. 
+I've had it. "" Well, that's a problem because one way or another, you have to get this guy moving because it's getting dark soon and dangerous. 
+It took me several such incidents to figure out what I was supposed to do. 
+At the beginning, it was a disaster. 
+I tried harsh words and threats and they took me nowhere. 
+That's what they had all their lives. 
+And at some point I found out, when a kid like this gets into a fit, the best thing that you can possibly do is stay as close as possible to this kid, which is difficult, because what you really want to do is go away. 
+But that's what he had all his life, people walking away from him. 
+So what you have to do is stay close and try to reach in and pet his shoulder or give him a piece of chocolate. 
+So I would say, "" Alex, I know that it's terribly difficult. 
+Why don't you rest for a few minutes and then we'll go on. "" "" Go away you maniac-psychopath. 
+Why would you bring us to this goddamn place? "" And I would say, "" Relax, Alex. 
+Here's a piece of chocolate. "" And Alex would go, "" Arrrrggg! "" Because you have to understand that on these rides we are constantly hungry — and after the rides also. 
+And who is this guy, Alex, to begin with? 
+He's a 17-year-old. 
+When he was eight, someone put him on a boat in Odessa and sent him, shipped him to Israel on his own. 
+And he ended up in south Tel Aviv and did not have the good luck to be picked up by a [unclear] and roamed the streets and became a prominent gang member. 
+And he spent the last 10 years of his life in two places only, the slums and the state prison, where he spent the last two years before he ended up sitting on this rock there. 
+And so this kid was probably abused, abandoned, ignored, betrayed by almost every adult along the way. 
+So, for such a kid, when an adult that he learns to respect stays close to him and doesn't walk away from him in any situation, irrespective of how he behaves, it's a tremendous healing experience. 
+It's an act of unconditional acceptance, something that he never had. 
+I want to say a few words about vision. 
+When I started this program four years ago, I had this original plan of creating a team of winning underdogs. 
+I had an image of Lance Armstrong in my mind. 
+And it took me exactly two months of complete frustration to realize that this vision was misplaced, and that there was another vision supremely more important and more readily available. 
+It all of a sudden dawned on me, in this project, that the purpose of these rides should actually be to expose the kids to one thing only: love. 
+Love to the country, to the uphill and the downhill, to all the incredible creatures that surround us — the animals, the plants, the insects — love and respect to other fellow members in your team, in your biking team, and most importantly, love and respect to yourself, which is something that they badly miss. 
+Together with the kids, I also went through a remarkable transformation. 
+Now, I come from a cutthroat world of science and high technology. 
+I used to think that reason and logic and relentless drive were the only ways to make things happen. 
+And before I worked with the kids, anything that I did with them, or anything that I did with myself, was supposed to be perfect, ideal, optimal, but after working with them for some time, I discovered the great virtues of empathy and flexibility and being able to start with some vision, and if the vision doesn't work, well nothing happened. 
+All you have to do is play with it, change it a little bit, and come up with something that does help, that does work. 
+So right now, I feel more like these are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And one of these principles is focus. 
+Before each ride we sit together with the kids, and we give them one word to think about during the ride. 
+You have to focus their attention on something because so many things happen. 
+So these are words like "" teamwork "" or "" endurance "" or even complicated concepts like "" resource allocation "" or "" perspective, "" a word that they don't understand. 
+You know, perspective is one of these critically important life-coping strategies that mountain biking can really teach you. 
+I tell kids when they struggle through some uphill and feel like they cannot take it anymore, it really helps to ignore the immediate obstacles and raise your head and look around and see how the vista around you grows. 
+It literally propels you upwards. 
+That's what perspective is all about. 
+Or you can also look back in time and realize that you've already conquered steeper mountains before. 
+And that's how they develop self-esteem. 
+Now, let me give you an example of how it works. 
+You stand with your bike at the beginning of February. 
+It's very cold, and you're standing in one of these rainy days, and it's drizzling and cold and chilly, and you're standing in, let's say, Yokneam. 
+And you look up at the sky through a hole in the clouds you see the monastery at the top of the Muhraka — that's where you're supposed to climb now — and you say, "" There's no way that I could possibly get there. "" And yet, two hours later you find yourself standing on the roof of this monastery, smeared with mud, blood and sweat. 
+And you look down at Yokneam; everything is so small and tiny. 
+And you say, "" Hey, Alex. Look at this parking lot where we started. 
+It's that big. 
+I can't believe that I did it. "" And that's the point when you start loving yourself. 
+And so we talked about these special words that we teach them. 
+And at the end of each ride, we sit together and share moments in which those special words of the day popped up and made a difference, and these discussions can be extremely inspiring. 
+In one of them, one of the kids once said, "" When we were riding on this ridge overlooking the Dead Sea — and he's talking about this spot here — "" I was reminded of the day when I left my village in Ethiopia and went away together with my brother. 
+We walked 120 kilometers until we reached Sudan. 
+This was the first place where we got some water and supplies. "" And he goes on saying, and everyone looks at him like a hero, probably for the first time in his life. 
+And he says — because I also have volunteers riding with me, adults, who are sitting there listening to him — and he says, "" And this was just the beginning of our ordeal until we ended up in Israel. 
+And only now, "" he says, "" I'm beginning to understand where I am, and I actually like it. "" Now I remember, when he said it, I felt goosebumps on my body, because he said it overlooking the Moab Mountains here in the background. 
+That's where Joshua descended and crossed the Jordan and led the people of Israel into the land of Canaan 3,000 years ago in this final leg of the journey from Africa. 
+And so, perspective and context and history play key roles in the way I plan my rides with the kids. 
+We visit Kibbutzim that were established by Holocaust survivors. 
+We explore ruins of Palestinian villages, and we discuss how they became ruins. 
+And we go through numerous remnants of Jewish settlements, Nabatic settlements, Canaanite settlements — three-, four, five-thousand years old. 
+And through this tapestry, which is the history of this country, the kids acquire what is probably the most important value in education, and that is the understanding that life is complex, and there's no black and white. 
+And by appreciating complexity, they become more tolerant, and tolerance leads to hope. 
+I ride with these kids once a week, every Tuesday. 
+Here's a picture I took last Tuesday — less than a week ago — and I ride with them tomorrow also. 
+In every one of these rides I always end up standing in one of these incredible locations, taking in this incredible landscape around me, and I feel blessed and fortunate that I'm alive, and that I sense every fiber in my aching body. 
+And I feel blessed and fortunate that 15 years ago I had the courage to resign my tenured position at NYU and return to my home country where I can do these incredible rides with this group of troubled kids coming from Ethiopia and Morocco and Russia. And I feel blessed and fortunate 
+that every week, every Tuesday — and actually every Friday also — I can once again celebrate in the marrow of my bones the very essence of living in Israel on the edge. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It sure used to be a lot easier to be from Iceland, because until a couple of years ago, people knew hardly anything about us, and I could basically come out here and say only good things about us. 
+But in the last couple of years we've become infamous for a couple of things. 
+First, of course, the economic meltdown. 
+It actually got so bad that somebody put our country up for sale on eBay. 
+(Laughter) Ninety-nine pence was the starting price and no reserve. 
+Then there was the volcano that interrupted the travel plans of almost all of you and many of your friends, including President Obama. 
+By the way, the pronunciation is "" Eyjafjallajokull. "" None of your media got it right. 
+(Laughter) But I'm not here to share these stories about these two things exactly. 
+I'm here to tell you the story of Audur Capital, which is a financial firm founded by me and Kristin — who you see in the picture — in the spring of 2007, just over a year before the economic collapse hit. 
+Why would two women who were enjoying successful careers in investment banking in the corporate sector leave to found a financial services firm? 
+Well let it suffice to say that we felt a bit overwhelmed with testosterone. 
+And I'm not here to say that men are to blame for the crisis and what happened in my country. 
+But I can surely tell you that in my country, much like on Wall Street and the city of London and elsewhere, men were at the helm of the game of the financial sector, and that kind of lack of diversity and sameness leads to disastrous problems. 
+(Applause) So we decided, a bit fed-up with this world and also with the strong feeling in our stomach that this wasn't sustainable, to found a financial services firm based on our values, and we decided to incorporate feminine values into the world of finance. 
+Raised quite a few eyebrows in Iceland. 
+We weren't known as the typical "" women "" women in Iceland up until then. 
+So it was almost like coming out of the closet to actually talk about the fact that we were women and that we believed that we had a set of values and a way of doing business that would be more sustainable than what we had experienced until then. 
+And we got a great group of people to join us — principled people with great skills, and investors with a vision and values to match ours. 
+And together we got through the eye of the financial storm in Iceland without taking any direct losses to our equity or to the funds of our clients. 
+And although I want to thank the talented people of our company foremost for that — and also there's a factor of luck and timing — we are absolutely convinced that we did this because of our values. 
+So let me share with you our values. 
+We believe in risk awareness. 
+What does that mean? 
+We believe that you should always understand the risks that you're taking, and we will not invest in things we don't understand. 
+Not a complicated thing. 
+But in 2007, at the height of the sub-prime and all the complicated financial structures, it was quite opposite to the reckless risk-taking behaviors that we saw on the market. 
+We also believe in straight-talking, telling it as it is, using simple language that people understand, telling people about the downsides as well as the potential upsides, and even telling the bad news that no one wants to utter, like our lack of belief in the sustainability of the Icelandic financial sector that already we had months before the collapse hit us. 
+And, although we do work in the financial sector, where Excel is king, we believe in emotional capital. 
+And we believe that doing emotional due diligence is just as important as doing financial due diligence. 
+It is actually people that make money and lose money, not Excel spreadsheets. 
+(Applause) Last, but not least, we believe in profit with principles. 
+We care how we make our profit. 
+So while we want to make economic profit for ourselves and our customers, we are willing to do it with a long-term view, and we like to have a wider definition of profits than just the economic profit in the next quarter. 
+So we like to see profits, plus positive social and environmental benefits, when we invest. 
+But it wasn't just about the values, although we are convinced that they matter. 
+It was also about a business opportunity. 
+It's the female trend, and it's the sustainability trend, that are going to create some of the most interesting investment opportunities in the years to come. 
+The whole thing about the female trend is not about women being better than men; it is actually about women being different from men, bringing different values and different ways to the table. 
+So what do you get? You get better decision-making, and you get less herd behavior, and both of those things hit your bottom line with very positive results. 
+But one has to wonder, now that we've had this financial sector collapse upon us in Iceland — and by the way, Europe looks pretty bad right now, and many would say that you in America are heading for some more trouble as well. 
+Now that we've had all that happen, and we have all this data out there telling us that it's much better to have diversity around the decision-making tables, will we see business and finance change? 
+Will government change? 
+Well I'll give you my straight talk about this. 
+I have days that I believe, but I have days that I'm full of doubt. 
+Have you seen the incredible urge out there to rebuild the very things that failed us? 
+(Applause) Einstein said that this was the definition of insanity — to do the same things over and over again, hoping for a different outcome. 
+So I guess the world is insane, because I see entirely too much of doing the same things over and over again, hoping that this time it's not going to collapse upon us. 
+I want to see more revolutionary thinking, and I remain hopeful. 
+Like TED, I believe in people. 
+And I know that consumers are becoming more conscious, and they are going to start voting with their wallets, and they are going to change the face of business and finance from the outside, if they don't do it from the inside. 
+But I'm more of the revolutionary, and I should be; I'm from Iceland. 
+We have a long history of strong, courageous, independent women, ever since the Viking age. 
+And I want to tell you when I first realized that women matter to the economy and to the society, I was seven — it happened to be my mother's birthday — October 24, 1975. 
+Women in Iceland took the day off. 
+From work or from home, they took the day off, and nothing worked in Iceland. 
+(Laughter) They marched into the center of Reykjavik, and they put women's issues onto the agenda. 
+And some say this was the start of a global movement. 
+For me it was the start of a long journey, but I decided that day to matter. 
+Five years later, Iceland elected Vigdis Finnbogadottir as their president — first female to become head of state, single mom, a breast cancer survivor who had had one of her breasts removed. 
+And at one of the campaign sessions, she had one of her male contenders allude to the fact that she couldn't become president — she was a woman, and even half a woman. 
+That night she won the election, because she came back — not just because of his crappy behavior — but she came back and said, "" Well, I'm actually not going to breastfeed the Icelandic nation; I'm going to lead it. "" (Applause) So I've had incredibly many women role models that have influenced who I am and where I am today. 
+But in spite of that, I went through the first 10 or 15 years of my career mostly in denial of being a woman. 
+Started in corporate America, and I was absolutely convinced that it was just about the individual, that women and men would have just the same opportunities. 
+But I've come to conclude lately that it isn't like that. 
+We are not the same, and it's great. Because of our differences, we create and sustain life. 
+So we should embrace our difference and aim for challenge. 
+The final thought I want to leave with you is that I'm fed up with this tyranny of either / or choices in life — either it's men or it's women. 
+We need to start embracing the beauty of balance. 
+So let's move away from thinking about business here and philanthropy there, and let's start thinking about doing good business. 
+That's how we change the world. That's the only sustainable future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Usually at the end of our shift we had a drink — but not that night. 
+"" I'm pregnant. 
+Without hesitation, she replied, "" I've had an abortion. "" Before Polly, no one had ever told me that she'd had an abortion. 
+I'd graduated from college just a few months earlier and I was in a new relationship when I found out that I was pregnant. 
+When I thought about my choices, I honestly did not know how to decide, what criteria I should use. 
+How would I know what the right decision was? 
+I worried that I would regret an abortion later. 
+Coming of age on the beaches of Southern California, I grew up in the middle of our nation's abortion wars. 
+I was born in a trailer on the third anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. 
+Our community was surfing Christians. 
+We cared about God, the less fortunate, and the ocean. 
+Everyone was pro-life. 
+As a kid, the idea of abortion made me so sad that I knew if I ever got pregnant I could never have one. 
+And then I did. 
+It was a step towards the unknown. 
+But Polly had given me a very special gift: the knowledge that I wasn't alone and the realization that abortion was something that we can talk about. 
+Abortion is common. 
+According to the Guttmacher Institute, one in three women in America will have an abortion in their lifetime. 
+But for the last few decades, the dialogue around abortion in the United States has left little room for anything beyond pro-life and pro-choice. 
+It's political and polarizing. 
+But as much as abortion is hotly debated, it's still rare for us, whether as fellow women or even just as fellow people, to talk with one another about the abortions that we have. 
+There is a gap. 
+Between what happens in politics and what happens in real life, and in that gap, a battlefield mentality. 
+This isn't just about abortion. 
+And so finding ways to shift the conflict to a place of conversation is the work of my life. 
+There are two main ways to get started. 
+One way is to listen closely. 
+And the other way is to share stories. 
+So, 15 years ago, I cofounded an organization called Exhale to start listening to people who have had abortions. 
+Free of judgment and politics, believe it or not, nothing like our sevice had ever existed. 
+We needed a new framework that could hold all the experiences that we were hearing on our talk-line. 
+The feminist who regrets her abortion. 
+The personal experiences that weren't fitting neatly into one box or the other. 
+We didn't think it was right to ask women to pick a side. 
+We wanted to show them that the whole world was on their side, as they were going through this deeply personal experience. 
+So we invented "" pro-voice. "" Beyond abortion, pro-voice works on hard issues that we've struggled with globally for years, issues like immigration, religious tolerance, violence against women. 
+It also works on deeply personal topics that might only matter to you and your immediate family and friends. 
+They have a terminal illness, their mother just died, they have a child with special needs and they can't talk about it. 
+Listening and storytelling are the hallmarks of pro-voice practice. 
+Listening and storytelling. 
+That sounds pretty nice. 
+Sounds maybe, easy? We could all do that. 
+It's not easy. It's very hard. 
+Pro-voice is hard because we are talking about things everyone's fighting about or the things that no one wants to talk about. 
+I wish I could tell you that when you decide to be pro-voice, that you'll find beautiful moments of breakthrough and gardens full of flowers, where listening and storytelling creates wonderful "" a-ha "" moments. 
+I wish I could tell you that there would be a feminist welcoming party for you, or that there's a long-lost sisterhood of people who are just ready to have your back when you get slammed. 
+But it can be vulnerable and exhausting to tell our own stories when it feels like nobody cares. 
+And if we truly listen to one another, we will hear things that demand that we shift our own perceptions. 
+There is no perfect time and there is no perfect place to start a difficult conversation. 
+There's never a time when everyone will be on the same page, share the same lens, or know the same history. 
+So, let's talk about listening and how to be a good listener. 
+There's lots of ways to be a good listener and I'm going to give you just a couple. 
+One is to ask open-ended questions. 
+"What was that like?" 
+"What do you hope for, now?" 
+Another way to be a good listener is to use reflective language. 
+If someone is talking about their own personal experience, use the words that they use. 
+If someone is talking about an abortion and they say the word "" baby, "" you can say "" baby. "" If they say "" fetus, "" you can say "" fetus. "" If someone describes themselves as gender queer to you, you can say "" gender queer. "" If someone kind of looks like a he, but they say they're a she — it's cool. 
+Call that person a she. 
+When we reflect the language of the person who is sharing their own story, we are conveying that we are interested in understanding who they are and what they're going through. 
+The same way that we hope people are interested in knowing us. 
+So, I'll never forget being in one of the Exhale counselor meetings, listening to a volunteer talk about how she was getting a lot of calls from Christian women who were talking about God. 
+Now, some of our volunteers are religious, but this particular one was not. 
+At first, it felt a little weird for her to talk to callers about God. 
+So, she decided to get comfortable. 
+And she stood in front of her mirror at home, and she said the word "" God. "" "God." "God." "God." "God." "God." "God." 
+Over and over and over again until the word no longer felt strange coming out her mouth. Saying the word God did not turn this volunteer into a Christian, but it did make her a much better listener of Christian women. So, another way to be pro-voice is to share stories, and one risk that you take on, when you share your story with someone else, is that given the same set of circumstances as you 
+they might actually make a different decision. 
+For example, if you're telling a story about your abortion, realize that she might have had the baby. 
+She might have told her parents and her partner — or not. 
+She might have felt relief and confidence, even though you felt sad and lost. 
+This is okay. 
+Empathy gets created the moment we imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes. 
+It doesn't mean we all have to end up in the same place. 
+It's not agreement, it's not sameness that pro-voice is after. 
+It creates a culture and a society that values what make us special and unique. 
+It values what makes us human, our flaws and our imperfections. 
+And this way of thinking allows us to see our differences with respect, instead of fear. 
+And it generates the empathy that we need to overcome all the ways that we try to hurt one another. 
+Stigma, shame, prejudice, discrimination, oppression. 
+Pro-voice is contagious, and the more it's practiced the more it spreads. 
+So, last year I was pregnant again. 
+This time I was looking forward to the birth of my son. 
+And while pregnant, I had never been asked how I was feeling so much in all my life. 
+(Laughter) And however I replied, whether I was feeling wonderful and excited or scared and totally freaked out, there was always someone there giving me a "" been there "" response. 
+It was awesome. 
+It was a welcome, yet dramatic departure from what I experience when I talk about my mixed feelings of my abortion. 
+Pro-voice is about the real stories of real people making an impact on the way abortion and so many other politicized and stigmatized issues are understood and discussed. 
+From sexuality and mental health to poverty and incarceration. 
+Far beyond definition as single right or wrong decisions, our experiences can exist on a spectrum. 
+Pro-voice focuses that conversation on human experience and it makes support and respect possible for all. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The universe is really big. 
+We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy. 
+There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. 
+And if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky, and you just keep the shutter open, as long as your camera is attached to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will see something like this. 
+Every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way — a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs. 
+There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. 
+100 billion is the only number you need to know. 
+The age of the universe, between now and the Big Bang, is a hundred billion in dog years. 
+(Laughter) Which tells you something about our place in the universe. 
+One thing you can do with a picture like this is simply admire it. 
+It's extremely beautiful. 
+I've often wondered, what is the evolutionary pressure that made our ancestors in the Veldt adapt and evolve to really enjoy pictures of galaxies when they didn't have any. 
+But we would also like to understand it. 
+As a cosmologist, I want to ask, why is the universe like this? 
+One big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time. 
+If you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity, it would be moving away from you. 
+And if you look at a galaxy even farther away, it would be moving away faster. 
+So we say the universe is expanding. 
+What that means, of course, is that, in the past, things were closer together. 
+In the past, the universe was more dense, and it was also hotter. 
+If you squeeze things together, the temperature goes up. 
+That kind of makes sense to us. 
+The thing that doesn't make sense to us as much is that the universe, at early times, near the Big Bang, was also very, very smooth. 
+You might think that that's not a surprise. 
+The air in this room is very smooth. 
+You might say, "" Well, maybe things just smoothed themselves out. "" But the conditions near the Big Bang are very, very different than the conditions of the air in this room. 
+In particular, things were a lot denser. 
+The gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the Big Bang. 
+What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, a hundred billion stars each. 
+At early times, those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big — literally — at early times. 
+And you have to imagine doing that squeezing without any imperfections, without any little spots where there were a few more atoms than somewhere else. 
+Because if there had been, they would have collapsed under the gravitational pull into a huge black hole. 
+Keeping the universe very, very smooth at early times is not easy; it's a delicate arrangement. 
+It's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly. 
+There is something that made it that way. 
+We would like to know what. 
+So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 19th century. 
+And Boltzmann's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy. 
+You've heard of entropy. 
+It's the randomness, the disorder, the chaoticness of some systems. 
+Boltzmann gave us a formula — engraved on his tombstone now — that really quantifies what entropy is. 
+And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same. 
+If you have the air in this room, you don't notice each individual atom. 
+A low entropy configuration is one in which there's only a few arrangements that look that way. 
+A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way. 
+This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics — the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe. 
+The reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy. 
+That's a wonderful insight, but it leaves something out. 
+This insight that entropy increases, by the way, is what's behind what we call the arrow of time, the difference between the past and the future. 
+Every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing — the fact that you can remember the past, but not the future. 
+The fact that you are born, and then you live, and then you die, always in that order, that's because entropy is increasing. 
+Boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy, it's very natural for it to increase because there's more ways to be high entropy. 
+What he didn't explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place. 
+The fact that the entropy of the universe was low was a reflection of the fact that the early universe was very, very smooth. 
+We'd like to understand that. 
+That's our job as cosmologists. 
+Unfortunately, it's actually not a problem that we've been giving enough attention to. 
+It's not one of the first things people would say, if you asked a modern cosmologist, "What are the problems we're trying to address?" 
+One of the people who did understand that this was a problem was Richard Feynman. 
+50 years ago, he gave a series of a bunch of different lectures. 
+He gave the popular lectures that became "" The Character of Physical Law. "" He gave lectures to Caltech undergrads that became "" The Feynman Lectures on Physics. "" He gave lectures to Caltech graduate students that became "" The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation. "" In every one of these books, every one of these sets of lectures, he emphasized this puzzle: Why did the early universe have such a small entropy? 
+So he says — I'm not going to do the accent — he says, "" For some reason, the universe, at one time, had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. 
+The arrow of time cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to understanding. "" So that's our job. 
+We want to know — this is 50 years ago, "" Surely, "" you're thinking, "we've figured it out by now." 
+It's not true that we've figured it out by now. 
+The reason the problem has gotten worse, rather than better, is because in 1998 we learned something crucial about the universe that we didn't know before. 
+We learned that it's accelerating. 
+The universe is not only expanding. 
+If you look at the galaxy, it's moving away. 
+If you come back a billion years later and look at it again, it will be moving away faster. 
+Individual galaxies are speeding away from us faster and faster so we say the universe is accelerating. 
+Unlike the low entropy of the early universe, even though we don't know the answer for this, we at least have a good theory that can explain it, if that theory is right, and that's the theory of dark energy. 
+It's just the idea that empty space itself has energy. 
+In every little cubic centimeter of space, whether or not there's stuff, whether or not there's particles, matter, radiation or whatever, there's still energy, even in the space itself. 
+And this energy, according to Einstein, exerts a push on the universe. 
+It is a perpetual impulse that pushes galaxies apart from each other. 
+Because dark energy, unlike matter or radiation, does not dilute away as the universe expands. 
+The amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same, even as the universe gets bigger and bigger. 
+This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future. 
+For one thing, the universe will expand forever. 
+Back when I was your age, we didn't know what the universe was going to do. 
+Some people thought that the universe would recollapse in the future. 
+Einstein was fond of this idea. 
+But if there's dark energy, and the dark energy does not go away, the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever. 
+14 billion years in the past, 100 billion dog years, but an infinite number of years into the future. 
+Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes, space looks finite to us. 
+Space may be finite or infinite, but because the universe is accelerating, there are parts of it we cannot see and never will see. 
+There's a finite region of space that we have access to, surrounded by a horizon. 
+So even though time goes on forever, space is limited to us. 
+Finally, empty space has a temperature. 
+In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking told us that a black hole, even though you think it's black, it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics. 
+The curvature of space-time around the black hole brings to life the quantum mechanical fluctuation, and the black hole radiates. 
+A precisely similar calculation by Hawking and Gary Gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space, then the whole universe radiates. 
+The energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations. 
+And so even though the universe will last forever, and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away, there will always be some radiation, some thermal fluctuations, even in empty space. 
+So what this means is that the universe is like a box of gas that lasts forever. 
+Well what is the implication of that? 
+That implication was studied by Boltzmann back in the 19th century. 
+He said, well, entropy increases because there are many, many more ways for the universe to be high entropy, rather than low entropy. 
+But that's a probabilistic statement. 
+It will probably increase, and the probability is enormously huge. 
+It's not something you have to worry about — the air in this room all gathering over one part of the room and suffocating us. 
+It's very, very unlikely. 
+Except if they locked the doors and kept us here literally forever, that would happen. 
+Everything that is allowed, every configuration that is allowed to be obtained by the molecules in this room, would eventually be obtained. 
+So Boltzmann says, look, you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium. 
+He didn't know about the Big Bang. He didn't know about the expansion of the universe. 
+He thought that space and time were explained by Isaac Newton — they were absolute; they just stuck there forever. 
+So his idea of a natural universe was one in which the air molecules were just spread out evenly everywhere — the everything molecules. 
+But if you're Boltzmann, you know that if you wait long enough, the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations. 
+And then, of course, in the natural course of things, they will expand back. 
+So it's not that entropy must always increase — you can get fluctuations into lower entropy, more organized situations. 
+Well if that's true, Boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas — the multiverse and the anthropic principle. 
+He says, the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we can't live there. 
+Remember, life itself depends on the arrow of time. 
+We would not be able to process information, metabolize, walk and talk, if we lived in thermal equilibrium. 
+So if you imagine a very, very big universe, an infinitely big universe, with randomly bumping into each other particles, there will occasionally be small fluctuations in the lower entropy states, and then they relax back. 
+But there will also be large fluctuations. 
+Occasionally, you will make a planet or a star or a galaxy or a hundred billion galaxies. 
+So Boltzmann says, we will only live in the part of the multiverse, in the part of this infinitely big set of fluctuating particles, where life is possible. 
+That's the region where entropy is low. 
+Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time. 
+Now your homework assignment is to really think about this, to contemplate what it means. 
+Carl Sagan once famously said that "" in order to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe. "" But he was not right. 
+In Boltzmann's scenario, if you want to make an apple pie, you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie. 
+That will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven, and then making you an apple pie. 
+So this scenario makes predictions. 
+And the predictions are that the fluctuations that make us are minimal. 
+Even if you imagine that this room we are in now exists and is real and here we are, and we have, not only our memories, but our impression that outside there's something called Caltech and the United States and the Milky Way Galaxy, it's much easier for all those impressions to randomly fluctuate into your brain than for them actually to randomly fluctuate into Caltech, the United States and the galaxy. 
+The good news is that, therefore, this scenario does not work; it is not right. 
+This scenario predicts that we should be a minimal fluctuation. 
+Even if you left our galaxy out, you would not get a hundred billion other galaxies. 
+And Feynman also understood this. 
+Feynman says, "" From the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation, all the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we've never seen before, we will find it mixed up, and not like the piece we've just looked at — high entropy. 
+If our order were due to a fluctuation, we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it. 
+We therefore conclude the universe is not a fluctuation. "" So that's good. The question is then what is the right answer? 
+If the universe is not a fluctuation, why did the early universe have a low entropy? 
+And I would love to tell you the answer, but I'm running out of time. 
+(Laughter) Here is the universe that we tell you about, versus the universe that really exists. 
+I just showed you this picture. 
+The universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so. 
+It's cooling off. 
+But we now know enough about the future of the universe to say a lot more. 
+If the dark energy remains around, the stars around us will use up their nuclear fuel, they will stop burning. 
+They will fall into black holes. 
+We will live in a universe with nothing in it but black holes. 
+That universe will last 10 to the 100 years — a lot longer than our little universe has lived. 
+The future is much longer than the past. 
+But even black holes don't last forever. 
+They will evaporate, and we will be left with nothing but empty space. 
+That empty space lasts essentially forever. 
+However, you notice, since empty space gives off radiation, there's actually thermal fluctuations, and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space. 
+So even though the universe lasts forever, there's only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe. 
+They all happen over a period of time equal to 10 to the 10 to the 120 years. 
+So here's two questions for you. 
+Number one: If the universe lasts for 10 to the 10 to the 120 years, why are we born in the first 14 billion years of it, in the warm, comfortable afterglow of the Big Bang? 
+Why aren't we in empty space? 
+You might say, "" Well there's nothing there to be living, "" but that's not right. 
+You could be a random fluctuation out of the nothingness. 
+Why aren't you? 
+More homework assignment for you. 
+So like I said, I don't actually know the answer. 
+I'm going to give you my favorite scenario. 
+Either it's just like that. There is no explanation. 
+This is a brute fact about the universe that you should learn to accept and stop asking questions. 
+Or maybe the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe. 
+An egg, an unbroken egg, is a low entropy configuration, and yet, when we open our refrigerator, we do not go, "" Hah, how surprising to find this low entropy configuration in our refrigerator. "" That's because an egg is not a closed system; it comes out of a chicken. 
+Maybe the universe comes out of a universal chicken. 
+Maybe there is something that naturally, through the growth of the laws of physics, gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations. 
+If that's true, it would happen more than once; we would be part of a much bigger multiverse. 
+That's my favorite scenario. 
+So the organizers asked me to end with a bold speculation. 
+My bold speculation is that I will be absolutely vindicated by history. 
+And 50 years from now, all of my current wild ideas will be accepted as truths by the scientific and external communities. 
+We will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse. 
+And even better, we will understand what happened at the Big Bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations. 
+This is a prediction. I might be wrong. 
+But we've been thinking as a human race about what the universe was like, why it came to be in the way it did for many, many years. 
+It's exciting to think we may finally know the answer someday. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+He was the chief of anesthesiology in a hospital in Malawi, a teaching hospital. 
+He went to work every day in an operating theater like this one, trying to deliver anesthesia and teach others how to do so using that same equipment that became so unreliable, and frankly unsafe, in his hospital. 
+Now we know room air is gloriously free, it is abundant, and it's already 21 percent oxygen. 
+And so it's not going to break very easily, but if it does, virtually every piece in this machine can be swapped out and replaced with a hex wrench and a screwdriver. 
+
+All right, so let's take four subjects that obviously go together: big data, tattoos, immortality and the Greeks. 
+Right? 
+Now, the issue about tattoos is that, without a word, tattoos really do shout. 
+[Beautiful] [Intriguing] So you don't have to say a lot. 
+[Allegiance] [Very intimate] [Serious mistakes] (Laughter) And tattoos tell you a lot of stories. 
+If I can ask an indiscreet question, how many of you have tattoos? 
+A few, but not most. 
+What happens if Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, cell phones, GPS, Foursquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor, all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic tattoos? 
+And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would? 
+What's ended up happening over the past few decades is the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people who are Tweeting, blogging, following you, watching your credit scores and what you do to yourself. 
+And electronic tattoos also shout. 
+And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, it's getting really hard to hide from this stuff, among other things, because it's not just the electronic tattoos, it's facial recognition that's getting really good. 
+So you can take a picture with an iPhone and get all the names, although, again, sometimes it does make mistakes. (Laughter) But that means you can take a typical bar scene like this, take a picture, say, of this guy right here, get the name, and download all the records before you utter a word or speak to somebody, because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by electronic tattoos. 
+And so there's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online. 
+Here's what happened to this company. 
+[Company sold to Facebook, June 18, 2012...] There are other companies that will place a camera like this — this has nothing to do with Facebook — they take your picture, they tie it to the social media, they figure out you really like to wear black dresses, so maybe the person in the store comes up and says, "" Hey, we've got five black dresses that would just look great on you. "" So what if Andy was wrong? 
+Here's Andy's theory. 
+[In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.] What if we flip this? 
+What if you're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes? (Laughter) Well, then, because of electronic tattoos, maybe all of you and all of us are very close to immortality, because these tattoos will live far longer than our bodies will. 
+And if that's true, then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from the Greeks and one lesson from a Latin American. 
+Why the Greeks? 
+Well, the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time. 
+So lesson number one: Sisyphus. 
+Remember? He did a horrible thing, condemned for all time to roll this rock up, it would roll back down, roll back up, roll back down. 
+It's a little like your reputation. 
+Once you get that electronic tattoo, you're going to be rolling up and down for a long time, so as you go through this stuff, just be careful what you post. 
+Myth number two: Orpheus, wonderful guy, charming to be around, great partier, great singer, loses his beloved, charms his way into the underworld, only person to charm his way into the underworld, charms the gods of the underworld, they release his beauty on the condition he never look at her until they're out. 
+So he's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just can't resist. He looks at her, loses her forever. 
+With all this data out here, it might be a good idea not to look too far into the past of those you love. 
+Lesson number three: Atalanta. 
+Greatest runner. She would challenge anybody. 
+If you won, she would marry you. 
+If you lost, you died. 
+How did Hippomenes beat her? 
+Well, he had all these wonderful little golden apples, and she'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. 
+She'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. 
+She kept getting distracted. He eventually won the race. 
+Just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about them or send a late-night message. 
+And then, of course, there's Narcissus. 
+Nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with Narcissus. 
+(Laughter) But as you're thinking about Narcissus, just don't fall in love with your own reflection. 
+Last lesson, from a Latin American: This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges. 
+When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military junta, he came back and said, "" Oh, come on, how else can you threaten, other than with death? "" The interesting thing, the original thing, would be to threaten somebody with immortality. 
+And that, of course, is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+For emotions, we should not move quickly to the desert. 
+So, first, a small housekeeping announcement: please switch off your proper English check programs installed in your brain. 
+(Applause) So, welcome to the Golden Desert, Indian desert. 
+It receives the least rainfall in the country, lowest rainfall. 
+If you are well-versed with inches, nine inches, centimeters, 16 [centimeters]. 
+The groundwater is 300 feet deep, 100 meters. 
+And in most parts it is saline, not fit for drinking. 
+So, you can't install hand pumps or dig wells, though there is no electricity in most of the villages. 
+But suppose you use the green technology, solar pumps — they are of no use in this area. 
+So, welcome to the Golden Desert. 
+Clouds seldom visit this area. 
+But we find 40 different names of clouds in this dialect used here. 
+There are a number of techniques to harvest rain. 
+This is a new work, it's a new program. 
+But for the desert society this is no program; this is their life. 
+And they harvest rain in many ways. 
+So, this is the first device they use in harvesting rain. 
+It's called kunds; somewhere it is called [unclear]. 
+And you can notice they have created a kind of false catchment. 
+The desert is there, sand dunes, some small field. 
+And this is all big raised platform. 
+You can notice the small holes the water will fall on this catchment, and there is a slope. 
+Sometimes our engineers and architects do not care about slopes in bathrooms, but here they will care properly. 
+And the water will go where it should go. 
+And then it is 40 feet deep. 
+The waterproofing is done perfectly, better than our city contractors, because not a single drop should go waste in this. 
+They collect 100 thousand liters in one season. 
+And this is pure drinking water. 
+Below the surface there is hard saline water. 
+But now you can have this for year round. 
+It's two houses. 
+We often use a term called bylaws. 
+Because we are used to get written things. 
+But here it is unwritten by law. 
+And people made their house, and the water storage tanks. 
+These raised up platforms just like this stage. 
+In fact they go 15 feet deep, and collect rain water from roof, there is a small pipe, and from their courtyard. 
+It can also harvest something like 25,000 in a good monsoon. 
+Another big one, this is of course out of the hardcore desert area. 
+This is near Jaipur. This is called the Jaigarh Fort. 
+And it can collect six million gallons of rainwater in one season. 
+The age is 400 years. 
+So, since 400 years it has been giving you almost six million gallons of water per season. 
+You can calculate the price of that water. 
+It draws water from 15 kilometers of canals. 
+You can see a modern road, hardly 50 years old. 
+It can break sometimes. 
+But this 400 year old canal, which draws water, it is maintained for so many generations. 
+Of course if you want to go inside, the two doors are locked. 
+But they can be opened for TED people. 
+(Laughter) And we request them. 
+You can see person coming up with two canisters of water. 
+And the water level — these are not empty canisters — water level is right up to this. 
+It can envy many municipalities, the color, the taste, the purity of this water. 
+And this is what they call Zero B type of water, because it comes from the clouds, pure distilled water. 
+We stop for a quick commercial break, and then we come back to the traditional systems. 
+The government thought that this is a very backward area and we should bring a multi-million dollar project to bring water from the Himalayas. 
+That's why I said that this is a commercial break. 
+(Laughter) But we will come back, once again, to the traditional thing. 
+So, water from 300, 400 kilometers away, soon it become like this. 
+In many portions, water hyacinth covered these big canals like anything. 
+Of course there are some areas where water is reaching, I'm not saying that it is not reaching at all. 
+But the tail end, the Jaisalmer area, you will notice in Bikaner things like this: where the water hyacinth couldn't grow, the sand is flowing in these canals. 
+The bonus is that you can find wildlife around it. 
+(Laughter) We had full-page advertisements, some 30 years, 25 years ago when this canal came. 
+They said that throw away your traditional systems, these new cement tanks will supply you piped water. 
+It's a dream. And it became a dream also. 
+Because soon the water was not able to reach these areas. 
+And people started renovating their own structures. 
+These are all traditional water structures, which we won't be able to explain in such a short time. 
+But you can see that no woman is standing on those. 
+(Laughter) And they are plaiting hair. 
+(Applause) Jaisalmer. This is heart of desert. 
+This town was established 800 years ago. 
+I'm not sure by that time Bombay was there, or Delhi was there, or Chennai was there, or Bangalore was there. 
+So, this was the terminal point for silk route. 
+Well connected, 800 years ago, through Europe. 
+None of us were able to go to Europe, but Jaisalmer was well connected to it. 
+And this is the 16 centimeter area. 
+Such a limited rainfall, and highest colorful life flourished in these areas. 
+You won't find water in this slide. 
+But it is invisible. 
+Somewhere a stream or a rivulet is running through here. 
+Or, if you want to paint, you can paint it blue throughout because every roof which you see in this picture collects rainwater drops and deposit in the rooms. 
+But apart from this system, they designed 52 beautiful water bodies around this town. 
+And what we call private public partnership you can add estate also. 
+So, estate, public and private entrepreneurs work together to build this beautiful water body. 
+And it's a kind of water body for all seasons. 
+You will admire it. Just behold the beauty throughout the year. 
+Whether water level goes up or down, the beauty is there throughout. 
+Another water body, dried up, of course, during the summer period, but you can see how the traditional society combines engineering with aesthetics, with the heart. 
+These statues, marvelous statues, gives you an idea of water table. 
+When this rain comes and the water starts filling this tank, it will submerge these beautiful statues in what we call in English today "" mass communication. "" This was for mass communication. 
+Everybody in the town will know that this elephant has drowned, so water will be there for seven months or nine months, or 12 months. 
+And then they will come and worship this pond, pay respect, their gratitude. 
+Another small water body, called the [unclear]. 
+It is difficult to translate in English, especially in my English. 
+But the nearest would be "" glory, "" a reputation. 
+The reputation in desert of this small water body is that it never dries up. 
+In severe drought periods nobody has seen this water body getting dried up. 
+And perhaps they knew the future also. 
+It was designed some 150 years ago. 
+But perhaps they knew that on sixth, November, 2009, there will be a TED green and blue session, so they painted it like this. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Dry water body. Children are standing on a very difficult device to explain. 
+This is called kund. We have, in English, surface water and ground water. 
+But this is not ground water. 
+You can draw ground water from any well. 
+But this is no ordinary well. 
+It squeeze the moisture hidden in the sand. 
+And they have dubbed this water as the third one called [unclear]. 
+And there is a gypsum belt running below it. 
+And it was deposited by the great mother Earth, some three million years ago. 
+And where we have this gypsum strip they can harvest this water. 
+This is the same dry water body. 
+Now, you don't find any kund; they are all submerged. 
+But when the water goes down they will be able to draw water from those structures throughout the year. 
+This year they have received only six centimeters. 
+Six centimeter of rainfall, and they can telephone you that if you find any water problem in your city, Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Mysore, please come to our area of six centimeters, we can give you water. 
+(Laughter) How they maintain them? 
+There are three things: concept, planning, making the actual thing, and also maintaining them. 
+It is a structure for maintain, for centuries, by generations, without any department, without any funding, So the secret is "" [unclear], "" respect. 
+Your own thing, not personal property, my property, every time. 
+So, these stone pillars will remind you that you are entering into a water body area. 
+Don't spit, don't do anything wrong, so that the clean water can be collected. 
+Another pillar, stone pillar on your right side. 
+If you climb these three, six steps you will find something very nice. 
+This was done in 11th century. 
+And you have to go further down. 
+They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so we can say a thousand words right now, an another thousand words. 
+If the water table goes down, you will find new stairs. 
+If it comes up, some of them will be submerged. 
+So, throughout the year this beautiful system will give you some pleasure. 
+Three sides, such steps, on the fourth side there is a four-story building where you can organize such TED conferences anytime. 
+(Applause) Excuse me, who built these structures? 
+They are in front of you. 
+The best civil engineers we had, the best planners, the best architects. 
+We can say that because of them, because of their forefathers, India could get the first engineering college in 1847. 
+There were no English medium schools at that time, even no Hindi schools, [unclear] schools. 
+But such people, compelled to the East India Company, which came here for business, a very dirty kind of business... 
+(Laughter) but not to create the engineering colleges. 
+But because of them, first engineering college was created in a small village, not in the town. 
+The last point, we all know in our primary schools that that camel is a ship of desert. 
+So, you can find through your Jeep, a camel, and a cart. 
+This tire comes from the airplane. 
+So, look at the beauty from the desert society who can harvest rainwater, and also create something through a tire from a jet plane, and used in a camel cart. 
+Last picture, it's a tattoo, 2,000-years-old tattoo. 
+They were using it on their body. 
+Tattoo was, at one time, a kind of a blacklisted or con thing, but now it is in thing. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) You can copy this tattoo. I have some posters of this. (Laughter) 
+The center of life is water. 
+These are the beautiful waves. 
+These are the beautiful stairs which we just saw in one of the slides. 
+These are the trees. 
+And these are the flowers which add fragrance to our lives. 
+So, this is the message of desert. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: So, first of all, I wish I had your eloquence, truly, in any language. (Applause) 
+These artifacts and designs are inspiring. 
+Do you believe that they can be used elsewhere, that the world can learn from this? 
+Or is this just right for this place? 
+Anupam Mishra: No, the basic idea is to utilize water that falls on our area. 
+So, the ponds, the open bodies, are everywhere, right from Sri Lanka to Kashmir, and in other parts also. 
+And these [unclear], which stored water, there are two type of things. 
+One recharge, and one stores. 
+So, it depends on the terrain. 
+But kund, which uses the gypsum belt, for that you have to go back to your calendar, three million years ago. 
+If it is there it can be done right now. 
+Otherwise, it can't be done. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) CA: Thank you so much. (Applause) 
+
+Where do you come from? 
+It's such a simple question, but these days, of course, simple questions bring ever more complicated answers. 
+People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. 
+Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. 
+I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects. 
+So I don't think I've really earned the right to call myself an Indian. 
+And if "" Where do you come from? "" means "" Where were you born and raised and educated? "" then I'm entirely of that funny little country known as England, except I left England as soon as I completed my undergraduate education, and all the time I was growing up, I was the only kid in all my classes who didn't begin to look like the classic English heroes represented in our textbooks. And if "" Where do you come from? "" 
+means "" Where do you pay your taxes? 
+Where do you see your doctor and your dentist? "" then I'm very much of the United States, and I have been for 48 years now, since I was a really small child. 
+Except, for many of those years, I've had to carry around this funny little pink card with green lines running through my face identifying me as a permanent alien. 
+I do actually feel more alien the longer I live there. 
+(Laughter) And if "" Where do you come from? "" means "" Which place goes deepest inside you and where do you try to spend most of your time? "" then I'm Japanese, because I've been living as much as I can for the last 25 years in Japan. 
+Except, all of those years I've been there on a tourist visa, and I'm fairly sure not many Japanese would want to consider me one of them. 
+And I say all this just to stress how very old-fashioned and straightforward my background is, because when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver, most of the kids I meet are much more international and multi-cultured than I am. 
+And they have one home associated with their parents, but another associated with their partners, a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be, a fourth connected with the place they dream of being, and many more besides. 
+And their whole life will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole. 
+Home for them is really a work in progress. 
+It's like a project on which they're constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections. 
+And for more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. 
+If somebody suddenly asks me, "" Where's your home? "" I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be. 
+And I'd always felt this way, but it really came home to me, as it were, some years ago when I was climbing up the stairs in my parents' house in California, and I looked through the living room windows and I saw that we were encircled by 70-foot flames, one of those wildfires that regularly tear through the hills of California and many other such places. 
+And three hours later, that fire had reduced my home and every last thing in it except for me to ash. 
+And when I woke up the next morning, I was sleeping on a friend's floor, the only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush I had just bought from an all-night supermarket. 
+Of course, if anybody asked me then, "Where is your home?" 
+I literally couldn't point to any physical construction. 
+My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me. 
+And in so many ways, I think this is a terrific liberation. 
+Because when my grandparents were born, they pretty much had their sense of home, their sense of community, even their sense of enmity, assigned to them at birth, and didn't have much chance of stepping outside of that. 
+And nowadays, at least some of us can choose our sense of home, create our sense of community, fashion our sense of self, and in so doing maybe step a little beyond some of the black and white divisions of our grandparents' age. 
+No coincidence that the president of the strongest nation on Earth is half-Kenyan, partly raised in Indonesia, has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law. 
+The number of people living in countries not their own now comes to 220 million, and that's an almost unimaginable number, but it means that if you took the whole population of Canada and the whole population of Australia and then the whole population of Australia again and the whole population of Canada again and doubled that number, you would still have fewer people than belong to this great floating tribe. 
+And the number of us who live outside the old nation-state categories is increasing so quickly, by 64 million just in the last 12 years, that soon there will be more of us than there are Americans. 
+Already, we represent the fifth-largest nation on Earth. 
+And in fact, in Canada's largest city, Toronto, the average resident today is what used to be called a foreigner, somebody born in a very different country. 
+And I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake. 
+You can't take anything for granted. 
+Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked "" on. "" Suddenly you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. 
+The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said, consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. 
+And of course, once you have new eyes, even the old sights, even your home become something different. 
+Many of the people living in countries not their own are refugees who never wanted to leave home and ache to go back home. 
+But for the fortunate among us, I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities. 
+Certainly when I'm traveling, especially to the major cities of the world, the typical person I meet today will be, let's say, a half-Korean, half-German young woman living in Paris. 
+And as soon as she meets a half-Thai, half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh, she recognizes him as kin. 
+She realizes that she probably has much more in common with him than with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany. 
+So they become friends. They fall in love. 
+They move to New York City. 
+(Laughter) Or Edinburgh. 
+And the little girl who arises out of their union will of course be not Korean or German or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian or even American, but a wonderful and constantly evolving mix of all those places. 
+And potentially, everything about the way that young woman dreams about the world, writes about the world, thinks about the world, could be something different, because it comes out of this almost unprecedented blend of cultures. 
+Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. 
+More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. 
+And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. 
+It's the place where you become yourself. 
+And yet, there is one great problem with movement, and that is that it's really hard to get your bearings when you're in midair. 
+Some years ago, I noticed that I had accumulated one million miles on United Airlines alone. 
+You all know that crazy system, six days in hell, you get the seventh day free. 
+(Laughter) And I began to think that really, movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective. 
+And eight months after my house burned down, I ran into a friend who taught at a local high school, and he said, "" I've got the perfect place for you. "" "" Really? "" I said. I'm always a bit skeptical when people say things like that. 
+"" No, honestly, "" he went on, "" it's only three hours away by car, and it's not very expensive, and it's probably not like anywhere you've stayed before. "" "Hmm." I was beginning to get slightly intrigued. "What is it?" 
+"" Well — "" Here my friend hemmed and hawed — "Well, actually it's a Catholic hermitage." 
+This was the wrong answer. 
+I had spent 15 years in Anglican schools, so I had had enough hymnals and crosses to last me a lifetime. 
+Several lifetimes, actually. 
+But my friend assured me that he wasn't Catholic, nor were most of his students, but he took his classes there every spring. 
+And as he had it, even the most restless, distractible, testosterone-addled 15-year-old Californian boy only had to spend three days in silence and something in him cooled down and cleared out. 
+He found himself. 
+And I thought, "" Anything that works for a 15-year-old boy ought to work for me. "" So I got in my car, and I drove three hours north along the coast, and the roads grew emptier and narrower, and then I turned onto an even narrower path, barely paved, that snaked for two miles up to the top of a mountain. 
+And when I got out of my car, the air was pulsing. 
+The whole place was absolutely silent, but the silence wasn't an absence of noise. 
+It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening. 
+And at my feet was the great, still blue plate of the Pacific Ocean. 
+All around me were 800 acres of wild dry brush. 
+And I went down to the room in which I was to be sleeping. 
+Small but eminently comfortable, it had a bed and a rocking chair and a long desk and even longer picture windows looking out on a small, private, walled garden, and then 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass running down to the sea. 
+And I sat down, and I began to write, and write, and write, even though I'd gone there really to get away from my desk. 
+And by the time I got up, four hours had passed. 
+Night had fallen, and I went out under this great overturned saltshaker of stars, and I could see the tail lights of cars disappearing around the headlands 12 miles to the south. 
+And it really seemed like my concerns of the previous day vanishing. 
+And the next day, when I woke up in the absence of telephones and TVs and laptops, the days seemed to stretch for a thousand hours. 
+It was really all the freedom I know when I'm traveling, but it also profoundly felt like coming home. 
+And I'm not a religious person, so I didn't go to the services. 
+I just took walks along the monastery road and sent postcards to loved ones. 
+I looked at the clouds, and I did what is hardest of all for me to do usually, which is nothing at all. 
+And I started to go back to this place, and I noticed that I was doing my most important work there invisibly just by sitting still, and certainly coming to my most critical decisions the way I never could when I was racing from the last email to the next appointment. 
+And I began to think that something in me had really been crying out for stillness, but of course I couldn't hear it because I was running around so much. 
+I was like some crazy guy who puts on a blindfold and then complains that he can't see a thing. 
+And I thought back to that wonderful phrase I had learned as a boy from Seneca, in which he says, "" That man is poor not who has little but who hankers after more. "" And, of course, I'm not suggesting that anybody here go into a monastery. 
+But I do think it's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. 
+And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home. 
+And I've noticed so many people now take conscious measures to sit quietly for 30 minutes every morning just collecting themselves in one corner of the room without their devices, or go running every evening, or leave their cell phones behind when they go to have a long conversation with a friend. 
+Movement is a fantastic privilege, and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing. 
+But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. 
+And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. 
+It's the place where you stand. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Many believe driving is an activity solely reserved for those who can see. 
+A blind person driving a vehicle safely and independently was thought to be an impossible task, until now. 
+Hello, my name is Dennis Hong, and we're bringing freedom and independence to the blind by building a vehicle for the visually impaired. 
+So before I talk about this car for the blind, let me briefly tell you about another project that I worked on called the DARPA Urban Challenge. 
+Now this was about building a robotic car that can drive itself. 
+You press start, nobody touches anything, and it can reach its destination fully autonomously. 
+So in 2007, our team won half a million dollars by placing third place in this competition. 
+So about that time, the National Federation of the Blind, or NFB, challenged the research committee about who can develop a car that lets a blind person drive safely and independently. 
+We decided to give it a try, because we thought, "" Hey, how hard could it be? "" We have already an autonomous vehicle. 
+We just put a blind person in it and we're done, right? 
+(Laughter) We couldn't have been more wrong. 
+What NFB wanted was not a vehicle that can drive a blind person around, but a vehicle where a blind person can make active decisions and drive. 
+So we had to throw everything out the window and start from scratch. 
+So to test this crazy idea, we developed a small dune buggy prototype vehicle to test the feasibility. 
+And in the summer of 2009, we invited dozens of blind youth from all over the country and gave them a chance to take it for a spin. 
+It was an absolutely amazing experience. 
+But the problem with this car was it was designed to only be driven in a very controlled environment, in a flat, closed-off parking lot — even the lanes defined by red traffic cones. 
+So with this success, we decided to take the next big step, to develop a real car that can be driven on real roads. 
+So how does it work? 
+Well, it's a rather complex system, but let me try to explain it, maybe simplify it. 
+So we have three steps. 
+We have perception, computation and non-visual interfaces. 
+Now obviously the driver cannot see, so the system needs to perceive the environment and gather information for the driver. 
+For that, we use an initial measurement unit. 
+So it measures acceleration, angular acceleration — like a human ear, inner ear. 
+We fuse that information with a GPS unit to get an estimate of the location of the car. 
+We also use two cameras to detect the lanes of the road. 
+And we also use three laser range finders. 
+The lasers scan the environment to detect obstacles — a car approaching from the front, the back and also any obstacles that run into the roads, any obstacles around the vehicle. 
+So all this vast amount of information is then fed into the computer, and the computer can do two things. 
+One is, first of all, process this information to have an understanding of the environment — these are the lanes of the road, there's the obstacles — and convey this information to the driver. 
+The system is also smart enough to figure out the safest way to operate the car. 
+So we can also generate instructions on how to operate the controls of the vehicle. 
+But the problem is this: How do we convey this information and instructions to a person who cannot see fast enough and accurate enough so he can drive? 
+So for this, we developed many different types of non-visual user interface technology. 
+So starting from a three-dimensional ping sound system, a vibrating vest, a click wheel with voice commands, a leg strip, even a shoe that applies pressure to the foot. 
+But today we're going to talk about three of these non-visual user interfaces. 
+Now the first interface is called a DriveGrip. 
+So these are a pair of gloves, and it has vibrating elements on the knuckle part so you can convey instructions about how to steer — the direction and the intensity. 
+Another device is called SpeedStrip. 
+So this is a chair — as a matter of fact, it's actually a massage chair. 
+We gut it out, and we rearrange the vibrating elements in different patterns, and we actuate them to convey information about the speed, and also instructions how to use the gas and the brake pedal. 
+So over here, you can see how the computer understands the environment, and because you cannot see the vibration, we actually put red LED's on the driver so that you can see what's happening. 
+This is the sensory data, and that data is transferred to the devices through the computer. 
+So these two devices, DriveGrip and SpeedStrip, are very effective. 
+But the problem is these are instructional cue devices. 
+So this is not really freedom, right? 
+The computer tells you how to drive — turn left, turn right, speed up, stop. 
+We call this the "" backseat-driver problem. "" So we're moving away from the instructional cue devices, and we're now focusing more on the informational devices. 
+A good example for this informational non-visual user interface is called AirPix. 
+So think of it as a monitor for the blind. 
+So it's a small tablet, has many holes in it, and compressed air comes out, so it can actually draw images. 
+So even though you are blind, you can put your hand over it, you can see the lanes of the road and obstacles. 
+Actually, you can also change the frequency of the air coming out and possibly the temperature. 
+So it's actually a multi-dimensional user interface. 
+So here you can see the left camera, the right camera from the vehicle and how the computer interprets that and sends that information to the AirPix. 
+For this, we're showing a simulator, a blind person driving using the AirPix. 
+This simulator was also very useful for training the blind drivers and also quickly testing different types of ideas for different types of non-visual user interfaces. 
+So basically that's how it works. 
+So just a month ago, on January 29th, we unveiled this vehicle for the very first time to the public at the world-famous Daytona International Speedway during the Rolex 24 racing event. 
+We also had some surprises. Let's take a look. 
+(Music) (Video) Announcer: This is an historic day in January. 
+He's coming up to the grandstand, fellow Federationists. 
+(Cheering) (Honking) There's the grandstand now. 
+And he's [unclear] following that van that's out in front of him. 
+Well there comes the first box. 
+Now let's see if Mark avoids it. 
+He does. He passes it on the right. 
+Third box is out. The fourth box is out. 
+And he's perfectly making his way between the two. 
+He's closing in on the van to make the moving pass. 
+Well this is what it's all about, this kind of dynamic display of audacity and ingenuity. 
+He's approaching the end of the run, makes his way between the barrels that are set up there. 
+(Honking) (Applause) Dennis Hong: I'm so happy for you. 
+Mark's going to give me a ride back to the hotel. 
+Mark Riccobono: Yes. 
+(Applause) DH: So since we started this project, we've been getting hundreds of letters, emails, phone calls from people from all around the world. 
+Letters thanking us, but sometimes you also get funny letters like this one: "Now I understand why there is Braille on a drive-up ATM machine." 
+(Laughter) But sometimes — (Laughter) But sometimes I also do get — I wouldn't call it hate mail — but letters of really strong concern: "" Dr. Hong, are you insane, trying to put blind people on the road? 
+You must be out of your mind. "" But this vehicle is a prototype vehicle, and it's not going to be on the road until it's proven as safe as, or safer than, today's vehicle. 
+And I truly believe that this can happen. 
+But still, will the society, would they accept such a radical idea? 
+How are we going to handle insurance? 
+How are we going to issue driver's licenses? 
+There's many of these different kinds of hurdles besides technology challenges that we need to address before this becomes a reality. 
+Of course, the main goal of this project is to develop a car for the blind. 
+But potentially more important than this is the tremendous value of the spin-off technology that can come from this project. 
+The sensors that are used can see through the dark, the fog and rain. 
+And together with this new type of interfaces, we can use these technologies and apply them to safer cars for sighted people. 
+Or for the blind, everyday home appliances — in the educational setting, in the office setting. 
+Just imagine, in a classroom a teacher writes on the blackboard and a blind student can see what's written and read using these non-visual interfaces. 
+This is priceless. 
+So today, the things I've showed you today, is just the beginning. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I am passionate about the American landscape and how the physical form of the land, from the great Central Valley of California to the bedrock of Manhattan, has really shaped our history and our character. 
+But one thing is clear. 
+In the last 100 years alone, our country — and this is a sprawl map of America — our country has systematically flattened and homogenized the landscape to the point where we've forgotten our relationship with the plants and animals that live alongside us and the dirt beneath our feet. 
+And so, how I see my work contributing is sort of trying to literally re-imagine these connections and physically rebuild them. 
+This graph represents what we're dealing with now in the built environment. 
+And it's really a conflux of urban population rising, biodiversity plummeting and also, of course, sea levels rising and climate changing. 
+So when I also think about design, I think about trying to rework and re-engage the lines on this graph in a more productive way. 
+And you can see from the arrow here indicating "" you are here, "" I'm trying to sort of blend and meld these two very divergent fields of urbanism and ecology, and sort of bring them together in an exciting new way. 
+So the era of big infrastructure is over. 
+I mean, these sort of top-down, mono-functional, capital-intensive solutions are really not going to cut it. 
+We need new tools and new approaches. 
+Similarly, the idea of architecture as this sort of object in the field, devoid of context, is really not the — excuse me, it's fairly blatant — is really not the approach that we need to take. 
+So we need new stories, new heroes and new tools. 
+So now I want to introduce you to my new hero in the global climate change war, and that is the eastern oyster. 
+So, albeit a very small creature and very modest, this creature is incredible, because it can agglomerate into these mega-reef structures. 
+It can grow; you can grow it; and — did I mention? — it's quite tasty. 
+So the oyster was the basis for a manifesto-like urban design project that I did about the New York Harbor called "" oyster-tecture. "" And the core idea of oyster-tecture is to harness the biological power of mussels, eelgrass and oysters — species that live in the harbor — and, at the same time, harness the power of people who live in the community towards making change now. 
+Here's a map of my city, New York City, showing inundation in red. 
+And what's circled is the site that I'm going to talk about, the Gowanus Canal and Governors Island. 
+If you look here at this map, showing everything in blue is out in the water, and everything in yellow is upland. 
+But you can see, even just intuit, from this map, that the harbor has dredged and flattened, and went from a rich, three-dimensional mosaic to flat muck in really a matter of years. 
+Another set of views of actually the Gowanus Canal itself. 
+Now the Gowanus is particularly smelly — I will admit it. 
+There are problems of sewage overflow and contamination, but I would also argue that almost every city has this exact condition, and it's a condition that we're all facing. 
+And here's a map of that condition, showing the contaminants in yellow and green, exacerbated by this new flow of storm-surge and sea-level rise. 
+So we really had a lot to deal with. 
+When we started this project, one of the core ideas was to look back in history and try to understand what was there. 
+And you can see from this map, there's this incredible geographical signature of a series of islands that were out in the harbor and a matrix of salt marshes and beaches that served as natural wave attenuation for the upland settlement. 
+We also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the Gowanus Canal itself. 
+So our concept is really this back-to-the-future concept, harnessing the intelligence of that land settlement pattern. 
+And the idea has two core stages. 
+One is to develop a new artificial ecology, a reef out in the harbor, that would then protect new settlement patterns inland and the Gowanus. 
+Because if you have cleaner water and slower water, you can imagine a new way of living with that water. 
+So the project really addresses these three core issues in a new and exciting way, I think. 
+Here we are, back to our hero, the oyster. 
+And again, it's this incredibly exciting animal. 
+It accepts algae and detritus in one end, and through this beautiful, glamorous set of stomach organs, out the other end comes cleaner water. 
+And one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. 
+Oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days. 
+They were key in our culture and our economy. 
+Basically, New York was built on the backs of oystermen, and our streets were literally built over oyster shells. 
+This image is an image of an oyster cart, which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today. 
+So again, we got the short end of the deal there. 
+(Laughter) Finally, oysters can attenuate and agglomerate onto each other and form these amazing natural reef structures. 
+They really become nature's wave attenuators. 
+And they become the bedrock of any harbor ecosystem. 
+Many, many species depend on them. 
+So we were inspired by the oyster, but I was also inspired by the life cycle of the oyster. 
+It can move from a fertilized egg to a spat, which is when they're floating through the water, and when they're ready to attach onto another oyster, to an adult male oyster or female oyster, in a number of weeks. 
+We reinterpreted this life cycle on the scale of our sight and took the Gowanus as a giant oyster nursery where oysters would be grown up in the Gowanus, then paraded down in their spat stage and seeded out on the Bayridge Reef. 
+And so the core idea here was to hit the reset button and regenerate an ecology over time that was regenerative and cleaning and productive. 
+How does the reef work? Well, it's very, very simple. 
+A core concept here is that climate change isn't something that — the answers won't land down from the Moon. 
+And with a $20 billion price tag, we should simply start and get to work with what we have now and what's in front of us. 
+So this image is simply showing — it's a field of marine piles interconnected with this woven fuzzy rope. 
+What is fuzzy rope, you ask? 
+It's just that; it's this very inexpensive thing, available practically at your hardware store, and it's very cheap. 
+So we imagine that we would actually potentially even host a bake sale to start our new project. 
+(Laughter) So in the studio, rather than drawing, we began to learn how to knit. 
+The concept was to really knit this rope together and develop this new soft infrastructure for the oysters to grow on. 
+You can see in the diagram how it grows over time from an infrastructural space into a new public urban space. 
+And that grows over time dynamically with the threat of climate change. 
+It also creates this incredibly interesting, I think, new amphibious public space, where you can imagine working, you can imagine recreating in a new way. 
+In the end, what we realized we were making was a new blue-green watery park for the next watery century — an amphibious park, if you will. 
+So get your Tevas on. 
+So you can imagine scuba diving here. 
+This is an image of high school students, scuba divers that we worked with on our team. 
+So you can imagine a sort of new manner of living with a new relationship with the water, and also a hybridizing of recreational and science programs in terms of monitoring. 
+Another new vocabulary word for the brave new world: this is the word "" flupsy "" — it's short for "" floating upwelling system. "" And this glorious, readily available device is basically a floating raft with an oyster nursery below. 
+So the water is churned through this raft. 
+You can see the eight chambers on the side host little baby oysters and essentially force-feed them. 
+So rather than having 10 oysters, you have 10,000 oysters. 
+And then those spat are then seeded. 
+Here's the Gowanus future with the oyster rafts on the shorelines — the flupsification of the Gowanus. 
+New word. 
+And also showing oyster gardening for the community along its edges. 
+And finally, how much fun it would be to watch the flupsy parade and cheer on the oyster spats as they go down to the reef. 
+I get asked two questions about this project. 
+One is: why isn't it happening now? 
+And the second one is: when can we eat the oysters? 
+And the answer is: not yet, they're working. 
+But we imagine, with our calculations, that by 2050, you might be able to sink your teeth into a Gowanus oyster. 
+To conclude, this is just one cross-section of one piece of city, but my dream is, my hope is, that when you all go back to your own cities that we can start to work together and collaborate on remaking and reforming a new urban landscape towards a more sustainable, a more livable and a more delicious future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I am a pediatric cancer doctor and stem-cell researcher at Stanford University where my clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation. 
+Now, inspired by Jill Bolte Taylor last year, I didn't bring a human brain, but I did bring a liter of bone marrow. 
+And bone marrow is actually what we use to save the lives of tens of thousands of patients, most of whom have advanced malignancies like leukemia and lymphoma and some other diseases. 
+So, a few years ago, I'm doing my transplant fellowship at Stanford. 
+I'm in the operating room. We have Bob here, who is a volunteer donor. 
+We're sending his marrow across the country to save the life of a child with leukemia. 
+So actually how do we harvest this bone marrow? 
+Well we have a whole O.R. team, general anesthesia, nurses, and another doctor across from me. 
+Bob's on the table, and we take this sort of small needle, you know, not too big. 
+And the way we do this is we basically place this through the soft tissue, and kind of punch it into the hard bone, into the tuchus — that's a technical term — and aspirate about 10 mls of bone marrow out, each time, with a syringe. 
+And hand it off to the nurse. She squirts it into a tin. 
+Hands it back to me. And we do that again and again. 
+About 200 times usually. 
+And by the end of this my arm is sore, I've got a callus on my hand, let alone Bob, whose rear end looks something more like this, like Swiss cheese. 
+So I'm thinking, you know, this procedure hasn't changed in about 40 years. 
+And there is probably a better way to do this. 
+So I thought of a minimally invasive approach, and a new device that we call the Marrow Miner. 
+This is it. 
+And the Marrow Miner, the way it works is shown here. 
+Our standard see-through patient. 
+Instead of entering the bone dozens of times, we enter just once, into the front of the hip or the back of the hip. 
+And we have a flexible, powered catheter with a special wire loop tip that stays inside the crunchy part of the marrow and follows the contours of the hip, as it moves around. 
+So it enables you to very rapidly aspirate, or suck out, rich bone marrow very quickly through one hole. 
+We can do multiple passes through that same entry. 
+No robots required. 
+And, so, very quickly, Bob can just get one puncture, local anesthesia, and do this harvest as an outpatient. 
+So I did a few prototypes. I got a small little grant at Stanford. 
+And played around with this a little bit. 
+And our team members developed this technology. 
+And eventually we got two large animals, and pig studies. 
+And we found, to our surprise, that we not only got bone marrow out, but we got 10 times the stem cell activity in the marrow from the Marrow Miner, compared to the normal device. 
+This device was just FDA approved in the last year. 
+Here is a live patient. You can see it following the flexible curves around. 
+There will be two passes here, in the same patient, from the same hole. 
+This was done under local anesthesia, as an outpatient. 
+And we got, again, about three to six times more stem cells than the standard approach done on the same patient. 
+So why should you care? Bone marrow is a very rich source of adult stem cells. 
+You all know about embryonic stem cells. 
+They've got great potential but haven't yet entered clinical trials. 
+Adult stem cells are throughout our body, including the blood-forming stem cells in our bone marrow, which we've been using as a form of stem-cell therapy for over 40 years. 
+In the last decade there's been an explosion of use of bone marrow stem cells to treat the patient's other diseases such as heart disease, vascular disease, orthopedics, tissue engineering, even in neurology to treat Parkinson's and diabetes. 
+We've just come out, we're commercializing, this year, generation 2.0 of the Marrow Miner. 
+The hope is that this gets more stem cells out, which translates to better outcomes. 
+It may encourage more people to sign up to be potential live-saving bone marrow donors. 
+It may even enable you to bank your own marrow stem cells, when you're younger and healthier, to use in the future should you need it. 
+And ultimately — and here's a picture of our bone marrow transplant survivors, who come together for a reunion each year at Stanford. 
+Hopefully this technology will let us have more of these survivors in the future. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+For years I've been feeling frustrated, because as a religious historian, I've become acutely aware of the centrality of compassion in all the major world faiths. 
+Every single one of them has evolved their own version of what's been called the Golden Rule. 
+Sometimes it comes in a positive version — "Always treat all others as you'd like to be treated yourself." 
+And equally important is the negative version — "Don't do to others what you would not like them to do to you." 
+Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. 
+And people have emphasized the importance of compassion, not just because it sounds good, but because it works. 
+People have found that when they have implemented the Golden Rule as Confucius said, "" all day and every day, "" not just a question of doing your good deed for the day and then returning to a life of greed and egotism, but to do it all day and every day, you dethrone yourself from the center of your world, put another there, and you transcend yourself. 
+And it brings you into the presence of what's been called God, Nirvana, Rama, Tao. 
+Something that goes beyond what we know in our ego-bound existence. 
+But you know you'd never know it a lot of the time, that this was so central to the religious life. 
+Because with a few wonderful exceptions, very often when religious people come together, religious leaders come together, they're arguing about abstruse doctrines or uttering a council of hatred or inveighing against homosexuality or something of that sort. 
+Often people don't really want to be compassionate. 
+I sometimes see when I'm speaking to a congregation of religious people a sort of mutinous expression crossing their faces because people often want to be right instead. 
+And that of course defeats the object of the exercise. 
+Now why was I so grateful to TED? 
+Because they took me very gently from my book-lined study and brought me into the 21st century, enabling me to speak to a much, much wider audience than I could have ever conceived. 
+Because I feel an urgency about this. 
+If we don't manage to implement the Golden Rule globally, so that we treat all peoples, wherever and whoever they may be, as though they were as important as ourselves, I doubt that we'll have a viable world to hand on to the next generation. 
+The task of our time, one of the great tasks of our time, is to build a global society, as I said, where people can live together in peace. 
+And the religions that should be making a major contribution are instead seen as part of the problem. 
+And of course it's not just religious people who believe in the Golden Rule. 
+This is the source of all morality, this imaginative act of empathy, putting yourself in the place of another. 
+And so we have a choice, it seems to me. 
+We can either go on bringing out or emphasizing the dogmatic and intolerant aspects of our faith, or we can go back to the rabbis. Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, who, when asked by a pagan to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg, said, "" That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. 
+That is the Torah and everything else is only commentary. "" And the rabbis and the early fathers of the church who said that any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred and disdain was illegitimate. 
+And we need to revive that spirit. 
+And it's not just going to happen because a spirit of love wafts us down. 
+We have to make this happen, and we can do it with the modern communications that TED has introduced. 
+Already I've been tremendously heartened at the response of all our partners. 
+In Singapore, we have a group going to use the Charter to heal divisions recently that have sprung up in Singaporean society, and some members of the parliament want to implement it politically. 
+In Malaysia, there is going to be an art exhibition in which leading artists are going to be taking people, young people, and showing them that compassion also lies at the root of all art. 
+Throughout Europe, the Muslim communities are holding events and discussions, are discussing the centrality of compassion in Islam and in all faiths. 
+But it can't stop there. It can't stop with the launch. 
+Religious teaching, this is where we've gone so wrong, concentrating solely on believing abstruse doctrines. 
+Religious teaching must always lead to action. 
+And I intend to work on this till my dying day. 
+And I want to continue with our partners to do two things — educate and stimulate compassionate thinking. 
+Education because we've so dropped out of compassion. 
+People often think it simply means feeling sorry for somebody. 
+But of course you don't understand compassion if you're just going to think about it. 
+You also have to do it. 
+I want them to get the media involved because the media are crucial in helping to dissolve some of the stereotypical views we have of other people, which are dividing us from one another. 
+The same applies to educators. 
+I'd like youth to get a sense of the dynamism, the dynamic and challenge of a compassionate lifestyle. 
+And also see that it demands acute intelligence, not just a gooey feeling. 
+I'd like to call upon scholars to explore the compassionate theme in their own and in other people's traditions. 
+And perhaps above all, to encourage a sensitivity about uncompassionate speaking, so that because people have this Charter, whatever their beliefs or lack of them, they feel empowered to challenge uncompassionate speech, disdainful remarks from their religious leaders, their political leaders, from the captains of industry. 
+Because we can change the world, we have the ability. 
+I would never have thought of putting the Charter online. 
+I was still stuck in the old world of a whole bunch of boffins sitting together in a room and issuing yet another arcane statement. 
+And TED introduced me to a whole new way of thinking and presenting ideas. 
+Because that is what is so wonderful about TED. 
+In this room, all this expertise, if we joined it all together, we could change the world. 
+And of course the problems sometimes seem insuperable. 
+But I'd just like to quote, finish at the end with a reference to a British author, an Oxford author whom I don't quote very often, C.S. Lewis. 
+But he wrote one thing that stuck in my mind ever since I read it when I was a schoolgirl. 
+It's in his book "" The Four Loves. "" He said that he distinguished between erotic love, when two people gaze, spellbound, into each other's eyes. 
+And then he compared that to friendship, when two people stand side by side, as it were, shoulder to shoulder, with their eyes fixed on a common goal. 
+We don't have to fall in love with each other, but we can become friends. 
+And I am convinced. 
+I felt it very strongly during our little deliberations at Vevey, that when people of all different persuasions come together, working side by side for a common goal, differences melt away. 
+And we learn amity. 
+And we learn to live together and to get to know one another. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to talk about my dad. 
+My dad has Alzheimer's disease. 
+He started showing the symptoms about 12 years ago, and he was officially diagnosed in 2005. 
+Now he's really pretty sick. He needs help eating, he needs help getting dressed, he doesn't really know where he is or when it is, and it's been really, really hard. 
+My dad was my hero and my mentor for most of my life, and I've spent the last decade watching him disappear. 
+My dad's not alone. There's about 35 million people globally living with some kind of dementia, and by 2030 they're expecting that to double to 70 million. 
+That's a lot of people. 
+Dementia scares us. The confused faces and shaky hands of people who have dementia, the big numbers of people who get it, they frighten us. 
+And because of that fear, we tend to do one of two things: We go into denial: "" It's not me, it has nothing to do with me, it's never going to happen to me. "" Or, we decide that we're going to prevent dementia, and it will never happen to us because we're going to do everything right and it won't come and get us. 
+I'm looking for a third way: I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's disease. 
+Prevention is good, and I'm doing the things that you can do to prevent Alzheimer's. 
+I'm eating right, I'm exercising every day, I'm keeping my mind active, that's what the research says you should do. 
+But the research also shows that there's nothing that will 100 percent protect you. 
+If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you. 
+That's what happened with my dad. 
+My dad was a bilingual college professor. His hobbies were chess, bridge and writing op-eds. 
+(Laughter) He got dementia anyway. 
+If the monster wants you, the monster's gonna get you. 
+Especially if you're me, 'cause Alzheimer's tends to run in families. 
+So I'm preparing to get Alzheimer's disease. 
+Based on what I've learned from taking care of my father, and researching what it's like to live with dementia, I'm focusing on three things in my preparation: I'm changing what I do for fun, I'm working to build my physical strength, and — this is the hard one — I'm trying to become a better person. 
+Let's start with the hobbies. When you get dementia, it gets harder and harder to enjoy yourself. 
+You can't sit and have long talks with your old friends, because you don't know who they are. 
+It's confusing to watch television, and often very frightening. 
+And reading is just about impossible. 
+When you care for someone with dementia, and you get training, they train you to engage them in activities that are familiar, hands-on, open-ended. 
+With my dad, that turned out to be letting him fill out forms. 
+He was a college professor at a state school; he knows what paperwork looks like. 
+He'll sign his name on every line, he'll check all the boxes, he'll put numbers in where he thinks there should be numbers. 
+But it got me thinking, what would my caregivers do with me? 
+I'm my father's daughter. I read, I write, I think about global health a lot. 
+Would they give me academic journals so I could scribble in the margins? 
+Would they give me charts and graphs that I could color? 
+So I've been trying to learn to do things that are hands-on. 
+I've always liked to draw, so I'm doing it more even though I'm really very bad at it. 
+I am learning some basic origami. I can make a really great box. 
+(Laughter) And I'm teaching myself to knit, which so far I can knit a blob. 
+But, you know, it doesn't matter if I'm actually good at it. What matters is that my hands know how to do it. 
+Because the more things that are familiar, the more things my hands know how to do, the more things that I can be happy and busy doing when my brain's not running the show anymore. 
+They say that people who are engaged in activities are happier, easier for their caregivers to look after, and it may even slow the progress of the disease. 
+That all seems like win to me. 
+I want to be as happy as I can for as long as I can. 
+A lot of people don't know that Alzheimer's actually has physical symptoms, as well as cognitive symptoms. You lose your sense of balance, you get muscle tremors, and that tends to lead people to being less and less mobile. 
+They get scared to walk around. They get scared to move. 
+So I'm doing activities that will build my sense of balance. 
+I'm doing yoga and tai chi to improve my balance, so that when I start to lose it, I'll still be able to be mobile. 
+I'm doing weight-bearing exercise, so that I have the muscle strength so that when I start to wither, I have more time that I can still move around. 
+Finally, the third thing. I'm trying to become a better person. 
+My dad was kind and loving before he had Alzheimer's, and he's kind and loving now. 
+I've seen him lose his intellect, his sense of humor, his language skills, but I've also seen this: He loves me, he loves my sons, he loves my brother and my mom and his caregivers. 
+And that love makes us want to be around him, even now. 
+even when it's so hard. 
+When you take away everything that he ever learned in this world, his naked heart still shines. 
+I was never as kind as my dad, and I was never as loving. 
+And what I need now is to learn to be like that. 
+I need a heart so pure that if it's stripped bare by dementia, it will survive. 
+I don't want to get Alzheimer's disease. 
+What I want is a cure in the next 20 years, soon enough to protect me. 
+But if it comes for me, I'm going to be ready. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What I'm going to do, in the spirit of collaborative creativity, is simply repeat many of the points that the three people before me have already made, but do them — this is called "" creative collaboration; "" it's actually called "" borrowing "" — but do it through a particular perspective, and that is to ask about the role of users and consumers in this emerging world of collaborative creativity that Jimmy and others have talked about. 
+Let me just ask you, to start with, this simple question: who invented the mountain bike? 
+Because traditional economic theory would say, well, the mountain bike was probably invented by some big bike corporation that had a big R & D lab where they were thinking up new projects, and it came out of there. It didn't come from there. 
+Another answer might be, well, it came from a sort of lone genius working in his garage, who, working away on different kinds of bikes, comes up with a bike out of thin air. 
+It didn't come from there. The mountain bike came from users, came from young users, particularly a group in Northern California, who were frustrated with traditional racing bikes, which were those sort of bikes that Eddy Merckx rode, or your big brother, and they're very glamorous. 
+But also frustrated with the bikes that your dad rode, which sort of had big handlebars like that, and they were too heavy. 
+So, they got the frames from these big bikes, put them together with the gears from the racing bikes, got the brakes from motorcycles, and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients. 
+And for the first, I don't know, three to five years of their life, mountain bikes were known as "" clunkers. "" And they were just made in a community of bikers, mainly in Northern California. 
+And then one of these companies that was importing parts for the clunkers decided to set up in business, start selling them to other people, and gradually another company emerged out of that, Marin, and it probably was, I don't know, 10, maybe even 15, years, before the big bike companies realized there was a market. 
+Thirty years later, mountain bike sales and mountain bike equipment account for 65 percent of bike sales in America. 
+That's 58 billion dollars. 
+This is a category entirely created by consumers that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they couldn't see the need, the opportunity; they didn't have the incentive to innovate. 
+The one thing I think I disagree with about Yochai's presentation is when he said the Internet causes this distributive capacity for innovation to come alive. 
+It's when the Internet combines with these kinds of passionate pro-am consumers — who are knowledgeable; they've got the incentive to innovate; they've got the tools; they want to — that you get this kind of explosion of creative collaboration. 
+And out of that, you get the need for the kind of things that Jimmy was talking about, which is our new kinds of organization, or a better way to put it: how do we organize ourselves without organizations? 
+That's now possible; you don't need an organization to be organized, to achieve large and complex tasks, like innovating new software programs. 
+So this is a huge challenge to the way we think creativity comes about. 
+The traditional view, still enshrined in much of the way that we think about creativity — in organizations, in government — is that creativity is about special people: wear baseball caps the wrong way round, come to conferences like this, in special places, elite universities, R & D labs in the forests, water, maybe special rooms in companies painted funny colors, you know, bean bags, maybe the odd table-football table. 
+Special people, special places, think up special ideas, then you have a pipeline that takes the ideas down to the waiting consumers, who are passive. 
+They can say "" yes "" or "" no "" to the invention. 
+That's the idea of creativity. 
+What's the policy recommendation out of that if you're in government, or you're running a large company? 
+More special people, more special places. 
+Build creative clusters in cities; create more R & D parks, so on and so forth. 
+Expand the pipeline down to the consumers. 
+Well this view, I think, is increasingly wrong. 
+I think it's always been wrong, because I think always creativity has been highly collaborative, and it's probably been largely interactive. 
+But it's increasingly wrong, and one of the reasons it's wrong is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline. 
+The ideas are coming back from the consumers, and they're often ahead of the producers. 
+Why is that? 
+Well, one issue is that radical innovation, when you've got ideas that affect a large number of technologies or people, have a great deal of uncertainty attached to them. 
+The payoffs to innovation are greatest where the uncertainty is highest. 
+And when you get a radical innovation, it's often very uncertain how it can be applied. 
+The whole history of telephony is a story of dealing with that uncertainty. 
+The very first landline telephones, the inventors thought that they would be used for people to listen in to live performances from West End theaters. 
+When the mobile telephone companies invented SMS, they had no idea what it was for; it was only when that technology got into the hands of teenage users that they invented the use. 
+So the more radical the innovation, the more the uncertainty, the more you need innovation in use to work out what a technology is for. 
+All of our patents, our entire approach to patents and invention, is based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for; we can say what it's for. 
+More and more, the inventors of things will not be able to say that in advance. 
+It will be worked out in use, in collaboration with users. 
+We like to think that invention is a sort of moment of creation: there is a moment of birth when someone comes up with an idea. 
+The truth is that most creativity is cumulative and collaborative; like Wikipedia, it develops over a long period of time. 
+The second reason why users are more and more important is that they are the source of big, disruptive innovations. 
+If you want to find the big new ideas, it's often difficult to find them in mainstream markets, in big organizations. 
+And just look inside large organizations and you'll see why that is so. 
+So, you're in a big corporation. 
+You're obviously keen to go up the corporate ladder. 
+Do you go into your board and say, "" Look, I've got a fantastic idea for an embryonic product in a marginal market, with consumers we've never dealt with before, and I'm not sure it's going to have a big payoff, but it could be really, really big in the future? "" No, what you do, is you go in and you say, "" I've got a fantastic idea for an incremental innovation to an existing product we sell through existing channels to existing users, and I can guarantee you get this much return out of it over the next three years. "" Big corporations have an in-built tendency 
+to reinforce past success. 
+They've got so much sunk in it that it's very difficult for them to spot emerging new markets. Emerging new markets, then, are the breeding grounds for passionate users. 
+Best example: who in the music industry, 30 years ago, would have said, "" Yes, let's invent a musical form which is all about dispossessed black men in ghettos expressing their frustration with the world through a form of music that many people find initially quite difficult to listen to. 
+That sounds like a winner; we'll go with it. "" (Laughter). 
+So what happens? Rap music is created by the users. 
+They do it on their own tapes, with their own recording equipment; they distribute it themselves. 
+30 years later, rap music is the dominant musical form of popular culture — would never have come from the big companies. 
+Had to start — this is the third point — with these pro-ams. 
+This is the phrase that I've used in some stuff which I've done with a think tank in London called Demos, where we've been looking at these people who are amateurs — i.e., they do it for the love of it — but they want to do it to very high standards. 
+And across a whole range of fields — from software, astronomy, natural sciences, vast areas of leisure and culture like kite-surfing, so on and so forth — you find people who want to do things because they love it, but they want to do these things to very high standards. 
+They work at their leisure, if you like. 
+They take their leisure very seriously: they acquire skills; they invest time; they use technology that's getting cheaper — it's not just the Internet: cameras, design technology, leisure technology, surfboards, so on and so forth. 
+Largely through globalization, a lot of this equipment has got a lot cheaper. 
+More knowledgeable consumers, more educated, more able to connect with one another, more able to do things together. 
+Consumption, in that sense, is an expression of their productive potential. 
+Why, we found, people were interested in this, is that at work they don't feel very expressed. 
+They don't feel as if they're doing something that really matters to them, so they pick up these kinds of activities. 
+This has huge organizational implications for very large areas of life. 
+Take astronomy as an example, which Yochai has already mentioned. 
+Twenty years ago, 30 years ago, only big professional astronomers with very big telescopes could see far into space. 
+And there's a big telescope in Northern England called Jodrell Bank, and when I was a kid, it was amazing, because the moon shots would take off, and this thing would move on rails. 
+And it was huge — it was absolutely enormous. 
+Now, six amateur astronomers, working with the Internet, with Dobsonian digital telescopes — which are pretty much open source — with some light sensors developed over the last 10 years, the Internet — they can do what Jodrell Bank could only do 30 years ago. 
+So here in astronomy, you have this vast explosion of new productive resources. 
+The users can be producers. 
+What does this mean, then, for our organizational landscape? 
+Well, just imagine a world, for the moment, divided into two camps. 
+Over here, you've got the old, traditional corporate model: special people, special places; patent it, push it down the pipeline to largely waiting, passive consumers. 
+Over here, let's imagine we've got Wikipedia, Linux, and beyond — open source. 
+This is open; this is closed. 
+This is new; this is traditional. 
+Well, the first thing you can say, I think with certainty, is what Yochai has said already — is there is a great big struggle between those two organizational forms. 
+These people over there will do everything they can to stop these kinds of organizations succeeding, because they're threatened by them. 
+And so the debates about copyright, digital rights, so on and so forth — these are all about trying to stifle, in my view, these kinds of organizations. 
+What we're seeing is a complete corruption of the idea of patents and copyright. 
+Meant to be a way to incentivize invention, meant to be a way to orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge, they are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place. 
+Let me just give you two examples. 
+The first is: imagine yourself going to a venture capitalist and saying, "" I've got a fantastic idea. 
+I've invented this brilliant new program that is much, much better than Microsoft Outlook. "" Which venture capitalist in their right mind is going to give you any money to set up a venture competing with Microsoft, with Microsoft Outlook? No one. 
+That is why the competition with Microsoft is bound to come — will only come — from an open-source kind of project. 
+So, there is a huge competitive argument about sustaining the capacity for open-source and consumer-driven innovation, because it's one of the greatest competitive levers against monopoly. 
+There'll be huge professional arguments as well. 
+Because the professionals, over here in these closed organizations — they might be academics; they might be programmers; they might be doctors; they might be journalists — my former profession — say, "" No, no — you can't trust these people over here. "" When I started in journalism — Financial Times, 20 years ago — it was very, very exciting to see someone reading the newspaper. 
+And you'd kind of look over their shoulder on the Tube to see if they were reading your article. 
+Usually they were reading the share prices, and the bit of the paper with your article on was on the floor, or something like that, and you know, "" For heaven's sake, what are they doing! 
+They're not reading my brilliant article! "" And we allowed users, readers, two places where they could contribute to the paper: the letters page, where they could write a letter in, and we would condescend to them, cut it in half, and print it three days later. 
+Or the op-ed page, where if they knew the editor — had been to school with him, slept with his wife — they could write an article for the op-ed page. 
+Those were the two places. 
+Shock, horror: now, the readers want to be writers and publishers. 
+That's not their role; they're supposed to read what we write. 
+But they don't want to be journalists. The journalists think that the bloggers want to be journalists; they don't want to be journalists; they just want to have a voice. 
+They want to, as Jimmy said, they want to have a dialogue, a conversation. 
+They want to be part of that flow of information. 
+What's happening there is that the whole domain of creativity is expanding. 
+So, there's going to be a tremendous struggle. 
+But, also, there's going to be tremendous movement from the open to the closed. 
+What you'll see, I think, is two things that are critical, and these, I think, are two challenges for the open movement. 
+The first is: can we really survive on volunteers? 
+If this is so critical, do we not need it funded, organized, supported in much more structured ways? 
+I think the idea of creating the Red Cross for information and knowledge is a fantastic idea, but can we really organize that, just on volunteers? 
+What kind of changes do we need in public policy and funding to make that possible? 
+What's the role of the BBC, for instance, in that world? 
+What should be the role of public policy? 
+And finally, what I think you will see is the intelligent, closed organizations moving increasingly in the open direction. 
+So it's not going to be a contest between two camps, but, in between them, you'll find all sorts of interesting places that people will occupy. 
+New organizational models coming about, mixing closed and open in tricky ways. 
+It won't be so clear-cut; it won't be Microsoft versus Linux — there'll be all sorts of things in between. 
+And those organizational models, it turns out, are incredibly powerful, and the people who can understand them will be very, very successful. 
+Let me just give you one final example of what that means. 
+I was in Shanghai, in an office block built on what was a rice paddy five years ago — one of the 2,500 skyscrapers they've built in Shanghai in the last 10 years. 
+And I was having dinner with this guy called Timothy Chan. 
+Timothy Chan set up an Internet business in 2000. 
+Didn't go into the Internet, kept his money, decided to go into computer games. 
+He runs a company called Shanda, which is the largest computer games company in China. 
+Nine thousand servers all over China, has 250 million subscribers. 
+At any one time, there are four million people playing one of his games. 
+How many people does he employ to service that population? 
+500 people. 
+Well, how can he service 250 million people from 500 employees? 
+Because basically, he doesn't service them. 
+He gives them a platform; he gives them some rules; he gives them the tools and then he kind of orchestrates the conversation; he orchestrates the action. 
+But actually, a lot of the content is created by the users themselves. 
+And it creates a kind of stickiness between the community and the company which is really, really powerful. 
+The best measure of that: so you go into one of his games, you create a character that you develop in the course of the game. 
+If, for some reason, your credit card bounces, or there's some other problem, you lose your character. 
+You've got two options. 
+One option: you can create a new character, right from scratch, but with none of the history of your player. 
+That costs about 100 dollars. 
+Or you can get on a plane, fly to Shanghai, queue up outside Shanda's offices — cost probably 600, 700 dollars — and reclaim your character, get your history back. 
+Every morning, there are 600 people queuing outside their offices to reclaim these characters. (Laughter) So this is about companies built on communities, that provide communities with tools, resources, platforms in which they can share. 
+He's not open source, but it's very, very powerful. 
+So here is one of the challenges, I think, for people like me, who do a lot of work with government. 
+If you're a games company, and you've got a million players in your game, you only need one percent of them to be co-developers, contributing ideas, and you've got a development workforce of 10,000 people. 
+Imagine you could take all the children in education in Britain, and one percent of them were co-developers of education. 
+What would that do to the resources available to the education system? 
+Or if you got one percent of the patients in the NHS to, in some sense, be co-producers of health. 
+The reason why — despite all the efforts to cut it down, to constrain it, to hold it back — why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force, is that they multiply our productive resources. 
+And one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers, consumers into designers. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+So, this is the short story of that research. 
+They've never found a society that did not have it. 
+There's other love poems that are, of course, just as good, but I don't think this one can be surpassed. 
+(Laughter) So anyway, we found activity in three brain regions. 
+That brain system — the reward system for wanting, for motivation, for craving, for focus — becomes more active when you can't get what you want. 
+It comes from a David Mamet play, and there's two con artists in the play, and the woman is conning the man, and the man looks at the woman and says, "Oh, you're a bad pony, I'm not going to bet on you." 
+You focus on the person, you obsessively think about them, you crave them, you distort reality, your willingness to take enormous risks to win this person. 
+Unless you're stuck in a laboratory cage — and you know, if you spend your entire life in a little box, you're not going to be as picky about who you have sex with, but I've looked in a hundred species, and everywhere in the wild, animals have favorites. 
+As a matter of fact, ethologists know this. 
+There are over eight words for what they call "" animal favoritism: "" selective proceptivity, mate choice, female choice, sexual choice. 
+And indeed, there are now three academic articles in which they've looked at this attraction, which may only last for a second, but it's a definite attraction, and either this same brain region, this reward system, or the chemicals of that reward system are involved. 
+And I think that this is really the origin of what you and I call "" love at first sight. "" People have often asked me whether what I know about love has spoiled it for me. 
+And in fact, sometimes I feel a little sorry for the chicken on my dinner plate, when I think of how intense this brain system is. 
+There are still many questions to be answered and asked about romantic love. 
+I never would have even thought to think of this, but Match.com, the Internet dating site, came to me three years ago and asked me that question. 
+So, it began to occur to me that maybe your biology pulls you towards some people rather than another. 
+I think we've evolved four very broad personality types associated with the ratios of these four chemicals in the brain. 
+And 3.7 million people have taken the questionnaire in America. 
+
+So the question is, what is invisible? 
+There is more of it than you think, actually. 
+Everything, I would say. Everything that matters except every thing and except matter. 
+We can see matter. But we can't see what's the matter. 
+As in this cryptic sentence I found in The Guardian recently: "" The marriage suffered a setback in 1965, when the husband was killed by the wife. "" (Laughter) There's a world of invisibility there, isn't there? (Laughter) 
+So, we can see the stars and the planets, but we can't see what holds them apart or what draws them together. 
+With matter, as with people, we see only the skin of things. 
+We can't see into the engine room. 
+We can't see what makes people tick, at least not without difficulty. 
+And the closer we look at anything, the more it disappears. 
+In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there. 
+Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy. And you can't see energy. 
+So everything that matters, that's important, is invisible. 
+One slightly silly thing that's invisible is this story, which is invisible to you. 
+And I'm now going to make it visible to you in your minds. 
+It's about an M.P. called Geoffrey Dickens. 
+The late Geoffrey Dickens, M.P. was attending a fete in his constituency. 
+Wherever he went, at every stall he stopped he was closely followed by a devoted smiling woman of indescribable ugliness. 
+(Laughter) Try as he might, he couldn't get away from her. 
+A few days later he received a letter from a constituent saying how much she admired him, had met him at a fete and asking for a signed photograph. 
+After her name, written in brackets was the apt description, horse face. 
+(Laughter) "" I've misjudged this women, "" thought Mr. Dickens. 
+"" Not only is she aware of her physical repulsiveness, she turns it to her advantage. 
+A photo is not enough. "" So he went out and bought a plastic frame to put the photograph in. 
+And on the photograph, he wrote with a flourish, "To Horse Face, with love from Geoffrey Dickens, M.P." 
+After it had been sent off, his secretary said to him, "" Did you get that letter from the woman at the fete? 
+I wrote Horse Face on her, so you'd remember who she was. "" (Laughter) I bet he thought he wished he was invisible, don't you? (Laughter) 
+So, one of the interesting things about invisibility is that things that we can't see we also can't understand. 
+Gravity is one thing that we can't see and which we don't understand. 
+It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, and the weakest. 
+And nobody really knows what it is or why it's there. 
+For what it's worth, Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, he thought Jesus came to Earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity. 
+That's what he thought he was there for. 
+So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know. 
+(Laughter) Consciousness. I see all your faces. 
+I have no idea what any of you are thinking. Isn't that amazing? 
+Isn't that incredible that we can't read each other's minds? 
+But we can touch each other, taste each other perhaps, if we get close enough. 
+But we can't read each other's minds. I find that quite astonishing. 
+In the Sufi faith, this great Middle Eastern religion, which some claim is the route of all religions, Sufi masters are all telepaths, so they say. 
+But their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it doesn't exist. 
+So that's why we don't think it exists, the Sufi masters working on us. 
+In the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence has really, like the study of consciousness, gotten nowhere. We have no idea how consciousness works. 
+With artificial intelligence, not only have they not created artificial intelligence, they haven't yet created artificial stupidity. 
+(Laughter) The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful. 
+Remind you of anyone? 
+Interesting. I'm, as you can guess, not a materialist, I'm an immaterialist. 
+And I've found a very useful new word, ignostic. Okay? 
+I'm an ignostic. 
+I refuse to be drawn on the question of whether God exists, until somebody properly defines the terms. 
+(Laughter) Another thing we can't see is the human genome. 
+And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago, when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain around 100,000 genes. 
+Geneticists will know this, but every year since, it's been revised downwards. 
+We now think there are likely to be only just over 20,000 genes in the human genome. 
+This is extraordinary. Because rice — get this — rice is known to have 38 thousand genes. 
+Potatoes, potatoes have 48 chromosomes. Do you know that? 
+Two more than people, and the same as a gorilla. 
+(Laughter) You can't see these things, but they are very strange. (Laughter) 
+The stars by day. I always think that's fascinating. 
+The universe disappears. 
+The more light there is, the less you can see. 
+Time, nobody can see time. 
+I don't know if you know this. Modern physics, there is a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist, because it's too inconvenient for the figures. 
+It's much easier if it's not really there. 
+You can't see the future, obviously. 
+And you can't see the past, except in your memory. 
+One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can't see. My son asked me this the other day, he said, "" Dad, can you remember what I was like when I was two? "" And I said, "" Yes. "" And he said, "" Why can't I? "" Isn't that extraordinary? You cannot remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three, which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they'd be out of a job. 
+Because that's where all the stuff happens (Laughter) that makes you who you are. 
+Another thing you can't see is the grid on which we hang. 
+This is fascinating. You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed. You can see it in skin and this kind of stuff. 
+Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff. 
+But every cell in your body is replaced at some point. 
+Taste buds, every 10 days or so. 
+Livers and internal organs sort of take a bit longer. A spine takes several years. 
+But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago. 
+The question is, who, then, are we? 
+What are we? What is this thing that we hang on, that is actually us? 
+Okay. Atoms, you can't see them. 
+Nobody ever will. They're smaller than the wavelength of light. 
+Gas, you can't see that. 
+Interesting. Somebody mentioned 1600 recently. 
+Gas was invented in 1600 by a Dutch chemist called Van Helmont. 
+It's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual. 
+Quite good. He also invented a word called "" blas, "" meaning astral radiation. 
+Didn't catch on, unfortunately. 
+(Laughter) But well done, him. (Laughter) 
+There is so many things that — Light. 
+You can't see light. When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it. Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this. 
+But it's odd that you can't see the beam of light, you can only see what it hits. 
+I find that extraordinary, not to be able to see light, not to be able to see darkness. 
+Electricity, you can't see that. 
+Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity. 
+They don't. Nobody knows what it is. 
+(Laughter) You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light when you turn the light on. They don't. 
+Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say. 
+(Laughter) Galaxies, 100 billion of them estimated in the universe. 
+100 billion. How many can we see? Five. 
+Five out of the 100 billion galaxies, with the naked eye, and one of them is quite difficult to see unless you've got very good eyesight. 
+Radio waves. There's another thing. 
+Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated. 
+And somebody said to him, "" Well what's the point of these, Heinrich? 
+What's the point of these radio waves that you've found? "" And he said, "" Well, I've no idea. 
+But I guess somebody will find a use for them someday. "" And that's what they do, radio. That's what they discovered. 
+Anyway, so the biggest thing that's invisible to us is what we don't know. 
+It is incredible how little we know. 
+Thomas Edison once said, "" We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything. "" And I've come to the conclusion — because you've asked this other question, "" What's another thing you can't see? "" The point, most of us. What's the point? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) You can't see a point. It's by definition dimensionless, like an electron, oddly enough. 
+But the point, what I've got it down to, is there are only two questions really worth asking. 
+"" Why are we here? "" and "" What should we do about it while we are? 
+And to help you, I've got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century, one a mathematician and an engineer, and the other a poet. 
+The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, "" I don't know why we are here. 
+But I'm pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves. "" (Laughter) He was a cheerful bastard wasn't he? (Laughter) 
+And secondly and lastly, W.H. Auden, one of my favorite poets, who said, "" We are here on earth to help others. 
+What the others are here for, I've no idea. "" (Laughter) (Applause) 
+
+Last year at TED I gave an introduction to the LHC. 
+And I promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine worked. 
+So this is it. And for those of you that weren't there, the LHC is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted — 27 kilometers in circumference. 
+Its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began, up to 600 million times a second. 
+It's nothing if not ambitious. 
+This is the machine below Geneva. 
+We take the pictures of those mini-Big Bangs inside detectors. 
+This is the one I work on. It's called the ATLAS detector — 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter. 
+Spectacular picture here of ATLAS under construction so you can see the scale. 
+On the 10th of September last year we turned the machine on for the first time. 
+And this picture was taken by ATLAS. 
+It caused immense celebration in the control room. 
+It's a picture of the first beam particle going all the way around the LHC, colliding with a piece of the LHC deliberately, and showering particles into the detector. 
+In other words, when we saw that picture on September 10th we knew the machine worked, which is a great triumph. 
+I don't know whether this got the biggest cheer, or this, when someone went onto Google and saw the front page was like that. 
+It means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact. 
+About a week later we had a problem with the machine, related actually to these bits of wire here — these gold wires. 
+Those wires carry 13 thousand amps when the machine is working in full power. 
+Now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say, "No they don't. They're small wires." 
+They can do that because when they are very cold they are what's called superconducting wire. 
+So at minus 271 degrees, colder than the space between the stars, those wires can take that current. 
+In one of the joints between over 9,000 magnets in LHC, there was a manufacturing defect. 
+So the wire heated up slightly, and its 13,000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance. 
+This was the result. 
+Now that's more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tons, and they moved about a foot. 
+So we damaged about 50 of the magnets. 
+We had to take them out, which we did. 
+We reconditioned them all, fixed them. 
+They're all on their way back underground now. 
+By the end of March the LHC will be intact again. 
+We will switch it on, and we expect to take data in June or July, and continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are. 
+Now of course, in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge. It's easy to refute. 
+I think that the fact that it's so difficult, the fact that we're overreaching, is the value of things like the LHC. 
+I will leave the final word to an English scientist, Humphrey Davy, who, I suspect, when defending his protege's useless experiments — his protege was Michael Faraday — said this, "" Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What worries me is when politicians with money and charismatic rock stars — (Laughter) use the words, "... it all just sounds so, so simple." 
+I'll leave that to others. 
+But I do have an idea, and that idea is called Housing for Health. 
+It works in the places where they live, and the work is done to improve their health. 
+Over the last 28 years, this tough, grinding, dirty work has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia and, more recently, overseas, and their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments. 
+It can improve health and it can play a part in reducing, if not eliminating, poverty. 
+A man called Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man, was running a health service. 
+Eighty percent of what walked in the door, in terms of illness, was infectious disease — third world, developing world infectious disease, caused by a poor living environment. 
+He got an environmental health guy. 
+And he hand-selected a team of local Aboriginal people to work on this project. 
+Yami told us at that first meeting, "" There's no money, "" — always a good start — ""... no money, you have six months, and I want you to start on a project — "" which, in his language, he called "" Uwankara Palyanku Kanyintjaku, "" which, translated, is "" a plan to stop people getting sick "" — a profound brief. 
+That was our task. 
+And he worked on what were to become these nine health goals — what were we aiming at? 
+After six months of work, he came to my office and presented me with those nine words on a piece of paper. 
+[The 9 Healthy Living Practices: Washing, clothes, wastewater, nutrition, crowding, animals, dust, temperature, injury] I was very unimpressed. Big ideas need big words, and preferably a lot of them. 
+The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason. 
+The Aboriginal people who were our bosses and the senior people were most commonly illiterate, so the story had to be told in pictures of what these goals were. 
+We worked with the community, not telling them what was going to happen in a language they didn't understand. 
+So we had the goals and each one of these goals — and I won't go through them all — puts at the center the person and their health issue, and it then connects them to the bits of the physical environment that are actually needed to keep their health good. 
+This morning before you came, who could have had a wash using a shower? 
+I want you all to select one of the houses of the 25 houses you see on the screen. 
+I want you to select one of them and note the position of that house and keep that in your head. 
+You and your kids are fine. 
+If you get a red cross, well, I've looked carefully around the room and it's not going to make much difference to this crew. 
+And before you get offended and leave, I've got to say that being too old, in this case, means that pretty much everyone in the room, I think, is over five years of age. 
+And why? 
+Washing is the antidote to the sort of bugs, the common infectious diseases of the eyes, the ears, the chest and the skin that, if they occur in the first five years of life, permanently damage those organs. 
+That means that by the age of five, you can't see as well for the rest of your life. 
+You can't breathe as well. 
+And even skin infection, which we originally thought wasn't that big a problem, mild skin infections naught to five give you a greatly increased chance of renal failure, needing dialysis at age 40. 
+This is a big deal, so the ticks and crosses on the screen are actually critical for young kids. 
+Those ticks and crosses represent the 7,800 houses we've looked at nationally around Australia, the same proportion. 
+What you see on the screen — 35 percent of those not-so-famous houses lived in by 50,000 indigenous people — 35 percent had a working shower. 
+In the case of the shower: does it have hot and cold water, two taps that work, a shower rose to get water onto your head or onto your body, and a drain that takes the water away? 
+And the same tests for the electrical system and the toilets. 
+Housing for Health projects aren't about measuring failure — they're actually about improving houses. 
+By the evening of the first day, a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning. 
+That work continues for six to 12 months, until all the houses are improved and we've spent our budget of 7,500 dollars total per house. 
+That's our average budget. 
+It's very easy to spend money. 
+And these are the results we can get with our 7,500 dollars. 
+We can get showers up to 86 percent working, we can get electrical systems up to 77 percent working and we can get 90 percent of toilets working in those 7,500 houses. 
+Why do we have to do this work? 
+Why are the houses in such poor condition? 
+Twenty-one percent of the things we fix are due to faulty construction — literally things that are built upside down and back to front. 
+They don't work, we have to fix them. 
+It's one of the almost rock-solid pieces of evidence which I've never seen evidence for, that's always reeled out as "" That's the problem with indigenous housing. "" Well, nine percent of what we spend is damage, misuse or abuse of any sort. 
+We argue strongly that the people living in the house are simply not the problem. 
+Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia — over 75 at the minute — are actually local, indigenous people from the communities we work in. 
+(Applause) In 2010, for example, there were 831, all over Australia, and the Torres Strait Islands, all states, working to improve the houses where they and their families live, and that's an important thing. 
+It's a developing-world illness, and yet, the picture you see behind is in an Aboriginal community in the late 1990s, where 95 percent of school-aged kids had active trachoma in their eyes, doing damage. 
+Well, first thing we do, we get showers working. 
+We put washing facilities in the school as well, so kids can wash their faces many times during the day. 
+We wash the bug out. 
+We did it. He provided us dust monitors. 
+(Laughter) And the doctor of flies very quickly determined that there was one fly that carried the bug. 
+He could give school kids in this community the beautiful fly trap you see above in the slide. 
+And over the year, trachoma dropped radically in this place, and stayed low. 
+We changed the environment, not just treated the eyes. 
+(Applause) Just to show that the principles we've used in Australia can be used in other places, I'm just going to go to one other place, and that's Nepal. 
+We were asked by a small village of 600 people to go in and make toilets where none existed. 
+We went in with no grand plan, no grand promises of a great program, just the offer to build two toilets for two families. 
+We were there originally to look at toilets and get human waste off the ground, that's fine. 
+Solution: Take human waste, take animal waste, put it into a chamber, out of that, extract biogas, methane gas. 
+The gas gives three to four hours cooking a day — clean, smokeless and free for the family. 
+(Applause) I put it to you: is this eliminating poverty? 
+And the answer from the Nepali team who's working at the minute would say, don't be ridiculous — we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim. 
+But as we all sit here today, there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby. 
+She's probably right now cooking lunch for her family on biogas, smokeless fuel. 
+Surya takes the waste out of the biogas chamber when it's shed the gas, he puts it on his crops. 
+And finally Bishnu, the leader of the team, has now understood that not only have we built toilets, we've also built a team, and that team is now working in two villages where they're training up the next two villages to keep the work expanding. 
+And that, to me, is the key. 
+(Applause) People are not the problem. 
+It is man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. "" I want to end by saying it's been the actions of thousands of ordinary human beings doing — I think — extraordinary work, that have actually improved health, and, maybe only in a small way, reduced poverty. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In the space that used to house one transistor, we can now fit one billion. 
+That made it so that a computer the size of an entire room now fits in your pocket. 
+You might say the future is small. 
+As an engineer, I'm inspired by this miniaturization revolution in computers. 
+As a physician, I wonder whether we could use it to reduce the number of lives lost due to one of the fastest-growing diseases on Earth: cancer. 
+Now when I say that, what most people hear me say is that we're working on curing cancer. 
+And we are. 
+But it turns out that there's an incredible opportunity to save lives through the early detection and prevention of cancer. 
+Worldwide, over two-thirds of deaths due to cancer are fully preventable using methods that we already have in hand today. 
+Things like vaccination, timely screening and of course, stopping smoking. 
+But even with the best tools and technologies that we have today, some tumors can't be detected until 10 years after they've started growing, when they are 50 million cancer cells strong. 
+What if we had better technologies to detect some of these more deadly cancers sooner, when they could be removed, when they were just getting started? 
+Let me tell you about how miniaturization might get us there. 
+This is a microscope in a typical lab that a pathologist would use for looking at a tissue specimen, like a biopsy or a pap smear. 
+This $7,000 microscope would be used by somebody with years of specialized training to spot cancer cells. 
+This is an image from a colleague of mine at Rice University, Rebecca Richards-Kortum. 
+What she and her team have done is miniaturize that whole microscope into this $10 part, and it fits on the end of an optical fiber. 
+Now what that means is instead of taking a sample from a patient and sending it to the microscope, you can bring the microscope to the patient. 
+And then, instead of requiring a specialist to look at the images, you can train the computer to score normal versus cancerous cells. 
+Now this is important, because what they found working in rural communities, is that even when they have a mobile screening van that can go out into the community and perform exams and collect samples and send them to the central hospital for analysis, that days later, women get a call with an abnormal test result and they're asked to come in. 
+Fully half of them don't turn up because they can't afford the trip. 
+With the integrated microscope and computer analysis, Rebecca and her colleagues have been able to create a van that has both a diagnostic setup and a treatment setup. 
+And what that means is that they can do a diagnosis and perform therapy on the spot, so no one is lost to follow up. 
+That's just one example of how miniaturization can save lives. 
+Now as engineers, we think of this as straight-up miniaturization. 
+You took a big thing and you made it little. 
+But what I told you before about computers was that they transformed our lives when they became small enough for us to take them everywhere. 
+So what is the transformational equivalent like that in medicine? 
+Well, what if you had a detector that was so small that it could circulate in your body, find the tumor all by itself and send a signal to the outside world? 
+It sounds a little bit like science fiction. 
+But actually, nanotechnology allows us to do just that. 
+Nanotechnology allows us to shrink the parts that make up the detector from the width of a human hair, which is 100 microns, to a thousand times smaller, which is 100 nanometers. 
+And that has profound implications. 
+It turns out that materials actually change their properties at the nanoscale. 
+You take a common material like gold, and you grind it into dust, into gold nanoparticles, and it changes from looking gold to looking red. 
+If you take a more exotic material like cadmium selenide — forms a big, black crystal — if you make nanocrystals out of this material and you put it in a liquid, and you shine light on it, they glow. 
+And they glow blue, green, yellow, orange, red, depending only on their size. 
+It's wild! Can you imagine an object like that in the macro world? 
+It would be like all the denim jeans in your closet are all made of cotton, but they are different colors depending only on their size. 
+(Laughter) So as a physician, what's just as interesting to me is that it's not just the color of materials that changes at the nanoscale; the way they travel in your body also changes. 
+And this is the kind of observation that we're going to use to make a better cancer detector. 
+So let me show you what I mean. 
+This is a blood vessel in the body. 
+Surrounding the blood vessel is a tumor. 
+We're going to inject nanoparticles into the blood vessel and watch how they travel from the bloodstream into the tumor. 
+Now it turns out that the blood vessels of many tumors are leaky, and so nanoparticles can leak out from the bloodstream into the tumor. 
+Whether they leak out depends on their size. 
+So in this image, the smaller, hundred-nanometer, blue nanoparticles are leaking out, and the larger, 500-nanometer, red nanoparticles are stuck in the bloodstream. 
+So that means as an engineer, depending on how big or small I make a material, I can change where it goes in your body. 
+In my lab, we recently made a cancer nanodetector that is so small that it could travel into the body and look for tumors. 
+We designed it to listen for tumor invasion: the orchestra of chemical signals that tumors need to make to spread. 
+For a tumor to break out of the tissue that it's born in, it has to make chemicals called enzymes to chew through the scaffolding of tissues. 
+We designed these nanoparticles to be activated by these enzymes. 
+One enzyme can activate a thousand of these chemical reactions in an hour. 
+Now in engineering, we call that one-to-a-thousand ratio a form of amplification, and it makes something ultrasensitive. 
+So we've made an ultrasensitive cancer detector. 
+OK, but how do I get this activated signal to the outside world, where I can act on it? 
+For this, we're going to use one more piece of nanoscale biology, and that has to do with the kidney. 
+The kidney is a filter. 
+Its job is to filter out the blood and put waste into the urine. 
+It turns out that what the kidney filters is also dependent on size. 
+So in this image, what you can see is that everything smaller than five nanometers is going from the blood, through the kidney, into the urine, and everything else that's bigger is retained. 
+OK, so if I make a 100-nanometer cancer detector, I inject it in the bloodstream, it can leak into the tumor where it's activated by tumor enzymes to release a small signal that is small enough to be filtered out of the kidney and put into the urine, I have a signal in the outside world that I can detect. 
+OK, but there's one more problem. 
+This is a tiny little signal, so how do I detect it? 
+Well, the signal is just a molecule. 
+They're molecules that we designed as engineers. 
+They're completely synthetic, and we can design them so they are compatible with our tool of choice. 
+If we want to use a really sensitive, fancy instrument called a mass spectrometer, then we make a molecule with a unique mass. 
+Or maybe we want make something that's more inexpensive and portable. 
+Then we make molecules that we can trap on paper, like a pregnancy test. 
+In fact, there's a whole world of paper tests that are becoming available in a field called paper diagnostics. 
+Alright, where are we going with this? 
+What I'm going to tell you next, as a lifelong researcher, represents a dream of mine. 
+I can't say that's it's a promise; it's a dream. 
+But I think we all have to have dreams to keep us pushing forward, even — and maybe especially — cancer researchers. 
+I'm going to tell you what I hope will happen with my technology, that my team and I will put our hearts and souls into making a reality. 
+OK, here goes. 
+I dream that one day, instead of going into an expensive screening facility to get a colonoscopy, or a mammogram, or a pap smear, that you could get a shot, wait an hour, and do a urine test on a paper strip. 
+I imagine that this could even happen without the need for steady electricity, or a medical professional in the room. 
+Maybe they could be far away and connected only by the image on a smartphone. 
+Now I know this sounds like a dream, but in the lab we already have this working in mice, where it works better than existing methods for the detection of lung, colon and ovarian cancer. 
+And I hope that what this means is that one day we can detect tumors in patients sooner than 10 years after they've started growing, in all walks of life, all around the globe, and that this would lead to earlier treatments, and that we could save more lives than we can today, with early detection. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+You've all seen lots of articles on climate change, and here's yet another New York Times article, just like every other darn one you've seen. 
+It says all the same stuff as all the other ones you've seen. 
+It even has the same amount of headline as all the other ones you've seen. 
+What's unusual about this one, maybe, is that it's from 1953. 
+And the reason I'm saying this is that you may have the idea this problem is relatively recent. 
+That people have just sort of figured out about it, and now with Kyoto and the Governator and people beginning to actually do something, we may be on the road to a solution. 
+The fact is — uh-uh. 
+We've known about this problem for 50 years, depending on how you count it. 
+We have talked about it endlessly over the last decade or so. 
+And we've accomplished close to zip. 
+This is the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere. 
+You've seen this in various forms, but maybe you haven't seen this one. 
+What this shows is that the rate of growth of our emissions is accelerating. 
+And that it's accelerating even faster than what we thought was the worst case just a few years back. 
+So that red line there was something that a lot of skeptics said the environmentalists only put in the projections to make the projections look as bad as possible, that emissions would never grow as fast as that red line. 
+But in fact, they're growing faster. 
+Here's some data from actually just 10 days ago, which shows this year's minimum of the Arctic Sea ice, and it's the lowest by far. 
+And the rate at which the Arctic Sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models. 
+So despite all sorts of experts like me flying around the planet and burning jet fuel, and politicians signing treaties — in fact, you could argue the net effect of all this has been negative, because it's just consumed a lot of jet fuel. (Laughter) No, no! In terms of what we really need to do to put the brakes on this very high inertial thing — our big economy — we've really hardly started. 
+Really, we're doing this, basically. Really, not very much. 
+I don't want to depress you too much. 
+The problem is absolutely soluble, and even soluble in a way that's reasonably cheap. 
+Cheap meaning sort of the cost of the military, not the cost of medical care. 
+Cheap meaning a few percent of GDP. 
+No, this is really important to have this sense of scale. 
+So the problem is soluble, and the way we should go about solving it is, say, dealing with electricity production, which causes something like 43-or-so percent and rising of CO2 emissions. 
+And we could do that by perfectly sensible things like conservation, and wind power, nuclear power and coal to CO2 capture, which are all things that are ready for giant scale deployment, and work. 
+All we lack is the action to actually spend the money to put those into place. 
+Instead, we spend our time talking. 
+But nevertheless, that's not what I'm going to talk to you about tonight. 
+What I'm going to talk to you about tonight is stuff we might do if we did nothing. 
+And it's this stuff in the middle here, which is what you do if you don't stop the emissions quickly enough. 
+And you need to deal — somehow break the link between human actions that change climate, and the climate change itself. And that's particularly important because, of course, while we can adapt to climate change — and it's important to be honest here, there will be some benefits to climate change. 
+Oh, yes, I think it's bad. I've spent my whole life working to stop it. 
+But one of the reasons it's politically hard is there are winners and losers — not all losers. 
+But, of course, the natural world, polar bears. 
+I spent time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high Arctic. 
+They will completely lose. 
+And there's no adaption. 
+So this problem is absolutely soluble. 
+This geo-engineering idea, in it's simplest form, is basically the following. 
+You could put signed particles, say sulfuric acid particles — sulfates — into the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, where they'd reflect away sunlight and cool the planet. 
+And I know for certain that that will work. 
+Not that there aren't side effects, but I know for certain it will work. 
+And the reason is, it's been done. 
+And it was done not by us, not by me, but by nature. 
+Here's Mount Pinatubo in the early '90s. That put a whole bunch of sulfur in the stratosphere with a sort of atomic bomb-like cloud. 
+The result of that was pretty dramatic. 
+After that, and some previous volcanoes we have, you see a quite dramatic cooling of the atmosphere. 
+So this lower bar is the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, and it heats up after these volcanoes. 
+But you'll notice that in the upper bar, which is the lower atmosphere and the surface, it cools down because we shielded the atmosphere a little bit. 
+There's no big mystery about it. 
+There's lots of mystery in the details, and there's some bad side effects, like it partially destroys the ozone layer — and I'll get to that in a minute. 
+But it clearly cools down. 
+And one other thing: it's fast. 
+It's really important to say. So much of the other things that we ought to do, like slowing emissions, are intrinsically slow, because it takes time to build all the hardware we need to reduce emissions. 
+And not only that, when you cut emissions, you don't cut concentrations, because concentrations, the amount of CO2 in the air, is the sum of emissions over time. 
+So you can't step on the brakes very quickly. 
+But if you do this, it's quick. 
+And there are times you might like to do something quick. 
+Another thing you might wonder about is, does it work? 
+Can you shade some sunlight and effectively compensate for the added CO2, and produce a climate sort of back to what it was originally? 
+And the answer seems to be yes. 
+So here are the graphs you've seen lots of times before. 
+That's what the world looks like, under one particular climate model's view, with twice the amount of CO2 in the air. 
+The lower graph is with twice the amount of CO2 and 1.8 percent less sunlight, and you're back to the original climate. 
+And this graph from Ken Caldeira. It's important to say came, because Ken — at a meeting that I believe Marty Hoffart was also at in the mid- '90s — Ken and I stood up at the back of the meeting and said, "Geo-engineering won't work." 
+And to the person who was promoting it said, "The atmosphere's much more complicated." 
+Gave a bunch of physical reasons why it wouldn't do a very good compensation. 
+Ken went and ran his models, and found that it did. 
+This topic is also old. 
+That report that landed on President Johnson's desk when I was two years old — 1965. 
+That report, in fact, which had all the modern climate science — the only thing they talked about doing was geo-engineering. 
+It didn't even talk about cutting emissions, which is an incredible shift in our thinking about this problem. 
+I'm not saying we shouldn't cut emissions. 
+We should, but it made exactly this point. 
+So, in a sense, there's not much new. 
+The one new thing is this essay. 
+So I should say, I guess, that since the time of that original President Johnson report, and the various reports of the U.S. National Academy — 1977, 1982, 1990 — people always talked about this idea. 
+Not as something that was foolproof, but as an idea to think about. 
+But when climate became, politically, a hot topic — if I may make the pun — in the last 15 years, this became so un-PC, we couldn't talk about it. 
+It just sunk below the surface. We weren't allowed to speak about it. 
+But in the last year, Paul Crutzen published this essay saying roughly what's all been said before: that maybe, given our very slow rate of progress in solving this problem and the uncertain impacts, we should think about things like this. 
+He said roughly what's been said before. 
+The big deal was he happened to have won the Nobel prize for ozone chemistry. 
+And so people took him seriously when he said we should think about this, even though there will be some ozone impacts. 
+And in fact, he had some ideas to make them go away. 
+There was all sorts of press coverage, all over the world, going right down to "" Dr. Strangelove Saves the Earth, "" from the Economist. 
+And that got me thinking. I've worked on this topic on and off, but not so much technically. And I was actually lying in bed thinking one night. 
+And I thought about this child's toy — hence, the title of my talk — and I wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin 'round in the child's radiometer, to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there. 
+One of the problems with sulfates is they fall out quickly. 
+The other problem is they're right in the ozone layer, and I'd prefer them above the ozone layer. 
+And it turns out, I woke up the next morning, and I started to calculate this. 
+It was very hard to calculate from first principles. I was stumped. 
+But then I found out that there were all sorts of papers already published that addressed this topic because it happens already in the natural atmosphere. 
+So it seems there are already fine particles that are levitated up to what we call the mesosphere, about 100 kilometers up, that already have this effect. 
+I'll tell you very quickly how the effect works. 
+There are a lot of fun complexities that I'd love to spend the whole evening on, but I won't. 
+But let's say you have sunlight hitting some particle and it's unevenly heated. 
+So the side facing the sun is warmer; the side away, cooler. 
+Gas molecules that bounce off the warm side bounce away with some extra velocity because it's warm. 
+And so you see a net force away from the sun. 
+That's called the photophoretic force. 
+There are a bunch of other versions of it that I and some collaborators have thought about how to exploit. 
+And of course, we may be wrong — this hasn't all been peer reviewed, we're in the middle of thinking about it — but so far, it seems good. 
+But it looks like we could achieve long atmospheric lifetimes — much longer than before — because they're levitated. 
+We can move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere, in principle solving the ozone problem. 
+I'm sure there will be other problems that arise. 
+Finally, we could make the particles migrate to over the poles, so we could arrange the climate engineering so it really focused on the poles. 
+Which would have minimal bad impacts in the middle of the planet, where we live, and do the maximum job of what we might need to do, which is cooling the poles in case of planetary emergency, if you like. 
+This is a new idea that's crept up that may be, essentially, a cleverer idea than putting sulfates in. 
+Whether this idea is right or some other idea is right, I think it's almost certain we will eventually think of cleverer things to do than just putting sulfur in. 
+That if engineers and scientists really turned their minds to this, it's amazing how we can affect the planet. 
+The one thing about this is it gives us extraordinary leverage. 
+This improved science and engineering will, whether we like it or not, give us more and more leverage to affect the planet, to control the planet, to give us weather and climate control — not because we plan it, not because we want it, just because science delivers it to us bit by bit, with better knowledge of the way the system works and better engineering tools to effect it. 
+Now, suppose that space aliens arrived. 
+Maybe they're going to land at the U.N. headquarters down the road here, or maybe they'll pick a smarter spot — but suppose they arrive and they give you a box. 
+And the box has two knobs. 
+One knob is the knob for controlling global temperature. 
+Maybe another knob is a knob for controlling CO2 concentrations. 
+You might imagine that we would fight wars over that box. 
+Because we have no way to agree about where to set the knobs. 
+We have no global governance. 
+And different people will have different places they want it set. 
+Now, I don't think that's going to happen. It's not very likely. 
+But we're building that box. 
+The scientists and engineers of the world are building it piece by piece, in their labs. 
+Even when they're doing it for other reasons. 
+Even when they're thinking they're just working on protecting the environment. 
+They have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet. 
+They develop science that makes it easier and easier to do. 
+And so I guess my view on this is not that I want to do it — I do not — but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it seriously. 
+Because sooner or later, we'll be confronted with decisions about this, and it's better if we think hard about it, even if we want to think hard about reasons why we should never do it. 
+I'll give you two different ways to think about this problem that are the beginning of my thinking about how to think about it. 
+But what we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this. 
+We need a broader debate. 
+A debate that involves musicians, scientists, philosophers, writers, who get engaged with this question about climate engineering and think seriously about what its implications are. 
+So here's one way to think about it, which is that we just do this instead of cutting emissions because it's cheaper. 
+I guess the thing I haven't said about this is, it is absurdly cheap. 
+It's conceivable that, say, using the sulfates method or this method I've come up with, you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of GDP. 
+It's very cheap. We have a lot of leverage. 
+It's not a good idea, but it's just important. (Laughter) I'll tell you how big the lever is: the lever is that big. 
+And that calculation isn't much in dispute. 
+You might argue about the sanity of it, but the leverage is real. (Laughter) So because of this, we could deal with the problem simply by stopping reducing emissions, and just as the concentrations go up, we can increase the amount of geo-engineering. 
+I don't think anybody takes that seriously. 
+Because under this scenario, we walk further and further away from the current climate. 
+We have all sorts of other problems, like ocean acidification that come from CO2 in the atmosphere, anyway. 
+Nobody but maybe one or two very odd folks really suggest this. 
+But here's a case which is harder to reject. 
+Let's say that we don't do geo-engineering, we do what we ought to do, which is get serious about cutting emissions. 
+But we don't really know how quickly we have to cut them. 
+There's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much climate change is too much. 
+So let's say that we work hard, and we actually don't just tap the brakes, but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions and eventually reduce concentrations. 
+And maybe someday — like 2075, October 23 — we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are rolling down the other side. 
+And we have global celebrations, and we've actually started to — you know, we've seen the worst of it. 
+But maybe on that day we also find that the Greenland ice sheet is really melting unacceptably fast, fast enough to put meters of sea level on the oceans in the next 100 years, and remove some of the biggest cities from the map. 
+That's an absolutely possible scenario. 
+We might decide at that point that even though geo-engineering was uncertain and morally unhappy, that it's a lot better than not geo-engineering. 
+And that's a very different way to look at the problem. 
+It's using this as risk control, not instead of action. 
+It's saying that you do some geo-engineering for a little while to take the worst of the heat off, not that you'd use it as a substitute for action. 
+But there is a problem with that view. 
+And the problem is the following: knowledge that geo-engineering is possible makes the climate impacts look less fearsome, and that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions today. 
+This is what economists call a moral hazard. 
+And that's one of the fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about, and, in general, I think it's the underlying reason that it's been politically unacceptable to talk about this. 
+But you don't make good policy by hiding things in a drawer. 
+I'll leave you with three questions, and then one final quote. 
+Should we do serious research on this topic? 
+Should we have a national research program that looks at this? 
+Not just at how you would do it better, but also what all the risks and downsides of it are. 
+Right now, you have a few enthusiasts talking about it, some in a positive side, some in a negative side — but that's a dangerous state to be in because there's very little depth of knowledge on this topic. 
+A very small amount of money would get us some. 
+Many of us — maybe now me — think we should do that. 
+But I have a lot of reservations. 
+My reservations are principally about the moral hazard problem, and I don't really know how we can best avoid the moral hazard. 
+I think there is a serious problem: as you talk about this, people begin to think they don't need to work so hard to cut emissions. 
+Another thing is, maybe we need a treaty. 
+A treaty that decides who gets to do this. 
+Right now we may think of a big, rich country like the U.S. doing this. 
+But it might well be that, in fact, if China wakes up in 2030 and realizes that the climate impacts are just unacceptable, they may not be very interested in our moral conversations about how to do this, and they may just decide they'd really rather have a geo-engineered world than a non-geo-engineered world. 
+And we'll have no international mechanism to figure out who makes the decision. 
+So here's one last thought, which was said much, much better 25 years ago in the U.S. National Academy report than I can say today. 
+And I think it really summarizes where we are here. 
+That the CO2 problem, the climate problem that we've heard about, is driving lots of things — innovations in the energy technologies that will reduce emissions — but also, I think, inevitably, it will drive us towards thinking about climate and weather control, whether we like it or not. 
+And it's time to begin thinking about it, even if the reason we're thinking about it is to construct arguments for why we shouldn't do it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+I didn't always love unintended consequences, but I've really learned to appreciate them. 
+I've learned that they're really the essence of what makes for progress, even when they seem to be terrible. 
+And I'd like to review just how unintended consequences play the part that they do. 
+Let's go to 40,000 years before the present, to the time of the cultural explosion, when music, art, technology, so many of the things that we're enjoying today, so many of the things that are being demonstrated at TED were born. 
+And the anthropologist Randall White has made a very interesting observation: that if our ancestors 40,000 years ago had been able to see what they had done, they wouldn't have really understood it. 
+They were responding to immediate concerns. 
+They were making it possible for us to do what they do, and yet, they didn't really understand how they did it. 
+Now let's advance to 10,000 years before the present. 
+And this is when it really gets interesting. 
+What about the domestication of grains? 
+What about the origins of agriculture? 
+What would our ancestors 10,000 years ago have said if they really had technology assessment? 
+And I could just imagine the committees reporting back to them on where agriculture was going to take humanity, at least in the next few hundred years. 
+It was really bad news. 
+First of all, worse nutrition, maybe shorter life spans. 
+It was simply awful for women. 
+The skeletal remains from that period have shown that they were grinding grain morning, noon and night. 
+And politically, it was awful. 
+It was the beginning of a much higher degree of inequality among people. 
+If there had been rational technology assessment then, I think they very well might have said, "Let's call the whole thing off." 
+Even now, our choices are having unintended effects. 
+Historically, for example, chopsticks — according to one Japanese anthropologist who wrote a dissertation about it at the University of Michigan — resulted in long-term changes in the dentition, in the teeth, of the Japanese public. 
+And we are also changing our teeth right now. 
+There is evidence that the human mouth and teeth are growing smaller all the time. 
+That's not necessarily a bad unintended consequence. 
+But I think from the point of view of a Neanderthal, there would have been a lot of disapproval of the wimpish choppers that we now have. 
+So these things are kind of relative to where you or your ancestors happen to stand. 
+In the ancient world there was a lot of respect for unintended consequences, and there was a very healthy sense of caution, reflected in the Tree of Knowledge, in Pandora's Box, and especially in the myth of Prometheus that's been so important in recent metaphors about technology. 
+And that's all very true. 
+The physicians of the ancient world — especially the Egyptians, who started medicine as we know it — were very conscious of what they could and couldn't treat. 
+And the translations of the surviving texts say, "This I will not treat. This I cannot treat." 
+They were very conscious. 
+So were the followers of Hippocrates. 
+The Hippocratic manuscripts also — repeatedly, according to recent studies — show how important it is not to do harm. 
+More recently, Harvey Cushing, who really developed neurosurgery as we know it, who changed it from a field of medicine that had a majority of deaths resulting from surgery to one in which there was a hopeful outlook, he was very conscious that he was not always going to do the right thing. 
+But he did his best, and he kept meticulous records that let him transform that branch of medicine. 
+Now if we look forward a bit to the 19th century, we find a new style of technology. 
+What we find is, no longer simple tools, but systems. 
+We find more and more complex arrangements of machines that make it harder and harder to diagnose what's going on. 
+And the first people who saw that were the telegraphers of the mid-19th century, who were the original hackers. 
+Thomas Edison would have been very, very comfortable in the atmosphere of a software firm today. 
+And these hackers had a word for those mysterious bugs in telegraph systems that they called bugs. 
+That was the origin of the word "" bug. "" This consciousness, though, was a little slow to seep through the general population, even people who were very, very well informed. 
+Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, was a big investor in the most complex machine of all times — at least until 1918 — registered with the U.S. Patent Office. 
+That was the Paige typesetter. 
+The Paige typesetter had 18,000 parts. 
+The patent had 64 pages of text and 271 figures. 
+It was such a beautiful machine because it did everything that a human being did in setting type — including returning the type to its place, which was a very difficult thing. 
+And Mark Twain, who knew all about typesetting, really was smitten by this machine. 
+Unfortunately, he was smitten in more ways than one, because it made him bankrupt, and he had to tour the world speaking to recoup his money. 
+And this was an important thing about 19th century technology, that all these relationships among parts could make the most brilliant idea fall apart, even when judged by the most expert people. 
+Now there is something else, though, in the early 20th century that made things even more complicated. 
+And that was that safety technology itself could be a source of danger. 
+The lesson of the Titanic, for a lot of the contemporaries, was that you must have enough lifeboats for everyone on the ship. 
+And this was the result of the tragic loss of lives of people who could not get into them. 
+However, there was another case, the Eastland, a ship that capsized in Chicago Harbor in 1915, and it killed 841 people — that was 14 more than the passenger toll of the Titanic. 
+The reason for it, in part, was the extra life boats that were added that made this already unstable ship even more unstable. 
+And that again proves that when you're talking about unintended consequences, it's not that easy to know the right lessons to draw. 
+It's really a question of the system, how the ship was loaded, the ballast and many other things. 
+So the 20th century, then, saw how much more complex reality was, but it also saw a positive side. 
+It saw that invention could actually benefit from emergencies. 
+It could benefit from tragedies. 
+And my favorite example of that — which is not really widely known as a technological miracle, but it may be one of the greatest of all times, was the scaling up of penicillin in the Second World War. 
+Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but even by 1940, no commercially and medically useful quantities of it were being produced. 
+A number of pharmaceutical companies were working on it. 
+They were working on it independently, and they weren't getting anywhere. 
+And the Government Research Bureau brought representatives together and told them that this is something that has to be done. 
+And not only did they do it, but within two years, they scaled up penicillin from preparation in one-liter flasks to 10,000-gallon vats. 
+That was how quickly penicillin was produced and became one of the greatest medical advances of all time. 
+In the Second World War, too, the existence of solar radiation was demonstrated by studies of interference that was detected by the radar stations of Great Britain. 
+So there were benefits in calamities — benefits to pure science, as well as to applied science and medicine. 
+Now when we come to the period after the Second World War, unintended consequences get even more interesting. 
+And my favorite example of that occurred beginning in 1976, when it was discovered that the bacteria causing Legionnaires disease had always been present in natural waters, but it was the precise temperature of the water in heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems that raised the right temperature for the maximum reproduction of Legionella bacillus. 
+Well, technology to the rescue. 
+So chemists got to work, and they developed a bactericide that became widely used in those systems. 
+But something else happened in the early 1980s, and that was that there was a mysterious epidemic of failures of tape drives all over the United States. 
+And IBM, which made them, just didn't know what to do. 
+They commissioned a group of their best scientists to investigate, and what they found was that all these tape drives were located near ventilation ducts. 
+What happened was the bactericide was formulated with minute traces of tin. 
+And these tin particles were deposited on the tape heads and were crashing the tape heads. 
+So they reformulated the bactericide. 
+But what's interesting to me is that this was the first case of a mechanical device suffering, at least indirectly, from a human disease. 
+So it shows that we're really all in this together. 
+(Laughter) In fact, it also shows something interesting, that although our capabilities and technology have been expanding geometrically, unfortunately, our ability to model their long-term behavior, which has also been increasing, has been increasing only arithmetically. 
+So one of the characteristic problems of our time is how to close this gap between capabilities and foresight. 
+One other very positive consequence of 20th century technology, though, was the way in which other kinds of calamities could lead to positive advances. 
+There are two historians of business at the University of Maryland, Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch, who have done some extremely interesting work, much of it still unpublished, on the history of major innovations. 
+They have combined the list of major innovations, and they've discovered that the greatest number, the greatest decade, for fundamental innovations, as reflected in all of the lists that others have made — a number of lists that they have merged — was the Great Depression. 
+And nobody knows just why this was so, but one story can reflect something of it. 
+It was the origin of the Xerox copier, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. 
+And Chester Carlson, the inventor, was a patent attorney. 
+He really was not intending to work in patent research, but he couldn't really find an alternative technical job. 
+So this was the best job he could get. 
+He was upset by the low quality and high cost of existing patent reproductions, and so he started to develop a system of dry photocopying, which he patented in the late 1930s — and which became the first dry photocopier that was commercially practical in 1960. 
+So we see that sometimes, as a result of these dislocations, as a result of people leaving their original intended career and going into something else where their creativity could make a difference, that depressions and all kinds of other unfortunate events can have a paradoxically stimulating effect on creativity. 
+What does this mean? 
+It means, I think, that we're living in a time of unexpected possibilities. 
+Think of the financial world, for example. 
+The mentor of Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, developed his system of value investing as a result of his own losses in the 1929 crash. 
+And he published that book in the early 1930s, and the book still exists in further editions and is still a fundamental textbook. 
+So many important creative things can happen when people learn from disasters. 
+Now think of the large and small plagues that we have now — bed bugs, killer bees, spam — and it's very possible that the solutions to those will really extend well beyond the immediate question. 
+If we think, for example, of Louis Pasteur, who in the 1860s was asked to study the diseases of silk worms for the silk industry, and his discoveries were really the beginning of the germ theory of disease. 
+So very often, some kind of disaster — sometimes the consequence, for example, of over-cultivation of silk worms, which was a problem in Europe at the time — can be the key to something much bigger. 
+So this means that we need to take a different view of unintended consequences. 
+We need to take a really positive view. 
+We need to see what they can do for us. 
+We need to learn from those figures that I mentioned. 
+We need to learn, for example, from Dr. Cushing, who killed patients in the course of his early operations. 
+He had to have some errors. He had to have some mistakes. 
+And he learned meticulously from his mistakes. 
+And as a result, when we say, "" This isn't brain surgery, "" that pays tribute to how difficult it was for anyone to learn from their mistakes in a field of medicine that was considered so discouraging in its prospects. 
+And we can also remember how the pharmaceutical companies were willing to pool their knowledge, to share their knowledge, in the face of an emergency, which they hadn't really been for years and years. 
+They might have been able to do it earlier. 
+The message, then, for me, about unintended consequences is chaos happens; let's make better use of it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hello everyone. 
+And so the two of us are here to give you an example of creation. 
+And I'm going to be folding one of Robert Lang's models. 
+And this is the piece of paper it will be made from, and you can see all of the folds that are needed for it. 
+And Rufus is going to be doing some improvisation on his custom, five-string electric cello, and it's very exciting to listen to him. 
+Are you ready to go? OK. 
+Just to make it a little bit more exciting. 
+All right. Take it away, Rufus. 
+(Music) All right. There you go. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) 
+
+One in four people suffer from some sort of mental illness, so if it was one, two, three, four, it's you, sir. 
+You. Yeah. (Laughter) With the weird teeth. And you next to him. (Laughter) You know who you are. 
+Actually, that whole row isn't right. (Laughter) That's not good. Hi. Yeah. Real bad. Don't even look at me. (Laughter) I am one of the one in four. Thank you. 
+I think I inherit it from my mother, who, used to crawl around the house on all fours. 
+She had two sponges in her hand, and then she had two tied to her knees. My mother was completely absorbent. (Laughter) And she would crawl around behind me going, "Who brings footprints into a building?!" 
+So that was kind of a clue that things weren't right. 
+So before I start, I would like to thank the makers of Lamotrigine, Sertraline, and Reboxetine, because without those few simple chemicals, I would not be vertical today. 
+So how did it start? 
+My mental illness — well, I'm not even going to talk about my mental illness. 
+What am I going to talk about? Okay. 
+I always dreamt that, when I had my final breakdown, it would be because I had a deep Kafkaesque existentialist revelation, or that maybe Cate Blanchett would play me and she would win an Oscar for it. (Laughter) But that's not what happened. I had my breakdown during my daughter's sports day. 
+There were all the parents sitting in a parking lot eating food out of the back of their car — only the English — eating their sausages. They loved their sausages. (Laughter) Lord and Lady Rigor Mortis were nibbling on the tarmac, and then the gun went off and all the girlies started running, and all the mummies went, "" Run! Run Chlamydia! Run! "" (Laughter) "Run like the wind, Veruca! Run!" 
+And all the girlies, girlies running, running, running, everybody except for my daughter, who was just standing at the starting line, just waving, because she didn't know she was supposed to run. 
+So I took to my bed for about a month, and when I woke up I found I was institutionalized, and when I saw the other inmates, I realized that I had found my people, my tribe. (Laughter) Because they became my only friends, they became my friends, because very few people that I knew — Well, I wasn't sent a lot of cards or flowers. I mean, if I had had a broken leg or I was with child I would have been inundated, but all I got was a couple phone calls telling me to perk up. 
+Perk up. 
+Because I didn't think of that. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Because, you know, the one thing, one thing that you get with this disease, this one comes with a package, is you get a real sense of shame, because your friends go, "" Oh come on, show me the lump, show me the x-rays, "" and of course you've got nothing to show, so you're, like, really disgusted with yourself because you're thinking, "I'm not being carpet-bombed. I don't live in a township." 
+So you start to hear these abusive voices, but you don't hear one abusive voice, you hear about a thousand — 100,000 abusive voices, like if the Devil had Tourette's, that's what it would sound like. 
+But we all know in here, you know, there is no Devil, there are no voices in your head. 
+You know that when you have those abusive voices, all those little neurons get together and in that little gap you get a real toxic "" I want to kill myself "" kind of chemical, and if you have that over and over again on a loop tape, you might have yourself depression. 
+Oh, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg. 
+If you get a little baby, and you abuse it verbally, its little brain sends out chemicals that are so destructive that the little part of its brain that can tell good from bad just doesn't grow, so you might have yourself a homegrown psychotic. 
+If a soldier sees his friend blown up, his brain goes into such high alarm that he can't actually put the experience into words, so he just feels the horror over and over again. 
+So here's my question. My question is, how come when people have mental damage, it's always an active imagination? 
+How come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy, except the brain? 
+I'd like to talk a little bit more about the brain, because I know you like that here at TED, so if you just give me a minute here, okay. 
+Okay, let me just say, there's some good news. 
+There is some good news. First of all, let me say, we've come a long, long way. 
+We started off as a teeny, teeny little one-celled amoeba, tiny, just sticking onto a rock, and now, voila, the brain. 
+Here we go. (Laughter) This little baby has a lot of horsepower. 
+It comes completely conscious. It's got state-of-the-art lobes. 
+We've got the occipital lobe so we can actually see the world. 
+We got the temporal lobe so we can actually hear the world. 
+Here we've got a little bit of long-term memory, so, you know that night you want to forget, when you got really drunk? Bye-bye! Gone. (Laughter) So actually, it's filled with 100 billion neurons just zizzing away, electrically transmitting information, zizzing, zizzing. I'm going to give you a little side view here. 
+I don't know if you can get that here. (Laughter) So, zizzing away, and so — (Laughter) — And for every one — I know, I drew this myself. Thank you. 
+For every one single neuron, you can actually have from 10,000 to 100,000 different connections or dendrites or whatever you want to call it, and every time you learn something, or you have an experience, that bush grows, you know, that bush of information. 
+Can you imagine, every human being is carrying that equipment, even Paris Hilton? (Laughter) Go figure. 
+But I got a little bad news for you folks. I got some bad news. 
+This isn't for the one in four. This is for the four in four. 
+We are not equipped for the 21st century. 
+Evolution did not prepare us for this. We just don't have the bandwidth, and for people who say, oh, they're having a nice day, they're perfectly fine, they're more insane than the rest of us. 
+Because I'll show you where there might be a few glitches in evolution. Okay, let me just explain this to you. 
+When we were ancient man — (Laughter) — millions of years ago, and we suddenly felt threatened by a predator, okay? — (Laughter) — we would — Thank you. I drew these myself. (Laughter) Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Anyway, we would fill up with our own adrenaline and our own cortisol, and then we'd kill or be killed, we'd eat or we'd be eaten, and then suddenly we'd de-fuel, and we'd go back to normal. Okay. 
+So the problem is, nowadays, with modern man — (Laughter) — when we feel in danger, we still fill up with our own chemical but because we can't kill traffic wardens — (Laughter) — or eat estate agents, the fuel just stays in our body over and over, so we're in a constant state of alarm, a constant state. And here's another thing that happened. 
+About 150,000 years ago, when language came online, we started to put words to this constant emergency, so it wasn't just, "" Oh my God, there's a saber-toothed tiger, "" which could be, it was suddenly, "" Oh my God, I didn't send the email. Oh my God, my thighs are too fat. 
+Oh my God, everybody can see I'm stupid. I didn't get invited to the Christmas party! "" So you've got this nagging loop tape that goes over and over again that drives you insane, so, you see what the problem is? What once made you safe now drives you insane. 
+I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but somebody has to be. 
+Your pets are happier than you are. (Laughter) (Applause) So kitty cat, meow, happy happy happy, human beings, screwed. (Laughter) Completely and utterly — so, screwed. 
+But my point is, if we don't talk about this stuff, and we don't learn how to deal with our lives, it's not going to be one in four. It's going to be four in four who are really, really going to get ill in the upstairs department. 
+And while we're at it, can we please stop the stigma? 
+Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. 
+
+I'm going to read a few strips. 
+These are, most of these are from a monthly page I do in and architecture and design magazine called Metropolis. 
+And the first story is called "The Faulty Switch." 
+Another beautifully designed new building ruined by the sound of a common wall light switch. 
+It's fine during the day when the main rooms are flooded with sunlight. 
+But at dusk everything changes. 
+The architect spent hundreds of hours designing the burnished brass switchplates for his new office tower. 
+And then left it to a contractor to install these 79-cent switches behind them. 
+We know instinctively where to reach when we enter a dark room. 
+We automatically throw the little nub of plastic upward. 
+But the sound we are greeted with, as the room is bathed in the simulated glow of late-afternoon light, recalls to mind a dirty men's room in the rear of a Greek coffee shop. 
+(Laughter) This sound colors our first impression of any room; it can't be helped. 
+But where does this sound, commonly described as a click, come from? 
+Is it simply the byproduct of a crude mechanical action? 
+Or is it an imitation of one half the set of sounds we make to express disappointment? 
+The often dental consonant of no Indo-European language. 
+Or is it the amplified sound of a synapse firing in the brain of a cockroach? 
+In the 1950s they tried their best to muffle this sound with mercury switches and silent knob controls. 
+But today these improvements seem somehow inauthentic. 
+The click is the modern triumphal clarion proceeding us through life, announcing our entry into every lightless room. 
+The sound made flicking a wall switch off is of a completely different nature. 
+It has a deep melancholy ring. 
+Children don't like it. 
+It's why they leave lights on around the house. (Laughter) Adults find it comforting. 
+But wouldn't it be an easy matter to wire a wall switch so that it triggers the muted horn of a steam ship? 
+Or the recorded crowing of a rooster? 
+Or the distant peel of thunder? 
+Thomas Edison went through thousands of unlikely substances before he came upon the right one for the filament of his electric light bulb. 
+Why have we settled so quickly for the sound of its switch? 
+That's the end of that. 
+(Applause) The next story is called "In Praise of the Taxpayer." 
+That so many of the city's most venerable taxpayers have survived yet another commercial building boom, is cause for celebration. 
+These one or two story structures, designed to yield only enough income to cover the taxes on the land on which they stand, were not meant to be permanent buildings. 
+Yet for one reason or another they have confounded the efforts of developers to be combined into lots suitable for high-rise construction. 
+Although they make no claim to architectural beauty, they are, in their perfect temporariness, a delightful alternative to the large-scale structures that might someday take their place. 
+The most perfect examples occupy corner lots. 
+They offer a pleasant respite from the high-density development around them. 
+A break of light and air, an architectural biding of time. 
+So buried in signage are these structures, that it often takes a moment to distinguish the modern specially constructed taxpayer from its neighbor: the small commercial building from an earlier century, whose upper floors have been sealed, and whose groundfloor space now functions as a taxpayer. 
+The few surfaces not covered by signs are often clad in a distinctive, dark green-gray, striated aluminum siding. 
+Take-out sandwich shops, film processing drop-offs, peep-shows and necktie stores. 
+Now these provisional structures have, in some cases, remained standing for the better part of a human lifetime. 
+The temporary building is a triumph of modern industrial organization, a healthy sublimation of the urge to build, and proof that not every architectural idea need be set in stone. 
+That's the end. 
+(Laughter) And the next story is called, "" On the Human Lap. "" For the ancient Egyptians the lap was a platform upon which to place the earthly possessions of the dead — 30 cubits from foot to knee. 
+It was not until the 14th century that an Italian painter recognized the lap as a Grecian temple, upholstered in flesh and cloth. 
+Over the next 200 years we see the infant Christ go from a sitting to a standing position on the Virgin's lap, and then back again. 
+Every child recapitulates this ascension, straddling one or both legs, sitting sideways, or leaning against the body. 
+From there, to the modern ventriloquist's dummy, is but a brief moment in history. 
+You were late for school again this morning. 
+The ventriloquist must first make us believe that a small boy is sitting on his lap. 
+The illusion of speech follows incidentally. 
+What have you got to say for yourself, Jimmy? 
+As adults we admire the lap from a nostalgic distance. 
+We have fading memories of that provisional temple, erected each time an adult sat down. 
+On a crowded bus there was always a lap to sit on. 
+It is children and teenage girls who are most keenly aware of its architectural beauty. 
+They understand the structural integrity of a deep avuncular lap, as compared to the shaky arrangement of a neurotic niece in high heels. 
+The relationship between the lap and its owner is direct and intimate. 
+I envision a 36-story, 450-unit residential high-rise — a reason to consider the mental health of any architect before granting an important commission. 
+The bathrooms and kitchens will, of course, have no windows. 
+The lap of luxury is an architectural construct of childhood, which we seek, in vain, as adults, to employ. 
+That's the end. 
+(Laughter) The next story is called "" The Haverpiece Collection "" A nondescript warehouse, visible for a moment from the northbound lanes of the Prykushko Expressway, serves as the temporary resting place for the Haverpiece collection of European dried fruit. 
+The profound convolutions on the surface of a dried cherry. 
+The foreboding sheen of an extra-large date. 
+Do you remember wandering as a child through those dark wooden storefront galleries? 
+Where everything was displayed in poorly labeled roach-proof bins. 
+Pears dried in the form of genital organs. 
+Apricot halves like the ears of cherubim. 
+In 1962 the unsold stock was purchased by Maurice Haverpiece, a wealthy prune juice bottler, and consolidated to form the core collection. 
+As an art form it lies somewhere between still-life painting and plumbing. 
+Upon his death in 1967, a quarter of the items were sold off for compote to a high-class hotel restaurant. 
+(Laughter) Unsuspecting guests were served stewed turn-of-the-century Turkish figs for breakfast. (Laughter) 
+The rest of the collection remains here, stored in plain brown paper bags until funds can be raised to build a permanent museum and study center. 
+A shoe made of apricot leather for the daughter of a czar. 
+That's the end. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Let me talk about India through the evolution of ideas. 
+Now I believe this is an interesting way of looking at it because in every society, especially an open democratic society, it's only when ideas take root that things change. 
+Slowly ideas lead to ideology, lead to policies that lead to actions. 
+In 1930 this country went through a Great Depression, which led to all the ideas of the state and social security, and all the other things that happened in Roosevelt's time. 
+In the 1980s we had the Reagan revolution, which lead to deregulation. 
+And today, after the global economic crisis, there was a whole new set of rules about how the state should intervene. 
+So ideas change states. 
+And I looked at India and said, really there are four kinds of ideas which really make an impact on India. 
+The first, to my mind, is what I call as "" the ideas that have arrived. "" These ideas have brought together something which has made India happen the way it is today. 
+The second set of ideas I call "" ideas in progress. "" Those are ideas which have been accepted but not implemented yet. 
+The third set of ideas are what I call as "" ideas that we argue about "" — those are ideas where we have a fight, an ideological battle about how to do things. 
+And the fourth thing, which I believe is most important, is "the ideas that we need to anticipate." 
+Because when you are a developing country in the world where you can see the problems that other countries are having, you can actually anticipate what that did and do things very differently. 
+Now in India's case I believe there are six ideas which are responsible for where it has come today. 
+The first is really the notion of people. 
+In the '60s and' 70s we thought of people as a burden. 
+We thought of people as a liability. 
+Today we talk of people as an asset. 
+We talk of people as human capital. 
+And I believe this change in the mindset, of looking at people as something of a burden to human capital, has been one of the fundamental changes in the Indian mindset. 
+And this change in thinking of human capital is linked to the fact that India is going through a demographic dividend. 
+As healthcare improves, as infant mortality goes down, fertility rates start dropping. And India is experiencing that. 
+India is going to have a lot of young people with a demographic dividend for the next 30 years. 
+What is unique about this demographic dividend is that India will be the only country in the world to have this demographic dividend. 
+In other words, it will be the only young country in an aging world. 
+And this is very important. At the same time if you peel away the demographic dividend in India, there are actually two demographic curves. 
+One is in the south and in the west of India, which is already going to be fully expensed by 2015, because in that part of the country, the fertility rate is almost equal to that of a West European country. 
+Then there is the whole northern India, which is going to be the bulk of the future demographic dividend. 
+But a demographic dividend is only as good as the investment in your human capital. 
+Only if the people have education, they have good health, they have infrastructure, they have roads to go to work, they have lights to study at night — only in those cases can you really get the benefit of a demographic dividend. 
+In other words, if you don't really invest in the human capital, the same demographic dividend can be a demographic disaster. 
+Therefore India is at a critical point where either it can leverage its demographic dividend or it can lead to a demographic disaster. 
+The second thing in India has been the change in the role of entrepreneurs. 
+When India got independence entrepreneurs were seen as a bad lot, as people who would exploit. 
+But today, after 60 years, because of the rise of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs have become role models, and they are contributing hugely to the society. 
+This change has contributed to the vitality and the whole economy. 
+The third big thing I believe that has changed India is our attitude towards the English language. 
+English language was seen as a language of the imperialists. 
+But today, with globalization, with outsourcing, English has become a language of aspiration. 
+This has made it something that everybody wants to learn. 
+And the fact that we have English is now becoming a huge strategic asset. 
+The next thing is technology. 
+Forty years back, computers were seen as something which was forbidding, something which was intimidating, something that reduced jobs. 
+Today we live in a country which sells eight million mobile phones a month, of which 90 percent of those mobile phones are prepaid phones because people don't have credit history. 
+Forty percent of those prepaid phones are recharged at less than 20 cents at each recharge. 
+That is the scale at which technology has liberated and made it accessible. 
+And therefore technology has gone from being seen as something forbidding and intimidating to something that is empowering. 
+Twenty years back, when there was a report on bank computerization, they didn't name the report as a report on computers, they call them as "" ledger posting machines. "" They didn't want the unions to believe that they were actually computers. 
+And when they wanted to have more advanced, more powerful computers they called them "" advanced ledger posting machines. "" So we have come a long way from those days where the telephone has become an instrument of empowerment, and really has changed the way Indians think of technology. 
+And then I think the other point is that Indians today are far more comfortable with globalization. 
+Again, after having lived for more than 200 years under the East India Company and under imperial rule, Indians had a very natural reaction towards globalization believing it was a form of imperialism. 
+But today, as Indian companies go abroad, as Indians come and work all over the world, Indians have gained a lot more confidence and have realized that globalization is something they can participate in. 
+And the fact that the demographics are in our favor, because we are the only young country in an aging world, makes globalization all the more attractive to Indians. 
+And finally, India has had the deepening of its democracy. 
+When democracy came to India 60 years back it was an elite concept. 
+It was a bunch of people who wanted to bring in democracy because they wanted to bring in the idea of universal voting and parliament and constitution and so forth. 
+But today democracy has become a bottom-up process where everybody has realized the benefits of having a voice, the benefits of being in an open society. 
+And therefore democracy has become embedded. 
+I believe these six factors — the rise of the notion of population as human capital, the rise of Indian entrepreneurs, the rise of English as a language of aspiration, technology as something empowering, globalization as a positive factor, and the deepening of democracy — has contributed to why India is today growing at rates it has never seen before. 
+But having said that, then we come to what I call as ideas in progress. 
+Those are the ideas where there is no argument in a society, but you are not able to implement those things. 
+And really there are four things here. 
+One is the question of education. 
+For some reason, whatever reason — lack of money, lack of priorities, because of religion having an older culture — primary education was never given the focus it required. 
+But now I believe it's reached a point where it has become very important. 
+Unfortunately the government schools don't function, so children are going to private schools today. 
+Even in the slums of India more than 50 percent of urban kids are going into private schools. 
+So there is a big challenge in getting the schools to work. 
+But having said that, there is an enormous desire among everybody, including the poor, to educate their children. 
+So I believe primary education is an idea which is arrived but not yet implemented. 
+Similarly, infrastructure — for a long time, infrastructure was not a priority. 
+Those of you who have been to India have seen that. 
+It's certainly not like China. 
+But today I believe finally infrastructure is something which is agreed upon and which people want to implement. 
+It is reflected in the political statements. 
+20 years back the political slogan was, "" Roti, kapada, makaan, "" which meant, "" Food, clothing and shelter. "" And today's political slogan is, "" Bijli, sadak, pani, "" which means "" Electricity, water and roads. "" And that is a change in the mindset where infrastructure is now accepted. 
+So I do believe this is an idea which has arrived, but simply not implemented. 
+The third thing is again cities. 
+It's because Gandhi believed in villages and because the British ruled from the cities, therefore Nehru thought of New Delhi as an un-Indian city. 
+For a long time we have neglected our cities. 
+And that is reflected in the kinds of situations that you see. 
+But today, finally, after economic reforms, and economic growth, I think the notion that cities are engines of economic growth, cities are engines of creativity, cities are engines of innovation, have finally been accepted. 
+And I think now you're seeing the move towards improving our cities. 
+Again, an idea which is arrived, but not yet implemented. 
+The final thing is the notion of India as a single market — because when you didn't think of India as a market, you didn't really bother about a single market, because it didn't really matter. 
+And therefore you had a situation where every state had its own market for products. 
+Every province had its own market for agriculture. 
+Increasingly now the policies of taxation and infrastructure and all that, are moving towards creating India as a single market. 
+So there is a form of internal globalization which is happening, which is as important as external globalization. 
+These four factors I believe — the ones of primary education, infrastructure, urbanization, and single market — in my view are ideas in India which have been accepted, but not implemented. 
+Then we have what I believe are the ideas in conflict. 
+The ideas that we argue about. 
+These are the arguments we have which cause gridlock. 
+What are those ideas? One is, I think, are ideological issues. 
+Because of the historical Indian background, in the caste system, and because of the fact that there have been many people who have been left out in the cold, a lot of the politics is about how to make sure that we'll address that. 
+And it leads to reservations and other techniques. 
+It's also related to the way that we subsidize our people, and all the left and right arguments that we have. 
+A lot of the Indian problems are related to the ideology of caste and other things. 
+This policy is causing gridlock. 
+This is one of the factors which needs to be resolved. 
+The second one is the labor policies that we have, which make it so difficult for entrepreneurs to create standardized jobs in companies, that 93 percent of Indian labor is in the unorganized sector. 
+They have no benefits: they don't have social security; they don't have pension; they don't have healthcare; none of those things. 
+This needs to be fixed because unless you can bring these people into the formal workforce, you will end up creating a whole lot of people who are completely disenfranchised. 
+Therefore we need to create a new set of labor laws, which are not as onerous as they are today. 
+At the same time give a policy for a lot more people to be in the formal sector, and create the jobs for the millions of people that we need to create jobs for. 
+The third thing is our higher education. 
+Indian higher education is completely regulated. 
+It's very difficult to start a private university. 
+It's very difficult for a foreign university to come to India. 
+As a result of that our higher education is simply not keeping pace with India's demands. 
+That is leading to a lot of problems which we need to address. 
+But most important I believe are the ideas we need to anticipate. 
+Here India can look at what is happening in the west and elsewhere, and look at what needs to be done. 
+The first thing is, we're very fortunate that technology is at a point where it is much more advanced than when other countries had the development. 
+So we can use technology for governance. 
+We can use technology for direct benefits. 
+We can use technology for transparency, and many other things. 
+The second thing is, the health issue. 
+India has equally horrible health problems of the higher state of cardiac issue, the higher state of diabetes, the higher state of obesity. 
+So there is no point in replacing a set of poor country diseases with a set of rich country diseases. 
+Therefore we're to rethink the whole way we look at health. 
+We really need to put in place a strategy so that we don't go to the other extreme of health. 
+Similarly today in the West you're seeing the problem of entitlement — the cost of social security, the cost of Medicare, the cost of Medicaid. 
+Therefore when you are a young country, again you have a chance to put in place a modern pension system so that you don't create entitlement problems as you grow old. 
+And then again, India does not have the luxury of making its environment dirty, because it has to marry environment and development. 
+Just to give an idea, the world has to stabilize at something like 20 gigatons per year. 
+On a population of nine billion our average carbon emission will have to be about two tons per year. 
+India is already at two tons per year. 
+But if India grows at something like eight percent, income per year per person will go to 16 times by 2050. 
+So we're saying: income growing at 16 times and no growth in carbon. 
+Therefore we will fundamentally rethink the way we look at the environment, the way we look at energy, the way we create whole new paradigms of development. 
+Now why does this matter to you? 
+Why does what's happening 10 thousand miles away matter to all of you? 
+Number one, this matters because this represents more than a billion people. 
+A billion people, 1 / 6th of the world population. 
+It matters because this is a democracy. 
+And it is important to prove that growth and democracy are not incompatible, that you can have a democracy, that you can have an open society, and you can have growth. 
+It's important because if you solve these problems, you can solve the problems of poverty in the world. It's important because 
+you need it to solve the world's environment problems. 
+If we really want to come to a point, we really want to put a cap on our carbon emission, we want to really lower the use of energy — it has to be solved in countries like India. 
+You know if you look at the development in the West over 200 years, the average growth may have been about two percent. 
+Here we are talking about countries growing at eight to nine percent. 
+And that makes a huge difference. 
+When India was growing at about three, 3.5 percent and the population was growing at two percent, its per capita income was doubling every 45 years. 
+When the economic growth goes to eight percent and population growth drops to 1.5 percent, then per capita income is doubling every nine years. 
+In other words, you're certainly fast-forwarding this whole process of a billion people going to prosperity. 
+And you must have a clear strategy which is important for India and important for the world. 
+That is why I think all of you should be equally concerned with it as I am. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+One of my favorite cartoon characters is Snoopy. 
+I love the way he sits and lies on his kennel and contemplates the great things of life. 
+So when I thought about compassion, my mind immediately went to one of the cartoon strips, where he's lying there and he says, "" I really understand, and I really appreciate how one should love one's neighbor as one love's oneself. 
+The only trouble is the people next door; I can't stand them. "" This, in a way, is one of the challenges of how to interpret a really good idea. 
+We all, I think, believe in compassion. 
+If you look at all the world religions, all the main world religions, you'll find within them some teaching concerning compassion. 
+So in Judaism, we have, from our Torah, that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself. 
+And within Jewish teachings, the rabbinic teachings, we have Hillel, who taught that you shouldn't do to others what you don't like being done to yourself. 
+And all the main religions have similar teachings. 
+And again, within Judaism, we have a teaching about God, who is called the compassionate one, Ha-rachaman. 
+After all, how could the world exist without God being compassionate? 
+And we, as taught within the Torah that we are made in the image of God, so we too have to be compassionate. 
+But what does it mean? How does it impact on our everyday life? 
+Sometimes, of course, being compassionate can produce feelings within us that are very difficult to control. 
+I know there are many times when I've gone and conducted a funeral, or when I have been sitting with the bereaved, or with people who are dying, and I am overwhelmed by the sadness, by the difficulty, the challenge that is there for the family, for the person. 
+And I'm touched, so that tears come to my eyes. 
+And yet, if I just allowed myself to be overwhelmed by these feelings, I wouldn't be doing my job — because I have to actually be there for them and make sure that rituals happen, that practicalities are seen to. 
+And yet, on the other hand, if I didn't feel this compassion, then I feel that it would be time for me to hang up my robe and give up being a rabbi. 
+And these same feelings are there for all of us as we face the world. 
+Who cannot be touched by compassion when we see the terrible horrors of the results of war, or famine, or earthquakes, or tsunamis? 
+I know some people who say "" Well, you know there's just so much out there — I can't do anything, I'm not going to even begin to try. "" And there are some charity workers who call this compassion fatigue. 
+There are others who feel they can't confront compassion anymore, and so they turn off the television and don't watch. 
+In Judaism, though, we tend to always say, there has to be a middle way. 
+You have to, of course, be aware of the needs of others, but you have to be aware in such a way that you can carry on with your life and be of help to people. 
+So part of compassion has to be an understanding of what makes people tick. 
+And, of course, you can't do that unless you understand yourself a bit more. 
+And there's a lovely rabbinic interpretation of the beginnings of creation, which says that when God created the world, God thought that it would be best to create the world only with the divine attribute of justice. 
+Because, after all, God is just. 
+Therefore, there should be justice throughout the world. 
+And then God looked to the future and realized, if the world was created just with justice, the world couldn't exist. 
+So, God thought, "" Nope, I'm going to create the world just with compassion. "" And then God looked to the future and realized that, in fact, if the world were just filled with compassion, there would be anarchy and chaos. 
+There had to be limits to all things. 
+The rabbis describe this as being like a king who has a beautiful, fragile glass bowl. 
+If you put too much cold water in, it will shatter. 
+If you put boiling water in, it will shatter. 
+What do you have to do? Put in a mixture of the two. 
+And so God put both of these possibilities into the world. 
+There is something more though that has to be there. 
+And that is the translation of the feelings that we may have about compassion into the wider world, into action. 
+So, like Snoopy, we can't just lie there and think great thoughts about our neighbors. 
+We actually have to do something about it. 
+And so there is also, within Judaism, this notion of love and kindness that becomes very important: "" chesed. "" All these three things, then, have to be melded together. 
+The idea of justice, which gives boundaries to our lives and gives us a feeling of what's right about life, what's right about living, what should we be doing, social justice. 
+There has to be a willingness to do good deeds, but not, of course, at the expense of our own sanity. 
+You know, there's no way that you can do anything for anyone if you overdo things. 
+And balancing them all in the middle is this notion of compassion, which has to be there, if you like, at our very roots. 
+This idea of compassion comes to us because we're made in the image of God, who is ultimately the compassionate one. 
+What does this compassion entail? 
+It entails understanding the pain of the other. 
+But even more than that, it means understanding one's connection to the whole of creation: understanding that one is part of that creation, that there is a unity that underlies all that we see, all that we hear, all that we feel. 
+I call that unity God. 
+And that unity is something that connects all of creation. 
+And, of course, in the modern world, with the environmental movement, we're becoming even more aware of the connectivity of things, that something I do here actually does matter in Africa, that if I use too much of my carbon allowance, it seems to be that we are causing a great lack of rain in central and eastern Africa. 
+So there is a connectivity, and I have to understand that — as part of the creation, as part of me being made in the image of God. 
+And I have to understand that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs. 
+This "" 18 minutes "" business, I find quite fascinating. 
+Because in Judaism, the number 18, in Hebrew letters, stands for life — the word "" life. "" So, in a sense, the 18 minutes is challenging me to say, "In life, this is what's important in terms of compassion." 
+But, something else as well: actually, 18 minutes is important. 
+Because at Passover, when we have to eat unleavened bread, the rabbis say, what is the difference between dough that is made into bread, and dough that is made into unleavened bread, or "" matzah ""? 
+And they say "" It's 18 minutes. "" Because that's how long they say it takes for this dough to become leaven. 
+What does it mean, "" dough becomes leaven ""? 
+It means it gets filled with hot air. 
+What's matzah? What's unleavened bread? You don't get it. 
+Symbolically, what the rabbis say is that at Passover, what we have to do is try to get rid of our hot air — our pride, our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire world, and that everything should revolve round us. 
+So we try and get rid of those, and so doing, try to get rid of the habits, the emotions, the ideas that enslave us, that make our eyes closed, give us tunnel vision so we don't see the needs of others — and free ourselves and free ourselves from that. 
+And that too is a basis for having compassion, for understanding our place in the world. 
+Now there is, in Judaism, a gorgeous story of a rich man who sat in synagogue one day. 
+And, as many people do, he was dozing off during the sermon. 
+And as he was dozing off, they were reading from the book of Leviticus in the Torah. 
+And they were saying that in the ancient times in the temple in Jerusalem, the priests used to have bread, which they used to place into a special table in the temple in Jerusalem. 
+The man was asleep, but he heard the words bread, temple, God, and he woke up. 
+He said, "" God wants bread. That's it. God wants bread. I know what God wants. "" And he rushed home. And after the Sabbath, he made 12 loaves of bread, took them to the synagogue, went into the synagogue, opened the ark and said, "" God, I don't know why you want this bread, but here you are. "" And he put it in the ark with the scrolls of the Torah. 
+Then he went home. 
+The cleaner came into the synagogue. 
+"" Oh God, I'm in such trouble. I've got children to feed. 
+My wife's ill. I've got no money. What can I do? "" He goes into the synagogue. "" God, will you please help me? 
+Ah, what a wonderful smell. "" He goes to the ark. He opens the ark. 
+"There's bread! God, you've answered my plea. You've answered my question." 
+Takes the bread and goes home. 
+Meanwhile, the rich man thinks to himself, "" I'm an idiot. God wants bread? 
+God, the one who rules the entire universe, wants my bread? "" He rushes to the synagogue. "" I'll get it out of the ark before anybody finds it. "" He goes in there, and it's not there. 
+And he says, "" God, you really did want it. You wanted my bread. 
+Next week, with raisins. "" This went on for years. 
+Every week, the man would bring bread with raisins, with all sorts of good things, put it into the ark. 
+Every week, the cleaner would come. "" God you've answered my plea again. "" Take the bread. Take it home. 
+Went on until a new rabbi came. Rabbis always spoil things. 
+The rabbi came in and saw what was going on. 
+And he called the two of them to his office. 
+And he said, you know, "" This is what's happening. "" And the rich man — oh, dear — crestfallen. 
+"You mean God didn't want my bread?" 
+And the poor man said, "" And you mean God didn't answer my pleas? "" And the rabbi said, "" You've misunderstood me. 
+You've misunderstood totally, "" he said. 
+"" Of course, what you are doing, "" he said to the rich man, "" is answering God's plea that we should be compassionate. 
+And God, "" he said to the poor man, "" is answering your plea that people should be compassionate and give. "" He looked at the rich man. He held the rich man's hands and said, "Don't you understand?" He said, "These are the hands of God." 
+So that is the way I feel: that I can only try to approach this notion of being compassionate, of understanding that there is a connectivity, that there is a unity in this world; that I want to try and serve that unity, and that I can try and do that by understanding, I hope, trying to understand something of the pain of others; but understanding that there are limits, that people have to bear responsibility for some of the problems that come upon them; and that I have to understand that there are limits to my energy, to the giving I can give. 
+I have to reevaluate them, try and separate out the material things and my emotions that may be enslaving me, so that I can see the world clearly. 
+And then I have to try to see in what ways I can make these the hands of God. 
+And so try to bring compassion to life in this world. 
+
+Hi. I'm going to ask you to raise your arms and wave back, just the way I am — kind of a royal wave. 
+You can mimic what you can see. 
+You can program the hundreds of muscles in your arm. 
+Soon, you'll be able to look inside your brain and program, control the hundreds of brain areas that you see there. 
+I'm going to tell you about that technology. 
+People have wanted to look inside the human mind, the human brain, for thousands of years. 
+Well, coming out of the research labs just now, for our generation, is the possibility to do that. 
+People envision this as being very difficult. 
+You had to take a spaceship, shrink it down, inject it into the bloodstream. 
+It was terribly dangerous. (Laughter) You could be attacked by white blood cells in the arteries. 
+But now, we have a real technology to do this. 
+We're going to fly into my colleague Peter's brain. 
+We're going to do it non-invasively using MRI. 
+We don't have to inject anything. We don't need radiation. 
+We will be able to fly into the anatomy of Peter's brain — literally, fly into his body — but more importantly, we can look into his mind. 
+When Peter moves his arm, that yellow spot you see there is the interface to the functioning of Peter's mind taking place. 
+Now you've seen before that with electrodes you can control robotic arms, that brain imaging and scanners can show you the insides of brains. 
+What's new is that that process has typically taken days or months of analysis. 
+We've collapsed that through technology to milliseconds, and that allows us to let Peter to look at his brain in real time as he's inside the scanner. 
+He can look at these 65,000 points of activation per second. 
+If he can see this pattern in his own brain, he can learn how to control it. 
+There have been three ways to try to impact the brain: the therapist's couch, pills and the knife. 
+This is a fourth alternative that you are soon going to have. 
+We all know that as we form thoughts, they form deep channels in our minds and in our brains. 
+Chronic pain is an example. If you burn yourself, you pull your hand away. 
+But if you're still in pain in six months' or six years' time, it's because these circuits are producing pain that's no longer helping you. 
+If we can look at the activation in the brain that's producing the pain, we can form 3D models and watch in real time the brain process information, and then we can select the areas that produce the pain. 
+So put your arms back up and flex your bicep. 
+Now imagine that you will soon be able to look inside your brain and select brain areas to do that same thing. 
+What you're seeing here is, we've selected the pathways in the brain of a chronic pain patient. 
+This may shock you, but we're literally reading this person's brain in real time. 
+They're watching their own brain activation, and they're controlling the pathway that produces their pain. 
+They're learning to flex this system that releases their own endogenous opiates. 
+As they do it, in the upper left is a display that's yoked to their brain activation of their own pain being controlled. 
+When they control their brain, they can control their pain. 
+This is an investigational technology, but, in clinical trials, we're seeing a 44 to 64 percent decrease in chronic pain patients. 
+This is not "" The Matrix. "" You can only do this to yourself. You take control. 
+I've seen inside my brain. You will too, soon. 
+When you do, what do you want to control? 
+You will be able to look at all the aspects that make you yourself, all your experiences. 
+These are some of the areas we're working on today that I don't have time to go into in detail. 
+But I want to leave with you the big question. 
+We are the first generation that's going to be able to enter into, using this technology, the human mind and brain. 
+Where will we take it? 
+
+Now, if President Obama invited me to be the next Czar of Mathematics, then I would have a suggestion for him that I think would vastly improve the mathematics education in this country. 
+And it would be easy to implement and inexpensive. 
+The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra. 
+And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject. 
+And at top of that pyramid, it's calculus. 
+And I'm here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid... 
+that the correct summit — that all of our students, every high school graduate should know — should be statistics: probability and statistics. 
+(Applause) I mean, don't get me wrong. Calculus is an important subject. 
+It's one of the great products of the human mind. 
+The laws of nature are written in the language of calculus. 
+And every student who studies math, science, engineering, economics, they should definitely learn calculus by the end of their freshman year of college. 
+But I'm here to say, as a professor of mathematics, that very few people actually use calculus in a conscious, meaningful way, in their day-to-day lives. 
+On the other hand, statistics — that's a subject that you could, and should, use on daily basis. Right? 
+It's risk. It's reward. It's randomness. 
+It's understanding data. 
+I think if our students, if our high school students — if all of the American citizens — knew about probability and statistics, we wouldn't be in the economic mess that we're in today. (Laughter) (Applause) Not only — thank you — not only that... 
+but if it's taught properly, it can be a lot of fun. 
+I mean, probability and statistics, it's the mathematics of games and gambling. 
+It's analyzing trends. It's predicting the future. 
+Look, the world has changed from analog to digital. 
+And it's time for our mathematics curriculum to change from analog to digital, from the more classical, continuous mathematics, to the more modern, discrete mathematics — the mathematics of uncertainty, of randomness, of data — that being probability and statistics. 
+In summary, instead of our students learning about the techniques of calculus, I think it would be far more significant if all of them knew what two standard deviations from the mean means. And I mean it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I was about 10 years old on a camping trip with my dad in the Adirondack Mountains, a wilderness area in the northern part of New York State. 
+It was a beautiful day. 
+The forest was sparkling. 
+The sun made the leaves glow like stained glass, and if it weren't for the path we were following, we could almost pretend we were the first human beings to ever walk that land. 
+We got to our campsite. 
+It was a lean-to on a bluff looking over a crystal, beautiful lake, when I discovered a horror. 
+Behind the lean-to was a dump, maybe 40 feet square with rotting apple cores and balled-up aluminum foil, and a dead sneaker. 
+And I was astonished, I was very angry, and I was deeply confused. 
+The campers who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them? 
+That question stayed with me, and it simplified a little. 
+Who cleans up after us? 
+However you configure or wherever you place the us, who cleans up after us in Istanbul? 
+Who cleans up after us in Rio or in Paris or in London? 
+Here in New York, the Department of Sanitation cleans up after us, to the tune of 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recyclables every day. 
+I wanted to get to know them as individuals. 
+I wanted to understand who takes the job. 
+What's it like to wear the uniform and bear that burden? 
+So I started a research project with them. 
+I rode in the trucks and walked the routes and interviewed people in offices and facilities all over the city, and I learned a lot, but I was still an outsider. 
+I needed to go deeper. 
+So I took the job as a sanitation worker. 
+I didn't just ride in the trucks now. I drove the trucks. 
+And I operated the mechanical brooms and I plowed the snow. 
+It was a remarkable privilege and an amazing education. 
+Everyone asks about the smell. 
+It's there, but it's not as prevalent as you think, and on days when it is really bad, you get used to it rather quickly. 
+The weight takes a long time to get used to. 
+I knew people who were several years on the job whose bodies were still adjusting to the burden of bearing on your body tons of trash every week. 
+Then there's the danger. 
+According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sanitation work is one of the 10 most dangerous occupations in the country, and I learned why. 
+You're in and out of traffic all day, and it's zooming around you. 
+It just wants to get past you, so it's often the motorist is not paying attention. 
+That's really bad for the worker. 
+And then the garbage itself is full of hazards that often fly back out of the truck and do terrible harm. 
+I also learned about the relentlessness of trash. 
+When you step off the curb and you see a city from behind a truck, you come to understand that trash is like a force of nature unto itself. 
+It never stops coming. 
+It's also like a form of respiration or circulation. 
+It must always be in motion. 
+And then there's the stigma. 
+You put on the uniform, and you become invisible until someone is upset with you for whatever reason like you've blocked traffic with your truck, or you're taking a break too close to their home, or you're drinking coffee in their diner, and they will come and scorn you, and tell you that they don't want you anywhere near them. 
+I find the stigma especially ironic, because I strongly believe that sanitation workers are the most important labor force on the streets of the city, for three reasons. 
+They are the first guardians of public health. 
+If they're not taking away trash efficiently and effectively every day, it starts to spill out of its containments, and the dangers inherent to it threaten us in very real ways. 
+Diseases we've had in check for decades and centuries burst forth again and start to harm us. 
+The economy needs them. 
+If we can't throw out the old stuff, we have no room for the new stuff, so then the engines of the economy start to sputter when consumption is compromised. 
+I'm not advocating capitalism, I'm just pointing out their relationship. 
+And then there's what I call our average, necessary quotidian velocity. 
+By that I simply mean how fast we're used to moving in the contemporary day and age. 
+We usually don't care for, repair, clean, carry around our coffee cup, our shopping bag, our bottle of water. 
+We use them, we throw them out, we forget about them, because we know there's a workforce on the other side that's going to take it all away. 
+So I want to suggest today a couple of ways to think about sanitation that will perhaps help ameliorate the stigma and bring them into this conversation of how to craft a city that is sustainable and humane. 
+Their work, I think, is kind of liturgical. 
+They're on the streets every day, rhythmically. 
+They wear a uniform in many cities. 
+You know when to expect them. 
+And their work lets us do our work. 
+They are almost a form of reassurance. 
+The flow that they maintain keeps us safe from ourselves, from our own dross, our cast-offs, and that flow must be maintained always no matter what. 
+On the day after September 11 in 2001, I heard the growl of a sanitation truck on the street, and I grabbed my infant son and I ran downstairs and there was a man doing his paper recycling route like he did every Wednesday. 
+And I tried to thank him for doing his work on that day of all days, but I started to cry. 
+And he looked at me, and he just nodded, and he said, "" We're going to be okay. 
+We're going to be okay. "" It was a little while later that I started my research with sanitation, and I met that man again. 
+His name is Paulie, and we worked together many times, and we became good friends. 
+I want to believe that Paulie was right. 
+We are going to be okay. 
+But in our effort to reconfigure how we as a species exist on this planet, we must include and take account of all the costs, including the very real human cost of the labor. 
+And we also would be well informed to reach out to the people who do that work and get their expertise on how do we think about, how do we create systems around sustainability that perhaps take us from curbside recycling, which is a remarkable success across 40 years, across the United States and countries around the world, and lift us up to a broader horizon where we're looking at other forms of waste that could be lessened from manufacturing and industrial sources. 
+Municipal waste, what we think of when we talk about garbage, accounts for three percent of the nation's waste stream. 
+It's a remarkable statistic. 
+So in the flow of your days, in the flow of your lives, next time you see someone whose job is to clean up after you, take a moment to acknowledge them. 
+Take a moment to say thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Seventy-thousand years ago, our ancestors were insignificant animals. 
+The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were unimportant. 
+Their impact on the world was not much greater than that of jellyfish or fireflies or woodpeckers. 
+Today, in contrast, we control this planet. 
+And the question is: How did we come from there to here? 
+How did we turn ourselves from insignificant apes, minding their own business in a corner of Africa, into the rulers of planet Earth? 
+Usually, we look for the difference between us and all the other animals on the individual level. 
+We want to believe — I want to believe — that there is something special about me, about my body, about my brain, that makes me so superior to a dog or a pig, or a chimpanzee. 
+But the truth is that, on the individual level, I'm embarrassingly similar to a chimpanzee. 
+And if you take me and a chimpanzee and put us together on some lonely island, and we had to struggle for survival to see who survives better, I would definitely place my bet on the chimpanzee, not on myself. 
+And this is not something wrong with me personally. 
+I guess if they took almost any one of you, and placed you alone with a chimpanzee on some island, the chimpanzee would do much better. 
+The real difference between humans and all other animals is not on the individual level; it's on the collective level. 
+Humans control the planet because they are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers. 
+Now, there are other animals — like the social insects, the bees, the ants — that can cooperate in large numbers, but they don't do so flexibly. 
+Their cooperation is very rigid. 
+There is basically just one way in which a beehive can function. 
+And if there's a new opportunity or a new danger, the bees cannot reinvent the social system overnight. 
+They cannot, for example, execute the queen and establish a republic of bees, or a communist dictatorship of worker bees. 
+Other animals, like the social mammals — the wolves, the elephants, the dolphins, the chimpanzees — they can cooperate much more flexibly, but they do so only in small numbers, because cooperation among chimpanzees is based on intimate knowledge, one of the other. 
+I'm a chimpanzee and you're a chimpanzee, and I want to cooperate with you. 
+I need to know you personally. 
+What kind of chimpanzee are you? 
+Are you a nice chimpanzee? 
+Are you an evil chimpanzee? 
+Are you trustworthy? 
+If I don't know you, how can I cooperate with you? 
+The only animal that can combine the two abilities together and cooperate both flexibly and still do so in very large numbers is us, Homo sapiens. 
+One versus one, or even 10 versus 10, chimpanzees might be better than us. 
+But, if you pit 1,000 humans against 1,000 chimpanzees, the humans will win easily, for the simple reason that a thousand chimpanzees cannot cooperate at all. 
+And if you now try to cram 100,000 chimpanzees into Oxford Street, or into Wembley Stadium, or Tienanmen Square or the Vatican, you will get chaos, complete chaos. 
+Just imagine Wembley Stadium with 100,000 chimpanzees. 
+Complete madness. 
+In contrast, humans normally gather there in tens of thousands, and what we get is not chaos, usually. 
+What we get is extremely sophisticated and effective networks of cooperation. 
+All the huge achievements of humankind throughout history, whether it's building the pyramids or flying to the moon, have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. 
+Think even about this very talk that I'm giving now: I'm standing here in front of an audience of about 300 or 400 people, most of you are complete strangers to me. 
+Similarly, I don't really know all the people who have organized and worked on this event. 
+I don't know the pilot and the crew members of the plane that brought me over here, yesterday, to London. 
+I don't know the people who invented and manufactured this microphone and these cameras, which are recording what I'm saying. 
+I don't know the people who wrote all the books and articles that I read in preparation for this talk. 
+And I certainly don't know all the people who might be watching this talk over the Internet, somewhere in Buenos Aires or in New Delhi. 
+Nevertheless, even though we don't know each other, we can work together to create this global exchange of ideas. 
+This is something chimpanzees cannot do. 
+They communicate, of course, but you will never catch a chimpanzee traveling to some distant chimpanzee band to give them a talk about bananas or about elephants, or anything else that might interest chimpanzees. 
+Now cooperation is, of course, not always nice; all the horrible things humans have been doing throughout history — and we have been doing some very horrible things — all those things are also based on large-scale cooperation. 
+Prisons are a system of cooperation; slaughterhouses are a system of cooperation; concentration camps are a system of cooperation. 
+Chimpanzees don't have slaughterhouses and prisons and concentration camps. 
+Now suppose I've managed to convince you perhaps that yes, we control the world because we can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. 
+The next question that immediately arises in the mind of an inquisitive listener is: How, exactly, do we do it? 
+What enables us alone, of all the animals, to cooperate in such a way? 
+The answer is our imagination. 
+We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. 
+And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values. 
+All other animals use their communication system only to describe reality. 
+A chimpanzee may say, "" Look! There's a lion, let's run away! "" Or, "" Look! There's a banana tree over there! Let's go and get bananas! "" Humans, in contrast, use their language not merely to describe reality, but also to create new realities, fictional realities. 
+A human can say, "" Look, there is a god above the clouds! 
+And if you don't do what I tell you to do, when you die, God will punish you and send you to hell. "" And if you all believe this story that I've invented, then you will follow the same norms and laws and values, and you can cooperate. 
+This is something only humans can do. 
+You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him, ""... after you die, you'll go to chimpanzee heaven... "" (Laughter) ""... and you'll receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds. 
+So now give me this banana. "" No chimpanzee will ever believe such a story. 
+Only humans believe such stories, which is why we control the world, whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. 
+Now you may find it acceptable that yes, in the religious field, humans cooperate by believing in the same fictions. 
+Millions of people come together to build a cathedral or a mosque or fight in a crusade or a jihad, because they all believe in the same stories about God and heaven and hell. 
+But what I want to emphasize is that exactly the same mechanism underlies all other forms of mass-scale human cooperation, not only in the religious field. 
+Take, for example, the legal field. 
+Most legal systems today in the world are based on a belief in human rights. 
+But what are human rights? 
+Human rights, just like God and heaven, are just a story that we've invented. 
+They are not an objective reality; they are not some biological effect about homo sapiens. 
+Take a human being, cut him open, look inside, you will find the heart, the kidneys, neurons, hormones, DNA, but you won't find any rights. 
+The only place you find rights are in the stories that we have invented and spread around over the last few centuries. 
+They may be very positive stories, very good stories, but they're still just fictional stories that we've invented. 
+The same is true of the political field. 
+The most important factors in modern politics are states and nations. 
+But what are states and nations? 
+They are not an objective reality. 
+A mountain is an objective reality. 
+You can see it, you can touch it, you can even smell it. 
+But a nation or a state, like Israel or Iran or France or Germany, this is just a story that we've invented and became extremely attached to. 
+The same is true of the economic field. 
+The most important actors today in the global economy are companies and corporations. 
+Many of you today, perhaps, work for a corporation, like Google or Toyota or McDonald's. 
+What exactly are these things? 
+They are what lawyers call legal fictions. 
+They are stories invented and maintained by the powerful wizards we call lawyers. 
+(Laughter) And what do corporations do all day? 
+Mostly, they try to make money. 
+Yet, what is money? 
+Again, money is not an objective reality; it has no objective value. 
+Take this green piece of paper, the dollar bill. 
+Look at it — it has no value. 
+You cannot eat it, you cannot drink it, you cannot wear it. 
+But then came along these master storytellers — the big bankers, the finance ministers, the prime ministers — and they tell us a very convincing story: "" Look, you see this green piece of paper? 
+It is actually worth 10 bananas. "" And if I believe it, and you believe it, and everybody believes it, it actually works. 
+I can take this worthless piece of paper, go to the supermarket, give it to a complete stranger whom I've never met before, and get, in exchange, real bananas which I can actually eat. 
+This is something amazing. 
+You could never do it with chimpanzees. 
+Chimpanzees trade, of course: "Yes, you give me a coconut, I'll give you a banana." 
+That can work. 
+But, you give me a worthless piece of paper and you except me to give you a banana? 
+No way! 
+What do you think I am, a human? 
+(Laughter) Money, in fact, is the most successful story ever invented and told by humans, because it is the only story everybody believes. 
+Not everybody believes in God, not everybody believes in human rights, not everybody believes in nationalism, but everybody believes in money, and in the dollar bill. 
+Take, even, Osama Bin Laden. 
+He hated American politics and American religion and American culture, but he had no objection to American dollars. 
+He was quite fond of them, actually. 
+(Laughter) To conclude, then: We humans control the world because we live in a dual reality. 
+All other animals live in an objective reality. 
+Their reality consists of objective entities, like rivers and trees and lions and elephants. 
+We humans, we also live in an objective reality. 
+In our world, too, there are rivers and trees and lions and elephants. 
+But over the centuries, we have constructed on top of this objective reality a second layer of fictional reality, a reality made of fictional entities, like nations, like gods, like money, like corporations. 
+And what is amazing is that as history unfolded, this fictional reality became more and more powerful so that today, the most powerful forces in the world are these fictional entities. 
+Today, the very survival of rivers and trees and lions and elephants depends on the decisions and wishes of fictional entities, like the United States, like Google, like the World Bank — entities that exist only in our own imagination. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Yuval, you have a new book out. 
+After Sapiens, you wrote another one, and it's out in Hebrew, but not yet translated into... 
+Yuval Noah Harari: I'm working on the translation as we speak. 
+BG: In the book, if I understand it correctly, you argue that the amazing breakthroughs that we are experiencing right now not only will potentially make our lives better, but they will create — and I quote you — "... new classes and new class struggles, just as the industrial revolution did." 
+Can you elaborate for us? 
+YNH: Yes. In the industrial revolution, we saw the creation of a new class of the urban proletariat. 
+And much of the political and social history of the last 200 years involved what to do with this class, and the new problems and opportunities. 
+Now, we see the creation of a new massive class of useless people. 
+(Laughter) As computers become better and better in more and more fields, there is a distinct possibility that computers will out-perform us in most tasks and will make humans redundant. 
+And then the big political and economic question of the 21st century will be, "" What do we need humans for? "", or at least, "" What do we need so many humans for? "" BG: Do you have an answer in the book? 
+YNH: At present, the best guess we have is to keep them happy with drugs and computer games... 
+(Laughter) but this doesn't sound like a very appealing future. 
+BG: Ok, so you're basically saying in the book and now, that for all the discussion about the growing evidence of significant economic inequality, we are just kind of at the beginning of the process? 
+YNH: Again, it's not a prophecy; it's seeing all kinds of possibilities before us. 
+One possibility is this creation of a new massive class of useless people. 
+Another possibility is the division of humankind into different biological castes, with the rich being upgraded into virtual gods, and the poor being degraded to this level of useless people. 
+BG: I feel there is another TED talk coming up in a year or two. 
+Thank you, Yuval, for making the trip. 
+YNH: Thanks! 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to talk to you about power in this 21st century. 
+And basically, what I'd like to tell you is that power is changing, and there are two types of changes I want to discuss. 
+One is power transition, which is change of power amongst states. 
+And there the simple version of the message is it's moving from West to East. 
+The other is power diffusion, the way power is moving from all states West or East to non-state actors. 
+Those two things are the huge shifts of power in our century. 
+And I want to tell you about them each separately and then how they interact and why, in the end, there may be some good news. 
+When we talk about power transition, we often talk about the rise of Asia. 
+It really should be called the recovery or return of Asia. 
+If we looked at the world in 1800, you'd find that more than half of the world's people lived in Asia and they made more than half the world's product. 
+Now fast forward to 1900: half the world's people — more than half — still live in Asia, but they're now making only a fifth of the world's product. 
+What happened? The Industrial Revolution, which meant that all of a sudden, Europe and America became the dominant center of the world. 
+What we're going to see in the 21st century is Asia gradually returning to being more than half of the world's population and more than half of the world's product. 
+That's important and it's an important shift. 
+But let me tell you a little bit about the other shift that I'm talking about, which is power diffusion. 
+To understand power diffusion put this in your mind: computing and communications costs have fallen a thousandfold between 1970 and the beginning of this century. 
+Now that's a big abstract number. 
+But to make it more real, if the price of an automobile had fallen as rapidly as the price of computing power, you could buy a car today for five dollars. 
+Now when the price of any technology declines that dramatically, the barriers to entry go down. 
+Anybody can play in the game. 
+So in 1970, if you wanted to communicate from Oxford to Johannesburg to New Delhi to Brasilia and anywhere simultaneously, you could do it. 
+The technology was there. 
+But to be able to do it, you had to be very rich — a government, a multinational corporation, maybe the Catholic Church — but you had to be pretty wealthy. 
+Now, anybody has that capacity, which previously was restricted by price just to a few actors. 
+If they have the price of entry into an Internet cafe — the last time I looked, it was something like a pound an hour — and if you have Skype, it's free. 
+So capabilities that were once restricted are now available to everyone. 
+And what that means is not that the age of the State is over. 
+The State still matters. 
+But the stage is crowded. 
+The State's not alone. There are many, many actors. 
+Some of that's good: Oxfam, a great non-governmental actor. 
+Some of it's bad: Al Qaeda, another non-governmental actor. 
+But think of what it does to how we think in traditional terms and concepts. 
+We think in terms of war and interstate war. 
+And you can think back to 1941 when the government of Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. 
+It's worth noticing that a non-state actor attacking the United States in 2001 killed more Americans than the government of Japan did in 1941. 
+You might think of that as the privatization of war. 
+So we're seeing a great change in terms of diffusion of power. 
+Now the problem is that we're not thinking about it in very innovative ways. 
+So let me step back and ask: what's power? 
+Power is simple the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want, and you can do it in three ways. 
+You can do it with threats of coercion, "" sticks, "" you can do it with payments, "carrots," or you can do it by getting others to want what you want. 
+And that ability to get others to want what you want, to get the outcomes you want without coercion or payment, is what I call soft power. 
+And that soft power has been much neglected and much misunderstood, and yet it's tremendously important. 
+Indeed, if you can learn to use more soft power, you can save a lot on carrots and sticks. 
+Traditionally, the way people thought about power was primarily in terms of military power. 
+For example, the great Oxford historian who taught here at this university, A.J.P. Taylor, defined a great power as a country able to prevail in war. 
+But we need a new narrative if we're to understand power in the 21st century. 
+It's not just prevailing at war, though war still persists. 
+It's not whose army wins; it's also whose story wins. 
+And we have to think much more in terms of narratives and whose narrative is going to be effective. 
+Now let me go back to the question of power transition between states and what's happening there. 
+the narratives that we use now tend to be the rise and fall of the great powers. 
+And the current narrative is all about the rise of China and the decline of the United States. 
+Indeed, with the 2008 financial crisis, many people said this was the beginning of the end of American power. 
+The tectonic plates of world politics were shifting. 
+And president Medvedev of Russia, for example, pronounced in 2008 this was the beginning of the end of United States power. 
+But in fact, this metaphor of decline is often very misleading. 
+If you look at history, in recent history, you'll see the cycles of belief in American decline come and go every 10 or 15 years or so. 
+In 1958, after the Soviets put up Sputnik, it was "" That's the end of America. "" In 1973, with the oil embargo and the closing of the gold window, that was the end of America. 
+In the 1980s, as America went through a transition in the Reagan period, between the rust belt economy of the midwest to the Silicon Valley economy of California, that was the end of America. 
+But in fact, what we've seen is none of those were true. 
+Indeed, people were over-enthusiastic in the early 2000s, thinking America could do anything, which led us into some disastrous foreign policy adventures, and now we're back to decline again. 
+The moral of this story is all these narratives about rise and fall and decline tell us a lot more about psychology than they do about reality. 
+If we try to focus on the reality, then what we need to focus on is what's really happening in terms of China and the United States. 
+Goldman Sachs has projected that China, the Chinese economy, will surpass that of the U.S. 
+by 2027. 
+So we've got, what, 17 more years to go or so before China's bigger. 
+Now someday, with a billion point three people getting richer, they are going to be bigger than the United States. 
+But be very careful about these projections such as the Goldman Sachs projection as though that gives you an accurate picture of power transition in this century. 
+Let me mention three reasons why it's too simple. 
+First of all, it's a linear projection. 
+You know, everything says, here's the growth rate of China, here's the growth rate of the U.S., here it goes — straight line. 
+History is not linear. 
+There are often bumps along the road, accidents along the way. 
+The second thing is that the Chinese economy passes the U.S. economy in, let's say, 2030, which it may it, that will be a measure of total economic size, but not of per capita income — won't tell you about the composition of the economy. 
+China still has large areas of underdevelopment and per capita income is a better measure of the sophistication of the economy. 
+And that the Chinese won't catch up or pass the Americans until somewhere in the latter part, after 2050, of this century. 
+The other point that's worth noticing is how one-dimensional this projection is. 
+You know, it looks at economic power measured by GDP. 
+Doesn't tell you much about military power, doesn't tell you very much about soft power. 
+It's all very one-dimensional. 
+And also, when we think about the rise of Asia, or return of Asia as I called it a little bit earlier, it's worth remembering Asia's not one thing. 
+If you're sitting in Japan, or in New Delhi, or in Hanoi, your view of the rise of China is a little different than if you're sitting in Beijing. 
+Indeed, one of the advantages that the Americans will have in terms of power in Asia is all those countries want an American insurance policy against the rise of China. 
+It's as though Mexico and Canada were hostile neighbors to the United States, which they're not. 
+So these simple projections of the Goldman Sachs type are not telling us what we need to know about power transition. 
+But you might ask, well so what in any case? 
+Why does it matter? Who cares? 
+Is this just a game that diplomats and academics play? 
+The answer is it matters quite a lot. 
+Because, if you believe in decline and you get the answers wrong on this, the facts, not the myths, you may have policies which are very dangerous. 
+Let me give you an example from history. 
+The Peloponnesian War was the great conflict in which the Greek city state system tore itself apart two and a half millennia ago. 
+What caused it? 
+Thucydides, the great historian of the the Peloponnesian War, said it was the rise in the power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta. 
+Notice both halves of that explanation. 
+Many people argue that the 21st century is going to repeat the 20th century, in which World War One, the great conflagration in which the European state system tore itself apart and destroyed its centrality in the world, that that was caused by the rise in the power of Germany and the fear it created in Britain. 
+So there are people who are telling us this is going to be reproduced today, that what we're going to see is the same thing now in this century. 
+No, I think that's wrong. 
+It's bad history. 
+For one thing, Germany had surpassed Britain in industrial strength by 1900. 
+And as I said earlier, China has not passed the United States. 
+But also, if you have this belief and it creates a sense of fear, it leads to overreaction. 
+And the greatest danger we have of managing this power transition of the shift toward the East is fear. 
+To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt from a different context, the greatest thing we have to fear is fear itself. 
+We don't have to fear the rise of China or the return of Asia. 
+And if we have policies in which we take it in that larger historical perspective, we're going to be able to manage this process. 
+Let me say a word now about the distribution of power and how it relates to power diffusion and then pull these two types together. 
+If you ask how is power distributed in the world today, it's distributed much like a three-dimensional chess game. 
+Top board: military power among states. 
+The United States is the only superpower, and it's likely to remain that way for two or three decades. 
+China's not going to replace the U.S. on this military board. 
+Middle board of this three-dimensional chess game: economic power among states. 
+Power is multi-polar. 
+There are balancers — the U.S., Europe, China, Japan can balance each other. 
+The bottom board of this three-dimensional, the board of transnational relations, things that cross borders outside the control of governments, things like climate change, drug trade, financial flows, pandemics, all these things that cross borders outside the control of governments, there nobody's in charge. 
+It makes no sense to call this unipolar or multi-polar. 
+Power is chaotically distributed. 
+And the only way you can solve these problems — and this is where many greatest challenges are coming in this century — is through cooperation, through working together, which means that soft power becomes more important, that ability to organize networks to deal with these kinds of problems and to be able to get cooperation. 
+Another way of putting it is that as we think of power in the 21st century, we want to get away from the idea that power's always zero sum — my gain is your loss and vice versa. 
+Power can also be positive sum, where your gain can be my gain. 
+If China develops greater energy security and greater capacity to deal with its problems of carbon emissions, that's good for us as well as good for China as well as good for everybody else. 
+So empowering China to deal with its own problems of carbon is good for everybody, and it's not a zero sum, I win, you lose. 
+It's one in which we can all gain. 
+So as we think about power in this century, we want to get away from this view that it's all I win, you lose. 
+Now I don't mean to be Pollyannaish about this. 
+Wars persist. Power persists. 
+Military power is important. 
+Keeping balances is important. 
+All this still persists. 
+Hard power is there, and it will remain. 
+But unless you learn how to mix hard power with soft power into strategies that I call smart power, you're not going to deal with the new kinds of problems that we're facing. 
+So the key question that we need to think about as we look at this is how do we work together to produce global public goods, things from which all of us can benefit? 
+How do we define our national interests so that it's not just zero sum, but positive sum. 
+In that sense, if we define our interests, for example, for the United States the way Britain defined its interests in the 19th century, keeping an open trading system, keeping a monetary stability, keeping freedom of the seas — those were good for Britain, they were good for others as well. 
+And in the 21st century, you have to do an analog to that. 
+How do we produce global public goods, which are good for us, but good for everyone at the same time? 
+And that's going to be the good news dimension of what we need to think about as we think of power in the 21st century. 
+There are ways to define our interests in which, while protecting ourselves with hard power, we can organize with others in networks to produce, not only public goods, but ways that will enhance our soft power. 
+So if one looks at the statements that have been made about this, I am impressed that when Hillary Clinton described the foreign policy of the Obama administration, she said that the foreign policy of the Obama administration was going to be smart power, as she put it, "" using all the tools in our foreign policy tool box. "" And if we're going to deal with these two great power shifts that I've described, the power shift represented by transition among states, the power shift represented by diffusion of power away from all states, we're going to have to develop a new narrative of power 
+in which we combine hard and soft power into strategies of smart power. 
+And that's the good news I have. We can do that. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I once said, "" If you want to liberate a society, all you need is the Internet. "" I was wrong. 
+I said those words back in 2011, when a Facebook page I anonymously created helped spark the Egyptian revolution. 
+The Arab Spring revealed social media's greatest potential, but it also exposed its greatest shortcomings. 
+The same tool that united us to topple dictators eventually tore us apart. 
+I would like to share my own experience in using social media for activism, and talk about some of the challenges I have personally faced and what we could do about them. 
+In the early 2000s, Arabs were flooding the web. 
+Thirsty for knowledge, for opportunities, for connecting with the rest of the people around the globe, we escaped our frustrating political realities and lived a virtual, alternative life. 
+Just like many of them, I was completely apolitical until 2009. 
+At the time, when I logged into social media, I started seeing more and more Egyptians aspiring for political change in the country. 
+It felt like I was not alone. 
+In June 2010, Internet changed my life forever. 
+While browsing Facebook, I saw a photo, a terrifying photo, of a tortured, dead body of a young Egyptian guy. 
+His name was Khaled Said. 
+Khaled was a 29-year-old Alexandrian who was killed by police. 
+I saw myself in his picture. 
+I thought, "" I could be Khaled. "" I could not sleep that night, and I decided to do something. 
+I anonymously created a Facebook page and called it "" We are all Khaled Said. "" In just three days, the page had over 100,000 people, fellow Egyptians who shared the same concern. 
+Whatever was happening had to stop. 
+I recruited my co-admin, AbdelRahman Mansour. 
+We worked together for hours and hours. 
+We were crowdsourcing ideas from the people. 
+We were engaging them. 
+We were calling collectively for actions, and sharing news that the regime did not want Egyptians to know. 
+The page became the most followed page in the Arab world. 
+It had more fans than established media organizations and even top celebrities. 
+On January 14, 2011, Ben Ali fled out of Tunisia after mounting protests against his regime. 
+I saw a spark of hope. 
+Egyptians on social media were wondering, "If Tunisia did it, why can't we?" 
+I posted an event on Facebook and called it "A Revolution against Corruption, Injustice and Dictatorship." 
+I posed a question to the 300,000 users of the page at the time: "" Today is the 14th of January. 
+The 25th of January is Police Day. 
+It's a national holiday. 
+If 100,000 of us take to the streets of Cairo, no one is going to stop us. 
+I wonder if we could do it. "" In just a few days, the invitation reached over a million people, and over 100,000 people confirmed attendance. 
+Social media was crucial for this campaign. 
+It helped a decentralized movement arise. 
+It made people realize that they were not alone. 
+And it made it impossible for the regime to stop it. 
+At the time, they didn't even understand it. 
+And on January 25th, Egyptians flooded the streets of Cairo and other cities, calling for change, breaking the barrier of fear and announcing a new era. 
+Then came the consequences. 
+A few hours before the regime cut off the Internet and telecommunications, I was walking in a dark street in Cairo, around midnight. 
+I had just tweeted, "" Pray for Egypt. 
+The government must be planning a massacre tomorrow. "" I was hit hard on my head. 
+I lost my balance and fell down, to find four armed men surrounding me. 
+One covered my mouth and the others paralyzed me. 
+I knew I was being kidnapped by state security. 
+I found myself in a cell, handcuffed, blindfolded. 
+I was terrified. 
+So was my family, who started looking for me in hospitals, police stations and even morgues. 
+After my disappearance, a few of my fellow colleagues who knew I was the admin of the page told the media about my connection with that page, and that I was likely arrested by state security. 
+My colleagues at Google started a search campaign trying to find me, and the fellow protesters in the square demanded my release. 
+After 11 days of complete darkness, I was set free. 
+And three days later, Mubarak was forced to step down. 
+It was the most inspiring and empowering moment of my life. 
+It was a time of great hope. 
+Egyptians lived a utopia for 18 days during the revolution. 
+They all shared the belief that we could actually live together despite our differences, that Egypt after Mubarak would be for all. 
+But unfortunately, the post-revolution events were like a punch in the gut. 
+The euphoria faded, we failed to build consensus, and the political struggle led to intense polarization. 
+Social media only amplified that state, by facilitating the spread of misinformation, rumors, echo chambers and hate speech. 
+The environment was purely toxic. 
+My online world became a battleground filled with trolls, lies, hate speech. 
+I started to worry about the safety of my family. 
+But of course, this wasn't just about me. 
+The polarization reached its peak between the two main powers — the army supporters and the Islamists. 
+People in the center, like me, started feeling helpless. 
+Both groups wanted you to side with them; you were either with them or against them. 
+And on the 3rd of July 2013, the army ousted Egypt's first democratically elected president, after three days of popular protest that demanded his resignation. 
+That day I made a very hard decision. 
+I decided to go silent, completely silent. 
+It was a moment of defeat. 
+I stayed silent for more than two years, and I used the time to reflect on everything that happened, trying to understand why did it happen. 
+It became clear to me that while it's true that polarization is primarily driven by our human behavior, social media shapes this behavior and magnifies its impact. 
+Say you want to say something that is not based on a fact, pick a fight or ignore someone that you don't like. 
+These are all natural human impulses, but because of technology, acting on these impulses is only one click away. 
+In my view, there are five critical challenges facing today's social media. 
+First, we don't know how to deal with rumors. 
+Rumors that confirm people's biases are now believed and spread among millions of people. 
+Second, we create our own echo chambers. 
+We tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, un-follow and block everybody else. 
+Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs. 
+All of us probably know that. 
+It's as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars. 
+And fourth, it became really hard to change our opinions. 
+Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in 140 characters about complex world affairs. 
+And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet, and we are less motivated to change these views, even when new evidence arises. 
+Fifth — and in my point of view, this is the most critical — today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. 
+It's as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other. 
+I witnessed how these critical challenges contributed to an already polarized Egyptian society, but this is not just about Egypt. 
+Polarization is on the rise in the whole world. 
+We need to work hard on figuring out how technology could be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. 
+There's a lot of debate today on how to combat online harassment and fight trolls. 
+This is so important. 
+No one could argue against that. 
+But we need to also think about how to design social media experiences that promote civility and reward thoughtfulness. 
+I know for a fact if I write a post that is more sensational, more one-sided, sometimes angry and aggressive, I get to have more people see that post. 
+I will get more attention. 
+But what if we put more focus on quality? 
+What is more important: the total number of readers of a post you write, or who are the people who have impact that read what you write? 
+Couldn't we just give people more incentives to engage in conversations, rather than just broadcasting opinions all the time? 
+Or reward people for reading and responding to views that they disagree with? 
+And also, make it socially acceptable that we change our minds, or probably even reward that? 
+What if we have a matrix that says how many people changed their minds, and that becomes part of our social media experience? 
+If I could track how many people are changing their minds, I'd probably write more thoughtfully, trying to do that, rather than appealing to the people who already agree with me and "" liking "" because I just confirmed their biases. 
+We also need to think about effective crowdsourcing mechanisms, to fact-check widely spread online information, and reward people who take part in that. 
+In essence, we need to rethink today's social media ecosystem and redesign its experiences to reward thoughtfulness, civility and mutual understanding. 
+As a believer in the Internet, I teamed up with a few friends, started a new project, trying to find answers and explore possibilities. 
+Our first product is a new media platform for conversations. 
+We don't claim to have the answers, but we started experimenting with different discussions about very divisive issues, such as race, gun control, the refugee debate, relationship between Islam and terrorism. 
+These are conversations that matter. 
+Today, at least one out of three people on the planet have access to the Internet. 
+But part of this Internet is being held captive by the less noble aspects of our human behavior. 
+Five years ago, I said, "" If you want to liberate society, all you need is the Internet. "" Today, I believe if we want to liberate society, we first need to liberate the Internet. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I want to tell you a story — an encouraging story — about addressing desperation, depression and despair in Afghanistan, and what we have learned from it, and how to help people to overcome traumatic experiences and how to help them to regain some confidence in the time ahead — in the future — and how to participate again in everyday life. 
+So, I am a Jungian psychoanalyst, and I went to Afghanistan in January 2004, by chance, on an assignment for Medica Mondiale. 
+Jung in Afghanistan — you get the picture. 
+Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, and 70 percent of the people are illiterate. 
+War and malnutrition kills people together with hope. 
+You may know this from the media, but what you may not know is that the average age of the Afghan people is 17 years old, which means they grow up in such an environment and — I repeat myself — in 30 years of war. 
+So this translates into ongoing violence, foreign interests, bribery, drugs, ethnic conflicts, bad health, shame, fear and cumulative traumatic experiences. 
+Local and foreign military are supposed to build peace together with the donors and the governmental and non-governmental organizations. 
+And people had hope, yes, but until they realized their situation worsens every day — either because they are being killed or because, somehow, they are poorer than eight years ago. 
+One figure for that: 54 percent of the children under the age of five years suffer from malnutrition. 
+Yet, there is hope. 
+One day a man told me, "" My future does not look brilliant, but I want to have a brilliant future for my son. "" This is a picture I took in 2005, walking on Fridays over the hills in Kabul, and for me it's a symbolic picture of an open future for a young generation. 
+So, doctors prescribe medication. 
+And donors are supposed to bring peace by building schools and roads. 
+Military collect weapons, and depression stays intact. 
+Why? 
+Because people don't have tools to cope with it, to get over it. 
+So, soon after my arrival, I had confirmed something which I had already known; that my instruments come from the heart of modern Europe, yes. 
+However, what can wound us and our reaction to those wounds — they are universal. 
+And the big challenge was how to understand the meaning of the symptom in this specific cultural context. 
+After a counseling session, a woman said to me, "" Because you have felt me, I can feel myself again, and I want to participate again in my family life. "" This was very important, because the family is central in Afghans' social system. 
+No one can survive alone. 
+And if people feel used, worthless and ashamed, because something horrible has happened to them, then they retreat, and they fall into social isolation, and they do not dare to tell this evil to other people or to their loved ones, because they do not want to burden them. 
+And very often violence is a way to cope with it. 
+Traumatized people also easily lose control — symptoms are hyper-arousal and memory flashbacks — so people are in a constant fear that those horrible feelings of that traumatic event might come back unexpectedly, suddenly, and they cannot control it. 
+To compensate this loss of inner control, they try to control the outside, very understandably — mostly the family — and unfortunately, this fits very well into the traditional side, regressive side, repressive side, restrictive side of the cultural context. 
+So, husbands start beating wives, mothers and fathers beat their children, and afterward, they feel awful. 
+They did not want to do this, it just happened — they lost control. 
+The desperate try to restore order and normality, and if we are not able to cut this circle of violence, it will be transferred to the next generation without a doubt. 
+And partly this is already happening. 
+So everybody needs a sense for the future, and the Afghan sense of the future is shattered. 
+But let me repeat the words of the woman. 
+"" Because you have felt me, I can feel myself again. "" So the key here is empathy. 
+Somebody has to be a witness to what has happened to you. 
+Somebody has to feel how you felt. 
+And somebody has to see you and listen to you. 
+Everybody must be able to know what he or she has experienced is true, and this only goes with another person. 
+So everybody must be able to say, "" This happened to me, and it did this with me, but I'm able to live with it, to cope with it, and to learn from it. 
+And I want to engage myself in the bright future for my children and the children of my children, and I will not marry-off my 13 year-old daughter, "" — what happens too often in Afghanistan. 
+So something can be done, even in such extreme environments as Afghanistan. 
+And I started thinking about a counseling program. 
+But, of course, I needed help and funds. 
+And one evening, I was sitting next to a very nice gentleman in Kabul, and he asked what I thought would be good in Afghanistan. 
+And I explained to him quickly, I would train psycho-social counselors, I would open centers, and I explained to him why. 
+This man gave me his contact details at the end of the evening and said, "" If you want to do this, call me. "" At that time, it was the head of Caritas Germany. 
+So, I was able to launch a three-year project with Caritas Germany, and we trained 30 Afghan women and men, and we opened 15 counseling centers in Kabul. 
+This was our sign — it's hand-painted, and we had 45 all over Kabul. 
+Eleven thousand people came — more than that. 
+And 70 percent regained their lives. 
+This was a very exciting time, developing this with my wonderful Afghan team. 
+And they are working with me up to today. 
+We developed a culturally-sensitive psycho-social counseling approach. 
+So, from 2008 up until today, a substantial change and step forward has been taking place. 
+The European Union delegation in Kabul came into this and hired me to work inside the Ministry of Public Health, to lobby this approach — we succeeded. 
+We revised the mental health component of the primary health care services by adding psycho-social care and psycho-social counselors to the system. 
+This means, certainly, to retrain all health staff. 
+But for that, we already have the training manuals, which are approved by the Ministry and moreover, this approach is now part of the mental health strategy in Afghanistan. 
+So we also have implemented it already in some selected clinics in three provinces, and you are the first to see the results. 
+We wanted to know if what is being done is effective. 
+And here you can see the patients all had symptoms of depression, moderate and severe. 
+And the red line is the treatment as usual — medication with a medical doctor. 
+And all the symptoms stayed the same or even got worse. 
+And the green line is treatment with psycho-social counseling only, without medication. 
+And you can see the symptoms almost completely go away, and the psycho-social stress has dropped significantly, which is explicable, because you cannot take away the psycho-social stresses, but you can learn how to cope with them. 
+So this makes us very happy, because now we also have some evidence that this is working. 
+So here you see, this is a health facility in Northern Afghanistan, and every morning it looks like this all over. 
+And doctors usually have three to six minutes for the patients, but now this will change. 
+They go to the clinics, because they want to cure their immediate symptoms, and they will find somebody to talk to and discuss these issues and talk about what is burdening them and find solutions, develop their resources, learn tools to solve their family conflicts and gain some confidence in the future. 
+And I would like to share one short vignette. 
+One Hazara said to his Pashtun counselor, "" If we were to have met some years ago, then we would have killed each other. 
+And now you are helping me to regain some confidence in the future. "" And another counselor said to me after the training, "" You know, I never knew why I survived the killings in my village, but now I know, because I am part of a nucleus of a new peaceful society in Afghanistan. "" So I believe this kept me running. 
+And this is a really emancipatory and political contribution to peace and reconciliation. 
+And also — I think — without psycho-social therapy, and without considering this in all humanitarian projects, we cannot build-up civil societies. 
+I thought it was an idea worth spreading, and I think it must be, can be, could be replicated elsewhere. 
+I thank you for your attention. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Four years ago, on the TED stage, I announced a company I was working with at the time called Odeo. 
+And because of that announcement, we got a big article in The New York Times, which led to more press, which led to more attention, and me deciding to become CEO of that company — whereas I was just an adviser — and raising a round of venture capital and ramping up hiring. 
+One of the guys I hired was an engineer named Jack Dorsey, and a year later, when we were trying to decide which way to go with Odeo, Jack presented an idea he'd been tinkering around with for a number of years that was based around sending simple status updates to friends. 
+We were also playing with SMS at the time at Odeo, so we kind of put two and two together, and in early 2006 we launched Twitter as a side project at Odeo. 
+Now, it's hard to justify doing a side project at a startup, where focus is so critical, but I had actually launched Blogger as a side project to my previous company, thinking it was just a little thing we'd do on the side, and it ended up taking over not only the company, but my life for the next five or six years. 
+So I learned to follow hunches even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're going to go. 
+And that's kind of what's happened with Twitter, time after time. 
+So, for those of you unfamiliar, Twitter is based around a very simple, seemingly trivial concept. 
+You say what you're doing in 140 characters or less, and people who are interested in you get those updates. 
+If they're really interested, they get the update as a text message on their cell phone. 
+So, for instance, I may Twitter right now that I'm giving a talk at TED. 
+And in my case, when I hit send, up to 60,000 people will receive that message in a matter of seconds. 
+Now, the fundamental idea is that Twitter lets people share moments of their lives whenever they want, be they momentous occasions or mundane ones. 
+It is by sharing these moments as they're happening that lets people feel more connected and in touch, despite distance, and in real time. 
+This is the primary use we saw of Twitter from the beginning, and what got us excited. 
+What we didn't anticipate was the many, many other uses that would evolve from this very simple system. 
+One of the things we realized was how important Twitter could be during real-time events. 
+When the wildfires broke out in San Diego, in October of 2007, people turned to Twitter to report what was happening and to find information from neighbors about what was happening around them. 
+But it wasn't just individuals. 
+The L.A. Times actually turned to Twitter to dispense information as well, and put a Twitter feed on the front page, and the L.A. Fire Department and Red Cross used it to dispense news and updates as well. 
+At this event, dozens of people here are Twittering and thousands of people around the world are following along because they want to know what it feels like to be here and what's happening. 
+Among the other interesting things that have cropped up are many things from businesses, from marketing and communications and predictable things, to an insanely popular Korean-barbecue taco truck that drives around L.A. and Twitters where it stops, causing a line to form around the block. 
+Politicians have recently begun Twittering. 
+In fact, there are 47 members of Congress who currently have Twitter accounts. 
+And they're tweeting, in some cases, from behind closed-door sessions with the President. 
+In this case, this guy's not liking what he's hearing. 
+The President himself is our most popular Twitter user, although his tweets have dropped off as of late, while Senator McCain's have picked up. 
+As have this guy's. 
+Twitter was originally designed as a broadcast medium: you send one message and it goes out to everybody, and you receive the messages you're interested in. 
+One of the many ways that users shaped the evolution of Twitter was by inventing a way to reply to a specific person or a specific message. 
+So, this syntax, the "" @ username "" that Shaquille O'Neal's using here to reply to one of his fans, was completely invented by users, and we didn't build it into the system until it already became popular and then we made it easier. 
+This is one of the many ways that users have shaped the system. 
+Another is via the API. 
+We built an application-programming interface, which basically means that programmers can write software that interacts with Twitter. 
+We currently know about over 2,000 pieces of software that can send Twitter updates — interfaces for Mac, Windows, your iPhone, your BlackBerry — as well as things like a device that lets an unborn baby Twitter when it kicks or a plant Twitter when it needs water. 
+Probably the most important third-party development came from a little company in Virginia called Summize. 
+Summize built a Twitter search engine. 
+And they tapped into the fact that, if you have millions of people around the world talking about what they're doing and what's around them, you have an incredible resource to find out about any topic or event while it's going on. 
+This really changed how we perceived Twitter. 
+For instance, here's what people are saying about TED. 
+This is another way that our mind was shifted, and Twitter wasn't what we thought it was. 
+We liked this so much we actually bought the company and are folding it into the main product. 
+This not only lets you view Twitters in different ways, but it introduces new use cases as well. 
+One of my favorites is what happened a few months ago when there was a gas shortage in Atlanta. 
+Some users figured out that they would Twitter when they found gas — where it was, and how much it cost — and then appended the keyword "" # atlgas "" which let other people search for that and find gas themselves. 
+And this trend of people using this communication network to help each other out goes far beyond the original idea of just keeping up with family and friends. 
+It's happened more and more lately, whether it's raising money for homeless people or to dig wells in Africa or for a family in crisis. 
+People have raised tens of thousands of dollars over Twitter in a matter of days on several occasions. 
+It seems like when you give people easier ways to share information, more good things happen. 
+I have no idea what will happen next with Twitter. 
+I've learned to follow the hunch, but never assume where it will go. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: We're not quite done yet. 
+So, look, if we could have this screen live. 
+This is actually the most terrifying thing that any speaker can do after they've been to an event. 
+It's totally intimidating. 
+So, this would be the Twitter search screen. 
+So we're going to just type a couple of random words into Twitter. 
+For example: "" Evan Williams. "" "Evan Williams, give people more good ways to share information and follow your hunch at TED." 
+"Currently listening to Evan Williams." "Currently listening to Evan Williams." "Evan Williams —" Oh. 
+"" Evan Williams is just dying on stage here at TED. 
+Worst talk ever! "" (Laughter) Evan Williams: Nice. Thanks. 
+CA: Just kidding. 
+But, literally in the eight minutes he was talking, there are about fifty tweets that already came on the talk. 
+So he'll see every aspect of the reaction: the fact that Barack Obama is the biggest Twitterer, the fact that it came out of TED. 
+I don't think there's any other way of getting instant feedback that way. 
+You have build something very fascinating, and it looks like its best times are still ahead of it. 
+So, thank you very much, Evan. EW: Thank you. 
+CA: That was very interesting. 
+
+Most of the talks that you've heard in the last several fabulous days have been from people who have the characteristic that they have thought about something, they are experts, they know what's going on. 
+All of you know about the topic that I'm supposed to talk about. 
+That is, you know what simplicity is, you know what complexity is. 
+The trouble is, I don't. 
+And what I'm going to do is share with you my ignorance on this subject. 
+I want you to read this, because we're going to come back to it in a moment. 
+The quote is from the fabled Potter Stewart opinion on pornography. 
+And let me just read it, the important details here: "" Shorthand description, ['hardcore pornography']; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly defining it. 
+But I know it when I see it. "" I'm going to come back to that in a moment. 
+So, what is simplicity? 
+It's good to start with some examples. 
+A coffee cup — we don't think about coffee cups, but it's much more interesting than one might think — a coffee cup is a device, which has a container and a handle. 
+The handle enables you to hold it when the container is filled with hot liquid. 
+Why is that important? 
+Well, it enables you to drink coffee. 
+But also, by the way, the coffee is hot, the liquid is sterile; you're not likely to get cholera that way. 
+So the coffee cup, or the cup with a handle, is one of the tools used by society to maintain public health. 
+Scissors are your clothes, glasses enable you to see things and keep you from being eaten by cheetahs or run down by automobiles, and books are, after all, your education. 
+But there's another class of simple things, which are also very important. 
+Simple in function, but not at all simple in how they're constructed. 
+And the two here are just examples. 
+One is the cellphone, which we use every day. 
+And it rests on a complexity, which has some characteristics very different from those that my friend Benoit Mandelbrot discussed, but are very interesting. 
+And the other, of course, is a birth control pill, which, in a very simple way, fundamentally changed the structure of society by changing the role of women in it by providing to them the opportunity to make reproductive choices. 
+So, there are two ways of thinking about this word, I think. 
+And here I've corrupted the Potter Stewart quotation by saying that we can think about something — which spans all the way from scissors to the cell phone, Internet and birth control pills — by saying that they're simple, the functions are simple, and we recognize what that simplicity is when we see it. 
+Or there may be another way of doing it, which is to think about the problem in terms of what — if you associate with moral philosophers — is called the teapot problem. 
+The teapot problem I'll pose this way. 
+Suppose you see a teapot, and the teapot is filled with hot water. 
+And you then ask the question: Why is the water hot? 
+And that's a simple question. 
+It's like, what is simplicity? 
+One answer would be: because the kinetic energy of the water molecules is high and they bounce against things rapidly — that's a kind of physical science argument. 
+A second argument would be: because it was sitting on a stove with the flame on — that's an historical argument. 
+A third is that I wanted hot water for tea — that's an intentional argument. 
+And, since this is coming from a moral philosopher, the fourth would be that it's part of God's plan for the universe. 
+All of these are possibilities. 
+The point is that you get into trouble when you ask a single question with a single box for an answer, in which that single question actually is many questions with quite different meanings, but with the same words. 
+Asking, "" What is simplicity? "" I think falls in that category. 
+What is the state of science? 
+And, interestingly, complexity is very highly evolved. 
+We have a lot of interesting information about what complexity is. 
+Simplicity, for reasons that are a little bit obscure, is almost not pursued, at least in the academic world. 
+We academics — I am an academic — we love complexity. 
+You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes. (Laughter) Simplicity — all of you really would like your Waring Blender in the morning to make whatever a Waring Blender does, but not explode or play Beethoven. 
+You're not interested in the limits of these things. 
+So what one is interested in has a lot to do with the rewards of the system. 
+And there's a lot of rewards in thinking about complexity and emergence, not so much in thinking about simplicity. 
+One of the things I want to do is to help you with a very important task — which you may not know that you have very often — which is to understand how to sit next to a physicist at a dinner party and have a conversation. (Laughter) And the words that I would like you to focus on are complexity and emergence, because these will enable you to start the conversation and then daydream about other things. (Laughter) 
+All right, what is complexity in this view of things, and what is emergence? 
+We have, actually, a pretty good working definition of complexity. 
+It is a system, like traffic, which has components. 
+The components interact with one another. 
+These are cars and drivers. They dissipate energy. 
+It turns out that, whenever you have that system, weird stuff happens, and you in Los Angeles probably know this better than anyone. 
+Here's another example, which I put up because it's an example of really important current science. 
+You can't possibly read that. It's not intended that you read it, but that's a tiny part of the chemical reactions going on in each of your cells at any given moment. 
+And it's like the traffic that you see. 
+The amazing thing about the cell is that it actually does maintain a fairly stable working relationship with other cells, but we don't know why. 
+Anyone who tells you that we understand life, walk away. 
+And let me reduce this to the simplest level. 
+We've heard from Bill Gates recently. 
+All of us, to some extent, study this thing called a Bill Gates. 
+Terrific. You learn everything you can about that. 
+And then there's another kind of thing that you might study, and you study that hard. 
+That's a Bono, this is a Bono. 
+But then, if you know everything you can know about those two things, and you put them together, what can you say about this combination? 
+The answer is, not a lot. 
+And that's complexity. 
+Now, imagine building that up to a city, or to a society, and you've got, obviously, an interesting problem. 
+All right, so let me give you an example of simplicity of a particular kind. 
+And I want to introduce a word that I think is very useful, which is stacking. 
+And I'm going to use stacking for a kind of simplicity that has the characteristic that it is so simple and so reliable that I can build things with it. 
+Or I'm going to use simple to mean reliable, predictable, repeatable. 
+And I'm going to use as an example the Internet, because it's a particularly good example of stacked simplicity. 
+We call it a complex system, which it is, but it's also something else. 
+The Internet starts with mathematics, it starts with binary. 
+And if you look at the list of things on the bottom, we are familiar with the Arabic numbers one to 10 and so on. 
+In binary, one is 0001, seven is 0111. 
+The question is: Why is binary simpler than Arabic? 
+And the answer is, simply, that if I hold up three fingers, you can count that easily, but if I hold up this, it's sort of hard to say that I just did seven. 
+The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. 
+Anything else is more complicated. 
+You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. 
+So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it. 
+Now, if you like to represent this zero and one of binary, you need a device. 
+And think of things in your life that are binary, one of them is light switches. 
+They can be on and off. That's binary. 
+Now wall switches, we all know, fail. 
+But our friends who are condensed matter physicists managed to come up, some 50 years ago, with a very nice device, shown under that bell jar, which is a transistor. 
+A transistor is nothing more than a wall switch. 
+It turns things on and off, but it does so without moving parts and it doesn't fail, basically, for a very long period of time. 
+So the second layer of simplicity was the transistor in the Internet. 
+So, since the transistor is so simple, you can put lots of them together. 
+And you put lots of them together and you come with something called integrated circuits. 
+And a current integrated circuit might have in each one of these chips something like a billion transistors, all of which have to work perfectly every time. 
+So that's the next layer of simplicity, and, in fact, integrated circuits are really simple in the sense that they, in general, work really well. 
+With integrated circuits, you can build cellphones. 
+You all are accustomed to having your cellphones work the large majority of the time. 
+In Boston... Boston is a little bit like Namibia in its cell phone coverage, (Laughter) so that we're not accustomed to that all the time, but some of the time. 
+But, in fact, if you have cell phones, you can now go to this nice lady who's somewhere like Namibia, and who is extremely happy with the fact that although she does not have an master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT, she's nonetheless able to hack her cell phone to get power in some funny way. 
+And from that comes the Internet. 
+And this is a map of bitflows across the continent. 
+The two blobs that are light in the middle there are the United States and Europe. 
+And then back to simplicity again. 
+So here we have what I think is one of the great ideas, which is Google. 
+Which, in this simple portal makes the claim that it makes accessible all of the world's information. 
+But the point is that that extraordinary simple idea rests on layers of simplicity each compounded into a complexity that is itself simple, in the sense that it is completely reliable. 
+All right, let me then finish off with four general statements, an example and two aphorisms. 
+The characteristics, which I think are useful to think about for simple things: First, they are predictable. 
+Their behavior is predictable. 
+Now, one of the nice characteristics of simple things is you know what it's going to do, in general. 
+So simplicity and predictability are characteristics of simple things. 
+The second is, and this is a real world statement, they're cheap. 
+If you have things that are cheap enough, people will find uses for them, even if they seem very primitive. 
+So, for example, stones. 
+You can build cathedrals out of stones, you just have to know what it does. 
+You carve them in blocks and then you pile them on top of one another, and they support weight. 
+So there has to be function, the function has to be predictable and the cost has to be low. 
+What that means is that you have to have a high performance or value for cost. 
+And then I would propose as this last component that they serve, or have the potential to serve, as building blocks. 
+That is, you can stack them. 
+And stack can mean this way, or it can mean this way, or it can mean in some arbitrary n-dimensional space. 
+But if you have something that has a function, and it's really cheap, people will find new ways of putting it together to make new things. 
+Cheap, functional, reliable things unleash the creativity of people who then build stuff that you could not imagine. 
+There's no way of predicting the Internet based on the first transistor. 
+It just is not possible. 
+So these are the components. 
+Now, the example is something that I want to give you from the work that we ourselves do. 
+We are very interested in delivering health care in the developing world, and one of the things that we wish to do in this particular business is to find a way of doing medical diagnosis at as close to zero cost as we can manage. 
+So, how does one do that? 
+This is a world in which there's no electricity, there's no money, there's no medical competence. 
+And I don't want to spend your time in going through the details, but in the lower right-hand corner, you see an example of the kind of thing that we have. 
+It's a little paper chip. 
+It has a few things printed on it using the same technology that you use for making comic books, which was the inspiration for this particular idea. 
+And you put a drop, in this case, of urine at the bottom. 
+It wicks its way up into these little branches. 
+You know, no power required. 
+It turns colors. In this particular case, you're reading kidney function. 
+And, since the health care worker of much of this part of the world is an 18 year-old with an AK-47, who happens to be out of work and is willing to go around and do this sort of thing, he can take a picture of it with his cellphone, send the picture back to where there is a doctor, and the doctor can look at it. 
+So what you've done is to take a technology, which is available everywhere, make a device, which is extremely cheap, and make it in such a fashion that it is very, very reliable. 
+If we can pull this off, if we can build more function, it will be stackable. 
+That is to say, if we can make the basic technology of one or two things work, it will be applicable to a very, very large variety of human conditions, and hence, extendable in both vertical and horizontal directions. 
+Part of my interest in this, I have to say, is that I would like to — how do I put this politely? — change the way, or maybe eviscerate, the capital structure of the U.S. health care system, which I think is fundamentally broken. 
+So, let me close — (Applause) Let me close with my two aphorisms. 
+One of them is from Mr. Einstein, and he says, "" Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. "" And I think that's a very good way of thinking about the problem. 
+If you take too much out of something that's simple, you lose function. 
+You have to have low cost, but you also have to have a function. 
+So you can't make it too simple. 
+And the second is a design issue, and it's not directly relevant, but it's a nice statement. 
+This is by de Saint-Exupery. 
+And he says, "" You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away. "" And that certainly is going in the right direction. 
+So, what I think one can begin to do with this kind of cut at the word simplicity, which doesn't cover Brancusi, it doesn't answer the question of why Mondrian is better or worse or simpler or less simpler than Van Gogh, and certainly doesn't address the question of whether Mozart is simpler than Bach. 
+But it does make a point — which is one which, in a sense, differentiates the real world of people who make things, and the world of people who think about things, which is, there is an intellectual merit to asking: How do we make things as simple as we can, as cheap as we can, as functional as we can and as freely interconnectable as we can? 
+If we make that kind of simplicity in our technology and then give it to you guys, you can go off and do all kinds of fabulous things with it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question. 
+So can you picture that a science of simplicity might get to the point where you could look out at various systems — say a financial system or a legal system, health system — and say, "" That has got to the point of danger or dysfunctionality for the following reasons, and this is how we might simplify it ""? 
+George Whitesides: Yes, I think you could. Because if you look at the components from which the system is made and examine their fragility, or their stability, you can probably build a kind of risk assessment based on that basis. 
+CA: Have you started to do that? 
+I mean, with the health system, you got a sort of radical solution on the cost side, but in terms of the system itself? 
+GW: Well, no. 
+How do I put that simply? No. 
+CA: That was a simple, powerful answer. GW: Yes. 
+CA: So, in terms of that diagnostic technology that you've got, where is that, and when do you see that maybe getting rolled out to scale. 
+GW: That's coming out soon. I mean, the systems work, and we have to find out how to manufacture them and do things of this kind, but the basic technology works. 
+CA: You've got a company set up to... 
+GW: A foundation, a foundation. Not-for-profit. 
+CA: All right. Well, thank you so much for your talk. Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I was here about four years ago, talking about the relationship of design and happiness. 
+At the very end of it, I showed a list under that title. 
+I learned very few things in addition since (Laughter) — but made a whole number of them into projects since. 
+These are inflatable monkeys in every city in Scotland: "Everybody always thinks they are right." 
+They were combined in the media. 
+"Drugs are fun in the beginning but become a drag later on." 
+We're doing changing media. 
+This is a projection that can see the viewer as the viewer walks by. 
+You can't help but actually ripping that spider web apart. 
+All of these things are pieces of graphic design. 
+We do them for our clients. 
+They are commissioned. 
+I would never have the money to actually pay for the installment or pay for all the billboards or the production of these, so there's always a client attached to them. 
+These are 65,000 coat hangers in a street that's lined with fashion stores. 
+"Worrying solves nothing." 
+"Money does not make me happy" appeared first as double-page spreads in a magazine. 
+The printer lost the file, didn't tell us. 
+When the magazine — actually, when I got the subscription — it was 12 following pages. 
+It said, "" Money does does make me happy. "" And a friend of mine in Austria felt so sorry for me that he talked the largest casino owner in Linz into letting us wrap his building. 
+So this is the big pedestrian zone in Linz. 
+It just says "" Money, "" and if you look down the side street, it says, "" does not make me happy. "" We had a show that just came down last week in New York. 
+We steamed up the windows permanently, and every hour we had a different designer come in and write these things that they've learned into the steam in the window. 
+Everybody participated — Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli. 
+Singapore was quite in discussion. 
+This is a little spot that we filmed there that's to be displayed on the large JumboTrons in Singapore. 
+And, of course, it's one that's dear to my heart, because all of these sentiments — some banal, some a bit more profound — all originally had come out of my diary. 
+And I do go often into the diary and check if I wanted to change something about the situation. 
+If it's — see it for a long enough time, I actually do something about it. 
+And the very last one is a billboard. 
+This is our roof in New York, the roof of the studio. 
+This is newsprint plus stencils that lie on the newsprint. 
+We let that lie around in the sun. 
+As you all know, newsprint yellows significantly in the sun. 
+After a week, we took the stencils and the leaves off, shipped the newsprints to Lisbon to a very sunny spot, so on day one the billboard said, "Complaining is silly. Either act or forget." 
+Three days later it faded, and a week later, no more complaining anywhere. 
+(Laughter) Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Newspapers are dying for a few reasons. 
+Readers don't want to pay for yesterday's news, and advertisers follow them. 
+Your iPhone, your laptop, is much more handy than New York Times on Sunday. 
+And we should save trees in the end. 
+So it's enough to bury any industry. 
+So, should we rather ask, "" Can anything save newspapers? "" There are several scenarios for the future newspaper. 
+Some people say it should be free; it should be tabloid, or even smaller: A4; it should be local, run by communities, or niche, for some smaller groups like business — but then it's not free; it's very expensive. 
+It should be opinion-driven; less news, more views. 
+And we'd rather read it during breakfast, because later we listen to radio in a car, check your mail at work and in the evening you watch TV. 
+Sounds nice, but this can only buy time. 
+Because in the long run, I think there is no reason, no practical reason for newspapers to survive. 
+So what can we do? 
+(Laughter) Let me tell you my story. 
+20 years ago, Bonnier, Swedish publisher, started to set newspapers in the former Soviet Bloc. 
+After a few years, they had several newspapers in central and eastern Europe. 
+They were run by an inexperienced staff, with no visual culture, no budgets for visuals — in many places there were not even art directors. 
+I decided to be — to work for them as an art director. 
+Before, I was an architect, and my grandmother asked me once, "What are you doing for a living?" 
+I said, "" I'm designing newspapers. "" "What? There's nothing to design there. It's just boring letters" (Laughter) And she was right. I was very frustrated, until one day. 
+I came to London, and I've seen performance by Cirque du Soleil. 
+And I had a revelation. I thought, "" These guys took some creepy, run-down entertainment, and put it to the highest possible level of performance art. "" I thought "" Oh my God, maybe I can do the same with these boring newspapers. "" And I did. We started to redesign them, one by one. 
+The front page became our signature. 
+It was my personal intimate channel to talk to the readers. 
+I'm not going to tell you stories about teamwork or cooperation. 
+My approach was very egotistic. 
+I wanted my artistic statement, my interpretation of reality. 
+I wanted to make posters, not newspapers. 
+Not even magazines: posters. 
+We were experimenting with type, with illustration, with photos. And we had fun. 
+Soon it started to bring results. 
+In Poland, our pages were named "" Covers of the Year "" three times in a row. 
+Other examples you can see here are from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia — the central European countries. 
+But it's not only about the front page. 
+The secret is that we were treating the whole newspaper as one piece, as one composition — like music. 
+And music has a rhythm, has ups and downs. 
+And design is responsible for this experience. 
+Flipping through pages is readers experience, and I'm responsible for this experience. 
+We treated two pages, both spreads, as a one page, because that's how readers perceive it. 
+You can see some Russian pages here which got many awards on biggest infographic competition in Spain. 
+But the real award came from Society for Newspaper Design. 
+Just a year after redesigning this newspaper in Poland, they name it the World's Best-Designed Newspaper. 
+And two years later, the same award came to Estonia. 
+Isn't amazing? 
+What really makes it amazing: that the circulation of these newspapers were growing too. 
+Just some examples: in Russia, plus 11 after one year, plus 29 after three years of the redesign. 
+Same in Poland: plus 13, up to 35 percent raise of circulation after three years. 
+You can see on a graph, after years of stagnation, the paper started to grow, just after redesign. 
+But the real hit was in Bulgaria. 
+And that is really amazing. 
+Did design do this? 
+Design was just a part of the process. 
+And the process we made was not about changing the look, it was about improving the product completely. 
+I took an architectural rule about function and form and translated it into newspaper content and design. 
+And I put strategy at the top of it. 
+So first you ask a big question: why we do it? What is the goal? 
+Then we adjust the content accordingly. 
+And then, usually after two months, we start designing. 
+My bosses, in the beginning, were very surprised. 
+Why am I asking all of these business questions, instead of just showing them pages? 
+But soon they realized that this is the new role of designer: to be in this process from the very beginning to the very end. 
+So what is the lesson behind it? 
+The first lesson is about that design can change not just your product. 
+It can change your workflow — actually, it can change everything in your company; it can turn your company upside down. 
+It can even change you. 
+And who's responsible? Designers. 
+Give power to designers. 
+(Applause) But the second is even more important. 
+You can live in a small poor country, like me. 
+You can work for a small company, in a boring branch. 
+You can have no budgets, no people — but still can put your work to the highest possible level. 
+And everybody can do it. 
+You just need inspiration, vision and determination. 
+And you need to remember that to be good is not enough. 
+Thank you. 
+
+I will always remember the first time I met the girl in the blue uniform. 
+I was eight at the time, living in the village with my grandmother, who was raising me and other children. 
+Famine had hit my country of Zimbabwe, and we just didn't have enough to eat. 
+We were hungry. 
+And that's when the girl in the blue uniform came to my village with the United Nations to feed the children. 
+As she handed me my porridge, I asked her why she was there, and without hesitation, she said, "As Africans, we must uplift all the people of Africa." 
+I had absolutely no idea what she meant. 
+Two years later, famine hit my country for the second time. 
+My grandmother had no choice but to send me to the city to live with an aunt I had never met before. 
+So at the age of 10, I found myself in school for the very first time. 
+And there, at the city school, I would experience what it was to be unequal. 
+You see, in the village, we were all equal. 
+But in the eyes and the minds of the other kids, I was not their equal. 
+I couldn't speak English, and I was way behind in terms of reading and writing. 
+But this feeling of inequality would get even more complex. 
+Every school holiday spent back in the village with my grandmother made me consciously aware of the inequalities this incredible opportunity had created within my own family. 
+Suddenly, I had much more than the rest of my village. 
+And in their eyes, I was no longer their equal. 
+I felt guilty. 
+But I thought about the girl in the blue uniform, and I remember thinking, "" That's who I want to be — someone like her, someone who uplifts other people. "" This childhood experience led me to the United Nations, and to my current role with UN Women, where we are addressing one of the greatest inequalities that affects more than half of the world's population — women and girls. 
+Today, I want to share with you a simple idea that seeks to uplift all of us together. 
+Eight months ago, under the visionary leadership of Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, head of UN Women, we launched a groundbreaking initiative called HeForShe, inviting men and boys from around the world to stand in solidarity with each other and with women, to create a shared vision for gender equality. 
+This is an invitation for those who believe in equality for women and men, and those who don't yet know that they believe. 
+The initiative is based on a simple idea: that what we share is much more powerful than what divides us. 
+We all feel the same things. 
+HeForShe is about uplifting all of us, women and men together. 
+It's moving us towards an inflection point for gender equality. 
+Imagine a blank page with one horizontal line splitting it in half. 
+Now imagine that women are represented here, and men are represented here. 
+In our current population, HeForShe is about moving the 3.2 billion men, one man at a time, across that line, so that ultimately, men can stand alongside women and be on the right side of history, making gender equality a reality in the 21st century. 
+However, engaging men in the movement would prove quite controversial. 
+Why invite men? They are the problem. 
+But something incredible happened when we launched HeForShe. 
+In just three days, more than 100,000 men had signed up and committed to be agents of change for equality. 
+Within that first week, at least one man in every single country in the world stood up to be counted, and within that same week, HeForShe created more than 1.2 billion conversations on social media. 
+And that's when the emails started pouring in, sometimes as many as a thousand a day. 
+We heard from a man out of Zimbabwe, who, after hearing about HeForShe, created a "" husband school. "" (Laughter) He literally went around his village, hand-picking all of the men that were abusive to their partners, and committed to turn them into better husbands and fathers. 
+In Pune, India, a youth advocate organized an innovative bicycle rally, mobilizing 700 cyclists to share the HeForShe messages within their own community. 
+In another impact story, a man sent a very personal note of something that had happened in his own community. 
+He wrote, "" Dear Madam, I have lived all of my life next door to a man who continuously beats up his wife. 
+Two weeks ago, I was listening to my radio, and your voice came on, and you spoke about something called the HeForShe, and the need for men to play their role. 
+Within a few hours, I heard the woman cry again next door, but for the first time, I didn't just sit there. 
+Madam, it has been two weeks, and the woman has not cried since. 
+Thank you for giving me a voice. "" (Applause) Personal impact stories such as these show that we are tapping into something within men, but getting to a world where women and men are equal is not just a matter of bringing men to the cause. 
+We want concrete, systematic, structural change that can equalize the political, economic and social realities for women and men. 
+We are asking men to make concrete actions, calling them to intervene at a personal level, to change their behavior. 
+We are calling upon governments, businesses, universities, to change their policies. 
+We want male leaders to become role models and change agents within their own institutions. 
+Already, a number of prominent men and leaders have stepped up and made some concrete HeForShe commitments. 
+In a few early success stories, a leading French hospitality company, Accor, has committed to eliminate the pay gap for all of its 180,000 employees by 2020. 
+(Applause) The government of Sweden, under its current feminist government, has committed to close both the employment and the pay gap for all of its citizens within the current electoral term. 
+In Japan, the University of Nagoya is building, as part of their HeForShe commitments, what will become one of Japan's leading gender-research centers. 
+Now, eight months later, a movement is building. 
+We are seeing men sign up from every single walk of life, and from every single corner in the world, from the United Nations' own Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the Secretary-Generals of NATO and the EU Council, from the prime minister of Bhutan to the president of Sierra Leone. 
+In Europe alone, all the male EU Commissioners and the members of Parliament of the Swedish and Iceland governments have signed up to be HeForShe. 
+In fact, one in 20 men in Iceland has joined the movement. 
+The rallying call of our passionate goodwill ambassador, Emma Watson, has garnered more than five billion media impressions, mobilizing hundreds and thousands of students around the world to create more than a hundred HeForShe student associations. 
+Now this is the beginning of the vision that HeForShe has for the world that we want to see. 
+Einstein once said, "" A human being is part of the whole... 
+This delusion is a kind of prison for us... 
+Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion. "" If women and men are part of a greater whole, as Einstein suggests, it is my hope that HeForShe can help free us to realize that it is not our gender that defines us, but ultimately, our shared humanity. 
+HeForShe is tapping into women's and men's dreams, the dreams that we have for ourselves, and the dreams that we have for our families, our children, friends, communities. 
+So that's what it is about. 
+Thank you. 
+
+So you go to the doctor and get some tests. 
+The doctor determines that you have high cholesterol and you would benefit from medication to treat it. 
+So you get a pillbox. 
+You have some confidence, your physician has some confidence that this is going to work. 
+They studied it very carefully, skeptically, they approved it. 
+They have a rough idea of how it works, they have a rough idea of what the side effects are. 
+It should be OK. 
+You have a little more of a conversation with your physician and the physician is a little worried because you've been blue, haven't felt like yourself, you haven't been able to enjoy things in life quite as much as you usually do. 
+Your physician says, "" You know, I think you have some depression. 
+I'm going to have to give you another pill. "" So now we're talking about two medications. 
+This pill also — millions of people have taken it, the company did studies, the FDA looked at it — all good. 
+Think things should go OK. Think things should go OK. 
+Well, wait a minute. How much have we studied these two together? Well, it's very hard to do that. In fact, it's not traditionally done. We totally depend on what we call "" post-marketing surveillance, "" 
+after the drugs hit the market. 
+How can we figure out if bad things are happening between two medications? 
+Why do I care about this problem? 
+I care about it deeply. 
+I'm an informatics and data science guy and really, in my opinion, the only hope — only hope — to understand these interactions is to leverage lots of different sources of data in order to figure out when drugs can be used together safely and when it's not so safe. 
+And it begins with my student Nick. 
+Let's call him "" Nick, "" because that's his name. 
+(Laughter) Nick was a young student. 
+I said, "" You know, Nick, we have to understand how drugs work and how they work together and how they work separately, and we don't have a great understanding. 
+But the FDA has made available an amazing database. 
+It's a database of adverse events. 
+They literally put on the web — publicly available, you could all download it right now — hundreds of thousands of adverse event reports from patients, doctors, companies, pharmacists. 
+And these reports are pretty simple: it has all the diseases that the patient has, all the drugs that they're on, and all the adverse events, or side effects, that they experience. 
+It is not all of the adverse events that are occurring in America today, but it's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of drugs. 
+So I said to Nick, "" Let's think about glucose. 
+I sent Nick off. Nick came back. 
+"" Russ, "" he said, "" I've created a classifier that can look at the side effects of a drug based on looking at this database, and can tell you whether that drug is likely to change glucose or not. "" He did it. It was very simple, in a way. 
+He took all the drugs that were known to change glucose and a bunch of drugs that don't change glucose, and said, "" What's the difference in their side effects? 
+Differences in fatigue? In appetite? In urination habits? "" All those things conspired to give him a really good predictor. 
+It's that every physician in the world knows all the drugs that change glucose, because it's core to our practice. 
+So it's great, good job, but not really that interesting, definitely not publishable. "" (Laughter) He said, "" I know, Russ. I thought you might say that. "" Nick is smart. 
+I looked at people in this database who were on two drugs, and I looked for signals similar, glucose-changing signals, for people taking two drugs, where each drug alone did not change glucose, but together I saw a strong signal. "" And I said, "" Oh! You're clever. Good idea. Show me the list. "" And there's a bunch of drugs, not very exciting. 
+But what caught my eye was, on the list there were two drugs: paroxetine, or Paxil, an antidepressant; and pravastatin, or Pravachol, a cholesterol medication. 
+And I said, "" Huh. There are millions of Americans on those two drugs. "" In fact, we learned later, 15 million Americans on paroxetine at the time, 15 million on pravastatin, and a million, we estimated, on both. 
+So that's a million people who might be having some problems with their glucose if this machine-learning mumbo jumbo that he did in the FDA database actually holds up. 
+But I said, "" It's still not publishable, because I love what you did with the mumbo jumbo, with the machine learning, but it's not really standard-of-proof evidence that we have. "" So we have to do something else. 
+And I said, "" Let's see if people on these two drugs have problems with their glucose. "" Now there are thousands and thousands of people in the Stanford medical records that take paroxetine and pravastatin. 
+But we needed special patients. 
+We needed patients who were on one of them and had a glucose measurement, then got the second one and had another glucose measurement, all within a reasonable period of time — something like two months. 
+And when we did that, we found 10 patients. 
+However, eight out of the 10 had a bump in their glucose when they got the second P — we call this P and P — when they got the second P. 
+Either one could be first, the second one comes up, glucose went up 20 milligrams per deciliter. 
+Just as a reminder, you walk around normally, if you're not diabetic, with a glucose of around 90. 
+And if it gets up to 120, 125, your doctor begins to think about a potential diagnosis of diabetes. 
+So a 20 bump — pretty significant. 
+I said, "" Nick, this is very cool. 
+But, I'm sorry, we still don't have a paper, because this is 10 patients and — give me a break — it's not enough patients. "" So we said, what can we do? 
+And we said, let's call our friends at Harvard and Vanderbilt, who also — Harvard in Boston, Vanderbilt in Nashville, who also have electronic medical records similar to ours. 
+Let's see if they can find similar patients with the one P, the other P, the glucose measurements in that range that we need. 
+God bless them, Vanderbilt in one week found 40 such patients, same trend. 
+Harvard found 100 patients, same trend. 
+So at the end, we had 150 patients from three diverse medical centers that were telling us that patients getting these two drugs were having their glucose bump somewhat significantly. 
+More interestingly, we had left out diabetics, because diabetics already have messed up glucose. 
+This was a big deal, and we said, "" We've got to publish this. "" We submitted the paper. 
+It was all data evidence, data from the FDA, data from Stanford, data from Vanderbilt, data from Harvard. 
+We had not done a single real experiment. 
+But we were nervous. 
+So Nick, while the paper was in review, went to the lab. 
+We found somebody who knew about lab stuff. 
+I don't do that. 
+I take care of patients, but I don't do pipettes. 
+They taught us how to feed mice drugs. 
+And lo and behold, glucose went up 20 to 60 milligrams per deciliter in the mice. 
+So the paper was accepted based on the informatics evidence alone, but we added a little note at the end, saying, oh by the way, if you give these to mice, it goes up. 
+That was great, and the story could have ended there. 
+But I still have six and a half minutes. 
+(Laughter) So we were sitting around thinking about all of this, and I don't remember who thought of it, but somebody said, "" I wonder if patients who are taking these two drugs are noticing side effects of hyperglycemia. 
+They could and they should. 
+How would we ever determine that? "" We said, well, what do you do? 
+You're taking a medication, one new medication or two, and you get a funny feeling. 
+What do you do? 
+You go to Google and type in the two drugs you're taking or the one drug you're taking, and you type in "" side effects. "" What are you experiencing? 
+So we said OK, let's ask Google if they will share their search logs with us, so that we can look at the search logs and see if patients are doing these kinds of searches. 
+Google, I am sorry to say, denied our request. 
+So I was bummed. 
+I was at a dinner with a colleague who works at Microsoft Research and I said, "" We wanted to do this study, Google said no, it's kind of a bummer. "" He said, "" Well, we have the Bing searches. "" (Laughter) Yeah. 
+That's great. 
+Now I felt like I was — (Laughter) I felt like I was talking to Nick again. 
+He works for one of the largest companies in the world, and I'm already trying to make him feel better. 
+We not only have Bing searches, but if you use Internet Explorer to do searches at Google, Yahoo, Bing, any... 
+Then, for 18 months, we keep that data for research purposes only. "" I said, "" Now you're talking! "" This was Eric Horvitz, my friend at Microsoft. 
+So we did a study where we defined 50 words that a regular person might type in if they're having hyperglycemia, like "" fatigue, "" "" loss of appetite, "" "" urinating a lot, "" "" peeing a lot "" — forgive me, but that's one of the things you might type in. 
+So we had 50 phrases that we called the "" diabetes words. "" And we did first a baseline. 
+And it turns out that about .5 to one percent of all searches on the Internet involve one of those words. 
+So that's our baseline rate. 
+If people type in "" paroxetine "" or "" Paxil "" — those are synonyms — and one of those words, the rate goes up to about two percent of diabetes-type words, if you already know that there's that "" paroxetine "" word. 
+If it's "" pravastatin, "" the rate goes up to about three percent from the baseline. 
+If both "" paroxetine "" and "" pravastatin "" are present in the query, it goes up to 10 percent, a huge three- to four-fold increase in those searches with the two drugs that we were interested in, and diabetes-type words or hyperglycemia-type words. 
+We published this, and it got some attention. 
+The reason it deserves attention is that patients are telling us their side effects indirectly through their searches. 
+We brought this to the attention of the FDA. 
+They were interested. 
+They have set up social media surveillance programs to collaborate with Microsoft, which had a nice infrastructure for doing this, and others, to look at Twitter feeds, to look at Facebook feeds, to look at search logs, to try to see early signs that drugs, either individually or together, are causing problems. 
+Well, first of all, we have now the promise of big data and medium-sized data to help us understand drug interactions and really, fundamentally, drug actions. 
+How do drugs work? 
+This will create and has created a new ecosystem for understanding how drugs work and to optimize their use. 
+Nick went on; he's a professor at Columbia now. 
+He found several very important interactions, and so we replicated this and we showed that this is a way that really works for finding drug-drug interactions. 
+However, there's a couple of things. 
+We don't just use pairs of drugs at a time. 
+As I said before, there are patients on three, five, seven, nine drugs. 
+Have they been studied with respect to their nine-way interaction? 
+Yes, we can do pair-wise, A and B, A and C, A and D, but what about A, B, C, D, E, F, G all together, being taken by the same patient, perhaps interacting with each other in ways that either makes them more effective or less effective or causes side effects that are unexpected? 
+We really have no idea. 
+It's a blue sky, open field for us to use data to try to understand the interaction of drugs. 
+Two more lessons: I want you to think about the power that we were able to generate with the data from people who had volunteered their adverse reactions through their pharmacists, through themselves, through their doctors, the people who allowed the databases at Stanford, Harvard, Vanderbilt, to be used for research. 
+But we can't have a system that closes that data off, because it is too rich of a source of inspiration, innovation and discovery for new things in medicine. 
+The two drugs actually caused problems. 
+They increased glucose. 
+They could throw somebody into diabetes who would otherwise not be in diabetes, and so you would want to use the two drugs very carefully together, perhaps not together, make different choices when you're prescribing. 
+But there was another possibility. 
+We could have found two drugs or three drugs that were interacting in a beneficial way. 
+We could have found new effects of drugs that neither of them has alone, but together, instead of causing a side effect, they could be a new and novel treatment for diseases that don't have treatments or where the treatments are not effective. 
+If we think about drug treatment today, all the major breakthroughs — for HIV, for tuberculosis, for depression, for diabetes — it's always a cocktail of drugs. 
+And so the upside here, and the subject for a different TED Talk on a different day, is how can we use the same data sources to find good effects of drugs in combination that will provide us new treatments, new insights into how drugs work and enable us to take care of our patients even better? 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We will demonstrate the concept of machine athleticism and the research to achieve it with the help of these flying machines called quadrocopters, or quads, for short. 
+They are inherently unstable, and they need some form of automatic feedback control in order to be able to fly. 
+So, how did it just do that? 
+Cameras on the ceiling and a laptop serve as an indoor global positioning system. 
+It's the magic that brings these machines to life. 
+So how does one design the algorithms that create a machine athlete? 
+For example, that's how we can make the quad hover. 
+We first captured the dynamics with a set of differential equations. 
+We then manipulate these equations with the help of control theory to create algorithms that stabilize the quad. 
+Suppose that we want this quad to not only hover but to also balance this pole. 
+It becomes a little bit more difficult when I only have one foot on the ground and when I don't use my hands. 
+Notice how this pole has a reflective marker on top, which means that it can be located in the space. 
+We added the mathematical model of the pole to that of the quad. 
+Once we have a model of the combined quad-pole system, we can use control theory to create algorithms for controlling it. 
+Here, you see that it's stable, and even if I give it little nudges, it goes back — to the nice, balanced position. 
+Using this pointer, made out of reflective markers, I can point to where I want the quad to be in space a fixed distance away from me. 
+(Laughter) The key to these acrobatic maneuvers is algorithms, designed with the help of mathematical models and control theory. 
+Let's tell the quad to come back here and let the pole drop, and I will next demonstrate the importance of understanding physical models and the workings of the physical world. 
+Notice how the quad lost altitude when I put this glass of water on it. 
+Unlike the balancing pole, I did not include the mathematical model of the glass in the system. 
+Like before, I could use the pointer to tell the quad where I want it to be in space. 
+The second is that the propellers are all pointing in the same direction of the glass, pointing up. 
+You put these two things together, the net result is that all side forces on the glass are small and are mainly dominated by aerodynamic effects, which at these speeds are negligible. 
+And that's why you don't need to model the glass. 
+(Applause) (Applause ends) The lesson here is that some high-performance tasks are easier than others, and that understanding the physics of the problem tells you which ones are easy and which ones are hard. 
+We've all heard stories of athletes performing feats while physically injured. 
+Can a machine also perform with extreme physical damage? 
+Conventional wisdom says that you need at least four fixed motor propeller pairs in order to fly, because there are four degrees of freedom to control: roll, pitch, yaw and acceleration. 
+Hexacopters and octocopters, with six and eight propellers, can provide redundancy, but quadrocopters are much more popular because they have the minimum number of fixed motor propeller pairs: four. 
+(Laughter) If we analyze the mathematical model of this machine with only two working propellers, we discover that there's an unconventional way to fly it. 
+We relinquish control of yaw, but roll, pitch and acceleration can still be controlled with algorithms that exploit this new configuration. 
+Mathematical models tell us exactly when and why this is possible. 
+In this instance, this knowledge allows us to design novel machine architectures or to design clever algorithms that gracefully handle damage, just like human athletes do, instead of building machines with redundancy. 
+We can't help but hold our breath when we watch a diver somersaulting into the water, or when a vaulter is twisting in the air, the ground fast approaching. 
+Will the diver be able to pull off a rip entry? 
+Will the vaulter stick the landing? 
+This maneuver is going to happen so quickly that we can't use position feedback to correct the motion during execution. 
+Instead, what the quad can do is perform the maneuver blindly, observe how it finishes the maneuver, and then use that information to modify its behavior so that the next flip is better. 
+Similar to the diver and the vaulter, it is only through repeated practice that the maneuver can be learned and executed to the highest standard. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Striking a moving ball is a necessary skill in many sports. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) (Applause ends) This quad has a racket strapped onto its head with a sweet spot roughly the size of an apple, so not too large. 
+The following calculations are made every 20 milliseconds, or 50 times per second. 
+We first figure out where the ball is going. 
+We then next calculate how the quad should hit the ball so that it flies to where it was thrown from. 
+Third, a trajectory is planned that carries the quad from its current state to the impact point with the ball. 
+Fourth, we only execute 20 milliseconds' worth of that strategy. 
+(Applause) Machines can not only perform dynamic maneuvers on their own, they can do it collectively. 
+These three quads are cooperatively carrying a sky net. 
+(Applause) (Applause ends) They perform an extremely dynamic and collective maneuver to launch the ball back to me. 
+Notice that, at full extension, these quads are vertical. 
+(Applause) In fact, when fully extended, this is roughly five times greater than what a bungee jumper feels at the end of their launch. 
+The algorithms to do this are very similar to what the single quad used to hit the ball back to me. 
+Mathematical models are used to continuously re-plan a cooperative strategy 50 times per second. 
+What happens when we couple this machine athleticism with that of a human being? 
+What I have in front of me is a commercial gesture sensor mainly used in gaming. 
+It can recognize what my various body parts are doing in real time. 
+We now have a natural way of interacting with the raw athleticism of these quads with my gestures. 
+Take this quad, for example. 
+We can use mathematical models to estimate the force that I'm applying to the quad. 
+Once we know this force, we can also change the laws of physics, as far as the quad is concerned, of course. 
+Here, the quad is behaving as if it were in a viscous fluid. 
+We now have an intimate way of interacting with a machine. 
+I will use this new capability to position this camera-carrying quad to the appropriate location for filming the remainder of this demonstration. 
+So we can physically interact with these quads and we can change the laws of physics. 
+Let's have a little bit of fun with this. 
+As time goes on, gravity will be increased until we're all back on planet Earth, but I assure you we won't get there. 
+(Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Whew! 
+You're all thinking now, these guys are having way too much fun, and you're probably also asking yourself, why exactly are they building machine athletes? 
+Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities. 
+Others think that it has more of a social role, that it's used to bind the group. 
+Similarly, we use the analogy of sports and athleticism to create new algorithms for machines to push them to their limits. 
+Like all our past creations and innovations, they may be used to improve the human condition or they may be misused and abused. 
+They're the current members of the Flying Machine Arena research team. 
+Look out for them. They're destined for great things. 
+
+One thing I wanted to say about film making is — about this film — in thinking about some of the wonderful talks we've heard here, Michael Moschen, and some of the talks about music, this idea that there is a narrative line, and that music exists in time. 
+A film also exists in time; it's an experience that you should go through emotionally. 
+And in making this film I felt that so many of the documentaries I've seen were all about learning something, or knowledge, or driven by talking heads, and driven by ideas. 
+And I wanted this film to be driven by emotions, and really to follow my journey. 
+So instead of doing the talking head thing, instead it's composed of scenes, and we meet people along the way. 
+We only meet them once. 
+They don't come back several times, so it really chronicles a journey. 
+It's something like life, that once you get in it you can't get out. 
+There are two clips I want to show you, the first one is a kind of hodgepodge, its just three little moments, four little moments with three of the people who are here tonight. 
+It's not the way they occur in the film, because they are part of much larger scenes. 
+They play off each other in a wonderful way. 
+And that ends with a little clip of my father, of Lou, talking about something that is very dear to him, which is the accidents of life. 
+I think he felt that the greatest things in life were accidental, and perhaps not planned at all. 
+And those three clips will be followed by a scene of perhaps what, to me, is really his greatest building which is a building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. 
+He built the capital over there. 
+And I think you'll enjoy this building, it's never been seen — it's been still photographed, but never photographed by a film crew. 
+We were the first film crew in there. 
+So you'll see images of this remarkable building. 
+A couple of things to keep in mind when you see it, it was built entirely by hand, I think they got a crane the last year. 
+It was built entirely by hand off bamboo scaffolding, people carrying these baskets of concrete on their heads, dumping them in the forms. 
+It is the capital of the country, and it took 23 years to build, which is something they seem to be very proud of over there. 
+It took as long as the Taj Mahal. 
+Unfortunately it took so long that Lou never saw it finished. 
+He died in 1974. 
+The building was finished in 1983. 
+So it continued on for many years after he died. 
+Think about that when you see that building, that sometimes the things we strive for so hard in life we never get to see finished. 
+And that really struck me about my father, in the sense that he had such belief that somehow, doing these things giving in the way that he gave, that something good would come out of it, even in the middle of a war, there was a war with Pakistan at one point, and the construction stopped totally and he kept working, because he felt, "" Well when the war is done they'll need this building. "" So, those are the two clips I'm going to show. 
+Roll that tape. 
+(Applause) Richard Saul Wurman: I remember hearing him talk at Penn. 
+And I came home and I said to my father and mother, "" I just met this man: doesn't have much work, and he's sort of ugly, funny voice, and he's a teacher at school. 
+I know you've never heard of him, but just mark this day that someday you will hear of him, because he's really an amazing man. "" Frank Gehry: I heard he had some kind of a fling with Ingrid Bergman. Is that true? 
+Nathaniel Kahn: If he did he was a very lucky man. 
+(Laughter) NK: Did you hear that, really? 
+FG: Yeah, when he was in Rome. 
+Moshe Safdie: He was a real nomad. 
+And you know, when I knew him when I was in the office, he would come in from a trip, and he would be in the office for two or three days intensely, and he would pack up and go. 
+You know he'd be in the office till three in the morning working with us and there was this kind of sense of the nomad in him. 
+I mean as tragic as his death was in a railway station, it was so consistent with his life, you know? 
+I mean I often think I'm going to die in a plane, or I'm going to die in an airport, or die jogging without an identification on me. 
+I don't know why I sort of carry that from that memory of the way he died. 
+But he was a sort of a nomad at heart. 
+Louis Kahn: How accidental our existences are really and how full of influence by circumstance. 
+Man: We are the morning workers who come, all the time, here and enjoy the walking, city's beauty and the atmosphere and this is the nicest place of Bangladesh. 
+We are proud of it. 
+NK: You're proud of it? 
+Man: Yes, it is the national image of Bangladesh. 
+NK: Do you know anything about the architect? 
+Man: Architect? I've heard about him; he's a top-ranking architect. 
+NK: Well actually I'm here because I'm the architect's son, he was my father. 
+Man: Oh! Dad is Louis Farrakhan? 
+NK: Yeah. No not Louis Farrakhan, Louis Kahn. 
+Man: Louis Kahn, yes! 
+(Laughter) Man: Your father, is he alive? 
+NK: No, he's been dead for 25 years. 
+Man: Very pleased to welcome you back. 
+NK: Thank you. 
+NK: He never saw it finished, Pop. 
+No, he never saw this. 
+Shamsul Wares: It was almost impossible, building for a country like ours. 
+In 30, 50 years back, it was nothing, only paddy fields, and since we invited him here, he felt that he has got a responsibility. 
+He wanted to be a Moses here, he gave us democracy. 
+He is not a political man, but in this guise he has given us the institution for democracy, from where we can rise. 
+In that way it is so relevant. 
+He didn't care for how much money this country has, or whether he would be able to ever finish this building, but somehow he has been able to do it, build it, here. 
+And this is the largest project he has got in here, the poorest country in the world. 
+NK: It cost him his life. 
+SW: Yeah, he paid. He paid his life for this, and that is why he is great and we'll remember him. 
+But he was also human. 
+Now his failure to satisfy the family life, is an inevitable association of great people. 
+But I think his son will understand this, and will have no sense of grudge, or sense of being neglected, I think. 
+He cared in a very different manner, but it takes a lot of time to understand that. 
+In social aspect of his life he was just like a child, he was not at all matured. 
+He could not say no to anything, and that is why, that he cannot say no to things, we got this building today. 
+You see, only that way you can be able to understand him. 
+There is no other shortcut, no other way to really understand him. 
+But I think he has given us this building and we feel all the time for him, that's why, he has given love for us. 
+He could not probably give the right kind of love for you, but for us, he has given the people the right kind of love, that is important. 
+You have to understand that. 
+He had an enormous amount of love, he loved everybody. 
+To love everybody, he sometimes did not see the very closest ones, and that is inevitable for men of his stature. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is a wheat bread, a whole wheat bread, and it's made with a new technique that I've been playing around with, and developing and writing about which, for lack of a better name, we call the epoxy method. 
+And I call it an epoxy method because — it's not very appetizing. I understand that — but — but if you think about epoxy, what's epoxy? 
+It's two resins that are, sort of, in and of themselves — neither of which can make glue, but when you put the two together, something happens. A bond takes place, and you get this very strong, powerful adhesive. 
+Well, in this technique, what I've tried to do is kind of gather all of the knowledge that the bread-baking world, the artisan bread-baking community, has been trying to accumulate over the last 20 years or so — since we've been engaged in a bread renaissance in America — and put it together to come up with a method that would help to take whole-grain breads. 
+And let's face it, everyone's trying to move towards whole grains. 
+We finally, after 40 years of knowing that wholegrain was a healthier option, we're finally getting to the point where we actually are tipping over and attempting to actually eat them. 
+(Laughter) The challenge, though, for a wholegrain baker is, you know, how do you make it taste good? 
+Because whole grain — it's easy with white flour to make a good-tasting bread. White flour is sweet. 
+It's mainly starch, and starch, when you break it down — what is starch? It's — thank you — sugar, yes. 
+So a baker, and a good baker, knows how to pull or draw forth the inherent sugar trapped in the starch. 
+With whole grain bread, you have other obstacles. 
+You've got bran, which is probably the healthiest part of the bread for us, or the fiber for us because it is just loaded with fiber, for the bran is fiber. 
+It's got germ. Those are the good things, but those aren't the tastiest parts of the wheat. 
+So whole grain breads historically have had sort of this onus of being health food breads, and people don't like to eat, quote, health food. They like to eat healthy and healthily, but when we think of something as a health food, we think of it as something we eat out of obligation, not out of passion and love for the flavor. 
+And ultimately, the challenge of the baker, the challenge of every culinary student, of every chef, is to deliver flavor. 
+Flavor is king. Flavor rules. 
+I call it the flavor rule. Flavor rules. 
+And — and you can get somebody to eat something that's good for them once, but they won't eat it again if they don't like it, right? 
+So, this is the challenge for this bread. 
+We're going to try this at lunch, and I'll explain a bit more about it, but it's made not only with two types of pre-doughs — this attempt, again, at bringing out flavor is to make a piece of dough the day before that is not leavened. 
+It's just dough that is wet. 
+It's hydrated dough we call "" the soaker "" — that helps to start enzyme activity. 
+And enzymes are the secret, kind of, ingredient in dough that brings out flavor. 
+It starts to release the sugars trapped in the starch. 
+That's what enzymes are doing. 
+And so, if we can release some of those, they become accessible to us in our palate. 
+They become accessible to the yeast as food. 
+They become accessible to the oven for caramelization to give us a beautiful crust. 
+The other pre-dough that we make is fermented — our pre-ferment. 
+And it's made — it can be a sourdough starter, or what we call a "" biga "" or any other kind of pre-fermented dough with a little yeast in it, and that starts to develop flavor also. 
+And on day two, we put those two pieces together. That's the epoxy. 
+And we're hoping that, sort of, the enzyme piece of dough becomes the fuel pack for the leavened piece of dough, and when we put them together and add the final ingredients, we can create a bread that does evoke the full potential of flavor trapped in the grain. 
+That's the challenge. Okay, so, now, what we — in the journey of wheat, let's go back and look at these 12 stages. 
+I'm going to go through them very quickly and then revisit them. 
+Okay, we're going to start with the first stage. 
+And this is what every student has to begin with. 
+Everyone who works in the culinary world knows that the first stage of cooking is "" mise en place, "" which is just a French way of saying, "" get organized. "" Everything in its place. First stage. 
+So in baking we call it scaling — weighing out the ingredients. 
+Stage two is mixing. We take the ingredients and we mix them. 
+We have to develop the gluten. 
+There's no gluten in flour. There's only the potential for gluten. 
+Here's another kind of prefiguring of epoxy because we've got glutenin and gliadin, neither of which are strong enough to make a good bread. 
+But when they get hydrated and they bond to each other, they create a stronger molecule, a stronger protein we call gluten. 
+And so we, in the mixing process, have to develop the gluten, we have to activate the leaven or the yeast, and we have to essentially distribute all the ingredients evenly. 
+Then we get into fermentation, the third stage, which is really where the flavor develops. 
+The yeast comes alive and starts eating the sugars, creating carbon dioxide and alcohol — essentially it's burping and sweating, which is what bread is. 
+It's yeast burps and sweat. 
+And somehow, this is transformed — the yeast burps and sweats are later transformed — and this is really getting to the heart of what makes bread so special is that it is a transformational food, and we're going to explore that in a minute. 
+But then, quickly through the next few stages. 
+We, after it's fermented and it's developed, started to develop flavor and character, we divide it into smaller units. 
+And then we take those units and we shape them. We give them a little pre-shape, usually a round or a little torpedo shape, sometimes. 
+That's called "" rounding. "" And there's a short rest period. It can be for a few seconds. 
+It can be for 20 or 30 minutes. We call that resting or benching. 
+Then we go into final shaping, "" panning "" — which means putting the shaped loaf on a pan. 
+This takes a second, but it's a distinctive stage. 
+It can be in a basket. It can be in a loaf pan, but we pan it. 
+And then, stage nine. 
+The fermentation which started at stage three is continuing through all these other stages. Again, developing more flavor. 
+The final fermentation takes place in stage nine. 
+We call it "" proofing. "" Proofing means to prove that the dough is alive. 
+And at stage nine we get the dough to the final shape, and it goes into the oven — stage 10. 
+Three transformations take place in the oven. 
+The sugars in the dough caramelize in the crust. 
+They give us that beautiful brown crust. 
+Only the crust can caramelize. It's the only place that gets hot enough. 
+Inside, the proteins — this gluten — coagulates. 
+When it gets to about 160 degrees, the proteins all line up and they create structure, the gluten structure — what ultimately we will call the crumb of the bread. 
+And the starches, when they reach about 180 degrees, gelatinize. 
+And gelatinization is yet another oven transformation. 
+Coagulation, caramelization and gelatinization — when the starch is thick and they absorb all the moisture that's around them, they — they kind of swell, and then they burst. 
+And they burst, and they spill their guts into the bread. 
+So basically now we're eating yeast sweats — sweat, burps and starch guts. 
+Again, transformed in stage 10 in the oven because what went into the oven as dough comes out in stage 11 as bread. 
+And stage 11, we call it cooling — because we never really eat the bread right away. 
+There's a little carry-over baking. 
+The proteins have to set up, strengthen and firm up. 
+And then we have stage 12, which the textbooks call "" packaging, "" but my students call "" eating. "" And so, we're going to be on our own journey today from wheat to eat, and in a few minutes we will try this, and see if we have succeeded in fulfilling this baker's mission of pulling out flavor. 
+But I want to go back now and revisit these steps, and talk about it from the standpoint of transformation, because I really believe that all things can be understood — and this is not my own idea. This goes back to the Scholastics and to the Ancients — that all things can be understood on four levels: the literal, the metaphoric or poetic level, the political or ethical level. 
+And ultimately, the mystical or sometimes called the "" anagogical "" level. 
+It's hard to get to those levels unless you go through the literal. 
+In fact, Dante says you can't understand the three deeper levels unless you first understand the literal level, so that's why we're talking literally about bread. 
+But let's kind of look at these stages again from the standpoint of connections to possibly a deeper level — all in my quest for answering the question, "What is it about bread that's so special?" 
+And fulfilling this mission of evoking the full potential of flavor. 
+Because what happens is, bread begins as wheat or any other grain. 
+But what's wheat? Wheat is a grass that grows in the field. 
+And, like all grasses, at a certain point it puts out seeds. 
+And we harvest those seeds, and those are the wheat kernels. 
+Now, in order to harvest it — I mean, what's harvesting? 
+It's just a euphemism for killing, right? 
+I mean, that's what's harvest — we say we harvest the pig, you know? 
+Yes, we slaughter, you know. Yes, that's life. 
+We harvest the wheat, and in harvesting it, we kill it. 
+Now, wheat is alive, and as we harvest it, it gives up its seeds. 
+Now, at least with seeds we have the potential for future life. 
+We can plant those in the ground. 
+And we save some of those for the next generation. 
+But most of those seeds get crushed and turned into flour. 
+And at that point, the wheat has suffered the ultimate indignity. 
+It's not only been killed, but it's been denied any potential for creating future life. 
+So we turn it into flour. 
+So as I said, I think bread is a transformational food. 
+The first transformation — and, by the way, the definition of transformation for me is a radical change from one thing into something else. 
+O.K.? Radical, not subtle. 
+Not like hot water made cold, or cold water turned hot, but water boiled off and becoming steam. 
+That's a transformation, two different things. 
+Well, in this case, the first transformation is alive to dead. 
+I'd call that radical. 
+So, we've got now this flour. 
+And what do we do? We add some water. 
+In stage one, we weigh it. 
+In stage two, we add water and salt to it, mix it together, and we create something that we call "" clay. "" It's like clay. 
+And we infuse that clay with an ingredient that we call "" leaven. "" In this case, it's yeast, but yeast is leaven. What does leaven mean? 
+Leaven comes from the root word that means enliven — to vivify, to bring to life. 
+By the way, what's the Hebrew word for clay? Adam. 
+You see, the baker, in this moment, has become, in a sense, sort of, the God of his dough, you know, and his dough, well, while it's not an intelligent life form, is now alive. 
+And we know it's alive because in stage three, it grows. Growth is the proof of life. 
+And while it's growing, all these literal transformations are taking place. 
+Enzymes are breaking forth sugars. 
+Yeast is eating sugar and turning it into carbon dioxide and alcohol. 
+Bacteria is in there, eating the same sugars, turning them into acids. 
+In other words, personality and character's being developed in this dough under the watchful gaze of the baker. 
+And the baker's choices all along the way determine the outcome of the product. 
+A subtle change in temperature — a subtle change in time — it's all about a balancing act between time, temperature and ingredients. That's the art of baking. 
+So all these things are determined by the baker, and the bread goes through some stages, and characters develop. 
+And then we divide it, and this one big piece of dough is divided into smaller units, and each of those units are given shape by the baker. 
+And as they're shaped, they're raised again, all along proving that they're alive, and developing character. 
+And at stage 10, we take it to the oven. 
+It's still dough. Nobody eats bread dough — a few people do, I think, but not too many. 
+I've met some dough eaters, but — it's not the staff of life, right? Bread is the staff of life. 
+But dough is what we're working with, and we take that dough to the oven, and it goes into the oven. As soon as the interior temperature of that dough crosses the threshold of 140 degrees, it passes what we call the "" thermal death point. "" Students love that TDP. They think it's the name of a video game. 
+But it's the thermal death point — all life ceases there. 
+The yeast, whose mission it has been up till now to raise the dough, to enliven it, to vivify it, in order to complete its mission, which is also to turn this dough into bread, has to give up its life. 
+So you see the symbolism at work? It's starting to come forth a little bit, you know. 
+It's starting to make sense to me — what goes in is dough, what comes out is bread — or it goes in alive, comes out dead. 
+Third transformation. First transformation, alive to dead. 
+Second transformation, dead brought back to life. 
+Third transformation, alive to dead — but dough to bread. 
+Or another analogy would be, a caterpillar has been turned into a butterfly. 
+And it's what comes out of the oven that is what we call the staff of life. 
+This is the product that everyone in the world eats, that is so difficult to give up. 
+It's so deeply embedded in our psyches that bread is used as a symbol for life. 
+It's used as a symbol for transformation. 
+And so, as we get to stage 12 and we partake of that, again completing the life cycle, you know, we have a chance to essentially ingest that — it nurtures us, and we continue to carry on and have opportunities to ponder things like this. 
+So this is what I've learned from bread. 
+This is what bread has taught me in my journey. 
+And what we're going to attempt to do with this bread here, again, is to use, in addition to everything we talked about, this bread we're going to call "" spent grain bread "" because, as you know, bread-making is very similar to beer-making. 
+Beer is basically liquid bread, or bread is solid beer. 
+And — (Laughter) they — they're invented around the same time. I think beer came first. 
+And the Egyptian who was tending the beer fell asleep in the hot, Egyptian sun, and it turned into bread. 
+But we've got this bread, and what I did here is to try to, again, evoke even more flavor from this grain, was we've added into it the spent grain from beer-making. 
+And if you make this bread, you can use any kind of spent grain from any type of beer. 
+I like dark spent grain. Today we're using a light spent grain that's actually from, like, some kind of a lager of some sort — a light lager or an ale — that is wheat and barley that's been toasted. 
+In other words, the beer-maker knows also how to evoke flavor from the grains by using sprouting and malting and roasting. 
+We're going to take some of that, and put it into the bread. 
+So now we not only have a high-fiber bread, but now fiber on top of fiber. 
+And so this is, again, hopefully not only a healthy bread, but a bread that you will enjoy. 
+So, if I, kind of, break this bread, maybe we can share this now a little bit here. 
+We'll start a little piece here, and I'm going to take a little piece here — I think I'd better taste it myself before you have it at lunch. 
+I'll leave you with what I call the baker's blessing. 
+May your crust be crisp, and your bread always rise. 
+Thank you. 
+
+If you really want to understand the problem that we're facing with the oceans, you have to think about the biology at the same time you think about the physics. 
+We can't solve the problems unless we start studying the ocean in a very much more interdisciplinary way. 
+So I'm going to demonstrate that through discussion of some of the climate change things that are going on in the ocean. 
+We'll look at sea level rise. 
+We'll look at ocean warming. 
+And then the last thing on the list there, ocean acidification — if you were to ask me, you know, "" What do you worry about the most? 
+What frightens you? "" for me, it's ocean acidification. 
+And this has come onto the stage pretty recently. 
+So I will spend a little time at the end. 
+I was in Copenhagen in December like a number of you in this room. 
+And I think we all found it, simultaneously, an eye-opening and a very frustrating experience. 
+I sat in this large negotiation hall, at one point, for three or four hours, without hearing the word "" oceans "" one time. 
+It really wasn't on the radar screen. 
+The nations that brought it up when we had the speeches of the national leaders — it tended to be the leaders of the small island states, the low-lying island states. 
+And by this weird quirk of alphabetical order of the nations, a lot of the low-lying states, like Kiribati and Nauru, they were seated at the very end of these immensely long rows. 
+You know, they were marginalized in the negotiation room. 
+One of the problems is coming up with the right target. 
+It's not clear what the target should be. 
+And how can you figure out how to fix something if you don't have a clear target? 
+Now, you've heard about "" two degrees "": that we should limit temperature rise to no more than two degrees. 
+But there's not a lot of science behind that number. 
+We've also talked about concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 
+Should it be 450? Should it be 400? 
+There's not a lot of science behind that one either. 
+Most of the science that is behind these numbers, these potential targets, is based on studies on land. 
+And I would say, for the people that work in the ocean and think about what the targets should be, we would argue that they must be much lower. 
+You know, from an oceanic perspective, 450 is way too high. 
+Now there's compelling evidence that it really needs to be 350. 
+We are, right now, at 390 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. 
+We're not going to put the brakes on in time to stop at 450, so we've got to accept we're going to do an overshoot, and the discussion as we go forward has to focus on how far the overshoot goes and what's the pathway back to 350. 
+Now, why is this so complicated? 
+Why don't we know some of these things a little bit better? 
+Well, the problem is that we've got very complicated forces in the climate system. 
+There's all kinds of natural causes of climate change. 
+There's air-sea interactions. 
+Here in Galapagos, we're affected by El Ninos and La Nina. 
+But the entire planet warms up when there's a big El Nino. 
+Volcanoes eject aerosols into the atmosphere. 
+That changes our climate. 
+The ocean contains most of the exchangeable heat on the planet. 
+So anything that influences how ocean surface waters mix with the deep water changes the ocean of the planet. 
+And we know the solar output's not constant through time. 
+So those are all natural causes of climate change. 
+And then we have the human-induced causes of climate change as well. 
+We're changing the characteristics of the surface of the land, the reflectivity. 
+We inject our own aerosols into the atmosphere, and we have trace gases, and not just carbon dioxide — it's methane, ozone, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen. 
+So here's the thing. It sounds like a simple question. 
+Is CO2 produced by man's activities causing the planet to warm up? 
+But to answer that question, to make a clear attribution to carbon dioxide, you have to know something about all of these other agents of change. 
+But the fact is we do know a lot about all of those things. 
+You know, thousands of scientists have been working on understanding all of these man-made causes and the natural causes. 
+And we've got it worked out, and we can say, "Yes, CO2 is causing the planet to warm up now." 
+Now, we have many ways to study natural variability. 
+I'll show you a few examples of this now. 
+This is the ship that I spent the last three months on in the Antarctic. 
+It's a scientific drilling vessel. 
+We go out for months at a time and drill into the sea bed to recover sediments that tell us stories of climate change, right. 
+Like one of the ways to understand our greenhouse future is to drill down in time to the last period where we had CO2 double what it is today. 
+And so that's what we've done with this ship. 
+This was — this is south of the Antarctic Circle. 
+It looks downright tropical there. 
+One day where we had calm seas and sun, which was the reason I could get off the ship. 
+Most of the time it looked like this. 
+We had a waves up to 50 ft. 
+and winds averaging about 40 knots for most of the voyage and up to 70 or 80 knots. 
+So that trip just ended, and I can't show you too many results from that right now, but we'll go back one more year, to another drilling expedition I've been involved in. 
+This was led by Ross Powell and Tim Naish. 
+It's the ANDRILL project. 
+And we made the very first bore hole through the largest floating ice shelf on the planet. 
+This is a crazy thing, this big drill rig wrapped in a blanket to keep everybody warm, drilling at temperatures of minus 40. 
+And we drilled in the Ross Sea. 
+That's the Ross Sea Ice Shelf on the right there. 
+So, this huge floating ice shelf the size of Alaska comes from West Antarctica. 
+Now, West Antarctica is the part of the continent where the ice is grounded on sea floor as much as 2,000 meters deep. 
+So that ice sheet is partly floating, and it's exposed to the ocean, to the ocean heat. 
+This is the part of Antarctica that we worry about. 
+Because it's partly floating, you can imagine, is sea level rises a little bit, the ice lifts off the bed, and then it can break off and float north. 
+When that ice melts, sea level rises by six meters. 
+So we drill back in time to see how often that's happened, and exactly how fast that ice can melt. 
+Here's the cartoon on the left there. 
+We drilled through a hundred meters of floating ice shelf then through 900 meters of water and then 1,300 meters into the sea floor. 
+So it's the deepest geological bore hole ever drilled. 
+It took about 10 years to put this project together. 
+And here's what we found. 
+Now, there's 40 scientists working on this project, and people are doing all kinds of really complicated and expensive analyses. 
+But it turns out, you know, the thing that told the best story was this simple visual description. 
+You know, we saw this in the core samples as they came up. 
+We saw these alternations between sediments that look like this — there's gravel and cobbles in there and a bunch of sand. 
+That's the kind of material in the deep sea. 
+It can only get there if it's carried out by ice. 
+So we know there's an ice shelf overhead. 
+And that alternates with a sediment that looks like this. 
+This is absolutely beautiful stuff. 
+This sediment is 100 percent made up of the shells of microscopic plants. 
+And these plants need sunlight, so we know when we find that sediment there's no ice overhead. 
+And we saw about 35 alternations between open water and ice-covered water, between gravels and these plant sediments. 
+So what that means is, what it tells us is that the Ross Sea region, this ice shelf, melted back and formed anew about 35 times. 
+And this is in the past four million years. 
+This was completely unexpected. 
+Nobody imagined that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was this dynamic. 
+In fact, the lore for many years has been, "" The ice formed many tens of millions of years ago, and it's been there ever since. "" And now we know that in our recent past it melted back and formed again, and sea level went up and down, six meters at a time. 
+What caused it? 
+Well, we're pretty sure that it's very small changes in the amount of sunlight reaching Antarctica, just caused by natural changes in the orbit of the Earth. 
+But here's the key thing: you know, the other thing we found out is that the ice sheet passed a threshold, that the planet warmed up enough — and the number's about one degree to one and a half degrees Centigrade — the planet warmed up enough that it became... 
+that ice sheet became very dynamic and was very easily melted. 
+And you know what? 
+We've actually changed the temperature in the last century just the right amount. 
+So many of us are convinced now that West Antarctica, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is starting to melt. 
+We do expect to see a sea-level rise on the order of one to two meters by the end of this century. 
+And it could be larger than that. 
+This is a serious consequence for nations like Kiribati, you know, where the average elevation is about a little over a meter above sea level. 
+Okay, the second story takes place here in Galapagos. 
+This is a bleached coral, coral that died during the 1982- '83 El Nino. 
+This is from Champion Island. 
+It's about a meter tall Pavona clavus colony. 
+And it's covered with algae. That's what happens. 
+When these things die, immediately, organisms come in and encrust and live on that dead surface. 
+And so, when a coral colony is killed by an El Nino event, it leaves this indelible record. 
+You can go then and study corals and figure out how often do you see this. 
+So one of the things thought of in the '80s was to go back and take cores of coral heads throughout the Galapagos and find out how often was there a devastating event. 
+And just so you know, 1982- '83, that El Nino killed 95 percent of all the corals here in Galapagos. 
+Then there was similar mortality in '97-' 98. 
+And what we found after drilling back in time two to 400 years was that these were unique events. 
+We saw no other mass mortality events. 
+So these events in our recent past really are unique. 
+So they're either just truly monster El Ninos, or they're just very strong El Ninos that occurred against a backdrop of global warming. 
+Either case, it's bad news for the corals of the Galapagos Islands. 
+Here's how we sample the corals. 
+This is actually Easter Island. Look at this monster. 
+This coral is eight meters tall, right. 
+And it been growing for about 600 years. 
+Now, Sylvia Earle turned me on to this exact same coral. 
+And she was diving here with John Lauret — I think it was 1994 — and collected a little nugget and sent it to me. 
+And we started working on it, and we figured out we could tell the temperature of the ancient ocean from analyzing a coral like this. 
+So we have a diamond drill. 
+We're not killing the colony; we're taking a small core sample out of the top. 
+The core comes up as these cylindrical tubes of limestone. 
+And that material then we take back to the lab and analyze it. 
+You can see some of the coral cores there on the right. 
+So we've done that all over the Eastern Pacific. 
+We're starting to do it in the Western Pacific as well. 
+I'll take you back here to the Galapagos Islands. 
+And we've been working at this fascinating uplift here in Urbina Bay. 
+That the place where, during an earthquake in 1954, this marine terrace was lifted up out of the ocean very quickly, and it was lifted up about six to seven meters. 
+And so now you can walk through a coral reef without getting wet. 
+If you go on the ground there, it looks like this, and this is the grandaddy coral. 
+It's 11 meters in diameter, and we know that it started growing in the year 1584. 
+Imagine that. 
+And that coral was growing happily in those shallow waters, until 1954, when the earthquake happened. 
+Now the reason we know it's 1584 is that these corals have growth bands. 
+When you cut them, slice those cores in half and x-ray them, you see these light and dark bands. 
+Each one of those is a year. 
+We know these corals grow about a centimeter and a half a year. 
+And we just count on down to the bottom. 
+Then their other attribute is that they have this great chemistry. 
+We can analyze the carbonate that makes up the coral, and there's a whole bunch of things we can do. 
+But in this case, we measured the different isotopes of oxygen. 
+Their ratio tells us the water temperature. 
+In this example here, we had monitored this reef in Galapagos with temperature recorders, so we know the temperature of the water the coral's growing in. 
+Then after we harvest a coral, we measure this ratio, and now you can see, those curves match perfectly. 
+In this case, at these islands, you know, corals are instrumental-quality recorders of change in the water. 
+And of course, our thermometers only take us back 50 years or so here. 
+The coral can take us back hundreds and thousands of years. 
+So, what we do: we've merged a lot of different data sets. 
+It's not just my group; there's maybe 30 groups worldwide doing this. 
+But we get these instrumental- and near-instrumental-quality records of temperature change that go back hundreds of years, and we put them together. 
+Here's a synthetic diagram. 
+There's a whole family of curves here. 
+But what's happening: we're looking at the last thousand years of temperature on the planet. 
+And there's five or six different compilations there, But each one of those compilations reflects input from hundreds of these kinds of records from corals. 
+We do similar things with ice cores. 
+We work with tree rings. 
+And that's how we discover what is truly natural and how different is the last century, right? 
+And I chose this one because it's complicated and messy looking, right. 
+This is as messy as it gets. 
+You can see there's some signals there. 
+Some of the records show lower temperatures than others. 
+Some of them show greater variability. 
+But they all tell us what the natural variability is. 
+Some of them are from the northern hemisphere; some are from the entire globe. 
+But here's what we can say: what's natural in the last thousand years is that the planet was cooling down. 
+It was cooling down until about 1900 or so. 
+And there is natural variability caused by the Sun, caused by El Ninos. 
+A century-scale, decadal-scale variability, and we know the magnitude; it's about two-tenths to four-tenths of a degree Centigrade. 
+But then at the very end is where we have the instrumental record in black. 
+And there's the temperature up there in 2009. 
+You know, we've warmed the globe about a degree Centigrade in the last century, and there's nothing in the natural part of that record that resembles what we've seen in the last century. 
+You know, that's the strength of our argument, that we are doing something that's truly different. 
+So I'll close with a short discussion of ocean acidification. 
+I like it as a component of global change to talk about, because, even if you are a hard-bitten global warming skeptic, and I talk to that community fairly often, you cannot deny the simple physics of CO2 dissolving in the ocean. 
+You know, we're pumping out lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, from fossil fuels, from cement production. 
+Right now, about a third of that carbon dioxide is dissolving straight into the sea, right? 
+And as it does so, it makes the ocean more acidic. 
+So, you cannot argue with that. 
+That is what's happening right now, and it's a very different issue than the global warming issue. 
+It has many consequences. 
+There's consequences for carbonate organisms. 
+There are many organisms that build their shells out of calcium carbonate — plants and animals both. 
+The main framework material of coral reefs is calcium carbonate. 
+That material is more soluble in acidic fluid. 
+So one of the things we're seeing is organisms are having to spend more metabolic energy to build and maintain their shells. 
+At some point, as this transience, as this CO2 uptake in the ocean continues, that material's actually going to start to dissolve. 
+And on coral reefs, where some of the main framework organisms disappear, we will see a major loss of marine biodiversity. 
+But it's not just the carbonate producers that are affected. 
+There's many physiological processes that are influenced by the acidity of the ocean. 
+So many reactions involving enzymes and proteins are sensitive to the acid content of the ocean. 
+So, all of these things — greater metabolic demands, reduced reproductive success, changes in respiration and metabolism. 
+You know, these are things that we have good physiological reasons to expect to see stressed caused by this transience. 
+So we figured out some pretty interesting ways to track CO2 levels in the atmosphere, going back millions of years. 
+We used to do it just with ice cores, but in this case, we're going back 20 million years. 
+And we take samples of the sediment, and it tells us the CO2 level of the ocean, and therefore the CO2 level of the atmosphere. 
+And here's the thing: you have to go back about 15 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were about what they are today. 
+You have to go back about 30 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were double what they are today. 
+Now, what that means is that all of the organisms that live in the sea have evolved in this chemostatted ocean, with CO2 levels lower than they are today. 
+That's the reason that they're not able to respond or adapt to this rapid acidification that's going on right now. 
+So, Charlie Veron came up with this statement last year: "" The prospect of ocean acidification may well be the most serious of all of the predicted outcomes of anthropogenic CO2 release. "" And I think that may very well be true, so I'll close with this. 
+You know, we do need the protected areas, absolutely, but for the sake of the oceans, we have to cap or limit CO2 emissions as soon as possible. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously, on a collective level. 
+And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about, and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. 
+And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, everyday. 
+It's like when you're mean to your wife because you're mad at somebody else. 
+Or when you drink a little too much at a party, just out of anxiety. 
+Or when you overeat because your feelings are hurt, or whatever. 
+And when we do these kind of things, when 300 million people do unconscious behaviors, then it can add up to a catastrophic consequence that nobody wants, and no one intended. 
+And that's what I look at with my photographic work. 
+This is an image I just recently completed, that is — when you stand back at a distance, it looks like some kind of neo-Gothic, cartoon image of a factory spewing out pollution. 
+And as you get a little bit closer, it starts looking like lots of pipes, like maybe a chemical plant, or a refinery, or maybe a hellish freeway interchange. 
+And as you get all the way up close, you realize that it's actually made of lots and lots of plastic cups. 
+And in fact, this is one million plastic cups, which is the number of plastic cups that are used on airline flights in the United States every six hours. 
+We use four million cups a day on airline flights, and virtually none of them are reused or recycled. 
+They just don't do that in that industry. 
+Now, that number is dwarfed by the number of paper cups we use every day, and that is 40 million cups a day for hot beverages, most of which is coffee. 
+I couldn't fit 40 million cups on a canvas, but I was able to put 410,000. That's what 410,000 cups looks like. 
+That's 15 minutes of our cup consumption. 
+And if you could actually stack up that many cups in real life, that's the size it would be. 
+And there's an hour's worth of our cups. 
+And there's a day's worth of our cups. 
+You can still see the little people way down there. 
+That's as high as a 42-story building, and I put the Statue of Liberty in there as a scale reference. 
+Speaking of justice, there's another phenomenon going on in our culture that I find deeply troubling, and that is that America, right now, has the largest percentage of its population in prison of any country on Earth. 
+One out of four people, one out of four humans in prison are Americans, imprisoned in our country. 
+And I wanted to show the number. 
+The number is 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated in 2005. 
+And that's gone up since then, but we don't have the numbers yet. 
+So, I wanted to show 2.3 million prison uniforms, and in the actual print of this piece, each uniform is the size of a nickel on its edge. 
+They're tiny. They're barely visible as a piece of material, and to show 2.3 million of them required a canvas that was larger than any printer in the world would print. 
+And so I had to divide it up into multiple panels that are 10 feet tall by 25 feet wide. 
+This is that piece installed in a gallery in New York — those are my parents looking at the piece. 
+(Laughter) Every time I look at this piece, I always wonder if my mom's whispering to my dad, "He finally folded his laundry." (Laughter) 
+I want to show you some pieces now that are about addiction. 
+And this particular one is about cigarette addiction. 
+I wanted to make a piece that shows the actual number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking. 
+More than 400,000 people die in the United States every year from smoking cigarettes. 
+And so, this piece is made up of lots and lots of boxes of cigarettes. 
+And, as you slowly step back, you see that it's a painting by Van Gogh, called "" Skull with Cigarette. "" It's a strange thing to think about, that on 9 / 11, when that tragedy happened, 3,000 Americans died. 
+And do you remember the response? 
+It reverberated around the world, and will continue to reverberate through time. 
+It will be something that we talk about in 100 years. 
+And yet on that same day, 1,100 Americans died from smoking. 
+And the day after that, another 1,100 Americans died from smoking. 
+And every single day since then, 1,100 Americans have died. 
+And today, 1,100 Americans are dying from cigarette smoking. 
+And we aren't talking about it — we dismiss it. 
+The tobacco lobby, it's too strong. 
+We just dismiss it out of our consciousness. 
+And knowing what we know about the destructive power of cigarettes, we continue to allow our children, our sons and daughters, to be in the presence of the influences that start them smoking. 
+And this is what the next piece is about. 
+This is just lots and lots of cigarettes: 65,000 cigarettes, which is equal to the number of teenagers who will start smoking this month, and every month in the U.S. 
+More than 700,000 children in the United States aged 18 and under begin smoking every year. 
+One more strange epidemic in the United States that I want to acquaint you with is this phenomenon of abuse and misuse of prescription drugs. 
+This is an image I've made out of lots and lots of Vicodin. 
+Well, actually, I only had one Vicodin that I scanned lots and lots of times. 
+(Laughter) And so, as you stand back, you see 213,000 Vicodin pills, which is the number of hospital emergency room visits yearly in the United States, attributable to abuse and misuse of prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety medications. 
+One-third of all drug overdoses in the U.S. — and that includes cocaine, heroin, alcohol, everything — one-third of drug overdoses are prescription medications. 
+A strange phenomenon. 
+This is a piece that I just recently completed about another tragic phenomenon. And that is the phenomenon, this growing obsession we have with breast augmentation surgery. 
+384,000 women, American women, last year went in for elective breast augmentation surgery. 
+It's rapidly becoming the most popular high school graduation gift, given to young girls who are about to go off to college. 
+So, I made this image out of Barbie dolls, and so, as you stand back you see this kind of floral pattern, and as you get all the way back, you see 32,000 Barbie dolls, which represents the number of breast augmentation surgeries that are performed in the U.S. each month. 
+The vast majority of those are on women under the age of 21. 
+And strangely enough, the only plastic surgery that is more popular than breast augmentation is liposuction, and most of that is being done by men. 
+Now, I want to emphasize that these are just examples. 
+I'm not holding these out as being the biggest issues. 
+They're just examples. 
+And the reason that I do this, it's because I have this fear that we aren't feeling enough as a culture right now. 
+There's this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. 
+We've lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief about what's going on in our culture right now, what's going on in our country, the atrocities that are being committed in our names around the world. 
+They've gone missing; these feelings have gone missing. 
+Our cultural joy, our national joy is nowhere to be seen. 
+And one of the causes of this, I think, is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview, this holoptical worldview, this holographic image that we're all trying to create in our mind of the interconnection of things: the environmental footprints 1,000 miles away of the things that we buy; the social consequences 10,000 miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers. 
+As we try to build this view, and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture, the information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers: numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions and now in the trillions. 
+Bush's new budget is in the trillions, and these are numbers that our brain just doesn't have the ability to comprehend. 
+We can't make meaning out of these enormous statistics. 
+And so that's what I'm trying to do with my work, is to take these numbers, these statistics from the raw language of data, and to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt. 
+Because my belief is, if we can feel these issues, if we can feel these things more deeply, then they'll matter to us more than they do now. 
+And if we can find that, then we'll be able to find, within each one of us, what it is that we need to find to face the big question, which is: how do we change? 
+That, to me, is the big question that we face as a people right now: how do we change? How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior? 
+My belief is that you don't have to make yourself bad to look at these issues. 
+I'm not pointing the finger at America in a blaming way. 
+I'm simply saying, this is who we are right now. 
+And if there are things that we see that we don't like about our culture, then we have a choice. 
+The degree of integrity that each of us can bring to the surface, to bring to this question, the depth of character that we can summon, as we show up for the question of how do we change — it's already defining us as individuals and as a nation, and it will continue to do that, on into the future. 
+And it will profoundly affect the well-being, the quality of life of the billions of people who are going to inherit the results of our decisions. 
+I'm not speaking abstractly about this, I'm speaking — this is who we are in this room, right now, in this moment. 
+Thank you and good afternoon. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I believe big institutions have unique potential to create change, and I believe that we as individuals have unique power to influence the direction that those institutions take. 
+Now, these beliefs did not come naturally to me, because trusting big institutions, not really part of my family legacy. 
+My mother escaped North Korea when she was 10 years old. 
+To do so, she had to elude every big institution in her life: repressive governments, occupying armies and even armed border patrols. 
+Later, when she decided she wanted to emigrate to the United States, she had to defy an entire culture that said the girls would never be the best and brightest. 
+Only because her name happens to sound like a boy's was she able to finagle her way into the government immigration exam to come to the United States. 
+Because of her bravery and passion, I've had all the opportunities that she never did, and that has made my story so different. 
+I've had the chance over the course of my career to work for The Wall Street Journal, the White House and now one of the largest financial institutions in the world, where I lead sustainable investing. 
+Now, these institutions are like tankers, and working inside of them, I've come to appreciate what large wakes they can leave, and I've become convinced that the institution of the global capital markets, the nearly 290 trillion dollars of stocks and bonds in the world, that that may be one of our most powerful forces for positive social change at our disposal, if we ask it to be. 
+Now, I know some of you are thinking, global capital markets, positive social change, not usually in the same sentence or even the same paragraph. 
+I think many people think of the capital markets kind of like an ocean. 
+So the best that our little savings accounts or retirement accounts can do is to try to catch some waves in the good cycles and hope that we don't get inundated in the turbulent ones, but certainly our decisions on how to steer our little retirement accounts don't affect the tides, don't change the shape or size or direction of the waves. 
+But why is that? 
+Because actually, one third of this ocean of capital actually belongs to individuals like us, and most of the rest of the capital markets is controlled by the institutions that get their power and authority and their capital from us, as members, participants, beneficiaries, shareholders or citizens. 
+So if we are the ultimate owners of the capital markets, why aren't we able to make our voices heard? 
+Why can't we make some waves? 
+So let me ask you a different question: did any of you buy fair trade coffee the last time you were at a supermarket or at Starbucks? 
+OK. Do any of you go to the restaurant and order the sustainably farmed trout instead of the miso-glazed Chilean sea bass that you really wish you could have? 
+Do any of you drive hybrid cars or even electric cars? 
+So why do we do these things? 
+Right? One electric car doesn't amount to much in a fleet of 1.2 billion combustion engine vehicles. 
+One fish is just one fish in the sea. 
+And one cup of coffee doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. 
+It's a reusable mug. It has all these things printed on it. 
+Look at some of the things that are on it, that it says. 
+"This one cup can be used again and again." 
+"This one cup may inspire others to use one too." 
+I had no idea this plastic cup was so powerful. 
+(Laughter) So why do we think that our choice of a four dollar shade-grown fair trade artisanal cup of coffee in a reusable mug matters, but what we do with 4,000 dollars in our investment account for our IRA doesn't? 
+Why can't we tell the supermarket and the capital markets that we care, that we care about fair labor standards, that we care about sustainable production methods and about healthy communities? 
+Why aren't we voting with our investment dollars, but we would vote with our lattes? 
+So I think it has something to do with the myths, the fables that we all carry around in our collective consciousness. 
+Do you remember the Grimm's fairy tale about the magic porridge pot? 
+If you said to the pot, "" Boil, little pot, boil, "" it would fill up with sweet porridge. 
+And if you said, "" Stop, little pot, stop, "" it would stop. 
+But if you got the words wrong, it wouldn't listen, and things could go terribly awry. 
+So I think when it comes to markets, we have a little bit of a similar fable in our heads. 
+We believe that the markets is this magic pot that obeys only one command: make more money. 
+Only those words said exactly that way will make the pot fill up with gold. 
+Add in some extra words like "" protect the environment, "" the spell might not work. 
+Put in the wrong words like "" promote social justice, "" and you might see your gold coins shrink or even vanish entirely, according to this fable. 
+So we asked people, what do you really think? 
+And we actually went out and polled a thousand individual investors, and we found something fascinating. 
+71 percent of people said yes, they were interested in sustainable investing, which we define as taking the best in class investment process that you already have traditionally and adding in the extra information you get when you think about the environment and society and good governance. 
+72 percent said that they believe that companies who did that would actually do better financially. 
+So people really do believe that you can do well by doing good. 
+But here was the weird thing: 54 percent of the people still said if they put their money in those kinds of stocks, they thought that they would make less money. 
+So is it true? 
+Do you get less sweet porridge if you invest in shade-grown coffee instead of drinking it? 
+Well, you know, the investors in companies like Burt's Bees or Ben & Jerry's wouldn't say so. 
+Right? Both of those started out as small, socially conscious companies that ended up becoming so popular with consumers that the giants Unilever and Clorox bought them for hundreds of millions of dollars each. 
+If they didn't keep adding in those extra words of environmentally friendly and socially conscious, those brands wouldn't make more money. 
+But maybe this is just the exception the proves the rule, right? 
+The serious companies that fund our economy and that fund our retirements and that really make the world go round, they need to stick to making more money. 
+So, Harvard Business School actually researched this, and they found something fascinating. 
+If you had invested a dollar 20 years ago in a portfolio of companies that focused narrowly on making more money quarter by quarter, that one dollar would have grown to 14 dollars and 46 cents. 
+That's not bad until you consider that if instead you'd invested that same dollar in a portfolio of companies that focused on growing their business and on the most important environmental and social issues, that one dollar would have grown to 28 dollars and 36 cents. 
+almost twice as much sweet porridge. 
+Now, let's be clear, they didn't make that outperformance by giving away money to seem like a nice corporate citizen. 
+They did it by focusing on the things that matter to their business, like wasting less energy and water in their manufacturing processes; like making sure the CEO contracts had the CEOs incentivized for the long-term results of the company and the communities they served, not just quarterly results; or building a first class culture that would have higher employee loyalty, retention and productivity. 
+Now, Harvard's not alone. 
+Oxford also did a research study where they examined 120 different studies looking at the effect of sustainability and economic results, and they found time and time and time again that the companies that cared about these kinds of important things actually had better operational efficiency, lower cost of capital and better performance in their stock price. 
+And then there's Al Gore. 
+Post-White House, he opened an investment firm called Generation, where he baked environmental sustainability and other things right into the core investment process. 
+And at the time there was a good bit of skepticism about his views. 
+Ten years later, his track record is one more proof point that sustainable investing done right can be sound investing. 
+Far from making less sweet porridge because he added sustainability into the mix, he actually significantly outperformed the benchmark. 
+Now, sustainable investing, the good news is it doesn't require a magic spell and it doesn't require some investment secret, and it's not just for the elite. 
+It is not just about private equity for billionaires. 
+It's about stocks and bonds and Fortune 500 companies. 
+It's about mutual funds. 
+It's about all the things we already see in the market today. 
+So here's why I'm convinced that we collectively have the power to make sustainable investing the new normal. 
+First, the proof points are coming out all the time that sustainable investing done right, preserving all the same good principles of investing, the traditional sphere, can pay. 
+It makes sense. 
+Secondly, the biggest obstacle standing in our way may actually just be in our heads. 
+We just need to let go of that myth that if you add your values into your investment thinking, that you get less sweet porridge. 
+And once you get rid of the fable, you can actually start appreciating those facts we've been talking about. 
+And third, the future is already here. 
+Sustainable investment today is a 20 trillion dollar market and it's the fastest-growing segment of the investment industry. 
+In the United States, it has grown enormously, as you can see. 
+It now represents one out of every six dollars under professional management in the United States. 
+So what are we waiting for? 
+For me, it goes back to the inspiration that I received from my mother. 
+She knew that she wanted a life where she would have the freedom to make her own choices and to have her voice heard and write her own story. 
+She was passionate about that goal and she was clear that she would let no army, no obstacle, no big institution stand in her way. 
+She made it to the States, and she became a teacher, an award-winning author and a mother, and ended up sending her daughters to Harvard. 
+And these days, you can tell that she is amply comfortable holding court in the most powerful institutions in the world. 
+It seems almost too prophetic that her name in Korean means "passionate clarity." 
+Passionate clarity: that's what I think we need to drive change. 
+Passion about the change we want to see in the world, and clarity that we are able to help chart the course. 
+We have more opportunity today than ever before to make choices. 
+We have more power than ever before to make our voices heard. 
+So change your perspective. 
+Vote with your small change. 
+Invest in the change you want to see in the world. 
+Change the fables and change the markets. 
+Thank you. 
+
+Hello, everyone. Because this is my first time at TED, I've decided to bring along an old friend to help break the ice a bit. 
+Yes. That's right. This is Barbie. 
+She's 50 years old. And she's looking as young as ever. 
+(Laughter) But I'd also like to introduce you to what may be an unfamiliar face. 
+This is Fulla. Fulla is the Arab world's answer to Barbie. 
+Now, according to proponents of the clash of civilizations, Barbie and Fulla occupy these completely separate spheres. 
+They have different interests. They have divergent values. 
+And should they ever come in contact... 
+well, I've got to tell you, it's just not going to be pretty. 
+My experience, however, in the Islamic world is very different. 
+Where I work, in the Arab region, people are busy taking up Western innovations and changing them into things which are neither conventionally Western, nor are they traditionally Islamic. 
+I want to show you two examples. 
+The first is 4Shbab. 
+It means "" for youth "" and it's a new Arab TV channel. 
+(Video): Video clips from across the globe. 
+The USA. 
+♫ I am not afraid to stand alone ♫ ♫ I am not afraid to stand alone, if Allah is by my side ♫ ♫ I am not afraid to stand alone ♫ ♫ Everything will be all right ♫ ♫ I am not afraid to stand alone ♫ The Arab world. 
+(Music) ♫ She was preserved by modesty of the religion ♫ ♫ She was adorned by the light of the Quran ♫ Shereen El Feki: 4Shbab has been dubbed Islamic MTV. 
+Its creator, who is an Egyptian TV producer called Ahmed Abu Haïba, wants young people to be inspired by Islam to lead better lives. 
+He reckons the best way to get that message across is to use the enormously popular medium of music videos. 
+4Shbab was set up as an alternative to existing Arab music channels. 
+And they look something like this. 
+(Music) That, by the way is Haifa Wehbe. She's a Lebanese pop star and pan-Arab pin-up girl. 
+In the world of 4Shbab, it's not about bump and grind. 
+But it's not about fire and brimstone either. 
+Its videos are intended to show a kinder, gentler face of Islam, for young people to deal with life's challenges. 
+Now, my second example is for a slightly younger crowd. 
+And it's called "" The 99. "" Now, these are the world's first Islamic superheroes. 
+They were created by a Kuwaiti psychologist called Naif Al Mutawa. 
+And his desire is to rescue Islam from images of intolerance, all in a child-friendly format. 
+"" The 99. "" The characters are meant to embody the 99 attributes of Allah: justice, wisdom, mercy, among others. 
+So, for example, there is the character of Noora. 
+She is meant to have the power to look inside people and see the good and bad in everyone. 
+Another character called Jami has the ability to create fantastic inventions. 
+Now, "" The 99 "" is not just a comic book. 
+It's now a theme park. 
+There is an animated series in the works. 
+And by this time next year, the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman will have joined forces with "" The 99 "" to beat injustice wherever they find it. 
+"" The 99 "" and 4Shbab are just two of many examples of this sort of Islamic cross-cultural hybridization. 
+We're not talking here about a clash of civilizations. 
+Nor is it some sort of indistinguishable mash. 
+I like to think of it as a mesh of civilizations, in which the strands of different cultures are intertwined. 
+Now, while 4Shbab and "" The 99 "" may look new and shiny, there is actually a very long tradition of this. 
+Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations both ancient and modern. 
+After all, it's the Quran which encourages us to do this: "" We made you into nations and tribes so that you could learn from one another. "" And to my mind, those are pretty wise words, no matter what your creed. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My journey to become a polar specialist, photographing, specializing in the polar regions, began when I was four years old, when my family moved from southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland. 
+There we lived with the Inuit in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people, where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families. 
+And in this community, we didn't have a television; we didn't have computers, obviously, radio. 
+We didn't even have a telephone. 
+All of my time was spent outside with the Inuit, playing. 
+The snow and the ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my teachers. 
+And that's where I became truly obsessed with this polar realm. 
+And I knew someday that I was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it. 
+I'd like to share with you, for just two minutes only, some images, a cross-section of my work, to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile, "" Have You Ever. "" I don't know why National Geographic has done this, they've never done this before, but they're allowing me to show you a few images from a coverage that I've just completed that is not published yet. 
+National Geographic doesn't do this, so I'm very excited to be able to share this with you. 
+And what these images are — you'll see them at the start of the slide show — there's only about four images — but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest. 
+It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear. 
+It's a spirit bear, or a Kermode bear. 
+There are only 200 of these bears left. 
+They're more rare than the panda bear. 
+I sat there on the river for two months without seeing one. 
+I thought, my career's over. 
+I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic. 
+What in the heck was I thinking? 
+So I had two months to sit there and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life, after I was a photographer, because they were going to fire me. 
+Because National Geographic is a magazine; they remind us all the time: they publish pictures, not excuses. 
+(Laughter) And after two months of sitting there — one day, thinking that it was all over, this incredible big white male came down, right beside me, three feet away from me, and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it. 
+And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest. 
+He went through this old-growth forest and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep. 
+And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him, just in the forest, and photograph him. 
+So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions. 
+Please enjoy. 
+(Music) Brandi Carlile: ♫ Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? ♫ ♫ And everything there feels just as it should ♫ ♫ You're part of the life there ♫ ♫ You're part of something good ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Lying on your back, you're asking why ♫ ♫ What's the purpose? ♫ ♫ I wonder, who am I? ♫ ♫ If you've ever stared into a starry sky ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ 
+♫ Aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, oh, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Have you ever been out walking in the snow? ♫ ♫ Tried to get back where you were before ♫ ♫ You always end up ♫ ♫ Not knowing where to go ♫ ♫ If you've ever been out walking in the snow ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, ah ♫ ♫ Oh, ah, ah, ah ♫ 
+♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ If you'd ever been out walking you would know ♫ (Applause) Paul Nicklen: Thank you very much. The show's not over. 
+My clock is ticking. OK, let's stop. 
+Thank you very much. I appreciate it. 
+We're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it's at its lowest level. 
+And in fact, scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years. 
+Now they're saying the sea ice in the Arctic, the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years. 
+And what does that mean? 
+After a while of reading this in the news, it just becomes news. 
+You glaze over with it. 
+And what I'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this. 
+And I want people to understand and get the concept that, if we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire ecosystem. 
+Projections are that we could lose polar bears, they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years. 
+And there's no better, sexier, more beautiful, charismatic megafauna species for me to hang my campaign on. 
+Polar bears are amazing hunters. 
+This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores. 
+There was no ice around. 
+But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it. 
+And this bear swam out to that seal — 800 lb. bearded seal — grabbed it, swam back and ate it. 
+And he was so full, he was so happy and so fat eating this seal, that, as I approached him — about 20 feet away — to get this picture, his only defense was to keep eating more seal. 
+And as he ate, he was so full — he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly — and as he ate inside one side of his mouth, he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth. 
+So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive, but it's the ice that's disappearing. 
+We're finding more and more dead bears in the Arctic. 
+When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago, we never found dead bears. 
+And in the last four or five years, we're finding dead bears popping up all over the place. 
+We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea, floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out. 
+I found a couple in Norway last year. We're seeing them on the ice. 
+These bears are already showing signs of the stress of disappearing ice. 
+Here's a mother and her two year-old cub were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere, and they're riding on this big piece of glacier ice, which is great for them; they're safe at this point. 
+They're not going to die of hypothermia. 
+They're going to get to land. 
+But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem. 
+These ringed seals, these are the "" fatsicles "" of the Arctic. 
+These little, fat dumplings, 150-pound bundles of blubber are the mainstay of the polar bear. 
+And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here. 
+These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice. 
+They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice. 
+And here's a picture of sick ice. 
+This is a piece of multi-year ice that's 12 years old. 
+And what scientists didn't predict is that, as this ice melts, these big pockets of black water are forming and they're grabbing the sun's energy and accelerating the melting process. 
+And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea. 
+The visibility's 600 ft.; we're on our safety lines; the ice is moving all over the place. 
+I wish I could spend half an hour telling you about how we almost died on this dive. 
+But what's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice, that big chunk of ice up in the corner. 
+In that one single piece of ice, you have 300 species of microorganisms. 
+And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life. 
+So really what the ice does is it acts like a garden. 
+It acts like the soil in a garden. It's an inverted garden. 
+Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden. 
+Here's me in my office. 
+I hope you appreciate yours. 
+This is after an hour under the ice. 
+I can't feel my lips; my face is frozen; I can't feel my hands; I can't feel my feet. 
+And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water. 
+After an hour in these conditions, it's so extreme that, when I go down, almost every dive I vomit into my regulator because my body can't deal with the stress of the cold on my head. 
+And so I'm just so happy that the dive is over. 
+I get to hand my camera to my assistant, and I'm looking up at him, and I'm going, "" Woo. Woo. Woo. "" Which means, "" Take my camera. "" And he thinks I'm saying, "" Take my picture. "" So we had this little communication breakdown. 
+(Laughter) But it's worth it. 
+I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales, and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today, but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made. 
+I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw, and I looked up under the underside of the ice, and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo. 
+I got very nervous — no rope, no safety line, the whole world is moving around me — and I thought, "" I'm in trouble. "" But what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice, giving birth and living out their entire life cycle. 
+This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic, right here. 
+And when you have low productivity in this, in ice, the productivity in copepods go down. 
+This is a bowhead whale. 
+Supposedly, science is stating that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now. 
+This very whale right here could be over 250 years old. 
+This whale could have been born around the start of the Industrial Revolution. 
+It could have survived 150 years of whaling. 
+And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North because of the lives that we're leading in the South. 
+Narwhals, these majestic narwhals with their eight-foot long ivory tusks, don't have to be here; they could be out on the open water. 
+But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe, catch a breath, because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod. 
+And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods. 
+Alright, my favorite part. 
+When I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to remember one story more than any other. 
+Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful, I don't think I'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals. 
+Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation. 
+They've got that wryly smile on their mouth. 
+They've got those black sinister eyes and those spots on their body. 
+They look positively prehistoric and a bit scary. 
+And tragically in [2003], a scientist was taken down and drowned, and she was being consumed by a leopard seal. 
+And people were like, "" We knew they were vicious. We knew they were. "" And so people love to form their opinions. 
+And that's when I got a story idea: I want to go to Antarctica, get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can and give them a fair shake — find out if they really are these vicious animals, or if they're misunderstood. 
+So this is that story. 
+Oh, and they also happen to eat Happy Feet. 
+(Laughter) As a species, as humans, we like to say penguins are really cute, therefore, leopard seals eat them, so leopard seals are ugly and bad. 
+It doesn't work that way. 
+The penguin doesn't know it's cute, and the leopard seal doesn't know it's kind of big and monstrous. 
+This is just the food chain unfolding. 
+They're also big. 
+They're not these little harbor seals. 
+They are 12 ft. long, a thousand pounds. 
+And they're also curiously aggressive. 
+You get 12 tourists packed into a Zodiac, floating in these icy waters, and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon. 
+The boat starts to sink, they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked. 
+All the leopard seal was doing — it's just biting a balloon. 
+It just sees this big balloon in the ocean — it doesn't have hands — it's going to take a little bite, the boat pops, and off they go. 
+(Laughter) So after five days of crossing the Drake Passage — isn't that beautiful — after five days of crossing the Drake Passage, we have finally arrived at Antarctica. 
+I'm with my Swedish assistant and guide. 
+His name is Goran Ehlme from Sweden — Goran. 
+And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals. I have never seen one. 
+So we come around the cove in our little Zodiac boat, and there's this monstrous leopard seal. 
+And even in his voice, he goes, "" That's a bloody big seal, ya. "" (Laughter) And this seal is taking this penguin by the head, and it's flipping it back and forth. 
+And what it's trying to do is turn that penguin inside-out, so it can eat the meat off the bones, and then it goes off and gets another one. 
+And so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin, came under the boat, the Zodiac, starting hitting the hull of the boat. 
+And we're trying to not fall in the water. 
+And we sit down, and that's when Goran said to me, "" This is a good seal, ya. 
+It's time for you to get in the water. "" (Laughter) And I looked at Goran, and I said to him, "" Forget that. "" But I think I probably used a different word starting with the letter "" F. "" But he was right. 
+He scolded me out, and said, "" This is why we're here. 
+And you purposed this stupid story to National Geographic. 
+And now you've got to deliver. 
+And you can't publish excuses. "" So I had such dry mouth — probably not as bad as now — but I had such, such dry mouth. 
+And my legs were just trembling. I couldn't feel my legs. 
+I put my flippers on. I could barely part my lips. 
+I put my snorkel in my mouth, and I rolled over the side of the Zodiac into the water. 
+And this was the first thing she did. 
+She came racing up to me, engulfed my whole camera — and her teeth are up here and down here — but Goran, before I had gotten in the water, had given me amazing advice. 
+He said, "" If you get scared, you close your eyes, ya, and she'll go away. "" (Laughter) So that's all I had to work with at that point. 
+But I just started to shoot these pictures. 
+So she did this threat display for a few minutes, and then the most amazing thing happened — she totally relaxed. 
+She went off, she got a penguin. 
+She stopped about 10 feet away from me, and she sat there with this penguin, the penguin's flapping, and she let's it go. 
+The penguin swims toward me, takes off. 
+She grabs another one. She does this over and over. 
+And it dawned on me that she's trying to feed me a penguin. 
+Why else would she release these penguins at me? 
+And after she did this four or five times, she swam by me with this dejected look on her face. 
+You don't want to be too anthropomorphic, but I swear that she looked at me like, "" This useless predator's going to starve in my ocean. "" (Laughter) So realizing I couldn't catch swimming penguins, she'd get these other penguins and bring them slowly towards me, bobbing like this, and she'd let them go. 
+This didn't work. 
+I was laughing so hard and so emotional that my mask was flooding, because I was crying underwater, just because it was so amazing. 
+And so that didn't work. 
+So then she'd get another penguin and try this ballet-like sexy display sliding down this iceberg like this. (Laughter) And she would sort of bring them over to me and offer it to me. 
+This went on for four days. 
+This just didn't happen a couple of times. 
+And then so she realized I couldn't catch live ones, so she brought me dead penguins. 
+(Laughter) Now I've got four or five penguins floating around my head, and I'm just sitting there shooting away. 
+And she would often stop and have this dejected look on her face like, "" Are you for real? "" Because she can't believe I can't eat this penguin. 
+Because in her world, you're either breeding or you're eating — and I'm not breeding, so... 
+(Laughter) And then that wasn't enough; she started to flip penguins onto my head. 
+She was trying to force-feed me. She's pushing me around. 
+She's trying to force-feed my camera, which is every photographer's dream. 
+And she would get frustrated; she'd blow bubbles in my face. 
+She would, I think, let me know that I was going to starve. 
+But yet she didn't stop. 
+She would not stop trying to feed me penguins. 
+And on the last day with this female where I thought I had pushed her too far, I got nervous because she came up to me, she rolled over on her back, and she did this deep, guttural jackhammer sound, this gok-gok-gok-gok. 
+And I thought, she's about to bite. 
+She's about to let me know she's too frustrated with me. 
+What had happened was another seal had snuck in behind me, and she did that to threat display. 
+She chased that big seal away, went and got its penguin and brought it to me. 
+(Laughter) That wasn't the only seal I got in the water with. 
+I got in the water with 30 other leopard seals, and I never once had a scary encounter. 
+They are the most remarkable animals I've ever worked with, and the same with polar bears. 
+And just like the polar bears, these animals depend on an icy environment. 
+I get emotional. Sorry. 
+It's a story that lives deep in my heart, and I'm proud to share this with you. 
+And I'm so passionate about it. 
+Anybody want to come with me to Antarctica or the Arctic, I'll take you; let's go. 
+We've got to get the story out now. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+Thank you. Thanks very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Good morning. 
+Let's look for a minute at the greatest icon of all, Leonardo da Vinci. 
+We're all familiar with his fantastic work — his drawings, his paintings, his inventions, his writings. 
+But we do not know his face. 
+Thousands of books have been written about him, but there's controversy, and it remains, about his looks. 
+Even this well-known portrait is not accepted by many art historians. 
+So, what do you think? 
+Is this the face of Leonardo da Vinci or isn't it? 
+Let's find out. 
+Leonardo was a man that drew everything around him. 
+He drew people, anatomy, plants, animals, landscapes, buildings, water, everything. 
+But no faces? 
+I find that hard to believe. 
+His contemporaries made faces, like the ones you see here — en face or three-quarters. 
+So, surely a passionate drawer like Leonardo must have made self-portraits from time to time. 
+So let's try to find them. 
+I think that if we were to scan all of his work and look for self-portraits, we would find his face looking at us. 
+So I looked at all of his drawings, more than 700, and looked for male portraits. 
+There are about 120, you see them here. 
+Which ones of these could be self-portraits? 
+Well, for that they have to be done as we just saw, en face or three-quarters. 
+So we can eliminate all the profiles. 
+It also has to be sufficiently detailed. 
+So we can also eliminate the ones that are very vague or very stylized. 
+And we know from his contemporaries that Leonardo was a very handsome, even beautiful man. 
+So we can also eliminate the ugly ones or the caricatures. 
+(Laughter) And look what happens — only three candidates remain that fit the bill. 
+And here they are. 
+Yes, indeed, the old man is there, as is this famous pen drawing of the Homo Vitruvianus. 
+And lastly, the only portrait of a male that Leonardo painted, "" The Musician. "" Before we go into these faces, I should explain why I have some right to talk about them. 
+I've made more than 1,100 portraits myself for newspapers, over the course of 300 — 30 years, sorry, 30 years only. 
+(Laughter) But there are 1,100, and very few artists have drawn so many faces. 
+So I know a little about drawing and analyzing faces. 
+OK, now let's look at these three portraits. 
+And hold onto your seats, because if we zoom in on those faces, remark how they have the same broad forehead, the horizontal eyebrows, the long nose, the curved lips and the small, well-developed chin. 
+I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw that. 
+There is no reason why these portraits should look alike. 
+All we did was look for portraits that had the characteristics of a self-portrait, and look, they are very similar. 
+Now, are they made in the right order? 
+The young man should be made first. 
+And as you see here from the years that they were created, it is indeed the case. 
+They are made in the right order. 
+What was the age of Leonardo at the time? Does that fit? 
+Yes, it does. He was 33, 38 and 63 when these were made. 
+So we have three pictures, potentially of the same person of the same age as Leonardo at the time. 
+But how do we know it's him, and not someone else? 
+Well, we need a reference. 
+And here's the only picture of Leonardo that's widely accepted. 
+It's a statue made by Verrocchio, of David, for which Leonardo posed as a boy of 15. 
+And if we now compare the face of the statue, with the face of the musician, you see the very same features again. 
+The statue is the reference, and it connects the identity of Leonardo to those three faces. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, this story has not yet been published. 
+It's only proper that you here at TED hear and see it first. 
+The icon of icons finally has a face. 
+Here he is: Leonardo da Vinci. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, I am indeed going to talk about the spaces men create for themselves, but first I want to tell you why I'm here. 
+I'm here for two reasons. These two guys are my two sons Ford and Wren. 
+When Ford was about three years old, we shared a very small room together, in a very small space. 
+My office was on one half of the bedroom, and his bedroom was on the other half. 
+And you can imagine, if you're a writer, that things would get really crowded around deadlines. 
+So when Wren was on the way, I realized I needed to find a space of my own. 
+There was no more space in the house. So I went out to the backyard, and without any previous building experience, and about 3,000 dollars and some recycled materials, I built this space. 
+It had everything I needed. It was quiet. 
+There was enough space. And I had control, which was very important. 
+As I was building this space, I thought to myself, "" Surely I'm not the only guy to have to have carved out a space for his own. "" So I did some research. 
+And I found that there was an historic precedence. 
+Hemingway had his writing space. 
+Elvis had two or three manspaces, which is pretty unique because he lived with both his wife and his mother in Graceland. 
+In the popular culture, Superman had the Fortress of Solitude, and there was, of course, the Batcave. 
+So I realized then that I wanted to go out on a journey and see what guys were creating for themselves now. 
+Here is one of the first spaces I found. It is in Austin, Texas, which is where I'm from. 
+On the outside it looks like a very typical garage, a nice garage. 
+But on the inside, it's anything but. 
+And this, to me, is a pretty classic manspace. 
+It has neon concert posters, a bar and, of course, the leg lamp, which is very important. 
+I soon realized that manspaces didn't have to be only inside. 
+This guy built a bowling alley in his backyard, out of landscaping timbers, astroturf. 
+And he found the scoreboard in the trash. 
+Here's another outdoor space, a little bit more sophisticated. 
+This a 1923 wooden tugboat, made completely out of Douglas fir. 
+The guy did it all himself. 
+And there is about 1,000 square feet of hanging-out space inside. 
+So, pretty early on in my investigations I realized what I was finding was not what I expected to find, which was, quite frankly, a lot of beer can pyramids and overstuffed couches and flat-screen TVs. 
+There were definitely hang-out spots. 
+But some were for working, some were for playing, some were for guys to collect their things. 
+Most of all, I was just surprised with what I was finding. 
+Take this place for example. 
+On the outside it looks like a typical northeastern garage. 
+This is in Long Island, New York. 
+The only thing that might tip you off is the round window. 
+On the inside it's a recreation of a 16th century Japanese tea house. 
+The man imported all the materials from Japan, and he hired a Japanese carpenter to build it in the traditional style. 
+It has no nails or screws. 
+All the joints are hand-carved and hand-scribed. 
+Here is another pretty typical scene. This is a suburban Las Vegas neighborhood. 
+But you open one of the garage doors and there is a professional-size boxing ring inside. 
+(Laughter) And so there is a good reason for this. 
+It was built by this man who is Wayne McCullough. 
+He won the silver medal for Ireland in the 1992 Olympics, and he trains in this space. He trains other people. 
+And right off the garage he has his own trophy room where he can sort of bask in his accomplishments, which is another sort of important part about a manspace. 
+So, while this space represents someone's profession, this one certainly represents a passion. 
+It's made to look like the inside of an English sailing ship. 
+It's a collection of nautical antiques from the 1700s and 1800s. 
+Museum quality. 
+So, as I came to the end of my journey, I found over 50 spaces. 
+And they were unexpected and they were surprising. 
+But they were also — I was really impressed by how personalized they were, and how much work went into them. 
+And I realized that's because the guys that I met were all very passionate about what they did. 
+And they really loved their professions. 
+And they were very passionate about their collections and their hobbies. 
+And so they created these spaces to reflect what they love to do, and who they were. 
+So if you don't have a space of your own, I highly recommend finding one, and getting into it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+♫ Picture yourself in a world where there's no one else, ♫ ♫ nobody anywhere. ♫ ♫ A moment ago, there were voices and faces to look upon, ♫ ♫ you can't see them anywhere. ♫ ♫ Nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and no one left to say it to, anyway. ♫ ♫ Oh, listen to what I say. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫ ♫ Now picture a world where the people all feel their worth. ♫ 
+♫ Children are everywhere. ♫ ♫ Now there is a reason for everyone's time on Earth. ♫ ♫ Wondering why you should care, yeah. ♫ ♫ Nothing more to say ♫ ♫ and only love can see us through, anyway. ♫ ♫ Oh, listen what I say, yeah. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody ♫ ♫ and everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference. ♫ ♫ You don't have to be a big celebrity ♫ ♫ to feel the power, the power in your soul, no. ♫ 
+♫ You don't have to be a big star on MTV ♫ ♫ to realize that in your eyes is a view that only you can see. ♫ ♫ Everybody can be somebody. ♫ ♫ Everybody is free to make a difference in this world. ♫ ♫ You can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ I can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ She can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ He can make a little difference in this world. ♫ ♫ You can, I can, she can, he can, ♫ ♫ we can make a little bit of difference in this world. ♫ 
+♫ Everybody gonna make a little ♫ ♫ little difference, yeah. ♫ ♫ Talking 'bout everybody gonna make a little difference. ♫ ♫ Everybody gonna make a little difference in this world, ♫ ♫ oh yeah. ♫ (Applause) Thank you so much. (Applause) 
+This is a song that came about because I think it's difficult to be in the world and not be aware of what's going on, and the wars and so forth. 
+This song kind of came out of all of that. 
+And I wrote a lot of happy songs on my first record, which I still stand by, but this has got something else in it. 
+It's called "" Peace on Earth. "" ♫ There is no hope. ♫ ♫ There is no future. ♫ ♫ No faith in God to save the day. ♫ ♫ There is no reason, no understanding ♫ ♫ no sacred place to hide away. ♫ ♫ There is no earnest conversation. ♫ ♫ No words of wisdom from the wise. ♫ ♫ There is no reconciliation ♫ ♫ and no collective compromise. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫ 
+♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫ ♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫ ♫ and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫ ♫ There is no darkness, no sunshine. ♫ ♫ There is no great society. ♫ ♫ There is no freedom without conviction. ♫ ♫ There is no freedom to be free. ♫ ♫ There is no heaven, no fire and brimstone. ♫ ♫ There is no brotherhood of man. ♫ ♫ There is no country, no one religion. ♫ ♫ There is no universal plan. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ 
+♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Yet, there in the hallway ♫ ♫ lurks the ghost of war. ♫ ♫ He wants more, and more, and more, and more, ♫ ♫ and more, and more, and more, and more, and more. ♫ ♫ The answer is ♫ ♫ mutual-assured destruction, ♫ ♫ a balance of power, ♫ ♫ a weapon for everyone. ♫ ♫ Mutual-assured destruction ♫ ♫ bringing peace to everyone. ♫ (Trumpet sounds) (Trumpet sounds) ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we want. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth, ♫ ♫ that's what we all say. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ 
+♫ There in the hallway, ♫ ♫ peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ ♫ Peace on Earth. ♫ (Applause) 
+
+So, I'm going to start off with kind of the buzzkill a little bit. 
+Forty-two million people were displaced by natural disasters in 2010. 
+Now, there was nothing particularly special about 2010, because, on average, 31 and a half million people are displaced by natural disasters every single year. 
+Now, usually when people hear statistics or stats like that, you start thinking about places like Haiti or other kind of exotic or maybe even impoverished areas, but it happens right here in the United States every single year. 
+Last year alone, 99 federally declared disasters were on file with FEMA, from Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to the Central Texas wildfires that just happened recently. 
+Now, how does the most powerful country in the world handle these displaced people? 
+They cram them onto cots, put all your personal belongings in a plastic garbage bag, stick it underneath, and put you on the floor of an entire sports arena, or a gymnasium. 
+So obviously there's a massive housing gap, and this really upset me, because academia tells you after a major disaster, there's typically about an 18-month time frame to — we kinda recover, start the recovery process, but what most people don't realize is that on average it takes 45 to 60 days or more for the infamous FEMA trailers to even begin to show up. 
+Before that time, people are left to their own devices. 
+So I became obsessed with trying to figure out a way to actually fill this gap. 
+This actually became my creative obsession. 
+I put aside all my freelance work after hours and started just focusing particularly on this problem. 
+So I started sketching. 
+Two days after Katrina, I started sketching and sketching and trying to brainstorm up ideas or solutions for this, and as things started to congeal or ideas started to form, I started sketching digitally on the computer, but it was an obsession, so I couldn't just stop there. 
+I started experimenting, making models, talking to experts in the field, taking their feedback, and refining, and I kept on refining and refining for nights and weekends for over five years. 
+Now, my obsession ended up driving me to create full-size prototypes in my own backyard — (Laughter) — and actually spending my own personal savings on everything from tooling to patents and a variety of other costs, but in the end I ended up with this modular housing system that can react to any situation or disaster. 
+It can be put up in any environment, from an asphalt parking lot to pastures or fields, because it doesn't require any special setup or specialty tools. 
+Now, at the foundation and kind of the core of this whole system is the Exo Housing Unit, which is just the individual shelter module. 
+And though it's light, light enough that you can actually lift it by hand and move it around, and it actually sleeps four people. 
+And you can arrange these things as kind of more for encampments and more of a city grid type layout, or you can circle the wagons, essentially, and form these circular pods out of them, which give you this semi-private communal area for people to actually spill out into so they're not actually trapped inside these units. 
+Now this fundamentally changes the way we respond to disasters, because gone are the horrid conditions inside a sports arena or a gymnasium, where people are crammed on these cots inside. 
+Now we have instant neighborhoods outside. 
+So the Exo is designed to be simply, basically like a coffee cup. They can actually stack together so we get extremely efficient transportation and storage out of them. 
+In fact, 15 Exos can fit on a single semi truck by itself. 
+This means the Exo can actually be transported and set up faster than any other housing option available today. 
+But I'm obsessive, so I couldn't just stop there, so I actually started modifying the bunks where you could actually slide out the bunks and slide in desks or shelving, so the same unit can now be used for an office or storage location. 
+The doors can actually swap out, so you can actually put on a rigid panel with a window unit in it for climate control, or a connector module that would allow you to actually connect multiple units together, which gives you larger and kind of compartmentalized living spaces, so now this same kit of parts, this same unit can actually serve as a living room, bedroom or bathroom, or an office, a living space and secure storage. 
+Sounds like a great idea, but how do you make it real? 
+So the first idea I had, initially, was just to go the federal and state governments and go, "Here, take it, for free." 
+But I was quickly told that, "" Boy, our government doesn't really work like that. "" (Laughter) Okay. Okay. So maybe I would start a nonprofit to kind of help consult and get this idea going along with the government, but then I was told, "" Son, our government looks to private sector for things like this. "" Okay. So maybe I would take this whole idea and go to private corporations that would have this mutually shared benefit to it, but I was quickly told by some corporations that my personal passion project was not a brand fit because they didn't want their logos stamped 
+across the ghettos of Haiti. 
+Now, I wasn't just obsessed. I was outraged. (Laughter.) So I decided, kind of told myself, "" Oh yeah? Watch this. I'll do it myself. "" (Laughter) Now, this quickly, my day job sent me to work out of our Milan office for a few months, so I was like, what will I do? So I actually scheduled sleep on my calendar, and spent the 8-hour time difference on conference calls with material suppliers, manufacturers and potential customers. 
+And we found through this whole process, we found this great little manufacturer in Virginia, and if his body language is any indication, that's the owner — (Laughter) — of what it's like for a manufacturer to work directly with a designer, you've got to see what happens here. (Laughter) But G.S. Industries was fantastic. 
+They actually built three prototypes for us by hand. 
+So now we have prototypes that can show that four people can actually sleep securely and much more comfortably than a tent could ever provide. 
+And they actually shipped them here to Texas for us. 
+Now, a funny thing started happening. 
+Other people started to believe in what we were doing, and actually offered us hangar space, donated hangar space to us. And then the Georgetown Airport Authority was bent over backwards to help us with anything we needed. 
+So now we had a hangar space to work in, and prototypes to demo with. 
+So in one year, we've negotiated manufacturing agreements, been awarded one patent, filed our second patent, talked to multiple people, demoed this to FEMA and its consultants to rave reviews, and then started talking to some other people who requested information, this little group called the United Nations. 
+And on top of that, now we have a whole plethora of other individuals that have come up and started to talk to us from doing it for mining camps, mobile youth hostels, right down to the World Cup and the Olympics. 
+So, in closing, on this whole thing here is hopefully very soon we will not have to respond to these painful phone calls that we get after disasters where we don't really have anything to sell or give you yet. 
+Hopefully very soon we will be there, because we are destined, obsessed with making it real. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+By birth and by choice, I've been involved with the auto industry my entire life, and for the past 30 years, I've worked at Ford Motor Company. 
+And for most of those years, I worried about, how am I going to sell more cars and trucks? 
+But today I worry about, what if all we do is sell more cars and trucks? 
+What happens when the number of vehicles on the road doubles, triples, or even quadruples? 
+My life is guided by two great passions, and the first is automobiles. 
+I literally grew up with the Ford Motor Company. 
+I thought it was so cool as a little boy when my dad would bring home the latest Ford or Lincoln and leave it in the driveway. 
+And I decided about that time, about age 10, that it would be really cool if I was a test driver. 
+So my parents would go to dinner. 
+They'd sit down; I'd sneak out of the house. 
+I'd jump behind the wheel and take the new model around the driveway, and it was a blast. 
+And that went on for about two years, until — I think I was about 12 — my dad brought home a Lincoln Mark III. 
+And it was snowing that day. 
+So he and mom went to dinner, and I snuck out and thought it'd be really cool to do donuts or even some figure-eights in the snow. 
+My dad finished dinner early that evening. 
+And he was walking to the front hall and out the front door just about the same time I hit some ice and met him at the front door with the car — and almost ended up in the front hall. 
+So it kind of cooled my test-driving for a little while. 
+But I really began to love cars then. 
+And my first car was a 1975 electric-green Mustang. 
+And even though the color was pretty hideous, I did love the car, and it really cemented my love affair with cars that's continued on to this day. 
+But cars are really more than a passion of mine; they're quite literally in my blood. 
+My great grandfather was Henry Ford, and on my mother's side, my great grandfather was Harvey Firestone. 
+So when I was born, I guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me. 
+But my great grandfather, Henry Ford, really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company was to make people's lives better and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them. 
+Because he believed that with mobility comes freedom and progress. 
+And that's a belief that I share. 
+My other great passion is the environment. 
+And as a young boy, I used to go up to Northern Michigan and fish in the rivers that Hemingway fished in and then later wrote about. 
+And it really struck me as the years went by, in a very negative way, when I would go to some stream that I'd loved, and was used to walking through this field that was once filled with fireflies, and now had a strip mall or a bunch of condos on it. 
+And so even at a young age, that really resonated with me, and the whole notion of environmental preservation, at a very basic level, sunk in with me. 
+As a high-schooler, I started to read authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey, and I really began to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world. 
+But it never really occurred to me that my love of cars and trucks would ever be in conflict with nature. 
+And that was true until I got to college. 
+And when I got to college, you can imagine my surprise when I would go to class and a number of my professors would say that Ford Motor Company and my family was everything that was wrong with our country. 
+They thought that we were more interested, as an industry, in profits, rather than progress, and that we filled the skies with smog — and frankly, we were the enemy. 
+I joined Ford after college, after some soul searching whether or not this is really the right thing to do. 
+But I decided that I wanted to go and see if I could affect change there. 
+And as I look back over 30 years ago, it was a little naive to think at that age that I could. But I wanted to. 
+And I really discovered that my professors weren't completely wrong. 
+In fact, when I got back to Detroit, my environmental leanings weren't exactly embraced by those in my own company, and certainly by those in the industry. 
+I had some very interesting conversations, as you can imagine. 
+There were some within Ford who believed that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear and that I needed to stop hanging out with "" environmental wackos. "" I was considered a radical. 
+And I'll never forget the day I was called in by a member of top management and told to stop associating with any known or suspected environmentalists. 
+(Laughter) Of course, I had no intention of doing that, and I kept speaking out about the environment, and it really was the topic that we now today call sustainability. 
+And in time, my views went from controversial to more or less consensus today. 
+I mean, I think most people in the industry understand that we've got to get on with it. 
+And the good news is today we are tackling the big issues, of cars and the environment — not only at Ford, but really as an industry. 
+We're pushing fuel efficiency to new heights. 
+And with new technology, we're reducing — and I believe, someday we'll eliminate — CO2 emissions. 
+We're starting to sell electric cars, which is great. 
+We're developing alternative powertrains that are going to make cars affordable in every sense of the word — economically, socially and environmentally. 
+And actually, although we've got a long way to go and a lot of work to do, I can see the day where my two great passions — cars and the environment — actually come into harmony. 
+But unfortunately, as we're on our way to solving one monstrous problem — and as I said, we're not there yet; we've got a lot of work to do, but I can see where we will — but even as we're in the process of doing that, another huge problem is looming, and people aren't noticing. 
+And that is the freedom of mobility that my great grandfather brought to people is now being threatened, just as the environment is. 
+The problem, put in its simplest terms, is one of mathematics. 
+Today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world, and within our lifetime, that number's going to grow to about nine billion. 
+And at that population level, our planet will be dealing with the limits of growth. 
+And with that growth comes some severe practical problems, one of which is our transportation system simply won't be able to deal with it. 
+When we look at the population growth in terms of cars, it becomes even clearer. 
+Today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide. 
+But with more people and greater prosperity around the world, that number's going to grow to between two and four billion cars by mid century. 
+And this is going to create the kind of global gridlock that the world has never seen before. 
+Now think about the impact that this is going to have on our daily lives. 
+Today the average American spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams, and that's a huge waste of time and resources. 
+But that's nothing compared to what's going on in the nations that are growing the fastest. 
+Today the average driver in Beijing has a five-hour commute. 
+And last summer — many of you probably saw this — there was a hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China. 
+In the decades to come, 75 percent of the world's population will live in cities, and 50 of those cities will be of 10 million people or more. 
+So you can see the size of the issue that we're facing. 
+When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow. 
+Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam. 
+So, if we make no changes today, what does tomorrow look like? 
+Well I think you probably already have the picture. 
+Traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge, and they're really very, very inconvenient, but that's all they are. 
+But the bigger issue is that global gridlock is going to stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and health care, particularly to people that live in city centers. 
+And our quality of life is going to be severely compromised. 
+So what's going to solve this? 
+Well the answer isn't going to be more of the same. 
+My great grandfather once said before he invented the Model T, "" If I had asked people then what they wanted, they would have answered, 'We want faster horses.' "" So the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads. 
+When America began moving west, we didn't add more wagon trains, we built railroads. 
+And to connect our country after World War II, we didn't build more two-lane highways, we built the interstate highway system. 
+Today we need that same leap in thinking for us to create a viable future. 
+We are going to build smart cars, but we also need to build smart roads, smart parking, smart public transportation systems and more. 
+We don't want to waste our time sitting in traffic, sitting at tollbooths or looking for parking spots. 
+We need an integrated system that uses real time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale without hassle or compromises for travelers. 
+And frankly, that's the kind of system that's going to make the future of personal mobility sustainable. 
+Now the good news is some of this work has already begun in different parts of the world. 
+The city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi uses driverless electric vehicles that can communicate with one another, and they go underneath the city streets. 
+And up above, you've got a series of pedestrian walkways. 
+On New York City's 34th Street, gridlock will soon be replaced with a connected system of vehicle-specific corridors. 
+Pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created, and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute to get across town in New York from about an hour today at rush hour to about 20 minutes. 
+Now if you look at Hong Kong, they have a very interesting system called Octopus there. 
+It's a system that really ties together all the transportation assets into a single payment system. 
+So parking garages, buses, trains, they all operate within the same system. 
+Now shared car services are also springing up around the world, and these efforts, I think, are great. 
+They're relieving congestion, and they're frankly starting to save some fuel. 
+These are all really good ideas that will move us forward. 
+But what really inspires me is what's going to be possible when our cars can begin talking to each other. 
+Very soon, the same systems that we use today to bring music and entertainment and GPS information into our vehicles are going to be used to create a smart vehicle network. 
+Every morning I drive about 30 miles from my home in Ann Arbor to my office in Dearborn, Michigan. 
+And every night I go home, my commute is a total crapshoot. 
+And I often have to leave the freeway and look for different ways for me to try and make it home. 
+But very soon we're going to see the days when cars are essentially talking to each other. 
+So if the car ahead of me on I-94 hits traffic, it will immediately alert my car and tell my car to reroute itself to get me home in the best possible way. 
+And these systems are being tested right now, and frankly they're going to be ready for prime time pretty soon. 
+But the potential of a connected car network is almost limitless. 
+So just imagine: one day very soon, you're going to be able to plan a trip downtown and your car will be connected to a smart parking system. 
+So you get in your car, and as you get in your car, your car will reserve you a parking spot before you arrive — no more driving around looking for one, which frankly is one of the biggest users of fuel in today's cars in urban areas — is looking for parking spots. 
+Or think about being in New York City and tracking down an intelligent cab on your smart phone so you don't have to wait in the cold to hail one. 
+Or being at a future TED Conference and having your car talk to the calendars of everybody here and telling you all the best route to take home and when you should leave so that you can all arrive at your next destination on time. 
+This is the kind of technology that will merge millions of individual vehicles into a single system. 
+So I think it's clear we have the beginnings of a solution to this enormous problem. 
+But as we found out with addressing CO2 issues, and also fossil fuels, there is no one silver bullet. 
+The solution is not going to be more cars, more roads or a new rail system; it can only be found, I believe, in a global network of interconnected solutions. 
+Now I know we can develop the technology that's going to make this work, but we've got to be willing to get out there and seek out the solutions — whether that means vehicle sharing or public transportation or some other way we haven't even thought of yet; our overall transportation-mix and infrastructure must support all the future options. 
+We need our best and our brightest to start entertaining this issue. 
+Companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, they all need to understand this is a huge business opportunity, as well as an enormous social problem. 
+And just as these groups embrace the green energy challenge — and it's really been amazing to me to watch how much brain power, how much money and how much serious thought has, really over the last three years, just poured into the green energy field. 
+We need that same kind of passion and energy to attack global gridlock. 
+But we need people like all of you in this room, leading thinkers. 
+I mean, frankly, I need all of you to think about how you can help solve this huge issue. 
+And we need people from all walks of life; not just inventors, we need policymakers and government officials to also think about how they're going to respond to this challenge. 
+This isn't going to be solved by any one person or one group. 
+It's going to really require a national energy policy, frankly for each country, because the solutions in each country are going to be different based upon income levels, traffic jams and also how integrated the systems already are. 
+But we need to get going, and we need to get going today. 
+And we must have an infrastructure that's designed to support this flexible future. 
+You know, we've come a long way. 
+Since the Model T, most people never traveled more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime. 
+And since then, the automobile has allowed us the freedom to choose where we live, where we work, where we play and frankly when we just go out and want to move around. 
+We don't want to regress and lose that freedom. 
+We're on our way to solving — and as I said earlier, I know we've got a long way to go — the one big issue that we're all focused on that threatens it, and that's the environmental issue, but I believe we all must turn all of our effort and all of our ingenuity and determination to help now solve this notion of global gridlock. 
+Because in doing so, we're going to preserve what we've really come to take for granted, which is the freedom to move and move very effortlessly around the world. 
+And it frankly will enhance our quality of life if we fix this. 
+Because, if you can envision, as I do, a future of zero emissions and freedom to move around the country and around the world like we take for granted today, that's worth the hard work today to preserve that for tomorrow. 
+I believe we're at our best when we're confronted with big issues. 
+This is a big one, and it won't wait. 
+So let's get started now. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Come with me to the bottom of the world, Antarctica, the highest, driest, windiest, and yes, coldest region on Earth — more arid than the Sahara and, in parts, colder than Mars. 
+The ice of Antarctica glows with a light so dazzling, it blinds the unprotected eye. 
+Early explorers rubbed cocaine in their eyes to kill the pain of it. 
+The weight of the ice is such that the entire continent sags below sea level, beneath its weight. 
+Yet, the ice of Antarctica is a calendar of climate change. 
+It records the annual rise and fall of greenhouse gases and temperatures going back before the onset of the last ice ages. 
+Nowhere on Earth offers us such a perfect record. 
+And here, scientists are drilling into the past of our planet to find clues to the future of climate change. 
+This past January, I traveled to a place called WAIS Divide, about 600 miles from the South Pole. 
+It is the best place on the planet, many say, to study the history of climate change. 
+There, about 45 scientists from the University of Wisconsin, the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and others have been working to answer a central question about global warming. 
+What is the exact relationship between levels of greenhouse gases and planetary temperatures? 
+It's urgent work. We know that temperatures are rising. 
+This past May was the warmest worldwide on record. 
+And we know that levels of greenhouse gases are rising too. 
+What we don't know is the exact, precise, immediate impact of these changes on natural climate patterns — winds, ocean currents, precipitation rates, cloud formation, things that bear on the health and well-being of billions of people. 
+Their entire camp, every item of gear, was ferried 885 miles from McMurdo Station, the main U.S. supply base on the coast of Antarctica. 
+WAIS Divide itself though, is a circle of tents in the snow. 
+In blizzard winds, the crew sling ropes between the tents so that people can feel their way safely to the nearest ice house and to the nearest outhouse. 
+It snows so heavily there, the installation was almost immediately buried. 
+Indeed, the researchers picked this site because ice and snow accumulates here 10 times faster than anywhere else in Antarctica. 
+They have to dig themselves out every day. 
+It makes for an exotic and chilly commute. 
+(Laughter) But under the surface is a hive of industrial activity centered around an eight-million-dollar drill assembly. 
+Periodically, this drill, like a biopsy needle, plunges thousands of feet deep into the ice to extract a marrow of gases and isotopes for analysis. 
+Ten times a day, they extract the 10-foot long cylinder of compressed ice crystals that contain the unsullied air and trace chemicals laid down by snow, season after season for thousands of years. 
+It's really a time machine. 
+At the peak of activity earlier this year, the researchers lowered the drill an extra hundred feet deeper into the ice every day and another 365 years deeper into the past. 
+Periodically, they remove a cylinder of ice, like gamekeepers popping a spent shotgun shell from the barrel of a drill. 
+They inspect it, they check it for cracks, for drill damage, for spalls, for chips. 
+More importantly, they prepare it for inspection and analysis by 27 independent laboratories in the United States and Europe, who will examine it for 40 different trace chemicals related to climate, some in parts per quadrillion. 
+Yes, I said that with a Q, quadrillion. 
+They cut the cylinders up into three-foot sections for easier handling and shipment back to these labs, some 8,000 miles from the drill site. 
+Each cylinder is a parfait of time. 
+This ice formed as snow 15,800 years ago, when our ancestors were daubing themselves with paint and considering the radical new technology of the alphabet. 
+Bathed in polarized light and cut in cross-section, this ancient ice reveals itself as a mosaic of colors, each one showing how conditions at depth in the ice have affected this material at depths where pressures can reach a ton per square inch. 
+Every year, it begins with a snowflake, and by digging into fresh snow, we can see how this process is ongoing today. 
+This wall of undisturbed snow, back-lit by sunlight, shows the striations of winter and summer snow, layer upon layer. 
+Each storm scours the atmosphere, washing out dust, soot, trace chemicals, and depositing them on the snow pack year after year, millennia after millennia, creating a kind of periodic table of elements that at this point is more than 11,000 feet thick. 
+From this, we can detect an extraordinary number of things. 
+We can see the calcium from the world's deserts, soot from distant wildfires, methane as an indicator of the strength of a Pacific monsoon, all wafted on winds from warmer latitudes to this remote and very cold place. 
+Most importantly, these cylinders and this snow trap air. 
+Each cylinder is about 10 percent ancient air, a pristine time capsule of greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide — all unchanged from the day that snow formed and first fell. 
+And this is the object of their scrutiny. 
+But don't we already know what we need to know about greenhouse gases? 
+Why do we need to study this anymore? 
+Don't we already know how they affect temperatures? 
+Don't we already know the consequences of a changing climate on our settled civilization? 
+The truth is, we only know the outlines, and what we don't completely understand, we can't properly fix. 
+Indeed, we run the risk of making things worse. 
+Consider, the single most successful international environmental effort of the 20th century, the Montreal Protocol, in which the nations of Earth banded together to protect the planet from the harmful effects of ozone-destroying chemicals used at that time in air conditioners, refrigerators and other cooling devices. 
+We banned those chemicals, and we replaced them, unknowingly, with other substances that, molecule per molecule, are a hundred times more potent as heat-trapping, greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. 
+This process requires extraordinary precautions. 
+The scientists must insure that the ice is not contaminated. 
+Moreover, in this 8,000-mile journey, they have to insure this ice doesn't melt. 
+Imagine juggling a snowball across the tropics. 
+They have to, in fact, make sure this ice never gets warmer than about 20 degrees below zero, otherwise, the key gases inside it will dissipate. 
+So, in the coldest place on Earth, they work inside a refrigerator. 
+As they handle the ice, in fact, they keep an extra pair of gloves warming in an oven, so that, when their work gloves freeze and their fingers stiffen, they can don a fresh pair. 
+They work against the clock and against the thermometer. 
+So far, they've packed up about 4,500 feet of ice cores for shipment back to the United States. 
+This past season, they manhandled them across the ice to waiting aircraft. 
+The 109th Air National Guard flew the most recent shipment of ice back to the coast of Antarctica, where it was boarded onto a freighter, shipped across the tropics to California, unloaded, put on a truck, driven across the desert to the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado, where, as we speak, scientists are now slicing this material up for samples, for analysis, to be distributed to the laboratories around the country and in Europe. 
+Antarctica was this planet's last empty quarter — the blind spot in our expanding vision of the world. 
+Early explorers sailed off the edge of the map, and they found a place where the normal rules of time and temperature seem suspended. 
+Here, the ice seems a living presence. 
+The wind that rubs against it gives it voice. 
+It is a voice of experience. 
+It is a voice we should heed. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I made a film that was impossible to make, but I didn't know it was impossible, and that's how I was able to do it. 
+"" Mars et Avril "" is a science fiction film. 
+It's set in Montreal some 50 years in the future. 
+No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it's expensive, it's set in the future, and it's got tons of visual effects, and it's shot on green screen. 
+Yet this is the kind of movie that I wanted to make ever since I was a kid, really, back when I was reading some comic books and dreaming about what the future might be. 
+When American producers see my film, they think that I had a big budget to do it, like 23 million. 
+But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget. 
+I did "" Mars et Avril "" for only 2.3 million. 
+So you might wonder, what's the deal here? 
+How did I do this? 
+Well, it's two things. First, it's time. 
+When you don't have money, you must take time, and it took me seven years to do "" Mars et Avril. "" The second aspect is love. 
+I got tons and tons of generosity from everyone involved. 
+And it seems like every department had nothing, so they had to rely on our creativity and turn every problem into an opportunity. 
+And that brings me to the point of my talk, actually, how constraints, big creative constraints, can boost creativity. 
+But let me go back in time a bit. 
+In my early 20s, I did some graphic novels, but they weren't your usual graphic novels. 
+They were books telling a science fiction story through images and text, and most of the actors who are now starring in the movie adaptation, they were already involved in these books portraying characters into a sort of experimental, theatrical, simplistic way. 
+And one of these actors is the great stage director and actor Robert Lepage. 
+And I just love this guy. 
+I've been in love with this guy since I was a kid. 
+His career I admire a lot. 
+And I wanted this guy to be involved in my crazy project, and he was kind enough to lend his image to the character of Eugène Spaak, who is a cosmologist and artist who seeks relation in between time, space, love, music and women. 
+And he was a perfect fit for the part, and Robert is actually the one who gave me my first chance. 
+He was the one who believed in me and encouraged me to do an adaptation of my books into a film, and to write, direct, and produce the film myself. 
+And Robert is actually the very first example of how constraints can boost creativity. 
+Because this guy is the busiest man on the planet. 
+I mean, his agenda is booked until 2042, and he's really hard to get, and I wanted him to be in the movie, to reprise his role in the movie. 
+But the thing is, had I waited for him until 2042, my film wouldn't be a futuristic film anymore, so I just couldn't do that. Right? 
+But that's kind of a big problem. 
+How do you get somebody who is too busy to star in a movie? 
+Well, I said as a joke in a production meeting — and this is a true story, by the way — I said, "" Why don't we turn this guy into a hologram? 
+Because, you know, he is everywhere and nowhere on the planet at the same time, and he's an illuminated being in my mind, and he's in between reality and virtual reality, so it would make perfect sense to turn this guy into a hologram. "" Everybody around the table laughed, but the joke was kind of a good solution, so that's what we ended up doing. 
+Here's how we did it. We shot Robert with six cameras. 
+He was dressed in green and he was like in a green aquarium. 
+Each camera was covering 60 degrees of his head, so that in post-production we could use pretty much any angle we needed, and we shot only his head. 
+Six months later there was a guy on set, a mime portraying the body, the vehicle for the head. 
+And he was wearing a green hood so that we could erase the green hood in postproduction and replace it with Robert Lepage's head. 
+So he became like a renaissance man, and here's what it looks like in the movie. 
+(Music) (Video) Robert Lepage: [As usual, Arthur's drawing didn't account for the technical challenges. 
+I welded the breech, but the valve is still gaping. 
+I tried to lift the pallets to lower the pressure in the sound box, but I might have hit a heartstring. 
+It still sounds too low.] Jacques Languirand: [That's normal. 
+The instrument always ends up resembling its model.] (Music) Martin Villeneuve: Now these musical instruments that you see in this excerpt, they're my second example of how constraints can boost creativity, because I desperately needed these objects in my movie. 
+They are objects of desire. 
+They are imaginary musical instruments. 
+And they carry a nice story with them. 
+Actually, I knew what these things would look like in my mind for many, many years. 
+But my problem was, I didn't have the money to pay for them. I couldn't afford them. 
+So that's kind of a big problem too. 
+How do you get something that you can't afford? 
+And, you know, I woke up one morning with a pretty good idea. 
+I said, "" What if I have somebody else pay for them? "" (Laughter) But who on Earth would be interested by seven not-yet-built musical instruments inspired by women's bodies? 
+And I thought of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal, because who better to understand the kind of crazy poetry that I wanted to put on screen? 
+So I found my way to Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil's CEO, and I presented my crazy idea to him with sketches like this and visual references, and something pretty amazing happened. 
+Guy was interested by this idea not because I was asking for his money, but because I came to him with a good idea in which everybody was happy. 
+It was kind of a perfect triangle in which the art buyer was happy because he got the instruments at a cheaper price, because they weren't even made. 
+He took a leap of faith. 
+And the artist, Dominique Engel, brilliant guy, he was happy too because he had a dream project to work on for a year. 
+And obviously I was happy because I got the instruments in my film for free, which was kind of what I tried to do. 
+So here they are. 
+And my last example of how constraints can boost creativity comes from the green, because this is a weird color, a crazy color, and you need to replace the green screens eventually and you must figure that out sooner rather than later. 
+And I had, again, pretty much, ideas in my mind as to what the world would be, but then again I turned to my childhood imagination and went to the work of Belgian comic book master François Schuiten in Belgium. 
+And this guy is another guy I admire a lot, and I wanted him to be involved in the movie as a production designer. 
+But people told me, you know, Martin, it's impossible, the guy is too busy and he will say no. 
+Well, I said, you know what, instead of mimicking his style, I might as well call the real guy and ask him, and I sent him my books, and he answered that he was interested in working on the film with me because he could be a big fish in a small aquarium. 
+In other words, there was space for him to dream with me. 
+So here I was with one of my childhood heroes, drawing every single frame that's in the film to turn that into Montreal in the future. 
+And it was an amazing collaboration to work with this great artist whom I admire. 
+But then, you know, eventually you have to turn all these drawings into reality. 
+So, again, my solution was to aim for the best possible artist that I could think of. 
+And there's this guy in Montreal, another Quebecois called Carlos Monzon, and he's a very good VFX artist. 
+This guy had been lead compositor on such films as "" Avatar "" and "" Star Trek "" and "" Transformers, "" and other unknown projects like this, and I knew he was the perfect fit for the job, and I had to convince him, and, instead of working on the next Spielberg movie, he accepted to work on mine. 
+Why? Because I offered him a space to dream. 
+So if you don't have money to offer to people, you must strike their imagination with something as nice as you can think of. 
+So this is what happened on this movie, and that's how it got made, and we went to this very nice postproduction company in Montreal called Vision Globale, and they lent their 60 artists to work full time for six months to do this crazy film. 
+So I want to tell you that, if you have some crazy ideas in your mind, and that people tell you that it's impossible to make, well, that's an even better reason to want to do it, because people have a tendency to see the problems rather than the final result, whereas if you start to deal with problems as being your allies rather than your opponents, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing way. 
+I have experienced it. 
+And you might end up doing some crazy projects, and who knows, you might even end up going to Mars. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So it turns out that mathematics is a very powerful language. 
+It has generated considerable insight in physics, in biology and economics, but not that much in the humanities and in history. 
+I think there's a belief that it's just impossible, that you cannot quantify the doings of mankind, that you cannot measure history. 
+But I don't think that's right. 
+I want to show you a couple of examples why. 
+So my collaborator Erez and I were considering the following fact: that two kings separated by centuries will speak a very different language. 
+That's a powerful historical force. 
+So the king of England, Alfred the Great, will use a vocabulary and grammar that is quite different from the king of hip hop, Jay-Z. 
+(Laughter) Now it's just the way it is. 
+Language changes over time, and it's a powerful force. 
+So Erez and I wanted to know more about that. 
+So we paid attention to a particular grammatical rule, past-tense conjugation. 
+So you just add "" ed "" to a verb at the end to signify the past. 
+"Today I walk. Yesterday I walked." 
+But some verbs are irregular. 
+"Yesterday I thought." 
+Now what's interesting about that is irregular verbs between Alfred and Jay-Z have become more regular. 
+Like the verb "" to wed "" that you see here has become regular. 
+So Erez and I followed the fate of over 100 irregular verbs through 12 centuries of English language, and we saw that there's actually a very simple mathematical pattern that captures this complex historical change, namely, if a verb is 100 times more frequent than another, it regularizes 10 times slower. 
+That's a piece of history, but it comes in a mathematical wrapping. 
+Now in some cases math can even help explain, or propose explanations for, historical forces. 
+So here Steve Pinker and I were considering the magnitude of wars during the last two centuries. 
+There's actually a well-known regularity to them where the number of wars that are 100 times deadlier is 10 times smaller. 
+So there are 30 wars that are about as deadly as the Six Days War, but there's only four wars that are 100 times deadlier — like World War I. 
+So what kind of historical mechanism can produce that? 
+What's the origin of this? 
+So Steve and I, through mathematical analysis, propose that there's actually a very simple phenomenon at the root of this, which lies in our brains. 
+This is a very well-known feature in which we perceive quantities in relative ways — quantities like the intensity of light or the loudness of a sound. 
+For instance, committing 10,000 soldiers to the next battle sounds like a lot. 
+It's relatively enormous if you've already committed 1,000 soldiers previously. 
+But it doesn't sound so much, it's not relatively enough, it won't make a difference if you've already committed 100,000 soldiers previously. 
+So you see that because of the way we perceive quantities, as the war drags on, the number of soldiers committed to it and the casualties will increase not linearly — like 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 — but exponentially — 10,000, later 20,000, later 40,000. 
+And so that explains this pattern that we've seen before. 
+So here mathematics is able to link a well-known feature of the individual mind with a long-term historical pattern that unfolds over centuries and across continents. 
+So these types of examples, today there are just a few of them, but I think in the next decade they will become commonplace. 
+The reason for that is that the historical record is becoming digitized at a very fast pace. 
+So there's about 130 million books that have been written since the dawn of time. 
+Companies like Google have digitized many of them — above 20 million actually. 
+And when the stuff of history is available in digital form, it makes it possible for a mathematical analysis to very quickly and very conveniently review trends in our history and our culture. 
+So I think in the next decade, the sciences and the humanities will come closer together to be able to answer deep questions about mankind. 
+And I think that mathematics will be a very powerful language to do that. 
+It will be able to reveal new trends in our history, sometimes to explain them, and maybe even in the future to predict what's going to happen. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, how many of you have ever gotten behind the wheel of a car when you really shouldn't have been driving? 
+Maybe you're out on the road for a long day, and you just wanted to get home. 
+You were tired, but you felt you could drive a few more miles. 
+Maybe you thought, I've had less to drink than everybody else, I should be the one to go home. 
+Or maybe your mind was just entirely elsewhere. 
+Does this sound familiar to you? 
+Now, in those situations, wouldn't it be great if there was a button on your dashboard that you could push, and the car would get you home safely? 
+Now, that's been the promise of the self-driving car, the autonomous vehicle, and it's been the dream since at least 1939, when General Motors showcased this idea at their Futurama booth at the World's Fair. 
+Now, it's been one of those dreams that's always seemed about 20 years in the future. 
+Now, two weeks ago, that dream took a step forward, when the state of Nevada granted Google's self-driving car the very first license for an autonomous vehicle, clearly establishing that it's legal for them to test it on the roads in Nevada. 
+Now, California's considering similar legislation, and this would make sure that the autonomous car is not one of those things that has to stay in Vegas. 
+(Laughter) Now, in my lab at Stanford, we've been working on autonomous cars too, but with a slightly different spin on things. You see, we've been developing robotic race cars, cars that can actually push themselves to the very limits of physical performance. 
+Now, why would we want to do such a thing? 
+Well, there's two really good reasons for this. 
+First, we believe that before people turn over control to an autonomous car, that autonomous car should be at least as good as the very best human drivers. 
+Now, if you're like me, and the other 70 percent of the population who know that we are above-average drivers, you understand that's a very high bar. 
+There's another reason as well. 
+Just like race car drivers can use all of the friction between the tire and the road, all of the car's capabilities to go as fast as possible, we want to use all of those capabilities to avoid any accident we can. 
+Now, you may push the car to the limits not because you're driving too fast, but because you've hit an icy patch of road, conditions have changed. 
+In those situations, we want a car that is capable enough to avoid any accident that can physically be avoided. 
+I must confess, there's kind of a third motivation as well. 
+You see, I have a passion for racing. 
+In the past, I've been a race car owner, a crew chief and a driving coach, although maybe not at the level that you're currently expecting. 
+One of the things that we've developed in the lab — we've developed several vehicles — is what we believe is the world's first autonomously drifting car. 
+It's another one of those categories where maybe there's not a lot of competition. 
+(Laughter) But this is P1. It's an entirely student-built electric vehicle, which through using its rear-wheel drive and front-wheel steer-by-wire can drift around corners. 
+It can get sideways like a rally car driver, always able to take the tightest curve, even on slippery, changing surfaces, never spinning out. 
+We've also worked with Volkswagen Oracle, on Shelley, an autonomous race car that has raced at 150 miles an hour through the Bonneville Salt Flats, gone around Thunderhill Raceway Park in the sun, the wind and the rain, and navigated the 153 turns and 12.4 miles of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb route in Colorado with nobody at the wheel. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I guess it goes without saying that we've had a lot of fun doing this. 
+But in fact, there's something else that we've developed in the process of developing these autonomous cars. 
+We have developed a tremendous appreciation for the capabilities of human race car drivers. 
+As we've looked at the question of how well do these cars perform, we wanted to compare them to our human counterparts. 
+And we discovered their human counterparts are amazing. 
+Now, we can take a map of a race track, we can take a mathematical model of a car, and with some iteration, we can actually find the fastest way around that track. 
+We line that up with data that we record from a professional driver, and the resemblance is absolutely remarkable. 
+Yes, there are subtle differences here, but the human race car driver is able to go out and drive an amazingly fast line, without the benefit of an algorithm that compares the trade-off between going as fast as possible in this corner, and shaving a little bit of time off of the straight over here. 
+Not only that, they're able to do it lap after lap after lap. 
+They're able to go out and consistently do this, pushing the car to the limits every single time. 
+It's extraordinary to watch. 
+You put them in a new car, and after a few laps, they've found the fastest line in that car, and they're off to the races. 
+It really makes you think, we'd love to know what's going on inside their brain. 
+So as researchers, that's what we decided to find out. 
+We decided to instrument not only the car, but also the race car driver, to try to get a glimpse into what was going on in their head as they were doing this. 
+Now, this is Dr. Lene Harbott applying electrodes to the head of John Morton. 
+John Morton is a former Can-Am and IMSA driver, who's also a class champion at Le Mans. 
+Fantastic driver, and very willing to put up with graduate students and this sort of research. 
+She's putting electrodes on his head so that we can monitor the electrical activity in John's brain as he races around the track. 
+Now, clearly we're not going to put a couple of electrodes on his head and understand exactly what all of his thoughts are on the track. 
+However, neuroscientists have identified certain patterns that let us tease out some very important aspects of this. 
+For instance, the resting brain tends to generate a lot of alpha waves. 
+In contrast, theta waves are associated with a lot of cognitive activity, like visual processing, things where the driver is thinking quite a bit. 
+Now, we can measure this, and we can look at the relative power between the theta waves and the alpha waves. 
+This gives us a measure of mental workload, how much the driver is actually challenged cognitively at any point along the track. 
+Now, we wanted to see if we could actually record this on the track, so we headed down south to Laguna Seca. 
+Laguna Seca is a legendary raceway about halfway between Salinas and Monterey. 
+It has a curve there called the Corkscrew. 
+Now, the Corkscrew is a chicane, followed by a quick right-handed turn as the road drops three stories. 
+Now, the strategy for driving this as explained to me was, you aim for the bush in the distance, and as the road falls away, you realize it was actually the top of a tree. 
+All right, so thanks to the Revs Program at Stanford, we were able to take John there and put him behind the wheel of a 1960 Porsche Abarth Carrera. 
+Life is way too short for boring cars. 
+So, here you see John on the track, he's going up the hill — Oh! Somebody liked that — and you can see, actually, his mental workload — measuring here in the red bar — you can see his actions as he approaches. 
+Now watch, he has to downshift. 
+And then he has to turn left. 
+Look for the tree, and down. 
+Not surprisingly, you can see this is a pretty challenging task. 
+You can see his mental workload spike as he goes through this, as you would expect with something that requires this level of complexity. 
+But what's really interesting is to look at areas of the track where his mental workload doesn't increase. 
+I'm going to take you around now to the other side of the track. 
+Turn three. And John's going to go into that corner and the rear end of the car is going to begin to slide out. 
+He's going to have to correct for that with steering. 
+So watch as John does this here. 
+Watch the mental workload, and watch the steering. 
+The car begins to slide out, dramatic maneuver to correct it, and no change whatsoever in the mental workload. 
+Not a challenging task. 
+In fact, entirely reflexive. 
+Now, our data processing on this is still preliminary, but it really seems that these phenomenal feats that the race car drivers are performing are instinctive. 
+They are things that they have simply learned to do. 
+It requires very little mental workload for them to perform these amazing feats. 
+And their actions are fantastic. 
+This is exactly what you want to do on the steering wheel to catch the car in this situation. 
+Now, this has given us tremendous insight and inspiration for our own autonomous vehicles. 
+We've started to ask the question: Can we make them a little less algorithmic and a little more intuitive? 
+Can we take this reflexive action that we see from the very best race car drivers, introduce it to our cars, and maybe even into a system that could get onto your car in the future? 
+That would take us a long step along the road to autonomous vehicles that drive as well as the best humans. 
+But it's made us think a little bit more deeply as well. 
+Do we want something more from our car than to simply be a chauffeur? 
+Do we want our car to perhaps be a partner, a coach, someone that can use their understanding of the situation to help us reach our potential? 
+Can, in fact, the technology not simply replace humans, but allow us to reach the level of reflex and intuition that we're all capable of? 
+So, as we move forward into this technological future, I want you to just pause and think of that for a moment. 
+What is the ideal balance of human and machine? 
+And as we think about that, let's take inspiration from the absolutely amazing capabilities of the human body and the human mind. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+How do you feed a city? 
+It's one of the great questions of our time. 
+Yet it's one that's rarely asked. 
+We take it for granted that if we go into a shop or restaurant, or indeed into this theater's foyer in about an hour's time, there is going to be food there waiting for us, having magically come from somewhere. 
+But when you think that every day for a city the size of London, enough food has to be produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten, disposed of, and that something similar has to happen every day for every city on earth, it's remarkable that cities get fed at all. 
+We live in places like this as if they're the most natural things in the world, forgetting that because we're animals and that we need to eat, we're actually as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were. 
+And as more of us move into cities, more of that natural world is being transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me — it's soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil — in order to feed us. 
+These are extraordinary landscapes, but few of us ever get to see them. 
+And increasingly these landscapes are not just feeding us either. 
+As more of us move into cities, more of us are eating meat, so that a third of the annual grain crop globally now gets fed to animals rather than to us human animals. 
+And given that it takes three times as much grain — actually ten times as much grain — to feed a human if it's passed through an animal first, that's not a very efficient way of feeding us. 
+And it's an escalating problem too. 
+By 2050, it's estimated that twice the number of us are going to be living in cities. 
+And it's also estimated that there is going to be twice as much meat and dairy consumed. 
+So meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand. 
+And that's going to pose an enormous problem. 
+Six billion hungry carnivores to feed, by 2050. 
+That's a big problem. And actually if we carry on as we are, it's a problem we're very unlikely to be able to solve. 
+Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to create new arable land. 
+Although at the same time we're losing an equivalent amount of existing arables to salinization and erosion. 
+We're very hungry for fossil fuels too. 
+It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie of food that we consume in the West. 
+And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost, we don't actually value it. 
+Half the food produced in the USA is currently thrown away. 
+And to end all of this, at the end of this long process, we're not even managing to feed the planet properly. 
+A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve. 
+None of it makes very much sense. 
+And when you think that 80 percent of global trade in food now is controlled by just five multinational corporations, it's a grim picture. 
+As we're moving into cities, the world is also embracing a Western diet. 
+And if we look to the future, it's an unsustainable diet. 
+So how did we get here? 
+And more importantly, what are we going to do about it? 
+Well, to answer the slightly easier question first, about 10,000 years ago, I would say, is the beginning of this process in the ancient Near East, known as the Fertile Crescent. 
+Because, as you can see, it was crescent shaped. 
+And it was also fertile. 
+And it was here, about 10,000 years ago, that two extraordinary inventions, agriculture and urbanism, happened roughly in the same place and at the same time. 
+This is no accident, because agriculture and cities are bound together. They need each other. 
+Because it was discovery of grain by our ancient ancestors for the first time that produced a food source that was large enough and stable enough to support permanent settlements. 
+And if we look at what those settlements were like, we see they were compact. 
+They were surrounded by productive farm land and dominated by large temple complexes like this one at Ur, that were, in fact, effectively, spiritualized, central food distribution centers. 
+Because it was the temples that organized the harvest, gathered in the grain, offered it to the gods, and then offered the grain that the gods didn't eat back to the people. 
+So, if you like, the whole spiritual and physical life of these cities was dominated by the grain and the harvest that sustained them. 
+And in fact, that's true of every ancient city. 
+But of course not all of them were that small. 
+Famously, Rome had about a million citizens by the first century A.D. 
+So how did a city like this feed itself? 
+The answer is what I call "" ancient food miles. "" Basically, Rome had access to the sea, which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away. 
+This is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world, because it was very difficult to transport food over roads, which were rough. 
+And the food obviously went off very quickly. 
+So Rome effectively waged war on places like Carthage and Egypt just to get its paws on their grain reserves. 
+And, in fact, you could say that the expansion of the Empire was really sort of one long, drawn out militarized shopping spree, really. 
+(Laughter) In fact — I love the fact, I just have to mention this: Rome in fact used to import oysters from London, at one stage. I think that's extraordinary. 
+So Rome shaped its hinterland through its appetite. 
+But the interesting thing is that the other thing also happened in the pre-industrial world. 
+If we look at a map of London in the 17th century, we can see that its grain, which is coming in from the Thames, along the bottom of this map. 
+So the grain markets were to the south of the city. 
+And the roads leading up from them to Cheapside, which was the main market, were also grain markets. 
+And if you look at the name of one of those streets, Bread Street, you can tell what was going on there 300 years ago. 
+And the same of course was true for fish. 
+Fish was, of course, coming in by river as well. Same thing. 
+And of course Billingsgate, famously, was London's fish market, operating on-site here until the mid-1980s. 
+Which is extraordinary, really, when you think about it. 
+Everybody else was wandering around with mobile phones that looked like bricks and sort of smelly fish happening down on the port. 
+This is another thing about food in cities: Once its roots into the city are established, they very rarely move. 
+Meat is a very different story because, of course, animals could walk into the city. 
+So much of London's meat was coming from the northwest, from Scotland and Wales. 
+So it was coming in, and arriving at the city at the northwest, which is why Smithfield, London's very famous meat market, was located up there. 
+Poultry was coming in from East Anglia and so on, to the northeast. 
+I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this. Anyway, and so the birds were coming in with their feet protected with little canvas shoes. 
+And then when they hit the eastern end of Cheapside, that's where they were sold, which is why it's called Poultry. 
+And, in fact, if you look at the map of any city built before the industrial age, you can trace food coming in to it. 
+You can actually see how it was physically shaped by food, both by reading the names of the streets, which give you a lot of clues. 
+Friday Street, in a previous life, is where you went to buy your fish on a Friday. 
+But also you have to imagine it full of food. 
+Because the streets and the public spaces were the only places where food was bought and sold. 
+And if we look at an image of Smithfield in 1830 you can see that it would have been very difficult to live in a city like this and be unaware of where your food came from. 
+In fact, if you were having Sunday lunch, the chances were it was mooing or bleating outside your window about three days earlier. 
+So this was obviously an organic city, part of an organic cycle. 
+And then 10 years later everything changed. 
+This is an image of the Great Western in 1840. 
+And as you can see, some of the earliest train passengers were pigs and sheep. 
+So all of a sudden, these animals are no longer walking into market. 
+They're being slaughtered out of sight and mind, somewhere in the countryside. 
+And they're coming into the city by rail. 
+And this changes everything. 
+To start off with, it makes it possible for the first time to grow cities, really any size and shape, in any place. 
+Cities used to be constrained by geography; they used to have to get their food through very difficult physical means. 
+All of a sudden they are effectively emancipated from geography. 
+And as you can see from these maps of London, in the 90 years after the trains came, it goes from being a little blob that was quite easy to feed by animals coming in on foot, and so on, to a large splurge, that would be very, very difficult to feed with anybody on foot, either animals or people. 
+And of course that was just the beginning. After the trains came cars, and really this marks the end of this process. 
+It's the final emancipation of the city from any apparent relationship with nature at all. 
+And this is the kind of city that's devoid of smell, devoid of mess, certainly devoid of people, because nobody would have dreamed of walking in such a landscape. 
+In fact, what they did to get food was they got in their cars, drove to a box somewhere on the outskirts, came back with a week's worth of shopping, and wondered what on earth to do with it. 
+And this really is the moment when our relationship, both with food and cities, changes completely. 
+Here we have food — that used to be the center, the social core of the city — at the periphery. 
+It used to be a social event, buying and selling food. 
+Now it's anonymous. 
+We used to cook; now we just add water, or a little bit of an egg if you're making a cake or something. 
+We don't smell food to see if it's okay to eat. 
+We just read the back of a label on a packet. 
+And we don't value food. We don't trust it. 
+So instead of trusting it, we fear it. 
+And instead of valuing it, we throw it away. 
+One of the great ironies of modern food systems is that they've made the very thing they promised to make easier much harder. 
+By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place, they've actually distanced us from our most important relationship, which is that of us and nature. 
+And also they've made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver, that, as we've seen, are unsustainable. 
+So what are we going to do about that? 
+It's not a new question. 
+500 years ago it's what Thomas More was asking himself. 
+This is the frontispiece of his book "" Utopia. "" And it was a series of semi-independent city-states, if that sounds remotely familiar, a day's walk from one another where everyone was basically farming-mad, and grew vegetables in their back gardens, and ate communal meals together, and so on. 
+And I think you could argue that food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia, even though More never framed it that way. 
+And here is another very famous "" Utopian "" vision, that of Ebenezer Howard, "" The Garden City. "" Same idea: series of semi-independent city-states, little blobs of metropolitan stuff with arable land around, joined to one another by railway. 
+And again, food could be said to be the ordering principle of his vision. 
+It even got built, but nothing to do with this vision that Howard had. 
+And that is the problem with these Utopian ideas, that they are Utopian. 
+Utopia was actually a word that Thomas Moore used deliberately. 
+It was a kind of joke, because it's got a double derivation from the Greek. 
+It can either mean a good place, or no place. 
+Because it's an ideal. It's an imaginary thing. We can't have it. 
+And I think, as a conceptual tool for thinking about the very deep problem of human dwelling, that makes it not much use. 
+So I've come up with an alternative, which is Sitopia, from the ancient Greek, "" sitos "" for food, and "" topos "" for place. 
+I believe we already live in Sitopia. 
+We live in a world shaped by food, and if we realize that, we can use food as a really powerful tool — a conceptual tool, design tool, to shape the world differently. 
+So if we were to do that, what might Sitopia look like? 
+Well I think it looks a bit like this. 
+I have to use this slide. It's just the look on the face of the dog. 
+But anyway, this is — (Laughter) it's food at the center of life, at the center of family life, being celebrated, being enjoyed, people taking time for it. 
+This is where food should be in our society. 
+But you can't have scenes like this unless you have people like this. 
+By the way, these can be men as well. 
+It's people who think about food, who think ahead, who plan, who can stare at a pile of raw vegetables and actually recognize them. 
+We need these people. We're part of a network. 
+Because without these kinds of people we can't have places like this. 
+Here, I deliberately chose this because it is a man buying a vegetable. 
+But networks, markets where food is being grown locally. 
+It's common. It's fresh. 
+It's part of the social life of the city. 
+Because without that, you can't have this kind of place, food that is grown locally and also is part of the landscape, and is not just a zero-sum commodity off in some unseen hell-hole. 
+Cows with a view. 
+Steaming piles of humus. 
+This is basically bringing the whole thing together. 
+And this is a community project I visited recently in Toronto. 
+It's a greenhouse, where kids get told all about food and growing their own food. 
+Here is a plant called Kevin, or maybe it's a plant belonging to a kid called Kevin. I don't know. 
+But anyway, these kinds of projects that are trying to reconnect us with nature is extremely important. 
+So Sitopia, for me, is really a way of seeing. 
+It's basically recognizing that Sitopia already exists in little pockets everywhere. 
+The trick is to join them up, to use food as a way of seeing. 
+And if we do that, we're going to stop seeing cities as big, metropolitan, unproductive blobs, like this. 
+We're going to see them more like this, as part of the productive, organic framework of which they are inevitably a part, symbiotically connected. 
+But of course, that's not a great image either, because we need not to be producing food like this anymore. 
+We need to be thinking more about permaculture, which is why I think this image just sums up for me the kind of thinking we need to be doing. 
+It's a re-conceptualization of the way food shapes our lives. 
+The best image I know of this is from 650 years ago. 
+It's Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "" Allegory of Good Government. "" It's about the relationship between the city and the countryside. 
+And I think the message of this is very clear. 
+If the city looks after the country, the country will look after the city. 
+And I want us to ask now, what would Ambrogio Lorenzetti paint if he painted this image today? 
+What would an allegory of good government look like today? 
+Because I think it's an urgent question. 
+It's one we have to ask, and we have to start answering. 
+We know we are what we eat. 
+We need to realize that the world is also what we eat. 
+But if we take that idea, we can use food as a really powerful tool to shape the world better. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to try and explain why it is that perhaps we don't understand as much as we think we do. 
+I'd like to begin with four questions. 
+This is not some sort of cultural thing for the time of year. 
+That's an in-joke, by the way. 
+But these four questions, actually, are ones that people who even know quite a lot about science find quite hard. 
+And they're questions that I've asked of science television producers, of audiences of science educators — so that's science teachers — and also of seven-year-olds, and I find that the seven-year-olds do marginally better than the other audiences, which is somewhat surprising. 
+So the first question, and you might want to write this down, either on a bit of paper, physically, or a virtual piece of paper in your head. And, for viewers at home, you can try this as well. 
+A little seed weighs next to nothing and a tree weighs a lot, right? 
+I think we agree on that. Where does the tree get the stuff that makes up this chair, right? Where does all this stuff come from? 
+(Knocks) And your next question is, can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery, a bulb and one piece of wire? 
+And would you be able to, kind of, draw a — you don't have to draw the diagram, but would you be able to draw the diagram, if you had to do it? Or would you just say, that's actually not possible? 
+The third question is, why is it hotter in summer than in winter? 
+I think we can probably agree that it is hotter in summer than in winter, but why? And finally, would you be able to — and you can sort of scribble it, if you like — scribble a plan diagram of the solar system, showing the shape of the planets' orbits? 
+Would you be able to do that? 
+And if you can, just scribble a pattern. 
+OK. Now, children get their ideas not from teachers, as teachers often think, but actually from common sense, from experience of the world around them, from all the things that go on between them and their peers, and their carers, and their parents, and all of that. Experience. 
+And one of the great experts in this field, of course, was, bless him, Cardinal Wolsey. Be very careful what you get into people's heads because it's virtually impossible to shift it afterwards, right? 
+(Laughter) I'm not quite sure how he died, actually. 
+Was he beheaded in the end, or hung? 
+(Laughter) Now, those questions, which, of course, you've got right, and you haven't been conferring, and so on. 
+And I — you know, normally, I would pick people out and humiliate, but maybe not in this instance. 
+A little seed weighs a lot and, basically, all this stuff, 99 percent of this stuff, came out of the air. 
+Now, I guarantee that about 85 percent of you, or maybe it's fewer at TED, will have said it comes out of the ground. And some people, probably two of you, will come up and argue with me afterwards, and say that actually, it comes out of the ground. 
+Now, if that was true, we'd have trucks going round the country, filling people's gardens in with soil, it'd be a fantastic business. 
+But, actually, we don't do that. 
+The mass of this comes out of the air. 
+Now, I passed all my biology exams in Britain. 
+I passed them really well, but I still came out of school thinking that that stuff came out of the ground. 
+Second one: can you light a little torch-bulb with a battery bulb and one piece of wire? 
+Yes, you can, and I'll show you in a second how to do that. 
+Now, I have some rather bad news, which is that I had a piece of video that I was about to show you, which unfortunately — the sound doesn't work in this room, so I'm going to describe to you, in true "" Monty Python "" fashion, what happens in the video. And in the video, a group of researchers go to MIT on graduation day. 
+We chose MIT because, obviously, that's a very long way away from here, and you wouldn't mind too much, but it sort of works the same way in Britain and in the West Coast of the USA. 
+And we asked them these questions, and we asked those questions of science graduates, and they couldn't answer them. 
+And so, there's a whole lot of people saying, "" I'd be very surprised if you told me that this came out of the air. 
+That's very surprising to me. "" And those are science graduates. 
+And we intercut it with, "" We are the premier science university in the world, "" because of British-like hubris. 
+(Laughter) And when we gave graduate engineers that question, they said it couldn't be done. 
+And when we gave them a battery, and a piece of wire, and a bulb, and said, "" Can you do it? "" They couldn't do it. Right? 
+And that's no different from Imperial College in London, by the way, it's not some sort of anti-American thing going on. 
+As if. Now, the reason this matters is we pay lots and lots of money for teaching people — we might as well get it right. 
+And there are also some societal reasons why we might want people to understand what it is that's happening in photosynthesis. For example, one half of the carbon equation is how much we emit, and the other half of the carbon equation, as I'm very conscious as a trustee of Kew, is how much things soak up, and they soak up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. 
+That's what plants actually do for a living. 
+And, for any Finnish people in the audience, this is a Finnish pun: we are, both literally and metaphorically, skating on thin ice if we don't understand that kind of thing. 
+Now, here's how you do the battery and the bulb. 
+It's so easy, isn't it? Of course, you all knew that. 
+But if you haven't played with a battery and a bulb, if you've only seen a circuit diagram, you might not be able to do that, and that's one of the problems. 
+So, why is it hotter in summer than in winter? 
+We learn, as children, that you get closer to something that's hot, and it burns you. It's a very powerful bit of learning, and it happens pretty early on. 
+By extension, we think to ourselves, "" Why it's hotter in summer than in winter must be because we're closer to the Sun. "" I promise you that most of you will have got that. 
+Oh, you're all shaking your heads, but only a few of you are shaking your heads very firmly. 
+Other ones are kind of going like this. All right. 
+It's hotter in summer than in winter because the rays from the Sun are spread out more, right, because of the tilt of the Earth. 
+And if you think the tilt is tilting us closer, no, it isn't. 
+The Sun is 93 million miles away, and we're tilting like this, right? 
+It makes no odds. In fact, in the Northern Hemisphere, we're further from the Sun in summer, as it happens, but it makes no odds, the difference. 
+OK, now, the scribble of the diagram of the solar system. 
+If you believe, as most of you probably do, that it's hotter in summer than in winter because we're closer to the Sun, you must have drawn an ellipse. 
+Right? That would explain it, right? 
+Except, in your — you're nodding — now, in your ellipse, have you thought, "" Well, what happens during the night? "" Between Australia and here, right, they've got summer and we've got winter, and what — does the Earth kind of rush towards the Sun at night, and then rush back again? I mean, it's a very strange thing going on, and we hold these two models in our head, of what's right and what isn't right, and we do that, as human beings, in all sorts of fields. 
+So, here's Copernicus' view of what the solar system looked like as a plan. 
+That's pretty much what you should have on your piece of paper. Right? 
+And this is NASA's view. They're stunningly similar. 
+I hope you notice the coincidence here. 
+What would you do if you knew that people had this misconception, right, in their heads, of elliptical orbits caused by our experiences as children? 
+What sort of diagram would you show them of the solar system, to show that it's not really like that? 
+You'd show them something like this, wouldn't you? 
+It's a plan, looking down from above. 
+But, no, look what I found in the textbooks. 
+That's what you show people, right? These are from textbooks, from websites, educational websites — and almost anything you pick up is like that. 
+And the reason it's like that is because it's dead boring to have a load of concentric circles, whereas that's much more exciting, to look at something at that angle, isn't it? Right? And by doing it at that angle, if you've got that misconception in your head, then that two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional thing will be ellipses. 
+So you've — it's crap, isn't it really? As we say. 
+So, these mental models — we look for evidence that reinforces our models. 
+We do this, of course, with matters of race, and politics, and everything else, and we do it in science as well. So we look, just look — and scientists do it, constantly — we look for evidence that reinforces our models, and some folks are just all too able and willing to provide the evidence that reinforces the models. 
+So, being I'm in the United States, I'll have a dig at the Europeans. 
+These are examples of what I would say is bad practice in science teaching centers. These pictures are from La Villette in France and the welcome wing of the Science Museum in London. 
+And, if you look at the, kind of the way these things are constructed, there's a lot of mediation by glass, and it's very blue, and kind of professional — in that way that, you know, Woody Allen comes up from under the sheets in that scene in "" Annie Hall, "" and said, "" God, that's so professional. "" And that you don't — there's no passion in it, and it's not hands on, right, and, you know, pun intended. Whereas good interpretation — I'll use an example from nearby — is San Francisco Exploratorium, where all the things that — the demonstrations, and so on, 
+are made out of everyday objects that children can understand, it's very hands-on, and they can engage with, and experiment with. 
+And I know that if the graduates at MIT and in the Imperial College in London had had the battery and the wire and the bit of stuff, and you know, been able to do it, they would have learned how it actually works, rather than thinking that they follow circuit diagrams and can't do it. 
+So good interpretation is more about things that are bodged and stuffed and of my world, right? 
+And things that — where there isn't an extra barrier of a piece of glass or machined titanium, and it all looks fantastic, OK? 
+And the Exploratorium does that really, really well. 
+And it's amateur, but amateur in the best sense, in other words, the root of the word being of love and passion. 
+So, children are not empty vessels, OK? 
+So, as "" Monty Python "" would have it, this is a bit Lord Privy Seal to say so, but this is — children are not empty vessels. 
+They come with their own ideas and their own theories, and unless you work with those, then you won't be able to shift them, right? And I probably haven't shifted your ideas of how the world and universe operates, either. 
+But this applies, equally, to matters of trying to sell new technology. 
+For example, we are, in Britain, we're trying to do a digital switchover of the whole population into digital technology [for television]. 
+And it's one of the difficult things is that when people have preconceptions of how it all works, it's quite difficult to shift those. 
+So we're not empty vessels; the mental models that we have as children persist into adulthood. 
+Poor teaching actually does more harm than good. 
+In this country and in Britain, magnetism is understood better by children before they've been to school than afterwards, OK? 
+Same for gravity, two concepts, so it's — which is quite humbling, as a, you know, if you're a teacher, and you look before and after, that's quite worrying. They do worse in tests afterwards, after the teaching. 
+And we collude. We design tests, or at least in Britain, so that people pass them. Right? 
+And governments do very well. They pat themselves on the back. 
+OK? We collude, and actually if you — if someone had designed a test for me when I was doing my biology exams, to really understand, to see whether I'd understood more than just kind of putting starch and iodine together and seeing it go blue, and really understood that plants took their mass out of the air, then I might have done better at science. 
+So the most important thing is to get people to articulate their models. 
+Your homework is — you know, how does an aircraft's wing create lift? 
+An obvious question, and you'll have an answer now in your heads. 
+And the second question to that then is, ensure you've explained how it is that planes can fly upside down. 
+Ah ha, right. Second question is, why is the sea blue? All right? 
+And you've all got an idea in your head of the answer. 
+So, why is it blue on cloudy days? Ah, see. 
+(Laughter) I've always wanted to say that in this country. (Laughter) 
+Finally, my plea to you is to allow yourselves, and your children, and anyone you know, to kind of fiddle with stuff, because it's by fiddling with things that you, you know, you complement your other learning. It's not a replacement, it's just part of learning that's important. 
+Thank you very much. 
+Now — oh, oh yeah, go on then, go on. 
+(Applause) 
+
+You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back to those virgins. 
+But in fact, here in the northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as "" gardens watered by running streams. "" Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. 
+But the thing is, how come it's news to most people? 
+I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Koran, but given up, disconcerted by its "" otherness. "" The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran "" as toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble. "" (Laughter) Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book — as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach, as though God — and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad — 
+were just another author on the bestseller list. 
+Yet the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it's so easy to quote — that is, to misquote. 
+Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the "" highlighter version, "" which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes. 
+So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Koran properly — as properly as I could, that is. 
+My Arabic's reduced by now to wielding a dictionary, so I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side-by-side, verse-by-verse along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century Arabic. 
+Now I did have an advantage. 
+My last book was about the story behind the Shi'a-Sunni split, and for that I'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories, so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference. 
+I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Koran — an informed one, an experienced one even, but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading some else's holy book. 
+(Laughter) So I read slowly. (Laughter) 
+I'd set aside three weeks for this project, and that, I think, is what is meant by "" hubris "" — (Laughter) — because it turned out to be three months. 
+I did resist the temptation to skip to the back where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are. 
+But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Koran — that feeling of "" I get it now "" — it would slip away overnight, and I'd come back in the morning wondering if I wasn't lost in a strange land, and yet the terrain was very familiar. 
+The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels. 
+So one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus. 
+God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh — jealously insisting on no other gods. 
+The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert. 
+And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. 
+And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic. 
+Take the Fatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined. 
+It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. 
+And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing. 
+The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic, quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. 
+It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. 
+So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version, "an interpretation." 
+But all is not lost in translation. 
+As the Koran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises — a degree of environmental awareness, for instance, and of humans as mere stewards of God's creation, unmatched in the Bible. 
+And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second and third person masculine, the Koran includes women — talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women, honorable men and honorable women. 
+Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers. 
+Yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context: the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca where fighting was usually forbidden, and the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers. 
+Not "" You must kill unbelievers in Mecca, "" but you can, you are allowed to, but only after a grace period is over and only if there's no other pact in place and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first. 
+And even then — God is merciful; forgiveness is supreme — and so, essentially, better if you don't. 
+(Laughter) This was perhaps the biggest surprise — how flexible the Koran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible. 
+"" Some of these verses are definite in meaning, "" it says, "and others are ambiguous." 
+The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities, trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own. 
+Only God knows the true meaning. 
+The phrase "" God is subtle "" appears again and again, and indeed, the whole of the Koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe. 
+As in, for instance, that little matter of virgins and paradise. 
+Old-fashioned Orientalism comes into play here. 
+The word used four times is Houris, rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts, or as fair, high-bosomed virgins. 
+Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word: Houris. 
+Not a swelling breast nor a high bosom in sight. 
+(Laughter) Now this may be a way of saying "" pure beings "" — like in angels — or it may be like the Greek Kouros or Kórē, an eternal youth. 
+But the truth is nobody really knows, and that's the point. 
+Because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you'll be "a new creation in paradise" and that you will be "" recreated in a form unknown to you, "" which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin. 
+(Laughter) And that number 72 never appears. 
+There are no 72 virgins in the Koran. 
+That idea only came into being 300 years later, and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps. 
+Paradise is quite the opposite. 
+It's not virginity; it's fecundity. 
+It's plenty. 
+It's gardens watered by running streams. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Not yours, of course — other people's. 
+(Laughter) So after being at MIT for a few years, I realized that writing academic papers is not that exciting. 
+So I decided to try and write something more fun. 
+And I came up with an idea that I would write a cookbook. 
+Until somebody said, "" Look, if you're serious about this, you have to write about your research first; you have to publish something, then you'll get the opportunity to write something else. 
+I do it all day long, I want to write something a bit more free, less constrained. "" And this person was very forceful and said, "Look, that's the only way you'll ever do it." 
+People write to me about their personal experience, and about their examples, and where they disagree, and their nuances. 
+And even being here — I mean, the last few days, I've known heights of obsessive behavior I never thought about. 
+(Laughter) Which I think is just fascinating. 
+If I asked you what's longer, the vertical line on the table on the left, or the horizontal line on the table on the right, which one seems longer? 
+Can anybody see anything but the left one being longer? 
+Now, the interesting thing about this is when I take the lines away, it's as if you haven't learned anything in the last minute. 
+and there is almost nothing we can do about it, aside from taking a ruler and starting to measure it. 
+If I cover the rest of the cube, you can see that they are identical. 
+Vision is one of the best things we do. 
+(Laughter) Something we don't have an evolutionary reason to do, we don't have a specialized part of the brain for, and we don't do that many hours of the day. 
+And worse — not having an easy way to see them, because in visual illusions, we can easily demonstrate the mistakes; in cognitive illusion it's much, much harder to demonstrate the mistakes to people. 
+So I want to show you some cognitive illusions, or decision-making illusions, in the same way. 
+Giving organs to somebody else is probably about how much you care about society, how linked you are. 
+But if you look at this plot, you can see that countries that we think about as very similar, actually exhibit very different behavior. 
+Germany is on the left, and Austria is on the right. 
+The Netherlands is on the left, and Belgium is on the right. 
+And finally, depending on your particular version of European similarity, you can think about the U.K. and France as either similar culturally or not, but it turns out that with organ donation, they are very different. 
+It turns out that they got to 28 percent after mailing every household in the country a letter, begging people to join this organ donation program. 
+(Laughter) But whatever the countries on the right are doing, they're doing a much better job than begging. 
+The countries on the left have a form at the DMV that looks something like this. 
+People don't check, and they don't join. 
+The countries on the right, the ones that give a lot, have a slightly different form. 
+(Laughter) Now, think about what this means. 
+We wake up in the morning and we open the closet; we feel that we decide what to wear. 
+How many of you believe that if you went to renew your license tomorrow, and you went to the DMV, and you encountered one of these forms, that it would actually change your own behavior? 
+The cost of lifting the pencil and marking a "" V "" is higher than the possible benefit of the decision, so that's why we get this effect. "" (Laughter) But, in fact, it's not because it's easy. 
+He's been suffering from right hip pain for a while. "" And then, they said to the physicians, "" You decided a few weeks ago that nothing is working for this patient. 
+All these medications, nothing seems to be working. 
+Hip replacement. Okay? "" So the patient is on a path to have his hip replaced. 
+What do you do? Do you pull the patient back and try ibuprofen? 
+I hope this worries you, by the way — (Laughter) when you go to see your physician. 
+But the moment you set this as the default, it has a huge power over whatever people end up doing. 
+I'll give you a couple of more examples on irrational decision-making. 
+Now, weekend in Paris, weekend in Rome — these are different things. 
+If you want coffee, you have to pay for it yourself, it's two euros 50. 
+(Laughter) Now in some ways, given that you can have Rome with coffee, why would you possibly want Rome without coffee? 
+The fact that you have Rome without coffee makes Rome with coffee look superior, and not just to Rome without coffee — even superior to Paris. 
+(Laughter) Here are two examples of this principle. 
+(Laughter) Now I looked at this, and I called up The Economist, and I tried to figure out what they were thinking. 
+So I printed another version of this, where I eliminated the middle option. 
+What was happening was the option that was useless, in the middle, was useless in the sense that nobody wanted it. 
+In fact, relative to the option in the middle, which was get only the print for 125, the print and web for 125 looked like a fantastic deal. 
+People believe that when we deal with physical attraction, we see somebody, and we know immediately whether we like them or not, if we're attracted or not. 
+This is why we have these four-minute dates. 
+I'll show you images here, no real people, but the experiment was with people. 
+I showed some people a picture of Tom, and a picture of Jerry. 
+and I said, "" Who do you want to date? 
+(Laughter) For the other people, I added an ugly version of Tom. 
+And the question was, will ugly Jerry and ugly Tom help their respective, more attractive brothers? 
+(Laughter) This of course has two very clear implications for life in general. 
+(Laughter) You want a slightly uglier version of yourself. (Laughter) 
+Similar, but slightly uglier. (Laughter) 
+Now you get it. 
+The general point is that, when we think about economics, we have this beautiful view of human nature. 
+"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason!" 
+The silver lining is, I think, kind of the reason that behavioral economics is interesting and exciting. 
+Are we Superman, or are we Homer Simpson? 
+(Applause) 
+
+As a magician, I'm always interested in performances that incorporate elements of illusion. 
+And one of the most remarkable was the tanagra theater, which was popular in the early part of the 20th century. 
+It used mirrors to create the illusion of tiny people performing on a miniature stage. Now, I won't use mirrors, but this is my digital tribute to the tanagra theater. 
+So let the story begin. 
+On a dark and stormy night — really! — it was the 10th of July, 1856. 
+Lightning lit the sky, and a baby was born. 
+His name was Nikola, Nikola Tesla. 
+Now the baby grew into a very smart guy. 
+Let me show you. 
+Tesla, what is 236 multiplied by 501? 
+Nikola Tesla: The result is 118,236. 
+Marco Tempest: Now Tesla's brain worked in the most extraordinary way. 
+When a word was mentioned, an image of it instantly appeared in his mind. 
+Tree. Chair. Girl. 
+They were hallucinations, which vanished the moment he touched them. 
+Probably a form of synesthesia. 
+But it was something he later turned to his advantage. 
+Where other scientists would play in their laboratory, Tesla created his inventions in his mind. 
+NT: To my delight, I discovered I could visualize my inventions with the greatest facility. 
+MT: And when they worked in the vivid playground of his imagination, he would build them in his workshop. 
+NT: I needed no models, drawings or experiments. 
+I could picture them as real in my mind, and there I run it, test it and improve it. 
+Only then do I construct it. 
+MT: His great idea was alternating current. 
+But how could he convince the public that the millions of volts required to make it work were safe? 
+To sell his idea, he became a showman. 
+NT: We are at the dawn of a new age, the age of electricity. 
+I have been able, through careful invention, to transmit, with the mere flick of a switch, electricity across the ether. 
+It is the magic of science. 
+(Applause) Tesla has over 700 patents to his name: radio, wireless telegraphy, remote control, robotics. 
+He even photographed the bones of the human body. 
+But the high point was the realization of a childhood dream: harnessing the raging powers of Niagara Falls, and bringing light to the city. 
+But Tesla's success didn't last. 
+NT: I had bigger ideas. 
+Illuminating the city was only the beginning. 
+A world telegraphy center — imagine news, messages, sounds, images delivered to any point in the world instantly and wirelessly. 
+MT: It's a great idea; it was a huge project. Expensive, too. 
+NT: They wouldn't give me the money. 
+MT: Well, maybe you shouldn't have told them it could be used to contact other planets. 
+NT: Yes, that was a big mistake. 
+MT: Tesla's career as an inventor never recovered. 
+He became a recluse. 
+Dodged by death, he spent much of his time in his suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. 
+NT: Everything I did, I did for mankind, for a world where there would be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich, where products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life. 
+MT: Nikola Tesla died on the 7th of January, 1943. 
+His final resting place is a golden globe that contains his ashes at the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade. 
+His legacy is with us still. 
+Tesla became the man who lit the world, but this was only the beginning. 
+Tesla's insight was profound. 
+NT: Tell me, what will man do when the forests disappear, and the coal deposits are exhausted? 
+MT: Tesla thought he had the answer. 
+We are still asking the question. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was nine years old, my mom asked me what I would want my house to look like, and I drew this fairy mushroom. 
+And then she actually built it. 
+(Laughter) I don't think I realized this was so unusual at the time, and maybe I still haven't, because I'm still designing houses. 
+This is a six-story bespoke home on the island of Bali. 
+It's built almost entirely from bamboo. 
+The living room overlooks the valley from the fourth floor. 
+You enter the house by a bridge. 
+It can get hot in the tropics, so we make big curving roofs to catch the breezes. 
+But some rooms have tall windows to keep the air conditioning in and the bugs out. 
+This room we left open. 
+We made an air-conditioned, tented bed. 
+And one client wanted a TV room in the corner of her living room. 
+Boxing off an area with tall walls just didn't feel right, so instead, we made this giant woven pod. 
+Now, we do have all the necessary luxuries, like bathrooms. 
+This one is a basket in the corner of the living room, and I've got tell you, some people actually hesitate to use it. 
+We have not quite figured out our acoustic insulation. 
+(Laughter) So there are lots of things that we're still working on, but one thing I have learned is that bamboo will treat you well if you use it right. 
+It's actually a wild grass. 
+It grows on otherwise unproductive land — deep ravines, mountainsides. 
+It lives off of rainwater, spring water, sunlight, and of the 1,450 species of bamboo that grow across the world, we use just seven of them. 
+That's my dad. 
+He's the one who got me building with bamboo, and he is standing in a clump of Dendrocalamus asper niger that he planted just seven years ago. 
+Each year, it sends up a new generation of shoots. 
+That shoot, we watched it grow a meter in three days just last week, so we're talking about sustainable timber in three years. 
+Now, we harvest from hundreds of family-owned clumps. 
+Betung, as we call it, it's really long, up to 18 meters of usable length. 
+Try getting that truck down the mountain. 
+And it's strong: it has the tensile strength of steel, the compressive strength of concrete. 
+Slam four tons straight down on a pole, and it can take it. 
+Because it's hollow, it's lightweight, light enough to be lifted by just a few men, or, apparently, one woman. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And when my father built Green School in Bali, he chose bamboo for all of the buildings on campus, because he saw it as a promise. 
+It's a promise to the kids. 
+It's one sustainable material that they will not run out of. 
+And when I first saw these structures under construction about six years ago, I just thought, this makes perfect sense. 
+It is growing all around us. 
+It's strong. It's elegant. 
+It's earthquake-resistant. 
+Why hasn't this happened sooner, and what can we do with it next? 
+So along with some of the original builders of Green School, I founded Ibuku. 
+Ibu means "" mother, "" and ku means "" mine, "" so it represents my Mother Earth, and at Ibuku, we are a team of artisans, architects and designers, and what we're doing together is creating a new way of building. 
+Over the past five years together, we have built over 50 unique structures, most of them in Bali. 
+Nine of them are at Green Village — you've just seen inside some of these homes — and we fill them with bespoke furniture, we surround them with veggie gardens, we would love to invite you all to come visit someday. 
+And while you're there, you can also see Green School — we keep building classrooms there each year — as well as an updated fairy mushroom house. 
+We're also working on a little house for export. 
+This is a traditional Sumbanese home that we replicated, right down to the details and textiles. 
+A restaurant with an open-air kitchen. 
+It looks a lot like a kitchen, right? 
+And a bridge that spans 22 meters across a river. 
+Now, what we're doing, it's not entirely new. 
+From little huts to elaborate bridges like this one in Java, bamboo has been in use across the tropical regions of the world for literally tens of thousands of years. 
+There are islands and even continents that were first reached by bamboo rafts. 
+But until recently, it was almost impossible to reliably protect bamboo from insects, and so, just about everything that was ever built out of bamboo is gone. 
+Unprotected bamboo weathers. 
+Untreated bamboo gets eaten to dust. 
+And so that's why most people, especially in Asia, think that you couldn't be poor enough or rural enough to actually want to live in a bamboo house. 
+And so we thought, what will it take to change their minds, to convince people that bamboo is worth building with, much less worth aspiring to? 
+First, we needed safe treatment solutions. 
+Borax is a natural salt. 
+It turns bamboo into a viable building material. 
+Treat it properly, design it carefully, and a bamboo structure can last a lifetime. 
+Second, build something extraordinary out of it. 
+Inspire people. 
+Fortunately, Balinese culture fosters craftsmanship. 
+It values the artisan. 
+So combine those with the adventurous outliers from new generations of locally trained architects and designers and engineers, and always remember that you are designing for curving, tapering, hollow poles. 
+No two poles alike, no straight lines, no two-by-fours here. 
+The tried-and-true, well-crafted formulas and vocabulary of architecture do not apply here. 
+We have had to invent our own rules. 
+We ask the bamboo what it's good at, what it wants to become, and what it says is: respect it, design for its strengths, protect it from water, and to make the most of its curves. 
+So we design in real 3D, making scale structural models out of the same material that we'll later use to build the house. 
+And bamboo model-making, it's an art, as well as some hardcore engineering. 
+So that's the blueprint of the house. 
+(Laughter) And we bring it to site, and with tiny rulers, we measure each pole, and consider each curve, and we choose a piece of bamboo from the pile to replicate that house on site. 
+When it comes down to the details, we consider everything. 
+Why are doors so often rectangular? 
+Why not round? 
+How could you make a door better? 
+Well, its hinges battle with gravity, and gravity will always win in the end, so why not have it pivot on the center where it can stay balanced? 
+And while you're at it, why not doors shaped like teardrops? 
+To reap the selective benefits and work within the constraints of this material, we have really had to push ourselves, and within that constraint, we have found space for something new. 
+It's a challenge: how do you make a ceiling if you don't have any flat boards to work with? 
+Let me tell you, sometimes I dream of sheet rock and plywood. 
+(Laughter) But if what you've got is skilled craftsmen and itsy bitsy little splits, weave that ceiling together, stretch a canvas over it, lacquer it. 
+How do you design durable kitchen countertops that do justice to this curving structure you've just built? 
+Slice up a boulder like a loaf of bread, hand-carve each to fit the other, leave the crusts on, and what we're doing, it is almost entirely handmade. 
+The structural connections of our buildings are reinforced by steel joints, but we use a lot of hand-whittled bamboo pins. 
+There are thousands of pins in each floor. 
+This floor is made of glossy and durable bamboo skin. 
+You can feel the texture under bare feet. 
+And the floor that you walk on, can it affect the way that you walk? 
+Can it change the footprint that you'll ultimately leave on the world? 
+I remember being nine years old and feeling wonder, and possibility, and a little bit of idealism. 
+And we've got a really long way to go, there's a lot left to learn, but one thing I know is that with creativity and commitment, you can create beauty and comfort and safety and even luxury out of a material that will grow back. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+How many of you have been to Oklahoma City? 
+Raise your hand. Yeah? 
+How many of you have not been to Oklahoma City and have no idea who I am? (Laughter) Most of you. Let me give you a little bit of background. 
+Oklahoma City started in the most unique way imaginable. 
+Back on a spring day in 1889, the federal government held what they called a land run. 
+They literally lined up the settlers along an imaginary line, and they fired off a gun, and the settlers roared across the countryside and put down a stake, and wherever they put down that stake, that was their new home. 
+And at the end of the very first day, the population of Oklahoma City had gone from zero to 10,000, and our planning department is still paying for that. 
+The citizens got together on that first day and elected a mayor. 
+And then they shot him. 
+(Laughter) That's not really all that funny — (Laughter) — but it allows me to see what type of audience I'm dealing with, so I appreciate the feedback. 
+The 20th century was fairly kind to Oklahoma City. 
+Our economy was based on commodities, so the price of cotton or the price of wheat, and ultimately the price of oil and natural gas. 
+And along the way, we became a city of innovation. 
+The shopping cart was invented in Oklahoma City. 
+(Applause) The parking meter, invented in Oklahoma City. 
+You're welcome. 
+Having an economy, though, that relates to commodities can give you some ups and some downs, and that was certainly the case in Oklahoma City's history. 
+In the 1970s, when it appeared that the price of energy would never retreat, our economy was soaring, and then in the early 1980s, it cratered quickly. 
+The price of energy dropped. 
+Our banks began to fail. 
+Before the end of the decade, 100 banks had failed in the state of Oklahoma. 
+There was no bailout on the horizon. 
+Our banking industry, our oil and gas industry, our commercial real estate industry, were all at the bottom of the economic scale. 
+Young people were leaving Oklahoma City in droves for Washington and Dallas and Houston and New York and Tokyo, anywhere where they could find a job that measured up to their educational attainment, because in Oklahoma City, the good jobs just weren't there. 
+But along at the end of the '80s came an enterprising businessman who became mayor named Ron Norick. 
+Ron Norick eventually figured out that the secret to economic development wasn't incentivizing companies up front, it was about creating a place where businesses wanted to locate, and so he pushed an initiative called MAPS that basically was a penny-on-the-dollar sales tax to build a bunch of stuff. 
+It built a new sports arena, a new canal downtown, it fixed up our performing arts center, a new baseball stadium downtown, a lot of things to improve the quality of life. 
+And the economy indeed seemed to start showing some signs of life. 
+The next mayor came along. 
+He started MAPS for Kids, rebuilt the entire inner city school system, all 75 buildings either built anew or refurbished. 
+And then, in 2004, in this rare collective lack of judgment bordering on civil disobedience, the citizens elected me mayor. 
+Now the city I inherited was just on the verge of coming out of its slumbering economy, and for the very first time, we started showing up on the lists. 
+Now you know the lists I'm talking about. 
+The media and the Internet love to rank cities. 
+And in Oklahoma City, we'd never really been on lists before. 
+So I thought it was kind of cool when they came out with these positive lists and we were on there. 
+We weren't anywhere close to the top, but we were on the list, we were somebody. 
+Best city to get a job, best city to start a business, best downtown — Oklahoma City. 
+And then came the list of the most obese cities in the country. 
+And there we were. 
+Now I like to point out that we were on that list with a lot of really cool places. 
+(Laughter) Dallas and Houston and New Orleans and Atlanta and Miami. 
+You know, these are cities that, typically, you're not embarrassed to be associated with. 
+But nonetheless, I didn't like being on the list. 
+And about that time, I got on the scales. 
+And I weighed 220 pounds. 
+And then I went to this website sponsored by the federal government, and I typed in my height, I typed in my weight, and I pushed Enter, and it came back and said "" obese. "" I thought, "" What a stupid website. "" (Laughter) "I'm not obese. I would know if I was obese." 
+And then I started getting honest with myself about what had become my lifelong struggle with obesity, and I noticed this pattern, that I was gaining about two or three pounds a year, and then about every 10 years, I'd drop 20 or 30 pounds. 
+And then I'd do it again. 
+And I had this huge closet full of clothes, and I could only wear a third of it at any one time, and only I knew which part of the closet I could wear. 
+But it all seemed fairly normal, going through it. 
+Well, I finally decided I needed to lose weight, and I knew I could because I'd done it so many times before, so I simply stopped eating as much. 
+I had always exercised. 
+That really wasn't the part of the equation that I needed to work on. 
+But I had been eating 3,000 calories a day, and I cut it to 2,000 calories a day, and the weight came off. I lost about a pound a week for about 40 weeks. 
+Along the way, though, I started examining my city, its culture, its infrastructure, trying to figure out why our specific city seemed to have a problem with obesity. 
+And I came to the conclusion that we had built an incredible quality of life if you happen to be a car. 
+(Laughter) But if you happen to be a person, you are combatting the car seemingly at every turn. 
+Our city is very spread out. 
+We have a great intersection of highways, I mean, literally no traffic congestion in Oklahoma City to speak of. 
+And so people live far, far away. 
+Our city limits are enormous, 620 square miles, but 15 miles is less than 15 minutes. 
+You literally can get a speeding ticket during rush hour in Oklahoma City. 
+And as a result, people tend to spread out. 
+Land's cheap. 
+We had also not required developers to build sidewalks on new developments for a long, long time. 
+We had fixed that, but it had been relatively recently, and there were literally 100,000 or more homes into our inventory in neighborhoods that had virtually no level of walkability. 
+And as I tried to examine how we might deal with obesity, and was taking all of these elements into my mind, I decided that the first thing we need to do was have a conversation. 
+You see, in Oklahoma City, we weren't talking about obesity. 
+And so, on New Year's Eve of 2007, I went to the zoo, and I stood in front of the elephants, and I said, "" This city is going on a diet, and we're going to lose a million pounds. "" Well, that's when all hell broke loose. 
+(Laughter) The national media gravitated toward this story immediately, and they really could have gone with it one of two ways. 
+They could have said, "" This city is so fat that the mayor had to put them on a diet. "" But fortunately, the consensus was, "" Look, this is a problem in a lot of places. 
+This is a city that's wanting to do something about it. "" And so they started helping us drive traffic to the website. 
+Now, the web address was thiscityisgoingonadiet.com. 
+And I appeared on "" The Ellen DeGeneres Show "" one weekday morning to talk about the initiative, and on that day, 150,000 visits were placed to our website. 
+People were signing up, and so the pounds started to add up, and the conversation that I thought was so important to have was starting to take place. 
+It was taking place inside the homes, mothers and fathers talking about it with their kids. 
+It was taking place in churches. 
+Churches were starting their own running groups and their own support groups for people who were dealing with obesity. 
+Suddenly, it was a topic worth discussing at schools and in the workplace. 
+And the large companies, they typically have wonderful wellness programs, but the medium-sized companies that typically fall between the cracks on issues like this, they started to get engaged and used our program as a model for their own employees to try and have contests to see who might be able to deal with their obesity situation in a way that could be proactively beneficial to others. 
+And then came the next stage of the equation. 
+It was time to push what I called MAPS 3. 
+Now MAPS 3, like the other two programs, had had an economic development motive behind it, but along with the traditional economic development tasks like building a new convention center, we added some health-related infrastructure to the process. 
+We added a new central park, 70 acres in size, to be right downtown in Oklahoma City. 
+We're building a downtown streetcar to try and help the walkability formula for people who choose to live in the inner city and help us create the density there. 
+We're building senior health and wellness centers throughout the community. 
+We put some investments on the river that had originally been invested upon in the original MAPS, and now we are currently in the final stages of developing the finest venue in the world for the sports of canoe, kayak and rowing. 
+We hosted the Olympic trials last spring. 
+We have Olympic-caliber events coming to Oklahoma City, and athletes from all over the world moving in, along with inner city programs to get kids more engaged in these types of recreational activities that are a little bit nontraditional. 
+We also, with another initiative that was passed, are building hundreds of miles of new sidewalks throughout the metro area. 
+We're even going back into some inner city situations where we had built neighborhoods and we had built schools but we had not connected the two. 
+We had built libraries and we had built neighborhoods, but we had never really connected the two with any sort of walkability. 
+Through yet another funding source, we're redesigning all of our inner city streets to be more pedestrian-friendly. 
+Our streets were really wide, and you'd push the button to allow you to walk across, and you had to run in order to get there in time. 
+But now we've narrowed the streets, highly landscaped them, making them more pedestrian-friendly, really a redesign, rethinking the way we build our infrastructure, designing a city around people and not cars. 
+We're completing our bicycle trail master plan. 
+We'll have over 100 miles when we're through building it out. 
+And so you see this culture starting to shift in Oklahoma City. 
+And lo and behold, the demographic changes that are coming with it are very inspiring. 
+Highly educated twentysomethings are moving to Oklahoma City from all over the region and, indeed, even from further away, in California. 
+When we reached a million pounds, in January of 2012, I flew to New York with some our participants who had lost over 100 pounds, whose lives had been changed, and we appeared on the Rachael Ray show, and then that afternoon, I did a round of media in New York pushing the same messages that you're accustomed to hearing about obesity and the dangers of it. 
+And I went into the lobby of Men's Fitness magazine, the same magazine that had put us on that list five years before. 
+And as I'm sitting in the lobby waiting to talk to the reporter, I notice there's a magazine copy of the current issue right there on the table, and I pick it up, and I look at the headline across the top, and it says, "America's Fattest Cities: Do You Live in One?" 
+Well, I knew I did, so I picked up the magazine and I began to look, and we weren't on it. 
+(Applause) Then I looked on the list of fittest cities, and we were on that list. 
+We were on the list as the 22nd fittest city in the United States. 
+Our state health statistics are doing better. 
+Granted, we have a long way to go. 
+Health is still not something that we should be proud of in Oklahoma City, but we seem to have turned the cultural shift of making health a greater priority. 
+And we love the idea of the demographics of highly educated twentysomethings, people with choices, choosing Oklahoma City in large numbers. 
+We have the lowest unemployment in the United States, probably the strongest economy in the United States. 
+And if you're like me, at some point in your educational career, you were asked to read a book called "The Grapes of Wrath." 
+Oklahomans leaving for California in large numbers for a better future. 
+When we look at the demographic shifts of people coming from the west, it appears that what we're seeing now is the wrath of grapes. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) The grandchildren are coming home. 
+You've been a great audience and very attentive. 
+Thank you very much for having me here. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Something called the Danish Twin Study established that only about 10 percent of how long the average person lives, within certain biological limits, is dictated by our genes. 
+The other 90 percent is dictated by our lifestyle. 
+So the premise of Blue Zones: if we can find the optimal lifestyle of longevity we can come up with a de facto formula for longevity. 
+But if you ask the average American what the optimal formula of longevity is, they probably couldn't tell you. 
+They've probably heard of the South Beach Diet, or the Atkins Diet. 
+You have the USDA food pyramid. 
+There is what Oprah tells us. 
+There is what Doctor Oz tells us. 
+The fact of the matter is there is a lot of confusion around what really helps us live longer better. 
+Should you be running marathons or doing yoga? 
+Should you eat organic meats or should you be eating tofu? 
+When it comes to supplements, should you be taking them? 
+How about these hormones or resveratrol? 
+And does purpose play into it? 
+Spirituality? And how about how we socialize? 
+Well, our approach to finding longevity was to team up with National Geographic, and the National Institute on Aging, to find the four demographically confirmed areas that are geographically defined. 
+And then bring a team of experts in there to methodically go through exactly what these people do, to distill down the cross-cultural distillation. 
+And at the end of this I'm going to tell you what that distillation is. 
+But first I'd like to debunk some common myths when it comes to longevity. 
+And the first myth is if you try really hard you can live to be 100. 
+False. 
+The problem is, only about one out of 5,000 people in America live to be 100. 
+Your chances are very low. 
+Even though it's the fastest growing demographic in America, it's hard to reach 100. 
+The problem is that we're not programmed for longevity. 
+We are programmed for something called procreative success. 
+I love that word. 
+It reminds me of my college days. 
+Biologists term procreative success to mean the age where you have children and then another generation, the age when your children have children. 
+After that the effect of evolution completely dissipates. 
+If you're a mammal, if you're a rat or an elephant, or a human, in between, it's the same story. 
+So to make it to age 100, you not only have to have had a very good lifestyle, you also have to have won the genetic lottery. 
+The second myth is, there are treatments that can help slow, reverse, or even stop aging. 
+False. 
+When you think of it, there is 99 things that can age us. 
+Deprive your brain of oxygen for just a few minutes, those brain cells die, they never come back. 
+Play tennis too hard, on your knees, ruin your cartilage, the cartilage never comes back. 
+Our arteries can clog. Our brains can gunk up with plaque, and we can get Alzheimer's. 
+There is just too many things to go wrong. 
+Our bodies have 35 trillion cells, trillion with a "" T. "" We're talking national debt numbers here. 
+(Laughter) Those cells turn themselves over once every eight years. 
+And every time they turn themselves over there is some damage. And that damage builds up. 
+And it builds up exponentially. 
+It's a little bit like the days when we all had Beatles albums or Eagles albums and we'd make a copy of that on a cassette tape, and let our friends copy that cassette tape, and pretty soon, with successive generations that tape sounds like garbage. 
+Well, the same things happen to our cells. 
+That's why a 65-year-old person is aging at a rate of about 125 times faster than a 12-year-old person. 
+So, if there is nothing you can do to slow your aging or stop your aging, what am I doing here? 
+Well, the fact of the matter is the best science tells us that the capacity of the human body, my body, your body, is about 90 years, a little bit more for women. 
+But life expectancy in this country is only 78. 
+So somewhere along the line, we're leaving about 12 good years on the table. 
+These are years that we could get. 
+And research shows that they would be years largely free of chronic disease, heart disease, cancer and diabetes. 
+We think the best way to get these missing years is to look at the cultures around the world that are actually experiencing them, areas where people are living to age 100 at rates up to 10 times greater than we are, areas where the life expectancy is an extra dozen years, the rate of middle age mortality is a fraction of what it is in this country. 
+We found our first Blue Zone about 125 miles off the coast of Italy, on the island of Sardinia. 
+And not the entire island, the island is about 1.4 million people, but only up in the highlands, an area called the Nuoro province. 
+And here we have this area where men live the longest, about 10 times more centenarians than we have here in America. 
+And this is a place where people not only reach age 100, they do so with extraordinary vigor. 
+Places where 102 year olds still ride their bike to work, chop wood, and can beat a guy 60 years younger than them. 
+(Laughter) Their history actually goes back to about the time of Christ. 
+It's actually a Bronze Age culture that's been isolated. 
+Because the land is so infertile, they largely are shepherds, which occasions regular, low-intensity physical activity. 
+Their diet is mostly plant-based, accentuated with foods that they can carry into the fields. 
+They came up with an unleavened whole wheat bread called carta musica made out of durum wheat, a type of cheese made from grass-fed animals so the cheese is high in Omega-3 fatty acids instead of Omega-6 fatty acids from corn-fed animals, and a type of wine that has three times the level of polyphenols than any known wine in the world. 
+It's called Cannonau. 
+But the real secret I think lies more in the way that they organize their society. 
+And one of the most salient elements of the Sardinian society is how they treat older people. 
+You ever notice here in America, social equity seems to peak at about age 24? 
+Just look at the advertisements. 
+Here in Sardinia, the older you get the more equity you have, the more wisdom you're celebrated for. 
+You go into the bars in Sardinia, instead of seeing the Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar, you see the centenarian of the month calendar. 
+This, as it turns out, is not only good for your aging parents to keep them close to the family — it imparts about four to six years of extra life expectancy — research shows it's also good for the children of those families, who have lower rates of mortality and lower rates of disease. 
+That's called the grandmother effect. 
+We found our second Blue Zone on the other side of the planet, about 800 miles south of Tokyo, on the archipelago of Okinawa. 
+Okinawa is actually 161 small islands. 
+And in the northern part of the main island, this is ground zero for world longevity. 
+This is a place where the oldest living female population is found. 
+It's a place where people have the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world. 
+They have what we want. 
+They live a long time, and tend to die in their sleep, very quickly, and often, I can tell you, after sex. 
+They live about seven good years longer than the average American. 
+Five times as many centenarians as we have in America. 
+One fifth the rate of colon and breast cancer, big killers here in America. 
+And one sixth the rate of cardiovascular disease. 
+And the fact that this culture has yielded these numbers suggests strongly they have something to teach us. 
+What do they do? 
+Once again, a plant-based diet, full of vegetables with lots of color in them. 
+And they eat about eight times as much tofu as Americans do. 
+More significant than what they eat is how they eat it. 
+They have all kinds of little strategies to keep from overeating, which, as you know, is a big problem here in America. 
+A few of the strategies we observed: they eat off of smaller plates, so they tend to eat fewer calories at every sitting. 
+Instead of serving family style, where you can sort of mindlessly eat as you're talking, they serve at the counter, put the food away, and then bring it to the table. 
+They also have a 3,000-year-old adage, which I think is the greatest sort of diet suggestion ever invented. 
+It was invented by Confucius. 
+And that diet is known as the Hara, Hatchi, Bu diet. 
+It's simply a little saying these people say before their meal to remind them to stop eating when their stomach is [80] percent full. 
+It takes about a half hour for that full feeling to travel from your belly to your brain. 
+And by remembering to stop at 80 percent it helps keep you from doing that very thing. 
+But, like Sardinia, Okinawa has a few social constructs that we can associate with longevity. 
+We know that isolation kills. 
+Fifteen years ago, the average American had three good friends. 
+We're down to one and half right now. 
+If you were lucky enough to be born in Okinawa, you were born into a system where you automatically have a half a dozen friends with whom you travel through life. 
+They call it a Moai. And if you're in a Moai you're expected to share the bounty if you encounter luck, and if things go bad, child gets sick, parent dies, you always have somebody who has your back. 
+This particular Moai, these five ladies have been together for 97 years. 
+Their average age is 102. 
+Typically in America we've divided our adult life up into two sections. 
+There is our work life, where we're productive. 
+And then one day, boom, we retire. 
+And typically that has meant retiring to the easy chair, or going down to Arizona to play golf. 
+In the Okinawan language there is not even a word for retirement. 
+Instead there is one word that imbues your entire life, and that word is "" ikigai. "" And, roughly translated, it means "the reason for which you wake up in the morning." 
+For this 102-year-old karate master, his ikigai was carrying forth this martial art. 
+For this hundred-year-old fisherman it was continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week. 
+And this is a question. The National Institute on Aging actually gave us a questionnaire to give these centenarians. 
+And one of the questions, they were very culturally astute, the people who put the questionnaire. 
+One of the questions was, "" What is your ikigai? "" They instantly knew why they woke up in the morning. 
+For this 102 year old woman, her ikigai was simply her great-great-great-granddaughter. 
+Two girls separated in age by 101 and a half years. 
+And I asked her what it felt like to hold a great-great-great-granddaughter. 
+And she put her head back and she said, "It feels like leaping into heaven." 
+I thought that was a wonderful thought. 
+My editor at Geographic wanted me to find America's Blue Zone. 
+And for a while we looked on the prairies of Minnesota, where actually there is a very high proportion of centenarians. 
+But that's because all the young people left. 
+(Laughter) So, we turned to the data again. 
+And we found America's longest-lived population among the Seventh-Day Adventists concentrated in and around Loma Linda, California. 
+Adventists are conservative Methodists. 
+They celebrate their Sabbath from sunset on Friday till sunset on Saturday. 
+A "" 24-hour sanctuary in time, "" they call it. 
+And they follow five little habits that conveys to them extraordinary longevity, comparatively speaking. 
+In America here, life expectancy for the average woman is 80. 
+But for an Adventist woman, their life expectancy is 89. 
+And the difference is even more pronounced among men, who are expected to live about 11 years longer than their American counterparts. 
+Now, this is a study that followed about 70,000 people for 30 years. 
+Sterling study. And I think it supremely illustrates the premise of this Blue Zone project. 
+This is a heterogeneous community. 
+It's white, black, Hispanic, Asian. 
+The only thing that they have in common are a set of very small lifestyle habits that they follow ritualistically for most of their lives. 
+They take their diet directly from the Bible. 
+Genesis: Chapter one, Verse [29], where God talks about legumes and seeds, and on one more stanza about green plants, ostensibly missing is meat. 
+They take this sanctuary in time very serious. 
+For 24 hours every week, no matter how busy they are, how stressed out they are at work, where the kids need to be driven, they stop everything and they focus on their God, their social network, and then, hardwired right in the religion, are nature walks. 
+And the power of this is not that it's done occasionally, the power is it's done every week for a lifetime. 
+None of it's hard. None of it costs money. 
+Adventists also tend to hang out with other Adventists. 
+So, if you go to an Adventist's party you don't see people swilling Jim Beam or rolling a joint. 
+Instead they're talking about their next nature walk, exchanging recipes, and yes, they pray. 
+But they influence each other in profound and measurable ways. 
+This is a culture that has yielded Ellsworth Whareham. 
+Ellsworth Whareham is 97 years old. 
+He's a multimillionaire, yet when a contractor wanted 6,000 dollars to build a privacy fence, he said, "" For that kind of money I'll do it myself. "" So for the next three days he was out shoveling cement, and hauling poles around. 
+And predictably, perhaps, on the fourth day he ended up in the operating room. 
+But not as the guy on the table; the guy doing open-heart surgery. 
+At 97 he still does 20 open-heart surgeries every month. 
+Ed Rawlings, 103 years old now, an active cowboy, starts his morning with a swim. 
+And on weekends he likes to put on the boards, throw up rooster tails. 
+And then Marge Deton. 
+Marge is 104. 
+Her grandson actually lives in the Twin Cities here. 
+She starts her day with lifting weights. 
+She rides her bicycle. 
+And then she gets in her root-beer colored 1994 Cadillac Seville, and tears down the San Bernardino freeway, where she still volunteers for seven different organizations. 
+I've been on 19 hardcore expeditions. 
+I'm probably the only person you'll ever meet who rode his bicycle across the Sahara desert without sunscreen. 
+But I'll tell you, there is no adventure more harrowing than riding shotgun with Marge Deton. 
+"" A stranger is a friend I haven't met yet! "" she'd say to me. 
+So, what are the common denominators in these three cultures? 
+What are the things that they all do? 
+And we managed to boil it down to nine. 
+In fact we've done two more Blue Zone expeditions since this and these common denominators hold true. 
+And the first one, and I'm about to utter a heresy here, none of them exercise, at least the way we think of exercise. 
+Instead, they set up their lives so that they are constantly nudged into physical activity. 
+These 100-year-old Okinawan women are getting up and down off the ground, they sit on the floor, 30 or 40 times a day. 
+Sardinians live in vertical houses, up and down the stairs. 
+Every trip to the store, or to church or to a friend's house occasions a walk. 
+They don't have any conveniences. 
+There is not a button to push to do yard work or house work. 
+If they want to mix up a cake, they're doing it by hand. 
+That's physical activity. 
+That burns calories just as much as going on the treadmill does. 
+When they do do intentional physical activity, it's the things they enjoy. They tend to walk, the only proven way to stave off cognitive decline, and they all tend to have a garden. 
+They know how to set up their life in the right way so they have the right outlook. 
+Each of these cultures take time to downshift. 
+The Sardinians pray. The Seventh-Day Adventists pray. 
+The Okinawans have this ancestor veneration. 
+But when you're in a hurry or stressed out, that triggers something called the inflammatory response, which is associated with everything from Alzheimer's disease to cardiovascular disease. 
+When you slow down for 15 minutes a day you turn that inflammatory state into a more anti-inflammatory state. 
+They have vocabulary for sense of purpose, ikigai, like the Okinawans. 
+You know the two most dangerous years in your life are the year you're born, because of infant mortality, and the year you retire. 
+These people know their sense of purpose, and they activate in their life, that's worth about seven years of extra life expectancy. 
+There's no longevity diet. 
+Instead, these people drink a little bit every day, not a hard sell to the American population. 
+(Laughter) They tend to eat a plant-based diet. 
+Doesn't mean they don't eat meat, but lots of beans and nuts. 
+And they have strategies to keep from overeating, little things that nudge them away from the table at the right time. 
+And then the foundation of all this is how they connect. 
+They put their families first, take care of their children and their aging parents. 
+They all tend to belong to a faith-based community, which is worth between four and 14 extra years of life expectancy if you do it four times a month. 
+And the biggest thing here is they also belong to the right tribe. 
+They were either born into or they proactively surrounded themselves with the right people. 
+We know from the Framingham studies, that if your three best friends are obese there is a 50 percent better chance that you'll be overweight. 
+So, if you hang out with unhealthy people, that's going to have a measurable impact over time. 
+Instead, if your friend's idea of recreation is physical activity, bowling, or playing hockey, biking or gardening, if your friends drink a little, but not too much, and they eat right, and they're engaged, and they're trusting and trustworthy, that is going to have the biggest impact over time. 
+Diets don't work. No diet in the history of the world has ever worked for more than two percent of the population. 
+Exercise programs usually start in January; they're usually done by October. 
+When it comes to longevity there is no short term fix in a pill or anything else. 
+But when you think about it, your friends are long-term adventures, and therefore, perhaps the most significant thing you can do to add more years to your life, and life to your years. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a man who's trying to live from his heart, and so just before I get going, I wanted to tell you as a South African that one of the men who has inspired me most passed away a few hours ago. 
+Nelson Mandela has come to the end of his long walk to freedom. 
+And so this talk is going to be for him. 
+I grew up in wonder. 
+I grew up amongst those animals. 
+I grew up in the wild eastern part of South Africa at a place called Londolozi Game Reserve. 
+It's a place where my family has been in the safari business for four generations. 
+Now for as long as I can remember, my job has been to take people out into nature, and so I think it's a lovely twist of fate today to have the opportunity to bring some of my experiences out in nature in to this gathering. 
+Africa is a place where people still sit under starlit skies and around campfires and tell stories, and so what I have to share with you today is the simple medicine of a few campfire stories, stories about heroes of heart. 
+Now my stories are not the stories that you'll hear on the news, and while it's true that Africa is a harsh place, I also know it to be a place where people, animals and ecosystems teach us about a more interconnected world. 
+When I was nine years old, President Mandela came to stay with my family. 
+He had just been released from his 27 years of incarceration, and was in a period of readjustment to his sudden global icon status. 
+Members of the African National Congress thought that in the bush he would have time to rest and recuperate away from the public eye, and it's true that lions tend to be a very good deterrent to press and paparazzi. 
+(Laughter) But it was a defining time for me as a young boy. 
+I would take him breakfast in bed, and then, in an old track suit and slippers, he would go for a walk around the garden. 
+At night, I would sit with my family around the snowy, bunny-eared TV, and watch images of that same quiet man from the garden surrounded by hundreds and thousands of people as scenes from his release were broadcast nightly. 
+He was bringing peace to a divided and violent South Africa, one man with an unbelievable sense of his humanity. 
+Mandela said often that the gift of prison was the ability to go within and to think, to create in himself the things he most wanted for South Africa: peace, reconciliation, harmony. 
+Through this act of immense open-heartedness, he was to become the embodiment of what in South Africa we call "" ubuntu. "" Ubuntu: I am because of you. 
+Or, people are not people without other people. 
+It's not a new idea or value but it's one that I certainly think at these times is worth building on. 
+In fact, it is said that in the collective consciousness of Africa, we get to experience the deepest parts of our own humanity through our interactions with others. 
+Ubuntu is at play right now. 
+You are holding a space for me to express the deepest truth of who I am. 
+Without you, I'm just a guy talking to an empty room, and I spent a lot of time last week doing that, and it's not the same as this. 
+(Laughter) If Mandela was the national and international embodiment, then the man who taught me the most about this value personally was this man, Solly Mhlongo. 
+Solly was born under a tree 60 kilometers from where I grew up in Mozambique. 
+He would never have a lot of money, but he was to be one of the richest men I would ever meet. 
+Solly grew up tending to his father's cattle. 
+Now, I can tell you, I don't know what it is about people who grow up looking after cattle, but it makes for über-resourcefulness. 
+The first job that he ever got in the safari business was fixing the safari trucks. 
+Where he had learned to do that out in the bush I have no idea, but he could do it. 
+He then moved across into what we called the habitat team. 
+These were the people on the reserve who were responsible for its well-being. 
+He fixed roads, he mended wetlands, he did some anti-poaching. 
+And then one day we were out together, and he came across the tracks of where a female leopard had walked. 
+And it was an old track, but for fun he turned and he began to follow it, and I tell you, I could tell by the speed at which he moved on those pad marks that this man was a Ph.D.-level tracker. 
+If you drove past Solly somewhere out on the reserve, you look up in your rearview mirror, you'd see he'd stopped the car 20, 50 meters down the road just in case you need help with something. 
+The only accusation I ever heard leveled at him was when one of our clients said, "Solly, you are pathologically helpful." 
+(Laughter) When I started professionally guiding people out into this environment, Solly was my tracker. 
+We worked together as a team. 
+And the first guests we ever got were a philanthropy group from your East Coast, and they said to Solly, on the side, they said, "" Before we even go out to see lions and leopards, we want to see where you live. "" So we took them up to his house, and this visit of the philanthropist to his house coincided with a time when Solly's wife, who was learning English, was going through a phase where she would open the door by saying, "" Hello, I love you. 
+Welcome, I love you. "" (Laughter) And there was something so beautifully African about it to me, this small house with a huge heart in it. 
+Now on the day that Solly saved my life, he was already my hero. 
+It was a hot day, and we found ourselves down by the river. 
+Because of the heat, I took my shoes off, and I rolled up my pants, and I walked into the water. 
+Solly remained on the bank. 
+The water was clear running over sand, and we turned and we began to make our way upstream. 
+And a few meters ahead of us, there was a place where a tree had fallen out of the bank, and its branches were touching the water, and it was shadowy. 
+And if had been a horror movie, people in the audience would have started saying, "" Don't go in there. Don't go in there. "" (Laughter) And of course, the crocodile was in the shadows. 
+Now the first thing that you notice when a crocodile hits you is the ferocity of the bite. 
+Wham! It hits me by my right leg. 
+It pulls me. It turns. I throw my hand up. I'm able to grab a branch. 
+It's shaking me violently. 
+It's a very strange sensation having another creature try and eat you, and there are few things that promote vegetarianism like that. 
+(Laughter) Solly on the bank sees that I'm in trouble. 
+He turns. He begins to make his way to me. 
+The croc again continues to shake me. 
+It goes to bite me a second time. 
+I notice a slick of blood in the water around me that gets washed downstream. 
+As it bites the second time, I kick. 
+My foot goes down its throat. It spits me out. 
+I pull myself up into the branches, and as I come out of the water, I look over my shoulder. 
+My leg from the knee down is mangled beyond description. 
+The bone is cracked. 
+The meat is torn up. 
+I make an instant decision that I'll never look at that again. 
+As I come out of the water, Solly arrives at a deep section, a channel between us. 
+He knows, he sees the state of my leg, he knows that between him and I there is a crocodile, and I can tell you this man doesn't slow down for one second. 
+He comes straight into the channel. 
+He wades in to above his waist. 
+He gets to me. He grabs me. 
+I'm still in a vulnerable position. 
+He picks me and puts me on his shoulder. 
+This is the other thing about Solly, he's freakishly strong. 
+He turns. He walks me up the bank. 
+He lays me down. He pulls his shirt off. 
+He wraps it around my leg, picks me up a second time, walks me to a vehicle, and he's able to get me to medical attention. 
+And I survive. 
+Now — (Applause) Now I don't know how many people you know that go into a deep channel of water that they know has a crocodile in it to come and help you, but for Solly, it was as natural as breathing. 
+And he is one amazing example of what I have experienced all over Africa. 
+In a more collective society, we realize from the inside that our own well-being is deeply tied to the well-being of others. 
+Danger is shared. Pain is shared. 
+Joy is shared. Achievement is shared. 
+Houses are shared. Food is shared. 
+Ubuntu asks us to open our hearts and to share, and what Solly taught me that day is the essence of this value, his animated, empathetic action in every moment. 
+Now although the root word is about people, I thought that maybe ubuntu was only about people. 
+And then I met this young lady. 
+Her name was Elvis. 
+In fact, Solly gave her the name Elvis because he said she walked like she was doing the Elvis the pelvis dance. 
+She was born with very badly deformed back legs and pelvis. 
+She arrived at our reserve from a reserve east of us on her migratory route. 
+When I first saw her, I thought she would be dead in a matter of days. 
+And yet, for the next five years she returned in the winter months. 
+And we would be so excited to be out in the bush and to come across this unusual track. 
+It looked like an inverted bracket, and we would drop whatever we were doing and we would follow, and then we would come around the corner, and there she would be with her herd. 
+And that outpouring of emotion from people on our safari trucks as they saw her, it was this sense of kinship. 
+And it reminded me that even people who grow up in cities feel a natural connection with the natural world and with animals. 
+And yet still I remained amazed that she was surviving. 
+And then one day we came across them at this small water hole. 
+It was sort of a hollow in the ground. 
+And I watched as the matriarch drank, and then she turned in that beautiful slow motion of elephants, looks like the arm in motion, and she began to make her way up the steep bank. 
+The rest of the herd turned and began to follow. 
+And I watched young Elvis begin to psych herself up for the hill. 
+She got visibly — ears came forward, she had a full go of it and halfway up, her legs gave way, and she fell backwards. 
+She attempted it a second time, and again, halfway up, she fell backwards. 
+And on the third attempt, an amazing thing happened. 
+Halfway up the bank, a young teenage elephant came in behind her, and he propped his trunk underneath her, and he began to shovel her up the bank. 
+And it occurred to me that the rest of the herd was in fact looking after this young elephant. 
+The next day I watched again as the matriarch broke a branch and she would put it in her mouth, and then she would break a second one and drop it on the ground. 
+And a consensus developed between all of us who were guiding people in that area that that herd was in fact moving slower to accommodate that elephant. 
+What Elvis and the herd taught me caused me to expand my definition of ubuntu, and I believe that in the cathedral of the wild, we get to see the most beautiful parts of ourselves reflected back at us. 
+And it is not only through other people that we get to experience our humanity but through all the creatures that live on this planet. 
+If Africa has a gift to share, it's a gift of a more collective society. 
+And while it's true that ubuntu is an African idea, what I see is the essence of that value being invented here. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Pat Mitchell: So Boyd, we know that you knew President Mandela from early childhood and that you heard the news as we all did today, and deeply distraught and know the tragic loss that it is to the world. 
+But I just wondered if you wanted to share any additional thoughts, because we know that you heard that news just before coming in to do this session. 
+Boyd Varty: Well thanks, Pat. 
+I'm so happy because it was time for him to pass on. 
+He was suffering. 
+And so of course there's the mixed emotions. 
+But I just think of so many occurrences like the time he went on the Oprah show and asked her what the show would be about. 
+(Laughter) And she was like, "" Well, it'll be about you. "" I mean, that's just incredible humility. (Laughter) 
+He was the father of our nation and we've got a road to walk in South Africa. 
+And everything, they used to call it Madiba magic. 
+You know, he used to go to a rugby match and we would win. 
+Anywhere he went, things went well. 
+But I think that magic will be with us, and the important thing is that we carry what he stood for. 
+And so that's what I'm going to try and do, and that's what people all over South Africa are trying to do. 
+PM: And that's what you've done today. BV: Oh, thank you. 
+PM: Thank you. BV: Thank you. Thanks very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm here to talk to you about the economic invisibility of nature. 
+The bad news is that mother nature's back office isn't working yet, so those invoices don't get issued. 
+But we need to do something about this problem. 
+I began my life as a markets professional and continued to take an interest, but most of my recent effort has been looking at the value of what comes to human beings from nature, and which doesn't get priced by the markets. 
+A project called TEEB was started in 2007, and it was launched by a group of environment ministers of the G8 + 5. 
+And their basic inspiration was a stern review of Lord Stern. 
+They asked themselves a question: If economics could make such a convincing case for early action on climate change, well why can't the same be done for conservation? 
+Why can't an equivalent case be made for nature? 
+And the answer is: Yeah, it can. 
+But it's not that straightforward. 
+Biodiversity, the living fabric of this planet, is not a gas. 
+It exists in many layers, ecosystems, species and genes across many scales — international, national, local, community — and doing for nature what Lord Stern and his team did for nature is not that easy. 
+And yet, we began. 
+We began the project with an interim report, which quickly pulled together a lot of information that had been collected on the subject by many, many researchers. 
+And amongst our compiled results was the startling revelation that, in fact, we were losing natural capital — the benefits that flow from nature to us. 
+We were losing it at an extraordinary rate — in fact, of the order of two to four trillion dollars-worth of natural capital. 
+This came out in 2008, which was, of course, around the time that the banking crisis had shown that we had lost financial capital of the order of two and a half trillion dollars. 
+So this was comparable in size to that kind of loss. 
+We then have gone on since to present for [the] international community, for governments, for local governments and for business and for people, for you and me, a whole slew of reports, which were presented at the U.N. last year, which address the economic invisibility of nature and describe what can be done to solve it. 
+What is this about? 
+A picture that you're familiar with — the Amazon rainforests. 
+It's a massive store of carbon, it's an amazing store of biodiversity, but what people don't really know is this also is a rain factory. 
+Because the northeastern trade winds, as they go over the Amazonas, effectively gather the water vapor. 
+Something like 20 billion tons per day of water vapor is sucked up by the northeastern trade winds, and eventually precipitates in the form of rain across the La Plata Basin. 
+This rainfall cycle, this rainfall factory, effectively feeds an agricultural economy of the order of 240 billion dollars-worth in Latin America. 
+But the question arises: Okay, so how much do Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and indeed the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil pay for that vital input to that economy to the state of Amazonas, which produces that rainfall? 
+And the answer is zilch, exactly zero. 
+That's the economic invisibility of nature. 
+That can't keep going on, because economic incentives and disincentives are very powerful. 
+Economics has become the currency of policy. 
+And unless we address this invisibility, we are going to get the results that we are seeing, which is a gradual degradation and loss of this valuable natural asset. 
+It's not just about the Amazonas, or indeed about rainforests. 
+No matter what level you look at, whether it's at the ecosystem level or at the species level or at the genetic level, we see the same problem again and again. 
+So rainfall cycle and water regulation by rainforests at an ecosystem level. 
+At the species level, it's been estimated that insect-based pollination, bees pollinating fruit and so on, is something like 190 billion dollars-worth. 
+That's something like eight percent of the total agricultural output globally. 
+It completely passes below the radar screen. 
+But when did a bee actually ever give you an invoice? 
+Or for that matter, if you look at the genetic level, 60 percent of medicines were prospected, were found first as molecules in a rainforest or a reef. 
+Once again, most of that doesn't get paid. 
+And that brings me to another aspect of this, which is, to whom should this get paid? 
+That genetic material probably belonged, if it could belong to anyone, to a local community of poor people who parted with the knowledge that helped the researchers to find the molecule, which then became the medicine. 
+They were the ones that didn't get paid. 
+And if you look at the species level, you saw about fish. 
+Today, the depletion of ocean fisheries is so significant that effectively it is effecting the ability of the poor, the artisanal fisher folk and those who fish for their own livelihoods, to feed their families. 
+Something like a billion people depend on fish, the quantity of fish in the oceans. 
+A billion people depend on fish for their main source for animal protein. 
+And at this rate at which we are losing fish, it is a human problem of enormous dimensions, a health problem of a kind we haven't seen before. 
+And finally, at the ecosystem level, whether it's flood prevention or drought control provided by the forests, or whether it is the ability of poor farmers to go out and gather leaf litter for their cattle and goats, or whether it's the ability of their wives to go and collect fuel wood from the forest, it is actually the poor who depend most on these ecosystem services. 
+We did estimates in our study that for countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia, even though ecosystem services — these benefits that flow from nature to humanity for free — they're not very big in percentage terms of GDP — two, four, eight, 10, 15 percent — but in these countries, if we measure how much they're worth to the poor, the answers are more like 45 percent, 75 percent, 90 percent. 
+That's the difference. 
+Because these are important benefits for the poor. 
+And you can't really have a proper model for development if at the same time you're destroying or allowing the degradation of the very asset, the most important asset, which is your development asset, that is ecological infrastructure. 
+How bad can things get? 
+Well here a picture of something called the mean species abundance. 
+It's basically a measure of how many tigers, toads, ticks or whatever on average of biomass of various species are around. 
+The green represents the percentage. 
+If you start green, it's like 80 to 100 percent. 
+If it's yellow, it's 40 to 60 percent. 
+And these are percentages versus the original state, so to speak, the pre-industrial era, 1750. 
+Now I'm going to show you how business as usual will affect this. 
+And just watch the change in colors in India, China, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa as we move on and consume global biomass at a rate which is actually not going to be able to sustain us. 
+See that again. 
+The only places that remain green — and that's not good news — is, in fact, places like the Gobi Desert, like the tundra and like the Sahara. 
+But that doesn't help because there were very few species and volume of biomass there in the first place. 
+This is the challenge. 
+The reason this is happening boils down, in my mind, to one basic problem, which is our inability to perceive the difference between public benefits and private profits. 
+We tend to constantly ignore public wealth simply because it is in the common wealth, it's common goods. 
+And here's an example from Thailand where we found that, because the value of a mangrove is not that much — it's about $600 over the life of nine years that this has been measured — compared to its value as a shrimp farm, which is more like $9,600, there has been a gradual trend to deplete the mangroves and convert them to shrimp farms. 
+But of course, if you look at exactly what those profits are, almost 8,000 of those dollars are, in fact, subsidies. 
+So you compare the two sides of the coin and you find that it's more like 1,200 to 600. 
+That's not that hard. 
+But on the other hand, if you start measuring, how much would it actually cost to restore the land of the shrimp farm back to productive use? 
+Once salt deposition and chemical deposition has had its effects, that answer is more like $12,000 of cost. 
+And if you see the benefits of the mangrove in terms of the storm protection and cyclone protection that you get and in terms of the fisheries, the fish nurseries, that provide fish for the poor, that answer is more like $11,000. 
+So now look at the different lens. 
+If you look at the lens of public wealth as against the lens of private profits, you get a completely different answer, which is clearly conservation makes more sense, and not destruction. 
+So is this just a story from South Thailand? 
+Sorry, this is a global story. 
+And here's what the same calculation looks like, which was done recently — well I say recently, over the last 10 years — by a group called TRUCOST. 
+And they calculated for the top 3,000 corporations, what are the externalities? 
+In other words, what are the costs of doing business as usual? 
+This is not illegal stuff, this is basically business as usual, which causes climate-changing emissions, which have an economic cost. 
+It causes pollutants being issued, which have an economic cost, health cost and so on. 
+Use of freshwater. 
+If you drill water to make coke near a village farm, that's not illegal, but yes, it costs the community. 
+Can we stop this, and how? 
+I think the first point to make is that we need to recognize natural capital. 
+Basically the stuff of life is natural capital, and we need to recognize and build that into our systems. 
+When we measure GDP as a measure of economic performance at the national level, we don't include our biggest asset at the country level. 
+When we measure corporate performances, we don't include our impacts on nature and what our business costs society. 
+That has to stop. 
+In fact, this was what really inspired my interest in this phase. 
+I began a project way back called the Green Accounting Project. 
+That was in the early 2000s when India was going gung-ho about GDP growth as the means forward — looking at China with its stellar growths of eight, nine, 10 percent and wondering, why can we do the same? 
+And a few friends of mine and I decided this doesn't make sense. 
+This is going to create more cost to society and more losses. 
+So we decided to do a massive set of calculations and started producing green accounts for India and its states. 
+That's how my interests began and went to the TEEB project. 
+Calculating this at the national level is one thing, and it has begun. 
+And the World Bank has acknowledged this and they've started a project called WAVES — Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services. 
+But calculating this at the next level, that means at the business sector level, is important. 
+And actually we've done this with the TEEB project. 
+We've done this for a very difficult case, which was for deforestation in China. 
+This is important, because in China in 1997, the Yellow River actually went dry for nine months causing severe loss of agriculture output and pain and loss to society. 
+Just a year later the Yangtze flooded, causing something like 5,500 deaths. 
+So clearly there was a problem with deforestation. 
+It was associated largely with the construction industry. 
+And the Chinese government responded sensibly and placed a ban on felling. 
+A retrospective on 40 years shows that if we had accounted for these costs — the cost of loss of topsoil, the cost of loss of waterways, the lost productivity, the loss to local communities as a result of all these factors, desertification and so on — those costs are almost twice as much as the market price of timber. 
+So in fact, the price of timber in the Beijing marketplace ought to have been three-times what it was had it reflected the true pain and the costs to the society within China. 
+Of course, after the event one can be wise. 
+The way to do this is to do it on a company basis, to take leadership forward, and to do it for as many important sectors which have a cost, and to disclose these answers. 
+Someone once asked me, "" Who is better or worse, is it Unilever or is it P & G when it comes to their impact on rainforests in Indonesia? "" And I couldn't answer because neither of these companies, good though they are and professional though they are, do not calculate or disclose their externalities. 
+But if we look at companies like PUMA — Jochen Zeitz, their CEO and chairman, once challenged me at a function, saying that he's going to implement my project before I finish it. 
+Well I think we kind of did it at the same time, but he's done it. 
+He's basically worked the cost to PUMA. 
+PUMA has 2.7 billion dollars of turnover, 300 million dollars of profits, 200 million dollars after tax, 94 million dollars of externalities, cost to business. 
+Now that's not a happy situation for them, but they have the confidence and the courage to come forward and say, "" Here's what we are measuring. 
+We are measuring it because we know that you cannot manage what you do not measure. "" That's an example, I think, for us to look at and for us to draw comfort from. 
+If more companies did this, and if more sectors engaged this as sectors, you could have analysts, business analysts, and you could have people like us and consumers and NGOs actually look and compare the social performance of companies. 
+Today we can't yet do that, but I think the path is laid out. 
+This can be done. 
+And I'm delighted that the Institute of Chartered Accountants in the U.K. 
+has already set up a coalition to do this, an international coalition. 
+The other favorite, if you like, solution for me is the creation of green carbon markets. 
+And by the way, these are my favorites — externalities calculation and green carbon markets. 
+TEEB has more than a dozen separate groups of solutions including protected area evaluation and payments for ecosystem services and eco-certification and you name it, but these are the favorites. 
+What's green carbon? 
+Today what we have is basically a brown carbon marketplace. 
+It's about energy emissions. 
+The European Union ETS is the main marketplace. 
+It's not doing too well. We've over-issued. 
+A bit like inflation: you over-issue currency, you get what you see, declining prices. 
+But that's all about energy and industry. 
+But what we're missing is also some other emissions like black carbon, that is soot. 
+What we're also missing is blue carbon, which, by the way, is the largest store of carbon — more than 55 percent. 
+Thankfully, the flux, in other words, the flow of emissions from the ocean to the atmosphere and vice versa, is more or less balanced. 
+In fact, what's being absorbed is something like 25 percent of our emissions, which then leads to acidification or lower alkalinity in oceans. 
+More of that in a minute. 
+And finally, there's deforestation, and there's emission of methane from agriculture. 
+Green carbon, which is the deforestation and agricultural emissions, and blue carbon together comprise 25 percent of our emissions. 
+We have the means already in our hands, through a structure, through a mechanism, called REDD Plus — a scheme for the reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. 
+And already Norway has contributed a billion dollars each towards Indonesia and Brazil to implement this Red Plus scheme. 
+So we actually have some movement forward. 
+But the thing is to do a lot more of that. 
+Will this solve the problem? Will economics solve everything? 
+Well I'm afraid not. 
+There is an area that is the oceans, coral reefs. 
+As you can see, they cut across the entire globe all the way from Micronesia across Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Madagascar and to the West of the Caribbean. 
+These red dots, these red areas, basically provide the food and livelihood for more than half a billion people. 
+So that's almost an eighth of society. 
+And the sad thing is that, as these coral reefs are lost — and scientists tell us that any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 350 parts per million is too dangerous for the survival of these reefs — we are not only risking the extinction of the entire coral species, the warm water corals, we're not only risking a fourth of all fish species which are in the oceans, but we are risking the very lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million people who live in the developing world in poor countries. 
+So in selecting targets of 450 parts per million and selecting two degrees at the climate negotiations, what we have done is we've made an ethical choice. 
+We've actually kind of made an ethical choice in society to not have coral reefs. 
+Well what I will say to you in parting is that we may have done that. 
+Let's think about it and what it means, but please, let's not do more of that. 
+Because mother nature only has that much in ecological infrastructure and that much natural capital. 
+I don't think we can afford too much of such ethical choices. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The anger in me against corruption made me to make a big career change last year, becoming a full-time practicing lawyer. 
+My experiences over the last 18 months, as a lawyer, has seeded in me a new entrepreneurial idea, which I believe is indeed worth spreading. 
+So, I share it with all of you here today, though the idea itself is getting crystallized and I'm still writing up the business plan. 
+Of course it helps that fear of public failure diminishes as the number of ideas which have failed increases. 
+I've been a huge fan of enterprise and entrepreneurship since 1993. 
+I've explored, experienced, and experimented enterprise and capitalism to my heart's content. 
+I built, along with my two brothers, the leading real estate company in my home state, Kerala, and then worked professionally with two of India's biggest businessmen, but in their startup enterprises. 
+In 2003, when I stepped out of the pure play capitalistic sector to work on so-called social sector issues, I definitely did not have any grand strategy or plan to pursue and find for-profit solutions to addressing pressing public issues. 
+When life brought about a series of death and near-death experiences within my close circle, which highlighted the need for an emergency medical response service in India, similar to 911 in USA. 
+To address this, I, along with four friends, founded Ambulance Access for All, to promote life-support ambulance services in India. 
+For those from the developing world, there is nothing, absolutely nothing new in this idea. 
+But as we envisioned it, we had three key goals: Providing world-class life support ambulance service which is fully self-sustainable from its own revenue streams, and universally accessible to anyone in a medical emergency, irrespective of the capability to pay. 
+The service which grew out of this, Dial 1298 for Ambulance, with one ambulance in 2004, now has a hundred-plus ambulances in three states, and has transported over 100,000 patients and victims since inception. 
+The service is — (Applause) fully self-sustainable from its own revenues, without accessing any public funds, and the cross-subsidy model actually works, where the rich pays higher, poor pays lower, and the accident victim is getting the service free of charge. 
+The service responded effectively and efficiently, during the unfortunate 26 / 11 Mumbai terror attacks. 
+And as you can see from the visuals, the service was responding and rescuing victims from the incident locations even before the police could cordon off the incident locations and formally confirm it as a terror strike. 
+We ended up being the first medical response team in every incident location and transported 125 victims, saving life. 
+(Applause) In tribute and remembrance of 26 / 11 attacks over the last one year, we have actually helped a Pakistani NGO, Aman Foundation, to set up a self-sustainable life support ambulance service in Karachi, facilitated by Acumen Fund. (Applause) 
+It's a small message from us, in our own small way to the enemies of humanity, of Islam, of South Asia, of India, and of Pakistan, that humanity will continue to bloom, irrespective of such dastardly attacks. 
+Since then I've also co-founded two other social enterprises. 
+One is Education Access for All, setting up schools in small-town India. 
+And the other is Moksha-Yug Access, which is integrating rural supply chain on the foundations of self-help group-based microfinance. 
+I guess we seem to be doing at least a few things right. 
+Because diligent investors and venture funds have committed over 7.5 million dollars in funding. 
+With the significance being these funds have come in as a QT capital, not as grant or as philanthropy. 
+Now I come back to the idea of the new social enterprise that I'm exploring. 
+Corruption, bribes, and lack of transparency. 
+You may be surprised to know that eight speakers yesterday actually mentioned these terms in their talks. 
+Bribes and corruption have both a demand and a supply side, with the supply side being mostly of greedy corporate unethical businesses and hapless common man. 
+And the demand side being mostly politicians, bureaucrats and those who have discretionary power vested with them. 
+According to World Bank estimate, one trillion dollars is paid in bribes every year, worsening the condition of the already worse off. 
+Yet, if you analyze the common man, he or she does not wake up every day and say, "Hmm, let me see who I can pay a bribe to today." 
+or, "" Let me see who I can corrupt today. "" Often it is the constraining or the back-to-the-wall situation that the hapless common man finds himself or herself in that leads him to pay a bribe. 
+In the modern day world, where time is premium and battle for subsistence is unimaginably tough, the hapless common man simply gives in and pays the bribe just to get on with life. 
+Now, let me ask you another question. 
+Imagine you are being asked to pay a bribe in your day-to-day life to get something done. 
+What do you do? Of course you can call the police. 
+But what is the use if the police department is in itself steeped in corruption? 
+Most definitely you don't want to pay the bribe. 
+But you also don't have the time, resources, expertise or wherewithal to fight this. 
+Unfortunately, many of us in this room are supporters of capitalist policies and market forces. 
+Yet the market forces around the world have not yet thrown up a service where you can call in, pay a fee, and fight the demand for a bribe. 
+Like a bribe buster service, or 1-800-Fight-Bribes, or www.stopbribes.org or www.preventcorruption.org. 
+Such a service simply do not exist. 
+One image that has haunted me from my early business days is of a grandmother, 70 plus years, being harassed by the bureaucrats in the town planning office. 
+All she needed was permission to build three steps to her house, from ground level, making it easier for her to enter and exit her house. 
+Yet the officer in charge would not simply give her the permit for want of a bribe. 
+Even though it pricked my conscience then, I could not, or rather I did not tend to her or assist her, because I was busy building my real estate company. 
+I don't want to be haunted by such images any more. 
+A group of us have been working on a pilot basis to address individual instances of demands for bribes for common services or entitlement. 
+And in all 42 cases where we have pushed back such demands using existing and legitimate tools like the Right to Information Act, video, audio, or peer pressure, we have successfully obtained whatever our clients set out to achieve without actually paying a bribe. 
+And with the cost of these tools being substantially lower than the bribe demanded. 
+I believe that these tools that worked in these 42 pilot cases can be consolidated in standard processes in a BPO kind of environment, and made available on web, call-center and franchise physical offices, for a fee, to serve anyone confronted with a demand for a bribe. 
+The target market is as tempting as it can get. 
+It can be worth up to one trillion dollars, being paid in bribes every year, or equal to India's GDP. 
+And it is an absolutely virgin market. 
+I propose to explore this idea further, to examine the potential of creating a for-profit, fee-based BPO kind of service to stop bribes and prevent corruption. 
+I do realize that the fight for justice against corruption is never easy. 
+It never has been and it never will be. 
+In my last 18 months as a lawyer, battling small- and large-scale corruption, including the one perpetrated by India's biggest corporate scamster. 
+Through his charities I have had three police cases filed against me alleging trespass, impersonation and intimidation. 
+The battle against corruption exacts a toll on ourselves, our families, our friends, and even our kids. 
+Yet I believe the price we pay is well worth holding on to our dignity and making the world a fairer place. 
+What gives us the courage? 
+As my close friend replied, when told during the seeding days of the ambulance project that it is an impossible task and the founders are insane to chalk up their blue-chip jobs, I quote: "" Of course we cannot fail in this, at least in our own minds. 
+For we are insane people, trying to do an impossible task. 
+And an insane person does not know what an impossible task is. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Shaffi, that is a really exciting business idea. 
+Shaffi Mather: I just have to get through the initial days where I don't get eliminated. 
+(Laughter) CA: What's on your mind? 
+I mean, give us a sense of the numbers here — a typical bribe and a typical fee. I mean, what's in your head? 
+SM: So let me... Let me give you an example. 
+Somebody who had applied for the passport. 
+The officer was just sitting on it and was demanding around 3,000 rupees in bribes. 
+And he did not want to pay. 
+So we actually used the Right to Information Act, which is equal to the Freedom of Information Act in the United States, and pushed back the officers in this particular case. 
+And in all these 42 cases, when we kept pushing them back, there was three kinds of reaction. 
+A set of people actually say, "Oh, let me just grant it to them, and run away from it." 
+Some people actually come back and say, "Oh, you want to screw me. Let me show you what I can do." 
+And he will push us back. 
+So you take the next step, or use the next tool available in what we are putting together, and then he relents. 
+By the third time, in all 42 cases, we have achieved success. 
+CA: But if it's a 3,000-rupee, 70-dollar bribe, what fee would you have to charge, and can you actually make the business work? 
+SM: Well, actually the cost that we incurred was less than 200 rupees. 
+So, it actually works. 
+CA: That's a high gross margin business. I like it. 
+(Laughter) SM: I actually did not want to answer this on the TED stage. 
+CA: OK, so these are provisional numbers, no pricing guarantee. 
+If you can pull this off, you will be a global hero. 
+I mean, this could be huge. 
+Thank you so much for sharing this idea at TED. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to make an argument today that may seem a little bit crazy: social media and the end of gender. 
+Let me connect the dots. 
+I'm going to argue today that the social media applications that we all know and love, or love to hate, are actually going to help free us from some of the absurd assumptions that we have as a society about gender. 
+I think that social media is actually going to help us dismantle some of the silly and demeaning stereotypes that we see in media and advertising about gender. 
+If you hadn't noticed, our media climate generally provides a very distorted mirror of our lives and of our gender, and I think that's going to change. 
+Now most media companies — television, radio, publishing, games, you name it — they use very rigid segmentation methods in order to understand their audiences. 
+It's old-school demographics. 
+They come up with these very restrictive labels to define us. 
+Now the crazy thing is that media companies believe that if you fall within a certain demographic category then you are predictable in certain ways — you have certain taste, that you like certain things. 
+And so the bizarre result of this is that most of our popular culture is actually based on these presumptions about our demographics. 
+Age demographics: the 18 to 49 demo has had a huge impact on all mass media programming in this country since the 1960s, when the baby boomers were still young. 
+Now they've aged out of that demographic, but it's still the case that powerful ratings companies like Nielson don't even take into account viewers of television shows over age 54. 
+In our media environment, it's as if they don't even exist. 
+Now, if you watch "" Mad Men, "" like I do — it's a popular TV show in the States — Dr. Faye Miller does something called psychographics, which first came about in the 1960s, where you create these complex psychological profiles of consumers. 
+But psychographics really haven't had a huge impact on the media business. 
+It's really just been basic demographics. 
+So I'm at the Norman Lear Center at USC, and we've done a lot of research over the last seven, eight years on demographics and how they affect media and entertainment in this country and abroad. 
+And in the last three years, we've been looking specifically at social media to see what has changed, and we've discovered some very interesting things. 
+All the people who participate in social media networks belong to the same old demographic categories that media companies and advertisers have used in order to understand them. 
+But those categories mean even less now than they did before, because with online networking tools, it's much easier for us to escape some of our demographic boxes. 
+We're able to connect with people quite freely and to redefine ourselves online. 
+And we can lie about our age online, too, pretty easily. 
+We can also connect with people based on our very specific interests. 
+We don't need a media company to help do this for us. 
+So the traditional media companies, of course, are paying very close attention to these online communities. 
+They know this is the mass audience of the future; they need to figure it out. 
+But they're having a hard time doing it because they're still trying to use demographics in order to understand them, because that's how ad rates are still determined. 
+When they're monitoring your clickstream — and you know they are — they have a really hard time figuring out your age, your gender and your income. 
+They can make some educated guesses. 
+But they get a lot more information about what you do online, what you like, what interests you. 
+That's easier for them to find out than who you are. 
+And even though that's still sort of creepy, there is an upside to having your taste monitored. 
+Suddenly our taste is being respected in a way that it hasn't been before. 
+It had been presumed before. 
+So when you look online at the way people aggregate, they don't aggregate around age, gender and income. 
+They aggregate around the things they love, the things that they like, and if you think about it, shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories. 
+I'd much rather know whether you like "" Buffy the Vampire Slayer "" rather than how old you are. 
+That would tell me something more substantial about you. 
+Now there's something else that we've discovered about social media that's actually quite surprising. 
+It turns out that women are really driving the social media revolution. 
+If you look at the statistics — these are worldwide statistics — in every single age category, women actually outnumber men in their use of social networking technologies. 
+And then if you look at the amount of time that they spend on these sites, they truly dominate the social media space, which is a space that's having a huge impact on old media. 
+The question is: what sort of impact is this going to have on our culture, and what's it going to mean for women? 
+If the case is that social media is dominating old media and women are dominating social media, then does that mean that women are going to take over global media? 
+Are we suddenly going to see a lot more female characters in cartoons and in games and on TV shows? 
+Will the next big-budget blockbuster movies actually be chick flicks? 
+Could this be possible, that suddenly our media landscape will become a feminist landscape? 
+Well, I actually don't think that's going to be the case. 
+I think that media companies are going to hire a lot more women, because they realize this is important for their business, and I think that women are also going to continue to dominate the social media sphere. 
+But I think women are actually going to be — ironically enough — responsible for driving a stake through the heart of cheesy genre categories like the "" chick flick "" and all these other genre categories that presume that certain demographic groups like certain things — that Hispanics like certain things, that young people like certain things. 
+This is far too simplistic. 
+The future entertainment media that we're going to see is going to be very data-driven, and it's going to be based on the information that we ascertain from taste communities online, where women are really driving the action. 
+So you may be asking, well why is it important that I know what entertains people? 
+Why should I know this? 
+Of course, old media companies and advertisers need to know this. 
+But my argument is that, if you want to understand the global village, it's probably a good idea that you figure out what they're passionate about, what amuses them, what they choose to do in their free time. 
+This is a very important thing to know about people. 
+I've spent most of my professional life researching media and entertainment and its impact on people's lives. 
+And I do it not just because it's fun — though actually, it is really fun — but also because our research has shown over and over again that entertainment and play have a huge impact on people's lives — for instance, on their political beliefs and on their health. 
+And so, if you have any interest in understanding the world, looking at how people amuse themselves is a really good way to start. 
+So imagine a media atmosphere that isn't dominated by lame stereotypes about gender and other demographic characteristics. 
+Can you even imagine what that looks like? 
+I can't wait to find out what it looks like. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So we all have our own biases. 
+For example, some of us tend to think that it's very difficult to transform failing government systems. 
+When we think of government systems, we tend to think that they're archaic, set in their ways, and perhaps, the leadership is just too bureaucratic to be able to change things. 
+Well, today, I want to challenge that theory. 
+I want to tell you a story of a very large government system that has not only put itself on the path of reform but has also shown fairly spectacular results in less than three years. 
+There are 1 million such schools in India. 
+And even for me, who's lived in India all her life, walking into one of these schools is fairly heartbreaking. 
+By the time kids are 11, 50 percent of them have fallen so far behind in their education that they have no hope to recover. 
+11-year-olds cannot do simple addition, they cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence. 
+By the time kids are 13 or 14, they tend to drop out of schools. 
+In India, public schools not only offer free education — they offer free textbooks, free workbooks, free meals, sometimes even cash scholarships. 
+And yet, 40 percent of the parents today are choosing to pull their children out of public schools and pay out of their pockets to put them in private schools. 
+As a comparison, in a far richer country, the US, that number is only 10 percent. 
+That's a huge statement on how broken the Indian public education system is. 
+So it was with that background that I got a call in the summer of 2013 from an absolutely brilliant lady called Surina Rajan. 
+She was, at that time, the head of the Department of School Education in a state called Haryana in India. 
+So she said to us, "" Look, I've been heading this department for the last two years. 
+I've tried a number of things, and nothing seems to work. 
+Can you possibly help? "" Let me describe Haryana a little bit to you. 
+Haryana is a state which has 30 million people. 
+It has 15,000 public schools and 2 million plus children in those public schools. 
+So basically, with that phone call, I promised to help a state and system which was as large as that of Peru or Canada transform itself. 
+As I started this project, I was very painfully aware of two things. 
+One, that I had never done anything like this before. 
+And two, many others had, perhaps without too much success. 
+As my colleagues and I looked across the country and across the world, we couldn't find another example that we could just pick up and replicate in Haryana. 
+We knew that we had to craft our own journey. 
+But anyway, we jumped right in and as we jumped in, all sorts of ideas started flying at us. 
+People said, "" Let's change the way we recruit teachers, let's hire new principals and train them and send them on international learning tours, let's put technology inside classrooms. "" By the end of week one, we had 50 ideas on the table, all amazing, all sounded right. 
+There was no way we were going to be able to implement 50 things. 
+So I said, "" Hang on, stop. 
+Let's first at least decide what is it we're trying to achieve. "" So with a lot of push and pull and debate, Haryana set itself a goal which said: by 2020, we want 80 percent of our children to be at grade-level knowledge. 
+Now the specifics of the goal don't matter here, but what matters is how specific the goal is. 
+Because it really allowed us to take all those ideas which were being thrown at us and say which ones we were going to implement. 
+Does this idea support this goal? If yes, let's keep it. 
+But if it doesn't or we're not sure, then let's put it aside. 
+As simple as it sounds, having a very specific goal right up front has really allowed us to be very sharp and focused in our transformation journey. 
+And looking back over the last two and a half years, that has been a huge positive for us. 
+So we had the goal, and now we needed to figure out what are the issues, what is broken. 
+Before we went into schools, a lot of people told us that education quality is poor because either the teachers are lazy, they don't come into schools, or they're incapable, they actually don't know how to teach. 
+On most days, most teachers were actually inside schools. 
+And when you spoke with them, you realized they were perfectly capable of teaching elementary classes. 
+But they were not teaching. 
+I went to a school where the teachers were getting the construction of a classroom and a toilet supervised. 
+I went to another school where two of the teachers had gone to a nearby bank branch to deposit scholarship money into kids' accounts. 
+At lunchtime, most teachers were spending all of their time getting the midday meal cooking, supervised and served to the students. 
+So we asked the teachers, "What's going on, why are you not teaching?" 
+When a supervisor comes to visit us, these are exactly the things that he checks. 
+Has the toilet been made, has the meal been served. 
+When my principal goes to a meeting at headquarters, these are exactly the things which are discussed. "" You see, what had happened was, over the last two decades, India had been fighting the challenge of access, having enough schools, and enrollment, bringing children into the schools. 
+So the government launched a whole host of programs to address these challenges, and the teachers became the implicit executors of these programs. 
+Not explicitly, but implicitly. 
+And now, what was actually needed was not to actually train teachers further or to monitor their attendance but to tell them that what is most important is for them to go back inside classrooms and teach. 
+They needed to be monitored and measured and awarded on the quality of teaching and not on all sorts of other things. 
+So as we went through the education system, as we delved into it deeper, we found a few such core root causes which were determining, which were shaping how people behaved in the system. 
+And we realized that unless we change those specific things, we could do a number of other things. 
+We could train, we could put technology into schools, but the system wouldn't change. 
+And addressing these non-obvious core issues became a key part of the program. 
+So, we had the goal and we had the issues, and now we needed to figure out what the solutions were. 
+We obviously did not want to recreate the wheel, so we said, "" Let's look around and see what we can find. "" And we found these beautiful, small pilot experiments all over the country and all over the world. 
+All of them were limited to 50, 100 or 500 schools. 
+And here, we were looking for a solution for 15,000 schools. 
+So we looked into why, if these things actually work, why don't they actually scale? 
+What happens is that when a typical NGO comes in, they not only bring in their expertise but they also bring in additional resources. 
+So they might bring in money, they might bring in people, they might bring in technology. 
+And in the 50 or 100 schools that they actually operate in, those additional resources actually create a difference. 
+But now imagine that the head of this NGO goes to the head of the School Education Department and says, "" Hey, now let's do this for 15,000 schools. "" Where is that guy or girl going to find the money to actually scale this up to 15,000 schools? 
+He doesn't have the additional money, he doesn't have the resources. 
+And hence, innovations don't scale. 
+So right at the beginning of the project, what we said was, "" Whatever we have to do has to be scalable, it has to work in all 15,000 schools. "" And hence, it has to work within the existing budgets and resources that the state actually has. 
+(Laughter) I think this was definitely the point in time when my team hated me. 
+We spent a lot of long hours in office, in cafés, sometimes even in bars, scratching out heads and saying, "Where are the solutions, how are we going to solve this problem?" 
+In the context of effective learning, one of the things people talk about is hands-on learning. 
+Which basically means giving students things like beads, learning rods, abacuses. 
+But we did not have the budgets to give that to 15,000 schools, 2 million children. 
+We needed another solution. 
+One day, one of our team members went to a school and saw a teacher pick up sticks and stones from the garden outside and take them into the classroom and give them to the students. 
+That was a huge eureka moment for us. 
+So what happens now in the textbooks in Haryana is that after every concept, we have a little box which are instructions for the teachers which say, "" To teach this concept, here's an activity that you can do. 
+And by the way, in order to actually do this activity, here are things that you can use from your immediate environment, whether it be the garden outside or the classroom inside, which can be used as learning aids for kids. "" And we see teachers all over Haryana using lots of innovative things to be able to teach students. 
+So in this way, whatever we designed, we were actually able to implement it across all 15,000 schools from day one. 
+Now, this brings me to my last point. 
+How do you implement something across 15,000 schools and 100,000 teachers? 
+The department used to have a process which is very interesting. 
+I like to call it "" The Chain of Hope. "" They would write a letter from the headquarters and send it to the next level, which was the district offices. 
+They would hope that in each of these district offices, an officer would get the letter, would open it, read it and then forward it to the next level, which was the block offices. 
+And then you would hope that at the block office, somebody else got the letter, opened it, read it and forwarded it eventually to the 15,000 principals. 
+And then one would hope that the principals got the letter, received it, understood it and started implementing it. 
+It was a little bit ridiculous. 
+However, what the teachers do have are smartphones. 
+They're constantly on SMS, on Facebook and on WhatsApp. 
+So what now happens in Haryana is, all principals and teachers are divided into hundreds of WhatsApp groups and anytime something needs to be communicated, it's just posted across all WhatsApp groups. 
+It spreads like wildfire. 
+You can immediately check who has received it, who has read it. 
+And what's interesting is, it's not just the headquarters who are answering these questions. 
+Another teacher from a completely different part of the state will stand up and answer the question. 
+Everybody's acting as everybody's peer group, and things are getting implemented. 
+The teachers are back inside classrooms, they're teaching. 
+Often with innovative techniques. 
+When a supervisor comes to visit the classroom, he or she not only checks the construction of the toilet but also what is the quality of teaching. 
+Once a quarter, all students across the state are assessed on their learning outcomes and schools which are doing well are rewarded. 
+And schools which are not doing so well find themselves having difficult conversations. 
+Of course, they also get additional support to be able to do better in the future. 
+In the context of education, it's very difficult to see results quickly. 
+When people talk about systemic, large-scale change, they talk about periods of 7 years and 10 years. 
+But not in Haryana. 
+In the last one year, there have been three independent studies, all measuring student learning outcomes, which indicate that something fundamental, something unique is happening in Haryana. 
+Learning levels of children have stopped declining, and they have started going up. 
+Haryana is one of the few states in the country which is showing an improvement, and certainly the one that is showing the fastest rate of improvement. 
+These are still early signs, there's a long way to go, but this gives us a lot of hope for the future. 
+I recently went to a school, and as I was leaving, I ran into a lady, her name was Parvati, she was the mother of a child, and she was smiling. 
+And I said, "" Why are you smiling, what's going on? "" And she said, "" I don't know what's going on, but what I do know is that my children are learning, they're having fun, and for the time being, I'll stop my search for a private school to send them to. "" So I go back to where I started: Can government systems transform? 
+I certainly believe so. 
+Thank you. 
+
+It's great being here at TED. 
+You know, I think there might be some presentations that will go over my head, but the most amazing concepts are the ones that go right under my feet. 
+The little things in life, sometimes that we forget about, like pollination, that we take for granted. 
+And you can't tell the story about pollinators — bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies — without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years. 
+I've been filming time-lapse flowers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for over 35 years. 
+To watch them move is a dance I'm never going to get tired of. 
+It fills me with wonder, and it opens my heart. 
+Beauty and seduction, I believe, is nature's tool for survival, because we will protect what we fall in love with. 
+Their relationship is a love story that feeds the Earth. 
+It reminds us that we are a part of nature, and we're not separate from it. 
+When I heard about the vanishing bees, Colony Collapse Disorder, it motivated me to take action. 
+We depend on pollinators for over a third of the fruits and vegetables we eat. 
+And many scientists believe it's the most serious issue facing mankind. 
+It's like the canary in the coalmine. 
+If they disappear, so do we. 
+It reminds us that we are a part of nature and we need to take care of it. 
+What motivated me to film their behavior was something that I asked my scientific advisers: "What motivates the pollinators?" 
+Well, their answer was, "It's all about risk and reward." 
+Like a wide-eyed kid, I'd say, "" Why is that? "" And they'd say, "" Well, because they want to survive. "" I go, "" Why? "" "Well, in order to reproduce." 
+"Well, why?" 
+And I thought that they'd probably say, "" Well, it's all about sex. "" And Chip Taylor, our monarch butterfly expert, he replied, "" Nothing lasts forever. 
+Everything in the universe wears out. "" And that blew my mind. 
+Because I realized that nature had invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward, as a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life. 
+Rarely seen by the naked eye, this intersection between the animal world and the plant world is truly a magic moment. 
+It's the mystical moment where life regenerates itself, over and over again. 
+So here is some nectar from my film. 
+I hope you'll drink, tweet and plant some seeds to pollinate a friendly garden. 
+And always take time to smell the flowers, and let it fill you with beauty, and rediscover that sense of wonder. 
+Here are some images from the film. 
+(Music) (Applause) Thank you. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+What do you think of when I say the word "" design ""? 
+You probably think of things like this, finely crafted objects that you can hold in your hand, or maybe logos and posters and maps that visually explain things, classic icons of timeless design. 
+But I'm not here to talk about that kind of design. 
+I want to talk about the kind that you probably use every day and may not give much thought to, designs that change all the time and that live inside your pocket. 
+I'm talking about the design of digital experiences and specifically the design of systems that are so big that their scale can be hard to comprehend. 
+Consider the fact that Google processes over one billion search queries every day, that every minute, over 100 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube. 
+That's more in a single day than all three major U.S. networks broadcast in the last five years combined. 
+And Facebook transmitting the photos, messages and stories of over 1.23 billion people. 
+That's almost half of the Internet population, and a sixth of humanity. 
+These are some of the products that I've helped design over the course of my career, and their scale is so massive that they've produced unprecedented design challenges. 
+But what is really hard about designing at scale is this: It's hard in part because it requires a combination of two things, audacity and humility — audacity to believe that the thing that you're making is something that the entire world wants and needs, and humility to understand that as a designer, it's not about you or your portfolio, it's about the people that you're designing for, and how your work just might help them live better lives. 
+Now, unfortunately, there's no school that offers the course Designing for Humanity 101. 
+I and the other designers who work on these kinds of products have had to invent it as we go along, and we are teaching ourselves the emerging best practices of designing at scale, and today I'd like share some of the things that we've learned over the years. 
+Now, the first thing that you need to know about designing at scale is that the little things really matter. 
+Here's a really good example of how a very tiny design element can make a big impact. 
+The team at Facebook that manages the Facebook "" Like "" button decided that it needed to be redesigned. 
+The button had kind of gotten out of sync with the evolution of our brand and it needed to be modernized. 
+Now you might think, well, it's a tiny little button, it probably is a pretty straightforward, easy design assignment, but it wasn't. 
+Turns out, there were all kinds of constraints for the design of this button. 
+You had to work within specific height and width parameters. 
+You had to be careful to make it work in a bunch of different languages, and be careful about using fancy gradients or borders because it has to degrade gracefully in old web browsers. 
+The truth is, designing this tiny little button was a huge pain in the butt. 
+Now, this is the new version of the button, and the designer who led this project estimates that he spent over 280 hours redesigning this button over the course of months. 
+Now, why would we spend so much time on something so small? 
+It's because when you're designing at scale, there's no such thing as a small detail. 
+This innocent little button is seen on average 22 billion times a day and on over 7.5 million websites. 
+It's one of the single most viewed design elements ever created. 
+Now that's a lot of pressure for a little button and the designer behind it, but with these kinds of products, you need to get even the tiny things right. 
+Now, the next thing that you need to understand is how to design with data. 
+Now, when you're working on products like this, you have incredible amounts of information about how people are using your product that you can then use to influence your design decisions, but it's not just as simple as following the numbers. 
+Let me give you an example so that you can understand what I mean. 
+Facebook has had a tool for a long time that allowed people to report photos that may be in violation of our community standards, things like spam and abuse. 
+And there were a ton of photos reported, but as it turns out, only a small percentage were actually in violation of those community standards. 
+Most of them were just your typical party photo. 
+Now, to give you a specific hypothetical example, let's say my friend Laura hypothetically uploads a picture of me from a drunken night of karaoke. 
+This is purely hypothetical, I can assure you. 
+(Laughter) Now, incidentally, you know how some people are kind of worried that their boss or employee is going to discover embarrassing photos of them on Facebook? 
+Do you know how hard that is to avoid when you actually work at Facebook? 
+So anyway, there are lots of these photos being erroneously reported as spam and abuse, and one of the engineers on the team had a hunch. 
+He really thought there was something else going on and he was right, because when he looked through a bunch of the cases, he found that most of them were from people who were requesting the takedown of a photo of themselves. 
+Now this was a scenario that the team never even took into account before. 
+So they added a new feature that allowed people to message their friend to ask them to take the photo down. 
+But it didn't work. 
+Only 20 percent of people sent the message to their friend. 
+So the team went back at it. 
+They consulted with experts in conflict resolution. 
+They even studied the universal principles of polite language, which I didn't even actually know existed until this research happened. 
+And they found something really interesting. 
+They had to go beyond just helping people ask their friend to take the photo down. 
+They had to help people express to their friend how the photo made them feel. 
+Here's how the experience works today. 
+So I find this hypothetical photo of myself, and it's not spam, it's not abuse, but I really wish it weren't on the site. 
+So I report it and I say, "I'm in this photo and I don't like it," and then we dig deeper. 
+Why don't you like this photo of yourself? 
+And I select "" It's embarrassing. "" And then I'm encouraged to message my friend, but here's the critical difference. 
+I'm provided specific suggested language that helps me communicate to Laura how the photo makes me feel. 
+Now the team found that this relatively small change had a huge impact. 
+Before, only 20 percent of people were sending the message, and now 60 percent were, and surveys showed that people on both sides of the conversation felt better as a result. 
+That same survey showed that 90 percent of your friends want to know if they've done something to upset you. 
+Now I don't know who the other 10 percent are, but maybe that's where our "" Unfriend "" feature can come in handy. 
+So as you can see, these decisions are highly nuanced. 
+Of course we use a lot of data to inform our decisions, but we also rely very heavily on iteration, research, testing, intuition, human empathy. 
+It's both art and science. 
+Now, sometimes the designers who work on these products are called "" data-driven, "" which is a term that totally drives us bonkers. 
+The fact is, it would be irresponsible of us not to rigorously test our designs when so many people are counting on us to get it right, but data analytics will never be a substitute for design intuition. 
+Data can help you make a good design great, but it will never made a bad design good. 
+The next thing that you need to understand as a principle is that when you introduce change, you need to do it extraordinarily carefully. 
+Now I often have joked that I spend almost as much time designing the introduction of change as I do the change itself, and I'm sure that we can all relate to that when something that we use a lot changes and then we have to adjust. 
+The fact is, people can become very efficient at using bad design, and so even if the change is good for them in the long run, it's still incredibly frustrating when it happens, and this is particularly true with user-generated content platforms, because people can rightfully claim a sense of ownership. 
+It is, after all, their content. 
+Now, years ago, when I was working at YouTube, we were looking for ways to encourage more people to rate videos, and it was interesting because when we looked into the data, we found that almost everyone was exclusively using the highest five-star rating, a handful of people were using the lowest one-star, and virtually no one was using two, three or four stars. 
+So we decided to simplify into an up-down kind of voting binary model. 
+It's going to be much easier for people to engage with. 
+But people were very attached to the five-star rating system. 
+Video creators really loved their ratings. 
+Millions and millions of people were accustomed to the old design. 
+So in order to help people prepare themselves for change and acclimate to the new design more quickly, we actually published the data graph sharing with the community the rationale for what we were going to do, and it even engaged the larger industry in a conversation, which resulted in my favorite TechCrunch headline of all time: "" YouTube Comes to a 5-Star Realization: Its Ratings Are Useless. "" Now, it's impossible to completely avoid change aversion when you're making changes to products that so many people use. 
+Even though we tried to do all the right things, we still received our customary flood of video protests and angry emails and even a package that had to be scanned by security, but we have to remember people care intensely about this stuff, and it's because these products, this work, really, really matters to them. 
+Now, we know that we have to be careful about paying attention to the details, we have to be cognizant about how we use data in our design process, and we have to introduce change very, very carefully. 
+Now, these things are all really useful. 
+They're good best practices for designing at scale. 
+But they don't mean anything if you don't understand something much more fundamental. 
+You have to understand who you are designing for. 
+Now, when you set a goal to design for the entire human race, and you start to engage in that goal in earnest, at some point you run into the walls of the bubble that you're living in. 
+Now, in San Francisco, we get a little miffed when we hit a dead cell zone because we can't use our phones to navigate to the new hipster coffee shop. 
+But what if you had to drive four hours to charge your phone because you had no reliable source of electricity? 
+What if you had no access to public libraries? 
+What if your country had no free press? 
+What would these products start to mean to you? 
+This is what Google, YouTube and Facebook look like to most of the world, and it's what they'll look like to most of the next five billion people to come online. 
+Designing for low-end cell phones is not glamorous design work, but if you want to design for the whole world, you have to design for where people are, and not where you are. 
+So how do we keep this big, big picture in mind? 
+We try to travel outside of our bubble to see, hear and understand the people we're designing for. 
+We use our products in non-English languages to make sure that they work just as well. 
+And we try to use one of these phones from time to time to keep in touch with their reality. 
+So what does it mean to design at a global scale? 
+It means difficult and sometimes exasperating work to try to improve and evolve products. 
+Finding the audacity and the humility to do right by them can be pretty exhausting, and the humility part, it's a little tough on the design ego. 
+Because these products are always changing, everything that I've designed in my career is pretty much gone, and everything that I will design will fade away. 
+But here's what remains: the never-ending thrill of being a part of something that is so big, you can hardly get your head around it, and the promise that it just might change the world. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The story starts in Kenya in December of 2007, when there was a disputed presidential election, and in the immediate aftermath of that election, there was an outbreak of ethnic violence. 
+And there was a lawyer in Nairobi, Ory Okolloh — who some of you may know from her TEDTalk — who began blogging about it on her site, Kenyan Pundit. 
+And shortly after the election and the outbreak of violence, the government suddenly imposed a significant media blackout. 
+And so weblogs went from being commentary as part of the media landscape to being a critical part of the media landscape in trying to understand where the violence was. 
+And Okolloh solicited from her commenters more information about what was going on. 
+The comments began pouring in, and Okolloh would collate them. She would post them. 
+And she quickly said, "" It's too much. 
+I could do this all day every day and I can't keep up. 
+There is more information about what's going on in Kenya right now than any one person can manage. 
+If only there was a way to automate this. "" And two programmers who read her blog held their hands up and said, "" We could do that, "" and in 72 hours, they launched Ushahidi. 
+Ushahidi — the name means "" witness "" or "" testimony "" in Swahili — is a very simple way of taking reports from the field, whether it's from the web or, critically, via mobile phones and SMS, aggregating it and putting it on a map. 
+That's all it is, but that's all that's needed because what it does is it takes the tacit information available to the whole population — everybody knows where the violence is, but no one person knows what everyone knows — and it takes that tacit information and it aggregates it, and it maps it and it makes it public. 
+And that, that maneuver called "" crisis mapping, "" was kicked off in Kenya in January of 2008. 
+And enough people looked at it and found it valuable enough that the programmers who created Ushahidi decided they were going to make it open source and turn it into a platform. 
+It's since been deployed in Mexico to track electoral fraud. 
+It's been deployed in Washington D.C. to track snow cleanup. 
+And it's been used most famously in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. 
+And when you look at the map now posted on the Ushahidi front page, you can see that the number of deployments in Ushahidi has gone worldwide, all right? 
+This went from a single idea and a single implementation in East Africa in the beginning of 2008 to a global deployment in less than three years. 
+Now what Okolloh did would not have been possible without digital technology. 
+What Okolloh did would not have been possible without human generosity. 
+And the interesting moment now, the number of environments where the social design challenge relies on both of those things being true. 
+That is the resource that I'm talking about. 
+I call it cognitive surplus. 
+And it represents the ability of the world's population to volunteer and to contribute and collaborate on large, sometimes global, projects. 
+Cognitive surplus is made up of two things. 
+The first, obviously, is the world's free time and talents. 
+The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects. 
+Now, that free time existed in the 20th century, but we didn't get Ushahidi in the 20th century. 
+That's the second half of cognitive surplus. 
+The media landscape in the 20th century was very good at helping people consume, and we got, as a result, very good at consuming. 
+But now that we've been given media tools — the Internet, mobile phones — that let us do more than consume, what we're seeing is that people weren't couch potatoes because we liked to be. 
+We were couch potatoes because that was the only opportunity given to us. 
+We still like to consume, of course. 
+But it turns out we also like to create, and we like to share. 
+And it's those two things together — ancient human motivation and the modern tools to allow that motivation to be joined up in large-scale efforts — that are the new design resource. 
+And using cognitive surplus, we're starting to see truly incredible experiments in scientific, literary, artistic, political efforts. 
+Designing. 
+We're also getting, of course, a lot of LOLcats. 
+LOLcats are cute pictures of cats made cuter with the addition of cute captions. 
+And they are also part of the abundant media landscape we're getting now. 
+This is one of the participatory — one of the participatory models we see coming out of that, along with Ushahidi. 
+Now I want to stipulate, as the lawyers say, that LOLcats are the stupidest possible creative act. 
+There are other candidates of course, but LOLcats will do as a general case. 
+But here's the thing: The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. 
+Someone who has done something like this, however mediocre and throwaway, has tried something, has put something forward in public. 
+And once they've done it, they can do it again, and they could work on getting it better. 
+There is a spectrum between mediocre work and good work, and as anybody who's worked as an artist or a creator knows, it's a spectrum you're constantly struggling to get on top of. 
+The gap is between doing anything and doing nothing. 
+And someone who makes a LOLcat has already crossed over that gap. 
+Now it's tempting to want to get the Ushahidis without the LOLcats, right, to get the serious stuff without the throwaway stuff. 
+But media abundance never works that way. 
+Freedom to experiment means freedom to experiment with anything. 
+Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals. 
+So before I talk about what is, I think, the critical difference between LOLcats and Ushahidi, I want to talk about their shared source. 
+And that source is design for generosity. 
+It is one of the curiosities of our historical era that even as cognitive surplus is becoming a resource we can design around, social sciences are also starting to explain how important our intrinsic motivations are to us, how much we do things because we like to do them rather than because our boss told us to do them, or because we're being paid to do them. 
+This is a graph from a paper by Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, who set out to test, at the beginning of this decade, what they called "" deterrence theory. "" And deterrence theory is a very simple theory of human behavior: If you want somebody to do less of something, add a punishment and they'll do less of it. 
+Simple, straightforward, commonsensical — also, largely untested. 
+And so they went and studied 10 daycare centers in Haifa, Israel. 
+They studied those daycare centers at the time of highest tension, which is pick-up time. 
+At pick-up time the teachers, who have been with your children all day, would like you to be there at the appointed hour to take your children back. 
+Meanwhile, the parents — perhaps a little busy at work, running late, running errands — want a little slack to pick the kids up late. 
+So Gneezy and Rustichini said, "" How many instances of late pick-ups are there at these 10 daycare centers? "" Now they saw — and this is what the graph is, these are the number of weeks and these are the number of late arrivals — that there were between six and 10 instances of late pick-ups on average in these 10 daycare centers. 
+So they divided the daycare centers into two groups. 
+The white group there is the control group; they change nothing. 
+But the group of daycare centers represented by the black line, they said, "" We are changing this bargain as of right now. 
+If you pick your kid up more than 10 minutes late, we're going to add a 10 shekel fine to your bill. 
+Boom. No ifs, ands or buts. "" And the minute they did that, the behavior in those daycare centers changed. 
+Late pick-ups went up every week for the next four weeks until they topped out at triple the pre-fine average, and then they fluctuated at between double and triple the pre-fine average for the life of the fine. 
+And you can see immediately what happened, right? 
+The fine broke the culture of the daycare center. 
+By adding a fine, what they did was communicate to the parents that their entire debt to the teachers had been discharged with the payment of 10 shekels, and that there was no residue of guilt or social concern that the parents owed the teachers. 
+And so the parents, quite sensibly, said, "" 10 shekels to pick my kid up late? 
+What could be bad? "" (Laughter) The explanation of human behavior that we inherited in the 20th century was that we are all rational, self-maximizing actors, and in that explanation — the daycare center had no contract — should have been operating without any constraints. 
+But that's not right. 
+They were operating with social constraints rather than contractual ones. 
+And critically, the social constraints created a culture that was more generous than the contractual constraints did. 
+So Gneezy and Rustichini run this experiment for a dozen weeks — run the fine for a dozen weeks — and then they say, "" Okay, that's it. All done; fine. "" And then a really interesting thing happens: Nothing changes. 
+The culture that got broken by the fine stayed broken when the fine was removed. 
+Not only are economic motivations and intrinsic motivations incompatible, that incompatibility can persist over long periods. 
+So the trick in designing these kinds of situations is to understand where you're relying on the economic part of the bargain — as with the parents paying the teachers — and when you're relying on the social part of the bargain, when you're really designing for generosity. 
+This brings me back to the LOLcats and to Ushahidi. 
+This is, I think, the range that matters. 
+Both of these rely on cognitive surplus. 
+Both of these design for the assumption that people like to create and we want to share. 
+Here is the critical difference between these: LOLcats is communal value. 
+It's value created by the participants for each other. 
+Communal value on the networks we have is everywhere — every time you see a large aggregate of shared, publicly available data, whether it's photos on Flickr or videos on Youtube or whatever. 
+This is good. I like LOLcats as much as the next guy, maybe a little more even, but this is also a largely solved problem. 
+I have a hard time envisioning a future in which someone is saying, "" Where, oh where, can I find a picture of a cute cat? "" Ushahidi, by contrast, is civic value. 
+It's value created by the participants but enjoyed by society as a whole. 
+The goals set out by Ushahidi are not just to make life better for the participants, but to make life better for everyone in the society in which Ushahidi is operating. 
+And that kind of civic value is not just a side effect of opening up to human motivation. 
+It really is going to be a side effect of what we, collectively, make of these kinds of efforts. 
+There are a trillion hours a year of participatory value up for grabs. 
+That will be true year-in and year-out. 
+The number of people who are going to be able to participate in these kinds of projects is going to grow, and we can see that organizations designed around a culture of generosity can achieve incredible effects without an enormous amount of contractual overhead — a very different model than our default model for large-scale group action in the 20th century. 
+What's going to make the difference here is what Dean Kamen said, the inventor and entrepreneur. 
+Kamen said, "" Free cultures get what they celebrate. "" We've got a choice before us. 
+We've got this trillion hours a year. 
+We can use it to crack each other up, and we're going to do that. 
+That, we get for free. 
+But we can also celebrate and support and reward the people trying to use cognitive surplus to create civic value. 
+And to the degree we're going to do that, to the degree we're able to do that, we'll be able to change society. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+So this is a story of a place that I now call home. 
+It's a story of public education and of rural communities and of what design might do to improve both. 
+So this is Bertie County, North Carolina, USA. 
+To give you an idea of the "" where: "" So here's North Carolina, and if we zoom in, Bertie County is in the eastern part of the state. 
+It's about two hours east driving-time from Raleigh. 
+And it's very flat. It's very swampy. 
+It's mostly farmland. 
+The entire county is home to just 20,000 people, and they're very sparsely distributed. 
+So there's only 27 people per square mile, which comes down to about 10 people per square kilometer. 
+Bertie County is kind of a prime example in the demise of rural America. 
+We've seen this story all over the country and even in places beyond the American borders. 
+We know the symptoms. 
+It's the hollowing out of small towns. 
+It's downtowns becoming ghost towns. 
+The brain drain — where all of the most educated and qualified leave and never come back. 
+It's the dependence on farm subsidies and under-performing schools and higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban. 
+And Bertie County is no exception to this. 
+Perhaps the biggest thing it struggles with, like many communities similar to it, is that there's no shared, collective investment in the future of rural communities. 
+Only 6.8 percent of all our philanthropic giving in the U.S. right now benefits rural communities, and yet 20 percent of our population lives there. 
+So Bertie County is not only very rural; it's incredibly poor. 
+It is the poorest county in the state. 
+It has one in three of its children living in poverty, and it's what is referred to as a "" rural ghetto. "" The economy is mostly agricultural. 
+The biggest crops are cotton and tobacco, and we're very proud of our Bertie County peanut. 
+The biggest employer is the Purdue chicken processing plant. 
+The county seat is Windsor. 
+This is like Times Square of Windsor that you're looking at right now. 
+It's home to only 2,000 people, and like a lot of other small towns it has been hollowed out over the years. 
+There are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair than occupied and in use. 
+You can count the number of restaurants in the county on one hand — Bunn's Barbecue being my absolute favorite. 
+But in the whole county there is no coffee shop, there's no Internet cafe, there's no movie theater, there's no bookstore. 
+There isn't even a Walmart. 
+Racially, the county is about 60 percent African-American, but what happens in the public schools is most of the privileged white kids go to the private Lawrence Academy. 
+So the public school students are about 86 percent African-American. 
+And this is a spread from the local newspaper of the recent graduating class, and you can see the difference is pretty stark. 
+So to say that the public education system in Bertie County is struggling would be a huge understatement. 
+There's basically no pool of qualified teachers to pull from, and only eight percent of the people in the county have a bachelor's degree or higher. 
+So there isn't a big legacy in the pride of education. 
+In fact, two years ago, only 27 percent of all the third- through eighth-graders were passing the state standard in both English and math. 
+So it sounds like I'm painting a really bleak picture of this place, but I promise there is good news. 
+The biggest asset, in my opinion, one of the biggest assets in Bertie County right now is this man: This is Dr. Chip Zullinger, fondly known as Dr. Z. 
+He was brought in in October 2007 as the new superintendent to basically fix this broken school system. 
+And he previously was a superintendent in Charleston, South Carolina and then in Denver, Colorado. 
+He started some of the country's first charter schools in the late '80s in the U.S. 
+And he is an absolute renegade and a visionary, and he is the reason that I now live and work there. 
+So in February of 2009, Dr. Zullinger invited us, Project H Design — which is a non-profit design firm that I founded — to come to Bertie and to partner with him on the repair of this school district and to bring a design perspective to the repair of the school district. 
+And he invited us in particular because we have a very specific type of design process — one that results in appropriate design solutions in places that don't usually have access to design services or creative capital. 
+Specifically, we use these six design directives, probably the most important being number two: we design with, not for — in that, when we're doing humanitarian-focused design, it's not about designing for clients anymore. 
+It's about designing with people, and letting appropriate solutions emerge from within. 
+So at the time of being invited down there, we were based in San Francisco, and so we were going back and forth for basically the rest of 2009, spending about half our time in Bertie County. 
+And when I say we, I mean Project H, but more specifically, I mean myself and my partner, Matthew Miller, who's an architect and a sort of MacGyver-type builder. 
+So fast-forward to today, and we now live there. 
+I have strategically cut Matt's head out of this photo, because he would kill me if he knew I was using it because of the sweatsuits. 
+But this is our front porch. We live there. 
+We now call this place home. 
+Over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth, we realized we had fallen in love with the place. 
+We had fallen in love with the place and the people and the work that we're able to do in a rural place like Bertie County, that, as designers and builders, you can't do everywhere. 
+There's space to experiment and to weld and to test things. 
+We have an amazing advocate in Dr. Zullinger. 
+There's a nobility of real, hands-on, dirt-under-your-fingernails work. 
+But beyond our personal reasons for wanting to be there, there is a huge need. 
+There is a total vacuum of creative capital in Bertie County. 
+There isn't a single licensed architect in the whole county. 
+And so we saw an opportunity to bring design as this untouched tool, something that Bertie County didn't otherwise have, and to be sort of the — to usher that in as a new type of tool in their tool kit. 
+The initial goal became using design within the public education system in partnership with Dr. Zullinger — that was why we were there. 
+But beyond that, we recognized that Bertie County, as a community, was in dire need of a fresh perspective of pride and connectedness and of the creative capital that they were so much lacking. 
+So the goal became, yes, to apply design within education, but then to figure out how to make education a great vehicle for community development. 
+So in order to do this, we've taken three different approaches to the intersection of design and education. 
+And I should say that these are three things that we've done in Bertie County, but I feel pretty confident that they could work in a lot of other rural communities around the U.S. and maybe even beyond. 
+So the first of the three is design for education. 
+This is the most kind of direct, obvious intersection of the two things. 
+It's the physical construction of improved spaces and materials and experiences for teachers and students. 
+This is in response to the awful mobile trailers and the outdated textbooks and the terrible materials that we're building schools out of these days. 
+And so this played out for us in a couple different ways. 
+The first was a series of renovations of computer labs. 
+So traditionally, the computer labs, particularly in an under-performing school like Bertie County, where they have to benchmark test every other week, the computer lab is a kill-and-drill testing facility. 
+You come in, you face the wall, you take your test and you leave. 
+So we wanted to change the way that students approach technology, to create a more convivial and social space that was more engaging, more accessible, and also to increase the ability for teachers to use these spaces for technology-based instruction. 
+So this is the lab at the high school, and the principal there is in love with this room. 
+Every time he has visitors, it's the first place that he takes them. 
+And this also meant the co-creation with some teachers of this educational playground system called the learning landscape. 
+It allows elementary-level students to learn core subjects through game play and activity and running around and screaming and being a kid. 
+So this game that the kids are playing here — in this case they were learning basic multiplication through a game called Match Me. 
+And in Match Me, you take the class, divide it into two teams, one team on each side of the playground, and the teacher will take a piece of chalk and just write a number on each of the tires. 
+And then she'll call out a math problem — so let's say four times four — and then one student from each team has to compete to figure out that four times four is 16 and find the tire with the 16 on it and sit on it. 
+So the goal is to have all of your teammates sitting on the tires and then your team wins. 
+And the impact of the learning landscape has been pretty surprising and amazing. 
+Some of the classes and teachers have reported higher test scores, a greater comfort level with the material, especially with the boys, that in going outside and playing, they aren't afraid to take on a double-digit multiplication problem — and also that the teachers are able to use these as assessment tools to better gauge how their students are understanding new material. 
+So with design for education, I think the most important thing is to have a shared ownership of the solutions with the teachers, so that they have the incentive and the desire to use them. 
+So this is Mr. Perry. He's the assistant superintendent. 
+He came out for one of our teacher-training days and won like five rounds of Match Me in a row and was very proud of himself. 
+(Laughter) So the second approach is redesigning education itself. 
+This is the most complex. 
+It's a systems-level look at how education is administered and what is being offered and to whom. 
+So in many cases this is not so much about making change as it is creating the conditions under which change is possible and the incentive to want to make change, which is easier said than done in rural communities and in inside-the-box education systems in rural communities. 
+So for us, this was a graphic public campaign called Connect Bertie. 
+There are thousands of these blue dots all over the county. 
+And this was for a fund that the school district had to put a desktop computer and a broadband Internet connection in every home with a child in the public school system. 
+Right now I should say, there are only 10 percent of the houses that actually have an in-home Internet connection. 
+And the only places to get WiFi are in the school buildings, or at the Bojangles Fried Chicken joint, which I find myself squatting outside of a lot. 
+Aside from, you know, getting people excited and wondering what the heck these blue dots were all over the place, it asked the school system to envision how it might become a catalyst for a more connected community. 
+It asked them to reach outside of the school walls and to think about how they could play a role in the community's development. 
+So the first batch of computers are being installed later this summer, and we're helping Dr. Zullinger develop some strategies around how we might connect the classroom and the home to extend learning beyond the school day. 
+And then the third approach, which is what I'm most excited about, which is where we are now, is: design as education. 
+So "" design as education "" means that we could actually teach design within public schools, and not design-based learning — not like "" let's learn physics by building a rocket, "" but actually learning design-thinking coupled with real construction and fabrication skills put towards a local community purpose. 
+It also means that designers are no longer consultants, but we're teachers, and we are charged with growing creative capital within the next generation. 
+And what design offers as an educational framework is an antidote to all of the boring, rigid, verbal instruction that so many of these school districts are plagued by. 
+It's hands-on, it's in-your-face, it requires an active engagement, and it allows kids to apply all the core subject learning in real ways. 
+So we started thinking about the legacy of shop class and how shop class — wood and metal shop class in particular — historically, has been something intended for kids who aren't going to go to college. 
+It's a vocational training path. 
+It's working-class; it's blue-collar. 
+The projects are things like, let's make a birdhouse for your mom for Christmas. 
+And in recent decades, a lot of the funding for shop class has gone away entirely. 
+So we thought, what if you could bring back shop class, but this time orient the projects around things that the community needed, and to infuse shop class with a more critical and creative-design-thinking studio process. 
+So we took this kind of nebulous idea and have worked really closely with Dr. Zullinger for the past year on writing this as a one-year curriculum offered at the high school level to the junior class. 
+And so this starts in four weeks, at the end of the summer, and my partner and I, Matthew and I, just went through the arduous and totally convoluted process of getting certified as high school teachers to actually run it. 
+And this is what it looks like. 
+So over the course of two semesters, the Fall and the Spring, the students spend three hours a day every single day in our 4,500 square foot studio / shop space. 
+And during that time, they're doing everything from going out and doing ethnographic research and doing the need-finding, coming back into the studio, doing the brainstorming and design visualization to come up with concepts that might work, and then moving into the shop and actually testing them, building them, prototyping them, figuring out if they are going to work and refining that. 
+And then over the summer, they're offered a summer job. 
+They're paid as employees of Project H to be the construction crew with us to build these projects in the community. 
+So the first project, which will be built next summer, is an open-air farmers' market downtown, followed by bus shelters for the school bus system in the second year and home improvements for the elderly in the third year. 
+So these are real visible projects that hopefully the students can point to and say, "I built that, and I'm proud of it." 
+So I want you to meet three of our students. 
+This is Ryan. 
+She is 15 years old. 
+She loves agriculture and wants to be a high school teacher. 
+She wants to go to college, but she wants to come back to Bertie County, because that's where her family is from, where she calls home, and she feels very strongly about giving back to this place that she's been fairly fortunate in. 
+So what Studio H might offer her is a way to develop skills so that she might give back in the most meaningful way. 
+This is Eric. He plays for the football team. 
+He is really into dirtbike racing, and he wants to be an architect. 
+So for him, Studio H offers him a way to develop the skills he will need as an architect, everything from drafting to wood and metal construction to how to do research for a client. 
+And then this is Anthony. 
+He is 16 years old, loves hunting and fishing and being outside and doing anything with his hands, and so for him, Studio H means that he can stay interested in his education through that hands-on engagement. 
+He's interested in forestry, but he isn't sure, so if he ends up not going to college, he will have developed some industry-relevant skills. 
+What design and building really offers to public education is a different kind of classroom. 
+So this building downtown, which may very well become the site of our future farmers' market, is now the classroom. 
+And going out into the community and interviewing your neighbors about what kind of food they buy and from where and why — that's a homework assignment. 
+And the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of the summer when they have built the farmers' market and it's open to the public — that's the final exam. 
+And for the community, what design and building offers is real, visible, built progress. 
+It's one project per year, and it makes the youth the biggest asset and the biggest untapped resource in imagining a new future. 
+So we recognize that Studio H, especially in its first year, is a small story — 13 students, it's two teachers, it's one project in one place. 
+But we feel like this could work in other places. 
+And I really, strongly believe in the power of the small story, because it is so difficult to do humanitarian work at a global scale. 
+Because, when you zoom out that far, you lose the ability to view people as humans. 
+Ultimately, design itself is a process of constant education for the people that we work with and for and for us as designers. 
+And let's face it, designers, we need to reinvent ourselves. 
+We need to re-educate ourselves around the things that matter, we need to work outside of our comfort zones more, and we need to be better citizens in our own backyard. 
+So while this is a very small story, we hope that it represents a step in the right direction for the future of rural communities and for the future of public education and hopefully also for the future of design. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Roger Ebert: These are my words, but this is not my voice. 
+This is Alex, the best computer voice I've been able to find, which comes as standard equipment on every Macintosh. 
+For most of my life, I never gave a second thought to my ability to speak. 
+It was like breathing. 
+In those days, I was living in a fool's paradise. 
+After surgeries for cancer took away my ability to speak, eat or drink, I was forced to enter this virtual world in which a computer does some of my living for me. 
+For several days now, we have enjoyed brilliant and articulate speakers here at TED. 
+I used to be able to talk like that. 
+Maybe I wasn't as smart, but I was at least as talkative. 
+I want to devote my talk today to the act of speaking itself, and how the act of speaking or not speaking is tied so indelibly to one's identity as to force the birth of a new person when it is taken away. 
+However, I've found that listening to a computer voice for any great length of time can be monotonous. 
+So I've decided to recruit some of my TED friends to read my words aloud for me. 
+I will start with my wife, Chaz. 
+Chaz Ebert: It was Chaz who stood by my side through three attempts to reconstruct my jaw and restore my ability to speak. 
+Going into the first surgery for a recurrence of salivary cancer in 2006, I expected to be out of the hospital in time to return to my movie review show, 'Ebert and Roeper at the Movies.' I had pre-taped enough shows to get me through six weeks of surgery and recuperation. 
+The doctors took a fibula bone from my leg and some tissue from my shoulder to fashion into a new jaw. 
+My tongue, larynx and vocal cords were still healthy and unaffected. 
+(Laughter) (Laughter) CE: I was optimistic, and all was right with the world. 
+The first surgery was a great success. 
+I saw myself in the mirror and I looked pretty good. 
+Two weeks later, I was ready to return home. 
+I was using my iPod to play the Leonard Cohen song 'I'm Your Man' for my doctors and nurses. 
+Suddenly, I had an episode of catastrophic bleeding. 
+My carotid artery had ruptured. 
+Thank God I was still in my hospital room and my doctors were right there. 
+Chaz told me that if that song hadn't played for so long, I might have already been in the car, on the way home, and would have died right there and then. 
+So thank you, Leonard Cohen, for saving my life. 
+(Applause) There was a second surgery — which held up for five or six days and then it also fell apart. 
+And then a third attempt, which also patched me back together pretty well, until it failed. 
+A doctor from Brazil said he had never seen anyone survive a carotid artery rupture. 
+And before I left the hospital, after a year of being hospitalized, I had seven ruptures of my carotid artery. 
+There was no particular day when anyone told me I would never speak again; it just sort of became obvious. 
+Human speech is an ingenious manipulation of our breath within the sound chamber of our mouth and respiratory system. 
+We need to be able to hold and manipulate that breath in order to form sounds. 
+Therefore, the system must be essentially airtight in order to capture air. 
+Because I had lost my jaw, I could no longer form a seal, and therefore my tongue and all of my other vocal equipment was rendered powerless. 
+Dean Ornish: At first for a long time, I wrote messages in notebooks. 
+Then I tried typing words on my laptop and using its built in voice. 
+This was faster, and nobody had to try to read my handwriting. 
+I tried out various computer voices that were available online, and for several months I had a British accent, which Chaz called Sir Lawrence. "" (Laughter) "" It was the clearest I could find. 
+Then Apple released the Alex voice, which was the best I'd heard. 
+It knew things like the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark. 
+When it saw a period, it knew how to make a sentence sound like it was ending instead of staying up in the air. 
+There are all sorts of html codes you can use to control the timing and inflection of computer voices, and I've experimented with them. 
+For me, they share a fundamental problem: they're too slow. 
+When I find myself in a conversational situation, I need to type fast and to jump right in. 
+People don't have the time or the patience to wait for me to fool around with the codes for every word or phrase. 
+But what value do we place on the sound of our own voice? 
+How does that affect who you are as a person? 
+When people hear Alex speaking my words, do they experience a disconnect? 
+Does that create a separation or a distance from one person to the next? 
+How did I feel not being able to speak? 
+I felt, and I still feel, a lot of distance from the human mainstream. 
+I've become uncomfortable when I'm separated from my laptop. 
+Even then, I'm aware that most people have little patience for my speaking difficulties. 
+So Chaz suggested finding a company that could make a customized voice using my TV show voice from a period of 30 years. 
+At first I was against it. 
+I thought it would be creepy to hear my own voice coming from a computer. 
+There was something comforting about a voice that was not my own. 
+But I decided then to just give it a try. 
+So we contacted a company in Scotland that created personalized computer voices. 
+They'd never made one from previously-recorded materials. 
+All of their voices had been made by a speaker recording original words in a control booth. 
+But they were willing to give it a try. 
+So I sent them many hours of recordings of my voice, including several audio commentary tracks that I'd made for movies on DVDs. 
+And it sounded like me, it really did. 
+There was a reason for that; it was me. 
+But it wasn't that simple. 
+The tapes from my TV show weren't very useful because there were too many other kinds of audio involved — movie soundtracks, for example, or Gene Siskel arguing with me — (Laughter) and my words often had a particular emphasis that didn't fit into a sentence well enough. 
+I'll let you hear a sample of that voice. 
+These are a few of the comments I recorded for use when Chaz and I appeared on the Oprah Winfrey program. 
+And here's the voice we call Roger Jr. 
+or Roger 2.0. 
+Roger 2.0: Oprah, I can't tell you how great it is to be back on your show. 
+We have been talking for a long time, and now here we are again. 
+This is the first version of my computer voice. 
+It still needs improvement, but at least it sounds like me and not like HAL 9000. 
+When I heard it the first time, it sent chills down my spine. 
+When I type anything, this voice will speak whatever I type. 
+When I read something, it will read in my voice. 
+I have typed these words in advance, as I didn't think it would be thrilling to sit here watching me typing. 
+The voice was created by a company in Scotland named CereProc. 
+It makes me feel good that many of the words you are hearing were first spoken while I was commenting on "" Casablanca "" and "" Citizen Kane. "" This is the first voice they've created for an individual. 
+There are several very good voices available for computers, but they all sound like somebody else, while this voice sounds like me. 
+I plan to use it on television, radio and the Internet. 
+People who need a voice should know that most computers already come with built-in speaking systems. 
+Many blind people use them to read pages on the Web to themselves. 
+But I've got to say, in first grade, they said I talked too much, and now I still can. 
+(Laughter) Roger Ebert: As you can hear, it sounds like me, but the words jump up and down. 
+The flow isn't natural. 
+The good people in Scotland are still improving my voice, and I'm optimistic about it. 
+But so far, the Apple Alex voice is the best one I've heard. 
+I wrote a blog about it and actually got a comment from the actor who played Alex. 
+He said he recorded many long hours in various intonations to be used in the voice. 
+A very large sample is needed. 
+John Hunter: All my life I was a motormouth. 
+Now I have spoken my last words, and I don't even remember for sure what they were. 
+I feel like the hero of that Harlan Ellison story titled "" I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. "" On Wednesday, David Christian explained to us what a tiny instant the human race represents in the time-span of the universe. 
+For almost all of its millions and billions of years, there was no life on Earth at all. 
+For almost all the years of life on Earth, there was no intelligent life. 
+Only after we learned to pass knowledge from one generation to the next, did civilization become possible. 
+In cosmological terms, that was about 10 minutes ago. 
+Finally came mankind's most advanced and mysterious tool, the computer. 
+That has mostly happened in my lifetime. 
+Some of the famous early computers were being built in my hometown of Urbana, the birthplace of HAL 9000. 
+When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday, about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world, I had a flashback. 
+It was about 1960. 
+As a local newspaper reporter still in high school, I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called PLATO. 
+The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations. 
+This was a computer-assisted instruction system, which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC. 
+The programmers said it could assist students in their learning. 
+I doubt, on that day 50 years ago, they even dreamed of what Salman Khan has accomplished. 
+But that's not the point. 
+The point is PLATO was only 50 years ago, an instant in time. 
+It continued to evolve and operated in one form or another on more and more sophisticated computers, until only five years ago. 
+I have learned from Wikipedia that, starting with that humble beginning, PLATO established forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing and multiple-player games. 
+Since the first Web browser was also developed in Urbana, it appears that my hometown in downstate Illinois was the birthplace of much of the virtual, online universe we occupy today. 
+But I'm not here from the Chamber of Commerce. 
+(Laughter) I'm here as a man who wants to communicate. 
+All of this has happened in my lifetime. 
+I started writing on a computer back in the 1970s when one of the first Atech systems was installed at the Chicago Sun-Times. 
+I was in line at Radio Shack to buy one of the first Model 100's. 
+And when I told the people in the press room at the Academy Awards that they'd better install some phone lines for Internet connections, they didn't know what I was talking about. 
+When I bought my first desktop, it was a DEC Rainbow. 
+Does anybody remember that? "" (Applause) "" The Sun Times sent me to the Cannes Film Festival with a portable computer the size of a suitcase named the Porteram Telebubble. 
+I joined CompuServe when it had fewer numbers than I currently have followers on Twitter. 
+(Laughter) CE: All of this has happened in the blink of an eye. 
+It is unimaginable what will happen next. 
+It makes me incredibly fortunate to live at this moment in history. 
+Indeed, I am lucky to live in history at all, because without intelligence and memory there is no history. 
+For billions of years, the universe evolved completely without notice. 
+Now we live in the age of the Internet, which seems to be creating a form of global consciousness. 
+And because of it, I can communicate as well as I ever could. 
+We are born into a box of time and space. 
+We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others. 
+For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence. 
+I cannot speak; I can only type so fast. 
+Computer voices are sometimes not very sophisticated, but with my computer, I can communicate more widely than ever before. 
+I feel as if my blog, my email, Twitter and Facebook have given me a substitute for everyday conversation. 
+They aren't an improvement, but they're the best I can do. 
+They give me a way to speak. 
+Not everybody has the patience of my wife, Chaz. 
+But online, everybody speaks at the same speed. 
+This whole adventure has been a learning experience. 
+Every time there was a surgery that failed, I was left with a little less flesh and bone. 
+Now I have no jaw left at all. 
+While harvesting tissue from both my shoulders, the surgeries left me with back pain and reduced my ability to walk easily. 
+Ironic that my legs are fine, and it's my shoulders that slow up my walk. 
+When you see me today, I look like the Phantom of the Opera. 
+But no you don't. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) It is human nature to look at someone like me and assume I have lost some of my marbles. 
+People — (Applause) People talk loudly — I'm so sorry. 
+Excuse me. 
+(Applause) People talk loudly and slowly to me. 
+Sometimes they assume I am deaf. 
+There are people who don't want to make eye contact. 
+Believe me, he didn't mean this as — anyway, let me just read it. 
+(Laughter) You should never let your wife read something like this. (Laughter) 
+It is human nature to look away from illness. 
+We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. 
+That's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me. 
+My ability to think and write have not been affected. 
+And on the Web, my real voice finds expression. 
+I have also met many other disabled people who communicate this way. 
+One of my Twitter friends can type only with his toes. 
+One of the funniest blogs on the Web is written by a friend of mine named Smartass Cripple. 
+(Laughter) Google him and he will make you laugh. 
+All of these people are saying, in one way or another, that what you see is not all you get. 
+So I have not come here to complain. 
+I have much to make me happy and relieved. 
+I seem, for the time being, to be cancer-free. 
+I am writing as well as ever. 
+I am productive. 
+If I were in this condition at any point before a few cosmological instants ago, I would be as isolated as a hermit. 
+I would be trapped inside my head. 
+Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream. 
+RE: Wait. I have one more thing to add. 
+A guy goes into a psychiatrist. 
+The psychiatrist says, "" You're crazy. "" The guy says, "" I want a second opinion. "" The psychiatrist says, "" All right, you're ugly. "" (Laughter) You all know the test for artificial intelligence — the Turing test. 
+A human judge has a conversation with a human and a computer. 
+If the judge can't tell the machine apart from the human, the machine has passed the test. 
+I now propose a test for computer voices — the Ebert test. 
+If a computer voice can successfully tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that's the voice I want. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We are going to talk today about the sequel of "" Inconvenient Truth. "" It's time again to talk about "" Inconvenient Truth, "" a truth that everyone is concerned about, but nobody is willing to talk about. 
+Somebody has to take the lead, and I decided to do it. 
+If you are scared by global warming, wait until we learn about local warming. 
+We will talk today about local warming. 
+Important health message: blogging may be hazardous to your health, especially if you are a male. 
+This message is given as a public service. 
+Blogging affects your posture. We start with the posture. 
+This is the posture of ladies who are not blogging; this is the posture of ladies who are blogging. 
+(Laughter) This is the natural posture of a man sitting, squatting for ventilation purposes. (Laughter) 
+And this is the natural posture of a standing man, and I think this picture inspired Chris to insert me into the lateral thinking session. 
+This is male blogging posture sitting, and the result is, "" For greater comfort, men naturally sit with their legs farther apart than women, when working on laptop. 
+However, they will adopt a less natural posture in order to balance it on their laps, which resulted in a significant rise of body heat between their thighs. "" This is the issue of local warming. 
+(Laughter) This is a very serious newspaper; it's Times of England — very serious. This is a very — (Laughter) — gentlemen and ladies, be serious. 
+This is a very serious research, that you should read the underline. 
+And be careful, your genes are in danger. 
+Will geeks become endangered species? 
+The fact: population growth in countries with high laptop — (Laughter) I need Hans Rosling to give me a graph. 
+(Applause) Global warming fun. 
+(Laughter) But let's keep things in proportion. 
+How to take care in five easy steps: first of all, you can use natural ventilation. You can use body breath. 
+You should stay cool with the appropriate clothing. 
+You should care about your posture — this is not right. 
+Can you extract from Chris another minute and a half for me, because I have a video I have to show you. 
+(Applause) You are great. This is the correct posture. 
+Another benefit of Wi-Fi, we learned yesterday about the benefits of Wi-Fi. 
+Wi-Fi enables you to avoid the processor. And there are some enhanced protection measures, which I would like to share with you, and I would like, in a minute, to thank Philips for helping. 
+This is a research which was done in '86, but it's still valid. 
+Scrotal temperature reflects intratesticular temperature and is lowered by shaving. 
+By the way, I must admit, my English is not so good, I didn't know what is scrotal; I understand it's a scrotum. 
+I guess in plural it's scrotal, like medium and media. 
+Digital scrotum, digital media. 
+And only last year I recognized that I'm a proud scrotum owner. 
+(Laughter) And this research is being precipitated by the U.S. government, so you can see that your tax man is working for good causes. 
+Video: Man: The Philips Bodygroom has a sleek, ergonomic design for a safe and easy way to trim those scruffy underarm hairs, the untidy curls on and around your [bleep], as well as the hard to reach locks on the underside of your [bleep] and [bleep]. Once you use the Bodygroom, the world looks different. 
+And so does your [bleep]. These days, with a hair-free back, well-groomed shoulders and an extra optical inch on my [bleep], well, let's just say life has gotten pretty darn cozy. 
+Yossi Vardi: This is one of the most popular viral advertisement of last year, known as the optical inch by Philips. Let's applaud Philips — (Applause) — for this gesture for humanity. 
+And this is how they are promoting the product. This is — I didn't touch it, this is original. 
+Laptop use to solve overpopulation. And if everything failed, there are some secondary uses. 
+And then our next talk, our next TED if you invite me will be why you should not carry a cell phone in your pocket. 
+And this is what the young generation says. 
+(Applause) And I just want to show you that I'm not just preaching, but I also practice. 
+(Laughter) 4 am in the morning. (Laughter) 
+You cannot use this picture. 
+(Applause) Now, I have some mini TED Prizes, this is the Philips Bodygroom, one for our leader. (Applause) 
+Anybody feels threatened, anybody really need it? 
+(Laughter) Any lady, any lady? Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+If you haven't ordered yet, I generally find the rigatoni with the spicy tomato sauce goes best with diseases of the small intestine. 
+(Laughter) So, sorry — it just feels like I should be doing stand-up up here because of the setting. 
+No, what I want to do is take you back to 1854 in London for the next few minutes, and tell the story — in brief — of this outbreak, which in many ways, I think, helped create the world that we live in today, and particularly the kind of city that we live in today. 
+This period in 1854, in the middle part of the 19th century, in London's history, is incredibly interesting for a number of reasons. 
+But I think the most important one is that London was this city of 2.5 million people, and it was the largest city on the face of the planet at that point. 
+But it was also the largest city that had ever been built. 
+And so the Victorians were trying to live through and simultaneously invent a whole new scale of living: this scale of living that we, you know, now call "" metropolitan living. "" And it was in many ways, at this point in the mid-1850s, a complete disaster. 
+They were basically a city living with a modern kind of industrial metropolis with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. 
+So people, for instance, just to gross you out for a second, had cesspools of human waste in their basement. Like, a foot to two feet deep. 
+And they would just kind of throw the buckets down there and hope that it would somehow go away, and of course it never really would go away. 
+And all of this stuff, basically, had accumulated to the point where the city was incredibly offensive to just walk around in. 
+It was an amazingly smelly city. Not just because of the cesspools, but also the sheer number of livestock in the city would shock people. 
+Not just the horses, but people had cows in their attics that they would use for milk, that they would hoist up there and keep them in the attic until literally their milk ran out and they died, and then they would drag them off to the bone boilers down the street. 
+So, you would just walk around London at this point and just be overwhelmed with this stench. 
+And what ended up happening is that an entire emerging public health system became convinced that it was the smell that was killing everybody, that was creating these diseases that would wipe through the city every three or four years. 
+And cholera was really the great killer of this period. 
+It arrived in London in 1832, and every four or five years another epidemic would take 10,000, 20,000 people in London and throughout the U.K. 
+And so the authorities became convinced that this smell was this problem. 
+We had to get rid of the smell. 
+And so, in fact, they concocted a couple of early, you know, founding public-health interventions in the system of the city, one of which was called the "" Nuisances Act, "" which they got everybody as far as they could to empty out their cesspools and just pour all that waste into the river. 
+Because if we get it out of the streets, it'll smell much better, and — oh right, we drink from the river. 
+So what ended up happening, actually, is they ended up increasing the outbreaks of cholera because, as we now know, cholera is actually in the water. 
+It's a waterborne disease, not something that's in the air. 
+It's not something you smell or inhale; it's something you ingest. 
+And so one of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing. 
+So this was the state of London in 1854, and in the middle of all this carnage and offensive conditions, and in the midst of all this scientific confusion about what was actually killing people, it was a very talented classic 19th century multi-disciplinarian named John Snow, who was a local doctor in Soho in London, who had been arguing for about four or five years that cholera was, in fact, a waterborne disease, and had basically convinced nobody of this. 
+The public health authorities had largely ignored what he had to say. 
+And he'd made the case in a number of papers and done a number of studies, but nothing had really stuck. 
+And part of — what's so interesting about this story to me is that in some ways, it's a great case study in how cultural change happens, how a good idea eventually comes to win out over much worse ideas. 
+And Snow labored for a long time with this great insight that everybody ignored. 
+And then on one day, August 28th of 1854, a young child, a five-month-old girl whose first name we don't know, we know her only as Baby Lewis, somehow contracted cholera, came down with cholera at 40 Broad Street. 
+You can't really see it in this map, but this is the map that becomes the central focus in the second half of my book. 
+It's in the middle of Soho, in this working class neighborhood, this little girl becomes sick and it turns out that the cesspool, that they still continue to have, despite the Nuisances Act, bordered on an extremely popular water pump, local watering hole that was well known for the best water in all of Soho, that all the residents from Soho and the surrounding neighborhoods would go to. 
+And so this little girl inadvertently ended up contaminating the water in this popular pump, and one of the most terrifying outbreaks in the history of England erupted about two or three days later. 
+Literally, 10 percent of the neighborhood died in seven days, and much more would have died if people hadn't fled after the initial outbreak kicked in. 
+So it was this incredibly terrifying event. 
+You had these scenes of entire families dying over the course of 48 hours of cholera, alone in their one-room apartments, in their little flats. 
+Just an extraordinary, terrifying scene. 
+Snow lived near there, heard about the outbreak, and in this amazing act of courage went directly into the belly of the beast because he thought an outbreak that concentrated could actually potentially end up convincing people that, in fact, the real menace of cholera was in the water supply and not in the air. 
+He suspected an outbreak that concentrated would probably involve a single point source. 
+One single thing that everybody was going to because it didn't have the traditional slower path of infections that you might expect. 
+And so he went right in there and started interviewing people. 
+He eventually enlisted the help of this amazing other figure, who's kind of the other protagonist of the book — this guy, Henry Whitehead, who was a local minister, who was not at all a man of science, but was incredibly socially connected; he knew everybody in the neighborhood. 
+And he managed to track down, Whitehead did, many of the cases of people who had drunk water from the pump, or who hadn't drunk water from the pump. 
+And eventually Snow made a map of the outbreak. 
+He found increasingly that people who drank from the pump were getting sick. 
+People who hadn't drunk from the pump were not getting sick. 
+And he thought about representing that as a kind of a table of statistics of people living in different neighborhoods, people who hadn't, you know, percentages of people who hadn't, but eventually he hit upon the idea that what he needed was something that you could see. 
+Something that would take in a sense a higher-level view of all this activity that had been happening in the neighborhood. 
+And so he created this map, which basically ended up representing all the deaths in the neighborhoods as black bars at each address. 
+And you can see in this map, the pump right at the center of it and you can see that one of the residences down the way had about 15 people dead. 
+And the map is actually a little bit bigger. 
+As you get further and further away from the pump, the deaths begin to grow less and less frequent. 
+And so you can see this something poisonous emanating out of this pump that you could see in a glance. 
+And so, with the help of this map, and with the help of more evangelizing that he did over the next few years and that Whitehead did, eventually, actually, the authorities slowly started to come around. 
+It took much longer than sometimes we like to think in this story, but by 1866, when the next big cholera outbreak came to London, the authorities had been convinced — in part because of this story, in part because of this map — that in fact the water was the problem. 
+And they had already started building the sewers in London, and they immediately went to this outbreak and they told everybody to start boiling their water. 
+And that was the last time that London has seen a cholera outbreak since. 
+So, part of this story, I think — well, it's a terrifying story, it's a very dark story and it's a story that continues on in many of the developing cities of the world. 
+It's also a story really that is fundamentally optimistic, which is to say that it's possible to solve these problems if we listen to reason, if we listen to the kind of wisdom of these kinds of maps, if we listen to people like Snow and Whitehead, if we listen to the locals who understand what's going on in these kinds of situations. 
+And what it ended up doing is making the idea of large-scale metropolitan living a sustainable one. 
+When people were looking at 10 percent of their neighborhoods dying in the space of seven days, there was a widespread consensus that this couldn't go on, that people weren't meant to live in cities of 2.5 million people. 
+But because of what Snow did, because of this map, because of the whole series of reforms that happened in the wake of this map, we now take for granted that cities have 10 million people, cities like this one are in fact sustainable things. 
+We don't worry that New York City is going to collapse in on itself quite the way that, you know, Rome did, and be 10 percent of its size in 100 years or 200 years. 
+And so that in a way is the ultimate legacy of this map. 
+It's a map of deaths that ended up creating a whole new way of life, the life that we're enjoying here today. Thank you very much. 
+
+As a conceptual artist, I'm constantly looking for creative ways to spark challenging conversations. 
+I do this though painting, sculpture, video and performance. 
+But regardless of the format, two of my favorite materials are history and dialogue. 
+In 2007, I created "" Lotus, "" a seven-and-a-half-foot diameter, 600-pound glass depiction of a lotus blossom. 
+In Buddhism, the lotus is a symbol for transcendence and for purity of mind and spirit. 
+But a closer look at this lotus reveals each petal to be the cross-section of a slave ship. 
+This iconic diagram was taken from a British slaving manual and later used by abolitionists to show the atrocities of slavery. 
+In America, we don't like to talk about slavery, nor do we look at it as a global industry. 
+But by using this Buddhist symbol, I hope to universalize and transcend the history and trauma of black America and encourage discussions about our shared past. 
+To create "" Lotus, "" we carved over 6,000 figures. 
+And this later led to a commission by the City of New York to create a 28-foot version in steel as a permanent installation at the Eagle Academy for Young Men, a school for black and latino students, the two groups most affected by this history. 
+The same two groups are very affected by a more recent phenomenon, but let me digress. 
+I've been collecting wooden African figures from tourist shops and flea markets around the world. 
+The authenticity and origin of them is completely debatable, but people believe these to be imbued with power, or even magic. 
+Only recently have I figured out how to use this in my own work. 
+(Gun shots) Since 2012, the world has witnessed the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice and literally countless other unarmed black citizens at the hands of the police, who frequently walk away with no punishment at all. 
+In consideration of these victims and the several times that even I, a law-abiding, Ivy League professor, have been targeted and harassed at gunpoint by the police. 
+I created this body of work simply entitled "" BAM. "" It was important to erase the identity of each of these figures, to make them all look the same and easier to disregard. 
+To do this, I dip them in a thick, brown wax before taking them to a shooting range where I re-sculpted them using bullets. 
+And it was fun, playing with big guns and high-speed video cameras. 
+But my reverence for these figures kept me from actually pulling the trigger, somehow feeling as if I would be shooting myself. 
+Finally, my cameraman, Raul, fired the shots. 
+I then took the fragments of these and created molds, and cast them first in wax, and finally in bronze like the image you see here, which bears the marks of its violent creation like battle wounds or scars. 
+When I showed this work recently in Miami, a woman told me she felt every gun shot to her soul. 
+But she also felt that these artworks memorialized the victims of these killings as well as other victims of racial violence throughout US history. 
+But "" Lotus "" and "" BAM "" are larger than just US history. 
+
+Two years ago here at TED I reported that we had discovered at Saturn, with the Cassini Spacecraft, an anomalously warm and geologically active region at the southern tip of the small Saturnine moon Enceladus, seen here. 
+This region seen here for the first time in the Cassini image taken in 2005. This is the south polar region, with the famous tiger-stripe fractures crossing the south pole. 
+And seen just recently in late 2008, here is that region again, now half in darkness because the southern hemisphere is experiencing the onset of August and eventually winter. 
+And I also reported that we'd made this mind-blowing discovery — this once-in-a-lifetime discovery of towering jets erupting from those fractures at the south pole, consisting of tiny water ice crystals accompanied by water vapor and simple organic compounds like carbon dioxide and methane. 
+And at that time two years ago I mentioned that we were speculating that these jets might in fact be geysers, and erupting from pockets or chambers of liquid water underneath the surface, but we weren't really sure. 
+However, the implications of those results — of a possible environment within this moon that could support prebiotic chemistry, and perhaps life itself — were so exciting that, in the intervening two years, we have focused more on Enceladus. 
+We've flown the Cassini Spacecraft by this moon now several times, flying closer and deeper into these jets, into the denser regions of these jets, so that now we have come away with some very precise compositional measurements. 
+And we have found that the organic compounds coming from this moon are in fact more complex than we previously reported. 
+While they're not amino acids, we're now finding things like propane and benzene, hydrogen cyanide, and formaldehyde. 
+And the tiny water crystals here now look for all the world like they are frozen droplets of salty water, which is a discovery that suggests that not only do the jets come from pockets of liquid water, but that that liquid water is in contact with rock. 
+And that is a circumstance that could supply the chemical energy and the chemical compounds needed to sustain life. 
+So we are very encouraged by these results. 
+And we are much more confident now than we were two years ago that we might indeed have on this moon, under the south pole, an environment or a zone that is hospitable to living organisms. 
+Whether or not there are living organisms there, of course, is an entirely different matter. 
+And that will have to await the arrival, back at Enceladus, of the spacecrafts, hopefully some time in the near future, specifically equipped to address that particular question. 
+But in the meantime I invite you to imagine the day when we might journey to the Saturnine system, and visit the Enceladus interplanetary geyser park, just because we can. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to talk about post-conflict recovery and how we might do post-conflict recovery better. 
+The record on post-conflict recovery is not very impressive. 
+40 percent of all post-conflict situations, historically, have reverted back to conflict within a decade. 
+In fact, they've accounted for half of all civil wars. 
+Why has the record been so poor? 
+Well, the conventional approach to post-conflict situations has rested on, on kind of, three principles. 
+The first principle is: it's the politics that matters. 
+So, the first thing that is prioritized is politics. 
+Try and build a political settlement first. 
+And then the second step is to say, "The situation is admittedly dangerous, but only for a short time." 
+So get peacekeepers there, but get them home as soon as possible. 
+So, short-term peacekeepers. 
+And thirdly, what is the exit strategy for the peacekeepers? 
+It's an election. 
+That will produce a legitimate and accountable government. 
+So that's the conventional approach. 
+I think that approach denies reality. 
+We see that there is no quick fix. 
+There's certainly no quick security fix. 
+I've tried to look at the risks of reversion to conflict, during our post-conflict decade. 
+And the risks stay high throughout the decade. 
+And they stay high regardless of the political innovations. 
+Does an election produce an accountable and legitimate government? 
+What an election produces is a winner and a loser. 
+And the loser is unreconciled. 
+The reality is that we need to reverse the sequence. 
+It's not the politics first; it's actually the politics last. 
+The politics become easier as the decade progresses if you're building on a foundation of security and economic development — the rebuilding of prosperity. 
+Why does the politics get easier? 
+And why is it so difficult initially? 
+Because after years of stagnation and decline, the mentality of politics is that it's a zero-sum game. 
+If the reality is stagnation, I can only go up if you go down. 
+And that doesn't produce a productive politics. 
+And so the mentality has to shift from zero-sum to positive-sum before you can get a productive politics. 
+You can only get positive, that mental shift, if the reality is that prosperity is being built. 
+And in order to build prosperity, we need security in place. 
+So that is what you get when you face reality. 
+But the objective of facing reality is to change reality. 
+And so now let me suggest two complimentary approaches to changing the reality of the situations. 
+The first is to recognize the interdependence of three key actors, who are different actors, and at the moment are uncoordinated. 
+The first actor is the Security Council. 
+The Security Council typically has the responsibility for providing the peacekeepers who build the security. 
+And that needs to be recognized, first of all, that peacekeeping works. 
+It is a cost-effective approach. 
+It does increase security. 
+But it needs to be done long-term. 
+It needs to be a decade-long approach, rather than just a couple of years. 
+That's one actor, the Security Council. 
+The second actor, different cast of guys, is the donors. 
+The donors provide post-conflict aid. 
+Typically in the past, the donors have been interested in the first couple of years, and then they got bored. 
+They moved on to some other situation. 
+Post-conflict economic recovery is a slow process. 
+There are no quick processes in economics except decline. 
+You can do that quite fast. 
+(Laughter) So the donors have to stick with this situation for at least a decade. 
+And then the third key actor is the post-conflict government. 
+And there are two key things it's got to do. 
+One is it's got to do economic reform, not fuss about the political constitution. 
+It's got to reform economic policy. 
+Why? Because during conflict economic policy typically deteriorates. 
+Governments snatch short-term opportunities and, by the end of the conflict, the chickens have come home to roost. 
+So this legacy of conflict is really bad economic policy. 
+So there is a reform agenda, and there is an inclusion agenda. 
+The inclusion agenda doesn't come from elections. 
+Elections produce a loser, who is then excluded. 
+So the inclusion agenda means genuinely bringing people inside the tent. 
+So those three actors. 
+And they are interdependent over a long term. 
+If the Security Council doesn't commit to security over the course of a decade, you don't get the reassurance which produces private investment. 
+If you don't get the policy reform and the aid, you don't get the economic recovery, which is the true exit strategy for the peacekeepers. 
+So we should recognize that interdependence, by formal, mutual commitments. 
+The United Nations actually has a language for these mutual commitments, the recognition of mutual commitments; it's called the language of compact. 
+And so we need a post-conflict compact. 
+The United Nations even has an agency which could broker these compacts; it's called the Peace Building Commission. 
+It would be ideal to have a standard set of norms where, when we got to a post-conflict situation, there was an expectation of these mutual commitments from the three parties. 
+So that's idea one: recognize interdependence. 
+And now let me turn to the second approach, which is complimentary. 
+And that is to focus on a few critical objectives. 
+Typical post-conflict situation is a zoo of different actors with different priorities. 
+And indeed, unfortunately, if you navigate by needs you get a very unfocused agenda, because in these situations, needs are everywhere, but the capacity to implement change is very limited. 
+So we have to be disciplined and focus on things that are critical. 
+And I want to suggest that in the typical post-conflict situation three things are critical. 
+One is jobs. 
+One is improvements in basic services — especially health, which is a disaster during conflict. 
+So jobs, health, and clean government. 
+Those are the three critical priorities. 
+So I'm going to talk a little about each of them. 
+Jobs. 
+What is a distinctive approach to generating jobs in post-conflict situations? 
+And why are jobs so important? 
+Jobs for whom? Especially jobs for young men. 
+In post-conflict situations, the reason that they so often revert to conflict, is not because elderly women get upset. 
+It's because young men get upset. 
+And why are they upset? Because they have nothing to do. 
+And so we need a process of generating jobs, for ordinary young men, fast. 
+Now, that is difficult. 
+Governments in post-conflict situation often respond by puffing up the civil service. 
+That is not a good idea. 
+It's not sustainable. 
+In fact, you're building a long-term liability by inflating civil service. 
+But getting the private sector to expand is also difficult, because any activity which is open to international trade is basically going to be uncompetitive in a post-conflict situation. 
+These are not environments where you can build export manufacturing. 
+There's one sector which isn't exposed to international trade, and which can generate a lot of jobs, and which is, in any case, a sensible sector to expand, post-conflict, and that is the construction sector. 
+The construction sector has a vital role, obviously, in reconstruction. 
+But typically that sector has withered away during conflict. 
+During conflict people are doing destruction. 
+There isn't any construction going on. And so the sector shrivels away. 
+And then when you try and expand it, because it's shriveled away, you encounter a lot of bottlenecks. 
+Basically, prices soar and crooked politicians then milk the rents from the sector, but it doesn't generate any jobs. 
+And so the policy priority is to break the bottlenecks in expanding the construction sector. 
+What might the bottlenecks be? 
+Just think what you have to do successfully to build a structure, using a lot of labor. 
+First you need access to land. 
+Often the legal system is broken down so you can't even get access to land. 
+Secondly you need skills, the mundane skills of the construction sector. 
+In post-conflict situations we don't just need Doctors Without Borders, we need Bricklayers Without Borders, to rebuild the skill set. 
+We need firms. The firms have gone away. 
+So we need to encourage the growth of local firms. 
+If we do that, we not only get the jobs, we get the improvements in public infrastructure, the restoration of public infrastructure. 
+Let me turn from jobs to the second objective, which is improving basic social services. 
+And to date, there has been a sort of a schizophrenia in the donor community, as to how to build basic services in post-conflict sectors. 
+On the one hand it pays lip service to the idea of rebuild an effective state in the image of Scandinavia in the 1950s. 
+Lets develop line ministries of this, that, and the other, that deliver these services. 
+And it's schizophrenic because in their hearts donors know that's not a realistic agenda, and so what they also do is the total bypass: just fund NGOs. 
+Neither of those approaches is sensible. 
+And so what I'd suggest is what I call Independent Service Authorities. 
+It's to split the functions of a monopoly line ministry up into three. 
+The planning function and policy function stays with the ministry; the delivery of services on the ground, you should use whatever works — churches, NGOs, local communities, whatever works. 
+And in between, there should be a public agency, the Independent Service Authority, which channels public money, and especially donor money, to the retail providers. 
+So the NGOs become part of a public government system, rather than independent of it. 
+One advantage of that is that you can allocate money coherently. 
+Another is, you can make NGOs accountable. 
+You can use yardstick competition, so they have to compete against each other for the resources. 
+The good NGOs, like Oxfam, are very keen on this idea. 
+They want to have the discipline and accountability. 
+So that's a way to get basic services scaled up. 
+And because the government would be funding it, it would be co-branding these services. 
+So they wouldn't be provided thanks to the United States government and some NGO. 
+They would be co-branded as being done by the post-conflict government, in the country. 
+So, jobs, basic services, finally, clean government. 
+Clean means follow their money. 
+The typical post-conflict government is so short of money that it needs our money just to be on a life-support system. 
+You can't get the basic functions of the state done unless we put money into the core budget of these countries. 
+But, if we put money into the core budget, we know that there aren't the budget systems with integrity that mean that money will be well spent. 
+And if all we do is put money in and close our eyes it's not just that the money is wasted — that's the least of the problems — it's that the money is captured. 
+It's captured by the crooks who are at the heart of the political problem. 
+And so inadvertently we empower the people who are the problem. 
+So building clean government means, yes, provide money to the budget, but also provide a lot of scrutiny, which means a lot of technical assistance that follows the money. 
+Paddy Ashdown, who was the grand high nabob of Bosnia to the United Nations, in his book about his experience, he said, "" I realize what I needed was accountants without borders, to follow that money. "" So that's the — let me wrap up, this is the package. 
+What's the goal? 
+If we follow this, what would we hope to achieve? 
+That after 10 years, the focus on the construction sector would have produced both jobs and, hence, security — because young people would have jobs — and it would have reconstructed the infrastructure. 
+So that's the focus on the construction sector. 
+The focus on the basic service delivery through these independent service authorities would have rescued basic services from their catastrophic levels, and it would have given ordinary people the sense that the government was doing something useful. 
+The emphasis on clean government would have gradually squeezed out the political crooks, because there wouldn't be any money in taking part in the politics. 
+And so gradually the selection, the composition of politicians, would shift from the crooked to the honest. 
+Where would that leave us? 
+Gradually it would shift from a politics of plunder to a politics of hope. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) For any of you who have visited or lived in New York City, these shots might start to look familiar. 
+This is Central Park, one of the most beautifully designed public spaces in America. 
+But to anyone who hasn't visited, these images can't really fully convey. 
+To really understand Central Park, you have to physically be there. 
+Well, the same is true of the music, which my brother and I composed and mapped specifically for Central Park. 
+(Music) I'd like to talk to you today a little bit about the work that my brother Hays and I are doing — That's us there. That's both of us actually — specifically about a concept that we've been developing over the last few years, this idea of location-aware music. 
+Now, my brother and I, we're musicians and music producers. 
+We've been working together since, well, since we were kids, really. 
+But recently, we've become more and more interested in projects where art and technology intersect, from creating sight-specific audio and video installation to engineering interactive concerts. 
+But today I want to focus on this concept of composition for physical space. 
+But before I go too much further into that, let me tell you a little bit about how we got started with this idea. 
+My brother and I were living in New York City when the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude did their temporary installation, The Gates, in Central Park. 
+Hundreds of these brightly-colored sculptures decorated the park for a number of weeks, and unlike work that's exhibited in a more neutral space, like on the walls of a gallery or a museum, this was work that was really in dialogue with this place, and in a lot of ways, The Gates was really a celebration of Frederick Olmsted's incredible design. 
+This was an experience that stayed with us for a long time, and years later, my brother and I moved back to Washington, D.C., and we started to ask the question, would it be possible, in the same way that The Gates responded to the physical layout of the park, to compose music for a landscape? 
+Which brought us to this. 
+(Music) On Memorial Day, we released "" The National Mall, "" a location-aware album released exclusively as a mobile app that uses the device's built-in GPS functionality to sonically map the entire park in our hometown of Washington, D.C. 
+Hundreds of musical segments are geo-tagged throughout the entire park so that as a listener traverses the landscape, a musical score is actually unfolding around them. 
+So this is not a playlist or a list of songs intended for the park, but rather an array of distinct melodies and rhythms that fit together like pieces of a puzzle and blend seamlessly based on a listener's chosen trajectory. 
+So think of this as a choose-your-own-adventure of an album. 
+Let's take a closer look. 
+Let's look at one example here. 
+So using the app, as you make your way towards the grounds surrounding the Washington Monument, you hear the sounds of instruments warming up, which then gives way to the sound of a mellotron spelling out a very simple melody. 
+This is then joined by the sound of sweeping violins. 
+Keep walking, and a full choir joins in, until you finally reach the top of the hill and you're hearing the sound of drums and fireworks and all sorts of musical craziness, as if all of these sounds are radiating out from this giant obelisk that punctuates the center of the park. 
+But were you to walk in the opposite direction, this entire sequence happens in reverse. 
+And were you to actually exit the perimeter of the park, the music would fade to silence, and the play button would disappear. 
+We're sometimes contacted by people in other parts of the world who can't travel to the United States, but would like to hear this record. 
+Well, unlike a normal album, we haven't been able to accommodate this request. 
+When they ask for a C.D. or an MP3 version, we just can't make that happen, and the reason is because this isn't a promotional app or a game to promote or accompany the release of a traditional record. 
+In this case, the app is the work itself, and the architecture of the landscape is intrinsic to the listening experience. 
+Six months later, we did a location-aware album for Central Park, a park that is over two times the size of the National Mall, with music spanning from the Sheep's Meadow to the Ramble to the Reservoir. 
+Currently, my brother and I are working on projects all over the country, but last spring we started a project, here actually at Stanford's Experimental Media Art Department, where we're creating our largest location-aware album to date, one that will span the entirety of Highway 1 here on the Pacific Coast. 
+But what we're doing, integrating GPS with music, is really just one idea. 
+But it speaks to a larger vision for a music industry that's sometimes struggled to find its footing in this digital age, that they begin to see these new technologies not simply as ways of adding bells and whistles to an existing model, but to dream up entirely new ways for people to interact with and experience music. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Okay, a few of you. 
+Back where I'm from, most of our caves are made of lava rock, because we have a lot of volcanoes out there. 
+But the caves I want to share with you today are made completely of ice, specifically glacier ice that's formed in the side of the tallest mountain in the state of Oregon, called Mount Hood. 
+Now Mount Hood's only one hour's drive from Portland, the largest city in Oregon, where over two million people live. 
+Now the most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to find a new cave and be the first human to ever go into it. 
+The second most exciting thing for a cave explorer is to be the first one to make a map of a cave. 
+Now these days, with so many people hiking around, it's pretty hard to find a new cave, so you can imagine how excited we were to find three new caves within sight of Oregon's largest city and realize that they had never been explored or mapped before. 
+It was kind of like being an astronaut, because we were getting to see things and go places that no one had ever seen or gone to before. 
+So what is a glacier? 
+Well, those of you who have ever seen or touched snow, you know that it's really light, because it's just a bunch of tiny ice crystals clumped together, and it's mostly air. 
+Well, on a mountain like Hood, where it snows over 20 feet a year, it crushes the air out of it and gradually forms it into hard blue ice. 
+Now each year, more and more ice stacks up on top of it, and eventually it gets so heavy that it starts to slide down the mountain under its own weight, forming a slow-moving river of ice. 
+The name of the glacier these caves are formed in is the Sandy Glacier. 
+Now each year, as new snow lands on the glacier, it melts in the summer sun, and it forms little rivers of water on the flow along the ice, and they start to melt and bore their way down through the glacier, forming big networks of caves, sometimes going all the way down to the underlying bedrock. 
+Now the crazy thing about glacier caves is that each year, new tunnels form. 
+Different waterfalls pop up or move around from place to place inside the cave. 
+Warm water from the top of the ice is boring its way down, and warm air from below the mountain actually rises up, gets into the cave, and melts the ceilings back taller and taller. 
+But the weirdest thing about glacier caves is that the entire cave is moving, because it's formed inside a block of ice the size of a small city that's slowly sliding down the mountain. 
+Now this is Brent McGregor, my cave exploration partner. 
+He and I have both been exploring caves a long time and we've been climbing mountains a long time, but neither one of us had ever really explored a glacier cave before. 
+Back in 2011, Brent saw a YouTube video of a couple of hikers that stumbled across the entrance to one of these caves. 
+There were no GPS coordinates for it, and all we knew was that it was somewhere out on the Sandy Glacier. 
+So in July of that year, we went out on the glacier, and we found a big crack in the ice. 
+We had to build snow and ice anchors so that we could tie off ropes and rappel down into the hole. 
+At the end of this hole, we found a huge tunnel going right up the mountain underneath thousands of tons of glacier ice. 
+We followed this cave back for about a half mile until it came to an end, and then with the help of our survey tools we made a three-dimensional map of the cave on our way back out. 
+Well, cave maps aren't like trail maps or road maps because they have pits and holes going to overlapping levels. 
+To make a cave map, you have to set up survey stations every few feet inside the cave, and you use a laser to measure the distance between those stations. 
+Now those of you taking trigonometry, that particular type of math is very useful for making maps like this because it allows you to measure heights and distances without actually having to go there. 
+In fact, the more I mapped and studied caves, the more useful I found all that math that I originally hated in school to be. 
+So when you're done surveying, you take all this data and you punch it into a computer and you find someone that can draw really well, and you have them draft up a map that looks something like this, and it'll show you both a bird's-eye view of the passage as well as a profile view of the passage, kind of like an ant farm view. 
+We named this cave Snow Dragon Cave because it was like a big dragon sleeping under the snow. 
+The inside of it was coated with ice, so we had to wear big spikes on our feet called crampons so we could walk around without slipping. 
+This cave was amazing. 
+The ice in the ceiling was glowing blue anad green because the sunlight from far above was shining through the ice and lighting it all up. 
+And we couldn't understand why this cave was so much colder than Snow Dragon until we got to the end and we found out why. 
+There was a huge pit or shaft called a moulin going 130 feet straight up to the surface of the glacier. 
+Cold air from the top of the mountain was flowing down this hole and blasting through the cave, freezing everything inside of it. 
+And we were so excited about finding this new pit, we actually came back in January the following year so we could be the first ones to explore it. 
+It was so cold outside, we actually had to sleep inside the cave. 
+There's our camp on the left side of this entrance room. 
+The next morning, we climbed out of the cave and hiked all the way to the top of the glacier, where we finally rigged and rappelled this pit for the very first time. 
+Brent named this cave Pure Imagination, I think because the beautiful sights we saw in there were beyond what we could have ever imagined. 
+So besides really cool ice, what else is inside these caves? 
+Well not too much lives in them because they're so cold and the entrance is actually covered up with snow for about eight months of the year. 
+But there are some really cool things in there. 
+There's weird bacteria living in the water that actually eat and digest rocks to make their own food to live under this ice. 
+In fact, this past summer, scientists collected samples of water and ice specifically to see if things called extremophiles, tiny lifeforms that are evolved to live in completely hostile conditions, might be living under the ice, kind of like what they hope to find on the polar icecaps of Mars someday. 
+As these caves form and melt their way up into the ice, they make these artifacts rain down from the ceiling and fall onto the cave floor, where we end up finding them. 
+For example, this is a noble fir seed we found. 
+It's been frozen in the ice for over 100 years, and it's just now starting to sprout. 
+This mallard duck feather was found over 1,800 feet in the back of Snow Dragon Cave. 
+This duck died on the surface of the glacier long, long ago, and its feathers have finally made it down through over 100 feet of ice before falling inside the cave. 
+And this beautiful quartz crystal was also found in the back of Snow Dragon. 
+Even now, Brent and I find it hard to believe that all these discoveries were essentially in our own backyard, hidden away, just waiting to be found. 
+So it's actually not too late for one of you to become a discoverer yourself. 
+You just have to be willing to look and go where people don't often go and focus your eyes and your mind to recognize the discovery when you see it, because it might be in your own backyard. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was a young officer, they told me to follow my instincts, to go with my gut, and what I've learned is that often our instincts are wrong. 
+In the summer of 2010, there was a massive leak of classified documents that came out of the Pentagon. 
+It shocked the world, it shook up the American government, and it made people ask a lot of questions, because the sheer amount of information that was let out, and the potential impacts, were significant. 
+And one of the first questions we asked ourselves was why would a young soldier have access to that much information? 
+Why would we let sensitive things be with a relatively young person? 
+In the summer of 2003, I was assigned to command a special operations task force, and that task force was spread across the Mideast to fight al Qaeda. 
+Our main effort was inside Iraq, and our specified mission was to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. 
+For almost five years I stayed there, and we focused on fighting a war that was unconventional and it was difficult and it was bloody and it often claimed its highest price among innocent people. 
+We did everything we could to stop al Qaeda and the foreign fighters that came in as suicide bombers and as accelerants to the violence. 
+We honed our combat skills, we developed new equipment, we parachuted, we helicoptered, we took small boats, we drove, and we walked to objectives night after night to stop the killing that this network was putting forward. 
+We bled, we died, and we killed to stop that organization from the violence that they were putting largely against the Iraqi people. 
+Now, we did what we knew, how we had grown up, and one of the things that we knew, that was in our DNA, was secrecy. 
+It was security. It was protecting information. 
+It was the idea that information was the lifeblood and it was what would protect and keep people safe. 
+And we had a sense that, as we operated within our organizations, it was important to keep information in the silos within the organizations, particularly only give information to people had a demonstrated need to know. 
+But the question often came, who needed to know? 
+And in a tightly coupled world, that's very hard to predict. 
+It was a significant culture shift for an organization that had secrecy in its DNA. 
+We started by doing things, by building, not working in offices, knocking down walls, working in things we called situation awareness rooms, and in the summer of 2007, something happened which demonstrated this. 
+We captured the personnel records for the people who were bringing foreign fighters into Iraq. 
+What if the enemy finds out? "" And he says, "" They're their personnel records. "" (Laughter) So we did, and a lot of people got upset about that, but as we passed that information around, suddenly you find that information is only of value if you give it to people who have the ability to do something with it. 
+The fact that I know something has zero value if I'm not the person who can actually make something better because of it. 
+So as a consequence, what we did was we changed the idea of information, instead of knowledge is power, to one where sharing is power. 
+It was the fundamental shift, not new tactics, not new weapons, not new anything else. 
+It was the idea that we were now part of a team in which information became the essential link between us, not a block between us. 
+And I want everybody to take a deep breath and let it out, because in your life, there's going to be information that leaks out you're not going to like. 
+Somebody's going to get my college grades out, a that's going to be a disaster. (Laughter) But it's going to be okay, and I will tell you that I am more scared of the bureaucrat that holds information in a desk drawer or in a safe than I am of someone who leaks, because ultimately, we'll be better off if we share. 
+(Applause) Helen Walters: So I don't know if you were here this morning, if you were able to catch Rick Ledgett, the deputy director of the NSA who was responding to Edward Snowden's talk earlier this week. 
+I just wonder, do you think the American government should give Edward Snowden amnesty? 
+Stanley McChrystal: I think that Rick said something very important. 
+Edward Snowden shined a light on an important need that people had to understand. 
+He also took a lot of documents that he didn't have the knowledge to know the importance of, so I think we need to learn the facts about this case before we make snap judgments about Edward Snowden. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is my grandfather. 
+And this is my son. 
+My grandfather taught me to work with wood when I was a little boy, and he also taught me the idea that if you cut down a tree to turn it into something, honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful as you possibly can. 
+My little boy reminded me that for all the technology and all the toys in the world, sometimes just a small block of wood, if you stack it up tall, actually is an incredibly inspiring thing. 
+These are my buildings. 
+I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York. 
+And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials, depending on where we are. 
+But wood is the material that I love the most, and I'm going to tell you the story about wood. 
+And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood, I notice they react completely differently. 
+I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column, but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building. 
+I've actually seen how people touch the wood, and I think there's a reason for it. 
+Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. 
+That's a wonderful thing. 
+I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. 
+It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment. 
+Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest that grows to 33 stories tall. 
+Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall. 
+But the buildings that we think about in wood are only four stories tall in most places on Earth. 
+Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build much taller than four stories in many places, and that's true here in the United States. 
+Now there are exceptions, but there needs to be some exceptions, and things are going to change, I'm hoping. 
+And the reason I think that way is that today half of us live in cities, and that number is going to grow to 75 percent. 
+Cities and density mean that our buildings are going to continue to be big, and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities. 
+And I feel that way because three billion people in the world today, over the next 20 years, will need a new home. 
+That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need a new building built for them in the next 20 years. 
+Now, one in three people living in cities today actually live in a slum. 
+That's one billion people in the world live in slums. 
+A hundred million people in the world are homeless. 
+The scale of the challenge for architects and for society to deal with in building is to find a solution to house these people. 
+But the challenge is, as we move to cities, cities are built in these two materials, steel and concrete, and they're great materials. 
+They're the materials of the last century. 
+But they're also materials with very high energy and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process. 
+Steel represents about three percent of man's greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete is over five percent. 
+So if you think about that, eight percent of our contribution to greenhouse gases today comes from those two materials alone. 
+We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately, we actually don't even think about buildings, I think, as much as we should. 
+Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry, and if we look at energy, it's the same story. 
+You'll notice that transportation's sort of second down that list, but that's the conversation we mostly hear about. 
+And although a lot of that is about energy, it's also so much about carbon. 
+The problem I see is that, ultimately, the clash of how we solve that problem of serving those three billion people that need a home, and climate change, are a head-on collision about to happen, or already happening. 
+That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways, and I think wood is going to be part of that solution, and I'm going to tell you the story of why. 
+As an architect, wood is the only material, big material, that I can build with that's already grown by the power of the sun. 
+When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen and soaks up carbon dioxide, and it dies and it falls to the forest floor, it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground. 
+If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon back to the atmosphere as well. 
+But if you take that wood and you put it into a building or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy, it actually has an amazing capacity to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration. 
+One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide. 
+Now our two solutions to climate are obviously to reduce our emissions and find storage. 
+Wood is the only major material building material I can build with that actually does both those two things. 
+So I believe that we have an ethic that the Earth grows our food, and we need to move to an ethic in this century that the Earth should grow our homes. 
+Now, how are we going to do that when we're urbanizing at this rate and we think about wood buildings only at four stories? 
+We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need to grow bigger, and what we've been working on is 30-story tall buildings made of wood. 
+We've been engineering them with an engineer named Eric Karsh who works with me on it, and we've been doing this new work because there are new wood products out there for us to use, and we call them mass timber panels. 
+These are panels made with young trees, small growth trees, small pieces of wood glued together to make panels that are enormous: eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses. 
+The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say that we're all used to two-by-four construction when we think about wood. 
+Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids, and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego at that size, and out of two-by-fours. 
+But do remember when you were a kid, and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement, and you found that big 24-dot brick of Lego, and you were kind of like, "" Cool, this is awesome. I can build something really big, and this is going to be great. "" That's the change. 
+Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks. 
+They're changing the scale of what we can do, and what we've developed is something we call FFTT, which is a Creative Commons solution to building a very flexible system of building with these large panels where we tilt up six stories at a time if we want to. 
+This animation shows you how the building goes together in a very simple way, but these buildings are available for architects and engineers now to build on for different cultures in the world, different architectural styles and characters. 
+In order for us to build safely, we've engineered these buildings, actually, to work in a Vancouver context, where we're a high seismic zone, even at 30 stories tall. 
+Now obviously, every time I bring this up, people even, you know, here at the conference, say, "Are you serious? Thirty stories? How's that going to happen?" 
+And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked and important questions that we spent quite a long time working on the answers to as we put together our report and the peer reviewed report. 
+I'm just going to focus on a few of them, and let's start with fire, because I think fire is probably the first one that you're all thinking about right now. 
+And the way I describe it is this. 
+If I asked you to take a match and light it and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire, it doesn't happen, right? We all know that. 
+But to build a fire, you kind of start with small pieces of wood and you work your way up, and eventually you can add the log to the fire, and when you do add the log to the fire, of course, it burns, but it burns slowly. 
+Well, mass timber panels, these new products that we're using, are much like the log. 
+It's hard to start them on fire, and when they do, they actually burn extraordinarily predictably, and we can use fire science in order to predict and make these buildings as safe as concrete and as safe as steel. 
+The next big issue, deforestation. 
+Eighteen percent of our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is the result of deforestation. 
+Or, the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees. 
+There are models for sustainable forestry that allow us to cut trees properly, and those are the only trees appropriate to use for these kinds of systems. 
+Now I actually think that these ideas will change the economics of deforestation. 
+In countries with deforestation issues, we need to find a way to provide better value for the forest and actually encourage people to make money through very fast growth cycles — 10-, 12-, 15-year-old trees that make these products and allow us to build at this scale. 
+We've calculated a 20-story building: We'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes. 
+That's how much it takes. 
+The carbon story here is a really good one. 
+If we built a 20-story building out of cement and concrete, the process would result in the manufacturing of that cement and 1,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide. 
+If we did it in wood, in this solution, we'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes, for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes. 
+That's the equivalent of about 900 cars removed from the road in one year. 
+Think back to that three billion people that need a new home, and maybe this is a contributor to reducing. 
+We're at the beginning of a revolution, I hope, in the way we build, because this is the first new way to build a skyscraper in probably 100 years or more. 
+But the challenge is changing society's perception of possibility, and it's a huge challenge. 
+And the way I describe it is this. 
+The first skyscraper, technically — and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall, believe it or not — but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago, and people were terrified to walk underneath this building. 
+But only four years after it was built, Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower, and as he built the Eiffel Tower, he changed the skylines of the cities of the world, changed and created a competition between places like New York City and Chicago, where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings and pushing the envelope up higher and higher with better and better engineering. 
+We built this model in New York, actually, as a theoretical model on the campus of a technical university soon to come, and the reason we picked this site to just show you what these buildings may look like, because the exterior can change. 
+It's really just the structure that we're talking about. 
+The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university, and I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with. 
+It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent, and we don't really feel comfortable with it. 
+But that's the way it should be, nature's fingerprints in the built environment. 
+I'm looking for this opportunity to create an Eiffel Tower moment, we call it. 
+Buildings are starting to go up around the world. 
+There's a building in London that's nine stories, a new building that just finished in Australia that I believe is 10 or 11. 
+We're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings, and we're hoping, and I'm hoping, that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially announces the world's tallest at around 20 stories in the not-so-distant future. 
+That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling, these arbitrary ceilings of height, and allow wood buildings to join the competition. 
+And I believe the race is ultimately on. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I've been spending a lot of time traveling around the world these days, talking to groups of students and professionals, and everywhere I'm finding that I hear similar themes. 
+On the one hand, people say, "The time for change is now." 
+They want to be part of it. 
+They talk about wanting lives of purpose and greater meaning. 
+But on the other hand, I hear people talking about fear, a sense of risk-aversion. 
+They say, "" I really want to follow a life of purpose, but I don't know where to start. 
+I don't want to disappoint my family or friends. "" I work in global poverty. 
+And they say, "" I want to work in global poverty, but what will it mean about my career? 
+Will I be marginalized? 
+Will I not make enough money? 
+Will I never get married or have children? "" And as a woman who didn't get married until I was a lot older — and I'm glad I waited — (Laughter) — and has no children, I look at these young people and I say, "" Your job is not to be perfect. 
+Your job is only to be human. 
+And nothing important happens in life without a cost. "" These conversations really reflect what's happening at the national and international level. 
+Our leaders and ourselves want everything, but we don't talk about the costs. 
+We don't talk about the sacrifice. 
+One of my favorite quotes from literature was written by Tillie Olsen, the great American writer from the South. 
+In a short story called "" Oh Yes, "" she talks about a white woman in the 1950s who has a daughter who befriends a little African American girl, and she looks at her child with a sense of pride, but she also wonders, what price will she pay? 
+"" Better immersion than to live untouched. "" But the real question is, what is the cost of not daring? 
+What is the cost of not trying? 
+I've been so privileged in my life to know extraordinary leaders who have chosen to live lives of immersion. 
+One woman I knew who was a fellow at a program that I ran at the Rockefeller Foundation was named Ingrid Washinawatok. 
+She was a leader of the Menominee tribe, a Native American peoples. 
+And when we would gather as fellows, she would push us to think about how the elders in Native American culture make decisions. 
+And she said they would literally visualize the faces of children for seven generations into the future, looking at them from the Earth, and they would look at them, holding them as stewards for that future. 
+Ingrid understood that we are connected to each other, not only as human beings, but to every living thing on the planet. 
+And tragically, in 1999, when she was in Colombia working with the U'wa people, focused on preserving their culture and language, she and two colleagues were abducted and tortured and killed by the FARC. 
+And whenever we would gather the fellows after that, we would leave a chair empty for her spirit. 
+And more than a decade later, when I talk to NGO fellows, whether in Trenton, New Jersey or the office of the White House, and we talk about Ingrid, they all say that they're trying to integrate her wisdom and her spirit and really build on the unfulfilled work of her life's mission. 
+And when we think about legacy, I can think of no more powerful one, despite how short her life was. 
+And I've been touched by Cambodian women — beautiful women, women who held the tradition of the classical dance in Cambodia. 
+And I met them in the early '90s. 
+In the 1970s, under the Pol Pot regime, the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people, and they focused and targeted the elites and the intellectuals, the artists, the dancers. 
+And at the end of the war, there were only 30 of these classical dancers still living. 
+And the women, who I was so privileged to meet when there were three survivors, told these stories about lying in their cots in the refugee camps. 
+They said they would try so hard to remember the fragments of the dance, hoping that others were alive and doing the same. 
+And one woman stood there with this perfect carriage, her hands at her side, and she talked about the reunion of the 30 after the war and how extraordinary it was. 
+And these big tears fell down her face, but she never lifted her hands to move them. 
+And the women decided that they would train not the next generation of girls, because they had grown too old already, but the next generation. 
+And I sat there in the studio watching these women clapping their hands — beautiful rhythms — as these little fairy pixies were dancing around them, wearing these beautiful silk colors. 
+And I thought, after all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray. 
+Because they're focused on honoring what is most beautiful about our past and building it into the promise of our future. 
+And what these women understood is sometimes the most important things that we do and that we spend our time on are those things that we cannot measure. 
+I also have been touched by the dark side of power and leadership. 
+And I have learned that power, particularly in its absolute form, is an equal opportunity provider. 
+In 1986, I moved to Rwanda, and I worked with a very small group of Rwandan women to start that country's first microfinance bank. 
+And one of the women was Agnes — there on your extreme left — she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in Rwanda, and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of Rwanda. 
+We built this institution based on social justice, gender equity, this idea of empowering women. 
+But Agnes cared more about the trappings of power than she did principle at the end. 
+And though she had been part of building a liberal party, a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance, about three months before the genocide, she switched parties and joined the extremist party, Hutu Power, and she became the Minister of Justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women. 
+She was convicted of category one crimes of genocide. 
+And I would visit her in the prisons, sitting side-by-side, knees touching, and I would have to admit to myself that monsters exist in all of us, but that maybe it's not monsters so much, but the broken parts of ourselves, sadnesses, secret shame, and that ultimately it's easy for demagogues to prey on those parts, those fragments, if you will, and to make us look at other beings, human beings, as lesser than ourselves — and in the extreme, to do terrible things. 
+And there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men. 
+I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male. 
+And so in a gathering where we're focused on women, while it is so critical that we invest in our girls and we even the playing field and we find ways to honor them, we have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide. 
+And that, when they sit on those street corners and all they can think of in the future is no job, no education, no possibility, well then it's easy to understand how the greatest source of status can come from a uniform and a gun. 
+Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us. 
+One of the Acumen Fund fellows at my organization, Suraj Sudhakar, has what we call moral imagination — the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and lead from that perspective. 
+And he's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world, Kibera. 
+And they're incredible guys. 
+And together they started a book club for a hundred people in the slums, and they're reading many TED authors and liking it. 
+And then they created a business plan competition. 
+Then they decided that they would do TEDx's. 
+And I have learned so much from Chris and Kevin and Alex and Herbert and all of these young men. 
+Alex, in some ways, said it best. 
+He said, "" We used to feel like nobodies, but now we feel like somebodies. "" And I think we have it all wrong when we think that income is the link. 
+What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other. 
+And the reason these young guys told me that they're doing these TEDx's is because they were sick and tired of the only workshops coming to the slums being those workshops focused on HIV, or at best, microfinance. 
+And they wanted to celebrate what's beautiful about Kibera and Mathare — the photojournalists and the creatives, the graffiti artists, the teachers and the entrepreneurs. 
+And they're doing it. 
+And my hat's off to you in Kibera. 
+My own work focuses on making philanthropy more effective and capitalism more inclusive. 
+At Acumen Fund, we take philanthropic resources and we invest what we call patient capital — money that will invest in entrepreneurs who see the poor not as passive recipients of charity, but as full-bodied agents of change who want to solve their own problems and make their own decisions. 
+We leave our money for 10 to 15 years, and when we get it back, we invest in other innovations that focus on change. 
+I know it works. 
+We've invested more than 50 million dollars in 50 companies, and those companies have brought another 200 million dollars into these forgotten markets. 
+This year alone, they've delivered 40 million services like maternal health care and housing, emergency services, solar energy, so that people can have more dignity in solving their problems. 
+Patient capital is uncomfortable for people searching for simple solutions, easy categories, because we don't see profit as a blunt instrument. 
+But we find those entrepreneurs who put people and the planet before profit. 
+And ultimately, we want to be part of a movement that is about measuring impact, measuring what is most important to us. 
+And my dream is we'll have a world one day where we don't just honor those who take money and make more money from it, but we find those individuals who take our resources and convert it into changing the world in the most positive ways. 
+And it's only when we honor them and celebrate them and give them status that the world will really change. 
+Last May I had this extraordinary 24-hour period where I saw two visions of the world living side-by-side — one based on violence and the other on transcendence. 
+I happened to be in Lahore, Pakistan on the day that two mosques were attacked by suicide bombers. 
+And the reason these mosques were attacked is because the people praying inside were from a particular sect of Islam who fundamentalists don't believe are fully Muslim. 
+And not only did those suicide bombers take a hundred lives, but they did more, because they created more hatred, more rage, more fear and certainly despair. 
+But less than 24 hours, I was 13 miles away from those mosques, visiting one of our Acumen investees, an incredible man, Jawad Aslam, who dares to live a life of immersion. 
+Born and raised in Baltimore, he studied real estate, worked in commercial real estate, and after 9 / 11 decided he was going to Pakistan to make a difference. 
+For two years, he hardly made any money, a tiny stipend, but he apprenticed with this incredible housing developer named Tasneem Saddiqui. 
+And he had a dream that he would build a housing community on this barren piece of land using patient capital, but he continued to pay a price. 
+He stood on moral ground and refused to pay bribes. 
+It took almost two years just to register the land. 
+But I saw how the level of moral standard can rise from one person's action. 
+Today, 2,000 people live in 300 houses in this beautiful community. 
+And there's schools and clinics and shops. 
+But there's only one mosque. 
+And so I asked Jawad, "" How do you guys navigate? This is a really diverse community. 
+Who gets to use the mosque on Fridays? "" He said, "" Long story. 
+It was hard, it was a difficult road, but ultimately the leaders of the community came together, realizing we only have each other. 
+And we decided that we would elect the three most respected imams, and those imams would take turns, they would rotate who would say Friday prayer. 
+But the whole community, all the different sects, including Shi'a and Sunni, would sit together and pray. "" We need that kind of moral leadership and courage in our worlds. 
+We face huge issues as a world — the financial crisis, global warming and this growing sense of fear and otherness. 
+And every day we have a choice. 
+We can take the easier road, the more cynical road, which is a road based on sometimes dreams of a past that never really was, a fear of each other, distancing and blame. 
+Or we can take the much more difficult path of transformation, transcendence, compassion and love, but also accountability and justice. 
+I had the great honor of working with the child psychologist Dr. Robert Coles, who stood up for change during the Civil Rights movement in the United States. 
+And he tells this incredible story about working with a little six-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges, the first child to desegregate schools in the South — in this case, New Orleans. 
+And he said that every day this six-year-old, dressed in her beautiful dress, would walk with real grace through a phalanx of white people screaming angrily, calling her a monster, threatening to poison her — distorted faces. 
+And every day he would watch her, and it looked like she was talking to the people. 
+And he would say, "" Ruby, what are you saying? "" And she'd say, "" I'm not talking. "" And finally he said, "" Ruby, I see that you're talking. 
+What are you saying? "" And she said, "" Dr. Coles, I am not talking; I'm praying. "" And he said, "" Well, what are you praying? "" And she said, "" I'm praying, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.' "" At age six, this child was living a life of immersion, and her family paid a price for it. 
+But she became part of history and opened up this idea that all of us should have access to education. 
+My final story is about a young, beautiful man named Josephat Byaruhanga, who was another Acumen Fund fellow, who hails from Uganda, a farming community. 
+And we placed him in a company in Western Kenya, just 200 miles away. 
+And he said to me at the end of his year, "" Jacqueline, it was so humbling, because I thought as a farmer and as an African I would understand how to transcend culture. 
+But especially when I was talking to the African women, I sometimes made these mistakes — it was so hard for me to learn how to listen. "" And he said, "" So I conclude that, in many ways, leadership is like a panicle of rice. 
+Because at the height of the season, at the height of its powers, it's beautiful, it's green, it nourishes the world, it reaches to the heavens. "" And he said, "" But right before the harvest, it bends over with great gratitude and humility to touch the earth from where it came. "" We need leaders. 
+We ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe we can, ourselves, extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every man, woman and child on this planet. 
+And we need to have the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone. 
+Robert Kennedy once said that "" few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. "" And it is in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written. 
+Our lives are so short, and our time on this planet is so precious, and all we have is each other. 
+So may each of you live lives of immersion. 
+They won't necessarily be easy lives, but in the end, it is all that will sustain us. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Planetary systems outside our own are like distant cities whose lights we can see twinkling, but whose streets we can't walk. 
+By studying those twinkling lights though, we can learn about how stars and planets interact to form their own ecosystem and make habitats that are amenable to life. 
+In this image of the Tokyo skyline, I've hidden data from the newest planet-hunting space telescope on the block, the Kepler Mission. 
+Can you see it? 
+There we go. 
+This is just a tiny part of the sky the Kepler stares at, where it searches for planets by measuring the light from over 150,000 stars, all at once, every half hour, and very precisely. 
+And what we're looking for is the tiny dimming of light that is caused by a planet passing in front of one of these stars and blocking some of that starlight from getting to us. 
+In just over two years of operations, we've found over 1,200 potential new planetary systems around other stars. 
+To give you some perspective, in the previous two decades of searching, we had only known about 400 prior to Kepler. 
+When we see these little dips in the light, we can determine a number of things. 
+For one thing, we can determine that there's a planet there, but also how big that planet is and how far it is away from its parent star. 
+That distance is really important because it tells us how much light the planet receives overall. 
+And that distance and knowing that amount of light is important because it's a little like you or I sitting around a campfire: You want to be close enough to the campfire so that you're warm, but not so close that you're too toasty and you get burned. 
+However, there's more to know about your parent star than just how much light you receive overall. 
+And I'll tell you why. 
+This is our star. This is our Sun. 
+It's shown here in visible light. 
+That's the light that you can see with your own human eyes. 
+You'll notice that it looks pretty much like the iconic yellow ball — that Sun that we all draw when we're children. 
+But you'll notice something else, and that's that the face of the Sun has freckles. 
+These freckles are called sunspots, and they are just one of the manifestations of the Sun's magnetic field. 
+They also cause the light from the star to vary. 
+And we can measure this very, very precisely with Kepler and trace their effects. 
+However, these are just the tip of the iceberg. 
+If we had UV eyes or X-ray eyes, we would really see the dynamic and dramatic effects of our Sun's magnetic activity — the kind of thing that happens on other stars as well. 
+Just think, even when it's cloudy outside, these kind of events are happening in the sky above you all the time. 
+So when we want to learn whether a planet is habitable, whether it might be amenable to life, we want to know not only how much total light it receives and how warm it is, but we want to know about its space weather — this high-energy radiation, the UV and the X-rays that are created by its star and that bathe it in this bath of high-energy radiation. 
+And so, we can't really look at planets around other stars in the same kind of detail that we can look at planets in our own solar system. 
+I'm showing here Venus, Earth and Mars — three planets in our own solar system that are roughly the same size, but only one of which is really a good place to live. 
+But what we can do in the meantime is measure the light from our stars and learn about this relationship between the planets and their parent stars to suss out clues about which planets might be good places to look for life in the universe. 
+Kepler won't find a planet around every single star it looks at. 
+But really, every measurement it makes is precious, because it's teaching us about the relationship between stars and planets, and how it's really the starlight that sets the stage for the formation of life in the universe. 
+While it's Kepler the telescope, the instrument that stares, it's we, life, who are searching. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Thank you. 
+And I feel like this whole evening has been very amazing to me. 
+I feel it's sort of like the Vimalakirti Sutra, an ancient work from ancient India in which the Buddha appears at the beginning and a whole bunch of people come to see him from the biggest city in the area, Vaishali, and they bring some sort of jeweled parasols to make an offering to him. 
+All the young people, actually, from the city. 
+The old fogeys don't come because they're mad at Buddha, because when he came to their city he accepted — he always accepts the first invitation that comes to him, from whoever it is, and the local geisha, a movie-star sort of person, raced the elders of the city in a chariot and invited him first. 
+So he was hanging out with the movie star, and of course they were grumbling: "" He's supposed to be religious and all this. 
+What's he doing over there at Amrapali's house with all his 500 monks, "" and so on. They were all grumbling, and so they boycotted him. 
+They wouldn't go listen to him. 
+But the young people all came. 
+And they brought this kind of a jeweled parasol, and they put it on the ground. 
+And as soon as they had laid all these, all their big stack of these jeweled parasols that they used to carry in ancient India, he performed a kind of special effect which made it into a giant planetarium, the wonder of the universe. Everyone looked in that, and they saw in there the total interconnectedness of all life in all universes. 
+And of course, in the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it, and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets. 
+So they don't — when they look out and they see those lights that you showed in the sky — they don't just see sort of pieces of matter burning or rocks or flames or gases exploding. 
+They actually see landscapes and human beings and gods and dragons and serpent beings and goddesses and things like that. 
+He made that special effect at the beginning to get everyone to think about interconnection and interconnectedness and how everything in life was totally interconnected. 
+And then Leilei — I know his other name — told us about interconnection, and how we're all totally interconnected here, and how we've all known each other. And of course in the Buddhist universe, we've already done this already billions of times in many, many lifetimes in the past. 
+And I didn't give the talk always. You did, and we had to watch you, and so forth. 
+And we're all still trying to, I guess we're all trying to become TEDsters, if that's a modern form of enlightenment. 
+I guess so. Because in a way, if a TEDster relates to all the interconnectedness of all the computers and everything, it's the forging of a mass awareness, of where everybody can really know everything that's going on everywhere in the planet. 
+And therefore it will become intolerable — what compassion is, is where it will become intolerable for us, totally intolerable that we sit here in comfort and in pleasure and enjoying the life of the mind or whatever it is, and there are people who are absolutely riddled with disease and they cannot have a bite of food and they have no place, or they're being brutalized by some terrible person and so forth. 
+It just becomes intolerable. 
+With all of us knowing everything, we're kind of forced by technology to become Buddhas or something, to become enlightened. 
+And of course, we all will be deeply disappointed when we do. 
+Because we think that because we are kind of tired of what we do, a little bit tired, we do suffer. 
+We do enjoy our misery in a certain way. 
+We distract ourselves from our misery by running around somewhere, but basically we all have this common misery that we are sort of stuck inside our skins and everyone else is out there. 
+And occasionally we get together with another person stuck in their skin and the two of us enjoy each other, and each one tries to get out of their own, and ultimately it fails of course, and then we're back into this thing. 
+Because our egocentric perception — from the Buddha's point of view, misperception — is that all we are is what is inside our skin. 
+And it's inside and outside, self and other, and other is all very different. 
+And everyone here is unfortunately carrying that habitual perception, a little bit, right? 
+You know, someone sitting next to you in a seat — that's OK because you're in a theater, but if you were sitting on a park bench and someone came up and sat that close to you, you'd freak out. 
+What do they want from me? Like, who's that? 
+And so you wouldn't sit that close to another person because of your notion that it's you versus the universe — that's all Buddha discovered. 
+Because that cosmic basic idea that it is us all alone, each of us, and everyone else is different, then that puts us in an impossible situation, doesn't it? 
+Who is it who's going to get enough attention from the world? 
+Who's going to get enough out of the world? 
+Who's not going to be overrun by an infinite number of other beings — if you're different from all the other beings? 
+So where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way: through art, through meditation, through understanding, through knowledge actually, knowing that you have no such boundary, knowing your interconnectedness with other beings. 
+You can experience yourself as the other beings when you see through the delusion of being separated from them. 
+When you do that, you're forced to feel what they feel. 
+Luckily, they say — I still am not sure — but luckily, they say that when you reach that point because some people have said in the Buddhist literature, they say, "" Oh who would really want to be compassionate? 
+How awful! I'm so miserable on my own. My head is aching. 
+My bones are aching. I go from birth to death. I'm never satisfied. 
+I never have enough, even if I'm a billionaire, I don't have enough. 
+I need a hundred billion. "" So I'm like that. 
+Imagine if I had to feel even a hundred other people's suffering. 
+It would be terrible. 
+But apparently, this is a strange paradox of life. 
+When you're no longer locked in yourself, and as the wisdom or the intelligence or the scientific knowledge of the nature of the world, that enables you to let your mind spread out, and empathize, and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing, and realizing that you are the other being, somehow by that opening, you can see the deeper nature of life. And you can, you get away from this terrible iron circle of I, me, me, mine, like the Beatles used to sing. 
+You know, we really learned everything in the '60s. 
+Too bad nobody ever woke up to it, and they've been trying to suppress it since then. 
+I, me, me, mine. It's like a perfect song, that song. A perfect teaching. 
+But when we're relieved from that, we somehow then become interested in all the other beings. 
+And we feel ourselves differently. It's totally strange. It's totally strange. 
+The Dalai Lama always likes to say — 
+he says that when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion, it's because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theater for your intelligence. 
+It's really too boring whether you feel like this or like that, or what, you know — and the more you focus on how you feel, by the way, the worse it gets. 
+Like, even when you're having a good time, when is the good time over? 
+The good time is over when you think, how good is it? 
+And then it's never good enough. 
+I love that Leilei said that the way of helping those who are suffering badly on the physical plane or on other planes is having a good time, doing it by having a good time. 
+I think the Dalai Lama should have heard that. I wish he'd been there to hear that. 
+He once told me — he looked kind of sad; he worries very much about the haves and have-nots. 
+He looked a little sad, because he said, well, a hundred years ago, they went and took everything away from the haves. 
+You know, the big communist revolutions, Russia and China and so forth. 
+They took it all away by violence, saying they were going to give it to everyone, and then they were even worse. 
+They didn't help at all. 
+So what could possibly change this terrible gap that has opened up in the world today? 
+And so then he looks at me. 
+So I said, "" Well, you know, you're all in this yourself. You teach: it's generosity, "" was all I could think of. What is virtue? 
+But of course, what you said, I think the key to saving the world, the key to compassion is that it is more fun. 
+It should be done by fun. Generosity is more fun. That's the key. 
+Everybody has the wrong idea. They think Buddha was so boring, and they're so surprised when they meet Dalai Lama and he's fairly jolly. 
+Even though his people are being genocided — and believe me, he feels every blow on every old nun's head, in every Chinese prison. He feels it. 
+He feels the way they are harvesting yaks nowadays. 
+I won't even say what they do. But he feels it. 
+And yet he's very jolly. He's extremely jolly. 
+Because when you open up like that, then you can't just — what good does it do to add being miserable with others' misery? 
+You have to find some vision where you see how hopeful it is, how it can be changed. 
+Look at that beautiful thing Chiho showed us. She scared us with the lava man. 
+She scared us with the lava man is coming, then the tsunami is coming, but then finally there were flowers and trees, and it was very beautiful. 
+It's really lovely. 
+So, compassion means to feel the feelings of others, and the human being actually is compassion. 
+The human being is almost out of time. 
+The human being is compassion because what is our brain for? 
+Now, Jim's brain is memorizing the almanac. 
+But he could memorize all the needs of all the beings that he is, he will, he did. 
+He could memorize all kinds of fantastic things to help many beings. 
+And he would have tremendous fun doing that. 
+So the first person who gets happy, when you stop focusing on the self-centered situation of, how happy am I, where you're always dissatisfied — as Mick Jagger told us. You never get any satisfaction that way. 
+So then you decide, "" Well, I'm sick of myself. 
+I'm going to think of how other people can be happy. 
+I'm going to get up in the morning and think, what can I do for even one other person, even a dog, my dog, my cat, my pet, my butterfly? "" And the first person who gets happy when you do that, you don't do anything for anybody else, but you get happier, you yourself, because your whole perception broadens and you suddenly see the whole world and all of the people in it. 
+And you realize that this — being with these people — is the flower garden that Chiho showed us. 
+It is Nirvana. 
+And my time is up. And I know the TED commandments. 
+Thank you. 
+
+Salaam alaikum. 
+Welcome to Doha. 
+I am in charge of making this country's food secure. 
+That is my job for the next two years, to design an entire master plan, and then for the next 10 years to implement it — of course, with so many other people. 
+But first, I need to talk to you about a story, which is my story, about the story of this country that you're all here in today. 
+And of course, most of you have had three meals today, and probably will continue to have after this event. 
+So going in, what was Qatar in the 1940s? 
+We were about 11,000 people living here. 
+There was no water. There was no energy, no oil, no cars, none of that. 
+Most of the people who lived here either lived in coastal villages, fishing, or were nomads who roamed around with the environment trying to find water. 
+None of the glamour that you see today existed. 
+No cities like you see today in Doha or Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Kuwait or Riyadh. 
+It wasn't that they couldn't develop cities. 
+Resources weren't there to develop them. 
+And you can see that life expectancy was also short. 
+Most people died around the age of 50. 
+So let's move to chapter two: the oil era. 
+1939, that's when they discovered oil. 
+But unfortunately, it wasn't really fully exploited commercially until after the Second World War. 
+What did it do? 
+It changed the face of this country, as you can see today and witness. 
+It also made all those people who roamed around the desert — looking for water, looking for food, trying to take care of their livestock — urbanize. 
+You might find this strange, but in my family we have different accents. 
+My mother has an accent that is so different to my father, and we're all a population of about 300,000 people in the same country. 
+There are about five or six accents in this country as I speak. 
+Someone says, "" How so? How could this happen? "" Because we lived scattered. 
+We couldn't live in a concentrated way simply because there was no resources. 
+And when the resources came, be it oil, we started building these fancy technologies and bringing people together because we needed the concentration. 
+People started to get to know each other. 
+And we realized that there are some differences in accents. 
+So that is the chapter two: the oil era. 
+Let's look at today. 
+This is probably the skyline that most of you know about Doha. 
+So what's the population today? 
+It's 1.7 million people. 
+That is in less than 60 years. 
+The average growth of our economy is about 15 percent for the past five years. 
+Lifespan has increased to 78. 
+Water consumption has increased to 430 liters. 
+And this is amongst the highest worldwide. 
+From having no water whatsoever to consuming water to the highest degree, higher than any other nation. 
+I don't know if this was a reaction to lack of water. 
+But what is interesting about the story that I've just said? 
+The interesting part is that we continue to grow 15 percent every year for the past five years without water. 
+Now that is historic. It's never happened before in history. 
+Cities were totally wiped out because of the lack of water. 
+This is history being made in this region. 
+Not only cities that we're building, but cities with dreams and people who are wishing to be scientists, doctors. 
+Build a nice home, bring the architect, design my house. 
+These people are adamant that this is a livable space when it wasn't. 
+But of course, with the use of technology. 
+So Brazil has 1,782 millimeters per year of precipitation of rain. 
+Qatar has 74, and we have that growth rate. 
+The question is how. 
+How could we survive that? 
+We have no water whatsoever. 
+Simply because of this gigantic, mammoth machine called desalination. 
+Energy is the key factor here. It changed everything. 
+It is that thing that we pump out of the ground, we burn tons of, probably most of you used it coming to Doha. 
+So that is our lake, if you can see it. 
+That is our river. 
+That is how you all happen to use and enjoy water. 
+This is the best technology that this region could ever have: desalination. 
+So what are the risks? 
+Do you worry much? 
+I would say, perhaps if you look at the global facts, you will realize, of course I have to worry. 
+There is growing demand, growing population. 
+We've turned seven billion only a few months ago. 
+And so that number also demands food. 
+And there's predictions that we'll be nine billion by 2050. 
+So a country that has no water has to worry about what happens beyond its borders. 
+There's also changing diets. 
+By elevating to a higher socio-economic level, they also change their diet. 
+They start eating more meat and so on and so forth. 
+On the other hand, there is declining yields because of climate change and because of other factors. 
+And so someone has to really realize when the crisis is going to happen. 
+This is the situation in Qatar, for those who don't know. 
+We only have two days of water reserve. 
+We import 90 percent of our food, and we only cultivate less than one percent of our land. 
+The limited number of farmers that we have have been pushed out of their farming practices as a result of open market policy and bringing the big competitions, etc., etc. 
+So we also face risks. 
+These risks directly affect the sustainability of this nation and its continuity. 
+The question is, is there a solution? 
+Is there a sustainable solution? 
+Indeed there is. 
+This slide sums up thousands of pages of technical documents that we've been working on over the past two years. 
+Let's start with the water. 
+So we know very well — I showed you earlier — that we need this energy. 
+So if we're going to need energy, what sort of energy? 
+A depletable energy? Fossil fuel? 
+Or should we use something else? 
+Do we have the comparative advantage to use another sort of energy? 
+I guess most of you by now realize that we do: 300 days of sun. 
+And so we will use that renewable energy to produce the water that we need. 
+And we will probably put 1,800 megawatts of solar systems to produce 3.5 million cubic meters of water. 
+And that is a lot of water. 
+That water will go then to the farmers, and the farmers will be able to water their plants, and they will be able then to supply society with food. 
+But in order to sustain the horizontal line — because these are the projects, these are the systems that we will deliver — we need to also develop the vertical line: system sustenance, high-level education, research and development, industries, technologies, to produce these technologies for application, and finally markets. 
+But what gels all of it, what enables it, is legislation, policies, regulations. 
+Without it we can't do anything. 
+So that's what we are planning to do. 
+Within two years we should hopefully be done with this plan and taking it to implementation. 
+Our objective is to be a millennium city, just like many millennium cities around: Istanbul, Rome, London, Paris, Damascus, Cairo. 
+We are only 60 years old, but we want to live forever as a city, to live in peace. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Forrest North: The beginning of any collaboration starts with a conversation. 
+And I would like to share with you some of the bits of the conversation that we started with. 
+I grew up in a log cabin in Washington state with too much time on my hands. 
+Yves Behar: And in scenic Switzerland for me. 
+FN: I always had a passion for alternative vehicles. 
+This is a land yacht racing across the desert in Nevada. 
+YB: Combination of windsurfing and skiing into this invention there. 
+FN: And I also had an interest in dangerous inventions. 
+This is a 100,000-volt Tesla coil that I built in my bedroom, much to the dismay of my mother. 
+YB: To the dismay of my mother, this is dangerous teenage fashion right there. 
+(Laughter) FN: And I brought this all together, this passion with alternative energy and raced a solar car across Australia — also the U.S. and Japan. 
+YB: So, wind power, solar power — we had a lot to talk about. 
+We had a lot that got us excited. 
+So we decided to do a special project together. 
+To combine engineering and design and... 
+FN: Really make a fully integrated product, something beautiful. 
+YB: And we made a baby. 
+(Laughter) FN: Can you bring out our baby? 
+(Applause) This baby is fully electric. 
+It goes 150 miles an hour. 
+It's twice the range of any electric motorcycle. 
+Really the exciting thing about a motorcycle is just the beautiful integration of engineering and design. 
+It's got an amazing user experience. 
+It was wonderful working with Yves Behar. 
+He came up with our name and logo. We're Mission Motors. 
+And we've only got three minutes, but we could talk about it for hours. 
+YB: Thank you. 
+FN: Thank you TED. And thank you Chris, for having us. 
+(Applause) 
+
+There are other states that do that, but we don't. 
+There are a handful of states that do that; Texas doesn't. 
+
+So I was born on the last day of the last year of the '70s. 
+I was raised on "" Free to be you and me "" — (cheering) hip-hop — not as many woohoos for hip-hop in the house. 
+Thank you. Thank you for hip-hop — and Anita Hill. 
+(Cheering) My parents were radicals — (Laughter) who became, well, grown-ups. 
+My dad facetiously says, "" We wanted to save the world, and instead we just got rich. "" We actually just got "" middle class "" in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but you get the picture. 
+I was raised with a very heavy sense of unfinished legacy. 
+At this ripe old age of 30, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow up in this horrible, beautiful time, and I've decided, for me, it's been a real journey and paradox. 
+The first paradox is that growing up is about rejecting the past and then promptly reclaiming it. 
+Feminism was the water I grew up in. 
+When I was just a little girl, my mom started what is now the longest-running women's film festival in the world. 
+So while other kids were watching sitcoms and cartoons, I was watching very esoteric documentaries made by and about women. 
+You can see how this had an influence. 
+But she was not the only feminist in the house. 
+My dad actually resigned from the male-only business club in my hometown because he said he would never be part of an organization that would one day welcome his son, but not his daughter. 
+(Applause) He's actually here today. (Applause) 
+The trick here is my brother would become an experimental poet, not a businessman, but the intention was really good. 
+(Laughter) In any case, I didn't readily claim the feminist label, even though it was all around me, because I associated it with my mom's women's groups, her swishy skirts and her shoulder pads — none of which had much cachet in the hallways of Palmer High School where I was trying to be cool at the time. 
+But I suspected there was something really important about this whole feminism thing, so I started covertly tiptoeing into my mom's bookshelves and picking books off and reading them — never, of course, admitting that I was doing so. 
+I didn't actually claim the feminist label until I went to Barnard College and I heard Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner speak for the first time. 
+They were the co-authors of a book called "" Manifesta. "" So what very profound epiphany, you might ask, was responsible for my feminist click moment? 
+Fishnet stockings. 
+Jennifer Baumgardner was wearing them. 
+I thought they were really hot. 
+I decided, okay, I can claim the feminist label. 
+Now I tell you this — I tell you this at the risk of embarrassing myself, because I think part of the work of feminism is to admit that aesthetics, that beauty, that fun do matter. 
+There are lots of very modern political movements that have caught fire in no small part because of cultural hipness. 
+Anyone heard of these two guys as an example? 
+So my feminism is very indebted to my mom's, but it looks very different. 
+My mom says, "" patriarchy. "" I say, "" intersectionality. "" So race, class, gender, ability, all of these things go into our experiences of what it means to be a woman. 
+Pay equity? Yes. Absolutely a feminist issue. 
+But for me, so is immigration. (Applause) Thank you. 
+My mom says, "" Protest march. "" I say, "" Online organizing. "" I co-edit, along with a collective of other super-smart, amazing women, a site called Feministing.com. 
+We are the most widely read feminist publication ever, and I tell you this because I think it's really important to see that there's a continuum. 
+Feminist blogging is basically the 21st century version of consciousness raising. 
+But we also have a straightforward political impact. 
+Feministing has been able to get merchandise pulled off the shelves of Walmart. 
+We got a misogynist administrator sending us hate-mail fired from a Big Ten school. 
+And one of our biggest successes is we get mail from teenage girls in the middle of Iowa who say, "" I Googled Jessica Simpson and stumbled on your site. 
+I realized feminism wasn't about man-hating and Birkenstocks. "" So we're able to pull in the next generation in a totally new way. 
+My mom says, "" Gloria Steinem. "" I say, "" Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Miriam Perez, Ann Friedman, Jessica Valenti, Vanessa Valenti, and on and on and on and on. "" We don't want one hero. 
+We don't want one icon. 
+We don't want one face. 
+We are thousands of women and men across this country doing online writing, community organizing, changing institutions from the inside out — all continuing the incredible work that our mothers and grandmothers started. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Which brings me to the second paradox: sobering up about our smallness and maintaining faith in our greatness all at once. 
+Many in my generation — because of well-intentioned parenting and self-esteem education — were socialized to believe that we were special little snowflakes — (Laughter) who were going to go out and save the world. 
+These are three words many of us were raised with. 
+We walk across graduation stages, high on our overblown expectations, and when we float back down to earth, we realize we don't know what the heck it means to actually save the world anyway. 
+The mainstream media often paints my generation as apathetic, and I think it's much more accurate to say we are deeply overwhelmed. 
+And there's a lot to be overwhelmed about, to be fair — an environmental crisis, wealth disparity in this country unlike we've seen since 1928, and globally, a totally immoral and ongoing wealth disparity. 
+Xenophobia's on the rise. The trafficking of women and girls. 
+It's enough to make you feel very overwhelmed. 
+I experienced this firsthand myself when I graduated from Barnard College in 2002. 
+I was fired up; I was ready to make a difference. 
+I went out and I worked at a non-profit, I went to grad school, I phone-banked, I protested, I volunteered, and none of it seemed to matter. 
+And on a particularly dark night of December of 2004, I sat down with my family, and I said that I had become very disillusioned. 
+I admitted that I'd actually had a fantasy — kind of a dark fantasy — of writing a letter about everything that was wrong with the world and then lighting myself on fire on the White House steps. 
+My mom took a drink of her signature Sea Breeze, her eyes really welled with tears, and she looked right at me and she said, "" I will not stand for your desperation. "" She said, "" You are smarter, more creative and more resilient than that. "" Which brings me to my third paradox. 
+Growing up is about aiming to succeed wildly and being fulfilled by failing really well. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) There's a writer I've been deeply influenced by, Parker Palmer, and he writes that many of us are often whiplashed "" between arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves. "" You may have guessed by now, I did not light myself on fire. 
+I did what I know to do in desperation, which is write. 
+I wrote the book I needed to read. 
+I wrote a book about eight incredible people all over this country doing social justice work. 
+I wrote about Nia Martin-Robinson, the daughter of Detroit and two civil rights activists, who's dedicating her life to environmental justice. 
+I wrote about Emily Apt who initially became a caseworker in the welfare system because she decided that was the most noble thing she could do, but quickly learned, not only did she not like it, but she wasn't really good at it. 
+Instead, what she really wanted to do was make films. 
+So she made a film about the welfare system and had a huge impact. 
+I wrote about Maricela Guzman, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, who joined the military so she could afford college. 
+She was actually sexually assaulted in boot camp and went on to co-organize a group called the Service Women's Action Network. 
+What I learned from these people and others was that I couldn't judge them based on their failure to meet their very lofty goals. 
+Many of them are working in deeply intractable systems — the military, congress, the education system, etc. 
+But what they managed to do within those systems was be a humanizing force. 
+And at the end of the day, what could possibly be more important than that? 
+Cornel West says, "" Of course it's a failure. 
+But how good a failure is it? "" This isn't to say we give up our wildest, biggest dreams. 
+It's to say we operate on two levels. 
+On one, we really go after changing these broken systems of which we find ourselves a part. 
+But on the other, we root our self-esteem in the daily acts of trying to make one person's day more kind, more just, etc. 
+So when I was a little girl, I had a couple of very strange habits. 
+One of them was I used to lie on the kitchen floor of my childhood home, and I would suck the thumb of my left hand and hold my mom's cold toes with my right hand. 
+(Laughter) I was listening to her talk on the phone, which she did a lot. 
+She was talking about board meetings, she was founding peace organizations, she was coordinating carpools, she was consoling friends — all these daily acts of care and creativity. 
+And surely, at three and four years old, I was listening to the soothing sound of her voice, but I think I was also getting my first lesson in activist work. 
+The activists I interviewed had nothing in common, literally, except for one thing, which was that they all cited their mothers as their most looming and important activist influences. 
+So often, particularly at a young age, we look far afield for our models of the meaningful life, and sometimes they're in our own kitchens, talking on the phone, making us dinner, doing all that keeps the world going around and around. 
+My mom and so many women like her have taught me that life is not about glory, or certainty, or security even. 
+It's about embracing the paradox. 
+It's about acting in the face of overwhelm. 
+And it's about loving people really well. 
+And at the end of the day, these things make for a lifetime of challenge and reward. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I used to have this recurring dream where I'd walk into a roomful of people, and I'd try not to make eye contact with anyone. 
+Until someone notices me, and I just panic. 
+And the person walks up to me, and says, "" Hi, my name is So-and-so. 
+And what is your name? "" And I'm just quiet, unable to respond. 
+After some awkward silence, he goes, "Have you forgotten your name?" 
+And I'm still quiet. 
+And then, slowly, all the other people in the room begin to turn toward me and ask, almost in unison, (Voice-over, several voices) "" Have you forgotten your name? "" As the chant gets louder, I want to respond, but I don't. 
+I'm a visual artist. 
+Some of my work is humorous, and some is a bit funny but in a sad way. 
+And one thing that I really enjoy doing is making these little animations where I get to do the voice-over for all kinds of characters. 
+I've been a bear. 
+(Video) Bear (Safwat Saleem's voice): Hi. 
+(Laughter) Safwat Saleem: I've been a whale. 
+(Video) Whale (SS's voice): Hi. 
+(Laughter) SS: I've been a greeting card. 
+(Video) Greeting card (SS's voice): Hi. 
+(Laughter) SS: And my personal favorite is Frankenstein's monster. 
+(Video) Frankenstein's monster (SS's voice): (Grunts) (Laughter) SS: I just had to grunt a lot for that one. 
+A few years ago, I made this educational video about the history of video games. 
+And for that one, I got to do the voice of Space Invader. 
+(Video) Space Invader (SS's voice): Hi. 
+SS: A dream come true, really, (Laughter) And when that video was posted online, I just sat there on the computer, hitting "" refresh, "" excited to see the response. 
+I hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: Excellent video. I look forward to the next one. 
+SS: This was just the first of a two-part video. 
+I hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: Where is part TWO? WHEREEEEE? I need it NOWWWWW!: P (Laughter) SS: People other than my mom were saying nice things about me, on the Internet! 
+It felt like I had finally arrived. 
+I hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: His voice is annoying. No offense. 
+(Video) Comment: Could you remake this without peanut butter in your mouth? 
+SS: OK, at least the feedback is somewhat constructive. Hit "" refresh. "" (Video) Comment: Please don't use this narrator again u can barely understand him. 
+SS: Refresh. 
+(Video) Comment: Couldn't follow because of the Indian accent. 
+SS: OK, OK, OK, two things. 
+Number one, I don't have an Indian accent, I have a Pakistani accent, OK? 
+And number two, I clearly have a Pakistani accent. 
+(Laughter) But comments like that kept coming in, so I figured I should just ignore them and start working on the second part of the video. 
+I recorded my audio, but every time I sat down to edit, I just could not do it. 
+Every single time, it would take me back to my childhood, when I had a much harder time speaking. 
+I've stuttered for as long as I can remember. 
+I was the kid in class who would never raise his hand when he had a question — or knew the answer. 
+Every time the phone rang, I would run to the bathroom so I would not have to answer it. 
+If it was for me, my parents would say I'm not around. 
+And I hated introducing myself, especially in groups. 
+I'd always stutter on my name, and there was usually someone who'd go, "Have you forgotten your name?" 
+And then everybody would laugh. 
+That joke never got old. 
+(Laughter) I spent my childhood feeling that if I spoke, it would become obvious that there was something wrong with me, that I was not normal. 
+So I mostly stayed quiet. 
+And so you see, eventually for me to even be able to use my voice in my work was a huge step for me. 
+Every time I record audio, I fumble my way through saying each sentence many, many times, and then I go back in and pick the ones where I think I suck the least. 
+I can slow it down, speed it up, make it deeper, add an echo. 
+And if I stutter along the way, and if I stutter along the way, I just go back in and fix it. 
+SS: Using my highly edited voice in my work was a way for me to finally sound normal to myself. 
+But after the comments on the video, it no longer made me feel normal. 
+And so I stopped using my voice in my work. 
+Since then, I've thought a lot about what it means to be normal. 
+And I've come to understand that "" normal "" has a lot to do with expectations. 
+Let me give you an example. 
+I came across this story about the Ancient Greek writer, Homer. 
+Now, Homer mentions very few colors in his writing. 
+And even when he does, he seems to get them quite a bit wrong. 
+For example, the sea is described as wine red, people's faces are sometimes green and sheep are purple. 
+But it's not just Homer. 
+If you look at all of the ancient literature — Ancient Chinese, Icelandic, Greek, Indian and even the original Hebrew Bible — they all mention very few colors. 
+And the most popular theory for why that might be the case is that cultures begin to recognize a color only once they have the ability to make that color. 
+So basically, if you can make a color, only then can you see it. 
+A color like red, which was fairly easy for many cultures to make — they began to see that color fairly early on. 
+But a color like blue, which was much harder to make — many cultures didn't begin to learn how to make that color until much later. 
+They didn't begin to see it until much later as well. 
+So until then, even though a color might be all around them, they simply did not have the ability to see it. 
+It was invisIble. 
+It was not a part of their normal. 
+And that story has helped put my own experience into context. 
+So when I first read the comments on the video, my initial reaction was to take it all very personally. 
+But the people commenting did not know how self-conscious I am about my voice. 
+They were mostly reacting to my accent, that it is not normal for a narrator to have an accent. 
+But what is normal, anyway? 
+We know that professors are less likely to help female or minority students. 
+And we know that resumes with white-sounding names get more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names. 
+Why is that? 
+Because of our expectations of what is normal. 
+We think it is normal when a black student has spelling errors. We think it is normal 
+when a female or minority student does not succeed. 
+And we think it is normal that a white employee is a better hire than a black employee. 
+But studies also show that discrimination of this kind, in most cases, is simply favoritism, and it results more from wanting to help people that you can relate to than the desire to harm people that you can't relate to. 
+And not relating to people starts at a very early age. 
+Let me give you an example. 
+One library that keeps track of characters in the children's book collection every year, found that in 2014, only about 11 percent of the books had a character of color. 
+And just the year before, that number was about eight percent, even though half of American children today come from a minority background. 
+Half. 
+So there are two big issues here. 
+Number one, children are told that they can be anything, they can do anything, and yet, most stories that children of color consume are about people who are not like them. 
+Number two is that majority groups don't get to realize the great extent to which they are similar to minorities — our everyday experiences, our hopes, our dreams, our fears and our mutual love for hummus. 
+It's delicious! 
+(Laughter) Just like the color blue for Ancient Greeks, minorities are not a part of what we consider normal, because normal is simply a construction of what we've been exposed to, and how visible it is around us. 
+And this is where things get a bit difficult. 
+I can accept the preexisting notion of normal — that normal is good, and anything outside of that very narrow definition of normal is bad. 
+Or I can challenge that preexisting notion of normal with my work and with my voice and with my accent and by standing here onstage, even though I'm scared shitless and would rather be in the bathroom. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) (Video) Sheep (SS's voice): I'm now slowly starting to use my voice in my work again. 
+And it feels good. 
+It does not mean I won't have a breakdown the next time a couple dozen people say that I talk (Mumbling) like I have peanut butter in my mouth. 
+(Laughter) SS: It just means I now have a much better understanding of what's at stake, and how giving up is not an option. 
+The Ancient Greeks didn't just wake up one day and realize that the sky was blue. 
+It took centuries, even, for humans to realize what we had been ignoring for so long. 
+And so we must continuously challenge our notion of normal, because doing so is going to allow us as a society to finally see the sky for what it is. 
+(Video) Characters: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
+Frankenstein's monster: (Grunts) (Laughter) SS: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So for the past year and a half, my team at Push Pop Press and Charlie Melcher and Melcher Media have been working on creating the first feature-length interactive book. 
+It's called "" Our Choice "" and the author is Al Gore. 
+It's the sequel to "" An Inconvenient Truth, "" and it explores all the solutions that will solve the climate crisis. 
+The book starts like this. This is the cover. 
+As the globe spins, we can see our location, and we can open the book and swipe through the chapters to browse the book. 
+Or, we can scroll through the pages at the bottom. 
+And if we wanted to zoom into a page, we can just open it up. 
+And anything you see in the book, you can pick up with two fingers and lift off the page and open up. 
+And if you want to go back and read the book again, you just fold it back up and put it back on the page. 
+And so this works the same way; you pick it up and pop it open. 
+(Audio) Al Gore: I consider myself among the majority who look at windmills and feel they're a beautiful addition to the landscape. 
+Mike Matas: And so throughout the whole book, Al Gore will walk you through and explain the photos. 
+This photo, you can you can even see on an interactive map. 
+Zoom into it and see where it was taken. 
+And throughout the book, there's over an hour of documentary footage and interactive animations. 
+So you can open this one. 
+(Audio) AG: Most modern wind turbines consist of a large... 
+MM: It starts playing immediately. 
+And while it's playing, we can pinch and peak back at the page, and the movie keeps playing. 
+Or we can zoom out to the table of contents, and the video keeps playing. 
+But one of the coolest things in this book are the interactive infographics. 
+This one shows the wind potential all around the United States. 
+But instead of just showing us the information, we can take our finger and explore, and see, state by state, exactly how much wind potential there is. 
+We can do the same for geothermal energy and solar power. 
+This is one of my favorites. 
+So this shows... 
+(Laughter) (Applause) When the wind is blowing, any excess energy coming from the windmill is diverted into the battery. 
+And as the wind starts dying down, any excess energy will be diverted back into the house — the lights never go out. 
+And this whole book, it doesn't just run on the iPad. 
+It also runs on the iPhone. 
+And so you can start reading on your iPad in your living room and then pick up where you left off on the iPhone. 
+And it works the exact same way. 
+You can pinch into any page. 
+Open it up. 
+So that's Push Pop Press' first title, Al Gore's "" Our Choice. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: That's spectacular. 
+Do you want to be a publisher, a technology licenser? 
+What is the business here? 
+Is this something that other people can do? 
+MM: Yeah, we're building a tool that makes it really easy for publishers right now to build this content. 
+So Melcher Media's team, who's on the East coast — and we're on the West coast, building the software — takes our tool and, every day, drags in images and text. 
+CA: So you want to license this software to publishers to make books as beautiful as that? (MM: Yes.) All right. Mike, thanks so much. 
+MM: Thank you. (CA: Good luck.) (Applause) 
+
+I recently retired from the California Highway Patrol after 23 years of service. 
+The majority of those 23 years was spent patrolling the southern end of Marin County, which includes the Golden Gate Bridge. 
+The bridge is an iconic structure, known worldwide for its beautiful views of San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, and its inspiring architecture. 
+Unfortunately, it is also a magnet for suicide, being one of the most utilized sites in the world. 
+The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. 
+Joseph Strauss, chief engineer in charge of building the bridge, was quoted as saying, "" The bridge is practically suicide-proof. 
+Suicide from the bridge is neither practical nor probable. "" But since its opening, over 1,600 people have leapt to their death from that bridge. 
+Some believe that traveling between the two towers will lead you to another dimension — this bridge has been romanticized as such — that the fall from that frees you from all your worries and grief, and the waters below will cleanse your soul. 
+But let me tell you what actually occurs when the bridge is used as a means of suicide. 
+After a free fall of four to five seconds, the body strikes the water at about 75 miles an hour. 
+That impact shatters bones, some of which then puncture vital organs. 
+Most die on impact. 
+Those that don't generally flail in the water helplessly, and then drown. 
+I don't think that those who contemplate this method of suicide realize how grisly a death that they will face. 
+This is the cord. 
+Except for around the two towers, there is 32 inches of steel paralleling the bridge. 
+This is where most folks stand before taking their lives. 
+I can tell you from experience that once the person is on that cord, and at their darkest time, it is very difficult to bring them back. 
+I took this photo last year as this young woman spoke to an officer contemplating her life. 
+I want to tell you very happily that we were successful that day in getting her back over the rail. 
+When I first began working on the bridge, we had no formal training. 
+You struggled to funnel your way through these calls. 
+This was not only a disservice to those contemplating suicide, but to the officers as well. 
+We've come a long, long way since then. 
+Now, veteran officers and psychologists train new officers. 
+This is Jason Garber. 
+I met Jason on July 22 of last year when I get received a call of a possible suicidal subject sitting on the cord near midspan. 
+I responded, and when I arrived, I observed Jason speaking to a Golden Gate Bridge officer. 
+Jason was just 32 years old and had flown out here from New Jersey. 
+As a matter of fact, he had flown out here on two other occasions from New Jersey to attempt suicide on this bridge. 
+After about an hour of speaking with Jason, he asked us if we knew the story of Pandora's box. 
+Recalling your Greek mythology, Zeus created Pandora, and sent her down to Earth with a box, and told her, "" Never, ever open that box. "" Well one day, curiosity got the better of Pandora, and she did open the box. 
+Out flew plagues, sorrows, and all sorts of evils against man. 
+The only good thing in the box was hope. 
+Jason then asked us, "" What happens when you open the box and hope isn't there? "" He paused a few moments, leaned to his right, and was gone. 
+This kind, intelligent young man from New Jersey had just committed suicide. 
+I spoke with Jason's parents that evening, and I suppose that, when I was speaking with them, that I didn't sound as if I was doing very well, because that very next day, their family rabbi called to check on me. 
+Jason's parents had asked him to do so. 
+The collateral damage of suicide affects so many people. 
+I pose these questions to you: What would you do if your family member, friend or loved one was suicidal? 
+What would you say? 
+Would you know what to say? 
+In my experience, it's not just the talking that you do, but the listening. 
+Listen to understand. 
+Don't argue, blame, or tell the person you know how they feel, because you probably don't. 
+By just being there, you may just be the turning point that they need. 
+If you think someone is suicidal, don't be afraid to confront them and ask the question. 
+One way of asking them the question is like this: "" Others in similar circumstances have thought about ending their life; have you had these thoughts? "" Confronting the person head-on may just save their life and be the turning point for them. 
+Some other signs to look for: hopelessness, believing that things are terrible and never going to get better; helplessness, believing that there is nothing that you can do about it; recent social withdrawal; and a loss of interest in life. 
+I came up with this talk just a couple of days ago, and I received an email from a lady that I'd like to read you her letter. 
+She lost her son on January 19 of this year, and she wrote this me this email just a couple of days ago, and it's with her permission and blessing that I read this to you. 
+"" Hi, Kevin. I imagine you're at the TED Conference. 
+That must be quite the experience to be there. 
+I'm thinking I should go walk the bridge this weekend. 
+Just wanted to drop you a note. 
+Hope you get the word out to many people and they go home talking about it to their friends who tell their friends, etc. 
+I'm still pretty numb, but noticing more moments of really realizing Mike isn't coming home. 
+Mike was driving from Petaluma to San Francisco to watch the 49ers game with his father on January 19. 
+He never made it there. 
+I called Petaluma police and reported him missing that evening. 
+The next morning, two officers came to my home and reported that Mike's car was down at the bridge. 
+A witness had observed him jumping off the bridge at 1: 58 p.m. the previous day. 
+Thanks so much for standing up for those who may be only temporarily too weak to stand for themselves. 
+Who hasn't been low before without suffering from a true mental illness? 
+It shouldn't be so easy to end it. 
+My prayers are with you for your fight. 
+The GGB, Golden Gate Bridge, is supposed to be a passage across our beautiful bay, not a graveyard. 
+Good luck this week. Vicky. "" I can't imagine the courage it takes for her to go down to that bridge and walk the path that her son took that day, and also the courage just to carry on. 
+I'd like to introduce you to a man I refer to as hope and courage. 
+On March 11 of 2005, I responded to a radio call of a possible suicidal subject on the bridge sidewalk near the north tower. 
+I rode my motorcycle down the sidewalk and observed this man, Kevin Berthia, standing on the sidewalk. 
+When he saw me, he immediately traversed that pedestrian rail, and stood on that small pipe which goes around the tower. 
+For the next hour and a half, I listened as Kevin spoke about his depression and hopelessness. 
+Kevin decided on his own that day to come back over that rail and give life another chance. 
+When Kevin came back over, I congratulated him. 
+"This is a new beginning, a new life." 
+But I asked him, "" What was it that made you come back and give hope and life another chance? "" And you know what he told me? 
+He said, "" You listened. 
+You let me speak, and you just listened. "" Shortly after this incident, I received a letter from Kevin's mother, and I have that letter with me, and I'd like to read it to you. 
+"" Dear Mr. Briggs, Nothing will erase the events of March 11, but you are one of the reasons Kevin is still with us. 
+I truly believe Kevin was crying out for help. 
+He has been diagnosed with a mental illness for which he has been properly medicated. 
+I adopted Kevin when he was only six months old, completely unaware of any hereditary traits, but, thank God, now we know. 
+Kevin is straight, as he says. 
+We truly thank God for you. 
+Sincerely indebted to you, Narvella Berthia. "" And on the bottom she writes, "" P.S. When I visited San Francisco General Hospital that evening, you were listed as the patient. 
+Boy, did I have to straighten that one out. "" Today, Kevin is a loving father and contributing member of society. 
+He speaks openly about the events that day and his depression in the hopes that his story will inspire others. 
+Suicide is not just something I've encountered on the job. 
+It's personal. 
+My grandfather committed suicide by poisoning. 
+That act, although ending his own pain, robbed me from ever getting to know him. 
+This is what suicide does. 
+For most suicidal folks, or those contemplating suicide, they wouldn't think of hurting another person. 
+They just want their own pain to end. 
+Typically, this is accomplished in just three ways: sleep, drugs or alcohol, or death. 
+In my career, I've responded to and been involved in hundreds of mental illness and suicide calls around the bridge. 
+Of those incidents I've been directly involved with, I've only lost two, but that's two too many. 
+One was Jason. 
+The other was a man I spoke to for about an hour. 
+During that time, he shook my hand on three occasions. 
+On that final handshake, he looked at me, and he said, "Kevin, I'm sorry, but I have to go." 
+And he leapt. 
+Horrible, absolutely horrible. 
+I do want to tell you, though, the vast majority of folks that we do get to contact on that bridge do not commit suicide. 
+Additionally, that very few who have jumped off the bridge and lived and can talk about it, that one to two percent, most of those folks have said that the second that they let go of that rail, they knew that they had made a mistake and they wanted to live. 
+I tell people, the bridge not only connects Marin to San Francisco, but people together also. 
+That connection, or bridge that we make, is something that each and every one of us should strive to do. 
+Suicide is preventable. 
+There is help. There is hope. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was young, I prided myself as a nonconformist in the conservative U.S. state I live in, Kansas. 
+I didn't follow along with the crowd. 
+I wasn't afraid to try weird clothing trends or hairstyles. 
+I was outspoken and extremely social. 
+Even these pictures and postcards of my London semester abroad 16 years ago show that I obviously didn't care if I was perceived as weird or different. 
+(Laughter) But that same year I was in London, 16 years ago, I realized something about myself that actually was somewhat unique, and that changed everything. 
+I became the opposite of who I thought I once was. 
+I stayed in my room instead of socializing. 
+I stopped engaging in clubs and leadership activities. 
+I didn't want to stand out in the crowd anymore. 
+I told myself it was because I was growing up and maturing, not that I was suddenly looking for acceptance. 
+But I realize now that the moment I realized something was different about me was the exact same moment that I began conforming and hiding. 
+Hiding is a progressive habit, and once you start hiding, it becomes harder and harder to step forward and speak out. 
+In fact, even now, when I was talking to people about what this talk was about, I made up a cover story and I even hid the truth about my TED Talk. 
+So it is fitting and scary that I have returned to this city 16 years later and I have chosen this stage to finally stop hiding. 
+What have I been hiding for 16 years? 
+I am a lesbian. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+I've struggled to say those words, because I didn't want to be defined by them. 
+Every time I would think about coming out in the past, I would think to myself, but I just want to be known as Morgana, uniquely Morgana, but not "" my lesbian friend Morgana, "" or "" my gay coworker Morgana. "" Just Morgana. 
+For those of you from large metropolitan areas, this may not seem like a big deal to you. 
+It may seem strange that I have suppressed the truth and hidden this for so long. 
+But I was paralyzed by my fear of not being accepted. 
+And I'm not alone, of course. 
+A 2013 Deloitte study found that a surprisingly large number of people hide aspects of their identity. 
+Of all the employees they surveyed, 61 percent reported changing an aspect of their behavior or their appearance in order to fit in at work. 
+Of all the gay, lesbian and bisexual employees, 83 percent admitted to changing some aspects of themselves so they would not appear at work "" too gay. "" The study found that even in companies with diversity policies and inclusion programs, employees struggle to be themselves at work because they believe conformity is critical to their long-term career advancement. 
+And while I was surprised that so many people just like me waste so much energy trying to hide themselves, I was scared when I discovered that my silence has life-or-death consequences and long-term social repercussions. 
+Twelve years: the length by which life expectancy is shortened for gay, lesbian and bisexual people in highly anti-gay communities compared to accepting communities. 
+Twelve years reduced life expectancy. 
+When I read that in The Advocate magazine this year, I realized I could no longer afford to keep silent. 
+The effects of personal stress and social stigmas are a deadly combination. 
+The study found that gays in anti-gay communities had higher rates of heart disease, violence and suicide. 
+What I once thought was simply a personal matter I realized had a ripple effect that went into the workplace and out into the community for every story just like mine. 
+My choice to hide and not share who I really am may have inadvertently contributed to this exact same environment and atmosphere of discrimination. 
+I'd always told myself there's no reason to share that I was gay, but the idea that my silence has social consequences was really driven home this year when I missed an opportunity to change the atmosphere of discrimination in my own home state of Kansas. 
+In February, the Kansas House of Representatives brought up a bill for vote that would have essentially allowed businesses to use religious freedom as a reason to deny gays services. 
+A former coworker and friend of mine has a father who serves in the Kansas House of Representatives. 
+He voted in favor of the bill, in favor of a law that would allow businesses to not serve me. 
+How does my friend feel about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning people? 
+How does her father feel? 
+I don't know, because I was never honest with them about who I am. 
+And that shakes me to the core. 
+What if I had told her my story years ago? 
+Could she have told her father my experience? 
+Could I have ultimately helped change his vote? 
+I will never know, and that made me realize I had done nothing to try to make a difference. 
+How ironic that I work in human resources, a profession that works to welcome, connect and encourage the development of employees, a profession that advocates that the diversity of society should be reflected in the workplace, and yet I have done nothing to advocate for diversity. 
+When I came to this company one year ago, I thought to myself, this company has anti-discrimination policies that protect gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. 
+Their commitment to diversity is evident through their global inclusion programs. 
+When I walk through the doors of this company, I will finally come out. 
+But I didn't. 
+Instead of taking advantage of the opportunity, I did nothing. 
+(Applause) When I was looking through my London journal and scrapbook from my London semester abroad 16 years ago, I came across this modified quote from Toni Morrison's book, "" Paradise. "" "There are more scary things inside than outside." 
+And then I wrote a note to myself at the bottom: "Remember this." 
+I'm sure I was trying to encourage myself to get out and explore London, but the message I missed was the need to start exploring and embracing myself. 
+What I didn't realize until all these years later is that the biggest obstacles I will ever have to overcome are my own fears and insecurities. 
+I believe that by facing my fears inside, I will be able to change reality outside. 
+I made a choice today to reveal a part of myself that I have hidden for too long. 
+I hope that this means I will never hide again, and I hope that by coming out today, I can do something to change the data and also to help others who feel different be more themselves and more fulfilled in both their professional and personal lives. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What's the fastest growing threat to Americans' health? 
+Cancer? Heart attacks? Diabetes? 
+The answer is actually none of these; it's Alzheimer's disease. 
+Every 67 seconds, someone in the United States is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. 
+As the number of Alzheimer's patients triples by the year 2050, caring for them, as well as the rest of the aging population, will become an overwhelming societal challenge. 
+My family has experienced firsthand the struggles of caring for an Alzheimer's patient. 
+Growing up in a family with three generations, I've always been very close to my grandfather. 
+When I was four years old, my grandfather and I were walking in a park in Japan when he suddenly got lost. 
+It was one of the scariest moments I've ever experienced in my life, and it was also the first instance that informed us that my grandfather had Alzheimer's disease. 
+Over the past 12 years, his condition got worse and worse, and his wandering in particular caused my family a lot of stress. 
+My aunt, his primary caregiver, really struggled to stay awake at night to keep an eye on him, and even then often failed to catch him leaving the bed. 
+I became really concerned about my aunt's well-being as well as my grandfather's safety. 
+I searched extensively for a solution that could help my family's problems, but couldn't find one. 
+Then, one night about two years ago, I was looking after my grandfather and I saw him stepping out of the bed. 
+The moment his foot landed on the floor, I thought, why don't I put a pressure sensor on the heel of his foot? 
+Once he stepped onto the floor and out of the bed, the pressure sensor would detect an increase in pressure caused by body weight and then wirelessly send an audible alert to the caregiver's smartphone. 
+That way, my aunt could sleep much better at night without having to worry about my grandfather's wandering. 
+So now I'd like to perform a demonstration of this sock. 
+Could I please have my sock model on the stage? 
+Great. 
+So once the patient steps onto the floor — (Ringing) — an alert is sent to the caregiver's smartphone. 
+Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, sock model. 
+So this is a drawing of my preliminary design. 
+My desire to create a sensor-based technology perhaps stemmed from my lifelong love for sensors and technology. 
+Motion sensors would be installed inside the tiles of bathroom floors to detect the falls of elderly patients whenever they fell down in the bathroom. 
+Since I was only six years old at the time and I hadn't graduated from kindergarten yet, I didn't have the necessary resources and tools to translate my idea into reality, but nonetheless, my research experience really implanted in me a firm desire to use sensors to help the elderly people. 
+I really believe that sensors can improve the quality of life of the elderly. 
+When I laid out my plan, I realized that I faced three main challenges: first, creating a sensor; second, designing a circuit; and third, coding a smartphone app. 
+This made me realize that my project was actually much harder to realize than I initially had thought it to be. 
+First, I had to create a wearable sensor that was thin and flexible enough to be worn comfortably on the bottom of the patient's foot. 
+Once pressure is applied, the connectivity between the particles increases. 
+Next, I had to design a wearable wireless circuit, but wireless signal transmission consumes lots of power and requires heavy, bulky batteries. 
+Thankfully, I was able to find out about the Bluetooth low energy technology, which consumes very little power and can be driven by a coin-sized battery. 
+Lastly, I had to code a smartphone app that would essentially transform the care-giver's smartphone into a remote monitor. 
+For this, I had to expand upon my knowledge of coding with Java and XCode and I also had to learn about how to code for Bluetooth low energy devices by watching YouTube tutorials and reading various textbooks. 
+Integrating these components, I was able to successfully create two prototypes, one in which the sensor is embedded inside a sock, and another that's a re-attachable sensor assembly that can be adhered anywhere that makes contact with the bottom of the patient's foot. 
+I've tested the device on my grandfather for about a year now, and it's had a 100 percent success rate in detecting the over 900 known cases of his wandering. 
+Last summer, I was able to beta test my device at several residential care facilities in California, and I'm currently incorporating the feedback to further improve the device into a marketable product. 
+Testing the device on a number of patients made me realize that I needed to invent solutions for people who didn't want to wear socks to sleep at night. 
+So sensor data, collected on a vast number of patients, can be useful for improving patient care and also leading to a cure for the disease, possibly. 
+For example, I'm currently examining correlations between the frequency of a patient's nightly wandering and his or her daily activities and diet. 
+One thing I'll never forget is when my device first caught my grandfather's wandering out of bed at night. 
+At that moment, I was really struck by the power of technology to change lives for the better. 
+People living happily and healthfully — that's the world that I imagine. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+A human child is born, and for quite a long time is a consumer. 
+It cannot be consciously a contributor. 
+It is helpless. 
+It doesn't know how to survive, even though it is endowed with an instinct to survive. 
+It needs the help of mother, or a foster mother, to survive. 
+It can't afford to doubt the person who tends the child. 
+It has to totally surrender, as one surrenders to an anesthesiologist. 
+It has to totally surrender. 
+That implies a lot of trust. 
+That implies the trusted person won't violate the trust. 
+As the child grows, it begins to discover that the person trusted is violating the trust. 
+It doesn't know even the word "" violation. "" Therefore, it has to blame itself, a wordless blame, which is more difficult to really resolve — the wordless self-blame. 
+As the child grows to become an adult: so far, it has been a consumer, but the growth of a human being lies in his or her capacity to contribute, to be a contributor. 
+One cannot contribute unless one feels secure, one feels big, one feels: I have enough. 
+To be compassionate is not a joke. 
+It's not that simple. 
+One has to discover a certain bigness in oneself. 
+That bigness should be centered on oneself, not in terms of money, not in terms of power you wield, not in terms of any status that you can command in the society, but it should be centered on oneself. 
+The self: you are self-aware. 
+On that self, it should be centered — a bigness, a wholeness. 
+Otherwise, compassion is just a word and a dream. 
+You can be compassionate occasionally, more moved by empathy than by compassion. 
+Thank God we are empathetic. 
+When somebody's in pain, we pick up the pain. 
+In a Wimbledon final match, these two guys fight it out. 
+Each one has got two games. 
+It can be anybody's game. 
+What they have sweated so far has no meaning. 
+One person wins. 
+The tennis etiquette is, both the players have to come to the net and shake hands. 
+The winner boxes the air and kisses the ground, throws his shirt as though somebody is waiting for it. 
+(Laughter) And this guy has to come to the net. 
+When he comes to the net, you see, his whole face changes. 
+It looks as though he's wishing that he didn't win. 
+Why? Empathy. 
+That's human heart. 
+No human heart is denied of that empathy. 
+No religion can demolish that by indoctrination. 
+No culture, no nation and nationalism — nothing can touch it because it is empathy. 
+And that capacity to empathize is the window through which you reach out to people, you do something that makes a difference in somebody's life — even words, even time. 
+Compassion is not defined in one form. 
+There's no Indian compassion. 
+There's no American compassion. 
+It transcends nation, the gender, the age. 
+Why? Because it is there in everybody. 
+It's experienced by people occasionally. 
+Then this occasional compassion, we are not talking about — it will never remain occasional. 
+By mandate, you cannot make a person compassionate. 
+You can't say, "" Please love me. "" Love is something you discover. 
+It's not an action, but in the English language, it is also an action. 
+I will come to it later. 
+So one has got to discover a certain wholeness. 
+I am going to cite the possibility of being whole, which is within our experience, everybody's experience. 
+In spite of a very tragic life, one is happy in moments which are very few and far between. 
+And the one who is happy, even for a slapstick joke, accepts himself and also the scheme of things in which one finds oneself. 
+That means the whole universe, known things and unknown things. 
+All of them are totally accepted because you discover your wholeness in yourself. 
+The subject — "" me "" — and the object — the scheme of things — fuse into oneness, an experience nobody can say, "" I am denied of, "" an experience common to all and sundry. 
+That experience confirms that, in spite of all your limitations — all your wants, desires, unfulfilled, and the credit cards and layoffs and, finally, baldness — you can be happy. 
+But the extension of the logic is that you don't need to fulfill your desire to be happy. 
+You are the very happiness, the wholeness that you want to be. 
+There's no choice in this: that only confirms the reality that the wholeness cannot be different from you, cannot be minus you. 
+It has got to be you. 
+You cannot be a part of wholeness and still be whole. 
+Your moment of happiness reveals that reality, that realization, that recognition: "" Maybe I am the whole. 
+Maybe the swami is right. 
+Maybe the swami is right. "" You start your new life. 
+Then everything becomes meaningful. 
+I have no more reason to blame myself. 
+If one has to blame oneself, one has a million reasons plus many. 
+But if I say, in spite of my body being limited — if it is black it is not white, if it is white it is not black: body is limited any which way you look at it. Limited. 
+Your knowledge is limited, health is limited, and power is therefore limited, and the cheerfulness is going to be limited. 
+Compassion is going to be limited. 
+Everything is going to be limitless. 
+You cannot command compassion unless you become limitless, and nobody can become limitless, either you are or you are not. Period. 
+And there is no way of your being not limitless too. 
+Your own experience reveals, in spite of all limitations, you are the whole. 
+And the wholeness is the reality of you when you relate to the world. 
+It is love first. 
+When you relate to the world, the dynamic manifestation of the wholeness is, what we say, love. 
+And itself becomes compassion if the object that you relate to evokes that emotion. 
+Then that again transforms into giving, into sharing. 
+You express yourself because you have compassion. 
+To discover compassion, you need to be compassionate. 
+To discover the capacity to give and share, you need to be giving and sharing. 
+There is no shortcut: it is like swimming by swimming. 
+You learn swimming by swimming. 
+You cannot learn swimming on a foam mattress and enter into water. 
+(Laughter) You learn swimming by swimming. You learn cycling by cycling. 
+You learn cooking by cooking, having some sympathetic people around you to eat what you cook. 
+(Laughter) And, therefore, what I say, you have to fake it and make it. (Laughter) 
+You need to. 
+My predecessor meant that. 
+You have to act it out. 
+You have to act compassionately. 
+There is no verb for compassion, but you have an adverb for compassion. 
+That's interesting to me. 
+You act compassionately. 
+But then, how to act compassionately if you don't have compassion? 
+That is where you fake. 
+You fake it and make it. This is the mantra of the United States of America. 
+(Laughter) You fake it and make it. 
+You act compassionately as though you have compassion: grind your teeth, take all the support system. 
+If you know how to pray, pray. 
+Ask for compassion. 
+Let me act compassionately. 
+Do it. 
+You'll discover compassion and also slowly a relative compassion, and slowly, perhaps if you get the right teaching, you'll discover compassion is a dynamic manifestation of the reality of yourself, which is oneness, wholeness, and that's what you are. 
+With these words, thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) (Applause) I'm Jon M. Chu. And I'm not a dancer, I'm not a choreographer — I'm actually a filmmaker, a storyteller. 
+I directed a movie two years ago called "" Step Up 2: The Streets. "" Anybody? Anybody? Yeah! 
+During that movie I got to meet a ton of hip-hop dancers — amazing, the best in the world — and they brought me into a society, the sort of underground street culture that blew my mind. 
+I mean, this is literally human beings with super-human strength and abilities. 
+They could fly in the air. They could bend their elbow all the way back. 
+They could spin on their heads for 80 times in a row. 
+I'd never seen anything like that. 
+When I was growing up, my heroes were people like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson. 
+I grew up in a musical family. 
+(Laughter) And those guys, those were like, ultimate heroes. 
+Being a shy, little, skinny Asian kid growing up in the Silicon Valley with low self-esteem, those guys made me believe in something bigger. 
+Those guys made me want to, like, "" I'm going to do that moonwalk at that bar mitzvah tonight for that girl. "" (Applause) And it seems like those dance heroes have disappeared, sort of relegated to the background of pop stars and music videos. 
+But after seeing what I've seen, the truth is, they have not disappeared at all. 
+They're here, getting better and better every day. 
+And dance has progressed. 
+It is insane what dance is right now. 
+Dance has never had a better friend than technology. 
+Online videos and social networking... 
+dancers have created a whole global laboratory online for dance, where kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it with a Philly flair to create a whole new dance style in itself. 
+And this is happening every day. 
+And from these bedrooms and living rooms and garages, with cheap webcams, lies the world's great dancers of tomorrow. 
+Our Fred Astaires, our Gene Kellys our Michael Jacksons are right at our fingertips, and may not have that opportunity, except for us. 
+So, we created the LXD, sort of a — the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, a justice league of dancers that believe that dance can have a transformative effect on the world. 
+A living, breathing comic book series, but unlike Spiderman and Iron Man, these guys can actually do it. 
+And we're going to show you some today. So, let me introduce to you, some of our heroes right now. 
+We got Madd Chadd, Lil 'C, Kid David and J Smooth. 
+Please be excited, have fun, yell, scream. 
+Ladies and gentlemen: The LXD. 
+(Applause) (Video): Madd Chadd: When people first see me, I get a lot of different reactions actually. 
+Sometimes you would think that maybe kids would enjoy it, but sometimes they get a little freaked out. 
+And, I don't know, I kind of get a kick out of that a little bit. 
+(Music) (Applause) J Smooth: When I'm in the zone — I'm dancing and free styling it — I actually visually kind of picture lines, and moving them. 
+I think of like, Transformers, like how panels open and then they fold, they fold in, and then you close that panel. 
+And then another thing opens, you close that. 
+(Music) (Applause) Kid David: It's kind of like, honestly a lot of times I don't really know what's going on when I'm dancing. 
+Because at that point it's just really like, it's my body and the music. 
+It's not really a conscious decision, "I'm going to do this next, I'm going to do this." 
+It's kind of like this other level where you can't make choices anymore, and it's just your body reacting to certain sounds in the music. 
+I got my name just because I was so young. 
+I was young when I started. I was younger than a lot of the people I was dancing with. 
+So, it was always like, they called me Kid David, because I was the kid. 
+(Music) (Applause) L'il C: I tell them to create a ball, and then you just use that ball of energy. 
+And instead of throwing it out, people would think that's a krump move, that's a krump move. 
+That's not a krump move. You're going to throw it out, you throw it out, and you hold it. 
+And you let it go, and then right when you see the tail, you grab it by the tail, then you bring it back in. 
+And you just got this piece of energy and you just, you're manipulating it. 
+You know, you create power, then you tame it. 
+(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) 
+
+♫ I think I'm ready to do my thing ♫ ♫ I think I'm ready to take my chances ♫ ♫ I've been dining out and all stressed out ♫ ♫ Due to the circumstances. See? ♫ ♫ I gotta get up, get up, get up, get up ♫ ♫ Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up ♫ ♫ I see what you're saying ♫ ♫ We sent a demo to the world, they said it sounds like Take 6 ♫ ♫ I said "" Hold on, wait a minute, I'll be back with the remix "" ♫ ♫ They looking at us funny, we can't make any money ♫ 
+♫ It took us years to figure out that we was dealing with dummies ♫ ♫ They didn't understand the sound from the Bronx, that's the boogie down ♫ ♫ to Huntsville, Alabama, there's no circles in my planner, so ♫ ♫ It was time to make the product, so we hooked up with Townsend ♫ ♫ Made a deal with John Neal, on the road sold ten thousand ♫ ♫ WBA, that means a trip to Nashville ♫ ♫ Festplatte showed up and said them boys are naturals ♫ ♫ Can you hear what they were hearing? See what they were seeing? ♫ 
+♫ From Bronx to Berlin, we took the tour European ♫ ♫ All vocal yeah, we widit, call the album "" What is it? "" ♫ ♫ With Sarah Connor, set the goal for number one and we hit it ♫ ♫ But now it's Kev, Sim, Drew, Stew, time for a new day ♫ ♫ Ring the alarm, hit 'em on Skype or a two-way ♫ ♫ Sung by the words, we ready to fly! ♫ ♫ Fly baby! Time to leave that nest ♫ ♫ Fly baby! This ain't no time to rest ♫ ♫ Come on fly baby, we got work to do ♫ 
+♫ Here we go, spread my wings and... ♫ ♫ Fly baby! Time to leave that nest ♫ ♫ Fly baby! This ain't no time to rest. Come on ♫ ♫ Fly baby! We got work to do ♫ ♫ Here we go. Spread my wings and fly. One more time ♫ ♫ Fly baby! Time to leave that nest ♫ ♫ Fly baby! This ain't no time to rest ♫ ♫ Fly baby! We got work to do ♫ ♫ Here we go, spread my wings and... ♫ ♫ Fly baby! Fly baby fly ♫ ♫ Fly baby! Fly baby high ♫ 
+♫ Fly baby! Up to the sky ♫ ♫ Spread my wings and fly ♫ Instrumental! 
+♫ We're ready to fly! ♫ (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+Let's talk trash. 
+You know, we had to be taught to renounce the powerful conservation ethic we developed during the Great Depression and World War II. 
+After the war, we needed to direct our enormous production capacity toward creation of products for peacetime. 
+Life Magazine helped in this effort by announcing the introduction of throwaways that would liberate the housewife from the drudgery of doing dishes. 
+Mental note to the liberators: throwaway plastics take a lot of space and don't biodegrade. 
+Only we humans make waste that nature can't digest. 
+Plastics are also hard to recycle. 
+A teacher told me how to express the under-five-percent of plastics recovered in our waste stream. 
+It's diddly-point-squat. 
+That's the percentage we recycle. 
+Now, melting point has a lot to do with this. 
+Plastic is not purified by the re-melting process like glass and metal. 
+It begins to melt below the boiling point of water and does not drive off the oily contaminants for which it is a sponge. 
+Half of each year's 100 billion pounds of thermal plastic pellets will be made into fast-track trash. 
+A large, unruly fraction of our trash will flow downriver to the sea. 
+Here is the accumulation at Biona Creek next to the L.A. airport. 
+And here is the flotsam near California State University Long Beach and the diesel plant we visited yesterday. 
+In spite of deposit fees, much of this trash leading out to the sea will be plastic beverage bottles. 
+We use two million of them in the United States every five minutes, here imaged by TED presenter Chris Jordan, who artfully documents mass consumption and zooms in for more detail. 
+Here is a remote island repository for bottles off the coast of Baja California. 
+Isla San Roque is an uninhabited bird rookery off Baja's sparsely populated central coast. 
+Notice that the bottles here have caps on them. 
+Bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, PET, will sink in seawater and not make it this far from civilization. 
+Also, the caps are produced in separate factories from a different plastic, polypropylene. 
+They will float in seawater, but unfortunately do not get recycled under the bottle bills. 
+Let's trace the journey of the millions of caps that make it to sea solo. 
+After a year the ones from Japan are heading straight across the Pacific, while ours get caught in the California current and first head down to the latitude of Cabo San Lucas. 
+After ten years, a lot of the Japanese caps are in what we call the Eastern Garbage Patch, while ours litter the Philippines. 
+After 20 years, we see emerging the debris accumulation zone of the North Pacific Gyre. 
+It so happens that millions of albatross nesting on Kure and Midway atolls in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Monument forage here and scavenge whatever they can find for regurgitation to their chicks. 
+A four-month old Laysan Albatross chick died with this in its stomach. 
+Hundreds of thousands of the goose-sized chicks are dying with stomachs full of bottle caps and other rubbish, like cigarette lighters... 
+but, mostly bottle caps. 
+Sadly, their parents mistake bottle caps for food tossing about in the ocean surface. 
+The retainer rings for the caps also have consequences for aquatic animals. 
+This is Mae West, still alive at a zookeeper's home in New Orleans. 
+I wanted to see what my home town of Long Beach was contributing to the problem, so on Coastal Clean-Up Day in 2005 I went to the Long Beach Peninsula, at the east end of our long beach. 
+We cleaned up the swaths of beach shown. 
+I offered five cents each for bottle caps. 
+I got plenty of takers. 
+Here are the 1,100 bottle caps they collected. 
+I thought I would spend 20 bucks. 
+That day I ended up spending nearly 60. 
+I separated them by color and put them on display the next Earth Day at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro. 
+Governor Schwarzenegger and his wife Maria stopped by to discuss the display. 
+In spite of my "" girly man "" hat, crocheted from plastic shopping bags, they shook my hand. (Laughter) I showed him and Maria a zooplankton trawl from the gyre north of Hawaii with more plastic than plankton. 
+Here's what our trawl samples from the plastic soup our ocean has become look like. 
+Trawling a zooplankton net on the surface for a mile produces samples like this. 
+And this. 
+Now, when the debris washes up on the beaches of Hawaii it looks like this. 
+And this particular beach is Kailua Beach, the beach where our president and his family vacationed before moving to Washington. 
+Now, how do we analyze samples like this one that contain more plastic than plankton? 
+We sort the plastic fragments into different size classes, from five millimeters to one-third of a millimeter. 
+Small bits of plastic concentrate persistent organic pollutants up to a million times their levels in the surrounding seawater. 
+We wanted to see if the most common fish in the deep ocean, at the base of the food chain, was ingesting these poison pills. 
+We did hundreds of necropsies, and over a third had polluted plastic fragments in their stomachs. 
+The record-holder, only two-and-a-half inches long, had 84 pieces in its tiny stomach. 
+Now, you can buy certified organic produce. 
+But no fishmonger on Earth can sell you a certified organic wild-caught fish. 
+This is the legacy we are leaving to future generations. 
+The throwaway society cannot be contained — it has gone global. 
+We simply cannot store and maintain or recycle all our stuff. 
+We have to throw it away. 
+Now, the market can do a lot for us, but it can't fix the natural system in the ocean we've broken. 
+All the king's horses and all the king's men... 
+will never gather up all the plastic and put the ocean back together again. 
+Narrator (Video): The levels are increasing, the amount of packaging is increasing, the "" throwaway "" concept of living is proliferating, and it's showing up in the ocean. 
+Anchor: He offers no hope of cleaning it up. 
+Straining the ocean for plastic would be beyond the budget of any country and it might kill untold amounts of sea life in the process. 
+The solution, Moore says, is to stop the plastic at its source: stop it on land before it falls in the ocean. 
+And in a plastic-wrapped and packaged world, he doesn't hold out much hope for that, either. 
+This is Brian Rooney for Nightline, in Long Beach, California. 
+Charles Moore: Thank you. 
+
+I suspect that every aid worker in Africa comes to a time in her career when she wants to take all the money for her project — maybe it's a school or a training program — pack it in a suitcase, get on a plane flying over the poorest villages in the country, and start throwing that money out the window. 
+Because to a veteran aid worker, the idea of putting cold, hard cash into the hands of the poorest people on Earth doesn't sound crazy, it sounds really satisfying. 
+I had that moment right about the 10-year mark, and luckily, that's also when I learned that this idea actually exists, and it might be just what the aid system needs. 
+Economists call it an unconditional cash transfer, and it's exactly that: It's cash given with no strings attached. 
+Governments in developing countries have been doing this for decades, and it's only now, with more evidence and new technology that it's possible to make this a model for delivering aid. 
+It's a pretty simple idea, right? 
+Well, why did I spend a decade doing other stuff for the poor? 
+Honestly, I believed that I could do more good with money for the poor than the poor could do for themselves. 
+I held two assumptions: One, that poor people are poor in part because they're uneducated and don't make good choices; two is that we then need people like me to figure out what they need and get it to them. 
+It turns out, the evidence says otherwise. 
+In recent years, researchers have been studying what happens when we give poor people cash. 
+Dozens of studies show across the board that people use cash transfers to improve their own lives. 
+Pregnant women in Uruguay buy better food and give birth to healthier babies. 
+Sri Lankan men invest in their businesses. 
+Researchers who studied our work in Kenya found that people invested in a range of assets, from livestock to equipment to home improvements, and they saw increases in income from business and farming one year after the cash was sent. 
+None of these studies found that people spend more on drinking or smoking or that people work less. 
+In fact, they work more. 
+Now, these are all material needs. 
+In Vietnam, elderly recipients used their cash transfers to pay for coffins. 
+As someone who wonders if Maslow got it wrong, I find this choice to prioritize spiritual needs deeply humbling. 
+I don't know if I would have chosen to give food or equipment or coffins, which begs the question: How good are we at allocating resources on behalf of the poor? 
+Are we worth the cost? 
+Again, we can look at empirical evidence on what happens when we give people stuff of our choosing. 
+One very telling study looked at a program in India that gives livestock to the so-called ultra-poor, and they found that 30 percent of recipients had turned around and sold the livestock they had been given for cash. 
+The real irony is, for every 100 dollars worth of assets this program gave someone, they spent another 99 dollars to do it. 
+What if, instead, we use technology to put cash, whether from aid agencies or from any one of us directly into a poor person's hands. 
+Today, three in four Kenyans use mobile money, which is basically a bank account that can run on any cell phone. 
+A sender can pay a 1.6 percent fee and with the click of a button send money directly to a recipient's account with no intermediaries. 
+Like the technologies that are disrupting industries in our own lives, payments technology in poor countries could disrupt aid. 
+It's spreading so quickly that it's possible to imagine reaching billions of the world's poor this way. 
+That's what we've started to do at GiveDirectly. 
+We're the first organization dedicated to providing cash transfers to the poor. 
+We've sent cash to 35,000 people across rural Kenya and Uganda in one-time payments of 1,000 dollars per family. 
+So let's say that's your family. 
+We show up at your door with an Android phone. 
+We'll get your name, take your photo and a photo of your hut and grab the GPS coordinates. 
+That night, we send all the data to the cloud, and each piece gets checked by an independent team using, for one example, satellite images. 
+Then, we'll come back, we'll sell you a basic cell phone if you don't have one already, and a few weeks later, we send money to it. 
+Something that five years ago would have seemed impossible we can now do efficiently and free of corruption. 
+The more cash we give to the poor, and the more evidence we have that it works, the more we have to reconsider everything else we give. 
+Today, the logic behind aid is too often, well, we do at least some good. 
+When we're complacent with that as our bar, when we tell ourselves that giving aid is better than no aid at all, we tend to invest inefficiently, in our own ideas that strike us as innovative, on writing reports, on plane tickets and SUVs. 
+What if the logic was, will we do better than cash given directly? 
+Organizations would have to prove that they're doing more good for the poor than the poor can do for themselves. 
+Of course, giving cash won't create public goods like eradicating disease or building strong institutions, but it could set a higher bar for how we help individual families improve their lives. 
+I believe in aid. 
+I believe most aid is better than just throwing money out of a plane. 
+I am also absolutely certain that a lot of aid today isn't better than giving directly to the poor. 
+I hope that one day, it will be. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This map — (Applause) — this map shows the number of seconds that American network and cable news organizations dedicated to news stories, by country, in February of 2007 — just one year ago. 
+And in Paris, the IPCC released its study confirming man's impact on global warming. 
+And the cycle continues; as we all know, Britney has loomed pretty large lately. 
+So, why don't we hear more about the world? 
+And this lack of global coverage is all the more disturbing when we see where people go for news. 
+Local TV news looms large, and unfortunately only dedicates 12 percent of its coverage to international news. 
+Last year, Pew and the Colombia J-School analyzed the 14,000 stories that appeared on Google News' front page. 
+And they, in fact, covered the same 24 news events. 
+Similarly, a study in e-content showed that much of global news from U.S. news creators is recycled stories from the AP wire services and Reuters, and don't put things into a context that people can understand their connection to it. 
+So, if you put it all together, this could help explain why today's college graduates, as well as less educated Americans, know less about the world than their counterparts did 20 years ago. 
+And if you think it's simply because we are not interested, you would be wrong. 
+In recent years, Americans who say they closely follow global news most of the time grew to over 50 percent. 
+The real question: is this distorted worldview what we want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world? 
+And can we afford not to? Thank you. 
+
+Because of what I'm about to say, I really should establish my green credentials. 
+When I was a small boy, I took my pledge as an American, to save and faithfully defend from waste the natural resources of my country, its air, soil and minerals, its forests, waters and wildlife. 
+And I've stuck to that. 
+Stanford, I majored in ecology and evolution. 
+1968, I put out the Whole Earth Catalog. Was "" mister natural "" for a while. 
+And then worked for the Jerry Brown administration. 
+The Brown administration, and a bunch of my friends, basically leveled the energy efficiency of California, so it's the same now, 30 years later, even though our economy has gone up 80 percent, per capita. 
+And we are putting out less greenhouse gasses than any other state. 
+California is basically the equivalent of Europe, in this. 
+This year, Whole Earth Catalog has a supplement that I'll preview today, called Whole Earth Discipline. 
+The dominant demographic event of our time is this screamingly rapid urbanization that we have going on. 
+By mid-century we'll be about 80 percent urban, and that's mostly in the developing world, where that's happening. 
+It's interesting, because history is driven to a large degree by the size of cities. 
+The developing world now has all of the biggest cities, and they are developing three times faster than the developed countries, and nine times bigger. 
+It's qualitatively different. 
+They are the drivers of history, as we see by looking at history. 
+1,000 years ago this is what the world looked like. 
+Well we now have a distribution of urban power similar to what we had 1,000 years ago. 
+In other words, the rise of the West, dramatic as it was, is over. 
+The aggregate numbers are absolutely overwhelming: 1.3 million people a week coming to town, decade after decade. 
+What's really going on? 
+Well, what's going on is the villages of the world are emptying out. 
+Subsistence farming is drying up basically. 
+People are following opportunity into town. 
+And this is why. 
+I used to have a very romantic idea about villages, and it's because I never lived in one. 
+(Laughter) Because in town — this is the bustling squatter city of Kibera, near Nairobi — they see action. They see opportunity. 
+They see a cash economy that they were not able to participate in back in the subsistence farm. 
+As you go around these places there's plenty of aesthetics. 
+There is plenty going on. 
+They are poor, but they are intensely urban. And they are intensely creative. 
+The aggregate numbers now are that basically squatters, all one billion of them, are building the urban world, which means they're building the world — personally, one by one, family by family, clan by clan, neighborhood by neighborhood. 
+They start flimsy and they get substantial as time goes by. 
+They even build their own infrastructure. 
+Well, steal their own infrastructure, at first. 
+Cable TV, water, the whole gamut, all gets stolen. 
+And then gradually gentrifies. 
+It is not the case that slums undermine prosperity, not the working slums; they help create prosperity. 
+So in a town like Mumbai, which is half slums, it's 1 / 6th of the GDP of India. 
+Social capital in the slums is at its most urban and dense. 
+These people are valuable as a group. 
+And that's how they work. 
+There is a lot of people who think about all these poor people, "Oh there's terrible things. We've got to fix their housing." 
+It used to be, "" Oh we've got to get them phone service. "" Now they're showing us how they do their phone service. 
+Famine mostly is a rural event now. 
+There are things they care about. 
+And this is where we can help. 
+And the nations they're in can help. 
+And they are helping each other solve these issues. 
+And you go to a nice dense place like this slum in Mumbai. 
+You look at that lane on the right. 
+And you can ask, "" Okay what's going on there? "" The answer is, "" Everything. "" This is better than a mall. It's much denser. 
+It's much more interactive. 
+And the scale is terrific. 
+The main event is, these are not people crushed by poverty. 
+These are people busy getting out of poverty just as fast as they can. 
+They're helping each other do it. 
+They're doing it through an outlaw thing, the informal economy. 
+The informal economy, it's sort of like dark energy in astrophysics: it's not supposed to be there, but it's huge. 
+We don't understand how it works yet, but we have to. 
+Furthermore, people in the informal economy, the gray economy — as time goes by, crime is happening around them. And they can join the criminal world, or they can join the legitimate world. 
+We should be able to make that choice easier for them to get toward the legitimate world, because if we don't, they will go toward the criminal world. 
+There's all kinds of activity. 
+In Dharavi the slum performs not only a lot of services for itself, but it performs services for the city at large. 
+And one of the main events are these ad-hoc schools. 
+Parents pool their money to hire some local teachers to a private, tiny, unofficial school. 
+Education is more possible in the cities, and that changes the world. 
+So you see some interesting, typical, urban things. 
+So one thing slammed up against another, such as in Sao Paulo here. 
+That's what cities do. That's how they create value, is by slamming things together. 
+In this case, supply right next to demand. 
+So the maids and the gardeners and the guards that live in this lively part of town on the left walk to work, in the boring, rich neighborhood. 
+Proximity is amazing. 
+We are learning about how dense proximity can be. 
+Connectivity between the city and the country is what's going to keep the country good, because the city has interesting ways of doing things. 
+This is what makes cities — (Applause) this is what makes cities so green in the developing world. 
+Because people leave the poverty trap, an ecological disaster of subsistence farms, and head to town. 
+And when they're gone the natural environment starts to come back very rapidly. 
+And those who remain in the village can shift over to cash crops to send food to the new growing markets in town. 
+So if you want to save a village, you do it with a good road, or with a good cell phone connection, and ideally some grid electrical power. 
+So the event is: we're a city planet. That just happened. 
+More than half. 
+The numbers are considerable. A billion live in the squatter cities now. 
+Another billion is expected. 
+That's more than a sixth of humanity living a certain way. 
+And that will determine a lot of how we function. 
+Now, for us environmentalists, maybe the greenest thing about the cities is they diffuse the population bomb. 
+People get into town. 
+The immediately have fewer children. 
+They don't even have to get rich yet. Just the opportunity of coming up in the world means they will have fewer, higher-quality kids, and the birthrate goes down radically. 
+Very interesting side effect here, here's a slide from Phillip Longman. 
+Shows what is happening. 
+As we have more and more old people, like me, and fewer and fewer babies. 
+And they are regionally separated. 
+What you're getting is a world which is old folks, and old cities, going around doing things the old way, in the north. 
+And young people in brand new cities they're inventing, doing new things, in the south. 
+Where do you think the action is going to be? 
+Shift of subject. Quickly drop by climate. 
+The climate news, I'm sorry to say, is going to keep getting worse than we think, faster than we think. 
+Climate is a profoundly complex, nonlinear system, full of runaway positive feedbacks, hidden thresholds and irrevocable tipping points. 
+Here's just a few samples. 
+We're going to keep being surprised. And almost all the surprises are going to be bad ones. 
+From your standpoint this means a great increase in climate refugees over the coming decades, and what goes along with that, which is resource wars and chaos wars, as we're seeing in Darfur. 
+That's what drought does. 
+It brings carrying capacity down, and there's not enough carrying capacity to support the people. And then you're in trouble. 
+Shift to the power situation. 
+Baseload electricity is what it takes to run a city, or a city planet. 
+So far there is only three sources of baseload electricity: coal, some gas, nuclear and hydro. 
+Of those, only nuclear and hydro are green. 
+Coal is what is causing the climate problems. 
+And everyone will keep burning it because it's so cheap, until governments make it expensive. 
+Wind and solar can't help, because so far we don't have a way to store that energy. 
+So with hydro maxed out, coal and lose the climate, or nuclear, which is the current operating low-carbon source, and maybe save the climate. 
+And if we can eventually get good solar in space, that also could help. 
+Because remember, this is what drives the prosperity in the developing world in the villages and in the cities. 
+So, between coal and nuclear, compare their waste products. 
+If all of the electricity you used in your lifetime was nuclear, the amount of waste that would be added up would fit in a Coke can. 
+Whereas a coal-burning plant, a normal one gigawatt coal plant, burns 80 rail cars of coal a day, each car having 100 tons. 
+And it puts 18 thousand tons of carbon dioxide in the air. 
+So and then when you compare the lifetime emissions of these various energy forms, nuclear is about even with solar and wind, and ahead of solar — oh, I'm sorry — with hydro and wind, and ahead of solar. 
+And does nuclear really compete with coal? 
+Just ask the coal miners in Australia. 
+That's where you see some of the source, not from my fellow environmentalists, but from people who feel threatened by nuclear power. 
+Well the good news is that the developing world, but frankly, the whole world, is busy building, and starting to build, nuclear reactors. 
+This is good for the atmosphere. 
+It's good for their prosperity. 
+I want to point out one interesting thing, which is that environmentalists like the thing we call micropower. 
+It's supposed to be, I don't know, local solar and wind and cogeneration, and good things like that. 
+But frankly micro-reactors which are just now coming on, might serve even better. 
+The Russians, who started this, are building floating reactors, for their new passage, where the ice is melting, north of Russia. 
+And they're selling these floating reactors, only 35 megawatts, to developing countries. 
+Here's the design of an early one from Toshiba. 
+It's interesting, say, to take a 25-megawatt, 25 million watts, and you compare it to the standard big iron of an ordinary Westinghouse or Ariva, which is 1.2, 1.6 billion watts. 
+These things are way smaller. They're much more adaptable. 
+Here's an American design from Lawrence Livermore Lab. 
+Here's another American design that came out of Los Alamos, and is now commercial. 
+Almost all of these are not only small, they are proliferation-proof. 
+They're typically buried in the ground. 
+And the innovation is moving very rapidly. 
+So I think microreactors is going to be important for the future. 
+In terms of proliferation, nuclear energy has done more to dismantle nuclear weapons than any other activity. 
+And that's why 10 percent of the electricity in this room, 20 percent of electricity in this room is probably nuclear. 
+Half of that is coming from dismantled warheads from Russia, soon to be joined by our dismantled warheads. 
+And so I would like to see the GNEP program, that was developed in the Bush administration, go forward aggressively. 
+And I was glad to see that president Obama supported the nuclear fuel bank strategy when he spoke in Prague the other week. 
+One more subject. Genetically engineered food crops, in my view, as a biologist, have no reason to be controversial. 
+My fellow environmentalists, on this subject, have been irrational, anti-scientific, and very harmful. 
+Despite their best efforts, genetically engineered crops are the most rapidly successful agricultural innovation in history. 
+They're good for the environment because they enable no-till farming, which leaves the soil in place, getting healthier from year to year — slso keeps less carbon dioxide going from the soil into the atmosphere. 
+They reduce pesticide use. 
+And they increase yield, which allows you to have your agricultural area be smaller, and therefore more wild area is freed up. 
+By the way, this map from 2006 is out of date because it shows Africa still under the thumb of Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth from Europe, and they're finally getting out from under that. 
+And biotech is moving rapidly in Africa, at last. 
+This is a moral issue. 
+The Nuffield Council on Bioethics met on this issue twice in great detail and said it is a moral imperative to make genetically engineered crops readily available. 
+Speaking of imperatives, geoengineering is taboo now, especially in government circles, though I think there was a DARPA meeting on it a couple of weeks ago, but it will be on your plate — not this year but pretty soon, because some harsh realizations are coming along. 
+This is a list of them. 
+Basically the news is going to keep getting more scary. 
+There will be events, like 35,000 people dying of a heat wave, which happened a while back. 
+Like cyclones coming up toward Bangladesh. 
+Like wars over water, such as in the Indus. 
+And as those events keep happening we're going to say, "" Okay, what can we do about that really? "" But there's this little problem with geoengineering: what body is going to decide who gets to engineer? How much they do? Where they do it? 
+Because everybody is downstream, downwind of whatever is done. 
+And if we just taboo it completely we could lose civilization. 
+But if we just say "" OK, China, you're worried, you go ahead. 
+You geoengineer your way. We'll geoengineer our way. "" That would be considered an act of war by both nations. 
+So this is very interesting diplomacy coming along. 
+I should say, it is more practical than people think. 
+Here is an example that climatologists like a lot, one of the dozens of geoengineering ideas. 
+This one came from the sulfur dioxide from Mount Pinatubo in 1991 — cooled the earth by half a degree. 
+There was so much ice in 1992, the following year, that there was a bumper crop of polar bear cubs who were known as the Pinatubo cubs. 
+To put sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere would cost on the order of a billion dollars a year. 
+That's nothing, compared to all of the other things we may be trying to do about energy. 
+Just to run by another one: this is a plan to brighten the reflectance of ocean clouds, by atomizing seawater; that would brighten the albedo of the whole planet. 
+A nice one, because it can happen lots of little ways in lots of little places, is by copying the ancient Amazon Indians who made good agricultural soil by pyrolizing, smoldering, plant waste, and biochar fixes large quantities of carbon while it's improving the soil. 
+So here is where we are. 
+Nobel Prize-winning climatologist Paul Crutzen calls our geological era the Anthropocene, the human-dominated era. We are stuck with its obligations. 
+In the Whole Earth Catalog, my first words were, "We are as Gods, and might as well get good at it." 
+The first words of Whole Earth Discipline are, "" We are as Gods, and have to get good at it. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want you to imagine this for a moment. 
+Two men, Rahul and Rajiv, living in the same neighborhood, from the same educational background, similar occupation, and they both turn up at their local accident emergency complaining of acute chest pain. 
+Rahul is offered a cardiac procedure, but Rajiv is sent home. 
+What might explain the difference in the experience of these two nearly identical men? 
+Rajiv suffers from a mental illness. 
+The difference in the quality of medical care received by people with mental illness is one of the reasons why they live shorter lives than people without mental illness. 
+Even in the best-resourced countries in the world, this life expectancy gap is as much as 20 years. 
+In the developing countries of the world, this gap is even larger. 
+But of course, mental illnesses can kill in more direct ways as well. The most obvious example is suicide. 
+It might surprise some of you here, as it did me, when I discovered that suicide is at the top of the list of the leading causes of death in young people in all countries in the world, including the poorest countries of the world. 
+But beyond the impact of a health condition on life expectancy, we're also concerned about the quality of life lived. 
+Now, in order for us to examine the overall impact of a health condition both on life expectancy as well as on the quality of life lived, we need to use a metric called the DALY, which stands for a Disability-Adjusted Life Year. 
+Now when we do that, we discover some startling things about mental illness from a global perspective. 
+We discover that, for example, mental illnesses are amongst the leading causes of disability around the world. 
+Depression, for example, is the third-leading cause of disability, alongside conditions such as diarrhea and pneumonia in children. 
+When you put all the mental illnesses together, they account for roughly 15 percent of the total global burden of disease. 
+Indeed, mental illnesses are also very damaging to people's lives, but beyond just the burden of disease, let us consider the absolute numbers. 
+The World Health Organization estimates that there are nearly four to five hundred million people living on our tiny planet who are affected by a mental illness. 
+Now some of you here look a bit astonished by that number, but consider for a moment the incredible diversity of mental illnesses, from autism and intellectual disability in childhood, through to depression and anxiety, substance misuse and psychosis in adulthood, all the way through to dementia in old age, and I'm pretty sure that each and every one us present here today can think of at least one person, at least one person, who's affected by mental illness in our most intimate social networks. 
+I see some nodding heads there. 
+But beyond the staggering numbers, what's truly important from a global health point of view, what's truly worrying from a global health point of view, is that the vast majority of these affected individuals do not receive the care that we know can transform their lives, and remember, we do have robust evidence that a range of interventions, medicines, psychological interventions, and social interventions, can make a vast difference. 
+And yet, even in the best-resourced countries, for example here in Europe, roughly 50 percent of affected people don't receive these interventions. 
+In the sorts of countries I work in, that so-called treatment gap approaches an astonishing 90 percent. 
+It isn't surprising, then, that if you should speak to anyone affected by a mental illness, the chances are that you will hear stories of hidden suffering, shame and discrimination in nearly every sector of their lives. 
+But perhaps most heartbreaking of all are the stories of the abuse of even the most basic human rights, such as the young woman shown in this image here that are played out every day, sadly, even in the very institutions that were built to care for people with mental illnesses, the mental hospitals. 
+It's this injustice that has really driven my mission to try to do a little bit to transform the lives of people affected by mental illness, and a particularly critical action that I focused on is to bridge the gulf between the knowledge we have that can transform lives, the knowledge of effective treatments, and how we actually use that knowledge in the everyday world. 
+And an especially important challenge that I've had to face is the great shortage of mental health professionals, such as psychiatrists and psychologists, particularly in the developing world. 
+Now I trained in medicine in India, and after that I chose psychiatry as my specialty, much to the dismay of my mother and all my family members who kind of thought neurosurgery would be a more respectable option for their brilliant son. 
+Any case, I went on, I soldiered on with psychiatry, and found myself training in Britain in some of the best hospitals in this country. I was very privileged. 
+I worked in a team of incredibly talented, compassionate, but most importantly, highly trained, specialized mental health professionals. 
+Soon after my training, I found myself working first in Zimbabwe and then in India, and I was confronted by an altogether new reality. 
+This was a reality of a world in which there were almost no mental health professionals at all. 
+In Zimbabwe, for example, there were just about a dozen psychiatrists, most of whom lived and worked in Harare city, leaving only a couple to address the mental health care needs of nine million people living in the countryside. 
+In India, I found the situation was not a lot better. 
+To give you a perspective, if I had to translate the proportion of psychiatrists in the population that one might see in Britain to India, one might expect roughly 150,000 psychiatrists in India. 
+In reality, take a guess. 
+The actual number is about 3,000, about two percent of that number. 
+It became quickly apparent to me that I couldn't follow the sorts of mental health care models that I had been trained in, one that relied heavily on specialized, expensive mental health professionals to provide mental health care in countries like India and Zimbabwe. 
+I had to think out of the box about some other model of care. 
+It was then that I came across these books, and in these books I discovered the idea of task shifting in global health. 
+The idea is actually quite simple. The idea is, when you're short of specialized health care professionals, use whoever is available in the community, train them to provide a range of health care interventions, and in these books I read inspiring examples, for example of how ordinary people had been trained to deliver babies, diagnose and treat early pneumonia, to great effect. 
+And it struck me that if you could train ordinary people to deliver such complex health care interventions, then perhaps they could also do the same with mental health care. 
+Well today, I'm very pleased to report to you that there have been many experiments in task shifting in mental health care across the developing world over the past decade, and I want to share with you the findings of three particular such experiments, all three of which focused on depression, the most common of all mental illnesses. 
+In rural Uganda, Paul Bolton and his colleagues, using villagers, demonstrated that they could deliver interpersonal psychotherapy for depression and, using a randomized control design, showed that 90 percent of the people receiving this intervention recovered as compared to roughly 40 percent in the comparison villages. 
+Similarly, using a randomized control trial in rural Pakistan, Atif Rahman and his colleagues showed that lady health visitors, who are community maternal health workers in Pakistan's health care system, could deliver cognitive behavior therapy for mothers who were depressed, again showing dramatic differences in the recovery rates. Roughly 75 percent of mothers recovered as compared to about 45 percent in the comparison villages. 
+And in my own trial in Goa, in India, we again showed that lay counselors drawn from local communities could be trained to deliver psychosocial interventions for depression, anxiety, leading to 70 percent recovery rates as compared to 50 percent in the comparison primary health centers. 
+Now, if I had to draw together all these different experiments in task shifting, and there have of course been many other examples, and try and identify what are the key lessons we can learn that makes for a successful task shifting operation, I have coined this particular acronym, SUNDAR. 
+What SUNDAR stands for, in Hindi, is "" attractive. "" It seems to me that there are five key lessons that I've shown on this slide that are critically important for effective task shifting. 
+The first is that we need to simplify the message that we're using, stripping away all the jargon that medicine has invented around itself. 
+We need to unpack complex health care interventions into smaller components that can be more easily transferred to less-trained individuals. 
+We need to deliver health care, not in large institutions, but close to people's homes, and we need to deliver health care using whoever is available and affordable in our local communities. 
+And importantly, we need to reallocate the few specialists who are available to perform roles such as capacity-building and supervision. 
+Now for me, task shifting is an idea with truly global significance, because even though it has arisen out of the situation of the lack of resources that you find in developing countries, I think it has a lot of significance for better-resourced countries as well. Why is that? 
+Well, in part, because health care in the developed world, the health care costs in the [developed] world, are rapidly spiraling out of control, and a huge chunk of those costs are human resource costs. 
+But equally important is because health care has become so incredibly professionalized that it's become very remote and removed from local communities. 
+For me, what's truly sundar about the idea of task shifting, though, isn't that it simply makes health care more accessible and affordable but that it is also fundamentally empowering. 
+It empowers ordinary people to be more effective in caring for the health of others in their community, and in doing so, to become better guardians of their own health. Indeed, for me, task shifting is the ultimate example of the democratization of medical knowledge, and therefore, medical power. 
+Just over 30 years ago, the nations of the world assembled at Alma-Ata and made this iconic declaration. 
+Well, I think all of you can guess that 12 years on, we're still nowhere near that goal. 
+Still, today, armed with that knowledge that ordinary people in the community can be trained and, with sufficient supervision and support, can deliver a range of health care interventions effectively, perhaps that promise is within reach now. 
+Indeed, to implement the slogan of Health for All, we will need to involve all in that particular journey, and in the case of mental health, in particular we would need to involve people who are affected by mental illness and their caregivers. 
+It is for this reason that, some years ago, the Movement for Global Mental Health was founded as a sort of a virtual platform upon which professionals like myself and people affected by mental illness could stand together, shoulder-to-shoulder, and advocate for the rights of people with mental illness to receive the care that we know can transform their lives, and to live a life with dignity. 
+And in closing, when you have a moment of peace or quiet in these very busy few days or perhaps afterwards, spare a thought for that person you thought about who has a mental illness, or persons that you thought about who have mental illness, and dare to care for them. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+Stephanie White: I'm going to let her introduce herself to everybody. 
+Can you tell everybody your name? 
+Einstein: Einstein. 
+SW: This is Einstein. Can you tell everyone "" hi ""? 
+E: Hello. 
+SW: That's nice. Can you be polite? 
+E: Hi, sweetheart. 
+SW: Much better. Well, Einstein is very honored to be here at TED 2006, amongst all you modern-day Einsteins. In fact, she's very excited. 
+E: Woo. 
+SW: Yeah. 
+(Laughter) Since we've arrived, there's been a constant buzz about all the exciting speakers here for the conference. 
+This morning we've heard a lot of whispers about Tom Reilly's wrap-up on Saturday. Einstein, did you hear whispers? 
+E: [Squawks] SW: Yeah. 
+(Laughter) Einstein's especially interested in Penelope's talk. 
+A lot of her research goes on in caves, which can get pretty dusty. 
+E: Achoo! 
+SW: It could make her sneeze. But more importantly, her research could help Einstein find a cure for her never-ending scratchy throat. 
+Einstein: [Coughs] SW: Yeah. 
+(Laughter) Well, Bob Russell was telling us about his work on nanotubes in his research at the microscopic level. 
+Well, that's really cool, but what Einstein's really hoping is that maybe he'll genetically engineer a five-pound peanut. 
+E: Oh, my God! My God! My God! 
+SW: Yeah. She would get really, really excited. 
+(Laughter) That is one big peanut. Since Einstein is a bird, she's very interested in things that fly. 
+She thinks Burt Rutan is very impressive. 
+E: Ooh. 
+SW: Yeah. She especially likes his latest achievement, SpaceShipOne. 
+Einstein, would you like to ride in Burt's spaceship? 
+E: [Spaceship noise] SW: Even if it doesn't have a laser? 
+E: [Laser noise] (Laughter) SW: Yeah, yeah. That was pretty funny, Einstein. 
+Now, Einstein also thinks, you know, working in caves and travelling through space — it's all very dangerous jobs. 
+It would be very dangerous if you fell down. 
+E: Wheeeeeee! [Splat] SW: Yeah. 
+(Laughter) Little splat at the end there. Einstein, did that hurt? 
+E: Ow, ow, ow. 
+SW: Yeah. It's all a lot of hard work. 
+E: [Squawks] SW: Yeah. It can get a bird like Einstein frustrated. E: [Squawks] 
+SW: Yeah, it sure can. But when Einstein needs to relax from her job educating the public, she loves to take in the arts. 
+If the children of the Uganda need another dance partner, Einstein could sure fit the bill, because she loves to dance. 
+Can you get down? 
+E: [Bobbing head] (Laughter) SW: Let's get down for everybody. Come on now. 
+She's going to make me do it, too. Ooh, ooh. 
+Einstein: Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. 
+SW: Do your head now. 
+E: Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. 
+(Laughter) SW: Or maybe Sirena Huang would like to learn some arias on her violin, and Einstein can sing along with some opera? 
+E: [Operatic squawk] SW: Very good. 
+(Laughter) Or maybe Stu just needs another backup singer? 
+Einstein, can you also sing? 
+I know, you need to get rid of that seed first. Can you sing? 
+E: La, la. 
+SW: There you go. And, of course, if all else fails, you can just run off and enjoy a fun fiesta. 
+E: [Squawks] SW: All right. Well, Einstein was pretty embarrassed to admit this earlier, but she was telling me backstage that she had a problem. 
+E: What's the matter? 
+SW: No, I don't have a problem. You have the problem, remember? 
+You were saying that you were really embarrassed, because you're in love with a pirate? 
+E: Yar. 
+SW: There you go. And what do pirates like to drink? 
+E: Beer. 
+SW: Yeah, that's right. But you don't like to drink beer, Einstein. 
+You like to drink water. 
+E: [Water sound] SW: Very good. Now, really, she is pretty nervous. 
+Because one of her favorite folks from back home is here, and she's pretty nervous to meet him. 
+She thinks Al Gore is a really good-looking man. 
+What do you say to a good-looking man? 
+E: Hey, baby. 
+(Laughter) SW: And so do all the folks back home in Tennessee. 
+E: Yee haw. 
+(Laughter) SW: And since she's such a big fan, she knows that his birthday is coming up at the end of March. 
+And we didn't think he'd be in town then, so Einstein wanted to do something special for him. 
+So let's see if Einstein will sing "" Happy Birthday "" to Al Gore. 
+Can you sing "" Happy Birthday "" to him? 
+E: Happy birthday to you. 
+SW: Again. 
+E: Happy birthday to you. 
+SW: Again. 
+E: Happy birthday to you. 
+SW: Big finish. 
+E: Happy birthday to you. 
+SW: Good job! 
+(Applause) Well, before we wrap it up, she would like to give a shout out to all our animal friends back at the Knoxville Zoo. 
+Einstein, do you want to say "" hi "" to all the owls? 
+E: Woo, woo, woo. 
+SW: What about the other birds? 
+E: Tweet, tweet, tweet. 
+SW: And the penguin? 
+E: Quack, quack, quack. 
+SW: There we go. 
+(Laughter) Let's get that one out of there. How about a chimpanzee? 
+E: Ooh, ooh, ooh. Aah, aah, aah. 
+SW: Very good. 
+(Laughter) What about a wolf? 
+E: Ooooowww. 
+SW: And a pig? 
+E: Oink, oink, oink. 
+SW: And the rooster? 
+E: Cock-a-doodle-doo! 
+SW: And how about those cats? 
+E: Meow. 
+(Laughter) SW: At the zoo we have big cats from the jungle. 
+E: Grrrrr. 
+(Laughter) SW: What about a skunk? 
+E: Stinker. 
+(Laughter) SW: She's a comedian. I suppose you think you're famous? Are you famous? 
+E: Superstar. 
+SW: Yeah. You are a superstar. 
+(Laughter) Well, we would like to encourage all of you to do your part to help protect Einstein's animal friends, and to do your part to help protect their homes that they live [in]. 
+Now, Einstein does say it best when we ask her. 
+Why do we want to protect your home? 
+E: I'm special. 
+SW: You are very special. What would you like to say to all these nice people? 
+E: I love you. 
+SW: That's good. Can you blow them a kiss? 
+E: [Kissing noise] SW: And what do you say when it's time to go? 
+E: Goodbye. 
+SW: Good job. Thank you all. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I come from the tallest people on the planet — the Dutch. 
+It hasn't always been this way. 
+In fact, all across the globe, people have been gaining height. 
+In the last 150 years, in developed countries, on average, we have gotten 10 centimeters taller. 
+And scientists have a lot of theories about why this is, but almost all of them involve nutrition, namely the increase of dairy and meat. 
+In the last 50 years, global meat consumption has more than quadrupled, from 71 million tons to 310 million tons. 
+Something similar has been going on with milk and eggs. 
+In every society where incomes have risen, so has protein consumption. 
+And we know that globally, we are getting richer. 
+And as the middle class is on the rise, so is our global population, from 7 billion of us today to 9.7 billion by 2050, which means that by 2050, we are going to need at least 70 percent more protein than what is available to humankind today. 
+And the latest prediction of the UN puts that population number, by the end of this century, at 11 billion, which means that we are going to need a lot more protein. 
+This challenge is staggering — so much so, that recently, a team at Anglia Ruskin Global Sustainability Institute suggested that if we don't change our global policies and food production systems, our societies might actually collapse in the next 30 years. 
+Currently, our ocean serves as the main source of animal protein. 
+Over 2.6 billion people depend on it every single day. 
+At the same time, our global fisheries are two-and-a-half times larger than what our oceans can sustainably support, meaning that humans take far more fish from the ocean than the oceans can naturally replace. 
+WWF recently published a report showing that just in the last 40 years, our global marine life has been slashed in half. 
+And another recent report suggests that of our largest predatory species, such as swordfish and bluefin tuna, over 90 percent has disappeared since the 1950s. 
+And there are a lot of great, sustainable fishing initiatives across the planet working towards better practices and better-managed fisheries. 
+But ultimately, all of these initiatives are working towards keeping current catch constant. 
+It's unlikely, even with the best-managed fisheries, that we are going to be able to take much more from the ocean than we do today. 
+We have to stop plundering our oceans the way we have. 
+We need to alleviate the pressure on it. 
+And we are at a point where if we push much harder for more produce, we might face total collapse. 
+Our current systems are not going to feed a growing global population. 
+So how do we fix this? 
+What's the world going to look like in just 35 short years when there's 2.7 billion more of us sharing the same resources? 
+We could all become vegan. 
+Sounds like a great idea, but it's not realistic and it's impossibly hard to mandate globally. 
+People are eating animal protein whether we like it or not. 
+And suppose we fail to change our ways and continue on the current path, failing to meet demands. 
+The World Health Organization recently reported that 800 million people are suffering from malnutrition and food shortage, which is due to that same growing, global population and the declining access to resources like water, energy and land. 
+It takes very little imagination to picture a world of global unrest, riots and further malnutrition. 
+People are hungry, and we are running dangerously low on natural resources. 
+For so, so many reasons, we need to change our global food production systems. 
+We must do better and there is a solution. 
+And that solution lies in aquaculture — the farming of fish, plants like seaweed, shellfish and crustaceans. 
+As the great ocean hero Jacques Cousteau once said, "" We must start using the ocean as farmers instead of hunters. 
+That's what civilization is all about — farming instead of hunting. "" Fish is the last food that we hunt. 
+And why is it that we keep hearing phrases like, "Life's too short for farmed fish," or, "" Wild-caught, of course! "" over fish that we know virtually nothing about? 
+We don't know what it ate during its lifetime, and we don't know what pollution it encounters. 
+And if it was a large predatory species, it might have gone through the coast of Fukushima yesterday. 
+Very few people realize the traceability in fisheries never goes beyond the hunter that caught the wild animal. 
+But let's back up for a second and talk about why fish is the best food choice. 
+It's healthy, it prevents heart disease, it provides key amino acids and key fatty acids like Omega-3s, which is very different from almost any other type of meat. 
+And aside from being healthy, it's also a lot more exciting and diverse. 
+Think about it — most animal farming is pretty monotonous. 
+Cow is cow, sheep is sheep, pig's pig, and poultry — turkey, duck, chicken — pretty much sums it up. 
+And then there's 500 species of fish being farmed currently. 
+not that Western supermarkets reflect that on their shelves, but that's beside that point. 
+And you can farm fish in a very healthy manner that's good for us, good for the planet and good for the fish. 
+I know I sound fish-obsessed — (Laughter) Let me explain: My brilliant partner and wife, Amy Novograntz, and I got involved in aquaculture a couple of years ago. 
+We were inspired by Sylvia Earle, who won the TED Prize in 2009. 
+We actually met on Mission Blue I in the Galapagos. 
+Amy was there as the TED Prize Director; me, an entrepreneur from the Netherlands and concerned citizen, love to dive, passion for the oceans. 
+Mission Blue truly changed our lives. 
+We fell in love, got married and we came away really inspired, thinking we really want to do something about ocean conservation — something that was meant to last, that could make a real difference and something that we could do together. 
+Little did we expect that that would lead us to fish farming. 
+But a few months after we got off the boat, we got to a meeting at Conservation International, where the Director General of WorldFish was talking about aquaculture, asking a room full of environmentalists to stop turning from it, realize what was going on and to really get involved because aquaculture has the potential to be just what our oceans and populations need. 
+We were stunned when we heard the stats that we didn't know more about this industry already and excited about the chance to help get it right. 
+And to talk about stats — right now, the amount of fish consumed globally, wild catch and farmed combined, is twice the tonnage of the total amount of beef produced on planet earth last year. 
+Every single fishing vessel combined, small and large, across the globe, together produce about 65 million tons of wild-caught seafood for human consumption. 
+Aquaculture this year, for the first time in history, actually produces more than what we catch from the wild. 
+But now this: Demand is going to go up. 
+In the next 35 years, we are going to need an additional 85 million tons to meet demand, which is one-and-a-half times as much, almost, as what we catch globally out of our oceans. 
+An enormous number. 
+It's safe to assume that that's not going to come from the ocean. 
+And talk about farming — for farming you need resources. 
+As a human needs to eat to grow and stay alive, so does an animal. 
+A cow needs to eat eight to nine pounds of feed and drink almost 8,000 liters of water to create just one pound of meat. 
+Experts agree that it's impossible to farm cows for every inhabitant on this planet. 
+We just don't have enough feed or water. 
+And we can't keep cutting down rain forests for it. 
+And fresh water — planet earth has a very limited supply. 
+We need something more efficient to keep humankind alive on this planet. 
+And now let's compare that with fish farming. 
+You can farm one pound of fish with just one pound of feed, and depending on species, even less. 
+And why is that? 
+Well, that's because fish, first of all, float. 
+They don't need to stand around all day resisting gravity like we do. 
+And most fish are cold-blooded — they don't need to heat themselves. 
+Fish chills. 
+(Laughter) And it needs very little water, which is counterintuitive, but as we say, it swims in it but it hardly drinks it. 
+Fish are the most resource-efficient animal protein available to humankind, aside from insects. 
+How much we've learned since. 
+For example, on top of that 65 million tons that's annually caught for human consumption, there's an additional 30 million tons caught for animal feed, mostly sardines and anchovies for the aquaculture industry that's turned into fish meal and fish oil. 
+This is madness. 
+Sixty-five percent of these fisheries, globally, are badly managed. 
+Some of the worst issues of our time are connected to it. 
+It's destroying our oceans. 
+The worst slavery issues imaginable are connected to it. 
+Recently, an article came out of Stanford saying that if 50 percent of the world's aquaculture industry would stop using fish meal, our oceans would be saved. 
+Now think about that for a minute. 
+Now, we know that the oceans have far more problems — they have pollution, there's acidification, coral reef destruction and so on. 
+But it underlines the impact of our fisheries, and it underlines how interconnected everything is. 
+Fisheries, aquaculture, deforestation, climate change, food security and so on. 
+In the search for alternatives, the industry, on a massive scale, has reverted to plant-based alternatives like soy, industrial chicken waste, blood meal from slaughterhouses and so on. 
+And we understand where these choices come from, but this is not the right approach. 
+It's not sustainable, it's not healthy. 
+Have you ever seen a chicken at the bottom of the ocean? 
+If you feed salmon soy with nothing else, it literally explodes. 
+Salmon is a carnivore, it has no way to digest soy. 
+Now, fish farming is by far the best animal farming available to humankind. 
+But it's had a really bad reputation. 
+There's been excessive use of chemicals, there's been virus and disease transfered to wild populations, ecosystem destruction and pollution, escaped fish breeding with wild populations, altering the overall genetic pool, and then of course, as just mentioned, the unsustainable feed ingredients. 
+How blessed were the days when we could just enjoy food that was on our plate, whatever it was. 
+Once you know, you know. 
+You can't go back. 
+It's not fun. 
+We really need a transparent food system that we can trust, that produces healthy food. 
+But the good news is that decades of development and research have led to a lot of new technologies and knowledge that allow us to do a lot better. 
+We can now farm fish without any of these issues. 
+I think of agriculture before the green revolution — we are at aquaculture and the blue revolution. 
+New technologies means that we can now produce a feed that's perfectly natural, with a minimal footprint that consists of microbes, insects, seaweeds and micro-algae. 
+Healthy for the people, healthy for the fish, healthy for the planet. 
+Microbes, for example, can be a perfect alternative for high-grade fish meal — at scale. 
+Insects are the — well, first of all, the perfect recycling because they're grown on food waste; but second, think of fly-fishing, and you know how logical it actually is to use it as fish feed. 
+You don't need large tracts of land for it and you don't need to cut down rain forests for it. 
+And microbes and insects are actually net water producers. 
+This revolution is starting as we speak, it just needs scale. 
+We can now farm far more species than ever before in controlled, natural conditions, creating happy fish. 
+I imagine, for example, a closed system that's performing more efficiently than insect farming, where you can produce healthy, happy, delicious fish with little or no effluent, almost no energy and almost no water and a natural feed with a minimal footprint. 
+Or a system where you grow up to 10 species next to each other — off of each other, mimicking nature. 
+You need very little feed, very little footprint. 
+I think of seaweed growing off the effluent of fish, for example. 
+There's great technologies popping up all over the globe. 
+From alternatives to battle disease so we don't need antibiotics and chemicals anymore, to automated feeders that feel when the fish are hungry, so we can save on feed and create less pollution. 
+Software systems that gather data across farms, so we can improve farm practices. 
+There's really cool stuff happening all over the globe. 
+And make no mistake — all of these things are possible at a cost that's competitive to what a farmer spends today. 
+Tomorrow, there will be no excuse for anyone to not do the right thing. 
+And that's what we've been working on the last couple of years, and that's what we need to be working on together — rethinking everything from the ground up, with a holistic view across the value chain, connecting all these things across the globe, alongside great entrepreneurs that are willing to share a collective vision. 
+Now is the time to create change in this industry and to push it into a sustainable direction. 
+This industry is still young, much of its growth is still ahead. 
+It's a big task, but not as far-fetched as you might think. 
+It's possible. 
+So we need to take pressure off the ocean. 
+And if we eat an animal, it needs to be one that had a happy and healthy life. 
+We need to have a meal that we can trust, live long lives. 
+And this is not just for people in San Francisco or Northern Europe — this is for all of us. 
+Even in the poorest countries, it's not just about money. 
+People prefer something fresh and healthy that they can trust over something that comes from far away that they know nothing about. 
+We're all the same. 
+The day will come where people will realize — no, demand — farmed fish on their plate that's farmed well and that's farmed healthy — and refuse anything less. 
+You can help speed this up. 
+Ask questions when you order seafood. 
+Where does my fish come from? 
+Who raised it, and what did it eat? 
+Information about where your fish comes from and how it was produced needs to be much more readily available. 
+And consumers need to put pressure on the aquaculture industry to do the right thing. 
+So every time you order, ask for detail and show that you really care about what you eat and what's been given to you. 
+And eventually, they will listen. 
+Thank you. 
+
+And I find that since I've been in the Gulf a couple of times, I really kind of am traumatized because whenever I look at the ocean now, no matter where I am, even where I know that none of the oil has gone, I sort of see slicks, and I'm finding that I'm very much haunted by it. 
+It's like you dipped a marble in water. 
+They can handle a hurricane that comes and goes. 
+But when it's something other than water, and their water habitat changes, they don't have many options. 
+If you go to the site of the blowout, it looks pretty unbelievable. 
+It looks like you just emptied the oil pan in your car, and you just dumped it in the ocean. 
+If you go to the places where it's just arriving, like the eastern part of the Gulf, in Alabama, there's still people using the beach while there are people cleaning up the beach. 
+signs of their outrage... 
+There's a lot you can't see, also, underwater. 
+But I couldn't take a submarine ride — especially between the time I knew I was coming here and today — so I had to do a little experiment myself to see if there was oil in the Gulf of Mexico. 
+I think it's being hidden on purpose. 
+Now this is such a catastrophe and such a mess that lots of stuff is leaking out on the edges of the information stream. 
+You can see where the oil is concentrated at the surface, and then it is attacked, because they don't want the evidence, in my opinion. 
+These guys have to swim around through it. 
+That guide's entire calendar year is canceled bookings. 
+He has no bookings left. 
+That's the story of thousands of people. 
+So he moved away from it, turned around a few minutes later, it was right next to the side of the boat again. 
+The other thing about the Gulf that is important is that there are a lot of animals that concentrate in the Gulf at certain parts of the year. 
+These tuna swim the entire ocean. 
+They get in the Gulf Stream, they go all the way to Europe. 
+And that lower photo, that's a bird colony that has been boomed. 
+These birds make a living by diving into the water. 
+But really, where are those birds going to get released to? 
+It really started from the destruction of the idea that the government is there because it's our government, meant to protect the larger public interest. 
+So I think that the oil blowout, the bank bailout, the mortgage crisis and all these things are absolutely symptoms of the same cause. 
+But in the entire rest of government right now and for the last at least 30 years, there has been a culture of deregulation that is caused directly by the people who we need to be protected from, buying the government out from under us. 
+So what we really need to do is regain the idea that it's our government safeguarding our interests, and regain a sense of unity and common cause in our country that really has been lost. 
+So it's a continued fight. 
+It's a historic moment right now. 
+Who says it's too expensive? 
+We've been here before with energy, and people saying the economy cannot withstand a switch, because the cheapest energy was slavery. 
+
+My story actually began when I was four years old and my family moved to a new neighborhood in our hometown of Savannah, Georgia. 
+And this was the 1960s when actually all the streets in this neighborhood were named after Confederate war generals. 
+We lived on Robert E. Lee Boulevard. 
+And when I was five, my parents gave me an orange Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle. 
+It had a swooping banana seat and those ape hanger handlebars that made the rider look like an orangutan. 
+That's why they were called ape hangers. 
+They were actually modeled on hotrod motorcycles of the 1960s, which I'm sure my mom didn't know. 
+And one day I was exploring this cul-de-sac hidden away a few streets away. 
+And I came back, and I wanted to turn around and get back to that street more quickly, so I decided to turn around in this big street that intersected our neighborhood, and wham! I was hit by a passing sedan. 
+My mangled body flew in one direction, my mangled bike flew in the other. 
+And I lay on the pavement stretching over that yellow line, and one of my neighbors came running over. 
+"" Andy, Andy, how are you doing? "" she said, using the name of my older brother. 
+(Laughter) "" I'm Bruce, "" I said, and promptly passed out. 
+I broke my left femur that day — it's the largest bone in your body — and spent the next two months in a body cast that went from my chin to the tip of my toe to my right knee, and a steel bar went from my right knee to my left ankle. 
+And for the next 38 years, that accident was the only medically interesting thing that ever happened to me. 
+In fact, I made a living by walking. 
+I traveled around the world, entered different cultures, wrote a series of books about my travels, including "" Walking the Bible. "" I hosted a television show by that name on PBS. 
+I was, for all the world, the "" walking guy. "" Until, in May 2008, a routine visit to my doctor and a routine blood test produced evidence in the form of an alkaline phosphatase number that something might be wrong with my bones. 
+And my doctor, on a whim, sent me to get a full-body bone scan, which showed that there was some growth in my left leg. 
+That sent me to an X-ray, then to an MRI. 
+And one afternoon, I got a call from my doctor. 
+"" The tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor. "" I stopped walking, and it took my mind a second to convert that double negative into a much more horrifying negative. 
+I have cancer. 
+And to think that the tumor was in the same bone, in the same place in my body as the accident 38 years earlier — it seemed like too much of a coincidence. 
+So that afternoon, I went back to my house, and my three year-old identical twin daughters, Eden and Tybee Feiler, came running to meet me. 
+They'd just turned three, and they were into all things pink and purple. 
+In fact, we called them Pinkalicious and Purplicious — although I must say, our favorite nickname occurred on their birthday, April 15th. 
+When they were born at 6: 14 and 6: 46 on April 15, 2005, our otherwise grim, humorless doctor looked at his watch, and was like, "" Hmm, April 15th — tax day. 
+Early filer and late filer. "" (Laughter) The next day I came to see him. I was like, "" Doctor, that was a really good joke. "" And he was like, "" You're the writer, kid. "" Anyway — so they had just turned three, and they came and they were doing this dance they had just made up where they were twirling faster and faster until they tumbled to the ground, laughing with all the glee in the world. 
+I crumbled. 
+I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them, the art projects I might not mess up, the boyfriends I might not scowl at, the aisles I might not walk down. 
+Would they wonder who I was, I thought. 
+Would they yearn for my approval, my love, my voice? 
+A few days later, I woke with an idea of how I might give them that voice. 
+I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to be present in the passages of my daughters' lives. 
+"I believe my girls will have plenty of opportunities in their lives," I wrote these men. 
+"" They'll have loving families and welcoming homes, but they may not have me. 
+They may not have their dad. 
+Will you help be their dad? "" And I said to myself I would call this group of men "" the Council of Dads. "" Now as soon as I had this idea, I decided I wouldn't tell my wife. Okay. 
+She's a very upbeat, naturally excited person. 
+There's this idea in this culture — I don't have to tell you — that you sort of "" happy "" your way through a problem. 
+We should focus on the positive. 
+My wife, as I said, she grew up outside of Boston. 
+She's got a big smile. She's got a big personality. 
+She's got big hair — although, she told me recently, I can't say she has big hair, because if I say she has big hair, people will think she's from Texas. 
+And it's apparently okay to marry a boy from Georgia, but not to have hair from Texas. 
+And actually, in her defense, if she were here right now, she would point out that, when we got married in Georgia, there were three questions on the marriage certificate license, the third of which was, "" Are you related? "" (Laughter) I said, "" Look, in Georgia at least we want to know. 
+In Arkansas they don't even ask. "" What I didn't tell her is, if she said, "" Yes, "" you could jump. 
+You don't need the 30-day waiting period. 
+Because you don't need the get-to-know-you session at that point. 
+So I wasn't going to tell her about this idea, but the next day I couldn't control myself, I told her. 
+And she loved the idea, but she quickly started rejecting my nominees. 
+She was like, "" Well, I love him, but I would never ask him for advice. "" So it turned out that starting a council of dads was a very efficient way to find out what my wife really thought of my friends. 
+(Laughter) So we decided that we needed a set of rules, and we came up with a number. 
+And the first one was no family, only friends. 
+We thought our family would already be there. 
+Second, men only. 
+We were trying to fill the dad-space in the girls' lives. 
+And then third, sort of a dad for every side. 
+We kind of went through my personality and tried to get a dad who represented each different thing. 
+So what happened was I wrote a letter to each of these men. 
+And rather than send it, I decided to read it to them in person. 
+Linda, my wife, joked that it was like having six different marriage proposals. 
+I sort of friend-married each of these guys. 
+And the first of these guys was Jeff Schumlin. 
+Now Jeff led this trip I took to Europe when I graduated from high school in the early 1980s. 
+And on that first day we were in this youth hostel in a castle. 
+And I snuck out behind, and there was a moat, a fence and a field of cows. 
+And Jeff came up beside me and said, "So, have you ever been cow tipping?" 
+I was like, "" Cow tipping? 
+He was like, "" Yeah. Cows sleep standing up. 
+So if you approach them from behind, down wind, you can push them over and they go thud in the mud. "" So before I had a chance to determine whether this was right or not, we had jumped the moat, we had climbed the fence, we were tiptoeing through the dung and approaching some poor, dozing cow. 
+So a few weeks after my diagnosis, we went up to Vermont, and I decided to put Jeff as the first person in the Council of Dads. 
+And we went to this apple orchard, and I read him this letter. 
+"Will you help be their dad?" 
+And I got to the end — he was crying and I was crying — and then he looked at me, and he said, "" Yes. "" I was like, "" Yes? "" I kind of had forgotten there was a question at the heart of my letter. 
+And frankly, although I keep getting asked this, it never occurred to me that anybody would turn me down under the circumstances. 
+And then I asked him a question, which I ended up asking to all the dads and ended up really encouraging me to write this story down in a book. 
+And that was, "" What's the one piece of advice you would give to my girls? "" And Jeff's advice was, "" Be a traveller, not a tourist. 
+Get off the bus. Seek out what's different. 
+Approach the cow. "" "" So it's 10 years from now, "" I said, "" and my daughters are about to take their first trip abroad, and I'm not here. 
+What would you tell them? "" He said, "" I would approach this journey as a young child might approach a mud puddle. 
+You can bend over and look at your reflection in the mirror and maybe run your finger and make a small ripple, or you can jump in and thrash around and see what it feels like, what it smells like. "" And as he talked he had that glint in his eye that I first saw back in Holland — the glint that says, "" Let's go cow tipping, "" even though we never did tip the cow, even though no one tips the cow, even though cows don't sleep standing up. 
+He said, "" I want to see you back here girls, at the end of this experience, covered in mud. "" Two weeks after my diagnosis, a biopsy confirmed I had a seven-inch osteosarcoma in my left femur. 
+Six hundred Americans a year get an osteosarcoma. 
+Eighty-five percent are under 21. 
+Only a hundred adults a year get one of these diseases. 
+Twenty years ago, doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped, and there was a 15 percent survival rate. 
+And then in the 1980's, they determined that one particular cocktail of chemo could be effective, and within weeks I had started that regimen. 
+And since we are in a medical room, I went through four and a half months of chemo. 
+Actually I had Cisplatin, Doxorubicin and very high-dose Methotrexate. 
+And then I had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon, Dr. John Healey at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium. 
+And if you did see the Sanjay special, you saw these enormous screws that they screwed into my pelvis. 
+Then he took my fibula from my calf, cut it out and then relocated it to my thigh, where it now lives. 
+And what he actually did was he de-vascularized it from my calf and re-vascularized it in my thigh and then connected it to the good parts of my knee and my hip. 
+And then he took out a third of my quadriceps muscle. 
+This is a surgery so rare only two human beings have survived it before me. 
+And my reward for surviving it was to go back for four more months of chemo. 
+It was, as we said in my house, a lost year. 
+Because in those opening weeks, we all had nightmares. 
+And one night I had a nightmare that I was walking through my house, sat at my desk and saw photographs of someone else's children sitting on my desk. 
+And I remember a particular one night that, when you told that story of — I don't know where you are Dr. Nuland — of William Sloane Coffin — it made me think of it. 
+Because I was in the hospital after, I think it was my fourth round of chemo when my numbers went to zero, and I had basically no immune system. 
+And they put me in an infectious disease ward at the hospital. 
+And anybody who came to see me had to cover themselves in a mask and cover all of the extraneous parts of their body. 
+And one night I got a call from my mother-in-law that my daughters, at that time three and a half, were missing me and feeling my absence. 
+And I hung up the phone, and I put my face in my hands, and I screamed this silent scream. 
+And what you said, Dr. Nuland — I don't know where you are — made me think of this today. 
+Because the thought that came to my mind was that the feeling that I had was like a primal scream. 
+And what was so striking — and one of the messages I want to leave you here with today — is the experience. 
+As I became less and less human — and at this moment in my life, I was probably 30 pounds less than I am right now. 
+Of course, I had no hair and no immune system. 
+They were actually putting blood inside my body. 
+At that moment I was less and less human, I was also, at the same time, maybe the most human I've ever been. 
+And what was so striking about that time was, instead of repulsing people, I was actually proving to be a magnet for people. 
+People were incredibly drawn. 
+When my wife and I had kids, we thought it would be all-hands-on-deck. 
+Instead, it was everybody running the other way. 
+And when I had cancer, we thought it'd be everybody running the other way. 
+Instead, it was all-hands-on-deck. 
+And when people came to me, rather than being incredibly turned off by what they saw — I was like a living ghost — they were incredibly moved to talk about what was going on in their own lives. 
+Cancer, I found, is a passport to intimacy. 
+It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to, but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed when we do. 
+And this also happened to my girls as they began to see, and, we thought, maybe became an ounce more compassionate. 
+One day, my daughter Tybee, Tybee came to me, and she said, "" I have so much love for you in my body, daddy, I can't stop giving you hugs and kisses. 
+And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that's where love comes from. "" (Laughter) And one night my daughter Eden came to me. 
+And as I lifted my leg out of bed, she reached for my crutches and handed them to me. 
+In fact, if I cling to one memory of this year, it would be walking down a darkened hallway with five spongy fingers grasping the handle underneath my hand. 
+I didn't need the crutch anymore, I was walking on air. 
+And one of the profound things that happened was this act of actually connecting to all these people. 
+And it made me think — and I'll just note for the record — one word that I've only heard once actually was when we were all doing Tony Robbins yoga yesterday — the one word that has not been mentioned in this seminar actually is the word "" friend. "" And yet from everything we've been talking about — compliance, or addiction, or weight loss — we now know that community is important, and yet it's one thing we don't actually bring in. 
+And there was something incredibly profound about sitting down with my closest friends and telling them what they meant to me. 
+And one of the things that I learned is that over time, particularly men, who used to be non-communicative, are becoming more and more communicative. 
+And that particularly happened — there was one in my life — is this Council of Dads that Linda said, what we were talking about, it's like what the moms talk about at school drop-off. 
+And no one captures this modern manhood to me more than David Black. 
+Now David is my literary agent. 
+He's about five-foot three and a half on a good day, standing fully upright in cowboy boots. 
+And on kind of the manly-male front, he answers the phone — I can say this I guess because you've done it here — he answers the phone, "" Yo, motherfucker. "" He gives boring speeches about obscure bottles of wine, and on his 50th birthday he bought a convertible sports car — although, like a lot of men, he's impatient; he bought it on his 49th. 
+But like a lot of modern men, he hugs, he bakes, he leaves work early to coach Little League. 
+Someone asked me if he cried when I asked him to be in the council of dads. 
+I was like, "" David cries when you invite him to take a walk. "" (Laughter) But he's a literary agent, which means he's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams don't come true. 
+And this is what we wanted him to capture — what it means to have setbacks and then aspirations. 
+And I said, "" What's the most valuable thing you can give to a dreamer? "" And he said, "" A belief in themselves. "" "" But when I came to see you, "" I said, "" I didn't believe in myself. 
+I was at a wall. "" He said, "" I don't see the wall, "" and I'm telling you the same, Don't see the wall. 
+You may encounter one from time to time, but you've got to find a way to get over it, around it, or through it. 
+But whatever you do, don't succumb to it. 
+Don't give in to the wall. 
+My home is not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, and during the year and a half I was on crutches, it became a sort of symbol to me. 
+So one day near the end of my journey, I said, "" Come on girls, let's take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. "" We set out on crutches. 
+I was on crutches, my wife was next to me, my girls were doing these rockstar poses up ahead. 
+And because walking was one of the first things I lost, I spent most of that year thinking about this most elemental of human acts. 
+Walking upright, we are told, is the threshold of what made us human. 
+And yet, for the four million years humans have been walking upright, the act is essentially unchanged. 
+As my physical therapist likes to say, "Every step is a tragedy waiting to happen." 
+You nearly fall with one leg, then you catch yourself with the other. 
+And the biggest consequence of walking on crutches — as I did for a year and a half — is that you walk slower. 
+You hurry, you get where you're going, but you get there alone. 
+You go slow, you get where you're going, but you get there with this community you built along the way. 
+At the risk of admission, I was never nicer than the year I was on crutches. 
+200 years ago, a new type of pedestrian appeared in Paris. 
+He was called a "" flaneur, "" one who wanders the arcades. 
+And it was the custom of those flaneurs to show they were men of leisure by taking turtles for walks and letting the reptile set the pace. 
+And I just love this ode to slow moving. 
+And it's become my own motto for my girls. 
+Take a walk with a turtle. 
+Behold the world in pause. 
+And this idea of pausing may be the single biggest lesson I took from my journey. 
+There's a quote from Moses on the side of the Liberty Bell, and it comes from a passage in the book of Leviticus, that every seven years you should let the land lay fallow. 
+And every seven sets of seven years, the land gets an extra year of rest during which time all families are reunited and people surrounded with the ones they love. 
+That 50th year is called the jubilee year, and it's the origin of that term. 
+And though I'm shy of 50, it captures my own experience. 
+My lost year was my jubilee year. 
+By laying fallow, I planted the seeds for a healthier future and was reunited with the ones I love. 
+Come the one year anniversary of my journey, I went to see my surgeon, Dr. John Healey — and by the way, Healey, great name for a doctor. 
+He's the president of the International Society of Limb Salvage, which is the least euphemistic term I've ever heard. 
+And I said, "" Dr. Healey, if my daughters come to you one day and say, 'What should I learn from my daddy's story?' what would you tell them? "" He said, "" I would tell them what I know, and that is everybody dies, but not everybody lives. 
+I want you to live. "" I wrote a letter to my girls that appears at the end of my book, "" The Council of Dads, "" and I listed these lessons, a few of which you've heard here today: Approach the cow, pack your flipflops, don't see the wall, live the questions, harvest miracles. 
+As I looked at this list — to me it was sort of like a psalm book of living — I realized, we may have done it for our girls, but it really changed us. 
+And that is, the secret of the Council of Dads, is that my wife and I did this in an attempt to help our daughters, but it really changed us. 
+So I stand here today as you see now, walking without crutches or a cane. 
+And last week I had my 18-month scans. 
+And as you all know, anybody with cancer has to get follow-up scans. 
+In my case it's quarterly. 
+And all the collective minds in this room, I dare say, can never find a solution for scan-xiety. 
+As I was going there, I was wondering, what would I say depending on what happened here. 
+I got good news that day, and I stand here today cancer-free, walking without aid and hobbling forward. 
+And I just want to mention briefly in passing — I'm past my time limit — but I just want to briefly mention in passing that one of the nice things that can come out of a conference like this is, at a similar meeting, back in the spring, Anne Wojcicki heard about our story and very quickly — in a span of three weeks — put the full resources of 23andMe, and we announced an initiative in July to get to decode the genome of anybody, a living person with a heart tissue, bone sarcoma. 
+And she told me last night, in the three months since we've done it, we've gotten 300 people who've contributed to this program. 
+And the epidemiologists here will tell you, that's half the number of people who get the disease in one year in the United States. 
+So if you go to 23andMe, or if you go to councilofdads.com, you can click on a link. 
+And we encourage anybody to join this effort. 
+But I'll just close what I've been talking about by leaving you with this message: May you find an excuse to reach out to some long-lost pal, or to that college roommate, or to some person you may have turned away from. 
+May you find a mud puddle to jump in someplace, or find a way to get over, around, or through any wall that stands between you and one of your dreams. 
+And every now and then, find a friend, find a turtle, and take a long, slow walk. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I am in search of another planet in the universe where life exists. 
+I can't see this planet with my naked eyes or even with the most powerful telescopes we currently possess. 
+But I know that it's there. 
+And understanding contradictions that occur in nature will help us find it. 
+On our planet, where there's water, there's life. 
+So we look for planets that orbit at just the right distance from their stars. 
+At this distance, shown in blue on this diagram for stars of different temperatures, planets could be warm enough for water to flow on their surfaces as lakes and oceans where life might reside. 
+Some astronomers focus their time and energy on finding planets at these distances from their stars. 
+What I do picks up where their job ends. 
+I model the possible climates of exoplanets. 
+And here's why that's important: there are many factors besides distance from its star that control whether a planet can support life. 
+Take the planet Venus. 
+It's named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, because of its benign, ethereal appearance in the sky. 
+But spacecraft measurements revealed a different story. 
+The surface temperature is close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 Celsius. 
+That's hot enough to melt lead. 
+Its thick atmosphere, not its distance from the sun, is the reason. 
+It causes a greenhouse effect on steroids, trapping heat from the sun and scorching the planet's surface. 
+The reality totally contradicted initial perceptions of this planet. 
+From these lessons from our own solar system, we've learned that a planet's atmosphere is crucial to its climate and potential to host life. 
+We don't know what the atmospheres of these planets are like because the planets are so small and dim compared to their stars and so far away from us. 
+For example, one of the closest planets that could support surface water — it's called Gliese 667 Cc — such a glamorous name, right, nice phone number for a name — it's 23 light years away. 
+So that's more than 100 trillion miles. 
+Trying to measure the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet passing in front of its host star is hard. 
+It's like trying to see a fruit fly passing in front of a car's headlight. 
+OK, now imagine that car is 100 trillion miles away, and you want to know the precise color of that fly. 
+So I use computer models to calculate the kind of atmosphere a planet would need to have a suitable climate for water and life. 
+Here's an artist's concept of the planet Kepler-62f, with the Earth for reference. 
+It's 1,200 light years away, and just 40 percent larger than Earth. 
+Our NSF-funded work found that it could be warm enough for open water from many types of atmospheres and orientations of its orbit. 
+So I'd like future telescopes to follow up on this planet to look for signs of life. 
+Ice on a planet's surface is also important for climate. 
+Ice absorbs longer, redder wavelengths of light, and reflects shorter, bluer light. 
+That's why the iceberg in this photo looks so blue. 
+The redder light from the sun is absorbed on its way through the ice. 
+Only the blue light makes it all the way to the bottom. 
+Then it gets reflected back to up to our eyes and we see blue ice. 
+My models show that planets orbiting cooler stars could actually be warmer than planets orbiting hotter stars. 
+There's another contradiction — that ice absorbs the longer wavelength light from cooler stars, and that light, that energy, heats the ice. 
+Using climate models to explore how these contradictions can affect planetary climate is vital to the search for life elsewhere. 
+And it's no surprise that this is my specialty. 
+I'm an African-American female astronomer and a classically trained actor who loves to wear makeup and read fashion magazines, so I am uniquely positioned to appreciate contradictions in nature — (Laughter) (Applause)... and how they can inform our search for the next planet where life exists. 
+My organization, Rising Stargirls, teaches astronomy to middle-school girls of color, using theater, writing and visual art. 
+That's another contradiction — science and art don't often go together, but interweaving them can help these girls bring their whole selves to what they learn, and maybe one day join the ranks of astronomers who are full of contradictions, and use their backgrounds to discover, once and for all, that we are truly not alone in the universe. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Alright. 
+I'm going to show you a couple of images from a very diverting paper in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. 
+I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that it is the most diverting paper ever published in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. 
+The title is "" Observations of In-Utero Masturbation. "" (Laughter) Okay. Now on the left you can see the hand — that's the big arrow — and the penis on the right. The hand hovering. 
+And over here we have, in the words of radiologist Israel Meisner, "The hand grasping the penis in a fashion resembling masturbation movements." 
+Bear in mind this was an ultrasound, so it would have been moving images. 
+Orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system. 
+Now, this is the part of the nervous system that deals with the things that we don't consciously control, like digestion, heart rate and sexual arousal. 
+But also, Kinsey interviewed a woman who could be brought to orgasm by having someone stroke her eyebrow. 
+People with spinal cord injuries, like paraplegias, quadriplegias, will often develop a very, very sensitive area right above the level of their injury, wherever that is. 
+There is such a thing as a knee orgasm in the literature. 
+I think the most curious one that I came across was a case report of a woman who had an orgasm every time she brushed her teeth. 
+(Laughter) Something in the complex sensory-motor action of brushing her teeth was triggering orgasm. 
+And she went to a neurologist, who was fascinated. 
+He checked to see if it was something in the toothpaste, but no — it happened with any brand. 
+They stimulated her gums with a toothpick, to see if that was doing it. 
+And the amazing thing to me is that you would think this woman would have excellent oral hygiene. 
+(Laughter) Sadly — this is what it said in the journal paper — "" She believed that she was possessed by demons and switched to mouthwash for her oral care. "" It's so sad. (Laughter) 
+When I was working on the book, I interviewed a woman who can think herself to orgasm. 
+She was part of a study at Rutgers University. 
+You've got to love that. Rutgers. 
+So I interviewed her in Oakland, in a sushi restaurant. 
+And I said, "" So, could you do it right here? "" And she said, "Yeah, but you know I'd rather finish my meal if you don't mind." 
+It was remarkable. It took about one minute. 
+And I said to her, "Are you just doing this all the time?" 
+(Laughter) She said, "" No. Honestly, when I get home, I'm usually too tired. "" (Laughter) She said that the last time she had done it was on the Disneyland tram. (Laughter) 
+The headquarters for orgasm, along the spinal nerve, is something called the sacral nerve root, which is back here. 
+And if you trigger, if you stimulate with an electrode, the precise spot, you will trigger an orgasm. 
+And it is a fact that you can trigger spinal reflexes in dead people — a certain kind of dead person, a beating-heart cadaver. 
+Now this is somebody who is brain-dead, legally dead, definitely checked out, but is being kept alive on a respirator, so that their organs will be oxygenated for transplantation. 
+Now in one of these brain-dead people, if you trigger the right spot, you will see something every now and then. 
+There is a reflex called the Lazarus reflex. 
+It's like this. You trigger the spot. 
+The dead guy, or gal, goes... like that. 
+Very unsettling for people working in pathology labs. 
+(Laughter) Now, if you can trigger the Lazarus reflex in a dead person, why not the orgasm reflex? 
+I asked this question to a brain death expert, Stephanie Mann, who was foolish enough to return my emails. 
+(Laughter) I said, "" So, could you conceivably trigger an orgasm in a dead person? "" She said, "" Yes, if the sacral nerve is being oxygenated, you conceivably could. "" Obviously it wouldn't be as much fun for the person. 
+But it would be an orgasm — (Laughter) nonetheless. 
+I said to her, "" You should do an experiment. 
+You know? You can get cadavers if you work at a university. "" I said, "" You should actually do this. "" She said, "" You get the human subjects review board approval for this one. "" (Laughter) According to 1930s marriage manual author, Theodoor van De Velde, a slight seminal odor can be detected on the breath of a woman within about an hour after sexual intercourse. 
+(Laughter) This is a guy writing a book, "" Ideal Marriage, "" you know. 
+But he wrote in this book, "" Ideal Marriage "" — he said that he could differentiate between the semen of a young man, which he said had a fresh, exhilarating smell, and the semen of mature men, whose semen smelled, quote, "" Remarkably like that of the flowers of the Spanish chestnut. 
+Sometimes quite freshly floral, and then again sometimes extremely pungent. "" (Laughter) Okay. In 1999, in the state of Israel, a man began hiccupping. 
+And this was one of those cases that went on and on. 
+He tried everything his friends suggested. 
+Days went by. 
+And lo and behold, the hiccups went away. 
+He told his doctor, who published a case report in a Canadian medical journal under the title, "Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable Hiccups." 
+I love this article because at a certain point they suggested that unattached hiccuppers could try masturbation. 
+(Laughter) I love that because there is like a whole demographic: unattached hiccuppers. (Laughter) 
+Married, single, unattached hiccupper. 
+In the 1900s, early 1900s, a lot of gynecologists believed that when a woman has an orgasm, the contractions serve to suck the semen up through the cervix and sort of deliver it really quickly to the egg, thereby upping the odds of conception. 
+It was called the "" upsuck "" theory. 
+(Laughter) If you go all the way back to Hippocrates, physicians believed that orgasm in women was not just helpful for conception, but necessary. 
+Doctors back then were routinely telling men the importance of pleasuring their wives. 
+Marriage-manual author and semen-sniffer Theodoor van De Velde — (Laughter) has a line in his book. 
+I loved this guy. 
+He had this line in his book that supposedly comes from the Habsburg Monarchy, where there was an empress Maria Theresa, who was having trouble conceiving. 
+And apparently the royal court physician said to her, "" I am of the opinion that the vulva of your most sacred majesty be titillated for some time prior to intercourse. "" (Laughter) It's apparently, I don't know, on the record somewhere. 
+Masters and Johnson: now we're moving forward to the 1950s. 
+Masters and Johnson were upsuck skeptics, which is also really fun to say. 
+They didn't buy it. 
+And they decided, being Masters and Johnson, that they would get to the bottom of it. 
+And in the artificial semen was a radio-opaque substance, such that it would show up on an X-ray. 
+Anyway, these women sat in front of an X-ray device. 
+And they masturbated. 
+And Masters and Johnson looked to see if the semen was being sucked up. 
+Did not find any evidence of upsuck. 
+You may be wondering, "" How do you make artificial semen? "" (Laughter) I have an answer for you. I have two answers. 
+I actually found three separate recipes in the literature. 
+(Laughter) My favorite being the one that says — you know, they have the ingredients listed, and then in a recipe it will say, for example, "Yield: two dozen cupcakes." 
+This one said, "" Yield: one ejaculate. "" (Laughter) There's another way that orgasm might boost fertility. 
+Sperm that sit around in the body for a week or more start to develop abnormalities that make them less effective at head-banging their way into the egg. 
+British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated that this is perhaps why men evolved to be such enthusiastic and frequent masturbators. 
+He said, "" If I keep tossing myself off I get fresh sperm being made. "" Which I thought was an interesting idea, theory. 
+So now you have an evolutionary excuse. 
+(Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) 
+All righty. There is considerable evidence for upsuck in the animal kingdom — pigs, for instance. 
+In Denmark, the Danish National Committee for Pig Production found out that if you sexually stimulate a sow while you artificially inseminate her, you will see a six-percent increase in the farrowing rate, which is the number of piglets produced. 
+So they came up with this five-point stimulation plan for the sows. 
+There is posters they put in the barn, and they have a DVD. 
+And I got a copy of this DVD. 
+(Laughter) This is my unveiling, because I am going to show you a clip. (Laughter) 
+So, okay. 
+It all looks very innocent. 
+He's going to be doing things with his hands that the boar would use his snout, lacking hands. Okay. 
+(Laughter) This is it. 
+(Laughter) This is to mimic the weight of the boar. (Laughter) 
+You should know, the clitoris of the pig is inside the vagina. 
+So this may be sort of titillating for her. 
+(Laughter) And the happy result. 
+(Applause) I love this video. 
+There is a point in this video, towards the beginning, where they zoom in for a close up of his hand with his wedding ring, as if to say, "" It's okay, it's just his job. 
+He really does like women. "" (Laughter) Okay. When I was in Denmark, my host was named Anne Marie. 
+Why don't you have the farmers do that? 
+That's not one of your five steps. "" I have to read you what she said, because I love it. 
+So we thought, let's not mention the clitoris right now. "" (Laughter) Shy but ambitious pig farmers, however, can purchase a — this is true — a sow vibrator, that hangs on the sperm feeder tube to vibrate. 
+So possibly, you know, a little more arousing than it looks. 
+And I also said to her, "" Now, these sows. I mean, you may have noticed there. 
+They use the upper half of the face; the ears are very expressive. 
+Primates, on the other hand, we use our mouths more. 
+(Laughter) And, interestingly, this has been observed in female macaques, but only when mounting another female. (Laughter) 
+Masters and Johnson. 
+In the 1950s, they decided, okay, we're going to figure out the entire human sexual response cycle, from arousal, all the way through orgasm, in men and women — everything that happens in the human body. 
+This did not stop Masters and Johnson. 
+They developed an artificial coition machine. 
+This is basically a penis camera on a motor. 
+There is a phallus, clear acrylic phallus, with a camera and a light source, attached to a motor that is kind of going like this. 
+And the woman would have sex with it. 
+That is what they would do. Pretty amazing. 
+This just kills me, not because I wanted to use it — I wanted to see it. 
+(Laughter) One fine day, Alfred Kinsey decided to calculate the average distance traveled by ejaculated semen. 
+Doctor Kinsey had heard — and there was a theory going around at the time, this being the 1940s — that the force with which semen is thrown against the cervix was a factor in fertility. 
+Kinsey thought it was bunk, so he got to work. 
+He got together in his lab 300 men, a measuring tape, and a movie camera. 
+(Laughter) And in fact, he found that in three quarters of the men the stuff just kind of slopped out. 
+It wasn't spurted or thrown or ejected under great force. 
+However, the record holder landed just shy of the eight-foot mark, which is impressive. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Yes. Exactly. (Laughter) 
+Sadly, he's anonymous. His name is not mentioned. (Laughter) 
+In his write-up of this experiment in his book, Kinsey wrote, "Two sheets were laid down to protect the oriental carpets." (Laughter) 
+Which is my second favorite line in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey. 
+My favorite being, "" Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female, but not the male. "" (Laughter) Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thanks! 
+
+Eric Berlow: I'm an ecologist, and Sean's a physicist, and we both study complex networks. 
+And we met a couple years ago when we discovered that we had both given a short TED Talk about the ecology of war, and we realized that we were connected by the ideas we shared before we ever met. 
+And then we thought, you know, there are thousands of other talks out there, especially TEDx Talks, that are popping up all over the world. 
+How are they connected, and what does that global conversation look like? 
+So Sean's going to tell you a little bit about how we did that. 
+Sean Gourley: Exactly. So we took 24,000 TEDx Talks from around the world, 147 different countries, and we took these talks and we wanted to find the mathematical structures that underly the ideas behind them. 
+And we wanted to do that so we could see how they connected with each other. 
+And so, of course, if you're going to do this kind of stuff, you need a lot of data. 
+So the data that you've got is a great thing called YouTube, and we can go down and basically pull all the open information from YouTube, all the comments, all the views, who's watching it, where are they watching it, what are they saying in the comments. 
+But we can also pull up, using speech-to-text translation, we can pull the entire transcript, and that works even for people with kind of funny accents like myself. 
+So we can take their transcript and actually do some pretty cool things. 
+We can take natural language processing algorithms to kind of read through with a computer, line by line, extracting key concepts from this. 
+And we take those key concepts and they sort of form this mathematical structure of an idea. 
+And we call that the meme-ome. 
+And the meme-ome, you know, quite simply, is the mathematics that underlies an idea, and we can do some pretty interesting analysis with it, which I want to share with you now. 
+So each idea has its own meme-ome, and each idea is unique with that, but of course, ideas, they borrow from each other, they kind of steal sometimes, and they certainly build on each other, and we can go through mathematically and take the meme-ome from one talk and compare it to the meme-ome from every other talk, and if there's a similarity between the two of them, we can create a link and represent that as a graph, just like Eric and I are connected. 
+So that's theory, that's great. 
+Let's see how it works in actual practice. 
+So what we've got here now is the global footprint of all the TEDx Talks over the last four years exploding out around the world from New York all the way down to little old New Zealand in the corner. 
+And what we did on this is we analyzed the top 25 percent of these, and we started to see where the connections occurred, where they connected with each other. 
+Cameron Russell talking about image and beauty connected over into Europe. 
+We've got a bigger conversation about Israel and Palestine radiating outwards from the Middle East. 
+And we've got something a little broader like big data with a truly global footprint reminiscent of a conversation that is happening everywhere. 
+So from this, we kind of run up against the limits of what we can actually do with a geographic projection, but luckily, computer technology allows us to go out into multidimensional space. 
+So we can take in our network projection and apply a physics engine to this, and the similar talks kind of smash together, and the different ones fly apart, and what we're left with is something quite beautiful. 
+EB: So I want to just point out here that every node is a talk, they're linked if they share similar ideas, and that comes from a machine reading of entire talk transcripts, and then all these topics that pop out, they're not from tags and keywords. 
+They come from the network structure of interconnected ideas. Keep going. 
+SG: Absolutely. So I got a little quick on that, but he's going to slow me down. 
+We've got education connected to storytelling triangulated next to social media. 
+You've got, of course, the human brain right next to healthcare, which you might expect, but also you've got video games, which is sort of adjacent, as those two spaces interface with each other. 
+But I want to take you into one cluster that's particularly important to me, and that's the environment. 
+And I want to kind of zoom in on that and see if we can get a little more resolution. 
+So as we go in here, what we start to see, apply the physics engine again, we see what's one conversation is actually composed of many smaller ones. 
+The structure starts to emerge where we see a kind of fractal behavior of the words and the language that we use to describe the things that are important to us all around this world. 
+So you've got food economy and local food at the top, you've got greenhouse gases, solar and nuclear waste. 
+What you're getting is a range of smaller conversations, each connected to each other through the ideas and the language they share, creating a broader concept of the environment. 
+And of course, from here, we can go and zoom in and see, well, what are young people looking at? 
+And they're looking at energy technology and nuclear fusion. 
+This is their kind of resonance for the conversation around the environment. 
+If we split along gender lines, we can see females resonating heavily with food economy, but also out there in hope and optimism. 
+And so there's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here, and I'll throw to Eric for the next part. 
+EB: Yeah, I mean, just to point out here, you cannot get this kind of perspective from a simple tag search on YouTube. 
+Let's now zoom back out to the entire global conversation out of environment, and look at all the talks together. 
+Now often, when we're faced with this amount of content, we do a couple of things to simplify it. 
+We might just say, well, what are the most popular talks out there? 
+And a few rise to the surface. 
+There's a talk about gratitude. 
+There's another one about personal health and nutrition. 
+And of course, there's got to be one about porn, right? 
+And so then we might say, well, gratitude, that was last year. 
+What's trending now? What's the popular talk now? 
+And we can see that the new, emerging, top trending topic is about digital privacy. 
+So this is great. It simplifies things. 
+But there's so much creative content that's just buried at the bottom. 
+And I hate that. How do we bubble stuff up to the surface that's maybe really creative and interesting? 
+Well, we can go back to the network structure of ideas to do that. 
+Remember, it's that network structure that is creating these emergent topics, and let's say we could take two of them, like cities and genetics, and say, well, are there any talks that creatively bridge these two really different disciplines. 
+And that's — Essentially, this kind of creative remix is one of the hallmarks of innovation. 
+Well here's one by Jessica Green about the microbial ecology of buildings. 
+It's literally defining a new field. 
+And we could go back to those topics and say, well, what talks are central to those conversations? 
+In the cities cluster, one of the most central was one by Mitch Joachim about ecological cities, and in the genetics cluster, we have a talk about synthetic biology by Craig Venter. 
+These are talks that are linking many talks within their discipline. 
+We could go the other direction and say, well, what are talks that are broadly synthesizing a lot of different kinds of fields. 
+We used a measure of ecological diversity to get this. 
+Like, a talk by Steven Pinker on the history of violence, very synthetic. 
+And then, of course, there are talks that are so unique they're kind of out in the stratosphere, in their own special place, and we call that the Colleen Flanagan index. 
+And if you don't know Colleen, she's an artist, and I asked her, "" Well, what's it like out there in the stratosphere of our idea space? "" And apparently it smells like bacon. 
+I wouldn't know. 
+So we're using these network motifs to find talks that are unique, ones that are creatively synthesizing a lot of different fields, ones that are central to their topic, and ones that are really creatively bridging disparate fields. 
+Okay? We never would have found those with our obsession with what's trending now. 
+And all of this comes from the architecture of complexity, or the patterns of how things are connected. 
+SG: So that's exactly right. 
+We've got ourselves in a world that's massively complex, and we've been using algorithms to kind of filter it down so we can navigate through it. 
+And those algorithms, whilst being kind of useful, are also very, very narrow, and we can do better than that, because we can realize that their complexity is not random. 
+It has mathematical structure, and we can use that mathematical structure to go and explore things like the world of ideas to see what's being said, to see what's not being said, and to be a little bit more human and, hopefully, a little smarter. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+For me they normally happen, these career crises, often, actually, on a Sunday evening, just as the sun is starting to set, and the gap between my hopes for myself and the reality of my life starts to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow. 
+I'm mentioning all this — I'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem; you may think I'm wrong in this, but I think we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew — about our lives, about our careers — comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality. 
+It's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety. 
+I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers. 
+Why we might be victims of these career crises, as we're weeping softly into our pillows. 
+One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs. 
+In a way, I've got some bad news, particularly to anybody who's come to Oxford from abroad. 
+The bad news is that's not true. 
+The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. 
+(Laughter) Now, the opposite of a snob is your mother. (Laughter) 
+Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine, but, as it were, the ideal mother, somebody who doesn't care about your achievements. 
+Most people make a strict correlation between how much time, and if you like, love — not romantic love, though that may be something — but love in general, respect — they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy. 
+And that's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. 
+You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. 
+I don't think we are particularly materialistic. 
+Think, "" This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love. "" (Laughter) Feel sympathy, rather than contempt. 
+There are other reasons — (Laughter) There are other reasons why it's perhaps harder now to feel calm than ever before. 
+Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality; we're all basically equal. 
+There is one really big problem with this, and that problem is envy. 
+The closer two people are — in age, in background, in the process of identification — the more there's a danger of envy, which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion, because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with. 
+So there's a spirit of equality combined with deep inequality, which can make for a very stressful situation. 
+It's probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy. 
+The first kind tells you, "" You can do it! You can make it! Anything's possible! "" The other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call "" low self-esteem, "" or impolitely call, "" feeling very bad about yourself. "" There's a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem. 
+So that's another way in which something quite positive can have a nasty kickback. 
+There is another reason why we might be feeling more anxious — about our careers, about our status in the world today, than ever before. 
+And it's, again, linked to something nice. 
+And that makes failure seem much more crushing. 
+You know, in the Middle Ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an "" unfortunate "" — literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. 
+Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may unkindly be described as a "" loser. "" There's a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser, and that shows 400 years of evolution in society and our belief in who is responsible for our lives. 
+That's exhilarating if you're doing well, and very crushing if you're not. 
+There are more suicides in developed, individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. 
+This idea that everybody deserves to get where they get to, I think it's a crazy idea, completely crazy. 
+But I think it's insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely meritocratic; it's an impossible dream. 
+There are simply too many random factors: accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people's heads, illnesses, etc. 
+We will never get to grade them, never get to grade people as they should. 
+I'm drawn to a lovely quote by St. Augustine in "" The City of God, "" where he says, "" It's a sin to judge any man by his post. "" In modern English that would mean it's a sin to come to any view of who you should talk to, dependent on their business card. 
+That is an unknown part of them, and we shouldn't behave as though it is known. 
+Tragic art, as it developed in the theaters of ancient Greece, in the fifth century B.C., was essentially an art form devoted to tracing how people fail, and also according them a level of sympathy, which ordinary life would not necessarily accord them. 
+I gave them the plotline of Madame Bovary. 
+And they wrote "" Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud. "" (Laughter) And then my favorite — they really do have a kind of genius of their own, these guys — my favorite is Sophocles' Oedipus the King: "Sex With Mum Was Blinding." (Laughter) 
+(Applause) In a way, if you like, at one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. 
+The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. 
+We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. 
+It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. 
+And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. 
+What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. 
+So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. 
+These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. 
+When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. 
+When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. 
+So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. 
+We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. 
+But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. 
+But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: That was fascinating. 
+But how do you reconcile this idea of it being bad to think of someone as a "" loser, "" with the idea that a lot of people like, of seizing control of your life, and that a society that encourages that, perhaps has to have some winners and losers? 
+Alain De Botton: Yes, I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. 
+That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic. 
+Or do you think that you can't, but it doesn't matter that much that we're putting too much emphasis on that? 
+AB: The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. 
+And it's a very hard line to make. 
+We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option. 
+
+Today, I'm going to talk to you about sketching electronics. 
+I'm, among several other things, an electrical engineer, and that means that I spend a good amount of time designing and building new pieces of technology, and more specifically designing and building electronics. 
+And what I've found is that the process of designing and building electronics is problematic in all sorts of ways. 
+So it's a really slow process, it's really expensive, and the outcome of that process, namely electronic circuit boards, are limited in all sorts of kind of interesting ways. 
+So they're really small, generally, they're square and flat and hard, and frankly, most of them just aren't very attractive, and so my team and I have been thinking of ways to really change and mix up the process and the outcome of designing electronics. 
+And so what if you could design and build electronics like this? So what if you could do it extremely quickly, extremely inexpensively, and maybe more interestingly, really fluidly and expressively and even improvisationally? 
+Wouldn't that be so cool, and that wouldn't that open up all sorts of new possibilities? 
+I'm going to share with you two projects that are investigations along these lines, and we'll start with this one. 
+(Video) Magnetic electronic pieces and ferrous paper. 
+A conductive pen from the Lewis lab at UIUC. 
+Sticker templates. 
+Speed x 4. 
+Making a switch. 
+Music: DJ Shadow. 
+Adding some intelligence with a microcontroller. 
+Sketching an interface. 
+(Music) (Laughter) (Applause) Pretty cool, huh? We think so. 
+So now that we developed these tools and found these materials that let us do these things, we started to realize that, essentially, anything that we can do with paper, anything that we can do with a piece of paper and a pen we can now do with electronics. 
+So the next project that I want to show you is kind of a deeper exploration of that possibility. 
+And I'll kind of let it speak for itself. 
+(Music) (Applause) So the next step for us in this process is now to find a way to let all of you build things like this, and so the way that we're approaching that is by teaching workshops to people where we explain how they can use these kinds of tools, and then also working to get the tools and the materials and techniques out into the real world in a variety of ways. 
+And so sometime soon, you'll be able to play and build and sketch with electronics in this fundamentally new way. 
+So thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+Because what that means is that for the first time in the history of the species, the majority of babies born in the developed world are having the opportunity to grow old. 
+And we suspect that this may help to explain why older people are better than younger people at solving hotly charged emotional conflicts and debates. 
+(Laughter) We've said, could it be that positive emotions are simply easier to process than negative emotions, and so you switch to the positive emotions? 
+When time horizons are long and nebulous, as they typically are in youth, people are constantly preparing, trying to soak up all the information they possibly can, taking risks, exploring. 
+(Laughter) We go on blind dates. (Laughter) 
+
+Well, this is about state budgets. 
+This is probably the most boring topic of the whole morning. 
+But I want to tell you, I think it's an important topic that we need to care about. 
+State budgets are big, big money — I'll show you the numbers — and they get very little scrutiny. 
+The understanding is very low. 
+Many of the people involved have special interests or short-term interests that get them not thinking about what the implications of the trends are. 
+And these budgets are the key for our future; they're the key for our kids. 
+Most education funding — whether it's K through 12, or the great universities or community colleges — most of the money for those things is coming out of these state budgets. 
+But we have a problem. 
+Here's the overall picture. 
+U.S. economy is big — 14.7 trillion. 
+Now out of that pie, the government spends 36 percent. 
+So this is combining the federal level, which is the largest, the state level and the local level. 
+And it's really in this combined way that you get an overall sense of what's going on, because there's a lot of complex things like Medicaid and research money that flow across those boundaries. 
+But we're spending 36 percent. 
+Well what are we taking in? 
+Simple business question. 
+Answer is 26 percent. 
+Now this leaves 10 percent deficit, sort of a mind-blowing number. 
+And some of that, in fact, is due to the fact that we've had an economic recession. 
+Receipts go down, some spending programs go up, but most of it is not because of that. 
+Most of it is because of ways that the liabilities are building up and the trends, and that creates a huge challenge. 
+In fact, this is the forecast picture. 
+There are various things in here: I could say we might raise more revenue, or medical innovation will make the spending even higher. 
+It is an increasingly difficult picture, even assuming the economy does quite well — probably better than it will do. 
+This is what you see at this overall level. 
+Now how did we get here? 
+How could you have a problem like this? 
+After all, at least on paper, there's this notion that these state budgets are balanced. 
+Only one state says they don't have to balance the budget. 
+But what this means actually is that there's a pretense. 
+There's no real, true balancing going on, and in a sense, the games they play to hide that actually obscure the topic so much that people don't see things that are actually pretty straight-forward challenges. 
+When Jerry Brown was elected, this was the challenge that was put to him. 
+That is, through various gimmicks and things, a so-called balanced budget had led him to have 25 billion missing out of the 76 billion in proposed spending. 
+Now he's put together some thoughts: About half of that he'll cut, another half, perhaps in a very complex set of steps, taxes will be approved. 
+But even so, as you go out into those future years, various pension costs, health costs go up enough, and the revenue does not go up enough. 
+So you get a big squeeze. 
+What were those things that allowed us to hide this? 
+Well, some really nice little tricks. 
+And these were somewhat noticed. 
+The paper said, "" It's not really balanced. 
+It's got holes. 
+It perpetuates deficit spending. 
+It's riddled with gimmicks. "" And really when you get down to it, the guys at Enron never would have done this. 
+This is so blatant, so extreme. 
+Is anyone paying attention to some of the things these guys do? 
+They borrow money. 
+They're not supposed to, but they figure out a way. 
+They make you pay more in withholding just to help their cash flow out. 
+They sell off the assets. 
+They defer the payments. 
+They sell off the revenues from tobacco. 
+And California's not unique. 
+In fact, there's about five states that are worse and only really four states that don't face this big challenge. 
+So it's systemic across the entire country. 
+It really comes from the fact that certain long-term obligations — health care, where innovation makes it more expensive, early retirement and pension, where the age structure gets worse for you, and just generosity — that these mis-accounting things allow to develop over time, that you've got a problem. 
+This is the retiree health care benefits. 
+Three million set aside, 62 billion dollar liability — much worse than the car companies. 
+And everybody looked at that and knew that that was headed toward a huge problem. 
+The forecast for the medical piece alone is to go from 26 percent of the budget to 42 percent. 
+Well what's going to give? 
+Well in order to accommodate that, you would have to cut education spending in half. 
+It really is this young versus the old to some degree. 
+If you don't change that revenue picture, if you don't solve what you're doing in health care, you're going to be deinvesting in the young. 
+The great University of California university system, the great things that have gone on, won't happen. 
+So far it's meant layoffs, increased class sizes. 
+Within the education community there's this discussion of, "" Should it just be the young teachers who get laid off, or the less good teachers who get laid off? "" And there's a discussion: if you're going to increase class sizes, where do you do that? How much effect does that have? 
+And unfortunately, as you get into that, people get confused and think, well maybe you think that's okay. 
+In fact, no, education spending should not be cut. 
+There's ways, if it's temporary, to minimize the impact, but it's a problem. 
+It's also really a problem for where we need to go. 
+Technology has a role to play. 
+Well we need money to experiment with that, to get those tools in there. 
+There's the idea of paying teachers for effectiveness, measuring them, giving them feedback, taking videos in the classroom. 
+That's something I think is very, very important. 
+Well you have to allocate dollars for that system and for that incentive pay. 
+In a situation where you have growth, you put the new money into this. 
+Or even if you're flat, you might shift money into it. 
+But with the type of cuts we're talking about, it will be far, far harder to get these incentives for excellence, or to move over to use technology in the new way. 
+So what's going on? 
+Where's the brain trust that's in error here? 
+Well there really is no brain trust. 
+(Laughter) It's sort of the voters. It's sort of us showing up. 
+Just look at this spending. 
+California will spend over 100 billion, Microsoft, 38, Google, about 19. 
+The amount of IQ in good numeric analysis, both inside Google and Microsoft and outside, with analysts and people of various opinions — should they have spent on that? 
+No, they wasted their money on this. What about this thing? — it really is quite phenomenal. 
+Everybody has an opinion. 
+There's great feedback. 
+And the numbers are used to make decisions. 
+If you go over the education spending and the health care spending — particularly these long-term trends — you don't have that type of involvement on a number that's more important in terms of equity, in terms of learning. 
+So what do we need to do? 
+We need better tools. 
+We can get some things out on the Internet. 
+I'm going to use my website to put up some things that will give the basic picture. 
+We need lots more. 
+There's a few good books, one about school spending and where the money comes from — how that's changed over time, and the challenge. 
+We need better accounting. 
+We need to take the fact that the current employees, the future liabilities they create, that should come out of the current budget. 
+We need to understand why they've done the pension accounting the way they have. 
+It should be more like private accounting. 
+It's the gold standard. 
+And finally, we need to really reward politicians. 
+Whenever they say there's these long-term problems, we can't say, "" Oh, you're the messenger with bad news? 
+We just shot you. "" In fact, there are some like these: Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson and others, who have gone through and given proposals for this overall federal health-spending state-level problem. 
+But in fact, their work was sort of pushed off. 
+In fact, the week afterwards, some tax cuts were done that made the situation even worse than their assumptions. 
+So we need these pieces. 
+Now I think this is a solvable problem. 
+It's a great country with lots of people. 
+But we have to draw those people in, because this is about education. 
+And just look at what happened with the tuitions with the University of California and project that out for another three, four, five years — it's unaffordable. 
+And that's the kind of thing — the investment in the young — that makes us great, allows us to contribute. 
+It allows us to do the art, the biotechnology, the software and all those magic things. 
+And so the bottom line is we need to care about state budgets because they're critical for our kids and our future. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I have the answer to a question that we've all asked. 
+The question is, Why is it that the letter X represents the unknown? 
+Now I know we learned that in math class, but now it's everywhere in the culture — The X prize, the X-Files, Project X, TEDx. 
+Where'd that come from? 
+About six years ago I decided that I would learn Arabic, which turns out to be a supremely logical language. 
+To write a word or a phrase or a sentence in Arabic is like crafting an equation, because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. 
+That's one of the reasons so much of what we've come to think of as Western science and mathematics and engineering was really worked out in the first few centuries of the Common Era by the Persians and the Arabs and the Turks. 
+This includes the little system in Arabic called al-jebra. 
+And al-jebr roughly translates to "the system for reconciling disparate parts." 
+Al-jebr finally came into English as algebra. 
+One example among many. 
+The Arabic texts containing this mathematical wisdom finally made their way to Europe — which is to say Spain — in the 11th and 12th centuries. 
+And when they arrived there was tremendous interest in translating this wisdom into a European language. 
+But there were problems. 
+One problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just don't make it through a European voice box without lots of practice. 
+Trust me on that one. 
+Also, those very sounds tend not to be represented by the characters that are available in European languages. 
+Here's one of the culprits. 
+This is the letter SHeen, and it makes the sound we think of as SH — "" sh. "" It's also the very first letter of the word shalan, which means "" something "" just like the the English word "" something "" — some undefined, unknown thing. 
+Now in Arabic, we can make this definite by adding the definite article "" al. "" So this is al-shalan — the unknown thing. 
+And this is a word that appears throughout early mathematics, such as this 10th century derivation of proofs. 
+The problem for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter SHeen and the word shalan can't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn't have that SH, that "" sh "" sound. 
+So by convention, they created a rule in which they borrowed the CK sound, "" ck "" sound, from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai. 
+Later when this material was translated into a common European language, which is to say Latin, they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X. 
+And once that happened, once this material was in Latin, it formed the basis for mathematics textbooks for almost 600 years. 
+But now we have the answer to our question. 
+Why is it that X is the unknown? X is the unknown 
+because you can't say "" sh "" in Spanish. 
+(Laughter) And I thought that was worth sharing. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When, in 1960, still a student, I got a traveling fellowship to study housing in North America. 
+We traveled the country. 
+We saw public housing high-rise buildings in all major cities: New York, Philadelphia. 
+Those who have no choice lived there. 
+And then we traveled from suburb to suburb, and I came back thinking, we've got to reinvent the apartment building. 
+There has to be another way of doing this. 
+We can't sustain suburbs, so let's design a building which gives the qualities of a house to each unit. 
+Habitat would be all about gardens, contact with nature, streets instead of corridors. 
+We prefabricated it so we would achieve economy, and there it is almost 50 years later. 
+It's a very desirable place to live in. 
+It's now a heritage building, but it did not proliferate. 
+In 1973, I made my first trip to China. 
+It was the Cultural Revolution. 
+We traveled the country, met with architects and planners. 
+This is Beijing then, not a single high rise building in Beijing or Shanghai. 
+Shenzhen didn't even exist as a city. 
+There were hardly any cars. 
+Thirty years later, this is Beijing today. 
+This is Hong Kong. 
+If you're wealthy, you live there, if you're poor, you live there, but high density it is, and it's not just Asia. 
+São Paulo, you can travel in a helicopter 45 minutes seeing those high-rise buildings consume the 19th-century low-rise environment. 
+And with it, comes congestion, and we lose mobility, and so on and so forth. 
+So a few years ago, we decided to go back and rethink Habitat. 
+Could we make it more affordable? 
+Could we actually achieve this quality of life in the densities that are prevailing today? 
+And we realized, it's basically about light, it's about sun, it's about nature, it's about fractalization. 
+Can we open up the surface of the building so that it has more contact with the exterior? 
+We came up with a number of models: economy models, cheaper to build and more compact; membranes of housing where people could design their own house and create their own gardens. 
+And then we decided to take New York as a test case, and we looked at Lower Manhattan. 
+And we mapped all the building area in Manhattan. 
+On the left is Manhattan today: blue for housing, red for office buildings, retail. 
+On the right, we reconfigured it: the office buildings form the base, and then rising 75 stories above, are apartments. 
+There's a street in the air on the 25th level, a community street. 
+It's permeable. 
+There are gardens and open spaces for the community, almost every unit with its own private garden, and community space all around. 
+And most important, permeable, open. 
+It does not form a wall or an obstruction in the city, and light permeates everywhere. 
+And in the last two or three years, we've actually been, for the first time, realizing the quality of life of Habitat in real-life projects across Asia. 
+This in Qinhuangdao in China: middle-income housing, where there is a bylaw that every apartment must receive three hours of sunlight. 
+That's measured in the winter solstice. 
+And under construction in Singapore, again middle-income housing, gardens, community streets and parks and so on and so forth. 
+And Colombo. 
+And I want to touch on one more issue, which is the design of the public realm. 
+A hundred years after we've begun building with tall buildings, we are yet to understand how the tall high-rise building becomes a building block in making a city, in creating the public realm. 
+In Singapore, we had an opportunity: 10 million square feet, extremely high density. 
+Taking the concept of outdoor and indoor, promenades and parks integrated with intense urban life. 
+So they are outdoor spaces and indoor spaces, and you move from one to the other, and there is contact with nature, and most relevantly, at every level of the structure, public gardens and open space: on the roof of the podium, climbing up the towers, and finally on the roof, the sky park, two and a half acres, jogging paths, restaurants, and the world's longest swimming pool. 
+And that's all I can tell you in five minutes. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What I want to do this afternoon is something a little different than what's scheduled. 
+Foreign policy, you can figure that out by watching, I don't know, Rachel Maddow or somebody, but — (Laughter) — I want to talk about young people and structure, young people and structure. 
+It's an old New York school building, nothing fancy. 
+And there are about 300 kids in this school, and the school's been going now for four years, and they're about to graduate their first class. 
+Twenty-two people are graduating, and all 22 are going to college. 
+They all come from homes where there is, for the most part, just one person in the home, usually the mother or the grandmother, and that's it, and they come here for their education and for their structure. 
+Now I had this picture taken, and it was put up on my Facebook page last week, and somebody wrote in, "Huh, why does he have him standing at attention like that?" 
+And then they said, "" But he looks good. "" (Laughter) He does look good, because kids need structure, and the trick I play in all of my school appearances is that when I get through with my little homily to the kids, I then invite them to ask questions, and when they raise their hands, I say, "" Come up, "" and I make them come up and stand in front of me. 
+I make them stand at attention like a soldier. 
+Put your arms straight down at your side, look up, open your eyes, stare straight ahead, and speak out your question loudly so everybody can hear. 
+No slouching, no pants hanging down, none of that stuff. 
+(Laughter) And this young man, his name is — his last name Cruz — he loved it. That's all over his Facebook page and it's gone viral. (Laughter) 
+So people think I'm being unkind to this kid. 
+No, we're having a little fun. 
+And the thing about it, I've done this for years, the younger they are, the more fun it is. 
+When I get six- and seven-year-olds in a group, I have to figure out how to keep them quiet. 
+You know that they'll always start yakking. 
+And so I play a little game with them before I make them stand at attention. 
+I say, "" Now listen. In the army, when we want you to pay attention, we have a command. It's called 'at ease.' It means everybody be quiet and pay attention. Listen up. 
+Do you understand? "" "Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh." "Let's practice. Everybody start chatting." 
+And I let them go for about 10 seconds, then I go, "" At ease! "" "" Huh! "" (Laughter) "Yes, General. Yes, General." 
+Try it with your kids. See if it works. (Laughter) I don't think so. 
+But anyway, it's a game I play, and it comes obviously from my military experience. 
+Because for the majority of my adult life, I worked with young kids, teenagers with guns, I call them. 
+And we would bring them into the army, and the first thing we would do is to put them in an environment of structure, put them in ranks, make them all wear the same clothes, cut all their hair off so they look alike, make sure that they are standing in ranks. 
+We teach them how to go right face, left face, so they can obey instructions and know the consequences of not obeying instructions. 
+It gives them structure. 
+And then we introduce them to somebody who they come to hate immediately, the drill sergeant. 
+And the drill sergeant starts screaming at them, and telling them to do all kinds of awful things. 
+Once that structure is developed, once they understand the reason for something, once they understand, "" Mama ain't here, son. 
+I'm your worst nightmare. I'm your daddy and your mommy. 
+And that's just the way it is. You got that, son? 
+Yeah, and then when I ask you a question, there are only three possible answers: yes, sir; no, sir; and no excuse, sir. 
+Don't start telling me why you didn't do something. 
+It's yes, sir; no, sir; no excuse, sir. "" "You didn't shave." "But sir —" "" No, don't tell me how often you scraped your face this morning. 
+I'm telling you you didn't shave. "" "No excuse, sir." "Attaboy, you're learning fast." 
+But you'd be amazed at what you can do with them once you put them in that structure. 
+In 18 weeks, they have a skill. They are mature. 
+And you know what, they come to admire the drill sergeant and they never forget the drill sergeant. 
+They come to respect him. 
+And so we need more of this kind of structure and respect in the lives of our children. 
+I spend a lot of time with youth groups, and I say to people, "" When does the education process begin? "" We're always talking about, "" Let's fix the schools. 
+Let's do more for our teachers. Let's put more computers in our schools. 
+Let's get it all online. "" That isn't the whole answer. It's part of the answer. 
+But the real answer begins with bringing a child to the school with structure in that child's heart and soul to begin with. 
+When does the learning process begin? Does it begin in first grade? 
+No, no, it begins the first time a child in a mother's arms looks up at the mother and says, "" Oh, this must be my mother. 
+She's the one who feeds me. 
+Oh yeah, when I don't feel so good down there, she takes care of me. 
+It's her language I will learn. "" And at that moment they shut out all the other languages that they could be learning at that age, but by three months, that's her. 
+And if the person doing it, whether it's the mother or grandmother, whoever's doing it, that is when the education process begins. 
+That's when language begins. 
+That's when love begins. That's when structure begins. 
+That's when you start to imprint on the child that "" you are special, you are different from every other child in the world. 
+And we're going to read to you. "" A child who has not been read to is in danger when that child gets to school. 
+A child who doesn't know his or her colors or doesn't know how to tell time, doesn't know how to tie shoes, doesn't know how to do those things, and doesn't know how to do something that goes by a word that was drilled into me as a kid: mind. 
+Mind your manners! Mind your adults! Mind what you're saying! 
+This is the way children are raised properly. 
+And I watched my own young grandchildren now come along and they're, much to the distress of my children, they are acting just like we did. You know? You imprint them. 
+And that's what you have to do to prepare children for education and for school. 
+And I'm working at all the energy I have to sort of communicate this message that we need preschool, we need Head Start, we need prenatal care. 
+The education process begins even before the child is born, and if you don't do that, you're going to have difficulty. 
+And we are having difficulties in so many of our communities and so many of our schools where kids are coming to first grade and their eyes are blazing, they've got their little knapsack on and they're ready to go, and then they realize they're not like the other first graders who know books, have been read to, can do their alphabet. 
+And by the third grade, the kids who didn't have that structure and minding in the beginning start to realize they're behind, and what do they do? 
+They act it out. They act it out, and they're on their way to jail or they're on their way to being dropouts. 
+It's predictable. 
+If you're not at the right reading level at third grade, you are a candidate for jail at age 18, and we have the highest incarceration rate because we're not getting our kids the proper start in life. 
+The last chapter in my book is called "The Gift of a Good Start." 
+The gift of a good start. Every child ought to have a good start in life. 
+I was privileged to have that kind of good start. 
+I was not a great student. 
+I was a public school kid in New York City, and I didn't do well at all. 
+I have my entire New York City Board of Education transcript from kindergarten through college. 
+I wanted it when I was writing my first book. 
+I wanted to see if my memory was correct, and, my God, it was. (Laughter) Straight C everywhere. 
+And I finally bounced through high school, got into the City College of New York with a 78.3 average, which I shouldn't have been allowed in with, and then I started out in engineering, and that only lasted six months. (Laughter) And then I went into geology, "" rocks for jocks. "" This is easy. 
+And then I found ROTC. 
+I found something that I did well and something that I loved doing, and I found a group of youngsters like me who felt the same way. 
+And so my whole life then was dedicated to ROTC and the military. 
+And I say to young kids everywhere, as you're growing up and as this structure is being developed inside of you, always be looking for that which you do well and that which you love doing, and when you find those two things together, man, you got it. 
+That's what's going on. And that's what I found. 
+Now the authorities at CCNY were getting tired of me being there. 
+I'd been there four and a half going on five years, and my grades were not doing particularly well, and I was in occasional difficulties with the administration. 
+And so they said, "" But he does so well in ROTC. 
+Look, he gets straight A's in that but not in anything else. "" And so they said, "" Look, let's take his ROTC grades and roll them into his overall GPA and see what happens. "" And they did, and it brought me up to 2.0. (Laughter) Yep. (Laughter) (Applause) They said, "" It's good enough for government work. 
+Give him to the army. We'll never see him again. We'll never see him again. "" So they shipped me off to the army, and lo and behold, many years later, I'm considered one of the greatest sons the City College of New York has ever had. (Laughter) So, I tell young people everywhere, it ain't where you start in life, it's what you do with life that determines where you end up in life, and you are blessed to be living in a country that, no matter where you start, you have opportunities so long as you believe in yourself, you believe in the society and the country, 
+and you believe that you can self-improve and educate yourself as you go along. 
+And that's the key to success. 
+But it begins with the gift of a good start. 
+If we don't give that gift to each and every one of our kids, if we don't invest at the earliest age, we're going to be running into difficulties. 
+It's why we have a dropout rate of roughly 25 percent overall and almost 50 percent of our minority population living in low-income areas, because they're not getting the gift of a good start. 
+My gift of a good start was not only being in a nice family, a good family, but having a family that said to me, "" Now listen, we came to this country in banana boats in 1920 and 1924. 
+We worked like dogs down in the garment industry every single day. 
+We're not doing it so that you can stick something up your nose or get in trouble. And don't even think about dropping out. "" If I had ever gone home and told those immigrant people that, "" You know, I'm tired of school and I'm dropping out, "" they'd said, "" We're dropping you out. We'll get another kid. "" (Laughter) They had expectations for all of the cousins and the extended family of immigrants that lived in the South Bronx, but they had more than just expectations for us. 
+They stuck into our hearts like a dagger a sense of shame: "" Don't you shame this family. "" Sometimes I would get in trouble, and my parents were coming home, and I was in my room waiting for what's going to happen, and I would sit there saying to myself, "" Okay, look, take the belt and hit me, but, God, don't give me that 'shame the family' bit again. "" It devastated me when my mother did that to me. 
+And I also had this extended network. 
+Children need a network. Children need to be part of a tribe, a family, a community. 
+In my case it was aunts who lived in all of these tenement buildings. 
+I don't know how many of you are New Yorkers, but there were these tenement buildings, and these women were always hanging out one of the windows, leaning on a pillow. 
+They never left. (Laughter) I, so help me God, I grew up walking those streets, and they were always there. 
+They never went to the bathroom. They never cooked. (Laughter) They never did anything. 
+But what they did was keep us in play. 
+They kept us in play. 
+And they didn't care whether you became a doctor or a lawyer or a general, and they never expected any generals in the family, as long as you got an education and then you got a job. 
+"" Don't give us any of that self-actualization stuff. 
+You get a job and get out of the house. 
+We don't have time to waste for that. 
+And then you can support us. That's the role of you guys. "" And so, it's so essential that we kind of put this culture back into our families, all families. 
+And it is so important that all of you here today who are successful people, and I'm sure have wonderful families and children and grandchildren, it's not enough. You've got to reach out and back and find kids like Mr. Cruz who can make it if you give them the structure, if you reach back and help, if you mentor, if you invest in boys and girls clubs, if you work with your school system, make sure it's the best school system, and not just your kid's school, but the school uptown in Harlem, not just downtown Montessori on the West Side. 
+All of us have to have a commitment to do that. 
+And we're not just investing in the kids. 
+We're investing in our future. 
+We're going to be a minority-majority country in one more generation. 
+Those that we call minorities now are going to be the majority. 
+And we have to make sure that they are ready to be the majority. 
+We have to make sure they're ready to be the leaders of this great country of ours, a country that is like no other, a country that amazes me every single day, a country that's fractious. We're always arguing with each other. 
+That's how the system's supposed to work. 
+It's a country of such contrasts, but it's a nation of nations. 
+We touch every nation. Every nation touches us. 
+We are a nation of immigrants. 
+That's why we need sound immigration policy. 
+It's ridiculous not to have a sound immigration policy to welcome those who want to come here and be part of this great nation, or we can send back home with an education to help their people rise up out of poverty. 
+One of the great stories I love to tell is about my love of going to my hometown of New York and walking up Park Avenue on a beautiful day and admiring everything and seeing all the people go by from all over the world. 
+But what I always have to do is stop at one of the corners and get a hot dog from the immigrant pushcart peddler. 
+Gotta have a dirty water dog. (Laughter) And no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I've got to do that. 
+I even did it when I was Secretary of State. 
+I'd come out of my suite at the Waldorf Astoria — (Laughter) — be walking up the street, and I would hit around 55th Street looking for the immigrant pushcart peddler. 
+In those days, I had five bodyguards around me and three New York City police cars would roll alongside to make sure nobody whacked me while I was going up Park Avenue. (Laughter) And I would order the hot dog from the guy, and he'd start to fix it, and then he'd look around at the bodyguards and the police cars — "" I've got a green card! I've got a green card! "" (Laughter) "It's okay, it's okay." 
+But now I'm alone. I'm alone. 
+I've got no bodyguards, I've got no police cars. I've got nothing. 
+But I gotta have my hot dog. 
+I did it just last week. It was on a Tuesday evening down by Columbus Circle. 
+And the scene repeats itself so often. 
+I'll go up and ask for my hot dog, and the guy will fix it, and as he's finishing, he'll say, "" I know you. I see you on television. 
+You're, well, you're General Powell. "" "Yes, yes." "Oh..." I hand him the money. 
+"" No, General. You can't pay me. I've been paid. 
+America has paid me. I never forget where I came from. 
+But now I'm an American. Sir, thank you. "" I accept the generosity, continue up the street, and it washes over me, my God, it's the same country that greeted my parents this way 90 years ago. 
+So we are still that magnificent country, but we are fueled by young people coming up from every land in the world, and it is our obligation as contributing citizens to this wonderful country of ours to make sure that no child gets left behind. 
+(Applause) 
+
+If Australia had to send 1,000 people tomorrow to West Papua, for example, we don't have 1,000 police officers hanging around that could go tomorrow, and we do have 1,000 soldiers that could go. 
+
+In the past several days, I heard people talking about China. 
+And also, I talked to friends about China and Chinese Internet. 
+Something is very challenging to me. 
+I want to make my friends understand: China is complicated. 
+So I always want to tell the story, like, one hand it is that, the other hand is that. 
+You can't just tell a one sided story. 
+I'll give an example. China is a BRIC country. 
+BRIC country means Brazil, Russia, India and China. 
+This emerging economy really is helping the revival of the world economy. 
+But at the same time, on the other hand, China is a SICK country, the terminology coined by Facebook IPO papers — file. 
+He said the SICK country means Syria, Iran, China and North Korea. 
+The four countries have no access to Facebook. 
+So basically, China is a SICK BRIC country. 
+(Laughter) Another project was built up to watch China and Chinese Internet. 
+And now, today I want to tell you my personal observation in the past several years, from that wall. 
+So, if you are a fan of the Game of Thrones, you definitely know how important a big wall is for an old kingdom. 
+It prevents weird things from the north. 
+Same was true for China. 
+In the north, there was a great wall, Chang Cheng. 
+It protected China from invaders for 2,000 years. 
+But China also has a great firewall. 
+That's the biggest digital boundary in the whole world. 
+It's not only to defend the Chinese regime from overseas, from the universal values, but also to prevent China's own citizens to access the global free Internet, and even separate themselves into blocks, not united. 
+So, basically the "" Internet "" has two Internets. 
+One is the Internet, the other is the Chinanet. 
+But if you think the Chinanet is something like a deadland, wasteland, I think it's wrong. 
+But we also use a very simple metaphor, the cat and the mouse game, to describe in the past 15 years the continuing fight between Chinese censorship, government censorship, the cat, and the Chinese Internet users. That means us, the mouse. 
+But sometimes this kind of a metaphor is too simple. 
+So today I want to upgrade it to 2.0 version. 
+In China, we have 500 million Internet users. 
+That's the biggest population of Netizens, Internet users, in the whole world. 
+So even though China's is a totally censored Internet, but still, Chinese Internet society is really booming. 
+How to make it? It's simple. 
+You have Google, we have Baidu. 
+You have Twitter, we have Weibo. 
+You have Facebook, we have Renren. 
+You have YouTube, we have Youku and Tudou. 
+The Chinese government blocked every single international Web 2.0 service, and we Chinese copycat every one. 
+(Laughter) So, that's the kind of the thing I call smart censorship. 
+That's not only to censor you. 
+Sometimes this Chinese national Internet policy is very simple: Block and clone. 
+On the one hand, he wants to satisfy people's need of a social network, which is very important; people really love social networking. 
+But on the other hand, they want to keep the server in Beijing so they can access the data any time they want. 
+That's also the reason Google was pulled out from China, because they can't accept the fact that Chinese government wants to keep the server. 
+Sometimes the Arab dictators didn't understand these two hands. 
+For example, Mubarak, he shut down the Internet. 
+He wanted to prevent the Netizens [from criticizing] him. 
+But once Netizens can't go online, they go in the street. 
+And now the result is very simple. 
+We all know Mubarak is technically dead. 
+But also, Ben Ali, Tunisian president, didn't follow the second rule. 
+That means keep the server in your hands. 
+He allowed Facebook, a U.S.-based service, to continue to stay on inside of Tunisia. 
+So he can't prevent it, his own citizens to post critical videos against his corruption. 
+The same thing happend. He was the first to topple during the Arab Spring. 
+But those two very smart international censorship policies didn't prevent Chinese social media [from] becoming a really public sphere, a pathway of public opinion and the nightmare of Chinese officials. 
+Because we have 300 million microbloggers in China. 
+It's the entire population of the United States. 
+So when these 300 million people, microbloggers, even they block the tweet in our censored platform. 
+But itself — the Chinanet — but itself can create very powerful energy, which has never happened in the Chinese history. 
+2011, in July, two [unclear] trains crashed, in Wenzhou, a southern city. 
+Right after the train crash, authorities literally wanted to cover up the train, bury the train. 
+So it angered the Chinese Netizens. 
+The first five days after the train crash, there were 10 million criticisms of the posting on social media, which never happened in Chinese history. 
+And later this year, the rail minister was sacked and sentenced to jail for 10 years. 
+And also, recently, very funny debate between the Beijing Environment Ministry and the American Embassy in Beijing because the Ministry blamed the American Embassy for intervening in Chinese internal politics by disclosing the air quality data of Beijing. 
+So, the up is the Embassy data, the PM 2.5. 
+He showed 148, they showed it's dangerous for the sensitive group. 
+So a suggestion, it's not good to go outside. 
+But that is the Ministry's data. He shows 50. 
+He says it's good. It's good to go outside. 
+But 99 percent of Chinese microbloggers stand firmly on the Embassy's side. 
+I live in Beijing. Every day, I just watch the American Embassy's data to decide whether I should open my window. 
+Why is Chinese social networking, even within the censorship, so booming? Part of the reason is Chinese languages. 
+You know, Twitter and Twitter clones have a kind of a limitation of 140 characters. 
+But in English it's 20 words or a sentence with a short link. 
+Maybe in Germany, in German language, it may be just "" Aha! "" (Laughter) But in Chinese language, it's really about 140 characters, means a paragraph, a story. 
+You can almost have all the journalistic elements there. 
+For example, this is Hamlet, of Shakespeare. 
+It's the same content. One, you can see exactly one Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. 
+Chinese is always cheating, right? 
+So because of this, the Chinese really regard this microblogging as a media, not only a headline to media. 
+And also, the clone, Sina company is the guy who cloned Twitter. 
+It even has its own name, with Weibo. 
+"" Weibo "" is the Chinese translation for "" microblog "". 
+It has its own innovation. 
+At the commenting area, [it makes] the Chinese Weibo more like Facebook, rather than the original Twitter. 
+So these innovations and clones, as the Weibo and microblogging, when it came to China in 2009, it immediately became a media platform itself. 
+It became the media platform of 300 million readers. 
+It became the media. 
+Anything not mentioned in Weibo, it does not appear to exist for the Chinese public. 
+But also, Chinese social media is really changing Chinese mindsets and Chinese life. 
+For example, they give the voiceless people a channel to make your voice heard. 
+We had a petition system. It's a remedy outside the judicial system, because the Chinese central government wants to keep a myth: The emperor is good. The old local officials are thugs. 
+So that's why the petitioner, the victims, the peasants, want to take the train to Beijing to petition to the central government, they want the emperor to settle the problem. 
+But when more and more people go to Beijing, they also cause the risk of a revolution. 
+So they send them back in recent years. 
+And even some of them were put into black jails. 
+But now we have Weibo, so I call it the Weibo petition. 
+People just use their cell phones to tweet. 
+So your sad stories, by some chance your story will be picked up by reporters, professors or celebrities. 
+One of them is Yao Chen, she is the most popular microblogger in China, who has about 21 million followers. 
+They're almost like a national TV station. 
+If you — so a sad story will be picked up by her. 
+So this Weibo social media, even in the censorship, still gave the Chinese a real chance for 300 million people every day chatting together, talking together. 
+It's like a big TED, right? 
+But also, it is like the first time a public sphere happened in China. 
+Chinese people start to learn how to negotiate and talk to people. 
+But also, the cat, the censorship, is not sleeping. 
+It's so hard to post some sensitive words on the Chinese Weibo. 
+For example, you can't post the name of the president, Hu Jintao, and also you can't post the city of Chongqing, the name, and until recently, you can't search the surname of top leaders. 
+So, the Chinese are very good at these puns and alternative wording and even memes. 
+They even name themselves — you know, use the name of this world-changing battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab. 
+The grass-mud horse is caoníma, is the phonogram for motherfucker, the Netizens call themselves. 
+River crab is héxiè, is the phonogram for harmonization, for censorship. 
+So that's kind of a caoníma versus the héxiè, that's very good. 
+So, when some very political, exciting moments happened, you can see on Weibo, you see a lot of very weird stories happened. 
+Weird phrases and words, even if you have a PhD of Chinese language, you can't understand them. 
+But you can't even expand more, no, because Chinese Sina Weibo, when it was founded was exactly one month after the official blocking of Twitter.com. 
+That means from the very beginning, Weibo has already convinced the Chinese government, we will not become the stage for any kind of a threat to the regime. 
+For example, anything you want to post, like "" get together "" or "" meet up "" or "" walk, "" it is automatically recorded and data mined and reported to a poll for further political analyzing. 
+Even if you want to have some gathering, before you go there, the police are already waiting for you. 
+Why? Because they have the data. 
+They have everything in their hands. 
+So they can use the 1984 scenario data mining of the dissident. 
+So the crackdown is very serious. 
+But I want you to notice a very funny thing during the process of the cat-and-mouse. 
+The cat is the censorship, but Chinese is not only one cat, but also has local cats. Central cat and local cats. 
+(Laughter) You know, the server is in the [central] cats' hands, so even that — when the Netizens criticize the local government, the local government has not any access to the data in Beijing. 
+Without bribing the central cats, he can do nothing, only apologize. 
+So these three years, in the past three years, social movements about microblogging really changed local government, became more and more transparent, because they can't access the data. 
+The server is in Beijing. 
+The story about the train crash, maybe the question is not about why 10 million criticisms in five days, but why the Chinese central government allowed the five days of freedom of speech online. 
+It's never happened before. 
+And so it's very simple, because even the top leaders were fed up with this guy, this independent kingdom. 
+So they want an excuse — public opinion is a very good excuse to punish him. 
+But also, the Bo Xilai case recently, very big news, he's a princeling. 
+But from February to April this year, Weibo really became a marketplace of rumors. 
+You can almost joke everything about these princelings, everything! It's almost like you're living in the United States. 
+But if you dare to retweet or mention any fake coup about Beijing, you definitely will be arrested. 
+So this kind of freedom is a targeted and precise window. 
+So Chinese in China, censorship is normal. 
+Something you find is, freedom is weird. 
+Something will happen behind it. 
+Because he was a very popular Leftist leader, so the central government wanted to purge him, and he was very cute, he convinced all the Chinese people, why he is so bad. 
+So Weibo, the 300 million public sphere, became a very good, convenient tool for a political fight. 
+But this technology is very new, but technically is very old. 
+It was made famous by Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong, because he mobilized millions of Chinese people in the Cultural Revolution to destroy every local government. 
+It's very simple, because Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead the public opinion. 
+They just give them a target window to not censor people. 
+Not censoring in China has become a political tool. 
+So that's the update about this game, cat-and-mouse. 
+Social media changed Chinese mindset. 
+More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright, not some imported American privilege. 
+But also, it gave the Chinese a national public sphere for people to, it's like a training of their citizenship, preparing for future democracy. 
+But it didn't change the Chinese political system, and also the Chinese central government utilized this centralized server structure to strengthen its power to counter the local government and the different factions. 
+So, what's the future? 
+After all, we are the mouse. 
+Whatever the future is, we should fight against the [cat]. 
+There is not only in China, but also in the United States there are some very small, cute but bad cats. 
+(Laughter) SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, TPP and ITU. 
+And also, like Facebook and Google, they claim they are friends of the mouse, but sometimes we see them dating the cats. 
+So my conclusion is very simple. 
+We Chinese fight for our freedom, you just watch your bad cats. 
+Don't let them hook [up] with the Chinese cats. 
+Only in this way, in the future, we will achieve the dreams of the mouse: that we can tweet anytime, anywhere, without fear. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I'm a filmmaker. 
+For the last 8 years, I have dedicated my life to documenting the work of Israelis and Palestinians who are trying to end the conflict using peaceful means. 
+When I travel with my work across Europe and the United States, one question always comes up: Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? 
+Why aren't Palestinians using nonviolent resistance? 
+The challenge I face when I hear this question is that often I have just returned from the Middle East where I spent my time filming dozens of Palestinians who are using nonviolence to defend their lands and water resources from Israeli soldiers and settlers. 
+These leaders are trying to forge a massive national nonviolent movement to end the occupation and build peace in the region. 
+Yet, most of you have probably never heard about them. 
+This divide between what's happening on the ground and perceptions abroad is one of the key reasons why we don't have yet a Palestinian peaceful resistance movement that has been successful. 
+So I'm here today to talk about the power of attention, the power of your attention, and the emergence and development of nonviolent movements in the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere — but today, my case study is going to be Palestine. 
+I believe that what's mostly missing for nonviolence to grow is not for Palestinians to start adopting nonviolence, but for us to start paying attention to those who already are. 
+Allow me to illustrate this point by taking you to this village called Budrus. 
+About seven years ago, they faced extinction, because Israel announced it would build a separation barrier, and part of this barrier would be built on top of the village. 
+They would lose 40 percent of their land and be surrounded, so they would lose free access to the rest of the West Bank. 
+Through inspired local leadership, they launched a peaceful resistance campaign to stop that from happening. 
+Let me show you some brief clips, so you have a sense for what that actually looked like on the ground. 
+(Music) Palestinian Woman: We were told the wall would separate Palestine from Israel. 
+Here in Budrus, we realized the wall would steal our land. 
+Israeli Man: The fence has, in fact, created a solution to terror. 
+Man: Today you're invited to a peaceful march. 
+You are joined by dozens of your Israeli brothers and sisters. 
+Israeli Activist: Nothing scares the army more than nonviolent opposition. 
+Woman: We saw the men trying to push the soldiers, but none of them could do that. 
+But I think the girls could do it. 
+Fatah Party Member: We must empty our minds of traditional thinking. 
+Hamas Party Member: We were in complete harmony, and we wanted to spread it to all of Palestine. 
+Chanting: One united nation. 
+Fatah, Hamas and the Popular Front! 
+News Anchor: The clashes over the fence continue. 
+Reporter: Israeli border police were sent to disperse the crowd. 
+They were allowed to use any force necessary. 
+(Gunshots) Man: These are live bullets. 
+It's like Fallujah. Shooting everywhere. 
+Israeli Activist: I was sure we were all going to die. 
+But there were others around me who weren't even cowering. 
+Israeli Soldier: A nonviolent protest is not going to stop the [unclear]. 
+Protester: This is a peaceful march. 
+There is no need to use violence. 
+Chanting: We can do it! We can do it! We can do it! 
+Julia Bacha: When I first heard 
+about the story of Budrus, I was surprised that the international media had failed to cover the extraordinary set of events that happened seven years ago, in 2003. 
+What was even more surprising was the fact that Budrus was successful. 
+The residents, after 10 months of peaceful resistance, convinced the Israeli government to move the route of the barrier off their lands and to the green line, which is the internationally recognized boundary between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. 
+The resistance in Budrus has since spread to villages across the West Bank and to Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem. 
+Yet the media remains mostly silent on these stories. 
+This silence carries profound consequences for the likelihood that nonviolence can grow, or even survive, in Palestine. 
+Violent resistance and nonviolent resistance share one very important thing in common; they are both a form of theater seeking an audience to their cause. 
+If violent actors are the only ones constantly getting front-page covers and attracting international attention to the Palestinian issue, it becomes very hard for nonviolent leaders to make the case to their communities that civil disobedience is a viable option in addressing their plight. 
+The power of attention is probably going to come as no surprise to the parents in the room. 
+The surest way to make your child throw increasingly louder tantrums is by giving him attention the first time he throws a fit. 
+The tantrum will become what childhood psychologists call a functional behavior, since the child has learned that he can get parental attention out of it. 
+Parents can incentivize or disincentivize behavior simply by giving or withdrawing attention to their children. 
+But that's true for adults too. 
+In fact, the behavior of entire communities and countries can be influenced, depending on where the international community chooses to focus its attention. 
+I believe that at the core of ending the conflict in the Middle East and bringing peace is for us to transform nonviolence into a functional behavior by giving a lot more attention to the nonviolent leaders on the ground today. 
+In the course of taking my film to villages in the West Bank, in Gaza and in East Jerusalem, I have seen the impact that even one documentary film can have in influencing the transformation. 
+In a village called Wallajeh, which sits very close to Jerusalem, the community was facing a very similar plight to Budrus. 
+They were going to be surrounded, lose a lot of their lands and not have freedom of access, either to the West Bank or Jerusalem. 
+They had been using nonviolence for about two years but had grown disenchanted since nobody was paying attention. 
+So we organized a screening. 
+A week later, they held the most well-attended and disciplined demonstration to date. 
+The organizers say that the villagers, upon seeing the story of Budrus documented in a film, felt that there were indeed people following what they were doing, that people cared. 
+So they kept on going. 
+On the Israeli side, there is a new peace movement called Solidariot, which means solidarity in Hebrew. 
+The leaders of this movement have been using Budrus as one of their primary recruiting tools. 
+They report that Israelis who had never been active before, upon seeing the film, understand the power of nonviolence and start joining their activities. 
+The examples of Wallajeh and the Solidariot movement show that even a small-budget independent film can play a role in transforming nonviolence into a functional behavior. 
+Now imagine the power that big media players could have if they started covering the weekly nonviolent demonstrations happening in villages like Bil'in, Ni'lin, Wallajeh, in Jerusalem neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan — the nonviolent leaders would become more visible, valued and effective in their work. 
+I believe that the most important thing is to understand that if we don't pay attention to these efforts, they are invisible, and it's as if they never happened. 
+But I have seen first hand that if we do, they will multiply. 
+If they multiply, their influence will grow in the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 
+And theirs is the kind of influence that can finally unblock the situation. 
+These leaders have proven that nonviolence works in places like Budrus. 
+Let's give them attention so they can prove it works everywhere. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) What you just heard are the interactions of barometric pressure, wind and temperature readings that were recorded of Hurricane Noel in 2007. 
+The musicians played off a three-dimensional graph of weather data like this. 
+Every single bead, every single colored band, represents a weather element that can also be read as a musical note. 
+I find weather extremely fascinating. 
+Weather is an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us. 
+So I use sculpture and music to make it, not just visible, but also tactile and audible. 
+All of my work begins very simple. 
+I extract information from a specific environment using very low-tech data collecting devices — generally anything I can find in the hardware store. 
+I then compare my information to the things I find on the Internet — satellite images, weather data from weather stations as well as offshore buoys. 
+That's both historical as well as real data. 
+And then I compile all of these numbers on these clipboards that you see here. 
+These clipboards are filled with numbers. 
+And from all of these numbers, I start with only two or three variables. 
+That begins my translation process. 
+My translation medium is a very simple basket. 
+A basket is made up of horizontal and vertical elements. 
+When I assign values to the vertical and horizontal elements, I can use the changes of those data points over time to create the form. 
+I use natural reed, because natural reed has a lot of tension in it that I cannot fully control. 
+That means that it is the numbers that control the form, not me. 
+What I come up with are forms like these. 
+These forms are completely made up of weather data or science data. 
+Every colored bead, every colored string, represents a weather element. 
+And together, these elements, not only construct the form, but they also reveal behavioral relationships that may not come across through a two-dimensional graph. 
+When you step closer, you actually see that it is indeed all made up of numbers. 
+The vertical elements are assigned a specific hour of the day. 
+So all the way around, you have a 24-hour timeline. 
+But it's also used to assign a temperature range. 
+On that grid, I can then weave the high tide readings, water temperature, air temperature and Moon phases. 
+I also translate weather data into musical scores. 
+And musical notation allows me a more nuanced way of translating information without compromising it. 
+So all of these scores are made up of weather data. 
+Every single color, dot, every single line, is a weather element. 
+And together, these variables construct a score. 
+I use these scores to collaborate with musicians. 
+This is the 1913 Trio performing one of my pieces at the Milwaukee Art Museum. 
+Meanwhile, I use these scores as blueprints to translate into sculptural forms like this, that function still in the sense of being a three-dimensional weather visualization, but now they're embedding the visual matrix of the musical score, so it can actually be read as a musical score. 
+What I love about this work is that it challenges our assumptions of what kind of visual vocabulary belongs in the world of art, versus science. 
+This piece here is read very differently depending on where you place it. 
+You place it in an art museum, it becomes a sculpture. 
+You place it in a science museum, it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data. 
+You place it in a music hall, it all of a sudden becomes a musical score. 
+And I really like that, because the viewer is really challenged as to what visual language is part of science versus art versus music. 
+The other reason why I really like this is because it offers an alternative entry point into the complexity of science. 
+And not everyone has a Ph.D. in science. 
+So for me, that was my way into it. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I could never have imagined that a 19-year-old suicide bomber would actually teach me a valuable lesson. 
+But he did. 
+He taught me to never presume anything about anyone you don't know. 
+On a Thursday morning in July 2005, the bomber and I, unknowingly, boarded the same train carriage at the same time, standing, apparently, just feet apart. 
+I didn't see him. 
+You know not to look at anyone on the Tube, but I guess he saw me. 
+I guess he looked at all of us, as his hand hovered over the detonation switch. 
+I've often wondered: What was he thinking? 
+Especially in those final seconds. 
+I know it wasn't personal. 
+He didn't set out to kill or maim me, Gill Hicks. 
+I mean — he didn't know me. 
+No. 
+Instead, he gave me an unwarranted and an unwanted label. 
+I had become the enemy. 
+To him, I was the "" other, "" the "" them, "" as opposed to "" us. "" The label "" enemy "" allowed him to dehumanize us. 
+It allowed him to push that button. 
+And he wasn't selective. 
+Twenty-six precious lives were taken in my carriage alone, and I was almost one of them. 
+In the time it takes to draw a breath, we were plunged into a darkness so immense that it was almost tangible; what I imagine wading through tar might be like. 
+We didn't know we were the enemy. 
+We were just a bunch of commuters who, minutes earlier, had followed the Tube etiquette: no direct eye contact, no talking and absolutely no conversation. 
+But in the lifting of the darkness, we were reaching out. 
+We were helping each other. 
+We were calling out our names, a little bit like a roll call, waiting for responses. 
+"" I'm Gill. I'm here. 
+I'm alive. 
+OK. "" "" I'm Gill. 
+Here. 
+Alive. 
+OK. "" I didn't know Alison. 
+But I listened for her check-ins every few minutes. 
+I didn't know Richard. 
+But it mattered to me that he survived. 
+All I shared with them was my first name. 
+They didn't know that I was a head of a department at the Design Council. 
+And here is my beloved briefcase, also rescued from that morning. 
+They didn't know that I published architecture and design journals, that I was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, that I wore black — still do — that I smoked cigarillos. 
+I don't smoke cigarillos anymore. 
+I drank gin and I watched TED Talks, of course, never dreaming that one day I would be standing, balancing on prosthetic legs, giving a talk. 
+I was a young Australian woman doing extraordinary things in London. 
+And I wasn't ready for that all to end. 
+I was so determined to survive that I used my scarf to tie tourniquets around the tops of my legs, and I just shut everything and everyone out, to focus, to listen to myself, to be guided by instinct alone. 
+I lowered my breathing rate. 
+I elevated my thighs. 
+I held myself upright and I fought the urge to close my eyes. 
+I held on for almost an hour, an hour to contemplate the whole of my life up until this point. 
+Perhaps I should have done more. 
+Perhaps I could have lived more, seen more. 
+Maybe I should have gone running, dancing, taken up yoga. 
+But my priority and my focus was always my work. 
+I lived to work. 
+Who I was on my business card mattered to me. 
+But it didn't matter down in that tunnel. 
+By the time I felt that first touch from one of my rescuers, I was unable to speak, unable to say even a small word, like "" Gill. "" I surrendered my body to them. 
+I had done all I possibly could, and now I was in their hands. 
+I understood just who and what humanity really is, when I first saw the ID tag that was given to me when I was admitted to hospital. 
+And it read: "One unknown estimated female." One unknown estimated female. 
+Those four words were my gift. What they told me very clearly 
+was that my life was saved, purely because I was a human being. 
+Difference of any kind made no difference to the extraordinary lengths that the rescuers were prepared to go to save my life, to save as many unknowns as they could, and putting their own lives at risk. 
+To them, it didn't matter if I was rich or poor, the color of my skin, whether I was male or female, my sexual orientation, who I voted for, whether I was educated, if I had a faith or no faith at all. 
+Nothing mattered other than I was a precious human life. 
+I see myself as a living fact. 
+I am proof that unconditional love and respect can not only save, but it can transform lives. 
+Here is a wonderful image of one of my rescuers, Andy, and I taken just last year. 
+Ten years after the event, and here we are, arm in arm. 
+Throughout all the chaos, my hand was held tightly. 
+My face was stroked gently. 
+I felt loved. 
+What's shielded me from hatred and wanting retribution, what's given me the courage to say: this ends with me is love. 
+I was loved. 
+I believe the potential for widespread positive change is absolutely enormous because I know what we're capable of. 
+I know the brilliance of humanity. 
+So this leaves me with some pretty big things to ponder and some questions for us all to consider: Is what unites us not far greater than what can ever divide? 
+Does it have to take a tragedy or a disaster for us to feel deeply connected as one species, as human beings? 
+And when will we embrace the wisdom of our era to rise above mere tolerance and move to an acceptance for all who are only a label until we know them? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is entitled, "" Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend "" — (Laughter) Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love. 
+Of all of the available women in the UK, all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with, somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely to find him attractive. 
+Now, just to put that into perspective, that's about 400 times fewer than the best estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are. 
+And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of bumping into any one of these special ladies on a given night out. 
+And so, to try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love. 
+Now, because they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade. 
+But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage. 
+In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid, you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale between one and five. 
+So let me try to illustrate their findings with an example. 
+If you compare Portia de Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of people, myself included, I should say, think that Sarah Jessica Parker is seriously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face of the Earth. 
+So what that means then is that if some people think that you're attractive, you're actually better off having some other people think that you're a massive minger. 
+That's much better than everybody just thinking that you're the cute girl next door. 
+That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. 
+The classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo, (Laughter) or bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where they're wearing hats. 
+So let's imagine then that you're a roaring success on the dating scene. 
+Now generally, it's not advisable to just cash in and marry the first person who comes along and shows you any interest at all. 
+As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts it, "" An unmarried woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again. "" (Laughter) Thanks a lot, Jane. 
+Now the rules are that once you cash in and get married, you can't look ahead to see what you could have had, and equally, you can't go back and change your mind. 
+In my experience at least, I find that typically people don't much like being recalled years after being passed up for somebody else, or that's just me. 
+So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37 percent of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as serious marriage potential. 
+(Laughter) And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you've seen before. 
+So here's the example. 
+Now if you do this, it can be mathematically proven, in fact, that this is the best possible way of maximizing your chances of finding the perfect partner. 
+(Laughter) Now, if you're following the maths, I'm afraid no one else comes along that's better than anyone you've seen before, so you have to go on rejecting everyone and die alone. (Laughter) 
+OK, another risk is, let's imagine, instead, that the first people that you dated in your first 37 percent are just incredibly dull, boring, terrible people. 
+So they reject every possible suitor that turns up in the first 37 percent of the mating season, and then they pick the next fish that comes along after that window that's, I don't know, bigger and burlier than all of the fish that they've seen before. 
+And then we only start looking seriously at potential marriage candidates once we hit our mid-to-late 20s. 
+Now, Top Tip # 3: How to avoid divorce. 
+Now, you can be forgiven, perhaps for thinking that the arguments that precede a marital breakup are not an ideal candidate for mathematical investigation. 
+So he recorded what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything apart from whether or not the wife was actually always right, which incidentally she totally is. 
+
+There's something about caves — a shadowy opening in a limestone cliff that draws you in. 
+As you pass through the portal between light and dark, you enter a subterranean world — a place of perpetual gloom, of earthy smells, of hushed silence. 
+As witness to their passage, they left behind mysterious engravings and paintings, like this panel of humans, triangles and zigzags from Ojo Guareña in Spain. 
+You now walk the same path as these early artists. 
+And in this surreal, otherworldly place, it's almost possible to imagine that you hear the muffled footfall of skin boots on soft earth, or that you see the flickering of a torch around the next bend. 
+When I'm in a cave, I often find myself wondering what drove these people to go so deep to brave dangerous and narrow passageways to leave their mark? 
+In this video clip, that was shot half a kilometer, or about a third of a mile, underground, in the cave of Cudon in Spain, we found a series of red paintings on a ceiling in a previously unexplored section of the cave. 
+As we crawled forward, military-style, with the ceiling getting ever lower, we finally got to a point where the ceiling was so low that my husband and project photographer, Dylan, could no longer achieve focus on the ceiling with his DSLR camera. 
+So while he filmed me, I kept following the trail of red paint with a single light and a point-and-shoot camera that we kept for that type of occasion. 
+Half a kilometer underground. 
+Seriously. 
+What was somebody doing down there with a torch or a stone lamp? 
+(Laughter) I mean — me, it makes sense, right? 
+I study some of the oldest art in the world. 
+It was created by these early artists in Europe, between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago. 
+And the thing is that I'm not just studying it because it's beautiful, though some of it certainly is. 
+But what I'm interested in is the development of the modern mind, of the evolution of creativity, of imagination, of abstract thought, about what it means to be human. 
+While all species communicate in one way or another, only we humans have really taken it to another level. 
+Our desire and ability to share and collaborate has been a huge part of our success story. 
+The thing is, though, that we've been building on the mental achievements of those that came before us for so long that it's easy to forget that certain abilities haven't already existed. 
+It's one of the things I find most fascinating about studying our deep history. 
+Those people didn't have the shoulders of any giants to stand on. 
+They were the original shoulders. 
+And while a surprising number of important inventions come out of that distant time, what I want to talk to you about today is the invention of graphic communication. 
+There are three main types of communication, spoken, gestural — so things like sign language — and graphic communication. 
+Spoken and gestural are by their very nature ephemeral. 
+Graphic communication, on the other hand, decouples that relationship. 
+And with its invention, it became possible for the first time for a message to be transmitted and preserved beyond a single moment in place and time. 
+Europe is one of the first places that we start to see graphic marks regularly appearing in caves, rock shelters and even a few surviving open-air sites. 
+But this is not the Europe we know today. 
+This was a world dominated by towering ice sheets, three to four kilometers high, with sweeping grass plains and frozen tundra. 
+Over the last century, more than 350 Ice Age rock art sites have been found across the continent, decorated with animals, abstract shapes and even the occasional human like these engraved figures from Grotta dell'Addaura in Sicily. 
+But for me, it was the abstract shapes, what we call geometric signs, that drew me to study the art. 
+But when I started on this back in 2007, there wasn't even a definitive list of how many shapes there were, nor was there a strong sense of whether the same ones appeared across space or time. 
+Before I could even get started on my questions, my first step was to compile a database of all known geometric signs from all of the rock art sites. 
+The problem was that while they were well documented at some sites, usually the ones with the very nice animals, there was also a large number of them where it was very vague — there wasn't a lot of description or detail. 
+These were the ones that I targeted for my field work. 
+Over the course of two years, my faithful husband Dylan and I each spent over 300 hours underground, hiking, crawling and wriggling around 52 sites in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily. 
+We found new, undocumented geometric signs at 75 percent of the sites we visited. 
+This is the level of accuracy I knew I was going to need if I wanted to start answering those larger questions. 
+So let's get to those answers. 
+Only 32 signs across a 30,000-year time span and the entire continent of Europe. 
+That is a very small number. 
+Now, if these were random doodles or decorations, we would expect to see a lot more variation, but instead what we find are the same signs repeating across both space and time. 
+Some signs start out strong, before losing popularity and vanishing, while other signs are later inventions. 
+But 65 percent of those signs stayed in use during that entire time period — things like lines, rectangles triangles, ovals and circles like we see here from the end of the Ice Age, at a 10,000-year-old site high in the Pyrenees Mountains. 
+And while certain signs span thousands of kilometers, other signs had much more restricted distribution patterns, with some being limited to a single territory, like we see here with these divided rectangles that are only found in northern Spain, and which some researchers have speculated could be some sort of family or clan signs. 
+On a side note, there is surprising degree of similarity in the earliest rock art found all the way from France and Spain to Indonesia and Australia. 
+With many of the same signs appearing in such far-flung places, especially in that 30,000 to 40,000-year range, it's starting to seem increasingly likely that this invention actually traces back to a common point of origin in Africa. 
+But that I'm afraid, is a subject for a future talk. 
+So back to the matter at hand. 
+There could be no doubt that these signs were meaningful to their creators, like these 25,000-year-old bas-relief sculptures from La Roque de Venasque in France. 
+We might not know what they meant, but the people of the time certainly did. 
+The repetition of the same signs, for so long, and at so many sites tells us that the artists were making intentional choices. 
+If we're talking about geometric shapes, with specific, culturally recognized, agreed-upon meanings, than we could very well be looking at one of the oldest systems of graphic communication in the world. 
+I'm not talking about writing yet. 
+There's just not enough characters at this point to have represented all of the words in the spoken language, something which is a requirement for a full writing system. 
+But what we do have are some intriguing one-offs, like this panel from La Pasiega in Spain, known as "" The Inscription, "" with its symmetrical markings on the left, possible stylized representations of hands in the middle, and what looks a bit like a bracket on the right. 
+The oldest systems of graphic communication in the world — Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the earliest Chinese script, all emerged between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, with each coming into existence from an earlier protosystem made up of counting marks and pictographic representations, where the meaning and the image were the same. 
+It's only later that we start to see these pictographs become more stylized, until they almost become unrecognizable and that we also start to see more symbols being invented to represent all those other missing words in language — things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives. 
+So knowing all this, it seems highly unlikely that the geometric signs from Ice Age Europe were truly abstract written characters. 
+Instead, what's much more likely is that these early artists were also making counting marks, maybe like this row of lines from Riparo di Za Minic in Sicily, as well as creating stylized representations of things from the world around them. 
+Or maybe even rivers, mountains, trees — landscape features, possibly like this black penniform surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs from the site of El Castillo in Spain. 
+The term penniform means "" feather-shaped "" in Latin, but could this actually be a depiction of a plant or a tree? 
+Some researchers have begun to ask these questions about certain signs at specific sites, but I believe the time has come to revisit this category as a whole. 
+The irony in all of this, of course, is that having just carefully classified all of the signs into a single category, I have a feeling that my next step will involve breaking it back apart as different types of imagery are identified and separated off. 
+Now don't get me wrong, the later creation of fully developed writing was an impressive feat in its own right. 
+But it's important to remember that those early writing systems didn't come out of a vacuum. 
+And that even 5,000 years ago, people were already building on something much older, with its origins stretching back tens of thousands of years — to the geometric signs of Ice Age Europe and far beyond, to that point, deep in our collective history, when someone first came up with the idea of making a graphic mark, and forever changed the nature of how we communicate. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I've learned some of my most important life lessons from drug dealers and gang members and prostitutes, and I've had some of my most profound theological conversations not in the hallowed halls of a seminary but on a street corner on a Friday night, at 1 a.m. 
+That's a little unusual, since I am a Baptist minister, seminary-trained, and pastored a church for over 20 years, but it's true. 
+It came as a part of my participation in a public safety crime reduction strategy that saw a 79 percent reduction in violent crime over an eight-year period in a major city. 
+But I didn't start out wanting to be a part of somebody's crime reduction strategy. 
+I was 25, had my first church. 
+If you would have asked me what my ambition was, I would have told you I wanted to be a megachurch pastor. 
+I wanted a 15-, 20,000-member church. 
+I wanted my own television ministry. 
+I wanted my own clothing line. 
+(Laughter) I wanted to be your long distance carrier. 
+You know, the whole nine yards. 
+(Laughter) After about a year of pastoring, my membership went up about 20 members. 
+So megachurchdom was way down the road. 
+But seriously, if you'd have said, "" What is your ambition? "" I would have said just to be a good pastor, to be able to be with people through all the passages of life, to preach messages that would have an everyday meaning for folks, and in the African-American tradition, to be able to represent the community that I serve. 
+But there was something else that was happening in my city and in the entire metro area, and in most metro areas in the United States, and that was the homicide rate started to rise precipitously. 
+And there were young people who were killing each other for reasons that I thought were very trivial, like bumping into someone in a high school hallway, and then after school, shooting the person. 
+Someone with the wrong color shirt on, on the wrong street corner at the wrong time. 
+And something needed to be done about that. 
+It got to the point where it started to change the character of the city. 
+You could go to any housing project, for example, like the one that was down the street from my church, and you would walk in, and it would be like a ghost town, because the parents wouldn't allow their kids to come out and play, even in the summertime, because of the violence. 
+You would listen in the neighborhoods on any given night, and to the untrained ear, it sounded like fireworks, but it was gunfire. 
+You'd hear it almost every night, when you were cooking dinner, telling your child a bedtime story, or just watching TV. 
+And you can go to any emergency room at any hospital, and you would see lying on gurneys young black and Latino men shot and dying. 
+And I was doing funerals, but not of the venerated matriarchs and patriarchs who'd lived a long life and there's a lot to say. 
+I was doing funerals of 18-year-olds, 17-year-olds, and 16-year-olds, and I was standing in a church or at a funeral home struggling to say something that would make some meaningful impact. 
+And so while my colleagues were building these cathedrals great and tall and buying property outside of the city and moving their congregations out so that they could create or recreate their cities of God, the social structures in the inner cities were sagging under the weight of all of this violence. 
+And so I stayed, because somebody needed to do something, and so I had looked at what I had and moved on that. 
+I started to preach decrying the violence in the community. 
+And I started to look at the programming in my church, and I started to build programs that would catch the at-risk youth, those who were on the fence to the violence. 
+I even tried to be innovative in my preaching. 
+You all have heard of rap music, right? 
+Rap music? 
+I even tried to rap sermon one time. 
+It didn't work, but at least I tried it. 
+I'll never forget the young person who came to me after that sermon. 
+He waited until everybody was gone, and he said, "" Rev, rap sermon, huh? "" And I was like, "" Yeah, what do you think? "" And he said, "" Don't do that again, Rev. "" (Laughter) But I preached and I built these programs, and I thought maybe if my colleagues did the same that it would make a difference. 
+But the violence just careened out of control, and people who were not involved in the violence were getting shot and killed: somebody going to buy a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store, or someone who was sitting at a bus stop just waiting for a bus, or kids who were playing in the park, oblivious to the violence on the other side of the park, but it coming and visiting them. 
+Things were out of control, and I didn't know what to do, and then something happened that changed everything for me. 
+It was a kid by the name of Jesse McKie, walking home with his friend Rigoberto Carrion to the housing project down the street from my church. 
+They met up with a group of youth who were from a gang in Dorchester, and they were killed. 
+But as Jesse was running from the scene mortally wounded, he was running in the direction of my church, and he died some 100, 150 yards away. 
+If he would have gotten to the church, it wouldn't have made a difference, because the lights were out; nobody was home. 
+And I took that as a sign. 
+When they caught some of the youth that had done this deed, to my surprise, they were around my age, but the gulf that was between us was vast. 
+It was like we were in two completely different worlds. 
+And so as I contemplated all of this and looked at what was happening, I suddenly realized that there was a paradox that was emerging inside of me, and the paradox was this: in all of those sermons that I preached decrying the violence, I was also talking about building community, but I suddenly realized that there was a certain segment of the population that I was not including in my definition of community. 
+And so the paradox was this: If I really wanted the community that I was preaching for, I needed to reach out and embrace this group that I had cut out of my definition. 
+Which meant not about building programs to catch those who were on the fences of violence, but to reach out and to embrace those who were committing the acts of violence, the gang bangers, the drug dealers. 
+As soon as I came to that realization, a quick question came to my mind. 
+Why me? 
+I mean, isn't this a law enforcement issue? 
+This is why we have the police, right? 
+As soon as the question, "" Why me? "" came, the answer came just as quickly: Why me? Because I'm the one who can't sleep at night thinking about it. 
+Because I'm the one looking around saying somebody needs to do something about this, and I'm starting to realize that that someone is me. 
+I mean, isn't that how movements start anyway? 
+They don't start with a grand convention and people coming together and then walking in lockstep with a statement. 
+But it starts with just a few, or maybe just one. 
+It started with me that way, and so I decided to figure out the culture of violence in which these young people who were committing them existed, and I started to volunteer at the high school. 
+After about two weeks of volunteering at the high school, I realized that the youth that I was trying to reach, they weren't going to high school. 
+I started to walk in the community, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to realize that they weren't out during the day. 
+So I started to walk the streets at night, late at night, going into the parks where they were, building the relationship that was necessary. 
+A tragedy happened in Boston that brought a number of clergy together, and there was a small cadre of us who came to the realization that we had to come out of the four walls of our sanctuary and meet the youth where they were, and not try to figure out how to bring them in. 
+And so we decided to walk together, and we would get together in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city on a Friday night and on a Saturday night at 10 p.m., and we would walk until 2 or 3 in the morning. 
+I imagine we were quite the anomaly when we first started walking. 
+I mean, we weren't drug dealers. 
+We weren't drug customers. 
+We weren't the police. Some of us would have collars on. 
+It was probably a really odd thing. 
+But they started speaking to us after a while, and what we found out is that while we were walking, they were watching us, and they wanted to make sure of a couple of things: that number one, we were going to be consistent in our behavior, that we would keep coming out there; and then secondly, they had wanted to make sure that we weren't out there to exploit them. 
+Because there was always somebody who would say, "We're going to take back the streets," but they would always seem to have a television camera with them, or a reporter, and they would enhance their own reputation to the detriment of those on the streets. 
+So when they saw that we had none of that, they decided to talk to us. 
+And then we did an amazing thing for preachers. 
+We decided to listen and not preach. 
+Come on, give it up for me. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) All right, come on, you're cutting into my time now, okay? (Laughter) But it was amazing. 
+We said to them, "" We don't know our own communities after 9 p.m. at night, between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., but you do. 
+You are the subject matter experts, if you will, of that period of time. 
+So talk to us. Teach us. 
+Help us to see what we're not seeing. 
+Help us to understand what we're not understanding. "" And they were all too happy to do that, and we got an idea of what life on the streets was all about, very different than what you see on the 11 o'clock news, very different than what is portrayed in popular media and even social media. 
+And as we were talking with them, a number of myths were dispelled about them with us. 
+And one of the biggest myths was that these kids were cold and heartless and uncharacteristically bold in their violence. 
+What we found out was the exact opposite. 
+Most of the young people who were out there on the streets are just trying to make it on the streets. 
+And we also found out that some of the most intelligent and creative and magnificent and wise people that we've ever met were on the street, engaged in a struggle. 
+And I know some of them call it survival, but I call them overcomers, because when you're in the conditions that they're in, to be able to live every day is an accomplishment of overcoming. 
+And as a result of that, we said to them, "" How do you see this church, how do you see this institution helping this situation? "" And we developed a plan in conversation with these youths. 
+We stopped looking at them as the problem to be solved, and we started looking at them as partners, as assets, as co-laborers in the struggle to reduce violence in the community. 
+Imagine developing a plan, you have one minister at one table and a heroin dealer at the other table, coming up with a way in which the church can help the entire community. 
+The Boston Miracle was about bringing people together. 
+We had other partners. 
+We had law enforcement partners. 
+We had police officers. 
+It wasn't the entire force, because there were still some who still had that lock- 'em-up mentality, but there were other cops who saw the honor in partnering with the community, who saw the responsibility from themselves to be able to work as partners with community leaders and faith leaders in order to reduce violence in the community. 
+Same with probation officers, same with judges, same with folks who were up that law enforcement chain, because they realized, like we did, that we'll never arrest ourselves out of this situation, that there will not be enough prosecutions made, and you cannot fill these jails up enough in order to alleviate the problem. 
+I helped to start an organization 20 years ago, a faith-based organization, to deal with this issue. 
+I left it about four years ago and started working in cities across the United States, 19 in total, and what I found out was that in those cities, there was always this component of community leaders who put their heads down and their nose to the grindstone, who checked their egos at the door and saw the whole as greater than the sum of its parts, and came together and found ways to work with youth out on the streets, that the solution is not more cops, but the solution is mining the assets that are there in the community, 
+to have a strong community component in the collaboration around violence reduction. 
+Now, there is a movement in the United States of young people who I am very proud of who are dealing with the structural issues that need to change if we're going to be a better society. 
+But there is this political ploy to try to pit police brutality and police misconduct against black-on-black violence. 
+But it's a fiction. 
+It's all connected. 
+When you think about decades of failed housing policies and poor educational structures, when you think about persistent unemployment and underemployment in a community, when you think about poor healthcare, and then you throw drugs into the mix and duffel bags full of guns, little wonder that you would see this culture of violence emerge. 
+And then the response that comes from the state is more cops and more suppression of hot spots. 
+It's all connected, and one of the wonderful things that we've been able to do is to be able to show the value of partnering together — community, law enforcement, private sector, the city — in order to reduce violence. 
+You have to value that community component. 
+I believe that we can end the era of violence in our cities. 
+I believe that it is possible and that people are doing it even now. 
+But I need your help. 
+It can't just come from folks who are burning themselves out in the community. 
+They need support. They need help. 
+Go back to your city. 
+Find those people. 
+"You need some help? I'll help you out." 
+Find those people. They're there. 
+Bring them together with law enforcement, the private sector, and the city, with the one aim of reducing violence, but make sure that that community component is strong. 
+Because the old adage that comes from Burundi is right: that you do for me, without me, you do to me. 
+God bless you. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It was less than a year after September 11, and I was at the Chicago Tribune writing about shootings and murders, and it was leaving me feeling pretty dark and depressed. 
+I had done some activism in college, so I decided to help a local group hang door knockers against animal testing. 
+I thought it would be a safe way to do something positive, but of course I have the absolute worst luck ever, and we were all arrested. 
+Police took this blurry photo of me holding leaflets as evidence. 
+My charges were dismissed, but a few weeks later, two FBI agents knocked on my door, and they told me that unless I helped them by spying on protest groups, they would put me on a domestic terrorist list. 
+I'd love to tell you that I didn't flinch, but I was terrified, and when my fear subsided, I became obsessed with finding out how this happened, how animal rights and environmental activists who have never injured anyone could become the FBI's number one domestic terrorism threat. 
+A few years later, I was invited to testify before Congress about my reporting, and I told lawmakers that, while everybody is talking about going green, some people are risking their lives to defend forests and to stop oil pipelines. 
+They're physically putting their bodies on the line between the whalers' harpoons and the whales. 
+These are everyday people, like these protesters in Italy who spontaneously climbed over barbed wire fences to rescue beagles from animal testing. 
+And these movements have been incredibly effective and popular, so in 1985, their opponents made up a new word, eco-terrorist, to shift how we view them. 
+They just made it up. 
+Now these companies have backed new laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which turns activism into terrorism if it causes a loss of profits. 
+Now most people never even heard about this law, including members of Congress. 
+Less than one percent were in the room when it passed the House. 
+The rest were outside at a new memorial. 
+They were praising Dr. King as his style of activism was branded as terrorism if done in the name of animals or the environment. 
+Supporters say laws like this are needed for the extremists: the vandals, the arsonists, the radicals. 
+But right now, companies like TransCanada are briefing police in presentations like this one about how to prosecute nonviolent protesters as terrorists. 
+The FBI's training documents on eco-terrorism are not about violence, they're about public relations. 
+Today, in multiple countries, corporations are pushing new laws that make it illegal to photograph animal cruelty on their farms. 
+The latest was in Idaho just two weeks ago, and today we released a lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional as a threat to journalism. 
+The first of these ag-gag prosecutions, as they're called, was a young woman named Amy Meyer, and Amy saw a sick cow being moved by a bulldozer outside of a slaughterhouse as she was on the public street. 
+And Amy did what any of us would: She filmed it. 
+When I found out about her story, I wrote about it, and within 24 hours, it created such an uproar that the prosecutors just dropped all the charges. 
+But apparently, even exposing stuff like that is a threat. 
+Through the Freedom of Information Act, I learned that the counter-terrorism unit has been monitoring my articles and speeches like this one. 
+They even included this nice little write-up of my book. 
+They described it as "" compelling and well-written. "" (Applause) Blurb on the next book, right? 
+The point of all of this is to make us afraid, but as a journalist, I have an unwavering faith in the power of education. 
+Our best weapon is sunlight. 
+Dostoevsky wrote that the whole work of man is to prove he's a man and not a piano key. 
+Over and over throughout history, people in power have used fear to silence the truth and to silence dissent. 
+It's time we strike a new note. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And it's really unfair to humanity, because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for. 
+Now you can probably make it, but it's going to be a pretty clumsy apparatus, I think. 
+(Laughter) But it shows the intelligence that the elephants have. 
+So it doesn't matter whatsoever. 
+(Laughter) It's as if they're saying, "If you're not behaving, I'm not going to be pro-social today." 
+And there are now many more, because after we did this about 10 years ago, it became very well-known. 
+Then she sees the other one getting grape, and you will see what happens. 
+(Applause) I still have two minutes left — let me tell you a funny story about this. 
+(Laughter) And another one wrote a whole chapter saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness, if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes. 
+
+Some of us will see it coming. 
+It's almost a symptom. 
+Throughout my career, I have responded to a number of incidents where the patient had minutes left to live and there was nothing I could do for them. 
+From that moment forward, I decided it was not my place to comfort the dying with my lies. 
+In fact, there are three patterns I have observed in all these cases. 
+As I placed the defibrillator pads on his chest, prepping for what was going to happen, he looked me in the eye and said, "" I wish I had spent more time with my children and grandchildren instead of being selfish with my time. "" Faced with imminent death, all he wanted was forgiveness. 
+Countless times, I have had a patient look me in the eyes and say, "" Will you remember me? "" The final pattern I observe always touched me the deepest, to the soul. 
+The dying need to know that their life had meaning. 
+This came to me very, very early in my career. 
+As the fire department worked to remove her from the car, I climbed in to begin to render care. 
+I have come to realize, regardless of the circumstance, it's generally met with peace and acceptance, that it's the littlest things, the littlest moments, the littlest things you brought into the world that give you peace in those final moments. 
+
+I'm an artist and I cut books. 
+This is one of my first book works. 
+It's called "" Alternate Route to Knowledge. "" I wanted to create a stack of books so that somebody could come into the gallery and think they're just looking at a regular stack of books, but then as they got closer they would see this rough hole carved into it, and wonder what was happening, wonder why, and think about the material of the book. 
+So I'm interested in the texture, but I'm more interested in the text and the images that we find within books. 
+In most of my work, what I do is I seal the edges of a book with a thick varnish so it's creating sort of a skin on the outside of the book so it becomes a solid material, but then the pages inside are still loose, and then I carve into the surface of the book, and I'm not moving or adding anything. 
+So everything you see within the finished piece is exactly where it was in the book before I began. 
+I think of my work as sort of a remix, in a way, because I'm working with somebody else's material in the same way that a D.J. might be working with somebody else's music. 
+This was a book of Raphael paintings, the Renaissance artist, and by taking his work and remixing it, carving into it, I'm sort of making it into something that's more new and more contemporary. 
+I'm thinking also about breaking out of the box of the traditional book and pushing that linear format, and try to push the structure of the book itself so that the book can become fully sculptural. 
+I'm using clamps and ropes and all sorts of materials, weights, in order to hold things in place before I varnish so that I can push the form before I begin, so that something like this can become a piece like this, which is just made from a single dictionary. 
+Or something like this can become a piece like this. 
+Or something like this, which who knows what that's going to be or why that's in my studio, will become a piece like this. 
+So I think one of the reasons people are disturbed by destroying books, people don't want to rip books and nobody really wants to throw away a book, is that we think about books as living things, we think about them as a body, and they're created to relate to our body, as far as scale, but they also have the potential to continue to grow and to continue to become new things. 
+So I think of the book as a body, and I think of the book as a technology. 
+I think of the book as a tool. 
+This is a full set of encyclopedias that's been connected and sanded together, and as I carve through it, I'm deciding what I want to choose. 
+So with encyclopedias, I could have chosen anything, but I specifically chose images of landscapes. 
+And with the material itself, I'm using sandpaper and sanding the edges so not only the images suggest landscape, but the material itself suggests a landscape as well. 
+So one of the things I do is when I'm carving through the book, I'm thinking about images, but I'm also thinking about text, and I think about them in a very similar way, because what's interesting is that when we're reading text, when we're reading a book, it puts images in our head, so we're sort of filling that piece. 
+We're sort of creating images when we're reading text, and when we're looking at an image, we actually use language in order to understand what we're looking at. 
+So there's sort of a yin-yang that happens, sort of a flip flop. 
+So I'm creating a piece that the viewer is completing themselves. 
+And I think of my work as almost an archaeology. 
+I'm excavating and I'm trying to maximize the potential and discover as much as I possibly can and exposing it within my own work. 
+But at the same time, I'm thinking about this idea of erasure, and what's happening now that most of our information is intangible, and this idea of loss, and this idea that not only is the format constantly shifting within computers, but the information itself, now that we don't have a physical backup, has to be constantly updated in order to not lose it. 
+And I have several dictionaries in my own studio, and I do use a computer every day, and if I need to look up a word, I'll go on the computer, because I can go directly and instantly to what I'm looking up. 
+I think that the book was never really the right format for nonlinear information, which is why we're seeing reference books becoming the first to be endangered or extinct. 
+People think that now that we have digital technology, the book is going to die, and we are seeing things shifting and things evolving. 
+I think that the book will evolve, and just like people said painting would die when photography and printmaking became everyday materials, but what it really allowed painting to do was it allowed painting to quit its day job. 
+It allowed painting to not have to have that everyday chore of telling the story, and painting became free and was allowed to tell its own story, and that's when we saw Modernism emerge, and we saw painting go into different branches. 
+And I think that's what's happening with books now, now that most of our technology, most of our information, most of our personal and cultural records are in digital form, I think it's really allowing the book to become something new. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Time flies. 
+It's actually almost 20 years ago when I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together: I invented the World Wide Web. 
+Now, 20 years on, at TED, I want to ask your help in a new reframing. 
+So going back to 1989, I wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system. 
+Nobody really did anything with it, pretty much. 
+But 18 months later — this is how innovation happens — 18 months later, my boss said I could do it on the side, as a sort of a play project, kick the tires of a new computer we'd got. 
+And so he gave me the time to code it up. 
+So I basically roughed out what HTML should look like: hypertext protocol, HTTP; the idea of URLs, these names for things which started with HTTP. 
+I wrote the code and put it out there. 
+Why did I do it? 
+Well, it was basically frustration. 
+I was frustrated — I was working as a software engineer in this huge, very exciting lab, lots of people coming from all over the world. 
+They brought all sorts of different computers with them. 
+They had all sorts of different data formats, all sorts, all kinds of documentation systems. 
+So that, in all that diversity, if I wanted to figure out how to build something out of a bit of this and a bit of this, everything I looked into, I had to connect to some new machine, I had to learn to run some new program, I would find the information I wanted in some new data format. 
+And these were all incompatible. 
+It was just very frustrating. 
+The frustration was all this unlocked potential. 
+In fact, on all these discs there were documents. 
+So if you just imagined them all being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky, say on the Internet, then life would be so much easier. 
+Well, once you've had an idea like that it kind of gets under your skin and even if people don't read your memo — actually he did, it was found after he died, his copy. 
+He had written, "" Vague, but exciting, "" in pencil, in the corner. 
+(Laughter) But in general it was difficult — it was really difficult to explain what the web was like. 
+It's difficult to explain to people now that it was difficult then. 
+But then — OK, when TED started, there was no web so things like "" click "" didn't have the same meaning. 
+I can show somebody a piece of hypertext, a page which has got links, and we click on the link and bing — there'll be another hypertext page. 
+Not impressive. 
+You know, we've seen that — we've got things on hypertext on CD-ROMs. 
+What was difficult was to get them to imagine: so, imagine that that link could have gone to virtually any document you could imagine. 
+Alright, that is the leap that was very difficult for people to make. 
+Well, some people did. 
+So yeah, it was difficult to explain, but there was a grassroots movement. 
+And that is what has made it most fun. 
+That has been the most exciting thing, not the technology, not the things people have done with it, but actually the community, the spirit of all these people getting together, sending the emails. 
+That's what it was like then. 
+Do you know what? It's funny, but right now it's kind of like that again. 
+I asked everybody, more or less, to put their documents — I said, "" Could you put your documents on this web thing? "" And you did. 
+Thanks. 
+It's been a blast, hasn't it? 
+I mean, it has been quite interesting because we've found out that the things that happen with the web really sort of blow us away. 
+They're much more than we'd originally imagined when we put together the little, initial website that we started off with. 
+Now, I want you to put your data on the web. 
+Turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential. 
+There is still a huge frustration that people have because we haven't got data on the web as data. 
+What do you mean, "" data ""? What's the difference — documents, data? 
+Well, documents you read, OK? 
+More or less, you read them, you can follow links from them, and that's it. 
+Data — you can do all kinds of stuff with a computer. 
+Who was here or has otherwise seen Hans Rosling's talk? 
+One of the great — yes a lot of people have seen it — one of the great TED Talks. 
+Hans put up this presentation in which he showed, for various different countries, in various different colors — he showed income levels on one axis and he showed infant mortality, and he shot this thing animated through time. 
+So, he'd taken this data and made a presentation which just shattered a lot of myths that people had about the economics in the developing world. 
+He put up a slide a little bit like this. 
+It had underground all the data OK, data is brown and boxy and boring, and that's how we think of it, isn't it? 
+Because data you can't naturally use by itself But in fact, data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it. 
+In this case, Hans had put the data together he had found from all kinds of United Nations websites and things. 
+He had put it together, combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces and then he'd put it into this software, which I think his son developed, originally, and produces this wonderful presentation. 
+And Hans made a point of saying, "" Look, it's really important to have a lot of data. "" And I was happy to see that at the party last night that he was still saying, very forcibly, "" It's really important to have a lot of data. "" So I want us now to think about not just two pieces of data being connected, or six like he did, but I want to think about a world where everybody has put data on the web and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web and then calling that linked data. 
+The technology is linked data, and it's extremely simple. 
+If you want to put something on the web there are three rules: first thing is that those HTTP names — those things that start with "" http: "" — we're using them not just for documents now, we're using them for things that the documents are about. 
+We're using them for people, we're using them for places, we're using them for your products, we're using them for events. 
+All kinds of conceptual things, they have names now that start with HTTP. 
+Second rule, if I take one of these HTTP names and I look it up and I do the web thing with it and I fetch the data using the HTTP protocol from the web, I will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing, about that event. 
+Who's at the event? Whatever it is about that person, where they were born, things like that. 
+So the second rule is I get important information back. 
+Third rule is that when I get back that information it's not just got somebody's height and weight and when they were born, it's got relationships. 
+Data is relationships. 
+Interestingly, data is relationships. 
+This person was born in Berlin; Berlin is in Germany. 
+And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it's related to is given one of those names that starts HTTP. 
+So, I can go ahead and look that thing up. 
+So I look up a person — I can look up then the city where they were born; then I can look up the region it's in, and the town it's in, and the population of it, and so on. 
+So I can browse this stuff. 
+So that's it, really. 
+That is linked data. 
+I wrote an article entitled "" Linked Data "" a couple of years ago and soon after that, things started to happen. 
+The idea of linked data is that we get lots and lots and lots of these boxes that Hans had, and we get lots and lots and lots of things sprouting. 
+It's not just a whole lot of other plants. 
+It's not just a root supplying a plant, but for each of those plants, whatever it is — a presentation, an analysis, somebody's looking for patterns in the data — they get to look at all the data and they get it connected together, and the really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is. 
+So, linked data. 
+The meme went out there. 
+And, pretty soon Chris Bizer at the Freie Universitat in Berlin who was one of the first people to put interesting things up, he noticed that Wikipedia — you know Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia with lots and lots of interesting documents in it. 
+Well, in those documents, there are little squares, little boxes. 
+And in most information boxes, there's data. 
+So he wrote a program to take the data, extract it from Wikipedia, and put it into a blob of linked data on the web, which he called dbpedia. 
+Dbpedia is represented by the blue blob in the middle of this slide and if you actually go and look up Berlin, you'll find that there are other blobs of data which also have stuff about Berlin, and they're linked together. 
+So if you pull the data from dbpedia about Berlin, you'll end up pulling up these other things as well. 
+And the exciting thing is it's starting to grow. 
+This is just the grassroots stuff again, OK? 
+Let's think about data for a bit. 
+Data comes in fact in lots and lots of different forms. 
+Think of the diversity of the web. It's a really important thing that the web allows you to put all kinds of data up there. 
+So it is with data. I could talk about all kinds of data. 
+We could talk about government data, enterprise data is really important, there's scientific data, there's personal data, there's weather data, there's data about events, there's data about talks, and there's news and there's all kinds of stuff. 
+I'm just going to mention a few of them so that you get the idea of the diversity of it, so that you also see how much unlocked potential. 
+Let's start with government data. 
+Barack Obama said in a speech, that he — American government data would be available on the Internet in accessible formats. 
+And I hope that they will put it up as linked data. 
+That's important. Why is it important? 
+Not just for transparency, yeah transparency in government is important, but that data — this is the data from all the government departments Think about how much of that data is about how life is lived in America. 
+It's actual useful. It's got value. 
+I can use it in my company. 
+I could use it as a kid to do my homework. 
+So we're talking about making the place, making the world run better by making this data available. 
+In fact if you're responsible — if you know about some data in a government department, often you find that these people, they're very tempted to keep it — Hans calls it database hugging. 
+You hug your database, you don't want to let it go until you've made a beautiful website for it. 
+Well, I'd like to suggest that rather — yes, make a beautiful website, who am I to say don't make a beautiful website? 
+Make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the data. 
+We want unadulterated data. 
+OK, we have to ask for raw data now. 
+And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? 
+Can you say "" raw ""? 
+Audience: Raw. 
+Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "" data ""? 
+Audience: Data. 
+TBL: Can you say "" now ""? 
+Audience: Now! 
+TBL: Alright, "" raw data now ""! 
+Audience: Raw data now! 
+Practice that. It's important because you have no idea the number of excuses people come up with to hang onto their data and not give it to you, even though you've paid for it as a taxpayer. 
+And it's not just America. It's all over the world. 
+And it's not just governments, of course — it's enterprises as well. 
+So I'm just going to mention a few other thoughts on data. 
+Here we are at TED, and all the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now — curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer's, understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable, understanding how the world works. 
+The people who are going to solve those — the scientists — they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. 
+But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared. 
+In fact, I'll just go into one area — if you're looking at Alzheimer's, for example, drug discovery — there is a whole lot of linked data which is just coming out because scientists in that field realize this is a great way of getting out of those silos, because they had their genomics data in one database in one building, and they had their protein data in another. 
+Now, they are sticking it onto — linked data — and now they can ask the sort of question, that you probably wouldn't ask, I wouldn't ask — they would. 
+What proteins are involved in signal transduction and also related to pyramidal neurons? 
+Well, you take that mouthful and you put it into Google. 
+Of course, there's no page on the web which has answered that question because nobody has asked that question before. 
+You get 223,000 hits — no results you can use. 
+You ask the linked data — which they've now put together — 32 hits, each of which is a protein which has those properties and you can look at. 
+The power of being able to ask those questions, as a scientist — questions which actually bridge across different disciplines — is really a complete sea change. 
+It's very very important. 
+Scientists are totally stymied at the moment — the power of the data that other scientists have collected is locked up and we need to get it unlocked so we can tackle those huge problems. 
+Now if I go on like this, you'll think that all the data comes from huge institutions and has nothing to do with you. 
+But, that's not true. 
+In fact, data is about our lives. 
+You just — you log on to your social networking site, your favorite one, you say, "" This is my friend. "" Bing! Relationship. Data. 
+You say, "" This photograph, it's about — it depicts this person. "" Bing! That's data. Data, data, data. 
+Every time you do things on the social networking site, the social networking site is taking data and using it — re-purposing it — and using it to make other people's lives more interesting on the site. 
+But, when you go to another linked data site — and let's say this is one about travel, and you say, "" I want to send this photo to all the people in that group, "" you can't get over the walls. 
+The Economist wrote an article about it, and lots of people have blogged about it — tremendous frustration. 
+The way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability between social networking sites. 
+We need to do that with linked data. 
+One last type of data I'll talk about, maybe it's the most exciting. 
+Before I came down here, I looked it up on OpenStreetMap The OpenStreetMap's a map, but it's also a Wiki. 
+Zoom in and that square thing is a theater — which we're in right now — The Terrace Theater. It didn't have a name on it. 
+So I could go into edit mode, I could select the theater, I could add down at the bottom the name, and I could save it back. 
+And now if you go back to the OpenStreetMap. org, and you find this place, you will find that The Terrace Theater has got a name. 
+I did that. Me! 
+I did that to the map. I just did that! 
+I put that up on there. Hey, you know what? 
+If I — that street map is all about everybody doing their bit and it creates an incredible resource because everybody else does theirs. 
+And that is what linked data is all about. 
+It's about people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting. 
+That's how linked data works. 
+You do your bit. Everybody else does theirs. 
+You may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there but you know to demand it. 
+And we've practiced that. 
+So, linked data — it's huge. 
+I've only told you a very small number of things There are data in every aspect of our lives, every aspect of work and pleasure, and it's not just about the number of places where data comes, it's about connecting it together. 
+And when you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn't happen just with the web, with documents. 
+You get this really huge power out of it. 
+So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this — the people who think it's a great idea. 
+And all the people — and I think there's a lot of people at TED who do things because — even though there's not an immediate return on the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has done it — they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does things which would be good if everybody else did them. 
+OK, so it's called linked data. 
+I want you to make it. 
+I want you to demand it. 
+And I think it's an idea worth spreading. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Every day, I listen to harrowing stories of people fleeing for their lives, across dangerous borders and unfriendly seas. 
+But there's one story that keeps me awake at night, and it's about Doaa. 
+And the war that drove them there was still raging in its fourth year. 
+And the community that once welcomed them there had become weary of them. 
+And one day, men on motorcycles tried to kidnap her. 
+Once an aspiring student thinking only of her future, now she was scared all the time. 
+But she was also full of hope, because she was in love with a fellow Syrian refugee named Bassem. 
+I will work, you can study — the promise of a new life. "" And he asked her father for her hand in marriage. 
+But they knew to get to Europe they had to risk their lives, traveling across the Mediterranean Sea, putting their hands in smugglers', notorious for their cruelty. 
+And Doaa was terrified of the water. 
+She always had been. She never learned to swim. 
+It was August that year, and already 2,000 people had died trying to cross the Mediterranean, but Doaa knew of a friend who had made it all the way to Northern Europe, and she thought, "" Maybe we can, too. "" So she asked her parents if they could go, and after a painful discussion, they consented, and Bassem paid his entire life savings — 2,500 dollars each — to the smugglers. 
+It was a Saturday morning when the call came, and they were taken by bus to a beach, hundreds of people on the beach. 
+They were taken then by small boats onto an old fishing boat, 500 of them crammed onto that boat, 300 below, [200] above. 
+There were Syrians, Palestinians, Africans, Muslims and Christians, 100 children, including Sandra — little Sandra, six years old — and Masa, 18 months. 
+There were families on that boat, crammed together shoulder to shoulder, feet to feet. 
+Day two on the water, they were sick with worry and sick to their stomachs from the rough sea. 
+Day three, Doaa had a premonition. 
+And she said to Bassem, "" I fear we're not going to make it. 
+I fear the boat is going to sink. "" And Bassem said to her, "" Please be patient. 
+We will make it to Sweden, we will get married and we will have a future. "" Day four, the passengers were getting agitated. 
+He said, "" In 16 hours we will reach the shores of Italy. "" They were weak and weary. 
+The parents were terrified for their children, and they collectively refused to disembark. 
+So the boat sped away in anger, and a half an hour later, came back and started deliberately ramming a hole in the side of Doaa's boat, just below where she and Bassem were sitting. 
+And she heard how they yelled, "Let the fish eat your flesh!" 
+And they started laughing as the boat capsized and sank. 
+The 300 people below deck were doomed. 
+Doaa was holding on to the side of the boat as it sank, and watched in horror as a small child was cut to pieces by the propeller. 
+Bassem said to her, "" Please let go, or you'll be swept in and the propeller will kill you, too. "" And remember — she can't swim. 
+But she let go and she started moving her arms and her legs, thinking, "" This is swimming. "" And miraculously, Bassem found a life ring. 
+It was one of those child's rings that they use to play in swimming pools and on calm seas. 
+Bassem was a good swimmer, so he held her hand and tread water. 
+Around them there were corpses. 
+One man approached them with a small baby perched on his shoulder, nine months old — Malek. 
+I'm too weak. I don't have the courage anymore. "" And he handed little Malek over to Bassem and to Doaa, and they perched her onto the life ring. 
+So now they were three, Doaa, Bassem and little Malek. 
+Millions of refugees are living in exile, in limbo. 
+They're living in countries [fleeing] from a war that has been raging for four years. 
+Even if they wanted to return, they can't. 
+So people continue to flee into neighboring countries, and we build refugee camps for them in the desert. 
+There are simply not enough schools, water systems, sanitation. 
+Even rich European countries could never handle such an influx without massive investment. 
+The Syria war has driven almost four million people over the borders, but over seven million people are on the run inside the country. 
+Back to those neighboring countries hosting so many. 
+They feel that the richer world has done too little to support them. 
+And days have turned into months, months into years. 
+A refugee's stay is supposed to be temporary. 
+And now it was Doaa's turn to say to Bassem, "My love, please hold on to hope, to our future. We will make it." 
+And he said to her, "" I'm sorry, my love, that I put you in this situation. 
+I have never loved anyone as much as I love you. "" And he released himself into the water, and Doaa watched as the love of her life drowned before her eyes. 
+Later that day, a mother came up to Doaa with her small 18-month-old daughter, Masa. 
+And she said to Doaa, "" Please take this child. 
+Let her be part of you. I will not survive. "" And then she went away and drowned. 
+So Doaa, the 19-year-old refugee who was terrified of the water, who couldn't swim, found herself in charge of two little baby kids. 
+Around them, the bodies were bloating and turning black. 
+On the fourth day in the water, this is how Doaa probably looked on the ring with her two children. 
+When Doaa took the little boy and the mother drowned, she said to the sobbing child, "She just went away to find you water and food." 
+But his heart soon stopped, and Doaa had to release the little boy into the water. 
+Later that day, she looked up into the sky with hope, because she saw two planes crossing in the sky. 
+But that afternoon, as the sun was going down, she saw a boat, a merchant vessel. 
+And she said, "" Please, God, let them rescue me. "" She waved her arms and she felt like she shouted for about two hours. 
+They pulled them onto the boat, they got oxygen and blankets, and a Greek helicopter came to pick them up and take them to the island of Crete. 
+But Doaa looked down and asked, "" What of Malek? "" And they told her the little baby did not survive — she drew her last breath in the boat's clinic. 
+But Doaa was sure that as they had been pulled up onto the rescue boat, that little baby girl had been smiling. 
+Only 11 people survived that wreck, of the 500. 
+There was never an international investigation into what happened. 
+And then the news cycle moved on. 
+Meanwhile, in a pediatric hospital on Crete, little Masa was on the edge of death. 
+She was really dehydrated. Her kidneys were failing. 
+Amazingly, little Masa survived. 
+And soon the Greek press started reporting about the miracle baby, who had survived four days in the water without food or anything to drink, and offers to adopt her came from all over the country. 
+And meanwhile, Doaa was in another hospital on Crete, thin, dehydrated. 
+An Egyptian family took her into their home as soon as she was released. 
+And soon word went around about Doaa's survival, and a phone number was published on Facebook. 
+Messages started coming in. 
+"" Doaa, do you know what happened to my brother? 
+My sister? My parents? My friends? Do you know if they survived? "" One of those messages said, "I believe you saved my little niece, Masa." 
+And it had this photo. 
+This was from Masa's uncle, a Syrian refugee who had made it to Sweden with his family and also Masa's older sister. 
+Soon, we hope, Masa will be reunited with him in Sweden, and until then, she's being cared for in a beautiful orphanage in Athens. 
+And Doaa? Well, word went around about her survival, too. 
+And the media wrote about this slight woman, and couldn't imagine how she could survive all this time under such conditions in that sea, and still save another life. 
+The Academy of Athens, one of Greece's most prestigious institutions, gave her an award of bravery, and she deserves all that praise, and she deserves a second chance. 
+But she wants to still go to Sweden. 
+But I have to ask: what if she didn't have to take that risk? 
+Why wasn't there a legal way for her to study in Europe? 
+Why is there no massive resettlement program for Syrian refugees, the victims of the worst war of our times? 
+The world did this for the Vietnamese in the 1970s. Why not now? 
+Why is there so little investment in the neighboring countries hosting so many refugees? 
+And why, the root question, is so little being done to stop the wars, the persecution and the poverty that is driving so many people to the shores of Europe? 
+Until these issues are resolved, people will continue to take to the seas and to seek safety and asylum. 
+Well, that is largely Europe's choice. 
+People are worried about their security, their economies, the changes of culture. 
+But is that more important than saving human lives? 
+Because there is something fundamental here that I think overrides the rest, and it is about our common humanity. 
+No person fleeing war or persecution should have to die crossing a sea to reach safety. 
+So on behalf of little Masa and on behalf of Doaa and of Bassem and of those 500 people who drowned with them, can we make sure that they did not die in vain? 
+Could we be inspired by what happened, and take a stand for a world in which every life matters? 
+Thank you. 
+
+Once? Twice? Seventeen times? 
+Do you remember what you were describing when you used the word? 
+No, I didn't think so, because it's come down to this, people: You're using the word incorrectly, and tonight I hope to show you how to put the "" awe "" back in "" awesome. "" Recently, I was dining at an outdoor cafe, and the server came up to our table, and asked us if we had dined there before, and I said, "" Yes, yes, we have. "" And she said, "" Awesome. "" And I thought, "" Really? 
+Awesome or just merely good that we decided to visit your restaurant again? "" The other day, one of my coworkers asked me if I could save that file as a PDF, and I said, "" Well, of course, "" and he said, "" Awesome. "" Seriously, can saving anything as a PDF be awesome? 
+Sadly, the frequent overuse of the word "" awesome "" has now replaced words like "" great "" and "" thank you. "" So Webster's dictionary defines the word "" awesome "" as fear mingled with admiration or reverence, a feeling produced by something majestic. 
+Now, with that in mind, was your Quiznos sandwich awesome? 
+Or that game the other day? Was that awesome? 
+The answer is no, no and no. 
+A sandwich can be delicious, that parking space can be nearby, and that game can be a blowout, but not everything can be awesome. 
+(Laughter) So when you use the word "" awesome "" to describe the most mundane of things, you're taking away the very power of the word. 
+This author says, "" Snowy days or finding money in your pants is awesome. "" (Laughter) Um, no, it is not, and we need to raise the bar for this poor schmuck. (Laughter) So in other words, if you have everything, you value nothing. 
+It's a lot like drinking from a firehose like this jackass right here. 
+There's no dynamic, there's no highs or lows, if everything is awesome. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, here are 10 things that are truly awesome. 
+Imagine, if you will, having to schlep everything on your back. 
+Wouldn't this be easier for me if I could roll this home? 
+Yes, so I think I'll invent the wheel. 
+The wheel, ladies and gentlemen. 
+Is the wheel awesome? Say it with me. 
+Yes, the wheel is awesome! 
+The Great Pyramids were the tallest man-made structure in the world for 4,000 years. 
+Pharaoh had his slaves move millions of blocks just to this site to erect a big freaking headstone. 
+Yes, the pyramids were awesome. 
+The Grand Canyon. Come on. 
+It's almost 80 million years old. 
+Is the Grand Canyon awesome? 
+Yes, the Grand Canyon is. 
+Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1829, and earlier today, when you whipped out your smartphone and you took a shot of your awesome sandwich, and you know who you are — (Laughter) — wasn't that easier than exposing the image to copper plates coated with iodized silver? 
+I mean, come on. Is photography awesome? 
+Yes, photography is awesome. 
+D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, the largest amphibious invasion in world history. 
+Was D-Day awesome? Yes, it was awesome. 
+Did you eat food today? Did you eat? 
+Then you can thank the honeybee, that's the one, because if crops aren't pollinated, we can't grow food, and then we're all going to die. 
+It's just like that. 
+But it's not like a flower can just get up and have sex with another flower, although that would be awesome. 
+(Laughter) Bees are awesome. Are you kidding me? 
+Landing on the moon! Come on! 
+Apollo 11. Are you kidding me? 
+Sixty-six years after the Wright Brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Neil Armstrong was 240,000 miles away. 
+That's like from here to the moon. 
+(Laughter) That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for awesome! 
+You're damn right, it was. 
+Woodstock, 1969: Rolling Stone Magazine said this changed the history of rock and roll. 
+Tickets were only 24 dollars back then. 
+You can't even buy a freaking t-shirt for that now. 
+Jimi Hendrix's version of "" The Star-Spangled Banner "" was the most iconic. 
+Was Woodstock awesome? Yes, it was awesome. 
+Sharks! They're at the top of the food chain. 
+Sharks have multiple rows of teeth that grow in their jaw and they move forward like a conveyor belt. 
+Some sharks can lose 30,000 teeth in their lifetime. 
+Does awesome inspire fear? 
+Oh, hell yeah, sharks are awesome! 
+The Internet was born in 1982 and it instantly took over global communication, and later tonight, when all these PowerPoints are uplifted to the Internet so that a guy in Siberia can get drunk and watch this crap, the Internet is awesome. 
+And finally, finally some of you can't wait to come up and tell me how awesome my PowerPoint was. 
+I will save you the time. 
+It was not awesome, but it was true, and I hope it was entertaining, and out of all the audiences I've ever had, y'all are the most recent. Thank you and good night. 
+
+Speaking up is hard to do. 
+I understood the true meaning of this phrase exactly one month ago, when my wife and I became new parents. 
+It was an amazing moment. 
+It was exhilarating and elating, but it was also scary and terrifying. 
+And it got particularly terrifying when we got home from the hospital, and we were unsure whether our little baby boy was getting enough nutrients from breastfeeding. 
+And we wanted to call our pediatrician, but we also didn't want to make a bad first impression or come across as a crazy, neurotic parent. 
+So we worried. 
+And we waited. 
+When we got to the doctor's office the next day, she immediately gave him formula because he was pretty dehydrated. 
+Our son is fine now, and our doctor has reassured us we can always contact her. 
+But in that moment, I should've spoken up, but I didn't. 
+But sometimes we speak up when we shouldn't, and I learned that over 10 years ago when I let my twin brother down. 
+My twin brother is a documentary filmmaker, and for one of his first films, he got an offer from a distribution company. 
+He was excited, and he was inclined to accept the offer. 
+But as a negotiations researcher, I insisted he make a counteroffer, and I helped him craft the perfect one. 
+And it was perfect — it was perfectly insulting. 
+The company was so offended, they literally withdrew the offer and my brother was left with nothing. 
+And I've asked people all over the world about this dilemma of speaking up: when they can assert themselves, when they can push their interests, when they can express an opinion, when they can make an ambitious ask. 
+And the range of stories are varied and diverse, but they also make up a universal tapestry. 
+Can I correct my boss when they make a mistake? 
+Can I confront my coworker who keeps stepping on my toes? 
+Can I challenge my friend's insensitive joke? 
+Can I tell the person I love the most my deepest insecurities? 
+And through these experiences, I've come to recognize that each of us have something called a range of acceptable behavior. 
+Now, sometimes we're too strong; we push ourselves too much. 
+That's what happened with my brother. 
+Even making an offer was outside his range of acceptable behavior. 
+But sometimes we're too weak. 
+That's what happened with my wife and I. 
+And this range of acceptable behaviors — when we stay within our range, we're rewarded. 
+When we step outside that range, we get punished in a variety of ways. 
+We get dismissed or demeaned or even ostracized. 
+Or we lose that raise or that promotion or that deal. 
+Now, the first thing we need to know is: What is my range? 
+But the key thing is, our range isn't fixed; it's actually pretty dynamic. 
+It expands and it narrows based on the context. 
+And there's one thing that determines that range more than anything else, and that's your power. 
+Your power determines your range. 
+What is power? 
+Power comes in lots of forms. 
+In negotiations, it comes in the form of alternatives. 
+So my brother had no alternatives; he lacked power. 
+The company had lots of alternatives; they had power. 
+Sometimes it's being new to a country, like an immigrant, or new to an organization or new to an experience, like my wife and I as new parents. 
+Sometimes it's at work, where someone's the boss and someone's the subordinate. 
+Sometimes it's in relationships, where one person's more invested than the other person. 
+And the key thing is that when we have lots of power, our range is very wide. 
+We have a lot of leeway in how to behave. 
+But when we lack power, our range narrows. 
+We have very little leeway. 
+The problem is that when our range narrows, that produces something called the low-power double bind. 
+The low-power double bind happens when, if we don't speak up, we go unnoticed, but if we do speak up, we get punished. 
+Now, many of you have heard the phrase the "" double bind "" and connected it with one thing, and that's gender. 
+The gender double bind is women who don't speak up go unnoticed, and women who do speak up get punished. 
+And the key thing is that women have the same need as men to speak up, but they have barriers to doing so. 
+But what my research has shown over the last two decades is that what looks like a gender difference is not really a gender double bind, it's a really a low-power double bind. 
+And what looks like a gender difference are really often just power differences in disguise. 
+Oftentimes we see a difference between a man and a woman or men and women, and think, "" Biological cause. There's something fundamentally different about the sexes. "" But in study after study, I've found that a better explanation for many sex differences is really power. 
+And so it's the low-power double bind. 
+And the low-power double bind means that we have a narrow range, and we lack power. 
+We have a narrow range, and our double bind is very large. 
+So we need to find ways to expand our range. 
+And over the last couple decades, my colleagues and I have found two things really matter. 
+The first: you seem powerful in your own eyes. 
+The second: you seem powerful in the eyes of others. 
+When I feel powerful, I feel confident, not fearful; I expand my own range. 
+When other people see me as powerful, they grant me a wider range. 
+So we need tools to expand our range of acceptable behavior. 
+And I'm going to give you a set of tools today. 
+Speaking up is risky, but these tools will lower your risk of speaking up. 
+The first tool I'm going to give you got discovered in negotiations in an important finding. 
+On average, women make less ambitious offers and get worse outcomes than men at the bargaining table. 
+But Hannah Riley Bowles and Emily Amanatullah have discovered there's one situation where women get the same outcomes as men and are just as ambitious. 
+That's when they advocate for others. 
+When they advocate for others, they discover their own range and expand it in their own mind. 
+They become more assertive. 
+This is sometimes called "" the mama bear effect. "" Like a mama bear defending her cubs, when we advocate for others, we can discover our own voice. 
+But sometimes, we have to advocate for ourselves. 
+How do we do that? 
+One of the most important tools we have to advocate for ourselves is something called perspective-taking. 
+And perspective-taking is really simple: it's simply looking at the world through the eyes of another person. 
+It's one of the most important tools we have to expand our range. 
+When I take your perspective, and I think about what you really want, you're more likely to give me what I really want. 
+But here's the problem: perspective-taking is hard to do. 
+So let's do a little experiment. 
+I want you all to hold your hand just like this: your finger — put it up. 
+And I want you to draw a capital letter E on your forehead as quickly as possible. 
+OK, it turns out that we can draw this E in one of two ways, and this was originally designed as a test of perspective-taking. 
+I'm going to show you two pictures of someone with an E on their forehead — my former student, Erika Hall. 
+And you can see over here, that's the correct E. 
+I drew the E so it looks like an E to another person. 
+That's the perspective-taking E because it looks like an E from someone else's vantage point. 
+But this E over here is the self-focused E. 
+And we particularly get self-focused in a crisis. 
+I want to tell you about a particular crisis. 
+A man walks into a bank in Watsonville, California. 
+And he says, "" Give me $2,000, or I'm blowing the whole bank up with a bomb. "" Now, the bank manager didn't give him the money. 
+She took a step back. 
+She took his perspective, and she noticed something really important. 
+He asked for a specific amount of money. 
+So she said, "Why did you ask for $2,000?" 
+And he said, "" My friend is going to be evicted unless I get him $2,000 immediately. "" And she said, "" Oh! You don't want to rob the bank — you want to take out a loan. "" (Laughter) "" Why don't you come back to my office, and we can have you fill out the paperwork. "" (Laughter) Now, her quick perspective-taking defused a volatile situation. 
+So when we take someone's perspective, it allows us to be ambitious and assertive, but still be likable. 
+Here's another way to be assertive but still be likable, and that is to signal flexibility. 
+Now, imagine you're a car salesperson, and you want to sell someone a car. 
+You're going to more likely make the sale if you give them two options. 
+Let's say option A: $24,000 for this car and a five-year warranty. 
+Or option B: $23,000 and a three-year warranty. 
+My research shows that when you give people a choice among options, it lowers their defenses, and they're more likely to accept your offer. 
+And this doesn't just work with salespeople; it works with parents. 
+When my niece was four, she resisted getting dressed and rejected everything. 
+But then my sister-in-law had a brilliant idea. 
+What if I gave my daughter a choice? 
+This shirt or that shirt? OK, that shirt. 
+This pant or that pant? OK, that pant. 
+And it worked brilliantly. 
+She got dressed quickly and without resistance. 
+When I've asked the question around the world when people feel comfortable speaking up, the number one answer is: "When I have social support in my audience; when I have allies." 
+So we want to get allies on our side. 
+How do we do that? 
+Well, one of the ways is be a mama bear. 
+When we advocate for others, we expand our range in our own eyes and the eyes of others, but we also earn strong allies. 
+Another way we can earn strong allies, especially in high places, is by asking other people for advice. 
+When we ask others for advice, they like us because we flatter them, and we're expressing humility. 
+And this really works to solve another double bind. 
+And that's the self-promotion double bind. 
+The self-promotion double bind is that if we don't advertise our accomplishments, no one notices. 
+And if we do, we're not likable. 
+But if we ask for advice about one of our accomplishments, we are able to be competent in their eyes but also be likeable. 
+And this is so powerful it even works when you see it coming. 
+There have been multiple times in life when I have been forewarned that a low-power person has been given the advice to come ask me for advice. 
+I want you to notice three things about this: First, I knew they were going to come ask me for advice. 
+Two, I've actually done research on the strategic benefits of asking for advice. 
+And three, it still worked! 
+I took their perspective, I became more invested in their cause, I became more committed to them because they asked for advice. 
+Now, another time we feel more confident speaking up is when we have expertise. 
+Expertise gives us credibility. 
+When we have high power, we already have credibility. 
+We only need good evidence. 
+When we lack power, we don't have the credibility. 
+We need excellent evidence. 
+And one of the ways we can come across as an expert is by tapping into our passion. 
+I want everyone in the next few days to go up to friend of theirs and just say to them, "I want you to describe a passion of yours to me." 
+I've had people do this all over the world and I asked them, "" What did you notice about the other person when they described their passion? "" And the answers are always the same. 
+"Their eyes lit up and got big." 
+"They smiled a big beaming smile." 
+"" They used their hands all over — I had to duck because their hands were coming at me. "" "They talk quickly with a little higher pitch." 
+(Laughter) "They leaned in as if telling me a secret." 
+And then I said to them, "What happened to you as you listened to their passion?" 
+They said, "" My eyes lit up. 
+I smiled. 
+I leaned in. "" When we tap into our passion, we give ourselves the courage, in our own eyes, to speak up, but we also get the permission from others to speak up. 
+Tapping into our passion even works when we come across as too weak. 
+Both men and women get punished at work when they shed tears. 
+But Lizzie Wolf has shown that when we frame our strong emotions as passion, the condemnation of our crying disappears for both men and women. 
+I want to end with a few words from my late father that he spoke at my twin brother's wedding. 
+Here's a picture of us. 
+My dad was a psychologist like me, but his real love and his real passion was cinema, like my brother. 
+And so he wrote a speech for my brother's wedding about the roles we play in the human comedy. 
+And he said, "" The lighter your touch, the better you become at improving and enriching your performance. 
+Those who embrace their roles and work to improve their performance grow, change and expand the self. 
+Play it well, and your days will be mostly joyful. "" What my dad was saying is that we've all been assigned ranges and roles in this world. 
+But he was also saying the essence of this talk: those roles and ranges are constantly expanding and evolving. 
+So when a scene calls for it, be a ferocious mama bear and a humble advice seeker. 
+Have excellent evidence and strong allies. 
+Be a passionate perspective taker. 
+And if you use those tools — and each and every one of you can use these tools — you will expand your range of acceptable behavior, and your days will be mostly joyful. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In 1991 I had maybe the most profound and transformative experience of my life. 
+I was in the third year of my seven-year undergraduate degree. 
+I took a couple victory laps in there. 
+And I was on a college choir tour up in Northern California, and we had stopped for the day after all day on the bus, and we were relaxing next to this beautiful idyllic lake in the mountains. 
+And there were crickets and birds and frogs making noise, and as we sat there, over the mountains coming in from the north were these Steven Spielbergian clouds rolling toward us, and as the clouds got about halfway over the valley, so help me God, every single animal in that place stopped making noise at the same time. 
+(Whoosh) This electric hush, as if they could sense what was about to happen. 
+And then the clouds came over us, and then, boom! This massive thunderclap, and sheets of rain. 
+It was just extraordinary, and when I came back home I found a poem by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and decided to set it to music, a piece for choir called "" Cloudburst, "" which is the piece that we'll perform for you in just a moment. 
+Now fast forward to just three years ago. 
+(Music) And we released to YouTube this, the Virtual Choir Project, 185 singers from 12 different countries. 
+You can see my little video there conducting these people, alone in their dorm rooms or in their living rooms at home. 
+Two years ago, on this very stage, we premiered Virtual Choir 2, 2,052 singers from 58 different countries, this time performing a piece that I had written called "" Sleep. "" And then just last spring we released Virtual Choir 3, "" Water Night, "" another piece that I had written, this time nearly 4,000 singers from 73 different countries. 
+(Music) And when I was speaking to Chris about the future of Virtual Choir and where we might be able to take this, he challenged me to push the technology as far as we possibly could. 
+Could we do this all in real time? 
+Could we have people singing together in real time? 
+And with the help of Skype, that is what we are going to attempt today. 
+Now, we'll perform "" Cloudburst "" for you. 
+The first half will be performed by the live singers here on stage. 
+I'm joined by singers from Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Fullerton and Riverside Community College, some of the best amateur choirs in the country, and — (Applause) — and in the second half of the piece, the virtual choir will join us, 30 different singers from 30 different countries. 
+Now, we've pushed the technology as far as it can go, but there's still less than a second of latency, but in musical terms, that's a lifetime. 
+We deal in milliseconds. 
+So what I've done is, I've adapted "" Cloudburst "" so that it embraces the latency and the performers sing into the latency instead of trying to be exactly together. 
+So with deep humility, and for your approval, we present "" Cloudburst. "" (Applause) (Piano) [The rain...] [Eyes of shadow-water] [eyes of well-water] [eyes of dream-water.] [Blue suns, green whirlwinds,] [birdbeaks of light pecking open] [pomegranate stars.] [But tell me, burnt earth, is there no water?] [Only blood, only dust,] [only naked footsteps on the thorns?] [The rain awakens...] [We must sleep with open eyes,] [we must dream with our hands,] [we must dream the dreams of a river seeking its course,] [of the sun dreaming its worlds.] [We must dream aloud,] [we must sing till the song puts forth roots,] [trunk, branches, birds, stars.] 
+[We must find the lost word,] [and remember what the blood,] [the tides, the earth, and the body say,] [and return to the point of departure...] (Music) (Applause) ["" Cloudburst "" Octavio Paz] [translation by Lysander Kemp, adapted by Eric Whitacre] Eric Whitacre: Beth. Annabelle, where are you? Jacob. (Applause) 
+Thank you. 
+
+My talk is "" Flapping Birds and Space Telescopes. "" And you would think that should have nothing to do with one another, but I hope by the end of these 18 minutes, you'll see a little bit of a relation. 
+It ties to origami. So let me start. 
+What is origami? 
+Most people think they know what origami is. It's this: flapping birds, toys, cootie catchers, that sort of thing. 
+And that is what origami used to be. 
+But it's become something else. 
+It's become an art form, a form of sculpture. 
+The common theme — what makes it origami — is folding is how we create the form. 
+You know, it's very old. This is a plate from 1797. 
+It shows these women playing with these toys. 
+If you look close, it's this shape, called a crane. 
+Every Japanese kid learns how to fold that crane. 
+So this art has been around for hundreds of years, and you would think something that's been around that long — so restrictive, folding only — everything that could be done has been done a long time ago. 
+And that might have been the case. 
+But in the twentieth century, a Japanese folder named Yoshizawa came along, and he created tens of thousands of new designs. 
+But even more importantly, he created a language, a way we could communicate, a code of dots, dashes and arrows. 
+Harkening back to Susan Blackmore's talk, we now have a means of transmitting information with heredity and selection, and we know where that leads. 
+And where it has led in origami is to things like this. 
+This is an origami figure — one sheet, no cuts, folding only, hundreds of folds. 
+This, too, is origami, and this shows where we've gone in the modern world. 
+Naturalism. Detail. 
+You can get horns, antlers — even, if you look close, cloven hooves. 
+And it raises a question: what changed? 
+And what changed is something you might not have expected in an art, which is math. 
+That is, people applied mathematical principles to the art, to discover the underlying laws. 
+And that leads to a very powerful tool. 
+The secret to productivity in so many fields — and in origami — is letting dead people do your work for you. 
+(Laughter) Because what you can do is take your problem, and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved, and use their solutions. 
+And I want to tell you how we did that in origami. 
+Origami revolves around crease patterns. 
+The crease pattern shown here is the underlying blueprint for an origami figure. 
+And you can't just draw them arbitrarily. 
+They have to obey four simple laws. 
+And they're very simple, easy to understand. 
+The first law is two-colorability. You can color any crease pattern with just two colors without ever having the same color meeting. 
+The directions of the folds at any vertex — the number of mountain folds, the number of valley folds — always differs by two. Two more or two less. 
+Nothing else. 
+If you look at the angles around the fold, you find that if you number the angles in a circle, all the even-numbered angles add up to a straight line, all the odd-numbered angles add up to a straight line. 
+And if you look at how the layers stack, you'll find that no matter how you stack folds and sheets, a sheet can never penetrate a fold. 
+So that's four simple laws. That's all you need in origami. 
+All of origami comes from that. 
+And you'd think, "" Can four simple laws give rise to that kind of complexity? "" But indeed, the laws of quantum mechanics can be written down on a napkin, and yet they govern all of chemistry, all of life, all of history. 
+If we obey these laws, we can do amazing things. 
+So in origami, to obey these laws, we can take simple patterns — like this repeating pattern of folds, called textures — and by itself it's nothing. 
+But if we follow the laws of origami, we can put these patterns into another fold that itself might be something very, very simple, but when we put it together, we get something a little different. 
+This fish, 400 scales — again, it is one uncut square, only folding. 
+And if you don't want to fold 400 scales, you can back off and just do a few things, and add plates to the back of a turtle, or toes. 
+Or you can ramp up and go up to 50 stars on a flag, with 13 stripes. 
+And if you want to go really crazy, 1,000 scales on a rattlesnake. 
+And this guy's on display downstairs, so take a look if you get a chance. 
+The most powerful tools in origami have related to how we get parts of creatures. 
+And I can put it in this simple equation. 
+We take an idea, combine it with a square, and you get an origami figure. 
+(Laughter) What matters is what we mean by those symbols. 
+And you might say, "" Can you really be that specific? 
+I mean, a stag beetle — it's got two points for jaws, it's got antennae. Can you be that specific in the detail? "" And yeah, you really can. 
+So how do we do that? Well, we break it down into a few smaller steps. 
+So let me stretch out that equation. 
+I start with my idea. I abstract it. 
+What's the most abstract form? It's a stick figure. 
+And from that stick figure, I somehow have to get to a folded shape that has a part for every bit of the subject, a flap for every leg. 
+And then once I have that folded shape that we call the base, you can make the legs narrower, you can bend them, you can turn it into the finished shape. 
+Now the first step, pretty easy. 
+Take an idea, draw a stick figure. 
+The last step is not so hard, but that middle step — going from the abstract description to the folded shape — that's hard. 
+But that's the place where the mathematical ideas can get us over the hump. 
+And I'm going to show you all how to do that so you can go out of here and fold something. 
+But we're going to start small. 
+This base has a lot of flaps in it. 
+We're going to learn how to make one flap. 
+How would you make a single flap? 
+Take a square. Fold it in half, fold it in half, fold it again, until it gets long and narrow, and then we'll say at the end of that, that's a flap. 
+I could use that for a leg, an arm, anything like that. 
+What paper went into that flap? 
+Well, if I unfold it and go back to the crease pattern, you can see that the upper left corner of that shape is the paper that went into the flap. 
+So that's the flap, and all the rest of the paper's left over. 
+I can use it for something else. 
+Well, there are other ways of making a flap. 
+There are other dimensions for flaps. 
+If I make the flaps skinnier, I can use a bit less paper. 
+If I make the flap as skinny as possible, I get to the limit of the minimum amount of paper needed. 
+And you can see there, it needs a quarter-circle of paper to make a flap. 
+There's other ways of making flaps. 
+If I put the flap on the edge, it uses a half circle of paper. 
+And if I make the flap from the middle, it uses a full circle. 
+So, no matter how I make a flap, it needs some part of a circular region of paper. 
+So now we're ready to scale up. 
+What if I want to make something that has a lot of flaps? 
+What do I need? I need a lot of circles. 
+And in the 1990s, origami artists discovered these principles and realized we could make arbitrarily complicated figures just by packing circles. 
+And here's where the dead people start to help us out, because lots of people have studied the problem of packing circles. 
+I can rely on that vast history of mathematicians and artists looking at disc packings and arrangements. 
+And I can use those patterns now to create origami shapes. 
+So we figured out these rules whereby you pack circles, you decorate the patterns of circles with lines according to more rules. That gives you the folds. 
+Those folds fold into a base. You shape the base. 
+You get a folded shape — in this case, a cockroach. 
+And it's so simple. 
+(Laughter) It's so simple that a computer could do it. 
+And you say, "" Well, you know, how simple is that? "" But computers — you need to be able to describe things in very basic terms, and with this, we could. 
+So I wrote a computer program a bunch of years ago called TreeMaker, and you can download it from my website. 
+It's free. It runs on all the major platforms — even Windows. 
+(Laughter) And you just draw a stick figure, and it calculates the crease pattern. 
+It does the circle packing, calculates the crease pattern, and if you use that stick figure that I just showed — which you can kind of tell, it's a deer, it's got antlers — you'll get this crease pattern. 
+And if you take this crease pattern, you fold on the dotted lines, you'll get a base that you can then shape into a deer, with exactly the crease pattern that you wanted. 
+And if you want a different deer, not a white-tailed deer, but you want a mule deer, or an elk, you change the packing, and you can do an elk. 
+Or you could do a moose. 
+Or, really, any other kind of deer. 
+These techniques revolutionized this art. 
+We found we could do insects, spiders, which are close, things with legs, things with legs and wings, things with legs and antennae. 
+And if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square wasn't interesting enough, then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square. 
+She's eating him. 
+I call it "" Snack Time. "" And you can do more than just insects. 
+This — you can put details, toes and claws. A grizzly bear has claws. 
+This tree frog has toes. 
+Actually, lots of people in origami now put toes into their models. 
+Toes have become an origami meme, because everyone's doing it. 
+You can make multiple subjects. 
+So these are a couple of instrumentalists. 
+The guitar player from a single square, the bass player from a single square. 
+And if you say, "" Well, but the guitar, bass — that's not so hot. 
+Do a little more complicated instrument. "" Well, then you could do an organ. 
+(Laughter) And what this has allowed is the creation of origami-on-demand. 
+So now people can say, "" I want exactly this and this and this, "" and you can go out and fold it. 
+And sometimes you create high art, and sometimes you pay the bills by doing some commercial work. 
+But I want to show you some examples. 
+Everything you'll see here, except the car, is origami. 
+(Video) (Applause) Just to show you, this really was folded paper. 
+Computers made things move, but these were all real, folded objects that we made. 
+And we can use this not just for visuals, but it turns out to be useful even in the real world. 
+Surprisingly, origami and the structures that we've developed in origami turn out to have applications in medicine, in science, in space, in the body, consumer electronics and more. 
+And I want to show you some of these examples. 
+One of the earliest was this pattern, this folded pattern, studied by Koryo Miura, a Japanese engineer. 
+He studied a folding pattern, and realized this could fold down into an extremely compact package that had a very simple opening and closing structure. 
+And he used it to design this solar array. 
+It's an artist's rendition, but it flew in a Japanese telescope in 1995. 
+Now, there is actually a little origami in the James Webb Space Telescope, but it's very simple. 
+The telescope, going up in space, it unfolds in two places. 
+It folds in thirds. It's a very simple pattern — you wouldn't even call that origami. 
+They certainly didn't need to talk to origami artists. 
+But if you want to go higher and go larger than this, then you might need some origami. 
+Engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab had an idea for a telescope much larger. 
+They called it the Eyeglass. 
+The design called for geosynchronous orbit 25,000 miles up, 100-meter diameter lens. 
+So, imagine a lens the size of a football field. 
+There were two groups of people who were interested in this: planetary scientists, who want to look up, and then other people, who wanted to look down. 
+Whether you look up or look down, how do you get it up in space? You've got to get it up there in a rocket. 
+And rockets are small. So you have to make it smaller. 
+How do you make a large sheet of glass smaller? 
+Well, about the only way is to fold it up somehow. 
+So you have to do something like this. 
+This was a small model. 
+Folded lens, you divide up the panels, you add flexures. 
+But this pattern's not going to work to get something 100 meters down to a few meters. 
+So the Livermore engineers, wanting to make use of the work of dead people, or perhaps live origamists, said, "Let's see if someone else is doing this sort of thing." 
+So they looked into the origami community, we got in touch with them, and I started working with them. 
+And we developed a pattern together that scales to arbitrarily large size, but that allows any flat ring or disc to fold down into a very neat, compact cylinder. 
+And they adopted that for their first generation, which was not 100 meters — it was a five-meter. 
+But this is a five-meter telescope — has about a quarter-mile focal length. 
+And it works perfectly on its test range, and it indeed folds up into a neat little bundle. 
+Now, there is other origami in space. 
+Japan Aerospace [Exploration] Agency flew a solar sail, and you can see here that the sail expands out, and you can still see the fold lines. 
+The problem that's being solved here is something that needs to be big and sheet-like at its destination, but needs to be small for the journey. 
+And that works whether you're going into space, or whether you're just going into a body. 
+And this example is the latter. 
+This is a heart stent developed by Zhong You at Oxford University. 
+It holds open a blocked artery when it gets to its destination, but it needs to be much smaller for the trip there, through your blood vessels. 
+And this stent folds down using an origami pattern, based on a model called the water bomb base. 
+Airbag designers also have the problem of getting flat sheets into a small space. 
+And they want to do their design by simulation. 
+So they need to figure out how, in a computer, to flatten an airbag. 
+And the algorithms that we developed to do insects turned out to be the solution for airbags to do their simulation. 
+And so they can do a simulation like this. 
+Those are the origami creases forming, and now you can see the airbag inflate and find out, does it work? 
+And that leads to a really interesting idea. 
+You know, where did these things come from? 
+Well, the heart stent came from that little blow-up box that you might have learned in elementary school. 
+It's the same pattern, called the water bomb base. 
+The airbag-flattening algorithm came from all the developments of circle packing and the mathematical theory that was really developed just to create insects — things with legs. 
+The thing is, that this often happens in math and science. 
+When you get math involved, problems that you solve for aesthetic value only, or to create something beautiful, turn around and turn out to have an application in the real world. 
+And as weird and surprising as it may sound, origami may someday even save a life. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm Dr. David Hanson, and I build robots with character. 
+And by that, I mean that I develop robots that are characters, but also robots that will eventually come to empathize with you. 
+So we're starting with a variety of technologies that have converged into these conversational character robots that can see faces, make eye contact with you, make a full range of facial expressions, understand speech and begin to model how you're feeling and who you are, and build a relationship with you. 
+I developed a series of technologies that allowed the robots to make more realistic facial expressions than previously achieved, on lower power, which enabled the walking biped robots, the first androids. 
+So, it's a full range of facial expressions simulating all the major muscles in the human face, running on very small batteries, extremely lightweight. 
+The materials that allowed the battery-operated facial expressions is a material that we call Frubber, and it actually has three major innovations in the material that allow this to happen. 
+One is hierarchical pores, and the other is a macro-molecular nanoscale porosity in the material. 
+There he's starting to walk. 
+This is at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. 
+I built the head. They built the body. 
+So the goal here is to achieve sentience in machines, and not just sentience, but empathy. 
+We're working with the Machine Perception Laboratory at the U.C. San Diego. 
+They have this really remarkable facial expression technology that recognizes facial expressions, what facial expressions you're making. 
+It also recognizes where you're looking, your head orientation. 
+We're emulating all the major facial expressions, and then controlling it with the software that we call the Character Engine. 
+And here is a little bit of the technology that's involved in that. 
+In fact, right now — plug it from here, and then plug it in here, and now let's see if it gets my facial expressions. 
+Okay. So I'm smiling. 
+(Laughter) Now I'm frowning. 
+And this is really heavily backlit. 
+Okay, here we go. 
+Oh, it's so sad. 
+Okay, so you smile, frowning. 
+So his perception of your emotional states is very important for machines to effectively become empathetic. 
+Machines are becoming devastatingly capable of things like killing. Right? 
+Those machines have no place for empathy. 
+And there is billions of dollars being spent on that. 
+Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. 
+So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future. 
+So, we've made 20 robots in the last eight years, during the course of getting my Ph.D. 
+And then I started Hanson Robotics, which has been developing these things for mass manufacturing. 
+This is one of our robots that we showed at Wired NextFest a couple of years ago. 
+And it sees multiple people in a scene, remembers where individual people are, and looks from person to person, remembering people. 
+So, we're involving two things. 
+One, the perception of people, and two, the natural interface, the natural form of the interface, so that it's more intuitive for you to interact with the robot. 
+You start to believe that it's alive and aware. 
+So one of my favorite projects was bringing all this stuff together in an artistic display of an android portrait of science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who wrote great works like, "" Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? "" which was the basis of the movie "" Bladerunner. "" In these stories, robots often think that they're human, and they sort of come to life. 
+So we put his writings, letters, his interviews, correspondences, into a huge database of thousands of pages, and then used some natural language processing to allow you to actually have a conversation with him. 
+And it was kind of spooky, because he would say these things that just sounded like they really understood you. 
+And this is one of the most exciting projects that we're developing, which is a little character that's a spokesbot for friendly artificial intelligence, friendly machine intelligence. 
+And we're getting this mass-manufactured. 
+We specked it out to actually be doable with a very, very low-cost bill of materials, so that it can become a childhood companion for kids. 
+Interfacing with the Internet, it gets smarter over the years. 
+As artificial intelligence evolves, so does his intelligence. 
+Chris Anderson: Thank you so much. That's incredible. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I am a reformed marketer, and I now work in international development. 
+In October, I spent some time in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the [second] largest country in Africa. 
+In fact, it's as large as Western Europe, but it only has 300 miles of paved roads. 
+The DRC is a dangerous place. 
+In the past 10 years, five million people have died due to a war in the east. 
+But war isn't the only reason that life is difficult in the DRC. 
+There are many health issues as well. 
+In fact, the HIV prevalence rate is 1.3 percent among adults. 
+This might not sound like a large number, but in a country with 76 million people, it means there are 930,000 that are infected. 
+And due to the poor infrastructure, only 25 percent of those are receiving the life-saving drugs that they need. 
+Which is why, in part, donor agencies provide condoms at low or no cost. 
+And so while I was in the DRC, I spent a lot of time talking to people about condoms, including Damien. 
+Damien runs a hotel outside of Kinshasa. 
+It's a hotel that's only open until midnight, so it's not a place that you stay. 
+But it is a place where sex workers and their clients come. 
+Now Damien knows all about condoms, but he doesn't sell them. 
+He said there's just not in demand. 
+It's not surprising, because only three percent of people in the DRC use condoms. 
+Joseph and Christine, who run a pharmacy where they sell a number of these condoms, said despite the fact that donor agencies provide them at low or no cost, and they have marketing campaigns that go along with them, their customers don't buy the branded versions. 
+They like the generics. 
+And as a marketer, I found that curious. 
+And so I started to look at what the marketing looked like. 
+And it turns out that there are three main messages used by the donor agencies for these condoms: fear, financing and fidelity. 
+They name the condoms things like Vive, "" to live "" or Trust. 
+They package it with the red ribbon that reminds us of HIV, put it in boxes that remind you who paid for them, show pictures of your wife or husband and tell you to protect them or to act prudently. 
+Now these are not the kinds of things that someone is thinking about just before they go get a condom. 
+(Laughter) What is it that you think about just before you get a condom? 
+Sex! 
+And the private companies that sell condoms in these places, they understand this. 
+Their marketing is slightly different. 
+The name might not be much different, but the imagery sure is. 
+Some brands are aspirational, and certainly the packaging is incredibly provocative. 
+And this made me think that perhaps the donor agencies had just missed out on a key aspect of marketing: understanding who's the audience. 
+And for donor agencies, unfortunately, the audience tends to be people that aren't even in the country they're working [in]. 
+It's people back home, people that support their work, people like these. 
+But if what we're really trying to do is stop the spread of HIV, we need to think about the customer, the people whose behavior needs to change — the couples, the young women, the young men — whose lives depend on it. 
+And so the lesson is this: it doesn't really matter what you're selling; you just have to think about who is your customer, and what are the messages that are going to get them to change their behavior. 
+It might just save their lives. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time. 
+If we extrapolate back, we find we must have all been on top of each other about 15 billion years ago. 
+We used to think that the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts. 
+First, there were the laws like Maxwell's equations and general relativity that determined the evolution of the universe, given its state over all of space at one time. 
+We have made good progress on the first part, and now have the knowledge of the laws of evolution in all but the most extreme conditions. 
+But until recently, we have had little idea about the initial conditions for the universe. 
+Moreover, we can calculate a probability that the universe was created in different states. 
+We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth, so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets, of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy. 
+We have two pieces of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing. 
+The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half billion years. 
+If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring, it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far. 
+Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. 
+Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet. 
+Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. 
+That is why I am in favor of manned — or should I say, personned — space flight. 
+All of my life I have sought to understand the universe and find answers to these questions. 
+The ultimate goal is a complete theory of the universe, and we are making good progress. 
+This answer took seven minutes, and really gave me an insight into the incredible act of generosity this whole talk was for TED. 
+Stephen Hawking: I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves. 
+We will take it as a salutary warning, I think, for the rest of our conference this week. 
+
+I moved back home 15 years ago after a 20-year stay in the United States, and Africa called me back. 
+And I founded my country's first graphic design and new media college. 
+And I called it the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts. 
+The idea, the dream, was really for a sort of Bauhaus sort of school where new ideas were interrogated and investigated, the creation of a new visual language based on the African creative heritage. 
+We offer a two-year diploma to talented students who have successfully completed their high school education. 
+And typography's a very important part of the curriculum and we encourage our students to look inward for influence. 
+Here's a poster designed by one of the students under the theme "" Education is a right. "" Some logos designed by my students. 
+Africa has had a long tradition of writing, but this is not such a well-known fact, and I wrote the book "" Afrikan Alphabets "" to address that. 
+The different types of writing in Africa, first was proto-writing, as illustrated by Nsibidi, which is the writing system of a secret society of the Ejagham people in southern Nigeria. 
+So it's a special-interest writing system. 
+The Akan of people of Ghana and [Cote d'Ivoire] developed Adinkra symbols some 400 years ago, and these are proverbs, historical sayings, objects, animals, plants, and my favorite Adinkra system is the first one at the top on the left. 
+It's called Sankofa. 
+It means, "" Return and get it. "" Learn from the past. 
+This pictograph by the Jokwe people of Angola tells the story of the creation of the world. 
+At the top is God, at the bottom is man, mankind, and on the left is the sun, on the right is the moon. 
+All the paths lead to and from God. 
+These secret societies of the Yoruba, Kongo and Palo religions in Nigeria, Congo and Angola respectively, developed this intricate writing system which is alive and well today in the New World in Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad and Haiti. 
+In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Ituri society, the men pound out a cloth out of a special tree, and the women, who are also the praise singers, paint interweaving patterns that are the same in structure as the polyphonic structures that they use in their singing — a sort of a musical score, if you may. 
+In South Africa, Ndebele women use these symbols and other geometric patterns to paint their homes in bright colors, and the Zulu women use the symbols in the beads that they weave into bracelets and necklaces. 
+Ethiopia has had the longest tradition of writing, with the Ethiopic script that was developed in the fourth century A.D. 
+and is used to write Amharic, which is spoken by over 24 million people. 
+King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon developed Shü-mom at the age of 25. 
+Shü-mom is a writing system. 
+It's a syllabary. It's not exactly an alphabet. 
+And here we see three stages of development that it went through in 30 years. 
+The Vai people of Liberia had a long tradition of literacy before their first contact with Europeans in the 1800s. 
+It's a syllabary and reads from left to right. 
+Next door, in Sierra Leone, the Mende also developed a syllabary, but theirs reads from right to left. 
+Africa has had a long tradition of design, a well-defined design sensibility, but the problem in Africa has been that, especially today, designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design because they are more apt to look outward for influence and inspiration. 
+The creative spirit in Africa, the creative tradition, is as potent as it has always been, if only designers could look within. 
+This Ethiopic cross illustrates what Dr. Ron Eglash has established: that Africa has a lot to contribute to computing and mathematics through their intuitive grasp of fractals. 
+Africans of antiquity created civilization, and their monuments, which still stand today, are a true testimony of their greatness. 
+Most probably, one of humanity's greatest achievements is the invention of the alphabet, and that has been attributed to Mesopotamia with their invention of cuneiform in 1600 BC, followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt, and that story has been cast in stone as historical fact. 
+That is, until 1998, when one Yale professor John Coleman Darnell discovered these inscriptions in the Thebes desert on the limestone cliffs in western Egypt, and these have been dated at between 1800 and 1900 B.C., centuries before Mesopotamia. 
+Called Wadi el-Hol because of the place that they were discovered, these inscriptions — research is still going on, a few of them have been deciphered, but there is consensus among scholars that this is really humanity's first alphabet. 
+Over here, you see a paleographic chart that shows what has been deciphered so far, starting with the letter A, "" ālep, "" at the top, and "" bêt, "" in the middle, and so forth. 
+It is time that students of design in Africa read the works of titans like Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop, whose seminal work on Egypt is vindicated by this discovery. 
+The last word goes to the great Jamaican leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Akan people of Ghana with their Adinkra symbol Sankofa, which encourages us to go to the past so as to inform our present and build on a future for us and our children. 
+It is also time that designers in Africa stop looking outside. 
+They've been looking outward for a long time, yet what they were looking for has been right there within grasp, right within them. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I only have three minutes so I'm going to have to talk fast, and it will use up your spare mental cycles, so multitasking may be hard. 
+So, 27 years ago I got a traffic ticket that got me thinking. 
+I've had some time to think it over. 
+And energy efficiency is more than just about the vehicle — it's also about the road. 
+Road design makes a difference, particularly intersections, of which there are two types: signalized and unsignalized, which means stop signs. 
+Fifty percent of crashes happen at intersections. 
+Roundabouts are much better. 
+A study of 24 intersections has found crashes drop 40 percent from when you convert a traffic light into a roundabout. 
+Injury crashes have dropped 76 percent, fatal crashes down 90 percent. 
+But that's just safety. 
+What about time and gas? 
+So, traffic keeps flowing, so that means less braking, which means less accelerating, less gas and less pollution, less time wasted, and that partly accounts for Europe's better efficiency than we have in the United States. 
+So, unsignalized intersections, meaning stop signs, they save many lives, but there's an excessive proliferation of them. 
+Small roundabouts are starting to appear. 
+This is one in my neighborhood. And they are much better — better than traffic lights, better than four-way stop signs. 
+They're expensive to install, but they are more expensive not to. So, we should look at that. 
+But they are not applicable in all situations. 
+So, take, for example, the three-way intersection. 
+So, it's logical that you'd have one there, on the minor road entering the major. 
+But the other two are somewhat questionable. 
+So, here's one. There's another one which I studied. 
+Cars rarely appear on that third road. 
+And so, the question is, what does that cost us? 
+That intersection I looked at had about 3,000 cars per day in each direction, and so that's two ounces of gas to accelerate out of. 
+That's five cents each, and times 3,000 cars per day, that's $51,000 per year. 
+That's just the gasoline cost. There is also pollution, wear on the car, and time. 
+What's that time worth? 
+Well, at 10 seconds per 3,000 cars, that's 8.3 hours per day. The average wage in the U.S. 
+is $20 an hour. That is 60,000 per year. 
+Add that together with the gas, and it's $112,000 per year, just for that sign in each direction. 
+Discount that back to the present, at five percent: over two million dollars for a stop sign, in each direction. 
+Now, if you look at what that adjacent property is worth, you could actually buy the property, cut down the shrubbery to improve the sight line, and then sell it off again. 
+And you'd still come out ahead. 
+So, it makes one wonder, "" Why is it there? "" I mean, why is there that stop sign in each direction? 
+Because it is saving lives. So, is there a better way to accomplish that goal? 
+The answer is to enable cars to come in from that side road safely. 
+Because there are a lot of people who might live up there and if they're waiting forever a long queue could form because the cars aren't slowing down on the main road. 
+Can that be accomplished with existing signs? 
+So, there is a long history of stop signs and yield signs. 
+Stop signs were invented in 1915, yield signs in 1950. But that's all we got. 
+So, why not use a yield sign? 
+Well the meaning of yield is: You must yield the right-of-way. 
+That means that if there are five cars waiting, you have to wait till they all go, then you go. It lacks the notion of alternating, or taking turns, and it's always on the minor road, allowing the major one to have primacy. 
+So, it's hard to create a new meaning for the existing sign. 
+You couldn't suddenly tell everyone, "" OK, remember what you used to do at yield signs? Now do something different. "" That would not work. 
+So, what the world needs now is a new type of sign. 
+(Applause) So, you'd have a little instruction below it, you know, for those who didn't see the public service announcements. 
+And it merges the stop sign and yield signs. 
+It's kind of shaped like a T, as in taking turns. 
+And uncertainty results in caution. 
+When people come to an unfamiliar situation they don't know how to deal with they slow down. 
+So, now that you are all "" Road Scholars ""... 
+(Laughter) don't wait for that sign to be adopted, these things don't change quickly. 
+But you all are members of communities, and you can exercise your community influence to create more sensible traffic flows. 
+And you can have more impact on the environment just getting your neighborhood to change these things than by changing your vehicle. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Can I get a show of hands — how many of you in this room have been on a plane in this past year? 
+That's pretty good. 
+Well, it turns out that you share that experience with more than three billion people every year. 
+And when we put so many people in all these metal tubes that fly all over the world, sometimes, things like this can happen and you get a disease epidemic. 
+I first actually got into this topic when I heard about the Ebola outbreak last year. 
+And it turns out that, although Ebola spreads through these more range-limited, large-droplet routes, there's all these other sorts of diseases that can be spread in the airplane cabin. 
+The worst part is, when we take a look at some of the numbers, it's pretty scary. 
+So with H1N1, there was this guy that decided to go on the plane and in the matter of a single flight actually spread the disease to 17 other people. 
+And then there was this other guy with SARS, who managed to go on a three-hour flight and spread the disease to 22 other people. 
+That's not exactly my idea of a great superpower. 
+When we take a look at this, what we also find is that it's very difficult to pre-screen for these diseases. 
+So when someone actually goes on a plane, they could be sick and they could actually be in this latency period in which they could actually have the disease but not exhibit any symptoms, and they could, in turn, spread the disease to many other people in the cabin. 
+How that actually works is that right now we've got air coming in from the top of the cabin and from the side of the cabin, as you see in blue. 
+And then also, that air goes out through these very efficient filters that eliminate 99.97 percent of pathogens near the outlets. 
+What happens right now, though, is that we have this mixing airflow pattern. 
+So if someone were to actually sneeze, that air would get swirled around multiple times before it even has a chance to go out through the filter. 
+So I thought: clearly, this is a pretty serious problem. 
+I didn't have the money to go out and buy a plane, so I decided to build a computer instead. 
+It actually turns out that with computational fluid dynamics, what we're able to do is create these simulations that give us higher resolutions than actually physically going in and taking readings in the plane. 
+And so how, essentially, this works is you would start out with these 2D drawings — these are floating around in technical papers around the Internet. 
+I take that and then I put it into this 3D-modeling software, really building that 3D model. 
+And then I divide that model that I just built into these tiny pieces, essentially meshing it so that the computer can better understand it. 
+And then I tell the computer where the air goes in and out of the cabin, throw in a bunch of physics and basically sit there and wait until the computer calculates the simulation. 
+So what we get, actually, with the conventional cabin is this: you'll notice the middle person sneezing, and we go "" Splat! "" — it goes right into people's faces. 
+It's pretty disgusting. 
+From the front, you'll notice those two passengers sitting next to the central passenger not exactly having a great time. 
+And when we take a look at that from the side, you'll also notice those pathogens spreading across the length of the cabin. 
+The first thing I thought was, "" This is no good. "" So I actually conducted more than 32 different simulations and ultimately, I came up with this solution right here. 
+This is what I call a — patent pending — Global Inlet Director. 
+With this, we're able to reduce pathogen transmission by about 55 times, and increase fresh-air inhalation by about 190 percent. 
+So how this actually works is we would install this piece of composite material into these existing spots that are already in the plane. 
+So it's very cost-effective to install and we can do this directly overnight. 
+All we have to do is put a couple of screws in there and you're good to go. 
+And the results that we get are absolutely amazing. 
+Instead of having those problematic swirling airflow patterns, we can create these walls of air that come down in-between the passengers to create personalized breathing zones. 
+So you'll notice the middle passenger here is sneezing again, but this time, we're able to effectively push that down to the filters for elimination. 
+And same thing from the side, you'll notice we're able to directly push those pathogens down. 
+So if you take a look again now at the same scenario but with this innovation installed, you'll notice the middle passenger sneezes, and this time, we're pushing that straight down into the outlet before it gets a chance to infect any other people. 
+So you'll notice the two passengers sitting next to the middle guy are breathing virtually no pathogens at all. 
+Take a look at that from the side as well, you see a very efficient system. 
+And in short, with this system, we win. 
+When we take a look at what this means, what we see is that this not only works if the middle passenger sneezes, but also if the window-seat passenger sneezes or if the aisle-seat passenger sneezes. 
+And so with this solution, what does this mean for the world? 
+Well, when we take a look at this from the computer simulation into real life, we can see with this 3D model that I built over here, essentially using 3D printing, we can see those same airflow patterns coming down, right to the passengers. 
+In the past, the SARS epidemic actually cost the world about 40 billion dollars. 
+And in the future, a big disease outbreak could actually cost the world in excess of three trillion dollars. 
+So before, it used to be that you had to take an airplane out of service for one to two months, spend tens of thousands of man hours and several million dollars to try to change something. 
+But now, we're able to install something essentially overnight and see results right away. 
+So it's really now a matter of taking this through to certification, flight testing, and going through all of these regulatory approvals processes. 
+But it just really goes to show that sometimes the best solutions are the simplest solutions. 
+And two years ago, even, this project would not have happened, just because the technology then wouldn't have supported it. 
+But now with advanced computing and how developed our Internet is, it's really the golden era for innovation. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi there. I'm Hasan. I'm an artist. 
+And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, "" Do you paint? "" or "" What kind of medium do you work in? "" Well most of my work that I work with is really a little bit about methodologies of working rather than actually a specific discipline or a specific technique. 
+So what I'm really interested in is creative problem solving. 
+And I had a little bit of a problem a few years ago. 
+So let me show you a little of that. 
+So it started over here. 
+And this is the Detroit airport in June 19th of 2002. 
+I was flying back to the U.S. from an exhibition overseas. 
+And as I was coming back, well I was taken by the FBI, met by an FBI agent, and went into a little room and he asked me all sorts of questions — "" Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you talking with? 
+Why were you there? Who pays for your trips? "" — all these little details. 
+And then literally just out of nowhere, the guy asks me, "" Where were you September 12th? "" And when most of us get asked, "" Where were you September 12th? "" or any date for that fact, it's like, "" I don't exactly remember, but I can look it up for you. "" So I pulled out my little PDA, and I said, "" Okay, let's look up my appointments for September 12th. "" I had September 12th — from 10: 00 a.m. to 10: 30 a.m., I paid my storage bill. 
+From 10: 30 a.m. to 12: 00 p.m., I met with Judith who was one of my graduate students at the time. 
+From 12: 00 p.m. to 3: 00 p.m., I taught my intro class, 3: 00 p.m. to 6: 00 p.m., I taught my advanced class. 
+"Where were you the 11th?" "Where were you the 10th?" 
+"Where were you the 29th? the 30th?" 
+"Where were you October 5th?" 
+We read about six months of my calendar. 
+And I don't think he was expecting me to have such detailed records of what I did. 
+But good thing I did, because I don't look good in orange. 
+(Laughter) So he asked me — (Applause) "" So this storage unit that you paid the rent on, what did you have in it? "" This was in Tampa, Florida, so I was like, "" Winter clothes that I have no use for in Florida. 
+Furniture that I can't fit in my ratty apartment. 
+Just assorted garage sale junk, because I'm a pack rat. "" And he looks at me really confused and says, "" No explosives? "" (Laughter) I was like, "" No, no. I'm pretty certain there were no explosives. 
+And if there were, I would have remembered that one. "" And he's still a little confused, but I think that anyone who talks to me for more than a couple of minutes realizes I'm not exactly a terrorist threat. 
+And so we're sitting there, and eventually after about an hour, hour and a half of just going back and forth, he says, "" Okay, I have enough information here. 
+I'm going to pass this onto the Tampa office. They're the ones who initiated this. 
+They'll follow up with you, and we'll take care of it. "" I was like, "" Great. "" So I got home and the phone rings, and a man introduced himself. 
+Basically this is the FBI offices in Tampa where I spent six months of my life — back and forth, not six months continuously. 
+By the way, you folks know that in the United States, you can't take photographs of federal buildings, but Google can do it for you. 
+So to the folks from Google, thank you. 
+(Applause) So I spent a lot of time in this building. 
+Questions like: "" Have you ever witnessed or participated in any act that may be detrimental to the United States or a foreign nation? "" And you also have to consider the state of mind you're in when you're doing this. 
+You're basically face-to-face with someone that essentially decides life or death. 
+Or questions such as — actually, during the polygraph, which was how it finally ended after nine consecutive of them — one of the polygraph questions was... 
+well the first one was, "" Is your name Hasan? "" "" Yes. "" "Are we in Florida?" "Yes." "Is today Tuesday?" "Yes." 
+Because you have to base it on a yes or no. 
+Then, of course, the next question is: "Do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States?" 
+I work at a university. 
+(Laughter) So I was like, "" Maybe you want to ask some of my colleagues that directly. "" But they said, "" Okay, aside from what we had discussed, do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States? "" I was like, "" No. "" So at the end of six months of this and nine consecutive polygraphs, they said, "" Hey, everything's fine. "" I was like, "" I know. That's what I've been trying to tell you guys all along. 
+I know everything's fine. "" So they're looking at me really odd. 
+And it's like, "" Guys, I travel a lot. "" This is with the FBI. 
+And I was like, "" All we need is Alaska not to get the last memo, and here we go all over again. "" And there was a sincere concern there. 
+And he was like, "" You know, if you get into trouble, give us a call — we'll take care of it. "" So ever since then, before I would go anywhere, I would call the FBI. 
+I would tell them, "" Hey guys, this is where I'm going. This is my flight. 
+Northwest flight seven coming into Seattle on March 12th "" or whatever. 
+A couple weeks later, I'd call again, let them know. 
+It wasn't that I had to, but I chose to. 
+Just wanted to say, "" Hey guys. 
+Don't want to make it look like I'm making any sudden moves. "" (Laughter) "" I don't want you guys to think that I'm about to flee. 
+Just letting you know. Heads up. "" And so I just kept doing this over and over and over. 
+And then the phone calls turned into emails, and the emails got longer and longer and longer... 
+with pictures, with travel tips. 
+Then I'd make websites. 
+And then I built this over here. Let me go back to it over here. 
+So I actually designed this back in 2003. 
+So this kind of tracks me at any given moment. 
+I wrote some code for my mobile phone. 
+Basically, what I decided is okay guys, you want to watch me, that's cool. 
+But I'll watch myself. It's okay. 
+You don't have to waste your energy or your resources. 
+And I'll help you out. 
+So in the process, I start thinking, well what else might they know about me? 
+Well they probably have all my flight records, so I decided to put all my flight records from birth online. 
+So you can see, Delta 1252 going from Kansas City to Atlanta. 
+And then you see, these are some of the meals that I've been fed on the planes. 
+This was on Delta 719 going from JFK to San Francisco. 
+See that? They won't let me on a plane with that, but they'll give it to me on the plane. 
+(Laughter) These are the airports that I hang out in, because I like airports. 
+That's Kennedy airport, May 19th, Tuesday. 
+This is in Warsaw. 
+Singapore. You can see, they're kind of empty. 
+These images are shot really anonymously to the point where it could be anyone. 
+But if you can cross-reference this with the other data, then you're basically replaying the roll of the FBI agent and putting it all together. 
+And when you're in a situation where you have to justify every moment of your existence, you're put in the situation where you react in a very different manner. 
+At the time that this was going on, the last thing on my mind was "" art project. "" I was certainly not thinking, hey, I got new work here. 
+But after going through this, after realizing, well what just happened? 
+And after piecing together this, this and this, this way of actually trying to figure out what happened for myself eventually evolved into this, and it actually became this project. 
+So these are the stores that I shop in — some of them — because they need to know. 
+This is me buying some duck flavored paste at the Ranch 99 in Daly City on Sunday, November 15th. 
+At Coreana Supermarket buying my kimchi because I like kimchi. 
+And I bought some crabs too right around there, and some chitlins at the Safeway in Emoryville. 
+And laundry too. Laundry detergent at West Oakland — East Oakland, sorry. 
+And then my pickled jellyfish at the Hong Kong Supermarket on Route 18 in East Brunswick. 
+Now if you go to my bank records, it'll actually show something from there, so you know that, on May 9th, that I bought $14.79 in fuel from Safeway Vallejo. 
+So not only that I'm giving this information here and there, but now there's a third party, an independent third party, my bank, that's verifying that, yes indeed, I was there at this time. 
+So there's points, and these points are actually being cross-referenced. 
+And there's a verification taking place. 
+Sometimes they're really small purchases. 
+So 34 cents foreign transaction fee. 
+All of these are extracted directly from my bank accounts, and everything pops up right away. 
+Sometimes there's a lot of information. 
+This is exactly where my old apartment in San Francisco was. 
+And then sometimes you get this. 
+Sometimes you just get this, just an empty hallway in Salt Lake City, January 22nd. 
+And I can tell you exactly who I was with, where I was, because this is what I had to do with the FBI. 
+I had to tell them every little detail of everything. 
+I spend a lot of time on the road. 
+This is a parking lot in Elko, Nevada off of Route 80 at 8: 01 p.m. on August 19th. 
+I spend a lot of time in gas stations too — empty train stations. 
+So there's multiple databases. 
+And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of images. 
+There's actually 46,000 images right now on my site, and the FBI has seen all of them — at least I trust they've seen all of them. 
+And then sometimes you don't get much information at all, you just get this empty bed. 
+And sometimes you get a lot of text information and no visual information. 
+So you get something like this. 
+This, by the way, is the location of my favorite sandwich shop in California — Vietnamese sandwich. 
+So there's different categorizations of meals eaten outside empty train stations, empty gas stations. 
+These are some of the meals that I've been cooking at home. 
+So how do you know these are meals eaten at home? 
+Well the same plate shows up a whole bunch of times. 
+So again, you have to do some detective work here. 
+So sometimes the databases get so specific. 
+These are all tacos eaten in Mexico City near a train station on July fifth to July sixth. 
+At 11: 39 a.m. was this one. 
+At 1: 56 p.m. was this one. At 4: 59 p.m. was this one. 
+So I time-stamp my life every few moments. 
+Every few moments I shoot the image. 
+Now it's all done on my iPhone, and it all goes straight up to my server, and my server does all the backend work and categorizes things and puts everything together. 
+They need to know where I'm doing my business, because they want to know about my business. 
+So on December 4th, I went here. 
+And on Sunday, June 14th at 2009 — this was actually about two o'clock in the afternoon in Skowhegan, Maine — this was my apartment there. 
+So what you're basically seeing here is all bits and pieces and all this information. 
+If you go to my site, there's tons of things. 
+And really, it's not the most user-friendly interface. 
+It's actually quite user-unfriendly. 
+And one of the reasons, also being part of the user-unfriendliness, is that everything is there, but you have to really work through it. 
+So by me putting all this information out there, what I'm basically telling you is I'm telling you everything. 
+But in this barrage of noise that I'm putting out, I actually live an incredibly anonymous and private life. 
+And you know very little about me actually. 
+And really so I've come to the conclusion that the way you protect your privacy, particularly in an era where everything is cataloged and everything is archived and everything is recorded, there's no need to delete information anymore. 
+So what do you do when everything is out there? 
+Well you have to take control over it. 
+And if I give you this information directly, it's a very different type of identity than if you were to try to go through and try to get bits and pieces. 
+The other thing that's also interesting that's going on here is the fact that intelligence agencies — and it doesn't matter who they are — they all operate in an industry where their commodity is information, or restricted access to information. 
+And the reason their information has any value is, well, because no one else has access to it. 
+And by me cutting out the middle man and giving it straight to you, the information that the FBI has has no value, so thus devaluing their currency. 
+And I understand that, on an individual level, it's purely symbolic. 
+But if 300 million people in the U.S. 
+started doing this, we would have to redesign the entire intelligence system from the ground up. 
+Because it just wouldn't work if everybody was sharing everything. 
+And we're getting to that. 
+When I first started this project, people were looking at me and saying, "" Why would you want to tell everybody what you're doing, where you're at? 
+Why are you posting these photos? "" This was an age before people were Tweeting everywhere and 750 million people were posting status messages or poking people. 
+So in a way, I'm glad that I'm completely obsolete. 
+I'm still doing this project, but it is obsolete, because you're all doing it. 
+This is something that we all are doing on a daily basis, whether we're aware of it or not. 
+So we're creating our own archives and so on. 
+And you know, some of my friends have always said, "" Hey, you're just paranoid. Why are you doing this? 
+Because no one's really watching. 
+No one's really going to bother you. "" So one of the things that I do is I actually look through my server logs very carefully. 
+Because it's about surveillance. 
+I'm watching who's watching me. 
+And I came up with these. 
+So these are some of my sample logs. 
+And just little bits and pieces, and you can see some of the things there. 
+And I cleaned up the list a little bit so you can see. 
+So you can see that the Homeland Security likes to come by — Department of Homeland Security. 
+You can see the National Security Agency likes to come by. 
+I actually moved very close to them. I live right down the street from them now. 
+Central Intelligence Agency. 
+Executive Office of the President. 
+Not really sure why they show up, but they do. 
+I think they kind of like to look at art. 
+And I'm glad that we have patrons of the arts in these fields. 
+So thank you very much. I appreciate it. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Hasan, just curious. 
+You said, "" Now everything automatically goes from my iPhone, "" but actually you do take the pictures and put on information. 
+So how many hours of the day does that take? 
+HE: Almost none. 
+It's no different than sending a text. 
+It's no different than checking an email. 
+It's one of those things, we got by just fine before we had to do any of those. 
+So it's just become another day. 
+I mean, when we update a status message, we don't really think about how long that's going to take. 
+So it's really just a matter of my phone clicking a couple of clicks, send, and then it's done. 
+And everything's automated at the other end. 
+BG: On the day you are in a place where there is no coverage, the FBI gets crazy? 
+HE: Well it goes to the last point that I was at. 
+So it holds onto the very last point. 
+So if I'm on a 12-hour flight, you'll see the last airport that I departed from. 
+BG: Hasan, thank you very much. (HE: Thank you.) (Applause) 
+
+As a kid, I was fascinated with all things air and space. 
+I would watch Nova on PBS. 
+Our school would show Bill Nye the Science Guy. 
+When I was in elementary school, my next door neighbor, he gave me a book for my birthday. 
+It was an astronomy book, and I poured over that thing for hours on end, and it was a combination of all these things that inspired me to pursue space exploration as my own personal dream, and part of that dream was, I always wanted to just fly around the solar system and visit different planets and visit moons and spacecraft. 
+Well, a number of years later, I graduated from UCLA and I found myself at NASA, working for the jet propulsion laboratory, and there our team was challenged to create a 3D visualization of the solar system, and today I want to show you what we've done so far. 
+Now, the kicker is, everything I'm about to do here you can do at home, because we built this for the public for you guys to use. 
+So what you're looking at right now is the Earth. 
+You can see the United States and California and San Diego, and you can use the mouse or the keyboard to spin things around. 
+Now, this isn't new. Anyone who's used Google Earth has seen this before, but one thing we like to say in our group is, we do the opposite of Google Earth. 
+Google Earth goes from this view down to your backyard. 
+We go from this view out to the stars. 
+So the Earth is cool, but what we really want to show are the spacecraft, so I'm going to bring the interface back up, and now you're looking at a number of satellites orbiting the Earth. 
+These are a number of our science space Earth orbiters. 
+We haven't included military satellites and weather satellites and communication satellites and reconnaissance satellites. 
+If we did, it would be a complete mess, because there's a lot of stuff out there. 
+And the cool thing is, we actually created 3D models for a number of these spacecraft, so if you want to visit any of these, all you need to do is double-click on them. 
+So I'm going to find the International Space Station, double-click, and it will take us all the way down to the ISS. 
+And now you're riding along with the ISS where it is right now. 
+And the other cool thing is, not only can we move the camera around, we can also control time, so I can slide this jog dial here to shuttle time forward, and now we can see what a sunset on the ISS would look like, and they get one every 90 minutes. (Laughter) All right, so what about the rest of it? 
+Well, I can click on this home button over here, and that will take us up to the inner solar system, and now we're looking at the rest of the solar system. 
+You can see, there's Saturn, there's Jupiter, and while we're here, I want to point out something. 
+It's actually pretty busy. 
+Here we have the Mars Science Laboratory on its way to Mars, just launched last weekend. 
+Here we have Juno on its cruise to Jupiter, there. 
+We have Dawn orbiting Vesta, and we have over here New Horizons on a straight shot to Pluto. 
+And I mention this because there's this strange public perception that NASA's dead, that the space shuttles stopped flying and all of the sudden there's no more spacecraft out there. 
+Well, a lot of what NASA does is robotic exploration, and we have a lot of spacecraft out there. 
+Granted, we're not sending humans up at the moment, well at least with our own launch vehicles, but NASA is far from dead, and one of the reasons why we write a program like this is so that people realize that there's so many other things that we're doing. 
+Anyway, while we're here, again, if you want to visit anything, all you need to do is double-click. 
+So I'm just going to double-click on Vesta, and here we have Dawn orbiting Vesta, and this is happening right now. 
+I'm going to double-click on Uranus, and we can see Uranus rotating on its side along with its moons. 
+You can see how it's tilted at about 89 degrees. 
+And just being able to visit different places and go through different times, we have data from 1950 to 2050. 
+Granted, we don't have everything in between, because some of the data is hard to get. 
+Just being able to visit places in different times, you can explore this for hours, literally hours on end, but I want to show you one thing in particular, so I'm going to open up the destination tab, spacecraft outer planet missions, Voyager 1, and I'm going to bring up the Titan flyby. 
+So now we've gone back in time. 
+We're now riding along with Voyager 1. 
+The date here is November 11, 1980. 
+Now, there's a funny thing going on here. 
+It doesn't look like anything's going on. 
+It looks like I've paused the program. 
+It's actually running at real rate right now, one second per second, and in fact, Voyager 1 here is flying by Titan at I think it's 38,000 miles per hour. 
+It only looks like nothing's moving because, well, Saturn here is 700,000 miles away, and Titan here is 4,000 to 5,000 miles away. 
+It's just the vastness of space makes it look like nothing's happening. 
+But to make it more interesting, I'm going to speed up time, and we can watch as Voyager 1 flies by Titan, which is a hazy moon of Saturn. 
+It actually has a very thick atmosphere. 
+And I'm going to recenter the camera on Saturn, here. 
+I'm going to pull out, and I want to show you Voyager 1 as it flies by Saturn. 
+There's a point to be made here. 
+With a 3D visualization like this, we can not only just say Voyager 1 flew by Saturn. 
+There's a whole story to tell here. 
+And even better, because it's an interactive application, you can tell the story for yourself. 
+If you want to pause it, you can pause it. 
+If you want to keep going, if you want to change the camera angle, you can do that, and because of that, I can show you that Voyager 1 doesn't just fly by Saturn. 
+It actually flies underneath Saturn. 
+Now, what happens is, as it flies underneath Saturn, Saturn grabs it gravitationally and flings it up and out of the solar system, so if I just keep letting this go, you can see Voyager 1 fly up like that. 
+And, in fact, I'm going to go back to the solar system. 
+I'm going to go back to today, now, and I want to show you where Voyager 1 is. 
+Right there, above, way above the solar system, way beyond our solar system. 
+And here's the thing. Now you know how it got there. 
+Now you know why, and to me, that's the point of this program. 
+You can manipulate it yourself. 
+You can fly around yourself and you can learn for yourself. 
+You know, the theme today is "" The World In Your Grasp. "" Well, we're trying to give you the solar system in your grasp — (Laughter) — and we hope once it's there, you'll be able to learn for yourself what we've done out there, and what we're about to do. 
+And my personal dream is for kids to take this and explore and see the wonders out there and be inspired, as I was as a kid, to pursue STEM education and to pursue a dream in space exploration. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+My travels to Afghanistan began many, many years ago on the eastern border of my country, my homeland, Poland. 
+I was walking through the forests of my grandmother's tales. 
+A land where every field hides a grave, where millions of people have been deported or killed in the 20th century. 
+Behind the destruction, I found a soul of places. 
+I met humble people. 
+I heard their prayer and ate their bread. 
+Then I have been walking East for 20 years — from Eastern Europe to Central Asia — through the Caucasus Mountains, Middle East, North Africa, Russia. 
+And I ever met more humble people. 
+And I shared their bread and their prayer. 
+This is why I went to Afghanistan. 
+One day, I crossed the bridge over the Oxus River. 
+I was alone on foot. 
+And the Afghan soldier was so surprised to see me that he forgot to stamp my passport. 
+But he gave me a cup of tea. 
+And I understood that his surprise was my protection. 
+So I have been walking and traveling, by horses, by yak, by truck, by hitchhiking, from Iran's border to the bottom, to the edge of the Wakhan Corridor. 
+And in this way I could find noor, the hidden light of Afghanistan. 
+My only weapon was my notebook and my Leica. 
+I heard prayers of the Sufi — humble Muslims, hated by the Taliban. 
+Hidden river, interconnected with the mysticism from Gibraltar to India. 
+The mosque where the respectful foreigner is showered with blessings and with tears, and welcomed as a gift. 
+What do we know about the country and the people that we pretend to protect, about the villages where the only one medicine to kill the pain and to stop the hunger is opium? 
+These are opium-addicted people on the roofs of Kabul 10 years after the beginning of our war. 
+These are the nomad girls who became prostitutes for Afghan businessmen. 
+What do we know about the women 10 years after the war? 
+Clothed in this nylon bag, made in China, with the name of burqa. 
+I saw one day, the largest school in Afghanistan, a girls' school. 
+13,000 girls studying here in the rooms underground, full of scorpions. 
+And their love [for studying] was so big that I cried. 
+What do we know about the death threats by the Taliban nailed on the doors of the people who dare to send their daughters to school as in Balkh? 
+The region is not secure, but full of the Taliban, and they did it. 
+My aim is to give a voice to the silent people, to show the hidden lights behind the curtain of the great game, the small worlds ignored by the media and the prophets of a global conflict. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Every year in the United States alone, 2,077,000 couples make a legal and spiritual decision to spend the rest of their lives together — (Laughter) And not to have sex with anyone else. 
+We even live longer, which is a pretty compelling argument for marrying someone you like a lot in the first place. 
+(Laughter) Now, if you're not currently experiencing the joy of the joint tax return, I can't tell you how to find a chore-loving person of the approximately ideal size and attractiveness, who prefers horror movies and doesn't have a lot of friends hovering on the brink of divorce, but I can only encourage you to try, because the benefits, as I've pointed out, are significant. 
+
+I'm a blogger, a filmmaker and a butcher, and I'll explain how these identities come together. 
+It started four years ago, when a friend and I opened our first Ramadan fast at one of the busiest mosques in New York City. 
+Crowds of men with beards and skullcaps were swarming the streets. 
+It was an FBI agent's wet dream. (Laughter) But being a part of this community, we knew how welcoming this space was. 
+For years, I'd seen photos of this space being documented as a lifeless and cold monolith, much like the stereotypical image painted of the American Muslim experience. 
+Frustrated by this myopic view, my friend and I had this crazy idea: Let's break our fast at a different mosque in a different state each night of Ramadan and share those stories on a blog. 
+We called it "" 30 Mosques in 30 Days, "" and we drove to all the 50 states and shared stories from over 100 vastly different Muslim communities, ranging from the Cambodian refugees in the L.A. projects to the black Sufis living in the woods of South Carolina. 
+What emerged was a beautiful and complicated portrait of America. 
+The media coverage forced local journalists to revisit their Muslim communities, but what was really exciting was seeing people from around the world being inspired to take their own 30-mosque journey. 
+There were even these two NFL athletes who took a sabbatical from the league to do so. 
+And as 30 Mosques was blossoming around the world, I was actually stuck in Pakistan working on a film. 
+My codirector, Omar, and I were at a breaking point with many of our friends on how to position the film. 
+The movie is called "" These Birds Walk, "" and it is about wayward street kids who are struggling to find some semblance of family. 
+We focus on the complexities of youth and family discord, but our friends kept on nudging us to comment on drones and target killings to make the film "" more relevant, "" essentially reducing these people who have entrusted us with their stories into sociopolitical symbols. 
+Of course, we didn't listen to them, and instead, we championed the tender gestures of love and headlong flashes of youth. 
+The agenda behind our cinematic immersion was only empathy, an emotion that's largely deficient from films that come from our region of the world. 
+And as "" These Birds Walk "" played at film festivals and theaters internationally, I finally had my feet planted at home in New York, and with all the extra time and still no real money, my wife tasked me to cook more for us. 
+And whenever I'd go to the local butcher to purchase some halal meat, something felt off. 
+For those that don't know, halal is a term used for meat that is raised and slaughtered humanely following very strict Islamic guidelines. 
+Unfortunately, the majority of halal meat in America doesn't rise to the standard that my faith calls for. 
+The more I learned about these unethical practices, the more violated I felt, particularly because businesses from my own community were the ones taking advantage of my orthodoxy. 
+So, with emotions running high, and absolutely no experience in butchery, some friends and I opened a meat store in the heart of the East Village fashion district. 
+(Laughter) We call it Honest Chops, and we're reclaiming halal by sourcing organic, humanely raised animals, and by making it accessible and affordable to working-class families. 
+There's really nothing like it in America. 
+The unbelievable part is actually that 90 percent of our in-store customers are not even Muslim. 
+For many, it is their first time interacting with Islam on such an intimate level. 
+So all these disparate projects — (Laughter) — are the result of a restlessness. 
+They are a visceral response to the businesses and curators who work hard to oversimplify my beliefs and my community, and the only way to beat their machine is to play by different rules. 
+We must fight with an inventive approach. 
+With the trust, with the access, with the love that only we can bring, we must unapologetically reclaim our beliefs in every moving image, in every cut of meat, because if we whitewash our stories for the sake of mass appeal, not only will we fail, but we will be trumped by those with more money and more resources to tell our stories. 
+But the call for creative courage is not for novelty or relevance. 
+It is simply because our communities are so damn unique and so damn beautiful. 
+They demand us to find uncompromising ways to be acknowledged and respected. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'll never forget the sound of laughing with my friends. I'll never forget the sound 
+And I'll never forget the comforting sound of water trickling down a stream. 
+Imagine my fear, pure fear, when, at the age of 10, I was told I was going to lose my hearing. 
+And over the next five years, it progressed until I was classified as profoundly deaf. 
+But I believe that losing my hearing was one of the greatest gifts I've ever received. 
+You see, I get to experience the world in a unique way. 
+And I believe that these unique experiences that people with disabilities have is what's going to help us make and design a better world for everyone — both for people with and without disabilities. 
+I used to be a disability rights lawyer, and I spent a lot of my time focused on enforcing the law, ensuring that accommodations were made. 
+And then I had to quickly learn international policy, because I was asked to work on the UN Convention that protects people with disabilities. 
+As the leader of the NGO there, I spent most of my energy trying to convince people about the capabilities of people with disabilities. 
+But somewhere along the way, and after many career transitions that my parents weren't so happy about — (Laughter) I stumbled upon a solution that I believe may be an even more powerful tool to solve some of the world's greatest problems, disability or not. 
+And that tool is called design thinking. 
+Design thinking is a process for innovation and problem solving. 
+There are five steps. 
+The first is defining the problem and understanding its constraints. 
+The second is observing people in real-life situations and empathizing with them. 
+Third, throwing out hundreds of ideas — the more the better, the wilder the better. 
+Fourth, prototyping: gathering whatever you can, whatever you can find, to mimic your solution, to test it and to refine it. 
+And finally, implementation: ensuring that the solution you came up with is sustainable. 
+Warren Berger says that design thinking teaches us to look sideways, to reframe, to refine, to experiment and, probably most importantly, ask those stupid questions. 
+Design thinkers believe that everyone is creative. 
+They believe in bringing people from multiple disciplines together, because they want to share multiple perspectives and bring them together and ultimately merge them to form something new. 
+Design thinking is such a successful and versatile tool that it has been applied in almost every industry. 
+I saw the potential that it had for the issues I faced, so I decided to go back to school and get my master's in social design. 
+This looks at how to use design to create positive change in the world. 
+While I was there, I fell in love with woodworking. 
+But what I quickly realized was that I was missing out on something. 
+As you're working with a tool, right before it's about to kick back at you — which means the piece or the tool jumps back at you — it makes a sound. 
+And I couldn't hear this sound. 
+So I decided, why not try and solve it? 
+My solution was a pair of safety glasses that were engineered to visually alert the user to pitch changes in the tool, before the human ear could pick it up. 
+Why hadn't tool designers thought of this before? 
+(Laughter) Two reasons: one, I was a beginner. 
+I wasn't weighed down by expertise or conventional wisdom. 
+The second is: I was Deaf. 
+My unique experience of the world helped inform my solution. 
+And as I went on, I kept running into more and more solutions that were originally made for people with disabilities, and that ended up being picked up, embraced and loved by the mainstream, disability or not. 
+It was originally designed for people with arthritis, but it was so comfortable, everybody loved it. 
+Text messaging: that was originally designed for people who are Deaf. 
+(Laughter) I started thinking: What if we changed our mindset? 
+What if we started designing for disability first — not the norm? 
+As you see, when we design for disability first, we often stumble upon solutions that are not only inclusive, but also are often better than when we design for the norm. 
+And this excites me, because this means that the energy it takes to accommodate someone with a disability can be leveraged, molded and played with as a force for creativity and innovation. 
+This moves us from the mindset of trying to change the hearts and the deficiency mindset of tolerance, to becoming an alchemist, the type of magician that this world so desperately needs to solve some of its greatest problems. 
+Now, I also believe that people with disabilities have great potential to be designers within this design-thinking process. 
+Without knowing it, from a very early age, I've been a design thinker, fine-tuning my skills. 
+Design thinkers are, by nature, problem solvers. 
+So imagine listening to a conversation and only understanding 50 percent of what is said. 
+You can't ask them to repeat every single word. 
+They would just get frustrated with you. 
+So without even realizing it, my solution was to take the muffled sound I heard, that was the beat, and turn it into a rhythm and place it with the lips I read. 
+Years later, someone commented that my writing had a rhythm to it. 
+Well, this is because I experience conversations as rhythms. 
+I also became really, really good at failing. 
+(Laughter) Quite literally. 
+My first semester in Spanish, I got a D. 
+But what I learned was that when I picked myself up and changed a few things around, eventually, I succeeded. 
+Similarly, design thinking encourages people to fail and fail often, because eventually, you will succeed. 
+Very few great innovations in this world have come from someone succeeding on the first try. 
+I also experienced this lesson in sports. 
+I'll never forget my coach saying to my mom, "" If she just didn't have her hearing loss, she would be on the national team. "" But what my coach, and what I didn't even know at the time, was that my hearing loss actually helped me excel at sports. 
+You see, when you lose your hearing, not only do you adapt your behavior, but you also adapt your physical senses. 
+One example of this is that my visual attention span increased. 
+Imagine a soccer player, coming down the left flank. 
+Imagine being goalkeeper, like I was, and the ball is coming down the left flank. 
+A person with normal hearing would have the visual perspective of this. 
+I had the benefit of a spectrum this wide. 
+So I picked up the players over here, that were moving about and coming down the field. 
+And I picked them up quicker, so that if the ball was passed, I could reposition myself and be ready for that shot. 
+So as you can see, I've been a design thinker for nearly all my life. 
+My observation skills have been honed so that I pick up on things that others would never pick up on. 
+My constant need to adapt has made me a great ideator and problem solver. 
+And I've often had to do this within limitations and constraints. 
+This is something that designers also have to deal with frequently. 
+Design thinkers often seek out extreme situations, because that often informs some of their best designs. 
+I lived and worked with 300 Deaf individuals that were relocated after the 2010 earthquake. 
+But five and a half years later, there still was no electricity; there still was no safe drinking water; there were still no job opportunities; there was still rampant crime, and it went unpunished. 
+International aid organizations came one by one. 
+They didn't come ready to observe and to adapt based on the community's needs. 
+One organization gave them goats and chickens. 
+But they didn't realize that there was so much hunger in that community, that when the Deaf went to sleep at night and couldn't hear, people broke into their yards and their homes and stole these chickens and goats, and eventually they were all gone. 
+Now, if that organization had taken the time to observe Deaf people, to observe the community, they would have realized their problem and perhaps they would have come up with a solution, something like a solar light, lighting up a secure pen to put them in at night to ensure their safety. 
+You don't have to be a design thinker to insert the ideas I've shared with you today. 
+You are creative. 
+You are a designer — everyone is. 
+Let people like me help you. 
+Let people with disabilities help you look sideways, and in the process, solve some of the greatest problems. 
+That's it. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+In 1975, I met in Florence a professor, Carlo Pedretti, my former professor of art history, and today a world-renowned scholar of Leonardo da Vinci. 
+Well, he asked me if I could find some technological way to unfold a five-centuries-old mystery related to a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, the "" Battle of Anghiari, "" which is supposed to be located in the Hall of the 500 in Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence. 
+Well, in the mid- '70s, there were not great opportunities for a bioengineer like me, especially in Italy, and so I decided, with some researchers from the United States and the University of Florence, to start probing the murals decorated by Vasari on the long walls of the Hall of the 500 searching for the lost Leonardo. 
+Unfortunately, at that time we did not know that that was not exactly where we should be looking, because we had to go much deeper in, and so the research came to a halt, and it was only taken up in 2000 thanks to the interest and the enthusiasm of the Guinness family. 
+Well, this time, we focused on trying to reconstruct the way the Hall of the 500 was before the remodeling, and the so-called Sala Grande, which was built in 1494, and to find out the original doors, windows, and in order to do that, we first created a 3D model, and then, with thermography, we went on to discover hidden windows. These are the original windows of the hall of the Sala Grande. We also found out about the height of the ceiling, and we managed to reconstruct, therefore, all the layout of this original hall the way it was before there came Vasari, 
+and restructured the whole thing, including a staircase that was very important in order to precisely place "" The Battle of Anghiari "" on a specific area of one of the two walls. 
+Well, we also learned that Vasari, who was commissioned to remodel the Hall of the 500 between 1560 and 1574 by the Grand Duke Cosimo I of the Medici family, we have at least two instances when he saved masterpieces specifically by placing a brick wall in front of it and leaving a small air gap. 
+One that we [see] here, Masaccio, the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, so we just said, well maybe, Visari has done something like that in the case of this great work of art by Leonardo, since he was a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci. 
+And so we built some very sophisticated radio antennas just for probing both walls and searching for an air gap. 
+And we did find many on the right panel of the east wall, an air gap, and that's where we believe "" The Battle of Anghiari, "" or at least the part that we know has been painted, which is called "" The Fight for the Standard, "" should be located. 
+Well, from there, unfortunately, in 2004, the project came to a halt. Many political reasons. 
+So I decided to go back to my alma mater, and, at the University of California, San Diego, and I proposed to open up a research center for engineering sciences for cultural heritage. 
+And in 2007, we created CISA3 as a research center for cultural heritage, specifically art, architecture and archaeology. So students started to flow in, and we started to build technologies, because that's basically what we also needed in order to move forward and go and do fieldwork. 
+We came back in the Hall of the 500 in 2011, and this time, with a great group of students, and my colleague, Professor Falko Kuester, who is now the director at CISA3, and we came back just since we knew already where to look for to find out if there was still something left. 
+Well, we were confined though, limited, I should rather say, for several reasons that it's not worth explaining, to endoscopy only, of the many other options we had, and with a 4mm camera attached to it, we were successful in documenting and taking some fragments of what it turns out to be a reddish color, black color, and there is some beige fragments that later on we ran a much more sophisticated exams, XRF, X-ray diffraction, and the results are very positive so far. It seems to indicate that indeed we have found some pigments, and since we know for sure 
+that no other artist has painted on that wall before Vasari came in about 60 years later, well, those pigments are therefore firmly related to mural painting and most likely to Leonardo. 
+Well, we are searching for the highest and highly praised work of art ever achieved by mankind. 
+As a matter of fact, this is by far the most important commission that Leonardo has ever had, and for doing this great masterpiece, he was named the number one artist influence at the time. 
+I had also had the privilege since the last 37 years to work on several masterpieces as you can see behind me, but basically to do what? Well, to assess, for example, the state of conservation. See here the face of the Madonna of the Chair that when just shining a UV light on it you suddenly see another, different lady, aged lady, I should rather say. 
+There is a lot of varnish still sitting there, several retouches, and some over cleaning. It becomes very visible. 
+But also, technology has helped to write new pages of our history, or at least to update pages of our histories. 
+For example, the "" Lady with the Unicorn, "" another painting by Rafael, well, you see the unicorn. 
+A lot has been said and written about the unicorn, but if you take an X-ray of the unicorn, it becomes a puppy dog. 
+And — (Laughter) — no problem, but, unfortunately, continuing with the scientific examination of this painting came out that Rafael did not paint the unicorn, did not paint the puppy dog, actually left the painting unfinished, so all this writing about the exotic symbol of the unicorn — (Laughter) — unfortunately, is not very reliable. (Laughter) Well, also, authenticity. Just think for a moment if science really could move in the field of authenticity of works of art. There would be a cultural revolution to say the least, but also, I would say, a market revolution, let me add. Take this example: 
+Otto Marseus, nice painting, which is "" Still Life "" at the Pitti Gallery, and just have an infrared camera peering through, and luckily for art historians, it just was confirmed that there is a signature of Otto Marseus. It even says when it was made and also the location. 
+So that was a good result. Sometimes, it's not that good, and so, again, authenticity and science could go together and change the way, not attributions being made, but at least lay the ground for a more objective, or, I should rather say, less subjective attribution, as it is done today. 
+But I would say the discovery that really caught my imagination, my admiration, is the incredibly vivid drawing under this layer, brown layer, of "" The Adoration of the Magi. "" Here you see a handmade setting XYZ scanner with an infrared camera put on it, and just peering through this brown layer of this masterpiece to reveal what could have been underneath. 
+Well, this happens to be the most important painting we have in Italy by Leonardo da Vinci, and look at the wonderful images of faces that nobody has seen for five centuries. Look at these portraits. 
+They're magnificent. You see Leonardo at work. 
+You see the geniality of his creation, right directly on the ground layer of the panel, and see this cool thing, finding, I should rather say, an elephant. (Laughter) Because of this elephant, over 70 new images came out, never seen for centuries. 
+This was an epiphany. We came to understand and to prove that the brown coating that we see today was not done by Leonardo da Vinci, which left us only the other drawing that for five centuries we were not able to see, so thanks only to technology. 
+Well, the tablet. Well, we thought, well, if we all have this pleasure, this privilege to see all this, to find all these discoveries, what about for everybody else? 
+So we thought of an augmented reality application using a tablet. Let me show you just simulating what we could be doing, any of us could be doing, in a museum environment. 
+So let's say that we go to a museum with a tablet, okay? 
+And we just aim the camera of the tablet to the painting that we are interested to see, like this. 
+Okay? And I will just click on it, we pause, and now let me turn to you so the moment the image, or, I should say, the camera, has locked in the painting, then the images you just saw up there in the drawing are being loaded. And so, see. 
+We can, as we said, we can zoom in. Then we can scroll. 
+Okay? Let's go and find the elephant. 
+So all we need is one finger. Just wipe off and we see the elephant. (Applause) (Applause) Okay? And then if we want, we can continue the scroll to find out, for example, on the staircase, the whole iconography is going to be changed. There are a lot of laymen reconstructing from the ruins of an old temple a new temple, and there are a lot of figures showing up. See? 
+This is not just a curiosity, because it changes not just the iconography as you see it, but the iconology, the meaning of the painting, and we believe this is a cool way, easy way, that everybody could have access to, to become more the protagonist of your own discovery, and not just be so passive about it, as we are when we walk through endless rooms of museums. 
+(Applause) Another concept is the digital clinical chart, which sounds very obvious if we were to talk about real patients, but when we talk about works of art, unfortunately, it's never been tapped as an idea. 
+Well, we believe, again, that this should be the beginning, the very first step, to do real conservation, and allowing us to really explore and to understand everything related to the state of our conservation, the technique, materials, and also if, when, and why we should restore, or, rather, to intervene on the environment surrounding the painting. 
+Well, our vision is to rediscover the spirit of the Renaissance, create a new discipline where engineering for cultural heritage is actually a symbol of blending art and science together. 
+We definitely need a new breed of engineers that will go out and do this kind of work and rediscover for us these values, these cultural values that we badly need, especially today. 
+And if you want to summarize in one just single word, well, this is what we're trying to do. 
+We're trying to give a future to our past in order to have a future. 
+As long as we live a life of curiosity and passion, there is a bit of Leonardo in all of us. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+When most people think about the beginnings of AIDS, they're gonna think back to the 1980s. 
+And certainly, this was the decade in which we discovered AIDS and the virus that causes it, HIV. 
+But in fact this virus crossed over into humans many decades before, from chimpanzees, where the virus originated, into humans who hunt these apes. 
+This photo was taken before the Great Depression in Brazzaville, Congo. 
+At this time, there were thousands of individuals, we think, that were infected with HIV. 
+So I have a couple of really important questions for you. 
+If this virus was in thousands of individuals at this point, why was it the case that it took us until 1984 to be able to discover this virus? 
+OK now, more importantly, had we been there in the '40s and' 50s, '60s, had we seen this disease, had we understood exactly what was going on with it, how might that have changed and completely transformed the nature of the way this pandemic moved? 
+In fact, this is not unique to HIV. The vast majority of viruses come from animals. 
+And you can kind of think of this as a pyramid of this bubbling up of viruses from animals into human populations. 
+But only at the very top of this pyramid do these things become completely human. 
+Nevertheless, we spend the vast majority of our energy focused on this level of the pyramid, trying to tackle things that are already completely adapted to human beings, that are going to be very very difficult to address — as we've seen in the case of HIV. 
+So during the last 15 years, I've been working to actually study the earlier interface here — what I've labeled "" viral chatter, "" which was a term coined by my mentor Don Burke. 
+This is the idea that we can study the sort of pinging of these viruses into human populations, the movement of these agents over into humans; and by capturing this moment, we might be able to move to a situation where we can catch them early. 
+OK, so this is a picture, and I'm going to show you some pictures now from the field. 
+This is a picture of a central African hunter. 
+It's actually a fairly common picture. 
+One of the things I want you to note from it is blood — that you see a tremendous amount of blood contact. 
+This was absolutely key for us. This is a very intimate form of connection. 
+So if we're going to study viral chatter, we need to get to these populations who have intensive contact with wild animals. 
+And so we've been studying people like this individual. 
+We collect blood from them, other specimens. 
+We look at the diseases, which are in the animals as well as the humans. 
+And ideally, this is going to allow us to catch these things early on, as they're moving over into human populations. 
+And the basic objective of this work is not to just go out once and look at these individuals, but to establish thousands of individuals in these populations that we would monitor continuously on a regular basis. 
+When they were sick, we would collect specimens from them. 
+We would actually enlist them — which we've done now — to collect specimens from animals. 
+We give them these little pieces of filter paper. 
+When they sample from animals, they collect the blood on the filter paper and this allows us to identify yet-unknown viruses from exactly the right animals — the ones that are actually being hunted. 
+(Video) Narrator: Deep in a remote region of Cameroon, two hunters stalk their prey. 
+Their names are Patrice and Patee. 
+They're searching for bush meat; forest animals they can kill to feed their families. 
+Patrice and Patee set out most days to go out hunting in the forest around their homes. 
+They have a series of traps, of snares that they've set up to catch wild pigs, snakes, monkeys, rodents — anything they can, really. 
+Patrice and Patee have been out for hours but found nothing. 
+The animals are simply gone. 
+We stop for a drink of water. 
+Then there is a rustle in the brush. 
+A group of hunters approach, their packs loaded with wild game. 
+There's at least three viruses that you know about, which are in this particular monkey. 
+Nathan Wolfe: This species, yeah. And there's many many more pathogens that are present in these animals. 
+These individuals are at specific risk, particularly if there's blood contact, they're at risk for transmission and possibly infection with novel viruses. 
+Narrator: As the hunters display their kills, something surprising happens. 
+They show us filter paper they've used to collect the animals' blood. 
+The blood will be tested for zoonotic viruses, part of a program Dr. Wolfe has spent years setting up. 
+NW: So this is from this animal right here, Greater Spot-Nosed Guenon. 
+Every person who has one of those filter papers has at least, at a minimum, been through our basic health education about the risks associated with these activities, which presumably, from our perspective, gives them the ability to decrease their own risk, and then obviously the risk to their families, the village, the country, and the world. 
+NW: OK, before I continue, I think it's important to take just a moment to talk about bush meat. Bush meat is the hunting of wild game. 
+OK? And you can consider all sorts of different bush meat. 
+I'm going to be talking about this. 
+When your children and grandchildren sort of pose questions to you about this period of time, one of the things they're gonna ask you, is how it was they we allowed some of our closest living relatives, some of the most valuable and endangered species on our planet, to go extinct because we weren't able to address some of the issues of poverty in these parts of the world. 
+But in fact that's not the only question they're going to ask you about this. 
+They're also going to ask you the question that when we knew that this was the way that HIV entered into the human population, and that other diseases had the potential to enter like this, why did we let these behaviors continue? 
+Why did we not find some other solution to this? 
+They're going to say, in regions of profound instability throughout the world, where you have intense poverty, where populations are growing and you don't have sustainable resources like this, this is going to lead to food insecurity. 
+But they're also going to ask you probably a different question. 
+It's one that I think we all need to ask ourselves, which is, why we thought the responsibility rested with this individual here. 
+Now this is the individual — you can see just right up over his right shoulder — this is the individual that hunted the monkey from the last picture that I showed you. 
+OK, take a look at his shirt. 
+You know, take a look at his face. 
+Bush meat is one of the central crises, which is occurring in our population right now, in humanity, on this planet. 
+But it can't be the fault of somebody like this. 
+OK? And solving it cannot be his responsibility alone. 
+There's no easy solutions, but what I'm saying to you is that we neglect this problem at our own peril. 
+So, in 1998, along with my mentors Don Burke and Colonel Mpoudi-Ngole, we went to actually start this work in Central Africa, to work with hunters in this part of the world. 
+And my job — at that time I was a post-doctoral fellow, and I was really tasked with setting this up. 
+So I said to myself, "" OK, great — we're gonna collect all kinds of specimens. We're gonna go to all these different locations. It's going to be wonderful. "" You know, I looked at the map; I picked out 17 sites; I figured, no problem. 
+(Laughter) Needless to say, I was drastically wrong. 
+This is challenging work to do. 
+Fortunately, I had and continue to have an absolutely wonderful team of colleagues and collaborators in my own team, and that's the only way that this work can really occur. 
+We have a whole range of challenges about this work. 
+One of them is just obtaining trust from individuals that we work with in the field. 
+The person you see on the right hand side is Paul DeLong-Minutu. 
+He's one of the best communicators that I've really ever dealt with. 
+When I arrived I didn't speak a word of French, and I still seemed to understand what it was he was saying. 
+Paul worked for years on the Cameroonian national radio and television, and he spoke about health issues. He was a health correspondent. 
+So we figured we'd hire this person — when we got there he could be a great communicator. 
+When we would get to these rural villages, though, what we found out is that no one had television, so they wouldn't recognize his face. 
+But — when he began to speak they would actually recognize his voice from the radio. 
+And this was somebody who had incredible potential to spread aspects of our message, whether it be with regards to wildlife conservation or health prevention. 
+Often we run into obstacles. This is us coming back from one of these very rural sites, with specimens from 200 individuals that we needed to get back to the lab within 48 hours. 
+I like to show this shot — this is Ubald Tamoufe, who's the lead investigator in our Cameroon site. 
+Ubald laughs at me when I show this photo because of course you can't see his face. 
+But the reason I like to show the shot is because you can see that he's about to solve this problem. 
+(Laughter) Which — which he did, which he did. 
+Just a few quick before and after shots. 
+This was our laboratory before. 
+This is what it looks like now. 
+Early on, in order to ship our specimens, we had to have dry ice. To get dry ice we had to go to the breweries — beg, borrow, steal to get these folks to give it to us. 
+Now we have our own liquid nitrogen. 
+I like to call our laboratory the coldest place in Central Africa — it might be. 
+And here's a shot of me, this is the before shot of me. 
+(Laughter) No comment. 
+So what happened? So during the 10 years that we've been doing this work, we actually surprised ourselves. 
+We made a number of discoveries. 
+And what we've found is that if you look in the right place, you can actually monitor the flow of these viruses into human populations. 
+That gave us a tremendous amount of hope. 
+What we've found is a whole range of new viruses in these individuals, including new viruses in the same group as HIV — so, brand new retroviruses. 
+And let's face it, any new retrovirus in the human population — it's something we should be aware of. 
+It's something we should be following. It's not something that we should be surprised by. 
+Needless to say in the past these viruses entering into these rural communities might very well have gone extinct. 
+That's no longer the case. Logging roads provide access to urban areas. 
+And critically, what happens in central Africa doesn't stay in Central Africa. 
+So, once we discovered that it was really possible that we could actually do this monitoring, we decided to move this from research, to really attempt to phase up to a global monitoring effort. 
+Through generous support and partnership scientifically with Google.org and the Skoll Foundation, we were able to start the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative and begin work in four different sites in Africa and Asia. 
+Needless to say, different populations from different parts of the world have different sorts of contact. 
+So it's not just hunters in Central Africa. 
+It's also working in live animal markets — these wet markets — which is exactly the place where SARS emerged in Asia. 
+But really, this is just the beginning from our perspective. 
+Our objective right now, in addition to deploying to these sites and getting everything moving, is to identify new partners because we feel like this effort needs to be extended to probably 20 or more sites throughout the world — to viral hotspots — because really the idea here is to cast an incredibly wide net so that we can catch these things, ideally, before they make it to blood banks, sexual networks, airplanes. And that's really our objective. 
+There was a time not very long ago when the discovery of unknown organisms was something that held incredible awe for us. 
+It had potential to really change the way that we saw ourselves, and thought about ourselves. 
+Many people, I think, on our planet right now despair, and they think we've reached a point where we've discovered most of the things. 
+I'm going tell you right now: please don't despair. 
+If an intelligent extra-terrestrial was taxed with writing the encyclopedia of life on our planet, 27 out of 30 of these volumes would be devoted to bacteria and virus, with just a few of the volumes left for plants, fungus and animals, humans being a footnote; interesting footnote but a footnote nonetheless. 
+This is honestly the most exciting period ever for the study of unknown life forms on our planet. 
+The dominant things that exist here we know almost nothing about. 
+And yet finally, we have the tools, which will allow us to actually explore that world and understand them. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+"Why?" 
+"" Why? "" is a question that parents ask me all the time. 
+"Why did my child develop autism?" 
+As a pediatrician, as a geneticist, as a researcher, we try and address that question. 
+But autism is not a single condition. 
+It's actually a spectrum of disorders, a spectrum that ranges, for instance, from Justin, a 13-year-old boy who's not verbal, who can't speak, who communicates by using an iPad to touch pictures to communicate his thoughts and his concerns, a little boy who, when he gets upset, will start rocking, and eventually, when he's disturbed enough, will bang his head to the point that he can actually cut it open and require stitches. 
+That same diagnosis of autism, though, also applies to Gabriel, another 13-year-old boy who has quite a different set of challenges. 
+He's actually quite remarkably gifted in mathematics. 
+He can multiple three numbers by three numbers in his head with ease, yet when it comes to trying to have a conversation, he has great difficulty. 
+He doesn't make eye contact. 
+He has difficulty starting a conversation, feels awkward, and when he gets nervous, he actually shuts down. 
+Yet both of these boys have the same diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. 
+One of the things that concerns us is whether or not there really is an epidemic of autism. 
+These days, one in 88 children will be diagnosed with autism, and the question is, why does this graph look this way? 
+Has that number been increasing dramatically over time? 
+Or is it because we have now started labeling individuals with autism, simply giving them a diagnosis when they were still present there before yet simply didn't have that label? 
+And in fact, in the late 1980s, the early 1990s, legislation was passed that actually provided individuals with autism with resources, with access to educational materials that would help them. 
+With that increased awareness, more parents, more pediatricians, more educators learned to recognize the features of autism. 
+As a result of that, more individuals were diagnosed and got access to the resources they needed. 
+In addition, we've changed our definition over time, so in fact we've widened the definition of autism, and that accounts for some of the increased prevalence that we see. 
+The next question everyone wonders is, what caused autism? 
+And a common misconception is that vaccines cause autism. 
+But let me be very clear: Vaccines do not cause autism. 
+(Applause) In fact, the original research study that suggested that was the case was completely fraudulent. 
+It was actually retracted from the journal Lancet, in which it was published, and that author, a physician, had his medical license taken away from him. 
+(Applause) The Institute of Medicine, The Centers for Disease Control, have repeatedly investigated this and there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. 
+Furthermore, one of the ingredients in vaccines, something called thimerosal, was thought to be what the cause of autism was. 
+That was actually removed from vaccines in the year 1992, and you can see that it really did not have an effect in what happened with the prevalence of autism. 
+So again, there is no evidence that this is the answer. 
+So the question remains, what does cause autism? 
+In fact, there's probably not one single answer. 
+Just as autism is a spectrum, there's a spectrum of etiologies, a spectrum of causes. 
+Based on epidemiological data, we know that one of the causes, or one of the associations, I should say, is advanced paternal age, that is, increasing age of the father at the time of conception. 
+In addition, another vulnerable and critical period in terms of development is when the mother is pregnant. 
+During that period, while the fetal brain is developing, we know that exposure to certain agents can actually increase the risk of autism. 
+In particular, there's a medication, valproic acid, which mothers with epilepsy sometimes take, we know can increase that risk of autism. 
+In addition, there can be some infectious agents that can also cause autism. 
+And one of the things I'm going to spend a lot of time focusing on are the genes that can cause autism. 
+I'm focusing on this not because genes are the only cause of autism, but it's a cause of autism that we can readily define and be able to better understand the biology and understand better how the brain works so that we can come up with strategies to be able to intervene. 
+One of the genetic factors that we don't understand, however, is the difference that we see in terms of males and females. 
+Males are affected four to one compared to females with autism, and we really don't understand what that cause is. 
+One of the ways that we can understand that genetics is a factor is by looking at something called the concordance rate. 
+In other words, if one sibling has autism, what's the probability that another sibling in that family will have autism? 
+And we can look in particular at three types of siblings: identical twins, twins that actually share 100 percent of their genetic information and shared the same intrauterine environment, versus fraternal twins, twins that actually share 50 percent of their genetic information, versus regular siblings, brother-sister, sister-sister, also sharing 50 percent of their genetic information, yet not sharing the same intrauterine environment. 
+And when you look at those concordance ratios, one of the striking things that you will see is that in identical twins, that concordance rate is 77 percent. 
+Remarkably, though, it's not 100 percent. 
+It is not that genes account for all of the risk for autism, but yet they account for a lot of that risk, because when you look at fraternal twins, that concordance rate is only 31 percent. 
+On the other hand, there is a difference between those fraternal twins and the siblings, suggesting that there are common exposures for those fraternal twins that may not be shared as commonly with siblings alone. 
+So this provides some of the data that autism is genetic. 
+Well, how genetic is it? 
+When we compare it to other conditions that we're familiar with, things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, in fact, genetics plays a much larger role in autism than it does in any of these other conditions. 
+But with this, that doesn't tell us what the genes are. 
+It doesn't even tell us in any one child, is it one gene or potentially a combination of genes? 
+And so in fact, in some individuals with autism, it is genetic! 
+That is, that it is one single, powerful, deterministic gene that causes the autism. 
+However, in other individuals, it's genetic, that is, that it's actually a combination of genes in part with the developmental process that ultimately determines that risk for autism. 
+We don't know in any one person, necessarily, which of those two answers it is until we start digging deeper. 
+So the question becomes, how can we start to identify what exactly those genes are. 
+And let me pose something that might not be intuitive. 
+In certain individuals, they can have autism for a reason that is genetic but yet not because of autism running in the family. 
+And the reason is because in certain individuals, they can actually have genetic changes or mutations that are not passed down from the mother or from the father, but actually start brand new in them, mutations that are present in the egg or the sperm at the time of conception but have not been passed down generation through generation within the family. 
+And we can actually use that strategy to now understand and to identify those genes causing autism in those individuals. 
+So in fact, at the Simons Foundation, we took 2,600 individuals that had no family history of autism, and we took that child and their mother and father and used them to try and understand what were those genes causing autism in those cases? 
+To do that, we actually had to comprehensively be able to look at all that genetic information and determine what those differences were between the mother, the father and the child. 
+In doing so, I apologize, I'm going to use an outdated analogy of encyclopedias rather than Wikipedia, but I'm going to do so to try and help make the point that as we did this inventory, we needed to be able to look at massive amounts of information. 
+Our genetic information is organized into a set of 46 volumes, and when we did that, we had to be able to account for each of those 46 volumes, because in some cases with autism, there's actually a single volume that's missing. 
+We had to get more granular than that, though, and so we had to start opening those books, and in some cases, the genetic change was more subtle. 
+It might have been a single paragraph that was missing, or yet, even more subtle than that, a single letter, one out of three billion letters that was changed, that was altered, yet had profound effects in terms of how the brain functions and affects behavior. 
+In doing this within these families, we were able to account for approximately 25 percent of the individuals and determine that there was a single powerful genetic factor that caused autism within those families. 
+On the other hand, there's 75 percent that we still haven't figured out. 
+As we did this, though, it was really quite humbling, because we realized that there was not simply one gene for autism. 
+In fact, the current estimates are that there are 200 to 400 different genes that can cause autism. 
+And that explains, in part, why we see such a broad spectrum in terms of its effects. 
+Although there are that many genes, there is some method to the madness. 
+It's not simply random 200, 400 different genes, but in fact they fit together. 
+They fit together in a pathway. 
+They fit together in a network that's starting to make sense now in terms of how the brain functions. 
+We're starting to have a bottom-up approach where we're identifying those genes, those proteins, those molecules, understanding how they interact together to make that neuron work, understanding how those neurons interact together to make circuits work, and understand how those circuits work to now control behavior, and understand that both in individuals with autism as well as individuals who have normal cognition. 
+But early diagnosis is a key for us. 
+Being able to make that diagnosis of someone who's susceptible at a time in a window where we have the ability to transform, to be able to impact that growing, developing brain is critical. 
+And so folks like Ami Klin have developed methods to be able to take infants, small babies, and be able to use biomarkers, in this case eye contact and eye tracking, to identify an infant at risk. 
+This particular infant, you can see, making very good eye contact with this woman as she's singing "" Itsy, Bitsy Spider, "" in fact is not going to develop autism. 
+This baby we know is going to be in the clear. 
+On the other hand, this other baby is going to go on to develop autism. 
+In this particular child, you can see, it's not making good eye contact. 
+Individuals with autism, some of them are wired a little bit differently. 
+
+Hi. I'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine. 
+And the way I got interested in this was, I noticed in myself, when I was growing up, and until about a few years ago, that I would want to say thank you to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me and I'd just stop it. 
+And I asked myself, why? 
+I felt shy, I felt embarrassed. 
+And then my question became, am I the only one who does this? 
+So, I decided to investigate. 
+I'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility, so I get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction. 
+And sometimes it comes down to something as simple as, their core wound is their father died without ever saying he's proud of them. 
+But then, they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him, but he never told the son. 
+It's because he didn't know that his son needed to hear it. 
+So my question is, why don't we ask for the things that we need? 
+I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, who's longing to hear his wife say, "Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids," but won't ask. 
+I know a woman who's good at this. 
+She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, "I'd really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids." 
+And he goes, "" Oh, this is great, this is great. "" And praise really does have to be genuine, but she takes responsibility for that. 
+And a friend of mine, April, who I've had since kindergarten, she thanks her children for doing their chores. 
+And she said, "" Why wouldn't I thank it, even though they're supposed to do it? "" So, the question is, why was I blocking it? 
+Why were other people blocking it? 
+Why can I say, "" I'll take my steak medium rare, I need size six shoes, "" but I won't say, "Would you praise me this way?" 
+And it's because I'm giving you critical data about me. 
+I'm telling you where I'm insecure. 
+I'm telling you where I need your help. 
+And I'm treating you, my inner circle, like you're the enemy. 
+Because what can you do with that data? 
+You could neglect me. 
+You could abuse it. 
+Or you could actually meet my need. 
+And I took my bike into the bike store — I love this — same bike, and they'd do something called "" truing "" the wheels. 
+The guy said, "" You know, when you true the wheels, it's going to make the bike so much better. "" I get the same bike back, and they've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels I've had for two and a half years, and my bike is like new. 
+So, I'm going to challenge all of you. 
+I want you to true your wheels: be honest about the praise that you need to hear. 
+What do you need to hear? Go home to your wife — go ask her, what does she need? 
+Go home to your husband — what does he need? 
+Go home and ask those questions, and then help the people around you. 
+And it's simple. 
+And why should we care about this? 
+We talk about world peace. 
+How can we have world peace with different cultures, different languages? 
+I think it starts household by household, under the same roof. 
+So, let's make it right in our own backyard. 
+And I want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands, great mothers, friends, daughters, sons. 
+And maybe somebody's never said that to you, but you've done a really, really good job. 
+And thank you for being here, just showing up and changing the world with your ideas. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+A month ago today I stood there: 90 degrees south, the top of the bottom of the world, the Geographic South Pole. 
+And I stood there beside two very good friends of mine, Richard Weber and Kevin Vallely. 
+Together we had just broken the world speed record for a trek to the South Pole. 
+It took us 33 days, 23 hours and 55 minutes to get there. 
+We shaved five days off the previous best time. 
+And in the process, I became the first person in history to make the entire 650-mile journey, from Hercules Inlet to South Pole, solely on feet, without skis. 
+Now, many of you are probably saying, "" Wait a sec, is this tough to do? "" (Laughter) Imagine, if you will, dragging a sled, as you just saw in that video clip, with 170 pounds of gear, in it everything you need to survive on your Antarctic trek. 
+It's going to be 40 below, every single day. 
+You'll be in a massive headwind. 
+And at some point you're going to have to cross these cracks in the ice, these crevasses. 
+Some of them have a very precarious thin footbridge underneath them that could give way at a moment's notice, taking your sled, you, into the abyss, never to be seen again. 
+The punchline to your journey? Look at the horizon. 
+Yes, it's uphill the entire way, because the South Pole is at 10,000 feet, and you're starting at sea level. 
+Our journey did not, in fact, begin at Hercules Inlet, where frozen ocean meets the land of Antarctica. 
+It began a little less than two years ago. 
+A couple of buddies of mine and I had finished a 111-day run across the entire Sahara desert. 
+And while we were there we learned the seriousness of the water crisis in Northern Africa. 
+We also learned that many of the issues facing the people of Northern Africa affected young people the most. 
+I came home to my wife after 111 days of running in the sand, and I said, "" You know, there's no doubt if this bozo can get across the desert, we are capable of doing anything we set our minds to. "" But if I'm going to continue doing these adventures, there has to be a reason for me to do them beyond just getting there. 
+Around that time I met an extraordinary human being, Peter Thum, who inspired me with his actions. 
+He's trying to find and solve water issues, the crisis around the world. 
+His dedication inspired me to come up with this expedition: a run to the South Pole where, with an interactive website, I will be able to bring young people, students and teachers from around the world on board the expedition with me, as active members. 
+So we would have a live website, that every single day of the 33 days, we would be blogging, telling stories of, you know, depleted ozone forcing us to cover our faces, or we will burn. 
+Crossing miles and miles of sastrugi — frozen ice snowdrifts that could be hip-deep. 
+I'm telling you, crossing these things with 170-pound sled, that sled may as well have weighed 1,700 pounds, because that's what it felt like. 
+We were blogging to this live website daily to these students that were tracking us as well, about 10-hour trekking days, 15-hour trekking days, sometimes 20 hours of trekking daily to meet our goal. 
+We'd catch cat-naps at 40 below on our sled, incidentally. 
+In turn, students, people from around the world, would ask us questions. 
+Young people would ask the most amazing questions. 
+One of my favorite: It's 40 below, you've got to go to the bathroom, where are you going to go and how are you going to do it? 
+I'm not going to answer that. But I will answer some of the more popular questions. 
+Where do you sleep? We slept in a tent that was very low to the ground, because the winds on Antarctica were so extreme, it would blow anything else away. 
+What do you eat? One of my favorite dishes on expedition: butter and bacon. It's about a million calories. 
+We were burning about 8,500 a day, so we needed it. 
+How many batteries do you carry for all the equipment that you have? 
+Virtually none. All of our equipment, including film equipment, was charged by the sun. 
+And do you get along? I certainly hope so, because at some point or another on this expedition, one of your teammates is going to have to take a very big needle, and put it in an infected blister, and drain it for you. 
+But seriously, seriously, we did get along, because we had a common goal of wanting to inspire these young people. 
+They were our teammates! They were inspiring us. 
+The stories we were hearing got us to the South Pole. 
+The website worked brilliantly as a two-way street of communication. 
+Young people in northern Canada, kids in an elementary school, dragging sleds across the school-yard, pretending they were Richard, Ray and Kevin. Amazing. 
+We arrived at the South Pole. We huddled into that tent, 45 below that day, I'll never forget it. 
+We looked at each other with these looks of disbelief at what we had just completed. 
+And I remember looking at the guys thinking, "" What do I take from this journey? "" You know? Seriously. 
+That I'm this uber-endurance guy? 
+As I stand here today talking to you guys, I've been running for the grand sum of five years. 
+And a year before that I was a pack-a-day smoker, living a very sedentary lifestyle. 
+What I take from this journey, from my journeys, is that, in fact, within every fiber of my belief standing here, I know that we can make the impossible possible. 
+I'm learning this at 40. 
+Can you imagine? Seriously, can you imagine? 
+I'm learning this at 40 years of age. 
+Imagine being 13 years old, hearing those words, and believing it. 
+Thank you very much. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The first thing I want to do is say thank you to all of you. 
+The second thing I want to do is introduce my co-author and dear friend and co-teacher. 
+Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years. 
+That's Ken Sharpe over there. 
+(Applause) So there is among many people — certainly me and most of the people I talk to — a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working, with the way our institutions run. 
+Our kids' teachers seem to be failing them. 
+Our doctors don't know who the hell we are, and they don't have enough time for us. 
+We certainly can't trust the bankers, and we certainly can't trust the brokers. 
+They almost brought the entire financial system down. 
+And even as we do our own work, all too often, we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing, or the required thing, or the profitable thing. 
+So everywhere we look, pretty much across the board, we worry that the people we depend on don't really have our interests at heart. 
+Or if they do have our interests at heart, we worry that they don't know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests. 
+They don't understand us. 
+They don't have the time to get to know us. 
+There are two kinds of responses that we make to this sort of general dissatisfaction. 
+If things aren't going right, the first response is: let's make more rules, let's set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing. 
+Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom, so even if they don't know what they're doing and don't care about the welfare of our kids, as long as they follow the scripts, our kids will get educated. 
+Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes, so that you don't need to rely on judges using their judgment. 
+Instead, all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime. 
+Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees. 
+More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent, uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with. 
+Or — or maybe and — in addition to rules, let's see if we can come up with some really clever incentives so that, even if the people we deal with don't particularly want to serve our interests, it is in their interest to serve our interest — the magic incentives that will get people to do the right thing even out of pure selfishness. 
+So we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems. 
+Rules and incentives — "sticks" and "carrots." 
+We passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse. 
+There's the Dodd-Frank Act, there's the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by Elizabeth Warren. 
+Maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave. 
+We'll see. 
+In addition, we are struggling to find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies, rather than securing short-term profits. 
+So if we find just the right incentives, they'll do the right thing — as I said — selfishly, and if we come up with the right rules and regulations, they won't drive us all over a cliff. 
+And Ken [Sharpe] and I certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers. 
+If there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that. 
+But what we believe, and what we argue in the book, is that there is no set of rules, no matter how detailed, no matter how specific, no matter how carefully monitored and enforced, there is no set of rules that will get us what we need. 
+Why? Because bankers are smart people. 
+And, like water, they will find cracks in any set of rules. 
+You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system "" almost-collapse "" can't happen again. 
+It is naive beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse, you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse. 
+So it's just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that. 
+What we desperately need, beyond, or along with, better rules and reasonably smart incentives, is we need virtue. 
+We need character. 
+We need people who want to do the right thing. 
+And in particular, the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called "practical wisdom." 
+Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is. 
+So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked. 
+And he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems — problems that they hadn't anticipated. 
+So one example is he sees these stonemasons working on the Isle of Lesbos, and they need to measure out round columns. 
+Well if you think about it, it's really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler. 
+So what do they do? 
+They fashion a novel solution to the problem. 
+They created a ruler that bends, what we would call these days a tape measure — a flexible rule, a rule that bends. 
+And Aristotle said, "" Hah, they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns, you need to bend the rule. "" And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people, we need to bend the rules. 
+Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass. 
+Wise people know when and how to bend the rules. 
+Wise people know how to improvise. 
+The way my co-author, Ken, and I talk about it, they are kind of like jazz musicians. 
+The rules are like the notes on the page, and that gets you started, but then you dance around the notes on the page, coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players. 
+So for Aristotle, the kind of rule-bending, rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman. 
+And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required. 
+A wise person knows when to bend the rules. 
+A wise person knows when to improvise. 
+And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims. 
+If you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself, what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people. 
+So it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself. 
+And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding. 
+Together they comprise practical wisdom, which Aristotle thought was the master virtue. 
+So I'll give you an example of wise practice in action. 
+It's the case of Michael. 
+Michael's a young guy. 
+He had a pretty low-wage job. 
+He was supporting his wife and a child, and the child was going to parochial school. 
+Then he lost his job. 
+He panicked about being able to support his family. 
+One night, he drank a little too much, and he robbed a cab driver — stole 50 dollars. 
+He robbed him at gunpoint. 
+It was a toy gun. 
+He got caught. He got tried. 
+He got convicted. 
+The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years, 24 months. 
+The judge on the case, Judge Lois Forer thought that this made no sense. 
+He had never committed a crime before. 
+He was a responsible husband and father. 
+He had been faced with desperate circumstances. 
+All this would do is wreck a family. 
+And so she improvised a sentence — 11 months, and not only that, but release every day to go to work. 
+Spend your night in jail, spend your day holding down a job. 
+He did. He served out his sentence. 
+He made restitution and found himself a new job. 
+And the family was united. 
+And it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life — a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge. 
+But it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that Judge Forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own, and so he appealed. 
+And he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery. 
+He did after all have a toy gun. 
+The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years. 
+He won the appeal. 
+Michael was sentenced to five years in prison. 
+Judge Forer had to follow the law. 
+And by the way, this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence, so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail. 
+Judge Forer did what she was required to do, and then she quit the bench. 
+And Michael disappeared. 
+So that is an example, both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant, of course, to make things better. 
+Now consider Ms. Dewey. 
+Ms. Dewey's a teacher in a Texas elementary school. 
+She found herself listening to a consultant one day who was trying to help teachers boost the test scores of the kids, so that the school would reach the elite category in percentage of kids passing big tests. 
+All these schools in Texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones, and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools. 
+So here was the consultant's advice: first, don't waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do. 
+Second, don't waste your time on kids who can't pass the test no matter what you do. 
+Third, don't waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted. 
+Focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble, the so-called "" bubble kids "" — kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing. 
+So Ms. Dewey heard this, and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly. 
+It's like they were about to go play a football game. 
+For Ms. Dewey, this isn't why she became a teacher. 
+Now Ken and I are not naive, and we understand that you need to have rules. 
+You need to have incentives. 
+People have to make a living. 
+But the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity, and they demoralize professional activity in two senses. 
+First, they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity. 
+Judge Forer quits, and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened. 
+And second, they demoralize the activity itself. 
+The very practice is demoralized, and the practitioners are demoralized. 
+It creates people — when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing — it creates people who are addicted to incentives. 
+That is to say, it creates people who only do things for incentives. 
+Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years. 
+Psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years. 
+We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures, they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward. 
+If you reward kids for reading books, they stop caring about what's in the books and only care about how long they are. 
+If you reward teachers for kids' test scores, they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation. 
+If you were to reward doctors for doing more procedures — which is the current system — they would do more. 
+If instead you reward doctors for doing fewer procedures, they will do fewer. 
+What we want, of course, is doctors who do just the right amount of procedures and do the right amount for the right reason — namely, to serve the welfare of their patients. 
+Psychologists have known this for decades, and it's time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit, instead of economists. 
+And it doesn't have to be this way. 
+We think, Ken and I, that there are real sources of hope. 
+We identify one set of people in all of these practices who we call canny outlaws. 
+These are people who, being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives, find away around the rules, find a way to subvert the rules. 
+So there are teachers who have these scripts to follow, and they know that if they follow these scripts, the kids will learn nothing. 
+And so what they do is they follow the scripts, but they follow the scripts at double-time and squirrel away little bits of extra time during which they teach in the way that they actually know is effective. 
+So these are little ordinary, everyday heroes, and they're incredibly admirable, but there's no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them out or grinds them down. 
+So canny outlaws are better than nothing, but it's hard to imagine any canny outlaw sustaining that for an indefinite period of time. 
+More hopeful are people we call system-changers. 
+These are people who are looking not to dodge the system's rules and regulations, but to transform the system, and we talk about several. 
+One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell. 
+And one day he was faced with the case of Gary Pettengill. 
+Pettengill was a 23-year-old vet who had planned to make the army a career, but then he got a severe back injury in Iraq, and that forced him to take a medical discharge. 
+He was married, he had a third kid on the way, he suffered from PTSD, in addition to the bad back, and recurrent nightmares, and he had started using marijuana to ease some of the symptoms. 
+He was only able to get part-time work because of his back, and so he was unable to earn enough to put food on the table and take care of his family. 
+So he started selling marijuana. 
+He was busted in a drug sweep. 
+His family was kicked out of their apartment, and the welfare system was threatening to take away his kids. 
+Under normal sentencing procedures, Judge Russell would have had little choice but to sentence Pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon. 
+But Judge Russell did have an alternative. 
+And that's because he was in a special court. 
+He was in a court called the Veterans' Court. 
+In the Veterans' Court — this was the first of its kind in the United States. 
+Judge Russell created the Veterans' Court. 
+It was a court only for veterans who had broken the law. 
+And he had created it exactly because mandatory sentencing laws were taking the judgment out of judging. 
+No one wanted non-violent offenders — and especially non-violent offenders who were veterans to boot — to be thrown into prison. 
+They wanted to do something about what we all know, namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system. 
+And what the Veterans' Court did, was it treated each criminal as an individual, tried to get inside their problems, tried to fashion responses to their crimes that helped them to rehabilitate themselves, and didn't forget about them once the judgment was made. 
+Stayed with them, followed up on them, made sure that they were sticking to whatever plan had been jointly developed to get them over the hump. 
+There are now 22 cities that have Veterans' Courts like this. 
+Why has the idea spread? 
+Well, one reason is that Judge Russell has now seen 108 vets in his Veterans' Court as of February of this year, and out of 108, guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison. 
+None. None. 
+Anyone would glom onto a criminal justice system that has this kind of a record. 
+So here's is a system-changer, and it seems to be catching. 
+There's a banker who created a for-profit community bank that encouraged bankers — I know this is hard to believe — encouraged bankers who worked there to do well by doing good for their low-income clients. 
+The bank helped finance the rebuilding of what was otherwise a dying community. 
+Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards, the default rate was extremely low. 
+The bank was profitable. 
+The bankers stayed with their loan recipients. 
+They didn't make loans and then sell the loans. 
+They serviced the loans. 
+They made sure that their loan recipients were staying up with their payments. 
+Banking hasn't always been the way we read about it now in the newspapers. 
+Even Goldman Sachs once used to serve clients, before it turned into an institution that serves only itself. 
+Banking wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be this way. 
+So there are examples like this in medicine — doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education, so that you don't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy, which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training. 
+And the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year. 
+So the patients are not organ systems, and they're not diseases; they're people, people with lives. 
+And in order to be an effective doctor, you need to treat people who have lives and not just disease. 
+In addition to which there's an enormous amount of back and forth, mentoring of one student by another, of all the students by the doctors, and the result is a generation — we hope — of doctors who do have time for the people they treat. 
+We'll see. 
+So there are lots of examples like this that we talk about. 
+Each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission — what Aristotle would have called its proper telos. 
+And Ken and I believe that this is what practitioners actually want. 
+People want to be allowed to be virtuous. 
+They want to have permission to do the right thing. 
+They don't want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work. 
+Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness, and he was right. 
+There's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy, and the two things that jump out in study after study — I know this will come as a shock to all of you — the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work. 
+Love: managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part. 
+Work: engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying. 
+If you have that, good close relations with other people, work that's meaningful and fulfilling, you don't much need anything else. 
+Well, to love well and to work well, you need wisdom. 
+Rules and incentives don't tell you how to be a good friend, how to be a good parent, how to be a good spouse, or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher. Rules and incentives 
+are no substitutes for wisdom. 
+Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom. 
+And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners. 
+In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing — to do right by others — practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What's in the box? 
+Whatever it is must be pretty important, because I've traveled with it, moved it, from apartment to apartment to apartment. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Sound familiar? 
+Did you know that we Americans have about three times the amount of space we did 50 years ago? 
+Three times. 
+So you'd think, with all this extra space, we'd have plenty of room for all our stuff. 
+Nope. 
+There's a new industry in town, a 22 billion-dollar, 2.2 billion sq. ft. industry: that of personal storage. 
+So we've got triple the space, but we've become such good shoppers that we need even more space. 
+So where does this lead? 
+Lots of credit card debt, huge environmental footprints, and perhaps not coincidentally, our happiness levels flat-lined over the same 50 years. 
+Well I'm here to suggest there's a better way, that less might actually equal more. 
+I bet most of us have experienced at some point the joys of less: college — in your dorm, traveling — in a hotel room, camping — rig up basically nothing, maybe a boat. 
+Whatever it was for you, I bet that, among other things, this gave you a little more freedom, a little more time. 
+So I'm going to suggest that less stuff and less space are going to equal a smaller footprint. 
+It's actually a great way to save you some money. 
+And it's going to give you a little more ease in your life. 
+So I started a project called Life Edited at lifeedited.org to further this conversation and to find some great solutions in this area. 
+First up: crowd-sourcing my 420 sq. ft. apartment in Manhattan with partners Mutopo and Jovoto.com. 
+I wanted it all — home office, sit down dinner for 10, room for guests, and all my kite surfing gear. 
+With over 300 entries from around the world, I got it, my own little jewel box. 
+By buying a space that was 420 sq. ft. 
+instead of 600, immediately I'm saving 200 grand. 
+Smaller space is going to make for smaller utilities — save some more money there, but also a smaller footprint. 
+And because it's really designed around an edited set of possessions — my favorite stuff — and really designed for me, I'm really excited to be there. 
+So how can you live little? 
+Three main approaches. 
+First of all, you have to edit ruthlessly. 
+We've got to clear the arteries of our lives. 
+And that shirt that I hadn't worn in years? 
+It's time for me to let it go. 
+We've got to cut the extraneous out of our lives, and we've got to learn to stem the inflow. 
+We need to think before we buy. 
+Ask ourselves, "Is that really going to make me happier? Truly?" 
+By all means, we should buy and own some great stuff. 
+But we want stuff that we're going to love for years, not just stuff. 
+Secondly, our new mantra: small is sexy. 
+We want space efficiency. 
+We want things that are designed for how they're used the vast majority of the time, not that rare event. 
+Why have a six burner stove when you rarely use three? 
+So we want things that nest, we want things that stack, and we want it digitized. 
+You can take paperwork, books, movies, and you can make it disappear — it's magic. 
+Finally, we want multifunctional spaces and housewares — a sink combined with a toilet, a dining table becomes a bed — same space, a little side table stretches out to seat 10. 
+In the winning Life Edited scheme in a render here, we combine a moving wall with transformer furniture to get a lot out of the space. 
+Look at the coffee table — it grows in height and width to seat 10. 
+My office folds away, easily hidden. 
+My bed just pops out of the wall with two fingers. 
+Guests? Move the moving wall, have some fold-down guest beds. 
+And of course, my own movie theater. 
+So I'm not saying that we all need to live in 420 sq. ft. 
+But consider the benefits of an edited life. 
+Go from 3,000 to 2,000, from 1,500 to 1,000. 
+Most of us, maybe all of us, are here pretty happily for a bunch of days with a couple of bags, maybe a small space, a hotel room. 
+So when you go home and you walk through your front door, take a second and ask yourselves, "" Could I do with a little life editing? 
+Would that give me a little more freedom? 
+Maybe a little more time? "" What's in the box? 
+It doesn't really matter. 
+I know I don't need it. 
+What's in yours? 
+Maybe, just maybe, less might equal more. 
+So let's make room for the good stuff. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was 10 years old, a cousin of mine took me on a tour of his medical school. 
+And as a special treat, he took me to the pathology lab and took a real human brain out of the jar and placed it in my hands. 
+And there it was, the seat of human consciousness, the powerhouse of the human body, sitting in my hands. 
+And that day I knew that when I grew up, I was going to become a brain doctor, scientist, something or the other. 
+Years later, when I finally grew up, my dream came true. 
+And it was while I was doing my Ph.D. 
+on the neurological causes of dyslexia in children that I encountered a startling fact that I'd like to share with you all today. 
+It is estimated that one in six children, that's one in six children, suffer from some developmental disorder. 
+This is a disorder that retards mental development in the child and causes permanent mental impairments. 
+Which means that each and every one of you here today knows at least one child that is suffering from a developmental disorder. 
+But here's what really perplexed me. 
+Despite the fact that each and every one of these disorders originates in the brain, most of these disorders are diagnosed solely on the basis of observable behavior. 
+But diagnosing a brain disorder without actually looking at the brain is analogous to treating a patient with a heart problem based on their physical symptoms, without even doing an ECG or a chest X-ray to look at the heart. 
+It seemed so intuitive to me. 
+To diagnose and treat a brain disorder accurately, it would be necessary to look at the brain directly. 
+Looking at behavior alone can miss a vital piece of the puzzle and provide an incomplete, or even a misleading, picture of the child's problems. 
+Yet, despite all the advances in medical technology, the diagnosis of brain disorders in one in six children still remained so limited. 
+And then I came across a team at Harvard University that had taken one such advanced medical technology and finally applied it, instead of in brain research, towards diagnosing brain disorders in children. 
+Their groundbreaking technology records the EEG, or the electrical activity of the brain, in real time, allowing us to watch the brain as it performs various functions and then detect even the slightest abnormality in any of these functions: vision, attention, language, audition. 
+A program called Brain Electrical Activity Mapping then triangulates the source of that abnormality in the brain. 
+And another program called Statistical Probability Mapping then performs mathematical calculations to determine whether any of these abnormalities are clinically significant, allowing us to provide a much more accurate neurological diagnosis of the child's symptoms. 
+And so I became the head of neurophysiology for the clinical arm of this team, and we're finally able to use this technology towards actually helping children with brain disorders. 
+And I'm happy to say that I'm now in the process of setting up this technology here in India. 
+I'd like to tell you about one such child, whose story was also covered by ABC News. 
+Seven-year-old Justin Senigar came to our clinic with this diagnosis of very severe autism. 
+Like many autistic children, his mind was locked inside his body. 
+There were moments when he would actually space out for seconds at a time. 
+And the doctors told his parents he was never going to be able to communicate or interact socially, and he would probably never have too much language. 
+When we used this groundbreaking EEG technology to actually look at Justin's brain, the results were startling. 
+It turned out that Justin was almost certainly not autistic. 
+He was suffering from brain seizures that were impossible to see with the naked eye, but that were actually causing symptoms that mimicked those of autism. 
+After Justin was given anti-seizure medication, the change in him was amazing. 
+Within a period of 60 days, his vocabulary went from two to three words to 300 words. 
+And his communication and social interaction were improved so dramatically that he was enrolled into a regular school and even became a karate super champ. 
+Research shows that 50 percent of children, almost 50 percent of children diagnosed with autism are actually suffering from hidden brain seizures. 
+These are the faces of the children that I have tested with stories just like Justin. 
+All these children came to our clinic with a diagnosis of autism, attention deficit disorder, mental retardation, language problems. 
+Instead, our EEG scans revealed very specific problems hidden within their brains that couldn't possibly have been detected by their behavioral assessments. 
+So these EEG scans enabled us to provide these children with a much more accurate neurological diagnosis and much more targeted treatment. 
+For too long now, children with developmental disorders have suffered from misdiagnosis while their real problems have gone undetected and left to worsen. 
+And for too long, these children and their parents have suffered undue frustration and desperation. 
+But we are now in a new era of neuroscience, one in which we can finally look directly at brain function in real time with no risks and no side effects, non-invasively, and find the true source of so many disabilities in children. 
+So if I could inspire even a fraction of you in the audience today to share this pioneering diagnostic approach with even one parent whose child is suffering from a developmental disorder, then perhaps one more puzzle in one more brain will be solved. 
+One more mind will be unlocked. 
+And one more child who has been misdiagnosed or even undiagnosed by the system will finally realize his or her true potential while there's still time for his or her brain to recover. 
+And all this by simply watching the child's brainwaves. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music by Anna Oxygen) (Music: "" Shells "" by Mirah) ♪ You learned how to be a diver ♪ ♪ Put on a mask and believe ♪ ♪ Gather a dinner of shells for me ♪ ♪ Take the tank down so you can breathe ♪ ♪ Below ♪ ♪ Movements slow ♪ ♪ You are an island ♪ ♪ All the secrets until then ♪ ♪ Pried open I held them ♪ ♪ Until they were still ♪ ♪ Until they were still ♪ ♪ Until they were still ♪ (Music) (Music by Caroline Lufkin) (Music by Anna Oxygen) ♪ Dream time, I will find you ♪ 
+♪ You are shady, you are new ♪ ♪ I'm not so good at mornings ♪ ♪ I can see too clearly ♪ ♪ I prefer the nighttime ♪ ♪ Dark and blurry ♪ ♪ Falling night ♪ ♪ Hovering light ♪ ♪ Calling night ♪ ♪ Hovering light ♪ ♪ In the moontime I will give up my life ♪ ♪ And in the deep dreams ♪ ♪ You will find me ♪ (Applause) [Excerpts from "" Myth and Infrastructure ""] Bruno Giussani: Come back. 
+Miwa Matreyek! 
+(Applause) 
+
+I was one of the founding members of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour. 
+And then there was me, the Iranian-American of the group. 
+Now, being Iranian-American presents its own set of problems, as you know. 
+So it causes a lot of inner conflict, you know, like part of me likes me, part of me hates me. 
+Because if you only have the Iranian passport, you're kind of limited to the countries you can go to with open arms, you know — Syria, Venezuela, North Korea. 
+Can you say 'I will kill you in the name of Allah?' "" I go, "" I could say that, but what if I were to say, 'Hello. I'm your doctor'? "" They go, "" Great! And then you hijack the hospital. "" (Laughter) Like, I think you're missing the point here. 
+If I want the money, why would I kill myself? "" (Laughter) Right? 
+Now I'll tell you, as a Middle-Eastern male, when you show up around a lot of these activities, you start feeling guilty at one point. 
+My question is: Why would you take credit for a failed car bombing? 
+it is the thought that counts. "" (Laughter) (Applause) "And in conclusion, win some, lose some." (Laughter) 
+And it's great, there's good people everywhere. 
+I was walking by. The guy goes, "" Psst! Habibi, my friend. "" (Laughter) "" You want some frozen yogurt? (Laughter) 
+I have one gram, five gram, 10 gram. How many gram do you want? "" (Laughter) I bought five grams. 10 dollars. 10 dollars! I said, "" What's in this? "" He's like, "" Good stuff, man. Colombian. Top of the line. "" (Laughter) The other thing you learn when you travel in these countries, in the Middle East, Latin American, South American countries, a lot of times when they build stuff, there's no rules and regulations. 
+For example, I took my two-year-old son to the playground at the Dubai Mall. 
+
+You know, I'm struck by how one of the implicit themes of TED is compassion, these very moving demonstrations we've just seen: HIV in Africa, President Clinton last night. 
+And I'd like to do a little collateral thinking, if you will, about compassion and bring it from the global level to the personal. 
+I'm a psychologist, but rest assured, I will not bring it to the scrotal. 
+(Laughter) There was a very important study done a while ago at Princeton Theological Seminary that speaks to why it is that when all of us have so many opportunities to help, we do sometimes, and we don't other times. 
+A group of divinity students at the Princeton Theological Seminary were told that they were going to give a practice sermon and they were each given a sermon topic. 
+Half of those students were given, as a topic, the parable of the Good Samaritan: the man who stopped the stranger in — to help the stranger in need by the side of the road. 
+Half were given random Bible topics. 
+Then one by one, they were told they had to go to another building and give their sermon. 
+As they went from the first building to the second, each of them passed a man who was bent over and moaning, clearly in need. The question is: Did they stop to help? 
+The more interesting question is: Did it matter they were contemplating the parable of the Good Samaritan? Answer: No, not at all. 
+What turned out to determine whether someone would stop and help a stranger in need was how much of a hurry they thought they were in — were they feeling they were late, or were they absorbed in what they were going to talk about. 
+And this is, I think, the predicament of our lives: that we don't take every opportunity to help because our focus is in the wrong direction. 
+There's a new field in brain science, social neuroscience. 
+This studies the circuitry in two people's brains that activates while they interact. 
+And the new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help. 
+That is to say, if we attend to the other person, we automatically empathize, we automatically feel with them. 
+There are these newly identified neurons, mirror neurons, that act like a neuro Wi-Fi, activating in our brain exactly the areas activated in theirs. We feel "" with "" automatically. 
+And if that person is in need, if that person is suffering, we're automatically prepared to help. At least that's the argument. 
+But then the question is: Why don't we? 
+And I think this speaks to a spectrum that goes from complete self-absorption, to noticing, to empathy and to compassion. 
+And the simple fact is, if we are focused on ourselves, if we're preoccupied, as we so often are throughout the day, we don't really fully notice the other. 
+And this difference between the self and the other focus can be very subtle. 
+I was doing my taxes the other day, and I got to the point where I was listing all of the donations I gave, and I had an epiphany, it was — I came to my check to the Seva Foundation and I noticed that I thought, boy, my friend Larry Brilliant would really be happy that I gave money to Seva. 
+Then I realized that what I was getting from giving was a narcissistic hit — that I felt good about myself. 
+Then I started to think about the people in the Himalayas whose cataracts would be helped, and I realized that I went from this kind of narcissistic self-focus to altruistic joy, to feeling good for the people that were being helped. I think that's a motivator. 
+But this distinction between focusing on ourselves and focusing on others is one that I encourage us all to pay attention to. 
+You can see it at a gross level in the world of dating. 
+I was at a sushi restaurant a while back and I overheard two women talking about the brother of one woman, who was in the singles scene. And this woman says, "" My brother is having trouble getting dates, so he's trying speed dating. "" I don't know if you know speed dating? 
+Women sit at tables and men go from table to table, and there's a clock and a bell, and at five minutes, bingo, the conversation ends and the woman can decide whether to give her card or her email address to the man for follow up. And this woman says, "" My brother's never gotten a card, and I know exactly why. 
+The moment he sits down, he starts talking non-stop about himself; he never asks about the woman. "" And I was doing some research in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times, looking at the back stories of marriages — because they're very interesting — and I came to the marriage of Alice Charney Epstein. And she said that when she was in the dating scene, she had a simple test she put people to. 
+The test was: from the moment they got together, how long it would take the guy to ask her a question with the word "" you "" in it. 
+And apparently Epstein aced the test, therefore the article. 
+(Laughter) Now this is a — it's a little test I encourage you to try out at a party. 
+Here at TED there are great opportunities. 
+The Harvard Business Review recently had an article called "" The Human Moment, "" about how to make real contact with a person at work. And they said, well, the fundamental thing you have to do is turn off your BlackBerry, close your laptop, end your daydream and pay full attention to the person. 
+There is a newly coined word in the English language for the moment when the person we're with whips out their BlackBerry or answers that cell phone, and all of a sudden we don't exist. 
+The word is "" pizzled "": it's a combination of puzzled and pissed off. 
+(Laughter) I think it's quite apt. It's our empathy, it's our tuning in which separates us from Machiavellians or sociopaths. 
+I have a brother-in-law who's an expert on horror and terror — he wrote the Annotated Dracula, the Essential Frankenstein — he was trained as a Chaucer scholar, but he was born in Transylvania and I think it affected him a little bit. 
+At any rate, at one point my brother-in-law, Leonard, decided to write a book about a serial killer. 
+This is a man who terrorized the very vicinity we're in many years ago. He was known as the Santa Cruz strangler. 
+And before he was arrested, he had murdered his grandparents, his mother and five co-eds at UC Santa Cruz. 
+So my brother-in-law goes to interview this killer and he realizes when he meets him that this guy is absolutely terrifying. 
+For one thing, he's almost seven feet tall. 
+But that's not the most terrifying thing about him. 
+The scariest thing is that his IQ is 160: a certified genius. 
+But there is zero correlation between IQ and emotional empathy, feeling with the other person. 
+They're controlled by different parts of the brain. 
+So at one point, my brother-in-law gets up the courage to ask the one question he really wants to know the answer to, and that is: how could you have done it? 
+Didn't you feel any pity for your victims? 
+These were very intimate murders — he strangled his victims. 
+And the strangler says very matter-of-factly, "" Oh no. If I'd felt the distress, I could not have done it. 
+I had to turn that part of me off. I had to turn that part of me off. "" And I think that that is very troubling, and in a sense, I've been reflecting on turning that part of us off. 
+When we focus on ourselves in any activity, we do turn that part of ourselves off if there's another person. 
+Think about going shopping and think about the possibilities of a compassionate consumerism. 
+Right now, as Bill McDonough has pointed out, the objects that we buy and use have hidden consequences. 
+We're all unwitting victims of a collective blind spot. 
+We don't notice and don't notice that we don't notice the toxic molecules emitted by a carpet or by the fabric on the seats. 
+Or we don't know if that fabric is a technological or manufacturing nutrient; it can be reused or does it just end up at landfill? In other words, we're oblivious to the ecological and public health and social and economic justice consequences of the things we buy and use. 
+In a sense, the room itself is the elephant in the room, but we don't see it. And we've become victims of a system that points us elsewhere. Consider this. 
+There's a wonderful book called Stuff: The Hidden Life of Everyday Objects. 
+And it talks about the back story of something like a t-shirt. 
+And it talks about where the cotton was grown and the fertilizers that were used and the consequences for soil of that fertilizer. And it mentions, for instance, that cotton is very resistant to textile dye; about 60 percent washes off into wastewater. 
+And it's well known by epidemiologists that kids who live near textile works tend to have high rates of leukemia. 
+There's a company, Bennett and Company, that supplies Polo.com, Victoria's Secret — they, because of their CEO, who's aware of this, in China formed a joint venture with their dye works to make sure that the wastewater would be properly taken care of before it returned to the groundwater. 
+Right now, we don't have the option to choose the virtuous t-shirt over the non-virtuous one. So what would it take to do that? 
+Well, I've been thinking. For one thing, there's a new electronic tagging technology that allows any store to know the entire history of any item on the shelves in that store. 
+You can track it back to the factory. Once you can track it back to the factory, you can look at the manufacturing processes that were used to make it, and if it's virtuous, you can label it that way. Or if it's not so virtuous, you can go into — today, go into any store, put your scanner on a palm onto a barcode, which will take you to a website. 
+They have it for people with allergies to peanuts. 
+That website could tell you things about that object. 
+In other words, at point of purchase, we might be able to make a compassionate choice. 
+There's a saying in the world of information science: ultimately everybody will know everything. 
+And the question is: will it make a difference? 
+Some time ago when I was working for The New York Times, it was in the '80s, I did an article on what was then a new problem in New York — it was homeless people on the streets. 
+And I spent a couple of weeks going around with a social work agency that ministered to the homeless. And I realized seeing the homeless through their eyes that almost all of them were psychiatric patients that had nowhere to go. They had a diagnosis. It made me — what it did was to shake me out of the urban trance where, when we see, when we're passing someone who's homeless in the periphery of our vision, it stays on the periphery. 
+We don't notice and therefore we don't act. 
+One day soon after that — it was a Friday — at the end of the day, I went down — I was going down to the subway. It was rush hour and thousands of people were streaming down the stairs. 
+And all of a sudden as I was going down the stairs I noticed that there was a man slumped to the side, shirtless, not moving, and people were just stepping over him — hundreds and hundreds of people. 
+And because my urban trance had been somehow weakened, I found myself stopping to find out what was wrong. 
+The moment I stopped, half a dozen other people immediately ringed the same guy. 
+And we found out that he was Hispanic, he didn't speak any English, he had no money, he'd been wandering the streets for days, starving, and he'd fainted from hunger. 
+Immediately someone went to get orange juice, someone brought a hotdog, someone brought a subway cop. 
+This guy was back on his feet immediately. 
+But all it took was that simple act of noticing, and so I'm optimistic. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Today I'm going to unpack for you three examples of iconic design, and it makes perfect sense that I should be the one to do it because I have a Bachelor's degree in Literature. 
+(Laughter) But I'm also a famous minor television personality and an avid collector of Design Within Reach catalogs, so I pretty much know everything there is. 
+Now, I'm sure you recognize this object; many of you probably saw it as you were landing your private zeppelins at Los Angeles International Airport over the past couple of days. 
+This is known as the Theme Building; that is its name for reasons that are still very murky. 
+And it is perhaps the best example we have in Los Angeles of ancient extraterrestrial architecture. 
+It was first excavated in 1961 as they were building LAX, although scientists believe that it dates back to the year 2000 Before Common Era, when it was used as a busy transdimensional space port by the ancient astronauts who first colonized this planet and raised our species from savagery by giving us the gift of written language and technology and the gift of revolving restaurants. 
+It is thought to have been a replacement for the older space ports located, of course, at Stonehenge and considered to be quite an improvement due to the uncluttered design, the lack of druids hanging around all the time and obviously, the much better access to parking. 
+When it was uncovered, it ushered in a new era of streamlined, archaically futuristic design called Googie, which came to be synonymous with the Jet Age, a misnomer. 
+After all, the ancient astronauts who used it did not travel by jet very often, preferring instead to travel by feathered serpent powered by crystal skulls. 
+(Applause) (Music) Ah yes, a table. 
+We use these every day. 
+And on top of it, the juicy salif. 
+This is a design by Philippe Starck, who I believe is in the audience at this very moment. 
+And you can tell it is a Starck design by its precision, its playfulness, its innovation and its promise of imminent violence. 
+(Laughter) It is a design that challenges your intuition — it is not what you think it is when you first see it. 
+It is not a fork designed to grab three hors d'oeuvres at a time, which would be useful out in the lobby, I would say. 
+And despite its obvious influence by the ancient astronauts and its space agey-ness and tripodism, it is not something designed to attach to your brain and suck out your thoughts. 
+It is in fact a citrus juicer and when I say that, you never see it as anything else again. 
+It is also not a monument to design, it is a monument to design's utility. 
+You can take it home with you, unlike the Theme Building, which will stay where it is forever. 
+This is affordable and can come home with you and, as such, it can sit on your kitchen counter — it can't go in your drawers; trust me, I found that out the hard way — and make your kitchen counter into a monument to design. 
+One other thing about it, if you do have one at home, let me tell you one of the features you may not know: when you fall asleep, it comes alive and it walks around your house and goes through your mail and watches you as you sleep. 
+(Applause) Okay, what is this object? 
+I have no idea. I don't know what that thing is. 
+It looks terrible. Is it a little hot plate? 
+I don't get it. 
+Does anyone know? Chi? 
+It's an... iPhone. iPhone. 
+Oh yes, that's right, I remember those; I had my whole bathroom tiles redone with those back in the good old days. 
+No, I have an iPhone. Of course I do. 
+Here is my well-loved iPhone. 
+I do so many things on this little device. 
+I like to read books on it. 
+More than that, I like to buy books on it that I never have to feel guilty about not reading because they go in here and I never look at them again and it's perfect. 
+I use it every day to measure the weight of an ox, for example. 
+Every now and then, I admit that I complete a phone call on it occasionally. 
+And yet I forget about it all the time. 
+This is a design that once you saw it, you forgot about it. 
+It is easy to forget the gasp-inducement that occurred in 2007 when you first touched this thing because it became so quickly pervasive and because of how instantly we adopted these gestures and made it an extension of our life. 
+Unlike the Theme Building, this is not alien technology. 
+Or I should say, what it did was it took technology which, unlike people in this room, to many other people in the world, still feels very alien, and made it immediately and instantly feel familiar and intimate. 
+And unlike the juicy salif, it does not threaten to attach itself to your brain, rather, it simply attaches itself to your brain. 
+(Laughter) And you didn't even notice it happened. 
+So there you go. My name is John Hodgman. 
+I just explained design. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives. 
+Some of those reforms have been good. 
+And we know why kids drop out. 
+We know why kids don't learn. 
+It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences... 
+But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. 
+George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. 
+Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. 
+I have looked at the best and I've looked at some of the worst. 
+A colleague said to me one time, "" They don't pay me to like the kids. 
+I should teach it, they should learn it, Case closed. "" Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like." 
+(Laughter) (Applause) She said, "" That's just a bunch of hooey. "" And I said to her, "Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear." 
+Needless to say, it was. 
+He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand, as opposed to being understood. 
+You ever thought about that? 
+(Laughter) I taught a lesson once on ratios. 
+I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry. "" They said, "" That's okay, Ms. Pierson. 
+You were so excited, we just let you go. "" I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient, that I cried. 
+How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time? 
+I told all my students, "" You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it. "" One of the students said, "" Really? "" (Laughter) I said, "" Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. 
+You just have to strut. "" (Laughter) And I gave them a saying to say: "" I am somebody. 
+I am powerful, and I am strong. 
+I deserve the education that I get here. 
+I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go. "" And they said, "" Yeah! "" (Laughter) You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you. 
+(Laughter) He said, "" Ms. Pierson, is this an F? "" I said, "" Yes. "" (Laughter) He said, "" Then why'd you put a smiley face? "" I said, "" Because you're on a roll. 
+You got two right. You didn't miss them all. "" (Laughter) I said, "" And when we review this, won't you do better? "" He said, "" Yes, ma'am, I can do better. "" You see, "" -18 "" sucks all the life out of you. 
+"+ 2" said, "I ain't all bad." 
+For years, I watched my mother take the time at recess to review, go on home visits in the afternoon, buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat, and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn't smell so good. 
+(Laughter) And kids can be cruel. 
+And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, "" You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life. 
+You made me feel like I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. 
+And I want you to just see what I've become. "" And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear. 
+Can we stand to have more relationships? 
+Never. 
+You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason. 
+It's the connection. It's the relationships. 
+So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway. 
+We teach anyway, because that's what we do. 
+Teaching and learning should bring joy. 
+How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? 
+Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. 
+We're born to make a difference. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? 
+1926: Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this "" substitution. "" 1933: Wera Mahler found when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind. 
+1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this, and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published. 
+Now, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt that they had a long way to go still to achieve their goal. 
+But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes, on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal. 
+You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) 
+
+Okay, it's great to be back at TED. 
+Why don't I just start by firing away with the video? 
+(Music) (Video) Man: Okay, Glass, record a video. 
+Woman: This is it. We're on in two minutes. 
+Man 2: Okay Glass, hang out with The Flying Club. 
+Man 3: Google "" photos of tiger heads. "" Hmm. 
+Man 4: You ready? You ready? (Barking) Woman 2: Right there. Okay, Glass, take a picture. 
+(Child shouting) Man 5: Go! 
+Man 6: Holy [beep]! That is awesome. 
+Child: Whoa! Look at that snake! 
+Woman 3: Okay, Glass, record a video! 
+Man 7: After this bridge, first exit. 
+Man 8: Okay, A12, right there! 
+(Applause) (Children singing) Man 9: Google, say "" delicious "" in Thai. 
+Google Glass: อร ่ อยMan 9: Mmm, อร ่ อย. 
+Woman 4: Google "" jellyfish. "" (Music) Man 10: It's beautiful. 
+(Applause) Sergey Brin: Oh, sorry, I just got this message from a Nigerian prince. 
+He needs help getting 10 million dollars. 
+I like to pay attention to these because that's how we originally funded the company, and it's gone pretty well. 
+Though in all seriousness, this position that you just saw me in, looking down at my phone, that's one of the reasons behind this project, Project Glass. 
+Because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how you want to connect to information. 
+Should it be by just walking around looking down? 
+But that was the vision behind Glass, and that's why we've created this form factor. 
+Okay. And I don't want to go through all the things it does and whatnot, but I want to tell you a little bit more about the motivation behind what led to it. 
+In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you're out and about looking at your phone, it's kind of, is this what you're meant to do with your body? 
+You're standing around there and you're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass. 
+You're just kind of moving around. 
+So when we developed Glass, we thought really about, can we make something that frees your hands? 
+You saw all of the things people are doing in the video back there. 
+They were all wearing Glass, and that's how we got that footage. 
+And also you want something that frees your eyes. 
+That's why we put the display up high, out of your line of sight, so it wouldn't be where you're looking and it wouldn't be where you're making eye contact with people. 
+And also we wanted to free up the ears, so the sound actually goes through, conducts straight to the bones in your cranium, which is a little bit freaky at first, but you get used to it. 
+And ironically, if you want to hear it better, you actually just cover your ear, which is kind of surprising, but that's how it works. 
+My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all. 
+You'd just have information come to you as you needed it. 
+And this is now, 15 years later, sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision when you're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth. 
+This project has lasted now, been just over two years. 
+We've learned an amazing amount. 
+It's been really important to make it comfortable. 
+So our first prototypes we built were huge. 
+It was like cell phones strapped to your head. 
+It was very heavy, pretty uncomfortable. 
+We had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job, and then she almost ran away screaming. 
+But we've come a long way. 
+And the other really unexpected surprise was the camera. 
+Our original prototypes didn't have cameras at all, but it's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family, my kids. 
+I just never would have dug out a camera or a phone or something else to take that moment. 
+And lastly I've realized, in experimenting with this device, that I also kind of have a nervous tic. 
+The cell phone is — yeah, you have to look down on it and all that, but it's also kind of a nervous habit. 
+Like if I smoked, I'd probably just smoke instead. 
+I would just light up a cigarette. It would look cooler. 
+You know, I'd be like — But in this case, you know, I whip this out and I sit there and look as if I have something very important to do or attend to. 
+But it really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent just secluding away, be it email or social posts or whatnot, even though it wasn't really — there's nothing really that important or that pressing. 
+And with this, I know I will get certain messages if I really need them, but I don't have to be checking them all the time. 
+Yeah, I've really enjoyed actually exploring the world more, doing more of the crazy things like you saw in the video. 
+Thank you all very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+All buildings today have something in common. 
+They're made using Victorian technologies. 
+This involves blueprints, industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers. 
+All of this effort results in an inert object. 
+And that means that there is a one-way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities. 
+This is not sustainable. 
+I believe that the only way that it is possible for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature, not insulating them from it. 
+Now, in order to do this, we need the right kind of language. 
+Living systems are in constant conversation with the natural world, through sets of chemical reactions called metabolism. 
+And this is the conversion of one group of substances into another, either through the production or the absorption of energy. 
+And this is the way in which living materials make the most of their local resources in a sustainable way. 
+So, I'm interested in the use of metabolic materials for the practice of architecture. 
+But they don't exist. So I'm having to make them. 
+I'm working with architect Neil Spiller at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and we're collaborating with international scientists in order to generate these new materials from a bottom up approach. 
+That means we're generating them from scratch. 
+One of our collaborators is chemist Martin Hanczyc, and he's really interested in the transition from inert to living matter. 
+Now, that's exactly the kind of process that I'm interested in, when we're thinking about sustainable materials. 
+So, Martin, he works with a system called the protocell. 
+Now all this is — and it's magic — is a little fatty bag. And it's got a chemical battery in it. 
+And it has no DNA. 
+This little bag is able to conduct itself in a way that can only be described as living. 
+It is able to move around its environment. 
+It can follow chemical gradients. 
+It can undergo complex reactions, some of which are happily architectural. 
+So here we are. These are protocells, patterning their environment. 
+We don't know how they do that yet. 
+Here, this is a protocell, and it's vigorously shedding this skin. 
+Now, this looks like a chemical kind of birth. 
+This is a violent process. 
+Here, we've got a protocell to extract carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbonate. 
+And that's the shell around that globular fat. 
+They are quite brittle. So you've only got a part of one there. 
+So what we're trying to do is, we're trying to push these technologies towards creating bottom-up construction approaches for architecture, which contrast the current, Victorian, top-down methods which impose structure upon matter. 
+That can't be energetically sensible. 
+So, bottom-up materials actually exist today. 
+They've been in use, in architecture, since ancient times. 
+If you walk around the city of Oxford, where we are today, and have a look at the brickwork, which I've enjoyed doing in the last couple of days, you'll actually see that a lot of it is made of limestone. 
+And if you look even closer, you'll see, in that limestone, there are little shells and little skeletons that are piled upon each other. 
+And then they are fossilized over millions of years. 
+Now a block of limestone, in itself, isn't particularly that interesting. 
+It looks beautiful. 
+But imagine what the properties of this limestone block might be if the surfaces were actually in conversation with the atmosphere. 
+Maybe they could extract carbon dioxide. 
+Would it give this block of limestone new properties? 
+Well, most likely it would. It might be able to grow. 
+It might be able to self-repair, and even respond to dramatic changes in the immediate environment. 
+So, architects are never happy with just one block of an interesting material. 
+They think big. Okay? 
+So when we think about scaling up metabolic materials, we can start thinking about ecological interventions like repair of atolls, or reclamation of parts of a city that are damaged by water. 
+So, one of these examples would of course be the historic city of Venice. 
+Now, Venice, as you know, has a tempestuous relationship with the sea, and is built upon wooden piles. 
+So we've devised a way by which it may be possible for the protocell technology that we're working with to sustainably reclaim Venice. 
+And architect Christian Kerrigan has come up with a series of designs that show us how it may be possible to actually grow a limestone reef underneath the city. 
+So, here is the technology we have today. 
+This is our protocell technology, effectively making a shell, like its limestone forefathers, and depositing it in a very complex environment, against natural materials. 
+We're looking at crystal lattices to see the bonding process in this. 
+Now, this is the very interesting part. 
+We don't just want limestone dumped everywhere in all the pretty canals. 
+What we need it to do is to be creatively crafted around the wooden piles. 
+So, you can see from these diagrams that the protocell is actually moving away from the light, toward the dark foundations. 
+We've observed this in the laboratory. 
+The protocells can actually move away from the light. 
+They can actually also move towards the light. You have to just choose your species. 
+So that these don't just exist as one entity, we kind of chemically engineer them. 
+And so here the protocells are depositing their limestone very specifically, around the foundations of Venice, effectively petrifying it. 
+Now, this isn't going to happen tomorrow. It's going to take a while. 
+It's going to take years of tuning and monitoring this technology in order for us to become ready to test it out in a case-by-case basis on the most damaged and stressed buildings within the city of Venice. 
+But gradually, as the buildings are repaired, we will see the accretion of a limestone reef beneath the city. 
+An accretion itself is a huge sink of carbon dioxide. 
+Also it will attract the local marine ecology, who will find their own ecological niches within this architecture. 
+So, this is really interesting. Now we have an architecture that connects a city to the natural world in a very direct and immediate way. 
+But perhaps the most exciting thing about it is that the driver of this technology is available everywhere. 
+This is terrestrial chemistry. We've all got it, which means that this technology is just as appropriate for developing countries as it is for First World countries. 
+So, in summary, I'm generating metabolic materials as a counterpoise to Victorian technologies, and building architectures from a bottom-up approach. 
+Secondly, these metabolic materials have some of the properties of living systems, which means they can perform in similar ways. 
+They can expect to have a lot of forms and functions within the practice of architecture. 
+And finally, an observer in the future marveling at a beautiful structure in the environment may find it almost impossible to tell whether this structure has been created by a natural process or an artificial one. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Now, I've been making pictures for quite a long time, and normally speaking, a picture like this, for me, should be straightforward. 
+Does anybody know 4x5 and 10x8 sheets of film, and you're setting it up, putting it on the tripod. 
+And what's most important for me is the beauty and the aesthetic, and that's based on the light. 
+So the light's setting on my left-hand side, and there's a balance in the communication with the Daasanach, the family of 30, all ages. 
+There's babies and there's grandparents, I'm getting them in the tree and waiting for the light to set, and it's going, going, and I've got one sheet of film left, and I think, I'm okay, I'm in control, I'm in control. 
+I'm setting it up and I'm setting up, and the light's just about to go, and I want it to be golden, I want it to be beautiful. 
+And it's about to go and it's about to go, and I put my sheet in the camera, it's all focused, and all of a sudden there's a massive "" whack, "" and I'm looking around, and in the top corner of the tree, one of the girls slaps the girl next to her, and the girl next to her pulls her hair, and all hell breaks loose, and I'm standing there going, "" But the light, the light. 
+Wait, I need the light. Stay still! Stay still! "" And they start screaming, and then one of the men turns around and starts screaming, shouting, and the whole tree collapses, not the tree, but the people in the tree. 
+It took me a week, it took me a week to make the picture which you see here today, and I'll tell you why. (Applause) It's very, very, very simple — I spent a week going around the village, and I went to every single one: "" Hello, can you meet at the tree? 
+What's your story? Who are you? "" And it all turned out to be about a boyfriend, for crying out loud. 
+It was about a boyfriend. The girl on the top, she'd kissed the wrong boy, and they'd started having a fight. 
+And there was a very, very beautiful lesson for me in that: If I was going to photograph these people in the dignified, respectful way that I had intended, and put them on a pedestal, I had to understand them. 
+So in the end, a week later, and I was absolutely exhausted, I mean on my knees going, "" Please get back up in that tree. 
+It's a picture I need to make. "" They all came back. I put them all back up in the tree. 
+And this was about four years ago, and I set off on a journey, to be honest, a very indulgent journey. 
+I'm a real romantic. I'm an idealist, perhaps in some ways naive. 
+But I truly believe that there are people on the planet that are beautiful. 
+It's very, very simple. It's not rocket science. 
+I wanted to put these people on a pedestal. 
+So, I chose about 35 different groups, tribes, indigenous cultures. 
+They were chosen purely because of their aesthetic, and I'll talk more about that later. 
+I'm not an anthropologist, I have no technical study with the subject, but I do have a very, very, very deep passion, and I believe that I had to choose the most beautiful people on the planet in the most beautiful environment that they lived in, and put the two together and present them to you. 
+About a year ago, I published the first pictures, and something extraordinarily exciting happened. 
+The whole world came running, and it was a bizarre experience, because everybody, from everywhere: "" Who are they? What are they? How many are they? 
+I really didn't have the answers, and I could sort of understand, okay, they're beautiful, that was my intention, but the questions that I was being fired at, I could not answer them. 
+Until, it was quite amusing, about a year ago somebody said, "" You've been invited to do a TED Talk. "" And I said, "" Ted? Ted? Who's Ted? I haven't met Ted before. "" He said, "" No, a TED Talk. "" I said, "" But who's Ted? 
+Do I have to talk to him or do we sit with each other on the stage? "" And, "" No, no, the TED group. You must know about it. "" And I said, "" I've been in a teepee and in a yurt for the last five years. 
+How do I know who Ted is? Introduce me to him. "" Anyway, to cut a long story short, he said, "" We have to do a TED Talk. "" Researched. Oh, exciting. That's great! 
+And then eventually you're going to go to TEDGlobal. 
+I thought, lessons, okay, well, what did I learn? Good question. 
+(Laughter) And I thought, three lessons, well, I'm going to think about it. 
+(Applause) So I thought long and hard, and I stood here two days ago, and I had my test run, and I had my cards and my clicker in my hands and my pictures were on the screen, and I had my three lessons, and I started presenting them, and I had this very odd out-of-body experience. 
+All these people sitting here, they've had more of these talks, they've heard more lessons in their life. 
+Who are you to guide them and who are you to show them what is right, what is wrong, what these people have to say? "" And I had a little bit of a, it was very private, a little bit of a meltdown. 
+I went back, and a little bit like the boy walking away from the tree with his goats, very disgruntled, going, that didn't work, It wasn't what I wanted to communicate. 
+There's only one person I know here, and that's me. 
+So what I'm going to do is share with you my lessons. 
+It's a very, as I explained at the beginning, very indulgent, very personal, how and why I made these pictures, and I leave it to you as the audience to interpret what these lessons have meant to me, what they could perhaps mean to you. 
+They're the Huli. 
+This is the real thing. 
+We spend the whole of our existence revolving around beauty: beautiful places, beautiful things, and ultimately, beautiful people. 
+And somebody said, "" You have to show them the picture of the Nenets. The Nenets. "" I was like, yeah, but that's not my favorite picture. 
+
+Have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade? Have you ever wondered 
+how such a situation can be turned around? 
+Have you ever looked at the Arab uprisings and thought, "" How could we have predicted that? "" or "" How could we have better prepared for that? "" Well my personal story, my personal journey, what brings me to the TED stage here today, is a demonstration of exactly what's been happening in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades, at least, and beyond. 
+I want to share some of that story with you, but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in Muslim-majority societies. 
+So let me begin by first of all giving a very, very brief history of time, if I may indulge. 
+In medieval societies there were defined allegiances. 
+An identity was defined primarily by religion. 
+And then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a European nation-state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity. 
+So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity, and the nation-state reflected that. 
+In the age of globalization, we moved on. 
+I call it the era of citizenship — where people could be from multi-racial, multi-ethnic backgrounds, but all be equal as citizens in a state. 
+You could be American-Italian; you could be American-Irish; you could be British-Pakistani. 
+But I believe now that we're moving into a new age, and that age The New York Times dubbed recently as "" the age of behavior. "" How I define the age of behavior is a period of transnational allegiances, where identity is defined more so by ideas and narratives. 
+And these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave. 
+Now this is not all necessarily good news, because it's also my belief that hatred has gone global just as much as love. 
+But actually it's my belief that the people who've been truly capitalizing on this age of behavior, up until now, up until recent times, up until the last six months, the people who have been capitalizing most on the age of behavior and the transnational allegiances, using digital activism and other sorts of borderless technologies, those who've been benefiting from this have been extremists. 
+And that's something which I'd like to elaborate on. 
+If we look at Islamists, if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists, one thing they've been very good at, one thing that they've actually been exceeding in, is communicating across borders, using technologies to organize themselves, to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena. 
+Now I should know, because for 13 years of my life, I was involved in an extreme Islamist organization. 
+And I was actually a potent force in spreading ideas across borders, and I witnessed the rise of Islamist extremism as distinct from Islam the faith, and the way in which it influenced my co-religionists across the world. 
+And my story, my personal story, is truly evidence for the age of behavior that I'm attempting to elaborate upon here. 
+I was, by the way — I'm an Essex lad, born and raised in Essex in the U.K. 
+Anyone who's from England knows the reputation we have from Essex. 
+But having been born in Essex, at the age of 16, I joined an organization. 
+At the age of 17, I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization. 
+At the age of 19, I was on the national leadership of this organization in the U.K. 
+At the age of 21, I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan. 
+At the age of 22, I was co-founding this organization in Denmark. 
+By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience. 
+Now that journey, and what took me from Essex all the way across the world — by the way, we were laughing at democratic activists. 
+We felt they were from the age of yesteryear. 
+We felt that they were out of date. 
+I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used. 
+I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected. 
+Eventually I was detected, of course, in Egypt. 
+But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state. 
+The age of behavior: where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances. 
+So as I said, we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it. 
+And it's not just Islamist extremists that did this. 
+But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late, far-right fascism is also on the rise. 
+A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it's transnational. 
+And the consequences that this is having is that it's affecting the political climate across Europe. 
+What's actually happening is that what were previously localized parochialisms, individual or groupings of extremists who were isolated from one another, have become interconnected in a globalized way and have thus become, or are becoming, mainstream. 
+Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world. 
+If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late, you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics, yet the phenomenon is transnational. 
+In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned. 
+In others, headscarves are being banned. 
+In others, kosher and halal meat are being banned, as we speak. 
+And on the flip side, we have transnational Islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies. 
+And so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream. 
+Now that never would have been possible before. 
+They would have felt isolated, until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon. 
+Where does that leave democracy aspirants? 
+Well I believe they're getting left far behind. 
+And I'll give you an example here at this stage. 
+If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot: there's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki. 
+As an American citizen, ethnically a Yemeni, in hiding currently in Yemen, who inspired a Nigerian, son of the head of Nigeria's national bank. 
+This Nigerian student studied in London, trained in Yemen, boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America. 
+In the meanwhile, the Old mentality with a capital O, was represented by his father, the head of the Nigerian bank, warning the CIA that his own son was about to attack, and this warning fell on deaf ears. 
+The Old mentality with a capital O, as represented by the nation-state, not yet fully into the age of behavior, not recognizing the power of transnational social movements, got left behind. 
+And the Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the United States of America. 
+Again with the example of the far right: that we find, ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization. 
+So why are they succeeding? 
+And why are democracy aspirants falling behind? 
+Well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this. 
+And a social movement is comprised, in my view, it's comprised of four main characteristics. 
+It's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders. 
+I'll talk you through one example, and that's the example that everyone here will be aware of, and that's the example of Al-Qaeda. 
+If I asked you to think of the ideas of Al-Qaeda, that's something that comes to your mind immediately. 
+If I ask you to think of their narratives — the West being at war with Islam, the need to defend Islam against the West — these narratives, they come to your mind immediately. 
+Incidentally, the difference between ideas and narratives: the idea is the cause that one believes in; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause — the propaganda, if you like, of the cause. 
+So the ideas and the narratives of Al-Qaeda come to your mind immediately. 
+If I ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders, they come to your mind immediately. 
+One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently. 
+So these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately. 
+And that's the power of social movements. 
+They're transnational, and they bond around these ideas and narratives and these symbols and these leaders. 
+However, if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan, and I ask you to think of the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today, you'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. 
+Which means, by definition, that particular leader no longer exists. 
+One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. 
+There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda, without the terrorism, for democracy across Muslim-majority societies. 
+There are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground. 
+So that begs the next question. 
+Why is it that extremist organizations, whether of the far-right or of the Islamist extremism — Islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of Islam over the rest of society — why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way, whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind? 
+And I believe that's for four reasons. 
+I believe, number one, it's complacency. 
+Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries. 
+And that level of complacency means they don't feel the need to advocate for that culture. 
+The second, I believe, is political correctness. 
+That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture because we are associating that — we associate believing in the universality of our values — with extremists. 
+Yet actually, whenever we talk about human rights, we do say that human rights are universal. 
+But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism. 
+To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism. 
+And the third, democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice, meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party, but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party — wanting to rule by military dictatorship. 
+And then you have a third party saying, "Vote for us; we'll establish a theocracy." 
+So democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies. 
+And what happens as a result of this is, when those parties are elected, and inevitably they fail, or inevitably they make political mistakes, democracy takes the blame for their political mistakes. 
+And then people say, "" We've tried democracy. It doesn't really work. 
+Let's bring the military back again. "" And the fourth reason, I believe, is what I've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance. 
+What I mean by that is, if the world superpower today was a communist, it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism, than it is today with the world superpower being America, occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals. 
+So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice, not merely as a political choice. 
+When talking about those reasons, let's break down certain preconceptions. 
+Is it just about grievances? 
+Is it just about a lack of education? 
+Well statistically, the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated. 
+Statistically, they are educated, on average, above the education levels of Western society. 
+Anecdotally, we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor, well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. 
+His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a pediatrician — not an ill-educated man. 
+International aid and development has been going on for years, but extremism in those societies, in many of those societies, has been on the rise. 
+And what I believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground, in addition to international aid, in addition to education, in addition to health. 
+Not exclusive to these things, but in addition to them, is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground. 
+And this is where I believe neoconservatism had it upside-down. 
+Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. 
+Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots. 
+They've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots, and we've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of Islamism. 
+Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy, rather than for a democratic uprising. 
+Because since pre-partition, they've been building demand for their ideology on the ground. 
+And what's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture — which is necessarily more than just elections. 
+But without freedom of speech, you can't have free and fair elections. 
+Without human rights, you don't have the protection granted to you to campaign. 
+Without freedom of belief, you don't have the right to join organizations. 
+So what's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture. 
+What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier, where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy. 
+Whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level, rather than merely on a political level, a level above politics — movements that are not political parties, but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture. 
+What we'll have in the end is this ideal that you see on the slide here — the ideal that people should vote in an existing democracy, not for a democracy. 
+But to get to that stage, where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric, but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship — i.e. you're voting in a democracy, in an existing democracy, and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box. 
+To get to that stage, we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground. 
+Now to conclude, how does that happen? 
+Well, Egypt is a good starting point. 
+The Arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning. 
+But what happened in the Arab uprisings and what happened in Egypt was particularly cathartic for me. 
+What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal, and that was to remove the leader. 
+We need to move one step beyond that now. 
+We need to see how we can help those societies move from political coalitions, loosely based political coalitions, to civilizational coalitions that are working for the ideals and narratives of the democratic culture on the ground. 
+Because it's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator. 
+That doesn't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values. 
+But generally, the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region. 
+So when Arab socialism started in Egypt, it spread across the region. 
+In the '80s and' 90s when Islamism started in the region, it spread across the MENA region as a whole. 
+And the aspiration that we have at the moment — as young Arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism — is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that. 
+But that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture. 
+And we've made a start for that in Pakistan with a movement called Khudi, where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture. 
+And it's with that thought that I'll end. 
+And my time is up, and thank you for your time. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When my first children's book was published in 2001, I returned to my old elementary school to talk to the students about being an author and an illustrator, and when I was setting up my slide projector in the cafetorium, I looked across the room, and there she was: my old lunch lady. 
+She was still there at the school and she was busily preparing lunches for the day. 
+So I approached her to say hello, and I said, "" Hi, Jeannie! How are you? "" And she looked at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, but she couldn't quite place me, and she looked at me and she said, "Stephen Krosoczka?" 
+And I was amazed that she knew I was a Krosoczka, but Stephen is my uncle who is 20 years older than I am, and she had been his lunch lady when he was a kid. 
+And she started telling me about her grandkids, and that blew my mind. 
+My lunch lady had grandkids, and therefore kids, and therefore left school at the end of the day? 
+I thought she lived in the cafeteria with the serving spoons. 
+Well, that chance encounter inspired my imagination, and I created the Lunch Lady graphic novel series, a series of comics about a lunch lady who uses her fish stick nunchucks to fight off evil cyborg substitutes, a school bus monster, and mutant mathletes, and the end of every book, they get the bad guy with their hairnet, and they proclaim, "" Justice is served! "" (Laughter) (Applause) And it's been amazing, because the series was so welcomed into the reading lives of children, and they sent me the most amazing letters and cards and artwork. 
+And I would notice as I would visit schools, the lunch staff would be involved in the programming in a very meaningful way. 
+And coast to coast, all of the lunch ladies told me the same thing: "Thank you for making a superhero in our likeness." 
+Because the lunch lady has not been treated very kindly in popular culture over time. 
+But it meant the most to Jeannie. 
+When the books were first published, I invited her to the book launch party, and in front of everyone there, everyone she had fed over the years, I gave her a piece of artwork and some books. 
+And two years after this photo was taken, she passed away, and I attended her wake, and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there, because next to her casket was this painting, and her husband told me it meant so much to her that I had acknowledged her hard work, I had validated what she did. 
+And that inspired me to create a day where we could recreate that feeling in cafeterias across the country: School Lunch Hero Day, a day where kids can make creative projects for their lunch staff. 
+And I partnered with the School Nutrition Association, and did you know that a little over 30 million kids participate in school lunch programs every day. 
+That equals up to a little over five billion lunches made every school year. 
+And the stories of heroism go well beyond just a kid getting a few extra chicken nuggets on their lunch tray. 
+There is Ms. Brenda in California, who keeps a close eye on every student that comes through her line and then reports back to the guidance counselor if anything is amiss. 
+There are the lunch ladies in Kentucky who realized that 67 percent of their students relied on those meals every day, and they were going without food over the summer, so they retrofitted a school bus to create a mobile feeding unit, and they traveled around the neighborhoods feedings 500 kids a day during the summer. 
+And kids made the most amazing projects. 
+I knew they would. 
+Kids made hamburger cards that were made out of construction paper. 
+They took photos of their lunch lady's head and plastered it onto my cartoon lunch lady and fixed that to a milk carton and presented them with flowers. 
+And they made their own comics, starring the cartoon lunch lady alongside their actual lunch ladies. 
+And they made thank you pizzas, where every kid signed a different topping of a construction paper pizza. 
+For me, I was so moved by the response that came from the lunch ladies, because one woman said to me, she said, "" Before this day, I felt like I was at the end of the planet at this school. 
+I didn't think that anyone noticed us down here. "" Another woman said to me, "" You know, what I got out of this is that what I do is important. "" And of course what she does is important. 
+What they all do is important. 
+They're feeding our children every single day, and before a child can learn, their belly needs to be full, and these women and men are working on the front lines to create an educated society. 
+So I hope that you don't wait for School Lunch Hero Day to say thank you to your lunch staff, and I hope that you remember how powerful a thank you can be. 
+A thank you can change a life. 
+It changes the life of the person who receives it, and it changes the life of the person who expresses it. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Back in New York, I am the head of development for a non-profit called Robin Hood. 
+When I'm not fighting poverty, I'm fighting fires as the assistant captain of a volunteer fire company. 
+Now in our town, where the volunteers supplement a highly skilled career staff, you have to get to the fire scene pretty early to get in on any action. 
+I remember my first fire. 
+I was the second volunteer on the scene, so there was a pretty good chance I was going to get in. 
+But still it was a real footrace against the other volunteers to get to the captain in charge to find out what our assignments would be. 
+When I found the captain, he was having a very engaging conversation with the homeowner, who was surely having one of the worst days of her life. 
+Here it was, the middle of the night, she was standing outside in the pouring rain, under an umbrella, in her pajamas, barefoot, while her house was in flames. 
+The other volunteer who had arrived just before me — let's call him Lex Luther — (Laughter) got to the captain first and was asked to go inside and save the homeowner's dog. 
+The dog! I was stunned with jealousy. 
+Here was some lawyer or money manager who, for the rest of his life, gets to tell people that he went into a burning building to save a living creature, just because he beat me by five seconds. 
+Well, I was next. 
+The captain waved me over. 
+He said, "" Bezos, I need you to go into the house. 
+I need you to go upstairs, past the fire, and I need you to get this woman a pair of shoes. "" (Laughter) I swear. 
+So, not exactly what I was hoping for, but off I went — up the stairs, down the hall, past the 'real' firefighters, who were pretty much done putting out the fire at this point, into the master bedroom to get a pair of shoes. 
+Now I know what you're thinking, but I'm no hero. 
+(Laughter) I carried my payload back downstairs where I met my nemesis and the precious dog by the front door. 
+We took our treasures outside to the homeowner, where, not surprisingly, his received much more attention than did mine. 
+A few weeks later, the department received a letter from the homeowner thanking us for the valiant effort displayed in saving her home. 
+The act of kindness she noted above all others: someone had even gotten her a pair of shoes. 
+(Laughter) In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis. 
+And you know what I've learned? 
+They all matter. 
+So as I look around this room at people who either have achieved, or are on their way to achieving, remarkable levels of success, I would offer this reminder: don't wait. 
+Don't wait until you make your first million to make a difference in somebody's life. 
+If you have something to give, give it now. 
+Serve food at a soup kitchen. Clean up a neighborhood park. 
+Be a mentor. 
+Not every day is going to offer us a chance to save somebody's life, but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one. 
+So get in the game. Save the shoes. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Mark, Mark, come back. (Applause) 
+Mark Bezos: Thank you. 
+
+I have a tough job to do. 
+You know, when I looked at the profile of the audience here, with their connotations and design, in all its forms, and with so much and so many people working on collaborative and networks, and so on, that I wanted to tell you, I wanted to build an argument for primary education in a very specific context. 
+In order to do that in 20 minutes, I have to bring out four ideas — it's like four pieces of a puzzle. 
+And if I succeed in doing that, maybe you would go back with the thought that you could build on, and perhaps help me do my work. 
+The first piece of the puzzle is remoteness and the quality of education. 
+Now, by remoteness, I mean two or three different kinds of things. 
+Of course, remoteness in its normal sense, which means that as you go further and further away from an urban center, you get to remoter areas. 
+What happens to education? 
+The second, or a different kind of remoteness is that within the large metropolitan areas all over the world, you have pockets, like slums, or shantytowns, or poorer areas, which are socially and economically remote from the rest of the city, so it's us and them. 
+What happens to education in that context? 
+So keep both of those ideas of remoteness. 
+We made a guess. The guess was that schools in remote areas do not have good enough teachers. 
+If they do have, they cannot retain those teachers. 
+They do not have good enough infrastructure. 
+And if they had some infrastructure, they have difficulty maintaining it. 
+But I wanted to check if this is true. So what I did last year was we hired a car, looked up on Google, found a route into northern India from New Delhi which, you know, which did not cross any big cities or any big metropolitan centers. Drove out about 300 kilometers, and wherever we found a school, administered a set of standard tests, and then took those test results and plotted them on a graph. 
+The graph was interesting, although you need to consider it carefully. 
+I mean, this is a very small sample; you should not generalize from it. 
+But it was quite obvious, quite clear, that for this particular route that I had taken, the remoter the school was, the worse its results seemed to be. 
+That seemed a little damning, and I tried to correlate it with things like infrastructure, or with the availability of electricity, and things like that. 
+To my surprise, it did not correlate. 
+It did not correlate with the size of classrooms. 
+It did not correlate with the quality of the infrastructure. 
+It did not correlate with the poverty levels. It did not correlate. 
+But what happened was that when I administered a questionnaire to each of these schools, with one single question for the teachers — which was, "" Would you like to move to an urban, metropolitan area? "" — 69 percent of them said yes. And as you can see from that, they say yes just a little bit out of Delhi, and they say no when you hit the rich suburbs of Delhi — because, you know, those are relatively better off areas — and then from 200 kilometers out of Delhi, the answer is consistently yes. 
+I would imagine that a teacher who comes or walks into class every day thinking that, I wish I was in some other school, probably has a deep impact on what happens to the results. 
+So it looked as though teacher motivation and teacher migration was a powerfully correlated thing with what was happening in primary schools, as opposed to whether the children have enough to eat, and whether they are packed tightly into classrooms and that sort of thing. It appears that way. 
+When you take education and technology, then I find in the literature that, you know, things like websites, collaborative environments — you've been listening to all that in the morning — it's always piloted first in the best schools, the best urban schools, and, according to me, biases the result. 
+The literature — one part of it, the scientific literature — consistently blames ET as being over-hyped and under-performing. 
+The teachers always say, well, it's fine, but it's too expensive for what it does. 
+Because it's being piloted in a school where the students are already getting, let's say, 80 percent of whatever they could do. 
+You put in this new super-duper technology, and now they get 83 percent. 
+So the principal looks at it and says, 3 percent for 300,000 dollars? Forget it. 
+If you took the same technology and piloted it into one of those remote schools, where the score was 30 percent, and, let's say, took that up to 40 percent — that will be a completely different thing. 
+So the relative change that ET, Educational Technology, would make, would be far greater at the bottom of the pyramid than at the top, but we seem to be doing it the other way about. 
+So I came to this conclusion that ET should reach the underprivileged first, not the other way about. 
+And finally came the question of, how do you tackle teacher perception? 
+Whenever you go to a teacher and show them some technology, the teacher's first reaction is, you cannot replace a teacher with a machine — it's impossible. 
+I don't know why it's impossible, but, even for a moment, if you did assume that it's impossible — I have a quotation from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer whom I met in Colombo, and he said something which completely solves this problem. 
+He said a teacher than can be replaced by a machine, should be. 
+So, you know, it puts the teacher into a tough bind, you have to think. 
+Anyway, so I'm proposing that an alternative primary education, whatever alternative you want, is required where schools don't exist, where schools are not good enough, where teachers are not available or where teachers are not good enough, for whatever reason. 
+If you happen to live in a part of the world where none of this applies, then you don't need an alternative education. 
+So far I haven't come across such an area, except for one case. I won't name the area, but somewhere in the world people said, we don't have this problem, because we have perfect teachers and perfect schools. 
+There are such areas, but — anyway, I'd never heard that anywhere else. 
+I'm going to talk about children and self-organization, and a set of experiments which sort of led to this idea of what might an alternative education be like. 
+They're called the hole-in-the-wall experiments. 
+I'll have to really rush through this. They're a set of experiments. 
+The first one was done in New Delhi in 1999. 
+And what we did over there was pretty much simple. 
+I had an office in those days which bordered a slum, an urban slum, so there was a dividing wall between our office and the urban slum. 
+They cut a hole inside that wall — which is how it has got the name hole-in-the-wall — and put a pretty powerful PC into that hole, sort of embedded into the wall so that its monitor was sticking out at the other end, a touchpad similarly embedded into the wall, put it on high-speed Internet, put the Internet Explorer there, put it on Altavista.com — in those days — and just left it there. 
+And this is what we saw. 
+So that was my office in IIT. Here's the hole-in-the-wall. 
+About eight hours later, we found this kid. 
+To the right is this eight-year-old child who — and to his left is a six-year-old girl, who is not very tall. 
+And what he was doing was, he was teaching her to browse. 
+So it sort of raised more questions than it answered. 
+Is this real? Does the language matter, because he's not supposed to know English? 
+Will the computer last, or will they break it and steal it — and did anyone teach them? 
+The last question is what everybody said, but you know, I mean, they must have poked their head over the wall and asked the people in your office, can you show me how to do it, and then somebody taught him. 
+So I took the experiment out of Delhi and repeated it, this time in a city called Shivpuri in the center of India, where I was assured that nobody had ever taught anybody anything. 
+(Laughter) So it was a warm day, and the hole in the wall was on that decrepit old building. This is the first kid who came there; he later on turned out to be a 13-year-old school dropout. 
+He came there and he started to fiddle around with the touchpad. 
+Very quickly, he noticed that when he moves his finger on the touchpad something moves on the screen — and later on he told me, "" I have never seen a television where you can do something. "" So he figured that out. It took him over two minutes to figure out that he was doing things to the television. 
+And then, as he was doing that, he made an accidental click by hitting the touchpad — you'll see him do that. 
+He did that, and the Internet Explorer changed page. 
+Eight minutes later, he looked from his hand to the screen, and he was browsing: he was going back and forth. 
+When that happened, he started calling all the neighborhood children, like, children would come and see what's happening over here. 
+And by the evening of that day, 70 children were all browsing. 
+So eight minutes and an embedded computer seemed to be all that we needed there. 
+So we thought that this is what was happening: that children in groups can self-instruct themselves to use a computer and the Internet. But under what circumstances? 
+At this time there was a — the main question was about English. 
+People said, you know, you really ought to have this in Indian languages. 
+So I said, have what, shall I translate the Internet into some Indian language? That's not possible. 
+So, it has to be the other way about. 
+But let's see, how do the children tackle the English language? 
+I took the experiment out to northeastern India, to a village called Madantusi, where, for some reason, there was no English teacher, so the children had not learned English at all. 
+And I built a similar hole-in-the-wall. 
+One big difference in the villages, as opposed to the urban slums: there were more girls than boys who came to the kiosk. 
+In the urban slums, the girls tend to stay away. 
+I left the computer there with lots of CDs — I didn't have any Internet — and came back three months later. 
+So when I came back there, I found these two kids, eight- and 12-year-olds, who were playing a game on the computer. 
+And as soon as they saw me they said, "We need a faster processor and a better mouse." 
+(Laughter) I was real surprised. 
+You know, how on earth did they know all this? 
+And they said, "" Well, we've picked it up from the CDs. "" So I said, "" But how did you understand what's going on over there? "" So they said, "" Well, you've left this machine which talks only in English, so we had to learn English. "" So then I measured, and they were using 200 English words with each other — mispronounced, but correct usage — words like exit, stop, find, save, that kind of thing, not only to do with the computer but in their day-to-day conversations. 
+So, Madantusi seemed to show that language is not a barrier; in fact they may be able to teach themselves the language if they really wanted to. 
+Finally, I got some funding to try this experiment out to see if these results are replicable, if they happen everywhere else. 
+India is a good place to do such an experiment in, because we have all the ethnic diversities, all the — you know, the genetic diversity, all the racial diversities, and also all the socio-economic diversities. 
+So, I could actually choose samples to cover a cross section that would cover practically the whole world. 
+So I did this for almost five years, and this experiment really took us all the way across the length and breadth of India. 
+This is the Himalayas. Up in the north, very cold. 
+I also had to check or invent an engineering design which would survive outdoors, and I was using regular, normal PCs, so I needed different climates, for which India is also great, because we have very cold, very hot, and so on. 
+This is the desert to the west. Near the Pakistan border. 
+And you see here a little clip of — one of these villages — the first thing that these children did was to find a website to teach themselves the English alphabet. 
+Then to central India — very warm, moist, fishing villages, where humidity is a very big killer of electronics. 
+So we had to solve all the problems we had without air conditioning and with very poor power, so most of the solutions that came out used little blasts of air put at the right places to keep the machines running. 
+I want to just cut this short. We did this over and over again. 
+This sequence is also nice. This is a small child, a six-year-old, telling his eldest sister what to do. 
+And this happens very often with these computers, that the younger children are found teaching the older ones. 
+What did we find? We found that six- to 13-year-olds can self-instruct in a connected environment, irrespective of anything that we could measure. 
+So if they have access to the computer, they will teach themselves, including intelligence. 
+I couldn't find a single correlation with anything, but it had to be in groups. 
+And that may be of great, you know, interest to this group, because all of you are talking about groups. 
+So here was the power of what a group of children can do, if you lift the adult intervention. 
+Just a quick idea of the measurements. 
+We took standard statistical techniques, so I'm going to not talk about that. 
+But we got a clean learning curve, almost exactly the same as what you would get in a school. 
+I'll leave it at that, because, I mean, it sort of says it all, doesn't it? 
+What could they learn to do? 
+Basic Windows functions, browsing, painting, chatting and email, games and educational material, music downloads, playing video. 
+In short, what all of us do. 
+And over 300 children will become computer literate and be able to do all of these things in six months with one computer. 
+So, how do they do that? 
+If you calculated the actual time of access, it would work out to minutes per day, so that's not how it's happening. 
+What you have, actually, is there is one child operating the computer. 
+And surrounding him are usually three other children, who are advising him on what they should do. 
+If you test them, all four will get the same scores in whatever you ask them. 
+Around these four are usually a group of about 16 children, who are also advising, usually wrongly, about everything that's going on on the computer. 
+And all of them also will clear a test given on that subject. 
+So they are learning as much by watching as they learn by doing. 
+It seems counter-intuitive to adult learning, but remember, eight-year-olds live in a society where most of the time they are told, don't do this, you know, don't touch the whiskey bottle. 
+So what does the eight-year-old do? 
+He observes very carefully how a whiskey bottle should be touched. 
+And if you tested him, he would answer every question correctly on that topic. 
+So, they seem to be able to acquire very quickly. 
+So what was the conclusion over the six years of work? 
+It was that primary education can happen on its own, or parts of it can happen on its own. 
+It does not have to be imposed from the top downwards. 
+It could perhaps be a self-organizing system, so that was the second bit that I wanted to tell you, that children can self-organize and attain an educational objective. 
+The third piece was on values, and again, to put it very briefly, I conducted a test over 500 children spread across all over India, and asked them — I gave them about 68 different values-oriented questions and simply asked them their opinions. 
+We got all sorts of opinions. Yes, no or I don't know. 
+I simply took those questions where I got 50 percent yeses and 50 percent noes — so I was able to get a collection of 16 such statements. 
+These were areas where the children were clearly confused, because half said yes and half said no. 
+A typical example being, "" Sometimes it is necessary to tell lies. "" They don't have a way to determine which way to answer this question; perhaps none of us do. 
+So I leave you with this third question. 
+Can technology alter the acquisition of values? 
+Finally, self-organizing systems, about which, again, I won't say too much because you've been hearing all about it. 
+Natural systems are all self-organizing: galaxies, molecules, cells, organisms, societies — except for the debate about an intelligent designer. 
+But at this point in time, as far as science goes, it's self-organization. 
+But other examples are traffic jams, stock market, society and disaster recovery, terrorism and insurgency. 
+And you know about the Internet-based self-organizing systems. 
+So here are my four sentences then. 
+Remoteness affects the quality of education. 
+Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first, and other areas later. 
+Values are acquired; doctrine and dogma are imposed — the two opposing mechanisms. 
+And learning is most likely a self-organizing system. 
+If you put all the four together, then it gives — according to me — it gives us a goal, a vision, for educational technology. 
+An educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected and self-organized. 
+As educationists, we have never asked for technology; we keep borrowing it. 
+PowerPoint is supposed to be considered a great educational technology, but it was not meant for education, it was meant for making boardroom presentations. 
+We borrowed it. Video conferencing. The personal computer itself. 
+I think it's time that the educationists made their own specs, and I have such a set of specs. This is a brief look at that. 
+And such a set of specs should produce the technology to address remoteness, values and violence. 
+So I thought I'd give it a name — why don't we call it "" outdoctrination. "" And could this be a goal for educational technology in the future? 
+So I want to leave that as a thought with you. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is a recent comic strip from the Los Angeles Times. 
+The punch line? 
+"" On the other hand, I don't have to get up at four every single morning to milk my Labrador. "" This is a recent cover of New York Magazine. 
+Best hospitals where doctors say they would go for cancer treatment, births, strokes, heart disease, hip replacements, 4 a.m. emergencies. 
+And this is a song medley I put together — (Music) Did you ever notice that four in the morning has become some sort of meme or shorthand? 
+It means something like you are awake at the worst possible hour. 
+(Laughter) A time for inconveniences, mishaps, yearnings. 
+A time for plotting to whack the chief of police, like in this classic scene from "" The Godfather. "" Coppola's script describes these guys as, "" exhausted in shirt sleeves. 
+It is four in the morning. "" (Laughter) A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like autopsies and embalmings in Isabel Allende's "The House of the Spirits." 
+After the breathtaking green-haired Rosa is murdered, the doctors preserve her with unguents and morticians' paste. 
+They worked until four o'clock in the morning. 
+A time for even grimmer stuff than that, like in last April's New Yorker magazine. 
+This short fiction piece by Martin Amis starts out, "" On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m. in Portland, Maine, and Mohamed Atta's last day began. "" For a time that I find to be the most placid and uneventful hour of the day, four in the morning sure gets an awful lot of bad press — (Laughter) across a lot of different media from a lot of big names. 
+And it made me suspicious. 
+I figured, surely some of the most creative artistic minds in the world, really, aren't all defaulting back to this one easy trope like they invented it, right? 
+Could it be there is something more going on here? 
+Something deliberate, something secret, and who got the four in the morning bad rap ball rolling anyway? 
+I say this guy — Alberto Giacometti, shown here with some of his sculptures on the Swiss 100 franc note. 
+He did it with this famous piece from the New York Museum of Modern Art. 
+Its title — "" The Palace at Four in the Morning — (Laughter) 1932. 
+Not just the earliest cryptic reference to four in the morning I can find. 
+I believe that this so-called first surrealist sculpture may provide an incredible key to virtually every artistic depiction of four in the morning to follow it. 
+I call this The Giacometti Code, a TED exclusive. 
+No, feel free to follow along on your Blackberries or your iPhones if you've got them. 
+It works a little something like — this is a recent Google search for four in the morning. 
+Results vary, of course. This is pretty typical. 
+The top 10 results yield you four hits for Faron Young's song, "" It's Four in the Morning, "" three hits for Judi Dench's film, "" Four in the Morning, "" one hit for Wislawa Szymborska's poem, "" Four in the Morning. "" But what, you may ask, do a Polish poet, a British Dame, a country music hall of famer all have in common besides this totally excellent Google ranking? 
+Well, let's start with Faron Young — who was born incidentally in 1932. 
+(Laughter) In 1996, he shot himself in the head on December ninth — which incidentally is Judi Dench's birthday. (Laughter) 
+But he didn't die on Dench's birthday. 
+He languished until the following afternoon when he finally succumbed to a supposedly self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 64 — which incidentally is how old Alberto Giacometti was when he died. 
+Where was Wislawa Szymborska during all this? 
+She has the world's most absolutely watertight alibi. 
+On that very day, December 10, 1996 while Mr. Four in the Morning, Faron Young, was giving up the ghost in Nashville, Tennessee, Ms. Four in the Morning — or one of them anyway — Wislawa Szymborska was in Stockholm, Sweden, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. 
+100 years to the day after the death of Alfred Nobel himself. 
+Coincidence? No, it's creepy. 
+(Laughter) Coincidence to me has a much simpler metric. 
+That's like me telling you, "" Hey, you know the Nobel Prize was established in 1901, which coincidentally is the same year Alberto Giacometti was born? "" No, not everything fits so tidily into the paradigm, but that does not mean there's not something going on at the highest possible levels. 
+In fact there are people in this room who may not want me to show you this clip we're about to see. 
+(Laughter) Video: Homer Simpson: We have a tennis court, a swimming pool, a screening room — You mean if I want pork chops, even in the middle of the night, your guy will fry them up? 
+Herbert Powell: Sure, that's what he's paid for. 
+Now do you need towels, laundry, maids? 
+HS: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait — let me see if I got this straight. 
+It is Christmas Day, 4 a.m. 
+There's a rumble in my stomach. 
+Marge Simpson: Homer, please. 
+Rives: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. 
+Let me see if I got this straight, Matt. 
+(Laughter) When Homer Simpson needs to imagine the most remote possible moment of not just the clock, but the whole freaking calendar, he comes up with 0400 on the birthday of the Baby Jesus. 
+And no, I don't know how it works into the whole puzzling scheme of things, but obviously I know a coded message when I see one. 
+(Laughter) I said, I know a coded message when I see one. 
+And folks, you can buy a copy of Bill Clinton's "" My Life "" from the bookstore here at TED. 
+Parse it cover to cover for whatever hidden references you want. 
+Or you can go to the Random House website where there is this excerpt. 
+And how far down into it you figure we'll have to scroll to get to the golden ticket? 
+Would you believe about a dozen paragraphs? 
+This is page 474 on your paperbacks if you're following along: "" Though it was getting better, I still wasn't satisfied with the inaugural address. 
+My speechwriters must have been tearing their hair out because as we worked between one and four in the morning on Inauguration Day, I was still changing it. "" Sure you were, because you've prepared your entire life for this historic quadrennial event that just sort of sneaks up on you. 
+And then — (Laughter) three paragraphs later we get this little beauty: "" We went back to Blair House to look at the speech for the last time. 
+It had gotten a lot better since 4 a.m. "" Well, how could it have? 
+By his own writing, this man was either asleep, at a prayer meeting with Al and Tipper or learning how to launch a nuclear missile out of a suitcase. 
+What happens to American presidents at 0400 on inauguration day? 
+What happened to William Jefferson Clinton? 
+We might not ever know. 
+And I noticed, he's not exactly around here today to face any tough questions. 
+(Laughter) It could get awkward, right? 
+I mean after all, this whole business happened on his watch. 
+But if he were here — (Laughter) he might remind us, as he does in the wrap-up to his fine autobiography, that on this day Bill Clinton began a journey — a journey that saw him go on to become the first Democrat president elected to two consecutive terms in decades. 
+In generations. 
+The first since this man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who began his own unprecedented journey way back at his own first election, way back in a simpler time, way back in 1932 — (Laughter) the year Alberto Giacometti (Laughter) made "" The Palace at Four in the Morning. "" The year, let's remember, that this voice, now departed, first came a-cryin 'into this big old crazy world of ours. 
+(Music) (Applause) 
+
+With all the legitimate concerns about AIDS and avian flu — and we'll hear about that from the brilliant Dr. Brilliant later today — I want to talk about the other pandemic, which is cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension — all of which are completely preventable for at least 95 percent of people just by changing diet and lifestyle. 
+And what's happening is that there's a globalization of illness occurring, that people are starting to eat like us, and live like us, and die like us. And in one generation, for example, Asia's gone from having one of the lowest rates of heart disease and obesity and diabetes to one of the highest. And in Africa, cardiovascular disease equals the HIV and AIDS deaths in most countries. 
+So there's a critical window of opportunity we have to make an important difference that can affect the lives of literally millions of people, and practice preventive medicine on a global scale. 
+Heart and blood vessel diseases still kill more people — not only in this country, but also worldwide — than everything else combined, and yet it's completely preventable for almost everybody. 
+It's not only preventable; it's actually reversible. And for the last almost 29 years, we've been able to show that by simply changing diet and lifestyle, using these very high-tech, expensive, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost interventions can be like — quantitative arteriography, before and after a year, and cardiac PET scans. 
+We showed a few months ago — we published the first study showing you can actually stop or reverse the progression of prostate cancer by making changes in diet and lifestyle, and 70 percent regression in the tumor growth, or inhibition of the tumor growth, compared to only nine percent in the control group. 
+And in the MRI and MR spectroscopy here, the prostate tumor activity is shown in red — you can see it diminishing after a year. 
+Now there is an epidemic of obesity: two-thirds of adults and 15 percent of kids. What's really concerning to me is that diabetes has increased 70 percent in the past 10 years, and this may be the first generation in which our kids live a shorter life span than we do. That's pitiful, and it's preventable. 
+Now these are not election returns, these are the people — the number of the people who are obese by state, beginning in '85,' 86, '87 — these are from the CDC website —' 88, '89,' 90, '91 — you get a new category —' 92, '93,' 94, '95,' 96, '97,' 98, '99, 2000, 2001 — it gets worse. We're kind of devolving. (Laughter) Now what can we do about this? Well, you know, the diet that we've found that can reverse heart disease and cancer is an Asian diet. 
+But the people in Asia are starting to eat like we are, which is why they're starting to get sick like we are. 
+So I've been working with a lot of the big food companies. They can make it fun and sexy and hip and crunchy and convenient to eat healthier foods, like — I chair the advisory boards to McDonald's, and PepsiCo, and ConAgra, and Safeway, and soon Del Monte, and they're finding that it's good business. 
+The salads that you see at McDonald's came from the work — they're going to have an Asian salad. At Pepsi, two-thirds of their revenue growth came from their better foods. 
+And so if we can do that, then we can free up resources for buying drugs that you really do need for treating AIDS and HIV and malaria and for preventing avian flu. Thank you. 
+
+And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "" Oh, I know that like the back of my hand. "" And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. 
+So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself, because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. 
+You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. 
+Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him. 
+But I know she will anyway, so instead I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix. 
+I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that's the way my mom taught me. 
+(Singing) There'll be days like this, my momma said. 
+When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape; when your boots will fill with rain, and you'll be up to your knees in disappointment. 
+And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you. 
+And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. 
+But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. 
+It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it. 
+"" Baby, "" I'll tell her, "" remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more. "" Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things. 
+Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing. 
+And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+Thanks. 
+All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true. They can be about whatever you want — 
+technology, entertainment, design, your family, what you had for breakfast. 
+I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, "" A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order. "" I know that I'm incredibly nervous and excited to be up here, which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool. 
+(Laughter) And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke. (Laughter) 
+Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. 
+And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken-word poetry. 
+My first spoken-word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. 
+The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken-word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that's what was expected of me. 
+The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking. 
+I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. 
+I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open Mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could. 
+I was the youngest by at least a decade, but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about. 
+They told me, "" Write about being 14. "" So I did and stood amazed every week when these brilliant, grown-up poets laughed with me and groaned their sympathy and clapped and told me, "" Hey, I really felt that too. "" Now I can divide my spoken-word journey into three steps. 
+Step one was the moment I said, "I can. I can do this." 
+And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie. 
+I love spoken word. I will keep coming back week after week. "" And step three began when I realized I didn't have to write indignant poems, if that's not what I was. 
+There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine. 
+It's not just the adage "" Write what you know. "" It's about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you've collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don't know. 
+But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project V.O.I.C.E., this time changing the mission to using spoken-word poetry as a way to entertain, educate and inspire. 
+We stayed full-time students, but in between we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates, from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus. 
+And we saw over and over the way that spoken-word poetry cracks open locks. 
+So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists. 
+And then someone else has something the complete opposite of yours. 
+Third, someone has something you've never even heard of before. 
+And I tell people that this is where great stories start from — these four intersections of what you're passionate about and what others might be invested in. 
+I don't have anything interesting to say. "" So I assigned her list after list, and one day I assigned the list "10 Things I Should Have Learned by Now." 
+(Laughter) "" Did you see him on 60 Minutes, racing Michael Phelps in a pool — nothing but swim trunks on — diving in the water, determined to beat this swimming champion? 
+After the race, he tossed his wet, cloud-white hair and said, 'You're a god.' No, Anderson, you're the god. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. 
+Somebody once told me it's like walking through life like this. 
+I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it. 
+It's not uncommon to feel like you're alone or that nobody understands you, but spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions, you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers, or your community, who will listen. 
+And that is an amazing realization to have, especially when you're 14. 
+Plus, now with YouTube, that connection's not even limited to the room we're in. 
+You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself. 
+And that is step three: infusing the work you're doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing. 
+I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story, and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint, a short film — And where exactly was the beginning, the middle or the end? 
+In preparing for TED, I discovered this diary page in an old journal. 
+It's clear that when I was a child, I definitely walked through life like this. 
+I would like to help others rediscover that wonder — to want to engage with it, to want to learn, to want to share what they've learned, what they've figured out to be true and what they're still figuring out. 
+When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby." 
+My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. 
+My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. 
+So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed. 
+In the original story, God told Sarah she could do something impossible, and — she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible. 
+Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. 
+Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk — they hear you. 
+It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth — that impossible connection. 
+There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. 
+The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. 
+After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. 
+But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. 
+And you, you get to share mine. 
+And that is the greatest present of all. 
+So if you tell me I can do the impossible — I'll probably laugh at you. 
+But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around. 
+
+So if I was to ask you what the connection between a bottle of Tide detergent and sweat was, you'd probably think that's the easiest question that you're going to be asked in Edinburgh all week. 
+But if I was to say that they're both examples of alternative or new forms of currency in a hyperconnected, data-driven global economy, you'd probably think I was a little bit bonkers. 
+But trust me, I work in advertising. 
+(Laughter) And I am going to tell you the answer, but obviously after this short break. 
+So a more challenging question is one that I was asked, actually, by one of our writers a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't know the answer: What's the world's best performing currency? 
+Now, for those of you who may not be familiar, Bitcoin is a crypto-currency, a virtual currency, synthetic currency. 
+It was founded in 2008 by this anonymous programmer using a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. 
+No one knows who or what he is. 
+He's almost like the Banksy of the Internet. 
+And I'm probably not going to do it proper service here, but my interpretation of how it works is that Bitcoins are released through this process of mining. 
+So there's a network of computers that are challenged to solve a very complex mathematical problem and the person that manages to solve it first gets the Bitcoins. 
+And the Bitcoins are released, they're put into a public ledger called the Blockchain, and then they float, so they become a currency, and completely decentralized, that's the sort of scary thing about this, which is why it's so popular. 
+It's actually managed by the network. 
+And the reason that it's proved very successful is it's private, it's anonymous, it's fast, and it's cheap. 
+And you do get to the point where there's some wild fluctuations with Bitcoin. 
+So in one level it went from something like 13 dollars to 266, literally in the space of four months, and then crashed and lost half of its value in six hours. 
+But what it does show is that it's sort of gaining ground, it's gaining respectability. 
+You get services, like Reddit and Wordpress are actually accepting Bitcoin as a payment currency now. 
+And that's showing you that people are actually placing trust in technology, and it's started to trump and disrupt and interrogate traditional institutions and how we think about currencies and money. 
+And that's not surprising, if you think about the basket case that is the E.U. 
+I think there was a Gallup survey out recently that said something like, in America, trust in banks is at an all-time low, it's something like 21 percent. 
+And you can see here some photographs from London where Barclays sponsored the city bike scheme, and some activists have done some nice piece of guerrilla marketing here and doctored the slogans. 
+"Sub-prime pedaling." "Barclays takes you for a ride." 
+These are the more polite ones I could share with you today. 
+But you get the gist, so people have really started to sort of lose faith in institutions. 
+There's a P.R. company called Edelman, they do this very interesting survey every year precisely around trust and what people are thinking. 
+And this is a global survey, so these numbers are global. 
+And what's interesting is that you can see that hierarchy is having a bit of a wobble, and it's all about heterarchical now, so people trust people like themselves more than they trust corporations and governments. 
+And if you look at these figures for the more developed markets like U.K., Germany, and so on, they're actually much lower. 
+And I find that sort of scary. 
+People are actually trusting businesspeople more than they're trusting governments and leaders. 
+So what's starting to happen, if you think about money, if you sort of boil money down to an essence, it is literally just an expression of value, an agreed value. 
+So what's happening now, in the digital age, is that we can quantify value in lots of different ways and do it more easily, and sometimes the way that we quantify those values, it makes it much easier to create new forms and valid forms of currency. 
+In that context, you can see that networks like Bitcoin suddenly start to make a bit more sense. 
+So if you think we're starting to question and disrupt and interrogate what money means, what our relationship with it is, what defines money, then the ultimate extension of that is, is there a reason for the government to be in charge of money anymore? 
+So obviously I'm looking at this through a marketing prism, so from a brand perspective, brands literally stand or fall on their reputations. 
+You know, reputations are built on trust, consistency, transparency. 
+So if you've actually decided that you trust a brand, you want a relationship, you want to engage with the brand, you're already kind of participating in lots of new forms of currency. 
+So you think about loyalty. 
+Loyalty essentially is a micro-economy. 
+You think about rewards schemes, air miles. 
+The Economist said a few years ago that there are actually more unredeemed air miles in the world than there are dollar bills in circulation. 
+You know, when you are standing in line in Starbucks, 30 percent of transactions in Starbucks on any one day are actually being made with Starbucks Star points. 
+So that's a sort of Starbucks currency staying within its ecosystem. 
+And what I find interesting is that Amazon has recently launched Amazon coins. 
+So admittedly it's a currency at the moment that's purely for the Kindle. 
+So you can buy apps and make purchases within those apps, but you think about Amazon, you look at the trust barometer that I showed you where people are starting to trust businesses, especially businesses that they believe in and trust more than governments. 
+So suddenly, you start thinking, well Amazon potentially could push this. 
+It could become a natural extension, that as well as buying stuff — take it out of the Kindle — you could buy books, music, real-life products, appliances and goods and so on. 
+And suddenly you're getting Amazon, as a brand, is going head to head with the Federal Reserve in terms of how you want to spend your money, what money is, what constitutes money. 
+And I'll get you back to Tide, the detergent now, as I promised. 
+This is a fantastic article I came across in New York Magazine, where it was saying that drug users across America are actually purchasing drugs with bottles of Tide detergent. 
+So they're going into convenience stores, stealing Tide, and a $20 bottle of Tide is equal to 10 dollars of crack cocaine or weed. 
+And what they're saying, so some criminologists have looked at this and they're saying, well, okay, Tide as a product sells at a premium. 
+It's 50 percent above the category average. 
+It's infused with a very complex cocktail of chemicals, so it smells very luxurious and very distinctive, and, being a Procter and Gamble brand, it's been supported by a lot of mass media advertising. 
+So what they're saying is that drug users are consumers too, so they have this in their neural pathways. 
+So it becomes this unit of currency, which the New York Magazine described as a very oddly loyal crime wave, brand-loyal crime wave, and criminals are actually calling Tide "" liquid gold. "" Now, what I thought was funny was the reaction from the P & G spokesperson. 
+They said, obviously tried to dissociate themselves from drugs, but said, "" It reminds me of one thing and that's the value of the brand has stayed consistent. "" (Laughter) Which backs up my point and shows he didn't even break a sweat when he said that. 
+So that brings me back to the connection with sweat. 
+In Mexico, Nike has run a campaign recently called, literally, Bid Your Sweat. 
+So you think about, these Nike shoes have got sensors in them, or you're using a Nike FuelBand that basically tracks your movement, your energy, your calorie consumption. 
+And what's happening here, this is where you've actually elected to join that Nike community. You've bought into it. 
+They're not advertising loud messages at you, and that's where advertising has started to shift now is into things like services, tools and applications. 
+So Nike is literally acting as a well-being partner, a health and fitness partner and service provider. 
+So what happens with this is they're saying, "" Right, you have a data dashboard. We know how far you've run, how far you've moved, what your calorie intake, all that sort of stuff. 
+What you can do is, the more you run, the more points you get, and we have an auction where you can buy Nike stuff but only by proving that you've actually used the product to do stuff. "" And you can't come into this. This is purely for the community that are sweating using Nike products. You can't buy stuff with pesos. 
+This is literally a closed environment, a closed auction space. 
+In Africa, you know, airtime has become literally a currency in its own right. 
+People are used to, because mobile is king, they're very, very used to transferring money, making payments via mobile. 
+And one of my favorite examples from a brand perspective going on is Vodafone, where, in Egypt, lots of people make purchases in markets and very small independent stores. 
+Loose change, small change is a real problem, and what tends to happen is you buy a bunch of stuff, you're due, say, 10 cents, 20 cents in change. 
+The shopkeepers tend to give you things like an onion or an aspirin, or a piece of gum, because they don't have small change. 
+So when Vodafone came in and saw this problem, this consumer pain point, they created some small change which they call Fakka, which literally sits and is given by the shopkeepers to people, and it's credit that goes straight onto their mobile phone. 
+So this currency becomes credit, which again, is really, really interesting. 
+And we did a survey that backs up the fact that, you know, 45 percent of people in this very crucial demographic in the U.S. 
+were saying that they're comfortable using an independent or branded currency. 
+So that's getting really interesting here, a really interesting dynamic going on. 
+And you think, corporations should start taking their assets and thinking of them in a different way and trading them. 
+And you think, is it much of a leap? 
+It seems farfetched, but when you think about it, in America in 1860, there were 1,600 corporations issuing banknotes. 
+There were 8,000 kinds of notes in America. 
+And the only thing that stopped that, the government controlled four percent of the supply, and the only thing that stopped it was the Civil War breaking out, and the government suddenly wanted to take control of the money. 
+So what I'm going to ask is, basically, is history repeating itself? 
+Is technology making paper money feel outmoded? 
+Are we decoupling money from the government? 
+You know, you think about, brands are starting to fill the gaps. 
+So I think, you know, will we be standing on stage buying a coffee — organic, fair trade coffee — next year using TED florins or TED shillings? 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Imagine if you could record your life — everything you said, everything you did, available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips, so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them, or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered. 
+Well that's exactly the journey that my family began five and a half years ago. 
+This is my wife and collaborator, Rupal. 
+And on this day, at this moment, we walked into the house with our first child, our beautiful baby boy. 
+And we walked into a house with a very special home video recording system. 
+(Video) Man: Okay. 
+Deb Roy: This moment and thousands of other moments special for us were captured in our home because in every room in the house, if you looked up, you'd see a camera and a microphone, and if you looked down, you'd get this bird's-eye view of the room. 
+Here's our living room, the baby bedroom, kitchen, dining room and the rest of the house. 
+And all of these fed into a disc array that was designed for a continuous capture. 
+So here we are flying through a day in our home as we move from sunlit morning through incandescent evening and, finally, lights out for the day. 
+Over the course of three years, we recorded eight to 10 hours a day, amassing roughly a quarter-million hours of multi-track audio and video. 
+So you're looking at a piece of what is by far the largest home video collection ever made. 
+(Laughter) And what this data represents for our family at a personal level, the impact has already been immense, and we're still learning its value. 
+Countless moments of unsolicited natural moments, not posed moments, are captured there, and we're starting to learn how to discover them and find them. 
+But there's also a scientific reason that drove this project, which was to use this natural longitudinal data to understand the process of how a child learns language — that child being my son. 
+And so with many privacy provisions put in place to protect everyone who was recorded in the data, we made elements of the data available to my trusted research team at MIT so we could start teasing apart patterns in this massive data set, trying to understand the influence of social environments on language acquisition. 
+So we're looking here at one of the first things we started to do. 
+This is my wife and I cooking breakfast in the kitchen, and as we move through space and through time, a very everyday pattern of life in the kitchen. 
+In order to convert this opaque, 90,000 hours of video into something that we could start to see, we use motion analysis to pull out, as we move through space and through time, what we call space-time worms. 
+And this has become part of our toolkit for being able to look and see where the activities are in the data, and with it, trace the pattern of, in particular, where my son moved throughout the home, so that we could focus our transcription efforts, all of the speech environment around my son — all of the words that he heard from myself, my wife, our nanny, and over time, the words he began to produce. 
+So with that technology and that data and the ability to, with machine assistance, transcribe speech, we've now transcribed well over seven million words of our home transcripts. 
+And with that, let me take you now for a first tour into the data. 
+So you've all, I'm sure, seen time-lapse videos where a flower will blossom as you accelerate time. 
+I'd like you to now experience the blossoming of a speech form. 
+My son, soon after his first birthday, would say "" gaga "" to mean water. 
+And over the course of the next half-year, he slowly learned to approximate the proper adult form, "" water. "" So we're going to cruise through half a year in about 40 seconds. 
+No video here, so you can focus on the sound, the acoustics, of a new kind of trajectory: gaga to water. 
+(Audio) Baby: Gagagagagaga Gaga gaga gaga guga guga guga wada gaga gaga guga gaga wader guga guga water water water water water water water water water. 
+DR: He sure nailed it, didn't he. 
+(Applause) So he didn't just learn water. 
+Over the course of the 24 months, the first two years that we really focused on, this is a map of every word he learned in chronological order. 
+And because we have full transcripts, we've identified each of the 503 words that he learned to produce by his second birthday. 
+He was an early talker. 
+And so we started to analyze why. 
+Why were certain words born before others? 
+This is one of the first results that came out of our study a little over a year ago that really surprised us. 
+The way to interpret this apparently simple graph is, on the vertical is an indication of how complex caregiver utterances are based on the length of utterances. 
+And the [horizontal] axis is time. 
+And all of the data, we aligned based on the following idea: Every time my son would learn a word, we would trace back and look at all of the language he heard that contained that word. 
+And we would plot the relative length of the utterances. 
+And what we found was this curious phenomena, that caregiver speech would systematically dip to a minimum, making language as simple as possible, and then slowly ascend back up in complexity. 
+And the amazing thing was that bounce, that dip, lined up almost precisely with when each word was born — word after word, systematically. 
+So it appears that all three primary caregivers — myself, my wife and our nanny — were systematically and, I would think, subconsciously restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language. 
+And the implications of this — there are many, but one I just want to point out, is that there must be amazing feedback loops. 
+Of course, my son is learning from his linguistic environment, but the environment is learning from him. 
+That environment, people, are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now. 
+But that's looking at the speech context. 
+What about the visual context? 
+We're not looking at — think of this as a dollhouse cutaway of our house. 
+We've taken those circular fish-eye lens cameras, and we've done some optical correction, and then we can bring it into three-dimensional life. 
+So welcome to my home. 
+This is a moment, one moment captured across multiple cameras. 
+The reason we did this is to create the ultimate memory machine, where you can go back and interactively fly around and then breathe video-life into this system. 
+What I'm going to do is give you an accelerated view of 30 minutes, again, of just life in the living room. 
+That's me and my son on the floor. 
+And there's video analytics that are tracking our movements. 
+My son is leaving red ink. I am leaving green ink. 
+We're now on the couch, looking out through the window at cars passing by. 
+And finally, my son playing in a walking toy by himself. 
+Now we freeze the action, 30 minutes, we turn time into the vertical axis, and we open up for a view of these interaction traces we've just left behind. 
+And we see these amazing structures — these little knots of two colors of thread we call "" social hot spots. "" The spiral thread we call a "" solo hot spot. "" And we think that these affect the way language is learned. 
+What we'd like to do is start understanding the interaction between these patterns and the language that my son is exposed to to see if we can predict how the structure of when words are heard affects when they're learned — so in other words, the relationship between words and what they're about in the world. 
+So here's how we're approaching this. 
+In this video, again, my son is being traced out. 
+He's leaving red ink behind. 
+And there's our nanny by the door. 
+(Video) Nanny: You want water? (Baby: Aaaa.) Nanny: All right. (Baby: Aaaa.) DR: She offers water, and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water. 
+And what we've done is use the word "" water "" to tag that moment, that bit of activity. 
+And now we take the power of data and take every time my son ever heard the word water and the context he saw it in, and we use it to penetrate through the video and find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water. 
+And what this data leaves in its wake is a landscape. 
+We call these wordscapes. 
+This is the wordscape for the word water, and you can see most of the action is in the kitchen. 
+That's where those big peaks are over to the left. 
+And just for contrast, we can do this with any word. 
+We can take the word "" bye "" as in "" good bye. "" And we're now zoomed in over the entrance to the house. 
+And we look, and we find, as you would expect, a contrast in the landscape where the word "" bye "" occurs much more in a structured way. 
+So we're using these structures to start predicting the order of language acquisition, and that's ongoing work now. 
+In my lab, which we're peering into now, at MIT — this is at the media lab. 
+This has become my favorite way of videographing just about any space. 
+Three of the key people in this project, Philip DeCamp, Rony Kubat and Brandon Roy are pictured here. 
+Philip has been a close collaborator on all the visualizations you're seeing. 
+And Michael Fleischman was another Ph.D. student in my lab who worked with me on this home video analysis, and he made the following observation: that "" just the way that we're analyzing how language connects to events which provide common ground for language, that same idea we can take out of your home, Deb, and we can apply it to the world of public media. "" And so our effort took an unexpected turn. 
+Think of mass media as providing common ground and you have the recipe for taking this idea to a whole new place. 
+We've started analyzing television content using the same principles — analyzing event structure of a TV signal — episodes of shows, commercials, all of the components that make up the event structure. 
+And we're now, with satellite dishes, pulling and analyzing a good part of all the TV being watched in the United States. 
+And you don't have to now go and instrument living rooms with microphones to get people's conversations, you just tune into publicly available social media feeds. 
+So we're pulling in about three billion comments a month, and then the magic happens. 
+You have the event structure, the common ground that the words are about, coming out of the television feeds; you've got the conversations that are about those topics; and through semantic analysis — and this is actually real data you're looking at from our data processing — each yellow line is showing a link being made between a comment in the wild and a piece of event structure coming out of the television signal. 
+And the same idea now can be built up. 
+And we get this wordscape, except now words are not assembled in my living room. 
+Instead, the context, the common ground activities, are the content on television that's driving the conversations. 
+And what we're seeing here, these skyscrapers now, are commentary that are linked to content on television. 
+Same concept, but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere. 
+And so fundamentally, rather than, for example, measuring content based on how many people are watching, this gives us the basic data for looking at engagement properties of content. 
+And just like we can look at feedback cycles and dynamics in a family, we can now open up the same concepts and look at much larger groups of people. 
+This is a subset of data from our database — just 50,000 out of several million — and the social graph that connects them through publicly available sources. 
+And if you put them on one plain, a second plain is where the content lives. 
+So we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials, and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph. 
+And then the important third dimension. 
+Each of the links that you're seeing rendered here is an actual connection made between something someone said and a piece of content. 
+And there are, again, now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content. 
+And we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways. 
+So if we, for example, trace the path of one piece of content that drives someone to comment on it, and then we follow where that comment goes, and then look at the entire social graph that becomes activated and then trace back to see the relationship between that social graph and content, a very interesting structure becomes visible. 
+We call this a co-viewing clique, a virtual living room if you will. 
+And there are fascinating dynamics at play. 
+It's not one way. 
+A piece of content, an event, causes someone to talk. 
+They talk to other people. 
+That drives tune-in behavior back into mass media, and you have these cycles that drive the overall behavior. 
+Another example — very different — another actual person in our database — and we're finding at least hundreds, if not thousands, of these. 
+We've given this person a name. 
+This is a pro-amateur, or pro-am media critic who has this high fan-out rate. 
+So a lot of people are following this person — very influential — and they have a propensity to talk about what's on TV. 
+So this person is a key link in connecting mass media and social media together. 
+One last example from this data: Sometimes it's actually a piece of content that is special. 
+So if we go and look at this piece of content, President Obama's State of the Union address from just a few weeks ago, and look at what we find in this same data set, at the same scale, the engagement properties of this piece of content are truly remarkable. 
+A nation exploding in conversation in real time in response to what's on the broadcast. 
+And of course, through all of these lines are flowing unstructured language. 
+We can X-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation, real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content. 
+So, to summarize, the idea is this: As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they're saying it in, what's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen. 
+It's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication. 
+And I think the implications here are profound, whether it's for science, for commerce, for government, or perhaps most of all, for us as individuals. 
+And so just to return to my son, when I was preparing this talk, he was looking over my shoulder, and I showed him the clips I was going to show to you today, and I asked him for permission — granted. 
+And then I went on to reflect, "" Isn't it amazing, this entire database, all these recordings, I'm going to hand off to you and to your sister "" — who arrived two years later — "" and you guys are going to be able to go back and re-experience moments that you could never, with your biological memory, possibly remember the way you can now? "" And he was quiet for a moment. 
+And I thought, "" What am I thinking? 
+He's five years old. He's not going to understand this. "" And just as I was having that thought, he looked up at me and said, "" So that when I grow up, I can show this to my kids? "" And I thought, "" Wow, this is powerful stuff. "" So I want to leave you with one last memorable moment from our family. 
+This is the first time our son took more than two steps at once — captured on film. 
+And I really want you to focus on something as I take you through. 
+It's a cluttered environment; it's natural life. 
+My mother's in the kitchen, cooking, and, of all places, in the hallway, I realize he's about to do it, about to take more than two steps. 
+And so you hear me encouraging him, realizing what's happening, and then the magic happens. 
+Listen very carefully. 
+About three steps in, he realizes something magic is happening, and the most amazing feedback loop of all kicks in, and he takes a breath in, and he whispers "" wow "" and instinctively I echo back the same. 
+And so let's fly back in time to that memorable moment. 
+(Video) DR: Hey. 
+Come here. 
+Can you do it? 
+Oh, boy. 
+Can you do it? 
+Baby: Yeah. 
+DR: Ma, he's walking. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) DR: Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I'd like to have you look at this pencil. 
+It's a thing. It's a legal thing. 
+And so are books you might have or the cars you own. 
+They're all legal things. 
+The great apes that you'll see behind me, they too are legal things. 
+Now, I can do that to a legal thing. 
+I can do whatever I want to my book or my car. 
+These great apes, you'll see. 
+The photographs are taken by a man named James Mollison who wrote a book called "" James & Other Apes. "" And he tells in his book how every single one them, almost every one of them, is an orphan who saw his mother and father die before his eyes. 
+They're legal things. 
+So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall that separates legal things from legal persons. 
+On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. 
+They don't count in law. 
+They don't have any legal rights. 
+They don't have the capacity for legal rights. 
+They are the slaves. 
+On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. 
+Legal persons are very visible to judges. 
+They count in law. 
+They may have many rights. 
+And they're the masters. 
+Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things. 
+All human beings are legal persons. 
+But being human and being a legal person has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person. 
+Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. 
+On the one side, there have been many human beings over the centuries who have been legal things. 
+Slaves were legal things. 
+Women, children, were sometimes legal things. 
+Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons. 
+But alas, that hole has closed up. 
+Now, on the other side are legal persons, but they've never only been limited to human beings. 
+There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive. 
+In the United States, we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons. 
+In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person, and in 2012, just recently, there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person who owned its own riverbed. 
+Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980, when I had a full head of lush, brown hair, and indeed I was moved by it, because I had become a lawyer because I wanted to speak for the voiceless, defend the defenseless, and I'd never realized how voiceless and defenseless the trillions, billions of nonhuman animals are. 
+And I began to work as an animal protection lawyer. 
+And by 1985, I realized that I was trying to accomplish something that was literally impossible, the reason being that all of my clients, all the animals whose interests I was trying to defend, were legal things; they were invisible. 
+It was not going to work, so I decided that the only thing that was going to work was they had, at least some of them, had to also be moved through a hole that we could open up again in that wall and begin feeding the appropriate nonhuman animals through that hole onto the other side of being legal persons. 
+Now, at that time, there was very little known about or spoken about truly animal rights, about the idea of having legal personhood or legal rights for a nonhuman animal, and I knew it was going to take a long time. 
+And so, in 1985, I figured that it would take about 30 years before we'd be able to even begin a strategic litigation, long-term campaign, in order to be able to punch another hole through that wall. 
+It turned out that I was pessimistic, that it only took 28. 
+So what we had to do in order to begin was not only to write law review articles and teach classes, write books, but we had to then begin to get down to the nuts and bolts of how you litigate that kind of case. 
+So one of the first things we needed to do was figure out what a cause of action was, a legal cause of action. 
+And a legal cause of action is a vehicle that lawyers use to put their arguments in front of courts. 
+It turns out there's a very interesting case that had occurred almost 250 years ago in London called Somerset vs. Stewart, whereby a black slave had used the legal system and had moved from a legal thing to a legal person. 
+I was so interested in it that I eventually wrote an entire book about it. 
+James Somerset was an eight-year-old boy when he was kidnapped from West Africa. 
+He survived the Middle Passage, and he was sold to a Scottish businessman named Charles Stewart in Virginia. 
+Now, 20 years later, Stewart brought James Somerset to London, and after he got there, James decided he was going to escape. 
+And so one of the first things he did was to get himself baptized, because he wanted to get a set of godparents, because to an 18th-century slave, they knew that one of the major responsibilities of godfathers was to help you escape. 
+And so in the fall of 1771, James Somerset had a confrontation with Charles Stewart. 
+We don't know exactly what happened, but then James dropped out of sight. 
+An enraged Charles Stewart then hired slave catchers to canvass the city of London, find him, bring him not back to Charles Stewart, but to a ship, the Ann and Mary, that was floating in London Harbour, and he was chained to the deck, and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica where James was to be sold in the slave markets and be doomed to the three to five years of life that a slave had harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica. 
+Well now James' godparents swung into action. 
+They approached the most powerful judge, Lord Mansfield, who was chief judge of the court of King's Bench, and they demanded that he issue a common law writ of habeus corpus on behalf of James Somerset. 
+Now, the common law is the kind of law that English-speaking judges can make when they're not cabined in by statutes or constitutions, and a writ of habeus corpus is called the Great Writ, capital G, capital W, and it's meant to protect any of us who are detained against our will. 
+A writ of habeus corpus is issued. 
+The detainer is required to bring the detainee in and give a legally sufficient reason for depriving him of his bodily liberty. 
+Well, Lord Mansfield had to make a decision right off the bat, because if James Somerset was a legal thing, he was not eligible for a writ of habeus corpus, only if he could be a legal person. 
+So Lord Mansfield decided that he would assume, without deciding, that James Somerset was indeed a legal person, and he issued the writ of habeus corpus, and James's body was brought in by the captain of the ship. 
+There were a series of hearings over the next six months. 
+On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield said that slavery was so odious, and he used the word "" odious, "" that the common law would not support it, and he ordered James free. 
+At that moment, James Somerset underwent a legal transubstantiation. 
+The free man who walked out of the courtroom looked exactly like the slave who had walked in, but as far as the law was concerned, they had nothing whatsoever in common. 
+The next thing we did is that the Nonhuman Rights Project, which I founded, then began to look at what kind of values and principles do we want to put before the judges? 
+What values and principles did they imbibe with their mother's milk, were they taught in law school, do they use every day, do they believe with all their hearts — and we chose liberty and equality. 
+Now, liberty right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because of how you're put together, and a fundamental liberty right protects a fundamental interest. 
+And the supreme interest in the common law are the rights to autonomy and self-determination. 
+So they are so powerful that in a common law country, if you go to a hospital and you refuse life-saving medical treatment, a judge will not order it forced upon you, because they will respect your self-determination and your autonomy. 
+Now, an equality right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because you resemble someone else in a relevant way, and there's the rub, relevant way. 
+So if you are that, then because they have the right, you're like them, you're entitled to the right. 
+Now, courts and legislatures draw lines all the time. 
+But you have to, at the bare minimum you must — that line has to be a reasonable means to a legitimate end. 
+The Nonhuman Rights Project argues that drawing a line in order to enslave an autonomous and self-determining being like you're seeing behind me, that that's a violation of equality. 
+We then searched through 80 jurisdictions, it took us seven years, to find the jurisdiction where we wanted to begin filing our first suit. 
+We decided upon chimpanzees, not just because Jane Goodall was on our board of directors, but because they, Jane and others, have studied chimpanzees intensively for decades. 
+We know the extraordinary cognitive capabilities that they have, and they also resemble the kind that human beings have. 
+And so we chose chimpanzees, and we began to then canvass the world to find the experts in chimpanzee cognition. 
+We found them in Japan, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, England and the United States, and amongst them, they wrote 100 pages of affidavits in which they set out more than 40 ways in which their complex cognitive capability, either individually or together, all added up to autonomy and self-determination. 
+Now, these included, for example, that they were conscious. 
+But they're also conscious that they're conscious. 
+They know they have a mind. They know that others have minds. 
+They know they're individuals, and that they can live. 
+They understand that they lived yesterday and they will live tomorrow. 
+They engage in mental time travel. They remember what happened yesterday. 
+They can anticipate tomorrow, which is why it's so terrible to imprison a chimpanzee, especially alone. 
+It's the thing that we do to our worst criminals, and we do that to chimpanzees without even thinking about it. 
+They have some kind of moral capacity. 
+When they play economic games with human beings, they'll spontaneously make fair offers, even when they're not required to do so. 
+They are numerate. They understand numbers. 
+They can do some simple math. 
+They can engage in language — or to stay out of the language wars, they're involved in intentional and referential communication in which they pay attention to the attitudes of those with whom they are speaking. 
+They have culture. 
+They have a material culture, a social culture. 
+They have a symbolic culture. 
+Scientists in the Taï Forests in the Ivory Coast found chimpanzees who were using these rocks to smash open the incredibly hard hulls of nuts. 
+It takes a long time to learn how to do that, and they excavated the area and they found that this material culture, this way of doing it, these rocks, had passed down for at least 4,300 years through 225 chimpanzee generations. 
+So now we needed to find our chimpanzee. 
+Our chimpanzee, first we found two of them in the state of New York. 
+Both of them would die before we could even get our suits filed. 
+Then we found Tommy. 
+Tommy is a chimpanzee. You see him behind me. 
+We found him in a small room that was filled with cages in a larger warehouse structure on a used trailer lot in central New York. 
+We found Kiko, who is partially deaf. 
+Kiko was in the back of a cement storefront in western Massachusetts. 
+And we found Hercules and Leo. 
+They're two young male chimpanzees who are being used for biomedical, anatomical research at Stony Brook. 
+We found them. 
+And so on the last week of December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three suits all across the state of New York using the same common law writ of habeus corpus argument that had been used with James Somerset, and we demanded that the judges issue these common law writs of habeus corpus. 
+We wanted the chimpanzees out, and we wanted them brought to Save the Chimps, a tremendous chimpanzee sanctuary in South Florida which involves an artificial lake with 12 or 13 islands — there are two or three acres where two dozen chimpanzees live on each of them. 
+
+This is the Livingston Public Library that was completed in 2004 in my hometown, and, you know, it's got a dome and it's got this round thing and columns, red brick, and you can kind of guess what Livingston is trying to say with this building: children, property values and history. 
+But it's the '80s, it's cool. 
+Tourism in Bilbao increased 2,500 percent after this building was completed. 
+So all of a sudden, everybody wants one of these buildings: L.A., Seattle, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Springfield. 
+And as you use them to tell your story, they become part of your personal narrative, and what you're doing is you're short-circuiting all of our collective memory, and you're making these charged symbols for us to understand. 
+If that building was going to be built today, the first thing they would do is go online and search "" new libraries. "" They would be bombarded by examples of experimentation, of innovation, of pushing at the envelope of what a library can be. 
+That means that that pendulum swinging back and forth from style to style, from movement to movement, is irrelevant. 
+We can actually move forward and find relevant solutions to the problems that our society faces. 
+It means that no building is too small for innovation, like this little reindeer pavilion that's as muscly and sinewy as the animals it's designed to observe. 
+We've just been waiting for all of you to want them. 
+
+If nothing else, at least I've discovered what it is we put our speakers through: sweaty palms, sleepless nights, a wholly unnatural fear of clocks. 
+I mean, it's quite brutal. 
+And I'm also a little nervous about this. 
+There are nine billion humans coming our way. 
+Now, the most optimistic dreams can get dented by the prospect of people plundering the planet. 
+But recently, I've become intrigued by a different way of thinking of large human crowds, because there are circumstances where they can do something really cool. 
+It's a phenomenon that I think any organization or individual can tap into. 
+It certainly impacted the way we think about TED's future, and perhaps the world's future overall. 
+So, let's explore. 
+The story starts with just a single person, a child, behaving a little strangely. 
+This kid is known online as Lil Demon. 
+He's doing tricks here, dance tricks, that probably no six-year-old in history ever managed before. 
+How did he learn them? 
+And what drove him to spend the hundreds of hours of practice this must have taken? 
+Here's a clue. 
+(Video) Lil Demon: ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫ ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫ Chris Anderson: So, that was sent to me by this man, a filmmaker, Jonathan Chu, who told me that was the moment he realized the Internet was causing dance to evolve. 
+This is what he said at TED in February. 
+In essence, dancers were challenging each other online to get better; incredible new dance skills were being invented; even the six-year-olds were joining in. 
+It felt like a revolution. 
+And so Jon had a brilliant idea: He went out to recruit the best of the best dancers off of YouTube to create this dance troupe — The League of Extraordinary Dancers, the LXD. 
+I mean, these kids were web-taught, but they were so good that they got to play at the Oscars this year. 
+And at TED here in February, their passion and brilliance just took our breath away. 
+So, this story of the evolution of dance seems strangely familiar. 
+You know, a while after TEDTalks started taking off, we noticed that speakers were starting to spend a lot more time in preparation. 
+It was resulting in incredible new talks like these two. 
+... Months of preparation crammed into 18 minutes, raising the bar cruelly for the next generation of speakers, with the effects that we've seen this week. 
+It's not as if J.J. and Jill actually ended their talks saying, "" Step your game up, "" but they might as well have. 
+So, in both of these cases, you've got these cycles of improvement, apparently driven by people watching web video. 
+What is going on here? 
+Well, I think it's the latest iteration of a phenomenon we can call "crowd-accelerated innovation." 
+And there are just three things you need for this thing to kick into gear. 
+You can think of them as three dials on a giant wheel. 
+You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to turn. 
+And the first thing you need is... a crowd, a group of people who share a common interest. 
+The bigger the crowd, the more potential innovators there are. 
+That's important, but actually most people in the crowd occupy these other roles. 
+They're creating the ecosystem from which innovation emerges. 
+The second thing you need is light. 
+You need clear, open visibility of what the best people in that crowd are capable of, because that is how you will learn how you will be empowered to participate. 
+And third, you need desire. 
+You know, innovation's hard work. 
+It's based on hundreds of hours of research, of practice. 
+Absent desire, not going to happen. 
+Now, here's an example — pre-Internet — of this machine in action. 
+Dancers at a street corner — it's a crowd, a small one, but they can all obviously see what each other can do. 
+And the desire part comes, I guess, from social status, right? 
+Best dancer walks tall, gets the best date. 
+There's probably going to be some innovation happening here. 
+But on the web, all three dials are ratcheted right up. 
+The dance community is now global. 
+There's millions connected. 
+And amazingly, you can still see what the best can do, because the crowd itself shines a light on them, either directly, through comments, ratings, email, Facebook, Twitter, or indirectly, through numbers of views, through links that point Google there. 
+So, it's easy to find the good stuff, and when you've found it, you can watch it in close-up repeatedly and read what hundreds of people have written about it. 
+That's a lot of light. 
+But the desire element is really dialed way up. 
+I mean, you might just be a kid with a webcam, but if you can do something that goes viral, you get to be seen by the equivalent of sports stadiums crammed with people. 
+You get hundreds of strangers writing excitedly about you. 
+And even if it's not that eloquent — and it's not — it can still really make your day. 
+So, this possibility of a new type of global recognition, I think, is driving huge amounts of effort. 
+And it's important to note that it's not just the stars who are benefiting: because you can see the best, everyone can learn. 
+Also, the system is self-fueling. 
+It's the crowd that shines the light and fuels the desire, but the light and desire are a lethal one-two combination that attract new people to the crowd. 
+So, this is a model that pretty much any organization could use to try and nurture its own cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation. 
+Invite the crowd, let in the light, dial up the desire. 
+And the hardest part about that is probably the light, because it means you have to open up, you have to show your stuff to the world. 
+It's by giving away what you think is your deepest secret that maybe millions of people are empowered to help improve it. 
+And, very happily, there's one class of people who really can't make use of this tool. 
+The dark side of the web is allergic to the light. 
+I don't think we're going to see terrorists, for example, publishing their plans online and saying to the world, "" Please, could you help us to actually make them work this time? "" But you can publish your stuff online. 
+And if you can get that wheel to turn, look out. 
+So, at TED, we've become a little obsessed with this idea of openness. 
+In fact, my colleague, June Cohen, has taken to calling it "" radical openness, "" because it works for us each time. 
+We opened up our talks to the world, and suddenly there are millions of people out there helping spread our speakers' ideas, and thereby making it easier for us to recruit and motivate the next generation of speakers. 
+By opening up our translation program, thousands of heroic volunteers — some of them watching online right now, and thank you! — have translated our talks into more than 70 languages, thereby tripling our viewership in non-English-speaking countries. 
+By giving away our TEDx brand, we suddenly have a thousand-plus live experiments in the art of spreading ideas. 
+And these organizers, they're seeing each other, they're learning from each other. 
+We are learning from them. 
+We're getting great talks back from them. 
+The wheel is turning. 
+Okay, step back a minute. 
+I mean, it's really not news for me to tell you that innovation emerges out of groups. 
+You know, we've heard that this week — this romantic notion of the lone genius with the "" eureka! "" moment that changes the world is misleading. 
+Even he said that, and he would know. 
+We're a social species. 
+We spark off each other. 
+It's also not news to say that the Internet has accelerated innovation. 
+For the past 15 years, powerful communities have been connecting online, sparking off each other. 
+If you take programmers, you know, the whole open-source movement is a fantastic instance of crowd-accelerated innovation. 
+But what's key here is, the reason these groups have been able to connect is because their work output is of the type that can be easily shared digitally — a picture, a music file, software. 
+And that's why what I'm excited about, and what I think is under-reported, is the significance of the rise of online video. 
+This is the technology that's going to allow the rest of the world's talents to be shared digitally, thereby launching a whole new cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation. 
+The first few years of the web were pretty much video-free, for this reason: video files are huge; the web couldn't handle them. 
+But in the last 10 years, bandwidth has exploded a hundredfold. 
+Suddenly, here we are. 
+Humanity watches 80 million hours of YouTube every day. 
+Cisco actually estimates that, within four years, more than 90 percent of the web's data will be video. 
+If it's all puppies, porn and piracy, we're doomed. 
+I don't think it will be. 
+Video is high-bandwidth for a reason. 
+It packs a huge amount of data, and our brains are uniquely wired to decode it. 
+Here, let me introduce you to Sam Haber. 
+He's a unicyclist. 
+Before YouTube, there was no way for him to discover his sport's true potential, because you can't communicate this stuff in words, right? 
+But looking at video clips posted by strangers, a world of possibility opens up for him. 
+Suddenly, he starts to emulate and then to innovate. 
+And a global community of unicyclists discover each other online, inspire each other to greatness. 
+And there are thousands of other examples of this happening — of video-driven evolution of skills, ranging from the physical to the artful. 
+And I have to tell you, as a former publisher of hobbyist magazines, I find this strangely beautiful. 
+I mean, there's a lot of passion right here on this screen. 
+But if Rube Goldberg machines and video poetry aren't quite your cup of tea, how about this. 
+Jove is a website that was founded to encourage scientists to publish their peer-reviewed research on video. 
+There's a problem with a traditional scientific paper. 
+It can take months for a scientist in another lab to figure out how to replicate the experiments that are described in print. 
+Here's one such frustrated scientist, Moshe Pritsker, the founder of Jove. 
+He told me that the world is wasting billions of dollars on this. 
+But look at this video. 
+I mean, look: if you can show instead of just describing, that problem goes away. 
+So it's not far-fetched to say that, at some point, online video is going to dramatically accelerate scientific advance. 
+Here's another example that's close to our hearts at TED, where video is sometimes more powerful than print — the sharing of an idea. 
+Why do people like watching TEDTalks? 
+All those ideas are already out there in print. 
+It's actually faster to read than to view. 
+Why would someone bother? 
+Well, so, there's some showing as well as telling. 
+But even leaving the screen out of it, there's still a lot more being transferred than just words. 
+And in that non-verbal portion, there's some serious magic. 
+Somewhere hidden in the physical gestures, the vocal cadence, the facial expressions, the eye contact, the passion, the kind of awkward, British body language, the sense of how the audience are reacting, there are hundreds of subconscious clues that go to how well you will understand, and whether you're inspired — light, if you like, and desire. 
+Incredibly, all of this can be communicated on just a few square inches of a screen. 
+Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions. 
+Face-to-face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution. 
+That's what's made it into this mysterious, powerful thing it is. 
+Someone speaks, there's resonance in all these receiving brains, the whole group acts together. 
+I mean, this is the connective tissue of the human superorganism in action. 
+It's probably driven our culture for millennia. 
+500 years ago, it ran into a competitor with a lethal advantage. 
+It's right here. 
+Print scaled. 
+The world's ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide, and so the art of the spoken word pretty much withered on the vine. 
+But now, in the blink of an eye, the game has changed again. 
+It's not too much to say that what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication. 
+So, that primal medium, which your brain is exquisitely wired for... 
+that just went global. 
+Now, this is big. 
+We may have to reinvent an ancient art form. 
+I mean, today, one person speaking can be seen by millions, shedding bright light on potent ideas, creating intense desire for learning and to respond — and in his case, intense desire to laugh. 
+For the first time in human history, talented students don't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers. 
+They can sit two feet in front of the world's finest. 
+Now, TED is just a small part of this. 
+I mean, the world's universities are opening up their curricula. 
+Thousands of individuals and organizations are sharing their knowledge and data online. 
+Thousands of people are figuring out new ways to learn and, crucially, to respond, completing the cycle. 
+And so, as we've thought about this, you know, it's become clear to us what the next stage of TED's evolution has to be. 
+TEDTalks can't be a one-way process, one-to-many. 
+Our future is many-to-many. 
+So, we're dreaming of ways to make it easier for you, the global TED community, to respond to speakers, to contribute your own ideas, maybe even your own TEDTalks, and to help shine a light on the very best of what's out there. 
+Because, if we can bubble up the very best from a vastly larger pool, this wheel turns. 
+Now, is it possible to imagine a similar process to this, happening to global education overall? 
+I mean, does it have to be this painful, top-down process? 
+Why not a self-fueling cycle in which we all can participate? 
+It's the participation age, right? 
+Schools can't be silos. 
+We can't stop learning at age 21. 
+What if, in the coming crowd of nine billion... 
+what if that crowd could learn enough to be net contributors, instead of net plunderers? 
+That changes everything, right? 
+I mean, that would take more teachers than we've ever had. 
+But the good news is they are out there. 
+They're in the crowd, and the crowd is switching on lights, and we can see them for the first time, not as an undifferentiated mass of strangers, but as individuals we can learn from. 
+Who's the teacher? 
+You're the teacher. 
+You're part of the crowd that may be about to launch the biggest learning cycle in human history, a cycle capable of carrying all of us to a smarter, wiser, more beautiful place. 
+Here's a group of kids in a village in Pakistan near where I grew up. 
+Within five years, each of these kids is going to have access to a cellphone capable of full-on web video and capable of uploading video to the web. 
+I mean, is it crazy to think that this girl, in the back, at the right, in 15 years, might be sharing the idea that keeps the world beautiful for your grandchildren? 
+It's not crazy; it's actually happening right now. 
+I want to introduce you to a good friend of TED who just happens to live in Africa's biggest shantytown. 
+(Video) Christopher Makau: Hi. My name is Christopher Makau. 
+I'm one of the organizers of TEDxKibera. 
+There are so many good things which are happening right here in Kibera. 
+There's a self-help group. 
+They turned a trash place into a garden. 
+The same spot, it was a crime spot where people were being robbed. 
+They used the same trash to form green manure. 
+The same trash site is feeding more than 30 families. 
+We have our own film school. 
+They are using Flip cameras to record, edit, and reporting to their own channel, Kibera TV. 
+Because of a scarcity of land, we are using the sacks to grow vegetables, and also [we're] able to save on the cost of living. 
+Change happens when we see things in a different way. 
+Today, I see Kibera in a different way. 
+My message to TEDGlobal and the entire world is: Kibera is a hotbed of innovation and ideas. 
+(Applause) CA: You know what? 
+I bet Chris has always been an inspiring guy. 
+What's new — and it's huge — is that, for the first time, we get to see him, and he can see us. 
+Right now, Chris and Kevin and Dennis and Dickson and their friends are watching us, in Nairobi, right now. 
+Guys, we've learned from you today. 
+Thank you. 
+And thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The magical moment, the magical moment of conducting. 
+Which is, you go onto a stage. There is an orchestra sitting. 
+They are all, you know, warming up and doing stuff. 
+And I go on the podium. 
+You know, this little office of the conductor. 
+Or rather a cubicle, an open-space cubicle, with a lot of space. 
+And in front of all that noise, you do a very small gesture. 
+Something like this, not very pomp, not very sophisticated, this. 
+And suddenly, out of the chaos, order. 
+Noise becomes music. 
+And this is fantastic. And it's so tempting to think that it's all about me. 
+(Laughter) All those great people here, virtuosos, they make noise, they need me to do that. 
+Not really. If it were that, I would just save you the talk, and teach you the gesture. 
+So you could go out to the world and do this thing in whatever company or whatever you want, and you have perfect harmony. It doesn't work. 
+Let's look at the first video. 
+I hope you'll think it's a good example of harmony. 
+And then speak a little bit about how it comes about. 
+(Music) Was that nice? 
+So that was a sort of a success. 
+Now, who should we thank for the success? 
+I mean, obviously the orchestra musicians playing beautifully, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. 
+They don't often even look at the conductor. 
+Then you have the clapping audience, yeah, actually taking part in doing the music. 
+You know Viennese audiences usually don't interfere with the music. 
+This is the closest to an Oriental bellydancing feast that you will ever get in Vienna. 
+(Laughter) Unlike, for example Israel, where audiences cough all the time. 
+You know, Arthur Rubinstein, the pianist, used to say that, "" Anywhere in the world, people that have the flu, they go to the doctor. 
+In Tel Aviv they come to my concerts. "" (Laughter) So that's a sort of a tradition. 
+But Viennese audiences do not do that. 
+Here they go out of their regular, just to be part of that, to become part of the orchestra, and that's great. 
+You know, audiences like you, yeah, make the event. 
+But what about the conductor? What can you say the conductor was doing, actually? 
+Um, he was happy. 
+And I often show this to senior management. 
+People get annoyed. 
+"You come to work. How come you're so happy?" 
+Something must be wrong there, yeah? But he's spreading happiness. 
+And I think the happiness, the important thing is this happiness does not come from only his own story and his joy of the music. 
+The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time. 
+You have the story of the orchestra as a professional body. 
+You have the story of the audience as a community. Yeah. 
+You have the stories of the individuals in the orchestra and in the audience. 
+And then you have other stories, unseen. 
+People who build this wonderful concert hall. 
+People who made those Stradivarius, Amati, all those beautiful instruments. 
+And all those stories are being heard at the same time. 
+This is the true experience of a live concert. 
+That's a reason to go out of home. Yeah? 
+And not all conductors do just that. 
+Let's see somebody else, a great conductor. 
+Riccardo Muti, please. 
+(Music) Yeah, that was very short, but you could see it's a completely different figure. Right? 
+He's awesome. He's so commanding. Yeah? 
+So clear. Maybe a little bit over-clear. 
+Can we have a little demonstration? Would you be my orchestra for a second? 
+Can you sing, please, the first note of Don Giovanni? 
+You have to sing "" Aaaaaah, "" and I'll stop you. 
+Okay? Ready? 
+Audience: ♫ Aaaaaaah... ♫ Itay Talgam: Come on, with me. If you do it without me I feel even more redundant than I already feel. 
+So please, wait for the conductor. 
+Now look at me. "" Aaaaaah, "" and I stop you. Let's go. 
+Audience: ♫... Aaaaaaaah... ♫ (Laughter) Itay Talgam: So we'll have a little chat later. (Laughter) 
+But... There is a vacancy for a... 
+But — (Laughter) — you could see that you could stop an orchestra with a finger. 
+Now what does Riccardo Muti do? He does something like this... 
+(Laughter) And then — sort of — (Laughter) So not only the instruction is clear, but also the sanction, what will happen if you don't do what I tell you. (Laughter) 
+So, does it work? Yes, it works — to a certain point. 
+When Muti is asked, "" Why do you conduct like this? "" He says, "" I'm responsible. "" Responsible in front of him. 
+No he doesn't really mean Him. He means Mozart, which is — (Laughter) — like a third seat from the center. (Laughter) 
+So he says, "" If I'm — (Applause) if I'm responsible for Mozart, this is going to be the only story to be told. 
+It's Mozart as I, Riccardo Muti, understand it. "" And you know what happened to Muti? 
+Three years ago he got a letter signed by all 700 employees of La Scala, musical employees, I mean the musicians, saying, "" You're a great conductor. We don't want to work with you. Please resign. "" (Laughter) "" Why? Because you don't let us develop. 
+You're using us as instruments, not as partners. 
+And our joy of music, etc., etc.... "" So he had to resign. Isn't that nice? 
+(Laughter) He's a nice guy. He's a really nice guy. 
+Well, can you do it with less control, or with a different kind of control? 
+Let's look at the next conductor, Richard Strauss. 
+(Music) I'm afraid you'll get the feeling that I really picked on him because he's old. 
+It's not true. When he was a young man of about 30, he wrote what he called "The Ten Commandments for Conductors." 
+The first one was: If you sweat by the end of the concert it means that you must have done something wrong. 
+That's the first one. The fourth one you'll like better. 
+It says: Never look at the trombones — it only encourages them. 
+(Laughter) So, the whole idea is really to let it happen by itself. 
+Do not interfere. 
+But how does it happen? Did you see him turning pages in the score? 
+Now, either he is senile, and doesn't remember his own music, because he wrote the music. 
+Or he is actually transferring a very strong message to them, saying, "" Come on guys. You have to play by the book. 
+So it's not about my story. It's not about your story. 
+It's only the execution of the written music, no interpretation. "" Interpretation is the real story of the performer. 
+So, no, he doesn't want that. That's a different kind of control. 
+Let's see another super-conductor, a German super-conductor. Herbert von Karajan, please. 
+(Music) What's different? Did you see the eyes? Closed. 
+Did you see the hands? 
+Did you see this kind of movement? Let me conduct you. Twice. 
+Once like a Muti, and you'll — (Claps) — clap, just once. 
+And then like Karajan. Let's see what happens. Okay? 
+Like Muti. You ready? Because Muti... 
+(Laughter) Okay? Ready? Let's do it. 
+Audience: (Claps) Itay Talgam: Hmm... again. Audience: (Claps) 
+Itay Talgam: Good. Now like a Karajan. Since you're already trained, let me concentrate, close my eyes. Come, come. 
+Audience: (Claps) (Laughter) Itay Talgam: Why not together? (Laughter) Because you didn't know when to play. 
+Now I can tell you, even the Berlin Philharmonic doesn't know when to play. 
+(Laughter) But I'll tell you how they do it. No cynicism. 
+This is a German orchestra, yes? 
+They look at Karajan. And then they look at each other. 
+(Laughter) "Do you understand what this guy wants?" 
+And after doing that, they really look at each other, and the first players of the orchestra lead the whole ensemble in playing together. 
+And when Karajan is asked about it he actually says, "" Yes, the worst damage I can do to my orchestra is to give them a clear instruction. 
+Because that would prevent the ensemble, the listening to each other that is needed for an orchestra. "" Now that's great. What about the eyes? 
+Why are the eyes closed? 
+There is a wonderful story about Karajan conducting in London. 
+And he cues in a flute player like this. 
+The guy has no idea what to do. (Laughter) "Maestro, with all due respect, when should I start?" 
+What do you think Karajan's reply was? When should I start? 
+Oh yeah. He says, "" You start when you can't stand it anymore. "" (Laughter) Meaning that you know you have no authority to change anything. 
+It's my music. The real music is only in Karajan's head. 
+And you have to guess my mind. So you are under tremendous pressure because I don't give you instruction, and yet, you have to guess my mind. 
+So it's a different kind of, a very spiritual but yet very firm control. 
+Can we do it in another way? Of course we can. Let's go back to the first conductor we've seen: Carlos Kleiber, his name. Next video, please. 
+(Music) (Laughter) Yeah. 
+Well, it is different. But isn't that controlling in the same way? 
+No, it's not, because he is not telling them what to do. 
+When he does this, it's not, "" Take your Stradivarius and like Jimi Hendrix, smash it on the floor. "" It's not that. 
+He says, "" This is the gesture of the music. 
+I'm opening a space for you to put in another layer of interpretation. "" That is another story. 
+But how does it really work together if it doesn't give them instructions? 
+It's like being on a rollercoaster. Yeah? 
+You're not really given any instructions, but the forces of the process itself keep you in place. 
+That's what he does. 
+The interesting thing is of course the rollercoaster does not really exist. 
+It's not a physical thing. It's in the players' heads. 
+And that's what makes them into partners. 
+You have the plan in your head. 
+You know what to do, even though Kleiber is not conducting you. 
+But here and there and that. You know what to do. 
+And you become a partner building the rollercoaster, yeah, with sound, as you actually take the ride. 
+This is very exciting for those players. 
+They do need to go to a sanatorium for two weeks, later. 
+(Laughter) It is very tiring. Yeah? 
+But it's the best music making, like this. 
+But of course it's not only about motivation and giving them a lot of physical energy. 
+You also have to be very professional. 
+And look again at this Kleiber. 
+Can we have the next video, quickly? 
+You'll see what happens when there is a mistake. 
+(Music) Again you see the beautiful body language. (Music) 
+And now there is a trumpet player who does something not exactly the way it should be done. 
+Go along with the video. Look. 
+See, second time for the same player. 
+(Laughter) And now the third time for the same player. (Laughter) 
+"" Wait for me after the concert. 
+I have a short notice to give you. "" You know, when it's needed, the authority is there. It's very important. 
+But authority is not enough to make people your partners. 
+Let's see the next video, please. See what happens here. 
+You might be surprised having seen Kleiber as such a hyperactive guy. 
+He's conducting Mozart. 
+(Music) The whole orchestra is playing. (Music) 
+Now something else. (Music) 
+See? He is there 100 percent, but not commanding, not telling what to do. 
+Rather enjoying what the soloist is doing. 
+(Music) Another solo now. See what you can pick up from this. (Music) 
+Look at the eyes. 
+Okay. You see that? 
+First of all, it's a kind of a compliment we all like to get. 
+It's not feedback. It's an "" Mmmm... "" Yeah, it comes from here. 
+So that's a good thing. 
+And the second thing is it's about actually being in control, but in a very special way. 
+When Kleiber does — did you see the eyes, going from here? (Singing) You know what happens? Gravitation is no more. 
+Kleiber not only creates a process, but also creates the conditions in the world in which this process takes place. 
+So again, the oboe player is completely autonomous and therefore happy and proud of his work, and creative and all of that. 
+And the level in which Kleiber is in control is in a different level. 
+So control is no longer a zero-sum game. 
+You have this control. You have this control. And all you put together, in partnership, brings about the best music. 
+So Kleiber is about process. 
+Kleiber is about conditions in the world. 
+But you need to have process and content to create the meaning. 
+Lenny Bernstein, my own personal maestro. 
+Since he was a great teacher, Lenny Bernstein always started from the meaning. Look at this, please. 
+(Music) Do you remember the face of Muti, at the beginning? 
+Well he had a wonderful expression, but only one. 
+(Laughter) Did you see Lenny's face? 
+You know why? Because the meaning of the music is pain. 
+And you're playing a painful sound. 
+And you look at Lenny and he's suffering. 
+But not in a way that you want to stop. 
+It's suffering, like, enjoying himself in a Jewish way, as they say. 
+(Laughter) But you can see the music on his face. 
+You can see the baton left his hand. No more baton. 
+Now it's about you, the player, telling the story. 
+Now it's a reversed thing. You're telling the story. And you're telling the story. 
+And even briefly, you become the storyteller to which the community, the whole community, listens to. 
+And Bernstein enables that. Isn't that wonderful? 
+Now, if you are doing all the things we talked about, together, and maybe some others, you can get to this wonderful point of doing without doing. 
+And for the last video, I think this is simply the best title. 
+My friend Peter says, "" If you love something, give it away. "" So, please. 
+(Music) (Applause) 
+
+I'm talking to you about the worst form of human rights violation, the third-largest organized crime, a $10 billion industry. 
+I'm talking to you about modern-day slavery. 
+I'd like to tell you the story of these three children, Pranitha, Shaheen and Anjali. 
+Pranitha's mother was a woman in prostitution, a prostituted person. 
+She got infected with HIV, and towards the end of her life, when she was in the final stages of AIDS, she could not prostitute, so she sold four-year-old Pranitha to a broker. 
+By the time we got the information, we reached there, Pranitha was already raped by three men. 
+Shaheen's background I don't even know. 
+We found her in a railway track, raped by many, many men, I don't know many. 
+But the indications of that on her body was that her intestine was outside her body. 
+And when we took her to the hospital she needed 32 stitches to put back her intestine into her body. 
+We still don't know who her parents are, who she is. 
+All that we know that hundreds of men had used her brutally. 
+Anjali's father, a drunkard, sold his child for pornography. 
+You're seeing here images of three years, four-year-olds, and five-year-old children who have been trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation. 
+In this country, and across the globe, hundreds and thousands of children, as young as three, as young as four, are sold into sexual slavery. 
+But that's not the only purpose that human beings are sold for. 
+They are sold in the name of adoption. 
+They are sold in the name of organ trade. 
+They are sold in the name of forced labor, camel jockeying, anything, everything. 
+I work on the issue of commercial sexual exploitation. 
+And I tell you stories from there. 
+My own journey to work with these children started as a teenager. 
+I was 15 when I was gang-raped by eight men. 
+I don't remember the rape part of it so much as much as the anger part of it. 
+Yes, there were eight men who defiled me, raped me, but that didn't go into my consciousness. 
+I never felt like a victim, then or now. 
+But what lingered from then till now — I am 40 today — is this huge outrageous anger. 
+Two years, I was ostracized, I was stigmatized, I was isolated, because I was a victim. 
+And that's what we do to all traffic survivors. 
+We, as a society, we have PhDs in victimizing a victim. 
+Right from the age of 15, when I started looking around me, I started seeing hundreds and thousands of women and children who are left in sexual slavery-like practices, but have absolutely no respite, because we don't allow them to come in. 
+Where does their journey begin? 
+Most of them come from very optionless families, not just poor. 
+You have even the middle class sometimes getting trafficked. 
+I had this I.S. officer's daughter, who is 14 years old, studying in ninth standard, who was raped chatting with one individual, and ran away from home because she wanted to become a heroine, who was trafficked. 
+I have hundreds and thousands of stories of very very well-to-do families, and children from well-to-do families, who are getting trafficked. 
+These people are deceived, forced. 
+99.9 percent of them resist being inducted into prostitution. 
+Some pay the price for it. 
+They're killed; we don't even hear about them. 
+They are voiceless, [unclear], nameless people. 
+But the rest, who succumb into it, go through everyday torture. 
+Because the men who come to them are not men who want to make you your girlfriends, or who want to have a family with you. 
+These are men who buy you for an hour, for a day, and use you, throw you. 
+Each of the girls that I have rescued — I have rescued more than 3,200 girls — each of them tell me one story in common... 
+(Applause) one story about one man, at least, putting chili powder in her vagina, one man taking a cigarette and burning her, one man whipping her. 
+We are living among those men: they're our brothers, fathers, uncles, cousins, all around us. 
+And we are silent about them. 
+We think it is easy money. 
+We think it is shortcut. 
+We think the person likes to do what she's doing. 
+But the extra bonuses that she gets is various infections, sexually transmitted infections, HIV, AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, you name it, substance abuse, drugs, everything under the sun. 
+And one day she gives up on you and me, because we have no options for her. 
+And therefore she starts normalizing this exploitation. 
+She believes, "" Yes, this is it, this is what my destiny is about. "" And this is normal, to get raped by 100 men a day. 
+And it's abnormal to live in a shelter. 
+It's abnormal to get rehabilitated. 
+It's in that context that I work. 
+It's in that context that I rescue children. 
+I've rescued children as young as three years, and I've rescued women as old as 40 years. 
+When I rescued them, one of the biggest challenges I had was where do I begin. 
+Because I had lots of them who were already HIV infected. 
+One third of the people I rescue are HIV positive. 
+And therefore my challenge was to understand how can I get out the power from this pain. 
+And for me, I was my greatest experience. 
+Understanding my own self, understanding my own pain, my own isolation, was my greatest teacher. 
+Because what we did with these girls is to understand their potential. 
+You see a girl here who is trained as a welder. 
+She works for a very big company, a workshop in Hyderabad, making furnitures. 
+She earns around 12,000 rupees. 
+She is an illiterate girl, trained, skilled as a welder. 
+Why welding and why not computers? 
+We felt, one of the things that these girls had is immense amount of courage. 
+They did not have any pardas inside their body, hijabs inside themselves; they've crossed the barrier of it. 
+And therefore they could fight in a male-dominated world, very easily, and not feel very shy about it. 
+We have trained girls as carpenters, as masons, as security guards, as cab drivers. 
+And each one of them are excelling in their chosen field, gaining confidence, restoring dignity, and building hopes in their own lives. 
+These girls are also working in big construction companies like Ram-ki construction, as masons, full-time masons. 
+What has been my challenge? 
+My challenge has not been the traffickers who beat me up. 
+I've been beaten up more than 14 times in my life. 
+I can't hear from my right ear. 
+I've lost a staff of mine who was murdered while on a rescue. 
+My biggest challenge is society. 
+It's you and me. 
+My biggest challenge is your blocks to accept these victims as our own. 
+A very supportive friend of mine, a well-wisher of mine, used to give me every month, 2,000 rupees for vegetables. 
+When her mother fell sick she said, "" Sunitha, you have so much of contacts. 
+Can you get somebody in my house to work, so that she can look after my mother? "" And there is a long pause. 
+And then she says, "" Not one of our girls. "" It's very fashionable to talk about human trafficking, in this fantastic A-C hall. 
+It's very nice for discussion, discourse, making films and everything. 
+But it is not nice to bring them to our homes. 
+It's not nice to give them employment in our factories, our companies. 
+It's not nice for our children to study with their children. 
+There it ends. 
+That's my biggest challenge. 
+If I'm here today, I'm here not only as Sunitha Krishnan. 
+I'm here as a voice of the victims and survivors of human trafficking. 
+They need your compassion. 
+They need your empathy. 
+They need, much more than anything else, your acceptance. 
+Many times when I talk to people, I keep telling them one thing: don't tell me hundred ways how you cannot respond to this problem. 
+Can you ply your mind for that one way that you can respond to the problem? 
+And that's what I'm here for, asking for your support, demanding for your support, requesting for your support. 
+Can you break your culture of silence? 
+Can you speak to at least two persons about this story? 
+Tell them this story. Convince them to tell the story to another two persons. 
+I'm not asking you all to become Mahatma Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings, or Medha Patkars, or something like that. 
+I'm asking you, in your limited world, can you open your minds? Can you open your hearts? 
+Can you just encompass these people too? 
+Because they are also a part of us. 
+They are also part of this world. 
+I'm asking you, for these children, whose faces you see, they're no more. 
+They died of AIDS last year. 
+I'm asking you to help them, accept as human beings — not as philanthropy, not as charity, but as human beings who deserve all our support. 
+I'm asking you this because no child, no human being, deserves what these children have gone through. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So here it is. You can check: I am short, I'm French, I have a pretty strong French accent, so that's going to be clear in a moment. 
+Maybe a sobering thought and something you all know about. 
+And I suspect many of you gave something to the people of Haiti this year. 
+And there is something else I believe in the back of your mind you also know. 
+That is, every day, 25,000 children die of entirely preventable causes. 
+That's a Haiti earthquake every eight days. 
+And I suspect many of you probably gave something towards that problem as well, but somehow it doesn't happen with the same intensity. 
+So why is that? 
+Well, here is a thought experiment for you. 
+Imagine you have a few million dollars that you've raised — maybe you're a politician in a developing country and you have a budget to spend. You want to spend it on the poor: How do you go about it? 
+Do you believe the people who tell you that all we need to do is to spend money? 
+That we know how to eradicate poverty, we just need to do more? 
+Or do you believe the people who tell you that aid is not going to help, on the contrary it might hurt, it might exacerbate corruption, dependence, etc.? 
+Or maybe you turn to the past. 
+After all, we have spent billions of dollars on aid. 
+Maybe you look at the past and see. 
+Has it done any good? 
+And, sadly, we don't know. 
+And worst of all, we will never know. 
+And the reason is that — take Africa for example. 
+Africans have already got a lot of aid. 
+These are the blue bars. 
+And the GDP in Africa is not making much progress. 
+Okay, fine. How do you know what would have happened without the aid? 
+Maybe it would have been much worse, or maybe it would have been better. 
+We have no idea. We don't know what the counterfactual is. 
+There's only one Africa. 
+So what do you do? 
+To give the aid, and hope and pray that something comes out of it? 
+Or do you focus on your everyday life and let the earthquake every eight days continue to happen? 
+The thing is, if we don't know whether we are doing any good, we are not any better than the Medieval doctors and their leeches. 
+Sometimes the patient gets better, sometimes the patient dies. 
+Is it the leeches? Is it something else? 
+We don't know. 
+So here are some other questions. 
+They're smaller questions, but they are not that small. 
+Immunization, that's the cheapest way to save a child's life. 
+And the world has spent a lot of money on it: The GAVI and the Gates Foundations are each pledging a lot of money towards it, and developing countries themselves have been doing a lot of effort. 
+And yet, every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get. 
+So this is what you call a "" last mile problem. "" The technology is there, the infrastructure is there, and yet it doesn't happen. 
+So you have your million. 
+How do you use your million to solve this last mile problem? 
+And here's another question: Malaria. Malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them under five. 
+In fact, that is the leading cause of under-five mortality. 
+We already know how to kill malaria, but some people come to you and say, "You have your millions. How about bed nets?" 
+Bed nets are very cheap. 
+For 10 dollars, you can manufacture and ship an insecticide treated bed net and you can teach someone to use them. 
+And, not only do they protect the people who sleep under them, but they have these great contagion benefits. 
+If half of a community sleeps under a net, the other half also benefits because the contagion of the disease spread. 
+And yet, only a quarter of kids at risk sleep under a net. 
+Societies should be willing to go out and subsidize the net, give them for free, or, for that matter, pay people to use them because of those contagion benefits. 
+"" Not so fast, "" say other people. 
+"" If you give the nets for free, people are not going to value them. 
+They're not going to use them, or at least they're not going to use them as bed nets, maybe as fishing nets. "" So, what do you do? 
+Do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage, or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them? 
+How do you know? 
+And a third question: Education. 
+Maybe that's the solution, maybe we should send kids to school. 
+But how do you do that? 
+Do you hire teachers? Do you build more schools? 
+Do you provide school lunch? 
+How do you know? 
+So here is the thing. 
+I cannot answer the big question, whether aid did any good or not. 
+But these three questions, I can answer them. 
+It's not the Middle Ages anymore, it's the 21st century. 
+And in the 20th century, randomized, controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don't work. 
+And you can do the same randomized, controlled trial for social policy. 
+You can put social innovation to the same rigorous, scientific tests that we use for drugs. 
+And in this way, you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works, what doesn't work and why. 
+And I'll give you some examples with those three questions. 
+So I start with immunization. 
+Here's Udaipur District, Rajasthan. Beautiful. 
+Well, when I started working there, about one percent of children were fully immunized. 
+That's bad, but there are places like that. 
+Now, it's not because the vaccines are not there — they are there and they are free — and it's not because parents do not care about their kids. 
+The same child that is not immunized against measles, if they do get measles, parents will spend thousands of rupees to help them. 
+So you get these empty village subcenters and crowded hospitals. 
+So what is the problem? 
+Well, part of the problem, surely, is people do not fully understand. 
+After all, in this country as well, all sorts of myths and misconceptions go around immunization. 
+So if that's the case, that's difficult, because persuasion is really difficult. 
+But maybe there is another problem as well. 
+It's going from intention to action. 
+Imagine you are a mother in Udaipur District, Rajasthan. 
+You have to walk a few kilometers to get your kids immunized. 
+And maybe when you get there, what you find is this: The subcenter is closed. Ao you have to come back, and you are so busy and you have so many other things to do, you will always tend to postpone and postpone, and eventually it gets too late. 
+Well, if that's the problem, then that's much easier. 
+Because A, we can make it easy, and B, we can maybe give people a reason to act today, rather than wait till tomorrow. 
+So these are simple ideas, but we didn't know. 
+So let's try them. 
+So what we did is we did a randomized, controlled trial in 134 villages in Udaipur Districts. 
+So the blue dots are selected randomly. 
+We made it easy — I'll tell you how in a moment. 
+In the red dots, we made it easy and gave people a reason to act now. 
+The white dots are comparisons, nothing changed. 
+So we make it easy by organizing this monthly camp where people can get their kids immunized. 
+And then you make it easy and give a reason to act now by adding a kilo of lentils for each immunization. 
+Now, a kilo of lentils is tiny. 
+It's never going to convince anybody to do something that they don't want to do. 
+On the other hand, if your problem is you tend to postpone, then it might give you a reason to act today rather than later. 
+So what do we find? 
+Well, beforehand, everything is the same. 
+That's the beauty of randomization. 
+Afterwards, the camp — just having the camp — increases immunization from six percent to 17 percent. 
+That's full immunization. 
+That's not bad, that's a good improvement. 
+Add the lentils and you reach to 38 percent. 
+So here you've got your answer. 
+Make it easy and give a kilo of lentils, you multiply immunization rate by six. 
+Now, you might say, "" Well, but it's not sustainable. 
+We cannot keep giving lentils to people. "" Well, it turns out it's wrong economics, because it is cheaper to give lentils than not to give them. 
+Since you have to pay for the nurse anyway, the cost per immunization ends up being cheaper if you give incentives than if you don't. 
+How about bed nets? 
+Should you give them for free, or should you ask people to pay for them? 
+So the answer hinges on the answer to three simple questions. 
+One is: If people must pay for a bed net, are they going to purchase them? 
+The second one is: If I give bed nets for free, are people going to use them? 
+And the third one is: Do free bed nets discourage future purchase? 
+The third one is important because if we think people get used to handouts, it might destroy markets to distribute free bed nets. 
+Now this is a debate that has generated a lot of emotion and angry rhetoric. 
+It's more ideological than practical, but it turns out it's an easy question. 
+We can know the answer to this question. 
+We can just run an experiment. 
+And many experiments have been run, and they all have the same results, so I'm just going to talk to you about one. 
+And this one that was in Kenya, they went around and distributed to people vouchers, discount vouchers. 
+So people with their voucher could get the bed net in the local pharmacy. 
+And some people get 100 percent discount, and some people get 20 percent discounts, and some people get 50 percent discount, etc. 
+And now we can see what happens. 
+So, how about the purchasing? 
+Well, what you can see is that when people have to pay for their bed nets, the coverage rate really falls down a lot. 
+So even with partial subsidy, three dollars is still not the full cost of a bed net, and now you only have 20 percent of the people with the bed nets, you lose the health immunity, that's not great. 
+Second thing is, how about the use? 
+Well, the good news is, people, if they have the bed nets, will use the bed nets regardless of how they got it. 
+If they get it for free, they use it. 
+If they have to pay for it, they use it. 
+How about the long term? 
+In the long term, people who got the free bed nets, one year later, were offered the option to purchase a bed net at two dollars. 
+And people who got the free one were actually more likely to purchase the second one than people who didn't get a free one. 
+So people do not get used to handouts; they get used to nets. 
+Maybe we need to give them a little bit more credit. 
+So, that's for bed nets. So you will think, "" That's great. 
+You know how to immunize kids, you know how to give bed nets. "" But what politicians need is a range of options. 
+They need to know: Out of all the things I could do, what is the best way to achieve my goals? 
+So suppose your goal is to get kids into school. 
+There are so many things you could do. You could pay for uniforms, you could eliminate fees, you could build latrines, you could give girls sanitary pads, etc., etc. 
+So what's the best? 
+Well, at some level, we think all of these things should work. 
+So, is that sufficient? If we think they should work intuitively, should we go for them? 
+Well, in business, that's certainly not the way we would go about it. 
+Consider for example transporting goods. 
+Before the canals were invented in Britain before the Industrial Revolution, goods used to go on horse carts. 
+And then canals were built, and with the same horseman and the same horse, you could carry ten times as much cargo. 
+So should they have continued to carry the goods on the horse carts, on the ground, that they would eventually get there? 
+Well, if that had been the case, there would have been no Industrial Revolution. 
+So why shouldn't we do the same with social policy? 
+In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something, so why aren't we doing that with social policy? 
+Well, with experiments, what you can do is answer a simple question. 
+Suppose you have 100 dollars to spend on various interventions. 
+How many extra years of education do you get for your hundred dollars? 
+Now I'm going to show you what we get with various education interventions. 
+So the first ones are if you want the usual suspects, hire teachers, school meals, school uniforms, scholarships. 
+And that's not bad. For your hundred dollars, you get between one and three extra years of education. 
+Things that don't work so well is bribing parents, just because so many kids are already going to school that you end up spending a lot of money. 
+And here are the most surprising results. 
+Tell people the benefits of education, that's very cheap to do. 
+So for every hundred dollars you spend doing that, you get 40 extra years of education. 
+And, in places where there are worms, intestinal worms, cure the kids of their worms. 
+And for every hundred dollars, you get almost 30 extra years of education. 
+So this is not your intuition, this is not what people would have gone for, and yet, these are the programs that work. 
+We need that kind of information, we need more of it, and then we need to guide policy. 
+So now, I started from the big problem, and I couldn't answer it. 
+And I cut it into smaller questions, and I have the answer to these smaller questions. 
+And they are good, scientific, robust answers. 
+So let's go back to Haiti for a moment. 
+In Haiti, about 200,000 people died — actually, a bit more by the latest estimate. 
+And the response of the world was great: Two billion dollars got pledged just last month, so that's about 10,000 dollars per death. 
+That doesn't sound like that much when you think about it. 
+But if we were willing to spend 10,000 dollars for every child under five who dies, that would be 90 billion per year just for that problem. 
+And yet it doesn't happen. 
+So, why is that? 
+Well, I think what part of the problem is that, in Haiti, although the problem is huge, somehow we understand it, it's localized. 
+You give your money to Doctors Without Borders, you give your money to Partners In Health, and they'll send in the doctors, and they'll send in the lumber, and they'll helicopter things out and in. 
+And the problem of poverty is not like that. 
+So, first, it's mostly invisible; second, it's huge; and third, we don't know whether we are doing the right thing. 
+There's no silver bullet. 
+You cannot helicopter people out of poverty. 
+And that's very frustrating. 
+But look what we just did today. 
+I gave you three simple answers to three questions: Give lentils to immunize people, provide free bed nets, deworm children. 
+With immunization or bed nets, you can save a life for 300 dollars per life saved. 
+With deworming, you can get an extra year of education for three dollars. 
+So we cannot eradicate poverty just yet, but we can get started. 
+And maybe we can get started small with things that we know are effective. 
+Here's an example of how this can be powerful. 
+Deworming. 
+Worms have a little bit of a problem grabbing the headlines. 
+They are not beautiful and don't kill anybody. 
+And yet, when the young global leader in Davos showed the numbers I gave you, they started Deworm the World. 
+And thanks to Deworm the World, and the effort of many country governments and foundations, 20 million school-aged children got dewormed in 2009. 
+So this evidence is powerful. 
+It can prompt action. 
+So we should get started now. 
+It's not going to be easy. 
+It's a very slow process. 
+You have to keep experimenting, and sometimes ideology has to be trumped by practicality. 
+And sometimes what works somewhere doesn't work elsewhere. 
+So it's a slow process, but there is no other way. 
+These economics I'm proposing, it's like 20th century medicine. 
+It's a slow, deliberative process of discovery. 
+There is no miracle cure, but modern medicine is saving millions of lives every year, and we can do the same thing. 
+And now, maybe, we can go back to the bigger question that I started with at the beginning. 
+I cannot tell you whether the aid we have spent in the past has made a difference, but can we come back here in 30 years and say, "" What we have done, it really prompted a change for the better. "" I believe we can and I hope we will. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Pat Mitchell: What is the story of this pin? 
+Madeleine Albright: This is "" Breaking the Glass Ceiling. "" PM: Oh. 
+That was well chosen, I would say, for TEDWomen. 
+MA: Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen. 
+And none of this pin stuff would have happened if it hadn't been for Saddam Hussein. 
+I'll tell you what happened. 
+I went to the United Nations as an ambassador, and it was after the Gulf War, and I was an instructed ambassador. 
+And the cease-fire had been translated into a series of sanctions resolutions, and my instructions were to say perfectly terrible things about Saddam Hussein constantly, which he deserved — he had invaded another country. 
+And so all of a sudden, a poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things, but among them an "" unparalleled serpent. "" And so I happened to have a snake pin. 
+So I wore it when we talked about Iraq. 
+(Laughter) And when I went out to meet the press, they zeroed in, said, "" Why are you wearing that snake pin? "" I said, "" Because Saddam Hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent. "" And then I thought, well this is fun. 
+So I went out and I bought a lot of pins that would, in fact, reflect what I thought we were going to do on any given day. 
+So that's how it all started. 
+PM: So how large is the collection? 
+MA: Pretty big. 
+It's now traveling. 
+At the moment it's in Indianapolis, but it was at the Smithsonian. 
+And it goes with a book that says, "" Read My Pins. "" (Laughter) PM: So is this a good idea. 
+I remember when you were the first woman as Secretary of State, and there was a lot of conversation always about what you were wearing, how you looked — the thing that happens to a lot of women, especially if they're the first in a position. 
+So how do you feel about that — the whole — MA: Well, it's pretty irritating actually because nobody ever describes what a man is wearing. 
+But people did pay attention to what clothes I had. 
+What was interesting was that, before I went up to New York as U.N. ambassador, I talked to Jeane Kirkpatrick, who'd been ambassador before me, and she said, "" You've got to get rid of your professor clothes. 
+Go out and look like a diplomat. "" So that did give me a lot of opportunities to go shopping. 
+But still, there were all kinds of questions about — "" did you wear a hat? "" "" How short was your skirt? "" And one of the things — if you remember Condoleezza Rice was at some event and she wore boots, and she got criticized over that. 
+And no guy ever gets criticized. But that's the least of it. 
+PM: It is, for all of us, men and women, finding our ways of defining our roles, and doing them in ways that make a difference in the world and shape the future. 
+How did you handle that balance between being the tough diplomatic and strong voice of this country to the rest of the world and also how you felt about yourself as a mother, a grandmother, nurturing... 
+and so how did you handle that? 
+MA: Well the interesting part was I was asked what it was like to be the first woman Secretary of State a few minutes after I'd been named. 
+And I said, "" Well I've been a woman for 60 years, but I've only been Secretary of State for a few minutes. "" So it evolved. 
+(Laughter) But basically I love being a woman. 
+And so what happened — and I think there will probably be some people in the audience that will identify with this — I went to my first meeting, first at the U.N., and that's when this all started, because that is a very male organization. 
+And I'm sitting there — there are 15 members of the Security Council — so 14 men sat there staring at me, and I thought — well you know how we all are. 
+You want to get the feeling of the room, and "" do people like me? "" and "" will I really say something intelligent? "" And all of a sudden I thought, "" Well, wait a minute. 
+I am sitting behind a sign that says' The United States, 'and if I don't speak today then the voice of the United States will not be heard, "" and it was the first time that I had that feeling that I had to step out of myself in my normal, reluctant female mode and decide that I had to speak on behalf of our country. 
+And so that happened more at various times, but I really think that there was a great advantage in many ways to being a woman. 
+I think we are a lot better at personal relationships, and then have the capability obviously of telling it like it is when it's necessary. 
+But I have to tell you, I have my youngest granddaughter, when she turned seven last year, said to her mother, my daughter, "" So what's the big deal about Grandma Maddie being Secretary of State? 
+Only girls are Secretary of State. "" (Laughter) (Applause) PM: Because in her lifetime — MA: That would be so. 
+PM: What a change that is. 
+As you travel now all over the world, which you do frequently, how do you assess this global narrative around the story of women and girls? 
+Where are we? 
+MA: I think we're slowly changing, but obviously there are whole pockets in countries where nothing is different. 
+And therefore it means that we have to remember that, while many of us have had huge opportunities — and Pat, you have been a real leader in your field — is that there are a lot of women that are not capable of worrying and taking care of themselves and understanding that women have to help other women. 
+And so what I have felt — and I have looked at this from a national security issue — when I was Secretary of State, I decided that women's issues had to be central to American foreign policy, not just because I'm a feminist, but because I believe that societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered, that values are passed down, the health situation is better, education is better, there is greater economic prosperity. 
+So I think that it behooves us — those of us that live in various countries where we do have economic and political voice — that we need to help other women. 
+And I really dedicated myself to that, both at the U.N. and then as Secretary of State. 
+PM: And did you get pushback from making that a central tenant of foreign policy? 
+MA: From some people. 
+I think that they thought that it was a soft issue. 
+The bottom line that I decided was actually women's issues are the hardest issues, because they are the ones that have to do with life and death in so many aspects, and because, as I said, it is really central to the way that we think about things. 
+Now for instance, some of the wars that took place when I was in office, a lot of them, the women were the main victims of it. 
+For instance, when I started, there were wars in the Balkans. 
+The women in Bosnia were being raped. 
+We then managed to set up a war crimes tribunal to deal specifically with those kinds of issues. 
+And by the way, one of the things that I did at that stage was, I had just arrived at the U.N., and when I was there, there were 183 countries in the U.N. 
+Now there are 192. 
+But it was one of the first times that I didn't have to cook lunch myself. 
+So I said to my assistant, "Invite the other women permanent representatives." 
+And I thought when I'd get to my apartment that there'd be a lot of women there. 
+I get there, and there are six other women, out of 183. 
+So the countries that had women representatives were Canada, Kazakhstan, Philippines, Trinidad Tobago, Jamaica, Lichtenstein and me. 
+So being an American, I decided to set up a caucus. 
+(Laughter) And so we set it up, and we called ourselves the G7. (Laughter) 
+PM: Is that "" Girl 7? "" MA: Girl 7. 
+And we lobbied on behalf of women's issues. 
+So we managed to get two women judges on this war crimes tribunal. 
+And then what happened was that they were able to declare that rape was a weapon of war, that it was against humanity. 
+(Applause) PM: So when you look around the world and you see that, in many cases — certainly in the Western world — women are evolving into more leadership positions, and even other places some barriers are being brought down, but there's still so much violence, still so many problems, and yet we hear there are more women at the negotiating tables. 
+Now you were at those negotiating tables when they weren't, when there was maybe you — one voice, maybe one or two others. 
+Do you believe, and can you tell us why, there is going to be a significant shift in things like violence and peace and conflict and resolution on a sustainable basis? 
+MA: Well I do think, when there are more women, that the tone of the conversation changes, and also the goals of the conversation change. 
+But it doesn't mean that the whole world would be a lot better if it were totally run by women. 
+If you think that, you've forgotten high school. 
+(Laughter) But the bottom line is that there is a way, when there are more women at the table, that there's an attempt to develop some understanding. 
+So for instance, what I did when I went to Burundi, we'd got Tutsi and Hutu women together to talk about some of the problems that had taken place in Rwanda. 
+And so I think the capability of women to put themselves — I think we're better about putting ourselves into the other guy's shoes and having more empathy. 
+I think it helps in terms of the support if there are other women in the room. 
+When I was Secretary of State, there were only 13 other women foreign ministers. 
+And so it was nice when one of them would show up. 
+For instance, she is now the president of Finland, but Tarja Halonen was the foreign minister of Finland and, at a certain stage, head of the European Union. 
+And it was really terrific. 
+Because one of the things I think you'll understand. 
+We went to a meeting, and the men in my delegation, when I would say, "" Well I feel we should do something about this, "" and they'd say, "" What do you mean, you feel? "" And so then Tarja was sitting across the table from me. 
+And all of a sudden we were talking about arms control, and she said, "" Well I feel we should do this. "" And my male colleagues kind of got it all of a sudden. 
+But I think it really does help to have a critical mass of women in a series of foreign policy positions. 
+The other thing that I think is really important: A lot of national security policy isn't just about foreign policy, but it's about budgets, military budgets, and how the debts of countries work out. 
+So if you have women in a variety of foreign policy posts, they can support each other when there are budget decisions being made in their own countries. 
+PM: So how do we get this balance we're looking for, then, in the world? 
+More women's voices at the table? 
+More men who believe that the balance is best? 
+MA: Well I think one of the things — I'm chairman of the board of an organization called the National Democratic Institute that works to support women candidates. 
+I think that we need to help in other countries to train women to be in political office, to figure out how they can in fact develop political voices. 
+I think we also need to be supportive when businesses are being created and just make sure that women help each other. 
+Now I have a saying that I feel very strongly about, because I am of a certain age where, when I started in my career, believe it or not, there were other women who criticized me: "Why aren't you in the carpool line?" 
+or "" Aren't your children suffering because you're not there all the time? "" And I think we have a tendency to make each other feel guilty. 
+In fact, I think "" guilt "" is every woman's middle name. 
+And so I think what needs to happen is we need to help each other. 
+And my motto is that there's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other. 
+(Applause) PM: Well Secretary Albright, I guess you'll be going to heaven. 
+Thank you for joining us today. 
+MA: Thank you all. Thanks Pat. 
+(Applause) 
+
+As a culture, we tell ourselves lots of stories about the future, and where we might move forward from this point. 
+Some of those stories are that somebody is just going to sort everything out for us. 
+Other stories are that everything is on the verge of unraveling. 
+But I want to tell you a different story here today. 
+Like all stories, it has a beginning. 
+My work, for a long time, has been involved in education, in teaching people practical skills for sustainability, teaching people how to take responsibility for growing some of their own food, how to build buildings using local materials, how to generate their own energy, and so on. 
+I lived in Ireland, built the first straw-bale houses in Ireland, and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing. 
+But all my work for many years was focused around the idea that sustainability means basically looking at the globalized economic growth model, and moderating what comes in at one end, and moderating the outputs at the other end. 
+And then I came into contact with a way of looking at things which actually changed that profoundly. 
+And in order to introduce you to that, I've got something here that I'm going to unveil, which is one of the great marvels of the modern age. 
+And it's something so astounding and so astonishing that I think maybe as I remove this cloth a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate. 
+If you could help me with that it would be fantastic. 
+(Laughter) This is a liter of oil. 
+This bottle of oil, distilled over a hundred million years of geological time, ancient sunlight, contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor — equivalent to about 35 strong people coming round and working for you. 
+We can turn it into a dazzling array of materials, medicine, modern clothing, laptops, a whole range of different things. 
+It gives us an energy return that's unimaginable, historically. 
+We've based the design of our settlements, our business models, our transport plans, even the idea of economic growth, some would argue, on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity. 
+Yet, when we take a step back, and look over the span of history, at what we might call the petroleum interval, it's a short period in history where we've discovered this extraordinary material, and then based a whole way of life around it. 
+But as we straddle the top of this energy mountain, at this stage, we move from a time where our economic success, our sense of individual prowess and well-being is directly linked to how much of this we consume, to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability. 
+And it's increasingly clear that we aren't going to be able to rely on the fact that we're going to have this at our disposal forever. 
+For every four barrels of oil that we consume, we only discover one. 
+And that gap continues to widen. 
+There is also the fact that the amount of energy that we get back from the oil that we discover is falling. 
+In the 1930s we got 100 units of energy back for every one that we put in to extract it. 
+Completely unprecedented, historically. 
+Already that's fallen to about 11. 
+And that's why, now, the new breakthroughs, the new frontiers in terms of oil extraction are scrambling about in Alberta, or at the bottom of the oceans. 
+There are 98 oil-producing nations in the world. 
+But of those, 65 have already passed their peak. 
+The moment when the world on average passes this peak, people wonder when that's going to happen. 
+And there is an emerging case that maybe that was what happened last July when the oil prices were so high. 
+But are we to assume that the same brilliance and creativity and adaptability that got us up to the top of that energy mountain in the first place is somehow mysteriously going to evaporate when we have to design a creative way back down the other side? 
+No. But the thinking that we have to come up with has to be based on a realistic assessment of where we are. 
+There is also the issue of climate change, is the other thing that underpins this transition approach. 
+But the thing that I notice, as I talk to climate scientists, is the increasingly terrified look they have in their eyes, as the data that's coming in, which is far ahead of what the IPCC are talking about. 
+So the IPCC said that we might see significant breakup of the arctic ice in 2100, in their worst case scenario. 
+Actually, if current trends continue, it could all be gone in five or 10 years' time. 
+If just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost is released as the world warms, it would offset all the savings that we need to make, in carbon, over the next 40 years to avoid runaway climate change. 
+We have no choice other than deep and urgent decarbonization. 
+But I'm always very interested to think about what might the stories be that the generations further down the slope from us are going to tell about us. 
+"" The generation that lived at the top of the mountain, that partied so hard, and so abused its inheritance. "" And one of the ways I like to do that is to look back at the stories people used to tell before we had cheap oil, before we had fossil fuels, and people relied on their own muscle, animal muscle energy, or a little bit of wind, little bit of water energy. 
+We had stories like "" The Seven-League Boots "": the giant who had these boots, where, once you put them on, with every stride you could cover seven leagues, or 21 miles, a kind of travel completely unimaginable to people without that kind of energy at their disposal. 
+Stories like The Magic Porridge Pot, where you had a pot where if you knew the magic words, this pot would just make as much food as you liked, without you having to do any work, provided you could remember the other magic word to stop it making porridge. 
+Otherwise you'd flood your entire town with warm porridge. 
+There is the story of "" The Elves and the Shoemaker. "" The people who make shoes go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and all the shoes are magically made for them. 
+It's something that was unimaginable to people then. 
+Now we have the seven-league boots in the form of Ryanair and Easyjet. 
+We have the magic porridge pot in the form of Walmart and Tesco. 
+And we have the elves in the form of China. 
+But we don't appreciate what an astonishing thing that has been. 
+And what are the stories that we tell ourselves now, as we look forward about where we're going to go. 
+And I would argue that there are four. There is the idea of business as usual, that the future will be like the present, just more of it. 
+But as we've seen over the last year, I think that's an idea that is increasingly coming into question. 
+And in terms of climate change, is something that is not actually feasible. 
+There is the idea of hitting the wall, that actually somehow everything is so fragile that it might just all unravel and collapse. 
+This is a popular story in some places. 
+The third story is the idea that technology can solve everything, that technology can somehow get us through this completely. 
+And it's an idea that I think is very prevalent at these TED Talks, the idea that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energy crisis, that a move to a knowledge economy can somehow neatly sidestep those energy constraints, the idea that we'll discover some fabulous new source of energy that will mean we can sweep all concerns about energy security to one side, the idea that we can step off neatly onto a completely renewable world. 
+But the world isn't Second Life. 
+We can't create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse. 
+And as we sit, exchanging free ideas with each other, there are still people mining coal in order to power the servers, extracting the minerals to make all of those things. 
+The breakfast that we eat as we sit down to check our email in the morning is still transported at great distances, usually at the expense of the local, more resilient food systems that would have supplied that in the past, which we've so effectively devalued and dismantled. 
+We can be astonishingly inventive and creative. 
+But we also live in a world with very real constraints and demands. 
+Energy and technology are not the same thing. 
+What I'm involved with is the transition response. 
+And this is really about looking the challenges of peak oil and climate change square in the face, and responding with a creativity and an adaptability and an imagination that we really need. 
+It's something which has spread incredibly fast. 
+And it is something which has several characteristics. 
+It's viral. It seems to spread under the radar very, very quickly. 
+It's open source. It's something which everybody who's involved with it develops and passes on as they work with it. 
+It's self-organizing. There is no great central organization that pushes this; people just pick up an idea and they run with it, and they implement it where they are. 
+It's solutions-focused. It's very much looking at what people can do where they are, to respond to this. 
+It's sensitive to place and to scale. 
+Transitional is completely different. 
+Transition groups in Chile, transition groups in the U.S., transition groups here, what they're doing looks very different in every place that you go to. 
+It learns very much from its mistakes. 
+And it feels historic. It tries to create a sense that this is a historic opportunity to do something really extraordinary. 
+And it's a process which is really joyful. 
+People have a huge amount of fun doing this, reconnecting with other people as they do it. 
+One of the things that underpins it is this idea of resilience. 
+And I think, in many ways, the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability. 
+The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology. 
+And it's really about how systems, settlements, withstand shock from the outside. 
+When they encounter shock from the outside that they don't just unravel and fall to pieces. 
+And I think it's a more useful concept than sustainability, as I said. 
+When our supermarkets have only two or three days' worth of food in them at any one time, often sustainability tends to focus on the energy efficiency of the freezers and on the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in. 
+Looking through the lens of resilience, we really question how we've let ourselves get into a situation that's so vulnerable. 
+Resilience runs much deeper: it's about building modularity into what we do, building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us. 
+This is a photograph of the Bristol and District Market Gardeners Association, in 1897. 
+This is at a time when the city of Bristol, which is quite close to here, was surrounded by commercial market gardens, which provided a significant amount of the food that was consumed in the town, and created a lot of employment for people, as well. 
+There was a degree of resilience, if you like, at that time, which we can now only look back on with envy. 
+So how does this transition idea work? 
+So basically, you have a group of people who are excited by the idea. 
+They pick up some of the tools that we've developed. 
+They start to run an awareness-raising program looking at how this might actually work in the town. 
+They show films, they give talks, and so on. 
+It's a process which is playful and creative and informative. 
+Then they start to form working groups, looking at different aspects of this, and then from that, there emerge a whole lot of projects which then the transition project itself starts to support and enable. 
+So it started out with some work I was involved in in Ireland, where I was teaching, and has since spread. 
+There are now over 200 formal transition projects. 
+And there are thousands of others who are at what we call the mulling stage. 
+They are mulling whether they're going to take it further. 
+And actually a lot of them are doing huge amounts of stuff. 
+But what do they actually do? You know, it's a kind of nice idea, but what do they actually do on the ground? 
+Well, I think it's really important to make the point that actually you know, this isn't something which is going to do everything on its own. 
+We need international legislation from Copenhagen and so on. 
+We need national responses. We need local government responses. 
+But all of those things are going to be much easier if we have communities that are vibrant and coming up with ideas and leading from the front, making unelectable policies electable, over the next 5 to 10 years. 
+Some of the things that emerge from it are local food projects, like community-supported agriculture schemes, urban food production, creating local food directories, and so on. 
+A lot of places now are starting to set up their own energy companies, community-owned energy companies, where the community can invest money into itself, to start putting in place the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need. 
+A lot of places are working with their local schools. 
+Newent in the Forest of Dean: big polytunnel they built for the school; the kids are learning how to grow food. 
+Promoting recycling, things like garden-share, that matches up people who don't have a garden who would like to grow food, with people who have gardens they aren't using anymore. 
+Planting productive trees throughout urban spaces. 
+And also starting to play around with the idea of alternative currencies. 
+This is Lewes in Sussex, who have recently launched the Lewes Pound, a currency that you can only spend within the town, as a way of starting to cycle money within the local economy. 
+You take it anywhere else, it's not worth anything. 
+But actually within the town you start to create these economic cycles much more effectively. 
+Another thing that they do is what we call an energy descent plan, which is basically to develop a plan B for the town. 
+Most of our local authorities, when they sit down to plan for the next five, 10, 15, 20 years of a community, still start by assuming that there will be more energy, more cars, more housing, more jobs, more growth, and so on. 
+What does it look like if that's not the case? And how can we embrace that and actually come up with something that was actually more likely to sustain everybody? 
+As a friend of mine says, "" Life is a series of things you're not quite ready for. "" And that's certainly been my experience with transition. 
+From three years ago, it just being an idea, this has become something that has virally swept around the world. 
+We're getting a lot of interest from government. Ed Miliband, the energy minister of this country, was invited to come to our recent conference as a keynote listener. 
+Which he did — (Laughter) (Applause) — and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea. 
+There are now two local authorities in this country who have declared themselves transitional local authorities, Leicestershire and Somerset. And in Stroud, the transition group there, in effect, wrote the local government's food plan. 
+And the head of the council said, "" If we didn't have Transition Stroud, we would have to invent all of that community infrastructure for the first time. "" As we see the spread of it, we see national hubs emerging. 
+In Scotland, the Scottish government's climate change fund has funded Transition Scotland as a national organization supporting the spread of this. 
+And we see it all over the place as well now. 
+But the key to transition is thinking not that we have to change everything now, but that things are already inevitably changing, and what we need to do is to work creatively with that, based on asking the right questions. 
+I think I'd like to just return at the end to the idea of stories. 
+Because I think stories are vital here. 
+And actually the stories that we tell ourselves, we have a huge dearth of stories about how to move forward creatively from here. 
+And one of the key things that transition does is to pull those stories out of what people are doing. 
+Stories about the community that's produced its own 21 pound note, for example, the school that's turned its car park into a food garden, the community that's founded its own energy company. 
+And for me, one of the great stories recently was the Obamas digging up the south lawn of the White House to create a vegetable garden. Because the last time that was done, when Eleanor Roosevelt did it, it led to the creation of 20 million vegetable gardens across the United States. 
+So the question I'd like to leave you with, really, is — for all aspects of the things that your community needs in order to thrive, how can it be done in such a way that drastically reduces its carbon emissions, while also building resilience? 
+Personally, I feel enormously grateful to have lived through the age of cheap oil. 
+I've been astonishingly lucky, we've been astonishingly lucky. 
+But let us honor what it has bought us, and move forward from this point. 
+Because if we cling to it, and continue to assume that it can underpin our choices, the future that it presents to us is one which is really unmanageable. 
+And by loving and leaving all that oil has done for us, and that the Oil Age has done for us, we are able to then begin the creation of a world which is more resilient, more nourishing, and in which, we find ourselves fitter, more skilled and more connected to each other. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Climate change is already a heavy topic, and it's getting heavier because we're understanding that we need to do more than we are. 
+We're understanding, in fact, that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions. 
+That's, to put it mildly, not what's on the table now. 
+And it tends to feel a little overwhelming when we look at what is there in reality today and the magnitude of the problem that we face. 
+And when we have overwhelming problems in front of us, we tend to seek simple answers. 
+And I think this is what we've done with climate change. 
+We look at where the emissions are coming from — they're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth, and we say, okay, well the problem is that they're coming out of fossil fuels that we're burning, so therefore, the answer must be to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy. 
+And while, of course, we do need clean energy, I would put to you that it's possible that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we're in fact setting ourselves up not to solve it. 
+And the reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing. 
+That shouldn't be news to any of us. 
+However, it's hard sometimes to remember the extent of that urbanization. 
+By mid-century, we're going to have about eight billion — perhaps more — people living in cities or within a day's travel of one. 
+We will be an overwhelmingly urban species. 
+In order to provide the kind of energy that it would take for eight billion people living in cities that are even somewhat like the cities that those of us in the global North live in today, we would have to generate an absolutely astonishing amount of energy. 
+It may be possible that we are not even able to build that much clean energy. 
+So if we're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet, we need to look somewhere else for the solution. 
+The solution, in fact, may be closer to hand than we think, because all of those cities we're building are opportunities. 
+Every city determines to a very large extent the amount of energy used by its inhabitants. 
+We tend to think of energy use as a behavioral thing — I choose to turn this light switch on — but really, enormous amounts of our energy use are predestined by the kinds of communities and cities that we live in. 
+I won't show you very many graphs today, but if I can just focus on this one for a moment, it really tells us a lot of what we need to know — which is, quite simply, that if you look, for example, at transportation, a major category of climate emissions, there is a direct relationship between how dense a city is and the amount of climate emissions that its residents spew out into the air. 
+And the correlation, of course, is that denser places tend to have lower emissions — which isn't really all that difficult to figure out, if you think about it. 
+Basically, we substitute, in our lives, access to the things we want. 
+We go out there and we hop in our cars and we drive from place to place. 
+And we're basically using mobility to get the access we need. 
+But when we live in a denser community, suddenly what we find, of course, is that the things we need are close by. 
+And since the most sustainable trip is the one that you never had to make in the first place, suddenly our lives become instantly more sustainable. 
+And it is possible, of course, to increase the density of the communities around us. 
+Some places are doing this with new eco districts, developing whole new sustainable neighborhoods, which is nice work if you can get it, but most of the time, what we're talking about is, in fact, reweaving the urban fabric that we already have. 
+So we're talking about things like infill development: really sharp little changes to where we have buildings, where we're developing. 
+Urban retrofitting: creating different sorts of spaces and uses out of places that are already there. 
+Increasingly, we're realizing that we don't even need to densify an entire city. 
+What we need instead is an average density that rises to a level where we don't drive as much and so on. 
+And that can be done by raising the density in very specific spots a whole lot. 
+So you can think of it as tent poles that actually raise the density of the entire city. 
+And we find that when we do that, we can, in fact, have a few places that are really hyper-dense within a wider fabric of places that are perhaps a little more comfortable and achieve the same results. 
+Now we may find that there are places that are really, really dense and still hold onto their cars, but the reality is that, by and large, what we see when we get a lot of people together with the right conditions is a threshold effect, where people simply stop driving as much, and increasingly, more and more people, if they're surrounded by places that make them feel at home, give up their cars altogether. 
+And this is a huge, huge energy savings, because what comes out of our tailpipe is really just the beginning of the story with climate emissions from cars. 
+We have the manufacture of the car, the disposal of the car, all of the parking and freeways and so on. 
+When you can get rid of all of those because somebody doesn't use any of them really, you find that you can actually cut transportation emissions as much as 90 percent. 
+And people are embracing this. 
+All around the world, we're seeing more and more people embrace this walkshed life. 
+People are saying that it's moving from the idea of the dream home to the dream neighborhood. 
+And when you layer that over with the kind of ubiquitous communications that we're starting to see, what you find is, in fact, even more access suffused into spaces. 
+Some of it's transportation access. 
+This is a Mapnificent map that shows me, in this case, how far I can get from my home in 30 minutes using public transportation. 
+Some of it is about walking. It's not all perfect yet. 
+This is Google Walking Maps. 
+I asked how to do the greater Ridgeway, and it told me to go via Guernsey. 
+It did tell me that this route maybe missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths, though. 
+(Laughter) But the technologies are getting better, and we're starting to really kind of crowdsource this navigation. 
+And as we just heard earlier, of course, we're also learning how to put information on dumb objects. 
+Things that don't have any wiring in them at all, we're learning how to include in these systems of notation and navigation. 
+Part of what we're finding with this is that what we thought was the major point of manufacturing and consumption, which is to get a bunch of stuff, is not, in fact, how we really live best in dense environments. 
+What we're finding is that what we want is access to the capacities of things. 
+My favorite example is a drill. Who here owns a drill, a home power drill? 
+Okay. I do too. 
+The average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes in its entire lifetime, depending on who you ask. 
+And so what we do is we buy these drills that have a potential capacity of thousands of hours of drill time, use them once or twice to put a hole in the wall and let them sit. 
+Our cities, I would put to you, are stockpiles of these surplus capacities. 
+And while we could try and figure out new ways to use those capacities — such as cooking or making ice sculptures or even a mafia hit — what we probably will find is that, in fact, turning those products into services that we have access to when we want them, is a far smarter way to go. 
+And in fact, even space itself is turning into a service. 
+We're finding that people can share the same spaces, do stuff with vacant space. 
+Buildings are becoming bundles of services. 
+So we have new designs that are helping us take mechanical things that we used to spend energy on — like heating, cooling etc. — and turn them into things that we avoid spending energy on. 
+So we light our buildings with daylight. 
+We cool them with breezes. We heat them with sunshine. 
+In fact, when we use all these things, what we've found is that, in some cases, energy use in a building can drop as much as 90 percent. 
+Which brings on another threshold effect I like to call furnace dumping, which is, quite simply, if you have a building that doesn't need to be heated with a furnace, you save a whole bunch of money up front. 
+These things actually become cheaper to build than the alternatives. 
+Now when we look at being able to slash our product use, slash our transportation use, slash our building energy use, all of that is great, but it still leaves something behind. 
+And if we're going to really, truly become sustainable cities, we need to think a little differently. 
+This is one way to do it. 
+This is Vancouver's propaganda about how green a city they are. 
+And certainly lots of people have taken to heart this idea that a sustainable city is covered in greenery. 
+So we have visions like this. 
+We have visions like this. We have visions like this. 
+Now all of these are fine projects, but they really have missed an essential point, which is it's not about the leaves above, it's about the systems below. 
+Do they, for instance, capture rainwater so that we can reduce water use? 
+Water is energy intensive. 
+Do they, perhaps, include green infrastructure, so that we can take runoff and water that's going out of our houses and clean it and filter it and grow urban street trees? 
+Do they connect us back to the ecosystems around us by, for example, connecting us to rivers and allowing for restoration? 
+Do they allow for pollination, pollinator pathways that bees and butterflies and such can come back into our cities? 
+Do they even take the very waste matter that we have from food and fiber and so forth, and turn it back into soil and sequester carbon — take carbon out of the air in the process of using our cities? 
+I would submit to you that all of these things are not only possible, they're being done right now, and that it's a darn good thing. 
+Because right now, our economy by and large operates as Paul Hawken said, "" by stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP. "" And if we have another eight billion or seven billion, or six billion, even, people, living on a planet where their cities also steal the future, we're going to run out of future really fast. 
+But if we think differently, I think that, in fact, we can have cities that are not only zero emissions, but have unlimited possibilities as well. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Someone who looks like me walks past you in the street. 
+Do you think they're a mother, a refugee or a victim of oppression? 
+Or do you think they're a cardiologist, a barrister or maybe your local politician? 
+Do you look me up and down, wondering how hot I must get or if my husband has forced me to wear this outfit? 
+What if I wore my scarf like this? 
+I can walk down the street in the exact same outfit and what the world expects of me and the way I'm treated depends on the arrangement of this piece of cloth. 
+But this isn't going to be another monologue about the hijab because Lord knows, Muslim women are so much more than the piece of cloth they choose, or not, to wrap their head in. 
+This is about looking beyond your bias. 
+What if I walked past you and later on you'd found out that actually I was a race car engineer, and that I designed my own race car and I ran my university's race team, because it's true. 
+What if I told you that I was actually trained as a boxer for five years, because that's true, too. 
+Would it surprise you? 
+Why? 
+Ladies and gentlemen, ultimately, that surprise and the behaviors associated with it are the product of something called unconscious bias, or implicit prejudice. 
+And that results in the ridiculously detrimental lack of diversity in our workforce, particularly in areas of influence. 
+Hello, Australian Federal Cabinet. 
+(Applause) Let me just set something out from the outset: Unconscious bias is not the same as conscious discrimination. 
+I'm not saying that in all of you, there's a secret sexist or racist or ageist lurking within, waiting to get out. 
+That's not what I'm saying. 
+We all have our biases. 
+They're the filters through which we see the world around us. 
+I'm not accusing anyone, bias is not an accusation. 
+Rather, it's something that has to be identified, acknowledged and mitigated against. 
+Bias can be about race, it can be about gender. 
+It can also be about class, education, disability. 
+The fact is, we all have biases against what's different, what's different to our social norms. 
+The thing is, if we want to live in a world where the circumstances of your birth do not dictate your future and where equal opportunity is ubiquitous, then each and every one of us has a role to play in making sure unconscious bias does not determine our lives. 
+There's this really famous experiment in the space of unconscious bias and that's in the space of gender in the 1970s and 1980s. 
+So orchestras, back in the day, were made up mostly of dudes, up to only five percent were female. 
+And apparently, that was because men played it differently, presumably better, presumably. 
+But in 1952, The Boston Symphony Orchestra started an experiment. 
+They started blind auditions. 
+So rather than face-to-face auditions, you would have to play behind a screen. 
+Now funnily enough, no immediate change was registered until they asked the audition-ers to take their shoes off before they entered the room. 
+because the clickity-clack of the heels against the hardwood floors was enough to give the ladies away. 
+Now get this, there results of the audition showed that there was a 50 percent increased chance a woman would progress past the preliminary stage. 
+And it almost tripled their chances of getting in. 
+What does that tell us? 
+Well, unfortunately for the guys, men actually didn't play differently, but there was the perception that they did. 
+And it was that bias that was determining their outcome. 
+So what we're doing here is identifying and acknowledging that a bias exists. 
+And look, we all do it. 
+Let me give you an example. 
+A son and his father are in a horrible car accident. 
+The father dies on impact and the son, who's severely injured, is rushed to hospital. 
+The surgeon looks at the son when they arrive and is like, "I can't operate." 
+Why? 
+"The boy is my son." 
+How can that be? 
+Ladies and gentlemen, the surgeon is his mother. 
+Now hands up — and it's okay — but hands up if you initially assumed the surgeon was a guy? 
+There's evidence that that unconscious bias exists, but we all just have to acknowledge that it's there and then look at ways that we can move past it so that we can look at solutions. 
+Now one of the interesting things around the space of unconscious bias is the topic of quotas. 
+And this something that's often brought up. 
+And of of the criticisms is this idea of merit. 
+Look, I don't want to be picked because I'm a chick, I want to be picked because I have merit, because I'm the best person for the job. 
+It's a sentiment that's pretty common among female engineers that I work with and that I know. 
+And yeah, I get it, I've been there. 
+But, if the merit idea was true, why would identical resumes, in an experiment done in 2012 by Yale, identical resumes sent out for a lab technician, why would Jennifers be deemed less competent, be less likely to be offered the job, and be paid less than Johns. 
+The unconscious bias is there, but we just have to look at how we can move past it. 
+And, you know, it's interesting, there's some research that talks about why this is the case and it's called the merit paradox. 
+And in organizations — and this is kind of ironic — in organizations that talk about merit being their primary value-driver in terms of who they hire, they were more likely to hire dudes and more likely to pay the guys more because apparently merit is a masculine quality. 
+But, hey. 
+So you guys think you've got a good read on me, you kinda think you know what's up. 
+Can you imagine me running one of these? 
+Can you imagine me walking in and being like, "Hey boys, this is what's up. This is how it's done." 
+Well, I'm glad you can. 
+(Applause) Because ladies and gentlemen, that's my day job. 
+And the cool thing about it is that it's pretty entertaining. 
+Actually, in places like Malaysia, Muslim women on rigs isn't even comment-worthy. 
+There are that many of them. 
+But, it is entertaining. 
+I remember, I was telling one of the guys, "Hey, mate, look, I really want to learn how to surf." 
+And he's like, "" Yassmin, I don't know how you can surf with all that gear you've got on, and I don't know any women-only beaches. "" And then, the guy came up with a brilliant idea, he was like, "" I know, you run that organization Youth Without Borders, right? 
+Why don't you start a clothing line for Muslim chicks in beaches. 
+You can call it Youth Without Boardshorts. "" (Laughter) And I was like, "" Thanks, guys. "" And I remember another bloke telling me that I should eat all the yogurt I could because that was the only culture I was going to get around there. 
+But, the problem is, it's kind of true because there's an intense lack of diversity in our workforce, particularly in places of influence. 
+Now, in 2010, The Australian National University did an experiment where they sent out 4,000 identical applications to entry level jobs, essentially. 
+To get the same number of interviews as someone with an Anglo-Saxon name, if you were Chinese, you had to send out 68 percent more applications. 
+If you were Middle Eastern — Abdel-Magied — you had to send out 64 percent, and if you're Italian, you're pretty lucky, you only have to send out 12 percent more. 
+In places like Silicon Valley, it's not that much better. 
+In Google, they put out some diversity results and 61 percent white, 30 percent Asian and nine, a bunch of blacks, Hispanics, all that kind of thing. 
+And the rest of the tech world is not that much better and they've acknowledged it, but I'm not really sure what they're doing about it. 
+The thing is, it doesn't trickle up. 
+In a study done by Green Park, who are a British senior exec supplier, they said that over half of the FTSE 100 companies don't have a nonwhite leader at their board level, executive or non-executive. 
+And two out of every three don't have an executive who's from a minority. 
+And most of the minorities that are at that sort of level are non-executive board directors. 
+So their influence isn't that great. 
+I've told you a bunch of terrible things. 
+You're like, "" Oh my god, how bad is that? What can I do about it? "" Well, fortunately, we've identified that there's a problem. 
+There's a lack of opportunity, and that's due to unconscious bias. 
+But you might be sitting there thinking, "I ain't brown. What's that got to do with me?" 
+Let me offer you a solution. 
+And as I've said before, we live in a world where we're looking for an ideal. 
+And if we want to create a world where the circumstances of your birth don't matter, we all have to be part of the solution. 
+And interestingly, the author of the lab resume experiment offered some sort of a solution. 
+She said the one thing that brought the successful women together, the one thing that they had in common, was the fact that they had good mentors. 
+So mentoring, we've all kind of heard that before, it's in the vernacular. 
+Here's another challenge for you. 
+I challenge each and every one of you to mentor someone different. 
+Think about it. 
+Everyone wants to mentor someone who kind of is familiar, who looks like us, we have shared experiences. 
+If I see a Muslim chick who's got a bit of attitude, I'm like, "" What's up? We can hang out. "" You walk into a room and there's someone who went to the same school, you play the same sports, there's a high chance that you're going to want to help that person out. 
+But for the person in the room who has no shared experiences with you it becomes extremely difficult to find that connection. 
+The idea of finding someone different to mentor, someone who doesn't come from the same background as you, whatever that background is, is about opening doors for people who couldn't even get to the damn hallway. 
+Because ladies and gentlemen, the world is not just. 
+People are not born with equal opportunity. 
+I was born in one of the poorest cities in the world, Khartoum. 
+I was born brown, I was born female, and I was born Muslim in a world that is pretty suspicious of us for reasons I can't control. 
+However, I also acknowledge the fact that I was born with privilege. 
+I was born with amazing parents, I was given an education and had the blessing of migrating to Australia. 
+But also, I've been blessed with amazing mentors who've opened doors for me that I didn't even know were there. 
+A mentor who said to me, "" Hey, your story's interesting. 
+Let's write something about it so that I can share it with people. "" A mentor who said, "" I know you're all those things that don't belong on an Australian rig, but come on anyway. "" And here I am, talking to you. 
+And I'm not the only one. 
+There's all sorts of people in my communities that I see have been helped out by mentors. 
+A young Muslim man in Sydney who ended up using his mentor's help to start up a poetry slam in Bankstown and now it's a huge thing. 
+And he's able to change the lives of so many other young people. 
+Or a lady here in Brisbane, an Afghan lady who's a refugee, who could barely speak English when she came to Australia, her mentors helped her become a doctor and she took our Young Queenslander of the Year Award in 2008. 
+She's an inspiration. 
+This is so not smooth. 
+This is me. 
+But I'm also the woman in the rig clothes, and I'm also the woman who was in the abaya at the beginning. 
+Would you have chosen to mentor me if you had seen me in one of those other versions of who I am? 
+Because I'm that same person. 
+We have to look past our unconscious bias, find someone to mentor who's at the opposite end of your spectrum because structural change takes time, and I don't have that level of patience. 
+So if we're going to create a change, if we're going to create a world where we all have those kinds of opportunities, then choose to open doors for people. 
+Because you might think that diversity has nothing to do with you, but we are all part of this system and we can all be part of that solution. 
+And if you don't know where to find someone different, go to the places you wouldn't usually go. 
+If you enroll in private high school tutoring, go to your local state school or maybe just drop into your local refugee tutoring center. 
+Or perhaps you work at an office. 
+Take out that new grad who looks totally out of place — 'cause that was me — and open doors for them, not in a tokenistic way, because we're not victims, but show them the opportunities because opening up your world will make you realize that you have access to doors that they didn't even know existed and you didn't even know they didn't have. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, there is a problem in our community with lack of opportunity, especially due to unconscious bias. 
+But each and every one one of you has the potential to change that. 
+I know you've been given a lot of challenges today, but if you can take this one piece and think about it a little differently, because diversity is magic. 
+And I encourage you to look past your initial perceptions because I bet you, they're probably wrong. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I started my journey 30 years ago. 
+And I worked in mines. And I realized that this was a world unseen. 
+And I wanted, through color and large format cameras and very large prints, to make a body of work that somehow became symbols of our use of the landscape, how we use the land. 
+And to me this was a key component that somehow, through this medium of photography, which allows us to contemplate these landscapes, that I thought photography was perfectly suited to doing this type of work. 
+And after 17 years of photographing large industrial landscapes, it occurred to me that oil is underpinning the scale and speed. 
+Because that is what has changed, is the speed at which we're taking all our resources. 
+And so then I went out to develop a whole series on the landscape of oil. 
+And what I want to do is to kind of map an arc that there is extraction, where we're taking it from the ground, refinement. And that's one chapter. 
+The other chapter that I wanted to look at was how we use it — our cities, our cars, our motorcultures, where people gather around the vehicle as a celebration. 
+And then the third one is this idea of the end of oil, this entropic end, where all of our parts of cars, our tires, oil filters, helicopters, planes — where are the landscapes where all of that stuff ends up? 
+And to me, again, photography was a way in which I could explore and research the world, and find those places. 
+And another idea that I had as well, that was brought forward by an ecologist — he basically did a calculation where he took one liter of gas and said, well, how much carbon it would take, and how much organic material? 
+It was 23 metric tons for one liter. 
+So whenever I fill up my gas, I think of that liter, and how much carbon. 
+And I know that oil comes from the ocean and phytoplankton, but he did the calculations for our Earth and what it had to do to produce that amount of energy. 
+From the photosynthetic growth, it would take 500 years of that growth to produce what we use, the 30 billion barrels we use per year. 
+And that also brought me to the fact that this poses such a risk to our society. 
+Looking at 30 billion per year, we look at our two largest suppliers, Saudi Arabia and now Canada, with its dirty oil. 
+And together they only form about 15 years of supply. 
+The whole world, at 1.2 trillion estimated reserves, only gives us about 45 years. 
+So, it's not a question of if, but a question of when peak oil will come upon us. 
+So, to me, using photography — and I feel that all of us need to now begin to really take the task of using our talents, our ways of thinking, to begin to deal with what I think is probably one of the most challenging issues of our time, how to deal with our energy crisis. 
+And I would like to say that, on the other side of it, 30, 40 years from now, the children that I have, I can look at them and say, "" We did everything we possibly, humanly could do, to begin to mitigate this, what I feel is one of the most important and critical moments in our time. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I wrote this poem after hearing a pretty well known actress tell a very well known interviewer on television, "" I'm really getting into the Internet lately. 
+I just wish it were more organized. "" So... 
+(Laughter) If I controlled the Internet, you could auction your broken heart on eBay. 
+Take the money; go to Amazon; buy a phonebook for a country you've never been to — call folks at random until you find someone who flirts really well in a foreign language. 
+(Laughter) If I were in charge of the Internet, you could Mapquest your lover's mood swings. 
+Hang left at cranky, right at preoccupied, U-turn on silent treatment, all the way back to tongue kissing and good lovin '. 
+You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection. 
+Some days, I'm as shallow as a baking pan, but I still stretch miles in all directions. 
+If I owned the Internet, Napster, Monster and Friendster.com would be one big website. 
+That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job and you're really just chattin 'with your pals. 
+(Laughter) Heck, if I ran the Web, you could email dead people. (Laughter) 
+They would not email you back (Laughter) — but you'd get an automated reply. (Laughter) 
+Their name in your inbox (Laughter) — it's all you wanted anyway. 
+And a message saying, "" Hey, it's me. I miss you. 
+(Laughter) Listen, you'll see being dead is dandy. 
+Now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving candy. "" If I designed the Internet, childhood.com would be a loop of a boy in an orchard, with a ski pole for a sword, trashcan lid for a shield, shouting, "" I am the emperor of oranges. 
+I am the emperor of oranges. I am the emperor of oranges. "" Now follow me, OK? 
+(Laughter) Grandma.com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit-bath instructions. 
+One, two, three. 
+That links with hotdiggitydog.com. 
+That is my grandfather. 
+They take you to gruff-ex-cop-on-his-fourth-marriage.dad. 
+He forms an attachment to kind-of-ditzy-but-still-sends-ginger-snaps-for-Christmas.mom, who downloads the boy in the orchard, the emperor of oranges, who grows up to be me — the guy who usually goes too far. 
+So if I were emperor of the Internet, I guess I'd still be mortal, huh? 
+But at that point, I would probably already have the lowest possible mortgage and the most enlarged possible penis (Laughter) — so I would outlaw spam on my first day in office. 
+I wouldn't need it. 
+I'd be like some kind of Internet genius, and me, I'd like to upgrade to deity and maybe just like that — pop! — I'd go wireless. 
+(Laughter) Huh? Maybe Google would hire this. 
+I could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus until the World Wide Web is as wise, as wild and as organized as I think a modern-day miracle / oracle can get, but, ooh-eee, you want to bet just how whack and un-PC your Mac or PC is going to be when I'm rocking hot-shit-hot-shot-god.net? 
+I guess it's just like life. 
+It is not a question of if you can — it's: do ya? 
+We can interfere with the interface. 
+We can make "" You've got Hallelujah "" the national anthem of cyberspace every lucky time we log on. 
+You don't say a prayer. 
+You don't write a psalm. 
+You don't chant an "" om. "" You send one blessed email to whomever you're thinking of at dah-da-la-dat-da-dah-da-la-dat.com. 
+Thank you, TED. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I thought of a different way, by thinking, well, the talks revolve around certain themes. 
+
+Think about your day for a second. 
+You woke up, felt fresh air on your face as you walked out the door, encountered new colleagues and had great discussions, and felt in awe when you found something new. 
+But I bet there's something you didn't think about today — something so close to home that you probably don't think about it very often at all. 
+And that's that all the sensations, feelings, decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called the brain. 
+Now the brain may not look like much from the outside — a couple pounds of pinkish-gray flesh, amorphous — but the last hundred years of neuroscience have allowed us to zoom in on the brain, and to see the intricacy of what lies within. 
+And they've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons. 
+Now unlike a human-designed computer, where there's a fairly small number of different parts — we know how they work, because we humans designed them — the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells, maybe tens of thousands. 
+They come in different shapes; they're made out of different molecules. 
+And they project and connect to different brain regions, and they also change different ways in different disease states. 
+Let's make it concrete. 
+There's a class of cells, a fairly small cell, an inhibitory cell, that quiets its neighbors. 
+It's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in disorders like schizophrenia. 
+It's called the basket cell. 
+And this cell is one of the thousands of kinds of cell that we are learning about. 
+New ones are being discovered everyday. 
+As just a second example: these pyramidal cells, large cells, they can span a significant fraction of the brain. 
+They're excitatory. 
+And these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy. 
+Every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device. 
+They receive input from thousands of upstream partners and compute their own electrical outputs, which then, if they pass a certain threshold, will go to thousands of downstream partners. 
+And this process, which takes just a millisecond or so, happens thousands of times a minute in every one of your 100 billion cells, as long as you live and think and feel. 
+So how are we going to figure out what this circuit does? 
+Ideally, we could go through the circuit and turn these different kinds of cell on and off and see whether we could figure out which ones contribute to certain functions and which ones go wrong in certain pathologies. 
+If we could activate cells, we could see what powers they can unleash, what they can initiate and sustain. 
+If we could turn them off, then we could try and figure out what they're necessary for. 
+And that's a story I'm going to tell you about today. 
+And honestly, where we've gone through over the last 11 years, through an attempt to find ways of turning circuits and cells and parts and pathways of the brain on and off, both to understand the science and also to confront some of the issues that face us all as humans. 
+Now before I tell you about the technology, the bad news is that a significant fraction of us in this room, if we live long enough, will encounter, perhaps, a brain disorder. 
+Already, a billion people have had some kind of brain disorder that incapacitates them, and the numbers don't do it justice though. 
+These disorders — schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction — they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are. 
+They take our identity and change our emotions and change who we are as people. 
+Now in the 20th century, there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders, and while many drugs have been developed that can alleviate symptoms of brain disorders, practically none of them can be considered to be cured. 
+And part of that's because we're bathing the brain in the chemical. 
+This elaborate circuit made out of thousands of different kinds of cell is being bathed in a substance. 
+That's also why, perhaps, most of the drugs, and not all, on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too. 
+Now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain. 
+And for Parkinson's disease, Cochlear implants, these have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorder. 
+But electricity also will go in all directions — the path of least resistance, which is where that phrase, in part, comes from. 
+And it also will affect normal circuits as well as the abnormal ones that you want to fix. 
+So again, we're sent back to the idea of ultra-precise control. 
+Could we dial-in information precisely where we want it to go? 
+So when I started in neuroscience 11 years ago, I had trained as an electrical engineer and a physicist, and the first thing I thought about was, if these neurons are electrical devices, all we need to do is to find some way of driving those electrical changes at a distance. 
+If we could turn on the electricity in one cell, but not its neighbors, that would give us the tool we need to activate and shut down these different cells, figure out what they do and how they contribute to the networks in which they're embedded. 
+And also it would allow us to have the ultra-precise control we need in order to fix the circuit computations that have gone awry. 
+Now how are we going to do that? 
+Well there are many molecules that exist in nature, which are able to convert light into electricity. 
+You can think of them as little proteins that are like solar cells. 
+If we can install these molecules in neurons somehow, then these neurons would become electrically drivable with light. 
+And their neighbors, which don't have the molecule, would not. 
+There's one other magic trick you need to make this all happen, and that's the ability to get light into the brain. 
+And to do that — the brain doesn't feel pain — you can put — taking advantage of all the effort that's gone into the Internet and communications and so on — optical fibers connected to lasers that you can use to activate, in animal models for example, in pre-clinical studies, these neurons and to see what they do. 
+So how do we do this? 
+Around 2004, in collaboration with Gerhard Nagel and Karl Deisseroth, this vision came to fruition. 
+There's a certain alga that swims in the wild, and it needs to navigate towards light in order to photosynthesize optimally. 
+And it senses light with a little eye-spot, which works not unlike how our eye works. 
+In its membrane, or its boundary, it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity. 
+So these molecules are called channelrhodopsins. 
+And each of these proteins acts just like that solar cell that I told you about. 
+When blue light hits it, it opens up a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eye-spot, and that allows this eye-spot to have an electrical signal just like a solar cell charging up a battery. 
+So what we need to do is to take these molecules and somehow install them in neurons. 
+And because it's a protein, it's encoded for in the DNA of this organism. 
+So all we've got to do is take that DNA, put it into a gene therapy vector, like a virus, and put it into neurons. 
+So it turned out that this was a very productive time in gene therapy, and lots of viruses were coming along. 
+So this turned out to be very simple to do. 
+And early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004, we gave it a try, and it worked on the first try. 
+You take this DNA and you put it into a neuron. 
+The neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell, like putting solar panels on a roof, and the next thing you know, you have a neuron which can be activated with light. 
+So this is very powerful. 
+One of the tricks you have to do is to figure out how to deliver these genes to the cells that you want and not all the other neighbors. 
+And you can do that; you can tweak the viruses so they hit just some cells and not others. 
+And there's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells. 
+This field has now come to be known as optogenetics. 
+And just as one example of the kind of thing you can do, you can take a complex network, use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network. 
+And then when you shine light on the entire network, just that cell type will be activated. 
+So for example, lets sort of consider that basket cell I told you about earlier — the one that's atrophied in schizophrenia and the one that is inhibitory. 
+If we can deliver that gene to these cells — and they're not going to be altered by the expression of the gene, of course — and then flash blue light over the entire brain network, just these cells are going to be driven. 
+And when the light turns off, these cells go back to normal, so they don't seem to be averse against that. 
+Not only can you use this to study what these cells do, what their power is in computing in the brain, but you can also use this to try to figure out — well maybe we could jazz up the activity of these cells, if indeed they're atrophied. 
+Now I want to tell you a couple of short stories about how we're using this, both at the scientific, clinical and pre-clinical levels. 
+One of the questions we've confronted is, what are the signals in the brain that mediate the sensation of reward? 
+Because if you could find those, those would be some of the signals that could drive learning. 
+The brain will do more of whatever got that reward. 
+And also these are signals that go awry in disorders such as addiction. 
+So if we could figure out what cells they are, we could maybe find new targets for which drugs could be designed or screened against, or maybe places where electrodes could be put in for people who have very severe disability. 
+So to do that, we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the Fiorella group, where one side of this little box, if the animal goes there, the animal gets a pulse of light in order to make different cells in the brain sensitive to light. 
+So if these cells can mediate reward, the animal should go there more and more. 
+And so that's what happens. 
+This animal's going to go to the right-hand side and poke his nose there, and he gets a flash of blue light every time he does that. 
+And he'll do that hundreds and hundreds of times. 
+These are the dopamine neurons, which some of you may have heard about, in some of the pleasure centers in the brain. 
+Now we've shown that a brief activation of these is enough, indeed, to drive learning. 
+Now we can generalize the idea. 
+Instead of one point in the brain, we can devise devices that span the brain, that can deliver light into three-dimensional patterns — arrays of optical fibers, each coupled to its own independent miniature light source. 
+And then we can try to do things in vivo that have only been done to-date in a dish — like high-throughput screening throughout the entire brain for the signals that can cause certain things to happen. 
+Or that could be good clinical targets for treating brain disorders. 
+And one story I want to tell you about is how can we find targets for treating post-traumatic stress disorder — a form of uncontrolled anxiety and fear. 
+And one of the things that we did was to adopt a very classical model of fear. 
+This goes back to the Pavlovian days. 
+It's called Pavlovian fear conditioning — where a tone ends with a brief shock. 
+The shock isn't painful, but it's a little annoying. 
+And over time — in this case, a mouse, which is a good animal model, commonly used in such experiments — the animal learns to fear the tone. 
+The animal will react by freezing, sort of like a deer in the headlights. 
+Now the question is, what targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear? 
+So what we do is we play that tone again after it's been associated with fear. 
+But we activate targets in the brain, different ones, using that optical fiber array I told you about in the previous slide, in order to try and figure out which targets can cause the brain to overcome that memory of fear. 
+And so this brief video shows you one of these targets that we're working on now. 
+This is an area in the prefrontal cortex, a region where we can use cognition to try to overcome aversive emotional states. 
+And the animal's going to hear a tone — and a flash of light occurred there. 
+There's no audio on this, but you can see the animal's freezing. 
+This tone used to mean bad news. 
+And there's a little clock in the lower left-hand corner, so you can see the animal is about two minutes into this. 
+And now this next clip is just eight minutes later. 
+And the same tone is going to play, and the light is going to flash again. 
+Okay, there it goes. Right now. 
+And now you can see, just 10 minutes into the experiment, that we've equipped the brain by photoactivating this area to overcome the expression of this fear memory. 
+Now over the last couple of years, we've gone back to the tree of life because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off. 
+If we could do that, this could be extremely powerful. 
+If you can delete cells just for a few milliseconds or seconds, you can figure out what necessary role they play in the circuits in which they're embedded. 
+And we've now surveyed organisms from all over the tree of life — every kingdom of life except for animals, we see slightly differently. 
+And we found all sorts of molecules, they're called halorhodopsins or archaerhodopsins, that respond to green and yellow light. 
+And they do the opposite thing of the molecule I told you about before with the blue light activator channelrhodopsin. 
+Let's give an example of where we think this is going to go. 
+Consider, for example, a condition like epilepsy, where the brain is overactive. 
+Now if drugs fail in epileptic treatment, one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain. 
+But that's obviously irreversible, and there could be side effects. 
+What if we could just turn off that brain for a brief amount of time, until the seizure dies away, and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state — sort of like a dynamical system that's being coaxed down into a stable state. 
+So this animation just tries to explain this concept where we made these cells sensitive to being turned off with light, and we beam light in, and just for the time it takes to shut down a seizure, we're hoping to be able to turn it off. 
+And so we don't have data to show you on this front, but we're very excited about this. 
+Now I want to close on one story, which we think is another possibility — which is that maybe these molecules, if you can do ultra-precise control, can be used in the brain itself to make a new kind of prosthetic, an optical prosthetic. 
+I already told you that electrical stimulators are not uncommon. 
+Seventy-five thousand people have Parkinson's deep-brain stimulators implanted. 
+Maybe 100,000 people have Cochlear implants, which allow them to hear. 
+There's another thing, which is you've got to get these genes into cells. 
+And new hope in gene therapy has been developed because viruses like the adeno-associated virus, which probably most of us around this room have, and it doesn't have any symptoms, which have been used in hundreds of patients to deliver genes into the brain or the body. 
+And so far, there have not been serious adverse events associated with the virus. 
+There's one last elephant in the room, the proteins themselves, which come from algae and bacteria and fungi, and all over the tree of life. 
+Most of us don't have fungi or algae in our brains, so what is our brain going to do if we put that in? 
+Are the cells going to tolerate it? Will the immune system react? 
+In its early days — these have not been done on humans yet — but we're working on a variety of studies to try and examine this, and so far we haven't seen overt reactions of any severity to these molecules or to the illumination of the brain with light. 
+So it's early days, to be upfront, but we're excited about it. 
+I wanted to close with one story, which we think could potentially be a clinical application. 
+Now there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors, our light sensors that are in the back of our eye, are gone. 
+And the retina, of course, is a complex structure. 
+Now let's zoom in on it here, so we can see it in more detail. 
+The photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top, and then the signals that are detected by the photoreceptors are transformed by various computations until finally that layer of cells at the bottom, the ganglion cells, relay the information to the brain, where we see that as perception. 
+In many forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa, or macular degeneration, the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed. 
+Now how could you repair this? 
+It's not even clear that a drug could cause this to be restored, because there's nothing for the drug to bind to. 
+On the other hand, light can still get into the eye. 
+The eye is still transparent and you can get light in. 
+So what if we could just take these channelrhodopsins and other molecules and install them on some of these other spare cells and convert them into little cameras. 
+And because there's so many of these cells in the eye, potentially, they could be very high-resolution cameras. 
+So this is some work that we're doing. 
+It's being led by one of our collaborators, Alan Horsager at USC, and being sought to be commercialized by a start-up company Eos Neuroscience, which is funded by the NIH. 
+And what you see here is a mouse trying to solve a maze. 
+It's a six-arm maze. And there's a bit of water in the maze to motivate the mouse to move, or he'll just sit there. 
+And the goal, of course, of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that's under the lit top port. 
+Now mice are smart, so this mouse solves the maze eventually, but he does a brute-force search. 
+He's swimming down every avenue until he finally gets to the platform. 
+So he's not using vision to do it. 
+These different mice are different mutations that recapitulate different kinds of blindness that affect humans. 
+And so we're being careful in trying to look at these different models so we come up with a generalized approach. 
+So how are we going to solve this? 
+We're going to do exactly what we outlined in the previous slide. 
+We're going to take these blue light photosensors and install them on a layer of cells in the middle of the retina in the back of the eye and convert them into a camera — just like installing solar cells all over those neurons to make them light sensitive. 
+Light is converted to electricity on them. 
+So this mouse was blind a couple weeks before this experiment and received one dose of this photosensitive molecule in a virus. 
+And now you can see, the animal can indeed avoid walls and go to this little platform and make cognitive use of its eyes again. 
+And to point out the power of this: these animals are able to get to that platform just as fast as animals that have seen their entire lives. 
+So this pre-clinical study, I think, bodes hope for the kinds of things we're hoping to do in the future. 
+To close, I want to point out that we're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology. 
+We're developing these tools, but we share them freely with hundreds of groups all over the world, so people can study and try to treat different disorders. 
+And our hope is that, by figuring out brain circuits at a level of abstraction that lets us repair them and engineer them, we can take some of these intractable disorders that I told you about earlier, practically none of which are cured, and in the 21st century make them history. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Juan Enriquez: So some of the stuff is a little dense. 
+(Laughter) But the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs, and being able to target those specifically is a first step. 
+The second thing that I think I heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors, like an on / off switch. 
+Ed Boyden: That's right. 
+JE: Which makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code. 
+EB: Right, yeah. 
+So with blue light, we can drive information, and it's in the form of a one. 
+And by turning things off, it's more or less a zero. 
+So our hope is to eventually build brain coprocessors that work with the brain so we can augment functions in people with disabilities. 
+JE: And in theory, that means that, as a mouse feels, smells, hears, touches, you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros. 
+EB: Sure, yeah. We're hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes can drive certain behaviors and certain thoughts and certain feelings, and use that to understand more about the brain. 
+JE: Does that mean that some day you could download memories and maybe upload them? 
+EB: Well that's something we're starting to work on very hard. 
+We're now working on some work where we're trying to tile the brain with recording elements too. 
+So we can record information and then drive information back in — sort of computing what the brain needs in order to augment its information processing. 
+JE: Well, that might change a couple things. Thank you. (EB: Thank you.) (Applause) 
+
+Mark Zuckerberg, a journalist was asking him a question about the news feed. 
+And the journalist was asking him, "Why is this so important?" 
+And Zuckerberg said, "" A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. "" And I want to talk about what a Web based on that idea of relevance might look like. 
+So when I was growing up in a really rural area in Maine, the Internet meant something very different to me. 
+It meant a connection to the world. 
+It meant something that would connect us all together. 
+And I was sure that it was going to be great for democracy and for our society. 
+But there's this shift in how information is flowing online, and it's invisible. 
+And if we don't pay attention to it, it could be a real problem. 
+So I first noticed this in a place I spend a lot of time — my Facebook page. 
+I'm progressive, politically — big surprise — but I've always gone out of my way to meet conservatives. 
+I like hearing what they're thinking about; I like seeing what they link to; I like learning a thing or two. 
+And so I was surprised when I noticed one day that the conservatives had disappeared from my Facebook feed. 
+And what it turned out was going on was that Facebook was looking at which links I clicked on, and it was noticing that, actually, I was clicking more on my liberal friends' links than on my conservative friends' links. 
+And without consulting me about it, it had edited them out. 
+They disappeared. 
+So Facebook isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible, algorithmic editing of the Web. 
+Google's doing it too. 
+If I search for something, and you search for something, even right now at the very same time, we may get very different search results. 
+Even if you're logged out, one engineer told me, there are 57 signals that Google looks at — everything from what kind of computer you're on to what kind of browser you're using to where you're located — that it uses to personally tailor your query results. 
+Think about it for a second: there is no standard Google anymore. 
+And you know, the funny thing about this is that it's hard to see. 
+You can't see how different your search results are from anyone else's. 
+But a couple of weeks ago, I asked a bunch of friends to Google "" Egypt "" and to send me screen shots of what they got. 
+So here's my friend Scott's screen shot. 
+And here's my friend Daniel's screen shot. 
+When you put them side-by-side, you don't even have to read the links to see how different these two pages are. 
+But when you do read the links, it's really quite remarkable. 
+Daniel didn't get anything about the protests in Egypt at all in his first page of Google results. 
+Scott's results were full of them. 
+And this was the big story of the day at that time. 
+That's how different these results are becoming. 
+So it's not just Google and Facebook either. 
+This is something that's sweeping the Web. 
+There are a whole host of companies that are doing this kind of personalization. 
+Yahoo News, the biggest news site on the Internet, is now personalized — different people get different things. 
+Huffington Post, the Washington Post, the New York Times — all flirting with personalization in various ways. 
+And this moves us very quickly toward a world in which the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see. 
+As Eric Schmidt said, "" It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them. "" So I do think this is a problem. 
+And I think, if you take all of these filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. 
+And your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. 
+And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. 
+But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. 
+And more importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out. 
+So one of the problems with the filter bubble was discovered by some researchers at Netflix. 
+And they were looking at the Netflix queues, and they noticed something kind of funny that a lot of us probably have noticed, which is there are some movies that just sort of zip right up and out to our houses. 
+They enter the queue, they just zip right out. 
+So "" Iron Man "" zips right out, and "" Waiting for Superman "" can wait for a really long time. 
+What they discovered was that in our Netflix queues there's this epic struggle going on between our future aspirational selves and our more impulsive present selves. 
+You know we all want to be someone who has watched "" Rashomon, "" but right now we want to watch "" Ace Ventura "" for the fourth time. 
+(Laughter) So the best editing gives us a bit of both. 
+It gives us a little bit of Justin Bieber and a little bit of Afghanistan. 
+It gives us some information vegetables; it gives us some information dessert. 
+And the challenge with these kinds of algorithmic filters, these personalized filters, is that, because they're mainly looking at what you click on first, it can throw off that balance. 
+And instead of a balanced information diet, you can end up surrounded by information junk food. 
+What this suggests is actually that we may have the story about the Internet wrong. 
+In a broadcast society — this is how the founding mythology goes — in a broadcast society, there were these gatekeepers, the editors, and they controlled the flows of information. 
+And along came the Internet and it swept them out of the way, and it allowed all of us to connect together, and it was awesome. 
+But that's not actually what's happening right now. 
+What we're seeing is more of a passing of the torch from human gatekeepers to algorithmic ones. 
+And the thing is that the algorithms don't yet have the kind of embedded ethics that the editors did. 
+So if algorithms are going to curate the world for us, if they're going to decide what we get to see and what we don't get to see, then we need to make sure that they're not just keyed to relevance. 
+We need to make sure that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important — this is what TED does — other points of view. 
+And the thing is, we've actually been here before as a society. 
+In 1915, it's not like newspapers were sweating a lot about their civic responsibilities. 
+Then people noticed that they were doing something really important. 
+That, in fact, you couldn't have a functioning democracy if citizens didn't get a good flow of information, that the newspapers were critical because they were acting as the filter, and then journalistic ethics developed. 
+It wasn't perfect, but it got us through the last century. 
+And so now, we're kind of back in 1915 on the Web. 
+And we need the new gatekeepers to encode that kind of responsibility into the code that they're writing. 
+I know that there are a lot of people here from Facebook and from Google — Larry and Sergey — people who have helped build the Web as it is, and I'm grateful for that. 
+But we really need you to make sure that these algorithms have encoded in them a sense of the public life, a sense of civic responsibility. 
+We need you to make sure that they're transparent enough that we can see what the rules are that determine what gets through our filters. 
+And we need you to give us some control so that we can decide what gets through and what doesn't. 
+Because I think we really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. 
+We need it to connect us all together. 
+We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. 
+And it's not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a Web of one. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I thought, "" I will talk about death. "" Seemed to be the passion today. 
+Actually, it's not about death. 
+It's inevitable, terrible, but really what I want to talk about is, I'm just fascinated by the legacy people leave when they die. 
+That's what I want to talk about. 
+So Art Buchwald left his legacy of humor with a video that appeared soon after he died, saying, "Hi! I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died." 
+And Mike, who I met at Galapagos, a trip which I won at TED, is leaving notes on cyberspace where he is chronicling his journey through cancer. 
+And my father left me a legacy of his handwriting through letters and a notebook. 
+In the last two years of his life, when he was sick, he filled a notebook with his thoughts about me. 
+He wrote about my strengths, weaknesses, and gentle suggestions for improvement, quoting specific incidents, and held a mirror to my life. 
+After he died, I realized that no one writes to me anymore. 
+Handwriting is a disappearing art. 
+I'm all for email and thinking while typing, but why give up old habits for new? 
+Why can't we have letter writing and email exchange in our lives? 
+There are times when I want to trade all those years that I was too busy to sit with my dad and chat with him, and trade all those years for one hug. 
+But too late. 
+But that's when I take out his letters and I read them, and the paper that touched his hand is in mine, and I feel connected to him. 
+So maybe we all need to leave our children with a value legacy, and not a financial one. 
+A value for things with a personal touch — an autographed book, a soul-searching letter. 
+If a fraction of this powerful TED audience could be inspired to buy a beautiful paper — John, it'll be a recycled one — and write a beautiful letter to someone they love, we actually may start a revolution where our children may go to penmanship classes. 
+So what do I plan to leave for my son? 
+I collect autographed books, and those of you authors in the audience know I hound you for them — and CDs too, Tracy. 
+I plan to publish my own notebook. 
+As I witnessed my father's body being swallowed by fire, I sat by his funeral pyre and wrote. 
+I have no idea how I'm going to do it, but I am committed to compiling his thoughts and mine into a book, and leave that published book for my son. 
+I'd like to end with a few verses of what I wrote at my father's cremation. 
+And those linguists, please pardon the grammar, because I've not looked at it in the last 10 years. 
+I took it out for the first time to come here. 
+"" Picture in a frame, ashes in a bottle, boundless energy confined in the bottle, forcing me to deal with reality, forcing me to deal with being grown up. 
+I hear you and I know that you would want me to be strong, but right now, I am being sucked down, surrounded and suffocated by these raging emotional waters, craving to cleanse my soul, trying to emerge on a firm footing one more time, to keep on fighting and flourishing just as you taught me. 
+Your encouraging whispers in my whirlpool of despair, holding me and heaving me to shores of sanity, to live again and to love again. "" Thank you. 
+
+Thomas Dolby: For pure pleasure please welcome the lovely, the delectable, and the bilingual Rachelle Garniez. 
+(Applause) (Bells) (Trumpet) Rachelle Garniez: ♫ Quand il me prend dans ses bras ♫ ♫ Il me parle tout bas, ♫ ♫ Je vois la vie en rose. ♫ ♫ Il me dit des mots d'amour, ♫ ♫ Des mots de tous les jours, ♫ ♫ Et ca me fait quelque chose. ♫ ♫ Il est entre dans mon coeur ♫ ♫ Une part de bonheur ♫ ♫ Dont je connais la cause. ♫ ♫ C'est lui pour moi. Moi pour lui ♫ ♫ Dans la vie, ♫ ♫ Il me l'a dit, l'a jure [pour] la vie. ♫ ♫ Et des que je l'apercois ♫ 
+♫ Alors je sens en moi ♫ ♫ Mon coeur qui bat ♫ (Applause) 
+
+I'd like to show you a video of some of the models I work with. 
+They're all the perfect size, and they don't have an ounce of fat. 
+Did I mention they're gorgeous? 
+And they're scientific models? (Laughs) As you might have guessed, I'm a tissue engineer, and this is a video of some of the beating heart that I've engineered in the lab. 
+And one day we hope that these tissues can serve as replacement parts for the human body. 
+But what I'm going to tell you about today is how these tissues make awesome models. 
+Well, let's think about the drug screening process for a moment. 
+You go from drug formulation, lab testing, animal testing, and then clinical trials, which you might call human testing, before the drugs get to market. 
+It costs a lot of money, a lot of time, and sometimes, even when a drug hits the market, it acts in an unpredictable way and actually hurts people. 
+And the later it fails, the worse the consequences. 
+It all boils down to two issues. One, humans are not rats, and two, despite our incredible similarities to one another, actually those tiny differences between you and I have huge impacts with how we metabolize drugs and how those drugs affect us. 
+So what if we had better models in the lab that could not only mimic us better than rats but also reflect our diversity? 
+Let's see how we can do it with tissue engineering. 
+One of the key technologies that's really important is what's called induced pluripotent stem cells. 
+They were developed in Japan pretty recently. 
+Okay, induced pluripotent stem cells. 
+They're a lot like embryonic stem cells except without the controversy. 
+We induce cells, okay, say, skin cells, by adding a few genes to them, culturing them, and then harvesting them. 
+So they're skin cells that can be tricked, kind of like cellular amnesia, into an embryonic state. 
+So without the controversy, that's cool thing number one. 
+Cool thing number two, you can grow any type of tissue out of them: brain, heart, liver, you get the picture, but out of your cells. 
+So we can make a model of your heart, your brain on a chip. 
+Generating tissues of predictable density and behavior is the second piece, and will be really key towards getting these models to be adopted for drug discovery. 
+And this is a schematic of a bioreactor we're developing in our lab to help engineer tissues in a more modular, scalable way. 
+Going forward, imagine a massively parallel version of this with thousands of pieces of human tissue. 
+It would be like having a clinical trial on a chip. 
+But another thing about these induced pluripotent stem cells is that if we take some skin cells, let's say, from people with a genetic disease and we engineer tissues out of them, we can actually use tissue-engineering techniques to generate models of those diseases in the lab. 
+Here's an example from Kevin Eggan's lab at Harvard. 
+He generated neurons from these induced pluripotent stem cells from patients who have Lou Gehrig's Disease, and he differentiated them into neurons, and what's amazing is that these neurons also show symptoms of the disease. 
+So with disease models like these, we can fight back faster than ever before and understand the disease better than ever before, and maybe discover drugs even faster. 
+This is another example of patient-specific stem cells that were engineered from someone with retinitis pigmentosa. 
+This is a degeneration of the retina. 
+It's a disease that runs in my family, and we really hope that cells like these will help us find a cure. 
+So some people think that these models sound well and good, but ask, "" Well, are these really as good as the rat? "" The rat is an entire organism, after all, with interacting networks of organs. 
+A drug for the heart can get metabolized in the liver, and some of the byproducts may be stored in the fat. 
+Don't you miss all that with these tissue-engineered models? 
+Well, this is another trend in the field. 
+By combining tissue engineering techniques with microfluidics, the field is actually evolving towards just that, a model of the entire ecosystem of the body, complete with multiple organ systems to be able to test how a drug you might take for your blood pressure might affect your liver or an antidepressant might affect your heart. 
+These systems are really hard to build, but we're just starting to be able to get there, and so, watch out. 
+But that's not even all of it, because once a drug is approved, tissue engineering techniques can actually help us develop more personalized treatments. 
+This is an example that you might care about someday, and I hope you never do, because imagine if you ever get that call that gives you that bad news that you might have cancer. 
+Wouldn't you rather test to see if those cancer drugs you're going to take are going to work on your cancer? 
+This is an example from Karen Burg's lab, where they're using inkjet technologies to print breast cancer cells and study its progressions and treatments. 
+And some of our colleagues at Tufts are mixing models like these with tissue-engineered bone to see how cancer might spread from one part of the body to the next, and you can imagine those kinds of multi-tissue chips to be the next generation of these kinds of studies. 
+And so thinking about the models that we've just discussed, you can see, going forward, that tissue engineering is actually poised to help revolutionize drug screening at every single step of the path: disease models making for better drug formulations, massively parallel human tissue models helping to revolutionize lab testing, reduce animal testing and human testing in clinical trials, and individualized therapies that disrupt what we even consider to be a market at all. 
+Essentially, we're dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning about how it acts in the human body. 
+Our process for doing this is essentially transforming biotechnology and pharmacology into an information technology, helping us discover and evaluate drugs faster, more cheaply and more effectively. 
+It gives new meaning to models against animal testing, doesn't it? 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Two weeks ago I was in my studio in Paris, and the phone rang and I heard, "" Hey, JR, you won the TED Prize 2011. 
+You have to make a wish to save the world. "" I was lost. 
+I mean, I can't save the world. Nobody can. 
+The world is fucked up. 
+Come on, you have dictators ruling the world, population is growing by millions, there's no more fish in the sea, the North Pole is melting and as the last TED Prize winner said, we're all becoming fat. 
+(Laughter) Except maybe French people. 
+Whatever. 
+So I called back and I told her, "" Look, Amy, tell the TED guys I just won't show up. 
+I can't do anything to save the world. "" She said, "" Hey, JR, your wish is not to save the world, but to change the world. "" "Oh, all right." 
+(Laughter) "That's cool." 
+I mean, technology, politics, business do change the world — not always in a good way, but they do. 
+What about art? 
+Could art change the world? 
+I started when I was 15 years old. 
+And at that time, I was not thinking about changing the world. 
+I was doing graffiti — writing my name everywhere, using the city as a canvas. 
+I was going in the tunnels of Paris, on the rooftops with my friends. 
+Each trip was an excursion, was an adventure. 
+It was like leaving our mark on society, to say, "" I was here, "" on the top of a building. 
+So when I found a cheap camera on the subway, I started documenting those adventures with my friends and gave them back as photocopies — really small photos just that size. 
+That's how, at 17 years old, I started pasting them. 
+And I did my first "" expo de rue, "" which means sidewalk gallery. 
+And I framed it with color so you would not confuse it with advertising. 
+I mean, the city's the best gallery I could imagine. 
+I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. 
+I would control it directly with the public in the streets. 
+So that's Paris. 
+I would change — depending on the places I would go — the title of the exhibition. 
+That's on the Champs-Elysees. 
+I was quite proud of that one. 
+Because I was just 18 and I was just up there on the top of the Champs-Elysees. 
+Then when the photo left, the frame was still there. 
+(Laughter) November 2005: the streets are burning. 
+A large wave of riots had broken into the first projects of Paris. 
+Everyone was glued to the TV, watching disturbing, frightening images taken from the edge of the neighborhood. 
+I mean, these kids, without control, throwing Molotov cocktails, attacking the cops and the firemen, looting everything they could in the shops. 
+These were criminals, thugs, dangerous, destroying their own environment. 
+And then I saw it — could it be possible? — my photo on a wall revealed by a burning car — a pasting I'd done a year earlier — an illegal one — still there. 
+I mean, these were the faces of my friends. 
+I know those guys. 
+All of them are not angels, but they're not monsters either. 
+So it was kind of weird to see those images and those eyes stare back at me through a television. 
+So I went back there with a 28 mm lens. 
+It was the only one I had at that time. 
+But with that lens, you have to be as close as 10 inches from the person. 
+So you can do it only with their trust. 
+So I took full portraits of people from Le Bosquet. 
+They were making scary faces to play the caricature of themselves. 
+And then I pasted huge posters everywhere in the bourgeois area of Paris with the name, age, even building number of these guys. 
+A year later, the exhibition was displayed in front of the city hall of Paris. 
+And we go from thug images, who've been stolen and distorted by the media, who's now proudly taking over his own image. 
+That's where I realized the power of paper and glue. 
+So could art change the world? 
+A year later, I was listening to all the noise about the Middle East conflict. 
+I mean, at that time, trust me, they were only referring to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. 
+So with my friend Marco, we decided to go there and see who are the real Palestinians and who are the real Israelis. 
+Are they so different? 
+When we got there, we just went in the street, started talking with people everywhere, and we realized that things were a bit different from the rhetoric we heard in the media. 
+So we decided to take portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same jobs — taxi-driver, lawyer, cooks. 
+Asked them to make a face as a sign of commitment. 
+Not a smile — that really doesn't tell about who you are and what you feel. 
+They all accepted to be pasted next to the other. 
+I decided to paste in eight Israeli and Palestinian cities and on both sides of the wall. 
+We launched the biggest illegal art exhibition ever. 
+We called the project Face 2 Face. 
+The experts said, "" No way. 
+The people will not accept. 
+The army will shoot you, and Hamas will kidnap you. "" We said, "" Okay, let's try and push as far as we can. "" I love the way that people will ask me, "How big will my photo be?" 
+"It will be as big as your house." 
+When we did the wall, we did the Palestinian side. 
+So we arrived with just our ladders and we realized that they were not high enough. 
+And so Palestinians guys say, "Calm down. No wait. I'm going to find you a solution." 
+So he went to the Church of Nativity and brought back an old ladder that was so old that it could have seen Jesus being born. 
+(Laughter) We did Face 2 Face with only six friends, two ladders, two brushes, a rented car, a camera and 20,000 square feet of paper. 
+We had all sorts of help from all walks of life. 
+Okay, for example, that's Palestine. 
+We're in Ramallah right now. 
+We're pasting portraits — so both portraits in the streets in a crowded market. 
+People come around us and start asking, "What are you doing here?" 
+"" Oh, we're actually doing an art project and we are pasting an Israeli and a Palestinian doing the same job. 
+And those ones are actually two taxi-drivers. "" And then there was always a silence. 
+"" You mean you're pasting an Israeli face — doing a face — right here? "" "Well, yeah, yeah, that's part of the project." 
+And I would always leave that moment, and we would ask them, "So can you tell me who is who?" 
+And most of them couldn't say. 
+(Applause) We even pasted on Israeli military towers, and nothing happened. 
+When you paste an image, it's just paper and glue. 
+People can tear it, tag on it, or even pee on it — some are a bit high for that, I agree — but the people in the street, they are the curator. 
+The rain and the wind will take them off anyway. 
+They are not meant to stay. 
+But exactly four years after, the photos, most of them are still there. 
+Face 2 Face demonstrated that what we thought impossible was possible — and, you know what, even easy. 
+We didn't push the limit; we just showed that they were further than anyone thought. 
+In the Middle East, I experienced my work in places without [many] museums. 
+So the reactions in the street were kind of interesting. 
+So I decided to go further in this direction and go in places where there were zero museums. 
+When you go in these developing societies, women are the pillars of their community, but the men are still the ones holding the streets. 
+So we were inspired to create a project where men will pay tribute to women by posting their photos. 
+I called that project Women Are Heroes. 
+When I listened to all the stories everywhere I went on the continents, I couldn't always understand the complicated circumstances of their conflict. 
+I just observed. 
+Sometimes there was no words, no sentence, just tears. 
+I just took their pictures and pasted them. 
+Women Are Heroes took me around the world. 
+Most of the places I went to, I decided to go there because I've heard about it through the media. 
+So for example, in June 2008, I was watching TV in Paris, and then I heard about this terrible thing that happened in Rio de Janeiro — the first favela of Brazil named Providencia. 
+Three kids — that was three students — were [detained] by the army because they were not carrying their papers. 
+And the army took them, and instead of bringing them to the police station, they brought them to an enemy favela where they get chopped into pieces. 
+I was shocked. 
+All Brazil was shocked. 
+I heard it was one of the most violent favelas, because the largest drug cartel controls it. 
+So I decided to go there. 
+When I arrived — I mean, I didn't have any contact with any NGO. 
+There was none in place — no association, no NGOs, nothing — no eyewitnesses. 
+So we just walked around, and we met a woman, and I showed her my book. 
+And she said, "" You know what? 
+We're hungry for culture. 
+We need culture out there. "" So I went out and I started with the kids. 
+I just took a few photos of the kids, and the next day I came with the posters and we pasted them. 
+The day after, I came back and they were already scratched. 
+But that's okay. 
+I wanted them to feel that this art belongs to them. 
+Then the next day, I held a meeting on the main square and some women came. 
+They were all linked to the three kids that got killed. 
+There was the mother, the grandmother, the best friend — they all wanted to shout the story. 
+After that day, everyone in the favela gave me the green light. 
+I took more photos, and we started the project. 
+The drug lords were kind of worried about us filming in the place, so I told them, "" You know what? 
+I'm not interested in filming the violence and the weapons. 
+You see that enough in the media. 
+What I want to show is the incredible life and energy. 
+I've been seeing it around me the last few days. "" So that's a really symbolic pasting, because that's the first one we did that you couldn't see from the city. 
+And that's where the three kids got arrested, and that's the grandmother of one of them. 
+And on that stairs, that's where the traffickers always stand and there's a lot of exchange of fire. 
+Everyone there understood the project. 
+And then we pasted everywhere — the whole hill. 
+(Applause) What was interesting is that the media couldn't get in. 
+I mean, you should see that. 
+They would have to film us from a really long distance by helicopter and then have a really long lens, and we would see ourselves, on TV, pasting. 
+And they would put a number: "" Please call this number if you know what's going on in Providencia. "" We just did a project and then left so the media wouldn't know. 
+So how can we know about the project? 
+So they had to go and find the women and get an explanation from them. 
+So you create a bridge between the media and the anonymous women. 
+We kept traveling. 
+We went to Africa, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kenya. 
+In war-torn places like Monrovia, people come straight to you. 
+I mean, they want to know what you're up to. 
+They kept asking me, "" What is the purpose of your project? 
+Are you an NGO? Are you the media? "" Art. Just doing art. 
+Some people question, "" Why is it in black and white? 
+Don't you have color in France? "" (Laughter) Or they tell you, "" Are these people all dead? "" Some who understood the project would explain it to others. 
+And to a man who did not understand, I heard someone say, "" You know, you've been here for a few hours trying to understand, discussing with your fellows. 
+During that time, you haven't thought about what you're going to eat tomorrow. 
+This is art. "" I think it's people's curiosity that motivates them to come into the projects. 
+And then it becomes more. 
+It becomes a desire, a need, an armor. 
+On this bridge that's in Monrovia, ex-rebel soldiers helped us pasting a portrait of a woman that might have been raped during the war. 
+Women are always the first ones targeted during conflict. 
+This is Kibera, Kenya, one of the largest slums of Africa. 
+You might have seen images about the post-election violence that happened there in 2008. 
+This time we covered the roofs of the houses, but we didn't use paper, because paper doesn't prevent the rain from leaking inside the house — vinyl does. 
+Then art becomes useful. 
+So the people kept it. 
+You know what I love is, for example, when you see the biggest eye there, there are so [many] houses inside. 
+And I went there a few months ago — photos are still there — and it was missing a piece of the eye. 
+So I asked the people what happened. 
+"Oh, that guy just moved." 
+(Laughter) When the roofs were covered, a woman said as a joke, "Now God can see me." 
+When you look at Kibera now, they look back. 
+Okay, India. 
+Before I start that, just so you know, each time we go to a place, we don't have authorization, so we set up like commandos — we're a group of friends who arrive there, and we try to paste on the walls. 
+But there are places where you just can't paste on a wall. 
+In India it was just impossible to paste. 
+I heard culturally and because of the law, they would just arrest us at the first pasting. 
+So we decided to paste white, white on the walls. 
+So imagine white guys pasting white papers. 
+So people would come to us and ask us, "Hey, what are you up to?" 
+"Oh, you know, we're just doing art." "Art?" 
+Of course, they were confused. 
+But you know how India has a lot of dust in the streets, and the more dust you would have going up in the air, on the white paper you can almost see, but there is this sticky part like when you reverse a sticker. 
+So the more dust you have, the more it will reveal the photo. 
+So we could just walk in the street during the next days and the photos would get revealed by themselves. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+So we didn't get caught this time. 
+Each project — that's a film from Women Are Heroes. 
+(Music) Okay. 
+For each project we do a film. 
+And most of what you see — that's a trailer from "" Women Are Heroes "" — its images, photography, taken one after the other. 
+And the photos kept traveling even without us. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Hopefully, you'll see the film, and you'll understand the scope of the project and what the people felt when they saw those photos. 
+Because that's a big part of it. There's layers behind each photo. 
+Behind each image is a story. 
+Women Are Heroes created a new dynamic in each of the communities, and the women kept that dynamic after we left. 
+For example, we did books — not for sale — that all the community would get. 
+But to get it, they would have to [get] it signed by one of the women. 
+We did that in most of the places. 
+We go back regularly. 
+And so in Providencia, for example, in the favela, we have a cultural center running there. 
+In Kibera, each year we cover more roofs. 
+Because of course, when we left, the people who were just at the edge of the project said, "" Hey, what about my roof? "" So we decided to come the year after and keep doing the project. 
+A really important point for me is that I don't use any brand or corporate sponsors. 
+So I have no responsibility to anyone but myself and the subjects. 
+(Applause) And that is for me one of the more important things in the work. 
+I think, today, as important as the result is the way you do things. 
+And that has always been a central part of the work. 
+And what's interesting is that fine line that I have with images and advertising. 
+We just did some pasting in Los Angeles on another project in the last weeks. 
+And I was even invited to cover the MOCA museum. 
+But yesterday the city called them and said, "" Look, you're going to have to tear it down. 
+Because this can be taken for advertising, and because of the law, it has to be taken down. "" But tell me, advertising for what? 
+The people I photograph were proud to participate in the project and to have their photo in the community. 
+But they asked me for a promise basically. 
+They asked me, "" Please, make our story travel with you. "" So I did. That's Paris. 
+That's Rio. 
+In each place, we built exhibitions with a story, and the story traveled. 
+You understand the full scope of the project. 
+That's London. 
+New York. 
+And today, they are with you in Long Beach. 
+All right, recently I started a public art project where I don't use my artwork anymore. 
+I use Man Ray, Helen Levitt, Giacomelli, other people's artwork. 
+It doesn't matter today if it's your photo or not. 
+The importance is what you do with the images, the statement it makes where it's pasted. 
+So for example, I pasted the photo of the minaret in Switzerland a few weeks after they voted the law forbidding minarets in the country. 
+(Applause) This image of three men wearing gas masks was taken in Chernobyl originally, and I pasted it in Southern Italy, where the mafia sometimes bury the garbage under the ground. 
+In some ways, art can change the world. 
+Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions. 
+Art can change the way we see the world. 
+Art can create an analogy. 
+Actually the fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions, and then enables you to change the world. 
+When I do my work, I have two kinds of reactions. 
+People say, "" Oh, why don't you go in Iraq or Afghanistan. 
+They would be really useful. "" Or, "" How can we help? "" I presume that you belong to the second category, and that's good, because for that project, I'm going to ask you to take the photos and paste them. 
+So now my wish is: (mock drum roll) (Laughter) I wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world inside out. 
+And this starts right now. 
+Yes, everyone in the room. 
+Everyone watching. 
+I wanted that wish to actually start now. 
+So a subject you're passionate about, a person who you want to tell their story or even your own photos — tell me what you stand for. 
+Take the photos, the portraits, upload it — I'll give you all the details — and I'll send you back your poster. Join by groups and reveal things to the world. 
+The full data is on the website — insideoutproject.net — that is launching today. 
+What we see changes who we are. 
+When we act together, the whole thing is much more than the sum of the parts. 
+So I hope that, together, we'll create something that the world will remember. 
+And this starts right now and depends on you. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Last year when I was here, I was speaking to you about a swim which I did across the North Pole. 
+And while that swim took place three years ago, I can remember it as if it was yesterday. 
+I remember standing on the edge of the ice, about to dive into the water, and thinking to myself, I have never ever seen any place on this earth which is just so frightening. 
+The water is completely black. 
+The water is minus 1.7 degrees centigrade, or 29 degrees Fahrenheit. 
+It's flipping freezing in that water. 
+And then a thought came across my mind: if things go pear-shaped on this swim, how long will it take for my frozen body to sink the four and a half kilometers to the bottom of the ocean? 
+And then I said to myself, I've just got to get this thought out of my mind as quickly as possible. 
+And the only way I can dive into that freezing cold water and swim a kilometer is by listening to my iPod and really revving myself up, listening to everything from beautiful opera all the way across to Puff Daddy, and then committing myself a hundred percent — there is nothing more powerful than the made-up mind — and then walking up to the edge of the ice and just diving into the water. 
+And that swim took me 18 minutes and 50 seconds, and it felt like 18 days. 
+And I remember getting out of the water and my hands feeling so painful and looking down at my fingers, and my fingers were literally the size of sausages because — you know, we're made partially of water — when water freezes it expands, and so the cells in my fingers had frozen and expanded and burst. 
+And the most immediate thought when I came out of that water was the following: I'm never, ever going to do another cold water swim in my life again. 
+Anyway, last year, I heard about the Himalayas and the melting of the — (Laughter) and the melting of the glaciers because of climate change. 
+I heard about this lake, Lake Imja. 
+This lake has been formed in the last couple of years because of the melting of the glacier. 
+The glacier's gone all the way up the mountain and left in its place this big lake. 
+And I firmly believe that what we're seeing in the Himalayas is the next great, big battleground on this earth. 
+Nearly two billion people — so one in three people on this earth — rely on the water from the Himalayas. 
+And with a population increasing as quickly as it is, and with the water supply from these glaciers — because of climate change — decreasing so much, I think we have a real risk of instability. 
+North, you've got China; south, you've India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all these countries. 
+And so I decided to walk up to Mt. Everest, the highest mountain on this earth, and go and do a symbolic swim underneath the summit of Mt. Everest. 
+Now, I don't know if any of you have had the opportunity to go to Mt. Everest, but it's quite an ordeal getting up there. 
+28 great, big, powerful yaks carrying all the equipment up onto this mountain — I don't just have my Speedo, but there's a big film crew who then send all the images around the world. 
+The other thing which was so challenging about this swim is not just the altitude. 
+I wanted to do the swim at 5,300 meters above sea level. 
+So it's right up in the heavens. 
+It's very, very difficult to breath. You get altitude sickness. 
+I feels like you've got a man standing behind you with a hammer just hitting your head all the time. 
+That's not the worst part of it. 
+The worst part was this year was the year where they decided to do a big cleanup operation on Mt. Everest. 
+Many, many people have died on Mt. Everest, and this was the year they decided to go and recover all the bodies of the mountaineers and then bring them down the mountain. 
+And when you're walking up the mountain to attempt to do something which no human has ever done before, and, in fact, no fish — there are no fish up there swimming at 5,300 meters — When you're trying to do that, and then the bodies are coming past you, it humbles you, and you also realize very, very clearly that nature is so much more powerful than we are. 
+And we walked up this pathway, all the way up. 
+And to the right hand side of us was this great Khumbu Glacier. 
+And all the way along the glacier we saw these big pools of melting ice. 
+And then we got up to this small lake underneath the summit of Mt. Everest, and I prepared myself the same way as I've always prepared myself, for this swim which was going to be so very difficult. 
+I put on my iPod, I listened to some music, I got myself as aggressive as possible — but controlled aggression — and then I hurled myself into that water. 
+I swam as quickly as I could for the first hundred meters, and then I realized very, very quickly, I had a huge problem on my hands. 
+I could barely breathe. 
+I was gasping for air. 
+I then began to choke, and then it quickly led to me vomiting in the water. 
+And it all happened so quickly: I then — I don't know how it happened — but I went underwater. 
+And luckily, the water was quite shallow, and I was able to push myself off the bottom of the lake and get up and then take another gasp of air. 
+And then I said, carry on. Carry on. Carry on. 
+I carried on for another five or six strokes, and then I had nothing in my body, and I went down to the bottom of the lake. 
+And I don't where I got it from, but I was able to somehow pull myself up and as quickly as possible get to the side of the lake. 
+I've heard it said that drowning is the most peaceful death that you can have. 
+I have never, ever heard such utter bollocks. 
+(Laughter) It is the most frightening and panicky feeling that you can have. 
+I got myself to the side of the lake. 
+My crew grabbed me, and then we walked as quickly as we could down — over the rubble — down to our camp. 
+And there, we sat down, and we did a debrief about what had gone wrong there on Mt. Everest. 
+And my team just gave it to me straight. 
+They said, Lewis, you need to have a radical tactical shift if you want to do this swim. 
+Every single thing which you have learned in the past 23 years of swimming, you must forget. 
+Every single thing which you learned when you were serving in the British army, about speed and aggression, you put that to one side. 
+We want you to walk up the hill in another two days' time. 
+Take some time to rest and think about things. 
+We want you to walk up the mountain in two days' time, and instead of swimming fast, swim as slowly as possible. 
+Instead of swimming crawl, swim breaststroke. 
+And remember, never ever swim with aggression. 
+This is the time to swim with real humility. 
+And so we walked back up to the mountain two days later. 
+And I stood there on the edge of the lake, and I looked up at Mt. Everest — and she is one of the most beautiful mountains on the earth — and I said to myself, just do this slowly. 
+And I swam across the lake. 
+And I can't begin to tell you how good I felt when I came to the other side. 
+But I learned two very, very important lessons there on Mt. Everest, and I thank my team of Sherpas who taught me this. 
+The first one is that just because something has worked in the past so well, doesn't mean it's going to work in the future. 
+And similarly, now, before I do anything, I ask myself what type of mindset do I require to successfully complete a task. 
+And taking that into the world of climate change — which is, frankly, the Mt. Everest of all problems — just because we've lived the way we have lived for so long, just because we have consumed the way we have for so long and populated the earth the way we have for so long, doesn't mean that we can carry on the way we are carrying on. 
+The warning signs are all there. 
+When I was born, the world's population was 3.5 billion people. 
+We're now 6.8 billion people, and we're expected to be 9 billion people by 2050. 
+And then the second lesson, the radical, tactical shift. 
+And I've come here to ask you today: what radical tactical shift can you take in your relationship to the environment, which will ensure that our children and our grandchildren live in a safe world and a secure world, and most importantly, in a sustainable world? 
+And I ask you, please, to go away from here and think about that one radical tactical shift which you could make, which will make that big difference, and then commit a hundred percent to doing it. 
+Blog about it, tweet about it, talk about it, and commit a hundred percent, because very, very few things are impossible to achieve if we really put our whole minds to it. 
+So thank you very, very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called "" Blink, "" and it's about snap judgments and first impressions. 
+And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate. 
+(Laughter) But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it's not really about happiness. 
+So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years, a man who is a great personal hero of mine: someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce. 
+Howard's about this high, and he's round, and he's in his 60s, and he has big huge glasses and thinning gray hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he's a great aficionado of medieval history. 
+And Howard is very interested in measuring things. 
+We'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi in order to have the perfect drink. "" Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that's what Howard thought. 
+What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness — eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12 — and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration, right? 
+Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. 
+Howard is not so easily placated. 
+Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. 
+And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedeviled him for years. 
+Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi? "" And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafé. 
+This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. 
+And they would say, "" Move! Next! "" Tried to get business, nobody would hire him — he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it. 
+And finally, he had a breakthrough. 
+Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, "" Doctor Moskowitz, we want to make the perfect pickle. "" And he said, "There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles." 
+And this was even more important. 
+And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce: by sweetness, by level of garlic, by tomatoey-ness, by tartness, by sourness, by visible solids — my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. 
+And then he analyzed the data. 
+Let's see if they congregate around certain ideas. 
+And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. 
+There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain; there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy; and there are people who like it extra chunky. 
+And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. 
+And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, "" You're telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs? "" And he said "" Yes! "" (Laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. 
+Everyone else in the industry looked at what Howard had done, and they said, "Oh my god! We've been thinking all wrong!" 
+And then eventually even Ragù hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragù that he did for Prego. 
+(Laughter) That's Howard's doing. 
+Now why is that important? 
+(Laughter) It is, in fact, enormously important. 
+Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat, what will make people happy, is to ask them. 
+Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce. "" And for all those years — 20, 30 years — through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. 
+Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize — it's another very critical point — he made us realize the importance of what he likes to call "" horizontal segmentation. "" Why is this critical? 
+Used to be, there were two mustards: French's and Gulden's. 
+(Laughter) And instead of charging a dollar fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, the way that French's and Gulden's did, they decided to charge four dollars. 
+And everyone's take-home lesson from that was that the way to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. 
+They don't say, "" Do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or...? "" No! 
+And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say, "" You know what? You're wrong! 
+Italian tomato sauce is what? 
+Which were thin, you just put a little bit and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. 
+Now in medical science, we don't want to know, necessarily, just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. 
+I guess my cancer different from your cancer. 
+And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks. 
+And the example he used was coffee. 
+If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe three or four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. 
+The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy. 
+That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. 
+
+What you're doing, right now, at this very moment, is killing you. 
+More than cars or the Internet or even that little mobile device we keep talking about, the technology you're using the most almost every day is this, your tush. 
+Nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day, which is more than we're sleeping, at 7.7 hours. 
+Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don't even question how much we're doing it, and because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. 
+In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation. 
+Of course there's health consequences to this, scary ones, besides the waist. 
+Things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical [activity], Ten percent in fact, on both of those. 
+Six percent for heart disease, seven percent for type 2 diabetes, which is what my father died of. 
+Now, any of those stats should convince each of us to get off our duff more, but if you're anything like me, it won't. 
+What did get me moving was a social interaction. 
+Someone invited me to a meeting, but couldn't manage to fit me in to a regular sort of conference room meeting, and said, "I have to walk my dogs tomorrow. Could you come then?" 
+It seemed kind of odd to do, and actually, that first meeting, I remember thinking, "I have to be the one to ask the next question," because I knew I was going to huff and puff during this conversation. 
+And yet, I've taken that idea and made it my own. 
+So instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week. 
+It's changed my life. 
+But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other. 
+So now, several hundred of these walking meetings later, I've learned a few things. 
+First, there's this amazing thing about actually getting out of the box that leads to out-of-the-box thinking. 
+Whether it's nature or the exercise itself, it certainly works. 
+And second, and probably the more reflective one, is just about how much each of us can hold problems in opposition when they're really not that way. 
+And if we're going to solve problems and look at the world really differently, whether it's in governance or business or environmental issues, job creation, maybe we can think about how to reframe those problems as having both things be true. 
+Because it was when that happened with this walk-and-talk idea that things became doable and sustainable and viable. 
+So I started this talk talking about the tush, so I'll end with the bottom line, which is, walk and talk. 
+Walk the talk. 
+You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+For the last 10 years, I've been spending my time trying to figure out how and why human beings assemble themselves into social networks. 
+And the kind of social network I'm talking about is not the recent online variety, but rather, the kind of social networks that human beings have been assembling for hundreds of thousands of years, ever since we emerged from the African savannah. 
+So, I form friendships and co-worker and sibling and relative relationships with other people who in turn have similar relationships with other people. 
+And this spreads on out endlessly into a distance. 
+And you get a network that looks like this. 
+Every dot is a person. 
+Every line between them is a relationship between two people — different kinds of relationships. 
+And you can get this kind of vast fabric of humanity, in which we're all embedded. 
+And my colleague, James Fowler and I have been studying for quite sometime what are the mathematical, social, biological and psychological rules that govern how these networks are assembled and what are the similar rules that govern how they operate, how they affect our lives. 
+But recently, we've been wondering whether it might be possible to take advantage of this insight, to actually find ways to improve the world, to do something better, to actually fix things, not just understand things. 
+So one of the first things we thought we would tackle would be how we go about predicting epidemics. 
+And the current state of the art in predicting an epidemic — if you're the CDC or some other national body — is to sit in the middle where you are and collect data from physicians and laboratories in the field that report the prevalence or the incidence of certain conditions. 
+So, so and so patients have been diagnosed with something, or other patients have been diagnosed, and all these data are fed into a central repository, with some delay. 
+And if everything goes smoothly, one to two weeks from now you'll know where the epidemic was today. 
+And actually, about a year or so ago, there was this promulgation of the idea of Google Flu Trends, with respect to the flu, where by looking at people's searching behavior today, we could know where the flu — what the status of the epidemic was today, what's the prevalence of the epidemic today. 
+But what I'd like to show you today is a means by which we might get not just rapid warning about an epidemic, but also actually early detection of an epidemic. 
+And, in fact, this idea can be used not just to predict epidemics of germs, but also to predict epidemics of all sorts of kinds. 
+For example, anything that spreads by a form of social contagion could be understood in this way, from abstract ideas on the left like patriotism, or altruism, or religion to practices like dieting behavior, or book purchasing, or drinking, or bicycle-helmet [and] other safety practices, or products that people might buy, purchases of electronic goods, anything in which there's kind of an interpersonal spread. 
+A kind of a diffusion of innovation could be understood and predicted by the mechanism I'm going to show you now. 
+So, as all of you probably know, the classic way of thinking about this is the diffusion-of-innovation, or the adoption curve. 
+So here on the Y-axis, we have the percent of the people affected, and on the X-axis, we have time. 
+And at the very beginning, not too many people are affected, and you get this classic sigmoidal, or S-shaped, curve. 
+And the reason for this shape is that at the very beginning, let's say one or two people are infected, or affected by the thing and then they affect, or infect, two people, who in turn affect four, eight, 16 and so forth, and you get the epidemic growth phase of the curve. 
+And eventually, you saturate the population. 
+There are fewer and fewer people who are still available that you might infect, and then you get the plateau of the curve, and you get this classic sigmoidal curve. 
+And this holds for germs, ideas, product adoption, behaviors, and the like. 
+But things don't just diffuse in human populations at random. 
+They actually diffuse through networks. 
+Because, as I said, we live our lives in networks, and these networks have a particular kind of a structure. 
+Now if you look at a network like this — this is 105 people. 
+And the lines represent — the dots are the people, and the lines represent friendship relationships. 
+You might see that people occupy different locations within the network. 
+And there are different kinds of relationships between the people. 
+You could have friendship relationships, sibling relationships, spousal relationships, co-worker relationships, neighbor relationships and the like. 
+And different sorts of things spread across different sorts of ties. 
+For instance, sexually transmitted diseases will spread across sexual ties. 
+Or, for instance, people's smoking behavior might be influenced by their friends. 
+Or their altruistic or their charitable giving behavior might be influenced by their coworkers, or by their neighbors. 
+But not all positions in the network are the same. 
+So if you look at this, you might immediately grasp that different people have different numbers of connections. 
+Some people have one connection, some have two, some have six, some have 10 connections. 
+And this is called the "" degree "" of a node, or the number of connections that a node has. 
+But in addition, there's something else. 
+So, if you look at nodes A and B, they both have six connections. 
+But if you can see this image [of the network] from a bird's eye view, you can appreciate that there's something very different about nodes A and B. 
+So, let me ask you this — I can cultivate this intuition by asking a question — who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network, A or B? 
+(Audience: B.) Nicholas Christakis: B, it's obvious. 
+B is located on the edge of the network. 
+Now, who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip were spreading through the network? 
+A. And you have an immediate appreciation that A is going to be more likely to get the thing that's spreading and to get it sooner by virtue of their structural location within the network. 
+A, in fact, is more central, and this can be formalized mathematically. 
+So, if we want to track something that was spreading through a network, what we ideally would like to do is to set up sensors on the central individuals within the network, including node A, monitor those people that are right there in the middle of the network, and somehow get an early detection of whatever it is that is spreading through the network. 
+So if you saw them contract a germ or a piece of information, you would know that, soon enough, everybody was about to contract this germ or this piece of information. 
+And this would be much better than monitoring six randomly chosen people, without reference to the structure of the population. 
+And in fact, if you could do that, what you would see is something like this. 
+On the left-hand panel, again, we have the S-shaped curve of adoption. 
+In the dotted red line, we show what the adoption would be in the random people, and in the left-hand line, shifted to the left, we show what the adoption would be in the central individuals within the network. 
+On the Y-axis is the cumulative instances of contagion, and on the X-axis is the time. 
+And on the right-hand side, we show the same data, but here with daily incidence. 
+And what we show here is — like, here — very few people are affected, more and more and more and up to here, and here's the peak of the epidemic. 
+But shifted to the left is what's occurring in the central individuals. 
+And this difference in time between the two is the early detection, the early warning we can get, about an impending epidemic in the human population. 
+The problem, however, is that mapping human social networks is not always possible. 
+It can be expensive, not feasible, unethical, or, frankly, just not possible to do such a thing. 
+So, how can we figure out who the central people are in a network without actually mapping the network? 
+What we came up with was an idea to exploit an old fact, or a known fact, about social networks, which goes like this: Do you know that your friends have more friends than you do? 
+Your friends have more friends than you do, and this is known as the friendship paradox. 
+Imagine a very popular person in the social network — like a party host who has hundreds of friends — and a misanthrope who has just one friend, and you pick someone at random from the population; they were much more likely to know the party host. 
+And if they nominate the party host as their friend, that party host has a hundred friends, therefore, has more friends than they do. 
+And this, in essence, is what's known as the friendship paradox. 
+The friends of randomly chosen people have higher degree, and are more central than the random people themselves. 
+And you can get an intuitive appreciation for this if you imagine just the people at the perimeter of the network. 
+If you pick this person, the only friend they have to nominate is this person, who, by construction, must have at least two and typically more friends. 
+And that happens at every peripheral node. 
+And in fact, it happens throughout the network as you move in, everyone you pick, when they nominate a random — when a random person nominates a friend of theirs, you move closer to the center of the network. 
+So, we thought we would exploit this idea in order to study whether we could predict phenomena within networks. 
+Because now, with this idea we can take a random sample of people, have them nominate their friends, those friends would be more central, and we could do this without having to map the network. 
+And we tested this idea with an outbreak of H1N1 flu at Harvard College in the fall and winter of 2009, just a few months ago. 
+We took 1,300 randomly selected undergraduates, we had them nominate their friends, and we followed both the random students and their friends daily in time to see whether or not they had the flu epidemic. 
+And we did this passively by looking at whether or not they'd gone to university health services. 
+And also, we had them [actively] email us a couple of times a week. 
+Exactly what we predicted happened. 
+So the random group is in the red line. 
+The epidemic in the friends group has shifted to the left, over here. 
+And the difference in the two is 16 days. 
+By monitoring the friends group, we could get 16 days advance warning of an impending epidemic in this human population. 
+Now, in addition to that, if you were an analyst who was trying to study an epidemic or to predict the adoption of a product, for example, what you could do is you could pick a random sample of the population, also have them nominate their friends and follow the friends and follow both the randoms and the friends. 
+Among the friends, the first evidence you saw of a blip above zero in adoption of the innovation, for example, would be evidence of an impending epidemic. 
+Or you could see the first time the two curves diverged, as shown on the left. 
+When did the randoms — when did the friends take off and leave the randoms, and [when did] their curve start shifting? 
+And that, as indicated by the white line, occurred 46 days before the peak of the epidemic. 
+So this would be a technique whereby we could get more than a month-and-a-half warning about a flu epidemic in a particular population. 
+I should say that how far advanced a notice one might get about something depends on a host of factors. 
+It could depend on the nature of the pathogen — different pathogens, using this technique, you'd get different warning — or other phenomena that are spreading, or frankly, on the structure of the human network. 
+Now in our case, although it wasn't necessary, we could also actually map the network of the students. 
+So, this is a map of 714 students and their friendship ties. 
+And in a minute now, I'm going to put this map into motion. 
+We're going to take daily cuts through the network for 120 days. 
+The red dots are going to be cases of the flu, and the yellow dots are going to be friends of the people with the flu. 
+And the size of the dots is going to be proportional to how many of their friends have the flu. 
+So bigger dots mean more of your friends have the flu. 
+And if you look at this image — here we are now in September the 13th — you're going to see a few cases light up. 
+You're going to see kind of blooming of the flu in the middle. 
+Here we are on October the 19th. 
+The slope of the epidemic curve is approaching now, in November. 
+Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang — you're going to see lots of blooming in the middle, and then you're going to see a sort of leveling off, fewer and fewer cases towards the end of December. 
+And this type of a visualization can show that epidemics like this take root and affect central individuals first, before they affect others. 
+Now, as I've been suggesting, this method is not restricted to germs, but actually to anything that spreads in populations. 
+Information spreads in populations, norms can spread in populations, behaviors can spread in populations. 
+And by behaviors, I can mean things like criminal behavior, or voting behavior, or health care behavior, like smoking, or vaccination, or product adoption, or other kinds of behaviors that relate to interpersonal influence. 
+If I'm likely to do something that affects others around me, this technique can get early warning or early detection about the adoption within the population. 
+The key thing is that for it to work, there has to be interpersonal influence. 
+It cannot be because of some broadcast mechanism affecting everyone uniformly. 
+Now the same insights can also be exploited — with respect to networks — can also be exploited in other ways, for example, in the use of targeting specific people for interventions. 
+So, for example, most of you are probably familiar with the notion of herd immunity. 
+So, if we have a population of a thousand people, and we want to make the population immune to a pathogen, we don't have to immunize every single person. 
+If we immunize 960 of them, it's as if we had immunized a hundred [percent] of them. 
+Because even if one or two of the non-immune people gets infected, there's no one for them to infect. 
+They are surrounded by immunized people. 
+So 96 percent is as good as 100 percent. 
+Well, some other scientists have estimated what would happen if you took a 30 percent random sample of these 1000 people, 300 people and immunized them. 
+Would you get any population-level immunity? 
+And the answer is no. 
+But if you took this 30 percent, these 300 people and had them nominate their friends and took the same number of vaccine doses and vaccinated the friends of the 300 — the 300 friends — you can get the same level of herd immunity as if you had vaccinated 96 percent of the population at a much greater efficiency, with a strict budget constraint. 
+And similar ideas can be used, for instance, to target distribution of things like bed nets in the developing world. 
+If we could understand the structure of networks in villages, we could target to whom to give the interventions to foster these kinds of spreads. 
+Or, frankly, for advertising with all kinds of products. 
+If we could understand how to target, it could affect the efficiency of what we're trying to achieve. 
+And in fact, we can use data from all kinds of sources nowadays [to do this]. 
+This is a map of eight million phone users in a European country. 
+Every dot is a person, and every line represents a volume of calls between the people. 
+And we can use such data, that's being passively obtained, to map these whole countries and understand who is located where within the network. 
+Without actually having to query them at all, we can get this kind of a structural insight. 
+And other sources of information, as you're no doubt aware are available about such features, from email interactions, online interactions, online social networks and so forth. 
+And in fact, we are in the era of what I would call "" massive-passive "" data collection efforts. 
+They're all kinds of ways we can use massively collected data to create sensor networks to follow the population, understand what's happening in the population, and intervene in the population for the better. 
+Because these new technologies tell us not just who is talking to whom, but where everyone is, and what they're thinking based on what they're uploading on the Internet, and what they're buying based on their purchases. 
+And all this administrative data can be pulled together and processed to understand human behavior in a way we never could before. 
+So, for example, we could use truckers' purchases of fuel. 
+So the truckers are just going about their business, and they're buying fuel. 
+And we see a blip up in the truckers' purchases of fuel, and we know that a recession is about to end. 
+Or we can monitor the velocity with which people are moving with their phones on a highway, and the phone company can see, as the velocity is slowing down, that there's a traffic jam. 
+And they can feed that information back to their subscribers, but only to their subscribers on the same highway located behind the traffic jam! 
+Or we can monitor doctors prescribing behaviors, passively, and see how the diffusion of innovation with pharmaceuticals occurs within [networks of] doctors. 
+Or again, we can monitor purchasing behavior in people and watch how these types of phenomena can diffuse within human populations. 
+And there are three ways, I think, that these massive-passive data can be used. 
+One is fully passive, like I just described — as in, for instance, the trucker example, where we don't actually intervene in the population in any way. 
+One is quasi-active, like the flu example I gave, where we get some people to nominate their friends and then passively monitor their friends — do they have the flu, or not? — and then get warning. 
+Or another example would be, if you're a phone company, you figure out who's central in the network and you ask those people, "" Look, will you just text us your fever every day? 
+Just text us your temperature. "" And collect vast amounts of information about people's temperature, but from centrally located individuals. 
+And be able, on a large scale, to monitor an impending epidemic with very minimal input from people. 
+Or, finally, it can be more fully active — as I know subsequent speakers will also talk about today — where people might globally participate in wikis, or photographing, or monitoring elections, and upload information in a way that allows us to pool information in order to understand social processes and social phenomena. 
+In fact, the availability of these data, I think, heralds a kind of new era of what I and others would like to call "computational social science." 
+It's sort of like when Galileo invented — or, didn't invent — came to use a telescope and could see the heavens in a new way, or Leeuwenhoek became aware of the microscope — or actually invented — and could see biology in a new way. 
+But now we have access to these kinds of data that allow us to understand social processes and social phenomena in an entirely new way that was never before possible. 
+And with this science, we can understand how exactly the whole comes to be greater than the sum of its parts. 
+And actually, we can use these insights to improve society and improve human well-being. 
+Thank you. 
+
+I am failing as a woman, I am failing as a feminist. 
+I have passionate opinions about gender equality, but I worry that to freely accept the label of "" feminist, "" would not be fair to good feminists. 
+I'm a feminist, but I'm a rather bad one. 
+Oh, so I call myself a Bad Feminist. 
+Or at least, I wrote an essay, and then I wrote a book called "" Bad Feminist, "" and then in interviews, people started calling me The Bad Feminist. 
+(Laughter) So, what started as a bit of an inside joke with myself and a willful provocation, has become a thing. 
+Let me take a step back. 
+When I was younger, mostly in my teens and 20s, I had strange ideas about feminists as hairy, angry, man-hating, sex-hating women — as if those are bad things. 
+(Laughter) These days, I look at how women are treated the world over, and anger, in particular, seems like a perfectly reasonable response. 
+But back then, I worried about the tone people used when suggesting I might be a feminist. 
+The feminist label was an accusation, it was an "" F "" word, and not a nice one. 
+I was labeled a woman who doesn't play by the rules, who expects too much, who thinks far too highly of myself, by daring to believe I'm equal — (Coughs) — superior to a man. 
+You don't want to be that rebel woman, until you realize that you very much are that woman, and cannot imagine being anyone else. 
+As I got older, I began to accept that I am, indeed, a feminist, and a proud one. 
+I hold certain truths to be self-evident: Women are equal to men. 
+We deserve equal pay for equal work. 
+We have the right to move through the world as we choose, free from harassment or violence. 
+We have the right to easy, affordable access to birth control, and reproductive services. 
+We have the right to make choices about our bodies, free from legislative oversight or evangelical doctrine. 
+We have the right to respect. 
+There's more. 
+When we talk about the needs of women, we have to consider the other identities we inhabit. 
+We are not just women. 
+We are people with different bodies, gender expressions, faiths, sexualities, class backgrounds, abilities, and so much more. 
+We need to take into account these differences and how they affect us, as much as we account for what we have in common. 
+Without this kind of inclusion, our feminism is nothing. 
+I hold these truths to be self-evident, but let me be clear: I'm a mess. 
+I am full of contradictions. 
+There are many ways in which I'm doing feminism wrong. 
+I have another confession. 
+When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume. 
+(Laughter) Even though the lyrics are degrading to women — these lyrics offend me to my core — the classic Yin Yang Twins song "" Salt Shaker "" — it is amazing. (Laughter) 
+"" Make it work with your wet t-shirt. 
+Bitch, you gotta shake it 'til your camel starts to hurt! "" (Laughter) Think about it. (Laughter) 
+Poetry, right? 
+I am utterly mortified by my music choices. 
+(Laughter) I firmly believe in man work, which is anything I don't want to do, including — (Laughter) — all domestic tasks, but also: bug killing, trash removal, lawn care and vehicle maintenance. 
+I want no part of any of that. 
+(Laughter) Pink is my favorite color. 
+I enjoy fashion magazines and pretty things. 
+I watch "" The Bachelor "" and romantic comedies, and I have absurd fantasies about fairy tales coming true. 
+Some of my transgressions are more flagrant. 
+If a woman wants to take her husband's name, that is her choice, and it is not my place to judge. 
+If a woman chooses to stay home to raise her children, I embrace that choice, too. 
+The problem is not that she makes herself economically vulnerable in that choice; the problem is that our society is set up to make women economically vulnerable when they choose. 
+Let's deal with that. 
+(Applause) I reject the mainstream feminism that has historically ignored or deflected the needs of women of color, working-class women, queer women and transgender women, in favor of supporting white, middle- and upper-class straight women. 
+Listen, if that's good feminism — I am a very bad feminist. 
+(Laughter) There is also this: As a feminist, I feel a lot of pressure. 
+We have this tendency to put visible feminists on a pedestal. 
+We expect them to pose perfectly. 
+When they disappoint us, we gleefully knock them from the very pedestal we put them on. 
+Like I said, I am a mess — consider me knocked off that pedestal before you ever try to put me up there. 
+(Laughter) Too many women, particularly groundbreaking women and industry leaders, are afraid to be labeled as feminists. 
+They're afraid to stand up and say, "" Yes, I am a feminist, "" for fear of what that label means, for fear of being unable to live up to unrealistic expectations. 
+Take, for example, Beyoncé, or as I call her, The Goddess. 
+(Laughter) She has emerged, in recent years, as a visible feminist. 
+At the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards, she performed in front of the word "" feminist "" 10 feet high. 
+It was a glorious spectacle to see this pop star openly embracing feminism and letting young women and men know that being a feminist is something to celebrate. 
+As the moment faded, cultural critics began endlessly debating whether or not Beyoncé was, indeed, a feminist. 
+They graded her feminism, instead of simply taking a grown, accomplished woman at her word. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) We demand perfection from feminists, because we are still fighting for so much, we want so much, we need so damn much. 
+We go far beyond reasonable, constructive criticism, to dissecting any given woman's feminism, tearing it apart until there's nothing left. 
+We do not need to do that. 
+Bad feminism — or really, more inclusive feminism — is a starting point. 
+But what happens next? 
+We go from acknowledging our imperfections to accountability, or walking the walk, and being a little bit brave. 
+If I listen to degrading music, I am creating a demand for which artists are more than happy to contribute a limitless supply. 
+These artists are not going to change how they talk about women in their songs until we demand that change by affecting their bottom line. 
+Certainly, it is difficult. 
+Why must it be so catchy? 
+(Laughter) It's hard to make the better choice, and it is so easy to justify a lesser one. 
+But — when I justify bad choices, I make it harder for women to achieve equality, the equality that we all deserve, and I need to own that. 
+I think of my nieces, ages three and four. 
+They are gorgeous and headstrong, brilliant girls, who are a whole lot of brave. 
+I want them to thrive in a world where they are valued for the powerful creatures they are. 
+I think of them, and suddenly, the better choice becomes far easier to make. 
+We can all make better choices. 
+We can change the channel when a television show treats sexual violence against women like sport, Game of Thrones. 
+We can change the radio station when we hear songs that treat women as nothing. 
+We can spend our box office dollars elsewhere when movies don't treat women as anything more than decorative objects. 
+We can stop supporting professional sports where the athletes treat their partners like punching bags. 
+(Applause) In other ways, men — and especially straight white men — can say, "" No, I will not publish with your magazine, or participate in your project, or otherwise work with you, until you include a fair number of women, both as participants and decision makers. 
+I won't work with you until your publication, or your organization, is more inclusive of all kinds of difference. "" Those of us who are underrepresented and invited to participate in such projects, can also decline to be included until more of us are invited through the glass ceiling, and we are tokens no more. 
+Without these efforts, without taking these stands, our accomplishments are going to mean very little. 
+We can commit these small acts of bravery and hope that our choices trickle upward to the people in power — editors, movie and music producers, CEOs, lawmakers — the people who can make bigger, braver choices to create lasting, meaningful change. 
+We can also boldly claim our feminism — good, bad, or anywhere in between. 
+The last line of my book "" Bad Feminist "" says, "I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all." 
+This is true for so many reasons, but first and foremost, I say this because once upon a time, my voice was stolen from me, and feminism helped me to get my voice back. 
+There was an incident. 
+I call it an incident so I can carry the burden of what happened. 
+Some boys broke me, when I was so young, I did not know what boys can do to break a girl. 
+They treated me like I was nothing. 
+I began to believe I was nothing. 
+They stole my voice, and in the after, I did not dare to believe that anything I might say could matter. 
+But — I had writing. 
+And there, I wrote myself back together. 
+I wrote myself toward a stronger version of myself. 
+I read the words of women who might understand a story like mine, and women who looked like me, and understood what it was like to move through the world with brown skin. 
+I read the words of women who showed me I was not nothing. 
+I learned to write like them, and then I learned to write as myself. 
+I found my voice again, and I started to believe that my voice is powerful beyond measure. 
+Through writing and feminism, I also found that if I was a little bit brave, another woman might hear me and see me and recognize that none of us are the nothing the world tries to tell us we are. 
+In one hand, I hold the power to accomplish anything. 
+And in my other, I hold the humbling reality that I am just one woman. 
+I am a bad feminist, I am a good woman, I am trying to become better in how I think, and what I say, and what I do, without abandoning everything that makes me human. 
+I hope that we can all do the same. 
+I hope that we can all be a little bit brave, when we most need such bravery. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We live in an incredibly busy world. 
+The pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we're always doing something. 
+So with that in mind, I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any time to do nothing? 
+So that's no emailing, texting, no Internet, no TV, no chatting, no eating, no reading. 
+Not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. 
+I see a lot of very blank faces. 
+The mind, our most valuable and precious resource, through which we experience every single moment of our life. 
+The mind that we rely upon to be happy, content, emotionally stable as individuals, and at the same time, to be kind and thoughtful and considerate in our relationships with others. 
+This is the same mind that we depend upon to be focused, creative, spontaneous, and to perform at our very best in everything that we do. 
+In fact, we spend more time looking after our cars, our clothes and our hair than we — okay, maybe not our hair, (Laughter) but you see where I'm going. 
+You know, the mind whizzes away like a washing machine going round and round, lots of difficult, confusing emotions, and we don't really know how to deal with that. 
+We miss out on the things that are most important to us, and the crazy thing is that everybody just assumes, that's the way life is, so we've just kind of got to get on with it. 
+So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class. 
+And trust me, it had all the stereotypes that you can imagine, the sitting cross-legged on the floor, the incense, the herbal tea, the vegetarians, the whole deal, but my mom was going and I was intrigued, so I went along with her. 
+I'd also seen a few kung fu movies, and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly, but I was very young at the time. 
+Now as I was there, I guess, like a lot of people, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind. 
+You get stressed, you do some meditation. 
+I hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature, until I was about 20, when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession, really serious things which just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts, inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with. 
+Every time I sort of pushed one down, another one would pop back up again. 
+Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support. 
+People often ask me what I learned from that time. 
+Well, obviously it changed things. 
+It taught me — it gave me a greater appreciation, an understanding for the present moment. 
+By that I mean not being lost in thought, not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to be present. 
+It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary. 
+There was a research paper that came out of Harvard, just recently, that said on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time. 
+Now we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, I don't know, it just kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there's something we can do about it, when there's a positive, practical, achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted. 
+And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts our entire life. 
+We need an exercise. 
+And that's what these are for, in case you've been wondering, because most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it's quite different from that. 
+It's more about stepping back, sort of seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind. 
+So for example, right now, if I focus too much on the balls, then there's no way I can relax and talk to you at the same time. 
+It's a very uncomfortable way to live life, when you get this tight and stressed. 
+So we're looking for a balance, a focused relaxation where we can allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement. 
+I really am worried. Wow, there's so much anxiety. "" And before we know it, right, we're anxious about feeling anxious. 
+If you think about the last time you had a wobbly tooth. 
+You know it's wobbly, and you know that it hurts. 
+But what do you do every 20, 30 seconds? 
+And we just keep telling ourselves, and we do it all the time. 
+You might find a mind that's really restless and — the whole time. 
+Don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that. 
+You might find a mind that's very dull and boring, and it's just, almost mechanical, it just seems it's as if you're getting up, going to work, eat, sleep, get up, work. 
+Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round your mind. 
+Well, whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear. 
+We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. 
+You don't have to burn any incense, and you definitely don't have to sit on the floor. 
+All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life. 
+
+Sarge Salman: All the way from Los Altos Hills, California, Mr. Henry Evans. 
+(Applause) Henry Evans: Hello. 
+My name is Henry Evans, and until August 29, 2002, I was living my version of the American dream. 
+I grew up in a typical American town near St. Louis. 
+My dad was a lawyer. 
+My mom was a homemaker. 
+My six siblings and I were good kids, but caused our fair share of trouble. 
+After high school, I left home to study and learn more about the world. 
+I went to Notre Dame University and graduated with degrees in accounting and German, including spending a year of study in Austria. 
+Later on, I earned an MBA at Stanford. 
+I married my high school sweetheart, Jane. 
+I am lucky to have her. 
+Together, we raised four wonderful children. 
+I worked and studied hard to move up the career ladder, eventually becoming a chief financial officer in Silicon Valley, a job I really enjoyed. 
+My family and I bought our first and only home on December 13, 2001, a fixer-upper in a beautiful spot of Los Altos Hills, California, from where I am speaking to you now. 
+We were looking forward to rebuilding it, but eight months after we moved in, I suffered a stroke-like attack caused by a birth defect. 
+Overnight, I became a mute quadriplegic at the ripe old age of 40. 
+It took me several years, but with the help of an incredibly supportive family, I finally decided life was still worth living. 
+I became fascinated with using technology to help the severely disabled. 
+Head tracking devices sold commercially by the company Madentec convert my tiny head movements into cursor movements, and enable my use of a regular computer. 
+I can surf the web, exchange email with people, and routinely destroy my friend Steve Cousins in online word games. 
+This technology allows me to remain engaged, mentally active, and feel like I am a part of the world. 
+One day, I was lying in bed watching CNN, when I was amazed by Professor Charlie Kemp of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech demonstrating a PR2 robot. 
+I emailed Charlie and Steve Cousins of Willow Garage, and we formed the Robots for Humanity project. 
+For about two years, Robots for Humanity developed ways for me to use the PR2 as my body surrogate. 
+I shaved myself for the first time in 10 years. 
+From my home in California, I shaved Charlie in Atlanta. (Laughter) I handed out Halloween candy. 
+I opened my refrigerator on my own. 
+I began doing tasks around the house. 
+I saw new and previously unthinkable possibilities to live and contribute, both for myself and others in my circumstance. 
+All of us have disabilities in one form or another. 
+For example, if either of us wants to go 60 miles an hour, both of us will need an assistive device called a car. 
+Your disability doesn't make you any less of a person, and neither does mine. 
+By the way, check out my sweet ride. (Laughter) Since birth, we have both suffered from the inability to fly on our own. 
+Last year, Kaijen Hsiao of Willow Garage connected with me Chad Jenkins. 
+Chad showed me how easy it is to purchase and fly aerial drones. 
+It was then I realized that I could also use an aerial drone to expand the worlds of bedridden people through flight, giving a sense of movement and control that is incredible. 
+Using a mouse cursor I control with my head, these web interfaces allow me to see video from the robot and send control commands by pressing buttons in a web browser. 
+With a little practice, I became good enough with this interface to drive around my home on my own. 
+I could look around our garden and see the grapes we are growing. 
+I inspected the solar panels on our roof. (Laughter) One of my challenges as a pilot is to land the drone on our basketball hoop. 
+I went even further by seeing if I could use a head-mounted display, the Oculus Rift, as modified by Fighting Walrus, to have an immersive experience controlling the drone. 
+With Chad's group at Brown, I regularly fly drones around his lab several times a week, from my home 3,000 miles away. 
+All work and no fun makes for a dull quadriplegic, so we also find time to play friendly games of robot soccer. (Laughter) I never thought I would be able to casually move around a campus like Brown on my own. 
+I just wish I could afford the tuition. (Laughter) Chad Jenkins: Henry, all joking aside, I bet all of these people here would love to see you fly this drone from your bed in California 3,000 miles away. 
+(Applause) Okay, Henry, have you been to D.C. lately? 
+(Laughter) Are you excited to be at TEDxMidAtlantic? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Can you show us how excited you are? (Laughter) 
+All right, big finish. 
+Can you show us how good of a pilot you are? 
+(Applause) All right, we still have a little ways to go with that, but I think it shows the promise. 
+What makes Henry's story amazing is it's about understanding Henry's needs, understanding what people in Henry's situation need from technology, and then also understanding what advanced technology can provide, and then bringing those two things together for use in a wise and responsible way. 
+What we're trying to do is democratize robotics, so that anybody can be a part of this. 
+We're providing affordable, off-the-shelf robot platforms such as the A.R. drone, 300 dollars, the Suitable Technologies beam, only 17,000 dollars, along with open-source robotics software so that you can be a part of what we're trying to do. 
+And our hope is that, by providing these tools, that you'll be able to think of better ways to provide movement for the disabled, to provide care for our aging population, to help better educate our children, to think about what the new types of middle class jobs could be for the future, to both monitor and protect our environment, and to explore the universe. 
+Back to you, Henry. 
+HE: Thank you, Chad. 
+With this drone setup, we show the potential for bedridden people to once again be able to explore the outside world, and robotics will eventually provide a level playing field where one is only limited by their mental acuity and imagination, where the disabled are able to perform the same activities as everyone else, and perhaps better, and technology will even allow us to provide an outlet for many people who are presently considered vegetables. 
+One hundred years ago, I would have been treated like a vegetable. 
+Actually, that's not true. 
+I would have died. 
+It is up to us, all of us, to decide how robotics will be used, for good or for evil, for simply replacing people or for making people better, for allowing us to do and enjoy more. 
+Our goal for robotics is to unlock everyone's mental power by making the world more physically accessible to people such as myself and others like me around the globe. 
+With the help of people like you, we can make this dream a reality. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+(Music) ♫ Slide into the shimmering surface ♫ ♫ between two worlds. ♫ ♫ Standing at the center of time ♫ ♫ as it uncurls. ♫ ♫ Cutting through the veil of illusion. ♫ ♫ Moving beyond past conclusions. ♫ ♫ Wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere right now, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ Searching for the future ♫ ♫ among the things we're throwing away. ♫ ♫ Trying to see the world ♫ 
+♫ through the junk we produce everyday. ♫ ♫ They say nothing lasts forever, ♫ ♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in history, ♫ ♫ I would want to be here. ♫ ♫ The Romans, the Spanish ♫ ♫ the British, the Dutch, ♫ ♫ American exceptionalism, so out of touch. ♫ ♫ The folly of empire repeating its course, ♫ 
+♫ imposing its will ♫ ♫ and ruling by force ♫ ♫ on and on through time. ♫ ♫ But the world can't take it very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world is going to shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change things, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫ ♫ They say nothing last forever, ♫ 
+♫ but all the plastic ever made is still here. ♫ ♫ And no amount of closing our eyes ♫ ♫ will make it disappear. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it ♫ ♫ very much longer. ♫ ♫ We're not going to make it ♫ ♫ unless we're smarter and stronger. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself free of our greed ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ ♫ And the world can't take it, that you can see. ♫ ♫ If the oceans don't make it, neither will we. ♫ ♫ The world's gonna shake itself all the way free ♫ ♫ somehow. ♫ 
+♫ If I could be anywhere, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere in time, ♫ ♫ if I could be anywhere and change the outcome, ♫ ♫ it would have to be now. ♫ (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+When I got my current job, I was given a good piece of advice, which was to interview three politicians every day. 
+And from that much contact with politicians, I can tell you they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another. 
+They have what I called "" logorrhea dementia, "" which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane. 
+(Laughter) But what they do have is incredible social skills. 
+When you meet them, they lock into you, they look you in the eye, they invade your personal space, they massage the back of your head. 
+I had dinner with a Republican senator several months ago who kept his hand on my inner thigh throughout the whole meal — squeezing it. 
+I once — this was years ago — I saw Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in the well of the Senate. 
+And they were friends, and they hugged each other and they were laughing, and their faces were like this far apart. 
+And they were moving and grinding and moving their arms up and down each other. 
+And I was like, "" Get a room. I don't want to see this. "" But they have those social skills. 
+Another case: Last election cycle, I was following Mitt Romney around New Hampshire, and he was campaigning with his five perfect sons: Bip, Chip, Rip, Zip, Lip and Dip. 
+(Laughter) And he's going into a diner. 
+And he goes into the diner, introduces himself to a family and says, "" What village are you from in New Hampshire? "" And then he describes the home he owned in their village. 
+And so he goes around the room, and then as he's leaving the diner, he first-names almost everybody he's just met. 
+I was like, "" Okay, that's social skill. "" But the paradox is, when a lot of these people slip into the policy-making mode, that social awareness vanishes and they start talking like accountants. 
+So in the course of my career, I have covered a series of failures. 
+We sent economists in the Soviet Union with privatization plans when it broke up, and what they really lacked was social trust. 
+We invaded Iraq with a military oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities. 
+We had a financial regulatory regime based on the assumptions that traders were rational creatures who wouldn't do anything stupid. 
+For 30 years, I've been covering school reform and we've basically reorganized the bureaucratic boxes — charters, private schools, vouchers — but we've had disappointing results year after year. 
+And the fact is, people learn from people they love. 
+And if you're not talking about the individual relationship between a teacher and a student, you're not talking about that reality. 
+But that reality is expunged from our policy-making process. 
+And so that's led to a question for me: Why are the most socially-attuned people on earth completely dehumanized when they think about policy? 
+And I came to the conclusion, this is a symptom of a larger problem. 
+That, for centuries, we've inherited a view of human nature based on the notion that we're divided selves, that reason is separated from the emotions and that society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions. 
+And it's led to a view of human nature that we're rational individuals who respond in straightforward ways to incentives, and it's led to ways of seeing the world where people try to use the assumptions of physics to measure how human behavior is. 
+And it's produced a great amputation, a shallow view of human nature. 
+We're really good at talking about material things, but we're really bad at talking about emotions. 
+We're really good at talking about skills and safety and health; we're really bad at talking about character. 
+Alasdair MacIntyre, the famous philosopher, said that, "" We have the concepts of the ancient morality of virtue, honor, goodness, but we no longer have a system by which to connect them. "" And so this has led to a shallow path in politics, but also in a whole range of human endeavors. 
+You can see it in the way we raise our young kids. 
+You go to an elementary school at three in the afternoon and you watch the kids come out, and they're wearing these 80-pound backpacks. 
+If the wind blows them over, they're like beetles stuck there on the ground. 
+You see these cars that drive up — usually it's Saabs and Audis and Volvos, because in certain neighborhoods it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car, so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy — that's fine. 
+They get picked up by these creatures I've called uber-moms, who are highly successful career women who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard. 
+And you can usually tell the uber-moms because they actually weigh less than their own children. 
+(Laughter) So at the moment of conception, they're doing little butt exercises. 
+Babies flop out, they're flashing Mandarin flashcards at the things. 
+Driving them home, and they want them to be enlightened, so they take them to Ben & Jerry's ice cream company with its own foreign policy. 
+In one of my books, I joke that Ben & Jerry's should make a pacifist toothpaste — doesn't kill germs, just asks them to leave. 
+It would be a big seller. 
+(Laughter) And they go to Whole Foods to get their baby formula, and Whole Foods is one of those progressive grocery stores where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International. (Laughter) 
+They buy these seaweed-based snacks there called Veggie Booty with Kale, which is for kids who come home and say, "Mom, mom, I want a snack that'll help prevent colon-rectal cancer." (Laughter) 
+And so the kids are raised in a certain way, jumping through achievement hoops of the things we can measure — SAT prep, oboe, soccer practice. 
+They get into competitive colleges, they get good jobs, and sometimes they make a success of themselves in a superficial manner, and they make a ton of money. 
+And sometimes you can see them at vacation places like Jackson Hole or Aspen. 
+And they've become elegant and slender — they don't really have thighs; they just have one elegant calve on top of another. 
+(Laughter) They have kids of their own, and they've achieved a genetic miracle by marrying beautiful people, so their grandmoms look like Gertrude Stein, their daughters looks like Halle Berry — I don't know how they've done that. 
+They get there and they realize it's fashionable now to have dogs a third as tall as your ceiling heights. 
+So they've got these furry 160-pound dogs — all look like velociraptors, all named after Jane Austen characters. 
+And then when they get old, they haven't really developed a philosophy of life, but they've decided, "" I've been successful at everything; I'm just not going to die. "" And so they hire personal trainers; they're popping Cialis like breath mints. 
+You see them on the mountains up there. 
+They're cross-country skiing up the mountain with these grim expressions that make Dick Cheney look like Jerry Lewis. 
+(Laughter) And as they whiz by you, it's like being passed by a little iron Raisinet going up the hill. (Laughter) 
+And so this is part of what life is, but it's not all of what life is. 
+And over the past few years, I think we've been given a deeper view of human nature and a deeper view of who we are. 
+And it's not based on theology or philosophy, it's in the study of the mind, across all these spheres of research, from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists, behavioral economists, psychologists, sociology, we're developing a revolution in consciousness. 
+And when you synthesize it all, it's giving us a new view of human nature. 
+And far from being a coldly materialistic view of nature, it's a new humanism, it's a new enchantment. 
+And I think when you synthesize this research, you start with three key insights. 
+The first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the work. 
+And so one way to formulate that is the human mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, of which it can be consciously aware of about 40. 
+And this leads to oddities. 
+One of my favorite is that people named Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, people named Lawrence become lawyers, because unconsciously we gravitate toward things that sound familiar, which is why I named my daughter President of the United States Brooks. 
+(Laughter) Another finding is that the unconscious, far from being dumb and sexualized, is actually quite smart. 
+So one of the most cognitively demanding things we do is buy furniture. 
+It's really hard to imagine a sofa, how it's going to look in your house. 
+And the way you should do that is study the furniture, let it marinate in your mind, distract yourself, and then a few days later, go with your gut, because unconsciously you've figured it out. 
+The second insight is that emotions are at the center of our thinking. 
+People with strokes and lesions in the emotion-processing parts of the brain are not super smart, they're actually sometimes quite helpless. 
+And the "" giant "" in the field is in the room tonight and is speaking tomorrow morning — Antonio Damasio. 
+And one of the things he's really shown us is that emotions are not separate from reason, but they are the foundation of reason because they tell us what to value. 
+And so reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom. 
+Now I'm a middle-aged guy. 
+I'm not exactly comfortable with emotions. 
+One of my favorite brain stories described these middle-aged guys. 
+They put them into a brain scan machine — this is apocryphal by the way, but I don't care — and they had them watch a horror movie, and then they had them describe their feelings toward their wives. 
+And the brain scans were identical in both activities. 
+It was just sheer terror. 
+So me talking about emotion is like Gandhi talking about gluttony, but it is the central organizing process of the way we think. 
+It tells us what to imprint. 
+The brain is the record of the feelings of a life. 
+And the third insight is that we're not primarily self-contained individuals. 
+We're social animals, not rational animals. 
+We emerge out of relationships, and we are deeply interpenetrated, one with another. 
+And so when we see another person, we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds. 
+When we watch a car chase in a movie, it's almost as if we are subtly having a car chase. 
+When we watch pornography, it's a little like having sex, though probably not as good. 
+And we see this when lovers walk down the street, when a crowd in Egypt or Tunisia gets caught up in an emotional contagion, the deep interpenetration. 
+And this revolution in who we are gives us a different way of seeing, I think, politics, a different way, most importantly, of seeing human capital. 
+We are now children of the French Enlightenment. 
+We believe that reason is the highest of the faculties. 
+But I think this research shows that the British Enlightenment, or the Scottish Enlightenment, with David Hume, Adam Smith, actually had a better handle on who we are — that reason is often weak, our sentiments are strong, and our sentiments are often trustworthy. 
+And this work corrects that bias in our culture, that dehumanizing bias. 
+It gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life. 
+When we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily — things like grades, SAT's, degrees, the number of years in schooling. 
+What it really takes to do well, to lead a meaningful life, are things that are deeper, things we don't really even have words for. 
+And so let me list just a couple of the things I think this research points us toward trying to understand. 
+The first gift, or talent, is mindsight — the ability to enter into other people's minds and learn what they have to offer. 
+Babies come with this ability. 
+Meltzoff, who's at the University of Washington, leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes old. 
+He wagged his tongue at the baby. 
+The baby wagged her tongue back. 
+Babies are born to interpenetrate into Mom's mind and to download what they find — their models of how to understand reality. 
+In the United States, 55 percent of babies have a deep two-way conversation with Mom and they learn models to how to relate to other people. 
+And those people who have models of how to relate have a huge head start in life. 
+Scientists at the University of Minnesota did a study in which they could predict with 77 percent accuracy, at age 18 months, who was going to graduate from high school, based on who had good attachment with mom. 
+Twenty percent of kids do not have those relationships. 
+They are what we call avoidantly attached. 
+They have trouble relating to other people. 
+They go through life like sailboats tacking into the wind — wanting to get close to people, but not really having the models of how to do that. 
+And so this is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge, one from another. 
+A second skill is equipoise, the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind. 
+So for example, we are overconfidence machines. 
+Ninety-five percent of our professors report that they are above-average teachers. 
+Ninety-six percent of college students say they have above-average social skills. 
+Time magazine asked Americans, "" Are you in the top one percent of earners? "" Nineteen percent of Americans are in the top one percent of earners. 
+(Laughter) This is a gender-linked trait, by the way. 
+Men drown at twice the rate of women, because men think they can swim across that lake. 
+But some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases, their own overconfidence. 
+They have epistemological modesty. 
+They are open-minded in the face of ambiguity. 
+They are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence. 
+They are curious. 
+And these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with IQ. 
+The third trait is metis, what we might call street smarts — it's a Greek word. 
+It's a sensitivity to the physical environment, the ability to pick out patterns in an environment — derive a gist. 
+One of my colleagues at the Times did a great story about soldiers in Iraq who could look down a street and detect somehow whether there was an IED, a landmine, in the street. 
+They couldn't tell you how they did it, but they could feel cold, they felt a coldness, and they were more often right than wrong. 
+The third is what you might call sympathy, the ability to work within groups. 
+And that comes in tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals. 
+And face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically, because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal. 
+And the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the IQ of the group; it's determined by how well they communicate, how often they take turns in conversation. 
+Then you could talk about a trait like blending. 
+Any child can say, "" I'm a tiger, "" pretend to be a tiger. 
+It seems so elementary. 
+But in fact, it's phenomenally complicated to take a concept "" I "" and a concept "" tiger "" and blend them together. 
+But this is the source of innovation. 
+What Picasso did, for example, was take the concept "" Western art "" and the concept "" African masks "" and blend them together — not only the geometry, but the moral systems entailed in them. 
+And these are skills, again, we can't count and measure. 
+And then the final thing I'll mention is something you might call limerence. 
+And this is not an ability; it's a drive and a motivation. 
+The conscious mind hungers for success and prestige. 
+The unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence, when the skull line disappears and we are lost in a challenge or a task — when a craftsman feels lost in his craft, when a naturalist feels at one with nature, when a believer feels at one with God's love. 
+That is what the unconscious mind hungers for. 
+And many of us feel it in love when lovers feel fused. 
+And one of the most beautiful descriptions I've come across in this research of how minds interpenetrate was written by a great theorist and scientist named Douglas Hofstadter at the University of Indiana. 
+He was married to a woman named Carol, and they had a wonderful relationship. 
+When their kids were five and two, Carol had a stroke and a brain tumor and died suddenly. 
+And Hofstadter wrote a book called "" I Am a Strange Loop. "" In the course of that book, he describes a moment — just months after Carol has died — he comes across her picture on the mantel, or on a bureau in his bedroom. 
+And here's what he wrote: "" I looked at her face, and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes. 
+And all at once I found myself saying as tears flowed, 'That's me. That's me.' And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit — the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. 
+I realized that, though Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but had lived on very determinedly in my brain. "" The Greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom. 
+Through his suffering, Hofstadter understood how deeply interpenetrated we are. 
+Through the policy failures of the last 30 years, we have come to acknowledge, I think, how shallow our view of human nature has been. 
+And now as we confront that shallowness and the failures that derive from our inability to get the depths of who we are, comes this revolution in consciousness — these people in so many fields exploring the depth of our nature and coming away with this enchanted, this new humanism. 
+And when Freud discovered his sense of the unconscious, it had a vast effect on the climate of the times. 
+Now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious, of who we are deep inside, and it's going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Motor racing is a funny old business. 
+We make a new car every year, and then we spend the rest of the season trying to understand what it is we've built to make it better, to make it faster. 
+And then the next year, we start again. 
+Now, the car you see in front of you is quite complicated. 
+The chassis is made up of about 11,000 components, the engine another 6,000, the electronics about eight and a half thousand. 
+So there's about 25,000 things there that can go wrong. 
+So motor racing is very much about attention to detail. 
+The other thing about Formula 1 in particular is we're always changing the car. 
+We're always trying to make it faster. 
+So every two weeks, we will be making about 5,000 new components to fit to the car. 
+Five to 10 percent of the race car will be different every two weeks of the year. 
+So how do we do that? 
+Well, we start our life with the racing car. 
+We have a lot of sensors on the car to measure things. 
+On the race car in front of you here there are about 120 sensors when it goes into a race. 
+It's measuring all sorts of things around the car. 
+That data is logged. We're logging about 500 different parameters within the data systems, about 13,000 health parameters and events to say when things are not working the way they should do, and we're sending that data back to the garage using telemetry at a rate of two to four megabits per second. 
+So during a two-hour race, each car will be sending 750 million numbers. 
+That's twice as many numbers as words that each of us speaks in a lifetime. 
+It's a huge amount of data. 
+But it's not enough just to have data and measure it. 
+You need to be able to do something with it. 
+So we've spent a lot of time and effort in turning the data into stories to be able to tell, what's the state of the engine, how are the tires degrading, what's the situation with fuel consumption? 
+So all of this is taking data and turning it into knowledge that we can act upon. 
+Okay, so let's have a look at a little bit of data. 
+Let's pick a bit of data from another three-month-old patient. 
+This is a child, and what you're seeing here is real data, and on the far right-hand side, where everything starts getting a little bit catastrophic, that is the patient going into cardiac arrest. 
+It was deemed to be an unpredictable event. 
+This was a heart attack that no one could see coming. 
+But when we look at the information there, we can see that things are starting to become a little fuzzy about five minutes or so before the cardiac arrest. 
+We can see small changes in things like the heart rate moving. 
+These were all undetected by normal thresholds which would be applied to data. 
+So the question is, why couldn't we see it? 
+Was this a predictable event? 
+Can we look more at the patterns in the data to be able to do things better? 
+So this is a child, about the same age as the racing car on stage, three months old. 
+It's a patient with a heart problem. 
+Now, when you look at some of the data on the screen above, things like heart rate, pulse, oxygen, respiration rates, they're all unusual for a normal child, but they're quite normal for the child there, and so one of the challenges you have in health care is, how can I look at the patient in front of me, have something which is specific for her, and be able to detect when things start to change, when things start to deteriorate? 
+Because like a racing car, any patient, when things start to go bad, you have a short time to make a difference. 
+So what we did is we took a data system which we run every two weeks of the year in Formula 1 and we installed it on the hospital computers at Birmingham Children's Hospital. 
+We streamed data from the bedside instruments in their pediatric intensive care so that we could both look at the data in real time and, more importantly, to store the data so that we could start to learn from it. 
+And then, we applied an application on top which would allow us to tease out the patterns in the data in real time so we could see what was happening, so we could determine when things started to change. 
+Now, in motor racing, we're all a little bit ambitious, audacious, a little bit arrogant sometimes, so we decided we would also look at the children as they were being transported to intensive care. 
+Why should we wait until they arrived in the hospital before we started to look? 
+And so we installed a real-time link between the ambulance and the hospital, just using normal 3G telephony to send that data so that the ambulance became an extra bed in intensive care. 
+And then we started looking at the data. 
+So the wiggly lines at the top, all the colors, this is the normal sort of data you would see on a monitor — heart rate, pulse, oxygen within the blood, and respiration. 
+The lines on the bottom, the blue and the red, these are the interesting ones. 
+The red line is showing an automated version of the early warning score that Birmingham Children's Hospital were already running. 
+They'd been running that since 2008, and already have stopped cardiac arrests and distress within the hospital. 
+The blue line is an indication of when patterns start to change, and immediately, before we even started putting in clinical interpretation, we can see that the data is speaking to us. 
+It's telling us that something is going wrong. 
+The plot with the red and the green blobs, this is plotting different components of the data against each other. 
+The green is us learning what is normal for that child. 
+We call it the cloud of normality. 
+And when things start to change, when conditions start to deteriorate, we move into the red line. 
+There's no rocket science here. 
+It is displaying data that exists already in a different way, to amplify it, to provide cues to the doctors, to the nurses, so they can see what's happening. 
+In the same way that a good racing driver relies on cues to decide when to apply the brakes, when to turn into a corner, we need to help our physicians and our nurses to see when things are starting to go wrong. 
+So we have a very ambitious program. 
+We think that the race is on to do something differently. 
+We are thinking big. It's the right thing to do. 
+We have an approach which, if it's successful, there's no reason why it should stay within a hospital. 
+With wireless connectivity these days, there is no reason why patients, doctors and nurses always have to be in the same place at the same time. 
+And meanwhile, we'll take our little three-month-old baby, keep taking it to the track, keeping it safe, and making it faster and better. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I think data can actually make us more human. 
+We're collecting and creating all kinds of data about how we're living our lives, and it's enabling us to tell some amazing stories. 
+Recently, a wise media theorist Tweeted, "" The 19th century culture was defined by the novel, the 20th century culture was defined by the cinema, and the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface. "" And I believe this is going to prove true. 
+Our lives are being driven by data, and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories. 
+So I'm going to show you a few of the projects that I've been working on over the last couple years that reflect on our lives and our systems. 
+This is a project called Flight Patterns. 
+What you're looking at is airplane traffic over North America for a 24-hour period. 
+As you see, everything starts to fade to black, and you see people going to sleep. 
+Followed by that, you see on the West coast planes moving across, the red-eye flights to the East coast. 
+And you'll see everybody waking up on the East coast, followed by European flights coming in the upper right-hand corner. 
+Everybody's moving from the East coast to the West coast. 
+You see San Francisco and Los Angeles start to make their journeys down to Hawaii in the lower left-hand corner. 
+I think it's one thing to say there's 140,000 planes being monitored by the federal government at any one time, and it's another thing to see that system as it ebbs and flows. 
+This is a time-lapse image of that exact same data, but I've color-coded it by type, so you can see the diversity of aircraft that are in the skies above us. 
+And I started making these, and I put them into Google Maps and allow you to zoom in and see individual airports and the patterns that are occurring there. 
+So here we can see the white represents low altitudes, and the blue are higher altitudes. 
+And you can zoom in. This is taking a look at Atlanta. 
+You can see this is a major shipping airport, and there's all kinds of activity there. 
+You can also toggle between altitude for model and manufacturer. 
+See again, the diversity. 
+And you can scroll around and see some of the different airports and the different patterns that they have. 
+This is scrolling up the East coast. 
+You can see some of the chaos that's happening in New York with the air traffic controllers having to deal with all those major airports next to each other. 
+So zooming back out real quick, we see, again, the U.S. — you get Florida down in the right-hand corner. 
+Moving across to the West coast, you see San Francisco and Los Angeles — big low-traffic zones across Nevada and Arizona. 
+And that's us down there in L.A. and Long Beach on the bottom. 
+I started taking a look as well at different perimeters, because you can choose what you want to pull out from the data. 
+This is looking at ascending versus descending flights. 
+And you can see, over time, the ways the airports change. 
+You see the holding patterns that start to develop in the bottom of the screen. 
+And you can see, eventually the airport actually flips directions. 
+So this is another project that I worked on with the Sensible Cities Lab at MIT. 
+This is visualizing international communications. 
+So it's how New York communicates with other international cities. 
+And we set this up as a live globe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the Design the Elastic Mind exhibition. 
+And it had a live feed with a 24-hour offset, so you could see the changing relationship and some demographic info coming through AT & T's data and revealing itself. 
+This is another project I worked on with Sensible Cities Lab and CurrentCity.org. 
+And it's visualizing SMS messages being sent in the city of Amsterdam. 
+So you're seeing the daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city, until we approach New Year's Eve, where everybody says, "" Happy New Year! "" (Laughter) So this is an interactive tool that you can move around and see different parts of the city. 
+This is looking at another event. This is called Queen's Day. 
+So again, you get this daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city. 
+And then you're going to see people start to gather in the center of the city to celebrate the night before, which happens right here. 
+And then you can see people celebrating the next day. 
+And you can pause it and step back and forth and see different phases. 
+So now on to something completely different. 
+Some of you may recognize this. 
+This is Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical chess playing machine. 
+And it's this amazing robot that plays chess extremely well, except for one thing: it's not a robot at all. 
+There's actually a legless man that sits in that box and controls this chess player. 
+This was the inspiration for a web service by Amazon called the Mechanical Turk — named after this guy. 
+And it's based on the premise that there are certain things that are easy for people, but really difficult for computers. 
+So they made this web service and said, "" Any programmer can write a piece of software and tap into the minds of thousands of people. "" The nerdy side of me thought, "" Wow, this is amazing. 
+I can tap into thousands of people's minds. "" And the other nerdy side of me thought, "" This is horrible. This is completely bizarre. 
+What does this mean for the future of mankind, where we're all plugged into this borg? "" I was probably being a little extreme. 
+But what does this mean when we have no context for what it is that we're working on, and we're just doing these little labors? 
+So I created this drawing tool. 
+I asked people to draw a sheep facing to the left. 
+And I said, "" I'll pay you two cents for your contribution. "" And I started collecting sheep. 
+And I collected a lot, a lot of different sheep. 
+Lots of sheep. 
+I took the first 10,000 sheep that I collected, and I put them on a website called TheSheepMarket.com where you can actually buy collections of 20 sheep. 
+You can't pick individual sheep, but you can buy a single plate block of stamps as a commodity. 
+And juxtaposed against this grid, you see actually, by rolling over each individual one, the humanity behind this hugely mechanical process. 
+I think there's something really interesting to watching people as they go through this creative toil — something we can all relate to, this creative process of trying to come up with something from nothing. 
+I think it was really interesting to juxtapose this humanity versus this massive distributed grid. 
+Kind of amazing what some people did. 
+So here's a few statistics from the project. 
+Approximate collection rate of 11 sheep per hour, which would make a working wage of 69 cents per hour. 
+There were 662 rejected sheep that didn't meet "" sheep-like "" criteria and were thrown out of the flock. 
+(Laughter) The amount of time spent drawing ranged from four seconds to 46 minutes. 
+That gives you an idea of the different types of motivations and dedication. 
+And there were 7,599 people that contributed to the project, or were unique IP addresses — so about how many people contributed. 
+But only one of them out of the 7,599 said this. 
+(Laughter) Which I was pretty surprised by. 
+I expected people to be wondering, "" Why did I draw a sheep? "" And I think it's a pretty valid question. 
+And there's a lot of reasons why I chose sheep. 
+Sheep were the first animal to be raised from mechanically processed byproducts, the first to be selectively bred for production traits, the first animal to be cloned. 
+Obviously, we think of sheep as followers. 
+And there's this reference to "" Le Petit Prince "" where the narrator asks the prince to draw a sheep. 
+He draws sheep after sheep. 
+The narrator's only appeased when he draws a box. 
+And he says, "" It's not about a scientific rendering of a sheep. 
+It's about your own interpretation and doing something different. "" And I like that. 
+So this is a clip from Charlie Chaplin's "" Modern Times. "" It's showing Charlie Chaplin dealing with some of the major changes during the Industrial Revolution. 
+So there were no longer shoe makers, but now there are people slapping soles on people's shoes. 
+And the whole idea of one's relationship to their work changed a lot. 
+So I thought this was an interesting clip to divide into 16 pieces and feed into the Mechanical Turk with a drawing tool. 
+This basically allowed — what you see on the left side is the original frame, and on the right side you see that frame as interpreted by 16 people who have no idea what it is they're doing. 
+And this was the inspiration for a project that I worked on with my friend Takashi Kawashima. 
+We decided to use the Mechanical Turk for exactly what it was meant for, which is making money. 
+So we took a hundred dollar bill and divided it into 10,000 teeny pieces, and we fed those into the Mechanical Turk. 
+We asked people to draw what it was that they saw. 
+But here there was no sheep-like criteria. 
+People, if they drew a stick figure or a smiley face, it actually made it into the bill. 
+So what you see is actually a representation of how well people did what it was they were asked to do. 
+So we took these hundred dollar bills, and we put them on a website called TenThousandsCents.com, where you can browse through and see all the individual contributions. 
+And you can also trade real hundred-dollar bills for fake hundred-dollar bills and make a donation to the Hundred Dollar Laptop Project, which is now known as One Laptop Per Child. 
+This is again showing all the different contributions. 
+You see some people did beautiful stipple renderings, like this one on top — spent a long time making realistic versions. 
+And other people would draw stick figures or smiley faces. 
+Here on the right-hand side in the middle you see this one guy writing, "" $0.01!!! Really? "" That's all I'm getting paid for this? 
+(Laughter) So the last Mechanical Turk project I'm going to talk to you about is called Bicycle Built for 2000. 
+This is a collaboration with my friend Daniel Massey. 
+You may recognize these two guys. 
+This is Max Mathews and John Kelly from Bell Labs in the '60s, where they created the song "" Daisy Bell, "" which was the world's first singing computer. 
+You may recognize it from "" 2001: A Space Odyssey. "" When HAL's dying at the end of the film he starts singing this song, as a reference to when computers became human. 
+So we resynthesized this song. 
+This is what that sounded like. 
+We broke down all the individual notes in the singing as well as the phonemes in the singing. 
+Daisy Bell: ♫ Daisy, Daisy... ♫ Aaron Koblin: And we took all of those individual pieces, and we fed them into another Turk request. 
+This is what it would look like if you went to the site. 
+You type in your code, but you first test your mic. 
+You'd be fed a simple audio clip. 
+(Honk) And then you'd do your best to recreate that with your own voice. 
+After previewing it and confirming it's what you submitted, you could submit it into the Mechanical Turk with no other context. 
+And this is what we first got back from the very first set of submissions. 
+Recording: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ♫ ♫ give me your answer do ♫ ♫ I'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ It can't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ I can't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ But you'll look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫ AK: So James Surowieki has this idea of the wisdom of crowds, that says that a whole bunch of people are smarter than any individual. 
+We wanted to see how this applies to collaborative, distributed music making, where nobody has any idea what it is they're working on. 
+So if you go to the BicycleBuiltforTwoThousand.com you can actually hear what all this sounds like together. 
+I'm sorry for this. 
+(Noise) Chorus: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ♫ ♫ Give me your answer do ♫ ♫ I'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ It can't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ I can't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ But you'd look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫ AK: So stepping back for a quick second, when I was at UCLA going to grad school, I was also working at a place called the Center for Embedded Network Sensing. 
+And I was writing software to visualize laser scanners. 
+So basically motion through 3D space. 
+And this was seen by a director in L.A. named James Frost who said, "" Wait a minute. 
+You mean we can shoot a music video without actually using any video? "" So we did exactly that. 
+We made a music video for one of my favorite bands, Radiohead. 
+And I think one of my favorite parts of this project was not just shooting a video with lasers, but we also open sourced it, and we made it released as a Google Code project, where people could download a bunch of the data and some source code to build their own versions of it. 
+And people were making some amazing things. 
+This is actually two of my favorites: the pin-board Thom Yorke and a LEGO Thom Yorke. 
+A whole YouTube channel of people submitting really interesting content. 
+More recently, somebody even 3D-printed Thom Yorke's head, which is a little creepy, but pretty cool. 
+So with everybody making so much amazing stuff and actually understanding what it was they were working on, I was really interested in trying to make a collaborative project where people were working together to build something. 
+And I met a music video director named Chris Milk. 
+And we started bouncing around ideas to make a collaborative music video project. 
+But we knew we really needed the right person to kind of rally behind and build something for. 
+So we put the idea on the back burner for a few months. 
+And he ended up talking to Rick Rubin, who was finishing up Johnny Cash's final album called "" Ain't No Grave. "" The lyrics to the leading track are "" Ain't no grave can hold my body down. "" So we thought this was the perfect project to build a collaborative memorial and a virtual resurrection for Johnny Cash. 
+So I teamed up with my good friend Ricardo Cabello, also known as Mr. doob, who's a much better programmer than I am, and he made this amazing Flash drawing tool. 
+As you know, an animation is a series of images. 
+So what we did was cross-cut a bunch of archival footage of Johnny Cash, and at eight frames a second, we allowed individuals to draw a single frame that would get woven into this dynamically changing music video. 
+So I don't have time to play the entire thing for you, but I want to show you two short clips. 
+One is the beginning of the music video. 
+And that's going to be followed by a short clip of people who have already contributed to the project talking about it briefly. 
+(Music) (Video) Johnny Cash: ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body down ♫ ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold body down ♫ ♫ When I hear the trumpet sound ♫ ♫ I'm going to ride right out of the ground ♫ ♫ Ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body... ♫ (Applause) AK: What better way to pay tribute to the man than to make something for one of his songs. 
+Collaborator: I felt really sad when he died. 
+And I just thought it'd be wonderful, it'd be really nice to contribute something to his memory. 
+Collaborator Two: It really allows this last recording of his to be a living, breathing memorial. 
+Collaborator Three: For all of the frames to be drawn by fans, each individual frame, it's got a very powerful feeling to it. 
+Collaborator Four: I've seen everybody from Japan, Venezuela, to the States, to Knoxville, Tennessee. 
+Collaborator Five: As much as is different from frame to frame, it really is personal. 
+Collaborator Six: Watching the video in my room, I could see me not understanding at the beginning of it. 
+And I just worked and worked through problems, until my little wee battles that I was fighting within the picture all began to resolve themselves. 
+You can actually see the point when I know what I'm doing, and a lot of light and dark comes into it. 
+And in a weird way, that's what I actually like about Johnny Cash's music as well. 
+It's the sum total of his life, all the things that had happened — the bad things, the good things. 
+You're hearing a person's life. 
+AK: So if you go to the website JohnnyCashProject.com, what you'll see is the video playing above. 
+And below it are all the individual frames that people have been submitting to the project. 
+So this isn't finished at all, but it's an ongoing project where people can continue to collaborate. 
+If you roll over any one of those individual thumbnails, you can see the person who drew that individual thumbnail and where they were located. 
+And if you find one that you're interested in, you can actually click on it and open up an information panel where you're able to rate that frame, which helps it bubble up to the top. 
+And you can also see the way that it was drawn. 
+Again, you can get the playback and personal contribution. 
+In addition to that, it's listed, the artist's name, the location, how long they spent drawing it. 
+And you can pick a style. So this one was tagged "" Abstract. "" But there's a bunch of different styles. 
+And you can sort the video a number of different ways. 
+You can say, "" I want to see the pointillist version or the sketchy version or the realistic version. 
+And then this is, again, the abstract version, which ends up getting a little bit crazy. 
+So the last project I want to talk to you about is another collaboration with Chris Milk. 
+And this is called "" The Wilderness Downtown. "" It's an online music video for the Arcade Fire. 
+Chris and I were really amazed by the potential now with modern web browsers, where you have HTML5 audio and video and the power of JavaScript to render amazingly fast. 
+And we wanted to push the idea of the music video that was meant for the Web beyond the four-by-three or sixteen-by-nine window and try to make it play out and choreograph throughout the screen. 
+But most importantly, I think, we really wanted to make an experience that was unlike the Johnny Cash Project, where you had a small group of people spending a lot of time to contribute something for everyone. 
+What if we had a very low commitment, but delivered something individually unique to each person who contributed? 
+So the project starts off by asking you to enter the address of the home where you grew up. 
+And you type in the address — it actually creates a music video specifically for you, pulling in Google maps and Streetview images into the experience itself. 
+So this should really be seen at home with you typing in your own address, but I'm going to give you a little preview of what you can expect. 
+(Video) Win Butler: ♫ Now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ Now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ Hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ Hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ Sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ Still moving through the pain ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ AK: So I think, if there's one thing to take away from my talk today, 
+it's that an interface can be a powerful narrative device. 
+And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together. 
+Thanks a lot. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My first love was for the night sky. 
+You're looking at a fly-through of the Hubble Space Telescope Ultra-Deep Field, one of the most distant images of our universe ever observed. 
+Everything you see here is a galaxy, comprised of billions of stars each. 
+And the farthest galaxy is a trillion, trillion kilometers away. 
+As an astrophysicist, I have the awesome privilege of studying some of the most exotic objects in our universe. 
+The objects that have captivated me from first crush throughout my career are supermassive, hyperactive black holes. 
+Weighing one to 10 billion times the mass of our own sun, these galactic black holes are devouring material, at a rate of upwards of 1,000 times more than your "" average "" supermassive black hole. 
+(Laughter) These two characteristics, with a few others, make them quasars. 
+At the same time, the objects I study are producing some of the most powerful particle streams ever observed. 
+These narrow streams, called jets, are moving at 99.99 percent of the speed of light, and are pointed directly at the Earth. 
+These jetted, Earth-pointed, hyperactive and supermassive black holes are called blazars, or blazing quasars. 
+What makes blazars so special is that they're some of the universe's most efficient particle accelerators, transporting incredible amounts of energy throughout a galaxy. 
+Here, I'm showing an artist's conception of a blazar. 
+The dinner plate by which material falls onto the black hole is called the accretion disc, shown here in blue. 
+Some of that material is slingshotted around the black hole and accelerated to insanely high speeds in the jet, shown here in white. 
+Although the blazar system is rare, the process by which nature pulls in material via a disk, and then flings some of it out via a jet, is more common. 
+We'll eventually zoom out of the blazar system to show its approximate relationship to the larger galactic context. 
+Beyond the cosmic accounting of what goes in to what goes out, one of the hot topics in blazar astrophysics right now is where the highest-energy jet emission comes from. 
+In this image, I'm interested in where this white blob forms and if, as a result, there's any relationship between the jet and the accretion disc material. 
+Clear answers to this question were almost completely inaccessible until 2008, when NASA launched a new telescope that better detects gamma ray light — that is, light with energies a million times higher than your standard x-ray scan. 
+I simultaneously compare variations between the gamma ray light data and the visible light data from day to day and year to year, to better localize these gamma ray blobs. 
+My research shows that in some instances, these blobs form much closer to the black hole than we initially thought. 
+As we more confidently localize where these gamma ray blobs are forming, we can better understand how jets are being accelerated, and ultimately reveal the dynamic processes by which some of the most fascinating objects in our universe are formed. 
+And it still is. 
+This love transformed me from a curious, stargazing young girl to a professional astrophysicist, hot on the heels of celestial discovery. 
+Who knew that chasing after the universe would ground me so deeply to my mission here on Earth. 
+Then again, when do we ever know where love's first flutter will truly take us. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was little — and by the way, I was little once — my father told me a story about an 18th century watchmaker. 
+And what this guy had done: he used to produce these fabulously beautiful watches. 
+And one day, one of his customers came into his workshop and asked him to clean the watch that he'd bought. 
+And the guy took it apart, and one of the things he pulled out was one of the balance wheels. 
+And as he did so, his customer noticed that on the back side of the balance wheel was an engraving, were words. 
+And he said to the guy, "" Why have you put stuff on the back that no one will ever see? "" And the watchmaker turned around and said, "God can see it." 
+Now I'm not in the least bit religious, neither was my father, but at that point, I noticed something happening here. 
+I felt something in this plexus of blood vessels and nerves, and there must be some muscles in there as well somewhere, I guess. 
+But I felt something. 
+And it was a physiological response. 
+And from that point on, from my age at the time, I began to think of things in a different way. 
+And as I took on my career as a designer, I began to ask myself the simple question: Do we actually think beauty, or do we feel it? 
+Now you probably know the answer to this already. 
+You probably think, well, I don't know which one you think it is, but I think it's about feeling beauty. 
+And so I then moved on into my design career and began to find some exciting things. 
+One of the most early work was done in automotive design — some very exciting work was done there. 
+And during a lot of this work, we found something, or I found something, that really fascinated me, and maybe you can remember it. 
+Do you remember when lights used to just go on and off, click click, when you closed the door in a car? 
+And then somebody, I think it was BMW, introduced a light that went out slowly. 
+Remember that? 
+I remember it clearly. 
+Do you remember the first time you were in a car and it did that? 
+I remember sitting there thinking, this is fantastic. 
+In fact, I've never found anybody that doesn't like the light that goes out slowly. 
+I thought, well what the hell's that about? 
+So I started to ask myself questions about it. 
+And the first was, I'd ask other people: "" Do you like it? "" "" Yes. "" "Why?" And they'd say, "Oh, it feels so natural," or, "" It's nice. "" I thought, well that's not good enough. 
+Can we cut down a little bit further, because, as a designer, I need the vocabulary, I need the keyboard, of how this actually works. 
+And so I did some experiments. 
+And I suddenly realized that there was something that did exactly that — light to dark in six seconds — exactly that. 
+Do you know what it is? Anyone? 
+You see, using this bit, the thinky bit, the slow bit of the brain — using that. 
+And this isn't a think, it's a feel. 
+And would you do me a favor? 
+For the next 14 minutes or whatever it is, will you feel stuff? 
+I don't need you to think so much as I want you to feel it. 
+I felt a sense of relaxation tempered with anticipation. 
+And that thing that I found was the cinema or the theater. 
+It's actually just happened here — light to dark in six seconds. 
+And when that happens, are you sitting there going, "No, the movie's about to start," or are you going, "" That's fantastic. I'm looking forward to it. 
+I get a sense of anticipation ""? 
+Now I'm not a neuroscientist. 
+I don't know even if there is something called a conditioned reflex. 
+But it might be. 
+Because the people I speak to in the northern hemisphere that used to go in the cinema get this. 
+And some of the people I speak to that have never seen a movie or been to the theater don't get it in the same way. 
+Everybody likes it, but some like it more than others. 
+So this leads me to think of this in a different way. 
+We're not feeling it. We're thinking beauty is in the limbic system — if that's not an outmoded idea. 
+These are the bits, the pleasure centers, and maybe what I'm seeing and sensing and feeling is bypassing my thinking. 
+The wiring from your sensory apparatus to those bits is shorter than the bits that have to pass through the thinky bit, the cortex. 
+They arrive first. 
+So how do we make that actually work? 
+And how much of that reactive side of it is due to what we already know, or what we're going to learn, about something? 
+This is one of the most beautiful things I know. 
+It's a plastic bag. 
+And when I looked at it first, I thought, no, there's no beauty in that. 
+Then I found out, post exposure, that this plastic bag if I put it into a filthy puddle or a stream filled with coliforms and all sorts of disgusting stuff, that that filthy water will migrate through the wall of the bag by osmosis and end up inside it as pure, potable drinking water. 
+And all of a sudden, this plastic bag was extremely beautiful to me. 
+Now I'm going to ask you again to switch on the emotional bit. 
+Would you mind taking the brain out, and I just want you to feel something. 
+Look at that. What are you feeling about it? 
+Is it beautiful? Is it exciting? 
+I'm watching your faces very carefully. 
+There's some rather bored-looking gentlemen and some slightly engaged-looking ladies who are picking up something off that. 
+Maybe there's an innocence to it. 
+Now I'm going to tell you what it is. Are you ready? 
+This is the last act on this Earth of a little girl called Heidi, five years old, before she died of cancer to the spine. 
+It's the last thing she did, the last physical act. 
+Look at that picture. 
+Look at the innocence. Look at the beauty in it. 
+Is it beautiful now? 
+Stop. Stop. How do you feel? 
+Where are you feeling this? 
+I'm feeling it here. I feel it here. 
+And I'm watching your faces, because your faces are telling me something. 
+The lady over there is actually crying, by the way. 
+But what are you doing? 
+I watch what people do. 
+I watch faces. 
+I watch reactions. 
+Because I have to know how people react to things. 
+And one of the most common faces on something faced with beauty, something stupefyingly delicious, is what I call the OMG. 
+And by the way, there's no pleasure in that face. 
+It's not a "" this is wonderful! "" The eyebrows are doing this, the eyes are defocused, and the mouth is hanging open. 
+That's not the expression of joy. 
+There's something else in that. 
+There's something weird happening. 
+So pleasure seems to be tempered by a whole series of different things coming in. 
+Poignancy is a word I love as a designer. 
+It means something triggering a big emotional response, often quite a sad emotional response, but it's part of what we do. 
+It isn't just about nice. 
+And this is the dilemma, this is the paradox, of beauty. 
+Sensorily, we're taking in all sorts of things — mixtures of things that are good, bad, exciting, frightening — to come up with that sensorial exposure, that sensation of what's going on. 
+Pathos appears obviously as part of what you just saw in that little girl's drawing. 
+And also triumph, this sense of transcendence, this "" I never knew that. Ah, this is something new. "" And that's packed in there as well. 
+And as we assemble these tools, from a design point of view, I get terribly excited about it, because these are things, as we've already said, they're arriving at the brain, it would seem, before cognition, before we can manipulate them — electrochemical party tricks. 
+Now what I'm also interested in is: Is it possible to separate intrinsic and extrinsic beauty? 
+By that, I mean intrinsically beautiful things, just something that's exquisitely beautiful, that's universally beautiful. 
+Very hard to find. Maybe you've got some examples of it. 
+Very hard to find something that, to everybody, is a very beautiful thing, without a certain amount of information packed in there before. 
+So a lot of it tends to be extrinsic. 
+It's mediated by information before the comprehension. 
+Or the information's added on at the back, like that little girl's drawing that I showed you. 
+Now when talking about beauty you can't get away from the fact that a lot experiments have been done in this way with faces and what have you. 
+And one of the most tedious ones, I think, was saying that beauty was about symmetry. 
+Well it obviously isn't. 
+This is a more interesting one where half faces were shown to some people, and then to add them into a list of most beautiful to least beautiful and then exposing a full face. 
+And they found that it was almost exact coincidence. 
+So it wasn't about symmetry. 
+In fact, this lady has a particularly asymmetrical face, of which both sides are beautiful. 
+But they're both different. 
+And as a designer, I can't help meddling with this, so I pulled it to bits and sort of did stuff like this, and tried to understand what the individual elements were, but feeling it as I go. 
+Now I can feel a sensation of delight and beauty if I look at that eye. 
+I'm not getting it off the eyebrow. 
+And the earhole isn't doing it to me at all. 
+So I don't know how much this is helping me, but it's helping to guide me to the places where the signals are coming off. 
+And as I say, I'm not a neuroscientist, but to understand how I can start to assemble things that will very quickly bypass this thinking part and get me to the enjoyable precognitive elements. 
+Anais Nin and the Talmud have told us time and time again that we see things not as they are, but as we are. 
+So I'm going to shamelessly expose something to you, which is beautiful to me. 
+And this is the F1 MV Agusta. 
+Ahhhh. 
+It is really — I mean, I can't express to you how exquisite this object is. 
+But I also know why it's exquisite to me, because it's a palimpsest of things. 
+It's masses and masses of layers. 
+This is just the bit that protrudes into our physical dimension. 
+It's something much bigger. 
+Layer after layer of legend, sport, details that resonate. 
+I mean, if I just go through some of them now — I know about laminar flow when it comes to air-piercing objects, and that does it consummately well, you can see it can. 
+So that's getting me excited. 
+And I feel that here. 
+This bit, the big secret of automotive design — reflection management. 
+It's not about the shapes, it's how the shapes reflect light. 
+Now that thing, light flickers across it as you move, so it becomes a kinetic object, even though it's standing still — managed by how brilliantly that's done on the reflection. 
+This little relief on the footplate, by the way, to a rider means there's something going on underneath it — in this case, a drive chain running at 300 miles and hour probably, taking the power from the engine. 
+I'm getting terribly excited as my mind and my eyes flick across these things. 
+Titanium lacquer on this. 
+I can't tell you how wonderful this is. 
+That's how you stop the nuts coming off at high speed on the wheel. 
+I'm really getting into this now. 
+And of course, a racing bike doesn't have a prop stand, but this one, because it's a road bike, it all goes away and it folds into this little gap. 
+So it disappears. 
+And then I can't tell you how hard it is to do that radiator, which is curved. 
+Why would you do that? 
+Because I know we need to bring the wheel farther into the aerodynamics. 
+So it's more expensive, but it's wonderful. 
+And to cap it all, brand royalty — Agusta, Count Agusta, from the great histories of this stuff. 
+The bit that you can't see is the genius that created this. 
+Massimo Tamburini. 
+They call him "" The Plumber "" in Italy, as well as "" Maestro, "" because he actually is engineer and craftsman and sculptor at the same time. 
+There's so little compromise on this, you can't see it. 
+But unfortunately, the likes of me and people that are like me have to deal with compromise all the time with beauty. 
+We have to deal with it. 
+So I have to work with a supply chain, and I've got to work with the technologies, and I've got to work with everything else all the time, and so compromises start to fit into it. 
+And so look at her. 
+I've had to make a bit of a compromise there. 
+I've had to move that part across, but only a millimeter. 
+No one's noticed, have they yet? 
+Did you see what I did? 
+I moved three things by a millimeter. 
+Pretty? Yes. 
+Beautiful? Maybe lesser. 
+But then, of course, the consumer says that doesn't really matter. 
+So that's okay, isn't it? 
+Another millimeter? 
+No one's going to notice those split lines and changes. 
+It's that easy to lose beauty, because beauty's incredibly difficult to do. 
+And only a few people can do it. 
+And a focus group cannot do it. 
+And a team rarely can do it. 
+It takes a central cortex, if you like, to be able to orchestrate all those elements at the same time. 
+This is a beautiful water bottle — some of you know of it — done by Ross Lovegrove, the designer. 
+This is pretty close to intrinsic beauty. This one, as long as you know what water is like then you can experience this. 
+It's lovely because it is an embodiment of something refreshing and delicious. 
+I might like it more than you like it, because I know how bloody hard it is to do it. 
+It's stupefyingly difficult to make something that refracts light like that, that comes out of the tool correctly, that goes down the line without falling over. 
+Underneath this, like the story of the swan, is a million things very difficult to do. 
+So all hail to that. 
+It's a fantastic example, a simple object. 
+And the one I showed you before was, of course, a massively complex one. 
+And they're working in beauty in slightly different ways because of it. 
+You all, I guess, like me, enjoy watching a ballet dancer dance. 
+And part of the joy of it is, you know the difficulty. 
+You also may be taking into account the fact that it's incredibly painful. 
+Anybody seen a ballet dancer's toes when they come out of the points? 
+While she's doing these graceful arabesques and plies and what have you, something horrible's going on down here. 
+The comprehension of it leads us to a greater and heightened sense of the beauty of what's actually going on. 
+Now I'm using microseconds wrongly here, so please ignore me. 
+But what I have to do now, feeling again, what I've got to do is to be able to supply enough of these enzymes, of these triggers into something early on in the process, that you pick it up, not through your thinking, but through your feeling. 
+So we're going to have a little experiment. 
+Right, are you ready? I'm going to show you something for a very, very brief moment. 
+Are you ready? Okay. 
+Did you think that was a bicycle when I showed it to you at the first flash? 
+It's not. 
+Tell me something, did you think it was quick when you first saw it? Yes you did. 
+Did you think it was modern? Yes you did. 
+That blip, that information, shot into you before that. 
+And because your brain starter motor began there, now it's got to deal with it. 
+And the great thing is, this motorcycle has been styled this way specifically to engender a sense that it's green technology and it's good for you and it's light and it's all part of the future. 
+So is that wrong? 
+Well in this case it isn't, because it's a very, very ecologically-sound piece of technology. 
+But you're a slave of that first flash. 
+We are slaves to the first few fractions of a second — and that's where much of my work has to win or lose, on a shelf in a shop. 
+It wins or loses at that point. 
+You may see 50, 100, 200 things on a shelf as you walk down it, but I have to work within that domain, to ensure that it gets you there first. 
+And finally, the layer that I love, of knowledge. 
+Some of you, I'm sure, will be familiar with this. 
+What's incredible about this, and the way I love to come back to it, is this is taking something that you hate or bores you, folding clothes, and if you can actually do this — who can actually do this? Anybody try to do this? 
+Yeah? 
+It's fantastic, isn't it? 
+Look at that. Do you want to see it again? 
+No time. It says I have two minutes left, so we can't do this. 
+But just go to the Web, YouTube, pull it down, "" folding T-shirt. "" That's how underpaid younger-aged people have to fold your T-shirt. 
+You didn't maybe know it. 
+But how do you feel about it? 
+It feels fantastic when you do it, you look forward to doing it, and when you tell somebody else about it — like you probably have — you look really smart. 
+The knowledge bubble that sits around the outside, the stuff that costs nothing, because that knowledge is free — bundle that together and where do we come out? 
+Form follows function? 
+Only sometimes. Only sometimes. 
+Form is function. Form is function. 
+It informs, it tells us, it supplies us answers before we've even thought about it. 
+And so I've stopped using words like "" form, "" and I've stopped using words like "" function "" as a designer. 
+What I try to pursue now is the emotional functionality of things. 
+Because if I can get that right, I can make them wonderful, and I can make them repeatedly wonderful. 
+And you know what those products and services are, because you own some of them. 
+They're the things that you'd snatch if the house was on fire. 
+Forming the emotional bond between this thing and you is an electrochemical party trick that happens before you even think about it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Two hundred years of modern science. 
+We have to admit that our performance is not great. 
+The machines we build continue to suffer from mechanical failures. 
+The houses we build do not survive severe earthquakes. 
+But we shouldn't be so critical of our scientists for a simple reason: they didn't have much time. 
+Two hundred years is not a lot of time, while nature had three billion years to perfect some of the most amazing materials, that we wish we had in our possession. 
+Remember, these materials carry a quality assurance of three billion years. 
+Take, for example, sequoia trees. 
+They carry hundreds of tons for hundreds of years in cold weather, in warm climates, UV light. 
+Yet, if you look at the structure by high-resolution electron microscopy, and you ask yourself, what is it made of, surprisingly, it's made of sugar. 
+Well, not exactly as we drink in our tea. 
+It's actually a nanofiber called nanocrystalline cellulose. 
+And this nanocrystalline cellulose is so strong, on a weight basis, it's about 10 times stronger than steel. 
+Yet it's made of sugar. 
+So scientists all over the world believe that nanocellulose is going to be one of the most important materials for the entire industry. 
+But here's the problem: say you want to buy a half a ton of nanocellulose to build a boat or an airplane. 
+Well, you can Google, you can eBay, you can even Alibaba. 
+You won't find it. 
+Of course, you're going to find thousands of scientific papers — great papers, where scientists are going to say this is a great material, there are lots of things we can do with it. 
+So we at the Hebrew University, together with our partners in Sweden, decided to focus on the development of an industrial-scale process to produce this nanocellulose. 
+And, of course, we didn't want to cut trees. 
+So we were looking for another source of raw material, and we found one — in fact, the sludge of the paper industry. 
+The reason: there is a lot of it. 
+Europe alone produces 11 million tons of that material annually. 
+It's the equivalent of a mountain three kilometers high, sitting on a soccer field. 
+And we produce this mountain every year. 
+So for everybody, it's an environmental problem, and for us, it's a gold mine. 
+So now, we are actually producing, on an industrial scale in Israel, nanocellulose, and very soon, in Sweden. 
+We can do a lot of things with the material. 
+For example, we have shown that by adding only a small percent of nanocellulose into cotton fibers, the same as my shirt is made of, it increases its strength dramatically. 
+So this can be used for making amazing things, like super-fabrics for industrial and medical applications. 
+But this is not the only thing. 
+For example, self-standing, self-supporting structures, like the shelters that you can see now, actually are now showcasing in the Venice Biennale for Architecture. 
+Nature actually didn't stop its wonders in the plant kingdom. 
+Think about insects. 
+Cat fleas, for example, have the ability to jump about a hundred times their height. 
+That's amazing. 
+It's the equivalent of a person standing in the middle of Liberty Island in New York, and in a single jump, going to the top of the Statue of Liberty. 
+So the question is: How do cat fleas do it? 
+It turns out, they make this wonderful material, which is called resilin. 
+In simple words, resilin, which is a protein, is the most elastic rubber on Earth. 
+You can stretch it, you can squish it, and it doesn't lose almost any energy to the environment. 
+When you release it — snap! 
+It brings back all the energy. 
+So I'm sure everybody would like to have that material. 
+But here's the problem: to catch cat fleas is difficult. 
+(Laughter) Why? Because they are jumpy. (Laughter) 
+But now, it's actually enough to catch one. 
+Now we can extract its DNA and read how cat fleas make the resilin, and clone it into a less-jumpy organism like a plant. 
+So that's exactly what we did. 
+Now we have the ability to produce lots of resilin. 
+Well, my team decided to do something really cool at the university. 
+They decided to combine the strongest material produced by the plant kingdom with the most elastic material produced by the insect kingdom — nanocellulose with resilin. 
+And the result is amazing. 
+This material, in fact, is tough, elastic and transparent. 
+So there are lots of things that can be done with this material. 
+For example, next-generation sport shoes, so we can jump higher, run faster. 
+And even touch screens for computers and smartphones, that won't break. 
+Well, the problem is, we continue to implant synthetic implants in our body, which we glue and screw into our body. 
+And I'm going to say that this is not a good idea. 
+Why? Because they fail. 
+This synthetic material fails, just like this plastic fork, that is not strong enough for its performance. 
+But sometimes they are too strong, and therefore their mechanical properties do not really fit their surrounding tissues. 
+But in fact, the reason is much more fundamental. 
+The reason is that in nature, there is no one there that actually takes my head and screws it onto my neck, or takes my skin and glues it onto my body. 
+In nature, everything is self-assembled. 
+So every living cell, whether coming from a plant, insect or human being, has a DNA that encodes for nanobio building blocks. 
+Many times they are proteins. 
+Other times, they are enzymes that make other materials, like polysaccharides, fatty acids. 
+And the common feature about all these materials is that they need no one. 
+They recognize each other and self-assemble into structures — scaffolds on which cells are proliferating to give tissues. 
+They develop into organs, and together bring life. 
+So we at the Hebrew University, about 10 years ago, decided to focus on probably the most important biomaterial for humans, which is collagen. 
+Why collagen? 
+Because collagen accounts for about 25 percent of our dry weight. 
+We have nothing more than collagen, other than water, in our body. 
+So I always like to say, anyone who is in the replacement parts of human beings would like to have collagen. 
+Admittedly, before we started our project, there were already more than 1,000 medical implants made of collagen. 
+You know, simple things like dermal fillers to reduce wrinkles, augment lips, and other, more sophisticated medical implants, like heart valves. 
+So where is the problem? 
+Well, the problem is the source. 
+The source of all that collagen is actually coming from dead bodies: dead pigs, dead cows and even human cadavers. 
+So safety is a big issue. 
+But it's not the only one. 
+Also, the quality. 
+Now here, I have a personal interest. 
+This is my father, Zvi, in our winery in Israel. 
+A heart valve, very similar to the one that I showed you before, seven years ago, was implanted in his body. 
+Now, the scientific literature says that these heart valves start to fail 10 years after the operation. 
+No wonder: they are made from old, used tissues, just like this wall made of bricks that is falling apart. 
+Yeah, of course, I can take those bricks and build a new wall. 
+But it's not going to be the same. 
+So the US Food and Drug Administration made a notice already in 2007, asking the companies to start to look for better alternatives. 
+So that's exactly what we did. 
+We decided to clone all the five human genes responsible for making type I collagen in humans into a transgenic tobacco plant. 
+So now, the plant has the ability to make human collagen brand new, untouched. 
+This is amazing. 
+Actually, it's happening now. 
+Today in Israel, we grow it in 25,000 square meters of greenhouses all over the country. 
+The farmers receive small plantlets of tobacco. 
+It looks exactly like regular tobacco, except that they have five human genes. 
+We grow them for about 50 to 70 days, we harvest the leaves, and then the leaves are transported by cooling trucks to the factory. 
+There, the process of extracting the collagen starts. 
+Now, if you ever made a pesto — essentially, the same thing. 
+(Laughter) You crush the leaves, you get the juice that contains the collagen. 
+We concentrate the protein, transfer the protein to clean rooms for the final purification, and the end result is a collagen identical to what we have in our body — untouched, brand new and from which we make different medical implants: bone void fillers, for example, for severe bone fractures, spinal fusion. 
+And more recently, even, we've been able to launch into the market here in Europe a flowable gel that is used for diabetic foot ulcers, that is now approved for use in the clinic. 
+This is not science fiction. 
+This is happening now. 
+We are using plants to make medical implants for replacement parts for human beings. 
+In fact, more recently, we've been able to make collagen fibers which are six times stronger than the Achilles tendon. 
+That's amazing. 
+Together with our partners from Ireland, we thought about the next thing: adding resilin to those fibers. 
+By doing that, we've been able to make a superfiber which is about 380 percent tougher, and 300 percent more elastic. 
+So oddly enough, in the future, when a patient is transplanted with artificial tendons or ligaments made from these fibers, we'll have better performance after the surgery than we had before the injury. 
+So what's for the future? 
+In the future, we believe we'll be able to make many nanobio building blocks that nature provided for us — collagen, nanocellulose, resilin and many more. 
+And that will enable us to make better machines perform better, even the heart. 
+Now, this heart is not going to be the same as we can get from a donor. 
+It will be better. 
+It actually will perform better and will last longer. 
+My friend Zion Suliman once told me a smart sentence. 
+He said, "" If you want a new idea, you should open an old book. "" And I'm going to say that the book was written. 
+It was written over three billion years of evolution. 
+And the text is the DNA of life. 
+All we have to do is read this text, embrace nature's gift to us and start our progress from here. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Good afternoon. 
+I am not a farmer. 
+(Laughter) I'm not. I'm a parent, I'm a resident and I'm a teacher. 
+And this is my world. 
+And along the way I've started noticing — I'm on my third generation of kids — that they're getting bigger. 
+They're getting sicker. 
+In addition to these complexities, I just learned that 70 percent of the kids that I see who are labeled learning disabled would not have been had they had proper prenatal nutrition. 
+The realities of my community are simple. They look like this. 
+Kids should not have to grow up and look at things like this. 
+And as jobs continue to leave my community, and energy continues to come in, be exported in, it's no wonder that really some people refer to the South Bronx as a desert. 
+But I'm the oldest sixth grader you'll ever meet, so I get up every day with this tremendous amount of enthusiasm that I'm hoping to share with you all today. 
+And with that note, I come to you with this belief that kids should not have to leave their communities to live, learn and earn in a better one. 
+So I'm here to tell you a story about me and this wall that I met outside, which I'm now bringing inside. 
+And it starts with three people. 
+The crazy teacher — that's me on the left, I dress up pretty, thank you, my wife, I love you for getting a good suit — my passionate borough president and a guy named George Irwin from Green Living Technologies who helped me with my class and helped me get involved with this patented technology. 
+But it all starts with seeds in classrooms, in my place, which looks like this. 
+And I'm here today hoping that my reach will exceed my grasp. 
+And that's really what this is all about. 
+And it starts with incredible kids like this, who come early and stay late. 
+All of my kids are either IEP or ELL learners, most come with a lot of handicaps, most are homeless and many are in foster care. 
+Almost all of my kids live below poverty. 
+But with those seeds, from day one, we are growing in my classroom, and this is what it looks like in my classroom. 
+And you see how attentive these kids are to these seeds. 
+And then you notice that those seeds become farms across the Bronx that look like this. 
+But again, I am not a farmer. I'm a teacher. 
+And I don't like weeding, and I don't like back-breaking labor. 
+So I wanted to figure out how I could get this kind of success into something small, like this, and bring it into my classroom so that handicapped kids could do it, kids who didn't want to be outside could do it, and everyone could have access. 
+So I called George Irwin, and what do you know? 
+He came to my class and we built an indoor edible wall. 
+And what we do is we partner it with authentic learning experiences, private-based learning. 
+And lo and behold, we gave birth to the first edible wall in New York City. 
+So if you're hungry, get up and eat. 
+You can do it right now. My kids play cow all the time. 
+Okay? But we were just getting started, the kids loved the technology, so we called up George and we said, "" We gotta learn more! "" Now, Mayor Bloomberg, thank you very much, we no longer need work permits, which comes with slices and bonded contractors — we're available for you — We decided to go to Boston. 
+And my kids, from the poorest congressional district in America, became the first to install a green wall, designed by a computer, with real-live learning tools, 21 stories up — if you're going to go visit it, it's on top of the John Hancock building. 
+But closer to home, we started installing these walls in schools that look like this with lighting like that, real LED stuff, 21st-century technology. 
+And what do you know? We made 21st century money, and that was groundbreaking. Wow! 
+This is my harvest, people. 
+And what do you do with this food? You cook it! 
+And those are my heirloom students making heirloom sauce, with plastic forks, and we get it into the cafeteria, and we grow stuff and we feed our teachers. 
+And that is the youngest nationally certified workforce in America with our Bronx Borough President. 
+And what'd we do then? Well, I met nice people like you, and they invited us to the Hamptons. 
+So I call this "" from South Bronx to Southampton. "" And we started putting in roofs that look like this, and we came in from destitute neighborhoods to start building landscape like this, wow! People noticed. 
+And so we got invited back this past summer, and we actually moved into the Hamptons, payed 3,500 dollars a week for a house, and we learned how to surf. 
+And when you can do stuff like this — These are my kids putting in this technology, and when you can build a roof that looks like that on a house that looks like that with sedum that looks like this, this is the new green graffiti. 
+So, you may wonder what does a wall like this really do for kids, besides changing landscapes and mindsets? 
+Okay, I'm going to tell you what it does. 
+It gets me to meet incredible contractors like this, Jim Ellenberger from Ellenberger Services. 
+And this is where it becomes true triple bottom line. 
+Because Jim realized that these kids, my future farmers, really had the skills he needed to build affordable housing for New Yorkers, right in their own neighborhood. 
+And this is what my kids are doing, making living wage. 
+Now, if you're like me, you live in a building, there are seven guys out of work looking to manage a million dollars. 
+I don't have it. But if you need a toilet fixed or, you know, some shelving, I gotta wait six months for an appointment with someone who drives a much nicer car than me. 
+That's the beauty of this economy. 
+But my kids are now licensed and bonded in trade. 
+And that's my first student to open up, the first in his family to have a bank account. 
+This immigrant student is the first one in his family to use an ATM. 
+And this is the true triple bottom line, because we can take neighborhoods that were abandoned and destitute and turn them into something like this with interiors like this. 
+Wow! People noticed. And notice they did. 
+So CNN called, and we were delighted to have them come to our farmer's market. 
+And then when Rockefeller Center said, NBC, could you put this thing up on the walls? We were delighted. 
+But this, I show you, when kids from the poorest congressional district in America can build a 30-foot by 15-foot wall, design it, plant it and install it in the heart of New York City, that's a true "" sí se puede "" moment. 
+Really scholastic, if you ask me. 
+But this is not a Getty image. 
+That's a picture I took of my Bronx Borough President, addressing my kids in his house, not the jailhouse, making them feel a part of it. 
+That's our State Senator Gustavo Rivera and Bob Bieder, coming to my classroom to make my kids feel important. 
+And when the Bronx Borough President shows up and the State Senator comes to our class, believe you me, the Bronx can change attitudes now. 
+We are poised, ready, willing and able to export our talent and diversity in ways we've never even imagined. 
+And when the local senator gets on the scale in public and says he's got to lose weight, so do I! 
+And I tell you what, I'm doing it and so are the kids. 
+Okay? And then celebrities started. 
+Produce Pete can't believe what we grow. 
+Lorna Sass came and donated books. 
+Okay? We're feeding seniors. 
+And when we realized that we were growing for food justice in the South Bronx, so did the international community. 
+And my kids in the South Bronx were repped in the first international green roof conference. 
+And that's just great. 
+Except what about locally? 
+Well, we met this woman, Avis Richards, with the Ground Up Campaign. 
+Unbelievable! Through her, my kids, the most disenfranchised and marginalized, were able to roll out 100 gardens to New York City public schools. 
+That's triple bottom line! Okay? 
+A year ago today, I was invited to the New York Academy of Medicine. 
+I thought this concept of designing a strong and healthy New York made sense, especially when the resources were free. 
+So thank you all and I love them. 
+They introduced me to the New York City Strategic Alliance for Health, again, free resources, don't waste them. 
+And what do you know? Six months later, my school and my kids were awarded the first ever high school award of excellence for creating a healthy school environment. 
+The greenest class in New York City. 
+But more importantly is my kids learned to get, they learned to give. 
+And we took the money that we made from our farmer's market, and started buying gifts for the homeless and for needy around the world. 
+So we started giving back. 
+And that's when I realized that the greening of America starts first with the pockets, then with the heart and then with the mind. 
+So we were onto something, and we're still onto something. 
+And thank God Trinity Wall Street noticed, because they gave us the birth of Green Bronx Machine. 
+We're 3,000 strong right now. 
+And what does it really do? 
+It teaches kids to re-vision their communities, so when they grow up in places like this, they can imagine it like this. 
+And my kids, trained and certified — Ma, you get the tax abatement. Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg — can take communities that look like this and convert them into things that look like that, and that to me, people, is another true "" sí se puede "" moment. 
+Now, how does it start? It starts in schools. 
+No more little Knicks and little Nets. 
+Group by broccoli, group by your favorite vegetable, something you can aspire to. 
+Okay? And these are my future farmers of America, growing up in Brook Park on 141st Street, the most migrant community in America. 
+When tenacious little ones learn how to garden like this, it's no wonder we get fruit like that. 
+And I love it! And so do they. 
+And we're building teepees in neighborhoods that were burning down. 
+And that's a true "" sí se puede "" moment. 
+And again, Brook Park feeds hundreds of people without a food stamp or a fingerprint. 
+The poorest congressional district in America, the most migratory community in America, we can do this. 
+Bissel Gardens is cranking out food in epic proportions, moving kids into an economy they never imagined. 
+Now, somewhere over the rainbow, my friends, is the South Bronx of America. And we're doing it. 
+How does it start? Well, look at Jose's attention to detail. 
+Thank God Omar knows that carrots come from the ground, and not aisle 9 at the supermarket or through a bullet-proof window or through a piece of styrofoam. 
+And when Henry knows that green is good, so do I. 
+And when you expand their palates, you expand their vocabulary. 
+And most importantly, when you put big kids together with little kids, you get the big fat white guy out of the middle, which is cool, and you create this kind of accountability amongst peers, which is incredible. 
+God, I'm going to run out of time, so I've gotta keep it moving. 
+But this is my weekly paycheck for kids; that's our green graffiti. 
+This is what we're doing. 
+And behold the glory and bounty that is Bronx County. 
+Nothing thrills me more than to see kids pollinating plants instead of each other. 
+I gotta tell you, I'm a protective parent. 
+But those kids are the kids who are now putting pumpkin patches on top of trains. 
+We're also designing coin ponds for the rich and affluent. 
+We're also becoming children of the corn, creating farms in the middle of Fordham Road for awareness and window bottles out of garbage. 
+Now I don't expect every kid to be a farmer, but I expect you to read about it, write about it, blog about it, offer outstanding customer service. 
+I expect them to be engaged, and man, are they! 
+So that's my incredible classroom, that's the food. 
+Where does it go? Zero miles to plate, right down into the cafeteria. 
+Or more importantly, to local shelters, where most of our kids are getting one to two meals a day. 
+And we're stepping it up. 
+No Air Jordans were ever ruined on my farm. 
+And in his day, a million dollar gardens and incredible installations. 
+Let me tell you something, people. 
+This is a beautiful moment. 
+Black field, brown field, toxic waste field, battlefield — we're proving in the Bronx that you can grow anywhere, on cement. 
+And we take orders for flowers. I'm putting the bake sale to shame. 
+We take orders now. I'm booking for the spring. 
+And these were all grown from seeds. We're learning everything. 
+And again, when you can take kids from backgrounds as diverse as this to do something as special as this, we're really creating a moment. 
+Now, you may ask about these kids. 
+Forty percent attendance to 93 percent attendance. 
+All start overage and under-credit. 
+They are now, my first cohort is all in college, earning a living wage. 
+The rest are scheduled to graduate this June. 
+Happy kids, happy families, happy colleagues. 
+Amazed people. The glory and bounty that is Bronx County. 
+Let's talk about mint. Where is my mint? 
+I grow seven kinds of mint in my class. 
+Mojitos, anybody? I'll be at Telepan later. 
+But, understand this is my intellectual Viagra. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, I gotta move quick, but understand this: The borough that gave us baggy pants and funky fresh beats is becoming home to the organic ones. 
+My green [unclear] 25,000 pounds of vegetables, I'm growing organic citizens, engaged kids. 
+So help us go from this to this. 
+Self-sustaining entities, 18 months return on investment, plus we're paying people living wage and health benefits, while feeding people for pennies on the dollar. 
+Martin Luther King said that people need to be uplifted with dignity. 
+So here in New York, I urge you, my fellow Americans, to help us make America great again. 
+It's simple. Share your passion. 
+It's real easy. Go see these two videos, please. 
+One got us invited to the White House, one's a recent incarnation. 
+And most importantly, get the biggest bully out of schools. 
+This has got to go tomorrow. 
+People, you can all do that. 
+Keep kids out of stores that look like this. 
+Make them a healthy plate, especially if you can pick it off the wall in your own classroom — delicioso! 
+Model good behavior. Get them to a green cart. 
+Big kids love strawberries and bananas. 
+Teach them entrepreneurship. Thank God for GrowNYC. 
+Let them cook. Great lunch today, let them do culinary things. 
+But most importantly, just love them. 
+Nothing works like unconditional love. 
+So, my good friend Kermit said it's not easy being green. 
+It's not. I come from a place where kids can buy 35 flavors of blunt wrap at any day of the moment, where ice cream freezers are filled with slushy malt liquor. 
+Okay? My dear friend Majora Carter once told me, we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. 
+So here, and at a time when we've gone from the audacity to hope to hope for some audacity, I urge you to do something. I urge you to do something. 
+Right now, we're all tadpoles, 
+but I urge you to become a big frog and take that big, green leap. 
+I don't care if you're on the left, on the right, up the middle, wherever. 
+Join me. Use — I've got a lot of energy. Help me use it. 
+We can do something here. 
+And along the way, please take time to smell the flowers, especially if you and your students grew them. 
+I'm Steve Ritz, this is Green Bronx Machine. 
+I've got to say thank you to my wife and family, for my kids, thank you for coming every day, and for my colleagues, believing and supporting me. 
+We are growing our way into a new economy. 
+Thank you, God bless you and enjoy the day. I'm Steve Ritz. 
+Sí se puede! 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is called Hooked on a Feeling: The Pursuit of Happiness and Human Design. 
+I put up a somewhat dour Darwin, but a very happy chimp up there. 
+My first point is that the pursuit of happiness is obligatory. 
+Man wishes to be happy, only wishes to be happy, and cannot wish not to be so. 
+We are wired to pursue happiness, not only to enjoy it, but to want more and more of it. 
+So given that that's true, how good are we at increasing our happiness? 
+Well, we certainly try. 
+If you look on the Amazon site, there are over 2,000 titles with advice on the seven habits, the nine choices, the 10 secrets, the 14,000 thoughts that are supposed to bring happiness. 
+Now another way we try to increase our happiness is we medicate ourselves. 
+And so there's over 120 million prescriptions out there for antidepressants. 
+Prozac was really the first absolute blockbuster drug. 
+It was clean, efficient, there was no high, there was really no danger, it had no street value. 
+In 1995, illegal drugs were a $400 billion business, representing eight percent of world trade, roughly the same as gas and oil. 
+These routes to happiness haven't really increased happiness very much. 
+One problem that's happening now is, although the rates of happiness are about as flat as the surface of the moon, depression and anxiety are rising. 
+Some people say this is because we have better diagnosis, and more people are being found out. 
+It isn't just that. We're seeing it all over the world. 
+In the United States right now there are more suicides than homicides. 
+There is a rash of suicide in China. 
+And the World Health Organization predicts by the year 2020 that depression will be the second largest cause of disability. 
+Now the good news here is that if you take surveys from around the world, we see that about three quarters of people will say they are at least pretty happy. 
+But this does not follow any of the usual trends. 
+For example, these two show great growth in income, absolutely flat happiness curves. 
+My field, the field of psychology, hasn't done a whole lot to help us move forward in understanding human happiness. 
+In part, we have the legacy of Freud, who was a pessimist, who said that pursuit of happiness is a doomed quest, is propelled by infantile aspects of the individual that can never be met in reality. 
+He said, "" One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of creation. "" So the ultimate goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy was really what Freud called ordinary misery. 
+(Laughter) And Freud in part reflects the anatomy of the human emotion system — which is that we have both a positive and a negative system, and our negative system is extremely sensitive. 
+So for example, we're born loving the taste of something sweet and reacting aversively to the taste of something bitter. 
+We also find that people are more averse to losing than they are happy to gain. 
+The formula for a happy marriage is five positive remarks, or interactions, for every one negative. 
+And that's how powerful the one negative is. 
+Especially expressions of contempt or disgust, well you really need a lot of positives to upset that. 
+I also put in here the stress response. 
+We're wired for dangers that are immediate, that are physical, that are imminent, and so our body goes into an incredible reaction where endogenous opioids come in. 
+We have a system that is really ancient, and really there for physical danger. 
+And so over time, this becomes a stress response, which has enormous effects on the body. 
+Cortisol floods the brain; it destroys hippocampal cells and memory, and can lead to all kinds of health problems. 
+But unfortunately, we need this system in part. 
+If we were only governed by pleasure we would not survive. 
+We really have two command posts. 
+Emotions are short-lived intense responses to challenge and to opportunity. 
+And each one of them allows us to click into alternate selves that tune in, turn on, drop out thoughts, perceptions, feelings and memories. 
+We tend to think of emotions as just feelings. 
+But in fact, emotions are an all-systems alert that change what we remember, what kind of decisions we make, and how we perceive things. 
+So let me go forward to the new science of happiness. 
+We've come away from the Freudian gloom, and people are now actively studying this. 
+And one of the key points in the science of happiness is that happiness and unhappiness are not endpoints of a single continuum. 
+The Freudian model is really one continuum that, as you get less miserable, you get happier. 
+And that isn't true — when you get less miserable, you get less miserable. 
+And that happiness is a whole other end of the equation. 
+And it's been missing. It's been missing from psychotherapy. 
+So when people's symptoms go away, they tend to recur, because there isn't a sense of the other half — of what pleasure, happiness, compassion, gratitude, what are the positive emotions. 
+And of course we know this intuitively, that happiness is not just the absence of misery. 
+But somehow it was not put forward until very recently, seeing these as two parallel systems. 
+So that the body can both look for opportunity and also protect itself from danger, at the same time. 
+And they're sort of two reciprocal and dynamically interacting systems. 
+People have also wanted to deconstruct. 
+We use this word "" happy, "" and it's this very large umbrella of a term. 
+And then three emotions for which there are no English words: fiero, which is the pride in accomplishment of a challenge; schadenfreude, which is happiness in another's misfortune, a malicious pleasure; and naches, which is a pride and joy in one's children. 
+Absent from this list, and absent from any discussions of happiness, are happiness in another's happiness. 
+We don't seem to have a word for that. 
+We are very sensitive to the negative, but it is in part offset by the fact that we have a positivity. 
+We're also born pleasure-seekers. 
+Babies love the taste of sweet and hate the taste of bitter. 
+They love to touch smooth surfaces rather than rough ones. 
+They like to look at beautiful faces rather than plain faces. 
+They like to listen to consonant melodies instead of dissonant melodies. 
+Babies really are born with a lot of innate pleasures. 
+There was once a statement made by a psychologist that said that 80 percent of the pursuit of happiness is really just about the genes, and it's as difficult to become happier as it is to become taller. 
+That's nonsense. 
+There is a decent contribution to happiness from the genes — about 50 percent — but there is still that 50 percent that is unaccounted for. 
+Let's just go into the brain for a moment, and see where does happiness arise from in evolution. 
+We have basically at least two systems here, and they both are very ancient. 
+One is the reward system, and that's fed by the chemical dopamine. 
+And it starts in the ventral tegmental area. 
+It goes to the nucleus accumbens, all the way up to the prefrontal cortex, orbital frontal cortex, where decisions are made, high level. 
+This was originally seen as a system that was the pleasure system of the brain. 
+In the 1950s, Olds and Milner put electrodes into the brain of a rat. 
+And the rat would just keep pressing that bar thousands and thousands and thousands of times. 
+It wouldn't eat. It wouldn't sleep. It wouldn't have sex. 
+It wouldn't do anything but press this bar. 
+So they assumed this must be, you know, the brain's orgasmatron. 
+It turned out that it wasn't, that it really is a system of motivation, a system of wanting. 
+It gives objects what's called incentive salience. 
+It makes something look so attractive that you just have to go after it. 
+That's something different from the system that is the pleasure system, which simply says, "" I like this. "" The pleasure system, as you see, which is the internal opiates, there is a hormone oxytocin, is widely spread throughout the brain. 
+Dopamine system, the wanting system, is much more centralized. 
+The other thing about positive emotions is that they have a universal signal. 
+And we see here the smile. 
+And the universal signal is not just raising the corner of the lips to the zygomatic major. 
+It's also crinkling the outer corner of the eye, the orbicularis oculi. 
+So you see, even 10-month-old babies, when they see their mother, will show this particular kind of smile. 
+Extroverts use it more than introverts. 
+People who are relieved of depression show it more after than before. 
+So if you want to unmask a true look of happiness, you will look for this expression. 
+Our pleasures are really ancient. 
+And we learn, of course, many, many pleasures, but many of them are base. And one of them, of course, is biophilia — that we have a response to the natural world that's very profound. 
+Very interesting studies done on people recovering from surgery, who found that people who faced a brick wall versus people who looked out on trees and nature, the people who looked out on the brick wall were in the hospital longer, needed more medication, and had more medical complications. 
+There is something very restorative about nature, and it's part of how we are tuned. 
+Humans, particularly so, we're very imitative creatures. 
+And we imitate from almost the second we are born. 
+Here is a three-week-old baby. 
+And if you stick your tongue out at this baby, the baby will do the same. 
+We are social beings from the beginning. 
+And even studies of cooperation show that cooperation between individuals lights up reward centers of the brain. 
+One problem that psychology has had is instead of looking at this intersubjectivity — or the importance of the social brain to humans who come into the world helpless and need each other tremendously — is that they focus instead on the self and self-esteem, and not self-other. 
+It's sort of "" me, "" not "" we. "" And I think this has been a really tremendous problem that goes against our biology and nature, and hasn't made us any happier at all. 
+Because when you think about it, people are happiest when in flow, when they're absorbed in something out in the world, when they're with other people, when they're active, engaged in sports, focusing on a loved one, learning, having sex, whatever. 
+They're not sitting in front of the mirror trying to figure themselves out, or thinking about themselves. 
+These are not the periods when you feel happiest. 
+The other thing is, that a piece of evidence is, is if you look at computerized text analysis of people who commit suicide, what you find there, and it's quite interesting, is use of the first person singular — "I," "me," "my," not "" we "" and "" us "" — and the letters are less hopeless than they are really alone. 
+And being alone is very unnatural to the human. 
+There is a profound need to belong. 
+But there are ways in which our evolutionary history can really trip us up. 
+Because, for example, the genes don't care whether we're happy, they care that we replicate, that we pass our genes on. 
+So for example we have three systems that underlie reproduction, because it's so important. 
+There's lust, which is just wanting to have sex. 
+And that's really mediated by the sex hormones. 
+Romantic attraction, that gets into the desire system. 
+And that's dopamine-fed. And that's, "" I must have this one person. "" There's attachment, which is oxytocin, and the opiates, which says, "" This is a long-term bond. "" See the problem is that, as humans, these three can separate. 
+So a person can be in a long term attachment, become romantically infatuated with someone else, and want to have sex with a third person. 
+The other way in which our genes can sometimes lead us astray is in social status. 
+We are very acutely aware of our social status and always seek to further and increase it. 
+Now in the animal world, there is only one way to increase status, and that's dominance. 
+I seize command by physical prowess, and I keep it by beating my chest, and you make submissive gestures. 
+Now, the human has a whole other way to rise to the top, and that is a prestige route, which is freely conferred. 
+Someone has expertise and knowledge, and knows how to do things, and we give that person status. 
+And that's clearly the way for us to create many more niches of status so that people don't have to be lower on the status hierarchy as they are in the animal world. 
+The data isn't terribly supportive of money buying happiness. 
+But it's not irrelevant. 
+So if you look at questions like this, life satisfaction, you see life satisfaction going up with each rung of income. 
+You see mental distress going up with lower income. 
+So clearly there is some effect. 
+But the effect is relatively small. 
+And one of the problems with money is materialism. 
+What happens when people pursue money too avidly, is they forget about the real basic pleasures of life. 
+So we have here, this couple. 
+"Do you think the less-fortunate are having better sex?" 
+And then this kid over here is saying, "" Leave me alone with my toys. "" So one of the things is that it really takes over. 
+That whole dopamine-wanting system takes over and derails from any of the pleasure system. 
+Maslow had this idea back in the 1950s that as people rise above their biological needs, as the world becomes safer and we don't have to worry about basic needs being met — our biological system, whatever motivates us, is being satisfied — we can rise above them, to think beyond ourselves toward self-actualization or transcendence, and rise above the materialist. 
+So to just quickly conclude with some brief data that suggests this might be so. 
+One is people who underwent what is called a quantum change: they felt their life and their whole values had changed. 
+And sure enough, if you look at the kinds of values that come in, you see wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, fun, be respected, before the change, and much more post-materialist values after. 
+Women had a whole different set of value shifts. 
+But very similarly, the only one that survived there was happiness. 
+They went from attractiveness and happiness and wealth and self-control to generosity and forgiveness. 
+I end with a few quotes. 
+"" There is only one question: How to love this world? "" And Rilke, "" If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself. 
+Tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches. "" "" First, say to yourself what you would be. 
+Then do what you have to do. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. 
+I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. 
+It was all very normal. 
+And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award. 
+And my parents said, "" Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that. 
+She hasn't actually achieved anything. "" (Laughter) And they were right, you know. 
+I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek." 
+Yeah, I know. What a contradiction. 
+But they were right, you know. 
+I wasn't doing anything that was out of the ordinary at all. 
+I wasn't doing anything that could be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation. 
+Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?" 
+And I said, "" What speech? "" You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. 
+And he said, "" You know, like, your motivational speaking. 
+You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff? "" (Laughter) "It's usually in the big hall." 
+And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. 
+We are not, to this kid — and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. 
+For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. 
+We're not real people. We are there to inspire. 
+And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? (Laughter) Yeah. 
+Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. 
+I am not here to inspire you. 
+Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. 
+It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. 
+It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional. 
+And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. 
+You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." 
+Or this one: "" Your excuse is invalid. "" Indeed. 
+Or this one: "" Before you quit, try! "" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. 
+You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. 
+You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. 
+And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. 
+(Laughter) And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. 
+So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. 
+The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "" Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. 
+I could be that person. "" But what if you are that person? 
+I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. 
+They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. (Laughter) And it is objectifying. 
+These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. 
+They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective. 
+And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. 
+We do overcome some things. 
+But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are. 
+They are not things to do with our bodies. 
+I use the term "" disabled people "" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses. 
+So I have lived in this body a long time. 
+I'm quite fond of it. 
+It does the things that I need it to do, and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity just as you have, and that's the thing about those kids in those pictures as well. 
+They're not doing anything out of the ordinary. 
+They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity. 
+So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images? 
+People, when they say, "" You're an inspiration, "" they mean it as a compliment. 
+And I know why it happens. 
+And it honestly doesn't. 
+And I know what you're thinking. 
+You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, "" Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things? "" And the thing is, I am. 
+I learn from other disabled people all the time. 
+I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though. 
+I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. (Laughter) I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery. 
+We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us. 
+I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice. 
+It makes life hard for us. 
+And that quote, "" The only disability in life is a bad attitude, "" the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. 
+No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. 
+Never. (Laughter) (Applause) Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. 
+No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. 
+I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm. 
+I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching "" Buffy the Vampire Slayer "" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down. I want to live in a world 
+where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. 
+I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user. 
+Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does. 
+
+And I say that sincerely, partly because (Mock sob) I need that. 
+Now I have to take off my shoes or boots to get on an airplane! (Laughter) 
+Driving ourselves. 
+(Laughter) I know it sounds like a little thing to you, but — (Laughter) I looked in the rear-view mirror and all of a sudden it just hit me. 
+And she said "" Yes, that's former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper. "" And the man said, "He's come down a long way, hasn't he?" 
+(Laughter) (Applause) There's been kind of a series of epiphanies. (Laughter) 
+The very next day, continuing the totally true story, I got on a G-V to fly to Africa to make a speech in Nigeria, in the city of Lagos, on the topic of energy. 
+And he was waving a piece of paper, and he was yelling, "Call Washington! Call Washington!" 
+(Laughter) But what it turned out to be, was that my staff was extremely upset because one of the wire services in Nigeria had already written a story about my speech, and it had already been printed in cities all across the United States of America. 
+(Laughter) And the story began, "" Former Vice President Al Gore announced in Nigeria yesterday, "" quote: 'My wife Tipper and I have opened a low-cost family restaurant' "" — (Laughter) "" 'named Shoney's, and we are running it ourselves.' "" (Laughter) Before I could get back to U.S. soil, David Letterman and Jay Leno had already started in on — one of them had me in a big white chef's hat, Tipper was saying, "" One more burger with fries! "" (Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!" (Laughter) 
+But I was thinking that, since I plan to make a lifelong habit of coming back to TED, that maybe I could talk about that another time. 
+I add new images, because I learn more about it every time I give it. 
+Just in the last two days, we got the new temperature records in January. 
+Efficiency in end-use electricity and end-use of all energy is the low-hanging fruit. 
+It's an easy, visible target of concern — and it should be — but there is more global warming pollution that comes from buildings than from cars and trucks. 
+Cars and trucks are very significant, and we have the lowest standards in the world. 
+You have choices with everything you buy, between things that have a harsh effect, or a much less harsh effect on the global climate crisis. 
+Participant Productions convened — with my active involvement — the leading software writers in the world, on this arcane science of carbon calculation, to construct a consumer-friendly carbon calculator. 
+And by the time the movie comes out in May, this will be updated to 2.0, and we will have click-through purchases of offsets. 
+Next, consider making your business carbon-neutral. 
+Invest sustainably. 
+And so I'm going to be conducting a course this summer for a group of people that are nominated by different folks to come and then give it en masse, in communities all across the country, and we're going to update the slideshow for all of them every single week, to keep it right on the cutting edge. 
+(Applause) Where did anybody get the idea that you ought to stay arm's length from politics? 
+Here's why: as long as the United States is out of the world system, it's not a closed system. 
+Somebody said the test we're facing now, a scientist told me, is whether the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable combination. 
+
+You know for me, the interest in contemporary forms of slavery started with a leaflet that I picked up in London. 
+It was the early '90s, and I was at a public event. 
+I saw this leaflet and it said, "There are millions of slaves in the world today." 
+And I thought, "" No way, no way. "" And I'm going to admit to hubris. 
+Because I also, I'm going to admit to you, I also thought, "" How can I be like a hot-shot young full professor who teaches human rights and not know this? 
+So it can't be true. "" Well, if you teach, if you worship in the temple of learning, do not mock the gods, because they will take you, fill you with curiosity and desire, and drive you. Drive you with a passion to change things. 
+I went out and did a lit review, 3,000 articles on the key word "" slavery. "" Two turned out to be about contemporary — only two. 
+All the rest were historical. 
+They were press pieces and they were full of outrage, they were full of speculation, they were anecdotal — no solid information. 
+So, I began to do a research project of my own. 
+I went to five countries around the world. 
+I looked at slaves. I met slaveholders, and I looked very deeply into slave-based businesses because this is an economic crime. 
+People do not enslave people to be mean to them. 
+They do it to make a profit. 
+And I've got to tell you, what I found out in the world in four different continents, was depressingly familiar. 
+Like this: Agricultural workers in Africa, whipped and beaten, showing us how they were beaten in the fields before they escaped from slavery and met up with our film crew. 
+It was mind-blowing. 
+And I want to be very clear. 
+I'm talking about real slavery. 
+This is not about lousy marriages, this is not about jobs that suck. 
+This is about people who can not walk away, people who are forced to work without pay, people who are operating 24 / 7 under a threat of violence and have no pay. 
+It's real slavery in exactly the same way that slavery would be recognized throughout all of human history. 
+Now, where is it? 
+Well, this map in the sort of redder, yellower colors are the places with the highest densities of slavery. 
+But in fact that kind of bluey color are the countries where we can't find any cases of slavery. 
+And you might notice that it's only Iceland and Greenland where we can't find any cases of enslavement around the world. 
+We're also particularly interested and looking very carefully at places where slaves are being used to perpetrate extreme environmental destruction. 
+Around the world, slaves are used to destroy the environment, cutting down trees in the Amazon; destroying forest areas in West Africa; mining and spreading mercury around in places like Ghana and the Congo; destroying the coastal ecosystems in South Asia. 
+It's a pretty harrowing linkage between what's happening to our environment and what's happening to our human rights. 
+Now, how on Earth did we get to a situation like this, where we have 27 million people in slavery in the year 2010? 
+That's double the number that came out of Africa in the entire transatlantic slave trade. 
+Well, it builds up with these factors. 
+They are not causal, they are actually supporting factors. 
+One we all know about, the population explosion: the world goes from two billion people to almost seven billion people in the last 50 years. 
+Being numerous does not make you a slave. 
+Add in the increased vulnerability of very large numbers of people in the developing world, caused by civil wars, ethnic conflicts, kleptocratic governments, disease... you name it, you know it. 
+We understand how that works. In some countries all of those things happen at once, like Sierra Leone a few years ago, and push enormous parts... about a billion people in the world, in fact, as we know, live on the edge, live in situations where they don't have any opportunity and are usually even destitute. 
+But that doesn't make you a slave either. 
+What it takes to turn a person who is destitute and vulnerable into a slave, is the absence of the rule of law. 
+If the rule of law is sound, it protects the poor and it protects the vulnerable. 
+But if corruption creeps in and people don't have the opportunity to have that protection of the rule of law, then if you can use violence, if you can use violence with impunity, you can reach out and harvest the vulnerable into slavery. 
+Well, that is precisely what has happened around the world. 
+Though, for a lot of people, the people who step into slavery today don't usually get kidnapped or knocked over the head. 
+They come into slavery because someone has asked them this question. 
+All around the world I've been told an almost identical story. 
+People say, "" I was home, someone came into our village, they stood up in the back of a truck, they said, 'I've got jobs, who needs a job?' "" And they did exactly what you or I would do in the same situation. 
+They said, "" That guy looked sketchy. I was suspicious, but my children were hungry. 
+We needed medicine. 
+I knew I had to do anything I could to earn some money to support the people I care about. "" They climb into the back of the truck. They go off with the person who recruits them. 
+Ten miles, 100 miles, 1,000 miles later, they find themselves in dirty, dangerous, demeaning work. 
+They take it for a little while, but when they try to leave, bang!, the hammer comes down, and they discover they're enslaved. 
+Now, that kind of slavery is, again, pretty much what slavery has been all through human history. 
+But there is one thing that is particularly remarkable and novel about slavery today, and that is a complete collapse in the price of human beings — expensive in the past, dirt cheap now. 
+Even the business programs have started picking up on this. 
+I just want to share a little clip for you. 
+Daphne: OK. Llively discussion guaranteed here, as always, as we get macro and talk commodities. 
+Continuing here in the studio with our guest Michael O'Donohue, head of commodities at Four Continents Capital Management. 
+And we're also joined by Brent Lawson from Lawson Frisk Securities. 
+Brent Lawson: Happy to be here. 
+D: Good to have you with us, Brent. 
+Now, gentlemen... Brent, where is your money going this year? 
+BL: Well Daphne, we've been going short on gas and oil recently and casting our net just a little bit wider. 
+We really like the human being story a lot. 
+If you look at a long-term chart, prices are at historical lows and yet global demand for forced labor is still real strong. 
+So, that's a scenario that we think we should be capitalizing on. 
+D: Michael, what's your take on the people story? Are you interested? 
+Michael O'Donoghue: Oh definitely. Non-voluntary labor's greatest advantage as an asset is the endless supply. 
+We're not about to run out of people. No other commodity has that. 
+BL: Daphne, if I may draw your attention to one thing. 
+That is that private equity has been sniffing around, and that tells me that this market is about to explode. 
+Africans and Indians, as usual, South Americans, and Eastern Europeans in particular are on our buy list. 
+D: Interesting. Micheal, bottom line, what do you recommend? 
+MO: We're recommending to our clients a buy and hold strategy. 
+There's no need to play the market. 
+There's a lot of vulnerable people out there. It's very exciting. 
+D: Exciting stuff indeed. Gentlemen, thank you very much. 
+Kevin Bales: Okay, you figured it out. That's a spoof. 
+Though I enjoyed watching your jaws drop, drop, drop, until you got it. 
+MTV Europe worked with us and made that spoof, and they've been slipping it in between music videos without any introduction, which I think is kind of fun. 
+Here's the reality. 
+The price of human beings across the last 4,000 years in today's money has averaged about 40,000 dollars. 
+Capital purchase items. 
+You can see that the lines cross when the population explodes. 
+The average price of a human being today, around the world, is about 90 dollars. 
+They are more expensive in places like North America. 
+Slaves cost between 3,000 to 8,000 dollars in North America, but I could take you places in India or Nepal where human beings can be acquired for five or 10 dollars. 
+They key here is that people have ceased to be that capital purchase item and become like Styrofoam cups. 
+You buy them cheaply, you use them, you crumple them up, and then when you're done with them you just throw them away. 
+These young boys are in Nepal. 
+They are basically the transport system on a quarry run by a slaveholder. 
+There are no roads there, so they carry loads of stone on their backs, often of their own weight, up and down the Himalaya Mountains. 
+One of their mothers said to us, "" You know, we can't survive here, but we can't even seem to die either. "" It's a horrible situation. 
+And if there is anything that makes me feel very positive about this, it's that there are also — in addition to young men like this who are still enslaved — there are ex-slaves who are now working to free others. 
+Or, we say, Frederick Douglass is in the house. 
+I don't know if you've ever had a daydream about, "" Wow. What would it be like to meet Harriet Tubman? 
+What would it be like to meet Frederick Douglass? "" I've got to say, one of the most exciting parts about my job is that I get to, and I want to introduce you to one of those. 
+His name is James Kofi Annan. He was a slave child in Ghana enslaved in the fishing industry, and he now, after escape and building a new life, has formed an organization that we work closely with to go back and get people out of slavery. 
+This is not James, this is one of the kids that he works with. 
+James Kofi Annan (Video): He was hit with a paddle in the head. And this reminds me of my childhood when I used to work here. 
+KB: James and our country director in Ghana, Emmanuel Otoo are now receiving regular death threats because the two of them managed to get convictions and imprisonment for three human traffickers for the very first time in Ghana for enslaving people, from the fishing industry, for enslaving children. 
+Now, everything I've been telling you, I admit, is pretty disheartening. 
+But there is actually a very positive side to this, and that is this: The 27 million people who are in slavery today, that's a lot of people, but it's also the smallest fraction of the global population to ever be in slavery. 
+And likewise, the 40 billion dollars that they generate into the global economy each year is the tiniest proportion of the global economy to ever be represented by slave labor. 
+Slavery, illegal in every country has been pushed to the edges of our global society. 
+And in a way, without us even noticing, has ended up standing on the precipice of its own extinction, waiting for us to give it a big boot and knock it over. And get rid of it. 
+And it can be done. 
+Now, if we do that, if we put the resources and the focus to it, what does it actually cost to get people out of slavery? 
+Well, first, before I even tell you the cost I've got to be absolutely clear. 
+We do not buy people out of slavery. 
+Buying people out of slavery is like paying a burglar to get your television back; it's abetting a crime. 
+Liberation, however, costs some money. 
+Liberation, and more importantly all the work that comes after liberation. 
+It's not an event, it's a process. 
+It's about helping people to build lives of dignity, stability, economic autonomy, citizenship. 
+Well, amazingly, in places like India where costs are very low, that family, that three-generation family that you see there who were in hereditary slavery — so, that granddad there, was born a baby into slavery — but the total cost, amortized across the rest of the work, was about 150 dollars to bring that family out of slavery and then take them through a two year process to build a stable life of citizenship and education. 
+A boy in Ghana rescued from fishing slavery, about 400 dollars. 
+In the United States, North America, much more expensive. Legal costs, medical costs... 
+we understand that it's expensive here: about 30,000 dollars. 
+But most of the people in the world in slavery live in those places where the costs are lowest. 
+And in fact, the global average is about what it is for Ghana. 
+And that means, when you multiply it up, the estimated cost of not just freedom but sustainable freedom for the entire 27 million people on the planet in slavery is something like 10.8 billion dollars — what Americans spend on potato chips and pretzels, what Seattle is going to spend on its light rail system: usually the annual expenditure in this country on blue jeans, or in the last holiday period when we bought GameBoys and iPods and other tech gifts for people, we spent 10.8 billion dollars. 
+Intel's fourth quarter earnings: 10.8 billion. 
+It's not a lot of money at the global level. 
+In fact, it's peanuts. 
+And the great thing about it is that it's not money down a hole, there is a freedom dividend. When you let people out of slavery to work for themselves, are they motivated? 
+They take their kids out of the workplace, they build a school, they say, "" We're going to have stuff we've never had before like three squares, medicine when we're sick, clothing when we're cold. "" They become consumers and producers and local economies begin to spiral up very rapidly. 
+That's important, all of that about how we rebuild sustainable freedom, because we'd never want to repeat what happened in this country in 1865. 
+Four million people were lifted up out of slavery and then dumped. 
+Dumped without political participation, decent education, any kind of real opportunity in terms of economic lives, and then sentenced to generations of violence and prejudice and discrimination. 
+And America is still paying the price for the botched emancipation of 1865. 
+We have made a commitment that we will never let people come out of slavery on our watch, and end up as second class citizens. 
+It's just not going to happen. 
+This is what liberation really looks like. 
+Children rescued from slavery in the fishing industry in Ghana, reunited with their parents, and then taken with their parents back to their villages to rebuild their economic well-being so that they become slave-proof — absolutely unenslaveable. 
+Now, this woman lived in a village in Nepal. 
+We'd been working there about a month. 
+They had just begun to come out of a hereditary kind of slavery. 
+They'd just begun to light up a little bit, open up a little bit. 
+But when we went to speak with her, when we took this photograph, the slaveholders were still menacing us from the sidelines. They hadn't been really pushed back. 
+I was frightened. We were frightened. 
+We said to her, "" Are you worried? Are you upset? "" She said, "" No, because we've got hope now. 
+How could we not succeed, "" she said, "" when people like you from the other side of the world are coming here to stand beside us? "" Okay, we have to ask ourselves, are we willing to live in a world with slavery? 
+If we don't take action, we just leave ourselves open to have someone else jerk the strings that tie us to slavery in the products we buy, and in our government policies. 
+And yet, if there's one thing that every human being can agree on, I think it's that slavery should end. 
+And if there is a fundamental violation of our human dignity that we would all say is horrific, it's slavery. 
+And we've got to say, what good is all of our intellectual and political and economic power — and I'm really thinking intellectual power in this room — if we can't use it to bring slavery to an end? 
+I think there is enough intellectual power in this room to bring slavery to an end. 
+And you know what? If we can't do that, if we can't use our intellectual power to end slavery, there is one last question: Are we truly free? 
+Okay, thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+♫ Where do we go from here? ♫ ♫ How do we carry on? ♫ ♫ I can't get beyond the questions ♫ ♫ Clambering for the scraps ♫ ♫ in the shatter of us, collapsed ♫ ♫ It cuts me with every could have been ♫ ♫ Pain on pain on play, repeating ♫ ♫ With the backup, makeshift life in waiting ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ What of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ There is nothing to see here now ♫ 
+♫ Turning the sign around ♫ ♫ We're closed to the Earth 'til further notice ♫ ♫ A crumbling cliche case ♫ ♫ crumpled and puffy faced ♫ ♫ caught dead in the stare of a thousand miles ♫ ♫ All I want, only one street level miracle ♫ ♫ I'll be an out and out born again ♫ ♫ from none more cynical ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ that time heals everything ♫ ♫ But what of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ And sit here cold? ♫ 
+♫ We will be long gone by then ♫ ♫ In lackluster ♫ ♫ In dust we lay around old magazines ♫ ♫ Fluorescent lighting sets the scene ♫ ♫ for all we could and should be being ♫ ♫ in the one life that we've got ♫ ♫ Everybody says ♫ ♫ time heals everything ♫ ♫ And what of the wretched hollow? ♫ ♫ The endless in between? ♫ ♫ Are we just going to wait it out? ♫ ♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫ ♫ Just going to sweat it out? ♫ ♫ Wait it out ♫ 
+(Applause) 
+
+At 7: 45 a.m., I open the doors to a building dedicated to building, yet only breaks me down. 
+I march down hallways cleaned up after me every day by regular janitors, but I never have the decency to honor their names. 
+Lockers left open like teenage boys' mouths when teenage girls wear clothes that covers their insecurities but exposes everything else. 
+Masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers, camouflage worn by bullies who are dangerously armed but need hugs. 
+Teachers paid less than what it costs them to be here. 
+Oceans of adolescents come here to receive lessons but never learn to swim, part like the Red Sea when the bell rings. 
+This is a training ground. 
+My high school is Chicago, diverse and segregated on purpose. 
+Social lines are barbed wire. 
+Labels like "" Regulars "" and "" Honors "" resonate. 
+I am an Honors but go home with Regular students who are soldiers in territory that owns them. 
+This is a training ground to sort out the Regulars from the Honors, a reoccurring cycle built to recycle the trash of this system. 
+Trained at a young age to capitalize, letters taught now that capitalism raises you but you have to step on someone else to get there. 
+This is a training ground where one group is taught to lead and the other is made to follow. 
+No wonder so many of my people spit bars, because the truth is hard to swallow. 
+The need for degrees has left so many people frozen. 
+Homework is stressful, but when you go home every day and your home is work, you don't want to pick up any assignments. 
+Reading textbooks is stressful, but reading does not matter when you feel your story is already written, either dead or getting booked. 
+Taking tests is stressful, but bubbling in a Scantron does not stop bullets from bursting. 
+I hear education systems are failing, but I believe they're succeeding at what they're built to do — to train you, to keep you on track, to track down an American dream that has failed so many of us all. 
+(Applause) 
+
+You may never have heard of Kenema, Sierra Leone or Arua, Nigeria. 
+But I know them as two of the most extraordinary places on earth. 
+In hospitals there, there's a community of nurses, physicians and scientists that have been quietly battling one of the deadliest threats to humanity for years: Lassa virus. 
+Lassa virus is a lot like Ebola. 
+It can cause a severe fever and can often be fatal. 
+But these individuals, they risk their lives every day to protect the individuals in their communities, and by doing so, protect us all. 
+But one of the most extraordinary things I learned about them on one of my first visits out there many years ago was that they start each morning — these challenging, extraordinary days on the front lines — by singing. 
+And over the years, from year after year as I've visited them and they've visited me, I get to gather with them and I sing and we write and we love it, because it reminds us that we're not just there to pursue science together; we're bonded through a shared humanity. 
+And that of course, as you can imagine, becomes extremely important, even essential, as things begin to change. 
+And that changed a great deal in March of 2014, when the Ebola outbreak was declared in Guinea. 
+This is the first outbreak in West Africa, near the border of Sierra Leone and Liberia. 
+And it was frightening, frightening for us all. 
+We had actually suspected for some time that Lassa and Ebola were more widespread than thought, and we thought it could one day come to Kenema. 
+And so members of my team immediately went out and joined Dr. Humarr Khan and his team there, and we set up diagnostics to be able to have sensitive molecular tests to pick up Ebola if it came across the border and into Sierra Leone. 
+We'd already set up this kind of capacity for Lassa virus, we knew how to do it, the team is outstanding. 
+We just had to give them the tools and place to survey for Ebola. 
+And unfortunately, that day came. 
+On May 23, 2014, a woman checked into the maternity ward at the hospital, and the team ran those important molecular tests and they identified the first confirmed case of Ebola in Sierra Leone. 
+This was an exceptional work that was done. 
+They were able to diagnose the case immediately, to safely treat the patient and to begin to do contact tracing to follow what was going on. 
+It could've stopped something. 
+But by the time that day came, the outbreak had already been breeding for months. 
+With hundreds of cases, it had already eclipsed all previous outbreaks. 
+And it came into Sierra Leone not as that singular case, but as a tidal wave. 
+We had to work with the international community, with the Ministry of Health, with Kenema, to begin to deal with the cases, as the next week brought 31, then 92, then 147 cases — all coming to Kenema, one of the only places in Sierra Leone that could deal with this. 
+And we worked around the clock trying to do everything we could, trying to help the individuals, trying to get attention, but we also did one other simple thing. 
+From that specimen that we take from a patient's blood to detect Ebola, we can discard it, obviously. 
+The other thing we can do is, actually, put in a chemical and deactivate it, so just place it into a box and ship it across the ocean, and that's what we did. 
+We sent it to Boston, where my team works. 
+And we also worked around the clock doing shift work, day after day, and we quickly generated 99 genomes of the Ebola virus. 
+This is the blueprint — the genome of a virus is the blueprint. 
+It says everything that makes up us, and it tells us so much information. 
+The results of this kind of work are simple and they're powerful. 
+We could actually take these 99 different viruses, look at them and compare them, and we could see, actually, compared to three genomes that had been previously published from Guinea, we could show that the outbreak emerged in Guinea months before, once into the human population, and from there had been transmitting from human to human. 
+Now, that's incredibly important when you're trying to figure out how to intervene, but the important thing is contact tracing. 
+We also could see that as the virus was moving between humans, it was mutating. 
+And each of those mutations are so important, because the diagnostics, the vaccines, the therapies that we're using, are all based on that genome sequence, fundamentally — that's what drives it. 
+And so global health experts would need to respond, would have to develop, to recalibrate everything that they were doing. 
+But the way that science works, the position I was in at that point is, I had the data, and I could have worked in a silo for many, many months, analyzed the data carefully, slowly, submitted the paper for publication, gone through a few back-and-forths, and then finally when the paper came out, might release that data. 
+That's the way the status quo works. 
+Well, that was not going to work at this point, right? 
+We had friends on the front lines and to us it was just obvious that what we needed is help, lots of help. 
+So the first thing we did is, as soon as the sequences came off the machines, we published it to the web. 
+We just released it to the whole world and said, "" Help us. "" And help came. 
+Before we knew it, we were being contacted from people all over, surprised to see the data out there and released. 
+Some of the greatest viral trackers in the world were suddenly part of our community. 
+We were working together in this virtual way, sharing, regular calls, communications, trying to follow the virus minute by minute, to see ways that we could stop it. 
+And there are so many ways that we can form communities like that. 
+Everybody, particularly when the outbreak started to expand globally, was reaching out to learn, to participate, to engage. 
+Everybody wants to play a part. 
+The amount of human capacity out there is just amazing, and the Internet connects us all. 
+And could you imagine that instead of being frightened of each other, that we all just said, "" Let's do this. 
+Let's work together, and let's make this happen. "" But the problem is that the data that all of us are using, Googling on the web, is just too limited to do what we need to do. 
+And so many opportunities get missed when that happens. 
+So in the early part of the epidemic from Kenema, we'd had 106 clinical records from patients, and we once again made that publicly available to the world. 
+And in our own lab, we could show that you could take those 106 records, we could train computers to predict the prognosis for Ebola patients to near 100 percent accuracy. 
+And we made an app that could release that, to make that available to health-care workers in the field. 
+But 106 is just not enough to make it powerful, to validate it. 
+We are still waiting, tweaking away, in silos rather than working together. 
+And this just — we can't accept that. 
+Right? You, all of you, cannot accept that. 
+It's our lives on the line. 
+And in fact, actually, many lives were lost, many health-care workers, including beloved colleagues of mine, five colleagues: Mbalu Fonnie, Alex Moigboi, Dr. Humarr Khan, Alice Kovoma and Mohamed Fullah. 
+These are just five of many health-care workers at Kenema and beyond that died while the world waited and while we all worked, quietly and separately. 
+See, Ebola, like all threats to humanity, it's fueled by mistrust and distraction and division. 
+When we build barriers amongst ourselves and we fight amongst ourselves, the virus thrives. 
+But unlike all threats to humanity, Ebola is one where we're actually all the same. 
+We're all in this fight together. 
+Ebola on one person's doorstep could soon be on ours. 
+And so in this place with the same vulnerabilities, the same strengths, the same fears, the same hopes, I hope that we work together with joy. 
+A graduate student of mine was reading a book about Sierra Leone, and she discovered that the word "" Kenema, "" the hospital that we work at and the city where we work in Sierra Leone, is named after the Mende word for "" clear like a river, translucent and open to the public gaze. "" That was really profound for us, because without knowing it, we'd always felt that in order to honor the individuals in Kenema where we worked, we had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together. 
+And we have to do that. 
+We all have to demand that of ourselves and others — to be open to each other when an outbreak happens, to fight in this fight together. 
+Because this is not the first outbreak of Ebola, it will not be the last, and there are many other microbes out there that are lying in wait, like Lassa virus and others. 
+And the next time this happens, it could happen in a city of millions, it could start there. 
+It could be something that's transmitted through the air. 
+And I know that that is frightening, I understand that, but I know also, and this experience shows us, that we have the technology and we have the capacity to win this thing, to win this and have the upper hand over viruses. 
+But we can only do it if we do it together and we do it with joy. 
+So for Dr. Khan and for all of those who sacrificed their lives on the front lines in this fight with us always, let us be in this fight with them always. 
+And let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds working in unity. 
+Thank you. 
+
+In System D, this is a store, and what I mean by that is that this is a photograph I took in Makoko, shantytown in Lagos, Nigeria. 
+It's built over the lagoon, and there are no streets where there can be stores to shop, and so the store comes to you. 
+And in the same community, this is business synergy. 
+This is the boat that that lady was paddling around in, and this artisan makes the boat and the paddles and sells directly to the people who need the boat and the paddles. 
+Ogandiro smokes fish in Makoko in Lagos, and I asked her, "" Where does the fish come from? "" And I thought she'd say, "" Oh, you know, up the lagoon somewhere, or maybe across Africa, "" but you'll be happy to know she said it came from here, it comes from the North Sea. 
+It's caught here, frozen, shipped down to Lagos, smoked, and sold for a tiny increment of profit on the streets of Lagos. 
+And this is a business incubator. 
+This is Olusosun dump, the largest garbage dump in Lagos, and 2,000 people work here, and I found this out from this fellow, Andrew Saboru. 
+Andrew spent 16 years scavenging materials on the dump, earned enough money to turn himself into a contract scaler, which meant he carried a scale and went around and weighed all the materials that people had scavenged from the dump. Now he's a scrap dealer. 
+This is a shopping mall. 
+This is Oshodi Market in Lagos. 
+Jorge Luis Borges had a story called "" The Aleph, "" and the Aleph is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists, and for me, this image is a point in the world where absolutely everything exists. 
+So, what am I talking about when I talk about System D? 
+It's traditionally called the informal economy, the underground economy, the black market. 
+I don't conceive of it that way. 
+I think it's really important to understand that something like this is totally open. It's right there for you to find. 
+All of this is happening openly, and aboveboard. 
+There's nothing underground about it. 
+It's our prejudgment that it's underground. 
+I've pirated the term System D from the former French colonies. 
+There's a word in French that is débrouillardise, that means to be self-reliant, and the former French colonies have turned that into System D for the economy of self-reliance, or the DIY economy. 
+But governments hate the DIY economy, and that's why — I took this picture in 2007, and this is the same market in 2009 — and I think, when the organizers of this conference were talking about radical openness, they didn't mean that the streets should be open and the people should be gone. 
+I had a friend who worked at a pickle factory, and the cucumbers would come flying down this conveyer belt, and his job was to pick off the ones that didn't look so good and throw them in the bin labeled "" relish "" where they'd be crushed and mixed with vinegar and used for other kinds of profit. 
+We're all focusing on — this is a statistic from earlier this month in the Financial Times — we're all focusing on the luxury economy. 
+It's worth 1.5 trillion dollars every year, and that's a vast amount of money, right? 
+So it's vast. But it should come with an asterisk, and the asterisk is that it excludes two thirds of the workers of the world. 
+1.8 billion people around the world work in the economy that is unregulated and informal. 
+That's a huge number, and what does that mean? 
+Well, it means if it were united in a single political system, one country, call it "" The United Street Sellers Republic, "" the U.S.S.R., or "" Bazaaristan, "" it would be worth 10 trillion dollars every year, and that would make it the second largest economy in the world, after the United States. 
+And given that projections are that the bulk of economic growth over the next 15 years will come from emerging economies in the developing world, it could easily overtake the United States and become the largest economy in the world. 
+So the implications of that are vast, because it means that this is where employment is — 1.8 billion people — and this is where we can create a more egalitarian world, because people are actually able to earn money and live and thrive, as Andrew Saboru did. 
+Big businesses have recognized this, and what's fascinating about this slide, it's not that the guys can carry boxes on their heads and run around without dropping them off. 
+it's that the Gala sausage roll is a product that's made by a global company called UAC foods that's active throughout Africa and the Middle East, but the Gala sausage roll is not sold in stores. 
+UAC foods has recognized that it won't sell if it's in stores. 
+It's only sold by a phalanx of street hawkers who run around the streets of Lagos at bus stations and in traffic jams and sell it as a snack, and it's been sold that way for 40 years. 
+It's a business plan for a corporation. 
+And it's not just in Africa. 
+Here's Mr. Clean looking amorously at all the other Procter & Gamble products, and Procter & Gamble, you know, the statistic always cited is that Wal-Mart is their largest customer, and it's true, as one store, Wal-Mart buys 15 percent, thus 15 percent of Procter & Gamble's business is with Wal-Mart, but their largest market segment is something that they call "" high frequency stores, "" which is all these tiny kiosks and the lady in the canoe and all these other businesses that exist in System D, the informal economy, and Procter & Gamble makes 20 percent of its money from that market segment, 
+and it's the only market segment that's growing. 
+So Procter & Gamble says, "" We don't care whether a store is incorporated or registered or anything like that. 
+We want our products in that store. "" And then there's mobile phones. 
+This is an ad for MTN, which is a South African multinational active in about 25 countries, and when they came into Nigeria — Nigeria is the big dog in Africa. 
+One in seven Africans is a Nigerian, and so everyone wants in to the mobile phone market in Nigeria. And when MTN came in, they wanted to sell the mobile service like I get in the United States or like people get here in the U.K. or in Europe — expensive monthly plans, you get a phone, you pay overages, you're killed with fees — and their plan crashed and burned. 
+And they went back to the drawing board, and they retooled, and they came up with another plan: We don't sell you the phone, we don't sell you the monthly plan. 
+We only sell you airtime. 
+And where's the airtime sold? 
+It's sold at umbrella stands all over the streets, where people are unregistered, unlicensed, but MTN makes most of its profits, perhaps 90 percent of its profits, from selling through System D, the informal economy. 
+And where do the phones come from? 
+Well, they come from here. This is in Guangzhou, China, and if you go upstairs in this rather sleepy looking electronics mall, you find the Guangzhou Dashatou second-hand trade center, and if you go in there, you follow the guys with the muscles who are carrying the boxes, and where are they going? 
+They're going to Eddy in Lagos. 
+Most of them are pirated. They have the name brand on them, but they're not manufactured by the name brand. 
+Now, are there downsides to that? 
+Well, I guess. You know, China has no — (Laughter) — no intellectual property, right? 
+Versace without the vowels. 
+Zhuomani instead of Armani. 
+S. Guuuci, and — (Laughter) (Applause) All around the world this is how products are being distributed, so, for instance, in one street market on Rua 25 de Março in São Paulo, Brazil, you can buy fake designer glasses. 
+You can buy cloned cologne. 
+You can buy pirated DVDs, of course. 
+You can buy New York Yankees caps in all sorts of unauthorized patterns. 
+You can buy cuecas baratas, designer underwear that isn't really manufactured by a designer, and even pirated evangelical mixtapes. (Laughter) Now, businesses tend to complain about this, and their, they, I don't want to take away from their entire validity of complaining about it, but I did ask a major sneaker manufacturer earlier this year what they thought about piracy, and they told me, "" Well, you can't quote me on this, because if you quote me on this, I have to kill you, "" but they use piracy as market research. 
+The sneaker manufacturer told me that if they find that Pumas are being pirated, or Adidas are being pirated and their sneakers aren't being pirated, they know they've done something wrong. (Laughter) So it's very important to them to track piracy exactly because of this, and the people who are buying, the pirates, are not their customers anyway, because their customers want the real deal. 
+Now, there's another problem. 
+All of System D really doesn't pay taxes, right? 
+And when I think about that, first of all I think that government is a social contract between the people and the government, and if the government isn't transparent, then the people aren't going to be transparent either, but also that we're blaming the little guy who doesn't pay his taxes, and we're not recognizing that everyone's fudging things all over the world, including some extremely respected businesses, and I'll give you one example. 
+There was one company that paid 4,000 bribes in the first decade of this millennium, and a million dollars in bribes every business day, right? 
+All over the world. And that company was the big German electronics giant Siemens. 
+So this goes on in the formal economy as well as the informal economy, so it's wrong of us to blame — and I'm not singling out Siemens, I'm saying everyone does it. Okay? 
+I just want to end by saying that if Adam Smith had framed out a theory of the flea market instead of the free market, what would be some of the principles? 
+First, it would be to understand that it could be considered a cooperative, and this is a thought from the Brazilian legal scholar Roberto Mangabeira Unger. 
+Cooperative development is a way forward. 
+Secondly, from the [Austrian] anarchist philosopher Paul Feyerabend, facts are relative, and what is a massive right of self-reliance to a Nigerian businessperson is considered unauthorized and horrible to other people, and we have to recognize that there are differences in how people define things and what their facts are. 
+And third is, and I'm taking this from the great American beat poet Allen Ginsberg, that alternate economies barter and different kinds of currency, alternate currencies are also very important, and he talked about buying what he needed just with his good looks. 
+And so I just want to leave you there, and say that this economy is a tremendous force for global development and we need to think about it that way. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+And I started in our medical university, Karolinska Institute, an undergraduate course called Global Health. 
+And one of the questions from which I learned a lot was this one: "Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs?" 
+And these were the results of the Swedish students. 
+That means that there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course. 
+(Laughter) But one late night, when I was compiling the report, I really realized my discovery. 
+(Laughter) Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey. 
+Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them, "What do you really think about the world?" 
+We have very good data since 1962 — 1960 about — on the size of families in all countries. 
+And 1962, there was really a group of countries here that was industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. 
+They move up into that corner. 
+And in the '90s, we have the terrible HIV epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries and all the rest of them move up into the corner, where we have long lives and small family, and we have a completely new world. 
+(Applause) (Applause ends) Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 
+And this is what happens: the data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. 
+If we don't look in the data, I think we all underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economical change. 
+Let's move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of the income. 
+And if we look where the income ends up, this is 100 percent the world's annual income. 
+We think about aid, like these people here giving aid to these people here. 
+And if I now let the world move forward, you will see that while population increases, there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty and some others getting into poverty, and this is the pattern we have today. 
+And you have the OECD there, and you have sub-Saharan Africa there, and we take off the Arab states there, coming both from Africa and from Asia, and we put them separately, and we can expand this axis, and I can give it a new dimension here, by adding the social values there, child survival. 
+And when it burst, the size of its country bubble is the size of the population. 
+Here in Uganda, development aid. 
+I can split South Asia here. India's the big bubble in the middle. 
+But a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. 
+There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. 
+This is Mao Tse-tung. He brought health to China. 
+And if we move back again, here, and we put on trails on them, like this, you can see again that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less in the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first. 
+And to show that, you can put on the way of United Arab Emirates. 
+They came from here, a mineral country. 
+So we've got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used in the past. 
+If I split Uganda, there's quite a difference within Uganda. 
+Everything in this world exists in Africa. 
+Because the data is hidden down in the databases. 
+All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly-funded statistics. 
+There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics. 
+(Laughter) And this won't work. 
+Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world, but what we really need is, of course, a search function. 
+A search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world. 
+He only says, "" We can't do it. "" (Laughter) And that's a quite clever guy, huh? (Laughter) 
+So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. 
+We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways. 
+This is the income distribution of the United States, 1970. 
+Almost like a ghost, isn't it? 
+(Laughter) It's pretty scary. (Laughter) 
+And instead of looking at this, I would like to end up by showing the Internet users per 1,000. 
+It takes some time to change for this, but on the axises, you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have. 
+And the thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them. 
+Now, statisticians don't like it, because they say that this will not show the reality; we have to have statistical, analytical methods. 
+I end now with the world. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My title: "" Queerer than we can suppose: the strangeness of science. "" "" Queerer than we can suppose "" comes from J.B.S. Haldane, the famous biologist, who said, "" Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. 
+David Deutsch, who's talking here, in "" The Fabric of Reality, "" embraces the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, because the worst that you can say about it is that it's preposterously wasteful. 
+And of course, there's nothing special about Cromwell or bladders — you have just breathed in a nitrogen atom that passed through the right lung of the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree. 
+But it's worth recalling Wittgenstein's remark on the subject: "" Tell me, "" he asked a friend, "" why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went 'round the Earth, rather than that the Earth was rotating? "" And his friend replied, "" Well, obviously, because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth. "" Wittgenstein replied, "" Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating? "" (Laughter) Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space. 
+As an evolutionary biologist, I'd say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude, of size and speed which our bodies operate at. 
+Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands, precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. 
+It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like "" solidity "" and "" impenetrability, "" because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate. 
+(Laughter) We are evolved denizens of Middle World, and that limits what we are capable of imagining. 
+We find it intuitively easy to grasp ideas like, when a rabbit moves at the sort of medium velocity at which rabbits and other Middle World objects move, and hits another Middle World object like a rock, it knocks itself out. 
+A whirlpool, for Steve Grand, is a thing with just as much reality as a rock. 
+It's what's technically known as a "" barchan, "" and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 meters per year. 
+If a neutrino had a brain, which it evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks really do consist of empty space. 
+A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal. 
+The fact that the bat uses echoes in pitch darkness to input the current variables to its model, while the swallow uses light, is incidental. 
+Middle World is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal, as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large and the very fast. 
+We could make a similar scale of improbabilities; nothing is totally impossible. 
+Because there are so many of them, and because there's no agreement among them in their preferred direction of movement, the marble, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. 
+Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World and achieve some sort of intuitive as well as mathematical understanding of the very small and the very large? 
+I wonder whether we might help ourselves to understand, say, quantum theory, if we brought up children to play computer games beginning in early childhood, which had a make-believe world of balls going through two slits on a screen, a world in which the strange goings-on of quantum mechanics were enlarged by the computer's make-believe, so that they became familiar on the Middle-World scale of the stream. 
+What we say — and I include the most austerely mechanistic among us, which is probably me — what we say is, "" Vile monster, prison is too good for you. "" Or worse, we seek revenge, in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating cycle of counter-revenge, which we see, of course, all over the world today. 
+The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. 
+Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people, with the universe as a whole. 
+(Laughter) If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa? 
+
+I'm just going to play a brief video clip. 
+Video: On the fifth of December 1985, a bottle of 1787 Lafitte was sold for 105,000 pounds — nine times the previous world record. 
+The buyer was Kip Forbes, son of one of the most flamboyant millionaires of the 20th century. 
+The original owner of the bottle turned out to be one of the most enthusiastic wine buffs of the 18th century. 
+Château Lafitte is one of the greatest wines in the world, the prince of any wine cellar. 
+Benjamin Wallace: Now, that's about all the videotape that remains of an event that set off the longest-running mystery in the modern wine world. 
+And the mystery existed because of a gentleman named Hardy Rodenstock. 
+In 1985, he announced to his friends in the wine world that he had made this incredible discovery. 
+Some workmen in Paris had broken through a brick wall, and happened upon this hidden cache of wines — apparently the property of Thomas Jefferson. 1787, 1784. 
+He wouldn't reveal the exact number of bottles, he would not reveal exactly where the building was and he would not reveal exactly who owned the building. 
+The mystery persisted for about 20 years. 
+It finally began to get resolved in 2005 because of this guy. 
+Bill Koch is a Florida billionaire who owns four of the Jefferson bottles, and he became suspicious. 
+And he ended up spending over a million dollars and hiring ex-FBI and ex-Scotland Yard agents to try to get to the bottom of this. 
+There's now ample evidence that Hardy Rodenstock is a con man, and that the Jefferson bottles were fakes. 
+But for those 20 years, an unbelievable number of really eminent and accomplished figures in the wine world were sort of drawn into the orbit of these bottles. 
+I think they wanted to believe that the most expensive bottle of wine in the world must be the best bottle of wine in the world, must be the rarest bottle of wine in the world. 
+I became increasingly, kind of voyeuristically interested in the question of you know, why do people spend these crazy amounts of money, not only on wine but on lots of things, and are they living a better life than me? 
+So, I decided to embark on a quest. 
+With the generous backing of a magazine I write for sometimes, I decided to sample the very best, or most expensive, or most coveted item in about a dozen categories, which was a very grueling quest, as you can imagine. 
+(Laughter) This was the first one. 
+A lot of the Kobe beef that you see in the U.S. is not the real thing. 
+It may come from Wagyu cattle, but it's not from the original, Appalachian Hyogo Prefecture in Japan. 
+There are very few places in the U.S. where you can try real Kobe, and one of them is Wolfgang Puck's restaurant, Cut, in Los Angeles. 
+I went there, and I ordered the eight-ounce rib eye for 160 dollars. 
+And it arrived, and it was tiny. 
+And I was outraged. 
+It was like, 160 dollars for this? 
+And then I took a bite, and I wished that it was tinier, because Kobe beef is so rich. 
+It's like foie gras — it's not even like steak. 
+I almost couldn't finish it. 
+I was really happy when I was done. 
+(Laughter) Now, the photographer who took the pictures for this project for some reason posed his dog in a lot of them, so that's why you're going to see this recurring character. 
+Which, I guess, you know, communicates to you that I did not think that one was really worth the price. 
+White truffles. 
+One of the most expensive luxury foods by weight in the world. 
+To try this, I went to a Mario Batali restaurant in Manhattan — Del Posto. 
+The waiter, you know, came out with the white truffle knob and his shaver, and he shaved it onto my pasta and he said, you know, "Would Signore like the truffles?" 
+And the charm of white truffles is in their aroma. 
+It's not in their taste, really. It's not in their texture. 
+It's in the smell. 
+These white pearlescent flakes hit the noodles, this haunting, wonderful, nutty, mushroomy smell wafted up. 
+10 seconds passed and it was gone. 
+And then I was left with these little ugly flakes on my pasta that, you know, their purpose had been served, and so I'm afraid to say that this was also a disappointment to me. 
+There were several — several of these items were disappointments. 
+(Laughter) Yeah. 
+The magazine wouldn't pay for me to go there. 
+(Laughter) They did give me a tour, though. 
+And this hotel suite is 4,300 square feet. 
+It has 360-degree views. 
+It has four balconies. 
+It was designed by the architect I.M. Pei. 
+It comes with its own Rolls Royce and driver. 
+It comes with its own wine cellar that you can draw freely from. 
+When I took the tour, it actually included some Opus One, I was glad to see. 
+30,000 dollars for a night in a hotel. 
+This is soap that's made from silver nanoparticles, which have antibacterial properties. 
+I washed my face with this this morning in preparation for this. 
+And it, you know, tickled a little bit and it smelled good, but I have to say that nobody here has complimented me on the cleanliness of my face today. 
+(Laughter) But then again, nobody has complimented me on the jeans I'm wearing. 
+These ones GQ did spring for — I own these — but I will tell you, not only did I not get a compliment from any of you, I have not gotten a compliment from anybody in the months that I have owned and worn these. 
+I don't think that whether or not you're getting a compliment should be the test of something's value, but I think in the case of a fashion item, an article of clothing, that's a reasonable benchmark. 
+That said, a lot of work goes into these. 
+They are made from handpicked organic Zimbabwean cotton that has been shuttle loomed and then hand-dipped in natural indigo 24 times. 
+But no compliments. 
+(Laughter) Thank you. 
+Armando Manni is a former filmmaker who makes this olive oil from an olive that grows on a single slope in Tuscany. 
+And he goes to great lengths to protect the olive oil from oxygen and light. 
+He uses tiny bottles, the glass is tinted, he tops the olive oil off with an inert gas. 
+And he actually — once he releases a batch of it, he regularly conducts molecular analyses and posts the results online, so you can go online and look at your batch number and see how the phenolics are developing, and, you know, gauge its freshness. 
+I did a blind taste test of this with 20 people and five other olive oils. 
+It tasted fine. It tasted interesting. 
+It was very green, it was very peppery. 
+But in the blind taste test, it came in last. 
+The olive oil that came in first was actually a bottle of Whole Foods 365 olive oil which had been oxidizing next to my stove for six months. 
+(Laughter) A recurring theme is that a lot of these things are from Japan — you'll start to notice. 
+I don't play golf, so I couldn't actually road test these, but I did interview a guy who owns them. 
+Even the people who market these clubs — I mean, they'll say these have four axis shafts which minimize loss of club speed and thereby drive the ball farther — but they'll say, look, you know, you're not getting 57,000 dollars worth of performance from these clubs. 
+You're paying for the bling, that they're encrusted with gold and platinum. 
+The guy who I interviewed who owns them did say that he's gotten a lot of pleasure out of them, so... 
+Oh, yeah, you know this one? 
+This is a coffee made from a very unusual process. 
+The luwak is an Asian Palm Civet. 
+It's a cat that lives in trees, and at night it comes down and it prowls the coffee plantations. 
+And apparently it's a very picky eater and it, you know, hones in on only the ripest coffee cherries. 
+And then an enzyme in its digestive tract leeches into the beans, and people with the unenviable job of collecting these cats' leavings then go through the forest collecting the, you know, results and processing it into coffee — although you actually can buy it in the unprocessed form. 
+That's right. 
+Unrelatedly — (Laughter) Japan is doing crazy things with toilets. (Laughter) 
+There is now a toilet that has an MP3 player in it. 
+There's one with a fragrance dispenser. 
+There's one that actually analyzes the contents of the bowl and transmits the results via email to your doctor. 
+It's almost like a home medical center — and that is the direction that Japanese toilet technology is heading in. 
+This one does not have those bells and whistles, but for pure functionality it's pretty much the best — the Neorest 600. 
+And to try this — I couldn't get a loaner, but I did go into the Manhattan showroom of the manufacturer, Toto, and they have a bathroom off of the showroom that you can use, which I used. 
+It's fully automated — you walk towards it, and the seat lifts. 
+The seat is preheated. 
+There's a water jet that cleans you. 
+There's an air jet that dries you. 
+You get up, it flushes by itself. 
+The lid closes, it self-cleans. 
+Not only is it a technological leap forward, but I really do believe it's a bit of a cultural leap forward. 
+I mean, a no hands, no toilet paper toilet. 
+And I want to get one of these. 
+(Laughter) This was another one I could not get a loaner of. 
+Tom Cruise supposedly owns this bed. 
+There's a little plaque on the end that, you know, each buyer gets their name engraved on it. 
+(Laughter) To try this one, the maker of it let me and my wife spend the night in the Manhattan showroom. 
+Lights glaring in off the street, and we had to hire a security guard and all these things. 
+But anyway, we had a great night's sleep. 
+And you spend a third of your life in bed. 
+I don't think it's that bad of a deal. 
+(Laughter) This was a fun one. 
+This is the fastest street-legal car in the world and the most expensive production car. 
+I got to drive this with a chaperone from the company, a professional race car driver, and we drove around the canyons outside of Los Angeles and down on the Pacific Coast Highway. 
+And, you know, when we pulled up to a stoplight the people in the adjacent cars kind of gave us respectful nods. 
+And it was really amazing. 
+It was such a smooth ride. 
+Most of the cars that I drive, if I get up to 80 they start to rattle. 
+I switched lanes on the highway and the driver, this chaperone, said, "You know, you were just going 110 miles an hour." 
+And I had no idea that I was one of those obnoxious people you occasionally see weaving in and out of traffic, because it was just that smooth. 
+And if I was a billionaire, I would get one. 
+(Laughter) This is a completely gratuitous video I'm just going to show of one of the pitfalls of advanced technology. 
+This is Tom Cruise arriving at the "" Mission: Impossible III "" premiere. 
+When he tries to open the door, you could call it "" Mission: Impossible IV. "" There was one object that I could not get my hands on, and that was the 1947 Cheval Blanc. 
+The '47 Cheval Blanc is probably the most mythologized wine of the 20th century. 
+And Cheval Blanc is kind of an unusual wine for Bordeaux in having a significant percentage of the Cabernet Franc grape. 
+And 1947 was a legendary vintage, especially in the right bank of Bordeaux. 
+And just together, that vintage and that chateau took on this aura that eventually kind of gave it this cultish following. 
+But it's 60 years old. 
+There's not much of it left. 
+What there is of it left you don't know if it's real — it's considered to be the most faked wine in the world. 
+Not that many people are looking to pop open their one remaining bottle for a journalist. 
+So, I'd about given up trying to get my hands on one of these. 
+I'd put out feelers to retailers, to auctioneers, and it was coming up empty. 
+And then I got an email from a guy named Bipin Desai. 
+Bipin Desai is a U.C. Riverside theoretical physicist who also happens to be the preeminent organizer of rare wine tastings, and he said, "" I've got a tasting coming up where we're going to serve the '47 Cheval Blanc. "" And it was going to be a double vertical — it was going to be 30 vintages of Cheval Blanc, and 30 vintages of Yquem. 
+And it was an invitation you do not refuse. 
+I went. 
+It was three days, four meals. 
+And at lunch on Saturday, we opened the '47. 
+And you know, it had this fragrant softness, and it smelled a little bit of linseed oil. 
+And then I tasted it, and it, you know, had this kind of unctuous, porty richness, which is characteristic of that wine — that it sort of resembles port in a lot of ways. 
+There were people at my table who thought it was, you know, fantastic. 
+There were some people who were a little less impressed. 
+And I wasn't that impressed. 
+And I don't — call my palate a philistine palate — so it doesn't necessarily mean something that I wasn't impressed, but I was not the only one there who had that reaction. 
+And it wasn't just to that wine. 
+Any one of the wines served at this tasting, if I'd been served it at a dinner party, it would have been, you know, the wine experience of my lifetime, and incredibly memorable. 
+But drinking 60 great wines over three days, they all just blurred together, and it became almost a grueling experience. 
+And I just wanted to finish by mentioning a very interesting study which came out earlier this year from some researchers at Stanford and Caltech. 
+And they gave subjects the same wine, labeled with different price tags. 
+A lot of people, you know, said that they liked the more expensive wine more — it was the same wine, but they thought it was a different one that was more expensive. 
+But what was unexpected was that these researchers did MRI brain imaging while the people were drinking the wine, and not only did they say they enjoyed the more expensively labeled wine more — their brain actually registered as experiencing more pleasure from the same wine when it was labeled with a higher price tag. 
+Thank you. 
+
+The first half of the 20th century was an absolute disaster in human affairs, a cataclysm. 
+We had the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the rise of the communist nations. 
+And each one of these forces split the world, tore the world apart, divided the world. 
+And they threw up walls — political walls, trade walls, transportation walls, communication walls, iron curtains — which divided peoples and nations. 
+It was only in the second half of the 20th century that we slowly began to pull ourselves out of this abyss. 
+Trade walls began to come tumbling down. 
+Here are some data on tariffs: starting at 40 percent, coming down to less than 5 percent. 
+We globalized the world. And what does that mean? 
+It means that we extended cooperation across national boundaries; we made the world more cooperative. 
+Transportation walls came tumbling down. 
+You know in 1950 the typical ship carried 5,000 to 10,000 tons worth of goods. 
+Today a container ship can carry 150,000 tons; it can be manned with a smaller crew; and unloaded faster than ever before. 
+Communication walls, I don't have to tell you — the Internet — have come tumbling down. 
+And of course the iron curtains, political walls have come tumbling down. 
+Now all of this has been tremendous for the world. 
+Trade has increased. 
+Here is just a little bit of data. 
+In 1990, exports from China to the United States: 15 billion dollars. 
+By 2007: over 300 billion dollars. 
+And perhaps most remarkably, at the beginning of the 21st century, really for the first time in modern history, growth extended to almost all parts of the world. 
+So China, I've already mentioned, beginning around 1978, around the time of the death of Mao, growth — ten percent a year. 
+Year after year after year, absolutely incredible. 
+Never before in human history have so many people been raised out of such great poverty as happened in China. 
+China is the world's greatest anti-poverty program over the last three decades. 
+India, starting a little bit later, but in 1990, begetting tremendous growth. 
+Incomes at that time less than $1,000 per year. 
+And over the next 18 years have almost tripled. 
+Growth of six percent a year. Absolutely incredible. 
+Now Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa — Sub-Saharan Africa has been the area of the world most resistant to growth. 
+And we can see the tragedy of Africa in the first few bars here. 
+Growth was negative. 
+People were actually getting poorer than their parents, and sometimes even poorer than their grandparents had been. 
+But at the end of the 20th century, the beginning of the 21st century, we saw growth in Africa. 
+And I think, as you'll see, there's reasons for optimism, because I believe that the best is yet to come. 
+Now why. 
+On the cutting edge today it's new ideas which are driving growth. 
+And by that I mean it's products for which the research and development costs are really high, and the manufacturing costs are low. 
+More than ever before it is these types of ideas which are driving growth on the cutting edge. 
+Now ideas have this amazing property. 
+Thomas Jefferson, I think, really expressed this quite well. 
+He said, "" He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself, without lessening mine. 
+As he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me. "" Or to put it slightly differently: one apple feeds one man, but an idea can feed the world. 
+Now this is not new. This is practically not new to TEDsters. 
+This is practically the model of TED. 
+But what is new is that the greater function of ideas is going to drive growth even more than ever before. 
+This provides a reason why trade and globalization are even more important, more powerful than ever before, and are going to increase growth more than ever before. 
+And to explain why this is so, I have a question. 
+Suppose that there are two diseases: one of them is rare, the other one is common, but if they are not treated they are equally severe. 
+If you had to choose, which would you rather have: the common disease or the rare disease? 
+Common, the common — I think that's absolutely right, and why? Because there are more drugs to treat common diseases than there are to treat rare diseases. 
+The reason for this is incentives. 
+It costs about the same to produce a new drug whether that drug treats 1,000 people, 100,000 people, or a million people. 
+But the revenues are much greater if the drug treats a million people. 
+So the incentives are much larger to produce drugs which treat more people. 
+To put this differently: larger markets save lives. 
+In this case misery truly does love company. 
+Now think about the following: if China and India were as rich as the United States is today, the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now. 
+Now we are not there yet, but it is happening. 
+As other countries become richer the demand for these pharmaceuticals is going to increase tremendously. 
+And that means an increase incentive to do research and development, which benefits everyone in the world. 
+Larger markets increase the incentive to produce all kinds of ideas, whether it's software, whether it's a computer chip, whether it's a new design. 
+For the Hollywood people in the audience, this even explains why action movies have larger budgets than comedies: it's because action movies translate easier into other languages and other cultures, so the market for those movies is larger. 
+People are willing to invest more, and the budgets are larger. 
+Alright. Well if larger markets increase the incentive to produce new ideas, how do we maximize that incentive? 
+It's by having one world market, by globalizing the world. 
+The way I like to put this is: one idea. Ideas are meant to be shared, so one idea can serve one world, one market. 
+One idea, one world, one market. 
+Well how else can we create new ideas? 
+That's one reason. 
+Globalize trade. 
+How else can we create new ideas? 
+Well, more idea creators. 
+Now idea creators, they come from all walks of life. 
+Artists and innovators — many of the people you've seen on this stage. 
+I'm going to focus on scientists and engineers because I have some data on that, and I'm a data person. 
+Now, today, less than one-tenth of one percent of the world's population are scientists and engineers. 
+(Laughter) The United States has been an idea leader. 
+A large fraction of those people are in the United States. 
+But the U.S. is losing its idea leadership. 
+And for that I am very grateful. 
+That is a good thing. 
+It is fortunate that we are becoming less of an idea leader because for too long the United States, and a handful of other developed countries, have shouldered the entire burden of research and development. 
+But consider the following: if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the United States is now there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers contributing to ideas which benefit everyone, which are shared by everyone. 
+I think of the great Indian mathematician, Ramanujan. 
+How many Ramanujans are there in India today toiling in the fields, barely able to feed themselves, when they could be feeding the world? 
+Now we're not there yet. 
+But it is going to happen in this century. 
+The real tragedy of the last century is this: if you think about the world's population as a giant computer, a massively parallel processor, then the great tragedy has been that billions of our processors have been off line. 
+But in this century China is coming on line. 
+India is coming on line. 
+Africa is coming on line. 
+We will see an Einstein in Africa in this century. 
+Here is just some data. This is China. 
+1996: less than one million new university students in China per year; 2006: over five million. 
+Now think what this means. 
+This means we all benefit when another country gets rich. 
+We should not fear other countries becoming wealthy. 
+That is something that we should embrace — a wealthy China, a wealthy India, a wealthy Africa. 
+We need a greater demand for ideas — those larger markets I was talking about earlier — and a greater supply of ideas for the world. 
+Now you can see some of the reasons why I'm optimistic. 
+Globalization is increasing the demand for ideas, the incentive to create new ideas. 
+Investments in education are increasing the supply of new ideas. 
+In fact if you look at world history you can see some reasons for optimism. 
+From about the beginnings of humanity to 1500: zero economic growth, nothing. 
+1500 to 1800: maybe a little bit of economic growth, but less in a century than you expect to see in a year today. 
+1900s: maybe one percent. 
+Twentieth century: a little bit over two percent. 
+Twenty-first century could easily be 3.3, even higher percent. 
+Even at that rate, by 2100 average GDP per capita in the world will be $200,000. 
+That's not U.S. GDP per capita, which will be over a million, but world GDP per capita — $200,000. 
+That's not that far. 
+We won't make it. 
+But some of our grandchildren probably will. 
+And I should say, I think this is a rather modest prediction. 
+In Kurzweilian terms this is gloomy. 
+In Kurzweilian terms I'm like the Eeyore of economic growth. 
+(Laughter) Alright what about problems? 
+What about a great depression? 
+Well let's take a look. Let's take a look at the Great Depression. 
+Here is GDP per capita from 1900 to 1929. 
+Now let's imagine that you were an economist in 1929, trying to forecast future growth for the United States, not knowing that the economy was about to go off a cliff, not knowing that we were about to enter the greatest economic disaster certainly in the 20th century. 
+What would you have predicted, not knowing this? 
+If you had based your prediction, your forecast on 1900 to 1929 you'd have predicted something like this. 
+If you'd been a little more optimistic — say, based upon the Roaring Twenties — you'd have said this. 
+So what actually happened? 
+We went off a cliff but we recovered. 
+In fact in the second half of the 20th century growth was even higher than anything you would have predicted based upon the first half of the 20th century. 
+So growth can wash away even what appears to be a great depression. 
+Alright. What else? 
+Oil. Oil. This was a big topic. 
+When I was writing up my notes oil was $140 per barrel. 
+So people were asking a question. They were saying, "Is China drinking our milkshake?" 
+(Laughter) And there is some truth to this, in the sense that we have something of a finite resource, and increased growth is going to push up demand for that. 
+But I think I don't have to tell this audience that a higher price of oil is not necessarily a bad thing. 
+Moreover, as everyone knows, look — it's energy, not oil, which counts. 
+And higher oil prices mean a greater incentive to invest in energy R & D. 
+You can see this in the data. 
+As oil prices go up, energy patents go up. 
+The world is much better equipped to overcome an increase in the price of oil today, than ever in the past, because of what I'm talking about. 
+One idea, one world, one market. 
+So I'm optimistic so long as we hew to these two ideas: to keep globalizing world markets, keep extending cooperation across national boundaries, and keep investing in education. 
+Now the United States has a particularly important role to play in this: to keep our education system globalized, to keep our education system open to students from all over the world, because our education system is the candle that other students come to light their own candles. 
+Now remember here what Jefferson said. 
+Jefferson said, "" When they come and light their candles at ours, they gain light, and we are not darkened. "" But Jefferson wasn't quite right, was he? 
+Because the truth is, when they light their candles at ours, there is twice as much light available for everyone. 
+So my view is: Be optimistic. 
+Spread the ideas. Spread the light. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The maxim, "" Know thyself "" has been around since the ancient Greeks. 
+By the way, feel free to check in on my head at any time. 
+(Laughter) My team at InteraXon and I have been developing thought-controlled application for almost a decade now. 
+On the subject of Google, today you can search and tag images based on the thoughts and feelings you had while you watched them. 
+Creating a big picture out of all the important little details that make up who we are. 
+
+Early visions of wireless power actually were thought of by Nikola Tesla basically about 100 years ago. 
+The thought that you wouldn't want to transfer electric power wirelessly, no one ever thought of that. 
+They thought, "" Who would use it if you didn't? "" And so, in fact, he actually set about doing a variety of things. 
+Built the Tesla coil. This tower was built on Long Island back at the beginning of the 1900s. 
+And the idea was, it was supposed to be able to transfer power anywhere on Earth. 
+We'll never know if this stuff worked. Actually, I think the Federal Bureau of Investigation took it down for security purposes, sometime in the early 1900s. 
+But the one thing that did come out of electricity is that we love this stuff so much. 
+I mean, think about how much we love this. 
+If you just walk outside, there are trillions of dollars that have been invested in infrastructure around the world, putting up wires to get power from where it's created to where it's used. 
+The other thing is, we love batteries. 
+And for those of us that have an environmental element to us, there is something like 40 billion disposable batteries built every year for power that, generally speaking, is used within a few inches or a few feet of where there is very inexpensive power. 
+So, before I got here, I thought, "" You know, I am from North America. 
+We do have a little bit of a reputation in the United States. "" So I thought I'd better look it up first. 
+So definition number six is the North American definition of the word "" suck. "" Wires suck, they really do. 
+Think about it. Whether that's you in that picture or something under your desk. 
+The other thing is, batteries suck too. 
+And they really, really do. 
+Do you ever wonder what happens to this stuff? 
+40 billion of these things built. 
+This is what happens. 
+They fall apart, they disintegrate, and they end up here. 
+So when you talk about expensive power, the cost per kilowatt-hour to supply battery power to something is on the order of two to three hundred pounds. 
+Think about that. 
+The most expensive grid power in the world is thousandths of that. 
+So fortunately, one of the other definitions of "" suck "" that was in there, it does create a vacuum. 
+And nature really does abhor a vacuum. 
+What happened back a few years ago was a group of theoretical physicists at MIT actually came up with this concept of transferring power over distance. 
+Basically they were able to light a 60 watt light bulb at a distance of about two meters. 
+It got about 50 percent of the efficiency — by the way, that's still a couple thousand times more efficient than a battery would be, to do the same thing. 
+But were able to light that, and do it very successfully. 
+This was actually the experiment. So you can see the coils were somewhat larger. 
+The light bulb was a fairly simple task, from their standpoint. 
+This all came from a professor waking up at night to the third night in a row that his wife's cellphone was beeping because it was running out of battery power. 
+And he was thinking, "" With all the electricity that's out there in the walls, why couldn't some of that just come into the phone so I could get some sleep? "" And he actually came up with this concept of resonant energy transfer. 
+But inside a standard transformer are two coils of wire. 
+And those two coils of wire are really, really close to each other, and actually do transfer power magnetically and wirelessly, only over a very short distance. 
+What Dr. Soljacic figured out how to do was separate the coils in a transformer to a greater distance than the size of those transformers using this technology, which is not dissimilar from the way an opera singer shatters a glass on the other side of the room. 
+It's a resonant phenomenon for which he actually received a MacArthur Fellowship Award, which is nicknamed the Genius Award, last September, for his discovery. 
+So how does it work? 
+Imagine a coil. For those of you that are engineers, there's a capacitor attached to it too. 
+And if you can cause that coil to resonate, what will happen is it will pulse at alternating current frequencies — at a fairly high frequency, by the way. 
+And if you can bring another device close enough to the source, that will only work at exactly that frequency, you can actually get them to do what's called strongly couple, and transfer magnetic energy between them. 
+And then what you do is, you start out with electricity, turn it into magnetic field, take that magnetic field, turn it back into electricity, and then you can use it. 
+Number one question I get asked. 
+I mean, people are worried about cellphones being safe. 
+You know. What about safety? 
+The first thing is this is not a "" radiative "" technology. 
+It doesn't radiate. 
+There aren't electric fields here. It's a magnetic field. 
+It stays within either what we call the source, or within the device. 
+And actually, the magnetic fields we're using are basically about the same as the Earth's magnetic field. 
+We live in a magnetic field. 
+And the other thing that's pretty cool about the technology is that it only transfers energy to things that work at exactly the same frequency. 
+And it's virtually impossible in nature to make that happen. 
+Then finally we have governmental bodies everywhere that will regulate everything we do. 
+They've pretty much set field exposure limits, which all of the things in the stuff I'll show you today sort of sit underneath those guidelines. 
+Mobile electronics. 
+Home electronics. 
+Those cords under your desk, I bet everybody here has something that looks like that or those batteries. 
+There are industrial applications. 
+And then finally, electric vehicles. 
+These electric cars are beautiful. 
+But who is going to want to plug them in? 
+Imagine driving into your garage — we've built a system to do this — you drive into your garage, and the car charges itself, because there is a mat on the floor that's plugged into the wall. 
+And it actually causes your car to charge safely and efficiently. 
+Then there's all kinds of other applications. Implanted medical devices, where people don't have to die of infections anymore if you can seal the thing up. 
+Credit cards, robot vacuum cleaners. 
+So what I'd like to do is take a couple minutes and show you, actually, how it works. 
+And what I'm going to do is to show you pretty much what's here. 
+You've got a coil. 
+That coil is connected to an R.F. amplifier that creates a high-frequency oscillating magnetic field. 
+We put one on the back of the television set. 
+By the way, I do make it look a little bit easier than it is. 
+There's lots of electronics and secret sauce and all kinds of intellectual property that go into it. 
+But then what's going to happen is, it will create a field. 
+It will cause one to get created on the other side. 
+And if the demo gods are willing, in about 10 seconds or so we should see it. 
+The 10 seconds actually are because we — I don't know if any of you have ever thought about plugging a T.V. in when you use just a cord. 
+Generally, you have to go over and hit the button. So I thought we put a little computer in it that has to wake up to tell it to do that. 
+So, I'll plug that in. 
+It creates a magnetic field here. 
+It causes one to be created out here. 
+And as I said, in sort of about 10 seconds we should start to see... 
+This is a commercially — (Applause) available color television set. 
+Imagine, you get one of these things. You want to hang them on the wall. 
+How many people want to hang them on the wall? 
+Think about it. You don't want those ugly cords coming down. 
+Imagine if you can get rid of it. 
+The other thing I wanted to talk about was safety. 
+So, there is nothing going on. I'm okay. 
+And I'll do it again, just for safety's sake. 
+Almost immediately, though, people ask, "How small can you make this? Can you make this small enough?" 
+Because remember Dr. Soljacic's original idea was his wife's cellphone beeping. 
+So, I wanted to show you something. 
+We're an equal opportunity designer of this sort of thing. 
+This a Google G1. 
+You know, it's the latest thing that's come out. 
+It runs the Android operating system. 
+I think I heard somebody talk about that before. 
+It's odd. It has a battery. 
+It also has coiled electronics that WiTricity has put into the back of it. 
+And if I can get the camera — okay, great — you'll see, as I get sort of close... 
+you're looking at a cellphone powered completely wirelessly. 
+(Applause) And I know some of you are Apple aficionados. 
+So, you know they don't make it easy at Apple to get inside their phones. 
+So we put a little sleeve on the back, but we should be able to get this guy to wake up too. 
+And those of you that have an iPhone recognize the green center. 
+(Applause) And Nokia as well. 
+You'll see that what we did there is put a little thing in the back, to do that, and it probably beeps, actually, as it goes on as well. 
+But they typically use it to light up the screen. 
+So, imagine these things could go... they could go in your ceiling. 
+They could go in the floor. They could go, actually, underneath your desktop. 
+So that when you walk in or you come in from home, if you carry a purse, it works in your purse. 
+You never have to worry about plugging these things in again. 
+And think of what that would do for you. 
+So I think in closing, sort of in the immortal visions of The New Yorker magazine, I thought I'd put up one more slide. 
+And for those of you who can't read it, it says, "It does appear to be some kind of wireless technology." 
+So, thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We've evolved with tools, and tools have evolved with us. 
+However, over the years, tools have become more and more specialized. 
+These sculpting tools have evolved through their use, and each one has a different form which matches its function. 
+But as tools have become more and more complex, we need more complex controls to control them. 
+And so designers have become very adept at creating interfaces that allow you to manipulate parameters while you're attending to other things, such as taking a photograph and changing the focus or the aperture. 
+But the computer has fundamentally changed the way we think about tools because computation is dynamic. 
+So it can do a million different things and run a million different applications. 
+And my belief is that, then, we must need new types of interfaces that can capture these rich abilities that we have and that can physically adapt to us and allow us to interact in new ways. 
+So with my colleagues, Daniel Leithinger and Hiroshi Ishii, we created inFORM, where the interface can actually come off the screen and you can physically manipulate it. 
+Or you can interact through gestures and direct deformations to sculpt digital clay. 
+Or interface elements can arise out of the surface and change on demand. 
+So the question is, how can we use this? 
+Traditionally, urban planners and architects build physical models of cities and buildings to better understand them. 
+We also believe that these dynamic shape displays can really change the ways that we remotely collaborate with people. 
+And so using inFORM, you can reach out from the screen and manipulate things at a distance. 
+And you can also manipulate and collaborate on 3D data sets as well, so you can gesture around them as well as manipulate them. 
+And so you can also bring in existing objects, and those will be captured on one side and transmitted to the other. 
+And so we do this by capturing the remote user using a depth-sensing camera like a Microsoft Kinect. 
+Now, you might be wondering how does this all work, and essentially, what it is, is 900 linear actuators that are connected to these mechanical linkages that allow motion down here to be propagated in these pins above. 
+So at Stanford, we created this haptic edge display, which is a mobile device with an array of linear actuators that can change shape, so you can feel in your hand where you are as you're reading a book. 
+Or you can feel in your pocket new types of tactile sensations that are richer than the vibration. 
+Or you can play games and have actual buttons. 
+And so we were able to do this by embedding 40 small, tiny linear actuators inside the device, and that allow you not only to touch them but also back-drive them as well. 
+But we've also looked at other ways to create more complex shape change. 
+And so together with Ken Nakagaki at the Media Lab, we created this new high-resolution version that uses an array of servomotors to change from interactive wristband to a touch-input device to a phone. 
+(Laughter) And we're also interested in looking at ways that users can actually deform the interfaces to shape them into the devices that they want to use. 
+So, in conclusion, I really think that we need to think about a new, fundamentally different way of interacting with computers. 
+But looking forward, I think we need to go beyond this, beyond devices, to really think about new ways that we can bring people together, and bring our information into the world, and think about smart environments that can adapt to us physically. 
+So with that, I will leave you. 
+
+(Music) (Applause) Thank you. 
+Imagining a solo cello concert, one would most likely think of Johann Sebastian Bach unaccompanied cello suites. 
+As a child studying these eternal masterpieces, Bach's music would intermingle with the singing voices of Muslim prayers from the neighboring Arab village of the northern Kibbutz in Israel where I grew up. 
+Late at night, after hours of practicing, I would listen to Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday as the sounds of tango music would be creeping from my parents' stereo. 
+It all became music to me. 
+I didn't hear the boundaries. 
+I still start every day practicing playing Bach. 
+His music never ceases to sound fresh and surprising to me. 
+But as I was moving away from the traditional classical repertoire and trying to find new ways of musical expression, I realized that with today's technological resources, there's no reason to limit what can be produced at one time from a single string instrument. 
+The power and coherency that comes from one person hearing, perceiving and playing all the voices makes a very different experience. 
+The excitement of a great orchestra performance comes from the attempt to have a collective of musicians producing one unified whole concept. 
+The excitement from using multi-tracking, the way I did in the piece you will hear next, comes from the attempt to build and create a whole universe with many diverse layers, all generated from a single source. 
+My cello and my voice are layered to create this large sonic canvas. 
+When composers write music for me, I ask them to forget what they know about the cello. 
+I hope to arrive at new territories to discover sounds I have never heard before. 
+I want to create endless possibilities with this cello. 
+I become the medium through which the music is being channeled, and in the process, when all is right, the music is transformed and so am I. 
+(Music) (Applause) 
+
+I live in South Central. 
+This is South Central: liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. 
+So the city planners, they get together and they figure they're going to change the name South Central to make it represent something else, so they change it to South Los Angeles, like this is going to fix what's really going wrong in the city. 
+This is South Los Angeles. (Laughter) Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. 
+Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert, South Central Los Angeles, home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. 
+Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys. 
+People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles. 
+For instance, the obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times higher than, say, Beverly Hills, which is probably eight, 10 miles away. 
+I got tired of seeing this happening. 
+And I was wondering, how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food, if every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects that the present food system has on your neighborhood? 
+I see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars. 
+I see dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks. 
+And I figured, this has to stop. 
+So I figured that the problem is the solution. 
+Food is the problem and food is the solution. 
+Plus I got tired of driving 45 minutes round trip to get an apple that wasn't impregnated with pesticides. 
+So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house. 
+It was on a strip of land that we call a parkway. 
+It's 150 feet by 10 feet. 
+Thing is, it's owned by the city. 
+But you have to maintain it. 
+So I'm like, "" Cool. I can do whatever the hell I want, since it's my responsibility and I gotta maintain it. "" And this is how I decided to maintain it. 
+So me and my group, L.A. Green Grounds, we got together and we started planting my food forest, fruit trees, you know, the whole nine, vegetables. 
+What we do, we're a pay-it-forward kind of group, where it's composed of gardeners from all walks of life, from all over the city, and it's completely volunteer, and everything we do is free. 
+And the garden, it was beautiful. 
+And then somebody complained. 
+The city came down on me, and basically gave me a citation saying that I had to remove my garden, which this citation was turning into a warrant. 
+And I'm like, "" Come on, really? 
+A warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about? "" (Laughter) And I was like, "" Cool. Bring it. "" Because this time it wasn't coming up. 
+So L.A. Times got ahold of it. Steve Lopez did a story on it and talked to the councilman, and one of the Green Grounds members, they put up a petition on Change.org, and with 900 signatures, we were a success. 
+We had a victory on our hands. 
+My councilman even called in and said how they endorse and love what we're doing. 
+I mean, come on, why wouldn't they? 
+L.A. leads the United States in vacant lots that the city actually owns. 
+They own 26 square miles of vacant lots. 
+That's 20 Central Parks. 
+That's enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants. 
+Why in the hell would they not okay this? 
+Growing one plant will give you 1,000, 10,000 seeds. 
+When one dollar's worth of green beans will give you 75 dollars' worth of produce. 
+It's my gospel, when I'm telling people, grow your own food. 
+Growing your own food is like printing your own money. 
+(Applause) See, I have a legacy in South Central. 
+I grew up there. I raised my sons there. 
+And I refuse to be a part of this manufactured reality that was manufactured for me by some other people, and I'm manufacturing my own reality. 
+See, I'm an artist. 
+Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art. 
+Just like a graffiti artist, where they beautify walls, me, I beautify lawns, parkways. 
+I use the garden, the soil, like it's a piece of cloth, and the plants and the trees, that's my embellishment for that cloth. 
+You'd be surprised what the soil could do if you let it be your canvas. 
+You just couldn't imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people. 
+So what happened? 
+I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education, a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood. 
+To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil. 
+We are the soil. 
+You'd be surprised how kids are affected by this. 
+Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. 
+Plus you get strawberries. 
+(Laughter) I remember this time, there was this mother and a daughter came, it was, like, 10: 30 at night, and they were in my yard, and I came out and they looked so ashamed. 
+So I'm like, man, it made me feel bad that they were there, and I told them, you know, you don't have to do this like this. 
+This is on the street for a reason. 
+It made me feel ashamed to see people that were this close to me that were hungry, and this only reinforced why I do this, and people asked me, "" Fin, aren't you afraid people are going to steal your food? "" And I'm like, "" Hell no, I ain't afraid they're gonna steal it. 
+That's why it's on the street. 
+That's the whole idea. 
+I want them to take it, but at the same time, I want them to take back their health. "" There's another time when I put a garden in this homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles. 
+These are the guys, they helped me unload the truck. 
+It was cool, and they just shared the stories about how this affected them and how they used to plant with their mother and their grandmother, and it was just cool to see how this changed them, if it was only for that one moment. 
+So Green Grounds has gone on to plant maybe 20 gardens. 
+We've had, like, 50 people come to our dig-ins and participate, and it's all volunteers. 
+If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. 
+(Laughter) If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. (Applause) But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them. 
+I see young people and they want to work, but they're in this thing where they're caught up — I see kids of color and they're just on this track that's designed for them, that leads them to nowhere. 
+So with gardening, I see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their communities, to have a sustainable life. 
+And when we do this, who knows? 
+We might produce the next George Washington Carver. 
+but if we don't change the composition of the soil, we will never do this. 
+Now this is one of my plans. This is what I want to do. 
+I want to plant a whole block of gardens where people can share in the food in the same block. 
+I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafes. 
+Now don't get me wrong. 
+I'm not talking about no free shit, because free is not sustainable. 
+The funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) What I'm talking about is putting people to work, and getting kids off the street, and letting them know the joy, the pride and the honor in growing your own food, opening farmer's markets. 
+So what I want to do here, we gotta make this sexy. 
+So I want us all to become ecolutionary renegades, gangstas, gangsta gardeners. 
+We gotta flip the script on what a gangsta is. 
+If you ain't a gardener, you ain't gangsta. 
+Get gangsta with your shovel, okay? 
+And let that be your weapon of choice. 
+(Applause) So basically, if you want to meet with me, you know, if you want to meet, don't call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit — where you talk about doing some shit. 
+If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit. 
+Peace. Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+This technology made a very important impact on us. 
+It changed the way our history developed. 
+But it's a technology so pervasive, so invisible, that we, for a long time, forgot to take it into account when we talked about human evolution. 
+But we see the results of this technology, still. 
+So let's make a little test. 
+So everyone of you turns to their neighbor please. 
+Turn and face your neighbors. 
+Please, also on the balcony. 
+Smile. Smile. Open the mouths. 
+Smile, friendly. 
+(Laughter) Do you — Do you see any Canine teeth? (Laughter) 
+Count Dracula teeth in the mouths of your neighbors? 
+Of course not. 
+Because our dental anatomy is actually made, not for tearing down raw meat from bones or chewing fibrous leaves for hours. 
+It is made for a diet which is soft, mushy, which is reduced in fibers, which is very easily chewable and digestible. 
+Sounds like fast food, doesn't it. 
+(Laughter) It's for cooked food. 
+We carry in our face the proof that cooking, food transformation, made us what we are. 
+So I would suggest that we change how we classify ourselves. 
+We talk about ourselves as omnivores. 
+I would say, we should call ourselves coctivors — (Laughter) from coquere, to cook. 
+We are the animals who eat cooked food. 
+No, no, no, no. Better — to live of cooked food. 
+So cooking is a very important technology. 
+It's technology. 
+I don't know how you feel, but I like to cook for entertainment. 
+And you need some design to be successful. 
+So, cooking is a very important technology, because it allowed us to acquire what brought you all here: the big brain, this wonderful cerebral cortex we have. 
+Because brains are expensive. 
+Those have to pay tuition fees know. 
+(Laughter) But it's also, metabolically speaking, expensive. 
+You now, our brain is two to three percent of the body mass, but actually it uses 25 percent of the total energy we use. 
+It's very expensive. 
+Where does the energy come from. Of course, from food. 
+If we eat raw food, we cannot release really the energy. 
+So this ingenuity of our ancestors, to invent this most marvelous technology. 
+Invisible — everyone of us does it every day, so to speak. 
+Cooking made it possible that mutations, natural selections, our environment, could develop us. 
+So if we think about this unleashing human potential, which was possible by cooking and food, why do we talk so badly about food? 
+Why is it always do and don'ts and it's good for you, it's not good for you? 
+I think the good news for me would be if we could go back and talk about the unleashing, the continuation of the unleashing of human potential. 
+Now, cooking allowed also that we became a migrant species. 
+We walked out of Africa two times. 
+We populated all the ecologies. 
+If you can cook, nothing can happen to you, because whatever you find, you will try to transform it. 
+It keeps also your brain working. 
+Now the very easy and simple technology which was developed actually runs after this formula. 
+Take something which looks like food, transform it, and it gives you a good, very easy, accessible energy. 
+This technology affected two organs, the brain and the gut, which it actually affected. 
+The brain could grow, but the gut actually shrunk. 
+Okay, it's not obvious to be honest. 
+(Laughter) But it shrunk to 60 percent of primate gut of my body mass. 
+So because of having cooked food, it's easier to digest. 
+Now having a large brain, as you know, is a big advantage, because you can actually influence your environment. 
+You can influence your own technologies you have invented. 
+You can continue to innovate and invent. 
+Now the big brain did this also with cooking. 
+But how did it actually run this show? 
+How did it actually interfere? 
+What kind of criteria did it use? 
+And this is actually taste reward and energy. 
+You know we have up to five tastes, three of them sustain us. 
+Sweet — energy. 
+Umami — this is a meaty taste. 
+You need proteins for muscles, recovery. 
+Salty, because you need salt, otherwise your electric body will not work. 
+And two tastes which protect you — bitter and sour, which are against poisonous and rotten material. 
+But of course, they are hard-wired but we use them still in a sophisticated way. 
+Think about bittersweet chocolate; or think about the acidity of yogurt — wonderful — mixed with strawberry fruits. 
+So we can make mixtures of all this kind of thing because we know that, in cooking, we can transform it to the form. 
+Reward: this is a more complex and especially integrative form of our brain with various different elements — the external states, our internal states, how do we feel, and so on are put together. 
+And something which maybe you don't like but you are so hungry that you really will be satisfied to eat. 
+So satisfaction was a very important part. 
+And as I say, energy was necessary. 
+Now how did the gut actually participate in this development? 
+And the gut is a silent voice — it's going more for feelings. 
+I use the euphemism digestive comfort — actually — it's a digestive discomfort, which the gut is concerned with. 
+If you get a stomach ache, if you get a little bit bloated, was not the right food, was not the right cooking manipulation or maybe other things went wrong. 
+So my story is a tale of two brains, because it might surprise you, our gut has a full-fledged brain. 
+All the managers in the room say, "" You don't tell me something new, because we know, gut feeling. 
+This is what we are using. "" (Laughter) And actually you use it and it's actually useful. 
+Because our gut is connected to our emotional limbic system, they do speak with each other and make decisions. 
+But what it means to have a brain there is that, not only the big brain has to talk with the food, the food has to talk with the brain, because we have to learn actually how to talk to the brains. 
+Now if there's a gut brain, we should also learn to talk with this brain. 
+Now 150 years ago, anatomists described very, very carefully — here is a model of a wall of a gut. 
+I took the three elements — stomach, small intestine and colon. 
+And within this structure, you see these two pinkish layers, which are actually the muscle. 
+And between this muscle, they found nervous tissues, a lot of nervous tissues, which penetrate actually the muscle — penetrate the submucosa, where you have all the elements for the immune system. 
+The gut is actually the largest immune system, defending your body. 
+It penetrates the mucosa. 
+This is the layer which actually touches the food you are swallowing and you digest, which is actually the lumen. 
+Now if you think about the gut, the gut is — if you could stretch it — 40 meters long, the length of a tennis court. 
+If we could unroll it, get out all the folds and so on, it would have 400 sq. meters of surface. 
+And now this brain takes care over this, to move it with the muscles and to do defend the surface and, of course, digest our food we cook. 
+So if we give you a specification, this brain, which is autonomous, have 500 million nerve cells, 100 million neurons — so around the size of a cat brain, so there sleeps a little cat — thinks for itself, optimizes whatever it digests. 
+It has 20 different neuron types. 
+It's got the same diversity you find actually in a pig brain, where you have 100 billion neurons. 
+It has autonomous organized microcircuits, has these programs which run. 
+It senses the food; it knows exactly what to do. 
+It senses it by chemical means and very importantly by mechanical means, because it has to move the food — it has to mix all the various elements which we need for digestion. 
+This control of muscle is very, very important, because, you know, there can be reflexes. 
+If you don't like a food, especially if you're a child, you gag. 
+It's this brain which makes this reflex. 
+And then finally, it controls also the secretion of this molecular machinery, which actually digests the food we cook. 
+Now how do the two brains work with each other? 
+I took here a model from robotics — it's called the Subsumption Architecture. 
+What it means is that we have a layered control system. 
+The lower layer, our gut brain, has its own goals — digestion defense — and we have the higher brain with the goal of integration and generating behaviors. 
+Now both look — and this is the blue arrows — both look to the same food, which is in the lumen and in the area of your intestine. 
+The big brain integrates signals, which come from the running programs of the lower brain, But subsumption means that the higher brain can interfere with the lower. 
+It can replace, or it can inhibit actually, signals. 
+So if we take two types of signals — a hunger signal for example. 
+If you have an empty stomach, your stomach produces a hormone called ghrelin. 
+It's a very big signal; it's sent to the brain says, "Go and eat." 
+You have stop signals — we have up to eight stop signals. 
+At least in my case, they are not listened to. 
+(Laughter) So what happens if the big brain in the integration overrides the signal? 
+So if you override the hunger signal, you can have a disorder, which is called anorexia. 
+Despite generating a healthy hunger signal, the big brain ignores it and activates different programs in the gut. 
+The more usual case is overeating. 
+It actually takes the signal and changes it, and we continue, even [though] our eight signals would say, "" Stop, enough. 
+We have transferred enough energy. "" Now the interesting thing is that, along this lower layer — this gut — the signal becomes stronger and stronger if undigested, but digestible, material could penetrate. 
+This we found from bariatric surgery. 
+That then the signal would be very, very high. 
+So now back to the cooking question and back to the design. 
+We have learned to talk to the big brain — taste and reward, as you know. 
+Now what would be the language we have to talk to the gut brain that its signals are so strong that the big brain cannot ignore it? 
+Then we would generate something all of us would like to have — a balance between the hunger and the satiation. 
+Now I give you, from our research, a very short claim. 
+This is fat digestion. 
+You have on your left an olive oil droplet, and this olive oil droplet gets attacked by enzymes. 
+This is an in vitro experiment. 
+It's very difficult to work in the intestine. 
+Now everyone would expect that when the degradation of the oil happens, when the constituents are liberated, they disappear, they go away because they [were] absorbed. 
+Actually, what happens is that a very intricate structure appears. 
+And I hope you can see that there are some ring-like structures in the middle image, which is water. 
+This whole system generates a huge surface to allow more enzymes to attack the remaining oil. 
+And finally, on your right side, you see a bubbly, cell-like structure appearing, from which the body will absorb the fat. 
+Now if we could take this language — and this is a language of structures — and make it longer-lasting, that it can go through the passage of the intestine, it would generate stronger signals. 
+So our research — and I think the research also at the universities — are now fixing on these points to say: how can we actually — and this might sound trivial now to you — how can we change cooking? 
+How can we cook that we have this language developed? 
+So what we have actually, it's not an omnivore's dilemma. 
+We have a coctivor's opportunity, because we have learned over the last two million years which taste and reward — quite sophisticated to cook — to please ourselves, to satisfy ourselves. 
+If we add the matrix, if we add the structure language, which we have to learn, when we learn it, then we can put it back; and around energy, we could generate a balance, which comes out from our really primordial operation: cooking. 
+So, to make cooking really a very important element, I would say even philosophers have to change and have to finally recognize that cooking is what made us. 
+So I would say, coquo ergo sum: I cook, therefore I am. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+All human life, all life, depends on plants. 
+Let me try to convince you of that in a few seconds. 
+Just think for a moment. 
+It doesn't matter whether you live in a small African village, or you live in a big city, everything comes back to plants in the end: whether it's for the food, the medicine, the fuel, the construction, the clothing, all the obvious things; or whether it's for the spiritual and recreational things that matter to us so much; or whether it's soil formation, or the effect on the atmosphere, or primary production. 
+Damn it, even the books here are made out of plants. 
+All these things, they come back to plants. 
+And without them we wouldn't be here. 
+Now plants are under threat. 
+They're under threat because of changing climate. 
+And they are also under threat because they are sharing a planet with people like us. 
+And people like us want to do things that destroy plants, and their habitats. 
+And whether that's because of food production, or because of the introduction of alien plants into places that they really oughtn't be, or because of habitats being used for other purposes — all these things are meaning that plants have to adapt, or die, or move. 
+And plants sometimes find it rather difficult to move because there might be cities and other things in the way. 
+So if all human life depends on plants, doesn't it make sense that perhaps we should try to save them? 
+I think it does. 
+And I want to tell you about a project to save plants. 
+And the way that you save plants is by storing seeds. 
+Because seeds, in all their diverse glory, are plants' futures. 
+All the genetic information for future generations of plants are held in seeds. 
+So here is the building; it looks rather unassuming, really. 
+But it goes down below ground many stories. 
+And it's the largest seed bank in the world. 
+It exists not only in southern England, but distributed around the world. I'll come to that. 
+This is a nuclear-proof facility. 
+God forbid that it should have to withstand that. 
+So if you're going to build a seed bank, you have to decide what you're going to store in it. Right? 
+And we decided that what we want to store first of all, are the species that are most under threat. 
+And those are the dry land species. 
+So first of all we did deals with 50 different countries. 
+It means negotiating with heads of state, and with secretaries of state in 50 countries to sign treaties. 
+We have 120 partner institutions all over the world, in all those countries colored orange. 
+People come from all over the world to learn, and then they go away and plan exactly how they're going to collect these seeds. 
+They have thousands of people all over the world tagging places where those plants are said to exist. 
+They search for them. They find them in flower. 
+And they go back when their seeds have arrived. 
+And they collect the seeds. All over the world. 
+The seeds — some of if is very untechnical. 
+You kind of shovel them all in to bags and dry them off. 
+You label them. You do some high-tech things here and there, some low-tech things here and there. 
+And the main thing is that you have to dry them very carefully, at low temperature. 
+And then you have to store them at about minus 20 degrees C — that's about minus four Fahrenheit, I think — with a very critically low moisture content. 
+And these seeds will be able to germinate, we believe, with many of the species, in thousands of years, and certainly in hundreds of years. 
+It's no good storing the seeds if you don't know they're still viable. 
+So every 10 years we do germination tests on every sample of seeds that we have. 
+And this is a distributed network. 
+So all around the world people are doing the same thing. 
+And that enables us to develop germination protocols. 
+That means that we know the right combination of heat and cold and the cycles that you have to get to make the seed germinate. 
+And that is very useful information. 
+And then we grow these things, and we tell people, back in the countries where these seeds have come from, "" Look, actually we're not just storing this to get the seeds later, but we can give you this information about how to germinate these difficult plants. "" And that's already happening. 
+So where have we got to? 
+I am pleased to unveil that our three billionth seed — that's three thousand millionth seed — is now stored. 
+Ten percent of all plant species on the planet, 24,000 species are safe; 30,000 species, if we get the funding, by next year. 
+Twenty-five percent of all the world's plants, by 2020. 
+These are not just crop plants, as you might have seen stored in Svalbard in Norway — fantastic work there. 
+This is at least 100 times bigger. 
+We have thousands of collections that have been sent out all over the world: drought-tolerant forest species sent to Pakistan and Egypt; especially photosynthetic-efficient plants come here to the United States; salt-tolerant pasture species sent to Australia; the list goes on and on. 
+These seeds are used for restoration. 
+So in habitats that have already been damaged, like the tall grass prairie here in the USA, or in mined land in various countries, restoration is already happening because of these species — and because of this collection. 
+Some of these plants, like the ones on the bottom to the left of your screen, they are down to the last few remaining members. 
+The one where the guy is collecting seeds there on the truck, that is down to about 30 last remaining trees. 
+Fantastically useful plant, both for protein and for medicine. 
+We have training going on in China, in the USA, and many other countries. 
+How much does it cost? 
+2,800 dollars per species is the average. 
+I think that's cheap, at the price. 
+And that gets you all the scientific data that goes with it. 
+The future research is "" How can we find the genetic and molecular markers for the viability of seeds, without having to plant them every 10 years? "" And we're almost there. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+How many are there in the human genome? Three billion. 
+Then he compared those two genomes in software, and what he found, among other things, was a deletion — a 2,000-base deletion across three billion bases in a particular gene called TP53. 
+So unfortunately, this doesn't help this woman, but it does have severe — profound, if you will — implications to her family. 
+I'm in so much pain. "" His pediatrician happens to have a background in clinical genetics and he has no idea what's going on, but he says, "" Let's get this kid's genome sequenced. "" And what they find is a single-point mutation in a gene responsible for controlling programmed cell death. 
+(Laughter) Look — (Laughter) These genomes, these 23 chromosomes, they don't in any way represent the quality of our relationships or the nature of our society — at least not yet. 
+
+If you're at all like me, this is what you do with the sunny summer weekends in San Francisco: you build experimental kite-powered hydrofoils capable of more than 30 knots. 
+And you realize that there is incredible power in the wind, and it can do amazing things. 
+And one day, a vessel not unlike this will probably break the world speed record. 
+But kites aren't just toys like this. 
+Kites: I'm going to give you a brief history, and tell you about the magnificent future of every child's favorite plaything. 
+So, kites are more than a thousand years old, and the Chinese used them for military applications, and even for lifting men. 
+So they knew at that stage they could carry large weights. 
+I'm not sure why there is a hole in this particular man. 
+(Laughter) In 1827, a fellow called George Pocock actually pioneered the use of kites for towing buggies in races against horse carriages across the English countryside. 
+Then of course, at the dawn of aviation, all of the great inventors of the time — like Hargreaves, like Langley, even Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, who was flying this kite — were doing so in the pursuit of aviation. 
+Then these two fellows came along, and they were flying kites to develop the control systems that would ultimately enable powered human flight. 
+So this is of course Orville and Wilbur Wright, and the Wright Flyer. 
+And their experiments with kites led to this momentous occasion, where we powered up and took off for the first-ever 12-second human flight. 
+And that was fantastic for the future of commercial aviation. 
+But unfortunately, it relegated kites once again to be considered children's toys. 
+That was until the 1970s, where we had the last energy crisis. 
+And a fabulous man called Miles Loyd who lives on the outskirts of San Francisco, wrote this seminal paper that was completely ignored in the Journal of Energy about how to use basically an airplane on a piece of string to generate enormous amounts of electricity. 
+The real key observation he made is that a free-flying wing can sweep through more sky and generate more power in a unit of time than a fixed-wing turbine. 
+So turbines grew. And they can now span up to three hundred feet at the hub height, but they can't really go a lot higher, and more height is where the more wind is, and more power — as much as twice as much. 
+So cut to now. We still have an energy crisis, and now we have a climate crisis as well. You know, so humans generate about 12 trillion watts, or 12 terawatts, from fossil fuels. 
+And Al Gore has spoken to why we need to hit one of these targets, and in reality what that means is in the next 30 to 40 years, we have to make 10 trillion watts or more of new clean energy somehow. 
+Wind is the second-largest renewable resource after solar: 3600 terawatts, more than enough to supply humanity 200 times over. 
+The majority of it is in the higher altitudes, above 300 feet, where we don't have a technology as yet to get there. 
+So this is the dawn of the new age of kites. 
+This is our test site on Maui, flying across the sky. 
+I'm now going to show you the first autonomous generation of power by every child's favorite plaything. 
+As you can tell, you need to be a robot to fly this thing for thousands of hours. 
+It makes you a little nauseous. 
+And here we're actually generating about 10 kilowatts — so, enough to power probably five United States households — with a kite not much larger than this piano. 
+And the real significant thing here is we're developing the control systems, as did the Wright brothers, that would enable sustained, long-duration flight. 
+And it doesn't hurt to do it in a location like this either. 
+So this is the equivalent for a kite flier of peeing in the snow — that's tracing your name in the sky. 
+And this is where we're actually going. 
+So we're beyond the 12-second steps. 
+And we're working towards megawatt-scale machines that fly at 2000 feet and generate tons of clean electricity. 
+So you ask, how big are those machines? 
+Well, this paper plane would be maybe a — oop! 
+That would be enough to power your cell phone. 
+Your Cessna would be 230 killowatts. 
+If you'd loan me your Gulfstream, I'll rip its wings off and generate you a megawatt. 
+If you give me a 747, I'll make six megawatts, which is more than the largest wind turbines today. 
+And the Spruce Goose would be a 15-megawatt wing. 
+So that is audacious, you say. I agree. 
+But audacious is what has happened many times before in history. 
+This is a refrigerator factory, churning out airplanes for World War II. 
+Prior to World War II, they were making 1000 planes a year. 
+By 1945, they were making 100,000. 
+With this factory and 100,000 planes a year, we could make all of America's electricity in about 10 years. 
+So really this is a story about the audacious plans of young people with these dreams. There are many of us. 
+I am lucky enough to work with 30 of them. 
+And I think we need to support all of the dreams of the kids out there doing these crazy things. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a tourism entrepreneur and a peacebuilder, but this is not how I started. 
+When I was seven years old, I remember watching television and seeing people throwing rocks, and thinking, this must be a fun thing to do. 
+So I got out to the street and threw rocks, not realizing I was supposed to throw rocks at Israeli cars. 
+Instead, I ended up stoning my neighbors' cars. (Laughter) They were not enthusiastic about my patriotism. 
+This is my picture with my brother. 
+This is me, the little one, and I know what you're thinking: "You used to look cute, what the heck happened to you?" 
+But my brother, who is older than me, was arrested when he was 18, taken to prison on charges of throwing stones. 
+He was beaten up when he refused to confess that he threw stones, and as a result, had internal injuries that caused his death soon after he was released from prison. 
+I was angry, I was bitter, and all I wanted was revenge. 
+But that changed when I was 18. 
+And we connected over really small things, like the fact that I love country music, which is really strange for Palestinians. 
+But it was then that I realized also that we have a wall of anger, of hatred and of ignorance that separates us. 
+I decided that it doesn't matter what happens to me. 
+What really matters is how I deal with it. 
+And therefore, I decided to dedicate my life to bringing down the walls that separate people. 
+I do so through many ways. 
+Tourism is one of them, but also media and education, and you might be wondering, really, can tourism change things? 
+Can it bring down walls? Yes. 
+Tourism is the best sustainable way to bring down those walls and to create a sustainable way of connecting with each other and creating friendships. 
+In 2009, I cofounded Mejdi Tours, a social enterprise that aims to connect people, with two Jewish friends, by the way, and what we'll do, the model we did, for example, in Jerusalem, we would have two tour guides, one Israeli and one Palestinian, guiding the trips together, telling history and narrative and archaeology and conflict from totally different perspectives. 
+I remember running a trip together with a friend named Kobi — Jewish congregation from Chicago, the trip was in Jerusalem — and we took them to a refugee camp, a Palestinian refugee camp, and there we had this amazing food. 
+And that's the Palestinian food called maqluba. 
+It means "" upside-down. "" You cook it with rice and chicken, and you flip it upside-down. 
+But when we left, both sides, they were crying because they did not want to leave. 
+Three years later, those relationships still exist. 
+Imagine with me if the one billion people who travel internationally every year travel like this, not being taken in the bus from one side to another, from one hotel to another, taking pictures from the windows of their buses of people and cultures, but actually connecting with people. 
+You know, I remember having a Muslim group from the U.K. 
+going to the house of an Orthodox Jewish family, and having their first Friday night dinners, that Sabbath dinner, and eating together hamin, which is a Jewish food, a stew, just having the connection of realizing, after a while, that a hundred years ago, their families came out of the same place in Northern Africa. 
+This is not disaster tourism. 
+This is the future of travel, and I invite you to join me to do that, to change your travel. 
+We're doing it all over the world now, from Ireland to Iran to Turkey, and we see ourselves going everywhere to change the world. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I am very, very happy to be amidst some of the most — the lights are really disturbing my eyes and they're reflecting on my glasses. 
+I am very happy and honored to be amidst very, very innovative and intelligent people. 
+I have listened to the three previous speakers, and guess what happened? 
+Every single thing I planned to say, they have said it here, and it looks and sounds like I have nothing else to say. 
+(Laughter) But there is a saying in my culture that if a bud leaves a tree without saying something, that bud is a young one. 
+So, I will — since I am not young and am very old, I still will say something. 
+We are hosting this conference at a very opportune moment, because another conference is taking place in Berlin. 
+It is the G8 Summit. 
+The G8 Summit proposes that the solution to Africa's problems should be a massive increase in aid, something akin to the Marshall Plan. 
+Unfortunately, I personally do not believe in the Marshall Plan. 
+One, because the benefits of the Marshall Plan have been overstated. 
+Its largest recipients were Germany and France, and it was only 2.5 percent of their GDP. 
+An average African country receives foreign aid to the tune of 13, 15 percent of its GDP, and that is an unprecedented transfer of financial resources from rich countries to poor countries. 
+But I want to say that there are two things we need to connect. 
+How the media covers Africa in the West, and the consequences of that. 
+By displaying despair, helplessness and hopelessness, the media is telling the truth about Africa, and nothing but the truth. 
+However, the media is not telling us the whole truth. 
+Because despair, civil war, hunger and famine, although they're part and parcel of our African reality, they are not the only reality. 
+And secondly, they are the smallest reality. 
+Africa has 53 nations. 
+We have civil wars only in six countries, which means that the media are covering only six countries. 
+Africa has immense opportunities that never navigate through the web of despair and helplessness that the Western media largely presents to its audience. 
+But the effect of that presentation is, it appeals to sympathy. 
+It appeals to pity. It appeals to something called charity. 
+And, as a consequence, the Western view of Africa's economic dilemma is framed wrongly. 
+The wrong framing is a product of thinking that Africa is a place of despair. 
+What should we do with it? We should give food to the hungry. 
+We should deliver medicines to those who are ill. 
+We should send peacekeeping troops to serve those who are facing a civil war. 
+And in the process, Africa has been stripped of self-initiative. 
+I want to say that it is important to recognize that Africa has fundamental weaknesses. 
+But equally, it has opportunities and a lot of potential. 
+We need to reframe the challenge that is facing Africa, from a challenge of despair, which is called poverty reduction, to a challenge of hope. 
+We frame it as a challenge of hope, and that is worth creation. 
+The challenge facing all those who are interested in Africa is not the challenge of reducing poverty. 
+It should be a challenge of creating wealth. 
+Once we change those two things — if you say the Africans are poor and they need poverty reduction, you have the international cartel of good intentions moving onto the continent, with what? 
+Medicines for the poor, food relief for those who are hungry, and peacekeepers for those who are facing civil war. 
+And in the process, none of these things really are productive because you are treating the symptoms, not the causes of Africa's fundamental problems. 
+Sending somebody to school and giving them medicines, ladies and gentlemen, does not create wealth for them. 
+Wealth is a function of income, and income comes from you finding a profitable trading opportunity or a well-paying job. 
+Now, once we begin to talk about wealth creation in Africa, our second challenge will be, who are the wealth-creating agents in any society? 
+They are entrepreneurs. [Unclear] told us they are always about four percent of the population, but 16 percent are imitators. 
+But they also succeed at the job of entrepreneurship. 
+So, where should we be putting the money? 
+We need to put money where it can productively grow. 
+Support private investment in Africa, both domestic and foreign. 
+Support research institutions, because knowledge is an important part of wealth creation. 
+But what is the international aid community doing with Africa today? 
+They are throwing large sums of money for primary health, for primary education, for food relief. 
+The entire continent has been turned into a place of despair, in need of charity. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, can any one of you tell me a neighbor, a friend, a relative that you know, who became rich by receiving charity? 
+By holding the begging bowl and receiving alms? 
+Does any one of you in the audience have that person? 
+Does any one of you know a country that developed because of the generosity and kindness of another? 
+Well, since I'm not seeing the hand, it appears that what I'm stating is true. 
+(Bono: Yes!) Andrew Mwenda: I can see Bono says he knows the country. 
+Which country is that? 
+(Bono: It's an Irish land.) (Laughter) (Bono: [unclear]) AM: Thank you very much. But let me tell you this. 
+External actors can only present to you an opportunity. 
+The ability to utilize that opportunity and turn it into an advantage depends on your internal capacity. 
+Africa has received many opportunities. 
+Many of them we haven't benefited much. 
+Why? Because we lack the internal, institutional framework and policy framework that can make it possible for us to benefit from our external relations. I'll give you an example. 
+Under the Cotonou Agreement, formerly known as the Lome Convention, African countries have been given an opportunity by Europe to export goods, duty-free, to the European Union market. 
+My own country, Uganda, has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union market. 
+We haven't exported one kilogram yet. 
+We import 50,000 metric tons of sugar from Brazil and Cuba. 
+Secondly, under the beef protocol of that agreement, African countries that produce beef have quotas to export beef duty-free to the European Union market. 
+None of those countries, including Africa's most successful nation, Botswana, has ever met its quota. 
+So, I want to argue today that the fundamental source of Africa's inability to engage the rest of the world in a more productive relationship is because it has a poor institutional and policy framework. 
+And all forms of intervention need support, the evolution of the kinds of institutions that create wealth, the kinds of institutions that increase productivity. 
+How do we begin to do that, and why is aid the bad instrument? 
+Aid is the bad instrument, and do you know why? 
+Because all governments across the world need money to survive. 
+Money is needed for a simple thing like keeping law and order. 
+You have to pay the army and the police to show law and order. 
+And because many of our governments are quite dictatorial, they need really to have the army clobber the opposition. 
+The second thing you need to do is pay your political hangers-on. 
+Why should people support their government? 
+Well, because it gives them good, paying jobs, or, in many African countries, unofficial opportunities to profit from corruption. 
+The fact is no government in the world, with the exception of a few, like that of Idi Amin, can seek to depend entirely on force as an instrument of rule. 
+Many countries in the [unclear], they need legitimacy. 
+To get legitimacy, governments often need to deliver things like primary education, primary health, roads, build hospitals and clinics. 
+If the government's fiscal survival depends on it having to raise money from its own people, such a government is driven by self-interest to govern in a more enlightened fashion. 
+It will sit with those who create wealth. 
+Talk to them about the kind of policies and institutions that are necessary for them to expand a scale and scope of business so that it can collect more tax revenues from them. 
+The problem with the African continent and the problem with the aid industry is that it has distorted the structure of incentives facing the governments in Africa. 
+The productive margin in our governments' search for revenue does not lie in the domestic economy, it lies with international donors. 
+Rather than sit with Ugandan — (Applause) — rather than sit with Ugandan entrepreneurs, Ghanaian businessmen, South African enterprising leaders, our governments find it more productive to talk to the IMF and the World Bank. 
+I can tell you, even if you have ten Ph.Ds., you can never beat Bill Gates in understanding the computer industry. 
+Why? Because the knowledge that is required for you to understand the incentives necessary to expand a business — it requires that you listen to the people, the private sector actors in that industry. 
+Governments in Africa have therefore been given an opportunity, by the international community, to avoid building productive arrangements with your own citizens, and therefore allowed to begin endless negotiations with the IMF and the World Bank, and then it is the IMF and the World Bank that tell them what its citizens need. 
+In the process, we, the African people, have been sidelined from the policy-making, policy-orientation, and policy- implementation process in our countries. 
+We have limited input, because he who pays the piper calls the tune. 
+The IMF, the World Bank, and the cartel of good intentions in the world has taken over our rights as citizens, and therefore what our governments are doing, because they depend on aid, is to listen to international creditors rather than their own citizens. 
+But I want to put a caveat on my argument, and that caveat is that it is not true that aid is always destructive. 
+Some aid may have built a hospital, fed a hungry village. 
+It may have built a road, and that road may have served a very good role. 
+The mistake of the international aid industry is to pick these isolated incidents of success, generalize them, pour billions and trillions of dollars into them, and then spread them across the whole world, ignoring the specific and unique circumstances in a given village, the skills, the practices, the norms and habits that allowed that small aid project to succeed — like in Sauri village, in Kenya, where Jeffrey Sachs is working — and therefore generalize this experience as the experience of everybody. 
+Aid increases the resources available to governments, and that makes working in a government the most profitable thing you can have, as a person in Africa seeking a career. 
+By increasing the political attractiveness of the state, especially in our ethnically fragmented societies in Africa, aid tends to accentuate ethnic tensions as every single ethnic group now begins struggling to enter the state in order to get access to the foreign aid pie. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, the most enterprising people in Africa cannot find opportunities to trade and to work in the private sector because the institutional and policy environment is hostile to business. 
+Governments are not changing it. Why? 
+Because they don't need to talk to their own citizens. 
+They talk to international donors. 
+So, the most enterprising Africans end up going to work for government, and that has increased the political tensions in our countries precisely because we depend on aid. 
+I also want to say that it is important for us to note that, over the last 50 years, Africa has been receiving increasing aid from the international community, in the form of technical assistance, and financial aid, and all other forms of aid. 
+Between 1960 and 2003, our continent received 600 billion dollars of aid, and we are still told that there is a lot of poverty in Africa. 
+Where has all the aid gone? 
+I want to use the example of my own country, called Uganda, and the kind of structure of incentives that aid has brought there. 
+In the 2006-2007 budget, expected revenue: 2.5 trillion shillings. 
+The expected foreign aid: 1.9 trillion. 
+Uganda's recurrent expenditure — by recurrent what do I mean? 
+Hand-to-mouth is 2.6 trillion. 
+Why does the government of Uganda budget spend 110 percent of its own revenue? 
+It's because there's somebody there called foreign aid, who contributes for it. 
+But this shows you that the government of Uganda is not committed to spending its own revenue to invest in productive investments, but rather it devotes this revenue to paying structure of public expenditure. 
+Public administration, which is largely patronage, takes 690 billion. 
+The military, 380 billion. 
+Agriculture, which employs 18 percent of our poverty-stricken citizens, takes only 18 billion. 
+Trade and industry takes 43 billion. 
+And let me show you, what does public expenditure — rather, public administration expenditure — in Uganda constitute? 
+There you go. 70 cabinet ministers, 114 presidential advisers, by the way, who never see the president, except on television. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And when they see him physically, it is at public functions like this, and even there, it is him who advises them. (Laughter) 
+We have 81 units of local government. 
+Each local government is organized like the central government — a bureaucracy, a cabinet, a parliament, and so many jobs for the political hangers-on. 
+There were 56, and when our president wanted to amend the constitution and remove term limits, he had to create 25 new districts, and now there are 81. 
+Three hundred thirty-three members of parliament. 
+You need Wembley Stadium to host our parliament. 
+One hundred thirty-four commissions and semi-autonomous government bodies, all of which have directors and the cars. And the final thing, this is addressed to Mr. Bono. In his work, he may help us on this. 
+A recent government of Uganda study found that there are 3,000 four-wheel drive motor vehicles at the Minister of Health headquarters. 
+Uganda has 961 sub-counties, each of them with a dispensary, none of which has an ambulance. 
+So, the four-wheel drive vehicles at the headquarters drive the ministers, the permanent secretaries, the bureaucrats and the international aid bureaucrats who work in aid projects, while the poor die without ambulances and medicine. 
+Finally, I want to say that before I came to speak here, I was told that the principle of TEDGlobal is that the good speech should be like a miniskirt. 
+It should be short enough to arouse interest, but long enough to cover the subject. 
+I hope I have achieved that. 
+(Laughter) Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Trees epitomize stasis. 
+Trees are rooted in the ground in one place for many human generations, but if we shift our perspective from the trunk to the twigs, trees become very dynamic entities, moving and growing. 
+And I decided to explore this movement by turning trees into artists. 
+I simply tied the end of a paintbrush onto a twig. 
+I waited for the wind to come up and held up a canvas, and that produced art. 
+The piece of art you see on your left is painted by a western red cedar and that on your right by a Douglas fir, and what I learned was that different species have different signatures, like a Picasso versus a Monet. 
+But I was also interested in the movement of trees and how this art might let me capture that and quantify it, so to measure the distance that a single vine maple tree — which produced this painting — moved in a single year, I simply measured and summed each of those lines. 
+I multiplied them by the number of twigs per branch and the number of branches per tree and then divided that by the number of minutes per year. 
+And so I was able to calculate how far a single tree moved in a single year. 
+You might have a guess. 
+The answer is actually 186,540 miles, or seven times around the globe. 
+And so simply by shifting our perspective from a single trunk to the many dynamic twigs, we are able to see that trees are not simply static entities, but rather extremely dynamic. 
+And I began to think about ways that we might consider this lesson of trees, to consider other entities that are also static and stuck, but which cry for change and dynamicism, and one of those entities is our prisons. 
+Prisons, of course, are where people who break our laws are stuck, confined behind bars. 
+And our prison system itself is stuck. 
+The United States has over 2.3 million incarcerated men and women. 
+That number is rising. 
+Of the 100 incarcerated people that are released, 60 will return to prison. 
+Funds for education, for training and for rehabilitation are declining, so this despairing cycle of incarceration continues. 
+I decided to ask whether the lesson I had learned from trees as artists could be applied to a static institution such as our prisons, and I think the answer is yes. 
+In the year 2007, I started a partnership with the Washington State Department of Corrections. 
+Working with four prisons, we began bringing science and scientists, sustainability and conservation projects to four state prisons. 
+We give science lectures, and the men here are choosing to come to our science lectures instead of watching television or weightlifting. 
+That, I think, is movement. 
+We partnered with the Nature Conservancy for inmates at Stafford Creek Correctional Center to grow endangered prairie plants for restoration of relic prairie areas in Washington state. 
+That, I think, is movement. 
+We worked with the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife to grow endangered frogs — the Oregon spotted frog — for later release into protected wetlands. 
+That, I think, is movement. 
+And just recently, we've begun to work with those men who are segregated in what we call Supermax facilities. 
+They've incurred violent infractions by becoming violent with guards and with other prisoners. 
+They're kept in bare cells like this for 23 hours a day. 
+When they have meetings with their review boards or mental health professionals, they're placed in immobile booths like this. 
+For one hour a day they're brought to these bleak and bland exercise yards. 
+Although we can't bring trees and prairie plants and frogs into these environments, we are bringing images of nature into these exercise yards, putting them on the walls, so at least they get contact with visual images of nature. 
+This is Mr. Lopez, who has been in solitary confinement for 18 months, and he's providing input on the types of images that he believes would make him and his fellow inmates more serene, more calm, less apt to violence. 
+And so what we see, I think, is that small, collective movements of change can perhaps move an entity such as our own prison system in a direction of hope. 
+We know that trees are static entities when we look at their trunks. 
+But if trees can create art, if they can encircle the globe seven times in one year, if prisoners can grow plants and raise frogs, then perhaps there are other static entities that we hold inside ourselves, like grief, like addictions, like racism, that can also change. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When my father and I started a company to 3D print human tissues and organs, some people initially thought we were a little crazy. 
+But since then, much progress has been made, both in our lab and other labs around the world. 
+And given this, we started getting questions like, "" If you can grow human body parts, can you also grow animal products like meat and leather? "" When someone first suggested this to me, quite frankly I thought they were a little crazy, but what I soon came to realize was that this is not so crazy after all. 
+What's crazy is what we do today. 
+I'm convinced that in 30 years, when we look back on today and on how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags, we'll see this as being wasteful and indeed crazy. 
+Did you know that today we maintain a global herd of 60 billion animals to provide our meat, dairy, eggs and leather goods? 
+And over the next few decades, as the world's population expands to 10 billion, this will need to nearly double to 100 billion animals. 
+But maintaining this herd takes a major toll on our planet. 
+Animals are not just raw materials. 
+They're living beings, and already our livestock is one of the largest users of land, fresh water, and one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases which drive climate change. 
+On top of this, when you get so many animals so close together, it creates a breeding ground for disease and opportunities for harm and abuse. 
+Clearly, we cannot continue on this path which puts the environment, public health, and food security at risk. 
+There is another way, because essentially, animal products are just collections of tissues, and right now we breed and raise highly complex animals only to create products that are made of relatively simple tissues. 
+What if, instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal, we started with what the tissues are made of, the basic unit of life, the cell? 
+This is biofabrication, where cells themselves can be used to grow biological products like tissues and organs. 
+Already in medicine, biofabrication techniques have been used to grow sophisticated body parts, like ears, windpipes, skin, blood vessels and bone, that have been successfully implanted into patients. 
+And beyond medicine, biofabrication can be a humane, sustainable and scalable new industry. 
+And we should begin by reimagining leather. 
+I emphasize leather because it is so widely used. 
+It is beautiful, and it has long been a part of our history. 
+Growing leather is also technically simpler than growing other animal products like meat. 
+It mainly uses one cell type, and it is largely two-dimensional. 
+It is also less polarizing for consumers and regulators. 
+Until biofabrication is better understood, it is clear that, initially at least, more people would be willing to wear novel materials than would be willing to eat novel foods, no matter how delicious. 
+In this sense, leather is a gateway material, a beginning for the mainstream biofabrication industry. 
+If we can succeed here, it brings our other consumer bioproducts like meat closer on the horizon. 
+Now how do we do it? 
+To grow leather, we begin by taking cells from an animal, through a simple biopsy. 
+The animal could be a cow, lamb, or even something more exotic. 
+This process does no harm, and Daisy the cow can live a happy life. 
+We then isolate the skin cells and multiply them in a cell culture medium. 
+This takes millions of cells and expands them into billions. 
+And we then coax these cells to produce collagen, as they would naturally. 
+This collagen is the stuff between cells. 
+It's natural connective tissue. 
+It's the extracellular matrix, but in leather, it's the main building block. 
+And what we next do is we take the cells and their collagen and we spread them out to form sheets, and then we layer these thin sheets on top of one another, like phyllo pastry, to form thicker sheets, which we then let mature. 
+And finally, we take this multilayered skin and through a shorter and much less chemical tanning process, we create leather. 
+And so I'm very excited to show you, for the first time, the first batch of our cultured leather, fresh from the lab. 
+This is real, genuine leather, without the animal sacrifice. 
+It can have all the characteristics of leather because it is made of the same cells, and better yet, there is no hair to remove, no scars or insect's bites, and no waste. 
+This leather can be grown in the shape of a wallet, a handbag or a car seat. 
+It is not limited to the irregular shape of a cow or an alligator. 
+And because we make this material, we grow this leather from the ground up, we can control its properties in very interesting ways. 
+This piece of leather is a mere seven tissue layers thick, and as you can see, it is nearly transparent. 
+And this leather is 21 layers thick and quite opaque. 
+You don't have that kind of fine control with conventional leather. 
+And we can tune this leather for other desirable qualities, like softness, breathability, durability, elasticity and even things like pattern. 
+We can mimic nature, but in some ways also improve upon it. 
+This type of leather can do what today's leather does, but with imagination, probably much more. 
+What could the future of animal products look like? 
+It need not look like this, which is actually the state of the art today. 
+Rather, it could be much more like this. 
+Already, we have been manufacturing with cell cultures for thousands of years, beginning with products like wine, beer and yogurt. 
+And speaking of food, our cultured food has evolved, and today we prepare cultured food in beautiful, sterile facilities like this. 
+A brewery is essentially a bioreactor. 
+It is where cell culture takes place. 
+Imagine that in this facility, instead of brewing beer, we were brewing leather or meat. 
+Imagine touring this facility, learning about how the leather or meat is cultured, seeing the process from beginning to end, and even trying some. 
+It's clean, open and educational, and this is in contrast to the hidden, guarded and remote factories where leather and meat is produced today. 
+Perhaps biofabrication is a natural evolution of manufacturing for mankind. 
+It's environmentally responsible, efficient and humane. 
+It allows us to be creative. 
+We can design new materials, new products, and new facilities. 
+We need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved. 
+Perhaps we are ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm Jessi, and this is my suitcase. 
+But before I show you what I've got inside, I'm going to make a very public confession, and that is, I'm outfit-obsessed. 
+I love finding, wearing, and more recently, photographing and blogging a different, colorful, crazy outfit for every single occasion. 
+But I don't buy anything new. 
+I get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores. 
+Aww, thank you. 
+Secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet. 
+I get to meet all kinds of great people; my dollars usually go to a good cause; I look pretty unique; and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt. 
+I mean, what am I going to find today? 
+Is it going to be my size? 
+Will I like the color? 
+Will it be under $20? 
+If all the answers are yes, I feel as though I've won. 
+I want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what I packed for this exciting week here at TED. 
+I mean, what does somebody with all these outfits bring with her? 
+So I'm going to show you exactly what I brought. 
+I brought seven pairs of underpants and that's it. 
+Exactly one week's worth of undies is all I put in my suitcase. 
+I was betting that I'd be able to find everything else I could possible want to wear once I got here to Palm Springs. 
+And since you don't know me as the woman walking around TED in her underwear — (Laughter) that means I found a few things. 
+And I'd really love to show you my week's worth of outfits right now. 
+Does that sound good? 
+(Applause) So as I do this, I'm also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that, believe it or not, I have picked up in these adventures wearing nothing new. 
+So let's start with Sunday. 
+I call this "" Shiny Tiger. "" You do not have to spend a lot of money to look great. 
+You can almost always look phenomenal for under $50. 
+This whole outfit, including the jacket, cost me $55, and it was the most expensive thing that I wore the entire week. 
+Monday: Color is powerful. 
+It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants. 
+(Laughter) If you are happy, you are going to attract other happy people to you. 
+Tuesday: Fitting in is way overrated. 
+I've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in. 
+Just be who you are. 
+If you are surrounding yourself with the right people, they will not only get it, they will appreciate it. 
+Wednesday: Embrace your inner child. 
+Sometimes people tell me that I look like I'm playing dress-up, or that I remind them of their seven-year-old. 
+I like to smile and say, "" Thank you. "" Thursday: Confidence is key. 
+If you think you look good in something, you almost certainly do. 
+And if you don't think you look good in something, you're also probably right. 
+I grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out. 
+But it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really got what this meant. 
+And I'm going to break it down for you for just a second. 
+If you believe you're a beautiful person inside and out, there is no look that you can't pull off. 
+So there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience. 
+We should be able to rock anything we want to rock. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Friday: A universal truth — five words for you: Gold sequins go with everything. 
+And finally, Saturday: Developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word. 
+It's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what I'm wearing, and we've had great conversations. 
+So obviously this is not all going to fit back in my tiny suitcase. 
+So before I go home to Brooklyn, I'm going to donate everything back. 
+Because the lesson I'm trying to learn myself this week is that it's okay to let go. 
+I don't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner, there is always going to be another crazy, colorful, shiny outfit just waiting for me, if I put a little love in my heart and look. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I'm a garbage man. 
+And you might find it interesting that I became a garbage man, because I absolutely hate waste. 
+I hope, within the next 10 minutes, to change the way you think about a lot of the stuff in your life. 
+And I'd like to start at the very beginning. 
+Think back when you were just a kid. 
+How did look at the stuff in your life? 
+Perhaps it was like these toddler rules: It's my stuff if I saw it first. 
+The entire pile is my stuff if I'm building something. 
+The more stuff that's mine, the better. 
+And of course, it's your stuff if it's broken. 
+(Laughter) Well after spending about 20 years in the recycling industry, it's become pretty clear to me that we don't necessarily leave these toddler rules behind as we develop into adults. 
+And let me tell you why I have that perspective. 
+Because each and every day at our recycling plants around the world we handle about one million pounds of people's discarded stuff. 
+Now a million pounds a day sounds like a lot of stuff, but it's a tiny drop of the durable goods that are disposed each and every year around the world — well less than one percent. 
+In fact, the United Nations estimates that there's about 85 billion pounds a year of electronics waste that gets discarded around the world each and every year — and that's one of the most rapidly growing parts of our waste stream. 
+And if you throw in other durable goods like automobiles and so forth, that number well more than doubles. 
+And of course, the more developed the country, the bigger these mountains. 
+Now when you see these mountains, most people think of garbage. 
+We see above-ground mines. 
+And the reason we see mines is because there's a lot of valuable raw materials that went into making all of this stuff in the first place. 
+And it's becoming increasingly important that we figure out how to extract these raw materials from these extremely complicated waste streams. 
+Because as we've heard all week at TED, the world's getting to be a smaller place with more people in it who want more and more stuff. 
+And of course, they want the toys and the tools that many of us take for granted. 
+And what goes into making those toys and tools that we use every single day? 
+It's mostly many types of plastics and many types of metals. 
+And the metals, we typically get from ore that we mine in ever widening mines and ever deepening mines around the world. 
+And the plastics, we get from oil, which we go to more remote locations and drill ever deeper wells to extract. 
+And these practices have significant economic and environmental implications that we're already starting to see today. 
+The good news is we are starting to recover materials from our end-of-life stuff and starting to recycle our end-of-life stuff, particularly in regions of the world like here in Europe that have recycling policies in place that require that this stuff be recycled in a responsible manner. 
+Most of what's extracted from our end-of-life stuff, if it makes it to a recycler, are the metals. 
+To put that in perspective — and I'm using steel as a proxy here for metals, because it's the most common metal — if your stuff makes it to a recycler, probably over 90 percent of the metals are going to be recovered and reused for another purpose. 
+Plastics are a whole other story: well less than 10 percent are recovered. 
+In fact, it's more like five percent. 
+Most of it's incinerated or landfilled. 
+Now most people think that's because plastics are a throw-away material, have very little value. 
+But actually, plastics are several times more valuable than steel. 
+And there's more plastics produced and consumed around the world on a volume basis every year than steel. 
+So why is such a plentiful and valuable material not recovered at anywhere near the rate of the less valuable material? 
+Well it's predominantly because metals are very easy to recycle from other materials and from one another. 
+They have very different densities. 
+They have different electrical and magnetic properties. 
+And they even have different colors. 
+So it's very easy for either humans or machines to separate these metals from one another and from other materials. 
+Plastics have overlapping densities over a very narrow range. 
+They have either identical or very similar electrical and magnetic properties. 
+And any plastic can be any color, as you probably well know. 
+So the traditional ways of separating materials just simply don't work for plastics. 
+Another consequence of metals being so easy to recycle by humans is that a lot of our stuff from the developed world — and sadly to say, particularly from the United States, where we don't have any recycling policies in place like here in Europe — finds its way to developing countries for low-cost recycling. 
+People, for as little as a dollar a day, pick through our stuff. 
+They extract what they can, which is mostly the metals — circuit boards and so forth — and they leave behind mostly what they can't recover, which is, again, mostly the plastics. 
+Or they burn the plastics to get to the metals in burn houses like you see here. 
+And they extract the metals by hand. 
+Now while this may be the low-economic-cost solution, this is certainly not the low-environmental or human health-and-safety solution. 
+I call this environmental arbitrage. 
+And it's not fair, it's not safe and it's not sustainable. 
+Now because the plastics are so plentiful — and by the way, those other methods don't lead to the recovery of plastics, obviously — but people do try to recover the plastics. 
+This is just one example. 
+This is a photo I took standing on the rooftops of one of the largest slums in the world in Mumbai, India. 
+They store the plastics on the roofs. 
+They bring them below those roofs into small workshops like these, and people try very hard to separate the plastics, by color, by shape, by feel, by any technique they can. 
+And sometimes they'll resort to what's known as the "" burn and sniff "" technique where they'll burn the plastic and smell the fumes to try to determine the type of plastic. 
+None of these techniques result in any amount of recycling in any significant way. 
+And by the way, please don't try this technique at home. 
+So what are we to do about this space-age material, at least what we used to call a space-aged material, these plastics? 
+Well I certainly believe that it's far too valuable and far too abundant to keep putting back in the ground or certainly send up in smoke. 
+So about 20 years ago, I literally started in my garage tinkering around, trying to figure out how to separate these very similar materials from each other, and eventually enlisted a lot of my friends, in the mining world actually, and in the plastics world, and we started going around to mining laboratories around the world. 
+Because after all, we're doing above-ground mining. 
+And we eventually broke the code. 
+This is the last frontier of recycling. 
+It's the last major material to be recovered in any significant amount on the Earth. 
+And we finally figured out how to do it. 
+And in the process, we started recreating how the plastics industry makes plastics. 
+The traditional way to make plastics is with oil or petrochemicals. 
+You breakdown the molecules, you recombine them in very specific ways, to make all the wonderful plastics that we enjoy each and every day. 
+We said, there's got to be a more sustainable way to make plastics. 
+And not just sustainable from an environmental standpoint, sustainable from an economic standpoint as well. 
+Well a good place to start is with waste. 
+It certainly doesn't cost as much as oil, and it's plentiful, as I hope that you've been able to see from the photographs. 
+And because we're not breaking down the plastic into molecules and recombining them, we're using a mining approach to extract the materials. 
+We have significantly lower capital costs in our plant equipment. 
+We have enormous energy savings. 
+I don't know how many other projects on the planet right now can save 80 to 90 percent of the energy compared to making something the traditional way. 
+And instead of plopping down several hundred million dollars to build a chemical plant that will only make one type of plastic for its entire life, our plants can make any type of plastic we feed them. 
+And we make a drop-in replacement for that plastic that's made from petrochemicals. 
+Our customers get to enjoy huge CO2 savings. 
+They get to close the loop with their products. 
+And they get to make more sustainable products. 
+In the short time period I have, I want to show you a little bit of a sense about how we do this. 
+It starts with metal recyclers who shred our stuff into very small bits. 
+They recover the metals and leave behind what's called shredder residue — it's their waste — a very complex mixture of materials, but predominantly plastics. 
+We take out the things that aren't plastics, such as the metals they missed, carpeting, foam, rubber, wood, glass, paper, you name it. 
+Even an occasional dead animal, unfortunately. 
+And it goes in the first part of our process here, which is more like traditional recycling. 
+We're sieving the material, we're using magnets, we're using air classification. 
+It looks like the Willy Wonka factory at this point. 
+At the end of this process, we have a mixed plastic composite: many different types of plastics and many different grades of plastics. 
+This goes into the more sophisticated part of our process, and the really hard work, multi-step separation process begins. 
+We grind the plastic down to about the size of your small fingernail. 
+We use a very highly automated process to sort those plastics, not only by type, but by grade. 
+And out the end of that part of the process come little flakes of plastic: one type, one grade. 
+We then use optical sorting to color sort this material. 
+We blend it in 50,000-lb. blending silos. 
+We push that material to extruders where we melt it, push it through small die holes, make spaghetti-like plastic strands. 
+And we chop those strands into what are called pellets. 
+And this becomes the currency of the plastics industry. 
+This is the same material that you would get from oil. 
+And today, we're producing it from your old stuff, and it's going right back into your new stuff. 
+(Applause) So now, instead of your stuff ending up on a hillside in a developing country or literally going up in smoke, you can find your old stuff back on top of your desk in new products, in your office, or back at work in your home. 
+And these are just a few examples of companies that are buying our plastic, replacing virgin plastic, to make their new products. 
+So I hope I've changed the way you look at at least some of the stuff in your life. 
+We took our clues from mother nature. 
+Mother nature wastes very little, reuses practically everything. 
+And I hope that you stop looking at yourself as a consumer — that's a label I've always hated my entire life — and think of yourself as just using resources in one form, until they can be transformed to another form for another use later in time. 
+And finally, I hope you agree with me to change that last toddler rule just a little bit to: "" If it's broken, it's my stuff. "" Thank you for your time. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) 
+
+How do you observe something you can't see? 
+This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. 
+Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly. 
+So, my story today about black holes is about one particular black hole. 
+I'm interested in finding whether or not there is a really massive, what we like to call "" supermassive "" black hole at the center of our galaxy. 
+And the reason this is interesting is that it gives us an opportunity to prove whether or not these exotic objects really exist. 
+And second, it gives us the opportunity to understand how these supermassive black holes interact with their environment, and to understand how they affect the formation and evolution of the galaxies which they reside in. 
+So, to begin with, we need to understand what a black hole is so we can understand the proof of a black hole. 
+So, what is a black hole? 
+Well, in many ways a black hole is an incredibly simple object, because there are only three characteristics that you can describe: the mass, the spin, and the charge. 
+And I'm going to only talk about the mass. 
+So, in that sense, it's a very simple object. 
+But in another sense, it's an incredibly complicated object that we need relatively exotic physics to describe, and in some sense represents the breakdown of our physical understanding of the universe. 
+But today, the way I want you to understand a black hole, for the proof of a black hole, is to think of it as an object whose mass is confined to zero volume. 
+So, despite the fact that I'm going to talk to you about an object that's supermassive, and I'm going to get to what that really means in a moment, it has no finite size. 
+So, this is a little tricky. 
+But fortunately there is a finite size that you can see, and that's known as the Schwarzschild radius. 
+And that's named after the guy who recognized why it was such an important radius. 
+This is a virtual radius, not reality; the black hole has no size. 
+So why is it so important? 
+It's important because it tells us that any object can become a black hole. 
+That means you, your neighbor, your cellphone, the auditorium can become a black hole if you can figure out how to compress it down to the size of the Schwarzschild radius. 
+At that point, what's going to happen? 
+At that point gravity wins. 
+Gravity wins over all other known forces. 
+And the object is forced to continue to collapse to an infinitely small object. 
+And then it's a black hole. 
+So, if I were to compress the Earth down to the size of a sugar cube, it would become a black hole, because the size of a sugar cube is its Schwarzschild radius. 
+Now, the key here is to figure out what that Schwarzschild radius is. 
+And it turns out that it's actually pretty simple to figure out. 
+It depends only on the mass of the object. 
+Bigger objects have bigger Schwarzschild radii. 
+Smaller objects have smaller Schwarzschild radii. 
+So, if I were to take the sun and compress it down to the scale of the University of Oxford, it would become a black hole. 
+So, now we know what a Schwarzschild radius is. 
+And it's actually quite a useful concept, because it tells us not only when a black hole will form, but it also gives us the key elements for the proof of a black hole. 
+I only need two things. 
+I need to understand the mass of the object I'm claiming is a black hole, and what its Schwarzschild radius is. 
+And since the mass determines the Schwarzschild radius, there is actually only one thing I really need to know. 
+So, my job in convincing you that there is a black hole is to show that there is some object that's confined to within its Schwarzschild radius. 
+And your job today is to be skeptical. 
+Okay, so, I'm going to talk about no ordinary black hole; I'm going to talk about supermassive black holes. 
+So, I wanted to say a few words about what an ordinary black hole is, as if there could be such a thing as an ordinary black hole. 
+An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life. 
+So, if a star starts its life off with much more mass than the mass of the Sun, it's going to end its life by exploding and leaving behind these beautiful supernova remnants that we see here. 
+And inside that supernova remnant is going to be a little black hole that has a mass roughly three times the mass of the Sun. 
+On an astronomical scale that's a very small black hole. 
+Now, what I want to talk about are the supermassive black holes. 
+And the supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the center of galaxies. 
+And this beautiful picture taken with the Hubble Space Telescope shows you that galaxies come in all shapes and sizes. 
+There are big ones. There are little ones. 
+Almost every object in that picture there is a galaxy. 
+And there is a very nice spiral up in the upper left. 
+And there are a hundred billion stars in that galaxy, just to give you a sense of scale. 
+And all the light that we see from a typical galaxy, which is the kind of galaxies that we're seeing here, comes from the light from the stars. 
+So, we see the galaxy because of the star light. 
+Now, there are a few relatively exotic galaxies. 
+I like to call these the prima donna of the galaxy world, because they are kind of show offs. 
+And we call them active galactic nuclei. 
+And we call them that because their nucleus, or their center, are very active. 
+So, at the center there, that's actually where most of the starlight comes out from. 
+And yet, what we actually see is light that can't be explained by the starlight. 
+It's way more energetic. 
+In fact, in a few examples it's like the ones that we're seeing here. 
+There are also jets emanating out from the center. 
+Again, a source of energy that's very difficult to explain if you just think that galaxies are composed of stars. 
+So, what people have thought is that perhaps there are supermassive black holes which matter is falling on to. 
+So, you can't see the black hole itself, but you can convert the gravitational energy of the black hole into the light we see. 
+So, there is the thought that maybe supermassive black holes exist at the center of galaxies. 
+But it's a kind of indirect argument. 
+Nonetheless, it's given rise to the notion that maybe it's not just these prima donnas that have these supermassive black holes, but rather all galaxies might harbor these supermassive black holes at their centers. 
+And if that's the case — and this is an example of a normal galaxy; what we see is the star light. 
+And if there is a supermassive black hole, what we need to assume is that it's a black hole on a diet. 
+Because that is the way to suppress the energetic phenomena that we see in active galactic nuclei. 
+If we're going to look for these stealth black holes at the center of galaxies, the best place to look is in our own galaxy, our Milky Way. 
+And this is a wide field picture taken of the center of the Milky Way. 
+And what we see is a line of stars. 
+And that is because we live in a galaxy which has a flattened, disk-like structure. 
+And we live in the middle of it, so when we look towards the center, we see this plane which defines the plane of the galaxy, or line that defines the plane of the galaxy. 
+Now, the advantage of studying our own galaxy is it's simply the closest example of the center of a galaxy that we're ever going to have, because the next closest galaxy is 100 times further away. 
+So, we can see far more detail in our galaxy than anyplace else. 
+And as you'll see in a moment, the ability to see detail is key to this experiment. 
+So, how do astronomers prove that there is a lot of mass inside a small volume? 
+Which is the job that I have to show you today. 
+And the tool that we use is to watch the way stars orbit the black hole. 
+Stars will orbit the black hole in the very same way that planets orbit the sun. 
+It's the gravitational pull that makes these things orbit. 
+If there were no massive objects these things would go flying off, or at least go at a much slower rate because all that determines how they go around is how much mass is inside its orbit. 
+So, this is great, because remember my job is to show there is a lot of mass inside a small volume. 
+So, if I know how fast it goes around, I know the mass. 
+And if I know the scale of the orbit I know the radius. 
+So, I want to see the stars that are as close to the center of the galaxy as possible. 
+Because I want to show there is a mass inside as small a region as possible. 
+So, this means that I want to see a lot of detail. 
+And that's the reason that for this experiment we've used the world's largest telescope. 
+This is the Keck observatory. It hosts two telescopes with a mirror 10 meters, which is roughly the diameter of a tennis court. 
+Now, this is wonderful, because the campaign promise of large telescopes is that is that the bigger the telescope, the smaller the detail that we can see. 
+But it turns out these telescopes, or any telescope on the ground has had a little bit of a challenge living up to this campaign promise. 
+And that is because of the atmosphere. 
+Atmosphere is great for us; it allows us to survive here on Earth. 
+But it's relatively challenging for astronomers who want to look through the atmosphere to astronomical sources. 
+So, to give you a sense of what this is like, it's actually like looking at a pebble at the bottom of a stream. 
+Looking at the pebble on the bottom of the stream, the stream is continuously moving and turbulent, and that makes it very difficult to see the pebble on the bottom of the stream. 
+Very much in the same way, it's very difficult to see astronomical sources, because of the atmosphere that's continuously moving by. 
+So, I've spent a lot of my career working on ways to correct for the atmosphere, to give us a cleaner view. 
+And that buys us about a factor of 20. 
+And I think all of you can agree that if you can figure out how to improve life by a factor of 20, you've probably improved your lifestyle by a lot, say your salary, you'd notice, or your kids, you'd notice. 
+And this animation here shows you one example of the techniques that we use, called adaptive optics. 
+You're seeing an animation that goes between an example of what you would see if you don't use this technique — in other words, just a picture that shows the stars — and the box is centered on the center of the galaxy, where we think the black hole is. 
+So, without this technology you can't see the stars. 
+With this technology all of a sudden you can see it. 
+This technology works by introducing a mirror into the telescope optics system that's continuously changing to counteract what the atmosphere is doing to you. 
+So, it's kind of like very fancy eyeglasses for your telescope. 
+Now, in the next few slides I'm just going to focus on that little square there. 
+So, we're only going to look at the stars inside that small square, although we've looked at all of them. 
+So, I want to see how these things have moved. 
+And over the course of this experiment, these stars have moved a tremendous amount. 
+So, we've been doing this experiment for 15 years, and we see the stars go all the way around. 
+Now, most astronomers have a favorite star, and mine today is a star that's labeled up there, SO-2. 
+Absolutely my favorite star in the world. 
+And that's because it goes around in only 15 years. 
+And to give you a sense of how short that is, the sun takes 200 million years to go around the center of the galaxy. 
+Stars that we knew about before, that were as close to the center of the galaxy as possible, take 500 years. 
+And this one, this one goes around in a human lifetime. 
+That's kind of profound, in a way. 
+But it's the key to this experiment. The orbit tells me how much mass is inside a very small radius. 
+So, next we see a picture here that shows you before this experiment the size to which we could confine the mass of the center of the galaxy. 
+What we knew before is that there was four million times the mass of the sun inside that circle. 
+And as you can see, there was a lot of other stuff inside that circle. 
+You can see a lot of stars. 
+So, there was actually lots of alternatives to the idea that there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, because you could put a lot of stuff in there. 
+But with this experiment, we've confined that same mass to a much smaller volume that's 10,000 times smaller. 
+And because of that, we've been able to show that there is a supermassive black hole there. 
+To give you a sense of how small that size is, that's the size of our solar system. 
+So, we're cramming four million times the mass of the sun into that small volume. 
+Now, truth in advertising. Right? 
+I have told you my job is to get it down to the Schwarzchild radius. 
+And the truth is, I'm not quite there. 
+But we actually have no alternative today to explaining this concentration of mass. 
+And, in fact, it's the best evidence we have to date for not only existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, but any in our universe. 
+So, what next? I actually think this is about as good as we're going to do with today's technology, so let's move on with the problem. 
+So, what I want to tell you, very briefly, is a few examples of the excitement of what we can do today at the center of the galaxy, now that we know that there is, or at least we believe, that there is a supermassive black hole there. 
+And the fun phase of this experiment is, while we've tested some of our ideas about the consequences of a supermassive black hole being at the center of our galaxy, almost every single one has been inconsistent with what we actually see. 
+And that's the fun. 
+So, let me give you the two examples. 
+You can ask, "" What do you expect for the old stars, stars that have been around the center of the galaxy for a long time, they've had plenty of time to interact with the black hole. "" What you expect there is that old stars should be very clustered around the black hole. 
+You should see a lot of old stars next to that black hole. 
+Likewise, for the young stars, or in contrast, the young stars, they just should not be there. 
+A black hole does not make a kind neighbor to a stellar nursery. 
+To get a star to form, you need a big ball of gas and dust to collapse. 
+And it's a very fragile entity. 
+And what does the big black hole do? 
+It strips that gas cloud apart. 
+It pulls much stronger on one side than the other and the cloud is stripped apart. 
+In fact, we anticipated that star formation shouldn't proceed in that environment. 
+So, you shouldn't see young stars. 
+So, what do we see? 
+Using observations that are not the ones I've shown you today, we can actually figure out which ones are old and which ones are young. 
+The old ones are red. 
+The young ones are blue. And the yellow ones, we don't know yet. 
+So, you can already see the surprise. 
+There is a dearth of old stars. 
+There is an abundance of young stars, so it's the exact opposite of the prediction. 
+So, this is the fun part. 
+And in fact, today, this is what we're trying to figure out, this mystery of how do you get — how do you resolve this contradiction. 
+So, in fact, my graduate students are, at this very moment, today, at the telescope, in Hawaii, making observations to get us hopefully to the next stage, where we can address this question of why are there so many young stars, and so few old stars. 
+To make further progress we really need to look at the orbits of stars that are much further away. 
+To do that we'll probably need much more sophisticated technology than we have today. 
+Because, in truth, while I said we're correcting for the Earth's atmosphere, we actually only correct for half the errors that are introduced. 
+We do this by shooting a laser up into the atmosphere, and what we think we can do is if we shine a few more that we can correct the rest. 
+So this is what we hope to do in the next few years. 
+And on a much longer time scale, what we hope to do is build even larger telescopes, because, remember, bigger is better in astronomy. 
+So, we want to build a 30 meter telescope. 
+And with this telescope we should be able to see stars that are even closer to the center of the galaxy. 
+And we hope to be able to test some of Einstein's theories of general relativity, some ideas in cosmology about how galaxies form. 
+So, we think the future of this experiment is quite exciting. 
+So, in conclusion, I'm going to show you an animation that basically shows you how these orbits have been moving, in three dimensions. 
+And I hope, if nothing else, I've convinced you that, one, we do in fact have a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. 
+And this means that these things do exist in our universe, and we have to contend with this, we have to explain how you can get these objects in our physical world. 
+Second, we've been able to look at that interaction of how supermassive black holes interact, and understand, maybe, the role in which they play in shaping what galaxies are, and how they work. 
+And last but not least, none of this would have happened without the advent of the tremendous progress that's been made on the technology front. 
+And we think that this is a field that is moving incredibly fast, and holds a lot in store for the future. 
+Thanks very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I wrote a letter last week talking about the work of the foundation, sharing some of the problems. 
+And Warren Buffet had recommended I do that — being honest about what was going well, what wasn't, and making it kind of an annual thing. 
+A goal I had there was to draw more people in to work on those problems, because I think there are some very important problems that don't get worked on naturally. 
+That is, the market does not drive the scientists, the communicators, the thinkers, the governments to do the right things. 
+And only by paying attention to these things and having brilliant people who care and draw other people in can we make as much progress as we need to. 
+So this morning I'm going to share two of these problems and talk about where they stand. 
+But before I dive into those I want to admit that I am an optimist. 
+Any tough problem, I think it can be solved. 
+And part of the reason I feel that way is looking at the past. 
+Over the past century, average lifespan has more than doubled. 
+Another statistic, perhaps my favorite, is to look at childhood deaths. 
+As recently as 1960, 110 million children were born, and 20 million of those died before the age of five. 
+Five years ago, 135 million children were born — so, more — and less than 10 million of them died before the age of five. 
+So that's a factor of two reduction of the childhood death rate. 
+It's a phenomenal thing. 
+Each one of those lives matters a lot. 
+And the key reason we were able to it was not only rising incomes but also a few key breakthroughs: vaccines that were used more widely. 
+For example, measles was four million of the deaths back as recently as 1990 and now is under 400,000. 
+So we really can make changes. 
+The next breakthrough is to cut that 10 million in half again. 
+And I think that's doable in well under 20 years. 
+Why? Well there's only a few diseases that account for the vast majority of those deaths: diarrhea, pneumonia and malaria. 
+So that brings us to the first problem that I'll raise this morning, which is how do we stop a deadly disease that's spread by mosquitos? 
+Well, what's the history of this disease? 
+It's been a severe disease for thousands of years. 
+In fact, if we look at the genetic code, it's the only disease we can see that people who lived in Africa actually evolved several things to avoid malarial deaths. 
+Deaths actually peaked at a bit over five million in the 1930s. 
+So it was absolutely gigantic. 
+And the disease was all over the world. 
+A terrible disease. It was in the United States. It was in Europe. 
+People didn't know what caused it until the early 1900s, when a British military man figured out that it was mosquitos. 
+So it was everywhere. 
+And two tools helped bring the death rate down. 
+One was killing the mosquitos with DDT. 
+The other was treating the patients with quinine, or quinine derivatives. 
+And so that's why the death rate did come down. 
+Now, ironically, what happened was it was eliminated from all the temperate zones, which is where the rich countries are. 
+So we can see: 1900, it's everywhere. 
+1945, it's still most places. 
+1970, the U.S. and most of Europe have gotten rid of it. 
+1990, you've gotten most of the northern areas. 
+And more recently you can see it's just around the equator. 
+And so this leads to the paradox that because the disease is only in the poorer countries, it doesn't get much investment. 
+For example, there's more money put into baldness drugs than are put into malaria. 
+Now, baldness, it's a terrible thing. 
+(Laughter) And rich men are afflicted. 
+And so that's why that priority has been set. 
+But, malaria — even the million deaths a year caused by malaria greatly understate its impact. 
+Over 200 million people at any one time are suffering from it. 
+It means that you can't get the economies in these areas going because it just holds things back so much. 
+Now, malaria is of course transmitted by mosquitos. 
+I brought some here, just so you could experience this. 
+We'll let those roam around the auditorium a little bit. 
+(Laughter) There's no reason only poor people should have the experience. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Those mosquitos are not infected. 
+So we've come up with a few new things. We've got bed nets. 
+And bed nets are a great tool. 
+What it means is the mother and child stay under the bed net at night, so the mosquitos that bite late at night can't get at them. 
+And when you use indoor spraying with DDT and those nets you can cut deaths by over 50 percent. 
+And that's happened now in a number of countries. 
+It's great to see. 
+But we have to be careful because malaria — the parasite evolves and the mosquito evolves. 
+So every tool that we've ever had in the past has eventually become ineffective. 
+And so you end up with two choices. 
+If you go into a country with the right tools and the right way, you do it vigorously, you can actually get a local eradication. 
+And that's where we saw the malaria map shrinking. 
+Or, if you go in kind of half-heartedly, for a period of time you'll reduce the disease burden, but eventually those tools will become ineffective, and the death rate will soar back up again. 
+And the world has gone through this where it paid attention and then didn't pay attention. 
+Now we're on the upswing. 
+Bed net funding is up. 
+There's new drug discovery going on. 
+Our foundation has backed a vaccine that's going into phase three trial that starts in a couple months. 
+And that should save over two thirds of the lives if it's effective. 
+So we're going to have these new tools. 
+But that alone doesn't give us the road map. 
+Because the road map to get rid of this disease involves many things. 
+It involves communicators to keep the funding high, to keep the visibility high, to tell the success stories. 
+It involves social scientists, so we know how to get not just 70 percent of the people to use the bed nets, but 90 percent. 
+We need mathematicians to come in and simulate this, to do Monte Carlo things to understand how these tools combine and work together. 
+Of course we need drug companies to give us their expertise. 
+We need rich-world governments to be very generous in providing aid for these things. 
+And so as these elements come together, I'm quite optimistic that we will be able to eradicate malaria. 
+Now let me turn to a second question, a fairly different question, but I'd say equally important. 
+And this is: How do you make a teacher great? 
+It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we'd understand very well. 
+And the answer is, really, that we don't. 
+Let's start with why this is important. 
+Well, all of us here, I'll bet, had some great teachers. 
+We all had a wonderful education. 
+That's part of the reason we're here today, part of the reason we're successful. 
+I can say that, even though I'm a college drop-out. 
+I had great teachers. 
+In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well. 
+There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. 
+So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. 
+And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. 
+And they've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront. 
+Now, the strength for those top 20 percent is starting to fade on a relative basis, but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. 
+Not only has that been weak. it's getting weaker. 
+And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. 
+And we have to change this. 
+We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. 
+We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics. 
+When I first learned the statistics, I was pretty stunned at how bad things are. 
+Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. 
+And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. 
+Because they weren't tracking where the kids were before that. 
+But most of the dropouts had taken place before that. 
+They had to raise the stated dropout rate as soon as that tracking was done to over 30 percent. 
+For minority kids, it's over 50 percent. 
+And even if you graduate from high school, if you're low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. 
+If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. 
+And that doesn't seem entirely fair. 
+So, how do you make education better? 
+Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. 
+There's many people working on it. 
+We've worked on small schools, we've funded scholarships, we've done things in libraries. 
+A lot of these things had a good effect. 
+But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. 
+And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile — the very best — and the bottom quartile. 
+How much variation is there within a school or between schools? 
+And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. 
+A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class — based on test scores — by over 10 percent in a single year. 
+What does that mean? 
+That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. 
+Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away. 
+So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers. 
+And so you'd say, "" Wow, we should reward those people. 
+We should retain those people. 
+We should find out what they're doing and transfer that skill to other people. "" But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today. 
+What are the characteristics of this top quartile? 
+What do they look like? 
+You might think these must be very senior teachers. 
+And the answer is no. 
+Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. 
+The variation is very, very small. 
+You might think these are people with master's degrees. 
+They've gone back and they've gotten their Master's of Education. 
+This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. 
+That bottom thing, which says there's no effect at all, is a master's degree. 
+Now, the way the pay system works is there's two things that are rewarded. 
+One is seniority. 
+Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. 
+The second is giving extra money to people who get their master's degree. 
+But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher. 
+Teach for America: slight effect. 
+For math teachers majoring in math there's a measurable effect. 
+But, overwhelmingly, it's your past performance. 
+There are some people who are very good at this. 
+And we've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability — or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system. 
+You might say, "" Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher's leave? "" The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. 
+And it's a system with very high turnover. 
+Now, there are a few places — very few — where great teachers are being made. 
+A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. 
+KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. 
+It's an unbelievable thing. 
+They have 66 schools — mostly middle schools, some high schools — and what goes on is great teaching. 
+They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges. 
+And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. 
+They're team teaching. They're constantly improving their teachers. 
+They're taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, "" Hey, you caused this amount of increase. "" They're deeply engaged in making teaching better. 
+When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. 
+I sat down and I thought, "" What is going on? "" The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. 
+I thought, "" I'm in the sports rally or something. 
+What's going on? "" And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. 
+It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years — fifth through eighth grade — keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn't want to be there. 
+Everybody needs to be involved. 
+And so KIPP is doing it. 
+How does that compare to a normal school? 
+Well, in a normal school, teachers aren't told how good they are. 
+The data isn't gathered. 
+In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom — sometimes to once per year. 
+And they need advanced notice to do that. 
+So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, "" Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment. "" Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn't have the tools to do it. 
+They don't have the test scores, and there's a whole thing of trying to block the data. 
+For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. 
+And so that's sort of working in the opposite direction. 
+But I'm optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do. 
+First of all, there's a lot more testing going on, and that's given us the picture of where we are. 
+And that allows us to understand who's doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are. 
+Of course, digital video is cheap now. 
+Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. 
+And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, "" OK, here's a little clip of something I thought I did well. 
+Here's a little clip of something I think I did poorly. 
+Advise me — when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that? "" And they could all sit and work together on those problems. 
+You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff. 
+You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. 
+If you have a kid who's behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept. 
+And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. 
+And so by thinking of this as a personnel system, we can do it much better. 
+Now there's a book actually, about KIPP — the place that this is going on — that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote — called, "" Work Hard, Be Nice. "" And I thought it was so fantastic. 
+It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. 
+I'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book. 
+(Applause) Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. 
+In fact we have in the stimulus bill — it's interesting — the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things. 
+But I — I'm optimistic. 
+I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. 
+I only had time to frame those two problems. 
+There's a lot more problems like that — AIDS, pneumonia — I can just see you're getting excited, just at the very name of these things. 
+And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad. 
+You know, the system doesn't naturally make it happen. 
+Governments don't naturally pick these things in the right way. 
+The private sector doesn't naturally put its resources into these things. 
+So it's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved — and you're helping to come up with solutions. 
+And with that, I think there's some great things that will come out of it. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to take you to another world. 
+And I'd like to share a 45 year-old love story with the poor, living on less than one dollar a day. 
+I went to a very elitist, snobbish, expensive education in India, and that almost destroyed me. 
+I was all set to be a diplomat, teacher, doctor — all laid out. 
+Then, I don't look it, but I was the Indian national squash champion for three years. 
+(Laughter) The whole world was laid out for me. 
+Everything was at my feet. 
+I could do nothing wrong. 
+And then I thought out of curiosity I'd like to go and live and work and just see what a village is like. 
+So in 1965, I went to what was called the worst Bihar famine in India, and I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. 
+It changed my life. 
+I came back home, told my mother, "I'd like to live and work in a village." 
+Mother went into a coma. 
+(Laughter) "" What is this? 
+The whole world is laid out for you, the best jobs are laid out for you, and you want to go and work in a village? 
+I mean, is there something wrong with you? "" I said, "" No, I've got the best eduction. 
+It made me think. 
+And I wanted to give something back in my own way. "" "" What do you want to do in a village? 
+No job, no money, no security, no prospect. "" I said, "" I want to live and dig wells for five years. "" "" Dig wells for five years? 
+You went to the most expensive school and college in India, and you want to dig wells for five years? "" She didn't speak to me for a very long time, because she thought I'd let my family down. 
+But then, I was exposed to the most extraordinary knowledge and skills that very poor people have, which are never brought into the mainstream — which is never identified, respected, applied on a large scale. 
+And I thought I'd start a Barefoot College — college only for the poor. 
+What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college. 
+I went to this village for the first time. 
+Elders came to me and said, "" Are you running from the police? "" I said, "" No. "" (Laughter) "You failed in your exam?" I said, "" No. "" 
+"You didn't get a government job?" I said, "No." 
+"" What are you doing here? 
+Why are you here? 
+The education system in India makes you look at Paris and New Delhi and Zurich; what are you doing in this village? 
+Is there something wrong with you you're not telling us? "" I said, "" No, I want to actually start a college only for the poor. 
+What the poor thought was important would be reflected in the college. "" So the elders gave me some very sound and profound advice. 
+They said, "" Please, don't bring anyone with a degree and qualification into your college. "" So it's the only college in India where, if you should have a Ph.D. or a Master's, you are disqualified to come. 
+You have to be a cop-out or a wash-out or a dropout to come to our college. 
+You have to work with your hands. 
+You have to have a dignity of labor. 
+You have to show that you have a skill that you can offer to the community and provide a service to the community. 
+So we started the Barefoot College, and we redefined professionalism. 
+Who is a professional? 
+A professional is someone who has a combination of competence, confidence and belief. 
+A water diviner is a professional. 
+A traditional midwife is a professional. 
+A traditional bone setter is a professional. 
+These are professionals all over the world. 
+You find them in any inaccessible village around the world. 
+And we thought that these people should come into the mainstream and show that the knowledge and skills that they have is universal. 
+It needs to be used, needs to be applied, needs to be shown to the world outside — that these knowledge and skills are relevant even today. 
+So the college works following the lifestyle and workstyle of Mahatma Gandhi. 
+You eat on the floor, you sleep on the floor, you work on the floor. 
+There are no contracts, no written contracts. 
+You can stay with me for 20 years, go tomorrow. 
+And no one can get more than $100 a month. 
+You come for the money, you don't come to Barefoot College. 
+You come for the work and the challenge, you'll come to the Barefoot College. 
+That is where we want you to try crazy ideas. 
+Whatever idea you have, come and try it. 
+It doesn't matter if you fail. 
+Battered, bruised, you start again. 
+It's the only college where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher. 
+And it's the only college where we don't give a certificate. 
+You are certified by the community you serve. 
+You don't need a paper to hang on the wall to show that you are an engineer. 
+So when I said that, they said, "" Well show us what is possible. What are you doing? 
+This is all mumbo-jumbo if you can't show it on the ground. "" So we built the first Barefoot College in 1986. 
+It was built by 12 Barefoot architects who can't read and write, built on $1.50 a sq. ft. 
+150 people lived there, worked there. 
+They got the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2002. 
+But then they suspected, they thought there was an architect behind it. 
+I said, "" Yes, they made the blueprints, but the Barefoot architects actually constructed the college. "" We are the only ones who actually returned the award for $50,000, because they didn't believe us, and we thought that they were actually casting aspersions on the Barefoot architects of Tilonia. 
+I asked a forester — high-powered, paper-qualified expert — I said, "" What can you build in this place? "" He had one look at the soil and said, "" Forget it. No way. 
+Not even worth it. 
+No water, rocky soil. "" I was in a bit of a spot. 
+And I said, "" Okay, I'll go to the old man in village and say, 'What should I grow in this spot?' "" He looked quietly at me and said, "You build this, you build this, you put this, and it'll work." 
+This is what it looks like today. 
+Went to the roof, and all the women said, "" Clear out. 
+The men should clear out because we don't want to share this technology with the men. 
+This is waterproofing the roof. "" (Laughter) It is a bit of jaggery, a bit of urens and a bit of other things I don't know. 
+But it actually doesn't leak. 
+Since 1986, it hasn't leaked. 
+This technology, the women will not share with the men. 
+(Laughter) It's the only college which is fully solar-electrified. 
+All the power comes from the sun. 
+45 kilowatts of panels on the roof. 
+And everything works off the sun for the next 25 years. 
+So long as the sun shines, we'll have no problem with power. 
+But the beauty is that is was installed by a priest, a Hindu priest, who's only done eight years of primary schooling — never been to school, never been to college. 
+He knows more about solar than anyone I know anywhere in the world guaranteed. 
+Food, if you come to the Barefoot College, is solar cooked. 
+But the people who fabricated that solar cooker are women, illiterate women, who actually fabricate the most sophisticated solar cooker. 
+It's a parabolic Scheffler solar cooker. 
+Unfortunately, they're almost half German, they're so precise. 
+(Laughter) You'll never find Indian women so precise. 
+Absolutely to the last inch, they can make that cooker. 
+And we have 60 meals twice a day of solar cooking. 
+We have a dentist — she's a grandmother, illiterate, who's a dentist. 
+She actually looks after the teeth of 7,000 children. 
+Barefoot technology: this was 1986 — no engineer, no architect thought of it — but we are collecting rainwater from the roofs. 
+Very little water is wasted. 
+All the roofs are connected underground to a 400,000 liter tank, and no water is wasted. 
+If we have four years of drought, we still have water on the campus, because we collect rainwater. 
+60 percent of children don't go to school, because they have to look after animals — sheep, goats — domestic chores. 
+So we thought of starting a school at night for the children. 
+Because the night schools of Tilonia, over 75,000 children have gone through these night schools. 
+Because it's for the convenience of the child; it's not for the convenience of the teacher. 
+And what do we teach in these schools? 
+Democracy, citizenship, how you should measure your land, what you should do if you're arrested, what you should do if your animal is sick. 
+This is what we teach in the night schools. 
+But all the schools are solar-lit. 
+Every five years we have an election. 
+Between six to 14 year-old children participate in a democratic process, and they elect a prime minister. 
+The prime minister is 12 years old. 
+She looks after 20 goats in the morning, but she's prime minister in the evening. 
+She has a cabinet, a minister of education, a minister for energy, a minister for health. 
+And they actually monitor and supervise 150 schools for 7,000 children. 
+She got the World's Children's Prize five years ago, and she went to Sweden. 
+First time ever going out of her village. 
+Never seen Sweden. 
+Wasn't dazzled at all by what was happening. 
+And the Queen of Sweden, who's there, turned to me and said, "" Can you ask this child where she got her confidence from? 
+She's only 12 years old, and she's not dazzled by anything. "" And the girl, who's on her left, turned to me and looked at the queen straight in the eye and said, "" Please tell her I'm the prime minister. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Where the percentage of illiteracy is very high, we use puppetry. 
+Puppets is the way we communicate. 
+You have Jokhim Chacha who is 300 years old. 
+He is my psychoanalyst. He is my teacher. 
+He's my doctor. He's my lawyer. 
+He's my donor. 
+He actually raises money, solves my disputes. 
+He solves my problems in the village. 
+If there's tension in the village, if attendance at the schools goes down and there's a friction between the teacher and the parent, the puppet calls the teacher and the parent in front of the whole village and says, "" Shake hands. 
+The attendance must not drop. "" These puppets are made out of recycled World Bank reports. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) So this decentralized, demystified approach of solar-electrifying villages, we've covered all over India from Ladakh up to Bhutan — all solar-electrified villages by people who have been trained. 
+And we went to Ladakh, and we asked this woman — this, at minus 40, you have to come out of the roof, because there's no place, it was all snowed up on both sides — and we asked this woman, "" What was the benefit you had from solar electricity? "" And she thought for a minute and said, "It's the first time I can see my husband's face in winter." 
+(Laughter) Went to Afghanistan. 
+One lesson we learned in India was men are untrainable. 
+(Laughter) Men are restless, men are ambitious, men are compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate. (Laughter) 
+All across the globe, you have this tendency of men wanting a certificate. 
+Why? Because they want to leave the village and go to a city, looking for a job. 
+So we came up with a great solution: train grandmothers. 
+What's the best way of communicating in the world today? 
+Television? No. 
+Telegraph? No. 
+Telephone? No. 
+Tell a woman. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) So we went to Afghanistan for the first time, and we picked three women and said, "" We want to take them to India. "" They said, "" Impossible. They don't even go out of their rooms, and you want to take them to India. "" I said, "" I'll make a concession. I'll take the husbands along as well. "" So I took the husbands along. 
+Of course, the women were much more intelligent than the men. 
+In six months, how do we train these women? 
+Sign language. 
+You don't choose the written word. 
+You don't choose the spoken word. 
+You use sign language. 
+And in six months they can become solar engineers. 
+They go back and solar-electrify their own village. 
+This woman went back and solar-electrified the first village, set up a workshop — the first village ever to be solar-electrified in Afghanistan [was] by the three women. This woman 
+is an extraordinary grandmother. 
+55 years old, and she's solar-electrified 200 houses for me in Afghanistan. 
+And they haven't collapsed. 
+She actually went and spoke to an engineering department in Afghanistan and told the head of the department the difference between AC and DC. 
+He didn't know. 
+Those three women have trained 27 more women and solar-electrified 100 villages in Afghanistan. 
+We went to Africa, and we did the same thing. 
+All these women sitting at one table from eight, nine countries, all chatting to each other, not understanding a word, because they're all speaking a different language. 
+But their body language is great. 
+They're speaking to each other and actually becoming solar engineers. 
+I went to Sierra Leone, and there was this minister driving down in the dead of night — comes across this village. 
+Comes back, goes into the village, says, "" Well what's the story? "" They said, "" These two grandmothers... "" "" Grandmothers? "" The minister couldn't believe what was happening. 
+"Where did they go?" "Went to India and back." 
+Went straight to the president. 
+He said, "" Do you know there's a solar-electrified village in Sierra Leone? "" He said, "" No. "" Half the cabinet went to see the grandmothers the next day. 
+"What's the story." 
+So he summoned me and said, "" Can you train me 150 grandmothers? "" I said, "" I can't, Mr. President. 
+But they will. The grandmothers will. "" So he built me the first Barefoot training center in Sierra Leone. 
+And 150 grandmothers have been trained in Sierra Leone. 
+Gambia: we went to select a grandmother in Gambia. 
+Went to this village. 
+I knew which woman I would like to take. 
+The community got together and said, "" Take these two women. "" I said, "" No, I want to take this woman. "" They said, "" Why? She doesn't know the language. You don't know her. "" I said, "" I like the body language. I like the way she speaks. "" "Difficult husband; not possible." 
+Called the husband, the husband came, swaggering, politician, mobile in his hand. "" Not possible. "" "Why not?" "The woman, look how beautiful she is." 
+I said, "" Yeah, she is very beautiful. "" "What happens if she runs off with an Indian man?" 
+That was his biggest fear. 
+I said, "" She'll be happy. She'll ring you up on the mobile. "" She went like a grandmother and came back like a tiger. 
+She walked out of the plane and spoke to the whole press as if she was a veteran. 
+She handled the national press, and she was a star. 
+And when I went back six months later, I said, "" Where's your husband? "" "Oh, somewhere. It doesn't matter." 
+(Laughter) Success story. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) I'll just wind up by saying that I think you don't have to look for solutions outside. 
+Look for solutions within. 
+And listen to people. They have the solutions in front of you. 
+They're all over the world. 
+Don't even worry. 
+Don't listen to the World Bank, listen to the people on the ground. 
+They have all the solutions in the world. 
+I'll end with a quotation by Mahatma Gandhi. 
+"" First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So there are lands few and far between on Earth itself that are hospitable to humans by any measure, but survive we have. 
+But at the same time, distracted by our bread and circuses and embroiled in the wars that we have waged on each other, it seems that we have forgotten this desire to explore. 
+We, as a species, we're evolved uniquely for Earth, on Earth, and by Earth, and so content are we with our living conditions that we have grown complacent and just too busy to notice that its resources are finite, and that our Sun's life is also finite. 
+How about a few weeks? 
+Such examples are only a few of the many challenges we would face on a planet like Mars. 
+So how do we steel ourselves for voyages whose destinations are so far removed from a tropical vacation? 
+As difficult as it is to see, homo sapiens, that is humans, evolves every day, and still continues to evolve. 
+How do we use our knowledge to protect ourselves from the external dangers and then protect ourselves from ourselves? 
+Mars is a destination, but it will not be our last. 
+
+But energy and climate are extremely important to these people; in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. 
+In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy. 
+The coal revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution, and, even in the 1900s, we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning; we can make modern materials and do so many things. 
+If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. 
+And the answer is, until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. 
+It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. 
+So you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person is using on average, the energy, on average, for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. 
+That's headed up to about nine billion. 
+In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, overall, that will more than double the services delivered per person. 
+Now, efficiency, "" E, "" the energy for each service — here, finally we have some good news. 
+Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings — there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. 
+Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. 
+But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it. 
+Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here? "" I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitoes, and somehow people enjoyed that. 
+I'm told they don't bite; in fact, they might not even leave that jar. 
+And that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. 
+It also has three big problems: cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. 
+So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. 
+And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. 
+And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. 
+Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. 
+Now, how are we going to go forward on this — what's the right approach? 
+Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. 
+Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. 
+And because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. 
+The other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and are in the process of getting it elsewhere? 
+That's a key element of making that report card. 
+Backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? 
+The Al Gore book, "" Our Choice, "" and the David MacKay book, "" Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. "" They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. 
+What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? 
+You'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. 
+We do need the market incentives — CO2 tax, cap and trade — something that gets that price signal out there. 
+(Applause) (Applause ends) Thank you. 
+And we start out, actually, by taking the waste that exists today that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry-casking by reactors — that's our fuel to begin with. 
+It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. 
+CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live? 
+We certainly need one to succeed. 
+And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal. 
+Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? 
+BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been overeating, and you're about to have a heart attack. 
+Then where do you go? 
+But I guess I'll accept it, because it's cheaper than what's come before. "" (Applause) CA: So that would be your response to the Bjørn Lomborg argument, basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do. 
+It shouldn't take away from other things. 
+The thing you get into big money on, and reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that — that, to me, mostly is a waste. 
+If the trade-off you get into is, "" Let's make energy super expensive, "" then the rich can afford that. 
+His shtick now is, "" Why isn't the R & D getting more discussed? "" He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R & D point. 
+The R & D piece — it's crazy how little it's funded. 
+
+Back in 1992, I started working for a company called Interval Research, which was just then being founded by David Lidell and Paul Allen as a for-profit research enterprise in Silicon Valley. 
+I met with David to talk about what I might do in his company. 
+I was just coming out of a failed virtual reality business and supporting myself by being on the speaking circuit and writing books — after twenty years or so in the computer game industry having ideas that people didn't think they could sell. 
+And David and I discovered that we had a question in common, that we really wanted the answer to, and that was, "Why hasn't anybody built any computer games for little girls?" 
+Why is that? 
+It can't just be a giant sexist conspiracy. 
+These people aren't that smart. 
+There's six billion dollars on the table. 
+They would go for it if they could figure out how. 
+So, what is the deal here? 
+And as we thought about our goals — I should say that Interval is really a humanistic institution, in the classical sense that humanism, at its best, finds a way to combine clear-eyed empirical research with a set of core values that fundamentally love and respect people. 
+The basic idea of humanism is the improvable quality of life; that we can do good things, that there are things worth doing because they're good things to do, and that clear-eyed empiricism can help us figure out how to do them. 
+So, contrary to popular belief, there is not a conflict of interest between empiricism and values. 
+And Interval Research is kind of the living example of how that can be true. 
+So David and I decided to go find out, through the best research we could muster, what it would take to get a little girl to put her hands on a computer, to achieve the level of comfort and ease with the technology that little boys have because they play video games. 
+We spent two and a half years conducting research; we spent another year and a half in advance development. 
+Then we formed a spin-off company. 
+In the research phase of the project at Interval, we partnered with a company called Cheskin Research, and these people — Davis Masten and Christopher Ireland — changed my mind entirely about what market research was and what it could be. 
+They taught me how to look and see, and they did not do the incredibly stupid thing of saying to a child, "" Of all these things we already make you, which do you like best? "" — which gives you zero answers that are usable. 
+So, what we did for the first two and a half years was four things: We did an extensive review of the literature in related fields, like cognitive psychology, spatial cognition, gender studies, play theory, sociology, primatology. 
+Thank you Frans de Waal, wherever you are, I love you and I'd give anything to meet you. 
+After we had done that with a pretty large team of people and discovered what we thought the salient issues were with girls and boys and playing — because, after all, that's really what this is about — we moved to the second phase of our work, where we interviewed adult experts in academia, some of the people who'd produced the literature that we found relevant. 
+Also, we did focus groups with people who were on the ground with kids every day, like playground supervisors. We talked to them, confirmed some hypotheses and identified some serious questions about gender difference and play. 
+Then we did what I consider to be the heart of the work: interviewed 1,100 children, boys and girls, ages seven to 12, all over the United States — except for Silicon Valley, Boston and Austin because we knew that their little families would have millions of computers in them and they wouldn't be a representative sample. 
+And at the end of those remarkable conversations with kids and their best friends across the United States, after two years, we pulled together some survey data from another 10,000 children, drew up a set up of what we thought were the key findings of our research, and spent another year transforming them into design heuristics, for designing computer-based products — and, in fact, any kind of products — for little girls, ages eight to 12. 
+And we spent that time designing interactive prototypes for computer software and testing them with little girls. 
+In 1996, in November, we formed the company Purple Moon which was a spinoff of Interval Research, and our chief investors were Interval Research, Vulcan Northwest, Institutional Venture Partners and Allen and Company. 
+We launched a website on September 2nd that has now served 25 million pages, and has 42,000 registered young girl users. 
+They visit an average of one and a half times a day, spend an average of 35 minutes a visit, and look at 50 pages a visit. 
+So we feel that we've formed a successful online community with girls. 
+We launched two titles in October — "" Rockett's New School "" — the first of a series of products — is about a character called Rockett beginning her first day of school in eighth grade at a brand new place, with a blank slate, which allows girls to play with the question of, "" What will I be like when I'm older? "" "" What's it going to be like to be in high school or junior high school? 
+Who are my friends? ""; to exercise the love of social complexity and the narrative intelligence that drives most of their play behavior; and which embeds in it values about noticing that we have lots of choices in our lives and the ways that we conduct ourselves. 
+The other title that we launched is called "" Secret Paths in the Forest, "" which addresses the more fantasy-oriented, inner lives of girls. 
+These two titles both showed up in the top 50 entertainment titles in PC Data — entertainment titles in PC Data in December, right up there with "" John Madden Football, "" which thrills me to death. 
+So, we're real, and we've touched several hundreds of thousands of little girls. 
+We've made half-a-billion impressions with marketing and PR for this brand, Purple Moon. 
+Ninety-six percent of them, roughly, have been positive; four percent of them have been "" other. "" I want to talk about the other, because the politics of this enterprise, in a way, have been the most fascinating part of it, for me. 
+There are really two kinds of negative reviews that we've received. 
+One kind of reviewer is a male gamer who thinks he knows what games ought to be, and won't show the product to little girls. 
+The other kind of reviewer is a certain flavor of feminist who thinks they know what little girls ought to be. 
+And so it's funny to me that these interesting, odd bedfellows have one thing in common: they don't listen to little girls. 
+They haven't looked at children and they're certainly not demonstrating any love for them. 
+I'd like to play you some voices of little girls from the two-and-a-half years of research that we did — actually, some of the voices are more recent. 
+And these voices will be accompanied by photographs that they took for us of their lives, of the things that they value and care about. 
+These are pictures the girls themselves never saw, but they gave to us This is the stuff those reviewers don't know about and aren't listening to and this is the kind of research I recommend to those who want to do humanistic work. 
+Girl 1: Yeah, my character is usually a tomboy. 
+Hers is more into boys. 
+Girl 2: Uh, yeah. 
+Girl 1: We have — in the very beginning of the whole game, always we do this: we each have a piece of paper; we write down our name, our age — are we rich, very rich, not rich, poor, medium, wealthy, boyfriends, dogs, pets — what else — sisters, brothers, and all those. 
+Girl 2: Divorced — parents divorced, maybe. 
+Girl 3: This is my pretend [unclear] one. 
+Girl 4: We make a school newspaper on the computer. 
+Girl 5: For a girl's game also usually they'll have really pretty scenery with clouds and flowers. 
+Girl 6: Like, if you were a girl and you were really adventurous and a real big tomboy, you would think that girls' games were kinda sissy. 
+Girl 7: I run track, I played soccer, I play basketball, and I love a lot of things to do. 
+And sometimes I feel like I can't really enjoy myself unless it's like a vacation, like when I get Mondays and all those days off. 
+Girl 8: Well, sometimes there is a lot of stuff going on because I have music lessons and I'm on swim team — all this different stuff that I have to do, and sometimes it gets overwhelming. 
+Girl 9: My friend Justine kinda took my friend Kelly, and now they're being mean to me. 
+Girl 10: Well, sometimes it gets annoying when your brothers and sisters, or brother or sister, when they copy you and you get your idea first and they take your idea and they do it themselves. 
+Girl 11: Because my older sister, she gets everything and, like, when I ask my mom for something, she'll say, "" No "" — all the time. 
+But she gives my sister everything. 
+Brenda Laurel: I want to show you, real quickly, just a minute of "" Rockett's Tricky Decision, "" which went gold two days ago. 
+Let's hope it's really stable. 
+This is the second day in Rockett's life. 
+The reason I'm showing you this is I'm hoping that the scene that I'm going to show you will look familiar and sound familiar, now that you've listened to some girls' voices. 
+And you can see how we've tried to incorporate the issues that matter to them in the game that we've created. 
+Miko: Hey Rockett! C'mere! 
+Rockett: Hi Miko! What's going on? 
+Miko: Did you hear about Nakilia's big Halloween party this weekend? 
+She asked me to make sure you knew about it. 
+Nakilia invited Reuben too, but — Rockett: But what? Isn't he coming? 
+Miko: I don't think so. 
+I mean, I heard his band is playing at another party the same night. 
+Rockett: Really? What other party? 
+Girl: Max's party is going to be so cool, Whitney. 
+He's invited all the best people. 
+BL: I'm going to fast-forward to the decision point because I know I don't have a lot of time. 
+After this awful event occurs, Rocket gets to decide how she feels about it. 
+Rockett: Who'd want to show up at that party anyway? 
+I could get invited to that party any day if I wanted to. 
+Gee, I doubt I'll make Max's best people list. 
+BL: OK, so we're going to emotionally navigate. 
+If we were playing the game, that's what we'd do. 
+If at any time during the game we want to learn more about the characters, we can go into this hidden hallway, and I'll quickly just show you the interface. 
+We can, for example, go find Miko's locker and get some more information about her. 
+Oops, I turned the wrong way. 
+But you get the general idea of the product. 
+I wanted to show you the ways, innocuous as they seem, in which we're incorporating what we've learned about girls — their desires to experience greater emotional flexibility, and to play around with the social complexity of their lives. 
+I want to make the point that what we're giving girls, I think, through this effort, is a kind of validation, a sense of being seen. 
+And a sense of the choices that are available in their lives. 
+We love them. 
+We see them. 
+We're not trying to tell them who they ought to be. 
+But we're really, really happy about who they are. 
+It turns out they're really great. 
+I want to close by showing you a videotape that's a version of a future game in the Rockett series that our graphic artists and design people put together, that we feel would please that four percent of reviewers. 
+"Rockett 28!" 
+Rockett: It's like I'm just waking up, you know? 
+BL: Thanks. 
+
+18 minutes is an absolutely brutal time limit, so I'm going to dive straight in, right at the point where I get this thing to work. 
+Here we go. I'm going to talk about five different things. 
+I'm going to talk about why defeating aging is desirable. 
+I'm going to talk about why we have to get our shit together, and actually talk about this a bit more than we do. 
+I'm going to talk about feasibility as well, of course. 
+I'm going to talk about why we are so fatalistic about doing anything about aging. 
+And then I'm going spend perhaps the second half of the talk talking about, you know, how we might actually be able to prove that fatalism is wrong, namely, by actually doing something about it. 
+I'm going to do that in two steps. 
+The first one I'm going to talk about is how to get from a relatively modest amount of life extension — which I'm going to define as 30 years, applied to people who are already in middle-age when you start — to a point which can genuinely be called defeating aging. 
+Namely, essentially an elimination of the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year — or indeed, to get sick in the first place. 
+And of course, the last thing I'm going to talk about is how to reach that intermediate step, that point of maybe 30 years life extension. 
+So I'm going to start with why we should. 
+Now, I want to ask a question. 
+Hands up: anyone in the audience who is in favor of malaria? 
+That was easy. OK. 
+OK. Hands up: anyone in the audience who's not sure whether malaria is a good thing or a bad thing? 
+OK. So we all think malaria is a bad thing. 
+That's very good news, because I thought that was what the answer would be. 
+Now the thing is, I would like to put it to you that the main reason why we think that malaria is a bad thing is because of a characteristic of malaria that it shares with aging. 
+And here is that characteristic. 
+The only real difference is that aging kills considerably more people than malaria does. 
+Now, I like in an audience, in Britain especially, to talk about the comparison with foxhunting, which is something that was banned after a long struggle, by the government not very many months ago. 
+I mean, I know I'm with a sympathetic audience here, but, as we know, a lot of people are not entirely persuaded by this logic. 
+And this is actually a rather good comparison, it seems to me. 
+You know, a lot of people said, "" Well, you know, city boys have no business telling us rural types what to do with our time. 
+It's a traditional part of the way of life, and we should be allowed to carry on doing it. 
+It's ecologically sound; it stops the population explosion of foxes. "" But ultimately, the government prevailed in the end, because the majority of the British public, and certainly the majority of members of Parliament, came to the conclusion that it was really something that should not be tolerated in a civilized society. 
+And I think that human aging shares all of these characteristics in spades. 
+What part of this do people not understand? 
+It's not just about life, of course — (Laughter) — it's about healthy life, you know — getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun, whether or not dying may be fun. 
+So really, this is how I would like to describe it. 
+It's a global trance. 
+These are the sorts of unbelievable excuses that people give for aging. 
+And, I mean, OK, I'm not actually saying that these excuses are completely valueless. 
+There are some good points to be made here, things that we ought to be thinking about, forward planning so that nothing goes too — well, so that we minimize the turbulence when we actually figure out how to fix aging. 
+But these are completely crazy, when you actually remember your sense of proportion. 
+You know, these are arguments; these are things that would be legitimate to be concerned about. 
+But the question is, are they so dangerous — these risks of doing something about aging — that they outweigh the downside of doing the opposite, namely, leaving aging as it is? 
+Are these so bad that they outweigh condemning 100,000 people a day to an unnecessarily early death? 
+You know, if you haven't got an argument that's that strong, then just don't waste my time, is what I say. 
+(Laughter) Now, there is one argument that some people do think really is that strong, and here it is. 
+People worry about overpopulation; they say, "" Well, if we fix aging, no one's going to die to speak of, or at least the death toll is going to be much lower, only from crossing St. Giles carelessly. 
+And therefore, we're not going to be able to have many kids, and kids are really important to most people. "" And that's true. 
+And you know, a lot of people try to fudge this question, and give answers like this. 
+I don't agree with those answers. I think they basically don't work. 
+I think it's true, that we will face a dilemma in this respect. 
+We will have to decide whether to have a low birth rate, or a high death rate. 
+A high death rate will, of course, arise from simply rejecting these therapies, in favor of carrying on having a lot of kids. 
+And, I say that that's fine — the future of humanity is entitled to make that choice. 
+What's not fine is for us to make that choice on behalf of the future. 
+If we vacillate, hesitate, and do not actually develop these therapies, then we are condemning a whole cohort of people — who would have been young enough and healthy enough to benefit from those therapies, but will not be, because we haven't developed them as quickly as we could — we'll be denying those people an indefinite life span, and I consider that that is immoral. 
+That's my answer to the overpopulation question. 
+Right. So the next thing is, now why should we get a little bit more active on this? 
+And the fundamental answer is that the pro-aging trance is not as dumb as it looks. 
+It's actually a sensible way of coping with the inevitability of aging. 
+Aging is ghastly, but it's inevitable, so, you know, we've got to find some way to put it out of our minds, and it's rational to do anything that we might want to do, to do that. 
+Like, for example, making up these ridiculous reasons why aging is actually a good thing after all. 
+But of course, that only works when we have both of these components. 
+And as soon as the inevitability bit becomes a little bit unclear — and we might be in range of doing something about aging — this becomes part of the problem. 
+This pro-aging trance is what stops us from agitating about these things. 
+And that's why we have to really talk about this a lot — evangelize, I will go so far as to say, quite a lot — in order to get people's attention, and make people realize that they are in a trance in this regard. 
+So that's all I'm going to say about that. 
+I'm now going to talk about feasibility. 
+And the fundamental reason, I think, why we feel that aging is inevitable is summed up in a definition of aging that I'm giving here. 
+A very simple definition. 
+Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place, which is to say, metabolism. 
+This is not a completely tautological statement; it's a reasonable statement. 
+Aging is basically a process that happens to inanimate objects like cars, and it also happens to us, despite the fact that we have a lot of clever self-repair mechanisms, because those self-repair mechanisms are not perfect. 
+So basically, metabolism, which is defined as basically everything that keeps us alive from one day to the next, has side effects. 
+Those side effects accumulate and eventually cause pathology. 
+That's a fine definition. So we can put it this way: we can say that, you know, we have this chain of events. 
+And there are really two games in town, according to most people, with regard to postponing aging. 
+They're what I'm calling here the "" gerontology approach "" and the "" geriatrics approach. "" The geriatrician will intervene late in the day, when pathology is becoming evident, and the geriatrician will try and hold back the sands of time, and stop the accumulation of side effects from causing the pathology quite so soon. 
+Of course, it's a very short-term-ist strategy; it's a losing battle, because the things that are causing the pathology are becoming more abundant as time goes on. 
+The gerontology approach looks much more promising on the surface, because, you know, prevention is better than cure. 
+But unfortunately the thing is that we don't understand metabolism very well. 
+In fact, we have a pitifully poor understanding of how organisms work — even cells we're not really too good on yet. 
+We've discovered things like, for example, RNA interference only a few years ago, and this is a really fundamental component of how cells work. 
+Basically, gerontology is a fine approach in the end, but it is not an approach whose time has come when we're talking about intervention. 
+So then, what do we do about that? 
+I mean, that's a fine logic, that sounds pretty convincing, pretty ironclad, doesn't it? 
+But it isn't. 
+Before I tell you why it isn't, I'm going to go a little bit into what I'm calling step two. 
+Just suppose, as I said, that we do acquire — let's say we do it today for the sake of argument — the ability to confer 30 extra years of healthy life on people who are already in middle age, let's say 55. 
+I'm going to call that "" robust human rejuvenation. "" OK. 
+What would that actually mean for how long people of various ages today — or equivalently, of various ages at the time that these therapies arrive — would actually live? 
+In order to answer that question — you might think it's simple, but it's not simple. 
+We can't just say, "" Well, if they're young enough to benefit from these therapies, then they'll live 30 years longer. "" That's the wrong answer. 
+And the reason it's the wrong answer is because of progress. 
+There are two sorts of technological progress really, for this purpose. 
+There are fundamental, major breakthroughs, and there are incremental refinements of those breakthroughs. 
+Now, they differ a great deal in terms of the predictability of time frames. 
+Fundamental breakthroughs: very hard to predict how long it's going to take to make a fundamental breakthrough. 
+It was a very long time ago that we decided that flying would be fun, and it took us until 1903 to actually work out how to do it. 
+But after that, things were pretty steady and pretty uniform. 
+I think this is a reasonable sequence of events that happened in the progression of the technology of powered flight. 
+We can think, really, that each one is sort of beyond the imagination of the inventor of the previous one, if you like. 
+The incremental advances have added up to something which is not incremental anymore. 
+This is the sort of thing you see after a fundamental breakthrough. 
+And you see it in all sorts of technologies. 
+Computers: you can look at a more or less parallel time line, happening of course a bit later. 
+You can look at medical care. I mean, hygiene, vaccines, antibiotics — you know, the same sort of time frame. 
+So I think that actually step two, that I called a step a moment ago, isn't a step at all. 
+That in fact, the people who are young enough to benefit from these first therapies that give this moderate amount of life extension, even though those people are already middle-aged when the therapies arrive, will be at some sort of cusp. 
+They will mostly survive long enough to receive improved treatments that will give them a further 30 or maybe 50 years. 
+In other words, they will be staying ahead of the game. 
+The therapies will be improving faster than the remaining imperfections in the therapies are catching up with us. 
+This is a very important point for me to get across. 
+Because, you know, most people, when they hear that I predict that a lot of people alive today are going to live to 1,000 or more, they think that I'm saying that we're going to invent therapies in the next few decades that are so thoroughly eliminating aging that those therapies will let us live to 1,000 or more. 
+I'm not saying that at all. 
+I'm saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough. 
+They'll never be perfect, but we'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of, before we have any 200-year-olds. 
+And the same for 300 and 400 and so on. 
+I decided to give this a little name, which is "" longevity escape velocity. "" (Laughter) Well, it seems to get the point across. 
+So, these trajectories here are basically how we would expect people to live, in terms of remaining life expectancy, as measured by their health, for given ages that they were at the time that these therapies arrive. 
+If you're already 100, or even if you're 80 — and an average 80-year-old, we probably can't do a lot for you with these therapies, because you're too close to death's door for the really initial, experimental therapies to be good enough for you. 
+You won't be able to withstand them. 
+But if you're only 50, then there's a chance that you might be able to pull out of the dive and, you know — (Laughter) — eventually get through this and start becoming biologically younger in a meaningful sense, in terms of your youthfulness, both physical and mental, and in terms of your risk of death from age-related causes. 
+And of course, if you're a bit younger than that, then you're never really even going to get near to being fragile enough to die of age-related causes. 
+So this is a genuine conclusion that I come to, that the first 150-year-old — we don't know how old that person is today, because we don't know how long it's going to take to get these first-generation therapies. 
+But irrespective of that age, I'm claiming that the first person to live to 1,000 — subject of course, to, you know, global catastrophes — is actually, probably, only about 10 years younger than the first 150-year-old. 
+And that's quite a thought. 
+Alright, so finally I'm going to spend the rest of the talk, my last seven-and-a-half minutes, on step one; namely, how do we actually get to this moderate amount of life extension that will allow us to get to escape velocity? 
+And in order to do that, I need to talk about mice a little bit. 
+I have a corresponding milestone to robust human rejuvenation. 
+I'm calling it "" robust mouse rejuvenation, "" not very imaginatively. 
+And this is what it is. 
+I say we're going to take a long-lived strain of mouse, which basically means mice that live about three years on average. 
+We do exactly nothing to them until they're already two years old. 
+And then we do a whole bunch of stuff to them, and with those therapies, we get them to live, on average, to their fifth birthday. 
+So, in other words, we add two years — we treble their remaining lifespan, starting from the point that we started the therapies. 
+The question then is, what would that actually mean for the time frame until we get to the milestone I talked about earlier for humans? 
+Which we can now, as I've explained, equivalently call either robust human rejuvenation or longevity escape velocity. 
+Secondly, what does it mean for the public's perception of how long it's going to take for us to get to those things, starting from the time we get the mice? 
+And thirdly, the question is, what will it do to actually how much people want it? 
+And it seems to me that the first question is entirely a biology question, and it's extremely hard to answer. 
+One has to be very speculative, and many of my colleagues would say that we should not do this speculation, that we should simply keep our counsel until we know more. 
+I say that's nonsense. 
+I say we absolutely are irresponsible if we stay silent on this. 
+We need to give our best guess as to the time frame, in order to give people a sense of proportion so that they can assess their priorities. 
+So, I say that we have a 50 / 50 chance of reaching this RHR milestone, robust human rejuvenation, within 15 years from the point that we get to robust mouse rejuvenation. 
+15 years from the robust mouse. 
+The public's perception will probably be somewhat better than that. 
+The public tends to underestimate how difficult scientific things are. 
+So they'll probably think it's five years away. 
+They'll be wrong, but that actually won't matter too much. 
+And finally, of course, I think it's fair to say that a large part of the reason why the public is so ambivalent about aging now is the global trance I spoke about earlier, the coping strategy. 
+That will be history at this point, because it will no longer be possible to believe that aging is inevitable in humans, since it's been postponed so very effectively in mice. 
+So we're likely to end up with a very strong change in people's attitudes, and of course that has enormous implications. 
+So in order to tell you now how we're going to get these mice, I'm going to add a little bit to my description of aging. 
+I'm going to use this word "" damage "" to denote these intermediate things that are caused by metabolism and that eventually cause pathology. 
+Because the critical thing about this is that even though the damage only eventually causes pathology, the damage itself is caused ongoing-ly throughout life, starting before we're born. 
+But it is not part of metabolism itself. 
+And this turns out to be useful. 
+Because we can re-draw our original diagram this way. 
+We can say that, fundamentally, the difference between gerontology and geriatrics is that gerontology tries to inhibit the rate at which metabolism lays down this damage. 
+And I'm going to explain exactly what damage is in concrete biological terms in a moment. 
+And geriatricians try to hold back the sands of time by stopping the damage converting into pathology. 
+And the reason it's a losing battle is because the damage is continuing to accumulate. 
+So there's a third approach, if we look at it this way. 
+We can call it the "" engineering approach, "" and I claim that the engineering approach is within range. 
+The engineering approach does not intervene in any processes. 
+It does not intervene in this process or this one. 
+And that's good because it means that it's not a losing battle, and it's something that we are within range of being able to do, because it doesn't involve improving on evolution. 
+The engineering approach simply says, "" Let's go and periodically repair all of these various types of damage — not necessarily repair them completely, but repair them quite a lot, so that we keep the level of damage down below the threshold that must exist, that causes it to be pathogenic. "" We know that this threshold exists, because we don't get age-related diseases until we're in middle age, even though the damage has been accumulating since before we were born. 
+Why do I say that we're in range? Well, this is basically it. 
+The point about this slide is actually the bottom. 
+If we try to say which bits of metabolism are important for aging, we will be here all night, because basically all of metabolism is important for aging in one way or another. 
+This list is just for illustration; it is incomplete. 
+The list on the right is also incomplete. 
+It's a list of types of pathology that are age-related, and it's just an incomplete list. 
+But I would like to claim to you that this list in the middle is actually complete — this is the list of types of thing that qualify as damage, side effects of metabolism that cause pathology in the end, or that might cause pathology. 
+And there are only seven of them. 
+They're categories of things, of course, but there's only seven of them. 
+Cell loss, mutations in chromosomes, mutations in the mitochondria and so on. 
+First of all, I'd like to give you an argument for why that list is complete. 
+Of course one can make a biological argument. 
+One can say, "" OK, what are we made of? "" We're made of cells and stuff between cells. 
+What can damage accumulate in? 
+The answer is: long-lived molecules, because if a short-lived molecule undergoes damage, but then the molecule is destroyed — like by a protein being destroyed by proteolysis — then the damage is gone, too. 
+It's got to be long-lived molecules. 
+So, these seven things were all under discussion in gerontology a long time ago and that is pretty good news, because it means that, you know, we've come a long way in biology in these 20 years, so the fact that we haven't extended this list is a pretty good indication that there's no extension to be done. 
+However, it's better than that; we actually know how to fix them all, in mice, in principle — and what I mean by in principle is, we probably can actually implement these fixes within a decade. 
+Some of them are partially implemented already, the ones at the top. 
+I haven't got time to go through them at all, but my conclusion is that, if we can actually get suitable funding for this, then we can probably develop robust mouse rejuvenation in only 10 years, but we do need to get serious about it. 
+We do need to really start trying. 
+So of course, there are some biologists in the audience, and I want to give some answers to some of the questions that you may have. 
+You may have been dissatisfied with this talk, but fundamentally you have to go and read this stuff. 
+I've published a great deal on this; I cite the experimental work on which my optimism is based, and there's quite a lot of detail there. 
+The detail is what makes me confident of my rather aggressive time frames that I'm predicting here. 
+So if you think that I'm wrong, you'd better damn well go and find out why you think I'm wrong. 
+And of course the main thing is that you shouldn't trust people who call themselves gerontologists because, as with any radical departure from previous thinking within a particular field, you know, you expect people in the mainstream to be a bit resistant and not really to take it seriously. 
+So, you know, you've got to actually do your homework, in order to understand whether this is true. 
+And we'll just end with a few things. 
+One thing is, you know, you'll be hearing from a guy in the next session who said some time ago that he could sequence the human genome in half no time, and everyone said, "" Well, it's obviously impossible. "" And you know what happened. 
+So, you know, this does happen. 
+We have various strategies — there's the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which is basically an incentive to innovate, and to do what you think is going to work, and you get money for it if you win. 
+There's a proposal to actually put together an institute. 
+This is what's going to take a bit of money. 
+But, I mean, look — how long does it take to spend that on the war in Iraq? 
+Not very long. OK. 
+(Laughter) It's got to be philanthropic, because profits distract biotech, but it's basically got a 90 percent chance, I think, of succeeding in this. 
+And I think we know how to do it. And I'll stop there. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: OK. I don't know if there's going to be any questions but I thought I would give people the chance. 
+Audience: Since you've been talking about aging and trying to defeat it, why is it that you make yourself appear like an old man? 
+(Laughter) AG: Because I am an old man. I am actually 158. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) Audience: Species on this planet have evolved with immune systems to fight off all the diseases so that individuals live long enough to procreate. 
+However, as far as I know, all the species have evolved to actually die, so when cells divide, the telomerase get shorter, and eventually species die. 
+So, why does — evolution has — seems to have selected against immortality, when it is so advantageous, or is evolution just incomplete? 
+AG: Brilliant. Thank you for asking a question that I can answer with an uncontroversial answer. 
+I'm going to tell you the genuine mainstream answer to your question, which I happen to agree with, which is that, no, aging is not a product of selection, evolution; [aging] is simply a product of evolutionary neglect. 
+In other words, we have aging because it's hard work not to have aging; you need more genetic pathways, more sophistication in your genes in order to age more slowly, and that carries on being true the longer you push it out. 
+So, to the extent that evolution doesn't matter, doesn't care whether genes are passed on by individuals, living a long time or by procreation, there's a certain amount of modulation of that, which is why different species have different lifespans, but that's why there are no immortal species. 
+CA: The genes don't care but we do? 
+AG: That's right. 
+Audience: Hello. I read somewhere that in the last 20 years, the average lifespan of basically anyone on the planet has grown by 10 years. 
+If I project that, that would make me think that I would live until 120 if I don't crash on my motorbike. 
+That means that I'm one of your subjects to become a 1,000-year-old? 
+AG: If you lose a bit of weight. 
+(Laughter) Your numbers are a bit out. 
+The standard numbers are that lifespans have been growing at between one and two years per decade. 
+So, it's not quite as good as you might think, you might hope. 
+But I intend to move it up to one year per year as soon as possible. 
+Audience: I was told that many of the brain cells we have as adults are actually in the human embryo, and that the brain cells last 80 years or so. 
+If that is indeed true, biologically are there implications in the world of rejuvenation? 
+If there are cells in my body that live all 80 years, as opposed to a typical, you know, couple of months? 
+AG: There are technical implications certainly. 
+Basically what we need to do is replace cells in those few areas of the brain that lose cells at a respectable rate, especially neurons, but we don't want to replace them any faster than that — or not much faster anyway, because replacing them too fast would degrade cognitive function. 
+What I said about there being no non-aging species earlier on was a little bit of an oversimplification. 
+There are species that have no aging — Hydra for example — but they do it by not having a nervous system — and not having any tissues in fact that rely for their function on very long-lived cells. 
+
+I haven't told many people this, but in my head, I've got thousands of secret worlds all going on all at the same time. 
+I am also autistic. 
+People tend to diagnose autism with really specific check-box descriptions, but in reality, it's a whole variation as to what we're like. 
+For instance, my little brother, he's very severely autistic. 
+He's nonverbal. He can't talk at all. 
+But I love to talk. 
+People often associate autism with liking maths and science and nothing else, but I know so many autistic people who love being creative. 
+But that is a stereotype, and the stereotypes of things are often, if not always, wrong. 
+For instance, a lot of people think autism and think "" Rain Man "" immediately. 
+That's the common belief, that every single autistic person is Dustin Hoffman, and that's not true. 
+But that's not just with autistic people, either. 
+I've seen it with LGBTQ people, with women, with POC people. 
+People are so afraid of variety that they try to fit everything into a tiny little box with really specific labels. 
+This is something that actually happened to me in real life: I googled "" autistic people are... "" and it comes up with suggestions as to what you're going to type. I googled "" autistic people are... "" 
+and the top result was "" demons. "" That is the first thing that people think when they think autism. 
+They know. 
+(Laughter) One of the things I can do because I'm autistic — it's an ability rather than a disability — is I've got a very, very vivid imagination. 
+Let me explain it to you a bit. 
+There's the real world, the world that we all share, and there's the world in my mind, and the world in my mind is often so much more real than the real world. 
+Like, it's very easy for me to let my mind loose because I don't try and fit myself into a tiny little box. 
+You find what you want to do, you find a way to do it, and you get on with it. 
+If I was trying to fit myself into a box, I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't have achieved half the things that I have now. 
+School can be a problem in general, but having also to explain to a teacher on a daily basis that their lesson is inexplicably dull and you are secretly taking refuge in a world inside your head in which you are not in that lesson, that adds to your list of problems. 
+(Laughter) Also, when my imagination takes hold, my body takes on a life of its own. 
+When something very exciting happens in my inner world, I've just got to run. 
+I've got to rock backwards and forwards, or sometimes scream. 
+This gives me so much energy, and I've got to have an outlet for all that energy. 
+But I've done that ever since I was a child, ever since I was a tiny little girl. 
+And my parents thought it was cute, so they didn't bring it up, but when I got into school, they didn't really agree that it was cute. 
+It can be that people don't want to be friends with the girl that starts screaming in an algebra lesson. 
+And this doesn't normally happen in this day and age, but it can be that people don't want to be friends with the autistic girl. 
+It can be that people don't want to associate with anyone who won't or can't fit themselves into a box that's labeled normal. 
+But that's fine with me, because it sorts the wheat from the chaff, and I can find which people are genuine and true and I can pick these people as my friends. 
+But if you think about it, what is normal? 
+What does it mean? 
+Imagine if that was the best compliment you ever received. 
+"Wow, you are really normal." 
+(Laughter) But compliments are, "you are extraordinary" or "" you step outside the box. "" It's "" you're amazing. "" So if people want to be these things, why are so many people striving to be normal? 
+Why are people pouring their brilliant individual light into a mold? 
+People are so afraid of variety that they try and force everyone, even people who don't want to or can't, to become normal. 
+There are camps for LGBTQ people or autistic people to try and make them this "" normal, "" and that's terrifying that people would do that in this day and age. 
+All in all, I wouldn't trade my autism and my imagination for the world. 
+Because I am autistic, I've presented documentaries to the BBC, I'm in the midst of writing a book, I'm doing this — this is fantastic — and one of the best things that I've achieved, that I consider to have achieved, is I've found ways of communicating with my little brother and sister, who as I've said are nonverbal. They can't speak. 
+And people would often write off someone who's nonverbal, but that's silly, because my little brother and sister are the best siblings that you could ever hope for. 
+I'm going to leave you with one question: If we can't get inside the person's minds, no matter if they're autistic or not, instead of punishing anything that strays from normal, why not celebrate uniqueness and cheer every time someone unleashes their imagination? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So here's the good news about families. 
+The last 50 years have seen a revolution in what it means to be a family. 
+We have blended families, adopted families, we have nuclear families living in separate houses and divorced families living in the same house. 
+But through it all, the family has grown stronger. 
+Eight in 10 say the family they have today is as strong or stronger than the family they grew up in. 
+Now, here's the bad news. 
+Nearly everyone is completely overwhelmed by the chaos of family life. 
+Every parent I know, myself included, feels like we're constantly playing defense. 
+Just when our kids stop teething, they start having tantrums. 
+Just when they stop needing our help taking a bath, they need our help dealing with cyberstalking or bullying. 
+And here's the worst news of all. 
+Our children sense we're out of control. 
+Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute asked 1,000 children, "" If you were granted one wish about your parents, what would it be? "" The parents predicted the kids would say, spending more time with them. 
+They were wrong. The kids' number one wish? 
+That their parents be less tired and less stressed. 
+So how can we change this dynamic? 
+Are there concrete things we can do to reduce stress, draw our family closer, and generally prepare our children to enter the world? 
+I spent the last few years trying to answer that question, traveling around, meeting families, talking to scholars, experts ranging from elite peace negotiators to Warren Buffett's bankers to the Green Berets. 
+I was trying to figure out, what do happy families do right and what can I learn from them to make my family happier? 
+I want to tell you about one family that I met, and why I think they offer clues. 
+At 7 p.m. on a Sunday in Hidden Springs, Idaho, where the six members of the Starr family are sitting down to the highlight of their week: the family meeting. 
+The Starrs are a regular American family with their share of regular American family problems. 
+David is a software engineer. Eleanor takes care of their four children, ages 10 to 15. 
+One of those kids tutors math on the far side of town. 
+One has lacrosse on the near side of town. 
+One has Asperger syndrome. One has ADHD. 
+"" We were living in complete chaos, "" Eleanor said. 
+What the Starrs did next, though, was surprising. 
+Instead of turning to friends or relatives, they looked to David's workplace. 
+They turned to a cutting-edge program called agile development that was just spreading from manufacturers in Japan to startups in Silicon Valley. 
+In agile, workers are organized into small groups and do things in very short spans of time. 
+So instead of having executives issue grand proclamations, the team in effect manages itself. 
+You have constant feedback. You have daily update sessions. 
+You have weekly reviews. You're constantly changing. 
+David said when they brought this system into their home, the family meetings in particular increased communication, decreased stress, and made everybody happier to be part of the family team. 
+When my wife and I adopted these family meetings and other techniques into the lives of our then-five-year-old twin daughters, it was the biggest single change we made since our daughters were born. 
+And these meetings had this effect while taking under 20 minutes. 
+So what is Agile, and why can it help with something that seems so different, like families? 
+In 1983, Jeff Sutherland was a technologist at a financial firm in New England. 
+He was very frustrated with how software got designed. 
+Companies followed the waterfall method, right, in which executives issued orders that slowly trickled down to programmers below, and no one had ever consulted the programmers. 
+Eighty-three percent of projects failed. 
+They were too bloated or too out of date by the time they were done. 
+Sutherland wanted to create a system where ideas didn't just percolate down but could percolate up from the bottom and be adjusted in real time. 
+He read 30 years of Harvard Business Review before stumbling upon an article in 1986 called "" The New New Product Development Game. "" It said that the pace of business was quickening — and by the way, this was in 1986 — and the most successful companies were flexible. 
+It highlighted Toyota and Canon and likened their adaptable, tight-knit teams to rugby scrums. 
+As Sutherland told me, we got to that article, and said, "" That's it. "" In Sutherland's system, companies don't use large, massive projects that take two years. 
+They do things in small chunks. 
+Nothing takes longer than two weeks. 
+So instead of saying, "" You guys go off into that bunker and come back with a cell phone or a social network, "" you say, "" You go off and come up with one element, then bring it back. Let's talk about it. Let's adapt. "" You succeed or fail quickly. 
+Today, agile is used in a hundred countries, and it's sweeping into management suites. 
+Inevitably, people began taking some of these techniques and applying it to their families. 
+You had blogs pop up, and some manuals were written. 
+Even the Sutherlands told me that they had an Agile Thanksgiving, where you had one group of people working on the food, one setting the table, and one greeting visitors at the door. 
+Sutherland said it was the best Thanksgiving ever. 
+So let's take one problem that families face, crazy mornings, and talk about how agile can help. 
+A key plank is accountability, so teams use information radiators, these large boards in which everybody is accountable. 
+So the Starrs, in adapting this to their home, created a morning checklist in which each child is expected to tick off chores. 
+So on the morning I visited, Eleanor came downstairs, poured herself a cup of coffee, sat in a reclining chair, and she sat there, kind of amiably talking to each of her children as one after the other they came downstairs, checked the list, made themselves breakfast, checked the list again, put the dishes in the dishwasher, rechecked the list, fed the pets or whatever chores they had, checked the list once more, gathered their belongings, and made their way to the bus. 
+It was one of the most astonishing family dynamics I have ever seen. 
+And when I strenuously objected this would never work in our house, our kids needed way too much monitoring, Eleanor looked at me. 
+"" That's what I thought, "" she said. 
+"" I told David, 'keep your work out of my kitchen.' But I was wrong. "" So I turned to David: "" So why does it work? "" He said, "" You can't underestimate the power of doing this. "" And he made a checkmark. 
+He said, "" In the workplace, adults love it. 
+With kids, it's heaven. "" The week we introduced a morning checklist into our house, it cut parental screaming in half. (Laughter) But the real change didn't come until we had these family meetings. 
+So following the agile model, we ask three questions: What worked well in our family this week, what didn't work well, and what will we agree to work on in the week ahead? 
+Everyone throws out suggestions and then we pick two to focus on. 
+And suddenly the most amazing things started coming out of our daughters' mouths. 
+What worked well this week? 
+Getting over our fear of riding bikes. Making our beds. 
+What didn't work well? Our math sheets, or greeting visitors at the door. 
+Like a lot of parents, our kids are something like Bermuda Triangles. 
+Like, thoughts and ideas go in, but none ever comes out, I mean at least not that are revealing. 
+This gave us access suddenly to their innermost thoughts. 
+But the most surprising part was when we turned to, what are we going to work on in the week ahead? 
+You know, the key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves, and it works in software and it turns out that it works with kids. 
+Our kids love this process. 
+So they would come up with all these ideas. 
+You know, greet five visitors at the door this week, get an extra 10 minutes of reading before bed. 
+Kick someone, lose desserts for a month. 
+It turns out, by the way, our girls are little Stalins. 
+We constantly have to kind of dial them back. 
+Now look, naturally there's a gap between their kind of conduct in these meetings and their behavior the rest of the week, but the truth is it didn't really bother us. 
+It felt like we were kind of laying these underground cables that wouldn't light up their world for many years to come. 
+Three years later — our girls are almost eight now — We're still holding these meetings. 
+My wife counts them among her most treasured moments as a mom. 
+So what did we learn? 
+The word "" agile "" entered the lexicon in 2001 when Jeff Sutherland and a group of designers met in Utah and wrote a 12-point Agile Manifesto. 
+I think the time is right for an Agile Family Manifesto. 
+I've taken some ideas from the Starrs and from many other families I met. 
+I'm proposing three planks. 
+Plank number one: Adapt all the time. 
+When I became a parent, I figured, you know what? 
+We'll set a few rules and we'll stick to them. 
+That assumes, as parents, we can anticipate every problem that's going to arise. 
+We can't. What's great about the agile system is you build in a system of change so that you can react to what's happening to you in real time. 
+It's like they say in the Internet world: if you're doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you're doing the wrong thing. 
+Parents can learn a lot from that. 
+But to me, "" adapt all the time "" means something deeper, too. 
+We have to break parents out of this straitjacket that the only ideas we can try at home are ones that come from shrinks or self-help gurus or other family experts. 
+The truth is, their ideas are stale, whereas in all these other worlds there are these new ideas to make groups and teams work effectively. 
+Let's just take a few examples. 
+Let's take the biggest issue of all: family dinner. 
+Everybody knows that having family dinner with your children is good for the kids. 
+But for so many of us, it doesn't work in our lives. 
+I met a celebrity chef in New Orleans who said, "" No problem, I'll just time-shift family dinner. 
+I'm not home, can't make family dinner? 
+We'll have family breakfast. We'll meet for a bedtime snack. 
+We'll make Sunday meals more important. "" And the truth is, recent research backs him up. 
+It turns out there's only 10 minutes of productive time in any family meal. 
+The rest of it's taken up with "" take your elbows off the table "" and "" pass the ketchup. "" You can take that 10 minutes and move it to any part of the day and have the same benefit. 
+So time-shift family dinner. That's adaptability. 
+An environmental psychologist told me, "" If you're sitting in a hard chair on a rigid surface, you'll be more rigid. 
+If you're sitting on a cushioned chair, you'll be more open. "" She told me, "" When you're discipling your children, sit in an upright chair with a cushioned surface. 
+The conversation will go better. "" My wife and I actually moved where we sit for difficult conversations because I was sitting above in the power position. 
+So move where you sit. That's adaptability. 
+The point is there are all these new ideas out there. 
+We've got to hook them up with parents. 
+So plank number one: Adapt all the time. 
+Be flexible, be open-minded, let the best ideas win. 
+Plank number two: Empower your children. 
+Our instinct as parents is to order our kids around. 
+It's easier, and frankly, we're usually right. 
+There's a reason that few systems have been more waterfall over time than the family. 
+But the single biggest lesson we learned is to reverse the waterfall as much as possible. 
+Enlist the children in their own upbringing. 
+Just yesterday, we were having our family meeting, and we had voted to work on overreacting. 
+So we said, "" Okay, give us a reward and give us a punishment. Okay? "" So one of my daughters threw out, you get five minutes of overreacting time all week. 
+So we kind of liked that. 
+But then her sister started working the system. 
+She said, "" Do I get one five-minute overreaction or can I get 10 30-second overreactions? "" I loved that. Spend the time however you want. 
+Now give us a punishment. Okay. 
+If we get 15 minutes of overreaction time, that's the limit. 
+Every minute above that, we have to do one pushup. 
+So you see, this is working. Now look, this system isn't lax. 
+There's plenty of parental authority going on. 
+But we're giving them practice becoming independent, which of course is our ultimate goal. 
+Just as I was leaving to come here tonight, one of my daughters started screaming. 
+The other one said, "" Overreaction! Overreaction! "" and started counting, and within 10 seconds it had ended. 
+To me that is a certified agile miracle. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And by the way, research backs this up too. 
+Children who plan their own goals, set weekly schedules, evaluate their own work build up their frontal cortex and take more control over their lives. 
+The point is, we have to let our children succeed on their own terms, and yes, on occasion, fail on their own terms. 
+I was talking to Warren Buffett's banker, and he was chiding me for not letting my children make mistakes with their allowance. 
+And I said, "" But what if they drive into a ditch? "" He said, "" It's much better to drive into a ditch with a $6 allowance than a $60,000-a-year salary or a $6 million inheritance. "" So the bottom line is, empower your children. 
+Plank number three: Tell your story. 
+Adaptability is fine, but we also need bedrock. 
+Jim Collins, the author of "" Good To Great, "" told me that successful human organizations of any kind have two things in common: they preserve the core, they stimulate progress. 
+So agile is great for stimulating progress, but I kept hearing time and again, you need to preserve the core. 
+So how do you do that? 
+Collins coached us on doing something that businesses do, which is define your mission and identify your core values. 
+So he led us through the process of creating a family mission statement. 
+We did the family equivalent of a corporate retreat. 
+We had a pajama party. 
+I made popcorn. Actually, I burned one, so I made two. 
+My wife bought a flip chart. 
+And we had this great conversation, like, what's important to us? 
+What values do we most uphold? 
+And we ended up with 10 statements. 
+We are travelers, not tourists. 
+We don't like dilemmas. We like solutions. 
+Again, research shows that parents should spend less time worrying about what they do wrong and more time focusing on what they do right, worry less about the bad times and build up the good times. 
+This family mission statement is a great way to identify what it is that you do right. 
+A few weeks later, we got a call from the school. 
+One of our daughters had gotten into a spat. 
+And suddenly we were worried, like, do we have a mean girl on our hands? 
+And we didn't really know what to do, so we called her into my office. 
+The family mission statement was on the wall, and my wife said, "" So, anything up there seem to apply? "" And she kind of looked down the list, and she said, "Bring people together?" 
+Suddenly we had a way into the conversation. 
+Another great way to tell your story is to tell your children where they came from. 
+Researchers at Emory gave children a simple "" what do you know "" test. 
+Do you know where your grandparents were born? 
+Do you know where your parents went to high school? 
+Do you know anybody in your family who had a difficult situation, an illness, and they overcame it? 
+The children who scored highest on this "" do you know "" scale had the highest self-esteem and a greater sense they could control their lives. 
+The "" do you know "" test was the single biggest predictor of emotional health and happiness. 
+As the author of the study told me, children who have a sense of — they're part of a larger narrative have greater self-confidence. 
+So my final plank is, tell your story. 
+Spend time retelling the story of your family's positive moments and how you overcame the negative ones. 
+If you give children this happy narrative, you give them the tools to make themselves happier. 
+I was a teenager when I first read "" Anna Karenina "" and its famous opening sentence, "" All happy families are alike. 
+Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. "" When I first read that, I thought, "" That sentence is inane. 
+Of course all happy families aren't alike. "" But as I began working on this project, I began changing my mind. 
+Recent scholarship has allowed us, for the first time, to identify the building blocks that successful families have. 
+I've mentioned just three here today: Adapt all the time, empower the children, tell your story. 
+Is it possible, all these years later, to say Tolstoy was right? 
+The answer, I believe, is yes. 
+When Leo Tolstoy was five years old, his brother Nikolay came to him and said he had engraved the secret to universal happiness on a little green stick, which he had hidden in a ravine on the family's estate in Russia. 
+If the stick were ever found, all humankind would be happy. 
+Tolstoy became consumed with that stick, but he never found it. 
+In fact, he asked to be buried in that ravine where he thought it was hidden. 
+He still lies there today, covered in a layer of green grass. 
+That story perfectly captures for me the final lesson that I learned: Happiness is not something we find, it's something we make. 
+Almost anybody who's looked at well-run organizations has come to pretty much the same conclusion. 
+Greatness is not a matter of circumstance. 
+It's a matter of choice. 
+You don't need some grand plan. You don't need a waterfall. 
+You just need to take small steps, accumulate small wins, keep reaching for that green stick. 
+In the end, this may be the greatest lesson of all. 
+What's the secret to a happy family? Try. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My name is Joseph, a Member of Parliament in Kenya. 
+Picture a Maasai village, and one evening, government soldiers come, surround the village and ask each elder to bring one boy to school. 
+That's how I went to school — pretty much a government guy pointing a gun and told my father, "" You have to make a choice. "" I walked very comfortably to this missionary school, that was run by an American missionary. 
+The first thing the American missionary gave me was a candy. 
+I had never in my life ever tasted candy. 
+So I said to myself, with all these hundred other boys, this is where I belong. 
+My family moved; we're nomads. 
+You slept in the bush, but you kept going. 
+All of a sudden I passed the national examination, found myself in a very beautiful high school in Kenya. 
+And I finished high school. 
+My mother still lived in a cow-dung hut, none of my brothers were going to school, and this man told me, "" Here, go. "" I got a scholarship to St. Lawrence University, Upstate New York; finished that. 
+And after that I went to Harvard Graduate School; finished that. 
+Every time, they sent scouts to make sure no one attacked them. 
+But these two people worked something out. 
+The blind man said, "" Look, I'm a very strong man but I can't see. "" The man with no legs says, "" I can see as far as the end of the world, but I can't save myself from a cat, or whatever animals. "" The blind man went down on his knees like this, and told the man with no legs to go over his back, and stood up. 
+So, this was told to me in a setup of elders. 
+And it's a really poor area. 
+And that man told me, "" So, here you are. 
+You've got a good education from America, you have a good life in America; what are you going to do for us? 
+We'll walk you, you lead us. "" The opportunity came. I was always thinking about that: "" What can I do to help my people? 
+Every time you go to an area where for 43 years of independence, we still don't have basic health facilities. 
+I'm leaving America. 
+My plan right now as I continue with introducing students to different fields — some become doctors, some lawyers — we want to produce a comprehensive group of people, students who can come back and help us see a community grow that is in the middle of a huge economic recession. 
+As I continue to be a Member of Parliament and as I continue listening to all of you talking about botany, health, democracy, new inventions, I'm hoping that one day in my own little community — which is 26,000 square km, maybe five times Rhode Island — with no roads, we'll be able to become a model to help others develop. 
+
+I want to talk about the election. 
+For the first time in the United States, a predominantly white group of voters voted for an African-American candidate for President. 
+And in fact Barack Obama did quite well. 
+He won 375 electoral votes. 
+And he won about 70 million popular votes more than any other presidential candidate — of any race, of any party — in history. 
+If you compare how Obama did against how John Kerry had done four years earlier — Democrats really like seeing this transition here, where almost every state becomes bluer, becomes more democratic — even states Obama lost, like out west, those states became more blue. 
+In the south, in the northeast, almost everywhere but with a couple of exceptions here and there. 
+One exception is in Massachusetts. 
+That was John Kerry's home state. 
+No big surprise, Obama couldn't do better than Kerry there. 
+Or in Arizona, which is John McCain's home, Obama didn't have much improvement. 
+But there is also this part of the country, kind of in the middle region here. 
+This kind of Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, West Virginia region. 
+Now if you look at '96, Bill Clinton — the last Democrat to actually win — how he did in' 96, you see real big differences in this part of the country right here, the kind of Appalachians, Ozarks, highlands region, as I call it: 20 or 30 point swings from how Bill Clinton did in '96 to how Obama did in 2008. 
+Yes Bill Clinton was from Arkansas, but these are very, very profound differences. 
+So, when we think about parts of the country like Arkansas, you know. 
+There is a book written called, "" What's the Matter with Kansas? "" But really the question here — Obama did relatively well in Kansas. 
+He lost badly but every Democrat does. 
+He lost no worse than most people do. 
+But yeah, what's the matter with Arkansas? 
+(Laughter) And when we think of Arkansas we tend to have pretty negative connotations. 
+We think of a bunch of rednecks, quote, unquote, with guns. 
+And we think people like this probably don't want to vote for people who look like this and are named Barack Obama. 
+We think it's a matter of race. And is this fair? 
+Are we kind of stigmatizing people from Arkansas, and this part of the country? 
+And the answer is: it is at least partially fair. 
+We know that race was a factor, and the reason why we know that is because we asked those people. 
+Actually we didn't ask them, but when they conducted exit polls in every state, in 37 states, out of the 50, they asked a question, that was pretty direct, about race. 
+They asked this question. 
+In deciding your vote for President today, was the race of the candidate a factor? 
+We're looking for people that said, "" Yes, race was a factor; moreover it was an important factor, in my decision, "" and people who voted for John McCain as a result of that factor, maybe in combination with other factors, and maybe alone. 
+We're looking for this behavior among white voters or, really, non-black voters. 
+So you see big differences in different parts of the country on this question. 
+In Louisiana, about one in five white voters said, "" Yes, one of the big reasons why I voted against Barack Obama is because he was an African-American. "" If those people had voted for Obama, even half of them, Obama would have won Louisiana safely. 
+Same is true with, I think, all of these states you see on the top of the list. 
+Meanwhile, California, New York, we can say, "" Oh we're enlightened "" but you know, certainly a much lower incidence of this admitted, I suppose, manifestation of racially-based voting. 
+Here is the same data on a map. 
+You kind of see the relationship between the redder states of where more people responded and said, "Yes, Barack Obama's race was a problem for me." 
+You see, comparing the map to '96, you see an overlap here. 
+This really seems to explain why Barack Obama did worse in this one part of the country. 
+So we have to ask why. 
+Is racism predictable in some way? 
+Is there something driving this? 
+Is it just about some weird stuff that goes on in Arkansas that we don't understand, and Kentucky? 
+Or are there more systematic factors at work? 
+And so we can look at a bunch of different variables. 
+These are things that economists and political scientists look at all the time — things like income, and religion, education. 
+Which of these seem to drive this manifestation of racism in this big national experiment we had on November 4th? 
+And there are a couple of these that have strong predictive relationships, one of which is education, where you see the states with the fewest years of schooling per adult are in red, and you see this part of the country, the kind of Appalachians region, is less educated. It's just a fact. 
+And you see the relationship there with the racially-based voting patterns. 
+The other variable that's important is the type of neighborhood that you live in. 
+States that are more rural — even to some extent of the states like New Hampshire and Maine — they exhibit a little bit of this racially-based voting against Barack Obama. 
+So it's the combination of these two things: it's education and the type of neighbors that you have, which we'll talk about more in a moment. 
+And the thing about states like Arkansas and Tennessee is that they're both very rural, and they are educationally impoverished. 
+So yes, racism is predictable. 
+These things, among maybe other variables, but these things seem to predict it. 
+We're going to drill down a little bit more now, into something called the General Social Survey. 
+This is conducted by the University of Chicago every other year. 
+And they ask a series of really interesting questions. 
+In 2000 they had particularly interesting questions about racial attitudes. 
+One simple question they asked is, "Does anyone of the opposite race live in your neighborhood?" 
+We can see in different types of communities that the results are quite different. 
+In cites, about 80 percent of people have someone whom they consider a neighbor of another race, but in rural communities, only about 30 percent. 
+Probably because if you live on a farm, you might not have a lot of neighbors, period. 
+But nevertheless, you're not having a lot of interaction with people who are unlike you. 
+So what we're going to do now is take the white people in the survey and split them between those who have black neighbors — or, really, some neighbor of another race — and people who have only white neighbors. 
+And we see in some variables in terms of political attitudes, not a lot of difference. 
+This was eight years ago, some people were more Republican back then. 
+But you see Democrats versus Republican, not a big difference based on who your neighbors are. 
+And even some questions about race — for example affirmative action, which is kind of a political question, a policy question about race, if you will — not much difference here. 
+Affirmative action is not very popular frankly, with white voters, period. 
+But people with black neighbors and people with mono-racial neighborhoods feel no differently about it really. 
+But if you probe a bit deeper and get a bit more personal if you will, "Do you favor a law banning interracial marriage?" 
+There is a big difference. 
+People who don't have neighbors of a different race are about twice as likely to oppose interracial marriage as people who do. 
+Just based on who lives in your immediate neighborhood around you. 
+And likewise they asked, not in 2000, but in the same survey in 1996, "Would you not vote for a qualified black president?" 
+You see people without neighbors who are African-American who were much more likely to say, "" That would give me a problem. "" So it's really not even about urban versus rural. 
+It's about who you live with. 
+Racism is predictable. And it's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races. 
+So if you want to address it, the goal is to facilitate interaction with people of other races. 
+I have a couple of very obvious, I suppose, ideas for maybe how to do that. 
+I'm a big fan of cities. 
+Especially if we have cites that are diverse and sustainable, and can support people of different ethnicities and different income groups. 
+I think cities facilitate more of the kind of networking, the kind of casual interaction than you might have on a daily basis. 
+But also not everyone wants to live in a city, certainly not a city like New York. 
+So we can think more about things like street grids. 
+This is the neighborhood where I grew up in East Lansing, Michigan. 
+It's a traditional Midwestern community, which means you have real grid. 
+You have real neighborhoods and real trees, and real streets you can walk on. 
+And you interact a lot with your neighbors — people you like, people you might not know. 
+And as a result it's a very tolerant community, which is different, I think, than something like this, which is in Schaumburg, Illinois, where every little set of houses has their own cul-de-sac and drive-through Starbucks and stuff like that. 
+I think that actually this type of urban design, which became more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s — I think there is a relationship between that and the country becoming more conservative under Ronald Reagan. 
+But also here is another idea we have — is an intercollegiate exchange program where you have students going from New York abroad. 
+But frankly there are enough differences within the country now where maybe you can take a bunch of kids from NYU, have them go study for a semester at the University of Arkansas, and vice versa. Do it at the high school level. 
+Literally there are people who might be in school in Arkansas or Tennessee and might never interact in a positive affirmative way with someone from another part of the country, or of another racial group. 
+I think part of the education variable we talked about before is the networking experience you get when you go to college where you do get a mix of people that you might not interact with otherwise. 
+But the point is, this is all good news, because when something is predictable, it is what I call designable. 
+You can start thinking about solutions to solving that problem, even if the problem is pernicious and as intractable as racism. 
+If we understand the root causes of the behavior and where it manifests itself and where it doesn't, we can start to design solutions to it. 
+So that's all I have to say. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Good morning everybody. 
+I'd like to talk about a couple of things today. 
+The first thing is water. 
+Now I see you've all been enjoying the water that's been provided for you here at the conference, over the past couple of days. 
+And I'm sure you'll feel that it's from a safe source. 
+But what if it wasn't? 
+What if it was from a source like this? 
+Then statistics would actually say that half of you would now be suffering with diarrhea. 
+I talked a lot in the past about statistics, and the provision of safe drinking water for all. 
+But they just don't seem to get through. 
+And I think I've worked out why. 
+It's because, using current thinking, the scale of the problem just seems too huge to contemplate solving. 
+So we just switch off: us, governments and aid agencies. 
+Well, today, I'd like to show you that through thinking differently, the problem has been solved. 
+By the way, since I've been speaking, another 13,000 people around the world are suffering now with diarrhea. 
+And four children have just died. 
+I invented Lifesaver bottle because I got angry. 
+I, like most of you, was sitting down, the day after Christmas in 2004, when I was watching the devastating news of the Asian tsunami as it rolled in, playing out on TV. 
+The days and weeks that followed, people fleeing to the hills, being forced to drink contaminated water or face death. 
+That really stuck with me. 
+Then, a few months later, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the side of America. 
+"Okay," I thought, "here's a First World country, let's see what they can do." 
+Day one: nothing. 
+Day two: nothing. 
+Do you know it took five days to get water to the Superdome? 
+People were shooting each other on the streets for TV sets and water. 
+That's when I decided I had to do something. 
+Now I spent a lot of time in my garage, over the next weeks and months, and also in my kitchen — much to the dismay of my wife. (Laughter) However, after a few failed prototypes, I finally came up with this, the Lifesaver bottle. 
+Okay, now for the science bit. 
+Before Lifesaver, the best hand filters were only capable of filtering down to about 200 nanometers. 
+The smallest bacteria is about 200 nanometers. 
+So a 200-nanometer bacteria is going to get through a 200-nanometer hole. 
+The smallest virus, on the other hand, is about 25 nanometers. 
+So that's definitely going to get through those 200 nanometer holes. 
+Lifesaver pores are 15 nanometers. 
+So nothing is getting through. 
+Okay, I'm going to give you a bit of a demonstration. 
+Would you like to see that? 
+I spent all the time setting this up, so I guess I should. 
+We're in the fine city of Oxford. 
+So — someone's done that up. 
+Fine city of Oxford, so what I've done is I've gone and got some water from the River Cherwell, and the River Thames, that flow through here. And this is the water. 
+But I got to thinking, you know, if we were in the middle of a flood zone in Bangladesh, the water wouldn't look like this. 
+So I've gone and got some stuff to add into it. 
+And this is from my pond. 
+(Sniffs) (Coughs) Have a smell of that, mister cameraman. 
+Okay. (Laughs) Right. 
+We're just going to pour that in there. 
+Audience: Ugh! 
+Michael Pritchard: Okay. We've got some runoff from a sewage plant farm. 
+So I'm just going to put that in there. 
+(Laughter) Put that in there. There we go. (Laughter) 
+And some other bits and pieces, chuck that in there. 
+And I've got a gift here from a friend of mine's rabbit. 
+So we're just going to put that in there as well. 
+(Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) Now. 
+The Lifesaver bottle works really simply. 
+You just scoop the water up. 
+Today I'm going to use a jug just to show you all. Let's get a bit of that poo in there. 
+That's not dirty enough. Let's just stir that up a little bit. 
+Okay, so I'm going to take this really filthy water, and put it in here. Do you want a drink yet? 
+(Laughter) Okay. There we go. 
+Replace the top. 
+Give it a few pumps. Okay? 
+That's all that's necessary. 
+Now as soon as I pop the teat, sterile drinking water is going to come out. 
+I've got to be quick. Okay, ready? 
+There we go. Mind the electrics. 
+That is safe, sterile drinking water. 
+(Applause) Cheers. (Applause) 
+There you go Chris. (Applause) 
+What's it taste of? 
+Chris Anderson: Delicious. 
+Michael Pritchard: Okay. 
+Let's see Chris's program throughout the rest of the show. Okay? 
+(Laughter) Okay. Lifesaver bottle is used by thousands of people around the world. 
+It'll last for 6,000 liters. 
+And when it's expired, using failsafe technology, the system will shut off, protecting the user. 
+Pop the cartridge out. Pop a new one in. 
+It's good for another 6,000 liters. 
+So let's look at the applications. 
+Traditionally, in a crisis, what do we do? 
+We ship water. 
+Then, after a few weeks, we set up camps. 
+And people are forced to come into the camps to get their safe drinking water. 
+What happens when 20,000 people congregate in a camp? 
+Diseases spread. More resources are required. 
+The problem just becomes self-perpetuating. 
+But by thinking differently, and shipping these, people can stay put. 
+They can make their own sterile drinking water, and start to get on with rebuilding their homes and their lives. 
+Now, it doesn't require a natural disaster for this to work. 
+Using the old thinking, of national infrastructure and pipe work, is too expensive. 
+When you run the numbers on a calculator, you run out of noughts. 
+So here is the "" thinking different "" bit. 
+Instead of shipping water, and using man-made processes to do it, let's use Mother Nature. She's got a fantastic system. 
+She picks the water up from there, desalinates it, for free, transports it over there, and dumps it onto the mountains, rivers, and streams. 
+And where do people live? Near water. 
+All we've go to do is make it sterile. How do we do that? 
+Well, we could use the Lifesaver bottle. 
+Or we could use one of these. 
+The same technology, in a jerry can. 
+This will process 25,000 liters of water; that's good enough for a family of four, for three years. 
+And how much does it cost? 
+About half a cent a day to run. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) So, by thinking differently, and processing water at the point of use, mothers and children no longer have to walk four hours a day to collect their water. 
+They can get it from a source nearby. 
+So with just eight billion dollars, we can hit the millennium goal's target of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water. 
+To put that into context, The U.K. government spends about 12 billion pounds a year on foreign aid. 
+But why stop there? 
+With 20 billion dollars, everyone can have access to safe drinking water. 
+So the three-and-a-half billion people that suffer every year as a result, and the two million kids that die every year, will live. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Restaurants and the food industry in general are pretty much the most wasteful industry in the world. 
+For every calorie of food that we consume here in Britain today, 10 calories are taken to produce it. 
+That's a lot. 
+I want to take something rather humble to discuss. 
+I found this in the farmers' market today, and if anybody wants to take it home and mash it later, you're very welcome to. 
+The humble potato — and I've spent a long time, 25 years, preparing these. 
+And it pretty much goes through eight different forms in its lifetime. 
+First of all, it's planted, and that takes energy. 
+It grows and is nurtured. 
+It's then harvested. 
+It's then distributed, and distribution is a massive issue. 
+It's then sold and bought, and it's then delivered to me. 
+I basically take it, prepare it, and then people consume it — hopefully they enjoy it. 
+The last stage is basically waste, and this is is pretty much where everybody disregards it. 
+There are different types of waste. 
+There's a waste of time; there's a waste of space; there's a waste of energy; and there's a waste of waste. 
+And every business I've been working on over the past five years, I'm trying to lower each one of these elements. 
+Okay, so you ask what a sustainable restaurant looks like. 
+Basically a restaurant just like any other. 
+This is the restaurant, Acorn House. 
+Front and back. 
+So let me run you through a few ideas. 
+Floor: sustainable, recyclable. 
+Chairs: recycled and recyclable. 
+Tables: Forestry Commission. 
+This is Norwegian Forestry Commission wood. 
+This bench, although it was uncomfortable for my mom — she didn't like sitting on it, so she went and bought these cushions for me from a local jumble sale — reusing, a job that was pretty good. 
+I hate waste, especially walls. 
+If they're not working, put a shelf on it, which I did, and that shows all the customers my products. 
+The whole business is run on sustainable energy. 
+This is powered by wind. All of the lights are daylight bulbs. 
+Paint is all low-volume chemical, which is very important when you're working in the room all the time. 
+I was experimenting with these — I don't know if you can see it — but there's a work surface there. 
+And that's a plastic polymer. 
+And I was thinking, well I'm trying to think nature, nature, nature. 
+But I thought, no, no, experiment with resins, experiment with polymers. 
+Will they outlive me? They probably might. 
+Right, here's a reconditioned coffee machine. 
+It actually looks better than a brand new one — so looking good there. 
+Now reusing is vital. 
+And we filter our own water. 
+We put them in bottles, refrigerate them, and then we reuse that bottle again and again and again. 
+Here's a great little example. 
+If you can see this orange tree, it's actually growing in a car tire, which has been turned inside out and sewn up. 
+It's got my compost in it, which is growing an orange tree, which is great. 
+This is the kitchen, which is in the same room. 
+I basically created a menu that allowed people to choose the amount and volume of food that they wanted to consume. 
+Rather than me putting a dish down, they were allowed to help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted. 
+Okay, it's a small kitchen. It's about five square meters. 
+It serves 220 people a day. 
+We generate quite a lot of waste. 
+This is the waste room. 
+You can't get rid of waste. 
+But this story's not about eliminating it, it's about minimizing it. 
+In here, I have produce and boxes that are unavoidable. 
+I put my food waste into this dehydrating, desiccating macerator — turns food into an inner material, which I can store and then compost later. 
+I compost it in this garden. 
+All of the soil you can see there is basically my food, which is generated by the restaurant, and it's growing in these tubs, which I made out of storm-felled trees and wine casks and all kinds of things. 
+Three compost bins — go through about 70 kilos of raw vegetable waste a week — really good, makes fantastic compost. 
+A couple of wormeries in there too. 
+And actually one of the wormeries was a big wormery. I had a lot of worms in it. 
+And I tried taking the dried food waste, putting it to the worms, going, "" There you go, dinner. "" It was like vegetable jerky, and killed all of them. 
+I don't know how many worms [were] in there, but I've got some heavy karma coming, I tell you. 
+(Laughter) What you're seeing here is a water filtration system. 
+This takes the water out of the restaurant, runs it through these stone beds — this is going to be mint in there — and I sort of water the garden with it. 
+And I ultimately want to recycle that, put it back into the loos, maybe wash hands with it, I don't know. 
+So, water is a very important aspect. 
+I started meditating on that and created a restaurant called Waterhouse. 
+If I could get Waterhouse to be a no-carbon restaurant that is consuming no gas to start with, that would be great. 
+I managed to do it. 
+This restaurant looks a little bit like Acorn House — same chairs, same tables. 
+They're all English and a little bit more sustainable. 
+But this is an electrical restaurant. 
+The whole thing is electric, the restaurant and the kitchen. 
+And it's run on hydroelectricity, so I've gone from air to water. 
+Now it's important to understand that this room is cooled by water, heated by water, filters its own water, and it's powered by water. 
+It literally is Waterhouse. 
+The air handling system inside it — I got rid of air-conditioning because I thought there was too much consumption going on there. 
+This is basically air-handling. 
+I'm taking the temperature of the canal outside, pumping it through the heat exchange mechanism, it's turning through these amazing sails on the roof, and that, in turn, is falling softly onto the people in the restaurant, cooling them, or heating them, as the need may be. 
+And this is an English willow air diffuser, and that's softly moving that air current through the room. 
+Very advanced, no air-conditioning — I love it. 
+In the canal, which is just outside the restaurant, there is hundreds of meters of coil piping. 
+This takes the temperature of the canal and turns it into this four-degrees of heat exchange. 
+I have no idea how it works, but I paid a lot of money for it. 
+(Laughter) And what's great is one of the chefs who works in that restaurant lives on this boat — it's off-grid; it generates all its own power. 
+He's growing all his own fruit, and that's fantastic. 
+There's no accident in names of these restaurants. 
+Acorn House is the element of wood; Waterhouse is the element of water; and I'm thinking, well, I'm going to be making five restaurants based on the five Chinese medicine acupuncture specialities. 
+I've got water and wood. I'm just about to do fire. 
+I've got metal and earth to come. 
+So you've got to watch your space for that. 
+Okay. So this is my next project. 
+Five weeks old, it's my baby, and it's hurting real bad. 
+The People's Supermarket. 
+So basically, the restaurants only really hit people who believed in what I was doing anyway. 
+What I needed to do was get food out to a broader spectrum of people. 
+So people — i.e., perhaps, more working-class — or perhaps people who actually believe in a cooperative. 
+This is a social enterprise, not-for-profit cooperative supermarket. 
+It really is about the social disconnect between food, communities in urban settings and their relationship to rural growers — connecting communities in London to rural growers. 
+Really important. 
+So I'm committing to potatoes; I'm committing to milk; I'm committing to leeks and broccoli — all very important stuff. 
+I've kept the tiles; I've kept the floors; I've kept the trunking; I've got in some recycled fridges; I've got some recycled tills; I've got some recycled trolleys. 
+I mean, the whole thing is is super-sustainable. 
+In fact, I'm trying and I'm going to make this the most sustainable supermarket in the world. 
+That's zero food waste. 
+And no one's doing that just yet. 
+In fact, Sainsbury's, if you're watching, let's have a go. Try it on. 
+I'm going to get there before you. 
+So nature doesn't create waste doesn't create waste as such. 
+Everything in nature is used up in a closed continuous cycle with waste being the end of the beginning, and that's been something that's been nurturing me for some time, and it's an important statement to understand. 
+If we don't stand up and make a difference and think about sustainable food, think about the sustainable nature of it, then we may fail. 
+But, I wanted to get up and show you that we can do it if we're more responsible. 
+Environmentally conscious businesses are doable. 
+They're here. You can see I've done three so far; I've got a few more to go. 
+The idea is embryonic. 
+I think it's important. 
+I think that if we reduce, reuse, refuse and recycle — right at the end there — recycling is the last point I want to make; but it's the four R's, rather than the three R's — then I think we're going to be on our way. 
+So these three are not perfect — they're ideas. 
+I think that there are many problems to come, but with help, I'm sure I'm going to find solutions. 
+And I hope you all take part. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+When I was growing up in Montana, I had two dreams. 
+I wanted to be a paleontologist, a dinosaur paleontologist, and I wanted to have a pet dinosaur. 
+And so that's what I've been striving for all of my life. 
+I was very fortunate early in my career. 
+I was fortunate in finding things. 
+I wasn't very good at reading things. 
+In fact, I don't read much of anything. 
+I am extremely dyslexic, and so reading is the hardest thing I do. 
+But instead, I go out and I find things. 
+Then I just pick things up. 
+I basically practice for finding money on the street. 
+(Laughter) And I wander about the hills, and I have found a few things. 
+And I have been fortunate enough to find things like the first eggs in the Western hemisphere and the first baby dinosaurs in nests, the first dinosaur embryos and massive accumulations of bones. 
+And it happened to be at a time when people were just starting to begin to realize that dinosaurs weren't the big, stupid, green reptiles that people had thought for so many years. 
+People were starting to get an idea that dinosaurs were special. 
+And so, at that time, I was able to make some interesting hypotheses along with my colleagues. 
+We were able to actually say that dinosaurs — based on the evidence we had — that dinosaurs built nests and lived in colonies and cared for their young, brought food to their babies and traveled in gigantic herds. 
+So it was pretty interesting stuff. 
+I have gone on to find more things and discover that dinosaurs really were very social. 
+We have found a lot of evidence that dinosaurs changed from when they were juveniles to when they were adults. 
+The appearance of them would have been different — which it is in all social animals. 
+In social groups of animals, the juveniles always look different than the adults. 
+The adults can recognize the juveniles; the juveniles can recognize the adults. 
+And so we're making a better picture of what a dinosaur looks like. 
+And they didn't just all chase Jeeps around. 
+(Laughter) But it is that social thing that I guess attracted Michael Crichton. 
+And in his book, he talked about the social animals. 
+And then Steven Spielberg, of course, depicts these dinosaurs as being very social creatures. 
+The theme of this story is building a dinosaur, and so we come to that part of "" Jurassic Park. "" Michael Crichton really was one of the first people to talk about bringing dinosaurs back to life. 
+You all know the story, right. 
+I mean, I assume everyone here has seen "" Jurassic Park. "" If you want to make a dinosaur, you go out, you find yourself a piece of petrified tree sap — otherwise known as amber — that has some blood-sucking insects in it, good ones, and you get your insect and you drill into it and you suck out some DNA, because obviously all insects that sucked blood in those days sucked dinosaur DNA out. 
+And you take your DNA back to the laboratory and you clone it. 
+And I guess you inject it into maybe an ostrich egg, or something like that, and then you wait, and, lo and behold, out pops a little baby dinosaur. 
+And everybody's happy about that. 
+(Laughter) And they're happy over and over again. 
+They keep doing it; they just keep making these things. 
+And then, then, then, and then... 
+Then the dinosaurs, being social, act out their socialness, and they get together, and they conspire. 
+And, of course, that's what makes Steven Spielberg's movie — conspiring dinosaurs chasing people around. 
+So I assume everybody knows that if you actually had a piece of amber and it had an insect in it, and you drilled into it, and you got something out of that insect, and you cloned it, and you did it over and over and over again, you'd have a room full of mosquitos. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And probably a whole bunch of trees as well. 
+Now if you want dinosaur DNA, I say go to the dinosaur. 
+So that's what we've done. 
+Back in 1993 when the movie came out, we actually had a grant from the National Science Foundation to attempt to extract DNA from a dinosaur, and we chose the dinosaur on the left, a Tyrannosaurus rex, which was a very nice specimen. 
+And one of my former doctoral students, Dr. Mary Schweitzer, actually had the background to do this sort of thing. 
+And so she looked into the bone of this T. rex, one of the thigh bones, and she actually found some very interesting structures in there. 
+They found these red circular-looking objects, and they looked, for all the world, like red blood cells. 
+And they're in what appear to be the blood channels that go through the bone. 
+And so she thought, well, what the heck. 
+So she sampled some material out of it. 
+Now it wasn't DNA; she didn't find DNA. 
+But she did find heme, which is the biological foundation of hemoglobin. 
+And that was really cool. 
+That was interesting. 
+That was — here we have 65-million-year-old heme. 
+Well we tried and tried and we couldn't really get anything else out of it. 
+So a few years went by, and then we started the Hell Creek Project. 
+And the Hell Creek Project was this massive undertaking to get as many dinosaurs as we could possibly find, and hopefully find some dinosaurs that had more material in them. 
+And out in eastern Montana there's a lot of space, a lot of badlands, and not very many people, and so you can go out there and find a lot of stuff. 
+And we did find a lot of stuff. 
+We found a lot of Tyrannosaurs, but we found one special Tyrannosaur, and we called it B-rex. 
+And B-rex was found under a thousand cubic yards of rock. 
+It wasn't a very complete T. rex, and it wasn't a very big T. rex, but it was a very special B-rex. 
+And I and my colleagues cut into it, and we were able to determine, by looking at lines of arrested growth, some lines in it, that B-rex had died at the age of 16. 
+We don't really know how long dinosaurs lived, because we haven't found the oldest one yet. 
+But this one died at the age of 16. 
+We gave samples to Mary Schweitzer, and she was actually able to determine that B-rex was a female based on medullary tissue found on the inside of the bone. 
+Medullary tissue is the calcium build-up, the calcium storage basically, when an animal is pregnant, when a bird is pregnant. 
+So here was the character that linked birds and dinosaurs. 
+But Mary went further. 
+She took the bone, and she dumped it into acid. 
+Now we all know that bones are fossilized, and so if you dump it into acid, there shouldn't be anything left. 
+But there was something left. 
+There were blood vessels left. 
+There were flexible, clear blood vessels. 
+And so here was the first soft tissue from a dinosaur. 
+It was extraordinary. 
+But she also found osteocytes, which are the cells that laid down the bones. 
+And try and try, we could not find DNA, but she did find evidence of proteins. 
+But we thought maybe — well, we thought maybe that the material was breaking down after it was coming out of the ground. 
+We thought maybe it was deteriorating very fast. 
+And so we built a laboratory in the back of an 18-wheeler trailer, and actually took the laboratory to the field where we could get better samples. 
+And we did. We got better material. 
+The cells looked better. 
+The vessels looked better. 
+Found the protein collagen. 
+I mean, it was wonderful stuff. 
+But it's not dinosaur DNA. 
+So we have discovered that dinosaur DNA, and all DNA, just breaks down too fast. 
+We're just not going to be able to do what they did in "" Jurassic Park. "" We're not going to be able to make a dinosaur based on a dinosaur. 
+But birds are dinosaurs. 
+Birds are living dinosaurs. 
+We actually classify them as dinosaurs. 
+We now call them non-avian dinosaurs and avian dinosaurs. 
+So the non-avian dinosaurs are the big clunky ones that went extinct. 
+Avian dinosaurs are our modern birds. 
+So we don't have to make a dinosaur because we already have them. 
+(Laughter) I know, you're as bad as the sixth-graders. (Laughter) 
+The sixth-graders look at it and they say, "" No. "" (Laughter) "" You can call it a dinosaur, but look at the velociraptor: the velociraptor is cool. "" (Laughter) "The chicken is not." (Laughter) 
+So this is our problem, as you can imagine. 
+The chicken is a dinosaur. 
+I mean it really is. 
+You can't argue with it because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) But the sixth-graders demand it. 
+"Fix the chicken." 
+(Laughter) So that's what I'm here to tell you about: how we are going to fix a chicken. 
+So we have a number of ways that we actually can fix the chicken. 
+Because evolution works, we actually have some evolutionary tools. 
+We'll call them biological modification tools. 
+We have selection. 
+And we know selection works. 
+We started out with a wolf-like creature and we ended up with a Maltese. 
+I mean, that's — that's definitely genetic modification. 
+Or any of the other funny-looking little dogs. 
+We also have transgenesis. 
+Transgenesis is really cool too. 
+That's where you take a gene out of one animal and stick it in another one. 
+That's how people make GloFish. 
+You take a glow gene out of a coral or a jellyfish and you stick it in a zebrafish, and, puff, they glow. 
+And that's pretty cool. 
+And they obviously make a lot of money off of them. 
+And now they're making Glow-rabbits and Glow-all-sorts-of-things. 
+I guess we could make a glow chicken. 
+(Laughter) But I don't think that'll satisfy the sixth-graders either. 
+But there's another thing. 
+There's what we call atavism activation. 
+And atavism activation is basically — an atavism is an ancestral characteristic. 
+You heard that occasionally children are born with tails, and it's because it's an ancestral characteristic. 
+And so there are a number of atavisms that can happen. 
+Snakes are occasionally born with legs. 
+And here's an example. 
+This is a chicken with teeth. 
+A fellow by the name of Matthew Harris at the University of Wisconsin in Madison actually figured out a way to stimulate the gene for teeth, and so was able to actually turn the tooth gene on and produce teeth in chickens. 
+Now that's a good characteristic. 
+We can save that one. 
+We know we can use that. 
+We can make a chicken with teeth. 
+That's getting closer. 
+That's better than a glowing chicken. 
+(Laughter) A friend of mine, a colleague of mine, Dr. Hans Larsson at McGill University, is actually looking at atavisms. 
+And he's looking at them by looking at the embryo genesis of birds and actually looking at how they develop, and he's interested in how birds actually lost their tail. 
+He's also interested in the transformation of the arm, the hand, to the wing. 
+He's looking for those genes as well. 
+And I said, "" Well, if you can find those, I can just reverse them and make what I need to make for the sixth-graders. "" And so he agreed. 
+And so that's what we're looking into. 
+If you look at dinosaur hands, a velociraptor has that cool-looking hand with the claws on it. 
+Archaeopteryx, which is a bird, a primitive bird, still has that very primitive hand. 
+But as you can see, the pigeon, or a chicken or anything else, another bird, has kind of a weird-looking hand, because the hand is a wing. 
+But the cool thing is that, if you look in the embryo, as the embryo is developing the hand actually looks pretty much like the archaeopteryx hand. 
+It has the three fingers, the three digits. 
+But a gene turns on that actually fuses those together. 
+And so what we're looking for is that gene. 
+We want to stop that gene from turning on, fusing those hands together, so we can get a chicken that hatches out with a three-fingered hand, like the archaeopteryx. 
+And the same goes for the tails. 
+Birds have basically rudimentary tails. 
+And so we know that in embryo, as the animal is developing, it actually has a relatively long tail. 
+But a gene turns on and resorbs the tail, gets rid of it. 
+So that's the other gene we're looking for. 
+We want to stop that tail from resorbing. 
+So what we're trying to do really is take our chicken, modify it and make the chickenosaurus. 
+(Laughter) It's a cooler-looking chicken. 
+But it's just the very basics. 
+So that really is what we're doing. 
+And people always say, "" Why do that? 
+Why make this thing? 
+What good is it? "" Well, that's a good question. 
+Actually, I think it's a great way to teach kids about evolutionary biology and developmental biology and all sorts of things. 
+And quite frankly, I think if Colonel Sanders was to be careful how he worded it, he could actually advertise an extra piece. 
+(Laughter) Anyway — When our dino-chicken hatches, it will be, obviously, the poster child, or what you might call a poster chick, for technology, entertainment and design. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. 
+This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford. 
+I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England in 1650. 
+That's its great claim to fame, and I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment. 
+And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people were drinking there. 
+Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank — both elite and mass folks drank — day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. 
+Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. 
+You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin — particularly around 1650 — and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. 
+That was the healthy choice — right — because the water wasn't safe to drink. 
+And so, effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. 
+And you can imagine what that would be like, right, in your own life — and I know this is true of some of you — if you were drinking all day, and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. 
+You would be sharper and more alert. 
+And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee. 
+But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. 
+It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. 
+It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. 
+This was their conjugal bed, in a sense — ideas would get together there. 
+And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story. 
+I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years, because I've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. 
+What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? 
+What's the kind of environmental — what is the space of creativity? 
+And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse; I've looked at media environments, like the world wide web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rainforests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation; and what I've been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. 
+Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives, or our own organizations, or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? 
+And I think I've found a few. 
+But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation. 
+We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. 
+We have the kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight, we have epiphanies, we have "" eureka! "" moments, we have the lightbulb moments, right? 
+All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing, it's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment. 
+But in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. 
+I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. 
+An idea — a new idea — is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. 
+It's a new configuration that has never formed before. 
+And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? 
+And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain. 
+So the metaphor I'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent — a lot more recent than the 1650s. 
+A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero, who has a company called... an organization called Design That Matters. 
+They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of, you know, the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. 
+One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know, by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically — it's very simple — we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. 
+So, the technology is there. 
+These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. 
+The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a mid-sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. 
+And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and then it ends up being useless. 
+So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts? 
+And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. 
+There's a Toyota Forerunner on the street in all these places. 
+They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. 
+So they started to think, "" Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts? "" And this is what they ended up coming with. 
+It's called a "" neonurture device. "" From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern, Western hospital. 
+In the inside, it's all car parts. 
+It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm — it runs off a car battery. 
+And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. 
+Now, that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. 
+We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state-of-the-art technology, but more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby. 
+We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. 
+That's really where innovation happens. 
+And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right. 
+I mean, this is one vision of it. 
+Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. 
+This is a statue from Oxford. 
+You know, you're sitting there thinking a deep thought, and the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. 
+In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this, right. 
+This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. 
+This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions — people from different backgrounds. 
+So, if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that — strangely enough — look a little bit more like this. 
+This is what your office should look like, is part of my message here. 
+And one of the problems with this is that people are actually — when you research this field — people are notoriously unreliable, when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas. 
+And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. 
+He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. 
+So when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all these things. 
+And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened. 
+And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image — you know, they're pouring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample. 
+And "" oh, eureka, "" they've got the idea. 
+What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope. 
+They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering. 
+And something about that environment — and I've started calling it the "" liquid network, "" where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other — that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation. 
+The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames. 
+So they want to tell the story of the "" eureka! "" moment. 
+They want to say, "" There I was, I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head. "" But in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods — I call this the "" slow hunch. "" We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. 
+They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. 
+They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but they can't quite solve. 
+Darwin is a great example of this. 
+Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic "" eureka! "" moment. 
+He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. 
+And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says, "" Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work. "" That's in his autobiography. 
+About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. 
+And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. 
+And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838. 
+There are passages where you can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has this epiphany. 
+And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it yet. 
+And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time. 
+Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life, right? 
+It's hard to go to your boss and say, "" I have an excellent idea for our organization. 
+It will be useful in 2020. 
+Could you just give me some time to do that? "" Now a couple of companies — like Google — they have innovation time off, 20 percent time, where, in a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. 
+But that's a key thing. 
+And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often happens. 
+You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. 
+So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, you know, building barricades, having secretive R & D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. 
+But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them. 
+And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values, and it's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways. 
+It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched, and we're in Laurel Maryland, at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. 
+And it's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. 
+And of course, this is nerd heaven, right? 
+There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened." 
+And two of them, two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. 
+And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. 
+And they start talking, and one of them says, "" Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? 
+There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. 
+We could probably hear it, if we tune in. "" And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, "" No, I hadn't thought of doing that. 
+That's an interesting idea. "" And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office. 
+And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they start kind of noodling around — hacking, as we might call it now. 
+And after a couple of hours, they actually start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track. 
+It was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax, basically. 
+So they made it really easy to find it. 
+So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start kind of coming into the office and saying, "Wow, that's pretty cool. Can I hear? Wow, that's great." 
+And before long, they think, "" Well jeez, this is kind of historic. 
+We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. 
+We should record it. "" And so they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep, bleeps. 
+And they start writing the kind of date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. 
+And they they start thinking, "" Well gosh, you know, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. 
+We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling, if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect. "" And then they played around with it a little bit more, and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties. 
+And they said, "" Jeez, you know, we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it's farthest away. 
+That's pretty cool. "" And eventually, they get permission — this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description. 
+They get permission to use the new, you know, UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that they'd just gotten at the APL. 
+They run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning. 
+A couple weeks later their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "" Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. 
+You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. 
+Could you go the other way? 
+Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground, if you knew the location of the satellite? "" And they thought about it and they said, "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." 
+So they went back, and they thought about it. 
+And they came back and said, "" Actually, it'll be easier. "" And he said, "" Oh, that's great. 
+Because see, I have these new nuclear submarines that I'm building. 
+And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow, if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. 
+So we're thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. 
+Could you work on that problem? "" And that's how GPS was born. 
+30 years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. 
+And now, I guarantee you certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. 
+And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last — (Laughter) in the last day or last week, right? 
+(Applause) And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power, the marvelous, kind of unplanned emergent, unpredictable power of open innovative systems. 
+When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of. 
+I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were fighting the Cold War, and then it turns out they're just helping somebody find a soy latte. 
+(Laughter) That is how innovation happens. 
+Chance favors the connected mind. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I grew up in East Los Angeles, not even realizing I was poor. 
+My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets. 
+Everyone knew who I was, so I thought I was a pretty big deal, and I was protected, and even though my dad spent most of my life in and out of jail, I had an amazing mom who was just fiercely independent. 
+She worked at the local high school as a secretary in the dean's office, so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class, for whatever reason, who were waiting to be disciplined. 
+Man, her office was packed. 
+So, see, kids like us, we have a lot of things to deal with outside of school, and sometimes we're just not ready to focus. 
+But that doesn't mean that we can't. 
+It just takes a little bit more. 
+Like, I remember one day I found my dad convulsing, foaming at the mouth, OD-ing on the bathroom floor. 
+Really, do you think that doing my homework that night was at the top of my priority list? 
+Not so much. 
+But I really needed a support network, a group of people who were going to help me make sure that I wasn't going to be a victim of my own circumstance, that they were going to push me beyond what I even thought I could do. 
+I needed teachers, in the classroom, every day, who were going to say, "" You can move beyond that. "" And unfortunately, the local junior high was not going to offer that. 
+It was gang-infested, huge teacher turnover rate. 
+So my mom said, "" You're going on a bus an hour and a half away from where we live every day. "" So for the next two years, that's what I did. 
+And eventually, I ended up at a school where there was a mixture. 
+There were some people who were really gang-affiliated, and then there were those of us really trying to make it to high school. 
+Well, trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable. 
+You had to survive. 
+You just had to do things sometimes. 
+So there were a lot of teachers who were like, "" She's never going to make it. 
+She has an issue with authority. 
+She's not going to go anywhere. "" Some teachers completely wrote me off as a lost cause. 
+But then, they were very surprised when I graduated from high school. 
+I was accepted to Pepperdine University, and I came back to the same school that I attended to be a special ed assistant. 
+And then I told them, "" I want to be a teacher. "" And boy, they were like, "" What? Why? 
+Why would you want to do that? "" So I began my teaching career at the exact same middle school that I attended, and I really wanted to try to save more kids who were just like me. 
+And so every year, I share my background with my kids, because they need to know that everyone has a story, everyone has a struggle, and everyone needs help along the way. 
+And I am going to be their help along the way. 
+So as a rookie teacher, I created opportunity. 
+I had a kid one day come into my class having been stabbed the night before. 
+I was like, "" You need to go to a hospital, the school nurse, something. "" He's like, "" No, Miss, I'm not going. 
+I need to be in class because I need to graduate. "" So he knew that I was not going to let him be a victim of his circumstance, but we were going to push forward and keep moving on. 
+And this idea of creating a safe haven for our kids and getting to know exactly what they're going through, getting to know their families — I wanted that, but I couldn't do it in a school with 1,600 kids, and teachers turning over year after year after year. 
+How do you get to build those relationships? 
+So we created a new school. 
+And we created the San Fernando Institute for Applied Media. 
+And we made sure that we were still attached to our school district for funding, for support. 
+But with that, we were going to gain freedom: freedom to hire the teachers that we knew were going to be effective; freedom to control the curriculum so that we're not doing lesson 1.2 on page five, no; and freedom to control a budget, to spend money where it matters, not how a district or a state says you have to do it. 
+We wanted those freedoms. 
+But now, shifting an entire paradigm, it hasn't been an easy journey, nor is it even complete. 
+Our community deserved a new way of doing things. 
+And as the very first pilot middle school in all of Los Angeles Unified School District, you better believe there was some opposition. 
+And it was out of fear — fear of, well, what if they get it wrong? 
+Yeah, what if we get it wrong? 
+But what if we get it right? 
+So even though teachers were against it because we employ one-year contracts — you can't teach, or you don't want to teach, you don't get to be at my school with my kids. 
+Well, we're making school worth coming to every day. 
+We make our kids feel like they matter to us. 
+We make our curriculum rigorous and relevant to them, and they use all the technology that they're used to. 
+Animation, software, moviemaking software, they have it all. 
+And because we connect it to what they're doing — For example, they made public service announcements for the Cancer Society. 
+These were played in the local trolley system. 
+Teaching elements of persuasion, it doesn't get any more real than that. 
+Our state test scores have gone up more than 80 points since we've become our own school. 
+But it's taken all stakeholders, working together — teachers and principals on one-year contracts, working over and above and beyond their contract hours without compensation. 
+And it takes a school board member who is going to lobby for you and say, "" Know, the district is trying to impose this, but you have the freedom to do otherwise. "" And it takes an active parent center who is not only there, showing a presence every day, but who is part of our governance, making decisions for their kids, our kids. 
+Because why should our students have to go so far away from where they live? 
+They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood, a school that they can be proud to say they attend, and a school that the community can be proud of as well, and they need teachers to fight for them every day and empower them to move beyond their circumstances. 
+Because it's time that kids like me stop being the exception, and we become the norm. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is Charley Williams. 
+He was 94 when this photograph was taken. 
+In the 1930s, Roosevelt put thousands and thousands of Americans back to work by building bridges and infrastructure and tunnels, but he also did something interesting, which was to hire a few hundred writers to scour America to capture the stories of ordinary Americans. 
+Charley Williams, a poor sharecropper, wouldn't ordinarily be the subject of a big interview, but Charley had actually been a slave until he was 22 years old. 
+And the stories that were captured of his life make up one of the crown jewels of histories, of human-lived experiences filled with ex-slaves. 
+Anna Deavere Smith famously said that there's a literature inside of each of us, and three generations later, I was part of a project called StoryCorps, which set out to capture the stories of ordinary Americans by setting up a soundproof booth in public spaces. 
+The idea is very, very simple. 
+You go into these booths, you interview your grandmother or relative, you leave with a copy of the interview and an interview goes into the Library of Congress. 
+It's essentially a way to make a national oral histories archive one conversation at a time. 
+And the question is, who do you want to remember — if you had just 45 minutes with your grandmother? 
+What's interesting, in conversations with the founder, Dave Isay, we always actually talked about this as a little bit of a subversive project, because when you think about it, it's actually not really about the stories that are being told, it's about listening, and it's about the questions that you get to ask, questions that you may not have permission to on any other day. 
+I'm going to play you just a couple of quick excerpts from the project. 
+[Jesus Melendez talking about poet Pedro Pietri's final moments] Jesus Melendez: We took off, and as we were ascending, before we had leveled off, our level-off point was 45,000 feet, so before we had leveled off, Pedro began leaving us, and the beauty about it is that I believe that there's something after life. 
+You can see it in Pedro. 
+[Danny Perasa to his wife Annie Perasa married 26 years] Danny Perasa: See, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say "" I love you "" to you, and I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me, it's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio, and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house. 
+(Laughter) [Michael Wolmetz with his girlfriend Debora Brakarz] Michael Wolmetz: So this is the ring that my father gave to my mother, and we can leave it there. 
+And he saved up and he purchased this, and he proposed to my mother with this, and so I thought that I would give it to you so that he could be with us for this also. 
+So I'm going to share a mic with you right now, Debora. 
+Where's the right finger? 
+Debora Brakarz: (Crying) MW: Debora, will you please marry me? 
+DB: Yes. Of course. I love you. 
+(Kissing) MW: So kids, this is how your mother and I got married, in a booth in Grand Central Station with my father's ring. 
+My grandfather was a cab driver for 40 years. 
+He used to pick people up here every day. 
+So it seems right. 
+Jake Barton: So I have to say I did not actually choose those individual samples to make you cry because they all make you cry. 
+The entire project is predicated on this act of love which is listening itself. 
+And that motion of building an institution out of a moment of conversation and listening is actually a lot of what my firm, Local Projects, is doing with our engagements in general. 
+So we're a media design firm, and we're working with a broad array of different institutions building media installations for museums and public spaces. 
+Our latest engagement is the Cleveland Museum of Art, which we've created an engagement called Gallery One for. 
+And Gallery One is an interesting project because it started with this massive, $350 million expansion for the Cleveland Museum of Art, and we actually brought in this piece specifically to grow new capacity, new audiences, at the same time that the museum itself is growing. 
+Glenn Lowry, the head of MoMA, put it best when he said, "" We want visitors to actually cease being visitors. 
+Visitors are transient. We want people who live here, people who have ownership. "" And so what we're doing is making a broad array of different ways for people to actually engage with the material inside of these galleries, so you can still have a traditional gallery experience, but if you're interested, you can actually engage with any individual artwork and see the original context from where it's from, or manipulate the work itself. 
+So, for example, you can click on this individual lion head, and this is where it originated from, 1300 B.C. 
+Or this individual piece here, you can see the actual bedroom. It really changes the way you think about this type of a tempera painting. 
+This is one of my favorites because you see the studio itself. 
+This is Rodin's bust. You get the sense of this incredible factory for creativity. 
+And it makes you think about literally the hundreds or thousands of years of human creativity and how each individual artwork stands in for part of that story. 
+This is Picasso, of course embodying so much of it from the 20th century. 
+And so our next interface, which I'll show you, actually leverages that idea of this lineage of creativity. 
+It's an algorithm that actually allows you to browse the actual museum's collection using facial recognition. 
+So this person's making different faces, and it's actually drawing forth different objects from the collection that connect with exactly how she's looking. 
+And so you can imagine that, as people are performing inside of the museum itself, you get this sense of this emotional connection, this way in which our face connects with the thousands and tens of thousands of years. 
+This is an interface that actually allows you to draw and then draws forth objects using those same shapes. 
+So more and more we're trying to find ways for people to actually author things inside of the museums themselves, to be creative even as they're looking at other people's creativity and understanding them. 
+So in this wall, the collections wall, you can actually see all 3,000 artworks all at the same time, and you can actually author your own individual walking tours of the museum, so you can share them, and someone can take a tour with the museum director or a tour with their little cousin. 
+But all the while that we've been working on this engagement for Cleveland, we've also been working in the background on really our largest engagement to date, and that's the 9 / 11 Memorial and Museum. 
+So we started in 2006 as part of a team with Thinc Design to create the original master plan for the museum, and then we've done all the media design both for the museum and the memorial and then the media production. 
+So the memorial opened in 2011, and the museum's going to open next year in 2014. 
+And you can see from these images, the site is so raw and almost archaeological. 
+And of course the event itself is so recent, somewhere between history and current events, it was a huge challenge to imagine how do you actually live up to a space like this, an event like this, to actually tell that story. 
+And so what we started with was really a new way of thinking about building an institution, through a project called Make History, which we launched in 2009. 
+So it's estimated that a third of the world watched 9 / 11 live, and a third of the world heard about it within 24 hours, making it really by nature of when it happened, this unprecedented moment of global awareness. 
+And so we launched this to capture the stories from all around the world, through video, through photos, through written history, and so people's experiences on that day, which was, in fact, this huge risk for the institution to make its first move this open platform. 
+But that was coupled together with this oral histories booth, really the simplest we've ever made, where you locate yourself on a map. 
+It's in six languages, and you can tell your own story about what happened to you on that day. 
+And when we started seeing the incredible images and stories that came forth from all around the world — this is obviously part of the landing gear — we really started to understand that there was this amazing symmetry between the event itself, between the way that people were telling the stories of the event, and how we ourselves needed to tell that story. 
+This image in particular really captured our attention at the time, because it so much sums up that event. 
+This is a shot from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. 
+There's a firefighter that's stuck, actually, in traffic, and so the firefighters themselves are running a mile and a half to the site itself with upwards of 70 pounds of gear on their back. 
+And we got this amazing email that said, "" While viewing the thousands of photos on the site, I unexpectedly found a photo of my son. 
+It was a shock emotionally, yet a blessing to find this photo, "" and he was writing because he said, "" I'd like to personally thank the photographer for posting the photo, as it meant more than words can describe to me to have access to what is probably the last photo ever taken of my son. "" And it really made us recognize what this institution needed to be in order to actually tell that story. 
+We can't have just a historian or a curator narrating objectively in the third person about an event like that, when you have the witnesses to history who are going to make their way through the actual museum itself. 
+And so we started imagining the museum, along with the creative team at the museum and the curators, thinking about how the first voice that you would hear inside the museum would actually be of other visitors. 
+And so we created this idea of an opening gallery called We Remember. 
+And I'll just play you part of a mockup of it, but you get a sense of what it's like to actually enter into that moment in time and be transported back in history. 
+(Video) Voice 1: I was in Honolulu, Hawaii. Voice 2: I was in Cairo, Egypt. 
+Voice 3: Sur les Champs-Élysées, à Paris. Voice 4: In college, at U.C. Berkeley. 
+Voice 5: I was in Times Square. Voice 6: São Paolo, Brazil. 
+(Multiple voices) Voice 7: It was probably about 11 o'clock at night. 
+Voice 8: I was driving to work at 5: 45 local time in the morning. 
+Voice 9: We were actually in a meeting when someone barged in and said, "Oh my God, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center." 
+Voice 10: Trying to frantically get to a radio. 
+Voice 11: When I heard it over the radio — Voice 12: Heard it on the radio. 
+(Multiple voices) Voice 13: I got a call from my father. Voice 14: The phone rang, it woke me up. 
+My business partner told me to turn on the television. 
+Voice 15: So I switched on the television. 
+Voice 16: All channels in Italy were displaying the same thing. 
+Voice 17: The Twin Towers. Voice 18: The Twin Towers. 
+JB: And you move from there into that open, cavernous space. 
+This is the so-called slurry wall. 
+It's the original, excavated wall at the base of the World Trade Center that withstood the actual pressure from the Hudson River for a full year after the event itself. 
+And so we thought about carrying that sense of authenticity, of presence of that moment into the actual exhibition itself. 
+And we tell the stories of being inside the towers through that same audio collage, so you're hearing people literally talking about seeing the planes as they make their way into the building, or making their way down the stairwells. 
+And as you make your way into the exhibition where it talks about the recovery, we actually project directly onto these moments of twisted steel all of the experiences from people who literally excavated on top of the pile itself. 
+And so you can hear oral histories — so people who were actually working the so-called bucket brigades as you're seeing literally the thousands of experiences from that moment. 
+And as you leave that storytelling moment understanding about 9 / 11, we then turn the museum back into a moment of listening and actually talk to the individual visitors and ask them their own experiences about 9 / 11. 
+And we ask them questions that are actually not really answerable, the types of questions that 9 / 11 itself draws forth for all of us. 
+And so these are questions like, "How can a democracy balance freedom and security?" 
+"How could 9 / 11 have happened?" 
+"And how did the world change after 9 / 11?" 
+And so these oral histories, which we've actually been capturing already for years, are then mixed together with interviews that we're doing with people like Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and you mix together these different players and these different experiences, these different reflection points about 9 / 11. 
+And suddenly the institution, once again, turns into a listening experience. 
+So I'll play you just a short excerpt of a mockup that we made of a couple of these voices, but you really get a sense of the poetry of everyone's reflection on the event. 
+(Video) Voice 1: 9 / 11 was not just a New York experience. 
+Voice 2: It's something that we shared, and it's something that united us. 
+Voice 3: And I knew when I saw that, people who were there that day who immediately went to help people known and unknown to them was something that would pull us through. 
+Voice 4: All the outpouring of affection and emotion that came from our country was something really that will forever, ever stay with me. 
+Voice 5: Still today I pray and think about those who lost their lives, and those who gave their lives to help others, but I'm also reminded of the fabric of this country, the love, the compassIon, the strength, and I watched a nation come together in the middle of a terrible tragedy. 
+JB: And so as people make their way out of the museum, reflecting on the experience, reflecting on their own thoughts of it, they then move into the actual space of the memorial itself, because they've gone back up to grade, and we actually got involved in the memorial after we'd done the museum for a few years. 
+The original designer of the memorial, Michael Arad, had this image in his mind of all the names appearing undifferentiated, almost random, really a poetic reflection on top of the nature of a terrorism event itself, but it was a huge challenge for the families, for the foundation, certainly for the first responders, and there was a negotiation that went forth and a solution was found to actually create not an order in terms of chronology, or in terms of alphabetical, but through what's called meaningful adjacency. 
+So these are groupings of the names themselves which appear undifferentiated but actually have an order, and we, along with Jer Thorp, created an algorithm to take massive amounts of data to actually start to connect together all these different names themselves. 
+So this is an image of the actual algorithm itself with the names scrambled for privacy, but you can see that these blocks of color are actually the four different flights, the two different towers, the first responders, and you can actually see within that different floors, and then the green lines are the interpersonal connections that were requested by the families themselves. 
+And so when you go to the memorial, you can actually see the overarching organization inside of the individual pools themselves. 
+You can see the way that the geography of the event is reflected inside of the memorial, and you can search for an individual name, or in this case an employer, Cantor Fitzgerald, and see the way in which all of those names, those hundreds of names, are actually organized onto the memorial itself, and use that to navigate the memorial. 
+And more importantly, when you're actually at the site of the memorial, you can see those connections. 
+You can see the relationships between the different names themselves. 
+So suddenly what is this undifferentiated, anonymous group of names springs into reality as an individual life. 
+In this case, Harry Ramos, who was the head trader at an investment bank, who stopped to aid Victor Wald on the 55th floor of the South Tower. 
+And Ramos told Wald, according to witnesses, "I'm not going to leave you." 
+And Wald's widow requested that they be listed next to each other. 
+Three generations ago, we had to actually get people to go out and capture the stories for common people. 
+Today, of course, there's an unprecedented amount of stories for all of us that are being captured for future generations. 
+And this is our hope, that's there's poetry inside of each of our stories. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Allow me to start this talk with a question to everyone. 
+You know that all over the world, people fight for their freedom, fight for their rights. 
+Some battle oppressive governments. 
+Others battle oppressive societies. 
+Which battle do you think is harder? 
+Allow me to try to answer this question in the few coming minutes. 
+Let me take you back two years ago in my life. 
+It was the bedtime of my son, Aboody. 
+He was five at the time. 
+After finishing his bedtime rituals, he looked at me and he asked a question: "Mommy, are we bad people?" 
+I was shocked. 
+"Why do you say such things, Aboody?" 
+Earlier that day, I noticed some bruises on his face when he came from school. 
+He wouldn't tell me what happened. 
+[But now] he was ready to tell. 
+"" Two boys hit me today in school. 
+They told me, 'We saw your mom on Facebook. 
+You and your mom should be put in jail. '"" I've never been afraid to tell Aboody anything. 
+I've been always a proud woman of my achievements. 
+But those questioning eyes of my son were my moment of truth, when it all came together. 
+You see, I'm a Saudi woman who had been put in jail for driving a car in a country where women are not supposed to drive cars. 
+Just for giving me his car keys, my own brother was detained twice, and he was harassed to the point he had to quit his job as a geologist, leave the country with his wife and two-year-old son. 
+My father had to sit in a Friday sermon listening to the imam condemning women drivers and calling them prostitutes amongst tons of worshippers, some of them our friends and family of my own father. 
+I was faced with an organized defamation campaign in the local media combined with false rumors shared in family gatherings, in the streets and in schools. 
+It all hit me. 
+It came into focus that those kids did not mean to be rude to my son. 
+They were just influenced by the adults around them. 
+And it wasn't about me, and it wasn't a punishment for taking the wheel and driving a few miles. 
+It was a punishment for daring to challenge the society's rules. 
+But my story goes beyond this moment of truth of mine. 
+Allow me to give you a briefing about my story. 
+It was May, 2011, and I was complaining to a work colleague about the harassments I had to face trying to find a ride back home, although I have a car and an international driver's license. 
+As long as I've known, women in Saudi Arabia have been always complaining about the ban, but it's been 20 years since anyone tried to do anything about it, a whole generation ago. 
+He broke the good / bad news in my face. 
+"But there is no law banning you from driving." 
+I looked it up, and he was right. 
+There wasn't an actual law in Saudi Arabia. 
+It was just a custom and traditions that are enshrined in rigid religious fatwas and imposed on women. 
+That realization ignited the idea of June 17, where we encouraged women to take the wheel and go drive. 
+It was a few weeks later, we started receiving all these "Man wolves will rape you if you go and drive." 
+A courageous woman, her name is Najla Hariri, she's a Saudi woman in the city of Jeddah, she drove a car and she announced but she didn't record a video. 
+We needed proof. 
+So I drove. I posted a video on YouTube. 
+And to my surprise, it got hundreds of thousands of views the first day. 
+What happened next, of course? 
+I started receiving threats to be killed, raped, just to stop this campaign. 
+The Saudi authorities remained very quiet. 
+That really creeped us out. 
+I was in the campaign with other Saudi women and even men activists. 
+We wanted to know how the authorities would respond on the actual day, June 17, when women go out and drive. 
+So this time I asked my brother to come with me and drive by a police car. 
+It went fast. We were arrested, signed a pledge not to drive again, released. 
+Arrested again, he was sent to detention for one day, and I was sent to jail. 
+I wasn't sure why I was sent there, because I didn't face any charges in the interrogation. 
+But what I was sure of was my innocence. 
+I didn't break a law, and I kept my abaya — it's a black cloak we wear in Saudi Arabia before we leave the house — and my fellow prisoners kept asking me to take it off, but I was so sure of my innocence, I kept saying, "No, I'm leaving today." 
+Outside the jail, the whole country went into a frenzy, some attacking me badly, and others supportive and even collecting signatures in a petition to be sent to the king to release me. 
+I was released after nine days. 
+June 17 comes. 
+The streets were packed with police cars and religious police cars, but some hundred brave Saudi women broke the ban and drove that day. 
+None were arrested. We broke the taboo. 
+(Applause) So I think by now, everyone knows that we can't drive, or women are not allowed to drive, in Saudi Arabia, but maybe few know why. 
+Allow me to help you answer this question. 
+There was this official study that was presented to the Shura Council — it's the consultative council appointed by the king in Saudi Arabia — and it was done by a local professor, a university professor. 
+He claims it's done based on a UNESCO study. 
+And the study states, the percentage of rape, adultery, illegitimate children, even drug abuse, prostitution in countries where women drive is higher than countries where women don't drive. 
+(Laughter) I know, I was like this, I was shocked. 
+I was like, "" We are the last country in the world where women don't drive. "" So if you look at the map of the world, that only leaves two countries: Saudi Arabia, and the other society is the rest of the world. 
+We started a hashtag on Twitter mocking the study, and it made headlines around the world. 
+[BBC News: 'End of virginity' if women drive, Saudi cleric warns] (Laughter) And only then we realized it's so empowering to mock your oppressor. 
+It strips it away of its strongest weapon: fear. 
+This system is based on ultra-conservative traditions and customs that deal with women as if they are inferior and they need a guardian to protect them, so they need to take permission from this guardian, whether verbal or written, all their lives. 
+We are minors until the day we die. 
+And it becomes worse when it's enshrined in religious fatwas based on wrong interpretation of the sharia law, or the religious laws. 
+What's worst, when they become codified as laws in the system, and when women themselves believe in their inferiority, and they even fight those who try to question these rules. 
+So for me, it wasn't only about these attacks I had to face. 
+It was about living two totally different perceptions of my personality, of my person — the villain back in my home country, and the hero outside. 
+Just to tell you, two stories happened in the last two years. 
+One of them is when I was in jail. 
+I'm pretty sure when I was in jail, everyone saw titles in the international media something like this during these nine days I was in jail. 
+But in my home country, it was a totally different picture. 
+It was more like this: "" Manal al-Sharif faces charges of disturbing public order and inciting women to drive. "" I know. 
+"Manal al-Sharif withdraws from the campaign." 
+Ah, it's okay. This is my favorite. 
+"" Manal al-Sharif breaks down and confesses: 'Foreign forces incited me.' "" (Laughter) And it goes on, even trial and flogging me in public. 
+So it's a totally different picture. 
+I was asked last year to give a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum. 
+I was surrounded by this love and the support of people around me, and they looked at me as an inspiration. 
+At the same time, I flew back to my home country, they hated that speech so much. 
+The way they called it: a betrayal to the Saudi country and the Saudi people, and they even started a hashtag called # OsloTraitor on Twitter. 
+Some 10,000 tweets were written in that hashtag, while the opposite hashtag, # OsloHero, there was like a handful of tweets written. 
+They even started a poll. 
+More than 13,000 voters answered this poll: whether they considered me a traitor or not after that speech. 
+Ninety percent said yes, she's a traitor. 
+So it's these two totally different perceptions of my personality. 
+For me, I'm a proud Saudi woman, and I do love my country, and because I love my country, I'm doing this. 
+Because I believe a society will not be free if the women of that society are not free. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. (Applause) 
+Thank you. 
+But you learn lessons from these things that happen to you. 
+I learned to be always there. 
+The first thing, I got out of jail, of course after I took a shower, I went online, I opened my Twitter account and my Facebook page, and I've been always very respectful to those people who are opining to me. 
+I would listen to what they say, and I would never defend myself with words only. 
+I would use actions. When they said I should withdraw from the campaign, I filed the first lawsuit against the general directorate of traffic police for not issuing me a driver's license. 
+There are a lot of people also — very big support, like those 3,000 people who signed the petition to release me. 
+We sent a petition to the Shura Council in favor of lifting the ban on Saudi women, and there were, like, 3,500 citizens who believed in that and they signed that petition. 
+There were people like that, I just showed some examples, who are amazing, who are believing in women's rights in Saudi Arabia, and trying, and they are also facing a lot of hate because of speaking up and voicing their views. 
+Saudi Arabia today is taking small steps toward enhancing women's rights. 
+The Shura Council that's appointed by the king, by royal decree of King Abdullah, last year there were 30 women assigned to that Council, like 20 percent. 
+20 percent of the Council. (Applause) The same time, finally, that Council, after rejecting our petition four times for women driving, they finally accepted it last February. (Applause) 
+After being sent to jail or sentenced lashing, or sent to a trial, the spokesperson of the traffic police said, we will only issue traffic violation for women drivers. 
+The Grand Mufti, who is the head of the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia, he said, it's not recommended for women to drive. 
+It used to be haram, forbidden, by the previous Grand Mufti. 
+So for me, it's not about only these small steps. 
+It's about women themselves. 
+A friend once asked me, she said, "So when do you think this women driving will happen?" 
+I told her, "" Only if women stop asking 'When?' and take action to make it now. "" So it's not only about the system, it's also about us women to drive our own life, I'd say. 
+So I have no clue, really, how I became an activist. 
+And I don't know how I became one now. 
+But all I know, and all I'm sure of, in the future when someone asks me my story, I will say, "" I'm proud to be amongst those women who lifted the ban, fought the ban, and celebrated everyone's freedom. "" So the question I started my talk with, who do you think is more difficult to face, oppressive governments or oppressive societies? 
+I hope you find clues to answer that from my speech. 
+Thank you, everyone. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Hi. I'm here to talk about congestion, namely road congestion. 
+Road congestion is a pervasive phenomenon. 
+It exists in basically all of the cities all around the world, which is a little bit surprising when you think about it. 
+I mean, think about how different cities are, actually. 
+I mean, you have the typical European cities, with a dense urban core, good public transportation mostly, not a lot of road capacity. 
+But then, on the other hand, you have the American cities. 
+It's moving by itself, okay. 
+Anyway, the American cities: lots of roads dispersed over large areas, almost no public transportation. 
+And then you have the emerging world cities, with a mixed variety of vehicles, mixed land-use patterns, also rather dispersed but often with a very dense urban core. 
+And traffic planners all around the world have tried lots of different measures: dense cities or dispersed cities, lots of roads or lots of public transport or lots of bike lanes or more information, or lots of different things, but nothing seems to work. 
+But all of these attempts have one thing in common. 
+They're basically attempts at figuring out what people should do instead of rush hour car driving. 
+They're essentially, to a point, attempts at planning what other people should do, planning their life for them. 
+Now, planning a complex social system is a very hard thing to do, and let me tell you a story. 
+Back in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, an urban planner in London got a phone call from a colleague in Moscow saying, basically, "" Hi, this is Vladimir. I'd like to know, who's in charge of London's bread supply? "" And the urban planner in London goes, "" What do you mean, who's in charge of London's — I mean, no one is in charge. "" "" Oh, but surely someone must be in charge. 
+I mean, it's a very complicated system. Someone must control all of this. "" "" No. No. No one is in charge. 
+I mean, it basically — I haven't really thought of it. 
+It basically organizes itself. "" It organizes itself. 
+That's an example of a complex social system which has the ability of self-organizing, and this is a very deep insight. 
+When you try to solve really complex social problems, the right thing to do is most of the time to create the incentives. 
+You don't plan the details, and people will figure out what to do, how to adapt to this new framework. 
+And let's now look at how we can use this insight to combat road congestion. 
+This is a map of Stockholm, my hometown. 
+Now, Stockholm is a medium-sized city, roughly two million people, but Stockholm also has lots of water and lots of water means lots of bridges — narrow bridges, old bridges — which means lots of road congestion. 
+And these red dots show the most congested parts, which are the bridges that lead into the inner city. 
+And then someone came up with the idea that, apart from good public transport, apart from spending money on roads, let's try to charge drivers one or two euros at these bottlenecks. 
+Now, one or two euros, that isn't really a lot of money, I mean compared to parking charges and running costs, etc., so you would probably expect that car drivers wouldn't really react to this fairly small charge. 
+You would be wrong. 
+One or two euros was enough to make 20 percent of cars disappear from rush hours. 
+Now, 20 percent, well, that's a fairly huge figure, you might think, but you've still got 80 percent left of the problem, right? 
+Because you still have 80 percent of the traffic. 
+Now, that's also wrong, because traffic happens to be a nonlinear phenomenon, meaning that once you reach above a certain capacity threshold then congestion starts to increase really, really rapidly. 
+But fortunately, it also works the other way around. 
+If you can reduce traffic even somewhat, then congestion will go down much faster than you might think. 
+Now, congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm on January 3, 2006, and the first picture here is a picture of Stockholm, one of the typical streets, January 2. 
+The first day with the congestion charges looked like this. 
+This is what happens when you take away 20 percent of the cars from the streets. 
+You really reduce congestion quite substantially. 
+But, well, as I said, I mean, car drivers adapt, right? 
+So after a while they would all come back because they have sort of gotten used to charges. 
+Wrong again. It's now six and a half years ago since the congestion charges were introduced in Stockholm, and we basically have the same low traffic levels still. 
+But you see, there's an interesting gap here in the time series in 2007. 
+Well, the thing is that, the congestion charges, they were introduced first as a trial, so they were introduced in January and then abolished again at the end of July, followed by a referendum, and then they were reintroduced again in 2007, which of course was a wonderful scientific opportunity. 
+I mean, this was a really fun experiment to start with, and we actually got to do it twice. 
+And personally, I would like to do this every once a year or so, but they won't let me do that. 
+But it was fun anyway. 
+So, we followed up. What happened? 
+This is the last day with the congestion charges, July 31, and you see the same street but now it's summer, and summer in Stockholm is a very nice and light time of the year, and the first day without the congestion charges looked like this. 
+All the cars were back again, and you even have to admire the car drivers. They adapt so extremely quickly. 
+The first day they all came back. 
+And this effect hanged on. So 2007 figures looked like this. 
+Now these traffic figures are really exciting and a little bit surprising and very useful to know, but I would say that the most surprising slide here I'm going to show you today is not this one. It's this one. 
+This shows public support for congestion pricing of Stockholm, and you see that when congestion pricing were introduced in the beginning of Spring 2006, people were fiercely against it. 
+Seventy percent of the population didn't want this. 
+But what happened when the congestion charges were there is not what you would expect, that people hated it more and more. 
+No, on the contrary, they changed, up to a point where we now have 70 percent support for keeping the charges, meaning that — I mean, let me repeat that: 70 percent of the population in Stockholm want to keep a price for something that used to be free. 
+Okay. So why can that be? Why is that? 
+Well, think about it this way. Who changed? 
+I mean, the 20 percent of the car drivers that disappeared, surely they must be discontent in a way. 
+And where did they go? If we can understand this, then maybe we can figure out how people can be so happy with this. 
+Well, so we did this huge interview survey with lots of travel services, and tried to figure out who changed, and where did they go? 
+And it turned out that they don't know themselves. (Laughter) For some reason, the car drivers are — they are confident they actually drive the same way that they used to do. 
+And why is that? It's because that travel patterns are much less stable than you might think. 
+Each day, people make new decisions, and people change and the world changes around them, and each day all of these decisions are sort of nudged ever so slightly away from rush hour car driving in a way that people don't even notice. 
+They're not even aware of this themselves. 
+And the other question, who changed their mind? 
+Who changed their opinion, and why? 
+So we did another interview survey, tried to figure out why people changed their mind, and what type of group changed their minds? 
+And after analyzing the answers, it turned out that more than half of them believe that they haven't changed their minds. 
+They're actually confident that they have liked congestion pricing all along. 
+Which means that we are now in a position where we have reduced traffic across this toll cordon with 20 percent, and reduced congestion by enormous numbers, and people aren't even aware that they have changed, and they honestly believe that they have liked this all along. 
+This is the power of nudges when trying to solve complex social problems, and when you do that, you shouldn't try to tell people how to adapt. 
+You should just nudge them in the right direction. 
+And if you do it right, people will actually embrace the change, and if you do it right, people will actually even like it. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Pat Mitchell: You have brought us images from the Yemen Times. 
+And take us through those, and introduce us to another Yemen. 
+Nadia Al-Sakkaf: Well, I'm glad to be here. 
+And I would like to share with you all some of the pictures that are happening today in Yemen. 
+This picture shows a revolution started by women, and it shows women and men leading a mixed protest. 
+The other picture is the popularity of the real need for change. 
+So many people are there. 
+The intensity of the upspring. 
+This picture shows that the revolution has allowed opportunities for training, for education. 
+These women are learning about first aid and their rights according to the constitution. 
+I love this picture. 
+I just wanted to show that over 60 percent of the Yemeni population are 15 years and below. 
+And they were excluded from decision-making, and now they are in the forefront of the news, raising the flag. 
+English — you will see, this is jeans and tights, and an English expression — the ability to share with the world what is going on in our own country. 
+And expression also, it has brought talents. 
+Yemenis are using cartoons and art, paintings, comics, to tell the world and each other about what's going on. 
+Obviously, there's always the dark side of it. 
+And this is just one of the less-gruesome pictures of the revolution and the cost that we have to pay. 
+The solidarity of millions of Yemenis across the country just demanding the one thing. 
+And finally, lots of people are saying that Yemen's revolution is going to break the country. 
+Is it going to be so many different countries? 
+Is it going to be another Somalia? 
+But we want to tell the world that, no, under the one flag, we'll still remain as Yemeni people. 
+PM: Thank you for those images, Nadia. 
+And they do, in many ways, tell a different story than the story of Yemen, the one that is often in the news. 
+And yet, you yourself defy all those characterizations. 
+So let's talk about the personal story for a moment. 
+Your father is murdered. 
+The Yemen Times already has a strong reputation in Yemen as an independent English language newspaper. 
+How did you then make the decision and assume the responsibilities of running a newspaper, especially in such times of conflict? 
+NA: Well, let me first warn you that I'm not the traditional Yemeni girl. 
+I've guessed you've already noticed this by now. 
+(Laughter) In Yemen, most women are veiled and they are sitting behind doors and not very much part of the public life. 
+But there's so much potential. 
+I wish I could show you my Yemen. 
+I wish you could see Yemen through my eyes. 
+Then you would know that there's so much to it. 
+And I was privileged because I was born into a family, my father would always encourage the boys and the girls. 
+He would say we are equal. 
+And he was such an extraordinary man. 
+And even my mother — I owe it to my family. 
+A story: I studied in India. 
+And in my third year, I started becoming confused because I was Yemeni, but I was also mixing up with a lot of my friends in college. 
+And I went back home and I said, "" Daddy, I don't know who I am. 
+I'm not a Yemeni; I'm not an Indian. "" And he said, "" You are the bridge. "" And that is something I will keep in my heart forever. 
+So since then I've been the bridge, and a lot of people have walked over me. 
+PM: I don't think so. (Laughter) NA: But it just helps tell that some people are change agents in the society. 
+And when I became editor-in-chief after my brother actually — my father passed away in 1999, and then my brother until 2005 — and everybody was betting that I will not be able to do it. 
+"" What's this young girl coming in and showing off because it's her family business, "" or something. 
+It was very hard at first. 
+I didn't want to clash with people. 
+But with all due respect to all the men, and the older men especially, they did not want me around. 
+It was very hard, you know, to impose my authority. 
+But a woman's got to do what a woman's got to do. 
+(Applause) And in the first year, I had to fire half of the men. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Brought in more women. 
+Brought in younger men. 
+And we have a more gender-balanced newsroom today. 
+The other thing is that it's about professionalism. 
+It's about proving who you are and what you can do. 
+And I don't know if I'm going to be boasting now, but in 2006 alone, we won three international awards. 
+One of them is the IPI Free Media Pioneer Award. 
+So that was the answer to all the Yemeni people. 
+And I want to score a point here, because my husband is in the room over there. 
+If you could please stand up, [unclear]. 
+He has been very supportive of me. 
+(Applause) PM: And we should point out that he works with you as well at the paper. 
+But in assuming this responsibility and going about it as you have, you have become a bridge between an older and traditional society and the one that you are now creating at the paper. 
+And so along with changing who worked there, you must have come up against another positioning that we always run into, in particular with women, and it has to do with outside image, dress, the veiled woman. 
+So how have you dealt with this on a personal level as well as the women who worked for you? 
+NA: As you know, the image of a lot of Yemeni women is a lot of black and covered, veiled women. 
+And this is true. 
+And a lot of it is because women are not able, are not free, to show their face to their self. 
+It's a lot of traditional imposing coming by authority figures such as the men, the grandparents and so on. 
+And it's economic empowerment and the ability for a woman to say, "" I am as much contributing to this family, or more, than you are. "" And the more empowered the women become, the more they are able to remove the veil, for example, or to drive their own car or to have a job or to be able to travel. 
+So the other face of Yemen is actually one that lies behind the veil, and it's economic empowerment mostly that allows the woman to just uncover it. 
+And I have done this throughout my work. 
+I've tried to encourage young girls. 
+We started with, you can take it off in the office. 
+And then after that, you can take it off on assignments. 
+Because I didn't believe a journalist can be a journalist with — how can you talk to people if you have your face covered? — and so on; it's just a movement. 
+And I am a role model in Yemen. 
+A lot of people look up to me. 
+A lot of young girls look up to me. 
+And I need to prove to them that, yes, you can still be married, you can still be a mother, and you can still be respected within the society, but at the same time, that doesn't mean you [should] just be one of the crowd. 
+You can be yourself and have your face. 
+PM: But by putting yourself personally out there — both projecting a different image of Yemeni women, but also what you have made possible for the women who work at the paper — has this put you in personal danger? 
+NA: Well the Yemen Times, across 20 years, has been through so much. 
+We've suffered prosecution; the paper was closed down more than three times. 
+It's an independent newspaper, but tell that to the people in charge. 
+They think that if there's anything against them, then we are being an opposition newspaper. 
+And very, very difficult times. 
+Some of my reporters were arrested. 
+We had some court cases. 
+My father was assassinated. 
+Today, we are in a much better situation. 
+We've created the credibility. 
+And in times of revolution or change like today, it is very important for independent media to have a voice. 
+It's very important for you to go to YemenTimes.com, and it's very important to listen to our voice. 
+And this is probably something I'm going to share with you in Western media probably — and how there's a lot of stereotypes — thinking of Yemen in one single frame: this is what Yemen is all about. 
+And that's not fair. 
+It's not fair for me; it's not fair for my country. 
+A lot of reporters come to Yemen and they want to write a story on Al-Qaeda or terrorism. 
+And I just wanted to share with you: there's one reporter that came. 
+He wanted to do a documentary on what his editors wanted. 
+And he ended up writing about a story that even surprised me — hip hop — that there are young Yemeni men who express themselves through dancing and puchu puchu. 
+(Laughter) That thing. (PM: Rap. Break dancing.) Yeah, break dancing. 
+I'm not so old. 
+I'm just not in touch. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) PM: Yes, you are. 
+Actually, that's a documentary that's available online; the video's online. 
+NA: ShaketheDust.org. 
+PM: "" Shake the Dust. "" (NA: "" Shake the Dust. "") PM: ShaketheDust.org. 
+And it definitely does give a different image of Yemen. 
+You spoke about the responsibility of the press. 
+And certainly, when we look at the ways in which we have separated ourselves from others and we've created fear and danger, often from lack of knowledge, lack of real understanding, how do you see the way that the Western press in particular is covering this and all other stories out of the region, but in particular, in your country? 
+NA: Well there is a saying that says, "" You fear what you don't know, and you hate what you fear. "" So it's about the lack of research, basically. 
+It's almost, "" Do your homework, "" — some involvement. 
+And you cannot do parachute reporting — just jump into a country for two days and think that you've done your homework and a story. 
+So I wish that the world would know my Yemen, my country, my people. 
+I am an example, and there are others like me. 
+We may not be that many, but if we are promoted as a good, positive example, there will be others — men and women — who can eventually bridge the gap — again, coming to the bridge — between Yemen and the world and telling first about recognition and then about communication and compassion. 
+I think Yemen is going to be in a very bad situation in the next two or three years. 
+It's natural. 
+But after the two years, which is a price we are willing to pay, we are going to stand up again on our feet, but in the new Yemen with a younger and more empowered people — democratic. 
+(Applause) PM: Nadia, I think you've just given us a very different view of Yemen. 
+And certainly you yourself and what you do have given us a view of the future that we will embrace and be grateful for. 
+And the very best of luck to you. 
+YemenTimes.com. 
+NA: On Twitter also. 
+PM: So you are plugged in. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Raise your hand if you've ever been asked the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
+Now if you had to guess, how old would you say you were when you were first asked this question? 
+You can just hold up fingers. 
+Three. Five. Three. Five. Five. OK. 
+Now, raise your hand if the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
+has ever caused you any anxiety. 
+(Laughter) Any anxiety at all. 
+I'm someone who's never been able to answer the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
+See, the problem wasn't that I didn't have any interests — it's that I had too many. 
+In high school, I liked English and math and art and I built websites and I played guitar in a punk band called Frustrated Telephone Operator. 
+Maybe you've heard of us. 
+(Laughter) This continued after high school, and at a certain point, I began to notice this pattern in myself where I would become interested in an area and I would dive in, become all-consumed, and I'd get to be pretty good at whatever it was, and then I would hit this point where I'd start to get bored. 
+And usually I would try and persist anyway, because I had already devoted so much time and energy and sometimes money into this field. 
+But eventually this sense of boredom, this feeling of, like, yeah, I got this, this isn't challenging anymore — it would get to be too much. 
+And I would have to let it go. 
+But then I would become interested in something else, something totally unrelated, and I would dive into that, and become all-consumed, and I'd be like, "" Yes! I found my thing, "" and then I would hit this point again where I'd start to get bored. 
+And eventually, I would let it go. 
+But then I would discover something new and totally different, and I would dive into that. 
+This pattern caused me a lot of anxiety, for two reasons. 
+The first was that I wasn't sure how I was going to turn any of this into a career. 
+I thought that I would eventually have to pick one thing, deny all of my other passions, and just resign myself to being bored. 
+The other reason it caused me so much anxiety was a little bit more personal. 
+I worried that there was something wrong with this, and something wrong with me for being unable to stick with anything. 
+I worried that I was afraid of commitment, or that I was scattered, or that I was self-sabotaging, afraid of my own success. 
+If you can relate to my story and to these feelings, I'd like you to ask yourself a question that I wish I had asked myself back then. 
+Ask yourself where you learned to assign the meaning of wrong or abnormal to doing many things. 
+I'll tell you where you learned it: you learned it from the culture. 
+We are first asked the question "" What do you want to be when you grow up? "" when we're about five years old. 
+And the truth is that no one really cares what you say when you're that age. 
+(Laughter) It's considered an innocuous question, posed to little kids to elicit cute replies, like, "" I want to be an astronaut, "" or "" I want to be a ballerina, "" or "" I want to be a pirate. "" Insert Halloween costume here. (Laughter) 
+But this question gets asked of us again and again as we get older in various forms — for instance, high school students might get asked what major they're going to pick in college. 
+And at some point, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
+goes from being the cute exercise it once was to the thing that keeps us up at night. 
+See, while this question inspires kids to dream about what they could be, it does not inspire them to dream about all that they could be. 
+In fact, it does just the opposite, because when someone asks you what you want to be, you can't reply with 20 different things, though well-meaning adults will likely chuckle and be like, "" Oh, how cute, but you can't be a violin maker and a psychologist. 
+You have to choose. "" This is Dr. Bob Childs — (Laughter) and he's a luthier and psychotherapist. 
+And this is Amy Ng, a magazine editor turned illustrator, entrepreneur, teacher and creative director. 
+But most kids don't hear about people like this. 
+All they hear is that they're going to have to choose. 
+But it's more than that. 
+The notion of the narrowly focused life is highly romanticized in our culture. 
+It's this idea of destiny or the one true calling, the idea that we each have one great thing we are meant to do during our time on this earth, and you need to figure out what that thing is and devote your life to it. 
+But what if you're someone who isn't wired this way? 
+What if there are a lot of different subjects that you're curious about, and many different things you want to do? 
+Well, there is no room for someone like you in this framework. 
+And so you might feel alone. 
+You might feel like you don't have a purpose. 
+And you might feel like there's something wrong with you. 
+There's nothing wrong with you. 
+What you are is a multipotentialite. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits. 
+It's a mouthful to say. 
+It might help if you break it up into three parts: multi, potential, and ite. 
+You can also use one of the other terms that connote the same idea, such as polymath, the Renaissance person. 
+Actually, during the Renaissance period, it was considered the ideal to be well-versed in multiple disciplines. 
+Barbara Sher refers to us as "" scanners. "" Use whichever term you like, or invent your own. 
+I have to say I find it sort of fitting that as a community, we cannot agree on a single identity. 
+(Laughter) It's easy to see your multipotentiality as a limitation or an affliction that you need to overcome. 
+But what I've learned through speaking with people and writing about these ideas on my website, is that there are some tremendous strengths to being this way. 
+Here are three multipotentialite super powers. 
+One: idea synthesis. 
+That is, combining two or more fields and creating something new at the intersection. 
+Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx drew from their shared interests in cartography, data visualization, travel, mathematics and design, when they founded Meshu. 
+Meshu is a company that creates custom geographically-inspired jewelry. 
+Sha and Rachel came up with this unique idea not despite, but because of their eclectic mix of skills and experiences. 
+Innovation happens at the intersections. 
+That's where the new ideas come from. 
+And multipotentialites, with all of their backgrounds, are able to access a lot of these points of intersection. 
+The second multipotentialite superpower is rapid learning. 
+When multipotentialites become interested in something, we go hard. 
+We observe everything we can get our hands on. 
+We're also used to being beginners, because we've been beginners so many times in the past, and this means that we're less afraid of trying new things and stepping out of our comfort zones. 
+What's more, many skills are transferable across disciplines, and we bring everything we've learned to every new area we pursue, so we're rarely starting from scratch. 
+Nora Dunn is a full-time traveler and freelance writer. 
+As a child concert pianist, she honed an incredible ability to develop muscle memory. 
+Now, she's the fastest typist she knows. 
+(Laughter) Before becoming a writer, Nora was a financial planner. 
+She had to learn the finer mechanics of sales when she was starting her practice, and this skill now helps her write compelling pitches to editors. 
+It is rarely a waste of time to pursue something you're drawn to, even if you end up quitting. 
+You might apply that knowledge in a different field entirely, in a way that you couldn't have anticipated. 
+The third multipotentialite superpower is adaptability; that is, the ability to morph into whatever you need to be in a given situation. 
+Abe Cajudo is sometimes a video director, sometimes a web designer, sometimes a Kickstarter consultant, sometimes a teacher, and sometimes, apparently, James Bond. 
+(Laughter) He's valuable because he does good work. 
+He's even more valuable because he can take on various roles, depending on his clients' needs. 
+Fast Company magazine identified adaptability as the single most important skill to develop in order to thrive in the 21st century. 
+The economic world is changing so quickly and unpredictably that it is the individuals and organizations that can pivot in order to meet the needs of the market that are really going to thrive. 
+Idea synthesis, rapid learning and adaptability: three skills that multipotentialites are very adept at, and three skills that they might lose if pressured to narrow their focus. 
+As a society, we have a vested interest in encouraging multipotentialites to be themselves. 
+We have a lot of complex, multidimensional problems in the world right now, and we need creative, out-of-the-box thinkers to tackle them. 
+Now, let's say that you are, in your heart, a specialist. 
+You came out of the womb knowing you wanted to be a pediatric neurosurgeon. 
+Don't worry — there's nothing wrong with you, either. 
+(Laughter) In fact, some of the best teams are comprised of a specialist and multipotentialite paired together. 
+The specialist can dive in deep and implement ideas, while the multipotentialite brings a breadth of knowledge to the project. 
+It's a beautiful partnership. 
+But we should all be designing lives and careers that are aligned with how we're wired. 
+And sadly, multipotentialites are largely being encouraged simply to be more like their specialist peers. 
+So with that said, if there is one thing you take away from this talk, I hope that it is this: embrace your inner wiring, whatever that may be. 
+If you're a specialist at heart, then by all means, specialize. 
+That is where you'll do your best work. 
+But to the multipotentialites in the room, including those of you who may have just realized in the last 12 minutes that you are one — (Laughter) to you I say: embrace your many passions. 
+Follow your curiosity down those rabbit holes. 
+Explore your intersections. 
+Embracing our inner wiring leads to a happier, more authentic life. 
+And perhaps more importantly — multipotentialites, the world needs us. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My work focuses on the connection of both thinking about our community life being part of the environment where architecture grows from the natural local conditions and traditions. 
+Today I brought two recent projects as an example of this. 
+Both projects are in emerging countries, one in Ethiopia and another one in Tunisia. 
+And also they have in common that the different analyses from different perspectives becomes an essential part of the final piece of architecture. 
+The first example started with an invitation to design a multistory shopping mall in Ethiopia's capital city Addis Ababa. 
+And this is the type of building we were shown as an example, to my team and myself, of what we had to design. 
+At first, the first thing I thought was, I want to run away. 
+(Laughter) After seeing a few of these buildings — there are many in the city — we realized that they have three very big points. 
+First, these buildings, they are almost empty because they have very large shops where people cannot afford to buy things. 
+Second, they need tons of energy to perform because of the skin treatment with glass that creates heat in the inside, and then you need a lot of cooling. 
+In a city where this shouldn't happen because they have really mild weather that ranges from 20 to 25 degrees the whole year. 
+And third is that their image has nothing to do with Africa and with Ethiopia. 
+It is a pity in a place that has such rich culture and traditions. 
+Also during our first visit to Ethiopia, I was really captivated by the old merkato that is this open-air structure where thousands of people, they go and buy things every day from small vendors. 
+And also it has this idea of the public space that uses the outdoors to create activity. 
+So I thought, this is what I really want to design, not a shopping mall. 
+But the question was how we could do a multistory, contemporary building with these principles. 
+The next challenge was when we looked at the site, that is, in a really growing area of the city, where most of these buildings that you see in the image, they were not there. 
+And it's also between two parallel streets that don't have any connection for hundreds of meters. 
+So the first thing we did was to create a connection between these two streets, putting all the entrances of the building. 
+And this extends with an inclined atrium that creates an open-air space in the building that self-protects itself with its own shape from the sun and the rain. 
+And around this void we placed this idea of the market with small shops, that change in each floor because of the shape of the void. 
+I also thought, how to close the building? 
+And I really wanted to find a solution that would respond to the local climate conditions. 
+And I started thinking about the textile like a shell made of concrete with perforations that would let the air in, and also the light, but in a filtered way. 
+And then the inspiration came from these beautiful patterns of the Ethiopian women's dresses. 
+That they have fractal geometry properties and this helped me to shape the whole facade. 
+And we are building that with these small prefabricated pieces that are the windows that let the air and the light in a controlled way inside the building. 
+And this is complemented by these small colored glasses that use the light from the inside of the building to light up the building at night. 
+With these ideas it was not easy first to convince the developers because they were like, "This is not a shopping mall. We didn't ask for that." 
+But then we all realized that this idea of the market happened to be a lot more profitable than the idea of the shopping mall because basically they had more shops to sell. 
+And also that the idea of the facade was much, much cheaper, not only because of the material compared with the glass, but also because we didn't need to have air conditioning anymore. 
+So we created some budget savings that we used to implement the project. 
+And the first implementation was to think about how we could make the building self-sufficient in terms of energy in a city that has electricity cuts almost every day. 
+So we created a huge asset by placing photovoltaics there on the roof. 
+And then under those panels we thought about the roof like a new public space with gathering areas and bars that would create this urban oasis. 
+And these porches on the roof, all together they collect the water to reuse for sanitation on the inside. 
+Hopefully by the beginning of next year, because we are already on the fifth floor of the construction. 
+The second example is a master plan of 2,000 apartments and facilities in the city of Tunis. 
+And for doing such a big project, the biggest project I've ever designed, I really needed to understand the city of Tunis, but also its surroundings and the tradition and culture. 
+During that analysis I paid special attention to the medina that is this 1,000-year-old structure that used to be closed by a wall, opened by twelve different gates, connected by almost straight lines. 
+When I went to the site, the first design operation we did was to extend the existing streets, creating 12 initial blocks similar in size and characteristics to the ones we have in Barcelona and other cities in Europe with these courtyards. 
+On top of that, we selected some strategic points reminded of this idea of the gates and connecting them by straight lines, and this modified this initial pattern. 
+And the last operation was to think about the cell, the small cell of the project, like the apartment, as an essential part of the master plan. 
+And for that I thought, what would be the best orientation in the Mediterranean climate for an apartment? 
+And it's north-south, because it creates a thermal difference between both sides of the house and then a natural ventilation. 
+So we overlap a pattern that makes sure that most of the apartments are perfectly oriented in that direction. 
+And this is the result that is almost like a combination of the European block and the Arab city. 
+It has these blocks with courtyards, and then on the ground floor you have all these connections for the pedestrians. 
+And also it responds to the local regulations that establish a higher density on the upper levels and a lower density on the ground floor. 
+And it also reinforces this idea of the gates. 
+The volume has this connecting shape that shades itself with three different types of apartments and also lets the light go on the ground floor in a very dense neighborhood And in the courtyards there are the different facilities, such as a gym and a kindergarten and close by, a series of commercial [spaces] that bring activity to the ground floor. 
+The roof, which is my favorite space of the project is almost like giving back to the community the space taken by the construction. 
+And it's where all the neighbors, they can go up and socialize, and do activities such as having a two-kilometer run in the morning, jumping from one building to another. 
+These two examples, they have a common approach in the design process. 
+And also, they are in emerging countries where you can see the cities literally growing. 
+In these cities, the impact of architecture in people's lives of today and tomorrow changes the local communities and economies at the same speed as the buildings grow. 
+For this reason, I see even more importance to look at architecture finding simple but affordable solutions that enhance the relationship between the community and the environment and that aim to connect nature and people. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+B.J. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future. 
+He had a vision. When he got out, he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight, and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision. 
+He'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. (Laughter) It was my first week in federal prison, and I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV. 
+In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate. 
+Now, 95 percent of the guys that I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside, but when they talked about what they did, they talked about it in a different jargon, but the business concepts that they talked about weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first year MBA class at Wharton: promotional incentives, you never charge a first-time user, focus-grouping new product launches, territorial expansion. 
+But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days. 
+For the most part, everyone was just trying to survive. 
+It's a lot harder than you might think. 
+Contrary to what most people think, people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay, for your life when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life. 
+You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it. 
+And it's hard for a couple of reasons. 
+First, everything's marked up 30 to 50 percent from what you'd pay on the street, and second, you don't make a lot of money. 
+I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job, unloading trucks at a food warehouse, for $5.25, not an hour, but per month. 
+So how do you survive? 
+Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of hustles. 
+There's legal hustles. 
+You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency. 
+You charge another inmate to clean his cell. 
+There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell. 
+There's pretty illegal hustles: You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell. 
+And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in, you get smuggled in, drugs, pornography, cell phones, and just as in the outer world, there's a risk-reward tradeoff, so the riskier the enterprise, the more profitable it can potentially be. 
+You want a cigarette in prison? Three to five dollars. 
+You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head? Three hundred bucks. 
+You want a dirty magazine? 
+Well, it can be as much as 1,000 dollars. 
+So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity. 
+Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers, or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make do with less, and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside and start restaurants, barber shops, personal training businesses. 
+But there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that, no rehabilitation at all in prison, no one to help them write a business plan, figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises, no access to the Internet, even. 
+And then, when they come out, most states don't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background. 
+So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years. 
+Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it. 
+But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure that guys like the ones I was locked up with didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had. 
+So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way. 
+The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons, because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back. 
+All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I have had the distinct pleasure of living inside two biospheres. 
+Of course we all here in this room live in Biosphere 1. 
+I've also lived in Biosphere 2. 
+And the wonderful thing about that is that I get to compare biospheres. 
+And hopefully from that I get to learn something. 
+So what did I learn? Well, here I am inside Biosphere 2, making a pizza. 
+So I am harvesting the wheat, in order to make the dough. 
+And then of course I have to milk the goats and feed the goats in order to make the cheese. 
+It took me four months in Biosphere 2 to make a pizza. 
+Here in Biosphere 1, well it takes me about two minutes, because I pick up the phone and I call and say, "Hey, can you deliver the pizza?" 
+So Biosphere 2 was essentially a three-acre, entirely sealed, miniature world that I lived in for two years and 20 minutes. 
+(Laughter) Over the top it was sealed with steel and glass, underneath it was sealed with a pan of steel — essentially entirely sealed. 
+So we had our own miniature rainforest, a private beach with a coral reef. 
+We had a savanna, a marsh, a desert. 
+We had our own half-acre farm that we had to grow everything. 
+And of course we had our human habitat, where we lived. 
+Back in the mid- '80s when we were designing Biosphere 2, we had to ask ourselves some pretty basic questions. 
+I mean, what is a biosphere? 
+Back then, yes, I guess we all know now that it is essentially the sphere of life around the Earth, right? 
+Well, you have to get a little more specific than that if you're going to build one. 
+And so we decided that what it really is is that it is entirely materially closed — that is, nothing goes in or out at all, no material — and energetically open, which is essentially what planet Earth is. 
+This is a chamber that was 1 / 400th the size of Biosphere 2 that we called our Test Module. 
+And the very first day that this fellow, John Allen, walked in, to spend a couple of days in there with all the plants and animals and bacteria that we'd put in there to hopefully keep him alive, the doctors were incredibly concerned that he was going to succumb to some dreadful toxin, or that his lungs were going to get choked with bacteria or something, fungus. 
+But of course none of that happened. 
+And over the ensuing few years, there were great sagas about designing Biosphere 2. 
+But by 1991 we finally had this thing built. 
+And it was time for us to go in and give it a go. 
+We needed to know, is life this malleable? 
+Can you take this biosphere, that has evolved on a planetary scale, and jam it into a little bottle, and will it survive? 
+Big questions. 
+And we wanted to know this both for being able to go somewhere else in the universe — if we were going to go to Mars, for instance, would we take a biosphere with us, to live in it? 
+We also wanted to know so we can understand more about the Earth that we all live in. 
+Well, in 1991 it was finally time for us to go in and try out this baby. 
+Let's take it on a maiden voyage. 
+Will it work? Or will something happen that we can't understand and we can't fix, thereby negating the concept of man-made biospheres? 
+So eight of us went in: four men and four women. 
+More on that later. 
+(Laughter) And this is the world that we lived in. 
+So, on the top, we had these beautiful rainforests and an ocean, and underneath we had all this technosphere, we called it, which is where all the pumps and the valves and the water tanks and the air handlers, and all of that. 
+One of the Biospherians called it "" garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier. "" And then also we had the human habitat of course, with the laboratories, and all of that. 
+This is the agriculture. 
+It was essentially an organic farm. 
+The day I walked into Biosphere 2, I was, for the first time, breathing a completely different atmosphere than everybody else in the world, except seven other people. 
+At that moment I became part of that biosphere. 
+And I don't mean that in an abstract sense; I mean it rather literally. 
+When I breathed out, my CO2 fed the sweet potatoes that I was growing. 
+And we ate an awful lot of the sweet potatoes. 
+(Laughter) And those sweet potatoes became part of me. 
+In fact, we ate so many sweet potatoes I became orange with sweet potato. 
+I literally was eating the same carbon over and over again. 
+I was eating myself in some strange sort of bizarre way. 
+When it came to our atmosphere, however, it wasn't that much of a joke over the long term, because it turned out that we were losing oxygen, quite a lot of oxygen. 
+And we knew that we were losing CO2. 
+And so we were working to sequester carbon. 
+Good lord — we know that term now. 
+We were growing plants like crazy. 
+We were taking their biomass, storing them in the basement, growing plants, going around, around, around, trying to take all of that carbon out of the atmosphere. 
+We were trying to stop carbon from going into the atmosphere. 
+We stopped irrigating our soil, as much as we could. 
+We stopped tilling, so that we could prevent greenhouse gasses from going into the air. 
+But our oxygen was going down faster than our CO2 was going up, which was quite unexpected, because we had seen them going in tandem in the test module. 
+And it was like playing atomic hide-and-seek. 
+We had lost seven tons of oxygen. 
+And we had no clue where it was. 
+And I tell you, when you lose a lot of oxygen — and our oxygen went down quite far; it went from 21 percent down to 14.2 percent — my goodness, do you feel dreadful. 
+I mean we were dragging ourselves around the Biosphere. 
+And we had sleep apnea at night. 
+So you'd wake up gasping with breath, because your blood chemistry has changed. 
+And that you literally do that. You stop breathing and then you — (Gasps) — take a breath and it wakes you up. And it's very irritating. 
+And everybody outside thought we were dying. 
+I mean, the media was making it sound like were were dying. 
+And I had to call up my mother every other day saying, "" No, Mum, it's fine, fine. 
+We're not dead. We're fine. We're fine. "" And the doctor was, in fact, checking us to make sure we were, in fact, fine. 
+But in fact he was the person who was most susceptible to the oxygen. 
+And one day he couldn't add up a line of figures. 
+And it was time for us to put oxygen in. 
+And you might think, well, "" Boy, your life support system was failing you. Wasn't that dreadful? "" Yes. In a sense it was terrifying. 
+Except that I knew I could walk out the airlock door at any time, if it really got bad, though who was going to say, "" I can't take it anymore! ""? 
+Not me, that was for sure. 
+But on the other hand, it was the scientific gold of the project, because we could really crank this baby up, as a scientific tool, and see if we could, in fact, find where those seven tons of oxygen had gone. 
+And we did indeed find it. 
+And we found it in the concrete. 
+Essentially it had done something very simple. 
+We had put too much carbon in the soil in the form of compost. 
+It broke down; it took oxygen out of the air; it put CO2 into the air; and it went into the concrete. 
+Pretty straightforward really. 
+So at the end of the two years when we came out, we were elated, because, in fact, although you might say we had discovered something that was quite "" uhh, "" when your oxygen is going down, stopped working, essentially, in your life support system, that's a very bad failure. 
+Except that we knew what it was. And we knew how to fix it. 
+And nothing else emerged that really was as serious as that. 
+And we proved the concept, more or less. 
+People, on the other hand, was a different subject. 
+We were — yeah I don't know that we were fixable. 
+We all went quite nuts, I will say. 
+And the day I came out of Biosphere 2, I was thrilled I was going to see all my family and my friends. 
+For two years I'd been seeing people through the glass. 
+And everybody ran up to me. 
+And I recoiled. They stank! 
+People stink! 
+We stink of hairspray and underarm deodorant, and all kinds of stuff. 
+Now we had stuff inside Biosphere to keep ourselves clean, but nothing with perfume. 
+And boy do we stink out here. 
+Not only that, but I lost touch of where my food came from. 
+I had been growing all my own food. 
+I had no idea what was in my food, where it came from. 
+I didn't even recognize half the names in most of the food that I was eating. 
+In fact, I would stand for hours in the aisles of shops, reading all the names on all of the things. 
+People must have thought I was nuts. 
+It was really quite astonishing. 
+And I slowly lost track of where I was in this big biosphere, in this big biosphere that we all live in. 
+In Biosphere 2 I totally understood that I had a huge impact on my biosphere, everyday, and it had an impact on me, very viscerally, very literally. 
+So I went about my business: Paragon Space Development Corporation, a little firm I started with people while I was in the Biosphere, because I had nothing else to do. 
+And one of the things we did was try to figure out: how small can you make these biospheres, and what can you do with them? 
+And so we sent one onto the Mir Space Station. 
+We had one on the shuttle and one on the International Space Station, for 16 months, where we managed to produce the first organisms to go through complete multiple life cycles in space — really pushing the envelope of understanding how malleable our life systems are. 
+And I'm also proud to announce that you're getting a sneak preview — on Friday we're going to announce that we're actually forming a team to develop a system to grow plants on the Moon, which is going to be pretty fun. 
+And the legacy of that is a system that we were designing: an entirely sealed system to grow plants to grow on Mars. 
+And part of that is that we had to model very rapid circulation of CO2 and oxygen and water through this plant system. 
+As a result of that modeling I ended up in all places, in Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa. 
+Eritrea, formerly part of Ethiopia, is one of those places that is astonishingly beautiful, incredibly stark, and I have no understanding of how people eke out a living there. 
+It is so dry. 
+This is what I saw. 
+But this is also what I saw. 
+I saw a company that had taken seawater and sand, and they were growing a kind of crop that will grow on pure salt water without having to treat it. 
+And it will produce a food crop. 
+In this case it was oilseed. 
+It was astonishing. They were also producing mangroves in a plantation. 
+And the mangroves were providing wood and honey and leaves for the animals, so that they could produce milk and whatnot, like we had in the Biosphere. 
+And all of it was coming from this: shrimp farms. 
+Shrimp farms are a scourge on the earth, frankly, from an environmental point of view. 
+They pour huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean. 
+They also pollute their next-door neighbors. 
+So they're all shitting each other's ponds, quite literally. 
+And what this project was doing was taking the effluent of these, and turning them into all of this food. 
+They were literally turning pollution into abundance for a desert people. 
+They had created an industrial ecosystem, of a sense. 
+I was there because I was actually modeling the mangrove portion for a carbon credit program, under the U.N. 
+Kyoto Protocol system. 
+And as I was modeling this mangrove swamp, I was thinking to myself, "" How do you put a box around this? "" When I'm modeling a plant in a box, literally, I know where to draw the boundary. 
+In a mangrove forest like this I have no idea. 
+Well, of course you have to draw the boundary around the whole of the Earth. 
+And understand its interactions with the entire Earth. 
+And put your project in that context. 
+Around the world today we're seeing an incredible transformation, from what I would call a biocidal species, one that — whether we intentionally or unintentionally — have designed our systems to kill life, a lot of the time. 
+This is in fact, this beautiful photograph, is in fact over the Amazon. 
+And here the light green are areas of massive deforestation. 
+And those beautiful wispy clouds are, in fact, fires, human-made fires. 
+We're in the process of transforming from this, to what I would call a biophilic society, one where we learn to nurture society. 
+Now it may not seem like it, but we are. 
+It is happening all across the world, in every kind of walk of life, and every kind of career and industry that you can think of. 
+And I think often times people get lost in that. 
+They go, "" But how can I possibly find my way in that? 
+It's such a huge subject. "" And I would say that the small stuff counts. It really does. 
+This is the story of a rake in my backyard. 
+This was my backyard, very early on, when I bought my property. 
+And in Arizona, of course, everybody puts gravel down. 
+And they like to keep everything beautifully raked. And they keep all the leaves away. 
+And on Sunday morning the neighbors leaf blower comes out, and I want to throttle them. 
+It's a certain type of aesthetic. 
+We're very uncomfortable with untidiness. 
+And I threw away my rake. 
+And I let all of the leaves fall from the trees that I have on my property. 
+And over time, essentially what have I been doing? 
+I've been building topsoil. 
+And so now all the birds come in. And I have hawks. 
+And I have an oasis. 
+This is what happens every spring. For six weeks, six to eight weeks, I have this flush of green oasis. 
+This is actually in a riparian area. 
+And all of Tucson could be like this if everybody would just revolt and throw away the rake. 
+The small stuff counts. 
+The Industrial Revolution — and Prometheus — has given us this, the ability to light up the world. 
+It has also given us this, the ability to look at the world from the outside. 
+Now we may not all have another biosphere that we can run to, and compare it to this biosphere. 
+But we can look at the world, and try to understand where we are in its context, and how we choose to interact with it. 
+And if you lose where you are in your biosphere, or are perhaps having a difficulty connecting with where you are in the biosphere, I would say to you, take a deep breath. 
+The yogis had it right. 
+Breath does, in fact, connect us all in a very literal way. 
+Take a breath now. 
+And as you breathe, think about what is in your breath. 
+There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next-door to you. 
+Maybe there is a little bit of oxygen from some algae on the beach not far from here. 
+It also connects us in time. 
+There may be some carbon in your breath from the dinosaurs. 
+There could also be carbon that you are exhaling now that will be in the breath of your great-great-great-grandchildren. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+The question today is not: Why did we invade Afghanistan? 
+The question is: why are we still in Afghanistan one decade later? 
+Why are we spending $135 billion? 
+Why have we got 130,000 troops on the ground? 
+Why were more people killed last month than in any preceding month of this conflict? 
+How has this happened? 
+The last 20 years has been the age of intervention, and Afghanistan is simply one act in a five-act tragedy. 
+We came out of the end of the Cold War in despair. 
+We faced Rwanda; we faced Bosnia, and then we rediscovered our confidence. 
+In the third act, we went into Bosnia and Kosovo and we seemed to succeed. 
+In the fourth act, with our hubris, our overconfidence developing, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the fifth act, we plunged into a humiliating mess. 
+So the question is: What are we doing? 
+Why are we still stuck in Afghanistan? 
+And the answer, of course, that we keep being given is as follows: we're told that we went into Afghanistan because of 9 / 11, and that we remain there because the Taliban poses an existential threat to global security. 
+In the words of President Obama, "" If the Taliban take over again, they will invite back Al-Qaeda, who will try to kill as many of our people as they possibly can. "" The story that we're told is that there was a "" light footprint "" initially — in other words, that we ended up in a situation where we didn't have enough troops, we didn't have enough resources, that Afghans were frustrated — they felt there wasn't enough progress and economic development and security, and therefore the Taliban came back — that we responded in 2005 and 2006 with troop deployments, but we still didn't put enough troops on the ground. 
+And that it wasn't until 2009, when President Obama signed off on a surge, that we finally had, in the words of Secretary Clinton, "the strategy, the leadership and the resources." 
+So, as the president now reassures us, we are on track to achieve our goals. 
+All of this is wrong. 
+Every one of those statements is wrong. 
+Afghanistan does not pose an existential threat to global security. 
+It is extremely unlikely the Taliban would ever be able to take over the country — extremely unlikely they'd be able to seize Kabul. 
+They simply don't have a conventional military option. 
+And even if they were able to do so, even if I'm wrong, it's extremely unlikely the Taliban would invite back Al-Qaeda. 
+From the Taliban's point of view, that was their number one mistake last time. 
+If they hadn't invited back Al-Qaeda, they would still be in power today. 
+And even if I'm wrong about those two things, even if they were able to take back the country, even if they were to invite back Al-Qaeda, it's extremely unlikely that Al-Qaeda would significantly enhance its ability to harm the United States or harm Europe. 
+Because this isn't the 1990s anymore. 
+If the Al-Qaeda base was to be established near Ghazni, we would hit them very hard, and it would be very, very difficult for the Taliban to protect them. 
+Furthermore, it's simply not true that what went wrong in Afghanistan is the light footprint. 
+In my experience, in fact, the light footprint was extremely helpful. 
+And these troops that we brought in — it's a great picture of David Beckham there on the sub-machine gun — made the situation worse, not better. 
+When I walked across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001-2002, what I saw was scenes like this. 
+A girl, if you're lucky, in the corner of a dark room — lucky to be able to look at the Koran. 
+But in those early days when we're told we didn't have enough troops and enough resources, we made a lot of progress in Afghanistan. 
+Within a few months, there were two and a half million more girls in school. 
+In Sangin where I was sick in 2002, the nearest health clinic was within three days walk. 
+Today, there are 14 health clinics in that area alone. 
+There was amazing improvements. 
+We went from almost no Afghans having mobile telephones during the Taliban to a situation where, almost overnight, three million Afghans had mobile telephones. 
+And we had progress in the free media. 
+We had progress in elections — all of this with the so-called light footprint. 
+But when we began to bring more money, when we began to invest more resources, things got worse, not better. How? 
+Well first see, if you put 125 billion dollars a year into a country like Afghanistan where the entire revenue of the Afghan state is one billion dollars a year, you drown everything. 
+It's not simply corruption and waste that you create; you essentially replace the priorities of the Afghan government, the elected Afghan government, with the micromanaging tendencies of foreigners on short tours with their own priorities. 
+And the same is true for the troops. 
+When I walked across Afghanistan, I stayed with people like this. 
+This is Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj. 
+Commandant Haji Malem Mohsin Khan of Kamenj was a great host. 
+He was very generous, like many of the Afghans I stayed with. 
+But he was also considerably more conservative, considerably more anti-foreign, considerably more Islamist than we'd like to acknowledge. 
+This man, for example, Mullah Mustafa, tried to shoot me. 
+And the reason I'm looking a little bit perplexed in this photograph is I was somewhat frightened, and I was too afraid on this occasion to ask him, having run for an hour through the desert and taken refuge in this house, why he had turned up and wanted to have his photograph taken with me. 
+But 18 months later, I asked him why he had tried to shoot me. 
+And Mullah Mustafa — he's the man with the pen and paper — explained that the man sitting immediately to the left as you look at the photograph, Nadir Shah had bet him that he couldn't hit me. 
+Now this is not to say Afghanistan is a place full of people like Mullah Mustafa. 
+It's not; it's a wonderful place full of incredible energy and intelligence. 
+But it is a place where the putting-in of the troops has increased the violence rather than decreased it. 
+2005, Anthony Fitzherbert, an agricultural engineer, could travel through Helmand, could stay in Nad Ali, Sangin and Ghoresh, which are now the names of villages where fighting is taking place. 
+Today, he could never do that. 
+So the idea that we deployed the troops to respond to the Taliban insurgency is mistaken. 
+Rather than preceding the insurgency, the Taliban followed the troop deployment, and as far as I'm concerned, the troop deployment caused their return. 
+Now is this a new idea? 
+No, there have been any number of people saying this over the last seven years. 
+I ran a center at Harvard from 2008 to 2010, and there were people like Michael Semple there who speak Afghan languages fluently, who've traveled to almost every district in the country. 
+Andrew Wilder, for example, born on the Pakistan-Iranian border, served his whole life in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 
+Paul Fishstein who began working there in 1978 — worked for Save the Children, ran the Afghan research and evaluation unit. 
+These are people who were able to say consistently that the increase in development aid was making Afghanistan less secure, not more secure — that the counter-insurgency strategy was not working and would not work. 
+And yet, nobody listened to them. 
+Instead, there was a litany of astonishing optimism. 
+Beginning in 2004, every general came in saying, "" I've inherited a dismal situation, but finally I have the right resources and the correct strategy, which will deliver, "" in General Barno's word in 2004, the "" decisive year. "" Well guess what? It didn't. 
+But it wasn't sufficient to prevent General Abuzaid saying that he had the strategy and the resources to deliver, in 2005, the "" decisive year. "" Or General David Richards to come in 2006 and say he had the strategy and the resources to deliver the "" crunch year. "" Or in 2007, the Norwegian deputy foreign minister, Espen Eide, to say that that would deliver the "" decisive year. "" Or in 2008, Major General Champoux to come in and say he would deliver the "" decisive year. "" Or in 2009, my great friend, General Stanley McChrystal, who said that he was "" knee-deep in the decisive year. "" 
+Or in 2010, the U.K. foreign secretary, David Miliband, who said that at last we would deliver the "" decisive year. "" And you'll be delighted to hear in 2011, today, that Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, assures us that we are in the "" decisive year. "" (Applause) How do we allow any of this to happen? 
+Well the answer, of course, is, if you spend 125 billion or 130 billion dollars a year in a country, you co-opt almost everybody. 
+Even the aid agencies, who begin to receive an enormous amount of money from the U.S. and the European governments to build schools and clinics, are somewhat disinclined to challenge the idea that Afghanistan is an existential threat to global security. 
+They're worried, in other words, that if anybody believes that it wasn't such a threat — Oxfam, Save the Children wouldn't get the money to build their hospitals and schools. 
+It's also very difficult to confront a general with medals on his chest. 
+It's very difficult for a politician, because you're afraid that many lives have been lost in vain. 
+You feel deep, deep guilt. 
+You exaggerate your fears, and you're terrified about the humiliation of defeat. 
+What is the solution to this? 
+Well the solution to this is we need to find a way that people like Michael Semple, or those other people, who are telling the truth, who know the country, who've spent 30 years on the ground — and most importantly of all, the missing component of this — Afghans themselves, who understand what is going on. 
+We need to somehow get their message to the policymakers. 
+And this is very difficult to do because of our structures. 
+The first thing we need to change is the structures of our government. 
+Very, very sadly, our foreign services, the United Nations, the military in these countries have very little idea of what's going on. 
+The average British soldier is on a tour of only six months; Italian soldiers, on tours of four months; the American military, on tours of 12 months. 
+Diplomats are locked in embassy compounds. 
+When they go out, they travel in these curious armored vehicles with these somewhat threatening security teams who ready 24 hours in advance who say you can only stay on the ground for an hour. 
+In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level. 
+And there was not a single Pashto speaker. 
+In the Afghan section in London responsible for governing Afghan policy on the ground, I was told last year that there was not a single staff member of the foreign office in that section who had ever served on a posting in Afghanistan. 
+So we need to change that institutional culture. 
+And I could make the same points about the United States and the United Nations. 
+Secondly, we need to aim off of the optimism of the generals. 
+We need to make sure that we're a little bit suspicious, that we understand that optimism is in the DNA of the military, that we don't respond to it with quite as much alacrity. 
+And thirdly, we need to have some humility. 
+We need to begin from the position that our knowledge, our power, our legitimacy is limited. 
+This doesn't mean that intervention around the world is a disaster. 
+It isn't. 
+Bosnia and Kosovo were signal successes, great successes. 
+Today when you go to Bosnia it is almost impossible to believe that what we saw in the early 1990s happened. 
+It's almost impossible to believe the progress we've made since 1994. 
+Refugee return, which the United Nations High Commission for Refugees thought would be extremely unlikely, has largely happened. 
+A million properties have been returned. 
+Borders between the Bosniak territory and the Bosnian-Serb territory have calmed down. 
+The national army has shrunk. 
+The crime rates in Bosnia today are lower than they are in Sweden. 
+This has been done by an incredible, principled effort by the international community, and, of course, above all, by Bosnians themselves. 
+But you need to look at context. 
+And this is what we've lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. 
+You need to understand that in those places what really mattered was, firstly, the role of Tudman and Milosevic in coming to the agreement, and then the fact those men went, that the regional situation improved, that the European Union could offer Bosnia something extraordinary: the chance to be part of a new thing, a new club, a chance to join something bigger. 
+And finally, we need to understand that in Bosnia and Kosovo, a lot of the secret of what we did, a lot of the secret of our success, was our humility — was the tentative nature of our engagement. 
+We criticized people a lot in Bosnia for being quite slow to take on war criminals. 
+We criticized them for being quite slow to return refugees. 
+But that slowness, that caution, the fact that President Clinton initially said that American troops would only be deployed for a year, turned out to be a strength, and it helped us to put our priorities right. 
+One of the saddest things about our involvement in Afghanistan is that we've got our priorities out of sync. 
+We're not matching our resources to our priorities. 
+Because if what we're interested in is terrorism, Pakistan is far more important than Afghanistan. 
+If what we're interested in is regional stability, Egypt is far more important. 
+If what we're worried about is poverty and development, sub-Saharan Africa is far more important. 
+This doesn't mean that Afghanistan doesn't matter, but that it's one of 40 countries in the world with which we need to engage. 
+So if I can finish with a metaphor for intervention, what we need to think of is something like mountain rescue. 
+Why mountain rescue? 
+Because when people talk about intervention, they imagine that some scientific theory — the Rand Corporation goes around counting 43 previous insurgencies producing mathematical formula saying you need one trained counter-insurgent for every 20 members of the population. 
+This is the wrong way of looking at it. 
+You need to look at it in the way that you look at mountain rescue. 
+When you're doing mountain rescue, you don't take a doctorate in mountain rescue, you look for somebody who knows the terrain. 
+It's about context. 
+You understand that you can prepare, but the amount of preparation you can do is limited — you can take some water, you can have a map, you can have a pack. 
+But what really matters is two kinds of problems — problems that occur on the mountain which you couldn't anticipate, such as, for example, ice on a slope, but which you can get around, and problems which you couldn't anticipate and which you can't get around, like a sudden blizzard or an avalanche or a change in the weather. 
+And the key to this is a guide who has been on that mountain, in every temperature, at every period — a guide who, above all, knows when to turn back, who doesn't press on relentlessly when conditions turn against them. 
+What we look for in firemen, in climbers, in policemen, and what we should look for in intervention, is intelligent risk takers — not people who plunge blind off a cliff, not people who jump into a burning room, but who weigh their risks, weigh their responsibilities. 
+Because the worst thing we have done in Afghanistan is this idea that failure is not an option. 
+It makes failure invisible, inconceivable and inevitable. 
+And if we can resist this crazy slogan, we shall discover — in Egypt, in Syria, in Libya, and anywhere else we go in the world — that if we can often do much less than we pretend, we can do much more than we fear. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. 
+Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 
+Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+Bruno Giussani: Rory, you mentioned Libya at the end. Just briefly, what's your take on the current events there and the intervention? Rory Stewart: Okay, I think Libya poses the classic problem. The problem in Libya 
+is that we are always pushing for the black or white. 
+We imagine there are only two choices: either full engagement and troop deployment or total isolation. 
+And we are always being tempted up to our neck. 
+We put our toes in and we go up to our neck. 
+What we should have done in Libya is we should have stuck to the U.N. resolution. 
+We should have limited ourselves very, very strictly to the protection of the civilian population in Benghazi. 
+We could have done that. 
+We set up a no-fly zone within 48 hours because Gaddafi had no planes within 48 hours. 
+Instead of which, we've allowed ourselves to be tempted towards regime change. 
+In doing so, we've destroyed our credibility with the Security Council, which means it's very difficult to get a resolution on Syria, and we're setting ourselves up again for failure. 
+Once more, humility, limits, honesty, realistic expectations and we could have achieved something to be proud of. 
+BG: Rory, thank you very much. 
+RS: Thank you. (BG: Thank you.) 
+
+From all outward appearances, John had everything going for him. 
+He had just signed the contract to sell his New York apartment at a six-figure profit, and he'd only owned it for five years. 
+The school where he graduated from with his master's had just offered him a teaching appointment, which meant not only a salary, but benefits for the first time in ages. 
+And yet, despite everything going really well for John, he was struggling, fighting addiction and a gripping depression. 
+On the night of June 11th, 2003, he climbed up to the edge of the fence on the Manhattan Bridge and he leaped to the treacherous waters below. 
+Remarkably — no, miraculously — he lived. 
+The fall shattered his right arm, broke every rib that he had, punctured his lung, and he drifted in and out of consciousness as he drifted down the East River, under the Brooklyn Bridge and out into the pathway of the Staten Island Ferry, where passengers on the ferry heard his cries of pain, contacted the boat's captain who contacted the Coast Guard who fished him out of the East River and took him to Bellevue Hospital. 
+And that's actually where our story begins. 
+Because once John committed himself to putting his life back together — first physically, then emotionally, and then spiritually — he found that there were very few resources available to someone who has attempted to end their life in the way that he did. 
+Research shows that 19 out of 20 people who attempt suicide will fail. 
+But the people who fail are 37 times more likely to succeed the second time. 
+This truly is an at-risk population with very few resources to support them. 
+And what happens when people try to assemble themselves back into life, because of our taboos around suicide, we're not sure what to say, and so quite often we say nothing. 
+And that furthers the isolation that people like John found themselves in. 
+I know John's story very well because I'm John. 
+And this is, today, the first time in any sort of public setting I've ever acknowledged the journey that I have been on. 
+But after having lost a beloved teacher in 2006 and a good friend last year to suicide, and sitting last year at TEDActive, I knew that I needed to step out of my silence and past my taboos to talk about an idea worth spreading — and that is that people who have made the difficult choice to come back to life need more resources and need our help. 
+As the Trevor Project says, it gets better. 
+It gets way better. 
+And I'm choosing to come out of a totally different kind of closet today to encourage you, to urge you, that if you are someone who has contemplated or attempted suicide, or you know somebody who has, talk about it; get help. 
+It's a conversation worth having and an idea worth spreading. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+An evolutionary biologist at Purdue University named William Muir studied chickens. 
+He was interested in productivity — I think it's something that concerns all of us — but it's easy to measure in chickens because you just count the eggs. 
+(Laughter) He wanted to know what could make his chickens more productive, so he devised a beautiful experiment. 
+Chickens live in groups, so first of all, he selected just an average flock, and he let it alone for six generations. 
+But then he created a second group of the individually most productive chickens — you could call them superchickens — and he put them together in a superflock, and each generation, he selected only the most productive for breeding. 
+After six generations had passed, what did he find? 
+Well, the first group, the average group, was doing just fine. 
+They were all plump and fully feathered and egg production had increased dramatically. 
+What about the second group? 
+Well, all but three were dead. 
+They'd pecked the rest to death. 
+(Laughter) The individually productive chickens had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest. 
+Now, as I've gone around the world talking about this and telling this story in all sorts of organizations and companies, people have seen the relevance almost instantly, and they come up and they say things to me like, "That superflock, that's my company." 
+(Laughter) Or, "" That's my country. "" Or, "" That's my life. "" All my life I've been told that the way we have to get ahead is to compete: get into the right school, get into the right job, get to the top, and I've really never found it very inspiring. 
+I've started and run businesses because invention is a joy, and because working alongside brilliant, creative people is its own reward. 
+And I've never really felt very motivated by pecking orders or by superchickens or by superstars. 
+But for the past 50 years, we've run most organizations and some societies along the superchicken model. 
+We've thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men, or occasionally women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power. 
+And the result has been just the same as in William Muir's experiment: aggression, dysfunction and waste. 
+If the only way the most productive can be successful is by suppressing the productivity of the rest, then we badly need to find a better way to work and a richer way to live. 
+(Applause) So what is it that makes some groups obviously more successful and more productive than others? 
+Well, that's the question a team at MIT took to research. 
+They brought in hundreds of volunteers, they put them into groups, and they gave them very hard problems to solve. 
+And what happened was exactly what you'd expect, that some groups were very much more successful than others, but what was really interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those where they had one or two people with spectacularly high I.Q. 
+Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate I.Q. 
+Instead, they had three characteristics, the really successful teams. 
+First of all, they showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. 
+This is measured by something called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. 
+It's broadly considered a test for empathy, and the groups that scored highly on this did better. 
+Secondly, the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers. 
+And thirdly, the more successful groups had more women in them. 
+(Applause) Now, was this because women typically score more highly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, so you're getting a doubling down on the empathy quotient? 
+Or was it because they brought a more diverse perspective? 
+We don't really know, but the striking thing about this experiment is that it showed what we know, which is some groups do better than others, but what's key to that is their social connectedness to each other. 
+So how does this play out in the real world? 
+Well, it means that what happens between people really counts, because in groups that are highly attuned and sensitive to each other, ideas can flow and grow. 
+People don't get stuck. They don't waste energy down dead ends. 
+An example: Arup is one of the world's most successful engineering firms, and it was commissioned to build the equestrian center for the Beijing Olympics. 
+Now, this building had to receive two and a half thousand really highly strung thoroughbred horses that were coming off long-haul flights, highly jet-lagged, not feeling their finest. 
+And the problem the engineer confronted was, what quantity of waste to cater for? 
+Now, you don't get taught this in engineering school — (Laughter) — and it's not really the kind of thing you want to get wrong, so he could have spent months talking to vets, doing the research, tweaking the spreadsheet. 
+Instead, he asked for help and he found someone who had designed the Jockey Club in New York. 
+The problem was solved in less than a day. 
+Arup believes that the culture of helpfulness is central to their success. 
+Now, helpfulness sounds really anemic, but it's absolutely core to successful teams, and it routinely outperforms individual intelligence. 
+Helpfulness means I don't have to know everything, I just have to work among people who are good at getting and giving help. 
+At SAP, they reckon that you can answer any question in 17 minutes. 
+But there isn't a single high-tech company I've worked with that imagines for a moment that this is a technology issue, because what drives helpfulness is people getting to know each other. 
+Now that sounds so obvious, and we think it'll just happen normally, but it doesn't. 
+When I was running my first software company, I realized that we were getting stuck. 
+There was a lot of friction, but not much else, and I gradually realized the brilliant, creative people that I'd hired didn't know each other. 
+They were so focused on their own individual work, they didn't even know who they were sitting next to, and it was only when I insisted that we stop working and invest time in getting to know each other that we achieved real momentum. 
+Now, that was 20 years ago, and now I visit companies that have banned coffee cups at desks because they want people to hang out around the coffee machines and talk to each other. 
+The Swedes even have a special term for this. 
+They call it fika, which means more than a coffee break. 
+It means collective restoration. 
+At Idexx, a company up in Maine, they've created vegetable gardens on campus so that people from different parts of the business can work together and get to know the whole business that way. 
+Have they all gone mad? 
+Quite the opposite — they've figured out that when the going gets tough, and it always will get tough if you're doing breakthrough work that really matters, what people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help. 
+Companies don't have ideas; only people do. 
+And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. 
+What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks. 
+Now, when you put all of this together, what you get is something called social capital. 
+Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust. 
+The term comes from sociologists who were studying communities that proved particularly resilient in times of stress. 
+Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust. 
+What does this mean in practical terms? 
+It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time. 
+So teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candor and openness. 
+And time is what builds value. 
+When Alex Pentland suggested to one company that they synchronize coffee breaks so that people would have time to talk to each other, profits went up 15 million dollars, and employee satisfaction went up 10 percent. 
+Not a bad return on social capital, which compounds even as you spend it. 
+Now, this isn't about chumminess, and it's no charter for slackers, because people who work this way tend to be kind of scratchy, impatient, absolutely determined to think for themselves because that's what their contribution is. 
+Conflict is frequent because candor is safe. 
+And that's how good ideas turn into great ideas, because no idea is born fully formed. 
+It emerges a little bit as a child is born, kind of messy and confused, but full of possibilities. 
+And it's only through the generous contribution, faith and challenge that they achieve their potential. 
+And that's what social capital supports. 
+Now, we aren't really used to talking about this, about talent, about creativity, in this way. 
+We're used to talking about stars. 
+So I started to wonder, well, if we start working this way, does that mean no more stars? 
+So I went and I sat in on the auditions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. 
+And what I saw there really surprised me, because the teachers weren't looking for individual pyrotechnics. 
+They were looking for what happened between the students, because that's where the drama is. 
+And when I talked to producers of hit albums, they said, "" Oh sure, we have lots of superstars in music. 
+It's just, they don't last very long. 
+It's the outstanding collaborators who enjoy the long careers, because bringing out the best in others is how they found the best in themselves. "" And when I went to visit companies that are renowned for their ingenuity and creativity, I couldn't even see any superstars, because everybody there really mattered. 
+And when I reflected on my own career, and the extraordinary people I've had the privilege to work with, I realized how much more we could give each other if we just stopped trying to be superchickens. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Once you appreciate truly how social work is, a lot of things have to change. 
+Management by talent contest has routinely pitted employees against each other. 
+Now, rivalry has to be replaced by social capital. 
+For decades, we've tried to motivate people with money, even though we've got a vast amount of research that shows that money erodes social connectedness. 
+Now, we need to let people motivate each other. 
+And for years, we've thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected, all by themselves, to solve complex problems. 
+Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together. 
+We know that this works. 
+When the Montreal Protocol called for the phasing out of CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons implicated in the hole in the ozone layer, the risks were immense. 
+CFCs were everywhere, and nobody knew if a substitute could be found. 
+But one team that rose to the challenge adopted three key principles. 
+The first was the head of engineering, Frank Maslen, said, there will be no stars in this team. 
+We need everybody. 
+Everybody has a valid perspective. 
+Second, we work to one standard only: the best imaginable. 
+And third, he told his boss, Geoff Tudhope, that he had to butt out, because he knew how disruptive power can be. 
+Now, this didn't mean Tudhope did nothing. 
+He gave the team air cover, and he listened to ensure that they honored their principles. 
+And it worked: Ahead of all the other companies tackling this hard problem, this group cracked it first. 
+And to date, the Montreal Protocol is the most successful international environmental agreement ever implemented. 
+There was a lot at stake then, and there's a lot at stake now, and we won't solve our problems if we expect it to be solved by a few supermen or superwomen. 
+Now we need everybody, because it is only when we accept that everybody has value that we will liberate the energy and imagination and momentum we need to create the best beyond measure. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Cheering) Not good enough. 
+(Loud cheering) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was. 
+He cut my mom six different times in six different directions, suffocating poor little me in the process. 
+(Laughter) CP is not genetic. 
+No one put a curse on my mother's uterus, and I didn't get it because my parents are first cousins, which they are. 
+(Laughter) It only happens from accidents, like what happened to me on my birth day. 
+Now, I must warn you, I'm not inspirational. 
+It's Christmas Eve, you're at the mall, you're driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see? 
+If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal. 
+I'm Palestinian, Muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) If you don't feel better about yourself, maybe you should. (Laughter) 
+I have always loved the fact that my hood and my affliction share the same initials. 
+A lot of people with CP don't walk, but my parents didn't believe in "" can't. "" My father's mantra was, "You can do it, yes you can can." 
+If my three older sisters went to public school, my parents would sue the school system and guarantee that I went too, and if we didn't all get A's, we all got my mother's slipper. 
+(Laughter) My father taught me how to walk when I was five years old by placing my heels on his feet and just walking. 
+(Laughter) My inner stripper was very strong. (Laughter) 
+Yeah. 
+I don't think anyone even noticed we weren't Italian. (Laughter) 
+I learned how to dance in heels, which means I can walk in heels. 
+And I'm from Jersey, and we are really concerned with being chic, so if my friends wore heels, so did I. 
+And when my friends went and spent their summer vacations on the Jersey Shore, I did not. 
+I spent my summers in a war zone, because my parents were afraid that if we didn't go back to Palestine every single summer, we'd grow up to be Madonna. 
+(Laughter) Summer vacations often consisted of my father trying to heal me, so I drank deer's milk, I had hot cups on my back, I was dunked in the Dead Sea, and I remember the water burning my eyes and thinking, "" It's working! It's working! "" (Laughter) But one miracle cure we did find was yoga. 
+I have to tell you, it's very boring, but before I did yoga, I was a stand-up comedian who can't stand up. 
+My parents reinforced this notion that I could do anything, that no dream was impossible, and my dream was to be on the daytime soap opera "" General Hospital. "" (Laughter) I went to college during affirmative action and got a sweet scholarship to ASU, Arizona State University, because I fit every single quota. (Laughter) 
+I did all the less-than-intelligent kids' homework, I got A's in all of my classes, A's in all of their classes. 
+(Laughter) Every time I did a scene from "" The Glass Menagerie, "" my professors would weep. 
+But I never got cast. 
+Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called "" They Dance Real Slow in Jackson. "" It's a play about a girl with CP. 
+So I start shouting from the rooftops, "" I'm finally going to get a part! 
+I have cerebral palsy! 
+Thank God almighty, I'm free at last! "" I didn't get the part. 
+I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically, like someone shot my cat, to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn't think I could do the stunts. 
+I said, "" Excuse me, if I can't do the stunts, neither can the character. "" (Laughter) (Applause) This was a part that I was literally born to play they gave it to a non-palsy actress. 
+Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled onscreen. 
+My dream was coming true. 
+And I knew that I would be promoted from "" Diner Diner "" to "" Wacky Best Friend "" in no time. 
+(Laughter) But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors. 
+They only hired perfect people. 
+I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen, and all of these women had one thing in common: they were comedians. 
+So I became a comic. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) My first gig was driving famous comics from New York City to shows in New Jersey, and I'll never forget the face of the first comic I ever drove when he realized that he was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with a chick with CP driving him. (Laughter) 
+I've performed in clubs all over America, and I've also performed in Arabic in the Middle East, uncensored and uncovered. (Laughter) 
+I never like to claim first, but I do know that they never heard that nasty little rumor that women aren't funny, and they find us hysterical. 
+(Laughter) In 2003, my brother from another mother and father Dean Obeidallah and I started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 10th year. 
+Our goal was to change the negative image of Arab-Americans in media, while also reminding casting directors that South Asian and Arab are not synonymous. 
+(Laughter) Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability. 
+I was invited to be a guest on the cable news show "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." 
+I walked in looking like I was going to the prom, and they shuffle me into a studio and seat me on a spinning, rolling chair. 
+(Laughter) So I looked at the stage manager and I'm like, "" Excuse me, can I have another chair? "" And she looked at me and she went, "Five, four, three, two..." 
+And we were live, right? 
+So I had to grip onto the anchor's desk so that I wouldn't roll off the screen during the segment, and when the interview was over, I was livid. 
+I had finally gotten my chance and I blew it, and I knew I would never get invited back. 
+But not only did Mr. Olbermann invite me back, he made me a full-time contributor, and he taped down my chair. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags. (Laughter) 
+Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game. 
+I would look at clips online and see comments like, "Yo, why's she tweakin '?" 
+What does she suffer from? 
+We should really pray for her. "" One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: screenwriter, comedian, palsy. 
+If a wheelchair user can't play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can't play a wheelchair user. 
+(Applause) People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment. 
+I hope that together, we can create more positive images of disability in the media and in everyday life. 
+Maybe it still takes a village to teach our children well. 
+My crooked journey has taken me to some very spectacular places. 
+I got to walk the red carpet flanked by soap diva Susan Lucci and the iconic Loreen Arbus. 
+I got to act in a movie with Adam Sandler and work with my idol, the amazing Dave Matthews. 
+I toured the world as a headliner on Arabs Gone Wild. 
+I was a delegate representing the great state of New Jersey at the 2008 DNC. 
+And I founded Maysoon's Kids, a charity that hopes to give Palestinian refugee children a sliver of the chance my parents gave me. 
+But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got — before this moment — (Laughter) (Applause) But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got to perform for the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson's and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali. (Applause) 
+(English) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and if I can can, you can can. 
+
+So, there's an actor called Dustin Hoffman. 
+And years ago, he made this movie which some of you may have heard of, called "" The Graduate. "" And there's two key scenes in that movie. 
+The first one is the seduction scene. 
+I'm not going to talk about that tonight. 
+(Laughter) The second scene is where he's taken out by the old guy to the pool, and as a young college graduate, the old guy basically says one word, just one word. 
+And of course, all of you know what that word is. 
+It's "" plastics. "" (Laughter) And the only problem with that is, it was completely the wrong advice. (Laughter) 
+Let me tell you why it was so wrong. 
+The word should have been "" silicon. "" And the reason it should have been silicon is because the basic patents for semiconductors had already been made, had already been filed, and they were already building them. 
+So Silicon Valley was just being built in 1967, when this movie was released. 
+And the year after the movie was released, Intel was founded. 
+So had the graduate heard the right one word, maybe he would have ended up onstage — oh, I don't know — maybe with these two. 
+(Laughter) So as you're thinking of that, let's see what bit of advice we might want to give so that your next graduate doesn't become a Tupperware salesman. (Laughter) 
+So in 2015, what word of advice would you give people, when you took a college graduate out by the pool and you said one word, just one word? 
+I think the answer would be "" lifecode. "" So what is "" lifecode? "" Lifecode is the various ways we have of programming life. 
+So instead of programming computers, we're using things to program viruses or retroviruses or proteins or DNA or RNA or plants or animals, or a whole series of creatures. 
+And as you're thinking about this incredible ability to make life do what you want it to do, what it's programmed to do, what you end up doing is taking what we've been doing for thousands of years, which is breeding, changing, mixing, matching all kinds of life-forms, and we accelerate it. 
+And this is not something new. 
+This humble mustard weed has been modified so that if you change it in one way, you get broccoli. 
+And if you change it in a third way, you get cauliflower. 
+So when you go to these all-natural, organic markets, you're really going to a place where people have been changing the lifecode of plants for a long time. 
+The difference today, to pick a completely politically neutral term — [Intelligent design] (Laughter) We're beginning to practice intelligent design. 
+That means that instead of doing this at random and seeing what happens over generations, we're inserting specific genes, we're inserting specific proteins, and we're changing lifecode for very deliberate purposes. 
+And that allows us to accelerate how this stuff happens. 
+Let me just give you one example. 
+Some of you occasionally might think about sex. 
+And we kind of take it for granted how we've changed sex. 
+So we think it's perfectly normal and natural to change it. 
+But in today's world, sex plus pill equals no baby. 
+(Laughter) And again, we think that's perfectly normal and natural, but that has not been the case for most of human history. 
+What it is does is it gives us control, so sex becomes separate from conception. 
+And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, then we've been playing with stuff that's a little bit more advanced, like art. 
+Not in the sense of painting and sculpture, but in the sense of assisted reproductive technologies. 
+So what are assisted reproductive technologies? 
+Assisted reproductive technologies are things like in vitro fertilization. 
+And when you do in vitro fertilization, there's very good reasons to do it. 
+Sometimes you just can't conceive otherwise. 
+But when you do that, what you ’ re doing is separating sex, conception, baby. 
+So you haven't just taken control of when you have a baby, you've separated when the baby and where the baby is fertilized. 
+So you've separated the baby from the body from the act. 
+And as you're thinking of other things we've been doing, think about twins. 
+So you can freeze sperm, you can freeze eggs, you can freeze fertilized eggs. 
+And what does that mean? 
+You're about to go under chemotherapy or under radiation, so you save these things. 
+But if you can save them and you can freeze them, and you can have a surrogate mother, it means that you've decoupled sex from time. 
+It means you can have twins born — oh, in 50 years? 
+(Laughter) In a hundred years? 
+Two hundred years? 
+And these are three really profound changes that are not, like, future stuff. 
+This is stuff we take for granted today. 
+It turns out to be this incredibly powerful way of changing viruses, of changing plants, of changing animals, perhaps even of evolving ourselves. 
+It's something that Steve Gullans and I have been thinking about for a while. 
+Let's have some risks. 
+Like every powerful technology, like electricity, like an automobile, like computers, this stuff potentially can be misused. 
+And that scares a lot of people. 
+And as you apply these technologies, you can even turn human beings into chimeras. 
+Remember the Greek myth where you mix animals? 
+Well, some of these treatments actually end up changing your blood type. 
+Or they'll put male cells in a female body or vice versa, which sounds absolutely horrible until you realize, the reason you're doing that is you're substituting bone marrow during cancer treatments. 
+So by taking somebody else's bone marrow, you may be changing some fundamental aspects of yourself, but you're also saving your life. 
+And as you're thinking about this stuff, here's something that happened 20 years ago. 
+This is Emma Ott. 
+She's a recent college admittee. 
+She's studying accounting. 
+She played two varsity sports. She graduated as a valedictorian. 
+And that's not particularly extraordinary, except that she's the first human being born to three parents. 
+Why? 
+Because she had a deadly mitochondrial disease that she might have inherited. 
+So when you swap out a third person's DNA and you put it in there, you save the lives of people. 
+But you also are doing germline engineering, which means her kids, if she has kids, will be saved and won't go through this. 
+And [their] kids will be saved, and their grandchildren will be saved, and this passes on. 
+That makes people nervous. 
+So 20 years ago, the various authorities said, why don't we study this for a while? 
+There are risks to doing stuff, and there are risks to not doing stuff, because there were a couple dozen people saved by this technology, and then we've been thinking about it for the next 20 years. 
+So as we think about it, as we take the time to say, "" Hey, maybe we should have longer studies, maybe we should do this, maybe we should do that, "" there are consequences to acting, and there are consequences to not acting. 
+Like curing deadly diseases — which, by the way, is completely unnatural. 
+It is normal and natural for humans to be felled by massive epidemics of polio, of smallpox, of tuberculosis. 
+When we put vaccines into people, we are putting unnatural things into their body because we think the benefit outweighs the risk. 
+Because we've built unnatural plants, unnatural animals, we can feed about seven billion people. 
+We can do things like create new life-forms. 
+And as you create new life-forms, again, that sounds terribly scary and terribly bothersome, until you realize that those life-forms live on your dining room table. 
+Those flowers you've got on your dining room table — there's not a lot that's natural about them, because people have been breeding the flowers to make this color, to be this size, to last for a week. 
+What all this does is it flips Darwin completely on his head. 
+See, for four billion years, what lived and died on this planet depended on two principles: on natural selection and random mutation. 
+And so what lived and died, what was structured, has now been flipped on its head. 
+And what we've done is created this completely parallel evolutionary system where we are practicing unnatural selection and non-random mutation. 
+So let me explain these things. 
+This is natural selection. 
+This is unnatural selection. 
+(Laughter) So what happens with this stuff is, we started breeding wolves thousands of years ago in central Asia to turn them into dogs. 
+But if you take one of the chihuahuas you see in the Hermès bags on Fifth Avenue and you let it loose on the African plain, you can watch natural selection happen. 
+(Laughter) Few things on Earth are less natural than a cornfield. 
+You will never, under any scenario, walk through a virgin forest and see the same plant growing in orderly rows at the same time, nothing else living there. 
+When you do a cornfield, you're selecting what lives and what dies. 
+It's the same with a wheat field, it's the same with a rice field. 
+It's the same with a city, it's the same with a suburb. 
+In fact, half the surface of Earth has been unnaturally engineered so that what lives and what dies there is what we want, which is the reason why you don't have grizzly bears walking through downtown Manhattan. 
+How about this random mutation stuff? 
+Well, this is random mutation. 
+This is Antonio Alfonseca. 
+He's otherwise known as the Octopus, his nickname. 
+He was the Relief Pitcher of the Year in 2000. 
+And he had a random mutation that gave him six fingers on each hand, which turns out to be really useful if you're a pitcher. 
+(Laughter) How about non-random mutation? 
+A non-random mutation is beer. 
+It's wine. It's yogurt. 
+How many times have you walked through the forest and found all-natural cheese? 
+So we've been engineering this stuff. 
+Now, the interesting thing is, we get to know the stuff better. 
+We found one of the single most powerful gene-editing instruments, CRISPR, inside yogurt. 
+And as we start engineering cells, we're producing eight out of the top 10 pharmaceutical products, including the stuff that you use to treat arthritis, which is the number one best-selling drug, Humira. 
+So this lifecode stuff. 
+It really is a way of programming stuff, and there's nothing that's going to change us more than this lifecode. 
+So as you're thinking of lifecode, let's think of five principles as to how we start guiding, and I'd love you to give me more. 
+So, principle number one: we have to take responsibility for this stuff. 
+The reason we have to take responsibility is because we're in charge. 
+This is what we are doing, what we are choosing. 
+It didn't come down by a verdict of somebody else. 
+We engineer this stuff, and it's the Pottery Barn rule: you break it, you own it. 
+Principle number two: we have to recognize and celebrate diversity in this stuff. 
+There have been at least 33 versions of hominids that have walked around this Earth. 
+Most all of them went extinct except us. 
+But the normal and natural state of this Earth is we have various versions of humans walking around at the same time, which is why most of us have some Neanderthal in us. 
+Some of us have some Denisova in us. 
+(Laughter) Principle number three: we have to respect other people's choices. 
+Some people will choose to never alter. 
+Some people will choose to alter all. 
+Some people will choose to alter plants but not animals. 
+Some people will choose to alter themselves. 
+Some people will choose to evolve themselves. 
+Diversity is not a bad thing, because even though we think of humans as very diverse, we came so close to extinction that all of us descend from a single African mother and the consequence of that is there's more genetic diversity in 55 African chimpanzees than there are in seven billion humans. 
+Principle number four: we should take about a quarter of the Earth and only let Darwin run the show there. 
+It doesn't have to be contiguous, doesn't have to all be tied together. 
+It should be part in the oceans, part on land. 
+We want to have our evolutionary system running. 
+We want to have Darwin's evolutionary system running. 
+And it's just really important to have these two things running in parallel and not overwhelm evolution. 
+(Applause) Last thing I'll say. 
+This is the single most exciting adventure human beings have been on. 
+This is the single greatest superpower humans have ever had. 
+It would be a crime for you not to participate in this stuff because you're scared of it, because you're hiding from it. 
+You can participate in the ethics. You can participate in the politics. 
+You can participate in just thinking about where medicine is going, where industry is going, where we're going to take the world. 
+It would be a crime for all of us not to be aware when somebody shows up at a swimming pool and says one word, just one word, if you don't listen if that word is "" lifecode. "" Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is a painting from the 16th century from Lucas Cranach the Elder. 
+It shows the famous Fountain of Youth. 
+If you drink its water or you bathe in it, you will get health and youth. 
+Every culture, every civilization has dreamed of finding eternal youth. 
+There are people like Alexander the Great or Ponce De León, the explorer, who spent much of their life chasing the Fountain of Youth. 
+They didn't find it. 
+But what if there was something to it? 
+I will share an absolutely amazing development in aging research that could revolutionize the way we think about aging and how we may treat age-related diseases in the future. 
+It started with experiments that showed, in a recent number of studies about growing, that animals — old mice — that share a blood supply with young mice can get rejuvenated. 
+This is similar to what you might see in humans, in Siamese twins, and I know this sounds a bit creepy. 
+But what Tom Rando, a stem-cell researcher, reported in 2007, was that old muscle from a mouse can be rejuvenated if it's exposed to young blood through common circulation. 
+This was reproduced by Amy Wagers at Harvard a few years later, and others then showed that similar rejuvenating effects could be observed in the pancreas, the liver and the heart. 
+But what I'm most excited about, and several other labs as well, is that this may even apply to the brain. 
+So, what we found is that an old mouse exposed to a young environment in this model called parabiosis, shows a younger brain — and a brain that functions better. 
+And I repeat: an old mouse that gets young blood through shared circulation looks younger and functions younger in its brain. 
+So when we get older — we can look at different aspects of human cognition, and you can see on this slide here, we can look at reasoning, verbal ability and so forth. 
+And up to around age 50 or 60, these functions are all intact, and as I look at the young audience here in the room, we're all still fine. 
+We know that with age, the connections between neurons — the way neurons talk to each other, the synapses — they start to deteriorate; neurons die, the brain starts to shrink, and there's an increased susceptibility for these neurodegenerative diseases. 
+One big problem we have — to try to understand how this really works at a very molecular mechanistic level — is that we can't study the brains in detail, in living people. 
+We can do cognitive tests, we can do imaging — all kinds of sophisticated testing. 
+This is what neuropathologists do, for example. 
+So, how about we think of the brain as being part of the larger organism. 
+And what connects all the different tissues in the body is blood. 
+Blood is the tissue that not only carries cells that transport oxygen, for example, the red blood cells, or fights infectious diseases, but it also carries messenger molecules, hormone-like factors that transport information from one cell to another, from one tissue to another, including the brain. 
+We know that as we get older, the blood changes as well, so these hormone-like factors change as we get older. 
+And what we noticed first is that between the youngest and the oldest group, about half the factors changed significantly. 
+And the way this looks is shown in this graph. 
+So, on the one axis you see the actual age a person lived, the chronological age. 
+And what you see is that there is a pretty good correlation, so we can pretty well predict the relative age of a person. 
+You can see here, the person I highlighted with the green dot is about 70 years of age but seems to have a biological age, if what we're doing here is really true, of only about 45. 
+On the other hand, the person here, highlighted with the red dot, is not even 40, but has a biological age of 65. 
+So what I've shown you so far is simply correlational, right? 
+So what I'm going to show you now is very remarkable and it suggests that these factors can actually modulate the age of a tissue. 
+And that's where we come back to this model called parabiosis. 
+So, parabiosis is done in mice by surgically connecting the two mice together, and that leads then to a shared blood system, where we can now ask, "" How does the old brain get influenced by exposure to the young blood? "" And for this purpose, we use young mice that are an equivalency of 20-year-old people, and old mice that are roughly 65 years old in human years. 
+What we found is quite remarkable. 
+There's an increased activity of the synapses, the connections between neurons. 
+And there's less of this bad inflammation. 
+But we observed that there are no cells entering the brains of these animals. 
+Instead, we've reasoned, then, that it must be the soluble factors, so we could collect simply the soluble fraction of blood which is called plasma, and inject either young plasma or old plasma into these mice, and we could reproduce these rejuvenating effects, but what we could also do now is we could do memory tests with mice. 
+It's just harder to detect them, but I'll show you in a minute how we do that. 
+So we teach them, over several days, to find this space on these cues in the space, and you can compare this for humans, to finding your car in a parking lot after a busy day of shopping. 
+This is an old mouse that has memory problems, as you'll notice in a moment. 
+It just looks into every hole, but it didn't form this spacial map that would remind it where it was in the previous trial or the last day. 
+In stark contrast, this mouse here is a sibling of the same age, but it was treated with young human plasma for three weeks, with small injections every three days. 
+And as you noticed, it almost looks around, "" Where am I? "" — and then walks straight to that hole and escapes. 
+So by all means, this old mouse seems to be rejuvenated — it functions more like a younger mouse. 
+So to summarize, we find the old mouse, and its brain in particular, are malleable. 
+Young blood factors can reverse aging, and what I didn't show you — in this model, the young mouse actually suffers from exposure to the old. 
+And most importantly, humans may have similar factors, because we can take young human blood and have a similar effect. 
+Old human blood, I didn't show you, does not have this effect; it does not make the mice younger. 
+So, is this magic transferable to humans? 
+We test them cognitively, and we ask their caregivers for daily activities of living. 
+And if that's the case, that could give us hope that what I showed you works in mice might also work in humans. 
+Now, I don't think we will live forever. 
+But maybe we discovered that the Fountain of Youth is actually within us, and it has just dried out. 
+And if we can turn it back on a little bit, maybe we can find the factors that are mediating these effects, we can produce these factors synthetically and we can treat diseases of aging, such as Alzheimer's disease or other dementias. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+So last year, on the Fourth of July, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider discovered the Higgs boson. 
+It was a historical day. 
+There's no doubt that from now on, the Fourth of July will be remembered not as the day of the Declaration of Independence, but as the day of the discovery of the Higgs boson. 
+Well, at least, here at CERN. 
+But for me, the biggest surprise of that day was that there was no big surprise. 
+In the eye of a theoretical physicist, the Higgs boson is a clever explanation of how some elementary particles gain mass, but it seems a fairly unsatisfactory and incomplete solution. 
+Too many questions are left unanswered. 
+The Higgs boson does not share the beauty, the symmetry, the elegance, of the rest of the elementary particle world. 
+For this reason, the majority of theoretical physicists believe that the Higgs boson could not be the full story. 
+We were expecting new particles and new phenomena accompanying the Higgs boson. 
+Instead, so far, the measurements coming from the LHC show no signs of new particles or unexpected phenomena. 
+Of course, the verdict is not definitive. 
+In 2015, the LHC will almost double the energy of the colliding protons, and these more powerful collisions will allow us to explore further the particle world, and we will certainly learn much more. 
+But for the moment, since we have found no evidence for new phenomena, let us suppose that the particles that we know today, including the Higgs boson, are the only elementary particles in nature, even at energies much larger than what we have explored so far. 
+Let's see where this hypothesis is going to lead us. 
+We will find a surprising and intriguing result about our universe, and to explain my point, let me first tell you what the Higgs is about, and to do so, we have to go back to one tenth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. 
+And according to the Higgs theory, at that instant, a dramatic event took place in the universe. 
+Space-time underwent a phase transition. 
+It was something very similar to the phase transition that occurs when water turns into ice below zero degrees. 
+But in our case, the phase transition is not a change in the way the molecules are arranged inside the material, but is about a change of the very fabric of space-time. 
+During this phase transition, empty space became filled with a substance that we now call Higgs field. 
+And this substance may seem invisible to us, but it has a physical reality. 
+It surrounds us all the time, just like the air we breathe in this room. 
+And some elementary particles interact with this substance, gaining energy in the process. 
+And this intrinsic energy is what we call the mass of a particle, and by discovering the Higgs boson, the LHC has conclusively proved that this substance is real, because it is the stuff the Higgs bosons are made of. 
+And this, in a nutshell, is the essence of the Higgs story. 
+But this story is far more interesting than that. 
+By studying the Higgs theory, theoretical physicists discovered, not through an experiment but with the power of mathematics, that the Higgs field does not necessarily exist only in the form that we observe today. 
+Just like matter can exist as liquid or solid, so the Higgs field, the substance that fills all space-time, could exist in two states. 
+Besides the known Higgs state, there could be a second state in which the Higgs field is billions and billions times denser than what we observe today, and the mere existence of another state of the Higgs field poses a potential problem. 
+This is because, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, it is possible to have transitions between two states, even in the presence of an energy barrier separating the two states, and the phenomenon is called, quite appropriately, quantum tunneling. 
+Because of quantum tunneling, I could disappear from this room and reappear in the next room, practically penetrating the wall. 
+But don't expect me to actually perform the trick in front of your eyes, because the probability for me to penetrate the wall is ridiculously small. 
+You would have to wait a really long time before it happens, but believe me, quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon, and it has been observed in many systems. 
+For instance, the tunnel diode, a component used in electronics, works thanks to the wonders of quantum tunneling. 
+But let's go back to the Higgs field. 
+If the ultra-dense Higgs state existed, then, because of quantum tunneling, a bubble of this state could suddenly appear in a certain place of the universe at a certain time, and it is analogous to what happens when you boil water. 
+Bubbles of vapor form inside the water, then they expand, turning liquid into gas. 
+In the same way, a bubble of the ultra-dense Higgs state could come into existence because of quantum tunneling. 
+The bubble would then expand at the speed of light, invading all space, and turning the Higgs field from the familiar state into a new state. 
+Is this a problem? Yes, it's a big a problem. 
+We may not realize it in ordinary life, but the intensity of the Higgs field is critical for the structure of matter. 
+If the Higgs field were only a few times more intense, we would see atoms shrinking, neutrons decaying inside atomic nuclei, nuclei disintegrating, and hydrogen would be the only possible chemical element in the universe. 
+And the Higgs field, in the ultra-dense Higgs state, is not just a few times more intense than today, but billions of times, and if space-time were filled by this Higgs state, all atomic matter would collapse. 
+No molecular structures would be possible, no life. 
+So, I wonder, is it possible that in the future, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and, through quantum tunneling, will be transformed into this nasty, ultra-dense state? 
+In other words, I ask myself, what is the fate of the Higgs field in our universe? 
+And the crucial ingredient necessary to answer this question is the Higgs boson mass. 
+And experiments at the LHC found that the mass of the Higgs boson is about 126 GeV. 
+This is tiny when expressed in familiar units, because it's equal to something like 10 to the minus 22 grams, but it is large in particle physics units, because it is equal to the weight of an entire molecule of a DNA constituent. 
+So armed with this information from the LHC, together with some colleagues here at CERN, we computed the probability that our universe could quantum tunnel into the ultra-dense Higgs state, and we found a very intriguing result. 
+Our calculations showed that the measured value of the Higgs boson mass is very special. 
+It has just the right value to keep the universe hanging in an unstable situation. 
+The Higgs field is in a wobbly configuration that has lasted so far but that will eventually collapse. 
+So according to these calculations, we are like campers who accidentally set their tent at the edge of a cliff. 
+And eventually, the Higgs field will undergo a phase transition and matter will collapse into itself. 
+So is this how humanity is going to disappear? 
+I don't think so. 
+Our calculation shows that quantum tunneling of the Higgs field is not likely to occur in the next 10 to the 100 years, and this is a very long time. 
+It's even longer than the time it takes for Italy to form a stable government. 
+(Laughter) Even so, we will be long gone by then. 
+In about five billion years, our sun will become a red giant, as large as the Earth's orbit, and our Earth will be kaput, and in a thousand billion years, if dark energy keeps on fueling space expansion at the present rate, you will not even be able to see as far as your toes, because everything around you expands at a rate faster than the speed of light. 
+So it is really unlikely that we will be around to see the Higgs field collapse. 
+But the reason why I am interested in the transition of the Higgs field is because I want to address the question, why is the Higgs boson mass so special? 
+Why is it just right to keep the universe at the edge of a phase transition? 
+Theoretical physicists always ask "" why "" questions. 
+More than how a phenomenon works, theoretical physicists are always interested in why a phenomenon works in the way it works. 
+We think that this these "" why "" questions can give us clues about the fundamental principles of nature. 
+And indeed, a possible answer to my question opens up new universes, literally. 
+It has been speculated that our universe is only a bubble in a soapy multiverse made out of a multitude of bubbles, and each bubble is a different universe with different fundamental constants and different physical laws. 
+And in this context, you can only talk about the probability of finding a certain value of the Higgs mass. 
+Then the key to the mystery could lie in the statistical properties of the multiverse. 
+It would be something like what happens with sand dunes on a beach. 
+In principle, you could imagine to find sand dunes of any slope angle in a beach, and yet, the slope angles of sand dunes are typically around 30, 35 degrees. 
+And the reason is simple: because wind builds up the sand, gravity makes it fall. 
+As a result, the vast majority of sand dunes have slope angles around the critical value, near to collapse. 
+And something similar could happen for the Higgs boson mass in the multiverse. 
+In the majority of bubble universes, the Higgs mass could be around the critical value, near to a cosmic collapse of the Higgs field, because of two competing effects, just as in the case of sand. 
+My story does not have an end, because we still don't know the end of the story. 
+This is science in progress, and to solve the mystery, we need more data, and hopefully, the LHC will soon add new clues to this story. 
+Just one number, the Higgs boson mass, and yet, out of this number we learn so much. 
+I started from a hypothesis, that the known particles are all there is in the universe, even beyond the domain explored so far. 
+From this, we discovered that the Higgs field that permeates space-time may be standing on a knife edge, ready for cosmic collapse, and we discovered that this may be a hint that our universe is only a grain of sand in a giant beach, the multiverse. 
+But I don't know if my hypothesis is right. 
+That's how physics works: A single measurement can put us on the road to a new understanding of the universe or it can send us down a blind alley. 
+But whichever it turns out to be, there is one thing I'm sure of: The journey will be full of surprises. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We say, "" Hello, how are you? 
+It's a beautiful day. 
+How do you feel? "" These sound kind of meaningless, right? And, in some ways, they are. 
+They have no semantic meaning. 
+It doesn't matter how you are or what the day is like. 
+They have something else. 
+They have social meaning. 
+What we mean when we say those things is: I see you there. 
+I'm obsessed with talking to strangers. 
+I make eye contact, say hello, I offer help, I listen. 
+I get all kinds of stories. 
+About seven years ago, I started documenting my experiences to try to figure out why. 
+What I found was that something really beautiful was going on. 
+This is almost poetic. 
+These were really profound experiences. 
+They were unexpected pleasures. 
+They were genuine emotional connections. 
+They were liberating moments. 
+So one day, I was standing on a corner waiting for the light to change, which, I'm a New Yorker, so that means I was actually standing in the street on the storm drain, as if that could get me across faster. 
+So he's wearing, like, a long overcoat and sort of an old-man hat, and he looked like somebody from a movie. 
+And he says to me, "Don't stand there. You might disappear." 
+So this is absurd, right? 
+But I did what he said. I stepped back onto the sidewalk. 
+And he smiled, and he said, "" Good. You never know. 
+I might have turned around, and zoop, you're gone. "" This was weird, and also really wonderful. 
+He was so warm, and he was so happy that he'd saved me. 
+We had this little bond. 
+For a minute, I felt like my existence as a person had been noticed, and I was worth saving. 
+The really sad thing is, in many parts of the world, we're raised to believe that strangers are dangerous by default, that we can't trust them, that they might hurt us. 
+But most strangers aren't dangerous. 
+We're uneasy around them because we have no context. 
+We don't know what their intentions are. 
+So instead of using our perceptions and making choices, we rely on this category of "" stranger. "" I have a four-year-old. 
+When I say hello to people on the street, she asks me why. 
+She says, "" Do we know them? "" I say, "" No, they're our neighbor. "" "Are they our friend?" 
+"No, it's just good to be friendly." 
+I think twice every time I say that to her, because I mean it, but as a woman, particularly, I know that not every stranger on the street has the best intentions. 
+It is good to be friendly, and it's good to learn when not to be, but none of that means we have to be afraid. 
+There are two huge benefits to using our senses instead of our fears. 
+The first one is that it liberates us. 
+When you think about it, using perception instead of categories is much easier said than done. 
+Categories are something our brains use. 
+When it comes to people, it's sort of a shortcut for learning about them. 
+We see male, female, young, old, black, brown, white, stranger, friend, and we use the information in that box. 
+It's quick, it's easy and it's a road to bias. 
+And it means we're not thinking about people as individuals. 
+I know an American researcher who travels frequently in Central Asia and Africa, alone. 
+She's entering into towns and cities as a complete stranger. 
+She has no bonds, no connections. 
+Her survival strategy is this: get one stranger to see you as a real, individual person. 
+If you can do that, it'll help other people see you that way, too. 
+The second benefit of using our senses has to do with intimacy. 
+I know it sounds a little counterintuitive, intimacy and strangers, but these quick interactions can lead to a feeling that sociologists call "" fleeting intimacy. "" So, it's a brief experience that has emotional resonance and meaning. 
+It's the good feeling I got from being saved from the death trap of the storm drain by the old man, or how I feel like part of a community when I talk to somebody on my train on the way to work. 
+Sometimes it goes further. 
+Researchers have found that people often feel more comfortable being honest and open about their inner selves with strangers than they do with their friends and their families — that they often feel more understood by strangers. 
+This gets reported in the media with great lament. 
+"Strangers communicate better than spouses!" 
+It's a good headline, right? 
+I think it entirely misses the point. 
+The important thing about these studies is just how significant these interactions can be; how this special form of closeness gives us something we need as much as we need our friends and our families. 
+So how is it possible that we communicate so well with strangers? 
+There are two reasons. 
+The first one is that it's a quick interaction. 
+It has no consequences. 
+The second reason is where it gets more interesting. 
+We have a bias when it comes to people we're close to. 
+We expect them to understand us. 
+So imagine you're at a party, and you can't believe that your friend or your spouse isn't picking up on it that you want to leave early. 
+And you're thinking, "I gave you the look." 
+With a stranger, we have to start from scratch. 
+We tell the whole story, we explain who the people are, how we feel about them; we spell out all the inside jokes. 
+And guess what? 
+Sometimes they do understand us a little better. 
+OK. 
+So now that we know that talking to strangers matters, how does it work? 
+There are unwritten rules we tend to follow. 
+The rules are very different depending on what country you're in, what culture you're in. 
+In most parts of the US, the baseline expectation in public is that we maintain a balance between civility and privacy. 
+This is known as civil inattention. 
+So, imagine two people are walking towards each other on the street. 
+They'll glance at each other from a distance. 
+That's the civility, the acknowledgment. 
+And then as they get closer, they'll look away, to give each other some space. 
+In other cultures, people go to extraordinary lengths not to interact at all. 
+People from Denmark tell me that many Danes are so averse to talking to strangers, that they would rather miss their stop on the bus than say "" excuse me "" to someone that they need to get around. 
+Instead, there's this elaborate shuffling of bags and using your body to say that you need to get past, instead of using two words. 
+In Egypt, I'm told, it's rude to ignore a stranger, and there's a remarkable culture of hospitality. 
+Strangers might ask each other for a sip of water. 
+Or, if you ask someone for directions, they're very likely to invite you home for coffee. 
+We see these unwritten rules most clearly when they're broken, or when you're in a new place and you're trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. 
+Sometimes breaking the rules a little bit is where the action is. 
+In case it's not clear, I really want you to do this. OK? 
+So here's how it's going to go. 
+Find somebody who is making eye contact. 
+That's a good signal. 
+The first thing is a simple smile. 
+See what happens. 
+Another is triangulation. 
+There's you, there's a stranger, there's some third thing that you both might see and comment on, like a piece of public art or somebody preaching in the street or somebody wearing funny clothes. 
+Give it a try. 
+Make a comment about that third thing, and see if starts a conversation. 
+This is usually giving a compliment. 
+I'm a big fan of noticing people's shoes. 
+I'm actually not wearing fabulous shoes right now, but shoes are fabulous in general. 
+And they're pretty neutral as far as giving compliments goes. 
+People always want to tell you things about their awesome shoes. 
+You may have already experienced the dogs and babies principle. 
+It can be awkward to talk to someone on the street; you don't know how they're going to respond. 
+The dog or the baby is a social conduit to the person, and you can tell by how they respond whether they're open to talking more. 
+The last one I want to challenge you to is disclosure. 
+So next time you're talking to a stranger and you feel comfortable, tell them something true about yourself, something really personal. 
+You might have that experience I talked about of feeling understood. 
+Sometimes in conversation, it comes up, people ask me, "" What does your dad do? "" or, "" Where does he live? "" And sometimes I tell them the whole truth, which is that he died when I was a kid. 
+Always in those moments, they share their own experiences of loss. 
+We tend to meet disclosure with disclosure, even with strangers. 
+So, here it is. 
+When you talk to strangers, you're making beautiful interruptions into the expected narrative of your daily life and theirs. 
+You're making unexpected connections. 
+If you don't talk to strangers, you're missing out on all of that. 
+We spend a lot of time teaching our children about strangers. 
+What would happen if we spent more time teaching ourselves? 
+We could reject all the ideas that make us so suspicious of each other. 
+We could make a space for change. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while writing an article for Italian Wired. 
+I always keep my thesaurus handy whenever I'm writing anything, but I'd already finished editing the piece, and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word "" disabled "" to see what I'd find. 
+Let me read you the entry. 
+"" Disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. 
+Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable. "" I was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but I'd just gotten past "" mangled, "" and my voice broke, and I had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed. 
+You know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so I'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? 
+But, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when I would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. 
+And, needless to say, thank God I wasn't using a thesaurus back then. 
+I mean, from this entry, it would seem that I was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured. 
+So, I immediately went to look up the 2009 online edition, expecting to find a revision worth noting. 
+Here's the updated version of this entry. 
+Unfortunately, it's not much better. 
+I find the last two words under "" Near Antonyms, "" particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome." 
+So, it's not just about the words. 
+It's what we believe about people when we name them with these words. 
+It's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values. 
+Our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. 
+In fact, many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was so powerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into existence. 
+So, what reality do we want to call into existence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? 
+By casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. 
+Wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead? 
+One such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the A.I. duPont Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. 
+His name was Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italian American, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most Americans to pronounce, so he went by Dr. P. 
+And Dr. P always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children. 
+I loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the exception of my physical therapy sessions. 
+I had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of exercises with these thick, elastic bands — different colors, you know — to help build up my leg muscles, and I hated these bands more than anything — I hated them, had names for them. I hated them. 
+And, you know, I was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with Dr. P to try to get out of doing these exercises, unsuccessfully, of course. 
+And, one day, he came in to my session — exhaustive and unforgiving, these sessions — and he said to me, "" Wow. Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you're going to break one of those bands. 
+When you do break it, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks. "" Now, of course, this was a simple ploy on Dr. P's part to get me to do the exercises I didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. 
+And I have to wonder today to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future. 
+This is an example of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. 
+But, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. 
+Our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. 
+Certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them — not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. 
+So, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset. 
+The human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and I'm going to make an admission: This phrase never sat right with me, and I always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it, and I think I'm starting to figure out why. 
+Implicit in this phrase of "" overcoming adversity "" is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience, as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability. 
+But, in fact, we are changed. We are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. 
+And I'm going to suggest that this is a good thing. 
+Adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. 
+It's part of our life. 
+And I tend to think of it like my shadow. 
+Sometimes I see a lot of it, sometimes there's very little, but it's always with me. 
+And, certainly, I'm not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a person's struggle. 
+There is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. 
+So, our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. 
+And we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt. 
+There's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not I'm disabled. 
+And, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability I've had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by those definitions. 
+In our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the expected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually disable someone. 
+Perhaps the existing model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself. 
+By not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. 
+We are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. 
+So we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. 
+And, most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. 
+So it's not about devaluing, or negating, these more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but instead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. 
+So maybe the idea I want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. 
+And, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it. 
+This year we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when writing about evolution, that Darwin illustrated, I think, a truth about the human character. 
+To paraphrase: It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. 
+Conflict is the genesis of creation. 
+From Darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. 
+So, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. 
+And, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're made of. 
+Maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power. 
+So, we can give ourselves a gift. 
+We can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. 
+Maybe we can see it as change. 
+Adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet. 
+I think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. 
+Now, who's normal? 
+There's no normal. 
+There's common, there's typical. There's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person if they existed? 
+(Laughter) I don't think so. 
+If we can change this paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility — or potency, to be even a little bit more dangerous — we can release the power of so many more children, and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community. 
+Anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of use, to be able to contribute. 
+There's evidence that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life experience of survival of these people proved of value to the community. 
+They didn't view these people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable. 
+A few years ago, I was in a food market in the town where I grew up in that red zone in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I was standing over a bushel of tomatoes. 
+It was summertime: I had shorts on. 
+I hear this guy, his voice behind me say, "" Well, if it isn't Aimee Mullins. "" And I turn around, and it's this older man. I have no idea who he is. 
+And I said, "" I'm sorry, sir, have we met? I don't remember meeting you. "" He said, "" Well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. 
+I mean, when we met I was delivering you from your mother's womb. "" (Laughter) Oh, that guy. 
+And, but of course, actually, it did click. 
+This man was Dr. Kean, a man that I had only known about through my mother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, I arrived late for my birthday by two weeks. 
+And so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents. 
+And, because I was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer — this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news. 
+He said to me, "" I had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever since. "" (Laughter) (Applause) The extraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee, marching with the Girl Scouts, you know, the Halloween parade, winning my college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and integrating it into teaching resident students, 
+med students from Hahnemann Medical School and Hershey Medical School. 
+And he called this part of the course the X Factor, the potential of the human will. 
+No prognosis can account for how powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. 
+And Dr. Kean went on to tell me, he said, "" In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve. "" See, Dr. Kean made that shift in thinking. 
+He understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. 
+And there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second. 
+I aspired to that kind of normalcy back then. 
+But if you ask me today, I'm not so sure. 
+And it's because of the experiences I've had with them, not in spite of the experiences I've had with them. 
+And perhaps this shift in me has happened because I've been exposed to more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast shadows on me. 
+See, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power, and you're off. 
+If you can hand somebody the key to their own power — the human spirit is so receptive — if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. 
+You're teaching them to open doors for themselves. 
+In fact, the exact meaning of the word "" educate "" comes from the root word "" educe. "" It means "" to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential. "" So again, which potential do we want to bring out? 
+There was a case study done in 1960s Britain, when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. 
+It's called the streaming trials. We call it "" tracking "" here in the States. 
+It's separating students from A, B, C, D and so on. 
+And the "" A students "" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers, etc. 
+Well, they took, over a three-month period, D-level students, gave them A's, told them they were "" A's, "" told them they were bright, and at the end of this three-month period, they were performing at A-level. 
+And, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they took the "" A students "" and told them they were "" D's. "" And that's what happened at the end of that three-month period. 
+Those who were still around in school, besides the people who had dropped out. 
+A crucial part of this case study was that the teachers were duped too. 
+The teachers didn't know a switch had been made. 
+They were simply told, "" These are the 'A-students,' these are the 'D-students.' "" And that's how they went about teaching them and treating them. 
+So, I think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer has our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. 
+If instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. 
+When a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being. 
+I'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century Persian poet named Hafiz that my friend, Jacques Dembois told me about, and the poem is called "" The God Who Only Knows Four Words "": "" Every child has known God, not the God of names, not the God of don'ts, but the God who only knows four words and keeps repeating them, saying, 'Come dance with me. 
+Come, dance with me. Come, dance with me. '"" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We all go to doctors. 
+And we do so with trust and blind faith that the test they are ordering and the medications they're prescribing are based upon evidence — evidence that's designed to help us. 
+However, the reality is that that hasn't always been the case for everyone. 
+What if I told you that the medical science discovered over the past century has been based on only half the population? 
+I'm an emergency medicine doctor. 
+I was trained to be prepared in a medical emergency. 
+It's about saving lives. How cool is that? 
+OK, there's a lot of runny noses and stubbed toes, but no matter who walks through the door to the ER, we order the same tests, we prescribe the same medication, without ever thinking about the sex or gender of our patients. 
+Why would we? 
+We were never taught that there were any differences between men and women. 
+A recent Government Accountability study revealed that 80 percent of the drugs withdrawn from the market are due to side effects on women. 
+So let's think about that for a minute. 
+Why are we discovering side effects on women only after a drug has been released to the market? 
+Do you know that it takes years for a drug to go from an idea to being tested on cells in a laboratory, to animal studies, to then clinical trials on humans, finally to go through a regulatory approval process, to be available for your doctor to prescribe to you? 
+Not to mention the millions and billions of dollars of funding it takes to go through that process. 
+So why are we discovering unacceptable side effects on half the population after that has gone through? 
+What's happening? 
+Well, it turns out that those cells used in that laboratory, they're male cells, and the animals used in the animal studies were male animals, and the clinical trials have been performed almost exclusively on men. 
+How is it that the male model became our framework for medical research? 
+Let's look at an example that has been popularized in the media, and it has to do with the sleep aid Ambien. 
+Ambien was released on the market over 20 years ago, and since then, hundreds of millions of prescriptions have been written, primarily to women, because women suffer more sleep disorders than men. 
+But just this past year, the Food and Drug Administration recommended cutting the dose in half for women only, because they just realized that women metabolize the drug at a slower rate than men, causing them to wake up in the morning with more of the active drug in their system. 
+And then they're drowsy and they're getting behind the wheel of the car, and they're at risk for motor vehicle accidents. 
+And I can't help but think, as an emergency physician, how many of my patients that I've cared for over the years were involved in a motor vehicle accident that possibly could have been prevented if this type of analysis was performed and acted upon 20 years ago when this drug was first released. 
+How many other things need to be analyzed by gender? 
+What else are we missing? 
+World War II changed a lot of things, and one of them was this need to protect people from becoming victims of medical research without informed consent. 
+So some much-needed guidelines or rules were set into place, and part of that was this desire to protect women of childbearing age from entering into any medical research studies. 
+There was fear: what if something happened to the fetus during the study? 
+Who would be responsible? 
+And so the scientists at this time actually thought this was a blessing in disguise, because let's face it — men's bodies are pretty homogeneous. 
+They don't have the constantly fluctuating levels of hormones that could disrupt clean data they could get if they had only men. 
+It was easier. It was cheaper. 
+Not to mention, at this time, there was a general assumption that men and women were alike in every way, apart from their reproductive organs and sex hormones. 
+So it was decided: medical research was performed on men, and the results were later applied to women. 
+What did this do to the notion of women's health? 
+Women's health became synonymous with reproduction: breasts, ovaries, uterus, pregnancy. 
+It's this term we now refer to as "" bikini medicine. "" And this stayed this way until about the 1980s, when this concept was challenged by the medical community and by the public health policymakers when they realized that by excluding women from all medical research studies we actually did them a disservice, in that apart from reproductive issues, virtually nothing was known about the unique needs of the female patient. 
+Since that time, an overwhelming amount of evidence has come to light that shows us just how different men and women are in every way. 
+You know, we have this saying in medicine: children are not just little adults. 
+And we say that to remind ourselves that children actually have a different physiology than normal adults. 
+And it's because of this that the medical specialty of pediatrics came to light. 
+And we now conduct research on children in order to improve their lives. 
+And I know the same thing can be said about women. 
+Women are not just men with boobs and tubes. 
+But they have their own anatomy and physiology that deserves to be studied with the same intensity. 
+Let's take the cardiovascular system, for example. 
+This area in medicine has done the most to try to figure out why it seems men and women have completely different heart attacks. 
+Heart disease is the number one killer for both men and women, but more women die within the first year of having a heart attack than men. 
+Men will complain of crushing chest pain — an elephant is sitting on their chest. 
+And we call this typical. 
+Women have chest pain, too. 
+But more women than men will complain of "" just not feeling right, "" "can't seem to get enough air in," "just so tired lately." 
+And for some reason we call this atypical, even though, as I mentioned, women do make up half the population. 
+And so what is some of the evidence to help explain some of these differences? 
+If we look at the anatomy, the blood vessels that surround the heart are smaller in women compared to men, and the way that those blood vessels develop disease is different in women compared to men. 
+And the test that we use to determine if someone is at risk for a heart attack, well, they were initially designed and tested and perfected in men, and so aren't as good at determining that in women. 
+And then if we think about the medications — common medications that we use, like aspirin. 
+We give aspirin to healthy men to help prevent them from having a heart attack, but do you know that if you give aspirin to a healthy woman, it's actually harmful? 
+What this is doing is merely telling us that we are scratching the surface. 
+Emergency medicine is a fast-paced business. 
+In how many life-saving areas of medicine, like cancer and stroke, are there important differences between men and women that we could be utilizing? 
+Or even, why is it that some people get those runny noses more than others, or why the pain medication that we give to those stubbed toes work in some and not in others? 
+The Institute of Medicine has said every cell has a sex. 
+What does this mean? 
+Sex is DNA. 
+Gender is how someone presents themselves in society. 
+And these two may not always match up, as we can see with our transgendered population. 
+But it's important to realize that from the moment of conception, every cell in our bodies — skin, hair, heart and lungs — contains our own unique DNA, and that DNA contains the chromosomes that determine whether we become male or female, man or woman. 
+It used to be thought that those sex-determining chromosomes pictured here — XY if you're male, XX if you're female — merely determined whether you would be born with ovaries or testes, and it was the sex hormones that those organs produced that were responsible for the differences we see in the opposite sex. 
+But we now know that that theory was wrong — or it's at least a little incomplete. 
+And thankfully, scientists like Dr. Page from the Whitehead Institute, who works on the Y chromosome, and Doctor Yang from UCLA, they have found evidence that tells us that those sex-determining chromosomes that are in every cell in our bodies continue to remain active for our entire lives and could be what's responsible for the differences we see in the dosing of drugs, or why there are differences between men and women in the susceptibility and severity of diseases. 
+This new knowledge is the game-changer, and it's up to those scientists that continue to find that evidence, but it's up to the clinicians to start translating this data at the bedside, today. 
+Right now. 
+And to help do this, I'm a co-founder of a national organization called Sex and Gender Women's Health Collaborative, and we collect all of this data so that it's available for teaching and for patient care. 
+And we're working to bring together the medical educators to the table. 
+That's a big job. 
+It's changing the way medical training has been done since its inception. 
+But I believe in them. 
+I know they're going to see the value of incorporating the gender lens into the current curriculum. 
+It's about training the future health care providers correctly. 
+And regionally, I'm a co-creator of a division within the Department of Emergency Medicine here at Brown University, called Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine, and we conduct the research to determine the differences between men and women in emergent conditions, like heart disease and stroke and sepsis and substance abuse, but we also believe that education is paramount. 
+We've created a 360-degree model of education. 
+We have programs for the doctors, for the nurses, for the students and for the patients. 
+Because this cannot just be left up to the health care leaders. 
+We all have a role in making a difference. 
+But I must warn you: this is not easy. 
+In fact, it's hard. 
+It's essentially changing the way we think about medicine and health and research. 
+It's changing our relationship to the health care system. 
+But there's no going back. 
+We now know just enough to know that we weren't doing it right. 
+Martin Luther King, Jr. has said, "" Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. "" And the first step towards change is awareness. 
+This is not just about improving medical care for women. 
+This is about personalized, individualized health care for everyone. 
+This awareness has the power to transform medical care for men and women. 
+And from now on, I want you to ask your doctors whether the treatments you are receiving are specific to your sex and gender. 
+They may not know the answer — yet. 
+But the conversation has begun, and together we can all learn. 
+Remember, for me and my colleagues in this field, your sex and gender matter. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm here because I have a very important message: I think we have found the most important factor for success. 
+And it was found close to here, Stanford. 
+Psychology professor took kids that were four years old and put them in a room all by themselves. 
+And he would tell the child, a four-year-old kid, "" Johnny, I am going to leave you here with a marshmallow for 15 minutes. 
+If, after I come back, this marshmallow is here, you will get another one. So you will have two. "" To tell a four-year-old kid to wait 15 minutes for something that they like, is equivalent to telling us, "" We'll bring you coffee in two hours. "" (Laughter) Exact equivalent. 
+So what happened when the professor left the room? 
+As soon as the door closed... 
+two out of three ate the marshmallow. 
+Five seconds, 10 seconds, 40 seconds, 50 seconds, two minutes, four minutes, eight minutes. 
+Some lasted 14-and-a-half minutes. 
+(Laughter) Couldn't do it. Could not wait. 
+What's interesting is that one out of three would look at the marshmallow and go like this... 
+Would look at it. 
+Put it back. 
+They would walk around. They would play with their skirts and pants. 
+That child already, at four, understood the most important principle for success, which is the ability to delay gratification. 
+Self-discipline: the most important factor for success. 
+15 years later, 14 or 15 years later, follow-up study. 
+What did they find? 
+They went to look for these kids who were now 18 and 19. 
+And they found that 100 percent of the children that had not eaten the marshmallow were successful. 
+They had good grades. They were doing wonderful. 
+They were happy. They had their plans. 
+They had good relationships with the teachers, students. 
+They were doing fine. 
+A great percentage of the kids that ate the marshmallow, they were in trouble. 
+They did not make it to university. 
+They had bad grades. Some of them dropped out. 
+A few were still there with bad grades. 
+A few had good grades. 
+I had a question in my mind: Would Hispanic kids react the same way as the American kids? 
+So I went to Colombia. And I reproduced the experiment. 
+And it was very funny. I used four, five and six years old kids. 
+And let me show you what happened. 
+(Spanish) (Laughter) So what happened in Colombia? 
+Hispanic kids, two out of three ate the marshmallow; one out of three did not. 
+This little girl was interesting; she ate the inside of the marshmallow. 
+(Laughter) In other words, she wanted us to think that she had not eaten it, so she would get two. 
+But she ate it. 
+So we know she'll be successful. But we have to watch her. 
+(Laughter) She should not go into banking, for example, or work at a cash register. 
+But she will be successful. 
+And this applies for everything. Even in sales. 
+The sales person that — the customer says, "" I want that. "" And the person says, "" Okay, here you are. "" That person ate the marshmallow. 
+If the sales person says, "" Wait a second. 
+Let me ask you a few questions to see if this is a good choice. "" Then you sell a lot more. 
+So this has applications in all walks of life. 
+I end with — the Koreans did this. 
+You know what? This is so good that we want a marshmallow book for children. 
+We did one for children. And now it is all over Korea. 
+They are teaching these kids exactly this principle. 
+And we need to learn that principle here in the States, because we have a big debt. 
+We are eating more marshmallows than we are producing. 
+Thank you so much. 
+
+Similar problems are emerging in the East as well. 
+And in 1921, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in a case involving Prickly Pear that the folks who were there first had the first, or "" senior water rights. "" These senior water rights are key. 
+In some states, senior water rights holders can leave their water in the stream while legally protecting it from others, and maintaining their water right. 
+
+Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. 
+It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. 
+I'm talking about your language, of course, because it allows you to implant a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind, and they can attempt to do the same to you, without either of you having to perform surgery. 
+Instead, when you speak, you're actually using a form of telemetry not so different from the remote control device for your television. 
+It's just that, whereas that device relies on pulses of infrared light, your language relies on pulses, discrete pulses, of sound. 
+And just as you use the remote control device to alter the internal settings of your television to suit your mood, you use your language to alter the settings inside someone else's brain to suit your interests. 
+Languages are genes talking, getting things that they want. 
+And just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that, merely by uttering a sound, it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic, and maybe even into its mouth. 
+Now language's subversive power has been recognized throughout the ages in censorship, in books you can't read, phrases you can't use and words you can't say. 
+In fact, the Tower of Babel story in the Bible is a fable and warning about the power of language. 
+According to that story, early humans developed the conceit that, by using their language to work together, they could build a tower that would take them all the way to heaven. 
+Now God, angered at this attempt to usurp his power, destroyed the tower, and then to ensure that it would never be rebuilt, he scattered the people by giving them different languages — confused them by giving them different languages. 
+And this leads to the wonderful irony that our languages exist to prevent us from communicating. 
+Even today, we know that there are words we cannot use, phrases we cannot say, because if we do so, we might be accosted, jailed, or even killed. 
+And all of this from a puff of air emanating from our mouths. 
+Now all this fuss about a single one of our traits tells us there's something worth explaining. 
+And that is how and why did this remarkable trait evolve, and why did it evolve only in our species? 
+Now it's a little bit of a surprise that to get an answer to that question, we have to go to tool use in the chimpanzees. 
+Now these chimpanzees are using tools, and we take that as a sign of their intelligence. 
+But if they really were intelligent, why would they use a stick to extract termites from the ground rather than a shovel? 
+And if they really were intelligent, why would they crack open nuts with a rock? 
+Why wouldn't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them? 
+Why not? I mean, that's what we do. 
+Now the reason the chimpanzees don't do that is that they lack what psychologists and anthropologists call social learning. 
+They seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching. 
+As a result, they can't improve on others' ideas or learn from others' mistakes — benefit from others' wisdom. 
+And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again. 
+In fact, we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same sticks for the termites and the same rocks to crack open the nuts. 
+Now this may sound arrogant, or even full of hubris. 
+How do we know this? 
+Because this is exactly what our ancestors, the Homo erectus, did. 
+These upright apes evolved on the African savanna about two million years ago, and they made these splendid hand axes that fit wonderfully into your hands. 
+But if we look at the fossil record, we see that they made the same hand axe over and over and over again for one million years. 
+You can follow it through the fossil record. 
+Now if we make some guesses about how long Homo erectus lived, what their generation time was, that's about 40,000 generations of parents to offspring, and other individuals watching, in which that hand axe didn't change. 
+It's not even clear that our very close genetic relatives, the Neanderthals, had social learning. 
+Sure enough, their tools were more complicated than those of Homo erectus, but they too showed very little change over the 300,000 years or so that those species, the Neanderthals, lived in Eurasia. 
+Okay, so what this tells us is that, contrary to the old adage, "monkey see, monkey do," the surprise really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that — at least not very much. 
+And even this picture has the suspicious taint of being rigged about it — something from a Barnum & Bailey circus. 
+But by comparison, we can learn. 
+We can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do. 
+We can then choose, from among a range of options, the best one. 
+We can benefit from others' ideas. 
+We can build on their wisdom. 
+And as a result, our ideas do accumulate, and our technology progresses. 
+And this cumulative cultural adaptation, as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas, is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives. 
+I mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. 
+And all of this because of cumulative cultural adaptation. 
+The chairs you're sitting in, the lights in this auditorium, my microphone, the iPads and iPods that you carry around with you — all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation. 
+Now to many commentators, cumulative cultural adaptation, or social learning, is job done, end of story. 
+Our species can make stuff, therefore we prospered in a way that no other species has. 
+In fact, we can even make the "" stuff of life "" — as I just said, all the stuff around us. 
+But in fact, it turns out that some time around 200,000 years ago, when our species first arose and acquired social learning, that this was really the beginning of our story, not the end of our story. 
+Because our acquisition of social learning would create a social and evolutionary dilemma, the resolution of which, it's fair to say, would determine not only the future course of our psychology, but the future course of the entire world. 
+And most importantly for this, it'll tell us why we have language. 
+And the reason that dilemma arose is, it turns out, that social learning is visual theft. 
+If I can learn by watching you, I can steal your best ideas, and I can benefit from your efforts, without having to put in the time and energy that you did into developing them. 
+If I can watch which lure you use to catch a fish, or I can watch how you flake your hand axe to make it better, or if I follow you secretly to your mushroom patch, I can benefit from your knowledge and wisdom and skills, and maybe even catch that fish before you do. 
+Social learning really is visual theft. 
+And in any species that acquired it, it would behoove you to hide your best ideas, lest somebody steal them from you. 
+And so some time around 200,000 years ago, our species confronted this crisis. 
+And we really had only two options for dealing with the conflicts that visual theft would bring. 
+One of those options was that we could have retreated into small family groups. 
+Because then the benefits of our ideas and knowledge would flow just to our relatives. 
+Had we chosen this option, sometime around 200,000 years ago, we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40,000 years ago. 
+And this is because in small groups there are fewer ideas, there are fewer innovations. 
+And small groups are more prone to accidents and bad luck. 
+So if we'd chosen that path, our evolutionary path would have led into the forest — and been a short one indeed. 
+The other option we could choose was to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others. 
+Choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of accumulated knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own. 
+Well, we chose the second option, and language is the result. 
+Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft. 
+Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation — for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities. 
+And you can see that, in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language, not having language would be a like a bird without wings. 
+Just as wings open up this sphere of air for birds to exploit, language opened up the sphere of cooperation for humans to exploit. 
+And we take this utterly for granted, because we're a species that is so at home with language, but you have to realize that even the simplest acts of exchange that we engage in are utterly dependent upon language. 
+And to see why, consider two scenarios from early in our evolution. 
+Let's imagine that you are really good at making arrowheads, but you're hopeless at making the wooden shafts with the flight feathers attached. 
+Two other people you know are very good at making the wooden shafts, but they're hopeless at making the arrowheads. 
+So what you do is — one of those people has not really acquired language yet. 
+And let's pretend the other one is good at language skills. 
+So what you do one day is you take a pile of arrowheads, and you walk up to the one that can't speak very well, and you put the arrowheads down in front of him, hoping that he'll get the idea that you want to trade your arrowheads for finished arrows. 
+But he looks at the pile of arrowheads, thinks they're a gift, picks them up, smiles and walks off. 
+Now you pursue this guy, gesticulating. 
+A scuffle ensues and you get stabbed with one of your own arrowheads. 
+Okay, now replay this scene now, and you're approaching the one who has language. 
+You put down your arrowheads and say, "I'd like to trade these arrowheads for finished arrows. I'll split you 50 / 50." 
+The other one says, "" Fine. Looks good to me. 
+We'll do that. "" Now the job is done. 
+Once we have language, we can put our ideas together and cooperate to have a prosperity that we couldn't have before we acquired it. 
+And this is why our species has prospered around the world while the rest of the animals sit behind bars in zoos, languishing. 
+That's why we build space shuttles and cathedrals while the rest of the world sticks sticks into the ground to extract termites. 
+All right, if this view of language and its value in solving the crisis of visual theft is true, any species that acquires it should show an explosion of creativity and prosperity. 
+And this is exactly what the archeological record shows. 
+If you look at our ancestors, the Neanderthals and the Homo erectus, our immediate ancestors, they're confined to small regions of the world. 
+But when our species arose about 200,000 years ago, sometime after that we quickly walked out of Africa and spread around the entire world, occupying nearly every habitat on Earth. 
+Now whereas other species are confined to places that their genes adapt them to, with social learning and language, we could transform the environment to suit our needs. 
+And so we prospered in a way that no other animal has. 
+Language really is the most potent trait that has ever evolved. 
+It is the most valuable trait we have for converting new lands and resources into more people and their genes that natural selection has ever devised. 
+Language really is the voice of our genes. 
+Now having evolved language, though, we did something peculiar, even bizarre. 
+As we spread out around the world, we developed thousands of different languages. 
+Currently, there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on Earth. 
+Now you might say, well, this is just natural. 
+As we diverge, our languages are naturally going to diverge. 
+But the real puzzle and irony is that the greatest density of different languages on Earth is found where people are most tightly packed together. 
+If we go to the island of Papua New Guinea, we can find about 800 to 1,000 distinct human languages, different human languages, spoken on that island alone. 
+There are places on that island where you can encounter a new language every two or three miles. 
+Now, incredible as this sounds, I once met a Papuan man, and I asked him if this could possibly be true. 
+And he said to me, "" Oh no. 
+They're far closer together than that. "" And it's true; there are places on that island where you can encounter a new language in under a mile. 
+And this is also true of some remote oceanic islands. 
+And so it seems that we use our language, not just to cooperate, but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities, and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from eavesdropping from outside. 
+And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures, we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups. 
+They slow the flow of technologies. 
+And they even slow the flow of genes. 
+Now I can't speak for you, but it seems to be the case that we don't have sex with people we can't talk to. 
+(Laughter) Now we have to counter that, though, against the evidence we've heard that we might have had some rather distasteful genetic dalliances with the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. (Laughter) 
+Okay, this tendency we have, this seemingly natural tendency we have, towards isolation, towards keeping to ourselves, crashes head first into our modern world. 
+This remarkable image is not a map of the world. 
+In fact, it's a map of Facebook friendship links. 
+And when you plot those friendship links by their latitude and longitude, it literally draws a map of the world. 
+Our modern world is communicating with itself and with each other more than it has at any time in its past. 
+And that communication, that connectivity around the world, that globalization now raises a burden. 
+Because these different languages impose a barrier, as we've just seen, to the transfer of goods and ideas and technologies and wisdom. 
+And they impose a barrier to cooperation. 
+And nowhere do we see that more clearly than in the European Union, whose 27 member countries speak 23 official languages. 
+The European Union is now spending over one billion euros annually translating among their 23 official languages. 
+That's something on the order of 1.45 billion U.S. dollars on translation costs alone. 
+Now think of the absurdity of this situation. 
+If 27 individuals from those 27 member states sat around table, speaking their 23 languages, some very simple mathematics will tell you that you need an army of 253 translators to anticipate all the pairwise possibilities. 
+The European Union employs a permanent staff of about 2,500 translators. 
+And in 2007 alone — and I'm sure there are more recent figures — something on the order of 1.3 million pages were translated into English alone. 
+And so if language really is the solution to the crisis of visual theft, if language really is the conduit of our cooperation, the technology that our species derived to promote the free flow and exchange of ideas, in our modern world, we confront a question. 
+And that question is whether in this modern, globalized world we can really afford to have all these different languages. 
+To put it this way, nature knows no other circumstance in which functionally equivalent traits coexist. 
+One of them always drives the other extinct. 
+And we see this in the inexorable march towards standardization. 
+There are lots and lots of ways of measuring things — weighing them and measuring their length — but the metric system is winning. 
+There are lots and lots of ways of measuring time, but a really bizarre base 60 system known as hours and minutes and seconds is nearly universal around the world. 
+There are many, many ways of imprinting CDs or DVDs, but those are all being standardized as well. 
+And you can probably think of many, many more in your own everyday lives. 
+And so our modern world now is confronting us with a dilemma. 
+And it's the dilemma that this Chinese man faces, who's language is spoken by more people in the world than any other single language, and yet he is sitting at his blackboard, converting Chinese phrases into English language phrases. 
+And what this does is it raises the possibility to us that in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange, and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity, his actions suggest to us it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Matt Ridley: Mark, one question. 
+Svante found that the FOXP2 gene, which seems to be associated with language, was also shared in the same form in Neanderthals as us. 
+Do we have any idea how we could have defeated Neanderthals if they also had language? 
+Mark Pagel: This is a very good question. 
+So many of you will be familiar with the idea that there's this gene called FOXP2 that seems to be implicated in some ways in the fine motor control that's associated with language. 
+The reason why I don't believe that tells us that the Neanderthals had language is — here's a simple analogy: Ferraris are cars that have engines. 
+My car has an engine, but it's not a Ferrari. 
+Now the simple answer then is that genes alone don't, all by themselves, determine the outcome of very complicated things like language. 
+What we know about this FOXP2 and Neanderthals is that they may have had fine motor control of their mouths — who knows. 
+But that doesn't tell us they necessarily had language. 
+MR: Thank you very much indeed. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival. 
+It's a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello, and play rules the day — where fun is serious business. 
+And no, this isn't Burning Man or San Francisco. 
+(Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, meet your cousins. 
+This is the world of wild bonobos in the jungles of Congo. 
+Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your living closest relative. 
+That means we all share a common ancestor, an evolutionary grandmother, who lived around six million years ago. 
+Now, chimpanzees are well-known for their aggression. 
+(Laughter) But unfortunately, we have made too much of an emphasis of this aspect in our narratives of human evolution. 
+But bonobos show us the other side of the coin. 
+While chimpanzees are dominated by big, scary guys, bonobo society is run by empowered females. 
+These guys have really worked something out, since this leads to a highly tolerant society where fatal violence has not been observed yet. 
+But unfortunately, bonobos are the least understood of the great apes. 
+They live in the depths of the Congolese jungle, and it has been very difficult to study them. 
+The Congo is a paradox — a land of extraordinary biodiversity and beauty, but also the heart of darkness itself — the scene of a violent conflict that has raged for decades and claimed nearly as many lives as the First World War. 
+Not surprisingly, this destruction also endangers bonobo survival. 
+Bushmeat trades and forest loss means we couldn't fill a small stadium with all the bonobos that are left in the world — and we're not even sure of that to be honest. 
+Yet, in this land of violence and chaos, you can hear hidden laughter swaying the trees. 
+Who are these cousins? 
+We know them as the "" make love, not war "" apes since they have frequent, promiscuous and bisexual sex to manage conflict and solve social issues. 
+Now, I'm not saying this is the solution to all of humanity's problems — since there's more to bonobo life than the Kama Sutra. 
+Bonobos, like humans, love to play throughout their entire lives. 
+Play is not just child's games. 
+For us and them, play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance. 
+It's where we learn to trust and where we learn about the rules of the game. 
+Play increases creativity and resilience, and it's all about the generation of diversity — diversity of interactions, diversity of behaviors, diversity of connections. 
+And when you watch bonobo play, you're seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter, dance and ritual. 
+Play is the glue that binds us together. 
+Now, I don't know how you play, but I want to show you a couple of unique clips fresh from the wild. 
+First, it's a ball game bonobo-style — and I do not mean football. 
+So here, we have a young female and a male engaged in a chase game. 
+Have a look what she's doing. 
+It might be the evolutionary origin of the phrase, "she's got him by the balls." 
+(Laughter) Only I think that he's rather loving it here, right? 
+Yeah. 
+(Laughter) So sex play is common in both bonobos and humans. 
+And this video is really interesting because it shows — this video's really interesting because it shows the inventiveness of bringing unusual elements into play — such as testicles — and also how play both requires trust and fosters trust — while at the same time being tremendous fun. 
+But play's a shapeshifter. 
+(Laughter) Play's a shapeshifter, and it can take many forms, some of which are more quiet, imaginative, curious — maybe where wonder is discovered anew. 
+And I want you to see, this is Fuku, a young female, and she is quietly playing with water. 
+I think, like her, we sometimes play alone, and we explore the boundaries of our inner and our outer worlds. 
+And it's that playful curiosity that drives us to explore, drives us to interact, and then the unexpected connections we form are the real hotbed for creativity. 
+So these are just small tasters into the insights that bonobo give us to our past and present. 
+But they also hold a secret for our future, a future where we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation. 
+The secret is that play is the key to these capacities. 
+In other words, play is our adaptive wildcard. 
+In order to adapt successfully to a changing world, we need to play. 
+But will we make the most of our playfulness? 
+Play is not frivolous. 
+Play's essential. 
+For bonobos and humans alike, life is not just red in tooth and claw. 
+In times when it seems least appropriate to play, it might be the times when it is most urgent. 
+And so, my fellow primates, let us embrace this gift from evolution and play together, as we rediscover creativity, fellowship and wonder. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So what I want to try to do is tell a quick story about a 404 page and a lesson that was learned as a result of it. 
+But to start it probably helps to have an understanding of what a 404 page actually is. 
+The 404 page is that. 
+It's that broken experience on the Web. 
+It's effectively the default page when you ask a website for something and it can't find it. 
+And it serves you the 404 page. 
+It's inherently a feeling of being broken when you go through it. 
+And I just want you to think a little bit about, remember for yourself, it's annoying when you hit this thing. 
+Because it's the feeling of a broken relationship. 
+And that's where it's actually also interesting to think about, where does 404 come from? 
+It's from a family of errors actually — a whole set of relationship errors, which, when I started digging into them, it looks almost like a checklist for a sex therapist or a couples counselor. 
+You sort of get down there to the bottom and things get really dicey. 
+(Laughter) Yes. 
+But these things are everywhere. 
+They're on sites big, they're on sites small. 
+This is a global experience. 
+What a 404 page tells you is that you fell through the cracks. 
+And that's not a good experience when you're used to experiences like this. 
+You can get on your Kinect and you can have unicorns dancing and rainbows spraying out of your mobile phone. 
+A 404 page is not what you're looking for. 
+You get that, and it's like a slap in the face. 
+Trying to think about how a 404 felt, and it would be like if you went to Starbucks and there's the guy behind the counter and you're over there and there's no skim milk. 
+And you say, "" Hey, could you bring the skim milk? "" And they walk out from behind the counter and they've got no pants on. 
+And you're like, "" Oh, I didn't want to see that. "" That's the 404 feeling. 
+(Laughter) I mean, I've heard about that. 
+So where this comes into play and why this is important is I head up a technology incubator, and we had eight startups sitting around there. 
+And those startups are focused on what they are, not what they're not, until one day Athletepath, which is a website that focuses on services for extreme athletes, found this video. 
+(Video) Guy: Joey! 
+Crowd: Whoa! 
+Renny Gleeson: You just... no, he's not okay. 
+They took that video and they embedded it in their 404 page and it was like a light bulb went off for everybody in the place. 
+Because finally there was a page that actually felt like what it felt like to hit a 404. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) So this turned into a contest. 
+Dailypath that offers inspiration put inspiration on their 404 page. 
+Stayhound, which helps you find pet sitters through your social network, commiserated with your pet. 
+Each one of them found this. 
+It turned into a 24-hour contest. 
+At 4: 04 the next day, we gave out $404 in cash. 
+And what they learned was that those little things, done right, actually matter, and that well-designed moments can build brands. 
+So you take a look out in the real world, and the fun thing is you can actually hack these yourself. 
+You can type in an URL and put in a 404 and these will pop. 
+This is one that commiserates with you. 
+This is one that blames you. 
+This is one that I loved. 
+This is an error page, but what if this error page was also an opportunity? 
+So it was a moment in time where all of these startups had to sit and think and got really excited about what they could be. 
+Because back to the whole relationship issue, what they figured out through this exercise was that a simple mistake can tell me what you're not, or it can remind me of why I should love you. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I'm here to tell you a story of success from Africa. 
+A year and a half ago, four of the five people who are full time members at Ushahidi, which means "" testimony "" in Swahili, were TED Fellows. 
+A year ago in Kenya we had post-election violence. 
+And in that time we prototyped and built, in about three days, a system that would allow anybody with a mobile phone to send in information and reports on what was happening around them. 
+We took what we knew about Africa, the default device, the mobile phone, as our common denominator, and went from there. 
+We got reports like this. 
+This is just a couple of them from January 17th, last year. 
+And our system was rudimentary. It was very basic. 
+It was a mash-up that used data that we collected from people, and we put it on our map. 
+But then we decided we needed to do something more. 
+We needed to take what we had built and create a platform out of it so that it could be used elsewhere in the world. 
+And so there is a team of developers from all over Africa, who are part of this team now — from Ghana, from Malawi, from Kenya. 
+There is even some from the U.S. 
+We're building for smartphones, so that it can be used in the developed world, as well as the developing world. 
+We are realizing that this is true. 
+If it works in Africa then it will work anywhere. 
+And so we build for it in Africa first and then we move to the edges. 
+It's now been deployed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 
+It's being used by NGOs all over East Africa, small NGOs doing their own little projects. 
+Just this last month it was deployed by Al Jazeera in Gaza. 
+But that's actually not what I'm here to talk about. 
+I'm here to talk about the next big thing, because what we're finding out is that we have this capacity to report eyewitness accounts of what's going on in real time. 
+We're seeing this in events like Mumbai recently, where it's so much easier to report now than it is to consume it. 
+There is so much information; what do you do? 
+This is the Twitter reports for over three days just covering Mumbai. 
+How do you decide what is important? 
+What is the veracity level of what you're looking at? 
+So what we find is that there is this great deal of wasted crisis information because there is just too much information for us to actually do anything with right now. 
+And what we're actually really concerned with is this first three hours. 
+What we are looking at is the first three hours. 
+How do we deal with that information that is coming in? 
+You can't understand what is actually happening. 
+On the ground and around the world people are still curious, and trying to figure out what is going on. But they don't know. 
+So what we built of course, Ushahidi, is crowdsourcing this information. 
+You see this with Twitter, too. You get this information overload. 
+So you've got a lot of information. That's great. 
+But now what? 
+So we think that there is something interesting we can do here. 
+And we have a small team who is working on this. 
+We think that we can actually create a crowdsourced filter. 
+Take the crowd and apply them to the information. 
+And by rating it and by rating the different people who submit information, we can get refined results and weighted results. 
+So that we have a better understanding of the probability of something being true or not. 
+This is the kind of innovation that is, quite frankly — it's interesting that it's coming from Africa. 
+It's coming from places that you wouldn't expect. 
+From young, smart developers. 
+And it's a community around it that has decided to build this. 
+So, thank you very much. 
+And we are very happy to be part of the TED family. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I am a writer. 
+Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. 
+It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. 
+And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. 
+But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. 
+And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "" Eat, Pray, Love "" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. 
+The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. 
+Seriously — doomed, doomed! 
+Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, "" Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? 
+Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again? "" So that's reassuring, you know. 
+But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. 
+Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure? "" (Laughter) Like that, you know. 
+The answer — the short answer to all those questions is, "" Yes. "" Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. 
+And I always have been. 
+And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. 
+But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? 
+Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. 
+And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? 
+Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? 
+"That chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going?" 
+It just didn't come up like that, you know? 
+But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. 
+(Laughter) We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. 
+And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? 
+And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. 
+Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said, "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." 
+An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. 
+But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish. 
+And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? 
+Are you comfortable with that? 
+Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know — I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. 
+I think it's odious. 
+And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. 
+And I definitely know that, in my case — in my situation — it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. 
+Which is — you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. 
+And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? 
+I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now — it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. 
+So Jesus, what a thought! 
+That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. 
+(Laughter) I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. 
+And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? 
+I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. 
+And, as I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. 
+And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. 
+So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. 
+But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? 
+People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. 
+The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "" daemons. "" Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. 
+The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. 
+Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. 
+They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. 
+So brilliant — there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. 
+And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? 
+So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? 
+If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. 
+If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? 
+Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. 
+And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius. 
+And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. 
+You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. 
+It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. 
+It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. 
+And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. 
+And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? 
+Can we do this differently? 
+Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. 
+Maybe not. 
+Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. 
+And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. 
+I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this. 
+But the question that I kind of want to pose is — you know, why not? 
+Why not think about it this way? 
+Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. 
+A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something — which is to say basically everyone here — - knows does not always behave rationally. 
+And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal. 
+I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. 
+And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. 
+And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. 
+She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. 
+And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first. 
+(Laughter) So when I heard that I was like — that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like. (Laughter) 
+That's not at all what my creative process is — I'm not the pipeline! 
+But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. 
+And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. 
+You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. 
+And what is that thing? 
+And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane? 
+And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. 
+And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized. 
+But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. 
+And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. 
+So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "" I'm going to lose this thing, and I'll be be haunted by this song forever. 
+He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. 
+He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" 
+(Laughter) "" Do I look like I can write down a song right now? 
+If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. 
+Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. 
+Go bother Leonard Cohen. "" And his whole work process changed after that. 
+Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. 
+But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. 
+It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. 
+It saved me when I was in the middle of writing "" Eat, Pray, Love, "" and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst book ever written. 
+But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. 
+So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. 
+And I said aloud, "" Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? 
+Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. 
+And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job. "" (Laughter) Because — (Applause) Because in the end it's like this, OK — centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. 
+They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? 
+But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. 
+And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. 
+It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. 
+And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. 
+He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. 
+And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. 
+They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." 
+That's God, you know. 
+Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "" Allah, Allah, Allah, "" to "" Olé, olé, olé, "" which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. 
+In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is — a glimpse of God. 
+But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. 
+He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. 
+And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? 
+This is hard. 
+This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. 
+But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. 
+But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. 
+This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success. 
+And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. 
+Don't be daunted. Just do your job. 
+Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. 
+If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "" Olé! "" And if not, do your dance anyhow. 
+And "" Olé! "" to you, nonetheless. 
+I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. 
+"" Olé! "" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+June Cohen: Olé! (Applause) 
+
+You know, cadaver dissection is the traditional way of learning human anatomy. 
+For students, it's quite an experience, but for a school, it could be very difficult or expensive to maintain. 
+So we learned the majority of anatomic classes taught, they do not have a cadaver dissection lab. 
+Maybe those reasons, or depending on where you are, cadavers may not be easily available. 
+So to address this, we developed with a Dr. Brown in Stanford: virtual dissection table. 
+So we call this Anatomage Table. 
+So with this Anatomage Table, students can experience the dissection without a human cadaver. 
+And the table form is important, and since it's touch-interactive, just like the way they do dissections in the lab, or furthermore just the way a surgeon operates on a patient you can literally interact with your table. 
+Our digital body is one-to-one life size, so this is exactly the way students will see the real anatomy. 
+I'm going to do some demonstrations. 
+As you can see, I use my finger to interact with my digital body. 
+I'm going to do some cuts. 
+I can cut any way I want to, so I cut right here. 
+Then it's going to show inside. 
+And I can change my cut to see different parts. 
+Maybe I can cut there, see the brain, and I can change my cut. 
+You can see some internal organs. 
+So we call this the slicer mode. 
+OK, I'm going to do another cut. 
+Right there. 
+This shows a lot of internal structures. 
+So if I want to see the back side, I can flip and see from behind. 
+Like this. 
+So if these images are uncomfortable to you or disturbing to you, that means we did the right job. 
+So our doctors said these are eye candies. 
+So instead of just butchering the body, I'd like to do more clinically meaningful dissections. 
+What I'm going to do is I'm going to peel off all the skin, muscles and bones, just to see a few internal organs. 
+Right here. 
+Let's say I'm going to cut the liver right here. 
+OK. 
+Let's say I'm interested in looking at the heart. 
+I'm going to do some surgery here. 
+I'm going to cut some veins, arteries. 
+Oops!... 
+You don't want to hear "" oops "" in real surgery. 
+(Laughter) But fortunately, our digital man has "" undo. "" (Laughter) Okay. 
+All right then. 
+Let me zoom in. 
+I'm going to make a cut right there. 
+And then you can see the inside of the heart. 
+You can see the atrium and the ventricles, how blood flows to our arteries and veins. 
+Just like this, students can isolate anybody and dissect any way you want to. 
+It doesn't have to be always dissection. 
+Since it's digital, we can do reverse dissection. 
+So let me show you, I'm going to start with the skeletal structure, and I can add a few internal organs. 
+Yep. 
+Maybe I can add quickly this way. 
+And I can build muscles gradually, just like that. 
+We can see tendons and muscles. 
+Wish I could build my muscle this fast. 
+(Laughter) And this is another way to learn anatomy. 
+Another thing I can show you is, more often than not, doctors get to meet patients in X-ray form. 
+So, Anatomage Table shows exactly how the anatomy will appear in X-ray. 
+You can also interact with your X-ray, and also if you want, you can compare with how anatomy would appear in X-ray, too. 
+So when you are done, just bring back the body and then it's ready for another session. 
+It looks like our table also can transform gender, too. 
+It's a female now. 
+So this is Anatomage Table. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Let me introduce to you Rezero. 
+This little fellow was developed by a group of 10 undergraduate students at the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at ETH-Zurich. 
+Our robot belongs to a family of robots called Ballbots. 
+Instead of wheels, a Ballbot is balancing and moving on one single ball. 
+The main characteristics of such a system is that there's one sole contact point to the ground. 
+This means that the robot is inherently unstable. 
+It's like when I am trying to stand on one foot. 
+You might ask yourself, what's the usefulness of a robot that's unstable? 
+Now we'll explain that in a second. 
+Let me first explain how Rezero actually keeps his balance. 
+Rezero keeps his balance by constantly measuring his pitch angle with a sensor. 
+He then counteracts and avoids toppling over by turning the motors appropriately. 
+This happens 160 times per second, and if anything fails in this process, Rezero would immediately fall to the ground. 
+Now to move and to balance, Rezero needs to turn the ball. 
+The ball is driven by three special wheels that allow Rezero to move into any direction and also move around his own axis at the same time. 
+Due to his instability, Rezero is always in motion. Now here's the trick. 
+It's indeed exactly this instability that allows a robot to move very [dynamically]. 
+Let's play a little. 
+You may have wondered what happens if I give the robot a little push. 
+In this mode, he's trying to maintain his position. 
+For the next demo, I'd like you to introduce to my colleagues Michael, on the computer, and Thomas who's helping me onstage. 
+In the next mode, Rezero is passive, and we can move him around. 
+With almost no force I can control his position and his velocity. 
+I can also make him spin. 
+In the next mode, we can get Rezero to follow a person. 
+He's now keeping a constant distance to Thomas. 
+This works with a laser sensor that's mounted on top of Rezero. 
+With the same method, we can also get him to circle a person. 
+We call this the orbiting mode. 
+All right, thank you, Thomas. 
+(Applause) Now, what's the use of this technology? 
+For now, it's an experiment, but let me show you some possible future applications. 
+Rezero could be used in exhibitions or parks. 
+With a screen it could inform people or show them around in a fun and entertaining way. 
+In a hospital, this device could be used to carry around medical equipment. 
+Due to the Ballbot system, it has a very small footprint and it's also easy to move around. 
+And of course, who wouldn't like to take a ride on one of these. 
+And these are more practical applications. 
+But there's also a certain beauty within this technology. 
+(Music) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. 
+
+I ’ m working a lot with motion and animation, and also I'm an old DJ and a musician. 
+So, music videos are something that I always found interesting, but they always seem to be so reactive. 
+So I was thinking, can you remove us as creators and try to make the music be the voice and have the animation following it? 
+So with two designers, Tolga and Christina, at my office, we took a track — many of you probably know it. It ’ s about 25 years old, and it's David Byrne and Brian Eno — and we did this little animation. 
+And I think that it's maybe interesting, also, that it deals with two problematic issues, which are rising waters and religion. 
+Song: Before God destroyed the people on the Earth, he warned Noah to build an Ark. 
+And after Noah built his Ark, I believe he told Noah to warn the people that they must change all their wicked ways before he come upon them and destroy them. 
+And when Noah had done built his Ark, I understand that somebody began to rend a song. 
+And the song began to move on I understand like this. 
+And when Noah had done built his Ark... 
+Move on... In fact... Concern... 
+So they get tired, has come dark and rain; they get weary and tired. 
+And then he went and knocked an old lady house. 
+And old lady ran to the door and say, "" Who is it? "" Jack say, "" Me, Mama-san, could we spend the night here? 
+Because we ’ re far from home, we ’ re very tired. "" And the old lady said, "" Oh yes, come on in. "" It was come dark and rain, will make you weary and tired. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. 
+And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. 
+And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! 
+Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun. "" Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes! 
+I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Frank Gehry said to me, "My mother pushed me." (Laughter) 
+TEDster Bill Gates says, "" I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company. "" I'd say it was a pretty good idea. 
+And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas — it's just doing some very simple things. 
+
+You may not know this, but you are celebrating an anniversary with me. 
+I'm not married, but one year ago today, I woke up from a month-long coma, following a double lung transplant. 
+Crazy, I know. Insane. 
+Thank you. 
+Six years before that, I was starting my career as an opera singer in Europe, when I was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension — also known as PH. 
+It happens when there's a thickening in the pulmonary veins, making the right side of the heart work overtime, and causing what I call the reverse-Grinch effect. 
+My heart was three-and-a-half sizes too big. 
+Physical activity becomes very difficult for people with this condition, and usually after two to five years, you die. 
+I went to see this specialist, and she was top-of-the-field and told me I had to stop singing. 
+She said, "" Those high notes are going to kill you. "" While she didn't have any medical evidence to back up her claim that there was a relationship between operatic arias and pulmonary hypertension, she was absolutely emphatic I was singing my own obituary. 
+I was very limited by my condition, physically. 
+But I was not limited when I sang, and as air came up from my lungs, through my vocal cords and passed my lips as sound, it was the closest thing I had ever come to transcendence. 
+And just because of someone's hunch, I wasn't going to give it up. 
+Thankfully, I met Reda Girgis, who is dry as toast, but he and his team at Johns Hopkins didn't just want me to survive, they wanted me to live a meaningful life. 
+This meant making trade-offs. 
+I come from Colorado. 
+It's a mile high, and I grew up there with my 10 brothers and sisters and two adoring parents. 
+Well, the altitude exacerbated my symptoms. 
+So I moved to Baltimore to be near my doctors and enrolled in a conservatory nearby. 
+I couldn't walk as much as I used to, so I opted for five-inch heels. 
+And I gave up salt, I went vegan, and I started taking huge doses of sildenafil, also known as Viagra. 
+(Laughter) My father and my grandfather were always looking for the newest thing in alternative or traditional therapies for PH, but after six months, I couldn't walk up a small hill. I couldn't climb a flight of stairs. 
+I could barely stand up without feeling like I was going to faint. 
+I had a heart catheterization, where they measure this internal arterial pulmonary pressure, which is supposed to be between 15 and 20. 
+Mine was 146. 
+I like to do things big, and it meant one thing: there is a big gun treatment for pulmonary hypertension called Flolan, and it's not just a drug; it's a way of life. 
+Doctors insert a catheter into your chest, which is attached to a pump that weighs about four-and-a-half pounds. 
+Every day, 24 hours, that pump is at your side, administering medicine directly to your heart, and it's not a particularly preferable medicine in many senses. 
+This is a list of the side effects: if you eat too much salt, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you'll probably end up in the ICU. 
+If you go through a metal detector, you'll probably die. 
+If you get a bubble in your medicine — because you have to mix it every morning — and it stays in there, you probably die. 
+If you run out of medicine, you definitely die. 
+No one wants to go on Flolan. 
+But when I needed it, it was a godsend. 
+Within a few days, I could walk again. 
+Within a few weeks, I was performing, and in a few months, I debuted at the Kennedy Center. 
+The pump was a little bit problematic when performing, so I'd attach it to my inner thigh with the help of the girdle and an ACE bandage. 
+Literally hundreds of elevator rides were spent with me alone stuffing the pump into my Spanx, hoping the doors wouldn't open unexpectedly. 
+And the tubing coming out of my chest was a nightmare for costume designers. 
+I graduated from graduate school in 2006, and I got a fellowship to go back to Europe. 
+A few days after arriving, I met this wonderful, old conductor who started casting me in all of these roles. 
+And before long, I was commuting between Budapest, Milan and Florence. 
+Though I was attached to this ugly, unwanted, high-maintenance, mechanical pet, my life was kind of like the happy part in an opera — very complicated, but in a good way. 
+Then in February of 2008, my grandfather passed away. 
+He was a big figure in all of our lives, and we loved him very much. 
+It certainly didn't prepare me for what came next. 
+Seven weeks later, I got a call from my family. 
+My father had been in a catastrophic car accident, and he died. 
+At 24, my death would have been entirely expected. 
+But his — well, the only way I can articulate how it felt was that it precipitated my medical decline. 
+Against my doctors' and family's wishes, I needed to go back for the funeral. 
+I had to say goodbye in some way, shape or form. 
+But soon I was showing signs of right-heart failure, and I had to return to sea level, doing so knowing that I probably would never see my home again. 
+I canceled most of my engagements that summer, but I had one left in Tel Aviv, so I went. 
+After one performance, I could barely drag myself from the stage to the taxicab. 
+I sat down and felt the blood rush down from my face, and in the heat of the desert, I was freezing cold. 
+My fingers started turning blue, and I was like, "" What is going on here? "" I heard my heart's valves snapping open and closed. 
+The cab stopped, and I pulled my body from it feeling each ounce of weight as I walked to the elevator. 
+I fell through my apartment door and crawled to the bathroom where I found my problem: I had forgotten to mix in the most important part of my medicine. 
+I was dying, and if I didn't mix that stuff up fast, I would never leave that apartment alive. 
+I started mixing, and I felt like everything was going to fall out through one hole or another, but I just kept on going. 
+Finally, with the last bottle in and the last bubble out, I attached the pump to the tubing and lay there hoping it would kick in soon enough. 
+If it didn't, I'd probably see my father sooner than I anticipated. 
+Thankfully, in a few minutes, I saw the signature hive-like rash appear on my legs, which is a side effect of the medication, and I knew I'd be okay. 
+We're not big on fear in my family, but I was scared. 
+I went back to the States, anticipating I'd return to Europe, but the heart catheterization showed that I wasn't going anywhere further that a flight-for-life from Johns Hopkins Hospital. 
+I performed here and there, but as my condition deteriorated, so did my voice. 
+My doctor wanted me to get on the list for a lung transplant. 
+I didn't. 
+I had two friends who had recently died months after having very challenging surgeries. 
+I knew another young man, though, who had PH who died while waiting for one. 
+I wanted to live. 
+I thought stem cells were a good option, but they hadn't developed to a point where I could take advantage of them yet. 
+I officially took a break from singing, and I went to the Cleveland Clinic to be reevaluated for the third time in five years, for transplant. 
+I was sitting there kind of unenthusiastically talking with the head transplant surgeon, and I asked him if I needed a transplant, what I could do to prepare. 
+He said, "" Be happy. 
+A happy patient is a healthy patient. "" It was like in one verbal swoop he had channeled my thoughts on life and medicine and Confucius. 
+I still didn't want a transplant, but in a month, I was back in the hospital with some severely edemic kankles — very attractive. 
+And it was right-heart failure. 
+I finally decided it was time to take my doctor's advice. 
+It was time for me to go to Cleveland and to start the agonizing wait for a match. 
+But the next morning, while I was still in the hospital, I got a telephone call. 
+It was my doctor in Cleveland, Marie Budev. 
+And they had lungs. 
+It was a match. 
+They were from Texas. 
+And everybody was really happy for me, but me. 
+Because, despite their problems, I had spent my whole life training my lungs, and I was not particularly enthusiastic about giving them up. 
+I flew to Cleveland, and my family rushed there in hopes that they would meet me and say what we knew might be our final goodbye. 
+But organs don't wait, and I went into surgery before I could say goodbye. 
+The last thing I remember was lying on a white blanket, telling my surgeon that I needed to see my mother again, and to please try and save my voice. 
+I fell into this apocalyptic dream world. 
+During the thirteen-and-a-half-hour surgery, I flatlined twice, 40 quarts of blood were infused into my body. 
+And in my surgeon's 20-year career, he said it was among the most difficult transplants that he's ever performed. 
+They left my chest open for two weeks. 
+You could see my over-sized heart beating inside of it. 
+I was on a dozen machines that were keeping me alive. 
+An infection ravaged my skin. 
+I had hoped my voice would be saved, but my doctors knew that the breathing tubes going down my throat might have already destroyed it. 
+If they stayed in, there was no way I would ever sing again. 
+So my doctor got the ENT, the top guy at the clinic, to come down and give me surgery to move the tubes around my voice box. 
+He said it would kill me. 
+So my own surgeon performed the procedure in a last-ditch attempt to save my voice. 
+Though my mom couldn't say goodbye to me before the surgery, she didn't leave my side in the months of recovery that followed. 
+And if you want an example of perseverance, grit and strength in a beautiful, little package, it is her. 
+One year ago to this very day, I woke up. 
+I was 95 lbs. 
+There were a dozen tubes coming in and out of my body. 
+I couldn't walk, I couldn't talk, I couldn't eat, I couldn't move, I certainly couldn't sing, I couldn't even breathe, but when I looked up and I saw my mother, I couldn't help but smile. 
+Whether by a Mack truck or by heart failure or faulty lungs, death happens. 
+But life isn't really just about avoiding death, is it? 
+It's about living. 
+Medical conditions don't negate the human condition. 
+And when people are allowed to pursue their passions, doctors will find they have better, happier and healthier patients. 
+My parents were totally stressed out about me going and auditioning and traveling and performing all over the place, but they knew that it was much better for me to do that than be preoccupied with my own mortality all of the time. 
+And I'm so grateful they did. 
+This past summer, when I was running and singing and dancing and playing with my nieces and my nephews and my brothers and my sisters and my mother and my grandmother in the Colorado Rockies, I couldn't help but think of that doctor who told me that I couldn't sing. 
+And I wanted to tell her, and I want to tell you, we need to stop letting disease divorce us from our dreams. 
+When we do, we will find that patients don't just survive; we thrive. 
+And some of us might even sing. 
+(Applause) [Singing: French] Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. 
+And I'd like to thank my pianist, Monica Lee. 
+(Applause) 
+Thank you so much. Thank you. 
+
+What I want to talk to you about is what we can learn from studying the genomes of living people and extinct humans. 
+But before doing that, I just briefly want to remind you about what you already know: that our genomes, our genetic material, are stored in almost all cells in our bodies in chromosomes in the form of DNA, which is this famous double-helical molecule. 
+And the genetic information is contained in the form of a sequence of four bases abbreviated with the letters A, T, C and G. 
+And the information is there twice — one on each strand — which is important, because when new cells are formed, these strands come apart, new strands are synthesized with the old ones as templates in an almost perfect process. 
+But nothing, of course, in nature is totally perfect, so sometimes an error is made and a wrong letter is built in. 
+And we can then see the result of such mutations when we compare DNA sequences among us here in the room, for example. 
+If we compare my genome to the genome of you, approximately every 1,200, 1,300 letters will differ between us. 
+And these mutations accumulate approximately as a function of time. 
+So if we add in a chimpanzee here, we will see more differences. 
+Approximately one letter in a hundred will differ from a chimpanzee. 
+And if you're then interested in the history of a piece of DNA, or the whole genome, you can reconstruct the history of the DNA with those differences you observe. 
+And generally we depict our ideas about this history in the form of trees like this. 
+In this case, it's very simple. 
+The two human DNA sequences go back to a common ancestor quite recently. 
+Farther back is there one shared with chimpanzees. 
+And because these mutations happen approximately as a function of time, you can transform these differences to estimates of time, where the two humans, typically, will share a common ancestor about half a million years ago, and with the chimpanzees, it will be in the order of five million years ago. 
+So what has now happened in the last few years is that there are account technologies around that allow you to see many, many pieces of DNA very quickly. 
+So we can now, in a matter of hours, determine a whole human genome. 
+Each of us, of course, contains two human genomes — one from our mothers and one from our fathers. 
+And they are around three billion such letters long. 
+And we will find that the two genomes in me, or one genome of mine we want to use, will have about three million differences in the order of that. 
+And what you can then also begin to do is to say, "" How are these genetic differences distributed across the world? "" And if you do that, you find a certain amount of genetic variation in Africa. 
+And if you look outside Africa, you actually find less genetic variation. 
+This is surprising, of course, because in the order of six to eight times fewer people live in Africa than outside Africa. 
+Yet the people inside Africa have more genetic variation. 
+Moreover, almost all these genetic variants we see outside Africa have closely related DNA sequences that you find inside Africa. 
+But if you look in Africa, there is a component of the genetic variation that has no close relatives outside. 
+So a model to explain this is that a part of the African variation, but not all of it, [has] gone out and colonized the rest of the world. 
+And together with the methods to date these genetic differences, this has led to the insight that modern humans — humans that are essentially indistinguishable from you and me — evolved in Africa, quite recently, between 100 and 200,000 years ago. 
+And later, between 100 and 50,000 years ago or so, went out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world. 
+So what I often like to say is that, from a genomic perspective, we are all Africans. 
+We either live inside Africa today, or in quite recent exile. 
+Another consequence of this recent origin of modern humans is that genetic variants are generally distributed widely in the world, in many places, and they tend to vary as gradients, from a bird's-eye perspective at least. 
+And since there are many genetic variants, and they have different such gradients, this means that if we determine a DNA sequence — a genome from one individual — we can quite accurately estimate where that person comes from, provided that its parents or grandparents haven't moved around too much. 
+But does this then mean, as many people tend to think, that there are huge genetic differences between groups of people — on different continents, for example? 
+Well we can begin to ask those questions also. 
+There is, for example, a project that's underway to sequence a thousand individuals — their genomes — from different parts of the world. 
+They've sequenced 185 Africans from two populations in Africa. 
+[They've] sequenced approximately equally [as] many people in Europe and in China. 
+And we can begin to say how much variance do we find, how many letters that vary in at least one of those individual sequences. 
+And it's a lot: 38 million variable positions. 
+But we can then ask: Are there any absolute differences between Africans and non-Africans? 
+Perhaps the biggest difference most of us would imagine existed. 
+And with absolute difference — and I mean a difference where people inside Africa at a certain position, where all individuals — 100 percent — have one letter, and everybody outside Africa has another letter. 
+And the answer to that, among those millions of differences, is that there is not a single such position. 
+This may be surprising. 
+Maybe a single individual is misclassified or so. 
+So we can relax the criterion a bit and say: How many positions do we find where 95 percent of people in Africa have one variant, 95 percent another variant, and the number of that is 12. 
+So this is very surprising. 
+It means that when we look at people and see a person from Africa and a person from Europe or Asia, we cannot, for a single position in the genome with 100 percent accuracy, predict what the person would carry. 
+And only for 12 positions can we hope to be 95 percent right. 
+This may be surprising, because we can, of course, look at these people and quite easily say where they or their ancestors came from. 
+So what this means now is that those traits we then look at and so readily see — facial features, skin color, hair structure — are not determined by single genes with big effects, but are determined by many different genetic variants that seem to vary in frequency between different parts of the world. 
+There is another thing with those traits that we so easily observe in each other that I think is worthwhile to consider, and that is that, in a very literal sense, they're really on the surface of our bodies. 
+They are what we just said — facial features, hair structure, skin color. 
+There are also a number of features that vary between continents like that that have to do with how we metabolize food that we ingest, or that have to do with how our immune systems deal with microbes that try to invade our bodies. 
+But so those are all parts of our bodies where we very directly interact with our environment, in a direct confrontation, if you like. 
+It's easy to imagine how particularly those parts of our bodies were quickly influenced by selection from the environment and shifted frequencies of genes that are involved in them. 
+But if we look on other parts of our bodies where we don't directly interact with the environment — our kidneys, our livers, our hearts — there is no way to say, by just looking at these organs, where in the world they would come from. 
+So there's another interesting thing that comes from this realization that humans have a recent common origin in Africa, and that is that when those humans emerged around 100,000 years ago or so, they were not alone on the planet. 
+There were other forms of humans around, most famously perhaps, Neanderthals — these robust forms of humans, compared to the left here with a modern human skeleton on the right — that existed in Western Asia and Europe since several hundreds of thousands of years. 
+So an interesting question is, what happened when we met? 
+What happened to the Neanderthals? 
+And to begin to answer such questions, my research group — since over 25 years now — works on methods to extract DNA from remains of Neanderthals and extinct animals that are tens of thousands of years old. 
+So this involves a lot of technical issues in how you extract the DNA, how you convert it to a form you can sequence. 
+You have to work very carefully to avoid contamination of experiments with DNA from yourself. 
+And this then, in conjunction with these methods that allow very many DNA molecules to be sequenced very rapidly, allowed us last year to present the first version of the Neanderthal genome, so that any one of you can now look on the Internet, on the Neanderthal genome, or at least on the 55 percent of it that we've been able to reconstruct so far. 
+And you can begin to compare it to the genomes of people who live today. 
+And one question that you may then want to ask is, what happened when we met? 
+Did we mix or not? 
+And the way to ask that question is to look at the Neanderthal that comes from Southern Europe and compare it to genomes of people who live today. 
+So we then look to do this with pairs of individuals, starting with two Africans, looking at the two African genomes, finding places where they differ from each other, and in each case ask: What is a Neanderthal like? 
+Does it match one African or the other African? 
+We would expect there to be no difference, because Neanderthals were never in Africa. 
+They should be equal, have no reason to be closer to one African than another African. 
+And that's indeed the case. 
+Statistically speaking, there is no difference in how often the Neanderthal matches one African or the other. 
+But this is different if we now look at the European individual and an African. 
+Then, significantly more often, does a Neanderthal match the European rather than the African. 
+The same is true if we look at a Chinese individual versus an African, the Neanderthal will match the Chinese individual more often. 
+This may also be surprising because the Neanderthals were never in China. 
+So the model we've proposed to explain this is that when modern humans came out of Africa sometime after 100,000 years ago, they met Neanderthals. 
+Presumably, they did so first in the Middle East, where there were Neanderthals living. 
+If they then mixed with each other there, then those modern humans that became the ancestors of everyone outside Africa carried with them this Neanderthal component in their genome to the rest of the world. 
+So that today, the people living outside Africa have about two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals. 
+So having now a Neanderthal genome on hand as a reference point and having the technologies to look at ancient remains and extract the DNA, we can begin to apply them elsewhere in the world. 
+And the first place we've done that is in Southern Siberia in the Altai Mountains at a place called Denisova, a cave site in this mountain here, where archeologists in 2008 found a tiny little piece of bone — this is a copy of it — that they realized came from the last phalanx of a little finger of a pinky of a human. 
+And it was well enough preserved so we could determine the DNA from this individual, even to a greater extent than for the Neanderthals actually, and start relating it to the Neanderthal genome and to people today. 
+And we found that this individual shared a common origin for his DNA sequences with Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago. 
+And further back, 800,000 years ago is there a common origin with present day humans. 
+So this individual comes from a population that shares an origin with Neanderthals, but far back and then have a long independent history. 
+We call this group of humans, that we then described for the first time from this tiny, tiny little piece of bone, the Denisovans, after this place where they were first described. 
+So we can then ask for Denisovans the same things as for the Neanderthals: Did they mix with ancestors of present day people? 
+If we ask that question, and compare the Denisovan genome to people around the world, we surprisingly find no evidence of Denisovan DNA in any people living even close to Siberia today. 
+But we do find it in Papua New Guinea and in other islands in Melanesia and the Pacific. 
+So this presumably means that these Denisovans had been more widespread in the past, since we don't think that the ancestors of Melanesians were ever in Siberia. 
+So from studying these genomes of extinct humans, we're beginning to arrive at a picture of what the world looked like when modern humans started coming out of Africa. 
+In the West, there were Neanderthals; in the East, there were Denisovans — maybe other forms of humans too that we've not yet described. 
+We don't know quite where the borders between these people were, but we know that in Southern Siberia, there were both Neanderthals and Denisovans at least at some time in the past. 
+Then modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa, came out of Africa, presumably in the Middle East. 
+They meet Neanderthals, mix with them, continue to spread over the world, and somewhere in Southeast Asia, they meet Denisovans and mix with them and continue on out into the Pacific. 
+And then these earlier forms of humans disappear, but they live on a little bit today in some of us — in that people outside of Africa have two and a half percent of their DNA from Neanderthals, and people in Melanesia actually have an additional five percent approximately from the Denisovans. 
+Does this then mean that there is after all some absolute difference between people outside Africa and inside Africa in that people outside Africa have this old component in their genome from these extinct forms of humans, whereas Africans do not? 
+Well I don't think that is the case. 
+Presumably, modern humans emerged somewhere in Africa. 
+They spread across Africa also, of course, and there were older, earlier forms of humans there. 
+And since we mixed elsewhere, I'm pretty sure that one day, when we will perhaps have a genome of also these earlier forms in Africa, we will find that they have also mixed with early modern humans in Africa. 
+So to sum up, what have we learned from studying genomes of present day humans and extinct humans? 
+We learn perhaps many things, but one thing that I find sort of important to mention is that I think the lesson is that we have always mixed. 
+We mixed with these earlier forms of humans, wherever we met them, and we mixed with each other ever since. 
+Thank you for your attention. 
+(Applause) 
+
+As a boy, I loved cars. 
+When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident. 
+Like this. 
+And then I decided I'd dedicate my life to saving one million people every year. 
+Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report, but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars. 
+I saw the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges where the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert. 
+And even though a hundred teams were there, these cars went nowhere. 
+So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car. 
+We built the hardware and the software. 
+We made it learn from us, and we set it free in the desert. 
+And the unimaginable happened: it became the first car to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge, winning Stanford 2 million dollars. 
+Yet I still hadn't saved a single life. 
+Since, our work has focused on building driving cars that can drive anywhere by themselves — any street in California. 
+We've driven 140,000 miles. 
+Our cars have sensors by which they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every aspect of driving. 
+It's the perfect driving mechanism. 
+We've driven in cities, like in San Francisco here. 
+We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1. 
+We've encountered joggers, busy highways, toll booths, and this is without a person in the loop; the car just drives itself. 
+In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles, people didn't even notice. 
+Mountain roads, day and night, and even crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco. 
+(Laughter) Sometimes our cars get so crazy, they even do little stunts. 
+(Video) Man: Oh, my God. 
+What? 
+Second Man: It's driving itself. 
+Sebastian Thrun: Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life, but I can do something for all the people who died. 
+Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people? 
+And do you realize that almost all of those are due to human error and not machine error, and can therefore be prevented by machines? 
+Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn't rely on human precision on staying in the lane — improve body position and therefore drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes, and do away with all traffic jams on highways? 
+Do you realize that you, TED users, spend an average of 52 minutes per day in traffic, wasting your time on your daily commute? 
+You could regain this time. 
+This is four billion hours wasted in this country alone. 
+And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted. 
+Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology, and I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I bring to you a message from tens of thousands of people — in the villages, in the slums, in the hinterland of the country — who have solved problems through their own genius, without any outside help. 
+When our home minister announces a few weeks ago a war on one third of India, about 200 districts that he mentioned were ungovernable, he missed the point. 
+The point that we have been stressing for the last 21 years, the point that people may be economically poor, but they're not poor in the mind. 
+In other words, the minds on the margin are not the marginal minds. 
+That is the message, which we started 31 years ago. 
+And what did it start? 
+Let me just tell you, briefly, my personal journey, which led me to come to this point. 
+In '85,' 86, I was in Bangladesh advising the government and the research council there how to help scientists work on the lands, on the fields of the poor people, and how to develop research technologies, which are based on the knowledge of the people. 
+I came back in '86. 
+I had been tremendously invigorated by the knowledge and creativity that I found in that country, which had 60 percent landlessness but amazing creativity. 
+I started looking at my own work: The work that I had done for the previous 10 years, almost every time, had instances of knowledge that people had shared. 
+Now, I was paid in dollars as a consultant, and I looked at my income tax return and tried to ask myself: "" Is there a line in my return, which shows how much of this income has gone to the people whose knowledge has made it possible? 
+Was it because I'm brilliant that I'm getting this reward, or because of the revolution? 
+Is it that I write very well? 
+Is it that I articulate very well? 
+Is it that I analyze the data very well? 
+Is it because I'm a professor, and, therefore, I must be entitled to this reward from society? "" I tried to convince myself that, "" No, no, I have worked for the policy changes. 
+You know, the public policy will become more responsive to the needs of the poor, and, therefore I think it's okay. "" But it appeared to me that all these years that I'd been working on exploitation — exploitation by landlords, by moneylenders, by traders — gave me an insight that probably I was also an exploiter, because there was no line in my income tax return which showed this income accrued because of the brilliance of the people — those people who have shared their knowledge and good faith and trust with me — and nothing ever went back to them. 
+So much so, that much of my work till that time was in the English language. 
+The majority of the people from whom I learned didn't know English. 
+So what kind of a contributor was I? 
+I was talking about social justice, and here I was, a professional who was pursuing the most unjust act — of taking knowledge from the people, making them anonymous, getting rent from that knowledge by sharing it and doing consultancy, writing papers and publishing them in the papers, getting invited to the conferences, getting consultancies and whatever have you. 
+So then, a dilemma rose in the mind that, if I'm also an exploiter, then this is not right; life cannot go on like that. 
+And this was a moment of great pain and trauma because I couldn't live with it any longer. 
+So I did a review of ethical dilemma and value conflicts and management research, wrote, read about 100 papers. 
+And I came to the conclusion that while dilemma is unique, dilemma is not unique; the solution had to be unique. 
+And one day — I don't know what happened — while coming back from the office towards home, maybe I saw a honey bee or it occurred to my mind that if I only could be like the honey bee, life would be wonderful. 
+What the honey bee does: it pollinates, takes nectar from the flower, pollinates another flower, cross-pollinates. 
+And when it takes the nectar, the flowers don't feel shortchanged. 
+In fact, they invite the honey bees through their colors, and the bees don't keep all the honey for themselves. 
+These are the three guiding principles of the Honey Bee Network: that whenever we learn something from people it must be shared with them in their language. 
+They must not remain anonymous. 
+And I must tell you that after 20 years, I have not made one percent of change in the professional practice of this art. 
+That is a great tragedy — which I'm carrying still with me and I hope that all of you will carry this with you — that the profession still legitimizes publication of knowledge of people without attributing them by making them anonymous. 
+The research guidelines of U.S. National Academy of Sciences or Research Councils of the U.K. 
+or of Indian Councils of Science Research do not require that whatever you learn from people, you must share back with them. 
+We are talking about an accountable society, a society that is fair and just, and we don't even do justice in the knowledge market. 
+And India wants to be a knowledge society. 
+How will it be a knowledge society? 
+So, obviously, you cannot have two principles of justice, one for yourself and one for others. 
+It must be the same. 
+You cannot discriminate. 
+You cannot be in favor of your own values, which are at a distance from the values that you espouse. 
+So, fairness to one and to the other is not divisible. 
+Look at this picture. 
+Can you tell me where has it been taken from, and what is it meant for? Anybody? 
+I'm a professor; I must quiz you. (Laughter) Anybody? Any guess at all? 
+Pardon? (Audience Member: Rajasthan.) Anil Gupta: But what has it been used for? What has it been used for? 
+(Murmuring) Pardon? 
+You know, you're so right. We must give him a hand, because this man knows how insensitive our government is. 
+Look at this. This is the site of the government of India. 
+It invites tourists to see the shame of our country. 
+I'm so sorry to say that. 
+Is this a beautiful picture or is it a terrible picture? 
+It depends upon how you look at the life of the people. 
+If this woman has to carry water on her head for miles and miles and miles, you cannot be celebrating that. 
+We should be doing something about it. 
+And let me tell you, with all the science and technology at our command, millions of women still carry water on their heads. 
+And we do not ask this question. 
+You must have taken tea in the morning. 
+Think for a minute. 
+The leaves of the tea, plucked from the bushes; you know what the action is? The action is: The lady picks up a few leaves, puts them in the basket on the backside. 
+Just do it 10 times; you will realize the pain in this shoulder. 
+And she does it a few thousand times every day. 
+The rice that you ate in the lunch, and you will eat today, is transplanted by women bending in a very awkward posture, millions of them, every season, in the paddy season, when they transplant paddy with their feet in the water. 
+And feet in the water will develop fungus, infections, and that infection pains because then other insects bite that point. 
+And every year, 99.9 percent of the paddy is transplanted manually. 
+No machines have been developed. 
+So the silence of scientists, of technologists, of public policy makers, of the change agent, drew our attention that this is not on, this is not on; this is not the way society will work. 
+This is not what our parliament would do. You know, we have a program for employment: One hundred, 250 million people have to be given jobs for 100 days by this great country. 
+Doing what? Breaking stones, digging earth. 
+So we asked a question to the parliament: Do poor have heads? 
+Do poor have legs, mouth and hands, but no head? 
+So Honey Bee Network builds upon the resource in which poor people are rich. 
+And what has happened? 
+An anonymous, faceless, nameless person gets in contact with the network, and then gets an identity. 
+This is what Honey Bee Network is about. 
+And this network grew voluntarily, continues to be voluntary, and has tried to map the minds of millions of people of our country and other parts of the world who are creative. 
+They could be creative in terms of education, they may be creative in terms of culture, they may be creative in terms of institutions; but a lot of our work is in the field of technological creativity, the innovations, either in terms of contemporary innovations, or in terms of traditional knowledge. 
+And it all begins with curiosity. 
+It all begins with curiosity. 
+This person, whom we met — and you will see it on the website, www.sristi.org — this tribal person, he had a wish. 
+And he said, "" If my wish gets fulfilled "" — somebody was sick and he had to monitor — "" God, please cure him. 
+And if you cure him, I will get my wall painted. "" And this is what he got painted. 
+Somebody was talking yesterday about Maslowian hierarchy. 
+There could be nothing more wrong than the Maslowian model of hierarchy of needs because the poorest people in this country can get enlightenment. 
+Kabir, Rahim, all the great Sufi saints, they were all poor people, and they had a great reason. (Applause) Please do not ever think that only after meeting your physiological needs and other needs can you be thinking about your spiritual needs or your enlightenment. 
+Any person anywhere is capable of rising to that highest point of attainment, only by the resolve that they have in their mind that they must achieve something. 
+Look at this. 
+We saw it in Shodh Yatra. Every six months we walk in different parts of the country. 
+I've walked about 4,000 kilometers in the last 12 years. 
+So on the wayside we found these dung cakes, which are used as a fuel. 
+Now, this lady, on the wall of the dung cake heap, has made a painting. 
+That's the only space she could express her creativity. 
+And she's so marvelous. 
+Look at this lady, Ram Timari Devi, on a grain bin. In Champaran, we had a Shodh Yatra and we were walking in the land where Gandhiji went to hear about the tragedy, pain of indigo growers. 
+Bhabi Mahato in Purulia and Bankura. 
+Look at what she has done. 
+The whole wall is her canvas. She's sitting there with a broom. 
+Is she an artisan or an artist? 
+Obviously she's an artist; she's a creative person. 
+If we can create markets for these artists, we will not have to employ them for digging earth and breaking stones. 
+They will be paid for what they are good at, not what they're bad at. 
+(Applause) Look at what Rojadeen has done. 
+In Motihari in Champaran, there are a lot of people who sell tea on the shack and, obviously, there's a limited market for tea. 
+Every morning you have tea, as well as coffee. 
+So he thought, why don't I convert a pressure cooker into a coffee machine? 
+So this is a coffee machine. Just takes a few hundred rupees. 
+People bring their own cooker, he attaches a valve and a steam pipe, and now he gives you espresso coffee. (Laughter) Now, this is a real, affordable coffee percolator that works on gas. 
+(Applause) Look at what Sheikh Jahangir has done. 
+A lot of poor people do not have enough grains to get ground. 
+So this fellow is bringing a flour-grinding machine on a two-wheeler. 
+If you have 500 grams, 1000, one kilogram, he will grind it for it for you; the flourmill will not grind such a small quantity. 
+Please understand the problem of poor people. 
+They have needs which have to be met efficiently in terms of energy, in terms of cost, in terms of quality. 
+They don't want second-standard, second-quality outputs. 
+But to be able to give them high-quality output you need to adapt technology to their needs. 
+And that is what Sheikh Jahangir did. 
+But that's not enough, what he did. Look at what he did here. 
+If you have clothes, and you don't have enough time to wash them, he brought a washing machine to your doorstep, mounted on a two-wheeler. 
+So here's a model where a two-wheeler washing machine... 
+He is washing your clothes and drying them at your doorstep. 
+(Applause) You bring your water, you bring your soap, I wash the clothes for you. Charge 50 paisa, one rupee for you per lot, and a new business model can emerge. 
+Now, what we need is, we need people who will be able to scale them up. 
+Look at this. 
+It looks like a beautiful photograph. 
+But you know what it is? Can anybody guess what it is? 
+Somebody from India would know, of course. 
+It's a tawa. 
+It's a hot plate made of clay. 
+Now, what is the beauty in it? 
+When you have a non-stick pan, it costs about, maybe, 250 rupees, five dollars, six dollars. 
+This is less than a dollar and this is non-stick; it is coated with one of these food-grade materials. 
+And the best part is that, while you use a costly non-stick pan, you eat the so-called Teflon or Teflon-like material because after some time the stuff disappears. Where has it gone? 
+It has gone in your stomach. It was not meant for that. (Laughter) You know? But here in this clay hot plate, it will never go into your stomach. 
+So it is better, it is safer; it is affordable, it is energy-efficient. 
+In other words, solutions by the poor people need not be cheaper, need not be, so-called, jugaad, need not be some kind of makeshift arrangement. 
+They have to be better, they have to be more efficient, they have to be affordable. 
+And that is what Mansukh Bhai Prajapati has done. 
+He has designed this plate with a handle. 
+And now with one dollar, you can afford a better alternative than the people market is offering you. 
+This lady, she developed a herbal pesticide formulation. 
+We filed the patent for her, the National Innovation Foundation. 
+And who knows? Somebody will license this technology and develop marketable products, and she would get revenue. 
+Now, let me mention one thing: I think we need a polycentric model of development, where a large number of initiatives in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world, would solve the needs of locality in a very efficient and adaptive manner. 
+Higher the local fit, greater is the chance of scaling up. 
+In the scaling up, there's an inherent inadequacy to match the needs of the local people, point by point, with the supply that you're making. 
+So why are people willing to adjust with that mismatch? 
+Things can scale up, and they have scaled up. 
+For example, cell phones: We have 400 million cellphones in this country. 
+Now, it is possible that I use only two buttons on the cellphone, only three options on the cellphone. 
+It has 300 options, I'm paying for 300; I'm using only three but I'm willing to live with it, therefore it is scaling up. 
+But if I had to get a match to match, obviously, I would need a different design of a cellphone. 
+So what we're saying is that scalability should not become an enemy of sustainability. 
+There must be a place in the world for solutions that are only relevant for a locality, and yet, one can be able to fund them. 
+One of the greatest studies that we've been finding is that many times investors would ask this question — "" What is a scalable model? "" — as if the need of a community, which is only located in a space and time and has those needs only located in those places, has no legitimate right to get them for free because it's not part of a larger scale. 
+So either you sub-optimize your needs to a larger scale or else you remain out. 
+Now, the eminent model, the long-tail model tells you that small sales of a large number of books, for example, having only a few copies sold can still be a viable model. 
+And we must find a mechanism where people will pool in the portfolio, will invest in the portfolio, where different innovations will go to a small number of people in their localities, and yet, the overall platform of the model will become viable. 
+Look at what he is doing. 
+Saidullah Sahib is an amazing man. 
+At the age of 70, he is linking up something very creative. 
+(Music) Saidullah Sahib: I couldn't wait for the boat. 
+I had to meet my love. 
+My desperation made me an innovator. 
+Even love needs help from technology. 
+Innovation is the light of my wife, Noor. 
+New inventions are the passion of my life. 
+My technology. 
+(Applause) AG: Saidulluh Sahib is in Motihari, again in Champaran. 
+Wonderful human being, but he stills sells, at this age, honey on a cycle to earn his livelihood, because we haven't been able to convince the water park people, the lake people, in [unclear] operations. 
+And we have not been able to convince the fire brigade people in Mumbai — where there was a flood a few years ago and people had to walk 20 kilometers, wading in the water — that, look, you should have this cycle in your fire brigade office because you can then go to those lanes where your buses will not go, where your transport will not go. 
+So we have not yet cracked the problem of making it available as a rescue device, as a vending device during the floods in eastern India, when you have to deliver things to people in different islands where they're marooned. 
+But the idea has a merit. The idea has a merit. 
+What has Appachan done? Appachan, unfortunately, is no more, but he has left behind a message. 
+A very powerful message Appachan: I watch the world wake up every day. 
+(Music) It's not that a coconut fell on my head, and I came upon this idea. 
+With no money to fund my studies, I scaled new heights. 
+Now, they call me the local Spiderman. 
+My technology. 
+(Applause) AG: Many of you might not realize and believe that we have sold this product internationally — what I call a G2G model, grassroots to global. 
+And a professor in the University of Massachusetts, in the zoology department, bought this climber because she wanted to study the insect diversity of the top of the tree canopy. 
+And this device makes it possible for her to take samples from a larger number of palms, rather than only a few, because otherwise she had to make a big platform and then climb her [unclear] would climb on that. 
+So, you know, we are advancing the frontiers of science. 
+Remya Jose has developed... 
+you can go to the YouTube and find India Innovates and then you will find these videos. 
+Innovation by her when she was in class 10th: a washing machine-cum-exercising machine. 
+Mr. Kharai who is a physically challenged person, one and a half foot height, only. 
+But he has modified a two-wheeler so that he can get autonomy and freedom and flexibility. 
+This innovation is from the slums of Rio. 
+And this person, Mr. Ubirajara. 
+We were talking about, my friends in Brazil, how we scale up this model in China and Brazil. 
+And we have a very vibrant network in China, particularly, but also emerging in Brazil and other parts of the world. 
+This stand on the front wheel, you will not find on any cycle. 
+India and China have the largest number of cycles. 
+But this innovation emerged in Brazil. 
+The point is, none of us should be parochial, none of us should be so nationalistic to believe that all good ideas will come only from our country. 
+No, we have to have the humility to learn from knowledge of economically poor people, wherever they are. 
+And look at this whole range of cycle-based innovations: cycle that's a sprayer, cycle that generates energy from the shocks on the road. 
+I can't change the condition of the road, but I can make the cycle run faster. 
+That is what Kanak Das has done. 
+And in South Africa, we had taken our innovators, and many of us had gone there share with the colleagues in South Africa as to how innovation can become a means of liberation from the drudgery that people have. 
+And this is a donkey cart which they modified. 
+There's an axle here, of 30, 40 kg, serving no purpose. 
+Remove it, the cart needs one donkey less. 
+This is in China. This girl needed a breathing apparatus. 
+These three people in the village sat down and decided to think, "How do we elongate the life of this girl of our village?" 
+They were not related to her, but they tried to find out, "How can we use..." They used a cycle, they put together a breathing apparatus. 
+And this breathing apparatus now saved the life, and she's very welcome. 
+There's a whole range of innovations that we have. 
+A car, which runs on compressed air with six paisa per kilometer. 
+Assam, Kanak Gogoi. 
+And you would not find this car in U.S. or Europe, but this is available in India. 
+Now, this lady, she used to do the winding of the yarn for Pochampally Saree. 
+In one day, 18,000 times, she had to do this winding to generate two sarees. 
+This is what her son has done after seven years of struggle. 
+She said, "" Change your profession. "" He said, "" I can't. This is the only thing I know, but I'll invent a machine, which will solve your problem. "" And this is what he did, a sewing machine in Uttar Pradesh. 
+So, this is what SRISTI is saying: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world." 
+I will just tell you that we are also doing a competition among children for creativity, a whole range of things. 
+We have sold things all over the world, from Ethiopia to Turkey to U.S. to wherever. 
+Products have gone to the market, a few. 
+These are the people whose knowledge made this Herbavate cream for eczema possible. 
+And here, a company which licensed this herbal pesticide put a photograph of the innovator on the packing so that every time a user uses it, it asks the user, "" You can also be an innovator. 
+If you have an idea, send it back to us. "" So, creativity counts, knowledge matters, innovations transform, incentives inspire. 
+And incentives: not just material, but also non-material incentives. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The shocking police crackdown on protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown, underscored the extent to which advanced military weapons and equipment, designed for the battlefield, are making their way to small-town police departments across the United States. 
+Although much tougher to observe, this same thing is happening with surveillance equipment. 
+NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling local police departments to gather vast quantities of sensitive information about each and every one of us in a way that was never previously possible. 
+Location information can be very sensitive. 
+If you drive your car around the United States, it can reveal if you go to a therapist, attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, if you go to church or if you don't go to church. 
+And when that information about you is combined with the same information about everyone else, the government can gain a detailed portrait of how private citizens interact. 
+This information used to be private. 
+Thanks to modern technology, the government knows far too much about what happens behind closed doors. 
+And local police departments make decisions about who they think you are based on this information. 
+One of the key technologies driving mass location tracking is the innocuous-sounding Automatic License Plate Reader. 
+If you haven't seen one, it's probably because you didn't know what to look for — they're everywhere. 
+Mounted on roads or on police cars, Automatic License Plate Readers capture images of every passing car and convert the license plate into machine-readable text so that they can be checked against hot lists of cars potentially wanted for wrongdoing. 
+But more than that, increasingly, local police departments are keeping records not just of people wanted for wrongdoing, but of every plate that passes them by, resulting in the collection of mass quantities of data about where Americans have gone. 
+Did you know this was happening? 
+When Mike Katz-Lacabe asked his local police department for information about the plate reader data they had on him, this is what they got: in addition to the date, time and location, the police department had photographs that captured where he was going and often who he was with. 
+The second photo from the top is a picture of Mike and his two daughters getting out of their car in their own driveway. 
+The government has hundreds of photos like this about Mike going about his daily life. 
+And if you drive a car in the United States, I would bet money that they have photographs like this of you going about your daily life. 
+Mike hasn't done anything wrong. 
+Why is it okay that the government is keeping all of this information? 
+The reason it's happening is because, as the cost of storing this data has plummeted, the police departments simply hang on to it, just in case it could be useful someday. 
+The issue is not just that one police department is gathering this information in isolation or even that multiple police departments are doing it. 
+At the same time, the federal government is collecting all of these individual pots of data, and pooling them together into one vast database with hundreds of millions of hits, showing where Americans have traveled. 
+This document from the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which is one of the agencies primarily interested in this, is one of several that reveal the existence of this database. 
+Meanwhile, in New York City, the NYPD has driven police cars equipped with license plate readers past mosques in order to figure out who is attending. 
+The uses and abuses of this technology aren't limited to the United States. 
+In the U.K., the police department put 80-year-old John Kat on a plate reader watch list after he had attended dozens of lawful political demonstrations where he liked to sit on a bench and sketch the attendees. 
+License plate readers aren't the only mass location tracking technology available to law enforcement agents today. 
+Through a technique known as a cell tower dump, law enforcement agents can uncover who was using one or more cell towers at a particular time, a technique which has been known to reveal the location of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people. 
+Also, using a device known as a StingRay, law enforcement agents can send tracking signals inside people's houses to identify the cell phones located there. 
+And if they don't know which house to target, they've been known to drive this technology around through whole neighborhoods. 
+Just as the police in Ferguson possess high-tech military weapons and equipment, so too do police departments across the United States possess high-tech surveillance gear. 
+Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. 
+The question is, what should we do about this? 
+I think this poses a serious civil liberties threat. 
+History has shown that once the police have massive quantities of data, tracking the movements of innocent people, it gets abused, maybe for blackmail, maybe for political advantage, or maybe for simple voyeurism. 
+Fortunately, there are steps we can take. 
+Local police departments can be governed by the city councils, which can pass laws requiring the police to dispose of the data about innocent people while allowing the legitimate uses of the technology to go forward. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause). 
+
+(Laughter) I'm an economist. 
+When I was five, I thought I was a genius, but my professors have beaten that idea out of my head long since. "" (Laughter) "And now I know I am completely competent." 
+He was an economically rational person. 
+Now, do you really want me to say now, tell you, "Really, I swear I don't kick children." 
+Might fail, kid. Don't make a lot of money at that, kid. 
+But then, you were born. "" (Laughter) (Applause) Do you really want to use your family, do you really ever want to look at your spouse and your kid, and see your jailers? 
+There was something you could have said to your kid, when he or she said, "" I have a dream. "" You could have said — looked the kid in the face and said, "" Go for it, kid! 
+Unless — "" unless, "" that most evocative of all English words — "unless." 
+So, those are the many reasons why you are going to fail to have a great career. 
+
+Martin Luther King did not say, "I have a nightmare," when he inspired the civil rights movements. 
+He said, "" I have a dream. "" And I have a dream. 
+I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare, and this is going to be a challenge, because, if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times, nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic. 
+I think this film is one of the hardest watches of modern times, "" The Road. "" It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but everything is desolate, everything is dead. 
+And just a father and son trying to survive, walking along the road. 
+And I think the environmental movement of which I am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future. 
+For too long, we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what's going to happen. 
+We have focused on the worst-case scenario. 
+We have focused on the problems. 
+And we have not thought enough about the solutions. 
+We've used fear, if you like, to grab people's attention. 
+And any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism. 
+It's part of the fight and flight mechanism, that when an animal is frightened — think of a deer. 
+A deer freezes very, very still, poised to run away. 
+And I think that's what we're doing when we're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change. 
+People are freezing and running away because we're using fear. 
+And I think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is. 
+What would it be like to be improving the human lot? 
+And one of the problems that we face, I think, is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is, an economic definition of what progress is — that somehow, if we get the right numbers to go up, we're going to be better off, whether that's on the stock market, whether that's with GDP and economic growth, that somehow life is going to get better. 
+This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear — that more is better. 
+Come on. In the Western world, we have enough. 
+Maybe some parts of the world don't, but we have enough. 
+And we've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations. 
+In fact, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, in the 1930s, said that, "" A nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income. "" But we've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff. 
+And indeed, this is probably historical, and it had its time. 
+In the second World War, we needed to produce a lot of stuff. 
+And indeed, we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe, and we had to rebuild it afterwards. 
+And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce. 
+But as early as 1968, this visionary man, Robert Kennedy, at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign, gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product that ever has been. 
+And he finished his talk with the phrase, that, "" The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile. "" How crazy is that? That our measure of progress, our dominant measure of progress in society, is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile? 
+I believe, if Kennedy was alive today, he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile. 
+He'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice, sustainability and people's well-being. 
+And actually, social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world. 
+This is from a global survey. 
+It's asking people, what do they want. 
+And unsurprisingly, people all around the world say that what they want is happiness, for themselves, for their families, their children, their communities. 
+Okay, they think money is slightly important. 
+It's there, but it's not nearly as important as happiness, and it's not nearly as important as love. 
+We all need to love and be loved in life. 
+It's not nearly as important as health. 
+We want to be healthy and live a full life. 
+These seem to be natural human aspirations. 
+Why are statisticians not measuring these? 
+Why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms, instead of just how much stuff we have? 
+And really, this is what I've done with my adult life — is think about how do we measure happiness, how do we measure well-being, how can we do that within environmental limits. 
+And we created, at the organization that I work for, the New Economics Foundation, something we call the Happy Planet Index, because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy. 
+Why don't we create a measure of progress that shows that? 
+And what we do, is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens. 
+That should be the goal of every nation on the planet. 
+But we have to remember that there's a fundamental input to that, and that is how many of the planet's resources we use. 
+We all have one planet. We all have to share it. 
+It is the ultimate scarce resource, the one planet that we share. 
+And economics is very interested in scarcity. 
+When it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome, it thinks in terms of efficiency. 
+It thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck. 
+And this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use. 
+It is an efficiency measure. 
+And probably the easiest way to show you that, is to show you this graph. 
+Running horizontally along the graph, is "" ecological footprint, "" which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet. 
+More is bad. 
+Running vertically upwards, is a measure called "" happy life years. "" It's about the well-being of nations. 
+It's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy. 
+It's like quality and quantity of life in nations. 
+And the yellow dot there you see, is the global average. 
+Now, there's a huge array of nations around that global average. 
+To the top right of the graph, are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being, but they're using a lot of planet to get there. 
+They are the U.S.A., other Western countries going across in those triangles and a few Gulf states in there actually. 
+Conversely, at the bottom left of the graph, are countries that are not producing much well-being — typically, sub-Saharan Africa. 
+In Hobbesian terms, life is short and brutish there. 
+The average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years. 
+Malaria, HIV / AIDS are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world. 
+But now for the good news! 
+There are some countries up there, yellow triangles, that are doing better than global average, that are heading up towards the top left of the graph. 
+This is an aspirational graph. 
+We want to be top left, where good lives don't cost the earth. 
+They're Latin American. 
+The country on its own up at the top is a place I haven't been to. 
+Maybe some of you have. 
+Costa Rica. 
+Costa Rica — average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years. 
+That is longer than in the USA. 
+They are, according to the latest Gallup world poll, the happiest nation on the planet — than anybody; more than Switzerland and Denmark. 
+They are the happiest place. 
+They are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in [the] Western world — a quarter of the resources. 
+What's going on there? 
+What's happening in Costa Rica? 
+We can look at some of the data. 
+99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources. 
+Their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021. 
+They abolished the army in 1949 — 1949. 
+And they invested in social programs — health and education. 
+They have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and in the world. 
+And they have that Latin vibe, don't they. 
+They have the social connectedness. 
+(Laughter) The challenge is, that possibly — and the thing we might have to think about — is that the future might not be North American, might not be Western European. 
+It might be Latin American. 
+And the challenge, really, is to pull the global average up here. 
+That's what we need to do. 
+And if we're going to do that, we need to pull countries from the bottom, and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph. 
+And then we're starting to create a happy planet. 
+That's one way of looking at it. 
+Another way of looking at it is looking at time trends. 
+We don't have good data going back for every country in the world, but for some of the richest countries, the OECD group, we do. 
+And this is the trend in well-being over that time, a small increase, but this is the trend in ecological footprint. 
+And so in strict happy-planet methodology, we've become less efficient at turning our ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to. 
+And the point really is, is that I think, probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening. 
+It's actually not very long away. 
+It's half a human lifetime away. 
+A child entering school today will be my age in 2050. 
+This is not the very distant future. 
+This is what the U.K. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like. 
+And I put it to you, that is not business as usual. 
+That is changing our business. 
+That is changing the way we create our organizations, we do our government policy and we live our lives. 
+And the point is, we need to carry on increasing well-being. 
+No one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce. 
+None of us, I think, want human progress to stop. 
+I think we want it to carry on. 
+I think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing. 
+And I think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in. 
+I think this is what they want. They want quality of life to keep increasing. 
+They want to hold on to what they've got. 
+And if we're going to engage them, I think that's what we've got to do. 
+And that means we have to really increase efficiency even more. 
+Now that's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that, but the point is we need to turn those curves. 
+And this is where I think we can take a leaf out of systems theory, systems engineers, where they create feedback loops, put the right information at the right point of time. 
+Human beings are very motivated by the "" now. "" You put a smart meter in your home, and you see how much electricity you're using right now, how much it's costing you, your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly. 
+What would that look like for society? 
+Why is it, on the radio news every evening, I hear the FTSE 100, the Dow Jones, the dollar pound ratio — I don't even know which way the dollar pound ratio should go to be good news. 
+And why do I hear that? 
+Why don't I hear how much energy Britain used yesterday, or American used yesterday? 
+Did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions? 
+That's how you create a collective goal. 
+You put it out there into the media and start thinking about it. 
+And we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being At a government level, they might create national accounts of well-being. 
+At a business level, you might look at the well-being of your employees, which we know is really linked to creativity, which is linked to innovation, and we're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues. 
+At a personal level, we need these nudges too. 
+Maybe we don't quite need the data, but we need reminders. 
+In the U.K., we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do — never my best thing. 
+What are these for happiness? 
+What are the five things that you should do every day to be happier? 
+We did a project for the Government Office of Science a couple of years ago, a big program called the Foresight program — lots and lots of people — involved lots of experts — everything evidence based — a huge tome. 
+But a piece of work we did was on: what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life? 
+And the point of these is they are, not quite, the secrets of happiness, but they are things that I think happiness will flow out the side from. 
+And the first of these is to connect, is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life. 
+Do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do, and energy? 
+Keep building them. 
+The second one is be active. 
+The fastest way out of a bad mood: step outside, go for a walk, turn the radio on and dance. 
+Being active is great for our positive mood. 
+The third one is take notice. 
+How aware are you of things going on around the world, the seasons changing, people around you? 
+Do you notice what's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge? 
+Based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, [very] strong for our well being. 
+The fourth is keep learning and keep is important — learning throughout the whole life course. 
+Older people who keep learning and are curious, they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down. 
+But it doesn't have to be formal learning; it's not knowledge based. 
+It's more curiosity. 
+It can be learning to cook a new dish, picking up an instrument you forgot as a child. 
+Keep learning. 
+And the final one is that most anti-economic of activities, but give. 
+Our generosity, our altruism, our compassion, are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain. 
+We feel good if we give. 
+You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning. 
+You tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people. 
+You measure their happiness at the end of the day, those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves. 
+And these five ways, which we put onto these handy postcards, I would say, don't have to cost the earth. 
+They don't have any carbon content. 
+They don't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied. 
+And so I think it's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth. 
+Now, Martin Luther King, on the eve of his death, gave an incredible speech. 
+He said, "" I know there are challenges ahead, there may be trouble ahead, but I fear no one. I don't care. 
+I have been to the mountain top, and I have seen the Promised Land. "" Now, he was a preacher, but I believe the environmental movement and, in fact, the business community, government, needs to go to the top of the mountain top, and it needs to look out, and it needs to see the Promised Land, or the land of promise, and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want. 
+And not only that, we need to create a Great Transition to get there, and we need to pave that great transition with good things. 
+Human beings want to be happy. 
+Pave them with the five ways. 
+And we need to have signposts gathering people together and pointing them — something like the Happy Planet Index. 
+And then I believe that we can all create a world we all want, where happiness does not cost the earth. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So this right here is the tiny village of Elle, close to Lista. 
+And on January 2 this year, an elderly guy who lives in the village, he went out to see what was cast ashore during a recent storm. 
+And on a patch of grass right next to the water's edge, he found a wetsuit. 
+It was grey and black, and he thought it looked cheap. 
+Out of each leg of the wetsuit there were sticking two white bones. 
+It was clearly the remains of a human being. 
+So they ran a DNA profile, and they started searching internationally through Interpol. 
+This was a person that nobody seemed to be missing. 
+It was an invisible life heading for a nameless grave. 
+But then, after a month, the police in Norway got a message from the police in the Netherlands. 
+But the police in the Netherlands managed to trace the wetsuit by an RFID chip that was sewn in the suit. 
+But this was all they were able to figure out. 
+It's the spot in continental Europe closest to Britain, and a lot of migrants and refugees are staying in this camp and are trying desperately to cross over to Britain. 
+Well, if you disappear one day, nobody will notice. 
+The police won't come search for you because nobody knows you're gone. 
+And this is what happened to Shadi Omar Kataf and Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria. 
+Me and Tomm went to Calais for the first time in April this year, and after three months of investigation, we were able to tell the story about how these two young men fled the war in Syria, ended up stuck in Calais, bought wetsuits and drowned in what seems to have been an attempt to swim across the English Channel in order to reach England. 
+It is a story about the fact that everybody has a name, everybody has a story, everybody is someone. 
+But it is also a story about what it's like to be a refugee in Europe today. 
+It has been dubbed the worst refugee camp in Europe. 
+And they do that by hiding in the back of trucks headed for the ferry, or the Eurotunnel, or they sneak inside the tunnel terminal at night to try to hide on the trains. 
+Most want to go to Britain because they know the language, and so they figure it would be easier to restart their lives from there. 
+But who all of these people are usually gets lost in the way we talk about refugees and migrants, because we usually do that in statistics. 
+And first, I want to tell you about one of them. 
+This is 22-year-old Mouaz Al Balkhi from Syria. 
+The analysis concluded the body who was found in a wetsuit on a beach in the Netherlands was actually Mouaz Al Balkhi. 
+And while we were doing all this investigation, we got to know Mouaz's story. 
+He was born in the Syrian capital of Damascus in 1991. 
+In Turkey, he's not accepted at a university, and once he had left Jordan as a refugee, he was not allowed to reenter. 
+We know he made at least 12 failed attempts to cross the English Channel by hiding in a truck. 
+But at some point, he must have given up all hope. 
+We found his name in the records, and he seems to have stayed there alone. 
+The day after, he went into Calais, entered a sports shop a couple of minutes before 8 o'clock in the evening, along with Shadi Kataf. 
+We have tried to figure out where Shadi met Mouaz, but we weren't able to do that. 
+Shadi, a couple of years older than Mouaz, was also raised in Damascus. 
+Yarmouk is being described as the worst place to live on planet Earth. 
+They've been bombed by the military, they've been besieged, they've been stormed by ISIS and they've been cut off from supplies for years. 
+There was a UN official who visited last year, and he said, "" They ate all the grass so there was no grass left. "" Out of a population of 150,000, only 18,000 are believed to still be left in Yarmouk. 
+So Shadi and one of his sisters, they fled to Libya. 
+And in this last remaining sort of stability in Libya, Shadi took up scuba diving, and he seemed to spend most of his time underwater. 
+He fell completely in love with the ocean, so when he finally decided that he could no longer be in Libya, late August 2014, he hoped to find work as a diver when he reached Italy. 
+Reality was not that easy. 
+On October 7, he calls his cousin in Belgium, and explains his situation. 
+What was left of Shadi was found nearly three months later, 800 kilometers away in a wetsuit on a beach in Norway. 
+He's still waiting for his funeral in Norway, and none of his family will be able to attend. 
+Many may think that the story about Shadi and Mouaz is a story about death, but I don't agree. 
+But if you are fleeing a war zone, the answers to those two questions are dramatically different. 
+And I have no trouble imagining that after spending weeks or even months as a second-grade citizen, living on the streets or in a horrible makeshift camp with a stupid, racist name like "" The Jungle, "" most of us would be willing to do just about anything. 
+If I could ask Shadi and Mouaz the second they stepped into the freezing waters of the English Channel, they would probably say, "" This is worth the risk, "" because they could no longer see any other option. 
+And that's desperation, but that's the reality of living as a refugee in Western Europe in 2015. 
+Thank you. 
+Tomm, you two have been back to Calais recently. 
+Anders Fjellberg: It wasn't easy at first, because we weren't able to know what we actually could figure out. 
+BG: That's an editor taking responsibility. 
+
+Companies are losing control. 
+What happens on Wall Street no longer stays on Wall Street. 
+What happens in Vegas ends up on YouTube. (Laughter) Reputations are volatile. Loyalties are fickle. 
+Management teams seem increasingly disconnected from their staff. (Laughter) A recent survey said that 27 percent of bosses believe their employees are inspired by their firm. 
+However, in the same survey, only four percent of employees agreed. 
+Companies are losing control of their customers and their employees. 
+But are they really? 
+I'm a marketer, and as a marketer, I know that I've never really been in control. 
+Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room, the saying goes. 
+Hyperconnectivity and transparency allow companies to be in that room now, 24 / 7. 
+They can listen and join the conversation. 
+In fact, they have more control over the loss of control than ever before. 
+They can design for it. But how? 
+First of all, they can give employees and customers more control. 
+They can collaborate with them on the creation of ideas, knowledge, content, designs and product. 
+They can give them more control over pricing, which is what the band Radiohead did with its pay-as-you-like online release of its album "" In Rainbows. "" Buyers could determine the price, but the offer was exclusive, and only stood for a limited period of time. 
+The album sold more copies than previous releases of the band. 
+The Danish chocolate company Anthon Berg opened a so-called "" generous store "" in Copenhagen. 
+It asked customers to purchase chocolate with the promise of good deeds towards loved ones. 
+It turned transactions into interactions, and generosity into a currency. 
+Companies can even give control to hackers. 
+When Microsoft Kinect came out, the motion-controlled add-on to its Xbox gaming console, it immediately drew the attention of hackers. 
+Microsoft first fought off the hacks, but then shifted course when it realized that actively supporting the community came with benefits. 
+The sense of co-ownership, the free publicity, the added value, all helped drive sales. 
+The ultimate empowerment of customers is to ask them not to buy. 
+Outdoor clothier Patagonia encouraged prospective buyers to check out eBay for its used products and to resole their shoes before purchasing new ones. 
+In an even more radical stance against consumerism, the company placed a "" Don't Buy This Jacket "" advertisement during the peak of shopping season. 
+It may have jeopardized short-term sales, but it builds lasting, long-term loyalty based on shared values. 
+Research has shown that giving employees more control over their work makes them happier and more productive. 
+The Brazilian company Semco Group famously lets employees set their own work schedules and even their salaries. 
+Hulu and Netflix, among other companies, have open vacation policies. 
+Companies can give people more control, but they can also give them less control. 
+Traditional business wisdom holds that trust is earned by predictable behavior, but when everything is consistent and standardized, how do you create meaningful experiences? 
+Giving people less control might be a wonderful way to counter the abundance of choice and make them happier. 
+Take the travel service Nextpedition. 
+Nextpedition turns the trip into a game, with surprising twists and turns along the way. 
+It does not tell the traveler where she's going until the very last minute, and information is provided just in time. Similarly, Dutch airline KLM launched a surprise campaign, seemingly randomly handing out small gifts to travelers en route to their destination. 
+U.K.-based Interflora monitored Twitter for users who were having a bad day, and then sent them a free bouquet of flowers. 
+Is there anything companies can do to make their employees feel less pressed for time? Yes. 
+Force them to help others. 
+A recent study suggests that having employees complete occasional altruistic tasks throughout the day increases their sense of overall productivity. 
+At Frog, the company I work for, we hold internal speed meet sessions that connect old and new employees, helping them get to know each other fast. 
+By applying a strict process, we give them less control, less choice, but we enable more and richer social interactions. 
+Companies are the makers of their fortunes, and like all of us, they are utterly exposed to serendipity. 
+That should make them more humble, more vulnerable and more human. 
+At the end of the day, as hyperconnectivity and transparency expose companies' behavior in broad daylight, staying true to their true selves is the only sustainable value proposition. 
+Or as the ballet dancer Alonzo King said, "What's interesting about you is you." 
+For the true selves of companies to come through, openness is paramount, but radical openness is not a solution, because when everything is open, nothing is open. 
+"A smile is a door that is half open and half closed," the author Jennifer Egan wrote. 
+Companies can give their employees and customers more control or less. They can worry about how much openness is good for them, and what needs to stay closed. 
+Or they can simply smile, and remain open to all possibilities. 
+Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+Chris Anderson: So, Jon, this feels scary. 
+Jonathan Haidt: Yeah. 
+CA: It feels like the world is in a place that we haven't seen for a long time. 
+There are much deeper differences afoot. 
+What on earth is going on, and how did we get here? 
+JH: This is different. 
+There's a much more apocalyptic sort of feeling. 
+Survey research by Pew Research shows that the degree to which we feel that the other side is not just — we don't just dislike them; we strongly dislike them, and we think that they are a threat to the nation. 
+Those numbers have been going up and up, and those are over 50 percent now on both sides. 
+People are scared, because it feels like this is different than before; it's much more intense. 
+Whenever I look at any sort of social puzzle, I always apply the three basic principles of moral psychology, and I think they'll help us here. 
+So the first thing that you have to always keep in mind when you're thinking about politics is that we're tribal. 
+We evolved for tribalism. 
+One of the simplest and greatest insights into human social nature is the Bedouin proverb: "" Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me and my brother and cousins against the stranger. "" And that tribalism allowed us to create large societies and to come together in order to compete with others. 
+That brought us out of the jungle and out of small groups, but it means that we have eternal conflict. 
+JH: Oh, absolutely. This is just a basic aspect of human social cognition. 
+But we can also live together really peacefully, and we've invented all kinds of fun ways of, like, playing war. 
+We're also really good at trade and exploration and meeting new people. 
+So you have to see our tribalism as something that goes up or down — it's not like we're doomed to always be fighting each other, but we'll never have world peace. 
+CA: The size of that tribe can shrink or expand. 
+JH: Right. 
+CA: The size of what we consider "" us "" and what we consider "" other "" or "" them "" can change. 
+And some people believed that process could continue indefinitely. 
+JH: That's right. 
+I mean, the left-right as we've all inherited it, comes out of the labor versus capital distinction, and the working class, and Marx. 
+But I think what we're seeing now, increasingly, is a divide in all the Western democracies between the people who want to stop at nation, the people who are more parochial — and I don't mean that in a bad way — people who have much more of a sense of being rooted, they care about their town, their community and their nation. 
+And then those who are anti-parochial and who — whenever I get confused, I just think of the John Lennon song "" Imagine. "" "Imagine there's no countries, nothing to kill or die for." 
+You see this all over Europe as well. 
+There's a great metaphor guy — actually, his name is Shakespeare — writing ten years ago in Britain. 
+And Britain is divided 52-48 on that point. 
+And America is divided on that point, too. 
+CA: And so, those of us who grew up with The Beatles and that sort of hippie philosophy of dreaming of a more connected world — it felt so idealistic and "" how could anyone think badly about that? "" And what you're saying is that, actually, millions of people today feel that that isn't just silly; it's actually dangerous and wrong, and they're scared of it. 
+And I think this is where we have to look very carefully at the social science about diversity and immigration. 
+Once something becomes politicized, once it becomes something that the left loves and the right — then even the social scientists can't think straight about it. 
+Now, diversity is good in a lot of ways. 
+It clearly creates more innovation. 
+The American economy has grown enormously from it. 
+There's a very important study by Robert Putnam, the author of "" Bowling Alone, "" looking at social capital databases. 
+And that leads to a progressive welfare state, a set of progressive left-leaning values, which says, "" Drawbridge down! The world is a great place. 
+People in Syria are suffering — we must welcome them in. "" And it's a beautiful thing. 
+But if, and I was in Sweden this summer, if the discourse in Sweden is fairly politically correct and they can't talk about the downsides, you end up bringing a lot of people in. 
+So this is all very uncomfortable to talk about. 
+But I think this is the thing, especially in Europe and for us, too, we need to be looking at. 
+CA: You're saying that people of reason, people who would consider themselves not racists, but moral, upstanding people, have a rationale that says humans are just too different; that we're in danger of overloading our sense of what humans are capable of, by mixing in people who are too different. 
+JH: Yes, but I can make it much more palatable by saying it's not necessarily about race. 
+It's about culture. 
+There's wonderful work by a political scientist named Karen Stenner, who shows that when people have a sense that we are all united, we're all the same, there are many people who have a predisposition to authoritarianism. 
+Those people aren't particularly racist when they feel as through there's not a threat to our social and moral order. 
+But if you prime them experimentally by thinking we're coming apart, people are getting more different, then they get more racist, homophobic, they want to kick out the deviants. 
+The left, following through the Lennonist line — the John Lennon line — does things that create an authoritarian reaction. 
+We saw it in Britain, we've seen it all over Europe. 
+But the more positive part of that is that I think the localists, or the nationalists, are actually right — that, if you emphasize our cultural similarity, then race doesn't actually matter very much. 
+So an assimilationist approach to immigration removes a lot of these problems. 
+And if you value having a generous welfare state, you've got to emphasize that we're all the same. 
+CA: OK, so rising immigration and fears about that are one of the causes of the current divide. 
+What are other causes? 
+JH: The next principle of moral psychology is that intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. 
+You've probably heard the term "" motivated reasoning "" or "" confirmation bias. "" There's some really interesting work on how our high intelligence and our verbal abilities might have evolved not to help us find out the truth, but to help us manipulate each other, defend our reputation... 
+We're really, really good at justifying ourselves. 
+And when you bring group interests into account, so it's not just me, it's my team versus your team, whereas if you're evaluating evidence that your side is wrong, we just can't accept that. 
+So this is why you can't win a political argument. 
+So now, give us the internet, give us Google: "" I heard that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. 
+Let me Google that — oh my God! 10 million hits! Look, he was! "" CA: So this has come as an unpleasant surprise to a lot of people. 
+Social media has often been framed by techno-optimists as this great connecting force that would bring people together. 
+And there have been some unexpected counter-effects to that. 
+JH: That's right. 
+The right — social conservatives, not libertarians — social conservatives generally believe people can be greedy and sexual and selfish, and we need regulation, and we need restrictions. 
+So, yeah, if you knock down all the walls, allow people to communicate all over the world, you get a lot of porn and a lot of racism. 
+What's changed that's deepened this feeling of division? 
+JH: You have to see six to ten different threads all coming together. 
+I'll just list a couple of them. 
+There's interesting research from Joe Henrich and others that says if your country was at war, especially when you were young, then we test you 30 years later in a commons dilemma or a prisoner's dilemma, you're more cooperative. 
+Because of our tribal nature, if you're — my parents were teenagers during World War II, and they would go out looking for scraps of aluminum to help the war effort. 
+I mean, everybody pulled together. 
+And so then these people go on, they rise up through business and government, they take leadership positions. 
+They're really good at compromise and cooperation. 
+They all retire by the '90s. 
+And their youth was spent fighting each other within each country, in 1968 and afterwards. 
+The loss of the World War II generation, "" The Greatest Generation, "" is huge. 
+So that's one. 
+Another, in America, is the purification of the two parties. 
+But because of a variety of factors that started things moving, by the 90's, we had a purified liberal party and conservative party. 
+So now, the people in either party really are different, and we really don't want our children to marry them, which, in the '60s, didn't matter very much. 
+Third is the internet and, as I said, it's just the most amazing stimulant for post-hoc reasoning and demonization. 
+CA: The tone of what's happening on the internet now is quite troubling. 
+I just did a quick search on Twitter about the election and saw two tweets next to each other. 
+One, against a picture of racist graffiti: "" This is disgusting! 
+Ugliness in this country, brought to us by # Trump. "" And then the next one is: "Crooked Hillary dedication page. Disgusting!" 
+So this idea of "" disgust "" is troubling to me. 
+Because you can have an argument or a disagreement about something, you can get angry at someone. 
+Disgust, I've heard you say, takes things to a much deeper level. 
+JH: That's right. Disgust is different. 
+Anger — you know, I have kids. 
+You just go back and forth: you get angry, you're not angry; you're angry, you're not angry. 
+But disgust is different. 
+Disgust paints the person as subhuman, monstrous, deformed, morally deformed. 
+Disgust is like indelible ink. 
+There's research from John Gottman on marital therapy. 
+If you look at the faces — if one of the couple shows disgust or contempt, that's a predictor that they're going to get divorced soon, whereas if they show anger, that doesn't predict anything, because if you deal with anger well, it actually is good. 
+Donald Trump personally uses the word "" disgust "" a lot. 
+He's very germ-sensitive, so disgust does matter a lot — more for him, that's something unique to him — but as we demonize each other more, and again, through the Manichaean worldview, the idea that the world is a battle between good and evil as this has been ramping up, we're more likely not just to say they're wrong or I don't like them, but we say they're evil, they're satanic, they're disgusting, they're revolting. 
+And then we want nothing to do with them. 
+And that's why I think we're seeing it, for example, on campus now. 
+I'm afraid that this whole generation of young people, if their introduction to politics involves a lot of disgust, they're not going to want to be involved in politics as they get older. 
+CA: So how do we deal with that? 
+Disgust. How do you defuse disgust? 
+JH: You can't do it with reasons. 
+I think... 
+Love is all about, like... 
+Disgust is closing off, borders. 
+Love is about dissolving walls. 
+So personal relationships, I think, are probably the most powerful means we have. 
+You can be disgusted by a group of people, but then you meet a particular person and you genuinely discover that they're lovely. 
+And then gradually that chips away or changes your category as well. 
+The tragedy is, Americans used to be much more mixed up in the their towns by left-right or politics. 
+It's harder to get to know them. 
+CA: What would you say to someone or say to Americans, people generally, about what we should understand about each other that might help us rethink for a minute this "" disgust "" instinct? 
+JH: Yes. 
+A really important thing to keep in mind — there's research by political scientist Alan Abramowitz, showing that American democracy is increasingly governed by what's called "" negative partisanship. "" That means you think, OK there's a candidate, you like the candidate, you vote for the candidate. 
+But with the rise of negative advertising and social media and all sorts of other trends, increasingly, the way elections are done is that each side tries to make the other side so horrible, so awful, that you'll vote for my guy by default. 
+And so as we more and more vote against the other side and not for our side, you have to keep in mind that if people are on the left, they think, "" Well, I used to think that Republicans were bad, but now Donald Trump proves it. 
+And now every Republican, I can paint with all the things that I think about Trump. "" And that's not necessarily true. 
+They're generally not very happy with their candidate. 
+So you have to first separate your feelings about the candidate from your feelings about the people who are given a choice. 
+And then you have to realize that, because we all live in a separate moral world — the metaphor I use in the book is that we're all trapped in "" The Matrix, "" or each moral community is a matrix, a consensual hallucination. 
+And so if you're within the blue matrix, everything's completely compelling that the other side — they're troglodytes, they're racists, they're the worst people in the world, and you have all the facts to back that up. 
+But somebody in the next house from yours is living in a different moral matrix. 
+And what I've found from being in the middle and trying to understand both sides is: both sides are right. 
+There are a lot of threats to this country, and each side is constitutionally incapable of seeing them all. 
+CA: So, are you saying that we almost need a new type of empathy? 
+Empathy is traditionally framed as: "Oh, I feel your pain. I can put myself in your shoes." 
+JH: No. That's right. 
+CA: What would it look like to build that type of empathy? 
+JH: Actually, I think... 
+Empathy is a very, very hot topic in psychology, and it's a very popular word on the left in particular. 
+And, I think... 
+You know, we had a long 50-year period of dealing with our race problems and legal discrimination, and that was our top priority for a long time and it still is important. 
+But I think this year, I'm hoping it will make people see that we have an existential threat on our hands. 
+Our left-right divide, I believe, is by far the most important divide we face. 
+We still have issues about race and gender and LGBT, but this is the urgent need of the next 50 years, and things aren't going to get better on their own. 
+So we're going to need to do a lot of institutional reforms, and we could talk about that, but that's like a whole long, wonky conversation. 
+But I think it starts with people realizing that this is a turning point. 
+We need to realize: this is what our country needs, and this is what you need if you don't want to — Raise your hand if you want to spend the next four years as angry and worried as you've been for the last year — raise your hand. 
+They have all kinds of great advice for how to drop the fear, reframe things, stop seeing other people as your enemy. 
+There's a lot of guidance in ancient wisdom for this kind of empathy. 
+CA: Here's my last question: Personally, what can people do to help heal? 
+JH: Yeah, it's very hard to just decide to overcome your deepest prejudices. 
+And there's research showing that political prejudices are deeper and stronger than race prejudices in the country now. 
+So I think you have to make an effort — that's the main thing. 
+Make an effort to actually meet somebody. 
+Everybody has a cousin, a brother-in-law, somebody who's on the other side. 
+So, after this election — wait a week or two, because it's probably going to feel awful for one of you — but wait a couple weeks, and then reach out and say you want to talk. 
+And before you do it, read Dale Carnegie, "" How to Win Friends and Influence People "" — (Laughter) I'm totally serious. 
+This is one of the main things I've learned that I take into my human relationships. 
+CA: Jon, it's absolutely fascinating speaking with you. 
+It really does feel like the ground that we're on is a ground populated by deep questions of morality and human nature. 
+
+To understand the business of mythology and what a Chief Belief Officer is supposed to do, you have to hear a story of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who is the scribe of storytellers, and his brother, the athletic warlord of the gods, Kartikeya. 
+The two brothers one day decided to go on a race, three times around the world. 
+Kartikeya leapt on his peacock and flew around the continents and the mountains and the oceans. 
+He went around once, he went around twice, he went around thrice. 
+But his brother, Ganesha, simply walked around his parents once, twice, thrice, and said, "" I won. "" "" How come? "" said Kartikeya. 
+And Ganesha said, "" You went around 'the world.' I went around 'my world.' "" What matters more? 
+If you understand the difference between 'the world' and 'my world,' you understand the difference between logos and mythos. 
+'The world 'is objective, logical, universal, factual, scientific. 
+'My world 'is subjective. 
+It's emotional. It's personal. 
+It's perceptions, thoughts, feelings, dreams. 
+It is the belief system that we carry. 
+It's the myth that we live in. 
+'The world 'tells us how the world functions, how the sun rises, how we are born. 
+'My world 'tells us why the sun rises, why we were born. 
+Every culture is trying to understand itself: "Why do we exist?" 
+And every culture comes up with its own understanding of life, its own customized version of mythology. 
+Culture is a reaction to nature, and this understanding of our ancestors is transmitted generation from generation in the form of stories, symbols and rituals, which are always indifferent to rationality. 
+And so, when you study it, you realize that different people of the world have a different understanding of the world. 
+Different people see things differently — different viewpoints. 
+There is my world and there is your world, and my world is always better than your world, because my world, you see, is rational and yours is superstition. 
+Yours is faith. 
+Yours is illogical. 
+This is the root of the clash of civilizations. 
+It took place, once, in 326 B.C. 
+on the banks of a river called the Indus, now in Pakistan. 
+This river lends itself to India's name. 
+India. Indus. 
+Alexander, a young Macedonian, met there what he called a "" gymnosophist, "" which means "" the naked, wise man. "" We don't know who he was. 
+Perhaps he was a Jain monk, like Bahubali over here, the Gomateshwara Bahubali whose image is not far from Mysore. 
+Or perhaps he was just a yogi who was sitting on a rock, staring at the sky and the sun and the moon. 
+Alexander asked, "" What are you doing? "" and the gymnosophist answered, "I'm experiencing nothingness." 
+Then the gymnosophist asked, "What are you doing?" 
+and Alexander said, "" I am conquering the world. "" And they both laughed. 
+Each one thought that the other was a fool. 
+The gymnosophist said, "" Why is he conquering the world? 
+It's pointless. "" And Alexander thought, "" Why is he sitting around, doing nothing? 
+What a waste of a life. "" To understand this difference in viewpoints, we have to understand the subjective truth of Alexander — his myth, and the mythology that constructed it. 
+Alexander's mother, his parents, his teacher Aristotle told him the story of Homer's "" Iliad. "" They told him of a great hero called Achilles, who, when he participated in battle, victory was assured, but when he withdrew from the battle, defeat was inevitable. 
+"" Achilles was a man who could shape history, a man of destiny, and this is what you should be, Alexander. "" That's what he heard. 
+"" What should you not be? 
+You should not be Sisyphus, who rolls a rock up a mountain all day only to find the boulder rolled down at night. 
+Don't live a life which is monotonous, mediocre, meaningless. 
+Be spectacular! — like the Greek heroes, like Jason, who went across the sea with the Argonauts and fetched the Golden Fleece. 
+Be spectacular like Theseus, who entered the labyrinth and killed the bull-headed Minotaur. 
+When you play in a race, win! — because when you win, the exhilaration of victory is the closest you will come to the ambrosia of the gods. "" Because, you see, the Greeks believed you live only once, and when you die, you have to cross the River Styx. 
+And if you have lived an extraordinary life, you will be welcomed to Elysium, or what the French call "" Champs-Élysées "" — (Laughter) — the heaven of the heroes. 
+But these are not the stories that the gymnosophist heard. 
+He heard a very different story. 
+He heard of a man called Bharat, after whom India is called Bhārata. 
+Bharat also conquered the world. 
+And then he went to the top-most peak of the greatest mountain of the center of the world called Meru. 
+And he wanted to hoist his flag to say, "I was here first." 
+But when he reached the mountain peak, he found the peak covered with countless flags of world-conquerors before him, each one claiming "" 'I was here first'... 
+that's what I thought until I came here. "" And suddenly, in this canvas of infinity, Bharat felt insignificant. 
+This was the mythology of the gymnosophist. 
+You see, he had heroes, like Ram — Raghupati Ram and Krishna, Govinda Hari. 
+But they were not two characters on two different adventures. 
+They were two lifetimes of the same hero. 
+When the Ramayana ends the Mahabharata begins. 
+When Ram dies, Krishna is born. 
+When Krishna dies, eventually he will be back as Ram. 
+You see, the Indians also had a river that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead. 
+But you don't cross it once. 
+You go to and fro endlessly. 
+It was called the Vaitarani. 
+You go again and again and again. 
+Because, you see, nothing lasts forever in India, not even death. 
+And so, you have these grand rituals where great images of mother goddesses are built and worshiped for 10 days... 
+And what do you do at the end of 10 days? 
+You dunk it in the river. 
+Because it has to end. 
+And next year, she will come back. 
+What goes around always comes around, and this rule applies not just to man, but also the gods. 
+You see, the gods have to come back again and again and again as Ram, as Krishna. 
+Not only do they live infinite lives, but the same life is lived infinite times till you get to the point of it all. 
+"Groundhog Day." 
+(Laughter) Two different mythologies. 
+Which is right? 
+Two different mythologies, two different ways of looking at the world. 
+One linear, one cyclical. 
+One believes this is the one and only life. 
+The other believes this is one of many lives. 
+And so, the denominator of Alexander's life was one. 
+So, the value of his life was the sum total of his achievements. 
+The denominator of the gymnosophist's life was infinity. 
+So, no matter what he did, it was always zero. 
+And I believe it is this mythological paradigm that inspired Indian mathematicians to discover the number zero. 
+Who knows? 
+And that brings us to the mythology of business. 
+If Alexander's belief influenced his behavior, if the gymnosophist's belief influences his behavior, then it was bound to influence the business they were in. 
+You see, what is business but the result of how the market behaves and how the organization behaves? 
+And if you look at cultures around the world, all you have to do is understand the mythology and you will see how they behave and how they do business. 
+Take a look. 
+If you live only once, in one-life cultures around the world, you will see an obsession with binary logic, absolute truth, standardization, absoluteness, linear patterns in design. 
+But if you look at cultures which have cyclical and based on infinite lives, you will see a comfort with fuzzy logic, with opinion, with contextual thinking, with everything is relative, sort of — (Laughter) mostly. (Laughter) 
+You look at art. Look at the ballerina, how linear she is in her performance. 
+And then look at the Indian classical dancer, the Kuchipudi dancer, the Bharatanatyam dancer, curvaceous. 
+(Laughter) And then look at business. 
+Standard business model: vision, mission, values, processes. 
+Sounds very much like the journey through the wilderness to the promised land, with the commandments held by the leader. 
+And if you comply, you will go to heaven. 
+But in India there is no "" the "" promised land. 
+There are many promised lands, depending on your station in society, depending on your stage of life. 
+You see, businesses are not run as institutions, by the idiosyncrasies of individuals. 
+It's always about taste. 
+It's always about my taste. 
+You see, Indian music, for example, does not have the concept of harmony. 
+There is no orchestra conductor. 
+There is one performer standing there, and everybody follows. 
+And you can never replicate that performance twice. 
+It is not about documentation and contract. 
+It's about conversation and faith. 
+It's not about compliance. It's about setting, getting the job done, by bending or breaking the rules — just look at your Indian people around here, you'll see them smile; they know what it is. 
+(Laughter) And then look at people who have done business in India, you'll see the exasperation on their faces. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) You see, this is what India is today. The ground reality is based on a cyclical world view. 
+So, it's rapidly changing, highly diverse, chaotic, ambiguous, unpredictable. 
+And people are okay with it. 
+And then globalization is taking place. 
+The demands of modern institutional thinking is coming in. 
+Which is rooted in one-life culture. 
+And a clash is going to take place, like on the banks of the Indus. 
+It is bound to happen. 
+I have personally experienced it. I'm trained as a medical doctor. 
+I did not want to study surgery. Don't ask me why. 
+I love mythology too much. 
+I wanted to learn mythology. But there is nowhere you can study. 
+So, I had to teach it to myself. 
+And mythology does not pay, well, until now. 
+(Laughter) So, I had to take up a job. And I worked in the pharma industry. 
+And I worked in the healthcare industry. 
+And I worked as a marketing guy, and a sales guy, and a knowledge guy, and a content guy, and a training guy. 
+I even was a business consultant, doing strategies and tactics. 
+And I would see the exasperation between my American and European colleagues, when they were dealing with India. 
+Example: Please tell us the process to invoice hospitals. 
+Step A. Step B. Step C. Mostly. 
+(Laughter) How do you parameterize "" mostly ""? 
+How do you put it in a nice little software? You can't. 
+I would give my viewpoints to people. 
+But nobody was interested in listening to it, you see, until I met Kishore Biyani of the Future group. 
+You see, he has established the largest retail chain, called Big Bazaar. 
+And there are more than 200 formats, across 50 cities and towns of India. 
+And he was dealing with diverse and dynamic markets. 
+And he knew very intuitively, that best practices, developed in Japan and China and Europe and America will not work in India. 
+He knew that institutional thinking doesn't work in India. Individual thinking does. 
+He had an intuitive understanding of the mythic structure of India. 
+So, he had asked me to be the Chief Belief Officer, and said, "All I want to do is align belief." 
+Sounds so simple. 
+But belief is not measurable. 
+You can't measure it. You can't manage it. 
+So, how do you construct belief? 
+How do you enhance the sensitivity of people to Indian-ness. 
+Even if you are Indian, it is not very explicit, it is not very obvious. 
+So, I tried to work on the standard model of culture, which is, develop stories, symbols and rituals. 
+And I will share one of the rituals with you. 
+You see it is based on the Hindu ritual of Darshan. 
+Hindus don't have the concept of commandments. 
+So, there is nothing right or wrong in what you do in life. 
+So, you're not really sure how you stand in front of God. 
+So, when you go to the temple, all you seek is an audience with God. 
+You want to see God. 
+And you want God to see you, and hence the gods have very large eyes, large unblinking eyes, sometimes made of silver, so they look at you. 
+Because you don't know whether you're right or wrong, and so all you seek is divine empathy. 
+"Just know where I came from, why I did the Jugaad." 
+(Laughter) "" Why did I do the setting, why I don't care for the processes. Just understand me, please. "" And based on this, we created a ritual for leaders. 
+After a leader completes his training and is about to take over the store, we blindfold him, we surround him with the stakeholders, the customer, his family, his team, his boss. 
+You read out his KRA, his KPI, you give him the keys, and then you remove the blindfold. 
+And invariably, you see a tear, because the penny has dropped. 
+He realizes that to succeed, he does not have to be a "" professional, "" he does not have to cut out his emotions, he has to include all these people in his world to succeed, to make them happy, to make the boss happy, to make everyone happy. 
+The customer is happy, because the customer is God. 
+That sensitivity is what we need. Once this belief enters, behavior will happen, business will happen. 
+And it has. 
+So, then we come back to Alexander and to the gymnosophist. 
+And everybody asks me, "" Which is the better way, this way or that way? "" And it's a very dangerous question, because it leads you to the path of fundamentalism and violence. 
+So, I will not answer the question. 
+What I will give you is an Indian answer, the Indian head-shake. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Depending on the context, depending on the outcome, choose your paradigm. 
+You see, because both the paradigms are human constructions. 
+They are cultural creations, not natural phenomena. 
+And so the next time you meet someone, a stranger, one request: Understand that you live in the subjective truth, and so does he. 
+Understand it. 
+And when you understand it you will discover something spectacular. 
+You will discover that within infinite myths lies the eternal truth. 
+Who sees it all? 
+Varuna has but a thousand eyes. 
+Indra, a hundred. 
+You and I, only two. 
+Thank you. Namaste. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I've been working on issues of poverty for more than 20 years, and so it's ironic that the problem that and question that I most grapple with is how you actually define poverty. What does it mean? 
+So often, we look at dollar terms — people making less than a dollar or two or three a day. 
+And yet the complexity of poverty really has to look at income as only one variable. 
+Because really, it's a condition about choice, and the lack of freedom. 
+And I had an experience that really deepened and elucidated for me the understanding that I have. 
+It was in Kenya, and I want to share it with you. 
+I was with my friend Susan Meiselas, the photographer, in the Mathare Valley slums. 
+Now, Mathare Valley is one of the oldest slums in Africa. 
+It's about three miles out of Nairobi, and it's a mile long and about two-tenths of a mile wide, where over half a million people live crammed in these little tin shacks, generation after generation, renting them, often eight or 10 people to a room. 
+And it's known for prostitution, violence, drugs: a hard place to grow up. 
+And when we were walking through the narrow alleys, it was literally impossible not to step in the raw sewage and the garbage alongside the little homes. 
+But at the same time it was also impossible not to see the human vitality, the aspiration and the ambition of the people who live there: women washing their babies, washing their clothes, hanging them out to dry. 
+I met this woman, Mama Rose, who has rented that little tin shack for 32 years, where she lives with her seven children. 
+Four sleep in one twin bed, and three sleep on the mud and linoleum floor. 
+And she keeps them all in school by selling water from that kiosk, and from selling soap and bread from the little store inside. 
+It was also the day after the inauguration, and I was reminded how Mathare is still connected to the globe. 
+And I would see kids on the street corners, and they'd say "" Obama, he's our brother! "" And I'd say "" Well, Obama's my brother, so that makes you my brother too. "" And they would look quizzically, and then be like, "" High five! "" And it was here that I met Jane. 
+I was struck immediately by the kindness and the gentleness in her face, and I asked her to tell me her story. 
+She started off by telling me her dream. She said, "" I had two. 
+My first dream was to be a doctor, and the second was to marry a good man who would stay with me and my family, because my mother was a single mom, and couldn't afford to pay for school fees. 
+So I had to give up the first dream, and I focused on the second. "" She got married when she was 18, had a baby right away. 
+And when she turned 20, found herself pregnant with a second child, her mom died and her husband left her — married another woman. 
+So she was again in Mathare, with no income, no skill set, no money. 
+And so she ultimately turned to prostitution. 
+It wasn't organized in the way we often think of it. 
+She would go into the city at night with about 20 girls, look for work, and sometimes come back with a few shillings, or sometimes with nothing. 
+And she said, "" You know, the poverty wasn't so bad. It was the humiliation and the embarrassment of it all. "" In 2001, her life changed. 
+She had a girlfriend who had heard about this organization, Jamii Bora, that would lend money to people no matter how poor you were, as long as you provided a commensurate amount in savings. 
+And so she spent a year to save 50 dollars, and started borrowing, and over time she was able to buy a sewing machine. 
+She started tailoring. 
+And that turned into what she does now, which is to go into the secondhand clothing markets, and for about three dollars and 25 cents she buys an old ball gown. 
+Some of them might be ones you gave. 
+And she repurposes them with frills and ribbons, and makes these frothy confections that she sells to women for their daughter's Sweet 16 or first Holy Communion — those milestones in a life that people want to celebrate all along the economic spectrum. 
+And she does really good business. In fact, I watched her walk through the streets hawking. And before you knew it, there was a crowd of women around her, buying these dresses. 
+And I reflected, as I was watching her sell the dresses, and also the jewelry that she makes, that now Jane makes more than four dollars a day. 
+And by many definitions she is no longer poor. 
+But she still lives in Mathare Valley. 
+And so she can't move out. 
+She lives with all of that insecurity, and in fact, in January, during the ethnic riots, she was chased from her home and had to find a new shack in which she would live. 
+Jamii Bora understands that and understands that when we're talking about poverty, we've got to look at people all along the economic spectrum. 
+And so with patient capital from Acumen and other organizations, loans and investments that will go the long term with them, they built a low-cost housing development, about an hour outside Nairobi central. 
+And they designed it from the perspective of customers like Jane herself, insisting on responsibility and accountability. 
+So she has to give 10 percent of the mortgage — of the total value, or about 400 dollars in savings. 
+And then they match her mortgage to what she paid in rent for her little shanty. 
+And in the next couple of weeks, she's going to be among the first 200 families to move into this development. 
+When I asked her if she feared anything, or whether she would miss anything from Mathare, she said, "" What would I fear that I haven't confronted already? 
+I'm HIV positive. I've dealt with it all. "" And she said, "" What would I miss? 
+You think I will miss the violence or the drugs? The lack of privacy? 
+Do you think I'll miss not knowing if my children are going to come home at the end of the day? "" She said "" If you gave me 10 minutes my bags would be packed. "" I said, "" Well what about your dreams? "" And she said, "" Well, you know, my dreams don't look exactly like I thought they would when I was a little girl. 
+But if I think about it, I thought I wanted a husband, but what I really wanted was a family that was loving. And I fiercely love my children, and they love me back. "" She said, "" I thought that I wanted to be a doctor, but what I really wanted to be was somebody who served and healed and cured. 
+And so I feel so blessed with everything that I have, that two days a week I go and I counsel HIV patients. 
+And I say, 'Look at me. You are not dead. 
+You are still alive. And if you are still alive you have to serve. '"" And she said, "" I'm not a doctor who gives out pills. 
+But maybe me, I give out something better because I give them hope. "" And in the middle of this economic crisis, where so many of us are inclined to pull in with fear, I think we're well suited to take a cue from Jane and reach out, recognizing that being poor doesn't mean being ordinary. 
+Because when systems are broken, like the ones that we're seeing around the world, it's an opportunity for invention and for innovation. 
+It's an opportunity to truly build a world where we can extend services and products to all human beings, so that they can make decisions and choices for themselves. 
+I truly believe it's where dignity starts. 
+We owe it to the Janes of the world. 
+And just as important, we owe it to ourselves. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This thing's selling still about a million copies a month. "" And I think it's because spiritual emptiness is a universal disease. 
+And I think that the difference between what I call the survival level of living, the success level of living, and the significance level of living is: Do you figure out, "" What on Earth am I here for? "" I meet a lot of people who are very smart, and say, "" But why can't I figure out my problems? "" And I meet a lot of people who are very successful, who say, "" Why don't I feel more fulfilled? 
+Why do I feel like I've got to pretend that I'm more than I really am? "" I think that comes down to this issue of meaning, of significance, of purpose. 
+I wanted to tell Michael before he spoke that I really appreciate what he does, because it makes my life work a whole lot easier. 
+And I decided that I was never going to go on TV, because I didn't want to be a celebrity. 
+That if you are a leader in any area — in business, in politics, in sports, in art, in academics, in any area — you don't own it. 
+Your worldview, though, does determine everything else in your life, because it determines your decisions; it determines your relationships; it determines your level of confidence. 
+So all of this money started pouring in, and all of this fame started pouring in. 
+And I'm going, what do I do with this? 
+And I'm watching a guy who's lived his life — he's now in his mid-80s — and he's dying with peace. 
+If money actually made you happy, then the wealthiest people in the world would be the happiest. 
+So, the good life is not about looking good, feeling good or having the goods, it's about being good and doing good. 
+And so we began to give away, and now after 30 years, my wife and I are reverse tithers — we give away 90 percent and live on 10. 
+When you read this prayer, it sounds incredibly selfish, self-centered. 
+And then he says, "" So that the king... "" — he was the king of Israel at that time, at its apex in power — ""... so that the king may care for the widow and orphan, support the oppressed, defend the defenseless, care for the sick, assist the poor, speak up for the foreigner, those in prison. "" Basically, he's talking about all the marginalized in society. 
+It's based on a whole different set of things. 
+They're just not in my pathway. 
+So I had to say, ok, I would use whatever affluence and whatever influence I've got to help those who don't have either of those. 
+Moses says, "" It's a staff. It's a shepherd's staff. "" And God says, "" Throw it down. "" And if you saw the movie, you know, he throws it down and it becomes a snake. 
+And then God says, "" Pick it up. "" And he picks it back up again, and it becomes a staff again. 
+But he doesn't do miracles just to show off. 
+Well, it was a shepherd's staff. Now, follow me on this. 
+And so, I'm talking to the players, because most of the NBA teams, NFL teams and all the other teams have done this 40 Days of Purpose, based on the book. 
+Talent, background, education, freedom, networks, opportunities, wealth, ideas, creativity. 
+Some people have the misguided idea that God only gets excited when you're doing, quote, "" spiritual things, "" like going to church or helping the poor, or, you know, confessing or doing something like that. 
+
+So the machine I'm going to talk you about is what I call the greatest machine that never was. 
+It was a machine that was never built, and yet, it will be built. 
+It was a machine that was designed long before anyone thought about computers. 
+If you know anything about the history of computers, you will know that in the '30s and the' 40s, simple computers were created that started the computer revolution we have today, and you would be correct, except for you'd have the wrong century. 
+The first computer was really designed in the 1830s and 1840s, not the 1930s and 1940s. 
+It was designed, and parts of it were prototyped, and the bits of it that were built are here in South Kensington. 
+That machine was built by this guy, Charles Babbage. 
+Now, I have a great affinity for Charles Babbage because his hair is always completely unkempt like this in every single picture. (Laughter) He was a very wealthy man, and a sort of, part of the aristocracy of Britain, and on a Saturday night in Marylebone, were you part of the intelligentsia of that period, you would have been invited round to his house for a soiree — and he invited everybody: kings, the Duke of Wellington, many, many famous people — and he would have shown you one of his mechanical machines. 
+I really miss that era, you know, where you could go around for a soiree and see a mechanical computer get demonstrated to you. (Laughter) But Babbage, Babbage himself was born at the end of the 18th century, and was a fairly famous mathematician. 
+He held the post that Newton held at Cambridge, and that was recently held by Stephen Hawking. 
+He's less well known than either of them because he got this idea to make mechanical computing devices and never made any of them. 
+The reason he never made any of them, he's a classic nerd. 
+Every time he had a good idea, he'd think, "" That's brilliant, I'm going to start building that one. 
+I'll spend a fortune on it. I've got a better idea. 
+I'm going to work on this one. (Laughter) And I'm going to do this one. "" He did this until Sir Robert Peel, then Prime Minister, basically kicked him out of Number 10 Downing Street, and kicking him out, in those days, that meant saying, "" I bid you good day, sir. "" (Laughter) The thing he designed was this monstrosity here, the analytical engine. Now, just to give you an idea of this, this is a view from above. 
+Every one of these circles is a cog, a stack of cogs, and this thing is as big as a steam locomotive. 
+So as I go through this talk, I want you to imagine this gigantic machine. We heard those wonderful sounds of what this thing would have sounded like. 
+And I'm going to take you through the architecture of the machine — that's why it's computer architecture — and tell you about this machine, which is a computer. 
+So let's talk about the memory. The memory is very like the memory of a computer today, except it was all made out of metal, stacks and stacks of cogs, 30 cogs high. 
+Imagine a thing this high of cogs, hundreds and hundreds of them, and they've got numbers on them. 
+It's a decimal machine. Everything's done in decimal. 
+And he thought about using binary. The problem with using binary is that the machine would have been so tall, it would have been ridiculous. As it is, it's enormous. 
+So he's got memory. 
+The memory is this bit over here. 
+You see it all like this. 
+This monstrosity over here is the CPU, the chip, if you like. 
+Of course, it's this big. 
+Completely mechanical. This whole machine is mechanical. 
+This is a picture of a prototype for part of the CPU which is in the Science Museum. 
+The CPU could do the four fundamental functions of arithmetic — so addition, multiplication, subtraction, division — which already is a bit of a feat in metal, but it could also do something that a computer does and a calculator doesn't: this machine could look at its own internal memory and make a decision. 
+It could do the "" if then "" for basic programmers, and that fundamentally made it into a computer. 
+It could compute. It couldn't just calculate. It could do more. 
+Now, if we look at this, and we stop for a minute, and we think about chips today, we can't look inside a silicon chip. It's just so tiny. 
+Yet if you did, you would see something very, very similar to this. 
+There's this incredible complexity in the CPU, and this incredible regularity in the memory. 
+If you've ever seen an electron microscope picture, you'll see this. This all looks the same, then there's this bit over here which is incredibly complicated. 
+All this cog wheel mechanism here is doing is what a computer does, but of course you need to program this thing, and of course, Babbage used the technology of the day and the technology that would reappear in the '50s,' 60s and '70s, which is punch cards. This thing over here is one of three punch card readers in here, and this is a program in the Science Museum, just not far from here, created by Charles Babbage, that is sitting there — you can go see it — waiting for the machine to be built. 
+And there's not just one of these, there's many of them. 
+He prepared programs anticipating this would happen. 
+Now, the reason they used punch cards was that Jacquard, in France, had created the Jacquard loom, which was weaving these incredible patterns controlled by punch cards, so he was just repurposing the technology of the day, and like everything else he did, he's using the technology of his era, so 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, cogs, steam, mechanical devices. Ironically, born the same year as Charles Babbage was Michael Faraday, who would completely revolutionize everything with the dynamo, transformers, all these sorts of things. 
+Babbage, of course, wanted to use proven technology, so steam and things. 
+Now, he needed accessories. 
+Obviously, you've got a computer now. 
+You've got punch cards, a CPU and memory. 
+You need accessories you're going to come with. 
+You're not just going to have that, So, first of all, you had sound. You had a bell, so if anything went wrong — (Laughter) — or the machine needed the attendant to come to it, there was a bell it could ring. (Laughter) And there's actually an instruction on the punch card which says "" Ring the bell. "" So you can imagine this "" Ting! "" You know, just stop for a moment, imagine all those noises, this thing, "" Click, clack click click click, "" steam engine, "" Ding, "" right? (Laughter) You also need a printer, obviously, and everyone needs a printer. 
+This is actually a picture of the printing mechanism for another machine of his, called the Difference Engine No. 2, which he never built, but which the Science Museum did build in the '80s and' 90s. 
+It's completely mechanical, again, a printer. 
+It prints just numbers, because he was obsessed with numbers, but it does print onto paper, and it even does word wrapping, so if you get to the end of the line, it goes around like that. 
+You also need graphics, right? 
+I mean, if you're going to do anything with graphics, so he said, "" Well, I need a plotter. I've got a big piece of paper and an ink pen and I'll make it plot. "" So he designed a plotter as well, and, you know, at that point, I think he got pretty much a pretty good machine. 
+Along comes this woman, Ada Lovelace. 
+Now, imagine these soirees, all these great and good comes along. 
+This lady is the daughter of the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Lord Byron, and her mother, being a bit worried that she might have inherited some of Lord Byron's madness and badness, thought, "" I know the solution: Mathematics is the solution. 
+We'll teach her mathematics. That'll calm her down. "" (Laughter) Because of course, there's never been a mathematician that's gone crazy, so, you know, that'll be fine. (Laughter) Everything'll be fine. So she's got this mathematical training, and she goes to one of these soirees with her mother, and Charles Babbage, you know, gets out his machine. 
+The Duke of Wellington is there, you know, get out the machine, obviously demonstrates it, and she gets it. She's the only person in his lifetime, really, who said, "" I understand what this does, and I understand the future of this machine. "" And we owe to her an enormous amount because we know a lot about the machine that Babbage was intending to build because of her. 
+Now, some people call her the first programmer. 
+This is actually from one of — the paper that she translated. 
+This is a program written in a particular style. 
+It's not, historically, totally accurate that she's the first programmer, and actually, she did something more amazing. 
+Rather than just being a programmer, she saw something that Babbage didn't. 
+Babbage was totally obsessed with mathematics. 
+He was building a machine to do mathematics, and Lovelace said, "" You could do more than mathematics on this machine. "" And just as you do, everyone in this room already's got a computer on them right now, because they've got a phone. 
+If you go into that phone, every single thing in that phone or computer or any other computing device is mathematics. It's all numbers at the bottom. 
+Whether it's video or text or music or voice, it's all numbers, it's all, underlying it, mathematical functions happening, and Lovelace said, "" Just because you're doing mathematical functions and symbols doesn't mean these things can't represent other things in the real world, such as music. "" This was a huge leap, because Babbage is there saying, "" We could compute these amazing functions and print out tables of numbers and draw graphs, "" — (Laughter) — and Lovelace is there and she says, "" Look, this thing could even compose music if you told it a representation of music numerically. "" So this is what I call Lovelace's Leap. 
+When you say she's a programmer, she did do some, but the real thing is to have said the future is going to be much, much more than this. 
+Now, a hundred years later, this guy comes along, Alan Turing, and in 1936, and invents the computer all over again. 
+Now, of course, Babbage's machine was entirely mechanical. 
+Turing's machine was entirely theoretical. 
+Both of these guys were coming from a mathematical perspective, but Turing told us something very important. 
+He laid down the mathematical foundations for computer science, and said, "It doesn't matter how you make a computer." 
+It doesn't matter if your computer's mechanical, like Babbage's was, or electronic, like computers are today, or perhaps in the future, cells, or, again, mechanical again, once we get into nanotechnology. 
+We could go back to Babbage's machine and just make it tiny. All those things are computers. 
+There is in a sense a computing essence. 
+This is called the Church – Turing thesis. 
+And so suddenly, you get this link where you say this thing Babbage had built really was a computer. 
+In fact, it was capable of doing everything we do today with computers, only really slowly. (Laughter) To give you an idea of how slowly, it had about 1k of memory. 
+It used punch cards, which were being fed in, and it ran about 10,000 times slower the first ZX81. 
+It did have a RAM pack. 
+You could add on a lot of extra memory if you wanted to. 
+(Laughter) So, where does that bring us today? 
+So there are plans. 
+Over in Swindon, the Science Museum archives, there are hundreds of plans and thousands of pages of notes written by Charles Babbage about this analytical engine. 
+One of those is a set of plans that we call Plan 28, and that is also the name of a charity that I started with Doron Swade, who was the curator of computing at the Science Museum, and also the person who drove the project to build a difference engine, and our plan is to build it. 
+Here in South Kensington, we will build the analytical engine. 
+The project has a number of parts to it. 
+One was the scanning of Babbage's archive. 
+That's been done. The second is now the study of all of those plans to determine what to build. 
+The third part is a computer simulation of that machine, and the last part is to physically build it at the Science Museum. 
+When it's built, you'll finally be able to understand how a computer works, because rather than having a tiny chip in front of you, you've got to look at this humongous thing and say, "" Ah, I see the memory operating, I see the CPU operating, I hear it operating. I probably smell it operating. "" (Laughter) But in between that we're going to do a simulation. 
+Babbage himself wrote, he said, as soon as the analytical engine exists, it will surely guide the future course of science. 
+Of course, he never built it, because he was always fiddling with new plans, but when it did get built, of course, in the 1940s, everything changed. 
+Now, I'll just give you a little taste of what it looks like in motion with a video which shows just one part of the CPU mechanism working. 
+So this is just three sets of cogs, and it's going to add. This is the adding mechanism in action, so you imagine this gigantic machine. 
+So, give me five years. 
+Before the 2030s happen, we'll have it. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+I don't know why, but I'm continually amazed to think that two and a half billion of us around the world are connected to each other through the Internet and that at any point in time more than 30 percent of the world's population can go online to learn, to create and to share. 
+And the amount of time each of us is spending doing all of this is also continuing to go grow. 
+A recent study showed that the young generation alone is spending over eight hours a day online. 
+As the parent of a nine-year-old girl, that number seems awfully low. 
+(Laughter) But just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us, it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world. 
+And increasingly, the price we're being asked to pay for all of this connectedness is our privacy. 
+Today, what many of us would love to believe is that the Internet is a private place; it's not. 
+And with every click of the mouse and every touch of the screen, we are like Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs of our personal information everywhere we travel through the digital woods. 
+We are leaving our birthdays, our places of residence, our interests and preferences, our relationships, our financial histories, and on and on it goes. 
+Now don't get me wrong, I'm not for one minute suggesting that sharing data is a bad thing. 
+In fact, when I know the data that's being shared and I'm asked explicitly for my consent, I want some sites to understand my habits. 
+It helps them suggest books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends for us to connect with. 
+But when I don't know and when I haven't been asked, that's when the problem arises. 
+It's a phenomenon on the Internet today called behavioral tracking, and it is very big business. 
+In fact, there's an entire industry formed around following us through the digital woods and compiling a profile on each of us. 
+And when all of that data is held, they can do almost whatever they want with it. 
+This is an area today that has very few regulations and even fewer rules. 
+Except for some of the recent announcements here in the United States and in Europe, it's an area of consumer protection that's almost entirely naked. 
+So let me expose this lurking industry a little bit further. 
+The visualization you see forming behind me is called Collusion and it's an experimental browser add-on that you can install in your Firefox browser that helps you see where your Web data is going and who's tracking you. 
+The red dots you see up there are sites that are behavioral tracking that I have not navigated to, but are following me. 
+The blue dots are the sites that I've actually navigated directly to. 
+And the gray dots are sites that are also tracking me, but I have no idea who they are. 
+All of them are connected, as you can see, to form a picture of me on the Web. 
+And this is my profile. 
+So let me go from an example to something very specific and personal. 
+I installed Collusion in my own laptop two weeks ago and I let it follow me around for what was a pretty typical day. 
+Now like most of you, I actually start my day going online and checking email. 
+I then go to a news site, look for some headlines. 
+And in this particular case I happened to like one of them on the merits of music literacy in schools and I shared it over a social network. 
+Our daughter then joined us at the breakfast table, and I asked her, "" Is there an emphasis on music literacy in your school? "" And she, of course, naturally as a nine-year-old, looked at me and said quizzically, "" What's literacy? "" So I sent her online, of course, to look it up. 
+Now let me stop here. 
+We are not even two bites into breakfast and there are already nearly 25 sites that are tracking me. 
+I have navigated to a total of four. 
+So let me fast-forward through the rest of my day. 
+I go to work, I check email, I log onto a few more social sites, I blog, I check more news reports, I share some of those news reports, I go look at some videos, pretty typical day — in this case, actually fairly pedantic — and at the end of the day, as my day winds down, look at my profile. 
+The red dots have exploded. 
+The gray dots have grown exponentially. 
+All in all, there's over 150 sites that are now tracking my personal information, most all of them without my consent. 
+I look at this picture and it freaks me out. 
+This is nothing. I am being stalked across the Web. 
+And why is this happening? 
+Pretty simple — it's huge business. 
+The revenue of the top handful of companies in this space is over 39 billion dollars today. 
+And as adults, we're certainly not alone. 
+At the same time I installed my own Collusion profile, I installed one for my daughter. 
+And on one single Saturday morning, over two hours on the Internet, here's her Collusion profile. 
+This is a nine-year-old girl navigating to principally children's sites. 
+I move from this, from freaked out to enraged. 
+This is no longer me being a tech pioneer or a privacy advocate; this is me being a parent. 
+Imagine in the physical world if somebody followed our children around with a camera and a notebook and recorded their every movement. 
+I can tell you, there isn't a person in this room that would sit idly by. 
+We'd take action. It may not be good action, but we would take action. 
+(Laughter) We can't sit idly by here either. 
+This is happening today. 
+Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn't be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. 
+Our voices matter and our actions matter even more. 
+Today we've launched Collusion. 
+You can download it, install it in Firefox, to see who is tracking you across the Web and following you through the digital woods. 
+Going forward, all of our voices need to be heard. 
+Because what we don't know can actually hurt us. 
+Because the memory of the Internet is forever. 
+We are being watched. 
+It's now time for us to watch the watchers. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. 
+
+So little Billy goes to school, and he sits down and the teacher says, "What does your father do?" 
+And little Billy says, "" My father plays the piano in an opium den. "" So the teacher rings up the parents, and says, "" Very shocking story from little Billy today. 
+Just heard that he claimed that you play the piano in an opium den. "" And the father says, "" I'm very sorry. Yes, it's true, I lied. 
+But how can I tell an eight-year-old boy that his father is a politician? "" (Laughter) Now, as a politician myself, standing in front of you, or indeed, meeting any stranger anywhere in the world, when I eventually reveal the nature of my profession, they look at me as though I'm somewhere between a snake, a monkey and an iguana, and through all of this, I feel, strongly, that something is going wrong. 
+Four hundred years of maturing democracy, colleagues in Parliament who seem to me, as individuals, reasonably impressive, an increasingly educated, energetic, informed population, and yet a deep, deep sense of disappointment. 
+My colleagues in Parliament include, in my new intake, family doctors, businesspeople, professors, distinguished economists, historians, writers, army officers ranging from colonels down to regimental sergeant majors. 
+All of them, however, including myself, as we walk underneath those strange stone gargoyles just down the road, feel that we've become less than the sum of our parts, feel as though we have become profoundly diminished. 
+And this isn't just a problem in Britain. 
+It's a problem across the developing world, and in middle income countries too. In Jamaica, for example — look at Jamaican members of Parliament, you meet them, and they're often people who are Rhodes Scholars, who've studied at Harvard or at Princeton, and yet, you go down to downtown Kingston, and you are looking at one of the most depressing sites that you can see in any middle-income country in the world: a dismal, depressing landscape of burnt and half-abandoned buildings. 
+And this has been true for 30 years, and the handover in 1979, 1980, between one Jamaican leader who was the son of a Rhodes Scholar and a Q.C. to another who'd done an economics doctorate at Harvard, over 800 people were killed in the streets in drug-related violence. 
+Ten years ago, however, the promise of democracy seemed to be extraordinary. George W. Bush stood up in his State of the Union address in 2003 and said that democracy was the force that would beat most of the ills of the world. He said, because democratic governments respect their own people and respect their neighbors, freedom will bring peace. 
+Distinguished academics at the same time argued that democracies had this incredible range of side benefits. 
+They would bring prosperity, security, overcome sectarian violence, ensure that states would never again harbor terrorists. 
+Since then, what's happened? 
+Well, what we've seen is the creation, in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, of democratic systems of government which haven't had any of those side benefits. 
+In Afghanistan, for example, we haven't just had one election or two elections. We've gone through three elections, presidential and parliamentary. And what do we find? 
+Do we find a flourishing civil society, a vigorous rule of law and good security? No. What we find in Afghanistan is a judiciary that is weak and corrupt, a very limited civil society which is largely ineffective, a media which is beginning to get onto its feet but a government that's deeply unpopular, perceived as being deeply corrupt, and security that is shocking, security that's terrible. 
+In Pakistan, in lots of sub-Saharan Africa, again you can see democracy and elections are compatible with corrupt governments, with states that are unstable and dangerous. 
+And when I have conversations with people, I remember having a conversation, for example, in Iraq, with a community that asked me whether the riot we were seeing in front of us, this was a huge mob ransacking a provincial council building, was a sign of the new democracy. 
+The same, I felt, was true in almost every single one of the middle and developing countries that I went to, and to some extent the same is true of us. 
+Well, what is the answer to this? Is the answer to just give up on the idea of democracy? 
+Well, obviously not. It would be absurd if we were to engage again in the kind of operations we were engaged in, in Iraq and Afghanistan if we were to suddenly find ourselves in a situation in which we were imposing anything other than a democratic system. 
+Anything else would run contrary to our values, it would run contrary to the wishes of the people on the ground, it would run contrary to our interests. 
+I remember in Iraq, for example, that we went through a period of feeling that we should delay democracy. 
+We went through a period of feeling that the lesson learned from Bosnia was that elections held too early enshrined sectarian violence, enshrined extremist parties, so in Iraq in 2003 the decision was made, let's not have elections for two years. Let's invest in voter education. Let's invest in democratization. 
+The result was that I found stuck outside my office a huge crowd of people, this is actually a photograph taken in Libya but I saw the same scene in Iraq of people standing outside screaming for the elections, and when I went out and said, "" What is wrong with the interim provincial council? 
+What is wrong with the people that we have chosen? 
+There is a Sunni sheikh, there's a Shiite sheikh, there's the seven — leaders of the seven major tribes, there's a Christian, there's a Sabian, there are female representatives, there's every political party in this council, what's wrong with the people that we chose? "" The answer came, "" The problem isn't the people that you chose. The problem is that you chose them. "" I have not met, in Afghanistan, in even the most remote community, anybody who does not want a say in who governs them. 
+Most remote community, I have never met a villager who does not want a vote. 
+So we need to acknowledge that despite the dubious statistics, despite the fact that 84 percent of people in Britain feel politics is broken, despite the fact that when I was in Iraq, we did an opinion poll in 2003 and asked people what political systems they preferred, and the answer came back that seven percent wanted the United States, five percent wanted France, three percent wanted Britain, and nearly 40 percent wanted Dubai, which is, after all, not a democratic state at all but a relatively prosperous minor monarchy, democracy is a thing of value for which we should be fighting. But in order to do so 
+we need to get away from instrumental arguments. 
+We need to get away from saying democracy matters because of the other things it brings. 
+We need to get away from feeling, in the same way, human rights matters because of the other things it brings, or women's rights matters for the other things it brings. 
+Why should we get away from those arguments? 
+Because they're very dangerous. If we set about saying, for example, torture is wrong because it doesn't extract good information, or we say, you need women's rights because it stimulates economic growth by doubling the size of the work force, you leave yourself open to the position where the government of North Korea can turn around and say, "" Well actually, we're having a lot of success extracting good information with our torture at the moment, "" or the government of Saudi Arabia to say, "" Well, our economic growth's okay, thank you very much, considerably better than yours, so maybe we don't need to go ahead with this program on women's rights. "" 
+The point about democracy is not instrumental. 
+It's not about the things that it brings. 
+The point about democracy is not that it delivers legitimate, effective, prosperous rule of law. 
+It's not that it guarantees peace with itself or with its neighbors. 
+The point about democracy is intrinsic. 
+Democracy matters because it reflects an idea of equality and an idea of liberty. It reflects an idea of dignity, the dignity of the individual, the idea that each individual should have an equal vote, an equal say, in the formation of their government. 
+But if we're really to make democracy vigorous again, if we're ready to revivify it, we need to get involved in a new project of the citizens and the politicians. 
+Democracy is not simply a question of structures. 
+It is a state of mind. It is an activity. 
+And part of that activity is honesty. 
+After I speak to you today, I'm going on a radio program called "" Any Questions, "" and the thing you will have noticed about politicians on these kinds of radio programs is that they never, ever say that they don't know the answer to a question. It doesn't matter what it is. 
+If you ask about child tax credits, the future of the penguins in the south Antarctic, asked to hold forth on whether or not the developments in Chongqing contribute to sustainable development in carbon capture, and we will have an answer for you. 
+We need to stop that, to stop pretending to be omniscient beings. 
+Politicians also need to learn, occasionally, to say that certain things that voters want, certain things that voters have been promised, may be things that we cannot deliver or perhaps that we feel we should not deliver. 
+And the second thing we should do is understand the genius of our societies. 
+Our societies have never been so educated, have never been so energized, have never been so healthy, have never known so much, cared so much, or wanted to do so much, and it is a genius of the local. 
+One of the reasons why we're moving away from banqueting halls such as the one in which we stand, banqueting halls with extraordinary images on the ceiling of kings enthroned, the entire drama played out here on this space, where the King of England had his head lopped off, why we've moved from spaces like this, thrones like that, towards the town hall, is we're moving more and more towards the energies of our people, and we need to tap that. 
+That can mean different things in different countries. 
+In Britain, it could mean looking to the French, learning from the French, getting directly elected mayors in place in a French commune system. 
+In Afghanistan, it could have meant instead of concentrating on the big presidential and parliamentary elections, we should have done what was in the Afghan constitution from the very beginning, which is to get direct local elections going at a district level and elect people's provincial governors. 
+But for any of these things to work, the honesty in language, the local democracy, it's not just a question of what politicians do. 
+It's a question of what the citizens do. 
+For politicians to be honest, the public needs to allow them to be honest, and the media, which mediates between the politicians and the public, needs to allow those politicians to be honest. 
+If local democracy is to flourish, it is about the active and informed engagement of every citizen. 
+In other words, if democracy is to be rebuilt, is to become again vigorous and vibrant, it is necessary not just for the public to learn to trust their politicians, but for the politicians to learn to trust the public. 
+Thank you very much indeed. (Applause) 
+
+I love video games. 
+I'm also slightly in awe of them. 
+I'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination, in terms of technology, in terms of concept. 
+But I think, above all, I'm in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we've ever invented has quite done before. 
+And I think that we can learn some pretty amazing things by looking at how we do this. 
+And in particular, I think we can learn things about learning. 
+Now the video games industry is far and away the fastest growing of all modern media. 
+From about 10 billion in 1990, it's worth 50 billion dollars globally today, and it shows no sign of slowing down. 
+In four years' time, it's estimated it'll be worth over 80 billion dollars. 
+That's about three times the recorded music industry. 
+This is pretty stunning, but I don't think it's the most telling statistic of all. 
+The thing that really amazes me is that, today, people spend about eight billion real dollars a year buying virtual items that only exist inside video games. 
+This is a screenshot from the virtual game world, Entropia Universe. 
+Earlier this year, a virtual asteroid in it sold for 330,000 real dollars. 
+And this is a Titan class ship in the space game, EVE Online. 
+And this virtual object takes 200 real people about 56 days of real time to build, plus countless thousands of hours of effort before that. 
+And yet, many of these get built. 
+At the other end of the scale, the game Farmville that you may well have heard of, has 70 million players around the world and most of these players are playing it almost every day. 
+This may all sound really quite alarming to some people, an index of something worrying or wrong in society. 
+But we're here for the good news, and the good news is that I think we can explore why this very real human effort, this very intense generation of value, is occurring. 
+And by answering that question, I think we can take something extremely powerful away. 
+And I think the most interesting way to think about how all this is going on is in terms of rewards. 
+And specifically, it's in terms of the very intense emotional rewards that playing games offers to people both individually and collectively. 
+Now if we look at what's going on in someone's head when they are being engaged, two quite different processes are occurring. 
+On the one hand, there's the wanting processes. 
+This is a bit like ambition and drive — I'm going to do that. I'm going to work hard. 
+On the other hand, there's the liking processes, fun and affection and delight and an enormous flying beast with an orc on the back. 
+It's a really great image. It's pretty cool. 
+It's from the game World of Warcraft with more than 10 million players globally, one of whom is me, another of whom is my wife. 
+And this kind of a world, this vast flying beast you can ride around, shows why games are so very good at doing both the wanting and the liking. 
+Because it's very powerful. It's pretty awesome. 
+It gives you great powers. 
+Your ambition is satisfied, but it's very beautiful. 
+It's a very great pleasure to fly around. 
+And so these combine to form a very intense emotional engagement. 
+But this isn't the really interesting stuff. 
+The really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it. 
+Because what you can measure in virtuality is everything. 
+Every single thing that every single person who's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured. 
+The biggest games in the world today are measuring more than one billion points of data about their players, about what everybody does — far more detail than you'd ever get from any website. 
+And this allows something very special to happen in games. 
+It's something called the reward schedule. 
+And by this, I mean looking at what millions upon millions of people have done and carefully calibrating the rate, the nature, the type, the intensity of rewards in games to keep them engaged over staggering amounts of time and effort. 
+Now, to try and explain this in sort of real terms, I want to talk about a kind of task that might fall to you in so many games. 
+Go and get a certain amount of a certain little game-y item. 
+Let's say, for the sake of argument, my mission is to get 15 pies and I can get 15 pies by killing these cute, little monsters. 
+Simple game quest. 
+Now you can think about this, if you like, as a problem about boxes. 
+I've got to keep opening boxes. 
+I don't know what's inside them until I open them. 
+And I go around opening box after box until I've got 15 pies. 
+Now, if you take a game like Warcraft, you can think about it, if you like, as a great box-opening effort. 
+The game's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes, getting better and better stuff in them. 
+This sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling. 
+And the way they do this is through a combination of probability and data. 
+Let's think about probability. 
+If we want to engage someone in the process of opening boxes to try and find pies, we want to make sure it's neither too easy, nor too difficult, to find a pie. 
+So what do you do? Well, you look at a million people — no, 100 million people, 100 million box openers — and you work out, if you make the pie rate about 25 percent — that's neither too frustrating, nor too easy. 
+It keeps people engaged. 
+But of course, that's not all you do — there's 15 pies. 
+Now, I could make a game called Piecraft, where all you had to do was get a million pies or a thousand pies. 
+That would be very boring. 
+Fifteen is a pretty optimal number. 
+You find that — you know, between five and 20 is about the right number for keeping people going. 
+But we don't just have pies in the boxes. 
+There's 100 percent up here. 
+And what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened, there's something in it, some little reward that keeps people progressing and engaged. 
+In most adventure games, it's a little bit in-game currency, a little bit experience. 
+But we don't just do that either. 
+We also say there's going to be loads of other items of varying qualities and levels of excitement. 
+There's going to be a 10 percent chance you get a pretty good item. 
+There's going to be a 0.1 percent chance you get an absolutely awesome item. 
+And each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item. 
+And also, we say, "Well, how many monsters? Should I have the entire world full of a billion monsters?" 
+No, we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time. 
+So I'm drawn on. It's not too easy, not too difficult. 
+So all this is very powerful. 
+But we're in virtuality. These aren't real boxes. 
+So we can do some rather amazing things. 
+We notice, looking at all these people opening boxes, that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies, their perception shifts, they start to get a bit bored, a bit testy. 
+They're not rational about probability. 
+They think this game is unfair. 
+It's not giving me my last two pies. I'm going to give up. 
+If they're real boxes, there's not much we can do, but in a game we can just say, "" Right, well. 
+When you get to 13 pies, you've got 75 percent chance of getting a pie now. "" Keep you engaged. Look at what people do — adjust the world to match their expectation. 
+Our games don't always do this. 
+And one thing they certainly do at the moment is if you got a 0.1 percent awesome item, they make very sure another one doesn't appear for a certain length of time to keep the value, to keep it special. 
+And the point is really that we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways. 
+Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning. 
+But now, we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes. 
+So what does all this mean in practice? 
+Well, I've come up with seven things that, I think, show how you can take these lessons from games and use them outside of games. 
+The first one is very simple: experience bars measuring progress — something that's been talked about brilliantly by people like Jesse Schell earlier this year. 
+It's already been done at the University of Indiana in the States, among other places. 
+It's the simple idea that instead of grading people incrementally in little bits and pieces, you give them one profile character avatar which is constantly progressing in tiny, tiny, tiny little increments which they feel are their own. 
+And everything comes towards that, and they watch it creeping up, and they own that as it goes along. 
+Second, multiple long and short-term aims — 5,000 pies, boring, 15 pies, interesting. 
+So, you give people lots and lots of different tasks. 
+You say, it's about doing 10 of these questions, but another task is turning up to 20 classes on time, but another task is collaborating with other people, another task is showing you're working five times, another task is hitting this particular target. 
+You break things down into these calibrated slices that people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged and that you can use to point them towards individually beneficial activities. 
+Third, you reward effort. 
+It's your 100 percent factor. Games are brilliant at this. 
+Every time you do something, you get credit; you get a credit for trying. 
+You don't punish failure. You reward every little bit of effort — a little bit of gold, a little bit of credit. You've done 20 questions — tick. 
+It all feeds in as minute reinforcement. 
+Fourth, feedback. 
+This is absolutely crucial, and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this. 
+If you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today that we've been hearing amazing things about, it's very, very hard for people to learn if they cannot link consequences to actions. 
+Pollution, global warming, these things — the consequences are distant in time and space. 
+It's very hard to learn, to feel a lesson. 
+But if you can model things for people, if you can give things to people that they can manipulate and play with and where the feedback comes, then they can learn a lesson, they can see, they can move on, they can understand. 
+And fifth, the element of uncertainty. 
+Now this is the neurological goldmine, if you like, because a known reward excites people, but what really gets them going is the uncertain reward, the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty, that they didn't quite know whether they were going to get it or not. 
+The 25 percent. This lights the brain up. 
+And if you think about using this in testing, in just introducing control elements of randomness in all forms of testing and training, you can transform the levels of people's engagement by tapping into this very powerful evolutionary mechanism. 
+When we don't quite predict something perfectly, we get really excited about it. 
+We just want to go back and find out more. 
+As you probably know, the neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine. 
+It's associated with reward-seeking behavior. 
+And something very exciting is just beginning to happen in places like the University of Bristol in the U.K., where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain. 
+And what this means is we can predict learning, we can predict enhanced engagement, these windows, these windows of time, in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level. 
+And two things really flow from this. 
+The first has to do with memory, that we can find these moments. 
+When someone is more likely to remember, we can give them a nugget in a window. 
+And the second thing is confidence, that we can see how game-playing and reward structures make people braver, make them more willing to take risks, more willing to take on difficulty, harder to discourage. 
+This can all seem very sinister. 
+But you know, sort of "" our brains have been manipulated; we're all addicts. "" The word "" addiction "" is thrown around. 
+There are real concerns there. 
+But the biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people. 
+This is what really excites us. 
+In reward terms, it's not money; it's not being given cash — that's nice — it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us. 
+And I want to tell you a quick story about 1999 — a video game called EverQuest. 
+And in this video game, there were two really big dragons, and you had to team up to kill them — 42 people, up to 42 to kill these big dragons. 
+That's a problem because they dropped two or three decent items. 
+So players addressed this problem by spontaneously coming up with a system to motivate each other, fairly and transparently. 
+What happened was, they paid each other a virtual currency they called "" dragon kill points. "" And every time you turned up to go on a mission, you got paid in dragon kill points. 
+They tracked these on a separate website. 
+So they tracked their own private currency, and then players could bid afterwards for cool items they wanted — all organized by the players themselves. 
+Now the staggering system, not just that this worked in EverQuest, but that today, a decade on, every single video game in the world with this kind of task uses a version of this system — tens of millions of people. 
+And the success rate is at close to 100 percent. 
+This is a player-developed, self-enforcing, voluntary currency, and it's incredibly sophisticated player behavior. 
+And I just want to end by suggesting a few ways in which these principles could fan out into the world. 
+Let's start with business. 
+I mean, we're beginning to see some of the big problems around something like business are recycling and energy conservation. 
+We're beginning to see the emergence of wonderful technologies like real-time energy meters. 
+And I just look at this, and I think, yes, we could take that so much further by allowing people to set targets by setting calibrated targets, by using elements of uncertainty, by using these multiple targets, by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system, by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets to collaborate and compete, to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see. 
+In terms of education, perhaps most obviously of all, we can transform how we engage people. 
+We can offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment. 
+We can break things down into highly calibrated small tasks. 
+We can use calculated randomness. 
+We can reward effort consistently as everything fields together. 
+And we can use the kind of group behaviors that we see evolving when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms. 
+Government, well, one thing that comes to mind is the U.S. government, among others, is literally starting to pay people to lose weight. 
+So we're seeing financial reward being used to tackle the great issue of obesity. 
+But again, those rewards could be calibrated so precisely if we were able to use the vast expertise of gaming systems to just jack up that appeal, to take the data, to take the observations, of millions of human hours and plow that feedback into increasing engagement. 
+And in the end, it's this word, "" engagement, "" that I want to leave you with. 
+It's about how individual engagement can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games. 
+But it's also about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale in games. 
+And if we can look at these things and learn from them and see how to turn them outwards, then I really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Do you remember the story of Odysseus and the Sirens from high school or junior high school? 
+There was this hero, Odysseus, who's heading back home after the Trojan War. 
+And he's standing on the deck of his ship, he's talking to his first mate, and he's saying, "" Tomorrow, we will sail past those rocks, and on those rocks sit some beautiful women called Sirens. 
+And these women sing an enchanting song, a song so alluring that all sailors who hear it crash into the rocks and die. "" Now you would expect, given that, that they would choose an alternate route around the Sirens, but instead Odysseus says, "" I want to hear that song. 
+And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pour wax in the ears of you and all the men — stay with me — so that you can't hear the song, and then I'm going to have you tie me to the mast so that I can listen and we can all sail by unaffected. "" So this is a captain putting the life of every single person on the ship at risk so that he can hear a song. 
+And I'd like to think if this was the case, they probably would have rehearsed it a few times. 
+Odysseus would have said, "" Okay, let's do a dry run. 
+You tie me to the mast, and I'm going to beg and plead. 
+And no matter what I say, you cannot untie me from the mast. 
+All right, so tie me to the mast. "" And the first mate takes a rope and ties Odysseus to the mast in a nice knot. 
+And Odysseus does his best job playacting and says, "" Untie me. Untie me. 
+I want to hear that song. Untie me. "" And the first mate wisely resists and doesn't untie Odysseus. 
+And then Odysseus says, "" I see that you can get it. 
+All right, untie me now and we'll get some dinner. "" And the first mate hesitates. 
+He's like, "" Is this still the rehearsal, or should I untie him? "" And the first mate thinks, "Well, I guess at some point the rehearsal has to end." 
+So he unties Odysseus, and Odysseus flips out. 
+He's like, "" You idiot. You moron. 
+If you do that tomorrow, I'll be dead, you'll be dead, every single one of the men will be dead. 
+Now just don't untie me no matter what. "" He throws the first mate to the ground. 
+This repeats itself through the night — rehearsal, tying to the mast, conning his way out of it, beating the poor first mate up mercilessly. 
+Hilarity ensues. 
+Tying yourself to a mast is perhaps the oldest written example of what psychologists call a commitment device. 
+A commitment device is a decision that you make with a cool head to bind yourself so that you don't do something regrettable when you have a hot head. 
+Because there's two heads inside one person when you think about it. 
+Scholars have long invoked this metaphor of two selves when it comes to questions of temptation. 
+There is first, the present self. 
+This is like Odysseus when he's hearing the song. 
+He just wants to get to the front row. 
+He just thinks about the here and now and the immediate gratification. 
+But then there's this other self, the future self. 
+This is Odysseus as an old man who wants nothing more than to retire in a sunny villa with his wife Penelope outside of Ithaca — the other one. 
+So why do we need commitment devices? 
+Well resisting temptation is hard, as the 19th century English economist Nassau William Senior said, "" To abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results, are among the most painful exertions of the human will. "" If you set goals for yourself and you're like a lot of other people, you probably realize it's not that your goals are physically impossible that's keeping you from achieving them, it's that you lack the self-discipline to stick to them. 
+It's physically possible to lose weight. 
+It's physically possible to exercise more. 
+But resisting temptation is hard. 
+The other reason that it's difficult to resist temptation is because it's an unequal battle between the present self and the future self. 
+I mean, let's face it, the present self is present. 
+It's in control. It's in power right now. 
+It has these strong, heroic arms that can lift doughnuts into your mouth. 
+And the future self is not even around. 
+It's off in the future. It's weak. 
+It doesn't even have a lawyer present. 
+There's nobody to stick up for the future self. 
+And so the present self can trounce all over its dreams. 
+So there's this battle between the two selves that's being fought, and we need commitment devices to level the playing field between the two. 
+Now I'm a big fan of commitment devices actually. 
+Tying yourself to the mast is the oldest one, but there are other ones such as locking a credit card away with a key or not bringing junk food into the house so you won't eat it or unplugging your Internet connection so you can use your computer. 
+I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. 
+So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. 
+I had to write five pages a day towards papers or I would have to give up five dollars. 
+And when you try to execute these commitment devices, you realize the devil is really in the details. 
+Because it's not that easy to get rid of five dollars. 
+I mean, you can't burn it; that's illegal. 
+And I thought, well I could give it to a charity or give it to my wife or something like that. 
+But then I thought, oh, I'm sending myself mixed messages. 
+Because not writing is bad, but giving to charity is good. 
+So then I would kind of justify not writing by giving a gift. 
+And then I kind of flipped that around and thought, well I could give it to the neo-Nazis. 
+But then I was like, that's more bad than writing is good, and so that wouldn't work. 
+So ultimately, I just decided I would leave it in an envelope on the subway. 
+Sometimes a good person would find it, sometimes a bad person would find it. 
+On average, it was just a completely pointless exchange of money that I would regret. 
+(Laughter) Such it is with commitment devices. 
+But despite my like for them, there's two nagging concerns that I've always had about commitment devices, and you might feel this if you use them yourself. 
+So the first is, when you've got one of these devices going, such as this contract to write everyday or pay, it's just a constant reminder that you have no self-control. 
+You're just telling yourself, "" Without you, commitment device, I am nothing, I have no self-discipline. "" And then when you're ever in a situation where you don't have a commitment device in place — like, "" Oh my God, that person's offering me a doughnut, and I have no defense mechanism, "" — you just eat it. 
+So I don't like the way that they take the power away from you. 
+I think self-discipline is something, it's like a muscle. 
+The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. 
+The other problem with commitment devices is that you can always weasel your way out of them. 
+You say, "" Well, of course I can't write today, because I'm giving a TEDTalk and I have five media interviews, and then I'm going to a cocktail party and then I'll be drunk after that. 
+And so there's no way that this is going to work. "" So in effect, you are like Odysseus and the first mate in one person. 
+You're putting yourself, you're binding yourself, and you're weaseling your way out of it, and then you're beating yourself up afterwards. 
+So I've been working for about a decade now on finding other ways to change people's relationship to the future self without using commitment devices. 
+In particular, I'm interested in the relationship to the future financial self. 
+And this is a timely issue. 
+I'm talking about the topic of saving. 
+Now saving is a classic two selves problem. 
+The present self does not want to save at all. 
+It wants to consume. 
+Whereas the future self wants the present self to save. 
+So this is a timely problem. 
+We look at the savings rate and it has been declining since the 1950s. 
+At the same time, the Retirement Risk Index, the chance of not being able to meet your needs in retirement, has been increasing. 
+And we're at a situation now where for every three baby boomers, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that two will not be able to meet their pre-retirement needs while they're in retirement. 
+So what can we do about this? 
+There's a philosopher, Derek Parfit, who said some words that were inspiring to my coauthors and I. 
+He said that, "" We might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination. "" That is to say, we somehow might not believe that we're going to get old, or we might not be able to imagine that we're going to get old some day. 
+On the one hand, it sounds ridiculous. 
+Of course, we know that we're going to get old. 
+But aren't there things that we believe and don't believe at the same time? 
+So my coauthors and I have used computers, the greatest tool of our time, to assist people's imagination and help them imagine what it might be like to go into the future. 
+And I'll show you some of these tools right here. 
+The first is called the distribution builder. 
+It shows people what the future might be like by showing them a hundred equally probable outcomes that might be obtained in the future. 
+Each outcome is shown by one of these markers, and each sits on a row that represents a level of wealth and retirement. 
+Being up at the top means that you're enjoying a high income in retirement. 
+Being down at the bottom means that you're struggling to make ends meet. 
+When you make an investment, what you're really saying is, "" I accept that any one of these 100 things could happen to me and determine my wealth. "" Now you can try to move your outcomes around. 
+You can try to manipulate your fate, like this person is doing, but it costs you something to do it. 
+It means that you have to save more today. 
+Once you find an investment that you're happy with, what people do is they click "" done "" and the markers begin to disappear, slowly, one by one. 
+It simulates what it is like to invest in something and to watch that investment pan out. 
+At the end, there will only be one marker left standing and it will determine our wealth in retirement. 
+Yes, this person retired at 150 percent of their working income in retirement. 
+They're making more money while retired than they were making while they were working. 
+If you're like most people, just seeing that gave you a small sense of elation and joy — just to think about making 50 percent more money in retirement than before. 
+However, had you ended up on the very bottom, it might have given you a slight sense of dread and / or nausea thinking about struggling to get by in retirement. 
+By using this tool over and over and simulating outcome after outcome, people can understand that the investments and savings that they undertake today determine their well-being in the future. 
+Now people are motivated through emotions, but different people find different things motivating. 
+This is a simulation that uses graphics, but other people find motivating what money can buy, not just numbers. 
+So here I made a distribution builder where instead of showing numerical outcomes, I show people what those outcomes will get you, in particular apartments that you can afford if you're retiring on 3,000, 2,500, 2,000 dollars per month and so on. 
+As you move down the ladder of apartments, you see that they get worse and worse. 
+Some of them look like places I lived in as a graduate student. 
+And as you get to the very bottom, you're faced with the unfortunate reality that if you don't save anything for retirement, you won't be able to afford any housing at all. 
+Those are actual pictures of actual apartments renting for that amount as advertised on the Internet. 
+The last thing I'll show you, the last behavioral time machine, is something that I created with Hal Hershfield, who was introduced to me by my coauthor on a previous project, Bill Sharpe. 
+And what it is is an exploration into virtual reality. 
+So what we do is we take pictures of people — in this case, college-age people — and we use software to age them and show these people what they'll look like when they're 60, 70, 80 years old. 
+And we try to test whether actually assisting your imagination by looking at the face of your future self can change you investment behavior. 
+So this is one of our experiments. 
+Here we see the face of the young subject on the left. 
+He's given a control that allows him to adjust his savings rate. 
+As he moves his savings rate down, it means that he's saving zero when it's all the way here at the left. 
+You can see his current annual income — this is the percentage of his paycheck that he can take home today — is quite high, 91 percent, but his retirement income is quite low. 
+He's going to retire on 44 percent of what he earned while he was working. 
+If he saves the maximum legal amount, his retirement income goes up, but he's unhappy because now he has less money on the left-hand side to spend today. 
+Other conditions show people the future self. 
+And from the future self's point of view, everything is in reverse. 
+If you save very little, the future self is unhappy living on 44 percent of the income. 
+Whereas if the present self saves a lot, the future self is delighted, where the income is close up near 100 percent. 
+To bring this to a wider audience, I've been working with Hal and Allianz to create something we call the behavioral time machine, in which you not only get to see yourself in the future, but you get to see anticipated emotional reactions to different levels of retirement wealth. 
+So for instance, here is somebody using the tool. 
+And just watch the facial expressions as they move the slider. 
+The younger face gets happier and happier, saving nothing. 
+The older face is miserable. 
+And slowly, slowly we're bringing it up to a moderate savings rate. 
+And then it's a high savings rate. 
+The younger face is getting unhappy. 
+The older face is quite pleased with the decision. 
+We're going to see if this has an effect on what people do. 
+And what's nice about it is it's not something that biasing people actually, because as one face smiles, the other face frowns. 
+It's not telling you which way to put the slider, it's just reminding you that you are connected to and legally tied to this future self. 
+Your decisions today are going to determine its well-being. 
+And that's something that's easy to forget. 
+This use of virtual reality is not just good for making people look older. 
+There are programs you can get to see how people might look if they smoke, if they get too much exposure to the sun, if they gain weight and so on. 
+And what's good is, unlike in the experiments that Hal and myself ran with Russ Smith, you don't have to program these by yourself in order to see the virtual reality. 
+There are applications you can get on smartphones for just a few dollars that do the same thing. 
+This is actually a picture of Hal, my coauthor. 
+You might recognize him from the previous demos. 
+And just for kicks we ran his picture through the balding, aging and weight gain software to see how he would look. 
+Hal is here, so I think we owe it to him as well as yourself to disabuse you of that last image. 
+And I'll close it there. 
+On behalf of Hal and myself, I wish all the best to your present and future selves. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I grew up watching Star Trek. I love Star Trek. 
+Star Trek made me want to see alien creatures, creatures from a far-distant world. 
+But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth. 
+And what I do is I study insects. 
+I'm obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight. 
+I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life. 
+Without insects, there'd be no flowering plants. 
+Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks. 
+(Laughter) Now, David and Hidehiko and Ketaki gave a very compelling story about the similarities between fruit flies and humans, and there are many similarities, and so you might think that if humans are similar to fruit flies, the favorite behavior of a fruit fly might be this, for example — (Laughter) but in my talk, I don't want to emphasize on the similarities between humans and fruit flies, but rather the differences, and focus on the behaviors that I think fruit flies excel at doing. 
+And so I want to show you a high-speed video sequence of a fly shot at 7,000 frames per second in infrared lighting, and to the right, off-screen, is an electronic looming predator that is going to go at the fly. 
+The fly is going to sense this predator. 
+It is going to extend its legs out. 
+It's going to sashay away to live to fly another day. 
+Now I have carefully cropped this sequence to be exactly the duration of a human eye blink, so in the time that it would take you to blink your eye, the fly has seen this looming predator, estimated its position, initiated a motor pattern to fly it away, beating its wings at 220 times a second as it does so. 
+I think this is a fascinating behavior that shows how fast the fly's brain can process information. 
+Now, flight — what does it take to fly? 
+Well, in order to fly, just as in a human aircraft, you need wings that can generate sufficient aerodynamic forces, you need an engine sufficient to generate the power required for flight, and you need a controller, and in the first human aircraft, the controller was basically the brain of Orville and Wilbur sitting in the cockpit. 
+Now, how does this compare to a fly? 
+Well, I spent a lot of my early career trying to figure out how insect wings generate enough force to keep the flies in the air. 
+And you might have heard how engineers proved that bumblebees couldn't fly. 
+Well, the problem was in thinking that the insect wings function in the way that aircraft wings work. But they don't. 
+And we tackle this problem by building giant, dynamically scaled model robot insects that would flap in giant pools of mineral oil where we could study the aerodynamic forces. 
+And it turns out that the insects flap their wings in a very clever way, at a very high angle of attack that creates a structure at the leading edge of the wing, a little tornado-like structure called a leading edge vortex, and it's that vortex that actually enables the wings to make enough force for the animal to stay in the air. 
+But the thing that's actually most — so, what's fascinating is not so much that the wing has some interesting morphology. 
+What's clever is the way the fly flaps it, which of course ultimately is controlled by the nervous system, and this is what enables flies to perform these remarkable aerial maneuvers. 
+Now, what about the engine? 
+The engine of the fly is absolutely fascinating. 
+They have two types of flight muscle: so-called power muscle, which is stretch-activated, which means that it activates itself and does not need to be controlled on a contraction-by-contraction basis by the nervous system. 
+It's specialized to generate the enormous power required for flight, and it fills the middle portion of the fly, so when a fly hits your windshield, it's basically the power muscle that you're looking at. 
+But attached to the base of the wing is a set of little, tiny control muscles that are not very powerful at all, but they're very fast, and they're able to reconfigure the hinge of the wing on a stroke-by-stroke basis, and this is what enables the fly to change its wing and generate the changes in aerodynamic forces which change its flight trajectory. 
+And of course, the role of the nervous system is to control all this. 
+So let's look at the controller. 
+Now flies excel in the sorts of sensors that they carry to this problem. 
+They have antennae that sense odors and detect wind detection. 
+They have a sophisticated eye which is the fastest visual system on the planet. 
+They have another set of eyes on the top of their head. 
+We have no idea what they do. 
+They have sensors on their wing. 
+Their wing is covered with sensors, including sensors that sense deformation of the wing. 
+They can even taste with their wings. 
+One of the most sophisticated sensors a fly has is a structure called the halteres. 
+The halteres are actually gyroscopes. 
+These devices beat back and forth about 200 hertz during flight, and the animal can use them to sense its body rotation and initiate very, very fast corrective maneuvers. 
+But all of this sensory information has to be processed by a brain, and yes, indeed, flies have a brain, a brain of about 100,000 neurons. 
+Now several people at this conference have already suggested that fruit flies could serve neuroscience because they're a simple model of brain function. 
+And the basic punchline of my talk is, I'd like to turn that over on its head. 
+I don't think they're a simple model of anything. 
+And I think that flies are a great model. 
+They're a great model for flies. 
+(Laughter) And let's explore this notion of simplicity. 
+So I think, unfortunately, a lot of neuroscientists, we're all somewhat narcissistic. 
+When we think of brain, we of course imagine our own brain. 
+But remember that this kind of brain, which is much, much smaller — instead of 100 billion neurons, it has 100,000 neurons — but this is the most common form of brain on the planet and has been for 400 million years. 
+And is it fair to say that it's simple? 
+Well, it's simple in the sense that it has fewer neurons, but is that a fair metric? 
+And I would propose it's not a fair metric. 
+So let's sort of think about this. I think we have to compare — (Laughter) — we have to compare the size of the brain with what the brain can do. 
+So I propose we have a Trump number, and the Trump number is the ratio of this man's behavioral repertoire to the number of neurons in his brain. 
+We'll calculate the Trump number for the fruit fly. 
+Now, how many people here think the Trump number is higher for the fruit fly? 
+(Applause) It's a very smart, smart audience. 
+Yes, the inequality goes in this direction, or I would posit it. 
+Now I realize that it is a little bit absurd to compare the behavioral repertoire of a human to a fly. 
+But let's take another animal just as an example. Here's a mouse. 
+A mouse has about 1,000 times as many neurons as a fly. 
+I used to study mice. When I studied mice, I used to talk really slowly. 
+And then something happened when I started to work on flies. 
+(Laughter) And I think if you compare the natural history of flies and mice, it's really comparable. They have to forage for food. 
+They have to engage in courtship. 
+They have sex. They hide from predators. 
+They do a lot of the similar things. 
+But I would argue that flies do more. 
+So for example, I'm going to show you a sequence, and I have to say, some of my funding comes from the military, so I'm showing this classified sequence and you cannot discuss it outside of this room. Okay? 
+So I want you to look at the payload at the tail of the fruit fly. 
+Watch it very closely, and you'll see why my six-year-old son now wants to be a neuroscientist. 
+Wait for it. 
+Pshhew. 
+So at least you'll admit that if fruit flies are not as clever as mice, they're at least as clever as pigeons. (Laughter) Now, I want to get across that it's not just a matter of numbers but also the challenge for a fly to compute everything its brain has to compute with such tiny neurons. 
+So this is a beautiful image of a visual interneuron from a mouse that came from Jeff Lichtman's lab, and you can see the wonderful images of brains that he showed in his talk. 
+But up in the corner, in the right corner, you'll see, at the same scale, a visual interneuron from a fly. 
+And I'll expand this up. 
+And it's a beautifully complex neuron. 
+It's just very, very tiny, and there's lots of biophysical challenges with trying to compute information with tiny, tiny neurons. 
+How small can neurons get? Well, look at this interesting insect. 
+It looks sort of like a fly. It has wings, it has eyes, it has antennae, its legs, complicated life history, it's a parasite, it has to fly around and find caterpillars to parasatize, but not only is its brain the size of a salt grain, which is comparable for a fruit fly, it is the size of a salt grain. 
+So here's some other organisms at the similar scale. 
+This animal is the size of a paramecium and an amoeba, and it has a brain of 7,000 neurons that's so small — you know these things called cell bodies you've been hearing about, where the nucleus of the neuron is? 
+This animal gets rid of them because they take up too much space. 
+So this is a session on frontiers in neuroscience. 
+I would posit that one frontier in neuroscience is to figure out how the brain of that thing works. 
+But let's think about this. How can you make a small number of neurons do a lot? 
+And I think, from an engineering perspective, you think of multiplexing. 
+You can take a hardware and have that hardware do different things at different times, or have different parts of the hardware doing different things. 
+And these are the two concepts I'd like to explore. 
+And they're not concepts that I've come up with, but concepts that have been proposed by others in the past. 
+And one idea comes from lessons from chewing crabs. 
+And I don't mean chewing the crabs. 
+I grew up in Baltimore, and I chew crabs very, very well. 
+But I'm talking about the crabs actually doing the chewing. 
+Crab chewing is actually really fascinating. 
+Crabs have this complicated structure under their carapace called the gastric mill that grinds their food in a variety of different ways. 
+And here's an endoscopic movie of this structure. 
+The amazing thing about this is that it's controlled by a really tiny set of neurons, about two dozen neurons that can produce a vast variety of different motor patterns, and the reason it can do this is that this little tiny ganglion in the crab is actually inundated by many, many neuromodulators. 
+You heard about neuromodulators earlier. 
+There are more neuromodulators that alter, that innervate this structure than actually neurons in the structure, and they're able to generate a complicated set of patterns. 
+And this is the work by Eve Marder and her many colleagues who've been studying this fascinating system that show how a smaller cluster of neurons can do many, many, many things because of neuromodulation that can take place on a moment-by-moment basis. 
+So this is basically multiplexing in time. 
+Imagine a network of neurons with one neuromodulator. 
+You select one set of cells to perform one sort of behavior, another neuromodulator, another set of cells, a different pattern, and you can imagine you could extrapolate to a very, very complicated system. 
+Is there any evidence that flies do this? 
+Well, for many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators. 
+You can tether a fly to a little stick. 
+You can measure the aerodynamic forces it's creating. 
+You can let the fly play a little video game by letting it fly around in a visual display. 
+So let me show you a little tiny sequence of this. 
+Here's a fly and a large infrared view of the fly in the flight simulator, and this is a game the flies love to play. 
+You allow them to steer towards the little stripe, and they'll just steer towards that stripe forever. 
+It's part of their visual guidance system. 
+But very, very recently, it's been possible to modify these sorts of behavioral arenas for physiologies. 
+So this is the preparation that one of my former post-docs, Gaby Maimon, who's now at Rockefeller, developed, and it's basically a flight simulator but under conditions where you actually can stick an electrode in the brain of the fly and record from a genetically identified neuron in the fly's brain. 
+And this is what one of these experiments looks like. 
+It was a sequence taken from another post-doc in the lab, Bettina Schnell. 
+The green trace at the bottom is the membrane potential of a neuron in the fly's brain, and you'll see the fly start to fly, and the fly is actually controlling the rotation of that visual pattern itself by its own wing motion, and you can see this visual interneuron respond to the pattern of wing motion as the fly flies. 
+So for the first time we've actually been able to record from neurons in the fly's brain while the fly is performing sophisticated behaviors such as flight. 
+And one of the lessons we've been learning is that the physiology of cells that we've been studying for many years in quiescent flies is not the same as the physiology of those cells when the flies actually engage in active behaviors like flying and walking and so forth. 
+And why is the physiology different? 
+Well it turns out it's these neuromodulators, just like the neuromodulators in that little tiny ganglion in the crabs. 
+So here's a picture of the octopamine system. 
+Octopamine is a neuromodulator that seems to play an important role in flight and other behaviors. 
+But this is just one of many neuromodulators that's in the fly's brain. 
+So I really think that, as we learn more, it's going to turn out that the whole fly brain is just like a large version of this stomatogastric ganglion, and that's one of the reasons why it can do so much with so few neurons. 
+Now, another idea, another way of multiplexing is multiplexing in space, having different parts of a neuron do different things at the same time. 
+So here's two sort of canonical neurons from a vertebrate and an invertebrate, a human pyramidal neuron from Ramon y Cajal, and another cell to the right, a non-spiking interneuron, and this is the work of Alan Watson and Malcolm Burrows many years ago, and Malcolm Burrows came up with a pretty interesting idea based on the fact that this neuron from a locust does not fire action potentials. 
+It's a non-spiking cell. 
+So a typical cell, like the neurons in our brain, has a region called the dendrites that receives input, and that input sums together and will produce action potentials that run down the axon and then activate all the output regions of the neuron. 
+But non-spiking neurons are actually quite complicated because they can have input synapses and output synapses all interdigitated, and there's no single action potential that drives all the outputs at the same time. 
+So there's a possibility that you have computational compartments that allow the different parts of the neuron to do different things at the same time. 
+So these basic concepts of multitasking in time and multitasking in space, I think these are things that are true in our brains as well, but I think the insects are the true masters of this. 
+So I hope you think of insects a little bit differently next time, and as I say up here, please think before you swat. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So I'm here to explain why I'm wearing these ninja pajamas. 
+And to do that, I'd like to talk first about environmental toxins in our bodies. 
+So some of you may know about the chemical Bisphenol A, BPA. 
+It's a material hardener and synthetic estrogen that's found in the lining of canned foods and some plastics. 
+So BPA mimics the body's own hormones and causes neurological and reproductive problems. 
+And it's everywhere. 
+A recent study found BPA in 93 percent of people six and older. 
+But it's just one chemical. 
+The Center for Disease Control in the U.S. 
+says we have 219 toxic pollutants in our bodies, and this includes preservatives, pesticides and heavy metals like lead and mercury. 
+To me, this says three things. 
+First, don't become a cannibal. 
+Second, we are both responsible for and the victims of our own pollution. 
+And third, our bodies are filters and storehouses for environmental toxins. 
+So what happens to all these toxins when we die? 
+The short answer is: They return to the environment in one way or another, continuing the cycle of toxicity. 
+But our current funeral practices make the situation much worse. 
+If you're cremated, all those toxins I mentioned are released into the atmosphere. 
+And this includes 5,000 pounds of mercury from our dental fillings alone every year. 
+And in a traditional American funeral, a dead body is covered with fillers and cosmetics to make it look alive. 
+It's then pumped with toxic formaldehyde to slow decomposition — a practice which causes respiratory problems and cancer in funeral personnel. 
+So by trying to preserve our dead bodies, we deny death, poison the living and further harm the environment. 
+Green or natural burials, which don't use embalming, are a step in the right direction, but they don't address the existing toxins in our bodies. 
+I think there's a better solution. 
+I'm an artist, so I'd like to offer a modest proposal at the intersection of art, science and culture. 
+The Infinity Burial Project, an alternative burial system that uses mushrooms to decompose and clean toxins in bodies. The Infinity Burial Project 
+began a few years ago with a fantasy to create the Infinity Mushroom — a new hybrid mushroom that would decompose bodies, clean the toxins and deliver nutrients to plant roots, leaving clean compost. 
+But I learned it's nearly impossible to create a new hybrid mushroom. 
+I also learned that some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins in soil. 
+So I thought maybe I could train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms to eat my body. 
+So today, I'm collecting what I shed or slough off — my hair, skin and nails — and I'm feeding these to edible mushrooms. 
+As the mushrooms grow, I pick the best feeders to become Infinity Mushrooms. 
+It's a kind of imprinting and selective breeding process for the afterlife. 
+So when I die, the Infinity Mushrooms will recognize my body and be able to eat it. 
+All right, so for some of you, this may be really, really out there. 
+(Laughter) Just a little. 
+I realize this is not the kind of relationship that we usually aspire to have with our food. 
+We want to eat, not be eaten by, our food. 
+But as I watch the mushrooms grow and digest my body, I imagine the Infinity Mushroom as a symbol of a new way of thinking about death and the relationship between my body and the environment. 
+See for me, cultivating the Infinity Mushroom is more than just scientific experimentation or gardening or raising a pet, it's a step towards accepting the fact that someday I will die and decay. 
+It's also a step towards taking responsibility for my own burden on the planet. 
+Growing a mushroom is also part of a larger practice of cultivating decomposing organisms called decompiculture, a concept that was developed by an entomologist, Timothy Myles. 
+The Infinity Mushroom is a subset of decompiculture I'm calling body decompiculture and toxin remediation — the cultivation of organisms that decompose and clean toxins in bodies. 
+And now about these ninja pajamas. 
+Once it's completed, I plan to integrate the Infinity Mushrooms into a number of objects. 
+First, a burial suit infused with mushroom spores, the Mushroom Death Suit. 
+(Laughter) I'm wearing the second prototype of this burial suit. 
+It's covered with a crocheted netting that is embedded with mushroom spores. 
+The dendritic pattern you see mimics the growth of mushroom mycelia, which are the equivalent of plant roots. 
+I'm also making a decompiculture kit, a cocktail of capsules that contain Infinity Mushroom spores and other elements that speed decomposition and toxin remediation. 
+These capsules are embedded in a nutrient-rich jelly, a kind of second skin, which dissolves quickly and becomes baby food for the growing mushrooms. 
+So I plan to finish the mushroom and decompiculture kit in the next year or two, and then I'd like to begin testing them, first with expired meat from the market and then with human subjects. 
+And believe it or not, a few people have offered to donate their bodies to the project to be eaten by mushrooms. 
+(Laughter) What I've learned from talking to these folks is that we share a common desire to understand and accept death and to minimize the impact of our death on the environment. 
+I wanted to cultivate this perspective just like the mushrooms, so I formed the Decompiculture Society, a group of people called decompinauts who actively explore their postmortem options, seek death acceptance and cultivate decomposing organisms like the Infinity Mushroom. 
+The Decompiculture Society shares a vision of a cultural shift, from our current culture of death denial and body preservation to one of decompiculture, a radical acceptance of death and decomposition. 
+Accepting death means accepting that we are physical beings who are intimately connected to the environment, as the research on environmental toxins confirms. 
+And the saying goes, we came from dust and will return to dust. 
+And once we understand that we're connected to the environment, we see that the survival of our species depends on the survival of the planet. 
+I believe this is the beginning of true environmental responsibility. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The recent debate over copyright laws like SOPA in the United States and the ACTA agreement in Europe has been very emotional. 
+And I think some dispassionate, quantitative reasoning could really bring a great deal to the debate. 
+I'd therefore like to propose that we employ, we enlist, the cutting edge field of copyright math whenever we approach this subject. 
+For instance, just recently the Motion Picture Association revealed that our economy loses 58 billion dollars a year to copyright theft. 
+Now rather than just argue about this number, a copyright mathematician will analyze it and he'll soon discover that this money could stretch from this auditorium all the way across Ocean Boulevard to the Westin, and then to Mars... 
+(Laughter)... if we use pennies. 
+Now this is obviously a powerful, some might say dangerously powerful, insight. 
+But it's also a morally important one. 
+Because this isn't just the hypothetical retail value of some pirated movies that we're talking about, but this is actual economic losses. 
+This is the equivalent to the entire American corn crop failing along with all of our fruit crops, as well as wheat, tobacco, rice, sorghum — whatever sorghum is — losing sorghum. 
+But identifying the actual losses to the economy is almost impossible to do unless we use copyright math. 
+Now music revenues are down by about eight billion dollars a year since Napster first came on the scene. 
+So that's a chunk of what we're looking for. 
+But total movie revenues across theaters, home video and pay-per-view are up. 
+And TV, satellite and cable revenues are way up. 
+Other content markets like book publishing and radio are also up. 
+So this small missing chunk here is puzzling. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Since the big content markets have grown in line with historic norms, it's not additional growth that piracy has prevented, but copyright math tells us it must therefore be foregone growth in a market that has no historic norms — one that didn't exist in the 90's. 
+What we're looking at here is the insidious cost of ringtone piracy. 
+(Laughter) 50 billion dollars of it a year, which is enough, at 30 seconds a ringtone, that could stretch from here to Neanderthal times. (Laughter) 
+It's true. 
+(Applause) I have Excel. 
+(Laughter) The movie folks also tell us that our economy loses over 370,000 jobs to content theft, which is quite a lot when you consider that, back in '98, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that the motion picture and video industries were employing 270,000 people. 
+Other data has the music industry at about 45,000 people. 
+And so the job losses that came with the Internet and all that content theft, have therefore left us with negative employment in our content industries. 
+And this is just one of the many mind-blowing statistics that copyright mathematicians have to deal with every day. 
+And some people think that string theory is tough. 
+(Laughter) Now this is a key number from the copyright mathematicians' toolkit. 
+It's the precise amount of harm that comes to media companies whenever a single copyrighted song or movie gets pirated. 
+Hollywood and Congress derived this number mathematically back when they last sat down to improve copyright damages and made this law. 
+Some people think this number's a little bit large, but copyright mathematicians who are media lobby experts are merely surprised that it doesn't get compounded for inflation every year. 
+Now when this law first passed, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs. 
+And it was a big Christmas hit. 
+Because what little hoodlum wouldn't want a million and a half bucks-worth of stolen goods in his pocket. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) These days an iPod Classic can hold 40,000 songs, which is to say eight billion dollars-worth of stolen media. (Applause) 
+Or about 75,000 jobs. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Now you might find copyright math strange, but that's because it's a field that's best left to experts. 
+So that's it for now. 
+I hope you'll join me next time when I will be making an equally scientific and fact-based inquiry into the cost of alien music piracy to he American economy. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+Chris Anderson: So I guess what we're going to do is we're going to talk about your life, and using some pictures that you shared with me. 
+And I think we should start right here with this one. 
+Okay, now who is this? 
+Martine Rothblatt: This is me with our oldest son Eli. 
+He was about age five. 
+This is taken in Nigeria right after having taken the Washington, D.C. bar exam. 
+CA: Okay. But this doesn't really look like a Martine. 
+MR: Right. That was myself as a male, the way I was brought up. 
+CA: You were brought up Martin Rothblatt. 
+CA: And about a year after this picture, you married a beautiful woman. 
+MR: It was love at the first sight. 
+I saw Bina at a discotheque in Los Angeles, and we later began living together, but the moment I saw her, I saw just an aura of energy around her. 
+I asked her to dance. 
+She said she saw an aura of energy around me. 
+We showed each other our kids' pictures, and we've been happily married for a third of a century now. 
+(Applause) CA: And at the time, you were kind of this hotshot entrepreneur, working with satellites. 
+I think you had two successful companies, and then you started addressing this problem of how could you use satellites to revolutionize radio. 
+Tell us about that. 
+MR: Right. I always loved space technology, and satellites, to me, are sort of like the canoes that our ancestors first pushed out into the water. 
+So it was exciting for me to be part of the navigation of the oceans of the sky, and as I developed different types of satellite communication systems, the main thing I did was to launch bigger and more powerful satellites, the consequence of which was that the receiving antennas could be smaller and smaller, and after going through direct television broadcasting, I had the idea that if we could make a more powerful satellite, the receiving dish could be so small that it would just be a section of a parabolic dish, a flat little plate embedded into the roof of an automobile, 
+and it would be possible to have nationwide satellite radio, and that's Sirius XM today. 
+CA: Wow. So who here has used Sirius? 
+(Applause) MR: Thank you for your monthly subscriptions. 
+(Laughter) CA: So that succeeded despite all predictions at the time. 
+It was a huge commercial success, but soon after this, in the early 1990s, there was this big transition in your life and you became Martine. 
+MR: Correct. CA: So tell me, how did that happen? 
+MR: It happened in consultation with Bina and our four beautiful children, and I discussed with each of them that I felt my soul was always female, and as a woman, but I was afraid people would laugh at me if I expressed it, so I always kept it bottled up and just showed my male side. 
+And each of them had a different take on this. 
+Bina said, "" I love your soul, and whether the outside is Martin and Martine, it doesn't it matter to me, I love your soul. "" My son said, "" If you become a woman, will you still be my father? "" And I said, "" Yes, I'll always be your father, "" and I'm still his father today. 
+My youngest daughter did an absolutely brilliant five-year-old thing. 
+She told people, "" I love my dad and she loves me. "" So she had no problem with a gender blending whatsoever. 
+CA: And a couple years after this, you published this book: "The Apartheid of Sex." 
+MR: My thesis in this book is that there are seven billion people in the world, and actually, seven billion unique ways to express one's gender. 
+And while people may have the genitals of a male or a female, the genitals don't determine your gender or even really your sexual identity. 
+That's just a matter of anatomy and reproductive tracts, and people could choose whatever gender they want if they weren't forced by society into categories of either male or female the way South Africa used to force people into categories of black or white. 
+We know from anthropological science that race is fiction, even though racism is very, very real, and we now know from cultural studies that separate male or female genders is a constructed fiction. 
+The reality is a gender fluidity that crosses the entire continuum from male to female. 
+CA: You yourself don't always feel 100 percent female. 
+MR: Correct. I would say in some ways I change my gender about as often as I change my hairstyle. 
+CA: (Laughs) Okay, now, this is your gorgeous daughter, Jenesis. 
+And I guess she was about this age when something pretty terrible happened. 
+MR: Yes, she was finding herself unable to walk up the stairs in our house to her bedroom, and after several months of doctors, she was diagnosed to have a rare, almost invariably fatal disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension. 
+CA: So how did you respond to that? 
+MR: Well, we first tried to get her to the best doctors we could. 
+We ended up at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. 
+The head of pediatric cardiology told us that he was going to refer her to get a lung transplant, but not to hold out any hope, because there are very few lungs available, especially for children. 
+He said that all people with this illness died, and if any of you have seen the film "" Lorenzo's Oil, "" there's a scene when the protagonist kind of rolls down the stairway crying and bemoaning the fate of his son, and that's exactly how we felt about Jenesis. 
+MR: Correct. She was in the intensive care ward for weeks at a time, and Bina and I would tag team to stay at the hospital while the other watched the rest of the kids, and when I was in the hospital and she was sleeping, I went to the hospital library. 
+I had not taken any biology, even in college, so I had to go from a biology textbook to a college-level textbook and then medical textbook and the journal articles, back and forth, and eventually I knew enough to think that it might be possible that somebody could find a cure. 
+So we started a nonprofit foundation. 
+I wrote a description asking people to submit grants and we would pay for medical research. 
+I became an expert on the condition — doctors said to me, Martine, we really appreciate all the funding you've provided us, but we are not going to be able to find a cure in time to save your daughter. 
+However, there is a medicine that was developed at the Burroughs Wellcome Company that could halt the progression of the disease, but Burroughs Wellcome has just been acquired by Glaxo Wellcome. 
+They made a decision not to develop any medicines for rare and orphan diseases, and maybe you could use your expertise in satellite communications to develop this cure for pulmonary hypertension. 
+CA: So how on earth did you get access to this drug? 
+MR: I went to Glaxo Wellcome and after three times being rejected and having the door slammed in my face because they weren't going to out-license the drug to a satellite communications expert, they weren't going to send the drug out to anybody at all, and they thought I didn't have the expertise, finally I was able to persuade a small team of people to work with me and develop enough credibility. 
+I wore down their resistance, and they had no hope this drug would even work, by the way, and they tried to tell me, "" You're just wasting your time. 
+We're sorry about your daughter. "" But finally, for 25,000 dollars and agreement to pay 10 percent of any revenues we might ever get, they agreed to give me worldwide rights to this drug. 
+CA: And so you put this drug on the market in a really brilliant way, by basically charging what it would take to make the economics work. 
+MR: Oh yes, Chris, but this really wasn't a drug that I ended up — after I wrote the check for 25,000, and I said, "" Okay, where's the medicine for Jenesis? "" they said, "" Oh, Martine, there's no medicine for Jenesis. 
+This is just something we tried in rats. "" And they gave me, like, a little plastic Ziploc bag of a small amount of powder. 
+They said, "" Don't give it to any human, "" and they gave me a piece of paper which said it was a patent, and from that, we had to figure out a way to make this medicine. 
+A hundred chemists in the U.S. at the top universities all swore that little patent could never be turned into a medicine. 
+If it was turned into a medicine, it could never be delivered because it had a half-life of only 45 minutes. 
+CA: And yet, a year or two later, you were there with a medicine that worked for Jenesis. 
+MR: Chris, the astonishing thing is that this absolutely worthless piece of powder that had the sparkle of a promise of hope for Jenesis is not only keeping Jenesis and other people alive today, but produces almost a billion and a half dollars a year in revenue. 
+(Applause) CA: So here you go. 
+So you took this company public, right? 
+And made an absolute fortune. 
+And how much have you paid Glaxo, by the way, after that 25,000? 
+MR: Yeah, well, every year we pay them 10 percent of 1.5 billion, 150 million dollars, last year 100 million dollars. 
+It's the best return on investment they ever received. (Laughter) CA: And the best news of all, I guess, is this. 
+MR: Yes. Jenesis is an absolutely brilliant young lady. 
+She's alive, healthy today at 30. 
+You see me, Bina and Jenesis there. 
+The most amazing thing about Jenesis is that while she could do anything with her life, and believe me, if you grew up your whole life with people in your face saying that you've got a fatal disease, I would probably run to Tahiti and just not want to run into anybody again. 
+But instead she chooses to work in United Therapeutics. 
+She says she wants to do all she can to help other people with orphan diseases get medicines, and today, she's our project leader for all telepresence activities, where she helps digitally unite the entire company to work together to find cures for pulmonary hypertension. 
+CA: But not everyone who has this disease has been so fortunate. 
+There are still many people dying, and you are tackling that too. How? 
+MR: Exactly, Chris. There's some 3,000 people a year in the United States alone, perhaps 10 times that number worldwide, who continue to die of this illness because the medicines slow down the progression but they don't halt it. 
+The only cure for pulmonary hypertension, pulmonary fibrosis, cystic fibrosis, emphysema, COPD, what Leonard Nimoy just died of, is a lung transplant, but sadly, there are only enough available lungs for 2,000 people in the U.S. a year to get a lung transplant, whereas nearly a half million people a year die of end-stage lung failure. 
+CA: So how can you address that? 
+MR: So I conceptualize the possibility that just like we keep cars and planes and buildings going forever with an unlimited supply of building parts and machine parts, why can't we create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs to keep people living indefinitely, and especially people with lung disease. 
+So we've teamed up with the decoder of the human genome, Craig Venter, and the company he founded with Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X Prize, to genetically modify the pig genome so that the pig's organs will not be rejected by the human body and thereby to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. 
+We do this through our company, United Therapeutics. 
+MR: Absolutely, Chris. 
+I'm as certain of that as I was of the success that we've had with direct television broadcasting, Sirius XM. 
+It's actually not rocket science. 
+It's straightforward engineering away one gene after another. 
+We're so lucky to be born in the time that sequencing genomes is a routine activity, and the brilliant folks at Synthetic Genomics are able to zero in on the pig genome, find exactly the genes that are problematic, and fix them. 
+CA: But it's not just bodies that — though that is amazing. 
+(Applause) It's not just long-lasting bodies that are of interest to you now. 
+It's long-lasting minds. 
+And I think this graph for you says something quite profound. 
+What does this mean? 
+MR: What this graph means, and it comes from Ray Kurzweil, is that the rate of development in computer processing hardware, firmware and software, has been advancing along a curve such that by the 2020s, as we saw in earlier presentations today, there will be information technology that processes information and the world around us at the same rate as a human mind. 
+CA: And so that being so, you're actually getting ready for this world by believing that we will soon be able to, what, actually take the contents of our brains and somehow preserve them forever? 
+How do you describe that? 
+MR: Well, Chris, what we're working on is creating a situation where people can create a mind file, and a mind file is the collection of their mannerisms, personality, recollection, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values, everything that we've poured today into Google, into Amazon, into Facebook, and all of this information stored there will be able, in the next couple decades, once software is able to recapitulate consciousness, be able to revive the consciousness which is imminent in our mind file. 
+CA: Now you're not just messing around with this. 
+You're serious. I mean, who is this? 
+MR: This is a robot version of my beloved spouse, Bina. 
+And we call her Bina 48. 
+She was programmed by Hanson Robotics out of Texas. 
+There's the centerfold from National Geographic magazine with one of her caregivers, and she roams the web and has hundreds of hours of Bina's mannerisms, personalities. 
+She's kind of like a two-year-old kid, but she says things that blow people away, best expressed by perhaps a New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amy Harmon who says her answers are often frustrating, but other times as compelling as those of any flesh person she's interviewed. 
+CA: And is your thinking here, part of your hope here, is that this version of Bina can in a sense live on forever, or some future upgrade to this version can live on forever? 
+MR: Yes. Not just Bina, but everybody. 
+You know, it costs us virtually nothing to store our mind files on Facebook, Instagram, what-have-you. 
+Social media is I think one of the most extraordinary inventions of our time, and as apps become available that will allow us to out-Siri Siri, better and better, and develop consciousness operating systems, everybody in the world, billions of people, will be able to develop mind clones of themselves that will have their own life on the web. 
+CA: So the thing is, Martine, that in any normal conversation, this would sound stark-staring mad, but in the context of your life, what you've done, some of the things we've heard this week, the constructed realities that our minds give, I mean, you wouldn't bet against it. 
+MR: Well, I think it's really nothing coming from me. 
+If anything, I'm perhaps a bit of a communicator of activities that are being undertaken by the greatest companies in China, Japan, India, the U.S., Europe. 
+There are tens of millions of people working on writing code that expresses more and more aspects of our human consciousness, and you don't have to be a genius to see that all these threads are going to come together and ultimately create human consciousness, and it's something we'll value. 
+There are so many things to do in this life, and if we could have a simulacrum, a digital doppelgänger of ourselves that helps us process books, do shopping, be our best friends, I believe our mind clones, these digital versions of ourselves, will ultimately be our best friends, and for me personally and Bina personally, we love each other like crazy. 
+Each day, we are always saying, like, "" Wow, I love you even more than 30 years ago. 
+And so for us, the prospect of mind clones and regenerated bodies is that our love affair, Chris, can go on forever. 
+And we never get bored of each other. I'm sure we never will. 
+(Applause) Thank you, thank you. 
+Come and join Martine here. 
+I mean, look, when you got married, if someone had told you that, in a few years time, the man you were marrying would become a woman, and a few years after that, you would become a robot — (Laughter) — how has this gone? How has it been? 
+Bina Rothblatt: It's been really an exciting journey, and I would have never thought that at the time, but we started making goals and setting those goals and accomplishing things, and before you knew it, we just keep going up and up and we're still not stopping, so it's great. 
+CA: Martine told me something really beautiful, just actually on Skype before this, which was that he wanted to live for hundreds of years as a mind file, but not if it wasn't with you. 
+BR: That's right, we want to do it together. 
+We're cryonicists as well, and we want to wake up together. 
+CA: So just so as you know, from my point of view, this isn't only one of the most astonishing lives I have heard, it's one of the most astonishing love stories I've ever heard. 
+It's just a delight to have you both here at TED. 
+Thank you so much. 
+MR: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+For the last 20 years I've been designing puzzles. 
+And I'm here today to give you a little tour, starting from the very first puzzle I designed, through what I'm doing now. 
+I've designed puzzles for books, printed things. 
+I'm the puzzle columnist for Discover Magazine. 
+I've been doing that for about 10 years. 
+I have a monthly puzzle calendar. 
+I do toys. The bulk of my work is in computer games. 
+I did puzzles for "" Bejeweled. "" (Applause) I didn't invent "" Bejeweled. "" I can't take credit for that. 
+So, very first puzzle, sixth grade, my teacher said, "" Oh, let's see, that guy, he likes to make stuff. 
+I'll have him cut out letters out of construction paper for the board. "" I thought this was a great assignment. 
+And so here is what I came up with. I start fiddling with it. 
+I came up with this letter. This is a letter of the alphabet that's been folded just once. 
+The question is, which letter is it if I unfold it? 
+One hint: It's not "" L. "" (Laughter) It could be an "" L, "" of course. 
+So, what else could it be? 
+Yeah, a lot of you got it. 
+Oh yeah. So, clever thing. 
+Now, that was my first puzzle. I got hooked. 
+I created something new, I was very excited because, you know, I'd made crossword puzzles, but that's sort of like filling in somebody else's matrix. 
+This was something really original. I got hooked. 
+I read Martin Gardner's columns in Scientific American. 
+Went on, and eventually decided to devote myself, full time, to that. 
+Now, I should pause and say, what do I mean by puzzle? 
+A puzzle is a problem that is fun to solve and has a right answer. 
+"" Fun to solve, "" as opposed to everyday problems, which, frankly, are not very well-designed puzzles. 
+You know, they might have a solution. 
+It might take a long time. Nobody wrote down the rules clearly. 
+Who designed this? 
+It's like, you know, life is not a very well-written story so we have to hire writers to make movies. 
+Well, I take everyday problems, and I make puzzles out of them. 
+And "" right answer, "" of course there might be more than one right answer; many puzzles have more than one. 
+But as opposed to a couple other forms of play, toys and games — by toy I mean, something you play with that doesn't have a particular goal. 
+You can create one out of Legos. 
+You know, you can do anything you want. 
+Or competitive games like chess where, well, you're not trying to solve... You can make a chess puzzle, but the goal really is to beat another player. 
+I consider that puzzles are an art form. 
+They're very ancient. It goes back as long as there is written history. 
+It's a very small form, like a joke, a poem, a magic trick or a song, very compact form. 
+At worst, they're throwaways, they're for amusement. 
+But at best they can reach for something more and create a memorable impression. 
+The progression of my career that you'll see is looking for creating puzzles that have a memorable impact. 
+So, one thing I found early on, when I started doing computer games, is that I could create puzzles that will alter your perception. 
+I'll show you how. Here is a famous one. 
+So, it's two profiles in black, or a white vase in the middle. 
+This is called a figure-ground illusion. 
+The artist M.C. Escher exploited that in some of his wonderful prints. 
+Here we have "" Day and Night. "" Here is what I did with figure and ground. 
+So, here we have "" figure "" in black. 
+Here we have "" figure "" in white. 
+And it's all part of the same design. 
+The background to one is the other. 
+Originally I tried to do the words "" figure "" and "" ground. "" But I couldn't do that, I realized. I changed the problem. 
+It's all "" figure. "" (Laughter) A few other things. Here is my name. 
+And that turns into the title of my first book, "" Inversions. "" These sorts of designs now go by the word "" ambigram. "" I'll show you just a couple others. Here we have the numbers one through 10, the digits zero through nine, actually. 
+Each letter here is one of these digits. 
+Not strictly an ambigram in the conventional sense. 
+I like pushing on what an ambigram can mean. 
+Here's the word "" mirror. "" No, it's not the same upside-down. 
+It's the same this way. 
+And a marvelous fellow from the Media Lab who just got appointed head of RISD, is John Maeda. 
+And so I did this for him. It's sort of a visual canon. 
+(Laughter) And recently in Magic magazine I've done a number of ambigrams on magician's names. 
+So here we have Penn and Teller, same upside-down. 
+This appears in my puzzle calendar. 
+Okay, let's go back to the slides. 
+Thank you very much. 
+Now, those are fun to look at. 
+Now how would you do it interactively? 
+For a while I was an interface designer. 
+And so I think a lot about interaction. 
+Well, let's first of all simplify the vases illusion, make the thing on the right. 
+Now, if you could pick up the black vase, it would look like the figure on top. 
+If you could pick up the white area, it would look like the figure on the bottom. 
+Well, you can't do that physically, but on a computer you can do it. Let's switch over to the P.C. 
+And here it is, figure-ground. 
+The goal here is to take the pieces on the left and make them so they look like the shape on the right. 
+And this follows the rules I just said: any black area that is surrounded by white can be picked up. 
+But that is also true of any white area. 
+So, here we got the white area in the middle, and you can pick it up. 
+I'll just go one step further. 
+So, here is — here is a couple pieces. Move them together, and now this is an active piece. 
+You can really get inside somebody's perception and have them experience something. 
+It's like the old maxim of "" you can tell somebody something and show them, but if they do it they really learn it. "" Here is another thing you can do. 
+There is a game called Rush Hour. 
+This is one of the true masterpieces in puzzle design besides Rubik's cube. 
+So, here we have a crowded parking lot with cars all over the place. 
+The goal is to get the red car out. It's a sliding block puzzle. 
+It's made by the company Think Fun. 
+It's done very well. I love this puzzle. 
+Well, let's play one. Here. So, here is a very simple puzzle. 
+Well, that's too simple, let's add another piece. 
+Okay, so how would you solve this one? 
+Well, move the blue one out of the way. 
+Here, let's make it a little harder. Still pretty easy. 
+Now we'll make it harder, a little harder. 
+Now, this one is a little bit trickier. 
+You know? What do you do here? 
+The first move is going to be what? 
+You're going to move the blue one up in order to get the lavender one to the right. 
+And you can make puzzles like this one that aren't solvable at all. 
+Those four are locked in a pinwheel; you can't get them apart. 
+I wanted to make a sequel. 
+I didn't come up with the original idea. But this is another way I work as an inventor is to create a sequel. 
+I came up with this. This is Railroad Rush Hour. 
+It's the same basic game except I introduced a new piece, a square piece that can move both horizontally and vertically. 
+In the other game the cars can only move forward and back. 
+Created a whole bunch of levels for it. 
+Now I'm making it available to schools. 
+And it includes exercises that show you not just how to solve these puzzles, but how to extract the principles that will let you solve mathematical puzzles or problems in science, other areas. 
+So, I'm really interested in you learning how to make your own puzzles as well as just me creating them. 
+Garry Trudeau calls himself an investigative cartoonist. 
+You know, he does a lot of research before he writes a cartoon. 
+In Discover Magazine, I'm an investigative puzzle maker. 
+I got interested in gene sequencing. 
+And I said, "" Well, how on Earth can you come up with a sequence of the base pairs in DNA? "" Cut up the DNA, you sequence individual pieces, and then you look for overlaps, and you basically match them at the edges. And I said, "This is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces overlap." 
+So, here is what I created for Discover Magazine. 
+And it has to be solvable in a magazine. 
+You know, you can't cut out the pieces and move them around. 
+So, here is the nine pieces. And you're supposed to put them into this grid. 
+And you have to choose pieces that overlap on the edge. 
+There is only one solution. It's not that hard. 
+But it takes some persistence. 
+And when you're done, it makes this design, which, if you squint, is the word "" helix. "" So, that's the form of the puzzle coming out of the content, rather than the other way around. 
+Here is a couple more. Here is a physics-based puzzle. 
+Which way will these fall? 
+One of these weighs 50 pounds, 30 pounds and 10 pounds. 
+And depending on which one weighs which amount, they'll fall different directions. 
+And here is a puzzle based on color mixing. 
+I separated this image into cyan, magenta, yellow, black, the basic printing colors, and then mixed up the separations, and you get these peculiar pictures. 
+Which separations were mixed up to make those pictures? 
+Gets you thinking about color. 
+Finally, what I'm doing now. So, ShuffleBrain.com, website you can go visit, I joined up with my wife, Amy-Jo Kim. 
+She could easily be up here giving a talk about her work. 
+So, we're making smart games for social media. 
+I'll explain what that means. We're looking at three trends. 
+This is what's going on in the games industry right now. 
+First of all, you know, for a long time computer games meant things like "" Doom, "" where you're going around shooting things, very violent games, very fast, aimed at teenage boys. Right? That's who plays computer games. 
+Well, guess what? That's changing. 
+"" Bejeweled "" is a big hit. It was the game that really broke open what's called casual games. 
+And the main players are over 35, and are female. 
+Then recently "" Rock Band "" has been a big hit. 
+And it's a game you play with other people. 
+It's very physical. It looks nothing like a traditional game. 
+This is what's becoming the dominant form of electronic gaming. 
+Now, within that there is some interesting things happening. 
+There is also a trend towards games that are good for you. 
+Why? Well, we aging Boomers, Baby Boomers, we're eating our healthy food, we're exercising. What about our minds? 
+Oh no, our parents are getting Alzheimer's. We better do something. 
+Turns out doing crossword puzzles can stave off some of the effects of Alzheimer's. 
+So, we got games like "" Brain Age "" coming out for the Nintendo DS, huge hit. 
+A lot of people do Sudoku. In fact some doctors prescribe it. 
+And then there is social media, and what's happening on the Internet. 
+Everybody now considers themselves a creator, and not just a viewer. 
+And what does this add up to? 
+Here is what we see coming. 
+It's games that fit into a healthy lifestyle. 
+They're part of your life. They're not necessarily a separate thing. 
+And they are both, something that is good for you, and they're fun. 
+I'm a puzzle guy. My wife is an expert in social media. 
+And we decided to combine our skills. 
+Our first game is called "" Photo Grab. "" The game takes about a minute and 20 seconds. 
+This is your first time playing my game. Okay. 
+Let's see how well we can do. There are three images. 
+And we have 24 seconds each. 
+Where is that? 
+I'll play as fast as I can. 
+But if you can see it, shout out the answer. 
+You get more — Down, okay, yeah where is that? 
+Oh, yeah. There, okay. J-O and — I guess that's that part. We got the bow. That bow helps. 
+That's his hair. You get a lot of figure-ground problems. 
+Yeah, that one is easy. Okay. So, ahhh! Okay on to the next one. 
+Okay, so that's the lens. 
+Anybody? 
+Looks like a black shape. So, where is that? 
+That's the corner of the whole thing. 
+Yeah, I've played this image before, but even when I make up my own puzzles — and you can put your own images in here. 
+And we have people all over the world doing that now. 
+There we are. Visit ShuffleBrain.com if you want to try it yourself. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I want to help you re-perceive what philanthropy is, what it could be, and what your relationship to it is. 
+And in doing that, I want to offer you a vision, an imagined future, if you will, of how, as the poet Seamus Heaney has put it, "" Once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. "" I want to start with these word pairs here. 
+We all know which side of these we'd like to be on. 
+When philanthropy was reinvented a century ago, when the foundation form was actually invented, they didn't think of themselves on the wrong side of these either. 
+In fact they would never have thought of themselves as closed and set in their ways, as slow to respond to new challenges, as small and risk-averse. 
+And in fact they weren't. They were reinventing charity in those times, what Rockefeller called "" the business of benevolence. "" But by the end of the 20th century, a new generation of critics and reformers had come to see philanthropy just this way. 
+The thing to watch for as a global philanthropy industry comes about — and that's exactly what is happening — is how the aspiration is to flip these old assumptions, for philanthropy to become open and big and fast and connected, in service of the long term. 
+This entrepreneurial energy is emerging from many quarters. 
+And it's driven and propelled forward by new leaders, like many of the people here, by new tools, like the ones we've seen here, and by new pressures. 
+I've been following this change for quite a while now, and participating in it. 
+This report is our main public report. 
+What it tells is the story of how today actually could be as historic as 100 years ago. 
+What I want to do is share some of the coolest things that are going on with you. 
+And as I do that, I'm not going to dwell much on the very large philanthropy that everybody already knows about — the Gates or the Soros or the Google. 
+Instead, what I want to do is talk about the philanthropy of all of us: the democratization of philanthropy. 
+This is a moment in history when the average person has more power than at any time. 
+What I'm going to do is look at five categories of experiments, each of which challenges an old assumption of philanthropy. 
+The first is mass collaboration, represented here by Wikipedia. 
+Now, this may surprise you. 
+But remember, philanthropy is about giving of time and talent, not just money. 
+Clay Shirky, that great chronicler of everything networked, has captured the assumption that this challenges in such a beautiful way. 
+He said, "" We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. 
+Now we have Wikipedia. 
+Suddenly big things can be done for love. "" Watch, this spring, for Paul Hawken's new book — Author and entrepreneur many of you may know about. 
+The book is called "" Blessed Unrest. "" And when it comes out, a series of wiki sites under the label WISER, are going to launch at the same time. 
+WISER stands for World Index for Social and Environmental Responsibility. 
+WISER sets out to document, link and empower what Paul calls the largest movement, and fastest-growing movement in human history: humanity's collective immune response to today's threats. 
+Now, all of these big things for love — experiments — aren't going to take off. 
+But the ones that do are going to be the biggest, the most open, the fastest, the most connected form of philanthropy in human history. 
+Second category is online philanthropy marketplaces. 
+This is, of course, to philanthropy what eBay and Amazon are to commerce. 
+Think of it as peer-to-peer philanthropy. 
+And this challenges yet another assumption, which is that organized philanthropy is only for the very wealthy. 
+Take a look, if you haven't, at DonorsChoose. 
+Omidyar Network has made a big investment in DonorsChoose. 
+It's one of the best known of these new marketplaces where a donor can go straight into a classroom and connect with what a teacher says they need. 
+Take a look at Changing the Present, started by a TEDster, next time you need a wedding present or a holiday present. 
+GiveIndia is for a whole country. 
+And it goes on and on. 
+The third category is represented by Warren Buffet, which I call aggregated giving. 
+It's not just that Warren Buffet was so amazingly generous in that historic act last summer. 
+It's that he challenged another assumption, that every giver should have his or her own fund or foundation. 
+There are now, today, so many new funds that are aggregating giving and investing, bringing together people around a common goal, to think bigger. 
+One of the best known is Acumen Fund, led by Jacqueline Novogratz, a TEDster who got a big boost here at TED. 
+But there are many others: New Profit in Cambridge, New School's Venture Fund in Silicon Valley, Venture Philanthropy Partners in Washington, Global Fund for Women in San Francisco. 
+Take a look at these. 
+These funds are to philanthropy what venture capital, private equity, and eventually mutual funds are to investing, but with a twist — because often a community forms around these funds, as it has at Acumen and other places. 
+Now, imagine for a second these first three types of experiments: mass collaboration, online marketplaces, aggregated giving. 
+And understand how they help us re-perceive what organized philanthropy is. 
+It's not about foundations necessarily; it's about the rest of us. 
+And imagine the mash-up, if you will, of these things, in the future, when these things come together in the experiments of the future — imagine that somebody puts up, say, 100 million dollars for an inspiring goal — there were 21 gifts of 100 million dollars or more in the US last year, not out of the question — but only puts it up if it's matched by millions of small gifts from around the globe, thereby engaging lots of people, and building visibility and engaging people in the goal that's stated. 
+I'm going to look quickly at the fourth and fifth categories, which are innovation, competitions and social investing. 
+They're betting a visible competition, a prize, can attract talent and money to some of the most difficult issues, and thereby speed the solution. 
+This tackles yet another assumption, that the giver and the organization is at the center, as opposed to putting the problem at the center. 
+You can look to these innovators to help us especially with things that require technological or scientific solution. 
+That leaves the final category, social investing, which is really, anyway, the biggest of them all, represented here by Xigi.net. 
+And this, of course, tackles the biggest assumption of all, that business is business, and philanthropy is the vehicle of people who want to create change in the world. 
+Xigi is a new community site that's built by the community, linking and mapping this new social capital market. 
+It lists already 1,000 entities that are offering debt and equity for social enterprise. 
+So we can look to these innovators to help us remember that if we can leverage even a small amount of the capital that seeks a return, the good that can be driven could be astonishing. 
+Now, what's really interesting here is that we're not thinking our way into a new way of acting; we're acting our way into a new way of thinking. 
+Philanthropy is reorganizing itself before our very eyes. 
+And even though all of the experiments and all of the big givers don't yet fulfill this aspiration, I think this is the new zeitgeist: open, big, fast, connected, and, let us also hope, long. 
+We have got to realize that it is going to take a long time to do these things. 
+If we don't develop the stamina to stick with things — whatever it is you pick, stick with it — all of this stuff is just going to be, you know, a fad. 
+But I'm really hopeful. 
+And I'm hopeful because it's not only philanthropy that's reorganizing itself, it's also whole other portions of the social sector, and of business, that are busy challenging "" business as usual. "" And everywhere I go, including here at TED, I feel that there is a new moral hunger that is growing. 
+What we're seeing is people really wrestling to describe what is this new thing that's happening. 
+Words like "" philanthrocapitalism, "" and "" natural capitalism, "" and "" philanthroentrepreneur, "" and "" venture philanthropy. "" We don't have a language for it yet. 
+Whatever we call it, it's new, it's beginning, and I think it's gong to quite significant. 
+And that's where my imagined future comes in, which I am going to call the social singularity. 
+Many of you will realize that I'm ripping a bit off of the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge's notion of a technological singularity, where a number of trends accelerate and converge and come together to create, really, a shockingly new reality. 
+It may be that the social singularity ahead is the one that we fear the most: a convergence of catastrophes, of environmental degradation, of weapons of mass destruction, of pandemics, of poverty. 
+That's because our ability to confront the problems that we face has not kept pace with our ability to create them. 
+And as we've heard here, it is no exaggeration to say that we hold the future of our civilization in our hands as never before. 
+The question is, is there a positive social singularity? 
+Is there a frontier for us of how we live together? 
+Our future doesn't have to be imagined. 
+We can create a future where hope and history rhyme. 
+But we have a problem. 
+Our experience to date, both individually and collectively, hasn't prepared us for what we're going to need to do, or who we're going to need to be. 
+We are going to need a new generation of citizen leaders willing to commit ourselves to growing and changing and learning as rapidly as possible. 
+That's why I have one last thing I want to show you. 
+This is a photograph taken about 100 years ago of my grandfather and great-grandfather. 
+This is a newspaper publisher and a banker. 
+And they were great community leaders. 
+And, yes, they were great philanthropists. 
+I keep this photograph close by to me — it's in my office — because I've always felt a mystical connection to these two men, both of whom I never knew. 
+And so, in their honor, I want to offer you this blank slide. 
+And I want you to imagine that this a photograph of you. 
+And I want you to think about the community that you want to be part of creating. 
+Whatever that means to you. 
+And I want you to imagine that it's 100 years from now, and your grandchild, or great-grandchild, or niece or nephew or god-child, is looking at this photograph of you. 
+What is the story you most want for them to tell? 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And you can see that it's a lot cleaner burning of a cooking fuel. 
+One of the really exciting things, though, is something that came out of the trip that I took to Ghana just last month. 
+I have a few areas that I believe are especially important that we address. 
+So you can't use the same models that you use in the United States for making things move forward. 
+
+Well, indeed, I'm very, very lucky. 
+My talk essentially got written by three historic events that happened within days of each other in the last two months — seemingly unrelated, but as you will see, actually all having to do with the story I want to tell you today. 
+The first one was actually a funeral — to be more precise, a reburial. 
+On May 22nd, there was a hero's reburial in Frombork, Poland of the 16th-century astronomer who actually changed the world. 
+He did that, literally, by replacing the Earth with the Sun in the center of the Solar System, and then with this simple-looking act, he actually launched a scientific and technological revolution, which many call the Copernican Revolution. 
+Now that was, ironically, and very befittingly, the way we found his grave. 
+As it was the custom of the time, Copernicus was actually simply buried in an unmarked grave, together with 14 others in that cathedral. 
+DNA analysis, one of the hallmarks of the scientific revolution of the last 400 years that he started, was the way we found which set of bones actually belonged to the person who read all those astronomical books which were filled with leftover hair that was Copernicus' hair — obviously not many other people bothered to read these books later on. 
+That match was unambiguous. 
+The DNA matched, and we know that this was indeed Nicolaus Copernicus. 
+Now, the connection between biology and DNA and life is very tantalizing when you talk about Copernicus because, even back then, his followers very quickly made the logical step to ask: if the Earth is just a planet, then what about planets around other stars? 
+What about the idea of the plurality of the worlds, about life on other planets? 
+In fact, I'm borrowing here from one of those very popular books of the time. 
+And at the time, people actually answered that question positively: "" Yes. "" But there was no evidence. 
+And here begins 400 years of frustration, of unfulfilled dreams — the dreams of Galileo, Giordano Bruno, many others — which never led to the answer of those very basic questions which humanity has asked all the time. 
+"" What is life? What is the origin of life? 
+Are we alone? "" And that especially happened in the last 10 years, at the end of the 20th century, when the beautiful developments due to molecular biology, understanding the code of life, DNA, all of that seemed to actually put us, not closer, but further apart from answering those basic questions. 
+Now, the good news. 
+A lot has happened in the last few years, and let's start with the planets. 
+Let's start with the old Copernican question: Are there earths around other stars? 
+And as we already heard, there is a way in which we are trying, and now able, to answer that question. 
+It's a new telescope. 
+Our team, befittingly I think, named it after one of those dreamers of the Copernican time, Johannes Kepler, and that telescope's sole purpose is to go out, find the planets that orbit other stars in our galaxy, and tell us how often do planets like our own Earth happen to be out there. 
+The telescope is actually built similarly to the, well-known to you, Hubble Space Telescope, except it does have an additional lens — a wide-field lens, as you would call it as a photographer. 
+And if, in the next couple of months, you walk out in the early evening and look straight up and place you palm like this, you will actually be looking at the field of the sky where this telescope is searching for planets day and night, without any interruption, for the next four years. 
+The way we do that, actually, is with a method, which we call the transit method. 
+It's actually mini-eclipses that occur when a planet passes in front of its star. 
+Not all of the planets will be fortuitously oriented for us to be able do that, but if you have a million stars, you'll find enough planets. 
+And as you see on this animation, what Kepler is going to detect is just the dimming of the light from the star. 
+We are not going to see the image of the star and the planet as this. 
+All the stars for Kepler are just points of light. 
+But we learn a lot from that: not only that there is a planet there, but we also learn its size. 
+How much of the light is being dimmed depends on how big the planet is. 
+We learn about its orbit, the period of its orbit and so on. 
+So, what have we learned? 
+Well, let me try to walk you through what we actually see and so you understand the news that I'm here to tell you today. 
+What Kepler does is discover a lot of candidates, which we then follow up and find as planets, confirm as planets. 
+It basically tells us this is the distribution of planets in size. 
+There are small planets, there are bigger planets, there are big planets, okay. 
+So we count many, many such planets, and they have different sizes. 
+We do that in our solar system. 
+In fact, even back during the ancients, the Solar System in that sense would look on a diagram like this. 
+There will be the smaller planets, and there will be the big planets, even back to the time of Epicurus and then of course Copernicus and his followers. 
+Up until recently, that was the Solar System — four Earth-like planets with small radius, smaller than about two times the size of the Earth — and that was of course Mercury, Venus, Mars, and of course the Earth, and then the two big, giant planets. 
+Then the Copernican Revolution brought in telescopes, and of course three more planets were discovered. 
+Now the total planet number in our solar system was nine. 
+The small planets dominated, and there was a certain harmony to that, which actually Copernicus was very happy to note, and Kepler was one of the big proponents of. 
+So now we have Pluto to join the numbers of small planets. 
+But up until, literally, 15 years ago, that was all we knew about planets. 
+And that's what the frustration was. 
+The Copernican dream was unfulfilled. 
+Finally, 15 years ago, the technology came to the point where we could discover a planet around another star, and we actually did pretty well. 
+In the next 15 years, almost 500 planets were discovered orbiting other stars, with different methods. 
+Unfortunately, as you can see, there was a very different picture. 
+There was of course an explanation for it: We only see the big planets, so that's why most of those planets are really in the category of "" like Jupiter. "" But you see, we haven't gone very far. 
+We were still back where Copernicus was. 
+We didn't have any evidence whether planets like the Earth are out there. 
+And we do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive. 
+And we didn't have the evidence for that. 
+So today, I'm here to actually give you a first glimpse of what the new telescope, Kepler, has been able to tell us in the last few weeks, and, lo and behold, we are back to the harmony and to fulfilling the dreams of Copernicus. 
+You can see here, the small planets dominate the picture. 
+The planets which are marked "" like Earth, "" [are] definitely more than any other planets that we see. 
+And now for the first time, we can say that. 
+There is a lot more work we need to do with this. 
+Most of these are candidates. 
+In the next few years we will confirm them. 
+But the statistical result is loud and clear. 
+And the statistical result is that planets like our own Earth are out there. 
+Our own Milky Way Galaxy is rich in this kind of planets. 
+So the question is: what do we do next? 
+Well, first of all, we can study them now that we know where they are. 
+And we can find those that we would call habitable, meaning that they have similar conditions to the conditions that we experience here on Earth and where a lot of complex chemistry can happen. 
+So, we can even put a number to how many of those planets now do we expect our own Milky Way Galaxy harbors. 
+And the number, as you might expect, is pretty staggering. 
+It's about 100 million such planets. 
+That's great news. Why? 
+Because with our own little telescope, just in the next two years, we'll be able to identify at least 60 of them. 
+So that's great because then we can go and study them — remotely, of course — with all the techniques that we already have tested in the past five years. 
+We can find what they're made of, would their atmospheres have water, carbon dioxide, methane. 
+We know and expect that we'll see that. 
+That's great, but that is not the whole news. 
+That's not why I'm here. 
+Why I'm here is to tell you that the next step is really the exciting part. 
+The one that this step is enabling us to do is coming next. 
+And here comes biology — biology, with its basic question, which still stands unanswered, which is essentially: "" If there is life on other planets, do we expect it to be like life on Earth? "" And let me immediately tell you here, when I say life, I don't mean "" dolce vita, "" good life, human life. 
+I really mean life on Earth, past and present, from microbes to us humans, in its rich molecular diversity, the way we now understand life on Earth as being a set of molecules and chemical reactions — and we call that, collectively, biochemistry, life as a chemical process, as a chemical phenomenon. 
+So the question is: is that chemical phenomenon universal, or is it something which depends on the planet? 
+Is it like gravity, which is the same everywhere in the universe, or there would be all kinds of different biochemistries wherever we find them? 
+We need to know what we are looking for when we try to do that. 
+And that's a very basic question, which we don't know the answer to, but which we can try — and we are trying — to answer in the lab. 
+We don't need to go to space to answer that question. 
+And so, that's what we are trying to do. 
+And that's what many people now are trying to do. 
+And a lot of the good news comes from that part of the bridge that we are trying to build as well. 
+So this is one example that I want to show you here. 
+When we think of what is necessary for the phenomenon that we call life, we think of compartmentalization, keeping the molecules which are important for life in a membrane, isolated from the rest of the environment, but yet, in an environment in which they actually could originate together. 
+And in one of our labs, Jack Szostak's labs, it was a series of experiments in the last four years that showed that the environments — which are very common on planets, on certain types of planets like the Earth, where you have some liquid water and some clays — you actually end up with naturally available molecules which spontaneously form bubbles. 
+But those bubbles have membranes very similar to the membrane of every cell of every living thing on Earth looks like, like this. 
+And they really help molecules, like nucleic acids, like RNA and DNA, stay inside, develop, change, divide and do some of the processes that we call life. 
+Now this is just an example to tell you the pathway in which we are trying to answer that bigger question about the universality of the phenomenon. 
+And in a sense, you can think of that work that people are starting to do now around the world as building a bridge, building a bridge from two sides of the river. 
+On one hand, on the left bank of the river, are the people like me who study those planets and try to define the environments. 
+We don't want to go blind because there's too many possibilities, and there is not too much lab, and there is not enough human time to actually to do all the experiments. 
+So that's what we are building from the left side of the river. 
+From the right bank of the river are the experiments in the lab that I just showed you, where we actually tried that, and it feeds back and forth, and we hope to meet in the middle one day. 
+So why should you care about that? 
+Why am I trying to sell you a half-built bridge? 
+Am I that charming? 
+Well, there are many reasons, and you heard some of them in the short talk today. 
+This understanding of chemistry actually can help us with our daily lives. 
+But there is something more profound here, something deeper. 
+And that deeper, underlying point is that science is in the process of redefining life as we know it. 
+And that is going to change our worldview in a profound way — not in a dissimilar way as 400 years ago, Copernicus' act did, by changing the way we view space and time. 
+Now it's about something else, but it's equally profound. 
+And half the time, what's happened is it's related this kind of sense of insignificance to humankind, to the Earth in a bigger space. 
+And the more we learn, the more that was reinforced. 
+You've all learned that in school — how small the Earth is compared to the immense universe. 
+And the bigger the telescope, the bigger that universe becomes. 
+And look at this image of the tiny, blue dot. 
+This pixel is the Earth. 
+It is the Earth as we know it. 
+It is seen from, in this case, from outside the orbit of Saturn. 
+But it's really tiny. 
+We know that. 
+Let's think of life as that entire planet because, in a sense, it is. 
+The biosphere is the size of the Earth. 
+Life on Earth is the size of the Earth. 
+And let's compare it to the rest of the world in spatial terms. 
+What if that Copernican insignificance was actually all wrong? 
+Would that make us more responsible for what is happening today? 
+Let's actually try that. 
+So in space, the Earth is very small. 
+Can you imagine how small it is? 
+Let me try it. 
+Okay, let's say this is the size of the observable universe, with all the galaxies, with all the stars, okay, from here to here. 
+Do you know what the size of life in this necktie will be? 
+It will be the size of a single, small atom. 
+It is unimaginably small. 
+We can't imagine it. 
+I mean look, you can see the necktie, but you can't even imagine seeing the size of a little, small atom. 
+But that's not the whole story, you see. 
+The universe and life are both in space and time. 
+If that was the age of the universe, then this is the age of life on Earth. 
+Think about those oldest living things on Earth, but in a cosmic proportion. 
+This is not insignificant. 
+This is very significant. 
+So life might be insignificant in size, but it is not insignificant in time. 
+Life and the universe compare to each other like a child and a parent, parent and offspring. 
+So what does this tell us? 
+This tells us that that insignificance paradigm that we somehow got to learn from the Copernican principle, it's all wrong. 
+There is immense, powerful potential in life in this universe — especially now that we know that places like the Earth are common. 
+And that potential, that powerful potential, is also our potential, of you and me. 
+And if we are to be stewards of our planet Earth and its biosphere, we'd better understand the cosmic significance and do something about it. 
+And the good news is we can actually, indeed do it. 
+And let's do it. 
+Let's start this new revolution at the tail end of the old one, with synthetic biology being the way to transform both our environment and our future. 
+And let's hope that we can build this bridge together and meet in the middle. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So today, I want us to reflect on the demise of guys. 
+Guys are flaming out academically; they're wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women. 
+Other than that, there's not much of a problem. 
+So what's the data? 
+So the data on dropping out is amazing. 
+Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school. 
+In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls. 
+Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school. 
+There's a 10 percent differential between getting BA's and all graduate programs, with guys falling behind girls. 
+Two-thirds of all students in special ed. remedial programs are guys. 
+And as you all know, boys are five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention deficit disorder — and therefore we drug them with Ritalin. 
+What's the evidence of wiping out? 
+First, it's a new fear of intimacy. 
+Intimacy means physical, emotional connection with somebody else — and especially with somebody of the opposite sex who gives off ambiguous, contradictory, phosphorescent signals. 
+(Laughter) And every year there's research done on self-reported shyness among college students. 
+And we're seeing a steady increase among males. 
+And this is two kinds. 
+It's a social awkwardness. 
+The old shyness was a fear of rejection. 
+It's a social awkwardness like you're a stranger in a foreign land. 
+They don't know what to say, they don't know what to do, especially one-on-one [with the] opposite sex. 
+They don't know the language of face contact, the non-verbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk to somebody else, listen to somebody else. 
+There's something I'm developing here called social intensity syndrome, which tries to account for why guys really prefer male bonding over female mating. 
+It turns out, from earliest childhood, boys, and then men, prefer the company of guys — physical company. 
+And there's actually a cortical arousal we're looking at, because guys have been with guys in teams, in clubs, in gangs, in fraternities, especially in the military, and then in pubs. 
+And this peaks at Super Bowl Sunday when guys would rather be in a bar with strangers, watching a totally overdressed Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers, rather than Jennifer Lopez totally naked in the bedroom. 
+The problem is they now prefer [the] asynchronistic Internet world to the spontaneous interaction in social relationships. 
+What are the causes? Well, it's an unintended consequence. 
+I think it's excessive Internet use in general, excessive video gaming, excessive new access to pornography. 
+The problem is these are arousal addictions. 
+Drug addiction, you simply want more. 
+Arousal addiction, you want different. 
+Drugs, you want more of the same — different. 
+So you need the novelty in order for the arousal to be sustained. 
+And the problem is the industry is supplying it. 
+Jane McGonigal told us last year that by the time a boy is 21, he's played 10,000 hours of video games, most of that in isolation. 
+As you remember, Cindy Gallop said men don't know the difference between making love and doing porn. 
+The average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week. 
+And there's some guy watching a hundred, obviously. 
+(Laughter) And the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America — 15 billion annually. 
+For every 400 movies made in Hollywood, there are 11,000 now made porn videos. 
+So the effect, very quickly, is it's a new kind of arousal. 
+Boys' brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. 
+That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive. 
+They're also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which build gradually and subtly. 
+So what's the solution? It's not my job. 
+I'm here to alarm. It's your job to solve. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) But who should care? The only people who should care about this is parents of boys and girls, educators, gamers, filmmakers and women who would like a real man who they can talk to, who can dance, who can make love slowly and contribute to the evolutionary pressures to keep our species above banana slugs. 
+No offense to banana slug owners. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm an underwater explorer, more specifically a cave diver. 
+I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a little kid, but growing up in Canada as a young girl, that wasn't really available to me. 
+But as it turns out, we know a lot more about space than we do about the underground waterways coursing through our planet, the very lifeblood of Mother Earth. 
+So I decided to do something that was even more remarkable. 
+Instead of exploring outer space, I wanted to explore the wonders of inner space. 
+Now, a lot of people will tell you that cave diving is perhaps one of the most dangerous endeavors. 
+I mean, imagine yourself here in this room, if you were suddenly plunged into blackness, with your only job to find the exit, sometimes swimming through these large spaces, and at other times crawling beneath the seats, following a thin guideline, just waiting for the life support to provide your very next breath. 
+Well, that's my workplace. 
+But what I want to teach you today is that our world is not one big solid rock. 
+It's a whole lot more like a sponge. 
+I can swim through a lot of the pores in our earth's sponge, but where I can't, other life-forms and other materials can make that journey without me. 
+And my voice is the one that's going to teach you about the inside of Mother Earth. 
+There was no guidebook available to me when I decided to be the first person to cave dive inside Antarctic icebergs. 
+In 2000, this was the largest moving object on the planet. 
+It calved off the Ross Ice Shelf, and we went down there to explore ice edge ecology and search for life-forms beneath the ice. 
+We use a technology called rebreathers. 
+It's an awful lot like the same technology that is used for space walks. 
+This technology enables us to go deeper than we could've imagined even 10 years ago. 
+We use exotic gases, and we can make missions even up to 20 hours long underwater. 
+I work with biologists. 
+It turns out that caves are repositories of amazing life-forms, species that we never knew existed before. 
+Many of these life-forms live in unusual ways. 
+They have no pigment and no eyes in many cases, and these animals are also extremely long-lived. 
+In fact, animals swimming in these caves today are identical in the fossil record that predates the extinction of the dinosaurs. 
+So imagine that: these are like little swimming dinosaurs. 
+What can they teach us about evolution and survival? 
+When we look at an animal like this remipede swimming in the jar, he has giant fangs with venom. 
+He can actually attack something 40 times his size and kill it. 
+If he were the size of a cat, he'd be the most dangerous thing on our planet. 
+And these animals live in remarkably beautiful places, and in some cases, caves like this, that are very young, yet the animals are ancient. 
+How did they get there? 
+I also work with physicists, and they're interested oftentimes in global climate change. 
+They can take rocks within the caves, and they can slice them and look at the layers within with rocks, much like the rings of a tree, and they can count back in history and learn about the climate on our planet at very different times. 
+The red that you see in this photograph is actually dust from the Sahara Desert. 
+So it's been picked up by wind, blown across the Atlantic Ocean. 
+It's rained down in this case on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas. 
+And when we look back in the layers of these rocks, we can find times when the climate was very, very dry on earth, and we can go back many hundreds of thousands of years. 
+Paleoclimatologists are also interested in where the sea level stands were at other times on earth. 
+Here in Bermuda, my team and I embarked on the deepest manned dives ever conducted in the region, and we were looking for places where the sea level used to lap up against the shoreline, many hundreds of feet below current levels. 
+I also get to work with paleontologists and archaeologists. 
+In places like Mexico, in the Bahamas, and even in Cuba, we're looking at cultural remains and also human remains in caves, and they tell us a lot about some of the earliest inhabitants of these regions. 
+But my very favorite project of all was over 15 years ago, when I was a part of the team that made the very first accurate, three-dimensional map of a subterranean surface. 
+This device that I'm driving through the cave was actually creating a three-dimensional model as we drove it. 
+So I swam under houses and businesses and bowling alleys and golf courses, and even under a Sonny's BBQ Restaurant, Pretty remarkable, and what that taught me was that everything we do on the surface of our earth will be returned to us to drink. 
+Our water planet is not just rivers, lakes and oceans, but it's this vast network of groundwater that knits us all together. 
+It's a shared resource from which we all drink. 
+And when we can understand our human connections with our groundwater and all of our water resources on this planet, then we'll be working on the problem that's probably the most important issue of this century. 
+So I never got to be that astronaut that I always wanted to be, but this mapping device, designed by Dr. Bill Stone, will be. 
+It's actually morphed. 
+It's now a self-swimming autonomous robot, artificially intelligent, and its ultimate goal is to go to Jupiter's moon Europa and explore oceans beneath the frozen surface of that body. 
+And that's pretty amazing. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is my first time at TED. Normally, as an advertising man, I actually speak at TED Evil, which is TED's secret sister that pays all the bills. 
+It's held every two years in Burma. 
+And I particularly remember a really good speech by Kim Jong Il on how to get teens smoking again. 
+(Laughter) But, actually, it's suddenly come to me after years working in the business, that what we create in advertising, which is intangible value — you might call it perceived value, you might call it badge value, subjective value, intangible value of some kind — gets rather a bad rap. 
+If you think about it, if you want to live in a world in the future where there are fewer material goods, you basically have two choices. 
+You can either live in a world which is poorer, which people in general don't like. 
+Or you can live in a world where actually intangible value constitutes a greater part of overall value, that actually intangible value, in many ways is a very, very fine substitute for using up labor or limited resources in the creation of things. 
+Here is one example. This is a train which goes from London to Paris. 
+The question was given to a bunch of engineers, about 15 years ago, "" How do we make the journey to Paris better? "" And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast, and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time. 
+Now, call me Mister Picky. I'm just an ad man... 
+... but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter. 
+Now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks? 
+Here is my naive advertising man's suggestion. 
+What you should in fact do is employ all of the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Now, you'll still have about three billion pounds left in change, and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down. (Laughter) 
+Now, here is another naive advertising man's question again. 
+And this shows that engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually most problems, once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception. 
+So I'll ask you another question. 
+What on earth is wrong with placebos? 
+They seem fantastic to me. They cost very little to develop. 
+They work extraordinarily well. 
+They have no side effects, or if they do, they're imaginary, so you can safely ignore them. 
+(Laughter) So I was discussing this. And I actually went to the Marginal Revolution blog by Tyler Cowen. I don't know if anybody knows it. 
+Someone was actually suggesting that you can take this concept further, and actually produce placebo education. 
+The point is that education doesn't actually work by teaching you things. 
+It actually works by giving you the impression that you've had a very good education, which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence, which then makes you very, very successful in later life. 
+So, welcome to Oxford, ladies and gentlemen. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) But, actually, the point of placebo education is interesting. 
+How many problems of life can be solved actually by tinkering with perception, rather than that tedious, hardworking and messy business of actually trying to change reality? 
+Here's a great example from history. I've heard this attributed to several other kings, but doing a bit of historical research, it seems to be Fredrick the Great. 
+Fredrick the Great of Prussia was very, very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread. 
+And you get a far lower risk of famine, because you actually had two crops to fall back on, not one. 
+The only problem is: potatoes, if you think about it, look pretty disgusting. 
+And also, 18th century Prussians ate very, very few vegetables — rather like contemporary Scottish people. 
+(Laughter) So, actually, he tried making it compulsory. 
+The Prussian peasantry said, "" We can't even get the dogs to eat these damn things. 
+They are absolutely disgusting and they're good for nothing. "" There are even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes. 
+So he tried plan B. 
+He tried the marketing solution, which is he declared the potato as a royal vegetable, and none but the royal family could consume it. 
+And he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with secret instructions not to guard it very well. 
+(Laughter) Now, 18th century peasants know that there is one pretty safe rule in life, which is if something is worth guarding, it's worth stealing. 
+Before long, there was a massive underground potato-growing operation in Germany. 
+What he'd effectively done is he'd re-branded the potato. 
+It was an absolute masterpiece. 
+I told this story and a gentleman from Turkey came up to me and said, "Very, very good marketer, Fredrick the Great. But not a patch on Ataturk." 
+Ataturk, rather like Nicolas Sarkozy, was very keen to discourage the wearing of a veil, in Turkey, to modernize it. 
+Now, boring people would have just simply banned the veil. 
+But that would have ended up with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance. 
+Ataturk was a lateral thinker. 
+He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I can't verify that fully, but it does not matter. 
+There is your environmental problem solved, by the way, guys: All convicted child molesters have to drive a Porsche Cayenne. 
+(Laughter) What Ataturk realized actually is two very fundamental things. 
+Which is that, actually, first one, all value is actually relative. 
+All value is perceived value. 
+For those of you who don't speak Spanish, jugo de naranja — it's actually the Spanish for "" orange juice. "" Because actually it's not the dollar. It's actually the peso in Buenos Aires. Very clever Buenos Aires street vendors decided to practice price discrimination to the detriment of any passing gringo tourists. 
+As an advertising man, I have to admire that. 
+But the first thing is that all value is subjective. 
+Second point is that persuasion is often better than compulsion. 
+These funny signs that flash your speed at you, some of the new ones, on the bottom right, now actually show a smiley face or a frowny face, to act as an emotional trigger. 
+What's fascinating about these signs is they cost about 10 percent of the running cost of a conventional speed camera, but they prevent twice as many accidents. 
+So, the bizarre thing, which is baffling to conventional, classically trained economists, is that a weird little smiley face has a better effect on changing your behavior than the threat of a £60 fine and three penalty points. 
+Tiny little behavioral economics detail: in Italy, penalty points go backwards. 
+You start with 12 and they take them away. 
+Because they found that loss aversion is a more powerful influence on people's behavior. 
+In Britain we tend to feel, "" Whoa! Got another three! "" Not so in Italy. 
+Another fantastic case of creating intangible value to replace actual or material value, which remember, is what, after all, the environmental movement needs to be about: This again is from Prussia, from, I think, about 1812, 1813. 
+The wealthy Prussians, to help in the war against the French, were encouraged to give in all their jewelry. 
+And it was replaced with replica jewelry made of cast iron. 
+Here's one: "" Gold gab ich für Eisen, 1813. "" The interesting thing is that for 50 years hence, the highest status jewelry you could wear in Prussia wasn't made of gold or diamonds. 
+It was made of cast iron. 
+Because actually, never mind the actual intrinsic value of having gold jewelry. This actually had symbolic value, badge value. 
+It said that your family had made a great sacrifice in the past. 
+So, the modern equivalent would of course be this. 
+(Laughter) But, actually, there is a thing, just as there are Veblen goods, where the value of the good depends on it being expensive and rare — there are opposite kind of things where actually the value in them depends on them being ubiquitous, classless and minimalistic. 
+If you think about it, Shakerism was a proto-environmental movement. 
+Adam Smith talks about 18th century America, where the prohibition against visible displays of wealth was so great, it was almost a block in the economy in New England, because even wealthy farmers could find nothing to spend their money on without incurring the displeasure of their neighbors. 
+It's perfectly possible to create these social pressures which lead to more egalitarian societies. 
+What's also interesting, if you look at products that have a high component of what you might call messaging value, a high component of intangible value, versus their intrinsic value: They are often quite egalitarian. 
+In terms of dress, denim is perhaps the perfect example of something which replaces material value with symbolic value. 
+Coca-Cola. A bunch of you may be a load of pinkos, and you may not like the Coca-Cola company, but it's worth remembering Andy Warhol's point about Coke. 
+What Warhol said about Coke is, he said, "" What I really like about Coca-Cola is the president of the United States can't get a better Coke than the bum on the corner of the street. "" Now, that is, actually, when you think about it — we take it for granted — it's actually a remarkable achievement, to produce something that's that democratic. 
+Now, we basically have to change our views slightly. 
+There is a basic view that real value involves making things, involves labor. It involves engineering. 
+It involves limited raw materials. 
+And that what we add on top is kind of false. It's a fake version. 
+And there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainly about it. 
+It patently veers toward propaganda. 
+However, what we do have now is a much more variegated media ecosystem in which to kind of create this kind of value, and it's much fairer. 
+When I grew up, this was basically the media environment of my childhood as translated into food. 
+You had a monopoly supplier. On the left, you have Rupert Murdoch, or the BBC. 
+(Laughter) And on your right you have a dependent public which is pathetically grateful for anything you give it. (Laughter) 
+Nowadays, the user is actually involved. 
+This is actually what's called, in the digital world, "" user-generated content. "" Although it's called agriculture in the world of food. 
+(Laughter) This is actually called a mash-up, where you take content that someone else has produced and you do something new with it. 
+In the world of food we call it cooking. 
+This is food 2.0, which is food you produce for the purpose of sharing it with other people. 
+This is mobile food. British are very good at that. 
+Fish and chips in newspaper, the Cornish Pasty, the pie, the sandwich. 
+We invented the whole lot of them. 
+We're not very good at food in general. Italians do great food, but it's not very portable, generally. 
+(Laughter) I only learned this the other day. The Earl of Sandwich didn't invent the sandwich. 
+He actually invented the toasty. But then, the Earl of Toasty would be a ridiculous name. 
+(Laughter) Finally, we have contextual communication. 
+Now, the reason I show you Pernod — it's only one example. 
+Every country has a contextual alcoholic drink. In France it's Pernod. 
+It tastes great within the borders of that country, but absolute shite if you take it anywhere else. 
+(Laughter) Unicum in Hungary, for example. 
+The Greeks have actually managed to produce something called Retsina, which even tastes shite when you're in Greece. 
+(Laughter) But so much communication now is contextual that the capacity for actually nudging people, for giving them better information — B.J. Fogg, at the University of Stanford, makes the point that actually the mobile phone is — He's invented the phrase, "" persuasive technologies. "" He believes the mobile phone, by being location-specific, contextual, timely and immediate, is simply the greatest persuasive technology device ever invented. 
+Now, if we have all these tools at our disposal, we simply have to ask the question, and Thaler and Sunstein have, of how we can use these more intelligently. 
+I'll give you one example. 
+If you had a large red button of this kind, on the wall of your home, and every time you pressed it, it saved 50 dollars for you, put 50 dollars into your pension, you would save a lot more. 
+The reason is that the interface fundamentally determines the behavior. Okay? 
+Now, marketing has done a very, very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying. 
+Yet we've never created the opportunity for impulse saving. 
+If you did this, more people would save more. 
+It's simply a question of changing the interface by which people make decisions, and the very nature of the decisions changes. 
+Obviously, I don't want people to do this, because as an advertising man I tend to regard saving as just consumerism needlessly postponed. 
+(Laughter) But if anybody did want to do that, that's the kind of thing we need to be thinking about, actually: fundamental opportunities to change human behavior. 
+Now, I've got an example here from Canada. 
+There was a young intern at Ogilvy Canada called Hunter Somerville, who was working in improv in Toronto, and got a part-time job in advertising, and was given the job of advertising Shreddies. 
+Now this is the most perfect case of creating intangible, added value, without changing the product in the slightest. 
+Shreddies is a strange, square, whole-grain cereal, only available in New Zealand, Canada and Britain. 
+It's Kraft's peculiar way of rewarding loyalty to the crown. 
+(Laughter) In working out how you could re-launch Shreddies, he came up with this. 
+Video: (Buzzer) Man: Shreddies is supposed to be square. 
+(Laughter) Woman: Have any of these diamond shapes gone out? (Laughter) 
+Voiceover: New Diamond Shreddies cereal. 
+Same 100 percent whole-grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape. 
+(Applause) Rory Sutherland: I'm not sure this isn't the most perfect example of intangible value creation. All it requires is photons, neurons, and a great idea to create this thing. 
+I would say it's a work of genius. 
+But, naturally, you can't do this kind of thing without a little bit of market research. 
+Man: So, Shreddies is actually producing a new product, which is something very exciting for them. 
+So they are introducing new Diamond Shreddies. 
+(Laughter) So I just want to get your first impressions when you see that, when you see the Diamond Shreddies box there. (Laughter) 
+Woman: Weren't they square? 
+Woman # 2: I'm a little bit confused. Woman # 3: They look like the squares to me. 
+Man: They — Yeah, it's all in the appearance. 
+But it's kind of like flipping a six or a nine. Like a six, if you flip it over it looks like a nine. 
+But a six is very different from a nine. 
+Woman # 3: Or an "" M "" and a "" W "". Man: An "" M "" and a "" W "", exactly. 
+Man # 2: [unclear] You just looked like you turned it on its end. But when you see it like that it's more interesting looking. 
+Man: Just try both of them. 
+Take a square one there, first. 
+(Laughter) Man: Which one did you prefer? Man # 2: The first one. 
+Man: The first one? 
+(Laughter) Rory Sutherland: Now, naturally, a debate raged. 
+There were conservative elements in Canada, unsurprisingly, who actually resented this intrusion. 
+So, eventually, the manufacturers actually arrived at a compromise, which was the combo pack. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) If you think it's funny, bear in mind there is an organization called the American Institute of Wine Economics, which actually does extensive research into perception of things, and discovers that except for among perhaps five or ten percent of the most knowledgeable people, there is no correlation between quality and enjoyment in wine, except when you tell the people how expensive it is, in which case they tend to enjoy the more expensive stuff more. 
+So drink your wine blind in the future. 
+But this is both hysterically funny — but I think an important philosophical point, which is, going forward, we need more of this kind of value. 
+We need to spend more time appreciating what already exists, and less time agonizing over what else we can do. 
+Two quotations to more or less end with. 
+One of them is, "" Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new. "" Which isn't a bad definition of what our job is, to help people appreciate what is unfamiliar, but also to gain a greater appreciation, and place a far higher value on those things which are already existing. 
+There is some evidence, by the way, that things like social networking help do that. 
+Because they help people share news. 
+They give badge value to everyday little trivial activities. 
+So they actually reduce the need for actually spending great money on display, and increase the kind of third-party enjoyment you can get from the smallest, simplest things in life. Which is magic. 
+The second one is the second G.K. Chesterton quote of this session, which is, "" We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders, "" which I think for anybody involved in technology, is perfectly true. 
+And a final thing: When you place a value on things like health, love, sex and other things, and learn to place a material value on what you've previously discounted for being merely intangible, a thing not seen, you realize you're much, much wealthier than you ever imagined. 
+Thank you very much indeed. 
+(Applause) 
+
+A tourist is backpacking through the highlands of Scotland, and he stops at a pub to get a drink. 
+And the only people in there is a bartender and an old man nursing a beer. 
+And he orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while. 
+And suddenly the old man turns to him and goes, "" You see this bar? 
+I built this bar with my bare hands from the finest wood in the county. 
+Gave it more love and care than my own child. 
+But do they call me MacGregor the bar builder? No. "" Points out the window. 
+"" You see that stone wall out there? 
+I built that stone wall with my bare hands. 
+Found every stone, placed them just so through the rain and the cold. 
+But do they call me MacGregor the stone wall builder? No. "" Points out the window. 
+"" You see that pier on the lake out there? 
+I built that pier with my bare hands. 
+Drove the pilings against the tide of the sand, plank by plank. 
+But do they call me MacGregor the pier builder? No. 
+But you fuck one goat... "" (Laughter) Storytelling — (Laughter) is joke telling. 
+It's knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. 
+We all love stories. 
+We're born for them. 
+Stories affirm who we are. 
+We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. 
+And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. 
+It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined. 
+The children's television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, "" Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story. "" And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, which is "" Make me care "" — please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care. 
+We all know what it's like to not care. 
+You've gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one. 
+It's already halfway over, but something's caught you and you're drawn in and you care. 
+That's not by chance, that's by design. 
+So it got me thinking, what if I told you my history was story, how I was born for it, how I learned along the way this subject matter? 
+And to make it more interesting, we'll start from the ending and we'll go to the beginning. 
+And so if I were going to give you the ending of this story, it would go something like this: And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TED about story. 
+And the most current story lesson that I've had was completing the film I've just done this year in 2012. 
+The film is "" John Carter. "" It's based on a book called "" The Princess of Mars, "" which was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. 
+And Edgar Rice Burroughs actually put himself as a character inside this movie, and as the narrator. 
+And he's summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter, to his mansion with a telegram saying, "" See me at once. "" But once he gets there, he's found out that his uncle has mysteriously passed away and been entombed in a mausoleum on the property. 
+(Video) Butler: You won't find a keyhole. 
+Thing only opens from the inside. 
+He insisted, no embalming, no open coffin, no funeral. 
+You don't acquire the kind of wealth your uncle commanded by being like the rest of us, huh? 
+Come, let's go inside. 
+AS: What this scene is doing, and it did in the book, is it's fundamentally making a promise. 
+It's making a promise to you that this story will lead somewhere that's worth your time. 
+And that's what all good stories should do at the beginning, is they should give you a promise. 
+You could do it an infinite amount of ways. 
+Sometimes it's as simple as "" Once upon a time... "" These Carter books always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as a narrator in it. 
+And I always thought it was such a fantastic device. 
+It's like a guy inviting you around the campfire, or somebody in a bar saying, "" Here, let me tell you a story. 
+It didn't happen to me, it happened to somebody else, but it's going to be worth your time. "" A well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot and propels you forward through the story to the end. 
+In 2008, I pushed all the theories that I had on story at the time to the limits of my understanding on this project. 
+(Video) (Mechanical Sounds) ♫ And that is all ♫ ♫ that love's about ♫ ♫ And we'll recall ♫ ♫ when time runs out ♫ ♫ That it only ♫ (Laughter) AS: Storytelling without dialogue. 
+It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling. 
+It's the most inclusive approach you can take. 
+It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. 
+They just don't want to know that they're doing that. 
+That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal. 
+We're born problem solvers. 
+We're compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that's what we do in real life. 
+It's this well-organized absence of information that draws us in. 
+There's a reason that we're all attracted to an infant or a puppy. 
+It's not just that they're damn cute; it's because they can't completely express what they're thinking and what their intentions are. 
+And it's like a magnet. 
+We can't stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in. 
+I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on "" Finding Nemo. "" And we would call this the unifying theory of two plus two. 
+Make the audience put things together. 
+Don't give them four, give them two plus two. 
+The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience. 
+Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. 
+It's the invisible application that holds our attention to story. 
+I don't mean to make it sound like this is an actual exact science, it's not. 
+That's what's so special about stories, they're not a widget, they aren't exact. 
+Stories are inevitable, if they're good, but they're not predictable. 
+I took a seminar in this year with an acting teacher named Judith Weston. 
+And I learned a key insight to character. 
+She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine. 
+And the idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they're striving for, an itch that they can't scratch. 
+She gave a wonderful example of Michael Corleone, Al Pacino's character in "" The Godfather, "" and that probably his spine was to please his father. 
+And it's something that always drove all his choices. 
+Even after his father died, he was still trying to scratch that itch. 
+I took to this like a duck to water. 
+Wall-E's was to find the beauty. 
+Marlin's, the father in "" Finding Nemo, "" was to prevent harm. 
+And Woody's was to do what was best for his child. 
+And these spines don't always drive you to make the best choices. 
+Sometimes you can make some horrible choices with them. 
+I'm really blessed to be a parent, and watching my children grow, I really firmly believe that you're born with a temperament and you're wired a certain way, and you don't have any say about it, and there's no changing it. 
+All you can do is learn to recognize it and own it. 
+And some of us are born with temperaments that are positive, some are negative. 
+But a major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you and to take the wheel and steer it. 
+As parents, you're always learning who your children are. 
+They're learning who they are. 
+And you're still learning who you are. 
+So we're all learning all the time. 
+And that's why change is fundamental in story. 
+If things go static, stories die, because life is never static. 
+In 1998, I had finished writing "" Toy Story "" and "" A Bug's Life "" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting. 
+So I wanted to become much better at it and learn anything I could. 
+So I researched everything I possibly could. 
+And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: "" Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty. "" It's an incredibly insightful definition. 
+When you're telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? 
+In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next? 
+But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term? 
+Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be? 
+An example would be in "" Finding Nemo, "" in the short tension, you were always worried, would Dory's short-term memory make her forget whatever she was being told by Marlin. 
+But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge, vast ocean? 
+In our earliest days at Pixar, before we truly understood the invisible workings of story, we were simply a group of guys just going on our gut, going on our instincts. 
+And it's interesting to see how that led us places that were actually pretty good. 
+You've got to remember that in this time of year, 1993, what was considered a successful animated picture was "" The Little Mermaid, "" "" Beauty and the Beast, "" "Aladdin," "Lion King." 
+So when we pitched "" Toy Story "" to Tom Hanks for the first time, he walked in and he said, "You don't want me to sing, do you?" 
+And I thought that epitomized perfectly what everybody thought animation had to be at the time. 
+But we really wanted to prove that you could tell stories completely different in animation. 
+We didn't have any influence then, so we had a little secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves. 
+And they were: No songs, no "" I want "" moment, no happy village, no love story. 
+And the irony is that, in the first year, our story was not working at all and Disney was panicking. 
+So they privately got advice from a famous lyricist, who I won't name, and he faxed them some suggestions. 
+And we got a hold of that fax. 
+And the fax said, there should be songs, there should be an "" I want "" song, there should be a happy village song, there should be a love story and there should be a villain. 
+And thank goodness we were just too young, rebellious and contrarian at the time. 
+That just gave us more determination to prove that you could build a better story. 
+And a year after that, we did conquer it. 
+And it just went to prove that storytelling has guidelines, not hard, fast rules. 
+Another fundamental thing we learned was about liking your main character. 
+And we had naively thought, well Woody in "" Toy Story "" has to become selfless at the end, so you've got to start from someplace. 
+So let's make him selfish. And this is what you get. 
+(Voice Over) Woody: What do you think you're doing? 
+Off the bed. 
+Hey, off the bed! 
+Mr. Potato Head: You going to make us, Woody? 
+Woody: No, he is. 
+Slinky? Slink... Slinky! 
+Get up here and do your job. 
+Are you deaf? 
+I said, take care of them. 
+Slinky: I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them. 
+I don't think what you did was right. 
+Woody: What? Am I hearing correctly? 
+You don't think I was right? 
+Who said your job was to think, Spring Wiener? 
+AS: So how do you make a selfish character likable? 
+We realized, you can make him kind, generous, funny, considerate, as long as one condition is met for him, is that he stays the top toy. 
+And that's what it really is, is that we all live life conditionally. 
+We're all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met. 
+After that, all bets are off. 
+And before I'd even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about story. 
+In 1986, I truly understood the notion of story having a theme. 
+And that was the year that they restored and re-released "Lawrence of Arabia." 
+And I saw that thing seven times in one month. 
+I couldn't get enough of it. 
+I could just tell there was a grand design under it — in every shot, every scene, every line. 
+Yet, on the surface it just seemed to be depicting his historical lineage of what went on. 
+Yet, there was something more being said. What exactly was it? 
+And it wasn't until, on one of my later viewings, that the veil was lifted and it was in a scene where he's walked across the Sinai Desert and he's reached the Suez Canal, and I suddenly got it. 
+(Video) Boy: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! 
+Cyclist: Who are you? Who are you? 
+AS: That was the theme: Who are you? Here were all these seemingly disparate 
+events and dialogues that just were chronologically telling the history of him, but underneath it was a constant, a guideline, a road map. 
+Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world. 
+A strong theme is always running through a well-told story. 
+When I was five, I was introduced to possibly the most major ingredient that I feel a story should have, but is rarely invoked. 
+And this is what my mother took me to when I was five. 
+(Video) Thumper: Come on. It's all right. 
+Look. 
+The water's stiff. 
+Bambi: Yippee! 
+Thumper: Some fun, huh, Bambi? 
+Come on. Get up. 
+Like this. 
+Ha ha. No, no, no. 
+AS: I walked out of there wide-eyed with wonder. 
+And that's what I think the magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder. 
+Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent. 
+It can't be artificially evoked. 
+For me, there's no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling — to hold them still just for a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder. 
+When it's tapped, the affirmation of being alive, it reaches you almost to a cellular level. 
+And when an artist does that to another artist, it's like you're compelled to pass it on. 
+It's like a dormant command that suddenly is activated in you, like a call to Devil's Tower. 
+Do unto others what's been done to you. 
+The best stories infuse wonder. 
+When I was four years old, I have a vivid memory of finding two pinpoint scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. 
+And he said I had a matching pair like that on my head, but I couldn't see them because of my hair. 
+And he explained that when I was born, I was born premature, that I came out much too early, and I wasn't fully baked; I was very, very sick. 
+And when the doctor took a look at this yellow kid with black teeth, he looked straight at my mom and said, "He's not going to live." 
+And I was in the hospital for months. 
+And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special. 
+I don't know if I really believe that. 
+I don't know if my parents really believe that, but I didn't want to prove them wrong. 
+Whatever I ended up being good at, I would strive to be worthy of the second chance I was given. 
+(Video) (Crying) Marlin: There, there, there. 
+It's okay, daddy's here. 
+Daddy's got you. 
+I promise, I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo. 
+AS: And that's the first story lesson I ever learned. 
+Use what you know. Draw from it. 
+It doesn't always mean plot or fact. 
+It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core. 
+And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TEDTalk today. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My journey to coming here today started in 1974. 
+That's me with the funny gloves. 
+I was 17 and going on a peace walk. 
+What I didn't know though, was most of those people, standing there with me, were Moonies. 
+(Laughter) And within a week I had come to believe that the second coming of Christ had occurred, that it was Sun Myung Moon, and that I had been specially chosen and prepared by God to be his disciple. 
+Now as cool as that sounds, my family was not that thrilled with this. 
+(Laughter) And they tried everything they could to get me out of there. 
+There was an underground railroad of sorts that was going on during those years. Maybe some of you remember it. 
+They were called deprogrammers. 
+And after about five long years my family had me deprogrammed. 
+And I then became a deprogrammer. 
+I started going out on cases. 
+And after about five years of doing this, I was arrested for kidnapping. 
+Most of the cases I went out on were called involuntary. 
+What happened was that the family had to get their loved ones some safe place somehow. 
+And so they took them to some safe place. 
+And we would come in and talk to them, usually for about a week. 
+And so after this happened, I decided it was a good time to turn my back on this work. 
+And about 20 years went by. 
+There was a burning question though that would not leave me. 
+And that was, "" How did this happen to me? "" And in fact, what did happen to my brain? 
+Because something did. 
+And so I decided to write a book, a memoir, about this decade of my life. 
+And toward the end of writing that book there was a documentary that came out. 
+It was on Jonestown. 
+And it had a chilling effect on me. 
+These are the dead in Jonestown. 
+About 900 people died that day, most of them taking their own lives. 
+Women gave poison to their babies, and watched foam come from their mouths as they died. 
+The top picture is a group of Moonies that have been blessed by their messiah. 
+Their mates were chosen for them. 
+The bottom picture is Hitler youth. 
+This is the leg of a suicide bomber. 
+The thing I had to admit to myself, with great repulsion, was that I get it. 
+I understand how this could happen. 
+I understand how someone's brain, how someone's mind can come to the place where it makes sense — in fact it would be wrong, when your brain is working like that — not to try to save the world through genocide. 
+And so what is this? How does this work? 
+And how I've come to view what happened to me is a viral, memetic infection. 
+For those of you who aren't familiar with memetics, a meme has been defined as an idea that replicates in the human brain and moves from brain to brain like a virus, much like a virus. The way a virus works is — it can infect and do the most damage to someone who has a compromised immune system. 
+In 1974, I was young, I was naive, and I was pretty lost in my world. 
+I was really idealistic. 
+These easy ideas to complex questions are very appealing when you are emotionally vulnerable. 
+What happens is that circular logic takes over. 
+"" Moon is one with God. 
+God is going to fix all the problems in the world. 
+All I have to do is humbly follow. 
+Because God is going to stop war and hunger — all these things I wanted to do — all I have to do is humbly follow. 
+Because after all, God is [working through] the messiah. He's going to fix all this. "" It becomes impenetrable. 
+And the most dangerous part of this is that is creates "" us "" and "" them, "" "right" and "wrong," "good" and "evil." 
+And it makes anything possible, makes anything rationalizable. 
+And the thing is, though, if you looked at my brain during those years in the Moonies — neuroscience is expanding exponentially, as Ray Kurzweil said yesterday. Science is expanding. 
+We're beginning to look inside the brain. 
+And so if you looked at my brain, or any brain that's infected with a viral memetic infection like this, and compared it to anyone in this room, or anyone who uses critical thinking on a regular basis, I am convinced it would look very, very different. 
+And that, strange as it may sound, gives me hope. 
+And the reason that gives me hope is that the first thing is to admit that we have a problem. 
+But it's a human problem. It's a scientific problem, if you will. 
+It happens in the human brain. There is no evil force out there to get us. 
+And so this is something that, through research and education, I believe that we can solve. 
+And so the first step is to realize that we can do this together, and that there is no "" us "" and "" them. "" Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+Why can't we solve these problems? 
+We know what they are. 
+Something always seems to stop us. 
+Why? 
+I remember March the 15th, 2000. 
+The B15 iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf. 
+In the newspaper it said "it was all part of a normal process." 
+A little bit further on in the article it said "" a loss that would normally take the ice shelf 50-100 years to replace. "" That same word, "" normal, "" had two different, almost opposite meanings. 
+If we walk into the B15 iceberg when we leave here today, we're going to bump into something a thousand feet tall, 76 miles long, 17 miles wide, and it's going to weigh two gigatons. 
+I'm sorry, there's nothing normal about this. 
+And yet I think it's this perspective of us as humans to look at our world through the lens of normal is one of the forces that stops us developing real solutions. 
+Only 90 days after this, arguably the greatest discovery of the last century occurred. 
+It was the sequencing for the first time of the human genome. 
+This is the code that's in every single one of our 50 trillion cells that makes us who we are and what we are. 
+And if we just take one cell's worth of this code and unwind it, it's a meter long, two nanometers thick. 
+Two nanometers is 20 atoms in thickness. 
+And I wondered, what if the answer to some of our biggest problems could be found in the smallest of places, where the difference between what is valuable and what is worthless is merely the addition or subtraction of a few atoms? 
+And what if we could get exquisite control over the essence of energy, the electron? 
+So I started to go around the world finding the best and brightest scientists I could at universities whose collective discoveries have the chance to take us there, and we formed a company to build on their extraordinary ideas. 
+Six and a half years later, a hundred and eighty researchers, they have some amazing developments in the lab, and I will show you three of those today, such that we can stop burning up our planet and instead, we can generate all the energy we need right where we are, cleanly, safely, and cheaply. 
+Think of the space that we spend most of our time. 
+A tremendous amount of energy is coming at us from the sun. 
+We like the light that comes into the room, but in the middle of summer, all that heat is coming into the room that we're trying to keep cool. 
+In winter, exactly the opposite is happening. 
+We're trying to heat up the space that we're in, and all that is trying to get out through the window. 
+Wouldn't it be really great if the window could flick back the heat into the room if we needed it or flick it away before it came in? 
+One of the materials that can do this is a remarkable material, carbon, that has changed its form in this incredibly beautiful reaction where graphite is blasted by a vapor, and when the vaporized carbon condenses, it condenses back into a different form: chickenwire rolled up. 
+But this chickenwire carbon, called a carbon nanotube, is a hundred thousand times smaller than the width of one of your hairs. 
+It's a thousand times more conductive than copper. 
+How is that possible? 
+One of the things about working at the nanoscale is things look and act very differently. 
+You think of carbon as black. 
+Carbon at the nanoscale is actually transparent and flexible. 
+And when it's in this form, if I combine it with a polymer and affix it to your window when it's in its colored state, it will reflect away all heat and light, and when it's in its bleached state it will let all the light and heat through and any combination in between. 
+To change its state, by the way, takes two volts from a millisecond pulse. 
+And once you've changed its state, it stays there until you change its state again. 
+As we were working on this incredible discovery at University of Florida, we were told to go down the corridor to visit another scientist, and he was working on a pretty incredible thing. 
+Imagine if we didn't have to rely on artificial lighting to get around at night. 
+We'd have to see at night, right? 
+This lets you do it. 
+It's a nanomaterial, two nanomaterials, a detector and an imager. 
+The total width of it is 600 times smaller than the width of a decimal place. 
+And it takes all the infrared available at night, converts it into an electron in the space of two small films, and is enabling you to play an image which you can see through. 
+I'm going to show to TEDsters, the first time, this operating. 
+Firstly I'm going to show you the transparency. 
+Transparency is key. 
+It's a film that you can look through. 
+And then I'm going to turn the lights out. 
+And you can see, off a tiny film, incredible clarity. 
+As we were working on this, it dawned on us: this is taking infrared radiation, wavelengths, and converting it into electrons. 
+What if we combined it with this? 
+Suddenly you've converted energy into an electron on a plastic surface that you can stick on your window. 
+But because it's flexible, it can be on any surface whatsoever. 
+The power plant of tomorrow is no power plant. 
+We talked about generating and using. 
+We want to talk about storing energy, and unfortunately the best thing we've got going is something that was developed in France a hundred and fifty years ago, the lead acid battery. 
+In terms of dollars per what's stored, it's simply the best. 
+Knowing that we're not going to put fifty of these in our basements to store our power, we went to a group at University of Texas at Dallas, and we gave them this diagram. 
+It was in actually a diner outside of Dallas / Fort Worth Airport. 
+We said, "" Could you build this? "" And these scientists, instead of laughing at us, said, "" Yeah. "" And what they built was eBox. 
+EBox is testing new nanomaterials to park an electron on the outside, hold it until you need it, and then be able to release it and pass it off. 
+Being able to do that means that I can generate energy cleanly, efficiently and cheaply right where I am. 
+It's my energy. 
+And if I don't need it, I can convert it back up on the window to energy, light, and beam it, line of site, to your place. 
+And for that I do not need an electric grid between us. 
+The grid of tomorrow is no grid, and energy, clean efficient energy, will one day be free. 
+If you do this, you get the last puzzle piece, which is water. 
+Each of us, every day, need just eight glasses of this, because we're human. 
+When we run out of water, as we are in some parts of the world and soon to be in other parts of the world, we're going to have to get this from the sea, and that's going to require us to build desalination plants. 
+19 trillion dollars is what we're going to have to spend. 
+These also require tremendous amounts of energy. 
+In fact, it's going to require twice the world's supply of oil to run the pumps to generate the water. 
+We're simply not going to do that. 
+But in a world where energy is freed and transmittable easily and cheaply, we can take any water wherever we are and turn it into whatever we need. 
+I'm glad to be working with incredibly brilliant and kind scientists, no kinder than many of the people in the world, but they have a magic look at the world. 
+And I'm glad to see their discoveries coming out of the lab and into the world. 
+It's been a long time in coming for me. 
+18 years ago, I saw a photograph in the paper. 
+It was taken by Kevin Carter who went to the Sudan to document their famine there. 
+I've carried this photograph with me every day since then. 
+It's a picture of a little girl dying of thirst. 
+By any standard this is wrong. 
+It's just wrong. 
+We can do better than this. 
+We should do better than this. 
+And whenever I go round to somebody who says, "" You know what, you're working on something that's too difficult. 
+It'll never happen. You don't have enough money. 
+You don't have enough time. 
+There's something much more interesting around the corner, "" I say, "" Try saying that to her. "" That's what I say in my mind. And I just say "" thank you, "" and I go on to the next one. 
+This is why we have to solve our problems, and I know the answer as to how is to be able to get exquisite control over a building block of nature, the stuff of life: the simple electron. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What I'm going to try and do in the next 15 minutes or so is tell you about an idea of how we're going to make matter come alive. 
+Now this may seem a bit ambitious, but when you look at yourself, you look at your hands, you realize that you're alive. 
+So this is a start. 
+Now this quest started four billion years ago on planet Earth. 
+There's been four billion years of organic, biological life. 
+And as an inorganic chemist, my friends and colleagues make this distinction between the organic, living world and the inorganic, dead world. 
+And what I'm going to try and do is plant some ideas about how we can transform inorganic, dead matter into living matter, into inorganic biology. 
+Before we do that, I want to kind of put biology in its place. 
+And I'm absolutely enthralled by biology. 
+I love to do synthetic biology. 
+I love things that are alive. 
+I love manipulating the infrastructure of biology. 
+But within that infrastructure, we have to remember that the driving force of biology is really coming from evolution. 
+And evolution, although it was established well over 100 years ago by Charles Darwin and a vast number of other people, evolution still is a little bit intangible. 
+And when I talk about Darwinian evolution, I mean one thing and one thing only, and that is survival of the fittest. 
+And so forget about evolution in a kind of metaphysical way. 
+Think about evolution in terms of offspring competing, and some winning. 
+So bearing that in mind, as a chemist, I wanted to ask myself the question frustrated by biology: What is the minimal unit of matter that can undergo Darwinian evolution? 
+And this seems quite a profound question. 
+And as a chemist, we're not used to profound questions every day. 
+So when I thought about it, then suddenly I realized that biology gave us the answer. 
+And in fact, the smallest unit of matter that can evolve independently is, in fact, a single cell — a bacteria. 
+So this raises three really important questions: What is life? 
+Is biology special? 
+Biologists seem to think so. 
+Is matter evolvable? 
+Now if we answer those questions in reverse order, the third question — is matter evolvable? — if we can answer that, then we're going to know how special biology is, and maybe, just maybe, we'll have some idea of what life really is. 
+So here's some inorganic life. 
+This is a dead crystal, and I'm going to do something to it, and it's going to become alive. 
+And you can see, it's kind of pollinating, germinating, growing. 
+This is an inorganic tube. 
+And all these crystals here under the microscope were dead a few minutes ago, and they look alive. 
+Of course, they're not alive. 
+It's a chemistry experiment where I've made a crystal garden. 
+But when I saw this, I was really fascinated, because it seemed lifelike. 
+And as I pause for a few seconds, have a look at the screen. 
+You can see there's architecture growing, filling the void. 
+And this is dead. 
+So I was positive that, if somehow we can make things mimic life, let's go one step further. 
+Let's see if we can actually make life. 
+But there's a problem, because up until maybe a decade ago, we were told that life was impossible and that we were the most incredible miracle in the universe. 
+In fact, we were the only people in the universe. 
+Now, that's a bit boring. 
+So as a chemist, I wanted to say, "" Hang on. What is going on here? 
+Is life that improbable? "" And this is really the question. 
+I think that perhaps the emergence of the first cells was as probable as the emergence of the stars. 
+And in fact, let's take that one step further. 
+Let's say that if the physics of fusion is encoded into the universe, maybe the physics of life is as well. 
+And so the problem with chemists — and this is a massive advantage as well — is we like to focus on our elements. 
+In biology, carbon takes center stage. 
+And in a universe where carbon exists and organic biology, then we have all this wonderful diversity of life. 
+In fact, we have such amazing lifeforms that we can manipulate. 
+We're awfully careful in the lab to try and avoid various biohazards. 
+Well what about matter? 
+If we can make matter alive, would we have a matterhazard? 
+So think, this is a serious question. 
+If your pen could replicate, that would be a bit of a problem. 
+So we have to think differently if we're going to make stuff come alive. 
+And we also have to be aware of the issues. 
+But before we can make life, let's think for a second what life really is characterized by. 
+And forgive the complicated diagram. 
+This is just a collection of pathways in the cell. 
+And the cell is obviously for us a fascinating thing. 
+Synthetic biologists are manipulating it. 
+Chemists are trying to study the molecules to look at disease. 
+And you have all these pathways going on at the same time. 
+You have regulation; information is transcribed; catalysts are made; stuff is happening. 
+But what does a cell do? 
+Well it divides, it competes, it survives. 
+And I think that is where we have to start in terms of thinking about building from our ideas in life. 
+But what else is life characterized by? 
+Well, I like think of it as a flame in a bottle. 
+And so what we have here is a description of single cells replicating, metabolizing, burning through chemistries. 
+And so we have to understand that if we're going to make artificial life or understand the origin of life, we need to power it somehow. 
+So before we can really start to make life, we have to really think about where it came from. 
+And Darwin himself mused in a letter to a colleague that he thought that life probably emerged in some warm little pond somewhere — maybe not in Scotland, maybe in Africa, maybe somewhere else. 
+But the real honest answer is, we just don't know, because there is a problem with the origin. 
+Imagine way back, four and a half billion years ago, there is a vast chemical soup of stuff. 
+And from this stuff we came. 
+So when you think about the improbable nature of what I'm going to tell you in the next few minutes, just remember, we came from stuff on planet Earth. 
+And we went through a variety of worlds. 
+The RNA people would talk about the RNA world. 
+We somehow got to proteins and DNA. 
+We then got to the last ancestor. 
+Evolution kicked in — and that's the cool bit. 
+And here we are. 
+But there's a roadblock that you can't get past. 
+You can decode the genome, you can look back, you can link us all together by a mitochondrial DNA, but we can't get further than the last ancestor, the last visible cell that we could sequence or think back in history. 
+So we don't know how we got here. 
+So there are two options: intelligent design, direct and indirect — so God, or my friend. 
+Now talking about E.T. putting us there, or some other life, just pushes the problem further on. 
+I'm not a politician, I'm a scientist. 
+The other thing we need to think about is the emergence of chemical complexity. 
+This seems most likely. 
+So we have some kind of primordial soup. 
+And this one happens to be a good source of all 20 amino acids. 
+And somehow these amino acids are combined, and life begins. 
+But life begins, what does that mean? 
+What is life? What is this stuff of life? 
+So in the 1950s, Miller-Urey did their fantastic chemical Frankenstein experiment, where they did the equivalent in the chemical world. 
+They took the basic ingredients, put them in a single jar and ignited them and put a lot of voltage through. 
+And they had a look at what was in the soup, and they found amino acids, but nothing came out, there was no cell. 
+So the whole area's been stuck for a while, and it got reignited in the '80s when analytical technologies and computer technologies were coming on. 
+In my own laboratory, the way we're trying to create inorganic life is by using many different reaction formats. 
+So what we're trying to do is do reactions — not in one flask, but in tens of flasks, and connect them together, as you can see with this flow system, all these pipes. 
+We can do it microfluidically, we can do it lithographically, we can do it in a 3D printer, we can do it in droplets for colleagues. 
+And the key thing is to have lots of complex chemistry just bubbling away. 
+But that's probably going to end in failure, so we need to be a bit more focused. 
+And the answer, of course, lies with mice. 
+This is how I remember what I need as a chemist. 
+I say, "" Well I want molecules. "" But I need a metabolism, I need some energy. 
+I need some information, and I need a container. 
+Because if I want evolution, I need containers to compete. 
+So if you have a container, it's like getting in your car. 
+"" This is my car, and I'm going to drive around and show off my car. "" And I imagine you have a similar thing in cellular biology with the emergence of life. 
+So these things together give us evolution, perhaps. 
+And the way to test it in the laboratory is to make it minimal. 
+So what we're going to try and do is come up with an inorganic Lego kit of molecules. 
+And so forgive the molecules on the screen, but these are a very simple kit. 
+There's only maybe three or four different types of building blocks present. 
+And we can aggregate them together and make literally thousands and thousands of really big nano-molecular molecules the same size of DNA and proteins, but there's no carbon in sight. 
+Carbon is banned. 
+And so with this Lego kit, we have the diversity required for complex information storage without DNA. 
+But we need to make some containers. 
+And just a few months ago in my lab, we were able to take these very same molecules and make cells with them. 
+And you can see on the screen a cell being made. 
+And we're now going to put some chemistry inside and do some chemistry in this cell. 
+And all I wanted to show you is we can set up molecules in membranes, in real cells, and then it sets up a kind of molecular Darwinism, a molecular survival of the fittest. 
+And this movie here shows this competition between molecules. 
+Molecules are competing for stuff. 
+They're all made of the same stuff, but they want their shape to win. 
+They want their shape to persist. 
+And that is the key. 
+If we can somehow encourage these molecules to talk to each other and make the right shapes and compete, they will start to form cells that will replicate and compete. 
+If we manage to do that, forget the molecular detail. 
+Let's zoom out to what that could mean. 
+So we have this special theory of evolution that applies only to organic biology, to us. 
+If we could get evolution into the material world, then I propose we should have a general theory of evolution. 
+And that's really worth thinking about. 
+Does evolution control the sophistication of matter in the universe? 
+Is there some driving force through evolution that allows matter to compete? 
+So that means we could then start to develop different platforms for exploring this evolution. 
+So you imagine, if we're able to create a self-sustaining artificial life form, not only will this tell us about the origin of life — that it's possible that the universe doesn't need carbon to be alive; it can use anything — we can then take [it] one step further and develop new technologies, because we can then use software control for evolution to code in. 
+So imagine we make a little cell. 
+We want to put it out in the environment, and we want it to be powered by the Sun. 
+What we do is we evolve it in a box with a light on. 
+And we don't use design anymore. We find what works. 
+We should take our inspiration from biology. 
+Biology doesn't care about the design unless it works. 
+So this will reorganize the way we design things. 
+But not only just that, we will start to think about how we can start to develop a symbiotic relationship with biology. 
+Wouldn't it be great if you could take these artificial biological cells and fuse them with biological ones to correct problems that we couldn't really deal with? 
+The real issue in cellular biology is we are never going to understand everything, because it's a multidimensional problem put there by evolution. 
+Evolution cannot be cut apart. 
+You need to somehow find the fitness function. 
+And the profound realization for me is that, if this works, the concept of the selfish gene gets kicked up a level, and we really start talking about selfish matter. 
+And what does that mean in a universe where we are right now the highest form of stuff? 
+You're sitting on chairs. 
+They're inanimate, they're not alive. 
+But you are made of stuff, and you are using stuff, and you enslave stuff. 
+So using evolution in biology, and in inorganic biology, for me is quite appealing, quite exciting. 
+And we're really becoming very close to understanding the key steps that makes dead stuff come alive. 
+And again, when you're thinking about how improbable this is, remember, five billion years ago, we were not here, and there was no life. 
+So what will that tell us about the origin of life and the meaning of life? 
+But perhaps, for me as a chemist, I want to keep away from general terms; I want to think about specifics. 
+So what does it mean about defining life? 
+We really struggle to do this. 
+And I think, if we can make inorganic biology, and we can make matter become evolvable, that will in fact define life. 
+I propose to you that matter that can evolve is alive, and this gives us the idea of making evolvable matter. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Just a quick question on timeline. 
+You believe you're going to be successful in this project? 
+When? 
+Lee Cronin: So many people think that life took millions of years to kick in. 
+We're proposing to do it in just a few hours, once we've set up the right chemistry. 
+CA: And when do you think that will happen? 
+LC: Hopefully within the next two years. 
+CA: That would be a big story. 
+(Laughter) In your own mind, what do you believe the chances are that walking around on some other planet is non-carbon-based life, walking or oozing or something? 
+LC: I think it's 100 percent. 
+Because the thing is, we are so chauvinistic to biology, if you take away carbon, there's other things that can happen. 
+So the other thing that if we were able to create life that's not based on carbon, maybe we can tell NASA what really to look for. 
+Don't go and look for carbon, go and look for evolvable stuff. 
+CA: Lee Cronin, good luck. (LC: Thank you very much.) (Applause) 
+
+Cholera was reported in Haiti for the first time in over 50 years last October. 
+There was no way to predict how far it would spread through water supplies and how bad the situation would get. 
+And not knowing where help was needed always ensured that help was in short supply in the areas that needed it most. 
+We've gotten good at predicting and preparing for storms before they take innocent lives and cause irreversible damage, but we still can't do that with water, and here's why. 
+Right now, if you want to test water in the field, you need a trained technician, expensive equipment like this, and you have to wait about a day for chemical reactions to take place and provide results. 
+It's too slow to get a picture of conditions on the ground before they change, too expensive to implement in all the places that require testing. 
+And it ignores the fact that, in the meanwhile, people still need to drink water. 
+Most of the information that we collected on the cholera outbreak didn't come from testing water; it came from forms like this, which documented all the people we failed to help. 
+Countless lives have been saved by canaries in coalmines — a simple and invaluable way for miners to know whether they're safe. 
+I've been inspired by that simplicity as I've been working on this problem with some of the most hardworking and brilliant people I've ever known. 
+We think there's a simpler solution to this problem — one that can be used by people who face conditions like this everyday. 
+It's in its early stages, but this is what it looks like right now. 
+We call it the Water Canary. 
+It's a fast, cheap device that answers an important question: Is this water contaminated? 
+It doesn't require any special training. 
+And instead of waiting for chemical reactions to take place, it uses light. 
+That means there's no waiting for chemical reactions to take place, no need to use reagents that can run out and no need to be an expert to get actionable information. 
+To test water, you simply insert a sample and, within seconds, it either displays a red light, indicating contaminated water, or a green light, indicating the sample is safe. 
+This will make it possible for anyone to collect life-saving information and to monitor water quality conditions as they unfold. 
+We're also, on top of that, integrating wireless networking into an affordable device with GPS and GSM. 
+What that means is that each reading can be automatically transmitted to servers to be mapped in real time. 
+With enough users, maps like this will make it possible to take preventive action, containing hazards before they turn into emergencies that take years to recover from. 
+And then, instead of taking days to disseminate this information to the people who need it most, it can happen automatically. 
+We've seen how distributed networks, big data and information can transform society. 
+I think it's time for us to apply them to water. 
+Our goal over the next year is to get Water Canary ready for the field and to open-source the hardware so that anyone can contribute to the development and the evaluation, so we can tackle this problem together. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I love my food. 
+And I love information. 
+My children usually tell me that one of those passions is a little more apparent than the other. 
+(Laughter) But what I want to do in the next eight minutes or so is to take you through how those passions developed, the point in my life when the two passions merged, the journey of learning that took place from that point. 
+And one idea I want to leave you with today is what would would happen differently in your life if you saw information the way you saw food? 
+I was born in Calcutta — a family where my father and his father before him were journalists, and they wrote magazines in the English language. 
+That was the family business. 
+And as a result of that, I grew up with books everywhere around the house. 
+And I mean books everywhere around the house. 
+And that's actually a shop in Calcutta, but it's a place where we like our books. 
+In fact, I've got 38,000 of them now and no Kindle in sight. 
+But growing up as a child with the books around everywhere, with people to talk to about those books, this wasn't a sort of slightly learned thing. 
+By the time I was 18, I had a deep passion for books. 
+It wasn't the only passion I had. 
+I was a South Indian brought up in Bengal. 
+And two of the things about Bengal: they like their savory dishes and they like their sweets. 
+So by the time I grew up, again, I had a well-established passion for food. 
+Now I was growing up in the late '60s and early' 70s, and there were a number of other passions I was also interested in, but these two were the ones that differentiated me. 
+(Laughter) And then life was fine, dandy. 
+Everything was okay, until I got to about the age of 26, and I went to a movie called "" Short Circuit. "" Oh, some of you have seen it. 
+And apparently it's being remade right now and it's going to be coming out next year. 
+It's the story of this experimental robot which got electrocuted and found a life. 
+And as it ran, this thing was saying, "" Give me input. Give me input. "" And I suddenly realized that for a robot both information as well as food were the same thing. 
+Energy came to it in some form or shape, data came to it in some form or shape. 
+And I began to think, I wonder what it would be like to start imagining myself as if energy and information were the two things I had as input — as if food and information were similar in some form or shape. 
+I started doing some research then, and this was the 25-year journey, and started finding out that actually human beings as primates have far smaller stomachs than should be the size for our body weight and far larger brains. 
+And as I went to research that even further, I got to a point where I discovered something called the expensive tissue hypothesis. 
+That actually for a given body mass of a primate the metabolic rate was static. 
+What changed was the balance of the tissues available. 
+And two of the most expensive tissues in our human body are nervous tissue and digestive tissue. 
+And what transpired was that people had put forward a hypothesis that was apparently coming up with some fabulous results by about 1995. 
+It's a lady named Leslie Aiello. 
+And the paper then suggested that you traded one for the other. 
+If you wanted your brain for a particular body mass to be large, you had to live with a smaller gut. 
+That then set me off completely to say, Okay, these two are connected. 
+So I looked at the cultivation of information as if it were food and said, So we were hunter-gathers of information. 
+We moved from that to becoming farmers and cultivators of information. 
+Does that really explain what we're seeing with the intellectual property battles nowadays? 
+Because those people who were hunter-gatherers in origin wanted to be free and roam and pick up information as they wanted, and those that were in the business of farming information wanted to build fences around it, create ownership and wealth and structure and settlement. 
+So there was always going to be a tension within that. 
+And everything I saw in the cultivation said there were huge fights amongst the foodies between the cultivators and the hunter-gatherers. 
+And this is happening here. 
+When I moved to preparation, this same thing was true, expect that there were two schools. 
+One group of people said you can distill your information, you can extract value, separate it and serve it up, while another group turned around and said no, no you can ferment it. 
+You bring it all together and mash it up and the value emerges that way. 
+The same is again true with information. 
+But consumption was where it started getting really enjoyable. 
+Because what I began to see then was there were so many different ways people would consume this. 
+They'd buy it from the shop as raw ingredients. 
+Do you cook it? Do you have it served to you? 
+Do you go to a restaurant? 
+The same is true every time as I started thinking about information. 
+The analogies were getting crazy — that information had sell-by dates, that people had misused information that wasn't dated properly and could really make an effect on the stock market, on corporate values, etc. 
+And by this time I was hooked. 
+And this is about 23 years into this process. 
+And I began to start thinking of myself as we start having mash-ups of fact and fiction, docu-dramas, mockumentaries, whatever you call it. 
+Are we going to reach the stage where information has a percentage for fact associated with it? 
+We start labeling information for the fact percentage? 
+Are we going to start looking at what happens when your information source is turned off, as a famine? 
+Which brings me to the final element of this. 
+Clay Shirky once stated that there is no such animal as information overload, there is only filter failure. 
+I put it to you that information, if viewed from the point of food, is never a production issue; you never speak of food overload. 
+Fundamentally it's a consumption issue. 
+And we have to start thinking about how we create diets within ourselves, exercise within ourselves, to have the faculties to be able to deal with information, to have the labeling to be able to do it responsibly. 
+In fact, when I saw "" Supersize Me, "" I starting thinking of saying, What would happen if an individual had 31 days nonstop Fox News? 
+(Laughter) Would there be time to be able to work with it? 
+So you start really understanding that you can have diseases, toxins, a need to balance your diet, and once you start looking, and from that point on, everything I have done in terms of the consumption of information, the production of information, the preparation of information, I've looked at from the viewpoint of food. 
+It has probably not helped my waistline any because I like practicing on both sides. 
+But I'd like to leave you with just that question: If you began to think of all the information that you consume the way you think of food, what would you do differently? 
+Thank you very much for your time. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Let's start with day and night. 
+Life evolved under conditions of light and darkness, light and then darkness. 
+And so plants and animals developed their own internal clocks so that they would be ready for these changes in light. 
+These are chemical clocks, and they're found in every known being that has two or more cells and in some that only have one cell. 
+I'll give you an example — if you take a horseshoe crab off the beach, and you fly it all the way across the continent, and you drop it into a sloped cage, it will scramble up the floor of the cage as the tide is rising on its home shores, and it'll skitter down again right as the water is receding thousands of miles away. 
+It'll do this for weeks, until it kind of gradually loses the plot. 
+And it's incredible to watch, but there's nothing psychic or paranormal going on; it's simply that these crabs have internal cycles that correspond, usually, with what's going on around it. 
+So, we have this ability as well. 
+And in humans, we call it the "" body clock. "" You can see this most clearly when you take away someone's watch and you shut them into a bunker, deep underground, for a couple of months. (Laughter) People actually volunteer for this, and they usually come out kind of raving about their productive time in the hole. 
+So, no matter how atypical these subjects would have to be, they all show the same thing. 
+They get up just a little bit later every day — say 15 minutes or so — and they kind of drift all the way around the clock like this over the course of the weeks. 
+And so, in this way we know that they are working on their own internal clocks, rather than somehow sensing the day outside. 
+So fine, we have a body clock, and it turns out that it's incredibly important in our lives. 
+It's a huge driver for culture and I think that it's the most underrated force on our behavior. 
+We evolved as a species near the equator, and so we're very well-equipped to deal with 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. 
+But of course, we've spread to every corner of the globe and in Arctic Canada, where I live, we have perpetual daylight in summer and 24 hours of darkness in winter. 
+So the culture, the northern aboriginal culture, traditionally has been highly seasonal. 
+In winter, there's a lot of sleeping going on; you enjoy your family life inside. 
+And in summer, it's almost manic hunting and working activity very long hours, very active. 
+So, what would our natural rhythm look like? 
+What would our sleeping patterns be in the sort of ideal sense? 
+Well, it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every night. 
+They go to bed around 8: 00 p.m. 
+until midnight and then again, they sleep from about 2: 00 a.m. until sunrise. 
+And in-between, they have a couple of hours of sort of meditative quiet in bed. 
+And during this time, there's a surge of prolactin, the likes of which a modern day never sees. 
+The people in these studies report feeling so awake during the daytime, that they realize they're experiencing true wakefulness for the first time in their lives. 
+So, cut to the modern day. 
+We're living in a culture of jet lag, global travel, 24-hour business, shift work. 
+And you know, our modern ways of doing things have their advantages, but I believe we should understand the costs. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This may sound strange, but I'm a big fan of the concrete block. 
+The first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea: modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together. 
+Very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world. 
+They enabled us to to build things that were larger than us, buildings, bridges, one brick at a time. 
+Essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time. 
+Almost a hundred years later in 1947, LEGO came up with this. 
+It was called the Automatic Binding Brick. 
+And in a few short years, LEGO bricks took place in every household. 
+It's estimated that over 400 billion bricks have been produced — or 75 bricks for every person on the planet. 
+You don't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses, beautiful bridges, beautiful buildings. 
+LEGO made it accessible. 
+LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it into the building block of our imagination. 
+Meanwhile the exact same year, at Bell Labs the next revolution was about to be announced, the next building block. 
+The transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive. 
+Like the concrete block, the transistor allows you to build much larger, more complex circuits, one brick at a time. 
+But there's a main difference: The transistor was only for experts. 
+I personally don't accept this, that the building block of our time is reserved for experts, so I decided to change that. 
+Eight years ago when I was at the Media Lab, I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers. 
+A few years ago I started developing littleBits. 
+Let me show you how they work. 
+LittleBits are electronic modules with each one specific function. 
+They're pre-engineered to be light, sound, motors and sensors. 
+And the best part about it is they snap together with magnets. 
+So you can't put them the wrong way. 
+The bricks are color-coded. 
+Green is output, blue is power, pink is input and orange is wire. 
+So all you need to do is snap a blue to a green and very quickly you can start making larger circuits. 
+You put a blue to a green, you can make light. 
+You can put a knob in between and now you've made a little dimmer. 
+Switch out the knob for a pulse module, which is here, and now you've made a little blinker. 
+Add this buzzer for some extra punch and you've created a noise machine. 
+I'm going to stop that. 
+So beyond simple play, littleBits are actually pretty powerful. 
+Instead of having to program, to wire, to solder, littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures. 
+So to make this blink faster or slower, you would just turn this knob and basically make it pulse faster or slower. 
+The idea behind littleBits is that it's a growing library. 
+We want to make every single interaction in the world into a ready-to-use brick. 
+Lights, sounds, solar panels, motors — everything should be accessible. 
+We've been giving littleBits to kids and seeing them play with them. 
+And it's been an incredible experience. 
+The nicest thing is how they start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they don't learn at schools. 
+For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch. 
+We've also been taking littleBits to design schools. 
+So for example, we've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littleBits as a material. 
+Here you see, with felt and paper water bottles, we have Geordie making... 
+(Clanging) (Buzzing) A few weeks ago we took littleBits to RISD and gave them to some designers with no experience in engineering whatsoever — just cardboard, wood and paper — and told them "" Make something. "" Here's an example of a project they made, a motion-activated confetti canon ball. 
+(Laughter) But wait, this is actually my favorite project. 
+It's a lobster made of playdough that's afraid of the dark. 
+(Laughter) To these non-engineers, littleBits became another material, electronics became just another material. 
+And we want to make this material accessible to everyone. 
+So littleBits is open-source. 
+You can go on the website, download all the design files, make them yourself. 
+We want to encourage a world of creators, of inventors, of contributors, because this world that we live in, this interactive world, is ours. 
+So go ahead and start inventing. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Interestingly, Charles Darwin was born a very lightly pigmented man, in a moderately-to-darkly pigmented world. 
+Over the course of his life, Darwin had great privilege. 
+He lived in a fairly wealthy home. 
+He was raised by very supportive and interested parents. 
+And when he was in his 20s he embarked upon a remarkable voyage on the ship the Beagle. 
+And during the course of that voyage, he saw remarkable things: tremendous diversity of plants and animals, and humans. 
+And the observations that he made on that epic journey were to be eventually distilled into his wonderful book, "" On the Origin of Species, "" published 150 years ago. 
+Now what is so interesting and to some, the extent, what's a bit infamous about "" The Origin of Species, "" is that there is only one line in it about human evolution. 
+"" Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. "" It wasn't until much longer, much later, that Darwin actually spoke and wrote about humans. 
+Now in his years of traveling on the Beagle, and from listening to the accounts or explorers and naturalists, he knew that skin color was one of the most important ways in which people varied. 
+And he was somewhat interested in the pattern of skin color. 
+He knew that darkly pigmented peoples were found close to the equator; lightly pigmented peoples, like himself, were found closer to the poles. 
+So what did he make of all this? 
+Well he didn't write anything about it in The Origin of Species. 
+But much later, in 1871, he did have something to say about it. 
+And it was quite curious. He said, "" Of all the differences between the races of men, the color of the skin is the most conspicuous and one of the best marked. "" And he went on to say, "" These differences do not coincide with corresponding differences in climate. "" So he had traveled all around. 
+He had seen people of different colors living in different places. 
+And yet he rejected the idea that human skin pigmentation was related to the climate. 
+If only Darwin lived today. 
+If only Darwin had NASA. 
+Now, one of the wonderful things that NASA does is it puts up a variety of satellites that detect all sort of interesting things about our environment. 
+And for many decades now there have been a series of TOMS satellites that have collected data about the radiation of the Earth's surface. 
+The TOMS 7 satellite data, shown here, show the annual average ultraviolet radiation at the Earth's surface. 
+Now the really hot pink and red areas are those parts of the world that receive the highest amounts of UV during the year. 
+The incrementally cooler colors — blues, greens, yellows, and finally grays — indicate areas of much lower ultraviolet radiation. 
+What's significant to the story of human skin pigmentation is just how much of the Northern Hemisphere is in these cool gray zones. 
+This has tremendous implications for our understanding of the evolution of human skin pigmentation. 
+And what Darwin could not appreciate, or didn't perhaps want to appreciate at the time, is that there was a fundamental relationship between the intensity of ultraviolet radiation and skin pigmentation. 
+And that skin pigmentation itself was a product of evolution. 
+And so when we look at a map of skin color, and predicted skin color, as we know it today, what we see is a beautiful gradient from the darkest skin pigmentations toward the equator, and the lightest ones toward the poles. 
+What's very, very important here is that the earliest humans evolved in high-UV environments, in equatorial Africa. 
+The earliest members of our lineage, the genus Homo, were darkly pigmented. 
+And we all share this incredible heritage of having originally been darkly pigmented, two million to one and half million years ago. 
+Now what happened in our history? 
+Let's first look at the relationship of ultraviolet radiation to the Earth's surface. 
+In those early days of our evolution, looking at the equator, we were bombarded by high levels of ultraviolet radiation. 
+The UVC, the most energetic type, was occluded by the Earth's atmosphere. 
+But UVB and UVA especially, came in unimpeded. 
+UVB turns out to be incredibly important. 
+It's very destructive, but it also catalyzes the production of vitamin D in the skin, vitamin D being a molecule that we very much need for our strong bones, the health of our immune system, and myriad other important functions in our bodies. 
+So, living at the equator, we got lots and lots of ultraviolet radiation and the melanin — this wonderful, complex, ancient polymer compound in our skin — served as a superb natural sunscreen. 
+This polymer is amazing because it's present in so many different organisms. 
+Melanin, in various forms, has probably been on the Earth a billion years, and has been recruited over and over again by evolution, as often happens. 
+Why change it if it works? 
+So melanin was recruited, in our lineage, and specifically in our earliest ancestors evolving in Africa, to be a natural sunscreen. 
+Where it protected the body against the degradations of ultraviolet radiation, the destruction, or damage to DNA, and the breakdown of a very important molecule called folate, which helps to fuel cell production, and reproduction in the body. 
+So, it's wonderful. We evolved this very protective, wonderful covering of melanin. 
+But then we moved. 
+And humans dispersed — not once, but twice. 
+Major moves, outside of our equatorial homeland, from Africa into other parts of the Old World, and most recently, into the New World. 
+When humans dispersed into these latitudes, what did they face? 
+Conditions were significantly colder, but they were also less intense with respect to the ultraviolet regime. 
+So if we're somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, look at what's happening to the ultraviolet radiation. 
+We're still getting a dose of UVA. 
+But all of the UVB, or nearly all of it, is dissipated through the thickness of the atmosphere. 
+In the winter, when you are skiing in the Alps, you may experience ultraviolet radiation. 
+But it's all UVA, and, significantly, that UVA has no ability to make vitamin D in your skin. 
+So people inhabiting northern hemispheric environments were bereft of the potential to make vitamin D in their skin for most of the year. 
+This had tremendous consequences for the evolution of human skin pigmentation. 
+Because what happened, in order to ensure health and well-being, these lineages of people dispersing into the Northern Hemisphere lost their pigmentation. 
+There was natural selection for the evolution of lightly pigmented skin. 
+Here we begin to see the evolution of the beautiful sepia rainbow that now characterizes all of humanity. 
+Lightly pigmented skin evolved not just once, not just twice, but probably three times. 
+Not just in modern humans, but in one of our distant unrelated ancestors, the Neanderthals. 
+A remarkable, remarkable testament to the power of evolution. 
+Humans have been on the move for a long time. 
+And just in the last 5,000 years, in increasing rates, over increasing distances. 
+Here are just some of the biggest movements of people, voluntary movements, in the last 5,000 years. 
+Look at some of the major latitudinal transgressions: people from high UV areas going to low UV and vice versa. 
+And not all these moves were voluntary. 
+Between 1520 and 1867, 12 million, 500 people were moved from high UV to low UV areas in the transatlantic slave trade. 
+Now this had all sorts of invidious social consequences. 
+But it also had deleterious health consequences to people. 
+So what? We've been on the move. 
+We're so clever we can overcome all of these seeming biological impediments. 
+Well, often we're unaware of the fact that we're living in environments in which our skin is inherently poorly adapted. 
+Some of us with lightly pigmented skin live in high-UV areas. 
+Some of us with darkly pigmented skin live in low-UV areas. 
+These have tremendous consequences for our health. 
+We have to, if we're lightly pigmented, be careful about the problems of skin cancer, and destruction of folate in our bodies, by lots of sun. 
+Epidemiologists and doctors have been very good about telling us about protecting our skin. 
+What they haven't been so good about instructing people is the problem of darkly pigmented people living in high latitude areas, or working inside all the time. 
+Because the problem there is just as severe, but it is more sinister, because vitamin D deficiency, from a lack of ultraviolet B radiation, is a major problem. 
+Vitamin D deficiency creeps up on people, and causes all sorts of health problems to their bones, to their gradual decay of their immune systems, or loss of immune function, and probably some problems with their mood and health, their mental health. 
+So we have, in skin pigmentation, one of these wonderful products of evolution that still has consequences for us today. 
+And the social consequences, as we know, are incredibly profound. 
+We live in a world where we have lightly and darkly pigmented people living next to one another, but often brought into proximity initially as a result of very invidious social interactions. 
+So how can we overcome this? 
+How can we begin to understand it? 
+Evolution helps us. 
+200 years after Darwin's birthday, we have the first moderately pigmented President of the United States. 
+(Applause) How wonderful is that? (Applause) 
+This man is significant for a whole host of reasons. 
+But we need to think about how he compares, in terms of his pigmentation, to other people on Earth. 
+He, as one of many urban admixed populations, is very emblematic of a mixed parentage, of a mixed pigmentation. 
+And he resembles, very closely, people with moderate levels of pigmentation who live in southern Africa, or Southeast Asia. 
+These people have a tremendous potential to tan, to develop more pigment in their skin, as a result of exposure to sun. 
+They also run the risk of vitamin D deficiency, if they have desk jobs, like that guy. 
+So lets all wish for his great health, and his awareness of his own skin pigmentation. 
+Now what is wonderful about the evolution of human skin pigmentation, and the phenomenon of pigmentation, is that it is the demonstration, the evidence, of evolution by natural selection, right on your body. 
+When people ask you, "" What is the evidence for evolution? "" You don't have to think about some exotic examples, or fossils. 
+You just have to look at your skin. 
+Darwin, I think, would have appreciated this, even though he eschewed the importance of climate on the evolution of pigmentation during his own life. 
+I think, were he able to look at the evidence we have today, he would understand it. 
+He would appreciate it. 
+And most of all, he would teach it. 
+You, you can teach it. 
+You can touch it. 
+You can understand it. 
+Take it out of this room. 
+Take your skin color, and celebrate it. 
+Spread the word. 
+You have the evolution of the history of our species, part of it, written in your skin. 
+Understand it. Appreciate it. Celebrate it. 
+Go out. Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it wonderful? 
+You are the products of evolution. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. 
+I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. 
+It's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop. 
+And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help them. 
+And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I just didn't know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction? 
+Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working, and is there a better way out there that we could try instead? 
+So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn't really find the answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit with different people around the world who lived this and studied this and talk to them and see if I could learn from them. 
+And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is, almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we're going to have to change a lot more than our drug policies. 
+Let's think about this middle row here. 
+Imagine all of you, for 20 days now, went off and used heroin three times a day. 
+(Laughter) Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment. 
+Imagine you did that, right? 
+We think, because there are chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would become dependent on those hooks, you'd start to physically need them, and at the end of those 20 days, you'd all be heroin addicts. Right? 
+If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I'll be taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of diamorphine. 
+Diamorphine is heroin. 
+It's actually much better heroin than you're going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. 
+They've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels. 
+But here's the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. 
+They almost never use it. 
+None of them ever use it compulsively. 
+You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives. 
+Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this is just a thing about rats, they're quite different to us. 
+Maybe not as different as we'd like, but, you know — But fortunately, there was a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the exact same time. 
+It was called the Vietnam War. 
+In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total sense. 
+Ninety-five percent of them just stopped. 
+Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to think there might be a different story about addiction. 
+Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. 
+Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. 
+Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that's our nature. 
+And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see, I've got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? 
+I'm looking at lots of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. 
+Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of vodka, right? 
+We could all be getting drunk — I might after this — (Laughter) — but we're not. 
+You wouldn't end up homeless. 
+You're not going to do that, and the reason you're not going to do that is not because anyone's stopping you. 
+It's because you've got bonds and connections that you want to be present for. 
+And a core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life. 
+Now, this has really significant implications. 
+The most obvious implications are for the War on Drugs. 
+In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, "" I was a drug addict, "" and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they're going to have criminal records that mean they'll never work in the legal economy again. 
+There was a doctor in Canada, Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system. 
+Now, there's a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went there to see how it worked. 
+One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year, they tried the American way more and more. 
+And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can't go on with a country where we're having ever more people becoming heroin addicts. 
+And they set up a panel led by an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new evidence, and they came back and they said, "" Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but "" — and this is the crucial next step — "" take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them, and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society. "" And that's not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. 
+So say you used to be a mechanic. 
+It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. 
+Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. 
+One of the ways you know it's worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system. 
+Now, that's the political implications. 
+Before these talks began — you guys know this — we were told we weren't allowed to have our smartphones on, and I have to say, a lot of you looked an awful lot like addicts who were told their dealer was going to be unavailable for the next couple of hours. (Laughter) A lot of us feel like that, and it might sound weird to say, I've been talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected society that's ever been, surely. 
+It looked at the number of close friends the average American believes they can call on in a crisis. 
+Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park. 
+You are angry a lot of the time, and I think one of the reasons why this debate is so charged is because it runs through the heart of each of us, right? 
+And I began to think, I began to see why that approach doesn't work, and I began to think that's almost like the importing of the logic of the Drug War into our private lives. 
+So I was thinking, how could I be Portuguese? 
+And what I've tried to do now, and I can't tell you I do it consistently and I can't tell you it's easy, is to say to the addicts in my life that I want to deepen the connection with them, to say to them, I love you whether you're using or you're not. 
+I love you, whatever state you're in, and if you need me, I'll come and sit with you because I love you and I don't want you to be alone or to feel alone. 
+And I think the core of that message — you're not alone, we love you — has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially, politically and individually. 
+For 100 years now, we've been singing war songs about addicts. 
+I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them, because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. 
+The opposite of addiction is connection. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm extremely excited to be given the opportunity to come and speak to you today about what I consider to be the biggest stunt on Earth. 
+Or perhaps not quite on Earth. 
+A parachute jump from the very edge of space. 
+More about that a bit later on. 
+What I'd like to do first is take you through a very brief helicopter ride of stunts and the stunts industry in the movies and in television, and show you how technology has started to interface with the physical skills of the stunt performer in a way that makes the stunts bigger and actually makes them safer than they've ever been before. 
+I've been a professional stunt man for 13 years. 
+I'm a stunt coordinator. And as well as perform stunts I often design them. 
+During that time, health and safety has become everything about my job. 
+It's critical now that when a car crash happens it isn't just the stunt person we make safe, it's the crew. 
+We can't be killing camera men. We can't be killing stunt men. 
+We can't be killing anybody or hurting anybody on set, or any passerby. So, safety is everything. 
+But it wasn't always that way. 
+In the old days of the silent movies — Harold Lloyd here, hanging famously from the clock hands — a lot of these guys did their own stunts. They were quite remarkable. 
+They had no safety, no real technology. 
+What safety they had was very scant. 
+This is the first stunt woman, Rosie Venger, an amazing woman. 
+You can see from the slide, very very strong. 
+She really paved the way at a time when nobody was doing stunts, let alone women. 
+My favorite and a real hero of mine is Yakima Canutt. 
+Yakima Canutt really formed the stunt fight. 
+He worked with John Wayne and most of those old punch-ups you see in the Westerns. Yakima was either there or he stunt coordinated. 
+This is a screen capture from "" Stagecoach, "" where Yakima Canutt is doing one of the most dangerous stunts I've ever seen. 
+There is no safety, no back support, no pads, no crash mats, no sand pits in the ground. 
+That's one of the most dangerous horse stunts, certainly. 
+Talking of dangerous stunts and bringing things slightly up to date, some of the most dangerous stunts we do as stunt people are fire stunts. 
+We couldn't do them without technology. 
+These are particularly dangerous because there is no mask on my face. 
+They were done for a photo shoot. One for the Sun newspaper, one for FHM magazine. 
+Highly dangerous, but also you'll notice it doesn't look as though I'm wearing anything underneath the suit. 
+The fire suits of old, the bulky suits, the thick woolen suits, have been replaced with modern materials like Nomex or, more recently, Carbonex — fantastic materials that enable us as stunt professionals to burn for longer, look more spectacular, and in pure safety. 
+Here's a bit more. 
+There's a guy with a flame thrower there, giving me what for. 
+One of the things that a stuntman often does, and you'll see it every time in the big movies, is be blown through the air. 
+Well, we used to use trampettes. In the old days, that's all they had. 
+And that's a ramp. Spring off the thing and fly through the air, and hopefully you make it look good. 
+Now we've got technology. This thing is called an air ram. 
+It's a frightening piece of equipment for the novice stunt performer, because it will break your legs very, very quickly if you land on it wrong. 
+Having said that, it works with compressed nitrogen. 
+And that's in the up position. When you step on it, either by remote control or with the pressure of your foot, it will fire you, depending on the gas pressure, anything from five feet to 30 feet. 
+I could, quite literally, fire myself into the gallery. 
+Which I'm sure you wouldn't want. 
+Not today. 
+Car stunts are another area where technology and engineering advances have made life easier for us, and safer. 
+We can do bigger car stunts than ever before now. 
+Being run over is never easy. 
+That's an old-fashioned, hard, gritty, physical stunt. 
+But we have padding, and fantastic shock-absorbing things like Sorbothane — the materials that help us, when we're hit like this, not to hurt ourselves too much. 
+The picture in the bottom right-hand corner there is of some crash test dummy work that I was doing. 
+Showing how stunts work in different areas, really. 
+And testing breakaway signpost pillars. 
+A company makes a Lattix pillar, which is a network, a lattice-type pillar that collapses when it's hit. 
+The car on the left drove into the steel pillar. 
+And you can't see it from there, but the engine was in the driver's lap. 
+They did it by remote control. 
+I drove the other one at 60 miles an hour, exactly the same speed, and clearly walked away from it. 
+Rolling a car over is another area where we use technology. 
+We used to have to drive up a ramp, and we still do sometimes. 
+But now we have a compressed nitrogen cannon. 
+You can just see, underneath the car, there is a black rod on the floor by the wheel of the other car. 
+That's the piston that was fired out of the floor. 
+We can flip lorries, coaches, buses, anything over with a nitrogen cannon with enough power. (Laughs) It's a great job, really. (Laughter) It's such fun! 
+You should hear some of the phone conversations that I have with people on my Bluetooth in the shop. 
+"" Well, we can flip the bus over, we can have it burst into flames, and how about someone, you know, big explosion. "" And people are looking like this... 
+(Laughs) I sort of forget how bizarre some of those conversations are. 
+The next thing that I'd like to show you is something that Dunlop asked me to do earlier this year with our Channel Five's "" Fifth Gear Show. "" A loop-the-loop, biggest in the world. 
+Only one person had ever done it before. 
+Now, the stuntman solution to this in the old days would be, "" Let's hit this as fast as possible. 60 miles an hour. 
+Let's just go for it. Foot flat to the floor. "" Well, you'd die if you did that. 
+We went to Cambridge University, the other university, and spoke to a Doctor of Mechanical Engineering there, a physicist who taught us that it had to be 37 miles an hour. 
+Even then, I caught seven G and lost a bit of consciousness on the way in. 
+That's a long way to fall, if you get it wrong. That was just about right. 
+So again, science helps us, and with the engineering too — the modifications to the car and the wheel. 
+High falls, they're old fashioned stunts. 
+What's interesting about high falls is that although we use airbags, and some airbags are quite advanced, they're designed so you don't slip off the side like you used to, if you land a bit wrong. So, they're a much safer proposition. 
+Just basically though, it is a basic piece of equipment. 
+It's a bouncy castle with slats in the side to allow the air to escape. 
+That's all it is, a bouncy castle. 
+That's the only reason we do it. See, it's all fun, this job. 
+What's interesting is we still use cardboard boxes. 
+They used to use cardboard boxes years ago and we still use them. 
+And that's interesting because they are almost retrospective. 
+They're great for catching you, up to certain heights. 
+And on the other side of the fence, that physical art, the physical performance of the stuntman, has interfaced with the very highest technology in I.T. and in software. 
+Not the cardboard box, but the green screen. 
+This is a shot of "" Terminator, "" the movie. 
+Two stunt guys doing what I consider to be a rather benign stunt. 
+It's 30 feet. It's water. It's very simple. 
+With the green screen we can put any background in the world on it, moving or still, and I can assure you, nowadays you can't see the joint. 
+This is a parachutist with another parachutist doing exactly the same thing. 
+Completely in the safety of a studio, and yet with the green screen we can have some moving image that a skydiver took, and put in the sky moving and the clouds whizzing by. 
+Decelerator rigs and wires, we use them a lot. 
+We fly people on wires, like this. 
+This guy is not skydiving. He's being flown like a kite, or moved around like a kite. 
+And this is a Guinness World Record attempt. 
+They asked me to open their 50th anniversary show in 2004. 
+And again, technology meant that I could do the fastest abseil over 100 meters, and stop within a couple of feet of the ground without melting the rope with the friction, because of the alloys I used in the descender device. 
+And that's Centre Point in London. 
+We brought Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road to a standstill. 
+Helicopter stunts are always fun, hanging out of them, whatever. 
+And aerial stunts. No aerial stunt would be the same without skydiving. 
+Which brings us quite nicely to why I'm really here today: Project Space Jump. 
+In 1960, Joseph Kittenger of the United States Air Force did the most spectacular thing. 
+He did a jump from 100,000 feet, 102,000 to be precise, and he did it to test high altitude systems for military pilots in the new range of aircraft that were going up to 80,000 feet or so. 
+And I'd just like to show you a little footage of what he did back then. 
+And just how brave he was in 1960, bear in mind. 
+Project Excelsior, it was called. 
+There were three jumps. 
+They first dropped some dummies. 
+So that's the balloon, big gas balloon. 
+It's that shape because the helium has to expand. 
+My balloon will expand to 500 times and look like a big pumpkin when it's at the top. 
+These are the dummies being dropped from 100,000 feet, and there is the camera that's strapped to them. 
+You can clearly see the curvature of the Earth at that kind of altitude. 
+And I'm planning to go from 120,000 feet, which is about 22 miles. 
+You're in a near vacuum in that environment, which is in minus 50 degrees. 
+So it's an extremely hostile place to be. 
+This is Joe Kittenger himself. 
+Bear in mind, ladies and gents, this was 1960. 
+He didn't know if he would live or die. This is an extremely brave man. 
+I spoke with him on the phone a few months ago. 
+He's a very humble and wonderful human being. 
+He sent me an email, saying, "" If you get this thing off the ground I wish you all the best. "" And he signed it, "" Happy landings, "" which I thought was quite lovely. 
+He's in his 80s and he lives in Florida. He's a tremendous guy. 
+This is him in a pressure suit. 
+Now one of the challenges of going up to altitude is when you get to 30,000 feet — it's great, isn't it? — When you get to 30,000 feet you can really only use oxygen. 
+Above 30,000 feet up to nearly 50,000 feet, you need pressure breathing, which is where you're wearing a G suit. 
+This is him in his old rock-and-roll jeans there, pushing him in, those turned up jeans. 
+You need a pressure suit. 
+You need a pressure breathing system with a G suit that squeezes you, that helps you to breathe in and helps you to exhale. 
+Above 50,000 feet you need a space suit, a pressure suit. 
+Certainly at 100,000 feet no aircraft will fly. 
+Not even a jet engine. 
+It needs to be rocket-powered or one of these things, a great big gas balloon. 
+It took me a while; it took me years to find the right balloon team to build the balloon that would do this job. 
+I've found that team in America now. 
+And it's made of polyethylene, so it's very thin. 
+We will have two balloons for each of my test jumps, and two balloons for the main jump, because they notoriously tear on takeoff. 
+They're just so, so delicate. 
+This is the step off. He's written on that thing, "The highest step in the world." 
+And what must that feel like? 
+I'm excited and I'm scared, both at the same time in equal measures. 
+And this is the camera that he had on him as he tumbled before his drogue chute opened to stabilize him. 
+A drogue chute is just a smaller chute which helps to keep your face down. 
+You can just see them there, popping open. 
+Those are the drogue chutes. He had three of them. 
+I did quite a lot of research. 
+And you'll see in a second there, he comes back down to the floor. 
+Now just to give you some perspective of this balloon, the little black dots are people. 
+It's hundreds of feet high. It's enormous. 
+That's in New Mexico. 
+That's the U.S. Air Force Museum. 
+And they've made a dummy of him. That's exactly what it looked like. 
+My gondola will be more simple than that. 
+It's a three sided box, basically. 
+So I've had to do quite a lot of training. 
+This is Morocco last year in the Atlas mountains, training in preparation for some high altitude jumps. 
+This is what the view is going to be like at 90,000 feet for me. 
+Now you may think this is just a thrill-seeking trip, a pleasure ride, just the world's biggest stunt. 
+Well there's a little bit more to it than that. 
+Trying to find a space suit to do this has led me to an area of technology that I never really expected when I set about doing this. 
+I contacted a company in the States who make suits for NASA. 
+That's a current suit. This was me last year with their chief engineer. 
+That suit would cost me about a million and a half dollars. 
+And it weighs 300 pounds and you can't skydive in it. 
+So I've been stuck. For the past 15 years I've been trying to find a space suit that would do this job, or someone that will make one. 
+Something revolutionary happened a little while ago, at the same facility. 
+That's the prototype of the parachute. I've now had them custom make one, the only one of its kind in the world. And that's the only suit of its kind in the world. 
+It was made by a Russian that's designed most of the suits of the past 18 years for the Soviets. 
+He left the company because he saw, as some other people in the space suit industry, an emerging market for space suits for space tourists. 
+You know if you are in an aircraft at 30,000 feet and the cabin depressurizes, you can have oxygen. 
+If you're at 100,000 feet you die. 
+In six seconds you've lost consciousness. In 10 seconds you're dead. 
+Your blood tries to boil. It's called vaporization. 
+The body swells up. It's awful. 
+And so we expect — it's not much fun. 
+We expect, and others expect, that perhaps the FAA, the CAA might say, "" You need to put someone in a suit that's not inflated, that's connected to the aircraft. "" Then they're comfortable, they have good vision, like this great big visor. 
+And then if the cabin depressurizes while the aircraft is coming back down, in whatever emergency measures, everyone is okay. 
+I would like to bring Costa on, if he's here, to show you the only one of its kind in the world. 
+I was going to wear it, but I thought I'd get Costa to do it, my lovely assistant. 
+Thank you. He's very hot. Thank you, Costa. 
+This is the communication headset you'll see on lots of space suits. 
+It's a two-layer suit. NASA suits have got 13 layers. 
+This is a very lightweight suit. It weighs about 15 pounds. 
+It's next to nothing. Especially designed for me. 
+It's a working prototype. I will use it for all the jumps. 
+Would you just give us a little twirl, please, Costa? 
+Thank you very much. 
+And it doesn't look far different when it's inflated, as you can see from the picture down there. 
+I've even skydived in it in a wind tunnel, which means that I can practice everything I need to practice, in safety, before I ever jump out of anything. Thanks very much, Costa. 
+(Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, that's just about it from me. 
+The status of my mission at the moment is it still needs a major sponsor. 
+I'm confident that we'll find one. 
+I think it's a great challenge. 
+And I hope that you will agree with me, it is the greatest stunt on Earth. 
+Thank you very much for your time. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Good morning everybody. 
+I work with really amazing, little, itty-bitty creatures called cells. 
+And let me tell you what it's like to grow these cells in the lab. 
+I work in a lab where we take cells out of their native environment. 
+We plate them into dishes that we sometimes call petri dishes. 
+And we feed them — sterilely of course — with what we call cell culture media — which is like their food — and we grow them in incubators. 
+Why do I do this? 
+We observe the cells in a plate, and they're just on the surface. 
+But what we're really trying to do in my lab is to engineer tissues out of them. 
+What does that even mean? 
+Well it means growing an actual heart, let's say, or grow a piece of bone that can be put into the body. 
+Not only that, but they can also be used for disease models. 
+And for this purpose, traditional cell culture techniques just really aren't enough. 
+The cells are kind of homesick; the dish doesn't feel like their home. 
+And so we need to do better at copying their natural environment to get them to thrive. 
+We call this the biomimetic paradigm — copying nature in the lab. 
+Let's take the example of the heart, the topic of a lot of my research. 
+What makes the heart unique? 
+Well, the heart beats, rhythmically, tirelessly, faithfully. 
+We copy this in the lab by outfitting cell culture systems with electrodes. 
+These electrodes act like mini pacemakers to get the cells to contract in the lab. 
+What else do we know about the heart? 
+Well, heart cells are pretty greedy. 
+Nature feeds the heart cells in your body with a very, very dense blood supply. 
+In the lab, we micro-pattern channels in the biomaterials on which we grow the cells, and this allows us to flow the cell culture media, the cells' food, through the scaffolds where we're growing the cells — a lot like what you might expect from a capillary bed in the heart. 
+So this brings me to lesson number one: life can do a lot with very little. 
+Let's take the example of electrical stimulation. 
+Let's see how powerful just one of these essentials can be. 
+On the left, we see a tiny piece of beating heart tissue that I engineered from rat cells in the lab. 
+It's about the size of a mini marshmallow. 
+And after one week, it's beating. 
+You can see it in the upper left-hand corner. 
+But don't worry if you can't see it so well. 
+It's amazing that these cells beat at all. 
+But what's really amazing is that the cells, when we electrically stimulate them, like with a pacemaker, that they beat so much more. 
+But that brings me to lesson number two: cells do all the work. 
+In a sense, tissue engineers have a bit of an identity crisis here, because structural engineers build bridges and big things, computer engineers, computers, but what we are doing is actually building enabling technologies for the cells themselves. 
+What does this mean for us? 
+Let's do something really simple. 
+Let's remind ourselves that cells are not an abstract concept. 
+Let's remember that our cells sustain our lives in a very real way. 
+"" We are what we eat, "" could easily be described as, "" We are what our cells eat. "" And in the case of the flora in our gut, these cells may not even be human. 
+But it's also worth noting that cells also mediate our experience of life. 
+Behind every sound, sight, touch, taste and smell is a corresponding set of cells that receive this information and interpret it for us. 
+It begs the question: shall we expand our sense of environmental stewardship to include the ecosystem of our own bodies? 
+I invite you to talk about this with me further, and in the meantime, I wish you luck. 
+May none of your non-cancer cells become endangered species. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a medical illustrator, and I come from a slightly different point of view. 
+I've been watching, since I grew up, the expressions of truth and beauty in the arts and truth and beauty in the sciences. 
+And while these are both wonderful things in their own right — they both have very wonderful things going for them — truth and beauty as ideals that can be looked at by the sciences and by math are almost like the ideal conjoined twins that a scientist would want to date. 
+(Laughter) These are expressions of truth as awe-full things, by meaning they are things you can worship. 
+They are ideals that are powerful. They are irreducible. 
+They are unique. They are useful — sometimes, often a long time after the fact. 
+And you can actually roll some of the pictures now, because I don't want to look at me on the screen. 
+Truth and beauty are things that are often opaque to people who are not in the sciences. 
+They are things that describe beauty in a way that is often only accessible if you understand the language and the syntax of the person who studies the subject in which truth and beauty is expressed. 
+If you look at the math, E = mc squared, if you look at the cosmological constant, where there's an anthropic ideal, where you see that life had to evolve from the numbers that describe the universe — these are things that are really difficult to understand. 
+And what I've tried to do since I had my training as a medical illustrator — since I was taught animation by my father, who was a sculptor and my visual mentor — I wanted to figure out a way to help people understand truth and beauty in the biological sciences by using animation, by using pictures, by telling stories so that the things that are not necessarily evident to people can be brought forth, and can be taught, and can be understood. 
+Students today are often immersed in an environment where what they learn is subjects that have truth and beauty embedded in them, but the way they're taught is compartmentalized and it's drawn down to the point where the truth and beauty are not always evident. 
+It's almost like that old recipe for chicken soup where you boil the chicken until the flavor is just gone. 
+We don't want to do that to our students. 
+So we have an opportunity to really open up education. 
+And I had a telephone call from Robert Lue at Harvard, in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Department, a couple of years ago. He asked me if my team and I would be interested and willing to really change how medical and scientific education is done at Harvard. 
+So we embarked on a project that would explore the cell — that would explore the truth and beauty inherent in molecular and cellular biology so that students could understand a larger picture that they could hang all of these facts on. 
+They could have a mental image of the cell as a large, bustling, hugely complicated city that's occupied by micro-machines. 
+And these micro-machines really are at the heart of life. 
+These micro-machines, which are the envy of nanotechnologists the world over, are self-directed, powerful, precise, accurate devices that are made out of strings of amino acids. 
+And these micro-machines power how a cell moves. 
+They power how a cell replicates. They power our hearts. 
+They power our minds. 
+And so what we wanted to do was to figure out how we could make this story into an animation that would be the centerpiece of BioVisions at Harvard, which is a website that Harvard has for its molecular and cellular biology students that will — in addition to all the textual information, in addition to all the didactic stuff — put everything together visually, so that these students would have an internalized view of what a cell really is in all of its truth and beauty, and be able to study with this view in mind, so that their imaginations would be sparked, 
+so that their passions would be sparked and so that they would be able to go on and use these visions in their head to make new discoveries and to be able to find out, really, how life works. 
+So we set out by looking at how these molecules are put together. 
+We worked with a theme, which is, you've got macrophages that are streaming down a capillary, and they're touching the surface of the capillary wall, and they're picking up information from cells that are on the capillary wall, and they are given this information that there's an inflammation somewhere outside, where they can't see and sense. 
+But they get the information that causes them to stop, causes them to internalize that they need to make all of the various parts that will cause them to change their shape, and try to get out of this capillary and find out what's going on. 
+So these molecular motors — we had to work with the Harvard scientists and databank models of the atomically accurate molecules and figure out how they moved, and figure out what they did. 
+And figure out how to do this in a way that was truthful in that it imparted what was going on, but not so truthful that the compact crowding in a cell would prevent the vista from happening. 
+And so what I'm going to show you is a three-minute Reader's Digest version of the first aspect of this film that we produced. It's an ongoing project that's going to go another four or five years. 
+And I want you to look at this and see the paths that the cell manufactures — these little walking machines, they're called kinesins — that take these huge loads that would challenge an ant in relative size. 
+Run the movie, please. 
+But these machines that power the inside of the cells are really quite amazing, and they really are the basis of all life because all of these machines interact with each other. 
+They pass information to each other. 
+They cause different things to happen inside the cell. 
+And the cell will actually manufacture the parts that it needs on the fly, from information that's brought from the nucleus by molecules that read the genes. 
+No life, from the smallest life to everybody here, would be possible without these little micro-machines. 
+In fact, it would really, in the absence of these machines, have made the attendance here, Chris, really quite sparse. 
+(Laughter) (Music) This is the FedEx delivery guy of the cell. 
+This little guy is called the kinesin, and he pulls a sack that's full of brand new manufactured proteins to wherever it's needed in the cell — whether it's to a membrane, whether it's to an organelle, whether it's to build something or repair something. 
+And each of us has about 100,000 of these things running around, right now, inside each one of your 100 trillion cells. 
+So no matter how lazy you feel, you're not really intrinsically doing nothing. 
+(Laughter) So what I want you to do when you go home is think about this, and think about how powerful our cells are. 
+And think about some of the things that we're learning about cellular mechanics. 
+Once we figure out all that's going on — and believe me, we know almost a percent of what's going on — once we figure out what's going on, we're really going to be able to have a lot of control over what we do with our health, with what we do with future generations, and how long we're going to live. 
+And hopefully we'll be able to use this to discover more truth, and more beauty. 
+(Music) But it's really quite amazing that these cells, these micro-machines, are aware enough of what the cell needs that they do their bidding. 
+They work together. They make the cell do what it needs to do. 
+And their working together helps our bodies — huge entities that they will never see — function properly. 
+Enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My name is Joshua Walters. 
+I'm a performer. 
+(Beatboxing) (Laughter) (Applause) But as far as being a performer, I'm also diagnosed bipolar. 
+I reframe that as a positive because the crazier I get onstage, the more entertaining I become. 
+When I was 16 in San Francisco, I had my breakthrough manic episode in which I thought I was Jesus Christ. 
+Maybe you thought that was scary, but actually there's no amount of drugs you can take that can get you as high as if you think you're Jesus Christ. 
+(Laughter) I was sent to a place, a psych ward, and in the psych ward, everyone is doing their own one-man show. (Laughter) 
+There's no audience like this to justify their rehearsal time. 
+They're just practicing. 
+One day they'll get here. 
+Now when I got out, I was diagnosed and I was given medications by a psychiatrist. 
+"" Okay, Josh, why don't we give you some — why don't we give you some Zyprexa. 
+Okay? Mmhmm? 
+At least that's what it says on my pen. "" (Laughter) Some of you are in the field, I can see. 
+I can feel your noise. 
+The first half of high school was the struggle of the manic episode, and the second half was the overmedications of these drugs, where I was sleeping through high school. 
+The second half was just one big nap, pretty much, in class. 
+When I got out I had a choice. 
+I could either deny my mental illness or embrace my mental skillness. 
+(Bugle sound) There's a movement going on right now to reframe mental illness as a positive — at least the hypomanic edge part of it. 
+Now if you don't know what hypomania is, it's like an engine that's out of control, maybe a Ferrari engine, with no breaks. 
+Many of the speakers here, many of you in the audience, have that creative edge, if you know what I'm talking about. 
+You're driven to do something that everyone has told you is impossible. 
+And there's a book — John Gartner. 
+John Gartner wrote this book called "" The Hypomanic Edge "" in which Christopher Columbus and Ted Turner and Steve Jobs and all these business minds have this edge to compete. 
+A different book was written not too long ago in the mid-90s called "" Touched With Fire "" by Kay Redfield Jamison in which it was looked at in a creative sense in which Mozart and Beethoven and Van Gogh all have this manic depression that they were suffering with. 
+Some of them committed suicide. 
+So it wasn't all the good side of the illness. 
+Now recently, there's been development in this field. 
+And there was an article written in the New York Times, September 2010, that stated: "Just Manic Enough." 
+Just be manic enough in which investors who are looking for entrepreneurs that have this kind of spectrum — you know what I'm talking about — not maybe full bipolar, but they're in the bipolar spectrum — where on one side, maybe you think you're Jesus, and on the other side maybe they just make you a lot of money. 
+(Laughter) Your call. Your call. 
+And everyone's somewhere in the middle. 
+Everyone's somewhere in the middle. 
+So maybe, you know, there's no such thing as crazy, and being diagnosed with a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy. 
+But maybe it just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel. 
+Maybe no one's really crazy. 
+Everyone is just a little bit mad. 
+How much depends on where you fall in the spectrum. How much 
+depends on how lucky you are. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I come from one of the most liberal, tolerant, progressive places in the United States, Seattle, Washington. 
+And I grew up with a family of great Seattlites. 
+My mother was an artist, my father was a college professor, and I am truly grateful for my upbringing, because I always felt completely comfortable designing my life exactly as I saw fit. 
+And in point of fact, I took a route that was not exactly what my parents had in mind. 
+When I was 19, I dropped out of college — dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs. 
+(Laughter) And I went on the road as a professional French horn player, which was my lifelong dream. 
+I played chamber music all over the United States and Europe, and I toured for a couple of years with a great jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird. 
+And by the end of my 20s, I wound up as a member of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra in Spain. 
+What a great life. 
+And you know, my parents never complained. 
+They supported me all the way through it. 
+It wasn't their dream. 
+They used to tell their neighbors and friends, "Our son, he's taking a gap decade." 
+(Laughter) And — There was, however, one awkward conversation about my lifestyle that I want to tell you about. 
+I was 27, and I was home from Barcelona, and I was visiting my parents for Christmas, and I was cooking dinner with my mother, and we were alone in the kitchen. 
+And she was quiet, too quiet. 
+Something was wrong. 
+And so I said, "" Mom, what's on your mind? "" And she said, "" Your dad and I are really worried about you. "" And I said, "" What? "" I mean, what could it be, at this point? 
+And she said, "" I want you to be completely honest with me: have you been voting for Republicans? "" (Laughter) Now, the truth is, I wasn't really political, I was just a French horn player. 
+But I had a bit of an epiphany, and they had detected it, and it was causing some confusion. 
+You see, I had become an enthusiast for capitalism, and I want to tell you why that is. 
+It stems from a lifelong interest of mine in, believe it or not, poverty. 
+See, when I was a kid growing up in Seattle, I remember the first time I saw real poverty. 
+We were a lower middle class family, but that's of course not real poverty. 
+That's not even close. 
+The first time I saw poverty, and poverty's face, was when I was six or seven years old, early 1970s. 
+And it was like a lot of you, kind of a prosaic example, kind of trite. 
+It was a picture in the National Geographic Magazine of a kid who was my age in East Africa, and there were flies on his face and a distended belly. 
+And he wasn't going to make it, and I knew that, and I was helpless. 
+Some of you remember that picture, not exactly that picture, one just like it. 
+It introduced the West to grinding poverty around the world. 
+Well, that vision kind of haunted me as I grew up and I went to school and I dropped out and dropped in and started my family. 
+And I wondered, what happened to that kid? 
+Or to people just like him all over the world? 
+And so I started to study, even though I wasn't in college, I was looking for the answer: what happened to the world's poorest people? 
+Has it gotten worse? Has it gotten better? What? 
+And I found the answer, and it changed my life, and I want to share it with you. 
+See — most Americans believe that poverty has gotten worse since we were children, since they saw that vision. 
+If you ask Americans, "" Has poverty gotten worse or better around the world? "", 70 percent will say that hunger has gotten worse since the early 1970s. 
+But here's the truth. 
+Here's the epiphany that I had that changed my thinking. 
+From 1970 until today, the percentage of the world's population living in starvation levels, living on a dollar a day or less, obviously adjusted for inflation, that percentage has declined by 80 percent. 
+There's been an 80 percent decline in the world's worst poverty since I was a kid. 
+And I didn't even know about it. 
+This, my friends, that's a miracle. 
+That's something we ought to celebrate. 
+It's the greatest antipoverty achievement in the history of mankind, and it happened in our lifetimes. 
+(Applause) So when I learned this, I asked, what did that? What made it possible? 
+Because if you don't know why, you can't do it again. 
+If you want to replicate it and get the next two billion people out of poverty, because that's what we're talking about: since I was a kid, two billion of the least of these, our brothers and sisters, have been pulled out of poverty. 
+I want the next two billion, so I've got to know why. 
+And I went in search of an answer. 
+I wanted the best answer from mainstream economists left, right and center. 
+And here it is. 
+Here are the reasons. 
+There are five reasons that two billion of our brothers and sisters have been pulled out of poverty since I was a kid. 
+Number one: globalization. 
+Number two: free trade. 
+Number three: property rights. 
+Number four: rule of law. 
+Number five: entrepreneurship. 
+It was the free enterprise system spreading around the world after 1970 that did that. 
+Now, I'm not naive. 
+I know that free enterprise isn't perfect, and I know that free enterprise isn't everything we need to build a better world. 
+But that is great. 
+And that's beyond politics. 
+Here's what I learned. This is the epiphany. 
+Capitalism is not just about accumulation. 
+At its best, it's about aspiration, which is what so many people on this stage talk about, is the aspiration that comes from dreams that are embedded in the free enterprise system. 
+And we've got to share it with more people. 
+Now, I want to tell you about a second epiphany that's related to that first one that I think can bring us progress, not just around the world, but right here at home. 
+The best quote I've ever heard to summarize the thoughts that I've just given you about pulling people out of poverty is as follows: "" Free markets have created more wealth than any system in history. 
+They have lifted billions out of poverty. "" Who said it? 
+It sounds like Milton Friedman or Ronald Reagan. 
+Wrong. 
+President Barack Obama said that. 
+Why do I know it by heart? 
+Because he said it to me. 
+Crazy. 
+And I said, "" Hallelujah. "" But more than that, I said, "What an opportunity." 
+You know what I was thinking? 
+It was at an event that we were doing on the subject at Georgetown University in May of 2015. 
+And I thought, this is the solution to the biggest problem facing America today. What? 
+It's coming together around these ideas, liberals and conservatives, to help people who need us the most. 
+Now, I don't have to tell anybody in this room that we're in a crisis, in America and many countries around the world with political polarization. 
+It's risen to critical, crisis levels. 
+There was an article last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is one of the most prestigious scientific journals published in the West. 
+And it was an article in 2014 on political motive asymmetry. 
+What's that? That's what psychologists call the phenomenon of assuming that your ideology is based in love but your opponents' ideology is based in hate. 
+It's common in world conflict. 
+You expect to see this between Palestinians and Israelis, for example. 
+What the authors of this article found was that in America today, a majority of Republicans and Democrats suffer from political motive asymmetry. 
+A majority of people in our country today who are politically active believe that they are motivated by love but the other side is motivated by hate. 
+Think about it. Think about it. 
+Most people are walking around saying, "" You know, my ideology is based on basic benevolence, I want to help people, but the other guys, they're evil and out to get me. "" You can't progress as a society when you have this kind of asymmetry. 
+It's impossible. 
+How do we solve it? 
+Well, first, let's be honest: there are differences. 
+Let's not minimize the differences. That would be really naïve. 
+There's a lot of good research on this. 
+He's a psychology professor at New York University. 
+He does work on the ideology and values and morals of different people to see how they differ. 
+And he's shown, for example, that conservatives and liberals have a very different emphasis on what they think is important. 
+For example, Jon Haidt has shown that liberals care about poverty 59 percent more than they care about economic liberty. 
+And conservatives care about economic liberty 28 percent more than they care about poverty. 
+Irreconcilable differences, right? 
+We'll never come together. Wrong. 
+That is diversity in which lies our strength. 
+Remember what pulled up the poor. 
+It was the obsession with poverty, accompanied by the method of economic freedom spreading around the world. 
+We need each other, in other words, if we want to help people and get the next two billion people out of poverty. 
+There's no other way. 
+Hmm. 
+How are we going to get that? 
+It's a tricky thing, isn't it. 
+We need innovative thinking. 
+A lot of it's on this stage. 
+We need investment overseas in a sustainable, responsible, ethical and moral way. Yes. Yes. 
+But you know what we really need? 
+We need a new day in flexible ideology. 
+We need to be less predictable. 
+Don't we? 
+Do you ever feel like your own ideology is starting to get predictable? 
+Kinda conventional? 
+Do you ever feel like you're always listening to people who agree with you? 
+Why is that dangerous? 
+Because when we talk in this country about economics, on the right, conservatives, you're always talking about taxes and regulations and big government. 
+And on the left, liberals, you're talking about economics, it's always about income inequality. 
+Right? Now those are important things, really important to me, really important to you. 
+But when it comes to lifting people up who are starving and need us today, those are distractions. 
+We need to come together around the best ways to mitigate poverty using the best tools at our disposal, and that comes only when conservatives recognize that they need liberals and their obsession with poverty, and liberals need conservatives and their obsession with free markets. 
+That's the diversity in which lies the future strength of this country, if we choose to take it. 
+So how are we going to do it? How are we going to do it together? 
+I've got to have some action items, not just for you but for me. 
+Number one. Action item number one: remember, it's not good enough just to tolerate people who disagree. 
+It's not good enough. 
+We have to remember that we need people who disagree with us, because there are people who need all of us who are still waiting for these tools. 
+Now, what are you going to do? How are you going to express that? 
+Where does this start? It starts here. 
+You know, all of us in this room, we're blessed. 
+We're blessed with people who listen to us. 
+When people hear us, with the kind of unpredictable ideology, then maybe people will listen. 
+Maybe progress will start at that point. 
+That's number one. Number two. 
+Number two: I'm asking you and I'm asking me to be the person specifically who blurs the lines, who is ambiguous, who is hard to classify. 
+If you're a conservative, be the conservative who is always going on about poverty and the moral obligation to be a warrior for the poor. 
+And if you're a liberal, be a liberal who is always talking about the beauty of free markets to solve our problems when we use them responsibly. 
+If we do that, we get two things. 
+Number one: we get to start to work on the next two billion and be the solution that we've seen so much of in the past and we need to see more of in the future. That's what we get. 
+And the second is that we might just be able to take the ghastly holy war of ideology that we're suffering under in this country and turn it into a competition of ideas based on solidarity and mutual respect. 
+And then maybe, just maybe, we'll all realize that our big differences aren't really that big after all. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Well, I thought there would be a podium, so I'm a bit scared. 
+(Laughter) Chris asked me to tell again how we found the structure of DNA. 
+And since, you know, I follow his orders, I'll do it. 
+But it slightly bores me. 
+(Laughter) And, you know, I wrote a book. So I'll say something — (Laughter) — I'll say a little about, you know, how the discovery was made, and why Francis and I found it. 
+And then, I hope maybe I have at least five minutes to say what makes me tick now. 
+In back of me is a picture of me when I was 17. 
+I was at the University of Chicago, in my third year, and I was in my third year because the University of Chicago let you in after two years of high school. 
+So you — it was fun to get away from high school — (Laughter) — because I was very small, and I was no good in sports, or anything like that. 
+But I should say that my background — my father was, you know, raised to be an Episcopalian and Republican, but after one year of college, he became an atheist and a Democrat. 
+(Laughter) And my mother was Irish Catholic, and — but she didn't take religion too seriously. 
+And by the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. 
+So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. 
+I guess, you know, he was the big hero. 
+And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution. 
+And at the University of Chicago I was a zoology major, and thought I would end up, you know, if I was bright enough, maybe getting a Ph.D. from Cornell in ornithology. 
+Then, in the Chicago paper, there was a review of a book called "" What is Life? "" by the great physicist, Schrodinger. 
+And that, of course, had been a question I wanted to know. 
+You know, Darwin explained life after it got started, but what was the essence of life? 
+And Schrodinger said the essence was information present in our chromosomes, and it had to be present on a molecule. I'd never really thought of molecules before. 
+You know chromosomes, but this was a molecule, and somehow all the information was probably present in some digital form. And there was the big question of, how did you copy the information? 
+So that was the book. And so, from that moment on, I wanted to be a geneticist — understand the gene and, through that, understand life. 
+So I had, you know, a hero at a distance. 
+It wasn't a baseball player; it was Linus Pauling. 
+And so I applied to Caltech and they turned me down. 
+(Laughter) So I went to Indiana, which was actually as good as Caltech in genetics, and besides, they had a really good basketball team. (Laughter) So I had a really quite happy life at Indiana. 
+And it was at Indiana I got the impression that, you know, the gene was likely to be DNA. 
+And so when I got my Ph.D., I should go and search for DNA. 
+So I first went to Copenhagen because I thought, well, maybe I could become a biochemist, but I discovered biochemistry was very boring. 
+It wasn't going anywhere toward, you know, saying what the gene was; it was just nuclear science. And oh, that's the book, little book. 
+You can read it in about two hours. 
+And — but then I went to a meeting in Italy. 
+And there was an unexpected speaker who wasn't on the program, and he talked about DNA. 
+And this was Maurice Wilkins. He was trained as a physicist, and after the war he wanted to do biophysics, and he picked DNA because DNA had been determined at the Rockefeller Institute to possibly be the genetic molecules on the chromosomes. 
+Most people believed it was proteins. 
+But Wilkins, you know, thought DNA was the best bet, and he showed this x-ray photograph. 
+Sort of crystalline. So DNA had a structure, even though it owed it to probably different molecules carrying different sets of instructions. 
+So there was something universal about the DNA molecule. 
+So I wanted to work with him, but he didn't want a former birdwatcher, and I ended up in Cambridge, England. 
+So I went to Cambridge, because it was really the best place in the world then for x-ray crystallography. And x-ray crystallography is now a subject in, you know, chemistry departments. 
+I mean, in those days it was the domain of the physicists. 
+So the best place for x-ray crystallography was at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. 
+And there I met Francis Crick. 
+I went there without knowing him. He was 35. I was 23. 
+And within a day, we had decided that maybe we could take a shortcut to finding the structure of DNA. 
+Not solve it like, you know, in rigorous fashion, but build a model, an electro-model, using some coordinates of, you know, length, all that sort of stuff from x-ray photographs. 
+But just ask what the molecule — how should it fold up? 
+And the reason for doing so, at the center of this photograph, is Linus Pauling. About six months before, he proposed the alpha helical structure for proteins. And in doing so, he banished the man out on the right, Sir Lawrence Bragg, who was the Cavendish professor. 
+This is a photograph several years later, when Bragg had cause to smile. 
+He certainly wasn't smiling when I got there, because he was somewhat humiliated by Pauling getting the alpha helix, and the Cambridge people failing because they weren't chemists. 
+And certainly, neither Crick or I were chemists, so we tried to build a model. And he knew, Francis knew Wilkins. 
+So Wilkins said he thought it was the helix. 
+X-ray diagram, he thought was comparable with the helix. 
+So we built a three-stranded model. 
+The people from London came up. 
+Wilkins and this collaborator, or possible collaborator, Rosalind Franklin, came up and sort of laughed at our model. 
+They said it was lousy, and it was. 
+So we were told to build no more models; we were incompetent. 
+(Laughter) And so we didn't build any models, and Francis sort of continued to work on proteins. 
+And basically, I did nothing. And — except read. 
+You know, basically, reading is a good thing; you get facts. 
+And we kept telling the people in London that Linus Pauling's going to move on to DNA. 
+If DNA is that important, Linus will know it. 
+He'll build a model, and then we're going to be scooped. 
+And, in fact, he'd written the people in London: Could he see their x-ray photograph? 
+And they had the wisdom to say "" no. "" So he didn't have it. 
+But there was ones in the literature. 
+Actually, Linus didn't look at them that carefully. 
+But about, oh, 15 months after I got to Cambridge, a rumor began to appear from Linus Pauling's son, who was in Cambridge, that his father was now working on DNA. 
+And so, one day Peter came in and he said he was Peter Pauling, and he gave me a copy of his father's manuscripts. 
+And boy, I was scared because I thought, you know, we may be scooped. 
+I have nothing to do, no qualifications for anything. 
+(Laughter) And so there was the paper, and he proposed a three-stranded structure. 
+And I read it, and it was just — it was crap. 
+(Laughter) So this was, you know, unexpected from the world's — (Laughter) — and so, it was held together by hydrogen bonds between phosphate groups. 
+Well, if the peak pH that cells have is around seven, those hydrogen bonds couldn't exist. 
+We rushed over to the chemistry department and said, "" Could Pauling be right? "" And Alex Hust said, "" No. "" So we were happy. 
+(Laughter) And, you know, we were still in the game, but we were frightened that somebody at Caltech would tell Linus that he was wrong. 
+And so Bragg said, "" Build models. "" And a month after we got the Pauling manuscript — I should say I took the manuscript to London, and showed the people. 
+Well, I said, Linus was wrong and that we're still in the game and that they should immediately start building models. 
+But Wilkins said "" no. "" Rosalind Franklin was leaving in about two months, and after she left he would start building models. 
+And so I came back with that news to Cambridge, and Bragg said, "" Build models. "" Well, of course, I wanted to build models. 
+And there's a picture of Rosalind. She really, you know, in one sense she was a chemist, but really she would have been trained — she didn't know any organic chemistry or quantum chemistry. 
+She was a crystallographer. 
+And I think part of the reason she didn't want to build models was, she wasn't a chemist, whereas Pauling was a chemist. 
+And so Crick and I, you know, started building models, and I'd learned a little chemistry, but not enough. 
+Well, we got the answer on the 28th February '53. 
+And it was because of a rule, which, to me, is a very good rule: Never be the brightest person in a room, and we weren't. 
+We weren't the best chemists in the room. 
+I went in and showed them a pairing I'd done, and Jerry Donohue — he was a chemist — he said, it's wrong. 
+You've got — the hydrogen atoms are in the wrong place. 
+I just put them down like they were in the books. 
+He said they were wrong. 
+So the next day, you know, after I thought, "" Well, he might be right. "" So I changed the locations, and then we found the base pairing, and Francis immediately said the chains run in absolute directions. 
+And we knew we were right. 
+So it was a pretty, you know, it all happened in about two hours. 
+From nothing to thing. 
+And we knew it was big because, you know, if you just put A next to T and G next to C, you have a copying mechanism. 
+So we saw how genetic information is carried. 
+It's the order of the four bases. 
+So in a sense, it is a sort of digital-type information. 
+And you copy it by going from strand-separating. 
+So, you know, if it didn't work this way, you might as well believe it, because you didn't have any other scheme. 
+(Laughter) But that's not the way most scientists think. 
+Most scientists are really rather dull. 
+They said, we won't think about it until we know it's right. 
+But, you know, we thought, well, it's at least 95 percent right or 99 percent right. 
+So think about it. The next five years, there were essentially something like five references to our work in "" Nature "" — none. 
+And so we were left by ourselves, and trying to do the last part of the trio: how do you — what does this genetic information do? 
+It was pretty obvious that it provided the information to an RNA molecule, and then how do you go from RNA to protein? 
+For about three years we just — I tried to solve the structure of RNA. 
+It didn't yield. It didn't give good x-ray photographs. 
+I was decidedly unhappy; a girl didn't marry me. 
+It was really, you know, sort of a shitty time. 
+(Laughter) So there's a picture of Francis and I before I met the girl, so I'm still looking happy. (Laughter) 
+But there is what we did when we didn't know where to go forward: we formed a club and called it the RNA Tie Club. 
+George Gamow, also a great physicist, he designed the tie. 
+He was one of the members. The question was: How do you go from a four-letter code to the 20-letter code of proteins? 
+Feynman was a member, and Teller, and friends of Gamow. 
+But that's the only — no, we were only photographed twice. 
+And on both occasions, you know, one of us was missing the tie. 
+There's Francis up on the upper right, and Alex Rich — the M.D.-turned-crystallographer — is next to me. 
+This was taken in Cambridge in September of 1955. 
+And I'm smiling, sort of forced, I think, because the girl I had, boy, she was gone. 
+(Laughter) And so I didn't really get happy until 1960, because then we found out, basically, you know, that there are three forms of RNA. 
+And we knew, basically, DNA provides the information for RNA. 
+RNA provides the information for protein. 
+And that let Marshall Nirenberg, you know, take RNA — synthetic RNA — put it in a system making protein. He made polyphenylalanine, polyphenylalanine. So that's the first cracking of the genetic code, and it was all over by 1966. 
+So there, that's what Chris wanted me to do, it was — so what happened since then? 
+Well, at that time — I should go back. 
+When we found the structure of DNA, I gave my first talk at Cold Spring Harbor. The physicist, Leo Szilard, he looked at me and said, "" Are you going to patent this? "" And — but he knew patent law, and that we couldn't patent it, because you couldn't. No use for it. 
+(Laughter) And so DNA didn't become a useful molecule, and the lawyers didn't enter into the equation until 1973, 20 years later, when Boyer and Cohen in San Francisco and Stanford came up with their method of recombinant DNA, and Stanford patented it and made a lot of money. 
+At least they patented something which, you know, could do useful things. 
+And then, they learned how to read the letters for the code. 
+And, boom, we've, you know, had a biotech industry. And, but we were still a long ways from, you know, answering a question which sort of dominated my childhood, which is: How do you nature-nurture? 
+And so I'll go on. I'm already out of time, but this is Michael Wigler, a very, very clever mathematician turned physicist. And he developed a technique which essentially will let us look at sample DNA and, eventually, a million spots along it. 
+There's a chip there, a conventional one. Then there's one made by a photolithography by a company in Madison called NimbleGen, which is way ahead of Affymetrix. 
+And we use their technique. 
+And what you can do is sort of compare DNA of normal segs versus cancer. 
+And you can see on the top that cancers which are bad show insertions or deletions. 
+So the DNA is really badly mucked up, whereas if you have a chance of surviving, the DNA isn't so mucked up. 
+So we think that this will eventually lead to what we call "" DNA biopsies. "" Before you get treated for cancer, you should really look at this technique, and get a feeling of the face of the enemy. 
+It's not a — it's only a partial look, but it's a — I think it's going to be very, very useful. 
+So, we started with breast cancer because there's lots of money for it, no government money. 
+And now I have a sort of vested interest: I want to do it for prostate cancer. So, you know, you aren't treated if it's not dangerous. 
+But Wigler, besides looking at cancer cells, looked at normal cells, and made a really sort of surprising observation. 
+Which is, all of us have about 10 places in our genome where we've lost a gene or gained another one. 
+So we're sort of all imperfect. And the question is well, if we're around here, you know, these little losses or gains might not be too bad. 
+But if these deletions or amplifications occurred in the wrong gene, maybe we'll feel sick. 
+So the first disease he looked at is autism. 
+And the reason we looked at autism is we had the money to do it. 
+Looking at an individual is about 3,000 dollars. And the parent of a child with Asperger's disease, the high-intelligence autism, had sent his thing to a conventional company; they didn't do it. 
+Couldn't do it by conventional genetics, but just scanning it we began to find genes for autism. 
+And you can see here, there are a lot of them. 
+So a lot of autistic kids are autistic because they just lost a big piece of DNA. 
+I mean, big piece at the molecular level. 
+We saw one autistic kid, about five million bases just missing from one of his chromosomes. 
+We haven't yet looked at the parents, but the parents probably don't have that loss, or they wouldn't be parents. 
+Now, so, our autism study is just beginning. We got three million dollars. 
+I think it will cost at least 10 to 20 before you'd be in a position to help parents who've had an autistic child, or think they may have an autistic child, and can we spot the difference? 
+So this same technique should probably look at all. 
+It's a wonderful way to find genes. 
+And so, I'll conclude by saying we've looked at 20 people with schizophrenia. 
+And we thought we'd probably have to look at several hundred before we got the picture. But as you can see, there's seven out of 20 had a change which was very high. 
+And yet, in the controls there were three. 
+So what's the meaning of the controls? 
+Were they crazy also, and we didn't know it? 
+Or, you know, were they normal? I would guess they're normal. 
+And what we think in schizophrenia is there are genes of predisposure, and whether this is one that predisposes — and then there's only a sub-segment of the population that's capable of being schizophrenic. 
+Now, we don't have really any evidence of it, but I think, to give you a hypothesis, the best guess is that if you're left-handed, you're prone to schizophrenia. 
+30 percent of schizophrenic people are left-handed, and schizophrenia has a very funny genetics, which means 60 percent of the people are genetically left-handed, but only half of it showed. I don't have the time to say. 
+Now, some people who think they're right-handed are genetically left-handed. OK. I'm just saying that, if you think, oh, I don't carry a left-handed gene so therefore my, you know, children won't be at risk of schizophrenia. You might. OK? 
+(Laughter) So it's, to me, an extraordinarily exciting time. 
+We ought to be able to find the gene for bipolar; there's a relationship. 
+And if I had enough money, we'd find them all this year. 
+I thank you. 
+
+At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become, and then when we become those people, we're not always thrilled with the decisions we made. 
+So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. 
+Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. 
+Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. 
+On and on and on. 
+The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret? 
+Now, I think one of the reasons — I'll try to convince you today — is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. 
+Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year. 
+But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? 
+Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be. 
+What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. 
+Let me give you some data to back up that claim. 
+So here's a study of change in people's personal values over time. 
+Here's three values. 
+Well, we asked thousands of people. 
+We asked half of them to predict for us how much their values would change in the next 10 years, and the others to tell us how much their values had changed in the last 10 years. 
+And this enabled us to do a really interesting kind of analysis, because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people, say, 18 years old, to the reports of people who were 28, and to do that kind of analysis throughout the lifespan. 
+Here's what we found. 
+First of all, you are right, change does slow down as we age, but second, you're wrong, because it doesn't slow nearly as much as we think. 
+At every age, from 18 to 68 in our data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years. 
+We call this the "" end of history "" illusion. 
+To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do. 
+Now it's not just values. It's all sorts of other things. 
+For example, personality. 
+Many of you know that psychologists now claim that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality: neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. 
+Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years, and also how much they had changed over the last 10 years, and what we found, well, you're going to get used to seeing this diagram over and over, because once again the rate of change does slow as we age, but at every age, people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade. 
+And it isn't just ephemeral things like values and personality. 
+You can ask people about their likes and dislikes, their basic preferences. 
+For example, name your best friend, your favorite kind of vacation, what's your favorite hobby, what's your favorite kind of music. 
+We ask half of them to tell us, "Do you think that that will change over the next 10 years?" 
+and half of them to tell us, "Did that change over the last 10 years?" 
+And what we find, well, you've seen it twice now, and here it is again: people predict that the friend they have now is the friend they'll have in 10 years, the vacation they most enjoy now is the one they'll enjoy in 10 years, and yet, people who are 10 years older all say, "Eh, you know, that's really changed." 
+Does any of this matter? 
+Is this just a form of mis-prediction that doesn't have consequences? 
+It bedevils our decision-making in important ways. 
+Bring to mind right now for yourself your favorite musician today and your favorite musician 10 years ago. 
+I put mine up on the screen to help you along. 
+Now we asked people to predict for us, to tell us how much money they would pay right now to see their current favorite musician perform in concert 10 years from now, and on average, people said they would pay 129 dollars for that ticket. 
+And yet, when we asked them how much they would pay to see the person who was their favorite 10 years ago perform today, they say only 80 dollars. 
+Now, in a perfectly rational world, these should be the same number, but we overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability. 
+Why does this happen? We're not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining. 
+Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. 
+The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. 
+It transforms our preferences. 
+We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. 
+Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. 
+It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. 
+It's a watershed on the timeline. 
+It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. 
+Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. 
+The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. 
+The one constant in our life is change. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+About four years ago, the New Yorker published an article about a cache of dodo bones that was found in a pit on the island of Mauritius. 
+Now, the island of Mauritius is a small island off the east coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, and it is the place where the dodo bird was discovered and extinguished, all within about 150 years. 
+Everyone was very excited about this archaeological find, because it meant that they might finally be able to assemble a single dodo skeleton. 
+See, while museums all over the world have dodo skeletons in their collection, nobody — not even the actual Natural History Museum on the island of Mauritius — has a skeleton that's made from the bones of a single dodo. 
+Well, this isn't exactly true. 
+The fact is, is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century — it was actually mummified, skin and all — but in a fit of space-saving zeal, they actually cut off the head and they cut off the feet and they burned the rest in a bonfire. 
+If you go look at their website today, they'll actually list these specimens, saying, the rest was lost in a fire. 
+Not quite the whole truth. Anyway. 
+The frontispiece of this article was this photo, and I'm one of the people that thinks that Tina Brown was great for bringing photos to the New Yorker, because this photo completely rocked my world. 
+I became obsessed with the object — not just the beautiful photograph itself, and the color, the shallow depth of field, the detail that's visible, the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put this skeleton together — there's an entire story here. 
+And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if I had my own dodo skeleton? 
+(Laughter) I want to point out here at this point that I've spent my life obsessed by objects and the stories that they tell, and this was the very latest one. 
+So I began looking around for — to see if anyone sold a kit, some kind of model that I could get, and I found lots of reference material, lots of lovely pictures. 
+No dice: no dodo skeleton for me. But the damage had been done. 
+I had saved a few hundred photos of dodo skeletons into my "" Creative Projects "" folder — it's a repository for my brain, everything that I could possibly be interested in. 
+Any time I have an internet connection, there's a sluice of stuff moving into there, everything from beautiful rings to cockpit photos. 
+The key that the Marquis du Lafayette sent to George Washington to celebrate the storming of the Bastille. 
+Russian nuclear launch key: The one on the top is the picture of the one I found on eBay; the one on the bottom is the one I made for myself, because I couldn't afford the one on eBay. 
+Storm trooper costumes. Maps of Middle Earth — that's one I hand-drew myself. There's the dodo skeleton folder. 
+This folder has 17,000 photos — over 20 gigabytes of information — and it's growing constantly. 
+And one day, a couple of weeks later, it might have been maybe a year later, I was in the art store with my kids, and I was buying some clay tools — we were going to have a craft day. 
+I bought some Super Sculpeys, some armature wire, some various materials. 
+And I looked down at this Sculpey, and I thought, maybe, yeah, maybe I could make my own dodo skull. 
+I should point out at this time — I'm not a sculptor; I'm a hard-edged model maker. 
+You give me a drawing, you give me a prop to replicate, you give me a crane, scaffolding, parts from "" Star Wars "" — especially parts from "" Star Wars "" — I can do this stuff all day long. 
+It's exactly how I made my living for 15 years. 
+But you give me something like this — my friend Mike Murnane sculpted this; it's a maquette for "" Star Wars, Episode Two "" — this is not my thing — this is something other people do — dragons, soft things. 
+However, I felt like I had looked at enough photos of dodo skulls to actually be able to understand the topology and perhaps replicate it — I mean, it couldn't be that difficult. 
+So, I started looking at the best photos I could find. 
+I grabbed all the reference, and I found this lovely piece of reference. 
+This is someone selling this on eBay; it was clearly a woman ’ s hand, hopefully a woman's hand. 
+Assuming it was roughly the size of my wife's hand, I made some measurements of her thumb, and I scaled them out to the size of the skull. 
+I blew it up to the actual size, and I began using that, along with all the other reference that I had, comparing it to it as size reference for figuring out exactly how big the beak should be, exactly how long, etc. 
+And over a few hours, I eventually achieved what was actually a pretty reasonable dodo skull. And I didn't mean to continue, I — it's kind of like, you know, you can only clean a super messy room by picking up one thing at a time; you can't think about the totality. 
+I wasn't thinking about a dodo skeleton; I just noticed that as I finished this skull, the armature wire that I had been used to holding it up was sticking out of the back just where a spine would be. 
+And one of the other things I'd been interested in and obsessed with over the years is spines and skeletons, having collected a couple of hundred. 
+I actually understood the mechanics of vertebrae enough to kind of start to imitate them. 
+And so button by button, vertebrae by vertebrae, I built my way down. 
+And actually, by the end of the day, I had a reasonable skull, a moderately good vertebrae and half of a pelvis. 
+And again, I kept on going, looking for more reference, every bit of reference I could find — drawings, beautiful photos. 
+This guy — I love this guy! He put a dodo leg bones on a scanner with a ruler. 
+This is the kind of accuracy that I wanted, and I replicated every last bone and put it in. 
+And after about six weeks, I finished, painted, mounted my own dodo skeleton. 
+You can see that I even made a museum label for it that includes a brief history of the dodo. 
+And TAP Plastics made me — although I didn't photograph it — a museum vitrine. 
+I don't have the room for this in my house, but I had to finish what I had started. 
+And this actually represented kind of a sea change to me. 
+Again, like I said, my life has been about being fascinated by objects and the stories that they tell, and also making them for myself, obtaining them, appreciating them and diving into them. 
+And in this folder, "" Creative Projects, "" there are tons of projects that I'm currently working on, projects that I've already worked on, things that I might want to work on some day, and things that I may just want to find and buy and have and look at and touch. 
+But now there was potentially this new category of things that I could sculpt that was different, that I — you know, I have my own R2D2, but that's — honestly, relative to sculpting, to me, that's easy. 
+And so I went back and looked through my "" Creative Projects "" folder, and I happened across the Maltese Falcon. 
+Now, this is funny for me: to fall in love with an object from a Hammett novel, because if it's true that the world is divided into two types of people, Chandler people and Hammett people, I am absolutely a Chandler person. 
+But in this case, it's not about the author, it's not about the book or the movie or the story, it's about the object in and of itself. 
+And in this case, this object is — plays on a host of levels. 
+First of all, there's the object in the world. 
+This is the "" Kniphausen Hawk. "" It is a ceremonial pouring vessel made around 1700 for a Swedish Count, and it is very likely the object from which Hammett drew his inspiration for the Maltese Falcon. 
+Then there is the fictional bird, the one that Hammett created for the book. 
+Built out of words, it is the engine that drives the plot of his book and also the movie, in which another object is created: a prop that has to represent the thing that Hammett created out of words, inspired by the Kniphausen Hawk, and this represents the falcon in the movie. 
+And then there is this fourth level, which is a whole new object in the world: the prop made for the movie, the representative of the thing, becomes, in its own right, a whole other thing, a whole new object of desire. 
+And so now it was time to do some research. 
+I actually had done some research a few years before — it's why the folder was there. 
+I'd bought a replica, a really crappy replica, of the Maltese Falcon on eBay, and had downloaded enough pictures to actually have some reasonable reference. 
+But I discovered, in researching further, really wanting precise reference, that one of the original lead birds had been sold at Christie's in 1994, and so I contacted an antiquarian bookseller who had the original Christie's catalogue, and in it I found this magnificent picture, which included a size reference. 
+I was able to scan the picture, blow it up to exactly full size. 
+I found other reference. Avi [Ara] Chekmayan, a New Jersey editor, actually found this resin Maltese Falcon at a flea market in 1991, although it took him five years to authenticate this bird to the auctioneers' specifications, because there was a lot of controversy about it. 
+It was made out of resin, which wasn't a common material for movie props about the time the movie was made. 
+It's funny to me that it took a while to authenticate it, because I can see it compared to this thing, and I can tell you — it's real, it's the real thing, it's made from the exact same mold that this one is. 
+In this one, because the auction was actually so controversial, Profiles in History, the auction house that sold this — I think in 1995 for about 100,000 dollars — they actually included — you can see here on the bottom — not just a front elevation, but also a side, rear and other side elevation. 
+So now, I had all the topology I needed to replicate the Maltese Falcon. 
+What do they do, how do you start something like that? I really don't know. 
+So what I did was, again, like I did with the dodo skull, I blew all my reference up to full size, and then I began cutting out the negatives and using those templates as shape references. 
+So I took Sculpey, and I built a big block of it, and I passed it through until, you know, I got the right profiles. 
+And then slowly, feather by feather, detail by detail, I worked out and achieved — working in front of the television and Super Sculpey — here's me sitting next to my wife — it's the only picture I took of the entire process. 
+As I moved through, I achieved a very reasonable facsimile of the Maltese Falcon. 
+But again, I am not a sculptor, and so I don't know a lot of the tricks, like, I don't know how my friend Mike gets beautiful, shiny surfaces with his Sculpey; I certainly wasn't able to get it. 
+So, I went down to my shop, and I molded it and I cast it in resin, because in the resin, then, I could absolutely get the glass smooth finished. 
+Now there's a lot of ways to fill and get yourself a nice smooth finish. 
+My preference is about 70 coats of this — matte black auto primer. 
+I spray it on for about three or four days, it drips to hell, but it allows me a really, really nice gentle sanding surface and I can get it glass-smooth. 
+Oh, finishing up with triple-zero steel wool. 
+Now, the great thing about getting it to this point was that because in the movie, when they finally bring out the bird at the end, and they place it on the table, they actually spin it. 
+So I was able to actually screen-shot and freeze-frame to make sure. 
+And I'm following all the light kicks on this thing and making sure that as I'm holding the light in the same position, I'm getting the same type of reflection on it — that's the level of detail I'm going into this thing. 
+I ended up with this: my Maltese Falcon. 
+And it's beautiful. And I can state with authority at this point in time, when I'd finished it, of all of the replicas out there — and there is a few — this is by far the most accurate representation of the original Maltese Falcon than anyone has sculpted. Now the original one, I should tell you, is sculpted by a guy named Fred Sexton. 
+This is where it gets weird. 
+Fred Sexton was a friend of this guy, George Hodel. 
+Terrifying guy — agreed by many to be the killer of the Black Dahlia. 
+Now, James Ellroy believes that Fred Sexton, the sculptor of the Maltese Falcon, killed James Elroy's mother. 
+I'll go you one stranger than that: In 1974, during the production of a weird comedy sequel to "" The Maltese Falcon, "" called "" The Black Bird, "" starring George Segal, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had a plaster original of the Maltese Falcon — one of the original six plasters, I think, made for the movie — stolen out of the museum. A lot of people thought it was a publicity stunt for the movie. 
+John's Grill, which actually is seen briefly in "" The Maltese Falcon, "" is still a viable San Francisco eatery, counted amongst its regular customers Elisha Cook, who played Wilmer Cook in the movie, and he gave them one of his original plasters of the Maltese Falcon. 
+And they had it in their cabinet for about 15 years, until it got stolen in January of 2007. 
+It would seem that the object of desire only comes into its own by disappearing repeatedly. 
+So here I had this Falcon, and it was lovely. It looked really great, the light worked on it really well, it was better than anything that I could achieve or obtain out in the world. 
+But there was a problem. And the problem was that: I wanted the entirety of the object, I wanted the weight behind the object. 
+This thing was made of resin and it was too light. 
+There's this group online that I frequent. 
+It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props. 
+And it turned out that one of the guys there, a friend of mine that I never actually met, but befriended through some prop deals, was the manager of a local foundry. 
+He took my master Falcon pattern, he actually did lost wax casting in bronze for me, and this is the bronze I got back. 
+And this is, after some acid etching, the one that I ended up with. 
+And this thing, it's deeply, deeply satisfying to me. 
+Here, I'm going to put it out there, later on tonight, and I want you to pick it up and handle it. 
+You want to know how obsessed I am. This project's only for me, and yet I went so far as to buy on eBay a 1941 Chinese San Francisco-based newspaper, in order so that the bird could properly be wrapped... 
+like it is in the movie. 
+(Laughter) Yeah, I know! 
+(Laughter) (Applause) There you can see, it's weighing in at 27 and a half pounds. 
+That's half the weight of my dog, Huxley. 
+But there's a problem. 
+Now, here's the most recent progression of Falcons. 
+On the far left is a piece of crap — a replica I bought on eBay. 
+There's my somewhat ruined Sculpey Falcon, because I had to get it back out of the mold. There's my first casting, there's my master and there's my bronze. 
+There's a thing that happens when you mold and cast things, which is that every time you throw it into silicone and cast it in resin, you lose a little bit of volume, you lose a little bit of size. 
+And when I held my bronze one up against my Sculpey one, it was shorter by three-quarters of an inch. 
+Yeah, no, really, this was like aah — why didn't I remember this? 
+Why didn't I start and make it bigger? 
+So what do I do? I figure I have two options. 
+One, I can fire a freaking laser at it, which I have already done, to do a 3D scan — there's a 3D scan of this Falcon. 
+I had figured out the exact amount of shrinkage I achieved going from a wax master to a bronze master and blown this up big enough to make a 3D lithography master of this, which I will polish, then I will send to the mold maker and then I will have it done in bronze. Or: There are several people who own originals, and I have been attempting to contact them and reach them, hoping that they will let me spend a few minutes in the presence of one of the real birds, maybe to take a picture, or even to pull out the hand-held laser scanner 
+that I happen to own that fits inside a cereal box, and could maybe, without even touching their bird, I swear, get a perfect 3D scan. And I'm even willing to sign pages saying that I'll never let anyone else have it, except for me in my office, I promise. 
+I'll give them one if they want it. 
+And then, maybe, then I'll achieve the end of this exercise. 
+But really, if we're all going to be honest with ourselves, I have to admit that achieving the end of the exercise was never the point of the exercise to begin with, was it. 
+Thank you. 
+
+I love a challenge, and saving the Earth is probably a good one. 
+We all know the Earth is in trouble. 
+We have now entered in the 6X, the sixth major extinction on this planet. 
+I often wondered, if there was a United Organization of Organisms — otherwise known as "" Uh-Oh "" — (Laughter) — and every organism had a right to vote, would we be voted on the planet, or off the planet? 
+I think that vote is occurring right now. 
+I want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions, using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium. 
+The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it's extremely tenacious. 
+This holds up to 30,000 times its mass. 
+They're the grand molecular disassemblers of nature — the soil magicians. 
+They generate the humus soils across the landmasses of Earth. 
+We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mcyelium — so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks, cedars and Douglas firs. 
+Dusty and I, we like to say, on Sunday, this is where we go to church. 
+I'm in love with the old-growth forest, and I'm a patriotic American because we have those. 
+Most of you are familiar with Portobello mushrooms. 
+And frankly, I face a big obstacle. 
+When I mention mushrooms to somebody, they immediately think Portobellos or magic mushrooms, their eyes glaze over, and they think I'm a little crazy. 
+So, I hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group. 
+We call it mycophobia, the irrational fear of the unknown, when it comes to fungi. 
+Mushrooms are very fast in their growth. 
+Day 21, day 23, day 25. 
+Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics. 
+In fact, we're more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom. 
+A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting opisthokonta — a super-kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together. 
+We share in common the same pathogens. 
+Fungi don't like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi. 
+But here is a mushroom that's past its prime. 
+After they sporulate, they do rot. 
+But I propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest. 
+They give rise to the trees, they create the debris fields that feed the mycelium. 
+And so we see a mushroom here sporulating. 
+And the spores are germinating, and the mycelium forms and goes underground. 
+In a single cubic inch of soil, there can be more than eight miles of these cells. 
+My foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium. 
+This is photomicrographs from Nick Read and Patrick Hickey. 
+And notice that as the mycelium grows, it conquers territory and then it begins the net. 
+I've been a scanning electron microscopist for many years, I have thousands of electron micrographs, and when I'm staring at the mycelium, I realize that they are microfiltration membranes. 
+We exhale carbon dioxide, so does mycelium. 
+It inhales oxygen, just like we do. 
+But these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs. 
+And I present to you a concept that these are extended neurological membranes. 
+And in these cavities, these micro-cavities form, and as they fuse soils, they absorb water. 
+These are little wells. 
+And inside these wells, then microbial communities begin to form. 
+And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion, but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms. 
+I first proposed, in the early 1990s, that mycelium is Earth's natural Internet. 
+When you look at the mycelium, they're highly branched. 
+And if there's one branch that is broken, then very quickly, because of the nodes of crossing — Internet engineers maybe call them hot points — there are alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information. 
+The mycelium is sentient. 
+It knows that you are there. 
+When you walk across landscapes, it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris. 
+So, I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven, biologically successful model. 
+The Earth invented the computer Internet for its own benefit, and we now, being the top organism on this planet, are trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere. 
+Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. 
+I believe matter begets life; life becomes single cells; single cells become strings; strings become chains; chains network. 
+And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe. 
+Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land. 
+They came to land 1.3 billion years ago, and plants followed several hundred million years later. 
+How is that possible? 
+It's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids, and many other acids and enzymes, pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxalates. 
+Makes the rocks crumble, and the first step in the generation of soil. 
+Oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together. 
+So, fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates. 
+And all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix. 
+This was first discovered in 1859. 
+This is a photograph by Franz Hueber. 
+This photograph's taken 1950s in Saudi Arabia. 
+420 million years ago, this organism existed. 
+It was called Prototaxites. 
+Prototaxites, laying down, was about three feet tall. 
+The tallest plants on Earth at that time were less than two feet. 
+Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus, a giant mushroom. 
+Across the landscapes of Earth were dotted these giant mushrooms. 
+All across most land masses. 
+And these existed for tens of millions of years. 
+Now, we've had several extinction events, and as we march forward — 65 million years ago — most of you know about it — we had an asteroid impact. 
+The Earth was struck by an asteroid, a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere. 
+Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the Earth. 
+Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded, because fungi do not need light. 
+More recently, at Einstein University, they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like plants use light. 
+So, the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere, I think, is a forgone conclusion, at least in my own mind. 
+The largest organism in the world is in Eastern Oregon. 
+I couldn't miss it. It was 2,200 acres in size: 2,200 acres in size, 2,000 years old. 
+The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat, one cell wall thick. 
+How is it that this organism can be so large, and yet be one cell wall thick, whereas we have five or six skin layers that protect us? 
+The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom — it bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt. 
+We were involved with several experiments. 
+I'm going to show you six, if I can, solutions for helping to save the world. 
+Battelle Laboratories and I joined up in Bellingham, Washington. 
+There were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste: one was a control pile; one pile was treated with enzymes; one pile was treated with bacteria; and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium. 
+The mycelium absorbs the oil. 
+The mycelium is producing enzymes — peroxidases — that break carbon-hydrogen bonds. 
+These are the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together. 
+So, the mycelium becomes saturated with the oil, and then, when we returned six weeks later, all the tarps were removed, all the other piles were dead, dark and stinky. 
+We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms, and the color changed to a light form. 
+The enzymes remanufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates — fungal sugars. 
+Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms. 
+They're very large. 
+They're showing how much nutrition that they could've obtained. 
+But something else happened, which was an epiphany in my life. 
+They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae. 
+Birds then came, bringing in seeds, and our pile became an oasis of life. 
+Whereas the other three piles were dead, dark and stinky, and the PAH's — the aromatic hydrocarbons — went from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200 in eight weeks. 
+The last image we don't have. 
+The entire pile was a green berm of life. 
+These are gateway species, vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities. 
+So I invented burlap sacks, bunker spawn — and putting the mycelium — using storm blown debris, you can take these burlap sacks and put them downstream from a farm that's producing E. coli, or other wastes, or a factory with chemical toxins, and it leads to habitat restoration. 
+So, we set up a site in Mason County, Washington, and we've seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms. 
+And I'll show you a graph here. 
+This is a logarithmic scale, 10 to the eighth power. 
+There's more than a 100 million colonies per gram, and 10 to the third power is around 1,000. 
+In 48 hours to 72 hours, these three mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times. 
+Think of the implications. 
+This is a space-conservative method that uses storm debris — and we can guarantee that we will have storms every year. 
+So, this one mushroom, in particular, has drawn our interest over time. 
+This is my wife Dusty, with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis — Agarikon. 
+It's a mushroom exclusive to the old-growth forest that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D. 
+as a treatment against consumption. 
+This mushroom grows in Washington State, Oregon, northern California, British Columbia, now thought to be extinct in Europe. 
+May not seem that large — let's get closer. 
+This is extremely rare fungus. 
+Our team — and we have a team of experts that go out — we went out 20 times in the old-growth forest last year. 
+We found one sample to be able to get into culture. 
+Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old-growth forest I think is absolutely critical for human health. 
+I've been involved with the U.S. Defense Department BioShield program. 
+We submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water, and mycelium harvesting these extracellular metabolites. 
+And a few years ago, we received these results. 
+We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms that were highly active against poxviruses. 
+Dr. Earl Kern, who's a smallpox expert of the U.S. Defense Department, states that any compounds that have a selectivity index of two or more are active. 
+10 or greater are considered to be very active. 
+Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range. 
+There's a vetted press release that you can read — it's vetted by DOD — if you Google "" Stamets "" and "" smallpox. "" Or you can go to NPR.org and listen to a live interview. 
+So, encouraged by this, naturally we went to flu viruses. 
+And so, for the first time, I am showing this. 
+We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses. 
+Here's the selectivity index numbers — against pox, you saw 10s and 20s — now against flu viruses, compared to the ribavirin controls, we have an extraordinarily high activity. 
+And we're using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical. 
+We tried it against flu A viruses — H1N1, H3N2 — as well as flu B viruses. 
+So then we tried a blend, and in a blend combination we tried it against H5N1, and we got greater than 1,000 selectivity index. 
+(Applause) I then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense. (Applause) 
+I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi — fungi that kill insects. 
+Our house was being destroyed by carpenter ants. 
+So, I went to the EPA homepage, and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants, as well as termites. 
+I did something that nobody else had done. 
+I actually chased the mycelium, when it stopped producing spores. 
+These are spores — this is in their spores. 
+I was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form. 
+And so the industry has spent over 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house. 
+But the insects aren't stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form. 
+And I got my daughter's Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house, and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there's no spores. 
+They gave it to the queen. 
+One week later, I had no sawdust piles whatsoever. 
+And then — a delicate dance between dinner and death — the mycelium is consumed by the ants, they become mummified, and, boing, a mushroom pops out of their head. 
+(Laughter) Now after sporulation, the spores repel. 
+So, the house is no longer suitable for invasion. 
+So, you have a near-permanent solution for reinvasion of termites. 
+And so my house came down, I received my first patent against carpenter ants, termites and fire ants. 
+Then we tried extracts, and lo and behold, we can steer insects to different directions. 
+This has huge implications. 
+I then received my second patent — and this is a big one. 
+It's been called an Alexander Graham Bell patent. 
+It covers over 200,000 species. 
+This is the most disruptive technology — I've been told by executives of the pesticide industry — that they have ever witnessed. 
+This could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world. 
+You could fly 100 Ph.D. students under the umbrella of this concept, because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi, prior to sporulation, attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores. 
+And so I came up with a Life Box, because I needed a delivery system. 
+The Life Box — you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference — you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agarikon mushroom. 
+The seeds then are mothered by this mycelium. 
+And then you put tree seeds in here, and then you end up growing — potentially — an old-growth forest from a cardboard box. 
+I want to reinvent the delivery system, and the use of cardboard around the world, so they become ecological footprints. 
+If there's a YouTube-like site that you could put up, you could make it interactive, zip code specific — where people could join together, and through satellite imaging systems, through Virtual Earth or Google Earth, you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through Life Boxes. 
+You could take a cardboard box delivering shoes, you could add water — I developed this for the refugee community — corns, beans and squash and onions. 
+I took several containers — my wife said, if I could do this, anybody could — and I ended up growing a seed garden. 
+Then you harvest the seeds — and thank you, Eric Rasmussen, for your help on this — and then you're harvesting the seed garden. 
+Then you can harvest the kernels, and then you just need a few kernels. 
+I add mycelium to it, and then I inoculate the corncobs. 
+Now, three corncobs, no other grain — lots of mushrooms begin to form. 
+Too many withdrawals from the carbon bank, and so this population will be shut down. 
+But watch what happens here. 
+The mushrooms then are harvested, but very importantly, the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars. 
+And so I thought, how could we address the energy crisis in this country? 
+And we came up with Econol. 
+Generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary — and you gain all the benefits that I've described to you already. 
+But to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent, and I think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels. 
+So, we build the carbon banks on the planet, renew the soils. 
+These are a species that we need to join with. 
+I think engaging mycelium can help save the world. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+My values can be radically different from your values, which means that what I consider moral or immoral based on that might not necessarily be what you consider moral or immoral. 
+So it's at first a very simple, very obvious question I would like to give you: What are your intentions if you are designing something? 
+And these things are very effective, it turns out — so effective that they motivate people to engage in unsafe driving behaviors, like not stopping at a red light, because that way you have to stop and restart the engine, and that would use quite some fuel, wouldn't it? 
+So despite this being a very well-intended application, obviously there was a side effect of that. 
+Commendable: a site that allows parents to give their kids little badges for doing the things that parents want their kids to do, like tying their shoes. 
+But it turns out, if you look into research on people's mindset, caring about outcomes, caring about public recognition, caring about these kinds of public tokens of recognition is not necessarily very helpful for your long-term psychological well-being. 
+It's better when you care about yourself than how you appear in front of other people. 
+So that kind of motivational tool that is used actually, in and of itself, has a long-term side effect, in that every time we use a technology that uses something like public recognition or status, we're actually positively endorsing this as a good and normal thing to care about — that way, possibly having a detrimental effect on the long-term psychological well-being of ourselves as a culture. 
+So that's a second, very obvious question: What are the effects of what you're doing — the effects you're having with the device, like less fuel, as well as the effects of the actual tools you're using to get people to do things — public recognition? 
+In the words of Michel Foucault, it is a "" technology of the self. "" It is a technology that empowers the individual to determine its own life course, to shape itself. 
+These technologies want us to stay in the game that society has devised for us. 
+They want us to optimize ourselves to fit in. 
+We can question: Is it a good thing that all of us continuously self-optimize ourselves to fit better into that society? 
+And that is an idea that, I think, Paul Richard Buchanan put nicely in a recent essay, where he said, "" Products are vivid arguments about how we should live our lives. "" Our designs are not ethical or unethical in that they're using ethical or unethical means of persuading us. 
+And if you look into the designed environment around us with that kind of lens, asking, "" What is the vision of the good life that our products, our design, present to us? "", then you often get the shivers, because of how little we expect of each other, of how little we actually seem to expect of our life, and what the good life looks like. 
+So that's a fourth question I'd like to leave you with: What vision of the good life do your designs convey? 
+It puts a certain vision of the good life out there in front of us, which is what Peter-Paul Verbeek, the Dutch philosopher of technology, says. 
+No matter whether we as designers intend it or not, we materialize morality. 
+Even something as innocuous as a set of school chairs is a persuasive technology, because it presents and materializes a certain vision of the good life — a good life in which teaching and learning and listening is about one person teaching, the others listening; in which it is about learning-is-done-while-sitting; in which you learn for yourself; in which you're not supposed to change these rules, because the chairs are fixed to the ground. 
+And even something as innocuous as a single-design chair, like this one by Arne Jacobsen, is a persuasive technology, because, again, it communicates an idea of the good life: a good life — a life that you, as a designer, consent to by saying, "" In a good life, goods are produced as sustainably or unsustainably as this chair. 
+So these are the kinds of layers, the kinds of questions I wanted to lead you through today; the question of: What are the intentions that you bring to bear when you're designing something? 
+I think that all of these things are eventually informed by the core of all of this, and this is nothing but life itself. 
+"" Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? "" as Michel Foucault puts it. 
+Well, here is the set of axioms that Habit Labs, Buster's start-up, put up for themselves on how they wanted to work together as a team when they're building these applications — a set of moral principles they set themselves for working together — one of them being, "We take care of our own health and manage our own burnout." 
+Because ultimately, how can you ask yourselves and how can you find an answer on what vision of the good life you want to convey and create with your designs without asking the question: What vision of the good life do you yourself want to live? 
+
+It's amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, "" What is your most precious natural resource? "" — they will not say children at first. 
+And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you. 
+(Video): We're traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police, and we're dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years. 
+The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement. 
+There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don't have electricity at home or at school. 
+And in some countries — let me pick Afghanistan — 75 percent of the little girls don't go to school. 
+And I don't mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade — they don't go. 
+So in the three years since I talked at TED and showed a prototype, it's gone from an idea to a real laptop. 
+We have half a million laptops today in the hands of children. 
+We have about a quarter of a million in transit to those and other children, and then there are another quarter of a million more that are being ordered at this moment. 
+So, in rough numbers, there are a million laptops. 
+That's smaller than I predicted — I predicted three to 10 million — but is still a very large number. 
+In Colombia, we have about 3,000 laptops. 
+It's the Minister of Defense with whom we're working, not the Minister of Education, because it is seen as a strategic defense issue in the sense of liberating these zones that had been completely closed off, in which the people who had been causing, if you will, 40 years' worth of bombings and kidnappings and assassinations lived. 
+And suddenly, the kids have connected laptops. 
+They've leapfrogged. 
+The change is absolutely monumental, because it's not just opening it up, but it's opening it up to the rest of the world. 
+So yes, they're building roads, yes, they're putting in telephone, yes, there will be television. 
+But the kids six to 12 years old are surfing the Internet in Spanish and in local languages, so the children grow up with access to information, with a window into the rest of the world. 
+Before, they were closed off. 
+Interestingly enough, in other countries, it will be the Minister of Finance who sees it as an engine of economic growth. 
+And that engine is going to see the results in 20 years. 
+It's not going to happen, you know, in one year, but it's an important, deeply economic and cultural change that happens through children. 
+Thirty-one countries in total are involved, and in the case of Uruguay, half the children already have them, and by the middle of 2009, every single child in Uruguay will have a laptop — a little green laptop. 
+Now what are some of the results? 
+Some of the results that go across every single country include teachers saying they have never loved teaching so much, and reading comprehension measured by third parties — not by us — skyrockets. 
+Probably the most important thing we see is children teaching parents. 
+They own the laptops. They take them home. 
+And so when I met with three children from the schools, who had traveled all day to come to Bogota, one of the three children brought her mother. 
+And the reason she brought her mother is that this six-year-old child had been teaching her mother how to read and write. 
+Her mother had not gone to primary school. 
+And this is such an inversion, and such a wonderful example of children being the agents of change. 
+So now, in closing, people say, now why laptops? 
+Laptops are a luxury; it's like giving them iPods. No. 
+The reason you want laptops is that the word is education, not laptop. 
+This is an education project, not a laptop project. 
+They need to learn learning. And then, just think — they can have, let's say, 100 books. 
+In a village, you have 100 laptops, each with a different set of 100 books, and so that village suddenly has 10,000 books. 
+You and I didn't have 10,000 books when we went to primary school. 
+Sometimes school is under a tree, or in many cases, the teacher has only a fifth-grade education, so you need a collaborative model of learning, not just building more schools and training more teachers, which you have to do anyway. 
+So we're once again doing "" Give One, Get One. "" Last year, we ran a "" Give One, Get One "" program, and it generated over 100,000 laptops that we were then able to give free. 
+And by being a zero-dollar laptop, we can go to countries that can't afford it at all. 
+And that's what we did. We went to Haiti, we went to Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mongolia. 
+Places that are not markets, seeding it with the principles of saturation, connectivity, low ages, etc. 
+And then we can actually roll out large numbers. 
+So think of it this way: think of it as inoculating children against ignorance. 
+And think of the laptop as a vaccine. 
+You don't vaccinate a few children. 
+You vaccinate all the children in an area. 
+
+It's a great pleasure to be here. 
+It's a great pleasure to speak after Brian Cox from CERN. 
+I think CERN is the home of the Large Hadron Collider. 
+What ever happened to the Small Hadron Collider? 
+Where is the Small Hadron Collider? 
+Because the Small Hadron Collider once was the big thing. 
+Now, the Small Hadron Collider is in a cupboard, overlooked and neglected. 
+You know when the Large Hadron Collider started, and it didn't work, and people tried to work out why, it was the Small Hadron Collider team who sabotaged it because they were so jealous. 
+The whole Hadron Collider family needs unlocking. 
+The lesson of Brian's presentation, in a way — all those fantastic pictures — is this really: that vantage point determines everything that you see. 
+What Brian was saying was science has opened up successively different vantage points from which we can see ourselves, and that's why it's so valuable. 
+So the vantage point you take determines virtually everything that you will see. 
+The question that you will ask will determine much of the answer that you get. 
+And so if you ask this question: Where would you look to see the future of education? 
+The answer that we've traditionally given to that is very straightforward, at least in the last 20 years: You go to Finland. 
+Finland is the best place in the world to see school systems. 
+The Finns may be a bit boring and depressive and there's a very high suicide rate, but by golly, they are qualified. 
+And they have absolutely amazing education systems. 
+So we all troop off to Finland, and we wonder at the social democratic miracle of Finland and its cultural homogeneity and all the rest of it, and then we struggle to imagine how we might bring lessons back. 
+Well, so, for this last year, with the help of Cisco who sponsored me, for some balmy reason, to do this, I've been looking somewhere else. 
+Because actually radical innovation does sometimes come from the very best, but it often comes from places where you have huge need — unmet, latent demand — and not enough resources for traditional solutions to work — traditional, high-cost solutions, which depend on professionals, which is what schools and hospitals are. 
+So I ended up in places like this. 
+This is a place called Monkey Hill. 
+It's one of the hundreds of favelas in Rio. 
+Most of the population growth of the next 50 years will be in cities. 
+We'll grow by six cities of 12 million people a year for the next 30 years. 
+Almost all of that growth will be in the developed world. Almost all of that growth will be 
+in places like Monkey Hill. 
+This is where you'll find the fastest growing young populations of the world. 
+So if you want recipes to work — for virtually anything — health, education, government politics and education — you have to go to these places. 
+And if you go to these places, you meet people like this. 
+This is a guy called Juanderson. 
+At the age of 14, in common with many 14-year-olds in the Brazilian education system, he dropped out of school. 
+It was boring. 
+And Juanderson, instead, went into what provided kind of opportunity and hope in the place that he lived, which was the drugs trade. 
+And by the age of 16, with rapid promotion, he was running the drugs trade in 10 favelas. 
+He was turning over 200,000 dollars a week. 
+He employed 200 people. 
+He was going to be dead by the age of 25. 
+And luckily, he met this guy, who is Rodrigo Baggio, the owner of the first laptop to ever appear in Brazil. 
+1994, Rodrigo started something called CDI, which took computers donated by corporations, put them into community centers in favelas and created places like this. 
+What turned Juanderson around was technology for learning that made learning fun and accessible. 
+Or you can go to places like this. 
+This is Kibera, which is the largest slum in East Africa. 
+Millions of people living here, stretched over many kilometers. 
+And there I met these two, Azra on the left, Maureen on the right. 
+They just finished their Kenyan certificate of secondary education. 
+That name should tell you that the Kenyan education system borrows almost everything from Britain, circa 1950, but has managed to make it even worse. 
+So there are schools in slums like this. 
+They're places like this. 
+That's where Maureen went to school. 
+They're private schools. There are no state schools in slums. 
+And the education they got was pitiful. 
+It was in places like this. This a school set up by some nuns in another slum called Nakuru. 
+Half the children in this classroom have no parents because they've died through AIDS. 
+The other half have one parent because the other parent has died through AIDS. 
+So the challenges of education in this kind of place are not to learn the kings and queens of Kenya or Britain. 
+They are to stay alive, to earn a living, to not become HIV positive. 
+The one technology that spans rich and poor in places like this is not anything to do with industrial technology. 
+It's not to do with electricity or water. 
+It's the mobile phone. 
+If you want to design from scratch virtually any service in Africa, you would start now with the mobile phone. 
+Or you could go to places like this. 
+This is a place called the Madangiri Settlement Colony, which is a very developed slum about 25 minutes outside New Delhi, where I met these characters who showed me around for the day. 
+The remarkable thing about these girls, and the sign of the kind of social revolution sweeping through the developing world is that these girls are not married. 
+Ten years ago, they certainly would have been married. 
+Now they're not married, and they want to go on to study further, to have a career. 
+They've been brought up by mothers who are illiterate, who have never ever done homework. 
+All across the developing world there are millions of parents — tens, hundreds of millions — who for the first time are with children doing homework and exams. 
+And the reason they carry on studying is not because they went to a school like this. 
+This is a private school. 
+This is a fee-pay school. This is a good school. 
+This is the best you can get in Hyderabad in Indian education. 
+The reason they went on studying was this. 
+This is a computer installed in the entrance to their slum by a revolutionary social entrepreneur called Sugata Mitra who has conducted the most radical experiments, showing that children, in the right conditions, can learn on their own with the help of computers. 
+Those girls have never touched Google. 
+They know nothing about Wikipedia. 
+Imagine what their lives would be like if you could get that to them. 
+So if you look, as I did, through this tour, and by looking at about a hundred case studies of different social entrepreneurs working in these very extreme conditions, look at the recipes that they come up with for learning, they look nothing like school. 
+What do they look like? 
+Well, education is a global religion. 
+And education, plus technology, is a great source of hope. 
+You can go to places like this. 
+This is a school three hours outside of Sao Paulo. 
+Most of the children there have parents who are illiterate. 
+Many of them don't have electricity at home. 
+But they find it completely obvious to use computers, websites, make videos, so on and so forth. 
+When you go to places like this what you see is that education in these settings works by pull, not push. 
+Most of our education system is push. 
+I was literally pushed to school. 
+When you get to school, things are pushed at you: knowledge, exams, systems, timetables. 
+If you want to attract people like Juanderson who could, for instance, buy guns, wear jewelry, ride motorbikes and get girls through the drugs trade, and you want to attract him into education, having a compulsory curriculum doesn't really make sense. 
+That isn't really going to attract him. 
+You need to pull him. 
+And so education needs to work by pull, not push. 
+And so the idea of a curriculum is completely irrelevant in a setting like this. 
+You need to start education from things that make a difference to them in their settings. 
+What does that? 
+Well, the key is motivation, and there are two aspects to it. 
+One is to deliver extrinsic motivation, that education has a payoff. 
+Our education systems all work on the principle that there is a payoff, but you have to wait quite a long time. 
+That's too long if you're poor. 
+Waiting 10 years for the payoff from education is too long when you need to meet daily needs, when you've got siblings to look after or a business to help with. 
+So you need education to be relevant and help people to make a living there and then, often. 
+And you also need to make it intrinsically interesting. 
+So time and again, I found people like this. 
+This is an amazing guy, Sebastiao Rocha, in Belo Horizonte, in the third largest city in Brazil. 
+He's invented more than 200 games to teach virtually any subject under the sun. 
+In the schools and communities that Taio works in, the day always starts in a circle and always starts from a question. 
+Imagine an education system that started from questions, not from knowledge to be imparted, or started from a game, not from a lesson, or started from the premise that you have to engage people first before you can possibly teach them. 
+Our education systems, you do all that stuff afterward, if you're lucky, sport, drama, music. 
+These things, they teach through. 
+They attract people to learning because it's really a dance project or a circus project or, the best example of all — El Sistema in Venezuela — it's a music project. 
+And so you attract people through that into learning, not adding that on after all the learning has been done and you've eaten your cognitive greens. 
+So El Sistema in Venezuela uses a violin as a technology of learning. 
+Taio Rocha uses making soap as a technology of learning. 
+And what you find when you go to these schemes is that they use people and places in incredibly creative ways. 
+Masses of peer learning. 
+How do you get learning to people when there are no teachers, when teachers won't come, when you can't afford them, and even if you do get teachers, what they teach isn't relevant to the communities that they serve? 
+Well, you create your own teachers. 
+You create peer-to-peer learning, or you create para-teachers, or you bring in specialist skills. 
+But you find ways to get learning that's relevant to people through technology, people and places that are different. 
+So this is a school in a bus on a building site in Pune, the fastest growing city in Asia. 
+Pune has 5,000 building sites. 
+It has 30,000 children on those building sites. 
+That's one city. 
+Imagine that urban explosion that's going to take place across the developing world and how many thousands of children will spend their school years on building sites. 
+Well, this is a very simple scheme to get the learning to them through a bus. 
+And they all treat learning, not as some sort of academic, analytical activity, but as that's something that's productive, something you make, something that you can do, perhaps earn a living from. 
+So I met this character, Steven. 
+He'd spent three years in Nairobi living on the streets because his parents had died of AIDS. 
+And he was finally brought back into school, not by the offer of GCSEs, but by the offer of learning how to become a carpenter, a practical making skill. 
+So the trendiest schools in the world, High Tech High and others, they espouse a philosophy of learning as productive activity. 
+Here, there isn't really an option. 
+Learning has to be productive in order for it to make sense. 
+And finally, they have a different model of scale, and it's a Chinese restaurant model of how to scale. 
+And I learned it from this guy, who is an amazing character. 
+He's probably the most remarkable social entrepreneur in education in the world. 
+His name is Madhav Chavan, and he created something called Pratham. 
+And Pratham runs preschool play groups for, now, 21 million children in India. 
+It's the largest NGO in education in the world. 
+And it also supports working-class kids going into Indian schools. 
+He's a complete revolutionary. 
+He's actually a trade union organizer by background, and that's how he learned the skills to build his organization. 
+When they got to a certain stage, Pratham got big enough to attract some pro bono support from McKinsey. 
+McKinsey came along and looked at his model and said, "" You know what you should do with this, Madhav? 
+You should turn it into McDonald's. 
+And what you do when you go to any new site is you kind of roll out a franchise. 
+And it's the same wherever you go. 
+It's reliable and people know exactly where they are. 
+And there will be no mistakes. "" And Madhav said, "" Why do we have to do it that way? 
+Why can't we do it more like the Chinese restaurants? "" There are Chinese restaurants everywhere, but there is no Chinese restaurant chain. 
+Yet, everyone knows what is a Chinese restaurant. 
+They know what to expect, even though it'll be subtly different and the colors will be different and the name will be different. 
+You know a Chinese restaurant when you see it. 
+These people work with the Chinese restaurant model — same principles, different applications and different settings — not the McDonald's model. 
+The McDonald's model scales. 
+The Chinese restaurant model spreads. 
+So mass education started with social entrepreneurship in the 19th century. 
+And that's desperately what we need again on a global scale. 
+And what can we learn from all of that? 
+Well, we can learn a lot because our education systems are failing desperately in many ways. 
+They fail to reach the people they most need to serve. 
+They often hit their target but miss the point. 
+Improvement is increasingly difficult to organize; our faith in these systems, incredibly fraught. 
+And this is just a very simple way of understanding what kind of innovation, what kind of different design we need. 
+There are two basic types of innovation. 
+There's sustaining innovation, which will sustain an existing institution or an organization, and disruptive innovation that will break it apart, create some different way of doing it. 
+There are formal settings — schools, colleges, hospitals — in which innovation can take place, and informal settings — communities, families, social networks. 
+Almost all our effort goes in this box, sustaining innovation in formal settings, getting a better version of the essentially Bismarckian school system that developed in the 19th century. 
+And as I said, the trouble with this is that, in the developing world there just aren't teachers to make this model work. 
+You'd need millions and millions of teachers in China, India, Nigeria and the rest of developing world to meet need. 
+And in our system, we know that simply doing more of this won't eat into deep educational inequalities, especially in inner cities and former industrial areas. 
+So that's why we need three more kinds of innovation. 
+We need more reinvention. 
+And all around the world now you see more and more schools reinventing themselves. 
+They're recognizably schools, but they look different. 
+There are Big Picture schools in the U.S. and Australia. 
+There are Kunskapsskolan schools in Sweden. 
+Of 14 of them, only two of them are in schools. 
+Most of them are in other buildings not designed as schools. 
+There is an amazing school in Northen Queensland called Jaringan. 
+And they all have the same kind of features: highly collaborative, very personalized, often pervasive technology, learning that starts from questions and problems and projects, not from knowledge and curriculum. 
+So we certainly need more of that. 
+But because so many of the issues in education aren't just in school, they're in family and community, what you also need, definitely, is more on the right hand side. 
+You need efforts to supplement schools. 
+The most famous of these is Reggio Emilia in Italy, the family-based learning system to support and encourage people in schools. 
+The most exciting is the Harlem Children's Zone, which over 10 years, led by Geoffrey Canada, has, through a mixture of schooling and family and community projects, attempted to transform not just education in schools, but the entire culture and aspiration of about 10,000 families in Harlem. 
+We need more of that completely new and radical thinking. 
+You can go to places an hour away, less, from this room, just down the road, which need that, which need radicalism of a kind that we haven't imagined. 
+And finally, you need transformational innovation that could imagine getting learning to people in completely new and different ways. 
+So we are on the verge, 2015, of an amazing achievement, the schoolification of the world. 
+Every child up to the age of 15 who wants a place in school will be able to have one in 2015. 
+It's an amazing thing. 
+But it is, unlike cars, which have developed so rapidly and orderly, actually the school system is recognizably an inheritance from the 19th century, from a Bismarkian model of German schooling that got taken up by English reformers, and often by religious missionaries, taken up in the United States as a force of social cohesion, and then in Japan and South Korea as they developed. 
+It's recognizably 19th century in its roots. 
+And of course it's a huge achievement. 
+And of course it will bring great things. 
+It will bring skills and learning and reading. 
+But it will also lay waste to imagination. 
+It will lay waste to appetite. It will lay waste to social confidence. 
+It will stratify society as much as it liberates it. 
+And we are bequeathing to the developing world school systems that they will now spend a century trying to reform. 
+That is why we need really radical thinking, and why radical thinking is now more possible and more needed than ever in how we learn. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+They need to be part of the pack. 
+
+They're covered in sand, they're difficult to see. 
+I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them. 
+What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years. 
+This area is huge — it's four miles by three miles in size. 
+The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city. 
+So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom — it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+We are here today because [the] United Nations have defined goals for the progress of countries. 
+They're called Millennium Development Goals. 
+And the reason I really like these goals is that there are eight of them. 
+And by specifying eight different goals, the United Nations has said that there are so many things needed to change in a country in order to get the good life for people. 
+Look here — you have to end poverty, education, gender, child and maternal health, control infections, protect the environment and get the good global links between nations in every aspect from aid to trade. 
+There's a second reason I like these development goals, and that is because each and every one is measured. 
+Take child mortality; the aim here is to reduce child mortality by two-thirds, from 1990 to 2015. 
+That's a four percent reduction per year — and this, with measuring. 
+That's what makes the difference between political talking like this and really going for the important thing, a better life for people. 
+And what I'm so happy about with this is that we have already documented that there are many countries in Asia, in the Middle East, in Latin America and East Europe that [are] reducing with this rate. 
+And even mighty Brazil is going down with five percent per year, and Turkey with seven percent per year. 
+So there's good news. 
+But then I hear people saying, "" There is no progress in Africa. 
+And there's not even statistics on Africa to know what is happening. "" I'll prove them wrong on both points. 
+Come with me to the wonderful world of statistics. 
+I bring you to the webpage, ChildMortality.org, where you can take deaths in children below five years of age for all countries — it's done by U.N. specialists. 
+And I will take Kenya as an example. 
+Here you see the data. 
+Don't panic — don't panic now, I'll help you through this. 
+It looks nasty, like in college when you didn't like statistics. 
+But first thing, when you see dots like this, you have to ask yourself: from where do the data come? 
+What is the origin of the data? 
+Is it so that in Kenya, there are doctors and other specialists who write the death certificate at the death of the child and it's sent to the statistical office? 
+No — low-income countries like Kenya still don't have that level of organization. 
+It exists, but it's not complete because so many deaths occur in the home with the family, and it's not registered. 
+What we rely on is not an incomplete system. 
+We have interviews, we have surveys. 
+And this is highly professional female interviewers who sit down for one hour with a woman and ask her about [her] birth history. 
+How many children did you have? 
+Are they alive? 
+If they died, at what age and what year? 
+And then this is done in a representative sample of thousands of women in the country and put together in what used to be called a demographic health survey report. 
+But these surveys are costly, so they can only be done [in] three- to five-year intervals. 
+But they have good quality. 
+So this is a limitation. 
+And all these colored lines here are results; each color is one survey. 
+But that's too complicated for today, so I'll simplify it for you, and I give you one average point for each survey. 
+This was 1977, 1988, 1992, '97 and 2002. 
+And when the experts in the U.N. 
+have got these surveys in place in their database, then they use advanced mathematical formulas to produce a trend line, and the trend line looks like this. 
+See here — it's the best fit they can get of this point. 
+But watch out — they continue the line beyond the last point out into nothing. 
+And they estimated that in 2008, Kenya had per child mortality of 128. 
+And I was sad, because we could see this reversal in Kenya with an increased child mortality in the 90s. 
+It was so tragic. 
+But in June, I got a mail in my inbox from Demographic Health Surveys, and it showed good news from Kenya. 
+I was so happy. 
+This was the estimate of the new survey. 
+Then it just took another three months for [the] U.N. to get it into their server, and on Friday we got the new trend line — it was down here. 
+Isn't it nice — isn't it nice, yeah? 
+I was actually, on Friday, sitting in front of my computer, and I saw the death rate fall from 128 to 84 just that morning. 
+So we celebrated. 
+But now, when you have this trend line, how do we measure progress? 
+I'm going into some details here, because [the] U.N. do it like this. 
+They start [in] 1990 — they measure to 2009. 
+They say, "" 0.9 percent, no progress. "" That's unfair. 
+As a professor, I think I have the right to propose something differently. 
+I would say, at least do this — 10 years is enough to follow the trend. 
+It's two surveys, and you can see what's happening now. 
+They have 2.4 percent. 
+Had I been in the Ministry of Health in Kenya, I may have joined these two points. 
+So what I'm telling you is that we know the child mortality. 
+We have a decent trend. 
+It's coming into some tricky things then when we are measuring MDGs. 
+And the reason here for Africa is especially important, because '90s was a bad decade, not only in Kenya, but across Africa. 
+The HIV epidemic peaked. 
+There was resistance for the old malaria drugs, until we got the new drugs. 
+We got, later, the mosquito netting. 
+And there was socio-economic problems, which are now being solved at a much better scale. 
+So look at the average here — this is the average for all of sub-Saharan Africa. 
+And [the] U.N. says it's a reduction with 1.8 percent. 
+Now this sounds a little theoretical, but it's not so theoretical. 
+You know, these economists, they love money, they want more and more of it, they want it to grow. 
+So they calculate the percent annual growth rate of [the] economy. 
+We in public health, we hate child death, so we want less and less and less of child deaths. 
+So we calculate the percent reduction per year, but it's sort of the same percentage. 
+If your economy grows with four percent, you ought to reduce child mortality four percent; if it's used well and people are really involved and can get the use of the resources in the way they want it. 
+So is this fair now to measure this over 19 years? 
+An economist would never do that. 
+I have just divided it into two periods. 
+In the 90s, only 1.2 percent, only 1.2 percent. 
+Whereas now, second gear — it's like Africa had first gear, now they go into second gear. 
+But even this is not a fair representation of Africa, because it's an average, it's an average speed of reduction in Africa. 
+And look here when I take you into my bubble graphs. 
+Still here, child death per 1,000 on that axis. 
+Here we have [the] year. 
+And I'm now giving you a wider picture than the MDG. 
+I start 50 years ago when Africa celebrated independence in most countries. 
+I give you Congo, which was high, Ghana — lower. And Kenya — even lower. 
+And what has happened over the years since then? Here we go. 
+You can see, with independence, literacy improved and vaccinations started, smallpox was eradicated, hygiene was improved, and things got better. 
+But then, in the '80s, watch out here. 
+Congo got into civil war, and they leveled off here. 
+Ghana got very ahead, fast. 
+This was the backlash in Kenya, and Ghana bypassed, but then Kenya and Ghana go down together — still a standstill in Congo. 
+That's where we are today. 
+You can see it doesn't make sense to make an average of this zero improvement and this very fast improvement. 
+Time has come to stop thinking about sub-Saharan Africa as one place. 
+Their countries are so different, and they merit to be recognized in the same way, as we don't talk about Europe as one place. 
+I can tell you that the economy in Greece and Sweden are very different — everyone knows that. 
+And they are judged, each country, on how they are doing. 
+So let me show the wider picture. 
+My country, Sweden: 1800, we were up there. 
+What a strange personality disorder we must have, counting the children so meticulously in spite of a high child death rate. 
+It's very strange. It's sort of embarrassing. 
+But we had that habit in Sweden, you know, that we counted all the child deaths, even if we didn't do anything about it. 
+And then, you see, these were famine years. 
+These were bad years, and people got fed up with Sweden. 
+My ancestors moved to the United States. 
+And eventually, soon they started to get better and better here. 
+And here we got better education, and we got health service, and child mortality came down. 
+We never had a war; Sweden was in peace all this time. 
+But look, the rate of lowering in Sweden was not fast. 
+Sweden achieved a low child mortality because we started early. 
+We had primary school actually started in 1842. 
+And then you get that wonderful effect when we got female literacy one generation later. 
+You have to realize that the investments we do in progress are long-term investments. 
+It's not about just five years — it's long-term investments. 
+And Sweden never reached [the] Millennium Development Goal rate, 3.1 percent when I calculated. 
+So we are off track — that's what Sweden is. 
+But you don't talk about it so much. 
+We want others to be better than we were, and indeed, others have been better. 
+Let me show you Thailand, see what a success story, Thailand from the 1960s — how they went down here and reached almost the same child mortality levels as Sweden. 
+And I'll give you another story — Egypt, the most hidden, glorious success in public health. 
+Egypt was up here in 1960, higher than Congo. 
+The Nile Delta was a misery for children with diarrheal disease and malaria and a lot of problems. 
+And then they got the Aswan Dam. They got electricity in their homes, they increased education and they got primary health care. 
+And down they went, you know. 
+And they got safer water, they eradicated malaria. 
+And isn't it a success story. 
+Millennium Development Goal rates for child mortality is fully possible. 
+And the good thing is that Ghana today is going with the same rate as Egypt did at its fastest. 
+Kenya is now speeding up. 
+Here we have a problem. 
+We have a severe problem in countries which are at a standstill. 
+Now, let me now bring you to a wider picture, a wider picture of child mortality. 
+I'm going to show you the relationship between child mortality on this axis here — this axis here is child mortality — and here I have the family size. 
+The relationship between child mortality and family size. 
+One, two, three, four children per woman: six, seven, eight children per woman. 
+This is, once again, 1960 — 50 years ago. 
+Each bubble is a country — the color, you can see, a continent. 
+The dark blue here is sub-Saharan Africa. 
+And the size of the bubble is the population. 
+And these are the so-called "" developing "" countries. 
+They had high, or very high, child mortality and family size, six to eight. 
+And the ones over there, they were so-called Western countries. 
+They had low child mortality and small families. 
+What has happened? 
+What I want you [to do] now is to see with your own eyes the relation between fall in child mortality and decrease in family size. 
+I just want not to have any room for doubt — you have to see that for yourself. 
+This is what happened. Now I start the world. 
+Here we come down with the eradication of smallpox, better education, health service. 
+It got down there — China comes into the Western box here. 
+And here Brazil is in the Western Box. 
+India is approaching. The first African countries coming into the Western box, and we get a lot a new neighbors. 
+Welcome to a decent life. 
+Come on. We want everyone down there. 
+This is the vision we have, isn't it. 
+And look now, the first African countries here are coming in. 
+There we are today. 
+There is no such thing as a "" Western world "" and "" developing world. "" This is the report from [the] U.N., which came out on Friday. 
+It's very good — "" Levels and Trends in Child Mortality "" — except this page. 
+This page is very bad; it's a categorization of countries. 
+It labels "" developing countries, "" — I can read from the list here — developing countries: Republic of Korea — South Korea. 
+Huh? 
+They get Samsung, how can they be [a] developing country? 
+They have here Singapore. 
+They have the lowest child mortality in the world, Singapore. 
+They bypassed Sweden five years ago, and they are labeled a developing country. 
+They have here Qatar. 
+It's the richest country in the world with Al Jazeera. 
+How the heck could they be [a] developing country? 
+This is crap. 
+(Applause) The rest here is good — the rest is good. 
+We have to have a modern concept, which fits to the data. 
+And we have to realize that we are all going to into this, down to here. 
+What is the importance now with the relations here. 
+Look — even if we look in Africa — these are the African countries. 
+You can clearly see the relation with falling child mortality and decreasing family size, even within Africa. 
+It's very clear that this is what happens. 
+And a very important piece of research came out on Friday from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle showing that almost 50 percent of the fall in child mortality can be attributed to female education. 
+That is, when we get girls in school, we'll get an impact 15 to 20 years later, which is a secular trend which is very strong. 
+That's why we must have that long-term perspective, but we must measure the impact over 10-year periods. 
+It's fully possible to get child mortality down in all of these countries and to get them down in the corner where we all would like to live together. 
+And of course, lowering child mortality is a matter of utmost importance from humanitarian aspects. 
+It's a decent life for children, we are talking about. 
+But it is also a strategic investment in the future of all mankind, because it's about the environment. 
+We will not be able to manage the environment and avoid the terrible climate crisis if we don't stabilize the world population. 
+Let's be clear about that. 
+And the way to do that, that is to get child mortality down, get access to family planning and behind that drive female education. 
+And that is fully possible. Let's do it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person by looking at what's on their bookshelves. 
+What do my bookshelves say about me? 
+Well, when I asked myself this question a few years ago, I made an alarming discovery. 
+I'd always thought of myself as a fairly cultured, cosmopolitan sort of person. 
+But my bookshelves told a rather different story. 
+Pretty much all the titles on them were by British or North American authors, and there was almost nothing in translation. 
+Discovering this massive, cultural blind spot in my reading came as quite a shock. 
+And when I thought about it, it seemed like a real shame. 
+I knew there had to be lots of amazing stories out there by writers working in languages other than English. 
+And it seemed really sad to think that my reading habits meant I would probably never encounter them. 
+So, I decided to prescribe myself an intensive course of global reading. 
+2012 was set to be a very international year for the UK; it was the year of the London Olympics. 
+And so I decided to use it as my time frame to try to read a novel, short story collection or memoir from every country in the world. 
+And so I did. 
+And it was very exciting and I learned some remarkable things and made some wonderful connections that I want to share with you today. 
+But it started with some practical problems. 
+After I'd worked out which of the many different lists of countries in the world to use for my project, I ended up going with the list of UN-recognized nations, to which I added Taiwan, which gave me a total of 196 countries. 
+And after I'd worked out how to fit reading and blogging about, roughly, four books a week around working five days a week, I then had to face up to the fact that I might even not be able to get books in English from every country. 
+Only around 4.5 percent of the literary works published each year in the UK are translations, and the figures are similar for much of the English-speaking world. 
+Although, the proportion of translated books published in many other countries is a lot higher. 
+4.5 percent is tiny enough to start with, but what that figure doesn't tell you is that many of those books will come from countries with strong publishing networks and lots of industry professionals primed to go out and sell those titles to English-language publishers. 
+So, for example, although well over 100 books are translated from French and published in the UK each year, most of them will come from countries like France or Switzerland. 
+French-speaking Africa, on the other hand, will rarely ever get a look-in. 
+The upshot is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no commercially available literature in English. 
+Their books remain invisible to readers of the world's most published language. 
+But when it came to reading the world, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. 
+Having spent my life reading almost exclusively British and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. 
+I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. 
+I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. 
+There was no hiding it — I was a clueless literary xenophobe. 
+So how on earth was I going to read the world? 
+I was going to have to ask for help. 
+So in October 2011, I registered my blog, ayearofreadingtheworld.com, and I posted a short appeal online. 
+I explained who I was, how narrow my reading had been, and I asked anyone who cared to to leave a message suggesting what I might read from other parts of the planet. 
+Now, I had no idea whether anyone would be interested, but within a few hours of me posting that appeal online, people started to get in touch. 
+At first, it was friends and colleagues. 
+Then it was friends of friends. 
+And pretty soon, it was strangers. 
+Four days after I put that appeal online, I got a message from a woman called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur. 
+She said she loved the sound of my project, could she go to her local English-language bookshop and choose my Malaysian book and post it to me? 
+I accepted enthusiastically, and a few weeks later, a package arrived containing not one, but two books — Rafidah's choice from Malaysia, and a book from Singapore that she had also picked out for me. 
+Now, at the time, I was amazed that a stranger more than 6,000 miles away would go to such lengths to help someone she would probably never meet. 
+But Rafidah's kindness proved to be the pattern for that year. 
+Time and again, people went out of their way to help me. 
+Some took on research on my behalf, and others made detours on holidays and business trips to go to bookshops for me. 
+It turns out, if you want to read the world, if you want to encounter it with an open mind, the world will help you. 
+When it came to countries with little or no commercially available literature in English, people went further still. 
+Books often came from surprising sources. 
+My Panamanian read, for example, came through a conversation I had with the Panama Canal on Twitter. 
+Yes, the Panama Canal has a Twitter account. 
+And when I tweeted at it about my project, it suggested that I might like to try and get hold of the work of the Panamanian author Juan David Morgan. 
+I found Morgan's website and I sent him a message, asking if any of his Spanish-language novels had been translated into English. 
+And he said that nothing had been published, but he did have an unpublished translation of his novel "" The Golden Horse. "" He emailed this to me, allowing me to become one of the first people ever to read that book in English. 
+Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith to share his work with me in this way. 
+From Sweden to Palau, writers and translators sent me self-published books and unpublished manuscripts of books that hadn't been picked up by Anglophone publishers or that were no longer available, giving me privileged glimpses of some remarkable imaginary worlds. 
+I read, for example, about the Southern African king Ngungunhane, who led the resistance against the Portuguese in the 19th century; and about marriage rituals in a remote village on the shores of the Caspian sea in Turkmenistan. 
+I met Kuwait's answer to Bridget Jones. 
+(Laughter) And I read about an orgy in a tree in Angola. 
+But perhaps the most amazing example of the lengths that people were prepared to go to to help me read the world, came towards the end of my quest, when I tried to get hold of a book from the tiny, Portuguese-speaking African island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. 
+Now, having spent several months trying everything I could think of to find a book that had been translated into English from the nation, it seemed as though the only option left to me was to see if I could get something translated for me from scratch. 
+Now, I was really dubious whether anyone was going to want to help with this, and give up their time for something like that. 
+But, within a week of me putting a call out on Twitter and Facebook for Portuguese speakers, I had more people than I could involve in the project, including Margaret Jull Costa, a leader in her field, who has translated the work of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago. 
+With my nine volunteers in place, I managed to find a book by a São Toméan author that I could buy enough copies of online. 
+Here's one of them. 
+And I sent a copy out to each of my volunteers. 
+They all took on a couple of short stories from this collection, stuck to their word, sent their translations back to me, and within six weeks, I had the entire book to read. 
+In that case, as I found so often during my year of reading the world, my not knowing and being open about my limitations had become a big opportunity. 
+When it came to São Tomé and Príncipe, it was a chance not only to learn something new and discover a new collection of stories, but also to bring together a group of people and facilitate a joint creative endeavor. 
+My weakness had become the project's strength. 
+The books I read that year opened my eyes to many things. 
+As those who enjoy reading will know, books have an extraordinary power to take you out of yourself and into someone else's mindset, so that, for a while at least, you look at the world through different eyes. 
+That can be an uncomfortable experience, particularly if you're reading a book from a culture that may have quite different values to your own. 
+But it can also be really enlightening. 
+Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas can help clarify your own thinking. 
+And it can also show up blind spots in the way you might have been looking at the world. 
+When I looked back at much of the English-language literature I'd grown up with, for example, I began to see how narrow a lot of it was, compared to the richness that the world has to offer. 
+And as the pages turned, something else started to happen, too. 
+Little by little, that long list of countries that I'd started the year with, changed from a rather dry, academic register of place names into living, breathing entities. 
+Now, I don't want to suggest that it's at all possible to get a rounded picture of a country simply by reading one book. 
+But cumulatively, the stories I read that year made me more alive than ever before to the richness, diversity and complexity of our remarkable planet. 
+It was as though the world's stories and the people who'd gone to such lengths to help me read them had made it real to me. 
+These days, when I look at my bookshelves or consider the works on my e-reader, they tell a rather different story. 
+It's the story of the power books have to connect us across political, geographical, cultural, social, religious divides. 
+It's the tale of the potential human beings have to work together. 
+And, it's testament to the extraordinary times we live in, where, thanks to the Internet, it's easier than ever before for a stranger to share a story, a worldview, a book with someone she may never meet, on the other side of the planet. 
+I hope it's a story I'm reading for many years to come. 
+And I hope many more people will join me. 
+If we all read more widely, there'd be more incentive for publishers to translate more books, and we would all be richer for that. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I have the feeling that we can all agree that we're moving towards a new model of the state and society. 
+But, we're absolutely clueless as to what this is or what it should be. 
+It seems like we need to have a conversation about democracy in our day and age. 
+Let's think about it this way: We are 21st-century citizens, doing our very, very best to interact with 19th century-designed institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th century. 
+Let's have a look at some of the characteristics of this system. 
+First of all, it's designed for an information technology that's over 500 years old. 
+And the best possible system that could be designed for it is one where the few make daily decisions in the name of the many. 
+In the second place, the costs of participating in this system are incredibly high. 
+You have to become a party member and slowly start working up the ranks until maybe, one day, you'll get to sit at a table where a decision is being made. 
+And last but not least, the language of the system — it's incredibly cryptic. 
+It's done for lawyers, by lawyers, and no one else can understand. 
+So, it's a system where we can choose our authorities, but we are completely left out on how those authorities reach their decisions. 
+So, in a day where a new information technology allows us to participate globally in any conversation, our barriers of information are completely lowered and we can, more than ever before, express our desires and our concerns. 
+Our political system remains the same for the past 200 years and expects us to be contented with being simply passive recipients of a monologue. 
+So, it's really not surprising that this kind of system is only able to produce two kinds of results: silence or noise. 
+Silence, in terms of citizens not engaging, simply not wanting to participate. 
+There's this commonplace [idea] that I truly, truly dislike, and it's this idea that we citizens are naturally apathetic. That we shun commitment. 
+But, can you really blame us for not jumping at the opportunity of going to the middle of the city in the middle of a working day to attend, physically, a public hearing that has no impact whatsoever? 
+Conflict is bound to happen between a system that no longer represents, nor has any dialogue capacity, and citizens that are increasingly used to representing themselves. 
+And, then we find noise: Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico Italy, France, Spain, the United States, they're all democracies. 
+Their citizens have access to the ballot boxes. But they still feel the need, they need to take to the streets in order to be heard. 
+To me, it seems like the 18th-century slogan that was the basis for the formation of our modern democracies, "" No taxation without representation, "" can now be updated to "" No representation without a conversation. "" We want our seat at the table. 
+And rightly so. 
+But in order to be part of this conversation, we need to know what we want to do next, because political action is being able to move from agitation to construction. 
+My generation has been incredibly good at using new networks and technologies to organize protests, protests that were able to successfully impose agendas, roll back extremely pernicious legislation, and even overthrow authoritarian governments. 
+And we should be immensely proud of this. 
+But, we also must admit that we haven't been good at using those same networks and technologies to successfully articulate an alternative to what we're seeing and find the consensus and build the alliances that are needed to make it happen. 
+And so the risk that we face is that we can create these huge power vacuums that will very quickly get filled up by de facto powers, like the military or highly motivated and already organized groups that generally lie on the extremes. 
+But our democracy is neither just a matter of voting once every couple of years. 
+So the question I'd like to raise here, and I do believe it's the most important question we need to answer, is this one: If Internet is the new printing press, then what is democracy for the Internet era? 
+What institutions do we want to build for the 21st-century society? 
+I don't have the answer, just in case. 
+So, I'd like to share our experience and what we've learned so far and hopefully contribute two cents to this conversation. 
+Two years ago, with a group of friends from Argentina, we started thinking, "" how can we get our representatives, our elected representatives, to represent us? "" Marshall McLuhan once said that politics is solving today's problems with yesterday's tools. 
+So the question that motivated us was, can we try and solve some of today's problems with the tools that we use every single day of our lives? 
+Our first approach was to design and develop a piece of software called DemocracyOS. 
+DemocracyOS is an open-source web application that is designed to become a bridge between citizens and their elected representatives to make it easier for us to participate from our everyday lives. 
+So first of all, you can get informed so every new project that gets introduced in Congress gets immediately translated and explained in plain language on this platform. 
+But we all know that social change is not going to come from just knowing more information, but from doing something with it. 
+So better access to information should lead to a conversation about what we're going to do next, and DemocracyOS allows for that. 
+Because we believe that democracy is not just a matter of stacking up preferences, one on top of each other, but that our healthy and robust public debate should be, once again, one of its fundamental values. 
+So DemocracyOS is about persuading and being persuaded. 
+It's about reaching a consensus as much as finding a proper way of channeling our disagreement. 
+And finally, you can vote how you would like your elected representative to vote. 
+And if you do not feel comfortable voting on a certain issue, you can always delegate your vote to someone else, allowing for a dynamic and emerging social leadership. 
+It suddenly became very easy for us to simply compare these results with how our representatives were voting in Congress. 
+But, it also became very evident that technology was not going to do the trick. 
+What we needed to do to was to find actors that were able to grab this distributed knowledge in society and use it to make better and more fair decisions. 
+So we reached out to traditional political parties and we offered them DemocracyOS. 
+We said, "" Look, here you have a platform that you can use to build a two-way conversation with your constituencies. "" And yes, we failed. 
+We failed big time. 
+We were sent to play outside like little kids. 
+Amongst other things, we were called naive. 
+And I must be honest: I think, in hindsight, we were. 
+Because the challenges that we face, they're not technological, they're cultural. 
+Political parties were never willing to change the way they make their decisions. 
+So it suddenly became a bit obvious that if we wanted to move forward with this idea, we needed to do it ourselves. 
+And so we took quite a leap of faith, and in August last year, we founded our own political party, El Partido de la Red, or the Net Party, in the city of Buenos Aires. 
+And taking an even bigger leap of faith, we ran for elections in October last year with this idea: if we want a seat in Congress, our candidate, our representatives were always going to vote according to what citizens decided on DemocracyOS. 
+Every single project that got introduced in Congress, we were going vote according to what citizens decided on an online platform. 
+It was our way of hacking the political system. 
+We understood that if we wanted to become part of the conversation, to have a seat at the table, we needed to become valid stakeholders, and the only way of doing it is to play by the system rules. 
+But we were hacking it in the sense that we were radically changing the way a political party makes its decisions. 
+For the first time, we were making our decisions together with those who we were affecting directly by those decisions. 
+It was a very, very bold move for a two-month-old party in the city of Buenos Aires. 
+But it got attention. 
+So, even if that wasn't enough to win a seat in Congress, it was enough for us to become part of the conversation, to the extent that next month, Congress, as an institution, is launching for the first time in Argentina's history, a DemocracyOS to discuss, with the citizens, three pieces of legislation: two on urban transportation and one on the use of public space. 
+Of course, our elected representatives are not saying, "" Yes, we're going to vote according to what citizens decide, "" but they're willing to try. 
+They're willing to open up a new space for citizen engagement and hopefully they'll be willing to listen as well. 
+Our political system can be transformed, and not by subverting it, by destroying it, but by rewiring it with the tools that Internet affords us now. 
+But a real challenge is to find, to design to create, to empower those connectors that are able to innovate, to transform noise and silence into signal and finally bring our democracies to the 21st century. 
+I'm not saying it's easy. 
+But in our experience, we actually stand a chance of making it work. 
+And in my heart, it's most definitely worth trying. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Several years ago here at TED, Peter Skillman introduced a design challenge called the marshmallow challenge. 
+And the idea's pretty simple: Teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow. 
+The marshmallow has to be on top. 
+And, though it seems really simple, it's actually pretty hard because it forces people to collaborate very quickly. 
+And so, I thought this was an interesting idea, and I incorporated it into a design workshop. 
+And it was a huge success. 
+And since then, I've conducted about 70 design workshops across the world with students and designers and architects, even the CTOs of the Fortune 50, and there's something about this exercise that reveals very deep lessons about the nature of collaboration, and I'd like to share some of them with you. 
+So, normally, most people begin by orienting themselves to the task. 
+They talk about it, they figure out what it's going to look like, they jockey for power. 
+Then they spend some time planning, organizing, they sketch and they lay out spaghetti. 
+They spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into ever-growing structures. 
+And then finally, just as they're running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, and then they gingerly put it on top, and then they stand back, and — ta-da! — they admire their work. 
+But what really happens, most of the time, is that the "" ta-da "" turns into an "" uh-oh, "" because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse. 
+So there are a number of people who have a lot more "" uh-oh "" moments than others, and among the worst are recent graduates of business school. 
+(Laughter) They lie, they cheat, they get distracted and they produce really lame structures. 
+And of course there are teams that have a lot more "" ta-da "" structures, and among the best are recent graduates of kindergarten. 
+(Laughter) And it's pretty amazing. 
+As Peter tells us, not only do they produce the tallest structures, but they're the most interesting structures of them all. 
+So the question you want to ask is: How come? Why? What is it about them? 
+And Peter likes to say that none of the kids spend any time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti, Inc. Right? 
+They don't spend time jockeying for power. 
+But there's another reason as well. 
+And the reason is that business students are trained to find the single right plan, right? 
+And then they execute on it. 
+And then what happens is, when they put the marshmallow on the top, they run out of time and what happens? 
+It's a crisis. 
+Sound familiar? Right. 
+What kindergarteners do differently is that they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way. 
+Designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process. 
+And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work. 
+So the capacity to play in prototype is really essential, but let's look at how different teams perform. 
+So the average for most people is around 20 inches; business schools students, about half of that; lawyers, a little better, but not much better than that, kindergarteners, better than most adults. 
+Who does the very best? 
+Architects and engineers, thankfully. 
+(Laughter) Thirty-nine inches is the tallest structure I've seen. 
+And why is it? Because they understand triangles and self-reinforcing geometrical patterns are the key to building stable structures. 
+So CEOs, a little bit better than average, but here's where it gets interesting. 
+If you put you put an executive admin. on the team, they get significantly better. 
+(Laughter) It's incredible. You know, you look around, you go, "" Oh, that team's going to win. "" You can just tell beforehand. And why is that? 
+Because they have special skills of facilitation. 
+They manage the process, they understand the process. 
+And any team who manages and pays close attention to work will significantly improve the team's performance. 
+Specialized skills and facilitation skills are the combination that leads to strong success. 
+If you have 10 teams that typically perform, you'll get maybe six or so that have standing structures. 
+And I tried something interesting. 
+I thought, let's up the ante, once. 
+So I offered a 10,000 dollar prize of software to the winning team. 
+So what do you think happened to these design students? 
+What was the result? 
+Here's what happened: Not one team had a standing structure. 
+If anyone had built, say, a one inch structure, they would have taken home the prize. 
+So, isn't that interesting? That high stakes have a strong impact. 
+We did the exercise again with the same students. 
+What do you think happened then? 
+So now they understand the value of prototyping. 
+So the same team went from being the very worst to being among the very best. 
+They produced the tallest structures in the least amount of time. 
+So there's deep lessons for us about the nature of incentives and success. 
+So, you might ask: Why would anyone actually spend time writing a marshmallow challenge? 
+And the reason is, I help create digital tools and processes to help teams build cars and video games and visual effects. 
+And what the marshmallow challenge does is it helps them identify the hidden assumptions. 
+Because, frankly, every project has its own marshmallow, doesn't it? 
+The challenge provides a shared experience, a common language, a common stance to build the right prototype. 
+And so, this is the value of the experience, of this so simple exercise. 
+And those of you who are interested may want to go to MarshmallowChallenge.com. 
+It's a blog that you can look at how to build the marshmallows. 
+There's step-by-step instructions on this. 
+There are crazy examples from around the world of how people tweak and adjust the system. 
+There's world records that are on this as well. 
+And the fundamental lesson, I believe, is that design truly is a contact sport. 
+It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand. 
+And sometimes, a little prototype of this experience is all that it takes to turn us from an "" uh-oh "" moment to a "" ta-da "" moment. 
+And that can make a big difference. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Ladies and gentlemen, the history of music and television on the Internet in three minutes. 
+A TED medley — a TEDley. 
+♫ It's nine o 'clock on a Saturday ♫ ♫ The record store's closed for the night ♫ ♫ So I fire up the old iTunes music store ♫ ♫ And soon I am feelin' all right ♫ ♫ I know Steve Jobs can find me a melody ♫ ♫ With one dollar pricing that rocks ♫ ♫ I can type in the track and get album names back ♫ ♫ While still in my PJs and socks ♫ ♫ Sell us a song, you're the music man ♫ ♫ My iPod's still got 10 gigs to go ♫ ♫ Yes, we might prefer more compatibility ♫ 
+♫ But Steve likes to run the whole show ♫ ♫ I heard "" Desperate Housewives "" was great last night ♫ ♫ But I had a bad piece of cod ♫ ♫ As I threw up my meal, I thought, "" It's no big deal "" ♫ ♫ I'll watch it tonight on my 'Pod ♫ ♫ And now all of the networks are joining in ♫ ♫ Two bucks a show without ads ♫ ♫ It's a business those guys always wanted to try ♫ ♫ But only Steve Jobs had the' nads ♫ ♫ They say we're young, don't watch TV ♫ 
+♫ They say the Internet is all we see ♫ ♫ But that's not true; they've got it wrong ♫ ♫ See, all our shows are just two minutes long ♫ ♫ Hey ♫ ♫ I got YouTube ♫ ♫ I got YouTube ♫ And now, ladies and gentlemen, a tribute to the Recording Industry Association of America — the RIAA! 
+♫ Young man, you were surfin 'along ♫ ♫ And then, young man, you downloaded a song ♫ ♫ And then, dumb man, copied it to your' Pod ♫ ♫ Then a phone call came to tell you... ♫ ♫ You've just been sued by the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ You've just been screwed by the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ Their attorneys say you committed a crime ♫ ♫ And there'd better not be a next time ♫ ♫ They've lost their minds at the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ Justice is blind at the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ You're depriving the bands ♫ ♫ You are learning to steal ♫ 
+♫ You can't do whatever you feel ♫ ♫ CD sales have dropped every year ♫ ♫ They're not greedy, they're just quaking with fear ♫ ♫ Yes indeedy, what if their end is near ♫ ♫ And we download all our music ♫ ♫ Yeah, that would piss off the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ No plastic discs from the R-I-A-A ♫ ♫ What a way to make friends ♫ ♫ It's a plan that can't fail ♫ ♫ All your customers off to jail ♫ ♫ Who'll be next for the R-I-A-A? ♫ ♫ What else is vexing the R-I-A-A? ♫ 
+♫ Maybe whistling a tune ♫ ♫ Maybe humming along ♫ ♫ Maybe mocking 'em in a song ♫ 
+
+Who are we? 
+That is the big question. 
+And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape. 
+This could be us. 
+We belong to the family called the Hominidae. 
+We are the species called Homo sapiens sapiens, and it's important to remember that, in terms of our place in the world today and our future on planet Earth. 
+We are one species of about five and a half thousand mammalian species that exist on planet Earth today. 
+And that's just a tiny fraction of all species that have ever lived on the planet in past times. 
+We're one species out of approximately, or let's say, at least 16 upright-walking apes that have existed over the past six to eight million years. 
+But as far as we know, we're the only upright-walking ape that exists on planet Earth today, except for the bonobos. 
+And it's important to remember that, because the bonobos are so human, and they share 99 percent of their genes with us. 
+And we share our origins with a handful of the living great apes. 
+It's important to remember that we evolved. 
+Now, I know that's a dirty word for some people, but we evolved from common ancestors with the gorillas, the chimpanzee and also the bonobos. 
+We have a common past, and we have a common future. 
+And it is important to remember that all of these great apes have come on as long and as interesting evolutionary journey as we ourselves have today. 
+And it's this journey that is of such interest to humanity, and it's this journey that has been the focus of the past three generations of my family, as we've been in East Africa looking for the fossil remains of our ancestors to try and piece together our evolutionary past. 
+And this is how we look for them. 
+A group of dedicated young men and women walk very slowly out across vast areas of Africa, looking for small fragments of bone, fossil bone, that may be on the surface. 
+And that's an example of what we may do as we walk across the landscape in Northern Kenya, looking for fossils. 
+I doubt many of you in the audience can see the fossil that's in this picture, but if you look very carefully, there is a jaw, a lower jaw, of a 4.1-million-year-old upright-walking ape as it was found at Lake Turkana on the west side. 
+(Laughter) It's extremely time-consuming, labor-intensive and it is something that is going to involve a lot more people, to begin to piece together our past. 
+We still really haven't got a very complete picture of it. 
+When we find a fossil, we mark it. 
+Today, we've got great technology: we have GPS. 
+We mark it with a GPS fix, and we also take a digital photograph of the specimen, so we could essentially put it back on the surface, exactly where we found it. 
+And we can bring all this information into big GIS packages, today. 
+When we then find something very important, like the bones of a human ancestor, we begin to excavate it extremely carefully and slowly, using dental picks and fine paintbrushes. 
+And all the sediment is then put through these screens, and where we go again through it very carefully, looking for small bone fragments, and it's then washed. 
+And these things are so exciting. They are so often the only, or the very first time that anybody has ever seen the remains. 
+And here's a very special moment, when my mother and myself were digging up some remains of human ancestors. 
+And it is one of the most special things to ever do with your mother. 
+(Laughter) Not many people can say that. 
+But now, let me take you back to Africa, two million years ago. 
+I'd just like to point out, if you look at the map of Africa, it does actually look like a hominid skull in its shape. 
+Now we're going to go to the East African and the Rift Valley. 
+It essentially runs up from the Gulf of Aden, or runs down to Lake Malawi. 
+And the Rift Valley is a depression. 
+It's a basin, and rivers flow down from the highlands into the basin, carrying sediment, preserving the bones of animals that lived there. 
+If you want to become a fossil, you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. 
+You then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface. 
+And then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you. 
+(Laughter) OK, so it is absolutely surprising that we know as much as we do know today about our ancestors, because it's incredibly difficult, A, for these things to become — to be — preserved, and secondly, for them to have been brought back up to the surface. 
+And we really have only spent 50 years looking for these remains, and begin to actually piece together our evolutionary story. 
+So, let's go to Lake Turkana, which is one such lake basin in the very north of our country, Kenya. 
+And if you look north here, there's a big river that flows into the lake that's been carrying sediment and preserving the remains of the animals that lived there. 
+Fossil sites run up and down both lengths of that lake basin, which represents some 20,000 square miles. 
+That's a huge job that we've got on our hands. 
+Two million years ago at Lake Turkana, Homo erectus, one of our human ancestors, actually lived in this region. 
+You can see some of the major fossil sites that we've been working in the north. But, essentially, two million years ago, Homo erectus, up in the far right corner, lived alongside three other species of human ancestor. 
+And here is a skull of a Homo erectus, which I just pulled off the shelf there. 
+(Laughter) But it is not to say that being a single species on planet Earth is the norm. 
+In fact, if you go back in time, it is the norm that there are multiple species of hominids or of human ancestors that coexist at any one time. 
+Where did these things come from? 
+That's what we're still trying to find answers to, and it is important to realize that there is diversity in all different species, and our ancestors are no exception. 
+Here's some reconstructions of some of the fossils that have been found from Lake Turkana. 
+But I was very lucky to have been brought up in Kenya, essentially accompanying my parents to Lake Turkana in search of human remains. 
+And we were able to dig up, when we got old enough, fossils such as this, a slender-snouted crocodile. 
+And we dug up giant tortoises, and elephants and things like that. 
+But when I was 12, as I was in this picture, a very exciting expedition was in place on the west side, when they found essentially the skeleton of this Homo erectus. 
+I could relate to this Homo erectus skeleton very well, because I was the same age that he was when he died. 
+And I imagined him to be tall, dark-skinned. 
+His brothers certainly were able to run long distances chasing prey, probably sweating heavily as they did so. 
+He was very able to use stones effectively as tools. 
+And this individual himself, this one that I'm holding up here, actually had a bad back. He'd probably had an injury as a child. 
+He had a scoliosis and therefore must have been looked after quite carefully by other female, and probably much smaller, members of his family group, to have got to where he did in life, age 12. 
+Unfortunately for him, he fell into a swamp and couldn't get out. 
+Essentially, his bones were rapidly buried and beautifully preserved. 
+And he remained there until 1.6 million years later, when this very famous fossil hunter, Kamoya Kimeu, walked along a small hillside and found that small piece of his skull lying on the surface amongst the pebbles, recognized it as being hominid. 
+It's actually this little piece up here on the top. 
+Well, an excavation was begun immediately, and more and more little bits of skull started to be extracted from the sediment. 
+And what was so fun about it was this: the skull pieces got closer and closer to the roots of the tree, and fairly recently the tree had grown up, but it had found that the skull had captured nice water in the hillside, and so it had decided to grow its roots in and around this, holding it in place and preventing it from washing away down the slope. 
+We began to find limb bones; we found finger bones, the bones of the pelvis, vertebrae, ribs, the collar bones, things that had never, ever been seen before in Homo erectus. 
+It was truly exciting. 
+He had a body very similar to our own, and he was on the threshold of becoming human. 
+Well, shortly afterwards, members of his species started to move northwards out of Africa, and you start to see fossils of Homo erectus in Georgia, China and also in parts of Indonesia. 
+So, Homo erectus was the first human ancestor to leave Africa and begin its spread across the globe. 
+Some exciting finds, again, as I mentioned, from Dmanisi, in the Republic of Georgia. 
+But also, surprising finds recently announced from the Island of Flores in Indonesia, where a group of these human ancestors have been isolated, and have become dwarfed, and they're only about a meter in height. 
+But they lived only 18,000 years ago, and that is truly extraordinary to think about. 
+Just to put this in terms of generations, because people do find it hard to think of time, Homo erectus left Africa 90,000 generations ago. 
+We evolved essentially from an African stock. 
+Again, at about 200,000 years as a fully-fledged us. 
+And we only left Africa about 70,000 years ago. 
+And until 30,000 years ago, at least three upright-walking apes shared the planet Earth. 
+The question now is, well, who are we? 
+We're certainly a polluting, wasteful, aggressive species, with a few nice things thrown in, perhaps. 
+(Laughter) For the most part, we're not particularly pleasant at all. 
+We have a much larger brain than our ape ancestors. 
+Is this a good evolutionary adaptation, or is it going to lead us to being the shortest-lived hominid species on planet Earth? 
+And what is it that really makes us us? 
+I think it's our collective intelligence. 
+It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness. 
+From very primitive beginnings, with a very crude tool kit of stones, we now have a very advanced tool kit, and our tool use has really reached unprecedented levels: we've got buggies to Mars; we've mapped the human genome; and recently even created synthetic life, thanks to Craig Venter. 
+And we've also managed to communicate with people all over the world, from extraordinary places. 
+Even from within an excavation in northern Kenya, we can talk to people about what we're doing. 
+As Al Gore so clearly has reminded us, we have reached extraordinary numbers of people on this planet. 
+Human ancestors really only survive on planet Earth, if you look at the fossil record, for about, on average, a million years at a time. 
+We've only been around for the past 200,000 years as a species, yet we've reached a population of more than six and a half billion people. 
+And last year, our population grew by 80 million. 
+I mean, these are extraordinary numbers. 
+You can see here, again, taken from Al Gore's book. 
+But what's happened is our technology has removed the checks and balances on our population growth. 
+We have to control our numbers, and I think this is as important as anything else that's being done in the world today. 
+But we have to control our numbers, because we can't really hold it together as a species. 
+My father so appropriately put it, that "" We are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species. "" Can we hold it together? 
+It's important to remember that we all evolved in Africa. 
+We all have an African origin. 
+We have a common past and we share a common future. 
+Evolutionarily speaking, we're just a blip. 
+We're sitting on the edge of a precipice, and we have the tools and the technology at our hands to communicate what needs to be done to hold it together today. 
+We could tell every single human being out there, if we really wanted to. 
+But will we do that, or will we just let nature take its course? 
+Well, to end on a very positive note, I think evolutionarily speaking, this is probably a fairly good thing, in the end. 
+I'll leave it at that, thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to talk today about saving more, but not today, tomorrow. 
+I'm going to talk about Save More Tomorrow. 
+It's a program that Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago and I devised maybe 15 years ago. 
+The program, in a sense, is an example of behavioral finance on steroids — how we could really use behavioral finance. 
+Now you might ask, what is behavioral finance? 
+So let's think about how we manage our money. 
+Let's start with mortgages. 
+It's kind of a recent topic, at least in the U.S. 
+A lot of people buy the biggest house they can afford, and actually slightly bigger than that. 
+And then they foreclose. 
+And then they blame the banks for being the bad guys who gave them the mortgages. 
+Let's also think about how we manage risks — for example, investing in the stock market. 
+Two years ago, three years ago, about four years ago, markets did well. 
+We were risk takers, of course. 
+Then market stocks seize and we're like, "" Wow. 
+These losses, they feel, emotionally, they feel very different from what we actually thought about it when markets were going up. "" So we're probably not doing a great job when it comes to risk taking. 
+How many of you have iPhones? 
+Anyone? Wonderful. 
+I would bet many more of you insure your iPhone — you're implicitly buying insurance by having an extended warranty. 
+What if you lose your iPhone? 
+What if you do this? 
+How many of you have kids? 
+Anyone? 
+Keep your hands up if you have sufficient life insurance. 
+I see a lot of hands coming down. 
+I would predict, if you're a representative sample, that many more of you insure your iPhones than your lives, even when you have kids. 
+We're not doing that well when it comes to insurance. 
+The average American household spends 1,000 dollars a year on lotteries. 
+And I know it sounds crazy. 
+How many of you spend a thousand dollars a year on lotteries? 
+No one. 
+So that tells us that the people not in this room are spending more than a thousand to get the average to a thousand. 
+Low-income people spend a lot more than a thousand on lotteries. 
+So where does it take us? 
+We're not doing a great job managing money. 
+Behavioral finance is really a combination of psychology and economics, trying to understand the money mistakes people make. 
+And I can keep standing here for the 12 minutes and 53 seconds that I have left and make fun of all sorts of ways we manage money, and at the end you're going to ask, "" How can we help people? "" And that's what I really want to focus on today. 
+How do we take an understanding of the money mistakes people make, and then turning the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions? 
+And what I'm going to talk about today is Save More Tomorrow. 
+I want to address the issue of savings. 
+We have on the screen a representative sample of 100 Americans. 
+And we're going to look at their saving behavior. 
+First thing to notice is, half of them do not even have access to a 401 (k) plan. 
+They cannot make savings easy. 
+They cannot have money go away from their paycheck into a 401 (k) plan before they see it, before they can touch it. 
+What about the remaining half of the people? 
+Some of them elect not to save. 
+They're just too lazy. 
+They never get around to logging into a complicated website and doing 17 clicks to join the 401 (k) plan. 
+And then they have to decide how they're going to invest in their 52 choices, and they never heard about what is a money market fund. 
+And they get overwhelmed and the just don't join. 
+How many people end up saving to a 401 (k) plan? 
+One third of Americans. 
+Two thirds are not saving now. 
+Are they saving enough? 
+Take out those who say they save too little. 
+One out of 10 are saving enough. 
+Nine out of 10 either cannot save through their 401 (k) plan, decide not to save — or don't decide — or save too little. 
+We think we have a problem of people saving too much. 
+Let's look at that. 
+We have one person — well, actually we're going to slice him in half because it's less than one percent. 
+Roughly half a percent of Americans feel that they save too much. 
+What are we going to do about it? 
+That's what I really want to focus on. 
+We have to understand why people are not saving, and then we can hopefully flip the behavioral challenges into behavioral solutions, and then see how powerful it might be. 
+So let me divert for a second as we're going to identify the problems, the challenges, the behavioral challenges, that prevent people from saving. 
+I'm going to divert and talk about bananas and chocolate. 
+Suppose we had another wonderful TED event next week. 
+And during the break there would be a snack and you could choose bananas or chocolate. 
+How many of you think you would like to have bananas during this hypothetical TED event next week? 
+Who would go for bananas? 
+Wonderful. 
+I predict scientifically 74 percent of you will go for bananas. 
+Well that's at least what one wonderful study predicted. 
+And then count down the days and see what people ended up eating. 
+The same people that imagined themselves eating the bananas ended up eating chocolates a week later. 
+Self-control is not a problem in the future. 
+It's only a problem now when the chocolate is next to us. 
+What does it have to do with time and savings, this issue of immediate gratification? 
+Or as some economists call it, present bias. 
+We think about saving. We know we should be saving. 
+We know we'll do it next year, but today let us go and spend. 
+Christmas is coming, we might as well buy a lot of gifts for everyone we know. 
+So this issue of present bias causes us to think about saving, but end up spending. 
+Let me now talk about another behavioral obstacle to saving having to do with inertia. 
+But again, a little diversion to the topic of organ donation. 
+Wonderful study comparing different countries. 
+We're going to look at two similar countries, Germany and Austria. 
+And in Germany, if you would like to donate your organs — God forbid something really bad happens to you — when you get your driving license or an I.D., you check the box saying, "I would like to donate my organs." 
+Not many people like checking boxes. 
+It takes effort. You need to think. 
+Twelve percent do. 
+Austria, a neighboring country, slightly similar, slightly different. 
+What's the difference? 
+Well, you still have choice. 
+You will decide whether you want to donate your organs or not. 
+But when you get your driving license, you check the box if you do not want to donate your organ. 
+Nobody checks boxes. 
+That's kind of too much effort. 
+One percent check the box. The rest do nothing. 
+Doing nothing is very common. 
+Not many people check boxes. 
+What are the implications to saving lives and having organs available? 
+In Germany, 12 percent check the box. 
+Twelve percent are organ donors. 
+Huge shortage of organs, God forbid, if you need one. 
+In Austria, again, nobody checks the box. 
+Therefore, 99 percent of people are organ donors. 
+Inertia, lack of action. 
+What is the default setting if people do nothing, if they keep procrastinating, if they don't check the boxes? 
+Very powerful. 
+We're going to talk about what happens if people are overwhelmed and scared to make their 401 (k) choices. 
+Are we going to make them automatically join the plan, or are they going to be left out? 
+In too many 401 (k) plans, if people do nothing, it means they're not saving for retirement, if they don't check the box. 
+And checking the box takes effort. 
+So we've chatted about a couple of behavioral challenges. 
+One more before we flip the challenges into solutions, having to do with monkeys and apples. 
+No, no, no, this is a real study and it's got a lot to do with behavioral economics. 
+One group of monkeys gets an apple, they're pretty happy. 
+The other group gets two apples, one is taken away. 
+They still have an apple left. 
+They're really mad. 
+Why have you taken our apple? 
+This is the notion of loss aversion. 
+We hate losing stuff, even if it doesn't mean a lot of risk. 
+You would hate to go to the ATM, take out 100 dollars and notice that you lost one of those $20 bills. 
+It's very painful, even though it doesn't mean anything. 
+Those 20 dollars might have been a quick lunch. 
+So this notion of loss aversion kicks in when it comes to savings too, because people, mentally and emotionally and intuitively frame savings as a loss because I have to cut my spending. 
+So we talked about all sorts of behavioral challenges having to do with savings eventually. 
+Whether you think about immediate gratification, and the chocolates versus bananas, it's just painful to save now. 
+It's a lot more fun to spend now. 
+We talked about inertia and organ donations and checking the box. 
+If people have to check a lot of boxes to join a 401 (k) plan, they're going to keep procrastinating and not join. 
+And last, we talked about loss aversion, and the monkeys and the apples. 
+If people frame mentally saving for retirement as a loss, they're not going to be saving for retirement. 
+So we've got these challenges, and what Richard Thaler and I were always fascinated by — take behavioral finance, make it behavioral finance on steroids or behavioral finance 2.0 or behavioral finance in action — flip the challenges into solutions. 
+And we came up with an embarrassingly simple solution called Save More, not today, Tomorrow. 
+How is it going to solve the challenges we chatted about? 
+If you think about the problem of bananas versus chocolates, we think we're going to eat bananas next week. 
+We think we're going to save more next year. 
+Save More Tomorrow invites employees to save more maybe next year — sometime in the future when we can imagine ourselves eating bananas, volunteering more in the community, exercising more and doing all the right things on the planet. 
+Now we also talked about checking the box and the difficulty of taking action. 
+Save More Tomorrow makes it easy. 
+It's an autopilot. 
+Once you tell me you would like to save more in the future, let's say every January you're going to be saving more automatically and it's going to go away from your paycheck to the 401 (k) plan before you see it, before you touch it, before you get the issue of immediate gratification. 
+But what are we going to do about the monkeys and loss aversion? 
+Next January comes and people might feel that if they save more, they have to spend less, and that's painful. 
+Well, maybe it shouldn't be just January. 
+Maybe we should make people save more when they make more money. 
+That way, when they make more money, when they get a pay raise, they don't have to cut their spending. 
+They take a little bit of the increase in the paycheck home and spend more — take a little bit of the increase and put it in a 401 (k) plan. 
+So that is the program, embarrassingly simple, but as we're going to see, extremely powerful. 
+We first implemented it, Richard Thaler and I, back in 1998. 
+Mid-sized company in the Midwest, blue collar employees struggling to pay their bills repeatedly told us they cannot save more right away. 
+Saving more today is not an option. 
+We invited them to save three percentage points more every time they get a pay raise. 
+And here are the results. 
+We're seeing here a three and a half-year period, four pay raises, people who were struggling to save, were saving three percent of their paycheck, three and a half years later saving almost four times as much, almost 14 percent. 
+And there's shoes and bicycles and things on this chart because I don't want to just throw numbers in a vacuum. 
+I want, really, to think about the fact that saving four times more is a huge difference in terms of the lifestyle that people will be able to afford. 
+It's real. 
+It's not just numbers on a piece of paper. 
+Whereas with saving three percent, people might have to add nice sneakers so they can walk, because they won't be able to afford anything else, when they save 14 percent they might be able to maybe have nice dress shoes to walk to the car to drive. 
+This is a real difference. 
+By now, about 60 percent of the large companies actually have programs like this in place. 
+It's been part of the Pension Protection Act. 
+And needless to say that Thaler and I have been blessed to be part of this program and make a difference. 
+Let me wrap with two key messages. 
+One is behavioral finance is extremely powerful. 
+This is just one example. 
+Message two is there's still a lot to do. 
+This is really the tip of the iceberg. 
+If you think about people and mortgages and buying houses and then not being able to pay for it, we need to think about that. 
+If you're thinking about people taking too much risk and not understanding how much risk they're taking or taking too little risk, we need to think about that. 
+If you think about people spending a thousand dollars a year on lottery tickets, we need to think about that. 
+The average actually, the record is in Singapore. 
+The average household spends $4,000 a year on lottery tickets. 
+We've got a lot to do, a lot to solve, also in the retirement area when it comes to what people do with their money after retirement. 
+One last question: How many of you feel comfortable that as you're planning for retirement you have a really solid plan when you're going to retire, when you're going to claim Social Security benefits, what lifestyle to expect, how much to spend every month so you're not going to run out of money? 
+How many of you feel you have a solid plan for the future when it comes to post-retirement decisions. 
+One, two, three, four. 
+Less than three percent of a very sophisticated audience. 
+Behavioral finance has a long way. 
+There's a lot of opportunities to make it powerful again and again and again. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And there are days — I don't know about the rest of you — but there are days when I palpably feel how much I rely on other people for pretty much everything in my life. 
+So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work about how NASA has been using hydroponics to explore growing food in space. 
+And I really wanted it to be an open project, because hydroponics is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting in the United States right now, and could possibly become another area like Monsanto, where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property in the way of people's food. 
+So she expresses here what it's like to see someone halfway across the world having taken your idea, built upon it and then acknowledging you for contributing. 
+
+Well, the subject of difficult negotiation reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the Middle East, of a man who left to his three sons, 17 camels. 
+To the first son, he left half the camels; to the second son, he left a third of the camels; and to the youngest son, he left a ninth of the camels. 
+(Laughter) Now, if you think about that story for a moment, I think it resembles a lot of the difficult negotiations we get involved in. 
+We're all one family. 
+How do we deal with our deepest differences, given the human propensity for conflict and the human genius at devising weapons of enormous destruction? 
+As I've spent the last better part of three decades, almost four, traveling the world, trying to work, getting involved in conflicts ranging from Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Chechnya to Venezuela — some of the most difficult conflicts on the face of the planet — I've been asking myself that question. 
+It's not easy, but it's simple. 
+Let me give you just a story, an example. 
+Because, after all, within living memory, they were hunters and gatherers, living pretty much like our ancestors lived for maybe 99 percent of the human story. 
+It may take two days, three days, four days, but they don't rest until they find a resolution or better yet — a reconciliation. 
+And if tempers are still too high, then they send someone off to visit some relatives, as a cooling-off period. 
+But what we don't often see is that there's always a third side, and the third side of the conflict is us, it's the surrounding community, it's the friends, the allies, the family members, the neighbors. 
+And we met in the Hague, in the Peace Palace, in the same room where the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal was taking place. 
+And the talks got off to a rather rocky start when the vice president of Chechnya began by pointing at the Russians and said, "" You should stay right here in your seats, because you're going to be on trial for war crimes. "" And then he turned to me and said, "" You're an American. 
+How could we possibly go to the balcony? 
+There are a hundred times more people who die in a conflict in Africa than in the Middle East. 
+In a phrase, it's: Four thousand years ago, a man and his family walked across the Middle East, and the world has never been the same since. 
+And what he stood for was unity, the unity of the family; he's the father of us all. 
+But it's not just what he stood for, it's what his message was. 
+His basic message was unity too, the interconnectedness of it all, the unity of it all. 
+So what if, then, you took the story of Abraham, which is a third-side story, what if that could be — because Abraham stands for hospitality — what if that could be an antidote to terrorism? 
+Now, it's not enough just to tell a story. 
+And that's what comes to the first step here. 
+That's why in negotiations, often, when things get tough, people go for walks in the woods. 
+We went to Damascus, which has a long history associated with Abraham. 
+How many of you have had the experience of being in a strange neighborhood or strange land, and a total stranger, perfect stranger, comes up to you and shows you some kindness — maybe invites you into their home, gives you a drink, gives you a coffee, gives you a meal? 
+They've begun to walk in Israel and Palestine, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Syria. 
+And this woman right here, Um Ahmad, is a woman who lives on the path in Northern Jordan. 
+She's partially blind, her husband can't work, she's got seven kids. 
+She makes the most delicious food, that's fresh from the herbs in the surrounding countryside. 
+There are literally hundreds of those kinds of communities across the Middle East, across the path. 
+And in that sense, the Abraham Path is a game-changer. 
+When I think back to my childhood, a good part of which I spent, after being born here in Chicago, I spent in Europe. 
+But they did it, thanks to a common identity, Europe, and a common economy. 
+So my question is, if it can be done in Europe, why not in the Middle East? 
+Why not, thanks to a common identity, which is the story of Abraham, and thanks to a common economy that would be based, in good part, on tourism? 
+That's walking Abraham's Path. 
+
+Hello. 
+This is my first trip, first time in life I'm outside of the walls of Gaza. 
+I'm so happy to be here. 
+(Applause) My ambition always was to be a pilot, to fly a plane, to feel free to fly the sky, to touch the sky. 
+But that didn't happen. 
+Simply, I live in Gaza, there is no airport. 
+All borders are closed on every side. 
+We live in one of the biggest prisons in the world. 
+The only thing I can do is just to look up to the sky. 
+On some days, we are lucky if we have electricity for four or five hours. 
+When it's cold, we make a fire on the front or on the roof of our homes. 
+Sometimes we make food, too. 
+My job in Gaza is to arrange everything for journalists who come to my homeland to tell the stories about what's going on in Gaza. 
+Many mornings, I had to go to the border area to collect a journalist. 
+If anything should happen to the journalist, or if the journalist decides to cover a story the government doesn't want us to cover, bad things could happen. 
+Navigating through my country helping journalists, filmmakers, news crews, is my working life. 
+I believe my success comes from building a relationship not only with journalists and the news crews, but also with the communities in the Gaza Strip. 
+These communities who don't want their stories to be told, I never looked to them as stories or numbers. 
+But like me, they are human beings. 
+I have built up many relationships over 10 years. 
+And guess what? 
+This gives me the chance to get access to people, to stories that others can't. 
+In some certain situations, I feel, as a woman, I have more power. 
+Many male journalists in my society, they want to cover a story about drug addiction in my country. 
+That problem started when the Gaza tunnel was being built. 
+With the siege on Gaza, tunnels brought people all the basic needs like food, building material, other stuff we needed. 
+But not anymore, because the Egyptian side flooded them up with water and they are not working anymore. 
+Drugs were being smuggled, and many young people got addicted, too. 
+In the tradition of the Palestinian society, it's forbidden for men to enter the household. 
+So, no male journalists get the story. 
+But I did. 
+I have a wonderful husband, a wonderful husband who supports me despite all the criticism he gets from the society. 
+He's at home now with my two kids, and I have another one that's growing in here. 
+(Applause) When I'm working, I call him every two hours, and he knows if he doesn't hear from me, he should call my contact, the one who gives me access to the story, which is the one who I trust. 
+One of the times in Gaza, during the kidnapping of the British journalist Alan Johnston, I was asked by an American magazine to set up a meeting with the kidnappers in Gaza, and I did. 
+The journalist covering the story and I were asked to meet outside of his hotel. 
+They came, they picked us up in a black van with black windows, they were wearing masks on that day. 
+And they drove us away, far away in the middle of a field. 
+They took our cell phones and we did the interview with the kidnapper outside in that field. 
+I was so scared that day, a day I will never forget. 
+So, why do I do what I do? 
+There are some more stories I could tell you about my country. 
+And not all of them are bad. 
+I love my country, despite the terrible situation we live in — siege, poverty, unemployment — but there is life. 
+There are people who are dreamers and amazing people full of energy. 
+We have wonderful music, and a great music school. 
+We have parkour dancers who dance in the rubble of their homes. 
+And Gaza is the only place in the Arab world where Muslims and Christians live in strong brotherhood. 
+(Applause) During the time of war, the hardest part for me is leaving the house early in the morning, leaving my children. 
+I take a picture of them everyday because I never know if I will make it back to them. 
+Being a fixer and a journalist is difficult and dangerous in Gaza. 
+But when I hear the sound of the shelling or the sound of the bombing, I just head straight toward it, because I want to be there first, because these stories should be told. 
+When my children were small and we heard the sound of the war, I used to tell them that they were fireworks. 
+Now they are older, they understand. 
+I do have terrible nightmares because of all that I witnessed during war times, especially these lifeless bodies of young children. 
+I still remember a little girl, her name is Hala. 
+She's the only survivor from her family. 
+Her picture will be with me forever. 
+I will never forget her. 
+I'm proud that I can stand here and be here today with you. 
+I'm proud that I can tell you stories, sad and happy, stories about my small corner of the world, Gaza. 
+I'm proud that I am the first female fixer working in Gaza. 
+And the funny thing is they call me Mr. Rambo in Gaza. 
+(Laughter) I hope one day, I will get the chance to tell the stories of all other women, all other amazing women I know in my country. 
+I hope that one day I can help other women in my country to be fixers like me. 
+And of course sometimes, I feel I can't do this work anymore, it's just too much for me. 
+But I remember these words: "" Don't limit your challenge, but challenge your limit. 
+Don't allow others to stand in front of your dreams. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hetain Patel: (In Chinese) Yuyu Rau: Hi, I'm Hetain. I'm an artist. 
+And this is Yuyu, who is a dancer I have been working with. 
+I have asked her to translate for me. 
+HP: (In Chinese) YR: If I may, I would like to tell you a little bit about myself and my artwork. HP: (In Chinese) 
+YR: I was born and raised near Manchester, in England, but I'm not going to say it in English to you, because I'm trying to avoid any assumptions that might be made from my northern accent. 
+(Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) YR: The only problem with masking it with Chinese Mandarin is I can only speak this paragraph, which I have learned by heart when I was visiting in China. (Laughter) So all I can do is keep repeating it in different tones and hope you won't notice. (Laughter) HP: (In Chinese) (Laughter) 
+YR: Needless to say, I would like to apologize to any Mandarin speakers in the audience. 
+As a child, I would hate being made to wear the Indian kurta pajama, because I didn't think it was very cool. 
+It felt a bit girly to me, like a dress, and it had this baggy trouser part you had to tie really tight to avoid the embarrassment of them falling down. 
+My dad never wore it, so I didn't see why I had to. 
+Also, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, that people assume I represent something genuinely Indian when I wear it, because that's not how I feel. 
+HP: (In Chinese) YR: Actually, the only way I feel comfortable wearing it is by pretending they are the robes of a kung fu warrior like Li Mu Bai from that film, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." 
+(Music) Okay. 
+So my artwork is about identity and language, challenging common assumptions based on how we look like or where we come from, gender, race, class. 
+What makes us who we are anyway? 
+HP: (In Chinese) YR: I used to read Spider-Man comics, watch kung fu movies, take philosophy lessons from Bruce Lee. 
+He would say things like — HP: Empty your mind. 
+(Laughter) Be formless, shapeless, like water. 
+Now you put water into a cup. 
+It becomes the cup. 
+You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. 
+Put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. 
+Now, water can flow or it can crash. 
+Be water, my friend. (Applause) YR: This year, I am 32 years old, the same age Bruce Lee was when he died. 
+I have been wondering recently, if he were alive today, what advice he would give me about making this TED Talk. 
+HP: Don't imitate my voice. 
+It offends me. 
+(Laughter) YR: Good advice, but I still think that we learn who we are by copying others. 
+Who here hasn't imitated their childhood hero in the playground, or mum or father? 
+I have. 
+HP: A few years ago, in order to make this video for my artwork, I shaved off all my hair so that I could grow it back as my father had it when he first emigrated from India to the U.K. in the 1960s. 
+He had a side parting and a neat mustache. 
+At first, it was going very well. 
+I even started to get discounts in Indian shops. 
+(Laughter) But then very quickly, I started to underestimate my mustache growing ability, and it got way too big. 
+It didn't look Indian anymore. 
+Instead, people from across the road, they would shout things like — HP and YR: Arriba! Arriba! Ándale! Ándale! 
+(Laughter) HP: Actually, I don't know why I am even talking like this. 
+My dad doesn't even have an Indian accent anymore. 
+He talks like this now. 
+So it's not just my father that I've imitated. 
+A few years ago I went to China for a few months, and I couldn't speak Chinese, and this frustrated me, so I wrote about this and had it translated into Chinese, and then I learned this by heart, like music, I guess. 
+YR: This phrase is now etched into my mind clearer than the pin number to my bank card, so I can pretend I speak Chinese fluently. 
+When I had learned this phrase, I had an artist over there hear me out to see how accurate it sounded. 
+I spoke the phrase, and then he laughed and told me, "" Oh yeah, that's great, only it kind of sounds like a woman. "" I said, "" What? "" He said, "" Yeah, you learned from a woman? "" I said, "" Yes. So? "" He then explained the tonal differences between male and female voices are very different and distinct, and that I had learned it very well, but in a woman's voice. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) HP: Okay. So this imitation business does come with risk. 
+It doesn't always go as you plan it, even with a talented translator. 
+But I am going to stick with it, because contrary to what we might usually assume, imitating somebody can reveal something unique. 
+So every time I fail to become more like my father, I become more like myself. 
+Every time I fail to become Bruce Lee, I become more authentically me. 
+This is my art. 
+I strive for authenticity, even if it comes in a shape that we might not usually expect. 
+It's only recently that I've started to understand that I didn't learn to sit like this through being Indian. 
+I learned this from Spider-Man. 
+(Laughter) Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Let's talk dirty. 
+A few years ago, oddly enough, I needed the bathroom, and I found one, a public bathroom, and I went into the stall, and I prepared to do what I'd done most of my life: use the toilet, flush the toilet, forget about the toilet. 
+And for some reason that day, instead, I asked myself a question, and it was, where does this stuff go? 
+And with that question, I found myself plunged into the world of sanitation — there's more coming — (Laughter) — sanitation, toilets and poop, and I have yet to emerge. 
+And that's because it's such an enraging, yet engaging place to be. 
+To go back to that toilet, it wasn't a particularly fancy toilet, it wasn't as nice as this one from the World Toilet Organization. 
+That's the other WTO. (Laughter) But it had a lockable door, it had privacy, it had water, it had soap so I could wash my hands, and I did because I'm a woman, and we do that. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) But that day, when I asked that question, I learned something, and that was that I'd grown up thinking that a toilet like that was my right, when in fact it's a privilege. 
+2.5 billion people worldwide have no adequate toilet. 
+They don't have a bucket or a box. 
+Forty percent of the world with no adequate toilet. 
+And they have to do what this little boy is doing by the side of the Mumbai Airport expressway, which is called open defecation, or poo-pooing in the open. 
+And he does that every day, and every day, probably, that guy in the picture walks on by, because he sees that little boy, but he doesn't see him. 
+But he should, because the problem with all that poop lying around is that poop carries passengers. 
+Fifty communicable diseases like to travel in human shit. 
+All those things, the eggs, the cysts, the bacteria, the viruses, all those can travel in one gram of human feces. 
+How? Well, that little boy will not have washed his hands. 
+He's barefoot. He'll run back into his house, and he will contaminate his drinking water and his food and his environment with whatever diseases he may be carrying by fecal particles that are on his fingers and feet. 
+In what I call the flushed-and-plumbed world that most of us in this room are lucky to live in, the most common symptoms associated with those diseases, diarrhea, is now a bit of a joke. 
+It's the runs, the Hershey squirts, the squits. 
+Where I come from, we call it Delhi belly, as a legacy of empire. 
+But if you search for a stock photo of diarrhea in a leading photo image agency, this is the picture that you come up with. 
+(Laughter) Still not sure about the bikini. 
+And here's another image of diarrhea. 
+This is Marie Saylee, nine months old. 
+You can't see her, because she's buried under that green grass in a little village in Liberia, because she died in three days from diarrhea — the Hershey squirts, the runs, a joke. 
+And that's her dad. 
+But she wasn't alone that day, because 4,000 other children died of diarrhea, and they do every day. 
+Diarrhea is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, and you've probably been asked to care about things like HIV / AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. 
+It's a very potent weapon of mass destruction. 
+And the cost to the world is immense: 260 billion dollars lost every year on the losses to poor sanitation. 
+These are cholera beds in Haiti. 
+You'll have heard of cholera, but we don't hear about diarrhea. 
+It gets a fraction of the attention and funding given to any of those other diseases. 
+But we know how to fix this. 
+We know, because in the mid-19th century, wonderful Victorian engineers installed systems of sewers and wastewater treatment and the flush toilet, and disease dropped dramatically. 
+Child mortality dropped by the most it had ever dropped in history. 
+The flush toilet was voted the best medical advance of the last 200 years by the readers of the British Medical Journal, and they were choosing over the Pill, anesthesia, and surgery. 
+It's a wonderful waste disposal device. 
+But I think that it's so good — it doesn't smell, we can put it in our house, we can lock it behind a door — and I think we've locked it out of conversation too. 
+We don't have a neutral word for it. 
+Poop's not particularly adequate. 
+Shit offends people. Feces is too medical. 
+Because I can't explain otherwise, when I look at the figures, what's going on. 
+We know how to solve diarrhea and sanitation, but if you look at the budgets of countries, developing and developed, you'll think there's something wrong with the math, because you'll expect absurdities like Pakistan spending 47 times more on its military than it does on water and sanitation, even though 150,000 children die of diarrhea in Pakistan every year. 
+But then you look at that already minuscule water and sanitation budget, and 75 to 90 percent of it will go on clean water supply, which is great; we all need water. 
+No one's going to refuse clean water. 
+But the humble latrine, or flush toilet, reduces disease by twice as much as just putting in clean water. 
+Think about it. That little boy who's running back into his house, he may have a nice, clean fresh water supply, but he's got dirty hands that he's going to contaminate his water supply with. 
+And I think that the real waste of human waste is that we are wasting it as a resource and as an incredible trigger for development, because these are a few things that toilets and poop itself can do for us. 
+So a toilet can put a girl back in school. 
+Twenty-five percent of girls in India drop out of school because they have no adequate sanitation. 
+They've been used to sitting through lessons for years and years holding it in. 
+We've all done that, but they do it every day, and when they hit puberty and they start menstruating, it just gets too much. 
+And I understand that. Who can blame them? 
+So if you met an educationalist and said, "" I can improve education attendance rates by 25 percent with just one simple thing, "" you'd make a lot of friends in education. 
+That's not the only thing it can do for you. 
+Poop can cook your dinner. 
+It's got nutrients in it. 
+We ingest nutrients. We excrete nutrients as well. 
+We don't keep them all. 
+In Rwanda, they are now getting 75 percent of their cooking fuel in their prison system from the contents of prisoners' bowels. 
+So these are a bunch of inmates in a prison in Butare. 
+They're genocidal inmates, most of them, and they're stirring the contents of their own latrines, because if you put poop in a sealed environment, in a tank, pretty much like a stomach, then, pretty much like a stomach, it gives off gas, and you can cook with it. 
+And you might think it's just good karma to see these guys stirring shit, but it's also good economic sense, because they're saving a million dollars a year. 
+They're cutting down on deforestation, and they've found a fuel supply that is inexhaustible, infinite and free at the point of production. 
+It's not just in the poor world that poop can save lives. 
+Here's a woman who's about to get a dose of the brown stuff in those syringes, which is what you think it is, except not quite, because it's actually donated. 
+There is now a new career path called stool donor. 
+It's like the new sperm donor. 
+Because she has been suffering from a superbug called C. diff, and it's resistant to antibiotics in many cases. 
+She's been suffering for years. 
+She gets a dose of healthy human feces, and the cure rate for this procedure is 94 percent. 
+It's astonishing, but hardly anyone is still doing it. 
+Maybe it's the ick factor. 
+That's okay, because there's a team of research scientists in Canada who have now created a stool sample, a fake stool sample which is called RePOOPulate. 
+So you'd be thinking by now, okay, the solution's simple, we give everyone a toilet. 
+And this is where it gets really interesting, because it's not that simple, because we are not simple. 
+So the really interesting, exciting work — this is the engaging bit — in sanitation is that we need to understand human psychology. 
+We need to understand software as well as just giving someone hardware. 
+They've found in many developing countries that governments have gone in and given out free latrines and gone back a few years later and found that they've got lots of new goat sheds or temples or spare rooms with their owners happily walking past them and going over to the open defecating ground. 
+So the idea is to manipulate human emotion. 
+It's been done for decades. The soap companies did it in the early 20th century. 
+They tried selling soap as healthy. No one bought it. 
+They tried selling it as sexy. Everyone bought it. 
+In India now there's a campaign which persuades young brides not to marry into families that don't have a toilet. 
+It's called "" No Loo, No I Do. "" (Laughter) And in case you think that poster's just propaganda, here's Priyanka, 23 years old. 
+I met her last October in India, and she grew up in a conservative environment. 
+She grew up in a rural village in a poor area of India, and she was engaged at 14, and then at 21 or so, she moved into her in-law's house. 
+And she was horrified to get there and find that they didn't have a toilet. 
+She'd grown up with a latrine. 
+It was no big deal, but it was a latrine. 
+And the first night she was there, she was told that at 4 o'clock in the morning — her mother-in-law got her up, told her to go outside and go and do it in the dark in the open. 
+And she was scared. She was scared of drunks hanging around. 
+She was scared of snakes. She was scared of rape. 
+After three days, she did an unthinkable thing. 
+She left. 
+And if you know anything about rural India, you'll know that's an unspeakably courageous thing to do. 
+But not just that. 
+She got her toilet, and now she goes around all the other villages in India persuading other women to do the same thing. 
+It's what I call social contagion, and it's really powerful and really exciting. 
+Another version of this, another village in India near where Priyanka lives is this village, called Lakara, and about a year ago, it had no toilets whatsoever. 
+Kids were dying of diarrhea and cholera. 
+Some visitors came, using various behavioral change tricks like putting out a plate of food and a plate of shit and watching the flies go one to the other. 
+Somehow, people who'd been thinking that what they were doing was not disgusting at all suddenly thought, "" Oops. "" Not only that, but they were ingesting their neighbors' shit. 
+That's what really made them change their behavior. 
+So this woman, this boy's mother installed this latrine in a few hours. 
+Her entire life, she'd been using the banana field behind, but she installed the latrine in a few hours. 
+It cost nothing. It's going to save that boy's life. 
+So when I get despondent about the state of sanitation, even though these are pretty exciting times because we've got the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation reinventing the toilet, which is great, we've got Matt Damon going on bathroom strike, which is great for humanity, very bad for his colon. 
+But there are things to worry about. 
+It's the most off-track Millennium Development Goal. 
+It's about 50 or so years off track. 
+We're not going to meet targets, providing people with sanitation at this rate. 
+So when I get sad about sanitation, I think of Japan, because Japan 70 years ago was a nation of people who used pit latrines and wiped with sticks, and now it's a nation of what are called Woshurettos, washlet toilets. 
+They have in-built bidet nozzles for a lovely, hands-free cleaning experience, and they have various other features like a heated seat and an automatic lid-raising device which is known as the "" marriage-saver. "" (Laughter) But most importantly, what they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. 
+They've made it conversational. 
+People go out and upgrade their toilet. 
+They talk about it. They've sanitized it. 
+I hope that we can do that. It's not a difficult thing to do. 
+All we really need to do is look at this issue as the urgent, shameful issue that it is. 
+And don't think that it's just in the poor world that things are wrong. 
+Our sewers are crumbling. 
+Things are going wrong here too. 
+The solution to all of this is pretty easy. 
+I'm going to make your lives easy this afternoon and just ask you to do one thing, and that's to go out, protest, speak about the unspeakable, and talk shit. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a visual artist, and I'm also one of the co-founders of the Plastic Pollution Coalition. 
+I've been working with plastic bags, which I cut up and sew back together as my primary material for my artwork for the last 20 years. 
+I turn them into two and three-dimensional pieces and sculptures and installations. 
+Upon working with the plastic, after about the first eight years, some of my work started to fissure and break down into smaller little bits of plastic. 
+And I thought, "" Great. 
+It's ephemeral just like us. "" Upon educating myself a little further about plastics, I actually realized this was a bad thing. 
+It's a bad thing that plastic breaks down into smaller little bits, because it's always still plastic. 
+And what we're finding is that a lot of it is in the marine environment. 
+I then, in the last few years, learned about the Pacific garbage patch and the gyre. 
+And my initial reaction — and I think this is a lot of people's first reaction to learning about it — is, "" Oh my God! 
+We've got to go out there and clean this thing up. "" So I actually developed a proposal to go out with a cargo ship and two decommissioned fishing trawlers, a crane, a chipping machine and a cold-molding machine. 
+And my intention was to go out to the gyre, raise awareness about this issue and begin to pick up the plastic, chip it into little bits and cold mold it into bricks that could potentially be used as building materials in underdeveloped communities. 
+I began talking with people who actually had been out to the gyre and were studying the plastic problem in the marine environment and upon doing so, I realized actually that cleaning it up would be a very small drop in the bucket relative to how much is being generated every day around the world, and that actually I needed to back up and look at the bigger picture. 
+And the bigger picture is: we need to find a way to turn off the faucet. 
+We need to cut the spigot of single-use and disposable plastics, which are entering the marine environment every day on a global scale. 
+So in looking at that, I also realized that I was really angry. 
+I wasn't just concerned about plastic that you're trying to imagine out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean — of which I have learned there are now 11 gyres, potentially, of plastic in five major oceans in the world. 
+It's not just that gyre of plastic that I'm concerned about — it's the gyre of plastic in the supermarket. 
+I'd go to the supermarket and all of my food is packaged in plastic. 
+All of my beverages are packaged in plastic, even at the health food market. 
+I'm also concerned about the plastic in the refrigerator, and I'm concerned about the plastic and the toxins that leach from plastic into us and into our bodies. 
+So I came together with a group of other people who were all looking at this issue, and we created the Plastic Pollution Coalition. 
+We have many initiatives that we're working on, but some of them are very basic. 
+One is: if 80 to 90 percent of what we're finding in the ocean — of the marine debris that we're finding in the ocean — is plastic, then why don't we call it what it is. 
+It's plastic pollution. 
+Recycling — everybody kind of ends their books about being sustainable and greening with the idea of recycling. 
+You put something in a bin and you don't have to think about it again. 
+What is the reality of that? 
+In the United States, less than seven percent of our plastics are recycled. 
+And if you really look into it, particularly when it comes to plastic bottles, most of it is only down-cycled, or incinerated, or shipped to China. 
+It is down-cycled and turned into lesser things, while a glass bottle can be a glass bottle again or can be used again — a plastic bottle can never be a plastic bottle again. 
+So this is a big issue for us. 
+Another thing that we're looking at and asking people to think about is we've added a fourth R onto the front of the "" Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, "" three R's, and that is refuse. 
+Whenever possible, refuse single-use and disposable plastics. 
+Alternatives exist; some of them are very old-school. 
+I myself am now collecting these cool Pyrex containers and using those instead of Glad and Tupperware containers to store food in. 
+And I know that I am doing a service to myself and my family. 
+It's very easy to pick up a stainless-steel bottle or a glass bottle, if you're traveling and you've forgotten to bring your stainless-steel bottle and fill that up with water or filtered water, versus purchasing plastic bottled water. 
+I guess what I want to say to everybody here — and I know that you guys know a lot about this issue — is that this is a huge problem in the oceans, but this is a problem that we've created as consumers and we can solve. 
+We can solve this by raising awareness of the issue and teaching people to choose alternatives. 
+So whenever possible, to choose alternatives to single-use plastics. 
+We can cut the stem — tide the stem of this into our oceans and in doing so, save our oceans, save our planet, save ourselves. 
+Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+I want to talk to you today a little bit about predictable irrationality. 
+And my interest in irrational behavior started many years ago in the hospital. 
+I was burned very badly. 
+And if you spend a lot of time in hospital, you'll see a lot of types of irrationalities. 
+And the one that particularly bothered me in the burn department was the process by which the nurses took the bandage off me. 
+Now, you must have all taken a Band-Aid off at some point, and you must have wondered what's the right approach. 
+Do you rip it off quickly — short duration but high intensity — or do you take your Band-Aid off slowly — you take a long time, but each second is not as painful — which one of those is the right approach? 
+The nurses in my department thought that the right approach was the ripping one, so they would grab hold and they would rip, and they would grab hold and they would rip. 
+And because I had 70 percent of my body burned, it would take about an hour. 
+And as you can imagine, I hated that moment of ripping with incredible intensity. 
+And I would try to reason with them and say, "" Why don't we try something else? 
+Why don't we take it a little longer — maybe two hours instead of an hour — and have less of this intensity? "" And the nurses told me two things. 
+They told me that they had the right model of the patient — that they knew what was the right thing to do to minimize my pain — and they also told me that the word patient doesn't mean to make suggestions or to interfere or... 
+This is not just in Hebrew, by the way. 
+It's in every language I've had experience with so far. 
+And, you know, there's not much — there wasn't much I could do, and they kept on doing what they were doing. 
+And about three years later, when I left the hospital, I started studying at the university. 
+And one of the most interesting lessons I learned was that there is an experimental method that if you have a question you can create a replica of this question in some abstract way, and you can try to examine this question, maybe learn something about the world. 
+So that's what I did. 
+I was still interested in this question of how do you take bandages off burn patients. 
+So originally I didn't have much money, so I went to a hardware store and I bought a carpenter's vice. 
+And I would bring people to the lab and I would put their finger in it, and I would crunch it a little bit. 
+(Laughter) And I would crunch it for long periods and short periods, and pain that went up and pain that went down, and with breaks and without breaks — all kinds of versions of pain. 
+And when I finished hurting people a little bit, I would ask them, so, how painful was this? Or, how painful was this? 
+Or, if you had to choose between the last two, which one would you choose? 
+(Laughter) I kept on doing this for a while. (Laughter) 
+And then, like all good academic projects, I got more funding. 
+I moved to sounds, electrical shocks — I even had a pain suit that I could get people to feel much more pain. 
+But at the end of this process, what I learned was that the nurses were wrong. 
+Here were wonderful people with good intentions and plenty of experience, and nevertheless they were getting things wrong predictably all the time. 
+It turns out that because we don't encode duration in the way that we encode intensity, I would have had less pain if the duration would have been longer and the intensity was lower. 
+It turns out it would have been better to start with my face, which was much more painful, and move toward my legs, giving me a trend of improvement over time — that would have been also less painful. 
+And it also turns out that it would have been good to give me breaks in the middle to kind of recuperate from the pain. 
+All of these would have been great things to do, and my nurses had no idea. 
+And from that point on I started thinking, are the nurses the only people in the world who get things wrong in this particular decision, or is it a more general case? 
+And it turns out it's a more general case — there's a lot of mistakes we do. 
+And I want to give you one example of one of these irrationalities, and I want to talk to you about cheating. 
+And the reason I picked cheating is because it's interesting, but also it tells us something, I think, about the stock market situation we're in. 
+So, my interest in cheating started when Enron came on the scene, exploded all of a sudden, and I started thinking about what is happening here. 
+Is it the case that there was kind of a few apples who are capable of doing these things, or are we talking a more endemic situation, that many people are actually capable of behaving this way? 
+So, like we usually do, I decided to do a simple experiment. 
+And here's how it went. 
+If you were in the experiment, I would pass you a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems that everybody could solve, but I wouldn't give you enough time. 
+When the five minutes were over, I would say, "Pass me the sheets of paper, and I'll pay you a dollar per question." 
+People did this. I would pay people four dollars for their task — on average people would solve four problems. 
+Other people I would tempt to cheat. 
+I would pass their sheet of paper. 
+When the five minutes were over, I would say, "" Please shred the piece of paper. 
+Put the little pieces in your pocket or in your backpack, and tell me how many questions you got correctly. "" People now solved seven questions on average. 
+Now, it wasn't as if there was a few bad apples — a few people cheated a lot. 
+Instead, what we saw is a lot of people who cheat a little bit. 
+Now, in economic theory, cheating is a very simple cost-benefit analysis. 
+You say, what's the probability of being caught? 
+How much do I stand to gain from cheating? 
+And how much punishment would I get if I get caught? 
+And you weigh these options out — you do the simple cost-benefit analysis, and you decide whether it's worthwhile to commit the crime or not. 
+So, we try to test this. 
+For some people, we varied how much money they could get away with — how much money they could steal. 
+We paid them 10 cents per correct question, 50 cents, a dollar, five dollars, 10 dollars per correct question. 
+You would expect that as the amount of money on the table increases, people would cheat more, but in fact it wasn't the case. 
+We got a lot of people cheating by stealing by a little bit. 
+What about the probability of being caught? 
+Some people shredded half the sheet of paper, so there was some evidence left. 
+Some people shredded the whole sheet of paper. 
+Some people shredded everything, went out of the room, and paid themselves from the bowl of money that had over 100 dollars. 
+You would expect that as the probability of being caught goes down, people would cheat more, but again, this was not the case. 
+Again, a lot of people cheated by just by a little bit, and they were insensitive to these economic incentives. 
+So we said, "" If people are not sensitive to the economic rational theory explanations, to these forces, what could be going on? "" And we thought maybe what is happening is that there are two forces. 
+At one hand, we all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves, so we don't want to cheat. 
+On the other hand, we can cheat a little bit, and still feel good about ourselves. 
+So, maybe what is happening is that there's a level of cheating we can't go over, but we can still benefit from cheating at a low degree, as long as it doesn't change our impressions about ourselves. 
+We call this like a personal fudge factor. 
+Now, how would you test a personal fudge factor? 
+Initially we said, what can we do to shrink the fudge factor? 
+So, we got people to the lab, and we said, "We have two tasks for you today." 
+First, we asked half the people to recall either 10 books they read in high school, or to recall The Ten Commandments, and then we tempted them with cheating. 
+Turns out the people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments — and in our sample nobody could recall all of The Ten Commandments — but those people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments, given the opportunity to cheat, did not cheat at all. 
+It wasn't that the more religious people — the people who remembered more of the Commandments — cheated less, and the less religious people — the people who couldn't remember almost any Commandments — cheated more. 
+The moment people thought about trying to recall The Ten Commandments, they stopped cheating. 
+In fact, even when we gave self-declared atheists the task of swearing on the Bible and we give them a chance to cheat, they don't cheat at all. 
+Now, Ten Commandments is something that is hard to bring into the education system, so we said, "Why don't we get people to sign the honor code?" 
+So, we got people to sign, "I understand that this short survey falls under the MIT Honor Code." 
+Then they shredded it. No cheating whatsoever. 
+And this is particularly interesting, because MIT doesn't have an honor code. 
+(Laughter) So, all this was about decreasing the fudge factor. 
+What about increasing the fudge factor? 
+The first experiment — I walked around MIT and I distributed six-packs of Cokes in the refrigerators — these were common refrigerators for the undergrads. 
+And I came back to measure what we technically call the half-lifetime of Coke — how long does it last in the refrigerators? 
+As you can expect it doesn't last very long; people take it. 
+In contrast, I took a plate with six one-dollar bills, and I left those plates in the same refrigerators. 
+No bill ever disappeared. 
+Now, this is not a good social science experiment, so to do it better I did the same experiment as I described to you before. 
+A third of the people we passed the sheet, they gave it back to us. 
+A third of the people we passed it to, they shredded it, they came to us and said, "Mr. Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X dollars." 
+A third of the people, when they finished shredding the piece of paper, they came to us and said, "Mr Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X tokens." 
+We did not pay them with dollars; we paid them with something else. 
+And then they took the something else, they walked 12 feet to the side, and exchanged it for dollars. 
+Think about the following intuition. 
+How bad would you feel about taking a pencil from work home, compared to how bad would you feel about taking 10 cents from a petty cash box? 
+These things feel very differently. 
+Would being a step removed from cash for a few seconds by being paid by token make a difference? 
+Our subjects doubled their cheating. 
+I'll tell you what I think about this and the stock market in a minute. 
+But this did not solve the big problem I had with Enron yet, because in Enron, there's also a social element. 
+People see each other behaving. 
+In fact, every day when we open the news we see examples of people cheating. 
+What does this cause us? 
+So, we did another experiment. 
+We got a big group of students to be in the experiment, and we prepaid them. 
+So everybody got an envelope with all the money for the experiment, and we told them that at the end, we asked them to pay us back the money they didn't make. OK? 
+The same thing happens. 
+When we give people the opportunity to cheat, they cheat. 
+They cheat just by a little bit, all the same. 
+But in this experiment we also hired an acting student. 
+This acting student stood up after 30 seconds, and said, "I solved everything. What do I do now?" 
+And the experimenter said, "" If you've finished everything, go home. 
+That's it. The task is finished. "" So, now we had a student — an acting student — that was a part of the group. 
+Nobody knew it was an actor. 
+And they clearly cheated in a very, very serious way. 
+What would happen to the other people in the group? 
+Will they cheat more, or will they cheat less? 
+Here is what happens. 
+It turns out it depends on what kind of sweatshirt they're wearing. 
+Here is the thing. 
+We ran this at Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh. 
+And at Pittsburgh there are two big universities, Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh. 
+All of the subjects sitting in the experiment were Carnegie Mellon students. 
+When the actor who was getting up was a Carnegie Mellon student — he was actually a Carnegie Mellon student — but he was a part of their group, cheating went up. 
+But when he actually had a University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt, cheating went down. 
+(Laughter) Now, this is important, because remember, when the moment the student stood up, it made it clear to everybody that they could get away with cheating, because the experimenter said, "" You've finished everything. Go home, "" and they went with the money. 
+So it wasn't so much about the probability of being caught again. 
+It was about the norms for cheating. 
+If somebody from our in-group cheats and we see them cheating, we feel it's more appropriate, as a group, to behave this way. 
+But if it's somebody from another group, these terrible people — I mean, not terrible in this — but somebody we don't want to associate ourselves with, from another university, another group, all of a sudden people's awareness of honesty goes up — a little bit like The Ten Commandments experiment — and people cheat even less. 
+So, what have we learned from this about cheating? 
+We've learned that a lot of people can cheat. 
+They cheat just by a little bit. 
+When we remind people about their morality, they cheat less. 
+When we get bigger distance from cheating, from the object of money, for example, people cheat more. 
+And when we see cheating around us, particularly if it's a part of our in-group, cheating goes up. 
+Now, if we think about this in terms of the stock market, think about what happens. 
+What happens in a situation when you create something where you pay people a lot of money to see reality in a slightly distorted way? 
+Would they not be able to see it this way? 
+Of course they would. 
+What happens when you do other things, like you remove things from money? 
+You call them stock, or stock options, derivatives, mortgage-backed securities. 
+Could it be that with those more distant things, it's not a token for one second, it's something that is many steps removed from money for a much longer time — could it be that people will cheat even more? 
+And what happens to the social environment when people see other people behave around them? 
+I think all of those forces worked in a very bad way in the stock market. 
+More generally, I want to tell you something about behavioral economics. 
+We have many intuitions in our life, and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. 
+The question is, are we going to test those intuitions? 
+We can think about how we're going to test this intuition in our private life, in our business life, and most particularly when it goes to policy, when we think about things like No Child Left Behind, when you create new stock markets, when you create other policies — taxation, health care and so on. 
+And the difficulty of testing our intuition was the big lesson I learned when I went back to the nurses to talk to them. 
+So I went back to talk to them and tell them what I found out about removing bandages. 
+And I learned two interesting things. 
+One was that my favorite nurse, Ettie, told me that I did not take her pain into consideration. 
+She said, "" Of course, you know, it was very painful for you. 
+But think about me as a nurse, taking, removing the bandages of somebody I liked, and had to do it repeatedly over a long period of time. 
+Creating so much torture was not something that was good for me, too. "" And she said maybe part of the reason was it was difficult for her. 
+But it was actually more interesting than that, because she said, "" I did not think that your intuition was right. 
+I felt my intuition was correct. "" So, if you think about all of your intuitions, it's very hard to believe that your intuition is wrong. 
+And she said, "" Given the fact that I thought my intuition was right... "" — she thought her intuition was right — it was very difficult for her to accept doing a difficult experiment to try and check whether she was wrong. 
+But in fact, this is the situation we're all in all the time. 
+We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things — our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. 
+But unless we start testing those intuitions, we're not going to do better. 
+And just think about how better my life would have been if these nurses would have been willing to check their intuition, and how everything would have been better if we just start doing more systematic experimentation of our intuitions. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+I was one of those kids that, every time I got in the car, I basically had to roll down the window. 
+It was usually too hot, too stuffy or just too smelly, and my father would not let us use the air conditioner. 
+He said that it would overheat the engine. 
+And you might remember, some of you, how the cars were back then, and it was a common problem of overheating. 
+But it was also the signal that capped the use, or overuse, of energy-consuming devices. 
+Things have changed now. We have cars that we take across country. 
+We blast the air conditioning the entire way, and we never experience overheating. 
+So there's no more signal for us to tell us to stop. 
+Great, right? Well, we have similar problems in buildings. 
+In the past, before air conditioning, we had thick walls. 
+The thick walls are great for insulation. It keeps the interior very cool during the summertime, and warm during the wintertime, and the small windows were also very good because it limited the amount of temperature transfer between the interior and exterior. 
+Then in about the 1930s, with the advent of plate glass, rolled steel and mass production, we were able to make floor-to-ceiling windows and unobstructed views, and with that came the irreversible reliance on mechanical air conditioning to cool our solar-heated spaces. 
+Over time, the buildings got taller and bigger, our engineering even better, so that the mechanical systems were massive. They require a huge amount of energy. 
+They give off a lot of heat into the atmosphere, and for some of you may understand the heat island effect in cities, where the urban areas are much more warm than the adjacent rural areas, but we also have problems that, when we lose power, we can't open a window here, and so the buildings are uninhabitable and have to be made vacant until that air conditioning system can start up again. 
+Even worse, with our intention of trying to make buildings move towards a net-zero energy state, we can't do it just by making mechanical systems more and more efficient. 
+We need to look for something else, and we've gotten ourselves a little bit into a rut. 
+So what do we do here? How do we pull ourselves and dig us out of this hole that we've dug? 
+If we look at biology, and many of you probably don't know, I was a biology major before I went into architecture, the human skin is the organ that naturally regulates the temperature in the body, and it's a fantastic thing. 
+That's the first line of defense for the body. 
+It has pores, it has sweat glands, it has all these things that work together very dynamically and very efficiently, and so what I propose is that our building skins should be more similar to human skin, and by doing so can be much more dynamic, responsive and differentiated, depending on where it is. 
+And this gets me back to my research. 
+What I proposed first doing is looking at a different material palette to do that. 
+I presently, or currently, work with smart materials, and a smart thermo-bimetal. 
+First of all, I guess we call it smart because it requires no controls and it requires no energy, and that's a very big deal for architecture. 
+What it is, it's a lamination of two different metals together. 
+You can see that here by the different reflection on this side. 
+And because it has two different coefficients of expansion, when heated, one side will expand faster than the other and result in a curling action. 
+So in early prototypes I built these surfaces to try to see how the curl would react to temperature and possibly allow air to ventilate through the system, and in other prototypes did surfaces where the multiplicity of having these strips together can try to make bigger movement happen when also heated, and currently have this installation at the Materials & Applications gallery in Silver Lake, close by, and it's there until August, if you want to see it. 
+It's called "" Bloom, "" and the surface is made completely out of thermo-bimetal, and its intention is to make this canopy that does two things. One, it's a sun-shading device, so that when the sun hits the surface, it constricts the amount of sun passing through, and in other areas, it's a ventilating system, so that hot, trapped air underneath can actually move through and out when necessary. 
+You can see here in this time-lapse video that the sun, as it moves across the surface, as well as the shade, each of the tiles moves individually. 
+Keep in mind, with the digital technology that we have today, this thing was made out of about 14,000 pieces and there's no two pieces alike at all. Every single one is different. 
+And the great thing with that is the fact that we can calibrate each one to be very, very specific to its location, to the angle of the sun, and also how the thing actually curls. 
+So this kind of proof of concept project has a lot of implications to actual future application in architecture, and in this case, here you see a house, that's for a developer in China, and it's actually a four-story glass box. 
+It's still with that glass box because we still want that visual access, but now it's sheathed with this thermo-bimetal layer, it's a screen that goes around it, and that layer can actually open and close as that sun moves around on that surface. 
+In addition to that, it can also screen areas for privacy, so that it can differentiate from some of the public areas in the space during different times of day. 
+And what it basically implies is that, in houses now, we don't need drapes or shutters or blinds anymore because we can sheath the building with these things, as well as control the amount of air conditioning you need inside that building. 
+I'm also looking at trying to develop some building components for the market, and so here you see a pretty typical double-glazed window panel, and in that panel, between those two pieces of glass, that double-glazing, I'm trying to work on making a thermo-bimetal pattern system so that when the sun hits that outside layer and heats that interior cavity, that thermo-bimetal will begin to curl, and what actually will happen then is it'll start to block out the sun in certain areas of the building, and totally, if necessary. 
+And so you can imagine, even in this application, that in a high-rise building where the panel systems go from floor to floor up to 30, 40 floors, the entire surface could be differentiated at different times of day depending on how that sun moves across and hits that surface. 
+And these are some later studies that I'm working on right now that are on the boards, where you can see, in the bottom right-hand corner, with the red, it's actually smaller pieces of thermometal, and it's actually going to, we're trying to make it move like cilia or eyelashes. 
+This last project is also of components. 
+The influence — and if you have noticed, one of my spheres of influence is biology — is from a grasshopper. 
+And grasshoppers have a different kind of breathing system. 
+They breathe through holes in their sides called spiracles, and they bring the air through and it moves through their system to cool them down, and so in this project, I'm trying to look at how we can consider that in architecture too, how we can bring air through holes in the sides of a building. 
+And so you see here some early studies of blocks, where those holes are actually coming through, and this is before the thermo-bimetal is applied, and this is after the bimetal is applied. Sorry, it's a little hard to see, but on the surfaces, you can see these red arrows. 
+On the left, it's when it's cold and the thermo-bimetal is flat so it will constrict air from passing through the blocks, and on the right, the thermo-bimetal curls and allows that air to pass through, so those are two different components that I'm working on, and again, it's a completely different thing, because you can imagine that air could potentially be coming through the walls instead of opening windows. 
+So I want to leave you with one last impression about the project, or this kind of work and using smart materials. 
+When you're tired of opening and closing those blinds day after day, when you're on vacation and there's no one there on the weekends to be turning off and on the controls, or when there's a power outage, and you have no electricity to rely on, these thermo-bimetals will still be working tirelessly, efficiently and endlessly. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+I still remember the day in school when our teacher told us that the world population had become three billion people, and that was in 1960. 
+I'm going to talk now about how world population has changed from that year and into the future, but I will not use digital technology, as I've done during my first five TEDTalks. 
+Instead, I have progressed, and I am, today, launching a brand new analog teaching technology that I picked up from IKEA: this box. 
+This box contains one billion people. 
+And our teacher told us that the industrialized world, 1960, had one billion people. 
+In the developing world, she said, they had two billion people. 
+And they lived away then. 
+There was a big gap between the one billion in the industrialized world and the two billion in the developing world. 
+In the industrialized world, people were healthy, educated, rich, and they had small families. 
+And their aspiration was to buy a car. 
+And in 1960, all Swedes were saving to try to buy a Volvo like this. 
+This was the economic level at which Sweden was. 
+But in contrast to this, in the developing world, far away, the aspiration of the average family there was to have food for the day. 
+They were saving to be able to buy a pair of shoes. 
+There was an enormous gap in the world when I grew up. 
+And this gap between the West and the rest has created a mindset of the world, which we still use linguistically when we talk about "" the West "" and "" the Developing World. "" But the world has changed, and it's overdue to upgrade that mindset and that taxonomy of the world, and to understand it. 
+And that's what I'm going to show you, because since 1960 what has happened in the world up to 2010 is that a staggering four billion people have been added to the world population. 
+Just look how many. 
+The world population has doubled since I went to school. 
+And of course, there's been economic growth in the West. 
+A lot of companies have happened to grow the economy, so the Western population moved over to here. 
+And now their aspiration is not only to have a car. 
+Now they want to have a holiday on a very remote destination and they want to fly. 
+So this is where they are today. 
+And the most successful of the developing countries, they have moved on, you know, and they have become emerging economies, we call them. 
+They are now buying cars. 
+And what happened a month ago was that the Chinese company, Geely, they acquired the Volvo company, and then finally the Swedes understood that something big had happened in the world. 
+(Laughter) So there they are. 
+And the tragedy is that the two billion over here that is struggling for food and shoes, they are still almost as poor as they were 50 years ago. 
+The new thing is that we have the biggest pile of billions, the three billions here, which are also becoming emerging economies, because they are quite healthy, relatively well-educated, and they already also have two to three children per woman, as those [richer also] have. 
+And their aspiration now is, of course, to buy a bicycle, and then later on they would like to have a motorbike also. 
+But this is the world we have today, no longer any gap. 
+But the distance from the poorest here, the very poorest, to the very richest over here is wider than ever. 
+But there is a continuous world from walking, biking, driving, flying — there are people on all levels, and most people tend to be somewhere in the middle. 
+This is the new world we have today in 2010. 
+And what will happen in the future? 
+Well, I'm going to project into 2050. 
+I was in Shanghai recently, and I listened to what's happening in China, and it's pretty sure that they will catch up, just as Japan did. 
+All the projections [say that] this one [billion] will [only] grow with one to two or three percent. 
+[But this second] grows with seven, eight percent, and then they will end up here. 
+They will start flying. 
+And these lower or middle income countries, the emerging income countries, they will also forge forwards economically. 
+And if, but only if, we invest in the right green technology — so that we can avoid severe climate change, and energy can still be relatively cheap — then they will move all the way up here. 
+And they will start to buy electric cars. 
+This is what we will find there. 
+So what about the poorest two billion? 
+What about the poorest two billion here? 
+Will they move on? 
+Well, here population [growth] comes in because there [among emerging economies] we already have two to three children per woman, family planning is widely used, and population growth is coming to an end. 
+Here [among the poorest], population is growing. 
+So these [poorest] two billion will, in the next decades, increase to three billion, and they will thereafter increase to four billion. 
+There is nothing — but a nuclear war of a kind we've never seen — that can stop this [growth] from happening. 
+Because we already have this [growth] in process. 
+But if, and only if, [the poorest] get out of poverty, they get education, they get improved child survival, they can buy a bicycle and a cell phone and come [to live] here, then population growth will stop in 2050. 
+We cannot have people on this level looking for food and shoes because then we get continued population growth. 
+And let me show you why by converting back to the old-time digital technology. 
+Here I have on the screen my country bubbles. 
+Every bubble is a country. The size is population. 
+The colors show the continent. 
+The yellow on there is the Americas; dark blue is Africa; brown is Europe; green is the Middle East and this light blue is South Asia. 
+That's India and this is China. Size is population. 
+Here I have children per woman: two children, four children, six children, eight children — big families, small families. 
+The year is 1960. 
+And down here, child survival, the percentage of children surviving childhood up to starting school: 60 percent, 70 percent, 80 percent, 90, and almost 100 percent, as we have today in the wealthiest and healthiest countries. 
+But look, this is the world my teacher talked about in 1960: one billion Western world here — high child-survival, small families — and all the rest, the rainbow of developing countries, with very large families and poor child survival. 
+What has happened? I start the world. Here we go. 
+Can you see, as the years pass by, child survival is increasing? 
+They get soap, hygiene, education, vaccination, penicillin and then family planning. Family size is decreasing. 
+[When] they get up to 90-percent child survival, then families decrease, and most of the Arab countries in the Middle East is falling down there [to small families]. 
+Look, Bangladesh catching up with India. 
+The whole emerging world joins the Western world with good child survival and small family size, but we still have the poorest billion. 
+Can you see the poorest billion, those [two] boxes I had over here? 
+They are still up here. 
+And they still have a child survival of only 70 to 80 percent, meaning that if you have six children born, there will be at least four who survive to the next generation. 
+And the population will double in one generation. 
+So the only way of really getting world population [growth] to stop is to continue to improve child survival to 90 percent. 
+That's why investments by Gates Foundation, UNICEF and aid organizations, together with national government in the poorest countries, are so good; because they are actually helping us to reach a sustainable population size of the world. 
+We can stop at nine billion if we do the right things. 
+Child survival is the new green. 
+It's only by child survival that we will stop population growth. 
+And will it happen? 
+Well, I'm not an optimist, neither am I a pessimist. 
+I'm a very serious "" possibilist. "" It's a new category where we take emotion apart, and we just work analytically with the world. 
+It can be done. 
+We can have a much more just world. 
+With green technology and with investments to alleviate poverty, and global governance, the world can become like this. 
+And look at the position of the old West. 
+Remember when this blue box was all alone, leading the world, living its own life. 
+This will not happen [again]. 
+The role of the old West in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world — nothing more, nothing less. 
+But it's a very important role. 
+Do it well and get used to it. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is the Large Hadron Collider. 
+It's 27 kilometers in circumference. 
+It's the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. 
+Over 10,000 physicists and engineers from 85 countries around the world have come together over several decades to build this machine. 
+What we do is we accelerate protons — so, hydrogen nuclei — around 99.999999 percent the speed of light. 
+Right? At that speed, they go around that 27 kilometers 11,000 times a second. 
+And we collide them with another beam of protons going in the opposite direction. 
+We collide them inside giant detectors. 
+They're essentially digital cameras. 
+And this is the one that I work on, ATLAS. 
+You get some sense of the size — you can just see these EU standard-size people underneath. 
+(Laughter) You get some sense of the size: 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter, 7,000 tons. 
+And we re-create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began up to 600 million times a second inside that detector — immense numbers. 
+And if you see those metal bits there — those are huge magnets that bend electrically charged particles, so it can measure how fast they're traveling. 
+This is a picture about a year ago. 
+Those magnets are in there. 
+And, again, a EU standard-size, real person, so you get some sense of the scale. 
+And it's in there that those mini-Big Bangs will be created, sometime in the summer this year. 
+And actually, this morning, I got an email saying that we've just finished, today, building the last piece of ATLAS. 
+So as of today, it's finished. I'd like to say that I planned that for TED, but I didn't. So it's been completed as of today. 
+(Applause) Yeah, it's a wonderful achievement. 
+So, you might be asking, "" Why? 
+Why create the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began? "" Well, particle physicists are nothing if not ambitious. 
+And the aim of particle physics is to understand what everything's made of, and how everything sticks together. 
+And by everything I mean, of course, me and you, the Earth, the Sun, the 100 billion suns in our galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. 
+Absolutely everything. 
+Now you might say, "" Well, OK, but why not just look at it? 
+You know? If you want to know what I'm made of, let's look at me. "" Well, we found that as you look back in time, the universe gets hotter and hotter, denser and denser, and simpler and simpler. 
+Now, there's no real reason I'm aware of for that, but that seems to be the case. 
+So, way back in the early times of the universe, we believe it was very simple and understandable. 
+All this complexity, all the way to these wonderful things — human brains — are a property of an old and cold and complicated universe. 
+Back at the start, in the first billionth of a second, we believe, or we've observed, it was very simple. 
+It's almost like... 
+imagine a snowflake in your hand, and you look at it, and it's an incredibly complicated, beautiful object. But as you heat it up, it'll melt into a pool of water, and you would be able to see that, actually, it was just made of H20, water. 
+So it's in that same sense that we look back in time to understand what the universe is made of. 
+And, as of today, it's made of these things. 
+Just 12 particles of matter, stuck together by four forces of nature. 
+The quarks, these pink things, are the things that make up protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei in your body. 
+The electron — the thing that goes around the atomic nucleus — held around in orbit, by the way, by the electromagnetic force that's carried by this thing, the photon. 
+The quarks are stuck together by other things called gluons. 
+And these guys, here, they're the weak nuclear force, probably the least familiar. 
+But, without it, the sun wouldn't shine. 
+And when the sun shines, you get copious quantities of these things, called neutrinos, pouring out. 
+Actually, if you just look at your thumbnail — about a square centimeter — there are something like 60 billion neutrinos per second from the sun, passing through every square centimeter of your body. 
+But you don't feel them, because the weak force is correctly named — very short range and very weak, so they just fly through you. 
+And these particles have been discovered over the last century, pretty much. 
+The first one, the electron, was discovered in 1897, and the last one, this thing called the tau neutrino, in the year 2000. Actually just — I was going to say, just up the road in Chicago. I know it's a big country, America, isn't it? 
+Just up the road. 
+Relative to the universe, it's just up the road. 
+(Laughter) So, this thing was discovered in the year 2000, so it's a relatively recent picture. 
+One of the wonderful things, actually, I find, is that we've discovered any of them, when you realize how tiny they are. 
+You know, they're a step in size from the entire observable universe. 
+So, 100 billion galaxies, 13.7 billion light years away — a step in size from that to Monterey, actually, is about the same as from Monterey to these things. 
+Absolutely, exquisitely minute, and yet we've discovered pretty much the full set. 
+So, one of my most illustrious forebears at Manchester University, Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the atomic nucleus, once said, "" All science is either physics or stamp collecting. "" Now, I don't think he meant to insult the rest of science, although he was from New Zealand, so it's possible. 
+(Laughter) But what he meant was that what we've done, really, is stamp collect there. 
+OK, we've discovered the particles, but unless you understand the underlying reason for that pattern — you know, why it's built the way it is — really you've done stamp collecting. You haven't done science. 
+Fortunately, we have probably one of the greatest scientific achievements of the twentieth century that underpins that pattern. 
+It's the Newton's laws, if you want, of particle physics. 
+It's called the standard model — beautifully simple mathematical equation. 
+You could stick it on the front of a T-shirt, which is always the sign of elegance. 
+This is it. 
+(Laughter) I've been a little disingenuous, because I've expanded it out in all its gory detail. 
+This equation, though, allows you to calculate everything — other than gravity — that happens in the universe. 
+So, you want to know why the sky is blue, why atomic nuclei stick together — in principle, you've got a big enough computer — why DNA is the shape it is. 
+In principle, you should be able to calculate it from that equation. 
+But there's a problem. 
+Can anyone see what it is? 
+A bottle of champagne for anyone that tells me. 
+I'll make it easier, actually, by blowing one of the lines up. 
+Basically, each of these terms refers to some of the particles. 
+So those Ws there refer to the Ws, and how they stick together. 
+These carriers of the weak force, the Zs, the same. 
+But there's an extra symbol in this equation: H. 
+Right, H. 
+H stands for Higgs particle. 
+Higgs particles have not been discovered. 
+But they're necessary: they're necessary to make that mathematics work. 
+So all the exquisitely detailed calculations we can do with that wonderful equation wouldn't be possible without an extra bit. 
+So it's a prediction: a prediction of a new particle. 
+What does it do? 
+Well, we had a long time to come up with good analogies. 
+And back in the 1980s, when we wanted the money for the LHC from the U.K. government, Margaret Thatcher, at the time, said, "" If you guys can explain, in language a politician can understand, what the hell it is that you're doing, you can have the money. 
+I want to know what this Higgs particle does. "" And we came up with this analogy, and it seemed to work. 
+Well, what the Higgs does is, it gives mass to the fundamental particles. 
+And the picture is that the whole universe — and that doesn't mean just space, it means me as well, and inside you — the whole universe is full of something called a Higgs field. 
+Higgs particles, if you will. 
+The analogy is that these people in a room are the Higgs particles. 
+Now when a particle moves through the universe, it can interact with these Higgs particles. 
+But imagine someone who's not very popular moves through the room. 
+Then everyone ignores them. They can just pass through the room very quickly, essentially at the speed of light. They're massless. 
+And imagine someone incredibly important and popular and intelligent walks into the room. 
+They're surrounded by people, and their passage through the room is impeded. 
+It's almost like they get heavy. They get massive. 
+And that's exactly the way the Higgs mechanism works. 
+The picture is that the electrons and the quarks in your body and in the universe that we see around us are heavy, in a sense, and massive, because they're surrounded by Higgs particles. 
+They're interacting with the Higgs field. 
+If that picture's true, then we have to discover those Higgs particles at the LHC. 
+If it's not true — because it's quite a convoluted mechanism, although it's the simplest we've been able to think of — then whatever does the job of the Higgs particles we know have to turn up at the LHC. 
+So, that's one of the prime reasons we built this giant machine. 
+I'm glad you recognize Margaret Thatcher. 
+Actually, I thought about making it more culturally relevant, but — (Laughter) anyway. 
+So that's one thing. 
+That's essentially a guarantee of what the LHC will find. 
+There are many other things. You've heard many of the big problems in particle physics. 
+One of them you heard about: dark matter, dark energy. 
+There's another issue, which is that the forces in nature — it's quite beautiful, actually — seem, as you go back in time, they seem to change in strength. 
+Well, they do change in strength. 
+So, the electromagnetic force, the force that holds us together, gets stronger as you go to higher temperatures. 
+The strong force, the strong nuclear force, which sticks nuclei together, gets weaker. And what you see is the standard model — you can calculate how these change — is the forces, the three forces, other than gravity, almost seem to come together at one point. 
+It's almost as if there was one beautiful kind of super-force, back at the beginning of time. 
+But they just miss. 
+Now there's a theory called super-symmetry, which doubles the number of particles in the standard model, which, at first sight, doesn't sound like a simplification. 
+But actually, with this theory, we find that the forces of nature do seem to unify together, back at the Big Bang — absolutely beautiful prophecy. The model wasn't built to do that, but it seems to do it. 
+Also, those super-symmetric particles are very strong candidates for the dark matter. 
+So a very compelling theory that's really mainstream physics. 
+And if I was to put money on it, I would put money on — in a very unscientific way — that that these things would also crop up at the LHC. 
+Many other things that the LHC could discover. 
+But in the last few minutes, I just want to give you a different perspective of what I think — what particle physics really means to me — particle physics and cosmology. 
+And that's that I think it's given us a wonderful narrative — almost a creation story, if you'd like — about the universe, from modern science over the last few decades. 
+And I'd say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis' talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of the high Andes and the frozen north. 
+This is a creation story, I think, equally as wonderful. 
+The story goes like this: we know that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago, in an immensely hot, dense state, much smaller than a single atom. 
+It began to expand about a million, billion, billion, billion billionth of a second — I think I got that right — after the Big Bang. 
+Gravity separated away from the other forces. 
+The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation. 
+In about the first billionth of a second or so, the Higgs field kicked in, and the quarks and the gluons and the electrons that make us up got mass. 
+The universe continued to expand and cool. 
+After about a few minutes, there was hydrogen and helium in the universe. That's all. 
+The universe was about 75 percent hydrogen, 25 percent helium. It still is today. 
+It continued to expand about 300 million years. 
+Then light began to travel through the universe. 
+It was big enough to be transparent to light, and that's what we see in the cosmic microwave background that George Smoot described as looking at the face of God. 
+After about 400 million years, the first stars formed, and that hydrogen, that helium, then began to cook into the heavier elements. 
+So the elements of life — carbon, and oxygen and iron, all the elements that we need to make us up — were cooked in those first generations of stars, which then ran out of fuel, exploded, threw those elements back into the universe. 
+They then re-collapsed into another generation of stars and planets. 
+And on some of those planets, the oxygen, which had been created in that first generation of stars, could fuse with hydrogen to form water, liquid water on the surface. 
+On at least one, and maybe only one of those planets, primitive life evolved, which evolved over millions of years into things that walked upright and left footprints about three and a half million years ago in the mud flats of Tanzania, and eventually left a footprint on another world. 
+And built this civilization, this wonderful picture, that turned the darkness into light, and you can see the civilization from space. 
+As one of my great heroes, Carl Sagan, said, these are the things — and actually, not only these, but I was looking around — these are the things, like Saturn V rockets, and Sputnik, and DNA, and literature and science — these are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years. 
+Absolutely remarkable. 
+And, the laws of physics. Right? 
+So, the right laws of physics — they're beautifully balanced. 
+If the weak force had been a little bit different, then carbon and oxygen wouldn't be stable inside the hearts of stars, and there would be none of that in the universe. 
+And I think that's a wonderful and significant story. 
+50 years ago, I couldn't have told that story, because we didn't know it. 
+It makes me really feel that that civilization — which, as I say, if you believe the scientific creation story, has emerged purely as a result of the laws of physics, and a few hydrogen atoms — then I think, to me anyway, it makes me feel incredibly valuable. 
+So that's the LHC. 
+The LHC is certainly, when it turns on in summer, going to write the next chapter of that book. 
+And I'm certainly looking forward with immense excitement to it being turned on. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Suppose that two American friends are traveling together in Italy. 
+They go to see Michelangelo's "" David, "" and when they finally come face to face with the statue, they both freeze dead in their tracks. 
+The first guy — we'll call him Adam — is transfixed by the beauty of the perfect human form. 
+The second guy — we'll call him Bill — is transfixed by embarrassment, at staring at the thing there in the center. 
+So here's my question for you: which one of these two guys was more likely to have voted for George Bush, which for Al Gore? 
+I don't need a show of hands because we all have the same political stereotypes. 
+We all know that it's Bill. 
+And in this case, the stereotype corresponds to reality. 
+It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience. 
+People who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. 
+People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable. 
+If you know about this trait, you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior. 
+You can understand why artists are so different from accountants. 
+You can actually predict what kinds of books they like to read, what kinds of places they like to travel to, and what kinds of food they like to eat. 
+Once you understand this trait, you can understand why anybody would eat at Applebee's, but not anybody that you know. 
+(Laughter) This trait also tells us a lot about politics. 
+The main researcher of this trait, Robert McCrae says that, "" Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views "" — they like a society which is open and changing — "whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right-wing views." 
+This trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join. 
+So here's the description of a group I found on the Web. 
+What kinds of people would join a global community welcoming people from every discipline and culture, who seek a deeper understanding of the world, and who hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all? 
+This is from some guy named Ted. 
+(Laughter) Well, let's see now, if openness predicts who becomes liberal, and openness predicts who becomes a TEDster, then might we predict that most TEDsters are liberal? 
+Let's find out. 
+I'm going to ask you to raise your hand, whether you are liberal, left of center — on social issues, we're talking about, primarily — or conservative, and I'll give a third option, because I know there are a number of libertarians in the audience. 
+So, right now, please raise your hand — down in the simulcast rooms, too, let's let everybody see who's here — please raise your hand if you would say that you are liberal or left of center. 
+Please raise your hand high right now. OK. 
+Please raise your hand if you'd say you're libertarian. 
+OK, about a — two dozen. 
+And please raise your hand if you'd say you are right of center or conservative. 
+One, two, three, four, five — about eight or 10. 
+OK. This is a bit of a problem. 
+Because if our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. 
+Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team, and once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open-minded thinking. 
+When the liberal team loses, as it did in 2004, and as it almost did in 2000, we comfort ourselves. 
+(Laughter) We try to explain why half of America voted for the other team. 
+We think they must be blinded by religion, or by simple stupidity. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) So, if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way, then my message to you is that you're trapped in a moral matrix, in a particular moral matrix. 
+And by the matrix, I mean literally the matrix, like the movie "" The Matrix. "" But I'm here today to give you a choice. 
+You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions, or you can take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix. 
+Now, because I know — (Applause) — OK, I assume that answers my question. 
+I was going to ask you which one you picked, but no need. 
+You're all high in openness to experience, and besides, it looks like it might even taste good, and you're all epicures. 
+So anyway, let's go with the red pill. 
+Let's study some moral psychology and see where it takes us. 
+Let's start at the beginning. 
+What is morality and where does it come from? 
+The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth. 
+Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds, and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others. 
+The best definition of innateness I've ever seen — this just clarifies so many things for me — is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. 
+He says, "" The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. 
+Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. 
+Built-in doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience. "" OK, so what's on the first draft of the moral mind? 
+To find out, my colleague, Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches. 
+What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines? 
+That you find across cultures and even across species? 
+We found five — five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality. 
+The first one is harm / care. 
+We're all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. 
+It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. 
+This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED. 
+The second foundation is fairness / reciprocity. 
+There's actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. 
+This Norman Rockwell painting is called "" The Golden Rule, "" and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong, of course, as the foundation of so many religions. 
+That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED. 
+The third foundation is in-group / loyalty. 
+You do find groups in the animal kingdom — you do find cooperative groups — but these groups are always either very small or they're all siblings. 
+It's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. 
+This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. 
+And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun. 
+(Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. 
+We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives. 
+The fourth foundation is authority / respect. 
+Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species. 
+But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. 
+It's based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times. 
+The fifth foundation is purity / sanctity. 
+This painting is called "" The Allegory Of Chastity, "" but purity's not just about suppressing female sexuality. 
+It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. 
+And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. 
+Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body. 
+I believe these are the five best candidates for what's written on the first draft of the moral mind. 
+I think this is what we come with, at least a preparedness to learn all of these things. 
+But as my son, Max, grows up in a liberal college town, how is this first draft going to get revised? 
+And how will it end up being different from a kid born 60 miles south of us in Lynchburg, Virginia? 
+To think about culture variation, let's try a different metaphor. 
+If there really are five systems at work in the mind — five sources of intuitions and emotions — then we can think of the moral mind as being like one of those audio equalizers that has five channels, where you can set it to a different setting on every channel. 
+And my colleagues, Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham, and I, made a questionnaire, which we put up on the Web at www.YourMorals.org. 
+And so far, 30,000 people have taken this questionnaire, and you can too. 
+Here are the results. 
+Here are the results from about 23,000 American citizens. 
+On the left, I've plotted the scores for liberals; on the right, those for conservatives; in the middle, the moderates. 
+The blue line shows you people's responses on the average of all the harm questions. 
+So, as you see, people care about harm and care issues. 
+They give high endorsement of these sorts of statements all across the board, but as you also see, liberals care about it a little more than conservatives — the line slopes down. 
+Same story for fairness. 
+But look at the other three lines. 
+For liberals, the scores are very low. 
+Liberals are basically saying, "" No, this is not morality. 
+In-group, authority, purity — this stuff has nothing to do with morality. I reject it. "" But as people get more conservative, the values rise. 
+We can say that liberals have a kind of a two-channel, or two-foundation morality. 
+Conservatives have more of a five-foundation, or five-channel morality. 
+We find this in every country we look at. 
+Here's the data for 1,100 Canadians. 
+I'll just flip through a few other slides. 
+The U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia. 
+Notice also that on all of these graphs, the slope is steeper on in-group, authority, purity. 
+Which shows that within any country, the disagreement isn't over harm and fairness. 
+Everybody — I mean, we debate over what's fair — but everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter. 
+Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group, authority, purity. 
+This effect is so robust that we find it no matter how we ask the question. 
+In one recent study, we asked people to suppose you're about to get a dog. 
+You picked a particular breed, you learned some new information about the breed. 
+Suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded, and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal? 
+Well, if you are a liberal, you say, "" Hey, that's great! "" Because liberals like to say, "" Fetch, please. "" (Laughter) But if you're conservative, that's not so attractive. 
+If you're conservative, and you learn that a dog's extremely loyal to its home and family, and doesn't warm up quickly to strangers, for conservatives, well, loyalty is good — dogs ought to be loyal. 
+But to a liberal, it sounds like this dog is running for the Republican nomination. 
+(Laughter) So, you might say, OK, there are these differences between liberals and conservatives, but what makes those three other foundations moral? 
+Aren't those just the foundations of xenophobia and authoritarianism and Puritanism? 
+What makes them moral? 
+The answer, I think, is contained in this incredible triptych from Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights." 
+In the first panel, we see the moment of creation. 
+All is ordered, all is beautiful, all the people and animals are doing what they're supposed to be doing, where they're supposed to be. 
+But then, given the way of the world, things change. 
+We get every person doing whatever he wants, with every aperture of every other person and every other animal. 
+Some of you might recognize this as the '60s. 
+(Laughter) But the '60s inevitably gives way to the' 70s, where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more. 
+Of course, Bosch called this hell. 
+So this triptych, these three panels portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay. 
+The truth of social entropy. 
+But lest you think this is just some part of the Christian imagination where Christians have this weird problem with pleasure, here's the same story, the same progression, told in a paper that was published in Nature a few years ago, in which Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter had people play a commons dilemma. 
+A game in which you give people money, and then, on each round of the game, they can put money into a common pot, and then the experimenter doubles what's in there, and then it's all divided among the players. 
+So it's a really nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues, where we're asking people to make a sacrifice and they themselves don't really benefit from their own sacrifice. 
+But you really want everybody else to sacrifice, but everybody has a temptation to a free ride. 
+And what happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative — and this is all played anonymously. 
+On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can. 
+But they quickly see, "" You know what, other people aren't doing so much though. 
+I don't want to be a sucker. I'm not going to cooperate. "" And so cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good, down to close to zero. 
+But then — and here's the trick — Fehr and Gachter said, on the seventh round, they told people, "" You know what? New rule. 
+If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren't contributing, you can do that. "" And as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on, cooperation shoots up. 
+It shoots up and it keeps going up. 
+There's a lot of research showing that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps. 
+It's not enough to just appeal to people's good motives. 
+It really helps to have some sort of punishment. 
+Even if it's just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they're in large groups, to cooperate. 
+There's even some recent research suggesting that religion — priming God, making people think about God — often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior. 
+Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere, in part for the purpose of trusting each other, and then being more effective at competing with other groups. 
+I think that's probably right, although this is a controversial issue. 
+But I'm particularly interested in religion, and the origin of religion, and in what it does to us and for us. 
+Because I think that the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon. 
+The Grand Canyon is really simple. 
+It's just a lot of rock, and then a lot of water and wind, and a lot of time, and you get the Grand Canyon. 
+It's not that complicated. 
+This is what's really complicated, that there were people living in places like the Grand Canyon, cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa, or on the frozen shores of Alaska, and then some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon, and Rome, and Tenochtitlan. 
+How did this happen? 
+This is an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon. 
+The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox. 
+It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups. 
+Yes, you do need to be concerned about harm, you do need a psychology of justice. 
+But it really helps to organize a group if you can have sub-groups, and if those sub-groups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality, to pursue higher, nobler ends. 
+And now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. 
+Because liberals reject three of these foundations. 
+They say "" No, let's celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership. "" They say, "" Let's question authority. "" And they say, "" Keep your laws off my body. "" Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. 
+Traditional authority, traditional morality can be quite repressive, and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people that don't fit in. 
+So liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. 
+They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. 
+This guy's shirt says, "" Stop bitching, start a revolution. "" If you're high in openness to experience, revolution is good, it's change, it's fun. 
+Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. 
+They want order, even at some cost to those at the bottom. 
+The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. 
+It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose. 
+So as Edmund Burke said, "" The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. "" This was after the chaos of the French Revolution. 
+So once you see this — once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability — then I think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix. 
+This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained. 
+Think about yin and yang. 
+Yin and yang aren't enemies. Yin and yang don't hate each other. 
+Yin and yang are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world. 
+You find the same thing in Hinduism. 
+There are many high gods in Hinduism. 
+Two of them are Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. 
+This image actually is both of those gods sharing the same body. 
+You have the markings of Vishnu on the left, so we could think of Vishnu as the conservative god. 
+You have the markings of Shiva on the right, Shiva's the liberal god. And they work together. 
+You find the same thing in Buddhism. 
+These two stanzas contain, I think, the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology. 
+From the Zen master Seng-ts'an: "" If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. 
+The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease. "" Now unfortunately, it's a disease that has been caught by many of the world's leaders. 
+But before you feel superior to George Bush, before you throw a stone, ask yourself, do you accept this? 
+Do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil? 
+Can you be not for or against anything? 
+So, what's the point? What should you do? 
+Well, if you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions, and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, I think you come to these conclusions: that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth. 
+So what should you do? Am I telling you to not strive? 
+Am I telling you to embrace Seng-ts'an and stop, stop with this struggle of for and against? 
+No, absolutely not. I'm not saying that. 
+This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much, using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their money, to make the world a better place, to fight — to fight wrongs, to solve problems. 
+But as we learned from Samantha Power, in her story about Sergio Vieira de Mello, you can't just go charging in, saying, "" You're wrong, and I'm right. "" Because, as we just heard, everybody thinks they are right. 
+A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. 
+And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are — understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we're right — and then step out, even if it's just for a moment, step out — check in with Seng-ts'an. 
+Step out of the moral matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out, in which everybody does think they're right, and everybody, at least, has some reasons — even if you disagree with them — everybody has some reasons for what they're doing. 
+Step out. 
+And if you do that, that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition. 
+Think about the Dalai Lama. 
+Think about the enormous moral authority of the Dalai Lama — and it comes from his moral humility. 
+So I think the point — the point of my talk, and I think the point of TED — is that this is a group that is passionately engaged in the pursuit of changing the world for the better. 
+People here are passionately engaged in trying to make the world a better place. 
+But there is also a passionate commitment to the truth. 
+And so I think that the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try to turn it into a better future for us all. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Two years ago, after having served four years in the United States Marine Corps and deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself in Port-au-Prince, leading a team of veterans and medical professionals in some of the hardest-hit areas of that city, three days after the earthquake. 
+We were going to the places that nobody else wanted to go, the places nobody else could go, and after three weeks, we realized something. Military veterans are very, very good at disaster response. 
+And coming home, my cofounder and I, we looked at it, and we said, there are two problems. 
+The first problem is there's inadequate disaster response. 
+It's slow. It's antiquated. It's not using the best technology, and it's not using the best people. 
+The second problem that we became aware of was a very inadequate veteran reintegration, and this is a topic that is front page news right now as veterans are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and they're struggling to reintegrate into civilian life. 
+And we sat here and we looked at these two problems, and finally we came to a realization. These aren't problems. 
+These are actually solutions. And what do I mean by that? 
+Well, we can use disaster response as an opportunity for service for the veterans coming home. 
+Recent surveys show that 92 percent of veterans want to continue their service when they take off their uniform. 
+And we can use veterans to improve disaster response. 
+Now on the surface, this makes a lot of sense, and in 2010, we responded to the tsunami in Chile, the floods in Pakistan, we sent training teams to the Thai-Burma border. 
+But it was earlier this year, when one of our original members caused us to shift focus in the organization. 
+This is Clay Hunt. Clay was a Marine with me. 
+We served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. 
+Clay was with us in Port-au-Prince. He was also with us in Chile. 
+Earlier this year, in March, Clay took his own life. 
+This was a tragedy, but it really forced us to refocus what it is that we were doing. 
+You know, Clay didn't kill himself because of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clay killed himself because of what he lost when he came home. 
+He lost purpose. He lost his community. 
+And perhaps most tragically, he lost his self-worth. 
+And so, as we evaluated, and as the dust settled from this tragedy, we realized that, of those two problems — in the initial iteration of our organization, we were a disaster response organization that was using veteran service. We had a lot of success, and we really felt like we were changing the disaster response paradigm. 
+But after Clay, we shifted that focus, and suddenly, now moving forward, we see ourselves as a veteran service organization that's using disaster response. 
+Because we think that we can give that purpose and that community and that self-worth back to the veteran. 
+And tornadoes in Tuscaloosa and Joplin, and then later Hurricane Irene, gave us an opportunity to look at that. 
+Now I want you to imagine for a second an 18-year-old boy who graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri. 
+He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle. 
+They send him to Iraq. 
+Every day he leaves the wire with a mission. 
+That mission is to defend the freedom of the family that he left at home. 
+It's to keep the men around him alive. 
+It's to pacify the village that he works in. 
+He's got a purpose. But he comes home [to] Kansas City, Missouri, maybe he goes to college, maybe he's got a job, but he doesn't have that same sense of purpose. 
+You give him a chainsaw. You send him to Joplin, Missouri after a tornado, he regains that. 
+Going back, that same 18-year-old boy graduates from high school in Kansas City, Missouri, joins the Army, the Army gives him a rifle, they send him to Iraq. 
+Every day he looks into the same sets of eyes around him. 
+He leaves the wire. He knows that those people have his back. 
+He's slept in the same sand. They've lived together. 
+They've eaten together. They've bled together. 
+He goes home to Kansas City, Missouri. 
+He gets out of the military. He takes his uniform off. 
+He doesn't have that community anymore. 
+But you drop 25 of those veterans in Joplin, Missouri, they get that sense of community back. 
+Again, you have an 18-year-old boy who graduates high school in Kansas City. 
+He joins the Army. The Army gives him a rifle. 
+They send him to Iraq. 
+They pin a medal on his chest. He goes home to a ticker tape parade. 
+He takes the uniform off. He's no longer Sergeant Jones in his community. He's now Dave from Kansas City. 
+He doesn't have that same self-worth. 
+But you send him to Joplin after a tornado, and somebody once again is walking up to him and shaking their hand and thanking them for their service, now they have self-worth again. 
+I think it's very important, because right now somebody needs to step up, and this generation of veterans has the opportunity to do that if they are given the chance. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+We're 25, 26 years after the advent of the Macintosh, which was an astoundingly seminal event in the history of human-machine interface and in computation in general. 
+It fundamentally changed the way that people thought about computation, thought about computers, how they used them and who and how many people were able to use them. 
+It was such a radical change, in fact, that the early Macintosh development team in '82,' 83, '84 had to write an entirely new operating system from the ground up. 
+Now, this is an interesting little message, and it's a lesson that has since, I think, been forgotten or lost or something, and that is, namely, that the OS is the interface. 
+The interface is the OS. 
+It's like the land and the king (i.e. Arthur) they're inseparable, they are one. 
+And to write a new operating system was not a capricious matter. 
+It wasn't just a matter of tuning up some graphics routines. 
+There were no graphics routines. There were no mouse drivers. 
+So it was a necessity. 
+But in the quarter-century since then, we've seen all of the fundamental supporting technologies go berserk. 
+So memory capacity and disk capacity have been multiplied by something between 10,000 and a million. 
+Same thing for processor speeds. 
+Networks, we didn't have networks at all at the time of the Macintosh's introduction, and that has become the single most salient aspect of how we live with computers. 
+And, of course, graphics: Today 84 dollars and 97 cents at Best Buy buys you more graphics power than you could have gotten for a million bucks from SGI only a decade ago. 
+So we've got that incredible ramp-up. 
+Then, on the side, we've got the Web and, increasingly, the cloud, which is fantastic, but also — in the regard in which an interface is fundamental — kind of a distraction. 
+So we've forgotten to invent new interfaces. 
+Certainly we've seen in recent years a lot of change in that regard, and people are starting to wake up about that. 
+So what happens next? Where do we go from there? 
+The problem, as we see it, has to do with a single, simple word: "" space, "" or a single, simple phrase: "real world geometry." 
+Computers and the programming languages that we talk to them in, that we teach them in, are hideously insensate when it comes to space. 
+They don't understand real world space. 
+It's a funny thing because the rest of us occupy it quite frequently and quite well. 
+They also don't understand time, but that's a matter for a separate talk. 
+So what happens if you start to explain space to them? 
+One thing you might get is something like the Luminous Room. 
+The Luminous Room is a system in which it's considered that input and output spaces are co-located. 
+That's a strangely simple, and yet unexplored idea, right? 
+When you use a mouse, your hand is down here on the mouse pad. 
+It's not even on the same plane as what you're talking about: The pixels are up on the display. 
+So here was a room in which all the walls, floors, ceilings, pets, potted plants, whatever was in there, were capable, not only of display but of sensing as well. 
+And that means input and output are in the same space enabling stuff like this. 
+That's a digital storage in a physical container. 
+The contract is the same as with real word objects in real world containers. 
+Has to come back out, whatever you put in. 
+This little design experiment that was a small office here knew a few other tricks as well. 
+If you presented it with a chess board, it tried to figure out what you might mean by that. 
+And if there was nothing for them to do, the chess pieces eventually got bored and hopped away. 
+The academics who were overseeing this work thought that that was too frivolous, so we built deadly serious applications like this optics prototyping workbench in which a toothpaste cap on a cardboard box becomes a laser. 
+The beam splitters and lenses are represented by physical objects, and the system projects down the laser beam path. 
+So you've got an interface that has no interface. 
+You operate the world as you operate the real world, which is to say, with your hands. 
+Similarly, a digital wind tunnel with digital wind flowing from right to left — not that remarkable in a sense; we didn't invent the mathematics. 
+But if you displayed that on a CRT or flat panel display, it would be meaningless to hold up an arbitrary object, a real world object in that. 
+Here, the real world merges with the simulation. 
+And finally, to pull out all the stops, this is a system called Urp, for urban planners, in which we give architects and urban planners back the models that we confiscated when we insisted that they use CAD systems. 
+And we make the machine meet them half way. 
+It projects down digital shadows, as you see here. 
+And if you introduce tools like this inverse clock, then you can control the sun's position in the sky. 
+That's 8 a.m. shadows. 
+They get a little shorter at 9 a.m. 
+There you are, swinging the sun around. 
+Short shadows at noon and so forth. 
+And we built up a series of tools like this. 
+There are inter-shadowing studies that children can operate, even though they don't know anything about urban planning: To move a building, you simply reach out your hand and you move the building. 
+A material wand makes the building into a sort of Frank Gehry thing that reflects light in all directions. 
+Are you blinding passers by and motorists on the freeways? 
+A zoning tool connects distant structures, a building and a roadway. 
+Are you going to get sued by the zoning commission? And so forth. 
+Now, if these ideas seem familiar or perhaps even a little dated, that's great; they should seem familiar. 
+This work is 15 years old. 
+This stuff was undertaken at MIT and the Media Lab under the incredible direction of Professor Hiroshi Ishii, director of the Tangible Media Group. 
+But it was that work that was seen by Alex McDowell, one of the world's legendary production designers. 
+But Alex was preparing a little, sort of obscure, indie, arthouse film called "" Minority Report "" for Steven Spielberg, and invited us to come out from MIT and design the interfaces that would appear in that film. 
+And the great thing about it was that Alex was so dedicated to the idea of verisimilitude, the idea that the putative 2054 that we were painting in the film be believable, that he allowed us to take on that design work as if it were an R & D effort. 
+And the result is sort of gratifyingly perpetual. 
+People still reference those sequences in "" Minority Report "" when they talk about new UI design. 
+So this led full circle, in a strange way, to build these ideas into what we believe is the necessary future of human machine interface: the Spatial Operating Environment, we call it. 
+So here we have a bunch of stuff, some images. 
+And, using a hand, we can actually exercise six degrees of freedom, six degrees of navigational control. 
+And it's fun to fly through Mr. Beckett's eye. 
+And you can come back out through the scary orangutan. 
+And that's all well and good. 
+Let's do something a little more difficult. 
+Here, we have a whole bunch of disparate images. 
+We can fly around them. 
+So navigation is a fundamental issue. 
+You have to be able to navigate in 3D. 
+Much of what we want computers to help us with in the first place is inherently spatial. 
+And the part that isn't spatial can often be spatialized to allow our wetware to make greater sense of it. 
+Now we can distribute this stuff in many different ways. 
+So we can throw it out like that. Let's reset it. 
+We can organize it this way. 
+And, of course, it's not just about navigation, but about manipulation as well. 
+So if we don't like stuff, or we're intensely curious about Ernst Haeckel's scientific falsifications, we can pull them out like that. 
+And then if it's time for analysis, we can pull back a little bit and ask for a different distribution. 
+Let's just come down a bit and fly around. 
+So that's a different way to look at stuff. 
+If you're of a more analytical nature then you might want, actually, to look at this as a color histogram. 
+So now we've got the stuff color-sorted, angle maps onto color. 
+And now, if we want to select stuff, 3D, space, the idea that we're tracking hands in real space becomes really important because we can reach in, not in 2D, not in fake 2D, but in actual 3D. 
+Here are some selection planes. 
+And we'll perform this Boolean operation because we really love yellow and tapirs on green grass. 
+So, from there to the world of real work. 
+Here's a logistics system, a small piece of one that we're currently building. 
+There're a lot of elements. 
+And one thing that's very important is to combine traditional tabular data with three-dimensional and geospatial information. 
+So here's a familiar place. 
+And we'll bring this back here for a second. 
+Maybe select a little bit of that. 
+And bring out this graph. 
+And we should, now, be able to fly in here and have a closer look. 
+These are logistics elements that are scattered across the United States. 
+One thing that three-dimensional interactions and the general idea of imbuing computation with space affords you is a final destruction of that unfortunate one-to-one pairing between human beings and computers. 
+That's the old way, that's the old mantra: one machine, one human, one mouse, one screen. 
+Well, that doesn't really cut it anymore. 
+In the real world, we have people who collaborate; we have people who have to work together, and we have many different displays. 
+And we might want to look at these various images. 
+We might want to ask for some help. 
+The author of this new pointing device is sitting over there, so I can pull this from there to there. 
+These are unrelated machines, right? 
+So the computation is space soluble and network soluble. 
+So I'm going to leave that over there because I have a question for Paul. 
+Paul is the designer of this wand, and maybe its easiest for him to come over here and tell me in person what's going on. 
+So let me get some of these out of the way. 
+Let's pull this apart: I'll go ahead and explode it. 
+Kevin, can you help? 
+Let me see if I can help us find the circuit board. 
+Mind you, it's a sort of gratuitous field-stripping exercise, but we do it in the lab all the time. 
+All right. 
+So collaborative work, whether it's immediately co-located or distant and distinct, is always important. 
+And again, that stuff needs to be undertaken in the context of space. 
+And finally, I'd like to leave you with a glimpse that takes us back to the world of imagery. 
+This is a system called TAMPER, which is a slightly whimsical look at what the future of editing and media manipulation systems might be. 
+We at Oblong believe that media should be accessible in much more fine-grained form. 
+So we have a large number of movies stuck inside here. 
+And let's just pick out a few elements. 
+We can zip through them as a possibility. 
+We can grab elements off the front, where upon they reanimate, come to life, and drag them down onto the table here. 
+We'll go over to Jacques Tati here and grab our blue friend and put him down on the table as well. 
+We may need more than one. 
+And we probably need, well, we probably need a cowboy to be quite honest. 
+(Laughter) Yeah, let's take that one. (Laughter) 
+You see, cowboys and French farce people don't go well together, and the system knows that. 
+Let me leave with one final thought, and that is that one of the greatest English language writers of the last three decades suggested that great art is always a gift. 
+And he wasn't talking about whether the novel costs 24.95 [dollars], or whether you have to spring 70 million bucks to buy the stolen Vermeer; he was talking about the circumstances of its creation and of its existence. 
+And I think that it's time that we asked for the same from technology. 
+Technology is capable of expressing and being imbued with a certain generosity, and we need to demand that, in fact. 
+For some of this kind of technology, ground center is a combination of design, which is crucially important. 
+We can't have advances in technology any longer unless design is integrated from the very start. 
+And, as well, as of efficacy, agency. 
+We're, as human beings, the creatures that create, and we should make sure that our machines aid us in that task and are built in that same image. 
+So I will leave you with that. Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: So to ask the obvious question — actually this is from Bill Gates — when? (John Underkoffler: When?) CA: When real? When for us, not just in a lab and on a stage? 
+Can it be for every man, or is this just for corporations and movie producers? 
+JU: No, it has to be for every human being. 
+That's our goal entirely. 
+We won't have succeeded unless we take that next big step. 
+I mean it's been 25 years. 
+Can there really be only one interface? There can't. 
+CA: But does that mean that, at your desk or in your home, you need projectors, cameras? 
+You know, how can it work? 
+JU: No, this stuff will be built into the bezel of every display. 
+It'll be built into architecture. 
+The gloves go away in a matter of months or years. 
+So this is the inevitability about it. 
+CA: So, in your mind, five years time, someone can buy this as part of a standard computer interface? 
+JU: I think in five years time when you buy a computer, you'll get this. 
+CA: Well that's cool. 
+(Applause) The world has a habit of surprising us as to how these things are actually used. 
+What do you think, what in your mind is the first killer app for this? 
+JU: That's a good question, and we ask ourselves that every day. 
+At the moment, our early-adopter customers — and these systems are deployed out in the real world — do all the big data intensive, data heavy problems with it. 
+So, whether it's logistics and supply chain management or natural gas and resource extraction, financial services, pharmaceuticals, bioinformatics, those are the topics right now, but that's not a killer app. 
+And I understand what you're asking. 
+CA: C'mon, c'mon. Martial arts, games. C'mon. 
+(Laughter) John, thank you for making science-fiction real. 
+JU: It's been a great pleasure. 
+Thank you to you all. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, a funny thing happened on my way to becoming a brilliant, world-class neuropsychologist: I had a baby. 
+
+Is there anything unique about human beings? 
+There is. 
+We're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments. 
+We're obsessed with morality as social creatures. 
+We need to know why people are doing what they're doing. 
+And I personally am obsessed with morality. 
+It was all due to this woman, Sister Mary Marastela, also known as my mom. 
+As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense, and I learned to say phrases in Latin, but I also had time to think about whether my mother's top-down morality applied to everybody. 
+I saw that people who were religious and non-religious were equally obsessed with morality. 
+I thought, maybe there's some earthly basis for moral decisions. 
+But I wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral. 
+I want to know if there's a chemistry of morality. I want to know 
+if there was a moral molecule. 
+After 10 years of experiments, I found it. 
+Would you like to see it? I brought some with me. 
+This little syringe contains the moral molecule. 
+(Laughter) It's called oxytocin. 
+So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals. 
+In rodents, it was known to make mothers care for their offspring, and in some creatures, allowed for toleration of burrowmates. 
+But in humans, it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women, and is released by both sexes during sex. 
+So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule. 
+I did what most of us do — I tried it on some colleagues. 
+One of them told me, "" Paul, that is the world's stupidist idea. 
+It is, "" he said, "" only a female molecule. 
+It can't be that important. "" But I countered, "" Well men's brains make this too. 
+There must be a reason why. "" But he was right, it was a stupid idea. 
+But it was testably stupid. 
+In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral. 
+Turns out it wasn't so easy. 
+First of all, oxytocin is a shy molecule. 
+Baseline levels are near zero, without some stimulus to cause its release. 
+And when it's produced, it has a three-minute half-life, and degrades rapidly at room temperature. 
+So this experiment would have to cause a surge of oxytocin, have to grab it fast and keep it cold. 
+I think I can do that. 
+Now luckily, oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood, so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery. 
+Then I had to measure morality. 
+So taking on Morality with a capital M is a huge project. 
+So I started smaller. 
+I studied one single virtue: trustworthiness. 
+Why? I had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous. 
+So in these countries, more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. 
+So poor countries are by and large low trust countries. 
+So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness, I might help alleviate poverty. 
+But I'm also a skeptic. 
+I don't want to just ask people, "" Are you trustworthy? "" So instead I use the Jerry Maguire approach to research. 
+If you're so virtuous, show me the money. 
+So what we do in my lab is we tempt people with virtue and vice by using money. 
+Let me show you how we do that. 
+So we recruit some people for an experiment. 
+They all get $10 if they agree to show up. 
+We give them lots of instruction, and we never ever deceive them. 
+Then we match them in pairs by computer. 
+And in that pair, one person gets a message saying, "" Do you want to give up some of your $10 you earned for being here and ship it to someone else in the lab? "" The trick is you can't see them, you can't talk to them. 
+You only do it one time. 
+Now whatever you give up gets tripled in the other person's account. 
+You're going to make them a lot wealthier. 
+And they get a message by computer saying person one sent you this amount of money. 
+Do you want to keep it all, or do you want to send some amount back? 
+So think about this experiment for minute. 
+You're going to sit on these hard chairs for an hour and a half. 
+Some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle and take four tubes of blood. 
+And now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger? 
+So this was the birth of vampire economics. 
+Make a decision and give me some blood. 
+So in fact, experimental economists had run this test around the world, and for much higher stakes, and the consensus view was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust, and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness. 
+But in fact, economists were flummoxed on why the second person would ever return any money. 
+They assumed money is good, why not keep it all? 
+That's not what we found. 
+We found 90 percent of the first decision-makers sent money, and of those who received money, 95 percent returned some of it. 
+But why? 
+Well by measuring oxytocin we found that the more money the second person received, the more their brain produced oxytocin, and the more oxytocin on board, the more money they returned. 
+So we have a biology of trustworthiness. 
+But wait. What's wrong with this experiment? 
+Two things. 
+One is that nothing in the body happens in isolation. 
+So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin, but they didn't have any effect. 
+But the second is that I still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness. 
+I didn't know for sure oxytocin caused trustworthiness. 
+So to make the experiment, I knew I'd have to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly. 
+I used everything short of a drill to get oxytocin into my own brain. 
+And I found I could do it with a nasal inhaler. 
+So along with colleagues in Zurich, we put 200 men on oxytocin or placebo, had that same trust test with money, and we found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust, we can more than double the number of people who sent all their money to a stranger — all without altering mood or cognition. 
+So oxytocin is the trust molecule, but is it the moral molecule? 
+Using the oxytocin inhaler, we ran more studies. 
+We showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent. 
+We showed it increases donations to charity by 50 percent. 
+We've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin. 
+These include massage, dancing and praying. 
+Yes, my mom was happy about that last one. 
+And whenever we raise oxytocin, people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers. 
+But why do they do this? 
+What does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin? 
+To investigate this question, we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son, and his son has terminal brain cancer. 
+After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin. 
+The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy. 
+So it's empathy that makes us connect to other people. 
+It's empathy that makes us help other people. 
+It's empathy that makes us moral. 
+Now this idea is not new. 
+A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called "" The Theory of Moral Sentiments. "" In this book, Smith argued that we are moral creatures, not because of a top-down reason, but for a bottom-up reason. 
+He said we're social creatures, so we share the emotions of others. 
+So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain. 
+So I tend to avoid that. 
+If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy. 
+So I tend to do those things. 
+Now this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later, would write a little book called "" The Wealth of Nations "" — the founding document of economics. 
+But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher, and he was right on why we're moral. 
+I just found the molecule behind it. 
+But knowing that molecule is valuable, because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off. 
+In particular, it tells us why we see immorality. 
+So to investigate immorality, let me bring you back now to 1980. 
+I'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. 
+You sit in a gas station all day, you see lots of morality and immorality, let me tell you. 
+So one Sunday afternoon, a man walks into my cashier's booth with this beautiful jewelry box. 
+Opens it up and there's a pearl necklace inside. 
+And he said, "" Hey, I was in the men's room. 
+I just found this. What do you think we should do with it? "" "I don't know, put it in the lost and found." 
+"" Well this is very valuable. 
+We have to find the owner for this. "" I said, "" Yea. "" So we're trying to decide what to do with this, and the phone rings. 
+And a man says very excitedly, "" I was in your gas station a while ago, and I bought this jewelry for my wife, and I can't find it. "" I said, "" Pearl necklace? "" "" Yeah. "" "Hey, a guy just found it." 
+"" Oh, you're saving my life. Here's my phone number. 
+Tell that guy to wait half an hour. 
+I'll be there and I'll give him a $200 reward. "" Great, so I tell the guy, "" Look, relax. 
+Get yourself a fat reward. Life's good. "" He said, "" I can't do it. 
+I have this job interview in Galena in 15 minutes, and I need this job, I've got to go. "" Again he asked me, "" What do you think we should do? "" I'm in high school. I have no idea. 
+So I said, "" I'll hold it for you. "" He said, "" You know, you've been so nice, let's split the reward. "" I'll give you the jewelry, you give me a hundred dollars, and when the guy comes... "" You see it. I was conned. 
+So this is a classic con called the pigeon drop, and I was the pigeon. 
+So the way many cons work is not that the conman gets the victim to trust him, it's that he shows he trusts the victim. 
+Now we know what happens. 
+The victim's brain releases oxytocin, and you're opening up your wallet or purse, giving away the money. 
+So who are these people who manipulate our oxytocin systems? 
+We found, testing thousands of individuals, that five percent of the population don't release oxytocin on stimulus. 
+So if you trust them, their brains don't release oxytocin. 
+If there's money on the table, they keep it all. 
+So there's a technical word for these people in my lab. 
+We call them bastards. 
+(Laughter) These are not people you want to have a beer with. 
+They have many of the attributes of psychopaths. 
+Now there are other ways the system can be inhibited. 
+One is through improper nurturing. 
+So we've studied sexually abused women, and about half those don't release oxytocin on stimulus. 
+You need enough nurturing for this system to develop properly. 
+Also, high stress inhibits oxytocin. 
+So we all know this, when we're really stressed out, we're not acting our best. 
+There's another way oxytocin is inhibited, which is interesting — through the action of testosterone. 
+So we, in experiments, have administered testosterone to men. 
+And instead of sharing money, they become selfish. 
+But interestingly, high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish. 
+(Laughter) Now think about this. It means, within our own biology, we have the yin and yang of morality. 
+We have oxytocin that connects us to others, makes us feel what they feel. 
+And we have testosterone. 
+And men have 10 times the testosterone as women, so men do this more than women — we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally. 
+We don't need God or government telling us what to do. 
+It's all inside of us. 
+So you may be wondering: these are beautiful laboratory experiments, do they really apply to real life? 
+Yeah, I've been worrying about that too. 
+So I've gone out of the lab to see if this really holds in our daily lives. 
+So last summer, I attended a wedding in Southern England. 
+200 people in this beautiful Victorian mansion. 
+I didn't know a single person. 
+And I drove up in my rented Vauxhall. 
+And I took out a centrifuge and dry ice and needles and tubes. 
+And I took blood from the bride and the groom and the wedding party and the family and the friends before and immediately after the vows. 
+(Laughter) And guess what? 
+Weddings cause a release of oxytocin, but they do so in a very particular way. 
+Who is the center of the wedding solar system? 
+The bride. 
+She had the biggest increase in oxytocin. 
+Who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride? 
+Her mother, that's right. 
+Her mother was number two. 
+Then the groom's father, then the groom, then the family, then the friends — arrayed around the bride like planets around the Sun. 
+So I think it tells us that we've designed this ritual to connect us to this new couple, connect us emotionally. 
+Why? Because we need them to be successful at reproducing to perpetuate the species. 
+I also worried that my trust experiments with small amounts of money didn't really capture how often we actually trust our lives to strangers. 
+So even though I have a fear of heights, I recently strapped myself to another human being and stepped out of an airplane at 12,000 ft. 
+I took my blood before and after, and I had a huge spike of oxytocin. 
+And there are so many ways we can connect to people. 
+For example, through social media. 
+Many people are Tweeting right now. 
+So we investigated the role of social media and found the using social media produced a solid double-digit increase in oxytocin. 
+So I ran this experiment recently for the Korean Broadcasting System. 
+And they had the reporters and their producers participate. 
+And one of these guys, he must have been 22, he had 150 percent spike in oxytocin. 
+I mean, astounding; no one has this. 
+So he was using social media in private. 
+When I wrote my report to the Koreans, I said, "" Look, I don't know what this guy was doing, "" but my guess was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend. 
+They checked. 
+He was interacting on his girlfriend's Facebook page. 
+There you go. That's connection. 
+So there's tons of ways that we can connect to other people, and it seems to be universal. 
+Two weeks ago, I just got back from Papua New Guinea where I went up to the highlands — very isolated tribes of subsistence farmers living as they have lived for millenia. 
+There are 800 different languages in the highlands. 
+These are the most primitive people in the world. 
+And they indeed also release oxytocin. 
+So oxytocin connects us to other people. 
+Oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel. 
+And it's so easy to cause people's brains to release oxytocin. 
+I know how to do it, and my favorite way to do it is, in fact, the easiest. 
+Let me show it to you. 
+Come here. Give me a hug. 
+(Laughter) There you go. 
+(Applause) So my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname Dr. Love. 
+I'm happy to share a little more love in the world, it's great, but here's your prescription from Dr. Love: eight hugs a day. 
+We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier. 
+And they're happier because they have better relationships of all types. 
+Dr. Love says eight hugs a day. 
+Eight hugs a day — you'll be happier and the world will be a better place. 
+Of course, if you don't like to touch people, I can always shove this up your nose. 
+(Laughter) Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hello. My name is Birke Baehr, and I'm 11 years old. 
+I came here today to talk about what's wrong with our food system. 
+First of all, I would like to say that I'm really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on TV, at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look. 
+It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids, like me, to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn't good for us or the planet. 
+Little kids, especially, are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys. 
+I must admit, I used to be one of them. 
+I also used to think that all of our food came from these happy, little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day. 
+What I discovered was this is not true. 
+I began to look into this stuff on the Internet, in books and in documentary films, in my travels with my family. 
+I discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system. 
+First, there's genetically engineered seeds and organisms. 
+That is when a seed is manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature — like taking the DNA of a fish and putting it into the DNA of a tomato. Yuck. 
+Don't get me wrong, I like fish and tomatoes, but this is just creepy. 
+(Laughter) The seeds are then planted, then grown. 
+The food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals, and people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990s. 
+And most folks don't even know they exist. 
+Did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity? 
+These include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight. 
+Yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way. 
+And let me tell you, corn is in everything. 
+And don't even get me started on the Confined Animal Feeding Operations called CAFOS. 
+(Laughter) Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to make plants grow. 
+They do this because they've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again. 
+Next, more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables, like pesticides and herbicides, to kill weeds and bugs. 
+When it rains, these chemicals seep into the ground, or run off into our waterways, poisoning our water too. 
+Then they irradiate our food, trying to make it last longer, so it can travel thousands of miles from where it's grown to the supermarkets. 
+So I ask myself, how can I change? How can I change these things? 
+This is what I found out. 
+I discovered that there's a movement for a better way. 
+Now a while back, I wanted to be an NFL football player. 
+I decided that I'd rather be an organic farmer instead. 
+(Applause) Thank you. 
+And that way I can have a greater impact on the world. 
+This man, Joel Salatin, they call him a lunatic farmer because he grows against the system. 
+Since I'm home-schooled, I went to go hear him speak one day. 
+This man, this "" lunatic farmer, "" doesn't use any pesticides, herbicides, or genetically modified seeds. 
+And so for that, he's called crazy by the system. 
+I want you to know that we can all make a difference by making different choices, by buying our food directly from local farmers, or our neighbors who we know in real life. 
+Some people say organic or local food is more expensive, but is it really? 
+With all these things I've been learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer, or we can pay the hospital. 
+(Applause) Now I know definitely which one I would choose. 
+I want you to know that there are farms out there — like Bill Keener in Sequatchie Cove Farm in Tennessee — whose cows do eat grass and whose pigs do roll in the mud, just like I thought. 
+Sometimes I go to Bill's farm and volunteer, so I can see up close and personal where the meat I eat comes from. 
+I want you to know that I believe kids will eat fresh vegetables and good food if they know more about it and where it really comes from. 
+I want you to know that there are farmers' markets in every community popping up. 
+I want you to know that me, my brother and sister actually like eating baked kale chips. 
+I try to share this everywhere I go. 
+Not too long ago, my uncle said that he offered my six-year-old cousin cereal. 
+He asked him if he wanted organic Toasted O's or the sugarcoated flakes — you know, the one with the big striped cartoon character on the front. 
+My little cousin told his dad that he would rather have the organic Toasted O's cereal because Birke said he shouldn't eat sparkly cereal. 
+And that, my friends, is how we can make a difference one kid at a time. 
+So next time you're at the grocery store, think local, choose organic, know your farmer and know your food. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hello, Doha. Hello! 
+It feels like the United Nations here. 
+You land at the airport, and you're welcomed by an Indian lady who takes you to Al Maha Services, where you meet a Filipino lady who hands you off to a South African lady who then takes you to a Korean who takes you to a Pakistani guy with the luggage who takes you to the car with a Sri Lankan. 
+I said, "" Where are the Qataris? "" (Laughter) (Applause) They said, "" No, no, it's too hot. They come out later. They're smart. "" "They know." (Laughter) 
+You know, like sometimes you run into people that you think know the city well, but they don't know it that well. 
+My Indian cab driver showed up at the W, and I asked him to take me to the Sheraton, and he said, "" No problem, sir. "" And then we sat there for two minutes. 
+I said, "" What's wrong? "" He said, "" One problem, sir. "" (Laughter) I said, "" What? "" He goes, "" Where is it? "" (Laughter) I go, "" You're the driver, you should know. "" He goes, "" No, I just arrived, sir. "" I go, "" You just arrived at the W? "" "" No, I just arrived in Doha, sir. "" (Laughter) "" I was on my way home from the airport, I got a job. I'm working already. "" (Laughter) He goes, "" Sir, why don't you drive? "" (Laughter) "I don't know where we're going." 
+(Laughter) Every country is different and it's confusing, okay? 
+In Saudi Arabia, they go one, two, and then they stay on the same side: three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 — (Laughter) Next time you see a Saudi, look closely. 
+Why is that? Are you too tired to go all the way around? 
+(Laughter) "" Habibi, it's so hot. Just come here for a second. Say hello. 
+Hello, Habibi. Just don't move. Just stay there, please. 
+I need to rest. "" (Laughter) Iranians, sometimes we do two, sometimes we do three. 
+So with Iranians, you can tell whose side the person is on based on the number of kisses they give you. 
+But no, guys, really, it is exciting to be here, and like I said, you guys are doing a lot culturally, you know, and it's amazing, and it helps change the image of the Middle East in the West. 
+There's so much, we laugh, right? 
+One guy wrote another guy. He said, "" I never knew these people laughed. "" Think about it. You never see us laughing in American film or television, right? 
+But never like, "" Ha ha ha ha la. "" (Laughter) We like to laugh. We like to celebrate life. 
+For example, I don't know if you heard about this, a little while ago in the US, there was a Muslim family walking down the aisle of an airplane, talking about the safest place to sit on the plane. 
+I'm not supposed to be walking down the aisle, and be like, "" Hi, Jack. "" That's not cool. 
+(Laughter) Even if I'm there with my friend named Jack, I say, "Greetings, Jack. Salutations, Jack." 
+So my advice to all my Middle Eastern friends and Muslim friends and anyone who looks Middle Eastern or Muslim, so to, you know, Indians, and Latinos, everyone, if you're brown — (Laughter) Here's my advice to my brown friends. (Laughter) 
+The next time you're on an airplane in the US, just speak your mother tongue. 
+(Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) Rainbow! (Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) 
+
+I was a student in the '60s, a time of social upheaval and questioning, and — on a personal level — an awakening sense of idealism. 
+The war in Vietnam was raging, the Civil Rights movement was under way and pictures had a powerful influence on me. 
+Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing and photographers were telling us another. 
+I believed the photographers and so did millions of other Americans. 
+Their images fuelled resistance to the war and to racism. 
+They not only recorded history — they helped change the course of history. 
+Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and, as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible, but inevitable. 
+It puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact. 
+What happens at ground level, far from the halls of power, happens to ordinary citizens one by one. 
+And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view. 
+It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice. 
+My TED wish. There ’ s a vital story that needs to be told and I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era. 
+Thank you very much. 
+[10.3.08 — The story breaks.] ["" I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. ""] [South Africa] [This is happening now.] [Cambodia] [Swaziland] [One person dies every 20 seconds.] [Thailand] [An ancient disease is taking on a deadly new form.] [Siberia] [Lesotho] [Tuberculosis: the next pandemic?] [India] [TB is preventable and curable,] [but it is mutating due to inadequate treatment.] [XDR-TB:] [extreme drug resistant tuberculosis.] [There is no reliable cure.] 
+[Patients often die within weeks of diagnosis.] [49 countries have reported XDR-TB.] [XDR-TB is a critical threat to global health.] [Extreme outbreak, suffering, affliction] [Extreme loss, pain, pandemic] [Extremely preventable.] [XDR-TB.] [We can stop this now.] [Spread the story. Stop the disease.] [Go to XDRTB.org now.] [XDRTB.org: we are the treatment.] [We are the treatment.] [Made possible through the kind support of BD.] 
+
+The electricity powering the lights in this theater was generated just moments ago. 
+Because the way things stand today, electricity demand must be in constant balance with electricity supply. 
+If in the time that it took me to walk out here on this stage, some tens of megawatts of wind power stopped pouring into the grid, the difference would have to be made up from other generators immediately. 
+But coal plants, nuclear plants can't respond fast enough. 
+A giant battery could. 
+With a giant battery, we'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal, gas and nuclear do today. 
+You see, the battery is the key enabling device here. 
+With it, we could draw electricity from the sun even when the sun doesn't shine. 
+And that changes everything. 
+Because then renewables such as wind and solar come out from the wings, here to center stage. 
+Today I want to tell you about such a device. 
+It's called the liquid metal battery. 
+It's a new form of energy storage that I invented at MIT along with a team of my students and post-docs. 
+Now the theme of this year's TED Conference is Full Spectrum. 
+The OED defines spectrum as "" The entire range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays of which the range of visible light is only a small part. "" So I'm not here today only to tell you how my team at MIT has drawn out of nature a solution to one of the world's great problems. 
+I want to go full spectrum and tell you how, in the process of developing this new technology, we've uncovered some surprising heterodoxies that can serve as lessons for innovation, ideas worth spreading. 
+And you know, if we're going to get this country out of its current energy situation, we can't just conserve our way out; we can't just drill our way out; we can't bomb our way out. 
+We're going to do it the old-fashioned American way, we're going to invent our way out, working together. 
+(Applause) Now let's get started. 
+The battery was invented about 200 years ago by a professor, Alessandro Volta, at the University of Padua in Italy. 
+His invention gave birth to a new field of science, electrochemistry, and new technologies such as electroplating. 
+Perhaps overlooked, Volta's invention of the battery for the first time also demonstrated the utility of a professor. 
+(Laughter) Until Volta, nobody could imagine a professor could be of any use. 
+Here's the first battery — a stack of coins, zinc and silver, separated by cardboard soaked in brine. 
+This is the starting point for designing a battery — two electrodes, in this case metals of different composition, and an electrolyte, in this case salt dissolved in water. 
+The science is that simple. 
+Admittedly, I've left out a few details. 
+Now I've taught you that battery science is straightforward and the need for grid-level storage is compelling, but the fact is that today there is simply no battery technology capable of meeting the demanding performance requirements of the grid — namely uncommonly high power, long service lifetime and super-low cost. 
+We need to think about the problem differently. 
+We need to think big, we need to think cheap. 
+So let's abandon the paradigm of let's search for the coolest chemistry and then hopefully we'll chase down the cost curve by just making lots and lots of product. 
+Instead, let's invent to the price point of the electricity market. 
+So that means that certain parts of the periodic table are axiomatically off-limits. 
+This battery needs to be made out of earth-abundant elements. 
+I say, if you want to make something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt — (Laughter) preferably dirt that's locally sourced. 
+And we need to be able to build this thing using simple manufacturing techniques and factories that don't cost us a fortune. 
+So about six years ago, I started thinking about this problem. 
+And in order to adopt a fresh perspective, I sought inspiration from beyond the field of electricity storage. 
+In fact, I looked to a technology that neither stores nor generates electricity, but instead consumes electricity, huge amounts of it. 
+I'm talking about the production of aluminum. 
+The process was invented in 1886 by a couple of 22-year-olds — Hall in the United States and Heroult in France. 
+And just a few short years following their discovery, aluminum changed from a precious metal costing as much as silver to a common structural material. 
+You're looking at the cell house of a modern aluminum smelter. 
+It's about 50 feet wide and recedes about half a mile — row after row of cells that, inside, resemble Volta's battery, with three important differences. 
+Volta's battery works at room temperature. 
+It's fitted with solid electrodes and an electrolyte that's a solution of salt and water. 
+The Hall-Heroult cell operates at high temperature, a temperature high enough that the aluminum metal product is liquid. 
+The electrolyte is not a solution of salt and water, but rather salt that's melted. 
+It's this combination of liquid metal, molten salt and high temperature that allows us to send high current through this thing. 
+Today, we can produce virgin metal from ore at a cost of less than 50 cents a pound. 
+That's the economic miracle of modern electrometallurgy. 
+It is this that caught and held my attention to the point that I became obsessed with inventing a battery that could capture this gigantic economy of scale. 
+And I did. 
+I made the battery all liquid — liquid metals for both electrodes and a molten salt for the electrolyte. 
+I'll show you how. 
+So I put low-density liquid metal at the top, put a high-density liquid metal at the bottom, and molten salt in between. 
+So now, how to choose the metals? 
+For me, the design exercise always begins here with the periodic table, enunciated by another professor, Dimitri Mendeleyev. 
+Everything we know is made of some combination of what you see depicted here. 
+And that includes our own bodies. 
+I recall the very moment one day when I was searching for a pair of metals that would meet the constraints of earth abundance, different, opposite density and high mutual reactivity. 
+I felt the thrill of realization when I knew I'd come upon the answer. 
+Magnesium for the top layer. 
+And antimony for the bottom layer. 
+You know, I've got to tell you, one of the greatest benefits of being a professor: colored chalk. 
+(Laughter) So to produce current, magnesium loses two electrons to become magnesium ion, which then migrates across the electrolyte, accepts two electrons from the antimony, and then mixes with it to form an alloy. 
+The electrons go to work in the real world out here, powering our devices. 
+Now to charge the battery, we connect a source of electricity. 
+It could be something like a wind farm. 
+And then we reverse the current. 
+And this forces magnesium to de-alloy and return to the upper electrode, restoring the initial constitution of the battery. 
+And the current passing between the electrodes generates enough heat to keep it at temperature. 
+It's pretty cool, at least in theory. 
+But does it really work? 
+So what to do next? 
+We go to the laboratory. 
+Now do I hire seasoned professionals? 
+No, I hire a student and mentor him, teach him how to think about the problem, to see it from my perspective and then turn him loose. 
+This is that student, David Bradwell, who, in this image, appears to be wondering if this thing will ever work. 
+What I didn't tell David at the time was I myself wasn't convinced it would work. 
+But David's young and he's smart and he wants a Ph.D., and he proceeds to build — (Laughter) He proceeds to build the first ever liquid metal battery of this chemistry. 
+And based on David's initial promising results, which were paid with seed funds at MIT, I was able to attract major research funding from the private sector and the federal government. 
+And that allowed me to expand my group to 20 people, a mix of graduate students, post-docs and even some undergraduates. 
+And I was able to attract really, really good people, people who share my passion for science and service to society, not science and service for career building. 
+And if you ask these people why they work on liquid metal battery, their answer would hearken back to President Kennedy's remarks at Rice University in 1962 when he said — and I'm taking liberties here — "" We choose to work on grid-level storage, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. "" (Applause) So this is the evolution of the liquid metal battery. 
+We start here with our workhorse one watt-hour cell. 
+I called it the shotglass. 
+We've operated over 400 of these, perfecting their performance with a plurality of chemistries — not just magnesium and antimony. 
+Along the way we scaled up to the 20 watt-hour cell. 
+I call it the hockey puck. 
+And we got the same remarkable results. 
+And then it was onto the saucer. 
+That's 200 watt-hours. 
+The technology was proving itself to be robust and scalable. 
+But the pace wasn't fast enough for us. 
+So a year and a half ago, David and I, along with another research staff-member, formed a company to accelerate the rate of progress and the race to manufacture product. 
+So today at LMBC, we're building cells 16 inches in diameter with a capacity of one kilowatt-hour — 1,000 times the capacity of that initial shotglass cell. 
+We call that the pizza. 
+And then we've got a four kilowatt-hour cell on the horizon. 
+It's going to be 36 inches in diameter. 
+We call that the bistro table, but it's not ready yet for prime-time viewing. 
+And one variant of the technology has us stacking these bistro tabletops into modules, aggregating the modules into a giant battery that fits in a 40-foot shipping container for placement in the field. 
+And this has a nameplate capacity of two megawatt-hours — two million watt-hours. 
+That's enough energy to meet the daily electrical needs of 200 American households. 
+So here you have it, grid-level storage: silent, emissions-free, no moving parts, remotely controlled, designed to the market price point without subsidy. 
+So what have we learned from all this? 
+(Applause) So what have we learned from all this? 
+Let me share with you some of the surprises, the heterodoxies. 
+They lie beyond the visible. 
+Temperature: Conventional wisdom says set it low, at or near room temperature, and then install a control system to keep it there. 
+Avoid thermal runaway. 
+Liquid metal battery is designed to operate at elevated temperature with minimum regulation. 
+Our battery can handle the very high temperature rises that come from current surges. 
+Scaling: Conventional wisdom says reduce cost by producing many. 
+Liquid metal battery is designed to reduce cost by producing fewer, but they'll be larger. 
+And finally, human resources: Conventional wisdom says hire battery experts, seasoned professionals, who can draw upon their vast experience and knowledge. 
+To develop liquid metal battery, I hired students and post-docs and mentored them. 
+In a battery, I strive to maximize electrical potential; when mentoring, I strive to maximize human potential. 
+So you see, the liquid metal battery story is more than an account of inventing technology, it's a blueprint for inventing inventors, full-spectrum. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, I was just asked to go and shoot this film called "" Elizabeth. "" And we're all talking about this great English icon and saying, "" She's a fantastic woman, she does everything. 
+How are we going to introduce her? "" So we went around the table with the studio and the producers and the writer, and they came to me and said, "" Shekhar, what do you think? "" And I said, "" I think she's dancing. "" And I could see everybody looked at me, somebody said, "" Bollywood. "" The other said, "" How much did we hire him for? "" And the third said, "" Let's find another director. "" I thought I had better change. 
+So we had a lot of discussion on how to introduce Elizabeth, and I said, "" OK, maybe I am too Bollywood. 
+Maybe Elizabeth, this great icon, dancing? 
+What are you talking about? "" So I rethought the whole thing, and then we all came to a consensus. 
+And here was the introduction of this great British icon called "" Elizabeth. "" Leicester: May I join you, my lady? 
+Elizabeth: If it please you, sir. 
+(Music) Shekhar Kapur: So she was dancing. 
+So how many people who saw the film did not get that here was a woman in love, that she was completely innocent and saw great joy in her life, and she was youthful? 
+And how many of you did not get that? 
+That's the power of visual storytelling, that's the power of dance, that's the power of music: the power of not knowing. 
+You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience. 
+So I come up, and I say, "" What am I going to do today? "" I'm not going to do what I planned to do, and I put myself into absolute panic. 
+It's my one way of getting rid of my mind, getting rid of this mind that says, "" Hey, you know what you're doing. You know exactly what you're doing. 
+I'm doing it right now; you can watch me. I'm getting nervous, I don't know what to say, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't want to go there. 
+And as I go there, of course, my A.D. says, "You know what you're going to do, sir." I say, "Of course I do." 
+And the studio executives, they would say, "Hey, look at Shekhar. He's so prepared." 
+I'm allowing myself to go into chaos because out of chaos, I'm hoping some moments of truth will come. 
+All preparation is preparation. 
+I don't even know if it's truthful. 
+The truth of it all comes on the moment, organically, and if you get five great moments of great, organic stuff in your storytelling, in your film, your film, audiences will get it. 
+So I'm looking for those moments, and I'm standing there and saying, "" I don't know what to say. "" So, ultimately, everybody's looking at you, 200 people at seven in the morning who got there at quarter to seven, and you arrived at seven, and everybody's saying, "Hey. What's the first thing? What's going to happen?" 
+And you put yourself into a state of panic where you don't know, and so you don't know. 
+And so, because you don't know, you're praying to the universe because you're praying to the universe that something — I'm going to try and access the universe the way Einstein — say a prayer — accessed his equations, the same source. I'm looking for the same source because creativity comes from absolutely the same source that you meditate somewhere outside yourself, outside the universe. 
+You're looking for something that comes and hits you. 
+Until that hits you, you're not going to do the first shot. 
+So Cate says, "" Shekhar, what do you want me to do? "" And I say, "" Cate, what do you want to do? "" (Laughter) "" You're a great actor, and I like to give to my actors — why don't you show me what you want to do? "" (Laughter) What am I doing? I'm trying to buy time. I'm trying to buy time. 
+Get out of it, get it out. 
+And let's go to the universe because there's something out there that is more truthful than your mind, that is more truthful than your universe. 
+[unclear], you said that yesterday. I'm just repeating it because that's what I follow constantly to find the shunyata somewhere, the emptiness. 
+Out of the emptiness comes a moment of creativity. 
+So that's what I do. 
+When I was a kid — I was about eight years old. 
+You remember how India was. There was no pollution. 
+In Delhi, we used to live — we used to call it a chhat or the khota. 
+Khota's now become a bad word. It means their terrace — and we used to sleep out at night. 
+At school I was being just taught about physics, and I was told that if there is something that exists, then it is measurable. 
+If it is not measurable, it does not exist. 
+And at night I would lie out, looking at the unpolluted sky, as Delhi used to be at that time when I was a kid, and I used to stare at the universe and say, "How far does this universe go?" 
+My father was a doctor. 
+And I would think, "" Daddy, how far does the universe go? "" And he said, "" Son, it goes on forever. "" So I said, "" Please measure forever because in school they're teaching me that if I cannot measure it, it does not exist. 
+It doesn't come into my frame of reference. "" So, how far does eternity go? 
+What does forever mean? 
+And I would lie there crying at night because my imagination could not touch creativity. 
+So what did I do? 
+At that time, at the tender age of seven, I created a story. 
+What was my story? 
+And I don't know why, but I remember the story. 
+There was a woodcutter who's about to take his ax and chop a piece of wood, and the whole galaxy is one atom of that ax. 
+And when that ax hits that piece of wood, that's when everything will destroy and the Big Bang will happen again. 
+But all before that there was a woodcutter. 
+And then when I would run out of that story, I would imagine that woodcutter's universe is one atom in the ax of another woodcutter. 
+So every time, I could tell my story again and again and get over this problem, and so I got over the problem. 
+How did I do it? Tell a story. 
+So what is a story? 
+A story is our — all of us — we are the stories we tell ourselves. 
+In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. 
+We are the stories we tell ourselves. 
+So that's as wide as we look at stories. 
+A story is the relationship that you develop between who you are, or who you potentially are, and the infinite world, and that's our mythology. 
+We tell our stories, and a person without a story does not exist. 
+So Einstein told a story and followed his stories and came up with theories and came up with theories and then came up with his equations. 
+Alexander had a story that his mother used to tell him, and he went out to conquer the world. 
+We all, everybody, has a story that they follow. 
+We tell ourselves stories. 
+So, I will go further, and I say, "I tell a story, and therefore I exist." 
+I exist because there are stories, and if there are no stories, we don't exist. 
+We create stories to define our existence. 
+If we do not create the stories, we probably go mad. 
+I don't know; I'm not sure, but that's what I've done all the time. 
+Now, a film. 
+A film tells a story. 
+I often wonder when I make a film — I'm thinking of making a film of the Buddha — and I often wonder: If Buddha had all the elements that are given to a director — if he had music, if he had visuals, if he had a video camera — would we get Buddhism better? 
+But that puts some kind of burden on me. 
+I have to tell a story in a much more elaborate way, but I have the potential. 
+It's called subtext. 
+When I first went to Hollywood, they said — I used to talk about subtext, and my agent came to me, "Would you kindly not talk about subtext?" 
+And I said, "" Why? "" He said, "" Because nobody is going to give you a film if you talk about subtext. 
+Just talk about plot and say how wonderful you'll shoot the film, what the visuals will be. "" So when I look at a film, here's what we look for: We look for a story on the plot level, then we look for a story on the psychological level, then we look for a story on the political level, then we look at a story on a mythological level. 
+And I look for stories on each level. 
+Now, it is not necessary that these stories agree with each other. 
+What is wonderful is, at many times, the stories will contradict with each other. 
+So when I work with Rahman who's a great musician, I often tell him, "" Don't follow what the script already says. 
+Find that which is not. 
+Find the truth for yourself, and when you find the truth for yourself, there will be a truth in it, but it may contradict the plot, but don't worry about it. "" So, the sequel to "" Elizabeth, "" "" Golden Age. "" When I made the sequel to "" Elizabeth, "" here was a story that the writer was telling: A woman who was threatened by Philip II and was going to war, and was going to war, fell in love with Walter Raleigh. 
+Because she fell in love with Walter Raleigh, she was giving up the reasons she was a queen, and then Walter Raleigh fell in love with her lady in waiting, and she had to decide whether she was a queen going to war or she wanted... 
+Here's the story I was telling: The gods up there, there were two people. 
+There was Philip II, who was divine because he was always praying, and there was Elizabeth, who was divine, but not quite divine because she thought she was divine, but the blood of being mortal flowed in her. 
+But the divine one was unjust, so the gods said, "" OK, what we need to do is help the just one. "" And so they helped the just one. 
+And what they did was, they sent Walter Raleigh down to physically separate her mortal self from her spirit self. 
+And the mortal self was the girl that Walter Raleigh was sent, and gradually he separated her so she was free to be divine. 
+And the two divine people fought, and the gods were on the side of divinity. 
+Of course, all the British press got really upset. 
+They said, "" We won the Armada. "" But I said, "" But the storm won the Armada. 
+The gods sent the storm. "" So what was I doing? 
+I was trying to find a mythic reason to make the film. 
+Of course, when I asked Cate Blanchett, I said, "" What's the film about? "" She said, "" The film's about a woman coming to terms with growing older. "" Psychological. 
+The writer said "" It's about history, plot. "" I said "" It's about mythology, the gods. "" So let me show you a film — a piece from that film — and how a camera also — so this is a scene, where in my mind, she was at the depths of mortality. 
+She was discovering what mortality actually means, and if she is at the depths of mortality, what really happens. 
+And she's recognizing the dangers of mortality and why she should break away from mortality. 
+Remember, in the film, to me, both her and her lady in waiting were parts of the same body, one the mortal self and one the spirit self. 
+So can we have that second? 
+(Music) Elizabeth: Bess? Bess? 
+Bess Throckmorton? Bess: Here, my lady. Elizabeth: Tell me, is it true? Are you with child? 
+Are you with child? 
+Bess: Yes, my lady. Elizabeth: Traitorous. You dare to keep secrets from me? You ask my permission before you rut, 
+before you breed. 
+My bitches wear my collars. 
+Do you hear me? Do you hear me? 
+Walsingham: Majesty. Please, dignity. Mercy. 
+Elizabeth: This is no time for mercy, Walsingham. 
+You go to your traitor brother and leave me to my business. 
+Is it his? 
+Tell me. Say it. Is the child his? Is it his? 
+Bess: Yes. 
+My lady, it is my husband's child. 
+Elizabeth: Bitch! (Cries) Raleigh: Majesty. 
+This is not the queen I love and serve. 
+Elizabeth: This man has seduced a ward of the queen, and she has married without royal consent. 
+These offenses are punishable by law. Arrest him. 
+Go. 
+You no longer have the queen's protection. 
+Bess: As you wish, Majesty. 
+Elizabeth: Get out! Get out! Get out! 
+Get out. 
+(Music) Shekhar Kapur: So, what am I trying to do here? 
+Elizabeth has realized, and she's coming face-to-face with her own sense of jealousy, her own sense of mortality. 
+What am I doing with the architecture? 
+The architecture is telling a story. The architecture is telling a story 
+about how, even though she's the most powerful woman in the world at that time, there is the other, the architecture's bigger. 
+The stone is bigger than her because stone is an organic. 
+It'll survive her. 
+So it's telling you, to me, stone is part of her destiny. 
+Not only that, why is the camera looking down? 
+The camera's looking down at her because she's in the well. 
+She's in the absolute well of her own sense of being mortal. 
+That's where she has to pull herself out from the depths of mortality, come in, release her spirit. 
+And that's the moment where, in my mind, both Elizabeth and Bess are the same person. 
+But that's the moment she's surgically removing herself from that. 
+So the film is operating on many many levels in that scene. 
+And how we tell stories visually, with music, with actors, and at each level it's a different sense and sometimes contradictory to each other. 
+So how do I start all this? 
+What's the process of telling a story? 
+About ten years ago, I heard this little thing from a politician, not a politician that was very well respected in India. 
+And he said that these people in the cities, in one flush, expend as much water as you people in the rural areas don't get for your family for two days. 
+That struck a chord, and I said, "" That's true. "" I went to see a friend of mine, and he made me wait in his apartment in Malabar Hill on the twentieth floor, which is a really, really upmarket area in Mumbai. 
+And he was having a shower for 20 minutes. 
+I got bored and left, and as I drove out, I drove past the slums of Bombay, as you always do, and I saw lines and lines in the hot midday sun of women and children with buckets waiting for a tanker to come and give them water. 
+And an idea started to develop. 
+So how does that become a story? 
+I suddenly realized that we are heading towards disaster. 
+So my next film is called "" Paani "" which means water. 
+And now, out of the mythology of that, I'm starting to create a world. 
+What kind of world do I create, and where does the idea, the design of that come? 
+So, in my mind, in the future, they started to build flyovers. 
+You understand flyovers? Yeah? 
+They started to build flyovers to get from A to B faster, but they effectively went from one area of relative wealth to another area of relative wealth. 
+And then what they did was they created a city above the flyovers. 
+And the rich people moved to the upper city and left the poorer people in the lower cities, about 10 to 12 percent of the people have moved to the upper city. 
+Now, where does this upper city and lower city come? 
+There's a mythology in India about — where they say, and I'll say it in Hindi, [Hindi] Right. What does that mean? 
+It says that the rich are always sitting on the shoulders and survive on the shoulders of the poor. 
+So, from that mythology, the upper city and lower city come. 
+So the design has a story. 
+And now, what happens is that the people of the upper city, they suck up all the water. 
+Remember the word I said, suck up. 
+They suck up all the water, keep to themselves, and they drip feed the lower city. 
+And if there's any revolution, they cut off the water. 
+And, because democracy still exists, there's a democratic way in which you say "Well, if you give us what [we want], we'll give you water." 
+So, okay my time is up. 
+But I can go on about telling you how we evolve stories, and how stories effectively are who we are and how these get translated into the particular discipline that I am in, which is film. 
+But ultimately, what is a story? It's a contradiction. 
+Everything's a contradiction. 
+The universe is a contradiction. 
+And all of us are constantly looking for harmony. 
+When you get up, the night and day is a contradiction. 
+But you get up at 4 a.m. 
+That first blush of blue is where the night and day are trying to find harmony with each other. 
+Harmony is the notes that Mozart didn't give you, but somehow the contradiction of his notes suggest that. 
+All contradictions of his notes suggest the harmony. 
+It's the effect of looking for harmony in the contradiction that exists in a poet's mind, a contradiction that exists in a storyteller's mind. 
+In a storyteller's mind, it's a contradiction of moralities. 
+In a poet's mind, it's a conflict of words, in the universe's mind, between day and night. 
+In the mind of a man and a woman, we're looking constantly at the contradiction between male and female, we're looking for harmony within each other. 
+The whole idea of contradiction, but the acceptance of contradiction is the telling of a story, not the resolution. 
+The problem with a lot of the storytelling in Hollywood and many films, and as [unclear] was saying in his, that we try to resolve the contradiction. 
+Harmony is not resolution. 
+Harmony is the suggestion of a thing that is much larger than resolution. 
+Harmony is the suggestion of something that is embracing and universal and of eternity and of the moment. 
+Resolution is something that is far more limited. 
+It is finite; harmony is infinite. 
+So that storytelling, like all other contradictions in the universe, is looking for harmony and infinity in moral resolutions, resolving one, but letting another go, letting another go and creating a question that is really important. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Contagious is a good word. 
+Even in the times of H1N1, I like the word. 
+Laughter is contagious. Passion is contagious. 
+Inspiration is contagious. 
+We've heard some remarkable stories from some remarkable speakers. 
+But for me, what was contagious about all of them was that they were infected by something I call the "" I Can "" bug. 
+So, the question is, why only them? 
+In a country of a billion people and some, why so few? 
+Is it luck? Is it chance? 
+Can we all not systematically and consciously get infected? 
+So, in the next eight minutes I would like to share with you my story. 
+I got infected when I was 17, when, as a student of the design college, I encountered adults who actually believed in my ideas, challenged me and had lots of cups of chai with me. 
+And I was struck by just how wonderful it felt, and how contagious that feeling was. 
+I also realized I should have got infected when I was seven. 
+So, when I started Riverside school 10 years ago it became a lab, a lab to prototype and refine a design process that could consciously infect the mind with the "" I Can "" bug. 
+And I uncovered that if learning is embedded in real-world context, that if you blur the boundaries between school and life, then children go through a journey of "" aware, "" where they can see the change, "" enable, "" be changed, and then "" empower, "" lead the change. 
+And that directly increased student wellbeing. 
+Children became more competent, and less helpless. 
+But this was all common sense. 
+So, I'd like to show you a little glimpse of what common practice looks like at Riverside. 
+A little background: when my grade five was learning about child rights, they were made to roll incense sticks, agarbattis, for eight hours to experience what it means to be a child laborer. 
+It transformed them. What you will see is their journey, and then their utter conviction that they could go out and change the world. 
+(Music) That's them rolling. 
+And in two hours, after their backs were broke, they were changed. 
+And once that happened, they were out in the city convincing everybody that child labor just had to be abolished. 
+And look at Ragav, that moment when his face changes because he's been able to understand that he has shifted that man's mindset. 
+And that can't happen in a classroom. 
+So, when Ragav experienced that he went from "" teacher told me, "" to "" I am doing it. "" And that's the "" I Can "" mindshift. 
+And it is a process that can be energized and nurtured. 
+But we had parents who said, "" Okay, making our children good human beings is all very well, but what about math and science and English? 
+Show us the grades. "" And we did. The data was conclusive. 
+When children are empowered, not only do they do good, they do well, in fact very well, as you can see in this national benchmarking assessment taken by over 2,000 schools in India, Riverside children were outperforming the top 10 schools in India in math, English and science. 
+So, it worked. It was now time to take it outside Riverside. 
+So, on August 15th, Independence Day, 2007, the children of Riverside set out to infect Ahmedabad. 
+Now it was not about Riverside school. 
+It was about all children. So, we were shameless. 
+We walked into the offices of the municipal corporation, the police, the press, businesses, and basically said, "" When are you going to wake up and recognize the potential that resides in every child? 
+When will you include the child in the city? 
+Basically, open your hearts and your minds to the child. "" So, how did the city respond? 
+Since 2007 every other month the city closes down the busiest streets for traffic and converts it into a playground for children and childhood. 
+Here was a city telling its child, "" You can. "" A glimpse of infection in Ahmedabad. 
+Video: [Unclear] So, the busiest streets closed down. 
+We have the traffic police and municipal corporation helping us. 
+It gets taken over by children. 
+They are skating. They are doing street plays. 
+They are playing, all free, for all children. 
+(Music) Atul Karwal: aProCh is an organization which has been doing things for kids earlier. 
+And we plan to extend this to other parts of the city. 
+(Music) Kiran Bir Sethi: And the city will give free time. 
+And Ahmedabad got the first child-friendly zebra crossing in the world. 
+Geet Sethi: When a city gives to the children, in the future the children will give back to the city. 
+(Music) KBS: And because of that, Ahmedabad is known as India's first child-friendly city. 
+So, you're getting the pattern. First 200 children at Riverside. 
+Then 30,000 children in Ahmedabad, and growing. 
+It was time now to infect India. 
+So, on August 15th, again, Independence Day, 2009, empowered with the same process, we empowered 100,000 children to say, "" I can. "" How? We designed a simple toolkit, converted it into eight languages, and reached 32,000 schools. 
+We basically gave children a very simple challenge. 
+We said, take one idea, anything that bothers you, choose one week, and change a billion lives. 
+And they did. Stories of change poured in from all over India, from Nagaland in the east, to Jhunjhunu in the west, from Sikkim in the north, to Krishnagiri in the south. 
+Children were designing solutions for a diverse range of problems. 
+Right from loneliness to filling potholes in the street to alcoholism, and 32 children who stopped 16 child marriages in Rajasthan. 
+I mean, it was incredible. 
+Basically again reaffirming that when adults believe in children and say, "" You can, "" then they will. 
+Infection in India. 
+This is in Rajasthan, a rural village. 
+Child: Our parents are illiterate and we want to teach them how to read and write. 
+KBS: First time, a rally and a street play in a rural school — unheard of — to tell their parents why literacy is important. 
+Look at what their parents says. 
+Man: This program is wonderful. 
+We feel so nice that our children can teach us how to read and write. 
+Woman: I am so happy that my students did this campaign. 
+In the future, I will never doubt my students' abilities. 
+See? They have done it. 
+KBS: An inner city school in Hyderabad. 
+Girl: 581. This house is 581... 
+We have to start collecting from 555. 
+KBS: Girls and boys in Hyderabad, going out, pretty difficult, but they did it. 
+Woman: Even though they are so young, they have done such good work. 
+First they have cleaned the society, then it will be Hyderabad, and soon India. 
+Woman: It was a revelation for me. It doesn't strike me that they had so much inside them. 
+Girl: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. 
+For our auction we have some wonderful paintings for you, for a very good cause, the money you give us will be used to buy hearing aids. 
+Are you ready, ladies and gentlemen? Audience: Yes! 
+Girl: Are you ready? Audience: Yes! Girl: Are you ready? Audience: Yes! 
+KBS: So, the charter of compassion starts right here. Street plays, auctions, petitions. I mean, they were changing lives. It was incredible. So, how can we still stay immune? How can we stay immune to that passion, that energy, that excitement? I know it's obvious, 
+but I have to end with the most powerful symbol of change, Gandhiji. 
+70 years ago, it took one man to infect an entire nation with the power of "" We can. "" So, today who is it going to take to spread the infection from 100,000 children to the 200 million children in India? 
+Last I heard, the preamble still said, "" We, the people of India, "" right? 
+So, if not us, then who? 
+If not now, then when? 
+Like I said, contagious is a good word. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+For a long time, there was me, and my body. 
+Me was composed of stories, of cravings, of strivings, of desires of the future. 
+Me was trying not to be an outcome of my violent past, but the separation that had already occurred between me and my body was a pretty significant outcome. 
+Me was always trying to become something, somebody. 
+Me only existed in the trying. 
+My body was often in the way. 
+Me was a floating head. 
+For years, I actually only wore hats. 
+It was a way of keeping my head attached. 
+It was a way of locating myself. 
+I worried that [if] I took my hat off I wouldn't be here anymore. 
+I actually had a therapist who once said to me, "" Eve, you've been coming here for two years, and, to be honest, it never occurred to me that you had a body. "" All this time I lived in the city because, to be honest, I was afraid of trees. 
+I never had babies because heads cannot give birth. 
+Babies actually don't come out of your mouth. 
+As I had no reference point for my body, I began to ask other women about their bodies — in particular, their vaginas, because I thought vaginas were kind of important. 
+This led to me writing "" The Vagina Monologues, "" which led to me obsessively and incessantly talking about vaginas everywhere I could. 
+I did this in front of many strangers. 
+One night on stage, I actually entered my vagina. 
+It was an ecstatic experience. 
+It scared me, it energized me, and then I became a driven person, a driven vagina. 
+I began to see my body like a thing, a thing that could move fast, like a thing that could accomplish other things, many things, all at once. 
+I began to see my body like an iPad or a car. 
+I would drive it and demand things from it. 
+It had no limits. It was invincible. 
+It was to be conquered and mastered like the Earth herself. 
+I didn't heed it; no, I organized it and I directed it. 
+I didn't have patience for my body; I snapped it into shape. 
+I was greedy. 
+I took more than my body had to offer. 
+If I was tired, I drank more espressos. 
+If I was afraid, I went to more dangerous places. 
+Oh sure, sure, I had moments of appreciation of my body, the way an abusive parent can sometimes have a moment of kindness. 
+My father was really kind to me on my 16th birthday, for example. 
+I heard people murmur from time to time that I should love my body, so I learned how to do this. 
+I was a vegetarian, I was sober, I didn't smoke. 
+But all that was just a more sophisticated way to manipulate my body — a further disassociation, like planting a vegetable field on a freeway. 
+As a result of me talking so much about my vagina, many women started to tell me about theirs — their stories about their bodies. 
+Actually, these stories compelled me around the world, and I've been to over 60 countries. 
+I heard thousands of stories, and I have to tell you, there was always this moment where the women shared with me that particular moment when she separated from her body — when she left home. 
+I heard about women being molested in their beds, flogged in their burqas, left for dead in parking lots, acid burned in their kitchens. 
+Some women became quiet and disappeared. 
+Other women became mad, driven machines like me. 
+In the middle of my traveling, I turned 40 and I began to hate my body, which was actually progress, because at least my body existed enough to hate it. 
+Well my stomach — it was my stomach I hated. 
+It was proof that I had not measured up, that I was old and not fabulous and not perfect or able to fit into the predetermined corporate image in shape. 
+My stomach was proof that I had failed, that it had failed me, that it was broken. 
+My life became about getting rid of it and obsessing about getting rid of it. 
+In fact, it became so extreme I wrote a play about it. 
+But the more I talked about it, the more objectified and fragmented my body became. 
+It became entertainment; it became a new kind of commodity, something I was selling. 
+Then I went somewhere else. 
+I went outside what I thought I knew. 
+I went to the Democratic Republic of Congo. 
+And I heard stories that shattered all the other stories. I heard stories 
+that got inside my body. 
+I heard about a little girl who couldn't stop peeing on herself because so many grown soldiers had shoved themselves inside her. 
+I heard an 80-year-old woman whose legs were broken and pulled out of her sockets and twisted up on her head as the soldiers raped her like that. 
+There are thousands of these stories, and many of the women had holes in their bodies — holes, fistula — that were the violation of war — holes in the fabric of their souls. 
+These stories saturated my cells and nerves, and to be honest, I stopped sleeping for three years. 
+All the stories began to bleed together. 
+The raping of the Earth, the pillaging of minerals, the destruction of vaginas — none of these were separate anymore from each other or me. 
+Militias were raping six-month-old babies so that countries far away could get access to gold and coltan for their iPhones and computers. 
+My body had not only become a driven machine, but it was responsible now for destroying other women's bodies in its mad quest to make more machines to support the speed and efficiency of my machine. 
+Then I got cancer — or I found out I had cancer. 
+It arrived like a speeding bird smashing into a windowpane. 
+Suddenly, I had a body, a body that was pricked and poked and punctured, a body that was cut wide open, a body that had organs removed and transported and rearranged and reconstructed, a body that was scanned and had tubes shoved down it, a body that was burning from chemicals. 
+Cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection. 
+I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was the crisis in the world, and it wasn't happening later, it was happening now. 
+Suddenly, my cancer was a cancer that was everywhere, the cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live down the streets from chemical plants — and they're usually poor — the cancer inside the coal miner's lungs, the cancer of stress for not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma, the cancer in caged chickens and polluted fish, the cancer in women's uteruses from being raped, the cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness. 
+In his new and visionary book, "New Self, New World," the writer Philip Shepherd says, "" If you are divided from your body, you are also divided from the body of the world, which then appears to be other than you or separate from you, rather than the living continuum to which you belong. "" Before cancer, the world was something other. 
+It was as if I was living in a stagnant pool and cancer dynamited the boulder that was separating me from the larger sea. 
+Now I am swimming in it. 
+Now I lay down in the grass and I rub my body in it, and I love the mud on my legs and feet. 
+Now I make a daily pilgrimage to visit a particular weeping willow by the Seine, and I hunger for the green fields in the bush outside Bukavu. 
+And when it rains hard rain, I scream and I run in circles. 
+I know that everything is connected, and the scar that runs the length of my torso is the markings of the earthquake. 
+And I am there with the three million in the streets of Port-au-Prince. 
+And the fire that burned in me on day three through six of chemo is the fire that is burning in the forests of the world. 
+I know that the abscess that grew around my wound after the operation, the 16 ounces of puss, is the contaminated Gulf of Mexico, and there were oil-drenched pelicans inside me and dead floating fish. 
+And the catheters they shoved into me without proper medication made me scream out the way the Earth cries out from the drilling. 
+In my second chemo, my mother got very sick and I went to see her. 
+And in the name of connectedness, the only thing she wanted before she died was to be brought home by her beloved Gulf of Mexico. 
+So we brought her home, and I prayed that the oil wouldn't wash up on her beach before she died. 
+And gratefully, it didn't. 
+And she died quietly in her favorite place. 
+And a few weeks later, I was in New Orleans, and this beautiful, spiritual friend told me she wanted to do a healing for me. 
+And I was honored. 
+And I went to her house, and it was morning, and the morning New Orleans sun was filtering through the curtains. 
+And my friend was preparing this big bowl, and I said, "" What is it? "" And she said, "" It's for you. 
+The flowers make it beautiful, and the honey makes it sweet. "" And I said, "" But what's the water part? "" And in the name of connectedness, she said, "" Oh, it's the Gulf of Mexico. "" And I said, "" Of course it is. "" And the other women arrived and they sat in a circle, and Michaela bathed my head with the sacred water. 
+And she sang — I mean her whole body sang. 
+And the other women sang and they prayed for me and my mother. 
+And as the warm Gulf washed over my naked head, I realized that it held the best and the worst of us. 
+It was the greed and recklessness that led to the drilling explosion. 
+It was all the lies that got told before and after. 
+It was the honey in the water that made it sweet, it was the oil that made it sick. 
+It was my head that was bald — and comfortable now without a hat. 
+It was my whole self melting into Michaela's lap. 
+It was the tears that were indistinguishable from the Gulf that were falling down my cheek. 
+It was finally being in my body. 
+It was the sorrow that's taken so long. 
+It was finding my place and the huge responsibility that comes with connection. 
+It was the continuing devastating war in the Congo and the indifference of the world. 
+It was the Congolese women who are now rising up. 
+It was my mother leaving, just at the moment that I was being born. 
+It was the realization that I had come very close to dying — in the same way that the Earth, our mother, is barely holding on, in the same way that 75 percent of the planet are hardly scraping by, in the same way that there is a recipe for survival. 
+What I learned is it has to do with attention and resources that everybody deserves. 
+It was advocating friends and a doting sister. 
+It was wise doctors and advanced medicine and surgeons who knew what to do with their hands. 
+It was underpaid and really loving nurses. 
+It was magic healers and aromatic oils. 
+It was people who came with spells and rituals. 
+It was having a vision of the future and something to fight for, because I know this struggle isn't my own. 
+It was a million prayers. 
+It was a thousand hallelujahs and a million oms. 
+It was a lot of anger, insane humor, a lot of attention, outrage. 
+It was energy, love and joy. 
+It was all these things. It was all these things. It was all these things 
+in the water, in the world, in my body. (Applause) 
+
+Today I'm going to talk about work. 
+And the question I want to ask and answer is this: "Why do we work?" 
+Why do we drag ourselves out of bed every morning instead of living our lives just filled with bouncing from one TED-like adventure to another? 
+(Laughter) You may be asking yourselves that very question. 
+Now, I know of course, we have to make a living, but nobody in this room thinks that that's the answer to the question, "Why do we work?" 
+For folks in this room, the work we do is challenging, it's engaging, it's stimulating, it's meaningful. 
+And if we're lucky, it might even be important. 
+So, we wouldn't work if we didn't get paid, but that's not why we do what we do. 
+And in general, I think we think that material rewards are a pretty bad reason for doing the work that we do. 
+When we say of somebody that he's "" in it for the money, "" we are not just being descriptive. 
+(Laughter) Now, I think this is totally obvious, but the very obviousness of it raises what is for me an incredibly profound question. 
+Why, if this is so obvious, why is it that for the overwhelming majority of people on the planet, the work they do has none of the characteristics that get us up and out of bed and off to the office every morning? 
+How is it that we allow the majority of people on the planet to do work that is monotonous, meaningless and soul-deadening? 
+Why is it that as capitalism developed, it created a mode of production, of goods and services, in which all the nonmaterial satisfactions that might come from work were eliminated? 
+Workers who do this kind of work, whether they do it in factories, in call centers, or in fulfillment warehouses, do it for pay. 
+There is certainly no other earthly reason to do what they do except for pay. 
+So the question is, "" Why? "" And here's the answer: the answer is technology. 
+Now, I know, I know — yeah, yeah, yeah, technology, automation screws people, blah blah — that's not what I mean. 
+I'm not talking about the kind of technology that has enveloped our lives, and that people come to TED to hear about. 
+I'm not talking about the technology of things, profound though that is. 
+I'm talking about another technology. 
+I'm talking about the technology of ideas. 
+I call it, "" idea technology "" — how clever of me. 
+(Laughter) In addition to creating things, science creates ideas. 
+Science creates ways of understanding. 
+And in the social sciences, the ways of understanding that get created are ways of understanding ourselves. 
+And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act. 
+If you think your poverty is God's will, you pray. 
+If you think your poverty is the result of your own inadequacy, you shrink into despair. 
+And if you think your poverty is the result of oppression and domination, then you rise up in revolt. 
+Whether your response to poverty is resignation or revolution, depends on how you understand the sources of your poverty. 
+This is the role that ideas play in shaping us as human beings, and this is why idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us. 
+And there's something special about idea technology, that makes it different from the technology of things. 
+With things, if the technology sucks, it just vanishes, right? 
+Bad technology disappears. 
+With ideas — false ideas about human beings will not go away if people believe that they're true. 
+Because if people believe that they're true, they create ways of living and institutions that are consistent with these very false ideas. 
+And that's how the industrial revolution created a factory system in which there was really nothing you could possibly get out of your day's work, except for the pay at the end of the day. 
+Because the father — one of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith — was convinced that human beings were by their very natures lazy, and wouldn't do anything unless you made it worth their while, and the way you made it worth their while was by incentivizing, by giving them rewards. 
+That was the only reason anyone ever did anything. 
+So we created a factory system consistent with that false view of human nature. 
+But once that system of production was in place, there was really no other way for people to operate, except in a way that was consistent with Adam Smith's vision. 
+So the work example is merely an example of how false ideas can create a circumstance that ends up making them true. 
+It is not true that you "" just can't get good help anymore. "" It is true that you "" can't get good help anymore "" when you give people work to do that is demeaning and soulless. 
+And interestingly enough, Adam Smith — the same guy who gave us this incredible invention of mass production, and division of labor — understood this. 
+He said, of people who worked in assembly lines, of men who worked in assembly lines, he says: "He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become." 
+Now, notice the word here is "" become. "" "He generally becomes as stupid as it is possible for a human being to become." 
+Whether he intended it or not, what Adam Smith was telling us there, is that the very shape of the institution within which people work creates people who are fitted to the demands of that institution and deprives people of the opportunity to derive the kinds of satisfactions from their work that we take for granted. 
+The thing about science — natural science — is that we can spin fantastic theories about the cosmos, and have complete confidence that the cosmos is completely indifferent to our theories. 
+It's going to work the same damn way no matter what theories we have about the cosmos. 
+But we do have to worry about the theories we have of human nature, because human nature will be changed by the theories we have that are designed to explain and help us understand human beings. 
+The distinguished anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, said, years ago, that human beings are the "" unfinished animals. "" And what he meant by that was that it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live. 
+That human nature, that is to say our human nature, is much more created than it is discovered. 
+We design human nature by designing the institutions within which people live and work. 
+And so you people — pretty much the closest I ever get to being with masters of the universe — you people should be asking yourself a question, as you go back home to run your organizations. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thanks. 
+
+Do we live in a borderless world? 
+Before you answer that, have a look at this map. 
+Contemporary political map shows that we have over 200 countries in the world today. 
+That's probably more than at any time in centuries. 
+Now, many of you will object. 
+For you this would be a more appropriate map. 
+You could call it TEDistan. 
+In TEDistan, there are no borders, just connected spaces and unconnected spaces. 
+Most of you probably reside in one of the 40 dots on this screen, of the many more that represent 90 percent of the world economy. 
+But let's talk about the 90 percent of the world population that will never leave the place in which they were born. 
+For them, nations, countries, boundaries, borders still matter a great deal, and often violently. 
+Now here at TED, we're solving some of the great riddles of science and mysteries of the universe. 
+Well here is a fundamental problem we have not solved: our basic political geography. 
+How do we distribute ourselves around the world? 
+Now this is important, because border conflicts justify so much of the world's military-industrial complex. 
+So I think we need a deeper understanding of how people, money, power, religion, culture, technology interact to change the map of the world. 
+And we can try to anticipate those changes, and shape them in a more constructive direction. 
+So we're going to look at some maps of the past, the present and some maps you haven't seen in order to get a sense of where things are going. 
+Let's start with the world of 1945. 
+1945 there were just 100 countries in the world. 
+After World War II, Europe was devastated, but still held large overseas colonies: French West Africa, British East Africa, South Asia, and so forth. 
+Then over the late '40s,' 50s, '60s,' 70s and '80s, waves of decolonization took place. 
+Over 50 new countries were born. 
+You can see that Africa has been fragmented. 
+India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South East Asian nations created. 
+Then came the end of the Cold War. 
+The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. 
+You had the creation of new states in Eastern Europe, the former Yugoslav republics and the Balkans, and the 'stans of central Asia. 
+Today we have 200 countries in the world. 
+The entire planet is covered by sovereign, independent nation-states. 
+Does that mean that someone's gain has to be someone else's loss? 
+Let's zoom in on one of the most strategic areas of the world, Eastern Eurasia. 
+As you can see on this map, Russia is still the largest country in the world. 
+And as you know, China is the most populous. 
+And they share a lengthy land border. 
+What you don't see on this map is that most of Russia's 150 million people are concentrated in its western provinces and areas that are close to Europe. 
+In fact, the World Bank predicts that Russia's population is declining towards about 120 million people And there is another thing that you don't see on this map. 
+Stalin, Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders forced Russians out to the far east to be in gulags, labor camps, nuclear cities, whatever the case was. 
+But as oil prices rose, Russian governments have invested in infrastructure to unite the country, east and west. 
+But nothing has more perversely impacted Russia's demographic distribution, because the people in the east, who never wanted to be there anyway, have gotten on those trains and roads and gone back to the west. 
+As a result, in the Russian far east today, which is twice the size of India, you have exactly six million Russians. 
+So let's get a sense of what is happening in this part of the world. 
+We can start with Mongolia, or as some call it, Mine-golia. 
+Because in Mine-golia, Chinese firms operate and own most of the mines — copper, zinc, gold — and they truck the resources south and east into mainland China. 
+Colonies were once conquered. Today countries are bought. 
+Siberia most of you probably think of as a cold, desolate, unlivable place. 
+But in fact, with global warming and rising temperatures, all of a sudden you have vast wheat fields and agribusiness, and grain being produced in Siberia. 
+But who is it going to feed? 
+Well, just on the other side of the Amo River, in the Heilongjiang and Harbin provinces of China, you have over 100 million people. 
+That's larger than the entire population of Russia. 
+Every single year, for at least a decade or more, [60,000] of them have been voting with their feet, crossing, moving north and inhabiting this desolate terrain. 
+Now maybe this is what the map of the region might look like in 10 to 20 years. 
+This is the map of the Yuan Dynasty, led by Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. 
+So history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme. 
+Again, globalization Chinese style. 
+Because globalization opens up all kinds of ways for us to undermine and change the way we think about political geography. 
+So, the history of East Asia in fact, people don't think about nations and borders. 
+They think more in terms of empires and hierarchies, usually Chinese or Japanese. 
+Well it's China's turn again. 
+So let's look at how China is re-establishing that hierarchy in the far East. 
+It starts with the global hubs. 
+Remember the 40 dots on the nighttime map that show the hubs of the global economy? 
+East Asia today has more of those global hubs than any other region in the world. 
+Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sidney. 
+These are the filters and funnels of global capital. 
+Trillions of dollars a year are being brought into the region, so much of it being invested into China. 
+These vectors and arrows represent ever stronger trade relationships that China has with every country in the region. 
+Specifically, it targets Japan and Korea and Australia, countries that are strong allies of the United States. 
+And now many of you have been reading in the news how people are looking to China to lead the rebound, the economic rebound, not just in Asia, but potentially for the world. 
+The Asian free trade zone, almost free trade zone, that's emerging now has a greater trade volume than trade across the Pacific. 
+So China is becoming the anchor of the economy in the region. 
+Another pillar of this strategy is diplomacy. 
+China has signed military agreements with many countries in the region. 
+It has become the hub of diplomatic institutions such as the East Asian Community. 
+Some of these organizations don't even have the United States as a member. 
+There is a treaty of nonaggression between countries, such that if there were a conflict between China and the United States, most countries vow to just sit it out, including American allies like Korea and Australia. 
+Another pillar of the strategy, like Russia, is demographic. 
+China exports business people, nannies, students, teachers to teach Chinese around the region, to intermarry and to occupy ever greater commanding heights of the economies. 
+Already ethnic Chinese people in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are the real key factors and drivers in the economies there. 
+Chinese pride is resurgent in the region as a result. 
+Singapore, for example, used to ban Chinese language education. 
+Now it encourages it. 
+If you add it all up what do you get? 
+Well, if you remember before World War II, Japan had a vision for a greater Japanese co-prosperity sphere. 
+What's emerging today is what you might call a greater Chinese co-prosperity sphere. 
+So no matter what the lines on the map tell you in terms of nations and borders, what you really have emerging in the far east are national cultures, but in a much more fluid, imperial zone. 
+All of this is happening without firing a shot. 
+Let's start with Iraq. 
+Six years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the country still exists more on a map than it does in reality. 
+Oil used to be one of the forces holding Iraq together; now it is the most significant cause of the country's disintegration. 
+The Kurds for 3,000 years have been waging a struggle for independence, and now is their chance to finally have it. 
+These are pipeline routes, which emerge from Kurdistan, which is an oil-rich region. 
+And today, if you go to Kurdistan, you'll see that Kurdish Peshmerga guerillas are squaring off against the Sunni Iraqi army. 
+Is it really a border on the map? 
+No. It's the pipelines. 
+If the Kurds can control their pipelines, they can set the terms of their own statehood. 
+Iraq will still be the second largest oil producer in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. 
+Now remember Kurdistan is landlocked. 
+In order to profit from its oil it has to export it through Turkey or Syria, and other countries, and Iraq itself. 
+That is, of course, in Palestine. 
+Palestine is something of a cartographic anomaly because it's two parts Palestinian, one part Israel. 
+30 years of rose garden diplomacy have not delivered us peace in this conflict. 
+What might? I believe that what might solve the problem is infrastructure. 
+Today donors are spending billions of dollars on this. 
+These two arrows are an arc, an arc of commuter railroads and other infrastructure that link the West Bank and Gaza. 
+If Gaza can have a functioning port and be linked to the West Bank, you can have a viable Palestinian state, Palestinian economy. 
+The lesson from Kurdistan and from Palestine is that independence alone, without infrastructure, is futile. 
+Now what might this entire region look like if in fact we focus on other lines on the map besides borders, when the insecurities might abate? 
+The last time that was the case was actually a century ago, during the Ottoman Empire. 
+This is the Hejaz Railway. 
+It even had an offshoot running to Haifa in what is today Israel, on the Mediterranean Sea. 
+If we were to focus on reconstructing these curvy lines on the map, infrastructure, that cross the straight lines, the borders, I believe the Middle East would be a far more peaceful region. 
+Now let's look at another part of the world, the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, the 'stans. 
+These countries' borders originate from Stalin's decrees. 
+He wanted ethnicities to mingle in ways that would allow him to divide and rule. 
+Now I know some of you may be thinking, "" Oil, oil, oil. 
+Why is it all he's talking about is oil? "" Well, there is a big difference in the way we used to talk about oil and the way we're talking about it now. 
+Here are just some of the pipeline projections and possibilities and scenarios and routes that are being mapped out for the next several decades. 
+For a number of countries in this part of the world, having pipelines is the ticket to becoming part of the global economy and for having some meaning besides the borders that they are not loyal to themselves. 
+Azerbaijan was a forgotten corner of the Caucuses, but now with the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline into Turkey, it has rebranded itself as the frontier of the west. 
+Then there is Turkmenistan, which most people think of as a frozen basket case. 
+But now it's contributing gas across the Caspian Sea to provide for Europe, and even a potentially Turkmen- Afghan-Pakistan-India pipeline as well. 
+Then there is Kazakhstan, which didn't even have a name before. 
+Today most people recognize Kazakhstan as an emerging geopolitical player. Why? 
+Because it has shrewdly designed pipelines to flow across the Caspian, north through Russia, and even east to China. 
+More pipelines means more silk roads, instead of the Great Game. 
+Silk road connotes independence and mutual trust. 
+Now let's look at the only part of the world that really has brought down its borders, and how that has enhanced its strength. 
+The European Union began as just the coal and steel community of six countries, and their main purpose was really to keep the rehabilitation of Germany to happen in a peaceful way. 
+But then eventually it grew into 12 countries, and those are the 12 stars on the European flag. 
+On average, the E.U. has grown by one country per year since the end of the Cold War. 
+In 2004, 15 new countries joined the E.U. 
+and now you have what most people consider a zone of peace spanning 27 countries and 450 million people. 
+So what is next? What is the future of the European Union? 
+Well in light blue, you see the zones or the regions that are at least two-thirds or more dependent on the European Union for trade and investment. 
+Even if these regions aren't part of the E.U., they are becoming part of its sphere of influence. 
+But you can get on a German ICE train and make it almost to Albania. 
+In Bosnia you use the Euro currency already, and that's the only currency they're probably ever going to have. 
+So, looking at other parts of Europe's periphery, such as North Africa. 
+On average, every year or two, a new oil or gas pipeline opens up under the Mediterranean, connecting North Africa to Europe. 
+That not only helps Europe diminish its reliance on Russia for energy, but if you travel to North Africa today, you'll hear more and more people saying that they don't really think of their region as the Middle East. 
+So in other words, I believe that President Sarkozy of France is right when he talks about a Mediterranean union. 
+I mentioned Azerbaijan before. 
+That corridor of Turkey and the Caucasus has become the conduit for 20 percent of Europe's energy supply. 
+So does Turkey really have to be a member of the European Union? 
+I don't think it does. I think it's already part of a Euro-Turkish superpower. 
+So what's next? Where are we going to see borders change and new countries born? 
+Well, South Central Asia, South West Asia is a very good place to start. 
+Eight years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan there is still a tremendous amount of instability. 
+Pakistan and Afghanistan are still so fragile that neither of them have dealt constructively with the problem of Pashtun nationalism. 
+This is the flag that flies in the minds of 20 million Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Afghan and Pakistan border. 
+Let's not neglect the insurgency just to the south, Balochistan. Two weeks ago, Balochi rebels attacked a Pakistani military garrison, and this was the flag that they raised over it. 
+The post-colonial entropy that is happening around the world is accelerating, and I expect more such changes to occur in the map as the states fragment. 
+Of course, we can't forget Africa. 
+53 countries, and by far the most number of suspiciously straight lines on the map. 
+If we were to look at all of Africa we could most certainly acknowledge far more, tribal divisions and so forth. 
+It has three ongoing civil wars, the genocide in Darfur, which you all know about, the civil war in the east of the country, and south Sudan. 
+There is a great race on for energy resources under the Arctic seabed. 
+Who will win? Canada? Russia? The United States? 
+So Denmark is about to get a whole lot smaller. 
+Geopolitics is a very unsentimental discipline. 
+And like our relationship with the ecosystem we're always searching for equilibrium in how we divide ourselves across the planet. 
+But I believe that the inertia of the existing borders that we have today is far worse and far more violent. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This was in an area called Wellawatta, a prime residential area in Colombo. 
+We stood on the railroad tracks that ran between my friend's house and the beach. 
+The tracks are elevated about eight feet from the waterline normally, but at that point the water had receded to a level three or four feet below normal. 
+I'd never seen the reef here before. 
+There were fish caught in rock pools left behind by the receding water. 
+Some children jumped down and ran to the rock pools with bags. 
+They were trying to catch fish. 
+No one realized that this was a very bad idea. 
+The people on the tracks just continued to watch them. 
+I turned around to check on my friend's house. 
+Then someone on the tracks screamed. 
+Before I could turn around, everyone on the tracks was screaming and running. 
+The water had started coming back. It was foaming over the reef. 
+The children managed to run back onto the tracks. 
+No one was lost there. But the water continued to climb. 
+In about two minutes, it had reached the level of the railroad tracks and was coming over it. We had run about 100 meters by this time. 
+It continued to rise. 
+I saw an old man standing at his gate, knee-deep in water, refusing to move. 
+He said he'd lived his whole life there by the beach, and that he would rather die there than run. 
+A boy broke away from his mother to run back into his house to get his dog, who was apparently afraid. 
+An old lady, crying, was carried out of her house and up the road by her son. 
+The slum built on the railroad reservation between the sea and the railroad tracks was completely swept away. 
+Since this was a high-risk location, the police had warned the residents, and no one was there when the water rose. 
+But they had not had any time to evacuate any belongings. 
+For hours afterwards, the sea was strewn with bits of wood for miles around — all of this was from the houses in the slum. 
+When the waters subsided, it was as if it had never existed. 
+This may seem hard to believe — unless you've been reading lots and lots of news reports — but in many places, after the tsunami, villagers were still terrified. 
+When what was a tranquil sea swallows up people, homes and long-tail boats — mercilessly, without warning — and no one can tell you anything reliable about whether another one is coming, I'm not sure you'd want to calm down either. 
+One of the scariest things about the tsunami that I've not seen mentioned is the complete lack of information. 
+This may seem minor, but it is terrifying to hear rumor after rumor after rumor that another tidal wave, bigger than the last, will be coming at exactly 1 p.m., or perhaps tonight, or perhaps... 
+You don't even know if it is safe to go back down to the water, to catch a boat to the hospital. 
+We think that Phi Phi hospital was destroyed. 
+We think this boat is going to Phuket hospital, but if it's too dangerous to land at its pier, then perhaps it will go to Krabi instead, which is more protected. 
+We don't think another wave is coming right away. 
+At the Phi Phi Hill Resort, I was tucked into the corner furthest away from the television, but I strained to listen for information. 
+They reported that there was an 8.5 magnitude earthquake in Sumatra, which triggered the massive tsunami. 
+Having this news was comforting in some small way to understand what had just happened to us. 
+However, the report focused on what had already occurred and offered no information on what to expect now. 
+In general, everything was merely hearsay and rumor, and not a single person I spoke to for over 36 hours knew anything with any certainty. 
+Those were two accounts of the Asian tsunami from two Internet blogs that essentially sprang up after it occurred. 
+I'm now going to show you two video segments from the tsunami that also were shown on blogs. 
+I should warn you, they're pretty powerful. 
+One from Thailand, and the second one from Phuket as well. 
+(Screaming) Voice 1: It's coming in. It's coming again. 
+Voice 2: It's coming again? 
+Voice 1: Yeah. It's coming again. 
+Voice 2: Come get inside here. 
+Voice 1: It's coming again. Voice 2: New wave? 
+Voice 1: It's coming again. New wave! 
+[Unclear] (Screaming) They called me out here. 
+James Surowiecki: Phew. Those were both on this site: waveofdestruction.org. 
+In the world of blogs, there's going to be before the tsunami and after the tsunami, because one of the things that happened in the wake of the tsunami was that, although initially — that is, in that first day — there was actually a kind of dearth of live reporting, there was a dearth of live video and some people complained about this. 
+They said, "" The blogsters let us down. "" What became very clear was that, within a few days, the outpouring of information was immense, and we got a complete and powerful picture of what had happened in a way that we never had been able to get before. 
+And what you had was a group of essentially unorganized, unconnected writers, video bloggers, etc., who were able to come up with a collective portrait of a disaster that gave us a much better sense of what it was like to actually be there than the mainstream media could give us. 
+And so in some ways the tsunami can be seen as a sort of seminal moment, a moment in which the blogosphere came, to a certain degree, of age. 
+Now, I'm going to move now from this kind of — the sublime in the traditional sense of the word, that is to say, awe-inspiring, terrifying — to the somewhat more mundane. 
+Because when we think about blogs, I think for most of us who are concerned about them, we're primarily concerned with things like politics, technology, etc. 
+And I want to ask three questions in this talk, in the 10 minutes that remain, about the blogosphere. 
+The first one is, What does it tell us about our ideas, about what motivates people to do things? 
+The second is, Do blogs genuinely have the possibility of accessing a kind of collective intelligence that has previously remained, for the most part, untapped? 
+And then the third part is, What are the potential problems, or the dark side of blogs as we know them? 
+OK, the first question: What do they tell us about why people do things? 
+One of the fascinating things about the blogosphere specifically, and, of course, the Internet more generally — and it's going to seem like a very obvious point, but I think it is an important one to think about — is that the people who are generating these enormous reams of content every day, who are spending enormous amounts of time organizing, linking, commenting on the substance of the Internet, are doing so primarily for free. 
+They are not getting paid for it in any way other than in the attention and, to some extent, the reputational capital that they gain from doing a good job. 
+And this is — at least, to a traditional economist — somewhat remarkable, because the traditional account of economic man would say that, basically, you do things for a concrete reward, primarily financial. 
+But instead, what we're finding on the Internet — and one of the great geniuses of it — is that people have found a way to work together without any money involved at all. 
+They have come up with, in a sense, a different method for organizing activity. 
+The Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler, in an essay called "" Coase's Penguin, "" talks about this open-source model, which we're familiar with from Linux, as being potentially applicable in a whole host of situations. 
+And, you know, if you think about this with the tsunami, what you have is essentially a kind of an army of local journalists, who are producing enormous amounts of material for no reason other than to tell their stories. 
+That's a very powerful idea, and it's a very powerful reality. 
+And it's one that offers really interesting possibilities for organizing a whole host of activities down the road. 
+So, I think the first thing that the blogosphere tells us is that we need to expand our idea of what counts as rational, and we need to expand our simple equation of value equals money, or, you have to pay for it to be good, but that in fact you can end up with collectively really brilliant products without any money at all changing hands. 
+There are a few bloggers — somewhere maybe around 20, now — who do, in fact, make some kind of money, and a few who are actually trying to make a full-time living out of it, but the vast majority of them are doing it because they love it or they love the attention, or whatever it is. 
+So, Howard Rheingold has written a lot about this and, I think, is writing about this more, but this notion of voluntary cooperation is an incredibly powerful one, and one worth thinking about. 
+The second question is, What does the blogosphere actually do for us, in terms of accessing collective intelligence? 
+You know, as Chris mentioned, I wrote a book called "" The Wisdom of Crowds. "" And the premise of "" The Wisdom of Crowds "" is that, under the right conditions, groups can be remarkably intelligent. 
+And they can actually often be smarter than even the smartest person within them. 
+The simplest example of this is if you ask a group of people to do something like guess how many jellybeans are in a jar. 
+If I had a jar of jellybeans and I asked you all to guess how many jellybeans were in that jar, your average guess would be remarkably good. 
+It would be somewhere probably within three and five percent of the number of beans in the jar, and it would be better than 90 to 95 percent of you. 
+There may be one or two of you who are brilliant jelly bean guessers, but for the most part the group's guess would be better than just about all of you. 
+And what's fascinating is that you can see this phenomenon at work in many more complicated situations. 
+For instance, if you look at the odds on horses at a racetrack, they predict almost perfectly how likely a horse is to win. 
+In a sense, the group of betters at the racetrack is forecasting the future, in probabilistic terms. 
+You know, if you think about something like Google, which essentially is relying on the collective intelligence of the Web to seek out those sites that have the most valuable information — we know that Google does an exceptionally good job of doing that, and it does that because, collectively, this disorganized thing we call the "" World Wide Web "" actually has a remarkable order, or a remarkable intelligence in it. 
+And this, I think, is one of the real promises of the blogosphere. 
+Dan Gillmor — whose book "" We the Media "" is included in the gift pack — has talked about it as saying that, as a writer, he's recognized that his readers know more than he does. 
+And this is a very challenging idea. It's a very challenging idea to mainstream media. It's a very challenging idea to anyone who has invested an enormous amount of time and expertise, and who has a lot of energy invested in the notion that he or she knows better than everyone else. 
+But what the blogosphere offers is the possibility of getting at the kind of collective, distributive intelligence that is out there, and that we know is available to us if we can just figure out a way of accessing it. 
+Each blog post, each blog commentary may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we're looking for, but collectively the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, more often than not is going to give you a very interesting and enormously valuable picture of what's going on. 
+So, that's the positive side of it. 
+That's the positive side of what is sometimes called participatory journalism or citizen journalism, etc. — that, in fact, we are giving people who have never been able to talk before a voice, and we're able to access information that has always been there but has essentially gone untapped. 
+But there is a dark side to this, and that's what I want to spend the last part of my talk on. 
+One of the things that happens if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, and you spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet, is that it is very easy to fall in love with the Internet. 
+It is very easy to fall in love with the decentralized, bottom-up structure of the Internet. 
+It is very easy to think that networks are necessarily good things — that being linked from one place to another, that being tightly linked in a group, is a very good thing. 
+And much of the time it is. 
+But there's also a downside to this — a kind of dark side, in fact — and that is that the more tightly linked we've become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. 
+One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that, once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. 
+That's one of the things that defines what a network is. 
+A network is not just the product of its component parts. 
+It is something more than that. 
+It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon. 
+Now, this has all these benefits: it's very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information; it gives you access to a whole host of people; it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. 
+But the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. 
+This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds, or the paradox of collective intelligence, that what it requires is actually a form of independent thinking. 
+And networks make it harder for people to do that, because they drive attention to the things that the network values. 
+So, one of the phenomena that's very clear in the blogosphere is that once a meme, once an idea gets going, it is very easy for people to just sort of pile on, because other people have, say, a link. 
+People have linked to it, and so other people in turn link to it, etc., etc. 
+And that phenomenon of piling on the existing links is one that is characteristic of the blogosphere, particularly of the political blogosphere, and it is one that essentially throws off this beautiful, decentralized, bottom-up intelligence that blogs can manifest in the right conditions. 
+The metaphor that I like to use is the metaphor of the circular mill. 
+A lot of people talk about ants. 
+You know, this is a conference inspired by nature. 
+When we talk about bottom-up, decentralized phenomena, the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions. 
+So, the ant colony is a great model: you have all these little parts that collectively add up to a great thing. 
+But we know that occasionally ants go astray, and what happens is that, if army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule — just do what the ant in front of you does. 
+And what happens is that the ants eventually end up in a circle. 
+And there's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days, and the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died. 
+And that, I think, is a sort of thing to watch out for. 
+That's the thing we have to fear — is that we're just going to keep marching around and around until we die. 
+Now, I want to connect this back, though, to the tsunami, because one of the great things about the tsunami — in terms of the blogosphere's coverage, not in terms of the tsunami itself — is that it really did represent a genuine bottom-up phenomenon. 
+You saw sites that had never existed before getting huge amounts of traffic. 
+You saw people being able to offer up their independent points of view in a way that they hadn't before. 
+There, you really did see the intelligence of the Web manifest itself. 
+So, that's the upside. The circular mill is the downside. 
+And I think that the former is what we really need to strive for. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+Democracy. 
+In the West, we make a colossal mistake taking it for granted. 
+We see democracy not as the most fragile of flowers that it really is, but we see it as part of our society's furniture. 
+We tend to think of it as an intransigent given. 
+We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy. 
+It doesn't. 
+Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and his great imitators in Beijing have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it is perfectly possible to have a flourishing capitalism, spectacular growth, while politics remains democracy-free. 
+Indeed, democracy is receding in our neck of the woods, here in Europe. 
+Earlier this year, while I was representing Greece — the newly elected Greek government — in the Eurogroup as its Finance Minister, I was told in no uncertain terms that our nation's democratic process — our elections — could not be allowed to interfere with economic policies that were being implemented in Greece. 
+At that moment, I felt that there could be no greater vindication of Lee Kuan Yew, or the Chinese Communist Party, indeed of some recalcitrant friends of mine who kept telling me that democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything. 
+Tonight, here, I want to present to you an economic case for an authentic democracy. 
+I want to ask you to join me in believing again that Lee Kuan Yew, the Chinese Communist Party and indeed the Eurogroup are wrong in believing that we can dispense with democracy — that we need an authentic, boisterous democracy. 
+And without democracy, our societies will be nastier, our future bleak and our great, new technologies wasted. 
+Speaking of waste, allow me to point out an interesting paradox that is threatening our economies as we speak. 
+I call it the twin peaks paradox. 
+One peak you understand — you know it, you recognize it — is the mountain of debts that has been casting a long shadow over the United States, Europe, the whole world. 
+We all recognize the mountain of debts. 
+But few people discern its twin. 
+A mountain of idle cash belonging to rich savers and to corporations, too terrified to invest it into the productive activities that can generate the incomes from which you can extinguish the mountain of debts and which can produce all those things that humanity desperately needs, like green energy. 
+Now let me give you two numbers. 
+Over the last three months, in the United States, in Britain and in the Eurozone, we have invested, collectively, 3.4 trillion dollars on all the wealth-producing goods — things like industrial plants, machinery, office blocks, schools, roads, railways, machinery, and so on and so forth. 
+$3.4 trillion sounds like a lot of money until you compare it to the $5.1 trillion that has been slushing around in the same countries, in our financial institutions, doing absolutely nothing during the same period except inflating stock exchanges and bidding up house prices. 
+So a mountain of debt and a mountain of idle cash form twin peaks, failing to cancel each other out through the normal operation of the markets. 
+The result is stagnant wages, more than a quarter of 25- to 54-year-olds in America, in Japan and in Europe out of work. 
+And consequently, low aggregate demand, which in a never-ending cycle, reinforces the pessimism of the investors, who, fearing low demand, reproduce it by not investing — exactly like Oedipus' father, who, terrified by the prophecy of the oracle that his son would grow up to kill him, unwittingly engineered the conditions that ensured that Oedipus, his son, would kill him. 
+This is my quarrel with capitalism. 
+Its gross wastefulness, all this idle cash, should be energized to improve lives, to develop human talents, and indeed to finance all these technologies, green technologies, which are absolutely essential for saving planet Earth. 
+I believe so, but before we move on, what do we mean by democracy? 
+Aristotle defined democracy as the constitution in which the free and the poor, being in the majority, control government. 
+Now, of course Athenian democracy excluded too many. 
+Women, migrants and, of course, the slaves. 
+But it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of ancient Athenian democracy on the basis of whom it excluded. 
+What was more pertinent, and continues to be so about ancient Athenian democracy, was the inclusion of the working poor, who not only acquired the right to free speech, but more importantly, crucially, they acquired the rights to political judgments that were afforded equal weight in the decision-making concerning matters of state. 
+Now, of course, Athenian democracy didn't last long. 
+Like a candle that burns brightly, it burned out quickly. 
+And indeed, our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens. 
+They have their roots in the Magna Carta, in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, indeed in the American constitution. 
+Whereas Athenian democracy was focusing on the masterless citizen and empowering the working poor, our liberal democracies are founded on the Magna Carta tradition, which was, after all, a charter for masters. 
+And indeed, liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible to separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere, so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere, leaving the economic sphere — the corporate world, if you want — as a democracy-free zone. 
+Now, in our democracies today, this separation of the economic from the political sphere, the moment it started happening, it gave rise to an inexorable, epic struggle between the two, with the economic sphere colonizing the political sphere, eating into its power. 
+Have you wondered why politicians are not what they used to be? 
+It's not because their DNA has degenerated. 
+(Laughter) It is rather because one can be in government today and not in power, because power has migrated from the political to the economic sphere, which is separate. 
+Indeed, I spoke about my quarrel with capitalism. 
+If you think about it, it is a little bit like a population of predators, that are so successful in decimating the prey that they must feed on, that in the end they starve. 
+Similarly, the economic sphere has been colonizing and cannibalizing the political sphere to such an extent that it is undermining itself, causing economic crisis. 
+Corporate power is increasing, political goods are devaluing, inequality is rising, aggregate demand is falling and CEOs of corporations are too scared to invest the cash of their corporations. 
+So the more capitalism succeeds in taking the demos out of democracy, the taller the twin peaks and the greater the waste of human resources and humanity's wealth. 
+Clearly, if this is right, we must reunite the political and economic spheres and better do it with a demos being in control, like in ancient Athens except without the slaves or the exclusion of women and migrants. 
+Now, this is not an original idea. 
+The Marxist left had that idea 100 years ago and it didn't go very well, did it? 
+The lesson that we learned from the Soviet debacle is that only by a miracle will the working poor be reempowered, as they were in ancient Athens, without creating new forms of brutality and waste. 
+But there is a solution: eliminate the working poor. 
+Capitalism's doing it by replacing low-wage workers with automata, androids, robots. 
+The problem is that as long as the economic and the political spheres are separate, automation makes the twin peaks taller, the waste loftier and the social conflicts deeper, including — soon, I believe — in places like China. 
+So we need to reconfigure, we need to reunite the economic and the political spheres, but we'd better do it by democratizing the reunified sphere, lest we end up with a surveillance-mad hyperautocracy that makes The Matrix, the movie, look like a documentary. 
+(Laughter) So the question is not whether capitalism will survive the technological innovations it is spawning. 
+The more interesting question is whether capitalism will be succeeded by something resembling a Matrix dystopia or something much closer to a Star Trek-like society, where machines serve the humans and the humans expend their energies exploring the universe and indulging in long debates about the meaning of life in some ancient, Athenian-like, high tech agora. 
+I think we can afford to be optimistic. 
+But what would it take, what would it look like to have this Star Trek-like utopia, instead of the Matrix-like dystopia? 
+In practical terms, allow me to share just briefly, a couple of examples. 
+At the level of the enterprise, imagine a capital market, where you earn capital as you work, and where your capital follows you from one job to another, from one company to another, and the company — whichever one you happen to work at at that time — is solely owned by those who happen to work in it at that moment. 
+Then all income stems from capital, from profits, and the very concept of wage labor becomes obsolete. 
+No more separation between those who own but do not work in the company and those who work but do not own the company; no more tug-of-war between capital and labor; no great gap between investment and saving; indeed, no towering twin peaks. 
+At the level of the global political economy, imagine for a moment that our national currencies have a free-floating exchange rate, with a universal, global, digital currency, one that is issued by the International Monetary Fund, the G-20, on behalf of all humanity. 
+And imagine further that all international trade is denominated in this currency — let's call it "" the cosmos, "" in units of cosmos — with every government agreeing to be paying into a common fund a sum of cosmos units proportional to the country's trade deficit, or indeed to a country's trade surplus. 
+And imagine that that fund is utilized to invest in green technologies, especially in parts of the world where investment funding is scarce. 
+This is not a new idea. 
+It's what, effectively, John Maynard Keynes proposed in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. 
+The problem is that back then, they didn't have the technology to implement it. 
+Now we do, especially in the context of a reunified political-economic sphere. 
+The world that I am describing to you is simultaneously libertarian, in that it prioritizes empowered individuals, Marxist, since it will have confined to the dustbin of history the division between capital and labor, and Keynesian, global Keynesian. 
+But above all else, it is a world in which we will be able to imagine an authentic democracy. 
+Will such a world dawn? 
+Or shall we descend into a Matrix-like dystopia? 
+The answer lies in the political choice that we shall be making collectively. 
+It is our choice, and we'd better make it democratically. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Yanis... 
+It was you who described yourself in your bios as a libertarian Marxist. 
+What is the relevance of Marx's analysis today? 
+Yanis Varoufakis: Well, if there was any relevance in what I just said, then Marx is relevant. 
+Because the whole point of reunifying the political and economic is — if we don't do it, then technological innovation is going to create such a massive fall in aggregate demand, what Larry Summers refers to as secular stagnation. 
+With this crisis migrating from one part of the world, as it is now, it will destabilize not only our democracies, but even the emerging world that is not that keen on liberal democracy. 
+But so is Hayek, that's why I'm a libertarian Marxist, and so is Keynes, so that's why I'm totally confused. 
+(Applause) YV: If you are not confused, you are not thinking, OK? 
+BG: That's a very, very Greek philosopher kind of thing to say — YV: That was Einstein, actually — BG: During your talk you mentioned Singapore and China, and last night at the speaker dinner, you expressed a pretty strong opinion about how the West looks at China. 
+YV: Well, there's a great degree of hypocrisy. 
+In our liberal democracies, we have a semblance of democracy. 
+It's because we have confined, as I was saying in my talk, democracy to the political sphere, while leaving the one sphere where all the action is — the economic sphere — a completely democracy-free zone. 
+We had an opportunity on the basis of the Greek program — which by the way, was the first program to manifest that denial — to put it right. 
+
+I'm going to tell you about one of the world's largest problems and how it can be solved. 
+I'd like to start with a little experiment. 
+Could you put your hand up if you wear glasses or contact lenses, or you've had laser refractive surgery? 
+Now, unfortunately, there are too many of you for me to do the statistics properly. 
+But it looks like — I'm guessing — that it'll be about 60 percent of the room because that's roughly the fraction of developed world population that have some sort of vision correction. 
+The World Health Organization estimates — well, they make various estimates of the number of people who need glasses — the lowest estimate is 150 million people. 
+They also have an estimate of around a billion. 
+But in fact, I would argue that we've just done an experiment here and now, which shows us that the global need for corrective eyewear is around half of any population. 
+And the problem of poor vision, is actually not just a health problem, it's also an educational problem, and it's an economic problem, and it's a quality of life problem. 
+Glasses are not very expensive. They're quite plentiful. 
+The problem is, there aren't enough eye care professionals in the world to use the model of the delivery of corrective eyewear that we have in the developed world. 
+There are just way too few eye care professionals. 
+So this little slide here shows you an optometrist and the little blue person represents about 10,000 people and that's the ratio in the U.K. 
+This is the ratio of optometrists to people in sub-Saharan Africa. 
+In fact, there are some countries in sub-Saharan Africa where there's one optometrist for eight million of the population. 
+How do you do this? How do you solve this problem? 
+I came up with a solution to this problem, and I came up with a solution based on adaptive optics for this. 
+And the idea is you make eye glasses, and you adjust them yourself and that solves the problem. 
+What I want to do is to show you that one can make a pair of glasses. 
+I shall just show you how you make a pair of glasses. I shall pop this in my pocket. 
+I'm short sighted. I look at the signs at the end, I can hardly see them. 
+So — okay, I can now see that man running out there, and I can see that guy running out there. 
+I've now made prescription eyewear to my prescription. 
+Next step in my process. 
+So, I've now made eye glasses to my prescription. 
+Okay, so I've made these glasses and... 
+Okay, I've made the glasses to my prescription and... 
+... I've just... 
+And I've now made some glasses. That's it. 
+(Applause) Now, these aren't the only pair in the world. 
+In fact, this technology's been evolving. 
+I started working on it in 1985, and it's been evolving very slowly. 
+There are about 30,000 in use now. 
+And they're in fifteen countries. They're spread around the world. 
+And I have a vision, which I'll share with you. 
+I have a global vision for vision. 
+And that vision is to try to get a billion people wearing the glasses they need by the year 2020. 
+To do that — this is an early example of the technology. 
+The technology is being further developed — the cost has to be brought down. 
+This pair, in fact, these currently cost about 19 dollars. 
+But the cost has to be brought right down. 
+It has to be brought down because we're trying to serve populations who live on a dollar a day. 
+How do you solve this problem? 
+You start to get into detail. 
+And on this slide, I'm basically explaining all the problems you have. 
+How do you distribute? How do you work out how to fit the thing? 
+How do you have people realizing that they have a vision problem? 
+How do you deal with the industry? 
+And the answer to that is research. 
+What we've done is to set up the Center for Vision in the Developing World here in the university. 
+If you want to know more, just come have a look at our website. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I tried my first trick, it looked like this: (Laughter) I couldn't even do the simplest trick, but it was very natural for me, because I was not dextrous, and hated all sports. 
+But after one week of practicing, my throws became more like this: A bit better. 
+It took me hours and hours a day to build my skills up to the next level. 
+And I won. 
+I may get many sponsors, a lot of money, tons of interviews, and be on TV! "" I thought. 
+(Laughter) But after coming back to Japan, totally nothing changed in my life. (Laughter) 
+As a result of these efforts, and the help of many others, it happened. 
+I won the World YoYo Contest again in the artistic performance division. 
+(Applause) What I learned from the yo-yo is, if I make enough effort with huge passion, there is no impossible. 
+(Applause) (Water sound) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Applause ends) (Music) (Applause) 
+
+When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. 
+And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. 
+And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. 
+You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. 
+And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. 
+(Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns. (Laughter) 
+Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. 
+And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. 
+And it went like this: "" R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. 
+Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie. "" (Laughter) Yeah. 
+So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. 
+(Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. 
+And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books. 
+And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. 
+But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer. 
+Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. 
+I could have told you 50 others just like it — all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. 
+And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. 
+But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be — partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. 
+And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. 
+And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them. 
+Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. 
+And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss. 
+Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. 
+A third to a half of the population are introverts — a third to a half. 
+So that's one out of every two or three people you know. 
+So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now — all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. 
+We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing. 
+Now, to see the bias clearly, you need to understand what introversion is. 
+It's different from being shy. 
+Shyness is about fear of social judgment. 
+Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. 
+So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. 
+So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us. 
+But now here's where the bias comes in. 
+Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. 
+And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place. 
+So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. 
+We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. 
+But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks — four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. 
+And kids are working in countless group assignments. 
+Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. 
+And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. 
+And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research. 
+(Laughter) Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. 
+Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. 
+And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks — which is something we might all favor nowadays. 
+And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface. 
+Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. 
+Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi — all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. 
+And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. 
+I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. 
+And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert / extrovert spectrum. 
+Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. 
+And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert / extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. 
+And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. 
+And what I'm saying is that culturally, we need a much better balance. 
+This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them. 
+And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. 
+So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations. 
+Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California. 
+And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. 
+Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubicle in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time. 
+Now, of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating — and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer — but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. 
+And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. 
+It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. 
+If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers — Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad — seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness, where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. 
+This is no surprise, though, if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. 
+It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. 
+Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing. 
+And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas — I mean zero. 
+So — (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. 
+And do you really want to leave it up to chance? 
+Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there. 
+Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? 
+Why are we setting up our schools this way, and our workplaces? 
+Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the "" man "" of contemplation. 
+But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. 
+And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like "Character, the Grandest Thing in the World." 
+And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln, who was praised for being modest and unassuming. 
+Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority." 
+But then we hit the 20th century, and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. 
+And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. 
+So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. 
+And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "" How to Win Friends and Influence People. "" And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. 
+So that's the world we're living in today. 
+Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. 
+The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. 
+And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. 
+So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. 
+Guess what? 
+Books. 
+I have a suitcase full of books. 
+Here's Margaret Atwood, "" Cat's Eye. "" Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. 
+And here's "" The Guide for the Perplexed "" by Maimonides. 
+But these are not exactly my books. 
+I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors. 
+My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. 
+I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. 
+Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read. 
+But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. 
+He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. 
+Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted — so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. 
+And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. 
+But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. 
+So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. 
+And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. 
+It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. 
+But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion. 
+(Laughter) And that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu. 
+So I prepared for moments like these as best I could. 
+I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get. 
+And I call this my "" year of speaking dangerously. "" (Laughter) And that actually helped a lot. 
+But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. 
+And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision. 
+Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. 
+Just stop it. 
+(Laughter) Thank you. 
+(Applause) And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions — you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. 
+It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. 
+We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. 
+Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. 
+I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often. 
+Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. 
+So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. 
+Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. 
+But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. 
+But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. 
+So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+A few years ago, my eyes were opened to the dark side of the construction industry. 
+In 2006, young Qatari students took me to go and see the migrant worker camps. 
+And since then I've followed the unfolding issue of worker rights. 
+In the last six months, more than 300 skyscrapers in the UAE have been put on hold or canceled. 
+Behind the headlines that lay behind these buildings is the fate of the often-indentured construction worker. 
+1.1 million of them. 
+Mainly Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Nepalese, these laborers risk everything to make money for their families back home. 
+They pay a middle-man thousands of dollars to be there. 
+And when they arrive, they find themselves in labor camps with no water, no air conditioning, and their passports taken away. 
+While it's easy to point the finger at local officials and higher authorities, 99 percent of these people are hired by the private sector, and so therefore we're equally, if not more, accountable. 
+Groups like Buildsafe UAE have emerged, but the numbers are simply overwhelming. 
+In August 2008, UAE public officials noted that 40 percent of the country's 1,098 labor camps had violated minimum health and fire safety regulations. 
+And last summer, more than 10,000 workers protested for the non-payment of wages, for the poor quality of food, and inadequate housing. 
+And then the financial collapse happened. 
+When the contractors have gone bust, as they've been overleveraged like everyone else, the difference is everything goes missing, documentation, passports, and tickets home for these workers. 
+Currently, right now, thousands of workers are abandoned. 
+There is no way back home. 
+And there is no way, and no proof of arrival. 
+These are the boom-and-bust refugees. 
+The question is, as a building professional, as an architect, an engineer, as a developer, if you know this is going on, as we go to the sights every single week, are you complacent or complicit in the human rights violations? 
+So let's forget your environmental footprint. 
+Let's think about your ethical footprint. 
+What good is it to build a zero-carbon, energy efficient complex, when the labor producing this architectural gem is unethical at best? 
+Now, recently I've been told I've been taking the high road. 
+But, quite frankly, on this issue, there is no other road. 
+So let's not forget who is really paying the price of this financial collapse. 
+And that as we worry about our next job in the office, the next design that we can get, to keep our workers. 
+Let's not forget these men, who are truly dying to work. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+We most certainly do talk to terrorists, no question about it. 
+We are at war with a new form of terrorism. 
+It's sort of the good old, traditional form of terrorism, but it's sort of been packaged for the 21st century. 
+One of the big things about countering terrorism is, how do you perceive it? 
+Because perception leads to your response to it. 
+So if you have a traditional perception of terrorism, it would be that it's one of criminality, one of war. 
+So how are you going to respond to it? 
+Naturally, it would follow that you meet kind with kind. 
+You fight it. If you have a more modernist approach, and your perception of terrorism is almost cause-and-effect, then naturally from that, the responses that come out of it are much more asymmetrical. 
+We live in a modern, global world. 
+Terrorists have actually adapted to it. 
+It's something we have to, too, and that means the people who are working on counterterrorism responses have to start, in effect, putting on their Google-tinted glasses, or whatever. 
+For my part, what I wanted us to do was just to look at terrorism as though it was a global brand, say, Coca-Cola. 
+Both are fairly bad for your health. (Laughter) If you look at it as a brand in those ways, what you'll come to realize is, it's a pretty flawed product. 
+As we've said, it's pretty bad for your health, it's bad for those who it affects, and it's not actually good if you're a suicide bomber either. 
+It doesn't actually do what it says on the tin. 
+You're not really going to get 72 virgins in heaven. 
+It's not going to happen, I don't think. 
+And you're not really going to, in the '80s, end capitalism by supporting one of these groups. It's a load of nonsense. 
+But what you realize, it's got an Achilles' heel. 
+The brand has an Achilles' heel. 
+We've mentioned the health, but it needs consumers to buy into it. 
+The consumers it needs are the terrorist constituency. 
+They're the people who buy into the brand, support them, facilitate them, and they're the people we've got to reach out to. 
+We've got to attack that brand in front of them. 
+There's two essential ways of doing that, if we carry on this brand theme. 
+One is reducing their market. What I mean is, it's their brand against our brand. We've got to compete. 
+We've got to show we're a better product. 
+If I'm trying to show we're a better product, I probably wouldn't do things like Guantanamo Bay. 
+We've talked there about curtailing the underlying need for the product itself. You could be looking there at poverty, injustice, all those sorts of things which feed terrorism. 
+The other thing to do is to knock the product, attack the brand myth, as we've said. 
+You know, there's nothing heroic about killing a young kid. 
+Perhaps we need to focus on that and get that message back across. 
+We've got to reveal the dangers in the product. 
+Our target audience, it's not just the producers of terrorism, as I've said, the terrorists. 
+It's not just the marketeers of terrorism, which is those who finance, those who facilitate it, but it's the consumers of terrorism. 
+We've got to get in to those homelands. 
+That's where they recruit from. That's where they get their power and strength. 
+That's where their consumers come from. 
+And we have to get our messaging in there. 
+So the essentials are, we've got to have interaction in those areas, with the terrorists, the facilitators, etc. 
+We've got to engage, we've got to educate, and we've got to have dialogue. 
+Now, staying on this brand thing for just a few more seconds, think about delivery mechanisms. 
+How are we going to do these attacks? 
+Well, reducing the market is really one for governments and civil society. We've got to show we're better. 
+We've got to show our values. 
+We've got to practice what we preach. 
+But when it comes to knocking the brand, if the terrorists are Coca-Cola and we're Pepsi, I don't think, being Pepsi, anything we say about Coca-Cola, anyone's going to believe us. 
+So we've got to find a different mechanism, and one of the best mechanisms I've ever come across is the victims of terrorism. 
+They are somebody who can actually stand there and say, "" This product's crap. I had it and I was sick for days. 
+It burnt my hand, whatever. "" You believe them. 
+You can see their scars. You trust them. 
+But whether it's victims, whether it's governments, NGOs, or even the Queen yesterday, in Northern Ireland, we have to interact and engage with those different layers of terrorism, and, in effect, we do have to have a little dance with the devil. 
+This is my favorite part of my speech. 
+I wanted to blow you all up to try and make a point, but — (Laughter) — TED, for health and safety reasons, have told me I've got to do a countdown, so I feel like a bit of an Irish or Jewish terrorist, sort of a health and safety terrorist, and I — (Laughter) — I've got to count 3, 2, 1, and it's a bit alarming, so thinking of what my motto would be, and it would be, "" Body parts, not heart attacks. "" So 3, 2, 1. (Explosion sound) Very good. (Laughter) Now, lady in 15J was a suicide bomber amongst us all. 
+We're all victims of terrorism. 
+There's 625 of us in this room. We're going to be scarred for life. 
+There was a father and a son who sat in that seat over there. 
+The son's dead. The father lives. 
+The father will probably kick himself for years to come that he didn't take that seat instead of his kid. 
+He's going to take to alcohol, and he's probably going to kill himself in three years. That's the stats. 
+There's a very young, attractive lady over here, and she has something which I think's the worst form of psychological, physical injury I've ever seen out of a suicide bombing: It's human shrapnel. 
+What it means is, when she sat in a restaurant in years to come, 10 years to come, 15 years to come, or she's on the beach, every so often she's going to start rubbing her skin, and out of there will come a piece of that shrapnel. 
+And that is a hard thing for the head to take. 
+There's a lady over there as well who lost her legs in this bombing. 
+She's going to find out that she gets a pitiful amount of money off our government for looking after what's happened to her. 
+She had a daughter who was going to go to one of the best universities. She's going to give up university to look after Mum. 
+We're all here, and all of those who watch it are going to be traumatized by this event, but all of you here who are victims are going to learn some hard truths. 
+That is, our society, we sympathize, but after a while, we start to ignore. We don't do enough as a society. 
+We do not look after our victims, and we do not enable them, and what I'm going to try and show is that actually, victims are the best weapon we have against more terrorism. 
+How would the government at the turn of the millennium approach today? Well, we all know. 
+What they'd have done then is an invasion. 
+If the suicide bomber was from Wales, good luck to Wales, I'd say. 
+Knee-jerk legislation, emergency provision legislation — which hits at the very basis of our society, as we all know — it's a mistake. 
+We're going to drive prejudice throughout Edinburgh, throughout the U.K., for Welsh people. 
+Today's approach, governments have learned from their mistakes. 
+They are looking at what I've started off on, on these more asymmetrical approaches to it, more modernist views, cause and effect. 
+But mistakes of the past are inevitable. 
+It's human nature. 
+The fear and the pressure to do something on them is going to be immense. They are going to make mistakes. 
+They're not just going to be smart. 
+There was a famous Irish terrorist who once summed up the point very beautifully. He said, "" The thing is, about the British government, is, is that it's got to be lucky all the time, and we only have to be lucky once. "" So what we need to do is we have to effect it. 
+We've got to start thinking about being more proactive. 
+We need to build an arsenal of noncombative weapons in this war on terrorism. 
+But of course, it's ideas — is not something that governments do very well. 
+I want to go back just to before the bang, to this idea of brand, and I was talking about Coke and Pepsi, etc. 
+We see it as terrorism versus democracy in that brand war. 
+They'll see it as freedom fighters and truth against injustice, imperialism, etc. 
+We do have to see this as a deadly battlefield. 
+It's not just [our] flesh and blood they want. 
+They actually want our cultural souls, and that's why the brand analogy is a very interesting way of looking at this. 
+If we look at al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was essentially a product on a shelf in a souk somewhere which not many people had heard of. 
+9 / 11 launched it. It was its big marketing day, and it was packaged for the 21st century. They knew what they were doing. 
+They were effectively [doing] something in this brand image of creating a brand which can be franchised around the world, where there's poverty, ignorance and injustice. 
+We, as I've said, have got to hit that market, but we've got to use our heads rather than our might. 
+If we perceive it in this way as a brand, or other ways of thinking at it like this, we will not resolve or counter terrorism. 
+What I'd like to do is just briefly go through a few examples from my work on areas where we try and approach these things differently. 
+The first one has been dubbed "" lawfare, "" for want of a better word. 
+When we originally looked at bringing civil actions against terrorists, everyone thought we were a bit mad and mavericks and crackpots. Now it's got a title. Everyone's doing it. 
+There's a bomb, people start suing. 
+But one of the first early cases on this was the Omagh Bombing. 
+A civil action was brought from 1998. 
+In Omagh, bomb went off, Real IRA, middle of a peace process. 
+That meant that the culprits couldn't really be prosecuted for lots of reasons, mostly to do with the peace process and what was going on, the greater good. 
+It also meant, then, if you can imagine this, that the people who bombed your children and your husbands were walking around the supermarket that you lived in. 
+Some of those victims said enough is enough. 
+We brought a private action, and thank God, 10 years later, we actually won it. There is a slight appeal on at the moment so I have to be a bit careful, but I'm fairly confident. 
+Why was it effective? 
+It was effective not just because justice was seen to be done where there was a huge void. 
+It was because the Real IRA and other terrorist groups, their whole strength is from the fact that they are an underdog. When we put the victims as the underdog and flipped it, they didn't know what to do. 
+They were embarrassed. Their recruitment went down. 
+The bombs actually stopped — fact — because of this action. 
+We became, or those victims became, more importantly, a ghost that haunted the terrorist organization. 
+There's other examples. We have a case called Almog which is to do with a bank that was, allegedly, from our point of view, giving rewards to suicide bombers. 
+Just by bringing the very action, that bank has stopped doing it, and indeed, the powers that be around the world, which for real politic reasons before, couldn't actually deal with this issue, because there was lots of competing interests, have actually closed down those loopholes in the banking system. 
+There's another case called the McDonald case, where some victims of Semtex, of the Provisional IRA bombings, which were supplied by Gaddafi, sued, and that action has led to amazing things for new Libya. 
+New Libya has been compassionate towards those victims, and started taking it — so it started a whole new dialogue there. 
+But the problem is, we need more and more support for these ideas and cases. 
+Civil affairs and civil society initiatives. 
+A good one is in Somalia. There's a war on piracy. 
+If anyone thinks you can have a war on piracy like a war on terrorism and beat it, you're wrong. 
+What we're trying to do there is turn pirates to fisherman. 
+They used to be fisherman, of course, but we stole their fish and dumped a load of toxic waste in their water, so what we're trying to do is create security and employment by bringing a coastguard along with the fisheries industry, and I can guarantee you, as that builds, al Shabaab and such likes will not have the poverty and injustice any longer to prey on those people. 
+These initiatives cost less than a missile, and certainly less than any soldier's life, but more importantly, it takes the war to their homelands, and not onto our shore, and we're looking at the causes. 
+The last one I wanted to talk about was dialogue. 
+The advantages of dialogue are obvious. 
+It self-educates both sides, enables a better understanding, reveals the strengths and weaknesses, and yes, like some of the speakers before, the shared vulnerability does lead to trust, and it does then become, that process, part of normalization. 
+But it's not an easy road. After the bomb, the victims are not into this. 
+There's practical problems. 
+It's politically risky for the protagonists and for the interlocutors. On one occasion I was doing it, every time I did a point that they didn't like, they actually threw stones at me, and when I did a point they liked, they starting shooting in the air, equally not great. (Laughter) Whatever the point, it gets to the heart of the problem, you're doing it, you're talking to them. 
+Now, I just want to end with saying, if we follow reason, we realize that I think we'd all say that we want to have a perception of terrorism which is not just a pure military perception of it. 
+We need to foster more modern and asymmetrical responses to it. 
+This isn't about being soft on terrorism. 
+It's about fighting them on contemporary battlefields. 
+We must foster innovation, as I've said. 
+Governments are receptive. It won't come from those dusty corridors. 
+The private sector has a role. 
+The role we could do right now is going away and looking at how we can support victims around the world to bring initiatives. 
+If I was to leave you with some big questions here which may change one's perception to it, and who knows what thoughts and responses will come out of it, but did myself and my terrorist group actually need to blow you up to make our point? 
+We have to ask ourselves these questions, however unpalatable. 
+Have we been ignoring an injustice or a humanitarian struggle somewhere in the world? 
+What if, actually, engagement on poverty and injustice is exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do? 
+What if the bombs are just simply wake-up calls for us? 
+What happens if that bomb went off because we didn't have any thoughts and things in place to allow dialogue to deal with these things and interaction? 
+What is definitely uncontroversial is that, as I've said, we've got to stop being reactive, and more proactive, and I just want to leave you with one idea, which is that it's a provocative question for you to think about, and the answer will require sympathy with the devil. 
+It's a question that's been tackled by many great thinkers and writers: What if society actually needs crisis to change? 
+What if society actually needs terrorism to change and adapt for the better? 
+It's those Bulgakov themes, it's that picture of Jesus and the Devil hand in hand in Gethsemane walking into the moonlight. 
+What it would mean is that humans, in order to survive in development, quite Darwinian spirit here, inherently must dance with the devil. 
+A lot of people say that communism was defeated by the Rolling Stones. It's a good theory. 
+Maybe the Rolling Stones has a place in this. 
+Thank you. 
+(Music) (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. (Applause) 
+
+One way to change our genes is to make new ones, as Craig Venter has so elegantly shown. 
+Another is to change our lifestyles. 
+And what we're learning is how powerful and dynamic these changes can be, that you don't have to wait very long to see the benefits. 
+When you eat healthier, manage stress, exercise and love more, your brain actually gets more blood flow and more oxygen. 
+But more than that, your brain gets measurably bigger. 
+Things that were thought impossible just a few years ago can actually be measured now. 
+This was figured out by Robin Williams a few years before the rest of us. 
+Now, there's some things that you can do to make your brain grow new brain cells. 
+Some of my favorite things, like chocolate and tea, blueberries, alcohol in moderation, stress management and cannabinoids found in marijuana. 
+I'm just the messenger. 
+(Laughter) What were we just talking about? (Laughter) 
+And other things that can make it worse, that can cause you to lose brain cells. 
+The usual suspects, like saturated fat and sugar, nicotine, opiates, cocaine, too much alcohol and chronic stress. 
+Your skin gets more blood flow when you change your lifestyle, so you age less quickly. Your skin doesn't wrinkle as much. 
+Your heart gets more blood flow. 
+We've shown that you can actually reverse heart disease. 
+That these clogged arteries that you see on the upper left, after only a year become measurably less clogged. 
+And the cardiac PET scan shown on the lower left, the blue means no blood flow. 
+A year later — orange and white is maximum blood flow. 
+We've shown you may be able to stop and reverse the progression of early prostate cancer and, by extension, breast cancer, simply by making these changes. 
+We've found that tumor growth in vitro was inhibited 70 percent in the group that made these changes, whereas only nine percent in the comparison group. 
+These differences were highly significant. 
+Even your sexual organs get more blood flow, so you increase sexual potency. 
+One of the most effective anti-smoking ads was done by the Department of Health Services, showing that nicotine, which constricts your arteries, can cause a heart attack or a stroke, but it also causes impotence. 
+Half of guys who smoke are impotent. 
+How sexy is that? 
+Now we're also about to publish a study — the first study showing you can change gene expression in men with prostate cancer. 
+This is what's called a heat map — and the different colors — and along the side, on the right, are different genes. 
+And we found that over 500 genes were favorably changed — in effect, turning on the good genes, the disease-preventing genes, turning off the disease-promoting genes. 
+And so these findings I think are really very powerful, giving many people new hope and new choices. 
+And companies like Navigenics and DNA Direct and 23andMe, that are giving you your genetic profiles, are giving some people a sense of, "" Gosh, well, what can I do about it? "" Well, our genes are not our fate, and if we make these changes — they're a predisposition — but if we make bigger changes than we might have made otherwise, we can actually change how our genes are expressed. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets. 
+It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004. 
+I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this. 
+They were blank on one side, and on the other side I listed some simple instructions. 
+I asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they'd never told anyone before. 
+And I handed out these postcards randomly on the streets of Washington, D.C., not knowing what to expect. 
+But soon the idea began spreading virally. 
+People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards. 
+I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox, not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C., but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq. 
+Soon my crazy idea didn't seem so crazy. 
+PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world. 
+And this is my postcard collection today. 
+You can see my wife struggling to stack a brick of postcards on a pyramid of over a half-million secrets. 
+What I'd like to do now is share with you a very special handful of secrets from that collection, starting with this one. 
+"" I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. 
+I never did have someone. "" Secrets can take many forms. 
+They can be shocking or silly or soulful. 
+They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet. 
+(Laughter) Maybe one of you sent this one in. 
+I don't know. 
+This one does a great job of demonstrating the creativity that people have when they make and mail me a postcard. 
+This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side. 
+"" Dear Birthmother, I have great parents. 
+I've found love. I'm happy. "" Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now. 
+"" Everyone who knew me before 9 / 11 believes I'm dead. "" "" I used to work with a bunch of uptight religious people, so sometimes I didn't wear panties, and just had a big smile and chuckled to myself. "" (Laughter) This next one takes a little explanation before I share it with you. 
+I love to speak on college campuses and share secrets and the stories with students. 
+And sometimes afterwards I'll stick around and sign books and take photos with students. 
+And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos. 
+And I should also mention that, just like today, at that PostSecret event, I was using a wireless microphone. 
+"" Your mic wasn't off during sound check. 
+We all heard you pee. "" (Laughter) This was really embarrassing when it happened, until I realized it could have been worse. 
+Right. You know what I'm saying. 
+(Laughter) "" Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use. 
+I feel like the happiest person on Earth (now.) "" "" One of these men is the father of my son. 
+He pays me a lot to keep it a secret. "" (Laughter) "" That Saturday when you wondered where I was, well, I was getting your ring. 
+It's in my pocket right now. "" I had this postcard posted on the PostSecret blog two years ago on Valentine's Day. 
+It was the very bottom, the last secret in the long column. 
+And it hadn't been up for more than a couple hours before I received this exuberant email from the guy who mailed me this postcard. 
+And he said, "" Frank, I've got to share with you this story that just played out in my life. "" He said, "" My knees are still shaking. "" He said, "" For three years, my girlfriend and I, we've made it this Sunday morning ritual to visit the PostSecret blog together and read the secrets out loud. 
+I read some to her, she reads some to me. "" He says, "" It's really brought us closer together through the years. 
+And so when I discovered that you had posted my surprise proposal to my girlfriend at the very bottom, I was beside myself. 
+And I tried to act calm, not to give anything away. 
+And just like every Sunday, we started reading the secrets out loud to each other. "" He said, "" But this time it seemed like it was taking her forever to get through each one. "" But she finally did. 
+She got to that bottom secret, his proposal to her. 
+And he said, "" She read it once and then she read it again. "" And she turned to him and said, "Is that our cat?" 
+(Laughter) And when she saw him, he was down on one knee, he had the ring out. 
+He popped the question, she said yes. It was a very happy ending. 
+So I emailed him back and I said, "" Please share with me an image, something, that I can share with the whole PostSecret community and let everyone know your fairy tale ending. "" And he emailed me this picture. 
+(Laughter) "" I found your camera at Lollapalooza this summer. 
+I finally got the pictures developed and I'd love to give them to you. "" This picture never got returned back to the people who lost it, but this secret has impacted many lives, starting with a student up in Canada named Matty. 
+Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website, a website called IFoundYourCamera. 
+Matty invites people to mail him digital cameras that they've found, memory sticks that have been lost with orphan photos. 
+And Matty takes the pictures off these cameras and posts them on his website every week. 
+And people come to visit to see if they can identify a picture they've lost or help somebody else get the photos back to them that they might be desperately searching for. 
+This one's my favorite. 
+(Laughter) Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers. 
+And it might seem like a simple idea, and it is, but the impact it can have on people's lives can be huge. 
+Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture. 
+"" That's me, my husband and son. 
+The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother. 
+Thank you for making your site. 
+These pictures mean more to me than you know. 
+My son's birth is on this camera. 
+He turns four tomorrow. "" Every picture that you see there and thousands of others have been returned back to the person who lost it — sometimes crossing oceans, sometimes going through language barriers. 
+This is the last postcard I have to share with you today. 
+"" When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again. "" When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died. 
+They said that by preserving those voices and sharing them, it helped them keep the spirit of their loved ones alive. 
+One young girl posted the last message she ever heard from her grandmother. 
+Secrets can take many forms. 
+They can be shocking or silly or soulful. 
+They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet again. 
+Voicemail recording: First saved voice message. 
+Grandma: ♫ It's somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ Somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ The candles are lighted ♫ ♫ on somebody's cake ♫ ♫ And we're all invited ♫ ♫ for somebody's sake ♫ You're 21 years old today. 
+Have a real happy birthday, and I love you. 
+I'll say bye for now. 
+FW: Thank you. 
+(Applause) Thank you. (Applause) 
+June Cohen: Frank, that was beautiful, so touching. 
+Have you ever sent yourself a postcard? 
+Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret? 
+FW: I have one of my own secrets in every book. 
+I think in some ways, the reason I started the project, even though I didn't know it at the time, was because I was struggling with my own secrets. 
+And it was through crowd-sourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me, that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me. 
+JC: And has anyone ever discovered which secret was yours in the book? 
+Has anyone in your life been able to tell? 
+FW: Sometimes I share that information, yeah. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) 
+
+About a year ago, I asked myself a question: "" Knowing what I know, why am I not a vegetarian? "" After all, I'm one of the green guys: I grew up with hippie parents in a log cabin. 
+I started a site called TreeHugger — I care about this stuff. 
+I knew that eating a mere hamburger a day can increase my risk of dying by a third. 
+Cruelty: I knew that the 10 billion animals we raise each year for meat are raised in factory farm conditions that we, hypocritically, wouldn't even consider for our own cats, dogs and other pets. 
+Environmentally, meat, amazingly, causes more emissions than all of transportation combined: cars, trains, planes, buses, boats, all of it. 
+And beef production uses 100 times the water that most vegetables do. 
+I also knew that I'm not alone. 
+We as a society are eating twice as much meat as we did in the 50s. 
+So what was once the special little side treat now is the main, much more regular. 
+So really, any of these angles should have been enough to convince me to go vegetarian. 
+Yet, there I was — chk, chk, chk — tucking into a big old steak. 
+So why was I stalling? 
+I realized that what I was being pitched was a binary solution. 
+It was either you're a meat eater or you're a vegetarian, and I guess I just wasn't quite ready. 
+Imagine your last hamburger. 
+(Laughter) So my common sense, my good intentions, were in conflict with my taste buds. 
+And I'd commit to doing it later, and not surprisingly, later never came. 
+Sound familiar? 
+So I wondered, might there be a third solution? 
+And I thought about it, and I came up with one. 
+I've been doing it for the last year, and it's great. 
+It's called weekday veg. 
+The name says it all: Nothing with a face Monday through Friday. 
+On the weekend, your choice. 
+Simple. 
+If you want to take it to the next level, remember, the major culprits in terms of environmental damage and health are red and processed meats. 
+So you want to swap those out with some good, sustainably harvested fish. 
+It's structured, so it ends up being simple to remember, and it's okay to break it here and there. 
+After all, cutting five days a week is cutting 70 percent of your meat intake. 
+The program has been great, weekday veg. 
+My footprint's smaller, I'm lessening pollution, I feel better about the animals, I'm even saving money. 
+Best of all, I'm healthier, I know that I'm going to live longer, and I've even lost a little weight. 
+So, please ask yourselves, for your health, for your pocketbook, for the environment, for the animals: What's stopping you from giving weekday veg a shot? 
+After all, if all of us ate half as much meat, it would be like half of us were vegetarians. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Frank Gehry: I listened to this scientist this morning. 
+Dr. Mullis was talking about his experiments, and I realized that I almost became a scientist. 
+When I was 14 my parents bought me a chemistry set and I decided to make water. 
+(Laughter) So, I made a hydrogen generator and I made an oxygen generator, and I had the two pipes leading into a beaker and I threw a match in. (Laughter) 
+And the glass — luckily I turned around — I had it all in my back and I was about 15 feet away. 
+The wall was covered with... 
+I had an explosion. 
+Richard Saul Wurman: Really? 
+FG: People on the street came and knocked on the door to see if I was okay. 
+RSW:... huh. (Laughter) I'd like to start this session again. 
+The gentleman to my left is the very famous, perhaps overly famous, Frank Gehry. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And Frank, you've come to a place in your life, which is astonishing. 
+I mean it is astonishing for an artist, for an architect, to become actually an icon and a legend in their own time. 
+I mean you have become, whether you can giggle at it because it's a funny... you know, it's a strange thought, but your building is an icon — you can draw a little picture of that building, it can be used in ads — and you've had not rock star status, but celebrity status in doing what you wanted to do for most of your life. 
+And I know the road was extremely difficult. 
+And it didn't seem, at least, that your sell outs, whatever they were, were very big. 
+You kept moving ahead in a life where you're dependent on working for somebody. 
+But that's an interesting thing for a creative person. 
+A lot of us work for people; we're in the hands of other people. 
+And that's one of the great dilemmas — we're in a creativity session — it's one of the great dilemmas in creativity: how to do work that's big enough and not sell out. 
+And you've achieved that and that makes your win doubly big, triply big. 
+It's not quite a question but you can comment on it. 
+It's a big issue. 
+FG: Well, I've always just... 
+I've never really gone out looking for work. 
+I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head. 
+And when I started out, I thought that architecture was a service business and that you had to please the clients and stuff. 
+And I realized when I'd come into the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. 
+But I couldn't do anything else. 
+That was my response to the people in the time. 
+And actually, it was responding to clients that I had who didn't have very much money, so they couldn't afford very much. 
+I think it was circumstantial. 
+Until I got to my house, where the client was my wife. 
+We bought this tiny little bungalow in Santa Monica and for like 50 grand I built a house around it. 
+And a few people got excited about it. 
+I was visiting with an artist, Michael Heizer, out in the desert near Las Vegas somewhere. 
+He's building this huge concrete place. 
+And it was late in the evening. We'd had a lot to drink. 
+We were standing out in the desert all alone and, thinking about my house, he said, "" Did it ever occur to you if you built stuff more permanent, somewhere in 2000 years somebody's going to like it? "" (Laughter) So, I thought, "" Yeah, that's probably a good idea. "" Luckily I started to get some clients that had a little more money, so the stuff was a little more permanent. 
+But I just found out the world ain't going to last that long, this guy was telling us the other day. 
+So where do we go now? 
+Back to — everything's so temporary. 
+I don't see it the way you characterized it. 
+For me, every day is a new thing. 
+I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going — if I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. 
+When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it. 
+I discard it. 
+So I approach it with the same trepidation. 
+Obviously, over time I have a lot more confidence that it's going to be OK. 
+I do run a kind of a business — I've got 120 people and you've got to pay them, so there's a lot of responsibility involved — but the actual work on the project is with, I think, a healthy insecurity. 
+And like the playwright said the other day — I could relate to him: you're not sure. 
+When Bilbao was finished and I looked at it, I saw all the mistakes, I saw... 
+They weren't mistakes; I saw everything that I would have changed and I was embarrassed by it. 
+I felt an embarrassment — "" How could I have done that? 
+How could I have made shapes like that or done stuff like that? "" It's taken several years to now look at it detached and say — as you walk around the corner and a piece of it works with the road and the street, and it appears to have a relationship — that I started to like it. 
+RSW: What's the status of the New York project? 
+FG: I don't really know. 
+Tom Krens came to me with Bilbao and explained it all to me, and I thought he was nuts. 
+I didn't think he knew what he was doing, and he pulled it off. 
+So, I think he's Icarus and Phoenix all in one guy. 
+(Laughter) He gets up there and then he... comes back up. 
+They're still talking about it. 
+September 11 generated some interest in moving it over to Ground Zero, and I'm totally against that. 
+I just feel uncomfortable talking about or building anything on Ground Zero I think for a long time. 
+RSW: The picture on the screen, is that Disney? 
+FG: Yeah. 
+RSW: How much further along is it than that, and when will that be finished? 
+FG: That will be finished in 2003 — September, October — and I'm hoping Kyu, and Herbie, and Yo-Yo and all those guys come play with us at that place. 
+Luckily, today most of the people I'm working with are people I really like. 
+Richard Koshalek is probably one of the main reasons that Disney Hall came to me. 
+He's been a cheerleader for quite a long time. 
+There aren't many people around that are really involved with architecture as clients. 
+If you think about the world, and even just in this audience, most of us are involved with buildings. 
+Nothing that you would call architecture, right? 
+And so to find one, a guy like that, you hang on to him. 
+He's become the head of Art Center, and there's a building by Craig Ellwood there. 
+I knew Craig and respected him. 
+They want to add to it and it's hard to add to a building like that — it's a beautiful, minimalist, black steel building — and Richard wants to add a library and more student stuff and it's a lot of acreage. 
+I convinced him to let me bring in another architect from Portugal: Alvaro Siza. 
+RSW: Why did you want that? 
+FG: I knew you'd ask that question. 
+It was intuitive. 
+(Laughter) Alvaro Siza grew up and lived in Portugal and is probably considered the Portuguese main guy in architecture. 
+I visited with him a few years ago and he showed me his early work, and his early work had a resemblance to my early work. 
+When I came out of college, I started to try to do things contextually in Southern California, and you got into the logic of Spanish colonial tile roofs and things like that. 
+I tried to understand that language as a beginning, as a place to jump off, and there was so much of it being done by spec builders and it was trivialized so much that it wasn't... 
+I just stopped. 
+I mean, Charlie Moore did a bunch of it, but it didn't feel good to me. 
+Siza, on the other hand, continued in Portugal where the real stuff was and evolved a modern language that relates to that historic language. 
+And I always felt that he should come to Southern California and do a building. 
+I tried to get him a couple of jobs and they didn't pan out. 
+I like the idea of collaboration with people like that because it pushes you. 
+I've done it with Claes Oldenburg and with Richard Serra, who doesn't think architecture is art. 
+Did you see that thing? 
+RSW: No. What did he say? 
+FG: He calls architecture "" plumbing. "" (Laughter) FG: Anyway, the Siza thing. 
+It's a richer experience. 
+It must be like that for Kyu doing things with musicians — it's similar to that I would imagine — where you... huh? 
+Audience: Liquid architecture. 
+FG: Liquid architecture. 
+(Laughter) Where you... It's like jazz: you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. 
+And I think for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city and what might happen in the city. 
+RSW: Is it going to be near the current campus? 
+Or is it going to be down near... 
+FG: No, it's near the current campus. 
+Anyway, he's that kind of patron. 
+It's not his money, of course. 
+(Laughter) RSW: What's his schedule on that? 
+FG: I don't know. 
+What's the schedule, Richard? 
+Richard Koshalek: [Unclear] starts from 2004. 
+FG: 2004. 
+You can come to the opening. I'll invite you. 
+No, but the issue of city building in democracy is interesting because it creates chaos, right? 
+Everybody doing their thing makes a very chaotic environment, and if you can figure out how to work off each other — if you can get a bunch of people who respect each other's work and play off each other, you might be able to create models for how to build sections of the city without resorting to the one architect. 
+Like the Rockefeller Center model, which is kind of from another era. 
+RSW: I found the most remarkable thing. 
+My preconception of Bilbao was this wonderful building, you go inside and there'd be extraordinary spaces. 
+I'd seen drawings you had presented here at TED. 
+The surprise of Bilbao was in its context to the city. 
+That was the surprise of going across the river, of going on the highway around it, of walking down the street and finding it. 
+That was the real surprise of Bilbao. 
+FG: But you know, Richard, most architects when they present their work — most of the people we know, you get up and you talk about your work, and it's almost like you tell everybody you're a good guy by saying, "" Look, I'm worried about the context, I'm worried about the city, I'm worried about my client, I worry about budget, that I'm on time. "" Blah, blah, blah and all that stuff. 
+And it's like cleansing yourself so that you can... 
+by saying all that, it means your work is good somehow. 
+And I think everybody — I mean that should be a matter of fact, like gravity. 
+You're not going to defy gravity. 
+You've got to work with the building department. 
+If you don't meet the budgets, you're not going to get much work. 
+If it leaks — Bilbao did not leak. 
+I was so proud. 
+(Laughter) The MIT project — they were interviewing me for MIT and they sent their facilities people to Bilbao. 
+I met them in Bilbao. 
+They came for three days. 
+RSW: This is the computer building? 
+FG: Yeah, the computer building. 
+They were there three days and it rained every day and they kept walking around — I noticed they were looking under things and looking for things, and they wanted to know where the buckets were hidden, you know? 
+People put buckets out... 
+I was clean. There wasn't a bloody leak in the place, it was just fantastic. 
+But you've got to — yeah, well up until then every building leaked, so this... 
+(Laughter) RSW: Frank had a sort of... 
+FG: Ask Miriam! 
+RW:... sort of had a fame. His fame was built on that in L.A. for a while. 
+(Laughter) FG: You've all heard the Frank Lloyd Wright story, when the woman called and said, "" Mr. Wright, I'm sitting on the couch and the water's pouring in on my head. "" And he said, "" Madam, move your chair. "" (Laughter) So, some years later I was doing a building, a little house on the beach for Norton Simon, and his secretary, who was kind of a hell on wheels type lady, called me and said, "" Mr. Simon's sitting at his desk and the water's coming in on his head. "" And I told her the Frank Lloyd Wright story. 
+RSW: Didn't get a laugh. 
+FG: No. Not now either. 
+(Laughter) But my point is that... and I call it the "" then what? "" OK, you solved all the problems, you did all the stuff, you made nice, you loved your clients, you loved the city, you're a good guy, you're a good person... 
+and then what? 
+What do you bring to it? 
+And I think that's what I've always been interested in, is that — which is a personal kind of expression. 
+Bilbao, I think, shows that you can have that kind of personal expression and still touch all the bases that are necessary of fitting into the city. 
+That's what reminded me of it. 
+And I think that's the issue, you know; it's the "" then what "" that most clients who hire architects — most clients aren't hiring architects for that. 
+They're hiring them to get it done, get it on budget, be polite, and they're missing out on the real value of an architect. 
+RSW: At a certain point a number of years ago, people — when Michael Graves was a fashion, before teapots... 
+FG: I did a teapot and nobody bought it. 
+(Laughter) RSW: Did it leak? 
+FG: No. 
+(Laughter) RSW:... people wanted a Michael Graves building. 
+Is that a curse, that people want a Bilbao building? 
+FG: Yeah. 
+Since Bilbao opened, which is now four, five years, both Krens and I have been called with at least 100 opportunities — China, Brazil, other parts of Spain — to come in and do the Bilbao effect. 
+And I've met with some of these people. 
+Usually I say no right away, but some of them come with pedigree and they sound well-intentioned and they get you for at least one or two meetings. 
+In one case, I flew all the way to Malaga with a team because the thing was signed with seals and various very official seals from the city, and that they wanted me to come and do a building in their port. 
+I asked them what kind of building it was. 
+"" When you get here we'll explain it. "" Blah, blah, blah. 
+So four of us went. 
+And they took us — they put us up in a great hotel and we were looking over the bay, and then they took us in a boat out in the water and showed us all these sights in the harbor. 
+Each one was more beautiful than the other. 
+And then we were going to have lunch with the mayor and we were going to have dinner with the most important people in Malaga. 
+Just before going to lunch with the mayor, we went to the harbor commissioner. 
+It was a table as long as this carpet and the harbor commissioner was here, and I was here, and my guys. 
+We sat down, and we had a drink of water and everybody was quiet. 
+And the guy looked at me and said, "Now what can I do for you, Mr. Gehry?" 
+(Laughter) RSW: Oh, my God. 
+FG: So, I got up. 
+I said to my team, "Let's get out of here." 
+We stood up, we walked out. 
+They followed — the guy that dragged us there followed us and he said, "You mean you're not going to have lunch with the mayor?" 
+I said, "" Nope. "" "You're not going to have dinner at all?" 
+They just brought us there to hustle this group, you know, to create a project. 
+And we get a lot of that. 
+Luckily, I'm old enough that I can complain I can't travel. 
+(Laughter) I don't have my own plane yet. 
+RSW: Well, I'm going to wind this up and wind up the meeting because it's been very long. 
+But let me just say a couple words. 
+FG: Can I say something? 
+Are you going to talk about me or you? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) RSW: Once a shit, always a shit! 
+FG: Because I want to get a standing ovation like everybody, so... 
+RSW: You're going to get one! You're going to get one! 
+(Laughter) I'm going to make it for you! 
+FG: No, no. Wait a minute! 
+(Applause) 
+
+One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don't — into the religious and the atheists. 
+There have been some very vocal atheists who've pointed out, not just that religion is wrong, but that it's ridiculous. 
+These people, many of whom have lived in North Oxford, have argued — they've argued that believing in God is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game. 
+Now I think it's too easy. I think it's too easy 
+to dismiss the whole of religion that way. 
+And what I'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist — if you like, a new version of atheism we could call Atheism 2.0. 
+Of course, there are no deities or supernatural spirits or angels, etc. 
+I'm interested in the kind of constituency that thinks something along these lines: that thinks, "" I can't believe in any of this stuff. 
+I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament. "" Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about — people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine. 
+It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart. 
+So that's a sort of tough choice. 
+I don't think we have to make that choice. 
+I think there is an alternative. 
+I think there are ways — and I'm being both very respectful and completely impious — of stealing from religions. 
+If you don't believe in a religion, there's nothing wrong with picking and mixing, with taking out the best sides of religion. 
+And for me, atheism 2.0 is about both, as I say, a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying, "" What here could we use? "" The secular world is full of holes. 
+We have secularized badly, I would argue. 
+And a thorough study of religion could give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well. 
+And I'd like to run through a few of these today. 
+I'd like to kick off by looking at education. 
+Now education is a field the secular world really believes in. 
+When we think about how we're going to make the world a better place, we think education; that's where we put a lot of money. 
+Education is going to give us, not only commercial skills, industrial skills, it's also going to make us better people. 
+You know the kind of thing a commencement address is, and graduation ceremonies, those lyrical claims that education, the process of education — particularly higher education — will make us into nobler and better human beings. 
+That's a lovely idea. 
+Interesting where it came from. 
+In the early 19th century, church attendance in Western Europe started sliding down very, very sharply, and people panicked. 
+They asked themselves the following question. 
+They said, where are people going to find the morality, where are they going to find guidance, and where are they going to find sources of consolation? 
+And influential voices came up with one answer. 
+They said culture. 
+It's to culture that we should look for guidance, for consolation, for morality. 
+Let's look to the plays of Shakespeare, the dialogues of Plato, the novels of Jane Austen. 
+In there, we'll find a lot of the truths that we might previously have found in the Gospel of Saint John. 
+Now I think that's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea. 
+They wanted to replace scripture with culture. 
+And that's a very plausible idea. 
+It's also an idea that we have forgotten. 
+If you went to a top university — let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge — and you said, "" I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live, "" they would show you the way to the insane asylum. 
+This is simply not what our grandest and best institutes of higher learning are in the business of. 
+Why? They don't think we need it. 
+They don't think we are in an urgent need of assistance. 
+They see us as adults, rational adults. 
+What we need is information. 
+We need data, we don't need help. 
+Now religions start from a very different place indeed. 
+All religions, all major religions, at various points call us children. 
+And like children, they believe that we are in severe need of assistance. 
+We're only just holding it together. 
+Perhaps this is just me, maybe you. 
+But anyway, we're only just holding it together. 
+And we need help. Of course, we need help. 
+And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning. 
+You know, in the 18th century in the U.K., the greatest preacher, greatest religious preacher, was a man called John Wesley, who went up and down this country delivering sermons, advising people how they could live. 
+He delivered sermons on the duties of parents to their children and children to their parents, the duties of the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich. 
+He was trying to tell people how they should live through the medium of sermons, the classic medium of delivery of religions. 
+Now we've given up with the idea of sermons. 
+If you said to a modern liberal individualist, "Hey, how about a sermon?" 
+they'd go, "" No, no. I don't need one of those. 
+I'm an independent, individual person. "" What's the difference between a sermon and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture? 
+Well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. 
+And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition. 
+The tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable, because we are in need of guidance, morality and consolation — and religions know that. 
+Another point about education: we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. 
+Sit them in a classroom, tell them about Plato at the age of 20, send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years, and that lesson will stick with them. 
+Religions go, "" Nonsense. 
+You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. 
+So get on your knees and repeat it. "" That's what all religions tell us: "Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." 
+Otherwise our minds are like sieves. 
+So religions are cultures of repetition. 
+They circle the great truths again and again and again. 
+We associate repetition with boredom. 
+"" Give us the new, "" we're always saying. 
+"The new is better than the old." 
+If I said to you, "" Okay, we're not going to have new TED. 
+We're just going to run through all the old ones and watch them five times because they're so true. 
+We're going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times because what she says is so clever, "" you'd feel cheated. 
+Not so if you're adopting a religious mindset. 
+The other things that religions do is to arrange time. 
+All the major religions give us calendars. 
+What is a calendar? 
+A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas. 
+In the Catholic chronology, Catholic calendar, at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor. 
+You won't do that by accident; you will do that because you are guided to do that. 
+Now we don't think that way. 
+In the secular world we think, "" If an idea is important, I'll bump into it. 
+I'll just come across it. "" Nonsense, says the religious world view. 
+Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time, we need to synchronize encounters. 
+This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings. 
+Take the Moon. It's really important to look at the Moon. 
+You know, when you look at the Moon, you think, "" I'm really small. What are my problems? "" It sets things into perspective, etc., etc. 
+We should all look at the Moon a bit more often. We don't. 
+Why don't we? Well there's nothing to tell us, "" Look at the Moon. "" But if you're a Zen Buddhist in the middle of September, you will be ordered out of your home, made to stand on a canonical platform and made to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi, where you will be given poems to read in honor of the Moon and the passage of time and the frailty of life that it should remind us of. 
+You'll be handed rice cakes. 
+And the Moon and the reflection on the Moon will have a secure place in your heart. 
+That's very good. 
+The other thing that religions are really aware of is: speak well — I'm not doing a very good job of this here — but oratory, oratory is absolutely key to religions. 
+In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career. 
+But the religious world doesn't think that way. 
+What you're saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it. 
+So if you go to an African-American Pentecostalist church in the American South and you listen to how they talk, my goodness, they talk well. 
+After every convincing point, people will go, "" Amen, amen, amen. "" At the end of a really rousing paragraph, they'll all stand up, and they'll go, "" Thank you Jesus, thank you Christ, thank you Savior. "" If we were doing it like they do it — let's not do it, but if we were to do it — I would tell you something like, "" Culture should replace scripture. "" And you would go, "" Amen, amen, amen. "" And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up and you would go, "" Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen. "" And we'd know that we had a real rhythm going. 
+All right, all right. We're getting there. We're getting there. 
+(Applause) The other thing that religions know is we're not just brains, we are also bodies. 
+And when they teach us a lesson, they do it via the body. 
+So for example, take the Jewish idea of forgiveness. 
+Jews are very interested in forgiveness and how we should start anew and start afresh. 
+They don't just deliver us sermons on this. 
+They don't just give us books or words about this. 
+They tell us to have a bath. 
+So in Orthodox Jewish communities, every Friday you go to a Mikveh. 
+You immerse yourself in the water, and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea. 
+We don't tend to do that. 
+Our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another. 
+Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two. 
+Let's look at art now. 
+Now art is something that in the secular world, we think very highly of. We think art is really, really important. 
+A lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums, etc. 
+We sometimes hear it said that museums are our new cathedrals, or our new churches. 
+You've heard that saying. 
+Now I think that the potential is there, but we've completely let ourselves down. 
+And the reason we've let ourselves down is that we're not properly studying how religions handle art. 
+The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art: The first idea is that art should be for art's sake — a ridiculous idea — an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world. 
+I couldn't disagree more. 
+The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn't explain itself, that artists shouldn't say what they're up to, because if they said it, it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy. 
+That's why a very common feeling when you're in a museum — let's admit it — is, "" I don't know what this is about. "" But if we're serious people, we don't admit to that. 
+But that feeling of puzzlement is structural to contemporary art. 
+Now religions have a much saner attitude to art. 
+They have no trouble telling us what art is about. 
+Art is about two things in all the major faiths. 
+Firstly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to love. 
+And secondly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to fear and to hate. 
+And that's what art is. 
+Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith. 
+So as you walk around a church, or a mosque or a cathedral, what you're trying to imbibe, what you're imbibing is, through your eyes, through your senses, truths that have otherwise come to you through your mind. 
+Essentially it's propaganda. 
+Rembrandt is a propagandist in the Christian view. 
+Now the word "" propaganda "" sets off alarm bells. 
+We think of Hitler, we think of Stalin. Don't, necessarily. 
+Propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something. 
+And if that thing is good, there's no problem with it at all. 
+My view is that museums should take a leaf out of the book of religions. 
+And they should make sure that when you walk into a museum — if I was a museum curator, I would make a room for love, a room for generosity. 
+All works of art are talking to us about things. 
+And if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we would be told, use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind, we would get a lot more out of art. 
+Art would pick up the duty that it used to have and that we've neglected because of certain mis-founded ideas. 
+Art should be one of the tools by which we improve our society. 
+Art should be didactic. 
+Let's think of something else. 
+The people in the modern world, in the secular world, who are interested in matters of the spirit, in matters of the mind, in higher soul-like concerns, tend to be isolated individuals. 
+They're poets, they're philosophers, they're photographers, they're filmmakers. 
+And they tend to be on their own. 
+They're our cottage industries. They are vulnerable, single people. 
+And they get depressed and they get sad on their own. 
+And they don't really change much. 
+Now think about religions, think about organized religions. 
+What do organized religions do? 
+They group together, they form institutions. 
+And that has all sorts of advantages. 
+First of all, scale, might. 
+The Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to the Wall Street Journal. 
+These are massive machines. 
+They're collaborative, they're branded, they're multinational, and they're highly disciplined. 
+These are all very good qualities. 
+We recognize them in relation to corporations. 
+And corporations are very like religions in many ways, except they're right down at the bottom of the pyramid of needs. 
+They're selling us shoes and cars. 
+Whereas the people who are selling us the higher stuff — the therapists, the poets — are on their own and they have no power, they have no might. 
+So religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind. 
+Now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it. 
+Books alone, books written by lone individuals, are not going to change anything. 
+We need to group together. 
+If you want to change the world, you have to group together, you have to be collaborative. 
+And that's what religions do. 
+They are multinational, as I say, they are branded, they have a clear identity, so they don't get lost in a busy world. 
+That's something we can learn from. 
+I want to conclude. 
+Really what I want to say is for many of you who are operating in a range of different fields, there is something to learn from the example of religion — even if you don't believe any of it. 
+If you're involved in anything that's communal, that involves lots of people getting together, there are things for you in religion. 
+If you're involved, say, in a travel industry in any way, look at pilgrimage. 
+Look very closely at pilgrimage. 
+We haven't begun to scratch the surface of what travel could be because we haven't looked at what religions do with travel. 
+If you're in the art world, look at the example of what religions are doing with art. 
+And if you're an educator in any way, again, look at how religions are spreading ideas. 
+You may not agree with the ideas, but my goodness, they're highly effective mechanisms for doing so. 
+So really my concluding point is you may not agree with religion, but at the end of the day, religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Now this is actually a courageous talk, because you're kind of setting up yourself in some ways to be ridiculed in some quarters. 
+AB: You can get shot by both sides. 
+You can get shot by the hard-headed atheists, and you can get shot by those who fully believe. 
+CA: Incoming missiles from North Oxford at any moment. 
+AB: Indeed. 
+CA: But you left out one aspect of religion that a lot of people might say your agenda could borrow from, which is this sense — that's actually probably the most important thing to anyone who's religious — of spiritual experience, of some kind of connection with something that's bigger than you are. 
+Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0? 
+AB: Absolutely. I, like many of you, meet people who say things like, "" But isn't there something bigger than us, something else? "" And I say, "" Of course. "" And they say, "" So aren't you sort of religious? "" And I go, "" No. "" Why does that sense of mystery, that sense of the dizzying scale of the universe, need to be accompanied by a mystical feeling? 
+Science and just observation gives us that feeling without it, so I don't feel the need. 
+The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. 
+So one can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit. 
+CA: Actually, let me just ask a question. 
+How many people here would say that religion is important to them? 
+Is there an equivalent process by which there's a sort of bridge between what you're talking about and what you would say to them? 
+AB: I would say that there are many, many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged. 
+It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things. 
+It's so sad that we constantly say, "" I don't believe so I can't have community, so I'm cut off from morality, so I can't go on a pilgrimage. "" One wants to say, "" Nonsense. Why not? "" And that's really the spirit of my talk. 
+There's so much we can absorb. 
+Atheism shouldn't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion. 
+CA: It seems to me that there's plenty of people in the TED community who are atheists. 
+But probably most people in the community certainly don't think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common. 
+Are we foolish to be optimistic about the possibility of a world where, instead of religion being the great rallying cry of divide and war, that there could be bridging? 
+AB: No, we need to be polite about differences. 
+Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue. 
+It's seen as hypocrisy. 
+But we need to get to a stage when you're an atheist and someone says, "" Well you know, I did pray the other day, "" you politely ignore it. 
+You move on. 
+Because you've agreed on 90 percent of things, because you have a shared view on so many things, and you politely differ. 
+And I think that's what the religious wars of late have ignored. 
+They've ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement. 
+CA: And finally, does this new thing that you're proposing that's not a religion but something else, does it need a leader, and are you volunteering to be the pope? 
+(Laughter) AB: Well, one thing that we're all very suspicious of is individual leaders. 
+It doesn't need it. 
+What I've tried to lay out is a framework and I'm hoping that people can just fill it in. 
+I've sketched a sort of broad framework. 
+But wherever you are, as I say, if you're in the travel industry, do that travel bit. 
+If you're in the communal industry, look at religion and do the communal bit. 
+So it's a wiki project. 
+(Laughter) CA: Alain, thank you for sparking many conversations later. 
+(Applause) 
+
+As a particle physicist, I study the elementary particles and how they interact on the most fundamental level. 
+For most of my research career, I've been using accelerators, such as the electron accelerator at Stanford University, just up the road, to study things on the smallest scale. 
+But more recently, I've been turning my attention to the universe on the largest scale. 
+Because, as I'll explain to you, the questions on the smallest and the largest scale are actually very connected. 
+So I'm going to tell you about our twenty-first-century view of the universe, what it's made of and what the big questions in the physical sciences are — at least some of the big questions. 
+So, recently, we have realized that the ordinary matter in the universe — and by ordinary matter, I mean you, me, the planets, the stars, the galaxies — the ordinary matter makes up only a few percent of the content of the universe. 
+Almost a quarter, or approximately a quarter of the matter in the universe, is stuff that's invisible. 
+By invisible, I mean it doesn't absorb in the electromagnetic spectrum. 
+It doesn't emit in the electromagnetic spectrum. It doesn't reflect. 
+It doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what we use to detect things. 
+It doesn't interact at all. So how do we know it's there? 
+We know it's there by its gravitational effects. 
+In fact, this dark matter dominates the gravitational effects in the universe on a large scale, and I'll be telling you about the evidence for that. 
+What about the rest of the pie? 
+The rest of the pie is a very mysterious substance called dark energy. 
+More about that later, OK. 
+So for now, let's turn to the evidence for dark matter. 
+In these galaxies, especially in a spiral galaxy like this, most of the mass of the stars is concentrated in the middle of the galaxy. 
+This huge mass of all these stars keeps stars in circular orbits in the galaxy. 
+So we have these stars going around in circles like this. 
+As you can imagine, even if you know physics, this should be intuitive, OK — that stars that are closer to the mass in the middle will be rotating at a higher speed than those that are further out here, OK. 
+So what you would expect is that if you measured the orbital speed of the stars, that they should be slower on the edges than on the inside. 
+In other words, if we measured speed as a function of distance — this is the only time I'm going to show a graph, OK — we would expect that it goes down as the distance increases from the center of the galaxy. 
+When those measurements are made, instead what we find is that the speed is basically constant, as a function of distance. 
+If it's constant, that means that the stars out here are feeling the gravitational effects of matter that we do not see. 
+In fact, this galaxy and every other galaxy appears to be embedded in a cloud of this invisible dark matter. 
+And this cloud of matter is much more spherical than the galaxy themselves, and it extends over a much wider range than the galaxy. 
+So we see the galaxy and fixate on that, but it's actually a cloud of dark matter that's dominating the structure and the dynamics of this galaxy. 
+Galaxies themselves are not strewn randomly in space; they tend to cluster. 
+And this is an example of a very, actually, famous cluster, the Coma cluster. 
+And there are thousands of galaxies in this cluster. 
+They're the white, fuzzy, elliptical things here. 
+So these galaxy clusters — we take a snapshot now, we take a snapshot in a decade, it'll look identical. 
+But these galaxies are actually moving at extremely high speeds. 
+They're moving around in this gravitational potential well of this cluster, OK. 
+So all of these galaxies are moving. 
+We can measure the speeds of these galaxies, their orbital velocities, and figure out how much mass is in this cluster. 
+And again, what we find is that there is much more mass there than can be accounted for by the galaxies that we see. 
+Or if we look in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, we see that there's a lot of gas in this cluster, as well. 
+But that cannot account for the mass either. 
+In fact, there appears to be about ten times as much mass here in the form of this invisible or dark matter as there is in the ordinary matter, OK. 
+It would be nice if we could see this dark matter a little bit more directly. 
+I'm just putting this big, blue blob on there, OK, to try to remind you that it's there. 
+Can we see it more visually? Yes, we can. 
+And so let me lead you through how we can do this. 
+So here's an observer: it could be an eye; it could be a telescope. 
+And suppose there's a galaxy out here in the universe. 
+How do we see that galaxy? 
+A ray of light leaves the galaxy and travels through the universe for perhaps billions of years before it enters the telescope or your eye. 
+Now, how do we deduce where the galaxy is? 
+Well, we deduce it by the direction that the ray is traveling as it enters our eye, right? 
+We say, the ray of light came this way; the galaxy must be there, OK. 
+Now, suppose I put in the middle a cluster of galaxies — and don't forget the dark matter, OK. 
+Now, if we consider a different ray of light, one going off like this, we now need to take into account what Einstein predicted when he developed general relativity. 
+And that was that the gravitational field, due to mass, will deflect not only the trajectory of particles, but will deflect light itself. 
+So this light ray will not continue in a straight line, but would rather bend and could end up going into our eye. 
+Where will this observer see the galaxy? 
+You can respond. Up, right? 
+We extrapolate backwards and say the galaxy is up here. 
+Is there any other ray of light that could make into the observer's eye from that galaxy? 
+Yes, great. I see people going down like this. 
+So a ray of light could go down, be bent up into the observer's eye, and the observer sees a ray of light here. 
+Now, take into account the fact that we live in a three-dimensional universe, OK, a three-dimensional space. 
+Are there any other rays of light that could make it into the eye? 
+Yes! The rays would lie on a — I'd like to see — yeah, on a cone. 
+So there's a whole ray of light — rays of light on a cone — that will all be bent by that cluster and make it into the observer's eye. 
+If there is a cone of light coming into my eye, what do I see? 
+A circle, a ring. It's called an Einstein ring. Einstein predicted that, OK. 
+Now, it will only be a perfect ring if the source, the deflector and the eyeball, in this case, are all in a perfectly straight line. 
+If they're slightly skewed, we'll see a different image. 
+Now, you can do an experiment tonight over the reception, OK, to figure out what that image will look like. 
+Because it turns out that there is a kind of lens that we can devise, that has the right shape to produce this kind of effect. 
+We call this gravitational lensing. 
+And so, this is your instrument, OK. 
+(Laughter). 
+But ignore the top part. 
+It's the base that I want you to concentrate, OK. 
+So, actually, at home, whenever we break a wineglass, I save the bottom, take it over to the machine shop. 
+We shave it off, and I have a little gravitational lens, OK. 
+So it's got the right shape to produce the lensing. 
+And so the next thing you need to do in your experiment is grab a napkin. I grabbed a piece of graph paper — I'm a physicist. (Laughter) So, a napkin. Draw a little model galaxy in the middle. 
+And now put the lens over the galaxy, and what you'll find is that you'll see a ring, an Einstein ring. 
+Now, move the base off to the side, and the ring will split up into arcs, OK. 
+And you can put it on top of any image. 
+On the graph paper, you can see how all the lines on the graph paper have been distorted. 
+And again, this is a kind of an accurate model of what happens with the gravitational lensing. 
+OK, so the question is: do we see this in the sky? 
+Do we see arcs in the sky when we look at, say, a cluster of galaxies? 
+And the answer is yes. 
+And so, here's an image from the Hubble Space Telescope. 
+Many of the images you are seeing are earlier from the Hubble Space Telescope. 
+Well, first of all, for the golden shape galaxies — those are the galaxies in the cluster. 
+They're the ones that are embedded in that sea of dark matter that are causing the bending of the light to cause these optical illusions, or mirages, practically, of the background galaxies. 
+So the streaks that you see, all these streaks, are actually distorted images of galaxies that are much further away. 
+So what we can do, then, is based on how much distortion we see in those images, we can calculate how much mass there must be in this cluster. 
+And it's an enormous amount of mass. 
+And also, you can tell by eye, by looking at this, that these arcs are not centered on individual galaxies. 
+They are centered on some more spread out structure, and that is the dark matter in which the cluster is embedded, OK. 
+So this is the closest you can get to kind of seeing at least the effects of the dark matter with your naked eye. 
+OK, so, a quick review then, to see that you're following. 
+So the evidence that we have that a quarter of the universe is dark matter — this gravitationally attracting stuff — is that galaxies, the speed with which stars orbiting galaxies is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. 
+The speed with which galaxies within clusters are orbiting is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. 
+And we see these gravitational lensing effects, these distortions that say that, again, clusters are embedded in dark matter. 
+OK. So now, let's turn to dark energy. 
+So to understand the evidence for dark energy, we need to discuss something that Stephen Hawking referred to in the previous session. 
+And that is the fact that space itself is expanding. 
+So if we imagine a section of our infinite universe — and so I've put down four spiral galaxies, OK — and imagine that you put down a set of tape measures, so every line on here corresponds to a tape measure, horizontal or vertical, for measuring where things are. 
+If you could do this, what you would find that with each passing day, each passing year, each passing billions of years, OK, the distance between galaxies is getting greater. 
+And it's not because galaxies are moving away from each other through space. 
+They're not necessarily moving through space. 
+They're moving away from each other because space itself is getting bigger, OK. 
+That's what the expansion of the universe or space means. 
+So they're moving further apart. 
+Now, what Stephen Hawking mentioned, as well, is that after the Big Bang, space expanded at a very rapid rate. 
+But because gravitationally attracting matter is embedded in this space, it tends to slow down the expansion of the space, OK. 
+So the expansion slows down with time. 
+So, in the last century, OK, people debated about whether this expansion of space would continue forever; whether it would slow down, you know, will be slowing down, but continue forever; slow down and stop, asymptotically stop; or slow down, stop, and then reverse, so it starts to contract again. 
+So a little over a decade ago, two groups of physicists and astronomers set out to measure the rate at which the expansion of space was slowing down, OK. 
+By how much less is it expanding today, compared to, say, a couple of billion years ago? 
+The startling answer to this question, OK, from these experiments, was that space is expanding at a faster rate today than it was a few billion years ago, OK. 
+So the expansion of space is actually speeding up. 
+This was a completely surprising result. 
+There is no persuasive theoretical argument for why this should happen, OK. 
+No one was predicting ahead of time this is what's going to be found. 
+It was the opposite of what was expected. 
+So we need something to be able to explain that. 
+Now it turns out, in the mathematics, you can put it in as a term that's an energy, but it's a completely different type of energy from anything we've ever seen before. 
+We call it dark energy, and it has this effect of causing space to expand. 
+But we don't have a good motivation for putting it in there at this point, OK. 
+So it's really unexplained as to why we need to put it in. 
+Now, so at this point, then, what I want to really emphasize to you, is that, first of all, dark matter and dark energy are completely different things, OK. 
+There are really two mysteries out there as to what makes up most of the universe, and they have very different effects. 
+Dark matter, because it gravitationally attracts, it tends to encourage the growth of structure, OK. 
+So clusters of galaxies will tend to form, because of all this gravitational attraction. 
+Dark energy, on the other hand, is putting more and more space between the galaxies, makes it, the gravitational attraction between them decrease, and so it impedes the growth of structure. 
+So by looking at things like clusters of galaxies, and how they — their number density, how many there are as a function of time — we can learn about how dark matter and dark energy compete against each other in structure forming. 
+In terms of dark matter, I said that we don't have any, you know, really persuasive argument for dark energy. 
+Do we have anything for dark matter? And the answer is yes. 
+We have well-motivated candidates for the dark matter. 
+Now, what do I mean by well motivated? 
+I mean that we have mathematically consistent theories that were actually introduced to explain a completely different phenomenon, OK, things that I haven't even talked about, that each predict the existence of a very weakly interacting, new particle. 
+So, this is exactly what you want in physics: where a prediction comes out of a mathematically consistent theory that was actually developed for something else. 
+But we don't know if either of those are actually the dark matter candidate, OK. 
+One or both, who knows? Or it could be something completely different. 
+Now, we look for these dark matter particles because, after all, they are here in the room, OK, and they didn't come in the door. 
+They just pass through anything. 
+They can come through the building, through the Earth — they're so non-interacting. 
+So one way to look for them is to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to a dark matter particle coming through and bumping it. 
+So a crystal that will ring if that happens. 
+So one of my colleagues up the road and his collaborators have built such a detector. 
+And they've put it deep down in an iron mine in Minnesota, OK, deep under the ground, and in fact, in the last couple of days announced the most sensitive results so far. 
+They haven't seen anything, OK, but it puts limits on what the mass and the interaction strength of these dark matter particles are. 
+There's going to be a satellite telescope launched later this year and it will look towards the middle of the galaxy, to see if we can see dark matter particles annihilating and producing gamma rays that could be detected with this. 
+The Large Hadron Collider, a particle physics accelerator, that we'll be turning on later this year. 
+It is possible that dark matter particles might be produced at the Large Hadron Collider. 
+Now, because they are so non-interactive, they will actually escape the detector, so their signature will be missing energy, OK. 
+Now, unfortunately, there is a lot of new physics whose signature could be missing energy, so it will be hard to tell the difference. 
+And finally, for future endeavors, there are telescopes being designed specifically to address the questions of dark matter and dark energy — ground-based telescopes, and there are three space-based telescopes that are in competition right now to be launched to investigate dark matter and dark energy. 
+So in terms of the big questions: what is dark matter? What is dark energy? 
+The big questions facing physics. 
+And I'm sure you have lots of questions, which I very much look forward to addressing over the next 72 hours, while I'm here. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a very lucky person. 
+I've been privileged to see so much of our beautiful Earth and the people and creatures that live on it. 
+And my passion was inspired at the age of seven, when my parents first took me to Morocco, at the edge of the Sahara Desert. 
+Now imagine a little Brit somewhere that wasn't cold and damp like home. 
+What an amazing experience. 
+And it made me want to explore more. 
+So as a filmmaker, I've been from one end of the Earth to the other trying to get the perfect shot and to capture animal behavior never seen before. 
+And what's more, I'm really lucky, because I get to share that with millions of people worldwide. 
+Now the idea of having new perspectives of our planet and actually being able to get that message out gets me out of bed every day with a spring in my step. 
+You might think that it's quite hard to find new stories and new subjects, but new technology is changing the way we can film. 
+It's enabling us to get fresh, new images and tell brand new stories. 
+In Nature's Great Events, a series for the BBC that I did with David Attenborough, we wanted to do just that. 
+Images of grizzly bears are pretty familiar. 
+You see them all the time, you think. 
+But there's a whole side to their lives that we hardly ever see and had never been filmed. 
+So what we did, we went to Alaska, which is where the grizzlies rely on really high, almost inaccessible, mountain slopes for their denning. 
+And the only way to film that is a shoot from the air. 
+(Video) David Attenborough: Throughout Alaska and British Columbia, thousands of bear families are emerging from their winter sleep. 
+There is nothing to eat up here, but the conditions were ideal for hibernation. 
+Lots of snow in which to dig a den. 
+To find food, mothers must lead their cubs down to the coast, where the snow will already be melting. 
+But getting down can be a challenge for small cubs. 
+These mountains are dangerous places, but ultimately the fate of these bear families, and indeed that of all bears around the North Pacific, depends on the salmon. 
+KB: I love that shot. 
+I always get goosebumps every time I see it. 
+That was filmed from a helicopter using a gyro-stabilized camera. 
+And it's a wonderful bit of gear, because it's like having a flying tripod, crane and dolly all rolled into one. 
+But technology alone isn't enough. 
+To really get the money shots, it's down to being in the right place at the right time. 
+And that sequence was especially difficult. 
+The first year we got nothing. 
+We had to go back the following year, all the way back to the remote parts of Alaska. 
+And we hung around with a helicopter for two whole weeks. 
+And eventually we got lucky. 
+The cloud lifted, the wind was still, and even the bear showed up. 
+And we managed to get that magic moment. 
+For a filmmaker, new technology is an amazing tool, but the other thing that really, really excites me is when new species are discovered. 
+Now, when I heard about one animal, I knew we had to get it for my next series, Untamed Americas, for National Geographic. 
+In 2005, a new species of bat was discovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador. 
+And what was amazing about that discovery is that it also solved the mystery of what pollinated a unique flower. 
+It depends solely on the bat. 
+Now, the series hasn't even aired yet, so you're the very first to see this. 
+See what you think. 
+(Video) Narrator: The tube-lipped nectar bat. 
+A pool of delicious nectar lies at the bottom of each flower's long flute. 
+But how to reach it? 
+Necessity is the mother of evolution. 
+(Music) This two-and-a-half-inch bat has a three-and-a-half-inch tongue, the longest relative to body length of any mammal in the world. 
+If human, he'd have a nine-foot tongue. 
+(Applause) KB: What a tongue. 
+We filmed it by cutting a tiny little hole in the base of the flower and using a camera that could slow the action by 40 times. 
+So imagine how quick that thing is in real life. 
+Now people often ask me, "" Where's your favorite place on the planet? "" And the truth is I just don't have one. 
+There are so many wonderful places. 
+But some locations draw you back time and time again. 
+And one remote location — I first went there as a backpacker; I've been back several times for filming, most recently for Untamed Americas — it's the Altiplano in the high Andes of South America, and it's the most otherworldly place I know. 
+But at 15,000 feet, it's tough. 
+It's freezing cold, and that thin air really gets you. 
+Sometimes it's hard to breathe, especially carrying all the heavy filming equipment. 
+And that pounding head just feels like a constant hangover. 
+But the advantage of that wonderful thin atmosphere is that it enables you to see the stars in the heavens with amazing clarity. 
+Have a look. 
+(Video) Narrator: Some 1,500 miles south of the tropics, between Chile and Bolivia, the Andes completely change. 
+It's called the Altiplano, or "" high plains "" — a place of extremes and extreme contrasts. 
+Where deserts freeze and waters boil. 
+More like Mars than Earth, it seems just as hostile to life. 
+The stars themselves — at 12,000 feet, the dry, thin air makes for perfect stargazing. 
+Some of the world's astronomers have telescopes nearby. 
+But just looking up with the naked eye, you really don't need one. 
+(Music) (Applause) KB: Thank you so much for letting me share some images of our magnificent, wonderful Earth. 
+Thank you for letting me share that with you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+What would be a good end of life? 
+And I'm talking about the very end. 
+I'm talking about dying. 
+We all think a lot about how to live well. 
+I'd like to talk about increasing our chances of dying well. 
+I'm not a geriatrician. 
+I design reading programs for preschoolers. 
+What I know about this topic comes from a qualitative study with a sample size of two. 
+In the last few years, I helped two friends have the end of life they wanted. 
+Jim and Shirley Modini spent their 68 years of marriage living off the grid on their 1,700-acre ranch in the mountains of Sonoma County. 
+They kept just enough livestock to make ends meet so that the majority of their ranch would remain a refuge for the bears and lions and so many other things that lived there. 
+This was their dream. 
+I met Jim and Shirley in their 80s. 
+They were both only children who chose not to have kids. 
+As we became friends, I became their trustee and their medical advocate, but more importantly, I became the person who managed their end-of-life experiences. 
+And we learned a few things about how to have a good end. 
+In their final years, Jim and Shirley faced cancers, fractures, infections, neurological illness. 
+It's true. 
+At the end, our bodily functions and independence are declining to zero. 
+What we found is that, with a plan and the right people, quality of life can remain high. 
+The beginning of the end is triggered by a mortality awareness event, and during this time, Jim and Shirley chose ACR nature preserves to take their ranch over when they were gone. 
+This gave them the peace of mind to move forward. 
+It might be a diagnosis. It might be your intuition. 
+But one day, you're going to say, "" This thing is going to get me. "" Jim and Shirley spent this time letting friends know that their end was near and that they were okay with that. 
+Dying from cancer and dying from neurological illness are different. 
+In both cases, last days are about quiet reassurance. 
+Jim died first. He was conscious until the very end, but on his last day he couldn't talk. 
+Through his eyes, we knew when he needed to hear again, "" It is all set, Jim. We're going to take care of Shirley right here at the ranch, and ACR's going to take care of your wildlife forever. "" From this experience I'm going to share five practices. 
+I've put worksheets online, so if you'd like, you can plan your own end. 
+It starts with a plan. 
+Most people say, "" I'd like to die at home. "" Eighty percent of Americans die in a hospital or a nursing home. 
+Saying we'd like to die at home is not a plan. 
+A lot of people say, "" If I get like that, just shoot me. "" This is not a plan either; this is illegal. 
+(Laughter) A plan involves answering straightforward questions about the end you want. 
+Where do you want to be when you're no longer independent? 
+What do you want in terms of medical intervention? 
+And who's going to make sure your plan is followed? 
+You will need advocates. 
+Having more than one increases your chance of getting the end you want. 
+Don't assume the natural choice is your spouse or child. 
+You want someone who has the time and proximity to do this job well, and you want someone who can work with people under the pressure of an ever-changing situation. 
+Hospital readiness is critical. 
+You are likely to be headed to the emergency room, and you want to get this right. 
+Prepare a one-page summary of your medical history, medications and physician information. 
+Put this in a really bright envelope with copies of your insurance cards, your power of attorney, and your do-not-resuscitate order. 
+Have advocates keep a set in their car. 
+Tape a set to your refrigerator. 
+When you show up in the E.R. with this packet, your admission is streamlined in a material way. 
+You're going to need caregivers. 
+You'll need to assess your personality and financial situation to determine whether an elder care community or staying at home is your best choice. 
+In either case, do not settle. 
+We went through a number of not-quite-right caregivers before we found the perfect team led by Marsha, who won't let you win at bingo just because you're dying but will go out and take videos of your ranch for you when you can't get out there, and Caitlin, who won't let you skip your morning exercises but knows when you need to hear that your wife is in good hands. 
+Finally, last words. 
+What do you want to hear at the very end, and from whom would you like to hear it? 
+In my experience, you'll want to hear that whatever you're worried about is going to be fine. 
+When you believe it's okay to let go, you will. 
+So, this is a topic that normally inspires fear and denial. 
+What I've learned is if we put some time into planning our end of life, we have the best chance of maintaining our quality of life. 
+Here are Jim and Shirley just after deciding who would take care of their ranch. 
+Here's Jim just a few weeks before he died, celebrating a birthday he didn't expect to see. 
+And here's Shirley just a few days before she died being read an article in that day's paper about the significance of the wildlife refuge at the Modini ranch. 
+Jim and Shirley had a good end of life, and by sharing their story with you, I hope to increase our chances of doing the same. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Space, we all know what it looks like. 
+We've been surrounded by images of space our whole lives, from the speculative images of science fiction to the inspirational visions of artists to the increasingly beautiful pictures made possible by complex technologies. 
+But whilst we have an overwhelmingly vivid visual understanding of space, we have no sense of what space sounds like. 
+And indeed, most people associate space with silence. 
+But the story of how we came to understand the universe is just as much a story of listening as it is by looking. 
+And yet despite this, hardly any of us have ever heard space. 
+How many of you here could describe the sound of a single planet or star? 
+Well in case you've ever wondered, this is what the Sun sounds like. 
+(Static) (Crackling) (Static) (Crackling) This is the planet Jupiter. 
+(Soft crackling) And this is the space probe Cassini pirouetting through the ice rings of Saturn. 
+(Crackling) This is a a highly condensed clump of neutral matter, spinning in the distant universe. 
+(Tapping) So my artistic practice is all about listening to the weird and wonderful noises emitted by the magnificent celestial objects that make up our universe. 
+And you may wonder, how do we know what these sounds are? 
+How can we tell the difference between the sound of the Sun and the sound of a pulsar? 
+Well the answer is the science of radio astronomy. 
+Radio astronomers study radio waves from space using sensitive antennas and receivers, which give them precise information about what an astronomical object is and where it is in our night sky. 
+And just like the signals that we send and receive here on Earth, we can convert these transmissions into sound using simple analog techniques. 
+And therefore, it's through listening that we've come to uncover some of the universe's most important secrets — its scale, what it's made of and even how old it is. 
+So today, I'm going to tell you a short story of the history of the universe through listening. 
+It's punctuated by three quick anecdotes, which show how accidental encounters with strange noises gave us some of the most important information we have about space. 
+Now this story doesn't start with vast telescopes or futuristic spacecraft, but a rather more humble technology — and in fact, the very medium which gave us the telecommunications revolution that we're all part of today: the telephone. 
+It's 1876, it's in Boston, and this is Alexander Graham Bell who was working with Thomas Watson on the invention of the telephone. 
+A key part of their technical set up was a half-mile long length of wire, which was thrown across the rooftops of several houses in Boston. 
+The line carried the telephone signals that would later make Bell a household name. 
+But like any long length of charged wire, it also inadvertently became an antenna. 
+Thomas Watson spent hours listening to the strange crackles and hisses and chirps and whistles that his accidental antenna detected. 
+Now you have to remember, this is 10 years before Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves — 15 years before Nikola Tesla's four-tuned circuit — nearly 20 years before Marconi's first broadcast. 
+So Thomas Watson wasn't listening to us. 
+We didn't have the technology to transmit. 
+So what were these strange noises? 
+Watson was in fact listening to very low-frequency radio emissions caused by nature. 
+Some of the crackles and pops were lightning, but the eerie whistles and curiously melodious chirps had a rather more exotic origin. 
+Using the very first telephone, Watson was in fact dialed into the heavens. 
+As he correctly guessed, some of these sounds were caused by activity on the surface of the Sun. 
+It was a solar wind interacting with our ionosphere that he was listening to — a phenomena which we can see at the extreme northern and southern latitudes of our planet as the aurora. 
+So whilst inventing the technology that would usher in the telecommunications revolution, Watson had discovered that the star at the center of our solar system emitted powerful radio waves. 
+He had accidentally been the first person to tune in to them. 
+Fast-forward 50 years, and Bell and Watson's technology has completely transformed global communications. 
+But going from slinging some wire across rooftops in Boston to laying thousands and thousands of miles of cable on the Atlantic Ocean seabed is no easy matter. 
+And so before long, Bell were looking to new technologies to optimize their revolution. 
+Radio could carry sound without wires. 
+But the medium is lossy — it's subject to a lot of noise and interference. 
+So Bell employed an engineer to study those noises, to try and find out where they came from, with a view towards building the perfect hardware codec, which would get rid of them so they could think about using radio for the purposes of telephony. 
+Most of the noises that the engineer, Karl Jansky, investigated were fairly prosaic in origin. 
+They turned out to be lightning or sources of electrical power. 
+But there was one persistent noise that Jansky couldn't identify, and it seemed to appear in his radio headset four minutes earlier each day. 
+Now any astronomer will tell you, this is the telltale sign of something that doesn't originate from Earth. 
+Jansky had made a historic discovery, that celestial objects could emit radio waves as well as light waves. 
+Fifty years on from Watson's accidental encounter with the Sun, Jansky's careful listening ushered in a new age of space exploration: the radio astronomy age. 
+Over the next few years, astronomers connected up their antennas to loudspeakers and learned about our radio sky, about Jupiter and the Sun, by listening. 
+Let's jump ahead again. 
+It's 1964, and we're back at Bell Labs. 
+And once again, two scientists have got a problem with noise. 
+Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using the horn antenna at Bell's Holmdel laboratory to study the Milky Way with extraordinary precision. 
+They were really listening to the galaxy in high fidelity. 
+There was a glitch in their soundtrack. 
+A mysterious persistent noise was disrupting their research. 
+It was in the microwave range, and it appeared to be coming from all directions simultaneously. 
+Now this didn't make any sense, and like any reasonable engineer or scientist, they assumed that the problem must be the technology itself, it must be the dish. 
+There were pigeons roosting in the dish. 
+And so perhaps once they cleaned up the pigeon droppings, get the disk kind of operational again, normal operations would resume. 
+But the noise didn't disappear. 
+The mysterious noise that Penzias and Wilson were listening to turned out to be the oldest and most significant sound that anyone had ever heard. 
+It was cosmic radiation left over from the very birth of the universe. 
+This was the first experimental evidence that the Big Bang existed and the universe was born at a precise moment some 14.7 billion years ago. 
+So our story ends at the beginning — the beginning of all things, the Big Bang. 
+This is the noise that Penzias and Wilson heard — the oldest sound that you're ever going to hear, the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang. 
+(Fuzz) Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Technology can change our understanding of nature. 
+Take for example the case of lions. 
+For centuries, it's been said that female lions do all of the hunting out in the open savanna, and male lions do nothing until it's time for dinner. 
+You've heard this too, I can tell. 
+Well recently, I led an airborne mapping campaign in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. 
+Our colleagues put GPS tracking collars on male and female lions, and we mapped their hunting behavior from the air. 
+The lower left shows a lion sizing up a herd of impala for a kill, and the right shows what I call the lion viewshed. 
+That's how far the lion can see in all directions until his or her view is obstructed by vegetation. 
+And what we found is that male lions are not the lazy hunters we thought them to be. 
+They just use a different strategy. 
+Whereas the female lions hunt out in the open savanna over long distances, usually during the day, male lions use an ambush strategy in dense vegetation, and often at night. 
+This video shows the actual hunting viewsheds of male lions on the left and females on the right. 
+Red and darker colors show more dense vegetation, and the white are wide open spaces. 
+And this is the viewshed right literally at the eye level of hunting male and female lions. 
+All of a sudden, you get a very clear understanding of the very spooky conditions under which male lions do their hunting. 
+I bring up this example to begin, because it emphasizes how little we know about nature. 
+There's been a huge amount of work done so far to try to slow down our losses of tropical forests, and we are losing our forests at a rapid rate, as shown in red on the slide. 
+I find it ironic that we're doing so much, yet these areas are fairly unknown to science. 
+So how can we save what we don't understand? 
+Now I'm a global ecologist and an Earth explorer with a background in physics and chemistry and biology and a lot of other boring subjects, but above all, I'm obsessed with what we don't know about our planet. 
+So I created this, the Carnegie Airborne Observatory, or CAO. 
+It may look like a plane with a fancy paint job, but I packed it with over 1,000 kilos of high-tech sensors, computers, and a very motivated staff of Earth scientists and pilots. 
+Two of our instruments are very unique: one is called an imaging spectrometer that can actually measure the chemical composition of plants as we fly over them. 
+Another one is a set of lasers, very high-powered lasers, that fire out of the bottom of the plane, sweeping across the ecosystem and measuring it at nearly 500,000 times per second in high-resolution 3D. 
+Here's an image of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, not far from where I live. 
+Although we flew straight over this bridge, we imaged it in 3D, captured its color in just a few seconds. 
+But the real power of the CAO is its ability to capture the actual building blocks of ecosystems. 
+This is a small town in the Amazon, imaged with the CAO. 
+We can slice through our data and see, for example, the 3D structure of the vegetation and the buildings, or we can use the chemical information to actually figure out how fast the plants are growing as we fly over them. 
+The hottest pinks are the fastest-growing plants. 
+And we can see biodiversity in ways that you never could have imagined. 
+This is what a rainforest might look like as you fly over it in a hot air balloon. 
+This is how we see a rainforest, in kaleidoscopic color that tells us that there are many species living with one another. 
+But you have to remember that these trees are literally bigger than whales, and what that means is that they're impossible to understand just by walking on the ground below them. 
+So our imagery is 3D, it's chemical, it's biological, and this tells us not only the species that are living in the canopy, but it tells us a lot of information about the rest of the species that occupy the rainforest. 
+Now I created the CAO in order to answer questions that have proven extremely challenging to answer from any other vantage point, such as from the ground, or from satellite sensors. 
+I want to share three of those questions with you today. 
+The first questions is, how do we manage our carbon reserves in tropical forests? 
+Tropical forests contain a huge amount of carbon in the trees, and we need to keep that carbon in those forests if we're going to avoid any further global warming. 
+Unfortunately, global carbon emissions from deforestation now equals the global transportation sector. 
+That's all ships, airplanes, trains and automobiles combined. 
+So it's understandable that policy negotiators have been working hard to reduce deforestation, but they're doing it on landscapes that are hardly known to science. 
+If you don't know where the carbon is exactly, in detail, how can you know what you're losing? 
+Basically, we need a high-tech accounting system. 
+With our system, we're able to see the carbon stocks of tropical forests in utter detail. 
+The red shows, obviously, closed-canopy tropical forest, and then you see the cookie cutting, or the cutting of the forest in yellows and greens. 
+It's like cutting a cake except this cake is about whale deep. 
+And yet, we can zoom in and see the forest and the trees at the same time. 
+And what's amazing is, even though we flew very high above this forest, later on in analysis, we can go in and actually experience the treetrops, leaf by leaf, branch by branch, just as the other species that live in this forest experience it along with the trees themselves. 
+We've been using the technology to explore and to actually put out the first carbon geographies in high resolution in faraway places like the Amazon Basin and not-so-faraway places like the United States and Central America. 
+What I'm going to do is I'm going to take you on a high-resolution, first-time tour of the carbon landscapes of Peru and then Panama. 
+The colors are going to be going from red to blue. 
+Red is extremely high carbon stocks, your largest cathedral forests you can imagine, and blue are very low carbon stocks. 
+And let me tell you, Peru alone is an amazing place, totally unknown in terms of its carbon geography until today. 
+We can fly to this area in northern Peru and see super high carbon stocks in red, and the Amazon River and floodplain cutting right through it. 
+We can go to an area of utter devastation caused by deforestation in blue, and the virus of deforestation spreading out in orange. 
+We can also fly to the southern Andes to see the tree line and see exactly how the carbon geography ends as we go up into the mountain system. 
+And we can go to the biggest swamp in the western Amazon. 
+It's a watery dreamworld akin to Jim Cameron's "" Avatar. "" We can go to one of the smallest tropical countries, Panama, and see also a huge range of carbon variation, from high in red to low in blue. 
+Unfortunately, most of the carbon is lost in the lowlands, but what you see that's left, in terms of high carbon stocks in greens and reds, is the stuff that's up in the mountains. 
+One interesting exception to this is right in the middle of your screen. 
+You're seeing the buffer zone around the Panama Canal. 
+That's in the reds and yellows. 
+The canal authorities are using force to protect their watershed and global commerce. 
+This kind of carbon mapping has transformed conservation and resource policy development. 
+It's really advancing our ability to save forests and to curb climate change. 
+My second question: How do we prepare for climate change in a place like the Amazon rainforest? 
+Let me tell you, I spend a lot of time in these places, and we're seeing the climate changing already. 
+Temperatures are increasing, and what's really happening is we're getting a lot of droughts, recurring droughts. 
+The 2010 mega-drought is shown here with red showing an area about the size of Western Europe. 
+The Amazon was so dry in 2010 that even the main stem of the Amazon river itself dried up partially, as you see in the photo in the lower portion of the slide. 
+What we found is that in very remote areas, these droughts are having a big negative impact on tropical forests. 
+For example, these are all of the dead trees in red that suffered mortality following the 2010 drought. 
+This area happens to be on the border of Peru and Brazil, totally unexplored, almost totally unknown scientifically. 
+So what we think, as Earth scientists, is species are going to have to migrate with climate change from the east in Brazil all the way west into the Andes and up into the mountains in order to minimize their exposure to climate change. 
+One of the problems with this is that humans are taking apart the western Amazon as we speak. 
+Look at this 100-square-kilometer gash in the forest created by gold miners. 
+You see the forest in green in 3D, and you see the effects of gold mining down below the soil surface. 
+Species have nowhere to migrate in a system like this, obviously. 
+If you haven't been to the Amazon, you should go. 
+It's an amazing experience every time, no matter where you go. 
+You're going to probably see it this way, on a river. 
+But what happens is a lot of times the rivers hide what's really going on back in the forest itself. 
+We flew over this same river, imaged the system in 3D. 
+The forest is on the left. 
+And then we can digitally remove the forest and see what's going on below the canopy. 
+And in this case, we found gold mining activity, all of it illegal, set back away from the river's edge, as you'll see in those strange pockmarks coming up on your screen on the right. 
+Don't worry, we're working with the authorities to deal with this and many, many other problems in the region. 
+So in order to put together a conservation plan for these unique, important corridors like the western Amazon and the Andes Amazon corridor, we have to start making geographically explicit plans now. 
+How do we do that if we don't know the geography of biodiversity in the region, if it's so unknown to science? 
+So what we've been doing is using the laser-guided spectroscopy from the CAO to map for the first time the biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. 
+Here you see actual data showing different species in different colors. 
+Reds are one type of species, blues are another, and greens are yet another. 
+And when we take this together and scale up to the regional level, we get a completely new geography of biodiversity unknown prior to this work. 
+This tells us where the big biodiversity changes occur from habitat to habitat, and that's really important because it tells us a lot about where species may migrate to and migrate from as the climate shifts. 
+And this is the pivotal information that's needed by decision makers to develop protected areas in the context of their regional development plans. 
+And third and final question is, how do we manage biodiversity on a planet of protected ecosystems? 
+The example I started out with about lions hunting, that was a study we did behind the fence line of a protected area in South Africa. 
+And the truth is, much of Africa's nature is going to persist into the future in protected areas like I show in blue on the screen. 
+This puts incredible pressure and responsibility on park management. 
+They need to do and make decisions that will benefit all of the species that they're protecting. 
+Some of their decisions have really big impacts. 
+For example, how much and where to use fire as a management tool? 
+Or, how to deal with a large species like elephants, which may, if their populations get too large, have a negative impact on the ecosystem and on other species. 
+And let me tell you, these types of dynamics really play out on the landscape. 
+In the foreground is an area with lots of fire and lots of elephants: wide open savanna in blue, and just a few trees. 
+As we cross this fence line, now we're getting into an area that has had protection from fire and zero elephants: dense vegetation, a radically different ecosystem. 
+And in a place like Kruger, the soaring elephant densities are a real problem. 
+I know it's a sensitive issue for many of you, and there are no easy answers with this. 
+But what's good is that the technology we've developed and we're working with in South Africa, for example, is allowing us to map every single tree in the savanna, and then through repeat flights we're able to see which trees are being pushed over by elephants, in the red as you see on the screen, and how much that's happening in different types of landscapes in the savanna. 
+That's giving park managers a very first opportunity to use tactical management strategies that are more nuanced and don't lead to those extremes that I just showed you. 
+So really, the way we're looking at protected areas nowadays is to think of it as tending to a circle of life, where we have fire management, elephant management, those impacts on the structure of the ecosystem, and then those impacts affecting everything from insects up to apex predators like lions. 
+Going forward, I plan to greatly expand the airborne observatory. 
+I'm hoping to actually put the technology into orbit so we can manage the entire planet with technologies like this. 
+Until then, you're going to find me flying in some remote place that you've never heard of. 
+I just want to end by saying that technology is absolutely critical to managing our planet, but even more important is the understanding and wisdom to apply it. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Ben Roche: So I'm Ben, by the way. 
+Homaro Cantu: And I'm Homaro. 
+BR: And we're chefs. So when Moto opened in 2004, people didn't really know what to expect. A lot of people thought that it was a Japanese restaurant, and maybe it was the name, maybe it was the logo, which was like a Japanese character, but anyway, we had all these requests for Japanese food, which is really not what we did. And after about the ten thousandth request for a maki roll, we decided to give the people what they wanted. So this picture is an example of printed food, and this was the first foray into what we like to call 
+flavor transformation. So this is all the ingredients, all the flavor of, you know, a standard maki roll, printed onto a little piece of paper. 
+HC: So our diners started to get bored with this idea, and we decided to give them the same course twice, so here we actually took an element from the maki roll and and took a picture of a dish and then basically served that picture with the dish. 
+So this dish in particular is basically champagne with seafood. 
+The champagne grapes that you see are actually carbonated grapes. A little bit of seafood and some crème fraiche and the picture actually tastes exactly like the dish. (Laughter) BR: But it's not all just edible pictures. 
+We decided to do something a little bit different and transform flavors that were very familiar — so in this case, we have carrot cake. 
+So we take a carrot cake, put it in a blender, and we have kind of like a carrot cake juice, and then that went into a balloon frozen in liquid nitrogen to create this hollow shell of carrot cake ice cream, I guess, and it comes off looking like, you know, Jupiter's floating around your plate. 
+So yeah, we're transforming things into something that you have absolutely no reference for. 
+HC: And here's something we have no reference to eat. This is a cigar, and basically it's a Cuban cigar made out of a Cuban pork sandwich, so we take these spices that go into the pork shoulder, we fashion that into ash. We take the sandwich and wrap it up in a collard green, put an edible label that bears no similarity to a Cohiba cigar label, and we put it in a dollar ninety-nine ashtray and charge you about twenty bucks for it. (Laughter) HC: Delicious. 
+BR: That's not it, though. 
+Instead of making foods that look like things that you wouldn't eat, we decided to make ingredients look like dishes that you know. 
+So this is a plate of nachos. 
+The difference between our nachos and the other guy's nachos, is that this is actually a dessert. 
+So the chips are candied, the ground beef is made from chocolate, and the cheese is made from a shredded mango sorbet that gets shredded into liquid nitrogen to look like cheese. 
+And after doing all of this dematerialization and reconfiguring of this, of these ingredients, we realized that it was pretty cool, because as we served it, we learned that the dish actually behaves like the real thing, where the cheese begins to melt. 
+So when you're looking at this thing in the dining room, you have this sensation that this is actually a plate of nachos, and it's not really until you begin tasting it that you realize this is a dessert, and it's just kind of like a mind-ripper. 
+(Laughter) HC: So we had been creating all of these dishes out of a kitchen that was more like a mechanic's shop than a kitchen, and the next logical step for us was to install a state-of-the-art laboratory, and that's what we have here. 
+So we put this in the basement, and we got really serious about food, like serious experimentation. 
+BR: One of the really cool things about the lab, besides that we have a new science lab in the kitchen, is that, you know, with this new equipment, and this new approach, all these different doors to creativity that we never knew were there began to open, and so the experiments and the food and the dishes that we created, they just kept going further and further out there. 
+HC: Let's talk about flavor transformation, and let's actually make some cool stuff. 
+You see a cow with its tongue hanging out. 
+What I see is a cow about to eat something delicious. What is that cow eating? 
+And why is it delicious? 
+So the cow, basically, eats three basic things in their feed: corn, beets, and barley, and so what I do is I actually challenge my staff with these crazy, wild ideas. Can we take what the cow eats, remove the cow, and then make some hamburgers out of that? 
+And basically the reaction tends to be kind of like this. (Laughter) BR: Yeah, that's our chef de cuisine, Chris Jones. This is not the only guy that just flips out when we assign a ridiculous task, but a lot of these ideas, they're hard to understand. 
+They're hard to just get automatically. 
+There's a lot of research and a lot of failure, trial and error — I guess, more error — that goes into each and every dish, so we don't always get it right, and it takes a while for us to be able to explain that to people. 
+HC: So, after about a day of Chris and I staring at each other, we came up with something that was pretty close to the hamburger patty, and as you can see it basically forms like hamburger meat. 
+This is made from three ingredients: beets, barley, corn, and so it actually cooks up like hamburger meat, looks and tastes like hamburger meat, and not only that, but it's basically removing the cow from the equation. 
+So replicating food, taking it into that next level is where we're going. 
+(Applause) BR: And it's definitely the world's first bleeding veggie burger, which is a cool side effect. 
+And a miracle berry, if you're not familiar with it, is a natural ingredient, and it contains a special property. 
+It's a glycoprotein called miraculin, a naturally occurring thing. It still freaks me out every time I eat it, but it has a unique ability to mask certain taste receptors on your tongue, so that primarily sour taste receptors, so normally things that would taste very sour or tart, somehow begin to taste very sweet. 
+HC: You're about to eat a lemon, and now it tastes like lemonade. 
+Let's just stop and think about the economic benefits of something like that. 
+We could eliminate sugar across the board for all confectionary products and sodas, and we can replace it with all-natural fresh fruit. 
+BR: So you see us here cutting up some watermelon. The idea with this is that we're going to eliminate tons of food miles, wasted energy, and overfishing of tuna by creating tuna, or any exotic produce or item from a very far-away place, with local, organic produce; so we have a watermelon from Wisconsin. 
+HC: So if miracle berries take sour things and turn them into sweet things, we have this other pixie dust that we put on the watermelon, and it makes it go from sweet to savory. 
+So after we do that, we put it into a vacuum bag, add a little bit of seaweed, some spices, and we roll it, and this starts taking on the appearance of tuna. 
+So the key now is to make it behave like tuna. 
+BR: And then after a quick dip into some liquid nitrogen to get that perfect sear, we really have something that looks, tastes and behaves like the real thing. 
+HC: So the key thing to remember here is, we don't really care what this tuna really is. 
+As long as it's good for you and good for the environment, it doesn't matter. 
+But where is this going? 
+How can we take this idea of tricking your tastebuds and leapfrog it into something that we can do today that could be a disruptive food technology? 
+So here's the next challenge. 
+I told the staff, let's just take a bunch of wild plants, think of them as food ingredients. As long as they're non-poisonous to the human body, go out around Chicago sidewalks, take it, blend it, cook it and then have everybody flavor-trip on it at Moto. 
+Let's charge them a boatload of cash for this and see what they think. (Laughter) BR: Yeah, so you can imagine, a task like this — this is another one of those assignments that the kitchen staff hated us for. But we really had to almost relearn how to cook in general, because these are ingredients, you know, plant life that we're, one, unfamiliar with, and two, we have no reference for how to cook these things because people don't eat them. 
+So we really had to think about new, creative ways to flavor, new ways to cook and to change texture — and that was the main issue with this challenge. 
+HC: So this is where we step into the future and we leapfrog ahead. 
+So developing nations and first-world nations, imagine if you could take these wild plants and consume them, food miles would basically turn into food feet. 
+This disruptive mentality of what food is would essentially open up the encyclopedia of what raw ingredients are, even if we just swapped out, say, one of these for flour, that would eliminate so much energy and so much waste. 
+And to give you a simple example here as to what we actually fed these customers, there's a bale of hay there and some crab apples. 
+And basically we took hay and crab apples and made barbecue sauce out of those two ingredients. 
+People swore they were eating barbecue sauce, and this is free food. 
+BR: Thanks, guys. 
+(Applause) 
+
+(Applause) (Applause) I am a papercutter. 
+(Laughter) I cut stories. 
+So my process is very straightforward. 
+I take a piece of paper, I visualize my story, sometimes I sketch, sometimes I don't. 
+And as my image is already inside the paper, I just have to remove what's not from that story. 
+So I didn't come to papercutting in a straight line. 
+In fact, I see it more as a spiral. 
+I was not born with a blade in my hand. 
+And I don't remember papercutting as a child. 
+As a teenager, I was sketching, drawing, and I wanted to be an artist. 
+But I was also a rebel. 
+And I left everything and went for a long series of odd jobs. 
+So among them, I have been a shepherdess, a truck driver, a factory worker, a cleaning lady. 
+I worked in tourism for one year in Mexico, one year in Egypt. 
+I moved for two years in Taiwan. 
+And then I settled in New York where I became a tour guide. 
+And I still worked as a tour leader, traveled back and forth in China, Tibet and Central Asia. 
+So of course, it took time, and I was nearly 40, and I decided it's time to start as an artist. 
+(Applause) I chose papercutting because paper is cheap, it's light, and you can use it in a lot of different ways. 
+And I chose the language of silhouette because graphically it's very efficient. 
+And it's also just getting to the essential of things. 
+So the word "" silhouette "" comes from a minister of finance, Etienne de Silhouette. 
+And he slashed so many budgets that people said they couldn't afford paintings anymore, and they needed to have their portrait "a la silhouette." 
+(Laughter) So I made series of images, cuttings, and I assembled them in portfolios. 
+And people told me — like these 36 views of the Empire State building — they told me, "" You're making artist books. "" So artist books have a lot of definitions. 
+They come in a lot of different shapes. 
+But to me, they are fascinating objects to visually narrate a story. 
+They can be with words or without words. 
+And I have a passion for images and for words. 
+I love pun and the relation to the unconscious. 
+I love oddities of languages. 
+And everywhere I lived, I learned the languages, but never mastered them. 
+So I'm always looking for the false cognates or identical words in different languages. 
+So as you can guess, my mother tongue is French. 
+And my daily language is English. 
+So I did a series of work where it was identical words in French and in English. 
+So one of these works is the "" Spelling Spider. "" So the Spelling Spider is a cousin of the spelling bee. 
+(Laughter) But it's much more connected to the Web. (Laughter) 
+And this spider spins a bilingual alphabet. 
+So you can read "" architecture active "" or "" active architecture. "" So this spider goes through the whole alphabet with identical adjectives and substantives. 
+So if you don't know one of these languages, it's instant learning. 
+And one ancient form of the book is scrolls. 
+So scrolls are very convenient, because you can create a large image on a very small table. 
+So the unexpected consequences of that is that you only see one part of your image, so it makes a very freestyle architecture. 
+And I'm making all those kinds of windows. 
+So it's to look beyond the surface. 
+It's to have a look at different worlds. 
+And very often I've been an outsider. 
+So I want to see how things work and what's happening. 
+So each window is an image and is a world that I often revisit. 
+And I revisit this world thinking about the image or cliché about what we want to do, and what are the words, colloquialisms, that we have with the expressions. 
+It's all if. 
+So what if we were living in balloon houses? 
+It would make a very uplifting world. 
+And we would leave a very low footprint on the planet. 
+It would be so light. 
+So sometimes I view from the inside, like EgoCentriCity and the inner circles. 
+Sometimes it's a global view, to see our common roots and how we can use them to catch dreams. 
+And we can use them also as a safety net. 
+And my inspirations are very eclectic. 
+I'm influenced by everything I read, everything I see. 
+I have some stories that are humorous, like "" Dead Beats. "" (Laughter) Other ones are historical. 
+Here it's "" CandyCity. "" It's a non-sugar-coated history of sugar. 
+It goes from slave trade to over-consumption of sugar with some sweet moments in between. 
+And sometimes I have an emotional response to news, such as the 2010 Haitian earthquake. 
+Other times, it's not even my stories. 
+People tell me their lives, their memories, their aspirations, and I create a mindscape. 
+I channel their history [so that] they have a place to go back to look at their life and its possibilities. 
+I call them Freudian cities. 
+I cannot speak for all my images, so I'll just go through a few of my worlds just with the title. 
+"ModiCity." 
+"ElectriCity." 
+"MAD Growth on Columbus Circle." 
+"ReefCity." 
+"A Web of Time." 
+"Chaos City." 
+"Daily Battles." 
+"FeliCity." 
+"Floating Islands." 
+And at one point, I had to do "" The Whole Nine Yards. "" So it's actually a papercut that's nine yards long. 
+(Laughter) So in life and in papercutting, everything is connected. 
+One story leads to another. 
+I was also interested in the physicality of this format, because you have to walk to see it. 
+And parallel to my cutting is my running. 
+I started with small images, I started with a few miles. 
+Larger images, I started to run marathons. 
+Then I went to run 50K, then 60K. 
+Then I ran 50 miles — ultramarathons. 
+And I still feel I'm running, it's just the training to become a long-distance papercutter. 
+(Laughter) And running gives me a lot of energy. 
+Here is a three-week papercutting marathon at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. 
+The result is "" Hells and Heavens. "" It's two panels 13 ft. high. 
+They were installed in the museum on two floors, but in fact, it's a continuous image. 
+And I call it "" Hells and Heavens "" because it's daily hells and daily heavens. 
+There is no border in between. 
+Some people are born in hells, and against all odds, they make it to heavens. 
+Other people make the opposite trip. 
+That's the border. 
+You have sweatshops in hells. 
+You have people renting their wings in the heavens. 
+And then you have all those individual stories where sometimes we even have the same action, and the result puts you in hells or in heavens. 
+So the whole "" Hells and Heavens "" is about free will and determinism. 
+And in papercutting, you have the drawing as the structure itself. 
+So you can take it off the wall. 
+Here it's an artist book installation called "" Identity Project. "" It's not autobiographical identities. 
+They are more our social identities. 
+And then you can just walk behind them and try them on. 
+So it's like the different layers of what we are made of and what we present to the world as an identity. 
+That's another artist book project. 
+In fact, in the picture, you have two of them. 
+It's one I'm wearing and one that's on exhibition at the Center for Books Arts in New York City. 
+Why do I call it a book? 
+It's called "" Fashion Statement, "" and there are quotes about fashion, so you can read it, and also, because the definition of artist book is very generous. 
+So artist books, you take them off the wall. 
+You take them for a walk. 
+You can also install them as public art. 
+Here it's in Scottsdale, Arizona, and it's called "" Floating Memories. "" So it's regional memories, and they are just randomly moved by the wind. 
+I love public art. 
+And I entered competitions for a long time. 
+After eight years of rejection, I was thrilled to get my first commission with the Percent for Art in New York City. 
+It was for a merger station for emergency workers and firemen. 
+I made an artist book that's in stainless steel instead of paper. 
+I called it "" Working in the Same Direction. "" But I added weathervanes on both sides to show that they cover all directions. 
+With public art, I could also make cut glass. 
+Here it's faceted glass in the Bronx. 
+And each time I make public art, I want something that's really relevant to the place it's installed. 
+So for the subway in New York, I saw a correspondence between riding the subway and reading. 
+It is travel in time, travel on time. 
+And Bronx literature, it's all about Bronx writers and their stories. 
+Another glass project is in a public library in San Jose, California. 
+So I made a vegetable point of view of the growth of San Jose. 
+So I started in the center with the acorn for the Ohlone Indian civilization. 
+Then I have the fruit from Europe for the ranchers. 
+And then the fruit of the world for Silicon Valley today. 
+And it's still growing. 
+So the technique, it's cut, sandblasted, etched and printed glass into architectural glass. 
+And outside the library, I wanted to make a place to cultivate your mind. 
+I took library material that had fruit in their title and I used them to make an orchard walk with these fruits of knowledge. 
+I also planted the bibliotree. 
+So it's a tree, and in its trunk you have the roots of languages. 
+And it's all about international writing systems. 
+And on the branches you have library material growing. 
+You can also have function and form with public art. 
+So in Aurora, Colorado it's a bench. 
+But you have a bonus with this bench. 
+Because if you sit a long time in summer in shorts, you will walk away with temporary branding of the story element on your thighs. 
+(Laughter) Another functional work, it's in the south side of Chicago for a subway station. 
+And it's called "" Seeds of the Future are Planted Today. "" It's a story about transformation and connections. 
+So it acts as a screen to protect the rail and the commuter, and not to have objects falling on the rails. 
+To be able to change fences and window guards into flowers, it's fantastic. 
+And here I've been working for the last three years with a South Bronx developer to bring art to life to low-income buildings and affordable housing. 
+So each building has its own personality. 
+And sometimes it's about a legacy of the neighborhood, like in Morrisania, about the jazz history. 
+And for other projects, like in Paris, it's about the name of the street. 
+It's called Rue des Prairies — Prairie Street. 
+So I brought back the rabbit, the dragonfly, to stay in that street. 
+And in 2009, I was asked to make a poster to be placed in the subway cars in New York City for a year. 
+So that was a very captive audience. 
+And I wanted to give them an escape. 
+I created "" All Around Town. "" It is a papercutting, and then after, I added color on the computer. 
+So I can call it techno-crafted. 
+And along the way, I'm kind of making papercuttings and adding other techniques. 
+But the result is always to have stories. 
+So the stories, they have a lot of possibilities. 
+They have a lot of scenarios. 
+I don't know the stories. 
+I take images from our global imagination, from cliché, from things we are thinking about, from history. 
+And everybody's a narrator, because everybody has a story to tell. 
+But more important is everybody has to make a story to make sense of the world. 
+And in all these universes, it's like imagination is the vehicle to be transported with, but the destination is our minds and how we can reconnect with the essential and with the magic. 
+And it's what story cutting is all about. 
+(Applause) 
+
+People say things about religion all the time. 
+(Laughter) The late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "" God Is Not Great "" whose subtitle was, "" Religion Poisons Everything. "" (Laughter) But last month, in Time magazine, Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather is referred to as America's rabbi, said, to balance that against that negative characterization, that no important form of social change can be brought about except through organized religion. 
+Now, remarks of this sort on the negative and the positive side are very old. 
+I have one in my pocket here from the first century BCE by Lucretius, the author of "" On the Nature of Things, "" who said, "" Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum "" — I should have been able to learn that by heart — which is, that's how much religion is able to persuade people to do evil, and he was talking about the fact of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice in order to preserve the prospects of his army. 
+So there have been these long debates over the centuries, in that case, actually, we can say over the millennia, about religion. 
+People have talked about it a lot, and they've said good and bad and indifferent things about it. 
+What I want to persuade you of today is of a very simple claim, which is that these debates are in a certain sense preposterous, because there is no such thing as religion about which to make these claims. 
+There isn't a thing called religion, and so it can't be good or bad. 
+It can't even be indifferent. 
+And if you think about claims about the nonexistence of things, one obvious way to try and establish the nonexistence of a purported thing would be to offer a definition of that thing and then to see whether anything satisfied it. 
+I'm going to start out on that little route to begin with. 
+So if you look in the dictionaries and if you think about it, one very natural definition of religion is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings. 
+As I say, this is in many dictionaries, but you'll also find it actually in the work of Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, one of the first modern anthropologists. 
+In his book on primitive culture, he says the heart of religion is what he called animism, that is, the belief in spiritual agency, belief in spirits. 
+The first problem for that definition is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called "" Tuff. "" There's a guy talking to a rabbi. 
+The guy says, "" You're a rabbi, how can you not believe in God? "" And the reply is, "" It's what's so great about being Jewish. 
+You don't have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish. "" (Laughter) So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi, and if you have to believe in God in order to be religious, then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi without believing in God, Judaism isn't a religion. 
+That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought. 
+Here's another argument against this view. 
+A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine, went to his grandfather when he was very young, a child, and said to him, "I want to talk to you about religion," and his grandfather said, "" You're too young. 
+Come back when you're a teenager. "" So he came back when he was a teenager, and he said to his grandfather, "" It may be a bit late now because I've discovered that I don't believe in the gods. "" And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said, "" Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch of the Hindu tradition. "" (Laughter) And finally, there's this guy, who famously doesn't believe in God. 
+He often jokes that he's one of the world's leading atheists. 
+But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion does not involve belief in God. 
+Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion works. 
+I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paradigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a religion, what we ask is, "" Well, is it like one of these? "" Right? 
+And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and Judaism has a chance of being a good starter, because they're on our list. 
+But why do we have such a list? 
+What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list? 
+I think the answer is a pretty simple one and therefore crude and contentious. 
+I think the answer is, European travelers, starting roughly about the time of Columbus, started going around the world. 
+They came from a Christian culture, and when they arrived in a new place, they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity, and so they asked themselves the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity? 
+And that list was essentially constructed. 
+It consists of the things that other people had instead of Christianity. 
+Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way, which is that Christianity is extremely, even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition. 
+It has all kinds of things in it that are very, very particular that are the results of the specifics of Christian history, and one thing that's at the heart of it, one thing that's at the heart of most understandings of Christianity, which is the result of the specific history of Christianity, is that it's an extremely creedal religion. 
+It's a religion in which people are really concerned about whether you believe the right things. 
+The history of Christianity, the internal history of Christianity, is largely the history of people killing each other because they believed the wrong thing, and it's also involved in struggles with other religions, obviously starting in the Middle Ages, a struggle with Islam, in which, again, it was the infidelity, the fact that they didn't believe the right things, that seemed so offensive to the Christian world. 
+Now that's a very specific and particular history that Christianity has, and not everywhere is everything that has ever been put on this sort of list like it. 
+A very specific thing happened. 
+It was actually adverted to earlier, but a very specific thing happened in the history of the kind of Christianity that we see around us mostly in the United States today, and it happened in the late 19th century, and that specific thing that happened in the late 19th century was a kind of deal that was cut between science, this new way of organizing intellectual authority, and religion. 
+If you think about the 18th century, say, if you think about intellectual life before the late 19th century, anything you did, anything you thought about, whether it was the physical world, the human world, the natural world apart from the human world, or morality, anything you did would have been framed against the background of a set of assumptions that were religious, Christian assumptions. 
+You couldn't give an account of the natural world that didn't say something about its relationship, for example, to the creation story in the Abrahamic tradition, the creation story in the first book of the Torah. 
+So everything was framed in that way. 
+But this changes in the late 19th century, and for the first time, it's possible for people to develop serious intellectual careers as natural historians like Darwin. 
+Darwin worried about the relationship between what he said and the truths of religion, but he could proceed, he could write books about his subject without having to say what the relationship was to the religious claims, and similarly, geologists increasingly could talk about it. 
+In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist and made a claim about the age of the Earth, you had to explain whether that was consistent or how it was or wasn't consistent with the age of the Earth implied by the account in Genesis. 
+By the end of the 19th century, you can just write a geology textbook in which you make arguments about how old the Earth is. 
+So there's a big change, and that division, that intellectual division of labor occurs as I say, I think, and it sort of solidifies so that by the end of the 19th century in Europe, there's a real intellectual division of labor, and you can do all sorts of serious things, including, increasingly, even philosophy, without being constrained by the thought, "" Well, what I have to say has to be consistent with the deep truths that are given to me by our religious tradition. "" So imagine someone who's coming out of that world, that late-19th-century world, coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana, 
+the society that I grew up in, Asante, coming into that world at the turn of the 20th century with this question that made the list: what have they got instead of Christianity? 
+Well, here's one thing he would have noticed, and by the way, there was a person who actually did this. 
+His name was Captain Rattray, he was sent as the British government anthropologist, and he wrote a book about Asante religion. 
+This is a soul disc. 
+There are many of them in the British Museum. 
+I could give you an interesting, different history of how it comes about that many of the things from my society ended up in the British Museum, but we don't have time for that. 
+So this object is a soul disc. 
+What is a soul disc? 
+It was worn around the necks of the soul-washers of the Asante king. 
+What was their job? To wash the king's soul. 
+It would take a long while to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing that could be washed, but Rattray knew that this was religion because souls were in play. 
+And similarly, there were many other things, many other practices. 
+For example, every time anybody had a drink, more or less, they poured a little bit on the ground in what's called the libation, and they gave some to the ancestors. 
+My father did this. Every time he opened a bottle of whiskey, which I'm glad to say was very often, he would take the top off and pour off just a little on the ground, and he would talk to, he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line, or Yao Antony, my great uncle, he would talk to them, offer them a little bit of this. 
+This is an early-19th-century drawing by another British military officer of such a ceremonial, where the king was involved, and the king's job, one of the large parts of his job, apart from organizing warfare and things like that, was to look after the tombs of his ancestors, and when a king died, the stool that he sat on was blackened and put in the royal ancestral temple, and every 40 days, the King of Asante has to go and do cult for his ancestors. 
+That's a large part of his job, and people think that if he doesn't do it, things will fall apart. 
+So he's a religious figure, as Rattray would have said, as well as a political figure. 
+So all this would count as religion for Rattray, but my point is that when you look into the lives of those people, you also find that every time they do anything, they're conscious of the ancestors. 
+Every morning at breakfast, you can go outside the front of the house and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua outside your house, and again, you'll talk to the gods and the high gods and the low gods and the ancestors and so on. 
+This is not a world in which the separation between religion and science has occurred. 
+Religion has not being separated from any other areas of life, and in particular, what's crucial to understand about this world is that it's a world in which the job that science does for us is done by what Rattray is going to call religion, because if they want an explanation of something, if they want to know why the crop just failed, if they want to know why it's raining or not raining, if they need rain, if they want to know why their grandfather has died, they are going to appeal to the very same entities, the very same language, 
+talk to the very same gods about that. 
+This great separation, in other words, between religion and science hasn't happened. 
+Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity, except that in large parts of the world, this is still the truth. 
+I had the privilege of going to a wedding the other day in northern Namibia, 20 miles or so south of the Angolan border in a village of 200 people. 
+These were modern people. 
+We had with us Oona Chaplin, who some of you may have heard of, and one of the people from this village came up to her, and said, "" I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.' "" So these were not people who were isolated from our world, but nevertheless, for them, the gods and the spirits are still very much there, and when we were on the bus going back and forth to the various parts of the [ceremony], they prayed not just in a generic way but for the safety of the journey, and they meant it, and when they said to me that my mother, 
+the bridegroom's [grandmother], was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively. 
+They meant, even though she was a dead person, they meant that she was still around. 
+So in large parts of the world today, that separation between science and religion hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today, and as I say, these are not — This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank. 
+These are fellow citizens of the world with you, but they come from a place in which religion is occupying a very different role. 
+So what I want you to think about next time somebody wants to make some vast generalization about religion is that maybe there isn't such a thing as a religion, such a thing as religion, and that therefore what they say cannot possibly be true. 
+
+The Value of Nothing: Out of Nothing Comes Something. 
+That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B +. (Laughter) What I'm going to talk about: nothing out of something, and how we create. 
+And I'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments: that is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity. 
+(Laughter) OK. 
+So, I also want to explain, because Dave Eggers said he was going to heckle me if I said anything that was a lie, or not true to universal creativity. 
+And I've done it this way for half the audience, who is scientific. 
+When I say we, I don't mean you, necessarily; I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain and the one that's in between that is the censor and tells me what I'm saying is wrong. 
+And I'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually — the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I'm creating something new. 
+And that includes nature, and nurture, and what I refer to as nightmares. 
+Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect. 
+And some people would say that we're born with it in some other means. 
+And others, like my mother, would say that I get my material from past lives. 
+Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk — van Gogh syndrome — that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression. 
+I do have to say, somebody — I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't — I suppose it does something in some part of your brain. 
+And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago, but it was during the time I was writing my last book, and some people say that book is quite different. 
+I think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis: you know, who am I, why am I this particular person, why am I not black like everybody else? 
+And sometimes you're equipped with skills, but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity. 
+I used to draw. I thought I would be an artist. 
+And I had a miniature poodle. 
+And it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really creative. 
+Because all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way. 
+And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book. 
+And then, I also wasn't really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be, and you know, you look at those scores, and it wasn't bad, but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words. 
+Also, one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma. 
+And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had, and that is that, you know, I had expectations placed on me. 
+That figure right there, by the way, figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but nine years old, and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age. 
+I have some ones that were long lasting: from the age of five to 15, this was supposed to be my side occupation, and it led to a sense of failure. 
+But actually, there was something quite real in my life that happened when I was about 14. 
+And it was discovered that my brother, in 1967, and then my father, six months later, had brain tumors. 
+And my mother believed that something had gone wrong, and she was gonna find out what it was, and she was gonna fix it. 
+My father was a Baptist minister, and he believed in miracles, and that God's will would take care of that. 
+But, of course, they ended up dying, six months apart. 
+And after that, my mother believed that it was fate, or curses — she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened. 
+Everything except randomness. She did not believe in randomness. 
+There was a reason for everything. 
+And one of the reasons, she thought, was that her mother, who had died when she was very young, was angry at her. 
+And so, I had this notion of death all around me, because my mother also believed that I would be next, and she would be next. 
+And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon, you begin to think very much about everything. 
+You become very creative, in a survival sense. 
+And this, then, led to my big questions. 
+And they're the same ones that I have today. 
+And they are: why do things happen, and how do things happen? 
+And the one my mother asked: how do I make things happen? 
+It's a wonderful way to look at these questions, when you write a story. 
+Because, after all, in that framework, between page one and 300, you have to answer this question of why things happen, how things happen, in what order they happen. What are the influences? 
+How do I, as the narrator, as the writer, also influence that? 
+And it's also one that, I think, many of our scientists have been asking. 
+It's a kind of cosmology, and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe, as the creator of that universe. 
+And you see, there's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen, trying to figure it out — years and years, oftentimes. 
+So, when I look at creativity, I also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress, my looking at associations in practically anything in life. 
+And I got a lot of them during what's been going on throughout this conference, almost everything that's been going on. 
+And so I'm going to use, as the metaphor, this association: quantum mechanics, which I really don't understand, but I'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor. 
+So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter. 
+And it's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen. 
+There's a lot of unknown, and you often don't know what it is except by its absence. 
+But when you make those associations, you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story, and what you're finding is what matters. The meaning. 
+And that's what I look for in my work, a personal meaning. 
+There is also the uncertainty principle, which is part of quantum mechanics, as I understand it. (Laughter) And this happens constantly in the writing. 
+And there's the terrible and dreaded observer effect, in which you're looking for something, and you know, things are happening simultaneously, and you're looking at it in a different way, and you're trying to really look for the about-ness, or what is this story about. And if you try too hard, then you will only write the about. 
+You won't discover anything. 
+And what you were supposed to find, what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way, is no longer there. 
+Now, I don't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe, like many of our scientists have. 
+And so, I am going to just throw in string theory here, and just say that creative people are multidimensional, and there are 11 levels, I think, of anxiety. 
+(Laughter) And they all operate at the same time. 
+There is also a big question of ambiguity. 
+And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant. 
+And you don't know what is operating, but something is operating there. 
+And ambiguity, to me, is very uncomfortable in my life, and I have it. Moral ambiguity. 
+It is constantly there. And, just as an example, this is one that recently came to me. 
+It was something I read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in Iraq. And she said, "Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." 
+A very famous Chinese saying, she said. 
+And that means because we went into Iraq, we should stay there until things were solved. You know, maybe even 100 years. 
+So, there was another one that I came across, and it's "" saving fish from drowning. "" And it's what Buddhist fishermen say, because they're not supposed to kill anything. 
+And they also have to make a living, and people need to be fed. 
+So their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning, and unfortunately, in the process the fish die. 
+Now, what's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors — actually, one of them is my mother's interpretation, and it is a famous Chinese saying, because she said it to me: "save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." 
+And it was a warning — don't get involved in other people's business, or you're going to get stuck. 
+OK. I think if somebody really was drowning, she'd save them. 
+But, both of these sayings — saving a fish from drowning, or saving a man from drowning — to me they had to do with intentions. 
+And all of us in life, when we see a situation, we have a response. 
+And then we have intentions. 
+There's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do, and then we do something. 
+And the results of that may not match what our intentions had been. 
+Maybe things go wrong. And so, after that, what are our responsibilities? 
+What are we supposed to do? 
+Do we stay in for life, or do we do something else and justify and say, well, my intentions were good, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it? 
+That is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me, and led me to write a book called "Saving Fish From Drowning." 
+I saw examples of that. Once I identified this question, it was all over the place. 
+I got these hints everywhere. 
+And then, in a way, I knew that they had always been there. 
+And then writing, that's what happens. I get these hints, these clues, and I realize that they've been obvious, and yet they have not been. 
+And what I need, in effect, is a focus. 
+And when I have the question, it is a focus. 
+And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant. 
+And it seems like it's happening all the time. 
+You think there's a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity, in which you're getting all this help from the universe. 
+And it may also be explained that now you have a focus. 
+And you are noticing it more often. 
+But you apply this. 
+You begin to look at things having to do with your tensions. 
+Your brother, who's fallen in trouble, do you take care of him? 
+Why or why not? 
+It may be something that is perhaps more serious — as I said, human rights in Burma. 
+I was thinking that I shouldn't go because somebody said, if I did, it would show that I approved of the military regime there. 
+And then, after a while, I had to ask myself, "" Why do we take on knowledge, why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us? "" And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up, and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father, who was a Baptist minister. 
+So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions, and still didn't know that if I went there, what the result of that would be, if I wrote a book — and I just would have to face that later, when the time came. 
+We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of. 
+We come to this point and say, what do I as an individual do? 
+Not all of us can go to Africa, or work at hospitals, so what do we do, if we have this moral response, this feeling? 
+Also, I think one of the biggest things we are all looking at, and we talked about today, is genocide. 
+This leads to this question. 
+When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable, and I consider what my intentions should be, I realize it goes back to this identity question that I had when I was a child — and why am I here, and what is the meaning of my life, and what is my place in the universe? 
+It seems so obvious, and yet it is not. 
+We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. 
+In writing a story, it is the place where I begin. 
+Sometimes I get help from the universe, it seems. 
+My mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book, because it seemed I knew things I was not supposed to know. 
+Instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally, from an overdose of opium, while having too much of a good time, I actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself, and that actually was the way it happened. 
+And my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother. 
+There are also things, quite uncanny, which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book. 
+In this case, I was writing a story that included some kind of detail, period of history, a certain location. 
+And I needed to find something historically that would match that. 
+And I took down this book, and I — first page that I flipped it to was exactly the setting, and the time period, and the kind of character I needed — was the Taiping rebellion, happening in the area near Guilin, outside of that, and a character who thought he was the son of God. 
+You wonder, are these things random chance? 
+Well, what is random? What is chance? What is luck? 
+What are things that you get from the universe that you can't really explain? 
+And that goes into the story, too. 
+These are the things I constantly think about from day to day. 
+Especially when good things happen, and, in particular, when bad things happen. 
+But I do think there's a kind of serendipity, and I do want to know what those elements are, so I can thank them, and also try to find them in my life. 
+Because, again, I think that when I am aware of them, more of them happen. 
+Another chance encounter is when I went to a place — I just was with some friends, and we drove randomly to a different place, and we ended up in this non-tourist location, a beautiful village, pristine. 
+And we walked three valleys beyond, and the third valley, there was something quite mysterious and ominous, a discomfort I felt. And then I knew that had to be [the] setting of my book. 
+And in writing one of the scenes, it happened in that third valley. 
+For some reason I wrote about cairns — stacks of rocks — that a man was building. 
+And I didn't know exactly why I had it, but it was so vivid. 
+I got stuck, and a friend, when she asked if I would go for a walk with her dogs, that I said, sure. And about 45 minutes later, walking along the beach, I came across this. 
+And it was a man, a Chinese man, and he was stacking these things, not with glue, not with anything. 
+And I asked him, "" How is it possible to do this? "" And he said, "" Well, I guess with everything in life, there's a place of balance. "" And this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point. 
+I had so many examples — I have so many instances like this, when I'm writing a story, and I cannot explain it. 
+Is it because I had the filter that I have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things? 
+Or is it a kind of serendipity that we cannot explain, like the cosmological constant? 
+A big thing that I also think about is accidents. 
+And as I said, my mother did not believe in randomness. 
+What is the nature of accidents? 
+And how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are, outside of a court of law? 
+I was able to see that in a firsthand way, when I went to beautiful Dong village, in Guizhou, the poorest province of China. 
+And I saw this beautiful place. I knew I wanted to come back. 
+And I had a chance to do that, when National Geographic asked me if I wanted to write anything about China. 
+And I said yes, about this village of singing people, singing minority. 
+And they agreed, and between the time I saw this place and the next time I went, there was a terrible accident. A man, an old man, fell asleep, and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm. 
+60 homes were destroyed, and 40 were damaged. 
+Responsibility was assigned to the family. 
+The man's sons were banished to live three kilometers away, in a cowshed. 
+And, of course, as Westerners, we say, "" Well, it was an accident. That's not fair. 
+It's the son, not the father. "" When I go on a story, I have to let go of those kinds of beliefs. 
+It takes a while, but I have to let go of them and just go there, and be there. 
+And so I was there on three occasions, different seasons. 
+And I began to sense something different about the history, and what had happened before, and the nature of life in a very poor village, and what you find as your joys, and your rituals, your traditions, your links with other families. And I saw how this had a kind of justice, in its responsibility. 
+I was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using, a ceremony they hadn't used in about 29 years. And it was to send some men — a Feng Shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses. 
+Now you, as Westerners, and I, as Westerners, would say well, that's superstition. But after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world, determining how things happen. 
+So I remained with them, and the more I wrote that story, the more I got into those beliefs, and I think that's important for me — to take on the beliefs, because that is where the story is real, and that is where I'm gonna find the answers to how I feel about certain questions that I have in life. 
+Years go by, of course, and the writing, it doesn't happen instantly, as I'm trying to convey it to you here at TED. 
+The book comes and it goes. When it arrives, it is no longer my book. 
+It is in the hands of readers, and they interpret it differently. 
+But I go back to this question of, how do I create something out of nothing? 
+And how do I create my own life? 
+And I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths. 
+I believe in specifics, the specifics of story, and the past, the specifics of that past, and what is happening in the story at that point. 
+I also believe that in thinking about things — my thinking about luck, and fate, and coincidences and accidents, God's will, and the synchrony of mysterious forces — I will come to some notion of what that is, how we create. 
+I have to think of my role. Where I am in the universe, and did somebody intend for me to be that way, or is it just something I came up with? 
+And I also can find that by imagining fully, and becoming what is imagined — and yet is in that real world, the fictional world. 
+And that is how I find particles of truth, not the absolute truth, or the whole truth. 
+And they have to be in all possibilities, including those I never considered before. 
+So, there are never complete answers. 
+Or rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that is good, because then I will discover something new. 
+And if there is a partial answer, a more complete answer from me, it is to simply imagine. 
+And to imagine is to put myself in that story, until there was only — there is a transparency between me and the story that I am creating. 
+And that's how I've discovered that if I feel what is in the story — in one story — then I come the closest, I think, to knowing what compassion is, to feeling that compassion. 
+Because for everything, in that question of how things happen, it has to do with the feeling. 
+I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that. 
+We've come to the end of the talk, and I will reveal what is in the bag, and it is the muse, and it is the things that transform in our lives, that are wonderful and stay with us. 
+There she is. 
+Thank you very much! 
+(Applause) 
+
+I have given the slide show that I gave here two years ago about 2,000 times. 
+I'm giving a short slide show this morning that I'm giving for the very first time, so — well it's — I don't want or need to raise the bar, I'm actually trying to lower the bar. 
+Because I've cobbled this together to try to meet the challenge of this session. 
+And I was reminded by Karen Armstrong's fantastic presentation that religion really properly understood is not about belief, but about behavior. 
+Perhaps we should say the same thing about optimism. 
+How dare we be optimistic? 
+Optimism is sometimes characterized as a belief, an intellectual posture. 
+As Mahatma Gandhi famously said, "You must become the change you wish to see in the world." 
+And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone, except to the extent that the belief brings about new behavior. But the word "" behavior "" is also, I think, sometimes misunderstood in this context. 
+I'm a big advocate of changing the lightbulbs and buying hybrids, and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house, and dug the geothermal wells, and did all of that other stuff. 
+But, as important as it is to change the lightbulbs, it is more important to change the laws. 
+And when we change our behavior in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part. In order to be optimistic about this, we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. 
+In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis. 
+And we have one. 
+I have been trying to tell this story for a long time. 
+I was reminded of that recently, by a woman who walked past the table I was sitting at, just staring at me as she walked past. She was in her 70s, looked like she had a kind face. I thought nothing of it until I saw from the corner of my eye she was walking from the opposite direction, also just staring at me. And so I said, "" How do you do? "" And she said, "" You know, if you dyed your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore. "" (Laughter) Many years ago, when I was a young congressman, I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge 
+of nuclear arms control — the nuclear arms race. 
+And the military historians taught me, during that quest, that military conflicts are typically put into three categories: local battles, regional or theater wars, and the rare but all-important global, world war — strategic conflicts. 
+And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources, a different approach, a different organizational model. 
+Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories, and most of what we think about are local environmental problems: air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste dumps. But there are also regional environmental problems, like acid rain from the Midwest to the Northeast, and from Western Europe to the Arctic, and from the Midwest out the Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico. 
+And there are lots of those. But the climate crisis is the rare but all-important global, or strategic, conflict. 
+Everything is affected. And we have to organize our response appropriately. We need a worldwide, global mobilization for renewable energy, conservation, efficiency and a global transition to a low-carbon economy. 
+We have work to do. And we can mobilize resources and political will. But the political will has to be mobilized, in order to mobilize the resources. 
+Let me show you these slides here. 
+I thought I would start with the logo. What's missing here, of course, is the North Polar ice cap. 
+Greenland remains. Twenty-eight years ago, this is what the polar ice cap — the North Polar ice cap — looked like at the end of the summer, at the fall equinox. 
+This last fall, I went to the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, and talked to the researchers here in Monterey at the Naval Postgraduate Laboratory. 
+This is what's happened in the last 28 years. 
+To put it in perspective, 2005 was the previous record. 
+Here's what happened last fall that has really unnerved the researchers. 
+The North Polar ice cap is the same size geographically — doesn't look quite the same size — but it is exactly the same size as the United States, minus an area roughly equal to the state of Arizona. 
+The amount that disappeared in 2005 was equivalent to everything east of the Mississippi. 
+The extra amount that disappeared last fall was equivalent to this much. It comes back in the winter, but not as permanent ice, as thin ice — vulnerable. The amount remaining could be completely gone in summer in as little as five years. 
+That puts a lot of pressure on Greenland. 
+Already, around the Arctic Circle — this is a famous village in Alaska. This is a town in Newfoundland. Antarctica. Latest studies from NASA. 
+The amount of a moderate-to-severe snow melting of an area equivalent to the size of California. 
+"" They were the best of times, they were the worst of times "": the most famous opening sentence in English literature. I want to share briefly a tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are exactly the same size. Earth's diameter is about 400 kilometers larger, but essentially the same size. 
+They have exactly the same amount of carbon. 
+But the difference is, on Earth, most of the carbon has been leeched over time out of the atmosphere, deposited in the ground as coal, oil, natural gas, etc. On Venus, most of it is in the atmosphere. The difference is that our temperature is 59 degrees on average. On Venus, it's 855. This is relevant to our current strategy of taking as much carbon out of the ground as quickly as possible, and putting it into the atmosphere. 
+It's not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun. 
+It's three times hotter than Mercury, which is right next to the Sun. Now, briefly, here's an image you've seen, as one of the only old images, but I show it because I want to briefly give you CSI: Climate. 
+The global scientific community says: man-made global warming pollution, put into the atmosphere, thickening this, is trapping more of the outgoing infrared. 
+You all know that. At the last IPCC summary, the scientists wanted to say, "How certain are you?" They wanted to answer that "99 percent." 
+The Chinese objected, and so the compromise was "more than 90 percent." 
+Now, the skeptics say, "" Oh, wait a minute, this could be variations in this energy coming in from the sun. "" If that were true, the stratosphere would be heated as well as the lower atmosphere, if it's more coming in. 
+If it's more being trapped on the way out, then you would expect it to be warmer here and cooler here. Here is the lower atmosphere. 
+Here's the stratosphere: cooler. 
+CSI: Climate. 
+Now, here's the good news. Sixty-eight percent of Americans now believe that human activity is responsible for global warming. Sixty-nine percent believe that the Earth is heating up in a significant way. There has been progress, but here is the key: when given a list of challenges to confront, global warming is still listed at near the bottom. 
+What is missing is a sense of urgency. 
+If you agree with the factual analysis, but you don't feel the sense of urgency, where does that leave you? 
+Well, the Alliance for Climate Protection, which I head in conjunction with Current TV — who did this pro bono — did a worldwide contest to do commercials on how to communicate this. 
+This is the winner. 
+NBC — I'll show all of the networks here — the top journalists for NBC asked 956 questions in 2007 of the presidential candidates: two of them were about the climate crisis. ABC: 844 questions, two about the climate crisis. 
+Fox: two. CNN: two. CBS: zero. 
+From laughs to tears — this is one of the older tobacco commercials. 
+So here's what we're doing. 
+This is gasoline consumption in all of these countries. And us. 
+But it's not just the developed nations. 
+The developing countries are now following us and accelerating their pace. And actually, their cumulative emissions this year are the equivalent to where we were in 1965. And they're catching up very dramatically. The total concentrations: by 2025, they will be essentially where we were in 1985. 
+If the wealthy countries were completely missing from the picture, we would still have this crisis. 
+But we have given to the developing countries the technologies and the ways of thinking that are creating the crisis. This is in Bolivia — over thirty years. 
+This is peak fishing in a few seconds. The '60s. 
+'70s. '80s.' 90s. We have to stop this. And the good news is that we can. 
+We have the technologies. 
+We have to have a unified view of how to go about this: the struggle against poverty in the world and the challenge of cutting wealthy country emissions, all has a single, very simple solution. 
+People say, "" What's the solution? "" Here it is. 
+Put a price on carbon. We need a CO2 tax, revenue neutral, to replace taxation on employment, which was invented by Bismarck — and some things have changed since the 19th century. 
+In the poor world, we have to integrate the responses to poverty with the solutions to the climate crisis. 
+Plans to fight poverty in Uganda are mooted, if we do not solve the climate crisis. 
+But responses can actually make a huge difference in the poor countries. This is a proposal that has been talked about a lot in Europe. 
+This was from Nature magazine. These are concentrating solar, renewable energy plants, linked in a so-called "" supergrid "" to supply all of the electrical power to Europe, largely from developing countries — high-voltage DC currents. 
+This is not pie in the sky; this can be done. 
+We need to do it for our own economy. 
+The latest figures show that the old model is not working. There are a lot of great investments that you can make. If you are investing in tar sands or shale oil, then you have a portfolio that is crammed with sub-prime carbon assets. 
+And it is based on an old model. 
+Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and their legs collapse. Developing tar sands and coal shale is the equivalent. Here are just a few of the investments that I personally think make sense. 
+I have a stake in these, so I'll have a disclaimer there. 
+But geothermal, concentrating solar, advanced photovoltaics, efficiency and conservation. 
+You've seen this slide before, but there's a change. 
+The only two countries that didn't ratify — and now there's only one. Australia had an election. 
+And there was a campaign in Australia that involved television and Internet and radio commercials to lift the sense of urgency for the people there. 
+And we trained 250 people to give the slide show in every town and village and city in Australia. 
+Lot of other things contributed to it, but the new Prime Minister announced that his very first priority would be to change Australia's position on Kyoto, and he has. Now, they came to an awareness partly because of the horrible drought that they have had. 
+This is Lake Lanier. My friend Heidi Cullen said that if we gave droughts names the way we give hurricanes names, we'd call the one in the southeast now Katrina, and we would say it's headed toward Atlanta. 
+We can't wait for the kind of drought Australia had to change our political culture. 
+Here's more good news. The cities supporting Kyoto in the U.S. 
+are up to 780 — and I thought I saw one go by there, just to localize this — which is good news. 
+Now, to close, we heard a couple of days ago about the value of making individual heroism so commonplace that it becomes banal or routine. 
+What we need is another hero generation. Those of us who are alive in the United States of America today especially, but also the rest of the world, have to somehow understand that history has presented us with a choice — just as Jill [Bolte] Taylor was figuring out how to save her life while she was distracted by the amazing experience that she was going through. 
+We now have a culture of distraction. 
+But we have a planetary emergency. 
+And we have to find a way to create, in the generation of those alive today, a sense of generational mission. 
+I wish I could find the words to convey this. 
+This was another hero generation that brought democracy to the planet. 
+Another that ended slavery. And that gave women the right to vote. 
+We can do this. Don't tell me that we don't have the capacity to do it. 
+If we had just one week's worth of what we spend on the Iraq War, we could be well on the way to solving this challenge. 
+We have the capacity to do it. 
+One final point: I'm optimistic, because I believe we have the capacity, at moments of great challenge, to set aside the causes of distraction and rise to the challenge that history is presenting to us. 
+Sometimes I hear people respond to the disturbing facts of the climate crisis by saying, "" Oh, this is so terrible. 
+What a burden we have. "" I would like to ask you to reframe that. How many generations in all of human history have had the opportunity to rise to a challenge that is worthy of our best efforts? 
+A challenge that can pull from us more than we knew we could do? I think we ought to approach this challenge with a sense of profound joy and gratitude that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future. 
+Let's do that. Thank you very much. 
+Chris Anderson: For so many people at TED, there is deep pain that basically a design issue on a voting form — one bad design issue meant that your voice wasn't being heard like that in the last eight years in a position where you could make these things come true. 
+That hurts. 
+Al Gore: You have no idea. (Laughter) CA: When you look at what the leading candidates in your own party are doing now — I mean, there's — are you excited by their plans on global warming? 
+AG: The answer to the question is hard for me because, on the one hand, I think that we should feel really great about the fact that the Republican nominee — certain nominee — John McCain, and both of the finalists for the Democratic nomination — all three have a very different and forward-leaning position on the climate crisis. All three have offered leadership, and all three are very different from the approach taken by the current administration. And I think that all three have also been responsible in putting forward plans and proposals. But the campaign dialogue that — as illustrated by the questions — 
+that was put together by the League of Conservation Voters, by the way, the analysis of all the questions — and, by the way, the debates have all been sponsored by something that goes by the Orwellian label, "" Clean Coal. "" Has anybody noticed that? 
+Every single debate has been sponsored by "" Clean Coal. "" "Now, even lower emissions!" 
+The richness and fullness of the dialogue in our democracy has not laid the basis for the kind of bold initiative that is really needed. 
+So they're saying the right things and they may — whichever of them is elected — may do the right thing, but let me tell you: when I came back from Kyoto in 1997, with a feeling of great happiness that we'd gotten that breakthrough there, and then confronted the United States Senate, only one out of 100 senators was willing to vote to confirm, to ratify that treaty. Whatever the candidates say has to be laid alongside what the people say. 
+This challenge is part of the fabric of our whole civilization. 
+CO2 is the exhaling breath of our civilization, literally. 
+And now we mechanized that process. Changing that pattern requires a scope, a scale, a speed of change that is beyond what we have done in the past. 
+So that's why I began by saying, be optimistic in what you do, but be an active citizen. 
+Demand — change the light bulbs, but change the laws. Change the global treaties. 
+We have to speak up. We have to solve this democracy — this — We have sclerosis in our democracy. And we have to change that. 
+Use the Internet. Go on the Internet. 
+Connect with people. Become very active as citizens. 
+Have a moratorium — we shouldn't have any new coal-fired generating plants that aren't able to capture and store CO2, which means we have to quickly build these renewable sources. 
+Now, nobody is talking on that scale. But I do believe that between now and November, it is possible. 
+This Alliance for Climate Protection is going to launch a nationwide campaign — grassroots mobilization, television ads, Internet ads, radio, newspaper — with partnerships with everybody from the Girl Scouts to the hunters and fishermen. 
+We need help. We need help. 
+CA: In terms of your own personal role going forward, Al, is there something more than that you would like to be doing? 
+AG: I have prayed that I would be able to find the answer to that question. What can I do? 
+Buckminster Fuller once wrote, "" If the future of all human civilization depended on me, what would I do? 
+How would I be? "" It does depend on all of us, but again, not just with the light bulbs. 
+We, most of us here, are Americans. We have a democracy. 
+We can change things, but we have to actively change. 
+What's needed really is a higher level of consciousness. 
+And that's hard to — that's hard to create — but it is coming. 
+There's an old African proverb that some of you know that says, "" If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. "" We have to go far, quickly. 
+So we have to have a change in consciousness. 
+A change in commitment. A new sense of urgency. 
+A new appreciation for the privilege that we have of undertaking this challenge. 
+CA: Al Gore, thank you so much for coming to TED. 
+AG: Thank you. Thank you very much. 
+
+It's a great honor to be here. 
+It's a great honor to be here talking about cities, talking about the future of cities. 
+It's great to be here as a mayor. 
+I really do believe that mayors have the political position to really change people's lives. 
+That's the place to be. 
+And it's great to be here as the mayor of Rio. 
+Rio's a beautiful city, a vibrant place, special place. 
+Actually, you're looking at a guy who has the best job in the world. 
+And I really wanted to share with you a very special moment of my life and the history of the city of Rio. 
+(Video) Announcer: And now, ladies and gentlemen, the envelope containing the result. 
+Jacques Rogge: I have the honor to announce that the games of the 31st Olympiad are awarded to the city of Rio de Janeiro. 
+(Cheering) EP: Okay, that's very touching, very emotional, but it was not easy to get there. 
+Actually it was a very hard challenge. 
+We had to beat the European monarchy. 
+This is Juan Carlos, king of Spain. 
+We had to beat the powerful Japanese with all of their technology. 
+We had to beat the most powerful man in the world defending his own city. 
+So it was not easy at all. 
+And actually this last guy here said a phrase a few years ago that I think fits perfectly to the situation of Rio winning the Olympic bid. 
+We really showed that, yes, we can. 
+And really, this is the reason I came here tonight. 
+I came here tonight to tell you that things can be done, that you don't have always to be rich or powerful to get things on the way, that cities are a great challenge. 
+It's a difficult task to deal with cities. 
+But with some original ways of getting things done, with some basic commandments, you can really get cities to be a great, great place to live. 
+I want you all to imagine Rio. 
+You probably think about a city full of energy, a vibrant city full of green. 
+And nobody showed that better than Carlos Saldanha in last year's "" Rio. "" (Music) (Video) Bird: This is incredible. (Music) 
+EP: Okay, some parts of Rio are pretty much like that, but it's not like that everywhere. 
+We're like every big city in the world. 
+We've got lots of people, pollution, cars, concrete, lots of concrete. 
+These pictures I'm showing here, they are some pictures from Madureira. 
+It's like the heart of the suburb in Rio. 
+And I want to use an example of Rio that we're doing in Madureira, in this region, to see what we should think as our first commandment. 
+So every time you see a concrete jungle like that, what you've got to do is find open spaces. 
+If you don't have open spaces, you've got to go there and open spaces. 
+So go inside these open spaces and make it that people can get inside and use those spaces. 
+This is going to be the third largest park in Rio by June this year. 
+It's going to be a place where people can meet, where you can put nature. 
+The temperature's going to drop two, three degrees centigrade. 
+So the first commandment I want to leave you tonight is, a city of the future has to be environmentally friendly. 
+Every time you think of a city, you've got to think green. 
+You've got to think green and green. 
+So moving to our second commandment that I wanted to show you. 
+Let's think that cities are made of people, lots of people together. 
+cities are packed with people. 
+So how do you move these people around? 
+When you have 3.5 billion people living in cities — by 2050, it's going to be 6 billion people. 
+So every time you think about moving these people around, you think about high-capacity transportation. 
+But there is a problem. 
+High-capacity transportation means spending lots and lots of money. 
+So what I'm going to show here is something that was already presented in TED by the former mayor of Curitiba who created that, a city in Brazil, Jaime Lerner. 
+And it's something that we're doing, again, lots in Rio. 
+It's the BRT, the Bus Rapid Transit. 
+So you get a bus. It's a simple bus that everybody knows. 
+You transform it inside as a train car. 
+You use separate lanes, dedicated lanes. 
+The contractors, they don't like that. 
+You don't have to dig deep down underground. 
+You can build nice stations. 
+This is actually a station that we're doing in Rio. 
+Again, you don't have to dig deep down underground to make a station like that. 
+This station has the same comfort, the same features as a subway station. 
+A kilometer of this costs a tenth of a subway. 
+So spending much less money and doing it much faster, you can really change the way people move. 
+This is a map of Rio. 
+All the lines, the colored lines you see there, it's our high-capacity transportation network. 
+In this present time today, we only carry 18 percent of our population in high-capacity transportation. 
+With the BRTs we're doing, again, the cheapest and fastest way, we're going to move to 63 percent of the population being carried by high-capacity transportation. 
+So remember what I said: You don't always have to be rich or powerful to get things done. 
+You can find original ways to get things done. 
+So the second commandment I want to leave you tonight is, a city of the future has to deal with mobility and integration of its people. 
+Moving to the third commandment. 
+And this is the most controversial one. 
+It has to do with the favelas, the slums — whatever you call it, there are different names all over the world. 
+But the point we want to make here tonight is, favelas are not always a problem. 
+I mean, favelas can sometimes really be a solution, if you deal with them, if you put public policy inside the favelas. 
+Let me just show a map of Rio again. 
+Rio has 6.3 million inhabitants — More than 20 percent, 1.4 million, live in the favelas. 
+All these red parts are favelas. 
+So you see, they are spread all over the city. 
+This is a typical view of a favela in Rio. 
+You see the contrast between the rich and poor. 
+So I want to make two points here tonight about favelas. 
+The first one is, you can change from what I call a [vicious] circle to a virtual circle. 
+But what you've got to do to get that is you've got to go inside the favelas, bring in the basic services — mainly education and health — with high quality. 
+I'm going to give a fast example here. 
+This was an old building in a favela in Rio — [unclear favela name] — that we just transformed into a primary school, with high quality. 
+This is primary assistance in health that we built inside a favela, again, with high quality. 
+We call it a family clinic. 
+So the first point is bring basic services inside the favelas with high quality. 
+The second point I want to make about the favelas is, you've got to open spaces in the favela. 
+Bring infrastructure to the favelas, to the slums, wherever you are. 
+Rio has the aim, by 2020, to have all its favelas completely urbanized. 
+Another example, this was completely packed with houses, and then we built this, what we call, a knowledge square. 
+This is a place with high technology where the kids that live in a poor house next to this place can go inside and have access to all technology. 
+We even built a theater there — 3D movie. 
+And this is the kind of change you can get for that. 
+And by the end of the day you get something better than a TED Prize, which is this great laugh from a kid that lives in the favela. 
+So the third commandment I want to leave here tonight is, a city of the future has to be socially integrated. 
+You cannot deal with a city if it's not socially integrated. 
+But moving to our fourth commandment, I really wouldn't be here tonight. 
+Between November and May, Rio's completely packed. 
+We just had last week Carnivale. 
+It was great. It was lots of fun. 
+We have New Year's Eve. 
+There's like two million people on Copacabana Beach. 
+We have problems. 
+We fight floods, tropical rains at this time of the year. 
+You can imagine how people get happy with me watching these kinds of scenes. 
+We have problems with the tropical rains. 
+Almost every year we have these landslides, which are terrible. 
+But the reason I could come here is because of that. 
+This was something we did with IBM that's a little bit more than a year old. 
+It's what we call the Operations Center of Rio. 
+And I wanted to show that I can govern my city, using technology, from here, from Long Beach, so I got here last night and I know everything. 
+We're going to speak now to the Operations Center. 
+This is Osorio, he's our secretary of urban affairs. 
+So Osorio, good to be there with you. 
+I've already told the people that we have tropical rain this time of year. 
+So how's the weather in Rio now? 
+Osorio: The weather is fine. We have fair weather today. 
+Let me get you our weather satellite radar. 
+You see just a little bit of moisture around the city. 
+Absolutely no problem in the city in terms of weather, today and in the next few days. 
+EP: Okay, how's the traffic? 
+We, at this time of year, get lots of traffic jams. 
+People get mad at the mayor. So how's the traffic tonight? 
+Osario: Well traffic tonight is fine. 
+Let me get you one of our 8,000 buses. 
+A live transmission in downtown Rio for you, Mr. Mayor. 
+You see, the streets are clear. 
+Now it's 11: 00 pm in Rio. 
+Nothing of concern in terms of traffic. 
+I'll get to you now the incidents of the day. 
+We had heavy traffic early in the morning and in the rush hour in the afternoon, but nothing of big concern. 
+We are below average in terms of traffic incidents in the city. 
+EP: Okay, so you're showing now some public services. 
+These are the cars. 
+Osorio: Absolutely, Mr. Mayor. 
+Let me get you the fleet of our waste collection trucks. 
+This is live transmission. 
+We have GPS's in all of our trucks. 
+And you can see them working in all parts of the city. 
+Waste collection on time. 
+Public services working well. 
+EP: Okay, Osorio, thank you very much. 
+It was great to have you here. 
+We're going to move so that I can make a conclusion. 
+(Applause) Okay, so no files, this place, no paperwork, no distance, 24 / 7 working. 
+So the fourth commandment I want to share with you here tonight is, a city of the future has to use technology to be present. 
+I don't need to be there anymore to know and to administrate the city. 
+But everything that I said here tonight, or the commandments, are means, are ways, for us to govern cities — invest in infrastructure, invest in the green, open parks, open spaces, integrate socially, use technology. 
+But at the end of the day, when we talk about cities, we talk about a gathering of people. 
+And we cannot see that as a problem. 
+That is fantastic. 
+If there's 3.5 billion now, it's going to be six billion then it's going to be 10 billion. 
+That is great, that means we're going to have 10 billion minds working together, 10 billion talents together. 
+So a city of the future, I really do believe that it's a city that cares about its citizens, integrates socially its citizens. 
+A city of the future is a city that can never let anyone out of this great party, which are cities. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I was 14 years old, I was interested in science — fascinated by it, excited to learn about it. 
+And I had a high school science teacher who would say to the class, "The girls don't have to listen to this." 
+Encouraging, yes. 
+(Laughter) I chose not to listen — but to that statement alone. 
+So let me take you to the Andes mountains in Chile, 500 kilometers, 300 miles northeast of Santiago. 
+It's very remote, it's very dry and it's very beautiful. 
+And there's not much there. 
+There are condors, there are tarantulas, and at night, when the light dims, it reveals one of the darkest skies on Earth. 
+It's kind of a magic place, the mountain. 
+It's a wonderful combination of very remote mountaintop with exquisitely sophisticated technology. 
+And our ancestors, for as long as there's been recorded history, have looked at the night sky and pondered the nature of our existence. 
+And we're no exception, our generation. 
+The only difficulty is that the night sky now is blocked by the glare of city lights. 
+And so astronomers go to these very remote mountaintops to view and to study the cosmos. 
+So telescopes are our window to the cosmos. 
+It's no exaggeration to say that the Southern Hemisphere is going to be the future of astronomy for the 21st century. 
+We have an array of existing telescopes already, in the Andes mountains in Chile, and that's soon to be joined by a really sensational array of new capability. 
+There will be two international groups that are going to be building giant telescopes, sensitive to optical radiation, as our eyes are. 
+There will be a survey telescope that will be scanning the sky every few nights. 
+There will be radio telescopes, sensitive to long-wavelength radio radiation. 
+And then there will be telescopes in space. 
+There'll be a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope; it's called the James Webb Telescope, and it will be launched in 2018. 
+There'll be a satellite called TESS that will discover planets outside of our solar system. 
+For the last decade, I've been leading a group — a consortium — international group, to build what will be, when it's finished, the largest optical telescope in existence. 
+It's called the Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT. 
+This telescope is going to have mirrors that are 8.4 meters in diameter — each of the mirrors. 
+That's almost 27 feet. 
+So it dwarfs this stage — maybe out to the fourth row in this audience. 
+Each of the seven mirrors in this telescope will be almost 27 feet in diameter. 
+Together, the seven mirrors in this telescope will comprise 80 feet in diameter. 
+So, essentially the size of this entire auditorium. 
+The whole telescope will stand about 43 meters high, and again, being in Rio, some of you have been to see the statue of the giant Christ. 
+The scale is comparable in height; in fact, it's smaller than this telescope will be. 
+It's comparable to the size of the Statue of Liberty. 
+And it's going to be housed in an enclosure that's 22 stories — 60 meters high. 
+But it's an unusual building to protect this telescope. 
+It will have open windows to the sky, be able to point and look at the sky, and it will actually rotate on a base — 2,000 tons of rotating building. 
+The Giant Magellan Telescope will have 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. 
+It will be 20 million times more sensitive than the human eye. 
+And it may, for the first time ever, be capable of finding life on planets outside of our solar system. 
+It's going to allow us to look back at the first light in the universe — literally, the dawn of the cosmos. 
+The cosmic dawn. 
+It's a telescope that's going to allow us to peer back, witness galaxies as they were when they were actually assembling, the first black holes in the universe, the first galaxies. 
+Now, for thousands of years, we have been studying the cosmos, we've been wondering about our place in the universe. 
+The ancient Greeks told us that the Earth was the center of the universe. 
+Five hundred years ago, Copernicus displaced the Earth, and put the Sun at the heart of the cosmos. 
+And as we've learned over the centuries, since Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist, first turned, in that time, a two-inch, very small telescope, to the sky, every time we have built larger telescopes, we have learned something about the universe; we've made discoveries, without exception. 
+We've learned in the 20th century that the universe is expanding and that our own solar system is not at the center of that expansion. 
+We know now that the universe is made of about 100 billion galaxies that are visible to us, and each one of those galaxies has 100 billion stars within it. 
+So we're looking now at the deepest image of the cosmos that's ever been taken. 
+It was taken using the Hubble Space Telescope, and by pointing the telescope at what was previously a blank region of sky, before the launch of Hubble. 
+And if you can imagine this tiny area, it's only one-fiftieth of the size of the full moon. 
+So, if you can imagine the full moon. 
+And there are now 10,000 galaxies visible within that image. 
+And the faintness of those images and the tiny size is only a result of the fact that those galaxies are so far away, the vast distances. 
+And each of those galaxies may contain within it a few billion or even hundreds of billions of individual stars. 
+Telescopes are like time machines. 
+So the farther back we look in space, the further back we see in time. 
+And they're like light buckets — literally, they collect light. 
+So larger the bucket, the larger the mirror we have, the more light we can see, and the farther back we can view. 
+So, we've learned in the last century that there are exotic objects in the universe — black holes. 
+We've even learned that there's dark matter and dark energy that we can't see. 
+So you're looking now at an actual image of dark matter. 
+(Laughter) You got it. Not all audiences get that. (Laughter) 
+So the way we infer the presence of dark matter — we can't see it — but there's an unmistakable tug, due to gravity. 
+We now can look out, we see this sea of galaxies in a universe that's expanding. 
+What I do myself is to measure the expansion of the universe, and one of the projects that I carried out in the 1990s used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure how fast the universe is expanding. 
+We can now trace back to 14 billion years. 
+We've learned over time that stars have individual histories; that is, they have birth, they have middle ages and some of them even have dramatic deaths. 
+So the embers from those stars actually then form the new stars that we see, most of which turn out to have planets going around them. 
+And one of the really surprising results in the last 20 years has been the discovery of other planets going around other stars. 
+These are called exoplanets. 
+And until 1995, we didn't even know the existence of any other planets, other than going around our own sun. 
+But now, there are almost 2,000 other planets orbiting other stars that we can now detect, measure masses for. 
+There are 500 of those that are multiple-planet systems. 
+And there are 4,000 — and still counting — other candidates for planets orbiting other stars. 
+They come in a bewildering variety of different kinds. 
+There are Jupiter-like planets that are hot, there are other planets that are icy, there are water worlds and there are rocky planets like the Earth, so-called "" super-Earths, "" and there have even been planets that have been speculated diamond worlds. 
+So we know there's at least one planet, our own Earth, in which there is life. 
+We've even found planets that are orbiting two stars. 
+That's no longer the province of science fiction. 
+So around our own planet, we know there's life, we've developed a complex life, we now can question our own origins. 
+And given all that we've discovered, the overwhelming numbers now suggest that there may be millions, perhaps — maybe even hundreds of millions — of other [planets] that are close enough — just the right distance from their stars that they're orbiting — to have the existence of liquid water and maybe could potentially support life. 
+So we marvel now at those odds, the overwhelming odds, and the amazing thing is that within the next decade, the GMT may be able to take spectra of the atmospheres of those planets, and determine whether or not they have the potential for life. 
+So, what is the GMT project? 
+It's an international project. 
+It includes Australia, South Korea, and I'm happy to say, being here in Rio, that the newest partner in our telescope is Brazil. 
+(Applause) It also includes a number of institutions across the United States, including Harvard University, the Smithsonian and the Carnegie Institutions, and the Universities of Arizona, Chicago, Texas-Austin and Texas A & M University. 
+It also involves Chile. 
+So, the making of the mirrors in this telescope is also fascinating in its own right. 
+Take chunks of glass, melt them in a furnace that is itself rotating. 
+This happens underneath the football stadium at the University of Arizona. 
+It's tucked away under 52,000 seats. 
+Nobody know it's happening. 
+And there's essentially a rotating cauldron. 
+The mirrors are cast and they're cooled very slowly, and then they're polished to an exquisite precision. 
+And so, if you think about the precision of these mirrors, the bumps on the mirror, over the entire 27 feet, amount to less than one-millionth of an inch. 
+So, can you visualize that? 
+Ow! 
+(Laughter) That's one five-thousandths of the width of one of my hairs, over this entire 27 feet. 
+It's a spectacular achievement. 
+It's what allows us to have the precision that we will have. 
+So, what does that precision buy us? 
+So the GMT, if you can imagine — if I were to hold up a coin, which I just happen to have, and I look at the face of that coin, I can see from here the writing on the coin; I can see the face on that coin. 
+My guess that even in the front row, you can't see that. 
+But if we were to turn the Giant Magellan Telescope, all 80-feet diameter that we see in this auditorium, and point it 200 miles away, if I were standing in São Paulo, we could resolve the face of this coin. 
+That's the extraordinary resolution and power of this telescope. 
+And if we were — (Applause) If an astronaut went up to the Moon, a quarter of a million miles away, and lit a candle — a single candle — then we would be able to detect it, using the GMT. 
+Quite extraordinary. 
+This is a simulated image of a cluster in a nearby galaxy. 
+"" Nearby "" is astronomical, it's all relative. 
+It's tens of millions of light-years away. 
+This is what this cluster would look like. 
+So look at those four bright objects, and now lets compare it with a camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. 
+You can see faint detail that starts to come through. 
+And now finally — and look how dramatic this is — this is what the GMT will see. 
+So, keep your eyes on those bright images again. 
+This is what we see on one of the most powerful existing telescopes on the Earth, and this, again, what the GMT will see. 
+Extraordinary precision. 
+So, where are we? 
+We have now leveled the top of the mountaintop in Chile. 
+We blasted that off. 
+We've tested and polished the first mirror. 
+We've cast the second and the third mirrors. 
+And we're about to cast the fourth mirror. 
+We had a series of reviews this year, international panels that came in and reviewed us, and said, "" You're ready to go to construction. "" And so we plan on building this telescope with the first four mirrors. 
+We want to get on the air quickly, and be taking science data — what we astronomers call "" first light, "" in 2021. 
+And the full telescope will be finished in the middle of the next decade, with all seven mirrors. 
+So we're now poised to look back at the distant universe, the cosmic dawn. 
+We'll be able to study other planets in exquisite detail. 
+But for me, one of the most exciting things about building the GMT is the opportunity to actually discover something that we don't know about — that we can't even imagine at this point, something completely new. 
+And my hope is that with the construction of this and other facilities, that many young women and men will be inspired to reach for the stars. 
+Thank you very much. 
+Obrigado. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Wendy. 
+Stay with me, because I have a question for you. 
+You mentioned different facilities. 
+So the Magellan Telescope is going up, but also ALMA and others in Chile and elsewhere, including in Hawaii. 
+Is it about cooperation and complementarity, or about competition? 
+I know there's competition in terms of funding, but what about the science? 
+Wendy Freedman: In terms of the science, they're very complementary. 
+The telescopes that are in space, the telescopes on the ground, telescopes with different wavelength capability, telescopes even that are similar, but different instruments — they will all look at different parts of the questions that we're asking. 
+So when we discover other planets, we'll be able to test those observations, we'll be able to measure the atmospheres, be able to look in space with very high resolution. 
+So, they're very complementary. 
+You're right about the funding, we compete; but scientifically, it's very complementary. 
+BG: Wendy, thank you very much for coming to TEDGlobal. 
+WF: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And I suspect if you had put spiders in there, the combinations of insects and spiders would have just topped the chart. 
+Now, I am not one of those people. 
+Well, why is that? 
+Some of it, of course, is just the sheer magnitude of almost everything about them. 
+There are at least a million, maybe as many as 10 million. 
+This means that you could have an insect-of-the-month calendar and not have to reuse a species for over 80,000 years. 
+Scientist use insects to make fundamental discoveries about everything from the structure of our nervous systems to how our genes and DNA work. 
+Insects seem like they do everything that people do. 
+And they do so with what looks like love or animosity. 
+But what drives their behaviors is really different than what drives our own, and that difference can be really illuminating. 
+There's nowhere where that's more true than when it comes to one of our most consuming interests — sex. 
+I think sex in insects is more interesting than sex in people. 
+Of course, to start with, a lot of insects don't need to have sex at all to reproduce. 
+Virgin birth, right there. 
+Now, male insects do compete with weapons, like the horns on these beetles. 
+But they also compete after mating with their sperm. 
+Dragonflies and damselflies have penises that look kind of like Swiss Army knives with all of the attachments pulled out. 
+(Laughter) They use these formidable devices like scoops, to remove the sperm from previous males that the female has mated with. (Laughter) 
+So, people have this idea that nature dictates kind of a 1950s sitcom version of what males and females are like. 
+So for example, take katydids, which are relatives of crickets and grasshoppers. 
+In both panels, the male's the one on the right, and that sword-like appendage is the female's egg-laying organ. 
+The white blob is the sperm, the green blob is the nuptial gift, and the male manufactures this from his own body and it's extremely costly to produce. 
+I will now pause for a moment and let you think about what it would be like if human men, every time they had sex, had to produce something that weighed 50, 60, 70 pounds. 
+And so what that means is the katydid males are very choosy about who they offer these nuptial gifts to. 
+But it also means that the males are very passive about mating, whereas the females are extremely aggressive and competitive, in an attempt to get as many of these nutritious nuptial gifts as they can. 
+Even more generally though, males are actually not all that important in the lives of a lot of insects. 
+People have had a hard time getting their head around that idea for millennia. 
+Aristotle tried to get involved as well. 
+And you know, even today, my students, for instance, call every animal they see, including insects, a male. 
+And when I tell them that the ferocious army-ant soldiers with their giant jaws, used to defend the colony, are all always female, they seem to not quite believe me. 
+Well, what difference does this make? 
+And what I think we've done, is use males, in any species, as though they are the model system. 
+The way things are supposed to be. 
+And so, back to the insects. 
+But when we do that, we really miss out on a lot of what nature is like. 
+And we can also miss out on the way natural, living things, including people, can vary. 
+Well, the last thing I really love about insects is something that a lot of people find unnerving about them. 
+They have complicated behavior, but they lack complicated brains. 
+And so, we can't just think of them as though they're little people because they don't do things the way that we do. 
+(Laughter) Instead, you really have to accept them on their own terms, because insects make us question what's normal and what's natural. 
+Now, you know, people write fiction and talk about parallel universes. 
+The allure of another world is something that people say is part of why they want to dabble in the paranormal. 
+But as far as I'm concerned, who needs to be able to see dead people, when you can see live insects? 
+Thank you. 
+
+The things we make have one supreme quality — they live longer than us. 
+We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. 
+Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many. 
+I want this morning to talk about the story, the biography — or rather the biographies — of one particular object, one remarkable thing. 
+It doesn't, I agree, look very much. 
+It's about the size of a rugby ball. 
+It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun. 
+And as you can see, it's been knocked about a bit, which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879. 
+But today, this thing is, I believe, a major player in the politics of the Middle East. 
+And it's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet. 
+The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change. 
+And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with, Belshazzar's feast — because we're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 BC. 
+And the parallels between the events of 539 BC and 2003 and in between are startling. 
+What you're looking at is Rembrandt's painting, now in the National Gallery in London, illustrating the text from the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. 
+And you all know roughly the story. 
+Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon. 
+Not only the Jews, he'd taken the temple vessels. 
+He'd ransacked, desecrated the temple. 
+And the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem had been taken to Babylon. 
+Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast. 
+And in order to make it even more exciting, he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun, and he brings out the temple vessels. 
+He's already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia. 
+And that night, Daniel tells us, at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall, "" You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and the Persians. "" And that very night Cyrus, king of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell. 
+It is, of course, a great moment in the history of the Jewish people. 
+It's a great story. It's story we all know. 
+"The writing on the wall" is part of our everyday language. 
+What happened next was remarkable, and it's where our cylinder enters the story. 
+Cyrus, king of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight — the great empire of Babylon, which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus. 
+And Cyrus makes a declaration. 
+And that is what this cylinder is, the declaration made by the ruler guided by God who had toppled the Iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people. 
+In ringing Babylonian — it was written in Babylonian — he says, "" I am Cyrus, king of all the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world. "" They're not shy of hyperbole as you can see. 
+This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we've got. 
+And it's written, as we'll see in due course, by very skilled P.R. consultants. 
+So the hyperbole is not actually surprising. 
+And what is the great king, the powerful king, the king of the four quarters of the world going to do? 
+He goes on to say that, having conquered Babylon, he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians — Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar — have captured and enslaved go free. 
+He'll let them return to their countries. 
+And more important, he will let them all recover the gods, the statues, the temple vessels that had been confiscated. 
+All the peoples that the Babylonians had repressed and removed will go home, and they'll take with them their gods. 
+And they'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place. 
+This is the decree, this object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews, after the exile in Babylon, the years they'd spent sitting by the waters of Babylon, weeping when they remembered Jerusalem, those Jews were allowed to go home. 
+They were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple. 
+It's a central document in Jewish history. 
+And the Book of Chronicles, the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms. 
+This is the Jewish version of the same story. 
+"" Thus said Cyrus, king of Persia, 'All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem. 
+Who is there among you of his people? 
+The Lord God be with him, and let him go up. '"" "" Go up "" — aaleh. 
+The central element, still, of the notion of return, a central part of the life of Judaism. 
+As you all know, that return from exile, the second temple, reshaped Judaism. 
+And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia, reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay. 
+Two great texts, what about the politics? 
+What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history. 
+The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire. 
+Cyrus begins in the 530s BC. 
+And by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control. 
+This empire is, in fact, the Middle East as we now know it, and it's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it. 
+It was the largest empire the world had known until then. 
+Much more important, it was the first multicultural, multifaith state on a huge scale. 
+And it had to be run in a quite new way. 
+It had to be run in different languages. 
+The fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing. 
+And it had to recognize their different habits, different peoples, different religions, different faiths. 
+All of those are respected by Cyrus. 
+Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational, multifaith, multicultural society. 
+And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen, and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by Alexander. 
+It left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together. 
+The Greek invasions ended that. 
+And of course, Alexander couldn't sustain a government and it fragmented. 
+But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central. 
+The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his book "" Cyropaedia "" promoting Cyrus as the great ruler. 
+And throughout European culture afterward, Cyrus remained the model. 
+This is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was. 
+And Xenophon's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. 
+Jefferson was a great admirer — the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state. 
+Meanwhile, back in Babylon, things had not been going well. 
+After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost — until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon. 
+And it enters now another story. 
+It enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century: Are the scriptures reliable? Can we trust them? 
+We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures. 
+No other evidence. 
+Suddenly, this appeared. 
+And great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution, by geology, here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true. 
+It's a great 19th century moment. 
+But — and this, of course, is where it becomes complicated — the facts were true, hurrah for archeology, but the interpretation was rather more complicated. 
+Because the cylinder account and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect. 
+The Babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of Bablyon, Marduk. 
+And, not surprisingly, they tell you that all this was done by Marduk. 
+"Marduk, we hold, called Cyrus by his name." 
+Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon. 
+Marduk tells Cyrus that he will do these great, generous things of setting the people free. 
+And this is why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk. 
+The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised to learn, take a rather different view of this. 
+For them, of course, it can't possibly by Marduk that made all this happen. 
+It can only be Jehovah. 
+And so in Isaiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this, not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel — the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people. 
+It's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event, two different religious takeovers of a political fact. 
+God, we know, is usually on the side of the big battalions. 
+The question is, which god was it? 
+And the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the Hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion. 
+And it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk. 
+And there's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this, because he says, this is God speaking, of course, "" I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me. "" I think it's recognized that Cyrus doesn't realize that he's acting under orders from Jehovah. 
+And equally, he'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from Marduk. 
+Because interestingly, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts. 
+(Laughter) That's 1879. 
+40 years on and we're in 1917, and the cylinder enters a different world. 
+This time, the real politics of the contemporary world — the year of the Balfour Declaration, the year when the new imperial power in the Middle East, Britain, decides that it will declare a Jewish national home, it will allow the Jews to return. 
+And the response to this by the Jewish population in Eastern Europe is rhapsodic. 
+And across Eastern Europe, Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side — the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem. 
+And the Cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan. 
+You all know what happened. 
+The state of Israel is setup, and 50 years later, in the late 60s, it's clear that Britain's role as the imperial power is over. 
+And another story of the cylinder begins. 
+The region, the U.K. and the U.S. decide, has to be kept safe from communism, and the superpower that will be created to do this would be Iran, the Shah. 
+And so the Shah invents an Iranian history, or a return to Iranian history, that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the Cyrus cylinder. 
+When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis, he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum, goes to Tehran, and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty. 
+Cyrus cylinder: guarantor of the Shah. 
+10 years later, another story: Iranian Revolution, 1979. 
+Islamic revolution, no more Cyrus; we're not interested in that history, we're interested in Islamic Iran — until Iraq, the new superpower that we've all decided should be in the region, attacks. 
+Then another Iran-Iraq war. 
+And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past, their great past when they fought Iraq and won. 
+It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians — Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout. 
+And the obvious emblem is Cyrus. 
+So when the British Museum and Tehran National Musuem cooperate and work together, as we've been doing, the Iranians ask for one thing only as a loan. 
+It's the only object they want. 
+They want to borrow the Cyrus cylinder. 
+And last year, the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time. 
+It's shown being presented here, put into its case by the director of the National Museum of Tehran, one of the many women in Iran in very senior positions, Mrs. Ardakani. 
+It was a huge event. 
+This is the other side of that same picture. 
+It's seen in Tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months. 
+This is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the West. 
+And it's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means, what Cyrus means, but above all, Cyrus as articulated through this cylinder — Cyrus as the defender of the homeland, the champion, of course, of Iranian identity and of the Iranian peoples, tolerant of all faiths. 
+And in the current Iran, Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament, something to be very, very proud of. 
+To see this object in Tehran, thousands of Jews living in Iran came to Tehran to see it. 
+It became a great emblem, a great subject of debate about what Iran is at home and abroad. 
+Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed? 
+Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated? 
+This is heady national rhetoric, and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return. 
+Here you see this out-sized Cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from Iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of Iran. 
+It was a narrative presented by the president himself. 
+And for me, to take this object to Iran, to be allowed to take this object to Iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what Iran is, what different Irans there are and how the different histories of Iran might shape the world today. 
+It's a debate that's still continuing, and it will continue to rumble, because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration. 
+It stands with the American constitution. 
+It certainly says far more about real freedoms than Magna Carta. 
+It is a document that can mean so many things, for Iran and for the region. 
+A replica of this is at the United Nations. 
+In New York this autumn, it will be present when the great debates about the future of the Middle East take place. 
+And I want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures. 
+It will appear, certainly, in many more Middle Eastern stories. 
+And what story of the Middle East, what story of the world, do you want to see reflecting what is said, what is expressed in this cylinder? 
+The right of peoples to live together in the same state, worshiping differently, freely — a Middle East, a world, in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate. 
+In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are, as you know, shrill. 
+But I think it's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Imagine that you're a pig farmer. 
+You live on a small farm in the Philippines. 
+Your animals are your family's sole source of income — as long as they're healthy. 
+You know that any day, one of your pigs can catch the flu, the swine flu. 
+Living in tight quarters, one pig coughing and sneezing may soon lead to the next pig coughing and sneezing, until an outbreak of swine flu has taken over your farm. 
+If it's a bad enough virus, the health of your herd may be gone in the blink of an eye. 
+If you called in a veterinarian, he or she would visit your farm and take samples from your pigs' noses and mouths. 
+But then they would have to drive back into the city to test those samples in their central lab. 
+Two weeks later, you'd hear back the results. 
+Two weeks may be just enough time for infection to spread and take away your way of life. 
+But it doesn't have to be that way. 
+Today, farmers can take those samples themselves. 
+They can jump right into the pen and swab their pigs' noses and mouths with a little filter paper, place that little filter paper in a tiny tube, and mix it with some chemicals that will extract genetic material from their pigs' noses and mouths. 
+And without leaving their farms, they take a drop of that genetic material and put it into a little analyzer smaller than a shoebox, program it to detect DNA or RNA from the swine flu virus, and within one hour get back the results, visualize the results. 
+This reality is possible because today we're living in the era of personal DNA technology. 
+Every one of us can actually test DNA ourselves. 
+DNA is the fundamental molecule the carries genetic instructions that help build the living world. 
+Humans have DNA. 
+Pigs have DNA. 
+Even bacteria and some viruses have DNA too. 
+The genetic instructions encoded in DNA inform how our bodies develop, grow, function. 
+And in many cases, that same information can trigger disease. 
+Your genetic information is strung into a long and twisted molecule, the DNA double helix, that has over three billion letters, beginning to end. 
+But the lines that carry meaningful information are usually very short — a few dozen to several thousand letters long. 
+So when we're looking to answer a question based on DNA, we actually don't need to read all those three billion letters, typically. 
+That would be like getting hungry at night and having to flip through the whole phone book from cover to cover, pausing at every line, just to find the nearest pizza joint. 
+(Laughter) Luckily, three decades ago, humans started to invent tools that can find any specific line of genetic information. 
+These DNA machines are wonderful. 
+They can find any line in DNA. 
+But once they find it, that DNA is still tiny, and surrounded by so much other DNA, that what these machines then do is copy the target gene, and one copy piles on top of another, millions and millions and millions of copies, until that gene stands out against the rest; until we can visualize it, interpret it, read it, understand it, until we can answer: Does my pig have the flu? 
+Or other questions buried in our own DNA: Am I at risk of cancer? 
+Am I of Irish descent? 
+Is that child my son? 
+(Laughter) This ability to make copies of DNA, as simple as it sounds, has transformed our world. 
+Scientists use it every day to detect and address disease, to create innovative medicines, to modify foods, to assess whether our food is safe to eat or whether it's contaminated with deadly bacteria. 
+Even judges use the output of these machines in court to decide whether someone is innocent or guilty based on DNA evidence. 
+The inventor of this DNA-copying technique was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993. 
+But for 30 years, the power of genetic analysis has been confined to the ivory tower, or bigwig PhD scientist work. 
+Well, several companies around the world are working on making this same technology accessible to everyday people like the pig farmer, like you. 
+I cofounded one of these companies. 
+Three years ago, together with a fellow biologist and friend of mine, Zeke Alvarez Saavedra, we decided to make personal DNA machines that anyone could use. 
+Our goal was to bring DNA science to more people in new places. 
+We started working in our basements. 
+We had a simple question: What could the world look like if everyone could analyze DNA? 
+We were curious, as curious as you would have been if I had shown you this picture in 1980. 
+(Laughter) You would have thought, "" Wow! 
+I can now call my Aunt Glenda from the car and wish her a happy birthday. 
+I can call anyone, anytime. 
+This is the future! "" Little did you know, you would tap on that phone to make dinner reservations for you and Aunt Glenda to celebrate together. 
+With another tap, you'd be ordering her gift. 
+And yet one more tap, and you'd be "" liking "" Auntie Glenda on Facebook. 
+And all of this, while sitting on the toilet. 
+(Laughter) It is notoriously hard to predict where new technology might take us. 
+And the same is true for personal DNA technology today. 
+For example, I could never have imagined that a truffle farmer, of all people, would use personal DNA machines. 
+Dr. Paul Thomas grows truffles for a living. 
+We see him pictured here, holding the first UK-cultivated truffle in his hands, on one of his farms. 
+Truffles are this delicacy that stems from a fungus growing on the roots of living trees. 
+And it's a rare fungus. 
+Some species may fetch 3,000, 7,000, or more dollars per kilogram. 
+I learned from Paul that the stakes for a truffle farmer can be really high. 
+When he sources new truffles to grow on his farms, he's exposed to the threat of knockoffs — truffles that look and feel like the real thing, but they're of lower quality. 
+But even to a trained eye like Paul's, even when looked at under a microscope, these truffles can pass for authentic. 
+So in order to grow the highest quality truffles, the ones that chefs all over the world will fight over, Paul has to use DNA analysis. 
+Isn't that mind-blowing? 
+I bet you will never look at that black truffle risotto again without thinking of its genes. 
+(Laughter) But personal DNA machines can also save human lives. 
+Professor Ian Goodfellow is a virologist at the University of Cambridge. 
+Last year he traveled to Sierra Leone. 
+When the Ebola outbreak broke out in Western Africa, he quickly realized that doctors there lacked the basic tools to detect and combat disease. 
+Results could take up to a week to come back — that's way too long for the patients and the families who are suffering. 
+Ian decided to move his lab into Makeni, Sierra Leone. 
+Here we see Ian Goodfellow moving over 10 tons of equipment into a pop-up tent that he would equip to detect and diagnose the virus and sequence it within 24 hours. 
+But here's a surprise: the same equipment that Ian could use at his lab in the UK to sequence and diagnose Ebola, just wouldn't work under these conditions. 
+We're talking 35 Celsius heat and over 90 percent humidity here. 
+But instead, Ian could use personal DNA machines small enough to be placed in front of the air-conditioning unit to keep sequencing the virus and keep saving lives. 
+This may seem like an extreme place for DNA analysis, but let's move on to an even more extreme environment: outer space. 
+Let's talk about DNA analysis in space. 
+When astronauts live aboard the International Space Station, they're orbiting the planet 250 miles high. 
+They're traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. 
+Picture that — you're seeing 15 sunsets and sunrises every day. 
+You're also living in microgravity, floating. 
+And under these conditions, our bodies can do funky things. 
+One of these things is that our immune systems get suppressed, making astronauts more prone to infection. 
+A 16-year-old girl, a high school student from New York, Anna-Sophia Boguraev, wondered whether changes to the DNA of astronauts could be related to this immune suppression, and through a science competition called "" Genes In Space, "" Anna-Sophia designed an experiment to test this hypothesis using a personal DNA machine aboard the International Space Station. 
+Here we see Anna-Sophia on April 8, 2016, in Cape Canaveral, watching her experiment launch to the International Space Station. 
+That cloud of smoke is the rocket that brought Anna-Sophia's experiment to the International Space Station, where, three days later, astronaut Tim Peake carried out her experiment — in microgravity. 
+Personal DNA machines are now aboard the International Space Station, where they can help monitor living conditions and protect the lives of astronauts. 
+A 16-year-old designing a DNA experiment to protect the lives of astronauts may seem like a rarity, the mark of a child genius. 
+Well, to me, it signals something bigger: that DNA technology is finally within the reach of every one of you. 
+A few years ago, a college student armed with a personal computer could code an app, an app that is now a social network with more than one billion users. 
+Could we be moving into a world of one personal DNA machine in every home? 
+I know families who are already living in this reality. 
+The Daniels family, for example, set up a DNA lab in the basement of their suburban Chicago home. 
+This is not a family made of PhD scientists. 
+This is a family like any other. 
+They just like to spend time together doing fun, creative things. 
+By day, Brian is an executive at a private equity firm. 
+At night and on weekends, he experiments with DNA alongside his kids, ages seven and nine, as a way to explore the living world. 
+Last time I called them, they were checking out homegrown produce from the backyard garden. 
+They were testing tomatoes that they had picked, taking the flesh of their skin, putting it in a test tube, mixing it with chemicals to extract DNA and then using their home DNA copier to test those tomatoes for genetically engineered traits. 
+For the Daniels family, the personal DNA machine is like the chemistry set for the 21st century. 
+Most of us may not yet be diagnosing genetic conditions in our kitchen sinks or doing at-home paternity testing. 
+(Laughter) But we've definitely reached a point in history where every one of you could actually get hands-on with DNA in your kitchen. 
+You could copy, paste and analyze DNA and extract meaningful information from it. 
+And it's at times like this that profound transformation is bound to happen; moments when a transformative, powerful technology that was before limited to a select few in the ivory tower, finally becomes within the reach of every one of us, from farmers to schoolchildren. 
+Think about the moment when phones stopped being plugged into the wall by cords, or when computers left the mainframe and entered your home or your office. 
+The ripples of the personal DNA revolution may be hard to predict, but one thing is certain: revolutions don't go backwards, and DNA technology is already spreading faster than our imagination. 
+So if you're curious, get up close and personal with DNA — today. 
+It is in our DNA to be curious. 
+(Laughter) Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a historian by training, and what I study in that case is the way that people have dealt with anatomy — meaning human bodies, animal bodies — how they dealt with bodily fluids, concepts of bodies; how have they thought about bodies. 
+The other hat that I've worn in my work is as an activist, as a patient advocate — or, as I sometimes say, as an impatient advocate — for people who are patients of doctors. 
+In that case, what I've worked with is people who have body types that challenge social norms. 
+Intersex comes in a lot of different forms. 
+I'll just give you a few examples of the types of ways you can have sex that isn't standard for male or female. 
+So in one instance, you can have somebody who has an XY chromosomal basis, and that SRY gene on the Y chromosome tells the proto-gonads, which we all have in the fetal life, to become testes. 
+So we have the concept that what it means to be a woman is to have a female identity; what it means to be a black person is, allegedly, to have an African anatomy in terms of your history. 
+I had a lot of journalists calling me, asking me, "" Which is the test they're going to run that will tell us whether or not Caster Semenya is male or female? "" And I had to explain to the journalists there isn't such a test. 
+It's also in terms of race, which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed. 
+We have difficult conversations about at what point we decide a body becomes a human, such that it has a different right than a fetal life. 
+So as part of that, they were coming to us with a concept that was about anatomical commonality. 
+Next came the successful Civil Rights Movement, where we found people like Sojourner Truth talking about, "" Ain't I a woman? "" We find men on the marching lines of the Civil Rights Movement saying, "" I am a man. "" Again, people of color appealing to a commonality of anatomy over a difference of anatomy, again, successfully. 
+We have two beings, both conceived in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day. 
+Henry, by virtue of being assumed to be male — although I haven't told you that he's the XY one — by virtue of being assumed to be male is now liable to be drafted, which Mary does not need to worry about. 
+So for example, Texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man is to mean that you don't have a Y chromosome, and what it means to marry a woman means you have a Y chromosome. 
+My response to him was, "" Well, have you considered political asylum instead of a separation surgery? "" The United States has offered tremendous possibility for allowing people to be the way they are, without having them have to be changed for the sake of the state. 
+And I want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like, or might have looked like, if we had more involved the mothers. 
+And what we know from cross-cultural studies is that females, on average — not everyone, but on average — are more inclined to be very attentive to complex social relations and to taking care of people who are, basically, vulnerable within the group. 
+
+Well, I have a big announcement to make today, and I'm really excited about this. 
+And this may be a little bit of a surprise to many of you who know my research and what I've done well. 
+I've really tried to solve some big problems: counterterrorism, nuclear terrorism, and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer, but I started thinking about all these problems, and I realized that the really biggest problem we face, what all these other problems come down to, is energy, is electricity, the flow of electrons. 
+And I decided that I was going to set out to try to solve this problem. 
+And this probably is not what you're expecting. 
+You're probably expecting me to come up here and talk about fusion, because that's what I've done most of my life. 
+But this is actually a talk about, okay — (Laughter) — but this is actually a talk about fission. 
+It's about perfecting something old, and bringing something old into the 21st century. 
+Let's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works. 
+In a nuclear power plant, you have a big pot of water that's under high pressure, and you have some fuel rods, and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium, and they're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel, and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level, and that reaction heats up water, the water turns to steam, steam turns the turbine, and you produce electricity from it. 
+This is the same way we've been producing electricity, the steam turbine idea, for 100 years, and nuclear was a really big advancement in a way to heat the water, but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine. 
+And I thought, you know, is this the best way to do it? 
+Is fission kind of played out, or is there something left to innovate here? 
+And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world. 
+And this is what it is. 
+This is a small modular reactor. 
+So it's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here. 
+This is between 50 and 100 megawatts. 
+But that's a ton of power. 
+That's between, say at an average use, that's maybe 25,000 to 100,000 homes could run off that. 
+Now the really interesting thing about these reactors is they're built in a factory. 
+So they're modular reactors that are built essentially on an assembly line, and they're trucked anywhere in the world, you plop them down, and they produce electricity. 
+This region right here is the reactor. 
+And this is buried below ground, which is really important. 
+For someone who's done a lot of counterterrorism work, I can't extol to you how great having something buried below the ground is for proliferation and security concerns. 
+And inside this reactor is a molten salt, so anybody who's a fan of thorium, they're going to be really excited about this, because these reactors happen to be really good at breeding and burning the thorium fuel cycle, uranium-233. 
+But I'm not really concerned about the fuel. 
+You can run these off — they're really hungry, they really like down-blended weapons pits, so that's highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that's been down-blended. 
+It's made into a grade where it's not usable for a nuclear weapon, but they love this stuff. 
+And we have a lot of it sitting around, because this is a big problem. 
+You know, in the Cold War, we built up this huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and that was great, and we don't need them anymore, and what are we doing with all the waste, essentially? 
+What are we doing with all the pits of those nuclear weapons? 
+Well, we're securing them, and it would be great if we could burn them, eat them up, and this reactor loves this stuff. 
+So it's a molten salt reactor. It has a core, and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt, the radioactive salt, to a cold salt which isn't radioactive. 
+It's still thermally hot but it's not radioactive. 
+And then that's a heat exchanger to what makes this design really, really interesting, and that's a heat exchanger to a gas. 
+So going back to what I was saying before about all power being produced — well, other than photovoltaic — being produced by this boiling of steam and turning a turbine, that's actually not that efficient, and in fact, in a nuclear power plant like this, it's only roughly 30 to 35 percent efficient. 
+That's how much thermal energy the reactor's putting out to how much electricity it's producing. 
+And the reason the efficiencies are so low is these reactors operate at pretty low temperature. 
+They operate anywhere from, you know, maybe 200 to 300 degrees Celsius. 
+And these reactors run at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius, which means the higher the temperature you go to, thermodynamics tells you that you will have higher efficiencies. 
+And this reactor doesn't use water. It uses gas, so supercritical CO2 or helium, and that goes into a turbine, and this is called the Brayton cycle. 
+This is the thermodynamic cycle that produces electricity, and this makes this almost 50 percent efficient, between 45 and 50 percent efficiency. 
+And I'm really excited about this, because it's a very compact core. 
+Molten salt reactors are very compact by nature, but what's also great is you get a lot more electricity out for how much uranium you're fissioning, not to mention the fact that these burn up. 
+Their burn-up is much higher. 
+So for a given amount of fuel you put in the reactor, a lot more of it's being used. 
+And the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is, you've got these rods that are clad in zirconium, and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets. 
+Well, uranium dioxide's a ceramic, and ceramic doesn't like releasing what's inside of it. 
+So you have what's called the xenon pit, and so some of these fission products love neutrons. 
+They love the neutrons that are going on and helping this reaction take place. 
+And they eat them up, which means that, combined with the fact that the cladding doesn't last very long, you can only run one of these reactors for roughly, say, 18 months without refueling it. 
+So these reactors run for 30 years without refueling, which is, in my opinion, very, very amazing, because it means it's a sealed system. 
+No refueling means you can seal them up and they're not going to be a proliferation risk, and they're not going to have either nuclear material or radiological material proliferated from their cores. 
+But let's go back to safety, because everybody after Fukushima had to reassess the safety of nuclear, and one of the things when I set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe, and I'm really excited about this reactor for essentially two reasons. 
+One, it doesn't operate at high pressure. 
+So traditional reactors like a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor, they're very, very hot water at very high pressures, and this means, essentially, in the event of an accident, if you had any kind of breach of this stainless steel pressure vessel, the coolant would leave the core. 
+These reactors operate at essentially atmospheric pressure, so there's no inclination for the fission products to leave the reactor in the event of an accident. 
+Also, they operate at high temperatures, and the fuel is molten, so they can't melt down, but in the event that the reactor ever went out of tolerances, or you lost off-site power in the case of something like Fukushima, there's a dump tank. 
+Because your fuel is liquid, and it's combined with your coolant, you could actually just drain the core into what's called a sub-critical setting, basically a tank underneath the reactor that has some neutrons absorbers. 
+And this is really important, because the reaction stops. 
+In this kind of reactor, you can't do that. 
+The fuel, like I said, is ceramic inside zirconium fuel rods, and in the event of an accident in one of these type of reactors, Fukushima and Three Mile Island — looking back at Three Mile Island, we didn't really see this for a while — but these zirconium claddings on these fuel rods, what happens is, when they see high pressure water, steam, in an oxidizing environment, they'll actually produce hydrogen, and that hydrogen has this explosive capability to release fission products. 
+So the core of this reactor, since it's not under pressure and it doesn't have this chemical reactivity, means that there's no inclination for the fission products to leave this reactor. 
+So even in the event of an accident, yeah, the reactor may be toast, which is, you know, sorry for the power company, but we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land. 
+So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity. 
+Carbon-free electricity. 
+And it's an amazing technology because not only does it combat climate change, but it's an innovation. 
+It's a way to bring power to the developing world, because it's produced in a factory and it's cheap. 
+You can put them anywhere in the world you want to. 
+And maybe something else. 
+As a kid, I was obsessed with space. 
+Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me. 
+But I think I get to come back to this, because imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50 to 100 megawatts. 
+That is the rocket designer's dream. 
+That's someone who is designing a habitat on another planet's dream. 
+Not only do you have 50 to 100 megawatts to power whatever you want to provide propulsion to get you there, but you have power once you get there. 
+You know, rocket designers who use solar panels or fuel cells, I mean a few watts or kilowatts — wow, that's a lot of power. 
+I mean, now we're talking about 100 megawatts. 
+That's a ton of power. 
+That could power a Martian community. 
+That could power a rocket there. 
+And so I hope that maybe I'll have an opportunity to kind of explore my rocketry passion at the same time that I explore my nuclear passion. 
+And people say, "" Oh, well, you've launched this thing, and it's radioactive, into space, and what about accidents? "" But we launch plutonium batteries all the time. 
+Everybody was really excited about Curiosity, and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium-238, which actually has a higher specific activity than the low-enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors, which means that the effects would be negligible, because you launch it cold, and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor. 
+So I'm really excited. 
+I think that I've designed this reactor here that can be an innovative source of energy, provide power for all kinds of neat scientific applications, and I'm really prepared to do this. 
+I graduated high school in May, and — (Laughter) (Applause) — I graduated high school in May, and I decided that I was going to start up a company to commercialize these technologies that I've developed, these revolutionary detectors for scanning cargo containers and these systems to produce medical isotopes, but I want to do this, and I've slowly been building up a team of some of the most incredible people I've ever had the chance to work with, and I'm really prepared to make this a reality. 
+And I think, I think, that looking at the technology, this will be cheaper than or the same price as natural gas, and you don't have to refuel it for 30 years, which is an advantage for the developing world. 
+And I'll just say one more maybe philosophical thing to end with, which is weird for a scientist. 
+But I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors. 
+They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky. 
+The energy that I'm able to talk to you today, while it was converted to chemical energy in my food, originally came from a nuclear reaction, and so there's something poetic about, in my opinion, perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy. 
+So thank you guys. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm going to talk about your mindset. 
+Does your mindset correspond to my dataset? 
+(Laughter) If not, one or the other needs upgrading, isn't it? 
+When I talk to my students about global issues, and I listen to them in the coffee break, they always talk about "" we "" and "" them. "" And when they come back into the lecture room I ask them, "" What do you mean with "" we "" and "" them ""? 
+"" Oh, it's very easy. It's the western world and it's the developing world, "" they say. 
+"We learned it in college." 
+And what is the definition then? "" The definition? 
+Everyone knows, "" they say. 
+But then you know, I press them like this. 
+So one girl said, very cleverly, "" It's very easy. 
+Western world is a long life in a small family. 
+Developing world is a short life in a large family. "" And I like that definition, because it enabled me to transfer their mindset into the dataset. 
+And here you have the dataset. 
+So, you can see that what we have on this axis here is size of family. One, two, three, four, five children per woman on this axis. 
+And here, length of life, life expectancy, 30, 40, 50. 
+Exactly what the students said was their concept about the world. 
+And really this is about the bedroom. 
+Whether the man and woman decide to have small family, and take care of their kids, and how long they will live. 
+It's about the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have soap, water and food, you know, you can live long. 
+And the students were right. It wasn't that the world consisted — the world consisted here, of one set of countries over here, which had large families and short life. Developing world. 
+And we had one set of countries up there which was the western world. 
+They had small families and long life. 
+And you are going to see here the amazing thing that has happened in the world during my lifetime. 
+Then the developing countries applied soap and water, vaccination. 
+And all the developing world started to apply family planning. 
+And partly to USA who help to provide technical advice and investment. 
+And you see all the world moves over to a two child family, and a life with 60 to 70 years. 
+But some countries remain back in this area here. 
+And you can see we still have Afghanistan down here. 
+We have Liberia. We have Congo. 
+So we have countries living there. 
+So the problem I had is that the worldview that my students had corresponds to reality in the world the year their teachers were born. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And we, in fact, when we have played this over the world. 
+I was at the Global Health Conference here in Washington last week, and I could see the wrong concept even active people in United States had, that they didn't realize the improvement of Mexico there, and China, in relation to United States. 
+Look here when I move them forward. 
+Here we go. 
+They catch up. There's Mexico. 
+It's on par with United States in these two social dimensions. 
+There was less than five percent of the specialists in Global Health that was aware of this. 
+This great nation, Mexico, has the problem that arms are coming from North, across the borders, so they had to stop that, because they have this strange relationship to the United States, you know. 
+But if I would change this axis here, I would instead put income per person. 
+Income per person. I can put that here. 
+And we will then see a completely different picture. 
+By the way, I'm teaching you how to use our website, Gapminder World, while I'm correcting this, because this is a free utility on the net. 
+And when I now finally got it right, I can go back 200 years in history. 
+And I can find United States up there. 
+And I can let the other countries be shown. 
+And now I have income per person on this axis. 
+And United States only had some, one, two thousand dollars at that time. 
+And the life expectancy was 35 to 40 years, on par with Afghanistan today. 
+And what has happened in the world, I will show now. 
+This is instead of studying history for one year at university. 
+You can watch me for one minute now and you'll see the whole thing. 
+(Laughter) You can see how the brown bubbles, which is west Europe, and the yellow one, which is the United States, they get richer and richer and also start to get healthier and healthier. 
+And this is now 100 years ago, where the rest of the world remains behind. 
+Here we come. And that was the influenza. 
+That's why we are so scared about flu, isn't it? 
+It's still remembered. The fall of life expectancy. 
+And then we come up. Not until independence started. 
+Look here You have China over there, you have India over there, and this is what has happened. 
+Did you note there, that we have Mexico up there? 
+Mexico is not at all on par with the United States, but they are quite close. 
+And especially, it's interesting to see China and the United States during 200 years, because I have my oldest son now working for Google, after Google acquired this software. 
+Because in fact, this is child labor. My son and his wife sat in a closet for many years and developed this. 
+And my youngest son, who studied Chinese in Beijing. 
+So they come in with the two perspectives I have, you know? 
+And my son, youngest son who studied in Beijing, in China, he got a long-term perspective. 
+Whereas when my oldest son, who works for Google, he should develop by quarter, or by half-year. 
+Or Google is quite generous, so he can have one or two years to go. 
+But in China they look generation after generation because they remember the very embarrassing period, for 100 years, when they went backwards. 
+And then they would remember the first part of last century, which was really bad, and we could go by this so-called Great Leap Forward. 
+But this was 1963. 
+Mao Tse-Tung eventually brought health to China, and then he died, and then Deng Xiaoping started this amazing move forward. 
+Isn't it strange to see that the United States first grew the economy, and then gradually got rich? 
+Whereas China could get healthy much earlier, because they applied the knowledge of education, nutrition, and then also benefits of penicillin and vaccines and family planning. 
+And Asia could have social development before they got the economic development. 
+So to me, as a public health professor, it's not strange that all these countries grow so fast now. 
+Because what you see here, what you see here is the flat world of Thomas Friedman, isn't it. 
+It's not really, really flat. 
+But the middle income countries — and this is where I suggest to my students, stop using the concept "" developing world. "" Because after all, talking about the developing world is like having two chapters in the history of the United States. 
+The last chapter is about present, and president Obama, and the other is about the past, where you cover everything from Washington to Eisenhower. 
+Because Washington to Eisenhower, that is what we find in the developing world. 
+We could actually go to Mayflower to Eisenhower, and that would be put together into a developing world, which is rightly growing its cities in a very amazing way, which have great entrepreneurs, but also have the collapsing countries. 
+So, how could we make better sense about this? 
+Well, one way of trying is to see whether we could look at income distribution. 
+This is the income distribution of peoples in the world, from $1. This is where you have food to eat. 
+These people go to bed hungry. 
+And this is the number of people. 
+This is $10, whether you have a public or a private health service system. This is where you can provide health service for your family and school for your children, and this is OECD countries: Green, Latin America, East Europe. 
+This is East Asia, and the light blue there is South Asia. 
+And this is how the world changed. 
+It changed like this. 
+Can you see how it's growing? And how hundreds of millions and billions is coming out of poverty in Asia? 
+And it goes over here? 
+And I come now, into projections, but I have to stop at the door of Lehman Brothers there, you know, because — (Laughter) that's where the projections are not valid any longer. 
+Probably the world will do this. 
+and then it will continue forward like this. 
+But more or less, this is what will happen, and we have a world which cannot be looked upon as divided. 
+We have the high income countries here, with the United States as a leading power; we have the emerging economies in the middle, which provide a lot of the funding for the bailout; and we have the low income countries here. 
+Yeah, this is a fact that from where the money comes, they have been saving, you know, over the last decade. 
+And here we have the low income countries where entrepreneurs are. 
+And here we have the countries in collapse and war, like Afghanistan, Somalia, parts of Congo, Darfur. 
+We have all this at the same time. 
+That's why it's so problematic to describe what has happened in the developing world. 
+Because it's so different, what has happened there. 
+And that's why I suggest a slightly different approach of what you would call it. 
+And you have huge differences within countries also. 
+I heard that your departments here were by regions. 
+Here you have Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Arab states, East Europe, Latin America, and OECD. 
+And on this axis, GDP. 
+And on this, heath, child survival, and it doesn't come as a surprise that Africa south of Sahara is at the bottom. 
+But when I split it, when I split it into country bubbles, the size of the bubbles here is the population. 
+Then you see Sierra Leone and Mauritius, completely different. 
+There is such a difference within Sub-Saharan Africa. 
+And I can split the others. Here is the South Asian, Arab world. 
+Now all your different departments. 
+East Europe, Latin America, and OECD countries. 
+And here were are. We have a continuum in the world. 
+We cannot put it into two parts. 
+It is Mayflower down here. It is Washington here, building, building countries. 
+It's Lincoln here, advancing them. 
+It's Eisenhower bringing modernity into the countries. 
+And then it's United States today, up here. 
+And we have countries all this way. 
+Now, this is the important thing of understanding how the world has changed. 
+At this point I decided to make a pause. 
+(Laughter) And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thanks to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. 
+Many are not aware of — no, this is not a joke. 
+This is very serious. 
+It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. 
+(Applause) And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. 
+And providing data free of charge on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much. 
+Quite the opposite of the World Bank, who compiled data with government money, tax money, and then they sell it to add a little profit, in a very inefficient, Gutenberg way. 
+(Applause) But the people doing that at the World Bank are among the best in the world. 
+And they are highly skilled professionals. 
+It's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in the modern way, as we do. 
+And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. 
+And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor. 
+(Laughter) And I'm not paid to come here, no. 
+I would like to show you what happens with the data, what we can show with this data. 
+Look here. This is the world. 
+With income down there and child mortality. 
+And what has happened in the world? 
+Since 1950, during the last 50 years we have had a fall in child mortality. 
+And it is the DHS that makes it possible to know this. 
+And we had an increase in income. 
+And the blue former developing countries are mixing up with the former industrialized western world. 
+We have a continuum. But we still have, of course, Congo, up there. We still have as poor countries as we have had, always, in history. 
+And that's the bottom billion, where we've heard today about a completely new approach to do it. 
+And how fast has this happened? 
+Well, MDG 4. 
+The United States has not been so eager to use MDG 4. 
+But you have been the main sponsor that has enabled us to measure it, because it's the only child mortality that we can measure. 
+And we used to say that it should fall four percent per year. 
+Let's see what Sweden has done. 
+We used to boast about fast social progress. 
+That's where we were, 1900. 
+1900, Sweden was there. 
+Same child mortality as Bangladesh had, 1990, though they had lower income. 
+They started very well. They used the aid well. 
+They vaccinated the kids. They get better water. 
+And they reduced child mortality, with an amazing 4.7 percent per year. They beat Sweden. 
+I run Sweden the same 16 year period. 
+Second round, it's Sweden, 1916, against Egypt, 1990. 
+Here we go. Once again the USA is part of the reason here. 
+They get safe water, they get food for the poor, and they get malaria eradicated. 
+5.5 percent. They are faster than the millennium development goal. 
+And third chance for Sweden, against Brazil here. 
+Brazil here has amazing social improvement over the last 16 years, and they go faster than Sweden. 
+This means that the world is converging. 
+The middle income countries, the emerging economy, they are catching up. 
+They are moving to cities, where they also get better assistance for that. 
+Well the Swedish students protest at this point. 
+They say, "" This is not fair, because these countries had vaccines and antibiotics that were not available for Sweden. 
+We have to do real-time competition. "" Okay. I give you Singapore, the year I was born. 
+Singapore had twice the child mortality of Sweden. 
+It's the most tropical country in the world, a marshland on the equator. 
+And here we go. It took a little time for them to get independent. 
+But then they started to grow their economy. 
+And they made the social investment. They got away malaria. 
+They got a magnificent health system that beat both the U.S. and Sweden. 
+We never thought it would happen that they would win over Sweden! 
+(Applause) All these green countries are achieving millennium development goals. 
+These yellow are just about to be doing this. 
+These red are the countries that doesn't do it, and the policy has to be improved. 
+Not simplistic extrapolation. 
+We have to really find a way of supporting those countries in a better way. 
+We have to respect the middle income countries on what they are doing. 
+And we have to fact-base the whole way we look at the world. 
+This is dollar per person. This is HIV in the countries. 
+The blue is Africa. 
+The size of the bubbles is how many are HIV affected. 
+You see the tragedy in South Africa there. 
+About 20 percent of the adult population are infected. 
+And in spite of them having quite a high income, they have a huge number of HIV infected. 
+But you also see that there are African countries down here. 
+There is no such thing as an HIV epidemic in Africa. 
+There's a number, five to 10 countries in Africa that has the same level as Sweden and United States. 
+And there are others who are extremely high. 
+And I will show you that what has happened in one of the best countries, with the most vibrant economy in Africa and a good governance, Botswana. 
+They have a very high level. It's coming down. 
+But now it's not falling, because there, with help from PEPFAR, it's working with treatment. And people are not dying. 
+And you can see it's not that easy, that it is war which caused this. 
+Because here, in Congo, there is war. 
+And here, in Zambia, there is peace. 
+And it's not the economy. Richer country has a little higher. 
+If I split Tanzania in its income, the richer 20 percent in Tanzania has more HIV than the poorest one. 
+And it's really different within each country. 
+Look at the provinces of Kenya. They are very different. 
+And this is the situation you see. 
+It's not deep poverty. It's the special situation, probably of concurrent sexual partnership among part of the heterosexual population in some countries, or some parts of countries, in south and eastern Africa. 
+Don't make it Africa. Don't make it a race issue. 
+Make it a local issue. And do prevention at each place, in the way it can be done there. 
+So to just end up, there are things of suffering in the one billion poorest, which we don't know. 
+Those who live beyond the cellphone, those who have yet to see a computer, those who have no electricity at home. 
+This is the disease, Konzo, I spent 20 years elucidating in Africa. 
+It's caused by fast processing of toxic cassava root in famine situation. 
+It's similar to the pellagra epidemic in Mississippi in the '30s. 
+It's similar to other nutritional diseases. 
+It will never affect a rich person. 
+We have seen it here in Mozambique. 
+This is the epidemic in Mozambique. This is an epidemic in northern Tanzania. 
+You never heard about the disease. 
+But it's much more than Ebola that has been affected by this disease. 
+Cause crippling throughout the world. 
+And over the last two years, 2,000 people has been crippled in the southern tip of Bandundu region. 
+That used to be the illegal diamond trade, from the UNITA-dominated area in Angola. 
+That has now disappeared, and they are now in great economic problem. 
+And one week ago, for the first time, there were four lines on the Internet. 
+Don't get confused of the progress of the emerging economies and the great capacity of people in the middle income countries and in peaceful low income countries. 
+There is still mystery in one billion. 
+And we have to have more concepts than just developing countries and developing world. 
+We need a new mindset. The world is converging, but — but — but not the bottom billion. 
+They are still as poor as they've ever been. 
+It's not sustainable, and it will not happen around one superpower. 
+But you will remain one of the most important superpowers, and the most hopeful superpower, for the time to be. 
+And this institution will have a very crucial role, not for United States, but for the world. 
+So you have a very bad name, State Department. This is not the State Department. 
+It's the World Department. 
+And we have a high hope in you. Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Now this is a very un-TED-like thing to do, but let's kick off the afternoon with a message from a mystery sponsor. 
+Anonymous: Dear Fox News, it has come to our unfortunate attention that both the name and nature of Anonymous has been ravaged. 
+We are everyone. We are no one. 
+We are anonymous. We are legion. 
+We do not forgive. We do not forget. 
+We are but the base of chaos. 
+Misha Glenny: Anonymous, ladies and gentlemen — a sophisticated group of politically motivated hackers who have emerged in 2011. 
+And they're pretty scary. 
+You never know when they're going to attack next, who or what the consequences will be. 
+But interestingly, they have a sense of humor. 
+These guys hacked into Fox News' Twitter account to announce President Obama's assassination. 
+Now you can imagine the panic that would have generated in the newsroom at Fox. 
+"" What do we do now? 
+Put on a black armband, or crack open the champagne? "" (Laughter) And of course, who could escape the irony of a member of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. 
+being a victim of hacking for a change. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Sometimes you turn on the news and you say, "" Is there anyone left to hack? "" Sony Playstation Network — done, the government of Turkey — tick, Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency — a breeze, the CIA — falling off a log. 
+In fact, a friend of mine from the security industry told me the other day that there are two types of companies in the world: those that know they've been hacked, and those that don't. 
+I mean three companies providing cybersecurity services to the FBI have been hacked. 
+Is nothing sacred anymore, for heaven's sake? 
+Anyway, this mysterious group Anonymous — and they would say this themselves — they are providing a service by demonstrating how useless companies are at protecting our data. 
+But there is also a very serious aspect to Anonymous — they are ideologically driven. 
+They claim that they are battling a dastardly conspiracy. 
+They say that governments are trying to take over the Internet and control it, and that they, Anonymous, are the authentic voice of resistance — be it against Middle Eastern dictatorships, against global media corporations, or against intelligence agencies, or whoever it is. 
+And their politics are not entirely unattractive. 
+Okay, they're a little inchoate. 
+There's a strong whiff of half-baked anarchism about them. 
+But one thing is true: we are at the beginning of a mighty struggle for control of the Internet. 
+The Web links everything, and very soon it will mediate most human activity. 
+Because the Internet has fashioned a new and complicated environment for an old-age dilemma that pits the demands of security with the desire for freedom. 
+Now this is a very complicated struggle. 
+And unfortunately, for mortals like you and me, we probably can't understand it very well. 
+Nonetheless, in an unexpected attack of hubris a couple of years ago, I decided I would try and do that. 
+And I sort of get it. 
+These were the various things that I was looking at as I was trying to understand it. 
+But in order to try and explain the whole thing, I would need another 18 minutes or so to do it, so you're just going to have to take it on trust from me on this occasion, and let me assure you that all of these issues are involved in cybersecurity and control of the Internet one way or the other, but in a configuration that even Stephen Hawking would probably have difficulty trying to get his head around. 
+So there you are. 
+And as you see, in the middle, there is our old friend, the hacker. 
+The hacker is absolutely central to many of the political, social and economic issues affecting the Net. 
+And so I thought to myself, "Well, these are the guys who I want to talk to." 
+And what do you know, nobody else does talk to the hackers. 
+They're completely anonymous, as it were. 
+So despite the fact that we are beginning to pour billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, into cybersecurity — for the most extraordinary technical solutions — no one wants to talk to these guys, the hackers, who are doing everything. 
+Instead, we prefer these really dazzling technological solutions, which cost a huge amount of money. 
+And so nothing is going into the hackers. 
+Well, I say nothing, but actually there is one teeny weeny little research unit in Turin, Italy called the Hackers Profiling Project. 
+And they are doing some fantastic research into the characteristics, into the abilities and the socialization of hackers. 
+But because they're a U.N. operation, maybe that's why governments and corporations are not that interested in them. 
+Because it's a U.N. operation, of course, it lacks funding. 
+But I think they're doing very important work. 
+Because where we have a surplus of technology in the cybersecurity industry, we have a definite lack of — call me old-fashioned — human intelligence. 
+Now, so far I've mentioned the hackers Anonymous who are a politically motivated hacking group. 
+Of course, the criminal justice system treats them as common old garden criminals. 
+But interestingly, Anonymous does not make use of its hacked information for financial gain. 
+But what about the real cybercriminals? 
+Well real organized crime on the Internet goes back about 10 years when a group of gifted Ukrainian hackers developed a website, which led to the industrialization of cybercrime. 
+Welcome to the now forgotten realm of CarderPlanet. 
+This is how they were advertising themselves a decade ago on the Net. 
+Now CarderPlanet was very interesting. 
+Cybercriminals would go there to buy and sell stolen credit card details, to exchange information about new malware that was out there. 
+And remember, this is a time when we're seeing for the first time so-called off-the-shelf malware. 
+This is ready for use, out-of-the-box stuff, which you can deploy even if you're not a terribly sophisticated hacker. 
+And so CarderPlanet became a sort of supermarket for cybercriminals. 
+And its creators were incredibly smart and entrepreneurial, because they were faced with one enormous challenge as cybercriminals. 
+And that challenge is: How do you do business, how do you trust somebody on the Web who you want to do business with when you know that they're a criminal? 
+(Laughter) It's axiomatic that they're dodgy, and they're going to want to try and rip you off. 
+So the family, as the inner core of CarderPlanet was known, came up with this brilliant idea called the escrow system. 
+They appointed an officer who would mediate between the vendor and the purchaser. 
+The vendor, say, had stolen credit card details; the purchaser wanted to get a hold of them. 
+The purchaser would send the administrative officer some dollars digitally, and the vendor would sell the stolen credit card details. 
+And the officer would then verify if the stolen credit card worked. 
+And if they did, he then passed on the money to the vendor and the stolen credit card details to the purchaser. 
+And it was this which completely revolutionized cybercrime on the Web. 
+And after that, it just went wild. 
+We had a champagne decade for people who we know as Carders. 
+Now I spoke to one of these Carders who we'll call RedBrigade — although that wasn't even his proper nickname — but I promised I wouldn't reveal who he was. 
+And he explained to me how in 2003 and 2004 he would go on sprees in New York, taking out $10,000 from an ATM here, $30,000 from an ATM there, using cloned credit cards. 
+He was making, on average a week, $150,000 — tax free of course. 
+And he said that he had so much money stashed in his upper-East side apartment at one point that he just didn't know what to do with it and actually fell into a depression. 
+But that's a slightly different story, which I won't go into now. 
+Now the interesting thing about RedBrigade is that he wasn't an advanced hacker. 
+He sort of understood the technology, and he realized that security was very important if you were going to be a Carder, but he didn't spend his days and nights bent over a computer, eating pizza, drinking coke and that sort of thing. 
+He was out there on the town having a fab time enjoying the high life. 
+And this is because hackers are only one element in a cybercriminal enterprise. 
+And often they're the most vulnerable element of all. 
+And I want to explain this to you by introducing you to six characters who I met while I was doing this research. 
+Dimitry Golubov, aka SCRIPT — born in Odessa, Ukraine in 1982. 
+Now he developed his social and moral compass on the Black Sea port during the 1990s. 
+This was a sink-or-swim environment where involvement in criminal or corrupt activities was entirely necessary if you wanted to survive. 
+As an accomplished computer user, what Dimitry did was to transfer the gangster capitalism of his hometown onto the Worldwide Web. 
+And he did a great job in it. 
+You have to understand though that from his ninth birthday, the only environment he knew was gangsterism. 
+He knew no other way of making a living and making money. 
+Then we have Renukanth Subramaniam, aka JiLsi — founder of DarkMarket, born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. 
+As an eight year-old, he and his parents fled the Sri Lankan capital because Singhalese mobs were roaming the city, looking for Tamils like Renu to murder. 
+At 11, he was interrogated by the Sri Lankan military, accused of being a terrorist, and his parents sent him on his own to Britain as a refugee seeking political asylum. 
+At 13, with only little English and being bullied at school, he escaped into a world of computers where he showed great technical ability, but he was soon being seduced by people on the Internet. 
+He was convicted of mortgage and credit card fraud, and he will be released from Wormwood Scrubs jail in London in 2012. 
+Matrix001, who was an administrator at DarkMarket. 
+Born in Southern Germany to a stable and well-respected middle class family, his obsession with gaming as a teenager led him to hacking. 
+And he was soon controlling huge servers around the world where he stored his games that he had cracked and pirated. 
+His slide into criminality was incremental. 
+And when he finally woke up to his situation and understood the implications, he was already in too deep. 
+Max Vision, aka ICEMAN — mastermind of CardersMarket. 
+Born in Meridian, Idaho. 
+Max Vision was one of the best penetration testers working out of Santa Clara, California in the late 90s for private companies and voluntarily for the FBI. 
+Now in the late 1990s, he discovered a vulnerability on all U.S. government networks, and he went in and patched it up — because this included nuclear research facilities — sparing the American government a huge security embarrassment. 
+But also, because he was an inveterate hacker, he left a tiny digital wormhole through which he alone could crawl. 
+But this was spotted by an eagle-eye investigator, and he was convicted. 
+At his open prison, he came under the influence of financial fraudsters, and those financial fraudsters persuaded him to work for them on his release. 
+And this man with a planetary-sized brain is now serving a 13-year sentence in California. 
+Adewale Taiwo, aka FreddyBB — master bank account cracker from Abuja in Nigeria. 
+He set up his prosaically entitled newsgroup, bankfrauds @ yahoo.co.uk before arriving in Britain in 2005 to take a Masters in chemical engineering at Manchester University. 
+He impressed in the private sector, developing chemical applications for the oil industry while simultaneously running a worldwide bank and credit card fraud operation that was worth millions until his arrest in 2008. 
+And then finally, Cagatay Evyapan, aka Cha0 — one of the most remarkable hackers ever, from Ankara in Turkey. 
+He combined the tremendous skills of a geek with the suave social engineering skills of the master criminal. 
+One of the smartest people I've ever met. 
+He also had the most effective virtual private network security arrangement the police have ever encountered amongst global cybercriminals. 
+Now the important thing about all of these people is they share certain characteristics despite the fact that they come from very different environments. 
+They are all people who learned their hacking skills in their early to mid-teens. They are all people 
+who demonstrate advanced ability in maths and the sciences. 
+Remember that, when they developed those hacking skills, their moral compass had not yet developed. 
+And most of them, with the exception of SCRIPT and Cha0, they did not demonstrate any real social skills in the outside world — only on the Web. 
+And the other thing is the high incidence of hackers like these who have characteristics which are consistent with Asperger's syndrome. 
+Now I discussed this with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen who's the professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge. 
+And he has done path-breaking work on autism and confirmed, also for the authorities here, that Gary McKinnon — who is wanted by the United States for hacking into the Pentagon — suffers from Asperger's and a secondary condition of depression. 
+And Baron-Cohen explained that certain disabilities can manifest themselves in the hacking and computing world as tremendous skills, and that we should not be throwing in jail people who have such disabilities and skills because they have lost their way socially or been duped. 
+Now I think we're missing a trick here, because I don't think people like Max Vision should be in jail. 
+And let me be blunt about this. 
+In China, in Russia and in loads of other countries that are developing cyber-offensive capabilities, this is exactly what they are doing. 
+They are recruiting hackers both before and after they become involved in criminal and industrial espionage activities — are mobilizing them on behalf of the state. 
+We need to engage and find ways of offering guidance to these young people, because they are a remarkable breed. 
+And if we rely, as we do at the moment, solely on the criminal justice system and the threat of punitive sentences, we will be nurturing a monster we cannot tame. 
+Thank you very much for listening. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: So your idea worth spreading is hire hackers. 
+How would someone get over that kind of fear that the hacker they hire might preserve that little teensy wormhole? 
+MG: I think to an extent, you have to understand that it's axiomatic among hackers that they do that. 
+They're just relentless and obsessive about what they do. 
+But all of the people who I've spoken to who have fallen foul of the law, they have all said, "" Please, please give us a chance to work in the legitimate industry. 
+We just never knew how to get there, what we were doing. 
+We want to work with you. "" Chris Anderson: Okay, well that makes sense. Thanks a lot Misha. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And exactly six years and three days earlier, on June 20, 1994, a ship named the Apollo Sea sank near Dassen Island, oiling 10,000 penguins, half of which died. 
+Now when the Treasure sank in 2000, it was the height of the best breeding season scientists had ever recorded for the African penguin, which at the time, was listed as a threatened species. 
+Eventually, over the course of this rescue, more than 12-and-a-half thousand volunteers came from all over the world to Cape Town, to help save these birds. 
+So for the few of us that were there in a professional capacity, this extraordinary volunteer response to this animal crisis was profoundly moving and awe-inspiring. 
+So in wildlife rescue as in life, we learn from each previous experience, and we learn from both our successes and our failures. 
+And as a result, during the Treasure rescue, just 160 penguins died during the transport process, as opposed to 5,000. 
+But an interesting thing was noted during the training process. 
+When you clean a penguin, you first have to spray it with a degreaser. 
+After half a million hours of grueling volunteer labor, more than 90 percent of those oiled penguins were successfully returned to the wild. 
+So what did I learn from this intense and unforgettable experience? 
+And simply put: if penguins are dying, it means our oceans are dying. 
+And the two main threats to penguins today are overfishing and global warming. 
+
+Today I'd like to show you the future of the way we make things. 
+I believe that soon our buildings and machines will be self-assembling, replicating and repairing themselves. 
+So I'm going to show you what I believe is the current state of manufacturing, and then compare that to some natural systems. 
+So in the current state of manufacturing, we have skyscrapers — two and a half years [of assembly time], 500,000 to a million parts, fairly complex, new, exciting technologies in steel, concrete, glass. 
+We have exciting machines that can take us into space — five years [of assembly time], 2.5 million parts. 
+But on the other side, if you look at the natural systems, we have proteins that have two million types, can fold in 10,000 nanoseconds, or DNA with three billion base pairs we can replicate in roughly an hour. 
+So there's all of this complexity in our natural systems, but they're extremely efficient, far more efficient than anything we can build, far more complex than anything we can build. 
+They're far more efficient in terms of energy. 
+They hardly ever make mistakes. 
+And they can repair themselves for longevity. 
+So there's something super interesting about natural systems. 
+And if we can translate that into our built environment, then there's some exciting potential for the way that we build things. 
+And I think the key to that is self-assembly. 
+So if we want to utilize self-assembly in our physical environment, I think there's four key factors. 
+The first is that we need to decode all of the complexity of what we want to build — so our buildings and machines. 
+And we need to decode that into simple sequences — basically the DNA of how our buildings work. 
+Then we need programmable parts that can take that sequence and use that to fold up, or reconfigure. 
+We need some energy that's going to allow that to activate, allow our parts to be able to fold up from the program. 
+And we need some type of error correction redundancy to guarantee that we have successfully built what we want. 
+So I'm going to show you a number of projects that my colleagues and I at MIT are working on to achieve this self-assembling future. 
+The first two are the MacroBot and DeciBot. 
+So these projects are large-scale reconfigurable robots — 8 ft., 12 ft. long proteins. 
+They're embedded with mechanical electrical devices, sensors. 
+You decode what you want to fold up into, into a sequence of angles — so negative 120, negative 120, 0, 0, 120, negative 120 — something like that; so a sequence of angles, or turns, and you send that sequence through the string. 
+Each unit takes its message — so negative 120 — it rotates to that, checks if it got there and then passes it to its neighbor. 
+So these are the brilliant scientists, engineers, designers that worked on this project. 
+And I think it really brings to light: Is this really scalable? 
+I mean, thousands of dollars, lots of man hours made to make this eight-foot robot. 
+Can we really scale this up? Can we really embed robotics into every part? 
+The next one questions that and looks at passive nature, or passively trying to have reconfiguration programmability. 
+But it goes a step further, and it tries to have actual computation. 
+It basically embeds the most fundamental building block of computing, the digital logic gate, directly into your parts. 
+So this is a NAND gate. 
+You have one tetrahedron which is the gate that's going to do your computing, and you have two input tetrahedrons. 
+One of them is the input from the user, as you're building your bricks. 
+The other one is from the previous brick that was placed. 
+And then it gives you an output in 3D space. 
+So what this means is that the user can start plugging in what they want the bricks to do. 
+It computes on what it was doing before and what you said you wanted it to do. 
+And now it starts moving in three-dimensional space — so up or down. 
+So on the left-hand side, [1,1] input equals 0 output, which goes down. 
+On the right-hand side, [0,0] input is a 1 output, which goes up. 
+And so what that really means is that our structures now contain the blueprints of what we want to build. 
+So they have all of the information embedded in them of what was constructed. 
+So that means that we can have some form of self-replication. 
+In this case I call it self-guided replication, because your structure contains the exact blueprints. 
+If you have errors, you can replace a part. 
+All the local information is embedded to tell you how to fix it. 
+So you could have something that climbs along and reads it and can output at one to one. 
+It's directly embedded; there's no external instructions. 
+So the last project I'll show is called Biased Chains, and it's probably the most exciting example that we have right now of passive self-assembly systems. 
+So it takes the reconfigurability and programmability and makes it a completely passive system. 
+So basically you have a chain of elements. 
+Each element is completely identical, and they're biased. 
+So each chain, or each element, wants to turn right or left. 
+So as you assemble the chain, you're basically programming it. 
+You're telling each unit if it should turn right or left. 
+So when you shake the chain, it then folds up into any configuration that you've programmed in — so in this case, a spiral, or in this case, two cubes next to each other. 
+So you can basically program any three-dimensional shape — or one-dimensional, two-dimensional — up into this chain completely passively. 
+So what does this tell us about the future? 
+I think that it's telling us that there's new possibilities for self-assembly, replication, repair in our physical structures, our buildings, machines. 
+There's new programmability in these parts. 
+And from that you have new possibilities for computing. 
+We'll have spatial computing. 
+Imagine if our buildings, our bridges, machines, all of our bricks could actually compute. 
+That's amazing parallel and distributed computing power, new design possibilities. 
+So it's exciting potential for this. 
+So I think these projects I've showed here are just a tiny step towards this future, if we implement these new technologies for a new self-assembling world. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Ten years ago exactly, I was in Afghanistan. 
+I was covering the war in Afghanistan, and I witnessed, as a reporter for Al Jazeera, the amount of suffering and destruction that emerged out of a war like that. 
+Then, two years later, I covered another war — the war in Iraq. 
+I was placed at the center of that war because I was covering the war from the northern part of Iraq. 
+And the war ended with a regime change, like the one in Afghanistan. 
+And that regime that we got rid of was actually a dictatorship, an authoritarian regime, that for decades created a great sense of paralysis within the nation, within the people themselves. 
+However, the change that came through foreign intervention created even worse circumstances for the people and deepened the sense of paralysis and inferiority in that part of the world. 
+For decades, we have lived under authoritarian regimes — in the Arab world, in the Middle East. 
+These regimes created something within us during this period. 
+I'm 43 years old right now. 
+For the last 40 years, I have seen almost the same faces for kings and presidents ruling us — old, aged, authoritarian, corrupt situations — regimes that we have seen around us. 
+And for a moment I was wondering, are we going to live in order to see real change happening on the ground, a change that does not come through foreign intervention, through the misery of occupation, through nations invading our land and deepening the sense of inferiority sometimes? 
+The Iraqis: yes, they got rid of Saddam Hussein, but when they saw their land occupied by foreign forces they felt very sad, they felt that their dignity had suffered. 
+And this is why they revolted. 
+This is why they did not accept. 
+And actually other regimes, they told their citizens, "" Would you like to see the situation of Iraq? 
+Would you like to see civil war, sectarian killing? 
+Would you like to see destruction? 
+Would you like to see foreign troops on your land? "" And the people thought for themselves, "" Maybe we should live with this kind of authoritarian situation that we find ourselves in, instead of having the second scenario. "" That was one of the worst nightmares that we have seen. 
+For 10 years, unfortunately we have found ourselves reporting images of destruction, images of killing, of sectarian conflicts, images of violence, emerging from a magnificent piece of land, a region that one day was the source of civilizations and art and culture for thousands of years. 
+Now I am here to tell you that the future that we were dreaming for has eventually arrived. 
+A new generation, well-educated, connected, inspired by universal values and a global understanding, has created a new reality for us. 
+We have found a new way to express our feelings and to express our dreams: these young people who have restored self-confidence in our nations in that part of the world, who have given us new meaning for freedom and empowered us to go down to the streets. 
+Nothing happened. No violence. Nothing. 
+Just step out of your house, raise your voice and say, "" We would like to see the end of the regime. "" This is what happened in Tunisia. 
+Over a few days, the Tunisian regime that invested billions of dollars in the security agencies, billions of dollars in maintaining, trying to maintain, its prisons, collapsed, disappeared, because of the voices of the public. 
+People who were inspired to go down to the streets and to raise their voices, they tried to kill. 
+The intelligence agencies wanted to arrest people. 
+They found something called Facebook. 
+They found something called Twitter. 
+They were surprised by all of these kinds of issues. 
+And they said, "These kids are misled." 
+Therefore, they asked their parents to go down to the streets and collect them, bring them back home. 
+This is what they were telling. This is their propaganda. 
+"" Bring these kids home because they are misled. "" But yes, these youth who have been inspired by universal values, who are idealistic enough to imagine a magnificent future and, at the same time, realistic enough to balance this kind of imagination and the process leading to it — not using violence, not trying to create chaos — these young people, they did not go home. 
+Parents actually went to the streets and they supported them. 
+And this is how the revolution was born in Tunisia. 
+We in Al Jazeera were banned from Tunisia for years, and the government did not allow any Al Jazeera reporter to be there. 
+But we found that these people in the street, all of them are our reporters, feeding our newsroom with pictures, with videos and with news. 
+And suddenly that newsroom in Doha became a center that received all this kind of input from ordinary people — people who are connected and people who have ambition and who have liberated themselves from the feeling of inferiority. 
+And then we took that decision: We are unrolling the news. 
+We are going to be the voice for these voiceless people. 
+We are going to spread the message. 
+Yes, some of these young people are connected to the Internet, but the connectivity in the Arab world is very little, is very small, because of many problems that we are suffering from. 
+But Al Jazeera took the voice from these people and we amplified [it]. 
+We put it in every sitting room in the Arab world — and internationally, globally, through our English channel. 
+And then people started to feel that there's something new happening. 
+And then Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali decided to leave. 
+And then Egypt started, and Hosni Mubarak decided to leave. 
+And now Libya as you see it. 
+And then you have Yemen. 
+And you have many other countries trying to see and to rediscover that feeling of, "" How do we imagine a future which is magnificent and peaceful and tolerant? "" I want to tell you something, that the Internet and connectivity has created [a] new mindset. 
+But this mindset has continued to be faithful to the soil and to the land that it emerged from. 
+And while this was the major difference between many initiatives before to create change, before we thought, and governments told us — and even sometimes it was true — that change was imposed on us, and people rejected that, because they thought that it is alien to their culture. 
+Always, we believed that change will spring from within, that change should be a reconciliation with culture, cultural diversity, with our faith in our tradition and in our history, but at the same time, open to universal values, connected with the world, tolerant to the outside. 
+And this is the moment that is happening right now in the Arab world. 
+This is the right moment, and this is the actual moment that we see all of these meanings meet together and then create the beginning of this magnificent era that will emerge from the region. 
+How did the elite deal with that — the so-called political elite? 
+In front of Facebook, they brought the camels in Tahrir Square. 
+In front of Al Jazeera, they started creating tribalism. 
+And then when they failed, they started speaking about conspiracies that emerged from Tel Aviv and Washington in order to divide the Arab world. 
+They started telling the West, "" Be aware of Al-Qaeda. 
+Al-Qaeda is taking over our territories. 
+These are Islamists trying to create new Imaras. 
+Be aware of these people who [are] coming to you in order to ruin your great civilization. "" Fortunately, people right now cannot be deceived. 
+Because this corrupt elite in that region has lost even the power of deception. 
+They could not, and they cannot, imagine how they could really deal with this reality. 
+They have lost. 
+They have been detached from their people, from the masses, and now we are seeing them collapsing one after the other. 
+Al Jazeera is not a tool of revolution. 
+We do not create revolutions. 
+However, when something of that magnitude happens, we are at the center of the coverage. 
+We were banned from Egypt, and our correspondents, some of them were arrested. 
+But most of our camera people and our journalists, they went underground in Egypt — voluntarily — to report what happened in Tahrir Square. 
+For 18 days, our cameras were broadcasting, live, the voices of the people in Tahrir Square. 
+I remember one night when someone phoned me on my cellphone — ordinary person who I don't know — from Tahrir Square. 
+He told me, "" We appeal to you not to switch off the cameras. 
+If you switch off the cameras tonight, there will be a genocide. 
+You are protecting us by showing what is happening at Tahrir Square. "" I felt the responsibility to phone our correspondents there and to phone our newsroom and to tell them, "" Make your best not to switch off the cameras at night, because the guys there really feel confident when someone is reporting their story — and they feel protected as well. "" So we have a chance to create a new future in that part of the world. 
+We have a chance to go and to think of the future as something which is open to the world. 
+Let us not repeat the mistake of Iran, of [the] Mosaddeq revolution. 
+Let us free ourselves — especially in the West — from thinking about that part of the world based on oil interest, or based on interests of the illusion of stability and security. 
+The stability and security of authoritarian regimes cannot create but terrorism and violence and destruction. 
+Let us accept the choice of the people. 
+Let us not pick and choose who we would like to rule their future. 
+The future should be ruled by people themselves, even sometimes if they are voices that might now scare us. 
+But the values of democracy and the freedom of choice that is sweeping the Middle East at this moment in time is the best opportunity for the world, for the West and the East, to see stability and to see security and to see friendship and to see tolerance emerging from the Arab world, rather than the images of violence and terrorism. 
+Let us support these people. 
+Let us stand for them. 
+And let us give up our narrow selfishness in order to embrace change, and in order to celebrate with the people of that region a great future and hope and tolerance. 
+The future has arrived, and the future is now. 
+I thank you very much. 
+(Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+Chris Anderson: I just have a couple of questions for you. 
+Thank you for coming here. 
+How would you characterize the historical significance of what's happened? 
+Is this a story-of-the-year, a story-of-the-decade or something more? 
+Wadah Khanfar: Actually, this may be the biggest story that we have ever covered. 
+We have covered many wars. 
+We have covered a lot of tragedies, a lot of problems, a lot of conflict zones, a lot of hot spots in the region, because we were centered at the middle of it. 
+But this is a story — it is a great story; it is beautiful. 
+It is not something that you only cover because you have to cover a great incident. 
+You are witnessing change in history. 
+You are witnessing the birth of a new era. 
+And this is what the story's all about. 
+CA: There are a lot of people in the West who are still skeptical, or think this may just be an intermediate stage before much more alarming chaos. 
+You really believe that if there are democratic elections in Egypt now, that a government could emerge that espouses some of the values you've spoken about so inspiringly? 
+WK: And people actually, after the collapse of the Hosni Mubarak regime, the youth who have organized themselves in certain groups and councils, they are guarding the transformation and they are trying to put it on a track in order to satisfy the values of democracy, but at the same time also to make it reasonable and to make it rational, not to go out of order. 
+In my opinion, these people are much more wiser than, not only the political elite, even the intellectual elite, even opposition leaders including political parties. 
+At this moment in time, the youth in the Arab world are much more wiser and capable of creating the change than the old — including the political and cultural and ideological old regimes. 
+(Applause) CA: We are not to get involved politically and interfere in that way. 
+What should people here at TED, here in the West, do if they want to connect or make a difference and they believe in what's happening here? 
+WK: I think we have discovered a very important issue in the Arab world — that people care, people care about this great transformation. 
+Mohamed Nanabhay who's sitting with us, the head of Aljazeera.net, he told me that a 2,500 percent increase of accessing our website from various parts of the world. 
+Fifty percent of it is coming from America. 
+Because we discovered that people care, and people would like to know — they are receiving the stream through our Internet. 
+Unfortunately in the United States, we are not covering but Washington D.C. at this moment in time for Al Jazeera English. 
+But I can tell you, this is the moment to celebrate through connecting ourselves with those people in the street and expressing our support to them and expressing this kind of feeling, universal feeling, of supporting the weak and the oppressed to create a much better future for all of us. 
+CA: Well Wadah, a group of members of the TED community, TEDxCairo, are meeting as we speak. 
+They've had some speakers there. 
+I believe they've heard your talk. 
+Thank you for inspiring them and for inspiring all of us. 
+Thank you so much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And she said, "" How are you? "" And I said, "" I'm great. I'm okay. "" She said, "" What's going on? "" And this is a therapist who sees therapists, because we have to go to those, because their B.S. meters are good. 
+
+Ten years ago, on a Tuesday morning, I conducted a parachute jump at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 
+It was a routine training jump, like many more I'd done since I became a paratrooper 27 years before. 
+We went down to the airfield early because this is the Army and you always go early. 
+You do some routine refresher training, and then you go to put on your parachute and a buddy helps you. 
+And you put on the T-10 parachute. 
+And you're very careful how you put the straps, particularly the leg straps because they go between your legs. 
+And then you put on your reserve, and then you put on your heavy rucksack. 
+And then a jumpmaster comes, and he's an experienced NCO in parachute operations. 
+He checks you out, he grabs your adjusting straps and he tightens everything so that your chest is crushed, your shoulders are crushed down, and, of course, he's tightened so your voice goes up a couple octaves as well. 
+Then you sit down, and you wait a little while, because this is the Army. 
+Then you load the aircraft, and then you stand up and you get on, and you kind of lumber to the aircraft like this, in a line of people, and you sit down on canvas seats on either side of the aircraft. 
+And you wait a little bit longer, because this is the Air Force teaching the Army how to wait. 
+Then you take off. 
+And it's painful enough now — and I think it's designed this way — it's painful enough so you want to jump. 
+You didn't really want to jump, but you want out. 
+So you get in the aircraft, you're flying along, and at 20 minutes out, these jumpmasters start giving you commands. 
+They give 20 minutes — that's a time warning. 
+You sit there, OK. 
+Then they give you 10 minutes. 
+And of course, you're responding with all of these. 
+And that's to boost everybody's confidence, to show that you're not scared. 
+Then they give you, "" Get ready. "" Then they go, "" Outboard personnel, stand up. "" If you're an outboard personnel, now you stand up. 
+If you're an inboard personnel, stand up. 
+And then you hook up, and you hook up your static line. 
+And at that point, you think, "" Hey, guess what? 
+I'm probably going to jump. 
+There's no way to get out of this at this point. "" You go through some additional checks, and then they open the door. 
+And this was that Tuesday morning in September, and it was pretty nice outside. 
+So nice air comes flowing in. 
+The jumpmasters start to check the door. 
+And then when it's time to go, a green light goes and the jumpmaster goes, "" Go. "" The first guy goes, and you're just in line, and you just kind of lumber to the door. 
+Jump is a misnomer; you fall. 
+You fall outside the door, you're caught in the slipstream. 
+The first thing you do is lock into a tight body position — head down in your chest, your arms extended, put over your reserve parachute. 
+You do that because, 27 years before, an airborne sergeant had taught me to do that. 
+I have no idea whether it makes any difference, but he seemed to make sense, and I wasn't going to test the hypothesis that he'd be wrong. 
+And then you wait for the opening shock for your parachute to open. 
+If you don't get an opening shock, you don't get a parachute — you've got a whole new problem set. 
+But typically you do; typically it opens. 
+And of course, if your leg straps aren't set right, at that point you get another little thrill. 
+Boom. 
+So then you look around, you're under a canopy and you say, "" This is good. "" Now you prepare for the inevitable. 
+You are going to hit the ground. 
+You can't delay that much. 
+And you really can't decide where you hit very much, because they pretend you can steer, but you're being delivered. 
+So you look around, where you're going to land, you try to make yourself ready. 
+And then as you get close, you lower your rucksack below you on a lowering line, so that it's not on you when you land, and you prepare to do a parachute-landing fall. 
+Now the Army teaches you to do five points of performance — the toes of your feet, your calves, your thighs, your buttocks and your push-up muscles. 
+It's this elegant little land, twist and roll. 
+And that's not going to hurt. 
+In 30-some years of jumping, I never did one. 
+(Laughter) I always landed like a watermelon out of a third floor window. (Laughter) 
+And as soon as I hit, the first thing I did is I'd see if I'd broken anything that I needed. 
+I'd shake my head, and I'd ask myself the eternal question: "Why didn't I go into banking?" 
+(Laughter) And I'd look around, and then I'd see another paratrooper, a young guy or girl, and they'd have pulled out their M4 carbine and they'd be picking up their equipment. 
+They'd be doing everything that we had taught them. 
+And I realized that, if they had to go into combat, they would do what we had taught them and they would follow leaders. 
+And I realized that, if they came out of combat, it would be because we led them well. 
+And I was hooked again on the importance of what I did. 
+So now I do that Tuesday morning jump, but it's not any jump — that was September 11th, 2001. 
+And when we took off from the airfield, America was at peace. 
+When we landed on the drop-zone, everything had changed. 
+And what we thought about the possibility of those young soldiers going into combat as being theoretical was now very, very real — and leadership seemed important. 
+But things had changed; I was a 46-year-old brigadier general. 
+I'd been successful, but things changed so much that I was going to have to make some significant changes, and on that morning, I didn't know it. 
+I was raised with traditional stories of leadership: Robert E. Lee, John Buford at Gettysburg. 
+And I also was raised with personal examples of leadership. 
+This was my father in Vietnam. 
+And I was raised to believe that soldiers were strong and wise and brave and faithful; they didn't lie, cheat, steal or abandon their comrades. 
+And I still believe real leaders are like that. 
+But in my first 25 years of career, I had a bunch of different experiences. 
+One of my first battalion commanders, I worked in his battalion for 18 months and the only conversation he ever had with Lt. McChrystal was at mile 18 of a 25-mile road march, and he chewed my ass for about 40 seconds. 
+And I'm not sure that was real interaction. 
+But then a couple of years later, when I was a company commander, I went out to the National Training Center. 
+And we did an operation, and my company did a dawn attack — you know, the classic dawn attack: you prepare all night, move to the line of departure. 
+And I had an armored organization at that point. 
+We move forward, and we get wiped out — I mean, wiped out immediately. 
+The enemy didn't break a sweat doing it. 
+And after the battle, they bring this mobile theater and they do what they call an "" after action review "" to teach you what you've done wrong. 
+Sort of leadership by humiliation. 
+They put a big screen up, and they take you through everything: "and then you didn't do this, and you didn't do this, etc." 
+I walked out feeling as low as a snake's belly in a wagon rut. 
+And I saw my battalion commander, because I had let him down. 
+And I went up to apologize to him, and he said, "" Stanley, I thought you did great. "" And in one sentence, he lifted me, put me back on my feet, and taught me that leaders can let you fail and yet not let you be a failure. 
+When 9 / 11 came, 46-year-old Brig. Gen. McChrystal sees a whole new world. 
+First, the things that are obvious, that you're familiar with: the environment changed — the speed, the scrutiny, the sensitivity of everything now is so fast, sometimes it evolves faster than people have time to really reflect on it. 
+But everything we do is in a different context. 
+More importantly, the force that I led was spread over more than 20 countries. 
+And instead of being able to get all the key leaders for a decision together in a single room and look them in the eye and build their confidence and get trust from them, I'm now leading a force that's dispersed, and I've got to use other techniques. 
+I've got to use video teleconferences, I've got to use chat, I've got to use email, I've got to use phone calls — I've got to use everything I can, not just for communication, but for leadership. 
+A 22-year-old individual operating alone, thousands of miles from me, has got to communicate to me with confidence. 
+I have to have trust in them and vice versa. 
+And I also have to build their faith. 
+And that's a new kind of leadership for me. 
+We had one operation where we had to coordinate it from multiple locations. 
+An emerging opportunity came — didn't have time to get everybody together. 
+So we had to get complex intelligence together, we had to line up the ability to act. 
+It was sensitive, we had to go up the chain of command, convince them that this was the right thing to do and do all of this on electronic medium. 
+We failed. 
+The mission didn't work. 
+And so now what we had to do is I had to reach out to try to rebuild the trust of that force, rebuild their confidence — me and them, and them and me, and our seniors and us as a force — all without the ability to put a hand on a shoulder. 
+Entirely new requirement. 
+Also, the people had changed. 
+You probably think that the force that I led was all steely-eyed commandos with big knuckle fists carrying exotic weapons. 
+In reality, much of the force I led looked exactly like you. 
+It was men, women, young, old — not just from military; from different organizations, many of them detailed to us just from a handshake. 
+And so instead of giving orders, you're now building consensus and you're building a sense of shared purpose. 
+Probably the biggest change was understanding that the generational difference, the ages, had changed so much. 
+I went down to be with a Ranger platoon on an operation in Afghanistan, and on that operation, a sergeant in the platoon had lost about half his arm throwing a Taliban hand grenade back at the enemy after it had landed in his fire team. 
+We talked about the operation, and then at the end I did what I often do with a force like that. 
+I asked, "" Where were you on 9 / 11? "" And one young Ranger in the back — his hair's tousled and his face is red and windblown from being in combat in the cold Afghan wind — he said, "" Sir, I was in the sixth grade. "" And it reminded me that we're operating a force that must have shared purpose and shared consciousness, and yet he has different experiences, in many cases a different vocabulary, a completely different skill set in terms of digital media than I do and many of the other senior leaders. 
+And yet, we need to have that shared sense. 
+It also produced something which I call an inversion of expertise, because we had so many changes at the lower levels in technology and tactics and whatnot, that suddenly the things that we grew up doing wasn't what the force was doing anymore. 
+So how does a leader stay credible and legitimate when they haven't done what the people you're leading are doing? 
+And it's a brand new leadership challenge. 
+And it forced me to become a lot more transparent, a lot more willing to listen, a lot more willing to be reverse-mentored from lower. 
+And yet, again, you're not all in one room. 
+Then another thing. 
+There's an effect on you and on your leaders. 
+There's an impact, it's cumulative. 
+You don't reset, or recharge your battery every time. 
+I stood in front of a screen one night in Iraq with one of my senior officers and we watched a firefight from one of our forces. 
+And I remembered his son was in our force. 
+And I said, "" John, where's your son? And how is he? "" And he said, "" Sir, he's fine. Thanks for asking. "" I said, "" Where is he now? "" And he pointed at the screen, he said, "" He's in that firefight. "" Think about watching your brother, father, daughter, son, wife in a firefight in real time and you can't do anything about it. 
+Think about knowing that over time. 
+And it's a new cumulative pressure on leaders. 
+And you have to watch and take care of each other. 
+I probably learned the most about relationships. 
+I learned they are the sinew which hold the force together. 
+I grew up much of my career in the Ranger regiment. 
+And every morning in the Ranger regiment, every Ranger — and there are more than 2,000 of them — says a six-stanza Ranger creed. 
+You may know one line of it, it says, "I'll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy." 
+And it's not a mindless mantra, and it's not a poem. 
+It's a promise. 
+Every Ranger promises every other Ranger, "" No matter what happens, no matter what it costs me, if you need me, I'm coming. "" And every Ranger gets that same promise from every other Ranger. 
+Think about it. It's extraordinarily powerful. 
+It's probably more powerful than marriage vows. 
+And they've lived up to it, which gives it special power. 
+And so the organizational relationship that bonds them is just amazing. 
+And I learned personal relationships were more important than ever. 
+We were in a difficult operation in Afghanistan in 2007, and an old friend of mine, that I had spent many years at various points of my career with — godfather to one of their kids — he sent me a note, just in an envelope, that had a quote from Sherman to Grant that said, "" I knew if I ever got in a tight spot, that you would come, if alive. "" And having that kind of relationship, for me, turned out to be critical at many points in my career. 
+And I learned that you have to give that in this environment, because it's tough. 
+That was my journey. 
+I hope it's not over. 
+I came to believe that a leader isn't good because they're right; they're good because they're willing to learn and to trust. 
+This isn't easy stuff. 
+It's not like that electronic abs machine where, 15 minutes a month, you get washboard abs. 
+(Laughter) And it isn't always fair. 
+You can get knocked down, and it hurts and it leaves scars. 
+But if you're a leader, the people you've counted on will help you up. 
+And if you're a leader, the people who count on you need you on your feet. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So, this is my grandfather, Salman Schocken, who was born into a poor and uneducated family with six children to feed, and when he was 14 years old, he was forced to drop out of school in order to help put bread on the table. 
+He never went back to school. 
+Instead, he went on to build a glittering empire of department stores. 
+Salman was the consummate perfectionist, and every one of his stores was a jewel of Bauhaus architecture. 
+He was also the ultimate self-learner, and like everything else, he did it in grand style. 
+He surrounded himself with an entourage of young, unknown scholars like Martin Buber and Shai Agnon and Franz Kafka, and he paid each one of them a monthly salary so that they could write in peace. 
+And yet, in the late '30s, Salman saw what's coming. 
+He fled Germany, together with his family, leaving everything else behind. 
+His department stores confiscated, he spent the rest of his life in a relentless pursuit of art and culture. 
+This high school dropout died at the age of 82, a formidable intellectual, cofounder and first CEO of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and founder of Schocken Books, an acclaimed imprint that was later acquired by Random House. 
+Such is the power of self-study. 
+And these are my parents. 
+They too did not enjoy the privilege of college education. 
+They were too busy building a family and a country. 
+And yet, just like Salman, they were lifelong, tenacious self-learners, and our home was stacked with thousands of books, records and artwork. 
+I remember quite vividly my father telling me that when everyone in the neighborhood will have a TV set, then we'll buy a normal F.M. radio. (Laughter) And that's me, I was going to say holding my first abacus, but actually holding what my father would consider an ample substitute to an iPad. (Laughter) So one thing that I took from home is this notion that educators don't necessarily have to teach. 
+Instead, they can provide an environment and resources that tease out your natural ability to learn on your own. 
+Self-study, self-exploration, self-empowerment: these are the virtues of a great education. 
+So I'd like to share with you a story about a self-study, self-empowering computer science course that I built, together with my brilliant colleague Noam Nisan. 
+As you can see from the pictures, both Noam and I had an early fascination with first principles, and over the years, as our knowledge of science and technology became more sophisticated, this early awe with the basics has only intensified. 
+So it's not surprising that, about 12 years ago, when Noam and I were already computer science professors, we were equally frustrated by the same phenomenon. 
+As computers became increasingly more complex, our students were losing the forest for the trees, and indeed, it is impossible to connect with the soul of the machine if you interact with a black box P.C. or a Mac which is shrouded by numerous layers of closed, proprietary software. 
+So Noam and I had this insight that if we want our students to understand how computers work, and understand it in the marrow of their bones, then perhaps the best way to go about it is to have them build a complete, working, general-purpose, useful computer, hardware and software, from the ground up, from first principles. 
+Now, we had to start somewhere, and so Noam and I decided to base our cathedral, so to speak, on the simplest possible building block, which is something called NAND. 
+It is nothing more than a trivial logic gate with four input-output states. 
+So we now start this journey by telling our students that God gave us NAND — (Laughter) — and told us to build a computer, and when we asked how, God said, "" One step at a time. "" And then, following this advice, we start with this lowly, humble NAND gate, and we walk our students through an elaborate sequence of projects in which they gradually build a chip set, a hardware platform, an assembler, a virtual machine, a basic operating system and a compiler for a simple, Java-like language that we call "" JACK. "" The students celebrate the end of this tour de force 
+by using JACK to write all sorts of cool games like Pong, Snake and Tetris. 
+You can imagine the tremendous joy of playing with a Tetris game that you wrote in JACK and then compiled into machine language in a compiler that you wrote also, and then seeing the result running on a machine that you built starting with nothing more than a few thousand NAND gates. 
+It's a tremendous personal triumph of going from first principles all the way to a fantastically complex and useful system. 
+Noam and I worked five years to facilitate this ascent and to create the tools and infrastructure that will enable students to build it in one semester. 
+And this is the great team that helped us make it happen. 
+The trick was to decompose the computer's construction into numerous stand-alone modules, each of which could be individually specified, built and unit-tested in isolation from the rest of the project. 
+And from day one, Noam and I decided to put all these building blocks freely available in open source on the Web. 
+So chip specifications, APIs, project descriptions, software tools, hardware simulators, CPU emulators, stacks of hundreds of slides, lectures — we laid out everything on the Web and invited the world to come over, take whatever they need, and do whatever they want with it. 
+And then something fascinating happened. 
+The world came. 
+And in short order, thousands of people were building our machine. 
+And NAND2Tetris became one of the first massive, open, online courses, although seven years ago we had no idea that what we were doing is called MOOCs. 
+We just observed how self-organized courses were kind of spontaneously spawning out of our materials. 
+For example, Pramode C.E., an engineer from Kerala, India, has organized groups of self-learners who build our computer under his good guidance. 
+And Parag Shah, another engineer, from Mumbai, has unbundled our projects into smaller, more manageable bites that he now serves in his pioneering do-it-yourself computer science program. 
+The people who are attracted to these courses typically have a hacker mentality. 
+They want to figure out how things work, and they want to do it in groups, like this hackers club in Washington, D.C., that uses our materials to offer community courses. 
+And because these materials are widely available and open-source, different people take them to very different and unpredictable directions. 
+For example, Yu Fangmin, from Guangzhou, has used FPGA technology to build our computer and show others how to do the same using a video clip, and Ben Craddock developed a very nice computer game that unfolds inside our CPU architecture, which is quite a complex 3D maze that Ben developed using the Minecraft 3D simulator engine. 
+The Minecraft community went bananas over this project, and Ben became an instant media celebrity. 
+And indeed, for quite a few people, taking this NAND2Tetris pilgrimage, if you will, has turned into a life-changing experience. 
+For example, take Dan Rounds, who is a music and math major from East Lansing, Michigan. 
+A few weeks ago, Dan posted a victorious post on our website, and I'd like to read it to you. 
+So here's what Dan said. 
+"" I did the coursework because understanding computers is important to me, just like literacy and numeracy, and I made it through. I never worked harder on anything, never been challenged to this degree. 
+But given what I now feel capable of doing, I would certainly do it again. 
+To anyone considering NAND2Tetris, it's a tough journey, but you'll be profoundly changed. "" So Dan demonstrates the many self-learners who take this course off the Web, on their own traction, on their own initiative, and it's quite amazing because these people cannot care less about grades. 
+They are doing it because of one motivation only. 
+They have a tremendous passion to learn. 
+And with that in mind, I'd like to say a few words about traditional college grading. 
+I'm sick of it. 
+We are obsessed with grades because we are obsessed with data, and yet grading takes away all the fun from failing, and a huge part of education is about failing. 
+Courage, according to Churchill, is the ability to go from one defeat to another without losing enthusiasm. (Laughter) And [Joyce] said that mistakes are the portals of discovery. 
+And yet we don't tolerate mistakes, and we worship grades. 
+So we collect your B pluses and your A minuses and we aggregate them into a number like 3.4, which is stamped on your forehead and sums up who you are. 
+Well, in my opinion, we went too far with this nonsense, and grading became degrading. 
+So with that, I'd like to say a few words about upgrading, and share with you a glimpse from my current project, which is different from the previous one, but it shares exactly the same characteristics of self-learning, learning by doing, self-exploration and community-building, and this project deals with K-12 math education, beginning with early age math, and we do it on tablets because we believe that math, like anything else, should be taught hands on. 
+So here's what we do. Basically, we developed numerous mobile apps, every one of them explaining a particular concept in math. 
+So for example, let's take area. 
+When you deal with a concept like area — well, we also provide a set of tools that the child is invited to experiment with in order to learn. 
+So if area is what interests us, then one thing which is natural to do is to tile the area of this particular shape and simply count how many tiles it takes to cover it completely. 
+And this little exercise here gives you a first good insight of the notion of area. 
+Moving along, what about the area of this figure? 
+Well, if you try to tile it, it doesn't work too well, does it. 
+So instead, you can experiment with these different tools here by some process of guided trial and error, and at some point you will discover that one thing that you can do among several legitimate transformations is the following one. You can cut the figure, you can rearrange the parts, you can glue them and then proceed to tile just like we did before. 
+(Applause) Now this particular transformation did not change the area of the original figure, so a six-year-old who plays with this has just discovered a clever algorithm to compute the area of any given parallelogram. 
+We don't replace teachers, by the way. 
+We believe that teachers should be empowered, not replaced. 
+Moving along, what about the area of a triangle? 
+So after some guided trial and error, the child will discover, with or without help, that he or she can duplicate the original figure and then take the result, transpose it, glue it to the original and then proceed [with] what we did before: cut, rearrange, paste — oops — paste and glue, and tile. 
+Now this transformation has doubled the area of the original figure, and therefore we have just learned that the area of the triangle equals the area of this rectangle divided by two. 
+But we discovered it by self-exploration. 
+So, in addition to learning some useful geometry, the child has been exposed to some pretty sophisticated science strategies, like reduction, which is the art of transforming a complex problem into a simple one, or generalization, which is at the heart of any scientific discipline, or the fact that some properties are invariant under some transformations. 
+And all this is something that a very young child can pick up using such mobile apps. 
+So presently, we are doing the following: First of all, we are decomposing the K-12 math curriculum into numerous such apps. 
+And because we cannot do it on our own, we've developed a very fancy authoring tool that any author, any parent or actually anyone who has an interest in math education, can use this authoring tool to develop similar apps on tablets without programming. 
+And finally, we are putting together an adaptive ecosystem that will match different learners with different apps according to their evolving learning style. 
+The driving force behind this project is my colleague Shmulik London, and, you see, just like Salman did about 90 years ago, the trick is to surround yourself with brilliant people, because at the end, it's all about people. 
+And a few years ago, I was walking in Tel Aviv and I saw this graffiti on a wall, and I found it so compelling that by now I preach it to my students, and I'd like to try to preach it to you. 
+Now, I don't know how many people here are familiar with the term "" mensch. "" It basically means to be human and to do the right thing. 
+And with that, what this graffiti says is, "" High-tech schmigh-tech. 
+The most important thing is to be a mensch. "" (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause) 
+
+I normally teach courses on how to rebuild states after war. 
+But today I've got a personal story to share with you. 
+This is a picture of my family, my four siblings — my mom and I — taken in 1977. 
+And we're actually Cambodians. 
+And this picture is taken in Vietnam. 
+So how did a Cambodian family end up in Vietnam in 1977? 
+Well to explain that, I've got a short video clip to explain the Khmer Rouge regime during 1975 and 1979. 
+Video: April 17th, 1975. 
+The communist Khmer Rouge enters Phnom Penh to liberate their people from the encroaching conflict in Vietnam, and American bombing campaigns. 
+Led by peasant-born Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge evacuates people to the countryside in order to create a rural communist utopia, much like Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution in China. 
+The Khmer Rouge closes the doors to the outside world. 
+But after four years the grim truth seeps out. 
+In a country of only seven million people, one and a half million were murdered by their own leaders, their bodies piled in the mass graves of the killing fields. 
+Sophal Ear: So, notwithstanding the 1970s narration, on April 17th 1975 we lived in Phnom Penh. 
+And my parents were told by the Khmer Rouge to evacuate the city because of impending American bombing for three days. 
+And here is a picture of the Khmer Rouge. 
+They were young soldiers, typically child soldiers. 
+And this is very normal now, of modern day conflict, because they're easy to bring into wars. 
+The reason that they gave about American bombing wasn't all that far off. 
+I mean, from 1965 to 1973 there were more munitions that fell on Cambodia than in all of World War II Japan, including the two nuclear bombs of August 1945. 
+The Khmer Rouge didn't believe in money. 
+So the equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank in Cambodia was bombed. 
+But not just that, they actually banned money. 
+I think it's the only precedent in which money has ever been stopped from being used. 
+And we know money is the root of all evil, but it didn't actually stop evil from happening in Cambodia, in fact. 
+My family was moved from Phnom Penh to Pursat province. 
+This is a picture of what Pursat looks like. 
+It's actually a very pretty area of Cambodia, where rice growing takes place. 
+And in fact they were forced to work the fields. 
+So my father and mother ended up in a sort of concentration camp, labor camp. 
+And it was at that time that my mother got word from the commune chief that the Vietnamese were actually asking for their citizens to go back to Vietnam. 
+And she spoke some Vietnamese, as a child having grown up with Vietnamese friends. 
+And she decided, despite the advice of her neighbors, that she would take the chance and claim to be Vietnamese so that we could have a chance to survive, because at this point they're forcing everybody to work. 
+And they're giving about — in a modern-day, caloric-restriction diet, I guess — they're giving porridge, with a few grains of rice. 
+And at about this time actually my father got very sick. 
+And he didn't speak Vietnamese. 
+So he died actually, in January 1976. 
+And it made it possible, in fact, for us to take on this plan. 
+So the Khmer Rouge took us from a place called Pursat to Kaoh Tiev, which is across from the border from Vietnam. 
+And there they had a detention camp where alleged Vietnamese would be tested, language tested. 
+And my mother's Vietnamese was so bad that to make our story more credible, she'd given all the boys and girls new Vietnamese names. 
+But she'd given the boys girls' names, and the girls boys' names. 
+And it wasn't until she met a Vietnamese lady who told her this, and then tutored her for two days intensively, that she was able to go into her exam and — you know, this was a moment of truth. 
+If she fails, we're all headed to the gallows; if she passes, we can leave to Vietnam. 
+And she actually, of course — I'm here, she passes. 
+And we end up in Hong Ngu on the Vietnamese side. 
+And then onwards to Chau Doc. 
+And this is a picture of Hong Ngu, Vietnam today. 
+A pretty idyllic place on the Mekong Delta. 
+But for us it meant freedom. 
+And freedom from persecution from the Khmer Rouge. 
+Last year, the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, which the U.N. is helping Cambodia take on, started, and I decided that as a matter of record I should file a Civil Complaint with the Tribunal about my father's passing away. 
+And I got word last month that the complaint was officially accepted by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. 
+And it's for me a matter of justice for history, and accountability for the future, because Cambodia remains a pretty lawless place, at times. 
+Five years ago my mother and I went back to Chau Doc. 
+And she was able to return to a place that for her meant freedom, but also fear, because we had just come out of Cambodia. 
+I'm happy, actually, today, to present her. 
+She's here today with us in the audience. 
+Thank you mother. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Alisa Volkman: So this is where our story begins — the dramatic moments of the birth of our first son, Declan. 
+Obviously a really profound moment, and it changed our lives in many ways. 
+It also changed our lives in many unexpected ways, and those unexpected ways we later reflected on, that eventually spawned a business idea between the two of us, and a year later, we launched Babble, a website for parents. 
+Rufus Griscom: Now I think of our story as starting a few years earlier. AV: That's true. 
+RG: You may remember, we fell head over heels in love. 
+AV: We did. 
+RG: We were at the time running a very different kind of website. 
+It was a website called Nerve.com, the tagline of which was "" literate smut. "" It was in theory, and hopefully in practice, a smart online magazine about sex and culture. 
+AV: That spawned a dating site. 
+But you can understand the jokes that we get. Sex begets babies. 
+You follow instructions on Nerve and you should end up on Babble, which we did. 
+And we might launch a geriatric site as our third. We'll see. 
+RG: But for us, the continuity between Nerve and Babble was not just the life stage thing, which is, of course, relevant, but it was really more about our desire to speak very honestly about subjects that people have difficulty speaking honestly about. 
+It seems to us that when people start dissembling, people start lying about things, that's when it gets really interesting. 
+That's a subject that we want to dive into. 
+And we've been surprised to find, as young parents, that there are almost more taboos around parenting than there are around sex. 
+AV: It's true. So like we said, the early years were really wonderful, but they were also really difficult. 
+And we feel like some of that difficulty was because of this false advertisement around parenting. 
+(Laughter) We subscribed to a lot of magazines, did our homework, but really everywhere you look around, we were surrounded by images like this. 
+And we went into parenting expecting our lives to look like this. 
+The sun was always streaming in, and our children would never be crying. 
+I would always be perfectly coiffed and well rested, and in fact, it was not like that at all. 
+RG: When we lowered the glossy parenting magazine that we were looking at, with these beautiful images, and looked at the scene in our actual living room, it looked a little bit more like this. 
+These are our three sons. 
+And of course, they're not always crying and screaming, but with three boys, there's a decent probability that at least one of them will not be comporting himself exactly as he should. 
+AV: Yes, you can see where the disconnect was happening for us. 
+We really felt like what we went in expecting had nothing to do with what we were actually experiencing, and so we decided we really wanted to give it to parents straight. 
+We really wanted to let them understand what the realities of parenting were in an honest way. 
+RG: So today, what we would love to do is share with you four parenting taboos. 
+And of course, there are many more than four things you can't say about parenting, but we would like to share with you today four that are particularly relevant for us personally. 
+So the first, taboo number one: you can't say you didn't fall in love with your baby in the very first minute. 
+I remember vividly, sitting there in the hospital. 
+We were in the process of giving birth to our first child. 
+AV: We, or I? 
+RG: I'm sorry. 
+Misuse of the pronoun. 
+Alisa was very generously in the process of giving birth to our first child — (AV: Thank you.) — and I was there with a catcher's mitt. 
+And I was there with my arms open. 
+The nurse was coming at me with this beautiful, beautiful child, and I remember, as she was approaching me, the voices of friends saying, "" The moment they put the baby in your hands, you will feel a sense of love that will come over you that is [on] an order of magnitude more powerful than anything you've ever experienced in your entire life. "" So I was bracing myself for the moment. 
+The baby was coming, and I was ready for this Mack truck of love to just knock me off my feet. 
+And instead, when the baby was placed in my hands, it was an extraordinary moment. 
+This picture is from literally a few seconds after the baby was placed in my hands and I brought him over. 
+And you can see, our eyes were glistening. 
+I was overwhelmed with love and affection for my wife, with deep, deep gratitude that we had what appeared to be a healthy child. 
+And it was also, of course, surreal. 
+I mean, I had to check the tags and make sure. 
+I was incredulous, "" Are you sure this is our child? "" And this was all quite remarkable. 
+But what I felt towards the child at that moment was deep affection, but nothing like what I feel for him now, five years later. 
+And so we've done something here that is heretical. 
+We have charted our love for our child over time. 
+(Laughter) This, as you know, is an act of heresy. 
+You're not allowed to chart love. 
+The reason you're not allowed to chart love is because we think of love as a binary thing. 
+You're either in love, or you're not in love. 
+You love, or you don't love. 
+And I think the reality is that love is a process, and I think the problem with thinking of love as something that's binary is that it causes us to be unduly concerned that love is fraudulent, or inadequate, or what have you. 
+And I think I'm speaking obviously here to the father's experience. 
+But I think a lot of men do go through this sense in the early months, maybe their first year, that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion. 
+AV: Well, I'm glad Rufus is bringing this up, because you can notice where he dips in the first years where I think I was doing most of the work. 
+But we like to joke, in the first few months of all of our children's lives, this is Uncle Rufus. 
+(Laughter) RG: I'm a very affectionate uncle, very affectionate uncle. 
+AV: Yes, and I often joke with Rufus when he comes home that I'm not sure he would actually be able to find our child in a line-up amongst other babies. 
+So I actually threw a pop quiz here onto Rufus. 
+RG: Uh oh. 
+AV: I don't want to embarrass him too much. But I am going to give him three seconds. 
+RG: That is not fair. This is a trick question. He's not up there, is he? 
+AV: Our eight-week-old son is somewhere in here, and I want to see if Rufus can actually quickly identify him. 
+RG: The far left. AV: No! 
+(Laughter) RG: Cruel. 
+AV: Nothing more to be said. 
+(Laughter) I'll move on to taboo number two. 
+You can't talk about how lonely having a baby can be. 
+I enjoyed being pregnant. I loved it. 
+I felt incredibly connected to the community around me. 
+I felt like everyone was participating in my pregnancy, all around me, tracking it down till the actual due-date. 
+I felt like I was a vessel of the future of humanity. 
+That continued into the the hospital. It was really exhilarating. 
+I was shower with gifts and flowers and visitors. 
+It was a really wonderful experience, but when I got home, I suddenly felt very disconnected and suddenly shut in and shut out, and I was really surprised by those feelings. 
+I did expect it to be difficult, have sleepless nights, constant feedings, but I did not expect the feelings of isolation and loneliness that I experienced, and I was really surprised that no one had talked to me, that I was going to be feeling this way. 
+And I called my sister whom I'm very close to — and had three children — and I asked her, "" Why didn't you tell me I was going to be feeling this way, that I was going to have these — feeling incredibly isolated? "" And she said — I'll never forget — "" It's just not something you want to say to a mother that's having a baby for the first time. "" RG: And of course, we think it's precisely what you really should be saying to mothers who have kids for the first time. 
+And that this, of course, one of the themes for us is that we think that candor and brutal honesty is critical to us collectively being great parents. 
+And it's hard not to think that part of what leads to this sense of isolation is our modern world. 
+So Alisa's experience is not isolated. 
+So your 58 percent of mothers surveyed report feelings of loneliness. 
+Of those, 67 percent are most lonely when their kids are zero to five — probably really zero to two. 
+In the process of preparing this, we looked at how some other cultures around the world deal with this period of time, because here in the Western world, less than 50 percent of us live near our family members, which I think is part of why this is such a tough period. 
+So to take one example among many: in Southern India there's a practice known as jholabhari, in which the pregnant woman, when she's seven or eight months pregnant, moves in with her mother and goes through a series of rituals and ceremonies, give birth and returns home to her nuclear family several months after the child is born. 
+And this is one of many ways that we think other cultures offset this kind of lonely period. 
+AV: So taboo number three: you can't talk about your miscarriage — but today I'll talk about mine. 
+So after we had Declan, we kind of recalibrated our expectations. 
+We thought we actually could go through this again and thought we knew what we would be up against. 
+And we were grateful that I was able to get pregnant, and I soon learned that we were having a boy, and then when I was five months, we learned that we had lost our child. 
+This is actually the last little image we have of him. 
+And it was obviously a very difficult time — really painful. 
+As I was working through that mourning process, I was amazed that I didn't want to see anybody. 
+I really wanted to crawl into a hole, and I didn't really know how I was going to work my way back into my surrounding community. 
+And I realize, I think, the way I was feeling that way, is on a really deep gut level, I was feeling a lot of shame and embarrassed, frankly, that, in some respects, I had failed at delivering what I'm genetically engineered to do. 
+And of course, it made me question, if I wasn't able to have another child, what would that mean for my marriage, and just me as a woman. 
+So it was a very difficult time. 
+As I started working through it more, I started climbing out of that hole and talking with other people. 
+I was really amazed by all the stories that started flooding in. 
+People I interacted with daily, worked with, was friends with, family members that I had known a long time, had never shared with me their own stories. 
+And I just remember feeling all these stories came out of the woodwork, and I felt like I happened upon this secret society of women that I now was a part of, which was reassuring and also really concerning. 
+And I think, miscarriage is an invisible loss. 
+There's not really a lot of community support around it. 
+There's really no ceremony, rituals, or rites. 
+And I think, with a death, you have a funeral, you celebrate the life, and there's a lot of community support, and it's something women don't have with miscarriage. 
+RG: Which is too bad because, of course, it's a very common and very traumatic experience. 
+Fifteen to 20 percent of all pregnancies result in miscarriage, and I find this astounding. 
+In a survey, 74 percent of women said that miscarriage, they felt, was partly their fault, which is awful. 
+And astoundingly, 22 percent said they would hide a miscarriage from their spouse. 
+So taboo number four: you can't say that your average happiness has declined since having a child. 
+The party line is that every single aspect of my life has just gotten dramatically better ever since I participated in the miracle that is childbirth and family. 
+I'll never forget, I remember vividly to this day, our first son, Declan, was nine months old, and I was sitting there on the couch, and I was reading Daniel Gilbert's wonderful book, "" Stumbling on Happiness. "" And I got about two-thirds of the way through, and there was a chart on the right-hand side — on the right-hand page — that we've labeled here "" The Most Terrifying Chart Imaginable for a New Parent. "" This chart is comprised of four completely independent studies. 
+Basically, there's this precipitous drop of marital satisfaction, which is closely aligned, we all know, with broader happiness, that doesn't rise again until your first child goes to college. 
+So I'm sitting here looking at the next two decades of my life, this chasm of happiness that we're driving our proverbial convertible straight into. 
+We were despondent. 
+AV: So you can imagine, I mean again, the first few months were difficult, but we'd come out of it, and were really shocked to see this study. 
+So we really wanted to take a deeper look at it in hopes that we would find a silver lining. 
+RG: And that's when it's great to be running a website for parents, because we got this incredible reporter to go and interview all the scientists who conducted these four studies. 
+We said, something is wrong here. 
+There's something missing from these studies. 
+It can't possibly be that bad. 
+So Liz Mitchell did a wonderful job with this piece, and she interviewed four scientists, and she also interviewed Daniel Gilbert, and we did indeed find a silver lining. 
+So this is our guess as to what this baseline of average happiness arguably looks like throughout life. 
+Average happiness is, of course, inadequate, because it doesn't speak to the moment-by-moment experience, and so this is what we think it looks like when you layer in moment-to-moment experience. 
+And so we all remember as children, the tiniest little thing — and we see it on the faces of our children — the teeniest little thing can just rocket them to these heights of just utter adulation, and then the next teeniest little thing can cause them just to plummet to the depths of despair. 
+And it's just extraordinary to watch, and we remember it ourselves. 
+And then, of course, as you get older, it's almost like age is a form of lithium. 
+As you get older, you become more stable. 
+And part of what happens, I think, in your '20s and' 30s, is you start to learn to hedge your happiness. 
+You start to realize that "" Hey, I could go to this live music event and have an utterly transforming experience that will cover my entire body with goosebumps, but it's more likely that I'll feel claustrophobic and I won't be able to get a beer. 
+So I'm not going to go. 
+I've got a good stereo at home. So, I'm not going to go. "" So your average happiness goes up, but you lose those transcendent moments. 
+AV: Yeah, and then you have your first child, and then you really resubmit yourself to these highs and lows — the highs being the first steps, the first smile, your child reading to you for the first time — the lows being, our house, any time from six to seven every night. 
+But you realize you resubmit yourself to losing control in a really wonderful way, which we think provides a lot of meaning to our lives and is quite gratifying. 
+RG: And so in effect, we trade average happiness. 
+We trade the sort of security and safety of a certain level of contentment for these transcendent moments. 
+So where does that leave the two of us as a family with our three little boys in the thick of all this? 
+There's another factor in our case. 
+We have violated yet another taboo in our own lives, and this is a bonus taboo. 
+AV: A quick bonus taboo for you, that we should not be working together, especially with three children — and we are. 
+RG: And we had reservations about this on the front end. 
+Everybody knows, you should absolutely not work with your spouse. 
+In fact, when we first went out to raise money to start Babble, the venture capitalists said, "" We categorically don't invest in companies founded by husbands and wives, because there's an extra point of failure. 
+It's a bad idea. Don't do it. "" And we obviously went forward. We did. 
+We raised the money, and we're thrilled that we did, because in this phase of one's life, the incredibly scarce resource is time. 
+And if you're really passionate about what you do every day — which we are — and you're also passionate about your relationship, this is the only way we know how to do it. 
+And so the final question that we would ask is: can we collectively bend that happiness chart upwards? 
+It's great that we have these transcendent moments of joy, but they're sometimes pretty quick. 
+And so how about that average baseline of happiness? 
+Can we move that up a little bit? 
+AV: And we kind of feel that the happiness gap, which we talked about, is really the result of walking into parenting — and really any long-term partnership for that matter — with the wrong expectations. 
+And if you have the right expectations and expectation management, we feel like it's going to be a pretty gratifying experience. 
+RG: And so this is what — And we think that a lot of parents, when you get in there — in our case anyway — you pack your bags for a trip to Europe, and you're really excited to go. 
+Get out of the airplane, it turns out you're trekking in Nepal. 
+And trekking in Nepal is an extraordinary experience, particularly if you pack your bags properly and you know what you're getting in for and you're psyched. 
+So the point of all this for us today is not just hopefully honesty for the sake of honesty, but a hope that by being more honest and candid about these experiences, that we can all collectively bend that happiness baseline up a little bit. 
+RG + AV: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+When I turned 19, I started my career as the first female photojournalist in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. 
+My work as a woman photographer was considered a serious insult to local traditions, and created a lasting stigma for me and my family. 
+The male-dominated field made my presence unwelcome by all possible means. 
+They made clear that a woman must not do a man's job. 
+Photo agencies in Gaza refused to train me because of my gender. 
+The "" No "" sign was pretty clear. 
+Three of my colleagues went as far as to drive me to an open air strike area where the explosion sounds were the only thing I could hear. 
+Dust was flying in the air, and the ground was shaking like a swing beneath me. 
+I only realized we weren't there to document the event when the three of them got back into the armored Jeep and drove away, waving and laughing, leaving me behind in the open air strike zone. 
+For a moment, I felt terrified, humiliated, and sorry for myself. 
+My colleagues' action was not the only death threat I have received, but it was the most dangerous one. 
+The perception of women's life in Gaza is passive. 
+Until a recent time, a lot of women were not allowed to work or pursue education. 
+At times of such doubled war including both social restrictions on women and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, women's dark and bright stories were fading away. 
+To men, women's stories were seen as inconsequential. 
+I started paying closer attention to women's lives in Gaza. 
+Because of my gender, I had access to worlds where my colleagues were forbidden. 
+Beyond the obvious pain and struggle, there was a healthy dose of laughter and accomplishments. 
+In front of a police compound in Gaza City during the first war in Gaza, an Israeli air raid managed to destroy the compound and break my nose. 
+For a moment, all I saw was white, bright white, like these lights. 
+I thought to myself I either got blind or I was in heaven. 
+By the time I managed to open my eyes, I had documented this moment. 
+Mohammed Khader, a Palestinian worker who spent two decades in Israel, as his retirement plan, he decided to build a four-floor house, only by the first field operation at his neighborhood, the house was flattened to the ground. 
+Nothing was left but the pigeons he raised and a jacuzzi, a bathtub that he got from Tel Aviv. 
+Mohammed got the bathtub on the top of the rubble and started giving his kids an every morning bubble bath. 
+My work is not meant to hide the scars of war, but to show the full frame of unseen stories of Gazans. 
+As a Palestinian female photographer, the journey of struggle, survival and everyday life has inspired me to overcome the community taboo and see a different side of war and its aftermath. 
+I became a witness with a choice: to run away or stand still. 
+Thank you. 
+
+For kids like me, being called childish can be a frequent occurrence. 
+Every time we make irrational demands, exhibit irresponsible behavior, or display any other signs of being normal American citizens, we are called childish. 
+After all, take a look at these events: Imperialism and colonization, world wars, George W. Bush. 
+Ask yourself, who's responsible? Adults. 
+Now, what have kids done? 
+Well, Anne Frank touched millions with her powerful account of the Holocaust. 
+Ruby Bridges helped to end segregation in the United States. 
+And, most recently, Charlie Simpson helped to raise 120,000 pounds for Haiti, on his little bike. 
+So as you can see evidenced by such examples, age has absolutely nothing to do with it. 
+The traits the word "" childish "" addresses are seen so often in adults, that we should abolish this age-discriminatory word, when it comes to criticizing behavior associated with irresponsibility and irrational thinking. 
+Maybe you've had grand plans before, but stopped yourself, thinking, "That's impossible," or "That costs too much," or "" That won't benefit me. "" For better or worse, we kids aren't hampered as much when it comes to thinking about reasons why not to do things. 
+In many ways, our audacity to imagine helps push the boundaries of possibility. 
+(Applause) has a program called Kids Design Glass, and kids draw their own ideas for glass art. 
+Now, when you think of glass, you might think of colorful Chihuly designs, or maybe Italian vases, but kids challenge glass artists to go beyond that, into the realm of brokenhearted snakes and bacon boys, who you can see has meat vision. 
+The reality, unfortunately, is a little different, and it has a lot to do with trust, or a lack of it. 
+Now, if you don't trust someone, you place restrictions on them, right? 
+If I doubt my older sister's ability to pay back the 10 percent interest I established on her last loan, I'm going to withhold her ability to get more money from me, until she pays it back. 
+Now, adults seem to have a prevalently restrictive attitude towards kids, from every "" Don't do that, don't do this "" in the school handbook, to restrictions on school Internet use. 
+And although adults may not be quite at the level of totalitarian regimes, kids have no or very little say in making the rules, when really, the attitude should be reciprocal, meaning that the adult population should learn and take into account the wishes of the younger population. 
+Now, what's even worse than restriction, is that adults often underestimate kids' abilities. 
+Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round." 
+Thank you, Bill Gates, and thank you, Ma. 
+I wrote over 300 short stories on that little laptop, and I wanted to get published. 
+Instead of just scoffing at this heresy that a kid wanted to get published, or saying wait until you're older, my parents were really supportive. 
+One large children's publisher ironically said that they didn't work with children. 
+And from there on, it's gone to speaking at hundreds of schools, keynoting to thousands of educators, and finally, today, speaking to you. 
+But there's a problem with this rosy picture of kids being so much better than adults. 
+Kids grow up and become adults just like you. 
+(Laughter) Or just like you? Really? 
+The goal is not to turn kids into your kind of adult, but rather, better adults than you have been, which may be a little challenging, considering your guys' credentials. 
+(Laughter) But the way progress happens, is because new generations and new eras grow and develop and become better than the previous ones. 
+It's the reason we're not in the Dark Ages anymore. 
+No matter your position or place in life, it is imperative to create opportunities for children, so that we can grow up to blow you away. 
+(Laughter) Adults and fellow TEDsters, you need to listen and learn from kids, and trust us and expect more from us. 
+And in case you don't think that this really has meaning for you, remember that cloning is possible, and that involves going through childhood again, in which case you'll want to be heard, just like my generation. 
+Now, the world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. 
+Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. 
+(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. 
+
+How many of you love rhythm? 
+Oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh yeah. (Cheers) (Drumming) I mean, I love all kinds of rhythm. 
+I like to play jazz, a little funk, and hip hop, a little pop, a little R & B, a little Latin, African. 
+And this groove right here, comes from the Crescent City, the old second line. 
+(Cheers) Now, one thing all those rhythms have in common is math, and I call it a-rhythm-etic. 
+Can you repeat after me? A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
+Clayton Cameron: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
+CC: A-rhythm a-rhythm. Audience: A-rhythm a-rhythm. 
+CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
+Now all those styles of rhythm are all counted in four and then subdivided by three. 
+What? 
+Yeah. Three is a magic number. 
+Three is a groovin 'number. 
+Three is a hip-hop kind of number. 
+But what does subdividing by three mean? 
+And counting off by four? 
+A measure of music as a dollar. 
+Now a dollar has four quarters, right? 
+And so does a 4 / 4 measure of music. 
+It has four quarter notes. 
+Now, how do you subdivide? 
+Now let's envision this: three dollars' worth of quarters. 
+You would have three groups of four, and you would count it, a-one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. Together. 
+All: A-one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. 
+CC: Okay, now you feel that? 
+Now let's take those three groups of four and make them four groups of three. 
+And listen to this. 
+A-one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, with me. 
+One-two-three-four, one-two-three, come on, y'all! 
+All: One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, ah. 
+CC: There you go. 
+All right, second line. 
+One-two-three-four, one-two-three. One-two-three-four, one-two-three. One-two-three-four, one-two-three. 
+One-two-three-four, one-two-three. Yeah. Now, that's what I call a-rhythm-etic. Can you say it? A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: A-rhythm a-rhythm. Audience: A-rhythm a-rhythm. 
+CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
+CC: Yeah. Now pick the swing beat, and do the same thing. One, two, one, two, a-one-two-three-four. Yeah. Mm. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Whoo. So I want to take the second line beat and the swing beat and put them together, 
+Aha. 
+A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. 
+Now it's using a faster group of three we call a triplet. 
+Triplet-triplet. Say it with me. 
+CC: Triplet-triplet. Triplet-triplet. 
+CC: So I'll take all the rhythms that you heard earlier, we'll put them together, and they sound like this. 
+A-rhythm-etic. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is me. My name is Ben Saunders. 
+I specialize in dragging heavy things around cold places. 
+On May 11th last year, I stood alone at the North geographic Pole. 
+I was the only human being in an area one-and-a-half times the size of America, five-and-a-half thousand square miles. 
+More than 2,000 people have climbed Everest. 
+12 people have stood on the moon. 
+Including me, only four people have skied solo to the North Pole. 
+And I think the reason for that — (Applause) — thank you — I think the reason for that is that it's — it's — well, it's as Chris said, bonkers. 
+It's a journey that is right at the limit of human capability. 
+I skied the equivalent of 31 marathons back to back. 800 miles in 10 weeks. 
+And I was dragging all the food I needed, the supplies, the equipment, sleeping bag, one change of underwear — everything I needed for nearly three months. 
+(Laughter) What we're going to try and do today, in the 16 and a bit minutes I've got left, is to try and answer three questions. The first one is, why? 
+The second one is, how do you go to the loo at minus 40? 
+"" Ben, I've read somewhere that at minus 40, exposed skin becomes frostbitten in less than a minute, so how do you answer the call of nature? "" I don't want to answer these now. I'll come on to them at the end. 
+Third one: how do you top that? What's next? 
+It all started back in 2001. 
+My first expedition was with a guy called Pen Hadow — enormously experienced chap. 
+This was like my polar apprenticeship. 
+We were trying to ski from this group of islands up here, Severnaya Zemlya, to the North Pole. 
+And the thing that fascinates me about the North Pole, geographic North Pole, is that it's slap bang in the middle of the sea. 
+This is about as good as maps get, and to reach it you've got to ski literally over the frozen crust, the floating skin of ice on the Artic Ocean. 
+I'd spoken to all the experts. 
+I'd read lots of books. I studied maps and charts. 
+But I realized on the morning of day one that I had no idea exactly what I'd let myself in for. 
+I was 23 years old. No one my age had attempted anything like this, and pretty quickly, almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. 
+We were attacked by a polar bear on day two. 
+I had frostbite in my left big toe. 
+We started running very low on food. We were both pretty hungry, losing lots of weight. 
+Some very unusual weather conditions, very difficult ice conditions. 
+We had decidedly low-tech communications. 
+We couldn't afford a satellite phone, so we had HF radio. 
+You can see two ski poles sticking out of the roof of the tent. 
+There's a wire dangling down either side. 
+That was our HF radio antenna. 
+We had less than two hours two-way communication with the outside world in two months. 
+Ultimately, we ran out of time. 
+We'd skied 400 miles. We were just over 200 miles left to go to the Pole, and we'd run out of time. 
+We were too late into the summer; the ice was starting to melt; we spoke to the Russian helicopter pilots on the radio, and they said, "" Look boys, you've run out of time. 
+We've got to pick you up. "" And I felt that I had failed, wholeheartedly. 
+I was a failure. 
+The one goal, the one dream I'd had for as long as I could remember — I hadn't even come close. 
+And skiing along that first trip, I had two imaginary video clips that I'd replay over and over again in my mind when the going got tough, just to keep my motivation going. 
+The first one was reaching the Pole itself. 
+I could see vividly, I suppose, being filmed out of the door of a helicopter, there was, kind of, rock music playing in the background, and I had a ski pole with a Union Jack, you know, flying in the wind. 
+I could see myself sticking the flag in a pole, you know — ah, glorious moment — the music kind of reaching a crescendo. 
+The second video clip that I imagined was getting back to Heathrow airport, and I could see again, vividly, the camera flashbulbs going off, the paparazzi, the autograph hunters, the book agents coming to sign me up for a deal. 
+And of course, neither of these things happened. 
+We didn't get to the Pole, and we didn't have any money to pay anyone to do the PR, so no one had heard of this expedition. 
+And I got back to Heathrow. My mum was there; my brother was there; my granddad was there — had a little Union Jack — (Laughter) — and that was about it. I went back to live with my mum. 
+I was physically exhausted, mentally an absolute wreck, considered myself a failure. 
+In a huge amount of debt personally to this expedition, and lying on my mum's sofa, day in day out, watching daytime TV. 
+My brother sent me a text message, an SMS — it was a quote from the "" Simpsons. "" It said, "" You tried your hardest and failed miserably. 
+The lesson is: don't even try. "" (Laughter) Fast forward three years. I did eventually get off the sofa, and start planning another expedition. This time, I wanted to go right across, on my own this time, from Russia, at the top of the map, to the North Pole, where the sort of kink in the middle is, and then on to Canada. 
+No one has made a complete crossing of the Arctic Ocean on their own. 
+Two Norwegians did it as a team in 2000. No one's done it solo. 
+Very famous, very accomplished Italian mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, tried it in 1995, and he was rescued after a week. 
+He described this expedition as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. 
+So for some reason, this was what I wanted to have a crack at, but I knew that even to stand a chance of getting home in one piece, let alone make it across to Canada, I had to take a radical approach. 
+This meant everything from perfecting the sawn-off, sub-two-gram toothbrush, to working with one of the world's leading nutritionists in developing a completely new, revolutionary nutritional strategy from scratch: 6,000 calories a day. 
+And the expedition started in February last year. 
+Big support team. We had a film crew, a couple of logistics people with us, my girlfriend, a photographer. 
+At first it was pretty sensible. We flew British Airways to Moscow. 
+The next bit in Siberia to Krasnoyarsk, on a Russian internal airline called KrasAir, spelled K-R-A-S. 
+The next bit, we'd chartered a pretty elderly Russian plane to fly us up to a town called Khatanga, which was the sort of last bit of civilization. 
+Our cameraman, who it turned out was a pretty nervous flier at the best of times, actually asked the pilot, before we got on the plane, how long this flight would take, and the pilot — Russian pilot — completely deadpan, replied, "Six hours — if we live." 
+(Laughter) We got to Khatanga. 
+I think the joke is that Khatanga isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from there. 
+(Laughter) It was supposed to be an overnight stay. We were stuck there for 10 days. 
+There was a kind of vodka-fueled pay dispute between the helicopter pilots and the people that owned the helicopter, so we were stuck. We couldn't move. 
+Finally, morning of day 11, we got the all-clear, loaded up the helicopters — two helicopters flying in tandem — dropped me off at the edge of the pack ice. 
+We had a frantic sort of 45 minutes of filming, photography; while the helicopter was still there, I did an interview on the satellite phone; and then everyone else climbed back into the helicopter, wham, the door closed, and I was alone. 
+And I don't know if words will ever quite do that moment justice. 
+All I could think about was running back up to the door, banging on the door, and saying, "" Look guys, I haven't quite thought this through. "" (Laughter) To make things worse, you can just see the white dot up at the top right hand side of the screen; that's a full moon. 
+Because we'd been held up in Russia, of course, the full moon brings the highest and lowest tides; when you're standing on the frozen surface of the sea, high and low tides generally mean that interesting things are going to happen — the ice is going to start moving around a bit. 
+I was, you can see there, pulling two sledges. 
+Grand total in all, 95 days of food and fuel, 180 kilos — that's almost exactly 400 pounds. 
+When the ice was flat or flattish, I could just about pull both. 
+When the ice wasn't flat, I didn't have a hope in hell. 
+I had to pull one, leave it, and go back and get the other one. 
+Literally scrambling through what's called pressure ice — the ice had been smashed up under the pressure of the currents of the ocean, the wind and the tides. 
+NASA described the ice conditions last year as the worst since records began. 
+And it's always drifting. The pack ice is always drifting. 
+I was skiing into headwinds for nine out of the 10 weeks I was alone last year, and I was drifting backwards most of the time. 
+My record was minus 2.5 miles. 
+I got up in the morning, took the tent down, skied north for seven-and-a-half hours, put the tent up, and I was two and a half miles further back than when I'd started. 
+I literally couldn't keep up with the drift of the ice. 
+(Video): So it's day 22. 
+I'm lying in the tent, getting ready to go. 
+The weather is just appalling — oh, drifted back about five miles in the last — last night. 
+Later in the expedition, the problem was no longer the ice. 
+It was a lack of ice — open water. 
+I knew this was happening. I knew the Artic was warming. 
+I knew there was more open water. And I had a secret weapon up my sleeve. 
+This was my little bit of bio-mimicry. 
+Polar bears on the Artic Ocean move in dead straight lines. 
+If they come to water, they'll climb in, swim across it. 
+So we had a dry suit developed — I worked with a team in Norway — based on a sort of survival suit — I suppose, that helicopter pilots would wear — that I could climb into. It would go on over my boots, over my mittens, it would pull up around my face, and seal pretty tightly around my face. 
+And this meant I could ski over very thin ice, and if I fell through, it wasn't the end of the world. 
+It also meant, if the worst came to the worst, I could actually jump in and swim across and drag the sledge over after me. 
+Some pretty radical technology, a radical approach — but it worked perfectly. 
+Another exciting thing we did last year was with communications technology. 
+In 1912, Shackleton's Endurance expedition — there was — one of his crew, a guy called Thomas Orde-Lees. 
+He said, "" The explorers of 2012, if there is anything left to explore, will no doubt carry pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes. "" Well, Orde-Lees guessed wrong by about eight years. This is my pocket wireless telephone, Iridium satellite phone. 
+The wireless telescope was a digital camera I had tucked in my pocket. 
+And every single day of the 72 days I was alone on the ice, I was blogging live from my tent, sending back a little diary piece, sending back information on the distance I'd covered — the ice conditions, the temperature — and a daily photo. 
+Remember, 2001, we had less than two hours radio contact with the outside world. 
+Last year, blogging live from an expedition that's been described as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. 
+It wasn't all high-tech. This is navigating in what's called a whiteout. 
+When you get lots of mist, low cloud, the wind starts blowing the snow up. 
+You can't see an awful lot. You can just see, there's a yellow ribbon tied to one of my ski poles. 
+I'd navigate using the direction of the wind. 
+So, kind of a weird combination of high-tech and low-tech. 
+I got to the Pole on the 11th of May. 
+It took me 68 days to get there from Russia, and there is nothing there. 
+(Laughter). 
+There isn't even a pole at the Pole. There's nothing there, purely because it's sea ice. It's drifting. 
+Stick a flag there, leave it there, pretty soon it will drift off, usually towards Canada or Greenland. 
+I knew this, but I was expecting something. 
+Strange mixture of feelings: it was extremely warm by this stage, a lot of open water around, and of course, elated that I'd got there under my own steam, but starting to really realize that my chances of making it all the way across to Canada, which was still 400 miles away, were slim at best. 
+The only proof I've got that I was there is a blurry photo of my GPS, the little satellite navigation gadget. 
+You can just see — there's a nine and a string of zeros here. 
+Ninety degrees north — that is slap bang in the North Pole. 
+I took a photo of that. Sat down on my sledge. Did a sort of video diary piece. 
+Took a few photos. I got my satellite phone out. 
+I warmed the battery up in my armpit. 
+I dialed three numbers. I dialed my mum. 
+I dialed my girlfriend. I dialed the CEO of my sponsor. 
+And I got three voicemails. 
+(Laughter) (Video): Ninety. 
+It's a special feeling. 
+The entire planet is rotating beneath my feet. 
+The — the whole world underneath me. 
+I finally got through to my mum. She was at the queue of the supermarket. 
+She started crying. She asked me to call her back. 
+(Laughter) I skied on for a week past the Pole. 
+I wanted to get as close to Canada as I could before conditions just got too dangerous to continue. 
+This was the last day I had on the ice. 
+When I spoke to the — my project management team, they said, "" Look, Ben, conditions are getting too dangerous. 
+There are huge areas of open water just south of your position. 
+We'd like to pick you up. 
+Ben, could you please look for an airstrip? "" This was the view outside my tent when I had this fateful phone call. 
+I'd never tried to build an airstrip before. Tony, the expedition manager, he said, "" Look Ben, you've got to find 500 meters of flat, thick safe ice. "" The only bit of ice I could find — it took me 36 hours of skiing around trying to find an airstrip — was exactly 473 meters. I could measure it with my skis. 
+I didn't tell Tony that. I didn't tell the pilots that. 
+I thought, it'll have to do. 
+(Video): Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. 
+It just about worked. A pretty dramatic landing — the plane actually passed over four times, and I was a bit worried it wasn't going to land at all. 
+The pilot, I knew, was called Troy. I was expecting someone called Troy that did this for a living to be a pretty tough kind of guy. 
+I was bawling my eyes out by the time the plane landed — a pretty emotional moment. 
+So I thought, I've got to compose myself for Troy. 
+I'm supposed to be the roughty toughty explorer type. 
+The plane taxied up to where I was standing. 
+The door opened. This guy jumped out. He's about that tall. He said, "" Hi, my name is Troy. "" (Laughter). 
+The co-pilot was a lady called Monica. 
+She sat there in a sort of hand-knitted jumper. 
+They were the least macho people I've ever met, but they made my day. 
+Troy was smoking a cigarette on the ice; we took a few photos. He climbed up the ladder. He said, "" Just — just get in the back. "" He threw his cigarette out as he got on the front, and I climbed in the back. 
+(Laughter) Taxied up and down the runway a few times, just to flatten it out a bit, and he said, "" Right, I'm going to — I'm going to give it a go. "" And he — I've now learned that this is standard practice, but it had me worried at the time. 
+He put his hand on the throttle. 
+You can see the control for the engines is actually on the roof of the cockpit. 
+It's that little bar there. He put his hand on the throttle. 
+Monica very gently put her hand sort of on top of his. 
+I thought, "" God, here we go. We're, we're — this is all or nothing. "" Rammed it forwards. Bounced down the runway. Just took off. 
+One of the skis just clipped a pressure ridge at the end of the runway, banking. I could see into the cockpit, Troy battling the controls, and he just took one hand off, reached back, flipped a switch on the roof of the cockpit, and it was the "" fasten seat belt "" sign you can see on the wall. 
+(Laughter) And only from the air did I see the big picture. 
+Of course, when you're on the ice, you only ever see one obstacle at a time, whether it's a pressure ridge or there's a bit of water. 
+This is probably why I didn't get into trouble about the length of my airstrip. 
+I mean, it really was starting to break up. 
+Why? I'm not an explorer in the traditional sense. 
+I'm not skiing along drawing maps; everyone knows where the North Pole is. 
+At the South Pole there's a big scientific base. There's an airstrip. 
+There's a cafe and there's a tourist shop. 
+For me, this is about exploring human limits, about exploring the limits of physiology, of psychology and of technology. They're the things that excite me. 
+And it's also about potential, on a personal level. 
+This, for me, is a chance to explore the limits — really push the limits of my own potential, see how far they stretch. 
+And on a wider scale, it amazes me how people go through life just scratching the surface of their potential, just doing three or four or five percent of what they're truly capable of. So, on a wider scale, I hope that this journey was a chance to inspire other people to think about what they want to do with their potential, and what they want to do with the tiny amount of time we each have on this planet. 
+That's as close as I can come to summing that up. 
+The next question is, how do you answer the call of nature at minus 40? 
+The answer, of course, to which is a trade secret — and the last question, what's next? As quickly as possible, if I have a minute left at the end, I'll go into more detail. 
+What's next: Antarctica. 
+It's the coldest, highest, windiest and driest continent on Earth. 
+Late 1911, early 1912, there was a race to be the first to the South Pole: the heart of the Antarctic continent. 
+If you include the coastal ice shelves, you can see that the Ross Ice Shelf — it's the big one down here — the Ross Ice Shelf is the size of France. 
+Antarctica, if you include the ice shelves, is twice the size of Australia — it's a big place. 
+And there's a race to get to the Pole between Amundsen, the Norwegian — Amundsen had dog sleds and huskies — and Scott, the British guy, Captain Scott. 
+Scott had sort of ponies and some tractors and a few dogs, all of which went wrong, and Scott and his team of four people ended up on foot. 
+They got to the Pole late January 1912 to find a Norwegian flag already there. 
+There was a tent, a letter to the Norwegian king. 
+And they turned around, headed back to the coast, and all five of them died on the return journey. 
+Since then, no one has ever skied — this was 93 years ago — since then, no one has ever skied from the coast of Antarctica to the Pole and back. 
+Every South Pole expedition you may have heard about is either flown out from the Pole or has used vehicles or dogs or kites to do some kind of crossing — no one has ever made a return journey. So that's the plan. 
+Two of us are doing it. 
+That's pretty much it. 
+One final thought before I get to the toilet bit, is — is, I have a — and I meant to scan this and I've forgotten — but I have a — I have a school report. I was 13 years old, and it's framed above my desk at home. It says, "" Ben lacks sufficient impetus to achieve anything worthwhile. "" (Laughter) (Applause) I think if I've learned anything, it's this: that no one else is the authority on your potential. 
+You're the only person that decides how far you go and what you're capable of. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, that's my story. 
+Thank you very much. 
+
+I'd like you to notice the color of the door, the material that it's made out of. 
+I need you to actually see this. 
+It's a talking horse. 
+You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose. 
+Walk past him. 
+In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road, and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion from "" The Wizard of Oz, "" hand-in-hand, skipping straight towards you. 
+Okay. Open your eyes. 
+And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist, expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants. 
+(Laughter) They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, looking at them just once. 
+They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers. 
+In fact, I have just an average memory. 
+We've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books. "" And I said, "" Whoa. How come I never heard of this before? "" And we were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy, says to me, "" Josh, you're an American journalist. 
+I ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory, but also investigating it, trying to understand how it works, why it sometimes doesn't work, and what its potential might be. 
+He's an amnesic who had, very possibly, the worst memory in the world. 
+His memory was so bad, that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem, which is amazing. 
+(Laughter) And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin, in antiquity, and then later, in the Middle Ages. 
+One of the really interesting things that I learned is that once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today. 
+Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds. 
+Over the last few millenia, we've invented a series of technologies — from the alphabet, to the scroll, to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone — that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity. 
+They wanted to know: Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours? 
+There was, however, one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to. 
+When they put these guys in an fMRI machine, scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes, they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain than everyone else. 
+Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation. 
+And while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these competitions, everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately come down to a concept that psychologists refer to as "" elaborative encoding. "" And it's well-illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker / baker paradox, which goes like this: If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy named Baker." 
+That's his name. 
+And I say to you, "" Remember that there is a guy who is a baker. "" Okay? 
+Do you remember what it was? "" The person who was told his name is Baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is a baker. 
+Bakers have flour on their hands. 
+Bakers smell good when they come home from work. 
+The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests, and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life, is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lower-case B bakers — to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning, and transform it in some way, so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind. 
+He was actually the hired entertainment, because back then, if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet. 
+The bodies can't be properly buried. 
+It's one tragedy compounding another. 
+Simonides, standing outside, the sole survivor amid the wreckage, closes his eyes and has this realization, which is that in his mind's eye, he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting. 
+What Simonides figured out at that moment, is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers, and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories. 
+So how does this work? 
+(Laughter) And then you'd go inside your house, and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed. 
+And that would remind you that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook. 
+And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell. 
+And you'd go into your kitchen, and the fourth topic you were going to talk about was this strange journey that you went on for a year, and you'd have some friends to help you remember that. 
+This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches — not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up, but topic-for-topic. 
+In fact, the phrase "" topic sentence "" — that comes from the Greek word "" topos, "" which means "" place. "" That's a vestige of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric in these sorts of spatial terms. 
+The phrase "" in the first place, "" that's like "" in the first place of your memory palace. "" I thought this was just fascinating, and I got really into it. 
+And I went to a few more of these memory contests, and I had this notion that I might write something longer about this subculture of competitive memorizers. 
+The problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event. 
+What you're doing, is you're trying to get better and better at creating, at dreaming up, these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious, and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye. 
+And I got pretty into it. 
+This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit. 
+(Laughter) It's a pair of earmuffs and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over except for two small pinholes, because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy. 
+(Applause) Now, it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it's actually kind of beside the point. 
+They work because they're based on some pretty basic principles about how our brains work. 
+And you don't have to be building memory palaces or memorizing packs of playing cards to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works. 
+We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. 
+We remember when we are able to take a piece of information and experience, and figure out why it is meaningful to us, why it is significant, why it's colorful, when we're able to transform it in some way that makes sense in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds, when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers. 
+They force a kind of depth of processing, a kind of mindfulness, that most of us don't normally walk around exercising. 
+How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives, by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply? 
+
+Hi, my name is Marcin — farmer, technologist. 
+I was born in Poland, now in the U.S. 
+I started a group called Open Source Ecology. 
+We've identified the 50 most important machines that we think it takes for modern life to exist — things from tractors, bread ovens, circuit makers. 
+Then we set out to create an open source, DIY, do it yourself version that anyone can build and maintain at a fraction of the cost. 
+We call this the Global Village Construction Set. 
+So let me tell you a story. 
+So I finished my 20s with a Ph.D. in fusion energy, and I discovered I was useless. 
+I had no practical skills. 
+The world presented me with options, and I took them. 
+I guess you can call it the consumer lifestyle. 
+So I started a farm in Missouri and learned about the economics of farming. 
+I bought a tractor — then it broke. 
+I paid to get it repaired — then it broke again. 
+Then pretty soon, I was broke too. 
+I realized that the truly appropriate, low-cost tools that I needed to start a sustainable farm and settlement just didn't exist yet. 
+I needed tools that were robust, modular, highly efficient and optimized, low-cost, made from local and recycled materials that would last a lifetime, not designed for obsolescence. 
+I found that I would have to build them myself. 
+So I did just that. 
+And I tested them. 
+And I found that industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale. 
+So then I published the 3D designs, schematics, instructional videos and budgets on a wiki. 
+Then contributors from all over the world began showing up, prototyping new machines during dedicated project visits. 
+So far, we have prototyped eight of the 50 machines. 
+And now the project is beginning to grow on its own. 
+We know that open source has succeeded with tools for managing knowledge and creativity. 
+And the same is starting to happen with hardware too. 
+We're focusing on hardware because it is hardware that can change people's lives in such tangible material ways. 
+If we can lower the barriers to farming, building, manufacturing, then we can unleash just massive amounts of human potential. 
+That's not only in the developing world. 
+Our tools are being made for the American farmer, builder, entrepreneur, maker. 
+We've seen lots of excitement from these people, who can now start a construction business, parts manufacturing, organic CSA or just selling power back to the grid. 
+Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear, so complete, that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit. 
+I've planted a hundred trees in a day. 
+I've pressed 5,000 bricks in one day from the dirt beneath my feet and built a tractor in six days. 
+From what I've seen, this is only the beginning. 
+If this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant. 
+A greater distribution of the means of production, environmentally sound supply chains, and a newly relevant DIY maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity. 
+We're exploring the limits of what we all can do to make a better world with open hardware technology. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Thank you. I have two missions here today. 
+The first is to tell you something about pollen, I hope, and to convince you that it's more than just something that gets up your nose. 
+And, secondly, to convince you that every home really ought to have a scanning electron microscope. 
+(Laughter) Pollen is a flower's way of making more flowers. 
+It carries male sex cells from one flower to another. 
+This gives us genetic diversity, or at least it gives the plants genetic diversity. 
+And it's really rather better not to mate with yourself. 
+That's probably true of humans as well, mostly. 
+Pollen is produced by the anthers of flowers. 
+Each anther can carry up to 100,000 grains of pollen, so, it's quite prolific stuff. 
+And it isn't just bright flowers that have pollen; it's also trees and grasses. 
+And remember that all our cereal crops are grasses as well. 
+Here is a scanning electron micrograph of a grain of pollen. 
+The little hole in the middle, we'll come to a bit later, but that's for the pollen tube to come out later on. A very tiny tube. 
+So, that's 20 micrometers across, that pollen grain there. 
+That's about a 50th of a millimeter. 
+But not all pollen is quite so simple looking. 
+This is Morina. This is a plant — which I've always thought to be rather tedious — named after Morin, who was an enterprising French gardener, who issued the first seed catalog in 1621. 
+But anyway, take a look at its pollen. 
+This is amazing, I think. 
+That little hole in the middle there is for the pollen tube, and when the pollen finds its special female spot in another Morina flower, just on the right species, what happens? 
+Like I said, pollen carries the male sex cells. 
+If you actually didn't realize that plants have sex, they have rampant, promiscuous and really quite interesting and curious sex. Really. 
+(Laughter) A lot. 
+My story is actually not about plant propagation, but about pollen itself. 
+"" So, what are pollen's properties? "" I hear you ask. 
+First of all, pollen is tiny. Yes we know that. 
+It's also very biologically active, as anyone with hay fever will understand. 
+Now, pollen from plants, which are wind-dispersed — like trees and grasses and so on — tend to cause the most hay fever. 
+And the reason for that is they've got to chuck out masses and masses of pollen to have any chance of the pollen reaching another plant of the same species. 
+Here are some examples — they're very smooth if you look at them — of tree pollen that is meant to be carried by the wind. 
+Again — this time, sycamore — wind-dispersed. 
+So, trees: very boring flowers, not really trying to attract insects. 
+Cool pollen, though. 
+This one I particularly like. 
+This is the Monterey Pine, which has little air sacks to make the pollen carry even further. 
+Remember, that thing is just about 30 micrometers across. 
+Now, it's much more efficient if you can get insects to do your bidding. 
+This is a bee's leg with the pollen glommed onto it from a mallow plant. 
+And this is the outrageous and beautiful flower of the mangrove palm. 
+Very showy, to attract lots of insects to do its bidding. 
+The pollen has little barbs on it, if we look. 
+Now, those little barbs obviously stick to the insects well, but there is something else that we can tell from this photograph, and that is that you might be able to see a fracture line across what would be the equator of this, if it was the Earth. 
+That tells me that it's actually been fossilized, this pollen. 
+And I'm rather proud to say that this was found just near London, and that 55 million years ago London was full of mangroves. 
+Isn't that cool? 
+(Laughter) Okay, so this is another species evolved to be dispersed by insects. 
+You can tell that from the little barbs on there. 
+All these pictures were taken with a scanning electron microscope, actually in the lab at Kew Laboratories. 
+No coincidence that these were taken by Rob Kesseler, who is an artist, and I think it's someone with a design and artistic eye like him that has managed to bring out the best in pollen. 
+(Laughter) Now, all this diversity means that you can look at a pollen grain and tell what species it came from, and that's actually quite handy if you maybe have a sample and you want to see where it came from. 
+So, different species of plants grow in different places, and some pollen carries further than others. 
+So, if you have a pollen sample, then in principle, you should be able to tell where that sample came from. 
+And this is where it gets interesting for forensics. 
+Pollen is tiny. It gets on to things, and it sticks to them. 
+So, not only does each type of pollen look different, but each habitat has a different combination of plants. 
+A different pollen signature, if you like, or a different pollen fingerprint. 
+By looking at the proportions and combinations of different kinds of pollen in a sample, you can tell very precisely where it came from. 
+This is some pollen embedded in a cotton shirt, similar to the one that I'm wearing now. 
+Now, much of the pollen will still be there after repeated washings. 
+Where has it been? 
+Four very different habitats might look similar, but they've got very different pollen signatures. 
+Actually this one is particularly easy, these pictures were all taken in different countries. 
+But pollen forensics can be very subtle. 
+It's being used now to track where counterfeit drugs have been made, where banknotes have come from, to look at the provenance of antiques and see that they really did come from the place the seller said they did. 
+And murder suspects have been tracked using their clothing, certainly in the U.K., to within an area that's small enough that you can send in tracker dogs to find the murder victim. 
+So, you can tell from a piece of clothing to within about a kilometer or so, where that piece of clothing has been recently and then send in dogs. 
+And finally, in a rather grizzly way, the Bosnia war crimes; some of the people brought to trial were brought to trial because of the evidence from pollen, which showed that bodies had been buried, exhumed and then reburied somewhere else. 
+I hope I've opened your eyes, if you'll excuse the visual pun, (Laughter) to some of pollen's secrets. 
+This is a horse chestnut. 
+There is an invisible beauty all around us, each grain with a story to tell... 
+each of us, in fact, with a story to tell from the pollen fingerprint that's upon us. 
+Thank you to the colleagues at Kew, and thank you to palynologists everywhere. 
+(Applause) 
+
+A girl I've never met before changed my life and the life of thousands of other people. 
+I'm the CEO of DoSomething.org. 
+It's one of the largest organizations in the world for young people. 
+In fact it's bigger than the Boy Scouts in the United States. 
+(Laughter) And it's true — the way we communicate with young people is by text, because that's how young people communicate. 
+So we'll run over 200 campaigns this year, things like collecting peanut butter for food pantries, or making Valentine's Day cards for senior citizens who are homebound. 
+And we'll text them. 
+And we'll have a 97 percent open rate. 
+It'll over-index Hispanic and urban. 
+We collected 200,000 jars of peanut butter and over 365,000 Valentine's Day cards. 
+This is big scale. OK — (Applause) But there's one weird side effect. 
+Every time we send out a text message, we get back a few dozen text messages having nothing to do with peanut butter or hunger or senior citizens — but text messages about being bullied, text messages about being addicted to pot. 
+And the worst message we ever got said exactly this: "" He won't stop raping me. 
+It's my dad. 
+He told me not to tell anyone. Are you there? "" We couldn't believe this was happening. 
+We couldn't believe that something so horrific could happen to a human being, and that she would share it with us — something so intimate, so personal. 
+And we realized we had to stop triaging this and we had to build a crisis text line for these people in pain. 
+So we launched Crisis Text Line, very quietly, in Chicago and El Paso — just a few thousand people in each market. 
+And in four months, we were in all 295 area codes in America. 
+Just to put that into perspective, that's zero marketing and faster growth than when Facebook first launched. 
+(Applause) Text is unbelievably private. 
+No one hears you talking. 
+So we spike everyday at lunch time — kids are sitting at the lunch table and you think that she's texting the cute boy across the hall, but she's actually texting us about her bulimia. 
+We get things like, "" I want to die. 
+I have a bottle of pills on the desk in front of me. "" And so the crisis counselor says, "How about you put those pills in the drawer while we text?" 
+And they go back and forth for a while. 
+And the crisis counselor gets the girl to give her her address, because if you're texting a text line, you want help. 
+So she gets the address and the counselor triggers an active rescue while they're texting back and forth. 
+And then it goes quiet — 23 minutes with no response from this girl. 
+And the next message that comes in says — it's the mom — "" I had no idea, and I was in the house, we're in an ambulance on our way to the hospital. "" As a mom that one just — The next message comes a month later. 
+"" I just got out of the hospital. 
+I was diagnosed as bipolar, and I think I'm going to be OK. "" (Applause) I would love to tell you that that's an unusual exchange, but we're doing on average 2.41 active rescues a day. 
+Thirty percent of our text messages are about suicide and depression — huge. 
+The beautiful thing about Crisis Text Line is that these are strangers counseling other strangers on the most intimate issues, and getting them from hot moments to cold moments. 
+It's exciting, and I will tell you that we have done a total of more than 6.5 million text messages in less than two years. 
+(Applause) But the thing that really gets me hot and sweaty about this, the thing that really gets me psyched is the data: 6.5 million messages — that's the volume, velocity and variety to provide a really juicy corpus. 
+We can do things like predictive work. 
+We can do all kinds of conclusions and learnings from that data set. 
+So we can be better, and the world can be better. 
+So how do we use the data to make us better? 
+Alright, chances are someone here, someone watching this has seen a therapist or a shrink at some point in time in your life — you do not have to raise your hand. 
+(Laughter) How do you know that person's any good? 
+Oh, they have a degree from Harvard on the wall? 
+(Laughter) When my husband and I saw a marriage counselor, I thought she was a genius when she said, "I'll see you guys in two weeks — but I need to see you next week, sir." (Laughter) 
+We have the data to know what makes a great counselor. 
+We know that if you text the words "" numbs "" and "" sleeve, "" there's a 99 percent match for cutting. 
+We know that if you text in the words "" mg "" and "" rubber band, "" there's a 99 percent match for substance abuse. 
+And we know that if you text in "" sex, "" "" oral "" and "" Mormon, "" you're questioning if you're gay. 
+Now that's interesting information that a counselor could figure out but that algorithm in our hands means that an automatic pop-up says, "99 percent match for cutting — try asking one of these questions" to prompt the counselor. 
+Or "" 99 percent match for substance abuse, here are three drug clinics near the texter. "" It makes us more accurate. 
+On the day that Robin Williams committed suicide, people flooded hotlines all over this country. 
+It was sad to see an icon, a funnyman, commit suicide, and there were three hour wait times on every phone hotline in the country. 
+We had a spike in volume also. 
+The difference was if you text us, "" I want to die, "" or "" I want to kill myself, "" the algorithm reads that, you're code orange, and you become number one in the queue. 
+(Applause) This data is also making the world better because I'm sitting on the world's first map of real-time crises. 
+Think about it: those 6.5 million messages, auto-tagging through natural language processes, all of these data points — I can tell you that the worst day of the week for eating disorders: Monday. 
+The worst time of day for substance abuse: 5am. 
+And that Montana is a beautiful place to visit but you do not want to live there, because it is the number one state for suicidal ideation. 
+And we've made this data public and free and open. 
+We've pulled all the personally identifiable information. 
+Because I want schools to be able to see that Monday is the worst day for eating disorders, so that they can plan meals and guidance counselors to be there on Mondays. 
+And I want families to see that substance abuse questions spike at 5am. 
+(Applause) Data, evidence makes policy, research, journalism, policing, school boards — everything better. 
+I don't think of myself as a mental health activist. 
+I think of myself as a national health activist. 
+I get really excited about this data, I'm a little nerdy. 
+Yeah, that sounded too girly. 
+I'm nerdy. 
+(Laughter) I love data. 
+And the only difference really between me and those people in hoodies down the road with their fat-funded companies, is that I'm not inspired by helping you find Chinese food at 2am in Dallas, or helping you touch your wrist and get a car immediately, or swipe right and get laid. 
+I'm inspired — (Laughter, applause) I want to use tech and data to make the world a better place. 
+I want to use it to help that girl, who texted in about being raped by her father. 
+Because the truth is we never heard from her again. 
+And I hope that she is somewhere safe and healthy, and I hope that she sees this talk and she knows that her desperation and her courage inspired the creation of Crisis Text Line and inspires me every freaking day. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm here today to share with you an extraordinary journey - extraordinarily rewarding journey, actually - which brought me into training rats to save human lives by detecting landmines and tuberculosis. 
+As a child, I had two passions. 
+One was a passion for rodents. 
+I had all kinds of rats, mice, hamsters, gerbils, squirrels. 
+You name it, I bred it, and I sold them to pet shops. 
+(Laughter) I also had a passion for Africa. 
+Growing up in a multicultural environment, we had African students in the house, and I learned about their stories, so different backgrounds, dependency on imported know-how, goods, services, exuberant cultural diversity. 
+Africa was truly fascinating for me. 
+I became an industrial engineer, engineer in product development, and I focused on appropriate detection technologies, actually the first appropriate technologies for developing countries. 
+I started working in the industry, but I wasn't really happy to contribute to a material consumer society in a linear, extracting and manufacturing mode. 
+I quit my job to focus on the real world problem: landmines. 
+We're talking '95 now. 
+Princess Diana is announcing on TV that landmines form a structural barrier to any development, which is really true. 
+As long as these devices are there, or there is suspicion of landmines, you can't really enter into the land. 
+Actually, there was an appeal worldwide for new detectors sustainable in the environments where they're needed to produce, which is mainly in the developing world. 
+We chose rats. 
+Why would you choose rats? 
+Because, aren't they vermin? 
+Well, actually rats are, in contrary to what most people think about them, rats are highly sociable creatures. 
+And actually, our product — what you see here. 
+There's a target somewhere here. 
+You see an operator, a trained African with his rats in front who actually are left and right. 
+There, the animal finds a mine. 
+It scratches on the soil. 
+And the animal comes back for a food reward. 
+Very, very simple. 
+Very sustainable in this environment. 
+Here, the animal gets its food reward. 
+And that's how it works. 
+Very, very simple. 
+Now why would you use rats? 
+Rats have been used since the '50s last century, in all kinds of experiments. 
+Rats have more genetic material allocated to olfaction than any other mammal species. 
+They're extremely sensitive to smell. 
+Moreover, they have the mechanisms to map all these smells and to communicate about it. 
+Now how do we communicate with rats? 
+Well don't talk rat, but we have a clicker, a standard method for animal training, which you see there. 
+A clicker, which makes a particular sound with which you can reinforce particular behaviors. 
+First of all, we associate the click sound with a food reward, which is smashed banana and peanuts together in a syringe. 
+Once the animal knows click, food, click, food, click, food — so click is food — we bring it in a cage with a hole, and actually the animal learns to stick the nose in the hole under which a target scent is placed, and to do that for five seconds — five seconds, which is long for a rat. 
+Once the animal knows this, we make the task a bit more difficult. 
+It learns how to find the target smell in a cage with several holes, up to 10 holes. 
+Then the animal learns to walk on a leash in the open and find targets. 
+In the next step, animals learn to find real mines in real minefields. 
+They are tested and accredited according to International Mine Action Standards, just like dogs have to pass a test. 
+This consists of 400 square meters. 
+There's a number of mines placed blindly, and the team of trainer and their rat have to find all the targets. 
+If the animal does that, it gets a license as an accredited animal to be operational in the field — just like dogs, by the way. 
+Maybe one slight difference: we can train rats at a fifth of the price of training the mining dog. 
+This is our team in Mozambique: one Tanzanian trainer, who transfers the skills to these three Mozambican fellows. 
+And you should see the pride in the eyes of these people. 
+They have a skill, which makes them much less dependent on foreign aid. 
+Moreover, this small team together with, of course, you need the heavy vehicles and the manual de-miners to follow-up. 
+But with this small investment in a rat capacity, we have demonstrated in Mozambique that we can reduce the cost-price per square meter up to 60 percent of what is currently normal — two dollars per square meter, we do it at $1.18, and we can still bring that price down. 
+Question of scale. 
+If you can bring in more rats, we can actually make the output even bigger. 
+We have a demonstration site in Mozambique. 
+Eleven African governments have seen that they can become less dependent by using this technology. 
+They have signed the pact for peace and treaty in the Great Lakes region, and they endorse hero rats to clear their common borders of landmines. 
+But let me bring you to a very different problem. 
+And there's about 6,000 people last year that walked on a landmine, but worldwide last year, almost 1.9 million died from tuberculosis as a first cause of infection. 
+Especially in Africa where T.B. and HIV are strongly linked, there is a huge common problem. 
+Microscopy, the standard WHO procedure, reaches from 40 to 60 percent reliability. 
+In Tanzania — the numbers don't lie — 45 percent of people — T.B. patients — get diagnosed with T.B. before they die. 
+It means that, if you have T.B., you have more chance that you won't be detected, but will just die from T.B. secondary infections and so on. 
+And if, however, you are detected very early, diagnosed early, treatment can start, and even in HIV-positives, it makes sense. 
+You can actually cure T.B., even in HIV-positives. 
+So in our common language, Dutch, the name for T.B. 
+is "" tering, "" which, etymologically, refers to the smell of tar. 
+Already the old Chinese and the Greek, Hippocrates, have actually published, documented, that T.B. can be diagnosed based on the volatiles exuding from patients. 
+So what we did is we collected some samples — just as a way of testing — from hospitals, trained rats on them and see if this works, and wonder, well, we can reach 89 percent sensitivity, 86 percent specificity using multiple rats in a row. 
+This is how it works, and really, this is a generic technology. 
+We're talking now explosives, tuberculosis, but can you imagine, you can actually put anything under there. 
+So how does it work? 
+You have a cassette with 10 samples. 
+You put these 10 samples at once in the cage. 
+An animal only needs two hundredths of a second to discriminate the scent, so it goes extremely fast. 
+Here it's already at the third sample. 
+This is a positive sample. 
+It gets a click sound and comes for the food reward. 
+And by doing so, very fast, we can have like a second-line opinion to see which patients are positive, which are negative. 
+Just as an indication, whereas a microscopist can process 40 samples in a day, a rat can process the same amount of samples in seven minutes only. 
+A cage like this — (Applause) A cage like this — provided that you have rats, and we have now currently 25 tuberculosis rats — a cage like this, operating throughout the day, can process 1,680 samples. 
+Can you imagine the potential offspring applications — environmental detection of pollutants in soils, customs applications, detection of illicit goods in containers and so on. 
+But let's stick first to tuberculosis. 
+I just want to briefly highlight, the blue rods are the scores of microscopy only at the five clinics in Dar es Salaam on a population of 500,000 people, where 15,000 reported to get a test done. 
+Microscopy for 1,800 patients. 
+And by just presenting the samples once more to the rats and looping those results back, we were able to increase case detection rates by over 30 percent. 
+Throughout last year, we've been — depending on which intervals you take — we've been consistently increasing case detection rates in five hospitals in Dar es Salaam between 30 and 40 percent. 
+So this is really considerable. 
+Knowing that a missed patient by microscopy infects up to 15 people, healthy people, per year, you can be sure that we have saved lots of lives. 
+At least our hero rats have saved lots of lives. 
+The way forward for us is now to standardize this technology. 
+And there are simple things like, for instance, we have a small laser in the sniffer hole where the animal has to stick for five seconds. 
+So, to standardize this. 
+Also, to standardize the pellets, the food rewards, and to semi-automate this in order to replicate this on a much larger scale and affect the lives of many more people. 
+To conclude, there are also other applications at the horizon. 
+Here is a first prototype of our camera rat, which is a rat with a rat backpack with a camera that can go under rubble to detect for victims after earthquake and so on. 
+This is in a prototype stage. 
+We don't have a working system here yet. 
+To conclude, I would actually like to say, you may think this is about rats, these projects, but in the end it is about people. 
+It is about empowering vulnerable communities to tackle difficult, expensive and dangerous humanitarian detection tasks, and doing that with a local resource, plenty available. 
+So something completely different is to keep on challenging your perception about the resources surrounding you, whether they are environmental, technological, animal, or human. 
+And to respectfully harmonize with them in order to foster a sustainable world. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+The big residual is always value for money. 
+All the time we are trying to get value for money. 
+What we don't look for is value for many, while we are generating value for money. 
+Do we care about those four billion people whose income levels are less than two dollars a day, the so-called bottom of the pyramid? 
+What are the challenges in getting value for money as well as value for many? 
+We have described here in terms of the performance and the price. 
+If you have money, of course, you can get the value. 
+You can get a Mercedes for a very high price, very high performance. 
+But if you don't have money, what happens? 
+Well, you are to ride a bicycle, carrying your own weight and also some other weight, so that you can earn the bread for the day. 
+Well, poor do not remain poor; they become lower-middle-class. 
+And if they do so, then, of course, the conditions improve, and they start riding on scooters. 
+But the challenge is, again, they don't get much value, because they can't afford anything more than the scooter. 
+The issue is, at that price, can you give them some extra value? 
+A super value, in terms of their ability to ride in a car, to get that dignity, to get that safety, looks practically impossible, isn't it. 
+Now, this is something that we see on Indian streets all the time. 
+But many people see the same thing and think things differently, and one of them is here, Ratan Tata. 
+The great thing about our leaders is that, should they not only have passion in their belly, which practically all of them have, they're also very innovative. 
+An innovator is one who does not know it cannot be done. 
+They believe that things can be done. 
+But great leaders like Ratan have compassion. 
+And what you said, Lakshmi, is absolutely true: it's not just Ratan Tata, it's the house of Tatas over time. 
+Let me confirm what she said. 
+Yes, I went barefoot until I was 12. 
+I struggled to [unclear] day was a huge issue. 
+And when I finished my SSC, the eleventh standard, I stood eleventh among 125,000 students. 
+But I was about to leave the school, because my poor mother couldn't afford schooling. 
+And it was [unclear] Tata Trust, which gave me six rupees per month, almost a dollar per month for six years. 
+That's how I'm standing before you. 
+So that is the House of Tata. 
+(Applause) Innovation, compassion and passion. 
+They combine all that. 
+And it was that compassion which bothered them, because when he saw — in fact, he told me about eight or nine years ago how he was driving his own car — he drives his own car by the way — and he saw in the rain, a family like the one that I showed to you getting drenched with an infant. 
+And then he said, "" Well, I must give them a car that they can afford, one lakh car, $2,000 car. "" Of course, as soon as you say something like this people say it is impossible, and that's what was said by Suzuki. 
+He said, oh, probably he is going to build a three-wheeler with stepney. 
+And you can see the cartoon here. 
+Well they didn't build that. They built a proper car. Nano. 
+And mind you, I'm six feet half an inch, Ratan is taller than me, and we have ample space in the front and ample space in the back in this particular car. 
+And incredible car. 
+And of course, nothing succeeds like success; the cynics then turned around, and one after the other they also started saying, "" Yes, we also want to make a car in the Nano Segment. 
+We'll manufacture a car in the Nano Segment. "" How did this great story unfold, the making of Nano? 
+Let me tell you a bit about it. 
+For example, how we started: Ratan just began with a five-engineer team, young people in their mid-twenties. 
+And he said, "" Well, I won't define the vehicle for you, but I will define the cost for you. 
+It is one lakh, 100,000 rupees, and you are to make it within that. "" And he told them, "" Question the unquestionable. 
+Stretch the envelope. "" And at a point in time, he got so engrossed in the whole challenge, that he himself became a member of the team. 
+Can you believe it? 
+I still am told about this story of that single wiper design in which he participated. 
+Until midnight, he'd be thinking. 
+Early morning he'll be coming back with sort of solutions. 
+But who was the team leader? 
+The team leader was Girish Wagh, a 34 year-old boy in [unclear]. 
+And the Nano team average age was just 27 years. 
+And they did innovation in design and beyond. 
+Broke many norms of the standard conventions for the first time. 
+For example, that a two-cylinder gas engine was used in a car with a single balancer shaft. 
+Adhesives were replacing the rivets. 
+There was a co-creation, a huge co-creation, with vendors and suppliers. 
+All ideas on board were welcome. 
+100 vendors were co-located adjacent to the plant, and innovative business models for automobile dealerships were developed. 
+Imagine that a fellow who sells cloth, for example, will be selling Nano. 
+I mean, it was incredible innovation. 
+Seeking solutions for non-auto sectors. 
+It was an open innovation, ideas from all over were welcome. 
+The mechanism of helicopters seats and windows was used, by the way, as well as a dashboard that was inspired by two-wheelers. 
+The fuel lines and lamps were as in two-wheelers. 
+And the crux of the matter was, however, getting more from less. 
+All the time, you have been given an envelope. 
+You can't cross that envelope, which is 100,000 rupees, 2,000 dollars. 
+And therefore, each component had to have a dual functionality. 
+And the seat riser, for example, serving as a mounting for the seat as well as a structural part of the functional rigidity. 
+Half the number of parts are contained in Nano in comparison to a typical passenger car. 
+The length is smaller by eight percent by the way. 
+But the current entry-level cars in comparison to that is eight percent less, but 21 percent more inside space. 
+And what happened was that — more from less — you can see how much more for how much less. 
+When the Model T was launched — and this is, by the way, all the figures that are adjusted to 2007 dollar prices — Model T was 19,700 by Ford. 
+Volkswagon was 11,333. 
+And British Motor was around 11,000. 
+And Nano was, bang, 2,000 dollars. 
+This is why you started actually a new paradigm shift, where the same people who could not dream of sitting in a car, who were carrying their entire family in a scooter, started dreaming of being in a car. 
+And those dreams are getting fulfilled. 
+This is a photograph of a house and a driver and a car near my own home. 
+The driver's name is Naran. 
+He has bought his own Nano. 
+And you can see, there is a physical space that has been created for him, parking that car, along with the owner's car, but more importantly, they've created a space in their mind that "Yes, my chauffeur is going to come in his own car and park it." 
+And that's why I call it a transformational innovation. 
+It is not just technological, it is social innovation that we talk about. 
+And that is where, ladies and gentlemen, this famous theme of getting more from less for more becomes important. 
+I remember talking about this for the first time in Australia, about one and a half years ago, when their academy honored me with a fellowship. 
+And unbelievably, in 40 years, I was the first Indian to be honored. 
+And the title of my talk was therefore "" Indian innovation from Gandhi to Gandhian engineering. "" And I titled this more from less for more and more people as Gandhian engineering. 
+And Gandhian engineering, in my judgment, is the one which is going to take the world forward, is going to make a difference, not just for a few, but for everyone. 
+Let me move from mobility in a car to individual mobility for those unfortunates who have lost their legs. 
+Here is an American citizen and his son having an artificial foot. 
+What is its price? 20,000 dollars. 
+And of course, these feet are so designed that they can walk only on such perfect pavement or roads. 
+Unfortunately, that's not the case in India. 
+You can see him walk barefoot on an awkward land, sometimes in a marshy land, and so on and so forth. 
+More importantly, they not only walk far to work, and not only do they cycle to work, but they cycle for work, as you can see here. 
+And they climb up for their work. 
+You have to design an artificial foot for such conditions. 
+A challenge, of course. 
+Four billion people, their incomes are less then two dollars a day. 
+And if you talk about a 20,000-dollar shoe, you're talking about 10,000 days of income. 
+You just don't have it. 
+And therefore, you ought to look at alternatives. 
+And that is how Jaipur Foot was created in India. 
+It had a revolutionary prosthetic fitment and delivery system, a quick molding and modular components, enabling custom-made, on-the-spot limb fitments. 
+You could feel it actually in an hour, by the way, whereas the equivalent other feet took something like a day, as so on. 
+Outer socket made by using heated high-density polyethylene pipes, rather than using heated sheets. 
+And unique high-ankle design and human-like looks, [unclear] and functions. 
+And I like to show how it looks and how it works. 
+(Music) See, he jumps. You can see what stress it must have. 
+(Text:... any person with a below the knee limb could do this. 
+... above the limb, yes, it would be difficult... 
+"Did it hurt?" 
+"No... not at all." 
+... he can run a kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds...) One kilometer in four minutes and 30 seconds. 
+(Applause) So that's what it is all about. 
+And therefore Time took notice of this 28-dollar foot, basically. 
+(Applause) An incredible story. 
+Let's move on to something else. 
+I've been talking about getting more from less for more. 
+Let's move to health. 
+We've talked about mobility and the rest of it, let's talk about health. 
+What's happening in the area of health? 
+You know, you have new diseases that require new drugs. 
+And if you look at the drug development 10 years ago and now, what has happened? 
+10 years ago, it used to cost about a quarter billion. 
+Today it costs 1.5 billion dollars. 
+Time taken for moving a molecule to marketplace, after all the human and animal testing, was 10 years, now it is 15 years. 
+Are you getting more drugs because you are spending more time and more money? 
+No, I'm sorry. 
+We used to have 40, now they have come down to 30. 
+So actually we are getting less from more for less and less people. 
+Why less and less people? Because it is so expensive, so very few will be able to basically afford that. 
+Let us just take an example. 
+Psoriasis is very dreadful disease of the skin. 
+The cost of treatment, 20,000 dollars. 
+1,000-dollar antibody injections under the skin, by the way, and 20 of them. 
+Time for development — it took around 10 years and 700 million dollars. 
+Let's start in the spirit of more from less and more for more and start putting some targets. 
+For example, we don't want 20,000 dollars; we don't have it. 
+Can we do it [for] 100 dollars? 
+Time for development, not 10 years. 
+We are in a hurry. Five years. 
+Cost of development — 300 million dollars. 
+Sorry. I can't spend more than 10 million dollars. 
+Looks absolutely audacious. 
+Looks absolutely ridiculous. 
+You know something? This has been achieved in India. 
+These targets have been achieved in India. 
+And how they have been achieved... 
+Sir Francis Bacon once said, "" When you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before, it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before. "" And therefore, the standard process, where you develop a molecule, put it into mice, into men, are not yielding those results — the billions of dollars that have been spent. 
+The Indian cleverness was using its traditional knowledge, however, scientifically validating it and making that journey from men to mice to men, not molecule to mice to men, you know. 
+And that is how this difference has come. 
+And you can see this blending of traditional medicine, modern medicine, modern science. 
+I launched a big program [unclear] CSIR about nine years ago. 
+He is giving us not just for Psoriasis, for cancer and a whole range of things, changing the whole paradigm. 
+And you can see this Indian Psoriasis breakthrough obtained by this reverse form of [unclear] by doing things differently. 
+You can see before treatment and after treatment. 
+This is really getting more from less for more and more people, because these are all affordable treatments now. 
+Let me just remind you of what Mahatma Gandhi had said. 
+He had said, "" Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. "" So the message he was giving us was you must get more from less and less and less so that you can share it for more and more people, not only the current generation, but the future generations. 
+And he also said, "" I would prize every invention of science made for the benefit for all. "" So he was giving you the message that you must have it for more and more people, not just a few people. 
+And therefore, ladies and gentlemen, this is the theme, getting more from less for more. 
+And mind you, it is not getting just a little more for just a little less. 
+It's not about low cost. 
+It's about ultra-low cost. 
+You cannot say it's a mere treatment 10,000 dollars, but because you are poor I'll give it for 9,000. 
+Sorry, it doesn't work. You have to give it for 100 dollars, 200 dollars. 
+Is it possible? It has been made possible, by the way, for certain other different reasons. 
+So you are not talking about low cost, you are talking about ultra-low cost. 
+You are not talking about affordability, you are talking about extreme affordability. 
+Because of the four billion people whose income is under two dollars a day. 
+You're not talking exclusive innovation. 
+You're talking about inclusive innovation. 
+And therefore, you're not talking about incremental innovation, you're talking about disruptive innovation. 
+The ideas have to be such that you think in completely different terms. 
+And I would also add, it is not only getting more from less for more by more and more people, the whole world working for it. 
+I was very touched when I saw a breakthrough the other day. 
+You know, incubators for infants, for example. 
+They're not available in Africa. 
+They're not available in Indian villages. 
+And infants die. 
+And incubator costs 2,000 dollars. 
+And there's a 25-dollar incubator giving that performance that had been created. 
+And by whom? 
+By young students from Standford University on an extreme affordability project that they had, basically. 
+Their heart is in the right place, like Ratan Tata. 
+It's not just innovation, compassion and passion — compassion in the heart and passion in the belly. 
+That's the new world that we want to create. 
+And that is why the message is that of Gandhian engineering. 
+Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to end before time. 
+I was also afraid of those 18 minutes. 
+I've still one and a half to go. 
+The message, the final message, is this: India gave a great gift to the world. 
+What was that? 
+[In the] 20th century, we gave Gandhi to the world. 
+The 21st century gift, which is very, very important for the whole world, whether it is global economic meltdown, whether it is climate change — any problem that you talk about is gaining more from less for more and more — not only the current generations, for the future generations. 
+And that can come only from Gandhian engineering. 
+So ladies and gentlemen, I'm very happy to announce, this gift of the 21st century to the world from India, Gandhian engineering. 
+(Applause) Lakshmi Pratury: Thank you, Dr. Mashelkar. (R.A. Mashelkar: Thank you very much.) LP: A quick question for you. 
+Now, when you were a young boy in this school, what were your thoughts, like what did you think you could become? 
+What do you think that drove you? 
+Was there a vision you had? What is it that drove you? 
+RAM: I'll tell you a story that drove me, that transformed my life. 
+I remember, I went to a poor school, because my mother could not gather the 21 rupees, that half a dollar that was required within the stipulated time. 
+It was [unclear] high school. 
+But it was a poor school with rich teachers, honestly. 
+And one of them was [unclear] who taught us physics. 
+One day he took us out into the sun and tried to show us how to find the focal length of a convex lens. 
+The lens was here. The piece of paper was there. He moved it up and down. 
+And there was a bright spot up there. 
+And then he said, "" This is the focal length. "" But then he held it for a little while, Lakshmi. 
+And then the paper burned. 
+When the paper burned, for some reason he turned to me, and he said, "" Mashelkar, like this, if you do not diffuse your energies, if you focus your energies, you can achieve anything in the world. "" That gave me a great message: focus and you can achieve. 
+I said, "" Whoa, science is so wonderful, I have to become a scientist. "" But more importantly, focus and you can achieve. 
+And that message, very frankly, is valuable for society today. 
+What does that focal length do? 
+It has parallel lines, which are sun rays. 
+And the property of parallel lines is that they never meet. 
+What does that convex lens do? 
+It makes them meet. 
+This is convex lens leadership. 
+You know what today's leadership is doing? Concave length. 
+They divide them farther. 
+So I learned the lesson of convex lens leadership from that. 
+And when I was at National Chemical Laboratory [unclear]. 
+When I was at Council of Scientific Industry Research — 40 laboratories — when two laboratories were not talking to each other, I would [unclear]. 
+And currently I'm president of Global Research Alliance, 60,000 scientists in nine counties, right from India to the U.S. 
+I'm trying to build a global team, which will look at the global grand challenges that the world is facing. 
+That was the lesson. That was the inspirational moment. 
+LP: Thank you very much. (RAM: Thank you.) (Applause) 
+
+When we park in a big parking lot, how do we remember where we parked our car? 
+Here's the problem facing Homer. 
+And we're going to try to understand what's happening in his brain. 
+So we'll start with the hippocampus, shown in yellow, which is the organ of memory. 
+If you have damage there, like in Alzheimer's, you can't remember things including where you parked your car. 
+It's named after Latin for "" seahorse, "" which it resembles. 
+And like the rest of the brain, it's made of neurons. 
+So the human brain has about a hundred billion neurons in it. 
+And the neurons communicate with each other by sending little pulses or spikes of electricity via connections to each other. 
+The hippocampus is formed of two sheets of cells, which are very densely interconnected. 
+And scientists have begun to understand how spatial memory works by recording from individual neurons in rats or mice while they forage or explore an environment looking for food. 
+So we're going to imagine we're recording from a single neuron in the hippocampus of this rat here. 
+And when it fires a little spike of electricity, there's going to be a red dot and a click. 
+So what we see is that this neuron knows whenever the rat has gone into one particular place in its environment. 
+And it signals to the rest of the brain by sending a little electrical spike. 
+So we could show the firing rate of that neuron as a function of the animal's location. 
+And if we record from lots of different neurons, we'll see that different neurons fire when the animal goes in different parts of its environment, like in this square box shown here. 
+So together they form a map for the rest of the brain, telling the brain continually, "Where am I now within my environment?" 
+Place cells are also being recorded in humans. 
+So epilepsy patients sometimes need the electrical activity in their brain monitoring. 
+And some of these patients played a video game where they drive around a small town. 
+And place cells in their hippocampi would fire, become active, start sending electrical impulses whenever they drove through a particular location in that town. 
+So how does a place cell know where the rat or person is within its environment? 
+Well these two cells here show us that the boundaries of the environment are particularly important. 
+So the one on the top likes to fire sort of midway between the walls of the box that their rat's in. 
+And when you expand the box, the firing location expands. 
+The one below likes to fire whenever there's a wall close by to the south. 
+And if you put another wall inside the box, then the cell fires in both place wherever there's a wall to the south as the animal explores around in its box. 
+So this predicts that sensing the distances and directions of boundaries around you — extended buildings and so on — is particularly important for the hippocampus. 
+And indeed, on the inputs to the hippocampus, cells are found which project into the hippocampus, which do respond exactly to detecting boundaries or edges at particular distances and directions from the rat or mouse as it's exploring around. 
+So the cell on the left, you can see, it fires whenever the animal gets near to a wall or a boundary to the east, whether it's the edge or the wall of a square box or the circular wall of the circular box or even the drop at the edge of a table, which the animals are running around. 
+And the cell on the right there fires whenever there's a boundary to the south, whether it's the drop at the edge of the table or a wall or even the gap between two tables that are pulled apart. 
+So that's one way in which we think place cells determine where the animal is as it's exploring around. 
+We can also test where we think objects are, like this goal flag, in simple environments — or indeed, where your car would be. 
+So we can have people explore an environment and see the location they have to remember. 
+And then, if we put them back in the environment, generally they're quite good at putting a marker down where they thought that flag or their car was. 
+But on some trials, we could change the shape and size of the environment like we did with the place cell. 
+In that case, we can see how where they think the flag had been changes as a function of how you change the shape and size of the environment. 
+And what you see, for example, if the flag was where that cross was in a small square environment, and then if you ask people where it was, but you've made the environment bigger, where they think the flag had been stretches out in exactly the same way that the place cell firing stretched out. 
+It's as if you remember where the flag was by storing the pattern of firing across all of your place cells at that location, and then you can get back to that location by moving around so that you best match the current pattern of firing of your place cells with that stored pattern. 
+That guides you back to the location that you want to remember. 
+But we also know where we are through movement. 
+So if we take some outbound path — perhaps we park and we wander off — we know because our own movements, which we can integrate over this path roughly what the heading direction is to go back. 
+And place cells also get this kind of path integration input from a kind of cell called a grid cell. 
+Now grid cells are found, again, on the inputs to the hippocampus, and they're a bit like place cells. 
+But now as the rat explores around, each individual cell fires in a whole array of different locations which are laid out across the environment in an amazingly regular triangular grid. 
+And if you record from several grid cells — shown here in different colors — each one has a grid-like firing pattern across the environment, and each cell's grid-like firing pattern is shifted slightly relative to the other cells. 
+So the red one fires on this grid and the green one on this one and the blue on on this one. 
+So together, it's as if the rat can put a virtual grid of firing locations across its environment — a bit like the latitude and longitude lines that you'd find on a map, but using triangles. 
+And as it moves around, the electrical activity can pass from one of these cells to the next cell to keep track of where it is, so that it can use its own movements to know where it is in its environment. 
+Do people have grid cells? 
+Well because all of the grid-like firing patterns have the same axes of symmetry, the same orientations of grid, shown in orange here, it means that the net activity of all of the grid cells in a particular part of the brain should change according to whether we're running along these six directions or running along one of the six directions in between. 
+So we can put people in an MRI scanner and have them do a little video game like the one I showed you and look for this signal. 
+And indeed, you do see it in the human entorhinal cortex, which is the same part of the brain that you see grid cells in rats. 
+So back to Homer. 
+He's probably remembering where his car was in terms of the distances and directions to extended buildings and boundaries around the location where he parked. 
+And that would be represented by the firing of boundary-detecting cells. 
+He's also remembering the path he took out of the car park, which would be represented in the firing of grid cells. 
+Now both of these kinds of cells can make the place cells fire. 
+And he can return to the location where he parked by moving so as to find where it is that best matches the firing pattern of the place cells in his brain currently with the stored pattern where he parked his car. 
+And that guides him back to that location irrespective of visual cues like whether his car's actually there. 
+Maybe it's been towed. 
+But he knows where it was, so he knows to go and get it. 
+So beyond spatial memory, if we look for this grid-like firing pattern throughout the whole brain, we see it in a whole series of locations which are always active when we do all kinds of autobiographical memory tasks, like remembering the last time you went to a wedding, for example. 
+So it may be that the neural mechanisms for representing the space around us are also used for generating visual imagery so that we can recreate the spatial scene, at least, of the events that have happened to us when we want to imagine them. 
+So if this was happening, your memories could start by place cells activating each other via these dense interconnections and then reactivating boundary cells to create the spatial structure of the scene around your viewpoint. 
+And grid cells could move this viewpoint through that space. 
+Another kind of cell, head direction cells, which I didn't mention yet, they fire like a compass according to which way you're facing. 
+They could define the viewing direction from which you want to generate an image for your visual imagery, so you can imagine what happened when you were at this wedding, for example. 
+So this is just one example of a new era really in cognitive neuroscience where we're beginning to understand psychological processes like how you remember or imagine or even think in terms of the actions of the billions of individual neurons that make up our brains. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Isn't that cool? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) Design — I love its design. 
+I looked at that giant monster and said to myself — "I am not going to lock myself on that bench the whole day!" 
+The best of all is that if I don't want to practice, (Whispering) I can hide it. 
+(Laughter) A few years later, I heard a joke about the greatest violinist, Jascha Heifetz. 
+And Mr. Heifetz was a very cool person, so he picked up his violin and said, "Funny — I don't hear anything." 
+(Laughter) But actually, the most impressive thing to me is that — well, actually, I would also like to say this for all children is to say thank you to all adults, for actually caring for us a lot, and to make our future world much better. 
+
+That splendid music, the coming-in music, "" The Elephant March "" from "" Aida, "" is the music I've chosen for my funeral. 
+(Laughter) And you can see why. It's triumphal. 
+I won't feel anything, but if I could, I would feel triumphal at having lived at all, and at having lived on this splendid planet, and having been given the opportunity to understand something about why I was here in the first place, before not being here. 
+The only slight jarring note was when Jeffrey Katzenberg said of the mustang, "the most splendid creatures that God put on this earth." 
+(Laughter) I'm a biologist, and the central theorem of our subject: the theory of design, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. 
+In non-professional circles outside America, it's largely ignored. 
+But in non-professional circles within America, it arouses so much hostility — (Laughter) it's fair to say that American biologists are in a state of war. 
+The war is so worrying at present, with court cases coming up in one state after another, that I felt I had to say something about it. 
+If you want to know what I have to say about Darwinism itself, I'm afraid you're going to have to look at my books, which you won't find in the bookstore outside. 
+(Laughter) Contemporary court cases often concern an allegedly new version of creationism, called "" Intelligent Design, "" or ID. 
+Don't be fooled. There's nothing new about ID. 
+It's just creationism under another name, rechristened — I choose the word advisedly — (Laughter) for tactical, political reasons. 
+The arguments of so-called ID theorists are the same old arguments that had been refuted again and again, since Darwin down to the present day. 
+There is an effective evolution lobby coordinating the fight on behalf of science, and I try to do all I can to help them, but they get quite upset when people like me dare to mention that we happen to be atheists as well as evolutionists. 
+Creationists, lacking any coherent scientific argument for their case, fall back on the popular phobia against atheism: Teach your children evolution in biology class, and they'll soon move on to drugs, grand larceny and sexual "" pre-version. "" (Laughter) In fact, of course, educated theologians from the Pope down are firm in their support of evolution. 
+People like Kenneth Miller could be called a "" godsend "" to the evolution lobby, (Laughter) because they expose the lie that evolutionism is, as a matter of fact, tantamount to atheism. 
+It's not a thing I often do, so listen carefully. 
+(Laughter) I think they're right about one thing. 
+I think they're right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion. 
+In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. 
+No, what I want to urge upon you — (Laughter) Instead, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism. (Laughter) 
+(Applause) But that's putting it too negatively. 
+Statistical improbability in the direction of good design — "" complexity "" is another word for this. 
+The standard creationist argument — there is only one; they're all reduced to this one — takes off from a statistical improbability. 
+Any designer capable of designing something really complex has to be even more complex himself, and that's before we even start on the other things he's expected to do, like forgive sins, bless marriages, listen to prayers — favor our side in a war — (Laughter) disapprove of our sex lives, and so on. (Laughter) 
+Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem. 
+But here, I only want to make the point that the elegance of Darwinism is corrosive to religion, precisely because it is so elegant, so parsimonious, so powerful, so economically powerful. 
+The God theory is not just a bad theory. 
+He begins this speech, which was tape recorded in Cambridge shortly before he died — he begins by explaining how science works through the testing of hypotheses that are framed to be vulnerable to disproof, and then he goes on. 
+It has certain ideas at the heart of it, which we call 'sacred' or 'holy.' What it means is: here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about. 
+You're just not. Why not? Because you're not. "" (Laughter) "" Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the universe began, about who created the universe — no, that's holy. 
+"" Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it, because you're not allowed to say these things. 
+In my view, not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. 
+There's Douglas Adams, magnificent picture from his book, "" Last Chance to See. "" Now, there's a typical scientific journal, The Quarterly Review of Biology. 
+Now, the next one. 
+"" The President of the Royal Society has been vouchsafed a strong inner conviction that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. "" (Laughter) "" It has been privately revealed to Professor Huxtane that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. "" (Laughter) "" Professor Hordley was brought up to have total and unquestioning faith "" — (Laughter) — "that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." 
+"" Professor Hawkins has promulgated an official dogma binding on all loyal Hawkinsians that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. "" (Laughter) That's inconceivable, of course. 
+whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists. 
+Mr. Bush's reply has become infamous. 
+"" No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. 
+This is one nation under God. "" Bush's bigotry was not an isolated mistake, blurted out in the heat of the moment and later retracted. 
+[In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty] Incidentally, I'm not usually very proud of being British, but you can't help making the comparison. 
+(Applause) In practice, what is an atheist? 
+An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. 
+As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) And however we define atheism, it's surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non-citizen. 
+Natalie Angier wrote a rather sad piece in the New Yorker, saying how lonely she felt as an atheist. 
+The latest survey makes surprisingly encouraging reading. 
+You can't help wondering why vote-seeking politicians are so proverbially overawed by the power of, for example, the Jewish lobby — the state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote — while at the same time, consigning the non-religious to political oblivion. 
+This secular non-religious vote, if properly mobilized, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote. 
+Why does this far more substantial minority not make a move to exercise its political muscle? 
+[Them folks misunderestimated me] (Laughter) The survey that I quoted, which is the ARIS survey, didn't break down its data by socio-economic class or education, IQ or anything else. 
+But a recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine provides some straws in the wind. 
+Mensa, as you know, is an international organization for people with very high IQ. 
+And from a meta-analysis of the literature, Bell concludes that, I quote — "" Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief, and one's intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. 
+That is, the higher one's intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious. "" Well, I haven't seen the original 42 studies, and I can't comment on that meta-analysis, but I would like to see more studies done along those lines. 
+And I know that there are — if I could put a little plug here — there are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question, and I put the suggestion up, for what it's worth. 
+In 1998, Larson and Witham polled the cream of American scientists, those who'd been honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences, and among this select group, belief in a personal God dropped to a shattering seven percent. 
+About 20 percent are agnostic; the rest could fairly be called atheists. 
+Among biological scientists, the figure is even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God. 
+I've not seen corresponding figures for elite scholars in other fields, such as history or philosophy, but I'd be surprised if they were different. 
+A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. 
+If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it — the intelligentsia — unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. 
+To put it bluntly: American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) I'm not a citizen of this country, so I hope it won't be thought unbecoming if I suggest that something needs to be done. (Laughter) 
+From what I've seen of TED, I think this may be the ideal place to launch it. 
+(Laughter) This could be similar to the campaign organized by homosexuals a few years ago, although heaven forbid that we should stoop to public outing of people against their will. 
+In most cases, people who out themselves will help to destroy the myth that there is something wrong with atheists. 
+On the contrary, they'll demonstrate that atheists are often the kinds of people who could serve as decent role models for your children, the kinds of people an advertising agent could use to recommend a product, the kinds of people who are sitting in this room. 
+There should be a snowball effect, a positive feedback, such that the more names we have, the more we get. 
+I suspect that the word "" atheist "" itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves. 
+I think that generally an 'agnostic' would be the most correct description of my state of mind. "" He even became uncharacteristically tetchy with Edward Aveling. 
+Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism — incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate "" Das Kapital "" to Darwin, which he didn't, it was actually Edward Aveling. 
+What happened was that Aveling's mistress was Marx's daughter, and when both Darwin and Marx were dead, Marx's papers became muddled up with Aveling's papers, and a letter from Darwin saying, "" My dear sir, thank you very much but I don't want you to dedicate your book to me, "" was mistakenly supposed to be addressed to Marx, and that gave rise to this whole myth, which you've probably heard. 
+It's not recorded whether Aveling told Darwin to come down off his high horse. 
+(Laughter) But in any case, that was more than 100 years ago. 
+Now, a friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew, who, incidentally, observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a "" tooth-fairy agnostic. "" He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but "" agnostic "" on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence. 
+Hence the phrase, "" tooth-fairy agnostic. "" Bertrand Russell made the same point using a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars. 
+You would strictly have to be agnostic about whether there is a teapot in orbit about Mars, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as on all fours with its non-existence. 
+If you want to believe one particular one of them — unicorns or tooth fairies or teapots or Yahweh — the onus is on you to say why. 
+The onus is not on the rest of us to say why not. 
+We, who are atheists, are also a-fairyists and a-teapotists. 
+This has the advantage of a worldwide network of well-organized associations and journals and things already in place. 
+My problem with it is only its apparent anthropocentrism. 
+(Laughter) Such people might be those belonging to the British lynch mob, which last year attacked a pediatrician in mistake for a pedophile. (Laughter) 
+I think the best of the available alternatives for "" atheist "" is simply "" non-theist. "" It lacks the strong connotation that there's definitely no God, and it could therefore easily be embraced by teapot or tooth-fairy agnostics. 
+When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word "" God, "" they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand. 
+But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word "" atheism "" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word, carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. 
+As Carl Sagan, another recently dead hero, put it, "" How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! 
+My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way. 'A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. "" Now, this is an elite audience, and I would therefore expect about 10 percent of you to be religious. 
+But I also suspect that a fair number of those secretly despise religion as much as I do. 
+If my books sold as well as Stephen Hawking's books, instead of only as well as Richard Dawkins' books, I'd do it myself. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like to tell you a story about death and architecture. 
+A hundred years ago, we tended to die of infectious diseases like pneumonia, that, if they took hold, would take us away quite quickly. 
+We tended to die at home, in our own beds, looked after by family, although that was the default option because a lot of people lacked access to medical care. 
+And then in the 20th century a lot of things changed. 
+We developed new medicines like penicillin so we could treat those infectious diseases. 
+New medical technologies like x-ray machines were invented. 
+And because they were so big and expensive, we needed large, centralized buildings to keep them in, and they became our modern hospitals. 
+After the Second World War, a lot of countries set up universal healthcare systems so that everyone who needed treatment could get it. 
+The result was that lifespans extended from about 45 at the start of the century to almost double that today. 
+The 20th century was this time of huge optimism about what science could offer, but with all of the focus on life, death was forgotten, even as our approach to death changed dramatically. 
+Now, I'm an architect, and for the past year and a half I've been looking at these changes and at what they mean for architecture related to death and dying. 
+We now tend to die of cancer and heart disease, and what that means is that many of us will have a long period of chronic illness at the end of our lives. 
+During that period, we'll likely spend a lot of time in hospitals and hospices and care homes. 
+Now, we've all been in a modern hospital. 
+You know those fluorescent lights and the endless corridors and those rows of uncomfortable chairs. 
+Hospital architecture has earned its bad reputation. 
+But the surprising thing is, it wasn't always like this. 
+This is L'Ospedale degli Innocenti, built in 1419 by Brunelleschi, who was one of the most famous and influential architects of his time. 
+And when I look at this building and then think about hospitals today, what amazes me is this building's ambition. 
+It's just a really great building. 
+It has these courtyards in the middle so that all of the rooms have daylight and fresh air, and the rooms are big and they have high ceilings, so they just feel more comfortable to be in. 
+And it's also beautiful. 
+Somehow, we've forgotten that that's even possible for a hospital. 
+Now, if we want better buildings for dying, then we have to talk about it, but because we find the subject of death uncomfortable, we don't talk about it, and we don't question how we as a society approach death. 
+One of the things that surprised me most in my research, though, is how changeable attitudes actually are. 
+This is the first crematorium in the U.K., which was built in Woking in the 1870s. 
+And when this was first built, there were protests in the local village. 
+And yet, only a hundred years later, three quarters of us get cremated. 
+People are actually really open to changing things if they're given the chance to talk about them. 
+So this conversation about death and architecture was what I wanted to start when I did my first exhibition on it in Venice in June, which was called "" Death in Venice. "" It was designed to be quite playful so that people would literally engage with it. 
+This is one of our exhibits, which is an interactive map of London that shows just how much of the real estate in the city is given over to death and dying, and as you wave your hand across the map, the name of that piece of real estate, the building or cemetery, is revealed. 
+Another of our exhibits was a series of postcards that people could take away with them. 
+And they showed people's homes and hospitals and cemeteries and mortuaries, and they tell the story of the different spaces that we pass through on either side of death. 
+We wanted to show that where we die is a key part of how we die. 
+Now, the strangest thing was the way that visitors reacted to the exhibition, especially the audio-visual works. 
+We had people dancing and running and jumping as they tried to activate the exhibits in different ways, and at a certain point they would kind of stop and remember that they were in an exhibition about death, and that maybe that's not how you're supposed to act. 
+But actually, I would question whether there is one way that you're supposed to act around death, and if there's not, I'd ask you to think about what you think a good death is, and what you think that architecture that supports a good death might be like, and mightn't it be a little less like this and a little more like this? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Everything is interconnected. 
+As a Shinnecock Indian, I was raised to know this. 
+We are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of Long Island near the town of Southampton in New York. 
+When I was a little girl, my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day. 
+There were no clouds in the sky. 
+And after a while I began to perspire. 
+And he pointed up to the sky, and he said, "" Look, do you see that? 
+That's part of you up there. 
+That's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals. "" In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life, I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said, "" Mom, you should do that. "" And so three days later, driving very fast, I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell, capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes, although only two percent actually do. 
+These clouds can grow so big, up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere. 
+They can grow so big, blocking all daylight, making it very dark and ominous standing under them. 
+Storm chasing is a very tactile experience. 
+There's a warm, moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth, the wheat, the grass, the charged particles. 
+And then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming, the greens and the turquoise blues. 
+I've learned to respect the lightning. 
+My hair used to be straight. 
+(Laughter) I'm just kidding. (Laughter) 
+What really excites me about these storms is their movement, the way they swirl and spin and undulate, with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds. 
+They become lovely monsters. 
+When I'm photographing them, I cannot help but remember my grandfather's lesson. 
+As I stand under them, I see not just a cloud, but understand that what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces, the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy, our solar system, our sun and even this very planet. 
+All my relations. Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence. 
+And I'm going to tell you about the Richard Feynman that I knew. 
+I also had the good fortune to be in those lectures, up in the balcony. 
+And what I mean by that is a lot of room, in my case — I can't speak for anybody else, but in my case — a lot of room for another big ego. 
+(Laughter) Well, I happened to have been very quick that day, and I said, "" Yeah, but a lot less baloney. "" (Laughter) (Applause) The truth of the matter is that a Feynman sandwich had a load of ham, but absolutely no baloney. 
+And the last time the rich guy invited us, he also invited a couple of philosophers. 
+But the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-ophizing. 
+And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality. 
+(Laughter) And he said, "" Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or your father when you were a kid? "" I said, "" Well, my real hero was my father. 
+
+The advances that have taken place in astronomy, cosmology and biology, in the last 10 years, are really extraordinary — to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine. 
+But there was something else that I've noticed as those changes were taking place, as people were starting to find out that hmm... yeah, there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. 
+The science writers and editors — I shouldn't say science writers, I should say people who write about science — and editors would sit down over a couple of beers, after a hard day of work, and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works. 
+And they would inevitably end up in what I thought was a very bizarre place, which is ways the world could end very suddenly. 
+And that's what I want to talk about today. (Laughter) Ah, you laugh, you fools. (Laughter) (Voice: Can we finish up a little early?) (Laughter) Yeah, we need the time! 
+Stephen Petranek: At first, it all seemed a little fantastical to me, but after challenging a lot of these ideas, I began to take a lot of them seriously. And then September 11 happened, and I thought, ah, God, I can't go to the TED conference and talk about how the world is going to end. 
+Nobody wants to hear that. Not after this! 
+And that got me into a discussion with some other people, other scientists, about maybe some other subjects, and one of the guys I talked to, who was a neuroscientist, said, "You know, I think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up," and reminds me of Michael's talk yesterday and his mother saying you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem. 
+So, we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow, and lo and behold, we found them. 
+Which leads me to a videotape of a President Bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago. 
+Can we run that, Andrew? 
+President George W. Bush: Whatever it costs to defend our security, and whatever it costs to defend our freedom, we must pay it. 
+SP: I agree with the president. 
+He wants two trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year, a two-trillion-dollar federal budget, which will land us back into deficit spending real fast. 
+But terrorists aren't the only threat we face. 
+There are really serious calamities staring us in the eye that we're in the same kind of denial about that we were about terrorism, and what could've happened on September 11. 
+I would propose, therefore, that if we took 10 billion dollars from that 2.13 trillion dollar budget — which is two one hundredths of that budget — and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems I'm going to talk to you about, the vast majority could be solved, and the rest we could deal with. So, I hope you find this both fascinating — I'm fascinated by this kind of stuff, I gotta admit — to me these are Richard's cockroaches. 
+But I also hope, because I think the people in this room can literally change the world, I hope you take some of this stuff away with you, and when you have an opportunity to be influential, that you try to get some heavy-duty money spent on some of these ideas. 
+So let's start. Number 10: we lose the will to survive. 
+We live in an incredible age of modern medicine. 
+We are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago. 
+People around the world are getting better medicine — but mentally, we're falling apart. 
+The World Health Organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed. 
+And the World Health Organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced. 
+Soon, genetic breakthroughs and even better medicine are going to allow us to think of 100 as a normal lifespan. 
+A female child born tomorrow, on average — median — will live to age 83. 
+Our life longevity is going up almost a year for every year that passes. 
+Now the problem with all of this, getting older, is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide. 
+So, what are the solutions? 
+We don't really have mental health insurance in this country, and it's — (Applause) — it's really a crime. 
+Something like 98 percent of all people with depression, and I mean really severe depression — I have a friend with stunningly severe depression — this is a curable disease, with present medicine and present technology. 
+But it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills. 
+Pills alone don't do it, especially in clinically depressed people. 
+You ought to be able to go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and put down your 10-dollar copay, and get treated, just like you do when you got a cut on your arm. It's ridiculous. 
+Secondly, drug companies are not going to develop really sophisticated psychoactive drugs. We know that most mental illnesses have a biological component that can be dealt with. 
+And we know just an amazing amount more about the brain now than we did 10 years ago. We need a pump-push from the federal government, through NIH and National Science — NSF — and places like that to start helping the drug companies develop some advanced psychoactive drugs. 
+Moving on. Number nine — don't laugh — aliens invade Earth. 
+Ten years ago, you couldn't have found an astronomer — well, very few astronomers — in the world who would've told you that there are any planets anywhere outside our solar system. 
+1995, we found three. The count now is up to 80 — we're finding about two or three a month. 
+All of the ones we've found, by the way, are in this little, teeny, tiny corner where we live, in the Milky Way. There must be millions of planets in the Milky Way, and as Carl Sagan insisted for many years, and was laughed at for it, there must be billions and billions in the universe. 
+In a few years, NASA is going to launch four or five telescopes out to Jupiter, where there's less dust, and start looking for Earth-like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect. 
+It's becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and probably fairly close to us, is a fairly remote idea. 
+And the chance that some of it isn't more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea. 
+Remember, we've only been an advanced civilization — an industrial civilization, if you would — for 200 years. 
+Although every time I go to Pompeii, I'm amazed that they had the equivalent of a McDonald's on every street corner, too. 
+So, I don't know how much civilization really has progressed since AD 79, but there's a great likelihood. I really believe this, and I don't believe in aliens, and I don't believe there are any aliens on the Earth or anything like that. But there's a likelihood that we will confront a civilization that is more intelligent than our own. 
+Now, what will happen? What if they come to, you know, suck up our oceans for the hydrogen? 
+And swat us away like flies, the way we swat away flies when we go into the rainforest and start logging it. 
+We can look at our own history. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill said, "" Advanced Western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization. "" If the aliens come visiting, we're the primitive civilization. 
+So, what are the solutions to this? (Laughter) Thank God you can all read! 
+It may seem ridiculous, but we have a really lousy history of anticipating things like this and actually being prepared for them. 
+How much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species? 
+Secondly — and you're going to hear more from me about this — we have to become an outward-looking, space-faring nation. 
+We have got to develop the idea that the Earth doesn't last forever, our sun doesn't last forever. 
+If we want humanity to last forever, we have to colonize the Milky Way. 
+And that is not something that is beyond comprehension at this point. 
+(Applause) It'll also help us a lot, if we meet an advanced civilization along the way, if we're trying to be an advanced civilization. Number eight — (Voice: Steve, that's what I'm doing after TED.) (Laughter) (Applause) SP: You've got it! You've got the job. 
+Number eight: the ecosystem collapses. 
+Last July, in Science, the journal Science, 19 oceanographers published a very, very unusual article. 
+It wasn't really a research report; it was a screed. 
+They said, we've been looking at the oceans for a long time now, and we want to tell you they're not in trouble, they're near collapse. 
+Many other ecosystems on Earth are in real, real danger. 
+We're living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000. 
+We have lost 25 percent of the unique species in Hawaii in the last 20 years. 
+California is expected to lose 25 percent of its species in the next 40 years. 
+Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree. 
+You cut down that tree, the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem. 
+There's really a tree like that out there. That's really what it comes to. 
+And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere. So, what do we do about this? What are the solutions? 
+There is some modeling of ecosystems going on now. 
+The problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly, that we don't know they're really in trouble until it's almost too late. 
+We need to know earlier that they're getting in trouble, and we need to be able to pump possible solutions into models. 
+And with the kind of computing power we have now, there is, as I say, some of this going on, but it needs money. 
+National Science Foundation needs to say — you know, almost all the money that's spent on science in this country comes from the federal government, one way or another. 
+And they get to prioritize, you know? 
+There are people at the National Science Foundation who get to say, this is the most important thing. 
+This is one of the things they ought to be thinking more about. 
+Secondly, we need to create huge biodiversity reserves on the planet, and start moving them around. 
+There's been an experiment for the last four or five years on the Georges Bank, or the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. It's a no-take fishing zone. 
+They can't fish there for a radius of 200 miles. 
+And an amazing thing has happened: almost all the fish have come back, and they're reproducing like crazy. We're going to have to start doing this around the globe. We're going to have to have no-take zones. 
+We're going to have to say, no more logging in the Amazon for 20 years. 
+Let it recover, before we start logging again. 
+(Applause) Number seven: particle accelerator mishap. 
+You all remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? 
+One of the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire and set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. 
+A lot of very sober-minded physicists, believe it or not, have had exactly the same thought. 
+This spring — there's a collider at Brookhaven, on Long Island — this spring, it's going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes. 
+They are expecting to create little, tiny black holes. 
+They expect them to evaporate. (Laughter) I hope they're right. (Laughter) Other collider experiments — there's one that's going to take place next summer at CERN — have the possibility of creating something called strangelets, which are kind of like antimatter. Whenever they hit other matter, they destroy it and obliterate it. Most physicists say that the accelerators we have now are not really powerful enough to create black holes and strangelets that we need to worry about, and they're probably right. 
+But, all around the world, in Japan, in Canada, there's talk about this, of reviving this in the United States. 
+We shut one down that was going to be big. 
+But there's talk of building very big accelerators. 
+What can we do about this? What are the solutions? 
+We've got the fox watching the henhouse here. 
+We need to — we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics, but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what's going on with these experiments. 
+Secondly, we have a natural laboratory surrounding the Earth. 
+We have an electromagnetic field around the Earth, and it's constantly bombarded by high-energy particles, like protons. 
+And in my opinion, we don't spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what's safe to do on Earth. 
+Number six: biotech disaster. 
+It's one of my favorite ones, because we've done several stories on Bt corn. 
+Bt corn is a corn that creates its own pesticide to kill a corn borer. 
+You may of heard of it — heard it called StarLink, especially when all those taco shells were taken out of the supermarkets about a year and a half ago. 
+This stuff was supposed to only be feed for animals in the United States, and it got into the human food supply, and somebody should've figured out that it would get in the human food supply very easily. 
+But the thing that's alarming is a couple of months ago, in Mexico, where Bt corn and all genetically altered corn is totally illegal, they found Bt corn genes in wild corn plants. 
+Now, corn originated, we think, in Mexico. 
+This is the genetic biodiversity storehouse of corn. 
+This brings back a skepticism that has gone away recently, that superweeds and superpests could spread around the world, from biotechnology, that literally could destroy the world's food supply in very short order. 
+So, what do we do about that? 
+We treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants. 
+It's that simple. This is an amazingly unregulated field. 
+When the StarLink disaster happened, there was a battle between the EPA and the FDA over who really had authority, and over what parts of this, and they didn't get it straightened out for months. That's kind of crazy. 
+Number five, one of my favorites: reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. 
+Believe it or not, this happens every few hundred thousand years, and has happened many times in our history. 
+North Pole goes to the South, South Pole goes to the North, and vice versa. 
+But what happens, as this occurs, is that we lose our magnetic field around the Earth over the period of about 100 years, and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun, that this field protects us from, are — well, basically, we're gonna fry. (Laughter) (Voice: Steve, I have some additional hats downstairs.) SP: So, what can we do about this? Oh, by the way, we're overdue. 
+It's been 780,000 years since this happened. 
+So, it should have happened about 480,000 years ago. 
+Oh, and here's one other thing. 
+Scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about five percent. 
+So, maybe we're in the throes of it. 
+One of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the Earth is, is that we have — you know, we don't have good weather data from 60 years ago, much less data on things like the ozone layer. 
+So, there's a fairly simple solution to this. 
+There's going to be a lot of cheap rocketry that's going to come online in about six or seven years that gets us into the low atmosphere very cheaply. 
+You know, we can make ozone from car tailpipes. 
+It's not hard: it's just three oxygen atoms. 
+If you brought the entire ozone layer down to the surface of the Earth, it would be the thickness of two pennies, at 14 pounds per square inch. 
+You don't need that much up there. 
+We need to learn how to repair and replenish the Earth's ozone layer. 
+(Applause) Number four: giant solar flares. 
+Solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the Sun that bombard the Earth with high-speed subatomic particles. 
+So far, our atmosphere has done, and our magnetic field has done pretty well protecting us from this. 
+Occasionally, we get a flare from the Sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth, and electricity. 
+But the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our Sun, and they've found that a number of them, when they're about the age of our Sun, brighten by a factor of as much as 20. Doesn't last for very long. 
+And they think these are super-flares, millions of times more powerful than any flares we've had from our Sun so far. 
+Obviously, we don't want one of those. (Laughter) There's a flip side to it. In studying stars like our Sun, we've found that they go through periods of diminishment, when their total amount of energy that's expelled from them goes down by maybe one percent. 
+One percent doesn't sound like a lot, but it would cause one hell of an ice age here. 
+So, what can we do about this? 
+(Laughter) Start terraforming Mars. This is one of my favorite subjects. 
+I wrote a story about this in Life magazine in 1993. 
+This is rocket science, but it's not hard rocket science. 
+Everything that we need to make an atmosphere on Mars, and to make a livable planet on Mars, is probably there. 
+And you just, literally, have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of Mars and spit out the oxygen. 
+The problem is it takes 300 years to terraform Mars, minimum. 
+Really more like 500 years to do it right. 
+There's no reason why we shouldn't start now. (Laughter) Number three — isn't this stuff cool? (Laughter) A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time, the germs sure get the upper hand. 
+In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people. 
+That was back when the population was around 100 million people. 
+The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans. 
+AIDS is coming back. Ebola seems to be rearing its head with much too much frequency, and old diseases like cholera are becoming resistant to antibiotics. 
+We've all learned what — the kind of panic that can occur when an old disease rears its head, like anthrax. 
+The worst possibility is that a very simple germ, like staph, for which we have one antibiotic that still works, mutates. 
+And we know staph can do amazing things. 
+A staph cell can be next to a muscle cell in your body and borrow genes from it when antibiotics come, and change and mutate. 
+The danger is that some germ like staph will be — will mutate into something that's really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it. 
+That's happened before. About 12,000 years ago, there was a massive wave of mammal extinctions in the Americas, and that is thought to have been a virulent disease. 
+So, what can we do about it? 
+It is nuts. We give antibiotics — (Applause) — every cow, every lamb, every chicken, they get antibiotics every day, all. 
+You know, you go to a restaurant, you eat fish, I got news for you, it's all farmed. You know, you gotta ask when you go to a restaurant if it's a wild fish, cause they're not going to tell you. We're giving away the code. 
+This is like being at war and giving somebody your secret code. 
+We're telling the germs out there how to fight us. 
+We gotta fix that. We gotta outlaw that right away. 
+Secondly, our public health system, as we saw with anthrax, is a real disaster. 
+We have a real, major outbreak of disease in the United States, we are not prepared to cope with it. 
+Now, there is money in the federal budget, next year, to build up the public health service. 
+But I don't think to any extent that it really needs to be done. 
+Number two — my favorite — we meet a rogue black hole. 
+You know, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, really, you walk into an astronomy convention, and you say, "You know, there's probably a black hole at the center of every galaxy," and they're going to hoot you off the stage. 
+And now, if you went into one of those conventions and you said, "" Well, I don't think black holes are out there, "" they'd hoot you off the stage. 
+Our comprehension of the way the universe works is really — has just gained unbelievably in recent years. 
+We think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the Milky Way alone, our galaxy. 
+And these stars have compressed down to maybe something like 12, 15 miles wide, and they are black holes. And they are gobbling up everything around them, including light, which is why we can't see them. 
+Most of them should be in orbit around something. 
+But galaxies are very violent places, and things can be spun out of orbit. 
+And also, space is incredibly vast. 
+So even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit, the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote. 
+But it only has to get close, about a billion miles away, one of these things. 
+About a billion miles away, here's what happens to Earth's orbit: it becomes elliptical instead of circular. 
+And for three months out of the year, the surface temperatures go up to 150 to 180. 
+For three months out of the year, they go to 50 below zero. 
+That won't work too well. What can we do about this? 
+And this is my scariest. (Laughter) I don't have a good answer for this one. 
+Again, we gotta think about being a colonizing race. 
+And finally, number one: biggest danger to life as we know it, I think, a really big asteroid heads for Earth. 
+The important thing to remember here — this is not a question of if, this is a question of when, and how big. 
+In 1908, just a 200-foot piece of a comet exploded over Siberia and flattened forests for maybe 100 miles. 
+It had the effect of about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. 
+Astronomers estimate that little asteroids like that come about every hundred years. 
+In 1989, a large asteroid passed 400,000 miles away from Earth. 
+Nothing to worry about, right? 
+It passed directly through Earth's orbit. We were in that that spot six hours earlier. 
+A small asteroid, say a half mile wide, would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up — Carl Sagan's nuclear winter thing. 
+An asteroid five miles wide causes major extinctions. 
+We think the one that got the dinosaurs was about five miles wide. 
+Where are they? There's something called the Kuiper belt, which — some people think Pluto's not a planet, that's where Pluto is, it's in the Kuiper belt. 
+There's also something a little farther out, called the Oort cloud. 
+There are about 100,000 balls of ice and rock — comets, really — out there, that are 50 miles in diameter or more, and they regularly take a little spin, in towards the Sun and pass reasonably close to us. 
+Of more concern, I think, is the asteroids that exist between Mars and Jupiter. 
+The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey told us last fall — they're making the first map of the universe, three-dimensional map of the universe — that there are probably 700,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that are a half a mile big or bigger. 
+So you say, yeah, well, what are really the chances of this happening? 
+Andrew, can you put that chart up? 
+This is a chart that Dr. Clark Chapman at the Southwest Research Institute presented to Congress a few years ago. 
+You'll notice that the chance of an asteroid-slash-comet impact killing you is about one in 20,000, according to the work they've done. 
+Now look at the one right below that. 
+Passenger aircraft crash, one in 20,000. 
+We spend an awful lot of money trying to be sure that we don't die in airplane accidents, and we're not spending hardly anything on this. And yet, this is completely preventable. 
+We finally have, just in the last year, the technology to stop this cold. 
+Could we have the solutions? 
+NASA's spending three million dollars a year, three million bucks — that is like pocket change — to search for asteroids. 
+Because we can actually figure out every asteroid that's out there, and if it might hit Earth, and when it might hit Earth. 
+And they're trying to do that. 
+But it's going to take them 10 years, at spending three million dollars a year, and even then, they claim they'll only have about 80 percent of them catalogued. 
+Comets are a tougher act. 
+We don't really have the technology to predict comet trajectories, or when one with our name on it might arrive. 
+But we would have lots of time, if we see it coming. 
+We really need a dedicated observatory. 
+You'll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of, amateur astronomers? That's because nobody's looking for them, except amateurs. 
+We need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets. 
+Part two of the solutions: we need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid, or alter its trajectory. Now, a year ago, we did an amazing thing. 
+We sent a probe out to this asteroid belt, called NEAR, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. 
+And these guys orbited a 30 — or no, about a 22-mile long asteroid called Eros. 
+And then, of course, you know, they pulled one of those sneaky NASA things, where they had extra batteries and extra gas aboard and everything, and then, at the last minute, they landed. 
+When the mission was over, they actually landed on the thing. 
+We have landed a rocket ship on an asteroid. It's not a big deal. 
+Now, the trouble with just sending a bomb out for this thing is that you don't have anything to push against in space, because there's no air. 
+A nuclear explosion is just as hot, but we don't really have anything big enough to melt a 22-mile long asteroid, or vaporize it, would be more like it. 
+But we can learn to land on these asteroids that have our name on them and put something like a small ion propulsion motor on it, which would gently, slowly, after a period of time, push it into a different trajectory, which, if we've done our math right, would keep it from hitting Earth. 
+This is just a matter of finding 'em, going there, and doing something about it. 
+I know your head is spinning from all this stuff. 
+Yikes! So many big threats! 
+The thing, I think, to remember, is September 11. 
+We don't want to get caught flat-footed again. 
+We know about this stuff. 
+Science has the power to predict the future in many cases now. 
+Knowledge is power. 
+The worst thing we can do is say, jeez, I got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid. (Laughter) That's a mistake that could literally cost us our future. 
+Thank you. 
+
+For the last year, everyone's been watching the same show, and I'm not talking about "" Game of Thrones, "" but a horrifying, real-life drama that's proved too fascinating to turn off. 
+It's a show produced by murderers and shared around the world via the Internet. 
+Their names have become familiar: James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning, Peter Kassig, Haruna Yukawa, Kenji Goto Jogo. 
+Their beheadings by the Islamic State were barbaric, but if we think they were archaic, from a remote, obscure age, then we're wrong. 
+They were uniquely modern, because the murderers acted knowing well that millions of people would tune in to watch. 
+The headlines called them savages and barbarians, because the image of one man overpowering another, killing him with a knife to the throat, conforms to our idea of ancient, primitive practices, the polar opposite of our urban, civilized ways. 
+We don't do things like that. 
+But that's the irony. 
+We think a beheading has nothing to do with us, even as we click on the screen to watch. 
+But it is to do with us. 
+The Islamic State beheadings are not ancient or remote. 
+They're a global, 21st century event, a 21st century event that takes place in our living rooms, at our desks, on our computer screens. 
+They're entirely dependent on the power of technology to connect us. 
+And whether we like it or not, everyone who watches is a part of the show. 
+And lots of people watch. 
+We don't know exactly how many. 
+Obviously, it's difficult to calculate. 
+But a poll taken in the UK, for example, in August 2014, estimated that 1.2 million people had watched the beheading of James Foley in the few days after it was released. 
+And that's just the first few days, and just Britain. 
+A similar poll taken in the United States in November 2014 found that nine percent of those surveyed had watched beheading videos, and a further 23 percent had watched the videos but had stopped just before the death was shown. 
+Nine percent may be a small minority of all the people who could watch, but it's still a very large crowd. 
+And of course that crowd is growing all the time, because every week, every month, more people will keep downloading and keep watching. 
+If we go back 11 years, before sites like YouTube and Facebook were born, it was a similar story. 
+When innocent civilians like Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, Paul Johnson, were beheaded, those videos were shown during the Iraq War. 
+Nick Berg's beheading quickly became one of the most searched for items on the Internet. 
+Within a day, it was the top search term across search engines like Google, Lycos, Yahoo. 
+In the week after Nick Berg's beheading, these were the top 10 search terms in the United States. 
+The Berg beheading video remained the most popular search term for a week, and it was the second most popular search term for the whole month of May, runner-up only to "" American Idol. "" The al-Qaeda-linked website that first showed Nick Berg's beheading had to close down within a couple of days due to overwhelming traffic to the site. 
+One Dutch website owner said that his daily viewing figures rose from 300,000 to 750,000 every time a beheading in Iraq was shown. 
+He told reporters 18 months later that it had been downloaded many millions of times, and that's just one website. 
+A similar pattern was seen again and again when videos of beheadings were released during the Iraq War. 
+Social media sites have made these images more accessible than ever before, but if we take another step back in history, we'll see that it was the camera that first created a new kind of crowd in our history of beheadings as public spectacle. 
+As soon as the camera appeared on the scene, a full lifetime ago on June 17, 1939, it had an immediate and unequivocal effect. 
+That day, the first film of a public beheading was created in France. 
+It was the execution, the guillotining, of a German serial killer, Eugen Weidmann, outside the prison Saint-Pierre in Versailles. 
+Weidmann was due to be executed at the crack of dawn, as was customary at the time, but his executioner was new to the job, and he'd underestimated how long it would take him to prepare. 
+So Weidmann was executed at 4: 30 in the morning, by which time on a June morning, there was enough light to take photographs, and a spectator in the crowd filmed the event, unbeknownst to the authorities. 
+Several still photographs were taken as well, and you can still watch the film online today and look at the photographs. 
+The crowd on the day of Weidmann's execution was called "" unruly "" and "" disgusting "" by the press, but that was nothing compared to the untold thousands of people who could now study the action over and over again, freeze-framed in every detail. 
+The camera may have made these scenes more accessible than ever before, but it's not just about the camera. 
+If we take a bigger leap back in history, we'll see that for as long as there have been public judicial executions and beheadings, there have been the crowds to see them. 
+In London, as late as the early 19th century, there might be four or five thousand people to see a standard hanging. 
+There could be 40,000 or 50,000 to see a famous criminal killed. 
+And a beheading, which was a rare event in England at the time, attracted even more. 
+In May 1820, five men known as the Cato Street Conspirators were executed in London for plotting to assassinate members of the British government. 
+They were hung and then decapitated. 
+It was a gruesome scene. 
+Each man's head was hacked off in turn and held up to the crowd. 
+And 100,000 people, that's 10,000 more than can fit into Wembley Stadium, had turned out to watch. 
+The streets were packed. 
+People had rented out windows and rooftops. 
+People had climbed onto carts and wagons in the street. 
+People climbed lamp posts. 
+People had been known to have died in the crush on popular execution days. 
+Evidence suggests that throughout our history of public beheadings and public executions, the vast majority of the people who come to see are either enthusiastic or, at best, unmoved. 
+Disgust has been comparatively rare, and even when people are disgusted and are horrified, it doesn't always stop them from coming out all the same to watch. 
+Perhaps the most striking example of the human ability to watch a beheading and remain unmoved and even be disappointed was the introduction in France in 1792 of the guillotine, that famous decapitation machine. 
+To us in the 21st century, the guillotine may seem like a monstrous contraption, but to the first crowds who saw it, it was actually a disappointment. 
+They were used to seeing long, drawn-out, torturous executions on the scaffold, where people were mutilated and burned and pulled apart slowly. 
+To them, watching the guillotine in action, it was so quick, there was nothing to see. 
+The blade fell, the head fell into a basket, out of sight immediately, and they called out, "Give me back my gallows, give me back my wooden gallows." 
+The end of torturous public judicial executions in Europe and America was partly to do with being more humane towards the criminal, but it was also partly because the crowd obstinately refused to behave in the way that they should. 
+All too often, execution day was more like a carnival than a solemn ceremony. 
+Today, a public judicial execution in Europe or America is unthinkable, but there are other scenarios that should make us cautious about thinking that things are different now and we don't behave like that anymore. 
+Take, for example, the incidents of suicide baiting. 
+This is when a crowd gathers to watch a person who has climbed to the top of a public building in order to kill themselves, and people in the crowd shout and jeer, "Get on with it! Go on and jump!" 
+This is a well-recognized phenomenon. 
+One paper in 1981 found that in 10 out of 21 threatened suicide attempts, there was incidents of suicide baiting and jeering from a crowd. 
+And there have been incidents reported in the press this year. 
+This was a very widely reported incident in Telford and Shropshire in March this year. 
+And when it happens today, people take photographs and they take videos on their phones and they post those videos online. 
+When it comes to brutal murderers who post their beheading videos, the Internet has created a new kind of crowd. 
+Today, the action takes place in a distant time and place, which gives the viewer a sense of detachment from what's happening, a sense of separation. 
+We are also offered an unprecedented sense of intimacy. 
+Today, we are all offered front row seats. 
+We can all watch in private, in our own time and space, and no one need ever know that we've clicked on the screen to watch. 
+This sense of separation — from other people, from the event itself — seems to be key to understanding our ability to watch, and there are several ways in which the Internet creates a sense of detachment that seems to erode individual moral responsibility. 
+Our activities online are often contrasted with real life, as though the things we do online are somehow less real. 
+We feel less accountable for our actions when we interact online. 
+There's a sense of anonymity, a sense of invisibility, so we feel less accountable for our behavior. 
+The Internet also makes it far easier to stumble upon things inadvertently, things that we would usually avoid in everyday life. 
+Today, a video can start playing before you even know what you're watching. 
+Or you may be tempted to look at material that you wouldn't look at in everyday life or you wouldn't look at if you were with other people at the time. 
+And when the action is pre-recorded and takes place in a distant time and space, watching seems like a passive activity. 
+There's nothing I can do about it now. 
+All these things make it easier as an Internet user for us to give in to our sense of curiosity about death, to push our personal boundaries, to test our sense of shock, to explore our sense of shock. 
+But we're not passive when we watch. 
+On the contrary, we're fulfilling the murderer's desire to be seen. 
+When the victim of a decapitation is bound and defenseless, he or she essentially becomes a pawn in their killer's show. 
+Unlike a trophy head that's taken in battle, that represents the luck and skill it takes to win a fight, when a beheading is staged, when it's essentially a piece of theater, the power comes from the reception the killer receives as he performs. 
+In other words, watching is very much part of the event. 
+The event no longer takes place in a single location at a certain point in time as it used to and as it may still appear to. 
+Now the event is stretched out in time and place, and everyone who watches plays their part. 
+We should stop watching, but we know we won't. 
+History tells us we won't, and the killers know it too. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Let me get this back. Thank you. 
+Let's move here. While they install for the next performance, I want to ask you the question that probably many here have, which is how did you get interested in this topic? 
+Frances Larson: I used to work at a museum called the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which was famous for its display of shrunken heads from South America. 
+People used to say, "" Oh, the shrunken head museum, the shrunken head museum! "" And at the time, I was working on the history of scientific collections of skulls. 
+I was working on the cranial collections, and it just struck me as ironic that here were people coming to see this gory, primitive, savage culture that they were almost fantasizing about and creating without really understanding what they were seeing, and all the while these vast — I mean hundreds of thousands of skulls in our museums, all across Europe and the States — were kind of upholding this Enlightenment pursuit of scientific rationality. 
+So I wanted to kind of twist it round and say, "" Let's look at us. "" We're looking through the glass case at these shrunken heads. 
+Let's look at our own history and our own cultural fascination with these things. 
+BG: Thank you for sharing that. 
+FL: Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And so at the end of the day, I say, "You know what? I guess you're right: P." 
+There's the audience in rhetorical arguments. 
+
+I'd like to talk to you today about a whole new way to think about sexual activity and sexuality education, by comparison. 
+If you talk to someone today in America about sexual activity, you'll find pretty soon you're not just talking about sexual activity. 
+You're also talking about baseball. 
+Because baseball is the dominant cultural metaphor that Americans use to think about and talk about sexual activity, and we know that because there's all this language in English that seems to be talking about baseball but that's really talking about sexual activity. 
+So, for example, you can be a pitcher or a catcher, and that corresponds to whether you perform a sexual act or receive a sexual act. 
+Of course, there are the bases, which refer to specific sexual activities that happen in a very specific order, ultimately resulting in scoring a run or hitting a home run, which is usually having vaginal intercourse to the point of orgasm, at least for the guy. 
+(Laughter) You can strike out, which means you don't get to have any sexual activity. 
+And if you're a benchwarmer, you might be a virgin or somebody who for whatever reason isn't in the game, maybe because of your age or because of your ability or because of your skillset. 
+A bat's a penis, and a nappy dugout is a vulva, or a vagina. 
+A glove or a catcher's mitt is a condom. 
+A switch-hitter is a bisexual person, and we gay and lesbian folks play for the other team. 
+And then there's this one: "if there's grass on the field, play ball." 
+And that usually refers to if a young person, specifically often a young woman, is old enough to have pubic hair, she's old enough to have sex with. 
+This baseball model is incredibly problematic. 
+It's sexist. It's heterosexist. 
+It's competitive. It's goal-directed. 
+And it can't result in healthy sexuality developing in young people or in adults. 
+So we need a new model. 
+I'm here today to offer you that new model. 
+And it's based on pizza. 
+Now pizza is something that is universally understood and that most people associate with a positive experience. 
+So let's do this. 
+Let's take baseball and pizza and compare it when talking about three aspects of sexual activity: the trigger for sexual activity, what happens during sexual activity, and the expected outcome of sexual activity. 
+So when do you play baseball? 
+You play baseball when it's baseball season and when there's a game on the schedule. 
+It's not exactly your choice. 
+So if it's prom night or a wedding night or at a party or if our parents aren't home, hey, it's just batter up. 
+Can you imagine saying to your coach, "" Uh, I'm not really feeling it today, I think I'll sit this game out. "" That's just not the way it happens. 
+And when you get together to play baseball, immediately you're with two opposing teams, one playing offense, one playing defense, somebody's trying to move deeper into the field. 
+That's usually a sign to the boy. 
+Somebody's trying to defend people moving into the field. 
+That's often given to the girl. 
+It's competitive. 
+We're not playing with each other. 
+We're playing against each other. 
+And when you show up to play baseball, nobody needs to talk about what we're going to do or how this baseball game might be good for us. 
+Everybody knows the rules. 
+But when do you have pizza? 
+Well, you have pizza when you're hungry for pizza. 
+It starts with an internal sense, an internal desire, or a need. 
+"Huh. I could go for some pizza." 
+(Laughter) And because it's an internal desire, we actually have some sense of control over that. 
+I could decide that I'm hungry but know that it's not a great time to eat. 
+And then when we get together with someone for pizza, we're not competing with them, we're looking for an experience that both of us will share that's satisfying for both of us, and when you get together for pizza with somebody, what's the first thing you do? 
+You talk about it. 
+You talk about what you want. 
+You talk about what you like. 
+You may even negotiate it. 
+"" How do you feel about pepperoni? "" (Laughter) "Not so much, I'm kind of a mushroom guy myself." 
+"Well, maybe we can go half and half." 
+And even if you've had pizza with somebody for a very long time, don't you still say things like, "Should we get the usual?" 
+(Laughter) "Or maybe something a little more adventurous?" 
+Okay, so when you're playing baseball, so if we talk about during sexual activity, when you're playing baseball, you're just supposed to round the bases in the proper order one at a time. 
+You can't hit the ball and run to right field. 
+And you also can't get to second base and say, "I like it here. I'm going to stay here." 
+No. 
+And also, of course, with baseball, there's, like, the specific equipment and a specific skill set. 
+Okay, but what about pizza? 
+When we're trying to figure out what's good for pizza, isn't it all about what's our pleasure? 
+There are a million different kinds of pizza. 
+There's a million different toppings. 
+And none of them are wrong. They're different. 
+And in this case, difference is good, because that's going to increase the chance that we're having a satisfying experience. 
+And lastly, what's the expected outcome of baseball? 
+Well, in baseball, you play to win. 
+You score as many runs as you can. 
+There's always a winner in baseball, and that means there's always a loser in baseball. 
+But what about pizza? 
+Well, in pizza, we're not really — there's no winning. How do you win pizza? 
+You don't. But you do look for, "Are we satisfied?" 
+And sometimes that can be different amounts over different times or with different people or on different days. 
+And we get to decide when we feel satisfied. 
+If we're still hungry, we might have some more. 
+If you eat too much, though, you just feel gross. 
+(Laughter) So what if we could take this pizza model and overlay it on top of sexuality education? 
+A lot of sexuality education that happens today is so influenced by the baseball model, and it sets up education that can't help but produce unhealthy sexuality in young people. 
+And those young people become older people. 
+But if we could create sexuality education that was more like pizza, we could create education that invites people to think about their own desires, to make deliberate decisions about what they want, to talk about it with their partners, and to ultimately look for not some external outcome but for what feels satisfying, and we get to decide that. 
+You may have noticed in the baseball and pizza comparison, under the baseball, it's all commands. 
+They're all exclamation points. 
+But under the pizza model, they're questions. 
+And who gets to answer those questions? 
+So remember, when we're thinking about sexuality education and sexual activity, baseball, you're out. 
+Pizza is the way to think about healthy, satisfying sexual activity, and good, comprehensive sexuality education. 
+Thank you very much for your time. 
+(Applause) 
+
+On the path that American children travel to adulthood, two institutions oversee the journey. 
+The first is the one we hear a lot about: college. 
+Some of you may remember the excitement that you felt when you first set off for college. 
+Some of you may be in college right now and you're feeling this excitement at this very moment. 
+It's expensive; it leaves young people in debt. 
+But all in all, it's a pretty good path. 
+Young people emerge from college with pride and with great friends and with a lot of knowledge about the world. 
+And perhaps most importantly, a better chance in the labor market than they had before they got there. 
+Today I want to talk about the second institution overseeing the journey from childhood to adulthood in the United States. 
+And that institution is prison. 
+Young people on this journey are meeting with probation officers instead of with teachers. 
+They're going to court dates instead of to class. 
+Their junior year abroad is instead a trip to a state correctional facility. 
+And they're emerging from their 20s not with degrees in business and English, but with criminal records. 
+This institution is also costing us a lot, about 40,000 dollars a year to send a young person to prison in New Jersey. 
+But here, taxpayers are footing the bill and what kids are getting is a cold prison cell and a permanent mark against them when they come home and apply for work. 
+There are more and more kids on this journey to adulthood than ever before in the United States and that's because in the past 40 years, our incarceration rate has grown by 700 percent. 
+I have one slide for this talk. 
+Here it is. 
+Here's our incarceration rate, about 716 people per 100,000 in the population. 
+What's more, it's poor kids that we're sending to prison, too many drawn from African-American and Latino communities so that prison now stands firmly between the young people trying to make it and the fulfillment of the American Dream. 
+The problem's actually a bit worse than this' cause we're not just sending poor kids to prison, we're saddling poor kids with court fees, with probation and parole restrictions, with low-level warrants, we're asking them to live in halfway houses and on house arrest, and we're asking them to negotiate a police force that is entering poor communities of color, not for the purposes of promoting public safety, but to make arrest counts, to line city coffers. 
+This is the hidden underside to our historic experiment in punishment: young people worried that at any moment, they will be stopped, searched and seized. 
+Not just in the streets, but in their homes, at school and at work. 
+I got interested in this other path to adulthood when I was myself a college student attending the University of Pennsylvania in the early 2000s. 
+Penn sits within a historic African-American neighborhood. 
+So you've got these two parallel journeys going on simultaneously: the kids attending this elite, private university, and the kids from the adjacent neighborhood, some of whom are making it to college, and many of whom are being shipped to prison. 
+In my sophomore year, I started tutoring a young woman who was in high school who lived about 10 minutes away from the university. 
+Soon, her cousin came home from a juvenile detention center. 
+He was 15, a freshman in high school. 
+I began to get to know him and his friends and family, and I asked him what he thought about me writing about his life for my senior thesis in college. 
+This senior thesis became a dissertation at Princeton and now a book. 
+By the end of my sophomore year, I moved into the neighborhood and I spent the next six years trying to understand what young people were facing as they came of age. 
+The first week I spent in this neighborhood, I saw two boys, five and seven years old, play this game of chase, where the older boy ran after the other boy. 
+He played the cop. 
+When the cop caught up to the younger boy, he pushed him down, handcuffed him with imaginary handcuffs, took a quarter out of the other child's pocket, saying, "" I'm seizing that. "" He asked the child if he was carrying any drugs or if he had a warrant. 
+Many times, I saw this game repeated, sometimes children would simply give up running, and stick their bodies flat against the ground with their hands above their heads, or flat up against a wall. 
+Children would yell at each other, "" I'm going to lock you up, I'm going to lock you up and you're never coming home! "" Once I saw a six-year-old child pull another child's pants down and try to do a cavity search. 
+In the first 18 months that I lived in this neighborhood, I wrote down every time I saw any contact between police and people that were my neighbors. 
+So in the first 18 months, I watched the police stop pedestrians or people in cars, search people, run people's names, chase people through the streets, pull people in for questioning, or make an arrest every single day, with five exceptions. 
+Fifty-two times, I watched the police break down doors, chase people through houses or make an arrest of someone in their home. 
+Fourteen times in this first year and a half, I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on or beat young men after they had caught them. 
+Bit by bit, I got to know two brothers, Chuck and Tim. 
+Chuck was 18 when we met, a senior in high school. 
+He was playing on the basketball team and making C's and B's. 
+His younger brother, Tim, was 10. 
+And Tim loved Chuck; he followed him around a lot, looked to Chuck to be a mentor. 
+They lived with their mom and grandfather in a two-story row home with a front lawn and a back porch. 
+Their mom was struggling with addiction all while the boys were growing up. 
+She never really was able to hold down a job for very long. 
+It was their grandfather's pension that supported the family, not really enough to pay for food and clothes and school supplies for growing boys. 
+The family was really struggling. 
+That winter, a kid in the schoolyard called Chuck's mom a crack whore. 
+Chuck pushed the kid's face into the snow and the school cops charged him with aggravated assault. 
+But anyway, since Chuck was 18, this agg. assault case sent him to adult county jail on State Road in northeast Philadelphia, where he sat, unable to pay the bail — he couldn't afford it — while the trial dates dragged on and on and on through almost his entire senior year. 
+Finally, near the end of this season, the judge on this assault case threw out most of the charges and Chuck came home with only a few hundred dollars' worth of court fees hanging over his head. 
+Tim was pretty happy that day. 
+The next fall, Chuck tried to re-enroll as a senior, but the school secretary told him that he was then 19 and too old to be readmitted. 
+Then the judge on his assault case issued him a warrant for his arrest because he couldn't pay the 225 dollars in court fees that came due a few weeks after the case ended. 
+Then he was a high school dropout living on the run. 
+Tim's first arrest came later that year after he turned 11. 
+Chuck had managed to get his warrant lifted and he was on a payment plan for the court fees and he was driving Tim to school in his girlfriend's car. 
+So a cop pulls them over, runs the car, and the car comes up as stolen in California. 
+Chuck had no idea where in the history of this car it had been stolen. 
+His girlfriend's uncle bought it from a used car auction in northeast Philly. 
+But anyway, the cops down at the precinct charged Chuck with receiving stolen property. 
+And then a juvenile judge, a few days later, charged Tim, age 11, with accessory to receiving a stolen property and then he was placed on three years of probation. 
+With this probation sentence hanging over his head, Chuck sat his little brother down and began teaching him how to run from the police. 
+They would sit side by side on their back porch looking out into the shared alleyway and Chuck would coach Tim how to spot undercover cars, how to negotiate a late-night police raid, how and where to hide. 
+I want you to imagine for a second what Chuck and Tim's lives would be like if they were living in a neighborhood where kids were going to college, not prison. 
+A neighborhood like the one I got to grow up in. 
+Okay, you might say. 
+But Chuck and Tim, kids like them, they're committing crimes! 
+Don't they deserve to be in prison? 
+Don't they deserve to be living in fear of arrest? 
+Well, my answer would be no. 
+They don't. 
+And certainly not for the same things that other young people with more privilege are doing with impunity. 
+If Chuck had gone to my high school, that schoolyard fight would have ended there, as a schoolyard fight. 
+It never would have become an aggravated assault case. 
+Not a single kid that I went to college with has a criminal record right now. 
+Not a single one. 
+But can you imagine how many might have if the police had stopped those kids and searched their pockets for drugs as they walked to class? 
+Or had raided their frat parties in the middle of the night? 
+Okay, you might say. 
+But doesn't this high incarceration rate partly account for our really low crime rate? 
+Crime is down. That's a good thing. 
+It dropped precipitously in the '90s and through the 2000s. 
+But according to a committee of academics convened by the National Academy of Sciences last year, the relationship between our historically high incarceration rates and our low crime rate is pretty shaky. 
+It turns out that the crime rate goes up and down irrespective of how many young people we send to prison. 
+We tend to think about justice in a pretty narrow way: good and bad, innocent and guilty. 
+Injustice is about being wrongfully convicted. 
+There are innocent and guilty people, there are victims and there are perpetrators. 
+Maybe we could think a little bit more broadly than that. 
+Right now, we're asking kids who live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, who have the least amount of family resources, who are attending the country's worst schools, who are facing the toughest time in the labor market, who are living in neighborhoods where violence is an everyday problem, we're asking these kids to walk the thinnest possible line — to basically never do anything wrong. 
+Why are we not providing support to young kids facing these challenges? 
+Why are we offering only handcuffs, jail time and this fugitive existence? 
+Can we imagine something better? 
+Can we imagine a criminal justice system that prioritizes recovery, prevention, civic inclusion, rather than punishment? 
+(Applause) A criminal justice system that acknowledges the legacy of exclusion that poor people of color in the U.S. have faced and that does not promote and perpetuate those exclusions. (Applause) 
+And finally, a criminal justice system that believes in black young people, rather than treating black young people as the enemy to be rounded up. (Applause) 
+The good news is that we already are. 
+A few years ago, Michelle Alexander wrote "" The New Jim Crow, "" which got Americans to see incarceration as a civil rights issue of historic proportions in a way they had not seen it before. 
+President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have come out very strongly on sentencing reform, on the need to address racial disparity in incarceration. 
+We're seeing cities and states decriminalize possession of marijuana. 
+New York, New Jersey and California have been dropping their prison populations, closing prisons, while also seeing a big drop in crime. 
+Texas has gotten into the game now, also closing prisons, investing in education. 
+This curious coalition is building from the right and the left, made up of former prisoners and fiscal conservatives, of civil rights activists and libertarians, of young people taking to the streets to protest police violence against unarmed black teenagers, and older, wealthier people — some of you are here in the audience — pumping big money into decarceration initiatives In a deeply divided Congress, the work of reforming our criminal justice system is just about the only thing that the right and the left are coming together on. 
+I did not think I would see this political moment in my lifetime. 
+I think many of the people who have been working tirelessly to write about the causes and consequences of our historically high incarceration rates did not think we would see this moment in our lifetime. 
+How much can we change? 
+I want to end with a call to young people, the young people attending college and the young people struggling to stay out of prison or to make it through prison and return home. 
+It may seem like these paths to adulthood are worlds apart, but the young people participating in these two institutions conveying us to adulthood, they have one thing in common: Both can be leaders in the work of reforming our criminal justice system. 
+Young people have always been leaders in the fight for equal rights, the fight for more people to be granted dignity and a fighting chance at freedom. 
+The mission for the generation of young people coming of age in this, a sea-change moment, potentially, is to end mass incarceration and build a new criminal justice system, emphasis on the word justice. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Living with a physical disability isn't easy anywhere in the world, but if you live in a country like the United States, there's certain appurtenances available to you that do make life easier. 
+So if you're in a building, you can take an elevator. 
+If you're crossing the street, you have sidewalk cutouts. 
+And if you have to travel some distance farther than you can do under your own power, there's accessible vehicles, and if you can't afford one of those, there's accessible public transportation. 
+But in the developing world, things are quite different. 
+There's 40 million people who need a wheelchair but don't have one, and the majority of these people live in rural areas, where the only connections to community, to employment, to education, are by traveling long distances on rough terrain often under their own power. 
+And the devices usually available to these people are not made for that context, break down quickly, and are hard to repair. 
+I started looking at wheelchairs in developing countries in 2005, when I spent the summer assessing the state of technology in Tanzania, and I talked to wheelchair users, wheelchair manufacturers, disability groups, and what stood out to me is that there wasn't a device available that was designed for rural areas, that could go fast and efficiently on many types of terrain. 
+So being a mechanical engineer, being at MIT and having lots of resources available to me, I thought I'd try to do something about it. 
+Now when you're talking about trying to travel long distances on rough terrain, I immediately thought of a mountain bike, and a mountain bike's good at doing this because it has a gear train, and you can shift to a low gear if you have to climb a hill or go through mud or sand and you get a lot of torque but a low speed. 
+And if you want to go faster, say on pavement, you can shift to a high gear, and you get less torque, but higher speeds. 
+But these are two products available in the U.S. that would be difficult to transfer into developing countries because they're much, much too expensive. 
+And the context I'm talking about is where you need to have a product that is less than 200 dollars. 
+And this ideal product would also be able to go about five kilometers a day so you could get to your job, get to school, and do it on many, many different types of terrain. 
+But when you get home or want to go indoors at your work, it's got to be small enough and maneuverable enough to use inside. 
+And furthermore, if you want it to last a long time out in rural areas, it has to be repairable using the local tools, materials and knowledge in those contexts. 
+So the real crux of the problem here is, how do you make a system that's a simple device but gives you a large mechanical advantage? 
+How do you make a mountain bike for your arms that doesn't have the mountain bike cost and complexity? 
+So as is the case with simple solutions, oftentimes the answer is right in front of your face, and for us it was levers. 
+And that moment of inspiration, that key invention moment, was when I was sitting in front of my design notebook and I started thinking about somebody grabbing a lever, and if they grab near the end of the lever, they can get an effectively long lever and produce a lot of torque as they push back and forth, and effectively get a low gear. 
+And as they slide their hand down the lever, they can push with a smaller effective lever length, but push through a bigger angle every stroke, which makes a faster rotational speed, and gives you an effective high gear. 
+So what's exciting about this system is that it's really, really mechanically simple, and you could make it using technology that's been around for hundreds of years. 
+So seeing this in practice, this is the Leveraged Freedom Chair that, after a few years of development, we're now going into production with, and this is a full-time wheelchair user — he's paralyzed — in Guatemala, and you see he's able to traverse pretty rough terrain. 
+Again, the key innovation of this technology is that when he wants to go fast, he just grabs the levers near the pivots and goes through a big angle every stroke, and as the going gets tougher, he just slides his hands up the levers, creates more torque, and kind of bench-presses his way out of trouble through the rough terrain. 
+Now the big, important point here is that the person is the complex machine in this system. 
+It's the person that's sliding his hands up and down the levers, so the mechanism itself can be very simple and composed of bicycle parts you can get anywhere in the world. 
+Because those bicycle parts are so ubiquitously available, they're super-cheap. 
+They're made by the gazillions in China and India, and we can source them anywhere in the world, build the chair anywhere, and most importantly repair it, even out in a village with a local bicycle mechanic who has local tools, knowledge and parts available. 
+Now, when you want to use the LFC indoors, all you have to do is pull the levers out of the drivetrain, stow them in the frame, and it converts into a normal wheelchair that you can use just like any other normal wheelchair, and we sized it like a normal wheelchair, so it's narrow enough to fit through a standard doorway, it's low enough to fit under a table, and it's small and maneuverable enough to fit in a bathroom and this is important so the user can get up close to a toilet, and be able to transfer off 
+just like he could in a normal wheelchair. 
+Now, there's three important points that I want to stress that I think really hit home in this project. 
+The first is that this product works well because we were effectively able to combine rigorous engineering science and analysis with user-centered design focused on the social and usage and economic factors important to wheelchair users in the developing countries. 
+So I'm an academic at MIT, and I'm a mechanical engineer, so I can do things like look at the type of terrain you want to travel on, and figure out how much resistance it should impose, look at the parts we have available and mix and match them to figure out what sort of gear trains we can use, and then look at the power and force you can get out of your upper body to analyze how fast you should be able to go in this chair as you put your arms up and down the levers. 
+So as a wet-behind-the-ears student, excited, our team made a prototype, brought that prototype to Tanzania, Kenya and Vietnam in 2008, and found it was terrible because we didn't get enough input from users. 
+So because we tested it with wheelchair users, with wheelchair manufacturers, we got that feedback from them, not just articulating their problems, but articulating their solutions, and worked together to go back to the drawing board and make a new design, which we brought back to East Africa in '09 that worked a lot better than a normal wheelchair on rough terrain, but it still didn't work well indoors because it was too big, it was heavy, it was hard to move around, so again with that user feedback, we went back to the drawing board, came up with a better design, 20 pounds lighter, 
+as narrow as a regular wheelchair, tested that in a field trial in Guatemala, and that advanced the product to the point where we have now that it's going into production. 
+Now also being engineering scientists, we were able to quantify the performance benefits of the Leveraged Freedom Chair, so here are some shots of our trial in Guatemala where we tested the LFC on village terrain, and tested people's biomechanical outputs, their oxygen consumption, how fast they go, how much power they're putting out, both in their regular wheelchairs and using the LFC, and we found that the LFC is about 80 percent faster going on these terrains than a normal wheelchair. 
+It's also about 40 percent more efficient than a regular wheelchair, and because of the mechanical advantage you get from the levers, you can produce 50 percent higher torque and really muscle your way through the really, really rough terrain. 
+Now the second lesson that we learned in this is that the constraints on this design really push the innovation, because we had to hit such a low price point, because we had to make a device that could travel on many, many types of terrain but still be usable indoors, and be simple enough to repair, we ended up with a fundamentally new product, a new product that is an innovation in a space that really hasn't changed in a hundred years. 
+And these are all merits that are not just good in the developing world. 
+So we teamed up with Continuum, a local product design firm here in Boston to make the high-end version, the developed world version, that we'll probably sell primarily in the U.S. and Europe, but to higher-income buyers. 
+And the final point I want to make is that I think this project worked well because we engaged all the stakeholders that buy into this project and are important to consider in bringing the technology from inception of an idea through innovation, validation, commercialization and dissemination, and that cycle has to start and end with end users. 
+These are the people that define the requirements of the technology, and these are the people that have to give the thumbs-up at the end, and say, "" Yeah, it actually works. It meets our needs. "" So people like me in the academic space, we can do things like innovate and analyze and test, create data and make bench-level prototypes, but how do you get that bench-level prototype to commercialization? 
+So we need gap-fillers like Continuum that can work on commercializing, and we started a whole NGO to bring our chair to market — Global Research Innovation Technology — and then we also teamed up with a big manufacturer in India, Pinnacle Industries, that's tooled up now to make 500 chairs a month and will make the first batch of 200 next month, which will be delivered in India. 
+And then finally, to get this out to the people in scale, we teamed up with the largest disability organization in the world, Jaipur Foot. 
+Now what's powerful about this model is when you bring together all these stakeholders that represent each link in the chain from inception of an idea all the way to implementation in the field, that's where the magic happens. 
+That's where you can take a guy like me, an academic, but analyze and test and create a new technology and quantitatively determine how much better the performance is. 
+You can connect with stakeholders like the manufacturers and talk with them face-to-face and leverage their local knowledge of manufacturing practices and their clients and combine that knowledge with our engineering knowledge to create something greater than either of us could have done alone. 
+And then you can also engage the end user in the design process, and not just ask him what he needs, but ask him how he thinks it can be achieved. 
+And this picture was taken in India in our last field trial, where we had a 90-percent adoption rate where people switched to using our Leveraged Freedom Chair over their normal wheelchair, and this picture specifically is of Ashok, and Ashok had a spinal injury when he fell out of a tree, and he had been working at a tailor, but once he was injured he wasn't able to transport himself from his house over a kilometer to his shop in his normal wheelchair. 
+The road was too rough. 
+But the day after he got an LFC, he hopped in it, rode that kilometer, opened up his shop and soon after landed a contract to make school uniforms and started making money, started providing for his family again. 
+I rested for a day at home. 
+The next day I went to my shop. 
+Now everything is back to normal. 
+Amos Winter: And thank you very much for having me today. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Well, that's kind of an obvious statement up there. 
+I started with that sentence about 12 years ago, and I started in the context of developing countries, but you're sitting here from every corner of the world. 
+So if you think of a map of your country, I think you'll realize that for every country on Earth, you could draw little circles to say, "These are places where good teachers won't go." 
+On top of that, those are the places from where trouble comes. 
+So we have an ironic problem — good teachers don't want to go to just those places where they're needed the most. 
+I started in 1999 to try and address this problem with an experiment, which was a very simple experiment in New Delhi. 
+I basically embedded a computer into a wall of a slum in New Delhi. 
+The children barely went to school, they didn't know any English — they'd never seen a computer before, and they didn't know what the internet was. 
+I connected high speed internet to it — it's about three feet off the ground — turned it on and left it there. 
+After this, we noticed a couple of interesting things, which you'll see. 
+But I repeated this all over India and then through a large part of the world and noticed that children will learn to do what they want to learn to do. 
+This is the first experiment that we did — eight year-old boy on your right teaching his student, a six year-old girl, and he was teaching her how to browse. 
+This boy here in the middle of central India — this is in a Rajasthan village, where the children recorded their own music and then played it back to each other and in the process, they've enjoyed themselves thoroughly. 
+They did all of this in four hours after seeing the computer for the first time. 
+In another South Indian village, these boys here had assembled a video camera and were trying to take the photograph of a bumble bee. 
+They downloaded it from Disney.com, or one of these websites, 14 days after putting the computer in their village. 
+So at the end of it, we concluded that groups of children can learn to use computers and the internet on their own, irrespective of who or where they were. 
+At that point, I became a little more ambitious and decided to see what else could children do with a computer. 
+We started off with an experiment in Hyderabad, India, where I gave a group of children — they spoke English with a very strong Telugu accent. 
+I gave them a computer with a speech-to-text interface, which you now get free with Windows, and asked them to speak into it. 
+So when they spoke into it, the computer typed out gibberish, so they said, "" Well, it doesn't understand anything of what we are saying. "" So I said, "" Yeah, I'll leave it here for two months. 
+Make yourself understood to the computer. "" So the children said, "" How do we do that. "" And I said, "I don't know, actually." 
+(Laughter) And I left. (Laughter) 
+Two months later — and this is now documented in the Information Technology for International Development journal — that accents had changed and were remarkably close to the neutral British accent in which I had trained the speech-to-text synthesizer. 
+In other words, they were all speaking like James Tooley. 
+(Laughter) So they could do that on their own. 
+After that, I started to experiment with various other things that they might learn to do on their own. 
+I got an interesting phone call once from Columbo, from the late Arthur C. Clarke, who said, "" I want to see what's going on. "" And he couldn't travel, so I went over there. 
+He said two interesting things, "A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be." 
+(Laughter) The second thing he said was that, "" If children have interest, then education happens. "" And I was doing that in the field, so every time I would watch it and think of him. 
+(Video) Arthur C. Clarke: And they can definitely help people, because children quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them. 
+And when you've got interest, then you have education. 
+Sugata Mitra: I took the experiment to South Africa. 
+This is a 15 year-old boy. 
+(Video) Boy:... just mention, I play games like animals, and I listen to music. 
+SM: And I asked him, "" Do you send emails? "" And he said, "" Yes, and they hop across the ocean. "" This is in Cambodia, rural Cambodia — a fairly silly arithmetic game, which no child would play inside the classroom or at home. 
+They would, you know, throw it back at you. 
+They'd say, "" This is very boring. "" If you leave it on the pavement and if all the adults go away, then they will show off with each other about what they can do. 
+This is what these children are doing. 
+They are trying to multiply, I think. 
+And all over India, at the end of about two years, children were beginning to Google their homework. 
+As a result, the teachers reported tremendous improvements in their English — (Laughter) rapid improvement and all sorts of things. 
+They said, "" They have become really deep thinkers and so on and so forth. 
+(Laughter) And indeed they had. 
+I mean, if there's stuff on Google, why would you need to stuff it into your head? 
+So at the end of the next four years, I decided that groups of children can navigate the internet to achieve educational objectives on their own. 
+At that time, a large amount of money had come into Newcastle University to improve schooling in India. 
+So Newcastle gave me a call. I said, "" I'll do it from Delhi. "" They said, "" There's no way you're going to handle a million pounds-worth of University money sitting in Delhi. "" So in 2006, I bought myself a heavy overcoat and moved to Newcastle. 
+I wanted to test the limits of the system. 
+The first experiment I did out of Newcastle was actually done in India. 
+And I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-old children in a South Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own? 
+And I thought, I'll test them, they'll get a zero — I'll give the materials, I'll come back and test them — they get another zero, I'll go back and say, "" Yes, we need teachers for certain things. "" I called in 26 children. 
+They all came in there, and I told them that there's some really difficult stuff on this computer. 
+I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't understand anything. 
+It's all in English, and I'm going. 
+(Laughter) So I left them with it. 
+I came back after two months, and the 26 children marched in looking very, very quiet. 
+I said, "" Well, did you look at any of the stuff? "" They said, "" Yes, we did. "" "Did you understand anything?" "No, nothing." 
+So I said, "" Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing? "" They said, "" We look at it every day. "" So I said, "" For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand? "" So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, "" Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else. "" (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) It took me three years to publish that. 
+It's just been published in the British Journal of Educational Technology. 
+One of the referees who refereed the paper said, "It's too good to be true," which was not very nice. 
+Well, one of the girls had taught herself to become the teacher. 
+And then that's her over there. 
+Remember, they don't study English. 
+I edited out the last bit when I asked, "" Where is the neuron? "" and she says, "" The neuron? The neuron, "" and then she looked and did this. 
+Whatever the expression, it was not very nice. 
+So their scores had gone up from zero to 30 percent, which is an educational impossibility under the circumstances. 
+But 30 percent is not a pass. 
+So I found that they had a friend, a local accountant, a young girl, and they played football with her. 
+I asked that girl, "" Would you teach them enough biotechnology to pass? "" And she said, "" How would I do that? I don't know the subject. "" I said, "" No, use the method of the grandmother. "" She said, "" What's that? "" I said, "" Well, what you've got to do is stand behind them and admire them all the time. 
+Just say to them, 'That's cool. That's fantastic. 
+What is that? Can you do that again? Can you show me some more? '"" She did that for two months. 
+The scores went up to 50, which is what the posh schools of New Delhi, with a trained biotechnology teacher were getting. 
+So I came back to Newcastle with these results and decided that there was something happening here that definitely was getting very serious. 
+So, having experimented in all sorts of remote places, I came to the most remote place that I could think of. 
+(Laughter) Approximately 5,000 miles from Delhi is the little town of Gateshead. 
+In Gateshead, I took 32 children and I started to fine-tune the method. 
+I made them into groups of four. 
+I said, "" You make your own groups of four. 
+Each group of four can use one computer and not four computers. "" Remember, from the Hole in the Wall. 
+"" You can exchange groups. 
+You can walk across to another group, if you don't like your group, etc. 
+You can go to another group, peer over their shoulders, see what they're doing, come back to you own group and claim it as your own work. "" And I explained to them that, you know, a lot of scientific research is done using that method. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) The children enthusiastically got after me and said, "Now, what do you want us to do?" 
+I gave them six GCSE questions. 
+The first group — the best one — solved everything in 20 minutes. 
+The worst, in 45. 
+They used everything that they knew — news groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc. 
+The teachers said, "" Is this deep learning? "" I said, "" Well, let's try it. 
+I'll come back after two months. 
+We'll give them a paper test — no computers, no talking to each other, etc. "" The average score when I'd done it with the computers and the groups was 76 percent. 
+When I did the experiment, when I did the test, after two months, the score was 76 percent. 
+There was photographic recall inside the children, I suspect because they're discussing with each other. 
+A single child in front of a single computer will not do that. 
+I have further results, which are almost unbelievable, of scores which go up with time. 
+Because their teachers say that after the session is over, the children continue to Google further. 
+Here in Britain, I put out a call for British grandmothers, after my Kuppam experiment. 
+Well, you know, they're very vigorous people, British grandmothers. 
+200 of them volunteered immediately. 
+(Laughter) The deal was that they would give me one hour of broadband time, sitting in their homes, one day in a week. 
+So they did that, and over the last two years, over 600 hours of instruction has happened over Skype, using what my students call the granny cloud. 
+The granny cloud sits over there. 
+I can beam them to whichever school I want to. 
+(Video) Teacher: You can't catch me. 
+You say it. 
+You can't catch me. 
+Children: You can't catch me. 
+Teacher: I'm the gingerbread man. 
+Children: I'm the gingerbread man. 
+Teacher: Well done. Very good... 
+SM: Back at Gateshead, a 10-year-old girl gets into the heart of Hinduism in 15 minutes. 
+You know, stuff which I don't know anything about. 
+Two children watch a TEDTalk. 
+They wanted to be footballers before. 
+After watching eight TEDTalks, he wants to become Leonardo da Vinci. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) It's pretty simple stuff. 
+This is what I'm building now — they're called SOLEs: Self Organized Learning Environments. 
+The furniture is designed so that children can sit in front of big, powerful screens, big broadband connections, but in groups. 
+If they want, they can call the granny cloud. 
+This is a SOLE in Newcastle. 
+The mediator is from Pune, India. 
+So how far can we go? One last little bit and I'll stop. 
+I went to Turin in May. 
+I sent all the teachers away from my group of 10 year-old students. 
+I speak only English, they speak only Italian, so we had no way to communicate. 
+I started writing English questions on the blackboard. 
+The children looked at it and said, "" What? "" I said, "" Well, do it. "" They typed it into Google, translated it into Italian, went back into Italian Google. 
+Fifteen minutes later — next question: where is Calcutta? 
+This one, they took only 10 minutes. 
+I tried a really hard one then. 
+Who was Pythagoras, and what did he do? 
+There was silence for a while, then they said, "" You've spelled it wrong. 
+It's Pitagora. "" And then, in 20 minutes, the right-angled triangles began to appear on the screens. 
+This sent shivers up my spine. 
+These are 10 year-olds. 
+Text: In another 30 minutes they would reach the Theory of Relativity. And then? 
+(Laughter) (Applause) SM: So you know what's happened? 
+I think we've just stumbled across a self-organizing system. 
+A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears without explicit intervention from the outside. 
+Self-organizing systems also always show emergence, which is that the system starts to do things, which it was never designed for. 
+Which is why you react the way you do, because it looks impossible. 
+I think I can make a guess now — education is self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon. 
+It'll take a few years to prove it, experimentally, but I'm going to try. 
+But in the meanwhile, there is a method available. 
+One billion children, we need 100 million mediators — there are many more than that on the planet — 10 million SOLEs, 180 billion dollars and 10 years. 
+We could change everything. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So raise your hand if you know someone in your immediate family or circle of friends who suffers from some form of mental illness. 
+Yeah. I thought so. Not surprised. 
+And raise your hand if you think that basic research on fruit flies has anything to do with understanding mental illness in humans. 
+Yeah. I thought so. I'm also not surprised. 
+I can see I've got my work cut out for me here. 
+As we heard from Dr. Insel this morning, psychiatric disorders like autism, depression and schizophrenia take a terrible toll on human suffering. 
+We know much less about their treatment and the understanding of their basic mechanisms than we do about diseases of the body. 
+Think about it: In 2013, the second decade of the millennium, if you're concerned about a cancer diagnosis and you go to your doctor, you get bone scans, biopsies and blood tests. 
+In 2013, if you're concerned about a depression diagnosis, you go to your doctor, and what do you get? 
+A questionnaire. 
+Now, part of the reason for this is that we have an oversimplified and increasingly outmoded view of the biological basis of psychiatric disorders. 
+We tend to view them — and the popular press aids and abets this view — as chemical imbalances in the brain, as if the brain were some kind of bag of chemical soup full of dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. 
+This view is conditioned by the fact that many of the drugs that are prescribed to treat these disorders, like Prozac, act by globally changing brain chemistry, as if the brain were indeed a bag of chemical soup. 
+But that can't be the answer, because these drugs actually don't work all that well. 
+A lot of people won't take them, or stop taking them, because of their unpleasant side effects. 
+These drugs have so many side effects because using them to treat a complex psychiatric disorder is a bit like trying to change your engine oil by opening a can and pouring it all over the engine block. 
+Some of it will dribble into the right place, but a lot of it will do more harm than good. 
+Now, an emerging view that you also heard about from Dr. Insel this morning, is that psychiatric disorders are actually disturbances of neural circuits that mediate emotion, mood and affect. 
+When we think about cognition, we analogize the brain to a computer. That's no problem. 
+Well it turns out that the computer analogy is just as valid for emotion. 
+It's just that we don't tend to think about it that way. 
+But we know much less about the circuit basis of psychiatric disorders because of the overwhelming dominance of this chemical imbalance hypothesis. 
+Now, it's not that chemicals are not important in psychiatric disorders. 
+It's just that they don't bathe the brain like soup. 
+Rather, they're released in very specific locations and they act on specific synapses to change the flow of information in the brain. 
+So if we ever really want to understand the biological basis of psychiatric disorders, we need to pinpoint these locations in the brain where these chemicals act. 
+Otherwise, we're going to keep pouring oil all over our mental engines and suffering the consequences. 
+Now to begin to overcome our ignorance of the role of brain chemistry in brain circuitry, it's helpful to work on what we biologists call "model organisms," animals like fruit flies and laboratory mice, in which we can apply powerful genetic techniques to molecularly identify and pinpoint specific classes of neurons, as you heard about in Allan Jones's talk this morning. 
+Moreover, once we can do that, we can actually activate specific neurons or we can destroy or inhibit the activity of those neurons. 
+So if we inhibit a particular type of neuron, and we find that a behavior is blocked, we can conclude that those neurons are necessary for that behavior. 
+On the other hand, if we activate a group of neurons and we find that that produces the behavior, we can conclude that those neurons are sufficient for the behavior. 
+So in this way, by doing this kind of test, we can draw cause and effect relationships between the activity of specific neurons in particular circuits and particular behaviors, something that is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do right now in humans. 
+But can an organism like a fruit fly, which is — it's a great model organism because it's got a small brain, it's capable of complex and sophisticated behaviors, it breeds quickly, and it's cheap. 
+But can an organism like this teach us anything about emotion-like states? 
+Do these organisms even have emotion-like states, or are they just little digital robots? 
+Charles Darwin believed that insects have emotion and express them in their behaviors, as he wrote in his 1872 monograph on the expression of the emotions in man and animals. 
+And my eponymous colleague, Seymour Benzer, believed it as well. 
+Seymour is the man that introduced the use of drosophila here at CalTech in the '60s as a model organism to study the connection between genes and behavior. 
+Seymour recruited me to CalTech in the late 1980s. 
+He was my Jedi and my rabbi while he was here, and Seymour taught me both to love flies and also to play with science. 
+So how do we ask this question? 
+It's one thing to believe that flies have emotion-like states, but how do we actually find out whether that's true or not? 
+Now, in humans we often infer emotional states, as you'll hear later today, from facial expressions. 
+However, it's a little difficult to do that in fruit flies. 
+(Laughter) It's kind of like landing on Mars and looking out the window of your spaceship at all the little green men who are surrounding it and trying to figure out, "" How do I find out if they have emotions or not? "" What can we do? It's not so easy. 
+Well, one of the ways that we can start is to try to come up with some general characteristics or properties of emotion-like states such as arousal, and see if we can identify any fly behaviors that might exhibit some of those properties. 
+So three important ones that I can think of are persistence, gradations in intensity, and valence. 
+Persistence means long-lasting. 
+We all know that the stimulus that triggers an emotion causes that emotion to last long after the stimulus is gone. 
+Gradations of intensity means what it sounds like. 
+You can dial up the intensity or dial down the intensity of an emotion. 
+If you're a little bit unhappy, the corners of your mouth turn down and you sniffle, and if you're very unhappy, tears pour down your face and you might sob. 
+Valence means good or bad, positive or negative. 
+So we decided to see if flies could be provoked into showing the kind of behavior that you see by the proverbial wasp at the picnic table, you know, the one that keeps coming back to your hamburger the more vigorously you try to swat it away, and it seems to keep getting irritated. 
+So we built a device, which we call a puff-o-mat, in which we could deliver little brief air puffs to fruit flies in these plastic tubes in our laboratory bench and blow them away. 
+And what we found is that if we gave these flies in the puff-o-mat several puffs in a row, they became somewhat hyperactive and continued to run around for some time after the air puffs actually stopped and took a while to calm down. 
+So we quantified this behavior using custom locomotor tracking software developed with my collaborator Pietro Perona, who's in the electrical engineering division here at CalTech. 
+And what this quantification showed us is that, upon experiencing a train of these air puffs, the flies appear to enter a kind of state of hyperactivity which is persistent, long-lasting, and also appears to be graded. 
+More puffs, or more intense puffs, make the state last for a longer period of time. 
+So now we wanted to try to understand something about what controls the duration of this state. 
+So we decided to use our puff-o-mat and our automated tracking software to screen through hundreds of lines of mutant fruit flies to see if we could find any that showed abnormal responses to the air puffs. 
+And this is one of the great things about fruit flies. 
+There are repositories where you can just pick up the phone and order hundreds of vials of flies of different mutants and screen them in your assay and then find out what gene is affected in the mutation. 
+So doing the screen, we discovered one mutant that took much longer than normal to calm down after the air puffs, and when we examined the gene that was affected in this mutation, it turned out to encode a dopamine receptor. 
+That's right — flies, like people, have dopamine, and it acts on their brains and on their synapses through the same dopamine receptor molecules that you and I have. 
+Dopamine plays a number of important functions in the brain, including in attention, arousal, reward, and disorders of the dopamine system have been linked to a number of mental disorders including drug abuse, Parkinson's disease, and ADHD. 
+Now, in genetics, it's a little counterintuitive. 
+We tend to infer the normal function of something by what doesn't happen when we take it away, by the opposite of what we see when we take it away. 
+So when we take away the dopamine receptor and the flies take longer to calm down, from that we infer that the normal function of this receptor and dopamine is to cause the flies to calm down faster after the puff. 
+And that's a bit reminiscent of ADHD, which has been linked to disorders of the dopamine system in humans. 
+Indeed, if we increase the levels of dopamine in normal flies by feeding them cocaine after getting the appropriate DEA license — oh my God — (Laughter) — we find indeed that these cocaine-fed flies calm down faster than normal flies do, and that's also reminiscent of ADHD, which is often treated with drugs like Ritalin that act similarly to cocaine. 
+So slowly I began to realize that what started out as a rather playful attempt to try to annoy fruit flies might actually have some relevance to a human psychiatric disorder. 
+Now, how far does this analogy go? 
+As many of you know, individuals afflicted with ADHD also have learning disabilities. 
+Is that true of our dopamine receptor mutant flies? 
+Remarkably, the answer is yes. 
+As Seymour showed back in the 1970s, flies, like songbirds, as you just heard, are capable of learning. 
+You can train a fly to avoid an odor, shown here in blue, if you pair that odor with a shock. 
+Then when you give those trained flies the chance to choose between a tube with the shock-paired odor and another odor, it avoids the tube containing the blue odor that was paired with shock. 
+Well, if you do this test on dopamine receptor mutant flies, they don't learn. Their learning score is zero. 
+They flunk out of CalTech. 
+So that means that these flies have two abnormalities, or phenotypes, as we geneticists call them, that one finds in ADHD: hyperactivity and learning disability. 
+Now what's the causal relationship, if anything, between these phenotypes? 
+In ADHD, it's often assumed that the hyperactivity causes the learning disability. 
+The kids can't sit still long enough to focus, so they don't learn. 
+But it could equally be the case that it's the learning disabilities that cause the hyperactivity. 
+Because the kids can't learn, they look for other things to distract their attention. 
+And a final possibility is that there's no relationship at all between learning disabilities and hyperactivity, but that they are caused by a common underlying mechanism in ADHD. 
+Now people have been wondering about this for a long time in humans, but in flies we can actually test this. 
+And the way that we do this is to delve deeply into the mind of the fly and begin to untangle its circuitry using genetics. 
+We take our dopamine receptor mutant flies and we genetically restore, or cure, the dopamine receptor by putting a good copy of the dopamine receptor gene back into the fly brain. 
+But in each fly, we put it back only into certain neurons and not in others, and then we test each of these flies for their ability to learn and for hyperactivity. 
+Remarkably, we find we can completely dissociate these two abnormalities. 
+If we put a good copy of the dopamine receptor back in this elliptical structure called the central complex, the flies are no longer hyperactive, but they still can't learn. 
+On the other hand, if we put the receptor back in a different structure called the mushroom body, the learning deficit is rescued, the flies learn well, but they're still hyperactive. 
+What that tells us is that dopamine is not bathing the brain of these flies like soup. 
+Rather, it's acting to control two different functions on two different circuits, so the reason there are two things wrong with our dopamine receptor flies is that the same receptor is controlling two different functions in two different regions of the brain. 
+Whether the same thing is true in ADHD in humans we don't know, but these kinds of results should at least cause us to consider that possibility. 
+So these results make me and my colleagues more convinced than ever that the brain is not a bag of chemical soup, and it's a mistake to try to treat complex psychiatric disorders just by changing the flavor of the soup. 
+What we need to do is to use our ingenuity and our scientific knowledge to try to design a new generation of treatments that are targeted to specific neurons and specific regions of the brain that are affected in particular psychiatric disorders. 
+If we can do that, we may be able to cure these disorders without the unpleasant side effects, putting the oil back in our mental engines, just where it's needed. Thank you very much. 
+
+How do we build a society without fossil fuels? 
+This is a very complex challenge, and I believe developing countries could take the lead in this transition. 
+And I'm aware that this is a contentious statement, but the reality is that so much is at stake in our countries if we let fossil fuels stay at the center of our development. 
+We can do it differently. 
+And it's time, it really is time, to debunk the myth that a country has to choose between development on the one hand and environmental protection, renewables, quality of life, on the other. 
+I come from Costa Rica, a developing country. 
+We are nearly five million people, and we live right in the middle of the Americas, so it's very easy to remember where we live. 
+Nearly 100 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources, five of them. 
+(Applause) Hydropower, geothermal, wind, solar, biomass. 
+Did you know that last year, for 299 days, we did not use any fossil fuels in order to generate all our electricity? 
+It's a fantastic achievement, and yet, it hides a paradox, which is that nearly 70 percent of all our energy consumption is oil. 
+Why? 
+Because of our transportation system, which is totally dependent on fossil fuels, like it is in most countries. 
+So if we think of the energy transition as a marathon, the question is, how do we get to the finish line, how do we decarbonize the rest of the economy? 
+And it's fair to say that if we don't succeed, it's difficult to see who will. 
+So that is why I want to talk to you about Costa Rica, because I believe we are a great candidate in pioneering a vision for development without fossil fuels. 
+If you know one thing about our country, it's that we don't have an army. 
+So I'm going to take you back to 1948. 
+That year, the country was coming out of civil war. 
+Thousands of Costa Ricans had died, and families were bitterly split. 
+And yet, a surprising idea won the hearts and minds: we would reboot the country, and that Second Republic would have no army. 
+So we abolished it. 
+And the president at the time, José Figueres, found a powerful way by smashing the walls of an army base. 
+The following year, 1949, we made that decision permanent in the new constitution, and that is why I can tell you that story nearly 70 years later. 
+And I'm grateful. 
+I'm grateful they made that decision before I was born, because it allowed me and millions of others to live in a very stable country. 
+And you might be thinking that it was good luck, but it wasn't. 
+There was a pattern of deliberate choices. 
+We called that social guarantees. 
+By abolishing the army, we were able to turn military spending into social spending, and that was a driver of stability. 
+In the '50s — (Applause) In the' 50s, we started investing in hydropower, and that kept us away from the trap of using fossil fuels for electricity generation, which is what the world is struggling with today. 
+In the '70s we invested in national parks, and that kept us away from the deeply flawed logic of growth, growth, growth at any cost that you see others embracing, especially in the developing world. 
+In the '90s, we pioneered payments for ecosystem services, and that helped us reverse deforestation and boosted ecotourism, which today is a key engine of growth. 
+So investing in environmental protection did not hurt our economy. 
+Quite the opposite. 
+And it doesn't mean we are perfect, and it doesn't mean we don't have contradictions. 
+The point is that, by making our own choices, we were able to develop resilience in dealing with development problems. 
+Also, if you take a country like ours, the GDP per capita is around 11,000 dollars, depending on how you measure it. 
+But according to the Social Progress Index, we are an absolute outlier when it comes to turning GDP into social progress. 
+Abolishing the army, investing in nature and people, did something very powerful, too. 
+It shaped the narrative, the narrative of a small country with big ideas, and it was very empowering to grow up with that narrative. 
+So the question is, what is the next big idea for this generation? 
+And I believe what comes next is for this generation to let go of fossil fuels for good, just as we did with the army. 
+Fossil fuels create climate change. 
+We know that, and we know how vulnerable we are to the impacts of climate change. 
+So as a developing country, it is in our best interest to build development without fossil fuels that harm people in the first place. 
+Because why would we continue importing oil for transportation if we can use electricity instead? 
+Remember, this is the country where electricity comes from water in our rivers, heat from volcanoes, wind turbines, solar panels, biowaste. 
+Abolishing fossil fuels means disrupting our transportation system so that we can power our cars, buses and trains with electricity instead of dirty energy. 
+And transportation, let me tell you, has become an existential issue for us Costa Ricans, because the model we have is not working for us. 
+It's hurting people, it's hurting companies, and it's hurting our health. 
+Because when policies and infrastructure fail, this is what happens on a daily basis. 
+Two hours in the morning, two hours in the evening. 
+I don't understand why we have to accept this as normal. 
+It's offensive to have to waste our time like this every single day. 
+And this highway is actually quite good compared to what you see in other countries where traffic is exploding. 
+You know, Costa Ricans call this "" presa. "" Presa means "" imprisoned. "" And people are turning violent in a country that is otherwise happy in pura vida. 
+It's happening. 
+The good news is that when we talk about clean transportation and different mobility, we're not talking about some distant utopia out there. 
+We're talking about electric mobility that is happening today. 
+By 2022, electric cars and conventional cars are expected to cost the same, and cities are already trying electric buses. 
+And these really cool creatures are saving money, and they reduce pollution. 
+But of course, some get very uncomfortable with this idea, and they will come and they will tell you that the world is stuck with oil, and so is Costa Rica, so get real. 
+That's what they tell you. 
+And you know what the answer to that argument is? 
+That in 1948, we didn't say the world is stuck with armies, so let's keep our army, too. 
+No, we made a very brave choice, and that choice made the whole difference. 
+So it's time for this generation to be brave again and abolish fossil fuels for good. 
+And I'll give you three reasons why we have to do this. 
+First, our model of transportation and urbanization is broken, so this is the best moment to redefine our urban and mobility future. 
+We don't want cities that are built for cars. 
+We want cities for people where we can walk and we can use bikes. 
+And we want public transportation, lots of it, public transportation that is clean and dignifying. 
+Because if we continue adding fleets of conventional cars, our cities will become unbearable. 
+Second, we have to change, but incremental change is not going to be sufficient. 
+We need transformational change. 
+And there are some incremental projects in my country, and I am the first one to celebrate them. 
+But let's not kid ourselves. 
+We're not talking about ending up with really beautiful electric cars here and a few electric buses there while we keep investing in the same kind of infrastructure, more cars, more roads, more oil. 
+We're talking about breaking free from oil, and you cannot get there through incrementalism. 
+Third, and you know this one, the world is hungry for inspiration. 
+It craves stories of success in dealing with complex issues, especially in developing countries. 
+So I believe Costa Rica can be an inspiration to others, as we did last year when we disclosed that for so many days we were not using any fossil fuels in order to generate all our electricity. 
+The news went viral around the world. 
+Also, and this makes me extremely proud, a Costa Rican woman, Christiana Figueres, played a decisive role in the negotiations of the Paris climate agreement. 
+So we have to protect that legacy and be an example. 
+So what comes next? 
+The people. 
+How do we get people to own this? How do we get people 
+to believe that it's possible to build a society without fossil fuels? 
+A lot of work from the ground up is needed. 
+That is why, in 2014, we created Costa Rica Limpia. 
+"Limpia" means "clean," because we want to empower and we want to inspire citizens. 
+If citizens don't get engaged, clean transportation decisions will be bogged down by endless, and I mean endless, technical discussions, and by avalanches of lobbying by various established interests. 
+Wanting to be a green country powered by renewables is already part of our story. 
+We should not let anybody take that away from us. 
+Last year, we brought people from our seven provinces to talk about climate change in terms that matter to them, and we also brought this year another group of Costa Ricans to talk about renewable energy. 
+And you know what? 
+These people disagree on almost everything except on renewable energy and clean transportation and clean air. 
+It brings people together. 
+And the key to real participation is to help people not to feel small. 
+So what we do is concrete things, and we translate technical issues into citizen language to show that citizens have a role to play and can play it together. 
+For the first time, we're tracking the promises that were made on clean transportation, and politicos know that they have to deliver it, but the tipping point will come when we form coalitions — citizens, companies, champions of public transportation — that will make electric mobility the new normal, especially in a developing country. 
+By the time the next election comes, I believe every candidate will have to disclose where they stand on the abolition of fossil fuels. 
+Because this question has to enter our mainstream politics. 
+And I'm telling you, this is not a question of climate policy or environmental agenda. 
+It's about the country that we want and the cities that we have and the cities that we want and who makes that choice. 
+Because at the end of the day, what we have to show is that development with renewable energy is good for the people, for Costa Ricans that are alive today and especially for those who haven't been born. 
+This is our National Museum today. 
+It's bright and peaceful, and when you stand up in front of it, it's really hard to believe these were military barracks at the end of the '40s. 
+We started a new life without an army in this place, and here is where our abolition of fossil fuels will be announced one day. 
+And we will make history again. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Today, I'd like to talk with you about something that should be a totally uncontroversial topic. 
+But, unfortunately, it's become incredibly controversial. 
+This year, if you think about it, over a billion couples will have sex with one another. 
+Couples like this one, and this one, and this one, and, yes, even this one. 
+(Laughter) And my idea is this — all these men and women should be free to decide whether they do or do not want to conceive a child. 
+And they should be able to use one of these birth control methods to act on their decision. 
+Now, I think you'd have a hard time finding many people who disagree with this idea. 
+Over one billion people use birth control without any hesitation at all. 
+They want the power to plan their own lives and to raise healthier, better educated and more prosperous families. 
+But, for an idea that is so broadly accepted in private, birth control certainly generates a lot of opposition in public. 
+Some people think when we talk about contraception that it's code for abortion, which it's not. 
+Some people — let's be honest — they're uncomfortable with the topic because it's about sex. 
+Some people worry that the real goal of family planning is to control populations. 
+These are all side issues that have attached themselves to this core idea that men and women should be able to decide when they want to have a child. 
+And as a result, birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda. 
+The victims of this paralysis are the people of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. 
+Here in Germany, the proportion of people that use contraception is about 66 percent. 
+That's about what you'd expect. 
+In El Salvador, very similar, 66 percent. 
+Thailand, 64 percent. 
+But let's compare that to other places, like Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest states in India. 
+In fact, if Uttar Pradesh was its own country, it would be the fifth largest country in the world. 
+Their contraception rate — 29 percent. 
+Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, 10 percent. 
+Chad, 2 percent. 
+Let's just take one country in Africa, Senegal. 
+Their rate is about 12 percent. 
+But why is it so low? 
+One reason is that the most popular contraceptives are rarely available. 
+Women in Africa will tell you over and over again that what they prefer today is an injectable. 
+They get it in their arm — and they go about four times a year, they have to get it every three months — to get their injection. 
+The reason women like it so much in Africa is they can hide it from their husbands, who sometimes want a lot of children. 
+The problem is every other time a woman goes into a clinic in Senegal, that injection is stocked out. 
+It's stocked out 150 days out of the year. 
+So can you imagine the situation — she walks all this way to go get her injection. 
+She leaves her field, sometimes leaves her children, and it's not there. 
+And she doesn't know when it's going to be available again. 
+This is the same story across the continent of Africa today. 
+And so what we've created as a world has become a life-and-death crisis. 
+There are 100,000 women [per year] who say they don't want to be pregnant and they die in childbirth — 100,000 women a year. 
+There are another 600,000 women [per year] who say they didn't want to be pregnant in the first place, and they give birth to a baby and her baby dies in that first month of life. 
+I know everyone wants to save these mothers and these children. 
+But somewhere along the way, we got confused by our own conversation. 
+And we stopped trying to save these lives. 
+So if we're going to make progress on this issue, we have to be really clear about what our agenda is. 
+We're not talking about abortion. 
+We're not talking about population control. 
+What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives and to give their families the best possible future. 
+Now, as a world, there are lots of things we have to do in the global health community if we want to make the world better in the future — things like fight diseases. 
+So many children today die of diarrhea, as you heard earlier, and pneumonia. 
+They kill literally millions of children a year. 
+We also need to help small farmers — farmers who plow small plots of land in Africa — so that they can grow enough food to feed their children. 
+And we have to make sure that children are educated around the world. 
+But one of the simplest and most transformative things we can do is to give everybody access to birth control methods that almost all Germans have access to and all Americans, at some point, they use these tools during their life. 
+And I think as long as we're really clear about what our agenda is, there's a global movement waiting to happen and ready to get behind this totally uncontroversial idea. 
+When I grew up, I grew up in a Catholic home. 
+I still consider myself a practicing Catholic. 
+My mom's great-uncle was a Jesuit priest. 
+My great-aunt was a Dominican nun. 
+She was a schoolteacher and a principal her entire life. 
+In fact, she's the one who taught me as a young girl how to read. 
+I was very close to her. 
+And I went to Catholic schools for my entire childhood until I left home to go to university. 
+In my high school, Ursuline Academy, the nuns made service and social justice a high priority in the school. 
+Today, in the [Gates] Foundation's work, I believe I'm applying the lessons that I learned in high school. 
+So, in the tradition of Catholic scholars, the nuns also taught us to question received teachings. 
+And one of the teachings that we girls and my peers questioned was is birth control really a sin? 
+Because I think one of the reasons we have this huge discomfort talking about contraception is this lingering concern that if we separate sex from reproduction, we're going to promote promiscuity. 
+And I think that's a reasonable question to be asked about contraception — what is its impact on sexual morality? 
+But, like most women, my decision about birth control had nothing to do with promiscuity. 
+I had a plan for my future. I wanted to go to college. 
+I studied really hard in college, and I was proud to be one of the very few female computer science graduates at my university. 
+I wanted to have a career, so I went on to business school and I became one of the youngest female executives at Microsoft. 
+I still remember, though, when I left my parents' home to move across the country to start this new job at Microsoft. 
+They had sacrificed a lot to give me five years of higher education. 
+But they said, as I left home — and I literally went down the front steps, down the porch at home — and they said, "" Even though you've had this great education, if you decide to get married and have kids right away, that's OK by us, too. "" They wanted me to do the thing that would make me the very happiest. 
+I was free to decide what that would be. 
+It was an amazing feeling. 
+In fact, I did want to have kids — but I wanted to have them when I was ready. 
+And so now, Bill and I have three. 
+And when our eldest daughter was born, we weren't, I would say, exactly sure how to be great parents. 
+Maybe some of you know that feeling. 
+And so we waited a little while before we had our second child. 
+And it's no accident that we have three children that are spaced three years apart. 
+Now, as a mother, what do I want the very most for my children? 
+I want them to feel the way I did — like they can do anything they want to do in life. 
+And so, what has struck me as I've travelled the last decade for the foundation around the world is that all women want that same thing. 
+Last year, I was in Nairobi, in the slums, in one called Korogocho — which literally means when translated, "" standing shoulder to shoulder. "" And I spoke with this women's group that's pictured here. 
+And the women talked very openly about their family life in the slums, what it was like. 
+And they talked quite intimately about what they did for birth control. 
+Marianne, in the center of the screen in the red sweater, she summed up that entire two-hour conversation in a phrase that I will never forget. 
+She said, "" I want to bring every good thing to this child before I have another. "" And I thought — that's it. 
+That's universal. 
+We all want to bring every good thing to our children. 
+But what's not universal is our ability to provide every good thing. 
+So many women suffer from domestic violence. 
+And they can't even broach the subject of contraception, even inside their own marriage. 
+There are many women who lack basic education. 
+Even many of the women who do have knowledge and do have power don't have access to contraceptives. 
+For 250 years, parents around the world have been deciding to have smaller families. 
+This trend has been steady for a quarter of a millennium, across cultures and across geographies, with the glaring exception of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. 
+The French started bringing down their family size in the mid-1700s. 
+And over the next 150 years, this trend spread all across Europe. 
+The surprising thing to me, as I learned this history, was that it spread not along socioeconomic lines but around cultural lines. 
+People who spoke the same language made that change as a group. 
+They made the same choice for their family, whether they were rich or whether they were poor. 
+The reason that trend toward smaller families spread was that this whole way was driven by an idea — the idea that couples can exercise conscious control over how many children they have. 
+This is a very powerful idea. 
+It means that parents have the ability to affect the future, not just accept it as it is. 
+In France, the average family size went down every decade for 150 years in a row until it stabilized. 
+It took so long back then because the contraceptives weren't that good. 
+In Germany, this transition started in the 1880s, and it took just 50 years for family size to stabilize in this country. 
+And in Asia and Latin America, the transition started in the 1960s, and it happened much faster because of modern contraception. 
+I think, as we go through this history, it's important to pause for a moment and to remember why this has become such a contentious issue. 
+It's because some family planning programs resorted to unfortunate incentives and coercive policies. 
+For instance, in the 1960s, India adopted very specific numeric targets and they paid women to accept having an IUD placed in their bodies. 
+Now, Indian women were really smart in this situation. 
+When they went to get an IUD inserted, they got paid six rupees. 
+And so what did they do? 
+They waited a few hours or a few days, and they went to another service provider and had the IUD removed for one rupee. 
+For decades in the United States, African-American women were sterilized without their consent. 
+The procedure was so common it became known as the Mississippi appendectomy — a tragic chapter in my country's history. 
+And as recently as the 1990s, in Peru, women from the Andes region were given anesthesia and they were sterilized without their knowledge. 
+The most startling thing about this is that these coercive policies weren't even needed. 
+They were carried out in places where parents already wanted to lower their family size. 
+Because in region after region, again and again, parents have wanted to have smaller families. 
+There's no reason to believe that African women have innately different desires. 
+Given the option, they will have fewer children. 
+The question is: will we invest in helping all women get what they want now? 
+Or, are we going to condemn them to some century-long struggle, as if this was still revolutionary France and the best method was coitus interruptus? 
+Empowering parents — it doesn't need justification. 
+But here's the thing — our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. 
+It's what propels societies forward. 
+In that same slum in Nairobi, I met a young businesswoman, and she was making backpacks out of her home. 
+She and her young kids would go to the local jeans factory and collect scraps of denim. 
+She'd create these backpacks and resell them. 
+And when I talked with her, she had three children, and I asked her about her family. 
+And she said she and her husband decided that they wanted to stop having children after their third one. 
+And so when I asked her why, she simply said, "Well, because I couldn't run my business if I had another child." 
+And she explained the income that she was getting out of her business afforded her to be able to give an education to all three of her children. 
+She was incredibly optimistic about her family's future. 
+This is the same mental calculus that hundreds of millions of men and women have gone through. 
+And evidence proves that they have it exactly right. 
+They are able to give their children more opportunities by exercising control over when they have them. 
+In Bangladesh, there's a district called Matlab. 
+It's where researchers have collected data on over 180,000 inhabitants since 1963. 
+In the global health community, we like to say it's one of the longest pieces of research that's been running. 
+We have so many great health statistics. 
+In one of the studies, what did they do? 
+Half the villagers were chosen to get contraceptives. 
+They got education and access to contraception. 
+Twenty years later, following those villages, what we learned is that they had a better quality of life than their neighbors. 
+The families were healthier. 
+The women were less likely to die in childbirth. 
+Their children were less likely to die in the first thirty days of life. 
+The children were better nourished. 
+The families were also wealthier. 
+The adult women's wages were higher. 
+Households had more assets — things like livestock or land or savings. 
+Finally, their sons and daughters had more schooling. 
+So when you multiply these types of effects over millions of families, the product can be large-scale economic development. 
+People talk about the Asian economic miracle of the 1980s — but it wasn't really a miracle. 
+One of the leading causes of economic growth across that region was this cultural trend towards smaller families. 
+Sweeping changes start at the individual family level — the family making a decision about what's best for their children. 
+When they make that change and that decision, those become sweeping regional and national trends. 
+When families in sub-Saharan Africa are given the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves, I think it will help spark a virtuous cycle of development in communities across the continent. 
+We can help poor families build a better future. 
+We can insist that all people have the opportunity to learn about contraceptives and have access to the full variety of methods. 
+I think the goal here is really clear: universal access to birth control that women want. 
+And for that to happen, it means that both rich and poor governments alike must make contraception a total priority. 
+We can do our part, in this room and globally, by talking about the hundreds of millions of families that don't have access to contraception today and what it would do to change their lives if they did have access. 
+I think if Marianne and the members of her women's group can talk about this openly and have this discussion out amongst themselves and in public, we can, too. 
+And we need to start now. 
+Because like Marianne, we all want to bring every good thing to our children. 
+And where is the controversy in that? 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. 
+I have some questions for Melinda. 
+(Applause ends) Thank you for your courage and everything else. 
+So, Melinda, in the last few years I've heard a lot of smart people say something to the effect of, "" We don't need to worry about the population issue anymore. 
+Family sizes are coming down naturally all over the world. 
+We're going to peak at nine or 10 billion. And that's it. "" Are they wrong? 
+Melinda Gates: If you look at the statistics across Africa, they are wrong. 
+And I think we need to look at it, though, from a different lens. 
+We need to look at it from the ground upwards. 
+I think that's one of the reasons we got ourselves in so much trouble on this issue of contraception. 
+We looked at it from top down and said we want to have different population numbers over time. 
+Yes, we care about the planet. Yes, we need to make the right choices. 
+But the choices have to be made at the family level. 
+And it's only by giving people access and letting them choose what to do that you get those sweeping changes that we have seen globally — except for sub-Saharan Africa and those places in South Asia and Afghanistan. 
+CA: Some people on the right in America and in many conservative cultures around the world might say something like this: "" It's all very well to talk about saving lives and empowering women and so on. 
+But, sex is sacred. 
+What you're proposing is going to increase the likelihood that lots of sex happens outside marriage. 
+And that is wrong. "" What would you say to them? 
+MG: I would say that sex is absolutely sacred. 
+And it's sacred in Germany, and it's sacred in the United States, and it's sacred in France and so many places around the world. 
+And the fact that 98 percent of women in my country who are sexually experienced say they use birth control doesn't make sex any less sacred. 
+It just means that they're getting to make choices about their lives. 
+And I think in that choice, we're also honoring the sacredness of the family and the sacredness of the mother's life and the childrens' lives by saving their lives. 
+To me, that's incredibly sacred, too. 
+CA: So what is your foundation doing to promote this issue? 
+And what could people here and people listening on the web — what would you like them to do? 
+MG: I would say this — join the conversation. 
+We've listed the website up here. Join the conversation. 
+Tell your story about how contraception has either changed your life or somebody's life that you know. 
+And say that you're for this. 
+We need a groundswell of people saying, "" This makes sense. 
+We've got to give all women access — no matter where they live. "" And one of the things that we're going to do is do a large event July 11 in London, with a whole host of countries, a whole host of African nations, to all say we're putting this back on the global health agenda. 
+We're going to commit resources to it, and we're going to do planning from the bottom up with governments to make sure that women are educated — so that if they want the tool, they have it, and that they have lots of options available either through their local healthcare worker or their local community rural clinic. 
+CA: Melinda, I'm guessing that some of those nuns who taught you at school are going to see this TED Talk at some point. 
+Are they going to be horrified, or are they cheering you on? 
+MG: I know they're going to see the TED Talk because they know that I'm doing it and I plan to send it to them. 
+And, you know, the nuns who taught me were incredibly progressive. 
+I hope that they'll be very proud of me for living out what they taught us about social justice and service. 
+I have come to feel incredibly passionate about this issue because of what I've seen in the developing world. 
+And for me, this topic has become very close to heart because you meet these women and they are so often voiceless. 
+And yet they shouldn't be — they should have a voice, they should have access. 
+And so I hope they'll feel that I'm living out what I've learned from them and from the decades of work that I've already done at the foundation. 
+CA: So, you and your team brought together today an amazing group of speakers to whom we're all grateful. 
+Did you learn anything? 
+(Laughter) MG: Oh my gosh, I learned so many things. I have so many follow-up questions. 
+And I think a lot of this work is a journey. 
+You heard the discussion about the journey through energy, or the journey through social design, or the journey in the coming and saying, "Why aren't there any women on this platform?" 
+And I think for all of us who work on these development issues, you learn by talking to other people. 
+You learn by doing. You learn by trying and making mistakes. 
+And it's the questions you ask. 
+Sometimes it's the questions you ask that helps lead to the answer the next person that can help you answer it. 
+So I have lots of questions for the panelists from today. 
+And I thought it was just an amazing day. 
+CA: Melinda, thank you for inviting all of us on this journey with you. 
+
+So security is two different things: it's a feeling, and it's a reality. 
+And they're different. 
+You could feel secure even if you're not. 
+And you can be secure even if you don't feel it. 
+Really, we have two separate concepts mapped onto the same word. 
+And what I want to do in this talk is to split them apart — figuring out when they diverge and how they converge. 
+And language is actually a problem here. 
+There aren't a lot of good words for the concepts we're going to talk about. 
+So if you look at security from economic terms, it's a trade-off. 
+Every time you get some security, you're always trading off something. 
+Whether this is a personal decision — whether you're going to install a burglar alarm in your home — or a national decision — where you're going to invade some foreign country — you're going to trade off something, either money or time, convenience, capabilities, maybe fundamental liberties. 
+And the question to ask when you look at a security anything is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it's worth the trade-off. 
+You've heard in the past several years, the world is safer because Saddam Hussein is not in power. 
+That might be true, but it's not terribly relevant. 
+The question is, was it worth it? 
+And you can make your own decision, and then you'll decide whether the invasion was worth it. 
+That's how you think about security — in terms of the trade-off. 
+Now there's often no right or wrong here. 
+Some of us have a burglar alarm system at home, and some of us don't. 
+And it'll depend on where we live, whether we live alone or have a family, how much cool stuff we have, how much we're willing to accept the risk of theft. 
+In politics also, there are different opinions. 
+A lot of times, these trade-offs are about more than just security, and I think that's really important. 
+Now people have a natural intuition about these trade-offs. 
+We make them every day — last night in my hotel room, when I decided to double-lock the door, or you in your car when you drove here, when we go eat lunch and decide the food's not poison and we'll eat it. 
+We make these trade-offs again and again, multiple times a day. 
+We often won't even notice them. 
+They're just part of being alive; we all do it. 
+Every species does it. 
+Imagine a rabbit in a field, eating grass, and the rabbit's going to see a fox. 
+That rabbit will make a security trade-off: "Should I stay, or should I flee?" 
+And if you think about it, the rabbits that are good at making that trade-off will tend to live and reproduce, and the rabbits that are bad at it will get eaten or starve. 
+So you'd think that us, as a successful species on the planet — you, me, everybody — would be really good at making these trade-offs. 
+Yet it seems, again and again, that we're hopelessly bad at it. 
+And I think that's a fundamentally interesting question. 
+I'll give you the short answer. 
+The answer is, we respond to the feeling of security and not the reality. 
+Now most of the time, that works. 
+Most of the time, feeling and reality are the same. 
+Certainly that's true for most of human prehistory. 
+We've developed this ability because it makes evolutionary sense. 
+One way to think of it is that we're highly optimized for risk decisions that are endemic to living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 B.C. 
+2010 New York, not so much. 
+Now there are several biases in risk perception. 
+A lot of good experiments in this. 
+And you can see certain biases that come up again and again. 
+So I'll give you four. 
+We tend to exaggerate spectacular and rare risks and downplay common risks — so flying versus driving. 
+The unknown is perceived to be riskier than the familiar. 
+One example would be, people fear kidnapping by strangers when the data supports kidnapping by relatives is much more common. 
+This is for children. 
+Third, personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks — so Bin Laden is scarier because he has a name. 
+And the fourth is people underestimate risks in situations they do control and overestimate them in situations they don't control. 
+So once you take up skydiving or smoking, you downplay the risks. 
+If a risk is thrust upon you — terrorism was a good example — you'll overplay it because you don't feel like it's in your control. 
+There are a bunch of other of these biases, these cognitive biases, that affect our risk decisions. 
+There's the availability heuristic, which basically means we estimate the probability of something by how easy it is to bring instances of it to mind. 
+So you can imagine how that works. 
+If you hear a lot about tiger attacks, there must be a lot of tigers around. 
+You don't hear about lion attacks, there aren't a lot of lions around. 
+This works until you invent newspapers. 
+Because what newspapers do is they repeat again and again rare risks. 
+I tell people, if it's in the news, don't worry about it. 
+Because by definition, news is something that almost never happens. 
+(Laughter) When something is so common, it's no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — those are the risks you worry about. 
+We're also a species of storytellers. 
+We respond to stories more than data. 
+And there's some basic innumeracy going on. 
+I mean, the joke "" One, Two, Three, Many "" is kind of right. 
+We're really good at small numbers. 
+One mango, two mangoes, three mangoes, 10,000 mangoes, 100,000 mangoes — it's still more mangoes you can eat before they rot. 
+So one half, one quarter, one fifth — we're good at that. 
+One in a million, one in a billion — they're both almost never. 
+So we have trouble with the risks that aren't very common. 
+And what these cognitive biases do is they act as filters between us and reality. 
+And the result is that feeling and reality get out of whack, they get different. 
+Now you either have a feeling — you feel more secure than you are. 
+There's a false sense of security. 
+Or the other way, and that's a false sense of insecurity. 
+I write a lot about "" security theater, "" which are products that make people feel secure, but don't actually do anything. 
+There's no real word for stuff that makes us secure, but doesn't make us feel secure. 
+Maybe it's what the CIA's supposed to do for us. 
+So back to economics. 
+If economics, if the market, drives security, and if people make trade-offs based on the feeling of security, then the smart thing for companies to do for the economic incentives are to make people feel secure. 
+And there are two ways to do this. 
+One, you can make people actually secure and hope they notice. 
+Or two, you can make people just feel secure and hope they don't notice. 
+So what makes people notice? 
+Well a couple of things: understanding of the security, of the risks, the threats, the countermeasures, how they work. 
+But if you know stuff, you're more likely to have your feelings match reality. 
+Enough real world examples helps. 
+Now we all know the crime rate in our neighborhood, because we live there, and we get a feeling about it that basically matches reality. 
+Security theater's exposed when it's obvious that it's not working properly. 
+Okay, so what makes people not notice? 
+Well, a poor understanding. 
+If you don't understand the risks, you don't understand the costs, you're likely to get the trade-off wrong, and your feeling doesn't match reality. 
+Not enough examples. 
+There's an inherent problem with low probability events. 
+If, for example, terrorism almost never happens, it's really hard to judge the efficacy of counter-terrorist measures. 
+This is why you keep sacrificing virgins, and why your unicorn defenses are working just great. 
+There aren't enough examples of failures. 
+Also, feelings that are clouding the issues — the cognitive biases I talked about earlier, fears, folk beliefs, basically an inadequate model of reality. 
+So let me complicate things. 
+I have feeling and reality. 
+I want to add a third element. I want to add model. 
+Feeling and model in our head, reality is the outside world. 
+It doesn't change; it's real. 
+So feeling is based on our intuition. 
+Model is based on reason. 
+That's basically the difference. 
+In a primitive and simple world, there's really no reason for a model because feeling is close to reality. 
+You don't need a model. 
+But in a modern and complex world, you need models to understand a lot of the risks we face. 
+There's no feeling about germs. 
+You need a model to understand them. 
+So this model is an intelligent representation of reality. 
+It's, of course, limited by science, by technology. 
+We couldn't have a germ theory of disease before we invented the microscope to see them. 
+It's limited by our cognitive biases. 
+But it has the ability to override our feelings. 
+Where do we get these models? We get them from others. 
+We get them from religion, from culture, teachers, elders. 
+A couple years ago, I was in South Africa on safari. 
+The tracker I was with grew up in Kruger National Park. 
+He had some very complex models of how to survive. 
+And it depended on if you were attacked by a lion or a leopard or a rhino or an elephant — and when you had to run away, and when you couldn't run away, and when you had to climb a tree — when you could never climb a tree. 
+I would have died in a day, but he was born there, and he understood how to survive. 
+I was born in New York City. 
+I could have taken him to New York, and he would have died in a day. 
+(Laughter) Because we had different models based on our different experiences. 
+Models can come from the media, from our elected officials. 
+Think of models of terrorism, child kidnapping, airline safety, car safety. 
+Models can come from industry. 
+The two I'm following are surveillance cameras, ID cards, quite a lot of our computer security models come from there. 
+A lot of models come from science. 
+Health models are a great example. 
+Think of cancer, of bird flu, swine flu, SARS. 
+All of our feelings of security about those diseases come from models given to us, really, by science filtered through the media. 
+So models can change. 
+Models are not static. 
+As we become more comfortable in our environments, our model can move closer to our feelings. 
+So an example might be, if you go back 100 years ago when electricity was first becoming common, there were a lot of fears about it. 
+I mean, there were people who were afraid to push doorbells, because there was electricity in there, and that was dangerous. 
+For us, we're very facile around electricity. 
+We change light bulbs without even thinking about it. 
+Our model of security around electricity is something we were born into. 
+It hasn't changed as we were growing up. 
+And we're good at it. 
+Or think of the risks on the Internet across generations — how your parents approach Internet security, versus how you do, versus how our kids will. 
+Models eventually fade into the background. 
+Intuitive is just another word for familiar. 
+So as your model is close to reality, and it converges with feelings, you often don't know it's there. 
+So a nice example of this came from last year and swine flu. 
+When swine flu first appeared, the initial news caused a lot of overreaction. 
+Now it had a name, which made it scarier than the regular flu, even though it was more deadly. 
+And people thought doctors should be able to deal with it. 
+So there was that feeling of lack of control. 
+And those two things made the risk more than it was. 
+As the novelty wore off, the months went by, there was some amount of tolerance, people got used to it. 
+There was no new data, but there was less fear. 
+By autumn, people thought the doctors should have solved this already. 
+And there's kind of a bifurcation — people had to choose between fear and acceptance — actually fear and indifference — they kind of chose suspicion. 
+And when the vaccine appeared last winter, there were a lot of people — a surprising number — who refused to get it — as a nice example of how people's feelings of security change, how their model changes, sort of wildly with no new information, with no new input. 
+This kind of thing happens a lot. 
+I'm going to give one more complication. 
+We have feeling, model, reality. 
+I have a very relativistic view of security. 
+I think it depends on the observer. 
+And most security decisions have a variety of people involved. 
+And stakeholders with specific trade-offs will try to influence the decision. 
+And I call that their agenda. 
+And you see agenda — this is marketing, this is politics — trying to convince you to have one model versus another, trying to convince you to ignore a model and trust your feelings, marginalizing people with models you don't like. 
+This is not uncommon. 
+An example, a great example, is the risk of smoking. 
+In the history of the past 50 years, the smoking risk shows how a model changes, and it also shows how an industry fights against a model it doesn't like. 
+Compare that to the secondhand smoke debate — probably about 20 years behind. 
+Think about seat belts. 
+When I was a kid, no one wore a seat belt. 
+Nowadays, no kid will let you drive if you're not wearing a seat belt. 
+Compare that to the airbag debate — probably about 30 years behind. 
+All examples of models changing. 
+What we learn is that changing models is hard. 
+Models are hard to dislodge. 
+If they equal your feelings, you don't even know you have a model. 
+And there's another cognitive bias I'll call confirmation bias, where we tend to accept data that confirms our beliefs and reject data that contradicts our beliefs. 
+So evidence against our model, we're likely to ignore, even if it's compelling. 
+It has to get very compelling before we'll pay attention. 
+New models that extend long periods of time are hard. 
+Global warming is a great example. 
+We're terrible at models that span 80 years. 
+We can do to the next harvest. 
+We can often do until our kids grow up. 
+But 80 years, we're just not good at. 
+So it's a very hard model to accept. 
+We can have both models in our head simultaneously, right, that kind of problem where we're holding both beliefs together, right, the cognitive dissonance. 
+Eventually, the new model will replace the old model. 
+Strong feelings can create a model. 
+September 11th created a security model in a lot of people's heads. 
+Also, personal experiences with crime can do it, personal health scare, a health scare in the news. 
+You'll see these called flashbulb events by psychiatrists. 
+They can create a model instantaneously, because they're very emotive. 
+So in the technological world, we don't have experience to judge models. 
+And we rely on others. We rely on proxies. 
+I mean, this works as long as it's to correct others. 
+We rely on government agencies to tell us what pharmaceuticals are safe. 
+I flew here yesterday. 
+I didn't check the airplane. 
+I relied on some other group to determine whether my plane was safe to fly. 
+We're here, none of us fear the roof is going to collapse on us, not because we checked, but because we're pretty sure the building codes here are good. 
+It's a model we just accept pretty much by faith. 
+And that's okay. 
+Now, what we want is people to get familiar enough with better models — have it reflected in their feelings — to allow them to make security trade-offs. 
+Now when these go out of whack, you have two options. 
+One, you can fix people's feelings, directly appeal to feelings. 
+It's manipulation, but it can work. 
+The second, more honest way is to actually fix the model. 
+Change happens slowly. 
+The smoking debate took 40 years, and that was an easy one. 
+Some of this stuff is hard. 
+I mean really though, information seems like our best hope. 
+And I lied. 
+Remember I said feeling, model, reality; I said reality doesn't change. It actually does. 
+We live in a technological world; reality changes all the time. 
+So we might have — for the first time in our species — feeling chases model, model chases reality, reality's moving — they might never catch up. 
+We don't know. 
+But in the long-term, both feeling and reality are important. 
+And I want to close with two quick stories to illustrate this. 
+1982 — I don't know if people will remember this — there was a short epidemic of Tylenol poisonings in the United States. 
+It's a horrific story. Someone took a bottle of Tylenol, put poison in it, closed it up, put it back on the shelf. 
+Someone else bought it and died. 
+This terrified people. 
+There were a couple of copycat attacks. 
+There wasn't any real risk, but people were scared. 
+And this is how the tamper-proof drug industry was invented. 
+Those tamper-proof caps, that came from this. 
+It's complete security theater. 
+As a homework assignment, think of 10 ways to get around it. 
+I'll give you one, a syringe. 
+But it made people feel better. 
+It made their feeling of security more match the reality. 
+Last story, a few years ago, a friend of mine gave birth. 
+I visit her in the hospital. 
+It turns out when a baby's born now, they put an RFID bracelet on the baby, put a corresponding one on the mother, so if anyone other than the mother takes the baby out of the maternity ward, an alarm goes off. 
+I said, "" Well, that's kind of neat. 
+I wonder how rampant baby snatching is out of hospitals. "" I go home, I look it up. 
+It basically never happens. 
+But if you think about it, if you are a hospital, and you need to take a baby away from its mother, out of the room to run some tests, you better have some good security theater, or she's going to rip your arm off. 
+(Laughter) So it's important for us, those of us who design security, who look at security policy, or even look at public policy in ways that affect security. 
+It's not just reality; it's feeling and reality. 
+What's important is that they be about the same. 
+It's important that, if our feelings match reality, we make better security trade-offs. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I became an inventor by accident. 
+I was out of the air force in 1956. No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm. 
+Now, that was before cassette tapes, C.D.s, DVDs — any of the cool stuff we've got now. 
+And it was an arm that, instead of hinging and pivoting as it went across the record, went straight: a radial, linear tracking tone arm. 
+And it was the hardest invention I ever made, but it got me started, and I got really lucky after that. 
+And without giving you too much of a tirade, I want to talk to you about an invention I brought with me today: my 44th invention. No, that's not true either. 
+Golly, I'm just totally losing it. 
+My 44th patent; about the 15th invention. 
+I call this hypersonic sound. 
+I'm going to play it for you in a couple minutes, but I want to make an analogy before I do to this. 
+I usually show this hypersonic sound and people will say, That's really cool, but what's it good for? 
+And I say, What is the light bulb good for? 
+Sound, light: I'm going to draw the analogy. 
+When Edison invented the light bulb, pretty much looked like this. 
+Hasn't changed that much. 
+Light came out of it in every direction. 
+Before the light bulb was invented, people had figured out how to put a reflector behind it, focus it a little bit; put lenses in front of it, focus it a little bit better. 
+Ultimately we figured out how to make things like lasers that were totally focused. 
+Now, think about where the world would be today if we had the light bulb, but you couldn't focus light; if when you turned one on it just went wherever it wanted to. 
+That's the way loudspeakers pretty much are. 
+You turn on the loudspeaker, and after almost 80 years of having those gadgets, the sound just kind of goes where it wants. 
+Even when you're standing in front of a megaphone, it's pretty much every direction. 
+A little bit of differential, but not much. 
+If the light bulb was the way the speaker is, and you couldn't focus or sharpen the edges or define it, we wouldn't have that, or movies in general, or computers, or T.V. sets, or C.D.s, or DVDs — and just go down the list of what the importance is of being able to focus light. 
+Now, after almost 80 years of having sound, I thought it was about time that we figure out a way to put sound where you want to. 
+I have a couple of units. 
+That guy there was made for a demo I did yesterday early in the day for a big car maker in Detroit who wants to put them in a car — small version, over your head — so that you can actually get binaural sound in a car. 
+What if I could aim sound the way I aim light? 
+I got this waterfall I recorded in my back yard. 
+Now, you're not going to hear a thing unless it hits you. 
+Maybe if I hit the side wall it will bounce around the room. 
+(Applause) The sound is being made right next to your ears. Is that cool? (Applause) 
+Because I have some limited time, I'll cut it off for a second, and tell you about how it works and what it's good for. 
+Course, like light, it's great to be able to put sound to highlight a clothing rack, or the cornflakes, or the toothpaste, or a talking plaque in a movie theater lobby. 
+Sony's got an idea — Sony's our biggest customers right now. 
+They tried this back in the '60s and were too smart, and so they gave up. 
+But they want to use it — seriously. 
+There's a mix an inventor has to have. 
+You have to be kind of smart, and though I did not graduate from college doesn't mean I'm stupid, because you cannot be stupid and do very much in the world today. 
+Too many other smart people out there. So. 
+I just happened to get my education in a little different way. 
+I'm not at all against education. 
+I think it's wonderful; I think sometimes people, when they get educated, lose it: they get so smart they're unwilling to look at things that they know better than. 
+And we're living in a great time right now, because almost everything's being explored anew. 
+I have this little slogan that I use a lot, which is: virtually nothing — and I mean this honestly — has been invented yet. 
+We're just starting. 
+We're just starting to really discover the laws of nature and science and physics. 
+And this is, I hope, a little piece of it. 
+Sony's got this vision back — to get myself on track — that when you stand in the checkout line in the supermarket, you're going to watch a new T.V. channel. 
+They know that when you watch T.V. at home, because there are so many choices you can change channels, miss their commercials. 
+A hundred and fifty-one million people every day stand in the line at the supermarket. 
+Now, they've tried this a couple years ago and it failed, because the checker gets tired of hearing the same message every 20 minutes, and reaches out, turns off the sound. 
+And, you know, if the sound isn't there, the sale typically isn't made. 
+For instance, like, when you're on an airplane, they show the movie, you get to watch it for free; when you want to hear the sound, you pay. 
+And so ABC and Sony have devised this new thing where when you step in the line in the supermarket — initially it'll be Safeways. It is Safeways; they're trying this in three parts of the country right now — you'll be watching TV. 
+And hopefully they'll be sensitive that they don't want to offend you with just one more outlet. 
+But what's great about it, from the tests that have been done, is, if you don't want to hear it, you take about one step to the side and you don't hear it. 
+So, we create silence as much as we create sound. 
+ATMs that talk to you; nobody else hears it. 
+Sit in bed, two in the morning, watch TV; your spouse, or someone, is next to you, asleep; doesn't hear it, doesn't wake up. 
+We're also working on noise canceling things like snoring, noise from automobiles. 
+I have been really lucky with this technology: all of a sudden as it is ready, the world is ready to accept it. 
+They have literally beat a path to our door. 
+We've been selling it since about last September, October, and it's been immensely gratifying. 
+If you're interested in what it costs — I'm not selling them today — but this unit, with the electronics and everything, if you buy one, is around a thousand bucks. 
+We expect by this time next year, it'll be hundreds, a few hundred bucks, to buy it. 
+It's not any more pricey than regular electronics. 
+Now, when I played it for you, you didn't hear the thunderous bass. 
+This unit that I played goes from about 200 hertz to above the range of hearing. 
+It's actually emitting ultrasound — low-level ultrasound — that's about 100,000 vibrations per second. 
+And the sound that you're hearing, unlike a regular speaker on which all the sound is made on the face, is made out in front of it, in the air. 
+The air is not linear, as we've always been taught. 
+You turn up the volume just a little bit — I'm talking about a little over 80 decibels — and all of a sudden the air begins to corrupt signals you propagate. 
+Here's why: the speed of sound is not a constant. It's fairly slow. 
+It changes with temperature and with barometric pressure. 
+Now, imagine, if you will, without getting too technical, I'm making a little sine wave here in the air. 
+Well, if I turn up the amplitude too much, I'm having an effect on the pressure, which means during the making of that sine wave, the speed at which it is propagating is shifting. 
+All of audio as we know it is an attempt to be more and more perfectly linear. 
+Linearity means higher quality sound. 
+Hypersonic sound is exactly the opposite: it's 100 percent based on non-linearity. 
+An effect happens in the air, it's a corrupting effect of the sound — the ultrasound in this case — that's emitted, but it's so predictable that you can produce very precise audio out of that effect. 
+Now, the question is, where's the sound made? 
+Instead of being made on the face of the cone, it's made at literally billions of little independent points along this narrow column in the air, and so when I aim it towards you, what you hear is made right next to your ears. 
+I said we can shorten the column, we can spread it out to cover the couch. 
+I can put it so that one ear hears one speaker, the other ear hears the other. That's true binaural sound. 
+When you listen to stereo on your home system, your both ears hear both speakers. 
+Turn on the left speaker sometime and notice you're hearing it also in your right ear. 
+So, the stage is more restricted — the sound stage that's supposed to spread out in front of you. 
+Because the sound is made in the air along this column, it does not follow the inverse square law, which says it drops off about two thirds every time you double the distance: 6dB every time you go from one meter, for instance, to two meters. 
+That means you go to a rock concert or a symphony, and the guy in the front row gets the same level as the guy in the back row, now, all of a sudden. 
+Isn't that terrific? 
+So, we've been, as I say, very successful, very lucky, in having companies catch the vision of this, from cars — car makers who want to put a stereo system in the front for the kids, and a separate system in the back — oh, no, the kids aren't driving today. 
+(Laughter) I was seeing if you were listening. 
+Actually, I haven't had breakfast yet. 
+A stereo system in the front for mom and dad, and maybe there's a little DVD player in the back for the kids, and the parents don't want to be bothered with that, or their rap music or whatever. 
+So, again, this idea of being able to put sound anywhere you want to is really starting to catch on. 
+It also works for transmitting and communicating data. 
+It also works five times better underwater. 
+We've got the military — have just deployed some of these into Iraq, where you can put fake troop movements quarter of a mile away on a hillside. 
+(Laughter) Or you can whisper in the ear of a supposed terrorist some Biblical verse. (Laughter) 
+I'm serious. And they have these infrared devices that can look at their countenance, and see a fraction of a degree Kelvin in temperature shift from 100 yards away when they play this thing. 
+And so, another way of hopefully determining who's friendly and who isn't. 
+We make a version with this which puts out 155 decibels. 
+Pain is 120. 
+So it allows you to go nearly a mile away and communicate with people, and there can be a public beach just off to the side, and they don't even know it's turned on. 
+We sell those to the military presently for about 70,000 dollars, and they're buying them as fast as we can make them. 
+We put it on a turret with a camera, so that when they shoot at you, you're over there, and it's there. 
+I have a bunch of other inventions. 
+I invented a plasma antenna, to shift gears. 
+Looked up at the ceiling of my office one day — I was working on a ground-penetrating radar project — and my physicist CEO came in and said, "" We have a real problem. 
+We're using very short wavelengths. 
+We've got a problem with the antenna ringing. 
+When you run very short wavelengths, like a tuning fork the antenna resonates, and there's more energy coming out of the antenna than there is the backscatter from the ground that we're trying to analyze, taking too much processing. "" I says, "" Why don't we make an antenna that only exists when you want it? 
+Turn it on; turn it off. 
+That's a fluorescent tube refined. "" I just sold that for a million and a half dollars, cash. 
+I took it back to the Pentagon after it got declassified, when the patent issued, and told the people back there about it, and they laughed, and then I took them back a demo and they bought. 
+(Laughter) Any of you ever wore a Jabber headphone — the little cell headphones? 
+That's my invention. I sold that for seven million dollars. 
+Big mistake: it just sold for 80 million dollars two years ago. 
+I actually drew that up on a little crummy Mac computer in my attic at my house, and one of the many designs which they have now is still the same design I drew way back when. 
+So, I've been really lucky as an inventor. 
+I'm the happiest guy you're ever going to meet. 
+And my dad died before he realized anybody in the family would maybe, hopefully, make something out of themselves. 
+You've been a great audience. I know I've jumped all over the place. 
+I usually figure out what my talk is when I get up in front of a group. 
+Let me give you, in the last minute, one more quick demo of this guy, for those of you that haven't heard it. 
+Can never tell if it's on. 
+If you haven't heard it, raise your hand. 
+Getting it over there? 
+Get the cameraman. 
+Yeah, there you go. 
+I've got a Coke can opening that's right in your head; that's really cool. 
+Thank you once again. 
+Appreciate it very much. 
+
+So let me just start with my story. 
+So I tore my knee joint meniscus cartilage playing soccer in college. 
+Then I went on to tear my ACL, the ligament in my knee, and then developed an arthritic knee. 
+And I'm sure that many of you in this audience have that same story, and, by the way, I married a woman who has exactly the same story. 
+So this motivated me to become an orthopedic surgeon and to see if I couldn't focus on solutions for those problems that would keep me playing sports and not limit me. 
+So with that, let me just show you a quick video to get you in the mood of what we're trying to explain. 
+Narrator: We are all aware of the risk of cancer, but there's another disease that's destined to affect even more of us: arthritis. 
+Cancer may kill you, but when you look at the numbers, arthritis ruins more lives. 
+Assuming you live a long life, there's a 50 percent chance you'll develop arthritis. 
+And it's not just aging that causes arthritis. 
+Common injuries can lead to decades of pain, until our joints quite literally grind to a halt. 
+Desperate for a solution, we've turned to engineering to design artificial components to replace our worn-out body parts, but in the midst of the modern buzz around the promises of a bionic body, shouldn't we stop and ask if there's a better, more natural way? 
+Let's consider an alternative path. 
+What if all the replacements our bodies need already exist in nature, or within our own stem cells? 
+This is the field of biologic replacements, where we replace worn-out parts with new, natural ones. 
+Kevin Stone: And so, the mission is: how do I treat these things biologically? 
+And let's talk about both what I did for my wife, and what I've done for hundreds of other patients. 
+First thing for my wife, and the most common thing I hear from my patients, particularly in the 40- to 80-year-old age group, 70-year-old age group, is they come in and say, "" Hey, Doc, isn't there just a shock absorber you can put in my knee? 
+I'm not ready for joint replacement. "" And so for her, I put in a human meniscus allograft donor right into that [knee] joint space. 
+And [the allograft] replaces [the missing meniscus]. 
+And then for that unstable ligament, we put in a human donor ligament to stabilize the knee. 
+And then for the damaged arthritis on the surface, we did a stem cell paste graft, which we designed in 1991, to regrow that articular cartilage surface and give it back a smooth surface there. 
+So here's my wife's bad knee on the left, and her just hiking now four months later in Aspen, and doing well. 
+And it works, not just for my wife, but certainly for other patients. 
+The girl on the video, Jen Hudak, just won the Superpipe in Aspen just nine months after having destroyed her knee, as you see in the other image — and having a paste graft to that knee. 
+And so we can regrow these surfaces biologically. 
+So with all this success, why isn't that good enough, you might ask. 
+Well the reason is because there's not enough donor cycles. 
+There's not enough young, healthy people falling off their motorcycle and donating that tissue to us. 
+And the tissue's very expensive. 
+And so that's not going to be a solution that's going to get us global with biologic tissue. 
+But the solution is animal tissue because it's plentiful, it's cheap, you can get it from young, healthy tissues, but the barrier is immunology. 
+And the specific barrier is a specific epitope called the galactosyl, or gal epitope. 
+So if we're going to transplant animal tissues to people, we have to figure out a way to get rid of that epitope. 
+So my story in working with animal tissues starts in 1984. 
+And I started first with cow Achilles tendon, where we would take the cow Achilles tendon, which is type-I collagen, strip it of its antigens by degrading it with an acid and detergent wash and forming it into a regeneration template. 
+We would then take that regeneration template and insert it into the missing meniscus cartilage to regrow that in a patient's knee. 
+We've now done that procedure, and it's been done worldwide in over 4,000 cases, so it's an FDA-approved and worldwide-accepted way to regrow the meniscus. 
+And that's great when I can degrade the tissue. 
+But what happens for your ligament when I need an intact ligament? 
+I can't grind it up in a blender. 
+So in that case, I have to design — and we designed with Uri Galili and Tom Turek — an enzyme wash to wash away, or strip, those galactosyl epitopes with a specific enzyme. 
+And we call that a "" gal stripping "" technique. 
+What we do is humanize the tissue. 
+It's by gal stripping that tissue we humanize it (Laughter), and then we can put it back into a patient's knee. 
+And we've done that. Now we've taken pig ligament — young, healthy, big tissue, put it into 10 patients in an FDA-approved trial — and then one of our patients went on to have three Canadian Masters Downhill championships — on his "" pig-lig, "" as he calls it. So we know it can work. 
+And there's a wide clinical trial of this tissue now pending. 
+So what about the next step? 
+What about getting to a total biologic knee replacement, not just the parts? 
+How are we going to revolutionize artificial joint replacement? 
+Well here's how we're going to do it. 
+So what we're going to do is take an articular cartilage from a young, healthy pig, strip it of its antigens, load it with your stem cells, then put it back on to that arthritic surface in your knee, tack it on there, have you heal that surface and then create a new biologic surface for your knee. 
+So that's our biologic approach right now. 
+We're going to rebuild your knee with the parts. 
+We're going to resurface it with a completely new surface. 
+But we have other advantages from the animal kingdom. 
+There's a benefit of 400 million years of ambulation. 
+We can harness those benefits. 
+We can use thicker, younger, better tissues than you might have injured in your knee, or that you might have when you're 40, 50 or 60. 
+We can do it as an outpatient procedure. 
+We can strip that tissue very economically, and so this is how we can get biologic knee replacement to go global. 
+And so welcome to super biologics. 
+It's not hardware. 
+It's not software. 
+It's bioware. 
+It's version 2.0 of you. 
+And so with that, coming to a — (Laughter) coming to an operating theater near you soon, I believe. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I would like to start with the story of Mary, a woman from an African village. 
+Her first memories are of her family fleeing violent riots orchestrated by the ruling political party. 
+Her brother was murdered by the state-sponsored militia, and she was raped more than once just because she belonged to the wrong party. 
+One morning, a month before the election, Mary's village was called to another intimidation meeting. 
+In this meeting, there is a man standing in front of them, telling them, "" We know who you are, we know who you will vote for, and if you're not going to drop the right paper, we're going to take revenge. "" But for Mary, this meeting is different. 
+She feels different. 
+This time, she's waiting for this meeting, because this time, she's carrying a small hidden camera in her dress, a camera that nobody else can see. 
+Nobody is allowed to film in these meetings. 
+You risk your life if you do. 
+Mary knows that, but she also knows that the only way to stop them and to protect herself and her community is to expose their intimidation, to make sure they understand somebody is following them, to break the impunity they feel. 
+Mary and her friends were filming for months, undercover, the intimidation of the ruling political party. 
+(Video) ["" Filmed with hidden cameras ""] Man: We are now going to speak about the upcoming elections. 
+Nothing can stop us from doing what we want. 
+If we hear you are with [The Opposition] we will not forgive you. 
+["" Militia intimidation rally ""] [The Party] can torture you at any time. 
+The youth can beat you. 
+["" Disruption of political meeting ""] For those who lie, saying they are back with [The Party], your time is running out. 
+["" Party youth militia ""] Some have died because they rebelled. 
+Some have lost their homes. 
+If you don't work together with [The Party], you will lead a very bad life. 
+Oren Yakobovich: These images were broadcast all over the world, but more importantly, they have been broadcast back to the community. 
+The perpetrators saw them too. 
+They understood somebody is following them. 
+They got scared. Impunity was broken. 
+Mary and her friends forced the ruling political party not to use violence during the election, and saved hundreds of lives. 
+Mary is just one of hundreds of people that my organization had helped to document human rights violations using cameras. 
+My background should have led me to a different direction. 
+I was born in Israel to a right-wing family, and as long as I remember myself, I wanted to join the Israeli army to serve my country and prove what I believed was our right for the whole land. 
+I didn't like what I saw. 
+It took me a while, but eventually I refused to serve in the West Bank and had to spend time in jail. 
+It was a bit — (Applause) — It was not that bad, I have to say. 
+It was a bit like being in a hotel, but with very shitty food. 
+(Laughter) In jail, I kept thinking that I need people to know. 
+I need people to understand what the reality in the West Bank looks like. 
+I need them to hear what I heard, I need them to see what I saw, but I also understood, we need the Palestinians themselves, the people that are suffering, to be able to tell their own stories, not journalists or filmmakers that are coming outside of the situation. 
+I joined a human rights organization, an Israeli human rights organization called B'Tselem. 
+Together, we analyzed the West Bank and picked 100 families that are living in the most risky places: close to checkpoints, near army bases, side by side with settlers. 
+We gave them cameras and training. 
+Quite fast, we started getting very disturbing images about how the settlers and the soldiers are abusing them. 
+Both of them were broadcast in Israel, and it created a massive debate. 
+The masked men you will see in the first clips are Jewish settlers. 
+The Palestinians refused. 
+They are approaching the Palestinian family. 
+Here you see him blindfolded and handcuffed. 
+In a few seconds, he regrets he came to this demonstration. 
+He's been shot in the foot with a rubber bullet. 
+He is okay. 
+Not all the settlers and the soldiers are acting this way. 
+These clips, and others like them, forced the army and the police to start investigations. 
+This project redefined the struggle for human rights in the occupied territories, and we managed to reduce the number of violent attacks in the West Bank. 
+The success of this project got me thinking how I can take the same methodology to other places in the world. 
+Now, we tend to believe that today, with all of the technology, the smartphones and the Internet, we are able to see and understand most of what's happening in the world, and people are able to tell their story — but it's only partly true. 
+Still today, with all the technology we have, less than half of the world's population has access to the Internet, and more than three billion people — I'm repeating the number — three billion people are consuming news that is censored by those in power. 
+More or less around the same time, I'm approached by a great guy named Uri Fruchtmann. 
+We understood we were thinking along the same lines, and we decided to establish Videre, our organization, together. 
+While building the organization in London, we've been traveling undercover to places where a community was suffering from abuses, where mass atrocities were happening, and there was a lack of reporting. 
+The first thing is that we have to engage with communities that are living in rural areas, where violations are happening far from the public eye. 
+We need to partner with them, and we need to understand which images are not making it out there and help them to document them. 
+The second thing I learned is that we have to enable them to film in a safe way. 
+Security has to be the priority. 
+Where I used to work before, in the West Bank, one can take a camera out, most likely not going to get shot, but in places we wanted to work, just try to pull a phone out, and you're dead — literally dead. 
+You can buy them off the shelf. 
+Today, we're building a custom-made hidden camera, like the one that Mary was wearing in her dress to film the intimidation meeting of the ruling political party. 
+It's a camera that nobody can see, that blends into the environment, into the surroundings. 
+To keep our partners safe, we work to understand the risk of every location and of every shot before it's happened, building a backup plan if something goes wrong, and making sure we have everything in place before our operations start. 
+You can have an amazing shot of atrocity, but if you can't verify it, it's worth nothing. 
+Recently, like in the ongoing war in Syria or the war in Gaza, we've seen images that are staged or brought from a different conflict. 
+How do you film a location? 
+You film road signs, you film watches, you film newspapers. 
+We are checking maps, looking at maps, double-checking the information, and looking also at the metadata of the material. 
+Now, the fourth and the most important thing I learned is how you use images to create a positive change. 
+To have an effect, the key thing is how you use the material. 
+We work with them both to understand the situation on the ground and which images are missing to describe it, who are the ones that are influencing the situation, and when to release the material to advance the struggle. 
+Sometimes, it's about putting it in the media, mostly local ones, to create awareness. 
+Sometimes it's working with decision makers, to change laws. 
+Sometimes, it's working with lawyers to use as evidence in court. 
+But more than often, the most effective way to create a social change is to work within the community. 
+I want to give you one example. 
+Fatuma is part of a network of women that are fighting abuses in Kenya. 
+Women in her community have been harassed constantly on their way to school and on their way to work. 
+They are trying to change the behavior of the community from inside. 
+(Video) Fatuma Chiusiku: My name is Fatuma Chiusiku. 
+I'm 32 years old, a mother, And Ziwa La Ng'Ombe is my home. 
+Each morning, I ride the mini-bus Number 11. 
+Come with me now and use my eyes to feel what I feel. 
+As I walk, I think to myself: Will I be touched? 
+Grabbed? 
+Violated by this conductor again? 
+Even the men inside the way they look at me touch my body, rub against me, grab me, and now, as I sit in my seat I only wish my mind was full of thoughts for my day, my dreams, my children at school, but instead I worry about the moment when we will arrive and I will be violated again. 
+OY: Today, there is a new front in the fight for human rights. 
+This is a much more powerful and much, much more effective weapon. 
+But we have to use its power wisely. 
+By putting the right images in the right hands at the right time, we can truly create an impact. 
+
+Last year I showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap, which for most of the last three million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40 percent. 
+But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice. 
+The arctic ice cap is, in a sense, the beating heart of the global climate system. 
+It expands in winter and contracts in summer. 
+The next slide I show you will be a rapid fast-forward of what's happened over the last 25 years. 
+The permanent ice is marked in red. 
+As you see, it expands to the dark blue — that's the annual ice in winter, and it contracts in summer. 
+The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older, you can see is almost like blood, spilling out of the body here. 
+In 25 years it's gone from this, to this. 
+This is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean, where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which, when it thaws, is turned into methane by microbes. 
+Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere, that amount could double if we cross this tipping point. 
+Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska, methane is actively bubbling up out of the water. 
+Professor Katey Walter from the University of Alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter. 
+Video: Whoa! (Laughter) Al Gore: She's okay. The question is whether we will be. 
+And one reason is, this enormous heat sink heats up Greenland from the north. 
+This is an annual melting river. 
+But the volumes are much larger than ever. 
+This is the Kangerlussuaq River in southwest Greenland. 
+If you want to know how sea level rises from land-base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea. 
+These flows are increasing very rapidly. 
+At the other end of the planet, Antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet. 
+Last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance. 
+And west Antarctica cropped up on top some under-sea islands, is particularly rapid in its melting. 
+That's equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland. 
+In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice: at the top you see new lakes, which a few years ago were glaciers. 
+40 percent of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow. 
+In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city. 
+The flows have increased. 
+But when they go away, so does much of the drinking water. 
+In California there has been a 40 percent decline in the Sierra snowpack. 
+This is hitting the reservoirs. 
+And the predictions, as you've read, are serious. 
+This drying around the world has lead to a dramatic increase in fires. 
+And the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate. 
+Four times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75. 
+This is a completely unsustainable pattern. 
+If you look at in the context of history you can see what this is doing. 
+In the last five years we've added 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours — 25 million tons every day to the oceans. 
+Look carefully at the area of the eastern Pacific, from the Americas, extending westward, and on either side of the Indian subcontinent, where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans. 
+The biggest single cause of global warming, along with deforestation, which is 20 percent of it, is the burning of fossil fuels. 
+Oil is a problem, and coal is the most serious problem. 
+The United States is one of the two largest emitters, along with China. 
+And the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants. 
+But we're beginning to see a sea change. 
+Here are the ones that have been cancelled in the last few years with some green alternatives proposed. 
+(Applause) However there is a political battle in our country. 
+And the coal industries and the oil industries spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the last calendar year promoting clean coal, which is an oxymoron. 
+That image reminded me of something. 
+(Laughter) Around Christmas, in my home in Tennessee, a billion gallons of coal sludge was spilled. 
+You probably saw it on the news. 
+This, all over the country, is the second largest waste stream in America. 
+This happened around Christmas. 
+One of the coal industry's ads around Christmas was this one. 
+Video: ♪ ♫ Frosty the coal man is a jolly, happy soul. 
+He's abundant here in America, and he helps our economy grow. 
+Frosty the coal man is getting cleaner everyday. 
+He's affordable and adorable, and workers keep their pay. 
+Al Gore: This is the source of much of the coal in West Virginia. 
+The largest mountaintop miner is the head of Massey Coal. 
+Video: Don Blankenship: Let me be clear about it. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, they don't know what they're talking about. 
+Al Gore: So the Alliance for Climate Protection has launched two campaigns. 
+This is one of them, part of one of them. 
+Video: Actor: At COALergy we view climate change as a very serious threat to our business. 
+That's why we've made it our primary goal to spend a large sum of money on an advertising effort to help bring out and complicate the truth about coal. 
+The fact is, coal isn't dirty. 
+We think it's clean — smells good, too. 
+So don't worry about climate change. 
+Leave that up to us. 
+(Laughter) Video: Actor: Clean coal — you've heard a lot about it. 
+So let's take a tour of this state-of-the-art clean coal facility. 
+Amazing! The machinery is kind of loud. 
+But that's the sound of clean coal technology. 
+And while burning coal is one of the leading causes of global warming, the remarkable clean coal technology you see here changes everything. 
+Take a good long look: this is today's clean coal technology. 
+Al Gore: Finally, the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge. 
+Video: Narrator: America is in crisis — the economy, national security, the climate crisis. 
+The thread that links them all: our addiction to carbon based fuels, like dirty coal and foreign oil. 
+But now there is a bold new solution to get us out of this mess. 
+Repower America with 100 percent clean electricity within 10 years. 
+A plan to put America back to work, make us more secure, and help stop global warming. 
+Finally, a solution that's big enough to solve our problems. 
+Repower America. Find out more. 
+Al Gore: This is the last one. 
+Video: Narrator: It's about repowering America. 
+One of the fastest ways to cut our dependence on old dirty fuels that are killing our planet. 
+Man: Future's over here. Wind, sun, a new energy grid. 
+Man # 2: New investments to create high-paying jobs. 
+Narrator: Repower America. It's time to get real. 
+Al Gore: There is an old African proverb that says, "" If you want to go quickly, go alone. 
+If you want to go far, go together. "" We need to go far, quickly. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Today I'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds. 
+And the problem I'm going to talk about is not the familiar one from philosophy, which is, "" How can we know whether other people have minds? "" That is, maybe you have a mind, and everyone else is just a really convincing robot. 
+So that's a problem in philosophy, but for today's purposes I'm going to assume that many people in this audience have a mind, and that I don't have to worry about this. 
+There is a second problem that is maybe even more familiar to us as parents and teachers and spouses and novelists, which is, "" Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes? "" Or perhaps, more relevantly, "Why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes?" 
+I think novelists put this best. 
+Like Philip Roth, who said, "" And yet, what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people? 
+So ill equipped are we all, to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims. "" So as a teacher and as a spouse, this is, of course, a problem I confront every day. 
+But as a scientist, I'm interested in a different problem of other minds, and that is the one I'm going to introduce to you today. 
+And that problem is, "" How is it so easy to know other minds? "" So to start with an illustration, you need almost no information, one snapshot of a stranger, to guess what this woman is thinking, or what this man is. 
+And put another way, the crux of the problem is the machine that we use for thinking about other minds, our brain, is made up of pieces, brain cells, that we share with all other animals, with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs. 
+And yet, you put them together in a particular network, and what you get is the capacity to write Romeo and Juliet. 
+Or to say, as Alan Greenspan did, "" I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant. "" (Laughter) So, the job of my field of cognitive neuroscience is to stand with these ideas, one in each hand. 
+And to try to understand how you can put together simple units, simple messages over space and time, in a network, and get this amazing human capacity to think about minds. 
+So I'm going to tell you three things about this today. 
+Obviously the whole project here is huge. 
+And I'm going to tell you just our first few steps about the discovery of a special brain region for thinking about other people's thoughts. 
+Some observations on the slow development of this system as we learn how to do this difficult job. 
+And then finally, to show that some of the differences between people, in how we judge others, can be explained by differences in this brain system. 
+So first, the first thing I want to tell you is that there is a brain region in the human brain, in your brains, whose job it is to think about other people's thoughts. 
+This is a picture of it. 
+It's called the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction. 
+It's above and behind your right ear. 
+And this is the brain region you used when you saw the pictures I showed you, or when you read Romeo and Juliet or when you tried to understand Alan Greenspan. 
+And you don't use it for solving any other kinds of logical problems. 
+So this brain region is called the Right TPJ. 
+And this picture shows the average activation in a group of what we call typical human adults. 
+They're MIT undergraduates. 
+(Laughter) The second thing I want to say about this brain system is that although we human adults are really good at understanding other minds, we weren't always that way. 
+It takes children a long time to break into the system. 
+I'm going to show you a little bit of that long, extended process. 
+The first thing I'm going to show you is a change between age three and five, as kids learn to understand that somebody else can have beliefs that are different from their own. 
+So I'm going to show you a five-year-old who is getting a standard kind of puzzle that we call the false belief task. 
+Rebecca Saxe (Video): This is the first pirate. His name is Ivan. 
+And you know what pirates really like? 
+Child: What? RS: Pirates really like cheese sandwiches. 
+Child: Cheese? I love cheese! 
+RS: Yeah. So Ivan has this cheese sandwich, and he says, "" Yum yum yum yum yum! 
+I really love cheese sandwiches. "" And Ivan puts his sandwich over here, on top of the pirate chest. 
+And Ivan says, "" You know what? I need a drink with my lunch. "" And so Ivan goes to get a drink. 
+And while Ivan is away the wind comes, and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass. 
+And now, here comes the other pirate. 
+This pirate is called Joshua. 
+And Joshua also really loves cheese sandwiches. 
+So Joshua has a cheese sandwich and he says, "Yum yum yum yum yum! I love cheese sandwiches." 
+And he puts his cheese sandwich over here on top of the pirate chest. 
+Child: So, that one is his. 
+RS: That one is Joshua's. That's right. 
+Child: And then his went on the ground. 
+RS: That's exactly right. 
+Child: So he won't know which one is his. 
+RS: Oh. So now Joshua goes off to get a drink. 
+Ivan comes back and he says, "" I want my cheese sandwich. "" So which one do you think Ivan is going to take? 
+Child: I think he is going to take that one. 
+RS: Yeah, you think he's going to take that one? All right. Let's see. 
+Oh yeah, you were right. He took that one. 
+So that's a five-year-old who clearly understands that other people can have false beliefs and what the consequences are for their actions. 
+Now I'm going to show you a three-year-old who got the same puzzle. 
+RS: And Ivan says, "" I want my cheese sandwich. "" Which sandwich is he going to take? 
+Do you think he's going to take that one? Let's see what happens. 
+Let's see what he does. Here comes Ivan. 
+And he says, "" I want my cheese sandwich. "" And he takes this one. 
+Uh-oh. Why did he take that one? 
+Child: His was on the grass. 
+So the three-year-old does two things differently. 
+First, he predicts Ivan will take the sandwich that's really his. 
+And second, when he sees Ivan taking the sandwich where he left his, where we would say he's taking that one because he thinks it's his, the three-year-old comes up with another explanation: He's not taking his own sandwich because he doesn't want it, because now it's dirty, on the ground. 
+So that's why he's taking the other sandwich. 
+Now of course, development doesn't end at five. 
+And we can see the continuation of this process of learning to think about other people's thoughts by upping the ante and asking children now, not for an action prediction, but for a moral judgment. 
+So first I'm going to show you the three-year-old again. 
+RS.: So is Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich? 
+Child: Yeah. 
+RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich? 
+Child: Yeah. 
+So it's maybe not surprising he thinks it was mean of Ivan to take Joshua's sandwich, since he thinks Ivan only took Joshua's sandwich to avoid having to eat his own dirty sandwich. 
+But now I'm going to show you the five-year-old. 
+Remember the five-year-old completely understood why Ivan took Joshua's sandwich. 
+RS: Was Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich? 
+Child: Um, yeah. 
+And so, it is not until age seven that we get what looks more like an adult response. 
+RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich? 
+Child: No, because the wind should get in trouble. 
+He says the wind should get in trouble for switching the sandwiches. 
+(Laughter) And now what we've started to do in my lab is to put children into the brain scanner and ask what's going on in their brain as they develop this ability to think about other people's thoughts. 
+So the first thing is that in children we see this same brain region, the Right TPJ, being used while children are thinking about other people. 
+But it's not quite like the adult brain. 
+So whereas in the adults, as I told you, this brain region is almost completely specialized — it does almost nothing else except for thinking about other people's thoughts — in children it's much less so, when they are age five to eight, the age range of the children I just showed you. 
+And actually if we even look at eight to 11-year-olds, getting into early adolescence, they still don't have quite an adult-like brain region. 
+And so, what we can see is that over the course of childhood and even into adolescence, both the cognitive system, our mind's ability to think about other minds, and the brain system that supports it are continuing, slowly, to develop. 
+But of course, as you're probably aware, even in adulthood, people differ from one another in how good they are at thinking of other minds, how often they do it and how accurately. 
+And so what we wanted to know was, could differences among adults in how they think about other people's thoughts be explained in terms of differences in this brain region? 
+So, the first thing that we did is we gave adults a version of the pirate problem that we gave to the kids. 
+And I'm going to give that to you now. 
+So Grace and her friend are on a tour of a chemical factory, and they take a break for coffee. 
+And Grace's friend asks for some sugar in her coffee. 
+Grace goes to make the coffee and finds by the coffee a pot containing a white powder, which is sugar. 
+But the powder is labeled "" Deadly Poison, "" so Grace thinks that the powder is a deadly poison. 
+And she puts it in her friend's coffee. 
+And her friend drinks the coffee, and is fine. 
+How many people think it was morally permissible for Grace to put the powder in the coffee? 
+Okay. Good. (Laughter) So we ask people, how much should Grace be blamed in this case, which we call a failed attempt to harm? 
+And we can compare that to another case, where everything in the real world is the same. 
+The powder is still sugar, but what's different is what Grace thinks. 
+Now she thinks the powder is sugar. 
+And perhaps unsurprisingly, if Grace thinks the powder is sugar and puts it in her friend's coffee, people say she deserves no blame at all. 
+Whereas if she thinks the powder was poison, even though it's really sugar, now people say she deserves a lot of blame, even though what happened in the real world was exactly the same. 
+And in fact, they say she deserves more blame in this case, the failed attempt to harm, than in another case, which we call an accident. 
+Where Grace thought the powder was sugar, because it was labeled "" sugar "" and by the coffee machine, but actually the powder was poison. 
+So even though when the powder was poison, the friend drank the coffee and died, people say Grace deserves less blame in that case, when she innocently thought it was sugar, than in the other case, where she thought it was poison and no harm occurred. 
+People, though, disagree a little bit about exactly how much blame Grace should get in the accident case. 
+Some people think she should deserve more blame, and other people less. 
+And what I'm going to show you is what happened when we look inside the brains of people while they're making that judgment. 
+So what I'm showing you, from left to right, is how much activity there was in this brain region, and from top to bottom, how much blame people said that Grace deserved. 
+And what you can see is, on the left when there was very little activity in this brain region, people paid little attention to her innocent belief and said she deserved a lot of blame for the accident. 
+Whereas on the right, where there was a lot of activity, people paid a lot more attention to her innocent belief, and said she deserved a lot less blame for causing the accident. 
+So that's good, but of course what we'd rather is have a way to interfere with function in this brain region, and see if we could change people's moral judgment. 
+And we do have such a tool. 
+It's called Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS. 
+This is a tool that lets us pass a magnetic pulse through somebody's skull, into a small region of their brain, and temporarily disorganize the function of the neurons in that region. 
+So I'm going to show you a demo of this. 
+First, I'm going to show you that this is a magnetic pulse. 
+I'm going to show you what happens when you put a quarter on the machine. 
+When you hear clicks, we're turning the machine on. 
+So now I'm going to apply that same pulse to my brain, to the part of my brain that controls my hand. 
+So there is no physical force, just a magnetic pulse. 
+Woman (Video): Ready, Rebecca? RS: Yes. 
+Okay, so it causes a small involuntary contraction in my hand by putting a magnetic pulse in my brain. 
+And we can use that same pulse, now applied to the RTPJ, to ask if we can change people's moral judgments. 
+So these are the judgments I showed you before, people's normal moral judgments. 
+And then we can apply TMS to the RTPJ and ask how people's judgments change. 
+And the first thing is, people can still do this task overall. 
+So their judgments of the case when everything was fine remain the same. They say she deserves no blame. 
+But in the case of a failed attempt to harm, where Grace thought that it was poison, although it was really sugar, people now say it was more okay, she deserves less blame for putting the powder in the coffee. 
+And in the case of the accident, where she thought that it was sugar, but it was really poison and so she caused a death, people say that it was less okay, she deserves more blame. 
+So what I've told you today is that people come, actually, especially well equipped to think about other people's thoughts. 
+We have a special brain system that lets us think about what other people are thinking. 
+This system takes a long time to develop, slowly throughout the course of childhood and into early adolescence. 
+And even in adulthood, differences in this brain region can explain differences among adults in how we think about and judge other people. 
+But I want to give the last word back to the novelists, and to Philip Roth, who ended by saying, "" The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. 
+It's getting them wrong that is living. 
+Getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) Chris Anderson: So, I have a question. When you start talking about using magnetic pulses to change people's moral judgments, that sounds alarming. 
+(Laughter) Please tell me that you're not taking phone calls from the Pentagon, say. 
+RS: I'm not. 
+I mean, they're calling, but I'm not taking the call. 
+(Laughter) CA: They really are calling? 
+So then seriously, you must lie awake at night sometimes wondering where this work leads. 
+I mean, you're clearly an incredible human being, but someone could take this knowledge and in some future not-torture chamber, do acts that people here might be worried about. 
+RS: Yeah, we worry about this. 
+So, there's a couple of things to say about TMS. 
+One is that you can't be TMSed without knowing it. 
+So it's not a surreptitious technology. 
+It's quite hard, actually, to get those very small changes. 
+The changes I showed you are impressive to me because of what they tell us about the function of the brain, but they're small on the scale of the moral judgments that we actually make. 
+And what we changed was not people's moral judgments when they're deciding what to do, when they're making action choices. 
+We changed their ability to judge other people's actions. 
+And so, I think of what I'm doing not so much as studying the defendant in a criminal trial, but studying the jury. 
+CA: Is your work going to lead to any recommendations in education, to perhaps bring up a generation of kids able to make fairer moral judgments? 
+RS: That's one of the idealistic hopes. 
+The whole research program here of studying the distinctive parts of the human brain is brand new. 
+Until recently, what we knew about the brain were the things that any other animal's brain could do too, so we could study it in animal models. 
+We knew how brains see, and how they control the body and how they hear and sense. 
+And the whole project of understanding how brains do the uniquely human things — learn language and abstract concepts, and thinking about other people's thoughts — that's brand new. 
+And we don't know yet what the implications will be of understanding it. 
+CA: So I've got one last question. There is this thing called the hard problem of consciousness, that puzzles a lot of people. 
+The notion that you can understand why a brain works, perhaps. 
+But why does anyone have to feel anything? 
+Why does it seem to require these beings who sense things for us to operate? 
+You're a brilliant young neuroscientist. 
+I mean, what chances do you think there are that at some time in your career, someone, you or someone else, is going to come up with some paradigm shift in understanding what seems an impossible problem? 
+RS: I hope they do. And I think they probably won't. 
+CA: Why? 
+RS: It's not called the hard problem of consciousness for nothing. 
+(Laughter) CA: That's a great answer. Rebecca Saxe, thank you very much. That was fantastic. 
+(Applause) 
+
+A question I'm often asked is, where did I get my passion for human rights and justice? 
+It started early. 
+I grew up in the west of Ireland, wedged between four brothers, two older than me and two younger than me. 
+So of course I had to be interested in human rights, and equality and justice, and using my elbows! 
+(Laughter) And those issues stayed with me and guided me, and in particular, when I was elected the first woman President of Ireland, from 1990 to 1997. 
+I dedicated my presidency to having a space for those who felt marginalized on the island of Ireland, and bringing together communities from Northern Ireland with those from the Republic, trying to build peace. 
+And I went as the first Irish president to the United Kingdom and met with Queen Elizabeth II, and also welcomed to my official residence — which we call "" Áras an Uachtaráin, "" the house of the president — members of the royal family, including, notably, the Prince of Wales. 
+And I was aware that at the time of my presidency, Ireland was a country beginning a rapid economic progress. 
+We were a country that was benefiting from the solidarity of the European Union. 
+Indeed, when Ireland first joined the European Union in 1973, there were parts of the country that were considered developing, including my own beloved native county, County Mayo. 
+I led trade delegations here to the United States, to Japan, to India, to encourage investment, to help to create jobs, to build up our economy, to build up our health system, our education — our development. 
+What I didn't have to do as president was buy land on mainland Europe, so that Irish citizens could go there because our island was going underwater. 
+What I didn't have to think about, either as president or as a constitutional lawyer, was the implications for the sovereignty of the territory because of the impact of climate change. 
+But that is what President Tong, of the Republic of Kiribati, has to wake up every morning thinking about. 
+He has bought land in Fiji as an insurance policy, what he calls, "" migration with dignity, "" because he knows that his people may have to leave their islands. 
+As I listened to President Tong describing the situation, I really felt that this was a problem that no leader should have to face. 
+And as I heard him speak about the pain of his problems, I thought about Eleanor Roosevelt. 
+I thought about her and those who worked with her on the Commission on Human Rights, which she chaired in 1948, and drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 
+For them, it would have been unimaginable that a whole country could go out of existence because of human-induced climate change. 
+I came to climate change not as a scientist or an environmental lawyer, and I wasn't really impressed by the images of polar bears or melting glaciers. 
+It was because of the impact on people, and the impact on their rights — their rights to food and safe water, health, education and shelter. 
+And I say this with humility, because I came late to the issue of climate change. 
+When I served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002, climate change wasn't at the front of my mind. 
+I don't remember making a single speech on climate change. 
+I knew that there was another part of the United Nations — the UN Convention on Climate Change — that was dealing with the issue of climate change. 
+It was later when I started to work in African countries on issues of development and human rights. 
+And I kept hearing this pervasive sentence: "Oh, but things are so much worse now, things are so much worse." 
+And then I explored what was behind that; it was about changes in the climate — climate shocks, changes in the weather. 
+I met Constance Okollet, who had formed a women's group in Eastern Uganda, and she told me that when she was growing up, she had a very normal life in her village and they didn't go hungry, they knew that the seasons would come as they were predicted to come, they knew when to sow and they knew when to harvest, and so they had enough food. 
+But, in recent years, at the time of this conversation, they had nothing but long periods of drought, and then flash flooding, and then more drought. 
+The school had been destroyed, livelihoods had been destroyed, their harvest had been destroyed. 
+She forms this women's group to try to keep her community together. 
+And this was a reality that really struck me, because of course, Constance Okollet wasn't responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that were causing this problem. 
+Indeed, I was very struck about the situation in Malawi in January of this year. 
+There was an unprecedented flooding in the country, it covered about a third of the country, over 300 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands lost their livelihoods. 
+And the average person in Malawi emits about 80 kg of CO2 a year. 
+The average US citizen emits about 17.5 metric tons. 
+So those who are suffering disproportionately don't drive cars, don't have electricity, don't consume very significantly, and yet they are feeling more and more the impacts of the changes in the climate, the changes that are preventing them from knowing how to grow food properly, and knowing how to look after their future. 
+I think it was really the importance of the injustice that really struck me very forcibly. 
+And I know that we're not able to address some of that injustice because we're not on course for a safe world. 
+Governments around the world agreed at the conference in Copenhagen, and have repeated it at every conference on climate, that we have to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming above pre-Industrial standards. 
+But we're on course for about four degrees. 
+So we face an existential threat to the future of our planet. 
+And that made me realize that climate change is the greatest threat to human rights in the 21st century. 
+And that brought me then to climate justice. 
+Climate justice responds to the moral argument — both sides of the moral argument — to address climate change. 
+First of all, to be on the side of those who are suffering most and are most effected. 
+And secondly, to make sure that they're not left behind again, when we start to move and start to address climate change with climate action, as we are doing. 
+In our very unequal world today, it's very striking how many people are left behind. 
+In our world of 7.2 billion people, about 3 billion are left behind. 
+1.3 billion don't have access to electricity, and they light their homes with kerosene and candles, both of which are dangerous. 
+And in fact they spend a lot of their tiny income on that form of lighting. 
+2.6 billion people cook on open fires — on coal, wood and animal dung. 
+And this causes about 4 million deaths a year from indoor smoke inhalation, and of course, most of those who die are women. 
+So we have a very unequal world, and we need to change from "" business as usual. "" And we shouldn't underestimate the scale and the transformative nature of the change which will be needed, because we have to go to zero carbon emissions by about 2050, if we're going to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming. 
+And that means we have to leave about two-thirds of the known resources of fossil fuels in the ground. 
+It's a very big change, and it means that obviously, industrialized countries must cut their emissions, must become much more energy-efficient, and must move as quickly as possible to renewable energy. 
+For developing countries and emerging economies, the problem and the challenge is to grow without emissions, because they must develop; they have very poor populations. 
+So they must develop without emissions, and that is a different kind of problem. 
+Indeed, no country in the world has actually grown without emissions. 
+All the countries have developed with fossil fuels, and then may be moving to renewable energy. 
+So it is a very big challenge, and it requires the total support of the international community, with the necessary finance and technology, and systems and support, because no country can make itself safe from the dangers of climate change. 
+This is an issue that requires complete human solidarity. 
+Human solidarity, if you like, based on self-interest — because we are all in this together, and we have to work together to ensure that we reach zero carbon by 2050. 
+The good news is that change is happening, and it's happening very fast. 
+Here in California, there's a very ambitious emissions target to cut emissions. 
+In Hawaii, they're passing legislation to have 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. 
+And governments are very ambitious around the world. 
+In Costa Rica, they have committed to being carbon-neutral by 2021. 
+In Ethiopia, the commitment is to be carbon-neutral by 2027. 
+Apple have pledged that their factories in China will use renewable energy. 
+And there is a race on at the moment to convert electricity from tidal and wave power, in order that we can leave the coal in the ground. 
+And that change is both welcome and is happening very rapidly. 
+But it's still not enough, and the political will is still not enough. 
+Let me come back to President Tong and his people in Kiribati. 
+They actually could be able to live on their island and have a solution, but it would take a lot of political will. 
+President Tong told me about his ambitious idea to either build up or even float the little islands where his people live. 
+This, of course, is beyond the resources of Kiribati itself. 
+It would require great solidarity and support from other countries, and it would require the kind of imaginative idea that we bring together when we want to have a space station in the air. 
+But wouldn't it be wonderful to have this engineering wonder and to allow a people to remain in their sovereign territory, and be part of the community of nations? 
+That is the kind of idea that we should be thinking about. 
+Yes, the challenges of the transformation we need are big, but they can be solved. 
+We are actually, as a people, very capable of coming together to solve problems. 
+I was very conscious of this as I took part this year in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1945. 
+1945 was an extraordinary year. 
+It was a year when the world faced what must have seemed almost insoluble problems — the devastation of the world wars, particularly the Second World War; the fragile peace that had been brought about; the need for a whole economic regeneration. 
+But the leaders of that time didn't flinch from this. 
+They had the capacity, they had a sense of being driven by never again must the world have this kind of problem. 
+And they had to build structures for peace and security. 
+And what did we get? What did they achieve? 
+The Charter of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, as they're called, The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. 
+A Marshall Plan for Europe, a devastated Europe, to reconstruct it. 
+And indeed a few years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 
+2015 is a year that is similar in its importance to 1945, with similar challenges and similar potential. 
+There will be two big summits this year: the first one, in September in New York, is the summit for the sustainable development goals. 
+And then the summit in Paris in December, to give us a climate agreement. 
+The sustainable development goals are intended to help countries to live sustainably, in tune with Mother Earth, not to take out of Mother Earth and destroy ecosystems, but rather, to live in harmony with Mother Earth, by living under sustainable development. 
+And the sustainable development goals will come into operation for all countries on January 1, 2016. 
+The climate agreement — a binding climate agreement — is needed because of the scientific evidence that we're on a trajectory for about a four-degree world and we have to change course to stay below two degrees. 
+So we need to take steps that will be monitored and reviewed, so that we can keep increasing the ambition of how we cut emissions, and how we move more rapidly to renewable energy, so that we have a safe world. 
+The reality is that this issue is much too important to be left to politicians and to the United Nations. 
+(Laughter) It's an issue for all of us, and it's an issue where we need more and more momentum. 
+Indeed, the face of the environmentalist has changed, because of the justice dimension. 
+It's now an issue for faith-based organizations, under very good leadership from Pope Francis, and indeed, the Church of England, which is divesting from fossil fuels. 
+It's an issue for the business community, and the good news is that the business community is changing very rapidly — except for the fossil fuel industries — (Laughter) Even they are beginning to slightly change their language — but only slightly. 
+But business is not only moving rapidly to the benefits of renewable energy, but is urging politicians to give them more signals, so that they can move even more rapidly. 
+It's an issue for the trade union movement. 
+It's an issue for the women's movement. 
+It's an issue for young people. 
+I was very struck when I learned that Jibreel Khazan, one of the Greensboro Four who had taken part in the Woolworth sit-ins, said quite recently that climate change is the lunch counter moment for young people. 
+So, lunch counter moment for young people of the 21st century — the sort of real human rights issue of the 21st century, because he said it is the greatest challenge to humanity and justice in our world. 
+I recall very much the Climate March last September, and that was a huge momentum, not just in New York, but all around the world. 
+and we have to build on that. 
+I was marching with some of The Elders family, and I saw a placard a little bit away from me, but we were wedged so closely together — because after all, there were 400,000 people out in the streets of New York — so I couldn't quite get to that placard, I would have just liked to have been able to step behind it, because it said, "" Angry Grannies! "" (Laughter) That's what I felt. 
+And I have five grandchildren now, I feel very happy as an Irish grandmother to have five grandchildren, and I think about their world, and what it will be like when they will share that world with about 9 billion other people in 2050. 
+We know that inevitably it will be a climate-constrained world, because of the emissions we've already put up there, but it could be a world that is much more equal and much fairer, and much better for health, and better for jobs and better for energy security, than the world we have now, if we have switched sufficiently and early enough to renewable energy, and no one is left behind. 
+No one is left behind. 
+And just as we've been looking back this year — in 2015 to 1945, looking back 70 years — I would like to think that they will look back, that world will look back 35 years from 2050, 35 years to 2015, and that they will say, "" Weren't they good to do what they did in 2015? 
+We really appreciate that they took the decisions that made a difference, and that put the world on the right pathway, and we benefit now from that pathway, "" that they will feel that somehow we took our responsibilities, we did what was done in 1945 in similar terms, we didn't miss the opportunity, we lived up to our responsibilities. 
+That's what this year is about. 
+And somehow for me, it's captured in words of somebody that I admired very much. 
+She was a mentor of mine, she was a friend, she died much too young, she was an extraordinary personality, a great champion of the environment: Wangari Maathai. 
+Wangari said once, "" In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called upon to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. "" And that's what we have to do. 
+We have to reach a new level of consciousness, a higher moral ground. 
+And we have to do it this year in those two big summits. 
+And that won't happen unless we have the momentum from people around the world who say: "" We want action now, we want to change course, we want a safe world, a safe world for future generations, a safe world for our children and our grandchildren, and we're all in this together. "" Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up, I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so. 
+Silence is Rwandan genocide. Silence is Katrina. 
+
+I thought in getting up to my TED wish I would try to begin by putting in perspective what I try to do and how it fits with what they try to do. 
+We live in a world that everyone knows is interdependent, but insufficient in three major ways. 
+It is, first of all, profoundly unequal: half the world's people still living on less than two dollars a day; a billion people with no access to clean water; two and a half billion no access to sanitation; a billion going to bed hungry every night; one in four deaths every year from AIDS, TB, malaria and the variety of infections associated with dirty water — 80 percent of them under five years of age. 
+Even in wealthy countries it is common now to see inequality growing. 
+In the United States, since 2001 we've had five years of economic growth, five years of productivity growth in the workplace, but median wages are stagnant and the percentage of working families dropping below the poverty line is up by four percent. 
+The percentage of working families without health care up by four percent. 
+So this interdependent world which has been pretty good to most of us — which is why we're all here in Northern California doing what we do for a living, enjoying this evening — is profoundly unequal. 
+It is also unstable. 
+Unstable because of the threats of terror, weapons of mass destruction, the spread of global disease and a sense that we are vulnerable to it in a way that we weren't not so many years ago. 
+And perhaps most important of all, it is unsustainable because of climate change, resource depletion and species destruction. 
+When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities — locally, nationally and globally — that share the characteristics of all successful communities: a broadly shared, accessible set of opportunities, a shared sense of responsibility for the success of the common enterprise and a genuine sense of belonging. 
+All easier said than done. 
+When the terrorist incidents occurred in the United Kingdom a couple of years ago, I think even though they didn't claim as many lives as we lost in the United States on 9 / 11, I think the thing that troubled the British most was that the perpetrators were not invaders, but homegrown citizens whose religious and political identities were more important to them than the people they grew up with, went to school with, worked with, shared weekends with, shared meals with. 
+In other words, they thought their differences were more important than their common humanity. 
+It is the central psychological plague of humankind in the 21st century. 
+Into this mix, people like us, who are not in public office, have more power to do good than at any time in history, because more than half the world's people live under governments they voted in and can vote out. 
+And even non-democratic governments are more sensitive to public opinion. 
+Because primarily of the power of the Internet, people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree. 
+When the tsunami hit South Asia, the United States contributed 1.2 billion dollars. 
+30 percent of our households gave. 
+Half of them gave over the Internet. 
+The median contribution was somewhere around 57 dollars. 
+And thirdly, because of the rise of non-governmental organizations. 
+They, businesses, other citizens' groups, have enormous power to affect the lives of our fellow human beings. 
+When I became president in 1993, there were none of these organizations in Russia. 
+There are now a couple of hundred thousand. 
+None in India. There are now at least a half a million active. 
+None in China. There are now 250,000 registered with the government, probably twice again that many who are not registered for political reasons. 
+When I organized my foundation, and I thought about the world as it is and the world that I hope to leave to the next generation, and I tried to be realistic about what I had cared about all my life that I could still have an impact on. 
+I wanted to focus on activities that would help to alleviate poverty, fight disease, combat climate change, bridge the religious, racial and other divides that torment the world, but to do it in a way that would either use whatever particular skills we could put together in our group to change the way some public good function was performed so that it would sweep across the world more. 
+You saw one reference to that in what we were able to do with AIDS drugs. 
+And I want to say that the head of our AIDS effort, and the person who also is primarily active in the wish I'll make tonight, Ira Magaziner, is here with me and I want to thank him for everything he's done. 
+He's over there. 
+(Applause) When I got out of office and was asked to work, first in the Caribbean, to try to help deal with the AIDS crisis, generic drugs were available for about 500 dollars a person a year. 
+If you bought them in vast bulks, you could get them at a little under 400 dollars. 
+The first country we went to work in, the Bahamas, was paying 3,500 dollars for these drugs. 
+The market was so terribly disorganized that they were buying this medicine through two agents who were gigging them sevenfold. 
+So the very first week we were working, we got the price down to 500 dollars. 
+And all of a sudden, they could save seven times as many lives for the same amount of money. 
+Then we went to work with the manufacturers of AIDS medicines, one of whom was cited in the film, and negotiated a whole different change in business strategy, because even at 500 dollars, these drugs were being sold on a high-margin, low-volume, uncertain-payment basis. 
+So we worked on improving the productivity of the operations and the supply chain, and went to a low-margin, high-volume, absolutely certain-payment business. 
+I joked that the main contribution we made to the battle against AIDS was to get the manufacturers to change from a jewelry store to a grocery store strategy. 
+But the price went to 140 dollars from 500. 
+And pretty soon, the average price was 192 dollars. 
+Now we can get it for about 100 dollars. 
+Children's medicine was 600 dollars, because nobody could afford to buy any of it. 
+We negotiated it down to 190. 
+Then, the French imposed their brilliantly conceived airline tax to create a something called UNITAID, got a bunch of other countries to help. 
+That children's medicine is now 60 dollars a person a year. 
+The only thing that is keeping us from basically saving the lives of everybody who needs the medicine to stay alive are the absence of systems necessary to diagnose, treat and care for people and deliver this medicine. 
+We started a childhood obesity initiative with the Heart Association in America. 
+We tried to do the same thing by negotiating industry-right deals with the soft drink and the snack food industry to cut the caloric and other dangerous content of food going to our children in the schools. 
+We just reorganized the markets. 
+And it occurred to me that in this whole non-governmental world, somebody needs to be thinking about organizing public goods markets. 
+And that is now what we're trying to do, and working with this large cities group to fight climate change, to negotiate huge, big, volume deals that will enable cities which generate 75 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, to drastically and quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is good economics. 
+And this whole discussion as if it's some sort of economic burden, is a mystery to me. 
+I think it's a bird's nest on the ground. 
+When Al Gore won his well-deserved Oscar for the "" Inconvenient Truth "" movie, I was thrilled, but I had urged him to make a second movie quickly. 
+For those of you who saw "" An Inconvenient Truth, "" the most important slide in the Gore lecture is the last one, which shows here's where greenhouse gases are going if we don't do anything, here's where they could go. 
+And then there are six different categories of things we can do to change the trajectory. 
+We need a movie on those six categories. 
+And all of you need to have it embedded in your brains and to organize yourselves around it. 
+So we're trying to do that. 
+So organizing these markets is one thing we try to do. 
+Now we have taken on a second thing, and this gets to my wish. 
+It has been my experience in working in developing countries that while the headlines may all be — the pessimistic headlines may say, well, we can't do this, that or the other thing because of corruption — I think incapacity is a far bigger problem in poor countries than corruption, and feeds corruption. 
+We now have the money, given these low prices, to distribute AIDS drugs all over the world to people we cannot presently reach. 
+Today these low prices are available in the 25 countries where we work, and in a total of 62 countries, and about 550,000 people are getting the benefits of them. 
+But the money is there to reach others. 
+The systems are not there to reach the people. 
+So what we have been trying to do, working first in Rwanda and then in Malawi and other places — but I want to talk about Rwanda tonight — is to develop a model for rural health care in a very poor area that can be used to deal with AIDS, TB, malaria, other infectious diseases, maternal and child health, and a whole range of health issues poor people are grappling with in the developing world, that can first be scaled for the whole nation of Rwanda, and then will be a model that could literally be implemented in any other poor country in the world. 
+And the test is: one, will it do the job? 
+Will it provide high quality care? 
+And two, will it do it at a price that will enable the country to sustain a health care system without foreign donors after five to 10 years? 
+Because the longer I deal with these problems, the more convinced I am that we have to — whether it's economics, health, education, whatever — we have to build systems. 
+And the absence of systems that function break the connection which got you all in this seat tonight. 
+You think about whatever your life has been, however many obstacles you have faced in your life, at critical junctures you always knew there was a predictable connection between the effort you exerted and the result you achieved. 
+In a world with no systems, with chaos, everything becomes a guerilla struggle, and this predictability is not there. 
+And it becomes almost impossible to save lives, educate kids, develop economies, whatever. 
+The person, in my view, who has done the best job of this in the health care area, of building a system in a very poor area, is Dr. Paul Farmer, who, many of you know, has worked for now 20 years with his group, Partners in Health, primarily in Haiti where he started, but they've also worked in Russia, in Peru and other places around the world. 
+As poor as Haiti is, in the area where Farmer's clinic is active — and they serve a catchment area far greater than the medical professionals they have would indicate they could serve — since 1988, they have not lost one person to tuberculosis, not one. 
+And they've achieved a lot of other amazing health results. 
+So when we decided to work in Rwanda on trying to dramatically increase the income of the country and fight the AIDS problem, we wanted to build a healthcare network, because it had been totally destroyed during the genocide in 1994, and the per capita income was still under a dollar a day. 
+So I rang up, asked Paul Farmer if he would help. 
+Because it seemed to me if we could prove there was a model in Haiti and a model in Rwanda that we could then take all over the country, number one, it would be a wonderful thing for a country that has suffered as much as any on Earth in the last 15 years, and number two, we would have something that could then be adapted to any other poor country anywhere in the world. 
+And so we have set about doing that. 
+Now, we started working together 18 months ago. 
+And we're working in an area called Southern Kayonza, which is one of the poorest areas in Rwanda, with a group that originally includes about 400,000 people. 
+We're essentially implementing what Paul Farmer did in Haiti: he develops and trains paid community health workers who are able to identify health problems, ensure that people who have AIDS or TB are properly diagnosed and take their medicine regularly, who work on bringing about health education, clean water and sanitation, providing nutritional supplements and moving people up the chain of health care if they have problems of the severity that require it. 
+The procedures that make this work have been perfected, as I said, by Paul Farmer and his team in their work in rural Haiti over the last 20 years. 
+Recently we did an evaluation of the first 18 months of our efforts in Rwanda. 
+And the results were so good that the Rwandan government has now agreed to adopt the model for the entire country, and has strongly supported and put the full resources of the government behind it. 
+I'll tell you a little bit about our team because it's indicative of what we do. 
+We have about 500 people around the world working in our AIDS program, some of them for nothing — just for transportation, room and board. 
+And then we have others working in these other related programs. 
+Our business plan in Rwanda was put together under the leadership of Diana Noble, who is an unusually gifted woman, but not unusual in the type of people who have been willing to do this kind of work. 
+She was the youngest partner at Schroder Ventures in London in her 20s. 
+She was CEO of a successful e-venture — she started and built Reed Elsevier Ventures — and at 45 she decided she wanted to do something different with her life. 
+So she now works full-time on this for very little pay. 
+She and her team of former business people have created a business plan that will enable us to scale this health system up for the whole country. 
+And it would be worthy of the kind of private equity work she used to do when she was making a lot more money for it. 
+When we came to this rural area, 45 percent of the children under the age of five had stunted growth due to malnutrition. 
+23 percent of them died before they reached the age of five. 
+Mortality at birth was over two-and-a-half percent. 
+Over 15 percent of the deaths among adults and children occurred because of intestinal parasites and diarrhea from dirty water and inadequate sanitation — all entirely preventable and treatable. 
+Over 13 percent of the deaths were from respiratory illnesses — again, all preventable and treatable. 
+And not a single soul in this area was being treated for AIDS or tuberculosis. 
+Within the first 18 months, the following things happened: we went from zero to about 2,000 people being treated for AIDS. 
+That's 80 percent of the people who need treatment in this area. 
+Listen to this: less than four-tenths of one percent of those being treated stopped taking their medicine or otherwise defaulted on treatment. 
+That's lower than the figure in the United States. 
+Less than three-tenths of one percent had to transfer to the more expensive second-line drugs. 
+400,000 pregnant women were brought into counseling and will give birth for the first time within an organized healthcare system. 
+That's about 43 percent of all the pregnancies. 
+About 40 percent of all the people — I said 400,000. I meant 40,000. 
+About 40 percent of all the people who need TB treatment are now getting it — in just 18 months, up from zero when we started. 
+43 percent of the children in need of an infant feeding program to prevent malnutrition and early death are now getting the food supplements they need to stay alive and to grow. 
+We've started the first malaria treatment programs they've ever had there. 
+Patients admitted to a hospital that was destroyed during the genocide that we have renovated along with four other clinics, complete with solar power generators, good lab technology. 
+We now are treating 325 people a month, despite the fact that almost 100 percent of the AIDS patients are now treated at home. 
+And the most important thing is because we've implemented Paul Farmer's model, using community health workers, we estimate that this system could be put into place for all of Rwanda for between five and six percent of GDP, and that the government could sustain that without depending on foreign aid after five or six years. 
+And for those of you who understand healthcare economics you know that all wealthy countries spend between nine and 11 percent of GDP on health care, except for the United States, we spend 16 — but that's a story for another day. 
+(Laughter) We're now working with Partners in Health and the Ministry of Health in Rwanda and our Foundation folks to scale this system up. 
+We're also beginning to do this in Malawi and Lesotho. 
+And we have similar projects in Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya and Ethiopia with other partners trying to achieve the same thing: to save as many lives as quickly as we can, but to do it in a systematic way that can be implemented nationwide and then with a model that can be implemented in any country in the world. 
+We need initial upfront investment to train doctors, nurses, health administration and community health workers throughout the country, to set up the information technology, the solar energy, the water and sanitation, the transportation infrastructure. 
+But over a five- to 10-year period, we will take down the need for outside assistance and eventually it will be phased out. 
+My wish is that TED assist us in our work and help us to build a high-quality rural health system in a poor country, Rwanda, that can be a model for Africa, and indeed, for any poor country anywhere in the world. 
+My belief is that this will help us to build a more integrated world with more partners and fewer terrorists, with more productive citizens and fewer haters, a place we'd all want our kids and our grandchildren to grow up in. 
+It has been an honor for me, particularly, to work in Rwanda where we also have a major economic development project in partnership with Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish philanthropist, where last year we, using the same thing with AIDS drugs, cut the cost of fertilizer and the interest rates on microcredit loans by 30 percent and achieved three- to four-hundred percent increases in crop yields with the farmers. 
+These people have been through a lot and none of us, most of all me, helped them when they were on the verge of destroying each other. 
+We're undoing that now, and they are so over it and so into their future. 
+We're doing this in an environmentally responsible way. 
+I'm doing my best to convince them not to run the electric grid to the 35 percent of the people that have no access, but to do it with clean energy. To have responsible reforestation projects, the Rwandans, interestingly enough, have been quite good, Mr. Wilson, in preserving their topsoil. 
+There's a couple of guys from southern farming families — the first thing I did when I went out to this place was to get down on my hands and knees and dig in the dirt and see what they'd done with it. 
+We have a chance here to prove that a country that almost slaughtered itself out of existence can practice reconciliation, reorganize itself, focus on tomorrow and provide comprehensive, quality health care with minimal outside help. 
+I am grateful for this prize, and I will use it to that end. 
+We could use some more help to do this, but think of what it would mean if we could have a world-class health system in Rwanda — in a country with a less-than-one-dollar-a-day-per-capita income, one that could save hundreds of millions of lives over the next decade if applied to every similarly situated country on Earth. 
+It's worth a try and I believe it would succeed. 
+Thank you and God bless you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'm a savant, or more precisely, a high-functioning autistic savant. 
+It's a rare condition. 
+And rarer still when accompanied, as in my case, by self-awareness and a mastery of language. 
+Very often when I meet someone and they learn this about me, there's a certain kind of awkwardness. 
+I can see it in their eyes. 
+They want to ask me something. 
+And in the end, quite often, the urge is stronger than they are and they blurt it out: "" If I give you my date of birth, can you tell me what day of the week I was born on? "" (Laughter) Or they mention cube roots or ask me to recite a long number or long text. 
+I hope you'll forgive me if I don't perform a kind of one-man savant show for you today. 
+I'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots — a little deeper and a lot closer, to my mind, than work. 
+I want to talk to you briefly about perception. 
+When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him — little details that other people seem to miss. 
+Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I too became a writer. 
+In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding. 
+Here are three questions drawn from my work. 
+Rather than try to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them. 
+For example, the calculation: can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall? 
+Or look at the foreign word and the sounds: can you get a sense of the range of meanings that it's pointing you towards? 
+And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit? 
+I'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. 
+Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know. 
+I'm an extreme example of this. 
+My worlds of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality. 
+As Juan said, it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia, an unusual cross-talk between the senses. 
+Here are the numbers one to 12 as I see them — every number with its own shape and character. 
+One is a flash of white light. 
+Six is a tiny and very sad black hole. 
+The sketches are in black and white here, but in my mind they have colors. 
+Three is green. 
+Four is blue. 
+Five is yellow. 
+I paint as well. 
+And here is one of my paintings. 
+It's a multiplication of two prime numbers. 
+Three-dimensional shapes and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape, the answer to the sum. 
+What about bigger numbers? 
+Well you can't get much bigger than Pi, the mathematical constant. 
+It's an infinite number — literally goes on forever. 
+In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi, I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape. 
+But it's not only numbers that I see in colors. 
+Words too, for me, have colors and emotions and textures. 
+And this is an opening phrase from the novel "" Lolita. "" And Nabokov was himself synesthetic. 
+And you can see here how my perception of the sound L helps the alliteration to jump right out. 
+Another example: a little bit more mathematical. 
+And I wonder if some of you will notice the construction of the sentence from "" The Great Gatsby. "" There is a procession of syllables — wheat, one; prairies, two; lost Swede towns, three — one, two, three. 
+And this effect is very pleasant on the mind, and it helps the sentence to feel right. 
+Let's go back to the questions I posed you a moment ago. 
+64 multiplied by 75. 
+If some of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why chessboards, eight by eight, have 64 squares. 
+So that gives us a form that we can picture, that we can perceive. 
+What about 75? 
+Well if 100, if we think of 100 as being like a square, 75 would look like this. 
+So what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind — something like this. 
+64 becomes 6,400. 
+And in the right-hand corner, you don't have to calculate anything. 
+Four across, four up and down — it's 16. 
+So what the sum is actually asking you to do is 16, 16, 16. 
+That's a lot easier than the way that the school taught you to do math, I'm sure. 
+It's 16, 16, 16, 48, 4,800 — 4,800, the answer to the sum. 
+Easy when you know how. 
+(Laughter) The second question was an Icelandic word. 
+I'm assuming there are not many people here who speak Icelandic. 
+So let me narrow the choices down to two. 
+Hnugginn: is it a happy word, or a sad word? 
+What do you say? 
+Okay. 
+Some people say it's happy. 
+Most people, a majority of people, say sad. 
+And it actually means sad. 
+(Laughter) Why do, statistically, a majority of people say that a word is sad, in this case, heavy in other cases? 
+In my theory, language evolves in such a way that sounds match, correspond with, the subjective, with the personal, intuitive experience of the listener. 
+Let's have a look at the third question. 
+It's a line from a poem by John Keats. 
+Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world. 
+It stands to reason that we, existing in this world, should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships. 
+And poets, like other artists, play with those intuitive understandings. 
+In the case of hare, it's an ambiguous sound in English. 
+It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head. 
+And if we think of that — let me put the picture up — the fibers represent vulnerability. 
+They yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion. 
+So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension. 
+The hare itself, the animal — not a cat, not a dog, a hare — why a hare? 
+Because think of the picture — not the word, the picture. 
+The overlong ears, the overlarge feet, helps us to picture, to feel intuitively, what it means to limp and to tremble. 
+So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities. 
+The world is richer, vaster than it too often seems to be. 
+I hope that I've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Everyone needs a coach. 
+It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. 
+(Laughter) My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go. 
+We all need people who will give us feedback. 
+That's how we improve. 
+Unfortunately, there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. 
+I'm talking about teachers. 
+When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. 
+Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory. 
+If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was "" satisfactory, "" I would have no hope of ever getting better. 
+How would I know who was the best? 
+How would I know what I was doing differently? 
+Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. 
+Our teachers deserve better. 
+The system we have today isn't fair to them. 
+It's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk. 
+So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve. 
+Let's start by asking who's doing well. 
+Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems. 
+So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve. 
+Consider the rankings for reading proficiency. 
+The U.S. isn't number one. 
+We're not even in the top 10. 
+We're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. 
+Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? 
+Eleven out of 14. 
+The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math. 
+So there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills. 
+Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China. 
+Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. 
+They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. 
+They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what's working. 
+They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues. 
+You might ask, why is a system like this so important? 
+It's because there's so much variation in the teaching profession. 
+Some teachers are far more effective than others. 
+In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. 
+If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world. 
+So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best. 
+What would that system look like? 
+Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching. 
+We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices. 
+For example, did they ask their students challenging questions? 
+Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea? 
+We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, "" Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson? "" "Do you learn to correct your mistakes?" 
+And what we found is very exciting. 
+First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes. 
+So it tells us we're asking the right questions. 
+And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve. 
+I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action. 
+(Music) (Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody. 
+Let's talk about what's going on today. 
+To get started, we're doing a peer review day, okay? 
+A peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays. 
+My name is Sarah Brown Wessling. 
+I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa. 
+Turn to somebody next to you. 
+Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I've talk about — I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it. 
+Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers. 
+I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. 
+You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. 
+I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens. 
+At the beginning of class, I just perch it in the back of the classroom. It's not a perfect shot. 
+It doesn't catch every little thing that's going on. 
+But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot. 
+And I'm able to learn a lot from it. 
+So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection. 
+All right, let's take a look at the long one first, okay? 
+Once I'm finished taping, then I put it in my computer, and then I'll scan it and take a peek at it. 
+If I don't write things down, I don't remember them. 
+So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I'm seeing as I'm writing. 
+I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom. 
+I'm glad that we've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn't. 
+I think that video exposes so much of what's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about. 
+I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy. 
+Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend. 
+I'll see you later. 
+[Every classroom could look like that] (Applause) Bill Gates: One day, we'd like every classroom in America to look something like that. 
+But we still have more work to do. 
+Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. 
+We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. 
+If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions. 
+So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won't be easy. 
+For example, I know some teachers aren't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom. 
+That's understandable, but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms, and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate. 
+Building this system will also require a considerable investment. 
+Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars. 
+Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries. 
+The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. 
+We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it. 
+But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. 
+It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. 
+This wouldn't just make us a more successful country. 
+It would also make us a more fair and just one, too. 
+I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve. 
+I hope you are too. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So over the past few centuries, microscopes have revolutionized our world. 
+It doesn't use optics like a regular microscope to make small objects bigger, but instead it uses a video camera and image processing to reveal to us the tiniest motions and color changes in objects and people, changes that are impossible for us to see with our naked eyes. 
+That change is incredibly subtle, which is why, when you look at other people, when you look at the person sitting next to you, you don't see their skin or their face changing color. 
+When we look at this video of Steve here, it appears to us like a static picture, but once we look at this video through our new, special microscope, suddenly we see a completely different image. 
+What you see here are small changes in the color of Steve's skin, magnified 100 times so that they become visible. 
+We can actually see a human pulse. 
+We can see how fast Steve's heart is beating, but we can also see the actual way that the blood flows in his face. 
+And we can do that not just to visualize the pulse, but also to actually recover our heart rates, and measure our heart rates. 
+And we can do it with regular cameras and without touching the patients. 
+So here you see the pulse and heart rate we extracted from a neonatal baby from a video we took with a regular DSLR camera, and the heart rate measurement we get is as accurate as the one you'd get with a standard monitor in a hospital. 
+And it doesn't even have to be a video we recorded. 
+We can do it essentially with other videos as well. 
+So I just took a short clip from "" Batman Begins "" here just to show Christian Bale's pulse. 
+(Laughter) And you know, presumably he's wearing makeup, the lighting here is kind of challenging, but still, just from the video, we're able to extract his pulse and show it quite well. 
+So how do we do all that? 
+We basically analyze the changes in the light that are recorded at every pixel in the video over time, and then we crank up those changes. 
+We make them bigger so that we can see them. 
+The tricky part is that those signals, those changes that we're after, are extremely subtle, so we have to be very careful when you try to separate them from noise that always exists in videos. 
+So we use some clever image processing techniques to get a very accurate measurement of the color at each pixel in the video, and then the way the color changes over time, and then we amplify those changes. 
+We make them bigger to create those types of enhanced videos, or magnified videos, that actually show us those changes. 
+But it turns out we can do that not just to show tiny changes in color, but also tiny motions, and that's because the light that gets recorded in our cameras will change not only if the color of the object changes, but also if the object moves. 
+So this is my daughter when she was about two months old. 
+It's a video I recorded about three years ago. 
+And as new parents, we all want to make sure our babies are healthy, that they're breathing, that they're alive, of course. 
+And this is pretty much what you'll see with a standard baby monitor. 
+You can see the baby's sleeping, but there's not too much information there. 
+There's not too much we can see. 
+Wouldn't it be better, or more informative, or more useful, if instead we could look at the view like this. 
+So here I took the motions and I magnified them 30 times, and then I could clearly see that my daughter was indeed alive and breathing. 
+(Laughter) Here is a side-by-side comparison. 
+So again, in the source video, in the original video, there's not too much we can see, but once we magnify the motions, the breathing becomes much more visible. 
+And it turns out, there's a lot of phenomena we can reveal and magnify with our new motion microscope. 
+We can see how our veins and arteries are pulsing in our bodies. 
+We can see that our eyes are constantly moving in this wobbly motion. 
+And that's actually my eye, and again this video was taken right after my daughter was born, so you can see I wasn't getting too much sleep. (Laughter) Even when a person is sitting still, there's a lot of information we can extract about their breathing patterns, small facial expressions. 
+Maybe we could use those motions to tell us something about our thoughts or our emotions. 
+We can also magnify small mechanical movements, like vibrations in engines, that can help engineers detect and diagnose machinery problems, or see how our buildings and structures sway in the wind and react to forces. 
+Those are all things that our society knows how to measure in various ways, but measuring those motions is one thing, and actually seeing those motions as they happen is a whole different thing. 
+And ever since we discovered this new technology, we made our code available online so that others could use and experiment with it. 
+It's very simple to use. 
+It can work on your own videos. 
+Our collaborators at Quanta Research even created this nice website where you can upload your videos and process them online, so even if you don't have any experience in computer science or programming, you can still very easily experiment with this new microscope. 
+And I'd like to show you just a couple of examples of what others have done with it. 
+So this video was made by a YouTube user called Tamez85. 
+I don't know who that user is, but he, or she, used our code to magnify small belly movements during pregnancy. 
+It's kind of creepy. 
+(Laughter) People have used it to magnify pulsing veins in their hands. 
+And you know it's not real science unless you use guinea pigs, and apparently this guinea pig is called Tiffany, and this YouTube user claims it is the first rodent on Earth that was motion-magnified. 
+You can also do some art with it. 
+So this video was sent to me by a design student at Yale. 
+She wanted to see if there's any difference in the way her classmates move. 
+She made them all stand still, and then magnified their motions. 
+It's like seeing still pictures come to life. 
+And the nice thing with all those examples is that we had nothing to do with them. 
+We just provided this new tool, a new way to look at the world, and then people find other interesting, new and creative ways of using it. 
+But we didn't stop there. 
+This tool not only allows us to look at the world in a new way, it also redefines what we can do and pushes the limits of what we can do with our cameras. 
+So as scientists, we started wondering, what other types of physical phenomena produce tiny motions that we could now use our cameras to measure? 
+And one such phenomenon that we focused on recently is sound. 
+Sound, as we all know, is basically changes in air pressure that travel through the air. 
+Those pressure waves hit objects and they create small vibrations in them, which is how we hear and how we record sound. 
+But it turns out that sound also produces visual motions. 
+Those are motions that are not visible to us but are visible to a camera with the right processing. 
+So here are two examples. 
+This is me demonstrating my great singing skills. 
+(Singing) (Laughter) And I took a high-speed video of my throat while I was humming. 
+Again, if you stare at that video, there's not too much you'll be able to see, but once we magnify the motions 100 times, we can see all the motions and ripples in the neck that are involved in producing the sound. 
+That signal is there in that video. 
+We also know that singers can break a wine glass if they hit the correct note. 
+So here, we're going to play a note that's in the resonance frequency of that glass through a loudspeaker that's next to it. 
+Once we play that note and magnify the motions 250 times, we can very clearly see how the glass vibrates and resonates in response to the sound. 
+It's not something you're used to seeing every day. 
+But this made us think. It gave us this crazy idea. 
+Can we actually invert this process and recover sound from video by analyzing the tiny vibrations that sound waves create in objects, and essentially convert those back into the sounds that produced them. 
+In this way, we can turn everyday objects into microphones. 
+So that's exactly what we did. 
+So here's an empty bag of chips that was lying on a table, and we're going to turn that bag of chips into a microphone by filming it with a video camera and analyzing the tiny motions that sound waves create in it. 
+So here's the sound that we played in the room. 
+(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And this is a high-speed video we recorded of that bag of chips. 
+Again it's playing. 
+There's no chance you'll be able to see anything going on in that video just by looking at it, but here's the sound we were able to recover just by analyzing the tiny motions in that video. 
+(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") I call it — Thank you. 
+(Applause) I call it the visual microphone. 
+We actually extract audio signals from video signals. 
+And just to give you a sense of the scale of the motions here, a pretty loud sound will cause that bag of chips to move less than a micrometer. 
+That's one thousandth of a millimeter. 
+That's how tiny the motions are that we are now able to pull out just by observing how light bounces off objects and gets recorded by our cameras. 
+We can recover sounds from other objects, like plants. 
+(Music: "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "") And we can recover speech as well. 
+So here's a person speaking in a room. 
+Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
+Michael Rubinstein: And here's that speech again recovered just from this video of that same bag of chips. 
+Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, that lamb was sure to go. 
+MR: We used "" Mary Had a Little Lamb "" because those are said to be the first words that Thomas Edison spoke into his phonograph in 1877. 
+It was one of the first sound recording devices in history. 
+It basically directed the sounds onto a diaphragm that vibrated a needle that essentially engraved the sound on tinfoil that was wrapped around the cylinder. 
+Here's a demonstration of recording and replaying sound with Edison's phonograph. 
+(Video) Voice: Testing, testing, one two three. 
+Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
+Testing, testing, one two three. 
+Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
+MR: And now, 137 years later, we're able to get sound in pretty much similar quality but by just watching objects vibrate to sound with cameras, and we can even do that when the camera is 15 feet away from the object, behind soundproof glass. 
+So this is the sound that we were able to recover in that case. 
+Voice: Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. 
+MR: And of course, surveillance is the first application that comes to mind. 
+(Laughter) But it might actually be useful for other things as well. 
+Maybe in the future, we'll be able to use it, for example, to recover sound across space, because sound can't travel in space, but light can. 
+We've only just begun exploring other possible uses for this new technology. 
+It lets us see physical processes that we know are there but that we've never been able to see with our own eyes until now. 
+This is our team. 
+Everything I showed you today is a result of a collaboration with this great group of people you see here, and I encourage you and welcome you to check out our website, try it out yourself, and join us in exploring this world of tiny motions. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+So just by a show of hands, how many of you all have a robot at home? 
+Not very many of you. 
+Okay. And actually of those hands, if you don't include Roomba how many of you have a robot at home? 
+So a couple. 
+That's okay. 
+That's the problem that we're trying to solve at Romotive — that I and the other 20 nerds at Romotive are obsessed with solving. 
+So we really want to build a robot that anyone can use, whether you're eight or 80. 
+And as it turns out, that's a really hard problem, because you have to build a small, portable robot that's not only really affordable, but it has to be something that people actually want to take home and have around their kids. 
+This robot can't be creepy or uncanny. 
+He should be friendly and cute. 
+So meet Romo. 
+Romo's a robot that uses a device you already know and love — your iPhone — as his brain. 
+And by leveraging the power of the iPhone's processor, we can create a robot that is wi-fi enabled and computer vision-capable for 150 bucks, which is about one percent of what these kinds of robots have cost in the past. 
+When Romo wakes up, he's in creature mode. 
+So he's actually using the video camera on the device to follow my face. 
+If I duck down, he'll follow me. 
+He's wary, so he'll keep his eyes on me. 
+If I come over here, he'll turn to follow me. 
+If I come over here — (Laughs) He's smart. 
+And if I get too close to him, he gets scared just like any other creature. 
+So in a lot of ways, Romo is like a pet that has a mind of his own. 
+Thanks, little guy. 
+(Sneezing sound) Bless you. 
+And if I want to explore the world — uh-oh, Romo's tired — if I want to explore the world with Romo, I can actually connect him from any other iOS device. 
+So here's the iPad. 
+And Romo will actually stream video to this device. 
+So I can see everything that Romo sees, and I get a robot's-eye-view of the world. 
+Now this is a free app on the App Store, so if any of you guys had this app on your phones, we could literally right now share control of the robot and play games together. 
+So I'll show you really quickly, Romo actually — he's streaming video, so you can see me and the entire TED audience. 
+If I get in front of Romo here. 
+And if I want to control him, I can just drive. 
+So I can drive him around, and I can take pictures of you. 
+I've always wanted a picture of a 1,500-person TED audience. 
+So I'll snap a picture. 
+And in the same way that you scroll through content on an iPad, I can actually adjust the angle of the camera on the device. 
+So there are all of you through Romo's eyes. 
+And finally, because Romo is an extension of me, I can express myself through his emotions. 
+So I can go in and I can say let's make Romo excited. 
+But the most important thing about Romo is that we wanted to create something that was literally completely intuitive. 
+You do not have to teach someone how to drive Romo. 
+In fact, who would like to drive a robot? 
+Okay. Awesome. 
+Here you go. 
+Thank you, Scott. 
+And even cooler, you actually don't have to be in the same geographic location as the robot to control him. 
+So he actually streams two-way audio and video between any two smart devices. 
+So you can log in through the browser, and it's kind of like Skype on wheels. 
+So we were talking before about telepresence, and this is a really cool example. 
+You can imagine an eight-year-old girl, for example, who has an iPhone, and her mom buys her a robot. 
+That girl can take her iPhone, put it on the robot, send an email to Grandma, who lives on the other side of the country. 
+Grandma can log into that robot and play hide-and-go-seek with her granddaughter for fifteen minutes every single night, when otherwise she might only be able to get to see her granddaughter once or twice a year. 
+Thanks, Scott. 
+(Applause) So those are a couple of the really cool things that Romo can do today. 
+But I just want to finish by talking about something that we're working on in the future. 
+This is actually something that one of our engineers, Dom, built in a weekend. 
+It's built on top of a Google open framework called Blockly. 
+This allows you to drag and drop these blocks of semantic code and create any behavior for this robot you want. 
+You do not have to know how to code to create a behavior for Romo. 
+And you can actually simulate that behavior in the browser, which is what you see Romo doing on the left. 
+And then if you have something you like, you can download it onto your robot and execute it in real life, run the program in real life. 
+And then if you have something you're proud of, you can share it with every other person who owns a robot in the world. 
+So all of these wi-fi – enabled robots actually learn from each other. 
+The reason we're so focused on building robots that everyone can train is that we think the most compelling use cases in personal robotics are personal. 
+They change from person to person. 
+So we think that if you're going to have a robot in your home, that robot ought to be a manifestation of your own imagination. 
+So I wish that I could tell you what the future of personal robotics looks like. 
+To be honest, I have no idea. 
+But what we do know is that it isn't 10 years or 10 billion dollars or a large humanoid robot away. 
+The future of personal robotics is happening today, and it's going to depend on small, agile robots like Romo and the creativity of people like yourselves. 
+So we can't wait to get you all robots, and we can't wait to see what you build. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is a guy named Bob McKim. 
+He was a creativity researcher in the '60s and' 70s, and also led the Stanford Design Program. 
+And in fact, my friend and IDEO founder, David Kelley, who ’ s out there somewhere, studied under him at Stanford. 
+And he liked to do an exercise with his students where he got them to take a piece of paper and draw the person who sat next to them, their neighbor, very quickly, just as quickly as they could. 
+And in fact, we ’ re going to do that exercise right now. 
+You all have a piece of cardboard and a piece of paper. 
+It ’ s actually got a bunch of circles on it. 
+I need you to turn that piece of paper over; you should find that it ’ s blank on the other side. 
+And there should be a pencil. 
+And I want you to pick somebody that ’ s seated next to you, and when I say, go, you ’ ve got 30 seconds to draw your neighbor, OK? 
+So, everybody ready? OK. Off you go. 
+You ’ ve got 30 seconds, you ’ d better be fast. 
+Come on: those masterpieces... 
+OK? Stop. All right, now. 
+(Laughter) Yes, lot ’ s of laughter. Yeah, exactly. 
+Lots of laughter, quite a bit of embarrassment. 
+(Laughter) Am I hearing a few "" sorry ’ s ""? I think I ’ m hearing a few sorry ’ s. 
+Yup, yup, I think I probably am. 
+And that ’ s exactly what happens every time, every time you do this with adults. 
+McKim found this every time he did it with his students. 
+He got exactly the same response: lots and lots of sorry ’ s. 
+(Laughter) And he would point this out as evidence that we fear the judgment of our peers, and that we ’ re embarrassed about showing our ideas to people we think of as our peers, to those around us. 
+And this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking. 
+So we might have a wild idea, but we ’ re afraid to share it with anybody else. 
+OK, so if you try the same exercise with kids, they have no embarrassment at all. 
+They just quite happily show their masterpiece to whoever wants to look at it. 
+But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. 
+And in studies of kids playing, it ’ s been shown time after time that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment — they ’ re the ones that feel most free to play. 
+And if you ’ re starting a design firm, let ’ s say, then you probably also want to create a place where people have the same kind of security. 
+Where they have the same kind of security to take risks. 
+Maybe have the same kind of security to play. 
+Before founding IDEO, David said that what he wanted to do was to form a company where all the employees are my best friends. 
+Now, that wasn ’ t just self-indulgence. 
+He knew that friendship is a short cut to play. 
+And he knew that it gives us a sense of trust, and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks that we need to take as designers. 
+And so, that decision to work with his friends — now he has 550 of them — was what got IDEO started. 
+And our studios, like, I think, many creative workplaces today, are designed to help people feel relaxed: familiar with their surroundings, comfortable with the people that they ’ re working with. 
+It takes more than decor, but I think we ’ ve all seen that creative companies do often have symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful, and that it ’ s a permissive environment. 
+So, whether it ’ s this microbus meeting room that we have in one our buildings at IDEO; or at Pixar, where the animators work in wooden huts and decorated caves; or at the Googleplex, where it ’ s famous for its [beach] volleyball courts, and even this massive dinosaur skeleton with pink flamingos on it. 
+Don ’ t know the reason for the pink flamingos, but anyway, they ’ re there in the garden. 
+Or even in the Swiss office of Google, which perhaps has the most wacky ideas of all. 
+And my theory is, that ’ s so the Swiss can prove to their Californian colleagues that they ’ re not boring. 
+So they have the slide, and they even have a fireman ’ s pole. 
+Don ’ t know what they do with that, but they have one. 
+So all of these places have these symbols. 
+Now, our big symbol at IDEO is actually not so much the place, it ’ s a thing. 
+And it ’ s actually something that we invented a few years ago, or created a few years ago. 
+It ’ s a toy; it ’ s called a "" finger blaster. "" And I forgot to bring one up with me. 
+So if somebody can reach under the chair that ’ s next to them, you ’ ll find something taped underneath it. 
+That ’ s great. If you could pass it up. Thanks, David, I appreciate it. 
+So this is a finger blaster, and you will find that every one of you has got one taped under your chair. 
+And I ’ m going to run a little experiment. Another little experiment. 
+But before we start, I need just to put these on. 
+Thank you. All right. 
+Now, what I ’ m going to do is, I ’ m going to see how — I can ’ t see out of these, OK. 
+I ’ m going to see how many of you at the back of the room can actually get those things onto the stage. 
+So the way they work is, you know, you just put your finger in the thing, pull them back, and off you go. 
+So, don ’ t look backwards. That ’ s my only recommendation here. 
+I want to see how many of you can get these things on the stage. 
+So come on! There we go, there we go. Thank you. Thank you. Oh. 
+I have another idea. I wanted to — there we go. 
+(Laughter) There we go. (Laughter) 
+Thank you, thank you, thank you. 
+Not bad, not bad. No serious injuries so far. 
+(Laughter) Well, they ’ re still coming in from the back there; they ’ re still coming in. 
+Some of you haven ’ t fired them yet. 
+Can you not figure out how to do it, or something? 
+It ’ s not that hard. Most of your kids figure out how to do this in the first 10 seconds, when they pick it up. 
+All right. This is pretty good; this is pretty good. 
+Okay, all right. Let ’ s — I suppose we'd better... 
+I'd better clear these up out of the way; otherwise, I ’ m going to trip over them. 
+All right. So the rest of you can save them for when I say something particularly boring, and then you can fire at me. 
+(Laughter) All right. I think I ’ m going to take these off now, because I can ’ t see a damn thing when I ’ ve — all right, OK. 
+So, ah, that was fun. 
+(Laughter) All right, good. 
+(Applause) So, OK, so why? 
+So we have the finger blasters. Other people have dinosaurs, you know. 
+Why do we have them? Well, as I said, we have them because we think maybe playfulness is important. 
+But why is it important? 
+We use it in a pretty pragmatic way, to be honest. 
+We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions. 
+Helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them. 
+Now, an adult encountering a new situation — when we encounter a new situation we have a tendency to want to categorize it just as quickly as we can, you know. 
+And there ’ s a reason for that: we want to settle on an answer. 
+Life ’ s complicated; we want to figure out what ’ s going on around us very quickly. 
+I suspect, actually, that the evolutionary biologists probably have lots of reasons [for] why we want to categorize new things very, very quickly. 
+One of them might be, you know, when we see this funny stripy thing: is that a tiger just about to jump out and kill us? 
+Or is it just some weird shadows on the tree? 
+We need to figure that out pretty fast. 
+Well, at least, we did once. 
+Most of us don ’ t need to anymore, I suppose. 
+This is some aluminum foil, right? You use it in the kitchen. 
+That ’ s what it is, isn ’ t it? Of course it is, of course it is. 
+Well, not necessarily. 
+(Laughter) Kids are more engaged with open possibilities. 
+Now, they ’ ll certainly — when they come across something new, they ’ ll certainly ask, "" What is it? "" Of course they will. But they ’ ll also ask, "" What can I do with it? "" And you know, the more creative of them might get to a really interesting example. 
+And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. 
+Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. 
+Yeah, thought so. So we ’ ve all seen it, haven ’ t we? 
+We ’ ve all told stories about how, on Christmas morning, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. 
+And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense. 
+Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. 
+Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo — which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. 
+So again, this is another one of those playful activities that, as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn. 
+So another one of Bob McKim ’ s favorite exercises is called the "" 30 Circles Test. "" So we ’ re back to work. You guys are going to get back to work again. 
+Turn that piece of paper that you did the sketch on back over, and you ’ ll find those 30 circles printed on the piece of paper. 
+So it should look like this. You should be looking at something like this. 
+So what I ’ m going to do is, I ’ m going to give you minute, and I want you to adapt as many of those circles as you can into objects of some form. 
+So for example, you could turn one into a football, or another one into a sun. All I ’ m interested in is quantity. 
+I want you to do as many of them as you can, in the minute that I ’ m just about to give you. 
+So, everybody ready? OK? Off you go. 
+Okay. Put down your pencils, as they say. 
+So, who got more than five circles figured out? 
+Hopefully everybody? More than 10? 
+Keep your hands up if you did 10. 
+15? 20? Anybody get all 30? 
+No? Oh! Somebody did. Fantastic. 
+Did anybody to a variation on a theme? Like a smiley face? 
+Happy face? Sad face? Sleepy face? Anybody do that? 
+Anybody use my examples? The sun and the football? 
+Great. Cool. So I was really interested in quantity. 
+I wasn ’ t actually very interested in whether they were all different. 
+I just wanted you to fill in as many circles as possible. 
+And one of the things we tend to do as adults, again, is we edit things. 
+We stop ourselves from doing things. 
+We self-edit as we ’ re having ideas. 
+And in some cases, our desire to be original is actually a form of editing. 
+And that actually isn ’ t necessarily really playful. 
+So that ability just to go for it and explore lots of things, even if they don ’ t seem that different from each other, is actually something that kids do well, and it is a form of play. 
+So now, Bob McKim did another version of this test in a rather famous experiment that was done in the 1960s. 
+Anybody know what this is? It ’ s the peyote cactus. 
+It ’ s the plant from which you can create mescaline, one of the psychedelic drugs. 
+For those of you around in the '60s, you probably know it well. 
+McKim published a paper in 1966, describing an experiment that he and his colleagues conducted to test the effects of psychedelic drugs on creativity. 
+So he picked 27 professionals — they were engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, furniture designers even, artists — and he asked them to come along one evening, and to bring a problem with them that they were working on. 
+He gave each of them some mescaline, and had them listen to some nice, relaxing music for a while. 
+And then he did what ’ s called the Purdue Creativity Test. 
+You might know it as, "" How many uses can you find for a paper clip? "" It ’ s basically the same thing as the 30 circles thing that I just had you do. 
+Now, actually, he gave the test before the drugs and after the drugs, to see what the difference was in people ’ s facility and speed with coming up with ideas. 
+And then he asked them to go away and work on those problems that they ’ d brought. 
+And they ’ d come up with a bunch of interesting solutions — and actually, quite valid solutions — to the things that they ’ d been working on. 
+And so, some of the things that they figured out, some of these individuals figured out; in one case, a new commercial building and designs for houses that were accepted by clients; a design of a solar space probe experiment; a redesign of the linear electron accelerator; an engineering improvement to a magnetic tape recorder — you can tell this is a while ago; the completion of a line of furniture; and even a new conceptual model of the photon. 
+So it was a pretty successful evening. 
+In fact, maybe this experiment was the reason that Silicon Valley got off to its great start with innovation. 
+We don ’ t know, but it may be. 
+We need to ask some of the CEOs whether they were involved in this mescaline experiment. 
+But really, it wasn ’ t the drugs that were important; it was this idea that what the drugs did would help shock people out of their normal way of thinking, and getting them to forget the adult behaviors that were getting in the way of their ideas. 
+But it ’ s hard to break our habits, our adult habits. 
+At IDEO we have brainstorming rules written on the walls. 
+Edicts like, "" Defer judgment, "" or "" Go for quantity. "" And somehow that seems wrong. 
+I mean, can you have rules about creativity? 
+Well, it sort of turns out that we need rules to help us break the old rules and norms that otherwise we might bring to the creative process. 
+And we ’ ve certainly learnt that over time, you get much better brainstorming, much more creative outcomes when everybody does play by the rules. 
+Now, of course, many designers, many individual designers, achieve this is in a much more organic way. 
+I think the Eameses are wonderful examples of experimentation. 
+And they experimented with plywood for many years without necessarily having one single goal in mind. 
+They were exploring following what was interesting to them. 
+They went from designing splints for wounded soldiers coming out of World War II and the Korean War, I think, and from this experiment they moved on to chairs. 
+Through constant experimentation with materials, they developed a wide range of iconic solutions that we know today, eventually resulting in, of course, the legendary lounge chair. 
+Now, if the Eameses had stopped with that first great solution, then we wouldn ’ t be the beneficiaries of so many wonderful designs today. 
+And of course, they used experimentation in all aspects of their work, from films to buildings, from games to graphics. 
+So, they ’ re great examples, I think, of exploration and experimentation in design. 
+Now, while the Eameses were exploring those possibilities, they were also exploring physical objects. 
+And they were doing that through building prototypes. 
+And building is the next of the behaviors that I thought I ’ d talk about. 
+So the average Western first-grader spends as much as 50 percent of their play time taking part in what ’ s called "" construction play. "" Construction play — it ’ s playful, obviously, but also a powerful way to learn. 
+When play is about building a tower out of blocks, the kid begins to learn a lot about towers. 
+And as they repeatedly knock it down and start again, learning is happening as a sort of by-product of play. 
+It ’ s classically learning by doing. 
+Now, David Kelley calls this behavior, when it ’ s carried out by designers, "" thinking with your hands. "" And it typically involves making multiple, low-resolution prototypes very quickly, often by bringing lots of found elements together in order to get to a solution. 
+On one of his earliest projects, the team was kind of stuck, and they came up with a mechanism by hacking together a prototype made from a roll-on deodorant. 
+Now, that became the first commercial computer mouse for the Apple Lisa and the Macintosh. 
+So, they learned their way to that by building prototypes. 
+Another example is a group of designers who were working on a surgical instrument with some surgeons. 
+They were meeting with them; they were talking to the surgeons about what it was they needed with this device. 
+And one of the designers ran out of the room and grabbed a white board marker and a film canister — which is now becoming a very precious prototyping medium — and a clothespin. He taped them all together, ran back into the room and said, "" You mean, something like this? "" And the surgeons grabbed hold of it and said, well, I want to hold it like this, or like that. 
+And all of a sudden a productive conversation was happening about design around a tangible object. 
+And in the end it turned into a real device. 
+And so this behavior is all about quickly getting something into the real world, and having your thinking advanced as a result. 
+At IDEO there ’ s a kind of a back-to-preschool feel sometimes about the environment. 
+The prototyping carts, filled with colored paper and Play-Doh and glue sticks and stuff — I mean, they do have a bit of a kindergarten feel to them. 
+But the important idea is that everything ’ s at hand, everything ’ s around. 
+So when designers are working on ideas, they can start building stuff whenever they want. 
+They don ’ t necessarily even have to go into some kind of formal workshop to do it. 
+And we think that ’ s pretty important. 
+And then the sad thing is, although preschools are full of this kind of stuff, as kids go through the school system it all gets taken away. 
+They lose this stuff that facilitates this sort of playful and building mode of thinking. 
+And of course, by the time you get to the average workplace, maybe the best construction tool we have might be the Post-it notes. It ’ s pretty barren. 
+But by giving project teams and the clients who they ’ re working with permission to think with their hands, quite complex ideas can spring into life and go right through to execution much more easily. 
+This is a nurse using a very simple — as you can see — plasticine prototype, explaining what she wants out of a portable information system to a team of technologists and designers that are working with her in a hospital. 
+And just having this very simple prototype allows her to talk about what she wants in a much more powerful way. 
+And of course, by building quick prototypes, we can get out and test our ideas with consumers and users much more quickly than if we ’ re trying to describe them through words. 
+But what about designing something that isn ’ t physical? 
+Something like a service or an experience? 
+Something that exists as a series of interactions over time? 
+Instead of building play, this can be approached with role-play. 
+So, if you ’ re designing an interaction between two people — such as, I don ’ t know — ordering food at a fast food joint or something, you need to be able to imagine how that experience might feel over a period of time. 
+And I think the best way to achieve that, and get a feeling for any flaws in your design, is to act it out. 
+So we do quite a lot of work at IDEO trying to convince our clients of this. 
+They can be a little skeptical; I ’ ll come back to that. 
+But a place, I think, where the effort is really worthwhile is where people are wrestling with quite serious problems — things like education or security or finance or health. 
+And this is another example in a healthcare environment of some doctors and some nurses and designers acting out a service scenario around patient care. 
+But you know, many adults are pretty reluctant to engage with role-play. 
+Some of it ’ s embarrassment and some of it is because they just don ’ t believe that what emerges is necessarily valid. 
+They dismiss an interesting interaction by saying, you know, "" That ’ s just happening because they ’ re acting it out. "" Research into kids' behavior actually suggests that it ’ s worth taking role-playing seriously. 
+Because when children play a role, they actually follow social scripts quite closely that they ’ ve learnt from us as adults. 
+If one kid plays "" store, "" and another one ’ s playing "" house, "" then the whole kind of play falls down. 
+So they get used to quite quickly to understanding the rules for social interactions, and are actually quite quick to point out when they ’ re broken. 
+So when, as adults, we role-play, then we have a huge set of these scripts already internalized. 
+We ’ ve gone through lots of experiences in life, and they provide a strong intuition as to whether an interaction is going to work. 
+So we ’ re very good, when acting out a solution, at spotting whether something lacks authenticity. 
+So role-play is actually, I think, quite valuable when it comes to thinking about experiences. 
+Another way for us, as designers, to explore role-play is to put ourselves through an experience which we ’ re designing for, and project ourselves into an experience. 
+So here are some designers who are trying to understand what it might feel like to sleep in a confined space on an airplane. 
+And so they grabbed some very simple materials, you can see, and did this role-play, this kind of very crude role-play, just to get a sense of what it would be like for passengers if they were stuck in quite small places on airplanes. 
+This is one of our designers, Kristian Simsarian, and he ’ s putting himself through the experience of being an ER patient. 
+Now, this is a real hospital, in a real emergency room. 
+One of the reasons he chose to take this rather large video camera with him was because he didn ’ t want the doctors and nurses thinking he was actually sick, and sticking something into him that he was going to regret later. 
+So anyhow, he went there with his video camera, and it ’ s kind of interesting to see what he brought back. 
+Because when we looked at the video when he got back, we saw 20 minutes of this. 
+(Laughter) And also, the amazing thing about this video — as soon as you see it you immediately project yourself into that experience. 
+And you know what it feels like: all of that uncertainty while you ’ re left out in the hallway while the docs are dealing with some more urgent case in one of the emergency rooms, wondering what the heck ’ s going on. 
+And so this notion of using role-play — or in this case, living through the experience as a way of creating empathy — particularly when you use video, is really powerful. 
+Or another one of our designers, Altay Sendil: he ’ s here having his chest waxed, not because he ’ s very vain, although actually he is — no, I ’ m kidding — but in order to empathize with the pain that chronic care patients go through when they ’ re having dressings removed. 
+And so sometimes these analogous experiences, analogous role-play, can also be quite valuable. 
+So when a kid dresses up as a firefighter, you know, he ’ s beginning to try on that identity. 
+He wants to know what it feels like to be a firefighter. 
+We ’ re doing the same thing as designers. 
+We ’ re trying on these experiences. 
+And so the idea of role-play is both as an empathy tool, as well as a tool for prototyping experiences. 
+And you know, we kind of admire people who do this at IDEO anyway. 
+Not just because they lead to insights about the experience, but also because of their willingness to explore and their ability to unselfconsciously surrender themselves to the experience. 
+In short, we admire their willingness to play. 
+Playful exploration, playful building and role-play: those are some of the ways that designers use play in their work. 
+And so far, I admit, this might feel like it ’ s a message just to go out and play like a kid. 
+And to certain extent it is, but I want to stress a couple of points. 
+The first thing to remember is that play is not anarchy. 
+Play has rules, especially when it ’ s group play. 
+When kids play tea party, or they play cops and robbers, they ’ re following a script that they ’ ve agreed to. 
+And it ’ s this code negotiation that leads to productive play. 
+So, remember the sketching task we did at the beginning? 
+The kind of little face, the portrait you did? 
+Well, imagine if you did the same task with friends while you were drinking in a pub. 
+But everybody agreed to play a game where the worst sketch artist bought the next round of drinks. 
+That framework of rules would have turned an embarrassing, difficult situation into a fun game. 
+As a result, we ’ d all feel perfectly secure and have a good time — but because we all understood the rules and we agreed on them together. 
+But there aren ’ t just rules about how to play; there are rules about when to play. 
+Kids don ’ t play all the time, obviously. 
+They transition in and out of it, and good teachers spend a lot of time thinking about how to move kids through these experiences. 
+As designers, we need to be able to transition in and out of play also. 
+And if we ’ re running design studios we need to be able to figure out, how can we transition designers through these different experiences? 
+I think this is particularly true if we think about the sort of — I think what ’ s very different about design is that we go through these two very distinctive modes of operation. 
+We go through a sort of generative mode, where we ’ re exploring many ideas; and then we come back together again, and come back looking for that solution, and developing that solution. 
+I think they ’ re two quite different modes: divergence and convergence. 
+And I think it ’ s probably in the divergent mode that we most need playfulness. 
+Perhaps in convergent mode we need to be more serious. 
+And so being able to move between those modes is really quite important. So, it ’ s where there ’ s a more nuanced version view of play, I think, is required. 
+Because it ’ s very easy to fall into the trap that these states are absolute. 
+You ’ re either playful or you ’ re serious, and you can ’ t be both. 
+But that ’ s not really true: you can be a serious professional adult and, at times, be playful. 
+It ’ s not an either / or; it ’ s an "" and. "" You can be serious and play. 
+So to sum it up, we need trust to play, and we need trust to be creative. So, there ’ s a connection. 
+And there are a series of behaviors that we ’ ve learnt as kids, and that turn out to be quite useful to us as designers. 
+They include exploration, which is about going for quantity; building, and thinking with your hands; and role-play, where acting it out helps us both to have more empathy for the situations in which we ’ re designing, and to create services and experiences that are seamless and authentic. 
+Thank you very much. (Applause) 
+
+The Highline is an old, elevated rail line that runs for a mile and a half right through Manhattan. 
+And it was originally a freight line that ran down 10th Ave. 
+And it became known as "" Death Avenue "" because so many people were run over by the trains that the railroad hired a guy on horseback to run in front, and he became known as the "" West Side Cowboy. "" But even with a cowboy, about one person a month was killed and run over. 
+So they elevated it. 
+They built it 30 ft. in the air, right through the middle of the city. 
+But with the rise of interstate trucking, it was used less and less. 
+And by 1980, the last train rode. 
+It was a train loaded with frozen turkeys — they say, at Thanksgiving — from the meatpacking district. 
+And then it was abandoned. 
+And I live in the neighborhood, and I first read about it in the New York Times, in an article that said it was going to be demolished. 
+And I assumed someone was working to preserve it or save it and I could volunteer, but I realized no one was doing anything. 
+I went to my first community board meeting — which I'd never been to one before — and sat next to another guy named Joshua David, who's a travel writer. 
+And at the end of the meeting, we realized we were the only two people that were sort of interested in the project; most people wanted to tear it down. 
+So we exchanged business cards, and we kept calling each other and decided to start this organization, Friends of the High Line. 
+And the goal at first was just saving it from demolition, but then we also wanted to figure out what we could do with it. 
+And what first attracted me, or interested me, was this view from the street — which is this steel structure, sort of rusty, this industrial relic. 
+But when I went up on top, it was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the middle of Manhattan with views of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River. 
+And that's really where we started, the idea coalesced around, let's make this a park, and let's have it be sort of inspired by this wildscape. 
+At the time, there was a lot of opposition. 
+Mayor Giuliani wanted to tear it down. 
+I'm going to fast-forward through a lot of lawsuits and a lot of community engagement. 
+Mayor Bloomberg came in office, he was very supportive, but we still had to make the economic case. 
+This was after 9 / 11; the city was in tough times. 
+So we commissioned an economic feasibility study to try to make the case. 
+And it turns out, we got those numbers wrong. 
+We thought it would cost 100 million dollars to build. 
+So far it's cost about 150 million. 
+And the main case was, this is going to make good economic sense for the city. 
+So we said over a 20-year time period, the value to the city in increased property values and increased taxes would be about 250 million. 
+That was enough. It really got the city behind it. 
+It turns out we were wrong on that. 
+Now people estimate it's created about a half a billion dollars, or will create about a half a billion dollars, in tax revenues for the city. 
+We did a design competition, selected a design team. 
+We worked with them to really create a design that was inspired by that wildscape. 
+There's three sections. 
+We opened the fist section in 2009. 
+It's been successful beyond our dreams. 
+Last year we had about two million people, which is about 10 times what we ever estimated. 
+This is one of my favorite features in section one. 
+It's this amphitheater right over 10th Ave. 
+And the first section ends at 20th St. right now. 
+The other thing, it's generated, obviously, a lot of economic value; it's also inspired, I think, a lot of great architecture. 
+There's a point, you can stand here and see buildings by Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Shigeru Ban, Neil Denari. 
+And the Whitney is moving downtown and is building their new museum right at the base of the High Line. 
+And this has been designed by Renzo Piano. 
+And they're going to break ground in May. 
+And we've already started construction on section two. 
+This is one of my favorite features, this flyover where you're eight feet off the surface of the High Line, running through a canopy of trees. 
+The High Line used to be covered in billboards, and so we've taken a playful take where, instead of framing advertisements, it's going to frame people in views of the city. 
+This was just installed last month. 
+And then the last section was going to go around the rail yards, which is the largest undeveloped site in Manhattan. 
+And the city has planned — for better or for worse — 12 million square-feet of development that the High Line is going to ring around. 
+But what really, I think, makes the High Line special is the people. 
+And honestly, even though I love the designs that we were building, I was always frightened that I wouldn't really love it, because I fell in love with that wildscape — and how could you recreate that magic? 
+But what I found is it's in the people and how they use it that, to me, makes it so special. 
+Just one quick example is I realized right after we opened that there were all these people holding hands on the High Line. 
+And I realized New Yorkers don't hold hands; we just don't do that outside. 
+But you see that happening on the High Line, and I think that's the power that public space can have to transform how people experience their city and interact with each other. 
+Thanks. 
+(Applause) 
+
+This is an ambucycle. 
+This is the fastest way to reach any medical emergency. 
+It has everything an ambulance has except for a bed. 
+You see the defibrillator. You see the equipment. 
+We all saw the tragedy that happened in Boston. 
+When I was looking at these pictures, it brought me back many years to my past when I was a child. 
+I grew up in a small neighborhood in Jerusalem. 
+When I was six years old, I was walking back from school on a Friday afternoon with my older brother. 
+We were passing by a bus stop. 
+We saw a bus blow up in front of our eyes. 
+The bus was on fire, and many people were hurt and killed. 
+I remembered an old man yelling to us and crying to help us get him up. 
+He just needed someone helping him. 
+We were so scared and we just ran away. 
+Growing up, I decided I wanted to become a doctor and save lives. 
+Maybe that was because of what I saw when I was a child. 
+When I was 15, I took an EMT course, and I went to volunteer on an ambulance. 
+For two years, I volunteered on an ambulance in Jerusalem. 
+I helped many people, but whenever someone really needed help, I never got there in time. We never got there. 
+The traffic is so bad. The distance, and everything. 
+We never got there when somebody really needed us. 
+One day, we received a call about a seven-year-old child choking from a hot dog. 
+Traffic was horrific, and we were coming from the other side of town in the north part of Jerusalem. 
+When we got there, 20 minutes later, we started CPR on the kid. 
+A doctor comes in from a block away, stop us, checks the kid, and tells us to stop CPR. 
+That second he declared this child dead. 
+At that moment, I understood that this child died for nothing. 
+If this doctor, who lived one block away from there, would have come 20 minutes earlier, not have to wait until that siren he heard before coming from the ambulance, if he would have heard about it way before, he would have saved this child. 
+He could have run from a block away. 
+He could have saved this child. 
+I said to myself, there must be a better way. 
+Together with 15 of my friends — we were all EMTs — we decided, let's protect our neighborhood, so when something like that happens again, we will be there running to the scene a lot before the ambulance. 
+So I went over to the manager of the ambulance company and I told him, "" Please, whenever you have a call coming into our neighborhood, we have 15 great guys who are willing to stop everything they're doing and run and save lives. 
+We'll buy these beepers, just tell your dispatch to send us the beeper, and we will run and save lives. "" Well, he was laughing. I was 17 years old. I was a kid. 
+And he said to me — I remember this like yesterday — he was a great guy, but he said to me, "" Kid, go to school, or go open a falafel stand. 
+We're not really interested in these kinds of new adventures. 
+We're not interested in your help. "" And he threw me out of the room. 
+"" I don't need your help, "" he said. 
+I was a very stubborn kid. 
+As you see now, I'm walking around like crazy, meshugenah. 
+(Laughter) (Applause) So I decided to use the Israeli very famous technique you've probably all heard of, chutzpah. (Laughter) And the next day, I went and I bought two police scanners, and I said, "" The hell with you, if you don't want to give me information, I'll get the information myself. "" And we did turns, who's going to listen to the radio scanners. 
+The next day, while I was listening to the scanners, I heard about a call coming in of a 70-year-old man hurt by a car only one block away from me on the main street of my neighborhood. 
+I ran there by foot. I had no medical equipment. 
+When I got there, the 70-year-old man was lying on the floor, blood was gushing out of his neck. 
+He was on Coumadin. 
+I knew I had to stop his bleeding or else he would die. 
+I took off my yarmulke, because I had no medical equipment, and with a lot of pressure, I stopped his bleeding. 
+When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later, I gave them over a patient who was alive. 
+(Applause) When I went to visit him two days later, he gave me a hug and was crying and thanking me for saving his life. 
+At that moment, when I realized this is the first person I ever saved in my life after two years volunteering in an ambulance, I knew this is my life's mission. 
+So today, 22 years later, we have United Hatzalah. 
+(Applause) "" Hatzalah "" means "" rescue, "" for all of you who don't know Hebrew. 
+So we have thousands of volunteers who are passionate about saving lives, and they're spread all around, so whenever a call comes in, they just stop everything and go and run and save a life. 
+Our average response time today went down to less than three minutes in Israel. 
+(Applause) I'm talking about heart attacks, I'm talking about car accidents, God forbid bomb attacks, shootings, whatever it is, even a woman 3 o'clock in the morning falling in her home and needs someone to help her. 
+Three minutes, we'll have a guy with his pajamas running to her house and helping her get up. 
+The reasons why we're so successful are because of three things. 
+Thousands of passionate volunteers who will leave everything they do and run to help people they don't even know. 
+We're not there to replace ambulances. 
+We're just there to get the gap between the ambulance call until they arrive. 
+And we save people that otherwise would not be saved. 
+The second reason is because of our technology. 
+You know, Israelis are good in technology. 
+Every one of us has on his phone, no matter what kind of phone, a GPS technology done by NowForce, and whenever a call comes in, the closest five volunteers get the call, and they actually get there really quick, and navigated by a traffic navigator to get there and not waste time. 
+And this is a great technology we use all over the country and reduce the response time. 
+And the third thing are these ambucycles. 
+These ambucycles are an ambulance on two wheels. 
+We don't transfer people, but we stabilize them, and we save their lives. 
+They never get stuck in traffic. They could even go on a sidewalk. 
+That's why we get there so fast. 
+A few years after I started this organization, in a Jewish community, two Muslims from east Jerusalem called me up. 
+They ask me to meet. They wanted to meet with me. 
+Muhammad Asli and Murad Alyan. 
+When Muhammad told me his personal story, how his father, 55 years old, collapsed at home, had a cardiac arrest, and it took over an hour for an ambulance arrive, and he saw his father die in front of his eyes, he asked me, "" Please start this in east Jerusalem. "" I said to myself, I saw so much tragedy, so much hate, and it's not about saving Jews. It's not about saving Muslims. 
+It's not about saving Christians. It's about saving people. 
+So I went ahead, full force — (Applause) — and I started United Hatzalah in east Jerusalem, and that's why the names United and Hatzalah match so well. 
+We started hand in hand saving Jews and Arabs. 
+Arabs were saving Jews. Jews were saving Arabs. 
+Arabs and Jews, they don't always get along together, but here in this situation, the communities, literally, it's an unbelievable situation that happened, the diversities, all of a sudden they had a common interest: Let's save lives together. 
+Settlers were saving Arabs and Arabs were saving settlers. 
+And these are all volunteers. 
+No one is getting money. 
+They're all doing it for the purpose of saving lives. 
+When my own father collapsed a few years ago from a cardiac arrest, one of the first volunteers to arrive to save my father was one of these Muslim volunteers from east Jerusalem who was in the first course to join Hatzalah. 
+Could you imagine how I felt in that moment? 
+When I started this organization, I was 17 years old. 
+I never imagined that one day I'd be speaking at TEDMED. 
+I never even knew what TEDMED was then. 
+I don't think it existed, but I never imagined, I never imagined that it's going to go all around, it's going to spread around, and this last year we started in Panama and Brazil. 
+All I need is a partner who is a little meshugenah like me, passionate about saving lives, and willing to do it. 
+And I'm actually starting it in India very soon with a friend who I met in Harvard just a while back. 
+Hatzalah actually started in Brooklyn by a Hasidic Jew years before us in Williamsburg, and now it's all over the Jewish community in New York, even Australia and Mexico and many other Jewish communities. 
+But it could spread everywhere. 
+It's very easy to adopt. 
+You even saw these volunteers in New York saving lives in the World Trade Center. 
+Last year alone, we treated in Israel 207,000 people. 
+Forty-two thousand of them were life-threatening situations. 
+And we made a difference. 
+I guess you could call this a lifesaving flash mob, and it works. 
+When I look all around here, I see lots of people who would go an extra mile, run an extra mile to save other people, no matter who they are, no matter what religion, no matter who, where they come from. 
+We all want to be heroes. 
+We just need a good idea, motivation and lots of chutzpah, and we could save millions of people that otherwise would not be saved. 
+Thank you very much. 
+(Applause) 
+
+I'd like you all to ask yourselves a question which you may never have asked yourselves before: What is possible with the human voice? What is possible with the human voice? 
+(Beatboxing) 
+♪ Ooh baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Cat meowing) (Dog barking) Yeah. 
+(Applause) (Boomerang noises) It was coming straight for me. I had to. It was, yeah. 
+As you can probably well imagine, I was a strange child. 
+(Laughter) Because the thing is, I was constantly trying to extend my repertoire of noises to be the very maximum that it could be. 
+I was constantly experimenting with these noises. 
+I'm still trying to find every noise that I can possibly make. 
+And the thing is, I'm a bit older and wiser now, and I know that there's some noises I'll never be able to make because I'm hemmed in by my physical body, and there's things it can't do. 
+And there's things that no one's voice can do. 
+You can do two-tone singing, which monks can do, which is like... 
+(Two-tone singing) But that's cheating. 
+And it hurts your throat. 
+So there's things you can't do, and these limitations on the human voice have always really annoyed me, because beatbox is the best way of getting musical ideas out of your head and into the world, but they're sketches at best, which is what's annoyed me. 
+If only, if only there was a way for these ideas to come out unimpeded by the restrictions which my body gives it. 
+So I've been working with these guys, and we've made a machine. 
+We've made a system which is basically a live production machine, a real-time music production machine, and it enables me to, using nothing but my voice, create music in real time as I hear it in my head unimpeded by any physical restrictions that my body might place on me. 
+And I'm going to show you what it can do. 
+And before I start making noises with it, and using it to manipulate my voice, I want to reiterate that everything that you're about to hear is being made by my voice. 
+This system has — thank you, beautiful assistant — this system has no sounds in it itself until I start putting sounds in it, so there's no prerecorded samples of any kind. 
+So once this thing really gets going, and it really starts to mangle the audio I'm putting into it, it becomes not obvious that it is the human voice, but it is, so I'm going to take you through it bit by bit and start nice and simple. 
+How do I get around the problem of really wanting to have as many different voices going on at the same time. 
+(Beatboxing) By dancing. It's like this. 
+(Music) Thanks. 
+(Applause) So that's probably the easiest way. 
+But if you want to do something a little bit more immediate, something that you can't achieve with live looping, there's other ways to layer your voice up. 
+There's things like pitch-shifting, which are awesome, and I'm going to show you now what that sounds like. 
+So I'm going to start another beat for you, like this. 
+(Beatboxing) There's always got to be a bit of a dance at the start, because it's just fun, so you can clap along if you want. 
+You don't have to. It's fine. Check it out. 
+I'm going to lay down a bass sound now. 
+(Music) And now, a rockabilly guitar. 
+Which is nice. But what if I want to make, say, a — (Applause) — Thanks. What if I want to make, say, a rock organ? 
+Is that possible? Yes, it is, by recording myself like this. 
+(Organ sound) And now I have that, I have that recorded. 
+Assign it to a keyboard. 
+(Music) So that's cool. 
+(Applause) But what if I wanted to sound like the whole of Pink Floyd? 
+Impossible, you say. No. 
+It is possible, and you can do it very simply using this machine. It's really fantastic. Check it out. 
+(Music) So every noise you can hear there is my voice. 
+I didn't just trigger something which sounds like that. 
+There's no samples. There's no synthesizers. 
+That is literally all my voice being manipulated, and when you get to that point, you have to ask, don't you, what's the point? 
+Why do this? (Laughter) Because it's cheaper than hiring the whole of Pink Floyd, I suppose, is the easy answer. 
+But in actual fact, I haven't made this machine so that I can emulate things that already exist. 
+I've made this so that I can make any noise that I can imagine. 
+So with your permission, I'm going to do some things that are in my mind, and I hope you enjoy them, because they're rather unusual, especially when you're doing things which are as unusual as this, it can be hard to believe that it is all my voice, you see. 
+(Voice effects) (Music) Like this. (Music) 
+So, loosely defined, that is what's possible with the human voice. 
+Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. 
+
+As a little girl, I always imagined I would one day run away. 
+From the age of six on, I kept a packed bag with some clothes and cans of food tucked away in the back of a closet. 
+There was a deep restlessness in me, a primal fear that I would fall prey to a life of routine and boredom. 
+And so, many of my early memories involved intricate daydreams where I would walk across borders, forage for berries, and meet all kinds of strange people living unconventional lives on the road. 
+Years have passed, but many of the adventures I fantasized about as a child — traveling and weaving my way between worlds other than my own — have become realities through my work as a documentary photographer. 
+But no other experience has felt as true to my childhood dreams as living amongst and documenting the lives of fellow wanderers across the United States. 
+This is the nomadic dream, a different kind of American dream lived by young hobos, travelers, hitchhikers, vagrants and tramps. 
+In most of our minds, the vagabond is a creature from the past. 
+The word "" hobo "" conjures up an old black and white image of a weathered old man covered in coal, legs dangling out of a boxcar, but these photographs are in color, and they portray a community swirling across the country, fiercely alive and creatively free, seeing sides of America that no one else gets to see. 
+Like their predecessors, today's nomads travel the steel and asphalt arteries of the United States. 
+By day, they hop freight trains, stick out their thumbs, and ride the highways with anyone from truckers to soccer moms. 
+By night, they sleep beneath the stars, huddled together with their packs of dogs, cats and pet rats between their bodies. 
+Others come from the underbelly of society, never given a chance to mobilize upwards: foster care dropouts, teenage runaways escaping abuse and unforgiving homes. 
+Where others see stories of privation and economic failure, travelers view their own existence through the prism of liberation and freedom. 
+They'd rather live off of the excess of what they view as a wasteful consumer society than slave away at an unrealistic chance at the traditional American dream. 
+They take advantage of the fact that in the United States, up to 40 percent of all food ends up in the garbage by scavenging for perfectly good produce in dumpsters and trash cans. 
+They sacrifice material comforts in exchange for the space and the time to explore a creative interior, to dream, to read, to work on music, art and writing. 
+But there are many aspects to this life that are far from idyllic. 
+No one loses their inner demons by taking to the road. 
+Addiction is real, the elements are real, freight trains maim and kill, and anyone who has lived on the streets can attest to the exhaustive list of laws that criminalize homeless existence. 
+Who here knows that in many cities across the United States it is now illegal to sit on the sidewalk, to wrap oneself in a blanket, to sleep in your own car, to offer food to a stranger? 
+I know about these laws because I've watched as friends and other travelers were hauled off to jail or received citations for committing these so-called crimes. 
+Many of you might be wondering why anyone would choose a life like this, under the thumb of discriminatory laws, eating out of trash cans, sleeping under bridges, picking up seasonal jobs here and there. 
+The answer to such a question is as varied as the people that take to the road, but travelers often respond with a single word: freedom. 
+Until we live in a society where every human is assured dignity in their labor so that they can work to live well, not only work to survive, there will always be an element of those who seek the open road as a means of escape, of liberation and, of course, of rebellion. 
+Thank you. 
+(Applause) 
+
+Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second. 
+I present to you a new type of photography, femto-photography, a new imaging technique so fast that it can create slow motion videos of light in motion. 
+And with that, we can create cameras that can look around corners, beyond line of sight, or see inside our body without an x-ray, and really challenge what we mean by a camera. 
+Now if I take a laser pointer and turn it on and off in one trillionth of a second — which is several femtoseconds — I'll create a packet of photons barely a millimeter wide. 
+And that packet of photons, that bullet, will travel at the speed of light, and again, a million times faster than an ordinary bullet. 
+Now, if you take that bullet and take this packet of photons and fire into this bottle, how will those photons shatter into this bottle? 
+How does light look in slow motion? 
+[Light in Slow Motion... 10 Billion x Slow] Now, the whole event — (Applause) Now remember, the whole event is effectively taking place in less than a nanosecond — that's how much time it takes for light to travel. 
+Now, there's a lot going on in this movie, so let me break this down and show you what's going on. 
+So the pulse enters the bottle, our bullet, with a packet of photons that start traveling through and that start scattering inside. 
+Some of the light leaks, goes on the table, and you start seeing these ripples of waves. 
+Many of the photons eventually reach the cap and then they explode in various directions. 
+As you can see, there's a bubble of air and it's bouncing around inside. 
+Meanwhile, the ripples are traveling on the table, and because of the reflections at the top, you see at the back of the bottle, after several frames, the reflections are focused. 
+Now, if you take an ordinary bullet and let it go the same distance and slow down the video — again, by a factor of 10 billion — do you know how long you'll have to sit here to watch that movie? 
+(Laughter) A day, a week? Actually, a whole year. 
+It'll be a very boring movie — (Laughter) of a slow, ordinary bullet in motion. 
+You can watch the ripples, again, washing over the table, the tomato and the wall in the back. 
+I thought: this is how nature paints a photo, one femto frame at a time, but of course our eye sees an integral composite. 
+So in the future, when this femto-camera is in your camera phone, you might be able to go to a supermarket and check if the fruit is ripe without actually touching it. 
+So what we do is we send that bullet — that packet of photons — millions of times, and record again and again with very clever synchronization, and from the gigabytes of data, we computationally weave together to create those femto-videos I showed you. 
+So, Superman can fly. 
+Some other heroes can become invisible. 
+But what about a new power for a future superhero: To see around corners. 
+The idea is that we could shine some light on the door, it's going to bounce, go inside the room, some of that is going to reflect back on the door, and then back to the camera. 
+And we could exploit these multiple bounces of light. 
+And it's not science fiction. We have actually built it. 
+There's a mannequin hidden behind a wall, and we're going to bounce light off the door. 
+(Music) [A laser pulse is fired] (Music) Ramesh Raskar: We're going to fire those bullets of light, and they're going to hit this wall, and because of the packet of the photons, they will scatter in all the directions, and some of them will reach our hidden mannequin, which in turn will again scatter that light, and again in turn, the door will reflect some of that scattered light. 
+(Music) And because we have a camera that can run so fast — our femto-camera — it has some unique abilities. 
+It has very good time resolution, and it can look at the world at the speed of light. 
+And this way, we know the distances, of course to the door, but also to the hidden objects, but we don't know which point corresponds to which distance. 
+(Music) By shining one laser, we can record one raw photo, which, if you look on the screen, doesn't really make any sense. 
+Can we see it in full 3D? 
+(Music) (Applause) Now, we have some ways to go before we take this outside the lab on the road, but in the future, we could create cars that avoid collisions with what's around the bend. 
+Or we can build endoscopes that can see deep inside the body around occluders, and also for cardioscopes. 
+Now, like Doc Edgerton, a scientist himself, science became art — an art of ultra-fast photography. 
+So by applying the corresponding space and time warp, we can correct for this distortion. 
+So whether it's for photography around corners, or creating the next generation of health imaging, or creating new visualizations, since our invention, we have open-sourced all the data and details on our website, and our hope is that the DIY, the creative and the research communities will show us that we should stop obsessing about the megapixels in cameras — (Laughter) and start focusing on the next dimension in imaging. 
+